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’.