Why conservatives should heart NYC, too.
I recommend reading this short essay imploring conservatives to care about cities.
“In Rome,” wrote the philosopher George Santayana, who spent his final years in the Eternal City, “I feel nearer to my own past, and to the whole past and future of the world, than I should in any cemetery or in any museum of relics.”
Rome is, of course, unique—the conservator of an almost unfathomably vast portion of human history. But every great city does something like the same thing and can engender something like the same experience: an experience forming the core of any authentic conservatism. For conservatism cannot be merely an attachment to certain abstract principles. It is also an attachment to real and tangible things, and to the past out of which those things, not to mention we ourselves, have emerged. Cities are, and remain, the chief places where these meanings are conserved and cultivated.
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A (slightly edited) passage from Lindsay Bremner’s draft for “Citiness as Literariness”
A (slightly edited) passage from Lindsay Bremner’s draft for “Citiness as Literariness” [PDF]. Found via Networked_Performance.
The city asserts its otherness in a number of ways.
Firstly, it exposes us to an excessive presence of others, of strangers, who call into question our ownership of the world.
Second…the city annihilates authorship. It is most certainly a made artifact, yet by whom? The very multiplicity of agency at work in it means firstly that it is not made by any one. In other words, it is made by no one, which is the same as to say by every one. Urban life is constantly made and unmade by multiple realities, and authorship, no matter how prominent, quickly disappears into obscurity, anonymity or cultural history. The city erases authorship for itself.
Thirdly, like the work of literature, the city brings its authors / writers into existence, not the other way round.
More information on Lindsay Bremner’s appearance in Slought Foundation’s Architecture Dejeuner Series may be found here.
Dérive
Dérive is a way of experiencing the city, put forth by philosopher Guy Debord, who said:
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
Can we trace the history of parkour [video] to Debord’s concept of dérive?