Imaginative Structure of the City 9780773571037

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THE IMAGINATIVE STRUCTURE OF THE CITY

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t h e c u l t u r e o f c i t i e s : m o n t r e a l , t o ro n t o, b e r l i n , dublin s e r i e s e d i t o rs : k i e r a n b o n n e r a n d w i l l s t r aw The Culture of Cities project is an international, scholarly endeavour devoted to the study of four cities – Berlin, Dublin, Montreal, and Toronto. Books in the series will examine the multiple ways in which these cities confront the forces transforming urban life around the world. Through analyses of multiple aspects of city life, the series will take up the larger question of each city's uniqueness and identity. The Culture of Cities series will offer a reflexive, interdisciplinary perspective on key issues in the analysis of urban culture. Each of the four cities studied by this project faces the potentially homogenizing changes resulting from globalization and other forces. In the response of each city, we witness a tension between the vibrancy of a city’s culture and its sense of its own vulnerability. This tension reveals itself in multiple ways in the life of cities – in the appeals made to history or to future development, or in debates over the distinctiveness of each city at a global level. Case studies, comparative analyses, and theoretical accounts of city life will offer tools and insights for an understanding of urban cultures as they confront these tensions. 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

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The Imaginative Structure of the City ALAN BLUM

McGill–Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2003 isbn 0-7735-2539-4 Legal deposit second quarter 2003 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Culture of Cities Project, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Blum, Alan The imaginative structure of the city / Alan Blum. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2539-4 1. Sociology, Urban. 2. Cities and towns. I. Title. ht119.b58 2003

307.76

c2002-906030-3

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Sabon.

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction

3

1 The City Is Nothing But a Sign! 24 2 The Common Situation 50 3 4

Time, Space

88

Cosmopolitanism 5

Nighttime 6

7 8

115

141

Scenes 164

Materialism 189 Impermanence

9 Excitement Conclusion

232 262

294

Bibliography 299 Index

327

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Acknowledgments

Sometime around 1998 at York University in Toronto, I was delegated the job of chairing my sociology department’s appointment committee, charged for that year with the task of hiring a specialist in urban sociology. Reading the files and literature in the field stimulated me to think about an intervention that could reclaim a space for social theory as I understood it, and I started writing and putting together a couple of chapters which I thought of as the foundation for an eventual book. As the year proceeded I spoke with my colleague Ioan Davies about the prospect of collaborating on a research project to articulate such interests, since he was working on issues connected to the culture of world cities and, like me, agreed on the need, at least in sociology, for a more nuanced approach to both culture and the city. In preparing our application for the competition of the Major Collaborative Research Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, I took advantage of the momentum generated in writing this book to create the successive series of documents that resulted in the achievement of the grant. I say all of this to note the reciprocal influences between the application process and its bureaucratic requirements and this book. My experience of writing the application and confronting the literature and research fed back upon this book in incalculable ways. The reactions of the Executive Committee of the Culture of Cities project to my writing was not simply a matter of formal “feedback” or responses to chapters but took the form of a continuous dialogue in which my ideas were reshaped by the face-to-face contacts and meetings between us. Here I mention Susan Bennett, Kieran Bonner, Jean-François Côté, Janine Marchessault, Greg Nielsen, and Will Straw. They have each and all been very supportive of my work and of me personally (my ambitions, aspirations, appetites, agenda) and even in resistance have maintained

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distinct and autonomous voices that I continue to hear. Each brought different perspectives and strengths to bear on our relations in ways that often caused me to rethink and reformulate unspoken intellectual habits and those tacit shibboleths by which we are typically ruled. Of course, total expurgation is not possible. In particular, I must mention the editors of this series for their encouragement and critical responses. Kieran Bonner is always valued for his hermeneutic rigour and intellectual generosity, for his patience and courage in taking on apparently intractable issues and converting them into problem-solving situations. His growing body of work on the reflexive challenges to taken-forgranted social forms has been an indispensable resource. Through the craft of his analyses, Will Straw has shown me the possibilities for a cultural studies that can be an ethnography of everyday life in ways that invariably make problematic distinctions that have become petrified usages in the analysis of popular culture. Though we are each and all different through varied approaches to the phenomenon, the ‘‘fatal strategy”of this book is to disclose the irreducible ambiguity around the question of the loss of transcendence in collective life. My book has been nourished by this diversity as more than a multicultural interdisciplinary mix, closer to a living dialectic between good colleagues. My intention to redeem a research initiative around the question of the end of transcendence as both topic and resource (and so, as an ‘‘end” that offers itself as a beginning for inquiry) requires me to join dialogically, disciplines, genres, and trends (philosophy, sociology, anthropology, post structuralism, history, art) as part of a strategy for exposing the ambiguity of the notion of form in an age of mechanical reproduction, showing how the question persists in everyday life even in its very contestation. The intellectual diversity of the Culture of Cities Project, encouraged by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as a living translation of its interdisciplinary mandate, has not only empowered the collaboration of faculty and students on the Project from a range of disciplines, but has entered crucially into the formation of this book and its method. Here, I seek to bring a variety of apparently disjunctive discourses into contact as part of a strategy for exacerbating the fundamental ambiguity disclosed in representations of space and time, the common situation, universalism, scenes, nightlife, the built environment, and the eternal present. Out of these collisions notions such as art, history, time and place, community, social class, and essentialism come alive to theorizing as both ends and beginnings, and in that space for intervention (for reflection or what Baudrillard calls radicality), serve in this book as case studies or opportunities for inquiring – opportunities that always

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bring to mind in the vision of palpable social practices and problemsolving initiatives the rivetting question(s) registered in what Emmanual Levinas calls ‘‘the unknowable black hole in the midst of night.” What I try to do in this book is to bring to view the problem of this ‘‘black (w)hole” as an observable locus of collectivization in the everyday life of cities and so, as an opportunity to formulate specific case studies as sites of problem-solving. By and large I had good experiences presenting parts or fragments of this work at meetings and conferences: at Lund for a meeting of the Theory Section of the International Association of Sociology; at Maynooth University of the National University of Ireland; at Manchester University; at Manchester Metropolitan University; at the University of Wales at Bangor; at the Conference on Night and the City at McGill University; and for Professor Rolf Lindner’s very engaging and talented students at Humboldt University in Berlin. Specifically at the University of Wales at Bangor where I did most of my writing, Howard Davis, Head of Social Science did everything humanly possible to make my stay pleasant. Agnes Mroz helped me significantly in preparing this manuscript, rescued me from a number of technological disasters, and maintained an abiding positive spirit at our Center during the course of its writing that continues today. My colleague Jim Porter has been a steadfast friend. A number of students from different graduate programs at York University collaborated with me in a variety of classes, groups, and routines in ways that were always vital, for they invariably provoked me with their ideas, studies, and intellectual challenges, tolerated me good-naturedly and came through in their own variety of researches with specific work and critical responses that fertilized my writing. I note especially Mervyn Horgan, Saeed Hydaralli, Saara Liinamaa, Stefka Lubenova, Tara Milbrandt, Pierre Ouellette, Meredith Risk, and Jenny Burman. I want to acknowledge Paul Moore in particular. Joohyun Kwon contributed to my technological and visual literacy. I was often thrilled and informed by the research of students at the Universities of Calgary, Concordia, McGill, Université du Québec à Montréal, and St. Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo, which they presented in papers at conferences and workshops. To name them all would be to reproduce a listserv. Nick Rogers of York University wrote a set of helpful, critical comments in response to a talk I gave from the perspective of a skeptical historian. My daughter Beth often engaged me with implications of the philosophical stance of this work and constantly embodies in her development a palpable and very intimate antidote to the resignation by which theorizing is constantly tempted. Elke Grenzer has been with me for the whole trip and

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responded vigorously to all chapters, invariably identifying and helping me overcome those moments when language goes on holiday, working with me through the fluctuations of spirit that accompany such writing, always reviving the manuscript at any point she intervened.

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THE IMAGINATIVE STRUCTURE OF THE CITY

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Introduction

Different ways of representing the city as a scene of collectivization typically come to view at critical moments and on a variety of occasions when routine matters are deliberated and contested. The city might be viewed in Max Weber’s sense as a corporate group necessarily governed by the exigencies of the division of labor and the functionalism of a restricted economy; on the other hand, the city is also understood as containing the seeds for being more than that, provided that we have the capacity to address and bring to view its incipient communal character. Moreover, the living dialectic of city life comes alive in the working out of this tension between these different views of its character as a collective. I think of the city as constantly engaged by this question, an engagement that is shown in its struggle with its twosided character as an organization ruled by its self understanding as a division of labor and by its need and desire for communality. Plato’s Republic shows conditions under which communal practices or what he called justice, might materialize in an environment ruled by instrumental transactions and exchanges, ideals of specialized competence and qualifications, in a world governed by the division of labor and its view as a restricted economy. We also have the precedent of Hegel’s analysis of collective development as a tension between (what he called) its character as a system of needs and as a spiritual entity. In viewing the city as an example of the dynamics of collectivization, I see its social forms and processes as reflecting a constant struggle for self recognition in the face of mutations that threaten to make theorizing such a process seem gratuitous or essentialist, perhaps an obsolete gesture, a temptation reflected in the nihilist provocation that the city is nothing but a sign.

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n i h i l i s m a s t h e e n v i ro n m e n t of collective life Every great philosophy has in some sense taken its bearings from the specter of nihilism, the reminder of the groundlessness of being. This is not merely an abstract “philosophical” problem, since popular culture is rife with images of the nihilist and has long dramatized this struggle in everyday life, for example, in films that highlight the encounter of a character with the psychopath, the predator, the serial killer, the robotic human, the teenager, the avaricious businessman or politician. In most cases, the nihilist is a figure for the tensions in the interior life of the character that continue to be evocative and haunting reminders of the limits of human agency. The temptation of nihilism appears at those points when we become recognizably inarticulate in the face of interpretation and action, when as Nietzsche says, the ludicrousness of action makes inaction seem the only true course. If the collective representation of nihilism is an elemental force in social life, it probably follows from what Heidegger speaks of as the anxiety integral to our encounter with our own indeterminacy, with our human status as something other than near-at-hand things in the world. This also accords with Charles Baudelaire’s comment that philosophy is the symptom of the worries of an age, meaning that every philosophy is in some way a symptom of that concerted anxiety, shaped specifically in its period as a particular way in which its self questioning both overstates itself and hesitates in taking its own measure. In this way, if every philosophy is a suppressed dialogue with that interlocutor, the voice that challenges the desire for truth and knowledge with that provocation (the desire Plato called the Good), then nihilism is internal to the Good as the trace of irresolution that always remains in action. This is to say that in appearing as it is, as the art and practice to which it gives its name, every philosophy claims to master nihilism even as it remains haunted by its voice. This also redeems nihilism from being seen as an abstract obsession of academic philosophers, since in its status as a worry it still confirms the vitality of life. Philosophy’s perennial dialogue with nihilism as a symptom of its engagement by the life in which it is immersed, is simply a refinement of the collective self reflection upon our limits and so, is an expression of the unending and often ordinary concern for ourselves and the “worries” integral to self reflection (Bonner, 2001). Nietzsche’s reinstatement of power as a glimpse of desire more dignified than what is typically identified as “governance” formulates sociality itself as the same kind of energy which he says we find in the best of art, the desire to create and recreate, what he calls “the will to power,” as if the city itself can be an action of empowerment in this

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sense, an expression of art, a work of art. Nietzsche says: think about the desire for truth from the perspective not of anyman but of the artist. This suggests that we ought reflect on the question of the truth of the city not as anyman would think about it (the administrator, the academic, the technician, the man on the street) but as the artist would. The city then appears from such an angle, for theorizing, as a configuration of courses of action absorbed in the details of its life not simply for the purpose of enduring that life but to the end of redeeming itself as more than a numerical aggregate of persons and resources, that is, as a community in the making. Nietzsche says further: then think about a gesture such as this from the perspective of life. He uses “life” to make reference to the contradictions, elisions, ruptures, gaps, and resistances that threaten to undermine the desire for truth itself in the way that life always tests reason and finds it wanting and so always exceeds it in just that sense. No master plan can master the life by which it is nourished. The city must come to terms with its life, the life that could annul and swamp it, the life reflected in the contingencies of living and working together, of gathering and convening, of socializing individuals while preserving the specificity and detail of these very relationships. We can understand this as follows: if the city is a work of art, it is also a life force that brings to view colliding and discrepant individual needs, ambitions, notions of domination and powerlessness, visions of autonomy and dependence, of comparison and contrast, heterogeneous views of functions and requirements of administering, of instituting, and distributing resources, and continuously evolving and contested visions of best practices of interpretation and judgment as part of its structures of reciprocity and mutual recognition. We suggest that the tension between the art and life of a social formation such as the city is reflected in the struggle between its vital character as a collective governed by the interests and needs of a division of labor and the need and desire to renew itself as a work of art. But I defer the question of the good of the city. If the city is a work of art that is created and renewed in a constant struggle with the life that reminds its desire for the finality of truth of its groundlessness, how can this work of art presence, how can the city appear as if a creative and vital set of practices? As a start Georges Bataille is helpful here: “The ultimate development of knowledge is questioning. We cannot endlessly defer to answers ... to knowledge ... and knowledge finally opens a void. At the summit of knowledge, knowledge stops. I yield and everything is vertigo” (Bataille, 1988b, 89). So he tells us in what the art of a collective might consist, that its will to power can be expressed through the creation of an environment for questioning that

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struggles to sustain its voice in the face of life (but life as the inspiring rather than horrific recognition of the groundlessness of being, of inescapable and inexorable vertigo). It might just be that the palpable appearance of the city is reflected in works that show both the production of vertigo (of fundamental ambiguity) and the creation of a social formation that is fertilized by this as if a central locus of collective life. This suggests that the way in which a city can at best deal with itself as a social formation and so, with its own vertigo, is neither by trying to master or eliminate it but through problem-solving encounters with vertigo in everyday life. Further, this is what the city might discover in all of the areas of everyday life which it engages, those specific ethical collisions that dramatize and bring to view endlessly inventive and contested solutions to the vertigo that accompanies any and every resolution claiming to be definitive. If as Baudrillard says, every resolution is irresolute, cannot this maxim empower us to rediscover the social creativity in irresolution itself? I am trying to pose the question, what is the city and what is the nature of a strong interest in it? If, as Bataille suggests, the outcome of this search can only be questioning, it is a questioning that needs lead to vertigo as a binding and creative social force. So, inquiry can reflect on itself as an art of sorts, trying to represent in speech an environment of questioning that actually brings people together despite their very real differences around the action of questioning itself, an action invariably objectified in studies of the varied ways in which problems and solutions to vertigo persist as ineluctable traces in the evanescent social forms and contents of the everyday life of cities. Yet the project of questioning is not an undivided action, always producing differences among and between those animated by its focus, for as Spinoza said different people can see the same object in different ways and the same person can see the same object in different ways. Therefore, if such a project assumes a commitment to its art and life as this kind of environment, it is not a commitment to doctrinal unity but to the play of questioning and to its objectification in studies. This means that we might risk thinking of the good of such an inquiry as a commitment to envisioning in a disciplined way, community in the making, community that is (in the words of Hegel) undeveloped, implicit, and abstract, always evolving as itself an open question leading to vertigo. The city as a community is then a work in progress (and so of course is this inquiry into the city).

community as subject and object Bataille comments on Heidegger who said at some place “in our community of seekers professors and students are determined by knowl-

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edge” (quoted in Bataille, 1988a, 24). Bataille objected to this, commenting “on the contrary ... there cannot be knowledge without a community of seekers, nor inner experience without a community who live it” (Bataille, 1988a, 24). Bataille then said the following: There is no truth when people look at each other as if they’re separate individuals. Truth starts with shared conversations, shared laughter, friendship and it only happens going from person to another. I hate the thought of a person being connected to isolation. The recluse who has the impression he reflects the world is ridiculous to my mind. He can’t reflect it because, being himself a center of the reflection, he stops being able to relate to what doesn’t have a center. As I picture it, the world doesn’t resemble a separate or circumscribed being but what goes from one person to another when we laugh or make love. When I think this is the way things are, immensity opens and I’m lost (Bataille, 1988b, 44–5).

Though today we might say that Bataille seems a bit of what we call a drama queen, always pushing himself towards vertigo, the void, immensity, it is worth reflecting on speaking and writing as a drama in which one risks losing himself. It is worth considering at every point in this inquiry how studies as works of art can risk losing themselves in questioning in order to regain their voice and whether or how what we have come to understand as research can measure up to such a demand with discipline. It is worth considering what such a method of writing and speaking would look like in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

the city in speech Why is it that the city appears as both topic and resource of the primordial (Western) text on social theory, Plato’s Republic? There, the city is linked to discussion (which is assumed to best take shape in the city), and to the “what” that is discussed (the growth of justice in the state). Recall in the Republic how Socrates posed the problem of the discussion as one of describing the formation of the ideal state and of “convincing ourselves that it can be brought into being and of indicating how” (v473, chapter xviii, 178). This suggests that in conversing, we are not just speaking about justice but doing justice itself and if attuned to this, can understand ourselves as bringing justice into being and showing how. This also suggests that a project which addresses the city, in its way shows itself in and through this very talk as the coming-into-being of a city of sorts. If justice in speech describes the environment of questioning, then The Republic proposes to represent the struggle between art and life in such an accomplishment. Plato wants to bring the question of justice down to

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earth by representing the way it can be realized in conversational practices, the way it materializes in and between us in our practices of working together. If we can think of this ideal state as the environment of questioning that materializes in specific conversational practices, we might suggest, in anticipation, that the problem with which we must contend is not making and implementing ideals, but dealing with the consequences of our actions, that is, with life and its continuous reminder of our limits. This means that the making of such a community is in part the remaking of the nihilism that invariably haunts it. And so, Plato shows us how this ideal state can come into being and how we might be convinced, but only if we come to terms with the vertigo we experience as the limits of reason. This means that justice is not some utopian dream because it comes into being with the experience of its vertigo and with the need for assurance in its wake. Neither the strength of the city nor the strength of the inquiry into it resides simply in the realization of objectives or milestones but in the capacity to show (to bring into being) demonstrable and enjoyable “solutions” to its own vertigo. The city is linked to this discussion in at least two ways. First, in contrast to nature, it is not an unalterable environment to be appreciated, revered, or acted upon technically (as in sublimity, the relief of respite or holidaying in a tranquil spot, plant cultivation, animal training, tuning up our bodies as in exercise or rock climbing), but makes reference to an opportunity for mutual and reciprocal influence and so, a context in which the agitations and frustrations released from trying to persuade one another circulate demandingly upon us in ways that sharpen our sensitivity to accountability. The city is the site of such a conversation because it is the place where our aspirations for worldly influence must run up against the “immense” forces released by our efforts to persuade one another. It is the city that represents such a danger and in so doing, serves as an incentive for conversation. We see this in the beginning of the Republic where a group of young men try to convince Socrates and his pal Glaucon to interrupt their sojourn and join them at the house of Cephalus. Socrates, said Polemarchus, I do believe you are starting back to town and leaving us. You have guessed right, I answered. Well, he said, you see what a large party we are? I do. Unless you are more than a match for us, then, you must stay here. Isn’t there another alternative, said I: we might convince you that you must let us go.

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How will you convince us if we refuse to listen? We cannot, said Glaucon. Well, we shall refuse. Make up your minds to that (chapter 1, i.327–331 D, 3).

The primordial question of conversation itself is raised here through the figures of force, number, and the refusal. Desire meets its match, can be outnumbered, forced to acquiesce, and just as any decision made between us that rests on number imposes force which must be questioned, persuasion itself in the best of cases can be refused in a gesture which declines to submit to its force. Although Socrates implies that he might outwit the force of number through reasoned persuasion, Plato more deeply suggests that any success even he achieves is itself an exercise of force (the force of his persuasiveness) which eventually can run up against the brick wall of the refusal. This is not just an “internal” administrative problem of the community in the making but of its relation to the outside. The very possibility of an environment of questioning idealized here depends upon its capacity to take the measure of refusal. “We cannot talk with you if you refuse,” Glaucon says, and Polemarchus retorts with the promise that they will refuse forever. The spirited perpetuity of collective practices must digest and represent the voice of refusal as part of its very art. The commitment to the environment of questioning can be tempted by the force of number both within and without in the same way that questioning such as this must not only work to convince itself that it can be realized in the best sense and in this way must come to terms with its own refusal to believe that or to listen to itself (its resignation, its tendency towards inaction in the face of the “ridiculous” irresolution of any action), but even further has to convince itself that its being a minority in a world ruled by the force of number is no indication of its impossibility but is an essential condition of its realization (in the way that the eternal refusal is part of its life). Just as Polemarchus promises to refuse to listen forever, Lacan in another vein says that other does not answer. This means that the environment of questioning which must live forever with its unanswered questions can only persist “by convincing itself that it can come into being and by indicating how” in the absence of the kind of reassurance number and agreement might bring.

th r asym ac h u s One of the most commented upon parts of the Republic concerns the intervention of Thrasymachus, whose impatience during the early course of the conversation becomes increasingly visible as he listens.

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All this time Thrasymachus had been trying more than once to break in upon our conversation; but his neighbors had restrained him, wishing to hear the argument to the end … he could keep quiet no longer; but gathering himself together like a wild beast he sprang at us as if he would tear us in pieces. Polemarchus and I were frightened out of our wits when he burst out to the whole company: What is the matter with you two, Socrates? Why do you go on in this imbecile way, politely deferring to each other’s nonsense? If you really want to know what justice means stop asking questions and scoring off the answers you get. You know very well it is easier to ask questions than to answer them. Answer yourself and tell us what you think justice means. I won’t have you telling us it is the same as what is obligatory or useful or advantageous or profitable or expedient; I want a clear and precise statement; I won’t put up with that sort of verbiage (chapter 111, i. 336 B-347E, 15–16).

Thrasymachus proposes that the meaning of something is determined by what is in the interest of the stronger party. This statement applies not only to politics narrowly understood but to meaning, language, discourse and its determination by so-called “interests.” This is something that is regularly said today by many people. In all states alike, “right” has the same meaning, namely, what it is for the party established in power. And that is the strongest. So the second conclusion is that what is “right” is the same everywhere, the interest of the strongest party (chapter 111, i. 338–1.339, 18).

Such a maxim applies to interpretation itself, to saying what something is, specifically to Thrasymachus’s saying what justice is in this gathering: for he claims by virtue of the clarity and force of his definition to be the stronger party in contrast to these others whom he finds to be indecisive and evasive weaklings. Thrasymachus’s intransigence is an attempt to enforce his thesis in order to control the discussion. If Thrasymachus is acting here as if he is the stronger party, this is consistent with his thesis that the stronger party determines what something means. For him, the conversation is simply an extension of what he asserts to be the case In this way, Socrates’s struggle with Thrasymachus can be viewed as a contest over who is the strongest party since the force of Socrates is also clearly in play as the desire to direct the inquiry along certain lines. Yet, because anyone winning an argument can be seen as a stronger party (the interpretation is strongest), Plato puts Socrates is the vertiginous position of losing even if he wins, that is, he is in the position of having to confirm what Thrasymachus asserts since even if he wins the argument it is because he is the strongest party.

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Socrates is then in the curious position of confirming Thrasymachus even if he refutes him in practice, for though Socrates aims to preserve justice per se against the view that it is determined by the interests of the strongest party, he proceeds as one consumed by the desire to be the stronger party. The Republic invites us to consider the startling aporia of truth: if reason is ruled by the force of self interest, than any refutation of the other is a refutation of one self because any argument whatsoever only confirms the force of its persuasiveness which at bottom, has nothing whatever to do with anything but the externality of strength (in the way that Bourdieu’s more articulate Professor simply happens to be the stronger party). So it seems as if the voice of Thrasymachus can never be silenced because he can say of anything and everything including the argument of the one who refutes him that it is determined by the interests of the stronger party. This tells us that for justice to come into being we must, in part, convince ourselves that the voice of Thrasymachus has been measured and found wanting, that there is some way out of the circle of power, self interest, and refutation. In this way, the conversation on justice has to contend with what we might think of as bad dualism (in the way medical practice talks of bad cholesterol), the bad dualism that tempts us to think that words and deeds are so different, that life is so vital and speech so deadly, that conversation makes no difference for the way things are. In this way, Plato shows through the relationship of Socrates to his young friends, that this possibility materializes not in a unity of doctrine but in our finding those who share desire for realizing justice, for making justice a real conversational practice. That Socrates is looking for those who are friendly to conversation rather than those who share his doctrine is shown in the passage where Glaucon and Adeimantus recognize that he has not refuted Thrasymachus and that he must do more work, must demand more of himself. Like him, they agree with the intuition that justice cannot simply be an expression of the interests of the stronger party and because of this accord, urge him to continue questioning. Socrates’s delight in this expression of shared desire binds them in a commitment to realizing the conversational practice even as they remain dissatisfied with his argument. That their disagreement with him is not directed to a doctrinal difference but is a critique of his desire confirms the status of the conversation as a friendliness to questioning, a questioning that must continue in the face of whatever appears to be fixed, in this case the very satisfaction of refutation, as long as its finality can be revitalized as an occasion for bringing justice into being as a conversational practice. Plato addresses the problem of whether and how an environment of questioning can exist or be realized in action not by stipulating that it

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exists but through construction of a situation in which that desire collides with the volatility of life in ways that make visible what such an environment needs to counteract the voice of nihilism. These “needs” represent nothing other than the desire of art to defend itself from its life, the attempt of conversation to defend itself from the vertigo of immensity and its various expressions in force that cannot be outmanned, silence which cannot be penetrated, and refutation that is constantly self canceling. In this work of art Socrates remains another character. The Republic dramatizes the various ways in which the volatility of life threatens to crush the bonds of incipient communality as a collective works towards mastering its content, works towards the finality of an answer. In order to convince ourselves that justice exists we need to convince ourselves that such questioning can and does exist, both among and between us in the practices of addressing the city.

questioning the city Since such an environment of questioning can be heard cynically in the way of Thrasymachus, or as platitudinous as if we are preaching simple “open-mindedness” or an “objective” such as ambiguity as an end in itself, we need to demonstrate that something more specific is intended here. It is fair to ask what all of this has to do with us and with the city, for both we who inquire and for the content of what we study. I have been trying to make the claim of the difference such an environment makes for the city so that we might redeem an identity for this book and so that we might begin to endow it with a voice of its own. In each legible area into which we inquire, the ephemera of city life give rise to resolute interpretations and actions that upon serious questioning disclose traces of collective anxiety over indeterminacy and its uncanny persistence as a problem to be solved, the problem of how to be resolute in the face of the irresolute. In the everyday life of the city such anxiety is registered in ethical collisions that reveal collective encounters with the vertigo released by varied attempts to master and represent the “immensity” of time and space, of division and proximity, of habitation and settlement, of locality and loyalty, of distance between people and things, of evanescent moments and sites that come to be and perish. The imaginative structure of the city makes reference in part to the collective anxiety aroused by the question of the power and mutual and reciprocal relevance of place to life and the impossible need to calculate answers to such questioning. The imaginative structure of the city materializes on those concrete occasions when indeterminacy remains an irresolute trace in an act of rebuilding, in planning, in changing and resisting the mutation of neighborhoods, in organizing a

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festival or garage sale, in representing and disputing housing needs, in identifying and seeking to remedy poverty, in industrial relocation, and in those countless details of city life that always raise for close questioning the remains of a conflict over the ideal and the real (or more prosaically: over values, or what policy calls “best practices”). Case studies or research then re-presents images of such collective problemsolving, but only when the example is questioned in order to make manifest its vertigo, only when the questioning makes demands upon itself, striving to see in its representation of the detail of a specific situation of action, the web of social indeterminacy by which it is exercised and which its various intended solutions seek to resolve.

objective and subjective Cities are addressed in countless ways, much as sex was described in the Kinsey report according to Bataille in terms of externals such as frequency, position, and class: “We have to laugh on reading this title underneath the ten columns of a table: Causes of Orgasm for the Population of the United States These mechanical classifications, usually applied to things like tons of steel or copper, are profoundly incompatible with the realities of the inner being” (Bataille, 1986, 153– 4). Although these “mechanical classifications” seem laughable to someone like Bataille because he measures and finds them wanting, finding them reductive, by the standard of his intuition of the “reality of the inner being” of the word, they often are the starting points which we need to develop through questioning. Thus, what is truly laughable is inquiry of any kind that treats its beginning as a result and thus, is indifferent to its further development. This suggests that I am not opting for a “subjective” approach to the city in contrast to that of the positive sciences, for anything passing under this rubric still leaves the city as an unambiguous object of analysis. For example, imagine, instead of such external views of the city, that we begin with very “internal” bits of first-hand testimony collected from millions of people in narratives telling us what the city (or sex) means to them. Then, we could have an analogue to the table Bataille makes fun of with the title Twenty Million Stories about Orgasm by the Population of the United States. That this would still be laughable is due to sex being treated in this case not as a ton of steel or copper but as an opinion passing as knowledge where the one who “has” it or says it is treated as qualified simply by being able to express a personal conviction. The fact that we must begin at these places does not mean that we end with them, for these beginnings always invite the work of figuring

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out what is going on in such material, the work of disclosing a social world, perhaps held in common but diversified in different ways as the material suggests, a disclosure that is always inviting to a discerning eye. What is laughable is not to engage in this work of disclosure by resting content with unmediated beginnings. Our desire to treat such views anthropologically means that the trouble we introduce for such working assumptions derives neither from wanting to introduce better definitions or facts about the matters at hand or to “replace” or rebut what is assumed of such matters. We are not probing more deeply, correcting facts, or litigating when we inquire into the ways in which the representation of the city appears in a variety of discourses directed to “solve” the problem of its ambiguity; rather, we seek to investigate how, even in the face of such divisions, the question of the city as an object is made to stand steadfast as an implicit focus of collective attention, tacitly serving to center a concerted engagement around the matter of collectivization. This means that the actions represented in this book and named in the title of each chapter, are neither simply determined nor simply free, but courses of problem-solving in which this relationship itself focuses collectivization around the city as a vital distinction. In what follows I seek to build a sense of this collective engagement from many voices which are coordinated as if a montage of views or speakers, illustrated through ethical collisions or examples used to dramatize the narrative. We suggest that the meaning of the collective to and for itself is a binding and elementary force in social life. This montage of views comes alive by virtue of our effort to make the speakers confront one another through the focus we impose upon their relations as if a centre of attention that binds them together. The persuasiveness of this project depends upon the ways in which the elementary force of the social materializes in very slight indications. I treat the city, then, as a distinction that exercises in varying ways a vital force in the lives of people. Even if the distinction is as indistinct, indeterminate, insubstantial, or ethereal as many assume, that it is so must be noted as such in ways that can only confirm its vitality. Further, though people might have all sorts of opinions and ideas about the vitality of the distinction as it appears to them, this does not mean that they are attuned or committed to the problem of questioning how whatever appears to them is as it appears or is an intimation of something else. From this angle, I understand the city as a collective force that fertilizes a range of encounters over questions connected to the uses of particular sites and the part these usages play in its everyday life, as well as questions of its status in relation to the populations that engage it both functionally and symbolically at one and the same time.

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In this work we resist the identification of theorizing with interpretation, first because the failure to make such a difference creates a sacrificial crisis (Girard, 1977) in which adequacy can only be settled by fiat or force (Thrasymachus’s argument), secondly, because interpretation tends (typically, not necessarily) to be exercised by visions of depth or finality (Wittgenstein’s argument against that “picture” of language), but most important, because interpretations are the material or data for theorizing. In each of the following chapters, my focus on the ways in which interpretations are done (rather than on the doing of a penultimate interpretation), attempts to redeem the imaginative capacities of collective life as a social fact. Theorizing the city always begins by addressing the mutually oriented social relationships integral to any medley of interpretations, as an imaginative structure that both animates and specifies the mix of views. In this way I resist offering yet another interpretation to add to this mix. An anthropological approach to interpretations treats them as part of the ritualized understandings and images objectified in various ways as local constraints and filters through which worldly matters are engaged by a people coming to terms with its interpretive sovereignty in relation to the fundamental ambiguity of its distinctions and actions.

c o n v e r s at i o n o f v i e w s This sense of theorizing examines interpretations, re-viewing them not as arguments to rebut but as a conversation of speakers, views, and standpoints made to constitute a discourse. Thus, each discourse invites us to recover its “metaphysical” roots if we understand metaphysics as part of the world rather than otherworldly, as a practice of trying to redeem “the transcendence inherent in the very taking-place of things” (Agamben, 1998, 16). What we aim to disclose through analysis of those “objective” and “subjective” beginnings is the link between the vitality of the city as a distinction in collective life and this transcendence “inherent in the very taking-place” of the city as a distinction. Arguments, policies, and interpretations over slight indications reveal important matters to the discerning eye of inquiry but only if they are taken up as invitations for questioning. In its way the metaphysics of mundaneity materializes in actions aroused by often contested but recurrent encounters over issues such as building codes and variances, gentrification and property rights, the creation and regulation of public spaces, making film festivals, planning the culture of the city, rebuilding at a site, searching for relationships and jobs, disputes over formulae for partitioning the city into administrative areas, proposals to extend or restrict licensing hours, or to affirm the right to tow cars

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from the front of business establishments. Such beginnings whatever they claim, invite questioning and entail the risk of refusing the invitation. Whatever opinion one begins with about local municipal politics (“whatever” side one is on) can appear laughable if it is not taken up for questioning. Whether the city is treated in such beginnings as a ton of steel or as first-hand personal testimony, such treatments remain laughable as inquiries, as theorizing, unless they are submitted to a form of questioning that seeks to disclose the transcendence inherent in the taking-place of these very views (Bonner, 2001).

beliefs as images In this work, I take seriously Plato’s metaphor of the Divided Line (Plato, 1945) as a notation for the scene of representation in which theorizing is conceived as a struggle of problem-solving over the being of representation itself, taking shape in the city over the best ways and means of interpreting and acting on its common situation. This abiding question is a question necessary and desirable and yet impossible to answer with the finality that would eliminate all traces of irresolution. For and in the city, the question takes shape as a concern for the kind and quality of collective life it has or can hope to realize and in the search for ways and means either of rising to the occasion or alternatively, to resign to remain defeated by the apparent intractability of any final solution. That the ideal state, as Socrates says, cannot be realized “down to the last detail” need not deter us from the conversation on that as something worth achieving even in the face of the indeterminacy of any concerted resolution. The fundamental ambiguity of representation (here, with respect to the city as an object) is the topic engaged in this work, the social phenomenon that comes to view in ethical collisions aroused by differences in interpretations, policies, and actions regarding very specific matters. I always begin with images that tacitly make reference to their grounds in ways that invite us to supply interpretive links for them, those links between images and originals Plato spoke of as beliefs. So, in what follows, much of this work is devoted to formulating “grounds” of speeches by introducing beliefs which make their images possible or credible, beliefs which explicate the implicit relationship between what is said and what is unsaid. From this it is fair to say that the beginning of each chapter in this book is occupied by an attentiveness towards the beliefs identified as invitations to rethink important questions of city life. The materials used in each chapter are such collections of beliefs and the momentum of each chapter is organized around a plan to co-

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ordinate these beliefs as parts of a discourse directed to a problem that exceeds the agenda of any specific belief. Because we “overvalue” or exaggerate the problem of fundamental ambiguity (Lacan, 1981), we force the beliefs to make reference to that problem through the substantive details by which they seem to be engaged. Thus if, in a neighborhood reputed to be the gay area of a city, there is a controversy over the use of a particular park and the question of whether homosexuals or “others” in the community should be permitted to define the typical uses of the spot, we treat the opposing beliefs not as a matter to adjudicate but as partial expressions of a discourse on the meaning of public space and the fundamental ambiguity of such borders. The controversy over the park is reinstated as an ethical collision permitting us to bring to view a discourse pertaining to the question of who owns space and how entitlement to speak for uses of spaces is interpreted and contested. The opposition between the beliefs is then cancelled but the differences are preserved (Hegel’s aufheben), as the beliefs are made into speaking positions within a discourse directed to solve a problem by which it is engaged but which it cannot master. The discourse is more comprehensive in its focus of attention than the particular beliefs because it orients to the phenomenon of the drawing of boundaries in a variety of ways and domains whereas the argument over the use of the parks is just a limiting case of this scope. The beliefs stand to the discourse as parts might relate to a whole (this means the beliefs are like images of an original). Yet the discourse could not come to fruition without the bits and pieces of such beliefs and their rudimentary argumentative structures that form the “material” through which we can begin to discern the discourse. The arguments and beliefs are the lively elements which animate any discourse. The original cannot exist without its images just as the discourse cannot exist without its beliefs: indeed, the original exists in its images, just as the discourse exists in its beliefs. Yet the original grounds its images, just as the discourse grounds its beliefs. That is, when aggregated numerically, the images and beliefs are seen to be relatively formless exchanges of opinion or exclamations without the intervention of a discourse that supplies them with their intelligible power as expressions of collective problem-solving. The beliefs then become modes of discursive adjustment, possible structures of alignment, affinity, and division, which crosscut collective life in ways that endlessly confirm its fertility. In part, the craft of theorizing lies in its working with the materials of images, beliefs, and discourses to construct a focused and reflective ascending voice in the narrative, a course of action both representing the collective (speaking for it) and re-presenting the collective (speaking of it).

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In the following chapters, cases are identified that illustrate tensions released by the volatility of modern social change in the city in which destabilized situations become foci of collective problem-solving, always appearing as fundamentally ambiguous ethical collisions. In this sense, cases are intended as dramatic interruptions of representations designed to bring collectives face-to-face with their limits in ways that can empower reflection on insoluble problems. Cases function as critical occasions for bringing to view collective problem-solving and its invariable ethical character in ways that are both exemplary and illustrative. The detail of each chapter deals with specific questions: Is the city only a sign? What is the common situation of the city? How does the city engage questions of cosmopolitanism, night life, scenes, materialism, building and rebuilding, and excitement? In each chapter the very indeterminacy of the question shows how it can produce a range of actions and interpretations, alliances and cleavages, that are centered and socialized by the ambiguity of the question. Each chapter seeks to disclose the social force of ambiguity itself as a locus of collectivization through the very problem-solving it fertilizes.

t h e p r es e n t e n vi ro nm e n t o f i n fl u en ce s In her foreword to an important book by Sophie Body-Gendrot, The Social Control of Cities?, Saskia Sassen notes how the author uses cities as “empirical sites” for the experience “in accentuated forms” of “the impact of economic globalization.” Sassen continues: These cities have rising numbers of high-income professional households, which, through their significant numbers and life styles, mark the urban landscape and create strong contrasts with the growing spaces of poverty and segregation. Because they are strategic for the global economy, these cities also develop policies ... that are seen as crucial for the role these cities play as strategic sites for the global economy. An important hypothesis explored by the author is that in this combination of conditions such cities emerge as the sites for the production of new norms. Among these norms is the renewed importance of order maintenance (Sassen, 2000c, x-xi).

Sassen plays off Max Weber’s discussion of the need of the market for calculable and predictable modes of social regulation or what is today called “governance” when she discusses Sophie Body-Gendrot’s “important hypothesis” and indeed this is such an important hypothesis that any approach to the culture of cities must take it into account, though not necessarily in the exact way it is stated or possibly intended. This important hypothesis says that under current conditions, cities emerge as the sites for the production of new norms.

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Note how this hypothesis revitalizes the link to the canonical sociological approach by recalling us to its intuition that the city is an exemplary scene of collective vitality. Historically, sociology has been called to the project of formulating and representing shapes and expressions of collective vitality and the “production of new norms” has always been part and parcel of such collectivization. But now Sassen gives and retracts in the same gesture, in two ways which influence our inquiry. By identifying the production of new norms with policies and strategies for “maintaining the global economy” she risks treating collective vitality reductively by disregarding the ambiguous but definitive dialectic between old and new and its dialogue around time and the temporal that has long marked the sociological intuition. This is evident in her recognition of “order maintenance” as one among the most important new norms, as if the culture of the city is best described as a response to the stimulus of economic globalization, a response that seeks to continue governing and maintaining order in the face of what Body-Gendrot calls “the negative consequences of economic restructuring and of rapid social mutations” (Body-Gendrot, 2000, ix). Such a reduction of this important recognition to a language of variables takes for granted the very question of the collective vitality of the city with which they begin. The governing and so-called order-maintaining function of culture is only one of the many parts of its discourse and even though it speaks truly, the conflicts which the notion of culture expresses and addresses are always more complex, nuanced, and differentiated than what is typically described under the rubric of “discipline.” This is because the notion of culture at its best makes reference to collective problem-solving in situations that are fundamentally destabilized and the primordial source of such destabilization does not reside in politics or economics but in distinctions that are the inescapable resources (or filters if you will) for understanding politics and economics in the first place. If the city is the site for the production of new norms, the ambiguity of that proposition and all that it implies is the fundamental and contested locus of collective life in the city. This book inquires into the proposition that the city is a site for the production of new norms, but we proceed in ways that contrast sharply with this approach because we examine both notions of “production” and “innovation” as surface features of discourses always needing to be put in question. Indeed, we suggest that the city is such a site insofar as it exemplifies the central and timely debate on the unrest of change reflected in the indeterminacy that shapes the defining mood of a civilization. Thus, in its way, each of the chapters specifies through a different example how the “production of new norms” appears as a locus of collectivization. In the case of the circulation of influences, cosmopolitanism, nightlife, scenes, material production and

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economic innovation, building and rebuilding, and the arts and style, tension between the new and the old and the centre and periphery materializes through the disputed claim that the city is a sign and nothing (or something) more. The conventional alternative that such phenomena can be approached through an idiom that chooses to depict the situation as one in which new norms are “produced” with regard to policies of governance, glosses the agonistic relationship to ambiguity as it appears in collective life, that is, the proposition glosses the social phenomenon of “producing new norms” as a discursive terrain that locates specific ethical collisions illustrative of the practices it recommends.

conclusion In what follows, the representation of the city evolves and is personified as part of a civilizational conversation on collectivization and community, discernible in discursive fragments or parts and in a sturdy imaginative structure that must be deeply and pervasively poetic, a process of human invention whose beginnings and ends are indeterminate and yet stimulating opportunities to recover senses of intimate connection and the necessary and desirable work its constant renewal imposes upon us as incentive and burden. The city – truly an imaginative object – shapes and is shaped by the uses made of it in trying to conquer, master, ignore, and, in some cases, destroy its legibility and limit its powers as a central locus of collective life. In this sense, as exemplar of both the highest and lowest in human association, the city always challenges us to recalculate the ethical limits of human ingenuity and its social creativity. One consequence of this work is my provision of another framework for situating the city within the contemporary debate on social change, often typified as the problem of globalization. From this perspective globalization, as a rubric, depicts the environment of influences that is thought to impinge upon the city, effecting it in decisive ways, perhaps to the point of altering its shape and sense of purpose and of endangering its integrity or, in contrast, of giving it new opportunities; certainly, it colors its everyday life in specific ways. No matter how it is described substantively (say, through the image of an unprecedented mobility of media, money, markets, people), this environment appears to cities as a “problem” which they must handle or “solve” in their various ways. That is, “whatever” this environment is viewed to be (on “whatever,” see Agamben, 1998), it always poses a challenge for the city, a problem that takes shape on critical occasions when the coming-to-view of differences of opinion can be reformulated to reflect back upon the common situation and provide a perspective on its limits.

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From this perspective, such an environment invites the city to conceive of itself as part of an adversarial relation to other cities rendered comparable by virtue of the competitive relations between cities in this market for recognition. The emphasis on comparability and competition further tempts cities to treat their differences as “cultural capital” or resources for product recognition in ways that make constantly problematic the relation of the identity of a city to its difference(s) from the others. The demand of cities to identify themselves and to make themselves distinct and recognizable in relation to other cities continuously raises the question on specific occasions of how a city makes a real difference, that is, how or whether its difference from the others is a real difference. In this book I search for cases in which such a question comes alive and appears to view, cases that can be reformulated as ethical collisions mediated by speakers debating this very question and working to solve it as a collective problem. From this angle, globalization is a contemporary trope that creates opportunities in everyday life to make vivid and graspable the work of collective identity in practice and to situate such work as directed towards “solving” the problem raised in the common situation of a city of being both the same and different from the others, of being twoheaded. Let me close by suggesting in a more formulaic way some of the salient themes that should come out of this book. The city heightens and brings to the surface the two-sidedness of modernity, its tensions, how it is at the same time, loved and hated, embraced and averted. The source of much of this tension comes from the city’s effort to “implement” modernity as a way of life, as a system of desire. Cities have been typically construed as centering themselves in the civilization(s) of which they are a part, and they try to accomplish this by constantly reinventing themselves as schools or laboratories for mastering social unrest by intensifying it as a central locus of excitation in everyday life. In this sense, cities tend to serve as exemplary agents of the “civilizing process” for populations suffering the tumultuousness of modernization in any historical period. Such creativity has been shown historically in the productivity of cities, constituting themselves through achievements of objective culture, materializing in palpable projects that invariably evoke discursive conflicts over the question of change and of the relations between the new and the old. The city is material insofar as its productivity materializes in images that exhibit dialogical traces integral to the formation of the image in the way the computer is the image of a debate over efficiency, alteration and modification of habits, the quality and conduct of work, the uses of time and space. The productivity of the city is measured by the productivity of its images that typically conceal as implicit, contestation over such questions of value, invariably observable in local practices and projects.

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In this sense, the market is only one aspect of the productivity of the city, for its images occur in ideas such as: cosmopolitanism; an extended nightlife; a heterogeneous landscape of scenes; a terrain of diverse and varied groups; innovations in arts, knowledge, and technologies and in the reconstruction of city centres; and the redefinition of excitement and opportunities for “sweetness of living” and entrepreneurial and career initiatives. Such images of the productivity of the city as a centre of “objective culture” materialize in conflicts over the question of what is understood as “given,” as seen-but-unnoticed background knowledge, discernible in disputed beliefs over the quality and direction of change that is good for the city per se. Every significant city can be expected to play back as in “an unruffled mirror” (Lacan, 1981) a fight to the death over the question of modernity and its collision with traditions to which the city gives its specific and detailed signature. The city gives detail to the specific form of this collision as part of the struggle of emplacement, to make the city of the present live in time. In writing a book such as this I seem compelled to define a position in relation to work in the field associated with names such as Sassen, Harvey, Lefebvre, Soja, Castells, and the like. Typically, the expectation is that spaces internal to the city are negotiated or reinvented in response to the changing space of a city in the world market. Instead of proposing yet another opinion or “position” to add to this mix, we still can use it as a point of departure for an interdisciplinary focus for conceiving of the relation of the city as a space to the world market as itself part of a living dialectic in which both city and world market change in the process. This conception of space is developed from a broader understanding of place that includes not just space but also time. This approach allows us to tap into the creativity of social practices in accord with our focus on culture and its link to the particular and unique character of the city. That is, whether or not cities are truly unique in fact or in principle, the question of their uniqueness tends to mediate the living dialectic of emplacement in which any and every relevant space can stimulate a dialogue on its historicity or existence in time. This living dialectic reveals emplacement itself as a contested process through which groups make and remake the city and its parts as historical phenomena linked to time rather than as fragments connected merely to social positions, their production, and Hobbesian interdependencies. Our method permits us to identify space with the extension and circulation of influences that ceaselessly play upon the city to mark it as a mobile environment continuously creating problem-solving situations over questions of its territorial integrity, its quality of life, and direc-

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tions of possible change, questions which require addressing the dialectical relation between space and time. Thus, the concern with space, from this perspective is a concern with a significant but not hegemonic orientation to the city. These questions all pertain to the problem of endowing the spaces of the city and the city itself as a space with a distinctive temporal legibility that can be affirmed or denied in the same breath. Both modern progress (and the supposed uniformity of cities) and local conditions (and the supposed historical specificity of the city) can coexist in the same gesture. In part, the space of the city refers to its status as an object of desire in the circulatory circuits of humankind because cities repel and attract movements of influences (capital, people, information) in ways that pose collective problems. Representations materialize as social influences and as traces of collective problem-solving directed to resolving the ambiguity that haunts any action. This ambiguity actually fertilizes social vitality as the different irresolute interpretive resolutions of groups come to focus alliances and cleavages that, in being observable, give opportunity to grasp what is at stake in any common situation. This “moving focus” points to the power of transcendence and reflection in collective life. The materialism of this book consists in its attempt to measure any conception (including economic determinism) by its vision of collective problemsolving because representing the world in whatever shape is part of an elementary situation of action through which humans resolve to their satisfaction how it is best to live with ambiguity. This irresolute “resolution” is the unspoken locus of any collective representation insofar as speech has to “solve” the problem of materializing in the world as a social influence.

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1 The City Is Nothing But a Sign!

i nt roduc ti on The idea that the city is nothing but a sign rules the representation of the city. This cliché is not limited to the positive sciences but appears in those varied reactions to empiricism expressed in celebrations of the priority of “lived experience” or of the immediacy and detail of the local context which shapes the “realities of the inner being.” Whether the actors are viewed as governed by conditions of forceful generality or of particular detail, they are still seen as absorbed by externals rather than as oriented to whatever absorbs them. It is in this spirit that Jean Baudrillard has linked the cliché to the end of transcendence because actors viewed as so absorbed are endowed with no capacities to reflect upon the limits of what they receive and produce. Note the following quote: a process of absorption of signs and absorption by signs … no longer any soul, no shadow, no double, and no image in the specular sense. There is no longer any contradiction within being, or any problematic of being and appearance. There is no longer anything but the transmission and reception of signs and the individual vanishes … never comes face to face with his own needs … his own image: he is immanent in the signs he arranges. There is no transcendence anymore, no finality, no objective: what characterizes this society is the absence of “reflection,” of a perspective on itself (Baudrillard, 1998, 191–2).

The “absorption” of the actor means that the individual (and so, individuality) “vanishes” because the actor is not oriented to anything other. Other is not given its contemporary inflection as say, different points of view but rather, is the innermost ambiguity resident in any act of distinguishing, the otherness that haunts the word. Here, “other” acquires its primary sense as in Plato to mean that the actor is not

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endowed with the capacity to see a reflection of himself (no soul, no shadow, no double) because events are treated as if they are as they appear rather than as an irresolute resolution. That the being of the actor is absorbed in what appears means that the actor is resolved to be as he appears, remaining uninfluenced by the limits of this relationship. Consequently, there is “no longer any contradiction within being, or any problematic of being and appearance.” Thus, the actor’s orientation to the action does not become “a perspective on itself,” on the action, and so does not reflect back to the actor its being done as one thing rather than another. The city is treated as a sign and nothing more in such versions not because of the substantive capacities it is reputed to possess or lack, but for the reason that the social actor assumed to be exercised by the distinction is not depicted in ways showing desire for a reflective relationship to the action of distinguishing. This can be noted in studies of the city in which the typical actors populating the interpretive terrain are constructed as absorbed by the problem of “transmitting and receiving” distinctions externally as if their choices and actions are determined rather than engaged as perspectives upon themselves. Thus, a widespread question today asks if the idea of the city has any weight, that is, whether it is capable of serving as a focus of loyalty, sovereignty, and solidarity for those diverse groups who settle in its precincts and for those many others who can only conceive it as a destination or part of their imaginings. It is often said that the “new” world mixes populations and influences so thoroughly as to compromise a sense of its place as anything more than a context for instrumental and privatized relations to habitation. The city is rejected on the grounds that it participates in the fate of any category to remain indeterminate, and like any such distinction, can only be sustained through stipulation in ways that are philosophically untenable. That is, when all is said and done, there are no strong reasons for treating the city as a special locus of meaning, since people in our civilization increasingly come to treat the city as a space or pit stop rather than a richly embedded place. The city is typically viewed as a context or background for a variety of individual actions, perhaps survival or the pursuit of amenities, but not as an order that mobilizes commitment to its ways as particular. Here, we would need to disclose a social world that sustains the problem of being and appearance for those engaged by the city as an amenity, the “contradiction” in such a view of the sign that could bring the actor face-to-face with his own limits. For example, even the most thoughtful urban researchers often treat the diversity and fragmentation of the city as compromising its legibility as a focus of solidarity, suggesting that the city is similar to any

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amenity which many “prefer” or enjoy but do not embrace in a way that is committed. These many treat the city as one of among a number of commodities. In contrast to these, the most primitive recoil from the city as a category on the grounds that it is polysemic and oriented to in a multitude of ways that produces an array (Socrates would say, a swarm) of cities in accord with each point of view or interest. Typically, the idea of the city as special is viewed as essentialist or utopian, as a “myth” inherited over time and rendered obsolete by the contemporary mixing and matching of peoples and influences. Thus, informed on the one hand, by a critique of essentialism, and on the other, by a critique of utopianism, the declaration comes to prevail that the city is nothing but a sign. Whether or not this is true, it remains an interesting hypothesis: the declaration that the city is nothing but a sign will be our starting point. But as Deleuze says, a proposition (such as this) is only the beginning and not the end of the kind of inquiry we will undertake. The dialectic is ironic, but irony is the art of problems and questions. Irony consists in treating things and beings as so many responses to hidden questions, so many cases for problems yet to be resolved … Problematic structure is part of objects themselves, allowing them to be grasped as signs, just as the questioning or problemetising is a part of knowledge allowing its positivity and its specificity to be grasped in the act of learning … Everything, however, is reversed if we begin with the propositions which represent … affirmations in consciousness. For problems … are by nature … extra-propositional and subrepresentative and do not resemble the propositions which represent the affirmations to which they give rise (Deleuze, 1994, 63, 164, 267).

The proposition that the city is nothing but a sign is not simply another sign but a challenge that invites us to address the problem and its symbolic field that stands in a relationship with this sign: “It is the signs which ‘cause problems’ and are developed in a symbolic field” (Deleuze, 1994, 164). The present chapter is a beginning in this direction. The “symbolic field” consists of the variety of interpretive moves that enter into the proposition and its object – the city – to make its affirmation or rejection a compelling decision point that glosses the discontinuities in which it is saturated.

the identity of the city The question of the identity of the city can only make reference to an elementary situation for both the theorist and the city dweller. That the city has a legible degree of permanence, distinctiveness, and centrality

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seems an unspoken resource for those who live in the city and take for granted its integrity and for those who study the city and take for granted that its position on a map translates into a course of action. Most important, this intuition of the legibility of the city remains an unspoken resource for all who orient to the city, whether accepting its existence or not, for even if it is absent as a secure and determinate place, its placelessness must appear as situated or “voiced” from the place of language (Blum, 2002). This is how Rancière can speak of the objective of inquiry as one of “mapping together a discursive space and a territorial space” (Rancière, 1994b), for he means that the concept (such as the city) is made to refer not to some territorial referent but to the space of the discourse which addresses and is addressed by it; the space of the dialogue that is located and focused by the city is given body as if the word is given flesh in the place where its meaning settles as the locus of a problem. Yet this elementary situation always envisions a site of contestation in which many paths can be taken and many implications are present. That is, the sovereignty of the place of language as a question in which many voices participate, means that we are constantly if implicitly engaged by the query: who is entitled to speak for and of the city? I aim to return through analysis to that beginning in order to recover and recollect the configuration of problems of the city that focus and provoke the discourse directed to that very question of its integrity. So if, as has been said, the city is no more, if it is a sign and nothing more, I want to put its reality on the spot (Baudrillard, 1987) by returning to the provocation and asking how it could be said. For example, if the city is treated simply as another amenity, its comparison with other cities is governed by the logic of consumption in ways that have important implications for the differentiation of cities since it could be expected to follow from the comparison of goods. That is, if the city is treated as a good, it can be expected to be differentiated in the ways goods are discriminated from one another. Whereas real differences make people “contradictory beings” (Baudrillard, 1998, 88) in the way that Montreal and Toronto could be said to contradict one another (because the singularity of each excludes that of the other), the differences of degree (“personalizing differences”) seeming to rule consumption as a logic suggests that the cities come to be rendered comparable in terms of an abstract model that is artificially designed (gnp, lifestyle indexes) to relinquish any real difference. Though the cities might “differ” in their respective relations to the model (their positions or “rank”), the finding always buries the question of the difference between being and appearance, that is, of the difference between such a difference and a real difference. In these cases, the cliché

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can be disclosed through inquiry which works to center the question of the difference between the model and what it models as a question that enables our representation of the city to develop a perspective on itself. Theorizing performs the disclosure of a social world meant to be enabling to and for its subject. In these ways, the recommendation that the city is nothing but a sign serves us as a research provocation for beginning to make transparent the imaginative structure of place. I call such a recognition rudimentary because it only begins to provide for the city as a legible distinction in our lives. At the very least, it resists and decisively annuls the despair released by the sense of the indeterminacy of the city or of any category by orienting us to its use as a locus of collectivization, that is, to the “mapping together of a discursive space and a territorial space.” Even indeterminacy (if it exists) must be engaged and encountered as the social form that it is from a place that is ruled by the sovereignty of questioning. That the object takes on flesh in its very discourse (say, the object of indeterminacy) means that the discourse is joined to the space of this (interpretive) territory which marks its boundaries. Even if it communicates nothing, the discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it desires the obvious, it affirms that the word constitutes the truth; even if it is designed to deceive, here the discourse speculates on faith in testimony (Lacan, 1968, 13).

That is, whether it is insignificant, banal, or deceitful, discourse confirms its sovereignty, for in being any and all of these things, it is, even as what it speaks is not identical to itself. It is only from this place that placelessness can be engaged. If Martin Heidegger speaks of placelessness, of being no place and no thing, as part of the primordial human encounter with our own indefiniteness, such a conception includes the encounter with the city as itself an other “entity.” This is how we can say that the uncanny experience of indeterminacy which often seems to haunt the lived experience of the city is, at the very same time, an opportunity or incentive for problem-solving in the way that any resolute action is a way of solving the problem of the ambiguity of the world. I conceive of the city as such a distinction if people can be assumed to be engaged by urban emplacement and by the need to make its priority or opaqueness visible in a variety of settings and on enumerable occasions. In this way, the question of the good city or the good of the city becomes basic and vivid in that space where actors engage its indeterminacy, a question which becomes compelling for many projects and in many areas of urban life. Thus, I am interested in developing a sociological approach to the proposition that the city is nothing but a sign by

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asking how that proposition can be seen to come into play in social practices. We can imagine discursive practices directed to clarifying, contesting and refashioning different senses of the city as an image (as a sign, an order, a community). In this, I simply follow the maxim of Max Weber for approaching the “existence” of collectives such as the city. If the city is an indeterminate category, or an amenity and nothing more, or even a disparate medley of various, heterogeneous points of view, it still must persist as the ground of such a structure of exposition, a ground that appears throughout the social practices of collective life. For sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality which “acts.” When reference is made in a sociological context to a “state,” a “nation,” a “corporation,” a “family,” or an “army corps,” or to similar collectivities, what is meant is, on the contrary, only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social actions of individual persons … These concepts of collective entities … have a meaning in the minds of … persons, partly as of something actually existing, partly as something with normative authority … Actors thus in part orient their actions to them, and in this role such ideas have a possible, often a decisive, causal influence on the course of action of real individuals. Thus, for instance, one of the important aspects of the “existence” of the modern state, precisely as a complex of social interaction of individual persons, consists of the fact that the action of various individuals is oriented to the belief that it exists or should exist (Weber, 1947, 102).

Weber is fond of saying that questions such as this are not “metaphysical,” by which he means the method that treats affirmation or rejection of the proposition as if it can be settled by fiat through close inspection of the argument or of the world in a way which begs all of the important issues for the sociologist. The existence of the city means that it is oriented to in action and interpretation (not reductively, for the “minds of people” is a shorthand) as an order to which conduct is directed. That the city is an oriented object, or a course of action, means that its existence is demonstrated in the discourse organized around the distinction it makes in collective life. In what follows we shall attend to the question of the existence of the city in this sense and all that it implies. The “we” of the city is then not a thing but an object of desire that comes to view and recedes in conflicts at a variety of points in everyday life. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, identity is not a something (some thing tangible and measurable in a determinate way), but it is not nothing either (formless, arbitrary, a simple expression of social construction, e.g., only a sign). That is, identity makes reference to a problem-of-living, a contentious and ambiguous force in everyday life. For example, representations of building and rebuilding, visions of citizenship, of the relation

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of art to community, of object and commodity, of street life, of days and nights, of landscapes and scenes, each and all in their ways can serve as mirrors which, in the controversies concerning action and interpretation that they occasion, reflect the “we” of the city as a kind of vanishing point. Any and each of these representations advance claims upon, or make claims for, the city, fertilizing a jurisdictional landscape of interpretive attempts to appropriate the voice of the city. Here, we think of community not as a final product achieved once and for all, but as the dialogical work of mapping this ongoing work-in-progress of different groups as an itinerary of problem-solving itself placed by the persistent questions “What is a city?” and “What should a good city be?” Weber’s formula for the existence of a social entity such as the city locates it in the web of social actions bound together by the category as an implicit discrimination. The formula of the normative order only conceals the ambiguous interdependencies that come to view when its common situation is made explicit. Weber shows in the first instance how the city (or any collective) materializes in practices but leaves to be developed how the practices of orienting to, of doing and engaging the city as an order, must be represented in a narrative which extends and develops the argument about the common situation that unites the aggregate touched by the category. That is, if the sociological view of the city at first identifies it as a normative order (and so, as something more than a sign), the story of the collectivization of the aggregate linked to one another by virtue of the order remains to be told. As cities come to increasingly resemble one another, do they strive even more vigorously to make a difference between themselves and the others? This is not altogether clear since many cities measure themselves by those they treat as comparable (in the “global marketplace”) in ways that make similarity to these others somewhat desirable. Still, if cities lose themselves to such a measure of comparability, they could risk losing a sense of their difference from the others. If the social practice of identity both collects and differentiates, then any city is in-between in just the way the modern inhabitant of a border city is reputed to be (Durrschmidt and Matthiesen, 2002). What this means is that if identity (say, of a city, a group, a person) is a practice of making a difference, it is not simply a negation (“Hi. I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not!” does not tell us anything about each of us except that we are not the other). Montreal is more than not-being Toronto (or any other city). The apparent negation through which one draws away from the others is more than an oppositional gesture, more like a particular and differentiated expression of what we both are (as cities, groups, persons). This means that the “identity” of a city is forged through the

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work of making a difference in the grammar of cities, of making a different kind of city. This demand is capable in principle of (re)calling any city to the question of what a city is, of inviting any city to recover (in Max Weber’s sense) its vocation as a city. In some implicit way, this vocation is linked to the question of the common bond of the city. In this vein, each of the following chapters searches for critical occasions or case studies that bring to view in various ways concerted collective engagements with this question of the common bond of the city, questioning that tacitly includes consideration of how the city is the same and the other, is the same by virtue of being other than the others. In much of the research, every change to the city can be interpreted as introducing a challenge to collective life in varied but specific shapes, whether to the continuity of the self because of the supposed link between biography and place (Corcoran, 2002), or to the homogeneity of the settlement in ways that bring to view the intersection of a conflict of influences mixing local and universal, old and new, parochial and international (Durrschmidt and Matthiesen, 2002). Yet, for the inquirer, any such change must be seen to be taken up as a challenge which disturbs the collective configuration of interpretations and attachments almost as if it is a question that demands collective clarification in the shape of a collision which answers to it. Such changes are registered in amalgamation proposals, gentrification, and the rebuilding initiatives which each in its way, makes it possible for inquiry to intervene in a dialogue over the question of the city as a vital distinction in collective life. It is in this vein that Nielsen and Hsu can say that “the particularity of each city shows itself in the way it engages … vexing issues” at the very time it encounters face-to-face “powerful globalizing and homogenizing forces” (Nielsen and Hsu, 2002). The dialectic of change and resistance releases fierce oppositions that can only be cured through the pharmakon of dialogue. The oppositions between people occupying the same space tends to increase the more they struggle over control of the space. That is, the closer they tend to come together, the farther they tend to come apart. At the most elementary level the imaginative structure of the city depicts a mosaic of interpretive courses of action, an ensemble of practices through which its territoriality is engaged and oriented to, used as grounds of inference and action. Thus, we might pose at the most rudimentary level the research question which asks how the notion of the existence of the city stimulates sociality, proceeding in our way by looking to the ethical collisions that focus its use, and to the objects which these collisions concern, including the production of other categories, divisions, groups, and social formations. At this level, when we ask how the priority of city as place functions, we query the variety of

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ways in which its self-maintenance as an object of desire becomes visible in and through its conflicts of interpretation and action. My guiding question in this work concerns how the tension between the indeterminacy of a content and the solidity and integrity of its ruling intuition, a tension recurrently noted in philosophy, actually materializes in the details of the city as a particular and distinctive social form, and in the practices of engaging the city as an object of desire. Throughout various areas of urban life, this question itself becomes the focus of a contested terrain in which, on the one hand, the city appears as an empty word, a vapor, and, on the other hand, “more real than dogs and cats” (Heidegger, 1961). This leads me to ask how theorizing stands with respect to the existence of the city (whether it is real or an empty word) and by implication, how it stands with respect to being. This contentiousness animated by conflicts that implicitly express concerted concern for the integrity, permeability, and transpositions of boundaries formulates the collective as the site of border warfare, and border warfare as both a topic and resource of collective life, continuous and observable, over the question of control over the means of interpretation. No matter what such border warfare says about the collective substantively, no matter how vigorous its denial of collective integrity, it always must confirm its character as what Durkheim called a “social fact” (Durkheim, 1961) and, later, a collective representation. This recommends that the city’s orientation to itself – to its own difference, so to speak – constitutes the focus of its collective life (the primary indication of its collective purpose). That the collective is collectivized by the very question of its own collectivization, means, in the case of the city, that we assume a population to be engaged by the question of the identity of the city as if that engagement is the “joint action” by which it is exercised as a fundamental problem, and that we can take up this engagement as the central focus of our study in a way that is theoretically coherent and empirically adequate (Weber, 1947). In this sense, the city is a “typical mode of action” in Max Weber’s sense rather than a monolithic collective actor. That is, collective life offers us countless examples of how a population is engaged by the question of the collectivization of its cities.

the city defined In his essay The City, Max Weber is exercised by the problem of defining the city, first as a marketplace, then as a political-administrative unit (Weber, 1951). These boundaries continuously dissolve when measured by his common-sense knowledge of what a city is and means, for example, when some places which appear to him to qualify as cities in

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terms of the definition he is developing are conceded not to be so and, alternatively, when some cities which fail to be located by his definition as cities strike him as real cities. That is, we must know what the city is not in order to say what it is, and we must know what it is in order to say what it is not. The working out or grounding of this intuition is the beginning of theorizing, a species of the problem philosophy has represented as the relation of the same to the other. If Weber truly does not know what the city is, how will he recognize it when he finds it? And if Weber does know what the city is, why is he beginning again? Plainly, the relationship between the same and the other is not first a relationship between the inquirer and the “external” world but a movement within the inquiry itself, a movement in which the fundamental ambiguity of thought is encountered. This is how Benardete can call theorizing, after Socrates, a “second sailing” (Benardete, 2000, 408–9). That is, Weber has some kind of knowledge of what the city is that he needs and desires to ground. Weber begins with his result (say, common-sense knowledge), and he will end by seeking to recollect this beginning. He will not eliminate this ambiguity at the root of the category and experience of the city but he may be able to clarify the elementary problem it poses in collective life through his demonstration of ways in which this special ambiguity is itself a social phenomenon and locus of collectivization for individuals and groups. The problem Weber faces is to objectify this encounter in language and action, for it is in the action of language that such a thoughtful engagement is represented. This problem of definition is not peculiar to Weber, for it seems to have plagued the tradition of urban sociology: “A sociological definition of the city cannot be formulated” (Gans, 1968, 114–15). And yet we live in cities, continuing to recognize and distinguish them in ways that are often unalterable and abiding, clear and definitive. A tension seems to exist between this sense of definitiveness and the indeterminacy of our definitions. Heidegger among others, has remarked on this “contradiction” which characterizes theorizing as it inquires into that which it firmly recognizes, always needing to suffer the tension between the clarity of its intuition (for example, what the city is and is not) and the impermeability of its distinction (Heidegger, 1961). And yet if such a tension exists in our inquiry into the city, is it particular to such an “object,” that is, to the city per se, or does it characterize inquiry into any content? Is there not a persistent tension between the search for grounds in theorizing which seeks to grasp its “object” even as the object withdraws from that very grasp? In speaking about freedom, Jean-Luc Nancy could be speaking of any notion, even the city: “For even when it is deprived of a referent, or empty of all assignable signification, this word still carries, even to the point of indecision, or

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rather in the impasse of its meanings, the very meaning of logos in which philosophy recognizes itself: the opening of a free space of meaning” (Nancy, 1993b, 8). The “free space of meaning” is one of a family of figurative combinations – lived experience, natural attitude, common-sense knowledge, pre-theoretic attitude – designed to lead us to recognize how any category always answers to our normal and typical capacity to imagine the life (an experience) which it must name. This is to say that the city must first point to some recurrent stereotypical encounter for which its name provisionally and tentatively stands (re-presents) and which, upon reflection, will measure its diversity. That is, the name must point to some implicit intuition of its form that, beginning as a cliché describing a typical experience, remains to be developed and explicated. Secondly, the heterogeneous appearances of the cliché in the life of a people guarantees both its historicity (that it changes over time) and its perspectiviality (that it varies at anyone time). Thus, at the very moment we intuit the implicit form of the category, we also concede its necessary plurality, leading some to declare that these constraints of time and space entering into the diversity of the appearance of the content make it indeterminate, as if it is a sign and nothing more. This opinion which treats the unity or integrity of form (the typification of the meaning of “city”) and the diversity of its appearances (the encounter with its variety of images) as if they are two opposing conditions, produces a dualistic picture of the relation of language and action which we need to reformulate. In the idiom of Hegel’s conception of the aufheben, we cancel the opposition between the unity and multiplicity of the free space of meaning, and we preserve the difference (Birchall, 1980). Some might also suggest that form is an essentialist gesture though we have said that it anticipates a free space of meaning, heterogeneous and open to question, but still integral in its fidelity to some living version of its name. That the free space of meaning of the city resides (in part) in its differences means that the city is both one and many, that is, a free space of meaning in which its typical experience assumes many shapes. Of course, at this point everything important remains since the question of form is an intuition (Rosen, 1980), awaiting development and explication. My inquiry is rooted in the strategy of locating materials that can be used for the purpose of reinventing such fragments as dialogue in ways that anticipate a progression. We will be obsessive about the need to track the relation between the form of the city and its plurality of voices through an examination of many cases and settings designed to reflect the richness of city life. We shall treat this relationship between the form or free space of meaning of the city and its heteroge-

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neous appearances in life not as adversarial but as a research question, a provocation. I engage representations of the experience of the city as part of a “natural” situation in which we encounter a “question that has been incorrectly formulated” because of its partiality, and yet sufficiently stimulating on its occasion, to be imagined as part of a dialogue “susceptible to a structural extension that is as general as any argument” (Benardete, 2000, 414).

the real city The hypothesis of the decline of the city (typically discussed under the rubric of “deterritorialization”) is perhaps only the symptom of a more pervasive mood towards collectives that runs through modern life. The philosopher David Carr says: “There are no doubt many reasons why the idea of a communal subject is not taken seriously today. One of them is … the resolutely third-person perspective from which the problem of social reality is viewed … often turn on questions of what can be directly observed” (Carr, 1986, 124). This suspicion is confounded today with the charge of the essentialist character of discrimination, an accusation which suggests that the reiterative exchange of signifiers can only reduce the signified to the status of dream, wish, or moan, reflected ultimately in the faintly audible breath (psyche) of the speaker’s voice. Further, though long a resource of the sociological tradition, collective actors are typically viewed with suspicion, as reified, gratuitous, or fictitious entities imposed upon what are basically individual actions. (All of these moves are part of the contentious discourse on “universals” that has long haunted philosophy and particularly that branch in the grip of models of predication.) The difficulty here in recognizing how people can be committed to collective purpose when it appears against their interest is integral to the problem of the General Will posed by Rousseau (Rousseau, 1947) and is typically represented in conceptions of the free rider problem, in the reduction of purposes to “utilities” (Stinchcombe, 1986b), and in the concomitant difficulty of thinking even of collective utilities, a limitation which results in restricting collective purpose to liminality, the cultic, or tribal ecstasies (Halton, 1993). This ties into Rancière’s idea that the indeterminacy of any notion rests on the incapacity of a population to actualize its relationship of language to action because of the ineluctable abstraction of the concept. A collective only begins to institute itself as something other than a category in its orienting to its collectivization per se. Rancière implicitly uses Marx’s method of formulating the trajectory of class formation as the ground of any collectivization (Rancière, 1999).

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An important drive of this work lies in its attempt to make transparent the exchanges between the metaphysics of anti-essentialism with its critique of the abiding character of form, and the ordinary and expert philosophies of city life that reciprocally influence and reflect such concerns. Instead of arguing with the hypothesis that the city is no more, as if empirical research could bring us to a final solution, we treat the hypothesis itself and what it intimates as a locus of collective life, that is, as an elementary problem which, in being worked out in and for any city, shows us something particular about the city. Therefore, the denial of the city as a relevant category needs to be rethought itself as a social practice that is part of the discourse of and on the city.

t h e c i t y a s a f r e e s pac e o f m e a n i n g The referent of the sign – that illusory “transcendental signified” – can only be made specific with reference to the collective engaged by the question of the city and all that this implies. That is, the “free space of meaning” is measured by the “lived experience” or course of action of language and its use to which it need refer. In contrast, the stipulation that the city is nothing but a sign could be an irony adopted as a strategy as in Baudrillard (Baudrillard, 1987), or a premature conclusion based upon an interpretation of the city’s fragmentation and apparent dispersiveness, or, finally, it could be a simple confirmation of what is often called its polysemy or “multiple codes” (Gottdinier and Lagopoulos, 1986). If the city is a sign and nothing more, this might only mean that it has become detached from any collective purpose which could mobilize people to act in its name, the collective purpose inscribed in the difference which the city is assumed to make, a difference to which a population is assumed to orient in engaging its kind of emplacement as grounds of inference and action. Criticism along this line might suggest that properties cannot be identified which distinguish cities from one another. Because we are said to lack agreement about the criteria which define collectives of various kinds – nations, societies, tribes – the collective is said to “exist” only by virtue of its name, where the name is thought to be a sign unrelated to actual practices. The proposition says that the name makes no difference. But this maxim becomes a research provocation in Weber’s formula (Weber, 1947) that challenges us to examine categories of place and locality as “action oriented to an order”: the city exists insofar as we can discern visible ensembles of practices directed to using emplacement and locality in ways which recognizably delineate it as a matter of relevance.

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The critique might imply that the city does not function as a lived experience and, so, in its way depends upon some view of the “objectivity” of any collective entity as spurious on the grounds that it cannot be rigorously delineated in terms of a unique set of properties. From this critique we recognize in addition, that because we each can classify ourselves and others by a number of identities, the “truth” of any one identity is not sufficient to explain its use. This in turn leads us to ask how we do identification by way of city (in distinction to other identities) and what kind of priority it has, both in relation to the other possibilities from which we select and to the contrasts and contexts that its use produces. In this vein, to propose that the city exists would be to recommend that a collective maintains itself by virtue of orienting to its name as an identity that enters into its practices and interpretive relations in a variety of ways. If the city “exists,” it can be expected to be displayed as a constraint upon practices through which its name appears in the “set of social identities with which one can be properly labele” (Moerman, 1965). The constraint of locality is expected to appear in many visible ways. The priority of the category of city is regularly observed and tested in conflicting interpretive practices with respect to other identities that make competing demands for loyalty. Similarly, we typically discover in the discourses around the city, systematic attention to the kinds of people inhabiting the place and their differences from other peoples and other places, including the relations of the city to the influences of other cities. In the same vein we find concerted interest in the imagined origin of local customs and their continuity and in the ways in which such customs are thought to document essential membership; and we note the fitting together of populations and places, often retrospectively, in ways which allow many who identify such links to characterize anything a population does as typical of the city (Moerman, 1965). Here, in comparing cities, we might ask questions such as the following: what priority does locality have for speaking about persons or practices which would, were we not there, be properly associated with other identifications? How, in any particular case, does locality produce contrasts between city, region, nation, in ways that mutually imply and define one another, providing a context for making comparisons appropriate? Finally, if locality has the power to make each population a joint enterprise with “countless generations of unexamined history” (Moerman, 1965), how is such a “universal” specified in the case of particular cities? At the most rudimentary level, the imaginative structure of the city is organized around the relevance of locality as if a “device” for

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assigning priorities, establishing contexts and contrasts of relevance, producing comparisons, typifying self-maintaining populations and self-perpetuating populations. At this level, locality permits us to speak of the imaginative structure of the city as its “common culture” as observable in the power and orderliness of collective interpretations (Garfinkel, 1967). To say that the city is nothing but a sign, then, should not distract us from the concern for how the categories of city and place are used as a priority in organizing everyday life. In this way, the cliché itself becomes an invitation to research because, if it is “nothing but a sign,” what this recommends should be observable in social practices. It is in this sense that, as a category, the city must function as more than a label but as a course of action: what it is is differentiated from what it is not, and what it was or what it will be is used to inform what it is. The construct – never an empty term – is accomplished through interpretive practice and most important, refers in its way to typical interpretive encounters with whatever it recommends. That is, the theme of the city as a living entity is produced in any present and elaborated through a series of instances (McHugh, 1968). I venture that the problem of what the city is as a kind of place serves as an actual and palpable locus of collective action in the everyday life of cities as shown unfailingly in projects which invariably raise questions and contested interpretations directed to the issue of the impermeability of its borders vis-à-vis its interior life and environment, its people, history, and future. In this sense, the idea that the city is a sign and nothing more – a mere vapor in Nietzsche’s sense – guides much work on globalization, work that posits the erosion of the city as a significant focus of loyalty. We shall use such research to direct our interest in many areas of city life by relentlessly considering its implications for representations of the city and of urban collective practices. Since even the polysemic city needs to be conceived as engaged by its polysemy, an implicit vision of a collective encounter with the city invariably seems to underlie the various ways of speaking. That is, the collective is an inescapable “background” of talk incarnated in the mutual recognition conveyed by the word as a deed. This might lead us to recognize how even if the city is conceived as a work of art, for us this should call to mind the classical conception of the agency of language, a conception whose ambiguity was dramatically confirmed in Nietsche’s Birth of Tragedy (Nietsche, 1956), and is best represented in the idea of the sign as expressing a “manner of being” (Ledrut, 1986, 123). We would treat words then, always alive and magical, as making reference to the intrinsic courses of action they affirm, for even inanimate things such as jug and bridge, as words, imply for us ways of being

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with and towards such things (see Simmel, 1959). This concern for the existence of the city takes shape in conflicting interpretations of how or whether the lived experience of locality and place for which it might stand is today something rather than nothing. If the city is an indifferent locus of meaning, how does discourse over that begin to express a concern for the manner of being commensurate with its emplacement, the constant collective engagement with the local that marks the city as a lived experience? That the collective is an inescapable background of talk means that some tacit sense of the sovereignty and authority of language, by virtue of its capacity to empower distinguishing whatever interest is at stake, remains the background of language. If we begin to approach the city as a “free space of meaning,” we must understand that it “exists” as such, from the point of view of a civilization, society, or people for whom it appears as a meaningful object of desire. Raymond Ledrut describes the image of the city as akin to a work of art – something like a “myth” or “literary work” – which can only inspire theorizing that is commensurate with such a structure, that is, theorizing which unfolds reflexively and dialectically to both evoke and grasp its many voices as expressions of a “situation” (Ledrut, 1986). There is no reason though, why the city should be unique in this respect since any topic invariably makes demands upon the imaginative questioner that exceed her self-assurance. There is always more than words can say. What Ledrut’s notion of the city as a work of art might suggest more deeply is that the city as an object is a running dialogue, an implicit, undeveloped, and abstract ensemble of representations produced and circulating within civilizations, continuously fashioned and refashioned in language and action as if a work of art. If the city is not impenetrable but an object of analysis, we can ask of such an object how it disguises and empowers at one and the same time a continuous concern to represent locality as a focus of collective life in ways that mark and differentiate cities. We can think of the dialogue itself as a whole, both because it exceeds the finality of our exposition and because it exists as an ongoing work of poiesis that we can only penetrate by encountering its parts (its speakers). This view of the whole is not like de Certeau’s notion of the “solar eye” (de Certeau, 1984), the panoptical vision of the city as seen from the detached perspective of urban planning or the master plan: rather, it is the dialogue which we inherit and in which we are immersed, the dialogue whose strength we want to recover and whose ambiguity we want to clarify by methodically making transparent its elementary form. The parts of this dialogue are invariably speakers and the speakers appear in the guise of opinions which we need to supply with voice.

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c i t y vo i ce s I want to treat the city from a somewhat different angle than that usually adopted in urban research, for I will examine ways in which civilizations bring to bear their considerable resources of interpretation and action upon the question of the uniqueness of their cities. In part, the imaginative structure of the city refers to the ways in which any city is conceived as orienting to the recognition, persistence, and maintenance of its difference as a feature of its routine problem-solving. Typically, the differences among cities were seen as produced by external conditions such as historical circumstances, geography, landscape, economic fluctuations, and the mix of people who come to live and work in these places. These differences seemed both to distinguish and limit cities, and by rendering cities unequal in terms of such externals, ecology and history have tended to write histories of the city that formulate them as collective actors determined by conditions which they could only receive but never truly authorize. And yet, the endlessly inventive character of cities is constantly exhibited not only in affirming or confirming their differences but in the ways in which their specific details of life express in these differences, distinctive solutions to common collective problems. So, cities fated to have seaports or unbearable heat or cold all year around could still be viewed as making themselves the distinctive places they were, even in the face of such limiting conditions which they are seen to share with others. While acknowledging the common situation of such cities, one could also say that distinctive cities cannot be imitated. It is this cliché and its “noncontradictory doublespeak” (Benardete, 2000) to which my work in this essay is directed. Thus, the inequality of cities with respect to external conditions is overcome through the recognition of their inescapable solidarity with respect to common problems. And yet, if it is necessary for this sociological gesture to confirm both the commonness and difference of any city, it is also necessary to appreciate how the work of a city lies, in part, in its varied projects and those critical occasions that show how its difference makes a difference within the context of the common problem-solving situation which it shares with all cities. In this work, I am concerned to study the engagement of the city with its difference not only as a problem it shares with all cities but as a constant locus of collective life that it needs to encounter, a problem we can link to the social phenomenon of collective identity as a focus of interpretation and action in everyday life. If cities are the same and different from one another, we always ask how cities are viewed as orienting to this mix (this impasse) in ways that

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make the question of uniqueness powerful, visible, and discursive. There are moments in the routines of cities at which they come alive to challenge the hypothesis that they are only different in degree from one another, to affirm the possibility that they are different in kind as well. On these occasions, cities are viewed as engaged by the question of whether their differences are unique and how the uniqueness could be something more than a difference of degree (in contrast to most comparative research on cities which treats culture as a difference of degree). In Montreal, for example, the topic of Québec’s status ignites this issue in terms of the rhetoric addressed to the question of how or to what extent the people of its province are distinct or unique, and, by implication, its major city as well. The rebuilding of Berlin in the wake of its particular history still forces that city to question what is specific to Berlin in its globalization, just as the economic revival of Dublin invites that city to engage the question of what, if anything, persists as part of its unique heritage in the face of these changes. If such cities can each freely acknowledge their distinction as a major city, critical occasions still induce them to raise the question in practice of whether and how these differences (which “belong” to the city) are unique. We intend to examine the ways in which such questioning is activated and engaged in urban life at revealing moments. This strategy permits us to treat the identity of the city not as a stereotypical stipulation, but as a dialogue that addresses the question of how (and whether) the city’s distinctiveness appears under different guises in many areas. For example, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the Referendum in Québec are only apparently conditions external to these cities: they are experiences and memories constantly reshaped and redefined to become “internal” to the city’s history and part of its fabric of collective experience, distinguishing residents of one city from the other and, so, marking their cities as different in kind and not simply in degree. The continuous dialectic between such external events and the social practices of city dwellers make and unmake the identity of the city as ongoing work-in-progress. Just as part of the meaning of Berlin as a unique place is exhibited in its practices of achieving a resolution to the effects of the Cold War and the persistence of its traces upon citizens, part of the meaning of Montreal is exhibited in the ways it “digests” or absorbs events such as the Referendum (or the ice storm) into the narrative fabric of its collective life. These “effects” are made integral to each city, registered in the ongoing and continuously revisable sense of its specificity and uniqueness which it negotiates as part of its relation to identity, as a persistent engagement of city dwellers on occasions which exhibit strong differences among cities even as they are exercised by common problems.

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The concept of environment, therefore, cannot be accepted crudely as such; it must be broken down, and recognized both as a variable and as a movement. Geography, topography and economics, although related, are not one and the same thing. Venice, for example, was a place of refuge, originally chosen for its inaccessibility, and it was also a place for commerce, grown prosperous because of its ease of access. Its palaces were counting houses that signified the progress of its wealth. They opened onto convenient porticoes that were docks and warehouses. Economy here complied with topography and drew advantage from it. The affluence born of trade explains the ostentation that spread, little short of insolently, across the facades of Venetian buildings; it explains as well the Arabian luxury of a city that faced both East and West. The perpetual mirage on the water and in its reflections, the crystalline particles suspended in the humidity of the air – these brought into being certain kinds of dreams and certain kinds of tastes that have been incomparably translated in the music of many poets and the warm tones of many colourists. Nowhere more perfectly than here can we hope, by the very conditions of Venice’s environment and by making use of a certain ethnic mixture whose ingredients are easily proportioned, to apprehend the temporal genealogy of a work of art. But Venice has worked on Venice with a most extraordinary freedom. The paradox of its construction is its struggle against the elements: it has installed Roman masses on sand and in water; it has outlined against rainy skies oriental silhouettes that were first conceived for use in perpetual sunlight; it has waged an unending war against the sea by devices of its own invention – the ’maritime tribunes, the works of masonry, the murazzi – and finally, it has seen the overwhelming preference of its painters for landscape, for the green depths of forest and mountain that lay so close at hand in the Carnic Alps (Focillon, 1989, 149–50).

The idea of Venice working on Venice is a notion we wish to make central not only to images of the “environment” but to all of those conditions which impress themselves upon us by virtue of their apparent externality. The environment produces a response which creates new problems and new responses. For example, Venice was used in different ways and by different types and groups, reflected in usage which influenced the growth of Venice itself. If we appreciate the city as a work of art, we see nevertheless that, as such an accomplishment, its history shows a constant dialectical relation to its influences, working against the elements as its way of working with them to extend and perpetuate its own voice. A monolithic history of Venice does not describe its voice because the constancy of collective problem-solving is reshuffled, appearing at critical points as efforts to confront the destabilized relation of its every present to its past and future.

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the city as an object of desire Certainly the city is an “item,” discussed extensively and comprehensively in popular and academic texts. The writers, like paparazzi tracking down a celebrity, note, and indeed in their ways help produce, the renewed notoriety of the city. These speeches tend to give us views of the city which, while partial, might add up to an interesting picture. But then again, a discourse is not simply additive in the way of an inventory (say of opinions), because it invites the violence of an intervention that can begin to orchestrate its voices as if a dialogue. Dialogue, on the other hand (v. conversation: ab) is animated by the idea of a possible progression in the discussion; it does not consist in the juxtaposition of several voices, but in their interaction (Todorov, 1993, 52).

Dialogue is the intervention into a conversation for the purpose of creating progression as if a narrative. Further, dialogue does not just “find” conversation but must create it out of the social detritus of opinion and cliché that it takes as relevant for its purpose (its interest). Dialogue creates an interaction among voices and our theorizing will aspire to recollect the sense of these various ethical collisions as the surface of a problem-solving situation. The situation though remains hidden until we begin to animate it through interest and action (inquiry). If inquiry discloses things in their hiddenness (Benardete, 2000, 413), it does so by recovering the suppressed dialogue implicit in the surfaces of things. This instructs us to organize voices as a dialogue and to intervene in ways designed to make the dialogue confront the fundamental ambiguity of the city as an object of desire (Bonner, 2001). My concern in this work is to intervene in the conversation on the city – in the many guises in which it appears to me – in order to transform its voices into a dialogue on the question of the city as a social form, a form of life both general and unique, and to use such a narrative “progression” to begin to focus ways in which the ambiguity of the city as an object of desire fertilizes collective problem-solving concerning differing visions of the vitality of city life and, so, diverse conceptions of the quality of the city and of its character as distinguishable, particular, and, perhaps, individual. Can we begin to navigate these waters to recover a degree of constancy in the representation of the city throughout its many and complex discursive permutations? Can we resuscitate what Raymond Ledrut calls the “pseudo-text” (Ledrut, 1986), the as if of dialogue, in which the city as an object of desire serves to focus collectivization in just this sense? The city collectivizes inquirers by

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virtue of holding fast (despite its many shades and variations) as an abiding object of fascination (as their topic and mine). And yet, the city is only a topic for us, for we who inquire, because we assume it to hold fast (despite its multiple and heterogeneous shapes and guises) as a normal, typical (though deeply layered) object (experience) in everyday life, as an elemental force in the social affairs of a population.

pl ac e Theorizing and research on the city is invariably haunted by the question of place, by the aura of the city as a kind of place. In this chapter I have begun to reflect upon this common understanding by asking how the interest in place presupposes an interest in joining the notion of space to time. In this way, recovering a strong notion of place in social life is part of a process of revitalizing collective capacities for transcendence. To treat the city as nothing but a sign means, in the language of Giogio Agamben, “to forget the transcendence inherent in the very takingplace of things (through) … its reduction to the status of another fact” (Agamben, 1998, 16). Yet, as Agamben surely knows, transcendence is not a “given,” for despite its omnipresence as a latent power of collective life, it must be made to appear as an object of desire. This often becomes visible when there is conflict and contestation over ways and means of interpreting public space. In a less high-toned way, when we speak of the civility of a city, we might be making reference to this capacity for transcendence, this implicit and undeveloped inclination to put into question emplacement itself as part of the problem-solving that is collectivization. For the inquirer, the case study reflects an attempt to take advantage of this current of collective life by bringing it to view on the occasion of contestation. If the “forgetting of transcendence” is observable in examples such as the rancorous conflict noted by Girard and discussed by Nielsen and Hsu in the amalgamation confrontation (Nielsen and Hsu, 2002), this is not because each or either of the adversarial positions in the debate are particularly so attuned. Rather their inflexibility leads them to become “locked” in an either/or face-off in which both sides are able to win their argument at the expense of the other: “when equally weighted discourses about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of amalgamation cease to orient to each other for rejoinders, there is a tendency of each to be reduced to strategic responses where they are frozen into inflexible and mutually exclusive positions” (113). This follows because “in using different reasons each side claims it takes into account the most efficient and functional solution to problem-solving and each argues that its choice best represents the interests of local democracy”

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(113). Note that because each side rushes into its argument by using as its resource a suppressed dialogue on the nature of local democracy and its “interests,” what is missing from the exchange is this dialogical opportunity. Yet, if the “dialogue” is missing, it is only noted as such because its absence appears as such to theorizing as an implicit presence in the confrontation between opposing views. When Nielsen and Hsu offer that participants could orient to the missing dialogue as an opportunity, they recommend that it is both absent and present and, even more, that its absence, while apparent, can be overcome. Thus, transcendence is not otherworldly, ethereal, and insubstantial if it can be practiced as part of a desire to overcome oppositions, not by cancellation but through preserving their apparent differences as expressions of the same (as different solutions to the common problem of figuring out what is local democracy). It is by virtue of the absent presence of the dialogical promise that a modern city can appear to be both mass and public at the same time, for if the city shows itself as a mass, as incarnating the end of transcendence, that end can always be opened up and brought to view through the very collisions that seem to assume its death. The studies that follow identify occasions for use as cases, exemplary and illustrative critical moments when such matters can become transparent. Thus, we can always ask how the case study might begin to mirror back to the society, its transcendence, its capacity for “reflection.” Baudrillard again suggests that the writer cannot merely live off the oppositions with which he begins, needing to recover their dialogical undercurrents through the use of a rule for locating the case by tracking among apparent binaries, another underlying question resting on a more intrinsic ambiguity (Baudrillard, 1990, 23). It is this fundamental ambiguity, like the question of local democracy and its interests, which needs to be recovered as the focus of collectivization that could sustain dialogue (reflection) even and as any answer is fated to leave a remainder. In this vein, case studies themselves function as interventions designed to expand the resources of a public culture, interrupting representations through formulations that dramatize the limits of selfunderstanding as a problem to work out. Here cases serve as critical occasions for bringing to view collective problem-solving and its invariable ethical character.

the theorist If representations of the city appear as speakers working their way through an implicit dialogue, we address these propositions by encountering them as if for the second time, much as one who makes the

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familiar strange. Thus, the travel metaphor is appropriate: we travel within a place rather than to another space, for, in disclosing things in their concealment, we encounter common views for the second time, so to speak. The common views are not esoteric for they are our views, binding us to the materials of study. We encounter diversity not by traveling to Appalachia or even Mongolia but in interrogating ourselves through the common distinctions which link us. What is most strange is the problematic nature of what is before our eyes and our capacity to suffer the struggle to articulate and objectify the discourse of which it is part, the discourse to which we intimately belong. Travel means healing the very defect of the concept, giving it the body in which we can “read” it … The paradox of identity is that you must travel to disclose it. The Same can be recognized on condition that it be an Other. It is identical to the concept in so far as it is elsewhere, not very far but somewhere else, requiring the little move. Now discovering his or her identity is framing the space of that identity. Identity is not a matter of moral or physical features, it is a question of space. Spatialization presents by its own virtue the identity of the concept to its flesh. It ensures that things and people stay at “their” place and cling to their identity. The (old) 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 (Rancière, 1994b, 32, 36).

The process of encountering the city theoretically is treated less as a foreign expedition requiring contact with the exotic, and more as a method of making the familiar strange. Whereas Doreen Massey says that we can learn about our Western cities by thinking about Africa (Massey, Allen, and Pile, 1999), Wittgenstein might say that we learn about our Western cities by thinking about them and so by first engaging the notion (right here in this spot!) of what it is to think the city as an object. Just how misleading Frazier’s accounts are, we see, from the fact that one could well imagine primitive practices oneself and it would only be by chance if they were not actually to be found somewhere. That is, the principle according to which these practices are ordered is much more general than Frazier shows it to be and we find it in ourselves: we could think out for ourselves the different possibilities – we can readily imagine that, say, in a given tribe no-one is allowed to see the king, or again that every man in the tribe is obliged to see him … Perhaps no-one will be allowed to touch him, and perhaps they will be compelled to do so (Wittgenstein, 1979, 5).

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The idea that the city is a sign and nothing more – an effect of external causes, a dismembered body, or a mixing bowl for the expression of diversity – is a beginning if we listen closely to the implications of such propositions, for in saying something very true about cities they leave to us the task of restoring such partial images to a dialogue that could begin to place them as its parts rather than as the whole. This is Rancière’s “countermarch”: instead of moving to the place of the other to find the same, we try to discover the other in the same. In this way, the hypothesis which equates urbanization with urbanity, or the proposition of the fragmentation of the city, or of its erosion as a locus of solidarity, each and all exhibit upon reflection, to we who theorize, an intricate symbolic field upon which their propositions depend, problems that invite us to find opportunities for analysis if we accept these challenges which they implicitly raise. The voices of the city appear then, as claims to speak about the city, which we engage as part of the meaning of the city as an object of analysis. If the city is a site that fertilizes interpretive energies, it can be said to focus collectivization in just that sense, for interpretations of the city implicitly situate it as a discursive terrain that we need to map, and the “we” in this case is simply the dialogue collectivized by its name. So, while a city is situated in space and time as the site which it is reputed to be, it is also placeless in the sense that an engagement with “it” is always part of an imaginative structure. The city (Chicago, Toronto) might appear to belong to those who can call it their own, to those who reside in its precincts and seem entitled to speak of it as “my place,” or my home, but for inquiry, such voices always raise the question of what kind of place or home it is, and of the differences between and among “mine” and “yours,” the “us” and the “they,” as varying and contested claims to possess the city as an interpretive object. If we assume typically that intimate knowledge of a place is a form of interpretive entitlement, we also know that being able to rest my jurisdiction on this alone is not the same as theorizing the city, just as a person who bears (owns?) a name or category cannot be assumed eo ipso to have the last word on that to which she is presumed to have such intimate access (Wittgenstein, 1953; Derrida, 1973). Recognition of the city as an irremediably local, parochial, and intimate landscape always confers upon the resident the voice of expertise but nothing more, for such expertise as intimate as it is with city spaces and customs, from the point of view of theorizing can only be one of the voices of its discourse. This is how we can say that theorizing makes problematic the question of the voice of the city through its desire to recreate this object (the city) as a terrain of many voices.

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My recreation of the voices of the city as a discourse resonates with Plato’s method of recollection or anamnesis in a way that qualifies the approach taken in this work to theory and method as mimetic in the classical sense of the term. I do not simply aim to reproduce the voices in the city as speeches which our text expresses as if it is a mouthpiece for unambiguous views. Rather, the intervention takes the form of reshaping such views as a story that is more than a medley of opinions or even a discursive realignment, but a dramatization that imitates the action of representation. For example, the idea that the city is nothing but a sign is nowhere stated explicitly in the mélange of views and opinions on the city but is an imitation of the action of storytelling that animates these voices as its unspoken ground. A mimetic approach dramatizes the usage as a discourse and, in turn, dramatizes the discourse as a narrative “progression” organized around a view of the ethical collisions which organize the materials as if an unspoken collective locus. My narrative does not then identify with the views but imitates or represents the action of representation in which they are immersed as if it is ethically driven to clarify or “solve” matters of fundamental ambiguity. Good theory in this view is then an intervention which raises the question in these very materials of what is and what is not a good story.

conclusion The proposition that the city is nothing but a sign is an irony inspired by a vision of the end of transcendence that, in its way, is designed to challenge and, so, open up the question of the link between territorial and discursive spaces. That is, if culture is a symbolic order, then “it” is not located in any place, because culturally it seems to exist placelessly. This appearance of placelessness brings to view the ambiguity of the image of undivided territoriality, an ambiguity which continuously appears in everyday life as an ethical collision putting flesh on the words that the city is nothing but a sign, bringing to life the proposition as the action which affirms the existence of the city in its very representation of intractable undecidability. The proposition raised at the start of the chapter, that the city is nothing but a sign, has turned out to be a question asking how the city exists, that is, what kind of relationship we affirm in our engagements with the city? We discover the proposition to typically suggest that this relationship is minimal, restricted, limited and that, while perhaps stimulating, it is a relationship lacking in depth. As a sign, the city seems much like any other commodity, ruled by exchanges that are instrumental, or matters of convenience at best. Yet, we have

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suggested ways of pursuing this question further: how does the city serve as a locus of the relationships of people to the meaning of collective engagements and the commitment to territorial bonds; how does the city begin to mirror the engagement of a people with the modes and meaning of its collectivization? In the following chapters I seek to give the city its place by situating it in relation to those who address it, that is, to the intimate structure of affinities that bind them to each other by virtue of the object, and bind them to the object by virtue of their coexistence. The city connects people (socializes them) by virtue of its common focus, and the instrumental relations among people link them to the city (socializes it) by virtue of their different motives, capacities, and expectations. The city binds through collecting and differentiating the plurality, differing by virtue of its many images that appear in various ways, and yet united through this concerted interest and its semblances. If the ambiguity of the city (its power for appearing in many guises), releases conflict among the many as to what it is and means, it is in conjunction with the differences among people (their various interests and propensities) that alternative beliefs occur and compete as intended “solutions” to such questions. In this world of images and beliefs, when the object in its various guises is apprehended by persons with their varying beliefs, ethical collisions appear (to the theorist in contrast to the believer) as actual and palpable figures that mark the fundamental ambiguity of the scene of representation (Plato, chapter xxiv, v1. 510, 225). Plato’s metaphor of the Divided Line advises us that the ascent to theorizing only begins when we are able to conceive of the collisions between different beliefs as themselves material images of the discourse of the object, and so, as material for further inquiry.

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2 The Common Situation

i nt roduc ti on In this chapter I will continue discussing the city as two-headed: as the site of an encounter animated by fundamental questions that engage populations both positively and negatively at the same time. Throughout, I propose that the elementary force of the city is shown in the vitality of this terrain as the ephemera of everyday life discloses anxiety over the uncanny persistence of irresolute meaning and its ambiguity as a locus of collective action. In this way, the city is implicated in the question of the Good by virtue of its capacity to stimulate and resist at the same time collective attempts to master its ambiguity. As Giorgi Agamben says, the Good is not an item separable from the world just as the transcendent “is not a supreme being above all things” but the “taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority … (just as) … The being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone” (Agamben, 1993, 14–15). If what is “irreparably in the world is what transcends and exposes every wordly entity,” forgetting this “taking-place” by reducing it to another fact like others, is a reduction that risks forgetting transcendence. In this sense, transcendence as a practice is “making reference to making reference” as an event in the world (McHugh et al., 1974). This Greek vision of fundamental ambiguity, which moderns reconfigure as an impasse, is reinstated in Agamben’s recognition. The Good persists at the point of the ethical collision over the taking-place proper to the city and is part of the city through this engagement itself. This means that “the end of transcendence,” is an appearance of the Good itself, insofar as the Good appears in its denial and, so, is always a beginning as well, for it “exists” in the city as the social fact which is a fundamental locus of collectivization.

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This “challenge” is taken up through a narrative that exposes and (so) transcends its very own taking-place through the practice of its writing. In this chapter, I translate the conception of the good city into the problem of how the city raises the question of the end of transcendence for populations that engage it functionally and symbolically, and I rehearse a strategy for plotting examples that can bring such an encounter to view in various and heterogeneous ways. The vitality of a city intensifies this concern. The ephemeral moments and engagements of city life give rise to concerted actions and reactions that can disclose to serious questioning traces of collective anxiety over the ambiguity of meaning and its uncanny persistence in the shape of problems to be solved. In the everyday life of the city such anxiety becomes visible in varied and diverse attempts to represent and master practical matters whose every resolution in action can only register an uncanny residue of indeterminacy. The fundamental “break” of the city – the anxiety released by recognizing the impossibility of making the idea material – becomes visible as a situation of problem-solving through which the city appears as an unending struggle to control its means of interpretation. Therefore, I want to revive Plato’s question of the good city as the Good of the city in an unorthodox way. This leads me to treat the Good of the city as recurrently coming-to-view in the representation of the city as a good rather than the Good, that is, in the representation of the city as a commodity in a way that invariably discloses the force of the difference. I do not treat the question metaphysically as a search for a final solution, code or definition; neither will I treat it as something that can be settled by reviewing or describing the solutions-in-use that members of society arrive at as matters of conviction. I ask, to what human needs does the representation of the Good of the city answer, and what kinds of materials permit us to locate this question as both a persistent and contested locus of collective life? I try to discover situations in everyday life when persons and groups orient to the question tacitly and implicitly, affirm it as a phenomenon, contest it, work out solutions to the uncertainties it poses, and, in general, treat the ambiguity it evokes and releases as occasions for problem-solving. Thus, Raymond Ledrut says of this question: “If the problem reappears periodically it is because it remains unresolved and equally because it has a real basis. However badly presented it is theoretically, and in spite of the fact that it remains, at bottom, insoluble in our society and our culture, it corresponds to legitimate concerns and to a real uneasiness … what is the purpose, what should be the purpose of a city” (Ledrut, 1986, 128). My objective is to make this interest observable even when it is denied in word, as a collective focus that absorbs people and

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groups in ways shown vividly through representations of the city that invariably orient to it in grounding action and interpretation. In this chapter I will begin to explore the question of the good city as a topic in collective life by trying to coax out ways in which this abiding concern appears in representations of urban social practices. How do enduring questions of collective life take material form in the routines of city life? Ledrut equates what I am calling the good of the city with the question of collective purpose. This enables us to begin to address collectivization itself as a feature of city life in line with the sociological tradition. If people do not question collective purpose directly and explicitly, the question of collective purpose appears still, as a metabolic feature of city practices, discernible not only in organizations, associations, and social formations but in the rhythms and intensities of life as a process of making reference to solidarities through initiatives, projects, affiliations, and concerted actions of many kinds. In countless ways, the city shows the energy of its collective life, and always implicitly through these actions, shows visions of collective purpose on occasions in which very practical matters are formulated, contested, and debated. In terms of our interest in this work, such practical matters invariably refer to space and place and to the sovereignty of boundaries and territorial limits. Seen historically, sociology’s project is the strengthening in modern societies of compelling and normative meaning. Its contribution is to show that meaning and normativity emerge from the directed vitality of collective life – with the collective relations, commitments, and efforts that Durkheim introduced as “dynamic density,” “collective spirit,” “collective soul,” and, most broadly, conscience collective (Swanson, 1993, 173).

In this work, our version of culture is linked to the collective problemsolving which shows itself on enumerable occasions that release interpretations and actions directed by the need to clarify and act upon collective purpose. That is, the ambiguity of collective purpose is both the source and topic of collective action. To speak of the good of the city is then not to make normative judgments about what is a good city, or to reiterate that people treat the city as a value (an object of desirability), for it proposes that the city is part of a cultural system insofar as it is available “in a symbolic form, that is, only when actors necessarily orient themselves towards these objects by means of symbolic operations” (Schmid, 1993, 98). Thus, assignments of normativity and value are only part of such a discourse because the notion of culture requires simply that the city (as object) is

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engaged. Here, we speak of the object (city) as a symbolic order that is a course of action. Since such an encounter must be open-ended, actors can maintain the city as an object while orienting to its different aspects without agreeing on its common properties, and they can reshape the differences and contradictions which are integral to it as a locus of action in heterogeneous ways. Difference, diversity, and contradiction are not external to the city as an object of culture but integral to its use. Yet culture does not refer to anything and everything done in the name of the object, that is, to every act of meaning-making, for it is an encounter grounded in the vision of a decision-making process which is sovereign to a population and thus collective, a process which maintains the object as an enforceably intelligible order. Typically, such a “process” is identified with language and representation, but such an “order” must make reference to a material locus of sovereignty that animates and grounds representation. This order or locus of collectivization is nevertheless fundamentally ambiguous. As Micheal Schmid puts it in his critique of Parsons: This situation implies … that even solutions that are collectively acceptable and are regarded as part of a common tradition will inevitably lead to further problems. These problems, by challenging the empirical and logical conditions that actors have to meet, will destabilize their common situation anew; and because the actors can never be sure that the new questions can be given traditional answers, the development of their culture will find no natural resting point. It is precisely the constant recursive process of disequilibration that is the most essential condition continuing the cultural process (Schmid, 1993, 111).

The fundamental ambiguity of culture arises from its character as a problem-solving situation where the very problem to be solved is the continuous clarification of the situation itself, that is, of the object as a course of action. Thus, any cultural object such as the city functions (as Deleuze says) as the appearance of a problem, and the problem as some sociologists have said (Swanson, 1970, 1971a, 1971b) is always part of a collective process in which a population engages its own sovereignty with respect to certain elementary matters and offer varieties of intended solutions which recursively alter the problems, creating new questions to be addressed. This is how objects such as the city “involve both restrictions and opportunities and … generate quite divergent consequences … giving rise to heterogeneous problems that actors try to solve in divergent ways … with no prospect of lasting integrative success” (Schmid, 1993, 110–11). If the “constant recursive process of disequilibration” is the “most essential condition continuing the cultural process,” this is because the

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ambiguity of problems and solutions destabilizes the common situation. But the so-called “common situation” is fundamentally ambiguous and, so, a continuous “problem” for the actions of everyday life (one might say that the common situation is itself continuously “destabilized”). Yet, the fact that there “is no natural resting point” or “prospect of lasting integrative success,” could lead us to appreciate how the fundamental ambiguity of culture is not simply disintegrative but a creative element in sociation. Further, if the “common situation” is simply a way of speaking of collective purpose, then collective purpose is invariably destabilized and, as such, a source of problem-solving. Plato says, the desire for truth and knowledge – that is, to clarify and act upon collective purpose (the common situation) – must still ground any project in the face of its prospect of no “lasting integrative success.” Thus, our conception of culture as collective problem-solving animated by the need and desire to resolve the question of the common situation permits us to anticipate occasions on which such destabilization becomes a locus of interpretation and action (Sartre, 1963). From this perspective, the destabilized common situation to which sociologists refer with this usage is simply an external way of speaking about the fundamental ambiguity of the scene of representation, since the common situation itself as a distinction appears in many guises and is interpreted under the auspices of many different beliefs. In other words, this sociological view of destabilization conceives of the common situation along the lines of Kuhn’s paradigms as a model of discovery and revision in the history of science where problems are solved and solutions rendered obsolete by “progress” in the course of development. Yet this normative vision of destabilization is derivative in relation to the notion of indeterminacy and fundamental ambiguity. The common situation is destabilized because “empirical and logical conditions” are challenged in ways described by conventional models of scientific progress. In contrast, for me this view becomes visible as only one of a number of beliefs when the destabilized common situation is conceived as a scene of representation, because the discourse over that very question can come to view. It is here that we might come to recognize how stability and destabilization, when viewed as opposites, presuppose a conception of the common situation that is framed by empirical and logical conditions rather than by a sense of the relationship integral to the very notion of the common, an understanding that leads us to recognize, in contrast, that the common situation is both the same and other, that it is unlike itself not when it is destabilized but because its commonness appears in many ways, and it is common not when it is stable, but because its many images are bound together by a sense of collective purpose. The common situation is then a sociologi-

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cal gloss for the indeterminacy realized by various concerted collective efforts to master the contingencies of everyday life, an anxiety taking shape in irresolute questions posed by the ephemeral and effervescent, the near and the far, the disappearing and regained, mastery and powerlessness. As we have said, at this point the common situation identifies the city as a sign and nothing (or something) more for a plurality of actors engaged by the ambiguity of that proposition as a distinction and the interpretive conundrums it releases and mirrors for desiring actors in particular ethical collisions. The common situation of the city is first and foremost that problem as a locus of collectivization. Collective purpose in this situation is less a desire for normative finality than for clarity with respect to this proposition and the differences in action which its various and alternative views recommend. The destabilization of the common situation is an image of the fundamental ambiguity of representation when conceived as a situation of action because it can only be characterized as such on the basis of a problematic notion of the common situation that is expressed in many guises, appearing variously to different persons. This means that the view or belief of the destabilized common situation is itself an image of the fundamental ambiguity of representation (of representing that) as a situation of action. While it might appear that what is first in nature is the destabilized common situation, for us what is first is the mimetic relationship to this proposition, that is, to the action(s) of doing and recognizing the scenic presuppositions of this representation in concerted and contested practices. Theorizing takes up this formulative challenge by locating palpable cases in everyday life that mirror ethical collisions specific to the representation (Sartre, 1963). But if this conception applies throughout collective life, that is, to families, organizations, friendships, and groups of all kind, how does it make reference to the city per se? That is, we need to formulate the typical relationship to the city, its typical “experience,” that generates its particular representation of destabilization. How is the common situation or collective purpose of the city engaged in particular? Or, over what field of interpretation, experience and action is the city as a distinction, undisputed sovereign? If some might talk of place in a way that seems intuitively correct, that is, of the relation of emplacement, we would need to go further by specifying how that relationship is typically and specifically urban. This permits us to begin to address the particular experience(s) which the cities of a civilization are said to embody, personify, and represent. In this respect, for the various social sciences, the city has always been reputed to focus the problem of social change.

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social change The accumulation of knowledge, and the methods of rational explanation by which it was achieved, is no doubt the most generally recognized aspect of modernization, and as an attitude of mind it lies at the center of this process (Black, 1966, 10–11).

It is interesting that, in this paradigmatic text, an “attitude of mind” is considered central to modernization in contrast to what Black terms “political science” which discusses modernization in terms of “political and social changes accompanying industrialization.” Here, we might begin to cut through the swath surrounding debates on the difference between modern and postmodern, between modernization and modernity and the like, by understanding this attitude of mind as a typical experience of social change that is objectified and oriented to in a population. In this analytic gesture we begin to incorporate social change into culture as part of the environment of problem-solving. The fundamental ambiguity of the common situation occasioned by ongoing efforts to clarify collective purpose comes to view in general, in debates over social change, and in particular, in debate which focuses upon the city as a figure within such a discourse. For example, issues raised by descriptions of globalization, innovation, technology, worldwide “flows” of capital and people, of corporations and ideas, can be situated within the context of the collective encounter with the problem of social change. Social change as a sociological gloss for the unrest occasioned by destabilization of the common situation makes reference to ways in which the impossibility of realizing the ideal becomes visible as problem-solving in varied attempts to master practical matters. In the most advanced societies, not merely all of the physical world but almost all organizations … and almost all qualities of human personality have come to be viewed as constituting, in principle, only tools or resources. They are therefore to be modified, supported, or retained only as desired. This orientation is not the blind transformation of people and of hallowed customs into marketable items through the mechanisms of the market … Nor need this transformation occur in the service of some technocratic dream … to conform to the dictates of some abstract standard of social efficiency, or to the aggrandizement of employers or of the state. The aim may be the enrichment and freedom of men as human persons; the insuring, that, as persons, men shall prevail. In any event, this orientation to change is but the latest step in modernization; the application to personality and society of the hope that underlay modernization from the beginning (Swanson, 1971a, 138–9).

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Today we might say that this emphasis upon change is animated (or distorted) by an enlightenment vision. Yet, two reservations are in order. In studying culture, we seek to lay it bare rather than to criticize it externally for failing to conform to some standard. That is, we do not at this point “correct” customs, but work to show how they play a part in collective problem-solving (that criticism is invariably part of this endeavor was discussed in chapter 1 under notions such as “travel” and the “second sailing”). This is to say that if collective purpose comes to view in “advanced” cities as a species of enlightenment problem-solving, we inquire into the ways in which the destabilized common situation to which this refers, creates varieties of encounters and contested claims about the direction of the city and its quality of life. Secondly, even if we ourselves and those most critical among us are reserved about such claims (even if we ourselves stand apart from such enthusiasms), the sociological vision of culture includes this very skepticism of ours as one of the voices in the debate over collective purpose. Note moreover, that this skepticism itself, in many of its forms, claims to be innovative in its skepticism in ways apparent in philosophy, the arts and humanities, technical doctrines, and social thinking, always appearing in these modes as claims that are invariably and palpably linked to interpretations of change (of the difference such work claims to make). This suggests also, that the clichés in circulation announcing any departure of the present from the past as a mode of thinking, knowing, and representing (for example, “God is dead,” the “death of the author,” the end of “metanarratives”) are, each in their way, voices in the debate on collective purpose, discursive gestures which are integral to our “common situation,” always coming to view as attempts to arrest the present through a compelling vision of its moment as a critical opportunity for change. Note also how this suggests that capacities for transcendence are part of any common situation. Representation and action in relation to the common situation of the city and the calculation of collective purpose is part of the problemsolving inspired by the need and desire to theorize the city. Ordinary people and their local projects figure in such an economy of desire as various efforts to negotiate the unruliness – disorder, unrest – which such desire invariably releases. Social unrest does not mean simply that individuals are discontented or unsettled or that unrest is widespread. It means that people want a new or renewed social order to replace one that they find unjust or ineffective, and it means that they believe that such an order will evolve if they work together … in this meaning, participants in social unrest will already be skilled in conducting

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social relations and in interacting with others to form organizations. Their diagnoses and prognoses may be hasty, erroneous, or unwitting, but people could not make them at all were they unaware of the relevance of social organizations for coping with certain classes of problems, or were they inexperienced in generating organizations or in using them (Swanson, 1971a, 126).

In relation to this focus, the city offers a continuous spectacle of local initiatives directed to solving the problem of collective purpose both within the city as a mark of its unique common situation and with respect to the city as a whole, as an object in its own right. Collectivization, running like an electric current through social life, is invariably linked to unrest and disorder through the desire to solve the problem of destabilization, a desire which is constantly objectified as a central focus of interpretation and action. If, in part, this is what we mean by culture, we note its intimate link to community building and the intractable resistances such problems pose: “social unrest is ubiquitous and so, therefore, are the collective processes built upon it … it need not involve a sudden, inarticulate pouring out of social discontent. The career of every organization, large or small, includes frequent, perhaps regular, periods of renewal, revival, or reaffirmation. Each period springs from a weakening of collective solidarity, actual or foreseen. There is no organization in which the participants are fully content. Some measure of injustice and ineffectiveness is endemic in groups. No participant is unalterably committed to any organization or to a particular role within it” (Swanson, 1971a, 127). In part, the work of the city might lie in its capacity to make organized unrest a spectacle for its population as a locus of their engagement with a compelling vision of its moment as a decisive opportunity for change. In this sense, the unrest occasioned by the city as an object is our topic, and we propose to locate our materials on those enumerable occasions and settings in which such unrest is exhibited as a problem and “solved” through projects and initiatives. If social change is “endemic” to the common situation, this suggests that the present, constantly emerging and disappearing, occupies a determinate and incalculable relation between past and future. Social change and unrest are external views of the fundamental ambiguity of the present moment as an event in time. According to the previous quotes on social change, actors at any present moment calculate needs and desires in terms of past and future (McHugh, 1968; Shils, 1981). Yet, because people vary in terms of needs and desires, the calculative requirements of present actions must appear in many ways according to different perspectives. Social change and unrest are then also external views of the fundamental ambiguity of the present moment as an

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event in space. According to the previous quotes on social change, actors at any present moment can only “solve” the ambiguity of time through typifications that sustain their concerted coexistence by rendering perspectivial differences inconsequential for all practical purposes (McHugh, 1968). Social change and unrest is “endemic” because at any present moment the ambiguity of collective existence in time and space is both concealed and transparent in social practices. In terms of our interest, the city as an object acquires its specificity as a site of social change and unrest because it uniquely makes vivid the collective need and desire to “work out” the problem of time and the problem of space through its landscape of convoluted and contested ethical collisions. This is the framework (hypothesis? proposition?) that guides the present work and instructs our search for cases or incidents which make observable this elementary situation.

the time of the present What we note in all studies of the city is the range of ways cities are collectivized by their relation to space through some vision of a common situation. Moreover, since the common situation is one for which an interpretation of change must be supplied, differences among studies appear in the ways in which social actors are formulated as subject to change and, so, to the event of temporality. In this way, very different studies must solve the common problem of deciding the related character of time and space, the problem of emplacement. That is, very specific and differentiated descriptions of situations become intelligible and compelling to the actors imagined by inquirers and to themselves through the ways they assume the problem of the existence of the space in time. This is seen in the manner in which each study, regardless of its detail, begins with a view of a common situation that undergoes change and, so, destabilization. Each study seeks to recover these ways of making sense by describing the actor’s relationship to the history of the space through an implicit phenomenology of the present. In each case the common situation emerges as a site of problem-solving in which the very problem to be solved is making sense of change as it is viewed and of coming to terms with this understanding. The common fate of such inquiries, regardless of their plural, heterogeneous, and diverse approaches, is to make intelligible the varied ways in which change appears to their actors. Change is thus not just an external fact or event that “happens,” but part of the destabilized common situation. The inquiries themselves produce change through their assumptions that the actors they describe orient to their common situation as a situation of change. Thus, any study tries to formulate the

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modern actor as a subject of change, and, so, by implication as the (typical) subject of modernity. It is then fair to ask of any study how it construes the modern aporia and its subject, how change appears to and for it, how it views this critical moment as conditioned by present relations to past and future, how it speaks against prevailing views and in what voice, and what different and specific shape it gives to this elementary problem of change. I will examine two specific examples, first of European neighborhoods and then of a German/Polish border town. In Mary Corcoran’s studies of European neighborhoods in Dublin, London, Toulouse, and Turin (Corcoran, 2002), the “ambiguity and indeterminacy” of the present for her subjects arises from a sense of the difference between present and past as her respondents note the absence now of what once was and the presence now of what was not. Corcoran’s rich texts provide a sense of the subject’s constant and vexed orientation to noticeable absences (cleanliness, friendliness), to alterations and disappearances of what once existed (turnover of property and people, levels of responsiveness), and to the presence of what has never been (dirt, waiting in line). For Corcoran’s modern subject, space is more than a demographic alteration (new types of people) but the “meaning” such differences have for those who interpret them, that is, the significance of the alteration. Thus, Corcoran provokes her respondents to express their complaints since at such moments, the vividness of their intimate connection to place is revealed even as it appears to be disrupted. For example, in both Dublin and Toulouse, the delay in repairing premises is taken as a sign of indifference, of being treated in ways that show a lack of respect as if those so treated are viewed as mere occupants of a space rather than as intimately rooted in attachments that confer rights and obligations. Time saturates these responses that constantly move backwards and forward, retrospectively and prospectively, to compare what is lost with what is added. Corcoran’s paper permits us to appreciate how change is registered as an anxiety for her subjects not simply through the presence of newcomers in the neighborhood but in the ways they see themselves construed as constantly new, as having no past or inherited togetherness that enables them to gain respect and to be differentiated from those others who are more recent, as if they are always and every time beginning again. It is as if her subjects recognize that they singly and collectively no longer make a difference. Corcoran suspects that intimacy is imperiled by change because of the loss and reorganization that every such alteration releases. Change is simply equated with modernization without specifying what the modern situation brings to change (there has always been the kind of change she describes). This allows her to use biography as both a re-

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source (a trope for envisioning the intimate connection of person to space) and as a problem which is continually engaged in collective life as a matter to “solve.” In this study, the biography of persons is governed by the biography of spaces in ways that make place the work of reconciliation. That is, if the long-term resident no longer makes a difference, this is because the space itself neither makes a difference between its present and its past or between and among all those who now come to inhabit the space. The space is now different from what it has been because now everyone is treated as the same. The space, severed from its history, seems to exaggerate to many a distorted relation to emplacement. Yet this work remains problematic because change is problematic. Change is problematic because the recognition that an apparent difference makes a difference is decided in practice and is not a metaphysical question. That is, the question of change is perennial because we can always ask if there is continuity in the “core” even as peripheral conditions are altered. Whereas a transformation might appear to bring something new into existence, an alteration might be similar to a modification in which everything essential seems to persist despite its new appearance. Because Corcoran’s world is divided between those who have power to alter the course of change and those who are powerless, the problem for her modern actor subject to such vagaries is to constantly reinvent new beginnings since it always seems for those down below that every present requires a new start and, so, demands biographical revisions in the face of ceaseless change. One of the great problems of modern life concerns how people orient to their situation by identifying change as an event and how they alternately take advantage or remain indifferent to such interpretations in action. In this way, Corcoran reports on various self-determining processes through which collectivization can and does take place under such conditions. We leave the paper with the sense that the essential vulnerability of place to erosion creates an unending dialectic in which lament, resignation, and selected opportunities for revitalization can be seen to coexist for a discerning eye. If the interlocutor to Corcoran’s discerning eye is the indifference of the bourgeoisie, of real-estate development, of planning, and of similar forces in terms of which the powerless are arrayed, the interlocutor to the eye of Durrschmidt and Matthiesen is a composite of the interlocking master plans of European unity (the European Union) and globalization (Durrschmidt and Matthiesen, 2002). The present in contrast to the “pre-socialist” past is locked between what was and what will be, between old Europe and its national boundaries and the new Europe and its permeable borders. In any present, the subject is one for whom the problem of surviving a mixture of influences in a way that is both

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coherent and unified is a practical matter to be accomplished. The disappearance of the past must be managed in the present through calculations of the future in terms of anticipations of what its mastery requires. This makes the border town Guben/Gubin which they study in east Germany an ideal site to serve as a microcosmic illustration of such large-scale processes. As in the case of Corcoran’s research, narratives are elicited to expose the modern subject and its problem-solving. What is assumed to be glossed or overlooked by the master plan is the lived experience of the in-between or what is called “hybridity” that appears to focus the practical reasoning of the actor. Certain themes, such as the disruptiveness of change and the powerlessness of persons to control its course, persist and are joined to the image of the forceful mechanisms through which time challenges not only intimate connections to spaces, but loyalty and planning itself, in ways that make any present an occasion of uncertainty. Durrschmidt and Matthiesen formulate their subject as more complex than bewildered, anguished, or impotent, as sagacious, as searching (in the idiom of Charles Pierce) not simply for habits to reinforce ideologies but for new habits that can endure and fortify them as persistent routines in an uncertain world. In speaking about placelessness or “non places” both of these studies are engaged by the ways in which the decay of place (and of any distinction) is made vivid in its present when the past is no more and the future is not yet. Time is death and loss and uncertainty haunt any present as its common fate and as a problem to solve, the problem of revitalization and renewal in a situation where the origin is absent and the result can only be a repetition. These studies inherit and extend this voice of the present in ways that might confirm the mood of contemporary Europe, making what they see in the ordinary lives of their subjects into exemplary illustrations of the skepticism that the modern celebration of change risks marginalizing. Could we say that these are snapshots of the heart of darkness of modern life, representations of the essential powerlessness of the subject in time? For example, it might appear in the case studies of Corcoran and of Durrschmidt and Matthiesen that the privatization they describe among their subjects shows no power except the skill to survive whatever turns up as their lot in life. In this sense, the “forgetting of transcendence” seems to appear in privatization itself as that kind of routine reductionism characterizing these peripheral city dwellers. It is interesting though, that Corcoran’s subjects identify change in all of the neighborhoods with the appearance of newcomers. If these newcomers stand for change, it is because their presence disrupts the experience of continuity for these subjects because new relationships have to be man-

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aged. It is from the need to negotiate new relationships with those who are recent that the uncanny experience of uprootedness is produced as an interpretation, suggesting to the modern subject imagined by the inquirer that the new situation does not make a place for the differences between them and those who are recent. Corcoran’s modern subjects experience themselves as dishonored by this new relationship to space. Even more dramatically, the border city seems to parody the very idea of a common space. Not only is the town on the border, it is split down the middle. It essence seems to be that it is other than itself. The very name of the town (Guben/Gubin) sounds like a stutter and could be a repetition, making constantly problematic the question of whether the space is one thing in two or two-in-one. The different subjects use the town for their own respective purposes, in one case as a destiny and the other as a stepping stone to other pursuits. People remain in the town because they cannot leave (“they have a house”), and, so, their present is determined by their past, or because it offers them an opportunity to do business and nothing else, and, so, their present is determined by their future. In this time of the present, no-one loves this town. Yet in the Europe of the present, every nation and city appears to the “little man” to be a spectacle of dissolving boundaries in which the relationship between European regions and cities risk imitating the permeable borders within Guben/Gubin and between Guben/Gubin and the other places. Durrschmidt and Matthiesen suggest that Guben/Gubin could be the prototype space of the new Europe and so a sanctuary for residents who are either imprisoned or opportune. In each case, the interpretation of the present is intimately linked to past and future in ways that produce a view of the subject as a social actor subject to emplacement as a temporal event. These studies are peculiar though in the sense that, in one case, change seems omnipresent, reflected in turnover and the appearance of newcomers and, in the other case, in modifications which remain basically the same. That is, though the border town might be suffering the effects of external changes, the inhabitants only “change” by adapting to such exigencies, as prisoners or opportunists. The picture of class becomes clearer as resignation and opportunism can roughly signify the proletariat and bourgeoisie who, though different, are similarly subject to the common situation of needing to adapt to forces outside of their control. In Corcoran’s study, constant change makes the experience of any present either one of obsolescence (old timers) or exclusion (newcomers). This suggests that, in any present, everyone is subject to the force of time, that is, to the destruction of difference. Indeed, that everyone will be both newcomer and obsolete at some point in life suggests that in any present each and all come to view themselves as the

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same. The common situation of any present is that all are substitutable in the way that prisoners and opportunists in one study, and old-timers and newcomers in the other, are the same by virtue of their helplessness with respect to external conditions. If the common situation of any present is inexorably one of loss, then the appearance of privatization must make reference to the privative solidarity of being subject to time. The present is summarized in the cliché of finitude as the common situation of all wide-awake people. If such notions inform the modern experience of any present as inexorably unhappy, we might ask if this limits a redemptive understanding of the common situation and what other opportunities are possible? What is it that “transcends” and “exposes” the taking-place of this representation of the common situation of the present?

t h e e x p e r i e n c e o f t h e c o n t e m p o r a ry c i t y The immediate way in which theorizing exposes and makes manifest the ambiguity of its own work is through its playful resistance to formulaic, prosaic representations of the common situation and of the engagements of typical social actors in relation to the environment of meaning. Such theorizing risks formulating the social actor as committed rather than as a “stick figure” of determinism (Benjamin, 1998, 307). The philosopher David Wiggins gives the following example from watching a film with a friend. I turned to my companion and asked, “What is it about these films that makes one feel so utterly desolate?” Her reply was: “Apart from the fact that so much of the film was about sea monsters eating one another, the unnerving thing was that nothing down there seemed to rest.” And as for play, disinterested curiosity, or merely contemplating, she could have added, these seemed inconceivable … If we can project upon a form of life nothing but the pursuit of life itself, in which we find there no non-instrumental concerns and no interest in the world considered as lasting longer than the animal in question will need the world to last to sustain the animal’s own life; then the form of life must be to some considerable extent alien to us (Wiggin, 1976, 344).

If formulations of the common situation of the city typically populate their social world with versions of actors as sea monsters, this is because they are construed as indifferent to collective purpose. Yet the response to such a Hobbesian vision is the “advance” hinted at by Baudrillard (see chapter 1) through his conception of a social world absorbed by the circulation of signs. While such “signifying” actors might seem more complicated agents than sea monsters, as he noted they still suffer an indifference to transcendence (no soul, no shadow,

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no double). The tension between these views of the social actor is both integral to the common situation of the city and to we who theorize the city and who struggle in our narrative to place these temptations. In disclosing the struggle over collectivization and its fundamental ambiguity in the common situation, any representation begins to recover its voice as something other than monstrous or signifying speech. Although we need to make the common situation strange as inquiry unfolds, we recover it through this gesture as something familiar (true to the lived experience) rather than alien. We can approach the same problem from another angle by imagining an exchange between Raymond Ledrut and Guy Debord on the quality of the modern city. Debord speaks about its unprecedented character as follows: For the first time … the formal poverty and gigantic spread of this new living experience both come from its mass character, which is implicit in its purposes, and in modern conditions of construction … The same architecture appears in all industrializing countries that are backward in this respect, as a suitable terrain for the new type of social existence which is to be implanted there … The dictatorship of the automobile, pilot-product of the first phase of commodity abundance, has been stamped into the environment with the domination of the freeway, which dislocates old urban centres and requires an ever larger dispersion. At the same time, stages of incomplete reorganization of the urban fabric polarize temporarily around “distribution factories,” enormous shopping centres built on the bare parking lot; and these temples of frenzied consumption, after bringing about a partial rearrangement of congestion (Debord, 1967, 173–4). Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. The economic organization of visits to different places is already, in itself, the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from the voyage, also removed from it the reality of space (168).

To this lament, Ledrut (hypothetically of course) replies with a query: does the spectacle of the modern city so engage (and enrage) Debord as an object of fascination that he becomes too paralyzed to imagine the life that enters into its accomplishment, too dumbstruck to desire to theorize the city as an object? “Is the city of today less meaningful than the city of yesterday?” (Ledrut, 1986, 122). Ledrut answers the question for himself. All cities are significant. The modern city is as “significant” as was the Greek city. It is just differently “significant.” It expresses … the society of its age and of its system, exactly as the mediaeval town did (Ledrut, 1986, 124).

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From Ledrut’s point of view, Debord’s interpretive practice, which depicts the alienated modern city, itself “belongs” to the city, since the expression of alienation is one of the voices of the city, one of the ways in which the city is experienced in modern life as a kind of place. The idea of the city as alienated is one part of the lived experience of the city and, so, is both his topic and a resource for his analysis. This alienation, which in different forms is the common lot of all of us, rests on the contradictions and ruptures of the real urban experience, the causes of which are many and fundamental. On the level of the “language of the city,” these divisions and discontinuities are translated by silences which are not always noticed. Rather than affirming that the city no longer speaks to us, it would be preferable to recognize that it speaks differently, and not of all things. And precisely because it speaks now in functional terms, now in terms of lived experience, and these two languages cannot be combined into a unified language, the city remains silent on the question of what could fuse these two languages into one (Ledrut, 1986, 130–1).

Ledrut says there is no escape from signification, even in the “alienated” city (Ledrut, 1986, 122, 128, 130), echoing Heraclitus’s maxim that there is no hiding from the logos. If alienation is our common lot (Ledrut, 130), this experience is registered in the voice of the city that speaks to us: “It is just differently ‘significant.› It expresses the society of its own age and of its system, exactly as the medieval town did” (Ledrut, 124). In this way, even indeterminacy suggests not the absence of form (the void), but the definitive form of social relationship that is the joint and reciprocal action(s) of engaging ambiguity: “signification is universal and never absent: there is a system of the absurd itself” (Ledrut, 1986, 116). Note though how Debord joins the problems of space and time around the idea of the circulation of commodities. It is this process and its erosion of a commitment to distinction and distinguishing that produces the aura of equivalence as the fate of cities in this civilization. The force of the present moment, for Dubord, renders the past impotent and the future bleak. The past is impotent because it proves incapable of compelling actions of distinguishing in the present, and the future is bleak because it cannot be imagined as anything other than the present. Debord writes as a man destined for suicide. This argument over the question of the typical experience of the city, implicitly a debate over the question of the city as an object, apparently makes alienation the matter of its central focus. Yet we see that the problems addressed are connected intimately, at a deeper level, to the question(s) of time and space. Their absorption by the question of time

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– is the city of today different from the city of the past? – depends upon Debord’s interpretation of the diminishing space between cities which threatens to render them indistinguishable from one another. Concertedly Debord and Ledrut raise the question of whether the generality of cities is unprecedented today: because they are engaged in calculating the common situation of the city, their questioning shows how such a calculation invariably reflects upon views of the city as an object in time and in space. The idea of the city as itself a commodity haunts this exchange. For Debord, the past might recall an undivided moment of undiluted use value in contrast to the appearance of the city as presently subject to exchange value, whereas Ledrut can imagine the indeterminate struggle of the city as a commodity in both past and future. That is, if the city is a commodity, its fate is to be haunted by indeterminacy, for what it once was is lost and what it will be is incalculable. Here, the city suffers the fate of any symbolic order and its existence in time and space: to be a result and a beginning at one and the same time, to be a moment whose stormy sources and consequences cannot be mastered by an idea. The difference between Debord and Ledrut becomes clearer once we recognize that, while they both might agree on the fact of the alienation of the city, Debord treats the image as if it is a part which is the whole, while Ledrut sees the image as part of the whole. Debord’s error is not about the fact, but lies in his absolutism in treating a part as the whole, an image as the original. Ledrut, beginning with Debord’s inaccurate opinion not of the fact, but in respect to its partiality, prepares to restore the part to the whole by recovering the relationship and its fundamental ambiguity. What this means is that Ledrut can differentiate past, present, and future because he can imagine the lived experience of past time as subject to the intensity of its present moment, and he can anticipate the lived experience of future time as subject to the intensity of its present experience. Debord can only treat the past and future as mirrors of his present: even though he acknowledges the difference of the present from the past, this difference makes no difference in his present. Yet, Debord opens up the question of the good of the city though the work of questioning remains to be developed. That work is necessary, desirable and unending: it will never be complete. For Ledrut, that work requires bringing together what appears to lie apart – the division or split which seems to characterize the subject who encounters the modern city – while recognizing that there is no master plan for “integrating” the subject (“no natural resting place”), that what invariably must remain is a trace of difference, irreconcilability, fundamental ambiguity. However, the question need be asked and in its

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imperativeness persists, constituting a problem that is perennial for anyone with the desire to query. What is the experience of the city, and how is any interpretation of this necessarily linked to its existence in time and space? How does the city speak, and who is entitled to speak for it? If the city remains silent on these questions, how might we who wonder, give it voice? In this respect, one typical version of the contemporary city captures the redemptive character of the present through a critique of the inspired character of its technological, architectural, and engineering accomplishments, understood as both excitatory as reflected in the arresting spectacle of its achievements and, at the very same time, as degrading through the fascination (and so, false consciousness) which it releases.

m e m o ry a n d h i s t o ry In many studies of the city, the voice of time (and so, place) is supplied through resources such as “memory” and “history” that are developed as part of an interpretive schema which criticizes or notes the fact of social construction as a process without apparent beginning or end. As Nietzsche all but said of those who “see becoming everywhere,” if the past is irrevocably lost and the present constantly disappearing, then the future exists only as a dream. Seeing becoming everywhere is like viewing the city as nothing more than a sign because beyond comingto-be and perishing there is nothing but “noting this fact.” Therefore our work is cut out for us as a project of identifying cases that empower a redemptive understanding in order to expose and transcend the “taking-place” of the representation of the common situation through studies in which this collision comes to view. Much research on the city treats social change as an extension of those commercially driven rebuilding initiatives that dot the landscape of modern cities. Change is initiated from the top down by those who know only too well how to control its course by exploiting the resources of the local public. The North American city, typified in studies that note urban dismemberment as a constant process, view the present as awash with publicity, marketing, and commerce and its mimetic contagion which rules all areas of life. For example, in the city typified by the focus upon corporate incursion, the modern subject is enterprise itself insofar as the voice of the people is silent, assumed throughout as acted upon rather than as acting. Enterprise personified in capitalist initiative, exemplifies the force of economic innovation that constantly dismembers the past, opportunistically editing and selecting from its re-

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mains for use in the present in ways that invariably produce resistance (including in this case, the inquiry that notes its fact and criticizes it). If Debord typifies such work, it is through his recognition of how the enterprise uses the method of spectacle to re-enchant the people, to attract them to its effects as a feast fusing technology and art. In such studies the past appears in the present through the makeover supplied by the capitalist enterprise’s desire to exploit resources of local detail for marketing purposes and the future can only appear in the present through the image of the promise of a market for what is now built. The experience of loss in the present, attributed to social selection, can only dramatize the problem of attrition as either malevolent or benign. That is, whereas in some cases, attrition is an existential parameter connected to the march of time and its power to erode distinguishing, the focus on the city as a marketplace populated by a voiceless multitude, can only produce a vision of attrition as diabolical (similar to mass media and all forms of popular entertainment, “spins” and hyperbole). The modern subject is at worst a victim and at best (reflectively) a critic who knows which way the wind is blowing. This picture of the city captures its desire to restlessly dismember time itself and its concerted dedication to the eternality of the present. Such a city is depicted as hiding behind a myth of absolutism which relentless critical scrutiny exposes. Yet, capitalist eternal time is empowered by the idea of the emancipatory force of the market and the commitment to its promise as life affirming. This leads us to see how an analysis of the lure of the spectacle can develop not simply from reciting the manipulative tactics of the enterprise but by formulating the public culture of the city to which the enterprise must orient. The popularity of the spectacle cannot be saved as a phenomenon by treating it as an extension of capitalist brainwashing because then the rule (capitalism as an interpretive schema) simply determines it to be ideology or false consciousness. If it is truly the question of this “popularity” which is to be understood, we can only enter it into the equation of the system of desire that is the city as part of what it means to be in this city and to exist in time as a subject of a specific city (that is, we cannot start by treating what is popular as false). When we ask what must be known about a city in order to understand it so specifically, we are first tempted to think of its history and then upon deeper reflection, of the city as a work of art. While history can recite the facts which lead a city to exhibit its distinctiveness, a conception of the city as a work of art might permit us to begin to understand the ways in which its appearing distinctive takes place in practices to which it orients, revises, and reinscribes as part of a living dialectic.

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fusion Ledrut provides an implicit criterion for writing about the city – to “fuse” the language of function and the language of lived experience. To Ledrut, this fusion seems to require a conception of the city as a work of art because only such a view can moderate the extreme views which see the city in one way or the other. Because any functional approach to the city needs to be empowered by a conception of the city’s existence in time, Ledrut understands this need as one of overcoming an unmediated conception of space by fusing space and time. The way of understanding the city as a place requires a “fusion” that represents the city as a work of art because it is such a representation that captures the poeisis of the city. But the city is a work of art in a limited sense, perhaps as itself an artefact built and rebuilt over time, as a cacophony of signs and stimuli, as the trace of a palimpsest which continues its “aura” as a constant through all change, as a setting that is picturesque in its special way. In all these ways and more, the city might evoke for those who are touched by it the character of a work of art. Yet, something remains abstract in these versions of the city. What Ledrut seems to mean is that the past can only survive in the present when we approach it as a work of art, and that the future can only be vital in the present when we conceive it as a work of art. This element of temporality might be flattened out in empirical versions of the city which, in their own way, yet affirm the conception of the city as a work of art. Here, as we see, time is equivalent to the history which enables us to comprehend the past from the advanced vantage point of our present. Before looking more closely at the three cities, however, we need to step back from the purely urban, because cities, interesting as they may be in their own right, are not independent forces so much as they are physical manifestations of larger economic and political space. No statement could be less accurate than the oldest cliché in city planning – the one that compares American cities to Topsy (who “just grow’d”). The built environment is not organic, although it may often appear chaotically unplanned. It has been created and is continually being re-created, albeit by collectivities of social actors engaged in complex dances of successive and symbiotic interactions. These interactions continually weave together nature, materials, techniques, socioeconomic processes, and cultural forms to generate the urban fabric – a transitory expression in space that, like any work of art, derives its meanings more from observers’ responses than from creators’ intentions … To admit that outcomes in the built environment are often not exactly what individual contributors intend is not to deny the city its status as a “work” (oeuvre) of “art” (skilled creation). But unlike

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the often ephemeral matter of more transient art forms, the built environment persists, the a nature of its passages often outlasting even the enduring stones out of which individual structures may be built. In addition, natural albeit potentially shiftable borders (edges between plains and highlands, between waters and coastal littorals) and, even more important, proprietary boundaries (walls, property lines, easements, ethnic turf, distinctive land uses) delineate spaces in the city, creating persistent units or templates that not only sketch the out-lines of present forms but shape future uses (Abu-Lughod, 1999, 4–5).

The conventional version of the work of art to which Abu-Lughod here makes reference relies on its equation with the artefact through the activity of making. Yet, even making, as Hannah Arendt so carefully noted (Arendt, 1956), is nested in a family of images which need be entangled (for example, its relations to labor and action). Thus, even if this quote rejects Topsy, it is not clear how it conceives of the activity of making, whether as labor or action. Basically, the city as a work of art is used as a device to affirm the importance of history in contrast to what is here regarded as an uncritical use of the category “global city” that lumps all cities together without considering the conditions which enter into their variation. History then, accounts for much of the variance: to see the city as a work of art is, for Abu-Lughod, to view it as a created thing (a built environment) that typically results in effects, uses, and consequences that were not calculated or necessarily anticipated as it was accomplished. As such a work of “skilled creation,” the city was created over time, delineating uses and provoking meanings that often exceed its exact intentions. This could be banal unless we formulate the notion of the city as a work of art, since equating the city with “skilled creation” must leave that very kind of action to be addressed. The activity of making beautiful things is not necessarily the same as the activity of making any and every thing. So, if the city is a work of art, we might consider beauty in general and the particular kind of beauty cities could be thought to have (unless we want to say that they are beautiful simply because they have “meaning,” or that “skilled creation” does not have to be linked to beauty, or finally, that all created things are the same by virtue of their being made). There seems to be a bit of each of these qualifications in this notion of the city as a work of art. Built environments are more than brute matter, however. Their human occupants endow environments with symbolic significance, with meanings. Places, and the concrete constructions that are implanted on them, are envalued by their inhabitants through associations and emotions of awe, love, attraction, fear, hate, revulsion, and even banal indifference. They are frequently sites of

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competition and contest, but not only over material interests. Because places stand for ideas and ideologies as well as serve more practical ends and uses, places constitute a system of semiotics, a text that encodes messages potential users must “read” and interpret. But the invitations and exclusions so signified need not be heeded; users may acquiesce to the restrictions or they may choose to risk sanctions by violating them (Abu-Lughod, 1999, 5).

Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York are each “meaningful” in their own way and are comparable by virtue of being “built.” If there is here a notion of the beauty of the city it seems to consist in the reconciliation achieved between what is most common and what is individual, in this case, the reconciliation that is the work of history. But, to paraphrase Marx’s famous quote, history does not just act, for men must be in position to “make history.” A recitation of the particular and critical incidents in the creation of Chicago might externally represent these incidents (Mayor Daley’s political machine, the Chicago fire) as actions men made out of conditions, but this does not begin to approach the creativity in the chronology of actions that might be recorded as Chicago’s history. Even such a record of actions that does not speak for itself as we know, does not show the art in action as anything other than an accomplishment. Thus, we need to consider how a history of such actions can be a work of art rather than a practical accomplishment (that is, a work of art in a strong rather than ethnomethodological sense). In terms of this interest we share with Abu-Lughod, that would be a concern for the ways in which such a history could be seen as oriented in its accomplishment to the making of a difference, to the making of the city in this case, as a focus of collective purpose, as a legible distinction in both time and space. In this respect, we could begin to imagine how the analysis of the history of an action or collective as a practical accomplishment, tends to formulate its subject in a way which typically buries its ambiguity (see Sartre, 1963). A historical phenomenon, completely understood and reduced to an item of knowledge, is, in relation to the man who knows it, dead; for he has found out its madness, its injustice, its blind passion, and especially the earthly and darkened horizon that was the source of its power for history (Nietzsche, 1967, 11).

The formulation of a painting or a novel as a history or practical accomplishment, no matter how exhaustive, could not begin to address the action as a work of art until its struggle with its influences was represented in ways showing how the action – both the same and other in this interplay – is produced as the difference it is. The action is both the same and other than its influences. This holds for a city such as Los

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Angeles (see Banham, 1971, in contrast to other treatments), for to represent it as a work of art is to show at one and the same time how it must maintain fidelity to conditions of being a city even as it appears to depart and materialize as the individual place it is reputed to be. That is, Los Angeles struggles with its being as a city to be the unique city it is. Treating the city as a work of art, according to Nietzsche, requires an openness to its unique and parochial unrest, an openness that can resist or, at least, moderate the temptation to invest its subject with an undivided rationality: “The original note sang of action, need, and terror; the overtone lulls us into a soft dilettante sleep” (Nietzsche, 1967, 36). Again, to treat the city as a work of art is not simply to make it intelligible historically, but to factor its “darkened horizon” into the account as part of the powers of its agency. To approach the city as a work of art would be to view the present moment as part of a whole that includes past and future as distinguishing moments in the movement from its birth, to death, to renewal. If the present moment is tempted by historical images of the city, an openness to its ambiguity would, by necessity, be responsive to its “unhistorical” beginnings and evolution: “And yet this condition, unhistorical and antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action, but of every just and justifiable action in the world” (Nietzsche, 1967, 10). In Plato’s sense, this link is supplied by the connection of beauty and procreation: the city as a beautiful object is the city for which the engagement with the question of fertility is abiding. The beauty of the present resides in conceiving of the past as that penultimate moment of fertility that is procreative by virtue of its capacity to empower our present to anticipate its materialization in our future as its repetition. The present binds past and future through its ecstatic capacity for selftranscendence (see Sartre, 1963). That is, at any present moment, action is both historical (rooted in past influence, anticipating future consequences) and unhistorical (appropriating both past and future for its present purposes). The present is haunted both by the excessive hold of the past and future upon it. The self-transcendence of any present is a reference to its two-headedness, that it is both historical and unhistorical in this sense, in exactly the way the love of the singular tries to master history (past and future) in its unhistorical erotic gesture. Molly O’Neill quotes Sottha Khunn, a chef from Le Cirque in Manhattan, whom she accompanies on his return home to Cambodia. Once you taste the perfect taste, just once you taste it. And you spend your whole life looking for it again. But you can never find it, never. The chef, he

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works like an animal to make one perfect taste, and when he does it break his heart, because he no can make it again, ever. But the chef, he can’t stop himself, he keeps looking and looking, he will do anything to find that one perfect taste again (O’Neill, 2001, 55).

The (past) history which animates the chef’s search is joined to the (future) history which invests the search with the sovereignty of its consequentiality, both “transcended” by the unhistorical action of the search and its obsessivenesss in the face of what he knows and anticipates as no prospect of lasting success. It is the very expectation of a “loss as great as possible” (Bataille, 1985) that eroticizes his quest, doomed to fail even as it might succeed, as, in Simmel’s comment on Casanova, who “desired the impossible” (Simmel, 1971, 246). History appears both as memory of the achievement and as the anticipation of its realization. But it is through the seduction of the “perfect taste” and its grip upon him, the “darkened horizon” of the unhistorical action of eros, that the generality of history and the seductiveness of the glimpse of perfection connect to produce the offspring as an individual (the work of the animal with the broken heart). In this sense, procreation identifies the collective vitality of the city when we conceive of the standard of perfect taste that it fertilizes, inducing those who savor it to work like broken-hearted animals to make it reappear, even in other places, knowing that it will pass away. The present of the city – constantly evoking traces of such erotic collisions – provide us with opportunities to recognize at last, cities themselves as creating and created in more than an historical sense, as parochial images of procreation, of the movement and disappearance of the past in the present. This allows us to free the question of the beauty of the city from its exemplary and pacific models in Capetown, San Francisco, or in the so-called “new urbanism,” by conceiving of the relationship to collective fertility – to birth, death, and rebirth which its imaginative structure continuously summons up – as a mobile and contested problem to solve. How do we begin to represent the city’s engagement with its own fertility (or a civilization’s engagement with the question of the fertility of its cities)? Science has a fate that profoundly distinguishes it from artistic work. Scientific work is chained to the course of progress; whereas in the realm of art there is no progress in the same sense. It is not true that the work of art of a period that has worked out new technical means, or, for instance, the laws of perspective, stands therefore artistically higher than a work of art devoid of all knowledge of those means and laws – if its form does justice to the material, that is, if its object has been chosen and formed so that it could be artistically mastered

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without applying those conditions and means. A work of art which is genuine “fulfillment” is never surpassed; it will never be antiquated. Individuals may differ in appreciating the personal significance of works of art, but no one will ever be able to say of such a work that it is “outstripped” by another work which is also “fulfillment.” In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years (Weber, 1946, 137–8).

To treat the city as a work of art or as inimitable, contrasts with treating it as “chained to the course of progress.” In the first case, the city, though altering its shape, retains a degree of eternal fidelity which is, in some sense, unchanging. In contrast, a city “chained to the course of progress” is always changing, always becoming other than itself. In a sense both views see the city as “chained,” in one case to its historical moment as exemplary, and, in the other, to change itself. Yet, since change is always occurring, the point of the contrast seems to concern the difference between the persistence or dissolution of sameness in change – the difference between the city seen as remaining true to itself or losing itself, of remaining the same or becoming the other. From the perspective of culture, Weber asks: does the form of the city do justice to these conditions? This is not an either/or question, for it accepts both persistence and change by asking how change does justice to persistence and how persistence does justice to change. If we conceive of the city at any time as engaged in a struggle to forge a just relation between its form and material conditions, we have suggested that in this struggle, the main interlocutors to its view are the positions that the city is chained to a conception of its persistence as an inimitable and singular mark and, alternatively, that the city is chained to the course of change as its inevitable and inexorable fate. To risk resurrecting menacing Germanic overtones, we can suggest that one view sees the city as chained to its destiny (its inimitable exemplarity), and the other as chained to its fate (inescapable commonality). If, as Weber suggests, form is to do justice to its materials, this means that form must do justice to both destiny and fate, must fuse them or bring them together. Now we have speakers and an implicit conception of dialogue over the question of the culture of the city, a dialogue inspired by the question of the city as a work of art, on the one hand, as an inimitable persistence of the same, or, on the other, as a continuous alteration of the other. Only a “fusion” will enable us to come to terms with this destabilized situation of inquiry aroused by our need and desire to understand the collective purpose of the city. And this dialogue is not between two external speakers but “within” the civilization and city itself as voices in the struggle. That is, to achieve a conception of culture

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in collective life we must suffer the struggle to achieve a view of the city as both the same and the other by locating cases and materials which bring to view contestation over this matter of fundamental ambiguity. That the city is two things at once – two-headed, so to speak – is integral to the destabilized situation it seeks to represent as common and to its collective purpose that it aspires to master. According to Weber, the problem of working out a just relation between form and material conditions, that is, of relating persistence to change, requires seeing the “fusion” as the collective problem to be solved, a problem continuously appearing in the routines and critical moments of city life. Can we begin to appreciate how an approach to the culture of the city is not determined solely by visions of its spellbinding historical finality, nor its progress in technical spheres, but makes reference to some sense of its self-maintenance as coming-to-view at the very moment when its absolutistic temptations become most compelling? To begin to grasp the culture of the city would then be to understand it as the exemplary site to display for an historical population its struggle to reconcile the challenging separation between contrasting views of its destiny or fate at any modern moment. In this sense, the city becomes the mirror through which a population confronts its modernity. We can be more specific by anticipating the connection raised by the metaphor of fertility and its associations: to approach the culture of the city might be the method of analyzing its engagement with modernity since such an encounter is a vivid representation of the entanglement of a population in the problem of its fertility. That is, if each and every historical society has its own modern moment, it is through the city that a population comes face-to-face with the question of modernity, of its modern moment. For any society the question of modernity would then materialize in and around the discourse on the city in a way which enables any dialogue on that encounter to show its conception of the city as engaged in struggle that can only appear as a fusion in the most exaggerated sense.

unrest Is this not the thrust of Bakhtin’s conception of the grotesque worldview in contrast to what he calls the linear notion of progress? All that exists dies and is born simultaneously, combines the past and the future, the obsolete and the youthful, the old truth and the new truth. However small the part of the existing world we have chosen, we shall find in it the same fusion. And this fusion is deeply dynamic: all that exists in the whole and each

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of its parts, is in the act of becoming, and therefore comic (as is all that is becoming), but its nature is also ironic and joyful (Bakhtin, 1984, 416).

The everyday life of the city presents us with the spectacle of “parts” of this whole, in which we are prepared to find this same “dynamic” fusion. This dynamism appears in representations of actions and policies which contrast and thus combine, the old and the new, the obsolete and the youthful, the old truth and the new truth, the past and the future. Here, then, will be a format for beginning to understand the encounter of a civilization with its modernity, a format applicable to the city in its relation to itself as such a mirroring function. To the extent that the city shows tensions between the old and the new in these senses, its fusion will never be harmonious, often marked by a violence which leads it to appear grotesque. We want nothing else than to locate those instances of city life – represented in conflicts of interpretation and action – when the death and rebirth of the civilization reveals itself in grotesque appearances. Note Peter Robb’s description of Naples: What Naples still had going for it in the seventies, apart from its decaying heap of incomparable art, was the popular urban life that went back, directly if tenuously, to the city’s ancient beginnings. It was unique in Europe and enabled by the very fact that Naples became a backwater at the beginning of the industrial age. In the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, as Goethe and Stendhal found and vividly testified, Naples was one of the three great capitals of Europe. Stendhal wrote in 1817, To my eyes it’s without compare the most beautiful city in the universe. It was as big as London and Paris and as splendid. Paradise and hellfire, said Gibbon, thinking of Pompeii’s fate and Vesuvius still smoking ominously outside the city’s perimeter. Marginalized by the shift of power to the north when Italy was unified, Naples went into the economic decline that spared it, at the cost of its decay, the destructive renewals of modernisation and development. Urban renewal was fragmentary, sporadic. A wide straight street was ploughed through the port slums late last century after a cholera epidemic. Some land was reclaimed at Santa Lucia. Mussolini later bulldozed another patch below via Toledo in the centre for the Bank of Naples, the police head quarters, the post office in fascist modernist monumental style, the city’s only decent new buildings in the last hundred years. Otherwise Naples was left alone. The centre still teemed with people and it still presented in a degraded form a continuity of culture long gone elsewhere (Robb, 1996, 150).

Naples mirrors the mix of beauty and ugliness. What is grotesque is how it is “left behind” in the wake of initiatives towards “modernization and development.” Even urban renewal and fascist architecture

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cannot makeover this city because the unity of its nation helped produce the economic decline which “spared it,” that is, which enabled it to hold onto what it was. This is curious: Naples is reborn (remains in touch with “a continuity long gone elsewhere”) at the moment it dies (suffers economic decline). That Robb says Naples presents itself in “a degraded form” confirms the link here between decadence and the grotesque, a link arguable and suggestive. Thus, in Bakhtin’s terms, fusion refers to the tension in duration between the obsolete and the youthful, and in extension, between the inside and the outside. Fusion – of the old and the new, the interior and the exterior – appears vividly in the competing truth claims circulating in the contested practices of city life, always requiring an approach or method that exaggerates the tension by making the claims themselves appear as material deeds (practices) that are comic by virtue of asserting what they deny and of denying what they assert. For example, the fascination of Naples for Robb is that the city lives and dies at the same time, that is, it exists as a living death. Naples kills itself to live, and it lives to kill itself. Naples mirrors for Italy the political and economic consequences of its modernization with respect to national unity: Naples shows the tenacious existence of backwardness at the soul of the nation. Naples begins to reveal how the force of the life of the people of the city can always exceed the demands of the modern moment. Here in Naples we see the tension not only between the old ways of the people and the new claims to rationalize life but between the new and old divisions of the country. Robb continues: I thought I saw the past and it worked. These were the survivors of the ancient world. I abandoned my plans and the world to stay in Naples, I thought it’d go on forever. After several thousand years and in the middle of late capitalism, why not? Like the Neapolitans I’d arrange myself. Three years later it was all gone. The people’s Naples had vanished (Robb, 1996, 151).

But in 1995 when he confronts Naples in the face of its changes, its decadence still fascinates, leaving him unsure. Naples’s ugliness is beautiful. Naples in 1995 still seemed an utterly disoriented city whose language and gestures remained what they’d been but no longer referred to reality. A poison was abroad in Naples now. Resentments surfaced quickly. The baroque configuration of the Neapolitan mind was being twisted further into something ugly. Meanwhile you were expected to admire pedestrian zones and open air cafés. The theme park necrosis was taking hold. Sinister forces wanted to embalm the city, create another Venice, a little piece of Tuscany. People were being pushed

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to the edges, if not out of town. You could see them in the shadows, at the edge of the field of vision. Was it the beauty that blurred my eyes now, or the life gone from the places I’d known? Naples had never seemed more beautiful. I felt like a ghost stalking the streets. The tourists are coming back! Twenty years earlier, Naples had been a dying city that belonged to the people who lived there. It was hardly bearable at best, yet there’d been life in the dreadfulness of life. You seldom heard Neapolitan now. The absurd comedy was gone. Naples broke my heart. And yet, as the city always had, it teased, it led you on to dream of more than it would ever deliver, made you remember why you’d thrown away your life to be there and still, for an instant, if you lived it, think it the most marvelous city in the world. In Naples you remembered being happy and never why. Naples, I consoled myself with thinking, would always be more interesting than other places. Naples would never bore … Naples was the only place I’d ever felt at home (Robb, 1996, 168–9).

This moving passage raises many of the issues we need to consider in reflecting upon the city as an object of desire. Robb says, “Naples had been a dying city that belonged to the people who lived there.” This suggests a pertinent question which we shall have occasion to consider throughout (and which is an implicit theme in the globalization literature): to what extent does a city belong to the people who live there and, as measured by the course of progress, does this question have any weight today? Secondly, the idea of life existing in the “dreadfulness of life,” seems an anachronism today, a romantic gesture at best, but one we might rescue and probe. Finally, the idea of the “theme park necrosis” spreading poison in the city by making it appear comparable to other cities still does not diminish his experience that it “never seemed more beautiful,” seeming “the most marvelous city in the world.” Robb puts to rest the conundrum of his relation to the grotesque city with three reasons: he remembers being happy and never why; he felt it always to be more interesting, never to bore; and he experiences it as the only place he has ever felt at home. At its worst moment, Naples never seems more beautiful; at the very point when its modernization imposes a uniformity upon it, its resistance allows it to appear unique and incomparable.

r i s e a n d fa l l In the usual stories of the rise and fall of cities, perpetuity is treated as akin to a biological fate. The message cities receive from the environment is that opportunism and luck in economic and environmental positioning will distinguish winners from losers (and today: “think globally, act locally,” or vice versa, etc.). The Darwinian aura of the

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history of cities begins to tell this story within the framework of a “challenge-and-response” model of collective identity in which “winners” and “losers” alike continuously struggle with the question of the fundamental ambiguity of collective integrity in word and deed. Here, though, the city is viewed as determined by its functional relation to an environment, itself understood functionally as a resource base. The notion of place as a destiny recedes in the face of the ecological view of the city in history as the struggle for existence of various spaces to become places. This history describes fluctuations in the fortunes of cities which appropriate spaces to their advantage: seaports, trading centre, capital cities, favored locations, networks of alliances, each and all based upon the securing of advantages which mark the history of the world as the rise and decline of spaces. Amsterdam, Bruges, Hamburg, Venice, Philadelphia, Istanbul are remembered as centres that became peripheral. The ecological history of the city has charted its fluctuation in terms of the instability of its function as a dominant centre. If the central city is seen to be shaped by trade routes, location, specialization, rule over neighbors, hinterland, and rival cities, then the primacy of its place – grounded in its capacity to create dependency in its subjects through specialization – establishes its power functionally. The history of cities narrates the chronology of a master-slave relationship understood functionally. Yet, a deep view of ecology can invite us to ask if domination and dependency is other than ecological and whether and how there might be more than ecology to the history of fluctuations in the fortunes of cities? That is, the perennial example of the eternal city invites us to consider how the persistence of place or its redefinition operates in cases such as Paris and London to counteract or redefine the precedence of ecology in ways that are distinctive and singular. The ecological view of the city as a struggle for existence, as an ongoing dialectic of rest and motion, life and death, engages us because its conception of space as a resource points to the city as a site of renewal. If the ecological view of the city shows us the relation between domination and renewal, this leads us to inquire into the city as a site of renewal. In this way too, we can anticipate the limits of a static conception of genius loci or place as an unalterable site of identity and loyalty. The image of the mortality of the city tells us that place and space are not irreconcilable opposites, because spaces must be renewed as places. If, in part, this involves redefining domesticity and work by revitalizing tensions between privatization and the public, it also involves more. This “something more” evokes the aura of eternity that renewal always invokes as its “mythology,” the investment of the present with the sense of permanence that can extend the city into the future as an object of desire.

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Thus, in response to the ecological vision of the city’s essential fragility and its renewal as contingent and fated to be limited, the example of Rome as the “eternal city” focuses for us the primary tension within the notion of renewal itself between its complementary senses. That the domination of Rome the eternal city is not simply ecological makes problematic the question of domination itself, inviting us to reflect upon the question of how the renewal of Rome is an ongoing struggle with the temptations of ecological domination. The “Roman question” is very complex: manpower depletion, hedonism, overextended annexation, tyrannical callousness, elitist exploitation, military discordance and exhaustion all figure as “contributions” to Rome’s decline. But has Rome declined? Note how Hitler attempted to reinvent Berlin as dominant in the Roman sense and, in so doing, also kept Rome alive despite its “fall.” When peoples experience inwardly periods of greatness, they represent these periods through external forms. Their word thus expressed is more convincing than the spoken work; it is the word of stone (Hitler) … These buildings of ours should not be conceived for the year 1940 … but like the cathedrals of our past they should stretch into the millennia of the future … Only thus shall we succeed in eclipsing our only rival, Rome (quoted in Ladd, 1997, 126).

Hitler places severe burdens on Berlin, forcing upon it an adversarial relation to Rome which he defines as the penultimate example of extension and duration. It is the drive of the tyrant to make his nation the immortal centre of a civilization that enjoins him to use Berlin as the city which will bear this weight. One of the problems of Berlin today is that fascism is the “environment” which it inherits as part of the problem it must negotiate under modern circumstances, the problem of renewing itself as a liberal city in the teeth of this inheritance. That is, the problem of Berlin is not just to “think globally” but to work out a just relation between its form and its material conditions (material conditions that, as an environment, includes its Nazi heritage). Hitler radicalizes the idea of the city as a work of art in his gesture of expurgating its functional relation to its modern moment. Hitler tries to overcome what drives critics such as Debord to despair, the overpowering functionalism of the present moment. In the absence of an attempt to relate form to material conditions, he simply expropriates the privileged historical example of Rome (its eternality) instead of developing an understanding of the form of Berlin through a consideration of its interaction with its environment of material conditions. The tyrant finds modernity too ugly to retain (in his words, “the dirty Jew shops and department stores”) in a way which limits the beauty of Berlin because the beauty of a city needs to fuse its creativity and

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commerce. It is in this sense that the view of the city which celebrates its beauty still externalizes its form, leaves it undeveloped and unexplored, in the idiom of Nietzsche, by “monumentalizing” its history (or Benjamin: by politicizing aesthetics). In response to an ecological record in which he discovers no taint of beauty, just a story of fluctuations in force, Hitler finds justification for treating Berlin’s beauty instrumentally in the most extreme sense, for its perpetuity will only be abstract. Yet, Rome’s beauty did not reside in its architecture; rather, it appeared in the contradictions it suffered and exposed in affirming its modernity at its time as the “capital of the civilized world” (Baudelaire, 1972, 416): in its class divisions and imperial conquest, in its extension of citizenship, in its fascination with spectacle, in its hedonism, vulgarity, and stoicism, and in its capacities to simultaneously demean and liberate its population. It is this mix of Rome that Hitler’s beautiful city seeks to eliminate while copying its architecture.

at h e n s In contrast to Hitler’s attempt to conquer space and time in Berlin, note the classical example of the suffering of this tension. The city of Athens remains a primordial example of the attempt to fuse concerns for perpetuity with the extension of worldly influence by a civilization that saw in this city all of the contradictions of its modern moment: freedom and enslavement, philosophy and despotism, creativity and commerce, community and self-interest. Pericles’s Funeral Oration attempts to join the form of Athens to its material conditions in a way that is just, in a method of exaggeration made transparent by Thucydides through the detachment of his reportorial style. In the Funeral Oration, Thucydides puts in the mouth of the statesman a panegyric to Athens that could well serve as a model of the city engaged by the question of a just relation between its form and material conditions. That is, whether or not Pericles’s self-praise is true, whether or not it accords with the facts, it serves as an exemplary case of the city consumed by the question of its culture and, so, shows the tensions inherent in the struggle to represent culture (Thucydides, 1934, 102–9). Of course the encounter is third-hand: Athens mediated through Pericles and Thucydides, but it is its character as a story that is instructive. Pericles’s characterization identifies the material conditions which Athens must rewrite as a just relationship in order to appear as collective virtues. Each condition is meant to mirror the spirit of the people of Athens. Pericles’s oration sets the standard for all ways of speaking about the engagement of the city with its own distinctiveness, with its own difference, not because of the substance of what the list in-

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cludes, but through its focus on how the specific conditions mirror the quality of city life. In this way Pericles claims that the distinctiveness of spirit of Athens appears in the conditions which he cites as symptoms of freedom and of the legacy of the city. As Thucydides enumerates Pericles’s list of virtues – a single law for rich and poor, administration in the hands of the people, an abiding respect for excellence, freedom without lawlessness, relaxation from toil and satisfaction of want, cultivation of mind, generosity towards foreigners, and a lively and open public life including great works – what comes to view are the contradictions. The freedom praised might be an official doctrine held in check by laws and by wars which enforce solidarity with respect to a common foe. In the absence of such constraints, discord and differences could reign. There are many questions raised of the list concerning the connection of the fortunes of Athens to its ruling families, its persecution of philosophers, its ostracism of dissidents, and its complex class relations. What comes to view is the opposition of the ideal described by Pericles to the “facts” it portrays, that is, the visible ambiguity that inheres in the self-representation of freedom. The beauty of Athens is seen not in a recounting of its expulsion of ugliness but in the panegyric which fuses the high and the low together under the hyperbolic banner of a vision of its just perpetuity. Even further, the city views itself in ways different from how it is seen by other cities. Athens is often seen as warlike, ambitious, aggressive, and imperialistic by its neighbors, who oppose its ideal with their other forms of life. If a city must claim to be the distinctive embodiment of freedom, a singular free citizenry, that claim can be disputed both internally and from without. The panegyric locates the hyperbole in the city’s affirmation of its identity, while yet affirming the necessity of such inflation. The oration is exemplary because it shows how the city must represent itself as free rather than enslaved and as central rather than peripheral. Yet, just as the freedom must be contested by each generation which finds itself “determined” by its past and by the inheritance of inequitable ruling coalitions, divisions, and factions which it confronts, so must its centrality be contested by rival cities who struggle to defend themselves against its influence. If the very necessary self-affirmativeness of the city risks denying the other; its engagement with the question of itself always must release the ambiguity of this dialectic. Far from being a “myth,” the freedom of Athens is an elementary problem it must solve. Whether the city is free in fact or not, it treats itself as the home for free spirits, the place where the freedom of spirit can settle. Moreover, the oration makes clear two further conditions of such a settlement. First, the people of such a site must create works that

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testify to the greatness of the city, accomplishments that Pericles can reiterate in his oration, achievements that testify to the link between the freedom of spirit of the people and their collective productivity and, thus, to a kind of civic discipline that mediates spirit and its objectification in works. This tells us that the wealth of the city – reflected in its productivity and works – is not simply for private accumulation, because it serves as a sign of the city’s greatness both to itself and to its outside. What the wealth of the city shows in the first instance is that the city is great because it is the site for the settlement of free spirit, the site where freedom of spirit can be disciplined and harnessed to the common good. Further, this wealth or productivity of the great city is a sign which rallies the people to it, signifying the confidence that it will persist as a memorable event in time. It is the materiality of the prideful locus of civic life that can unify the many voices of the city as a one. The voice affirming the culture of the city asserts unity as a relation to difference: the division between Athens and its neighbors, and within, to its landscape of diversity – class, generation, and gender – makes the city appear in these material conditions to which its form has to do justice. The oration, in making this claim, personifies the collective self-reflection on culture as both vivid and grotesque. The wealth and productivity of the city is a sign of its greatness and, so, marks its difference from its nation and all other cities. Thus, the twoedged character of the wealth of the city, on the one hand, animating pride for its works and, on the other hand, inspiring animosity for its arrogance. Thucydides’s Funeral Oration shows the primordial link between the wealth of the city and its claim to freedom, the eternal ambiguity of the connection of civic productivity and the freedom of the city. Further, in this primordial text, the wealth of the city is reflected only in part in the number of works or accomplishments of the city, because such quantity must always point to the quality of the people and its spirit. It is this quality which sets the city apart, which makes it unique for itself and its neighbors, a source of pride that can and ought exist in perpetuity. This palpable perpetuity of Athens that we discern in the Funeral Oration links it to the wealth and productivity of the city and to the variety of interpretive implications of such an imaginative structure. What is often spoken of as the history of the city – of its arts, artefacts, and sites of remembrance – is simply the visible sign of its productivity, of its creative energies, which conceal in their commonness as facades, the secret sufferings, stories, and moral careers of private troubles and injustices masked by the relentless productivity and material abundance of the city.

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The perpetuity of Athens points to its duration in a more material way. Athens’s continuation is linked to the mortality of the collective and the use of great works and public accomplishments to perpetuate its noteworthy existence in historical time. The city – always at risk because of the fragility of man-made things, always perishable and destructible – requires collective acts of concerted will, notably the strong intervention of a political rhetoric, to organize its present so as to face its future with the confidence that it will persist as a memorable event in time. If the materiality of the collective shows the incalculability of its historical moment, the wealth of the city (its “cultural capital”) is the core of its inheritance that must be objectified and externalized as its legacy. From Fustel de Coulanges (Coulanges, 1864) through stories of the Greek and Roman cities, to histories of the cities of the Italian Renaissance, the same refrain is repeated: material perpetuation of the city joins the desire for immortality and fame of powerful men and the concerted accomplishment of public works through a discipline both technological and rhetorical that identifies the immortality of the city with the eternal recognition (and salvation) of its distinguished citizenry. In this primordial text, the question of the quality of the collective is treated as irrevocable, as necessary and desirable, as demonstrable through the maintenance of a specific place, as linked to the material destiny of group and its people, as requiring care for past and future, as dependent upon the intervention of politics and power and upon the accumulation of public wealth, and as needing the enforcement machinery of a discipline and rhetoric of citizenship. We cannot resolve with certainty the question of Athens, though many judgments can be made. That the functional problem of its perpetuity was “solved” seems clear to we latecomers for whom its memory is a legible influence; and yet, a city can live in infamy. The problems arising from the effort to approach the city comes from having to face the grotesque character of the individual fusion of its common and particular character. The insistence of worldly forces seems to compel the civilization to represent the city as a Hobbesian jungle. Yet, Weber’s distinction between science and art points to a vision of culture as the working out of a just relation between destiny and fate, just as Bakhtin understands the fusion to be revealed on occasions or critical moments – cases – that always appear grotesque and, so, that invite the approach of “joyous irony.” Irony is needed to resist either extreme view of the destiny of the city (the fear that its inimitability is corrupted by change), or of the fate of the city (the fear that its change is paralyzed by piety): “Fear is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness which is defeated by laughter” (Bakhtin, 1984, 47).

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conclusion I have suggested that culture does not just refer to ways of living, or patterns of conduct, but to collective representations of situations in which perplexities of human existence are encountered, worked through, or suffered. And, of course, the project of human culture is always to sustain concerted commitment to forms of sociation in the face of the vital and constant reiteration of the groundlessness of being. What is most perplexing and is brought to view by the city as an object of analysis is the ambiguity of the relation of place to placelessness and how this tension might play off what Rancière calls democracy’s fear of indeterminacy. The enigma and threat of democracy is merely its own indeterminacy. This means that people have no place, that they are not “identical” to themselves; that indeterminacy in fact is a permanent challenge to the rationality of policy and the rationality of social knowledge (Rancière, 1994b, 34).

In terms of our discussion, it would be better to suggest that the modern moment of any historical society is always ruled by the ways in which the unrest of indeterminacy materializes in specific and vivid detail as a locus of collective problem-solving. Such occasions or critical moments are grotesque and, as such, opportunities or cases for study. It remains to be explored how the city is a figure within this discourse and how it occupies a particular place through the specific challenges it releases in relation to mundane topics such as globalization, commerce and consumption, building and rebuilding, excitement, and citizenship. If time and space seem to bear the weight of such collective representations, questions of duration and extension invariably come to view as contested matters in relation to a variety of social forms that we must begin to take up. In this chapter, I have sought to show how the elementary situation of the city as occasioned by the problem of social change and its unrest, represents the collective entanglement of a population with the fundamental ambiguity of its existence in time and space. I have focused on tensions in the notion of historical finality (art, science) and the problem of the fusion of such views. I have also intimated an incipient relation which I shall eventually explore, between beauty and progress, as a dialectic at the innermost core of the representation of procreation itself. Here, the figure of the Cambodian chef and his project of reproducing the standard of perfection (perfect taste) must invariably collide with the market and its progressive standards of satisfaction in ways

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that are uniquely dramatized by the city as an object of analysis, through both its achievements of objective culture and the heterogeneous and conflicted relations to pleasure and utility which its intractable aesthetic and ethical character raises.

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3 Time, Space

i nt roduc ti on I am exploring the notion of the “symbolic field” mentioned earlier which is the problematic structure integral to the object itself, that is, to the city as a vital distinction that animates worldly attachments (Deleuze, 1994, 164). When viewed through the conventional lens of social change and unrest, the city as a locus of the destabilized common situation, focuses first upon the tensions commensurate with time and the palpable problem-solving visible in its ethical collisions. In the same way, although time and space are concretely impossible to disentangle, we must contemplate the specific shapes of destabilization correlative with the ambiguity of space. One of the most striking changes in modern societies is the increase in the power and authority of the center over its periphery and in the simultaneous increase in the power and authority of the periphery over the center … This diminishes the difference between center and periphery (Shils, 1981, 247).

When the destabilized common situation is viewed through the conventional lens of centre and periphery, the constant and palpable tensions commensurate with the problem of space appears vividly as a question of collectivization. In the quote above, Shils says that the distinction between the centre and periphery is dissolving. For us, this need not necessarily mean that the city is the centre, but that it is the exemplary site where the dissolution of the difference is at issue in vivid and observable ways. That is, if the dissolution of the difference between centre and periphery is dramatized in and for the city this means that the time of the present is interpreted as a common situation in which the mixing and matching of these influences becomes a locus of ethical collisions.

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Not only are centre and periphery seen as endangering one another but the very ideas of centrality and peripherality are reconfigured. This suggests, for the present, that representations of the city, which include the proposition that it is nothing but a sign, are grounded in a discourse on social change and the reality of worldly movement in time and space. Such views of the city are part of an imaginative structure positing as the real and immediate environment of the city, a circulatory movement eroding boundaries that makes problematic beginnings and ends in space and time, a movement that views mixing, variety, or diversity as integral to every major city, and that sees everywhere unprecedented upsurges in energy directed to a process of local collectivization leading to an ongoing succession of projects and intensities that constantly make problematic the question of who controls the means of interpretation of the city and the power to define it as a space of participation. That this symbolic field is part of the object itself tells us that the city is a site at which this discourse is accentuated as a palpable environment of knowledge. The city is then not a local site in contrast to some global other, but a site at which this tension integral to the very notion of locality comes to view and is accentuated in a variety of ethical collisions in ways that situate it invariably as part of a system of desire. This is to say that, as a notion, the local is both the same and the other.

d u r at i o n a n d e x t e n s i o n Harold Innis explicitly links culture to the uniqueness of collective life: “It is perhaps a unique character of civilization that each … believes in its superiority and uniqueness to other civilizations. Indeed, this may be the meaning of culture … something we have that others have not” (Innis, 1995, 317). In this formula, Innis captures the idea that culture is used to mark a difference. This suggestion relates the making of such a difference to the problem to the mortality of collective life. A brief survey of cultural development in the West may indicate the peculiarity or uniqueness of culture and elements which make for duration and extension … How large an area did they cover and how long did they last? (Innis, 1995, 317).

The city brings to view the criticalness of the present moment for the civilization by embodying the various tensions connected to the extension and perpetuation of collective life. Moreover, because difference is linked to the question of when and where a collective ceases to be, identity is related to difference through the question of mortality.

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When the city is called a theatre, what is meant is that it centers the question of being for a civilization, mirroring as a drama the problem of collective mortality. The metabolism of the city and all of the contradictory tensions it releases imitate and travesty the two-sidedness of collective life consumed by the productivity of its modern moment, in simultaneously realizing its end and its new beginning. The relationship to succession and extension appears as a collective problem in the practices of everyday life in which distinctions between the city and its other are constructed, reproduced, debated, and challenged over the question of how (and whether) the city is the same (as itself) and other (unlike what is different). In the same way, the persistence of the city is contested by the changing configurations of its parts and by the constant circulation of people and objects in ways that continuously challenge and redefine its boundaries. If sociology speaks of the unrest of social change, we might understand this as the way the present of the city is haunted by fundamental ambiguity through the appearance of the ghosts of past and spectres of the future. What this means is that the modern moment of the collective poses acutely the problem of succession (in time) and extension (in space) on occasions when conflicts in interpretation and action mark development as an ongoing opportunity for bringing to view the ambiguity of collective identity as difference and of differentiation as self-maintaining. It is on such occasions that the question of collective purpose is addressed and suffered in relation to the common situation of the city amidst the challenges of succession, replenishment, and exodus released by social change. In part, the duration of the city, referring to its persistence over time, is captured in the violence inflicted upon cities historically as each generation seeks to work out its relationship to the past which it inherits. Yet, we might also locate here the invariable process of attrition which distinguishes the corruption of human things. That the city lives in fear of being a ruin means not only that it must care for and maintain itself as an artefact, a man-made thing, but it must care for its place in the circulatory circuits of influence lest it become a non-entity. Though this work of engaging its own perpetuity is ongoing, indefinite, and takes many paths, its inescapable necessity forms the environment of any city. That is, the “environment” of the city is not only its climate and landscape, nor simply the worldwide circulation of capital, but the “message” it receives from the civilization in which it is embodied. In this way, perpetuity makes reference to the collective work of contestation in thought and action, always centered by the problem of renewal as a concerted project of collective self-maintenance, the problem of the persistence of the particular in the universal.

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One could then say that the city is an agent of civilization. For example, globalization as such a message, is not just a “cause” impinging upon the city as its “effect,” but a way of typifying and normalizing the theme of a real world and its real movement in terms of which the city is “instructed” to find its place and make its mark. The global cities identified by researchers are then instances intended to reveal this worldly and fateful movement.

c i rc u l at i o n In chapter 1, I identified the cliché of globalization with a system of desire emphasizing the drama of the circulation of heterogeneous influences. Now we are reading Harold Innis to say that, for any civilization such as ours, the problems of its extension (circulation) and duration (present moment) are intimately linked to its cities, functioning perhaps, as interpretive occasions which bring to view the transparency of its culture. Of course, we are talking of nothing other than space (extension, circulation) and time (duration, the present moment), suggesting, first, that ethical collisions over these two problems set (interpretively) the agenda for cities, and, secondly, that the problemsolving of cities in relation to space and time becomes visible in cities as local accomplishments in relation to representing and acting upon its common situation. To put it directly, the culture of the city becomes observable as a local phenomenon in its projects that invariably and inexorably make duration and extension critical moments of problemsolving and, so, sources of observable discourses on collective purpose. Innis says that for every civilization the problems of extension (space) and duration (time) are fundamental, not only setting the agenda for local problem-solving but for the very representation of locality. The extension of civilization is, in part, embodied in its ways and means of collecting and differentiating its cities as points in a circulatory process and in its conventions of theorizing and of methodically comparing cities and distinguishing them from other places. The duration of civilization is, in part, embodied in its ways and means of typifying the present moment of cities as critical by linking them to their pasts and future and by calculating their collective purpose and its organization as resources which are seen to dramatize their struggles of self-maintenance and perpetuation. Thus, the question of form and its ambiguity haunts the movement of civilization as and at its ground. The extension of the city refers to its status as an object of desire in the circulatory circuits of humankind because cities repel and attract movement of influences (capital, people, information) in ways that pose collective problems. Here, we might begin to place colonialism

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and diaspora as two most obvious speakers in this debate, a debate grounded ultimately in the question of collective formation, disintegration, and the integrity and disappearance of boundaries. Colonialism and diaspora make fundamental claims on the integrity of the city through the ways in which cities figure in the circulatory circuits of humankind, extending influence by receiving influence and, vice versa, receiving influences in order to extend their own domain. Harold Innis tells us that the extension of a civilization refers to how great an area it covers. As we know, such a vision of area is social, in ways that permit us to think of the connection of extension to influence and, even, “communication.” Where today people speak of “flows” in contrast to what they take as the antiquated image of diffusion, the point is the same: cities are interpreted as positions in the circulatory circuits of civilizational energy. If the Roman Empire is the paradigmatic classical example of such a circulatory system, americanization is a prime contemporary example of such a circulatory movement in modern life. In the so-called global civilization, the most immediate example of circulating things is captured by images of the movement of capital, multinational corporations, and diasporic flows of populations. But the circulation of influences is more complex than this, more deeply layered, and, in every case, only observable in instances of collectivization and in the management of variety in particular local ways. That is, the engagement of the global civilization with the problem of its duration is embodied in collectivization that is irremediably local, specified in projects, initiatives, and the implementation of social formats in the everyday life of cities. Cities are interpreted in terms of their position and function within the circulation system we call globalization. If the most external views of cities rank order them as variables, other views consider them in terms of their hospitality or receptiveness to flows of influence. For example, cultural plans and urban planning circulate as initiatives and projects which city after city absorbs and reinvents in particular ways, as do formats for amalgamating cities and their surrounding areas, initiatives for new stadiums, and for revitalizing waterfronts and central “core areas.” Such demands upon cities function in the manner of Durkheim’s conception of social facts, presenting an aura of externality and coerciveness that, though ruling cities, give them opportunity for collective action that expresses in local ways, “solutions” to universal exigencies. Just as goods, objects, and products circulate, so do the formats for their exhibition and display. Heterogeneous examples of such a circuit of influence include doctrines of human rights, ways of designing ob-

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jects and settings, multiculturalism, affirmative action, Irish pubs, film festivals, Internet cafés, and the penumbra of representations persistently in motion. The “greatness” of the area of such a civilization leads to its marking of cities as sites of hospitality to such influence, as central or peripheral, as organized efficiently to accommodate such movement or as recalcitrant, resistant, “backward.” Amidst such movement, groups other than businesspeople, exiles, refugees, and tourists – such as traveling performers, professional architects, terrorists, and students – circulate in ways that constantly mark cities as objects of desire. The collective encounter over the problem of extension can be made observable through the detail of local accomplishments, for it is through such specificity that extension materializes as a problem: the influences reciprocally exercised between the collective and its “environment” is traced in an array of initiatives for rebuilding urban cores, museums, hotels, for the redesign of boundaries for creating corporate mergers or film festivals, for dreaming up alliances for the promotion of the city in the global world, or associations which defend different groups and interests within the city (language rights, gay rights, property owners’ and tenants’ rights), in procedures of organization to promote the training of “new” citizens or small businesses, and in the varied “scenes” created to service the specialized propensities of limited circles. Though cities typically seem to differ in their manner of taking such local initiative, upon inspection we note the place of the initiative in a circuit of influences, as a point in the transmission of formats and ideas. In each case extension comes alive to the discerning eye (“how large an area does it cover”?) as the topic of influence and the question of how far influence extends. In this way, the mediation of reciprocal influences exemplify, in every such case, the ways in which collective boundaries become palpable courses of action, two-in-one, both local and universal. The engagement of a population with the ambiguity of the common situation of its cities comes to view variously, first, in the opportunities for contact and collision stimulated by the constant need to revise solutions to the problem of social order. More basic, though, is the intensification of congestion and sprawl as “social problems” seen as arising from the dense concentration of large numbers in limited space. In these ways, the diversity of the city functions as a site in which contestation over questions of scarcity and order always serve to mirror in any intended solution, fragments of a discourse over the question of what the city is and is not and in what direction it ought be oriented. The problem of extension appears in ways other than organized initiatives and projects: as the diffusion of excitement and intensities. For

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example, the extension of globalization through its capacity to reconfigure play and leisure as entertainment is only the tip of its system of desire that structures sweetness of living as indissolubly linked to circulation not simply of products or commodities but of the “right” to be happy, to have it all, to market oneself in unlimited ways, to rationalize time and space in unprecedented ways, and to expand oneself by developing new regions of sensual emancipation through tasting, testing, and marketing. This begins to reveal how duration and the present moment, space and time, are linked in the city as a joint problem recognized in projects, initiatives, and formats that are locally palpable.

perpetuity In the primordial instance, duration is identified with place by virtue of the collective need to remain with its buried past (Coulanges, 1864). This past, inheritance, or tradition includes the ancestors buried at the site who must be maintained or cared for in a way which identifies perpetuity as a fundamental problem of collective life. That the continuity of the collective is inextricably connected to place and that place is a site of burial stamp the collective relation to its territory as material and ideal in the way the social relationship to death is fundamentally ambiguous. Coulanges’s notion of the “sacred fire” expresses this ambiguity, the relation of the collective to itself, to its own succession and continuity in time (Karatheodoris, 1979). Will the group survive or pass away? The material existence of the group raises for the collective this pressing question at every decisive stage of its life. The question invites an intuition both Dionysiac and Appolonian: duration is announced both in the intuition that everything which comes to be must perish and in the desire to outwit this inexorable fate through the creation of collective works that will stand the test of time. The perpetuity of collective life exists as both the materiality of need and desire, of life and death, as a grotesque two-headed image. In a similar vein, the encounter of the civilization with the problem of its duration cannot be separated from the local initiatives of cities in terms of which this problem must appear in varied ways as the mirror of the encounter. For moderns, the tension in duration is probably best reflected in the work of Walter Benjamin, who relentlessly noted the coexistence of old and new, but the collision appears as a constant feature in the rebuilding of cities, the movement and displacement of populations and activities that raise concerns for loyalty to the past, the mingling of diverse peoples that regularly create division between newcomers and long-term residents, and conflicts over customs, arts, techniques and information, districts, and rights and opportunities that

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continuously raise questions of the value and meaning of obsolescence and of the up-to-date in any and every practice and initiative. In the city, relations of the present moment to its past and future is dramatized in ideologies of planning, thrift, and scarcity immortalized in municipal budgets, in entrepreneurial energies animated by dreams of prospective future markets, in the quintessentially local signature of generational division and its correlative music and scenes, in identification of the “new” freedoms of every city in relation to its past fetters, and in the continuous urban narrative mosaic, both official and subterranean, that recalls the city as it was in its past and imagines it as it is sure to be in its future. From the testimony of urban survivors and long-term residents, to the archives of municipal agencies and museums, the memory of the city is refashioned, sustained, and disfigured at every present moment. In this respect, the discourse on and in the present moment always offers challenging propositions about the quality of life of the city and how it might possibly link to future happiness.

m o r ta l i t y If the discourse is necessary and necessarily linked to the calculation of the city’s existence in time and space, why do such concerns arouse anxiety? We can anticipate by suggesting that our existence in time and space is intimately connected to our identity through the notion of mortality. Earlier we spoke of culture as part of a relation to collective purpose that is fundamentally ambiguous. Identity provides the link between such a common situation and the collective need to come to terms with the problem of its collectivization because identity is linked to the existence of the collective in time and space through mortality. Notice how John McCumber, in contrasting an inflexible notion of identity with a “dialectical” conception, points out how it is the very strength of the dialectical vision that opens it to a recognition of the fragility of identity, to the fact that it has no determinate limit in any calculus of common properties. For to be … anything … is not to have a unique set of properties, but to have a history in the course of which various properties are added and subtracted at various times. And while this history may be unique and “particular” to a group’s identity, it is also always in constant interplay with a larger history, ultimately that of unrealized humanity … essential identities will ultimately be required by their own conceptual incoherence in the face of the unpredictable nature of experience, to maintain themselves by exercising force against the very individuals whose identity they constitute. Dialectical identities, on the other hand, are not subject to this particular incoherence, for while they are

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based on a set of experiences, they do not exclude the possibility that future experiences will subvert present identities … On the other hand, dialectical identity brings with it a certain loss of security, the individuals and groups who adopt it … must face the fact that they may eventually cease to exist as distinct individuals in a distinct group … this loss of separateness may be viewed, in the end, as a kind of communal death. Dialectical identity thus constitutes a mortal community. The only way to avoid the discomfort of this identity is to presume certain characteristics of such a community to be permanent and … beyond time (McCumber, 1995, 1157–8).

A dialectical relationship to identity addresses the encounter with the city as the constant interplay with “unrealized humanity” that is continuously observable as a kind of problem-solving: the attempt to master the destabilized common situation invariably runs up against the limits of “unpredictable experience,” leading to visible efforts to revise, reshape, and renew that which seemed to be secure and in hand. The openness of our categories to “experience” threatens to redefine their limits in ways that highlight their arbitrariness, just as such openness creates an incalculable future that promises to annul the sovereign borders we respect in any present. The solidity of that for which we stand is haunted by the fear for its extinction. But again, how does this ambiguity take shape around the city as an object in a way that is specific and individual? In the form of the challenge of perpetuity, collective life confronts its fate in the spectre of decline and replenishment, of exhaustion and revitalization, of “unrealized humanity” as its incalculable but inevitable porousness. Yet, only in the city is the metabolic intensity of the present moment intensified in the figure of the current generation or cohort which invariably travesties the fate of mortality by continuing to do business as if past and future are of no matter.

u r b a n i z at i o n The urbanization of the world is reputed to proceed apace with the universal appearance of goods, products, peoples, ideas, and influences that are thought to “flow” across boundaries with the force and momentum of a natural process. Thus, the same technologies, organizations, doctrines, and products are said to materialize in what were previously thought to be the most dissimilar spaces; such effects appearing in ways that seem to make these places equivalent and up-todate, solely by virtue of common exposure to these things and their influences. By virtue of having access to the same goods (such as cappuccino), the same advantages (such as a twenty-four-hour nightlife), the

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same information (such as provided by cable television), the same influences of “lifestyle” (such as advertising, trademark brands, or home furnishings), or the same kind of mixing of people, various cities are said to be rendered urban. In such a world, urbanization seems to have the power of a circulatory system that disseminates amenities, possessions, and influences much like an unmoved mover. Circulatory excitement transverses boundaries between the city and the country as populations move to pastures once isolated to mark them with influences typically thought to be unique to cities such as congestion, lifestyle, conveniences, and artefacts antithetical to the spirit of nature, amenities in the wake of real-estate development (MacGregor, 2001, 37–55). Within cities, different shapes of the same circulatory process are said to animate the appropriation of previously moribund areas and districts for use as sites of development and “gentrification,” displacing old residents and “revitalizing” neighborhoods once thought unappealing or parochial. The market-driven excitement of circulation, typically attributed to deregulation and the removal of restrictions on movement, creates a frenzied experience of freedom from oppressive ties and hopes for liberation of potentialities from the burdens of the past. As has been noted, such circulatory movement includes not only diasporic populations but franchises, multinational corporations, diseases which are said to range freely across borders, carbon copies of museums once thought to be special to one place, and all of the influences, ideas, and technologies once considered to be exclusive property of locations, areas, peoples, and groups. The interpenetration of worldly influences in any and every place is said to render places commensurate on the basis of their exposure to a circulatory system of equal accessibility of all to all. One implication of the thesis of the urbanization of the world is that places become equivalent by virtue of their relationship to a common process in a way which determines any particular place by the generality of circulation and its normative order (its “code”). If, in this way, the difference between town and country seems to dissolve (because of the reputed common access to popular culture and the universality of “product recognition”), so too do differences between cities seem to be eroding. In this work such claims lead me to explore the notion of urbanity as a measure upon urbanization by asking, in part, how urbanity might persist as a tenacious and legible feature of city life in ways that make problematic these ideas of equivalence and, especially, of the uniform experience of urbanization. Here is where the difference between space and place might become pertinent. All those regions that appear the same because of their similar relative positioning within a circulatory system, might not be the

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same, not only by virtue of the classical distinction between appearance and reality, but for the reason that it is just not clear what is the relationship between the appearance of urbanization and urbanity. Further, if the relationship of urbanity to urbanization is not simply a question of manners but focuses us upon a concern for civility or community as a locus of collective life, this begins to ask how the accoutrements of urbanization (amenities, film festivals, congestion, sushi) function in the process of emplacement, contributing to it or to its regression. This tells us, for example, that having amenities is not urbane eo ipso but needs to be put into play as a consideration. In all of these ways, interpretive questions insistently intervene as too fundamental for us to permit commentary on the city to proceed in uninterrupted ways as if it requires only evidence, further argument, rebuttal, or technical clarification. The problem of meaning has to be revived. If urbanization is a universal force, it seems curious to posit the end of the city. But upon reflection, this need not be strange, for if every place is urbanized, the idea of a city loses its weight. As the Greeks well knew, this invites us to revive the distinction between appearance and reality by asking for the difference between a real and spurious city. The essentialist aura of such a provocative query should not frighten us if we understand the difference implied not as formulaic but as a rule of thumb for alerting us to the question of urbanity. To push it further: if all cities seem to look alike in certain respects, how do they each work to maintain themselves within such an environment? We are familiar with this concern for individuality, applying as it does to collectives as well as single persons, who, as Simmel relentlessly noted, are forever working in this “tragic” space of ambiguity, the space of “solving” the problem of the coexisting and conflicted senses of their generality and singularity (Simmel, 1950). If urbanization depicts the universal circulation of goods, we must inquire into the city as a special site of such circulation. It has been noted that goods function primarily as marks of division and solidarity in a classification system in which individuals and groups collect and differentiate themselves as carriers of value. Goods make visible and available categories of culture when we consider the appeals to consensus and the distinguishing that enters into their use (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979, 59). In this view, goods are part of an information system that empowers users with access to, and availability within, opportune networks of affiliation. The uses of goods mobilize persons to be in position to receive and return influences and, so, to become more active parts of the “civilizing process” at any one time (Elias, 1978). If the circulation of goods functions as a system of information, the availability

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of goods and of information integral to their opportune use and incorporation into the calculation of life chances should be concentrated in the city. This is a strong version of Braudel’s notion that the city is a “center of communication” (Braudel, 1973), not simply for its media but because it brings to view the promise of the intensification of the social as a field of possibilities in the very presence of the goods which it circulates and makes available. Thus, whether or not urbanization is a universal process (that is, the circulation of goods), the city appears as the site where the transparency of this circulatory process as a system of information is made visible through the fundamental ambiguity of this promise of the social. The disappearance of the difference between centre and periphery is marked by the appearance of urbanization, but always in ways that are problematic. The difference between urbanization and urbanity can be grasped in the figure of travel that never guarantees more than movement rather than coming under the influence of a space or reciprocally, of exercising influence upon a space. Urbanity has been connected to emplacement through the historical experience of space in ways that measure the notion of urbanization by an implicit phenomenology in terms of which it is always contestable. The dissolving difference between centre and periphery – the influence of each upon the other – becomes visible and salient in the city as the living “contradiction” to which Baudrillard refers through the trope of the difference between reality and appearance. The fact that everyone and everything can move from here to there does not make distance any less important but, rather, raises the question in a compelling way of what it is to be near and far, of what it means socially to occupy the same space or to be dispersed in different spaces. Far from announcing the end of distance as an archaic essentialism, the easy movement of the present makes the question of distance vivid and compelling. With the extension of amenities that seem to mark every place as the same, that is, which appear to mark all peripheries as central, the problem of the meaning of centrality is invariably raised. The appearance of the same goods in every place always leaves to be explored the question of how goods are engaged and used to create solidarities and exclusions, diversified social formations such as markets and scenes, and social forms of criticism, elaboration, and refinement of the amenity. In this way, every amenity or good manages to become the focus of a social world in microcosm that can celebrate, elaborate, and even oppose it in ways that diversify its field of application. Amenities and goods become fertilizing agents of sociation in ways that raise the question of the difference between urbanization and urbanity. Most cities might have rebuilt centres and

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balsamic vinegar, but their “having” these amenities says no more than that they are there to be used. Other cities develop associations of coteries devoted to elaborating postures and differences of degree that assume the shape of economies of scale and, so, develop antinomianism, forms of resisting and criticizing such usage in ways that become socially significant. Goods become resources for aesthetic and ethical redefinitions of persons and groups and for construals of the meaning of life, its purpose and point, that are fateful and consequential. In the city, the abundance of goods never speaks for itself, because it makes the difference between goods and the Good a constant contested terrain through the way market value endangers that difference. To say that the distinction between centre and periphery is dissolving means that the question of the integration and use of goods and of markets is oriented to as communicative in the most intense ways, as sites of solidarity and fertilization, as grounds for organized enmity, as opportunities to elaborate and diversify entrepreneurial initiatives, as materials for constructing “postures” (Gans, 1993) or marks of identities, and as signs of the unprecedented relevance and opportunism of any and every present moment as a link to future happiness. It is the dissolving difference between centre and periphery that is dramatized in the city in ways that make cities central rather than peripheral. That the city is a marketplace means not that it is urbanized but that, in its self-affirmation as the exemplary site for viewing the Good through the lens of market value, it persistently intervenes through its focus upon the difference between what is central and peripheral. Only in the city is the indigestibility of goods and amenities (which the peripheries also “have”) made problematic, made dramatic, by virtue of the myriad and heterogeneous social uses to which they are put as resources in marking persons and groups. Emancipationism here means that every individual should be free to gratify his impulses, that he should attain happiness, defined by his own desires, and that he should associate only with persons who are akin to him in spirit (Shils, 1981, 3030).

Market value, exacerbated in the city as a drama, produces the equality (the coexistence of desiring actors) that limits its freedom (that qualifies its unlimitedness), and the freedom that challenges its equality (that aspires to establish unique and particular value). The dialectic between equality and freedom is marked in the ethical collisions of the city in debates over the authentic or inauthentic status of the collective and of the individual.

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diversity Derived from the preceding is the idea that the mobility released by forces of world finance produces a circulating mix of different people settling in major cities in ways that might compromise the sovereignty of any one city. That is, the diverse attachments of city populations to their homelands (custom, tradition) lead them to treat their present sites expediently as convenience and nothing more. Again though, if this observation is true it could add to, rather than deprive the city of color; by inviting us to inquire more deeply into the form of the mix which is a city, it leads us to the question of how a city does mixing. Diversity is not simply a numerical condition because leaving, coming, and being there are formed within a crucible of past influences and future anticipations. Just as the circulation of moving fragments does not confer urbanity, neither does the numerical aggregation of fragments confer diversity. If each major city is a “mixing bowl” in the idiom of Plato’s Timaeus, we might ask how some notion of urbanity can be used to measure the mix without assuming it to be formless. That is, if mixing is significant for the city, how is such diversity assumed to acquire its character as urbane? Does a city’s urbanity consist in the simple number of different things and influences it brings to the place? If so, diversity is controlled by the rule of number. Does a city’s urbanity consist in the way such quantity is varied, and variety subverts or in turn, is absorbed by the place, or does it consist in an interaction? For example, Gottdiener treats urban formlessness as resolved only by hegemonic usurpation: “space itself becomes the object of social interaction over contrasting signifieds. This clash of meanings is often resolved by the atrophy of all signifieds in the sign of place to the benefit of monosemic signifiers of instrumental function” (Gottdiener, 1986, 213). The mix of the city – noted anthropologically – is actually rooted in this semiotic vision of its “polysemic” and “multi-coded” appearances in the circulation of objects, signage, and influences. The celebration of mix itself has to mix what we call here semiotic and anthropological elements if mix is to be seen and oriented to as a social fact that is this rather than that. If this approach is intended in part, as the earthy counterpoint to the solar eye of the city, it is arrested by the same anthropological fascination for what Massey calls “mixity” (Massey, 1999, 109–11). Many researchers who recognize the mix of the city semiotically (or externally) have difficulty representing it as a social phenomenon (that is, formulating how number and its differences of degree are oriented to in the life of the city). Thus, Smith, Massey and

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others often embellish or preface their studies with intimate strolls through their local neighborhoods as part of a rhetoric that strains to make “mixity” a lived experience of immediacy for the inquirer as a local traveler (Smith, 2001, 108–10). This is another example of Baudrillard’s conception of the system of signs which absorbs all participants in ways that dissolve the desire for transcendence, for here the inquirers themselves can only “note the fact” of the whirlwind of semiotic diversity: “abolishing the real differences between human beings … simultaneously ushers the rein of differentiation” (Baudrillard, 1998, 89). The inquirers note and celebrate the differences while leaving undeliberated the question of the difference between real and apparent differences. Thus, the question of real versus spurious difference is always implicit and contestable and is indeed a social fact even as it might be denied in practices that signify the “end of transcendence.” This is because the reductionism of such a denial is only observable against the background of the real (questioning) from which it noticeably turns. If diversity is not to be treated as an aggregate of differences or an arithmetic order, it needs to be treated as a locus of collectivization itself, as a distinction to which action orients. This leads to concerns for how diversity appears in practices, that is, how it materializes in relationships between social parts of the collective rather than numerical fragments, and secondly, how such structures of mutual recognition can be conceived as orienting to diversity itself as a feature of the common situation? For example, does the mixed city mean the continuous co-presence and contact of different points of view, and, if so, how does this translate into an urban social relationship and into a typical course of action that can be seen to belong to the city? Presumably such researchers want to speak about the concentration of groups who are strange to one another, or of influences of diverse and disparate source that are brought into contact. What kind of social meaning does such diversity acquire as the operational environment of the city per se? In a fundamental sense, the diversity of the city comes alive as an object of analysis when we recognize its character as a cliché which we all use to characterize cities. This cliché allows us to think of the city as a circulating mélange of disparate and dissimilar influences that could be seen to produce, on the one hand, differential advantage (economic polarization) or, on the other, excessive stimulation (the blasé attitude). Each of these results, identified numerically, needs to be translated into a social relationship. For example, if formulae of economic polarization count rich and poor, they miscount as parts what are only categories until the relationship is formulated. As a cliché, diversity at first summons up the image of an aggregate of differences where each dif-

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ference is simply different from the others in the way number orders categories as different in degree. These fragments are not differentiated parts of a common situation until their relations to one another are seen as mediated socially by interpretations of common problems in terms of which they differentially participate. It is through the notion of participation that the relation of parts to the whole is formulated as a moment of collectivization that is not simply arithmetic. The common situation is not an arithmetic sum of its parts because the parts are diverse attempts to solve the problem of the common situation and an arithmetic order is simply the creation of an operation (addition) and not a problem. In this sense, real parts “participate” (Plato) in the whole by virtue of their differentiation, by virtue of being diverse expressions of common purpose. Even contrasting categories could not exist without the rule of number being implicitly authorized by a sense of the relevance of classification. If we conceive of the whole as the interpretation of the common situation and the structures of relevance which bind its actors, then it is such interpretations that lay the ground for all classification, including number, and we see that the parts cannot exist without the whole which provides such grounds for all partiality (perspectives) and that the whole cannot exist without the parts which specify and illustrate it. To say a city is diverse is not to enumerate it through number or classification but to claim that it shows diversity in practice by orienting to it in ethical collisions which make the question of true and false diversity a constant topic of engagement. A diverse city, understood as orienting to and showing diversity as a collective problem would be addressed as a city which encounters its own collectivization in the case of occasions that bring to view the struggle between fragmentation and participation, the struggle of categories to be social formations. For example, the idea that the city is a sign and nothing more suggests that it is only a category and nothing more: similarly, any and each category in the city reproduces or mirrors this struggle. Critical incidents and case studies bring to view the ongoing tension in the city between fragmentation and participation in the spectacle of the continuing collectivization of social formations. Because a mixed situation can materialize in ways that produce insularity, conflict, or fertilization, announcing it as a fact of city life is a beginning that always needs to be grounded interpretively in a problematic situation. More than this, the quantitative formulation of the mix must remain silent about the way(s) variety becomes part of city life and integral to the kind of place it is. Differences are socially significant as they are oriented to as influences that could be factored into

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the self-understanding of the city as a locus of collective action. That is, what kind of object of analysis is diversity? What is the connection of urbanity to variety as it is debated and acted upon in collective life? This leads us to appreciate how accounts of residential segregation and of discrimination are only part of a city’s story because in a more fundamental sense we need to encounter the social phenomenon of its specific mix. For example, if differences of gender, age, and race are typical to any city, how are these differences distributed in the streets, public spaces, and activities of the city not only in specific territories but at different times of the day as well? That is, how does variety interpenetrate with the rhythms of the city? If, for political economy, diversity is reflected in economic polarization and, for urban planning, in mixed uses of areas, we might ask how its variety and unity is engaged in the way of the specific city. How does the variety of a city come alive as its environment of knowledge? The diversity integral to each category (for example, age) invites us to ask how the category itself is oriented to in the social life of the city? For example, how is the variety of age itself exhibited in the life of a city not only with reference to the relative participation of young and old in its nighttime activities, or in the street life of its various areas and neighborhoods, but in relation to other categories as well? That is, how do age, race, and gender interpenetrate (say, controlling for class) in ways that might produce solidarities across categories (young black males, older white females) to become distributed in spaces and times of cities, serving to mark cities as distinctive; further, how do these configurations themselves relate to each other in ways that might produce for any city a hypothetical map of solidarities and exclusions as a terrain of collective permutations? Does a diverse city mean that there is correlative diversity within the categories of age, gender, race, or class, that distinguishes each category as internally heterogeneous? Is the diversity of a city correlative with the fluidity of its exchanges between and among categories that could take shape as interracial or intergenerational affiliations and solidarities? As soon as we open the notion of diversity to inspection, it betrays an immense range of combinatorial possibilities and instances of collectivization that we might anticipate intuitively as part of the discourse on “mixity” and the city. If the fact of mix as a notation says nothing, we in turn can begin to anticipate the extreme points at which cities animate, manage, or leave moribund the variety of their types and categories of persons and groups. The difference between the centre and the periphery is marked by the circulation of different groups in the city insofar as the interpenetration of such influences always raises the question of how differences modify

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the centre and how the centre reshapes the differences. What Shils calls the “plurality of traditions” (Shils, 1981, 255) is an inescapable feature of the city due to the constant migration of influences and peoples. Syncretism always provides an opportunity to observe patterns of addition, amalgamation, absorption, fusion, and conflict as these influences come into contact (Shils, 1981, 240–86). Again, the city dramatizes the question of interpenetration not in the quantitative presence of diverse groups (in the same way as goods or amenities) but through its capacity to unleash reciprocal expectations of participation, structures of mutual recognition concerning what it is to be in the city in ways that are themselves central or peripheral. Whether with reference to urbanization or diversity, transcendence is forgotten when the notion of distance as an entity taking place in the world is reduced to another fact, through the figures of movement and aggregation, reductions which in their ways invariably become opportunities for disclosing emplacement as a locus of collectivization.

the invisible hand The idea of the end of the city prevails in much interpretation. On the one hand, the notion that the mobility of global financial operations overcomes the sovereignty of discrete localities (nations, cities) reduces the city, at best, to being a nexus of municipal regulations that is ultimately determined by decisions made elsewhere (Delanty, 1995 and 1997; Castells, 1997). Here, studies of the city amount to no more than an endless notation on the powerlessness of local resistance or on the compliant practices of local political decision-making. If the city is imagined as an absorbent context for receiving influences originating anywhere, as an actor it tends to bear the mark of victim. The city is a sign and nothing more because whatever it comes to be is determined by forces outside of its control. Note though that even in the long history of oppressed peoples (nations, tribes, minorities) we have learned through many stories of the countless ways in which the interaction between such external conditions and the spirit of the people produce creative responses typically described as signs of the culture of a collective. So as a typical voice, Saskia Sassen is hard pressed to find such creativity, claiming that certain cities currently grow (her “global cities”) because National and global markets, as well as globally integrated organizations, require central places where the work of globalization gets done. Finance and advanced corporate services are industries producing the organizational

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commodities necessary for the implementation and management of global economic systems. Cities are preferred sites for the production of these services, particularly the most innovative, speculative, internationalised service sectors (Sassen, 2000b).

Note that whatever makes cities “preferred sites” is kept out of the picture, meaning that she is silent about the conditions which enter into the formation of the city as an object of desire. This is because cities tend to be treated here as commodities and nothing more, as “objects” coveted in terms of a standard of value originating in “national and global markets,” organizations, and their “requirements.” Sassen’s notion of emplacement requires cities to be places “where the work of globalization is done,” and places are chosen according to a standard of market value. Because she describes that work as the “innovative, speculative, and internationalized” services produced by “the advanced corporate sectors,” the work of globalization is the work of its financial and corporate specialists and the servicing of their requirements. Whatever we think of Sassen’s claims (for a summary of the conventional critiques, see Smith, 2001), it is clear that in her city, collectivization is limited to the creativity of corporate organizations and the projects which it generates, leading typically to the institutionalization of a clearly determined corporate “lifestyle” that includes large portions of an underclass (mostly immigrant) which services it. The market-driven circulation system brings visitors to the city in the form of tourists, corporate rulers, and migratory laborers, who often merge in projects and at moments of collectivization to generate a kind of lifestyle. Curiously, the visitors to the city define its ways by imposing the requirement of corporate self-maintenance upon long-term residents who either accept it (middle-class consumption) or sputter in enmity at the margins (the poor). The guests subvert the city through a process of parasitism where its interior is exteriorized by virtue of the agenda-setting initiatives of those external to its history who only come to it for instrumental reasons. The city is nothing but a sign because it appears as a place where globalization settles and consolidates its “strategic functions,” that is, it is simply used by international forces directed by some anonymous but coordinated corporate “solar eye.” Yet even such a city, viewed in these very limited terms, must struggle with the question of its identity and its status as a place. That is, a global city is produced interpretively, typified as the kind of object of desire it is by virtue of a matrix of interpretive possibilities that lead to its being conceived as the kind of hospitable place it is assumed to be.

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Such views as Sassen’s try to take the circulatory process a step further by describing ways in which it is implemented in action through projects. The notion of collectivization is limited to corporate initiatives and strategies as if these interests are so overwhelming that they come to define the culture of the city. The relation of the city to its collective purpose is treated either as quantitatively inaccessible, or perhaps as irrational, because it cannot be formatted as a “utility” or, most likely, is seen as exhausted in a vision of problem-solving that is viewed as if determined by the need to adapt to local manifestations of a global market. None of the interesting distinctions and concepts are put into question as problematic ways of constructing and typifying a social world in common binding those presumed to be so effected. The very idea of a market, of an economy of social actions, of the local and the global, are left unformulated as self-evident practical understandings in the absence of any sustained interrogation that exposes and exacerbates the discourse as a differentiated medley of agonistic voices. Throughout, the mastery of the investigative voice remains a steadfast resource without showing the will to put into play its own coherence and integrity as a provocative starting point for more, rather than as a self-assured conclusion or proposition. If the local nuances of the city always persist as stubborn traces in its everyday life, here a notion of generality is constructed and imposed as an interpretive resource which makes cities seem equivalent by virtue of their common relation to the factor of the global market. Yet, the collectivization of the city includes the great variety of social formations organized around interests such as festivals, carnivals, communal initiatives, new buildings and renovations, shifting coalitions and alliances, demonstrations and protests, local manifestations of international networks, and the myriad world of projects that mark the terrain as local in its particular way. As Anna Tsing says: Conflations of various projects through which the populist and the corporate, the scientific and the cultural, the excluded margins and the newly thriving centers, all seem wrapped up in the same energetic movement (Tsing, 2000, 332).

If cities are marked by the energy of collectivization as a social force, its most important manifestation might seem to be its diffusion of collective purpose in ways visible in the projects and intensities of everyday life. An important question we must consider for any city is how and to what extent collective purpose is concentrated or distributed, if it is blocked up, frustrated, dispersed, or even denied as a force, or, in contrast, shown in many ways, and whether it is limited to one or another

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group or faction. In contrast, the type of work we are examining here, first treats collectivization reductively by limiting it to corporate action (by virtue of a kind of stimulus-response model of exchanges between the primary actors it identifies as “causally” engaged), and then further reduces corporate action by proceeding without reference to the organizational rationalities and formats which enter into its constitution as a social phenomenon (Meyer, 1977) and, so, can only treat its enactment as “strategic” and nothing more. Such work raises the question of what centers the voice of the city. We think of this as the problem of sovereignty in which “formal” and “informal” compete in order to control the means of interpreting the city as an imaginative object in the life of a civilization. In this sense, we should begin to appreciate that the relationship between the centre and the periphery, the dissolution of which seems most apparent or “dramatic” in the city, is not primarily regional or geographic, but an implicit dialectic over the question of the difference between the centre and periphery of collective life. That this is a dialectic, confirms its fundamental and elementary form in which “parts” of the collective, in contesting the problem of participation, make collectivization the central locus. The focus on participation means that the relationship of the collective to its own collectivization occurs in the tension between goods and the Good, between numerical difference and social diversity, and between positions in the struggle to own the means of interpretation. The expressive economy of the city is sustained as a vital and elementary force in the contested relations between ruling and marginal voices (formal/informal, official/unofficial, high culture/popular culture) that constantly raise the question of the city as a difference in kind rather than degree. What is central about the city is less its urbanization, diversity, or strategic location as a control agency than its locus as the site where the question of centrality and perpherality is debated in practice as the “contradiction” of emplacement constantly arises as an implicit transcendental focus. The dissolution of the difference in the city is commensurate with the inflation of the question of participation, the conflicted terrain focused by the struggle over control of the means of interpreting the city, its collective purpose and common situation. The dissolution of the difference is correlative with the question “who and what are central and/or peripheral to the city?” as a question played out in the ethical collisions of everyday life. Thus, the apparent centralization and concentration of corporate power in the city is an image of this dialectic which releases oppositional energies as much as mechanical assent or docility, but energies still determined by the question of the difference between the centre

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and periphery. That the true centre is this central locus (the question of meaning) makes the city central rather than peripheral insofar as it is the dramatic site for encountering this question. This is to say that the city becomes central in sacrificing itself to be the site for dramatizing the difference between centre and the periphery by giving its bourgeoisie room to pose and contest the question of who and what are central: anti-globalization protests, the resurgence of demands for minority rights, the commodification of aesthetic bohemias, the flowering of underground and informal economies, the celebration of “emancipationist” and self-affirmative “postures,” and the correlative variety of heterogeneous voices being as much a part of the centrality of the city as its corporate culture and underclass. It is as if the city knows that centrality in its civilization depends upon its will to sacrifice itself to the question of the difference between the centre and the periphery, to be a host to, or sanctuary for, the raising of that question and the resentment and violence it invariably releases. In so sacrificing itself to be a centre for its civilization, the city struggles with the “natural” temptation to extend and elaborate its powers as a centre of market value. It is this collision over the question of the meaning of the city as a centre, as central rather than peripheral, that frames its existence in space at this time.

the present moment The environment of the city is temporally charged insofar as it identifies the present moment as an unending opportunity for action in which the survival of the future is at stake. The present is constantly interpreted as a critical occasion on which failure to take action will result in future loss: “Its longtime perspective is an integral part of the group’s entitlement to a superior moral status. Because its legal existence is eternal, it can make its demands in the name of unborn generations” (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979, 37). The Chicago Tribune series on Chicago’s problems in a global age at the millennium presents such an image. Here, the articles counsel the city to work to maintain its collective identity through a course of actions designed to sustain its perilous integrity as the particular city it is. The change is treated as one from the top down, a call for initiatives to be managed by political and economic elites to lead the revitalization of Chicago into the twenty-first century. Presumably, the message is that Chicago’s place in the world economy from its status as an industrial centre of capitalism has undergone change which promises its reduction to anonymity, that is, to being simply another city within a universal marketplace of competitors.

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The aura of loss and decline inhabits the voice of the series in a way which laments the erosion of Chicago’s distinction. What Chicago was is no more, and what it will be is uncertain. The march of civilization in its contemporary shape as “globalization,” is inexorable and ruthless, much like the indifference of impersonal and callous natural forces, and only the swift and strong will survive. The article suggests, “Reality waits for no man!”; that is, the real environment waits for no city. The maxim “think globally and act locally” means pay attention to the real environment (think globally) and organize your city accordingly if you want it to survive (act locally). Perceived alterations in Chicago’s relation to suburb, hinterland, nation, and world are attributed to economic and technological changes that are claimed to have altered its face. This panic narrative, suggesting that Chicago is on the verge of losing its identity, of becoming nothing, of appearing as a non-entity among cities, is intended to invite Chicagoans to reflect upon the survival of the local, its perpetuity and extension. Chicago must take its bearings from the real world, that is, the world must be observed in the spirit of Francis Bacon, and its dictates obeyed in order to master it. “Be real” means that observation of the environment leads to a capacity to anticipate it in order to achieve mastery. The reflection released by this warning causes the articles to raise the question of whether Chicago is only sustained by its resources or if there is something more to it, something constant and integral to Chicago that is immune to fluctuations in its resource base. That question cannot be answered but some decisive action can resolve the ethical collision. In this story, the renewal of Chicago in the face of “de-industrialization,” the evacuation of manufacturing, and the transformation of its stock markets into virtual systems are articulated as projects calling for specialization, for initiatives that can identify “what Chicago does best” in order to effectively compete against other cities in the world market. Chicago is called on to innovate in new and original ways which might, if all is well, renew its productivity. It is announced that in the present Chicago risks appearing as if it makes no difference, that it lacks a distinction that can discriminate it from other cities, unless it proves capable of organizing itself to meet the challenge of the environment, that is, unless it is able to discover some specialized function which it can control and exhibit. The environment instructs the city first, to imagine what is distinctive to it, and, then, to organize ways and means for exhibiting and circulating this self-representation as an sign to which others can orient. The city is invited into a reflection on how it might organize to make itself an object of desire.

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Presumably, what Chicago does best will be whatever it finds to distinguish itself, where such a search is based upon knowledge of what the environment (the world as a system) requires. There is nothing intrinsic to Chicago upon which it can draw, because the text has decided that its facelessness is already determined to follow from its economic decline. In this sense, both what is preserved and what is modified are framed economically as the resource base of the city. The rhetoric of the series on Chicago effectively dismisses its past by identifying it with immature stages of the life cycle – childhood, adolescence – as if the present is its adulthood and, so, its litmus test, its moment of reality. The reality of the environment is always defined as the challenge imposed by the environment at present. The present does not renew the past, instead claiming to create an absolute new beginning for the future. The present is an interim point between past and future as two moments in time segregated from one another. That the past is no longer means that its influence does not extend into the present and this marks it as worthless. As of any present, this panic narrative aspires to master a policy for the city that promises to restore or replace an identity has that has become vacuous. In putting Chicago in the hands of its future in this way, the series affirms the end of history in the present. In its current “crisis” Chicago is urged to equate self-reflection with a rationality of optimizing within a marketplace of competitors. The fate of Chicago is seen to reside in the advantages it can secure for itself under present conditions of scarce resources and the competition among cities. At the present moment, the demand upon the city is to conceive of its difference – its identity – only and exclusively in economic terms and to treat “culture” as whatever can enhance its self-presentation in the real environment. The selfmaintenance of Chicago will depend upon its capacity to create a niche of economic specialization. Yet, even here, the advantage is conceded to be difficult and unstable, as if a failure of collectivization will leave Chicago resourceless. The beauty of the city is just as vulnerable, for if the destiny of Chicago is anticipated as a contingent moment in the history of world cities, the look of Chicago – symbolized in its distinctive fusion of art and nature – is also vulnerable to erosion. For example, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, crumbling over time, can only affirm the failure of maintenance as a technical problem. Here, the care of Chicago for itself, for its own visual and aesthetic continuity, is seen to be endangered by the conjunction of indifference and market-driven forces. Finally, the “crisis” extends to the justice of Chicago itself, since the very forces that compromise its truth and beauty (the distinctiveness of

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Chicago) seem to guarantee that its diverse population cannot be recognized as anything other than a resource base or means for its “redevelopment.” And Chicago itself can only be recognized as one of a series of “opportunity structures” for migratory flows of laborers who cannot anticipate the city as anything more than a site for the exercise of privatized capacities. We might note that this interpretation of the city at its present moment proceeds under the auspices of a vision of crisis, stimulated by a sense of the force of externals to which the city’s resources are not adequate. The city is viewed as defenseless in the face of this challenge because its vulnerability, determined economically, only allows it to react rather than to develop what it already has and is. As of any present, the panic narrative aspires to master a policy for the city that promises to restore or replace an identity that has become vacuous.

conclusion Representations of the city are intimate parts of a discourse on globalization that frames the discussion. The discourse is visible as a grammar emphasizing the reality of circulation, the constraint of diversity and fragmentation, opportunities for either sporadic or conspiratorial bursts of social energy, and the drama of the present moment as an environment of interpretive parameters in which any city must find its place. Contestation over the question of locality as a social phenomenon is always part of an engagement with such an environment, a dialectical encounter with its reality that feeds back upon it in often incalculable but observable ways and on occasions when ethical collisions over the question of the direction of the city come to view as problems that are fundamentally ambiguous. In treating the contemporary urban debate as a concrete translation of the traditional metaphysical conversation over distinction and distinguishing, we have to move unreservedly in domains that accept with irony clichés such as globalization, postmodernism, and (even) the city as real and yet fundamentally ambiguous distinctions of collective life. My aim is to gradually unravel the senses of these clichés over the course of its narrative, not in order to destroy or deconstruct them, but as part of a strategy designed to show how the ambiguity released by the thought of their indeterminacy is a continuous and vexatious problem of collective life and a locus of concerted energy and communal self-recognition. To this end, I want to restore the notion of culture – another cliché – to serve as a mediating conception of agency which functions in such an economy of collective desire. Thus, the renovation of the idea of culture proceeds hand-in-glove with the renova-

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tion of the notions of the city and the social. Yet, it is important to ask of what are such clichés traces and how these clichés are intimations of socially oriented practices of renewal. Instead of burying the city and the social (because of the poison supposedly inflicted by social change), I want to ask how the city and the social are joined together in vivid and observable ways in cities of today. Therefore, rather than use the city to mark the end of the social, I will address its supposed devolution as one part of the fabric of understanding in terms of which the city is imagined as an object of desire. The cliché that the city is a sign and nothing more (which essentially posits the end of the city) and the cliché that the city is a work of art (which essentially says that it leaves only impure traces of its poesis or history) are both, in their ways, parts or images of such an imaginative structure. Ideas are often characterized as extinct or up-to-date. What is typically meant by an obsolete idea is the charge that its original intention is exhausted to the point where it has no apparent applicability in collective life. Usually, this suggests that the consensus that the idea is thought to have spun in the past is fragmented. But even exhausted ideas must leave traces of their exhaustion. More than this, it is not clear how these traces are modifications that impart to them new shape in ways that might prematurely conceal their affiliation. Thus, ideas, much like Simmel’s view of the ruin (Simmel, 1959), though perhaps destined for modifications that always appear as attrition, best materialize in collective life as sites of revitalization. So, instead of saying, as many have, that “concepts” such as the city, have disappeared from collective life, it might be more useful to treat such ideas as notions that are transformed and, so, conserved in new shapes. Here, then, is a stronger view of the canon than its critics would suggest and a stronger view of alterations in “paradigms” than devotees of such a distinction would suggest. The architectural conception of ideas as a line of persistence and modifications (Rossi, 1983) tells us that, at any point in history, past and present collide in every decisive moment as an occasion for amplification. That is, if ideas are ruins, they do not necessarily fall into oblivion because they are sites of renovation, occasioning projects of reconstruction and rehabilitation. Representations of the city give us such opportunity and perhaps, if we are patient, resources to grasp the seeds of an imaginative structure. When I say that the “structure” is hidden, I mean that it needs to be developed, explicated, and made concrete (Hegel, 1904). I do not know with finality what this will come to but I can intuit a trajectory that joins in some sense place, locality, and urbanity. If the city is a no place, its capacity to perpetuate and extend our dialogue even about that confirms its powers of community building and, so, implicitly, its

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power of emplacement. The city might just be two-headed, both no place and place in this way, requiring theorizing that respects this “non-contradictory doublespeak” (Benardete, 2000). I am searching not for the Holy Grail but to represent a confluence of influences imaginable as an elementary problem-solving situation in collective life. I also know that any exposé of the voices of the dialogue reveal its limits, since beyond the speakers and their hermeneutic positioning is the abiding aura of the dialogue itself and its voice, the voice of this confluence which, in the end, cannot be appropriated. What I can hope to show is that the dialogue marks a systemic tension – a fundamental encounter with ambiguity – that we might revitalize and explore to begin to understand some of the exemplary contradictions of collective life.

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4 Cosmopolitanism

i nt roduc ti on The various ways of comparing cities today tend to locate them as marked by differences of degree in terms of some standard, authorized by a normative conception that Martin Heidegger has famously discussed as “mathematical”: “Now nature is no longer an inner capacity of a body, determining its form of motion and place. Nature is now the realm of the uniform space-time context of motion, which is outlined in the axiomatic project and in which alone bodies can be bodies as part of it and anchored in it … Bodies have no concealed qualities, powers, and capacities. Natural bodies are now only what they show themselves as within this projected realm. Things now show themselves only within the relations of places and time points and in the measures of mass and working forces. How they show themselves is prefigured in the project. Therefore, the project also determines the mode of taking in and studying of what shows itself, experience” (Heidegger, 1967, 92–3). The mathematical project guarantees the externalization of the object (what Heidegger calls bodies) by conceiving of its nature in advance to be determined by relations in a space-time continuum that is quantified in terms of mass and working forces. If we understand cities in this sense, as “bodies,” we appreciate how the project must disregard their “concealed qualities, powers, and capacities.” What is disregarded is anything other than the city as a “place and time point” and of extension and duration as anything other than “mass and working forces” that is, all we have proposed as essential to a notion of culture. Yet, Heidegger shows us that it is not accurate to say of the project that it ignores culture because it can still approach it in terms of “mass and working forces,” that is, mathematically. We cannot blame the project

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because it is in its nature to treat cities as such things. However, in showing what such a project does in its practices, we can continue a discussion of the implications of this and alternative views in a way that should be helpful though strange. In this chapter, I will consider how cosmopolitanism is invoked in comparing cities, to surreptitiously explain the relations between and within them and how such a view tries to join external conditions of cities to concealed qualities, powers, and capacities.

the old and the new Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic of the New York Times, reviews the prospects for rebuilding New York after the attack on the World Trade Center. He quotes Shimon Peres third hand through the journalist Thomas Friedman: “This is not a clash of civilizations – the Muslim world versus the Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish worlds. The real clash today is not between civilizations but within them – between those … with a modern, progressive outlook and those with a medieval one” (Muschamp, 2001, 36). It seems that “modern” and “progressive” are meant to refer to forward looking, and “medieval” makes reference to backwardness and, further, that this division between old and new, obsolete and up-todate, exists in any society. If we are interested in the anthropology of such a division in collective life – the various ways in which it is interpreted, circulated, and contested – the orientation to the division should reveal certain typical relationships to the problem of the “collective identity” or sovereignty at stake. In this case, modern and medieval would eventually dissolve as sanctified categories but the relationship to the difference implicitly recommended by the division would be reinstated as our phenomenon. Note that the division is encountered in a variety of institutional spheres and our particular interest is in getting a grip on how it functions in relation to the city. To proceed in this direction requires us to begin to develop a better understanding of what the division between old and new means, to what it makes reference. This division between the old and the new within a society points to an important phenomenon linked to both time and space, the time of the present and the space of centrality. Jointly, this suggests that a place such as the modern city specializes in bringing to view images of its own spectacle as an objective value to be engaged, as an object of desire that releases a plentitude of images alternating between fascination and seduction.

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If the very stature and allure of the city creates a variety of views, it is as if the city is productive in the same way Plato spoke of the productivity of painting in the Republic. There he uses the metaphor of a craftsman (“who can produce all the things made by every sort of workman”) to describe productivity as the making of images. According to the dialogue, the best way to understand productivity in this sense is through the notion of the mirror: “The quickest perhaps would be to take a mirror and turn it round in all directions. In a very short time you could produce sun and stars and earth and yourself and all the other animals and plants and lifeless objects” ( Plato, 1945, chapter xxxv, x.597, 326). Of course we are unaccustomed to treat productivity in this way in terms of the mirror, and Glaucon’s intervention to suggest that such a mirror produces only appearances of real things sets up Plato’s critique of painting. Yet, for our purpose it is interesting to conceive of the productivity of the city along the lines of this kind of power to fertilize responses or images formed of it which may be as false as they are true. A strong city creates the conditions for it to be viewed and reviewed in the images made of it, images that could be true or false. Further, we might suggest that the beauty of the city is, in some way, linked to its very own procreative capacity to make such replies rich, varied, and inevitable. In a way similar to Plato’s critique of the productivity that is unmindful of the difference between true and false images, Nietzsche makes fun of the modern openness or promiscuity that fails to distinguish true from false “foreign” influences. … we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions, and sciences; we are wandering encyclopedias … But the only value of an encyclopedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, on the biding or the wrapper … the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians” Nietzsche, 1967, 24).

Therefore, Muschamp’s sequence of paraphrases is much too facile about the equation of the modern and progressive. Left unchallenged, it could recommend that both symptoms of the modern – its fabled productivity and its praiseworthy hospitality to “foreign influences” are, eo ipso, good without further question. Yet, we noted Plato’s reminder that productivity could “produce” false appearances, suggesting in its way that a productive place could, upon close examination, be a house of mirrors. Similarly, Nietzsche reminds us that hospitality

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to “foreign influences” when unexamined, could mislead us to identify vulgarity with flexibility, since a city open to all foreign influences could be like a person who cannot say no, who doesn’t know where to draw the boundaries. Being open in this sense could resemble the promiscuity that cannot understand where any one thing begins or ends, a mind that is closed to distinction and nuance. Yet, such opinions do reiterate the important truth with which I began, that the division between the old and the new in society is a site of contestation and, as such, is a social phenomenon that comes to view in recurrent ethical collisions, collisions that ought have particular pertinence for understanding the city.

open and closed societies A modern society typically viewed as open in contrast to the proverbial closed society, invites us to consider the link between such openness and/or closure and its relationship to foreign influences. Assuredly, this relationship can and is typified as a process, a mode of being, a course of conduct. “Up-to-date” and “backward” resonate with open and closed, suggesting, in turn, certain specific social practices in relation to foreign influences. A question that has haunted collective life and its pundits from time immemorial in a variety of fields concerns the connection between the persistence and integrity of collectives of all sorts and the responsiveness to such influences. This problem is often framed in terms of the grammar of self-other relations and the reciprocal exchange between identity and difference. That is, if self is imperious towards “foreign influences,” it risks remaining untouched and unchanged, insular and immune to the flow of life and its varying contingencies, and, if self opens porously to influences without discrimination, it risks annihilating itself to become a carbon copy of the other, sustaining its legibility as borrowed or derivative. The canon speaks of a mean between these extremes. For example, Nietzsche’s quote pointed to the danger of being overwhelmed by foreign influences while at other places he praises people such as the Greeks who become stronger (healthier he says) by risking being inhabited my foreign influences. Note the place of “foreign influences” as an influence upon the identity assumed of a “primitive” people. The ornamentation of the people of the Pacific Isles is full of interest, and is remarkable for the evolution and perfecting of an ornamental style by a primitive people, with myths and traditions purely local, and in no way influenced by other nations (Glazier, 1899, 3).

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What is interesting in this quote is how parochiality is made into a virtue as the sign of the strength of a people. This example assumes the purity of insularity and its immunity from foreign influences. Here we find not only recognition of the possibly pernicious effects of such influences but the idea that the distinctiveness of a people flourishes where such purity can be isolated and discerned. The distinctiveness of this people comes to view because they seem to live in a hothouse: shielded from influences, a pure case. But then, their purity would not be remarkable in a way that distinguishes them from other pure people if it seems only to result from external or natural circumstances. It would be more interesting if it expressed a kind of tenacity or reserve towards the foreign rather than a simple lack of exposure, or of being undeveloped. If so, it would be seen as truly different, that is, as oriented to being different, rather than as simply “backward.” If the “identity” of a people depends upon our being able to see the difference they make, that difference most vividly appears in practice in the shape of resistance, that is, as mimetic by virtue of its being oriented in practice to the doing of difference. Without this assumption, any difference shown by the people seems backward rather than strong, that is, as a condition determined by natural causes rather than chosen or oriented. While the people of Oceania seem to be different, how do we know that the difference is not a result of external conditions? The commentator elaborates what at first appears to be a result of isolation, by developing a picture of these people as relating to foreign influences and, so, as oriented to the difference between them self and the other. It is a style of meaning and symbolism, yet simple in detail and arrangement, not founded upon the beautiful vegetation and flora of their islands, but upon abstract forms derived from the human figure, and arranged with a pleasing geometrical precision remarkable for a primitive people (Glazier, 1899, 3).

What comes to view is not merely their immunity from external influences, but also a certain mimetic power we assume of them, that they are able to do more than reproduce their beautiful (natural) environment. This excess or capacity for “abstraction” seems “remarkable” for such a people because it requires them to see the “geometrical” potential in the human figure and how it can be represented in “abstract forms.” In this way, Glazier’s interpretation of the people of Oceania depends upon his conceiving of their relationship dialectically, not only with reference to nature per se but to its representation. What makes these people remarkable is not that they turn their back on nature but

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that they resist representing it in the most obvious and apparent way; that is, their distinctiveness resides in their powers to resist orienting to representation as if it must mirror their natural environment, empowering them to elevate themselves by rising above such a method to embrace “abstraction.” Here, what seems most remarkable in the evolution of an abstract “style” is the tension between the universal and the local exhibited by these people: being closed to all influences, they still develop an “abstract” geometrical style. This tells us that perhaps, what is crucial is not exposure to influence but how influences are handled. Further, if what is most remarkable is the way this difference is exhibited through the reworking of the universal by the local, than the local needs the universal because the local cannot be discerned without the danger of the threat of the universal; it is in the practice of resistance that the local is displayed. This example suggests that open and closed is a contrast that glosses what is at stake as if the extremes of isolation and absorption are the only options. Apparently, it is the relation to influences, the ways in which they are interpreted and engaged that is crucial. But what seems most important is the place of resistance, for it appears as if a people invite the influences by which they are attacked, in order to strengthen themselves. This is because, as intimated by the example of Oceania, resistance is not directed to the influence of externals but to the self. If the self is tempted to bend to the force and novelty of the foreign influence, it is this temptation that must be calculated and measured in the reply. In a sense, the collective is an object to and for itself, both subject and object. Thus, a dialectical relation to resistance materializes in action directed to the self in the form of the temptation to assent to the force of immediacy, whether to accept or repel the foreign influence. If in the best sense foreign influences are mediated reflectively, notions of limit, measure, and calculation are essential to the relationship. To clarify this relationship, note this example from the New York Times of a dedicated Muslim who interprets the situation so as to exclude any foreign influence as an infection that could spread contagious effects through the social body. “It may be hard to accept it, but you have to take Islam as a whole,” said a Saudi who follows the faith’s orthodox precepts, using the subject of veiling as an example: “When a guy says let a woman uncover her face, what they are really looking for is to be completely uncovered, to live like the West. This is just the first stone they are removing from the building. Where will it end if we allow every aspect of our lives to be taken away?” (MacFarquhar, 2001, B7).

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In contrast to such a reply, note that the capacity of powerless peoples to defend themselves against imperial conquerors in the absence of significant resources has often been attributed to their inventiveness in making over the influences of those more powerful. The reaction of warlike barbarians to the aggressive expansion of the Roman empire was the outer shell of a process through which citizenship was extended and mutual influences of centre and periphery played upon one another in a variety of ways other than military, through the persistent subversive ruses of humor, parody, and travesty, to exhibit the creative influence of minorities upon their environments. For example, just as American blacks have often been said to have taken over American culture, reinscribing their influences upon it in ways that are indelible, it has also been noted how homosexuality has been able to reinvent the urban aesthetics of modern cities. It may be worth considering whether the relation to foreign influences is strongest when there is a capacity to camouflage oneself in those influences by impersonating them, inhabiting the “dominant” voice in order to make it over in ways that select, translate, and digest it in accord with what is needed. It is difficult to draw the line between the “defensive” and creative character of appropriation (Blum, 2001). This makes the threat of foreign influences a source of excitation and an incentive by virtue of the very danger it poses, the expectation of a loss as great as possible (Bataille, 1985). If the protogeometric period saw Greek art in its cradle, and the geometric its childhood, then the Orientalizing period, of the later eighth and seventh centuries, suffered its adolescence; impressionable years in which the many and varied influences to which it was exposed worked something of a revolution in its outlook, and delinquency was only avoided by the quality and discipline of its early upbringing (Boardman, 1967, 73).

Unlike in Oceania, these people were exposed to influences and could show themselves in how they responded to or absorbed such influences. Boardman’s description of Greek art permits us to appreciate how foreign influences need not necessarily endanger collective identity but might help strengthen it in its way. Yet, what he suggests of the oriental influences upon Greek art is not that influences are either one thing or the other, good or bad, but dependent upon how they are absorbed, moderated, translated, or digested. This interpretation redirects us away from the question of influence per se, to consider the kind of “quality” or “discipline” assumed as necessary in collective life for a people to be fortified against overpowering influences. The metaphor of a good upbringing and its defense against “delinquency”

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allows us to see, in this case, that collective identity is neither created or destroyed by foreign influences because its ground is laid earlier. This implies again, that identity is an ongoing process of maintaining a balance between sameness and difference as seen in and worked out through the reciprocal exchanges between a people and foreign influences. The effect on Greek artists of this influx of eastern objects and ideas has been the subject of scholarly study for many years. It has never been difficult to list the many motifs which the Greeks borrowed … It is less easy to decide how these motifs were transferred and the extent to which their transference was a matter of mere copying (Boardman, 1967, 74).

It is suggested, well before globalization, that the environment of a society includes the worldly influences which impinge upon it and which become tacit and often imperceptible features of its collective life. This interpenetration of influences suggests that the very notion of the singularity of a people is at risk since any society bears the traces of others, leading us to appreciate how the imaginative construal of purity and impurity is a constant resource of collective life, an elementary problem and preoccupation always capable of being mobilized. There can be no doubt that the change which Greek art underwent in these years is almost wholly attributable to the influence of the east, but it is just as clear that this influence was very largely superficial, that the Greeks as pupils were highly selective of what they had to learn, and that they were quick to reject anything which they could not readily assimilate or mould to their own ideas (Boardman, 1967, 74).

h o s t s , g u e s t s , a n d pa r a s i t e s In current research, these reflections raise particular problems for the city and its representation. For example, Saskia Sassen conceives of the city as a resting place for the movement of global capital because of the need of such a circulation system for “capital fixity … vast concentrations of very material and not so mobile facilities and infrastructures” (Sassen, 2000a, 217). In making the city into a context for the implementation of “strategic functions” and nothing more, she identifies it with the control functions it exercises as determined by the circulation of capital and its “flows.” Though she speaks of “overlaps” and “interactions” between the global and local, the local remains the context in which the global is “embedded.”

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This results from the fact that the global requires a vast array of highly specialized functions be carried out, that infrastructures be secured, that legislative environments be made and kept hospitable (Sassen, 2000a, 217).

The local is invariably the medium “through which” the global operates, a zone of specification. The local does not add to or influence the universal but gives it body or flesh. The city is a final destination for a circuit of influences. To the extent that the global city is conceived as an active character rather than a mere context, it is identified through its capacity to “manage” the introduction of influences. Since at some point the “mobility” of the global has to be fixed, pinned down, and concentrated (“inserted into an institutional world”) if it is to be implemented, the city is the site that specializes in managing the process so that the flow of capital can be absorbed. The global city is emblematic here, with its vast capacities for controlling hypermobile dematerialized financial instruments and its enormous concentrations of those material and human, mostly place-bound, resources that make such capacities possible. Cities demonstrate one way in which economic globalization can be said to be nationally embedded, in this instance institutionally and locationally so (Sassen, 2000a, 218).

The city is justified on the grounds that it provides shelter for influences which must come home to roost. The implicit assumption that global cities are those places most hospitable to the universal contains an important partial truth, for it permits Sassen to surreptitiously link the power and identity of cities to cosmopolitanism. The hospitality of cities towards the global (within) describes an openness to flows of influence – people, ideas, corporate incursions – which they remake in their own image. The legal and institutional structures of these cities open themselves not just to global guests but to the very idea of openness. This vision of emplacement as hospitality to foreign influence, marks cities as either cosmopolitan or rude. Hospitable cities, which receive all influences indiscriminately, are then polarized sites – between those who exercise control functions and those who serve them, between long-time residents and newcomers, between those who prosper and the underclass – that invariably require regulatory mechanisms that counteract the very hospitality espoused to external influences. When examined closely, the hospitality of such cities might be more apparent than real. The notion of hospitality is itself double-edged, for as we know, hosts and hostesses do not give invitations to everyone. Hospitality

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does exclusion as well as inclusion; it should not easily be identified with generosity. Even more, we are never certain that cities reputed to be hospitable to global influences really develop their hospitality in ways that challenge rather than simply confirm their security. A good host needs to take responsibility for the consequences of the hospitable gesture and, if not, typically appears similar to the place with the opendoor policy to refugees that then remains indifferent to them after their arrival to the point of producing demoralization. Hospitality would then need to take responsibility for its invitation. This could also lead us to think about comparing cities that are equally reputed to be open societies by asking how their particularity is often marked by the ways in which they close off influences. Furthermore, the notion of hospitality is often a gloss that typifies the local as the parochial when in many cases what is most rude and unrefined is the generality and transportability of what is in circulation. Why should what travels easily (including people, ideas, entertainment) be good simply because it is digestible (unless we assume that what everyone swallows is eo ipso good)? Or conversely, why should what travels easily be bad simply because it is indigestible (unless we assume that what appeals to the many is eo ipso bad)? Hospitality is a strange notion, for there are many places that do not allow women to emerge in public in the same way as men, or who cut off the hands of women suspected of adultery, appearing in these ways as inhospitable to doctrines of human rights in circulation, while simultaneously welcoming internet cafés, computer technology, and Hollywood movies. Further the universal appearance of amenities in cities always remains a strange index of its cosmopolitanism, for how are such amenities different than the “universals” anthropologists have spoken of, such as the incest taboo? While we might call a place rude because the incest taboo does not appear there, would we call it cosmopolitan because it “has” an incest taboo? Imagine someone saying: “That city is really cosmopolitan; it has patrilocal descent!” This is to suggest that having a universal never qualifies a place to be cosmopolitan. But even further, if a place has such a rule or practice, its having it is never “implemented” without struggle. Think of the destabilized common situation that grounds these practices even in our society where incestuous feelings, experiences, and preoccupations saturate the externality of any representation of the incest taboo, just as controversies connected to where a cohabiting couple is to settle and reside, are continuous occasions of contestation which saturate the practice of patrilocal descent. Thus, to say that a place has an incest taboo or a rule of patrilocal descent is to say nothing in particular unless the imag-

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inative structure these rules release is explored. When Heidegger speaks of the concealed qualities, powers, and capacities of a thing, he speaks of its fundamental ambiguity: that it is not having cappuccino that is the issue, but the tension between its being here or there and its fundamental ambiguity, the tension between the external condition of the thing and its concealed quality that comes to view in conflicts of interpretation and action connected to the unrest it releases. The cosmopolitan city, hospitable at its core to influences of all sort, including the movement of people who come to it for freedom and opportunity, retains an enmity in its parochial ways and means towards the very influences it attracts. It is this lesson which must be learned, a lesson that reinstates the city as a more complex object of desire. It is not simply that the city is a seat of prejudice, but that as a city it must show a local tenacity at its core towards the very danger to its integrity which it imagines to be reflected in the influences it recruits and attracts. That the city is both open and closed at the same time invites us to investigate the kind of closure for which it stands and which it demonstrates. Thus, I suggest that one way of beginning to understand the power of locality in collective life is through the notion of tenacity to which we invariably cling as a necessary and desirable condition of appearing in the world as a collective. One place to begin is with the appearance of skepticism towards the very promise of cosmopolitanism, an appearance that can take many shapes.

dublin The fundamental ambiguity of distance, as both physical and social, is exposed and transcended in the recognition that proximity can be remote and remoteness can be intimate. Those who are close together can be far apart and those who are far apart can be close together. The economic boom of Dublin and its fabled “Celtic Tiger” registers the social phenomenon of distance as a locus of interpretation for all those who remain distant from each other though touched by the change and reputedly close by virtue of this. Not only are occupants of the same space often far apart from each other, but they are often closer to those who are at great distance from them. If part of the magic of cosmopolitanism is that it can free some from the constraint of physical space, it is this very capacity to imagine our universality that begins to distinguish those deemed fortunate from others who resist taking up this challenge. Just as the proximity of those who are far apart has often characterized the Irish diaspora, the distance between those who are close together constitutes a problem to manage in the everyday life of the city.

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Wander into almost any café in Dublin and you could be forgiven for thinking you have been transported to Italy, France or the us. Gone are the days when you couldn’t find a cup of decent coffee … Fancy a cappuccino … espresso … Panini or an Americano and an organic wrap? Easy (Marriott, 2000, 14).

Immediately, two matters could strike us as interesting here: first, the urban dweller’s imagination (Lacan’s imaginary) is connected to wanderlust, to thinking of being in other places, to transporting and travel; and secondly, that this is what could be creative about any place we are in, its capacity to fertilize our imagination to encourage us to contemplate being elsewhere. A stimulating place allows us to be both here and there at the same time, to be of two minds so to speak, or to be a body here and a mind there. But then, there is something menacing about this, for such a stimulating place seems to work against itself by inviting us to imagine being elsewhere. Although this text says nothing explicit about Dublin being a good place at this point, let us take that liberty: it is after all, our place. So, we find this curious – a place is stimulating to the extent to which it arouses us to think of being elsewhere. Ireland has always been conceived in this way as a source of persistent emigration, but this has typically been attributed to poverty, the potato famine and the like, or to the repressive nature of the Church, while, in contrast, the text hints rather suggestively that it is the imaginative vigor of the place that incites our desire, empowering us in some sense to think of being in other places. How does Dublin in particular raise the problem of the relation to place as a persistent and fundamentally ambiguous problem, as a problem that causes us to ask necessarily and impossibly after what it means, how its concealed qualities, powers, and capacities can be rediscovered in such specifics? Here (to paraphrase Freud) if such a “very important matter betrays itself in such slight indications,” can we methodically approach the complexity and indeterminacy of such an important matter by making transparent this ethical collision? Note, too, that Emmanual Levinas uses this conception of desire as a symptom of the metaphysical hankering of an actor for the “other,” that is, to be elsewhere (Levinas, 1969). Levinas connects metaphysical desire to place in this sense. Though, in his idiom, alterity is clothed in an object of pursuit he calls the Other, in this text, the metaphysical powers of Dublin are hinted at and ironicized: a good city somehow makes us restless, it can be a source of both pleasure and pain. Certainly some cities oppress us, seem to restrict our powers, causing us to desire escape; and yet, they could incite us to explore other sites because their power is procreative in Plato’s sense, evoking a kind of beauty that we seek to rediscover in other places (Scarry, 1999). That

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is, it might be the best places that cause us to leave and not the worst, since the best places so inspire us that we seek to recreate ourselves and other places in their image. Here we might have grounds for understanding Walter Benjamin’s nostalgia and also gain a glimpse of a way of approaching the heart of darkness that lies at the core of the contemporary discussion of globalization and the city. As the city appears to get better, does it actually get worse? What we note in this very slight indication is that the quality of city life might become bad even as it appears better. There is an implicit dialogue here on the difference between what appears and what is. Even more, the question of quality and its pursuit is raised, whether the cultivation of taste, discernment, and discrimination in relation to the things on which it is practiced, actually shows a love of beauty or in contrast, as Plato said, a love of beautiful things? Plato said that the love of beautiful things in the absence of a concern for beauty per se is simply the fetishistic love of things, really no different from the acquisitiveness of any snob or pedant obsessed with the object and the possession of its quality in a way simply abstract and mechanical, in a way that makes the object into a thing even while it voices respect for quality. For example, we know the collector to be often a lover of collecting and its instinct for mastery rather than of what he collects. Possessive acquisition under the guise of quality often appears the height of vulgarity because its fetishism of quality is a dissembling pretense unless it is anchored by a love for beauty which the object exemplifies, rather than by a love of possession. Like the person who pursues the perfect Persian carpet or the perfect coffee, this obsession with perfection among things remains sterile unless it is grounded in a concern for beauty. That the coffee is supposedly better, summons up the image of the world at our doorstep, allowing us to dream, as we sip, of being in the places where it is appreciated for its quality. Yet, that something seems missing shows an uncanniness in the very “progress” we celebrate. Is the progress experienced by some as a kind of loss? And even more, why does the coffee make us feel in tune with being elsewhere, why does it make us feel in tune with the present? Sipping the coffee does not make us feel as if we are there in the other place, for that would be a utopian interpretation that treats the Dubliner as a simple product of determinism (what Benjamin called a “stick figure”): rather, that the coffee of the world could be here as well, appears to correct the injustice of the worldly configuration of places by confirming that we here can have what everyone has. Coffee makes us part of the world not by virtue of the phantasmagoric imagining of being elsewhere but through the rectification of inequities between Dublin and other cities. This extension of worldly abundance to Dublin in particular

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restores the just relation between cities by enabling Dublin not merely to have what all have but, by virtue of this, to have choices as well, to drink the coffee or not – to welcome the influence of the world or not – bringing a new choice to Dublin (to accept or reject) as part and parcel of the copiousness of the world. Dublin is free from the unalterable constraint of having to accept only what is in its place. What on Earth could coffee mean in its universal diffusion, its circulation into all corners of the world, but the power of the dream, of the elsewhere and other place as an image of how our present is divided, of the essential injustice of location which the extension of the influence of the commodity rectifies. Such circulation induces Dublin to experience itself comparatively both between here and there and between now and then. That we can savor the coffee means that we can enjoy the choice, the copiousness of worldly magic, the power to experience our relation in space and time to other places to which ours is comparable and to other times from which ours now departs. If the coffee seems to transport us in the present to the world, it actually brings the world to us in all of its heterogeneity and plentitude, and it brings the past to us as the legacy from which we are free? And yet, why are we so sad? What is harder to find is a small traditional café offering ordinary food. Garlic chicken on tomato and olive bread may be good for our cholesterol level, but does it do anything for our emotional and mental states? I doubt it. Before becoming European, we were lrish – and there are times when all the lolo rosso and balsamic vinegar in the world won’t cheer us up. We need the food of our childhood (Marriott, 2000, section 14, 1).

The modern café itself is a place of transport. That this is a recurrent recognition in globalization commentary is reflected in the criticism of those “yuppies” in cafés sipping Italian coffee pretentiously. If at first we suspect that the yuppies are imagining being elsewhere, then the snobs might be our urban dreamers. But more likely, the yuppies are contemplating the inflation of their present place and time as the rectification of wordly injustice which only now permits the city to recognize itself as having everything anyone has and having it now for the first time. Yet, what is disappearing and hard to find is the “traditional and ordinary,” which, while not appearing good, “might be good for us.” That is, what is most desirable (stylish and nutritional amenities) “might not be good for our emotional and mental states.” The tension between our appearing to ourselves to have everything and the uncanny power of this appearance to haunt us, resonates with Socrates’s talk in the Republic on spices when he describes the basic conditions of a natural community and Glaucon intervenes:

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This is just the sort of provender you would supply, Socrates, if you were founding a community of pigs. Well, how are they to live then, Glaucon? With the ordinary comforts. Let them lie on couches and dine off tables on such dishes and sweets as we have nowadays. Ah, I see … we are to study the growth not just of a state, but of a luxurious one. Well, there may be no harm in that. But then, with this manner of life, physicians will be in much greater request (Plato, 1945, v11, 60–1).

That is, what appears desirable to Glaucon and to any of us accustomed to modern amenities might not be good for our emotional and mental well-being. That the stylish increment in diversification of amenities might actually produce a sense of loss is signified by the need for physicians to address our maladies. Well before the phenomenon of globalization, Plato here puts in the mouth of his characters an exchange which intimates the very tension implicit in this text on Dublin. Note the interpretive exchanges between desirability and its shapes: the unhealthy, that which does not contribute to our emotional or mental well-being, that which does not cheer us up. Amazingly, the malaise of Dublin is right here: what is reputed to be of high quality is depressing, progress makes us morbid. Of what is it that such improvements deprive us? The text says that our sense of being Irish before being European, of being specific rather than general, of being comfortable with ourselves as this is announced in the disappearing wellbeing that we experience (Simmel, 1950). Yet, if such a level of satisfaction is absent, it is an absent presence, leaving its trace in the contemporary landscape of Dublin. Can we say that despite what it seems to add to our lives, Dublin gives us unmistakable indication that something is missing? The magic of the commodity is not sufficient to provide “emotional and mental well-being.” It promises to extend and continue us at the expense of what we leave behind. But how can bad coffee be a cost if we agree that it is bad? No-one is denying how the coffee has improved: the focus on its quality, though, might be displaced. This is because the coffee is a symbol and its consumption is the act of incorporating the magic it represents, its capacity to bring the far near and to make the near far, its power to divide our present into a local and universal. We consume the divine power of the commodity at the cost of our well-being, that sense of being undivided before it made its appearance. How can such a good thing be unhealthy?

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We have the striking pronouncement that being Irish and luxuriating in the embrace of its meaning is in some way connected to “our childhood,” that being Irish rather than European is similar to being childlike rather than adult, that adulthood is painful: for even as it improves “quality” it fails to cheer us up. This is interesting, since in this text, childhood – typically associated with innocence, wonder, and imagination – is now connected to a vision of self-sufficiency and complacency, of undisturbed satisfaction, that moment of tranquility which preceded the irruption of a world of copious and abundant alternatives and options, of imaginable ways of modifying what seemed continuous and unalterable. What is bad is not the quality of coffee which has improved but the concern with pursuing quality in an external way, that is, as quantity, and the restlessness which it reflects. That is, the pursuit of quality among objects which are only identified as points and moving forces rather than measured, produces sickness and the need for physicians to cure our maladies, to restore our “emotional and mental well-being.” The sad news is, its only just possible to find a café that hasn’t been gentrified … Dublin’s transformation from depressed provincial city into fashionable European cultural center has seen the disappearance of popular cafés (Marriott, 2000, 14).

Here is the crux of the debate on globalization and the city encapsulated in a very slight indication: the transformation of the depressed city has itself depressing overtones, that is, it creates sad news. The sad news is that what seems good (fashionable centrality) has replaced what is bad (depressed provinciality) in a way that seems bad or, at least, not unequivocally good. The present is a matter of fundamental ambiguity for this city: is contemporary Dublin good or bad? The text does not seem to know and a vote will not settle the matter. What the text does know is that something has “disappeared,” that is, some practices are in danger of extinction, of being lost. Yet, Dubliners search for this missing “whatness,” this missing sense of place. Its absence is noted and oriented to in a way that persists as vivid. What is lost is called “popular.” But can this be correct in the face of the forceful evidence that the love of new cafés and coffee is what is truly popular? Just who is entitled to speak for the city, those who embrace the present or those who miss the past? Though for us there is no unambiguous answer to this question, in our cities the question takes shape around the debate over cosmopolitanism as our common situation and the need to clarify collective purpose in the wake of the unrest which these changes release. What seems to be disappearing is a kind of

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self-satisfaction imagined as prior to the emergence of alternatives which come to view in the present. How can the closed world imagined as prior to choice and abundance be conceived as better than the open world at present and the future it promises? Does not the doctrine of progress as material abundance make it insane to lament the past, or more charitably, make it appear an eccentric gesture? There is a melancholic ring to this sense of place. We are first Irish, that is, we are first at peace with the ways in which we appear in the world, before we are aroused to contemplate being everything thinkable. If our restricted past is experienced as oppressive, what kind of difference does our extended present make? These once popular cafés created opportunities for engaging one another in ways that seem no longer possible, or, if they are possible, can now only be eccentric. It seems that the magic of our extended present makes our love of what we have been seem grotesque, a case of arrested development. What seems good and in danger of extinction is the opportunity to engage being a Dubliner at certain sites. We might call such sites scenes in which the being and doing of Dubliner is made visible and accessible, brought to view, to be seen and, so, inhabits its space as a scene. What is the scene in which the traditional and ordinary is made to appear? The text describes several sites with names like the Alpha, Sherries, Nellie’s café, and Brendan’s Coffee Shop. One worker says: “we’re an oasis … with the five windows overlooking the street, it’s like a country crossroads. We get all ages, from babies to pensioners, and the customers mix well” (14). Max, an old regular who has been eating at the place for more than twenty years, says he comes because “the food is like home-made” and other younger customers such as students and office workers choose from staples which include “chunks of fried potatoes just like my mother used to make” (Marriott, 2000, 14). Food and mother join in a happy confluence symbolized by the “home-made.” Though many know that this need not be a happy confluence, here it is binding and memorable. Again we return to the ambiguity of the modern city: are the people sipping cappuccino trying to escape from their mothers’ home-made food, pretending they are French, Italian, American, pretending they were mothered by willowy contessas with flowing tresses and lovely gowns, throaty chuckles and constantly outstretched arms, murmuring: “Guido … Guido … come sit on mama’s lap …”? The traditional café seems to rebel against this modern pretence, this cosmopolitan fantasy. We then appreciate a very strong and pervasive member’s sense of quality identified not merely with the man-made but with the mom-made. Consider quality for the moment: “While it is great to have so many stylish cafés in Dublin, there are times we would rather eat baked beans

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on toast than a bagel; mashed potatoes than pasta. Then, we’ll make the trek to the few surviving real Irish cafés – but don’t drink the coffee” (Marriott, 2000, 14). This competitive image of food preference conceals something important. No-one seems to say that mother’s cooking is the best – certainly not the coffee, but it appears to satisfy needs that the contemporary city disregards. It might be that the power of mother’s food is entirely imaginary –that she could cook anything successfully as long as she cooks it. It is as if the modern city such as Dublin makes no space for the pleasures we imagine as our childhood and for the reassurance of the hand and art of the mother. To risk appearing more Freudian than we might wish, it sounds as if mother is the object of desire, that the relation to mother is part and parcel of the disappearing meaning of its place. And our problem is to understand how this relation to mother, to place and to social practices of everyday life in which it appears, is accomplished, reshaped, and contested as a terrain of fundamental ambiguity. Mother stands for the ambiguous nature of love of one’s own, a love that might appear arbitrary or even selfish, but necessary all the same. Do customers still want things like a mixed grill or have the Euro-cafés and fast-food places lured them away? We’ve not been affected. Traditional, homely Irish food will never die (Marriott, 2000, section 14, 1).

There is an African proverb that says the king acts as if he never sucked at his mother’s breast. Are modern Dubliners like those kings in danger of forgetting their original dependency at the hands (or breasts) of their mothers? But if this sense of place persists and “will never die,” the text is still ambivalent: on the one hand it is “great” to have the new and stylish, and on the other hand “people still like the traditional meals.” It seems not a question of deciding one or the other, for both appear to have their place. A steady diet of the new is exhausting; but a steady diet of mother alone might not be so “great,” it might be “depressing.” Dubliners cannot say if the old is better than the new or if the new is better than the old because it is this relationship which must be worked out. This modern city is a mix which is not completely reconcilable. Without modern amenities we risk depression and provinciality, and yet with these very amenities we risk being depressed about what we have lost: “We get a lot of emigrants who are here on holiday and they say it’s not changed … They come in because they met their husband here, or used to come here a lot, 25 years ago or more.” The unrest of Dublin incarnated in its destabilized common situation is poignantly reflected in the question of disappearance expressed in the struggle of the oasis to maintain itself as a site of vitality. The sad

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news of the text now becomes clearer as the news that Dublin is fighting for its life, fighting to sustain sites of biographic fertility both for its movers and shakers who come and go and for its loyal and sedentary population for whom this movement is an abstract spectacle. Indeed, the emotional and mental well-being of all Dubliners is at stake, for all those who need and desire to make Dublin into a place that is both modern and traditional, both extraordinary and ordinary.

manchester What we appreciate about the city then, is that it must provide for this work, this ongoing construction of a “third space” between the modern and the traditional, but it must be a public space that, in its way, provides for this relationship itself: it must be embodied in sites which sustain the comforting reassurance of recognizable regularity in the midst of domestic diversity, segregated but not detached from the changes that are occurring. But this is only one view of the city, for if the same problem is encountered by all cities, the shape it assumes in Dublin might be a mark of that city in particular. Think in contrast of Manchester and note the following description of the cappuccino sippers in modern cafés. In Manchester these days, such pretend utopias are part of the landscape. Moderately prosperous people and those who would like to be, can spend wet Saturdays as if they were in Milan or Madrid, consuming and coffee-sipping and practicing their discernment. And in every other big British city, people will be doing the same (Beckett, 2000, 32).

Here, the same vision operates as Dublin, for the “pretend utopias” are just those sanctuaries of pretence that we noted, inhabited by those who seemed to want to be anywhere and everywhere but here. Just as in Dublin too, the author is ambivalent, for, despite the observation that something is lacking, it remains unsure as to whether this development is good or bad. It is hard to see this as entirely bad, but it might be making these cities “blander” (Beckett, 2000, 32). Manchester calls a spade a spade: if modern cities still have (in the words of Dublin) “many stylish cafés,” Manchester suggests that such a development might make the city “blander.” Dublin never mentions blandness. Either Dublin is more complacent than Manchester, less perceptive, less “critical,” or more confident that it could never be bland no matter how many “European” cafés it has. Perhaps this points to a deep and pervasive difference not only between Dublin and Manchester but also between Ireland and England: the English rather than the

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Irish are exercised by the prospect of being bland (and for good reason, an Irishman might say!). In speaking of the disappearing street culture of Manchester and its unruly and unique character before it became comfortably “Europeanized,” Beckett (2000, 32) says: This street culture is not about civic pride and marketing initiatives … it can, and will, thrive in crappy coffee bars, under leaky roofs or down unlit roads. It’s uncontrollable, uncomfortable and never far removed from the problems of everyday living.

What comes to view is that becoming European “leaves behind” a strong sense of being a Dubliner or Mancunian and that what is left behind is “popular” and “unique.” In both cases, the contemporary views of Dublin and Manchester point to the concealed quality of place as a vanishing kind of engagement with urban spaces. And yet, such a loss is addressed differently by authors in ways that might be required by the difference between cities. In Dublin, this loss is revisited in images of domestic sanctuary, while in Manchester it is articulated in a vision of settings that bring to view unruly, uncontrollable, and uncomfortable co-presence. Two different images of congestion are addressed: in Dublin, the contagiousness of domesticity under the spell of the mother’s art and, in Manchester, the contagiousness of excitation under the spell of street life and its call to the young. It has never been a comfortable place. From its first years as an industrial city, Manchester was notoriously over-crowded, jerrybuilt and grey. The “poor quality of straight life” … gave a “mania” to the population’s effort at escape … the sheer density and novelty of the 19th century city generated … mass appetites. Music halls with capacities of thousands crammed freak shows, songs and comedy acts together into unstable evenings of drunken, unstable raucousness. The way in was rarely wider than a shop doorway … A cycle had been established in which a craze or subculture would emerge, swell to bursting point, and alarm the city authorities into belatedly banning it. Venues would be closed, the promoters and their punters would move on, and a new mutation would appear down the road (Beckett, 2000, 32).

Here the bad conditions spawned by industrial capitalism, particularly density and congestion, actually are remembered as creating good responses, that is, a kind of collective problem-solving induced by the pressure of overcrowding and the need for respite or relief from the grind, to find creative solutions in sites of amusement and entertainment and, eventually, in the music scenes of youth. The same process occurs with the fashions of the young and the territoriality of gangs: in

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each case, youth, under the press of bad conditions (monotonous work in the mills, unsatisfying family relations, dreary days punctuated only by reveries in expectation of the night or weekend), concert to produce the problem-solving search for breathing room – for spaces to anchor scenes in which creativity can be expressed. What is memorable and distinctive for the author now is not the bad conditions per se – who would wish for that? – but the ways in which such conditions have, in the past, animated the creative search for space and in turn, the distinctive and legible scenes which developed. What appears distinctive to the city now and in danger of being lost is the collective impulse towards problem-solving: conditions such as congestion, depressed families, routinized work, that have “caused” generations to experiment with time (in redefining as central night rather than day, and weekend rather than week) and with space (in reinventing streets as sites of solidarity). The nocturnal shuttlings of such groups of young men and women were known as “monkey runs”: their routes formed circles and triangles, with one sex on each side of the road and countless halts, in shop doorways (Beckett, 2000, 32).

In Manchester what is assumed as distinctive of the place is the mosaic of spaces identified as memorable by virtue of their scenic character as settings for the exercise of creative transgression with respect to the temporal and spatial organization of the industrial city. If what is disappearing is precisely such creativity, can we wish it back in the absence of those very bad conditions on which it seems to depend? The real danger, then, is that the vitality of contemporary youth under current conditions – conditions defined as good or progressive by the standard of the “pretend utopias”- that this vitality, unruliness, and improvisational vigor will be redefined (absorbed, co-opted) by changes in the city.

t h e u p - t o - dat e The pursuit of the bourgeoisie is not to attain the desirable object but for the look of desire, that is, to capture the look of the present, the look of ecstatic immersion in the moment and at the scene of centrality. The “object” of desire is not acquisition in the narrow sense of conspicuous consumption but the look of timely centrality, the appearance of contemporaneity. If the sign of cosmopolitanism is incarnated in this practice, it exists in struggle with other voices over the control of the means of interpretation in the city.

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The cosmopolitan profile – to be of the moment, to be at the centre – is hard won and constantly under revision. It distinguishes both the exemplary city dweller and the exemplary city, that is, the city which makes such a system of desire compelling. This system of desire identifies the ecstatic relation to the present and to centrality (to this time and to this space) as the sine qua non of universal man, the practice of doing and, so, of being a universal, of being universality incarnate. That universality is done in the city makes this a common feature of any significant city: since any city has the capacity to fertilize such postures, universality becomes a recognizable ground of worldliness in any and every place. In this respect, the examples of Dublin and Manchester show how parochial enmity always coexists within such universality as part of the dialectic of cosmopolitanism. An important facet of cosmopolitanism is the way it repossesses information. This fits into Douglas and Isherwood’s formulation of consumption as a system of information (Douglas and Isherwood, 1971). If cosmopolitan cities are centres of consumption, this suggests that they are high-density sites for the circulation of information, information pertaining to the efficient ways and means of mastering the social unrest paradigmatic of the modern moment. The city is a school offering to teach peoples of the world how to be social in the modern way, how to navigate the perilous social terrain which is au courant in its time. The allure of cosmopolitanism and its abundance of goods resides in the pedagogical promise of the city which it extends in principle to all people, its promise to provide the exemplary context for coming-toterms with the destabilized common situation. It is the secret lore of the cosmopolitan city – its unwritten treasury of strategies and tactics for mastering the experience of unrest – that penetrates the imagination of the people of the world as an object of desire. Such a lore is implicitly a curriculum for being up-to-date and free of the restrictions of local constraints. Indeed, the power of the cosmopolitan city lies in the seduction of its promise to teach what it is to be modern at this time and how to survive the unrest which this opportunity releases. The promise, though, is not unequivocal, since its lesson is that the implementation of desire is divided in ways that mark the use of goods. In this respect, the city teaches that the pursuit of freedom and opportunity is limited in ways that are decisive and, so, that coming to terms with the limitation of life chance is the secret lesson to be learned. The secret of the cosmopolitan city is that everyone needs to reckon with social class. Sharing goods and being made welcome to the hospitable table and to the marriage bed are the first, closest fields of inclusion, where exclusion operates

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spontaneously long before political boundaries are at stake. In the structure of a culture consumption, commensality, and cohabitation are forms of sharing; degrees of admission to each are often depicted by analogy with one another (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979, 88).

If the promise of the cosmopolitan city is the appeal of inclusiveness, in actuality the tenacity of the city reminds us that intimacy is always problematic. The city intensifies this tension in its welcome in ways that are provocative and parochial. Mastery of the city requires learning to solve the problem of its spurious and convoluted hospitality, its two-headed structure, which opens and closes itself at one and the same time. For example, note David Scott’s posing of an important question as he reviews the polemical debates on colonialism: “what is important for this present is a critical interrogation of the practices, modalities, and projects through which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized” (Scott, 1999, 17). We are suggesting that the promise of the city to provide the exemplary curriculum for mastering the present is the medium through which modernity “inserts itself” into the minds of the colonized, a curriculum which is invariably organized around an image of the city as a good – as a work of art and a commodity – that creates at this moment the opportunity for a new life and what Bataille calls the expectation of a loss as great as possible (Bataille, 1985). Integral to the promise is the division that becomes visible in its materialization, as the fact of class or life chance, the lived experience of encountering the promise and of seeking to solve the problems which its materialization releases. The homogeneous working class social environment is never going to provide the sort of information that the middle class family can get by its social contact. There is another kind of information which some can scan and contribute to, making some things relevant by the mere act of harkening, and other things irrelevant by ignoring them. To be in control of this sort of information may be vital for getting and keeping a high income potential. To be outside its range altogether, for the individual who can neither hear it or make his voice heard, is to risk being treated like a stone, trodden underfoot and kicked aside – a limit to future choosing and to the exercise of rational choice (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979, 91–2).

conclusion Much is at stake in the debate on cosmopolitanism, for it is made to absorb the energies of the extremes of political positions, not just over “lifestyle” but around issues such as diversity and immigration as well.

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For example, the parochial unrest at the heart of the cosmopolitan city is often reshaped in xenophobic revivals in ways that typically show inverse relations between cosmopolitan pacification and parochial militancy. But there is more as well, for the charm of cosmopolitanism, in part, draws off the curious empiricism of the critique of essentialism. Thus, Hans Magnus Enzensberger finds “self-ascriptive” justifications for ancestral priority “false” because there is no basis to claim priority within any territory: the invariable “mix” and heterogeneity of any place makes all claims equally conventional. If all categorization is arbitrary, then any claim to priority must suffer the “fact” that notions of limitation and origin are continuously compromised by the mobility of language and its play of differentiation. The mobility of the world, reflected in the deceit of every gesture of finality confirms the practices of civilization as irremediably false. For almost all nations the distinction between “our own” people and “strangers” appears quite natural, even if utterly questionable historically. Whoever wishes to hold on to the distinction needs to maintain, by his own logic, that he has always been there – a thesis which can all too easily be disproved. A national history assumes the ability to forget everything not in accord with it (Enzensberger, 1992, 19).

This extreme shape of cosmopolitanism can treat not only all claims for priority as false from the perspective of empiricism but all commitment to territory as “mythical.” If the treatment between “we” and “they” is taken as false in this respect (mathematically), then it is simply dismissed as a phenomenon; it is not viewed as something which a civilization does. In contrast, if loving one’s own and what is near is done as part of collective life, even if it seems to us to be in error, it still needs to be the starting point for any phenomenological approach to culture because we understand a people through its errors every bit as much as through the truths with which we agree. The ambiguity integral to cosmopolitanism can be noted in the fact that both corporate capitalism and socialism could treat the commitment to locality as a seat of prejudice, whether stubborn or mythic, that is, as reactionary in our present moment. It is important to understand how the fundamental ambiguity of cosmopolitanism trades off the ambiguity of essentialism, particularly with respect to space and time, and how it risks living off contempt for the parochial. If this is true, we must be wary, for we cannot begin to understand the city if we dismiss the notion of parochiality as an integral part of the experience of locality. In this respect, our effort to understand culture must begin to address and formulate essentialism not as myth, stereotype, or a case of “logocentric bewitchment” but in social practices through which it appears as part of

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the work of collectivization. The error we begin to understand is the way the truth of sovereignty operates in collective life, the truth of the difference (between “we” and “they,” between me and you, between “I” and “me”: the truth of space). We might note Hannah Arendt’s treatment of parochiality as a form of life: This We arises whenever men live together; its primal form is the family; and it can be constituted in many different ways, all of which rest ultimately on some form of consent, of which obedience is only the most common mode, just as disobedience is the most common and least harmful mode of dissent … Human plurality, the faceless “They” from which the individual Self splits to be itself alone, is divided into a great many units, and it is only as a member of such a unit, that is, of a community, that men are ready for action. The manifoldness of these communities is evinced in a great many forms and shapes, each obeying different laws, having different habits and customs, and cherishing different memories of its past (Arendt, 1971, 200–1).

In contrast to the other view, Arendt does not treat parochial attachments as an error, but as an invitation for inquiry. Certainly, her notion of consent glosses the struggle with its destabilized common situation, but in ways that remain to be explored. Whereas the other view can only destroy the phenomenon or treat it as an example of ideology, Arendt leads us to reflect upon the relations between plurality, parochiality, and consent. The idea that consent itself might be parochial uproots it from its conventional liberal, pacific overtones, pointing even to a shared eccentricity or stigma that marks a collective. Even more, it begins to suggest that cosmopolitanism rests upon consent that might in its way be parochial and, hence, local. We can again count upon Nietzsche to bring to view the drama of this discourse. The influence that ties men down to the same companions and circumstances, to the daily round of toil, to their bare mountainside, seems to be selfish and unreasonable; but it is a healthy unreason and of profit to the community, as everyone knows who has clearly realized the terrible consequences of a mere desire for migration and adventure -perhaps in whole peoples – or who watches the destiny of a nation that has lost confidence in its earlier days and is given up to a restless cosmopolitanism and an unceasing desire for novelty (Nietzsche, 1967, 19).

Before rushing to hear this as a reactionary diatribe, note how Nietzsche invites us to ask these questions: how can the unreason of a people and its place be “healthy,” and how might it profit the community? Does this not link to the secret of Dublin and of Manchester in ways we have yet to explore? What we might begin to appreciate is

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that all great cities are monstrous, that is, two-headed, both universal and local at the same time. Whereas we are tempted by an image of cosmopolitanism that idealizes the pursuit of urbanity as binding us through the acquisition of accoutrements, perhaps a truer image struggles to note and act upon the inescapable difference between “we” and “they” with tact (Gadamer, 1975). This would begin to restore the link of cosmopolitanism to cultivation from which it has come to be severed. The discourse around this question would then center the concern for the universal. The notion of cosmopolitanism sharpens the focus on the question of the voice of the city and the various exchanges over the means of interpreting it as a place. If at first, we can appreciate how such concerns play off the traditional Greek contrast between love of one’s own and commitment to the universal, we see now that we face not a choice between accepting or rejecting modernity. Instead, what comes to view is the fundamental ambiguity of progress itself, for the “civilizing process” which it seems to reflect can only be a constant topic of contestation in collision with visions of locality and parochiality. Rather than compare cities on some index of cosmopolitanism which begs this very question, we begin to recognize how a close view of any city must focus upon the local struggle with just this aspect of its common situation.

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5 Nighttime

i nt roduc ti on In this chapter, I take up the question of the relationship of night to the city. On the one hand, night has evoked an aura of ferocity and unruliness personified in the notion of “the last frontier.” On the other hand, a rousing nightlife is considered to be an essential amenity of a modern city and a twenty-four-hour city is often thought to be the sine qua non of cosmopolitanism. In fact, the availability of coffee, considered in the last chapter, and of a nightlife, considered here, are typically treated together as marks of the up-to-date city of today. This suggests that having access to certain amenities, having choices with respect to such options or possibilities, is in some way integral to the grammar of cosmopolitanism. It is worth considering, especially because of Kant’s connection of cosmopolitanism to peace, how having access to coffee and to a nightlife could contribute to the pacification of the city (to its “civilizing process”). Let us go even further and suggest that alcohol, tobacco, sexuality, licensing hours, and the question of the indisputable right to stay up late are each and all in their way interpretive sites at which the desire to pacify night collides with the aspiration to maintain its unruliness as a feature of the struggle between different voices to control the means of interpretation of the city. This question invites us to think the idea of night and then, of course, day, since an idea is typically apprehended at first as what it is by virtue of how it is unlike what is other to it. So it is this relationship between night and day that we must first consider. To proceed, I will lay out some part of the normal usage through which day and night are typically addressed, with the intent of disturbing these routines in order to bring to view disputes concerning the borders of day and night and the ambiguity of the relations between them. If, on the one hand, day

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and night might seem to appear in collective life as simple conventions, as signs and nothing more, on the other hand, day and night seem to abide as real distinctions and the relations between them to subsist as a real order that focuses collective energies and problem-solving. An important point to remember in thinking through a notion such as night is that regardless of the conduct done in its name, one part of its social meaning is the environment of expectations which it formulates as a social fact or course of action. For example, while I might not be a Sunday churchgoer, churchgoing is part of the meaning of Sunday. That is, I can rest assured that if I happen to find myself on a Sunday in a small midwestern town in the United States, part of the meaning of that day is that it requires me (in a way Durkheim called “external” and “coercive”) to orient to being viewed in terms of the relevances of churchgoing no matter what I think of the matter. Much of our knowledge about the city is like this, for we know what different parts of the twenty-four hours mean in a way that leads us to expect certain things when we visit the spaces and places at those times. We see too, that night and day are not just homogenous categories, as when 5: 00 tells us that it is an in-between, the end of day or the beginning of night, recognized in North America as “cocktail hour.” It is even more interesting to think of such in-between times as moments of awakening: in the way that dawn is the awakening of day, so is twilight the awakening of night. Thus, dawn and dusk are two different shapes of the same problem of awakening as a matter which is worked out in different ways for day and for night, ways which contribute to our thinking of the difference between day and night because sun-up and sundown invite different phenomenological relations to the time of the present and its power to break through lethargy. Moreover, just as day and night are understood as anything but homogeneous categories, so also do we routinely recognize that, as categories, they are constantly being made and unmade under influences that often tempt us to become so charmed by their elasticity that we typically have trouble knowing where, say, night begins and ends, and, so where each reciprocally dissolves into the other. For example, it is often said that technology makes it possible to ignore the distinction between day and night because it minimizes the discontinuity between these differences. Or, people are said to work at home – day or night – in ways which blur the boundaries, making night often look like day. But night might be more recalcitrant in this respect, for it is hard to imagine how day could look like night. Some might point to sleeping during the day as a nighttime activity, but typically sleep begins when night ends. This is to say that the defining character of night might be its struggle against sleep, its struggle to live the life of sleeplessness. We will return to this point later.

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It might be that night has a special character, making it appear more unyielding than day. That is, if night is regularly able to copy day – if it has that kind of power – it is hard to think of day as being able to imitate night. In the idiom of the Greeks, we might say that Night is a God. In this sense, one version of the question of the relation of night and day to the city could be its asking whether night in the great city is inimitable (by day?) or not and, so, whether it is more of a divinity in this sense in contrast to other cities in which this difference might dissolve or be indistinct.

t h e r e l at i o n o f n i g h t t o d ay How do we tell apart night from day without depending upon criteria which beg the very question? Everyone who speaks about night assumes this knowledge as self-evident, and we are in no position to challenge such confidence. This is the same position of the narrator in St Augustine’s Confessions who noted the “contradiction” in our social engagement with the idea of time: “How then, shall we be able to measure it? Nevertheless we do measure time” (Augustine, 1961, Book xi, 27). That members of society live in and work out this contradiction shows a form of collective problem-solving that we might make observable in its various shapes. What can we get at night that we cannot obtain during the day? This question often suggests that night, because of its distinctiveness, makes a city special by virtue of this allure, providing something lacking in day, leading it to differ from day in specific details. Yet, the matter is not so simple, for a city is typically viewed as special when day and night are seen as alike. Consider the question “what can we get at night that we can obtain during the day?” Here the answer “anything and everything” could actually inflate the apparent urbanity of the city by dissolving the borders between its times. Sometimes we mark a city by how its days and nights differ, as when we claim to have access to opportunities at night to which we are denied during the day. But then again, the idea of a “twenty-four-hour city” suggests that nights are indistinct from days, that the same opportunities exist in ways that do not permit us to distinguish one from the other. Do the great cities of the world make their nights similar to their days or do they enable their days and nights to respectively hold something in reserve from one another? What kind of relationship exists between night and day in the city? Imagine this as if a relationship between a self and an other or between two selves: does day lord it over night or does night lord it over day, as in a master-slave relationship, or are they equal by virtue of reciprocity? These permutations can create complexities and interesting questions, for it is not altogether

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clear that a city which offers at night everything obtainable in the day is a more urbane city. We would need to think about this difference. Paradoxically it might seem that, in a twenty-four-hour city where we can get anything around the clock, both night and day might lose their character. Again, where day and night appear as irreconcilable opposites, they might each mean something in their different ways, that is, day and night might have “identities.” In such a city, day and night would be incommensurable opposites to the point where their solidarity could be endangered. Does the identity or difference of the relation of day to night split the city into two (city by day, city by night), or does it enforce a unity that dissolves the discreteness of these moments? We could ask, in a twenty-four-hour city, would day and night be seductive objects of desire? We often speak about seasons of the year in this way, comparing places where seasons are indistinct (summer all the year around, winter all year around) to places which have discrete and recognizable seasons. Typically, interpretations of this relationship reject the extremes of identity and difference, supposing a kind of division of labor limited by social regulation, licensing hours, and diurnal rhythms. These interpretations suggest that the distinction is governed by conditions such as the state, custom, and the habituation of the body, but such views typically provide limited cases of the relation, views that speak as if these images of the discourse of night are the whole story. Note that if day and night are different by virtue of opposition, then day is not supplied with any positive content, viewed as it is simply by virtue of not-beingnight, and, conversely, night is not supplied with any positive content, viewed as it is simply by virtue of not-being-day. Because the other to each of night and day is simply its opposite, neither is limited by nonbeing, that is, by the question “what does night have to be to be night (and so, for day too)?” Even though we do not aim (and cannot) to answer this question, we hold it in mind as a measure of our inquiry. Typically, day and night seem to anticipate each other as relationships to life. Day is seen to begin after awakening and to end with the completion of work, while night is seen to begin after work and to end at the time we normally awaken. But this risks treating awakening as if it belongs to day, whereas we know that night has its own distinctive awakening. We know how inexact all of this is (we work at night, sleep in the day) and often use these exceptions as research programs (studies of the nighttime economy, studies of idleness) in order to sustain observation of these discrepancies as social facts. And yet, infractions only count as interesting because of what they presuppose. If the borders of work and sleep are regularly transgressed, we might think of the limits of day and night differently, for example, in terms of their respective

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and particular beginnings and ends. So, as we said earlier, each of day and night has its own and special awakening (dawn, twilight), and each should have its own and special termination as if there is a notion of mortality integral to day and to night that permits us to understand each in relation to its cycle of birth and death. Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of “existence” as an awakening, a “birth to presence” that is the joy of being reborn (Nancy, 1993a, 1–57): joy, jouissance, to come, to have the sense of birth: the sense of the inexhaustible imminence of sense (Nancy, 1193a, 5). If we begin to grasp night and day as the same in this respect, that is, as participating in the notion of awakening, we can also begin to understand the specificity of each as a different shape of the birth to presence. That is, how are we typically interpreted as reborn at day and at night? Not, how do we get reborn at night rather than in day (as in views of nocturnal liberation), but rather, what is the kind of rebirth commensurate with each? And if this leads us to inquire into the form of awakening – of birth and death – that begins to limit the notion of night, are we not on the way to treating night (and day) as distinctions or social forms with weight and value (rather than as indistinct distinctions which continuously dissolve into one another, that is, as signs and nothing more). So we might ask how night is oriented to in social practices that begin to make transparent the power of urbanity? How do the social practices of city life provide us with opportunities to bring to view images of the collective engagement with night as a passage both unique and particular? How might we begin to collect the voices of this discourse in relation to elementary problems of the city? (Some would say, crime and security are the practices of night, but this is the tip of the iceberg.)

violent night In Hesiod’s Theogony, the hatred of Sky (man) for his own children born of his union with Earth (woman) led to his exercise of violence upon them, not letting them reach the light of day by his hiding them in the bowels of Earth (Hesiod, 1953, iii, 154–210, 57–9). Night is identified as an original violence (the first act of violence) exercised by depriving the offspring of the light of day, that is, by inflicting blindness. The blindness of night is a life (without light) lived in the bowels of the Earth. Hesiod describes the “dismal gloomy region” of the goddess of Night, whose “grim house” centers such a “yawning gulf” for any man “entering the gates” that “he would be cruelly tossed this way and that by storm after storm – a mystery which terrifies even the gods”

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(Hesiod, 1953, xi, 736–819, 74). Yet, the darkness of Night should not obscure her fertility, for she arouses the power to imagine. Night gave birth to hateful Destruction and the black Specter and Death; she also bore Sleep and the race of Dreams – all these the dark goddess Night bore without sleeping with any male. Next she gave birth to Blame and painful Grief, and also the Fates and the pitiless Specters of Vengeance: it is these goddesses who keep account of the transgressions of men and of gods, and they never let their terrible anger end till they have brought punishment down on the head of the transgressor. Deadly Night also bore Retribution to plague men, then deceit and Love and accursed Old Age and stubborn Strife (Hesiod, 1953, v, 211–336).

Night keeps the human race from the light, shrouding it in the gloomy darkness of an abyss, creating the dispersion and uncollectedness that terrifies and remains a mystery even to the gods. Night is the region of imagination that produces both the dream of transgressiveness (crime) and the gods that answer to transgression (guilt, shame), creating both love and strife. The grim house of Night presides over the heart of darkness. Note in sociology how night is typically talked about in terms of crime and security or deviance and governance, whereas Hesiod leads us to consider these very concerns as aroused by night. Hesiod causes us to ask what it is about night that makes such an imaginative structure compelling?

free time The danger of night is perhaps a function of its equation with free time in ways that locate its subject as vulnerable by virtue of this freedom. That this does not have to hold is true, but is still worth examining. Thus, given the temptations ascribed to night we might reflect on the question of why utopian literature gives it only passing mention. Thomas More says of the citizens of his utopia: “they go to bed at 8 p.m., and sleep for eight hours. All the rest of the twenty-four they’re free to do what they like – not to waste their time in idleness or self-indulgence, but to make good use of it in some congenial activity” (More, 1965, 76). Note that at night they are not “free to do what they like” for they are compelled to sleep the eight hours from 8 pm to 4 am. Though they have six hour work days which give them free time inter-

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mittently during the course of the day, sleep is prescribed at night, presumably so that they may be rested for their work the following day. Night suffers in that the moderate use of free time is considered a virtue, the mark of a self-governing rather than “self-indulgent” citizen, and such moderation is conceived as being tested at the point when free time releases “destructive” temptations as idleness exacerbates the natural vulnerabilities of people, exposing them to conditions that bring out their worst. Thus, the temptations of night are not particular to it per se, but to free time, and if day and night were reversed in terms of work schedules, day would be as forceful a temptation as night. Note though that the connection of free time (leisure) to awakening and the sense of birth has not been explored, for a persistent theme of collective life also draws upon the connection of leisure to awakening and enlivening in ways that are enhancing rather than destructive. The place of night in this contested terrain remains to be developed. Yet, if we recall Hesiod’s story of Night, we see its link to transgression. This temptation that the different voices in the discourse on free time evoke suggests that it is transgression that is feared in free time. The transgressiveness of self-indulgence, interpreted by More as caused by idleness, could also be the awakening and rebirth imagined by (say) Jean-Luc Nancy. Then we could suggest in contrast to the utopian inflection, that the opportunity of free time can be imagined as a temptation that is creative by virtue of being transgressive. On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not fear poverty; I am not frightened by death; I entirely give myself over to them (Machiavelli, 1961, no. 137, 142).

Machiavelli lists the temptations of night and its free time as the obsessions he needs to pacify: the distractions of shame, boredom, fear of poverty and death, as a range of preoccupations which he overcomes by giving himself to the play of other minds and voices – to conversation – which he “enters” by asking and being answered by those whom he addresses. Often called one of the founders of modern social thought, Machiavelli works to resist the maladies of free time by making his night(s) productive. But the productivity is transgressive in two senses: it reshapes

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the Greek view of the darkness of night, and it renews worldly versions of the industrious use of free time. Machiavelli’s “solution” encounters Hesiod’s “dark and gloomy” forces (the ugliness of night) by imagining a social relation of good faith, and it resists More’s ascetic condemnation of the uses of night as “self-indulgent” and “idle” by actually luxuriating in “real robes” and food which is “only mine” in order to renew the present moment as voluptuous. In one gesture, Machiavelli resists the fear of the abyss by flaunting the very self-absorption excluded by Utopia. We could say that Machiavelli travesties the collective representation of night by making over transgression into a ceremonial action. Here we begin to glimpse the ritualized reinvention of night.

wa i t i n g Free time leads us to a consideration of passing time which is linked to the phenomenon of waiting. How does waiting differ from day to night? We could say that day anticipates night and night anticipates day and in a sense this is correct. On the surface, day appears to wait for night or for what-comes-after-work, while night appears to wait for day or for what-comes-after-sleep. As we have said, this interpretation takes the nature of night and day for granted, formulating their relation by implication of the opposition between the ruling metaphors of work and sleep. Here, what they each anticipate in the other would simply be the relief of the present. We can only renew this “dark and gloomy” view by understanding waiting (whether day or night) to be an encounter with its present as it is rather than as it is not. Do day and night not wait for their own awakening? Recalling our hypothetical exchange between Hesiod, Thomas More, and Machiavelli, we can locate the scene of that encounter as the dialectic of awakening at night: the renewal of nocturnal free time occurs in Machiavelli’s awakening of his self in the face of the violence and restraint of night that endangers self-composure. He proceeds through the ceremony of reading which, in recreating a social life in the teeth of the “storms of the abyss” (the fantasies of night), actually taunts the God to do her worse by flaunting his self-absorption and composure in a voluptuous ritual (see Bataille, 1985). We might pose some questions. Have cities emancipated night from its shackles? Or has night liberated the city from its chains? Or is it a little of both? One thing we know is that cities change as nights come into their own to create opportunities for the lived experience of public space. We might say that night expands the possibilities of life in the city in a variety of ways. Reciprocally, the city helps night achieve a kind of independence or autonomy, by bringing people out into it, the

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city empowers people to enjoy the night in perhaps unprecedented ways. We might speak of justice here: does the city do justice by its night or does it kill night by making it banal or through excessive management of its unruliness? Some cities have what is called a “nightlife” (lighting, entertainment, amenities) but not much else, or in Bataille’s sense, no expectation “of loss as great as possible” (Bataille, 1985). In many cases such nights are special only in relation to drab days, in a way standing as the exception to the rule, the transgressive to the mundane. Other cities such as New York, Berlin, and Paris have wonderful nights the anticipation of which actually intensifies the day. In these cities, night does not live off its difference from day but exacerbates the fullness of day. In great cities such as these we do not have to wait for night to relieve us from day because day is eventful in its own way: day and night do not prosper at the expense of one another. French cinema, for example Belle de Jour and Chloe in the Afternoon, specialize in depicting the rebirth of the day as eventful in itself in ways that confirm how night in such cities does not live off its superiority to day as in an opposition but as a difference, an alternate shape of awakening. Could we apply Hegel’s formula for the aufheben here in the form of a hypothesis: the greater the city the more likely the opposition between day and night is cancelled but its difference preserved? That is, the difference between day and night must exist but not as an opposition. Having a nightlife is not enough if it is possessed as if a commodity rather than absorbed into the bloodstream of the city in ways that fertilize and animate its days; having a nightlife is not so wonderful if it excels only by virtue of the mundaneity of day to which it is opposed. This is to say, also, that cities need to have days where transgression is possible instead of leaving transgression to the domain of night. If it is less demanding of a city to have a nightlife than a transgressive day suggests that night could only maintain its divine status when its day has vitality; it means that night needs day just as day needs night. This kind of reflection raises some interesting questions about cosmopolitanism: it might be more difficult to be creative in the day, it might be harder to make day interesting. Thus, we should not be hasty in accepting the twenty-four-hour-city model of cosmopolitanism, for, if any city can have a nightlife, to paraphrase Socrates, having a nightlife is not so wonderful. Even if having a nightlife is better than not, there are cities cosmopolitan in that sense, whose nights lack any challenge and present no risk, that is, nights with safe and secure reveling that lack any expectation of loss (say, nights where at best, we party or get drunk, lose a wallet, have a fight, meet a person, go to a performance, but always within the limited circle of sameness).

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s l e e p a n d wa k i n g If both day and night could be said to wait for their own form of awakening, then the connection of day with the wide-awake and of night with sleep are limiting because waking and sleeping are different relations to immediacy or to what is given. Sleep is the state in which the soul is immersed in its differenceless unity. Waking, on the other hand, is the state in which the soul has entered into opposition to this simple unity … . It can … be said that waking is brought about by the lightning-stroke of subjectivity breaking through the form of mind’s immediacy (Hegel, 1971,67).

In this quote Hegel leads us to think of day and night as two different lightning-strokes, as two different ways in which “subjectivity” breaks through “mind’s immediacy.” Yet, Hegel says that it is “natural” for us to treat sleep as the state of the soul’s undifferentiatedness as if “night obscures the difference of things … and daylight allows the differences of things to appear” (Hegel, 1971, 68) as if day is the lightning-stroke that breaks through the immediacy of night. In this “natural” view, night would appear poorer, to lack its own awakening. It is also inadequate to fix the distinction by saying vaguely that it is only in the waking state that man thinks. For thought in general is so much inherent in the nature of man that he is always thinking, even in sleep. In every form of mind, in feeling, intuition, as in picture-thinking, thought remains the basis. In so far … as thought is this indeterminate basis, it is unaffected by the alteration of sleep and waking; it does not constitute exclusively one of the alternating sides here but, on the contrary, as this wholly universal activity, stands above them both (Hegel, 1971, 69).

If we are always thinking, sleep and waking express two different relationships to mediation and stand to each other in the way dreaming stands to “intellect and Reason” (Hegel, 1971, 69). But Hegel so unreservedly equates night with sleep that we lose hold of the power and autonomy of night as a social form. Perhaps it is more interesting to suggest that the “lightning-stroke” of subjectivity of night by which its awakening is ruled is insomnia, since night only lives as sleeplessness. Then we might ask after the “birth to presence” in insomnia. There is an honorable precedent for resisting sleep that is based neither on idleness or the lack of productivity. This “honorable precedent” originated with Socrates’s caution in the Phaedrus against sleeping at noon. He speaks about the grasshoppers, who are the muses

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in disguise, and their propensity to laugh at he and his companion if they were to succumb to the temptation to sleep rather than converse. What would they say if they saw that we, like the many, are not conversing, but slumbering … lulled by their voices, too indolent to think? Would they not have a right to laugh at us? They might imagine that we were slaves, who, coming to rest at a place … of theirs, like sheep lie asleep … But if they see us discoursing and like Odysseus sailing past them, deaf to their siren voices, they may perhaps, out of respect, give us the gifts which they receive from the gods that they may impart them to men (Plato, Phaedrus, 302).

Though Plato’s Socrates speaks about fighting sleep at midday, there is no reason why this should be specific to day rather than night since the struggle to make something out of insomnia is the issue. What would be a productive relation to insomnia, day or night? In fact, we might appreciate that if the problem of day, of 12:00 noon, is the struggle of insomnia with the temptation to sleep, as Socrates says, the struggle of night might not be with sleep, that is, to stay awake rather than sleep, but with the excessive temptation of insomnia, a struggle to be discursive rather than hysterical. Night is the region in which insomnia struggles with itself, with the question of the difference between a true and false relation to sleeplessness. The insomnia of night tempts hysteria in terms of which we need to establish a discursive relation. It is not sleep that night fears but the madness of sleeplessness, the spectre of sleeplessness running riot, leading to anything and everything. In this bit of dialogue, night is the time when insomnia faces most acutely the problem of getting a grip upon itself. But the dialogue is even deeper than this, for it suggests that when night is absorbed by the difference between sleeplessness and sleep, it treats itself in the way Socrates speaks of the midday of slaves: people are either asleep or awake. But being awake is not so wonderful, for like those in the hotel lobby bars and lounges, the best we might say of them is that they are not sleeping. In contrast, can we begin to imagine the night not simply as escape from sleep but as a struggle with the meaning of sleeplessness itself, of what to do and how to live? In this sense, the globalization of night and its appearance in the twenty-fourhour city might just produce the kind of nightlife that Socrates calls noon, that is, a night no different than day, which simply prides itself on staying awake. If midnight shares with noon the need to stay awake, midnight is specific in the way it is confronted by, and must cure, insomnia, as the prospect of a life without limits. Plato’s vision of the otherness of night – as its need to be awake while the slaves slumber – is deeper than

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noting it to be an attempt to remain awake at noon. In this respect, a real night would have to struggle with the question of what to do at midnight, not whether or not to sleep, but how to live.

insomnia If at one point, insomnia was viewed as a malady, it now appears to be linked to progress, suggesting for the city a kind of nervous energy or restlessness that is constructive rather than hysterical. Insomnia begins to describe the city that never sleeps. Thus, an “advanced” nightlife is taken as a sign of progress every bit as tangible as new building initiatives and activity in the arts. In speaking of Berlin a journalist exclaims: Which makes what is happening there all the more exciting – the greatest experiment in urban planning in modern times is being matched by an equally uplifting energy in the arts and the nightlife. By day, you can work your way through the Who’s Who of architects and trawl through an extraordinary range of galleries. By night, you can hop between designer bars, cocktail lounges and nightclubs – although crawl is probably nearer the mark, as there are no closing times in a city that genuinely doesn’t sleep (Pietask, 2000).

The idea of no closing times, the insomniac city that never sleeps, is, of course, a picture of the twenty-four-hour city. Apparently “closing times” suggests restrictiveness in contrast to the unlimitedness of opportunities for staying awake, for deferring sleep. The city changes the status of home and sleep, making it something we can want and choose rather than a necessity which we are forced to accept. That we can choose to live without sleep reminds us of the fantasy of a life without death: the continuous deferral of sleep is like the dream of everlasting life, the dream of being unlimited. The city that makes such opportunity possible is the city on the side of freedom and progress, and of course, the market. “Ten years ago the average young Irish person’s dream was to go to New York and win a green card,” said Ailish Cantwell, marketing director of the Clarence Hotel, a trendy Temple Bar spot … The party in Dublin seems to have supplanted that dream. The Celtic Tiger the big boom is called. And the best time to hear it roar is at night, as the newly moneyed hordes converge on clubs, lounges and hotel lobby bars to feed it. “The Celtic Tiger we are experiencing means that people do have disposable income to spend on socializing and can afford all these upmarket bars and clubs,” said Tara O’Connor who makes the Dublin scene when she is not acting as hostess (Sander, 2001, 7).

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No-one spends money while sleeping and the city opens up night as an opportunity to spend by making it possible to live sleepless nights and, so, to spend disposable income at night. In this endeavor, the idea of the “upscale” becomes pertinent. Throughout the progressive world, in these liberated cosmopolitan cities, the new sites of socializing at night appear as the phenomenon of the “upmarket” or “upscale,” reflected here in designer bars, clubs, lounges, and hotel lobby bars. The cosmopolitan city breaks the ties of night to sleep, creating the insomnia that allows money to be spent at night, making possible socializing at new sites designed to attract those who conceive of themselves as a new social formation – the upscale – a generation blessed with the opportunity to spend rather than sleep at night and, so, to use the night to expand and intensify sociability. This tells us that breaking the tie of night to sleep is akin to disrupting the hold of privatization upon the city. The dense convergence of “hordes” at selected nocturnal sites energizes the city and expands its social powers. Moreover, a tinge of pride resonates in the talk of the new Berlin (“the greatest experiment in modern times”) and the Celtic Tiger, for those who previously would have wanted to be elsewhere, can now stay home where they belong. The city now has a nightlife. And we appreciate, in part, what this means. That the city now has a nightlife means that its young people are in an unprecedented position to conceive of themselves as upscale and upmarket. That the city has a nightlife is directly connected to its revolution in self-understanding, for, a nightlife, in this sense, is nothing other than an opportunity to be modern. That the city has a nightlife means that it is now in position to give its young the opportunity denied their parents, the opportunity to represent themselves as modern – as up-to-date – at their most productive moment. It is said today that the fate of the city is tied to its nightlife because the city’s ability to compete within the global marketplace depends upon its capacity to stay open, to extend sleeplessness. That the city, in this respect, needs to make its nights eventful is typically reflected in its calendar of nocturnal activities, classified under categories of art(s) and performance, where the eventful character of the activity is always normalized by the generic category which situates it as a pastime that will not be endangered by night. These “lists” (often in the press and media of the city) present the itinerary of nighttime as a safe and secure domain of action for both those tied to upscale self-identification and others who desire to experiment innocently with night. Just as Max Weber noted the necessity of legal calculability for ensuring the predictability of capitalism, so would we expect night to be made intelligible not

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merely through policing and security measures but by virtue of the collective need to make its environment calculable as an organization of social actions and practices which people can do alone and together and at sites to which they might orient as distinct and significant. In this instance we can understand cities as engaged in describing themselves, in writing about themselves and showing themselves in the ways they depict their nights. Night is secured through descriptions of the activities that are done at times and places, as activities designed to induce people to forgo sleep and make the effort to join the circulating mix, to spend money, and to be among others in lighted spaces within a dark landscape. The methodology of the city, joining activities and spaces at selected times, is guided by the promise that coming out at night will make a difference, that the extension of sleeplessness and the experience of insomnia will lead to its own awakening worth the price paid. Here, if restaurants, cinemas, and festivals, bars, and lounges carry the burden of the night before midnight, the various scenes of the city and its after-midnight repertoire always promise to intensify the experience because after midnight only the committed remain. Does it not go without saying that urban vitality is positive and negative, a resource and an opportunity to be appropriated, making this mix between the creativity and commerce of the city a social phenomenon we need engage, rather than, as Marx said, to merely note its fact? What we have to appreciate about a real rather than spurious nightlife is that midnight is not the end of the night but its beginning. In a city such as Berlin one can start the night late in a way that might not be possible in other cities. The city extends night and through a variety of methods can sustain a public life, by bringing people out later to begin and by keeping them out for longer periods of time. This shows one important empirical consideration for any city: how does it mark the beginning and end of its night? Thus, it is important for Berlin to have a café such as Schwarzes’ on Kantstrasse, open twenty-four hours, to catch people coming and going. But then we must understand that Berlin’s late and long night is different than New Orleans uninterrupted night in ways we have already noted, for a night that starts late is different than a night that never ends. In this sense the diversification of life after midnight is important in order for the city to reflect a place that is truly public rather than specialized, that is, as a city capable of attracting a mix of types rather than appealing to a limited circle. The imaginative character of night in the city has a degree of materiality evoked, say, in Woody Allen’s comment about New York as a place where one can get a hot and sour soup at 4:00 in the morning, for what

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is important is not getting the soup but knowing it is attainable. In part, what night means in this city is that signs of vitality exist after midnight as matters we know and trust in thinking of the city as a place, matters which give the image of the city a degree of reality. It is not that one will get hot and sour soup at 4:00 in the morning, nor especially that night and day are alike here because hot and sour soup is available around the clock. Rather, even though we can get it anytime, being able to have it at night says something particular about night even though one may have it in the day, too. This means that night in the city such as this has a kind of hospitality to many, if they choose to use it, not restricted just to, say, sex trade workers, but to a range of users desiring to share their sleeplessness. The tension arising from the effort to extend night, to sustain sleeplessness, must create conflicts with the demands of day, and we might expect such tension to be sharpest among the hardy Germans and in their capital city, Berlin, which relentlessly keeps its nights open in ways that appear to endanger its vision of daytime. Thus, Berliners increasingly come to find that the extension of sleeplessness at night prevents them from being properly prepared for work the following day. And yet, these Berliners want the pleasure that comes from sleepless nights. The question they face – how to have both? – might be a microcosmic version of the question (of cosmopolitanism?) of how to have everything? To such a question Berlin has seemed to achieve an unprecedented entrepreneurial solution. Mukti Rehrs has a problem. She wants to party. But, like a lot of people in Germany she takes her job seriously. “I work for a private kindergarten. Tomorrow, I start at 8 o’clock and it’s very important that I’m fit for work, because I don’t want to be aggressive with the children.” Which is how she came to be at the Far Out club on the Kurfurstendamm last Tuesday, taking advantage of the latest craze to hit Berlin’s ever-shifting club scene. As Mukti and her friend took to the dance floor, there was still daylight coming in through the windows. The craze began last October … An agency called Inferno organized it. “One day, we were wondering why good parties start so late, and why people have to feel rough the next day in the office,” said the owner Alexander Schulz, who has copyrighted the word “after work” … The idea is not to get wasted, but to dance, chat, drink a little – but only a little – and leave in time to get a full night’s sleep and wake up fresh the next morning … “I like to dance but I don’t like to wait half the night to do so,” said … an out of work software consultant … On the other side of the club, five young mothers were sitting together round a table. “We were going to a parents-teachers meeting, but we decided to miss it and come here instead … It’s great for us that it starts so early. The last

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time we went to a party, it didn’t finish till 1:30 in the morning, and that’s too late if you’ve got kids.” (“Germany Learns to Party Like There is a Tomorrow,” Guardian, 22 April 2000).

Although night remains the same, they decide to reclassify the activities typically done at night, dancing and partying, for by treating them as “after work,” they can return home to a more domesticated night free from the risk and irregularity of its intoxicating insomnia. The solution – to treat night moderately as a time to dance, to chat and drink only a little – reintroduces the idea that night can be a time of sobriety if these activities are treated technically. Thus the persistent fear that the excitement of night and its aura makes a claim upon people that they cannot resist is registered here in Berlin’s attempt to reorganize its club scene for those among its people who are both mature and productive enough to want to moderate pleasure and pain, telling us in its way that self-renunciation can have its own beauty.

n i g h t l i f e a s p u b l i c s pa c e That the city has a nightlife means in the most obvious sense that it offers a public life, a life in public, and thus finally has the power to lure its people into the streets and sites where they can be – alone and together – away from the domestic sphere. In terms of the culture of the city, nightlife is part of a complex machinery for attracting and mobilizing the people, for drawing them into the open, bringing them to view for oneself and other as the nocturnal horde that has renounced sleep for the life of insomnia. This nocturnal vitality sounds at first, as if it is the province of the marginal, the transgressive, or for all those who cannot or will not sleep, for reasons as perverted as normal. Yet, that the upscale and its alternative (the underground) – its downside – coexist as the mix in the night of the city shows that a pervasive concern of a city for its night organizes the question of to whom it belongs. That this does not apply only to the usual categories but to the persistent division of the night between those who are alone and those who are together has always been noted in good novels. Hear Jean Rhys: Walking in the night with the dark houses over you, like monsters. If you have money and friends, houses are just houses with steps and a front door – friendly houses where the door opens and somebody meets you, smiling. If you are quite secure and your roots are well struck in, they know. They stand back respectfully, waiting for the poor devil without any friends and without any money. Then they step forward, the waiting houses, to frown and crush. No

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hospitable doors, no lit windows, just frowning darkness. Frowning and leering and sneering, the houses, one after the other. Tall cubes of darkness, with two lighted eyes at the top to sneer. And they know who to frown at. They know as well as the policeman on the corner, and don’t you worry (Rhys, 1939, 18) .

Although much could be made of this observation, we note at this point only that the hospitality of city nights is not extensive and all inclusive not only because of exclusionary policies towards race, gender, and class, but to all those who are not together with others. Yet the very ruthlessness of a city towards those who are alone can make being alone not only dreary and repetitive but a moment of excitation, in the words of Baudelaire, for those who can be touched by their very isolation in the crowd, for those who can be inspired by the anonymity of nighttime vulnerability. Most important, we see that the night of the city, often identified with a public life where groups inhabit and transverse spaces together, is also an opportunity for the many to be private in more creative ways, that is, to extend and reinvent solitude in accenuated forms that sometimes take pleasure in being alone with others. We see this creativity in the artist, in Jean Rhys herself, able to gather herself together in the face of her nighttime imaginings, to personify the houses and the illumination of the city as a spectacle both terrifying for her character and inspirational as an image for her art. If night can arouse such fascination, art has the power to transform such fascination into a singular event by a singular person, as the testimony of a true individual that the suffering of night can be digested in collective life. Thus, nighttime, and in particular the time after midnight, is both a time and a space, for the night of the city always offers itself as an implicit public life that is there for the taking, a contested terrain in which the “upscale” and the “alternative” compete for the right to control the means of interpreting the city as a nighttime city. As part of this interpretive conflict, we are led, further, to think of night as an occasion for interrogating the kind of mix that inhabits the city and its spaces after dark, the kind of diversity, particularly in gender and generation, in class and race, by which each city is marked. This diversity does not only apply to categories of persons or groups but to types of activities as well. If, for example, we might drink and dance in Dublin after midnight, in Montreal we can do many more kinds of things in ways that suggest its relative heterogeneity. Finally, this notion of mix is a powerful metaphor for permitting us to grasp the night of the city in a more robust way, for besides persons, groups, and activities, sleeplessness in

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the city is distributed across its areas and districts in ways that allow us to reflect upon the dispersion of insomniac life and how the burden of nightlife is distributed as a relation between city centre and neighborhoods. It is also true, as many have noted, that different parties control different areas in the city, and, so, areas vary in their permeability. Although we are often tempted to privilege the idea of the universal accessibility of areas in a city as if the spatial analogue to the twentyfour-hour city is the completely open or transparent city, all cities must have spaces that cannot be penetrated, spaces that are impenetrable in ways more intricate than conveyed by concepts such as segregation. Besides enclaves of the rich and ghettos of the poor, the aura of locality pervades cities as those hidden spots about which only long-term residents know. The local character of any city and indeed the notion of locality itself is intimately connected to a structure of secrecy, of hidden associations and vestigal remains which only serves to reiterate the singularity of the city as a place. Despite the mood of cosmopolitanism marking each city, its rude and parochial vulgarity must persist as its incorrigible trace of locality, a trace thought to be intensified at night even in the teeth of cosmopolitan ecstasy. Such traces are registered typically as novelistic voices in which writing represents the city as something more than a context, but an individual. The very success of the influence of the city – of the power of its locality – upon its literature, the very possibility of say, a Manchester school, can lead to its appropriation and commodification as part of the circulatory system that marks culture as a vital process. The absorption of the upscale in the present as their moment often means that the past is hidden from their view, persisting as remains or vestiges that exist beyond their circle of lights. These vestiges persist, on the one hand, as outside the light, as outside the scope of illumination, and, on the other, as inside in the shape of shadows, as traces of the incalculable. These traces remain outside the light but reflected, conveying both the past which is no longer and the future which is not yet: the shadows reflect both what has been and what is yet to come. Can we say that every city has its shadows, its what-was and its not-yet as the detritus that haunts its present as an integral part of the seen-but-unnoticed meaning of night for all who are under the spell of the city?

t r av e l i n g at n i g h t If both the upscale and the underground are restless or, at least, mobile users of the night, folks within the houses that Jean Rhys’s character passes, or ones who are encased in sedentary private routines, may be

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among those who refuse the invitation of the city night for whatever reason. Nevertheless we can conceive of nighttime as an “object” to address in engagements that assume shape differently in specific cities. Jacques Rancière again helps us: This shows precisely what is theoretically at stake in travelling: not discovering far countries and exotic habits, but making the slight move which shapes the mapping of a “there” to a “here.” That mapping is the additional way, that is to say the human way of making flesh with words and sense with flesh (Rancière, 1994b, 31).

Plato calls this “slight move” a “mere trifle” that makes all of the difference in the world: instead of looking for the difference (other?) over there in a way which detracts you from what is before your eyes (Wittgenstein, 1953), find the practices for what you are speaking about here (make the concept flesh, that is, an observable relation). Instead of rushing to confirm or disconfirm the proposition, or to link it to other propositions, “map it” (situate it) in and as the problem which gives it flesh. Travel, as a metaphor for engaging the ambiguity of a “concept,” begins to describe the initiation of this “countermarch.” How does this metaphor enable us to conceive of a strong relation to night? If we find the other in the same, how would this be to engage the otherness in night? Instead of securing our idea of night in order to investigate how it is played out in other “far countries and exotic habits” (that is, by comparing our night with Berlin’s nights, Dublin’s nights, Montreal’s nights, ad infinitum), we make our (idea of) night flesh, that is, we give flesh to our engagement with night, first as a typical practice, then as a discourse that represents such practice(s) and finally as a problematic situation that anchors the discourse. In some sense this process involves “learning to lose our way” (Rancière, 1994, 36–7), that is, learning to make our familiar notions strange (a second sailing). To an extent, we have tried to imitate this counsel in addressing nighttime in this chapter. A further step is needed. If nighttime in the city is an opportunity to conceive of this engagement as a way of traveling from “there” to “here,” then the upscale, the alternative, and the sedentary are all voices in this discourse, various modes of addressing the object or of taking up its challenge. If for the upscale, consumption and reveling is one shape of such travel, so is the descent into the underground (or hell) one part of the history of narrative designed to depict our awakening to an “otherness” that is seen-but-unnoticed. The discourse of night regularly offers itself as an opportunity to reformulate and act upon our secure common understandings, to travel from there to here, but in ways that are not

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unproblematic. For example, if night offers such opportunity, could we ask of any city how it refashions this material so as to intensify the possibility of losing our way rather than simply to confirm night as an apparent difference (other?) that is really the same, that is, an extension of day and nothing more? To put it more specifically, does the ambiguity and incalculability of night intrude more insistently in the city as the tension increases between parochial tenacity and universal cosmopolitanism and what forms does the social organization of night assume under such varying conditions? Even more, is a cosmopolitan city one in which we are guaranteed not to lose our way, or is it a city where that risk is endemic, even a learning experience? This notion of travel depicts the excess of night as deriving from the constant prospect of loss that the night appears to offer as an opportunity to “return” to oneself, to recover the basics and fundamentals by exposing and transcending the taking-place of routine and productivity, of the day itself, as an event in the world. This drama occurs through the confrontation with the reduction of night to amenities and entertainment in ways that always risk covering over the subject’s encounter with the space of the present. Aloneness within a congested terrain, boredom in the face of constant stimulation, separation in the face of togetherness, frustration in the pursuit of satisfactions, typically seeming as negative symptoms of privation, come to appear at night as the definitive manner of exposing being with and for oneself, the problem of intimacy with oneself as an unanswerable question that must nevertheless be continuously asked.

conclusion These considerations begin to raise the question of to whom night in the city belongs, or who is entitled to speak for its night. When the development of urban nightlife is represented as a story, a matter of history, a course of action tied to the fate of progress from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, it is typically discussed as an emancipation from the fetters of the provincial past, a progressive movement linked to the awakening of each generation to its powers. This development is always narrated in the amusement activities of the “upscale” and “upmarket” at any modern moment. But then night is also represented as the concerted coming-to-view of marginality, of alternative lifestyles, of the underground. Just as sleeplessness leads to the “hordes” of consumers, so it produces those who want to be among them, to be around and in the action, participating in the structures that the city has produced in the public life it marks as its nighttime. The collective representation of night, as frequently noted, includes both fearfulness and euphoria as extreme views aroused by the powers and temptations of sleeplessness.

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The notion of the twenty-four-hour city seems to implicitly praise the cosmopolitanism of the city, representing it as an advance, technically in the case of lighting or illumination and socially in the case of freedom and the expansion of opportunities for leisure and life around the clock. If nocturnal liberation seems an integral part of this interpretive matrix, the notion of night and its relation to day still remains to be examined as something other than an empirical problem. How can we begin to address the social form of night as a lived experience? Such an examination not only potentially stimulates a reflection upon the difference between genuine and spurious cosmopolitanism but might lead us to consider the relation of cosmopolitanism to urbanity. Does globalization mean that major cities all become alike in the nightlife they acquire, all coming to approximate increasingly the twenty-four-hour city, or do cities impart a special accent of reality to their nights, making it unique in the way of the specific city? I have suggested that such specificity appears as those sorts of relations and observable practices through which cities mark the beginning and ends of their nights, expand and develop these nights as markets, structures of opportunity and social congregation, induce or restrict the uses of territory at night as diversified or limited theatres circulating people, activities, and spaces, and in general ways work to make night an inhabitable space by coordinating its eventfulness with the degree of normalcy that can be expected to achieve its security. I have proceeded by casting night and day as characters of a drama in which their fight for survival as distinct notions is intended to depict the ambiguity of their relationship and its impact upon the differences among cities. Thus, ultimately, I am interested in cities as characters in a drama in which night and its relation to day figures as a source of examples for imagining scenes at which ethical collisions occur, encounters designed to provoke us to think about questions of meaning – of what is and what is not – as normal and yet, ineluctable and often suppressed features of daily life and collective problem-solving. Here, I have been interested in raising a simple problem: what does it mean to have an “advanced” nightlife and, whatever it means, what does this say about the cosmopolitanism of cities? I think this bears upon questions of urbanity and for the quantitative discussion of cities today, which, in focusing upon the abundance of amenities, might just remain indifferent to the question of quality. The achievements of a civilization and its cities are typically treated as palpable in the shape of monuments, architecture, works of art, but also as advances in knowledge, science, and technology. If we think here of Max Weber’s famous discussion of the “achievement” of rationalization in the West, we might also think of “advances” in the extension of rights, and in the abundance of amenities produced in part,

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through the circulation of capital and of the labor moving in its wake. We can expand Simmel’s notion of “objective culture” (Simmel, 1971, 227–35) to include not simply great artworks but the idea of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984). The idea that art and knowledge can become commodities and that the commodity can be used as a work of art is basic to the recognition of the ambiguity of objective value. In this chapter, I have proposed that a twenty-four-hour nightlife is such an achievement of objective value for a city, reflected in the imagination and technology entering into its illuminated neon landscape and the new choices for engaging others which it offers, and in the commodification reflected in the expanded opportunities that it invites for calculating consumption possibilities. If Baudelaire identified great cities as “capitals of the civilized world,” the twenty-four-hour city exemplifies this dual function of the city as capital, first as the centre capable of making capitalism shine at night, the centre at which capitalism is illuminated and made brilliant. While many have noted how art is converted into capital (for example, in marketing the heritage of the city), fewer have tried to formulate the way in which capital is made into a quality of value (for example, how the extension of spending at night is made into an object of need and desire commensurate with the ideal and “lifestyle” of sweetness of living and with the expanded and intimate interpretive connection of commerce and cultivation). The status of coffee, discussed in the last chapter, is a prime example of the two-headed commodity, noted on the one hand as a stimulus contributing to the productivity and efficiency of labor and, on the other, as a savory source of delight. While critics have trouble seeing anything but the pernicious effects of caffeine, is it really true that its enjoyment is simply one more ideological weapon of capitalism? “The powerful stimulus that caffeine provided was a weapon against fatigue, helping to renew flagging energy and to maintain worker discipline. Yet other factors had less to do with the intrinsic nature of the beverages, and more with the intention of those who peddled or profited from them” (Mintz, 2001, 36). Such views which simplify everything deep about coffee (or night for that matter), rightly see the commodity as part of the circulation of the market, but reduce the market to exploitative and profit-oriented exchanges. As integral to this system of desire we need to think about the ambiguity of efficiency and its stress on linking productivity to enjoyment in ways fulfilling and comprehensive. The relation of the city to stimulation, to concerns for its maintenance, fragility, rhythms, and methods and procedures of simulation, mark cities invariably as centres of experimentation in body and mind and simultaneously as sites occasioning entrepreneurial initiatives in relation to stimulation itself

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and to questions pertaining to the scarcity and availability of products, settings, and opportunities promising “sweetness of living.” We might note again how the city which is at the centre of a civilization is the capital precisely because it can make the dissemination of the question of worldly desire its capital concern, a concern of such capital importance that it can become theatricalized at night as an expanded public stage in which all participants are reciprocally performers and audience, two-in-one, seeing each other and being seen in an environment enlarged through lighting to illuminate its varied choices. This capital illuminates the abundance and diversity of desire in ways central to the civilization of which it is part.

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6 Scenes

i nt roduc ti on The body of literature and research on cities seems to be silent on the question of scenes. Possible resources might include Karl Mannheim, who has spoken about coffee houses and their importance in the process of democratization (Mannheim, 1956, 141–2), but we are not confident about the easy identification of the scene with conversation and its transparency that marks the discussion of democratic public spaces. Similarly, the many anecdotal and ethnographic descriptions of coteries and social circles throughout history provide vivid detail while leaving the question of the scene unformulated. Political economy ignores scenes as a phenomenon by treating them externally as occasions of exploitation or false consciousness (Zukin, 1997), that is, as markets and nothing more, and, while there is some commentary on scenes as occasions on which ecstatic outbursts of “tribal” consciousness are affirmed (Maffesoli, 1996), there has been no attempt to theorize the scene as a social formation; there have been tendencies either to criticize its pretentiousness or to celebrate its liminality. Certainly, the claim to exclusiveness of the scene is saturated with pretension, and its fervor often appears to celebrate passion at the cost of discipline. Yet, the complexity of the scene as a collective problem always seems to exceed such characterizations. Finally, the recent explosion of interest in the public space of cities glosses these complexities by treating the scene either as a dialogical opportunity in ways that intellectualize and diminish its sensuality (as if the scene is a pedagogical moment in the career of democracy) or as an unformulated vision of shared space that leaves everything interesting to be developed (as if the scene is best understood as a mode of inhabiting intimate space by strangers whose copresence forces common problems upon them). What is apparent is

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that an exploration of the question of the scene and its status in urban life as a place that contributes to making the city itself a place should begin to permit us to clarify the interpretive links between two important glosses that have petrified to the point of cliché, on the one hand, the idea of public space (Clarke, 2000) and, on the other, the notion of “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983).

the grammar of scene as a social phenomenon In what follows I will take up the problem of the scene, first, by laying out some part of its grammar, and, secondly, by asking how that grammar raises problems in collective life for those who would desire to understand and speak about the scene reflectively. I will finish by considering how the scene resonates with urbanity in ways that might help us engage cities and their cultural life. To engage the being of the scene, we can best recall the following: Because the understanding of being resides first and foremost in a vague, indefinite meaning, and yet remains certain and definite; because, accordingly, the understanding of being … remains obscure, confused, and hidden, it must be elucidated, disentangled, and torn from its concealment. This can be done only if we inquire about this understanding … which we at first accepted as a mere fact – if we put it in question (Heidegger, 1961, 70).

In everyday life we speak regularly about scenes, and it is in such ways that the scene first appears to and for us. Then we ask, what are we talking about when we address the world in these ways, is there a persistence underling this diversity? Do we want to comment ad infinitum on scenes or should we try to recover some disciplined sense of the interpretive exchanges between the scene and collective life, a sense applicable to the city in particular? The scene is certainly connected to the city insofar as cities are thought to be breeding grounds of scenes, places where scenes are fertilized. In his lively book, Jonathan Raban, for example, derives the scenes of the city by implication, from the essential urban theatricality which he understands to be necessary because of the co-presence of strangers: “It is surely in recognition of this intrinsic theatricality of city life that public places in the city so often resemble lit stages awaiting a scenario” (Raban, 1988, 27). In this paradigmatic formulation of scenes, they are settings at which theatricality is intensified. We might just note now how the notion of scene is taken for granted, though we shall try to work from Raban’s example of the restaurant later in this

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chapter when we examine the mix of private and public functions in city spaces. Although Raban discusses how being with strangers in an anonymous situation imposes performance demands upon city dwellers, he does not yet provide for how urban theatricality in this way can be understood as the ground of the scene, that is, for the way scene as a social form depends upon such theatricality. It is in this direction that we shall move. As we examine texts on cities we note settings identified as “scenes,” recurrences envisioned as master categories that organize the very description of the city – the gay scene, the music scene, the drug scene, the art scene, the tango scene, the rave scene. Here, it sounds as if scenes, like commodities, circulate in ways that might bring them to some cities rather than others or to all cities in varying degrees. In such usages the specific and erotic character of the scene seems to dissolve under the universalistic gaze that finds the same scenes in every city or varying degrees of a scene in each and every city as if the scene is a universal function which is put into practice in diverse cities in ways that differ only in degree. Yet, the vernacular sense of scene always seems weighted with specific and local meaning that grounds its very intimate appeal and seductiveness for those under its spell, leading much of its discourse to appear to be produced by one who has not tasted its pleasure. Scenes tend to be identified in guidebooks with clubs and discos, “live venues,” and cafés and bars. Most specifically, the scene is identified with nightlife: Berlin has had a reputation for having some of the best – and steamiest – nightlife in Europe … Today the big draw is the clubs that have grown up out of the city’s techno … scene. In a remarkably short space of time these places, many housed in abandoned buildings on or around the former no-go area of the EastWest border strip, have spawned a scene that ranks among the most exciting in Europe (Holland and Gawthrop, 1998, 260).

If this is special to Berlin, its specificity lies in the way in which the idea of nightlife is endowed with scenic character in Berlin. Such an interpretation of the scene, typical as it is, provides a nocturnal sense which is not necessary since scene invariably presupposes a kind of specialized knowledge, access, and association more fundamental than its connection to the night. On the other hand, if the scene points to a recurring feature of all cities, or of any city worth its name (imagine a city that could not claim any scenes), then this universal function is distributed differently. Scene resonates with some concerted activity, an activity to a degree special-

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ized, at least differentiated, but not necessarily covert. Yet even if legitimate – for example, the fashion scene – scene suggests an element of secrecy or, at least, of differential access to what it celebrates. That is, there is an esoteric aura connected with any scene which often makes knowledge of its whereabouts a problem for outsiders or for those new to the city. That the location of the scene is problematic is linked not only to the specialized knowledge required of those who orient to it, but to the idea that the delicacy of such knowledge requires a degree of insulation from profane influences. The scene often appears sacred because the practices it cultivates could be interrupted by interests that do not engage it with the gravity it thinks it requires. But then again, do we know what is a scene and what it is not in a way that permits us to approach such a diversity of examples with intelligence and discrimination? Or should we accept as our task the prospect of beginning to get our bearings about the scene as a social persistence by thinking through this usage in all of its richness and diversity? This leads me to start with some remarks on the grammar of scene, in order to rebuild parameters from its usage.

regularity The “Singles’ Bar” scene: the coming and going is as regular as the setting of the sun. Does the scene merely identify a site of recurrence, of regularity, of repeatable practice? But then it would seem to be rule governed (Bennett, 1964) in the way the flame attracts the moth. The occasioned character of the scene – doing seeing and being seen – suggests an element of desire more powerful than a restricted economy (Battaille, 1985), or better, it suggests that the tension released by this relationship – between the restricted and general economy of desire – is the very content of the scene. The ambiguity of the scene as a collective problem consists in part in the attempt to sort out the relation between instrumental and ceremonial elements in its doing of seeing and being seen. To engage the singles bar as a site of seeing (a sight) in the way we have discussed is not to visit as the idle onlooker who is seen seeing in a disengaged sense. Rather, what is called into play as the doing of reciprocal seeing is the need and desire for its persistence. If the scene mobilizes the desire for its perpetuity in its subject, this helps us distinguish between the idle onlooker (the one who “visits” the site as in the computer idiom) and the one who is engaged by the persistence of the form. Thus, even regularity does not strongly describe the subject who might need and visit the site – even “require” it as an item in a daily calendar – but would not be prepared to sacrifice for the scene and its persistence as a social form. This begins to open up the realm of politics and the scene:

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when push comes to shove, do I simply miss my corner café or am I prepared to sacrifice for it? This was implicitly the argument of Carl Schmitt against bourgeois politics and the ground for his measure of “true” commitment to country (Schmitt, 1996). Because the scene makes voyeurism, regularity, and even exhibitionism parasitical possibilities, it always puts into play the question of real rather than spurious commitment and of what it means to be its true rather than apparent subject. In this way, the scene always raises the question of the comfort of the idle onlooker and whether she should be accepted as a gesture of hospitality or made to feel as an indigestible outsider. This leads to the question of the extensiveness of the scene in relation to the life of the city.

extensiveness Note how a guidebook praises Dublin’s “accessible” gay and lesbian scene: The scene in Dublin has developed a good reputation precisely because it is so accessible, attractive, and manageable for visitors … it caters to most tastes and it still doesn’t take itself too seriously. Visitors to Dublin may be particularly struck by the sense that the lesbian and gay scene is integrated into the social life of the city to a much greater extent than is the case in, for example, Manchester and London; and the majority of venues are gay-friendly rather than exclusively lesbian or gay (Time Out, 1998, 178).

To what extent is the scene removed from or integral to the city? If every great city needs and has its gay scene, this still does not tell us about the social relation of the scene to the city. That is, how is the scene apart from or part of the city? Further, it is not self-evident that being part of the city is intrinsically “good” for the scene, since it might (as even the guide book suggests), “blunt the radical edge” of the scene (Time Out, 1998, 178). Does the extensiveness of the scene mean that it takes over the city to the point where the city and scene are indistinguishable (in the way that San Francisco is one gay city, or Las Vegas is identified with its gambling action)? On the other hand, does exclusiveness resonate so intimately with the character of scene that its “hospitality” to all tastes and visitors can rob it of its vigor and distinctive character?

m o r ta l i t y One crucial interpretive site where the question of the scene – its parameters and boundaries – comes alive is around the issue of becoming, that is, of coming-to-be and perishing. The evolution and decline of scenes is an object of fascination in collective life, for it is often thought

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that the inexorable fate of scenes, their volatility and ephemerality, confirms their inevitable link to fad and fashion. In this way, the mortality of scenes seems to testify to their frivolity, always marking the scene – like fashion or restaurants in New York – as something here today and gone tomorrow and, so, as too insubstantial to support a more enduring interest. The mortality of scenes is intimately linked to the history of cities in the way that Paris, New York, London, and Barcelona are marked by their golden ages which, in most cases, are periods in which “avantgarde” activity is concentrated at urban sites. Art scenes, for example, are often the legacy of great cities, expressions both of exemplary periods in the history of the city and of exemplary tensions and circuits of creative restlessness. Yet, the anecdotal ethnography of golden ages and historic urban scenes (Flanner, 1974; McAlmon with Boyle, 1984; Shattuck, 1979) often glosses or leaves as unmentioned the tension between the city and the scene. That is, if London today can mark itself by its Pan-African scene of bygone years incarnated in the figure of George Padmore, or its Bloomsbury scene of Fry, Woolf, and others, this leaves unsaid the stories of the tension between such settlements and the city. If cities tell their stories through their scenes in part, the accomplishments of scenes are often hard won and hard fought: there is perhaps an official history of scenes (New York’s Algonquin Hotel, Jean Cocteau’s circle,) and a darker, secret, covert history that is deposited in the fragmentary remains of witness testimony, or awaits recovery. Yet the mystery of such scenes, an enigma that awaits exploration, is their local character: Dorothy Parker and Jean Cocteau were locals who rarely strayed from their haunts (even Cocteau’s numerous travels testify to his stature as the exemplary Parisian). We need to think about how the scene enforces the “lived experience” of locality upon its committed few, just as they redefine the city by virtue of the scene. In this way, Socrates, Cocteau, Parker appear as locals, that is, as those who absorbed, dramatized, and objectified the experience of place. The tension between the city and the scene needs to be recovered and rewritten as the story of how such figures sacrificed themselves for their cities and were sacrificed by their city for its history. In each case, the accentuation of the excess of sociality fertilized the scene and was fertilized by it – the libidinal circuits of intoxicated sociality – makes each of these figures a sacrificial victim of and for the scene and shows how each scene needs the same for itself, its scapegoat. The issue of the mortality of the scene allows us to revisit the problem of the idle onlooker, since it provides a stronger alternative to the picture of the subject thought to be engaged only and exclusively by regularity. We could suggest the subject of the scene to be committed to its persistence as a social form in a way that brings the city into view

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because the persistence of the form is treated as integral to the perpetuity of the city. For example, imagine the one who says “I don’t need the singles’ bar because I am married” or “I don’t need the gay scene because I am heterosexual“or “I don’t need the music scene because I have a good sound system,” etc., in contrast to the one who could say “the city needs the scene regardless of whatever I am.” Could we treat the lover of the scene – in contrast to the non-lover in Plato’s idiom – to be one engaged by the problem of its persistence as one part of the question of the common good and its inevitable struggle with privatization? The question of the mortality of the scene raises a number of problems concerning its boundaries and its “exchanges” with the outside. Taking art as an example, we might ask if it can survive if its scenes come and go, that is, what relationship exists between the scenes which embody the form and the form itself, or is it a “category mistake” to think in this way? Can art flourish in the absence of scenes or is this a tautology as if there can be no art without art scenes? And the same holds for the city, that is, can a city have art in the absence of art scenes and vice versa, can a city have art scenes but no real art? When posed in this way, the social phenomenon of art causes us not only to reflect upon the relation of the scene to public space but also to remain focussed upon the grammar of scene. If we can imagine art scenes in the absence of art, we would need to ask, just what then is being practiced in the scene? Indeed, is this question not integral to any art scene that relentlessly engages the topic of the quality of its products in a way which always produces the accusation of the phony and of spurious art as a feature of the scene itself? And a city with art and no art scenes could look as if the art was practiced privately whether in stately mansions or studios, a city where artists and lovers of art never encounter one another. It is curious that an art scene might produce bad art and be good for the city just as a city in the face of its beautiful works might be unable to integrate them into its public life. This tells us that an art scene might not be what is called an “art world” (Becker, 1984) and that it might have nothing to do with the quality of art. This points to the interdependence implicit in any scene which could bring together lovers of the form. This would sharpen our sense of scene by pointing to its character as a way of staging an encounter between lovers of the form. In this sense, we need to ask after the implicit sense of collectivization integral to the scene and how it conjures up a conception of collective behavior.

c o l l e c t i v i z at i o n We still do not want to reduce the scene to a logic exemplified by the restricted economy as say, described by Goffman as a “presentation of

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self” (Goffman, 1967) because the scene makes reference to the strength of the desire for communality within collective life. Thus, there might be many writers but not a writing scene as in the following implication of Sartre’s contrast of American and European writers. The American writer has often practiced manual occupations before writing his books; he goes back to them. Between two novels, his vocation seems to be on the ranch, in the shop, in the city streets; he does not see literature as a means of proclaiming his solitude, but an opportunity of escaping it. He writes blindly, out of an absurd need to rid himself of his fears and anger … He has no solidarity with other writers; he is often separated from them by the length and breadth of the continent … he drifts continually between the working-class world where he goes to seek his adventures, and his middle class readers (Sartre, quoted in Kaplan and Roussin, 1994, 204).

The scene demands a certain kind of solidarity not necessarily between those who practice writing (in Sartre’s quote above) but among those who love writing. At least this begins to permit us to imagine a city with many writers and no writing scene. Indeed, the nature of the bond between those committed to the scene remains to be explored. The distinction between performer and audience internal to the scene could dissolve if all are performers vis-à-vis an “outside” that is external to the love of the art. Even more, the interdependencies which link members of an art world (publishers, agents, bookstores, media, readers, authors) as if a chain of influences presents the bond of exchange as if it was a decisive influence. In contrast, can we rethink the exemplary relationship of the scene, its special and distinctive form of solidarity? Can a scene depict stages of collectivization ranging from the aggregate of those linked loosely by implication of a common relation to shared resources, to an incipient community engaged in forming, shaping, and revising its identity as a collective?

t h e at r i c a l i t y The element of theatricality integral to the scene marks the importance of its site as an occasion for seeing: the scene is an occasion for seeing and being seen and, so, for doing seeing and being seen. Seeing and being seen is done at the scene. But to mention its occasioned character is to bring time as well as space to the grammar of scene. For if the scene is a site, a space for seeing and being seen, its occasioned character marks it as the site whose engagement is punctuated temporally as if a ceremony. The scene joins space and time for doing seeing and being seen. Can we say, scenes are neither simply spaces nor simply times but social ceremonies? If the

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trap of the scene is that one comes to view as being seen seeing, then its risk is that one can always appear instrumental. In terms of the logic of the scene, its restricted economy is voyeurism as if one can always appear motivated towards seeing as an unseen viewer. That seeing is also being seen rather than unseen puts into play the struggle of the subject with voyeurism as an interpretive trajectory that marks every scene: the struggle to do seeing and being seen – to be seen seeing and, so, to be absorbed in the action rather than an idle onlooker – marks its subject as exhibitionistic rather than voyeuristic, that is, as one who is actively seen seeing and, so, as engaged by the reciprocity of seeing as an act of mutual recognition. Exhibitionism describes the doing of seeing and being seen – the social engagement with such seeing – because it captures the reciprocity in the action of being seen seeing. The subject does not first see, and then, secondly, is seen seeing: rather to be seen seeing is the fusion of “both” seeing and being seen as one course of action (on the double contigency, see Parsons, 1951, 36–7). Scenes are typically linked to exhibition, just as the promenade, for example, describes not just families or couples out for a stroll as if unseen, but as doing seeing as being seen and so as doing self-exhibition. This means that the subject of the scene always works to shed her aura as a simple spectator by doing or exhibiting the engagement required as one who enjoys being seen seeing, that is, as one who enjoys immersion in the practice. Such a subject works to accomplish the reciprocity of coming-to-view as a social relationship or course of action that resists abstractedness (its potential to be incarnated as the disinterested view) in order to appear engaged by the mutuality of viewing. This is what it means to say of the subject of the scene that he works to be seen, not necessarily in the shallow sense, but to be seen seeing, that is, to be seen as engaged by the reciprocity of seeing. This begins to refer to the public character of scene, that it raises as interesting the thin line between the view and the gaze (Lacan, 1981, 67–97). If the scene is marked by the reciprocal engagement with seeing that it requires, it is also marked at the very same time by its capacity to evoke the deeper bond that grows from such reciprocity. For example, some department stores such as Bloomingdales or Ka De We in Berlin are often described as scenes, first, because exhibition as a “secondary” function is seen to supercede the primary function of shopping. But this could gloss a robust sense of shopping as exhibition, that is, as doing a promenade. This points to another interesting tension arising from the ambiguity of the scene: the tension between seeing (spectator) and being seen (participant) must always be managed in a way that makes its commitment to the doing of seeing and being seen visible in action. Thus, the nudist beach or celebrity hangout always

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protects its repute as a scene by resisting the “idle onlookers” while yet, perhaps, capitalizing on them as well (whereas adolescent Turkish boys might remain clothed at Berlin’s nudist pools and beaches, they make themselves apparent as those who are both external to the scene and internal by virtue of their very fascination, just as those who go to celebrity hangouts to gawk are part of the scene through their very idolatry). If theatricality raises the question of being external or internal to the scene, then it makes parasitism a permanent feature of the scene and the parasite a persistent type who lives off the commitment of others and whose typicality becomes incorporated into the scene – often proudly – as a sign of its allure (Serres, 1982). Here is where the fan, hanger-on, groupie, or even tourist becomes essential to scenes. Indeed, if the preoccupation with membership in this sense often marks scenes, it is not simply true of scenes reputed to be vulgar, since scenes of all types – even those thought to be limited to the most refined sensibilities (café society, the literary salon, artistic circles) – continuously test and debate the question of qualification and belonging, often making this very concern a favorite discursive topic.

transgression One problem theatricality raises then, is exposure, in exactly the sense intended by Goffman when he develops the vernacular sense of scene as infraction. However, there are situations often called “scenes,” in which an individual acts in such a way as to destroy or seriously threaten the polite appearance of consensus, and while he may not act simply in order to create such dissonance, he acts with the knowledge that this kind of dissonance is likely to result. The common-sense phrase “creating-a-scene” is apt because, in effect, a new scene is created by such disruptions (Goffman, 1967, 210).

Part of the excitement of the scene is its institutionalization of the expectation of the faux pas in which “polite consensus” concerning membership itself and the qualification to belong are endangered by a disruption. Perhaps the strength of the scene is directly related to the danger of exposure which is commensurate with it in a way that makes any scene an occasion when the right to be there might be called into question. Does the challenge of the scene not make reference to the risk released by this prospect of exposure, a prospect that animates the scene and intensifies its liveliness as the occasion it is? What I am trying to show in this exercise is that exhibitionism does not have to be

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(treated as) shallow and that the question of the scene vividly raises the problematic nature of this border – shallow or deep? – as its subject matter. The theatricality of the scene resonates with its character as a performance. A good question to consider to which we shall continuously return concerns the nature of what is being performed: not just shopping, art, poetry readings, music, dance, and the like but seeing and being seen. We must make a central place for this very exhibitionism as the material of the performance affirmed by any scene as its content. What these reflections suggest is that if transgression is essential to the scene, it is not a transgressiveness of doctrine but transgression that lies in the nature of performance itself. The scene is transgressive not because it celebrates “countercultural” values or “lifestyles,” or marginal, esoteric doctrines or even subversive philosophies, but because its transgression resides in its exhibitionism and in the spectacle of its claim to mark itself off from the routinization of everyday life. It is such an understanding that permits us to speak about the courthouse scene of any major city or of any restaurant as a scene. That the scene is often shameless in its flamboyance always marks it implicitly as an opportunity for travesty. This is to say that it is performance that is transgressive as when a confrontational political strategy that was called by the New Left “UpAgainst-The-Wall-Mother-Fucker” in the 1960s, makes a doctrinal exchange into a performance. Performance is transgressive in its very potential to create exposure or humiliation even in its most mundane shape such as calling a spectator to perform (to sing, to recite poetry) in a way that dissolves the border between audience and performer. Performance challenges self-containment and in so doing, saturates the scene with an aura of danger. Performance brings into focus the passivity of the spectator by giving it body for all to see. Performance makes it impossible to sustain the invisibility of the body, making the unseen seer someone to be seen. Thus, to speak of formal occasions of sociability (“high life”) as scenes is to concede how they are fraught with the danger of exposure and humiliation provided by their very formality, and that this, in part, is the ground of excitement in anticipating their occasion. Thus, it is correct to speak of scenes as incidents as long as we recognize how danger derives from the bringing of something private to view, where what is most private is the illusion of the impermeable border. If the ecstatic character of the scene resides, in part, in its promise to transgress the routine of self-containment and all that this requires, the scene also suggests another kind of danger. That the scene is a site of collective practice means that it brings to view in the city the force of

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collective single-mindedness; the appearance of the crowd dominated by the mechanical frenzy of a uniform and disciplined pursuit of quality. In the current idiom, the scene evokes the sign of tribal hegemony because its practice always means the rule of a specialized solidarity at that site. This is to say that the danger of the scene is both within and without: the danger it promises “within” in the incident of exposure to those made ecstatic by this very trial of qualification, and the danger it evokes “without” by its solidarity and concentration to those who are dispersed and uncollected. The scene always reminds the city of the special nature of its project and of the absorption it requires and, so, always raises as a concern the question of the status of the project – of human projects – and of their worth.

s p e c ta c l e That the scene involves a project in some sense allows us to resist the easy identification of spectacle and scene. Apparently the matches of the ancient Roman gladiators constituted a scene in that city, bringing together audiences voracious for the excitement and “entertainment” that such trials represented (Barrow, 1993). If the games were theatrical in that sense, amusing, a source of fascination, an outlet for a restless population, we might still ask after the kind of project they represented? If the scene is more than a site of regular recurrence (the opera, the bowling league), must it not also be a site that is more than a theatrical focus (the cock fight, the race track, the casino)? To ask such questions is not to seek to legislate the meaning of scene by disqualifying some and elevating others but, rather, to point to the ambiguity of scene as a collective representation in a way that we (who theorize) must take into account. Any consideration of the scene invites us to reflect upon the borders of spectacle and project, of fascination and seduction, and the ways in which their clarification evokes a collective problem. In many of our cities new urban projects for stores, areas, entertainment complexes and the like are designed as engineering feats in which the spectacle of construction is intended to absorb the user by affirming the collective mastery of nature. If such projects always implicitly offer themselves as sites of collectivization, the fascination they mobilize threatens to arrest communalization through the inertia of spectacle and its paralyzing force. Yet the best architecture promises to surpass fascination through the scenic promise of its space. If every space struggles for emplacement, it is in the sense that it works to overcome the fascination which its spectacle induces as if it is a mighty struggle to make possible the seductiveness of its promise as a scene.

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In the best sense, every project struggles to be a scene, to be other than a curiosity, to be more than an object of fascination, in order to seduce its participants, to bring them under the spell of the community it envisions as its scene (Baudrillard, 1991). That the scene promises seduction as an overcoming of fascination applies not only to the interior landscape and topography of the city but to the city as a whole. The city thrives by virtue of its scenes not as a container stands to what is contained but essentially: in part, the diverse and heterogeneous opportunities to be seduced begin to mark a great city as memorable. It sounds as if the scene confirms something about the associational life of the city, the ways its web of groups, societies, and sects endow the city with a fraternal spirit, but this imagines the scene as a Gemeinschaft, whereas, in contrast, it is the mix of Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft and their impossible reconciliation that makes for the lure and excitement of the scene. We might think of Democracy in America where de Tocqueville discussed the rich associational life of America in a way that showed its continuous suspicion towards the scene (Tocqueville, 1945). That is, regardless of its rotary clubs, American legions, professional associations, small theatres, ethnic organizations (or group therapy networks), Tocqueville’s America feared seduction and the transformative power of the (urban) scene. It is in the movement between fascination and seduction that the power of the scene resides, for the scene lives as both promise and unfullfillment. We can say that the essence of the scene is longing, perhaps for the impossible, but a longing whose possibility is secured by memory of what is thought to be actual. Ledrut is right in this way when he calls the city an image much like a “myth or literary work” (Ledrut, 1986, 222). The scene opens up the conversation on the dream work of the city, how it arouses dreaming, the desire to be seduced by the present – the dream of the eternal present – in a way that can make it enduring. It is through the idea of scene that we can begin to recover the notion of the great city as exciting because such an approach leads us to rethink the interior dream of Gesellschaft, the dream that we might be strong enough as Hegel says, to cancel the opposition (between Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft) and to preserve the difference, that is, to dream the dream of Gesellschaft (that a society can be memorable, that this present can live in time).

the original urban scene From all accounts the original urban scene was organized around the philosophical exchanges that inspired the circle of Socrates and his fol-

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lowers. Most types of philosophizing do not issue in scenes, so what is interesting about the example of the Socratic circle is that by pointing to what an activity such as philosophy might need if it is to qualify as a scene, it can direct us to the limits of scene for any practice. Certainly, philosophical doctrines such as the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle have spawned groups, weekly meetings, and associations of all sort, but Socrates (and some few other philosophers) have become identified with scenes rather than social circles. Using the example of Socrates, we might ask what qualifies us to speak of such a social circle as a scene? First, he worked to demonstrate the indispensability of the city for the practice, as shown by his critique of the country. In that way he made the activity in which the scene specialized (in this case, philosophy) identical with the city. Secondly, philosophy was not abstractly urban but practiced at a site which became regularized as a place, the agora in which the activity was seen and done. The urbanity of the practice was occasioned as a collective practice, oriented to in its theatricality as an emblem of the city with its range of connotations. Forever, when we think of the origin of philosophy, we think of urbanity, and we think of the setting of philosophy as a marketplace existing as a theatrical site in the city. Yet, despite the essential urbanity of the scene, it existed in constant tension with the very city whose precincts it inhabited, a tension that materialized in the accusation, trial, and death of Socrates. This tension between the scene and the very city it exemplifies not only shows the dangerousness of the scene to the city but confirms how that danger was disseminated through the work of idle onlookers who visited the scene as uncommitted witnesses to the activity, that is, as spectators who wished to be entertained. Thus, the first book of The Republic shows how part of the work of the scene involves distinguishing idle onlookers from friends of the practice, that is, the work of figuring out everyone’s grounds for being there in that place. The first book shows how the content of the scene is devoted in large part to the question of qualification (as in the query “who is qualified or not to philosophize?”) in a way that could represent the “living experience” of the scene as an initiation rite (just as the elenchus is a ritual). But then a most important recognition follows. If the scene is devoted in practice to sorting out the question of qualification, and if it engages this matter in a marketplace, then it practices in public something most private (in the way that a discriminating concern for quality is private). This helps distinguish the scene from a cult or sect that withdraws from the world in a gesture of collective privatization

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because the scene chooses to do its business in public (even its business of making itself exclusive). Is the scene done in public for the reason that it needs to escape domestic space and its rule over the private? How and why does the scene make private matters public? It might be better to say that the scene provides for concerted enjoyment of discrimination, that is, it provides a place for the collective in some special sense (for the collective engaged by the special pursuit and practice of quality and qualification with respect to some matter). But then, if the scene resists easy designation as a sect or cult, how does it stand as a social movement? Is the social movement a scene? It appears that in the way social movements are typically discussed, its idle onlooker (or the one Communist Party members used to derogate as the “adventurer”) is the very one who would engage it as a scene. We might ask what typical meaning a social movement would need to be invested with to be seen as a scene? Here, we could imagine the social movement treated as an occasion per se rather than an instrumental association (and then, to paraphrase Wittgenstein’s comment on the talking lion, would it be a social movement)? The ambiguity released by this border is surely part of the discourse of scene. In chapter 1 we noted how Heidegger speaks of place as a process, an event such as making room, opening a region, setting up a seat for “reiterable possibilities” of future emplacement. Here, he brings place into contact with what we have come to think of as assumptions or presuppositions, with the local constraints on the actor, through the notions of nearness which brings about what he calls neighborhood. He says of neighborhood that it means “dwelling in nearness … in the nearness of neighborhood, place is particularized and made intimate, face-to-face” (Casey, 1997, chapter 11). That is, place is the scene of the encounter. Place becomes specific in the scene which it constructs and inhabits. If a scene is the place for bringing to view the affiliations which bind people as a collective of co-speakers as if they are dwelling in nearness to one another, as if together they incarnate a structure of mutual recognition, then any scene makes concrete and specific – brings to view to be seen – the intimacy of the inhabitants of a region of speech and, so, in its being done, is a kind of emplacement, a way of making room for its talk and, as Heidegger says, “that gives us room and allows us to do something … the seat that gives us room to experience how matters stand” (Casey, 1997, 282). Neighborhood is then a metaphor for the desire out of which such “making room” or emplacement unfolds, for the ways it settles at sites which it constructs and inhabits as scenes of the encounter which is place and, in this habitation, makes specific its structure of mutual recognition (Kolb, 1986).

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p r i vat e a n d / i n p u b l i c One of the implications of Heidegger’s formulation of place as creating a clearing or neighborhood for those with affinities is that it offers us ways to begin exploring the tension between the private and the public in the scene. It is on such a basis that Raban developed his conception of the city as a coexistence of strangers in two directions: the (public) accentuation of theatricality of which we earlier spoke and the proliferation of coteries that takes shape in an extension of privatization. This conjunction of tribalism and theatricality that both Raban and (by implication) Heidegger locate begins to situate the city as a site of communicative energy where private affinities are collectivized as a shared practice that is enjoyable simply by virtue of being shared. The scene makes sharing enjoyable as if it is a private experience, and it makes the very private orientation to quality and discrimination something to be shared. Raban speaks of this phenomenon: Intimate private groups compacted around a core of symbolic objects and ideas are very serious symptoms of a metropolitan condition (Raban, 1988, 119).

But this has to be developed in relation to the theatricality discussed earlier, for, as Heidegger implies, the scene makes a place for intimacy to dwell in nearness, it makes room for an encounter as something to be seen as a seat of reiterable possibilities. The scene makes the intimacy of neighbors something to be seen as fecund rather than moribund, as the seat of possibilities for and in something vital. This is to say that the scene seems to make a place for intimacy and for its sharing as something creative. Why would this be an urban phenomenon unless intimacy was imperiled? We might suggest now that the scene is the city’s way of demonstrating the vitality of intimacy, of showing that its “lived experience” of sharing and being shared can be seen and oriented to as its own specific form of creativity. Is the scene not the city’s way of making a place for intimacy in collective life? And again, this speaks against the easy identification of the social movement with scene: does the social movement not necessarily run roughshod over intimacy, privacy, quality, and its deep internal diversity (the necessity required by the purpose of a united front)? The fundamental ambiguity of the collective representation of intimacy animates an interesting problem in urban life, for intimacy can be seen as both or either life enhancing or deadly since the solidarities it affirms can be understood as threatening or inviting. Just as the Socratic circle was condemned for its corruption of youth (in part by the sheer weight of its solidity in space), the circle was also praised and

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emulated as an affiliation worth pursuing. One way to think about the pleasure of being private in public is to recover its strongest case in the notion of solitude and this requires us to recollect Baudelaire’s intuition that solitude is accentuated as enjoyment in the crowd (Baudelaire, 1972, 400). What this poet showed is that solitude is accentuated at the moment it is experienced as solidarity with the species, as the thrill of being both part of, and apart from, the crowd. Despite his sympathy for the urban scene, it is just this objectification of shared (private) intimacy that Raban has trouble seeing as anything other than ostentatious in a way that reduces theatricality to something very negative (Raban, 1988, 27), as if the restaurant, for example, is a stage in the most shallow sense. In his review of two books on the “invention” of the restaurant in France, Gopnik advances upon such an interpretation with the same sure stroke he uses to show the limits of formulations that describe such a public ritual as either false consciousness (the “new” social history) or as a means for developing “communicative competence.” Gopnik says that such academic views simplify the “lived experience” as a mode of being in public, by treating it either as a distracted escape from the sight of social inequities, or as a seed of the dialogical impulse. Such interpretations look away from the social phenomenon of eating-in-the restaurant as being private in public: “Loneliness is not the ‘price’ of liberty but part of the profit we take from it. The restaurant’s moral glory, like that of the library and the department store – another nineteenth century bourgeois invention – is its semi-private state, for semi-ness is the special half-tint of bourgeois societies” (Gopnik, 2000, 86). What he means is that something most private such as intimacy (whether being alone by oneself or with one or more others) is intensified, indeed, stimulated, by being in the presence of strangers: “As important as finding people you have things in common with is learning to live in pleasure alongside people with whom you don’t” (Gopnik, 2000, 86). If public life invites us to enjoy being with others in an undemanding way, the public would be best conceived not as an incipient dialogue but as the erotic intensification of what is most intimate and exclusive that is produced by the activity of viewing and being viewed by the other. Coming-to-view in this way heightens the enjoyment of solitude because our self-concentration is animated by the challenge of the view of the other. To understand the scene’s involvement with the stranger requires a rethinking that identifies strangeness with uncanniness rather than with the other person who is unknown. A group of customers in a restaurant who are unknown to each other is not subject to the spell of alterity, for what is most strange is the kind of incalculability released by what Bataille speaks of as the expectation of loss (Bataille, 1985). Strangeness formulates the risk integral to the mediation of adventure, fear, and loss. Eat-

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ing out brings into view the risk of confirmation or loss in any relationship, even for the moment, and this is both its pleasure and danger. The interpretive exchange between scene and spectacle has made it easy to identify the scene as a species of false consciousness as Gopnik suggests when its private pleasures are treated as its sine qua non. But then, such a view is forever uncomfortable with pleasure and especially with pleasure that seems exclusive. Such views might treat pleasure-inpublic as ostentatious, that is, as looking away from others in pain or, even worse, as showing off by invidiously affirming one’s good fortune at the expense of the other. Further, the apparent idleness of public rituals such as eating, digressive walking and lounging has been denigrated as a choice against doing something serious, as if the lived experience of entertainment should best be analyzed as a choice (Gopnik speaks of the view of “eating for power”) or through a calculation of the “content” of what is watched (think of Adorno on jazz). Such rumblings in the discourse of scene always play off an aversion to both its artifice and intimacy in public. Then again, being stimulated by the presence of strangers can be treated as perverse and/or decadent (as in some interpretations of the flaneur, e.g., Buck-Morss, 1986). In some way, being-alone-in-public is treated as a failure of gravity, a choice against (or a flight from) dialogue. It is as if solitude is treated as an unfortunate adaptation to the state of being without friends. Ultimately, the reputation of the scene always risks being tarnished by an ascetic condemnation of (what Simmel called) the play form of intimacy and often in the shape of the suspicion that the subject of the scene is an unwitting dupe of capitalist exploitation. But would not an analysis of the scene have to calculate that system of desire – what capitalism knows and takes for granted – that empowers it to imagine the scene as a market and the market as a scene? As C. Wright Mills so eloquently pointed out (through the idea of the “power elite” as itself a scene), capitalism and everything else is immersed in the appeal of the scene (that is, we have a long literature that confirms the ways in which “power elites” and powerless enclaves work assiduously to scrape together resources for the scene, that collective life is forever in the grip of this desire). And if it is this allure that we need to understand, can this not be the beginning of an analysis of excitement in the city and its various guises as the drive for sweetness of living that animates capitalism in all of its shapes?

political economy of the scene Is there a political economy of the scene? Certainly, the city is a marketplace, the ebb and flow of its energies is continuously organized by

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the objective of doing business and the imaginative structure that inspires such enterprise. The relentless circulation of capital is a constant search for markets, a search that threatens (in some eyes) to dissolve all local constraints. Scenes are calculated and reconfigured as opportune occasions for investment and the creation of consumers. Scenes are made and unmade under the insatiable drive for maximizing profit and minimizing loss, the drive of the logic of restricted economy. Of course this desire to market the scene and vice versa, to make markets into scenes, expresses the concerted revenge of the idle onlooker upon the city, the attempt to make its creativity profitable. If the scene appears to be made by the lover, the dialectic between the lover and the nonlover is integral to its inner life. This gesture is part of the discourse of the scene; just as the fan, groupie, gawker, tourist, and eccentric must be part of its aura, so too must business and commerce. The mix of commerce and creativity marks the city and its scenes. The entrepreneurial and corporate absorption in the scene is integral to the engagement which it mobilizes, the fascination that it induces. The scene charms the collective and, in arousing contempt, covetousness, or plans for “exploitation,” makes the very creativity of the city into a collective value. The vitality of the scene can always become a commodity. But then we would need to ask how the scene deals with the problem of its charm – its allure – as an object of desire in collective life? That is, how does it continue to do business as the scene which it is? This will cause us to explore and to research (in a way which we can only intimate now), the connection between the scene and the project.

a c r e at i v e c i t y A city makes it possible to do the sharing of private matters in a number of ways, that is, to make a place for the sharing of private matters. Because scenes are distributed throughout the city, they induce people to explore territorial boundaries. Scenes challenge the containment of people in territories and of territories themselves. Further, each scene always promises to become the nucleus of Bohemian activity, or of a practice that in some sense dramatizes the aesthetic, leisurely, and playful character of a mundane sphere. In the city Bohemias are created (literary salons, cafés, circles) and then not merely (or only) transformed into opportunities for consumption (“commodified bohemians” in Derek Wynne’s words) but often domesticated and made over into mainstream activities. The Moulin Rouge of Paris, immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec, is a paradigmatic example of the notorious spot which was transformed into a spectacle by its very success, the notoriety of its transgressive clientele and scintillating conduct becoming the

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source of attraction for visitors whose presence drove away the originals. The trajectory of scenes is often accompanied by the lament of originals who have either deserted or been deserted because of the very popularity of the scene. Each scene has within itself the potential to begin as a charismatic space and to become habituated over time, reconfigured as a normal space in a way that threatens to leave no trace of its original energies. If cities such as New York and Paris are marked by the rise and fall of scenes, this volatility testifies less to the fickleness of the city and its inhabitants than to its creativity. What such trajectories say about a city is that this is a place where scenes are regularly made and unmade and, so, a place where birth continues: this city lives! The presence of scenes, despite their mortality, means that the city continuously breeds the collective desire to represent shared intimacy in ways that are situated as special, particular, and exclusive. That the city breeds the celebration of intimacy means that the culture of the city is located as much in its topography of scenes as in its formal institutions of “high art” such as the ballet, opera, theatre district, museums, and galleries. One way of understanding the scene despite its nod towards exclusiveness is that it expresses the voice of the people. But then again, scenes are not simply expressions of “popular culture” (think of Bloomsbury or the “charmed circle” of the Algonquin Hotel) since their celebration is typically directed to the exclusive affirmation of specific quality as the bond of solidarity. Through its scenes the city represents its desire for inhabitation that is both communal and pluralistic on the one hand and, on the other, exclusive, special, and intimate.

s u p p ly a n d d e m a n d Could a tyrant come along and oversee the creation of many scenes on the grounds that such play will pacify and lull the people by distracting them from “serious” political activity and dissent (as if scenes are inherently frivolous)? Or better: in a mass society are scenes simply ways of honoring the multitudinous preferences and differences of degree that animate people? Then scenes are created by the abundant supply of marginal choices, propensities, and needs that characterize a population. This describes the city of New York in Cynthia Ozick’s following excerpt: Any of them can venture out to a collectivity of taste and imagination unconstrained by geography. Jazz and blues and night-life aficionados, movie buffs, gays, rap artists, boxing and wrestling zealots, singles, esoteric restaurant habitués, Central Park joggers, marathon runners, museum addicts, lovers of

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music or theatre or dance, lonelyhearts, shoppers, hotel weekenders, barflies, churchgoers, Talmud enthusiasts, Bronx-born Tibetan Buddhists, students of Sufism, kabbalists, theosophists, voice or ski coaches, S.A.T. and L.S.A.T. crammers, amateur painters, union members, members of boards and trustees, Internet devotees, fans of the Yankees or the Mets or the Jets or the Knicks, believers in psychics and tea-leaf readers, street walkers and their pimps, antiques fanciers, art collectors, philanthropists, professors of linguistics, lexicographers, copy editors, librarians, kindergarten teachers, crossing guards, wine votaries, storefront chiropractors, Chinese or Hebrew or Arabic calligraphers – all these and conceivably more can emerge from any locality to live, if only for a few hours, in a sympathetic neighborhood of affinity. Expertise and idiosyncrasy and burning desire burn and burn in New York: a conflagration of manifold, insatiable, tumultuous will (Ozick, 1999, 156).

To this we might have added, wild and crazy makers-of-lists! Ozick parodies the idea of scene as in the cliché “New York has many scenes because New York has many freaks.” But, if it is true that New York has many eccentrics, what is open to question is how and to what extent eccentricity figures in the making of a scene. From all I have said it should be clear that this is an idle onlooker’s view of the scene since a scene is business too serious to be left to eccentrics, and, at least, eccentricity needs to be disciplined in order to become part of the scene. In fact, such discipline points again to the problem of dealing with the idle onlooker who takes on the guise of the freak in this case. Every scene needs to deal with the freaks that would compromise its purity. The heterogeneity of the city means that the scene will always be vulnerable to “freaks,” that is, to those who treat it as an opportunity to express eccentricity. This means that the scene is always faced with the problem of defending its reputation, of demonstrating a gravity of purpose in the face of its appeal to eccentricity. Note how Hegel translates the problem of dealing with idle onlookers, which in the vernacular is often spoken of as the scene’s problem of dealing with freaks, into the abiding and constant problem of self-formation. That is, far from being a sanctuary of eccentrics, the scene must moderate “peculiarities” and especially the infantile allure of the idea of peculiarity as something essential. Individual souls are distinguished from one another by an infinite number of contingent modifications. But this infinity belongs to the spurious kind of infinity. One should not therefore rate the peculiarities of people too highly. On the contrary, the assertion that the teacher should carefully adjust himself to the individuality of each of his pupils, studying and developing it, must be treated as idle chatter … the peculiarities of children are tolerated within the family circle;

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but at school there begins a life subject to general regulations, to a rule which applies to all. It is a place where mind must be brought to lay aside its idiosyncrasies, to know and to desire the universal, to accept the general existing culture. This reshaping of the soul, this alone is what education means (Hegel, 1971, 51–2).

From this angle the scene does nothing to exacerbate eccentricity; on the contrary, it is a place where eccentricities are shaped and “put aside” in favor of a commitment to the universal. In this way, Hegel gives the scene a kind of integrity or dignity. The scene stands for the imposition of the universal upon those who – in their immature ways – see it only as a sanctuary for the exercise of peculiarity (as a means to that end). In this vein, peculiarity begins to appear as an infantile idea of the private, an idea that stands, for the self-indulgence tolerated, at best, in domestic circles. In contrast, he suggests we understand the scene as part of the great “civilizing process” of the city (Elias, 1978), a process that invites peculiarities to be “put aside” by encouraging commitment to the “universal” embodied in the practice it affirms, that is, to the idea which lies behind the art of sharing in public some concern for quality. No matter how peculiar the scene appears to idle onlookers – for example, the sado-masochist scene – it stands for the universal, that is, for the lived experience or course of action which it is. No matter whether we agree or disagree with this, Hegel’s striking formulative challenge brings out a tension residing at the innermost core of the scene and the endemic concern with corruption, with compromise of purpose, that is integral to its discourse. This question forever haunts the scene, concerning its dialectic of purity and impurity. Perhaps a better way to think of this is to remind ourselves that scenes correlate less with eccentricity and its supply or abundance than with appetites (as in “you can get anything in New York”). This means not only that New York is a place where everyone can achieve satisfaction but also a place where anyone and everyone can find affiliation, can bond with someone in a shared practice. At first, the availability of everything and anything in New York suggests the illegitimate market in a way that reduces the scene, just as does its equation with egocentricity. Yet the subject of the scene is limited neither to the freak or addict because the abundance which the city offers is its affiliative potential, its supply of shared intimacy. That this may never materialize is not important if we understand the scene of the city as the site of the dream: the city is a scene by virtue of the promise it offers for its place to be a site of mutual recognition. Note how Valerie Steele’s formulation of Balzac’s love of Paris captures the scenic character of its heterogeneity in a much more robust way than Ozick’s treatment of New York’s diversity.

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Every capital has its poem … where it is most particularly itself. The boulevards are today what the Grand canal was for Venice … what Regent Street is for London … (But) none is comparable to the boulevards of Paris … In Regent Street (there is) always the same Englishman and the same black suit, or the same Macintosh! … The Grand Canal is a cadaver … while in Paris! … Oh! in Paris, there is liberty of intelligence, there is life! A strange and fruitful life … an artistic and amusing life of contrasts … drunkards, grisettes, notaries, tailors … friends, enemies (Balzac, quoted in Steele, 1988, 143).

If the private sphere identifies the diversity among special and particular engagements with some quality that differentiates the people of the city, then, in bringing its people into the open, Paris invites them to perform their differences in public. To say that this city is a scene is to say that it makes its public space into a theatre, it makes its inhabitants into performers by inviting them to show and to share their diverse and differentiated relationships to quality. The place of Paris stands out alone and distinctive as a city different from other places only because it exacerbates the diversity of its types, and more specifically, only because it brings such diversity into the open, exhibiting it in its streets and spaces as that variety which is uniquely its own. In making its diversity a show (rather than managing it in the way of many tepid cities), Paris actually creates pride of place through its shamelessness. It is only because this city of Paris can arouse its types to come into the open to make the common space their own, to sacrifice the containment of their private spaces as a way of exhibiting their variation, that the city of Paris can display itself to the other places as a city unique and special. The irony of the great city increasing its stature by making a spectacle of itself, is perhaps what begins to allow us to understand the city itself as a scene. Such observations certainly tie into Simmel’s discussion of the blasé attitude of the metropolis (Simmel, 1950) but in an altogether different way than typically supposed. Instead of standing for the alienation of the metropolis, why not conceive of the indifference to the spectacle of diversity to be the city’s way of letting the scene be, that is, of resisting the temptations of either condemning or embracing it mindlessly? This city would not terrorize the scene for its marginality, nor again gawk at its spectacle in the way dwellers stare transfixed by construction work in progress or at the site (sight) of photo shoots of models or of filming in progress on its streets.

s c e n e s a n d s o c i a l f o r m at i o n s In London, when I stayed at the place of a friend near Gloucester road, I used to visit a small café frequented mainly by Arab men. They came to

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it regularly every day at intervals, seeming to know one another in the way of habitués and nothing more. For them, and I guess me too, this place was a spot. Very different is the collective that intermittently mobilizes around an activity such as cooking, swing dancing, or other “skills” (stock investment, language learning) which is more like a social circle bound together around a task or perhaps a person. Typically spots have the security of a site whereas circles often invest time searching for sites at which to meet. The coterie seems to be a bit of both, more personal than the spot and perhaps more enduring and passionate than the circle, unified more around the spirit and hospitality of a central figure than either the space of the spot or the functional activity of the circle. Coteries seem to have a charismatic aura. Strong teachers who often work to transform their classes from spots (drop-in centres) or circles (associations unified by the “function” of transmitting information) to coteries are typically derogated for making their teaching into a “cult of personality,” whereas they might be seen as trying to resist the mechanization of teaching (and indeed, many projects) by transforming it into an occasion in ways that require passing through the stage of coterie. If we ask how it is, with examples such as the bordello depicted in Jean Genet’s play The Balcony, we might think in related ways about urban clubs, “performance venues,” or even subscription series. But then perhaps spots, circles, and coteries only become scenic when they publicize their intimacy through dramaturgical ceremonies much like the transvestite balls depicted in Paris Is Burning. Or again, we would not call a street festival on its face a scene unless we could provide for it as part of the kind of incipient imaginative structure discussed in this paper. This reminds us that we are not free to speak in any way whatsoever about the things of the social world, that we must take responsibility for our declarations through interpretive work that brings to view our relation to the ambiguity of language and action. We then note the thematic running throughout this imaginative structure that connects the space to time through the idea of making it an occasion. This occasioning of the space is part of what we mean by its emplacement, its making space into a place. The desire for the scene plays off the collective concern for eventfulness in ways that highlight as part of the urban experience, the search for renewal through the critical moment. Nothing apocalyptic is implied here for the scene appears integral to the imaginative structure of the city as it strives to make this present a memorable moment and, thus, part of its ongoing and revisable biography. The scene accomplishes its work by making a site the occasion of a project. In this respect, Lacan tells a story of how, as a young man in an effort to escape his abstract life by engaging something practical and wordly, he accompanied some fishermen at work on the sea in Brittany.

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An individual known as Petit-Jean … pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can … And Petit-Jean said to me – Do you see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you! The point of this little story, as it had occurred to my partner, the fact that he found it so funny and I less so, derives from the fact that, if I am told a story like that one, it is because I, at that moment – as I appeared to those fellows who were earning their livings, with great difficulty, in the struggle with what was for them a pitiless nature – looked like nothing on earth. In short, I was rather out of place in the picture (Lacan, 1981, 96).

That is, Lacan’s interpretation stresses how his being out of place occurred by virtue of his appearing as an idle onlooker to those who were engaged in a project. A scene, as it gathers strength, makes those who are idle and detached appear out of place. This reminds us that a scene is always a project and, as such, makes the encounter with place a test for all those who fall under its spell. Lacan, though charmed by the project, fascinated to a point by its capacity to transport him, was not recognized by and in the project. Is this the danger of any scene – to play at your own risk?

conclusion We could say, paraphrasing Bataille, that the scene destroys the subject’s relation to utility in a gesture of sacrificial violence, revitalizing the connection to intimacy that the focus on utility always imperils (Bataille, 1989). Yet this interpretation minimizes the status of the scene as itself a commodity which intensifies the subject’s immersion in and access to a system of desire, enlarging social networks and access to information. The scene’s fusion of art and commodity, of pleasure and function, reaffirms the two-sided nature of its engagement, as both a way of doing business and as an exciting departure from the routines of doing business, making pleasure functional and functional relations pleasurable. In this way, the scene imitates the economy of the city through its functional methods of association and classification while at the very same time travestying this functionality by investing togetherness with the excitement of its contagiousness. The scene – never a community in the sense of finality – is a work in progress where being with or among others is a constantly evolving open question that brings to view the intimacy of social life as an unending problem to solve.

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7 Materialism

i nt roduc ti on Cities are reputed to be materialistic; as centres for the concentration of capital, they are said to be ruled by materialism and, so, special only by virtue of their material powers. Yet cities typically strike us as singular because of the indelible spirit they are reputed to show. If cities impress us as both material and ideal, as both matter and spirit, can we begin to unravel this relationship to make it more intelligible? Baudelaire calls great cities “capitals of the civilized world” (Baudelaire, 1972). This image makes problematic in important ways the dialectical relationship between city and civilization, a relationship mediated by the conception of the capital and its two-sided ambiguity. This two-sidedness reminds us that it is the fate of the city to be, among other things, a commodity. Indeed, the value of the city and its centrality guarantees that among the many uses to which it is put will be the exchange value that it can generate for those who engage it. In this chapter, I will consider how the engagement with the city is grounded in a system of desire mediated by what Max Weber called “the origin of the Western bourgeoisie class and its peculiarities” (Weber, 1930, 24), an imaginative structure informed by a skepticism towards the past that releases and stimulates an excited absorption in the present and the hope of its continuation into the future, as an orientation distinguishing modernity and its indeterminacy in ways that are expressed in both innovative local commerce and the transgressions that travesty it, marking each city as a spectacle of opportune dissembling and, so, as a site offering the promise of revitalized desire. I propose that cities are each marked in particular ways through the “local peculiarities” of their bourgeoisie and particularly as these take shape

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in the tensions between commerce and bohemianism that organize the basic ambiguity of this class towards productivity as suffered in an exemplary way by the petite bourgeoisie. The two-headed city as both a work of art and a commodity, as constantly dissolving in ways that undermine determination, remains an achievement of objective culture in Simmel’s sense (Simmel, 1971), but an achievement whose incalculable use includes whatever is made of it, including the capacity to see its beauty as profitable and, reciprocally, to see its opportunities for profit as in some sense beautiful. In this sense, the symbolic order of the city exists in accordance with Spinoza’s observation: “Different men can be effected in different ways by one and the same object, and one and the same man can be effected by one and the same object in different ways at different times” (Spinoza, 1992, 111, Proposition 51). The ambiguity of the city as such an object of desire is constantly being worked out in ways that are local and palpable. That the city is a marketplace is a recurrent motif in the study of cities, causing us to reflect on the culture of the marketplace. Today if we are instructed that the study of the city must retain hold on the idea of the economic grounds of urban culture (real-estate development, gentrification, economic polarization, consumption, residential gradients and segregation, corporate incursion), as if economy controls or determines the culture of the city, we might think against this view by treating it as a voice that is part of the discourse on the city but not its whole story. The effort to theorize the materialist city does not deny materialism, but yet can only put it into play by recovering materialism itself as part of a symbolic order and imaginative structure in which problems are posed and solved, and propositions offered and rebutted in the service of a dream of sweetness of living and the good life. Indeed, the effort to theorize materialism dare not deny its various appearances in everyday life as a cliché because it is from such a beginning that its inquiry and research proceeds, but always in a way that disrupts these images in order to recover their place in the discourse. This is because the market itself is a symbolic order and imaginative structure that confers meaning upon all of its objects, values, and desires, structuring it in accord with the realistic vision of social structure which it typically represents as unconditional.

w o r l d e c o n o m i c f o rc e s People typically speak about the power of world economic forces to shape everyday life and cities do not appear to be exempt from such a relentless process as groups and individuals reel somewhat like bowling

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pins in the path of an unmoved mover. Whenever initiative is assumed to intervene in the process, it is typified weakly either as a function of corporate machinations and decision-making occurring in some anonymous space, as formulaic entrepreneurial activity that mechanically acts out the process in opportune ways under a logic of optimization, or finally, in the shape of powerless local replies that can only sustain the inevitable march of such a system. In his review of the tradition of novel writing about capitalism from Frank Norris’s The Octopus to Robert Ludlum, James Surowieki notes of the novel that he thinks penetrates the secret of capitalism: What distinguishes it is Norris’ recognition that the railroad triumphs not because of evil acts but because of the imperativeness of the market. “Railroads build themselves,” the railroad’s president says at one point, “where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply … you are dealing with forces when you are speaking of wheat and the railroads … not with men” (Surowieki, 2000, 62).

In this formula, words such as “wheat” and “railroad” seem inflexible, like things. Yet words also express a manner of being. In terms of our project, we can suggest, first, our need to revitalize an inflexible relation to the word. In relation to cities, words such as “supply” and “demand,” meant to depict the movement of the market, or “polarization,” meant to depict the inexorable division into rich and poor, or “optimization,” meant to depict the way in which the motives of actors caught up in the process are ruled, all strike us as figures or implicit interpretations that invariably seal the fate of any city to be just a sign and nothing more. We cannot ignore such interpretations, such views and voices that are so much a part of the discourse on the city. Yet we must begin to examine the very idea of world economic forces, the unmoved mover, in ways that do not simply sustain and reiterate the interpretive framework itself: The global market of multinational capital is singular in the sense that it is neither specific to any part of the planet nor constrained by any logic outside the immanent criteria of its own operation: it asserts a universal sphere of exchange value (the sole medium of its existence) abstracted from and unlimited by all other values – its purely financial criteria are entirely immanent to its operation (Hallward, 2000, 10).

Here we can take upon ourselves the task of specifying such a process in terms of imaginative relations and circuits of desire that have a local

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expressive force. Supply and demand are relationships conceived as foundational for actors who are imagined to orient in practice to whatever these interpretations require (Blum and McHugh, 1971). For example, if the market is said to be ruled by notions such as supply and demand, we can also see how what is interpreted as needed and wanted in this sense as supply and demand must always be grounded in a vision of the social relationship(s) of supply and demand as oriented actions (in a notion of what it is to do supply and demand). If the city is a centre of economic innovation (Jacobs, 1970), it is a place where thinking achieves a kind of excellence in terms of its calculative powers, that is, a place where the common situation is constantly being redefined as innovative and, so, where economic innovation is done according to a way, and thus is mimetic rather than automated. Integral to economic innovation is the adding of new value to old, the creation of combinations that manage the temporal relations in any present. This is the implication of the New York City developer Louis Horowitz’s boast that he willed into existence the New York City skyline: that is, his desire to bring past and future together in the present is the ground of the change he helped accomplish. His changing the past in the present in terms of his capacity to imagine the future was not a “result” of supply and demand but of his ability to conceive of a future city (of needs and desires) as materializing in the present by virtue of the ways in which he could think of managing the disappearance and reshaping of the past. In this chapter, I want to begin to regain some stronger sense for these (economic) concepts as what sociologists typically call courses of action, normative orders, collective representations, and social facts, always implicated in convoluted and complex desiring relations between actors. Thus, I will take up a limited set of notions – major economic forces, market, supply and demand, the city as a commodity – in order to explore how the symbolic order and imaginative structure inscribes desire through a variety of collective representations in ways that provide grounds for inference and action in enumerable regions of city life.

sacr if ice We need to raise the question of how the city negotiates the thin line between its character as a site for the concentration and circulation of capital and its allure as a “capital of the civilized world.” In raising the question of civilization itself, the city always dramatizes the collision between private selfishness and the public good, or the relation of gain to sacrifice which Simmel claims to lie at the core of the meaning of human value (Simmel, 1971). That is, if the representation of materialism only focused upon gain (avarice, acquisition) and its selfish and privatized typical appearances, we would risk losing sense of its element of sacrifice.

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At first, the notion of sacrifice in Simmel’s essay sounds as it is meant to refer to a situation of choice in which certain options are excluded necessarily by those that are selected. This is because there is a sacrificial element in all commitment, in any and all action, including the economic. Thus, if “money makes the world go round,” it is because the common situation is defined as one in which actors are ruled by the notion of the relevance and power of money and of the “cash nexus” as the penultimate bond which grounds collective life and the concerted practices and projects of actors. This means that they are seen as sacrificing other ways of defining the real. “Money makes the world go round” is an abstraction which we can only give flesh by specifying as a scene of representation in which what it recommends is oriented to in action as a palpable problem to solve. As we utter this cliché we construct a world in which actors are ruled by whatever the cliché recommends to the exclusion of other matters. When actors are viewed as orienting to the priority and relevance of money in practice in ways that assign relevance to “money makes the world go round” as a compelling and unalterable representation of real social structures, other ways of engaging the real are excluded in a way that offers the cliché itself as a kind of sacrificial gesture. We might say that any formulation requires of the actors it formulates to sacrifice in order to live up to the terms of the description. In another sense, though, sacrifice makes reference to the destruction of the subject’s ties to market value itself through a process in which the very question of satisfaction and its ineluctable indeterminacy is raised. That is, if “money makes the world go round” is observable in practice, that it is so not only sacrifices other ways of conceiving the world but leads us to ask how it can be said in a way that is true to the structure of saying. The cliché invites us to reflect upon the question of speech and its excellence, in this case, to sacrifice a view of the proposition as an occasion of debate over facts in order to approach the suppressed dialectic over the question of the problem implied by the representation and, so, over the question of representation itself. We sacrifice the temptation to treat the cliché as a matter which we must decide factually or argumentatively in order to treat it as the surface of an implicit discourse in relation to a problem which remains to be explored. The true sacrifice breaks the subject’s ties to the (market) value of speech by risking the loss of containment that comes from encountering ambiguity. As Georges Bataille says of sacrifice, “it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice” (Bataille, 1989, 43). What Bataille means is that when the world governed by market value comes to its end, that is, at the moment it appears exemplary and climactic, its very power exposes the caprice of its limits in

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ways that open it to the vitality and violence of the question of the meaning or point of the life which it sanctions. The climax of productivity as both an end and a beginning, as both death and life, draws the subject into the violent world of questioning productivity at the very moment productivity realizes its power through its hold upon the subject. As material powers increase, intensify, and climax, they reach their end or death by exacerbating their limits; but it is a death which can give life back to the subject by revitalizing her connection to the violent and affirmative questioning of the present moment. This view is a cryptic translation of Durkheim’s conception of anomie (Durkheim, 1951). The real order must … neutralize life and replace it with the thing that the individual is in the society of labor. But it cannot prevent life’s disappearance in death from revealing the invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing. The power of death signifies that this real world … does not reveal its dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out. No one knew it was there when it was; it was overlooked in favor of real things: death was one real thing among others … That … life, which had lost the ability to reach me, which I regarded primarily as a thing, is fully restored to my sensibility through its absence. Death reveals life in its plenitude and dissolves the real order (Bataille, 1989, 47).

Sacrifice breaks the subject’s tie to market value because market value is simply a metaphor for usage and its governance by conventions of normativity and legitimacy (Weber’s “valid order”). Ultimately, the normative order is grounded in distinctions whose intelligibility is enforced and sanctioned in ways that might always be challenged. Sacrifice risks opening the subject to exposure to the indeterminacy of distinctions released by the question of the meaning of an object and its fundamental ambiguity. Sacrifice describes the movement from treating the object (the city) as external, as a thing, to conceiving of the city as an object of thought or a conception. In this movement, the birth of the conception both destroys and resurrects the object it conceives, restoring the intimacy of the relation to language and the world in the very indeterminacy of dialogue and its “unintelligible caprice.” The revitalization of the dialogical relation to the object, risking in this gesture treating dialogue as itself a thing, gathers its intensity by giving the relation life even as it destroys the thing. If we can reserve our suspicion or impatience in the face of talk such as this, I might propose in advance that cities take upon themselves the burden of this contradiction, the burden of registering and theatricalizing it in their everyday life as they bring the achievements of their civilization to a climax (and so, to death in a way) by restoring the need and desire to reconnect with the brilliance of life. That is, the city is a place where the distinctions in use

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are constantly challenged or made vulnerable in ways that exacerbate anxiety and discordance over that as part of the unrest of any present moment. The excitation accompanying such continuous challenge can be expressed in experimentation or resignation, exploration or nihilism, as the sacrifice of tranquility and security that any city must make as part of its commitment to living though the modern moment as an incarnation of renewal. To call the city a site of renewal is a gloss of the recognition that the disappearance of the old and the emergence of the new appears in any present as contestation over the question of the revitalization of the city as a form of life. This medley of hopes and fears which surfaces in any present in the mundane shape of local problem-solving is the material that an approach to the culture of the city aims to situate and represent. To paraphrase Bataille again, if the city offers the spectacle of the extraordinary and exemplary development of the means of production for its civilization, it also offers by virtue of this, the possibility of social inquiry that is “capable of fully realizing the meaning of production,” that is, it offers opportunity and incentive for engaging the problematic character of the material city. Man began to say: “Let us construct a world whose productive forces grow more and more. We shall meet more and more of our material needs.” The majority of mankind has given its consent to the industrial enterprise, and what presumes to go on existing alongside it gives the impression of a dethroned sovereign. It is clear that the majority of mankind is right: compared to the industrial rise, the rest is insignificant. Doubtless this majority has let itself be reduced to the order of things. Only the gigantic development of the means of production is capable of fully revealing the meaning of production (Bataille, 1989, 93).

Part of the development of the means of production include what Baudrillard calls “the system of needs” (Baudrillard, 1998), that is, the development of needs is “produced” as part of the growth of the productive apparatus. Correlative with the development of the means of production is the concerted recognition of the necessity of objects, the sense of lacking and needing to rectify imbalances in what is possessed. Of course, our need for the washing machine results from perceiving its greater efficiency and anticipating its labor-saving capacity to free us to be more creative with our time, but then this “need” is a symptom of restlessness constructed out of a conception of our lack and the importance of overcoming it. This “development” is commensurate with the need to master unrest typical of any modern moment. At the level of personal satisfaction,

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unrest is registered in the need and desire to acquire objects defined as necessary for living out the tumultuous passage of passing time. The development of the means of production which produces the need to rectify imbalances of possession, produces “sensible” consumption just as it creates extremes of addiction and conspicuous consumption. In exactly the same way, the development of the means of production continues to “produce” the critique of consumption in various shapes such as the bohemianism directed against its superfluity (Thoreau), directed against its commodity form (Marx), directed against its hypocricy (Rousseau), or directed against its vulgarity (Baudelaire). The means of production “produce” both the system of needs entering into consumption (the imperativeness in “we must have this!” and the vision of the integration of a personal life which accompanies this desire) and the critique which its discourse includes and determines as part of such a system. In the same way, the development of the means of production includes the inequities between those who appear to themselves as consummated and those who understand themselves as unfulfilled by such development and so “produces” an invariable division between plenty and poros reflected in the resentment integral to growth (Gans, 1985, 171–5). Man is not above material constraints, but he did not become human, as the materialists imagine, simply in struggling against them. Humanity was forged rather by the need to overcome the conflicts involved in living and acting together to transcend material constraints. The origin of representation, which defines the human, was not “practical” but ethical. And the material problems of man have been mediated by the ethical ever since (Gans, 1985, 95).

q u a n t i t y a n d t h e s p e c ta c l e o f n u m b e r In order to approach the question of how the city puts into play its own materialism, we need first to bring to view the social complexities attendant upon the problem of quantity as a locus of collective life by constructing a narrative that represents the ways quantity can serve as a source of ambiguity and as an incentive for collective action. We say this because the view of the city as essentially materialistic plays off its image as a site in which quality is overwhelmed by quantity. This tension between the values of quantity and quality seems to lie at the core of representations of the city. Indeed, it is through this dialectic that the collective representation of the materialism of the great city comes to view. This leads us to begin to appreciate how, as a social phenomenon, materialism is not an unambiguous focus of collective life.

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To begin to examine this tension we need to consider the link between what Braudel speaks of as “the weight of numbers” in cities and their position “at the centre of a network of communications” (Braudel, 1973, 374). This invites us to begin considering the lure of the city and the seductiveness of its congestion as an essential component of its imaginative structure. If quantity is a most rudimentary expression of collective life, its accentuation in the city stimulates the excess invariably associated with number as a social phenomenon, that is, with density, circulation, variety, and extremes of abundance and deprivation. As the site which concentrates and circulates influences through its persistent movement and flows of people, ideas, and objects, the city must always appear in some way as an aberration, a “monstrosity”: “An object is monstrous where by its size it defeats the end that forms its concept” (Kant, 1992, Book 11, Part 1, 253, 39, 100). What is the “end that forms the concept” of the city? In some sense that “end” has been identified historically with the notion of the polis, or in our terms the community. Without working out this relation for the present, we might only note that the end in this sense always makes reference to a conception of the quality of the city, to its excellence or arete. When the care of the city for its end or excellence is “defeated” by its size, the spectre of its monstrousness arises as a collective problem by which it is exercised. The inheritance of the city is, in part, the interaction between its quantitative growth and its locus as a persistent source of pride. The “weight of numbers” forces this concern upon us in the shape of our continuous engagement with the question of its monstrousness. In this way, the movement of objects and people in and out of cities has always marked its volatility as itself an object in flux, a destination saturated with value: “two most important” processes “of this millennium: the search for spices by Western countries, which brought alien nations and cultures into contact with one another for the first time; and the expansion of educational opportunities, which returned to the colonized peoples of the world … the right to determine their own future” (Ananta Toer, 1999, 112). Here, the exodus of spices and persons from their places of origin – often forceful and insidious – marks the city as a centre of communication in the most specific sense, that is, as an object of desire that attracts both spices and newcomers. Although spices were coveted as food preservatives in the absence of refrigeration, and as medicine, most vividly, they contribute to the demands of taste to vary the limited local cuisine. Similarly, newcomers visiting the city for education or residence as part of this reciprocal influence, contribute to the diversification of the local population. Thus, in the most

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elementary sense, the city affirms its need and desire for variation and diversification and, so, is marked by its capacity to concentrate and circulate such variation -the mix of its spices and people – as an integral feature of its stimulation. The elementary image of the city as an object of desire is rooted in its allure as the home of variation and diversity in both spices and people and, so, in its promise to modify inheritances long considered immutable. In part, the allure of the great city is to add spice to life through the contact its density brings to view between the new and what is long standing. If the city is the site where free spirit settles and takes shape as the home of diversity and variation, it offers itself simultaneously as the site that can tame such heterogeneity through the prideful recognition of its centrality through productivity and the creation of works which it claims as distinctive. The wealth of the city is offered as a sign both of its heterogeneity and its unity, its freedom and its productivity. The city attracts and centers variation itself and reproduces this variation as a symbol of its distinctiveness, a place where freedom can settle and flourish. What makes the city appealing is not simply variation but its capacity to enforce a discipline upon its heterogeneity in a manner that will guarantee productivity in ways that will lead to works and accomplishments that promise to distinguish the city from all others. We must consider how cities are productive and how the link of such productivity to the extension and duration of their civilization marks such cities as central and as capitals of the civilized world. The various chapters of Ferdinand Braudel’s work on The Structure of Everyday Life are animated by a vision of the city as empowered by quantity, leading to congestion, density, and the excess of prodigality: “It was all the fault of number – huge numbers of people. But the big city drew them like a magnet. From its parasitical existence anyone could pick up a few crumbs and find a niche” (Braudel, 1985, 556). Several points are interesting here. First, though the large numbers might suggest a drain on the resources of the city in the way that population is typically thought to heighten the problem of scarcity, the city also resonates with a kind of accessibility, if all and any can “find a niche.” The quantitative excess of the city might not then lead to equality, but certainly to a kind of heterogeneity in which diversity can at least survive. This shows how the “weight of numbers” can produce in the face of its inequities, an environment in which there is diversity in ways and means of survival. The city is a showcase for the extremes of humanity. Could we venture that the quantitative excess of cities make 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 mir-

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rored in the city as if a spectacle of human creativity. This recommends that the extremes of human suffering and of the emotions will be made manifest as part of the public life of the city in ways that bring what is highest and lowest into juxtaposition. Furthermore, the ethical character of this spectacle suggests that the extremes can always be brought to view; that the extremes are constantly open to the reciprocal view of the other and to all alike suggests that their denial is fated to be guilty and their celebration to be tinged with shame. Yet, this diversity in ways and means of survival has both ethical and aesthetic overtones, for it brings to view the concentrated spectacle of human ingenuity, in types, in styles, in work and play, in commerce and criminality. The city is a theatre of human creativity because its “weight of number” suggests more than material production but that imaginative surfeit in terms of which any and all can “find a niche.” The “parasitical” existence of the city says again that its density is used in a variety of ways to create “niches” of survival and, so, that the city is always in danger of being used only as a means and nothing more in its continuing risk of having no quality other than contextual, that is, as a resource to be exploited or survived in the service of human needs and powers. The quantitative force of concentration, density, and aggregation, drains nature, violates the quality of social life, converting social relationships into “monstrous agglomerations” (Braudel, 1985, 557). Yet, if the city appears as a monster, as a monstrous phenomenon in the critique of Rousseau, whom Braudel quotes, it could still be either an aberration or a symptom of growth. The truth is that these densely populated cities, in part parasites, do not arise of their own volition. They are what society, economy and politics oblige them to be. They are a yardstick, a means of measurement. If they display ostentatious luxury, that is because society, the economy, and the political and cultural order are cast in this mould, and because capital and surplus wealth is poured into them, partly for want of anything better to do with them. Above all, a great city should never be judged in itself: it is located within the great mass of urban systems, both animating them and being in turn determined by them. In the changing appearance of cities like London and Paris was reflected the transition from one way of life and art of living to another … bringing about the painful birth of a new order (Braudel, 1985, 557).

The city and “external forces” are implicated in a reciprocal mirroring relationship, for if the city is a “yardstick” or measure of the social order, this order “obliges” the city to be as it is. We can “read” the social order through the city and the city through the social order. More specifically, the city always shows the transition from one way of life or art

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of living to the other; it shows the birth of the new at any time. In this way, the city is always the measure of the modern, the materialization of the modern moment and all of its tensions, extremes, and intended resolutions. The uses to which the city is put is a function of its status as an object, as a work of art and a commodity, as the capital that concentrates capital and its organization as a spectacle. To call the city a commodity and nothing more glosses the myriad ways in which it is used and engaged as the object it is. The agency of the city is ambiguous, according to Braudel, because it is “cast in this mould” to mirror the demands of the new social order, its desire to “pour into it” the “capital and surplus wealth” which accrues at its time as a distinctive configuration. The city is the receptacle for the desire of the emerging social order which exceeds as if a surplus, necessities of survival, the place which absorbs and, so, centers all of the circuits of energy that climax at any period of renewal as if the penultimate reflection of the new in which its extremes are bound together as a visible social formation that identifies and differentiates the modern moment of the social order to and for itself. In this striking passage, Braudel makes clear the way in which the city functions as that image through which “society” – as the emerging social order – exhibits its newness as exemplary, as a spectacle of both theatrical and pedagogical force through its allure as an object of desire. The forceful effect of congestion and density in cities – noted as “monstrous” by Braudel – identified cities eternally through their involvement with quantity and, so, with the problem of recovering a collective interest in quality that each city might call its own. This tension points to the rudimentary ethical collision of cities, for it evokes senses of resignation and opportunity, skepticism and progress, which are registered as a fundamental ambiguity at the core of the inner life of the city. Thus, congestion and density are said to impose upon the city an abiding commitment to indistinction and, so, to vulgarity, in ways often assumed to mark cities as sanctuaries of the “mass,” either as an unreflective system of needs (Hegel, 1967), or as opportunity for the manipulative exercise of domination and tyranny by those who are resourceful and better organized, that is, as places persistently governed either by the ignorance of majority rule, or the crafty malevolent selfishness of elitist exploitation. On the one hand, cities are thought to be repositories of ignorance and licentiousness; and, on the other hand, the dense agglomeration of needs in the city has been said to produce a psychic volatility all its own, reflected in the copiousness of choice, variation, and abundance.

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In this first instance, the reputation of the city rests on the fundamental ambiguity of this imaginative structure, an imagination capable of conceiving of avarice and opportunity, criminality and creativity, as the cornerstone of urban life. Out of this collision, the monstrousness of the city is reputed to appear in the most apparent implications of quantity as the voice of materialism, and of materialism itself as an order to which any city must orient. We shall begin to address the materialism of the city as a “problem” which it must work to solve in its particular way.

m o n s t ro u s n e s s Braudel’s vision of the growth of the city resonates with Bakhtin’s discussion of the grotesque imagery of the body in Rabelais. In contrasting Schneegan’s “negative” concept of the grotesque to his own, Bakhtin says that the grotesque must be seen “as a negation closely linked to the affirmation of that which is born anew” (Bakhtin, 1984, 307). Birth, death, and renewal haunt both Braudel’s conception of the death of the ancien régime and rural world which it represented as the birth of modernity and Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque image of death. The city in this sense is not just a departure from what precedes it but a convulsive synecdoche of renewal, showing the tension between death and rebirth in the materialization of its transitional life, as if a grotesque two-headed body whose death and rebirth is experienced at the same time as the life of excess. The fate of the city is to be in excess, to be the site (sight) and seat of excess which – measured by the social order which is its “yardstick” – holds up to that order its mix of hopes and fears (and so, its uncanniness) by virtue of its capacity to bring to view its desire as climactic and exemplary. In the grotesque body … death brings nothing to an end, for it does not concern the ancestral body, which is renewed in the next generation. The events of the grotesque sphere are always developed on the boundary dividing one body from the other and, as it were, at their points of intersection. One body offers its death, the other its birth, but they are merged in a two-body image“(Bakhtin, 1984, 322).

Let us risk understanding Bakhtin’s “ancestral body” as the spirituality of a people, or as Hegel says, the collective as a “spiritual aggregate” rather than a “system of needs” (Hegel). Is it too essentialist to suggest, here, that the renewal of the spirit of collective perpetuity by each generation is intensified and dramatized in the great city as a spectacle of

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singular magnitude? The city appears as the penultimate place in which renewal of a new order materializes in contact with the vestiges of the old. This is to say that in its time any city is essentially modern and reflects in its monstrousness the eternal “grotesque” collision between the old and the new. Thus, in terms of Kant’s formula of the monstrous, the defeat of the “end” (quality) of the city by quantity is never conclusive but a process of revitalization in which the deformation of the end is but a moment of displacement. What is interesting in the city is not simply the replacement of the old by the new, but the manner in which the disappearance of the old is oriented to and managed in every present, introducing as distinctively urban, recurrent concerns for memory and its haunting. The duality of the city, in part its monstrousness, is glimpsed through its image as a grotesque social body, the two-bodied city, for “It is a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception” (Bakhtin, 1984, 318). The life and death of the city is noted in Braudel’s conception of how space attracts populations “like a magnet” and how populations devour space by exceeding its boundaries and fertilizing it in new shapes. Quantity and monstrousness come together in the notion of the gigantic development of the means of production to which Bataille alludes, catching, for example, the particular productivity of St Petersburg at the close of the eighteenth century of which Braudel speaks. Here, what is produced is the appearance of change itself in the shape of its “new diversity” that, seeming monstrous on the one hand, is sufficiently stimulating to provoke questioning of its identity. The wave of immigrants brought all kinds of people to the city: officials and nobles hard pressed for promotion, younger sons of families, officers, soldiers, sailors, technicians, professors, artists, entertainers, cooks, foreign tutors, governesses and most of all peasants, who flocked in from the poor countryside surrounding the town. They came as hauliers and food retailers … Or else they were snow – and ice shovellers at half a ruble a day: they were never done with clearing the approaches to the houses of the rich. Or they might be sledge drivers; they drove customers anywhere they wanted in the enormous city for one or two kopeks … The Finnish women were chambermaids or cooks. They adapted themselves to the task well and sometimes made a good match … Indeed this mixture was the basis of St Petersburg’s originality (Braudel, 1985, 538).

Braudel quotes J.G. Giorgi who “found himself wondering if the inhabitants of St Petersburg had a character of their own” (538), and this is precisely the question raised by the monstrous diversity of the city,

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the question of whether there is constancy in the face of such heterogeneity. Does this Dionysiac swirl of city life annul the capacity of the city to represent itself persistently in some legible and distinctive way? Braudel’s notion of the city’s “originality” hints that what endures in the city throughout the vicissitudes of history is the singular renewal of its mixture, that is, of its variety, where what is grotesque in the modern moment is the collision between the emerging mix of the people and the attempt to maintain “a character of their own,” a collision marked and accentuated in any city under pressure of the “weight of numbers” and the diversification it releases, a diversity taking shape in the gigantism that causes thoughtful people to ask the question of what the city is and is not. This hint – originating with Socrates, continued in Bataille, and now here – suggests that the very productivity of the city and its Babel as a tower of diversity, produces at one and the same time, philosophy, or the desire to question what its productivity means. The “surplus poured into” any city is more than a resource but a sign of both poros and plenty, of both poverty and plenitude. This is the “mix” which is constantly renewed in the guise of the face-to-face relationship of the city which always puts into play its reply to Giorgi’s query, “Does the city have a character of its own? Is the city nothing but a sign?” The weight of numbers and the extremes, which take shape under its auspices, force the city to affirm and demonstrate an art of living that can mediate the extremes, a sense of quality that can bind the extremes in their very extremity to the city itself as an object of desire. But can that form of life be anything but monstrous itself? More concretely, Braudel captures the monstrousness of the city through the ways in which it splits itself up, exceeds its boundaries, attracts more people than it can feed and satisfy, as part of a dynamic process in which needs exceed resources. In this view, the life-force of the city resides in its expansion, somewhat economically, as congestion overwhelms scarcity, forcing constant redefinition upon cities. He uses London as an exemplary case. As London expanded under the weight of congestion, its diverse people were concentrated and displaced. If some gained access to its wealth, luxury, artefacts, resources, and its privileged spaces, others were “pushed” or compelled to move to other places: The big city … could not cope with its ever-growing tasks … And even if it had wanted to, it would have lacked the means. The worst material ignominies remained the general rule (Braudel, 1985, 556).

In the first instance, the force of the quantitative in the great city appears through the imaginative structure organized by luxury as a collective problem.

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The east and certain peripheral districts were becoming more and more proletarian. Poverty moved in and installed itself wherever it found room in the London world. The darkest pages of the story concern two categories of outcasts: the Irish and the Jews from central Europe … The London drama – its festering criminality, its difficult biological life – can only really be comprehended from this worm’s eye view of the poor (Braudel, 1985, 555).

m u lt i t u d e Braudel says that the drama of the city can only be comprehended from the “worm’s eye” view of the poor. He does not say that the poor is the majority or the minority, and, yet, he claims that it speaks for the city. The eye of the poor sees the city as it is. The worm – underfoot and earthbound – seems to have the privileged view of the city. This long and honorable convention of interpretation says neither that the poor are the many or that the poor are all-seeing, but that what they see is real. The real can only be grasped from the eye of the worm. Though Braudel himself does not write from the worm’s eye view, he must claim to represent or interpret that point of view. Braudel says that what the poor see is their own existence in its bodily form – its “festering” and “difficult” material existence – as a multitude ruled by corporeality. If we theorize the city in the way the poor view themselves, then the self-understanding of the poor mirror for us, the best ways and means of representing the city. In electing to be a mouthpiece for the poor, Braudel risks equating the worm’s eye view with wisdom. At the very least though, we can accept this challenge to reflect upon the discourse over the real which this provocation makes transparent. Braudel instructs us to view the city neither as beautiful or functional, or as a “fusion,” but in the way we view the body or as the poor view themselves. To theorize, we are advised to imitate the earth-bound view from the ground, that is, from the lowest vantage point. Imitate the worm and we will be reconnected with the real! The real city only appears to those who are free of the veil of language and its dissembling pretense. Somewhere Marx says in passing that the secret of capitalism (the “key” to its analysis) resides in the proletariat. His use of the word “secret” is instructive for its focus upon what is concealed and needs to be unearthed, what seems to be masked or disguised at first glance. Presumably the worm’s eye view penetrates the pretense, sees beyond the disguises. Marx suggests that to analyze the social order, one should always try to imagine the voice of skepticism, by constantly asking oneself why desire is defeated. This is because the skepticism of the proletariat stands for the extinction of desire. Thus, he counsels us to search for sightings where the defeat of

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desire shows itself in palpable ways. The defeat of desire is particularly vivid in the eyes of the very poor who can barely survive the present. The defeat of desire mirrored in the eyes of the very poor must be systematically kept from coming to view in the city, but its absence is always a haunting presence. This is to say that the extinction of desire always haunts the city. The worm’s eye view of the poor, consumed by its difficult existence, seems to have no resources to conceive of itself as more than surviving its conditions and, so, no resources to imagine its present as anything more than passing time. From the worm’s eye view of the poor, life in the present might be seen to offer opportunities for others but not for the poor themselves. Regardless of what the others, even if a majority, might have and believe, what the poor see is that any difference makes no difference. Whatever promise the weight of numbers offers, the poor must remain steadfast in their view that whatever consumes the many, for them, makes no difference. Yet, the city is haunted by the existence of the worm’s eye view of the poor, just as Braudel himself is haunted. The view of the city as a multitude, the view from down below, is integral to the city itself, one of the voices of its discourse. Indeed, perhaps one of the ways in which quantity can be seen to overwhelm quality is through the figure of the city as a multitude. That is, no matter how the numbers add up, the defeat of desire can haunt the city to the point where it becomes monstrous. One problem of the bourgeoisie in any city is to deal with the ghosts, that is, to put their wandering and agitated spirits to rest. The fate of the poor is connected to the notion of life chances. Weber makes explicit what Marx’s work required through the conception of social class as life chances, that is, as the action of being marked by the past in the present in a way that limits the future. For the poor, the present continues and reiterates the fact that there is no future, that is, there is no way of making a difference. The bodily existence of the poor cannot be influenced by thought and action. Yet this need not be the only choice, for the poor is the multitude viewed as corporeal, that is, as a body. The city could be seen in other ways. In contrast to this (worm’s eye) view of the poor, there is another perspective that can see and try to capitalize on the fluidity of every present. This is the pointof-view of the bourgeoisie, who, whether majority or minority, can always imagine the present as an opportune occasion for making a difference. The bourgeoisie seem to have unlimited optimism just as the proletariat seem to have great reserves of skepticism. In contrast to the theoretic strategy of equating the worm’s eye view with wisdom (with a “realistic” grasp of social structure) is the opposite but similar strategy of equating the view of the bourgeoisie with wisdom. Typically, the view of the bourgeoisie, its dreams of sweetness of living, is made to

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speak for and of the city. What is similar about such opposing views is that they are beliefs that treat their partial opinions as if it is knowledge, that is, they treat their limited views as if they are definitive and comprehensive. In contrast to both, our conception of the city as a system of desire sees the voice of the proletariat and the voice of the bourgeoisie agonistically implicated in a discursive struggle to speak for the city, a struggle over the means of interpretation. In contrast to the worm’s eye view of the poor, the cliché that “everyone is middle class” suggests that the middle class is the majority. This means that “everyone” can (in principle) orient to the city from the point-of-view of the bourgeoisie. Everyone can participate in the common situation of the city by imagining it from the point-of-view of the bourgeoisie. From the point-of-view of the bourgeoisie, the common situation is inclusive. Recall Bataille’s notion that the rise of industry is accepted by the many who, reduced to the status of things, exist as such in contrast to the others. If “everyone” is middle class, that is, imagines the present from the point-of-view of the bourgeoisie, “everyone” is not a worm, though it is not clear if “everyone” accepts their reduction to “thinghood.” Neither the status of the bourgeoisie or proletariat is clear, for even if the worm’s eye view grasps itself as a thing (corporeality), it might not “accept” what it sees and might only be capable of expressing its pain. Similarly, though appearing as a thing in another guise, the bourgeoisie think they make a difference, and from their perspective, participate actively in the common situation. If the bourgeoisie accept themselves as things, like the poor, they seem to be ruled by the worm’s eye view; but if they see the present as a fluid opportunity, they seem anything but things. To treat the city as simply divided between rich and poor is a gloss of monstrous proportion, a gloss that is itself another worm’s eye view. The city raises the question of division in a much more radical form, as a question concerning the selfunderstanding of life chances and of the fundamental ambiguity of the city as a multitude and of how (and who is entitled) to speak of and for it as an object of desire.

po ros a nd p le n ty Materialism takes on a monstrous face in the elementary form proposed by Rousseau. Finally, consuming ambition, the fervor to raise one’s relative fortune less out of true need than in order to place oneself above others, inspires in all men a base inclination to harm each other, a secret jealousy all the more dangerous because, in order to strike its blow in greater safety, it often assumes the mask

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of benevolence; in a word, competition and rivalry on the one hand, opposition of interest on the other; and always the hidden desire to profit at the expense of others (Rousseau, 1964, 156).

Rousseau suggests that the point of view of the bourgeoisie is a pretense of monstrous proportions. Benevolence towards the worm masks the desire to profit. Yet, this cannot be adequate as it stands, for we have suggested that the bourgeoisie want above all, to make everyone the same, to create a collective ruled by their point of view. Of course this “profits” the bourgeoisie, because it will profit “everyone,” that is, everyone will be middle class. What then is the pretense? Simply that making “everyone” middle class pretends to be an egalitarian gesture whereas in fact, whatever it comes to will still conceal the social division of life chances. Any city exacerbates and brings to view in a monstrous shape the optimism of the bourgeoisie towards opportunity in collision with the skepticism of those for whom it pretends to speak. There is a dialectic between equality and distinction in the city, exacerbated by the pressures of quantity which transforms the desire for distinction from a “metaphysical” longing to social differentiation. That is, if “everyone” is the same, the desire to make a difference becomes both essential (necessary and desirable) and indeterminate since any standard of value or worth reiterates only the legitimacy of market value and its normative order (what is intelligibly enforced as good). As such an environment, the city must dramatize the “crisis of value” in any modern moment, showing how making a difference that makes a difference rests on nothing other than its power to elicit the recognition of an other. Rousseau suggests that any such mark or sign is a pretense of value, as if the person is nothing but a sign (that his claim to value and distinction is a pretense, backed up by nothing substantial, nothing except self-promotion). Rousseau inaugurates a cliché of considerable impact in the history of social thought: that the demonstration of selfworth through self-confidence, and that alone, is concentrated in the city as its capital. According to Rousseau, the fundamental ambiguity of self-worth is exacerbated in the city to the point where it becomes such a spectacle of theatrical import that it risks appearing monstrous. Yet, Rousseau’s critique also implies that what can appear (for example, to the worm) as a “dissembling pretense” need appear to the bourgeoisie as a life affirming and self-assertive revitalization of intimacy. If the city creates equality of a sort by dramatizing the reduction of “everyone” to the uniform status of thing, it must produce at the very same time, an appetite for distinction. The desire to be distinct, as the desire to be something other than a thing, should not be quickly condemned as it seems to be necessary for the very optimism of the

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bourgeoisie and their desire to seize the moment as if eternal. Indeed, without this pretense of the bourgeoisie we might risk moribund unexciting cities, either repositories of furious mass enmity or sites of totalitarian expansion (Arendt, 1968). Rousseau suggests that the city appears in any historical period as a site for the disproportionate concentration of power and powerlessness, of poros and plenty. This disproportion marks the relationship as if an event which concentrates the dissembling pretense of distinction and value and the worm’s eye view of the corporeal multitude (of selfabnegation) as a gigantic, monstrous development of the productive forces. In this way, the city mirrors for its civilization – always and everywhere – the fundamental ambiguity of the intractable problem of justice as an integral part of its common situation.

the bourgeoisie A central framework of this paper is that on the one hand cities concentrate a disproportionate share of corporate power and are one of the key sites for the overvalorization of the corporate economy, and on the other, they constitute a disproportionate share of the disadvantaged and are one of the key sites for their devalorization (Sassen, 1994, 14).

Sassen claims that globalization intensifies this concentration, giving it particular shape in the co-presence of corporate power and an immigrant underclass as a configuration that has various effects on the spaces of the city, e.g., “gentrified neighborhoods,” “informal economy,” and “downgraded manufacturing sectors.” In this way, the economically driven “weight of numbers” materializes in population concentrations in which those with differences in power are in proximate contact. As Marx might have said, each historical period creates social relations between haves and have-nots on the basis of their relations to the means of production. The city is the site at which this intensification of the implicit difference between those with such diverse interests appears, and in all of the major cities of the world, different uses of space are marked in similar ways. Sassen’s discussion of 14th Street in Manhattan is instructive (Sassen, 1994, 24–7) for the way it emphasizes these effects of quantity on uses of space. In general, the redesign of the city through corporate avarice dismantles what was a centre of working-class life on the grounds that this space – viewed as obsolete, in disrepair, and in need of revitalization – can be put to more profitable use and rendered up-to-date in terms of emerging professional and middle-class images of renewal with respect to office space and housing. She asks whether there might

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be another “reading” of the economic and social viability of such a space that could redeem its original vitality as a centre of working-class life? To this point, what she claims to be happening on 14th Street is occurring everywhere, as she concedes, documenting a process that is general across cities (except for its “illustration” in the particular detail of New York). The city here is just another context which brings to view the operation of the force of quantitative might (world economy, globalism) which can be documented in any city as a difference in degree. Quantity refers implicitly to the absolute force of world processes which remain indifferent to local agency except as material for economic expansion and conquest. Such conventions of interpretation mask a very particular sense of quantity that is inscribed in the force of the “weight of numbers.” For example, it is not that the working classes are outnumbered by the new classes, but that they lack the capacity and resources to organize and take command of the velocity and tempo of change which can only appear in any city as an indifferent and absolute force; that is, the great numbers of people in the city are unable to control what is happening to them: “Major economic forces in today’s large cities push towards the decimating of low-cost and generally working-class uses of space, be they individual buildings, commercial districts, or manufacturing operations” (Sassen, 1994, 24). Cities are sites at which “major economic forces” climax in ways that are forceful and often inarticulate. The quantitative might of “major economic forces” is signified in their capacity to exceed the agency of individuals and groups, while yet, answering to the inclinations and interests of those who understand them best and, so, participate in cultivating and exploiting the consequences of their expansion. There is an ambiguity here between the powerlessness of those who are victimized by such “major economic forces” and the power of those who understand their workings: while all alike are subject to the same forces, some have opportunities to take advantage of the process, while others remain helpless. This is a perfect translation of Marx’s formula for the organizing capacities of the bourgeois, capacities that empower their concerted collective ability to exploit the impersonal mechanisms of capitalism. In this view, cities are sites at which the division between the two classes are exacerbated to the point where the bourgeoisie take control of “major economic forces” to define any place in ways that accord with this development, that is, in ways that define as real and as good the ability to take advantage of this development. This suggests that the city is always the site at which the bourgeoisie take command, in part controlling the means of interpretation of collective purpose as a course of development. To this end, we might paraphrase Weber’s interest by

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asking how we can begin to understand the city through the peculiarities of its bourgeoisie: “in terms of cultural history, the problem is that of the Western bourgeois class, and of its peculiarities” (Weber, 1930, 24). Here, we have an opportunity to specify this approach to the city through the local peculiarities of its bourgeoisie. If the materialism of the city is notable in the recognition that its life is measured by the yardstick of the bourgeoisie, we know from Marx himself the ambiguity of such a yardstick: the bourgeoisie represent both the freedom and fetters of productivity. This means that at each historical period, the appropriation of the city as interpretive property in the life of the collective can be both a moment of progress or advance, and on the other hand, something monstrous. Thus, if the destruction of a working-class neighborhood is discernible on 14th Street as Sassen notes, it is because the area is redefined as an object of desire by entrepreneurs, only by virtue of their capacity to imagine the “revolution” in consumption that could now mobilize that very gentrification. That is, the capacity of the bourgeoisie to imagine 14th Street – once peripheral to them – as an object of desire with an implicit promise of centrality is not an effect of gentrification as if a superstructure relating to economic cause but an integral part of its ground. The bourgeoisie develop ways of managing the disappearance of the old in the new, guaranteeing the question of its persistence and loss in any present. The ambiguity which Weber noted and developed in his classic essay revolves around the tensions released by materialism, for example, in quoting John Wesley: “For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger … the desire of the flesh, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent this …?” (Weber, 1930, 175). Here, the affirmation of the bourgeois definition of life, of the real – as productivity (industry, frugality) – necessarily releases resentment and the decline of public spiritedness. If “major economic forces” have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men, as at no previous period of history (Weber, 1930, 181), so have the forces of resentment and privatization. The city is the site at which this tension materializes in an exemplary way: that is, the city is the locus of materialism in the collective life of the people. Thus, we need to understand how this tension is “resolved” by the bourgeoisie in any city in ways that bear the stamp of locality and place. That the city exacerbates and fails to resolve this tension between private selfishness and public spirit always risks making it appear hopeless to thoughtful people, causing them to avert their eyes in resignation and

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despair, or to dream of fleeing elsewhere. Indeed, part of the productivity of the city as the civilized capital of the world, is that it makes cynicism a continuous temptation, constantly producing the dream of flight and, so, its own shape of utopianism. This tension between productivity and resentment is not external to the bourgeoisie but an integral part of their life, for productivity and the confidence in which it is grounded coexists with a degree of anomie (Durkheim, 1951). Wealth, then, so far from being the reassuring symptom of the predestined Elect … acted on contemporary consciences as a moral agitator (Schama, 1984, 124) … The effort to moralize materialism created special sorts of cultural preoccupations (Schama, 1984, 49).

Here Schama identifies an ethical collision integral to the life of the city. In such interpretive gestures we begin to glimpse a phenomenology of materialism insofar as the rule of avarice and acquisition needs to be understood as grounded in a system of desire animated by a notion of the good of materialism itself. The aporia integral to materialism as itself a way of life, releases “special sorts of cultural preoccupations” always needing to be worked out as part and parcel of what materialism means. In terms of the city, this suggests that the intensification of private selfishness goes hand-in-glove with the need to make it right, always allowing us to appreciate how acquisition itself serves as a “moral agitator.” The apparent acquisitiveness of the bourgeoisie is grounded in a dream of sweetness of living where “everyone is middle class” and where the worm can be turned in a way that converts “everyone” into a consumer. Simmel’s dialectic of gain and sacrifice integral to value reappears as the attempt of avarice to relentlessly secure its self-confidence by reaffirming its contribution to collective purpose, to productive change as its sacrificial value. Yet, if Rousseau cautions us that the relentless productivity of the bourgeoisie is tinged with guilt in the face of the worm’s eye view of the poor, then the dissembling pretense charged by skepticism must come alive as a feature integral to this situation as a “problem” which persists in collective life as a “moral agitator.” Part of the creativity of the city resides in the way it invariably measures us – tests us so to speak – through the challenge of its cynicism. Whereas people used to say “if you can succeed in New York, you can succeed anywhere” as testimony to the high level of competition in New York (as validation of the bourgeoisie standard of quality), what they must mean at a “deeper” level is that one who can maintain integrity under the continuous temptation of cynicism can be expected to

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maintain it anywhere. One way in which the city handles this function is to constitute itself as the pedagogical centre of materialism for its people and its nation. This pedagogy is conceded in the reputation of the city as a civilized capital of the world, though it is typically connected to visions of its urbanity, as, at best, cosmopolitanism and, at worst, superfluity. But, we would do better to understand this pedagogy not as an encyclopedia for gracious living but as a curriculum that seeks to refashion powers for enduring and enlivening its materialism as part of the life affirming movement of urbanity itself. An interesting problem arises, for, if we are to understand a city, in part, through the local peculiarity of its bourgeoisie, in what sense might its self-confidence assume shape in specific cities as a “local peculiarity”? This link could be developed through a certain reading of Weber’s Protestant Ethic. There the origin of the local peculiarity of the Western bourgeoisie was related to the withdrawal of the security and certainty of salvation. We might think of this certainty as securing a degree of assurance about the meaning, value, or point of one’s actions and life, that is, an assurance of worthiness or self-worth. Think of the problem of the bourgeoisie as a practical problem: how can such assurance of self-worth be replaced in the absence of the definitive reply of salvation (in the face of the fact, as Lacan says, that other does not answer)? That is, in a world of irrevocable indeterminacy, how does one establish his own indubitable value? Weber’s solution consists of his description of a method in two parts: first, consider oneself chosen (that is, worthy) and, secondly, treat worldly activities as means for expressing such assurance. To bring these two points together, the rule states that we act in worthy activities as if we are worthy. Thus, the irony of uncertainty (of not having a determinate and tangible solution to the ambiguity of self-worth) is dissolved in this attitude. The confidence displayed in worldly activities expresses the will to continue in the face of the lack of certainty and, so, an optimism towards the future based upon a sense of the consequentiality of the present. This suggests that the continuous display of confidence in worldly contingencies is redefined as true faith. Weber’s essay on desire in modern life and its connection to faith, uncertainty and an expanded rather than restricted interest in self-formation recommends that faith must be demonstrated in self-confident worthy activities. The very fact that self-confidence does not prove worthiness and that it is always determined by whatever criteria of wordly activities are at any moment does not diminish the risk and even intensifies its danger because (in the words of Bataille) expectation of loss is as great as possible. Self-confidence in one’s worth is a matter of resolve in the face of the inconclusive reply of the other. To risk a

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colloquial formula: act as if you are successful (as if you have value), and you will be successful. Here we see the peculiar convergence of Judaism and Protestantism because this suggests that each city is marked in a way by the peculiar chutzpah (groundless and limitless gall) of its bourgeoisie and the shapes it takes, most specifically, in the devotion to commerce in the city. Two points are of immediate interest. It is this self-assurance and nothing else that Rousseau saw as dissembling, recognizable for him in the fact that the bourgeoisie simply determine or will their own value (their own worthiness) without further ado as if saying it is so makes it so. For Rousseau, such a gesture assumes monstrous proportion in the city. Rousseau views this as mean-spirited instead of being the only way open to the bourgeoisie to reestablish their vitality, even if their claims are spurious or groundless. Indeed, he does not appreciate how the very illusion of self-worth and of our consequentiality becomes real as it materializes simply because its imperativeness is life affirming. What Weber showed was that the uncertainty of salvation, bound to lead to paralyzing anxiety when viewed externally or logically, completely missed the point of its meaning for the Calvinist as real self-determination. Secondly, Rousseau does not develop the implications of this inflation of self-confidence, for example, by seeing it as resulting from the bourgeoisie being overstimulated by the withdrawal of self-assurance because the very risk of indeterminacy leads not to the paralyzing effect of anxiety but to its intensification of excitement through the experience of commerce itself. That is, Rousseau did not appreciate the intoxicating spell of groundless gall. In treating one’s actions as part of the constant whirlwind of doing business, a palpable and unequivocal demonstration of selfconfidence becomes available. Thus, the tie to utility is not abandoned as Bataille might suggest, but sustained and intensified hyperbolically by dramatizing the continuous opportunities for expanding and demonstrating self-worth as the challenge and risk of the future that makes the present decisive. The bourgeoisie is always searching for a justification of the common situation by exploring the ways its productivity can reinstate an intimate connection to life. Here then is the exhilarating risk faced by the bourgeoisie: if salvation offers a degree of assurance about self-worth in the shape of its security and confidence, when the subject’s ties to such criteria are broken, “unintelligible caprice” (fear and trembling) is expressed in actions aiming to prove self-worth in ways where the very insolubility of the challenge can only intensify the drama of the present moment. The very excitement of the confidence of the bourgeoisie exercises the force of mimetic contagion (Elias and Dunning, 1986) which sweeps across the city. Each city is marked by the ways in which the over-stimulation

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of its bourgeoisie by the withdrawal of the assurance of self-worth is expressed in the excitement of the commerce of the city to the point where its force becomes contagious and, so, mimetic, setting the tone for its city in a specific way. Buying and selling for example, assumes shape as mimetic contagion in which its excitement and exemplarity constantly circulates in city spaces: in the doing of business, in retail diversification, and in the dissemination of entrepreneurial energies and practices into all corners of city life. For example, Jane Jacobs speaks of the productivity of cities as linked to their capacity for innovation, in contrast to formulaic economic initiatives. She tries to correct moribund agglomeration by formulating a policy of what she calls zoning for diversity rather than zoning for conformity. In the city, we can inquire into the diversity of retail functions in space and the diversification of areas in the city in commercial functions and services. Agglomeration has a curious and problematic relation to the mix of the city: on the one hand, an agglomeration of theatres produces a scintillating theatre district, whereas, in the place where I live in Toronto, the concentration of eight sushi restaurants in a five-block area produces a moribund neighborhood. Productivity in the city is linked to the start-up of new and diverse businesses, the procedures for securing loans from banks, and the concentration and dispersion of retail functions across spaces. Further, the problem of the productivity of the city always raises the question of the meaning of a district, for example, in the way the concentration of Indian restaurants in Manchester’s Rusholme, of theatres in Times Square, of antique shops on Bergmanstrasse in Berlin, tend to identify these areas as distinct and lively in comparison to the density of hegemonic retail concentration. But then, why should the concentration of sushi restaurants diminish the vitality of an area as compared to the concentration of Indian restaurants? Are we simply being chauvinistic here, or are there other concealed matters pertaining to the people, area, and experience of the meal itself that we would need to consider? It is the overstimulated excitability of the bourgeoisie of the city that leads to its self-assured innovative energies in relation to commerce and to its capacities to detach itself from the formulaic commercial practices which it seeks to revitalize. It is in this sense that the entrepreneurial acitivities of the city have an element of destructiveness, noted not only in the revival of Joseph Schumpeter’s theories, but in the relentless downsizing, mergers, and the emergence of the idea of the virtual corporation in the wake of Millikin’s transformation, continuously driving to destroy what has been produced as part of the sacrificial feast of urban commerce. But it is also the over-stimulated excitability of the bourgeoisie that intensifies the temptation of skepticism and its various

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transgressive gestures that seem to reject commerce itself. The mimetic contagiousness of the inflated and ungrounded self-confidence of the bourgeoisie rules both commerce and its bohemian travesties.

life chances The power of locality shows itself in the fight to the death over the question of desire, its perpetuation and extinction. It is in this sense that the city is both a theatre and an arena. The interdependence of proletariat and bourgeoisie means that they live off one another and that skepticism is a reworking of the dissembling confidence or optimism to which it is opposed. We might then approach the city through the local peculiarity of its bourgeoisie in part by showing how the character of skeptical resistance actually sustains that “peculiarity.” If the bourgeoisie put their mark on the city, it is in part through the mimetic contagion of skepticism which imitates that confidence by travestying it in the violent excitability of cities in ways that mark them as distinct. In part, the city shows itself as irremediably local through skeptical refashioning of the dissembling confidence of its bourgeoisie, a refashioning that is excitable, intense, sometimes dangerous, often arcane, and fundamentally parochial. Yet, this still glosses the “worm’s eye” view of the poor which Braudel noted as an essential key to understanding the city. Rousseau collects the polarized city around the notion of ambition, dissembling, and selfishness as a representation which captures the tension in the mix of poros and plenty. For Rousseau, the bourgeoisie is as much a casualty of the city as the poor, and so, like Marx, he treats all classes as subject to this process. That is, if the city is truly the site of dissembling, it is the bourgeoisie who most markedly perfect this art by concealing their desire to profit at the expense of the other, under the mask of benevolence. What the city teaches in part is that benevolence is not as it appears. If the bourgeoisie perfect this art, it is fair to suggest that the tension between the appearance and reality of benevolence becomes most vivid from “the worm’s eye view of the poor.” Thus, in response to the perfection of the art of dissembling by the bourgeoisie, the proletariat perfect the art of skepticism. If this points to something other than a banal picture of the divided city, we might ask how the collision between these two arts mark the life of a city? Could cities be marked as unique through the specific ways in which these two arts of everyday life collide – the art of dissembling self-confidence and the art of skepticism? The proletariat provides the secret in Marx’s formula because the proletariat personifies the recognition that the past is all there is, in the

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memory of that innocent desire for its future whose vestiges now survive in the present as a trace of loss. The experience of the present as loss makes the past an unfulfilled dream and the future an illusion that promises only to reiterate the irrevocable constancy of unfulfilled desire. This means that the problem of the proletariat is to find a basis in the excitation of the bourgeoisie to revitalize desire. That the proletariat work at doing business in the way of the bourgeoisie is reflected not only in the growth of the service sector, contract and part-time work, and the informal economy, but in the very opportunity to exploit the fascination of the bourgeoisie with their skepticism – their diversity, their vitality, their foods and customs, their strange existence at the margins of productivity. If the proletariat imitate the excitability of the bourgeoisie (by trying to learn and master the regime of the city in the way Italians in Toronto built College Street), the bourgeoisie try to penetrate the enigma of the proletariat (the way Starbucks or real-estate developers try to understand and reproduce that kind of life desired by those who are unlike them not only by directly intervening but by seeking to apply and extend the format in other spaces). The mutual fascination of bourgeoisie and proletariat for and to one another constitutes the informal law of the city as an endless exchange of attempted seductions. The most mundane object – the cell phone – is a perfect embodiment of the contagiousness of the entrepreneurial spirit, starting perhaps with business calls and the need to maintain contact with the office, the customer, or the market, and sweeping through all groups and spaces of the city as an imperative, the need and desire to stay in touch, never to be out of reach. Is this a new norm? Whether or not, everyday life is redesigned in terms of the constant need to be available and to have access to the other whose availability needs to be assured. The cogency of justifications of whatever type (safety, keeping up with the children, the appointments) only pale alongside of the imaginative structure that affirms total accessibility, the virtues of timeliness, and of concordance that marks the schedule as a master plan for efficient living. The images of information on the move, the drama of the call answered and the missed call, marks life itself as doing business, and doing business as a moral order, confirming the self-worth of every person who is irrevocably hooked into the circuits of sociality, everyone who is engaged by the occupation of need and desire, of being wanted and reciprocally of wanting and needing, always announcing the unmistakable value of being called and of calling, the value of an object of desire. The proletariat imitates and inverts the cell phone as the instrument of doing business, doing its own business with the cell phone in ways that make the very rush and excitement of “being productive” (involved, occupied, busy) a cornerstone of everyday life.

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The sign of the proletariat is simply the skepticism which exists at the heart of the lived experience of productivity, a skepticism that personifies the extreme contrast to the alternate extreme confidence of the bourgeoisie. Confidence and skepticism are the extremes of productivity (in the Aristotelian sense), or on the one hand, the belief that productivity will continue forever, and on the other hand, that whatever its continuation, it makes no difference. This is also to suggest that in order to find the secret of the city, we might begin to think of the ways in which resistance to change is voiced and exhibited (whether as the transgression of bohemianism or the innovation of commerce), typically taking shape as a reply to productivity and market value, appearing as a subversive voice when utility is put into question through the violence of revitalization in collective initiatives and sporadic currents of social energy; ad hoc community building and collectivization of a city’s life through its arts, scenes, the wildness of its youth, the restlessness of its street life, its criminality, art and bohemianism, and again as an innovative entrepreneurial voice in initiatives like street vending, loan sharking, trading, and bartering. We need to understand such skepticism as a feature of the local peculiarity of the bourgeoisie, as a mimetic, contagious force that seeks to find a way to affirm dissembling and to sustain it by diversifying it in many shapes. The local peculiarity of the bourgeoisie is nothing less than the way it makes the pretense of benevolence into an art of dissembling that can disregard with rigorous self-assurance the question of collective purpose. The art of dissembling is the pretense that the demonstration of assurance about self-worth solves the problem of salvation. At any modern moment, this struggle is played out through the new generation. The new generation of the city releases in any modern moment critical opportunities to realign the system of desire. The youth of the city are invited to break their bonds to the fatefulness of life chances by imagining the point of view of the bourgeoisie. The power of the imaginative structure of the city is expressed in its varied attempts to seduce the new generation to the view that imagines making a difference and, so, seizing the opportunity of the present moment by imagining a future different from the past. The present moment of unrest in any city is marked by the manner in which social class as the question of life chances becomes a focus of collectivization that is worked out through the ways the local peculiarities of the bourgeoisie organize the environment of the city as a spectacle for the exhibition of its productive forces. The “reconciliation” of the tension between skepticism and confidence lying at the heart of the experience of the bourgeoisie, at the heart of the commitment to productivity as the be-all and end-all of the

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present, takes shape in its inevitable “reply” to the glorification of work and asceticism which is its bourgeoisie inheritance. This reply is reflected in uneasiness towards the exclusion of the question of the meaning conceived as a distraction to productivity and always available to be taken up as the “work” of any present generation. Thus, the local peculiarities of the bourgeoisie are typically expressed in the city in ambiguity towards bohemianism as a vital presence in the urban landscape, the question of the diverse and creative mix which ought to be sustained as a legitimate transgressive presence.

m i m e t i c c o n ta g i o n In his study of Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1984) recovers Rabelais’s description of the Parisian marketplace as part of a ceremonial order that organizes the concentration and displacement of skepticism. Bakhtin describes such travesty, as a political strategy for sustaining the general will of the poor in the face of a Hobbesian world. He views the market as travestying the skeptical self-understanding of the utilitarian transaction by actually exaggerating and flaunting its collective self-interest – in the words of Baudrillard, of being more false than false – by exaggerating the vulgarity of exchange in hyperbolic gestures that can only mock it. Note Bakhtin’s discussion of Rabelais’s prologue: It is written from beginning to end in the style and tone of the marketplace. We hear the cry of the barker, the quack, the hawker of miracle drugs, and the bookseller; we hear the curses that alternate with ironic advertisements and ambiguous praise … this entire prologue is a parody of the ecclesiastical method of persuasion (Bakhtin, 1984, 167) … The city rang with these many voices … the culture of the common folk idiom was to a great extent a culture of the loud word spoken in the open, in the street and marketplace. And the cries of Paris played their own considerable part in this culture (182) … The cries … were an essential part of the marketplace and street … Rabelais heard in them the tones of a banquet for all the people … These utopian tones were immersed in the depths of concrete, practical life, a life that could be touched, that was filled with aroma and sound (185) … The cries of Paris and … the hawking … are ambivalent; they too are filled with both laughter and irony. They may at any moment show their other side; … they may be turned into abuses and oaths. They too exercise the debasing function, they materialize the world (187).

Bakhtin tells us that the materialism of collective life is travestied in the Parisian marketplace not through “criticism“but in a language that is more materialistic than the “official language” it transgresses. Thus, if

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something remains abstract in the “official” ecclesiastical method of materialism – how its sanctimonious avarice remains a kind of “hawking” masked behind distinctions of market value – the marketplace in actuality brings into the open the very materialism that lies behind, representing it in the tones of “a banquet for all the people.” In the language of the marketplace, the transaction materializes as a banquet. Vulgarity exposes what remains concealed in the transaction by bringing utilitarianism into the open in a way that can be binding because of its very ribaldry. That is, the marketplace makes explicit what brings us together – the discomforting private appetites of avaricious actors – as a kind of common venality of the species, which, specifically and distinctively ours, serves to celebrate and, so, transform our instinct for survival into a “banquet for all the people.” We might now pose the question of the market anew: how does buying and selling become an occasion that is festive by virtue of this collision between its material and ideal elements? We might suggest that the traditional market was charged with meaning, according to Bakhtin, because its ostentatious vulgarity travestied the privatized transaction by bringing into the open the venal undertones of the collective struggle for existence and advantage in a way that could only be celebratory by speaking that language aloud. Is this the place of skepticism in the city, to speak aloud the language of bourgeoisie excitability?

bohemianism Now we have the bourgeoisie, the self-confident because (self) chosen people who “elect” to solve the problem of indeterminacy that so plagued Catholicism and Lutheranism by willing their own worth and merit in the absence of any palpable sign on the grounds that expressions of doubt are marks of weakness. If Weber’s example of Calvinism might seem untenable today because conditions have changed, as if we are seeking to apply a nineteenth-century “reading” to the contemporary situation, this ignores the exemplary status of this case as a paradigm of the desire for distinction through worldly activities in an environment where “other does not answer,” that is, where transcendental reassurance has been revoked on any grounds. If the crisis of indeterminacy characterizes the modern moment of any civilization, the modus operandi of the Calvinist bourgeoisie is to develop hyperbolic self-confidence as a demonstration of worth reflected in a strategy of methodic asceticism towards the meaning of action(s) and life. For example, in the absence of being able to provide for our value on any other grounds, we can only seize the opportunity to demonstrate our difference from the other person to whom we seem comparable. The

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need of the bourgeoisie to imitate the competitor in order to differ and to find a more productive niche in the market requires working to be different from those we resemble and finding a basis in the affinity to make a legible difference. We still must, despite our differences, share a standard which allows us to recognize and evaluate ourselves in relation to one another. Thus, being similar to those towards whom we differ binds us in the ways enemies must study each other and take on the camouflage of their point of view in order to treat them as adversaries (coming together in the need to calculate the common situation as the other does in order to master the other); and being different with respect to those who are similar binds us to them even as we study them in order to distinguish ourselves. If now skepticism is seen to refer to the distrust of transcendental reassurance itself (for example, the revocation of any palpable sign of salvation), the excitement of the optimism of the bourgeoisie is fuelled by the opportunity to be selfdetermining with respect to value and worth, that is, to demonstrate by and for oneself through composed self-assurance that value depends only upon human construction and will (being sufficiently methodic and ascetic to concentrate upon what is important and to relax doubt in the face of what is beyond our capacities to manage and master). Being competitively acute is an excitatory virtue. We can note how modern bohemianism, in its pretense of rejecting the devotion to commerce and stability of the bourgeoisie, still accepts in its way, the rejection of traditional pieties in the service of a self-determining will to construction. Bohemianism compared itself to the bourgeoisie city it was living in and “apart” from (its enemies), and simultaneously made prolific distinctions among its friends on the basis of authentic or spurious commitments to its mode of life. This competitive focus of bohemianism was shared with the bourgeoisie from whom it also recoiled. Regardless of its substantive doctrines, bohemianism invariably shared the basic competitiveness and self-determining hubris of its bourgeoisie lineage. Fundamentally, bohemianism rejected the notion of the priority of work which was not freely chosen and, at best, saw a “job” and a career as the personification of one’s identity. Thus, bohemianism was always tempted to invert the bourgeoisie overestimation of work by claiming the person to be more than the job, possibly compromised by its routinization. In this way, bohemianism could always bring to view the guilt of the bourgeoisie towards the miscalculation of its worldly priorities. Further, since the asceticism of the bourgeoisie was seen to deny the opportunity to improvise and learn from the changing circumstances of any present and to participate spontaneously in its give-and-take, bohemianism could always make transparent the anxiety of the bourgeoisie concerning their own rigidity and inflexibility.

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The critique of bohemianism was the radicalization of the voice of the bourgeoisie reflecting upon its own limits: “All shared … a marginal existence based on the refusal or inability to take on a stable and limited social identity. All lived simultaneously within ordinary society and outside it” (Seigel, 1986, 11). At any modern moment, the changing of the guard in a civilization requires some force analogous to bohemianism to supply a critique of the forms of stability and their limits which have become sanctified. The city sacrifices its bourgeoisie by empowering its descendents to renew civic vitality through opposition which both imitates and travesties the form of life of the bourgeoisie. In quoting Mrs Trollope’s comment on Paris’s “busy idleness,” Cesar Grana makes the important point that even the unemployed, anchorless, roaming marginals “whose existence was essentially improvised, unconventional, ingeniously opportunistic … actors in the pageant of self amusement” were occupied with their idleness in the way of the bourgeoisie, were busy being idle and doing business as idle in a way that imitated the bourgeoisie and imparted to Paris (in contrast to London) its appearance as a “glass beehive” (Grana,1964). This is to say that a city that would imitate Paris in order to emulate its creativity would need to sustain its bohemianism by making it possible for them to do business as idle, that is, to use their free time productively. In the same way, it is not that bohemianism is “productive” in its work, for example, art, for it eschews that vision of making for the life that it aspires to produce: “Bohemians were those for whom art meant living the life, not doing the work” (Seigel, 1986, 11).

q u a n t i t y a s s p e c ta c l e The excitability of the bourgeoisie infects the city in commerce (innovative practices, retail diversification, innovation, and destruction), in the improvisational practices of trading, bartering, and the circulation of money, goods, and services, in the enterprise of bohemian practices, in the tensions between “mainstreams, alternatives, and undergrounds” in art, commerce, and politics, and in the coexistence of heterogeneous persons in the same spaces. Because this mix of the city assumes the character of a diverse landscape of types, it typically acquires the shape of a spectacle, monstrous in its appearance of superficiality. T.J. Clark finds this spectacle a feature of the changing capitalist city epitomized in nineteenth-century Paris in which the objectification of public life as a visual representation (“crush of signs,” “exchange of signals”) undergoes historical fluctuations in which the distinctiveness of class seems to disappear, and yet remains as an organizing feature of the vision of the city. Whereas in the earlier stage, the spectacle of the city is

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represented in terms of discrete and legible marks of class, the development of capitalism is accompanied by the representation of the city as a mosaic of anonymous contacts between externally connected parts of a crowd whose individuality can only appear as the detachment of consumers, as external signs rather than the revelation of character (Clark, 1998, 47, 56–7, 63–7, 258). Yet the sneer towards this petit bourgeoisie subject, taken in by the promise of the city to invest the present with significance, reads the spectacle through a lens that risks losing the phenomenon, that dream of sweetness of living that identifies beauty with the visual feast of the city itself and its diverse range of modes of absorption in the present, of commitments to the present and its life as itself an object of desire. Indeed, the city offers this subject the possibility of living a life on the margins, of living a life in which the primacy of work and its stability can be decentered and given a relevance subordinate to the real business of life, the business of developing ways of being both free and methodic in the organization of everyday life and its priorities. According to Baudelaire, the spectacle of the city is not simply to be registered in the monstrous objectification of capitalist public life but in the volatility of the crowd and its rhythms which devours, consumes, and entertains itself like a great animal, sensual and musical, relentless, excitable, threatening. The coursing of the crowd through the city offers the observer (the one who would represent it) both the opportunity for loss and concentration, to be among and part of it unseen, and desiring to represent how “everyone of its movements presents a pattern of life” (Baudelaire, 1972, 400). The challenge of the crowd and in this case, the painter of modern life, is that the very uniformity dramatized in the city conceals difference and distinction “in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life. It is an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting” (Baudelaire, 400). The spectacle of uniformity only becomes powerful as it arouses us to desire its visual representation as a way of encountering a force both eternal and indeterminate, the power of beauty. It is this city that arouses our thirst for beauty, expressed intermittently in the desire for its visual representation, that is, the ephemeral and contingent details of diversity in this city inspire us to aspire for its representation as both one and many, as a uniformity that is both different and makes a difference. This is how the spectacle of the city, encountered at first in the representation of the crowd, is the image that joins the city as commodity and as work of art. For, instead of seeing the visual representation of the city as another move in the critique of capitalism and of the city as a commodity, we can begin to understand how the mix of pleasure and utility, in its very decor, fertilizes

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the desire to represent it. Thus, beauty too, is “produced” as part of the development of the productive forces insofar as the desire to procreate, to bring the city to view in art, must occur by grace of the local peculiarities of the bourgeoisie. The concentration of numbers in the city appears not only through its diversity but also in the material density of its uniformity as a theatrical spectacle. For example, in descriptions of the Great Exhibition in London of 1851, commentators report: In six months, as many as 6 million visitors, one-fifth of the entire population of Great Britain, filed through the galleries of Hyde Park’s crystal cathedra1 … It has been calculated that between 750,000 and 1,000,000 visitors took excursion tickets to London; it was the largest mass movement of population ever seen in Britain. One Tuesday, October 7, 1851, as many as 92,000 people crowded simultaneously into Paxton’s glorified greenhouse … All classes mingled, or at least enjoyed proximity. Even the young Queen Victoria strolled casually among the throng (Mordaunt Crook, 1999, 5–6).

Concentration and congregation in the shape of the crowd is one way in which the quantitative density of the city assumes the form of spectacle. Numbers of people are made into a multitude as one body, the body of the multitude. The monstrousness of the great city is dramatized in the powers of the multitudinous crowd to occupy and inhabit the spaces of the city in ways that are always of incalculable effect. The appearance of the crowd in the city shows the fundamental ambiguity of the city as a capital, as a centre, for the crowd appears as both a threat and a promise of organized consumption, a two-headed monster whose volatile and contagious excitability can be feared and exploited. If it is the art of the bourgeoisie that leads to the construction of exhibition and spectacle that promises to seduce the many into becoming the crowd, this very inventiveness produces the engagement which must be managed in order to maintain the city as both hospitable and orderly. Civilization provides its cities with opportunities for display and exhibition based upon formats in circulation for the design of public events, just as these events require producing the multitude as a crowd. The city struggles with the ambiguity of its crowd, struggles to pacify it as an audience of consumers rather than as an aggregate of unruly propensities that threaten to exceed these limits through self-determination. The crowd of the city is always apprehended as both a point and moving force and as having concealed powers, qualities, and capacities. In this way, the crowd testifies both to the triumph of bourgeois productivity and the ungrounded self-assurance of the good of number, and to the skepticism that understands the crowd as a horde or headless body.

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Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest … Potentially they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls (Arendt, 1968, 9).

According to Arendt, the masses stand for the incarnation of the antiessentialist impulse whose skepticism towards the veil of language translates into an antipathy to “common interest” and, so, to the coexistence of differences. In the extreme case, the numerical existence of the mass suggests that each would be with himself, a party of one, since any “other” interest would compromise this purity. This skepticism is a perfect mimetic rendition of Weber’s portrait of the bourgeoisie: “a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual” (Weber, 1930, 104). That is, the vigorous anti-essentialism of the mass imitates the vigorous anti-essentialism of the bourgeoisie in ways that succeed in maintaining their joint survival under conditions of indeterminacy: “The apathetic sections of a bourgeoisie-dominated society, no matter how unwilling they may be to assume the responsibilities of citizens, keep their personalities intact if only because without them they could hardly expect to survive the competitive struggle for life” (Arendt, 1968, 11). Now we need to recover the dialectic in this relationship between the dissembling pretense of the bourgeoisie and the skepticism of the proletariat. The “problem” for the bourgeoisie is to prevent the ontological skepticism intrinsic to the anomic subject of productivity from disintegrating into furious formless enmity. It is only this very groundless self-confidence of the bourgeoisie, this illusory and pretentious overestimation of self-worth in the absence of any confirmation, that can charm and excite skepticism to become something other than rancorously and furiously other. It might be that the mass becomes a force (for tyranny, totalitarianism) wherever the bourgeoisie lack the resources to seduce the proletariat to the decisiveness of the present moment, that is, wherever they are unable to mobilize the proletariat to accept the dream of the present. Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because

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this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest. What a temptation to flaunt extreme attitudes in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards, to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate and pretended to be gentle, to parade wickedness in a world, not of wickedness, but of meanness! (Arendt, 1968, 32).

In this example, the mimetic exchanges show capacities for reversal. The bourgeoisie, anticipating mass enmity to hypocrisy, travesty the standard whether through trangressive gestures (in politics or art), or by exposing the “double standard” of parliamentary deliberation, the cannon, civility. Although Arendt identifies such populistic exploitation with Nazism, it seems to characterize the mix of the city. Regardless of where such an exchange begins or ends, the hypocrisy of the normative remains a constant locus of collectivization in the city through the riveting fascination it arouses and, thus, can occasion both creative and banal replies. The velocity of mimetic exchanges that always make the question of beginning, end, and authorship problematic, at the very same time confirms the creativity of the city as a market of interpretations and, so, as an appearance of opportunity par excellence. The bourgeoisie is then a figure of speech for the commitment to the present required by the subject of productivity who is continuously tempted by anomic fantasies to detest the present because it is only passing time. The bourgeoisie stands for the system of desire necessary for the revitalization of any and every present as a moment of consequence, a system both exemplified and made exemplary in the city as the capital of the civilized world. In the city the bourgeoisie experiment with ways and means of resisting enmity to collective purpose (and its hypocrisy) by offering to make every present generation bourgeoisie. Is this not a primary symptom of the exchange between the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie and the worm’s eye view of the poor understood now as the need to make the present an object of desire? If it is such desire that gives meaning to existence in time, the city makes this ethical collision a locus of collectivization, a theatre in which consumption (the desire for and to be) is made productive.

va r i e t y As a primary site for the circulation of value incarnated in goods and objects, and, more diffusely, in influences and ideas, the quantitative emphasis of the great city is always reflected in the material density of its variation in the guise of the appearance of abundance and its distribution. This distribution of copious variation is one way in which the great city constructs itself as the quintessence of the modern moment.

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In this sense, the distribution of persons and groups as social types of great range and differentiation always serves as a precondition for the materialism of the city with respect to its identities. Indeed, the reputation of the city as a capital of the civilized world – its identity in that respect – is intimately and directly implicated in its capacity to empower its own “identity market.” From Baudelaire, through Simmel, to Robert Park, runs a subversive conception of the city as such a marketplace, as a site of the specialization and diversification of social types and as a system of desire much more supple than imagined in the economy of price and competition. Even the most crass mobility aspirations become visible in the city in which the uniformity of material density provokes and indeed, requires, the reply of the desire for distinction. As Simmel noted, the tension between quantity and quality is exacerbated in the city by the threat of its density to annul quality, and played out as a struggle for recognition between spatially proximate social selves. Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours in 1799, the year of Napolean’s coup d’etat. He came to Paris when he was twenty; like so many of his characters, he arrived wearing the provincial clothes that his mother had given him. Within a few years, however, he met several fashionable ladies and began ordering his clothes from Buisson, a well-known tailor on the rue de Richelieu; one month a walnut-colored redingote, a black waistcoat, steel-grey pantaloons; the next month black cashmere trousers and two white-quilted waistcoats; later thirtyone waistcoats bought in a single month, part of a plan to buy three hundred and sixty-five in a year. By the end of 1830, he owed his tailor 904 francs and his bootmaker almost 200 – twice the sum he had budgeted for a year’s food and rent. But he believed that good clothes were a necessity for an ambitious young man from the provinces out to conquer Paris (Steele, 1998, 57).

Here the dialectic between gain and sacrifice is resolved by Balzac according to a logic of recognition which renounces the present for the future: “The question of costume … is one of enormous importance for those who wish to have what they do not have, because that is often the best way of getting it later on” (Steele, 1998, 58). That it is Paris and not the province that lays the ground for this sacrifice shows its materialism as a complex system of desire. It is not only that the city offers different strategies for its own conquest (this cliché of social construction is repeated as a refrain by ideologues of every stripe and sensibility) but that it is the city alone that creates this desire to be wooed; it is the city that stimulates its subject to be its lover. If we are tempted to say here that the city brings out the worst in its subject, we must consider how this desire for recognition is more complex, a gesture of dis-

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sembling that risks clothing in material form the copious variability of social selves. The intricate sacrificial order to which Balzac is subject brings together social recognition and the “conquest” of Paris through the capacity to make himself an object of desire. Balzac’s sacrifice – to make himself a commodity no matter how shameless – is done to woo Paris, is done out of love for this city. We begin to appreciate how this variability itself becomes dense – almost sublime – through the weight of its quantity, inverting what begins as the desire for quality into the materialized look of the city, producing an aesthetic for the “weight of numbers,” that is, producing the look of the city of Paris. Moreover, in this city rather than any other, this means that winning the love of Paris by securing its recognition for his self-worth, is equivalent to winning the love of the world. Paris is inimitable and unique in a way that permits its self-confident citizen to compare himself with the world. Balzac does not need to travel, for the world comes to him by virtue of his powers for imagining Paris as its centre, as a capital of the civilized world. This interpretive exchange that equates Paris with the world by virtue of its incomparable centrality, at one and the same time satisfies Balzac’s desire to be a man of the world. The idea of comparison could not be more vivid: the incomparable secret powers of Paris, of locality, permit anyone with talent and desire, to be self-confident in his assurance that he is at the centre of the world. Could this be the secret longing of every city wishing to be great, to produce such assurance and self-confidence in its citizens? This text brings together confidence and skepticism in the figure of Balzac. First, his provincial skepticism permits him to achieve the detachment required to calculate what the city needs and wants and to master its system of desire. His demonstration imitates and travesties the criteria of recognition in the city in a gesture that speaks aloud the language of the bourgeoisie as must any newcomer out to conquer the city and to do business in a way that is demonstrable. Then, in the next breath, as a “success,” that is, in the voice of the self-confident personification of the bourgeoisie, he lives off the diversity of Parisian types and its fundamental skepticism as if it was his personal accomplishment, finding its intoxication to be an inimitable source of self-confidence and a condition for his self-assurance as a citizen of the world. The proletariat Balzac, who wants to be recognized by the city, strives to conquer it, in part, through his skeptical capacity to travesty its customs, then incarnates the voice of the bourgeoisie, aspiring to conquer the world in order to be recognized as a universal man, the cosmopolitan. Is this not in a nutshell a picture of the tension being worked out in our cities between skepticism and confidence, palpable in such desire for conquest, visible in such structures of mutual recognition?

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Within the system of desire of market value, skepticism as a speaker calculates that if it can learn what the city needs and wants, it can succeed by giving the city something of value and, so, can become an object of value itself (knowing full well that the “system” is an arena of dissembling). In a similar but different way, skeptics know that their city’s capacity to be an object of desire in the worldly circuits of influence, bestows upon the bourgeoisie by implication the recognition that accrues to their city, marking them as universal by virtue of the centrality of their place. The “success” of each of these gestures depends upon their being identified with something recognized as desirable and, so, by their borrowing desire (by implication of their relation to the other). Market value, operating according to this rule of association, says first that having the object everyone wants makes one into an object wanted and secondly that acting as if one is an object wanted is a convincing demonstration that one is an object wanted. Market value personifies the pretense of dissembling insofar as one claims value for the self by virtue of being an object of value for the other, as if a desirable object (for the other) is an object of desire (good). In the way that one’s association with a celebrity makes one a celebrity, or that in having a swell object one becomes a swell object, one achieves value by implication. The interpenetration of these voices accounts for the cliché that “everyone is middle class” and could just as well account for its contrast that “everyone is working class” insofar as skepticism and self-confidence coexist as the local strategy of everyday life in the city between the extremes of the very rich and the very poor. Within these extremes “everyone” tries to achieve the position of groundless self-confidence and “everyone” tries to calculate and penetrate such dissembling. In this way, Rousseau’s conception of the material city becomes more intelligible as the monstrous mix of self-confidence and skepticism, the “divided city” forming the environment of problem-solving in which dissembling and its moral order is a constant preoccupation.

l u x u ry The quantitative force of the great city materializes as the problem of luxury in collective life. Assuredly, this problem can be “comprehended from the worm’s eye view of the poor,” but this is only part of the story of the city, for its status as an object of desire exceeds formulae of the divided city. If the tension between poros and plenty is heightened in the great city, we need to ask what this relationship means and how it is given content in ways that link it to place and locality. In his classic study of the cultural roots of industrialism (Nef, 1960), Nef discussed the way in which the advance typically assumed of En-

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gland’s industrial progress was attributed to the quantitative emphases on producing cheap wares in large quantities and, so, implicitly, to the capacity of England to achieve emancipation from the French emphasis on quality, as if that stood as a decadent impediment to growth. Accordingly, progress seemed to depend – in received interpretations – upon the abilities of a quantitative emphasis on quantity, productivity, and utility, to wrestle free of the “economy of delight” inspired by the French dedication to quality and craftsmanship (Nef, 1960, 127, 129, 137). Nef recoiled from such interpretations which excluded quality from quantity, suggesting that one grows at the expense of the other. He wanted to resist the twin excesses, on the one hand, of diminishing the value of the quantitative by treating it as if determined by externals or, on the other hand, of banishing the value of the qualitative by treating it as an obsolete fetter upon progress. Thus, if the city is the site for the affirmation of quantitative value (the material abundance that is signified by the production of cheap goods), there must be a collective sense of “delight” or of the “good life” that is objectified in such a system. In asking us to reflect upon, rather than deny, the self-understanding of capitalism, Nef invites us to consider the affirmation of quality that quantity invariably makes, that is, to understand how the dedication to quantitative productivity must appeal to some definitive sense of beauty and of its end as promoting “the sweetness of living” (Nef, 1960, 138). If the interest in the production of cheap goods is not to be treated as an end in itself, it needs to be understood as implicated in and oriented to some conception of ends and objectives which give point and meaning to the pursuit. In asking, what kind of delight is revealed by the commitment to produce cheap goods in quantity, we are reflecting upon the vision of the good life animating production itself. We can, accordingly, trace this commitment to style, workmanship, beauty, and delight to the larger and historic French attempt to bind the object and the commodity both to a notion of oriented form and to the effects of an economy of delight. The claim of the emphasis on quantity cannot be to produce a large number of ugly things, but rather to show that a “larger quantity of exquisite commodities could be made” (Nef, 1960, 138). Thus, we have not quantity without quality but a quantitative conception of quality. This quantitative version of the good life or “sweetness of living” assumes in its way, the possibility of giving a “new form and perfection” to things, and by virtue of this, “to produce more stable and humane relations between individuals and nations” (Nef, 1960, 138). The claim of quantity is not to supersede quality but to be a means of maximizing its dissemination: to facilitate the beneficial effect of beauty on life and, so, to promote equal accessibility to the “sweet life.”

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In the first instance, this quantitative conception of the Good speaks to how form can be preserved in the production and abundance of material goods, leading in its way to the antinomies we associate with “mechanical reproduction,” and simulation, which the Greeks understood through the relation of image to original. Nef showed how the effort to imagine quantity as value (if it is not to be rooted in dumbstruck admiration of absolute number or of ineffable infinity) is discernible in the desire to bring order and style into the art of living which we might associate with the French economy of delight. In this way, such an art of life becomes visible partly in the search for perfection in the making of commodities, partly as nostalgia or the search for craftsmanship, partly in questing for things of quality in every imaginable type and site, and partly in the concern for the city itself as a work of art. Most relevantly, in the great city luxury comes alive as a collective problem around the question of quality and its very possibility, its very accessibility, its very dissemination and distribution. This question of the “sweetness of living” in specific relation to material production is dramatized and contested as an urgent matter in the great city and, so, as a major collective locus of its concern for abundance, copiousness, and questions concerning whether and how productivity makes a difference for the optimization of needs and priorities, and for the equality and humane relations among its people. We might say that the existence of the city is inseparably linked to the way it makes the question of “sweetness of living” unavoidable and inescapable through the force of its very ambiguity. This suggests that we can only begin to understand the city as we come to terms with the transformations of the bourgeoisie and the relevance of its local peculiarities for the dissemination of influences in the variety of settings of city life.

conclusion The capital of the civilized world makes observable and theatrical the brilliance of capitalism, its shine and sheen. The brilliance of capitalism contrasts with the dullness it has left behind or the lack of luster that can be discerned beyond its reach. Brilliance always raises the question of whether it is more apparent than real, whether its shine is only skin deep. The appearance of the brilliance of capitalism at the centre, always brings to view in its very shining the difference between what it seems to be and what might be concealed, the difference between what is and what is not, that is, the question of meaning. The city itself is an integral part of the objective value of its civilization, centering for its world, the power of capital to emancipate desire. The power of capital lies in its capacity to transform human nature, the

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nature of the human, and this power shines at the centre in gestures of affirmation and resistance, of dissembling and skeptical subversion, appearing as a two-sided monstrous discursive spectacle where the mortality of value itself always seems, but might not be, on the verge of extinction. The city which is the capital of the civilized world is the city that centers and exemplifies the power of capital not externally but by linking it squarely to the satisfaction of desire. The power of capital at such a centre is two-sided, residing in its capacity to empower the appearance of a quantitative expansion in the dream of sweetness of living and at the very same time, to arouse theorizing capable of putting into question this very conception of the real order, its concealed powers, qualities, and capacities. Thus, we note again how the city which is at the centre of a civilization is the capital precisely because it can make the dissemination of worldly desire its capital concern, a concern of such capital importance that it can be theatricalized as an expanded public stage in which all participants are reciprocally performers and audience, two-in-one, seeing each other and being seen in an environment enlarged to illuminate its varied choices and restricted to keep dark the possibility that these differences make no real difference. This capital illuminates the abundance and diversity of desire – both its hopes and fears – in ways central to the civilization of which it is part.

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8 Impermanence

i nt roduc ti on The development of the productive forces of civilization concentrate in the city as a spectacle of change. The material landscape assumes shape at any climactic moment as other than it was and by virtue of this, as other than it will be. If the present is a moment of loss, it is also a new beginning whose future is incalculable. The unrest of change, assuming theatrical form as a spectacle, transforms the city into the penultimate opportune occasion for mastering unrest itself, continuing the question “Is this a pretense of monstrous proportion, or is it a reiteration of the same, a repetition of human powerlessness?” Death and the sense of finitude of the human condition haunts collective life in concerns for perpetuity amidst constant change. Perhaps the first or most rudimentary shape in which the limits of human agency appear in collective life is through the images of mortality summoned up by the sense of the perishable character of human constructions and accomplishments. The density of any city dramatizes at one and the same time both the material force of its present and the limits of materiality by the destiny of time. The works and accomplishments of any city both anticipate their impermanence, and challenge the collective to find and revive its place as a matter of significance and meaning at the moment in ways that seek to give form to the relentless and inexorable bodily movement of its life. The building and rebuilding of the city is the first way in which the groundlessness of being appears as a spectacle for the collective, in the vividness of its haunting fragmentation.

the city in flux Impermanence is a problem constantly raised in the city, reflected in the ongoing challenge posed by the question of its persistence amidst con-

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tinuous change. In this chapter, we begin to show how collective perpetuity must always be worked out in the city in relation to the spectre of impermanence initiated by the “fact” of the city in flux. The uncanny aura which impermanence casts over the city is dramatized in its relentless building and rebuilding initiatives, its endless circulation of things, goods, spaces, and people, and even more, through the very nature of the city as an artefact experiencing deterioration and revitalization marked by its mixing and matching of times and spaces that imparts an eerie ontological eclecticism to everything that is made. The impermanence of the city affirms the active capacity of the collective to be selffashioning and, simultaneously, its anomic recognition of the perishable character of all that comes to be, showing in this way the limits of a finitude which is typically celebrated for its works and achievements, while being denigrated for its failure to master creation itself. The impermanence of the city strikes the chord of otherness, celebrating what must be rebuilt, destroying what will be replaced, in the relentless fusion of Apollonian and Dionysiac elements that constitutes a continuous challenge for the collective that would solve the ongoing problem of its perpetuation (Nietzsche, 1956). In suggesting that everything passes away, that nothing persists in form, that processes are ultimately revisable, that constancy is at the mercy of the fortuitous, in all these ways and more, impermanence tempts the city with resignation as its fate, as if its form, and indeed, form itself, cannot withstand the movement and force of life (Simmel, 1959), that is, as if the agency of the collective is an idle, humanist illusion. In this way too, impermanence challenges the city to put its reality “on the spot” in order to test its claim to be more than a city in name only. Thus, the city compels itself to suffer this challenge, this nihilistic provocation, in order to face up to the problem of its renewal. In a series of analyses of artefacts – the jug, the handle, the bridge, the ruin – Simmel shows how any instance of building or rebuilding affirms the human mastery of nature in a way that is temporary because the attrition or deterioration of the artefact – always objectified in the ruin – reasserts nature’s dominion in ways that bring humans face-toface with the recognition of their fragility (Simmel, 1959). If, in its way, the occasion of rebuilding accentuates the Dionysiac intuition of impermanence of which Nietzsche spoke, it also makes a place at the very same time, for the Appolonian intuition of the persistent dominion of the human spirit (Nietzsche, 1956). In this way, Simmel provided a means of translating architecture into a social dynamic that we can begin to explore in cities. For example, any building or rebuilding initiative offers an opportunity to investigate ways in which cities animate or breathe life into spaces. Simmel suggests that the deterioration of a building brings the collective face-to-face

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with the recognition that its continuous reversibility of the human relationship to nature is dramatized on every occasion as a challenge for the city. Thus, we can understand the collective response to the demands of building and rebuilding as an index of the tension released by conflicts between intuitions of the impermanence of man-made things and the need to surpass such recognition through the reassertion of human dominion. For example, the debate between urban policy and politics, corporate interests, and the profession of architecture is activated in cities as a dialogue concerning best ways and means of infusing spaces of the city with life. These policies and interpretations presuppose images of the people of the city, and of their uses of space, in ways which gloss, and yet make available, a discourse directed to the question of how users of space are imagined as engaged and enlivened through these encounters. We are in position to examine the various ways in which such questions are debated and resolved, in order to determine the range of possibilities through which city dwellers express collective concerns for their own persistence and change as a people. In this way, we are continuously guided by the question of how the city puts its stamp upon the debate and how the debate is shaped by the city. We might think of the city as the place where humans are stripped bare, are brought face-to-face with the question of their limits. The city can be said to expose its subject to the fundamental impermanence of all that comes to be, to the inexorable uncanniness of artifice and social construction. The city positions its subject at the precipice of the contrast between being and becoming in a way altogether different from the encounter of the villager with nature. At one and the same time, the essential flux of city life celebrates the freedom of the species and the fundamental constraint upon this freedom, evoking the constant spectre of the fragility of what we construct. In this way, the city is a provocation that tests us to find ourselves in the face of the constant spectacle of impermanence. If we are drawn to cities in the hope of challenging our limits (the promise of freedom), our fate in the city is to suffer the recognition that such a challenge is in continuous need of renewal. In part, the inheritance of the city resides in the ambiguity of this challenge itself, the problem(s) it poses for the collective which must persistently create, suffer, and contest the varieties of intended solutions that are offered. We shall begin to create a narrative that shows how the city produces through its spectacle of impermanence, diversity, and fragmentation, nihilism itself, as a meaningful incentive for, and test of, its commitment to any present moment, to modernity. Note that we do not call the city nihilistic, but, rather, the environment that dares to risk putting nihilism and its overtones into play as a

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vital part of the everyday discourse; indeed, this is what makes the city a primary centre of freedom. In this way the city arouses the very emotions it needs to surpass – the anomic intuition of fragility and impermanence – in its building and rebuilding that both affirms the present while deferring mastery of eternity. The mix of Dionysiac and Appolonian elements in this deferral marks the culture of the city and its fundamental ambiguity with respect to architecture. In this way, any project imagines the engagement of the people of the city with the space as an encounter intended to be powerful, to be significant for their lives, and thus, to be a statement about its own renewal as a city. And no matter how innovative such a gesture appears, it can only do its work of renewal from bits and pieces of what is handed down in the art of architecture, the convention of its genres of spaces, and its representations of forms of life conceived as inhabiting these spaces. For any city, impermanence is marked by flux (both internal changes and external fluctuations in fortune), the violence of building and rebuilding activities, and by its trajectory in time as an artefact with a life cycle that fuses natural and aesthetic values. This permits us to speak about the city in terms of the metaphors of circulation, renewal, and biography. Through such figures of speech we can grasp the essential movement of the city itself as a collective problem by which it is confronted and which it must work to “solve.” The flux of the city as a symbol which the city conjures up to and for itself is reflected in the variety of discourses of city life. In this chapter, the problem-solving city begins to come to view in images of the collective engaged by the problem of its self-renewal and the need and desire to grasp itself as a centre of integrity amidst the movement by which it is enveloped. The aura of impermanence suggests that the city is always on the verge of losing itself and, so, can always be approached as if poised for an ethical collision over the question of who and what it is, that is, by the question of its identity. The paradox of New York is that its disappearances contain constancies – and not only because some buildings of an earlier generation survive to prod us toward historical self-consciousness. What is most steadfast in New York has the fleet look of the mercurial: the city’s persistent daring, vivacity, enchantment, experiment; the marvel of new forms fired by old passions, the rekindling of the snuffed (Ozick, 1999, 152–3).

The city is in constant change: people move in and out, things persist and decline, spaces endure and deteriorate. The city is a site of movement and rest, of growth and destruction. As of any present, ones who enter the city are subject to others who have never moved, while those

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who are sedentary are confronted by others in motion, are faced by strangers who resemble them and neighbors who appear fundamentally dissimilar. The movement of persons distinguishing the city – entering and exiting, birth and death, immigration, migration and mobility – mark its surface as a dialectic of rest and motion, of life and death, decline, and rebirth. Spaces, just as persons, persist and decline, are put to various uses, replenished, or left to rot, to abandonment and deterioration. If hope springs eternal, it still coexists with loss in the cycle of waste and erosion, the renewal of houses, properties and territories, the endless succession of remains and rebuilding, of the decline and regeneration of districts, areas, and things. As of any present the ceaseless motion of the city – its persons and things – shows how its life is its death, a fate reflected in the image of the inexorable glimpsed in the formula of renewal. For the subject of the city at any present, questions are raised. Does the city persist throughout its alterations? What is the relation of the city dreamt to the real city? Where am I in this city and where is this city in me? And for its part, the city must make such questions compelling as its discourse that materializes in this place in a way that makes manifest its genius. And this is the pretence of the city, its “seduction,” for if it seems to make the question of the relation of the city dreamt to the real city before our eyes to be the abiding question that needs to be answered, this appearance is its lure for inciting us to look behind the veil of this formula. For the city invites us to query how its spaces change in a way that makes problematic the question of its constancy, how it can remain true to itself. The city invites us to reflect upon its endurance throughout its apparent flux, how its integrity can be said to persist. And so, we conceive of the dream of the city – of its integrity and persistence – as coexisting with the nightmare envisioned by the fear that the city is lost, that it is no more, that it is “nothing but a sign.” This is how insomnia can be said to mark the wide awake life of the city dweller, caught between the lure of its dream and the temptation of the nihilist view: that the city is lost and that what its subject had and desires is and will be no longer, that the city is dead and with that death, part of its subject, too. The city – in its insomniac subject – arouses the panic which worries that what is part of one is no longer and will never again be, and in this way, at any moment, raises for its subject the question of the death of one part of it. This is how we can say that insomnia is a constant temptation in the inner life of the city.

th e ch i cag o s c h o o l It is to the Chicago School, particularly Robert Park and his colleagues, that we owe the most radical explication of the city as a process of

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movement in which rebirth constantly occurs as the renewal of spaces by individuals and groups who aspire to find their place “within the great complexities of urban life” (Park, 1926, 4–18). Ecology conceives of the city not simply as a context or background of individual and of collective problem-solving but as a collective actor engaged by its own essential problem of life and death, a problem that takes shape in its many and various recurring effects upon its own parts. The city conceived as a collective actor is not simply pictured as an aggregate or organism, but as self-affirmative in a way that exceeds determination. The tension in this picture of the city stems from its image as locked in a natural order which “like plants” (Park, 1926, 3) goes through a succession of inexorable stages, that, in becoming resources for its own desire and memory, constrains it to recall and anticipate only within the terms of such an order, that is, as if its past and its future is limited only to a record of its choices and decisions. In this sense, the city survives its natural conditions as a collective fate to which it can only adapt, a fate that seems to mark each city as particular with respect to the way it reconfigures a position in relation to such a universal condition. The genius of the city makes itself manifest “where selection and segregation of the population has gone farthest” (Park, 1926), providing a way of distinguishing “great cities” from all others. Despite its relentless concern with the life and death movement of the city, the ecology of the Chicago School has no resources to contemplate how the life of the city is linked to its history and memory in ways that produce varieties of self-understanding more complex than what they can imagine. The coexistence of natural selection and segregation – the inexorable cyclical order of the city and its agency – is exhibited in the ways in which it works out this problem. Such “work” is shown in the ceaseless movement of groups and individuals who continuously act on spaces by appropriating them, alternately investing and withdrawing meaning, renewing boundaries and opportunities, all of which redefine relations between the centre and the periphery and of groups to spaces. The city – pictured as a state of continuous flux – alternates between the destruction of spaces (decay, decline) and the life of rebirth in which spaces are reinvented through the “movement of the population,” whether as the mobility of its individuals and groups or the wanderlust of marginal sectors and transient populations (lost souls, immigrants, artists). The oscillating rhythm of life and death in the city is reflected in the proposition that cities have “an indefinite life” and in the implicit corollary that spaces within the city come to be and perish, just as the persons and groups that inhabit them. Since the city is always changing, at any one moment it is not as it was, and it is not what it will be. At any moment, all conditions such as

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the land value of spaces, the height of buildings, the state of housing, the fluctuations in congestion, the relation of centre to periphery, the composition of spaces by its inhabitants, mark any space as essentially other, that is, as other than it was, and as other than it will be, while asking – implicitly – how it can persist as the same in the face of this otherness. The life and death of the city as represented by the Chicago School is exhibited in the fragility of the boundary, always deferring to the rule of the movement of selection and segregation, enabling the city to realize itself as essentially in transit, both other and the same as it was and will be. Thus, if the Chicago School appears to minimize the continuity of the boundary in this city of flux and motion, such continuity must yet always persist in the social and political consequences of such an inheritance, as the ever present vision of selection and segregation taking shape in any present as memory and desire, as the remains of a past which determines and limits the movement of any individual and group. The mix of sameness and otherness in any boundary is confirmed in the ways in which its dissolution stamps, marking the things that remain and erode by the trace of the vestige in every shape and the reshaping of the vestige in every trace. In the formula of the Chicago School, the city is charged with meaning: its size and density are signs of the dynamics of congestion in which the renewal of space is a process of subjectivization which marks the reivention of relation(s) of centre to periphery, whether in the simulation of centrality in areas long regarded as peripheral (gentrification), or the revocation of centrality from spaces now regarded as peripheral (de-industrialization). This essential intersubjectivity of spaces, persons, and groups, and of the attachments to things which come to be and perish, always establishes space as a social relationship in which the orientation of one to the orientation of the other is incarnated in the fundamental ambiguity of space as a problem to be worked out. That our own (absolute) space includes what the other makes of it and the other’s own (absolute) space includes what we make of it continues to confirm the permeability of the enclosure and, more fundamentally, of any border and, so, the opening of any inside to the outside.

e n d l e s s p r o l i f e r at i o n The Chicago School formulates renewal through indexes of movement and heterogeneity. If the whole divides into parts which themselves form wholes in relation to other parts, this apparent heterogeneity between groups and spaces is itself mirrored within the heterogeneity of its parts. The continuous flux and indistinction of the relation of whole

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to part and of part to whole is mirrored within each whole and within each part to make problematic the unity of spaces and the unity of groups, since any space is inhabited by different groups, and any group consists of persons distributed in different spaces. Fragmentation appears as the law of the city in a way that continuously raises the questions “where is the centre,” and, indeed, “what is centrality?” If areas are invested with the subjective meaning of groups, each area is both unified and divided. If people and groups are identified with the subjective meaning of their space, each group is both unified and divided. If spaces appear diverse by virtue of their distance from one another, within any space, inhabitants can be near or far apart, and between any spaces which appear near, there can be distance, while between those which appear distant, there can be proximity. Just as gentrification splits unified areas, similarities in lifestyle collect apparently diverse and differentiated areas. In this picture of the city in motion, the sedentary formula of uniformity is imagined at the extreme spaces where movement is arrested, the social graveyards of the insular enclave of the very rich and the homogeneous ghetto of the very poor, testifying over and again to the way the interplay at the borders of life and death mark the social landscape of the city and take shape in its most apparently incorrigible borders. The Chicago School permits us to speculate on the genius of the city as revealed in its movement and heterogeneity insofar as we come to expect the singularity of the city to make itself manifest in both the heterogeneity within and between spaces (groups, functions, activities, public life), and in the movement within and between spaces (decline and renewal of groups and things, identities and resources) in ways that we are always tempted to enumerate. The inexorable flux of the city always tempts us to think we can achieve mastery over these changes by measuring and quantifying “patterns.” Yet, if this lure of measurement and mastery tempts us to identify the genius of the city superficially with the selection and segregation that its formula recommends and more deeply with the movement and heterogeneity implied by this, we risk identifying the great city simply with its restlessness and diversity in a way that glosses its uniqueness. In the Chicago School, the spirit of the city is absorbed in the dynamic of renewal (of life and death) as an external condition that leaves its principle untouched. If all cities can illustrate such a dynamic, how do we come to address what is particular to Chicago, Barcelona, or Cologne? Further, the city is a place where the struggle for recognition occurs as individuals and groups aspire to be acknowledged and to achieve value within such a spatial order and as part of the struggle of the city itself for recognition. The Chicago School describes “communication”

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as concerted ways of negotiating identities within such a city, ways that can take shape in orderly succession (selection and segregation), or in subversion (marginality). The outcome of such work is a distribution of social locations, that is, of spaces with social meaning set in reference to standards of inclusion and exclusion with respect to resources such as power and prestige. What always seems particular to the city is then how it works out its “identity market” under the conditions of such a spatial order and its laws.

building and rebuilding Architecture is the means through which the city reinvents its space as it strives to renew itself in the face of ecological fluctuation. In part, the power of architecture lies in its projection into the future, its definition of the present as if a condition for eternity to confront. The tyrant’s fantasy inflates the city as a site of renewal in a way that joins renewal to the centrality of the city by virtue of its place at the heart of the nation. We have a hint here of the domination of the city as a place, not because of its ecological precedence but because of its need to revitalize itself as a matter with which the future must contend. If ecology says that the primary city dominates space, architecture claims the eternal city to dominate time. The problem, though, is that the city will be a ruin (Simmel, 1959). Architecture raises the question of the tension between renewal and the ruin, the question of how the collective problem-solving of city life can come to terms with that problem. Aldo Rossi describes the architectural project: “Architecture represents the physical signs of the biography of the city” (Rossi, 1983), making urban artefacts legible signs that permit us to examine the relationship between design and the permanent primary elements which signify the style of the city. According to Rossi such primary elements refer to the parts of the city such as its areas, its housing, streets, monuments, and fixed activities which materialize in shops, services, schools, hospitals, and services. Rossi assumes a visual constancy or form of the city based upon a vision of how its original plan and layout persists over time in modified remains that still preserve continuity through various historical traces. This relationship between the persistence and modification of the city form becomes in its way, a collective problem that is encountered anew in each generation. In this sense, the form of a city is under pressure from the dynamic life of its evolving history, particularly as reflected in the demand of each generation upon what is handed down. Shils has spoken of the appearance of the past in the present as the invariable mark of the play of tradition (Shils, 1981).

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The reproduction of a type of artifact carries the past into the present by reembodying in each newly made incarnation the image which guided earlier generations in its production and use. In each generation, each particular instance of an artifact carries forward an embodiment of an image of the object – whether it be a chest of drawers or a house or a gun – an image which guides its reproduction (Shils, 1981, 80).

Although Shils misses the opportunity to connect this observation to Simmel’s discussion of the relation of life to form as the uncanny dialectic that haunts every artefact, it highlights the inherent restlessness which building and rebuilding must accentuate. This restlessness refers not just to building and rebuilding but to artefacts themselves. Cities contain ever more finely sedimented layerings of objects in which a sense of the depth and complexity of the historical past is embodied: They are repositories for ever-increasing stocks of tangible, physical artifacts. The discarded books, recordings and clothes of several decades which fill thrift stores and flea markets … convey the vast sense of an abundance of cultural artifacts within the contemporary city (Straw, 1999).

In any city, we can identify selected occasions when changes in the attrition or deterioration of artefacts, in patterns of innovation in arts, bodies of knowledge, and practices, in interventions in spaces and areas, become controversial problems for its life and self-definition. The peril of such occasions is represented in argument and interpretation, as debated in media, local politics, and policy contestation, and in incipient or developed resistance through collective action. Controversy swirls around the rebuilding activities of all major cities in ways that allow us to approach their architectural decisions, policies, and contests as reflected visions of the continuity of urban culture, its past glories and future dreams. There are a variety of moments in the life of the city when the challenges of construction, of building and rebuilding, and of the design of spaces, activate concerns and issues connected to visions of the continuity of the city as a form, and of the limits on permissible modification of such a form (Ashihara, 1983; LeGates and Stout, 1996; Tschumi, 1994). Discourse over the question of the form of the city always presupposes certain images of its constancy, the legitimate range of transformations, and the variety of concerns for the corruption of form. All plans and projects for new building initiatives which spring up in the city activate such a discourse and bring it to life in controversies concerning the good city, the ways and means for its materialization, and

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the question of whether or not it can be attained under present conditions (Glazer and Lilla, 1987; Rowe, 1997; Jacobs, 1961; Scruton, 1987). On the surface the conflicts of interpretation that come to view through building and rebuilding initiatives seem to confirm Simmel’s comments on the pervasive influence of the contrast between the old and the new as a phenomenon of culture: “both the old, and at the same time the new and the rare, enjoy particular esteem” (Simmel, 1950, 29). In each case, the claim of the new to be absolute and unprecedented is limited by the very past from which it hopes to depart (Shils, 1980; Arendt, 1971), just as the claim of the past to be unchanging is limited by its persistence in many different shapes and guises (Shils, 1981, 164–7). The conflicts of interpretation over the value of the new and the old is a visible form of the tension between identity and difference (Heidegger, 1951), persistence and modification (Rossi, 1983), and the same and the other (Rosen, 1980) that haunts every action. At this writing, Berlin is perhaps the paradigmatic case among contemporary cities of the conflict over the question of whether and/or how the persistence of civic identity can and should materialize in building and rebuilding activity. In this context, a collision between forces of preservation, commercialism, and the aesthetic demands of architecture as a profession continues to be played out as a discourse over the question of the direction of the new city, its relationship to its past, and the concern for the way in which any particular building initiative is situated within the context of such a conflict of interpretation. Because building initiatives in Berlin correspond to the reconstruction of the city as the new capital of Germany, rebuilding what was destroyed in Berlin is correlatively the building of a new centre of the nation. Such considerations enable us to appreciate the reconstruction of this city as a decisive symbolic enterprise. Thus, the building of the new Reichstag and Government Centre, the renewal of Potsdamer Platz as the intended nucleus of a new public space for the city, and the development of the Jewish Museum are each and all gestures that have ignited the debate between politics, business, and the liberal profession of architecture (Kramer, 1999). In this debate, if politics (e.g., the urban planning bureaucracy) has sought to regulate proposed changes in the name of a conception of German identity and its preservation, corporations such as Daimler-Benz and Sony have intervened to redefine the changes in terms of more restricted economic considerations: between such extremes, the struggle of architecture to create a space for its work in the name of a reinvention of the identity of the city in the present has resulted in the array of solutions ranging from Norman Foster’s new Reichstag to David Liebeskind’s interpretation of German-Jewish rela-

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tions as a “void” that materializes in the external facade and interior structure of the museum. In any city, hovering over the debate is an image of the tacit and unspoken community to which conflicting claims and interpretations are addressed, a community, perhaps implicit as a tacit ethical auditor of any action (Grenzer, 2002). While the debate does not appear as dramatic in a city such as Dublin, building and rebuilding still proceeds at a pace in time with an expanding economy and persistent political conflict over the question of the preservation of the legibility of the city in the midst of such change. In this respect, the renovation of a section of the central city by the Temple Bar Project occurs as part of a controversial and contested claim to integrate its development objectives with local support for the arts, community initiatives, and access (Corcoran, 1998). If the architectural voice is not as celebrated and visible in Dublin as Berlin, the residue of conflict persists nevertheless. Thus, in Dublin the debate over the “reconstruction of heritage” (Brett, 1996) occupies a (structural) place similar to the debate over civic identity in Berlin (Kramer, 1999; Grenzer, 2002). The city is a site in constant renewal not from the ground up but piecemeal as the occasion demands. The “demanding” occasion is not revealed through natural law but practically, sometimes according to visible interest, sometimes as a result of fortuitous circumstances. If the city is a landscape of artefacts in which, at any moment, everything is dying, anything, on any occasion, can be hailed for an intervention. The possibility of repair, restoration, and renovation is omnipresent because death persists in the city as its unspoken and omnipresent aura. The very nature of the city as a landscape of artefacts means that at any moment they coexist in different stages of decline and, so, that intervention can always be justified on these grounds alone. Yet, the “legitimacy crisis” of the city suggests that if the appeal to renovation, conversion, and demolition can always be justified because of deterioration, then deterioration is a universal that cannot account for any one intervention. Curiously, the acceleration of building goes hand-inglove with the accentuation of the prospect of rebuilding, because what is built must deteriorate. In this way, the essential groundlessness of architectural innovation evokes the aura of the essential violence of impermanence. It is fair to say that violence haunts the city because the death of the artefact makes intervention immanent and irrational since there is no rational basis in nature for an intervention aside from the deterioration of the artefact, and, if this holds for any artefact, the justification always conceals an external interest. The connection of violence and the city, shown more vividly here than in “crime,” is registered in the experience

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of the constancy of impermanence reflected in the architectural intervention. If the city is a landscape of artefacts and is itself a paradigmatic artefact (Rossi, 1983), then the fate of the city is to suffer deterioration and intervention, that is, to suffer the life of violence in the name of renewal. This means that the city must maintain itself with resolve in the face of the demands of intervention for redefinition, a demand which exercises continuous temptations. In part the inheritance of the city lies in its commitment to being a sanctuary for freedom and, by virtue of this, to be the masochistic subject of freedom, the site continuously open to the violence of impermanence. That is, freedom can also suggest deregulation and the absence of limits upon private initiative and accumulation. This double-edge of freedom refers to the way the city lures its newcomers in search of emancipation from restrictive ties as well as the way it stimulates developmental ambitions and projects. The ambiguity of freedom accounts for the place in its mythology of will not only as the desire to escape the country in the name of creativity but as the ambition to renew the life of the city: “Louis Horowitz got rich putting up buildings in this city. In his memoir, he boasts of having willed the New York skyline into existence” (Goldberger, 1998a, 176). So, if one part of freedom pertains to the right of violent intervention, we would expect cities to be marked by their degree of commitment to deliberation directed to the difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence and, so, to some degree of thoughtful resistance to the will of (violent) development.

the conflict between old and new The ambiguity of the old and the new of which Simmel speaks should be accentuated in the city because of the colliding life cycle of artefacts and of the city itself, which marks every proposed intervention as if a drama through which this tension unfolds. The city presents the spectacle of the dialectic between inexorable attrition and the need and desire for creative intervention. Intervention is made possible by the environment of attrition which grounds its various possibilities. In this respect we can conceive of a range of relationships recommended by the action of intervention. In its limiting case, inaction simply concedes the force of attrition, as a space or artefact deteriorates and is not directly replaced, usually leaving waste (Lynch, 1990). Sometimes, this occurs as a result of demolition when the spot is an “eyesore,” troublesome, vandalized, and no financing or policy is in place for renewal. However, attrition also applies to the case of the ruin and in this shape can lead to collective action directed to preservation, veneration, and/or economic

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opportunism. Because attrition can take uncanny shape in fantasy, sloth, indolence, and inaction, just as well as in opportunism, its fundamental ambiguity marks the city as a sacred wasteland. Most notable examples of attrition are slums, regal residences, haunted houses, decrepit areas, and, in the paradigmatic case, the spaces around the Berlin wall before development of the site. Analogous to ghost towns, attrition marks the city as a landscape of ghostly spaces – of areas and artefacts – always awaiting development. Ghostly spaces are similar to the animals in pet store windows or the children of the orphanage, imploring passers-by to take them up and include them in their lives and projects. Since the ghostly spaces of the city – half dead and half alive – are separated from renewal by slivers of naked interest, opportunism, and fortuna, they always seem at the mercy of irrational forces in a way that makes the incalculable prospect of their development and rebirth an uncanny aura that haunts the city. But then we could say that ghostly spaces haunt the city as signs of decay and death as well as sites of hope and renewal through the very fantasies of economic opportunism, development, and exploitation they evoke. The construction site stands between life and death in this way – the city in decay and the city on the verge of development – bringing together death and life in the figure of the entrepreneur, the predator who picks among the ghostly spaces for opportunity and signs of life. Only the city can offer to the vulture the possibility of redemption, the chance to work for life, to rebuild the dead space. Only the city can trick the predator to enroll in the cause of life and by flattering and playing to his self-interest, can arouse him to see the life in the dying site. The fact that there are no guarantees in this relationship between the city and its predators is confirmed both in the ability of Manhattan to seduce philanthropic robber barons such as Frick, Morgan, and Rockefeller to create its museums as well as in its failure to resist the excesses of Donald Trump to recreate the city in his own image. In this way part of the uncanny aura of freedom in the city is connected to its powerlessness in the face of the domination of the rich and powerful, casting its every moment as a plaything for the caprice of forces beyond its control. Attrition is not simply a process of linear decline but an incentive for the creative renewal architecture describes as persistence and modification (Rossi, 1983). It is the creative relation to attrition that fertilizes the historical modifications upon venerable sites in ways that measure variation by a standard of formal continuity. Although monuments come to mind such as the Duomo in Milan, the images of the venerable street, or area, just as vividly summon up that sense of the city as a palimpsest.

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For example, cities have major arteries which center them in some respect, and which are claimed to be signs of distinctiveness in significant ways. These parts of the city function much like synecdoches that identify the city as a whole to inhabitants and outsiders. Such arteries remain foci of persistence and modification over time in ways that reflect not only economic and demographic changes in the city but decisive reallocations of meaning. Yonge Street in Toronto, St Catherine Street in Montreal, Grafton Street in Dublin, and Kufurstendamm (K’dam) in Berlin each in their way functions as a revelatory sign of the engagement of the city with its continuity and changes. In a literary sense, each of these arteries is a major character in the story of the city, its persistence and modification always marking trajectories of collective self-understanding. Yet the identity of the artery of any city is as difficult in its way as the identification of the major character of a complex novel with many voices. The relation of the artery to the core of the city and to competing streets that also claim centrality is always an open question, solved easily only by guide books. Thus, the very meaning of the artery is an ongoing problem. Further, it is also true that the identification of the major artery as such a persistent question for members creates problems for which solutions are always sought, problems reflected in the contingent influences of traffic patterns, commuting structures, and divergent or discrepant irregularities which disrupt the images of linearity symbolized by arteries. The history of such streets not only reflect constant building and rebuilding activity but changing patterns of settlement and movement that effect shifts in the circulation of people, groups, and objects. Tensions between the “primary” shopping function of such arteries and “secondary” uses by the people of the cities are reflected in the regulation of traffic and movement, the changing quality of life and action on the streets, and in modifications of the boundaries of the city and its quarters and, so, in the oscillating relation of the artery to the city as a whole.

remakes In the relation of replacement, an artefact is deleted and either directly replaced with another different in kind, or left as an unformed space to be filled in as circumstances develop. Real-estate development, such as the intervention of the Metropolis project into a busy downtown Toronto intersection, is like this, substituting itself for what is already in the space on the grounds of being a more valuable presence. In replacement, the old-style movie house that is destroyed can be replaced by something else altogether, converted into a structure that specializes in a different function, or it can be preserved by being made into a newer

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version on the same spot (in which case it is an “upgrade”). Where upgrading preserves the function in the space, but alters its form (and the form of the activity), replacement makes a new structure and activity (for example, substituting a video store for the movie theatre) and, thus, removes the function or activity from the area. It is difficult to decide if upgrading an old movie theatre is more violent than replacement in its space, though replacement seems a greater act of violence to the space than upgrading because it removes the movie theatre from the space. Yet, some might say that the quality of what is left (movie-going) is treated as violently in its way, that is, as a violation of the quality of film-going, than replacement, which destroys the space as an opportunity for film-going. This raises the important question as to whether or not an intervention could be more destructive of the site (by saying “no more films here!”) but less destructive towards the form of the art (at least we will not persist in the pretence that this “entertainment centre” is a true cinema and provides a real cinematic experience!). The model for replacement is the transformation of unused land into a living, public site, because the intervention does not interfere with an area or constituency that inhabits it, and, so, the appropriation is always justifiable as a “gift” to the city, claiming to make something out of nothing, to “give value” where none previously existed. In Toronto, the development of 18.2 hectares of wasteland called the “railway lands” intends to replace rubble with a mega-development with huge high-rise towers and condominium units. Yet despite its desire to give value to an empty space, this intervention named CityPlace introduces an aesthetic vision into the city that is contestable in the shape of massive condo towers set back from the streets for better viewing, cutting off the towers from surrounding neighborhoods while destroying street life. In the words of an architect: “The introduction of a suburban notion into the core of the city is dead wrong. Buildings in cities shape space, define streets and walls and animate sidewalks with shops and cafés and lobbies” (Steed, 1997, C4). Here, under what seems to be the most favorable conditions, a new claim to replace the old could be seen to redesign and apply a conventional conception of the city to its core. The remake raises the question of whether or not the suburban gesture is an act of violence simply because it fails to imagine what other vision of space could materialize. In this guise, replacement continuously invites us to consider how the failure to imagine what is right and demanding could be a kind of inaction as violent in its own way to the city as the inaction which it aspires to correct. There is a thin line between replacement and upgrading. Upgrading is not inherently the vulgar modernization of a site, but, at its best, part of the maintenance work of the city. At its best, upgrading is not simply

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repair work directed to outdated sites, but creative restoration that enables the site to persist imaginatively under changed conditions. The new Grand Central Terminal in New York comes to mind as the exemplary upgrade, teaching us “that monumental architecture can transcend issues of refinement and enrich the minutiae of daily life. The building, with its swarming crowds, is an oasis of calm, a serene eye in the midst of the swirling city … it is more like a town square. Its clarity and its serenity, as well as its majesty, belong to everyone, and not as they once did, primarily to those coming to board the Twentieth Century Limited” (Goldberger, 1998b, 94). It is true, too, that in order to succeed, this project faced vulgarization by commercial interests in the 1970s, including the prospect of a skyscraper on its roof, in order to satisfy real-estate interests. The successful legal defense of Grand Central Terminal by the Landmarks Preservation Commission reaffirmed “the right of a city to save its most valued buildings, even if they are privately owned and their land could be put to more profitable uses” (Goldberger, 1998b, 92). Note how this case makes visible the question of the right of the city to guard any of its sites from appropriation if we rethink the notion of landmark, for it could begin to point to the right of the city to defend any site defined as a communal resource even if privately owned, in ways that apply to the corner café as well as the architectural monument. In this way, upgrading always raises, implicitly, the question of the character of the city by giving it an opportunity to demonstrate its care for its sites and spaces. Here, the identity of the city as its own concern, discernible in such care for itself and its perpetuity as a symptom of its civility and discrimination (Arendt, 1968), is registered in its observable collective reply to intervention. In direct contrast to upgrading (say, where the Royal York Hotel in Toronto is transformed from a grand to a luxury hotel, or a university, or sports arena is altered in a way that allows the form of the setting to persist throughout its modifications), we can understand the displacement that characterizes removing the artefact and its activity to an altogether different space (for example, Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto is abandoned for Air Canada Centre). Such displacement usually claims to be a valuable update necessity, which is good for the city as a whole. Displacement does not destroy the activity but, in shifting it to another space, actually claims to increase the power of the city by inventing new centres of action. The violence risked by displacement lies in its abandonment of the old site in a way which seems to require its creation of centrality to occur at the cost of important damage done to sites, areas, and settlements left behind. There are, then, three kinds of intervention: replacement, upgrading, and displacement. The first destroys the link of site to action by substi-

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tuting a new kind for the old in a relation between two artefacts different in kind, and the second redefines the site in a way that preserves its link to the action, but in a modified form that could redefine the nature of the activity. Finally, displacement removes the site and action to a new space. It should be noted how each intervention produces its correlative risk for the city, for the site(s), and for the action that occurs in its setting. We can observe such risks in recent cases of building initiatives in Toronto, which exemplify replacement, upgrading, and displacement.

re pl ac em e n t Replacement, coming in all shapes and forms, has a vision both of the moribund character of what it deletes and of its own beneficial contribution to the process of urban life. Sometimes replacement finds it easy to justify its intervention as when it expands into unused or “wasted” territory either by reclaiming it for the civilized march of the city (as the way Chicago developed the unused part of its lakefront formerly east of Michigan avenue to create new hotel development and “entertainment”), or by redesigning a centre which time and circumstances have reduced to a trace (as in the redevelopment of the territory around the Berlin wall to recreate a new Potsdamer Platz). More typically, replacement is managed less like expansion than a military campaign in which an old area and way of life is dismantled on the grounds that it stands in the way of what decision makers regard as progressive. The case of certain development projects in Toronto is interesting in this respect, for their typicality. The Yonge Dundas Redevelopment Project is part of the reconstruction of an urban entertainment district in downtown Toronto, with a focus on the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Street. The project includes the creation of Dundas Square, a 3,250-square-metre public open space, along with an entertainment complex called Metropolis, and a media tower exhibiting new trends in signage and a large video screen similar to the displays of Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. amc Theatres of Canada, one of the partners in the hundred-milliondollar development with PenEquity Management Corporation, wants to imitate the success it thinks it has achieved in Times Square, Manhattan. The developers intend to create a retail-restaurant-entertainment “space” at the crucial intersection, designed to have visibility to passers-by and, so, promising to draw people from the enclosed Eaton Centre complex which is adjacent. The project promises to build a huge cinema, public square, and underground parking: “It is a street that in the past … had something for everyone, a reason for everyone to come

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down. More recently, it’s been quite shabby. It’s been hurting” (Promotional Material for the Young Dundas Re-Development Project, PenEquity Management Corporation, 1998). Only from their perspective has the street been “hurting,” an area the publicity describes as a shabby strip, populated by discount shops, fast food outlets which constitute a melange, an “ethnic hodgepodge: up a grubby stairway is Forever Young, a store filled with boudoir lingerie, but whose main business is selling photo ID cards. Its (sic) the very picture of a tawdry, vice-ridden street” (PenEquity). Here the ideas of infusion and revitalization inspire the project: the action of destruction is designed to produce a beneficial and constructive response. The effects of destruction are minimized because the area is “hurting,” and, so, what appears destructive (converting) is an appearance and nothing more since it is done for the good of the area and of the city as a whole. Presumably the limited circle of participants responsible for the intervention are satisfied that the replacement is necessary. One politician says, “tell the drug dealers and the gangs they’re no longer welcome,” equating as if a fact sleaziness with crime infestation, continuing to affirm “it will be safe, it will be lively, it will be well-lit” (PenEquity). The replacement is justified because the area is the heart of darkness of Toronto, its particular sanctuary for the antisocial and primitive. Yet, if the replacement initiative is justified by its aspiration to sanitize a dirty area, that very question is still open, only settled here by fiat and by tacit and undeliberated appeal to a hegemonic standard of civility. Crime aside, the former area of dereliction and decay can only be offensive to the new population configurations who had deserted the city because of such deterioration and would now hope to return to a city modeled after their vision of amenities. The ecstatic gush of the mayor who speaks for such a population expresses this idea: “I’m sick and tired of that flea market right down at the corner with pants hanging outside” (PenEquity) Here we have an image of the city besieged by the angry majority, those “sick and tired” of the unsightly hanging pants, who want to transform the area into a space with which they can be comfortable, a place somewhat like those districts in which they currently live from which the unsightly has been banished. Even more, the economy of suburban desire dictates the way in which this place will be constructed, enabling its organization of leisure, play, entertainment, and a “night out” to envision a new but typical encounter with space. Thus, the dream of a user-friendly city space coexists with the conception of a new actor, spectator, user, and a new course of action: “The overall concept is for patrons to be able to visit Metropolis, have dinner in one of the themed restaurants, visit the

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book superstore, take in a great feature film, browse the movie superstore, and enjoy some post movie entertainment in themed bars or interactive retail areas.” Although this seems like another instance of the rush of capitalism to devour what stands in its way, or at least a gesture compatible with the conventions of urban renewal and its utopian ideology, we should examine the chain of interpretation that animates the project for the way in which it recommends a vision of the city dweller. Strictly speaking, such initiatives always claim to be acting in the best interests of the user of the space (and of the city at large) by giving the user the service they want. In some cases, if this is talked about as “quality” or as if backed by surveys of consumer preferences, it must assume in an undeliberated way, demand as a standard, that what is built is guided by the criterion set by (what Hegel calls) a system of needs (Hegel, 1967). The question always begged assumes an equation of the wants of the majority with the Good. In the present case, the developer’s conception of a population with varied interests is captured by the image of an environment of themes, causing us to reflect upon the ways in which the interests of the population are represented as communal interests that materialize in the structure of a theme park. Here, activities are concentrated (eating, browsing, movie-going, interactive games) ostensibly for convenience but in a way which destroys the spontaneity and contingency of movement from spot-to-spot and, so, of uncertainty, walking, and decision-making, as anything other than channel selection. Furthermore, the concentration of functions occurs much as a curriculum which constrains and disciplines choice according to a classification of themes as if the user brings nothing strong and distinctive to the site but a reproduction of the most rudimentary categorizations (i.e., “Italian food,” “action movies,” a “New Orleans style bar”) and, thus, no resources or discriminatory powers other than what is offered by the themes. The user is not given the opportunity to explore and reconstruct the actions of dining, drinking, movie-going, and browsing in ways that are improvisational and creative, that is, as part of the corpus of ways and means of accomplishing a night out, of doing time and entertainment. It is as if the user is essentially unformed, requiring the massive pedagogical apparatus of real-estate development to learn the city. The project could even justify itself on the grounds that the user wants this, needs and desires such instruction in living the life of a night, and, so, that the structure is in the “best interests” of the user. The project can even claim that such a user is “demanding,” that is, a new kind of person, and that resistance to its initiative is a symptom of resistance to change. And in a sense, the claim is correct for the change that has occurred is reflected in new

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demands by new configurations of people to be allowed to use spaces of the city in ways unencumbered by the weight of deliberation, evaluation, and discrimination that repelled them in the past. In this way, the new user can claim to have been excluded from the city in the past because of its “demanding” nature, that is, because of its demand that the user do the work of forming himself within its space. The real-estate development can claim to represent this new user by creating new public spaces that will permit unimpeded and efficient access. It seems then that the entertainment complex imagines users without historic and cultivated relations to food, film, books, walking, and even entertainment, that is, to the savoring of time and space as a palpable and contingent social accomplishment. One conclusion to be drawn is that the user of the space is imagined as a stranger to the ways of the city, newcomers absent from a history of walking and browsing, suburban folk with expectations of convenience, efficiency, and concerns for security and sanitation, and adolescents whose expectations of spectacle and respite overwhelm other considerations. Replacement, truly radical, replaces a way of life and a type of city dweller with an imaginative structure that always brings to the surface contested interpretations concerning the relation of the old to the new. For no matter how new such an innovation, it cannot leave undisturbed the past and, indeed, needs and uses the past as that very standard from which it claims to depart.

upgrading Upgrading claims to modernize a site as in a make-over or remake and the resonance of cosmetic surgery is not idle. Much upgrading renovates a site whose historical place in the city is powerful and worth sustaining in some form, at least as the trace of a landmark. In Toronto the Royal York Hotel, reminiscent of the glory days of Canada’s colonial affiliation to Great Britain, has seemed worth preserving as a trace of the past, while being converted to a business hotel. In this way, the landmark status of the Royal York permits business travelers to discriminate between this site and other luxury hotels on the basis of its significance to the city, giving them a sense of its singular and special character. In other cases, upgrading becomes untempered violence when there is no landmark to offer resistance: for example, a modern, undifferentiated structure such as York University in Toronto easily fell prey to developmental caprice, since unlike the Royal York Hotel, it lacked any distinctiveness. Consequently, upgrading, untempered by any tangible constraint, was free to ignore the link between the meaning of the university and its space and could renovate it as if it was virginal territory

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to conquer. The upgrade proceeded by introducing three new elements without respect for their connection to the past: a retail mall, a rotunda, and a commons. That these innovations exhausted the upgrade was possible because of the dimness of the conception of the university as a place and of the materialization of its function. In such a situation, liberated from any restriction, upgrading can define the space as a retail outlet, grassy knoll, or in any way whatsoever, because the definition of the space is under control of those who are detached from its connotative history, and those who have an intimate connection with the place either withdraw for lack of expertise, or bargain away their interest. The ambiguity introduced by such upgrading is seen in the tension between two views: that an ugly place without resources can be made more desirable to most if its services and amenities are increased; and yet, that such change can appear as desirable only from the perspective of its function as a commercial establishment, that is, its quantitative increase of services (a food court, a cleaning shop, interactive video games, etc). The violence perpetrated by this upgrade raises the interesting question of how the organization of a setting contributes to a legible conception of the action that occurs therein, for example, how should a university use its space? If this question makes us reflect upon what is and is not a university, it is clear that this upgrade conceives of the space of a university as a marketing opportunity and students as consumers who happen to be taking classes. This notion of a captive university population of consumers parallels the redefinition of the movie theatre as primarily a food processing outlet in ways that are interesting for the violence exercised upon the art (film, higher education) and the user (film viewer, student). The upgrade of this university plainly redefines higher education as service delivery and the user of the space as a commuter population with needs for functional amenities before and after classes. The design is in accord with its vision of a new student population, part-time workers confined to polarized relations between job and suburban home and in need of fast and efficient services to satisfy timetables in which education is an opportunity to obtain credentials, a kind of interim pit stop between primary settings. In this way, the design of higher education and its setting is made problematic, again in ways that challenge views of the relation of past to present. This type of intervention is typical in the upgrade of public schools, hospitals, and churches. For example, it is often claimed that the “modernization” of churches leaves them indistinguishable from corporations and seriously jeopardizes the relation of form (religious service) and function. Yet, every such controversy has the positive function of renewing the question of what the form is (higher education, religion, caring for the ill) and how it should persist and/or be modified as the city changes.

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In most upgrades, regardless of the violence, some trace of the relation between present and past is sustained. Some upgrading is of such a magnitude that the structures it replaces, definitive neither of the area or of a distinctive function, qualify the prior state of the space as relatively formless. In such cases, upgrades are massive interventions whose newness and indiscernible link to the past site is intended to justify their claim to be loci of centrality for the city. Though there is a thin line between replacement and the upgrading of such superstores, it is worth discussing them separately.

displacement The evacuation of a venerable sports arena in Toronto (Maple Leaf Gardens, b.1931) occurred as part of a process of displacing that function to another site and to a new structure designed as an up-to-date “state of the arts” multi-purpose facility (Air Canada Centre). Reports in the local press claimed that the new facility “contributes little to the skyline but contributes enormously to the city” (Hume, 1999, S2). This distinction itself is worth pursuing, between the skyline and the city, perhaps as a reflection on the contrast between “mere” appearance and something more “real,” or between the external and the internal, the superficial and the deep. At least the distinction raises the question of this relationship itself, between the facade and the soul (Simmel, 1959), suggesting the denigration, in these words at least and in this city at least, of skyline as perhaps decorative when compared to a real contribution. The various comments on the intervention create justifications for the new facility along several lines, all emphasizing the way in which the new building extends the urbanity of downtown Toronto by opening up new unused spaces. The new facility is organized by a rhetoric of exploration as if the building initiative is a penetration into uncharted territory, somewhat as a gesture of annexation. Air Canada Centre is said to (1) appropriate abandoned land, (2) extend the city closer to the lake, (3) revitalize public transit by connecting the site to the downtown train station in a way that will make its location more accessible to suburban commuters, and (4) invite further development because the access which runs through unused land promises to open up to further development in the wake of its initiative. The claim that this new site “improves” the city, uttered by all, especially the mayor who was a cheerleader to the project, is based in part upon a vision of its capacity to stimulate further development, but, selfempowerment as the hub of a new centre for the city and, so, as a creative impact more significant than any decorative innovation. This cre-

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ativity of the new with respect to the old is grounded, then, in its claim to colonize unused space and in this way, to initiate further colonization efforts that will imitate it, and to be responsive to changing population configurations of the metropolitan area and to the suburban folk who desire more efficient access to the site. The project is a paragon of both fertility and sociability: it fertilizes barren space, puts it to work by populating it with new action and activities, and it resocializes suburban dwellers who had left or chosen against the city, by redesigning the city to their specifications, making it more appealing, accessible, efficient and, so, by inducing them to want to return. Another basis of improvement lies in the claim of the architect that the new site will be “a theatre of sport and entertainment, not an arena” and, so, a place that can concentrate many purposes and functions, leading to the opinion that it will be “a place where people can come early and stay late” (Hume, 1999, S2). Note that what is modified through the displacement is the idea of a sports arena and of the audience and user of the facility in a way that has relevance for sports itself. That is, the meanings of the sports and audiences (“fans”) are likely to change in a way that has implications for the presentation and meaning of sports in the city. That this implication is not unique to sports is suggested by the consequence that displacement endangers the form of any art or activity which takes place in the setting, but always in ways that are justified as up-to-date or “progressive” modifications of the activity. Changes in the conditions of being a spectator, of being a user of the space, interact with the form of the art or activity itself because the encounter of the user of the space with the action is always put into question in ways that challenge the integrity of the action. Further, as a pretext for the continuous development of the city core, the displacement justifies itself in ways that are virtually unarguable: it sacrifices an outdated version of the form of the action to a more contemporary vision; it caters to the new demands of the metropolitan area, in opening up new spaces and in creating new routes of access in ways designed to be “user friendly” for the majority of the city’s population, and it constructs the action as an entertainment that can be appreciated without any special capacities of discrimination. In this Toronto case, the former arena and the locus which was its site are sacrificed on the grounds that their viability was limited to a stage in the history of the city that is now passed. Maple Leaf Gardens was viable only in a one-sport city with a homogeneous population who grew intimately with the sport. Now, a new multicultural population without a history of such commitment and a suburban population with different expectations concerning the place of the sport within the

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entertainment matrix of the city combine to exert pressures on the redefinition of the sport itself and its relations to the round of free time, leisure, and organized sociability in the city. The spectacle of Air Canada Centre can be observed in its interior design. The amenities of the arena are affirmed as a technology which, through a network of giant television screens placed at various angles in the arena and television monitors throughout the place and in washrooms and public spaces, guarantees that the action will be continuously monitored and never lost from view. Instant replays permit the spectator to recover missed moments, camera positioning creates multiple angles from which to view the play from many perspectives, and monitors permit the action to be kept in view through all breaks and diversions. The designer of the facility claims “today most fans expect that kind of quality” so as to justify the technology as an attempt to “enhance the fan experience” (Brown, 1999, S2). Yet, part of what is at stake is whether this fan is “demanding” about technology or about the sport and why it should be assumed that they are both the same, rather than perhaps antagonistic demands. Since it could be that it is technology about which the fan is most “demanding” rather than the form of an action occurring in the setting, the designer might be inadvertently putting his finger on the important question. The Air Canada Centre embodies an image of the desire of the spectator for total visual mastery of the action through technical absorption which aspires to annul the inequities of seating, attention, perspective, and temporality which inhabit the situation of any spectator. In this way, the panoptical technical dream of the facility, based on its image of the spectator’s quest for quality, actually constitutes a discipline to control the body by constraining deviations and irregularities which might disrupt the tranquility of an undisturbed view. Note that the new facility concentrates functions in a way that has implications for the relation of the site to its locus and to the city at large, implications that always begin at the abandoned site and in this case, the inner city user that typically inhabited it. The displacement can only occur within a context in which play, leisure, free time, sport, and the relation of the periphery to the centrality of city spaces is rethought. Displacement raises a variety of questions. (1) What is the occasion for the initiative, that is, the grounds for the violence? (2) How is the change sanctioned and resisted? (3) What are the implications of the change for the future and past in the new and in the abandoned space? (4) What are the implications of the change for the redefinition of the action that occurs in the site and in the construction of the spectator or user? Every displacement raises such questions for us and for the city itself in the discourse of contested interpretations and actions that accompany the intervention and mark its occurrence as a critical moment in the city.

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t he su p ers tor e The so-called superstore joins many of these issues through its claim to create an environment that upgrades the action confined to its setting by converting it into a spectacle. The question always raised concerns how the new compromises the old, or how the “user friendliness” of the new setting works in its way to redefine the action therein. This tension between purity and progress becomes clearer if we consider the transformation of a movie house into a cineplex (Adelman, 1998, Dl, 12). Because the enlarged cinema and its multi screens mix films and types of film viewers, it tends to attack the insularity and aesthetic intensity of the one-film audience. But even more, by bringing in a new population of users in an environment with different activities, it creates a new concentration of functions under the same roof in a way that actively redefines film-going as a collective experience. Under such conditions film-going has to renegotiate its status with respect to other functions such as eating fast food, because the combination of mixed company and multi-functions converts film watching into one of a number of activities that has no special priority. The new movie house plays many films simultaneously and, so, mixes audiences in a way intended to maximize choice. High-decibel sound levels intensify the experience. In the same way, the cineplex adds a number of functions to the setting such as video games and interactive media so that viewers will not suffer during waiting periods. Food is available in a way that becomes a primary activity for viewers, and the more comfortable seating encourages viewers to treat the interiors as extensions of home, comfortably eating and talking to one another as if watching television. Private rooms are also created for exclusive viewing and socializing (“partying”) while watching the film. It is plain that the new setting contributes to the redefinition of film-going in a way designed to accord with a new type of user of the space. What is often not noted except by those designated as “purists” is that the interventions offer to remake the arts of everyday city life, of filmgoing, shopping, browsing, in ways that put the “old” into question under pressure from the “new.” In the same way, new grocery stores, new bookstores, and other such facilities function in the city not merely as examples of increases in scale and the concentration of services but as sites to observe violent interventions in the encounter between users of the space and the forms of action in the space, whether movie-going, shopping for groceries, or bookstore browsing. Such “built environments” create and sustain desire for objects by using the primary and antiquated action (film, groceries, books) as a pretext for stimulating congregation. In this way, they are often praised as new public spaces. In displaying diverse arrangements of functions, they not only offer

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something for everyone but succeed in affirming their own concentration of functions as a spectacle that enhances collective power. That diverse interests can be satisfied in one place is the spectacle, a triumph of engineering whose fascination rests upon its capacity to extinguish the legacy of obsessions with quality and discrimination that might have prevented most from engaging these actions in the past.

p u b l i c s pa c e s The reconstruction of Times Square in New York City raises the question of the difference between a remake and what has been called a facelift (Sussman, 1998, 42). Although the space had always been a tourist district, it is now said to be invested with a mode of consumption that “is almost wholly optical” (Rossi, 1998, 43–4). Thus, it is not simply that commercialism has altered the area but that it results in a different way in which the district exhibits itself through representations of its past. For example, both Times Square and the former Info Box at the site of the new Potsdamer Platz were said to rewrite their histories through exhibitions and guided tours that erase the lived memory of the place through spectacle that caters to its allure as an optical object of fascination (Rossi, 1998). This is to say, in the idiom of Sussman, that the excess integral to the life of the site, becomes reconstructed as “safe excess,” that is, as attraction without repulsion. We have noted this in the debate over the simulation of the traditional marketplace; in the reconstruction of Times Square it appears in the advertisements and signage, which refer to Times Square itself alone as the object of spectacle (Sussman, 1998). The medium is the message because the exhibition exhibits itself as the object of fascination. Accordingly, this “optical” relation to the site is said to coordinate the design of the excess integral to the place and to reproduce the designed view of excess as the ruling collective memory. If this is true, it suggests that what the site exhibits as an object is the design of excess itself. New public spaces are self-referential as engineering or design spectacles which, through their very virtuosity, exhibit their own coordination of excess as “a banquet for all the people.” We can appreciate the criticism of such initiatives as a facelift because, in making a spectacle of its own methods, the self-referential exhibition always risks losing contact with the historical detail that marks the site. Typically, the architectural or design initiative presents its action as a sacrifice which destroys the collective tie to convention, whether historical stories or “obsolete” views of building and constructing. Resistance to the initiative is typically treated as “old fashioned” whether in response to the downsizing of a business or

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corporation, the technomania of a computer specialist who disdains “narrative,” or a politician who proposes measures “against the grain.” The violence of the facelift exacerbates collective unrest in ways that bring to view (or could/should) the very topic of form. In this initiative, the facelift risks simplifying the story of the place, which, in the case of Times Square, is the story of Broadway and its mixture of the “extremes of success and failure of the society” characteristic of the diversity of its specific occupations, night people, hawkers, entertainers and losers, drifters, gangsters, and the like (Sussman, 1998). Any significant site becomes part of the history of the city in the way that Broadway is integral to the story of Manhattan, typically represented in the arts as a persistent locus of collective sentiment. Thus, it might be that the difference between the memory of the site and its historical reconstruction resides in the ways in which its excess is represented, on the one hand, as the uncanny diversity of its congestion – the volatile coexistence of its extremes – and, on the other hand, in the exhibition of its design and method as a spectacle (Grenzer, 2002). Here, the ethical collision released by the need to invest the setting with meaning in the city as an occasion is animated by these different ways of conceiving of the site as an opportunity to reproduce a “banquet for all the people.” Yet, the majority of users are typically satisfied with the change and the opportunities it seems to provide, in contrast to the minority of purists conceived as opponents of every architectural revision. The conflict around the question of the quality of public spaces in the city produce these different “solutions” to the problem of renewing sites as topics for the collective itself (in the original sense of topos, place), always presupposing the question of how settings work to exhibit their character as social occasions and, so, how their diversified congestion or design mobilizes the fascination of the subject. Such conflict continues to show the ways in which cities must be constantly engaged by such problem-solving at critical moments.

t h e “ b u i lt e n v i r o n m e n t ” a s a n a c h i e v e m e n t o f o b j e c t i v e c u lt u r e The architectural debate has settled on the distinction between the “primary” and “secondary” functions of the site, reiterating the recognition that the activity (habitation, shopping, film-going) should no longer be assumed to take interpretive precedence over the conception of the myriad uses of the site, its eventfulness, its symbolic value as an object, its character as a sign. As we have said throughout, as a sign, this built environment is an achievement of “objective culture,” both beautiful and “functional,” a work of art and a commodity. It is this

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eventfulness of the built environment, reflected in its indeterminate uses and ethical collisions over the question of the spaces of the city, that we need explore. The relentless destructiveness of architecture as itself an art must proceed apace with the destruction and renewal of the genre (the building, museum, hotel, shopping centre, cinema) as both the loss of the old and the beginning of the new. The promise to expand spheres of communication by bringing people to the sites in unprecedented quantities, combinations, and for pleasures conceived as new and liberating, mark each item of the built environment as a new site of consumption and sociability designed to enhance and expand spheres of communication and contact, increasing potential for the circulation of information, and mixing of strangers. Is building and rebuilding in the city another example of the dissembling pretense of the bourgeoisie noted by Rousseau, under the guise of benevolence, the claim that remaking the city is good for the city? The idea of “new public spaces” conveys as its message, the liberation of space from its shackles. We need to examine this claim. Under these conditions, the very notion of the primary and secondary functions of the site have to be re-examined not as a contrast between the “content” of the activity and its eventfulness or character as a sign but by beginning with the “primary” notion of public space as the “eventful” being-together of strangers, which leads us to ask what this mixing does in the collective life of the city. What is truly elementary is the seductiveness of design and engineering and its spectacle of technology. The built environment affirms the contemporary conquest of unrest through the mastery of nature which its technology claims to demonstrate in the spectacle of its engineering and design feats, as a mark of the progressiveness of the modern moment and of the concealed qualities, powers, and capacities of the local bourgeoisie for negotiating the terrain of the present to produce another achievement of objective culture. The built environment celebrates the “we” and its distinctive ceremonial solution to the unrest of the present, a ceremony of fascination for all absorbed by the spectacle of its productivity.

conclusion We have emphasized the ways in which the sense of collective agency of the city is continuously put into question by interventions to its social landscape, interventions that vividly call to mind in its everyday life, its essential impermanence, the fragility of what it is. This impermanence is symbolized by the melancholy attendant upon the loss and replenishment of its artefacts and the poignant consequences of its constantly

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disappearing facades which has come to be personified in the solitary figure of Walter Benjamin as the idealized subject of its flux (Benjamin, 1998 and 1999). The relentless circulation of artefacts, persons, spaces, and ways of life confirms endlessly that at any moment what was is no longer and what is will pass away. More than this, the aura of impermanence is intensified by the constancy of domination (Weber, 1947) by forces apparently beyond the powers and resources of the people of the city to alter, forces that sustain a permanent sense of helplessness with respect to its capacities to influence these states of affairs. This impotence is symbolized by the suicidal reply to the relentless and inexorable quantification of the quality of the everyday life of the city in a way that has come to be personified in the solitary figure of Guy Debord as the idealized subject of this spectacle in which all change seems to be ruled by the force of the will to domination (Debord, 1983). As no other environment, it is the very dynamism of the city and its promise of unfulfilled desire that creates in its most sensitive subjects the sense of groundlessness, but always in a way that tempts them to put this question into play. In this drama, architecture itself plays the part of the Royal Art, replacing Descartes’s vision of medical practice (“the perfect art”) as the consummate blend of discipline and invention, aiming to represent for the modern subject the mastery of time and the conquest of space in its gesture of making something of lasting value.

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9 Excitement

i nt roduc ti on We spoke of the city as the site of building and rebuilding that offers the constant spectacle of an ethical collision between the old and the new, reflected vigorously in the spectre of impermanence that haunts its everyday life. Now we must explore the city further as a system of desire organized around the search for experience and its continuous indeterminacy. This leads us to examine the city as a locus of eroticism that is reflected in the contact between congestion and the creativity of city dwellers who work to solve that problem in the space between fulfillment and its everlasting remainder. Excitement is connected to the revolutionary character of the bourgeoisie and the mimetic contagion it releases, particularly through the notion of enterprise. The dignity of enterprise obscures its elementary but diverse and constant shapes as hustling, through varieties of improvisational arts and initiatives designed to sustain the vitality of each generation and to animate the desire of all sectors of a population touched by the city. The greater or more creative the city, the more it reinforces the relationship between hustling and self- integrity through its socialization of an ethic of personal advancement. In some sense, hustling is socialized by conceiving it as necessary for self-formation and as a sign of the innovative capacities of modern people, the idea that they need to take risks defined as both indispensable and exciting. Since every real risk anticipates the possibility of failure, the excitement of hustling lives off this prospect of both hope and fear. Even more, success itself always must be maintained, is sustained under the constant expectation that it must be reproduced in order to avoid dissolution. In the idiom of enterprise, if success is better than failure, it is still a perishable, that is, a possession or presence that can withdraw at any moment. This sense of loss existing at the innermost heart of en-

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terprise is made vivid in mundane ways even more dramatically than revealed in discourses on collective memory, always suggesting how the excitatory character of any achievement comes in part from the inability to rest with its accomplishment. In this chapter, I want to pursue the question of how we can speak of cities as exciting and alienating, by exploring some parameters of the discourse that have evolved around this question, a discourse conventionally associated with the flâneur, but having implications for a range of voices and a variety of other interests. So, in one sense, I will be reformulating the view of the flâneur, in part by strengthening it and in part by pointing to certain limits, that is, by re-specifying its place in a larger conversation on excitement in the city. In another sense, I want to begin to understand how what is often called the art of the city is found only peripherally in its museums and concert halls, but most vigorously in the movement and mix of types in space and time that constitutes its rhythm. Thus, if the city is often said to be associated with excitement, I will begin tracing this association through notions such as beauty, adventure, and action as part of a landscape which we can think of as an erotic terrain. I will ask the question “What is so special about the erotic terrain of the city?” Though it is indubitable to me that the city offers such a promise – the lure of its erotic terrain – we must also keep in mind Rousseau’s question of whether this offer is part of the dissembling pretense of the bourgeoisie? Eventually I will try to link this question to the detail of particular cities so that we might be able to think of understanding the unique character of a city through the ways in which it makes observable the problem of its eroticism. In this chapter, I will pursue the connection between the erotic terrain of the city and enterprise by trying to rethink the connection between the city as a site of action and the adventure of opportunism which it makes compelling. Here though, opportunism refers not to naked self-interest and greed but to the distinctive shape of modern selflove that desires to make the present memorable as the self-reflective human way of dealing with finitude itself and the temptations towards nihilism which are both released and “overcome” by the bourgeoisie who constantly refine the arts of everyday life for suffering any present.

t h e e rot i c t e r r a i n To plunge into the erotic terrain of the city, we need to come to terms with anonymity as a social phenomenon. This means that we have to resist the all too easy temptation to simply criticize anonymity, the temptation to disregard its dialectical nuances. Benjamin himself hints at the direction of such a dialectic when he suggests the strategy of using language against itself (Buck-Morss, 1986, 108–9) or, in the idiom

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of Baudrillard, “to put the real on the spot” (Baudrillard, 1984, 43). Thus, we would wish to put anonymity on the spot and the way to proceed at this point is to examine the usage of the flâneur. But this gives us little relief since the commentary has tended either to praise the flâneur as a surrogate observer or to criticize the flâneur as a victim of capitalist logic, in either case tending to extinguish the phenomenon. Walter Benjamin, despite his commentators, can be treated as one who attempted to restore the voice of anonymity and by implication, the links between pleasure, solitude, and congestion that marks subjectivization as an instance of homo ludens. The restoration of the voice of anonymity has often been silenced by the criticism which can only hear privatization and consumerism in the footsteps of the flâneur. Even Durkheim recognized the play in anonymity; its essential ambiguity leading him to construct the anomic and egoistic types as ways and means of working out its irresolute character in order to pinpoint empirically the limits of any and every “solution” to its problem. Durkheim’s Suicide permits us to begin to appreciate anonymity as a discourse with many different shapes, reflected only in its extremes as the excess of privatization, but always imaginable as fertilized by a sense of proportion or centrally that centers its play. When Benjamin’s work is read as testimony to the erotic degradation of the subject under capitalism we lose access to any vision of the improvisational play of the city dweller, the way he “puts his being into question” (Bataille, 1986, 17, 31) by recreating opportunities for the loss and renewal of character in the settings of city life. In these views, the flâneur is treated, in Benjamin’s own idiom, as “a scarecrow of the determinist” (Benjamin, 1998, 307). What seems to be undeveloped in both the praise and criticism of the flâneur (and by implication, in the commentary on Benjamin) is a conception of the flâneur as a lover of the city and of Benjamin’s projects as writing a “lover’s discourse” for the city dweller. For example, if the praise of the flâneur recoils from its criticism, it takes shape in the affirmation of the figure as an observer, a “detective” who relentlessly botanises the types and settings of the city. This reduces the sensuality of the city dweller to the “high-minded” work of detached observation. Note Christopher Jenks’s question on the products of flânerie, which he contrasts to the repudiation of the flâneur as unproductive, decadent or idle: “Do they betray anything other than a deep seriousness?” (Jenks, 1995, 152). The pious praise is accomplished by virtue of the writer’s discomfort with the repudiation of the flâneur and its connection to pleasure, idleness and leisure, as if the figure’s “seriousness of purpose” could only be defined by introducing flâneurism to the pantheon of naturalist observation or socialist realism: the flâneur is rescued by being construed

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as the clinical spectator who seeks to penetrate and understand the life behind the surfaces with a gravity that marks anonymity as desperate rather than hyperbolic. In contrast, note the critic: “A new form of salaried employee … In order to survive under capitalism he writes what he sees and sells a product” (Buck- Morss, 1986, 113, 111). Whether praised or criticized, seen as detached and reflective or as a deluded specimen of false consciousness, the anonymity of the flâneur is treated as a device of separation, on the one hand, empowering his observational skills (an embryonic sociologist) and, on the other hand, as an alienated “docile body” produced by capitalist market value. In both cases, the dialectic between homo faber and homo ludens is suppressed, for, if praise wants to reassert the “seriousness” of the flâneur’s work, criticism can only deny that seriousness through the extreme but opposite gesture of reducing its idleness to “fantasizing.” Yet the voice of anonymity is situated between these extremes, these opposites, in a way that invites us to reflect upon Hegel’s formula for the aufhebung – to cancel the opposites and preserve their differences (Hegel, 1904). In some way, the seriousness and fantasizing of the flâneur need to be joined in a representation of the imaginative structure of the city dweller that takes nourishment from this very conjunction while giving justice to anonymity. It is in this space that we can begin to hear the voice of Benjamin, the seeds of the (city) lover’s discourse.

t h e l ov e r o f t h e c i t y The voice of the lover is, in part, expressive of the desire to be seduced by the city, in the words of Bataille, as an opportunity to put one’s being into question. For Bataille this evocation of eros materializes in engagements that encapsulate a condensed trajectory of self-formation – of containment, loss, and renewal – as a recollection of the same and the other, of uniformity and alterity, that anticipates revitalization through the promise of an eventful engagement in the present. This imaginative mosaic could be said to constitute for any time its erotic terrain, part of the promise of anonymity in the city. Yet, in the discourse on anonymity, the image of this promise is always annulled by the lament of criticism and its attempt to revive capitalism as a referent: “Capitalism has two ways of dealing with leisure, stigmatising it within an ideology of unemployment or taking it up into itself to make it profitable” (Buck-Morss, 1986, 113). Here anonymity, derivative upon leisure, is unreflectively measured by a joyless capitalist standard of work – either as simulated productivity or as escape from its constraint. Anonymity is reduced to the coerced idleness of unemployment or an opportunity to exploit leisure for profit. Such a truncated reflection mechanically accepts the voice of

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capitalism as authorizing the voice of anonymity – without question – in a way that short cuts inquiry into anonymity per se. Just as the flâneur submitted to criticism, the critic herself cannot escape from the pervasiveness of capitalism and its enforceable intelligibility. In such views, the city dweller is truly the “scarecrow of the determinist,” an oppressed subject with no agency, acting in accord with the design of capitalist market value. Desperation, whether of the theorist’s actor (the flâneur), or the theorist as actor (the critic), so overcomes the subject that anonymity can only be seen as survived or exploited rather than suffered as an opportunity for seduction. In the idiom of Wittgenstein, the object (e.g., anonymity) drops out as irrelevant. To say that capitalism simply “takes up” profits from leisure is to gloss over the questions of what excitement capitalism offers in the very opportunity to transgress it and of what is the alliance between capitalism and excitement (an alliance that intimates the imaginative structure of the city – of each city). Most primitively, there is an exhilarating character often attributed to the city by virtue of its movement and congestion. Typically, the excitation coexists with the sense of anonymity thought to mark the city as an intense circulatory swirl of particles. If congestion is a powerful force in the life of the city, its significance is marked by flows of people, by the movement and dispersal of bodies over spaces, and by the socially organized ways and means of regulating such trajectories in the streets and areas of cities. In the research of symbolic interaction, particularly the work of Goffman and of Lofland (Goffman, 1967; Lofland, 1985), urban public spaces come to be treated as sites for encounters between strangers. Out of the material of these engagements, interactional orders are developed, challenged and revised as part of the everyday life of the city. According to Goffman, the ritual character of flows of people has implications for different uses of city space by heterogeneous groups of persons. Areas and districts get marked as identifiable in various ways by the people who come to be associated with them and by their scenes and settings of actions, and by virtue of such marking, induce the flow of people through their capacities for attraction and repulsion. Thus, city spaces are differentiated through a process where those who use them reciprocally identify the space through this use, making it into a place known in common to be that kind of place. This interactional order, constantly reshaped and reinvented by city dwellers, transforms the city into a collection of spaces that organizes its movement of people in part by luring them to imagine identifiable sites of different meaning in relation to safety and danger, excitement, exploration, and the passing of time. For each city, walking and the use of streets creates street life as a common problem to be addressed and negotiated by members. That

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the problem appears as part of the legitimate order of the city is visible not only in the policies and ordinances that regulate traffic, the delineation of property, and the movement of the pedestrian but on those occasions of transgression when loitering, homelessness, the menace of congregating, and property infractions, elicit appeals to intervention and enforcement. The security apparatus of the city, in its public and privatized forms of policing, mediates between the legitimate order that marks the streets and the people who use its spaces. The life of the people of the city is often viewed, at first, as ways of working out this interactional order, reshaping it, handling infractions, and improvising solutions. This work consists, in part, of the appropriation of different streets by diverse groups and, for various purposes, imparting identities to streets themselves. Further, in continuously subverting the legal order of street life, the people of the city diversify and challenge authoritative conceptions of boundaries, areas and actions.

wa l k i n g To understand the city as a social phenomenon we must come to terms with the life of the street and, of course, with walking. That is, we must supply the missing phenomenology implied by conventions of interpreting the street as an interactional order. Indeed, life on the street and walking not only reaffirm the connection of the city to motion – both the moving images that the walker passes by and the walker herself as a moving image – but the connection of the city to its public. Walking in the city is revitalized as a question by de Certeau who asks: “To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong?” (de Certeau, 1984, 92). Whether seeing Manhattan from the top of a skyscraper or being eye level with the highest part of the Duomo in Milan from the balcony of the Bistro restaurant directly adjacent to one of its sides, the spectacle of such sites can only accentuate the experience of separation of viewer from viewed in a way that is always conclusive but stirring. If de Certeau’s description of the “solar eye looking down like a God” evokes a sense of mastery, the very same sites resonate with Kant’s conception of sublimity and its implications for the recognition of human finitude. Yet anonymity, if rhetorically available through such spectacular sightings, is routinely accentuated in the pleasure of separation experienced as the activity and practice of walking in the city. As de Certeau says, we “make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it and diverting it from its immobile order” (de Certeau, 1984, 102). Being in motion, being on the street, is part of the meaning of the public life of the city. This requires us to understand how privacy is commensurate with the home, family, and domesticity and with work

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and productivity. The street is then not simply a space, but the place between domesticity and work, between the idleness and safety of family, and the rationalization and discipline of productivity. In this sense, both extremes of domesticity and work sustain the regularization of time and space and the familiarity of enclosure or containment with respect to those about whom one has dependable knowledge, whereas on the street there is a revocation of such regularity and its commensurate dependability. This difference can be noted in attempts to rationalize street life as in models of way-finding (Arthur and Passini, 1992) which treat streets as a labyrinth to negotiate in solving the problem of reaching a destination. In this sense, even tourist literature that appears to treat the street as something other than regularized or privatized, as a domain different than domesticity or work, formulates streets as means to an end of reaching destinations or viewing sites in ways governed by a restricted rationality. Such a pedestrian is invariably conceived as a practical actor engaged by the task of mastering the city as an identifiable region of spaces. Despite all projects for rationalizing the streets of the city as a system of spaces in order to facilitate practical mastery, the public aura of the street persists as a place that could resist regularized and instrumental relations to objectives, that is, as an invitation or provocation fertilizing an involvement meant to put into question the self-containment of family and work, serving to undermine desire that is organized around a restricted economy that is instrumental and calculable in terms of profit and loss (Bataille, 1985). The street struggles vigorously to detach the inhabitants of the city from a restricted economy of desire and its characteristic routines in ways tinged with violence. The lure of the street is connected to this risk, this seduction: that it always endangers the sanctity of domesticity and productivity by making problematic its subject’s return. Domesticity and productivity both fear the street’s influence upon those it lures, thinking that the one who is called to the street will never return to home and productivity, that is, will remain invariably upon the street, or upon return, will be as a new man, so touched by the street that his appearance in the family or workplace will only be to cast an uncanny presence. The condemnation of the street as the habitat of idleness or promiscuity, of infidelity, decadence, and purposelessness, can only be preserved by imagining the street as either a means towards practical ends such as reaching destinations or positions which are the sites of specialized activities, or at the other extreme, as a spectacle or system of settings for contemplation, entertainment, and leisure as an escape from the discipline of domesticity and productivity.

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These extremes – the city as means and the city as spectacle – only imagine constraint (domesticity, productivity) and its escape (entertainment, respite) as the governing options of city life. These views function as parts of the discourse of the street, conceptions of its restricted economic use against which a notion of its public life must always struggle. In this discourse, the pedestrian appears on the one hand as the commuter, and on the other, as tourist or suburbanite. In such cases, the mastery of the city as a capacity to identify and negotiate its geographical terrain is taken as the sine qua non of knowledge of the city. For example, the conception of wayfinding idealizes such geographical literacy by equating knowledge of the city with the capacity to interpret the location of its activities on the basis of signs which are used as grounds of inference and action. If such a pedestrian takes her bearings from the fear of being lost, walking is conceived as the problem of surviving being without direction and so the criterion of knowledge is mastery of the labyrinth. Wayfinding glosses the uncanny character of walking and the problem of passing time as something other than survival, something like the action of engagement in the life of anonymity through its loss to the radical contingency of motion. In contrast to wayfinding, we can begin to think of walking as improvisation, with both views playing their part as voices in the collective representation of the street. What begins to emerge in this picture of the city dweller as one who inhabits the space of anonymity is an incipient opposition between the flâneuristic accentuation of the experience of fragmentation as itself a pleasure and other images of this habitation. Neither the tourist consumer of sites (sights) such as the participant in the walking tour, nor the wayfinder who seeks to navigate through the spaces of the city as if a newcomer seeking to accomplish a practical task (Arthur and Passini, 1992), the flâneur begins to emerge as part of an hyperbolic engagement in the textuality of the city. Plainly, we must ask after the pleasure in anonymity glimpsed in the practice of walking in the city and how it differs from the pedantic gambolling of the tourist or the survival strategies of the wayfinder and even from the “solitary promenade” of country walking (Rousseau, 1979). We might suggest that this pleasure is connected to the very mobility of the passing scene and to the perishability of its every image. The mobility of images raises questions about the integrity of the one who confronts them in a way which makes problematic the walker herself as an other image. We want to confront the tension in versions of this pedestrian, the walker in the city, to better appreciate the offerings and allure of the city as an object of desire. On the one hand, if the walker is simply an

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example of digression, even as a figure of loiterature in the most playful and creative sense (Chambers, 1999), she seems dominated by the very productivity from which she seeks respite. This view of walking leads to versions of its practice and of the exemplary flâneur, most immediately, as escape from the repetitiousness of routine and mundaneity, or as empowered by the conceit of omnipotence as the experience of singular quality in the midst of the undifferentiated multitude (Chambers, 1999, 215–49), or, finally, as an instance of the instinct to defend oneself from the sensual density and velocity of city life (Latham, 1999). Thus, a discourse on the experience of the city begins to emerge, symbolized in the figure of the creative idler, who could be viewed alternatively as driven by instincts towards escape, power, or survival. These images point to certain persistent collective concerns about the city and its exemplary dweller, but to rest with them would be to accept without question a very rudimentary conception of desire. Here we need to begin to grasp movement in the city as a robust social phenomenon in order to appreciate its dialectic, its risks, and its problem in collective life. This requires us to progressively formulate the search for experience that marks the trajectory of desire in the city, first, as the search for action and, then, through the anticipation of adventure. This will lead us, of course, to Simmel’s conception of the city itself as an object of desire.

street life We think of the city as a site of waiting and walking and, by implication, of watching. Watching seems to bind together waiting for the action and walking in itself by virtue of the pedestrian’s consciousness of his anonymity. The one who waits and walks without a plan will be defined by the moment, by whatever happens to come up. What the idleness of the city dweller points to is the willingness to be defined by the random, circumstantial and contingent. Observers have suggested that the culture of the city can best be encountered by imagining its quintessential subject as the pedestrian who walks only for the sake of walking: “Walking is by far the best way to look at cities. Nothing replaces looking while on foot” (Jacobs, 1985, 12). Walking, done for the purpose of realizing specific plans, reaching destinations, meeting appointments, commuting, or even shopping, in often appearing aimless, is nevertheless directed to sites of action and eventfulness. What binds together walking, waiting, and watching in the city is the street. Of course, the street is the path of walking but more than this offers the consummate positions for watching because of the traffic that moves upon it. Since proximity to the street or to a position for

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observing its pedestrian traffic is necessary for watching, watching is by and large tied to sedentary formats or posts such as cafés and benches. The relentless movement of street life requires relief for watching, for movement punctuated by observation posts. While much watching in the city is done by those who are off-duty – office workers on lunch hour, construction workers – shopkeepers and service workers could be said to be continuously observant as part of their occupations, and caretakers of children regularly organize their playground duties as listening posts. A city must create listening posts if its flow of people is not to persist as automated: it is the tension between observer and observed, between watching and being watched within the economy of urban desire that both marks the pedestrian as a social actor and provides for the inspired solution of listening posts. There are a number of tensions released by the ambiguity of the relation of watching to being watched. Since commercial establishments control most observation posts, the perspective of commerce always coexists with the demands of such posts and for spaces that would provide for them. This generates the subversiveness of pedestrians and their opportunistic search for watching and waiting space in the city, the transformation of business establishments into observation posts and the reinvention of such posts where they had not been imagined. Part of the culture of the city consists in the lore circulating with respect to such opportunities in a way that marks the pedestrian as one in constant struggle not with the automobile, but with the city’s resistance to the appropriation of its spaces. The regulation of walking by the city through its legal order, ordinances, bylaws, and rules of property exist in constant tension with the creativity of the pedestrian who seeks to find a place between the constraints of such a legal order and its sanitized segregation and planning of walking. The idleness of observation, always an interpretive possibility, is accentuated when the relation between watching and being watched parallels the division between offduty and on-duty activities, for if commuters and working people feel under continuous surveillance by those whom they take to be idle, commuters and strollers can feel transparent and exposed to the gaze of those engaged in labor. Finally, the detachment of watching can always be a source of contestation when those who are watched treat being observed as a violation of their privacy. This suggests that being on the street is not necessarily being in public, leading us to suspect that cities vary in how they compel the pedestrian to accept the street as an occasion which dissolves the privacy of the body. The city always raises the question of whether or how the private can and should be publicized and what is the proper boundary between the body in private and bodies in public.

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Just as walking and waiting, provincial cities often define watching as an activity that should not be conducted in public or else institutionalizes it in ways that minimize its risk. If these tensions exist in any city, we can view cities as methods addressed to “solve” such problems, and it is true that cities can be imagined and statistically differentiated in terms of how they produce an environment for walking, watching, and waiting, for their policies, and for patterns of segregation. Each city in some way has to create a culture of the street between the extremes on the one hand, of the unreflective flow of pedestrians as if an assembly line in motion and, on the other, sedentary enclaves of face-to-face neighbors who circulate around one another as if units of a solar system. In this way, the problem of the city is always one of confronting and renewing such privatized versions of the street, in the first case as an instrumental means to an end, and in the other as a sanctuary for those who only seek relief from isolation and nothing more.

d e n s i t y, s o l i t u d e The city then works to lure its privatized inhabitants into its streets by virtue of the theatricality of its public life. The more provincial the city, the more its inhabitants hide from the life of the street either by appealing to reasons of safety, fatigue, self-sufficiency, and the like, or by using the city only for excursions and “entertainment.” In part, the fear of the street is the fear for the risk of watching and being watched, of encountering the contingent and unknown, for the street, when engaged strongly, is a constant experiment with anonymity and heterogeneity released by the contingency of viewing and coming to view in ways that are incalculable. What is truly exciting about being alone in the street is the solitude intensified by the congestion of the city, for the tension between aloneness and congestion is revitalized as the solitude of the city dweller, an experience intensified as being alone and together at one and the same time, as being part of and apart from the crowd in which one is immersed (Baudelaire, 1972). What Baudelaire knew only too well is that the consummate pedestrian is the single person because the vulnerability of being alone in public intensifies its risk and excitation. The safety of walking in couples and groups resides not simply in their numbers but in their commitment to togetherness whereas the creativity of the single person is a function of her very vulnerability and the opportunities it provides for her to test her singularity by virtue of the capacity to enjoy being alone in public. The risk of the pedestrian as a single per-

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son lies in her flirtation with the knowledge that she is a nonentity and is singular in knowing that: the street raises the question of whether such knowledge will be paralyzing or inspiring. For the pedestrian the street is a refresher course, reminding her of her roots in the destiny of the species and in “ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” recalling her to the need and desire of life to affirm itself in the face of that spectre. If on the one hand, the quantitative force of the city can overwhelm its pedestrian, as can, Hong Kong or Calcutta, this is because quantity is not invariably mixed with the stimulating force of diversity. That is, large cities can be dense but not dynamic. In this sense, they have the force of quantity as might and limitlessness which is associated with Kant’s conception of the sublime, appearing not as beautiful but as great by virtue of their magnitude and formlessness (Kant, 1952, 98– 100) On the other hand, number can produce a form and shape the austerity and finality of which revokes any opportunity for stimulation. Number alone does not invest the city with life, for like the Manchester called Bleston by Butor in his novel (Butor, 1960; 1996, 52), a large city can conceal its variety by concentrating it in private spaces, leaving the streets open only to its strange, marginal, or deprived categories. Bleston is not unique … Manchester, or Leeds, Newcastle or Sheffield or Liverpool … or else no doubt, some American town such as Pittsburgh or Detroit, would have had a similar effect on me (Butor, 1960, 35–6, 38).

This suggests that congestion has a mean in the space between its excess as inundation and its insufficiency as austerity, between the excessive and sublime formlessness of quantity, and its insufficient and ugly disharmony – a point between these extremes – that makes problematic the street life of the city as a locus of collective energy. If the city works to make street life an occasion for the pedestrian, this is in part due to the mixed character of its street life, that is, to the presence of those others – couples and groups of walkers and watchers – whose absorption in togetherness contrasts and dramatizes the isolation of the pedestrian. That the pedestrian can only see herself in the mirror of these others, in her contrast from them, means that the vitality of the pedestrian depends upon this heterogeneity in the coexisting movement of couples and groups. Without such a mix the pedestrian would disappear into the flow of uniformity, becoming that familiar solitary refugee who haunts provincial cities as part of the shared isolation that marks their streets. The risk of the pedestrian is to appear among the others, to watch and to be watched by them as part of the ceaseless movement of street

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life and its inexorable opportunity for testing integrity in the confrontation with the nothingness by which it is endangered. To these others, couples and groups, the street is a pleasure, an opportunity to engage the amenities of urban sites but never a promise of eventful and fateful action. If Baudelaire says that to be unseen by the crowd evokes a sense of mastery, that the pedestrian’s mastery depends upon them exposes him to slavery: the hunger of the pedestrian for this mix and by implication for the city that can satisfy this desire, makes him a slave to the city and homeless in any city that cannot live up to its promise. Uprooted from such possibilities the pedestrian becomes a stick figure, estranged not because of lack of relationships or of unfamiliar customs but because the street is devoid of life. It is this connection that we want to begin to explore.

t h e a dv e n t u r e According to Simmel, the content of an experience does not qualify it as an adventure, but only when it activates a certain “experiential tension whereby this substance is realized,” that is, only when the “central source of strength” transforms the “externalization of life” (Simmel, 1959, 253). In its way, the adventure describes an experience that, on the one hand, departs from the continuity of life as if a “foreign body in our existence” and, yet, not accidental and alien insofar as it returns or falls back into the context of the life again (Simmel, 1959, 243) by being invested with necessity. What Simmel means is that the adventure describes the experience which, external or accidental, appears cut off from the whole of life, but that, in (and not despite) this apparent “extraterritoriality,” is connected “back” to the necessity of the life, to return “dream-like” in a way that renews its meaning (Simmel, 1959, 246–7). The boundary of the experience, always in the present, is both cut off from life as if external and, at the same moment, defined by its capacity to give necessity and meaning to the life. According to Simmel, the adventure is like the love affair, drawing its externality from its dependency on something which cannot be determined or compelled even if “won” through perseverance, skill, or concession as a “free gift,” appearing more like “a favor of fate” (Simmel, 1959, 252). The externality of the love affair in this sense and its momentary character are connected to the centre of the life in a way distinct from all accidental happenings. As the paradigm of the adventure, the love affair is both perishable and endowed with eternal validity, a temporal expression of the eternal and a moment of timeless validity and ideal significance (Simmel, 1959, 251–3). The love affair and its end stresses the tension in the dialectic of the adventure as “a climactic,

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abruptly subduing passion” and as the “destiny of two souls for one another” as something which cannot pass (Simmel, 1959, 253). The love affair shows us how the adventure as a transformation of the present, must conceive the accidental or external – the happening – as imbued with the power of dreamlike memory to haunt the future unfolding of the life as part of the story of its meaning and necessity. The incomparable experience which can be interpreted only as a particular encompassing of the accidentally external by the internally necessary (Simmel, 1959, 247).

The dialectic of the adventure is then an “eternal process playing back and forth between chance and necessity” (Simmel, 1959, 247) in which the accident is interpreted as renewing the meaning of the life. This dialectic becomes specific as a system of desire in which the incalculable element of life is treated with the confidence and resolve of one who knows that it is both impossible and desirable and desires it in the face of this impossibility with the certainty typically reserved for what is calculable. The adventurer, driven to “convert” the momentary and perishable moment into an event of eternal validity, always risks what Bataille calls “a loss as great as possible” (Bataille, 1985) because it is a loss that exceeds the outcome of the event and its cost accounting. In charging the present with such eternal significance, one is always acting as if the unknowable elements of our life are known. Here Simmel uses Casanova as an example of one whose “perspective on the future was wholly obliterated in the … moment” (Simmel, 1959, 246). Can we begin to bring this conception of adventure down to earth by specifying it in terms of spaces and sites of action? This would begin to permit us to address, in part, the material base of adventure.

t h e c i t y a s a s i t e o f ac t i o n Goffman tells us that – colloquially – action is used to refer to situations of a special kind, situations identified with chance-taking (Goffman, 1967, 149–270). Wherever action is found, chance-taking is sure to be (Goffman, 1967, 149). Goffman conceptualizes the parameters of such situations in terms of what he calls consequentiality and eventfulness. Where consequentiality refers to the ramifications of an action beyond the boundaries of the occasion in which it is consummated, that is, to its effects upon the whole life of the performer, he contrasts it with “killed moments” that are bounded and insulated and “do not spillover into the rest of life and have an effect there” (Goffman, 1967, 162).

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The individual’s lifecourse is not subject to his killed moments; his life is organized in such a way as to be impervious to them. Activities for killing time are selected in advance, as ones that cannot tie up or entangle the individual (Goffman, 1967, 149).

That is, an action could be problematic and yet still lack consequence; on the other hand, a problematic action with effects on the individual’s total life is conceived as eventful. An activity can be problematic and consequential. Such activity I call “fateful,” although the term “eventful” would do as well, and it is this kind of chanciness that will concern us here (Goffman, 1967, 164).

It is as if eventfulness inheres in situations themselves aside from the particular propensities of individuals, in a way that might allow us to conceive of a typography of situations with such possibilities. The human condition ensures that eventfulness will always be a possibility, especially in social situations. Yet the individual ordinarily manages his time and time-off so as to avoid fatefulness … And yet there are extraordinary niches in social life where activity is so markedly problematic and consequential that the participant is likely to orient himself to fatefulness prospectively, perceiving in these terms what it is that is taking place. It is then that fateful situations undergo a subtle transformation, cognitively reorganized by the person who must suffer them [if] uneventful moments are defined as moments that are not consequentially problematic … [and] tend to be dull and unexciting … to see a situation as eventful is to anticipate it as a situation of chance. The social world is such that any individual who is strongly oriented to action, as some gamblers are, can perceive the potentialities of chance, in situations others would see as devoid of eventfulness; the situation can even be structured so that these possibilities are made manifest (Goffman, 1967, 170, 200).

In this way, eventfulness is linked to the imaginative capacity to anticipate a situation in a certain way. This means that situations themselves provide opportunities for this imaginative structure insofar as they connote eventfulness as part of their being. By the term action, I mean activities that are consequential, problematic and undertaken for what is felt to be their own sake. The degree of action – their seriousness or realness – depends on how fully these properties are accentuated and is subject to the same ambiguities regarding measureness as those already described in the case of chanciness. Action seems most pronounced when the

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… phases of the play … occur over a period of time, brief enough to be contained within a continuous stretch of attention and experience. It is here that the individual releases himself to the passing moment, wagering his future state on what transpires precariously in the seconds to come. At such moments, a special affective state is likely to be aroused, emerging transformed into excitement. Action’s location can easily and quickly shift, as any floating crap game attests (Goffman, 1967, 185).

Goffman identifies fatefulness as the consequences of a situation for the life of the individual. This is an activity that is both problematic and consequential. Fateful actions are indeterminate (they can go one way or another) and of effect. Many actions are indeterminate and yet have indifferent effects. Fatefulness requires this conjunction, according to Goffman, of ambiguity and consequence. Again, just as eventfulness is part of the situation itself, so fatefulness inheres as an opportunity released by the action. According to Goffman, situations of action describe conditions which fertilize opportunities to anticipate eventfulness and fatefulness, and in a more archaic idiom, are like opportunity structures. A situation of action provides resources for initiating eventful and fateful relations to settings. Let us follow Goffman a step further: Beginning with … chance-taking, we move down into consequentiality; from there to fatefulness of the dutiful kind … and from there to action – a species of activity in which self-determination is celebrated. And we saw that the fatefulness, which many persons avoid, others for some reason approve, and there are those who construct an environment in which they can indulge it. Something meaningful and peculiar seems to be involved in action (Goffman, 1967, 214).

If we disregard the restricted economy that animates Goffman’s conception of character as self-presentation and self-preservation (its utilitarian aura), we can still follow him in understanding the appeal of the situation of action as a test of character. Given these arguments about the nature of character, it is possible to understand better why action seems to have a peculiar appeal. Plainly, it is during moments of action that the individual has the risk and opportunity of displaying to himself and sometimes to others his style of conduct when the chips are down. Characters gamble; a single good showing can be taken as representative, and a bad showing cannot be easily excused or re-attempted. To display or express character, we or strong, is to generate character. The self, in brief, can be voluntarily subjected to re-creation (Goffman, 1967, 237).

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This should permit us to specify the underside of the revolutionary character of the bourgeoisie to which we made reference in chapter 7. Indeed, Goffman’s notion of “vicarious fatefulness” allows us to grasp the ways in which the emphasis on productivity becomes displaced and condensed in an imaginative structure that treats all opportunities as agonistic occasions and, so, as exciting by virtue of this challenge. We can begin to conceive of the city dweller as an actor who “searches out” situations in terms of their promise of action. Action now refers to the opportunity to put the question of character into play. This is not much different than Bataille’s conception of eroticism in which the human actor “puts his being into question” (Bataille, 1962, 29). Here, then, we conceive of the social actor not simply in terms of the model of way-finding, finding one’s way among the topographical spaces of the city, but as the one whose search is guided by the anticipation of the action and the renewal of character which it promises. To satisfy the fundamental requirements of morale and continuity, we are encouraged in a fundamental illusion. It is our character. A something entirely our own that does not change, but that is nonetheless precarious and mutable. Possibilities regarding character encourage us to renew our efforts at every moment of society’s activity we approach, especially its social ones; and it is precisely through these renewals that the old routines can be sustained. We are allowed to think that there is something to be won in the moments that we face, so that society can face moments and defeat them (Goffman, 1967, 239).

Character then functions in this conception somewhat as the dream of the social actor that renewal is possible and situationally embedded. Could we not link this conception to the landscape of the city as its promissory mosaic of spaces and settings which call to or interpellate the subject of action? This allows us to begin to rethink the apparent contradiction displayed in the persistence of the particularity of some cities in the face of the growing uniformity which is assumed to extinguish their individuality. For example, if New York, London, and Tokyo are cited as examples of global cities, inundated by the tide of economic standardization and corporate incursion (Sassen, 1991 and 1994), perhaps their endurance as centres of collective integrity is due to the ways in which their landscape fertilizes the imaginative structure of social action. That is, regardless of the external appearances of corporate uniformity induced by globalization in such accounts, a sense of the city as a site of action remains unformulated. We are not speaking about the accoutrements that accompany changes in the city such as gentrification, waterfront projects, nor about entertainment or resources that appeal

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to tourism. Cities provide opportunities for the imagination of their life as eventful and fateful in ways that are not reducible to these conditions. In this sense, the city as a “civilized capital of the world” can be expected to make possible – as part of its topography of social situations – an imaginative structure of eventful and fateful action which promises the renewal of character. It is this interesting hypothesis that we can begin to explore. Thus, if Raymond Ledrut speaks about the privatization of eros and its reconciliation that seems to characterize the modern city (the disappearance of meaningful historical action to which he refers), we can perhaps first begin to understand this in terms of the disappearance of the sense of eventful and fateful engagement in the life of its social spaces, that is, as the disappearance of the vision of opportunity which situations of actions provide. This conception permits us to inquire in a more resonant way into the life – the routines and practices – of the urban dweller by treating her orientation to space as imaginative, and not simply as a deprivation visited upon her as claimed by critical theory and its critique of flâneurism and of the privatized musings of the city dweller as consumer. Here we might begin to imagine how the positive side of urban life is integral to its imaginative structure. Goffman distinguishes between two characters, the one obsessed with safety and security, and the other in search of excitement and thrills, as if the first resembles the actor pictured in the model of way-finding, who picks her way exegetically among the spaces of the city in order to survive a practical task, while the other is conceived as investing such topography with an anticipation of eventfulness and fatefulness. We might reverse this, as even Goffman suggests, and apply the typology to situations themselves. Looking for where the action is, one arrives at a romantic division of the world. On the one side are the safe and silent places, the home, the well-regulated role in business, industry and the professions; on the other are all those activities which generate expression, requiring the individual to lay himself on the line and place himself in jeopardy for a passing moment. It is from this contrast that we fashion nearly all of our commercial fantasies. It is from this contrast that delinquents, criminals, hustlers and sportsmen draw their self-respect. Perhaps this is payment in exchange for the use we make of the ritual of their performance (Goffman, 1967, 268).

From our experience with cities and their great variation, is it not possible that in some essential way the character of the city is inextricably bound to the opportunity it provides for the affirmation and renewal of character, for situations of decisive expressiveness, in which individuals

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“put themselves on the line” and that, in such opportunities, both excitement and incalculability coexist? This requires us to consider two activities which lie at the margins of such eventful and fateful opportunity: one activity which Goffman glosses over as “killing time,” used as a paradigm of uneventfulness; and the activity of walking, about which he is silent in his essay. Nevertheless, in both senses, killing time and walking provide opportunities to deepen our conceptions of the action of the city. According to Goffman, killing time is part of the class of “time-off” activities, likely to be problematic and inconsequential in contrast to collectively organized” serious work, which gears the individual’s efforts into the needs of other persons who count on him for supplies, equipment or services in order to fulfill their own obligations … [keeping] records … of his productions and deliveries, and penalties … if he fails to perform” (Goffman, 1967, 162–3). It sounds as if killing time, though problematic, is inconsequential. What we would need to contemplate is the way in which killing time can and is transformed into fateful action. Here we have the typical collection of activities in the city – shopping, consumption, strolling, browsing, loitering – all of which have been described as instances of urban privatization and in terms of the addiction of the solitary bourgeoisie city dweller to narcissistic selfabsorption. And yet there should be an opportunity to understand killing time in a stronger way, as part of the search of the social actor for action, that is, for eventful and fateful engagements in social situations. If killing time includes walking as part of its repertoire, we need to be able to rethink what appears to be “time-out behavior” as an engagement with the opportunity of the situations of the city in imaginative ways. That is, without an aesthetics of killing time, we will fail to understand leisure as anything other than the revolt of the bourgeoisie – privatized and fantastic – to the demands of the logic of a productive capitalist economy. If we pursue that direction and dismiss the phenomenon, we risk simplifying our conception of urban life, for it seems to be inextricably bound up with such moments in ways that we cannot simply resist.

wa i t i n g , i n a c t i o n , a n d pa s s i n g t i m e We can only understand the intensity of the public life of the city when we begin to come to terms with passing time as a commitment that is formal, occasioned, and fateful. Passing time is formal because it is guided by arts for doing it well or not; it is occasioned at any moment as its mundane and methodical character is resisted in the demarcation

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of its space as a place that is special and distinctive; and passing time is fateful when its engagement is guided by the lure of the difference its encounter promises as a realization in action. As we have noted, the view of loiterly cultivation as the perfection of idleness (Chambers, 1999) in response to the burden of productivity, linearity, and mechanization, still retains a conception of its digressiveness and its playful preoccupations, determined by the need to survive modern city life with grace (Chambers, 1999). Here we begin to discern a bricolage of the street, as a kind of urbane literacy. Yet, the truth in this view of the urban experience as the digressive subversion of urban routine tends to focus upon its escapist character. In contrast, in some of the work directed to rehabilitating the positive experience of city life typically buried in so-called critical theory, interpretation focuses on the desire to opportunistically renew the unruly tactile velocity and imagery of the city through a mode of “auratic” involvement directed to “transform the simple thingness of the object” (Latham, 1999, 466) and to “reclaim the forgotten human residue in things” (Latham, 1999, 467). In each of these cases, the city is seen as arousing forceful and vivid unruly emotions or responses whether repetition, restlessness, or sensual overload. But the action of inaction, of investing insignificant externals with the significance of meaning and necessity, still remains unexplored in such views as the implicit focus of collective life and its “problem” of cultivation in the city. How can we begin to imagine the aesthetics of killing time as part of the economy of excitement in the city, hinted at in both Simmel and Goffman, and implicit in the discourse on the flâneur? In Walter Ruttman’s classic film, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Berlin first appears as an assembly line of motions oriented imperceptibly to the production of a day in the life of a city. The city is presented as a cacophony of movement and congestion in a way designed to exhibit the anonymity of bodies as if projectiles in social space seen from the perspective of a Cartesian observer whose perception dwells upon its landscape as a congeries of vectors of seen-butunnoticed mechanical operations, trajectories of attraction and revulsion of social atoms that fortuitously contact and repel each other as bodies in transit, continuously evolving and declining. Because a day in the life of the city is taken as the point of departure for the film, from its awakening to its nocturnal end, the city is conceived as an immense cycle of operations and motions as seen by a perceiver in absolute command of this vision. The anonymity released by this conception is correlative with the viewer’s disinterest in occasions

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of action: it is the insignificance of each scene that gives the entire day its significance. But the insignificant scenes, the close-ups of seen but unnoticed textures and operations of objects, of bodies in motion and concert, even of projects of work and play, do not add up to significance. Rather, what is significant is the insignificance of a day in the city. In the absence of the imagination of the city as a site of action, what comes to view is the significance of its anonymity. The principle of Berlin per se does not emerge in the film because the desire to exhibit the city as a symphony of moving bodies, bring to view the insignificance of its day as what is significant and distinctive of the city, indeed of any city. In a curious way, the film succeeds: because it recreates the city as the place whose insignificance, because of its very poignancy, becomes charged with significance, it shows the city as the place where the point and purpose of existence comes into play and is raised as a question. The film itself, by exacerbating the insignificance of the moments of the day as if mechanical operations detached from any larger whole, raises the question, by implication, of the relationship of the moments of a day to the day and of the moments of a life to a life. If we accept the false picture of Berlin as what this city is (the assembly line of disembodied motions represented in the images which constitute the film), we miss the hyperbole of the film’s “falseness,” the exaggerated truth of that image as more false than false. What is true of the city is the significance of its insignificance, the point of its drift, the integrity of its anonymity. If this remains true of any city in a way that still does not distinguish Berlin from Chicago or Mexico City, it nevertheless permits us to begin to explore the anonymity of its life (its routines) as a challenge, as a way of raising the question of its identity. And, in this sense, is not the renewal of character of which Goffman speaks, the prospect of eventful and fateful engagement, part of the ways and means of addressing the insignificance of life as a problem, as a collective project of endowing anonymity with its possibility as action? Dare we say that the anonymity of the city is dramatized by the unending and repetitious eventlessness of its moments and days in a way that achieves the magnitude of a spectacle? And that the fascination for the spectacle of anonymity as experienced in its oppressive eventlessness is both aroused and anticipated as an experience to be overcome and mastered? The anticipation of action in the city then both builds upon and promises the surpassing of such eventlessness in the very structure of the critical moment as the fateful and eventful engagement. And if this first appears in the lure of the city as an eventful and fateful opportunity for action, it is this beginning which needs to be developed. The way to proceed is to formulate the social action of experi-

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encing the city as action oriented to transform the ephemeral event into a necessity which “connects to the character and identity of the bearer of a life” (Simmel, 1959, 246–7). Eric Gans tells us that in Waiting for Godot, Beckett dramatizes the universal anthropological condition or social situation of inaction (Gans, 1982), that is, by investing waiting with meaning in itself, without respect for outcome and finality, the inaction of waiting is charged with significance. These characters do not await opportunity, profit, payoff, determinate consequences, but an unrealizable end, and in so doing, endow what appears externally as merely an interim, with necessity and eventfulness as if it is all there is. The “universal” character of waiting as such inaction is shown in the way that waiting for death is a more “fundamental” condition or action than waiting for the postman or for news of the result of the competition for an award. What is raised in the play is the question of the difference between genuine and spurious waiting, between the action of genuine inaction and the activity of waiting for an outcome. Thus, we appreciate life itself as passing time, as the action of inaction displayed in waiting for death. Here, the typical view of the flâneur would need to be renewed, for the insignificance of city life, marked by the tactility and indistinctness of its times and places, can be seen as the environment of externals which, in the words of Simmel’s analysis of adventure, furnish the materials to be “connected to the character and identity of the bearer of the life” (Simmel, 1959, 246). The secret of the adventurer, that he treats the inaction of passing time as action, is linked to his knowing the difference between a life charged with meaning by virtue of its limitation by death and a life limited only by outcomes. That is, he knows that death charges every present moment, its externality and insignificance, with its meaning as opportune material for cultivating the life. The externality of passing time is encountered by the adventurer as if cut off from the life and yet transformed and returned to its centre as if a dreamlike fragment. That the present moment offers up to the future a dream of its past, marks the adventurer as an incarnation of the impossible desire to make ephemerality eternal. Perhaps we might anticipate how it is the very idle, digressiveness of this character that fertilizes both the unruly emotions of distraction and the need and desire to cultivate meaning in the face of the externality of passing time. This means that suffering genuine inaction always orients to the difference between the outcomes which its waiting anticipates as “objectives” and the limits of such expectations that invariably appear to it as a pretence of finality and significance. Yet again, inaction must first possess what it dispossesses in order to reject the outcome with

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strength (or else it risks being “sour grapes,” resentment). Thus, if genuine inaction gives up or dispossesses the present’s hold upon it by seeing it in its guise as what it will come to, as a past for the future, this adventurous spirit struggles not just with routine but with its own ironic self-understanding of the very existence of adventure in time. Can the city redeem the present? Simmel permits us to appreciate the experience of the city – seen through the eyes of its ideal speaker – as the continuous struggle to make its passing time action of significance, and to make its experience of the city – despite its “extraterritoriality” as if a foreign body – an adventure which renews its character and identity. Let us measure the typical discussion of the flâneur by such a conception.

anonymity and intimacy The root of culture in “cultivation” always seems to recommend its contrast to nature in the way artifice stands to the uncultivated. In terms of this view, nature typically appears as the country, as if the city is equivalent to culture by virtue of its character as an artefact, as built. This interpretation glosses the tension in the culture of the city, the tension organized around the cultivation of unruly propensities assumed to prevail under any and all conditions of collective life. That is, what is “natural” is not the country but the tension in cultivation itself, the elementary problem posed by the need and desire to master unrest. As Eric Gans suggests, the very word “culture” suggests a more socially relevant definition of the notion of mastery. Agriculture, from which this originally metaphoric term derives, exemplifies man’s domination of nature. The cultivated field is a conquest of humanly useful order from nature’s “disorder.” The metaphorical application of the word “culture” to humans, originally to children and then to adults, makes the inculcation of … great works of art, music, literature and so on the equivalent of a conquest of the natural – and socially unacceptable – “disorder” within man himself (Gans, 1982, 11).

If culture depicts mastery of the disorderliness within the soul, its application to the city makes explicit less its contrast to the country – to that view of nature – than to the nature within, that is, to the image of disorder commensurate with urban life. To this end, Gans continues: “The real meaning of artistic ‘mastery’ is thus mastery over human emotions. To accomplish this, the artist must produce convincing representations or ‘imitations’ of situations, the experience of which will arouse these emotions” (Gans, 1982, 11).

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This suggests that culture actually arouses and exacerbates the very emotions or disorder that it needs to overcome. In this sense, the city creates the emotions needing to be mastered, for example, as typically noted in the restlessness, distractedness, weariness, anonymity, resignation, and nihilism of an urban population. Can we say that the city intensifies these emotions and their “overcoming” in its imaginative mosaic of eventful and fateful actions? Culture, would then, locate the tension in the need both to intensify and surpass the experience of radical contingency that haunts daily life. Note the different ways of approaching this problem. At the most immediate level, if the city is the bastion of freedom and mobility, it is also the place where resentment achieves a particular modern shape; it is commensurate with the resentment of free and subjective individuals who need to work through their inequities, imagined as those conditions which isolate them from the centre (“where the action is”). The nature of the city and its diversity is correlative with the disorderly emotions of a population whose resentment is tied to this mode of stratification between centre and periphery. Exclusion and the resentment of social deprivation pervade the city because at any moment, one is not where the action is, that is, one is peripheral. In this sense, we might say that the culture of the city represents situations that arouse such emotions in order to “overcome” or purge them. The culture of the city creates fascination, self-pity, and fear for one’s isolation from the action as imagined to be induced by the division released by life chances. The nervousness that haunts the city and its most “sensitive” inhabitants concerning their exclusion from the action, is integral to its imaginative structure, taking shape variously in thoughts of conspiracy, reveries on missed opportunities, the mysteries of “high life,” celebrity scenes, inaccessible social circles, rumors, and images called “urban myths.” The city’s saturation by stories of what is being missed and what is going on, evokes an uncanny collective sense of a continuous scene of action, exclusive and remote, always running elsewhere and other-where along the margins as a secret place, an urban utopia, arousing resentment and fascination, always functioning as a temptation for its restless souls. In this view, the culture of the city is revealed in the ways it arouses and creates images of fragmentation and its surpassing through the very anxiety released by its ephemeral topography. The method of the city par excellence is the way it heightens fascination for its spectacle of anonymous and fragmentary congestion as its very means of mastering resentment. In activating the spectacle of anonymity, the situation of action arouses the need and desire for its mastery. Culture then imitates the mastery of anonymity in representations of moments of renewal

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imagined as the promise of concordance, of intimacy. In this sense, the situation of action represents the eventful and fateful engagement with life – with its contingency and impermanence – as the very promise of its mastery. The image of the situation of action dramatizes anonymity as the everlasting burden that the city dweller might overcome through engaging the challenge of cultivation. In Gans, for example, cultivation materializes as the deferral of mastery, made necessary by the diversity of the city and the resentment released in modern life by life chance and the preoccupation with unrealized and thwarted desires. Cultivation would then appear in the attempt to civilize resentment (Gans, 1982, 11–12). To anticipate some directions, it is the promise of action that provides eventlessness with its dramatic character of anonymity. For without that anticipation, inscribed within the imaginative structure of action, eventlessness would be equivalent to the drudgery of boredom. If the country is rightly condemned as eventless in that sense, it is the eventlessness of life without (the promise of) action. In the country, eventlessness is reduced to boredom. In contrast, the eventlessness of the city coexists as the anticipation of its overcoming in the eventful and fateful engagement. It is this coexistence that dramatizes eventlessness as the spectacle of anonymity. The eventlessness of the city is endowed with drama through its connection with the image of its overcoming in action that makes urban eventlessness a spectacle of anonymity rather than an experience of boredom. The situation of action is the promise of intimacy, of becoming real to oneself. In this sense, the eventlessness of the city, in contrast to the boredom of the country, can be understood as restlessness. It is such eventlessness that dramatizes anonymity as restlessness in a way that achieves the status of a spectacle. To say this in another way, the eventlessness of the city is an event, by virtue of the way in which waiting and expectation – looking for the action – becomes a spectacle in itself. If waiting suggests the suffering of eventlessness in anticipation of the engagement that will extinguish it, boredom in contrast, simply endures eventlessness with no end in sight. What gives waiting its drama is the social differentiation of the opportunity of action. The end of action is always imagined under the auspices of resentment not only because suffering of eventlessness can only be remedied through action but because it is conceived in accordance with the view of this possibility as confirmed by the life of the other (the others) who is (are) where the action is. The enigma of the other(s) and their satisfaction – their being where the action is – is a constant confirmation of the truth of eventfulness. The drama of waiting is not only the expectation of changing one’s personal lot but of being where the other is and so is not just a promise of overcoming through action but of the doing of the action that the other is always

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imagined as being in a position to do. The drama of waiting is connected to the stratification of opportunities for action in a way that accentuates waiting as separation that can overcome its lack through the event of intimacy. Unlike boredom, in which eventlessness is simply a parameter of life itself, the eventlessness of waiting in the city dramatizes one’s being two-in-one, separate from the action and in position to overcome separation. That the culture of the city both creates disorder and the means for its overcoming means that the city dramatizes as if a spectacle the human relation to finitude by making both time and space challenges of “monstrous” magnitude and in the same breath, makes the “vicarious fatefulness” of enterprise available as its means of overcoming mortality (of solving its problem). In the same way that the spectre of substitutability exposes the limits of space in the terrain of the city where each is (fundamentally) indistinct from the other, so the spectre of loss exposes the limits of time in which any and every distinction of value (of persons or things) is destined to pass. In this sense, the improvisational arts of everyday life in the city and the mimetic contagion it releases in the shape of “vicarious fatefulness” must remain its exemplary way of living the life of the present. Thus, the city is capable of fuelling desire in the present for the present as more than passing time but as an event of promise, as unfulfilled fulfillment, on the basis of the lure of eventful action at settings and sites that constitute its promissory mosaic. Such a landscape saturates the city with an aura of unbounded and, yet, unfulfilled intimacy; the city constantly makes itself an image between these extremes. Each and all of the distinctions and actions in use from the liminality of social occasions, to popular culture, to informal and parallel economies, to distinctions of marking and honoring goods and by association, persons, function in the city as part of its erotic landscape of opportunities, a diverse and carnivalesque array of ordinary theories and methods for mastering nihilism.

n o s ta l g i a a n d f e a s t i n g I will continue to speculate on the desire of the flâneur whose love for the city aspires to find expression in mastering it by losing himself in gestures that, curiously, by affirming his separation in both time and space, serve as his means of wooing the city, of gaining its favor. That the city cannot be mastered and that the flâneur must desire the impossible mastery of the city is revealed in the separation of his present moment from both past and future. The action of the city is always somewhere else: on the one hand, the city dweller is absent from the history of the city in a way that provokes him to entice it continuously

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to expose to him its past in a way that releases nostalgia as the visible means of his masochistic meandering; and, on the other hand, the lure of this present exists as a repast to be devoured, as material to be digested at a future point, now strictly incalculable, at which the weight of its past for that present will be measured. What this means is that the city dweller is never part of the city (this, in the best sense, is what he longs to be) but anticipates living the time when the city will be part of him. The “objective irony” (Baudrillard, 1987, 38) released by this tension in the ambiguity of the lure of the city is what provides the city dweller with the exhilarating tension of any present moment. Here is the city as a lure, the beloved; the city says, “it is hopeless for you to try to possess me through knowledge, to try to become part of me, but if you are willing, I can become part of you.” In the idiom of Lacan, the flâneur puts down his weapons (his self-containment) in order to open himself to the seductiveness of the city. Only if he risks abandonment to the anonymity of the city can the one who seeks to dwell eventfully in its present hope to inscribe the city upon his future as a past that was memorable. If here the discourse on the flâneur is intuitively correct about his mixed relationship to productivity, it is because the flâneur desires to make his present moment in the city “productive” for his life by endowing this moment in this place with the fatefulness that will be decisive for what he is and continues (or comes) to be. The eventfulness of this time in the city, of this present time, is integral to the biography of one who must come to recognize how he carries with him the city as the fatefulness of his past in his every future present. And what is “produced” in the present as fateful is the loss and renewal that is registered now in this place as his, to be confirmed in his future as the history that he has made of himself. Simmel’s notion of the dreamlike character of the adventure says this well, for like the love affair, as the “temporal expression of eternal validity,” the productivity of the flâneur towards the perishable moment of the present is his way of making his character and identity necessary. Simmel’s comparison of the adventure with the work of art is instructive, for the flâneur produces meaning out of the externals by charging the present with impossible eternal significance, with (what we might call) its biographic centrality.

t h e c r ow d For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer, it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be at home and yet to feel at home any

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where; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of these independent, intense, and impartial spirits (Baudelaire, 1972).

To be unmoved by what is so close and so encompassing is to demonstrate to oneself a certain strength. The need of the flâneur to remain in the crowd and to depend upon the crowd seems to contrast with the “independence” of these spirits. The flâneur disguises himself in the anonymous ebb and flow to see if his integrity can stand the test. The immersion, oriented and not casual, takes advantage of the rhythm of the day: he moves in and with the crowd at its peak moments, absorbed by the flow, engaging the times and decisive markers of work, play and the social intervals between moments of the day. In this ebb and flow of the crowd the basic solidarity of the species can be grasped as congestion – as quantity, density, the collision of unknown bodies, the threat of contagion, the materiality of boundary and classification and nothing more. Critical commentary on the flâneur invariably seizes upon Baudelaire’s description of the crowd as an example of his conceit, his inflated desire for omnipotence or invidious singularity with respect to the masses, as if his sense of distinctiveness is meant to grow at the expense of the undifferentiated crowd. At worst, the flâneur is viewed as powerhungry, at best, with the patronizing tone of a therapeutic voice which claims that he wants to be near the many but not connected as if he “fears involvement” (quoted in Latham, 1999). But these reductions of the adventure cannot do justice to its dialectic: the crowd is the exemplary, “extraterritorial” foreign body, cut off from the continuity of life and needing to be returned to its centre. Plunging into the crowd arouses its accidental externality and unruly distractedness as a challenge for adventure. What is most external in the crowd is not its lack of distinction but the force of anonymity which it releases, that in the crowd one is unknown or only known externally and, thus, without the armor that eases social intercourse in limited circles. One is as if a non-entity, herself a foreign body to these others, and reciprocally, in ways that can arouse all to the unruly experience of being devoid of quality, of having to maintain one’s place without the weapons of social distinction. To paraphrase Lacan on viewing a work of art (Lacan, 1981), in the crowd we lay down our weapons and risk giving ourselves to the other as naked and defenseless. The crowd is exciting not for offering the opportunity to feel invidiously superior – not for that kind of detachment – but for its capacity to create the challenge to maintain being as we are, the challenge of sustaining ourselves through the “particular encompassing of its accidentally external force” (Simmel, 1959, 247). The excitement of the

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crowd, which Baudelaire captures in his admonition that anyone bored in the crowd is himself a bore, a fool, whom he despises (Baudelaire, 1972), is seen in that mix of joy and sorrow necessary for the flâneur (joy for the moment and sorrow for its perishability). The solidarity of the species is felt in the movement of the collective as a primitive sign of contact incarnated in the force of quantity that exists “before” artifice and cultivation articulates its forms and categories. Congestion itself, as a lure to the flâneur, becomes a way of bringing to mind the solidarity of the species in becoming, in fragility and perishability, raising the constantly haunting question of its endurance and continuity, of the kind of record it will leave, the remains to which it will testify, the kind of monument its present will tomorrow be. And now, we can begin to appreciate how, for the flâneur as our ideal speaker, the love of the city is another way of describing the relation of the city dweller to the city as a love affair in Simmel’s sense, as itself the adventure par excellence for the flâneur. Because as an object of desire, being in the city is “a ‘favor of fate’ which is to be connected – even as a momentary, climactic, abruptly subduing passion” (Simmel, 1959, 252–3) – to the timeless validity and ideal significance of the life of the dweller. As our paradigmatic adventure, life in the city, despite its externality, is made to return to our centre as that dreamlike experience with such validity for our character and identity, that it can only promise to haunt us inescapably in our future. We defer mastering this city we cannot possess and at the same time, reserve its necessity at our core as that which cannot pass, the destiny of “two souls for one another,” a temporal expression of eternity.

conclusion We are in position to return to the notion of beauty that we introduced in earlier chapters, first, when we discussed the city as a work of art, then, as a resonance of Weber’s distinction between art and science, and, finally, in Simmel’s conception of objective culture. Baudelaire permits us to reformulate beauty as a feature of the way in which the ephemeral nature of any present is embodied in the representation of coming-to-view and appearing: “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one-half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable” (Baudelaire, 1972, 403). The city is the site at which this “look” appears and becomes palpable, especially on occasions when presenting a face to be exhibited and viewed, including the self, in its display, is designed to evoke what is most notable, admirable, and valuable in being seen: “I have said that every age has its own carriage, its expression, its gestures” (Baudelaire, 405).

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The city dramatizes the coming-to-view of the transient, fleeting, and contingent, in part when demands to appear in a positive light provide opportunities to exhibit and make a spectacle of the very meaning of a “positive light” at this time and in this place. The beauty of the city consists of the way in which it organizes its ephemeral circumstances to be appealing through the occasions which seduce its people to come to view, to view themselves as viewed, to perform or enact being in public, being seen and oriented to. Attending to the occasion allows us to recover the collective notion of a “positive light” and the city which invests its multitudinous routines and settings with such an occasioned character, adds pleasure to utility by endowing its everyday life with the quality of ornamentation. The beauty of the city lies in the ways it risks exhibiting and flaunting its very superficiality, its ornamentalism, as its lust for life amidst its overpowering mundaneity. Thus, when Baudelaire typically describes the variety of types who engage the artist’s attention – upper-class young women at the opera, aspiring suburban actresses, promenading families of the bourgeoisie, loungers, louts and courtesans – his sneer towards their vulgarity masks the resemblances he finds binding all such types as an “expression” or “gesture” of the age. Note how in contrast to Braudel’s representation of the worm’s eye view of the city as corporeal, Baudelaire’s corporeal city focuses upon a physiognomy that is not simply “festering” but expressive, showing itself as a blend of poise and awkwardness in its being subject to the view. Baudelaire’s cases have in common the desire to shine, that is, the way the occasion mobilizes ceremonial concentration, because the desirability at stake – contingent, ephemeral – comes-to-be and perishes in ways that cannot be mastered and, so, constantly arouse excitation through this fear of loss alone, coexisting with the opportunity to shine and excel at one and the same moment. Baudelaire’s method requires a rule which says: if we observe people absorbed in the thrill of performance, we will begin to understand how self-worth, desirability, and the value of a person is represented in collective life. In fact, the beauty of the city is nothing other than its power to induce all who are touched by it to embrace its everyday life as pomp and circumstance, as constant incentive and opportunity to risk participating in its exhibitionism, that is, bearing the mark of value – of being central and up-to-date – in a way that exemplifies the civilization of which the city is the centre. This means that the subject of this city, truly a brokenhearted animal, is forever in the spell of the procreatic desire to recover resemblances, signs of festivity, excitement, and intimacy. The love of the city personified by this figure is part of the imaginative structure of the city itself insofar as the adventure is always an object of desire for the city dweller, sometimes as nostalgia and sometimes

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in the shape of Goffman’s activism, but more deeply as the need to transform passing time in this place into an adventure of the spirit. Can we imagine cities to vary in terms of how they make space for adventure? If we recall from Baudelaire’s essay that the flâneur is said to haunt the “civilized capitals” of the world (Baudelaire, 1972, 400), the lament for the lost flâneur could tell us just as much about the lament for the loss of the city and, by implication, for the loss of the adventure which it promises. For, in its best sense, the city was and remains essentially a civilized capital of the world. This could begin to suggest that the loss of the flâneur is commensurate with the loss of any weighty sense of distinction among cities which distinguish and set apart “civilized capitals” as the penultimate form of city. Indeed, it seems (under conditions of “globalism”?) that anonymity endangers the character of the city itself, promising to dissolve the difference between anyone city and its other. Is it possible any longer to love a city, to connect with the city in such an act of renewal? Such questions complicate the view of the anonymity of the city in interesting ways: if it appears first in images of privatization and alienation, the example of the flâneur enables us to locate anonymity in the movement of inwardness in the lover of the city who aspires to distinguish and possess (impossibly) the beloved as his “civilized capital” and, so, as formative and decisive. Now however, the withdrawal of the city as such an object of desire and of its flâneur makes the anonymity of the contemporary city dweller such as Benjamin inescapably nostalgic, but a nostalgia organized around a stranger or wanderer’s predatory strategy of urban habitation, of making passing time interesting and productive. Thus, if Benjamin’s project of collecting the impressions of the city dweller as fragments of a book of the city, makes reference to a distinctive shape of anonymity, it is the tension between such detachment and the lover of the city that we should begin to explore. This chapter has suggested in part, that adventure in the city cultivates a response to both nostalgia and urbanity which in some way must overcome their immediacy and sensitivity and, so, that cultivation gains its strength from a passion only implicit in such responses. And if the argument over the distinctiveness of the city is still alive, is it not directed to the question of whether, how, and to what extent the city can fertilize adventure, how it can and must persist in its various guises as an impossible object of desire? If in this sense Baudelaire connects the beauty of the city to happiness through the thrill of living out ephemerality, this connection is solidified and contested through the configuration linking excitement to enterprise and the repressed but constant anticipation of vicarious fate-

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fulness. The thrill of the city, registered in popular culture and in the continuous invention of marginal markets is confirmed in the play of perennial voices at the margins trying to give shape to interests by hustling and doing business in every area of urban life. In this way the power of the city as a social fact, governed by the excitatory force of both opportunity and loss, always functions as a spectacle of contestation which in its turn raises the excitatory tempo of public life. Just as globalization is viewed by the Left as excluding from its promise those who are not in position to seize its opportunity, so the Right views the constant opportunism of the city as destroying long-standing distinctions of weight. From any and every angle, the city is seen as treating every distinction as an opportunity and every opportunity as a market, making it possible for each generation to contest these questions in ways that inspire at any present moment both contempt and reverence for the vitality of its youth.

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Conclusion

In this book we have tried to show how the symbolic order of the city and its range of imaginative permutations operate as vital distinctions in the everyday life of modern civilization. We have proceeded by treating the city as a mobile phenomenon that both constrains and fertilizes a dense and richly layered landscape of interpretation and action concerning the meaning and value of collective practices. To this end, we have treated the city as the site over which the encounter between different interpretations and actions concerning time and space come to view in mundane ethical collisions regarding the circulation of influences, people and things, cosmopolitanism, nightlife, materialism, building and rebuilding, and excitement. I have suggested that theorizing such phenomena requires notions that make problematic the representation of the city by disclosing, in part, the challenge it offers to redemptive collective action. In this respect, the narrative has orchestrated a dialogical montage in each chapter around specific anxieties, each anxiety identified as a locus of collective problem-solving. Throughout, I have proposed that the intensification of urban change creates the continuous need to resolve the ambiguity of distinctions between the new and the old, the near and the far, space and place, urbanization and urbanity, fragmentation and participation, the category and the collective, and escape and adventure. The ambiguity of such distinctions comes to view as problems and, so, as social phenomena, on critical occasions when the common situation of the city and its quality of life are contested in small ways, appearing as examples of fundamental and riveting questions concerning human association. The city is treated as two-headed, as both material and ideal, in ways that leave persistent, irresolute traces in the life that encounters and sustains its focus as a site of collective action.

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c o l l e c t i v e s e l f - u n d e r s ta n d i n g This leads to a more basic issue. Whatever comes to view in the city as an example in this book shows upon closer examination to be a situation of action and interpretation in which the vitality of urban life discloses the problem of temporality and the collective existence in time and space as a primordial engagement. Distinctions such as time and space, the new and the old, the near and the far, the here and the there are constantly aroused by the city through the intensification of urban change, appearing then as questions of concerted interest (as topics, phenomena) and, at the same time, as registers of the uncanniness that haunts all action, as pressing concerns, as ripples beneath the surface of collective life, challenging us to aspire to redeem ourselves as something other than no-thing and no-place. This desire of the collective to return to itself, to ground and found itself as one, is constantly assailed by the city through the fundamental ambiguity of self-understanding which its ephemeral effervescence arouses, an ambiguity always persisting as the haunting trace of the relation of Same to Other and the desire for truth and knowledge which the indeterminacy of this relationship releases. Martin Heidegger is helpful here. … that in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite … That in the face of which one has anxiety is characterized by the fact that what threatens is nowhere(Heidegger, 231, #187) That about which anxiety is anxious reveals itself as as that in the face of which it is anxious–namely, Being-in-the World (233, #187)

Our being-in-the world as both opaque and definitive includes and eludes our every effort to grasp the world as a near-at-hand distinction or as an other entity. To and for itself, the being-in-the world of the collective (which he calls dasein, the human kind) is completely indefinite in a way which materializes as placelessness, as the concerted experience of being no-thing and no-place. At special moments and on special occasions this self-understanding is exacerbated, materializing as alive and vivid for the collective encountering what it is as the Not (as being not a thing and no place) while holding on to its sense of the Same (that it can see and say this). In these ways collective problem-solving moves to restore itself through the security of familiar resolutions of interpretation and action. This uncanniness pursues … constantly … This threat can go together factically with complete assurance and self sufficiency in one’s everyday concern. Anxiety can arise in the most innocuous situations (234, #189).

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Each of the chapters in this work has sought to make palpable a specific interpretive site where collective life appears and becomes visible as a problem to solve. I have resisted treating the city as something athand to be gathered as “comprehensible” through a penultimate interpretation that treats it as if a ton of steel or some definite thing; the city as the city-for-us is intrinsically part of our indefinite relation to the world. This relationship which is the city is disclosed in the single unitary phenomenon (the case, the example) that, in appearing, simultaneously bears the weight and freight of ambiguity and brings to view to our discerning eye a lightness of being in its openness to questioning.

anamnesis as putting the pieces ( b ac k) to g et he r Whereas Plato spoke of theorizing as anamnesis or recollecting, we can give this usage a more contemporary inflection. Note Georges Perec’s use of the analogy of the puzzle. A wooden jigsaw puzzle … is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analyzed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element’s existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before or after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it. This means that you can look at a piece of puzzle for three whole days, you can believe you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further on than when you started. The only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces (Perec, 1978, Preamble, 1).

If the case is a puzzle to be worked out (questioned through “linking it” to other “pieces”) it is also true that such questioning must be guided by our anticipation of how the phenomenon itself is linked together in and through its indeterminacy. In this work we have inquired into the ways in which sociality links us even through division and difference by our use of every example to pursue the material shape of this puzzle. If the puzzle of social life invites us at first to inquire into the “joint reciprocity” that binds the occasion, we have discovered such a view of the social to undergo different phenomenological shapes as a division of labor, as the struggle for survival of sea monsters, as instrumental exchanges of power, and as links of signification and “mediation.” We have sought both to preserve such views (as voices in the montage of city life) and to surpass them, through the running formulation of a city discourse as those bits and pieces of a mobile and indetermi-

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nate archive of impressions and concerted interests. The engagement with such an archive is the unspoken ground of the city as an object of desire. This points to the notion of community-in-the-making to which we referred earlier as part of the collective work of stabilizing and standardizing self understanding in the face of the anxiety released by the image of the groundlessness of being. Again, Max Weber gives an illustration of the work of such collective problem-solving. It is by no means true that the existence of common qualities, a common situation, or common modes of behavior imply the existence of a communal social relationship. Thus, for instance, he possession of a common biological inheritance by virtue of which persons are classified as belonging to the same “race,” naturally implies no sort of communal social relationship between them even if they all react to this situation in the same way,this does not constitute a communal relationship. The latter does not even exist if they have a common ‘feeling’ about this situation and its consequences. It is only when this feeling leads to a mutual orientation of their behavior to each other that a social relationship arises between them, a social relationship to each other and not only to persons in the environment. Furthermore, it is only so far as this relationship involves feelings of belonging together that it is a “communal” relationship (Weber, 1947, 138).

As Weber makes clear, whether or not and in what way a collective can be conceived as communal is an open question. The question not only haunts the inquirer who must decide on this or that in any particular case, but it haunts the actor described by the inquirer as absorbed by a social situation, the actor who must work out or try to resolve the matter at hand. This open question and its various shapes is precisely the problem to be solved in any example, the pieces of the puzzle that must be aligned. Yet, it is true to say that the desire to master the puzzle coexists with the fact that its mastery in the deepest sense is impossible, for, as Perec says, the puzzle has been designed by the other, and, as Lacan says, other does not answer. The puzzle I have set for myself in this book is to recover the mutually oriented social relationship that could be said to collect each example, and the mutually oriented social relationship to the city that could be said to collect all of the examples. I have proceeded by resisting the temptation to rest assured with visions of social actors as only sea monsters (chapter 2), as only senders and receivers in a signifying chain (chapters 1 and 2), though such situations might seem to bear the traces of “mutually oriented social actions” (also, see Sartre, 1963). I have tried to overcome (surpass and preserve) such pictures of the social situation by formulating the indeterminacy of social life as itself the problem in any situation, taking shape in the specific detail of the indeterminate collective relation to place and time. In this way, even

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Weber’s “elevation” of the notion of a mutually oriented social relationship is much less powerful than what we could do (much too “normative”), since the invariable working out of what, who, and how we are must draw upon resources both definitive and ambiguous, notions, for example, of form. In this way the problem is never solved for we who theorize, until the fundamental ambiguity of the relation of the Same to the Other is made transparent in the very example(s) of the specific detail of city life, of the distinction as a life force.

forms We think of the forms as truth, justice, and beauty, and we think of their correlative practices as philosophy, politics, and art. This is a Platonic idiom that only old-fashioned folks might take seriously today. Intrinsic to the notion of the “end” frequently discussed is the idea of the end of forms, of any distinction being essential or final. Most people know that any such notion is conventional, revisable, alterable, contingent, circumstantial. For example, any claim to truth is rhetorical; any affirmation of the general will is an extension of interest and power; beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Such an assault on the sanctity of distinguishing is exacerbated at moments of unrest, tending to be symptoms of their very indeterminacy. These controversies become, to paraphrase Baudelaire, expressions of the philosophical worries of an age. By centering such debate, the city also provides opportunities for experimentation and innovation at the edges of these fields. For example, no philosopher worth her name would accept that the fuzziness of the border between truth and rhetoric prevents human communities from disregarding the dialogical opportunity (the inescapable need and desire) to confront the question of a true rhetoric. No politician worth his name would contend that the permeable border between general will and group interest prevents communities from encountering in an ongoing way the question of a communal interest. Finally, no artist worth her salt would say that the indistinction between beauty and its various others prevents a community from engaging the question of what kind of pleasing work is procreative. The city is the place where (and it is a place because) the end of collective life is taken up as a question releasing experimentation and resistance, conflict and enmity. In taking up such questions, the city serves as a locus of collectivization for its civilization, attracting not only creative souls, but predators, automatons, and barbarians, that is, all who would hope to “find a niche.”

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Index

Abu-Lughod, J.L., 71–2 action, 28–30, 36, 38–9, 64–5, 263, 265–80, 286– 7, 296–8; eroticism, 74, 263–7, 287–8; productivity, 19, 56, 82–5, 117, 195–6, 228–31, 259–60; problem-solving, 17–18, 20–1, 25, 40, 42, 53, 59, 86, 235 Adorno, T., 181 adventure, 274–5 Agamben, G., 15, 20, 44, 50 alienation, 66–8 anamnesis, 48, 296 Anderson, B., 165 anxiety, unheimlich, 295 architecture, 259–60 Arendt, H., 71, 139, 208, 224–5, 242 art, 170; and progress, 75– 6 Arthur, P. and R. Pasini, 268–9 Athens, 82–6 aufheben, 34 Augustine, Saint, 143 Bakhtin, M., 76–8, 85, 201–2, 218–19 Balzac, 186, 226–7 Banham, R., 73 Barrow, C., 175 Bataille, G., 5, 7, 13, 74,

121, 137, 149, 180, 188, 193–5, 212, 264–5, 268, 278 Baudelaire, C., 4, 82, 189, 222, 274, 288, 290–2, 298 Baudrillard, J., 6, 24–5, 27, 36, 45, 64, 102, 218, 264, 272, 274, 288 Becker, H., 170 Beckett, A., 133–5 Beckett, S., 283 beliefs, 15–18 Benardete, S., 33, 35, 40, 43, 114 Bourdieu, P., 162 Benjamin, W., 64, 82, 126– 7, 261, 263–4 Bennett, S., 167 Berlin, 41, 81–2, 166, 241– 2, 281–2 biography, 60–1 Black, C., 56 Blum, A. and P. McHugh, 192 Boardman, J., 121–2 Body-Gendrot, S., 18–20 bohemianism, 219–21 Bonner, K., 4, 43, bourgeoisie, 63, 135–7, 179–80, 189, 205–6, 208–15, 219–21, 224–5, 227–8, 262 Braudel, F., 99, 197–204, 291

Buck-Morss, S., 181, 263–4 building and rebuilding, 230–4 built environment/objective culture, 259–60 Butor, M., 273 canon, 114 Carr, D., 35, 60–4 case studies, 13, 15–16, 18, 31, 44–5, 296 Castells, M., 22, 105 Certeau, M. de, 39, 267 Chambers, R., 270, 281 Chicago, 72, 109–12 Chicago school, 236–40 circulation, 91–4 city: center, 99; common situation, 30, 53–5, 65; communication center, 98–9; creative, 182–3; duration and extension, 89–91; good, 5–6, 50–2, 230; hospitality, 122–5; identity, 26–32; as a market place, 190; monstrous, 201–4; object of desire, 39, 43–4, 76–9, 93, 226–8; perpetuity, 94–5; place, 44; science and art, 74–5; as a sign, 24–6, 106; social change, 56–9, 61, 79–82, 109– 12, 294; travel, 46, 159– 60; twenty-four-hour, 96,

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328 144, 149, 162; as a work of art, 5–6, 39, 69, 70–5, 190 civilizing process, 21 Clark, T.J., 221–2 Clarke, E.D., 165 class, 35, 63, 215–18 Cocteau, J., 169 coffee, 126–8, 142, 162 collective life, 107; purpose, 19, 32, 36, 52–3, 72, 75, 90, 95; utopia, 133 commodity, 66–7, 105–6, 124, 166 common situation, 53–5, 90, 96, 103, 136–7, 139– 40, 186–8 community, 3, 6–7, 297–8 comparing cities, 27, 37, 40, 42 consumption, 136–7, 195–6 Corcoran, M., 31, 59–63, 243 cosmopolitanism, 138, 149, 227–8 Coulanges, F. de, 85, 94 crowd, 222–3, 288–90 culture, 14, 19, 22, 52–4, 56, 284–5 death, 62, 75, 78, 82, 85–6, 232. See also mortality Debord, G., 65–9, 261 Delanty, G., 105 Deleuze, G., 26, 88 Derrida, J., 47 Descartes, R., 260 diversity, 101–5, 183–6, 197–9, 225–8 divided line, 16–18 division of labor, 3 Dublin, 60, 125–33 duration and extension, 89–91 Durkheim, E., 32, 92, 142, 194–211, 264 Dührrschmidt, J. and U. Matthiesen, 30, 60–4 ecology, 79–81 Elias, N. and E. Dunning, 98, 185, 213

Index Enzenberger, H.M., 138 flâneur, 263–5, 284, 287– 90 Focillon, H., 42 free time, 146–8 Gadamer, H., 140 Gans, E., 99, 196, 283 Gans, H., 33 Garfinkel, H, 38 Gay, P., 168 Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, 181 General Will, 35 generation, 83, 90, 241 Genet, J., 187 Girard, R., 15, 44 Glazier, R., 118–19 globalization, 18–23, 38, 61, 79, 91–2, 94, 105–9, 190–2 Goffman, E., 170–1, 173, 266, 275, 281 Goldberger, P., 244 Gopnik, A., 180 Gottdiener, M., 101, 140 grammar, 165–6 Grana, C., 221 Grenzer, E., 259 Hallward, 191 Harvey, D., 22 Hegel, G.W., 3, 34, 113, 184–5, 200–1, 251, 265 Heidegger, M., 4, 6–7, 28, 32–3, 115, 165, 178–9, 242, 295 Hesiod, 145, 147 Hitler, 81–2 Hobbes, T., 22, 64 images, 15–18 imaginative structure, 31–4 Innis, H., 89, 91–2 insomnia, 150–6, 162, 236 interpretation, 15 Isherwood, B. and M. Douglas, 98, 109, 136–7 Jacobs, J., 192, 214 Jenks, C., 264

Kant, I., 197, 273 Karatheodoris, S., 94 Kolb, D., 178 Lacan, J., 9, 17, 22, 28, 126, 187–8, 212, 288, 297 Ladd, B., 81 Latham, A., 270, 281, 289 Ledrut, R., 38–9, 43, 51–2, 65, 68, 70, 176, 279 Lefebvre, H., 22 Levinas, E., 126 life chances, 215–18 locality, 36–9, 58, 88–9, 93, 123 Lofland, L., 266 London, 187, 203–4, 223 Los Angeles, 71–2 Lynch, K., 244 MacGregor, R., 97 Machiavelli, N., 147–8 Maffesoli, M., 164 Manchester, 133–5 Mannheim, K., 164 market, 22, 69, 86, 153, 193–5, 228 market value, 100, 193–4, 227–8 Marx, K., 35, 72, 204–5, 208–10, 215 masses, 200, 224 Massey, D., 101 Massey, D., J. Allen, and S. Pike, 46 mathematical, 115–16 McAlmon, R. and K. Boyle, 169 McCumber, J., 95–6 McHugh, P., 38, 54, 56–9 memory, 68–9 metaphysics, 15 method, 14–16, 26–9, 43– 4, 48, 298 Meyer, J.W., 108 Mills, C.W., 181–6 mimetic contagion, 218– 19, 225–8, 262–3 modernity, 21–2, 60, 76, 78, 133–5, 140 Moerman, M., 37

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Index Montreal, 30, 41 monsters, 156, 199 Moore, T., 146 Mordaunt Crook, J., 223 mortality, 90, 95–6, 168–70 Muschamp, H., 116 Nancy, J.L., 33–4, 145 Naples, 77–9 Nef, J., 228–30 neighborhood, 178 Neitzsche, F., 4–5, 38, 46, 72–3, 82, 117, 139, 243 New York, 72, 185, 235, 245 Nielsen, G., Y. Hsu, and L. Jacob, 31, 44–5 nihilism, 3–13, 234 Norris, F., 190 old ad new, 116, 244–6 O’Neill, M, 73–4 open and closed, 118–22 Ozizk, C., 183–4, 235 Padmore, G., 169 paradigms, 112–13 parasitical, 199 Paris, 185–6, 221, 226–7 Paris Is Burning, 187 Park, R., 109–12, 236–40 Parker, D., 169 parochial, 138 Parsons, T., 53, 172 Perec, G., 296 Pericles, 82–6 perpetuity, 94–5 Pierce, C.,62 place, 28, 31–2, 44–5, 62, 66, 94, 125–33, 135, 178, 187 Plato, 3, 7–12, 15–18, 24, 48–9, 51, 73, 103, 117, 296 political economy, 181–2 poor, the, 204–8 private/public, 179–81, 185 public spaces, 156–8, 258– 60 puzzle, 296 question, 8–12

Raban, J., 165, 179–80 Rabelais, 218–19 Rancière, J., 27, 35, 46, 86 remakes, 246–9; displacement, 256–7; replacement, 249–52; upgrading, 252–4 representation, 3, 16–20, 23–7, 36–9, 45, 55, 57, 59–65, 68–9, 105, 112– 16; ambiguity, 14, 54, 66–7, 86–7, 96; indeterminacy, 12, 16, 28, 31–3, 51, 86; life world, 68, 70–6 The Republic, 117, 127–9; and justice, 3, 7 Rhys, J., 156–8 Robb, P., 77–9 Rome, 81–2 Rosen, S., 34 Rossi, A., 113, 240, 242, 244 Rossi, R., 258 Rousseau, J.J., 35, 199, 206–8, 211, 215, 263, 269 Ruttman, W., 281–2 sacrifice, 192–6 St Petersburg, 202 same and other, 24, 31, 33, 46, 54, 72, 75, 159–66, 295 Sartre, J.P., 54–5, 72–3, 171, 297 Sassen, S., 18–20, 22, 105– 6, 123, 208–10, 278 Scarry, E., 126 scenes, art, 170; collectivization, 170–1; mortality, 168–70; New Left, 174; parasitism, 173, 199; performance, 174; theatricality, 171–3; transgression, 149, 173–5 Schama, S., 211 Schmid, M., 52–3 Schmitt, C., 168 Schumpeter, J., 214 Scott, D., 137 Seigel, J., 221

329 self-reflection, 7–8, 13–18, 43–8; dialectic, 9, 40–2, 296–8; free space of meaning, 4, 36–9; identity, 21, 29–35, 40–6 Serres, M., 173 Shils, E., 58, 88, 99, 105, 240–2 Simmel, G., 39, 74, 98, 162, 186, 190, 192–3, 211, 226, 243, 270, 274– 5, 281, 283–4, 288, 290 Smith, M., 102, 106 social change, 19–20, 56–9, 75–6, 79–82, 90, 109– 12, 294 Socrates, 7–12, 33, 128–9, 150–2, 169, 176–8 Soja, E.W., 22 space, 88–9, 91–4, 97; and time, 22–3, 44, 58–67, 70, 80, 90, 94–100, 116, 187 spectacle, 175–6, 181, 221– 3; congestion, density, 200, 223; quantity and number, 196–201, 203– 6, 221–5, 230; visual, 221–3 Spinoza, 190 Steele, V., 185–6, 226 Stinchcombe, A., 35 Straw, W., 249 streets, 246, 266–7; density, solitude, 270–4; walking, 267–72; way-finding, 268–9 superstore, 257–8 Surowieki, J., 191 Sussman, M., 258–9 Swanson, G., 52–3, 56, 58 sweetness of life, 94, 228– 30 Thrasymachus, 9–12, 15 Thucydides, 82–6 Time, 90, 94 Times Square. See public spaces Todorov, T., 43 Tocqueville, de, 176 Toer, A., 197

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330 Travel, 46–8, 158–60 Tsing, A., 107 universal, 98–9, 124–5 urbanization, 96–100 Venice, 42

Index waiting, 148–9, 280–4 Weber, M., 3, 18, 29–33, 36, 75–6, 161, 189, 194, 205, 209–10, 212–13, 219, 297 Wiggins, D., 64

Wittgenstein, L., 15, 29, 46–7, 178, 266 Woolf, V., 169 Wynn, D., 182 Zukin, S., 164