Monthly Archives: January 2023

the ambiguous city

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Towards the end of his book All that is solid melts into air, Marshall Berman takes issue with the view that graffiti has ‘defaced’ a public sculpture by Richard Serra, TWU (referring to the Transit Workers’ Union), in New York City. He writes: “… all that the city has added to TWU has brought out its special depths”. It took me a while to work out what ‘the city’ referred to. It seemed ambiguous, but it also reminded me of Charles Williams’ references to ‘the city’ in his study of Dante, The Figure of Beatrice, and his novel All Hallows Eve.

Does ‘the city’ refer to the city-corporation or the city as the collection of all the people who ‘make up’ (another ambiguous term) the city? In Spanish these people might be referred to as toda la ciudad—which in English might be translated simply as ‘everyone in the city’. But who are they? It’s a good question: Who are the people who make up the city? Everyone who resides in the city? Everyone who is present in the city on any given day including transient visitors? Those people who identify themselves with the city and the city with themselves—Donne’s people who see themselves as a part of the city and, therefore, the city as a part of themselves.

Both of the indefinite articles in that last sentence are important. That people are ‘a part of the city’ seems obvious—even in a naïve or literal sense: people, as individuals, are ‘a’ part of the city because many, many other people also inhabit the city. But how can ‘the city’ be ‘a part of the individual’? Why isn’t it sufficient to say simply ‘the city is part of the individual’? Grammatically, that would be sufficient, and the indefinite article is not needed. But the presence of the indefinite article explicitly recognizes that the individual is more than just an extension—a digit, a limb, an instrument—of the city. This is where the soviet-communist view of the relationship between the state and the citizen went disastrously and tragically wrong—as dramatically illustrated by the HBO series Chernobyl. But the disaster there was not the failure of an ideal. It was the failure of the state and those responsible for governing the state to live up to that ideal—which was the tragedy.

People fail their ideals, but the ideals survive that failure. It is the ideal to which ‘the city’ refers—whether in Berman’s or William’s very different but very much related uses of the phrase.

My puzzlement at what seemed to be an ambiguity in Berman’s simple phrase ‘the city’ turns out to reflect pervasive tensions—which are psychological (within the individuals who make up the city) and political (between the individual and the community), and conceptual (the terms in which these questions play out). These tensions—conflicts, contradictions, antinomies—go to the very heart of the way ‘we’ think about the ‘self’ and what it means to be ‘an individual’.

going too far

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British GDP Per Capita 1501 to 1999Would it be going too far to attribute the explosive growth of the Global Domestic Product from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries to three extractive processes: the extraction of silver and gold from Central and South America; the extraction of coal from England and Europe; and the extraction of black people from Africa? Or to put this in other terms: money, energy, and labor.

Did the rise of markets, capital, trade, private property, and the rule of law contribute to the growth in the ‘world’ economy after 1500? Yes, certainly. But their contribution rested on the extraction of gold and silver, coal, and people. Would the transformation of markets, capital, trade, private property, and the rule of law have occurred in the absence of what might be called ‘the extractive economy’? It’s an unanswerable question. They are two sides of the same coin.

There were other extractions. The mass of the people living in western Europe were extracted from their traditional livelihoods, homes, and ways of life. They were either concentrated in the industrial slums of the cities or transported to the empty—or rather emptied—lands of the New World. That was another extraction: the extraction of the land of the ‘Americas’ from their long-standing occupants—and its conversion into property. Life, liberty, and property, Locke said, not adding the important caveat for some.

More than people and things were extracted. Ethical or moral values were extracted from the myths of Fall and Redemption, Salvation and Damnation that had supplied the ‘moral compass’ of not-yet-Europeans for more than a millennium. That ethos was converted into a utilitarian ethic reliant on a narrow concept of self-interest—ultimately christened ‘the virtue of selfishness’. The quest for meaning was extracted from the romances of the Middle Ages—Yvain, Parzifal, Le Morte d’Arthur, Tristan, Orlando Furioso—and distilled down into the quest for wealth and power as ends in themselves. Sir Gawain, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, and Perceval—questing for love, honor, glory, and salvation—were transformed into entrepreneurs questing after profit. The spell cast by romance of chivalry needed to be broken (¡gracias! Cervantes) but lost in that disenchantment was the sense—the belief, the conviction—that an individual’s actions have a meaning beyond themselves.

So, would it be going too far? Sometimes it’s worth going too far. Sometimes it’s necessary. And sometimes going too far is not going far enough.

the obscure object of hostility

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What is all the hostility on the right—the anti-communists, the right-libertarians, the paleo-conservatives, the reactionaries, the ur-individualists, the anti-collectivists, the anti-woke-ists—directed against? It seems to be directed against the idea that there is anyone or anything outside the individual himself (or herself¹) that needs to be considered as more than an opponent, an enemy, a danger. That everything other than the individual himself (or herself) exists solely to benefit … me. It/they only exist in me. It/they are merely a projection from me. It/they are a part of me; I am not a part of them; I exist only apart from them. And should I come to see that I am a part of them, it is the end of me: I cease to exist. This is solipsism. It is the ethical and political theory of idiots (in the Greek sense of ἰδιώτης). Synecdoche standing on its head and running amok.

My problem with this view is that my end is to be—merely?—a part of the whole. “A piece of the continent” Donne said. And neither the piece nor the continent can exist apart from the other.

¹ there have been and are plenty of women in this camp—Maggie Thatcher not least among them.