The Material City: Bodies, Minds, and the In-Between 9780228017837

Table of contents :
Cover
The Material City
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Indebtedness
Preamble
1 Strategy of Analysis
2 The Material Context of Urban Life
3 The Material View of Ambiguity: The Weight of Numbers
4 Use Value, Exchange Value
5 The City as a Writing Machine
6 Figures of Enlightenment: Globalization, Gentrification
7 Perpetuity
8 Publicity and the Project as Scene
9 Urban Governance
10 The Desire for Justice in Everyday Life
11 The Legacy of Care
12 The Soul of the City/The Soul of Inquiry
References
Index

Citation preview

The Material City

The Culture of Cities Series editors: Kieran Bonner and Will Straw Cities have long been a key focus of innovative work in the humanities and social sciences. In recent years, the city has assumed new importance for scholars working on cultural issues across a wide range of disciplines. Sociologists, anthropologists, media specialists, and scholars of literature, art, and cinema have come to emphasize the distinctly urban character of many of their objects of study. Those who study processes of globalization are drawn to analyzing cities as the places in which these processes are most deeply felt or where they are most strongly resisted. The Culture of Cities series has its roots in an international research project of the same name, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada during the period 2000–05. The series includes books based in the work of that project as well as other volumes that reflect the project’s spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry. Case studies, comparative analyses, and theoretical accounts of city life offer tools and insights for understanding urban cultures as they confront the forces acting upon them in the contemporary world. The Culture of Cities series is aimed at scholars and interested readers from a wide variety of backgrounds.

The Imaginative Structure of the City Alan Blum Urban Enigmas Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities Edited by Johanne Sloan Circulation and the City Essays on Urban Culture Edited by Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw Cartographies of Place Navigating the Urban Edited by Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault

Speaking Memory How Translation Shapes City Life Edited by Sherry Simon Urban Encounters Art and the Public Edited by Martha Radice and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier The Material City Bodies, Minds, and the In-Between Alan Blum

THE

M AT E R I A L CITY Bodies, Minds, and the In-Between

ALAN BLUM

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 isbn 978-0-2280-1661-8 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-1783-7 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-1784-4 (epub) Legal deposit second quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Financial support has also been received from the Book Publication Subvention Fund of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The material city : bodies, minds, and the in-between / Alan Blum. Names: Blum, Alan, 1935- author. Series: Culture of cities. Description: Series statement: The culture of cities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220467161 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220467242 | isbn 9780228016618 (cloth) | isbn 9780228017844 (epub) | isbn 9780228017837 (epdf) Subjects: lcsh: Sociology, Urban. | lcsh: City and town life. | lcsh: Social change. Classification: lcc ht119 .b585 2023 | ddc 307.76—dc23

This book was designed by studio oneonone in Minion 10.5/13

Roll of Honour Living and Dead In praise of the inheritance, the pleasure and pain of its moment, as both an abiding presence in my present and a loss forevermore: To and for those who shared with me in the city of New York at one and only time in the 1960s in that one and only place, the desire to revive the jouissance of inquiry, to keep the spirit of Plato alive in the material city. Though there are many stories of the naked city, I honour the untold story of its setting as a rebirth for me and for these others, as a scene of serious revelry and ribaldry that inspired a collective effort to bring together work and play, to make inquiry playful while measured by the work of reflection.

Contents

Acknowledgments | ix Indebtedness | xi

Preamble | 3 1

Strategy of Analysis | 12

2

The Material Context of Urban Life | 19

3

The Material View of Ambiguity: The Weight of Numbers | 37

4

Use Value, Exchange Value | 50

5

The City as a Writing Machine | 71

6

Figures of Enlightenment: Globalization, Gentrification | 95

7

Perpetuity | 117

8

Publicity and the Project as Scene | 146

9

Urban Governance | 167

10

The Desire for Justice in Everyday Life | 182

11

The Legacy of Care | 191

12

The Soul of the City/The Soul of Inquiry | 205

References | 215 Index | 231

Acknowledgments

The studies in this volume grew out of work done in collaboration with colleagues from the Culture of Cities project and from research presented in various forms at conferences and workshops. As an American and a Canadian I want to acknowledge how the differences between these countries accounted for our project insofar as this research could only have been initiated in Canada, with its culture of intellectual openness and excellence; this is perhaps best exemplified by the Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc), which provided hospitable support for the interpretive approach presented here. Our freedom from the empiricist regime that ruled the intellectual climate in the United States and that governed its decision making in most areas allowed us to develop the project whose story I continue to tell and reformulate in this work. As a lover of cities who has passed through a number of them – though always using my beloved New York as the gold standard – I wanted to understand what it was about the spirit and individuality of cities such as Amsterdam, Athens, Corfu, Dublin, London, Montreal, Rome, and San Francisco, among others, that moved me and enabled me to appreciate the city as something other than the kind of place depicted in the social sciences. Canada’s intellectual environment encouraged me to translate that question into a research project. Off the top I must express my gratitude to the extraordinary team at McGillQueen’s University Press, who took me on as if a patient, orchestrating my passage through this rewriting venture: particularly the editorial acumen of Jonathan Crago, whose talent, positive encouragement, and sensitive reading helped cure me, and the fine-tuned capacities of Ryan Perks, who attempted to monitor my addiction to transgressive exposition. As always, I owe Nasiha Prcic gratitude for working on much of this text with her exemplary care, patience, and fine-tuned ability. I have expressed my gratitude for the intellectual stimulation provided by members of the Culture of Cities project at various times in the past. This volume of studies is primarily the work of the Toronto researchers on the project over a very recent period when the work turned to specific interests in

x

Acknowledgments

innovation and heritage, and it is the contributions of these colleagues that I make use of in this book, especially the research of Kieran Bonner on Dublin and of Elke Grenzer on Berlin. I also must mention Han Zhang’s research on Chinese migrants to Canada and their reconstructions of the past, Benjamin Waterman’s research on genocide, George Martin’s dissertation on urban policy-makers’ decision making, the research of Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner through their studies on Los Angeles, and the contributions of Steve Bailey and Saeed Hydaralli to the research focus of these studies. My cases in this book are largely the result of research formed and developed for conference presentations, such as a paper presented at a workshop in Vienna, Austria, 14–16 December 2006, and entitled “Alternative Histories of Urban Consumption: Disease, Disguise, and Displacement in the Modern City”; “Social Innovation in the City,” a plenary address to the conference “Poeticizing the Urban Apparatus: Scenes of Innovation,” held at the Center for Social Innovation in New York City in 2013; and “Libidinal City,” a keynote address at a conference in the United Kingdom at the University of Liverpool in 2015. The keynote talk on “Care as Urban Governance” was presented at the Global Forum on Urban Culture and Governance at the Institute of Urban Governance, University of Sanya, China, 13–16 December 2019. The July 2016 unesco Declaration of principles and recommendations intended for the safeguarding, study, development, and promotion of the intangible cultural heritage distinguished between the tangible and intangible elements of a heritage. In response to this, the heritage research presented here was developed over conferences in Greece, taking most recent explicit shape in July 2016 as “Heritage and Scenes of Innovation,” a plenary presentation at a sshrc Connection Grant on Heritage in Transition in Syros, Greece, and in a keynote address at a conference sponsored by the Association for the Study of the Culture of Cities entitled “Intangible Heritage: Scenes of Urban Innovation V,” held in July 2018 at the Ionic Centre in Athens, Greece.

Indebtedness

Let me begin with a quote from Wittgenstein: This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written … It is a great temptation to try to make the spirit explicit. (1980, 6c, 8e) My confidence in acting on this temptation and to suffer its risks is based on the continuous support that I have had and continue to be fortunate enough to draw upon. I could cite many influences upon my writing that have entered into my research, and I trust that this book continues to mark such indebtedness. Yet, there are personal influences that should be differentiated. During this most recent period of writing, I owe special thanks to my daughter Paula, who provided support and her helpful technical and aesthetic assistance as well, and to my daughter Beth, with whom I regularly discuss research and who invariably reciprocates with gentle advice; of course her family, especially Jean-Christophe Cloutier, energizes me by virtue of their hospitality and examples of living thoughtfully in the material city. In my current attempt to reformulate the Culture of Cities project as a topic and as a method for deepening social relationships, I have been blessed by the good company of Margaret and Kieran Bonner and by Kieran’s always provocative formulations, and by the friendship of Saeed Hydaralli and our fruitful discussions on ways of engaging the intractable circumstances that constantly inhibit our desire for dialogue. During this period Carlos Neves, Patrick Colfer, and Steve Bailey have been steadfast and thoughtful friends. David Lynes and Andriani Papadopoulou have been most generous over these years, especially at our conferences in Greece, and I thank Stuart Murray, too, as an always accessible talking partner.

xii

Indebtedness

Elke Grenzer’s intelligence, strength of character, and affection have been a continuous and thought-provoking influence on my work and life. The challenges to my complacency offered by my daughter Hannah have been an important learning experience, sometimes unsettling but invariably a source of delight. Despite the hurtful loss I feel over the death of my colleague and friend Stanley Raffel, his creativity and unprecedented humour have been incentives for me to draw upon and to keep alive in writing this book.

The Material City

Preamble

With reference to the title of this book, I propose that what is in between bodies and minds are the interpretations, beliefs, impressions, images, and varied assumptions that constitute what is prosaically called the world of subjectivity as a typically unstated and untheorized domain that empiricists have identified by the gloss of “intervening variables.” As Nelson Goodman said years ago, “A symbol scheme is syntactically dense if it provides for infinitely many characters so ordered that between each two there is a third” (quoted in Davis, 2006, 71). This inbetween domain – typically unspoken because forgotten, or at worst denied, or avoided because of its resistance to being pinned down, is what this book treats as the in-between and as a topic for research. Of course, in this endeavour I am simply following and trying to refashion a path many have taken, as I will show. This book continues to engage the problem of the culture of the city and makes the case that culture is more than a notation about identity. The culture of the city is what Lacan would call a repressed signifier, one that, in the words of Virginia Woolf, buries the surfeit of meanings that interpenetrate and exceed its use as its connotative inheritance. Like any concept or distinction, the word “culture” is pregnant with undisclosed meaning that is always masked in its usage, in the way Hegel (1971) might say that the concept represses the notion. Lacan’s maxim had been reiterated and developed in many ways even before he proposed it. If the word “culture” signifies what Simmel would call the life of the word in the prosaic sense (common sense), following Simmel, our research over time has and continues to engage the word as a notion that is more-than-life in his terms. If the life of culture includes the themes, doctrines, and epistemological assumptions it might presuppose or gloss, that which is more-than-life is not more of the same, alternatives, or even underlying affect, or interpretations and beliefs that can be cited ad infinitum, or even transgressive gestures that try to reject common sense; more-than-life is the desire (understood here as if an implicit discourse) to be attuned to what is unsaid in language by saying the unsayable; this desire drives the subject to leave something of value in gestures that can never be confirmed

4

The Material City

as an absolute truth for oneself or any other individual. This desire has sometimes been called poetic (Bambach and George 2019), and what is reputed here as poetic is subsumed in Plato’s conception of eros as a capacity intrinsic to desire. We first begin to disclose the signifier “culture” as repressing the erotic infrastructure that empowers its intelligibility. What I have learned from Durkheim is that such an erotic infrastructure derives not from the concept or signifier – say, “culture” as a general idea – that might mask all shades of meaning, but is a function of the way the concept materializes in life as a focus of attention for speakers that bring them together to engage its buried meanings in discourse that is invariably contested: “If concepts were only general ideas they would not enrich knowledge a great deal, but if before all else they are collective representations … they correspond to the way this very special being, society, considers the things of its own special existence” (Durkheim 1965, 483). For example, the culture of the city as a general idea masks the way the ambiguity of this “general idea” serves as a locus of collectivization whose problematic status fertilizes the contestation and frustration that spill over in the city as the facade of its erotic landscape. The amenability of this discourse to inquiry has enabled me to design research situations to exacerbate the ambiguity glossed in the idea; this is intended to make observable the varied ways and means that subjects use to attempt to solve the problem posed by the idea, the problem they might envision as a need to resolve its ambiguity in a way satisfying to the great numbers. This permits me to engage this discourse, not by trying to advance a final interpretation, but to represent its to-and-fro erotic play and discordance as the rudiments of a dialogue on a common problem. I call such an approach travesty because it is based on analogical thinking that sees unlike ideas as related in ways that can appear strange and even comic; in this case, I relate a discourse on the culture of the city to a discourse on relations to ambiguity by trying to disclose how the “real” story of the former is revealed in and as the story of the latter. I travesty the idea that the speech is about what it purports (that the signifier is “about” the signified in this idiom) by exposing its real desire, as if the focus on the general idea hides the concern that exercises it as a problem to solve. To risk saying it prosaically: talk about any idea, when all is said and done, is talk that buries the system of desire upon which it depends, that grounds it, and my research over the years with colleagues has made, and continues to make, this observable. My conception of travesty is unorthodox, as I have acknowledged elsewhere (Blum 2019, 254–5), as I use it not in the conventional sense of ridiculing or demeaning a text. Instead, I proceed by exposing its buried meanings by relating it to apparently unrelated modes of speech upon which it implicitly depends to

Preamble

5

make its point. In this way I show how the speech depends upon generic and elementary habits of thought. The travesty resides in its subversion of taken-forgranted speech to disclose its unspoken heritage. This method is subversive, but again not in the conventional sense of subversion as an attempt to destroy or overthrow a regime (intellectual, in this usage) but in the manner of others who poke fun at an established order of speech in the way of comedians, or artists, in order to provoke playful questioning. In this way, I treat the action or so-called “buzz” of the city as a facade behind which rests the complexity of eros (desire) that becomes a spectacle and problem in urban life. Today, a great many people designate eros as either emotion or affect, but these are tepid normalizations of the notion that repress its connotative surplus. Plato identified this complexity of eros as an integral aspect of its division, one that reveals tensions between its acquisitiveness (at best self-determination, at worst tyrannical), and its aspiration to surpass such temptations through its creative impulse (which at best aspires to wisdom, and is poetic and aesthetic, and at worst is manifested as addictive excess). Although, as Plato put it, eros has this capacity to be destructive or heavenly, investigations over time have elaborated this division as the nucleus of a discourse on desire that includes mundane gestures of self-assertion and combative affirmations, revealed in partial drives that are reflected in performing, exhibiting, conforming, cathecting, clowning, coveting and expelling influences, and the collection of efforts that try to solve the problem of gaining some assurance about one’s self-worth in the face of the impossibility of any conclusion. The desire to be correct in beliefs in the absence of proof and to live forever in the face of death makes the human desire for the impossible an inevitable source of tension. The two-sidedness of eros that Plato formulated accounts for what Anne Carson (1986) calls its bitter-sweet character as both a vexatious problem and an incentive for more than this, for what Georg Simmel calls the desire for morethan-life, which can lead to humour, art, and justice, and which is a figure of speech central to my work. This “free space of meaning” (Nancy 1993, 33–4) was identified by Winnicott (1971) in his prosaic manner many years later as a space of play and creativity (65), showing in this statement the converging influences of a collection of important thinkers: It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality as one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing really matters and that life is not worth living. In

6

The Material City

a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine. (65) So, eros as the desire for more-than-life is something like the desire to be creative or to bear life and its conventions as more than satisfying but as enhancing one’s sense of self-worth. It is as if desire in this way imagines being creative as a prospect despite the condition that life imposes upon a subject that any acknowledgment of one’s value to and for oneself will forever remain unknown. Note that Winnicott is too reflective to call the uncreative life “toxic” and the creative life “woke,” for he acknowledges the two-sidedness of life as presupposing both. This so-called uncreative relationship to the world had been named “motivated compliance” by sociologists, and it can illustrate a certain limit to Winnicott’s polemic: that the compliance is motivated and guided by some tacit notion of the legitimacy of the normative order as valid has led many from Aristotle on to view it (the order, the code, the norms) as providing a necessary pleasure; this is the pleasure that we see not only in the bureaucrat or in the automated respect for convention that thrills many people, or that stimulates them to dream of being a “winner,” but in examples such as my writing here, which savours its anticipated recognition as a work designed to engage and elicit conventional appraisals of excellence. It is this erotic bond that can be expressed in the notion of jouissance as the enjoyment even of being regulated. In most cases the subject simply settles for this and rests in peace, not motivated by a desire to overstep what is handed down. Typically, we have as examples both the innocent affirmation of the value of “winning over losing” in accord with the norms as the point and purpose of life, and the less vulgar desire to exemplify competence and excellence in one’s tasks. In other words, one must enjoy what one has to do even if one has to do it. This is the inescapable constraint of what Peter McHugh called the “general environment” – Simmel’s notion of life – with which we all begin. In past work I identified the city as a site at which such tensions materialize as collective effects that circulate in ways that appear two-sided, marking the urban way of life as both a monstrous dead end and as a site for malleable opportunity, offering the prospect of desolation and/or rejuvenation as an expression of this division in desire as it is manifested in the atmosphere and environment of the city. I conceive of the social actor as constantly subject to the division in desire, as necessarily trying to “handle” the trials and tribulations of everyday life, and so as one who must try to “solve” the problem of coming to terms with these influences. In our teaching, Peter McHugh and I posited as a heuristic device a scale of forms starting with Socrates’s example of scratching an itch to differentiate the

Preamble

7

satisfaction of compliance to expectations from the pleasure of the fit in homeostatic harmony, and also from the enjoyment of administering jouissance in creativity. Therefore, I ground the model of the two-sided city in Simmel’s contrast as a reaffirmation of the dialectic in Plato’s version of eros. This model informs and instructs the semblances between many such contrasts as an interpretive infrastructure that is tacitly responsive to Plato’s primordial intuition of desire as being part of life itself, exposing the division in eros not as an opposition but as a difference that affirms life and more-than-life as two in one rather than two ones. Eros, as the desire to perpetuate oneself in images that signify one’s value, must forever be a desire for the impossible, that while necessary as equipment for living, is dependent upon images that are eternally revisable. As I have noted, eros must be formulated to include more than the two propensities that Plato identified. Accordingly, in this work, I have to incorporate and make explicit ways in which the latent dynamic of rivalry and of comparing oneself to others that is intrinsic to eros, is activated and reconfigured under contemporary conditions and can apply to the affective revelries of entrepreneurs and fierce competitors, and not just to saints and tyrants. For example, Martin Luther was renowned for his hatred of Catholicism and Jews, and I think that the way that such animosity motivates people can and should be included in the discourse of eros, as an aspect of its complexity. It is the work of Nietzsche (1995) that best personifies the modern translation of Plato’s conception of the ambiguity of eros, and he uses the figure of Socrates to illustrate certain aspects of this two-sided character of eros. Many can be inspired by competition to the point where polemic and its drive to cast a charismatic spell is an important part of eros, something that can be viewed as positive and/or negative, giving credence to love and hate as elements of eros. Even more, Kieran Bonner’s (2013) analysis of the influence of Socratic teaching on the great philosopher’s disciples and enemies in the Symposium shows vividly how reactions to the erotic challenge offered by such figures as a sign of their reputed creativity – not just strong teachers but all charismatic influentials – can create a discourse that sets a tone in the city as a riveting focus of attention. Bonner develops the idea of bittersweet eros to demonstrate how strong teachers can inspire followers who run the risk of not heeding their call and who might fall into madness, intoxication, and what he calls profound longing. If the erotic terrain of the city collects such effects on followers in ways that produce, as Bonner says, fans, disciples, users, accusers, and any and all touched by these influences, such a prospect of being celebrated or fawned over must also inspire the teacher to risk self-aggrandizement. Let us conceive of eros as infecting the subject in this way, inducing the excitement of being overstimulated by popularity and by the charge gained from opposing conventions and polemically

8

The Material City

challenging the ways of life of the social order. The drive of polemic has an abiding erotic aura. Bonner’s analysis can be a template for proposing that any celebrated figure can create effects of worship or vilification capable of becoming part of the erotic character of a city. We note this in the recurrent frenzy of the great numbers – heightened today by media and online representations – who salivate piously or snarl in contempt at the words and sight of public figures in politics, entertainment, and all institutional domains, figures who upon reflection might seem unworthy of such consideration, laughable and not laudable as decision makers, merely innocuous, banal, and at worst sick or sickening. For example, in speaking of the great numbers, a novelist says, “Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole” (Lockwood 2021, 9). Hatred is also shown in the tendency of thinking to be weighed down by the adversarial relationship it always inherits, at its best, to ideas and even to its own thoughts, but especially toward the opinions of others. If thinking is animated by a kind of rivalry that we consider “ambition,” and so by a degree of aspiration for excellence that is always somewhat competitive (toward others, oneself) and is therefore comparative, then we can appreciate a problem that life poses for thought, often unnoticed by philosophy but always recognized by great artists, involving the place of jealousy, resentment, and rivalry in thinking and how to dispose of it. The paradox coming into view is that thinking is always properly advised to overcome the adversarial relationship that it inherits in the name of such ambition, in order to achieve a degree of distance and contemplative detachment vis-à-vis warring positions and doctrines as well as its own vulgarity. Curiously, such counsel must advise rigor mortis, immunity to influence, in a way that can compel thinking to accept the value of detachment as pre-eminent. Here we begin to appreciate the paradox when Eric Gans notes the primordial usage of culture as the “mastery over human emotions” in ways that affirm values of restraint as equivalent to cultivation, for if the disorderly emotions that cultivation is expected to master are the emotions of resentment, then such mastery must risk overcoming creativity itself when thinking is assumed to flourish in such a way. If the vitality of thinking and its dynamic as a transference relationship is expurgated in terms of the lure of a healthy detachment capable of overseeing the rancorous chaos, it might well be that this solution is as deadly as the tumult from which it seeks to escape. To counteract this assumption, we would need to imagine such tumult as simply a stage that thinking must suffer in returning to itself, a stage both necessary and desirable but not final, a way station on its path of self-knowledge. We might begin to reflect upon the place of this division or

Preamble

9

tension in hallucination itself – say, as indicated in the representation of resentment. We can start with Gans’s proposition. Ressentiment against necessary and insuperable domination – mastery – is one thing; ressentiment against the contingent, and often temporary, superiority of others is another. Once individual and collective opportunities exist for reducing and eliminating social inferiority, those who fail can have no recourse to aesthetic catharsis. At best they may condemn the entire system; but such condemnation, very different from the aesthetic transcendence of individual difference that characterizes traditional culture, can lead only to escapist fantasies – or to revolution. Great cultures are precisely those that portray the structures of social reality as inescapable. (1982, 12–13) This fortifies my resolve to address culture as a notation that buries this relationship to the inescapable that is personified by mortality, and that makes the development of soul the modus vivendi of culture, a notation that conceals the relationship that the repression of the signifier masks and makes opportune as a focus of our research. Using such contributions, this book celebrates the canon as a resource of value today by seeing Plato’s view as disseminated and differentiated in the distinctive approaches to inquiry pursued by many contemporaries. We note this not only in formulations of the city as a site of interpretive conflict, but also, as I mentioned, in conceptions of eros that are “normalized” by the great numbers when they affirm unreflectively “the emotions” and “affect” as corporeal effects by simplifying the complexity of eros in ways that are designed to be user-friendly. To resist the accusation that I am an antiquarian devoted to Plato, I suggest that my work in this book brings together Lacan’s maxim to respect the repression of the signifier as the foundation of discourse with Virginia Woolf ’s description of the connotative surplus of any word, the result being an unfamiliar union between two such apparently different notables, a marriage as she might say: words are full of echoes, of memories, of associations … they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages … How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question. (1993, 141) I frame this question in engaging distinctions that are reflected in words and signifiers, such as “eros,” “the city,” “justice,” “soul” and many notions, as if they have

10

The Material City

this capacity to expose their overtones if we apply a healing touch that shows care for this quality in contrast to the tendency to let words lie in a way, as Woolf says, “that [they] become unreal … and we too become unreal [in allowing] the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river” (141). The buried meanings of a word have been conceded in the convention of its usage as the connotative surplus of any signifier or concept in a way that leads her to suggest that it is not simply “culture” that is buried, for that term conceals the complexity of the erotic relation to oneself and its illusory character. Here, we can also note the convergence of Woolf and Lacan in their relation to a term such as “affect,” which glosses the meaning of eros. In this sense, my use of “affect” throughout this work is designed to respect its usage as a sign of the common sense of eros that buries its sunken meaning for dialogue, as stated by Lacan: “Freud emphasizes that it is not the affect that is repressed. The affect … goes off somewhere else as best it can” (1977, 217). In other words, the signifier buries a view of the subject attuned to language itself that is experienced as a gap in the impossible desire to know oneself in a way that is conclusive and that must leave as its remainder a sense of oneself as unknown. For example, the emotional excess of acting out, of the type we might observe in an addiction, is not its ground, but simply an effect or target, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, that masks its cause as part of a complex attempt to create impossible self-assurance. If addictive self-aggrandizement seems to “get off ” through such pursuits, stories of addicts, predators, criminals, and con men illustrate the limits of such gestures as accounts of the excess insofar as every story discloses a subject’s desire for conclusive and impossible self-assurance that is dependent upon illusions. As anyone might know, to urge an addict to quit is foolish because the addiction is not a result of such decision making, implicated as it is in a system of desire. What is repressed is not emotion but an indefinite discourse that can only expose to and for the subject that what one knows of oneself testifies that it will forever remain unknown, confirming such ignorance as the best knowledge that humans can attain. Therefore, I differ somewhat even from these thinkers insofar as I do not treat what is buried as if it is an interpretive labyrinth that I might resolve with another interpretation; rather I use it instrumentally to create observable research occasions that induce subjects to try to solve the problem that its buried meaning(s) seems to raise for them. I try to show how a range of thinkers from Simmel to Winnicott to Wittgenstein, among others, can give us resources for “breaking through” and bringing these “sunken meanings” to view as topics for dialogue that they can engage as ways of bearing these limits without going mad. Further, what must be appreciated in what follows is that I proceed by conceiving of every author that I use,

Preamble

11

whether Plato, Lacan, Simmel, or whomever, in this way also as a repressed signifier – the name of the author – to the extent that its connotative surplus is buried in ways that I must take up, in contrast to the conventional academic model of the literature review and its dedication to exegetical fidelity; this is done not out of disrespect for the author but as part of an effort to “break through” such constraints for the purpose of creating a dialogue and a discourse that enhances the authorial voice by going beyond the word. In this way, Plato’s conception of the divide in eros becomes visible as a research opportunity in many illustrative examples and is discernible in various collisions in the life of cities. I treat discourse over justice in the city as an expression of the two-sided character of eros and its circulation in many areas of everyday life, a division that is observable in the collisions that mark the vitality of the city as both hyper-stimulating and in continuous need of medicinal therapy that offers to pacify its tumult. Attempts to “solve” the problem of the ambiguity of the representation serve to collectivize the society by inducing positive and negative effects, whether discontent, profound longing, madness, intoxication, or fear and loathing, as an erotic terrain that requires pacification to defer resentment (see also Gans 1993). I conceive of materialism as if it offers the cure of such medicine, as the program conventionally affirmed as the most reputable and efficient path for healing. Such medication seeks to purge the society of the ambiguity that infects its representations, through means that are both official and unofficial. This program is considered praiseworthy by virtue of its belief in the value of computational efficiency and the contacts and information with which it supposedly provides us. In line with Weber’s formulation of motivated compliance to any normative order, we can say that this subject “is oriented to the order and governed thereby” (1947, 87–132). The subject’s captivation by this algorithmic imaginary has been much recognized and criticized, but inquiry has tended typically to act out in response instead of trying to overcome this exchange through analysis (for an exception, see Finn 2017, and especially his analysis of Netflix). Accordingly, I want to formulate a subversive and playful relation to speech and action – both strategic and disciplined – as inquiry that is just to this environment of knowledge and that gives us options for resisting being swamped by the great numbers who accept this belief system without question and who treat the exclusion of buried meanings not only as normal and legitimate but as necessary medicine for healing the contentiousness that results from warring viewpoints. As Barry Sandywell says of this method, “the task is not to mimetically describe but to … transform the ordinary, to restore a richer theoreticity to agents and to change everyday life” (2016a, 69).

CHAPTER 1

Strategy of Analysis

Introduction My approach is influenced by Lacan’s suggestion that our fate is ruled by our need and desire to come to terms with the fact that the “Other doesn’t answer,” as he puts it – that we have to work out things to and for ourselves – in an interpretive landscape that provides for us no definitive “solution” or answer and that requires us to administer desire and enjoyment (jouissance) in actions designed at best to reconcile us irreconcilably to this irresolution. In Lacan’s usage, “Other,” capitalized in this way, is a figure of speech that stands for the inexplicable and inaccessible force anterior to us that we imagine as if a voice orienting to us and to which we orient, as the source of a gaze to which we must answer: by inflicting upon us our desire for consistency between our conduct and enjoyment, to enjoy what we do and to do whatever with enjoyment, this figure invests Other with jouissance that makes Other jouissance and jouissance Other, both the source and end of our striving, imagined and unspeakable, not a thing and not nothing either, personified in the gaze to which we answer as the Other. Capitalized in this way, “Other,” in contrast to “other,” enforces upon us the necessity to resolve what does not answer, the question we must consider on how to live life with its ambiguity. The ambiguity of Other in this sense marks every signifier, concept, or word as a mask of buried meanings that we must work out and that challenges us by offering this work as our freedom to realize jouissance. Yet, jouissance as an impossible problem to solve, not simply satisfaction or pleasure but more, remains our image of the irresolute/resolution of enjoyment. This description of Other that I find somewhat convoluted has been formulated in the conventions of the history of ideas as the Good in Plato, the Absolute in Hegel, and Being in Heidegger. Yet, the best examples for me are those theorists who exemplify participating in the relationship to Other in their very writing rather than try to be third-person spectators and commentators, those who show in their prose this relationship to jouissance; and here I

Strategy of Analysis

13

suggest that inquirers such as Bataille (1985, 1992), Baudrillard (e.g., 1983), and especially Wittgenstein, exemplify being both participants and spectators in the relation to Other. We must recall Socrates’s reminder that satisfaction is only scratching; what is irreconcilable cannot be harmonized as pleasure; and irresolution, if impossible to satisfy through a scratch, or to reconcile, as in a puzzle, must at best be enjoyed. This book focuses on the ways and means that such irresolution becomes topical in the city and how it is negotiated, managed, and worked out as a problem to solve. Each of the following chapters is designed to illustrate such problem solving as a situation of action in the city and in this way serves as a case study. It is in such a spirit that this book treats the city as a theatre that dramatizes collisions of meaning aroused by the spectacle of social change and the conundrums that are stimulated by discord in relation to conventional views of urbanity, material improvement, progress, loss, joy, and resentment. I conceive of the city as the site where fluctuations in the moods of enthusiasm and lament among people come to be viewed as palpable and as data to translate, making the city a material city by virtue of such timely textuality and its status as “material,” conveyed by way circulating images and representations. The “moods” of the city are nothing other than material manifestations of the collective division in eros – its bittersweet character – that its acquisitive nature both exhibits and inspires us to ground as something more. This approach, developed in earlier work by Peter McHugh and myself, and through a selective use of methodological influences in our environment at the time – namely, the work of Hannah Arendt, Kenneth Burke, Stanley Cavell, Aron Cicourel, Eric Gans, Harold Garfinkel, René Girard, Erving Goffman, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Serres, and especially Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others – orchestrates the implications and nuances of an ensemble of beliefs to make them conversational and mutually oriented by using narratives, reports, opinions, or even so-called “facts” in the manner of first speeches (see Kieran Bonner’s discussion of the tension in our effort to be reflective about reflexivity, 2016, 241–60). Discourse, then, serves to focus discussion that is modelled after improvisational theatre, where the audience’s suggestions are used as openers to create a trajectory that is intended to model a dialogue. I noted this connection while witnessing the play between performers and audience in the activities of the Second City Theatre in Chicago while a graduate student at the university. In each chapter I use a problem of urban life to open such a dialogue, which I then explore and analyze. I proceed in any and every case by working through a collection of diverse opinions, or doxa, that I convert into a discourse that appears to ground it, a discourse revealing a conception of a common problem and of intended solutions

14

The Material City

as a situation of problem solving that is governed by an appeal to principle that we can engage reflectively in dialogue (see my 2003 book The Imaginative Structure of the City, especially 3–23, for a more detailed exposition of the grounds of the method; also see Barry Sandywell’s eloquent overview and reformulation, 2016b, 19–93). In this respect, I reformulate models of the city that focus upon its complications as resulting from political economy, geography, and such conditions into a dialogue on urbanity as a system of desire using a variety of texts and influences. This method searches for the grounds of such beliefs by conceiving of the beliefs as a discourse inflected in diverse ways that I analyze in many examples of ethical confrontation in everyday life; the goal is to reveal through analysis a discourse that we can treat as exhibiting the collective fascination with material that promises to inform us about ways of healing discontent and of providing a degree of pleasure for people to negotiate the rounds and rhythms of the city. Whether in metaphors such as cave, magnet, or seething cauldron, I treat the city as reflected historically and at any present in different images that have consequences for the ways we think about opportunity and limit, pleasure and pain, optimism and pessimism. Following this beginning, my exposition tries to illuminate the conception of a material city, of the market, of production and consumption, and of the collective representation of materiality and the malleability of matter, in a narrative that is designed to formulate the enigma of mortality and its relations to pleasure, comedy, and fate. Therefore, this approach encourages me to think of materialism not in an orthodox way, as a contrast to idealism, but as if it discloses a conception of normative adequacy that governs conventional sense-making procedures that are constantly advised as medicine for we who are subject to such conditions, and to the effects of the Other not answering. We can conceive of the medicine as materialism’s version of its affirmative action as principled, as if expressed in “material” that is designed to “fill in” for this condition with information and mediated representations that intend to offer guidance. This medicine invariably recommends the expurgation of ambiguity in thought, action, and language. Yet, such a purge contributes to intensifying the frustration, aggression, and malaise of the population that is induced to suffer such an evaluative order and that contributes to making suffering and discontent both a burden to manage and an exhibition of continuous problem solving. I examine these intended solutions that seem to me to offer the ways and means of organizing experience through the ordinary methods and procedures of social actors, ways and means that reveal the systemic character of a discourse and its commitment to a specific conception of meaning as a standard.

Strategy of Analysis

15

It is in this sense that we can conceptualize the relation of justice to ambiguity insofar as ambiguity fertilizes discordance and contested opinions – what René Girard calls a sacrificial crisis (1977); this in turn produces an environment of adversaries (called “diversity”) that must be engaged, negated, or pacified in order to defer resentment. The chapters serve as illustrative cases that exemplify this problem and approach, each beginning with examples of the kind of sense making that Goffman (1967, 1974) described over time in his work, first as a spilling over of interaction and its contingencies and finally as embedded in frames of reference, but which are configured more comprehensively as parts of discourses that touch fundamental problems unspoken and untheorized (especially the work of many of my colleagues on the Culture of Cities project over the years). I suggest, then, that Weber’s notion of justice as being just to material conditions translates justice into the notion of a just relationship to the contentiousness of the multitude and its uncollected, untheorized doxa. Therefore, if the twosided nature of any phenomenon exposes its ambiguity, this is disclosed as a problem to handle in any topic that we study, including justice; and our method of inquiry must respect the ambiguity of its own procedures of analysis. Kieran Bonner formulates the problem of collaborating with different points of view (what he calls troublesome company) that our work invites as follows: The contingency of the beginning of social inquiry in the essential reflexivity of accounts does not need to resign to contingency nor, in totalitarian fashion, seek to eliminate contingency through abstracted theorizing. Good troublesome company allows for the recognition that through a collaborative analysis of an always-contingent beginning, humans can exemplify their humanity and so point to the possibility of the universal and unconditional, but ironically in ways that are particular and conditional. What was begun was a way of showing that responding to impossible questions has an authentic relationship to contingent conditions, when the speaker takes seriously the concern with reflexive integrity. (Bonner 2016, 258)

Design of Research To develop the analysis, I conceive of the subject as necessarily engaged by the relationship between absolutism and relativism that is expressed in the notion of the number – specifically in the two-sided nature of the number 1: of oneself as one and only (absolutism) and/or as one among many ones (relativism), a

16

The Material City

dynamic registered in each and every relationship. Justice, then, manifests in this relation to the two-sided nature both of the phenomenon and of oneself, and so, to the two-sidedness of this two-sidedness as a continuous problem to reconcile. As I have said in other work, in accord with Plato, the problem of justice as I intend it asks “how to develop reciprocally and communally from an original inequality; that is, how to develop justice in speech in the shape of a dialogical relation to diversity” (Blum 2011, 21). Here, though, “inequality” refers not only to the relationships between the different ones, but to the differences within any one individual between their prioritization of either absolutism or relativism. The desire to be just in practice seeks to work this out in ways that try to reconcile the temptations of extremism in relation to such priorities. That is, if our uniformity shows how we are all equal, such equality is grounded not only in the external conditions that mark our equity, but also in the condition of the very particularity that we share as our differences, reflected in a phenomenon that McHugh calls, after Nancy, Shared Being (2005), as the otherness in which we each participate: a concept that expresses how we are equal in being both the same as each other and distinct from one another. The chapters serve as illustrative cases that exemplify this problem and approach. I explore the usage that is responsive to this question by making observable certain ethical collisions and a discourse around the problem of the survival of the city in time and space. It is in this respect that I treat justice in relation to the city in particular as an attempt to exercise care for its quality or specific character, as far as this can be made out in thought and action. Care for the particularity of the city exists invariably in a state of tension with normative demands to adapt to its generic character, as if such motivated compliance is necessary for the survival of the city and its inhabitants. I note that if this is what we can posit as justice in relation to the city, we can also appreciate its applicability to any and all social relationships as well, that is, as care for particularity. This book is an exploration that does not conceive of final solutions to the problems it discusses. Instead, it tries in its way to imagine relationships to these problems that might provide the opportunity for collective and individual reflection on the present as an incentive for bearing the ambiguity that life challenges us to engage sensually. As Sandywell says of the aim of our reflective inquiry, reflection should ideally not only “produce” analytic accounts but also produce “others” – real and virtual collaborators – who are invited to assume dialogical positions with regard to these analytic formulations. The “products” of analytic work are thus necessarily open-ended, social and promissory; their point is to occasion other and alternate acts of interpretations

Strategy of Analysis

17

and communities of theorizing and, in a projective tense, future traditions of analytic responsibility. (2016b, 75) This nice formulation of what is “produced” by our method of inquiry not only identifies our resistance to hermeneutic finality, but also captures the sense of how a dialogue can be “produced” as a conversation released by and oriented to ambiguity (a conversation that exemplifies what Wittgenstein says is not a thing but not nothing either). Here, we can see the resolution to produce irresolution as desire other than nihilistic and as a serious and substantial application of Plato’s conception of the final cause of reflective inquiry: the best humans can do for both self and other remains the desire is to make dialogue a “product” of value for all who are up to the task of bearing its fundamental ambiguity. What we “produce,” then, is certainly dialogue with others, as Sandywell states, but in ways that derive from Plato’s conception of dialogue as a way of finding those who are friendly to the play of ambiguity and so, not any others. Bonner translates such a search as a desire to find what he calls good company in the midst of everyday life and the enmity or indifference of troublesome company (2016, 258). This reiterates Plato’s vision of the friend or good student as such good company imagined as one who is not in a state of comatose, in the words of Socrates (Plato [1941] 1945, 199–202).

Conclusion As I will show, I reverse Plato’s strategy of talking about the soul of people through his use of the city as an example of a well-ordered system by speaking about the soul of the city through use of the example of erotic desire in persons. This reversal reflects the extent to which my sense of modernity has been inhibited by a degree of black-and-white thinking about essentialism. After laying out the grounds of this approach in the first chapters, I try to frame a discussion of the discourse that engages the problem of the culture of the city as reflected in conceptions that identify it with popular culture, with history, here expressed as heritage and customs, with views of making and its products, such as the built environment or the arts, and in notions of the effervescence of instrumental relations to public space, each and all intended as designations of memorabilia that are efforts to register the everlasting value of the city. I try to disclose in each chapter ways that the spectre of mortality haunts every such approach and limits the conception of the culture of the city by its focus upon external conditions that still bury the meaning of soul and its relation to what Simmel calls subjective culture (1971,

18

The Material City

227–35). I continue to the final chapters by seeking to make a case for justice as a relation of care attuned to the spirit of the city in ways that must still comprehend the previous contributions of individuals and communities as partial indicators of the life of the city, while trying to break through to a conception of more-thanlife. I try not to forget that my work is part of this discourse rather than distinct from it, by always revealing this in my exposition. In this book I reformulate Henri Bergson’s conception of the comic character of mechanical and inelastic speech and action as if it is a semblance of the unconscious as a social form that is observable in its repetitiousness, inversions, and interferences in linear sequences. Here, I bring together free association, its anomalies, and the comedic in a vision of the erotic infrastructure that shows, whatever its content (as either tyrannical or heavenly), how it can still be laughable for its vainglorious, absent-minded self-absorption (Bergson 1956, 119–27).

CHAPTER 2

The Material Context of Urban Life

Introduction My use of Max Weber’s analysis of the withdrawal of the security of salvation in Protestantism (specifically ascetic Calvinism) and the anxiety released by virtue of this indeterminacy (Blum 2003) serves as a point of departure for investigating the system of desire that grounds the city as an affective economy emerging amid the conundrums released by the perplexity of human existence in time in relation to conceptions of mortality and the value of life (Weber 1930, 24). Basically, Weber’s work helped inaugurate the view of the modern subject, torn from any and all security, driven to search for alternative means of justifying worldly activity as meaningful, and so as necessarily haunted by anxiety (even if unspoken and beyond apprehension as palpable). I began to ask how the affective climate of the city influences ways of living without external reassurance, as if we are abandoned to our own resources and have to formulate this as a problemsolving situation. This “as if ” has informed my previous research and exemplifies what Jacques Rancière calls the aesthetic relationship to inquiry (2008, 2009a, 2009b) or what Simmel (2010) calls the drive for meaning – that is, for more life or even more-than-life. This tension between life and more-than-life is Simmel’s way of describing a “discrepancy” between the conditions that we inherit normally and conventionally – life – such as our name and family, the characterizations with which we are endowed, and the various classifications that mark our situation and dispositions, the objectives and standards that we accept. “Life,” then, includes the ways and means that govern how we are led to think of ourselves, others, and the world at large, that we are human and not animals, have selves, bodies, souls, and opportunities for this and that. With “life,” according to Simmel, we acquire the capacity to calculate how and where we stand, or should stand, in relation to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Thus, if we conceive of ourselves simultaneously as parts of a whole and as being unique and irreplaceable in certain ways,

20

The Material City

this conception still only measures us for ourselves in relation to others relatively, leaving out as it must our sense of individuality as being more than unique relative to others but as “having” an ineffable kind of human quality that cannot be fully expressed, perhaps only shown. It is this sense of individuality as “morethan-life” that Simmel sees as a constant need and desire for expression and that the drive of modern life and its “objectivity” tends to supress. The city, like modernity, is the terrain where no longer was it the “general human quality” in every individual but rather his qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability that now became the criteria for his value … It is the place of the metropolis to make a place for the conflict and for the attempts at unification of both of these in the sense that its own peculiar conditions have been revealed to us as the occasion and the stimulus for the development of both. Thereby they attain a quite unique place, fruitful with an inexhaustible richness of meaning in the development of the mental life. They reveal themselves as one of those great historical structures in which conflicting life-embracing currents find themselves with equal legitimacy. (Simmel 1971, 339) This is Simmel’s version of what Lacan cryptically affirms in his maxim of the repression of the signifier, the repression of the connotative richness or surplus of any concept or term, in this case, the notion of oneself. That the self as a signifier is repressed means in the Simmelian sense that individuality is repressed by the facade of its denotation. As Arendt says, my “who” is masked by the designation of my “what.” Isn’t this the point of all the protests against reputedly toxic characterizations of race, gender, and so forth and so on? Both extremes of narrowminded dogmatic fundamentalism that reject new explorations and influences that are ignorantly feared, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the automated, simple-minded designation of the advance of woke over toxic classifications are parts of this discourse that only repress its dialogical potential. Although this inevitable and necessary tension between life and more-thanlife is intrinsic to human desire, according to Simmel, and marks our two-sided character, he proposes that it derives from the more fundamental discrepancy between the development of a spirit of objectivity in modern life and the subjectivity of humans who bear such “progress.” Simmel wants to make a distinction here between the value of persons based upon their relative merit vis-à-vis criteria that define them as qualitatively unique or as one of a kind – criteria that still measure them normatively relative to others – and their ineffable individuality, which seems to supersede such criteria. We might think here of the way that real individuality differs from being what is called a winner or a loser: this quality is

The Material Context of Urban Life

21

connected to the “who” that appears to exceed the “what” and that seems to provide the spark for the tension that Simmel describes at the foundation of desire: The development of modern culture is characterized by the predominance of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjective; that is, in language as well as in law, in the technique of production as well as in art, in science as well as in the objects of domestic environment, there is embodied a sort of spirit, the daily growth of which is followed only imperfectly and with an even greater lag by the intellectual development of the individual … This discrepancy is in essence the result of the success of the growing division of labor. For it is this which requires from the individual an ever more one-sided type of achievement which, at its highest point, often permits his personality as a whole to fall into neglect. In any case this overgrowth of objective culture has been less and less satisfactory for the individual. Perhaps less conscious than in practical activity and in the obscure complex of feelings which flow from him, he is reduced to a negligible quantity. He becomes a single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces which gradually take out of his hands everything connected with progress, spirituality and value. The operation of these forces results in the transformation of the latter from a subjective form into one of purely objective existence. It need only be pointed out that the metropolis is the proper arena for this type of culture which has outgrown every personal element. (1971, 337–8) This two-sided character of conduct is disclosed in the conflict to which Simmel makes reference here and is revealed in the methods that are used to engage and try to resolve it in many situations, the conflict between what he calls “objective spirit over the subjective.” I suggest that any intended resolution must be a way of healing the unsettling feelings and sense of self-worth that is inflicted upon the subjects of such a society, and that enables them to bear its effects on their experiences of diminished individuality. (Also, see Jacques Ellul [(1954) 1964] for how this tension was developed to disclose the overbearing influence of technical calculation and its standard of efficiency as a burdensome constraint upon human values in conceptions of the so-called “advance” of enlightened thought.) Simmel again: All emotional relationships between persons rest on their individuality, whereas intellectual relationships deal with persons as with numbers… The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the

22

The Material City

sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. (1971, 326) So, if the truth for us is the ambiguity by which we are afflicted, our path of reconciliation is marked by our desire to come to terms with this truth through interpretations; but because the truth of ambiguity can only lead to interpretations that, as Peter McHugh (1968) says, could be otherwise, ambiguity must lead to interpretive conflict whose effects tend to infect all persons. Such an erotic terrain populated by endless and ongoing skirmishes over the truth of interpretations that can only be conventions, and that are therefore disputable, produces malaise, maladies, and discontent that is suffered and must be healed. The notion of healing proposes a social version of medicinal therapy for the population that suffers the injuries to self-worth that such contentiousness produces.

Materialism as Medicine I propose that if this relationship is tied together in an imaginative structure that tries to compensate for the absence of reassurance in the face of the unimaginable limits of life, it is actually more than compensatory – is in fact embraced as a positive means of doing self-improvement in the way, for example, that devotion to exercise or plans for better nutrition are conceived not simply as responses to perceived deficiencies (or “weakness”), but as rational justifications that seek to realize an imaginary conception of self-fulfillment. One effect of the decline of absolutism that Weber called “inner isolation,” necessarily raised as a problem for any self, is the subject’s need to translate the tumult of inner life and the sense of impotence that it evokes into dedication to the view that life matters. Thus, this twosided conception of solitude (Blum 2014a) helped me reinstate Weber’s notion of “inner isolation” as the experience of abandonment that could also be temporarily distracted by the belief in the prospect of improving oneself and one’s life chances, in ways that always imply the relevance of such solitude as isolation that is both negative and an incentive for positive action. As Simmel says, the city nurtures individual freedom: “the particularity and incomparability which ultimately every person possesses in some way is actually expressed.” (1971, 335). On the other hand, the unpleasantness of loneliness can be the price one pays for the freedom of city life: “under certain circumstances, one never feels as lonely and as deserted as in this metropolitan crush of persons” (334). Weber’s proposition – that the decline of absolutism as a mark of modernization creates paralyzing anxiety – also suggests a possibility for improvement by virtue of a need for guidance in managing worldly affairs that might, under the

The Material Context of Urban Life

23

best of circumstances, help the person improve their lot, identifying the modern subject as one in continuous need of “information” for self-regulation. This commitment to self-improvement through such “new” information seems positive as grounds for optimism and its use of the results of science and its research for support in such “knowledge” transmission. This is the medicine that I suggest that materialism provides, the “material” that it offers the subject as a way of guiding worldly affairs. The society can then be seen to saturate the environment with such material, making it a material city in this sense, a city that floods or, as Serres (2010) says, pollutes its people with such material, with images, information, advice, and what Kierkegaard (1962) calls talkativeness and with the omnipresence of pundits, specialists, and experts who convey such material. If, as Anthony Vidler (2000) proposes, this pollution drives the subject to seek escape from claustrophobia, this path of relief only leads to the experience of an indeterminate abyss signified by the agoraphobia endured by one who must engage fundamental ambiguity as a paralyzing challenge.

The Market Although Weber identified the city with the marketplace and in this gesture invented the notion of a material city, there have always been marketplaces, both inside cities and out, in ways that lead us to view the marketplace as a figure of speech for the image of the relationship that we typically have called materialism, an image ostensibly modelled after the transaction between buyer and seller conceived as mutually oriented to optimize advantages in relation to some conventional value. I work through a discourse on the ways such values connect productivity to social change and its institutionalization in criteria, which we tend to treat as unambiguous whether viewed as acceptable or contemptible. It is through such imagery that Weber (1958) enables us to appreciate the marketplace in its way as two-bodied, both functional and aesthetic, both medium of exchange and spectacle that exhibits the impasse of self-worth in many shapes. For example, such relations are supported by an ethical conception of the productivity of persons and groups that advance market value as a measure for deciding how the ambiguity of the worth of persons and activities is to be handled. Such emphases guarantee the persistence of self-worth as a problem to solve under such conditions and the implications of the fundamental ambiguity of such a problem. Following this, I propose, as many have, that the historical attempt to treat the mentality of marketing as a central priority and criterion of value tried to make the measurement of self-worth unambiguous. I treat this as an opening for

24

The Material City

engaging the relationship between survival and meaning since survival tends in this usage to be treated as function and meaning as aesthetic. Simmel (1958) made this distinction between function and aesthetic dramatic in his analysis of the jug and its handle, which we might translate into Baudrillard’s (1983, 2001) query: If human beings organize themselves first and foremost to survive or in relation to the meaning that they invest in shaping their existence? This question, condensing the legacy from Weber and Simmel, frames my approach in this book in different ways as I attempt to reconcile the opposition between these extremes – survival and meaning, which we use here as a provocation – by seeing it not as an either/or choice, as in doctrinaire versions of materialism or idealism, but as a relationship of fundamental ambiguity, a Grey Zone that humans must negotiate in working out the two-sidedness of the functional and the aesthetic. I treat this situation of action as setting the stage for problem solving or for engaging this tension between what Simmel calls the desire for life and more-than-life as part of the structure of jouissance that becomes observable and researchable in social practices that we can represent in dialogue (Durkheim 1965). The economic character of desire permits us to recognize how unease in the very midst of productivity requires a method for composing the self under such conditions. In this way, the demands for surviving meaningfully in the city bring to view a web of beliefs and interpretations that influence us all to try to negotiate the connection between survival and meaning as if confronting a problem-solving situation, offering the prospect that theorizing the situation will disclose different ways of handling this problem. To a discerning eye, these situations can become research opportunities. In contrast to the typical derogation of materialism as a reductionist doctrine that divests action and inquiry of its commitment to meaning, I try to redeem the life of materialism by recovering its aspiration for principled roots in a pragmatic tradition that sees ambiguity as the very problem needing to be approached and made an object of research (Dewey 1916; James [1890] 1913; Pierce 1992). In this way, I must view materialism as two-sided, as a distinction with common roots in its reductionist utilitarian legacy, and yet as capable of being seen otherwise as if it is oriented to “handle” (or in the words of Kenneth Burke “to size up”) fundamental problems for which there are no unambiguous solutions and so to illuminate ways of bearing irresolution with “lightness of being” (Burke 1957). In this book I pursue the question of how we can speak of the city under the influence of such a discourse on ambiguity and the two-sided character of the number and what kind of life we can expect to see and develop at such a site. For example, if the reputation of the city as a site of materialism typically seems to identify survival as its ruling motif, I want to move beyond this surface to show

The Material Context of Urban Life

25

how such a gloss risks missing the connection between survival and the way its meaningfulness is construed in the imaginary of materialism, not as a choice of survival over meaning but as a discourse that seeks to affirm a quality of survival that is meaningful and/or a course of meaningful action that can survive under any and all conditions. In other words, can we consider materialism as two-bodied in its way, as medication both positive in its offer of relief and negative in its masking of the real illness? In other words, citing the market is a passive way of designating the city, unless such a signifier is seen to connote a repressed and ambiguous relationship to the notion of market value as a way of evaluating people in practice. Materialism is “more than” the market: it is also an evaluative system that stratifies people, places, and things according to their reputed productivity, treated as unambiguous reflections of their exchange value or as contestable reflections of how much they are worth. The market is a system of designating the value of persons – a belief system that is masked by the impersonal citation of the signifier. Market value rewards and punishes subjects by evaluating them in ways that can and does inflict injuries upon them that require a medical response in order to enable the system’s survival. In a previous work, I described this connection as follows: The city has typically been conceived positively as a site at which resources of knowledge are concentrated and accessible to all (and so, as intelligible in principle with the aid of expert clarification) and at the same time, as a fragmented environment of services that bring to view in their very diversity, social conflict over assumptions and interpretations … In other words, the city is a site at which the ambiguity of ethical indecision is produced by the very advances in knowledge that are expected to offer definite resolution. The expectation that the city creates an objective way of life is always tested in cases where the population must suffer the frustrating lack of intimate connection offered by such progress. The two-sided character of the city means that its very productivity also creates anxiety over the application of such knowledge to life. Because the city is both stimulating and fragmented, differences become vivid around the question of the relation of healthfulness to life, reflected in collective representations of health and its management that become normative and always arguable models for both citizenship and a well-ordered environment. (Blum 2011, 15)

26

The Material City

Healing the Curse of Reflection as the Troublesome Crisis of Our Time To establish a line of continuity, I mention that in two previous works I first identified the city as a site of ethical collisions as I have explained here (Blum 2003), and then tried to show how such a landscape of conflict compels the city to develop ways and means of healing that are designed to purge the environment of the ambiguity that is released by unruly eros, by seeking to develop an agenda that I formulated as medicalization, and that was still unable to overcome the environment and the influences of its vitriolic and frustrating character (Blum 2011). The ambiguity of medicalization is part of the city insofar as such ambiguity participates in the erotic structure of urban life. In this way I conceived of the effort to heal the city as an expression of a materialist version of problem solving, an attempt to cure disturbing ambiguity by institutionalizing its expurgation in word and deed. My work on death continued to explore this notion by attending to the view of life as a toxic inheritance that can only be healed by disregarding reflection on our limits (Blum 2017a). I framed this problem of the medicalization of materialism as my name for its program of healing ambiguity and the anxieties it releases (Blum 2017a). There, I discussed the ambiguity of Prometheus’s gift to humans that cured them of a preoccupation with mortality at the expense of depriving them of a poetic sensibility, making this purge of ambiguity both pleasure and pain, creating the allure of the algorithm as medication (eliminating awareness of death), by proposing to colonize subjectivity by objectifying it: Here is the problem: If making death invisible (repressing it we would say) is a gift designed to remove the weight of anxiety over mortality and to enable humans to live at peace in time with the sense of purpose that life requires, this “gift” can still not eliminate anxiety because the life of knowledge (or the city as the Greeks said) is rife with expectation, aspiration, loss, dispossession, and all of the frustrations and aggressions to which we are heir, the overriding sense of longing and resentment … that is correlative with life. The irony is that making death invisible actually makes tragedy and its pathos inevitable because we still need a way of handling anxiety. (2017a, 185) Some novelists have enabled us to imagine worlds in which the preoccupation with meaning is accursed by picturing the work of great numbers who try to relieve their anxiety in the absence of poetry, burdened by the constraint of being unable to put into question the “point” of life as reflected in their work and ev-

The Material Context of Urban Life

27

eryday lives. If David Foster Wallace is exemplary here (1987), Joshua Ferris’s invention of the workplace of an American office provides a striking illustration that visualizes a setting in which everyone needs to relieve their anxiety in the absence of resources such as the belief in the sacred or a poetic sensibility. He creates through the use of the first-person plural the voice of one among the many who is both the same and different, both part of them and apart enough to reflect on the collective. They are constrained to avoid engaging the question of the point of their work, and so of life itself, and he differs only by being able to represent the situation as if he both speaks for them and as them: “If we had to call into question the point [of the work they were doing] we’d have fallen into an existential crisis that would have quickly led us to question the entire American enterprise. We had to keep telling ourselves to forget about the point and keep our noses down and focus on the fractured and isolated task at hand” (Ferris 2007, 234). This is how I can propose that materialism in part is a figure of speech for the medicine that is typically legitimated as the cure for the irrationality and injustice of life and is both produced by the Real (life and its irrationality) and masks or veils the Real (through the illusion that its cure separates it from such irrationality). In this sense I am interested in the economics of desire, that is, in the ways in which desire must be economized to survive what Kenneth Burke calls the “mysteries” of life in any present (1957; developed in detail in Blum 2014b). The mystery is a version of the primordial question posed by the Greeks that asks how we can have a rational response to irrationality. This of course resonates with the economic notion of libidinal energy formulated by Freud and others such as Lacan (1977), Laplanche (1976), Bataille (1985), and Baudrillard ([1970] 1998), or efforts to apply this conception to classical economic theory (Weisskopf 1955). Part of this “equipment for living” takes shape, as Burke suggests, in strategies for “sizing up the situation” (1957, 253–62), that is, in interpreting the “now” in ways that can maximize the sense of its eternality and, by implication, the sense of our consequentiality. Given the inevitability of frustration in such an environment as a situation of problem solving, this book focuses on how jouissance frames the order and disorder of urban life in any present and can thereby provoke a dialogue on the erotic character of the urban. As medication, materialism tries to “handle” the agoraphobia experienced by the wide-awake subject of the city – the one desirous of more-than-life – and in this sense must be somewhat utilitarian, as Francis Ferguson (2004) suggests. Hence, even the conventional Enlightenment standard of efficiency represses the buried meaning of the term, which suggests a more reflective vision of efficiency as the necessity of a kind of self-composition required for engaging ambiguity as a problem in everyday life.

28

The Material City

The Roots of Materialism in American Pragmatism and Classical Sociology This focus on problem solving suggests to me that materialism identifies the pragmatic legacy of William James, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey not simply identifying inquiry as problem solving (the problem being the inquiry itself) but as an opening into engaging the actor’s relationship to value (the orientation of the subject) and to its indeterminacy. For me, the problem of inquiry in any topic is how the actor (pragmatically) handles the question of value and its ambiguity, making this problem of the actor in fact a problem for the inquirer. The question for inquiry, then, is how to make the subjectivity of the actor researchable (observable as a conversational focus). The pragmatic legacy emphasizes that we focus upon the actor’s work of objectifying subjectivity in trying to solve the problem of integrating survival and meaning. I accept this implication by viewing the actor as the semblance of a pragmatist who tries to solve the problem of surviving in a meaningful way (see Steve Bailey’s [2008] connection of pragmatism to Lacan’s work). Further, what we learn from the sociological classics of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel, and now from Lacan’s amendment (2013), is that what must be survived is the symbolic order itself, or what sociology calls the normative order, or the code. It is surviving the code that is the problem, and the pragmatic focus on problem solving tends to leave this problem untheorized except by implication in the work of Erving Goffman. Goffman’s actor seems to personify the quintessential sociological version of surviving the code and of enjoying the jouissance of administration by investing such action with an erotic attachment inspired by performance (1967, 1974). Lacan implies that such a drive is partial, only one of the ways in which the human being tries to solve the problem of ambiguity, by seeking to provide libidinal fixity and a unity of discourse in drives that are used to compensate for the impossibility of achieving absolute knowledge (1977, 206). We note here Gertrude Stein’s development of pragmatism in ways that connect to all approaches we have been discussing that offer challenges to conventions of thought. Through her deconstruction of the notion of habit, Stein introduces through her pragmatic approach another shape of theorizing as problem solving: Stein’s work demonstrates the same complicated and dialectical treatment of habit that can be seen in James’s and Dewey’s philosophical examinations. Though she does not allow herself the conceptual escape-hatch of the oppositional stance, Stein remains profoundly aware of habit’s mindless, deadening qualities. Indeed, her sophisticated understanding of the workings of habit renders her ambivalence towards its power all the more profound. As James and Dewey, daily habits in Stein’s work carry both conservative and

The Material Context of Urban Life

29

transformative resonances, echoes of the past and visions of future actions. (Schoenbach 2004, 253) In her way, Stein works to moderate extremist temptations to conform to deadening habits, on the one hand, and/or to simply oppose or transgress habits on the other (as she treated surrealism) for a dialectically nuanced approach. Schoenbach again: Habit in Stein … is never merely a problem to be overcome, a failure of imagination … It is the smallest component part into which thought and behavior can be broken down and through which they are built back up. Stein makes … the duty of rendering habit visible: from the minutiae of daily life, to textual “habits” such as punctuation and cliché, to the habits that constitute national identity, to the collective habits that create institutions and literary canons. (244) Here we see a curious conversion in the appetite for theorizing in the city among strange bedfellows.

Survival as a Mundane Art My “data,” then, is the social speech of a society such as ours and the various methods used to survive evaluation. Basically, I focus on the subject’s response to evaluation and conceive of such evaluation as grounded typically in criteria of exchange value that determine how much the subject is worth. But such evaluation is always open-ended, not simply because of its source in criteria, which are ambiguous at best and arbitrary at worst (as the critique of capitalism and its discriminatory apparatus has long noted), but for the reason that anyone’s value can be addressed and represented by the multitude in ways that invariably invite scrutiny (now especially on social media). History does make a difference in how people are scrutinized even though being open to scrutiny is an eternal problem. The limits of exchange value are now on display as open objects of assessment to and for the many. Aside from the long-standing dichotomy between rich and poor, those most vulnerable to the revaluation of productivity are now often and most dramatically those who succeed as “winners,” since their position as successful is open and constantly exposed to the opinions of the multitude. For example, besides newsworthy types, such as official politicians, business people, and others who are treated as similar, athletes and entertainers celebrated in mass media as admirable for their performances are good illustrations of the

30

The Material City

phenomenon whereby productivity is often engaged as lacking in value because of its ambiguity even for those deemed “successful.” In such cases, those counted as “winners” according to the criteria of exchange value complain about how such evaluations mask their suffering. Thus, one athlete attains “all-star” status and says that he is depressed because of the many others who lack such good fortune; another complains about unhappiness caused by the excessive attention and scrutiny he receives along with negative appraisals that reflect the natural mix of opinions about his prowess (or apparent lack thereof) and the tendency to overlook the fact that he is more than an athlete but a human being as well. These examples indicate how the criteria of productivity, even if measurable as exchange value, can be challenged if seen as “not enough”: in one case here as ignoring the contingent nature of evaluation, and in the other as ignoring its ambiguity, and in both as inadequate for capturing the experience of the subject. In these examples, the weight of numbers, viewed quantitatively, does not appear to reveal enough qualitatively for the subject to experience satisfaction, producing an “overspill” of despondency. This shows how exchange value is itself not unambiguous but two-bodied in ways that are intensified by media in any period and by the circulation of the many views to which a subject must be exposed. I suggest that symptoms develop in response to challenges to self-worth stimulated by such images and representations insofar as they provoke subjects to compare themselves to others and their situations and to use such comparison as motivation for their actions, often to conceive of themselves as lesser or lost based on invidious contrasts, or to try to exceed these others under any and all circumstances, and even in many cases to become fretful enough to want to injure or do damage to themselves or others out of desperation. This experience can apply to power, money, sexuality, esteem, and recognition, or to any of the conventional indices of class and status that sociologists such as Max Weber (1947) have long identified. Malice, envy, joy, overstimulation, resignation, and ecstasy are part of the affective environment of the city, one that needs constant renegotiation and reflection upon paths of escape from overwhelming melancholy. Thus, jouissance itself can be seen as an affective landscape that one might manage or not, inevitably in ways that seem to seal the fate of a subject as either condemned to life or as having the opportunity for a reprieve. In this vein, I want to show how the cliché of neoliberalism and the relations that it tries to explain is not simply revealed in talk of politics but is discernible – observable, “out there” – in all formulations. Such an inquiry should help us see how so-called neoliberalism functions. To summarize here in anticipation of this point, I propose that neoliberalism does the work of deflecting a society such as ours from attributing personal disorders to the pathology of the system, from its fear of extremist transgressive prospects and from a sense of this system’s cul-

The Material Context of Urban Life

31

pability, in two ways. First, by using accounts of corporeal mechanisms – neurology, chemical functioning – to explain the perceived disorder. In this way, neoliberalism tries to incorporate accounts that redesign agency in various ways, primarily by trying to explain such incidents through recourse to notions of breakdown in rationality and the organized functions of the mind, that have been standard fare for societies governed by ideals of enlightened progress. Second, those who resist such reductionism – the more “sophisticated” path of neoliberalism – understand managing the mind to be a skill for incorporating all views, including mine.

Method: The Collective Representation as a Locus of Erotic Overspill Therefore, the present narrative continues the dialogue inaugurated in my book The Imaginative Structure of the City, which identifies the city as a site of problem solving where the problem is masked in relations to concrete topics such as congestion, poverty, and the like insofar as these disclose as fundamental the problem of ambiguity that inheres in the mediated relationship of language to the world and that materializes in any such topic. This is explained in detail in the introduction to that book and is exemplified in the cases that constitute the chapters of the present volume. In the conventions that I follow, the evocative resonance of words as images rather than variables makes another kind of analysis necessary. That words are infinite means not only that a word is oriented to in many ways, but that in any of these ways it must relate to other words in making a thought, and it is this relationship that is indefinite and inexhaustible because the word does not stand alone (like the cheese in the child’s rhyme), or in Lacan’s idiom, the signifier is subject for another signifier, or as Wittgenstein said, grammar determines meaning. The method of travesty that I have worked with over the years dramatizes the ambiguity of the word in the sense that the word must mean more than it says, that it makes reference to an infinite number of ways of making reference. That the word is a name with many resonances, as both Plato and Virginia Woolf say, does not mean that the word can be anything. The ambiguity of the word does not grant one the right to call a name anything (just because it can be taken as such) but for the reason that its alterity or otherness will still persist under any and all circumstances. Thus, the word we use, solid as matter, also is malleable in the way of matter that can persist under and in many varied circumstances.

32

The Material City

We expose the ambiguity of our words and thoughts through reflective uses of analogies. Wittgenstein discusses this exposition of a topic – such as the city – as two-sided, much as an allegory that uses the topic to make refence to a method of viewing any topic and so as the outer surface of a story, here the story of a subject’s relationship to ambiguity. This is illustrated in the presentation of the topic as a reflection of the relationship of the object (city) to a prototype or ideal (standard of comparison, yardstick) that authorizes it. The discussion about the city is grounded in a method of viewing that should centre reflection: We have to be told the object of comparison, the object from which this way of viewing things is derived … the prototype ought to be clearly presented for what it is; so that it characterizes the whole discussion and determines its form. This makes it the focal point, so that its general validity will depend on the fact that it determines the form of discussion. (Wittgenstein 1980, 14) This is the counteracting tendency to the absolutism of unreflective commitment – or to the undisciplined eros that is reputed to be manifest in the “orgiastic” drive of the unconscious – as a desire for responsibility that I need to develop by examining discourse as the relationships between prototypes. It is in this spirit that I want to centre the narrative as two-sided, making reference to the city and to a method of making reference. Thus, discussing the material character of the city enables me to make reference to social change through usages of time and space, and ultimately problems of justice and care for the city and all relationships, by virtue of my exploration of the ways and means used by social actors to handle ambiguity in word and deed. This also reveals the two-sided nature of justice as care that is expressed in conventions of urban life and social practices, and as care expressed in conventions of speech and action, both senses oriented to a concern for bringing out the best in words and deeds. What Wittgenstein calls our relationship to the prototype is what my colleagues and I have described as a principled relation to our speech (for a selection, see Blum and McHugh 1984; Bonner 2014; Raffel 2018). We suggest that any inquiry must rest on some implicit standard of how best to do inquiry and that the actual study makes reference to this prototype only if we reflect upon the inquiry over and again in a way that reads its words to go beyond them, to see its second story (see my extensive discussion of this two-sidedness in Durkheim’s text in Blum 2014a). Yet, a relation to principle is not simply a citation, but a relationship that includes grounding the prototype as functional and giving value to those who are exposed to it. The principle, then, tacitly endorses the good of the inquiry for

The Material Context of Urban Life

33

life, its value to and for the speaker and for those who hear it, and is intended as a proposition to be tested by life itself and its contingencies. Raffel (2018) suggests that the principled actor is formulated as one who desires to engage the value of what she is doing in contrast to one who is conceived as being satisfied with doing what is expected and nothing more. He suggests that if life requires each and all to do glossing practices that take the satisfaction of expectations for granted, life also provides an opportunity for such an actor to develop as an alternative, a desire for more-than-life that orients to the worth of what is being done. For example, if the search for grounds is our principle (see McGuirk 2017 on this as his translation of Plato’s Good), it serves in the way of a gift that we give and desire to leave as our version of the value of inquiry. Dialogue, then, works to wrestle from containment a space for this interrelation of prototypes to become topical in exchanges. In our work we try to imitate the maxim of Socratic ignorance – “I know that I don’t know” – by translating it as knowing that my principle (absolute) is part of a discourse (relative) and in this way tries to link our commitment to our recognition of its being part of a discourse. We design our research to express this irresolute two-sidedness in the conversation that is exacerbated by different prototypes. What we know absolutely is that our principle is both the same and the other: both the same as all other approaches in being animated implicitly by principles, and other than the others in the way our principled relationship to the problem can be seen as different. The dialogue that is created is designed to exhibit this two-sidedness and must be fundamentally ambiguous. Besides this recognition of the indispensable condition of ambiguity in thought and action, which I have noted of many authors from whom I have learned, there runs throughout the canon a degree of skepticism toward ambiguity by many who celebrate a standard of black-and-white thinking as the goal toward which reflective thought should aspire. For these, efficient thought should advocate the systemic expurgation of ambiguity as an obstacle to clarity. For such types, clear speech must imitate a model of clear thought that they imagine as denotatively driven and as governed by a standard of either/or declarations that they idealize as criteria for guiding unequivocal decision making about truth and falsity. This animus to ambiguity does not grasp the fact that thinking in its natural course is never an unambiguous passage between ideas: the notion of ambiguity as poisonous assumes that clear speech imitates clear thought because it conceives of thinking as a simple and unambiguous passage between ideas that is treated as self-evident in the manner of the movement of a syllogism (Raffel 2013). Such populistic rhapsodizing takes shape in praising the value of succinct and parsimonious summarizing that is rampant in popular culture in the form of ted

34

The Material City

Talks and condensations of research that do not tax their audience and that, as such, are good-hearted but limited conceptions of thought and action that honour banality as humane. Yet, figurative thought and its uses of metaphor and analogy are necessary, notwithstanding the risk of obfuscation that they offer in speaking reflectively because – as Simmel notes – separation and connectedness is always a problem for speaking and thinking. This makes everything we look upon fundamentally ambiguous in ways that must always fertilize contestable discourse about the boundaries and borders of distinctions. This is how ambiguity functions as a collective problem for Simmel and how it can serve as both a topic of, and a resource for, inquiry. In other words, interpretation is at the foundation of life and its actions, and correlative with this foundation is the spilling over of ambiguity, and so of discord. In this book I am proposing an engagement with ambiguity that can challenge us to resist misology or nihilistic concessions to enduring the void – the abyss – and its spell of agoraphobia as an incentive for creative work. In sociological work, the examples of Goffman’s research on face-work (1967), on institutions (1974), and on public space (Blum 2003, especially 275–80) constantly dramatizes ambiguity as a mundane situation of problem solving that is limited by the goal of surviving the code in the absence of resources for anything more. This engagement is itself interpretive but in ways that need to acknowledge its own ambiguity, as I will try to exhibit. As Raffel notes (2018), the glossing practices of members is a universal condition and its discovery – a start – is not so wonderful until it is developed as the beginning of a trajectory that posits the actor’s reach for morethan-life (on the actor’s “reach” in eros, see Carson 1986). This again reinforces Wittgenstein’s claim that there must be a stamp of the poetic in theorizing, and that this imperative – “must” – cannot be unambiguous. Such a poetic affinity is disclosed in the primary conflict that Simmel speaks about between life and form, or between continuity and division: We conceive of life as a continuous stream proceeding though sequences of generations. Yet the bearers of this process, those who make it up, are individuals, that is, closed, self-centered, unambiguously distinct beings. While the stream of life flows through these individuals (more accurately: flows as these individuals), it dams up in each one of them and becomes a sharply outlined form. Each individual then asserts itself as something complete against other individuals of its kind as well as against the total environment, and does not tolerate any blurring of its boundary. Here lies an ultimate metaphysically problematic condition of life: that it is boundless continuity and at the same time boundary-determined ego. (1971, 362)

The Material Context of Urban Life

35

If life is a stream, as Simmel says, it must include the discontinuities marked by practices of collecting and differentiating. Heidegger replays this intuition in dramatic form in his readings of Heraclitus and Parmenides, where he appropriates the logos in Heraclitus as the discontinuity of the stream and the logos in Parmenides as the continuity of form. Simmel says that all divisions constantly erode (like Heraclitus’s stream) and in this sense are as watery as life. The stream can stand for life or form, for everything coming to be and perishing, for everything in flux. Calvino parodies this in the figure of his obsessive Mr. Palomar (1986), who tries to master the stream through calculation and description. We try to step out of the stream to go ashore, to categorize what we have seen, and our distinctions appear just as watery as the stream. Life is the stream and even more, since as a stream it “produces” the need and desire to go ashore (to overstep). If all of our thinking about life is watery – if we are immersed in “whatever” we represent – one part of this “flow” of life is desire, the need to step out of the stream, the need to go ashore, the need for centring ourselves, for rest rather than immersion and movement. If life is a stream, knowledge or knowing this is both wet and dry. The secret of life at any time whatsoever pertains to the excess of life in relation to form and the intermingling of forms in relation to life: “Rhythm introduces its pulse into words, but as words, like molten glass, becomes too well integrated into the phrases, the pulse this rhythm had introduced almost entirely fades” (Negrete 2015, 95).

Conclusion A question Simmel poses is, Is this a watery grave? The answer he suggests is that an escape is impossible, and that, if the stream of life is inescapable, the secret of desire always demands a fluid ruse. The problem of fluidity – that it always appears amorphous – means that the secret of desire, in part, is one of facing up to the look of amorphousness (in the way that Simmel, as a German academic, always appeared, even to his friend Max Weber, as amorphous). If life produces desire, then life abandons us to self-consciousness: the guilt, shame, awkwardness of affirming what we deny (in representing the stream we deny our intuition that it is inexpressible), and of denying what we affirm (in affirming that the stream is whatever it is, we deny that it is separable to and for us). This “contradiction” affirms to and for ourselves and others not simply that we are amorphous (as in an accusation), but that this amorphousness is designed to imitate the watery movement of the stream, of life. The ruse of fluidity is part of the watery desire of life. In part this means making the awkwardness of existence

36

The Material City

fluid. Philosophy and desire: reason depends upon fluidity; and fluidity must maintain itself as reflective. It is in this space that we recover the poetic element of eros, as one of its parts but not its whole. Yet, besides those who find a focus on ambiguity tiring and obfuscating (as in Carnap’s accusation of Heidegger as a poet and not a philosopher, and all those wearied by having to “go beyond” the word), others maintain that such a concern only avoids trying to solve concrete problems and is actually a diversion that causes us to neglect current issues. This complaint goes back to the rebuke of Socrates by Callicles in the Gorgias and is an abiding and important voice in the discourse. Nevertheless, we heed Wittgenstein’s advice in our rebuttal of Callicles: “What is important about depicting anomalies precisely? If you cannot do it, that shows you do not know your way around the concepts” (1960, 72e). My inquiry tries to show that it knows its way around the erotic infrastructure through a strategy of analysis that moves from exploring the free associations of usage and its incongruities, to picturing the discourse it explores as a situation of problem solving, to representing this discourse in dialogue as a story that could be otherwise, to our speaking and writing that engages this irresolution as an enjoyable trace of Shared Being by embracing, reviving, and refashioning our poetic drive.

CHAPTER 3

The Material View of Ambiguity: The Weight of Numbers Introduction What strikes me about such a way of life is its two-sided character and how it mixes and tries to match pleasure and pain. Whereas most try to focus on either one side or the other, the good of pleasure or the bad of pain, I want to engage materialism as both and as a relationship to this mix itself. In this I seek to follow the “impossible” path Frederic Jameson proposes, as affirmed by Karl Marx, to think the two-sided nature of capitalism: In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. (1961, 47) Although, they speak about capitalism here, the talk connects to my approach to the material city and for the need for a reflective relationship that bears witness to this supposed separation of the positive and the negative and that has the capacity to bring them together. This is the virtue of a conception of the medicinal value of materialism as a “solution” to the problem Marx is said to have proposed – to think the development of this “system” as both positive and negative. Accordingly, I want to take up Marx’s challenge to understand capitalism itself as two-bodied and the ramifications of this intuition for representations of the city and its mental life.

38

The Material City

I suggest that this mix creates, among many effects, the possible coexistence of democracy and oligarchy at any one time and is reflected in its emphasis on number per se, since the conception of numbers creates a homogeneity in the population that allows each and all to treat themselves as a complete one and the society as a collection of those who are equal by virtue of being an aggregate of ones. Yet this equality masks the differences interior to each one in and as the personal history each experiences in ways that seem significant and distinctive to them for marking their identity as based upon inherited and seemingly arbitrary categories such as gender, race, class, body type, genetics, personality, experiences, and all of the whatevers. Note, too, that the relationships between the different ones and their “whatevers” are not necessarily all the same: the advantages and/or benefits or injustice deriving from class and race can be easily explained by both the political Right and Left as simple effects of exchange value (the Right saying injustice is deserving because of differences in industry and skill, the Left saying that injustice is undeserving because of bias, prejudice, and exploitation). Here we see how the particularity of gender and its “escape” from simple causal senses of market value makes it a special condition that must mask an intangible and more complex history. In an earlier book, I formulated this two-sided nature of the city as expressed in the tension inherent in its character as both a corporate group and an implicit community (2003), and I examined different and specific shapes illustrating this tension in the various chapters and how McHugh’s reformulation of Shared Being (2005), which I have mentioned, collects all of these issues.

Cogito Ergo Sum = I Am a Number I suggest that the heart of the material city is reflected in tensions elicited for a subject in trying to reconcile two aspects of the ambiguous experience of being a one, as a whole and absolute to and for oneself and as a part and relative in relation to all others as what Georg Simmel calls being a whole unto oneself and being a part of a whole, between relating to oneself as a one both absolutely and relatively (1971, 351–93). If experiencing relativism inspires the desire to escape claustrophobia, the release of absolutism and its aura of agoraphobia can produce in its turn the desire to escape freedom, as Eric Fromm (1941) named it in his memorable study, as an upshot of reaching for more-than-life. As I see it, justice is in part a way of being fair to this difference – of whole to part, absolute

The Material View of Ambiguity

39

to relative – and in its way underlies all distinctions between quantity and quality, particular and universal, singular and generic that appear in this book as manifestations of the notion of justice as care. Let me provide the context for this distinction. In my research on death in The Dying Body as a Lived Experience (2017a) I identified the following distinction: “the singularity of the relationship to death as my death and only mine even as it happens to everyone as the difference between death happening to one and to everyone. What I discussed was the difference between one treating their death relatively as an occurrence of all and intimately as unique and special, as absolute” (13). I continued as follows: Death makes reference to the notion of the relativism of death as a condition that all must suffer, and so a condition that all must submit to equally as a common exigency to be endured, in contrast to the particular fact of death experienced by and for the subject who encounters it as a singular and absolute loss that is specific and unique … Death then has two registers that interact to create a tension for the subject between its relativistic status as something that happens to all as if an anonymous condition of life … and an intimate experience as something happening to the subject in a unique way that reveals a particular kind of dispossession and loss felt in a singular way. These two registers of death, that it happens to all as shared and to each uniquely and irrevocably singular, is a focus and ethical collision that we will pursue throughout. (13–14) The collision between these two senses of number is an important focus of this work and reflects a legacy in theorizing anticipated in Plato of course and made explicit in the discourse on Spinoza that Warren Montag, based on influences from Macherey, orchestrates in his text. Macherey says of Spinoza, The individual or the subject does not exist by itself in the irreducible simplicity of a unique and eternal being but is composed by the encounter of singular beings that conjunctively agree in itself, the constitutive elements of an individual are themselves complex realities, composed of distinct parts that coexist together and are themselves determined from outside of this relation and so on to infinity, since the analysis of reality is, according to Spinoza, interminable and can never lead to absolutely simple beings on the basis of which would be built the complex system of their combination. (2011, 218)

40

The Material City

Montag (1999) adds, “just as there is no downward limit to the beings that compose beings … so there is no upward limit. Thus, groups, collectives, societies themselves comprise individuals, or singularities, that are no less real than human individuals” (67–8). I am proposing that in one case the subject relates to the world as if a number in two different ways, as a one that is part of the whole consisting of everyone and as a one that is special and unique. Thinking about materialism, I did not want to say that the subject does one or the other – say, treats the self as if a statistic – for that cliché would not catch the tension in the relationship for a subject engaging oneself at one and the same time as both. It is this relationship that begins to be responsive to Marx’s counsel to grasp the subject as two-bodied, as two kinds of one. The desperation noted in the subject of the material city is created by the very comparison of oneself as absolute and as relative, as quality and quantity, as intangible and tangible. That one is a statistic relative to all means that special claims can be denied or ignored as superstitious, romantic, or essentialist and must be earned through the production of exchange value: that one is special and unique means that claims about community or equality can be disavowed on the basis of the supposed sovereign right of individuality (as the architect hero in Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead). On the other hand, I can reformulate the contrast of absolutism and relativism in this work to reflect the subject’s relationship to language as follows: existence requires of us all that we come to terms with the Shared Being that expresses our relationship to mortality as inescapable and relative in its way, while absolutism makes reference to the varied ways in which we work out such a common problem in intended “solutions” that seem particular to us in our heterogeneous ways, reiterating in this sense Sartre’s formula that existence precedes essence. In the strongest sense, absolutism and relativism do not need to be caricatured, for absolutism at its best can express the desire of art to have its voice preserved and not externalized (Joselit 2003, 3–13), and relativism at its best can be recognized in the clichés of Chinese philosophy that counsel tranquility in recognizing and accepting our collective humanity (Julien 2002, 803–24). Absolutism and relativism can overcome their worst extremist temptations for theorizing if we recognize their expressions in the voice of art, on the one hand, and that of the sage, on the other, as good-hearted alternatives. In a different context, the writer Colin Barrett brings these senses of absolutism and relativism together for me as a feature of the practice of writing fiction: You write a book and – my God – people expect you to know what it’s about. They look at you like you might know … I am coming to think that a writer’s skill, or whatever it is, lies in evoking a pattern, but just enough of a pattern,

The Material View of Ambiguity

41

that the reader can fill in the gaps … All it boils down to is that I work in images. Images come to me. I don’t know anything about them. But I trust them and I follow them … Stories proceed by image … That’s all you need (or me, anyway) to anchor the story, to build out from. Events, logic, sequentiality, back story – all that will come, all that will, in a sense, take care of itself. And what I am trying to do with these images is build a story, yes, but also locate a space or spaces in the story where the reader can become active. These spaces can sometimes look like gaps. It’s not that you’re cutting corners or being wilfully abstruse and holding things back from the reader to annoy them. Increasingly, I am coming to think that a writer’s skill, or whatever it is, lies in evoking a pattern, but just enough of a pattern, that the reader can fill in the gaps, or extend their imagination beyond where the pattern ends, and so come to their own conclusion about things. (Barrett 2022, n.p.) The subject of the material city that I posit, then, is such a problem solver, one devoted to managing this terrain in ways that make interpretation and its irresolution the law of the land and the necessary focus of any research. In this project I take liberty with a range of influences by improvising with the usages of a number of important thinkers and texts in order to apply this intuition specifically to the material city. The sense of infinity – and so of the abyss – is one example of how the weight of numbers plays upon inquiry as a way of inducing materialism to treat the disavowal of meaning in these senses as necessary to achieve “higher purposes.” I treat this imaginative structure of materialism as both sad and humorous, viewing its compulsion to see language in this way as a constraint that we must understand and try to subvert artfully without going to war. Perhaps mutually orienting to the comic character of this belief system might start us toward irony as a preliminary step on the way to something stronger. Baudrillard (1987) identifies the strategy he calls seduction as a tactic necessary for diverting the subject from a concentration upon productivity to motivate a consideration of the meaning of what is spoken, what he calls Objective Irony and that colleagues and I think of as reflective analysis (Blum 2017a, 90–2). The focus on quantity invites us to recognize how its grasp of validity depends upon everyone accepting that being a good sport requires their agreement to compromise their belief in what they know as best.

42

The Material City

The Spectacle of Quantity as Monstrous and Malleable In my book The Imaginative Structure of the City (2003, 197) I used Kant’s notion that “an object is monstrous where by its size it defeats the end that forms its concept” (Kant 1952, 91) to put flesh on Braudel’s idea that the saturation of the city by quantity must make the city appear in “some way as an aberration, a monstrosity” inundated by what he calls the weight of numbers (Blum 2003, 197). I suggest that the common experiences of those subject to the city is the orientation they share to the material conditions embodied in the weight of numbers. I ask how the material conditions of a city, reformulated as its relationship to the weight of numbers, must be developed in order for the city to appear as either/or, as both a monstrosity and as malleable. Thus, like anything, the weight of numbers as a notion is two-sided, capable of leading to a city appearing monstrous or to an aura of theatricality as a spectacle of diversity in its range of adjustments (see Blum 2003, 230, on the “brilliance” of capitalism as a mask). The weight of numbers forces upon a population a generic model of equality that must be essentially porous (vague, open-textured) and open to question, likely to facilitate discord between factions that desire to bond with other similar ones around the particular interests that differentiate them from others and that are conducive to making every such scene and setting a mixture of equality and inequality, a social formation based on the supposed similarity of its ones whose very senses of identity must be based on their claims of differentness from the other ones. As Simmel (1955) has shown, the perpetual impasse is disclosed in the way equality always harbours this submerged difference between the two senses of difference, externally between one and the other(s) and internally within and between the different parts of any one, where each part can be seen in its way as a one. Such a perspective on the weight of numbers reveals, as Simmel says, that everyone must be a whole and a part, that this two-bodied nature of numbers (between being a whole and being part of a whole) creates the tragedy that he discusses as the fate of the human actor, disclosing both the monstrous and malleable ways in which humans are ruled by irrational classifications open to atrocities or improvisation.

The Weight of Numbers as Two-Bodied We see, further, that Braudel’s “weight of numbers” refers to more than abundance and congestion, also to the quantity of reactions and responses to any stimulus or situation, the fact that the magnitude of possible orientations to any “object”

The Material View of Ambiguity

43

can make for a situation that is ungovernable and ruled by the incoherence of imagination itself. This makes explicit the grounds of Lacan’s slogan that we begin with the repression of the signifier because this repression makes reference to the connotative surplus of the signifier that must exceed its designation and denotation. We formulate this “repression” as a situation of action that treats repression as a site of problem solving and as a notation on how ambiguity (Wittgenstein’s lack of absolute knowledge) fertilizes conflict that the materialist strategy tries impossibly to solve by purging ambiguity in the name of the “higher purpose” of achieving co-operation through standardization and automation. Here, then, some degree of intervention is required to simplify and administer such complexity in order to create associations between subjects that are more attuned to realizing objectives that can enable productive results. If this is the ground for the sacrificial crisis formulated by René Girard (1977), it is also the occasion for the emergence of the coexisting forms of democracy and oligarchy as discussed by Plato in the Republic and the intended solutions of tyranny and other extremist attempts to simplify speech and action through the uses invested in administration and its capacity for well-being or corruption. To this end, I suggest that the “weight of numbers” to which Braudel makes reference produces, besides the “monstrous” excess of the overcoming of quality by quantity, a kind of accessibility whereby “any and all can find a niche” (Blum 2003, 198). Because quantity can always make space for diversity in the way that magnitude is likely to produce variation to some extent, Braudel continues to say that “the quantitative excess of the city might not lead to equality but to a kind of homogeneity in which diversity can at least survive” (quoted in Blum 2003, 198). In this sense we can understand the theatricality of the city as an exhibition that is reflected in public opinion and punditry, art, retail, fashion, and any and all dissemination of information that represents what is being done and how to do it through the modelling of what is modish and obsolete at any present moment. Further, as Will Straw (1998) and others have suggested, an infrastructure of scenes, both under- and above ground, intensify this spectacle in the city in creating prospects and possibilities for solidarity and experimentation, in addition to opportunities for personal improvement and managing the self that are displayed in the mediated representations of urban life. As a school, the great city has always been the place where all must go to achieve a degree in life and its “lived experience” in ways revealed not only in the journey of discovery, and in visiting and travel, but in the mobility reflected in the promise of the urban to relieve anxiety, whether desperation or ambition. In this sense, the city is a school for the liberation of the senses, for emancipation and its risks, offering in its way the prospect, as we say, both for enthusiasm over the present moment and despair and contempt. This ambiguity of the city as a two-sided object of desire accounts

44

The Material City

both for the hostility of the periphery toward its centrality, as often reflected in its contempt and/or destructiveness, but also in the effort of the periphery to annul the so-called elitist distinction between itself and the centre by destroying the “strong bond” reflected in the spectacle of the great city, trying to rethink it by imagining all cities as different only in degree through the notion of a userfriendly creative city that seeks to fashion a “level playing field” by erasing distinctions among cities that are essential rather than incidental (Blum 2010). Such a concern helps situate what Baudrillard might call a hyperreal relation to urbanity around the question of whether urbanity itself can be simulated and, if so, with what effects (see, as an example of such an attempt to simulate urbanity, the case of Dubai in Saunders 2006, 238–63). So, it appears that the common experience of the weight of numbers leads to a situation in which the population, besides suffering monstrous standardization, can work to develop individuality in relation to this force. Can we suggest that the city is conceivable as a site for collective work on the homogeneous facade of the quantitative through a process of individuation? The weight of numbers, then, has the status of an ambiguous material force that must be oriented to and theorized as part of the life that strives to thrive under its auspices. The city can be seen either as a monstrosity or as malleable: the impasse derives from the condition that the capacity for differentiating within any one is endless as there is no downward limit, and the capacity for differentiating between ones is endless because there is no upward limit; ways that mark the subject as in between the monstrous and the malleable. In part, the discourse on justice involves ways that the city can show in practice its care for engaging this tension between its monstrous and malleable aspects. Note, though, that the praiseworthy malleability of the city is a function of the agoraphobic experience that its infinity can provoke, making possible both ecstasy and hopelessness. The two-bodied city reflects its past in vestiges that seem to distort it in the way that vestiges either lose the fullness of what is lost or caricature it in simplifications that can only simulate it. Similarly, what will be lost in the future can only be disfigured in its image(s) as remains. In the present, the monstrous announces that there are only vestiges of the past and remains for the future, as garbage, waste that might or might not be converted into images of high exchange value. The loss of both the past and future in and for the present tells us that this present will be a past for the future just as our past persists in the disfigured symptoms we continue as images of our past. This relationship to the past as no more and to the future as not yet can become grotesque unless it is reformulated as an incentive for the subject to achieve separation in inhabiting the present as a free space of meaning, listening to but unburdened by past and future. In this way

The Material View of Ambiguity

45

past and future must appear as a medley of voices making music in the present for its subject. The Culture of Cities project and my colleagues’ subsequent writings appeared at the point of intersection labelled “globalization” and now more recently characterized as post-colonial, post-human, post-empire, and in similar ways. If we use the popularization of this intersection in the model of the analog as the old and the digital as the new, we can see this tension taking shape in a discourse that we can represent as if engaged by the task of solving the problem of the “twobodied image” in situations of fundamental ambiguity. I suspect in our period of transition that this mix of the analogical and the digital is experienced as a “negation closely linked to the affirmation of that which is born anew” (Bakhtin 1984), both for a category and its “outside” and internally for the category and its variations. Part of the music made by the voices of past and future in the present is in the song of suffering conveyed through the poetic resonances of language. The connotative force of the analogical, though treated often as dead, must still live in the classifications and abstractions of the digital, just as the discriminations of the digital must limit and in such ways disfigure the desire implicit in the analogical (see Hull 2015 for a novel that parodies this repression of the connotative relation to a signifier). To put it plainly, language requires this mix to be negotiated, for without distinction the analogical is formless and without usage the digital is sterile. Therefore, in its language, the two-bodied city expresses its grotesque character most vividly in its characterizations ejaculated as adjectives such as “awesome” that are incapable of capturing the complexities of evaluation or in clichés intended to praise and describe that inevitably must dissolve into banal formulae or platitudes that are unable to be more than overviews designed to summarize and foreclose discussion. Note an exemplary example of such banality: “Systems that think and reason are the leading edge of new cognitive computing capabilities and are creating the opportunity for government organizations to improve program outcomes, revitalize citizen engagement and tune the engines of commerce in ways never before possible” (ibm Corporation 2017, 2; see also MacIsaac 2016; Martin 2021). This idea of the “system” ignores its own production as an interpretation, as if the system describes a natural thing that exists rather than reflects a method for its representation. Here, an anonymous voice affirms something as being new and different, revolutionary, the “leading edge” of the present and for the future, and as noteworthy, congratulating itself as an unprecedented achievement. A method is praised as a way of enhancing government capacities to rule and citizen engagement in an unproblematic affirmation that makes its own self-evidence

46

The Material City

appear unquestionable. The anonymous voice congratulates itself and its method as making things better than ever before, as a significant event in time. This is the speech of tyranny: I am leading edge because I say so! In Plato’s Republic, the son of the old-fashioned oligarch offered to humanize and moderate the corruption and closure of the system by “opening it up.” Here this takes shape in such ways through appeals to technology as a catalyst for the revolt of what is often termed digital democracy in the name of qualified leadership and the value of citizen engagement. I will have an opportunity to explore the effects of such platitudes on the mental life and spirit of the material city. ibm announces itself as the grotesque embodiment of the interim between past and future, death and life, hailing itself as designer of the new and unprecedented “data-driven economy” that heralds the efficiency and value of systems that interpret courses of action as if they are not driven by thought because it (ibm) has special ways and means of divesting data of meaning. I am proposing this as the sine qua non of ibm’s self-congratulatory description of its powers and capacities. In contrast to tyrannical bragging (e.g., Trump), we might compare the boasting of Muhammad Ali – “I am the greatest … I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” – as performance art designed to simultaneously affirm the confidence of the speaker theatrically (as in athletics) and to ridicule the narcissism of the subject of the material city who seriously imagines oneself as an unprecedented achievement. In other words, where Ali makes fun of bragging through a clownish gesture, and the tyrant’s narcissism hopefully limits and exposes his boast, ibm uses its sober descriptive voice to present its greatness as if a fact of life and in its way is more dangerous than the tyrant: the evil of banality might be more dangerous than the banality of evil.

IBM as Institution Now we should appreciate how the blurb quoted above disguises its status as a self-description of the productivity of ibm, akin to an advertisement for itself, masking this under the explicit claim that it is describing the facts of social change. Further, it disguises its interest in self-promotion by its claim that it can enhance the value of the universal relationship of civic governance by improving it with its new methods. In excluding its self-interest in this way, it develops the pretense that it is contributing a new view in the shape of its offer of resources to leaders in need of new tools. The blurb proposes to provide leaders with tools for enhancing community values by supplying them with technical know-how

The Material View of Ambiguity

47

that is new and adaptable to a changing world. The past, rendered obsolete through technological advance, requires modernization by its heirs and well-positioned descendants who can lead it in the present to face the future. This is the real transition to be controlled by ibm. Thus, ibm, as the speaker, offers itself and its self-described powers to leaders for managing social relationships in a new world. Its presentation of itself as embodying in its corporation the present’s command of the future is monstrous in its exaggeration of “data” and its conception of the management of data as the primary tool needed by such leadership: its pretense that it is directed to the people (leaders and citizens) masks its status as self-advertising. Of course, what it excludes and what will return to haunt it is the conception and prospect of a strong notion of leadership as oriented action that requires knowledge for harnessing such tools toward ends that are invariably ambiguous and contestable, a conception that we tend to call ethical. The sacrifice to ibm’s dream must inevitably produce the spillover of jouissance in many shapes of resistance, for even its habituation, discernible in devotees, will induce depression, burnout, renunciation of intellect, cynicism, resignation, and different shapes of “knowing better.” Here Baudrillard’s (1973) figures of automaton and robot seem to personify the leader imagined by ibm as an ideal speaker. ibm’s simplification of the leader as a social actor, its view of the methods of exercising leadership as data management and this alone, and its conception of the goals of leadership as depicted in its platitudes creates the figure of the leader as a grotesque addicted to the manipulation of data (of what is called data and simplified as such – i.e., information). In this society, tyrannical aspirations in the name of populist revolt and inspired by an unreflective support base will emerge in reaction to such platitudes, condemned to act out in exchanges that pass as debate in the material city: as in the case of terrorism, dogmatic bluff and bluster might be the only responses imaginable to such ethically indifferent leadership, but only if such intervention can align itself in some way with the oligarchic imaginary and associations of an ibm. This is possible when the intervention of a demagogue can be envisioned as a profitable possibility that creates the spectacle of the blowhard as “interesting” and as the basis for an opportunity structure. Such alliances require an art of administration that might reposition the leader not as the manager of data but as the one who has the know-how of an “inside dopester” who can connect such a manager to the leader. Note that this dream of connecting the leader to knowledge has a long and noble history when these terms are reconfigured: for Plato is reputed to have tried and failed in Syracuse, Machiavelli is infamous, and of course Heidegger tried to connect Hitler to “thinking Being.”

48

The Material City

In the material city, I suggest that the relation of leader to knowledge is typically represented as requiring mediation by an art of administration that specializes in managing and manipulating information, in the spirit of the ibm manifesto. My proposition: so-called progress always risks producing the standardization of methods and of the very idea of subjectivity that makes the identification of desperation impossible except on exceptional occasions. This is to say, paraphrasing Wittgenstein (1958), that with progress, language risks going on holiday and sanctioning and legitimizing indifference to meaning as necessary for achieving so-called higher purposes. The roots of such a tension can be discerned in a simplified version of subjectivity that is modelled after a limited conception of the I-thou relationship in ways that disavow engaging the dialectic of meaning beyond interaction, at one and the same time praising the need of subjectivity for rejecting a model of objective neutrality while simultaneously reducing subjectivity to empathic conduct akin to verstehend (Weber 1947) that can only be a beginning, to earn trust for opening inquiry, and never an analysis. Here, we continue to see effects of the repression of the signifier. Further, I suggest that this view of interaction as what Lacan considered weak rather than strong counter-transference is correlative to the trajectory hypothesized in Plato’s Republic: in this way I propose to modernize Plato’s view of how democracy tries to “solve” the problems of oligarchy and its divisions and corruption in ways that typically lead to the tepid environment of neoliberalism, which in turn sets the stage for the bombastic intervention of tyranny that is invariably supported by a frustrated and intellectually limited part of the electorate who wave the flag of populist democracy. In its way, democracy is a method for handling the desperation produced by the law of oligarchy, and in so doing, creates the spectacle of diversity that invites new laws and new interdictions, raising questions about the quality of lives lived under censorship and the compromises that we are forced to make.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have implicitly tried to operationalize McHugh’s reformulation of Nancy’s conception of Shared Being (2005) to provide a framework for treating our intended efforts to reconcile the two senses of numbers – between our singularity and commonness – as the continuous focus of justice, both in relation to the other and to oneself. I suggest that absolutism constantly threatens to reappear when discourse excludes this relationship to Shared Being, seeming incapable of bringing together the different parts of the Same and Other. Winnicott is again

The Material View of Ambiguity

49

valuable for the way in which he traces the itinerary of absolutism in the subject throughout life: I am therefore studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own. We can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is a natural root of grouping among human beings. (1971, 3) We not only see the grounds for different postures in the erotic pursuit of meaning and how our desire for playfulness can be transformed, but also how such paths can be opportunities for bonding and for the creation of scenes in the city when they become opportunities for sharing illusions that can create both while simultaneously giving rise to solidarity and conflict between positions. Yet, the example of Virginia Woolf ’s recognition of illusion as the inescapable ground of life in the face of the groundlessness of Being might have freed her intermittently, as we see in her works, while also producing a despondency that can only testify to the two-sided character of such a reflection (1993). I take up some implications of this discourse now. I use Bergson’s comedic approach as an antidote to despondency, disclosed in the comedic capacity to laugh at the fascination exhibited in all futile attempts to achieve mastery, including our own, and, instead of acting out inflexibly, to focus on enjoying the gestural element of speech and action (Bergson 1956, 152–7).

CHAPTER 4

Use Value, Exchange Value

Introduction The vision of the weight of numbers requires us to begin to assess the labour theory of value upon which it depends for making its crucial distinction between use value and exchange value. Materialism identifies itself as the Real based upon its picture of human needs and desire, which it views as unchanging. The importance of the labour theory of value for materialism is that it identifies social construction as labour in ways that treat social construction and making as the law of the land. What this assumption must always gloss is its character as beginning en medias res, in the middle of things, rather than as an unmoved mover, always beginning in the midst of signifiers or of an inheritance that it treats as worth nothing until it is refashioned as an object of labour. If Winnicott says that what is glossed is the dependence on an illusion, René Girard would say that what is illusory about illusion is its belief in its spontaneous desire rather than in its mimetic relationship and how such a gloss disguises this dependency. Winnicott offers us an agreement over this convergence: “in any cultural field it is not possible to be original except on a basis of tradition … The interplay between originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for inventiveness seems to me to be just one more example … of the interplay between separateness and union (1971, 99). In other words, erotic desire is framed mimetically. We see that the conception of a signifier/word/concept as mute until laboured over and given value and meaning disregards the intangible meaning presupposed in its every beginning (again, the repression of the signifier). The model of social construction implied in the labour theory of value avoids orienting to the intangible influences prior to construction, treating such as inaccessible or ineffable, invisible and as needing labour. The idea that social construction is labour makes human activity the source of value insofar as labour produces value. But of course, labour or construction

Use Value, Exchange Value

51

is constrained by a normative order whose requirements of labouring must be satisfied to be seen as productive. Before labour, then, there are requirements that specify paths for satisfying criteria. The normative order is therefore pedagogical: it instructs us on how to satisfy criteria to be seen as normal and it conceives of such normalcy as capable of being productive in various ways. What is necessary is that those who desire to be normal take that as a first step in desiring to be productive. Normalcy is an incentive to make something more out of oneself, and so-called neoliberalism fills this gap through its advice to “normals” that a certain conception of oneself is needed for developing the skills and abilities to satisfy criteria for productivity that are honoured in this society. In this way we can understand the cliché of neoliberalism as if it makes reference to a doctrine that conceives of the self as an opportunity for the subject to retrain by treating one’s self as “capital” and as an investment opportunity and that enables the achievement of one’s goals for survival as a winner under current conditions; such a doctrine always defers criticism of what the system lacks by shifting attention to what the subject lacks by focusing on how such a subject is constituted in terms of body and mind to be one who lacks, a loser lacking the will, intelligence, chemistry, and luck to retrain (Becker 2009).

The Materialist Version of Other If Other doesn’t answer, as Lacan says, then the materialist view of Other must lie in the freedom to choose and to act in response to this vacuum; the freedom of self-determination, making, in this way, self into Other. But as we note, selfgrounding must always draw upon resources that annul this claim, and so must be essentially mimetic. Mimesis reveals the two-sided nature of Other in the exercise of freedom in relation to what is inherited. The imperative of freedom in the conception of heritage as the ineffable relation of labour to what is before labour – that is, to Other conceived in this model as raw material that is unformed and mute until made into something of value that can be exchanged – makes what is prior a silent affect that can be of value only upon its being made into something that might satisfy consumers (e.g., in the way making the city a market for tourists and their satisfaction does this trick). Since every community and city has a background (and every person too), materialism says that this has no value until it can be converted into an outcome that satisfies exchange value. In other words, this view suggests that what we are or have has no value other than what we put into it through labour (what is called

52

The Material City

creativity or productivity in assigning meaning), but it adds that this productivity itself has no value (everyone tries) unless it can be exchanged for recognition that confers value upon it through active rather than inert conduct (action rather than what it calls inaction). Since this exchange depends upon satisfying consumer needs that are random and modelled on a view of the subject as rational, it must be abstract because it leaves out change, time, and life. The recognition that we are nothing without our labour can seem monstrous; surely this is the case, for example, with the idea that our use value (basic human value) is incommunicable, even inconsequential, because it is universal (everyone has it) and not scarce. In this way, exchange value supersedes use value and brings to view its limits, as Bataille (1985) in particular noted, by revealing how this very productivity exposes the impasse of exchange value through the contradictions and tensions that it brings into view, thus making the questioning of its limits possible (Bataille 1985, and developed in Blum 2003, 190) This is to say that the grotesque character of materialism appears in the way it travesties the accentuation of exchange value and its ethic of productivity. For example, in the classical economic theories examined by Weisskopf (1955), property was treated as one’s own and as belonging to one who has discretion by right of such possession to use it as wished, but it has no intrinsic value by virtue of such possession alone. Property only acquires value when it is used to produce and exchange in ways that elicit positive responses from others who find it useful. In other words, property in the way of a mute word or signifier is dead, having no value outside of labour and production. To say it otherwise: we are nothing until we put our property (the self we honour) into action though the labour of producing something, but more, something others want! Failing this, we are nobody. The Intangible Heritage of a Self and Its Labour We begin to make the materialist view of Other transparent as labour that makes value. We can apply this model to the self by thinking of the self as the property that classical economic theory treated as unformed raw material. If such material only acquires value through labour, the property that is the self is only one’s property by fiat, just as my image in the mirror is only the reflection that I wear but do not possess (to reiterate both Plato and Lacan). Further, if I do produce this relationship to my satisfaction, it still has no value until it is recognized and is wanted by other(s). Yet, since others’ wants fluctuate and are unstable, I am dependent upon such an irrational reply (i.e., market value) on the part of the

Use Value, Exchange Value

53

society. This interpretive chain not only parallels the Lacanian model of the relation of image to original and its fundamental dispossession, a relationship that Plato first dramatized through his trajectory of the divided line, but also reveals the analogy between raw material and the usage of language when the connotative surfeit or surplus of a word is treated as mute (rather than “full of life,” as Thales said) until it can be (re)produced and determined denotatively. Many representations of this view in art have parodied it in descriptions of characters whose self-absorption in presenting themselves as having value takes grotesque shape as an addiction to ideals of fame and fortune, from those depicted as moguls, to divas, to the pathos of Willie Loman (Miller 1949), or at its worst, The Wolf of Wall Street. In contrast, we can suggest that the raw material of language is far from mute but must include the “stuff ” captured in figures such as the unconscious, inheritance, and the connotative resonances of the word as language (Virginia Woolf [1993] speaks endlessly about such problems in writing and reading). Materialism here seems to eliminate the value of raw material (language) from labour (as if it is only barren land). If language is raw material, surplus value should be seen as the capacity of interpretation and theorizing to produce more value in language than seems to appear on the surface in the signifier (Weisskopf 1955, 51). Consequently, the view of language as mute makes no place for background and thus for creative action that is necessarily an innovative relationship to such conditions. “There is life before knowledge and somebody before words. And every life is constituted by the generations that precede it, like an obscured inheritance … Describing people as the (sole) authors of their own lives is another way of punishing them” (Phillips 1996, 11–12) In accord with the notion of the repression of the signifier and its buried meanings, it seems apparent that we must see language as two-bodied, as both raw material (say, in our inherited and intangible sense of a connection between a signifier and the signified or of the word and the concept) and as the connotative depth of the usage with which we start, the many ways of speaking about the term or concept, and as potentially valuable through the labour of metaphoric and metonymic elaboration that we invest in it. Staying only with the raw material of usage reifies it as a “heap” without form. But the value of such usage is that people orient to it in many ways, and it is such a mix that needs to be reproduced in some reflective relation to these different voices as if a conversation about a situation of action that can be endorsed in an interpretation that is recognized as true to life or useful.

54

The Material City

The Division in Eros as the Two Sides of Jouissance Weisskopf analyzes the tension in the notion of economic rationality, using Alfred Marshall’s text: The value symbol of rational economic man becomes the focal point of thinking. It is combined with an idealization of the activistic mode of life … Through this emphasis on rationality and character-forming activities, the danger was avoided that non-rational and hedonistic drives would enter through the door of subjectivism and destroy not only the regularity of the economic laws but also the value orientation required by the economic system. Therefore, it had to be demonstrated that rationality dominates all type of economic activity … The opening chapters of the principles present the picture of a titanic inner struggle. It is significant that Marshall feels compelled to start his monumental work with a defense of economics against the frequent accusation that economics is concerned merely with materialistic, selfish competition and neglects the higher goals of life. (Weisskopf 1955, 162–3) The impasse makes reference to this “inner struggle” between the demand for rationality as what sociology calls motivated compliance to an order and the effects created by its ungovernable surplus in the shape of varied needs to administer such jouissance. Where the norms require motivated compliance to an order – say, the market or any symbolic order that must make normative demands and shape motivation this way – desire as a means to an end (e.g., conformity) seems to require a degree of renunciation: the subjectivity that is expurgated or held in abeyance becomes a surplus “overspill” that has to be handled or managed, and it is this that makes intelligible the move to desire more-than-life. The desire to orient to this affective surplus as itself a form of pleasure – not as renunciation, as in the model of motivated compliance, but as the pleasure of administering means as itself an end – endows the action of administration with pleasure. This is important for a conception of the material city because it makes transparent values of self-management, expertise, and the need and desire for the subject to observe the behaviour of models and exemplars of “success” (on the overspill of affect, see Zaloszyc 1991). This “inner struggle” is a modernization of the struggle in eros that Plato identified as disclosing the tension in the desire for more-thanlife – the desire in creativity itself – between its acquisitive impulse and its aspiration for excellence. This distinction can be seen in attempts to correct the assignment to a normative order that one inherits – say, in relation to gender – and that inspires the

Use Value, Exchange Value

55

aspiration to regulate the surplus jouissance by transitioning. The assignment to conventional gender designations imposes on the subject the need to comply by investing jouissance in this order, but the spillover of jouissance refers to the recognition of this being insufficient and unresponsive to the subject’s experience and to the need to reallocate their orientation. Surviving the monstrous implications of the weight of numbers, then, becomes equivalent to developing an art of life whereby participating in and observing such an art becomes itself an art, reflected in the two-bodied image of a subject having to manage the fundamental ambiguity of urban life. But this is to suggest that the weight of numbers can seem deadly in its caricature as monstrous and at the same time lively and vital as a seat of diversity.

Transitioning A range of strategies derived from the conception of the two-bodied nature of action stress the impasse created by the collisions expressed in the tension between life and more-than-life as problems to solve. What is conventionally called transitioning discusses the relationship between conditions as if an exchange marked by surgery or external modifications or, in contrast, as the development of the two-bodied relationship in itself, which enhances its doubleness as the aufheben Hegel says cancels opposition and preserves difference (Birchall 1981). The model of paradoxical therapy stresses how an unreflective emphasis on producing an action inevitably produces unexpected consequences that can unravel the desired outcome (Palazzoli et al. 1978). When the subject commits to an algorithmic orientation to action, incalculable consequences invariably exceed such a fixation upon mastery. This has been discussed in different contexts, such as that of unanticipated consequences in sociology, or the idea of the return of the repressed, and in terms of the praxiological surplus of action. This recognition of the limits of any notion of production as a final solution has been a staple of many literatures that disclose how such finality must always open up a new problem to solve. For example, the act of wanting and then getting fame and fortune is inevitably accompanied by obsessive followers and enemies, plagiarism, and slavery to the maintenance of such an outcome: the mantra of self-professed anxiety and the complaints commensurate with such “success” have the status of a canon among the reputable achievers in the material city. This model, typically applied to the dialectic of domestic interplay, is illustrated in such a society in aspirations to live forever that have to gloss the obstacles that must arise, or as in the myth of

56

The Material City

Frankenstein, when the scientist’s creation of the monster, successful as it is, must “return” to him the burden of unfulfilled responsibility to care for his creation. The model of paradoxical therapy highlights the tension created between production and the maintenance of what it produces, a tension intrinsic to making (McHugh 1993). In other ways, countless examples of this division reveal how mastery creates the resentment of slavery, how ambition and its accomplishments create the indignation and ingratitude of those it has used and perhaps used up in its path, how the conquest of nature produces the vengeful reactions of the material it has expurgated in its renovation, and, classically, how the angst disclosed in Oedipus concerns the prospective loss of what one might treat as a most prideful possession and the signature of one’s identity. We have already specified the activity of labour’s becoming mechanical, of means becoming end, of habit becoming symptom, of Same becoming Other, and vice versa, all as examples of the two-sided character of action. Prosaically, the attempt of law to conquer violence must exemplify the violence of such regulation, and all of the examples of what Baudrillard calls reversibility that mark the way supposed exclusive categories pass through and into one another ad infinitum – beginning and end, self and other, life and death, man and woman, and the array. Just as our demonizing the enemy that we want to extinguish can only keep that enemy alive, because in learning its ways so as to defeat it we become similar, so do we often deaden our most vital relations through standardization and complacency, perhaps opposing what we support from a fear of losing our self through dependency, which can cause us to kill what we wish to keep alive and to hate what we love. What is revealed and untheorized in all such accounts is Simmel’s recognition of how the desire to express our individuality is more than impression management but is stamped by the aura of charismatic self-absorption that can blind eros to its supposedly “higher” nature. As McGuirk (2017) shows, both Aristophanes and Alcibiades accuse eros (and its incarnation in the character of Socrates) of being taken in by its quest for spiritual sovereignty, to the point where its contempt and impersonality can be self-destructive. As a contrast in handling this problem, consider the difference between such self-absorption in Heidegger, who dismisses those who “do not think being,” and Wittgenstein’s gentler manner of dealing with those whose picture of language differs from his. Here, the common problem concerns how to develop the philosophical component of eros without being taken in by the acquisitiveness of a charismatic self-absorption that captures both the thinker and their students and colleagues. The example of Alcibiades is even more interesting, for when he tests philosophical eros with his beauty and affection, Socrates’s impersonality shows him that this is insufficient

Use Value, Exchange Value

57

if he fails to grasp the project and its method (in the same way that we turn aside students who admire our charm and flash but fail to relate it to our method). The lesson: eros worth its name must be more than skin deep, must be more-thanlife. Simmel teaches us that eros must be seen as more than the desire in fashion.

Fashion Fashion is a good example of how what we are for – being stylish, unique, singular – becomes generic by virtue of the very success we desire, forcing upon us opposition to it in order to differentiate ourselves from a style that becomes the norm. Similarly, Weber’s model of the routinization of charisma has long been a resource for recognizing how action tends toward abstraction when standardization annuls its originating impulse (as celebrated by Nietzsche [1949]). Simmel formulates fashion as the template for discerning the two-sidedness of social change: Fashion displays the tension between social adaptation (imitation) and individuality (dissimilarity): Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for social adaptation: it leads the individual upon the road which all travel … At the same time it satisfies in no less degree the need of differentiation, the tendency towards dissimilarity, the desire for change and contrast, on the one hand by a constant change of contents, which gives to the fashion of today an individual stamp as opposed to that of yesterday and to-morrow, on the other hand because fashions differ for different classes … Thus fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change. (Simmel 1971, 296) This two-sidedness exists as a feature of the tension between the Same and the Other as translated in the Simmelian vernacular: “Two social tendencies are essential to the establishment of fashion, namely, the need of union on the one hand and the need of isolation on the other” (Simmel 1971, 301). As Simmel puts it, Union and segregation are the two fundamental functions which are here inseparably united … In addition to the element of imitation the element of demarcation constitutes an important factor of fashion … Each group establishes uniformity within, as well as difference without, the prescribed set …

58

The Material City

The more nervous the age, the more rapidly its fashion change, simply because the desire for differentiation, one of the most important elements of all fashion, goes hand in hand with the weakening of nervous energy … As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom. The distinctiveness which in the early stages of a set fashion assures for it a certain distribution is destroyed as the fashion spreads, and as this element wanes, the fashion also is bound to die. (1971, 297, 299, 302) A suggestive model of the reversibility of the passage as a mark of the modern is supplied by Simmel’s conception of fashion as a desire to individuate and differentiate customs that are long-standing, inflexible, or settled, by creating a singular and distinctive style that, by virtue of its very success as an influence, becomes destined for routinization as standardized, invariably inviting further differentiation and refashioning. Thus, Simmel uses fashion as a model of the repetitious dialectic of the modern as a restless movement that combines, unsettles, and recombines in ways that place a burden on actors who are subject to the problem of relating to self-fashioning as an impasse. The desire to “handle” the connotative excess or surplus that persists as the remainder of any and every determination is posited in both the Enlightenment model and the approach of fashion as work to be done in any situation, the work of “disposing” of meaning. Simmel again: The whole history of society is reflected in the striking conflicts, the compromises, slowly won and quickly lost, between socialistic adaptation to society and individual departure from its demands … great antagonistic forces … poles of their [life’s] oscillations … fundamental form of duality … The two antagonistic principles … [attempt] to combine the interest in duration, unity, and similarity with that in change, specialization, and peculiarity. It becomes self-evident that there is no institution, no law, no estate of life, which can uniformly satisfy the full demands of the two opposing principles. The only realization of this condition possible for humanity finds expression in constantly changing approximation, in ever retracted attempts and ever revived hopes … imitation in all the instances where it is a productive factor represents one of the fundamental tendencies of our character, namely that which contents itself with similarity, with uniformity, with the adaptation of the special to the general, and accentuates the constant element in change. Conversely wherever prominence is given to change, wherever individual differentiation, independence, and relief from generality are sought, there imitation is the negative and obstructive principle. The principle of adherence to given formulas, of being and of acting like others, is irreconcilably opposed to the striving to advance to ever new and individual forms of life; for this very reason social life rep-

Use Value, Exchange Value

59

resents a battle-ground, of which every inch is stubbornly contested, and social institutions may be looked upon as the peace-treaties, in which the constant antagonism of both principles has been reduced externally to a form of cooperation. (1971, 294–5) René Girard’s (1977) conception of mimetic desire helps us collect these reflections. If the uniformity of cities drives them toward the diversification of a style, as in the use of fashion by individuals, the competition between cities and their styles resembles an adversarial exchange between rivals who both differ and must remain similar by virtue of this common desire for singularity. Further, this notion of mimetic desire as a motor force in change also permits us to appreciate how the rival cities each contesting for a special style must compromise themselves by playing the victim in terms of the Enlightenment limits for co-operation that force them to accept the code or standardized grammar of material progress – for example, the way different cities must each and all accept the parameters imposed by urban planning and renovation and its rules, against which many, including Jane Jacobs (1969) and Michel de Certeau (1998), have famously argued. That is, the development of an urban style, no matter how distinct, depends upon a grammar shared by all participatory rivals regarding whatever it is that makes a style “stylish” rather than mundane. Cities excel only by virtue of successfully imitating the standard. Of course, by virtue of its success and adoption, such a “successful” example of stylishness is then condemned to be emulated, followed, and routinized as the norm, in a way that compels it to breed other styles as a kind of infinite procreative process that fertilizes debates over influence in relation to parasitism and of course the robbery of plagiarism. The Innovator’s Path: In Between Extremes In this way we can appreciate how the in-between can appear monstrous when it announces itself as leading a transition as if unprecedented, in affirming extremist self-affirmations of its innovative prospects. The city itself, in relation to other cities and to its own passage in time, could experience reflectively both death (past, heritage, canon) and rebirth (life, innovation, utopia) together in the present as a life of excess (see Blum 2003, 68–9, 244–57). This leads me to identify the affective climate of the material city as fundamentally hyperbolic and particularly prone to extremes in language and interpretation besides opinion mongering. If the city is the seat and site of excess as both a problem to be managed and as a spectacle to behold, this two-bodied image has to be endured as part of the curriculum of the material city. Here we imagine the problem forced upon the subject of the two-bodied city as one of being practical within the context of

60

The Material City

such a spectacle, of being at the same time participant and spectator in the mode and means of survival, of being two in one, both involved and witness to this participation. I collected the usage in the following way: “The city is a showcase for the extremes of humanity, and we venture that the quantitative excess of cities makes them into theatres in which the great range of variation in ways and means of human survival can be exhibited … This also suggests that the extremes of poros and plenty – of deprivation and plenitude – are mirrored in the city as if a spectacle of human creativity” (Blum 2003, 198–9). Thus, I was proposing an interpretive chain in which the weight of numbers produced extremes in suffering and in survival that become a spectacle of diverse adjustments and creates awe and contempt: what is fascinating as data is precisely this variety of ways and means, this array of methods for trying to solve the problem of surviving change by finding a niche in which life can be endured. What is fascinating is the fecundity of the weight of numbers and the capacity it arouses for imagining life emerging from a reputedly living death (see Rancière 2006). I suggest that it is this spectacle and its very drama and theatricality that we might view as monstrous, that can lead us to explore this possibility in more detail as the material basis for the culture of the city. It is also this spectacle and the charm of its variations, as Plato put it, that brings to view the allure and appeal of democracy as an object of fascination. What remains monstrous is how the present must devalue the past and its exchange value and overvalue the future in expectation of an increase of exchange value, using the cliché of progress toward this end, making the unambiguous sense of this opposition between advance and decline a necessary justification for the mantra of market value. Between the death of the old and the birth of the new, reactions can be monstrous, as reflected in the presence of ghosts from the past and of unformed adults imagined from the future in their here-and-now shape as spectres and children (Agamben 1993). Further, in the present what can seem monstrous is how loss of the past is magnified as an advance that masks what is lost under the presumptuous spectacle of its glorification as improvement (for more of this necessary fixation on the present, see most recently Blum 2017a, especially 196– 7, and my fundamental formulation in the paper on panic in Blum 1996). What is monstrous is how progress conceals its regression in its use of so-called winners and losers as exhibitionistic idols that attract and repel, in the affirmation of exchange value as innate and natural, and in the abuse of those conceived as useless and obsolescent. The intersection between the death of an old order and the birth of a new one can be identified as a period of transition, as a “turning point” in which the tension between death and birth, disappearance and appearance, is marked as two-bodied in its present when the death of the old (through simplification of

Use Value, Exchange Value

61

complexity) reappears as the birth of the new (also through simplification of complexity), making simplification itself monstrous as a figure that can retain in any one shape a vestige of the old that it has simplified, and an anticipation of the new that it simplifies in the promise of such a gesture to realize itself more fully. Thus, death persists in the present in the aura of the intangible heritage, while birth materializes in the present in the figure of innovation and the dream of utopia as the removal of present obstacles. Any present is two-bodied in its showing the coexistence of both past and future, intangible heritage and dream of innovation, in its every representation. What is monstrous are extremist reactions to this mix that on the one hand can either deny the presence of the past in the present and its image of what is handed down or, on the other, can deny the presence of the future in the present in its image of what is possible (see Blum 2003, 76, 113–14, 116–22). In our research over the years, the Culture of Cities project has addressed the ways the fixation upon the future in the name of innovation often depends upon a range of contestable representations of the past as irrelevant or useless, just as the fixation on the past in the name of heritage often depends upon problematic views of its presence in the present as irrelevant or ineffable. I continue in this vein by developing the argument that the discourse on the up-to-date and obsolete runs through any present period, as expressed in ideals and idols of expectation and loss in ways that mark the material city as a site of mediation between past and future in examples that invite discussion and research.

The Materialist Notion of the Good Life The weight of numbers as a notion appears to reflect the materialist version of a relationship to Other and invites us to formulate this condition as a system of desire that is the spine of materialism. Instead of simply condemning its facade as a devotion to quantification, we want to begin to engage the ethical impulse animating its imaginary relation to the world. The force of the weight of numbers is revealed in its status as an effect and not a cause because its conception operates as a defence against the recognition of the abyss of meaninglessness, serving as a notation on the incalculable anticipated effect of infinity upon the finite actions of subjects who try to anticipate the exchange value of their present self in the future through dreams of ideals of posterity and immortality. We note that the weight of numbers discloses the division between quantity and quality most obviously in ways long recognized in critiques of reductionism, reification, externalization, and the like, but is more significant in revealing

62

The Material City

specific approaches that work in concert to attribute an anti-social character to subjectivity: on the one hand, the figure of the weight of numbers dramatizes abundance as a threat to inquiry into any topic that illuminates fearfully an infinite quantity of responses that it imagines as an impediment to decision making at any one time. On the other hand, for materialism, the constraint of the so-called information highway as a mark of the overwhelming and inestimable force of information in quantity demands of the one subject to decision making a need to simplify the array of available choices, whether in inquiry, in consumption, in politics, or in judgment of any sort, in order to meet the demands of generic formulae. Here, the weight of numbers evokes the image of a world of data, two-bodied as both an opportunity for choice that seems to offer gain from a bountiful sea of selections that forecasts for the subject a promise of infinite malleability through self-transformation, and, simultaneously, pain as an eternal indecision and resignation that can foreshadow a monstrous impotence. The weight of numbers offers the dream of endless and unprecedented opportunities, choices, and channel selection as means for enhancing malleability, and at the very same time the prospect of a sensory overload whose sublimity overwhelms the capacities of any one subject. In addition to stress, what is often typified as monstrous is the way that such a spectacle creates the need for condensation in thought and especially prose and speech, condensation that is simplified in the demand to summarize complex quality in external designations designed to be user-friendly and undisturbing, particularly in formulae that will need to be mediated by expertise (punditry) or in formats such as ted Talks. In this way, praise of the information highway as an advance that celebrates “digital populism” must coexist with speech that censors any engagement with the meaning of what is circulated beyond the exclamatory affirmations of anonymous speakers sounding like Wittgenstein’s vision of talking lions whose use of words is treated as self-evident. Of course, the comic version of such condensation is the survey that treats responses to simple questions as meaningful by virtue of their being answered and for that reason alone, as if every respondent is an expert in relation to their own speech and thought, on the grounds that any responses to questions are valuable because they can be tabulated and objectified in terms of tangible criteria for computation, and that the respondent for this purpose can be viewed as a reliable narrator rather than an ignoramus (or, most likely as prey for consultancy and market research). Speech treated as a legitimate expression and possession of one who means what is said and says what is meant is viewed as private property not to be tampered with by questioning. The diagnosis of a population according to the model of the weight of numbers must enforce standardization in its various

Use Value, Exchange Value

63

formats, whether impressionistic, as in advice and self-help, in market research supplemented by common-sense marketing strategies, profiles, or algorithms, and “big data,” all as intended solutions, creating the method of consensus as the only legitimate mechanism that can enforce determinations of quality. (Note how the mass media create “pundits” out of those capable of doing common-sense advice in palaver on urgent problems, naming them “grief specialists” or “depression specialists,” or, comically, “weather specialists,” in ways intended to invest its cronies and broadcasters with authority by endowing them with expertise.)

Paths of Knowledge It is instructive to explore available avenues down which a subject might acquire knowledge in such an environment, and here we can imagine not only models of expertise supplied by media and its pundits, spokespersons, and exemplars of success, but also entertainment that is meant to demonstrate highs and lows in life though the celebration of right and wrong conduct. Indeed, as McLuhan pointed out (1987), advertising does not simply provide information about the product, as we all know, but embeds it in a settling of jubilation around which characters are made to show degrees of pleasure in attending to it as a focus of conviviality and celebration that is intended to be amusing, or at least entertaining. The product appears as what ethnomethodology calls “inference rich” (Garfinkel 1967). In bonding together in scenes of common interest, the subject learns about cooking and cosmetics, financing, stylizing bodies and domestic interiors, making mortgages, money management, real estate decision making, selecting from recipes and travel sites, collecting and segregating preferences and choices in the development of “know-how” in relation to lifestyle, whether choosing films to watch, hotels to stay in, dates to go on, and spouses to marry, or who to listen to for advice and emulation, who to trust, and who to respect or disavow. Scenes also enable subjects to commiserate with one another in discussing experiences that they are ready to make public and share from their different backgrounds in ways designed to affirm the precedence of this commonness and its capacity to overcome the privatized experience of these differences and that seem to signify deficiency by proving to them that they are not alone and that their difference need not be isolating, and by encouraging them to use their different experiences to fill in the common narrative. Such scenes are designed to help the subject recuperate the healing benefits of equality as a way of dissolving their self-absorbed preoccupation with background and its destructive effects

64

The Material City

on their feeling of unworthiness. Yet, those lacking in any resources beyond such media must face the unending and demoralizing burden of comparing themselves with the celebrants represented (whether jovial families in their kitchens or happy-go-lucky lifestyle enthusiasts) as a persistent index of their own worthlessness or, at best, exclusion from such fun. Thus, the force of the weight of numbers is best described not by the mantra affirming the defeat of quality by quantity and its criteria but by making reference to the mechanism of the glut of information that includes, besides print and conventional avenues, websites, social media, and an abundance of unregulated opinions meant to confirm the right of any and all user to expression. This is how the weight of numbers is nicely expressed as “user friendliness,” not necessarily in the strongest sense but in the right of anybody to have their say (to do a turn on Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, we recognize here the epidemic of the evil of banality, as I’d pointed out in the previous chapter). This is part of the elation and optimism that the weight of numbers can produce as a feeling of well-being. Thus, it is not that quantity simply “defeats” quality, but rather that it appears to make consensus the only way of regulating ungovernable quantity through criteria of majority rule and market value. One part of the force of the weight of numbers is that its making a necessity of the virtue of co-operation toward the attainment of consensus helps reveal standardization as a condition for the ecstatic self-representation of democracy. On the other hand, this information is controlled, edited, circulated, and made profitable by virtue of the secretive “know-how” that is monopolized by the exclusive corporate agencies that affirm the precedence of oligarchy in the midst of this democratic fervour. Quantity makes market value the only acceptable criterion of value because the weight of numbers seems to produce unruly diversity in its heterogeneity, which invites governance by partners assumed to be equal. All solutions must then acquire their status as Real by virtue of such stipulations. The force of the weight of numbers resides in its making necessary rigour, objectification, and ideals of harmonic equilibrium as mechanical criteria of resolution by virtue of the commitment to computation as a value. In this respect it is easy for oligarchy to use its so-called administrative skill as a guise to honour itself as informative about “best practices” for negotiating consensus in order to convert the quantitative overload into working agreements (into “deals”). In his notion of a drive beyond the pleasure principle and the dream of nirvana, Freud noted the problematic equation of harmony and quality that always must conceal the discordant and disjunctive heart of darkness marked by harmony (the infamous “silent majority”). This leads us to begin to engage the dialectic of inner isolation assumed to picture the subject of such a society

Use Value, Exchange Value

65

and their “mental life.” Insofar as oligarchy must understand itself as exercising the specialized knowledge necessary for administering diverse relationships, it tends to go hand in hand with the hoarding of information that both Dante and Simmel formulated as the miserliness of a closed society and its monopoly on “know-how” that invariably must motivate the move to democracy. Basically, then, I treat democracy not as a regime separate from others, but instead (reading between the lines in Plato’s Republic) as a method used by the perennial oligarchic society to give satisfaction to its numbers, to give relief to its masses for enduring the circumstances that they inherit. In dealing with the technological advances embodied in the emergence of the “information highway,” we see, as many others have noted, how automation, standardization, the idealization of quantity, and especially of computation, make reference to the desirability of exactitude, efficiency, and the expurgation of what these processes decide to be extraneous to a disciplined attainment of something of value, all such purges deemed necessary to deferring resentment that can and does arise from conflict over matters that cannot be resolved by accepting the rule of computation. Of course, everyone and anyone sentient knows this and accepts it without further ado as a fact of life, as “real.” This captures the spiritual, two-bodied character of the material city in its unalterable tenor for anyone in ways that make the phrase “get real” an interdiction designed to disavow conversation beyond externals. If to complain is neurotic, and to deny is psychotic, is perversion in between? The idea of the value of collecting opinions from anyone and everyone is based on the assumption that it opens up the closed society that is organized around the oligarchic hoarding of information and its secrecy. The notion that the availability of such information contributes to the creation of a well-informed citizenry is oriented to the model of the magazine Consumer Reports as informing “rational” decision making when comparing commodities. Those faced with the task of making inferences from such doxa always must deal with the problem of positive and negative rants that can praise or condemn the product in order to calculate how to discriminate between thoughtful opinions and mere acting out. Note further its assumption that collecting information is an end and not a means and how such a model is fated to identify the ought (value) as random. The value of the transparency of information is imagined in this symbolic order as exposing wrongdoing, but even this assumption depends on its belief that the opinion describes a situation in the way of an unproblematic relation between signifier and signified. This idealization of the transparency of information as a democratic correction of oligarchy imitates the review or rating that is governed by the market and its random, unqualified responses, applying this

66

The Material City

electoral model to hotels, restaurants, movies, and people, searching for patterns of complaints (bedbugs in hotels, service in restaurants) that are useful and open to question. Such data collection, when unanalyzed, is seen as a value, as self-reports that can be justified even as rants because they are viewed as expressions of experience (but being unanalyzed, such data is resistant to the organizational schemes of the market researcher, who does not know how to deal with them except as a list of preferences). In response to oligarchic secrecy and its tendencies toward corruption and conspiracy, democracy claims to use such information for a “higher” purpose. Note, however, that it cannot distinguish between opinions, has no method for getting beyond their externality, and so, if it cannot go on, must treat such a collection as what Aristotle called a “heap.” Democracy has no intellectual weapons for defending itself against the ignoramus except hyperbolic denunciation (the “he says, she says” exchange passing for discussion on television news shows) and must dissolve into a celebration of quantity with respect to majority opinion and of leaders who can best establish rapport with the ignoramus (Tom Grimwood [2001] is especially good at identifying these symptoms). This is how Baudrillard (2010) can say that a society that elects a Schwarzenegger (or today, a Trump) gets what it deserves since this is less an aberration or exception to the rule as a materialization of the rule itself.

The Fashion of Technology Think of this today if we dare: what is fashionable can be what the corporation discovers as necessary for feeding the great numbers if they are to be marketable. In our social institutions of law, education, and health, for example, the notion of the fashionable begins to identify what Goffman would call the script that is viewed as necessary to entertain the great numbers and to convert them from constituencies to markets. We have already noted how the expurgation of ambiguity does that work and solves that problem, at best through digitalization, but also in everyday operations such as algorithmic thinking, social selection, evaluation, and agendas for creating environments that are praised by many as “welcoming.” The enlightened thought that purportedly governs institutions expresses an awareness of what is needed to satisfy the great numbers in order to maintain them as a supportive constituency and market in education, business, media, and other corporations. Such a model of technical thinking designs and tries to institutionalize means for achieving an efficient social order that hopes to defer resentment and to heal the city of discontent.

Use Value, Exchange Value

67

If we recall the self-promotion of the ibm text discussed in chapter 3, we can see how dramatically it personifies the link between technology and fashion. For being up-to-date or in the mode of the contemporary is expressed as the selfproclaimed mastery of the in-between, of the present as if a style. ibm says that being stylish is showing, at this time, the capacity to manage data or to collect and sort through information as a means of increasing the speaker’s exchange value as what Alfred Schutz called the criterion of the well-informed citizen. Besides the management of data for personal use, information includes both good news and bad news and representations of courses of action to follow in work and leisure. It is best for us to treat the information or content circulating in the city as if it is gossip, even when claimed as systematic according to some criteria, as if hearsay or opinions passed on over back fences by townsfolk who are anointed as pundits legitimated by corporate standards of expertise. The Web passes on such gossip from both its so-called right- and left-wing voices on all matters of fact that require not just fine tuning in response but a degree of courage to resist the force of this avalanche of opinion, and a desire to overcome hysterical response by situating its doxa as a position in some symbolic order. The images to which the subject of the material city is exposed are reflections not simply of the “bad news” that used to be feared and oriented to as requiring censorship but of so-called good news that exaggerates in grotesque representations, pictures of merriment in the behaviour of cavorting types designed to impersonate the dedication to life as fun and games in any present, making both images of good and bad capable of stultifying the subject. The celebration of virtual and online discourse asserts that it makes possible an experimentation with one’s “multiple selves,” revealing the self as manifold and not rigid and uniform. Apologists for the banality of such exchanges claim that online discourse frees the subject from face-to-face relationships and from dependency upon the body in anchoring identity. It is reputed that virtual space invites the subject to discover their voice and to reflect upon who they are by overcoming essentialist versions of identity as a single thing. Thus, the subject is free to engage the one that it is reputed to be as many (ones) and as having alternatives for creatively reflecting upon this self. As usual, such palaver disregards the uses that have been made in the humanities, social theory, and in everyday life by those who engage writing, and indeed all texts, as if they offer opportunities for such exploration. From at least Plato on, the essence of strong engagements with such materials has been viewed as the opportunity they provide for such play in the cultivation of voice. Moreover, the notion of such exploration as a transition of the subject who exchanges one condition for another is misleading when one does not aspire to be other than they are: for example, an old person might not desire to be young as much as to have a good

68

The Material City

relationship to being old, where such a good relationship requires incorporating aspects of youth into one’s identity rather than becoming what one is not (in the way mimesis is not the same as copying). In these ways, the recourse to surgery by the old person who tries to be young or by the young person who tries to be old can both appear as grotesque gestures in contrast to the behaviour of those who would incorporate such otherness, as in the youthfulness of the old and the maturity of the young. The weight of numbers refers to how quantity overstimulates the subject in many ways but invariably in a fashion that forces upon the subject a recognition of the need to compromise what is known in order to satisfy demands for productivity because the ends justify such means of mechanization and standardization. As we see, though, if the weight of numbers enforces standardization as a constraint upon the actor, it also seems to provide opportunity for self-development in ways that create ambiguity – here endowing the city with its character as a collective actor that does impression management, implicitly affirming its offer of a better life. We have to consider how the desire that is eros materializes in urban life in many and diverse ways as a social force.

The Collectivization of Eros in the City On the one hand, we can appreciate how the so-called Data-Driven Society can overstimulate winners and losers and encourage them to dream of a malleable present and an opportunity structure open to any who would submit to proper retraining and commitment to the self as capital investment. However, even in Plato’s formulation of such desire, we can anticipate how his recognition of the appeal of erotically possessing the future can possess everyone in the material city as the promise of healing whatever maladies they happen to suffer in the present. Summarizing various usages from Plato’s Symposium, we can formulate his version of eros as proposing that human visions of mortality are dependent upon reproduction in ways that make possible and necessary eros as a discourse oriented to such problem solving. Unlike the gods, mortals can be said to preserve anything in a meaningful way, only through reproduction, by replacing that which passes away (including themselves) with a semblance. In terms of death, we strive to preserve the parts of ourselves that we understand as good and valuable (and not all parts). People desire to create the eternal preservation of these parts of ourselves that we value (Symposium 207d–e; and especially Hooper 2013). Thinking Greek in this sense, we might propose that our being mortal and intermediate between divine and bestial leads us to search for ways of imagining a

Use Value, Exchange Value

69

renewal here as a rebirth, a new life that can “handle” the problem of our future absence by creating semblances of ourselves in images that we give to the world – images of our virtue that cannot be real virtue but only second best, as images. Despite our future absence, we can still simulate a presence that might enable us to affect the world. However, if heavenly eros is not simply a desire to possess the Good, but in fact drives us toward possessing the Good forever and is therefore necessarily a desire for immortality, it seems a kind of self-acquisitiveness. Plato says that this self-oriented drive is nevertheless a means of leaving something of value in the world that is not simply personal but an opportunity or incentive for the world to use, inviting us to view such apparent self-assertiveness as a medium of gift giving to the world, a vision that still mixes the elements of eros in an ambiguous manner. In this way, the city should be populated by all sorts of expressions of this drive to express individuality through memorabilia of our virtue that can “stand for” our self-worth. This could be Plato’s way of viewing the material of the material city as data.

Conclusion We come to recognize that the culture of the city is itself a repressed signifier that leaves buried and unspoken the complex eroticism of the urban landscape, which it first tries to intuit as the expressiveness of the city that is revealed in its so-called popular culture. Yet, Plato enables us to see that culture is more than this, involving, as it must, an imaginary relationship to posterity and to the memorability of the city as an “object” in time. Plato frames the problem of immortality as if it grounds the discourse of eros and discloses the discourse as orienting to such problem solving in practices and methods that mortals develop to create things that are external to them, disclosing three types of such “things”: children; honor and fame; and logoi such as codes, arts, treatises. But such phenomena are unstable: the fate of our children is unpredictable; logoi such as legal codes can be overturned, as we see with Roe v. Wade, and works of art are subject to constantly shifting evaluative trends; while honour and repute are essentially revisable in reconstructions of the past as fluctuating appraisals of our past relations confirm. Thus, the discourse of eros comes into view first in social practices of creating memorials of and for subjects as vestiges of their virtues after their deaths, as memorials that promise to outlive them. Given that the discourse is the second-best alternative to the impossibility of realizing eternal immortality, we compensate for the impossibility of realizing immortal desire – the impossibility of being a god – through ways and means of

70

The Material City

performing, seeing and being seen, exhibiting, disciplining and being disciplined, conforming and transgressing, among enumerable strategies to solve this problem of perpetuating second-best value. These partial drives (as Lacan names them) all circle back to enable one to see oneself, for better and/or worse, in ways supported by illusions that make it intelligible to say that desire is essentially interpretation, because any interpretation – despite its illusory character – strives to provide “libidinal fixity” and a unity to the discourse that is achieved not as if a goal or resolution but as a process that is second best (for we who are not gods). If desire is essentially interpretation, as Lacan says, compensating for such a limit can only take shape in drives that are partial. As I have been saying throughout, both Plato’s sense of a desire for immortality and Lacan’s conception of partial drives are buried meanings repressed by orthodox usage or doxa that is inelastic and mechanical. This opens the door for inquiry to travesty such habits by disclosing how their incompatibility with rigid conceptions of self-composure by which they are governed reveals a vulnerability to the flood of life forces that threaten illusions of mastery. This vulnerability is the fate of the human subject meant to be suffered with light-heartedness. For Bergson, this sense of mastery is laughable and a temptation of inquiry itself if it imitates such absent-mindedness without reflection (1956, 154–5).

CHAPTER 5

The City as a Writing Machine

Introduction We have seen how the city can be formulated as a site flooded by competing desires to advance illusions that are shared in various ways, ways that make the city appear monstrous or malleable. We must ask: What drives these illusions that ground such beliefs, beliefs that drive speech and action to demonstrate self-worth? The development of the soul for the subject of the city makes reference on the most immediate level to the desire to signify one’s value through indications that can range from grandiose to innocuous as marks of virtue that promise to outlive them. Plato’s Republic, treated as the canonical classic text on the development of justice in the city, uses the connection between these two ideas – justice and city – to try to clarify as its “real” story the problem of how a normal subject can develop a relation to oneself that brings out one’s best part, one’s soul. The soul is the problem of such a subject, serving as a figure of speech for this desire to bring out one’s best in the midst of life and its conditions that interrupt this desire and lead to a resistance to it. Such conditions have typically been identified as the idea of enlightenment and its progress, as aspects of the imaginary relationship that is honoured as grounding self-formation in the material city. Yet, if the subject’s relation to the soul is part of the environment of the city that we explore, it frames our attempt to conceptualize a relationship to the soul of the city. How, then, can we use this framework to be just to the city and its particularity in our formulation? To address this problem, we first need to engage the relation of eros to the notion of the unconscious as a problem that Plato implied but could only gloss.

72

The Material City

The Strategy of the Republic The Republic narrates this process as a series of episodes in a trajectory where a subject’s desire for healing and to bring out the best part of themselves and the object they are representing – in the shape of a dialogical relationship to discordance – is thwarted not simply by external conditions that coerce them but also by the way they relate to such conditions. In this sense, we impede our own healing. Freud spoke of this as the unconscious. But long before Freud, Hegel reflected on crimes and what he called insanity: A violent, but groundless and senseless outburst of hatred, etc, may in contrast to a presupposed higher self-possession and stability of character, make its victim seem to be beside himself with frenzy … It is the evil genius of man which gains the upper hand in insanity, but in distinction from and in contrast to the better and more intelligent part, which is there also. Hence this state is mental derangement and distress. (1971, 123) So, we need to “trick” the evil genius, in order to turn down its promiscuous imagination and induce it to listen to its so-called better part, that part of itself that is stable and intelligent. Accordingly, we try to motivate the subject to engage oneself reflectively, as if discussion, as a means toward that end. Hegel suggests that such a subject deserves humane therapy that treats his “irrationality” as a contradiction that exposes his inability to act in terms of his better nature. Hegel sees his procedure as rational in its way, not in the manner of logic or epistemology, but because it tries to make the irrationality of the subject something to bring to life in its approach: it is rational in the way that this creation of conversation (interior reflection) is life-affirming and rational as a path toward such an end, leading us to view the unconscious as territory to explore and not dismiss. In such outbursts, Hegel continues, the contents which are set free in this reversion to mere nature are the selfseeking affections of the heart, such as vanity, pride, and the rest of the passions – fancies and hopes – merely personal love and hatred. When the influence of self-possession and of general principles, moral and theoretical, is relaxed, and ceases to keep the natural temper under lock and key, the earthly elements are set free – that evil which is always … latent in the heart, because the heart as immediate is natural and selfish … Crime and insanity are extremes which the human mind in general has to overcome in the course of its development, but which do not appear as extremes in every in-

The City as a Writing Machine

73

dividual but only in the form of limitations, errors, follies, and offenses not of a criminal nature. (1971, 124) So, this unconscious is two-bodied, not only creating a monstrous evil genius, a demon, not only errors, follies, and offences, but affections, passions, and the basis of the diverse social and creative actions that we can produce, conditions of both the monstrous and the malleable. The question is, how does this notion of the unconscious relate to dialogue? Michel Serres is apt here: We have all known places where dialogue flourished: two people in search of the truth struggle to exclude the noise between them that prevents their hearing each other, and try to include in their midst the meaning born from the intersection of their vocabularies and the interlacing of their good will. Dialogue is played out between four people, the two appear to speak, plus the excluded third, their demon, plus the included third, their hope – the god who descends into their midst. (2008, 330–1) Perfect: besides the two in dialogue, there are two others, the two who incite monstrous and malleable imaginings. The unconscious is not indivisible; it is complex and ambiguous, including the demon whom the principal speakers in Serres’s dramatization try, imperfectly, to exclude and who makes the “noise” that inhibits their desire for a soulful relation to dialogue, and the god whom they hope can descend into their midst and help them overcome this evil demon. What does Plato’s Republic have to say here, since the notion of the unconscious is a modern conception that we are imposing upon this venerable text? If a soulful relationship depends upon our moderating the influence(s) of the evil demon, how does the figure of the evil demon inhibit our desire to formulate the soul of the city? How can we conceive of the evil demon that infects urban life?

Technology From the point of view of enlightened thought, according to Jacques Ellul ([1954] 1964), the evil demon is the temptation of irresponsible subjectivity as an impediment or an intrusion that constantly disrupts the desire for efficiency. The marriage of technical thinking and efficiency is affirmed as the means-end relationship necessary for the creation of a good society. Calculation in the service of the institutionalized expurgation of ambiguity is required to cure the

74

The Material City

wasteful and self-absorbed distractedness that results from resisting this demand and that leads to orgiastic irresponsibility (Patocka 1996), to the incoherent and rambling meandering of poetry, and to gestures of transgression that revel in their own narcissism. Commitment to efficiency as expressed in standardization, algorithmic thinking, and exchange value is affirmed as the means for producing a good society, a method of delivering justice in contrast to the wasteful self-indulgence that recoils from this idealization. According to Ellul, this commitment to efficiency as marking the good society sees it as facilitating in our thinking the leap from superstition and absolutist illusions to rational decision making in all areas of life. He proposes that market value sustains this illusion as if it is immune to ambiguity, in its the claim that enlightenment is not merely a cure for ignorance but is the mark of a good society, as if the soul of the city can be observed in the ways that it appears to honour efficiency in practice. But the implications for the erotic landscape of the city is even more significant than Ellul suggests, for the emphasis on technical competence as criteria of self-worth can and does create monstrous specimens of human beings whose grotesque character resides in the gap between their technical skill and maturity: “We live in an age that has been profoundly warped by the headstrong impulses of men who are technically sophisticated but emotionally immature” (quoted in Radden Keefe 2022, 47). The spilling over of such ignorance circulates throughout the city in ways that can mark hustlers, eccentrics, lunatics, their rabid followers, and especially the pundits who try to figure out their plans and saturate the environment with commentary on the logic and decision making of immature subjects.

Rereading the Republic Let me revisit the canon to frame such a discussion. Plato’s Republic, the canonical text on justice, is reputed to equate the decline of justice with the evolution of democracy, but I treat this as an unimaginative formulation of his text. The Republic identifies the decline of the ideal state as a process, beginning with dissension in the ruling order that undermines the absolutism upon which the state was grounded. This absolutism was reflected in monarchical and orthodox fundamentalist regimes that could only endure as long as their self-evident rule was sanctioned by authoritarian measures that silenced discussion. The erosion of such measures can only release discussion reflecting the positions and opinions of different points of view. The Republic can be heard as reflecting upon the

The City as a Writing Machine

75

proposition that with the decline of (such) absolutism, dialogue will occur in ways that must inevitably lead to conflict and to the diverse landscape of beliefs and interpretations that exemplify democracy. I take Plato as suggesting that with the decline of such absolutism we get the liberating discourse praised as the Enlightenment, and it is the nature of the Enlightenment as progressive that becomes the problem of the city because the democracy that it ultimately produces can be and is fundamentally ambiguous, can be seen as good (as liberating) and bad (governed by oligarchic measures that seek to control the unruliness that discourse between different perspectives enables) by enforcing banal appeals to the value of such measures for healing discontent. What appears liberating is that the Enlightenment, both historically and as I am using it, generically, overcomes orthodoxies characterized by monarchy and other forms of fundamentalism or superstitious doctrines that are uninhibited by anything other than self-assurance and its authoritarian enforcement. If governance by the sacred silences ambiguity with its absolute declarations, then its withdrawal must leave in its place discourse and its ambiguity and capacity for endless distinguishing. In this sense, the decline of absolutism is emancipatory – freeing us from automatism, conformity, regulation, deprivation of freedom – in its guise as enlightenment as an advance over superstition and fundamentalism. On the other hand, such “advance” is only skin deep because it makes constant and continuous the necessity and ambiguity of discourse and the possibility of discord and resentment that Girard (1977) named the sacrificial crisis. In relation to this, the Weberian proposition makes transparent not only the ambiguity of the Enlightenment and its claim to progress – and so the ambiguity of progress per se – but also the fundamental ambiguity of absolutism and the status of its “decline.” When we consider the material city as the environment that centres this tension, we might realize that it is a figure of speech for the city of democracy, the city that centres as its fundamental situation of action the problem of engaging the ambiguity of absolutism in thought and action. In this way, the generic notion of enlightenment maintains a taint of both the positive and negative – it supersedes authoritarianism as its good and it cannot but fail to keep “due measure” in check as its bad. But how might we say more strongly than Weber that absolutism is positive, that it is more than regulative and compensatory but oriented to jouissance and creativity? Democracy permits us to see that this is not a question to be settled with an either/or decision because absolutism is fundamentally ambiguous in a way that identifies the material city as the site at which we must bear witness to such ambiguity and seek to endure it. Thus, all of these notions – the Enlightenment in both historic and generic usages – and concepts such as progress, absolutism, discourse, are fundamentally

76

The Material City

ambiguous, releasing the work that we need and desire to do to handle anxieties inflicted as both burdens and incentives imposed upon all who inhabit the city of democracy. Yet, it is only democracy that allows us to join different voices in a discourse as I do here with those such as Plato, Weber, Freud, Marx, Simmel, Wittgenstein, Arendt, Girard, Serres, and Lacan, among others, as voices that we can conceive as a discourse that sustains our inquiry. We have to address the status of the absolutism that Plato says begins to disappear and not simply take it for granted as self-evident. What we might note is that his conception of absolutism makes reference not to a concrete state of affairs but to something like the wish that we all harbour for consistency between our views and those of everyone, a kind of dream of this consensus as fulfillment. I take it that what Plato is saying is that the Enlightenment, when grasped analytically, is a dream or a fantasy (Lacan’s Imaginary) that is soiled/spoiled by discussion caused by the dissension that results from endless distinguishing that different points of view create in discourse (the collision of the imaginary dream of absolute consensus with the plurality of positions released by the symbolic order). In other words, our very human and infantile tendency to dream/covet such consistency for us must begin to decline when we confront the otherness and intersubjectivity of discourse, of differences in points of view. It is bittersweet eros and its capacity for demonic intoxication and/or creativity that confronts us as a challenge and as an incentive – as Patocka (1996) says – for taking responsible action rather than succumbing to its spellbinding allure. Here, Peter McHugh ([1970] 2019) says that we come to the realization that points of view are conventions that could be otherwise and are oriented and not innate in the nature of things. With the decline of absolutism, the drive for truth is influenced by the symbolic order, its plurality, and the recognition of otherness residing in any term, which elicits the “spillover of affect” elicited by the Real (“Get real!” is the vernacular paraphrase of the popular response to the imaginary dream of unity). The decline of absolutism in Plato is an awakening akin to the end of dreaming. In the Republic it begins with dissension in the family, between father and mother, between parents and children, in the family’s relation to the state, and, eventually, perhaps to other families. Disagreements must occur because people are different (Bateson 2000) in ways that produce different relations to defining the situation that absolutism and its facade of unity keeps in check. In this way, discourse that is good – necessary and desirable – must create consequences that could be bad if the discourse leads to the type of contentiousness that results in reviving the rigidity of absolutism in various guises (enduring this ambiguity is what it is to live life – a.k.a. the Real). For example, the response of tyranny describes extremist temptations that treat the dream as if real and

The City as a Writing Machine

77

that personify a Lacanian version of the crime that tries to enact the fantasy (see Bond 2009). This is how the desire for absolute consensus becomes monstrous: when it is viewed as the same that must be imposed upon others rather than as the Same and Other (i.e., as open to be shared), or as what Peter McHugh (2005) called Shared Being. We noted this in Winnicott’s notion of imposing our illusions on others. Such tyranny proceeds by forcing acceptance upon a dissenter and by treating the otherness of views competitively. So, if the standard vision of the Enlightenment says that progress is good because it signifies the conquest of old-fashioned absolutism, we might suggest that the spirit of a commitment to measure or principle is implied in a strong version of absolutism as a reflective antidote to its aura of domination, as the notion of limit that is needed to keep self-aggrandizement in check. If a commitment such as this looks absolutist, we need to reflect upon how a principled relationship can resist its temptation to be so. If we agree with Wittgenstein that our speech and ideas must depend upon a prototype, such dependency can be grasped as a commitment that is provisional and tentative, as what Benjamin calls a “prop” or strategy for moving discussion along, and not as a drive for mastery. I suggest that this question is the locus of the discourse that democracy raises in the material city. In this sense, I treat justice as the need to moderate its temptation to absolutism in its desire to care for the principled relationship to Shared Being in discourse. To paraphrase Wittgenstein here, we should show the other the road from error to truth rather than tell them they are in error! We see, then, that the question of progress – Is it good or bad? – really depends upon a reflective engagement in the question of absolutism – the question of what it means and how it is expressed in life in ways that are innocuous rather than spectacular. As I am seeing tyranny, it is nothing other than the intervention of the unconscious in its shape as Hegel’s evil demon, recognized here in Patocka’s metaphor of the orgiastic secret that we all harbour within (1999). It is the omnipresence of orgiastic eros – its responsiveness to fortuitous and contingent arousal – that can remain the seed of our absolutism throughout life. The division in eros always has the force to overcome the principled character of a commitment. However, while Plato identified the procreative spirit of eros as its desire to possess immortality, not acquisitively but by leaving its “presence” behind as a resonance of value, as a gift, he could not really explicate how such desire can be other than either tyrannical or heavenly, can be mundane in its shape as the drive to be “individual,” to be a “somebody.” In this way we can envision the source of the material in the material city to reside in the abundance of self-affirmative testimonials of the greater numbers that flood the environment with indications – in the words of Rilke – of having been here once and no more. In these ways,

78

The Material City

technology assists even a website or a curriculum vitae to serve as such testimony, investing every such gesture with the character of an obituary. So, I propose, as many have, that absolutism does not disappear (except as a characterization of fundamentalist regimes) because its recurrence is linked to the complex perdurance of the unconscious as a force. This complexity is disclosed in indications large and small that become part of the material of the city. Such indications materialize not only in innocuous marks as examples of Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil (1958), and in the legacy of Freud’s care for the way the significance of the small can be seen as the story of the largest. For example, Kracauer suggested in ways that anticipated ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967) that we should not focus exclusively on the so-called major events because it is the mundane crises that make up daily life (Kracauer [1963] 1995). This, of course, is territory that my colleagues and I have long explored under the influence of Wittgenstein and others such as Cavell (1995), and it is being mined in provocative ways today (e.g., Grimwood 2021). There are enumerable examples from different cases that dramatize this two-sidedness not as a relation between external conditions but as a tension intrinsic to any one action. Note, for example, studies by Hydaralli on the complaint (2016), Schnuer on sincerity (2016), Feesey on expatriates (2016), and Laurier on reunions (2016) – all part of a collection that is unrelated to the city per se but of relevance (Raffel and Sandywell 2016). In fiction an especially fine example is Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, which uses the interactions in an American office as a catastrophic reflection of the society at large (Ferris 2007). Of course, today what many call “toxic” is their recognition of the appearance of absolutism in classification and action with respect to categories to which we have become accustomed in everyday life. In this way, the recognition of the reappearance of absolutism is a preoccupation of the material city; as an “advance” it is necessarily supported by information meant to ground its own absolutist demonstrations in the democratic exchange of views. The reputed decline of absolutism is counteracted by opinions that “fill in” the vacated space of authoritative counsel, with doxa – offering advice, self-help information, appeals to research and science as bona fide, from the supposed expertise of pundits and the flow of low-grade commentary that is exposed in digital communication as if authoritative – in ways that also can accentuate the circulation of extremism and the ambiguity of digital democracy. Here, then, I must use the material city as a figure of speech to stand for the city that inundates us with material in the sense of data, for the city that claims to enhance and enable us to carry on in ways that are positive and attuned to our

The City as a Writing Machine

79

desire to be free of domination. This is the thesis of the Enlightenment, and if it is liberating in such a way, why does Weber find it so limited? To address this question, I must return to the canon. I take up the question of how the material city tries to do what Goffman called “impression management” with its material and how it uses its data for that purpose. As I have suggested, such impression management can fertilize the overload of testimonials produced by the greater numbers in ways that contribute to the material density of the city. It is this approach, I believe, that led the philosopher Harry Frankfurt (2005) to classify much of the talk offered by pundits in this environment as bullshit, and this skepticism must be factored into the discourse of democracy. That any claim to a principled relationship can be viewed as impression management as a sign of tyrannical eros makes skepticism an abiding current of belief in the material city. Yet, this potential only demonstrates the ambiguity of procreation itself as an abiding preoccupation of eros, both positive and negative.

Efficiency To this point, I have discussed the Enlightenment aspiration to advance the idea of thoughtfulness through its drive to purge speech and action of ambiguity as if the ambiguity of words and actions blocks such a drive. Yet, the conception of problem solving as a situation of action in ways I have discussed reveals this as a one-sided vision of self-composition, since the subject can “handle” efficiency in different ways. In other words, as with any term, efficiency is a repressed signifier that buries its meanings in ways that can be taken up; in this case, showing a dialectical conception as more enlightened than the “official” Enlightenment convention that Ellul caricatures in describing its governance by technical criteria. In this way, ambiguity intrinsic to the notion of enlightenment can dramatize vividly the relation of eros to the unconscious as a kind of selfnegotiation in which the subject must administer different temptations raised by the problem of survival. As noted, efficiency does not have to be modelled after narrow-minded bureaucratic thinking or cost accounting, though we do have to survive and take care of business. If the Enlightenment reflects an exemplary relation to economizing with respect to our limits, the eighteenth century is only one version, for the Socratic revolution, in bringing philosophy down to earth as it were by redirecting its gaze from Anaxagoras’s cosmos to the human things and distinctions made in speech, must qualify as the primordial enlightened attempt to take our bearings from what we are capable of mastering.

80

The Material City

In this sense, Socratic ignorance might be the primary gesture of efficient thought, perhaps the most reasonable way of navigating the contested terrain of ambiguity in word and deed. While the efficiency of the Enlightenment has long been reputed, especially in Kant’s strategy, for cutting our losses in the face of what is unknowable, there is a kind of unavoidable truth in the advice to know our limits and work with them. Although Horkheimer and Adorno parodied the notion of the myth of selfpreservation, this vision of efficiency has typically been regarded as what Burke (1957) calls “equipment for living.” Where the Stoics counselled the need for selfpreservation in maintaining tranquility, the Socratic Enlightenment certainly took its bearings from its vision of the need to return to the human things, the ways we speak, as a means of remaining within human limitations; in other words, efficiency depends upon a disciplined relation to mediation. If we defer the economic model of cost accounting and optimization, we might understand selfpreservation (and so efficiency) as part of our human way of coming to terms with fundamental ambiguity. Far from impersonating the caution of economic planning, self-preservation preserves and maintains human desire in the face of its irresolute and unfulfilled character. I like what Žižek says here: this dimension of radical negativity … defines la condition humaine as such: there is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to “overcome,” to “abolish” it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it in its terrifying dimension and then on this basis, to try to articulate this modus vivendi with it. (1997, 5) What enlightenment in this specific sense suggests is that the limits of efficiency as self-preservation might be surpassed by rethinking caution itself as something other than economic foresight, some relationship along the lines of this modus vivendi. This image of self-preservation permits us to save the phenomenon of efficiency – that is, to redeem it in a way that is true to life, by treating it neither as Hobbesian nor as narcissistic but as the modus vivendi. In terms of this gesture, it is actually the limited view of efficiency that is inefficient because its reductionism and instinct for mastery can only perpetuate vexation, restlessness, and inner isolation. So as far as I can see, the usage of efficiency frames the fundamental ambiguity of self-preservation as a metaphysical deadlock that recurs constantly in the ethical collisions of everyday life. Given that no one chooses inefficiency in this sense, what is reputed to be inefficiency should always appear in ways and means of doing self-preservation, ways and means discernible in contested interpretations over the question of these borders.

The City as a Writing Machine

81

In this way, enlightenment takes on meaning neither as recoiling from ambiguity nor as simplifying and reducing it abstractly but in gestures that improvise a modus vivendi in relation to the “gap,” through theory and research that exposes it over and again in the everyday life that we inhabit, giving us breathing room to continue to sustain our desire for desire as a value for us and for all who might be patient enough to take heed. That theorizing must exemplify and suffer in its studies the desire to know that it uncovers in all human actions in its formulation of the incipient shape of a discourse directed to solving a problem, sets theory apart from practice by (what Plato called) “this mere trifle.” What I call a dialectical relationship to enlightenment is a focus on maintaining self-composition in the face of the temptation of agoraphobia that besets the subject who is flooded by distractions caused by random circumstances, memories, and chance encounters that force upon oneself an obsessiveness that is destructive, that impedes concentration, and that drives negative thoughts and feelings. Here, self-preservation as problem solving mediates the best way to administer the connotative surplus that one inflicts upon oneself. A stunning example of this for me is Eimear McBride’s novel on a character whose vulnerability to such associations persists as an ongoing problem. Here she is, thinking to herself of her temptation to jump from her hotel balcony while she peers over it to view the street: Do this or not? The worst may be unpalatable but must remain on the table because … well … when all is said and done … it may not have been the best time for thinking about them; heights or falls … Really though, she’s becoming impatient with how much time she’s wasting on this. She should get to bed. She should get to sleep. She should get in and out of this cold before she catches her death. She doesn’t move. She lights another cigarette and snatches another peer over the edge, in spite of her mock Vertigo. (McBride 2020, 48; also see 50, 51, 53, 71, 84–6) This character continuously faces and tries to solve problems issuing from her freely associating her past to her present as she journeys through life as a fortyyear-old Irish woman who has passed through many cities whose vestiges remain with her in distracting ways. Here, the experience of loss is not connected to crossroads and choices – as what I should have done (the counterfactual conditional) or even to my errors and mistakes, or for lost relations or grievances –

82

The Material City

but to actions and memories, for better or worse, perhaps insignificant details, that persist as fascinations.

How Simmel Stands to Socrates The notion of a Socratic Enlightenment helps correct for the modernist implications of enlightenment and the idea that it references an eighteenth-century development (e.g., Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesqieu, Hume). Socrates is said to have redirected theorizing from the stars (nature) to human affairs. While this is typically taken as a movement away from natural science to the study of human things, we can hear it as making reference to the inescapable discursive character of the world. Understanding enlightenment in this way permits us to rethink the notion while maintaining fidelity to the modernist emphases, Kant’s for example. Basically, the movement from nature to the social has nothing whatsoever to do with disciplines such as natural science or political science but, rather, directs us to attend to the difference between external conditions that are outside of our control and internal conditions that we can negotiate and influence. In this sense, enlightenment invites us to talk about any things in a way that answer to our limits as discursive beings. This is a Stoic maxim: take counsel from matters within our control rather than from an aspiration to speak about things that are beyond our control. For example, instead of speaking about the stars, death, mental life, or whatever, speak about how such matters are represented. Here, the “revolution” suggests that we forgo the desire to begin to speak about things we cannot know (the mind of the other or even of oneself, the “likely story” of history, the unequivocal solution to choices, questions, conduct) and begin instead with collective representations or common conceptions (the ways in which they are represented). If we measure ourselves by that to which our capacities are not adequate (our limits), our aspiration to overreach ourselves will produce vexatious frustrations, including the litany of neurotic, hysterical, obsessive, perverse, and psychotic adaptations that Freud and later Lacan inventoried. Yet, the distortions of enlightenment historically are due to the conceit that by limiting our attention to standards that exceed our capacities we make the error of calculation in which we subject ourselves to a false vision of mastery. If mastery is impossible, this vision is still false, not because of that but for the reason that desire does not involve an error of calculation. This vision is false because the limits of desire are not due to inefficiency of that sort; rather, they are indicative of the ineluctable character

The City as a Writing Machine

83

of desire and its need to be suffered. Modern enlightenment acts as if this problem can be corrected by keeping our “eyes to the grindstone,” whereas Simmel knows that desire cannot be overcome by action that would terminate it because the overstepping of boundaries is a permanent and inescapable feature of human restlessness. That is, even if we keep our eyes to the grindstone, the tragedy of human life consists in the incalculable notion of this very standard (the impossibility of “applying” it as if it was an object[ive] to be realized).

The Philosopher and the Tyrant The Republic is often represented as if it tells the story of a conflict between the philosopher and the tyrant, and this is acceptable if we don’t think of the tyrant as Alexander the Great, or Hitler, or Trump, but as a course of action. (Some political scientists recognize this need to reformulate tyranny as something other than an evildoer and more as an action but seem to be suspicious of the conception of the unconscious. See the intuitive and helpful grasp of Beiner [2005], Connoll [2018], and the exemplary paper by McGuirk [2017].) Then, we can read the Republic as a story of how the desire to be at our best and to bring out the best in our self, in others, and in the topics we engage – how this desire for dialogue – can be tyrannized by the unconscious (not just by the evil demon) and by the excess of minded mindlessness (Santner 2001) that is jouissance. What is healthy is a reflective relationship to usage – to speech and ideas – that can be derailed or inspired by the unconscious. What seems to prevent this reflective potential for Plato is that aspect of narcissism that leads us to desire a final conclusive interpretation and validation of our beliefs and opinions. The Republic, then, tells the story of a subject whose initial aptitude for the best as aristocratic is increasingly humbled by intimates and friends who have affection for this character, first as impractical and incapable of defending himself in worldly affairs, and then as admirable and estimable nevertheless to those who are friendly to excellence and want to be associated with it, as in timocracy, but can do no more to make such quality recognized by the majority; to those who can confirm his value as tangible according to objective criteria such as wealth, as in oligarchy, only if the character can compromise the desire for quality; and finally to the situation where any such criteria that compromise quality can only release all of the reactions to such limitations that produces a crisis between partisans with different values in a landscape of extremist denotative adversaries, as in democracy.

84

The Material City

The struggle with the tyrant is the struggle “within” with our narcissistic temptation to close off dialogue in each regime by securing a conclusion that is designed to end the ambiguity. The Republic caricatures this trajectory as a series of transferences and counter-transferences between fathers and sons in which each regime is identified on the basis of its characteristic mode of acting out in relation to its inheritance. The tyrant, then, is a figure of speech standing for the symptom that tyrannizes the subject who strives for the best, leading to the inflexible habit that closes the subject off from being open to the ambiguity that is needed and desired. Relief from the tyrant is developed by converting the symptom into a workable path in the way of the sinthome that Lacan (2016) discussed as taking precedent in James Joyce’s writing, making the symptom into the kind of positive resource that Kenneth Burke (1957) formulated as the way poetry converts one’s vice into a virtue. According to Lacan, Joyce used his writing to work with and off his implicit psychosis. Whether accurate or arguable, we see that such work promises to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar by developing analogical relationships to one’s environment that can take pleasure in being a participant and spectator at the same time, two-sided in relation to words and deeds. We make the familiar strange in the way of Plato’s conception of the second sailing – that reflectively looks over the usage as if for the second time – through the recovery of analogical connections that reveal the expression as the centre of a discourse, and we make the strange familiar by disclosing this discourse as a situation of problem solving. This I take as the spirit of Rancière’s work on the hatred of democracy as a proposal to overcome disgust – either typical condemnation, on the one hand, or flag-waving, on the other, as extremes – desiring to develop an art of seeing as, in being part of and apart from the phenomenon, witnessing and analyzing its two-bodied spectacle of problem solving always done under the auspices of oligarchy and its rule of law, burdened by the banality of its monstrous consensus, and possibly enlivened by the malleability of its permutations as a discourse to behold and analyze (Rancière 2006, 63–74).

The Enlightenment Imaginary The Enlightenment produces the imaginary of opportunity that depends upon self-fashioning, which in turn depends upon information needed to do self-fashioning; the work needed by the subject to master being evaluated by the trial of market value. This is the paradigm: ambiguity-evaluation-hyperstimulation-eros.

The City as a Writing Machine

85

As part of the momentum of enlightenment, Simmel shows how the inner isolation identified by Max Weber as part of the malaise induced in the subject of capitalism can still socialize the subject tempted by the experience of abandonment in ways that include a range of affects. In contrast to Weber, Simmel makes inner isolation a complex dialectical phenomenon. In this respect, the victim of a monstrous perpetuation of isolation can also imagine having the opportunity to attach oneself in many ways to an opportunity structure that can advance one’s life chances, showing the mix of the monstrous and the malleable. Because the actor must still participate in the system of desire as a subject of eros, such a subject can become divine, demonic, or somewhere in between. In other words, if the life of the subject depends upon how desire is organized, information seems to be required to empower such desire. Self-fashioning depends upon information that the city must make available to invest self-fashioning with high exchange value, in other words to see the self as a good investment opportunity. As Simmel says, The development of the public mind shows itself by the fact that a sufficient number of groups is present which have form and organization. Their number is sufficient in the sense that they give an individual of many gifts the opportunity to pursue each of his interests in association with others … On the one hand the individual finds a community for each of his inclinations and strivings which makes it easier to satisfy them … On the other hand the specific qualities of the individual are preserved through the combination of groups which can be a different combination in each case. (1955, 162–3) Here, Simmel relates the growth of modern culture to the number of affiliations to which the individual is exposed in ways that lead to many fruitful problems. First “finding a community” for each of our interests is problematic in itself, assuming that such sharing of preferences is anything more than cursory or superficial, an external facade, illustrating nothing more than a beginning to be developed. Simmel raises as a problem the conception of community itself and of the difference between a group based on common interests and preferences (e.g., a scene) and a community in a stronger sense, perhaps characterized, as we have noted, by McHugh’s development of what Nancy (1991) calls Shared Being. What is clear for Simmel is that such a city makes a spectacle of many scenes and associations that can function, when displayed by and in media, as an overwhelming visible environment of images and representations. What is taken for granted in such a topography is the meaning of the connection, whether superficial or deeper, and further, Simmel’s assumption that the quantity of such affiliations relates to their quality in a way that identifies the modern

86

The Material City

imaginary in part as the capacity to dream of a social bond for any and every private affinity. Here, Simmel’s formulation anticipates the model of virtual sociality and its aspiration to make a meaningful connection on the basis of external preferences and opinions. In other words, the Web enables us to imagine such malleability through contacts based on these external inclinations and in this way can cause us to ask how a “network” of such contacts can qualify as community? Simmel’s conception of the scene as such an association is limited to its functional component as a setting for establishing such connections, unless we develop it in relation to the notion of dialogue that Bonner developed around the search for good company; this will enable us to treat the scene in a stronger way that we will reformulate in chapter 8. Simmel’s conception remains valuable for his focus on the opportunity structure evoked by modern culture through this image of its promise of community in a way that identifies such an element as fundamental to the modern imaginary. The mantra: it is possible for the subject to find a community for every preference (and we might add, for every random characteristic)! Simmel permits us to appreciate how the medicine of market value must include its ways and means of converting its irrationality into profit. Indeed, Simmel permits us to entertain how even the image of popular culture as the freak show that Plato imagined of democracy and how its oligarchic machinations can lead to the intended creation of communities. Note, though, that those with whom we imagine sharing interests are not necessarily good company (Bonner 2016). Yet, by disregarding this, Simmel anticipates the conception of neoliberalism by travestying the idea of scene based on unity in the absence of fellowship. Note that even if classifications change – for example, as in transitioning that might produce an array of new and different gender positions – it is still possible to search for and discover “groups of form and organization” that offer the prospect of association with like-minded individuals. Indeed, the social and political landscape of modern culture, with its array of opinions that are habituated as positions in a political spectrum, make such association possible on many levels. This is one way in which number exercises a force in modern life by motivating the utopian aspiration of the modern subject to dream of endless creative mixing and matching as opportunities for self-development. Yet, note as well that if each association seems to contribute to the flourishing of the individual, each must also function as a sacrificial structure by virtue of how it induces its subject to split jouissance, between the association and its overspill. Thus, the modern subject can only invest part of their affect in the association and not all, invariably raising the question (for theorizing) of how tribalism might compromise any such affiliation by making problematic the meaning of a social bond. That is, what kind

The City as a Writing Machine

87

of relation might exist between tribes (devoted affiliates based on common interests) and community (for the critique of such a conception of common properties, see Wittgenstein 1958). In this way, both the content and form of such an infrastructure of images come to prevail as an environment that Will Straw (1998) and some of his colleagues call saturated. Such saturation reveals the force of the environment as a persuasive form – aside from what its content discloses – or as what Michel Serres (2011) characterizes as producing soft pollution: Additionally [to hard garbage, hard pollution] … other garbage now invades space and our five senses, with soft signs and waves, the shock of words and photos, the whining and buzzing of what must be called Muzak … We forget that images, colors, music, and sounds are just as excremental, invading and polluting space just as much as the stifling sense of carbon dioxide and tar. Hard pollution appropriates the hard world. Just as dangerous if not more harmful, soft pollution appropriates humans with often subtle links and a discreet consciousness. This softness is often invisible but covers the space of things and our relations just as fast as hardness. Invading the absence of space, it haunts our souls. (62–3) The images of an environment saturated or polluted by signs and bits of information, of declarations and opinions that mix and match with one another as if self-evident affirmations of random moods and manners, can be monstrous, as Serres suggests, and yet inviting too, suggesting a world available for those who can persevere and accept the challenge of self-development. Here, we begin to grasp Marx’s advice to formulate the two-sided materialist foundation of life, its glimpse of malleability and monstrousness in and as the environment. What seems monstrous to these critics is the diminution of space between one subject and the image that is required for reflection, the need to take a perspective and to remove oneself from the babble. As Serres continues, there is too much noise, a derivative of what Kierkegaard called the talkativeness of modern life: Nowadays one can talk with anyone and it must be admitted that people’s opinions are exceedingly sensible, yet the conversation leaves one with the impression of having talked to an anonymity … People’s remarks are so objective, so all inclusive, that it is a matter of complete indifference who expresses this … and so our talk becomes … a pure abstraction … Objective thought produces an atmosphere, an abstract sound, which makes human speech superfluous. (Kierkegaard 1962)

88

The Material City

Pollution Using Durkheim’s conception of society as a writing machine that is described in a structure of platitudes and clichés, I analyze the collective engagement with its “curriculum” as an almost addictive dependency upon socially standardized formulae that disregard the qualitative register of persons, actions, and ideas. The writing machine is Durkheim’s conception of the automated collective relationship to the code, habits, norms (G.H. Mead’s generalized other, Rancière’s distribution of the sensible) in relation to which the pharmakon can and has been used as a figure to personify the path of healing (I used this conception of the writing machine from Gane in Blum 2017a, chap. 8). My discussion converges on the proposition that the city inundates its subjects with information and images in the way of a writing machine that legitimates and perpetuates desire and ways and means for its fulfillment, along with reasons for its lack, as if an interpretive infrastructure of illusions. Durkheim in particular formulates the symbolic order neither as simple origin nor as result, but rather as en medias res, in the middle of an inherited corpus of distinctions passed on and handed down, as he says “in the midst of collective effervescence” then translated into symbols as “a system of ideas with which individuals present to themselves the society of which they are members and the obscure but intimate relations they have with it” (1961, 257). Mike Gane says of this that “discourse is marked by the appearance of formulae, of secular and sacred and political kinds, which condense social knowledge. They are characterized by all the attributes of social facts but particularly by objectivity and externality, and … by the fact that as codes their existence is separate from their application … It is in connection with the totem as name/emblem that things are classified as sacred or profane” (1964, 9, 15). Durkheim identifies society as producing a writing that visualizes common sense lore in formulaic storylines meant to be absorbing or compelling to the many, in presenting the postures of performers through visual clichés of demeanour intended as personal, amusing, and informative for a mass audience imagined as perpetually enthralled by the mirroring of itself as a visual microcosm of the society. Gane continues: The collective habit exists … by a privilege of which we find no example in the biological realm, they are permanently expressed for all in a formula which is repeated from mouth to mouth, which is transmitted by education, and is fixed even in writing. Such is the origin and nature of legal and moral rules, aphorisms and popular sayings, articles of faith in which religious or political sects condense their beliefs, codes, or taste erected by literary schools,

The City as a Writing Machine

89

etc. (Gane 1964, 9; following this influence, I develop this notion of the writing machine extensively in Blum 2017a, 118–38) This collective script, not at all indivisible and uniform but nevertheless palpable in its myriad distinctions and rules of organization, not only consists of information and news, of expert testimony and ordinary stories, but of policies, documents, advertisements, visuals of many kinds, and fiction at each and every level. Moreover, such a script not only informs, illustrates, and entertains, but instructs and exemplifies through the structuring of expectations and paths of action that are followed and ought to be or not. What Gane calls Durkheim’s writing machine is the prescription for a sacred language as the system of classifications and interdictions laid out implicitly as a regime: “discourse is marked by the appearance of formulae, of secular and sacred and political kinds, which condense social knowledge.” Though the concern for urban life tends to be identified as an issue for social policy, as an “area” it can be seen to intersect with a variety of social currents and influences, from the organization and dissemination of knowledge to social change, even fashion and popular culture. Such a range of usage is a function of the status of the city as an object of desire that is itself a representation and as a structure of conceptions and assumptions about everyday life and its management. It is in such a way that the material city appears not simply in its display of information on composing ourselves, but as an interpretive structure that borders areas such as mass media and popular culture, communication, information, and “knowledge” transfer, and relations of science and/or medicine to society. As such, this writing of the city in its heterogeneous voices can highlight tensions and contradictions that render the discourse as a whole problematic in every respect. Perhaps the crucial tension in such writing concerns who has the authority to enforce interpretive control, particularly in the tensions between expertise and its backing and support, lay opinion, and the status of evidence, all of this in relation to the question of what is worth believing. There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who made fun of it previously. Then someone else discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have something to do with Israel and Palestine, and everyone made a pact never to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days. (Lockwood 2021, 11–12)

90

The Material City

Secondary Functions of Urban Scenes Simmel enables us to appreciate the function of scenes as providing not only regularity and contact but opportunities for elaborating one’s continuous self-presentation for archives that can testify to exchange value – for example, by accumulating a record of accomplishments for a subject as a participant in functions of the scene. Such collective self-representation allows us to grasp the datadriven city as a symptom of the acting out of a collective. Kieran Bonner’s (2013) analysis of Plato’s Symposium identifies the drinking party as the penultimate scene at the time of Socrates in a way that captures the functions and aesthetics of such a gathering, also demonstrating its universality as an exchange between figures seen as influential and those touched by them in any society. Despite the otherness of responses to Socrates that Bonner reveals in the reactions, he discloses their grounds in the common desire for more-thanlife that Socrates – and any such a figure – can arouse. This otherness includes disciples and fans who worship the figure, users who exploit his celebrity status, skeptics who accuse him of corruption, and necessarily Plato, who seeks to analyze the discourse. This otherness is bound together by a vision of the Socratic scene as a community that threatens to challenge the conventional view of the life of the city. The value of Bonner’s analysis is more than a historical notation, for it can apply to the spell cast by charismatic figures on their followers as a current disseminated throughout the city and often celebrated as contributing to its “data.” Though Bonner restricts his analysis to the example of strong teaching and its effects on followers, its applicability to relations between leaders and followers in social movements and between trendsetters and fans in modern society deepens the notion of eros as a driving force in the city that includes athletes, entertainers, and all “stars” of various kinds as a frame for analyzing fashions and movements in the arts and everyday life. We must even include in this erotic landscape excessive displays of all kinds, such as the manipulative tactics invented by celebrities who come and go, and who are driven to self-affirmation through gestures both reputable and unsavory as part of their desire to be a “somebody” of value. The city, then, is a site awash with testimonials of worship and truculence, signifying its character as an erotic terrain both monstrous and malleable for those under its spell.

The City as a Writing Machine

91

Two-Sided Symptoms: Solving Problems and as Problems to Solve In this way, materialism itself seems two-bodied, progressive and dehumanizing; the subject is divided, subjecting jouissance to renunciation in the name of a fundamentally ambiguous notion of “progress,” classified as unambiguous and Real. The subject is split: like all other subjects, one equally devoted to a “higher purpose” and to renunciation of anything more (existing in this way); and different in the tacit ways that conceal beneath the unity of any one their very particular and partial history of experiences that could differentiate the kind of one that such a one is (its essence, as we might say) from any other, a perfect candidate for the popular maladies described in the clichés of burnout, depression, and the like (see Grimwood 2021). We need to examine the impasse of number in more detail for it is this that contributes to the diagnosis of the bipolar symptom as the quintessential mark of the subject of the material city, the city that incarnates bipolarity itself as the rule of the city. Separating intellect from higher purpose, as Simmel suggests, reduces intellect to something lower than efficiency, even making it anti-social as an impediment if it becomes intrusive. Such problem solving must create the symptoms Lacan named “gimmicks” for dealing with the trauma of mortality (1997, 275–6). Yet any “gimmick” can be the basis of a preoccupation that supplies a subject with desire as equipment for living, a motive for going on. The desire to sustain the preoccupation, to sustain desire itself, is another way of thinking of the symptom. In this way the symptom itself is two-sided, necessary and valuable for living, and a gimmick that sustains us in the face of mortality. Consider the symptom as a preoccupation that we have learned to embrace as an attachment throughout life in order to distract ourselves from knowing that we are here today and gone tomorrow (see Kieran Bonner’s [2011b] exquisite analysis of the difference between Camus’s character Meursault and Antigone’s response to this path). Though the work we have been examining emphasizes the modern character of materialism as if it is a historical phenomenon, we must consider whether this emphasis is captivated by the technological “advances” that seem to make the polluted environment so dramatic to we who suffer it as a spectacle that disregards its recurrent character.

92

The Material City

Distraction Siegfried Kracauer famously advised us to reflect upon how the material city, as I am formulating it here, proceeds through what he called the organization of distraction. Basically, Kracauer anticipated ethnomethodology in his focus upon innocuous details that seem incidental but can be read as disclosing the limits of such a system; and he goes further yet, by producing a discourse on how the system’s concentration on such incidentals, rather than upon limits, deflects our attention from essentials. Many – especially Bataille and Baudrillard – have discussed such methods that apply simple-minded and digestible versions of life as economically motivated – as if an uncontested fact – to all human relations. We note the models of computational thinking that organize the activities of bourgeois entrepreneurs in ways that they treat as prototypes to disseminate and institutionalize (see Finn 2017 for an exemplary analysis of Netflix’s methodology). In this vein, I analyzed the method of arbitrage used proudly by a reputable journalist to describe reporting and collecting information as profit-oriented buying and selling from needy informants to hungry consumers as his self-professed clever application of stock-market cunning to the art (Blum 2007). In addition to these standard critiques of bourgeois thinking, exposing uncontested stipulations about the limits of the subject and the need for retraining has been done well and repeatedly in critiques of T. Schutz and G. Becker’s work on treating the self as capital and as an investment: It is an ideology that suggests that it is natural for individuals to constantly think of nearly every form of social existence in terms of a single-minded actuarial calculation guided by the profit motive. The incredibly attractive and empowering-sounding human capital ideology assumes that the pursuit of wealth and utility is the only meaningful mode of human existence. It reduces all life decisions and allocations of time such as whitening one’s teeth and migration to rational decisions to invest or fail to invest in one’s market value. When one invests in their own human capital, they become their own entrepreneur, with every life choice being reduced to a simple, rational decision made out of free will. The conflict between labor and capital Marx spoke of is resolved, but not in the way he imagined. “It’s not the means of production that have changed – instead, the meaning of being human has changed” (Katrine Marçal). The human capital approach makes unions and class consciousness obsolete since workers behave in a much more individualistic behavior, becoming mini-enterprises, capitalists of their own resources. (Karp n.d.)

The City as a Writing Machine

93

Fascination The distinction between distraction and fascination is important because distraction seems to either divert or externalize attention – by displacing it from something – whereas fascination examines how attention is concentrated upon the incidental. So, if distraction removes our attention from the limits of the system to our own limits, as if the problem is our own, fascination focuses upon the way the problem as our own absorbs our attention to the point where it can become phobic. In this way, classifications that are legitimated – through methods that are arguable – as authoritative diagnoses such as depression, burnout, attention deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder – disclose fascination with our own limits in ways that always risk excess. This is really what I take to be Foucault’s message on the biopolitical relation to life. Fascination reveals the mix of pleasure and pain that we can obtain from concentrating upon the incidental and how this mix is organized in ways that might divert us from reflecting upon the environment in which we are participating. This is not to say that such symptoms are incidental or unimportant in any sense, but that they are always opportunities for further exploration regarding their emergence as symptoms and not to be treated as self-evident medical “facts.” To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, that the medium and not the content is the message suggests that we are systemically distracted from the “real story” by the media that induce our fascination with the content (1964). Further, fascination depends in part on our being absorbed by any relation to images and media as if it is an instance of social interaction, with our attention directed to the contingencies of evaluation that are integral to such encounters. The mechanism of para-social interaction developed by Horton and Wohl (1956) emphasized how certain types of television talk shows – in their case, the latenight show hosted by Johnny Carson – work to establish a viewing relationship designed to imitate a regularized personal connection that simulates friendship. The para-social model of the viewing encounter suggests that “beyond” speech (or rather intrinsic to speech and so not beyond at all) is the evocation of affect and specifically, an affective connection between performer and viewer. The fascination of interacting with the persona as if a pal cannot only distract us from reflecting upon the content per se but also serves to absorb us in all of the contingencies that an interaction produces around questions of evaluation and reciprocal orientation. The power of para-social interaction was dramatized in film criticism well before Horton and Wohl, in the recognition that viewers view images by seeing themselves as semblances of what is viewed (as if a kind of narcissism underlies the spectator’s identification with the characters).

94

The Material City

Conclusion Many of these conceptions of the viewing situation – despite their ingenuity – risk distracting us from appreciating the work that the media and its methodology disclose in creating such a presumptive focus on our viewing. That is, if the media seem to presume that we are cattle- or sheep-like, we might also recognize in this monstrous presumption a feint at malleability suggesting that we should invest in ourselves not by identifying with the character or situation in a rudimentary way, but by trying to solve the problem of our in-between status as viewer between participant and spectator (Rancière 2009a, 2009b). The “material” of the material city immerses its subject through distraction and the fascination upon incidentals in ways that can become a spectacle for reflection and for art in particular that must always begin by analyzing the experience of claustrophobia, whether of Madame Bovary or more recent examples, typically experienced by women as characters. For example, this spectacle is dramatized in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), which depicts a young woman’s efforts to escape her saturation by such material through drugs and eventually sleep as the only path to avoid such talkativeness. In this way, the danger of such saturation can become an occasion for transitions of many kinds – and even promises of possible life-enhancing alternatives – that might redeem the monstrous city as malleable in its way. The material of the city revealed in its talkativeness is only a starting point for us insofar as such talkativeness for the city, as for a person, is data to be explored and grounded, much like the free associations that Freud engaged. The data that saturates the material city provide us with countless indications of how the city values and evaluates selves just as Durkheim and later Lacan, described as the way tattoos are designed to serve as identity markers or memorabilia; but to paraphrase Socrates, “this is not so wonderful” unless we can develop an account of how any version of the culture of the city must do more than cite perishable externals that are reversible over time, by providing for their force as incentives for more than this. In Plato’s terms, this data provides us with images of the culture of the city that rest on structures of belief that need to be engaged, marking this relationship of inquiry as “below” what he calls the divided line, that still requires the movement to thought in its strongest sense. In this respect, we follow up by moving toward a focus upon heritage, both overt and covert, and customs, as designations of the culture of the city that are designed to be “deeper” on grounds that heritage has the power to outlast mortality. But, just as popular culture is perishable, neither is the heritage of a city indestructible, for as Hegel reminded us, “the barbarians can come.”

CHAPTER 6

Figures of Enlightenment: Globalization, Gentrification Introduction If versions of the material of the material city bury the meanings conveyed by the culture or particularity of the city, expressed in the cliché of the soul of the city, we are invited to overcome this “lack” by observing the practices and habits of the city that are institutionalized in its customs and history. More specifically, we listen to the ways that the city speaks, its structure of representations or narratives that we consider as usage. In this way, we try to overcome the popular obsession with the data-driven material city as conclusive evidence, by bearing witness to its clichés and classifications, and more comprehensively, to the ways such beliefs make reference to the city as a situation of problem solving. Here, the ambiguity of the notion of a problem can become unsettling and provocative. For example, if we identify a situation that all cities face, it is thought that our comparison of how this situation is addressed can reveal differences among cities that mark them as both similar and different and can lead to conceptions of the particular identity of a city – as its culture in the strongest sense. So, the twofold nature of a problem is dramatized in the difference between the conventional approach to the problem of how the city “handles” social change, and how our theorizing sees this as a reflection of how a city can be seen to engage the problem of its culture or soul. In this way, we create in our typical subject, more than a propensity to bear life (to endure the influences of social change), a capacity to engage more-than-life by reflecting upon how such relationships (to change) make reference to a protype for inquiry, make reference to a way of doing inquiry. Globalization and gentrification are two events connected to social change in cities that bring to view in dramatic ways the fundamental ambiguity of progress as a notion and ethical collisions relating to time and space. When we began the Culture of Cities project, the context of our initiative was ruled by the image of a world in flux characterized this way through the rubric of globalization. We

96

The Material City

neither accepted this cliché unreservedly nor rejected it because it was a shibboleth: for our work it simply stood as a powerful indication of elemental collective representations that could be taken up and investigated, a social phenomenon registered in language as a conception of the world. We figured that if the culture of the city seemed to materialize in such practices, there must be more to it, as if culture as a signifier buried meanings that we needed to make transparent.

Cities, Same and Other In particular, while some were chanting antiglobalization mantras and most were enrolling as cheerleaders for this new market and the so-called freedom of its deregulation, for us, the relevance of globalization for our research resided in its character as a stimulus to rethink the notion of local identity, for it seemed in the popular imagination that the world was being transformed to the extent that cities were viewed as mere points in larger mobile circuits of influences, repelling and attracting the movement of capital, people, and information, in ways that seemed to compromise the particular identities of cities as they had been traditionally conceived. The image of such a borderless world made cities appear almost interchangeable, as if losing their special character or aura and function, instead of as destinations with their special character. What we recognized at this point was that if cities were thought of in such ways, in being treated as sites that simply make the most of such opportunities, there could be both economically successful and (we might say) socially unsuccessful cities because the cities that seem to grow or prosper economically might be the most indistinct ones. Since we also knew that the social existence of cities, their force in everyday life and collective imagination, rested on claims to distinctness, singularity, and a kind of uniqueness, we wondered how such claims (and such cities) could survive under these conditions of interchangeability. This posed an interesting problem to the extent that cities might be seen to grow economically at the same time as they appear to become indistinct. In a certain sense, cities could become successful and unsuccessful at the same time, twosided, in ways that were not merely curious to me but might cause anyone to think through the notion of what makes a city “successful?” This seemed the important problem to put on the agenda, a conceptual rather than an economic problem pure and simple.

Figures of Enlightenment

97

The Discourse of the University At the time of our project, the intellectual environment was characterized by a mix of speakers (political economy, geography, urban sociology, architecture, environmentalism), all addressing the global city as an emergent phenomenon. This mix consisted of an array of views, each advancing a particular position but none really interdisciplinary. These fruitful approaches, tending to be positive and quantitative, were necessarily silent about many important facets of urban life that they could not quantify, facets pertaining particularly to the distinctive effervescence and tone of the city, which appeared to provide for its quality and unique voice. We realized that these distinctions were the tip of the iceberg, developed as part of an academic discourse that still repressed the meanings of the culture of the city. This meant that in order to address the questions of interest to us we needed to develop a fluency in thinking about matters not immediately accessible to quantification, questions making reference to the quality or spirit of the city and that seemed to require the intuitive capacity of judgment. Such a capacity or inclination enabled us to identify cities and distinguish them from organizations, families, and societies as we all do, and it often, but not exactly, enabled us to delineate boundaries showing where a city begins and ends vis-à-vis suburb, hinterland, region, state, and where one city starts and ends in relation to others, and what can be taken as Chicago over and against Philadelphia, and what kinds of conditions allow us to compare and contrast cities, such as restaurant prices, taxi fares, unemployment figures, and crime statistics, each and all of great importance, but only when formulated in relation to whatever gives them significance. Such conventions forced upon us this truth and no more, leading us to accept the givenness of the name of the city as a facade of individuality, as a verity, as true, but leaving us with the what of the city and its configuration of variables, and not its who. And without some sense that is more than a recitation of variables and coefficients, and even to understand those, at best, or to speculate on them, we could not develop this sense in a way robust enough to empower us to face important questions concerning the city, its value for people, whether or how it is changing, and the like. In other words, without developing our sense of the city as a social form we could not engage all of the questions of life and death, ethics, aesthetics, and judgment that we need to face, and we certainly could not come to terms with the question of the city as a human association. So all questions of relevance to us – Are cities good for people or not? What makes cities special compared to other kinds of collectives? Are cities changing, and if so in what respects? Indeed, how is one city different than another? – seemed to require interpretation and judgment in excess of the prosaic limitations

98

The Material City

of common sense, and they seemed to rest upon some notion of what all cities share and how they differentiate this commonality.

Name and Life By focusing upon the tension between a name and a life, approaching the city as a life beyond its name – as more-than-life in Simmel’s sense – captured in the convention of culture as the signature of a collective, we followed the Greek notion of identity as what we might call the bias or stigma peculiar to a person or collective, and in this case, the particular slant of a city. Identity, then, is somewhat like a distortion or a particular accent on reality presented by a city or people. In focusing on the relation of the name of a city to its life, we become engaged in addressing the peculiarity of the city. This begins to teach us that what we must recover from the talkativeness of the material city is some way of making inferences from such material to a conception of the stigma of the city as an indication of its peculiarity, and so of its singularity. It then appeared to us that what cities have in common and what differentiates cities is one and the same, and that the condition, a kind of effervescence, tone, or quality, gives meaning to cities in ways that are distinctive and particular to each one. So, if the identity of a city is like its stigma – or a symptom, as we would say for an individual – this stigma is simply one particular way of working out the character of all cities, making each and every city seem comparable and yet different. But if each city is stigmatized or symptomatic in a different way, how can we determine a path of inquiry so opaque? As with people, cities are the same as each other and different in their otherness, which is of course particular to each. And then again, when cities change, as they must, like all mortal beings, how do these changes relate to transformations of their stigmata? Can these questions even make sense as anything but idle? We needed a method, a vocabulary, a model. We began by examining a process that seemed to occur in ways that affect all cities, so-called globalization, in order to begin engaging the question of how different cities were handling such a problem, and what we discovered was that everyone and anyone was saying the same thing: that cities were becoming gentrified. We therefore asked the following question: What happens to the symptom of the city under the weight of globalization as a force? The cities in our research project certainly seemed to be examples of the globalizing force of gentrification, whether Dublin as Celtic Tiger, Berlin’s architectural renovation frenzy, or Toronto’s celebration of its diversity and sanitized master

Figures of Enlightenment

99

plan, but we noted a commentary on the same process in great cities such as New York and Paris, and venerable cities such as Venice, and more recently (at the time) in the “creative city” talk that was sweeping North America. The city has to navigate in any present the tension between its past and future, reflected in conceptions of its background, recognized in the notion of heritage, and in its orientation to change, expressed in the usage of innovation. Today, heritage and innovation are conceptions that give us access to the city as a dynamic entity inviting dialectical analysis. The city in the present, in between past and future, can be seen to work on bringing together conceptions of heritage and innovation that often tend to be separated or kept apart. Here we see that the notion of heritage as a metaphor for the roots of a collective like the city in history and culture, while pointing to a legacy that seems part of the past, requires any active relationship to this past to treat it as a force moving toward the future as a way of transmitting and sustaining the identity of the community. In this way, the heritage of the past is a resource oriented to the future. Similarly, if work on innovation stresses the future as essential to its aspirations toward change, it is the past that always must be changed, a past sanctified in the present in the conditions that need revision. Thus, the dialectic between past and future is made transparent in conceptions of heritage and innovation, being worked out in any present despite the fact that the popular formulae remain clichés that are untheorized (see Grimwood 2021). If heritage could only signify something handed down in the way tradition was talked about and that would soon be reduced to cultural capital, between these extremes of tradition and cultural capital, we recognized what had come to be thought of as a body of knowledge and the critique that was soon to denigrate any corpus as a canon. These disputes about the corpus, the canon, its control by “dead white men,” and the ensuing praise in policy circles and the sciences of knowledge transfer, along with the problem and impasse to which they pointed, invited us to see this body of knowledge as handed down or deposited (no matter how it was formed) in the shape of material on which we work and invest affect as something given or gifted. It was essential to see the past of a city not simply as heritage or treasure but as an inheritance or legacy that is oriented to being adopted and received in the way of a dispensation, not simply a background fixed, static, or monumental, but as something valuable to be taken care of as an endowment. If heritage points to a gift, requiring indebtedness and a degree of loyalty, it must suggest a degree of care for what it gives. Yet, as Marx pointed out, it might also be the sign of a possible curse in the form of a rigid property system and its implications for stratification, and as Freud pointed out, of an immobile, burdensome legacy that deludes subjects into accepting false consciousness as truth, or as a deadly repository of unspeakable prejudices and of the oppression

100

The Material City

of races and of particular categories of inhabitants. We witness such ambiguity in the various conflicts over memorials, entitlement, and hatred toward any and all conceivable as vandals in different political circles. In one sense, then, an inheritance endows the present with material for which care is required (what the official doctrine calls preservation), in order to sustain its legacy as something of value. Note that an inheritance requires not simply conservation but the kind of care that can modify its shape in the wake of changing circumstances. The notion of inheritance makes heritage into a course of action that is oriented to its reception and value qua Weber’s notion of “action oriented to an order and governed thereby in its course” (1947, 187–90) and introduces the imperative of care and the responsibility to maintain and enhance the legacy and also the opportunity for revision, vandalism, and even dismemberment and destruction. Elke Grenzer’s research uses Berlin to challenge the official convention that contrasts intangible to tangible heritage with analyses that dramatize the ambiguity of engaging the problem and how the city’s rebuilding makes a statement about what kind of place it has become today in contrast to its past: Could we not suggest that a city such as Berlin works, through its very actions of rebuilding, to make its present appear as a difference by displaying its encounter with its past and its inheritance as the very quintessence of its flexibility? This would imply that the architectonic desire to represent the present moment is accomplished through its representation of Berlin as the center of an open society that it never fully was. (Grenzer 2001, 222) Further, such a conception of care for an inheritance does not only apply to cities but must be factored into any relationship as the action of maintaining its value in the best sense, or of art or practice (in the way I might be said to exercise care for sociology, or the care exercised by the artist for their art). The legacy, invariably a mix of the material and mental, always works its magic in many ways. We must recognize that what is fundamentally ambiguous is the very idea of the inheritance: while a legacy must exist in some shape, the question of its uniformity and differences, its quality and content, always remains an open question, but not one that denies the existence and force of such a past. The question always asks how this inheritance is acted on or used, how it “entered” into the present as an influence through mechanisms that we need to study. In this way what is now called knowledge transfer in discussions of applying science to life was always a concern, since we have always said of a city that it is situated at the node of a circuit of influence in which its present and past are mutually oriented. An inheritance is not limited by its legibility as an influence

Figures of Enlightenment

101

on collective identity; it is a legacy that requires its subjects to serve as its custodians, needing to conduct themselves in relation to ways specified by an order mixing into the action of care both indebtedness and an appetite for modification, renovation and innovation. This invariably makes care for the inheritance a problem that the cliché of “urban governance” always glosses or externalizes because such care must exercise concern for the urban way of life as a collective identity, intangible and yet definitive, or as Wittgenstein would say, not a thing but not nothing either. This question invites us to formulate the subject of the city as one who must engage its change in a way that makes a difference.

The Question of the Culture of the City as Its Soul If globalization and gentrifications are clichés intended to mark the influence of social change on cities, we note that, while cities that might differ in response, they still do not differentiate themselves in ways other than external, keeping their individuality buried. Even if each city discloses its peculiarity in attempting to solve such a problem (its stigma), in Simmel’s sense, singularity or uniqueness is still relative and exceptional only by virtue of a generic standard. Again, we note that the problem of the city in response to such conditions differs from the problem of inquiry that desires to see in such responses the individuality of the city as more than its singularity. We recognize the need to go further, perhaps to engage a discourse on the customs and history of the city that promises to identify it as morethan-life, perhaps in and through reference to its heritage. In this way, we engage how the Enlightenment vision of progress has an impact in cases that describe urban dwellers who experience the loss of satisfaction with changes that unsettle their habits and routines. Sharon Zukin’s (2010) description of the loss experienced by long-term residents of New York in response to gentrification is related to our research on how inhabitants of Venice interpret changes to their city and its causes and effects (this research, conducted by project interviewers in Venice, will be discussed in more detail below). In any present, a typical conception of the urban way of life seems to legitimate a view of the city as enlightened insofar as it accepts the present as a step toward future accomplishments in ways that require a careful revisionary relationship to the past. What appears to be rejected is a fixation upon the past that can impede adequate adaptation to change in the present. This conception of the urban way of life accepts the up-to-date enlightened renunciation of the search for an unknowable in itself that takes shape in the rejection of any concern for the essential city, any essentialist vision of the identity of the city that seems to be rooted in

102

The Material City

nostalgic versions of history. Of course, such essentialism can be marketed and used as bait for tourists in the present but only under the condition that its impact remains external in the form of tangible products, museums, memorials, and the artifacts of the built environment. The intangible heritage of the city can be converted into a medium of exchange value. The history of the city has to be adaptable by virtue of its need to be externalized in ways intelligible to those with no knowledge of it, such as youth or newcomers, and who are thrown into it with expectations for no more than its promise as a functional framework for life in the present. Such a history of the city must be translated and standardized to meet the demands of those who are innocent of its inheritance. Again, the question invites us to consider how the city can motivate such a population to desire more from it than a functional relationship and/or whether it is even important to know the city in a way that is intimate rather than external. In relation to heritage, as we have noted, this vision of making the city contemporary or bringing it up-to-date replays the critique of recalcitrant cities as labouring under the burden of the past. This was Richard Florida’s mantra for the creative city as one that can free itself from such shackles. In terms of our exposition in this book, this suggests a project that claims to be innovative itself by virtue of its capacity to make the city more efficient. An important problem relating innovation to heritage is reflected in the image of the algorithm as the attempt to modernize heritage but always in ways that risk simplifying or limiting resonances of the past. The risk of exposing the illiteracy that animates this gesture is shown in the claim that the format of the algorithm updates and supersedes the canon, or that it is more “rational” than a literary approach. The discourse includes different relations to being up-to-date, making possible a reflective relationship to changes over time in contrast to a mechanical attempt to freeze the past by framing it as obsolete. The problem for any city in attempting to be productive actually invites the city to reflect upon how its use value can be converted into exchange value by making some aspect of its intangible past tangible as an object of desire in the marketplace. If we understand how a society must be attached to its heritage, we can consider how its past functions in its present in a way that creates tendencies for its people to accept or reject many things, and we recognize the importance of such an understanding in making our plans for change responsive to this dimension. Here we learn that we must listen carefully to how the heritage works in the present and to factor this work in if we hope to make changes. Thus, most relevant for planning, heritage is seen as more than a table of variables – as an attachment, a social relationship to value that must be oriented to in communication, in attempts at persuasion and inducing change. For example, many knew that trying to influence conduct or behaviour requires the construction of appeals that rely

Figures of Enlightenment

103

on knowledge of the subject’s attachments to regimes of pleasure and value in the case of both rehabilitation and attitude change. If social scientific research has demonstrated the importance of considering attachments to value in inducing change, of course market researchers drew upon such information voraciously in anticipation of the uses of the cliché of “big data” to justify consumer surveys of today. In this context, heritage can be identified with many variables that are reputed to influence the identity of a city, where identity references the difference a city makes in relation to other cities. This means that the work or operation of heritage is seen in mechanisms of translating past influences in the present as if a causal force upon urban identity, requiring identity to be formulated not as a static condition but as a means of distinguishing one city from others in work done over time and in relation to space. Operationally, this suggests that heritage is a method that distinguishes a city in relation to time by revealing in some to-be-determined way how the past becomes part of the present, and in relation to space, how a condition that is external (say, climate, or genetics) becomes internal or part of the city, always making implicit inference to (perhaps) unstated mechanisms assumed to translate the passage of the past into the present, and the transformation of the external into the internal. Yet, such a conception of identity in Simmel’s terms is still “relative” and insensitive to the “individuality” of the city (Lacan’s agalma) and to the interrelations among cities as an example of Shared Being in which they are the same in reflecting different othernesses. In this way, the importance of the discourse on intangible heritage for globalization is the function of such a notion for exposing the otherness of cities as the individuality they share besides their generic function. If globalization implies a degree of uniformity among cities of the world through which migrants pass as if indifferent to quality, the notion of intangible heritage reminds us that what cities deeply share is the specific quality of each – making cities both the same in resembling one another as cities and as each and all different in similarly harbouring an intangible heritage.

Differences of Degree and Form In her book describing changes in the city, the sociologist Sharon Zukin (2010), using New York as her model case, poses the question of whether the recent changes that she seems to see in the city means that New York has lost its soul. Without being able to create a quantitative solution to such a question, we found that the oppositions and exchanges in such a discourse could still be translated

104

The Material City

in ways both productive and informative if we could see through its surfaces to various unstated representations of common interests, listening closely to this language as if a system ruled by idiomatic popular representations as a heritage both oral and akin to literary texts. In the city, the functional relationship that is accepted is the condition of the rule of market value and the demand to adjust to the movement of the market, while the tension here must relate to the desire to address what is best and most profound in ourselves: it is the tension in this division that reflects Simmel’s conception of desire for life and for more-than-life. In this sense, what Zukin means, of course, is to question how the symptomatic quality of New York, its stigma that marks it as peculiar, is affected by globalization and its consequences. This question has the curious underside of suggesting that the loss of soul, as a loss of peculiarity, might risk making a city such as New York both healthy (free of stigma, if that is possible) and indistinct. The loss of soul reflects our concern for the two-sided nature of eros that discloses not the loss of one thing for another but a manifestation of this ambiguity. Loss of soul suggests here that the city no longer shows the capacity to drive citizenship toward such expressiveness. Note that such desire for “our higher part” is a desire for expressiveness and as such might not be equated simply with good but with evil as well: as expressiveness, the desire in question may be somewhat like aesthetics in a way that makes working though the division in the self into an aesthetic problem, part of the desire to exceed or make over the normative order. As part of the desire to be aesthetic in some sense, to exceed and neutralize the common order (de Certeau 1998; Rancière 2009a, 2009b), soul begins in the action of negation that tries to intervene thoughtfully in the common order of classification. Is it possible that the health of a city, as a picture of a city free of excess, can only enforce a view of the good city as tepid and sanitized? Are automation and playfulness the either/or alternatives that a city favours in its influences upon those who turn to it? If the city can remain recognizable throughout its changes, as New York can according to Zukin, this raises the question of how change relates to such a loss, or what kind of alteration counts as a real change rather than as an alteration of conditions that are simply incidental. Note again that these are important questions of interpretation that cannot be settled by appeals to neurology, genetics, cognition, and the like, except through convoluted and circuitous interpretive routes and appeals to evidence. In other words, these are questions that must remain irresolute and yet necessary to ask and consider. These are questions raised by what we typically call the demand(s) of meaning – the Real – and if many choose to ignore them, so much the worse for the work they do. Despite the im-

Figures of Enlightenment

105

portance of such concerns, one temptation is always to disregard such questions because they seem to go nowhere. Yet, if we desire to engage these concerns by making explicit the various assumptions they hold in abeyance, we might read Zukin’s text for resonances that she leaves unstated. For example, Zukin’s critical voice is meant to impersonate the long-term resident who can remain sensually loyal to the city, seeming to appreciate its stability in the face of change, or, in contrast to Zukin herself, who might lament the changes as a significant loss that annuls whatever New York was. Perhaps Zukin’s description of New York’s loss is simply resistance to change, or thinly veiled antipathy to youth, who must come successively to discount the past as anything other than incidental. Perhaps this is the fate of the city as that ever-present site of change, having to engage this question of the relation of change to loss, of essentials to incidentals, and of the long-standing skepticism of the resident to what each new generation brings to the city and its melancholia in relation to what seems long gone. The unease that Zukin locates tends to be created by the unsettling character of change, which she assumes disturbs that secure sense of regularity and permanence of the village (continuity in work and life, regularity in routines and expectations, in the permanence of buildings and neighbours), bound to destabilize selves in the present who must seek replacements for what is lost. Here, desire for remaking and renovating marks the city in one essential way: it identifies as an urban imaginary this appetite for renovation (authenticity as she calls it) that leaves both haves and have-nots to pursue such restoration as a condition of the good life. The corporation is seen to exploit the nostalgia market: the resident and tourist alike engage in feverish consumption so as to recapture items of authentic value. The most relevant image of loss is reflected in the contrast of the city as an artifact and as a natural association, or, in other words, the disconnection between art and nature. It is often supposed that the loss of soul in the city reflects the loss of a connection with nature, and this can be understood in different ways. In sociology, the convention describes the erosion of the idealization of Gemeinschaft and of the village for the model of Gesellschaft, supposedly signifying the depersonalization of modernity in relation to the face-to-face, etc. But such images beg the question of representation and suffer because of this. For example, in the arts it is not the village that is lost to secularization, but the rich, connotative implications of language that are presumed often to lose or suffer at the hands of abstraction. Giambattista Vico (1984) was exercised by this problem. The assumption of rationalization overcoming the immediacy and spontaneity of life was applied in thinking of the city and its changes with respect to sanitized, geometrical, and

106

The Material City

functional models such as Le Corbusier in relation to the vitality that such models of urban planning were assumed to extinguish in the everyday life of the city. In fact, after surrealism and Dada, loss in the arts (soul of music, soul of painting, soul of theatre, soul of dance, soul of art per se) was seen through changes such those as ushered in by John Cage in rethinking music as an elemental reformulation of a tension between sound and noise, by Jackson Pollock in trying to pin down painting to the action of the process, by Antonin Artaud in looking for an elementary theatrical language, in theorizing silent film, and in many related efforts to subvert abstract structures by appealing to the life world. One of the best and paradigmatic examples is the attempt of ordinary language philosophy, and of Wittgenstein in particular, to return concepts to their natural home in everyday usage. Note that each of these examples represents something analogous in the orthodoxa to a loss of soul as quality, or of authenticity, as notations on how representation has lost its connection with nature, understood not empirically as if a connection to the agrarian, but as the natural connection to the referent. Such a loss converts the notion of the city into an accident insofar as it is stripped of its significative excess or surplus. Such usages are often derided as romantic attempts to compensate for our human limitations and inability to master and determine events with finality. But this is an accusation and not an analysis of the place of this vision of loss of soul in collective life, and in the humanities the most acceptable vision seems to be Walter Benjamin’s model for the erosion of aura, which at least addresses loss of soul from the perspective of a material city. A profound analysis in this spirit rather than accusation or description remains Georg Simmel’s essay on life and form ([1918] 2011, 99–154) and indeed, his countless works on this tension.

Gentrification: Gains and Losses The system of desire of the city is reflected vividly in the practice described as gentrification. The cliché, typically meant to describe the exploitation of the inner city by the bourgeoisie, always presupposes the power of the city as expressed in its capacity to stimulate the opportunism of entrepreneurs with respect to the development of areas reinvented as appealing. The description(s) of gentrification, wherever it is assumed to occur, invariably addresses the instability of value in the city: as soon as something is made appealing, it gets appropriated by others who had no part in the process of creating its value. Under the auspices

Figures of Enlightenment

of such an interpretive economy, everyone in the city is compelled to protect their products from being taken over in ways that signify the iron law of corruptibility, that making something good inevitably leads to its becoming desirable to and for others who are in a better position to acquire and use what is made. Here, we can appreciate how the reconfiguration of eros allows us to consider the entrepreneurial imaginary as an illustration claimed by its practitioners to be heavenly and derided by others as destructive (Plato did remind us that making money is an art of sorts, and all justifications of finance as such a form must appeal to such a principle and its value for the community). Indeed, the entrepreneurial principle might just be the pinnacle of the erotic life for the greater numbers and in ways that intensify the experience of isolation of many who are not simply “losers” but resistant to such values. The city guarantees that the end of an action can never be to produce something of value, nor even to care for and maintain it, because its vulnerability to expropriation by the other increases with its value. The protectiveness of the producer toward what he or she produces is counteracted by the Enlightenment objective of the market, which requires any one person’s product to be available to all in a way that creates a social situation in which the production of value has to include as part of its “productivity” ways and means of providing for its reproduction. In the material city, the success of a product, confirmed by its emulation (“imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”) or expropriation, means that the desirable product has to become a commodity. This curious element of stoicism, as a generic notion formulating the subject as a producer, implies that a detached relation to the product need be maintained in the face of a possible loss that can only be compensated for by an abstract profit. This also suggests that productivity as the reproduction of value always depends upon organization, or some notion of the rationalization of the continuation of productivity. In the material city, productivity is always a struggle to persist in what threatens to be lost. Gentrification reflects the Enlightenment vision of progress that demands renunciation of notions such as soul or aura in order to maximize the prospect of an efficient public discourse that can satisfy a diverse population by assuming objectives that most can agree upon. Gentrification can then be posited as the means and manner of place making for a mobile population, a way of arresting the movement of differences in the settlement. Gentrification seems to make the city a place by providing a generic site for the different movements of peoples because the generic site will tend to be acceptable to any and all. The means for making a generic place for the disparate population is typically mediated through use of any present generation as the omnirelevant condition that can bind together the great diversity of different backgrounds. The solidarity of generation can always

108

The Material City

pacify the resentment that might arise from long-standing attachments to diverse localities and sentiments by affirming the precedence of generational symptoms of identity formation in distinguishing images. Yet gentrification must be more than this: it must be a positive intervention as well, much like the constant repair work or work of maintenance that the city must undergo throughout its fluctuating circumstances and changes. In other words, the demands of change include for any city the need to maintain itself and to reorder itself constantly. In this sense, gentrification might stand for the cosmetic revolt initiated by each generation, satisfying in its way Baudelaire’s conception of how each age must impose upon its present a special and distinctive look. Here, far from being corrupt, gentrification seems the marriage of commerce and the makeup (makeover) it decides that it requires at each modern moment, leading to the unsettling sequence of styles and eccentric modes of self-display that we are forced to witness at and in any present (and as seen from the distance of a future that reviews its past, as laughable or even ghoulish). In this way gentrification could appear as simply another chapter in the eternal parade of gestures of civic improvement initiated under the banner of urban renovation. As a cosmetic update of the city, gentrification can always appear grotesque, especially in its monstrous standardization of what is a long-standing and intimate connection to the place, since gentrification always seems to do such violence, perpetuating the death of the past, despite its claim to invigorate remains that are out of date. So, this question invariably asks whether gentrification brings the past to life, or brings life through the past, or simply annuls the past despite its ceremonial relations to milestones, memorials, and such. Here we might think of comparing the deconstruction of a text that is treated as a classic to a process that converts it to a standardized format: yet despite the failure of gentrification to do more than convince the present that it has enlivened the past by remodelling it to meet present tastes, every such vulgar initiative raises the question of what our city is such that this project has value: Our civilization is characterized by the word “progress.” Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically, it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought as only a means to this end and not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity and perspicuity are valuable in themselves. I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings. (Wittgenstein 1980, 7e) Moreover, the spectacle of gentrification can only expose to us the truth of the “bottom line” that, when all is said and done, the democratic city as an oligarchic

Figures of Enlightenment

109

structure, a triumph of the monstrous rule of market value and of the profit motive over all and sundry that can only take shape in the format of the generic in word and deed. Only the format of the generic in style, language, and visualization is capable of deferring the resentment released by market value and its fluctuations. This is to say that if gentrification stands to what it gentrifies in the way innovation is assumed to relate to heritage, in translating this into a relationship to language we might say that the algorithm stands to what it simplifies in the name of efficiency in the way that innovation is assumed to stand to heritage. If language is as a heritage, innovation seeks to economize and make efficient our relationship to it. If the culture of the city – a figure now seeming to represent heritage – is made over by initiatives that aim to make the city a more efficient place, we can explore the movement of the city through history in a different way. Thus, every such project can cause us to reflect on the city and its meaning as a place in time. In this sense Agamben is correct in seeing how such gestures leave us with the remains of ghosts as our corpus of memories, the intangible heritage that its intangibility still continues in vestiges and traces. To take a page out of Lacan with liberties: unlike neurotic approaches to gentrification that simply complain, or the perverse range of approaches that revel in its ambiguity and/or exploit it, theorizing tries to analyze gentrification. Again, though, what gentrification illustrates directly is how exchange value invariably supersedes use value in measuring the property of the city as objects of value. In this respect, the example of gentrification shows how the media typically promote change and a “new economy” by stigmatizing the district that it changes, as a gesture of selfpromotion that can shamelessly exhibit its renovation as progress: this is dramatized in the inspiring study of Andre Jansson (2005) on Malmo, Sweden.

The Imaginary of Mobility: Staying and Leaving Mobility can be understood as a motivated course of action for whole peoples or aggregates, an expression of collective desire that reflects the drive to live, and in this case to move; in this sense, mobility is animated not only by oppression and injustice but by an imaginary version of the other place, or, perhaps in desperation, any other place, as a destination that is viewed as contemporary and as superseding the value of the place left behind by virtue of the resources it promises to have and that the place to be left lacks. In this important sense, movement must be linked to an anticipation of making a difference in the life that is led, and so, as gripped by an idealization of the future as a scene for the materialization of such consequences.

110

The Material City

To get some leverage on this notation for gentrification, we can contrast to a city such as New York, Venice as the home of masterpieces, the quintessential beautiful city that attracts all those engaged by the question of good taste. This allows us to begin to work through the notion of gentrification in the spirit of Aristotle, who said of being that it has many senses, by following this counsel to examine the many senses of gentrification as part of our work. To this end, we collected interviews with a number of citizens of Venice in order to throw light on the comparative experience of social change. The interviewer was a researcher from the project who was a native resident from Venice and who conducted interviews with seven long-standing, older residents of the city and three younger subjects. What we note is that gentrification is not the only image of change in the city, as the sense of loss is registered in the erosion of a way of life marked by the influx of new people who appear to represent challenges to what is long-standing. By and large, the respondents say that the city has not changed and then in the next breath claim that it has, as reflected in the influx of tourists, foreigners, rising prices and rents, the exodus of youth who leave for employment elsewhere, and so on. Thus, it seems that the secret story here is this denial of change or the interviewees’ reluctance to talk about the change they recognize. For example, to the question “What changes have you noticed in the city in the last few years?” one subject replies as follows: The city itself has not changed, it’s always the same, but what has changed is the environment of the city because of the migration of many residents to the mainland. The city has more tourists, more foreign workers than in the past. This is the most visible change. She denies that Venice has changed by distinguishing between the city and the environment as if “migration” belongs to the environment and not the city although its effects are palpable. There is a recurrent need to deny change in the city while affirming what the denial denies. Asked, “What do you think about ‘modern times’ and the lifestyle associated with it?” the same respondent said, Here in Venice it is difficult to talk about “modern times” or modern lifestyle exactly because of its unique nature. Of course, we notice new businesses cropping up to meet the demands of the young or of the tourists, but the sense of the “modern” is difficult here. I will tell you that I don’t like the way they have “modernized” certain events like the Carnival, which instead of being a cultural and artistic expression is turning out to be an excuse for the young to cause havoc and get drunk. This is sad.

Figures of Enlightenment

111

Apparently, the unique character of Venice, its authenticity, would be compromised by seeing it as modern because modernity as so seen appears to threaten the distinctiveness of the city, being a label that makes all cities comparable. This is the very loss that Zukin fears. Here, new businesses and a Carnival that meets the demands of youth and tourists are treated as an external alteration and not a real change because she views change from the perspective of the resident. It is interesting that youth and the generational change represented here are not part of the city for this subject. Her sadness shows the melancholia that denies and accepts the loss at the same time. Here, to another question – “What do you think of Venice with respect to other cities? Would you ever want to move away?” – we note the reply of a man: I wouldn’t change Venice for any other city because it is a unique city with its own set of advantages as well as disadvantages. I just think that this city is an open-air museum: Where can one find a place like this? The unique character of Venice is a function of its status as a work of art, the city as a virtual museum. Yet, that it is a museum entails risks: first the tourists that are bound to come and engage it externally as spectators and no more, and then the danger that the museum-city neglects its life – for example, its youth, changing demands of the environment, and the like. The city as a masterpiece has dangers, as this subject admits: [Interviewer] Why do you live in Venice? [Respondent] Because it’s fascinating; it’s wonderful living here; it’s like living within an art masterpiece. [Interviewer] A masterpiece, indeed, but full of tourists? [Respondent] In the mid-nineteen hundreds there were about a million tourists in the city; by 1998 there were eleven million; today there are twentyone million of them. That’s forty-two million pairs of eyes and many not particularly respectful of the city. I mean that you see many of them with their feet in the canals and eating in Piazza S. Marco bare-chested. The Venetians are against the idea of limiting the number of visitors, but the city needs to address this problem. Regulations exist and they have to be enforced. Take for example police in plain clothes who go after the illegal sellers [mostly of purses]. They try to catch these people who run away, running into people and generally creating havoc to elude the police. The police are more dangerous than the illegal sellers. I’ve seen horrible scenes like a child’s stroller being overturned by one of these people fleeing from the police, and the father catching the child in midair after it was thrown from the stroller.

112

The Material City

Is the government, I wonder, really trying to eliminate these illegal activities and petty crime or does it allow it, seeing it as a necessary social steam valve? If the masterpiece-city attracts spectators, it also attracts life in the shape of misuse, corruption, impurity, and vandalism. It is important for this subject and those like him to see this corruption not as the work of residents but of those who come from elsewhere and use the city for their purposes. It is essential that the work of constructing the city as masterpiece, the time-honoured work of Venetians themselves, be disavowed because that would cause them to ask: Why did you make a masterpiece if you knew that once you built it, they would come? And if you did not know this, what kind of builder were you? Were you similar to Dr Victor Frankenstein, who built his masterpiece and then abandoned it? The residents begin to face the question of whether the masterpiece can be monstrous, giving us an altogether different perspective on the beautiful city. Similar to New York but more so, Venice recognizes that becoming a central city (like Athens at one time) has its consequences insofar as the periphery hates the centre and can constantly work not simply to vandalize it but to destroy it and its masterpieces. [Interviewer] How do you see the city socially? [Respondent] Well, there are still Venetians living in Venice – mostly living in Castello and Cannareggio as well as the Giudecca. But the city is changing. I can see the changes in my own sestiere [area]. Half of the businesses are now owned not by Venetians but by, well, Chinese. [Interviewer] Are you pleased by this new international Venice? [Respondent] Not at all. I prefer to shop at stores owned by the locals with whom I can establish a friendly rapport. With the Chinese it seems rather difficult. They speak their own language and make us feel like outsiders. We are losing our identity because of them. Unfortunately, many people shop in their establishments, especially because many of them have installed video games. [Interviewer] What do you think is the biggest problem facing the city? [Respondent] They often talk about the city falling apart. But in my opinion if it’s falling apart, it’s because there are no options for the young people of the city: the city does not have places and open space for the eighteen-yearold. And the other, more significant problem is the number of people leaving the city. Forty years ago we were a city of over a hundred thousand people. Now we number sixty thousand. How is it that we can’t slow this down? Is there an alternative? For me this is the biggest problem facing the city. [Interviewer] Would you ever leave Venice? [Respondent] Absolutely not.

Figures of Enlightenment

113

Or from another interview: [Interviewer] What has changed in the life of the city? [Respondent] Well, what has changed is that it’s difficult to find Venetians in the historical centre. But the common folks are obliged to leave because of the high costs. Consequently, we have lost the real life of the city. Gone is the shoe store where the owner made the shoes himself. Gone are the artisanal shops now replaced by mass-produced goods. By encouraging mass tourism and by selling off properties to foreigners we have brought upon the death of the city, which is steadily declining. This mass tourism does not even know how to appreciate the city. Once someone came in the [book] store all worried and asked me how long he had before he needed to leave. Thinking that he was referring to our business hours I told him the time we closed – but he wanted to know at what time the city closed down, thinking that, like an amusement park, the city shut down at a certain time. The push-pull hypothesis sees the change as a result of foreign influences, of immigrants and tourists, and the departure of youth for these very reasons. This is because these foreign influences are assumed to contribute to the higher prices and rents and the unemployment that sends youth away. Another subject gives a remarkable avowal of such reasoning: [Interviewer] What changes have you noticed in the city in the last few years? [Respondent] The city has not changed, it’s not like other cities where one can tear down a building and put up a thirteen-, fourteen-storey tower. The changes that are noticeable are in the number of businesses that close down or are owned by foreigners. Then there’s the problem of people leaving the city and going to the mainland. Many would return to the city if it weren’t for the high prices of homes or for the fact that high waters have “eaten” away many apartments at the lower levels. So, Venice has not changed except for its changes! This contradiction can be avoided by thinking of such changes as inconveniences and not change per se, alterations that do not have to be decisive. [Interviewer] Has the quality of life changed over the years? Is it better or worse? [Respondent] We are not badly off now except life is not as quiet as it used to be. In the past we had tourists but not like today, which are the masses;

114

The Material City

once we got a different quality of tourists, who spent more and who were respectful. Now she distinguishes between inconveniences and “quality of life,” on the one hand, and real change on the other, accepting disruptions to quality of life as routine problems of maintaining a city and of its “working” or not. We also begin to see a distinction between types of tourists, breaking down the homogeneity of the category. Another respondent says, We now get tourists of lower levels; even stores have become ugly, selling ugly things at low prices that are not made in Italy. Once they used to sell beautiful glass items that were really made in Murano. But perhaps this happens in all art cities. I went to Florence a month ago and it appeared ugly to me. Tourism is the same everywhere it seems. Carnival was different than today. We used to get dressed up in costumes to go to house parties. Now it’s just for tourists. [Interviewee] Are many people leaving the city? [Respondent] Yes, because of the high cost of houses. If you are not lucky enough to own a house you can’t afford one. The municipality seems to listen only to the needs of the wealthy. The ordinary people don’t have a voice. I’m not crazy about the quality of people living in Venice. There are now many gondoliers, especially because now they don’t just work in the summer but also through the winter as well. They work when it’s raining and at night. They do good business. I’d have to say that the population of Venice is getting older and there are a few young people. Only the ones that love Venice stay, and those who are lucky enough to have parents who’ve bought homes for them. A house in Venice now averages five thousand euros per square metre, and you don’t get luxury for that. These are things that don’t work well in Venice, but I don’t have any plans to leave. Now it becomes clearer for this person: everything changes but she will not change, she will not imitate the fluctuations of the city that she both denies and then accepts, a fluctuation that includes the decline in the quality of the people. [Interviewer] It’s not an easy city to live in, maybe because it has lost the characteristics that once made it a livable city? [Respondent] Absolutely. You are always crowded by people who have no

Figures of Enlightenment

115

respect for you as a resident or for the city itself. It makes you resentful of the city, and the people who run the city who are making it unlivable. It’s confusing. On the one hand everyone wants tourists because they bring wealth, but on the other hand residents are seeing their government turn Venice into a Disneyland and an attraction destination with few moments of real life. Many Venetians are abandoning the city and are renting out their homes. On one side you have the vision of the city intended for the tourists, but on the other the reality of life for the resident who is not part of the consideration from those who administer the city. The only thing you can do is think that it’s a special city, accept it, and get on with it. [Interviewer] So in Venice there are only two possibilities: One stays because he loves the city, or one can’t put up with anymore and moves away? [Respondent] That’s right. Most people can’t cope anymore, especially because of costs but also because it’s not a livable city; because it’s a city that’s becoming more difficult to live in. As a young person maybe you don’t realize it because you can’t see an alternative, but as you grow up you do. As an adolescent I was so bored until I found a sport that helped me out a lot. But if someone does not have an interest, Venice offers you nothing except meeting friends at the bar. Thus, the residents are resisting the idea that they have killed the city, because the influx of foreign businesses suggests that the people who are condemned by the Venetians, such as the Chinese, are doing the business that the Venetians could have done for themselves. The success of these immigrants testifies painfully to the failure of the political and economic will of Venetians, their inability to provide what life the Chinese are providing now. In this sense, the talk raises the possibility that it is the Venetian resident who drives youth away through lethargy, and their accounts of change in the face of rising inconveniences might be attributing to externals (conditions, causes) what they have done to themselves. Venice risks appearing to its residents as a dead city that they have killed, a graveyard evacuated by the young and its future in the hands of others who are unintelligible. The loss of soul becomes more complex now. If both New York and Venice seem to be changing enough to raise the question of whether such change is a difference of form or degree, whether the change means the city is a new city or more of the same in altered form, it is apparent that residents are confused and yet continue to live in these cities. Just as cities change and so do people, it might be asking too much to avoid treating such a material condition as fatal, asking, rather, how we might relate to such change as something other than loss, as something other than melancholic.

116

The Material City

So far, we have focused on time as a central element in social change, but change mixes both factors of time and space because at any one moment the city must bear the influences of its constant and contingent positioning as a place in its civilization. Change is not simply marked by the succession of generations but by the relation of such a trajectory to the spatial landscape of the world reflected in the fluctuating interaction between Centre and Periphery. The formats for fashioning and constructing cities are much like memes that circulate as standardized influences in urban life, always threatening to mask the particular and unique local conditions of any city.

Conclusion Here we see that if we tend to identify the culture of the city with its heritage in conventions that mark both New York and Venice as singular and unique, this is insufficient until we listen to the anxieties expressed by respondents. Bearing witness to these concerns enable us to bring to the surface the unspoken and buried preoccupation with the loss of soul or with the possible extinction of the city, as the “real” problem for inquiry, as the need to perpetuate the city through its relationship to posterity. The soul of the city as a mark of its culture begins to be disclosed in ways in which it imagines how it might produce itself as memorable. If all cities are the same in bearing a heritage and other in the uniqueness of each heritage, this is not enough for our inquiry even as it satisfies the many; what marks the culture of a city as its soulfulness is its preoccupation with the memorability of its heritage, with the question of what it needs to make such memorability possible. It is this question that animates the restlessness of the ideal speaker who desires to overcome the focus on custom and history in order to bring the individuality of the city to dialogue: though we cannot possess immortality, what is the second-best way for cities to try to leave some indications of their value behind? When invited to reflect upon this question, we tend to invoke the idea of producing works – of arts, the built environment, codes and laws – as the medium of a preservation discourse; a medium that can be revealed in making such “things.”

CHAPTER 7

Perpetuity

Introduction This chapter continues by reflecting on the notion of an “official” preservation discourse through the example of the Venice Charter and its emphases on maintaining a legacy. We suggest that what needs to be preserved through the figure of the building or monument is the need to keep alive the sense of the eventfulness of building and of making as essential to the legacy of this city in the face of the temptation of indifference.

Preservation The preservation discourse is a good place to begin exploring the status of obsolescence under current conditions, and particularly the connection between the aging of persons and buildings. The analogy permits us to appreciate that persons are not buildings and that, because of this, they seem to have the advantage of a different kind of support network but the disadvantage of being private property and not public. Yet the differences are more relevant in the case of their status as objects, for buildings remain palpable, even as ruins, whereas the remains of persons are quite different, perhaps “memories” capturing the function of such traces and, as we know, memories inherently alienable and detachable are, as Derrida’s ghosts that bear witness, always in motion as part of the circulatory passages of life. In thinking of the work of preservation and preserving, say, old people and old buildings, we do note that they are similar not necessarily because of their beauty, or even their utility (the old person is in the way, the old building is of no use), but as an evocation of a deeper use value of sorts, a notion of this object as a site or scene of action that is important to recall, if intermittently, as a condition of who we are as a city at present. But this is not self-evident or easy

118

The Material City

to justify. In this way, preservation itself can become what Benjamin (1977) called a “stage prop” when speaking of the baroque relation to local detail, an intimation disclosing what the collective stands for and to what it might look up, how what it emulates is (in a sense) an object choice revealing whatever kind of quality it presumes to have (say, in this case, the importance of keeping certain matters, and not only buildings, alive and well). To anticipate, the preservation discourse in part is directed to enlivening any present in the face of the inexorability of death, by showing how it measures itself by what it has and promises to do in life with the objects supposedly in its possession. The struggle with the mood of obsolescence is inevitable: obsolescence itself always risks losing itself to the overpowering aura of loss, of its apparently diminished capacity to be an object of desire rather than to take the pleasure in such decline that any modern moment offers in the image of decadence.

The Charter and Such Documents The Venice Charter is a document that evolved historically at successive European conferences aimed at standardizing strong relations to the preservation of “culturally significant” buildings and sites (see Hardy 2008). The tendency of the Venice Charter to treat buildings as historical documents has been criticized for equating buildings with documents, but the deeper issue relates to the conception of the charter itself as a historical document. The focus on opening up the charter’s provisions to new interventions and amendments might just gloss the more elementary question of the writing of charters as a social form, and so as a field of investigation that could be of value in understanding and reflecting upon conservation initiatives. Treating the charter as akin to a code or law, we might ask: Upon what is it ruling? Here, the law affirms itself as an antidote to the violence of time, proposing that it will master such unruliness through stipulation and interdiction (through its own kind of violence) in order to maintain and defend the valuable vestige of the past from the destructiveness of present and future. This is a synopsis of the view relating law to violence, originating with Benjamin (1986) and popularized by Agamben (1998) through his criticism. Charters relating to monuments themselves function in ways similar to monuments, offering their prescriptions as monumental. Charters are also similar to constitutions, sacred texts, and a range of products often considered holy and untouchable, providing grounds for reactions as different as idolatry and vandalism and often stimulating emulation and even reproductions of many kinds

Perpetuity

119

ranging from mimetic to counterfeit. Charters evoke notions of mortality and extinction, purity and corruption, the original and its images, and the relation between the dead letter and the life it implies and/or represses. In these ways, the collective representation of the charter resonates with a range of contemporary interests in language and its limits. The Venice Charter, like all such texts, is therefore doubly interesting because both the text and the buildings and settings it seeks to perpetuate in the future evoke the aura of monumentality. The charter then invites theorizing with respect to its genre and its similarities to and differences from such prescriptions, rules, or normative orders, but invariably makes manifest in its way the ethical collision that collectivizes this discourse as a concerted interest in fundamentalism and its instabilities. In this respect, the debate on the Venice Charter and the actions and modifications it might require can be understood as dependent upon a discourse organized around concerns for time and for the critical moment marked by its eventful creation as a collective authorship, and for various notions of space expressed in its ideas of sovereignty, intertextuality, repetition, translation, and transitions across borders and boundaries of time and space. More fundamentally, this debate on the Venice Charter allows for an occasion to address the problems connected to preservation per se and the discourse released under the auspices of its name. Indeed, if a charter memorializes an event or accomplishment in time, then it typically must hold fast to an unproblematic notion of the action of memorialization in life and, more deeply, the action and place of preservation. For when all is said and done, preservation makes reference to nothing less than life and death, to perdurance, endurance, survival, and extinction, to passages and what passes away, and to the eye that records this or not, as whatever remains not to pass away but to persist (or not), but then unseen and to whom? Then again, the eye that records (or not) whatever stays, remains (or not, and then who says?) and must stand to the monument and its inscription in some uncertain way, but by grace of what hand and for whom? Matthew Hardy, among others, has remarked on how the preservation discourse imitates the historic conventions for representing public health through the rule of a logic of efficiency that separates work and life, sanitizing life by segregating uses of space from one another on the grounds of their danger for causing infection. In the language of Durkheim, the contagiousness of a volatile and dense social life is here treated as the danger of infection, analogous to the way diversity might be viewed as unhealthy. Quoting William Morris (1889), Hardy writes that “It has been most truly said … that these old buildings do not belong to us only; that they have belonged to our forefathers and they will belong to our descendants unless we play them false. They are not in any sense our property, to do with as we like. We are only trustees for those who come after us” (2004, 25).

120

The Material City

As Hardy notes, though this is a position to which we can show sympathy, its acceptance of the opposition between past and present, between the rights of our ancestors and our entitlement, between collective and individual property, tends to raise more issues than it settles. And this is how it should be for any complex social phenomenon. What the quote seems to identify as fundamental is the question of who is to assume sovereignty over our inheritance, and how an inheritance can be said to be one and/or many, unified and/or plural. While we can never hope to achieve a final solution to these questions, we can use them as an occasion for what Wittgenstein calls a grammatical investigation. That investigation could begin with certain common conceptions. For example, if we agree that our past is to be treated with care, neither with indifference, on the one hand, nor as our property to “do with as we like,” on the other, then we must still remain cautious toward the inflexibility registered in Morris’s desire to leave buildings intact by immunizing them from current infectious impulses. The relationship between such extreme positions must always draw upon an unspoken formulaic multitude of images that provide for its possibility and intelligibility (those assumptions regarding time, ownership, property, and partitioning, as the intimation of alterity within) and that confirms in its way the symptomatic character of Morris’s text. Morris not only exemplifies reverence for the past, as could be revealed by any interpretation, but delivers the message to every generation that the inheritance it confronts is not of its making and is to be treated as if a foreign legacy toward which it has no rights. In serving as a warning, Morris’s text displays the need of any present to protect its accomplishments from the unpredictable future through a method of parental admonition. As such a symptom, the admonition seems to point to an important feature of any document or memorial that attempts to guarantee its own immunity to the ravages of time, a desire shared by individuals and collectives alike to enforce a degree of perpetuity upon themselves as if creating a nimbus that will succeed in keeping such noise at arm’s length. Note that in this space between these extreme positions, true care for the present could show agreement with Morris in part on the need to not destroy the past but still might resist the apparent alternative of simply making the past operational, perhaps as a redesigned heritage site serving as a resource for the city at present. A middle ground is different, neither preservationist nor progressive in these ways, but a starting point that we might think of as procreative. Here, we could ask what elemental and vital features can we imagine of our past that we might stitch onto our present, less in the form of aspects to copy than as beginnings or initiatives to develop. So, if Morris advises us to leave monuments intact, he seems to assume that they do not belong to us in any way, as if any present intervention is a gesture of violence, of robbery, of theft. And yet if these

Perpetuity

121

monuments were made for us as if we are now the future that was anticipated then, how are we expected to use them on any terms other than ours? Do old buildings not belong to us in some sense? And to whom do “they” and “we” and “us” make reference? On what terms should we orient to the things, achievements, and events of our past? These conflicted usages of sovereignty, property, indexical expressions, of terms of reference, of borders and boundaries, of original and image, all need to be unscrambled, and this unscrambling occurs within the context of a reciprocal sense of justice haunting the conservation discourse that we will begin to explore.

Preservation and Its Place The concern for preservation plays off the interest in time and mortality, asking in its way if preservation is necessary and implying through such a query the capacity to imagine a world without. Yet, if preservation is a universal in the sense that for us at any moment time must leave its material traces, then the concern always calls us to heed the discourse on preservation, and the notion of the symbolic order as framing the question more specifically as one of developing lively and/or moribund relations to the practice itself. In this way, humans such as us, instead of trying to imagine a world in the absence of preservation, might, in a world in which it is omnipresent, ask: How is it with preservation and what makes a discursive relationship to the notion strong or weak? Note that from the point of view of the Real, preservation can make reference to the excess evoked in images of the groundlessness of being, of the evanescence of any moment, of the trace of the aura in any one determination. Yet, in terms of the symbolic order, what is Real in preservation must be announced in the central object (signifier, construct) that must materialize as a locus of communication for those touched by it to imagine their relatedness, and so, to imagine resemblances evoking both unity and differences, evoking the implicit explication of a discourse and the discordance and compromises that such a focus must release. Even more, such a symbolic order must be grounded in the desire for finality, continuity, or even closure that it conceives as its destiny while yet experiencing the mortality of this desire in the aura of its any and every living distinction, whether conceived as fantasy, deception, futility, or a dream of everlasting productivity, sensing the persistent aura of death and expiration in every living word. In such ways the imaginary relation to preservation, a relation that must be symbolized in some way, is a double of the relation to the ruin or to the city that

122

The Material City

Simmel formulated in a manner that captures the inexorable suffering of productivity and growth as decline and decay (whether for the building or the individual), that which brings the ruin and aging together in collective life as occasions for healing or for the decadence that enunciates resignation and inaction, indifference and the absence of care, for what seems obsolete, including oneself as the ruin. Monuments as Texts, Texts as Monuments The program statement of the conference on the Venice Charter creates the terms for a dialogue by proposing two positions in relation to historical monuments: the “pluralist view that would allow considerations of cultural continuity, tradition and collective memory,” in contrast to the “Charter’s insistence that buildings and settings be seen as historical documents which must not be ‘falsified’” (icomos quoted in Hardy 2008, xvi; for the text of the Venice Charter, see Hardy 2008, 729–33). The terms underlying this opposition might be accepted too readily as self-evident in ways that simplify the prospect of a relationship to a historical document, for such a relationship is neither self-evident nor indivisible. By aligning “pluralism” against a view of the document such as this, the heterogeneity of the relationship to a document is glossed, and so are the discursive tensions inherent in the very notion of the document as a social phenomenon. Not only this, but I suspect that just as useful for this discourse as maintaining the view of monuments as significant historical documents is approaching such documents as, in turn, monumental, as ideas of primary, secondary, and minor documents circulate as part of our historical repertoire, we might reflect upon the aura of the monumental text and the range of social relationships that this image fertilizes. In fact, if we reverse the procedure of thinking of monuments as documents, as stated in the Venice Charter, and think alternatively of documents as monumental, we might begin to recover more elemental features of the relationships glossed in the conservation literature. In fact, it might lie in the nature of the charter (of any charter) as a social form to invariably present its text as monumental and in some way as permanently endangered by threats of “falsification.” The monumental document, imagined as having a central place in the history of a people, suggests texts that are holy, sacred, or fated to remain intact in ways that seem to prejudge the possibility for amendments and modification. If the text occupies that unstable space between sacred and profane, it tends to be protected by interdictions that are both oppressive and alluring. Although the Venice Charter does not have to be interpreted as speaking in this way, it is animated by the desire to establish first principles that are capable of standardizing all modifications, and thus, of creating a uniformity among replies that can quiet the possible unruliness of diversity.

Perpetuity

123

It might be that the issue of “falsification” to which the Venice Charter alludes is treated differently in different sorts of monumental texts. The falsification of holy texts such as the Bible or the Quran can be viewed at any time as loci of dispute and rancorous debate over the relation of original to image, just as the falsification attributed to the epic, to great literary texts, or in the restoration of painting, or the replaying of original works of music, or to transfers of works between media, can lead to many levels of complexity. Falsification is often equated with any intervention in ways that are always contestable. Yet the falsification of a charter seems to share with the falsification of, say, a constitution, a sense of the violation of a moral imperative, much like a promise. We recognize that in all such cases the possibility of falsification depends upon the unspoken sense of a promise offered to the future, a promise that seems different than the contract offered in a transaction, or even as implied by the expectation of deference to the rights of the producers of works on the part of those who receive them, as in copyright disputes. Another feature of the monumental text resides in its aspiration to speak in the most comprehensive way in order to include many imaginable differences among respondents, leading to a typical association of monumentality with generality and to the connection of such texts to generic formula. Yet we must constantly keep in mind that an alternative view of the monumental text treats its authority and power as residing in the very diversity it might create for the future, that its fertility itself stimulates the fecundity of each generation. A basic question recurring throughout history concerns the power of any monumental work to collectivize a people in ways that the epic, the foundation myth, and the classic have always proposed. This is to say that the monumental text has grounded its authority not simply in the elegance of its construction but in its supposed use value in collective life. For example, Georg Simmel (1971) claimed of great works of art that the edifying aura of such greatness could often tranquilize the spectator instead of entering into one’s life as a moment of self-formation or as a part of what he called “subjective culture.”

The Venice Charter as a Model Therefore, instead of treating the Venice Charter simply as a set of prescriptions or recommendations, even as edicts or laws, we might focus on what it seems to do or perform. In this case, the charter offers guidance on how to respect the significant artifact and how to behave toward these works (safeguarding them from violence, maintaining them on a permanent basis, establishing a permissible range of modifications, regulating amendments to them in terms of imagined

124

The Material City

relations between the artifact and its “setting”). The charter becomes part of what Norbert Elias (2000) called the civilizing process, the informal induction of each generation into respectful relations to the past. Notice how the relations provide a model for relating to any text considered culturally significant, such as the translation of works from one language to another where we are encouraged to respect the boundaries separating us from the assumed original in order to protect it from being trespassed (Blum 2001). Alternatively, we might bring to mind Montaigne’s strategy of taking liberties with the texts of the past in order to reshape himself at present (in ways quite antithetical to Morris’s strictures). Indeed, any charter might need to resist the kinds of allegorical play (or montage, collage) that those such as Montaigne, Heidegger, and Benjamin have used in rereading texts as a kind of dream work that seems to exceed the point of view of the product (say, the monument), those condensations and displacements that can be found in retrospect to saturate the monument (or any product at its inception) in ways that seem now not to have been completely transparent then. Indeed, this imagined hiatus between now and then is in part what provides in any present for a playful relationship to its past as a relationship not simply exegetical, but constantly animated by a desire to mine (to relay the grounds of) the unsaid (see Grenzer 2001, 228, 234, 238, for examples of reframing the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz). If the notion of the monument evokes the conception of a relationship to any work of the past that has acquired “cultural significance” (as the charter says: not simply to “great works of art but also to more modest works of the past” [quoted in Hardy 2008, 730]), then the conception of the monument always raises the question of the permissible limits upon the actions of deference and initiative toward such works. In this way, Simmel’s conception of the way in which the conflict between form and life haunts modernity perhaps comes to view today in the suspicion that the notion of a charter, even of a constitution, and certainly of a canon, all represent at any present moment the artificial imposition of form upon self-expression, as though it were a massive external constraint seen as antithetical to life. We know enough to realize that any monumental text not only creates awe and deference in the abiding respect for its form and maintenance, but is also, because of this very evocation of purity, capable of producing both fundamentalist idolatry and the sense of frustration and resentment of each generation in the face of its prohibitions. Further, the very purity of a monumental text typically produces the transgressive impulses that inhabit purity as the fate it must endure. Indeed, Lacan might see in such “greatness” the incentive for perversion of every sort. In this way, purity and defilement can be said to belong to the monumental work as part of the grammar of the social form, and so, as ever-present features that cannot be dreamt away. It is in the space between these extremes

Perpetuity

125

that the relation to the monument as a social form resides: perhaps the monumentality of the monument refers less to its size, scale, chronological priority, or “cultural significance” in an abstract sense, than to the promise it offers to collectivize the people and to the opportunity for defilement that such a promise can release. In this way, the contentiousness between the extremist positions of inflexibility and permissiveness can be abridged when we appreciate each as a symptom of a certain approach to the emergence and maintenance of a “people” as a collective. Thus, the view of the original moment as untouchable, because it is taken as the unique and singular expression of the eventful emergence of a people, can be retrospectively seen as part of the aspiration to make a space for the natality or birth of collective life. In contrast, the permissiveness associated with any intervention in the built environment can also be reformulated in accord with the notion that what occurs exists in many ways and that an inheritance such as a building provides each generation with the opportunity to find its own voice or its own mode of expressiveness. Here, the extremist positions are redeemed, rescued from a dogmatic polarity between constituting and constituted sovereignty that Agamben (1998) seems to unwittingly translate from orthodox contrasts between charisma and routinization, sect and church, Christianity and Christendom, and the like, to read less as a hermeneutic display of amnesia for denying creative origins than as being in the grip of a desire to master time, contingency, and the future by imagining the origin as eternal. In this sense, Artaud’s (1970) war cry “No more masterpieces!” is less a reaction to conservative inflexibility than a demand for any “book of the people” to be written in such a way as to accommodate the necessary revisions of each and every successive use that can and should be made of it, a concern for the fertility considered intrinsic to the event of natality. Thought in such a way, the past is always a present object, just as the present is always a differentiation of what is handed down. It is the separation of tenses of time that becomes pathological, hysterical, or obsessive, whether through denial or conversion. Thus, to repeat the obvious, the past is always a focus at present and as such remains a symptom of how we coexist in any present by addressing one another. The past is not concealed by the passage of time in some deep antechamber inaccessible to us and demanding hermeneutic innovation capable of plumbing these depths, because the past is and exists for us at present, available in how we make use of it and point to it in addressing each and every other. So where Agamben, following Benjamin’s exposition in Reflections (1986, 304– 11), says that a constitution becomes rigid as it forgets its own creative source, in the way parliaments forget their original inspiration (or, in sociology, the organization and institution forget their founding vigour; or as science forgets the

126

The Material City

creation and origin of its representations), such an interpretive cliché overlooks the difference between falsity and origins and being untrue to the capacities and resources of the language we use at any present moment in ways that tempt us to allow our language to as it were go on holiday as we accept prosaic and mechanical distinguishing without further ado. Thus, the ambiguity of the original moment (the creation of the monument) compels those who follow to justify anything and to violently expel any opposition in its name. It is less the fact that the constitution becomes rigid in the guise of bourgeoisie parliamentary proceduralism than that its loss of rigour – its very looseness and inexact relation to language – makes possible fundamentalist attempts to finalize it as doctrine (as law). It is the sacrificial crisis (Girard 1977) that produces fundamentalism, a crisis inherent in the recognition of bare life as the justifiable right to murder any and every distinction, to animate the dead and lifeless word in any way whatsoever, paradoxically by giving it meaning in any way whatsoever. In other words, what is discovered is that in the name of the monument anything can be permitted, and it is this birth trauma that is converted into the opposition. As a hypothesis, the trauma here refers to the experience of that loss of innocent absolutism that supported our sense of coherence as if suddenly and starkly exposed and repressed in the moment of such a scene of recognition (the trauma). The notion of the evil of banality suggests that it is a view of lifeless words and of our inanimate engagement with the word that always requires prosopopoeia. The ambiguity here resides in the capacity of animation to be both affirmative and murderous. This recognition seems to be closer to the sense of bare life and its vulnerability. The monument itself confirms the vulnerability of the species to the caprice of modification, as in the serial murders depicted by Agamben under the rubric of bare life. Intrinsic to the monument is the destruction and/or distortion that can be done in its very name, but is only another way of addressing the uses to which monumentality can be put, usage captured by images such as falsification, perversion, vandalism, plagiarizing, copyright, and the assorted interventions that are themselves constitutive of any constituted action or anything that is done and made, even memory and forgetting. Here Michel Serres points to the fundamental ambiguity in the very notion of production as something fated to haunt monumentality itself: In the beginning is production … Yet I would like to know what production means. Those who call production reproduction make the job easy. Our world is full of copiers and repeaters, all highly rewarded with money and glory. It is better to interpret than to compose; it is better to have an opinion on what has already been made than to have one’s own. The modern illness is the engulfing of the new in the duplicate, the engulfing of intelligence in

Perpetuity

127

the jouissance of the homogeneous … Real production is undoubtedly rare, for it attracts parasites that immediately make it something common and banal. Real production is unexpected and improbable; it overflows with information and is always immediately parasite. (2007, 4) The ambiguity of what is constituted resides in its capacity to be reconstituted as if any action as a receptacle for the use that is made of it must suffer this replication, duplication, repetition as part of what it is in the way the parasite can be disguised in the many and varied manifestations done in its name. Parasitism raises an interesting question, causing us to ask in the relation of present to past, just who is giving and who is taking, for this question brings to view a fundamental point of ambiguity. If the present has to take from the past in this sense, must it also not give to the past the opportunity to remain vital through contemporary application and diversification? Or, if the present thinks it owes nothing to the past, does not this very representation owe to the past its lineage and mode of protestation, its “object” of reference? Indeed, if it is the fate of productivity, of what is produced, to be used and parasited, we still need to grasp the place of preserving this inheritance as a gesture capable of giving back to this product the value it needs in order to persist. In this way, the ambiguous character of parasitism needs to be opened up on any occasion in order to rescue preservation from this image of exploitation and usury, by conceiving it as a more creative initiative that adds as well as receives value, gives as well as takes. The preservation discourse has persistently been subject to scrutiny in terms of the assumptions and beliefs it must invariably disclose about its views of who and what is noteworthy, notable, and memorable in any present. The scandalous behaviour, rediscovered of late, of those it has designated as reputable, particularly in relation to their implicit racism or prejudices, considered normal in their time, often seem in retrospect as sufficiently abhorrent to warrant deleting their signatures from the sites and buildings bearing their name. If the preservation discourse makes provocative the question of what the gesture of naming a site means in collective life, it replays in a different shape the problem of the memorial and of repute that Plato’s Socrates advised his interlocutors to address, the pernicious influences of what a society looks up to that include both the notable people it admires as important to its legacy and the values that it enshrines as powerful and memorable indicators of its history and distinctiveness. As Plato knew, naming the building in honour of the notable person is part of the self-promotion of a society – its branding or advertising, and as such fated to be as idiotic as the glut of associations that it enshrines in its popular culture – a dispiriting and apparently random collection for each new generation who inhabit the city – and appearing to Plato much like a pathetic but comic display

128

The Material City

of the city’s self-conception and of the esteem it treats as deserved by those who seem to exemplify its ideals. In the folds of such a tangible heritage is the intangible heritage that lurks. Because businesspeople, theological figures, military men, celebrities, athletes, and benefactors of all kinds are used to name these spaces, the gallery of names adorning buildings and spaces can be a laughable spectacle. Of course, we do not want to enter the Hitler Wing of some hospital or Himmler Library at some university, but does going to Bill Gates Plaza make us feel any better, or Edgar Hoover Row or Google Lab when we discover, as we might, these figures’ various private shenanigans, or when we inhabit the building burdened by the emblem of some innocuous entertainer or entrepreneur who is nothing to us, and who is used as an emblem of the place? Socrates advises the young to hone their teeth on dialogue by inquiring into the reputations of those who are lionized, asking for the grounds of their repute, not in order to disclose their private misdeeds but to ascertain just what kinds of reflective relation to their environment they are identified as representing. Who should we honour, Madame Curie or Judy Garland? Can we name buildings after criminals such Al Capone or Dillinger, the Hillside Strangler, Jack the Ripper, Billy the Kid? Robin Hood lived here, we say, and then years later we discover that he didn’t take from the rich and give to the poor but kept it all for himself. Babe Ruth? Really? Should we name buildings for cancer casualties, sports figures, and entertainers whose claims to eternal and memorable greatness might be tarnished by discoveries about them or by the normal erosion of conventional piety over time? Such branding, always with its comedic potential, tries to give the city value by implication, in the way high school peer groups function by seeming to increase the value of the person who hangs out with someone reputed to be popular, or in the way of the delicatessen with its gallery of pictures of celebrities who have eaten in the place. What the soul of the preservation discourse recommends is that heritage is grounded in the spirit of a place and not its so-called celebrities, transient as they are, and that this desire for a soulful relationship must always work with and against the resistances of popular culture, must be both reflective of one who is both participant and spectator, as Rancière says, two bodied in this way. Of course, the inverse of such memorialization is the listing of the names of victims of wars or disasters, or of heroic figures standing for great deeds, or inventories of casualties of violence or wrongdoing such as lists of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. In these cases, naming makes public great deeds that are covert and unknown to most or lists oppressive actions that have been suffered privately in certain circles. In these cases, memorialization

Perpetuity

129

strives to make public silence itself as monstrous for a community on the grounds that its publicity will open up the prospect of a malleable future in different ways as Grenzer shows (see Grenzer 2001, 2002, 2010, part of her series of papers on revisiting sites of horror in Berlin – for example, in touring the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp – and on the re-display of events, culprits, and victims in the museum). Here we might note the ambiguity of memorialization as both a litany of atrocities (the monstrous heart of darkness) and as a resource for neoliberalism and its pedagogy of healing through instruction (promising the prospect for such a society to overcome this heritage to become malleable and open).

Old and New Consider the following comment by Hannah Arendt: “It is in the very nature of the human condition that each new generation grows into an old world … The world into which children are introduced … is an old world, that is, a pre-existing world, constructed by the living and the dead” (1961, 177). This “pre-existing world” includes buildings of course, but more essentially includes our representations of the built environment, representations that appear as an inheritance, or (what the sociologist Alfred Schutz called) a stock of knowledge. Each generation, then, faces the problem of dealing with its inheritance as a matter fundamentally ambiguous, requiring action and interpretation in any present that is invariably contestable. The discourse on preservation, and implicitly the Venice Charter, plays off this usage and its tensions not only because it stipulates ways and means of organizing ourselves in the present vis-à-vis our past but because it instructs us on how to intervene in the inheritance that is confronted in any present, on what kinds of steps we might take in acting on and interpreting this inheritance. This is to say that we not only inherit old buildings – our language is itself an object, objectified in ways that often appear authoritative and binding. It was Descartes who most aptly posed the problem of any present as one of engaging the accomplishments of the past as a relationship to foundations. If the Cartesian attempt to relay the grounds of past knowledge in the present was justly cited as the gesture symptomatic of modernity and its relentless review of inherited conventions, then his method for sanitizing language and concepts was fated to appear vulnerable to the same kind of critical scrutiny. This two-sided interest in foundation serves to dramatize an important ethical collision emerging in any present over the

130

The Material City

question of its relationship to past and future and for understanding conservation simultaneously as both conservative and radical and neither. Descartes accomplished this through his fabled use of architecture as trope: We do not, it is true, see people pulling down the houses of a whole town simply for the purpose of rebuilding them and rendering the streets more beautiful. But we do see many … engaged in this task of demolition and reconstruction, being sometimes constrained to do so because the houses are in danger of falling down and foundations are insecure. With this as my example, I am convinced that … I could not do better than to undertake to rid myself, at least once in my life, of all the opinions I had hitherto accepted on faith, in order either to replace them with better ones or to restore them to their former place, once I had brought them to the level of my reason. And I firmly believed that, in this way, I should succeed in ordering my life much better than if I simply built upon the old foundations, and based myself upon principles I had allowed myself to adopt in youth without ever considering whether they were true. (1960, 46) Descartes’s use of architecture permits us to envision the relation to the past and its achievements (those “modest works of the past which have acquired cultural significance,” as stated in article 1 of the Venice Charter [quoted in Hardy 2008, 729–33]), as a relationship to knowledge reflected in the terms we use to discuss and identify our possibilities: the question of foundations as posing the problem of demolition or reconstruction for any present invariably invites the present to review its inheritance and in this way can be a constant incentive in any present for renewal in the face of powerful but obsolete foundations (those that are “insecure”). Yet, the architectural metaphor has two more interesting implications. First, by suggesting that the insecurity of foundations is commensurate with their construction, it endows the activity of building as the laying of grounds with a vulnerability that is intrinsic to it and not a result of external conditions: in the way that what comes to be must inherently perish (be revisable in the future), the monument of the present must live with this limitation. What Descartes suggests here is that the passion for relaying grounds must yet be tempered in any present by a kind of ironic grasp of its own temporality. The cause of this fragility is due not to nature (e.g., as in the case of the ruin that is seen mistakenly to result from natural causes rather than abandonment) but rather to the legitimation of the project by the forces that define and give currency to its present – “youth” – because in any present, youth is tempted to adopt principles “without ever considering if they are true” and thus tend to “accept on faith” rather than to measure such acceptance by “reason.”

Perpetuity

131

The Cartesian rule that principles in any present accepted on faith are revisable offers any present both the opportunity for critique (evaluation) and the inexorable consequence that in doing such critique it will expose itself and its own limits to the future that will hold it accountable. In relating to what passes as our foundations or inheritance, particularly the principles, standards, or even texts that we treat as monumental (in the words of the Venice Charter, “a significant development or an historic event” [quoted in Hardy 2008, 730]), Descartes implicitly raises the question of whether there can be any other relationship than one between the voices of demolition and reconstruction, or better, how we might energize polarities between such notions as conservation and restoration through the aufheben that cancels the opposition while preserving their differences (in the idiom of Hegel). Descartes formulates the problem of monumentality as a social phenomenon by affirming the importance for anyone to – at least once in her life – revisit and review with a critical eye the principles she has accepted on faith. In this pedagogical counsel he assumes that each generation, encouraged to treat past accomplishments as “monumental” by virtue of their deference to repute, will be best advised to put this inheritance to the test of reason, even at the risk of demolishing such inheritance and starting over. Thus, Descartes, like Thoreau, as an advocate for modern reconstruction, seems not only antithetical to Morris but more in accord with the spirit of our time that typically celebrates itself as his opponent and as anti-Cartesian. The problem of extinction to which this points is important, for if demolition seems intuitively to deny history, it does reflect the view that history must be made supple if we are to creatively move on, needing to modify and embellish the best according to the demands of a present moment, but in this gesture needing to resist the temptation toward callow indifference that this opportunism might spark. What seems missing in the controversy over demolition is a sense of the necessary regard for what is essential in the past as a constraint upon its opportunistic annihilation, that what needs preservation is the eventfulness of the experience of the building and of the built environment that is meant to stand for Venice.

Procreation Thus, history, on the surface referring to monuments and archives, makes reference most fundamentally to the social bond represented as a “common world” that is at any time assumed as ours: the kind of implicit, ambiguous togetherness signified by ways of speaking together that seems to sustain us and to frame our sense of limits. Here, Arendt says that “a common world can survive the coming

132

The Material City

and going of generations only to the extent that it appears in public” (1958, 246), suggesting that care for history is care for perpetuity (“a common world”) in the face of incoherent material conditions (the “coming and going of generations”). We gather from this that at any point the collision between the “common world” as persistent and recurring and the unruly “coming and going of generations” is made into the problem of fertility for a city (how does a city “handle” the relationship between its “common world” and generational violence?) in ways that show how this problem itself is recurrent because its “solution” is irresolute (since each generation poses a new shape of the problem). But Arendt says more, for the “common world” is at risk in any present through the violence released by incoherent coming and going in exactly the way Plato pictured eros in the Symposium as procreative. That is, the vitality of the city is linked to procreation because it extends itself by remaking its common world in images (that is, “only to the extent that it appears in public”) that represent its desire for self-extension. We can think of the content of these images of the common world not as things reflected but as the language that reflects them, taking the step of saying that the common world appears in public through the materiality of its ways and means of speaking together. As Arendt puts it, Human parents … have not only summoned their children into life through conception and birth; they have simultaneously introduced them into a world. In education they assume responsibility for both, for the life and development of the child and for the continuance of the world. These two responsibilities do not by any means coincide: they may indeed come into conflict with each other. The responsibility for the development of the child turns in a certain sense against the world; the child requires special protection and care so that nothing distinctive may happen to him from the world. But the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation. (1961, 185–6) If the Cartesian metaphor appears procreative in this sense, then the opposition between demolition and restoration that is now visible in the Cartesian project through which demolition serves as a means for producing restoration (as its cause) only reveals the limits of this means-end relationship. This is because the relationship of demolition to restoration does not describe the procreative relationship to a common world or inheritance in which common conceptions are worked through and revived (deconstructed) rather than destroyed. More specifically, according to Arendt, a vital present must be procreative in relation to the

Perpetuity

133

very notion of a “common world,” while not just accepting the conceptions that are common at any moment as enforceable and legitimate (what is called “popular culture”), nevertheless working with them in the new and diverse usages that come and go in any time (Kenneth Burke speaks of de-sanctifying conceptions in use, or Wittgenstein speaks of finding them odd). In relation to any inheritance, a procreative relationship to common conceptions, as in strong teaching, could make the old (and common) worldly for the present generation and could use and specify the concerns of the present (of the new, the uncommon) as part of the differentiated shape of the common world (Blum 2001). In this way, the procreative relationship does not simply endorse or transgress the inheritance but tries to resituate it as a present living desire. I think of this procreative relationship to the inheritance sanctioned at present in any present as modelled along the lines of the process of improvisation. A procreative relationship to our inheritance in any present holds its ground between demolition and restoration by constantly improvising with the ways and means of speaking together.

The Mortality of the Inheritance Descartes recognized this implicitly in his counsel for any present to undertake a recurrent and relentless looking back that actually engages the ways in which we speak together now. The “truth” we might take from Descartes is the intensity of his passion for any present as an opportunity to develop practices that could bind us together not just in idle ways but for “the good of mankind” (as he claims medicine to exemplify). At any present the conditions for speaking together allow the understandings of terms to be placed under theoretical scrutiny: as Wittgenstein showed, any term can give rise to a grammatical investigation. Thus, Arendt’s common world not only appears in conditions of speaking together but is disclosed as a world not common and indivisible at all, since the prospect of its being taken up in various ways shows the stimulating character of grammar not simply as incentive for “investigations,” save for the creation of dialogue over our agreements and their limits, and so, for our constant encounter with the terms under which we live. The past and the future must remain fundamentally problematic at any present time in ways that invariably tempt nostalgia and utopia (and their fundamentalist correlatives) as responses to the images in circulation concerning what exceeds our present capacities. Another way of putting this is to say that recalling such periods, activities, events of the past about which only limited circles might

134

The Material City

be informed or might treat as import, raises in an uncanny way the spectre of the fragility of what is perpetuated and of the need of such moments (and so, of any present, including ours as we live it now) for hands to be laid on and for intellectual energies to be directed to sustaining in some shape. The materiality of impressions, perspectives, things, and gestures, and so, their perishability, always gives power and precedence to the making of images, including stories, in any present, which need to become in their way more substantially material than the materials that they represent. These caricatures conceal the fundamental tension in the collective representation of its present (the present of the collective itself) for our failure to understand how our past lives in our present. This is another way of saying that we cannot reflect on influences that are part of us and of which we are part, just as our failure to understand how our future lives in our present is another way of saying that we cannot reflect on the consequences of actions in a strong sense, on the power implied in the promise both to give form to the present and be formed by it, while knowing full well that the promise might always remain unfulfilled, a future without finality, with an everlasting and eternal remainder, for as Lacan says, Other does not answer. The question is whether, in spite of the many material conditions of memory, despite the fact that the influences, contexts, and purposes of memory can be expressed in many ways, how might we begin to reflect on giving form to the practice of responsibility for the present in ways that will give us form? What we know is that this present will be a past for some future just as it was once a future for some past, and we can conceive of such a collective as having no memory when it shows in practice no real interest in redeeming its past as if everything significant for it occurs in its present (Blum 1994). The contrast of empowering its past as an influence in its present, the contrast we might call care for the present, shows the city addressing the problem of needing and desiring to confirm that its present is deserved rather than accidental, that its present is the result of a circuit of influences in which it gave form and received form in both grounding and being grounded as the social formation it appears as in this present. The collective orients to being a part of a whole, of a configuration of influences that have shaped and continue to shape it as it reshapes these, extending itself irresolutely but firmly into its future, continuing to give form and be formed by such influences. Past, present, and future stand as images of influences in which we participate at any moment. This points to the strongest sense of giving and taking glossed by the figure of the parasite. Recall Agamben’s notion of evil as the failure to develop a relationship between present and past, an inability to recognize the dependence of this present upon the past (even though we often say the

Perpetuity

135

present “invents” its past) and an inability to recognize the consequences of this present for the future (even though we often say that the past will make of this present what it wishes). The difficulty of any present, reflected in these images of incalculable future and unknown past, makes all present action both necessary and telling – that is, a story worth retelling again, of the past for the future. This is totally different from any version of an “imagined community” that sets such a fancy against some community presumed to exist because any notion (and not just community) depends upon a sense of its continuity and recurrence throughout its various embodiments, the imaginary relation between its own possibility and existence. If it is this worldly but imaginative relationship to which the transcendental makes reference, then we see through language the metaphysical saturation of both collective and individual at any present. The reflective approach to everyday life construes itself as an escape from banality in the hope of acknowledging the present as both a result and a beginning, a promise to grasp rather than forget the transcendence inherent in the taking place of the present: [Gertrude] Stein’s pragmatic modernism calls for a different approach to the relation between past and future … [one that] not only respects the weight and power of the past, but actively demonstrates the dangers of ignoring that past. It shows that mindlessness is an equal danger in all habitual modes of thought, including those that orient themselves toward some imagined future. The delicate balance of pragmatist habit, continually juggling respect for constructive habits of the past with scepticism for any and all mindless practices, reaches into every sphere. (Schoenbach 2004, 255–6)

The Form of Reconstruction In discussing Freud on memory, Laplanche tries to reformulate the subject’s resistance as a refusal to translate, after Lacan, where the aim of the analyst is not interpretation of the past, or as Laplanche puts it, “not to restore an intact past but to allow in turn a deconstruction of the partial and erroneous construction to open up to the new translation that the patient will not fail to produce in his drive to translate” (1999, 164). In other words, if the fate of the patient is to produce “solutions” to the fragmentary and partial constructions that he inherits and remakes, and to resist trying to formulate such opinions and views in ways that orient to their limits and genesis, there must still remain the desire to translate these

136

The Material City

fragments in his erroneous manner as a way of making sense of the relation of his personal history to the present – that is, to normalize and synthesize such fragments in ways that make them operational. But for the analyst such gestures of normalization can only be seen as symptoms of resistance, as messages offered, rather than as occasions for interpretation. Baudrillard would say here that the fate of the subject is to overproduce the Real through delusions of absolutism and coherence inscribed in conventional systems of reference, or what he calls its “hyperreality.” The moral now is that constructions of the past are to be treated as constructions and not as part of an interest in verification, as messages that make reference to nothing other than the ambiguity and limits of making reference itself. In this respect, we can think of the city, too, as exercised by an ambiguous interest in how it might be imaginative toward its history at any present moment, a question that makes itself manifest in discussion about the terms we use for addressing sacred texts, charters, constitutions, contracts, and promises, and of course conservation and restoration. The common world appears in nothing other than what Emerson called “the times” or the “loose orbits of the prevailing ideas whose return and opposition we cannot reconcile” (quoted in Cavell 1995, 21). This conception seems to require a certain care for history and for the need and desire to suffer a struggle with the past (and future) that always mixes pleasure and pain because of the inevitable tension between diverse views of the moment and its place in time. The recurrent and unyielding structures of representation invariably collide with the enthusiasms for modification expressed in each and every present (captured in the figure of “youth” referred to by both Descartes and Arendt, which is intended to stand for the unmediated self-absorption of any present in its time as if eternal). Between these extremes of preservation and destruction, we might imagine a conservation of the past that is not simply conservative, more like a turn toward reshaping and revitalizing what is long-standing (again, Wittgenstein speaks of leading words home). While the old world of which Arendt speaks seems closest to customs, codes, or to the kinds of formal principles to which Descartes referred, we should be able to understand it now neither chronologically nor abstractly, but as those varied convictions and assumptions that enter into our ways and means of expressing ourselves that can be said to pre-exist each generation, as if a corpus that might be treated as, on the one hand, chains or bonds to destroy and/or overthrow (objects of demolition), or, on the other, as conditions to maintain, perhaps intact, to memorialize or monumentalize (objects of restoration). These are extreme positions easily recognized in the preservation discourse, but Arendt introduces the notion of care as a joining of the political and the aesthetic through a conception of judgment. If we are responsible for protecting our

Perpetuity

137

resources from the “onslaught of the new” then this does not simply mean preserving the dead past in the present but is also a matter of calculating how what is best about the past might be given shape in the present (for example, in the way I have tried to treat Descartes). Similarly and reciprocally, if we are responsible for inducting each generation into the world that pre-exists its entry, we are responsible for, on the one hand, animating that world to and for them, for making it materialize as a palpable human experience, while on the other hand resisting identifying mechanically with its innocence and energies as if it eo ipso speaks for us about the present. This suggests that our “material” is always the common conceptions of any present (even and especially as we can only imagine them of the past and prepare for a future that imagines us at present), the diverse shapes of self-understanding into which we are thrown and that we inherit at any present always to be taken up as our beginnings, neither as untouchable nor as objects for demolition, but as opportunities to apply in practice what we suppose ourselves to know, to challenge ourselves on any given occasion to measure ourselves by the question of how our knowledge makes a difference in life. This was discussed eloquently by Simmel (1971, 359–64). For our purposes in this chapter, the common conception we are led to consider through this circuitous narrative route can be grasped as asking not simply for the place of the monumental text in collective life but for the place of preservation and its various images in social forms and processes.

The Moment as Eternal In Baudrillard’s revolutionary tract (or manifesto) Simulations (1983), the question of preservation was dramatized as the opening trope focusing the exposition, particularly through the ways in which he formulated a present such as ours (or any present) as robbing the past of voice through the very forms it uses to record that past, forms such as history, ethnography, and the museum. Baudrillard discusses the way in which any present tries to preserve the past under the auspices of a logic of the question that demands an either/or yes/no response, instead of facing up to the ambiguity of the phenomenon of the form of preservation itself and the problem of how it is to be engaged as something worth preserving. That is, he makes a problem of the difference between preserving the past (fated to be self-serving) and preserving preservation. Like the ethnographic relation to the native, history records the past by endowing it with the voice of the present in ways that assimilate these forms to the method of violence that any present can use to master nature. Baudrillard tends to make this distortion an inescapable

138

The Material City

feature of any present in a way that must always limit even the best intentions. And indeed, how good can even these best intentions be toward the past (or toward nature) if they can only reiterate and sustain their own intention (and the necessity for any present) to maintain itself and its coherence, to see the object as a mirror of itself? The debate on the Venice Charter treats preservation as a choice to be argued and acted upon, whereas the fundamental question makes reference to preservation as the eventful distinction glossed in such controversy, the engagement in preservation as a problem of life and the differences among the heterogeneous ways of orienting to preservation. Any present, fated to distort the past, creates through such distortion a fertile mélange of views. In this way, any present makes possible a confrontation between alternative views of what can be known and represented about that which is necessarily opaque, and so a confrontation over the question of the best terms and conditions of discourse. In this sense, such a consideration dramatizes, as if at a scene or site of reflective engagement and demonstration, the question of what is worth preserving – the objects of opaque representation or the interest in modes of representation. In the best sense, attention is directed to making a difference between preserving objects of remembrance or preserving remembering itself, as if these are different interests or relationships, and as such, how these different interests combine and separate, taking shape in interrogation that focuses upon the power and place of preserving and the question of its precedence over the “whatever” that is preserved as the fundamental interest to be sustained and engaged, to be preserved. If the objects are fated to be lost to time and space, then the interest in loss itself remains essential in ways feverishly retained, the interest of voice that cannot be eradicated, the ineradicable trace to and for oneself of the one who speaks. On the one hand, the idea of the conservation of matter might suggest that nothing can be lost in a personal history and that everything is absorbed in some way. Thus, Benjamin, among others, has read Proust’s mémoire involontaire as a depiction of how what is seen but unnoticed becomes repressed and displaced, only to be activated on occasion or accidentally in the face of fortuitous circumstances (for example, olfactory stimulation). On the other hand, if the alter to such a process is rational reconstruction, in any such approach, whether to history or past, or even to “meaning,” then Plato’s comparison of this with the example of seeing an “object” as from a great distance argues for the inescapable distortion in any representation. In the same spirit as Plato’s insistence on the inevitability of distortion, Freud maintained that historical veracity was of no matter compared to the way in which the past is constructed as a symptom of the one doing the construction. Thus, making history in its retelling is what matters as a symptom or message that the actor delivers to an auditor, and the “facts” interpreted

Perpetuity

139

become at best (but significantly) the detail and content through which the message becomes palpable. This suggests that the possibility or not of history – of its preservation – depends not only upon its representation, but upon an interest in such as such, an interest that also depends upon its representation. Descartes’s cogito affirmed the impossibility of eradicating the one with an interest in eradication, tempting us to try to imagine a world without a trace of an interest, and so, the inescapability of preservation in just that sense, as coeval with its interest. That is, what needs to be preserved through all intellectual meanderings is this necessary supposition of an “I am,” that the “I” always be supposed as hic et nunc. Thinking preservation more fundamentally tells us that we who think cannot rest with the assurance of our preservation, and so that our non-being must continue to haunt us if we are wide awake, perhaps as the only sense of irony worth respecting because, though preservation exists for us, its being always remains a lost cause. Lacan even tried to imagine an experiment in which the world could be demonstrated to exist in the absence of any witness, as if in the absence of observation, a camera might be left standing in the wasteland to record what no one could orient to because no one existed. Of course, no one could or would know of this experiment unless she came along into this desert to look at what the camera turned up, unless she is around to appreciate whatever he is talking about and seeking to demonstrate, capable of downloading the camera and its testimonials, seeing for herself in the way that a community of sorts needs to be oriented to his demonstration for it to exist for him and us. The very idea of such a goofy experiment only makes sense in the world as an observable interest for sentient creatures such as us. This says something interesting, as if Lacan wondered whether the world could exist without him, and more than this, if it could exist before him! But more important, he asks if he can exist well in the absence of such a confirmation. The fact that we can easily recall Bishop Berkeley’s “subjective idealism” and the canonical philosophical contortions exercised by the question of whether a tree falling in the forest could be accredited as real in the absence of any witness testifies to the vitality of a discourse on preservation, and perhaps, to the elementary structure of narcissism as our life-support system. The concern for preservation – whether of the past in general, history in some sense, of buildings of this and that, or of monuments, memories, and the like – is but a derivative shape of the puzzle of self-reference and of the presence of our absence to ourselves, and the absence of our presence vis-à-vis ourselves, whether we can imagine the absence of imagination, can mediate on the absence of mediation, in other words, how we think our absence, and so, make our absence present, or conversely, how we think our presence as absent. If this is what seems important in talk on preservation and in the various opinions, arguments, and

140

The Material City

interpretations that differ over whether it is relevant or of no matter in specific cases, then the stakes are much deeper, for the interest seems symptomatic of the desire to imagine a world in our absence, a world without a trace of us except in the trace of our tracing, or, conversely, the desire to imagine our palpable presence now as absent eternally and forever, discernible or not in traces we leave and whether or how. This is why someone can say that writing (as tracing) comes first, even though such writing (the trace) always presupposes an interest. We might suggest that what needs to be preserved through the figure of the building or monument is the need to keep alive the sense of the eventfulness of building and of making as essential to the legacy of this city in the face of the temptation of indifference. Is it the self-representation of the city through its built environment that is at risk in the dialogue over preservation? Better, is it this relationship itself, between a city and its material environment, that needs to be topicalized as if the built environment is used to identify the material cause of the city? In terms of Plato’s notion of four causes, do the buildings and history of Venice as respective accounts not relate to its identity as those material conditions below the divided line, necessary but insufficient to provide for what Venice is? Is giving form to material conditions not the problem of preservation, the need and desire to hypothesize such a relationship as the very sine qua non of life itself? Then, what must be preserved as always in danger of extinction is desire as such. And then again, how can any living being know what is necessary to life (and to know death) except hypothetically? And if so, is not the need and desire to live hypothetically (in the imaginary engagement with form) not a necessity of life? And then again, who would know?

Living Forever All of these concerns directed to the phenomenon of preservation suggest that the twin obsessions of nostalgia and utopianism touch only the surface of the notion. For example, if we are living in an interim period punctuating a past ice age, the amnesia that is inescapable says that history cannot even exist for us, for just as we can imagine our present as not existing for the future, at present we imagine the future as being of no matter for us. The ice age seems to make preservation impossible through its image of life as a succession of new beginnings, each of which condemns humans to amnesia. Similarly, the impending catastrophe or meltdown, the barbarian invasion, or the inevitable end as we know it

Perpetuity

141

now, always must envision the end of history as a matter to reflect upon in any present. What we appreciate is that if preservation seems to resonate with survival or life expectancy, this still leaves its imaginary link to eternity and immortality untouched, invariably glossing the dialectic of the message it aspires to deliver. In contrast, we want to treat preservation by stripping it down to basics or desublimating it, in the words of Gérard Wajcman (2007), by actually elevating it to the status of a thing. Initially, when we think of formulating a notion such as preservation as a thing, we imagine it as akin to the reductionism that deprives it of any resonance except its status as external and coercive. This suggests a depersonalization that robs the notion of its meaning by concretizing it as lifeless. But depersonalization also serves to make the notion appear odd or queer, makes it strange by seeking to differentiate between what belongs to it essentially and what is external in much the way that Kant formulates the disengagement of the aesthetic imagination. Thus, de-sublimation can treat preservation as strange and, in so doing, “elevate” it by giving it form. As such, de-sublimation gives form to usage and seems to be an aesthetic relationship. A good example of this method is illustrated by the captions that the photographer Diane Arbus writes for her many photographs. If de-sublimation elevates the work (of art) to the dignity of a thing, it can elevate the city (and the person) by thinking of it as such, as a work of art. Art needs the fantasy of an intimate relation to the future or one who can see and be committed to care for such disclosure. If any work of art will always be infinite, to elevate the city to the dignity of a thing through de-sublimation is to engage this infinity hypothetically, imagining its eventfulness as the primordial moment when it resembles itself (what Lacan calls the time of the concept), when the difference between its being something and nothing is engaged. It is Venice the eternal city that comes to view in the preservation discourse as a reflection of the need and desire to treat anything as a work of art. And we see here what Benjamin should mean, for the work of art (in this specific sense) under conditions of mechanical reproduction risks losing its aura as the de-sublimated thing, the infinite work, perhaps, as Lacan says, only to be interpreted, passing over to the sciences, medicine, and the rest as the de-ritualized object under such conditions (the global city, the creative city). In this sense, elevation by reduction makes reference to conceiving of any notion such as preservation in a way that is elemental, that is, in a way that tries to imagine the eventful character of the distinction in the basic sense as something like what Laplanche calls a message. Here, Durkheim (1965, 480–7) famously spoke of the communicative function of the concept that captures this elemental character of any distinction as eventful in the way of a notion that makes an

142

The Material City

appeal to an auditor to be heard and oriented to in its manner. What is elemental to preservation, then, lies in the nature of such an appeal, its attempt to resolve a problem that in some way is produced by a trauma. The trauma itself with respect to preservation signals the recognition of the groundlessness of being, the enigmatic character of life as passing time, whether preserved or not, in representation that can only be construed as if in a dream because the one for whom preservation is an interest is the one who exists only in the space of this image of the absent presence, as present only when she is absent, and so, never known or knowing at any present to have a future presence in her absence, whether or not being present or absent, either and both being of great matter and no matter at once, outside of our control in the present. The trauma is simply what we might think of, after Durkheim and later Lacan, as the recognition of the elemental connection of interpretation to delirium, and so, of the Grey Zone (Blum 2011). This is how Rosset (1989) can say of any action, of the Real itself, that it is simultaneously determined (something or other) and insignificant. He seems to be speaking about belief rather than knowledge, which is both determinant and necessary in that sense, and insignificant. But what must be known is this (and this is a version of an answer to Lacan’s question: What is the subject supposed to know?), or that the difference between knowledge and belief is that belief passes away while knowledge remains with the subject as the enigma experienced in any reflection on what passing away means. If, as Heidegger says, everything passes away except passing away itself, which does not pass away, then how can he say this and how does he know if he, like everything else, passes away? This again discloses how we tend to be afflicted by the anxiety of preservation, which makes the question of the “passage” per se an object of fascination, materializing dramatically in the everlasting concern for questions of origin and end and their images in passages of birth and death. Preservation, dramatizing the problematic status of the self who thinks it, can only reveal this self, itself, as the receptacle, the space or khôra, that will receive whatever is made of it, in the form of simple usage elevated in its shape as spirit and its traces in effects fated to vanish by passing into other lives or not, as soul that both travels and inhabits imperceptibly whatever conditions welcome it and allow it to settle. This opens up the discussion of preservation to the question of the perpetuity of libido and its investment in the self as that primordial object of regard, seeming both necessary and desirable, and yet insignificant, ever-present eros.

Perpetuity

143

Recharging Immortality: Death and Innocence What the discourse on preservation reveals is its message, not hermeneutic, but a symptom of anxiety over the question of death that Plato put in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo, the question of the fear of death. The figure of decadence permits us to begin to reflect on how innocence can be seduced to engage old ways with some degree of pleasure and revitalizes the discourse on preservation as that kind of seduction. Whereas decadence has been typified as the overreaching attempt of declining powers to maintain vitality at any cost, and particularly through the recruitment of innocence to this spectacle, as if the pleasure of being witness to (or initiating innocence into) the mysteries of eclecticism is the sine qua non of pleasure, this conception seems unjust to the notion of decadence by confusing it with its distorted shape as pederasty that is based upon the proverbial delight attributed to the conquest of virginity. If the fall of Rome is the usual model of the self-indulgent movement of excess that, free of any constraint, begins to devour its own, or, even more, of the desire of declining states to be empowered by the vitality of innocence, we might still have trouble appreciating the best version of decadence as linked to the self-extension that Plato attributed to eros, which in the case of the preservation discourse, addresses the ways in which selfextension can be made palatable to the innocent. Here, then, we begin to differentiate decadence from teaching that is concerned principally with dissemination and not simply self-extension in ways that stamp decadence as inevitably instrumental and self-preservative in tone. The venerable city makes its demand upon the present generation to extend it (rather than anything other) in the future and thus to commit to an experimental liaison at present. Yet, we need to consider the nature of what is at stake in preservation. Cacciari provides a hint here: “Decadence … expresses the conscious disenchantment of the twilight of the age of Kultur, and no vague sense of derivation” (1996, 40). Note how the end of the age of culture is equated with the end of a line of descent (“sense of derivation”), setting forth a project of imagining derivation in some shape. He continues: Decadence is the non-representability of the whole, the elusiveness of the symbol. It is knowing oneself apart from the symbol and thus knowing the obligation to venture into composition, into saving and transforming the fragments, sacred in themselves. (Cacciari 1996, 40) Here Cacciari, who happened to be the mayor of Venice, treats preservation as an attempt to save what can only be redeemed as visible derivatives of an absent whole (the whole as the value and significance invested in the name of the city, in the name Venice), for with the erosion of the force of that name, reasonable

144

The Material City

people, knowing that they must save themselves without recourse to such an illusion and its promise of being operational, must commit to preserving the fragments as if they and the fragments mutually mirror each other (the buildings of Venice and its citizens mutually mirror each another as the only visible signs of the lineage of Venice that can be perpetuated). The decadence of this necessity lies in its making a virtue out of a loss (first, as if the loss itself is not partly of its own doing, and second, by showing a capacity to be stimulated by the loss, and so, by the end or death of something). One might say that the end of an era and of the non-representability of the whole becomes a decisive and defining moment that can be overstimulating in its way. Cacciari, who doesn’t go this far, illustrates this mood with a reflection from Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein claims that that for which he stands [Kultur] is a spirit that is “different from the mainstream of European and American Zivilisation,” from the spirit that finds its expression in “industry, architecture and music, in the fascism and socialism of our age.” (Cacciari 1996, 26–7) After saying that this spirit is “completely alien and unsympathetic to the author,” Wittgenstein makes (for me rather than Cacciari) the incredible qualification that this assessment should not be heard as a “value judgment on the age.” Cacciari continues to explain how the antipathy of Wittgenstein to Zivilisation is directed toward its submission to notions of progress, productivity, conceptions of problems and to the finality of their solutions, and to the language on which it is modelled. In order to be just to the notion of decadence, this begins to suggest to me that the exhaustion of language, as it seems to appear in any modern period (whether of a people, an era, a genre, a city) that becomes immediately visible in a sense of the “withdrawal” of wholeness reflected in images such as aura, totality, essent, and the like, as a sense of loss that can only be redeemed by preserving fragments, and perhaps most importantly, oneself, is a concrete and historical version of the hole in the symbolic order of which Lacan speaks. Even more, as a course of action, decadence suggests that the mood of melancholy registered in such an image of “loss” glosses the very pleasure of any engagement with the usage (fragment) under such conditions, that the ambiguity of the symbol is enjoyed. In Lacanian terms, this points to the possibility that the loss of the whole distracts us from considering how the loss belongs to the whole as its hole, as das Ding, and as such, can be related to as more than deprivation, but as a condition facing any modern city, the undeveloped name of the city that always invites the action of reinstating its topicality. Here, the preservation discourse begins to flirt with the prosthetic imaginary, perhaps by undertaking to view Venice as a future

Perpetuity

145

sanctuary for posthumous people, for all those who would hope to re-enter life through their art in times to come.

Conclusion A posthumous city, then, cannot be eclectic but it can certainly be creative as it conducts experiments in any present around the question of keeping a place for the poets, artists, and thinkers of its past, of keeping a place safe for them as such because of this strong bond of the name of the city to its current inhabitants. Those who cannot live up to such demands must flee to other cities, just like those students Socrates invited to find other teachers. The question for young people – whether they can see fit to mix and mingle with the ghosts destined to haunt the posthumous city – is a question any generation might face at some time. In terms of the culture of the city, what we should come to see at this point is that such an observation must include and surpass conceptions of the expressiveness of the city, of its customs and heritage, and even of its production of works of value such as buildings and artworks because all such things “made” tend to bury the connection of culture to soul. The fixation on memorials as things conveys the idea of the city as a thing that is the routine cliché of administrators who show “trained incapacity” or comedic “professional callousness” in rhapsodies over the city as an “object in time” (Bergson 1956, 75–7). Here it is suggested that the soul of the city, more than a thing, is reflected in its commitment not simply to produce great works or buildings or masterpieces, to its being so productive in comparison to other cities and unique in that respect, but to making a safe place for creativity. It is essential to note that this safe place of meaning cannot be simply for the great producers such as poets, thinkers, and philosophers, but for all and any who could desire more-than-life, and so, a space in which they are free to engage the present creatively. The soul of a city begins to be glimpsed in and as its commitment to the perpetuation of creativity – a free space of meaning – rather than to its preservation of specific works.

CHAPTER 8

Publicity and the Project as Scene

Introduction In terms of Simmel’s conception of life, the life of the city is marked by its sights, services, and opportunities. Sights might depict the way visitors engage the city visually as sites that are compelling; services make reference to the ways in which people in the city use its retail and functional settings to deliver satisfaction (the model of the suburbanite who comes to the city to consume or for respite); and opportunities reflect the way the city is understood as a prospect for realizing goals through work. This conception identifies the culture of the city as its generic environment of rudimentary conditions in a way that treats the free space of meaning as a concrete context that enables such instrumental uses and nothing more (than this life). Think instead of the free space of meaning as the space that enables us to freely engage the question of the city and its perdurance in time, the space that allows us to free ourselves to engage such a question and others related to the existence or distinction of the city. I have implied that good research on the city is infected by the very vitality and ambiguity that it engages, since its emergence as a project must be influenced both by the conditions of urban life in which it is immersed and by its desire to reflect on its participation. I noted in the last chapter how care for the city requires not simply maintaining it as a safe place for thinkers, artists, and poetic voices of the past, as if it is a museum housing official memorabilia and tokens of repute from the past, but as a free space of meaning. I anticipate here that the desire of a strong project to conceive of itself as immortal in the form of a community rather than a scene displays, on a collective level, the division and ambiguity of eros, again as a reflection of the need to give and leave something behind. This also speaks to the force of the notion of publicity and to the place of the archive in the project. Is not this free space of meaning, in Nancy’s sense, safe because it is a place for projects and scenes to thrive, a space that allows them to “break through” the constraint of life, to free themselves from the uncreative life and its

Publicity and the Project as Scene

147

satisfactions by seeing it as not enough, by inviting the desire for more-than-life? Does this not begin to capture for us a glimpse of the “subjective” element of culture in Simmel’s notion of subjective culture?

Bildung, Paideia Simmel implicitly develops the notion of the city as a work of art, not in his legendary work on the city per se but through his notion of subjective culture. Simmel strives to link culture to life by resisting the abstraction implied in the view of the object as a work of art. In this respect the idea of cultivation links Bilding to the object in a way that is meant to emphasize the struggle and resistance of culture as a self-formative praxis: “Culture is a perfection of man, but not every perfection of man is culture … Culture exists only if man draws into his development something that is external to him” (Simmel 1971, 230). An understanding of the self-formative relationship of culture conceives of the struggle with the object as a process of reciprocal influence: “The perfection does not remain a purely immanent process, but is consummated in a unique adjustment and teleological interweaving of subject and object” (230). This means, first, that culture is a social relationship. Secondly, even great works that appear to attain cultural value must be considered “cultural” only within a context that views them as occasioning the struggle of cultivation to “develop” in relation to their externality. Beautiful works of art that appear inimitable or as unsurpassable are “too much the master of their own province to accept the role of servant which would be necessary if they were to be factors of culture, means for the creation of a spiritual wholeness” (230). Simmel’s conception of culture fuses the two languages of function and lived experience insofar as the function of the notion of culture is to enter into and measure the development of those touched by it (function is cultivation) and the experience of culture (as cultivation) is a struggle through which a soul returns to itself by breaking down, surpassing, and reconciling the externality of conditions (the lived experience is dialectics). The inimitable beauty of a city does not in itself mark its culture (except as “objective”), but only when such external value can be understood as entering into the development of collective life as a dialectical process of cultivation in which its objectivity (whether lofty or lowly) is made over, translated, appropriated, digested, and reconfigured as a struggle to bring out human potentialities. Simmel then provides for the relevance of the conception of Bilding (the humanistic German conception of culture derived from Paideia) to the fusion of two languages; function and aesthetic as fused in

148

The Material City

a conception of culture as self-formation. To speak of the culture of the city is to represent its self-formative struggle (Simmel 1971, 227–34). Should the free space of meaning not be a site that promises to enhance this dialogical prospect buried in the repression of the signifier?

The Question of Truth Cities are most often treated as sites for the movement of the amenities, resources, and capital that “settle” in these places as if destinations. The notion of public life sanctioned by the usage of amenity seems to treat the presence of the pleasant and the agreeable as more than enough or as the best that can be offered, as if the indiscernible quality of the amenity makes its consideration too painful to absorb (subjective, essentialist). This old-fashioned concern was first voiced by Socrates in the Republic when he noted how a city with amenities is a city with influences and effects that are not eo ipso good simply because they are present, but only if they become food for thought (for example, just as the contradiction compels us to rethink what is pleasant and agreeable). The crucial distinction that this concern raises is between the pornographic relation to amenities (including public life) as goods or utilities and an erotic or procreative relation to the public (Scruton 2005, 11–15). This suggests that the relationship to amenities is erotic when it brings us out of our containment, leading us to behave in ways that are procreative (fertile), and that without such arousal, the use of an amenity remains sterile. As such an amenity, public life, too, ought bring us into view to and for one another, preparing us, as Bataille says, for the risk of social sacrifice (overcoming privatization). Both Georg Simmel and Hannah Arendt make the notion of public life demanding in this sense by implying that amenities are useful not because they are sufficient unto themselves but for the reason that they can occasion, if we take them up, such an impossible but necessary reflective relationship to quality, suggesting, for example, that public life flourishes as a “public good” not simply when (say) art exists and is practised, but when the question of good and bad art (of the truth, of art that is true to its name) becomes an eventful (even though irresolute) dialogical focus, – expressed, as Arendt says, as the care a collective exercises for the things it fabricates (what Simmel names “subjective development” in contrast to edification). If people today are uncomfortable with this idea of truth because it suggests to them correspondence with criteria of correctness and such, this is because they do not develop the necessary link of truth to eventful speech that is presupposed in any distinction (not only that any distinction must make

Publicity and the Project as Scene

149

the difference between what it affirms and denies eventful, but that any speech must make its very occurrence – the difference its speaking intends to make – eventful). From this angle, public life is (a) good, only when it can be said to stimulate desire, that is, to motivate thinking that desires to measure itself by some notion of a true public life. If we know the “real” object (say, public life) only as an image (as what it is not), we think of public life as a notion by (in Lacanian terms) “directing our libido to the point where it has to be for the propagation of the species” (Lacan 1992). Here, that “point” is the belief in the present as “mattering,” in our endowing public life with integrity, continuity, and so, consequentiality. In this sense, the imaginary of public life arouses us to commit to a belief in the present as if it makes such a difference. Our capacity to engage this view in ways that recognize its mediation by the other is stimulated by the otherness of public life itself, by the diversity of its usage, for example, in our encountering those ways that view it as limited to a “utility” that contributes to the pleasant and agreeable tone of a place, we are – at our best – compelled to objectify and ground seeing our present as if an opportunity for care in the face of our existence in time. That is, the use of public life as a notion is libidinized at precisely that point at which it becomes equipment for living (Burke 1957), a strategy to defend us from ephemerality. If the public life of the city is epitomized by what Lacan would call partial drives – sights, services, and opportunities – that I formulate as correlative with oral, anal, and genital satisfactions, these are only partial indications of the culture of the city. This notion of the public life of the city models it through the figures of onlooker, consumer, or worker in which we all participate but desire more of, as conditions that we often want to incorporate and move beyond. This is how the flâneur has become a compelling figure for beginning to represent this transition. This is to say that if cities are supposed to “produce” a public life (that is pleasant and agreeable), what it is that they are actually producing is a discourse engaged by and circulating around the question of how the imaginary relationship to belief in any present and its perpetuity can be suffered as part of the recognition of the eternal fatality of mediation (and so, of belief as other than knowledge). It is in this way that the city makes belief in the present compelling not as a hermeneutic problem but as part of how it shapes desire in the face of existence in time. Plato’s procreative element of eros captures this well even today in the notion that we make out of ourselves new products and in so doing foster a productivity that is renewed through the sacrifice that relinquishes abstract absorption in the mortality of the species by putting to rest and letting lie the “objective knowledge” of our death, which only returns in the shape of nocturnal imagining. Here we see the need, as Bataille says, “for dramatizing existence in general …

150

The Material City

Dramatization only becomes completely general by making itself inner.” By taking material conditions to heart and making them oriented, conditions and dramatization “can never develop without means which are commensurate with naïve aspirations – like that of never dying” (1989, 10–11). Here we see the death instinct and the imaginary of eternal life as the necessity recognized for what it is, revealing our need for what is unfulfillable in order to fortify ourselves against the dangers of privatization that “being not turn in on itself too much, not finish as a miserly shop-keeper, as a debauched old man” (Bataille 1992, 11). In this way, the public realm depends upon a commitment that always works against the temptation of misology, indolence, and its shape as privatization by endowing any present moment with the aura of opportunism, therefore treating it as a landscape of improvisational moments, intensely theatrical, where seeing and being seen is its own reward, whether as a mosaic of scenes (Blum 2003, chap. 6), or as territory for the production of occasioned exhibitionism. Otherness has two senses different from alter. First, if mediation is essential to life, it is only possible by imagining the absence of mediation and so is imaginary through and through, a narcissistic strategy; and yet, this very recognition can only persist in and as action that always must reveal its fidelity to mediation itself, to truth, to being true to mediation. For example, in a case such as this, if public life is imaginary (indefinable, etc.), its very being talked about still confirms the speaker (the one who must speak) as subject to the need to be true to the notion, and thus “dramatization” marks the action of the ideal speaker or as the one who is subject to desire (to the unfulfillable desire for truth) as the truth of mastering unfulfillable desire. Let us say that the ideal speaker desires the public life of the city to furnish a subject with resources for living creatively in a present under the spectre of mortality: How can one be creative in a present that will be an unstable past in the future? Isn’t this, too, what the old person on the verge of death must “deal with” as a problem? How can one enjoy being here once and no more? This is what the formula of public life as an amenity must leave as a sunken meaning, for how could anyone live in the present enjoyably and creatively in the shadow of this reminder?

The Deadlock of Nihilism The true formula of contemporary nihilism lies here … It is the nihilism of value itself. This is our fate, and from this stem both the happiest and most baleful consequences … Behind the exchange of Something, we have then,

Publicity and the Project as Scene

151

always, the exchange of the Nothing. Death, illusion, absence, the negative, evil, the accursed share are everywhere, running beneath the surface of all exchanges. It is even this continuity of the Nothing which grounds the possibility of the Great Game of Exchange. All current strategies boil down to this: passing around the debt, the credit, the unreal, the unnameable thing you cannot get rid of … And this is true also of the Real and the Virtual: the endless circulation of the Virtual will create a situation where the Real will never be able to be exchanged for anything. (Baudrillard 2001, 7) Despite its hyperbole, in terms of my discussion, what circulates is commitment to the social and its shape here as publicity. That is, the need and desire for publicity (and its metaphysical longing) frames any engagement with the Nothing. When Arendt says that “The primacy of appearance is a fact of everyday life which neither the scientist nor the philosopher can ever escape” (1971, 24), she is implying that the engagement with the Nothing, the encounter with nihilism, must yet still appear in everyday life in ways that invariably confirm the need and desire for publicity, for coming to view. This suggest that whatever is deemed “agreeable and pleasing” is always a gesture that defers recognizing what would destabilize its confidence and that recognition points to the incoherence of material conditions and to the relentless drive to publicize this recognition as a mixture of pleasure and pain. To remain satisfied with the pleasing and agreeable in word and deed is for Bataille to acknowledge the rule of discourse without embodying it as (what he calls) “experience”: “If we live under the law of language without contesting it, these states are within us as if they didn’t exist” (Bataille 1992, 14). In other words, we need to resist being governed only and exclusively by motivated compliance to the social order without desiring to search for its grounds.

The Metaphysics of Publicity Part of the self-understanding of the modern bourgeois city is the vision of an amiable environment (pleasant and agreeable) as one of the great methods of attracting persons to commit to the place in the “Now” as if the present is unending and the city is central and eternal. In other words, circulation makes reference to the recognition of the need to “normalize” or stabilize the irrationality of material conditions in visions of the present moment as significant. It is Simmel who affirms this tension at the heart of such fragmentation not as a historical fact but as a research topic or problem to be investigated, the problem

152

The Material City

of reconciling ambiguity, by proposing in effect that this recognition itself is always to be worked out in action. This remains Simmel’s great contribution, making ambiguity a social phenomenon, making the fantasy of the imaginary a focus of collectivization, and in this way making any social resolution inescapably metaphysical. Simmel implies that the “critique” of metaphysics is an abstract construal of desire because it fails to accredit the speaker or the one subject to the metaphysical representation as if an actor who has to enact whatever “solution” in action; revealing the formulation as requiring in an “essentialist” way action that must remain inescapably metaphysical. In this way, if the circulation of conditions describes the speed and incoherence of “material conditions” and its so-called fragmentation, the notion of public life, in contrast, must be endowed with a coherence and integrity that is immune from the circulatory flow, that is, must be made into (interpreted as) a relationship to desire that is not constantly destabilized. Public life takes shape here as a need and desire for publicity, for a centre. If for Simmel the most forceful and irrational “material conditions” are conceptions of what is pleasant and agreeable, it is these conditions that constantly circulate as the voice of the collective, of which we are both part and apart because we need a centre in some way unconditional (at rest). The desire for a centre begins to disclose that aspect of eros that searches for more-than-life, for the grounds of our conventions. Even the metaphysical underpinning of pleasure shows in the fact that it always fantasizes a renewal of sorts. For example, the pleasant and agreeable public life is the life that promises to revitalize the integrity of a stabilized self in the midst of incoherent material conditions that are in constant circulation, an integrity marked by self-possession in various guises (the promise of a centre). This suggests that the primordial public good is not any particular amenity but desire itself, specifically the desire for collective life or the social that Plato memorialized as procreative (in the way that such desire is not simply another “utility”). If the public realm is simply confirmed as if another utility (recalling Zukin’s opinion with which we might agree, that receptivity to strangers, tolerance, and opportunity for sociability, are utilities that seem to enhance the pleasant and agreeable character of the city), such utilities remain part of the otherness of public space (its many applications) that need to be reflected in relation to their recurrence as a problem true to public space (true to a sense of its unique or intimate character that distinguishes it from anything and everything). For example, Deleuze’s antidote to nihilism, the “empirical conversion” that he identifies as an affirmative relation to life in the face of the incoherence of multiplicity ([1995] 2005), takes shape in desire that fabricates, objectifies, and reifies the public realm and its perpetuity as part of our metaphysical equipment. Note

Publicity and the Project as Scene

153

how this antidote takes shape first in our desire to objectify and ground Zukin’s talk of public space and its material conditions by giving form to such conditions by using the otherness of the content (its list of important conditions) as our case. It is in this sense that we can say of public life that it has the capacity to dramatize existence by endowing it with a glow that comes from the naive belief that I will live forever: “the dramatic is not being in these or those conditions, all of which are positive conditions … It is necessary to reject external means … It is simply to be … It is the will, adding itself to discourse, not to be content with what is stated” (Bataille 1992, 12, 13). What “is stated” is that I will die and that the collective will live on in my absence: Only the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of individual men. Without this transcendence into a potentially earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, and no common world is possible. For unlike the common good as Christianity understood it – the salvation of one’s soul as a concern common to all – the common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die … it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and those who will come after us. But such a common world can survive the coming and going of the generations only to the extent that it appears in public. It is the publicity of the public realm which can absorb and make shine through the centuries whatever men may want to save from the natural ruin of time. (Arendt 1958, 55) There seems to be some convergence in the discourse at the most refined rather than vulgar level that what lurks behind the notion of the pleasant and agreeable city is the unspoken imaginative link of public life to mortality, or some degree of responsibility for the question of how the time of the present will come to be viewed as a past for the future. Behind the mask of the amiable city is the question of its perpetuity and how its extension into the future is never guaranteed, always dependent upon an effort that is both beyond our control and a necessity toward which we must exercise care. Such a consideration is not at all pleasant and agreeable because it could bring us face to face with an undesirable and painful truth (this is the force of the photographic image at its best).

154

The Material City

This suggests that public life needs to become an object of desire or a ground of value more complex than pleasure, that it needs to be rethought as a drive to traverse the fantasy that the realization of desire for the pleasant and agreeable is the be all and end all of the present moment, a drive capable of recognizing the limits of whatever is pleasant and agreeable, yet in ways that are stimulating (nondestructive), ways that reveal public life as an object of desire, of enhanced value. I have discussed this in relation to Goffman’s conception of public space as absorbed by the present in ways that risk leaving the limits of such a relation untheorized (Blum 2003, 262–94). In contrast, as such a non-destructive relationship to the present, eros at its best moderates the destructive excesses of nihilism and all shapes of terrorism (the antidote of the pharmakon for misology) because erotic desire is the sine qua non of the dramatization of existence. If public life is an amenity in the sense of its shape as publicity, we need to ask how this amenity sustains through its eros the desire for collective life or sociality in the face of the “fact” of individual mortality. To put it otherwise, if life and mortality is a poison, publicity is its antidote (and yet without irony toward the antidote, we can become even sicker from publicity). “Nihilism is, then, the state in which the potentials of a life … in the world, has been lost” (Deleuze [1995] 2005, 18). And what are “the potentials of a life in the world” other than the capacity to envision action. “Project is not only the mode of existence implied by action, necessary to action … it is the putting off of existence to a later point … (yet) … No one can lucidly have experience without having had the project for it … Project must be maintained” (Bataille 1992, 46, 54). So, the city is a scene of projects and public life is the project par excellence: There is established between experience and project the link that exists between pain and the voice of reason: reason represents the inanity of moral pain (saying: time will erase pain as when we must give up a loved one). The wound is there, present, dreadful and contesting reason, recognizing its own solid grounds, but only seeing in this one more horror … It is necessary to make use of project as of the assurance of an immanent healing. Project can, like the assurance, be a mocking servant aware of everything, skeptical and knowing itself to be a servant. (Bataille 1992, 54–5) The project (publicity, public life) is necessary and desirable and yet is “a mocking servant” or skeptical eye, always endangering our pleasure, which is secured by deferral for the hope just around the corner. Sandywell formulates this desire as other than privatized or “goal oriented” in the conventional idiom, as a desire to speak reflexively in a way that makes publicity social and dialogic, in contrast to its

Publicity and the Project as Scene

155

overtones as self-promotional: “The desire to speak reflexively is the desire to enter an agonistic space of creative tensions and ambivalence, to be open to the ambiguity and irresolution of all discourse, to enter the play of language itself” (2016a, 67).

Savouring I shall use this term “insignificance of the real” to designate this inherent property of any reality whereby it is always indifferently fortuitous and determined, always coextensively anyhow and somehow … Rigorous determination is indeed at the same time a mark of the fortuitous. Determination is not necessarily in that a thing be this and not that, nor that it be either this or that, but rather that it cannot escape the necessity of “being something or other,” that is, of being indifferent. So whereas every reality is equally and by necessity determined, it is also equally and by necessity indifferent. (Rosset 1989, 8–9) In its way, public life is the scene of the project(s) through which we must work to savour existence in an oriented way as the “something or other” needing to be developed discursively. This has been expressed through the figures of jouissance (Lacan 1977), joy (Rosset 1989), and the affirmation of life (Marcuse 1978), and it always seems to depend upon what Bataille conceptualized as the risk of loss (of losing oneself to the incoherent material conditions as a way of revitalizing them in an exposition). Note Rosset again: “The person who is incapable of ever losing himself is also the one who is forever lost” (1989, 10). Again, the use I made of Rancière (1994, 36), reiterates how “the … schema of identifying travel is finding the same by moving to the place of the other … The question thus arises of a countermarch: discovering the other in the same; that is to say, learning to miss one’s way” (quoted in Blum 2003, 46).

Infection One way to understand the social in the guise of the desire for publicity is through the figure of the contagiousness of generality and the infection that releases the contagiousness of our generality (reflected in density and proximity): “So viewed, life has two mutually complementary definitions. It is more-life, and

156

The Material City

it is more-than-life” (Simmel [1918] 2011, 368) What Simmel calls the “tragedy” of social life, Durkheim (1933) depicts as the risk of disease. Here, Durkheim suggests that contagiousness is endemic to the social and that living entails this risk (of tragedy, of infection). It is Durkheim who identifies the tension in circulation with the tension in life (see also Durkheim 1933, 21). The moral of this story of the irresolute togetherness of participation and separation in Desire is best captured by Simmel’s formula: “transcendence is immanent in life” (Simmel 1971, 363). Here we return to emplacement and the place of its desire in social life. How does the contagiousness of the social “lead to” communication, or better, become embodied as communicative energy? Combining Durkheim and Simmel, we arrive at the picture of life itself as contagious, including transcendence, in ways that begin to identify communication as part of this infection, the need and desire to discursively engage and represent the moment. We could say that life infects us through the image of communication and its contagiousness, with the desire for more-than-life in the face of incalculable visions of eternity and immortality. If life was only equivalent to locomotion or to moving in space without further ado, we would be as if silent monads leaving no testimony; but if we have a need to bear witness to such movement by representing it or constructing narratives and telling stories about our movement, it seems as if we are called to selfrepresentation by the contagious character of communicative energy, infected by it so to speak.

The Project As cities are increasingly expected to have “buzz,” to be creative, and to generally bring forth powers of invention and intuition, all of which can be forged into economic weapons, so the active engineering of the affective register of cities has been highlighted as the harnessing of the talent of transformation. Cities must exhibit intense expressivity. (Thrift 2004, 58) The constant struggle between the insularity of neighbourliness and the need and desire for communication takes shape within any city as publicity: a real public life (“expressivity” in the sense of communication that breaks out of the circle of like and like) must engage publicity and its risk of contagious overstimulation. We imagine this as the recurrent problem circulating in any and all cities. Although Zukin’s public life looks as if it takes this risk (tolerance, openness, diversity), it is not altogether clear if it is not wedded in its way to the harmonic order

Publicity and the Project as Scene

157

of the amenity (of the pleasant and agreeable). Why, after all, is the city the site at which the “happy and baleful consequences” become transparent in the spectre of nihilism and the question of the social? To risk answering in the simplest way now: because the city, historically identified as the centre (or home) of artistic and intellectual activity, shows not only the limits of capitalism (as some might have it) but the ephemeral character of pleasure itself, the pleasure invested in work and productivity. Zukin’s city must be productive, but it is not clear how transparent this productivity is as a challenge to take up, or whether its security is so fortified that it must remain only neighbourly (that is, whether even its recognition of divisions of class and race remain neighbourly). The city as the site of intensified productive activity at one and the same time displays the twosidedness of material life in the juxtaposition between the highest and most celebrated aspirations of self-reflective and critical “creative work” (that comes inexorably to recognize the groundlessness of Being), or in Hegel’s language, the geistige tierrreich (the animal kingdom or “jungle”) and the recognition of the self-deception of the “cult of productivity,” dramatically revealed as the fantasy needing to be traversed (that all of our projects only defer this recognition). In “harnessing … the talent of transformation … and exhibiting intense expressivity,” as Thrift says, the city brings to view the lowest in the claim of the highest, or as Gary Schapiro says, “the bad infinite of continually seeking fulfillment in the product only to find it criticized or outdated” (1979, 333) appears in the recognition of the fragility of “allegiance to the cause” (whether work, profession). This is to say that the demand for expressivity (understood as productivity, allegiance to a cause) that invests in the project an anticipation of realization “just around the corner” makes a claim for the “high” (the claim to significance, to being more than incidental) that can only be expressed through the medium of the “low” (the project, the optimistic ambitiousness of productivity). The city makes transparent the limits of the notion of “cause” as a justification for life, throwing the subject back upon the recognition that what she is always remains to be developed, remaining to be determined, in ways exceeding any production, putting flesh on Durkheim’s (1956) notion of anomie by making explicit the way the subject in the grip of an image of the finality of self-fulfillment is envisioned (whether by completing the body of work or in starting something new) as a justification that invariably comes up against the ephemeral character of the product (and of the pleasure of being productive). Here, Schapiro quotes Royce’s gloss on Hegel: “such is the kingdom of those who have no justification for their life task except that it is a life task” (Schapiro 1979, 330). In other words, through its demands for publicity and recognition, the city dramatizes the tenuousness of the expectation of finding fulfillment through

158

The Material City

work. This is to say that if the city personifies the jungle, it is not in a strictly Hobbesian sense, but rather for the reason that the city as the site at which intellectual capacities climax in public and theatrical ways is the scene where the “most refined version” of “struggles for survival and glory” take shape in justifications contained in appeals to “notions like the good of the profession or state of the art that render this version of the life-and-death struggle both more cerebral and more deceptive” (Schapiro 1979, 330). Therefore, if the city is a centre of communication, this means that it is the centre of tangled and self-cancelling justifications of life on any terms other than life itself. This is the crux of its “creative” dialogue in the best sense. The free space of meaning that the city tries to make in this way is a space that engages dialogically the distinction between life and more-than-life as the problem to engage in any present. Whatever the specific detail, what circulates in the city as a feature of its exorbitant social vitality is the need to negotiate the difference between a sick and healthy life, without the resource of any external criterion or magic, while living in ways that always expose life as (seeming) better or worse than it is (making appearance seem to be Real and the Real seem to be merely an appearance; making belief seem to be knowledge and knowledge seem to be belief). In other words, the city is the site of seeming and its glitter. What circulates wherever and whenever in the great city (which is one way in which its “greatness” appears to and for us) is the way it makes a space for this aporia, but only for those who take heed. In the studies that we have done and that I have presented in this volume, I have already shown these possibilities in reconfiguring notions of time and space with respect to such relationships over time, between centre and periphery, effects on newcomers, the antipathy of residents toward change, and the medley of beliefs and opinions that mark the city at any point in time as a volatile and unstable interpretive infrastructure.

Tracking the Culture of the City as a Repressed Signifier At its inception our Culture of the City project confronted this notion of the culture of a city as a repressed signifier that had to be challenged through interpretive research. Conventions in the social sciences and humanities (orthodox urban studies on the “right” and undisciplined interdisciplinary studies on the “left”) recoiled from such an approach, forcing us to deal with the limits of so-called pundits and the flawed system of evaluation that authorized their expertise. In

Publicity and the Project as Scene

159

this way, we can note how the strong project must begin by advancing the challenge of a minority voice. I review some of the case studies of the Culture of Cities project that relate to the problem of the city in time and space and reflect on the ways in which they bring the far near, make the large intimate, and the past and future present. This is meant to bring to view the strategies of analysis that we develop to research the everyday life of the city in relation to its heritage in ways both “official” and “unofficial,” to bring these foci together as a display of our interest in the larger problem of urban justice and further possibilities for research. Here, I will try to indicate how the cases bring to view what at first appear to be large-scale problems connected to social change through the orientation to heritage and its reformulations. Each case can be seen to offer a challenge to official views and conventions of describing change, not by rejecting them but by making explicit often unstated and decisive conceptions they presuppose, in order to strengthen the views themselves by bringing them into focus for dialogical attention. In this respect our case studies bring out implications that become new foci for research and analysis, new paths of inquiry, realigning the very topics of heritage and innovation as the work of the socially oriented renovation – of undoing and remaking – of the language and action of any present.

Rationalizing and Modernizing Heritage Attempts to rationalize heritage are typical and cited as exemplary strategies for modernizing a city. This of course is rooted in conceptions of social engineering that Karl Mannheim (1936) discussed and in foci on urban planning, gentrification, and reactions to urban renewal in forms of resistance and protest. If the theorizing of Jane Jacobs and Michel de Certeau comes immediately to mind for us, the critique of rationalization as a fetish is easy to digest even among those who support the so-called liberalizing effects of the rationalization of heritage. Yet, often understated is Talcott Parsons’s formulation of the emergence of Nazism as a reaction to the emphasis on the constraints of the past, Norbert Elias’s followup work here, and the circulation of extremist revivals in the United States, especially over Islamic influences. Also pertinent to this discourse is the mantra of the doctrine of Richard Florida’s Creative City exposition and its reaction to what it calls the burdens of the past. As part of the emphasis on modernizing a heritage to bring a city or a society up-to-date, we found useful Jane Kramer’s research on the attempt to open Maxim’s, an upscale restaurant in East Berlin, and the violent vandalizing reactions it elicited. This emphasis on rationalizing heritage in the

160

The Material City

name of a modernized city could also produce many projects and new structures in its rebuilding and positive projects aiming at revitalizing moribund neighbourhoods (e.g., the Harlem renewal illustrated by the collaboration of Ralph Ellison and Gordon Parks, or Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels) but also the accusation of amnesia toward the past reflected in Sharon Zukin’s lament over the gentrification of New York. This focus allowed us to direct some of our work to the tensions in modernization in cities such as Berlin, where Elke Grenzer researched a number of cases that illustrate strategies for enhancing the contemporaneous character of the city by attempting to sanitize, explain, or provide instruction about the Nazi past, not only in new museums but in an infrastructure of memorials both celebrating victims and condemning persecutors in the context of liberal curricula that advised revisiting sites for edification about the past as a heritage (Grenzer 2001, 2002, 2010, 2018). In a different way, Kieran Bonner’s (2011a) research on Dublin showed how the figure of the Celtic Tiger used to inform an emphasis on modernizing the heritage also displayed the tensions in commodifying a notable literary heritage and putting it to use in such a service. Grenzer’s research on Berlin showed that a city was not only and exclusively shadowed by its past but by its future as well. For example, Berlin’s attempt to remodel itself in the face of its Nazi past disclosed how all self-fashioning in its way orients to the future as a point from which its present will be revisited as a past, and so, as part of its heritage. Similarly, Bonner’s research on Dublin and how it is awakened as the Celtic Tiger showed that it involved not simply reusing and revising its literary past but imagining its future as a productive and prosperous point in time that will look back to this present as an inheritance to be remade or deserted. Grenzer and Bonner shifted the focus of inheritance from past to future, showing in different ways that heritage is more fundamentally concerned with a dialectic between preservation and perpetuity than with conservation, making care for a legacy the essential parameter of heritage. This focus redirected the attention of our project, where we had understood the power of inheritance to be relevant for translating conditions into influences upon the identity of the city. So, we not only redirected heritage from its externality, we freed it from the limiting case of its connection to collective identity, leading us to conceptualize it as tied inevitably and in a forceful way to the problem of succession. Here, cities such as Berlin and Dublin, and we could add many others, were not simply products of their pasts to be as they are in their present but are disposed to frame their present as communal on the basis of imagining their succession into the future. In a similar way, Grenzer (2001) demonstrated that the museum, whether the Jewish

Publicity and the Project as Scene

161

Museum in Berlin or the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York, is a method of self-description that functions to represent the present to the future as part of a body of knowledge that it could use to review this present as its past. Similarly, Marvin Taylor at our New York conference showed how the creation of the downtown New York art scene imagined its perpetuity as depending upon its capacity to make a record of its present in the form of an archive for the future.

Rituals and Rites of Remembrance Besides its emphasis on rationalization as a destabilizing force, the official discourse on heritage tends to see it mirrored in the various celebrations and rites of a city or society that focus on heritage as a sign of festivity. On the other hand, Durkheim’s conception of piacular rites that mourn events in ways that can bring a society together allowed us to appreciate disasters such as New Orleans (or more recently Orlando), or the 9/11 catastrophe, or the covid-19 pandemic, as occasions where a city is forced to consider its solidarity and to mechanically reiterate for itself and to its satisfaction the importance of its heritage. We observed something like a genre of urban reconstruction talk on such occasions and one of our researchers, Stephen Svenson, travelled frequently to New Orleans to film the aftereffects of its crisis and its attempt to rebuild its heritage under such conditions. Instead of accepting sanctimonious policy talk on urban renewal as if settled and conclusive, this research allowed us to make transparent its various interests and attempts to identify heritage as a particular feature of the city that could be marketed and made compelling as essential to an urban identity. In the same vein, Grenzer’s research on the Ground Zero museum in New York (2018) worked to show how the museum developed a method of self-presentation that risked obliterating a sense of the original event through technological modifications. Specifically, our research tried to demonstrate how heritage comes alive as a topic for the collective most vividly when it is threatened or comes under duress and people are required to pay homage rather than on routine celebratory occasions. But even then, we were not certain as to how such reactions to heritage are anything more than mechanical or cursory. Of course, the crisis initiated by the pandemic we suffer today relates to these concerns.

162

The Material City

Turning Points On the Culture of Cities project, we observed that the heritage of a city was represented in the official discourse in the shape of narratives that identified turning points or “Golden Ages” in which the stigma of the city’s particular character came into view dramatically. Of course, New York, Paris, London, Barcelona, among others, are noted Western examples of such a trajectory of highlights marked especially by movements in the arts and cycles of migration in which the appeal of cities to those seeking freedom, refuge, or autonomy is used to reflect on the history of a heritage. Yet the succession of generations in a city has been used as if chapters in the history of the city, and indeed in the history of the world, with each chapter reflecting an advance or regression in ways that exacerbate the ambiguity of progress. In attempting to bring out the tension in such a discourse in my research on the Venice Charter and persistence and modification in Venice, I suggested that the debate raised the question of who owns the past – Its creators or the present? – and what is the relation of any present to its past as a question bringing to view the tension between orthodoxy as fundamentalism and the reactions to its extremism. Such questioning guided us to see a heritage in its way as a text disseminated over time, whether as canon, background, tradition, or culture, but always capable of diversification, modification, and dismemberment, often removed or displaced in the name of progress or in an effort to reinvigorate ideals that seem to have perished.

The Fashioning of Heritage as Style The inflection of cultural studies and ethnomethodology on our project enabled us to treat the everyday life of a city – its artifacts, routines, and activities – as occasions that display heritage in crucial ways. Thus, the customs and manners of a city, its retail infrastructure, its cuisine, nightlife, and rhythms, allowed us to approach this round of life as if a sign system that showed priorities and oriented emphases approaching the values that rule unobtrusively over the history of the city. Of course, Norbert Elias’s magisterial body of work on the relations of largescale historical change to fluctuations in the customs and modes of self-composition fluctuating over time in everyday life comes to mind. Though many researchers on our project contributed here, and I am thinking of Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner in particular, I used influences from Charles Baudelaire and Georg Simmel to conceive of the aesthetic character of a heritage much like an urban plumage based upon representations of voice and style in Simmel’s

Publicity and the Project as Scene

163

essay on fashion, where the inflection of heritage could be seen as formed and re-formed in stylistic modifications that became topics for social bonding and collectivization. In this way, we can say that heritage as a kind of mobile resource is used and oriented to in the most innocuous ways that conceal its great significance because of the facade of triviality.

Scenes Our various researches on scenes intended to challenge the official discourse by exposing a layer of heritage unofficial and informal in the way that our identification of spontaneously emerging social formations and projects revealed members using heritage in very practical and improvisational routines to bond over common interests. Here, heritage served, whether for entertainment, sports, celebrity worship, appreciation of activities such as film or sex or music, and especially for collecting memorabilia of the past such as stamps, records, antiques, and comics, as ways of coming together on the basis of an assumed amateur know-how parading as expertise in some aspect of history that qualifies the subject as a “buff,” as in a film buff. For example, work over time by Will Straw, and studies of rockabilly by Steve Bailey, and silent film devotees by Paul Moore, disclosed not simply a fascination with the treasures offered by a past, but how such editing and selecting from a past are necessarily grounded in the present in the capacity to imagine the coming together of those conceived as like-minded participants in the routines of the scene and their necessary dream of its perpetuity. In this way, in my paper on preservation in Venice and the Venice Charter, I tried to show how preserving the great works of that city required an often decisive intervention on the part of any present generation for the purpose of remodelling the heritage in ways that had to be purposive while resisting the extremes of fundamentalism and transgression. Consequently, the heritage as an inheritance is always a work in progress. What we see, as we already noted, is that functionally, the scene operates as a basis of solidarity (like Alcoholics Anonymous) and as an opportunity structure for creating contacts, meetings, and avenues for self-promotion through publication and varies notations of productivity signified through participation that are included in cv s and various inventories of accomplishments that can be aggregated as if occurring in great number. This is what we might call the unanticipated function of the scene: it adds to the look of productivity through differences of degree and not of form.

164

The Material City

Masking the Past One implication of our focus is our recognition that all of the work on innovation that seems to emphasize the future-oriented character of present action as central to social change needs to come to terms with the ways in which change depends upon some conception of the inheritance to which the subject being changed is attached, some strong sense of how the past functions for such a subject, imparting a dialectical emphasis to heritage. When we approach the problem of the city in time from this perspective of the Culture of Cities research that I am laying out here, we can appreciate the import of dismantling many of the conventional formulae circulating in everyday life that conceal the strong version of disseminating knowledge that is masked in clichés such as knowledge transfer that the sciences have expropriated in arguing for the need to increase the scientific literacy of an uninformed public. Such clichés derive from the Enlightenment dream of advancing the thought of “mankind” from superstition to “rationality” by trying to transmit the up-to-date information, or “data,” that they call knowledge. In contrast, we remember that the drive of all inquiry to disseminate its knowledge to recipients was memorialized in Plato’s conception of the final cause as the intended destination of theorizing to induce all within its range to an awareness of the difference between knowledge and ignorance. In our inheritance this reveals over and again that the effort was always to motivate an opening up of dogmatic closed-mindedness to a receptiveness to dialogue (and of course this remains our problem when the sciences of our day try to colonize human relations as part of their dream). The Present as a Free Space of Meaning The research we have done on heritage and innovation, dramatizing dissemination as the desire to improvise in relation to traces of the past considered vulnerable and in risk of extinction, expresses an interest presupposed in much contemporary discourse and its volatility in relation to the problem of how a community needs to reflect on the place of memory in the life of its present and on the need to fortify its continuing survival for use by the unborn generations fated to follow. This is to say in an old-fashioned sociological idiom that the topic of the city in time resuscitates the themes of socialization and re-socialization, of memory and its succession, visible in everyday life as an abiding focus of our social order as both a source of rancorous conflict and as an incentive for community building.

Publicity and the Project as Scene

165

Today, of course, the use of heritage and its so-called tangible and intangible character becomes inevitably a topic of contestation in protest movements over the memorials erected as tangible vestiges of history and the intangible implications of their construction and use as civic recourses. What we see is that scenes form and develop not only around films and other habitual proclivities but around collective concerns for justice and injustice in ways that mark urban life by anti-racist and anti-homophobic movements as well as by neo-Nazi revivals. In this way, the notions of time and space reflected in clichés such as heritage, innovation, memory, and the like become fused with concerns for collective action designated by the phenomenon of the crowd and its elemental connection to distance and its contagiousness between and within urban inhabitants, beginning to reveal the relations of urban life to space. That is, the spacing between and within minds and bodies, and between and within words and their relationships in signifying chains, is our interest, disclosed through clichés such as affect, aura, and the crowd, clichés correlative with innovation, heritage, memory, and such in relation to the city in time. We have begun to explore how the affective attachment to urban spaces becomes an expression of the city as an event in both space and time and a source of ethical collisions that become research opportunities (see Cloutier 2019 on the struggle for such a scene and its memorability).

Conclusion What is left untouched in the discourse on heritage is the systemic repression of a trajectory that hints at injustice as perpetrated in ways that are concealed by tangible celebrations of continuity and harmony, the vestiges of oriented injustice and subordination that necessarily mark any community. This again – in a totally different shape – reasserts the force of the model of pseudo-mutuality that we find in research on schizophrenogenic families that celebrates dogmatically the unsupportable claim of homeostatic unity. We can make such a focus transparent when we conceive of the intangible heritage as the repressed unconscious of a collective, bringing together Freud and Marx as progenitors of this framework that can challenge the prosaic distinction between tangible and intangible heritage sanctified by official policy. Even more, though, what is repressed in the notion of public space as a free space of meaning is the need we must suffer to embrace the city as a site that demands that we enjoyably bear its present in the face of the constraint of posterity. What

166

The Material City

we now recognize is that freeing the public life of the city as a space of creativity is constrained by the enlightened vision of the good city as requiring technological thinking as a means for achieving the end of efficiency as the mark of justice. Our freedom to relate to the city as a free space is regulated by structures of urban governance materializing in institutions of politics, education, law, and health that are designed to medicalize and defer the turbulence of everyday life. So, the culture of the city seems to be exemplified in the ways it can engage this collision to make it topical. Here we begin to unmask the sunken meaning of the culture of the city as its relationship to care and the meaning of eros as the desire to exercise care by representing in practice its value in and for the future. In this way our conversation on justice as necessary and desirable must come to terms with its irresolution in any present. Why, then, must we be human and, shunning destiny, long for it? … Oh, not because happiness, that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists. Not from curiosity, or to practice the heart … But because to be here is much, and the transient Here Seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient. Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been Once, although only once, to have been of the earth, Seems irrevocable. And so we drive ourselves and want to achieve it, Want to hold it in our simple hands, In the surfeited gaze and in the speechless heart. (Rilke 1961, 67, 69) What we discern in the surface of the city – its finite face – is how change in time and space is registered in the spectre of perishability: popular culture comes and goes, heritage is re-evaluated, the built environment is constantly re-appropriated in ways that change the nature and meaning of the relations of public to private space, its art depends upon all of these conditions and the interaction between them as objects for commercial development. Change in the city summons up the recognition of mortality, joining senses of the coexistence of life and death through the present experience of the relation of every such change to loss.

CHAPTER 9

Urban Governance

Introduction In the same way that the notion of the culture of the city and its putative indices such as heritage, innovation, and affect risk becoming petrified in clichés that are basically untheorized, the notion of urban governance has gained currency as a commonplace conception that risks glossing its more interesting ramifications if left unspoken. Here I raise the question of the relation between the prevailing conventional interest in urban governance and our interest and history of research in the culture of the city. It is this intersection that is our problem. This discussion should begin to collect many of the threads of this work. Note that urban governance is connected to methods for organizing the social order of the city to make it more efficient, to strategies for planning such an order, to ways and means of making and designing a better city. How does an interest in culture relate to such a project? This invites us to reflect on how two concepts – governance and culture – are tied together, and I suggest that these two concepts must be treated not as opposites but dialectically as corelated in decisive ways.

Care: The Dialectic between Urban Governance and Culture First, I suggest that the notion of governance as making and designing a city not only presupposes its own beliefs and values as to what is the best way of making such a thing but assumes that the city can be taken as a thing rather than as a human association that exceeds such boundaries, and so might be ruled by an algorithmic vision of making. Note that making a city not only creates something new but must remake something handed down in a way that shows how urban governance as a desire to innovate falls between a past that is inherited and a future that is not yet. So, we see several things about the concept of urban gov-

168

The Material City

ernance with which we begin: it is a social relationship to time, oriented to making something new and modifying something old, making use of concepts such as heritage and innovation (two concepts that are in vogue today and that we have been analyzing). This shows that urban governance as a practice, in the words of Max Weber, is “oriented to an order and governed thereby in its practice” (1947). This begins to alert us to the cultural component of urban governance as a relationship grounded in interpretations and a belief system. Once we understand this, we see that urban governance does not just deal with congestion, transportation, crime control, and such matters as these but with a relationship to values of which such matters are indications. To appreciate the cultural character of urban governance as more than a philosophy or ideology of making and planning, we need to rethink the notion of culture. Only then can we begin to formulate the dialectical relation between these notions. Now, as we have noted, we do not use the notion of culture to refer to the customs of a people or city or society, such as hospitality, food, manners, and the like, because these are surface indications that we need to “read” and interpret, to move beyond, in order to discern their cultural aspect. This requires what the philosopher Wittgenstein called an aesthetic attitude or art: he said art is not simply a product, such as a painting or piece of music, but a relationship that can see something as something. In other words, art exists in seeing as, in seeing, say, hospitality or food habits, as something else, insofar as this capacity for analogy or figurative language (seeing one thing as another) is the foundation of art. All of these facts, these details connected to culture as customs and to urban governance as planning, regulation, and policy, need to be seen as something else, as if they are images or reflections of a social relationship. So, I propose that our rethinking of both of these notions, urban governance and culture, involves seeing them as expressions of a relationship that joins them in ways that allow us to see governing as cultural insofar as the two notions are tied together by the sunken notion of care. Governing a city is, in a sense, showing care for its specific and particular character, and such character has been described typically as its identity, “identity” used in this way as a designation of what culture is. So governing is care and care is one aspect of culture. Note that to care for something is not just exemplified by showing care for people but, as I take it, care for quality – that is, care for the quality of a city, and, as I am trying to show here, even care for the quality of language (of concepts such as governance and culture). I take care to be that kind of relationship. Note also, this concern for quality is itself an art, an aptitude that many cannot do (note in the US media praiseworthy citations of the use of teenagers and robots to care for the elderly). If to care for quality is to be attuned to its special character, such an aptitude or ability to “tune in” and listen to the inner voice of the population is itself a part of culture, some-

Urban Governance

169

thing not to be expected of teenagers or robots, no matter how meticulous and punctual they might be. Care, then, is something other than provisioning or delivering services.

The Art of Care The art of care requires seeing the detail of a city as expressive detail, that is, as reflections of the particular character of a people, not just its themes in the way an anthropologist must classify a population (optimistic, ambitious, etc.) but as indications of a particular angle of viewing the world, what the Greeks, as we have noted, call the bias or stigma of a people, the relation that seems to make them different. If sociologists have talked about values here, a philosophical tradition, especially that issuing from Hegel, says that what we are dealing with is something like the spirit of a people, an “object” that can only be measured or treated denotatively at risk of simplifying it out of existence. The spirit of a people is definite and immeasurable, but can be represented and discussed, brought to view in dialogue. Justice begins to be seen as the relationship that can show care for the spirit of the city. Though not an “object,” such a connotative surfeit can be engaged in conversation. The question for us: How do we gain access to the spirit of the city since it is immeasurable, and how can we care for such spirit if it is hard to capture or pin down? If we listen closely to the literature, research, and common speech, we can appreciate the notion of the city as an object of desire. Though many are thrown into the city through the accident of birth, as we have seen, more seem to be lured to the city, drawn to it because of what it seems to offer in the way of its promise of a better life or sweetness of living, sights, services, and opportunities. The city seduces us to taste its wares and then to accept the consequences of this encounter.

Spirit as the Spice of Life In his desire to recover the quality obscured by quantitative approaches to the city and the urban as an object for analysis, the sociologist Louis Wirth wanted to develop the difference between what he assumed to be insignificant and essential in any such formulation of the city and so was at the same time concerned with discriminating between such conditions and another “object” of analysis, the relationship to the urban that appeared to exceed the functional engagement

170

The Material City

with conditions, what he viewed as an immersion in these conditions. Wirth called this “object” the urban way of life (1938). Thus, if the city seems first and foremost a mix of disparate influences, people, groups, and interpretations of this and that, perhaps the quality of the city is disclosed in how it engages this mix. In this way, the question of the identity of the city could be heard as shifting from a concern with material conditions to the question about the emphasis a city can be seen to place on material life, how it engages materiality itself, revealing materialism as a social relationship always and everywhere. Identifying the urban way of life with the spirit of the city led those such as Durkheim to imagine the distinctive agency of any collective as its soul and to conclusions that we have already noted in earlier chapters about the risk of a city losing its soul. Of course, the city must prioritize the activities of settlement and its routinization in work, domestic life, and private sojourning. In this way the city must provide a framework for a functional relationship to life, always creating patterns and opportunities for doing survival, to make possible something like an infrastructure of niches of survival, not just as an opportunity structure but as grounds for an art of survival that seeks to invest such a functional network with a degree of meaning that must desire to do more than survive in life, to spice it up so to speak. So, the urban way of life is embodied as a functional association and as something more, perhaps oriented to ethics and to overtones of life that seem aesthetic. Any dialogue on the city must capture these different voices between the life of the city and more-than-life. Therefore, the convention of identifying the city with the marketplace and the ruling motif of materialistic interests is intelligible as a gloss that always requires more in the shape of a formulation of the kind of spirit such an emphasis makes possible. The postulate of materialism as a beginning invites us to inquire into the imaginary relationship that it must assume as an oriented relationship to the world, to objectives, time, space, and human desire and its conditions. I have noted that the sociologist Louis Wirth recognized the insufficiency of this gloss as a final interpretation and its value as a beginning provocation when he used the cliché as an opportunity to analyze the urban way of life. Kieran Bonner has done a variety of analyses of this discourse, by relating Wirth’s intuition to the canon and particularly to Plato and Arendt (Wirth 1938; Bonner 1997; and particularly the analyses of principled relations to mortality, excitement, and friendship in Bonner 2008, 2011a, 2011b). Wirth recognized how description of the city must make reference to a notion of a way of life that reaches beyond the recitation of demographics, conditions of affordable housing, congestion, sprawl, and social determinants, not by disavowing such factors but by making reference to the way they influence and presuppose an infrastructure of interpretation, idealization, and imagination relating to ways and

Urban Governance

171

means of bearing life and of handling its pleasure and pain. Part of this dialectic between pain and pleasure makes reference to the need and desire to do more than endure the functionalist requirements of urban life. In this way Wirth recognized that as a way of life, any attempt to study the city must reveal some sense of the city as an object of desire or a relationship to value, what Simmel called the ought, as an engagement that is fundamentally ambiguous (Blum 2017b). In this sense, the urban way of life, identified prosaically with the “buzz” of the city, is seen as connected to the affect of city living, both positive and negative, but in ways that cannot be concretely determined or measured, disseminating an aura that seems intangible to empiricists but definite despite its indeterminacy. To paraphrase Wittgenstein again, the urban way of life is not a thing, but it is not nothing either. This permits Clement Rosset to say of any relation to the Real that it is both definite and ambiguous, that it is definite in the sense of being something or other but not something in particular, that its unambiguous existence as something or other discloses its Grey Zone as definitely indefinite, as fundamentally ambiguous. Applied to the urban way of life, to paraphrase Rosset (1989, 5–21), we can say that its intangibility is tangible to the modern subject, something not to be determined obsessively but (in his words) savoured as and for what it is.

Spirit, Soul, Stimulation, and the Surplus In this way, the conception of culture conceals the notion of the soul of the city as a figure standing for its spirit as seen in and through its hustle and bustle (its so-called affect). But hustle and bustle is not enough, for it must be seen as oriented to a “buzz” that discloses for inquiry how it is connected to the city or seems to belong to it in a way that marks this relationship as unique, as if the city gives the hustle and bustle its particular character and not vice versa. Each city then imparts to hustle and bustle its specific style, and this is a way to see the city, the way of investing such seeing with a poetic or aesthetic sense. This hustle and bustle has been routinely translated as affect. My colleagues and I have done research that tries to distinguish such expressiveness of a city as if its signature that marks it as singular. My book (Blum 2003) pursued this topic, addressing Chicago, Manchester, Dublin, Athens, Berlin, and Naples at various points, and I continued this project with colleagues in many studies and in a comparative work that focused on Montreal and Toronto, among other cities, provisionally identifying the soul of the city with its “secret” as follows: “Recalling Simmel’s notion that the inarticulate ‘core’ of individuality that haunts us as secret and ‘incomplete’ remains

172

The Material City

throughout a life we begin to understand the conception of the soul and the imperativeness of an animistic relation to the self and the other, to the city, or to the person, and to each and every distinction we make” (Blum 2007, 47). I applied this notion of soul to a trajectory that culminated in Musil’s Man Without Qualities and the example of the character Ulrich’s return to Vienna, where Musil’s conceptions of music and rhythm could be seen as reflecting his view of the hold that the city exercises upon its subject, how the city gets under the skin of its dwellers: The materiality of the city exceeds both the rational and the empirical in the way that the “pulsating movement” and the “rhythmic throb” of the place inscribes itself upon its subject. Living decisively in the city amounts to being made in the city and thus to being in the place that the city makes, to being in the mould of the poesis of the place … Ultimately, the places to which we have been and the places we would want to be become parts of our biography, an intimate archive of telling or passing moments, of missed opportunities, of very slight indications of how much we feel that we have made of ourselves or of how little, of reveries of loss and longing, of detail that makes up at any present moment what we are to ourselves and how we might appear in the world. (Blum 2007, 44, 47) Examples such as this novel remind us that the notion of the urban way of life must begin to represent the way a city gets embodied in its subject, does get under its skin in specific ways, leaving sensual vestiges in its capacity to touch, to be tasted and savoured. If the novel is considered by empiricists to be unrealistic and anecdotal, as being qualitative and subjective, this is analogous to empirical views of qualitative research and of quality per se. Yet, novelists are human beings who inhabit cities and experience its routine encounters in everyday life with a sensitivity attuned to the nuances of its erotic terrain in many varied respects. Novelists have the capacity to imagine what conventional urban research leaves unspoken, scenes and situations that dramatically expose the untheorized undercurrents glossed by the cliché of affect.

Collective Affect and the Urban Way of Life We now approach the way the normalization of the spirit of the city as the cliché of affect functions in collective speech – that is, the way the collective tends to represent the notion of spirit as affect. The tendency to talk of affect as a matter

Urban Governance

173

of individual conduct, and of the relation of individuals to the environment or “object” as a kind of interaction, leads us to ask after affect in the city as a collective property or a propensity of collective life, as if collectives can be designated and described as “having” affect. This is not strange for we routinely recognize this aspect of collective life in crises, fads, fashion, trends, crowds, panic, projects of all sorts, and in patterns and regularities of social life, part of the domain that sociologists have long called collective behaviour and social movements. In the humanities Bakhtin (1984) in particular has captured the contemporary imagination with his many examples and exposition. We see such collective affect not just in critical uprisings, outbreaks, and initiatives of all sort and in such occasions festivals, celebrations, commemorations, and such but in mundane and innocuous conduct too, such as greetings and salutations, manners, customs, and in patterns and regularities such as traffic, walking, gentrification, revolutions, strikes, crime waves, violence, security measures, even walking the dog, posing in front of the mirror, offering compliments or insults, furnishing our places, kissing, and interrupting a conversation or taking turns in talking, online chats, and everything and anything we might conjure up in such ways. What sociology calls the normative order, others the symbolic order or ritual infrastructure, always illustrates that at its core its rules leave a hole that can only be filled in through the erotic drive of intuition that must exceed or overstep lists of rules and determinations. Materialism champions in its belated recognition of affect the force and circulation of eros in collective life. This, again, begins to unmask the erotic character of the city. Yet, this erotic infrastructure is something other than what is popularly designated as a collection of affects – it is an infrastructure that always has the need for further reflection. For example, for Lacan words like “depression,” “anger,” and “panic” are signals that invite research; they are not conclusive denotations but the beginnings of observed usage: I don’t have to do more than remind you of the confused nature of the recourse to affectivity. It reaches the point where … it always leads us … toward something we feel is not in the direction in which our research can really make progress. Of course, it is not a matter of denying the importance of affects. But it is important not to confuse them with the substance of that which we are seeking. (1992, 102)

174

The Material City

Affect and the Scenario of Anomie According to Max Weber (1930), modern life reveals a progressive revision of eros as part of the Enlightenment demand to exorcise magic and superstition in the name of advancing rationalization. As a metaphor, magic signifies the instability of subjectivity and the need to renounce a focus on what Weber called values or ends of action for means. Modernity requires a means-end orientation to action, what Bataille (1985) called a restricted economy, and in this way illustrates the normative requirements of administration. That is, values seem random and incoherent as ends of action (subjective, variable), but means seem to be more concrete and palpable procedures within our grasp that we can determine. Of course, since we can only evaluate means in terms of ends, when we reintroduce values again, we face the same problem. “Values” are the surface indications of eros that is seen as needing to be simplified and managed, perhaps even calculated as a quantitative influence, on the part of a subject who must compose herself and fashion a self-according to such requirements. So, we see here two spaces for eros: one obviously in the motivated compliance demanded of a subject to function in this order, and the other as the desire animating the order itself and its demands – that is, the investment in rationalization and efficiency as a value that supports this regime of interpretation. Now, combining sociology and Freud we see how such a subject can adapt in many ways and can re-engage desire in diverse forms of adaptation but all needing to suffer the loss of full embodiment and the reduction or simplification of jouissance that the order seems to require (Freud [1915] 1950). I have developed the principled relationship to eros in the city in ways that can now be viewed as reflecting the desire for more-than-life; in my previous reformulation of Goffman’s research on action and adventure, I treated his usages on night, gambling, and chance encounters as examples that can be expressed in routine strategies of varying routines (Blum 2003, 141–89, 262–94). Durkheim’s conception of anomie (1951) lays out the sociological notion of eros as a feature of modern life and its stress on productivity as that which leads either to failure and sorrow, or to relentless acquisition that cannot be sated and creates the aspiration for more as an unending chain of desire that must remain unfulfilled. The problem of such a subject is to deal with the ambiguity of loss and frustration continuously and in a positive way. The dialectic of pleasure here suggests that progress is destructive not only in Schumpeter’s (1947) sense of creative destruction that needs to dismantle what it produces as a feature of change and innovation, but in the way that social change must destroy accomplishments in the name of progress that makes the feeling of loss persistent, materializing both as an experience of the selective erosion of the past and attachments and in a persistent fascination with what Adam Phillips (2012) calls the unlived life that

Urban Governance

175

haunts any present as elsewhere, other, and excluded as what we could have done and didn’t or what we are missing. This version of social change resonates with Freud’s notion of the self-destructiveness of life as constant excitation, as always capable of influencing one to want to exchange such a life for a more pleasurable destination imagined as lacking frustration, and unresolved ambiguity.

Affect as a Translation of Eros As a supposed update of such a history, various examples from biomedicine propose that we rethink eros as corporeal in order to divest the notion of any essentialist or idealistic resonances. This has always been available in the sociological and psychoanalytic conception of drive and automation. For example, Freud identified energy as an element signified in an attachment to any object – self, other, idea, place, etc. – as a kind of adhesive force supplying coherence and stability to norms (again beyond the pleasure). Talcott Parsons treated affect as a medium of exchange like the motivational element in life that circulates, making motivation a collective resource that can be mobilized, tapped, and organized in ways to produce different shapes and forms of social life and necessary to be factored into understanding all kinds of social arrangements (Parsons and White 1960). This conventional sociological view, making implicit use of a libidinal conception of energy, also relates to more recent work, such as that by Deleuze ([1995] 2005) on the ability to affect and be affected, revealing eros not as the kind of personal feeling suggested by emotion but as a passage from one experiential state to another. This conception causes us to ask how the body can be factored into speech and action. That is, Durkheim’s conception of the pervasiveness of eros as a condition of social life, whether as drive or a formulaic relation to feelings, brings the body into speech by formulating speech and action as corporeal. What I have been saying implicitly (covertly for some to hear) is that the best sociological conception of corporeal speech might be the cliché, such as affect itself, when it is treated abstractly as if a dead letter and not invested with the life that theorizing can bring to it. As affect, eros then becomes a kind of collective resource that is tapped and stereotyped in different formulae and connected to agency, constraint, freedom, determinism, normalcy, and eccentricity, and is spoken in all areas of life. Such a model of affect as a structural effect or collective resource makes reference to the capacity to move and be moved, to be animated beyond mundane distinctions, and, as I mentioned, to Freud’s image of life as an instinct in contrast to death. In order to reach this point, we need some notion (such as Parsons’s distinction)

176

The Material City

of eros as a common resource or medium of exchange that circulates in collective life. In Plato’s Republic, it is this capacity in students that is looked for “prior” to formal instruction, by searching for a receptiveness in the learner that promises to disclose a capacity to be moved by speech to rediscover its affective tone as part of the engagement in learning itself, making all education a way of looking for those who seem to have a capacity to be moved (rather than grade point average). Socrates contrasts such a learner to the one he characterizes as in a comatose state, the one who is immune to stimulation as if dead. We might honour the dead, but we want students who are alive, erotic, and not inert (Plato [1941] 1945, 199–202). In the lingo of Lacan (1992), this version of eros brings it into relation with the conception of jouissance.

Affect as In-Between The resurgence of affect studies today testifies to the dissatisfaction with the polarity of mind and body as an undialectical relation and the recognition of that incalculable space in between that affect is meant to occupy. I have posited that this relationship is captured by the figure of insistence as the inexplicable upshot of the work of the unconscious in action, work that could hover between retention and extension, between restraining and giving. The notion of the unconscious, however, confirms for us that affect is an effect of the erotic desire to deal with one’s knowledge of self as a problem to be solved. Bruce Fink describes Lacan’s conception of affect as perpetuating an untheorized contrast between the affective and the symbolic, as if affect is not involved in the symbolization of experience, as if it is a fundamental substratum of thought. Lacan’s conception of desire, in conjunction with Plato’s notion of the erotic infrastructure, resituates affect as a representation, Wittgenstein’s example of a target rather than a cause: Affect is essentially amorphous – an amorphous quantity or substance, we might say metaphorically. It is common to hear patients say that it was only on Monday that they realized that they had spent the entire weekend in some sort of depressed state, indicating thereby that the signifier “depressed” was only added to the state three days into it … Affect is not something beyond thought, something that is somehow more real than thought. (Fink 2004, 51)

Urban Governance

177

Institutionalizing Care As shown in this work, the temper and tone of the city is demonstrated in representations of progress that are most dramatic in the city as indicators meant to signify the forward advance of history due largely to material accomplishments. Yet, progress polarizes life chances in ways that make it necessary for care to be directed to those who have no chance. Progress must coexist with such hopelessness in its midst, forcing upon a city the perennial need to deceive itself or the other about the future and life chances. In this way, the lie is a necessary part of progress if progress is to be engaged and reflected upon thoughtfully. This is the mother of all ethical collisions. Most relevant is the tension in progress between its gains and consequences insofar as progress is represented as an advance in many respects that polarizes the population for whom it is designed, creating consequences that require those reputed to gain or benefit to care for or exercise concern about those who suffer through the advance. This care, often limited, or misguided in many ways, generates responses that often materialize in protests and reactions that are viewed as threatening. This applies not only to conventional claims of injustice but to therapeutic agendas for rehabilitation. Such “problem solving” is correlative with progress and its often painful effects. For example, using the case of the Roma people’s settlement in Athens, Andriani Papadopoulou argued for the challenge that the existence offered by “others” can provide: “when we embark on problem solving, however humble or grand our motives … the ‘others’ who would meet us in this process will object, challenge us and reveal our limitations and flaws whether by choice or force” (2016, 226–7). Modern cities are always characterized by the inevitability of such a division and the various efforts to address or exclude it as a pertinent feature of everyday life. Insofar as such progress must include all consequences, and not only income polarization, I suggest that it creates, along with its tangible material effects, the problem of care and of developing ways and means of taking care of the very changes that are produced, by monitoring or reflecting upon courses of action that can remedy such consequences through activities intending to alleviate distress. Such consequences include poverty, health, crime, damaging effects on the environment and the spirit of inhabitants and of those who would or could be drawn to the city, making the city a constant focus of concern for ameliorative action and a topic for the variety of policies and plans proposed endlessly to document its fragility and to inspire a literate population to think of its vulnerability and need for repair. What we might begin to see is that the fascination with affect today as a research topic is an example of the distractive emphasis of the medical therapy of materialism that is designed to defend us from an inability to rethink eros and

178

The Material City

its complexity in ways that are reassuring and palatable; this conversion allows those who want to displace their uneasiness with the subjectivity of eros to rationalize it as an insistent corporeal force. Lacan might say that affect is a gimmick invented to distract us from coming to terms with eros and its complexity. This distinction is a good problem to take up that could be seen to be stimulated by the question of whether neoliberalism uses affect to distract itself from the more dangerous idea of eros. Does affect not medicalize the notion of eros by bringing the desire for more-than-life back down to earth by saying that eros and its turbulence can be normalized and made intelligible and non-threatening as what life is, if we just think of it as affect and as corporeally conditioned? In this respect, sociology has developed a program for medicalizing care under the rubric of justice through the conception of the institution as the primary agent of socialization that is designed to cure subjective excess in the most efficient way.

The Institutionalization of Banality: Goffman’s View of the Symbolic Order I examine Goffman’s (1961) conception of a social institution here because he conceptualizes the symbolic order in ways that permit us to appreciate how the expurgation of ambiguity is done as a practical accomplishment in ways left untheorized by others who still recognize its impact and artifice. In other words, Goffman describes institutionalization as the medicine that sociology discovered and uses in its routine interpretations as a conventional discipline. Goffman makes observable how glossing is done and legitimated as medicine for healing a social order that is viewed as vulnerable to the toxic threat of unruly subjectivity, especially in areas of conflict (law), health (medicine), and work (education). Materialism, in its sociological garb, replaces Hobbes’s legislator with the physician. Goffman identifies three parameters of the analysis as (1) rules of irrelevance or the doing of exclusion; (2) locally realized resources that make reference to the stated “official” objectives designed as noteworthy and to be accomplished; and (3) rules of transformation that are needed to reintegrate the excluded affective surplus. Rules of irrelevance specify ways in which the system practises exclusion – for example, in the quote from ibm that we used as an example of institutional selfpromotion, it forecloses a concentration upon intersubjectivity in the relation of the corporation to leadership and the leader to the technology and to the citizens. In terms of our discussion, rules of irrelevance describe how the repression of

Urban Governance

179

the signifier is done in practice, how its meaning(s) is buried. Here matters are ruled out as irrelevant on grounds that implicitly join impersonality to efficiency, and that prioritize external relationships over others. The standard of efficiency demands such exclusion because achieving efficiency is the value of social ordering. There is considerable evidence for the ways in which irrelevance is officially decided and sanctioned in institutions such as medicine, university, or law, evidence that derives from Weber’s work on bureaucracy, Parsons’s pattern variables, and other sources in ways that Kenneth Burke calls “mapping” or a terministic screen for doing. ibm excludes as extraneous any intersubjective relationship between itself as a corporation and the user of its methods and “tools” and between its leader and others. Its notion of “civic governance” excludes anything related to social interaction. The most important exclusion is the voice of the speaker as an interpreter who says what is said as if self-evident and in a way that excludes what the talk is addressing and the kind of problem to which it is responsive. Locally realized resources identify the methods and procedures used to reach objectives such as the composition of the treatment as an action, how leadership as it is envisioned here is described as being done, its necessary integration of lines of authority with co-operation and deference, and the development of the tactfulness necessary to carry the action to its conclusion as if a drama to be played that is part of a ceremonial affirmation of a world in microcosm. A number of sociologists besides Goffman have formulated the career of an action as the analytic conditions constituting its temporal accomplishment, most notably Parsons (1937), and also Swanson (1971) with his analyses of collectivization and primary process in groups. The influences of phenomenology and especially Alfred Schutz (1973) are important here for recognizing the world building and constructive action of any description that produces actors, courses of action, and its particular emphases according to some schema of interpretation. Thus, practices such as affirmations of technology, professed beliefs in the good of communal well-being as dependent upon intelligent and up-to-date responsiveness to new influences, a hospitable relationship to the corporation as a purveyor of truth and good will, and good-hearted commitment to optimistic beliefs in the relation of business to government as scenes of social action concertedly oriented toward making openness to corporate publicity a recognizable and legitimate outcome as if driven by a script. The script is nothing other than the grammar of the action as an implicit set of instructions for describing the conditions under which its accomplishment is in accord with the convention(s) depicting how it is done. In sociology such a script has been referred to as a normative order, the generalized other, the distribution of the sensible, the code, and other such figures as role, status, power, rights, and obligations. The script is intended to guarantee that a content that can be seen in many ways (up-to-date leadership here) is seen as what it is in accord with its

180

The Material City

specification of relevance (that the medium is the method means that the method is the means of delineating the content; in the idiom of Wittgenstein, that grammar determines the object, that the method of seeing determines what is seen). For example, the leader must be motivated to believe in this line and to accept its gospel as potential operating procedure. In other words, given the repression affirmed in institutional practice, goals must still be achieved and done in ways that are free of the burden of reflective thought that would complicate outcomes. A model of calculation is required that can guarantee consensus. Rules of transformation depict the work required to reincorporate what had been ruled irrelevant (such as subjectivity, an ethical awareness, for example) by identifying the impersonality as necessary and as justifiable, as beneficent (as a sacrifice) because of the requirements of technology, or the claim that efficient treatment requires disengagement. Rules of transformation indicate how the institution seeks to rectify such depersonalization through reversals such as its affirmation of the customer-care model developed in banking and retail, in seeking to recuperate the leader as a “whole person” rather than a specialist only, and to redeem the institution as caring for increasing the efficiency of governance as if efficiency is the bottom line. For example, in the ibm case we examined earlier, rules of transformation in this institution typically make reference to how old-fashioned models of leadership unsupported by the newest advances in technology are to be reversed by new approaches that are “cutting edge.” Rules of transformation are directed to reviving the leader, the governing bodies, and the citizens in a happy mutually beneficial harmony of interests that is intended to celebrate the “up-to-date” progress that technology marks so unequivocally. The imagined leader has to be formulated, of course, as a true believer and as an object for socialization and persuasion. In this sense, what is called neoliberalism is the cliché that designates how the exclusion that is justified by rules of irrelevance (the official repression) and operationalized in automated algorithms necessary to realize an outcome (realized resources) needs to be grounded in a rationalization that reaffirms the expurgation of meaning as a just procedure of the good society. In this way the up-todate leader envisioned by the data-driven corporation is construed as “good” and progressive solely by virtue of his contrast to the politician supported by the imagined populace: Our politicians had never been so authentic, so linked arm in arm with the common people. “My favorite meat is hot dog by the way,” one told us. “That is my favorite meat. My second favorite meat is hamburger. Oh, and everyone says, oh, don’t you prefer steak? It’s like, I know steaks are great, but I like hot dog best, and I like hamburger next best.” And we shivered with recog-

Urban Governance

181

nition, and a vague vote grew solid in our hands, for we too liked hot dog best, and hamburger next best. We were the common people on whom it all rested, and we lived in diners, and we went to church at the gas station, and our mother was a dirty mattress in the front yard, and we liked, Goddammit, hot dog best. (Lockwood 2021, 105–6)

Conclusion In the city, the functional relationship that is honoured tends to be governed by the rule of market value and the demand to adjust to the movement of the market, risking suppression of the desire to address what is best and most profound in ourselves: it is the tension in this division that reflects Simmel’s conception of the ambiguity that is integral to jouissance between the desire for life (what sociology calls motivated compliance) and for more-than-life (for more than this, to be at our best, to put our being into question). The desire to be soulful, necessary to ground care in the best sense, if no longer recognized as an imperative challenge to convention in the name of a pursuit of meaning, risks falling into disrepute, being seen either as soft and smarmy or as negative thinking. We can be our best by asking ourselves: Why let the accident of contingency and convention flourish undisturbed by giving up without a struggle? Is this struggle nothing other than what I have been proposing for an art of inquiry, as the need to suffer its review of usage as a script both monstrous and malleable, and so as implicitly comic, the need to artfully work the script over as a discourse that seems oriented to impossible problem solving, and the need to suffer the inconclusiveness of this inquiry as itself an irresolute resolution? Such inquiry promises to exemplify what Elaine Scarry (1999) calls the beauty of begetting in speech, the beauty of speaking in ways that subvert inelastic words and deeds by making connections and disconnections that travesty formulaic rigidity in thought and action, thereby creating new reflexive combinations by investing old words with new life.

CHAPTER 10

The Desire for Justice in Everyday Life

Introduction If the notion of the soul of the city is ruled by the idea that its social institutions give such indications, we see that institutions simply extend the view of culture as generic in ways that bury its meanings. The problem we reach here is twofold. First, how can the individual develop an erotic relation to oneself and to one’s soul under such constraints? How is it possible for a subject to relate to these institutions creatively? And second, how might we apply whatever we discover in response to this question to the problem of the soul of the city? How can the city develop an erotic relation to itself, a free space of meaning that could enable it to practise a reflective dialogue on the sunken meaning of soul that is buried in its representations of urban culture? As a way of trying to round out this dialogue, I note Empson’s remark that “the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy” (quoted in Phillips 2012, xiv). Although this quote identifies a universal problem as the inability to express one’s individuality, I have tried to formulate the materialist inflection of such an experience of separation as the accent it invests in such a “tragedy.” I have maintained that the emphasis on the productivity of persons as determined by market value and the criterion of exchange value creates very particular problems for the self-evaluations of persons and for their assessments of self-worth. Further, I have proposed that the force of the formula of the weight of numbers creates such feelings of “waste” for a subject – as mentioned here by Empson – around the question of what kind of “number 1” one is – that is, concerning the value of being a one. Imagine the subject asking if their life is either one of many and therefore interchangeable, or a one unique, singular, and irreplaceable, either/or one or both in this way. Here, the problem is whether one’s life has value or is felt deeply as a waste. Yet, Simmel says that even this question leaves untouched the status of individuality and its expression because an individual is re-

The Desire for Justice in Everyday Life

183

ally and truly more than the unique status confirmed by normative calculation. Secondly, in calling such a problem an impasse I need to engage the meaning of that term, what it is and what it is not, as a relationship. In other words, when does a problem that could reflect an ordinary tension or even contradiction become an impasse in my lexicon? What are the analytic conditions for Empson’s “tragedy” (or Simmel’s) to be seen as an impasse?

Impasse Cora Diamond formulates what I call here an impasse as follows: “Experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome or astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present the kind of difficulty of being hard or impossible or agonizing to get one’s mind round” (2008, 45–6; emphasis added). The pain of the impasse that she describes seems two-bodied, its character as inexplicable or as an experience of contradiction, and as something that is not taken as such by others. In this way the tension that she mentions as an aspect of this intractable relation to reality seems intensified by the fact that its enigma to one is not an enigma for others, confirming in this way how the weight of numbers can seem to disqualify one’s most innermost sense of value, heightening inner isolation in ways that accentuate it. Simmel would say that it is this sense of individuality that registers who we are, other than any unique and irreplaceable value that we might be assigned by the greater numbers, and it is a sense of individuality that is not taken as such by the greater numbers. This begins to point to a difference between solitude that does not have to be painful and abandonment as a separation whose pain is conditioned by an intuition of the force of the withdrawal of the “greater numbers” from any sense of sharing the experience, as if abandonment is a radical and mutually oriented separation in contrast to the solitude that chooses its position as a creative relationship to social life. Cora Diamond suggests that the pain of an impasse drives us to develop strategies that deflect us from its experience as a reflective challenge or desire to reach beyond for more-than-life. Diamond says that taking things to be inexplicable (say, Empson’s impasse) for oneself and not for others creates a wounded person. As an example, here is a poetic recognition of this situation where what is expressed as inexplicable for the poet is not likely to be a problem of others:

184

The Material City

Believe It Hard to believe that, after all of it, In bed for good now; knowing you haven’t done One thing of any lasting benefit Or grasped how to be happy, or had fun, You must remember everything and pass into a new condition that is not night, or a country, or a sleep, or peace, but nothing ever, more, for you. (Mehigan 2014, 66) Many have spoken of the development of symptoms or defences against this recognition. If death or mortality could qualify as a master signifier for the inexplicable, Lacan says that we develop sicknesses or “gimmicks” to handle the problem of mortality that seems perplexing to we who are here today and gone tomorrow, but not necessarily to others. Just as I have had to ask how a problem becomes an impasse, I must now query the question of the pain of an impasse, or how the impasse becomes and lives as a relationship to pain.

Pain Elaine Scarry’s work on pain treats it as the worldlessness, here illustrated dramatically in her examples of war and torture whereby the human body is used to verify the capricious authority of the symbolic order “when some central idea … or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population’s belief … the sheer factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty’” (1985, 14). If we follow Cora Diamond’s use of the observation of the character in Coetzee’s novel that “the book we read is not the book he/she was writing” (2008, 56), we see that the need to “go beyond” – the need for such desire – applies to texts as well as to conventions and conditions, and so, to Scarry’s text as well. Apparently, Scarry holds that the threat of injuring as legitimate and sanctioned by the normative order is itself an exercise of force that compels assent and prevents the desire to go “beyond,” inducing the subject to accept corporeality as the limits of the world. So, we accept this advice and try to go beyond what she says here. For example, Eric Santner (2001, 59) tries to “go beyond” Scarry’s text by reading it as recasting the concept of the transference socially as part of a process in

The Desire for Justice in Everyday Life

185

which, as Scarry says, a made world (the world of culture) becomes accented as if real and self-evident. Such an infantile relationship to meaning, which we have examined throughout this work, memorialized by a canon from at least Plato on, assigning “factual status” to the world on the basis of an unspoken dependency on an interpretive infrastructure, is used by Santner to identify “something rotten” in law and all institutions that depend upon what they deny or deny what they accept (for example, as in Benjamin’s conception of how law as an exercise of violence can only exercise its own violence in such an initiative). To Santner, what is rotten in any institution is its dependence upon a transference relationship to its authority (what I called a vision of the jouissance of administration or motivated compliance). Yet, unlike Scarry’s and Diamond’s proposals, Santner can only criticize law for acting out in this way as “something rotten.” He follows Benjamin in seeing this limitation in any institution as a sort of parameter: Benjamin’s claim is that at a certain point this chain of transferences bottoms out, encounters a missing link at the origin of the symbolic capital circulating through it … It is, Benjamin suggests, this missing link pertaining to the emergence of institutions that drives the symbolic machinery of the law – for Benjamin the paradigmatic institution – and infuses it with an element of violence and compulsion. (2001, 59) This is a misleading deflection because Santner sees Scarry’s writing as a contribution to the canonical critique of the symbolic order – its hole or limit disclosed in “the chain” of unanalyzed interpretations upon which such an order depends – and so, he misses the opportunity to go beyond her text as Diamond suggests – that is, he is deflected from appreciating the impasse as more than its inhabitation of a space of contradiction as does any institution (as if he is doing a counter-transference instead of analysis). As we have already noted, an institution is not “rotten” because it engages in glossing practices, as our use of Goffman’s model of institutions has demonstrated. Santner’s effort to connect Scarry’s text to Benjamin’s critique does not do it justice as more than a notation on a contradiction because it fails to distinguish between a conventional critique of any symbolic order by someone such as Trump (as an artifact, and so all lies, deceit, false speech) and those he praises (Benjamin, Lacan, Rozenzweig, etc.). To proceed otherwise, we need to treat Scarry not simply as a critic of the symbolic order and its leaks or “hole” but as one who aims to provide a relationship to limits that is something other than “critical” in this sense. That is, we need to “go beyond” her writing to begin to recover the principled relationship that animates it.

186

The Material City

To “go beyond,” in this sense, discloses Scarry’s project not simply as dismissing the symbolic order – say, as law (in the way Trump dismisses law as false speech) – but as providing for the conditions when an order such as this “can be seen as” approaching evil. In other words, Scarry says that when the symbolic order develops relationships to the subject that resemble the relationships illustrated in usages such as war and torture, that order is not simply inhabiting a space of contradiction (as is any symbolic order) but is displaying an exercise of force that is injurious in its effort to coerce the subject to assent and so to silence. That is, Scarry tries to lay out the conditions when any symbolic order functions more than “symbolically” – is limited not because of its necessary artifice, deceit in that sense – but when it creates what she calls “worldlessness.” To do this she uses the examples of war and torture in order to formulate such a speech situation: that is, the transference relationship to speech that Santner notes with such originality is illustrated vividly when we can grasp the speaker as subject to the exercise of force that Scarry sees in images that are semblances of war and torture. Such a speaker, truly coerced to resist the desire to “go beyond” speech, allows us to better illustrate the course of action being formulated in this work, enabling us to “go beyond” its code as a doctrine in order to appreciate it as a specific inflection of the Real as a way of life. In war, one treats survival as the end and cannot imagine going beyond such an end; in torture, one treats the relief of pain as an end and cannot desire more than this respite. Both types of speaker are absorbed by the reality of their corporeal limits – to live or die, to be in pain or escape from it – and can harbour no conceptions of going beyond. More, though, both examples of war and torture bring pain and helplessness together in an analogy that dramatizes how an institution might foster this relationship in ways that are truly more “rotten” than contradicting itself. Desire is dead for such a speaker, and to “go beyond” is inconceivable. An institution is not “rotten” for being in contradiction, but rather for being possessed by evil; in such a case, it prevents its subjects from “going beyond,” from mobilizing a desire for more-than-life. War and torture force acquiescence upon the subject and compel a self-absorption that must be deflected from anything other than corporeal survival and from orienting to a world outside of this condition. This sets the stage for the Real as a scene of survival and of its ideal speaker – the survivor – as one ruled by the spirit of compromise (as in Spinoza’s depiction of one who knows the best while doing the worst). I suggest that Scarry’s illustration of the force of war and torture through the joint impact of usages of machine and trial represents the one being tried by mechanization as if subject to interrogation rather than to the to and fro of conversation.

The Desire for Justice in Everyday Life

In other words, Scarry allows us to imaginatively convert the mechanization of evaluation into the situation of interrogation that constrains a subject being tried (evaluated), by showing how such a subject is induced to perform (answer questions) in response to denotative demands that prevent their “going beyond” such a format. Of course, all law forces this format upon us. Reciprocally, because the interrogator has no desire to “go beyond” these answers, this algorithmic question-answer format is justified in many institutional spheres as necessary and desirable because of the assumed self-centred temptation of subjects to exceed requirements in ways seen to jeopardize standardized evaluation. This image of the trial as a metaphor for the mechanization of evaluation pervades not only law, but medical diagnosis of the talk of patients, and the rule of performance evaluation in education. This discussion begins to make observable what we can think of as the institutionalization of the expurgation of ambiguity as the source of any institution and its organized and systemic banality. I have suggested that the description of a situation as a trial imagines the situation as governed by criteria of exchange value as its way of deciding upon the productivity of persons as a sign of their self-worth and value. Connected to this I have used Empson to suggest that the automated self-representation of the subject that is produced under such auspices can only lead to the “tragedy” of the social situation as if a problem to negotiate and to attempts to solve this that take shape in many and diverse ways. The Real, as such a space of fundamental ambiguity – neither good nor bad – can then become as if torture when it is conceived as a machine and/or the subject as a prisoner of war held captive by the greater numbers under such scrutiny. As a notion, we can say that the Real is life conceived as a machine, and as Camus ([1946] 2000) said, the ideal speaker is envisioned as one desperately trying to discover whether or not there is a hole in the machine (a.k.a. Empson’s tragic situation). I have been discussing the style of the material city as a ruling inflection or accent on reality that inflicts upon the subject procedures of evaluation that are guided by criteria of exchange value and the market. As I have noted previously in relation to Durkheim, the attempt to find happiness and to achieve with finality fulfilment and satisfaction (in his books The Division of Labor and Suicide) for one can only confirm how desire is inevitably repelled by the Real in ways that make living and its motivation a drive modelled after corporeal insistence and nothing else, thus forcing upon its subject the imperative to embrace life itself as automated (Blum 2014a). This involves not speaking about ambiguity externally but revealing it in writing itself that discloses how its definiteness in word can only remain ambiguous even as it speaks with finality about any matter. This potential for ambiguity to

188

The Material City

disrupt the symbolic order was used by Henri Bergson to affirm the value of comedy for exposing the necessary rigidity of the social order in ways that will risk forever identifying reflection with transgression: It is doubtless strange that the history of a person or of a group should sometimes appear like a game worked by strings, or gearings, or springs; but from what source does the special character of this strangeness arise? What is it that is laughable? To this question which we have already propounded in various forms, our answer must always be the same. The rigid mechanism which we occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in the living continuity of human affairs is of peculiar interest to us as being a kind of absentmindedness on the part of life. Were events unceasingly mindful of their own course, there would be no coincidences, no conjectures and no circular series; everything would evolve and progress continuously. And were all men always attentive to life, were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as with ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the workings of strings or springs. The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life. Consequently, it expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in events. ([1900] 1956, 116–17) This automatism of social life, punctuated and exposed by comedy as Bergson says, can also be disclosed, according to Durkheim, in cases that exaggerate its normalcy as a guide to life as if an abstract master plan that is closed to external influence. Exchange value and solitude become torture that resembles Scarry’s discussion of the mechanization of trial: trial by market value determines productivity as worldlessness when it lacks recourse to a poetic embrace of conditions. We recognize this “lack” in methods of recruitment, appraisal, grading, and performance evaluation, in assessments of discrimination and their attempted rectification, and in the spectacle of decision making. Such procedures serve in every institutional domain to operate in the name of justice as a methodology designed to satisfy the expectation of the great numbers in formulae that are intended to be user-friendly, but to lesser numbers might be laughable in Bergson’s sense: White people, who had the political education of potatoes – lumpy, unseasoned, and biased toward the Irish – were suddenly feeling compelled to

The Desire for Justice in Everyday Life

189

speak out about injustice. This happened once every four years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things. (Lockwood 2021, 33–4) This ties into Diamond’s work insofar as the wounded person, like an animal, begins perhaps by resembling a speaker who suffers the experiences of contradiction (confronting inexplicable tensions as an impasse in a claustrophobic space that seems to be unnoticed by others), that then risks becoming an agoraphobic space of worldlessness. Semblances of claustrophobia, besides this example of being among lumpy white people, come to view in examples such as being among academics for Rosenzweig, or a lecturer like Goffman among audience members, or a theorist among scientists like Lacan, or a traveller among tourists aboard a cruise ship like David Foster Wallace, or even as the flâneur who invests time in gambolling among street scenes (or all of the other suffocating scenes that we might imagine). The problem of justice as care now invites us to reflect on how to care for ourselves as the tension between our self as a part and our self as a whole. For our self, the lesson of life seems to counsel reaching beyond oneself, beyond claustrophobia and its escape, to risk making the here and now funny, challenging, and sensual, while always aware of the temptation of demonic orgiastic irresponsibility (Patocka 1996). The reminder of mortality teaches that the end of life is not disappointment for our failure to achieve more as if our deficiency, but an occasion to find artful ways of laughing and crying under the auspices of the Other’s silence in telling us whether or not we are a recognizable somebody. How, though, can this relate to one’s care for the other(s)?

Care, Bearing Witness, Being Just I have proposed that the soul of the city as the deep and buried meaning of culture is reflected in partial indications of its expressiveness, its heritage and customs, its productivity and works, and in its public spaces, scenes, and projects, but most comprehensively in how it makes a place for a space of creativity. The desire to make such a space can only create effects that are contested in ways that inflict constant frustration on the population and extremist responses. The culture of the city includes this terrain of discordance, institutionalized efforts to purge it of ambiguity, and the struggle of creative attempts to surpass this

190

The Material City

vitriolic environment by bearing witness to it, by caring for its spirit, and, at best, in trying to make tokens of its value memorable for both the posterity of the city and of the person. My talkativeness here makes reference to the sunken meaning that is repressed by and in the signifier of the culture of the city. This is the notation on the culture of the city and its erotic landscape that I promised at the beginning of this work, a landscape that we can appreciate now as exhibiting the spirit of the city, and as a way leading us to reflect on the relation of justice to the city as a relationship of care. I go further in connecting the desire to creatively endure the present under the shadow of impossible immortality for both the city and the individual. This again indicates the subversive strategy of analogy. For example, the important cities that I have passed through are not simply the cities that enumerate my trajectory over time, but those cities that marked in specific ways, a moment that dramatized a collision in my desire for more-than-life and that can be seen in retrospect as an erotic upheaval, and in this way as part(s) of me. I could even suggest that it is this sunken meaning that the notion of the culture of the city represses, in its leaving as its message for posterity its ways of making itself a free space of meaning that become part of the people who pass through it. In other words, just as for Plato’s individual, the second-best way of achieving immortality, impossible for a city just as for an individual, is to reproduce itself in offspring who make their time in the city a telling part of their journey through life. If this proposes such procreative capacity as marking the spirit of a city in ways that that stamp it as truly individual rather than as one unique place among many, we can now ask: How does a city seem to make this “impact”?

CHAPTER 11

The Legacy of Care

Introduction Conceptions of care not only pervade the field of health and illness around the problem of dealing properly with patients, the problem called “health care,” but enter into all areas of everyday life where relations of dependency and asymmetrical affinities have to be negotiated, from the family, to teaching and therapy, to the best reading of the political relationship, and in any case where parties are exposed to one another as mutually oriented social actors (Weber 1947) and as responsible in some ways for administering and co-operating in such encounters. Thus, notions of legitimacy, responsibility, asymmetrical connections of mastery or power in conjunction with unformedness and its demands for nurturance seem to matter in all relations of care. If in collective life the primordial relation of care is idealized in the bond between mother and child and the parental connection as its sine qua non, the ruler as shepherd, guardian, or representative in political care is an important figure in the line of descent from Plato’s Republic on, alongside great variations in modes of institutionalizing the coexistence of authority and responsibility that involve the professions such as teaching, therapy, and many forms of consultation and dissemination. In part this chapter launches an investigation into the grammar of care as a point of departure for research under many similar conditions, trying to identify a discourse that might begin to make transparent structures of care and of its dialectic as an environment to which any wide-awake subject must orient as an environment of knowledge. The example of health care permits us to appreciate how plurality is intrinsic to any convention. This seems to me a good way to begin to frame the problem of care as ethical and of its bearing witness to the distinction between chronic and acute disease as an internal struggle against the mentality of rescuing as an end in order to hear the call of the particular patient “to the infinity of the moral” by learning to see and hear that summons as “contained in every particular face.” This

192

The Material City

relation, to the difference between the infinite and the finite in Hegel (1967) and Levinas (cited in McHugh 2005), between the intimate and the thing in Bataille (1992, especially part 1), possibly between the ontic and the ontological in Heidegger (1962, especially 21–67), between the view and the gaze in Lacan (1977), between discourse and the Absolute, and between rule and principle in work by McHugh and I ([1970] 2019 and 2003, respectively), and between the unconditioned and sovereign in Derrida (1993). All of these notations are partial objectifications of the Grey Zone (Blum 2011, introduction and chapter 1) that make reference to the summons emanating from the particular face of the person that McHugh reveals. When we translate the “surviving face” as the patient or any “object” of care, we can begin to appreciate how an ethical relationship to care remains one of cultivating conditions for such hearing and seeing.

The Breakthrough to Ethics: The Gift If jouissance has been discussed in this work primarily as embodied in Simmelian desire for more-than-life, it has been observed that breaking through to such hearing and seeing – the convention of the “breakthrough” – can be understood through the figure of the gift. Lewis Hyde ([1979] 2007) uses this distinction to represent the kind of breakthrough that art might do (or creativity) in relation to the market. This theme has been taken up by Simmel in his essay “Faithfulness and Gratitude” (Simmel 1950), Bataille, Lacan, and Derrida in the recognition that the gift stands for a challenge internal to the market (circulating system), much like the tendency to recover the oddness in the familiar that Wittgenstein discussed. If gift is understood as the condition that is given, then our question becomes: What gives the conditions for giving? Here, how are the conditions for seeing and hearing the person – for bearing witness – given? If the gift arises in relation to the economy and apart, it is not foreign to finite circulation but a relation of foreignness within the system (Mansfield 2010, 77). According to McHugh, the gift is the breakthrough to affirmative action that affirms the value of the difference, in any finite case, between its finitude and the infinitely more that it expresses. We might say that the gift is affirmative action or the action that affirms principle by making its appearance in the world possible (as if a gift), the gift of action to principle, giving it the gift of affirming whatever it is that its promise promises. The gift, disrupting the logic of exchange, of triage, of interaction of self and other, of mutually oriented, calculable, and intelligible (or not) identities, must depict the necessary and yet possibly impossible condition of responding to the summons of the infinity of the moral in any particular face. This call of care

The Legacy of Care

193

begins to disclose the Grey Zone. What the gift gives is not reciprocity, return, or exchange, as Simmel noted (and not simply the pleasure taken in giving that Simmel calls the gain of the sacrifice), but the kind of gain that returns to the subject – neither an acquisition nor an enhancement of productivity – a realization of subjectivity as in a coming back to oneself that seeks to dismember the mastery in this very gesture. In the current lingo I might say that the gift is the capacity to enjoy the rift (rent) in sovereignty. Through hospitality to the finite, one is hospitable.

The Difference in Circulation In a paper on the university over thirty years ago (Blum 1991), I formulated the affirmative action principle of an institution as its affirmation of a principled relation to the representative situation of the institution. This was named as such in order to travesty the cliché that honours the objective of fairness or equity as an end in itself, as if it is this that is a principled relationship. I intended to redirect this formula to what it seemed to assume, the affirmation of the practice of care (in that case, between student and teacher, and among colleagues, that is, care in teaching, in collegiality, and in respect for the voice of material) in ways that are more resonant than fairness. In accord with the canonical discussion from Plato on mixed company in the Republic, through Hegel on the roots of theorizing in the multitude or horde (later, ordinary language), I proposed that if any such principled relation must originate within the context that it means to challenge or revitalize (say, the operating objective that honours equity and its implementation), it must affirm in practice the implicit (latent?) value of the institution by destabilizing this objective in rethinking it. This means, as many have recognized, that a principled relation is both part of and apart from the relations it addresses in ways that demand what Kenneth Burke calls “desanctification” or the breaking through sanctified distinctions in play. Rancière’s distinction between being a participant and a spectator-two-in-one in this way captures this two-sidedness. What McHugh added was his demonstration of how such a breakthrough, since it affirms a principled relation in action, comes to view in any context as an engagement with the difference between the finite face and the “infinitely more” that it contains, and also that this formulation holds for any institution and for the finite face of its engagement with any representative situation. Inquiry should then pursue the question of how such conditions – such a focus upon this difference – materializes in an institution.

194

The Material City

As McHugh says of the triage situation, rights are enforced but its substance is not addressed ([1970] 2019, 136) which, applied to care, would show that its rights are enforced (in the acute condition) but that its substance is not addressed. The substance of a notion such as care, what it is and what it is not, is impossible to determine with finality, always leaving a trace of the “infinitely more” but always necessary to think and imagine as a measure (what Rancière calls the uncounted part). This means that in the context of acute illness, care tends to be treated in terms of a model of equity, whereas in that of chronic illness the question of the substance of care would be raised. Raising the question of care does not mean chasing after a definition but keeping measure in mind, keeping in mind that care needs to be distinguished to appear in the world as whatever distinctive relationship it affirms. McHugh says that affirmative action is conduct that performs a collective promise in that it “affirms in some act whatever it is that the promise promises” ([1970] 2019, 153). This leads us to ask after the substance of care, what kind of action does care promise? In other words, what kind of relationship to the commonplace does it affirm as a promise? The answer suggests a certain kind of relationship: namely, the desire to connect the finite face to the “infinitely more.” What affirms principle is action: affirming action is necessary for principle to make an appearance in life as one element of the commonplace. The hardhearted but reasonable response always asks how this (so-called) “infinitely more” can be determined in practice.

The Boy and the Infinitely More James Joyce radicalizes this engagement in a monologue from Ulysses that he created for the character Stephen the teacher, whose reflection upon the difference maintains loyalty both to the finite (the face of a student, the boy, his appearance, the omnipresent horde of peers and hockey sticks, the constraint of the lesson at hand), and to the infinite and unconditioned (the suppressed conversation circulating around images of mothering, childhood, and his own sources and anxiety) in ways that make manifest this difference between the finite and the infinite in a palpable rumination. The finite face of the boy, appearing in the traces of inept and graceless hesitation, seems to stimulate the moment of giving that Stephen must initiate and sustain. Here is the passage named the Nestor segment after that part of the Iliad because it seems to focus upon the relation of the young teacher Stephen to the old principal, Mr Deasy, as analogous to the exchange where Telemachus consults Nestor for advice that he cannot give. Commentators pass over this exchange

The Legacy of Care

195

between Stephen and the young student with cursory and formulaic remarks. I suggest, in contrast, that it begins to bring the complexity of care into focus. In other words, unlike the commentary, I am showing care for the passage. Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly showing an open copybook. His tangled hair and scraggly neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, date-shaped, recent and damp as a snail’s bed. He held out his copybook. The word Sums was written on the headline. Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal. “Mr. Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them to you, sir.” Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility. “Do you understand how to do them now?” he asked. “Numbers eleven to fifteen,” Sargent answered. “Mr. Deasy said I was to copy them off the board, sir.” “Can you do them yourself?” Stephen asked. “No, sir.” Ugly and futile; lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, born him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother’s prostrate body the fiery Colambanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig bunt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, scraped and scraped. Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather. Sargent peered askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the hollow knock of the balls and a call from the field. “Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?” “Yes, sir.” In long shady strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective

196

The Material City

genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid him from sight of others his swaddling bands. Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned. “The sum was done. – It is very simple,” Stephen said as he stood up. “Yes, sir. Thanks,” Sargent answered. “You had better get your stick and go out to the others,” Stephen said as he followed towards the door the boy’s graceless form. (Joyce 1922, 24–6) I use this passage partly to expose the temptation to view Joyce’s character Stephen as a sentimental mediator who joins finite and infinite by treating the boy as part of the great chain of being (as in recognizing as “all too human” that everyone has a mother and must be equal by virtue of that), or by identifying with him because he (Stephen) sees himself in the boy and the boy in himself, recognizing his own childhood and how he and the boy are both the Same and Other by being similar and different in palpable ways. Invariably this is the cursory interpretation that commentators make on the passage as if it displays an awakening of the relation of a self to another in the spirit of I and thou or a humane universalism that views us all as knotted in such a spiritual embrace. This reduces the “infinitely more” to an understanding that might be completed by an interpretation of the inscrutable finite face of the boy in an exchange of reciprocal mirroring where each could be familiar in principle to the other because each is simply an extension of the other. Other is not really alter but simply a facsimile of the same, another self. This type of interpretation fixes on a formula that is imaginary, unable to break through such a convention by engaging the enigma that it releases for the spectator (modelled by the figure of Stephen for the author). I suggest that what remains “infinitely more” is not such an interpretation but the undetermined and unconditional conversation on the force of source and maternity as disclosed in the finite face as an unknown history, perhaps evoking influences of Catholicism in the holy fervour of Saint Colambanus the Proselytizer, of influence and sexuality, of an unknown legacy of protectiveness and loss, of the impotence of women and children, of the anonymity of males and husbands, of the inevitable estrangement of intimacy between and among created beings as an anxious and irresolute inheritance, of the intersection of birth and death, of the unresolved place of longing, regret, and mystery in life; this finite face reveals the trace of an untold story of the suppressed history that must re-

The Legacy of Care

197

main the secret archive of any finite face, its torturous and tenuous connection to how it was made and continues to be remade in this particular face and what it makes disappear in and for the face and for one who would try to demystify its eventfulness. What the monologue raises is not the interpretive conundrum of Stephen and his mom, of Stephen and the boy as successors to moms long forgotten, but the unknown legacy of maternity to and for any finite face. Without the “infinitely more” the finite face will be abandoned to its graceless ineptitude to be contained in characterizations that make the boy a thing. And yet the breakthrough requires such a thing, such a face-to-face, as the beginning of a narrative here that is both necessary and unending. I am saying that what is Other to Stephen is not the boy and his mom or Stephen and his mom, but the fundamental and ambiguous situation of maternity and the mystery of how it comes to be in the way of the finite peculiarities registered as this face and the face of the one who confronts it as both the Same and Other. Care for the infinitely more of the face must begin with this convention of the face-to-face in order to break though the imaginary picture that gives it satisfaction as such. When Lacan says that Other does not answer, this is what he means: in some continuously vexing and unknown way, each finite face is connected to the archive of secrets “sitting silent and stony in the dark palaces of our hearts,” disclosing the infinitely more in each finite face and the unfinished and unfinishable story that remains as an object of desire fated to be irresolute. Now the “infinitely more” begins to make sense as a figure for the unknown remains of the finite, revealing in this way that what must always remain is the untold story of the finite face and the need for a retelling that can never complete it. Joyce the novelist makes his character Stephen exemplify that desire or wonder for the remains of that unfinished story, knowing full well that such desire as both necessary and impossible to fulfill is something that can only be given such as a gift, a gift of wonder.

Wonder and Wittgenstein’s Vision of the Finite-Infinite Border It would be strange but useful to turn to Wittgenstein as one who mediates this relationship in practice because we can begin to bring down to earth this position of wonder that links finite to infinite. Let me suggest: if the unconditioned and indeterminate aura of the “infinitely more” tempts us to conceive of ourselves as inarticulate or speechless, Wittgenstein suggests that in giving ourselves the gift of desire, by opening to the face of the finite and its apparent inelastic conventionality, we can make possible wonder itself.

198

The Material City

First, recall his oft-repeated counsel in relation to the finite face (what he calls ordinary language): “The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity … The real foundations of his inquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him” – that is, dialogue can be tyrannized by the unconscious (not just by the evil demon) and by the excess of minded mindlessness (Santner 2001) that is jouissance. What is healthy is a reflective relationship to usage – to speech and ideas – that can be derailed or inspired by the unconscious. What seems to prevent this reflective potential for Plato is that aspect of narcissism that leads us to desire a final, conclusive interpretation and validation of our beliefs and opinions. I have noted that the Republic tells the story of a subject whose beginning aptitude for the best as aristocratic is increasingly humbled by intimates and friends who have affection for this character, first as impractical and incapable of defending oneself in worldly affairs (Wittgenstein 1958, 129, 150). From this he proceeds through a translation of hospitality to the finite that shifts attention from conformity to the model and its expectations (“the picture”), to the manner of “presenting the model as what it is, as an object of comparison – as, so to speak, a measuring rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond” (Wittgenstein 1958, 131, 51). Here the liniments of hospitality to the finite face are sketched as a beginning and not an end in the canonical formula that invites us to examine how the representation is done in many ways (plurality) and how its application makes reference not to externals to which it seems to refer but to the activity of making reference itself and to the expectations to which it does or does not live up. Yet the indefinite and apparently limitless connotations suggested by the usage can create a paralysis that arrests thought, subjecting the thinker to inaction between this infinity and the finite unless prepared to carry on in the following way: We ask “What does ‘I am frightened’ really mean, what am I referring to when I say it?” And of course we find no answer or one that is inadequate. The question is: “In what sort of context does it occur?” I can find no answer if I try to settle the question, “What am I referring to? What am I thinking when I say it?” by repeating the expression of fear and at the same time attending to myself, as it were observing my soul out of the corner of my eye. In a concrete case I can indeed ask “Why did I say that, what did I mean by it?” – and I might answer the question too; but not on the ground of observing what accompanied the speaking. And my answer would supplement, paraphrase the earlier utterance. What is fear? What does “being afraid” mean? If I wanted to define it in a single shewing – I should play-act fear.

The Legacy of Care

199

Could I also represent hope in this way? Hardly. And what about belief? Describing my state of mind (fear, say) is something I do in a particular context … Is it, then, so surprising that I use the same expression in different games? And sometimes as it were between the games? And do I always talk with very definite purpose? – And is what I say meaningless because I don’t? (Wittgenstein 1958, 188) Wittgenstein sets out to dramatize the position of one inhabiting the space between the finite face of the word and its infinitely more, a position that he travesties in the monologue of an ideal speaker that he represents as asking certain questions of the action (ironically, in this case, “fear,” because fear is apropos for the mediator lodged between the palpable finite face and the indeterminate otherness that it evokes), showing especially how the mediator as such can overcome the temptation to experience emptiness and speak meaningfully in such a position. Wittgenstein’s ideal speaker is playful with himself, imagining experiments with the usage under varying conditions, or play-acting with the idea (doing travesty) as moves designed to counteract immobility. This temptation, which Derrida calls paralysis in another context, and which Lacan identifies in the therapeutic encounter with its resistances and counter-transference, Wittgenstein translates into the problem of ethics when the actor runs up against the limits of language in trying to say what is the essence of the case. In some way, joining the finite word to its apparently infinite resonances seems like impossible fine tuning, as if precision or exactness is lacking (but then, perhaps it is the lack that lacks as Lacan says). “The word is on the tip of my tongue.” What is going on in my consciousness? That is not the point at all. Whatever did go on was not what was meant by that expression. It is of more interest what went on in my behavior. – “The word is on the tip of my tongue” tells you: the word which belongs here has escaped me, but I hope to find it soon. (1980, 219e) Wittgenstein is not criticizing the convention and seeking to replace it as if the finite formula is lacking (for, as he notes, that would be based on another expectation that might itself be lacking). Even better: all such expectations are lacking in the absence of hospitality that seeks to give them a foundation (the gift). Here, Wittgenstein begins to give the gift of a foundation to the formula “The word is on the tip of my tongue,” not by speculating on consciousness or pointing to some definitive behavior that would always accompany its enunciation, but by imagining a representative situation of problem solving (trying to make a moment of inarticulateness clear to an other as a means of affirming, in

200

The Material City

part, that one is oriented to what could be otherwise and knows what is going on). If hospitality to the finite enables this connecting to be done, such work gives conditions all around (to oneself, to the other, to the formula) in ways that must remain unfinished. The method of travesty here plays at innocence at times by acting as if it does not know the expression when it does, and on the other hand, acts as if it knows the answer by “defining it in a single shewing,” which it knows can only be the finite face of the expression or part of its story. Thus, for the mediator caught between finite and infinite, play-acting at either innocence or knowledge is a way of affirming the principle of being two in one, both finite and infinite as a person, showing in this way how care needs to respect this two-sidedness in the other (see Hyde 1998 for the model of such a mediator).

Speaking, Listening In his book, Harry Frankfurt uses an example that gives a misleading picture of Wittgenstein’s approach to care and to the structure of platitude that governs it. Because the finite face of the speech is typically registered as a cliché (“The word is on the tip of my tongue”), Wittgenstein’s caring relationship to speech and its “infinitely more” could never destroy the face as in an act of homicide. Frankfurt uses the example of Wittgenstein’s reply to his friend Fania Pascal after removal of her tonsils: “I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: ‘I feel just like a dog that has been run over.’ He was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like” (quoted in Frankfurt 2005, 24). Frankfurt sets out to show that Wittgenstein was not accusing her of lying but of being careless in her speech and of not trying to submit to “constraints of accurate representation” (32). This misleads us in identifying carelessness (which it might be) with unsupported uses of metaphor as if it is a case of comparing one situation (an operation) with another, unknown situation that is the issue, as in failed empiricism. He doesn’t say, “Indeed, how can thought be said to be on our tongues?” but asks us to think about how we use such figures to make reference to matters (such as being inarticulate at the moment) that may have nothing empirically to do with tongues and thoughts. To risk a pun, he is not giving our thinking a tongue-lashing! Similarly, he could not be saying to Fania, “Oh, you are doing incorrect description because you are not and never have been a dog!” Wittgenstein connects the finite speech and its apparent carelessness to the “infinitely more” register of desire reflected in her “feeling sorry for herself” and want-

The Legacy of Care

201

ing to elicit recognition in a situation that we today might call post-traumatic stress (after any surgery, even tonsil removal). Self-description in this specific situation makes use of whatever it needs in order to elicit a recognition of the suffering undergone. In the sense that Wittgenstein is exercised by Pascal’s laxity, it is through a desire to provide them both conditions for representing oneself in such a situation with greater fluency and artfulness. I would say that care for Pascal is exercised through hospitality to the finite speech that can orient to giving them both the gift of self-description and its witnessing and reception that could release them from the bondage of the finite alone so that they might awaken in each, reciprocally, some reverence for the art of representing what one suffers. The “real” object and problem-solving situation seems to me to be the situation of speaking and listening to one another in such a condition: How do we do care in speaking and listening to one another in a situation in which two are united by an asymmetrical attachment to some matter suffered by one and not by the other? Such situations are pervasive in everyday life, ranging from accounts of surgery to complaints, horror stories, renditions of bad news, and all sorts of texts of speaking and listening, where we need to connect the finite face to the infinitely more for all of us engaged in speaking and listening to one another. Now I say that the “infinitely more” summoned by the finite speech for theorizing is the reconnection to eloquence that it imagines for speaking and listening under bad conditions. More than this, the “real” object seems to be the phenomenon of “putting into words,” using examples such as “the tip of the tongue” and Pascal’s hyperbole, to disclose how what is masked is the eternal problem of the relationship to the unknown, whether death or knowledge, here dramatized in the most mundane faceto-face engagements of inarticulate speakers who aspire to say more than they can and fail, not because language lacks what would allow it to be completed but because that picture seems untrue to the (other) picture of mediation between the finite face and the infinitely more.

Conventions, Types, Formulae Think of the finite face of the boy in this story as the face of disease and illness, or of the patient. Now think of the category of disease or illness as a characterization of the finite face that, in the model of triage, collects all surviving faces as survivors without respect to their differences. Each disease category is, then, akin to a disaster that can be triaged for gravity, special needs, and the like, but in a way that respects all incumbents as uniform in relation to the disease as a type. If one of the diseased is an intimate or an enemy, thought will be developed regarding the particularity

202

The Material City

of the subject, but even then, the rule of fairness has safeguards for preventing the intrusion of bias. The patient as a member of the disease category is expected to be treated in the same way as all who are similarly subject to the classification and variations with respect to the disease are treated as technical differences in degree regarding different inflections or subtypes of the one disease. Any political relation to patients as a superordinate category to mobilize must contend with the mosaic of fractious and fragmented constituencies of each classification as self-interested advocates of partial positions. As in the method of triage in rescue operations, the equality of those classified as subject to one disease is expected to be enforced with standard methods and procedures of caretaking. Crosscutting the category of disease might be classifications of body parts that could collect as their “parts” different diseases (internal medicine, urology, vision, neurology), or different age breaks (geriatrics, childhood diseases) that collect as equals those with different diseases and such, but the presumed equality of incumbents in a category pervades the organization of care. Even the notion of emergency and its special space that collects all subordinate categories can exempt all other classifications for the moment by imposing a temporary uniformity upon its subjects in ways that make the particularity of patients irrelevant. The organization – spatial and hierarchic – of medicine and of the hospital itself recycles such an imaginary system, necessarily directed to the implementation of standardized procedures for anyone and everyone. The question, always pertinent, asks how the particularity of the patient insistently interrupts the exchange without making a spectacle or causing retributive responses. The auxiliary staff intervening between medical practitioners and patients has the burden and effrontery to manage, negotiate, and fine-tune the continuous struggle of patients to differentiate themselves in an environment of equals by demanding service of a quality that can only seem to hospital personnel as transgressions of the policy of equal and uniform treatment, or as gestures for advancing personal interests. Typically, such interruptions are only legitimated when a disruption in the form of error, mistake, or mechanical malfeasance might compel all to explore the question of responsibility in ways that implicitly bring to view the particularity of both victims and perpetrators.

Mistake, Error, Malfeasance By implication, we have already identified the economy of care as modelled after an acute situation of triage where the relation of the patient to the “infinitely more” is banned or disregarded because of exigencies that limit decision making

The Legacy of Care

203

to the immediate relief of distress (of all parties). The ethical implications of such a situation typically involve recovering the conditions for the emergency (disaster, event, accident) that made the method of rescue and triage necessary. The ethical dilemma of the acute situation (once triaging is done) is informed by the method of taking stock that inventories causes and conditions reconstructed as leading to the event, resulting in the development of curricula for preparing for such events in the future, and to systemic ways of ensuring preparedness and accountability. Therefore, in response to the acute condition of disaster, managing and monitoring the health of the people is conceived as a chronic condition of collective life that needs to be nurtured and organized in methodical ways. As applied to public health, the lessons of Ground Zero, New Orleans, and various epic disturbances, whether airplane crashes or natural disasters, is that collective life (a people) is essentially vulnerable and so needs to be continuously vigilant with respect to infrastructure of services that can prepare for such contingencies. The ethics of public health, informed by the spectre of triage as acute illness, is, then, oriented to accident prevention, safety, and the planning called “quality control.” How can this systemic concern relate to our discussion on the ethics of care as affirmative action?

The Affirmative Action of Care as Speaking and Listening Care for the face is not being equitable but the profane version of care typically begins with such a formulation of care as equitable. In our research, if we start from that position, we must always keep in mind the need for principle to measure our inquiry – say, as a question: Where is the person in/of the finite face? As a principle, care must affirm the promise to pursue this question in action that demonstrates the need and desire to orient to the unfinished remains that the face summons to view as the evocative traces needed to be bound as an untold story. Simmel allows us to begin to work with the equitable version of care and to approach the question of the person as both finite and infinite: We must still admit the existence of conflict between the two [individual and society]. One reason … is the fact that, in the individuals themselves, social elements fuse into the particular phenomenon called “society.” “Society” develops its own vehicles and organs by whose claims and commands the individual is confronted as by an alien party. A second reason results from another aspect of the inherency of society in the individual. For man has the capacity to decompose himself into parts and to feel any one of these

204

The Material City

as his proper self. Yet each part may collide with any other and may struggle for the dominion over the individual’s actions. This capacity places man … into an often contradictory relation with those among his impulses and interests that are not pre-empted by his social character. In other words, the conflict between society and individual is continued in the individual himself as the conflict among his component parts. (Simmel 1950, 59) If “society” inheres in the individual, it is by virtue of the individual’s capacity for decomposing into parts, a process that makes care for the finite face a method of being alive to the partiality of the face and the various special and particular alignments it suffers. In these terms, the parts might well be diseases in ways that make cancer one’s “proper self ” (as if one was identified solely and pre-eminently with the disease as a category), but then Simmel would note that those classified as such would vary among themselves in many ways (age, gender, race, class, and all whatnots), with each whatnot capable of forming another category as a uniform type with variations. We do not arrive at a person through predication because any characteristic can be seen as another constituency or type masking variations as “infinitely more.” The person in the cancer patient does not emerge in further characterizations that might provide additional specificity because the infinitely more continues to be summoned by every type. Care for the person can only be a pledge to listen for the infinitely more in any finite face. It is, then, listening as such that is the affirmative action of care.

Conclusion I have tried to honour the reader’s patience in following me this far by formulating the culture of the city as reflected more comprehensively than in the partial indications that we have reviewed, by recovering its sunken meaning as, in part, its commitment to justice that I suggest stands for care as the desire to bear witness or to listen for how signs of the infinitely more is expressed in the finite face. In this way I have tried to connect eros to justice as this kind of principled relationship in ways that can mark it as soulfulness.

CHAPTER 12

The Soul of the City/The Soul of Inquiry

Introduction We should appreciate at this point in the exposition how care, at the most fundamental level, is reflected in a relationship to language, to contemporary sensibilities legitimated in rules and norms that always must invite dismantling, and to a movement that strives to engage these constraints by exposing their ambiguity as a source of strength. Yet my exposition, influenced as it is by Plato’s conception of eros and the many permutations of this approach that I have used and explored, seems to focus exclusively on the soul of individuals. The question I must ask at this point is this: How might we formulate the soul of the city in ways that are not anthropomorphic and that can challenge the notion of soul as an essentialist fiction that is imagined by the unenlightened as their delusion? Put differently, how can we speak about the soul of the city (not only the individual, and not simply as an aggregate of individuals as if parts of a whole) as a desire to care for the infinitely more in the finite face? What in the conception of the city and its collective life could stand for the finite face and for the infinitely more? In part, I have already proposed an answer to these questions through the narrative that can be seen to treat the finite face of the city as the very indications described in earlier chapters as the writing of the city, its heritage and customs, its arts and work, its public life, and its approach to governing. Speaking of such indications as representations of the finite face of the city enables me to treat my narrative as the desire to see the infinite story that is revealed in the finite face. I have done this and need to develop this relationship further.

206

The Material City

The Finite Face of the City: Technology, Unease, Insignificant Detail In Joyce in Trieste, Michael McCourt (2000) reports on how James Joyce speaks of “making a brief list of what may be seen in the streets of a modern city: the electric tram, telegraph wires, the humble and necessary postman, the newsboys, the large commercial businesses, etc.” (164) as a way of exacerbating the tension in “modern progress” between its triumphant advance and the “unease” it releases: “in the midst of this complex and many-sided civilization the human mind, almost terrified by materialistic vastness, is bewildered, forsakes itself, and withers” (164). That is, the things that “are seen in the streets of the modern city” might appear, on the one hand, to be “trivial” and “transient,” or, on the other hand, as great accomplishments to be praised and celebrated, and both extremes must be understood as belonging to the city, to the “urban way of life” as part of the discourse collectivized in its name. These are the extremes of contempt (for the notion that technical progress is essential) and enthusiasm (for the notion that technical progress is essential). Yet, these extremes reduce the ambiguity in the experience of “terrifying vastness” by glossing the phenomenology of the city that remains undeveloped. The finite face of the city might seem to appear in this tension that shows itself in our relations to the objects, the uncanny experience of “unease” that accompanies “modern progress.” In this sense, the finite face of the city refers not simply to technology, to ordinary language, but to the peculiar bias of the city that appears as its manner, its expressiveness, even its poetry, part of what McCourt speaks of as the tension in “material progress” between advances in technology and the unease it produces, the “terrified” reply that becomes “bewildered, forsakes itself, and withers.” The finite face of the city might not just appear in “things” but in the moods and anxieties we discussed as parts of its eros.

Virginia Woolf’s Unease The urban way of life of the city tends to appear in the realistic novel of Joyce’s time in the very materialism of the city, imagined typically as the slight, imperceptible, volatile, and disorderly impressions of those subject to the city, to its pace and vitality. It is as if the tempo of the city is registered first in the impressions of its typified collective inner life, then represented in a language aiming to designate such a flux by embodying it in the word. Such a project typically

The Soul of the City/The Soul of Inquiry

207

leads to a critique of “materialism” as a familiar theme, expressed quite well in Virginia Woolf ’s review of some selected British fiction of her time: If we fasten … one label on all these books … [that of] materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring … Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. (1993, 7) Such “ill-fitting vestments” make reference to the external indicators of city life, also ruling much research, because in such gestures, the “essential thing” that is the spirit of the city seems to exceed and “refuses to be contained” in these categories. She sees that the spirit of the city must be revealed in its finite face as an infinite story that the writers she criticizes disregard by focusing on and fixating upon the details. The finite face of the city, not simply its technology and experience of unease, seems to be its “insignificant detail.” Woolf leads us to reflect on the possibility that what is most important or “essential” about the city as a phenomenon is its absorption in the trivial, transitory, and unimportant, its abandonment to, say, triviality itself. To find the infinite story in the finite face of the city might lie in exposing this absorption in banality, this loss of a sense of eloquence, by rethinking it as a loss that is redeemable through a recovery of eloquence. This desire, residing in the practice of travesty, would try to do an eloquent reshaping of trivial absorption as a vernacular peculiar to the city, as if banality suffers the loss of eloquence to which the voice of such care points and which it tries to redeem through the travesty of its method. How can we be eloquent about banality and its routinization in clichés, gossip, and declarations of this and that? We might see more clearly now that dwelling upon the trivial, transitory, and inessential is not what marks a materialist approach; that is only true if it dwells upon these undialectically as if essential and significant, as if, in her words, the significance of the insignificant is buried because they falsely take it as trivial and insignificant. The desire to “go beyond the words” begins to reinstate an interest in the proper place of the trivial, transitory, and inessential in the scheme of things and how the tension in this very relationship is the “interior” scene of the city. Note in Woolf ’s sense, “going beyond” is not a flight but rather stays with the word and listens to its overtones as if bearing witness by doing a listening that is a second hearing attuned to what is unsaid. With respect to what is unsaid of the city, of a specific city, we might begin to search for occasions in which its unease

208

The Material City

shows itself as a display after its own fashion, of its own specific manner. Research might present this situation dramatically as a story that unfolds in time.

The Material City and the Love of Incidentals What if Virginia Woolf ’s distinction between significance and insignificance, which she says materialism confuses, is translated as follows: What is significant is the reflection upon mortality alongside of which everything else pales, making anything and everything seem insignificant. That is, it is not that we need deny the most mundane thoughts and concerns by which we are exercised, but, rather, that these concerns become insignificant if we do not work through them as part of an ongoing reflection upon their limits. What if we conceive of opening ourselves to the relation of the infinite story in the finite face of the city as a way of breaking through to thinking of mortality as attuned to the limits of the word and deeds that we encounter in formulaic ways? One of the so-called mysteries prosaically caricatured as existential refers to how we (individually and collectively) understand our existence in time and what action(s) to take in relation to such an ambiguous problem. This mystery, which Nietzsche (1956) called the “groundlessness of being,” has aesthetic overtones (because it has to be seen as such and not everyone is prepared) and ethical overtones (because any implication for a course of action as better or worse is neither indivisible nor self-evident). Given the groundlessness of Being, why is inaction not our only alternative? Consider that the requirement that unambiguous action must be taken in the face of such ambiguity makes self-composition under the conditions that we inherit a necessity as “equipment for living” (Burke 1957, 157). The need to act unambiguously in the face of the temptation of inaction frames the problem of desire. While this seems a universal problem, of any age or period (an eternal “worry”), its modern inflection in the arts and sciences is expressed as the experience of the loss of the referent (and its various manifestations as the loss of the essent, of the Absolute, of the signified, of legitimacy, of totality). Now we can ask: What if the infinite story in the finite face is disclosed as the way the aura of mortality must hover over the detail, whether transitory and trivial? Here, we might state Nietzsche’s version of travesty: the question of Being and non-Being is the infinite story revealed in the most mundane and innocuous usage as expressed in its erotic landscape. If it is this erotic tumult of the city that is its finite face and that should be viewed as the recurrent problem that must be taken up, and this can inspire us

The Soul of the City/The Soul of Inquiry

209

to find the infinite story that this reveals, taking it up or not can be a critical moment, positive if we break through and negative if we remain inactive. Why is inaction negative? Benjamin provides an answer: “In every era the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it” (1977, 255). The overpowering conformism that characterizes every period is registered in the fashions in thought that govern the antics, moods, and mentality of the great numbers, always perpetuated and induced by those whose advantages are supported and legitimated by social institutions that repetitiously play out the mysterious inheritance of historical conditions. The danger that he mentions is the desire of conformism itself and its capacity for extinguishing dialogue that could speak to it, because the ways and means of speaking and thinking together are considered disturbing and inefficient. I have even viewed our Culture of Cities project as vulnerable to this danger in an academic context. I have formulated an approach to inquiry and research throughout this work that responds to this “danger,” which I see reflected in its institutionalized expurgation of ambiguity in meaning by the great numbers. As Benjamin implies, this danger is recurrent and inflected in different ways as a danger precisely because it threatens the desire for more-than-life, always raising the prospect of extinguishing the soul, and so, of extinguishing the best of such desire. In our time, this danger is rendered palpable, as we should know, in the simple-minded but vitriolic extremism of the great numbers of all political stripes. Today, fashion materializes in the dogmatic phantasies of conspiracy of the socalled Right and the infantile phantasies of retribution of the so-called Left, as two caricatures of such conformism at work, with many shapes in between. “Perhaps one day this civilization will produce a culture” (Wittgenstein 1980, 64e). In Lacanian on the individual level (Lacan 1977, 53), it is as if the resistances of the subject, reflected in symptoms and defensive ways of working through ambiguity, become repeated in an(y) action, but in ways that can become opportune for research on travesty, or for a moment of awakening. I have described the creation of situations that use ethical collisions toward that end, designed to make the experience of awakening a free space of meaning. Analogically, and to risk the charge of personification, it is as if the city repeats its primal repression in its pseudo-mutual acceptance of “conformism,” as if necessary for deferring resentment and conflict, while always keeping alive the possibility of an awakening to its own resistance.

210

The Material City

The Mundane as Travesty: Finding the Story In emphasizing the desire to “go beyond” words, I note how this can apply to our desire to go beyond exegetical accounts and histories. In this respect, I have implied that Bonner’s (2013) analysis of the fascination elicited by strong teaching can apply to exegetical views of the history of ideas canonized in academia by offering a challenge that shows how great philosophers and movements in the arts can be seen as loci of discourses united by the erotic spell cast upon followers. For example, we can think of Marx and Freud, of how Heidegger moved Arendt, Gadamer, Levinas, and many others, how Wittgenstein animated his British students and American fans, how logical positivism and its disciples created acolytes and murderous enemies, how French post-structuralism elicits the worship of its fans and the accusation of enemies, and how every movement in the arts has created its replies. Here, academic histories and exegeses can be reformulated as the discourse of not only fans, accusers, and dedicated followers, but of users who – as specialists or experts – satisfy Serres’s conception of parasites in ways that include pundits and commentators and recall Karl Marx’s quip about how crime has created criminologists. Since I do the same in my work with figures such as Plato, Simmel, Wittgenstein, and others, the question I raise seeks to understand how the use of the figure, which is necessary in our work, is other than parasitic. If it seems to be the same as all others, how is it other than these others? If the relation of follower to influence elicits a discourse of replies as fans, disciples, accusers, and users, this is life; how can we desire to do and be more than this – to attain more-than-life? Plato’s work seems exemplary: if we see that he is not simply a fan or a disciple of Socrates, despite what many say, but one who relates to the figure by designing a story or situation that represents the struggle of such an ideal speaker to be more-than-life, perhaps we can imagine a path. We dedicate ourselves not to worship or to description but to a story that shows care for the figure. The story designs a situation that shows the tension and work in the relationship between the finite face and the infinite story to be revealed in the struggle of a character, but a story suffered in its exposition by the author too. The author and character are semblances of each other insofar as they suffer the desire for more-than-life, to leave something of value. In this way, I use previous texts and authors that have influenced me as voices that enhance the dialogue created in and as the story, thereby functionally and aesthetically dramatizing the motif of the story.

The Soul of the City/The Soul of Inquiry

211

Travesty as Comedy In this work I have proposed that when we make reference to the city, we make reference to a method of viewing the city; and that such a method simultaneously makes reference to a method of viewing anything. The validity of any such method of viewing is not provided by some set of facts external to it, since any notion of facts is determined by the method of viewing. The focal point of this discussion has to be on such concerns and questions about how different methods of viewing are best as what Kenneth Burke calls equipment for living, for which there is no final solution. I have said that concentrating on this focal point is similar to finding the infinite story (the focal point) in the finite face (the representation). Let me impose upon the reader by repeating the excerpt from Wittgenstein: “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning” (Wittgenstein 1980, 16e). Is this “background” nothing other than a version of the intangible heritage, whether of person or city? Or better, of the infinitely more displayed in the finite face? As Benardete (1989) suggests, for Plato this background must even provide for the fictional character of idols of truth, beauty, justice, and the second sailing as necessary and desirable equipment for living, as illusory in their way. This statement is not intended as an apology but as a recognition of the fundamental ambiguity of any interpretive terrain and the dialogue that it must create as exemplified in this work and our projects. Living with such an inconclusive conclusion entails the acceptance of the fundamental ambiguity that Lacan memorialized in the statement that the Other does not answer, that the Other desires to strip away the gaze illuminated by our desire for a final interpretation and an end to ambiguity to induce our acceptance of this condition. Such acceptance could and should lead to examples of the play of inquiry that I try to develop in this work. Such inquiry, as an artful practice that – in Freud’s terms – can see matters of magnitude in the microcosm of details, or imagine a story of significance in the mundane conditions of everyday life, and so seems to require a capacity for analogical reflection that must be fundamentally aesthetic and disciplined. Again, Wittgenstein’s conclusion – “It’s a great temptation to try to make the spirit explicit” (1980, 8e) – discloses the desire to connect the finite and the infinite. Yet, because of this temptation and the impossibility of a final hermeneutic solution to it reflected in the fact that “We are engaged in a struggle with language,” Wittgenstein can say, “I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition”

212

The Material City

(1980, 11e, 24e). That we cannot have hermeneutic closure is analogous to our inability to live forever as a limit that we bear and try impossibly to overcome. In this book, in response to such ambiguity as promised at the start, I have tried to bring together justice and eros in the figure of the Good as the desire to connect the finite face to the “infinitely more.” The method of travesty that I have proposed throughout designs researchable situations that force subjects to engage the ambiguity of a notion – whether innocuous, like a greeting, or majestic, as colonialism – as an occasion for discussion that can reveal their methods of intended problem solving. Seeing the large in the small – say, the “large” problem of engaging ambiguity in the “small” occasion of the greeting – is similar to seeing the infinite story in the finite face, or, to go further, to seeing the relation to the groundlessness of being in any and every mundane exchange, as if what is really repressed is the relationship of the unspoken to Being and non-Being that is buried in any mundane usage. The contrast between the large and the small that such analogical thinking creates makes transparent the discourse and its common problem in ways that are comedic (see Patrick Colfer [2016] for a discussion of this movement from tragedy to comedy, especially at 213). Thus, Wittgenstein’s vision of tragedy invites us to see in the finite face (“I feel just like a dog that has been run over”) its relationship to the infinite story (co-speaking between people trying to recover common ground in relating to an injury that one and not the other has suffered) as part of his strategy for seeing in ordinary language (the finite face) the way the protype of analysis is maintained (the infinite story). In this sense, the conception of the aesthetics of inquiry works as an incentive that invites the inquirer to resist a demand for closure, by accepting a comedic perspective to the world in Baudelaire’s sense: “Any text that offers itself as an interpretive gesture towards the world, but that subverts the finality, of the offering, displays that refusal of self-totalization that I call comicality” (MacInnes 1988, 92). On the ambiguity that such an inquirer engages in research, Didi-Huberman says that it draws from its kind of negativity the strength of a multiple deployment; it makes possible not one or two univocal significations, but entire constellations of meaning, of which we must accept never to know the totality and the closure, constrained as we are to make our way incompletely through their virtual labyrinth … [The image] is situated at the junction of a proliferation of possible meanings, whence it draws its necessity, which it condenses, displaces, and transfigures. So perhaps we must call it a symptom, the suddenly manifested knot of an arborescence of associations or conflicting meanings. (Didi-Huberman [1990] 2005, 18–19)

The Soul of the City/The Soul of Inquiry

213

A remarkable feature of George Simmel’s approach to theorizing the material city was his desire to find breathing space in the city amid the multitude in ways that lead him to characterize the human tragedy as reflected in our ways of trying to solve this problem of mediating absolutism and relativism, of prioritizing oneself as a one and only or as a one among many, of coming to terms with this twosidedness of number one. In this way, Simmel, a most important influence in my book, is such a resource and more, a topic, personified in his figure as the theorist in and of the city, as the ideal speaker that I have discussed. Because Simmel’s desire for breathing space is a desire for separation in the city, and this desire materializes in a concern for form, we call Simmel aristocratic, not in the conventional sense of a privileged social class, but as a reflection of the desire to both separate and mediate the relationship of life to form (of participant to spectator), showing us how to inhabit the watery grave that we discussed earlier, the contrast between the wet (life) and the dry (form). In this respect, I have implicitly taken up what Jameson ([1961] 1992) calls Marx’s challenge to formulate the positive and negative mix of capitalism by seeing it as one specific articulation of the two-bodied nature of the materialist imaginary – as both monstrous and malleable – and therefore as perhaps the paradigmatic ethical collision of our time, a situation of problem solving that we work out as best we can as a terrain open to resignation, paths of healing, and attempted escape, but also to theorizing and, constantly, to the relief of breathing space through the art of inquiry.

References

Achebe, Chinua. 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Sherwood. (1919) 1999. Winesburg, Ohio. Athens: Ohio University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. – 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1961. Between Past and Future. London: Faber & Faber. – 1971. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Aristotle. 1946. The Works of Aristotle. Vol. 11, Rhetorica. Translated by W.R. Roberts. Edited by J.A. Smith and W.D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press. – 1959. De Rhetorica. Translated and edited by W.D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Artaud, Antonin. 1970. The Theatre and Its Double: Essays. London: Calder & Boyars. Ashton, Jennifer. 2002. “‘Rose Is a Rose’: Gertrude Stein and the Critique of Indeterminacy.” Modernism/Modernity 9 (4): 581–604. Bailey, Steve. 2008. “Performing Theory in the Theatre of Hypermodernity: Dramaturgy and Pragmatism in the Urban Present.” In Alternative Histories of Urban Consumption: Alternative Geschichten urbanen Konsums, edited by Susan Ingram, 137–46. Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag. – 2016. “Dasein/Analysis: Blum and McHugh between Ethnomethodological Heresy and the Continental Tradition.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 169–83. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

216

References

Balzac, Honoré de. 2010. Treatise on Elegant Living. Translated by Napoleon Jeffries. Cambridge: Wakefield Press. Bambach, Charles, and Theodore George. 2019. “Introduction: Poeticizing and Thinking.” In Philosophers and Their Poets: Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy since Kant, edited by Charles Bambach and Theodore George. Albany: State University of New York Press. Barrett, Colin. 2022. “You Write a Book and – My God – People Expect You to Know What It’s About.” Irish Times, 2 March 2022. https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/books/colin-barrett-you-write-a-book-and-my-god-people-expect-youto-know-what-it-s-about-1.4811356. Barthes, Roland. 1993. Mythologies. London: Vintage Press. Bataille, Georges. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Edited by Allan Stoekl. Translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – 1992. Theory of Religion. New York: Zone Books. Baudelaire, Charles. 1972. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Translated by P.E. Charvet. Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin Books. Baudrillard, Jean. (1970) 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Sage. – 1983. Simulations. Edited by Sylvère Lotinger. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Phil Beitchman. New York: Semiotexte. – 1990. Seduction. New York: St Martin’s Press. – 2001. Impossible Exchange. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. – 2003. Passwords. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. – 2010. Carnival and Cannibal, or The Play of Global Antagonism. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Seagull Books. Baudrillard, Jean, and Jean Nouvel. 2002. The Singular Objects of Architecture. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Becker, Gary. 2009. Human Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beiner, Ronald. 2005. “The Soul of the Tyrant, and the Souls of You and Me: Plato’s Understanding of Tyranny.” In Confronting Tyranny: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, edited by Toivo Koivukoski and David Edward Tabachnick, 181–96. Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield. Benardete, Seth. 1969. Herodotean Inquiries. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. – 1989. The Second Sailing in Plato’s Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1977. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. – Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. Edited by Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books.

References

217

– 1996. “Fate and Character.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 1, 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 201–6. Cambridge, ma: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. – 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso. – 1999. The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, ma: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bennett, Jonathan. 1964. Rationality. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Berger, Michael M. 2002. “Let Genius Soar above Tragedy: Banish the Bland – N.Y. Monument Calls for Greatness.” Los Angeles Times, 28 August 2002. http://articles. latimes.com/2002/aug/28/opinion/oe-berger28. Last accessed 11 July 2022. Bergson, Henri. (1900) 1956. “Laughter.” In Comedy, edited by Wylie Sypher, 59–190. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. – 2000. The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Birchall, B.C. 1981. “Hegel’s Notion of Aufheben.” Inquiry 24 (1): 75–103. Blum, Alan. 1977. “Criticalness and Traditional Prejudice: Science as the Perfect Art of Our Time.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 2 (1): 97–124. – 1991. “The Melancholy Life World of the University.” Dianoia 2 (1): 1–16. – 1993. “Travesty.” In Studies in Symbolic Interaction: A Research Annual, vol. 15, edited by Norman K. Denzin. Greenwich, ct: Jai Press. – 1994. “The Ethical Face of Commonplace Malice: Convolutions of the Divided Subject.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 16 (1): 215–49. – 1996. “Panic and Fear: On the Phenomenology of Desperation.” Sociological Quarterly 37 (4): 673–98. – 2001. “Voice and Its Appropriation: The Ventriloquist and the Dummy.” Poiesis: A Journal of the Arts and Communication 3:111–14. – 2003. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. – 2005. “Ground Zero comme spectacle.” Translated by Geneviève Perreault. Sociologie et sociétés 37 (1): 87–108. – 2007. “Comparing Cities: On the Mutual Honouring of Peculiarities.” In Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities. Edited by Johanne Sloan, 15–51. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2008. “Health, Desire, City: Theorizing and the Method of Analogy.” In Alternative Histories of Urban Consumption, edited by Susan Ingram, 19–49. Vienna: Mille Tre Verlag. – 2010. “The Imaginary of Self-Satisfaction: Reflections on the Platitude of the ‘Creative City.’” In Circulation and the City: Essays on Mobility and Urban Culture

218

References

Circulation, edited by Will Straw and Alexandra Boutros, 64–93. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2011. The Grey Zone of Health and Illness. Bristol, uk: Intellect Press. – 2013. “Motive, Desire, Drive: The Discourse of Force.” Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology 4 (2): 5–19. – 2014a. “Durkheim’s Ruse: The Concept as a Seduction.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 39 (4): 38. – 2014b. “The Ordeal of Solitude.” History of the Human Sciences 27 (2): 118–32. – 2015. “Guide(s) for the Perplexed: Science and Literature as Equipment for Living.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 48 (1): 54–72. – 2016. “On the Unending Beginning of Social Inquiry.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 263–88. London: Routledge. – 2017a. The Dying Body as a Lived Experience. London: Routledge. – 2017b. “The Mental Life of the Metropolis.” In Place, Space and Hermeneutics, edited by Bruce Janz, 301–78. New York: Springer. – “Delicacy, Desire, and Dream in the Work of Peter McHugh: Towards a Sociology of Jouissance.” In Redefining the Situation: The Writings of Peter McHugh, edited by Kieran Bonner and Stanley Raffel, 243–57. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Blum, Alan, and Peter McHugh. 1971. “The Social Ascription of Motives.” American Sociological Review 36 (1): 98–109. – 1984. Self Reflection in the Arts and Sciences. Atlantic Highlands, nj: Humanities Press. Bond, Henry. 2009. Lacan at the Scene. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Bonner, Kieran. 1997. A Great Place to Raise Kids: Interpretation, Science, and the Urban-Rural Debate. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2008. “Arendt’s Concept of Action: The Tension between Citizen Participation and Planning in Dublin.” In Acts of Citizenship, edited by Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen, 137–59. London: zed Books. – 2010. “Temple Bar, Density, and Circulation: The City as a Terrain of Many Voices.” In Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture, edited by Alexandra Boutros and William Straw, 258–80. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2011a. “Exciting, Intoxicating and Dangerous: Some Tiger Effects on Ireland and the Culture of Dublin.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 37 (1–2): 50–75. – 2011b. “The Illness of Hope, the Cure of Truth and the Difference of Principle: A Reflexive Analysis of Antigone’s and Meursault’s Confrontation with Death.” In Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability, edited by Tristanne Connolly, 43–56. Bristol, uk: Intellect Press.

References

219

– 2013. “Eros and Ironic Intoxication: Profound Longing, Madness, and Discipleship in Plato’s Symposium and in Modern Life.” History of Human Sciences 26 (5): 114–31. – 2014. “Principles, Dialectic and the Common World of Friendship: Socrates and Crito in Conversation.” History of Human Sciences 27 (2): 3–25. – 2016. “Dialectic, Reflexivity and Good Troublesome Company.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 241–60. London: Routledge. Bonner, Kieran, and Stanley Raffel, eds. 2019. Redefining the Situation: The Writings of Peter McHugh. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Braudel, Ferdinand. 1985. The Structures of Everyday Life. Vol. 1 of Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Translated by Siân Reynolds. London: William Collins. Burke, Kenneth. 1957. The Philosophy of Literary Form. New York: Vintage Books. Cacciari, Massimo. 1996. Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point. Translated by Rodger Friedman. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Calvino, Italo. 1986. Mr Palomar. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Camus, Albert. (1946) 2000. The Rebel. London: Penguin. Carson, Anne. 1986. Eros the Bittersweet. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Casemajor, Nathalie, and Will Straw. 2017. “The Visuality of Scenes: Urban Cultures and Visual Scenescapes.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 7 (2): 4–19. Cavell, Stanley. 1969. Must We Mean What We Say? New York: Charles Scribner. – 1995. “Emerson’s Constitutional Amending: Reading ‘Fate.’ In Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, edited by Stanley Cavell, 12–41. Cambridge, ma: Blackwell. Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. 2019. Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Colapinto, John. 2002. “The Kid and His Council.” New York Times Magazine, 6 October 2002, 91–4. Colfer, Patrick. 2016. “Collaboration and the Birth of Comedy: From the Symbolic to the Real in the Development of Analysis.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 202–14. London: Routledge. Collingwood, R.G. 1938. An Essay on Philosophical Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connell, Sophia. 2018. “Parallels between Tyrant and Philosopher in Plato’s Republic.” Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 35:447–77. Damisch, Hubert. 2001. The Narcissistic City. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Davis, Whitney. 2006. “How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age.” October 117:71–98. Debray, Régis. 2000. Transmitting Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

220

References

de Certeau, Michel. 1998. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Coulanges, Fustel. 1955. The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Rome and Greece. Translated by Willard Small. New York: Doubleday. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. – 1995a. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1995b. On the Name. Translated by David Wood. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. – 1995c. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Descartes, René. 1960. Discourse on Method and Meditations. Translated by Laurence J. Lafleur. Indianapolis, in: Bobbs-Merrill. Deleuze, Gilles. (1995) 2005. Pure Immanence: Essays of a Life. Translated by Anne Boyman. 2nd ed. New York: Zone Books. – 2003. “And Say the Animal Responded?” In Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, edited by Cary Wolfe, 121–46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan. Diamond, Cora. 2008. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.” In Philosophy and Animal Life, 43–89. New York: Columbia University Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. (1990) 2005. Confronting Images: Confronting the Ends of a Certain History of Art. University Park, pa: Penn State University Press. DiManno, Rosie. 2002. “Best Memorial Is a Living One.” Toronto Star, 9 September 2002. Durkheim, Émile. 1933. The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by George Simpson. New York: Macmillan. – 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Translated by J.A. Spaulding and C.G. Simson III. New York: Free Press. – 1965. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Free Press. Elias, Norbert. 1978. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, vol. 1. Translated by Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell. Oxford: Polity Press. Ellul, Jacques. (1954) 1964. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books. Eyers, Tom. 2017. Lacan and the Concept of the “Real.” Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave Macmillan. Feesey, Richard. 2016. “Expats.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 140–55. London: Routledge.

References

221

Ferguson, Francis. 2004. Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferris, Joshua. 2007. Then We Came to the End. New York: Little Brown and Company. Fineman, Mia. 1999. “Ecce Homo Prostheticus.” New German Critique, Special Issue on Weimar Visual Culture, 76:85–114. Fink, Bruce. 2004. Lacan to the Letter. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Finn, Ed. 2017. What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. – 2005. Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge. Foster Wallace, David. 1987. The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin Books. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan. London: Tavistock. Frankfurt, Harry G. 2005. On Bullshit. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Freud, Sigmund. (1914) 1991. On Narcissism – An Introduction. Edited by Joseph Sandler, Ethel Spector Person, and Peter Fonagy. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press. – (1915) 1950. “Repression.” In Collected Papers, vol. 4, translated by Joan Riviere, 84–97. London: Hogarth. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. 2004. Studies in Hysteria. Translated by Nicola Luckhurst. London: Penguin Books. Fromm, Eric. 1941. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. Gane, Mike. 1983. “The Sacred Language.” Economy and Society 12 (1): 1–47. Gans, Eric. 1982. “Beckett and the Problem of Modern Culture.” SubStance 11 (2): 3–15. – 1993. Originary Thinking. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Garfinkel, Harold 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood, nj: Prentice-Hall. Gelley, Andrew. 1995. Unruly Examples. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis, in: Bobbs-Merrill. – 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine Press. – 1974. Frame Analysis. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Goldberger, Paul. 2002. “Comment: Up from Zero.” New Yorker, 29 July 2002, 29–30. Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Language of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett, 196. Gopnik, Adam. 2016 “Jane Jacobs’ Street Smarts.” New Yorker, 26 September 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-street-smarts.

222

References

– 2018 “Why Has Crime Declined So Much in America?” New Yorker, 12 and 19 February 2018, 92–7. Gornick, Vivian. 2016. The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Grenzer, Elke. 2001. “Setting the Stage for a New Germany: Architecture and the Scene of Berlin.” Public 22–3:219–42. – 2002. “The Topographies of Memory in Berlin: The Neue Wache and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 11 (1): 93–110. – 2010. “Material Losses.” Public 42:57–66. – 2018. “Algorithms of Memory: The 9/11 Museum.” Unpublished paper for the Culture of Cities project. Grimwood, Tom. 2021. The Shock of the Same: An Anti-philosophy of Cliché. Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield. Hallward, Peter. 2000. “The Singular and the Specific: Recent French Philosophy.” Radical Philosophy 99:6–19. Hardy, Matthew. 2004. “The Renaissance of the Traditional City.” Axess Magasin 3:23–7. – ed. 2008. The Venice Charter Revisited: Modernism, Conservation and Tradition in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hegel, G.W.F. 1967. The Logic. Translated by William Wallace. London: Oxford University Press. – 1971. Philosophy of Mind. Translated by Walter Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press. – 1981. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. London: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1961. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Garden City, ny: Anchor Books. – 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Henderson, Andrea K. 2008. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzog, Todd. 2002. “Crime Stories: Criminal, Society, and the Modernist Case History.” Representations 80:34–61. Hooper, Anthony. 2013. “The Memory of Virtue: Achieving Immortality through Imagination in Plato’s Symposium.” Classical Quarterly 63 (2): 543–7. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. 1956. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction.” Psychiatry 19 (3): 215–29. Hull, David. 2015. The Man Who Remembered the Moon. Toronto: Dumagrad Books.

References

223

Hydaralli, Saeed. 2016. “The Complaint: An Analysis.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 156–66. London: Routledge. Hyde, Lewis. (1979) 2007. The Gift. New York: Vintage Books. – 1998. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. ibm Corporation. 2017. “Cognitive Government: Enabling the Data-Driven Economy in the Cognitive Era.” imb Corporation, accessed 20 February 2018. www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ST&infotype=SA& htmlfid=GVJ03029USEN&attachment=GVJ03029USEN.PDF. Jacobs, Jane. 1969. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House. James, William. (1890) 1913. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Jameson, Frederick. (1961) 1992. Post Modernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, nc: Duke University Press. Jansson, Andre. 2005. “Re-encoding the Spectacle: Stigmatization in the ‘City of Tomorrow.’” Urban Studies 4 (10): 1671–91. Joselit, David. 2003. “An Allegory of Criticism.” October 103: 3–13. Josipovici, Gabriel. 2010. Whatever Happened to Modernism? New Haven, ct: Yale University Press Joyce, James. 1922. Ulysses. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head. Julien, Francois. 2002. “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” Critical Inquiry 28 (4): 803–24. Kaminsky, Jack. 1962. Hegel on Art. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1952. The Critique of Judgment. Translated by J.H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Publishing. Karatani, Kojin. 1995. Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money. Edited by Michael Speaks. Translated by Sabu Kohso. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Karp, Julia. “Human Capital Ideology Is Neoliberalism’s Last Line of Defense.” Share the World, accessed 1 June 2022. https://sharetheworld.club/human-capitalideology-is-neoliberalisms-last-line-of-defense. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1962. The Present Age. Translated by Alexander Dru. New York: Harper Perennial. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1997. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Edited by John Johnston. London: Routledge. Kolb, Lawrence. 1986. The Critique of Pure Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kracauer, Siegfried. (1963) 1995. The Mass Ornament. Translated with an introduction by Thomas Levin. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Bk 11, The Four Fundamental

224

References

Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. – 1991. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Bk 2, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–55. Edited by Jacques Alain-Miller. Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. London: W.W. Norton and Company. – 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Bk 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. – 2016. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Bk 23, The Sinthome. New York: Polity Press. Laplanche, Jean. 1976. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. – 1999. Essays on Otherness. Edited by John Fletcher. London: Routledge. Laurier, Eric. 2016. “Reunions: Standing and Turning Relationships.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 111–26. London: Routledge. Lockwood, Patricia. 2021. No One Is Talking About This. New York: Riverhead Books. Lynes, David. 2016. “Analytic Desire and Everyday Life: On the Practice of Theory in On the Beginning of Social Inquiry.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 229–40. London: Routledge. Macherey, Pierre. 2011. Hegel or Spinoza. Translated by Susan M. Ruddick. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacInnes, John W. 1988. The Comical as Textual Practice in Les Fleurs du Mal. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida. MacIsaac, Andy. 2016. “Meeting Government Challenges with Cognitive.” LinkedIn, 21 January 2016. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/meeting-government-challengescognitive-andy-macisaac. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1985. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. London: Routledge. Mansfield, Nick. 2010. The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity between Freud, Bataille and Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press. Martin, George. 2021. “Zones of Ad-Hoc: Smart Cities and the Future: Local Engagements in Urban Administration.” PhD diss., York University. McBride, Eimear. 2020. Strange Hotel. Toronto: McClelland and Stuart. McCourt, John. 2000. The Bloom Years: Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. McGuirk, James. 2017. Eros, Otherness, Tyranny: The Indictment and Defence of the Philosophical Life in Plato, Nietzsche and Lévinas. Nordhausen, de: Verlag Transgott BautzGmbh.

References

225

McHugh, Peter. 1968. Defining the Situation: The Organization of Meaning in Social Interaction. Indianapolis, in: Bobbs-Merill. – (1970) 2019. “A Common Sense Conception of Deviance.” In Redefining the Situation: The Writings of Peter McHugh, edited by Kieran Bonner and Stanley Raffel, 70–99. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 1993. “Making, Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance.” Dianoia 3 (1): 41–51. – 2005. “Shared Being, Old Promises, and the Joint Necessity of Affirmative Action.” Human Studies 28:129–56. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet Books. – 1987. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mehigan, Joshua. 2014. Accepting the Disaster. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by M. Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Milburn, Colin. 2008. Nanovision: Engineering the Future. Durham, nc: Duke University Press. Miller, Arthur. 1949. Death of a Salesman. New York: Viking Press. Montag, Warren. 1999. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. London: Verso. Moshfegh, Ottessa. 2018. My Year of Rest and Relaxation. New York: Penguin Books. Mundell, Robert A. 1968. Man and Economics: The Science of Choice. New York: McGraw-Hill. Muschamp, Herbert. 2002. “Don’t Rebuild. Reimagine.” New York Times Magazine, 8 September 2002, 46–60. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Edited by Peter Connor. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – 1993. The Birth to Presence. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Negrete, Fernanda. 2015. “A Vital and Unliveable Force: Rhythm through Nathalie Saurrate and Schizoanalysis.” Mosaic 48 (7): 83–99. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1949. The Use and Abuse of History. New York: Liberal Arts Press. – 1956. The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Francis Golffing. Garden City, ny: Doubleday and Company. – 1995. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, Michael. 1999. Reading 1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Palazzoli, Maria Selvini, Luigi Boscolo, Gianfranco Cecchin, and Giuliana Prata. 1978. Paradox and Counterparadox: A New Model in the Therapy of the Family

226

References

in Schizophrenic Transaction. Translated by Elisabeth V. Burt. Lanham, md: Jason Aronson. Papadopoulou, Andriani. 2016. “Resistance in Collective and Collaborative Problem Solving.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 215–28. London: Routledge. Park, Robert E. 1926. “The Urban Community as a Spatial Pattern and a Moral Order.” In The Urban Community, edited by Ernest E. Burgess, 3–18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. Glencoe, il: Free Press. – 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, il: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott, and Winston White. 1960. “The Mass Media and the Structure of American Society.” Journal of Social Issues 3:67–77. Patocka, Jan. 1989. Jan Patocka: Philosophy and Selected Writings. Edited by Erazim Kohák. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1996. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Edited by James Dodd. Chicago: Open Court. Phillips, Adam. 1996. Terror and Experts. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. – 2012. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. London: Picador Press. Pierce, Charles. 1992. The Essential Pierce: Philosophical Writings, 1893–1913, vol. 2. Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Plato. (1941) 1945. Plato’s Republic. Translated with an introduction and notes by Francis M. Cornford. London: Oxford University Press. – 1949. Timaeus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Indianapolis, in: Bobbs-Merrill. – 1956. Symposium. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Prentice Hall/ Library of the Liberal Arts. – 1957. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato. Translated by Francis M. Cornford. New York: Liberal Arts Press. – 1965. The Republic of Plato. Translated with an introduction and notes by Francis M. Cornford. London: Oxford University Press. – 1981. Theaetetus. Translated by Francis M. Cornford. Indianapolis, in: BobbsMerrill. Poirier, Richard. 2010. “A Selection from the Archives.” Raritan 29 (4): 3–36. Possnock, Ross. 2010. “Under the Sign of Sontag: Philip Rieff and the Uses of Humiliation.” Raritan 29 (4): 47–73. Radden Keefe, Patrick. 2022. “King Josh.” New Yorker, 13 June 2022, 34–47. Raffel, Stanley. 1979. Matters of Fact: A Sociological Inquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. – 2006. “Parasites, Principles and the Problem of Attachment to Place.” History of the Human Sciences 19 (3): 83–108.

References

227

– 2013. The Method of Metaphor. Bristol, uk: Intellect Press. – 2018. “From Being Accountable to Being Principled.” Edinburgh Research Explorer, University of Edinburgh. https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/ portal/60587820/. Raffel, Stanley, and Sandywell, Barry, eds. The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Thinking. London: Routledge Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1994. “Discovering New Worlds: Politics of Travel and Metaphor.” In Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, edited by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Melinda Mash, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, 29–37. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. – 1995. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Translated by Steve Corcoran. London: Verso. – 2009a. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Polity. – 2009b. “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge.” Critical Inquiry 36 (1): 1–19. Rieff, Philip. 1961. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1961. Duino Elegies. Translated by C.F. MacIntyre. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosen, Stanley. 1987. Hermeneutics as Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. – 1999. Metaphysics in Ordinary Language. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press. Rosset, Clément. 1989. “Of a Real That Has Yet to Come.” Translated by Steven Winspur. SubStance 18 (3) (Issue 60: Special Issue): 5–21. Sandywell, Barry. 2016a. “Dialectic, Indebtedness, Ambivalence, and the Pursuit of Analytic Speech: Revisiting On the Beginning of Social Inquiry.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 19–93. London: Routledge. – 2016b. “The Dialectic of Lassitude.” In Boredom Studies Reader, edited by Michael E. Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn, 38–52. London: Routledge. Santner, Eric. 2001. On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saunders, George. 2006. The New Mecca. In The Best American Travel Writing, edited by Tim Cahill, 239–63. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press. – 1999. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Schapiro, Gary. 1979. “Notes on the Animal Kingdom of the Spirit.” Clio 8 (3): 323–38.

228

References

Schoenbach, Lisa. 2004. “Peaceful and Exciting: Habit, Shock, and Gertrude Stein’s Pragmatic Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity 11 (2): 239–59. Schnuer, Gregory. 2016. “Analysis and Sincerity: Warding Off Relativism.” In The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing, edited by Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell, 97–110. London: Routledge. Schultz, T.W. 1961. “Investment in Human Capital.” American Economic Review 51 (1): 1–17. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1947. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers. Schutz, Alfred. 1973. The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Serres, Michel. 2007. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – 2008. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mangled Bodies. London: Continuum. – 2010. Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution? Translated by Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Simmel, Georg. (1918) 2011. The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms. Translated by John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1950. Sociology. Translated by Kurt Wolff. Glencoe, il: Free Press. – 1955. Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations. Translated by Kurt Wolff and Reinhard Bendix. Glencoe, il: Free Press. – 1958. “The Handle.” Hudson Review 11 (3): 371–85. – 1971. Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stone, Allucquère Rosanne. 1995. The War of Desire and Technology and the Close of the Medicinal Age. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Straw, Will. 1998. “The Thingishness of Things.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies 2. https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/the-thingishness-of-things/. – 2021. “Conclusion: Notes on Cities, Undergrounds and Closed Upper Rooms.” In Fractured Scenes Underground Music-Making in Hong Kong and East Asia, edited by Damien Charrieras and Francois Mouillot, 29–37. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Swanson, G.E. 1971. Social Change. Glenview, il: Scott, Foresman. Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect.” Geografiska Annales, Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 57–78. Valéry, Paul. 1950. Selected Writings. New York: New Directions. Vico, Giambattista. 1984. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fish. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press. Vidler, Anthony. 2000. Warped Space. Cambridge, ma: mit Press.

References

229

Virilio, Paul, and Sylvère Lotringer. 2005. The Accident of Art. Translated by Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotexte. Wajcman, Gérard. 2007. “Desublimation: An Art of What Falls.” Translated by Barbara P. Fulks. lacanian ink 29:86–111. Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: George Allen and Unwin. – 1946. “Science as a Vocation.” In Essays in Sociology. Edited and translated by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–59. New York: Oxford University Press. – 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Edited by Talcott Parsons. Translated by A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, il: Free Press. – 1958. The City. Glencoe, il: Free Press. Weisskopf, Walter A. 1955. The Psychology of Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Winnicott, D.W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan. – 1980. Culture and Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1942. “Craftsmanship.” In The Death of the Moth. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. – 1993. “The London Scene.” In The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. Edited by Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin Books. Zaloszyc, Armand. 1991. “Sacrifice.” lacanian ink 4:49–57. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso. Zukin, Sharon. 2010. Naked City. New York: Oxford University Press.

Index

absolutism: decline of, 22, 74–8; reappearance of, 48, 76–8; relativism and, 15–16, 38, 40 addiction, 10 affect, 10, 171–8 agoraphobia, 23, 27, 34, 38, 81 algorithm, 26, 63, 102, 109, 180. See also under efficiency ambiguity: connotative surplus of words and, 31, 187; eros and, 7; intellectual inquiry and, 4, 15, 17; interpretative conflict and, 22; jouissance and, 12; justice and, 15; medicalization’s efforts to purge, 11, 14, 26, 43, 66; as object of research, 4, 24, 34, 152; potentially disruptive of symbolic order, 188; skepticism of, 33–4 analogy: foundational to art, 168; thinking connectively/comparatively, as making use of, 117, 190, 212; travesty and, 4, 32, 212 anomalies, Wittgenstein on, 36 arbitrage, 92 architecture, trope, 130 Arendt, Hannah, 20, 78, 129, 131–2; on the common world (public realm), 153. See also banality of evil/evil of banality automation, 43, 65, 104. See also efficiency banality of evil/evil of banality, 46, 64, 78, 126 Bataille, Georges, 52, 148–55, 174, 192; jouissance, in the prose of, 13 Baudrillard, Jean, 24, 44, 56, 66, 136–8; jouis-

sance, in the prose of, 13; nihilism, 150–1; objective irony, 41; robot, 47 bearing witness, 95, 116, 189–92, 204, 207 Being/being: groundlessness of, 49, 121, 142, 208, 212; in Heidegger, 12, 47, 56; nonBeing and, 139, 208, 212; Shared Being, 40, 103 (see also under McHugh, Peter) Berlin, 98, 100, 129, 160–1 Bildung, 147 Bonner, Kieran: Dublin, 160; the fascination elicited by strong teaching, 7–8, 90, 210; scholarly company (good and troublesome), 15, 17, 86 built environment: integral to urban selfrepresentation, 140; as tangible heritage, 102. See also preservation buried meanings/sunken meanings, 10–12, 53, 190; unmasking, exposing, or recovering, 4, 166, 204 (see also travesty). See also repression of the signifier Burke, Kenneth, 24, 27, 84, 179; de-sanctification, 133, 193; equipment for living, 80, 149, 208, 211 capitalism, 37, 85, 157, 213 care: concern for a common world (care for perpetuity), 131–7, 153; concern for the finite face of the individual, 204; concern for the peculiar character or spirit of the city, 16, 169; eros and the exercise of, 166; ethical (I/thou) relations of, 189, 196; indifference as the absence of, 122; justice as

232 relation of, 16, 18, 32, 38–9; preservation as form of, 99–101, 120, 160; seeing/hearing as a practice of, 201, 204 (see also bearing witness); social relations of, 191; urban governance and, 101, 168–9 collective representations: defined, in Durkheim, 4; uncovering the erotic overspill (poetic excesses) of, through travesty, 31–5 comedy: exposes rigidity of social order, 188; travesty and, 212 creative city, 44, 102, 141, 159 culture, 3; “mastery over human emotions,” 8; more than customs of a people, city, or society, 168; popular, 69, 86, 94, 133; as repressed/repressing signifier, 4, 9–10, 158, 171, 189; signature of a collective, 98; Simmel on, 147–8; as soul/spirit, 116, 145, 171, 189; urban governance and, as relationship of care, 167–8. See also Simmel, Georg: subjective versus objective culture Culture of Cities project, 45, 95–9, 158–9, 162, 171–2. See also Berlin; Dublin; New Orleans; New York; Venice death, 26, 39, 60–1, 68, 184; preservation discourse and, 108, 119, 143 democracy, 48, 64–6, 74–5; digital, 46, 78; oligarchy and, 38, 43, 48, 64–5, 83–4 distraction, fascination and, 93–4 doxa. See opinion Dublin, 98, 160 Durkheim, Émile, 156, 174–5, 187. See also under collective representations; writing machine efficiency: algorithm/algorithmic thinking and, 74, 109; hostile to extraneous relations and activities, 33, 179; key to rational “good society,” 73–4; self-composition preservation (managing ambiguity) as buried understanding of, 27, 79–81; urban governance and, 167

Index enlightenment/Enlightenment: generic process (enlightenment), 74, 75, 80–2, 85; historical movement and set of values (Enlightenment), 75–82, 101, 107, 164, 174. See also Socratic Enlightenment equipment for living, 7, 91. See also under Burke, Kenneth eros: “affect,” as non-threatening rendering of, 178; “buzz” of the city and, 5; circulating, collective force in modern life, 174–6; desire for more-than-life, 6, 174; exercise of care and, 166; justice and, 204, 212; procreative force, for Plato, 77, 132, 149; two-sided character of, both destructive/ tyrannical and heavenly, for Plato, 5, 7, 69, 77. See also affect; jouissance erotic infrastructure, 4, 173 evil genius/demon, 72–3, 77 exchange value: basis for social stratification, under capitalism, 25, 29–30, 38, 182, 187–8; distinct from use value, 50–2; gentrification and, 109; intangible heritage (culture) and, 102 fashion, 57–9, 163, 173 finite face: infinitely more and, 193–205, 212; infinite story and, 205–12 free space of meaning: as creative/erotic space, 5, 145–8, 158, 182, 190; formed through inquiry, 209 (see also travesty); potential for public space to be, 165 Gans, Eric, 8–9 Garfinkel, Harold, 63 gentrification, 95, 98, 101, 106–10 gift, 192–3, 197–201; inheritance (heritage) as, 99 Girard, René, 50, 59. See also sacrificial crisis globalization, 95, 98, 103–4; as focus of Culture of Cities project, 45, 96 Goffman, Erving, 15, 28, 34, 79; on institutionalization, 178–80

Index Grenzer, Elke, 100, 124, 129, 160–1 Grey Zone, 24, 142, 171, 192–3 habit, 28–9, 88, 135 hatred, 7–8, 72 healing: through inquiry (by containing ambiguity), 213 (see also travesty); through medicalization/institutionalization (by purging ambiguity), 11, 26, 178 heavenly eros. See under eros Heidegger, Martin, 12, 35, 47, 56 heritage, 94, 99–103, 116, 159–66; tangible and intangible, 61, 100–3, 109, 128, 165 ibm Corporation, 45–8, 67; as case study for analyzing institutionalization, 178–80 illness, chronic/acute, 194 imaginary: collectivizing dream or fantasy, 76, 152; example, Enlightenment, 84; example, materialist, 213; example, modern, 85–6; example, urban, 105 immortality: common world (public realm) and, in Arendt, 153; creativity (“making”) as second-best alternatives to, for cities and individuals, 69–70, 116, 190; discussed by Plato, 69, 77. See also perpetuity improvisation: in inquiry, 41 (see also travesty); in preservation discourse, key to mediating demolition and restoration, 133; in scenes, 163 improvisational theatre, 13 in-between, the, 3 innovation, 99–102, 109, 164; urban governance and, 167 insignificant detail: “finite face” of the city, as analytic counterpart to, 207; as revealing, in Freud, 78 institution. See under ibm Corporation intangible heritage. See under heritage jouissance: analytically analogous to Simmel’s “life and more-than-life,” 24, 181; as the unresolved tension between enjoy-

233 ment and its overspill/spillover (surplus), 12, 55, 86; urban life and, 27 justice, 15, 38–9; as care for the particular quality (or “soul”) of the city, 16, 169; as ethical concern for self and others, 189, 204; in Plato’s Republic, 16, 74; two-sided nature of, 32 Lacan, Jacques: on affect, 173, 178; on jouissance, 176; on the Other (who doesn’t answer), 12, 51, 134, 197, 211; on partial drives, 28, 70, 149; on the repression of the signifier, 9, 20, 43; on the symptom, 84 life and more-than-life, 3, 19–20, 155–6. See also under jouissance making: second-best way for achieving immortality, for cities, 116 (see also under immortality); urban governance (designing and building a better city) and, 167 material city, 13; identified with, but more than, the marketplace, 23, 170; split subject of, 38, 40, 91; two-bodied character of, where jouissance is both spectacle and problem to be managed, 5–6, 26–7, 59–60 materialism, 14, 23–8, 50–3, 91, 173; Woolf on, 207 McHugh, Peter, 6–7, 22, 56, 76, 192–4; Shared Being, 16, 48, 77, 85 medicalization, 26 mimesis, 51; Sandywell on, 11 monumental texts, 122–4; critical interrogation of, by Descartes, 131 monuments, 117–26, 140. See also Venice Charter neoliberalism, 30–1, 51, 178, 180 New Orleans, 161 New York: Culture of Cities project, 99, 161; Zukin on, 101, 103–5, 160 nihilism, 17, 34, 150–7 objective irony. See under Baudrillard, Jean

234 oligarchy. See under democracy opinion: collected, in social surveys, 65–6; decline of absolutism and, 78; democracy and, 66; punditry and, 23, 67, 74, 78, 79; as “talkativeness,” data (material) of the material city, 94; weight of numbers and, 64, 87 Other, the: as the “infinitely more in each finite face,” 197; in Lacan, 12, 211; materialist version of, 51–2, 61 partial drives, 5, 28, 70, 149 perpetuity: concern within preservation discourse, 160, 161; endurance of the common world (public realm), in Arendt, 131–2, 153 Plato, 17; eros and, 4–7, 68–9, 77, 132, 149; as exemplar, 210; Phaedo, 143; Republic, 43–8, 71–6, 83–4, 148, 176; Symposium, 68, 90, 132. See also second sailing poetic, the, in thinking and philosophy, 4, 34, 36, 211 pollution. See under Serres, Michel posthumous city, 145 pragmatism: the intellectual foundation of materialism, 28; mindless habit versus, 28–9, 135; as problem solving, 28. See also problem solving preservation: as care, 100, 120; discourse, 117–21, 127–9, 136–45, 160, 163. See also Venice Charter problem solving: ambiguity as situation of, 34; city as site of, 31, 95; medicalization as example of, 26; repression as situation of, 43; travesty as method for instigating/ researching, 10, 212. See also under pragmatism progress: destructive consequences of, requiring care, 174, 177, 206; as Enlightenment ideal, 77; gentrification and, 95, 107, 120; globalization and, 95; jouissance/soul/ eros renounced in the name of, 91, 107, 174; Wittgenstein on, 108

Index prototype, 32, 77, 92 publicity, against mortality/“the Nothing,” 151, 154 public realm: Arendt on, 153; commitment to opportunities for sociability and, 150, 152 Rancière, Jacques, 19, 84, 94, 104, 155 relativism. See under absolutism repression of the signifier, 20, 43, 53, 148; “rules of irrelevance,” as practical example of how meaning is buried, 178–9 robot. See under Baudrillard, Jean sacrificial crisis, 15, 43, 75, 126 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 40 saturation, 23, 87, 94 scenes: defined, social formation spontaneously emerging around those with similar interests and identities, 42, 63, 163, 165; different from “community,” characterized by Shared Being, 85; make up the material/spectacle of the city, 85; provide opportunities for solidarity, experimentation, and self-presentation, 43, 49, 63, 90, 163 second sailing, 84, 211 Serres, Michel, 73, 126–7; pollution (hard and soft), 87 Shared Being. See under McHugh, Peter Simmel, Georg, 213; on associations, and the combination of associations, 85; on the boundaries of individuals (as wholes, or parts of wholes), 34, 38, 42, 203–4; on the city and mental life, 20–2; on fashion, 57– 9; on life and more-than-life, 3–6, 19–20, 24, 155–6; scenes, 86, 90; on subjective versus objective culture, 17, 21, 123, 147 Socratic Enlightenment, 79–80, 82. See also enlightenment/Enlightenment soul: of the city, as buried signifier, 189; of the city, and creativity, 145; of the city, as “desire to care for the infinitely more in

Index the finite face,” 205; of the city, and eros, 17; of the city, peculiar urban identity (clichéd understanding), 95, 104, 106, 116, 145; of collectives, for Durkheim, 170; of individuals, for Plato, 71; urban change and the loss of, 103–6, 115. See also spirit spirit: of the city, and affect, 171–3; justice as care for, 169; progress versus, in Wittgenstein, 144. See also soul subversion, 5. See also travesty symbolic: order, and ambiguity, 187–8; order, in sociology called the normative order (or code), 28, 173; order, as theorized by Goffman, 178; torture/interrogation and the capricious authority of, in Scarry, 184–6 symptoms, 30, 93, 98, 125, 143; in psychoanalysis, 84, 91, 138, 184, 209, 212; stigma as, 98, 101, 104 time: dialectic between past, present, and future tenses, 44–5, 60–1, 99, 133–5, 140–1, 160–1; disentanglement of tenses as pathological, 125 tragedy, 26, 42, 83, 212; of a wasted life, or a life defined through exchange value, 182, 187 transgression, Bergson on, 188 transitions, turning point between orders as, 60–1 travesty, as method, 4–5, 10–11, 31, 200, 212 triage, situations of, 194, 201–3 tyrannical eros. See under eros tyranny, 43, 46–8, 76–7, 83 urban governance, 101, 166–8 usage, connotative richness of language revealed in, 3, 10, 53

235 use value: compared to exchange value, 52, 102; incommunicable value, as with monumental texts, or human beings, 52, 123; in preservation discourse, 117 Venice: Culture of Cities project, 99, 101, 110–16; preservation discourse and, 141–5, 163 Venice Charter, 117–19, 122–4, 129–31 Weber, Max: on attachment to the normative order, 11, 100, 168; on the city and the marketplace, 23; on modern subjectivity under capitalism, 19, 22, 85; on the repression of eros under Enlightenment, 174 weight of numbers: an ambiguous material force in the imaginative structure of materialism, 41–4; materialist version of relationship to the Other, 61–4; two-sided concept, both tragic and vital, 41–2, 55, 68, 182–3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: on the aesthetic attitude, 168; on anomalies, 36; on grammar determining meaning, 31; jouissance in the prose of, 13; on the poetic in theorizing, 34; on prototypes, 32, 77; stated antipathy to progress/civilization, 108, 144, 209; on wonder in the face of the infinite (or ordinary language), 197–201, 211 Woolf, Virginia: on the connotative surplus of any word, 3, 9, 31; essential versus trivial things, 207; on sunken meanings, 10 writing machine, Durkheim on, 88–9