Richard Shusterman 
Urban Scenes and Unseens 
i 
Celebra ted already in Plato and Aristotle, the city seems a symbolic 
solution to one of phi losophy 's most central problems - the many and the 
one. This p rob lem is at once metaphysical and epistemological, as well as 
ethical, political and aesthetic: the unity of substance in change, of truth in 
the manifold of appearance , of the self in plurality of action, of the unified 
polis with its m a n y citizens and households, of beauty as unity in variety. The 
city symbolizes the embrac ing of multiplicity and diversity within a single 
unit, often concretely represented by their collection within city walls. Rather 
than dividing the city (as in Berlin), such encompassing walls aimed at assert-
ing the city's integrity as a clear unit with definite limits, distinct from the 
indefinite sprawl of the surrounding countryside. The Greeks saw definite 
limits as essential to the values of clarity, rationality, and beautiful form. But 
when m o d e r n urbanizat ion overwhelmed the old city-walls, the charm and 
power of the cities was not thereby destroyed. For romantic thought inter-
vened to privilege the infinite and unlimited. Though poets like Blake and 
Wordswor th at tacked the city (in their poems on »London«) for its grimy grid 
of oppressive political limits, the small-minded greed of narrow »chartered« 
streets in contrast to Nature ' s vast bounty, the city could nonethelss be valor-
ized as a site of unl imited growth, endless activity, boundless variety, and 
infinite possibilities. Logically, a town or village would lose its status by grow-
ing too large and thus becoming a city. But the city, at least in principle, 
knows no limits to growth and variety. 
All the world, it seemed, could be experienced in the single city. Its 
dense wealthy populat ion enabled the bringing of even the most remotely 
p roduced and costly products to the city shops and museums. Too vast and 
varied to be captured or viewed f rom a single main street or square, the city's 
promise of ever new discoveries through its seemingly endless web of streets, 
set the flaneur in constant motion. Huge parks and zoos provided the modern 
metropolis with varieties of even country and jungle life, while urban com-
muter trains showed that the city could also allow its residents to travel exten-
sively without ever having to leave the city at all. Circumscribed infinity is a 
Filozofski vestnih, XVII (2/1996), pp. 171-179. 
Richard Shusterman 
powerful , though paradoxica l image. So though t fu l theor is ts of city life, like 
Georg Simmel , insist that par t of the city's dist inct ive l ibera t ing p o w e r is in 
t ranscending its physical boundar ies , thus p rov id ing n o t only a m e a n s bu t a 
symbol of boundless f r e e d o m . 
It is not only the immediate size of the area and the number of persons which 
... has made the metropolis the locale of freedom. It is rather in transcending 
this visible expanse that any given city becomes the seat of cosmopolitanism. 
... The sphere of life of the small town is, in the main, self-contained and 
autarchic ... The most significant characteristic of the metropolis is the func-
tional extension beyond its physical boundaries.1 
Simmel 's solution to the logical p r o b l e m of city-infinity is thus by ap-
peal to wha t is absent f r o m the physical site with wh ich the city is ident i f ied 
and has its center; it is only »in t r anscend ing this visible expanse that any 
given city becomes the seat of cosmopol i tan i sm« (ibid.). 
Urbanis t s like Simmel were, however , no t c o n c e r n e d with the logic of 
infinity. T h e y were p reoccup ied by the concre te p r o b l e m s resul t ing f r o m city 
plenty, where overwhelming quant i t ies of peop le , p roduc t s , a n d activit ies 
could overstrain and endange r the very quali ty of h u m a n expe r i ence , of per-
sonal and social life. This pa infu l p a r a d o x of m o r e m e a n i n g less is a lei tmotif 
in urban criticism f rom Friedrich Engels, th rough Baudela i re , Valéry , S immel , 
Benjamin, and Mumford , and still e x t e n d i n g into the p o s t m o d e r n h i p - h o p of 
Grandmas te r Flash, whose 1983 classic »New York , N e w York« bea r s the 
blunt refra in: »Too much, too m a n y peop le , too much!« 
Such critics did not dep lore the mul t i tud inous var ie ty of city life pe r se; 
they rel ished it. W h a t they instead a t tacked was the th rea t of d isor ienta t ing , 
dehumaniz ing , shocking chaos (symbolized by the fo rmless crowd) wh ich 
resulted f r o m the eno rmous u rban bust le of quanti t ies , complexi t ies , and di-
versities overwhelming our h u m a n powers of assimilation. In Ben jamin ' s terms 
we thus have the f ragmented shock of Erlebnis, someth ing l ived th rough , ra ther 
than the funded , ordered, convergent assimilation of exper ience. T h e urbanis t ' s 
aim is not to decrease the rich bust l ing var ie ty of city life, bu t to o rde r it so 
that it would no longer be threa teningly o v e r w h e l m i n g and u n m a n a g e a b l e . 
The p rob lem, then, is one of Ordnung, as o the r G e r m a n urbanis t s wou ld con-
cur. 
Fr iedr ich Engels , for e x a m p l e , m a r v e l l e d at L o n d o n ' s vas tness a n d 
achievements but found »the bustle of the streets« »distasteful« a n d »abhor-
1 George Simmel, »The Metropolis and Mental Life«, The Sociology of George Simmel, 
Free Press, New York 1950, p. 419. 
172 
Urban Scenes and Unseens 
ren t to h u m a n na ture« t h r o u g h its lack of structuring social relations. The 
only r e d e e m i n g rela t ion, he (perhaps ironically) notes, is a tacit one of or-
d e r e d non-con tac t : »that eve ryone should keep to the r ight of the pavement , 
so as no t to i m p e d e the s t ream of people mov ing in the opposi te direction.«2 
D e v e l o p i n g the anc ien t t rope that contras ted the city as deve loped mind 
to the less conscious , m o r e co rporea l country body, S immel regarded the com-
p lex mult ipl ici t ies and sensory intensities of city life as the stimulus that ne-
cessi ta ted »a h e i g h t e n e d awareness and p r e d o m i n a n c e of intell igence in met-
ropo l i t an man« . T o p ro tec t his psyche, he »reacts with his head instead of his 
heart«, with intel lectual o rde r ra ther than spontaneous feeling. Though this 
weakens affect ive social b o n d s , it is a »necessity ... b rough t about by the 
aggregat ion of so m a n y p e o p l e with such different iated interests, who must 
in tegra te their re la t ions and activities into a highly complex organism«. Oth-
erwise, S immel warns , »the whole s tructure would break down into an inex-
t r icable chaos«. 
W h a t would such a nightmare be, for Simmel the urban Ordner? »If all 
clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if 
only by an hour , all economic life and communicat ion of the city would be 
disrupted for a long time ... [and] long distances would make waiting and bro-
ken-appointments result in an ill-afforded waste of time.« »Metropolitan life« he 
concludes (with apparen t disregard of Naples, Marseille, or Marrakech) »is un-
imaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual 
relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule« (412-13). 
Th i s m e a n s suppress ing the individual ' s personal incl inat ions which 
th rea t en the c lockwork uni ty of the whole: Hence »the exclusion of those 
i r ra t ional , inst inct ive, sovere ign traits and impulses which aim at determin-
ing the m o d e of life f r o m within, instead of receiving the general and pre-
cisely schemat ized f o r m of life f rom without« (412-13). Yet despite this im-
pe r sona l o rde r , the city for S immel remains the site of the greatest »personal 
f r e e d o m « and »persona l subjectivity«; indeed it becomes so through the very 
factors that necess i ta te its impersonal i ty (413, 415). T h e deepest principle of 
o rde r tha t pe rmi t s this p a r a d o x , one which Simmel only faintly recognizes 
and fails to n a m e , is the e c o n o m y of absence, which also underl ies the u rban 
aesthet ics of B e n j a m i n and Baudelai re . 
Before cons ide r ing h o w the order ing e c o n o m y of absence works in their 
theor ies , let m e no te its role in Amer ican urbanis t Lewis Mumford , whose 
2 Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England cited in Walter Benjamin, 
»On Some Motifs in Baudelaire« in Illuminations, Schocken, New York 1988, p. 167. 
173 
Richard Shusterman 
vision of the city can be usefully cont ras ted with S immel ' s . 3 M u m f o r d ' s »prin-
ciples of u r b a n order« insist on p ic tur ing the city in m o r e h u m a n l y biological , 
affectively social, and aesthetic terms. Ra the r t han S immel ' s v iew of the city 
as »a social-technical mechan i sm« with its m o d e l of m e c h a n i c a l c lockwork 
unity and its images of »punctuali ty, calculabil i ty, a n d exactness« suggest ing 
that social connect ions are best m o d e l e d on rigid, t ime-eff ic ient t ra in connec-
tions (409, 413), M u m f o r d speaks of an an t i -mechan ica l »bio- technic« ap-
proach emphas iz ing the dynamic »flexibili ty« of »organic plans« tha t can 
bet ter cope with change so as »to create a n e w biological and social env i ron-
men t in which the highest possibilities of h u m a n existence will be realized« 
(381, 478, 492). This is symbolized by the dynamic unity of aesthetic experience. 
The city, he argues, is »an esthetic symbol of collect ive uni ty«; it n o t 
only fosters art by creat ing a complex , d e m a n d i n g stage for pe r sona l expres-
sion (as S immel also notes) but the city also »war t« (480, 492). As art is com-
municat ively social, »social needs are p r i m a r y in u r b a n p l ann ing ; r a the r than 
the physical p lant or t ranspor t system, »the social nuc leus [is] the essential 
element in every valid city plan: the spott ing and inter-relat ionships of schools, 
libraries, theatres, communi ty centres« (483). If the t radi t ional undi f fe ren t i -
ated social bonds of the small town are lost, o n e shou ld seek a m o r e mult i-
form cable through the weaving of par t ia l ly l inking b o n d s to p r o d u c e »a m o r e 
complex and many-co lored strand«. U r b a n p l ann ing ' s aes thet ic »aim is the 
adequate dramat izat ion of c o m m u n a l life« so that ind iv idua l and g r o u p activ-
ity b e c o m e more meaningfu l (481, 485). 
Wha teve r the pract ical viability of M u m f o r d ' s p r o g r a m , cer ta in interest-
ing conclusions are suggested by the logic of his biological and aesthet ic meta-
phors . First, life and aesthetic expe r i ence imply the n e e d for c h a n g e and 
conflict as well as ha rmony . Wi thout space for c h a n g e and confl ict , the re can 
be no h u m a n growth no r aesthetic d r a m a . T h e flawless regular i ty of clock-
work mechan i sm does not p rovide this; its s m o o t h - r u n n i n g h a r m o n y wou ld 
stultify. T h e p lanning of u rban aesthet ic uni ty thus requi res its spots of ab-
sence: its d i sharmonious conflicts its d is rupt ions , wha t today R i c h a r d Sennet t 
calls its »discontinuity and disorientat ion«.4 As p ragmat i s t and p o s t m o d e r n , I 
would add tha t the city, like art and life, also needs spots of con t ingency , 
absences of the p lanned and p r ede t e rmined , gaps for us to in t e rp re t and fill 
with significance. 
Ano the r conclusion to be d r awn f r o m ana logy with biological organ-
3 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, Harcourt Brace, New York 1971. 
4 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, Knopf, 
New York 1990, p. 225. 
174 
Urban Scenes and Unseens 
isms and ar tworks is the l imitat ion of city size. Deplor ing the bloated, suburb-
swal lowing megalopol i s , M u m f o r d insists that good city life requires respect-
ing and nu r tu r ing w h a t lies outs ide it. This absence is essential to the city not 
s imply as s t ruc tur ing o the r and b rea th ing space, but as source of new re-
sources , d i f fe ren t a t t i tudes and ways of life that can bo th challenge city ideas 
and enr ich t h e m t h r o u g h incorpora t ion . M u m f o r d ' s key unit of p lanning is 
n o t s imply the city b u t the region, in which the city funct ions as a nucleus 
which respects its limits, ne i the r overwhelming the space nor funct ions of its 
e n v i r o n i n g cell. Even wi thin the city, M u m f o r d advocates funct ional gaps or 
absences to ba l ance densi ty . H e n c e ra ther than an u rban i sm of dense, cen-
tral ized spreading , he favors a poly-nucleated city of distr ibuted funct ions 
that involves spac ing and gaps. In u rban i sm as in regionalism, M u m f o r d calls 
this logic »spott ing«; and it suggests the funct ional play of presence and ab-
sence that gives life grea te r m e a n i n g and aesthetic power , while also making 
it m o r e m a n a g e a b l e . 1 
5 Another crucial use of absence as a tool of order for coping with urban complexities 
should here be mentioned: the use of empty forms or matrices as a way of organizing, 
rationalizing, and so better managing the city's variety and complex flux. The rectan-
gular street-grid is one such empty form for ordering; so is the individual street for-
mat, so salient in Berlin, of parallel strips respectively devoted to the pedestrian, the 
cycler, the dog in need of a line of trees to do his business, and the motorist lanes for 
parking and travel. This format of empty, parallel ordering strips defining the types 
of movement and their limits can also be seen in the layout of concentration camps 
like Sachsenhausen with the distinctions between prisoner walking space (including a 
lane marked for the work of testing shoe durability through ceaseless walking), the 
»no man's land« danger strip, and the wall and patrol areas. 
Richard Sennett, who notes the city grid's »logic of emptiness«, relates it to the tem-
poral emptiness of mechanical time »an empty volume« through which time could be 
made objective and visual thus allowing diverse activities to be more easily ordered. 
Like Simmel he sees the invention of the mechanical clock in the Renaissance as 
central to the emergence of the modern metropolis, and he remarks that often old 
buildings were torn down so as to allow distant vision of the city's central clocks 
(Sennett, 176-180). Here, as it were, an abstract form of absence creates a concrete 
one. 
This seems a good occasion to insist that in describing the varieties of absence and its 
uses in urban life, I am not insisting that there is any substantive essence common to 
them all or that there must be a fixed meaning to the concept of absence for it to be 
usefully used in theoretical discourse like mine. 
175 
Richard Shusterman 
II 
Absence as a tool for urban coping centrally structures Simmel's case 
for the unmatched personal freedom of city life, though his argument lacks 
clarity and stumbles in many details. One major axis of argument is that 
urban freedom comes through greater intellectualism. Modern urban life is 
praised for sharpening mental faculties and higher consciousness, because 
this is required for coping with the greater »intensification of nervous stimu-
lation« resulting from the city's distinctive richness of sensory stimuli, jolts, 
and irregularities. But don't we also find this jostling overload of stimuli in a 
beduoin camel market, a suburban amusement park, or a savage jungle - the 
paradigmatic trope of the fearful complexity and sudden, violent jolts of city 
life? Moreover, if dealing with complexities of vivid sensory stimuli helps 
improve our mental powers, why then should Simmmel posit perfectly smooth-
functioning order posited as the ideal of city organization? Wouldn ' t its reali-
zation dull the minds of city dwellers? Whose consciousness is lower than the 
urban subway rider, who in daily hypnotic habit takes the same train and 
makes the same connection, whose disciplined habit of muscle memory leads 
him mindlessly to work just as an assembly line could lead him mindlessly 
through it? 
Leaving these troubling questions aside, we note that Simmel describes 
the higher urban consciousness in two related ways. First, by curbing »irra-
tional, instinctive ... impulses« and »emotional relations«, it constitutes a more 
intellectual attitude of »calculability«, »exactness«, and »quantitative« values 
that Simmel relates not only to the system of money but to »the universal 
diffusion of pocket watches« (411-13). Secondly, urban mentality is charac-
terized as »the blasé attitude«. This attitude, which Simmel says is »uncondi-
tionally reserved to the metropolis«, results f rom the same »rapidly changing 
and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves« that promote 
cold urban intellectualism. The nerves are so spent that they fail »to react to 
new sensations with the appropriate energy«; »the essence of the blasé atti-
tude consists in the bluntness of discrimination ... the meaning and differing 
values of things and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insub-
stantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no 
one object deserves preference over any other« (414). 
Here again Simmel seems confused. First, physiologically speaking, con-
trasting stimulations tire and blunt the nerves far less than sustained identical 
sensations. More importantly, the blasé type attitude of levelling indifference 
can be found outside the bustling sensorium of the metropolis. In fact, one 
classic site for its emergence is the empty desert. As an intelligence officer 
176 
Urban Scenes and Unseens 
long stationed in the Sinai, I had to alert myself and my soldiers to this dan-
ger, diagnosed by the Israeli medical corps as »apathia«. The term is instruc-
tive: absence of feeling, absence of affective investment, leads to lack of dis-
crimination; we do not see or react to differences because we simply don't 
care; we mentally withdraw ourselves in pathological disinterest; we are ab-
sent. 
For us reluctant desert dwellers, absence of affective investment derived 
from the absence of things to care about in the landscape. But in the me-
tropolis, the absence of feeling in the blasé attitude becomes a necessary with-
drawal of feeling, since there are too many people, products, and activities to 
which our heart would instinctively turn. (Just think of the dozens of beggars 
or buskers that one must learn to coldly pass by in everyday city life.) This 
protective taking of distance, of affective absence, is the deep logic common 
to Simmel's urban intellectualism and Blasiertheit. 
Such absence also constitutes the mechanism of Simmel's other main 
argument for the greater personal freedom of city life: the dissolution of tra-
ditionally strong social bonds which, though constructing and empowering 
the individual, also greatly constrain him. The wider circle of urban life in-
volves too many different people in too many different, quickly changing 
relationships for the forming of strong affective bonds with fellow residents 
to be psychologically healthy or even possible. Hence, an attitude Simmel 
calls »reserve« and »indifference« arises, which frees the urbanité from social 
obligations of courteous concern (and socially entrenched prejudices) that 
centripetally »hem in« the narrower circle of »small-town« life. This reserved 
attitude, argues Simmel, is »never felt more strongly« than in the individual's 
»independence [and loneliness] ... in the thickest crowd of the big city ... 
because the bodily proximity and narrowness of space make the mental dis-
tance only the more visible«, and psychically necessary (418). This withdrawal 
of the self through mental distance underlies the crucial point of urban ab-
sence I have been stressing: its redemptive role in coping with the bursting 
saturation of city presence, a cure not immune from possible unhappy side-
effects - as the threat of urban loneliness and callousness makes clear. 
Absence is also the motivating fulcrum of Simmel's final argument for 
the personal f reedom of urban life. Having robbed the individual of tradi-
tionally subjective spontaneity, affective impulse, and personally meaningful 
social bonds, the overwhelming organization of city life threatens the utter 
extinction of personality, reducing the individual (in Simmel's words) to a 
»quantité négligeable«, a »mere cog« in the enormous municipal machine. 
Spurred by this personal void and fear of total nullity, the individual responds 
by »summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to 
17 7 
Richard Shusterman 
preserve his most personal core« (422). T h e m o d e r n me t ropo l i s thus pro-
vokes a new model of personal f r e e d o m : n o t m e r e ind iv idua l i n d e p e n d e n c e 
f rom oppressive social bonds , but »the e labora t ion of individual i ty« as »quali-
tative uniqueness« so as to survive the conformis t p ressure of city c rowds 
where individuali ty and qualitative d i f fe rence are d r o w n e d (423). 
W e see here the Baudelair ian f igures of the dandy a n d flâneur who t ry to 
defy the utilitarian uniformity of u r b a n life. For Wal t e r B e n j a m i n and his 
political vision of the »streets ... as the dwel l ing p lace of the collective«, the 
flâneur is especially impor tan t in def in ing himself no t only against bu t through 
the conformis t crowd and the city streets they share . B e n j a m i n is m o r e care-
ful than Baudelaire to distinguish the flâneur f r o m »the m a n of the crowd«. 
Resisting the »manic behavior« of »met ropo l i t an masses« hect icly b e n t on 
their practical pursuits, the flâneur d is tances himself f r o m the c rowd by his 
absence of practical pu rpose and u rgency . H e d e m a n d s his »leisure« and 
»elbow room«, so as no t to be »jostled« and o v e r w h e l m e d by the c rowd. But 
in contrast to provincials and fastidious aristocrats, the flâneur could also en-
joy »the tempta t ion to lose himself« in the c rowd, to savor a m o m e n t a r y 
absence of selfhood's pressures.6 L inked to the c rowd yet s o m e h o w absen t 
f rom it, the flâneur is like the streets of Baudela i re ' s verse whose beau ty de-
rives f rom suggesting the crowd yet p rov id ing a dese r ted expanse for f r ee 
m o v e m e n t and explora t ion. T h e same strategy of aes thet ic absence can b e 
seen in those photos of Prague 's enchan t ing e m p t y streets, whose magic dis-
solves once the streets are actually b r i m m i n g with the city's swarming crowds. 
Nei ther at h o m e in the bust l ing c rowd no r »in an a t m o s p h e r e of com-
plete leisure«, the flâneur of Benjamin is charac te r ized by be ing essential ly 
»out of place« (172-3). This absence of p r o p e r p lace or p u r p o s e keeps h i m 
moving through the city streets, resist ing the seduct ive p resences tha t cou ld 
arrest him, driving h im on toward the ever m o r e distant p laces and possibil i-
ties that the metropol is promises endlessly to offer . C o n s i d e r the de f in ing 
absences in the following description of Ben jamin ian flânerie f r o m the Passagen-
Werk: 
An intoxication comes over the person who trudges through the streets for a 
long time and without a goal. The going wins a growing power with every 
step, Ever narrower grow the seduction of the stores, the bistros, the smiling 
women; ever more irrestible the magnetism of the next street corner, a distant 
mass of foliage, a street name. Then comes the hunger. He desires to know 
nothing of the hundred possibilities to still it. Like an ascetic animal, he strides 
6 Walter Benjamin, »On Some Motifs in Baudelaire«, pp. 162, 172-3. 
178 
Urban Scenes and Unseens 
through unknown quarters until finally in his room, which strange to him, lets 
him in coldly, he collapses into the deepest exhaustion.7 
A b s e n c e of goal, a p r e f e r ence for the unseen »next street corner« and 
»distant mass of foliage« over those present to hand , direct the flâneur1 s move-
m e n t ; the m e r e »name« of a street, signaling new spaces to explore , thus draws 
h i m m o r e than the actual c h a r m s of stores, bistros, and w o m e n on the present 
s treet . T h e flâneur' s de f in ing hunge r marks the presence of an absence that he 
does n o t wish to fill, for it p rov ides its own intoxication; so does his lack of 
reassur ing knowledge of the »unknown quarter« of his flânerie as well as his 
ever w a n i n g energy . Even his own r o o m is def ined by the absence of famili-
arity and w a r m t h tha t charac ter ize one ' s home. 
If B e n j a m i n ' s f l âneur seems a m o d e r n symbol for the mythical Utopian 
quester , sea rch ing the noc tu rna l u r b a n wasteland for a vision of an ideal city 
fo rever u n s e e n b u t ever inspir ing, we must ask if this figure is by now as 
a l together da ted and aufgehoben as Benjamin ' s Paris. Does the unseen still 
ho ld the au ra of Utopian p romise or mere ly offer a relief f rom the painful 
ugliness of the city seen. 
7 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1983, vol. 1, p. 525. 
179