Siting urban comparativism: The conundrums of the “out there”

One of the constitutive dimensions of comparing urban situations concerns the notion of the “out there.” How does a particular city or urban region compare with another city out there in some wider world; compare with something that is distinct, of some distance, but which is categorically similar enough to warrant attempts to derive some theoretical or practical relationship. In this brief essay, I want to consider not so much the mechanics of comparison themselves but this spatio-temporal domain of an “out there.” Not in terms of the specificities which are situated out there but the sense of a beyond itself and why it is important—ontologically and politically—to the very grounds of identifying the “here and now.”

Urban modernities concerned the ways in which space and time were organized in rational ways that reflect linear progressions, differentiated functions, ordered relations of cause and effect, and the configuration of circulatory systems that placed landscapes, resources and productivity in relationship to each other. Still cities were haunted by something “out there,” beyond the capacity to control, beyond the ordering of sovereignties that attempted to identify that outside. Beyond the incursions of potential enemies, disease vectors, or wayward natural occurrences, this “out there” pointed to the unanticipated implications of modernity’s own accomplishments. For, the capacity of the urban to interrelate different ways of life and materialities generated unanticipated excesses and trajectories that sometimes escaped the ability of governments to fold in disorder as an instigation to continuous progress.

These conditions are then antecedents for considering the position of a contemporary urban human and for the prospects of a life that exceeds both the capacity of the urban to individuate life, to enhance its productivity, and to consider how human life itself might be remade to insulate it from the adverse conditions that urbanization itself largely generated.  The urban human as a particular breed or brand is staked to three basic features of the urban. Firstly, the urban is the concrete manifestation of the human capacity of continuous self-invention. As the continuous rearrangement and intersection of things, urbanization exemplifies the human as something without any fundamental nature, as something open-ended, as process rather than entity, and where the “end” of the human is itself indicative of such open-endedness.  In other words, as Beth Povinelli (2016) puts it, the capacity of the human to decide for itself the terms of its own finitude and of the fundamental distinction between life and nonlife.

Second, the urban is the limit of that very capacity of continuous becoming. For, the implications of urbanization posit the real possibilities of human extinction and have always done so. Third, the urban is a form of life yet to come or, alternately and simultaneously, a form of human enactment that does not yet possess a mode of visibility or a vernacular to be sufficiently recognizable, something outside the available frames of recognition, as shadow, absence, immanence, or spirit—or even as undergirding, as the tain of the image, the support or background required to make the visible something that can be seen.