This sharp, witty study of a book never written, a sequel to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, is dedicated to New York City, capital of the twentieth century. A sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy, it analyzes an imaginary manuscript composed by a ghost.
Part sprawling literary montage, part fragmentary theory of modernity, part implosive manifesto on the urban revolution, The Manhattan Project offers readers New York as a landscape built of sheer life. It initiates them into a world of secret affinities between photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism, Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs, the flâneur and the homeless person, the collector and the hoarder, the glass-covered arcade and the bare, concrete street. These and many other threads can all be spooled back into one realization: for far too long, we have busied ourselves with thinking about ways to change the city; it is about time we let the city change the way we think.
This sharp, witty study of a book never written, a sequel to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, is dedicated to New York City, capital of the twentieth century. A sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy, it analyzes an imaginary manuscript composed by a ghost.
Part sprawling literary montage, part fragmentary theory of modernity, part implosive manifesto on the urban revolution, The Manhattan Project offers readers New York as a landscape built of sheer life. It initiates them into a world of secret affinities between photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism, Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs, the flâneur and the homeless person, the collector and the hoarder, the glass-covered arcade and the bare, concrete street. These and many other threads can all be spooled back into one realization: for far too long, we have busied ourselves with thinking about ways to change the city; it is about time we let the city change the way we think.
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Overview
This sharp, witty study of a book never written, a sequel to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, is dedicated to New York City, capital of the twentieth century. A sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy, it analyzes an imaginary manuscript composed by a ghost.
Part sprawling literary montage, part fragmentary theory of modernity, part implosive manifesto on the urban revolution, The Manhattan Project offers readers New York as a landscape built of sheer life. It initiates them into a world of secret affinities between photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism, Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs, the flâneur and the homeless person, the collector and the hoarder, the glass-covered arcade and the bare, concrete street. These and many other threads can all be spooled back into one realization: for far too long, we have busied ourselves with thinking about ways to change the city; it is about time we let the city change the way we think.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804794367 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Manhattan Project
A Theory of a City
By David Kishik
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9436-7
CHAPTER 1
BENJAMIN IN NEW YORK
"THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write." What we believe to be Benjamin's last recorded words from 1940 could not have been further from the truth. His tragedy verges on comedy. So before we begin, let me quickly deflate your possible enthusiasm. Reading The Manhattan Project and The Arcades Project side by side might give the impression that these are the brainchildren of two different authors. It is not unlikely that those who are familiar with Benjamin's early European writings will be taken somewhat aback by the turn his later work took. For the devoted followers of Saint Walter, this is probably going to be sacrilege. Yet it is the spirit, not the letter, of his work on Paris to which his American writings can still be compared.
Consider, in this respect, the circumstantial factors that must have caused his change of heart: the trauma of the war; his new identity, city, language, and culture; the sixteen years of silence while enduring his menial job; the shifting intellectual and political postwar climate; his monastic existence and advancing old age. This is not to suggest that The Manhattan Project can be dismissed as the inconsequential, senescent afterthought of a displaced or disoriented mind. Assuming that the composition of the manuscript under consideration indeed consumed the final three decades of his life, one can only imagine how scrupulous and deliberate his work on his last word was.
"Speech conquers thought," runs Benjamin's personal motto, "but writing commands it." Even though his ascetic lifestyle excluded him from the conversation of his contemporaries and exposed him to only the thinnest sliver of what New York had to offer, his immersion in the endless accounts of the city, readily available and continuously accumulating in the stacks of the Public Library, was apparently enough to satiate his voracious intellect.
"Action can, of course, be as subtle as thought. But a thought must be crude to find its way into action." Benjamin learned this lesson from Brecht in the 1930s. Yet two decades had to pass before he finally found a way to put it into literary practice. In comparison with many of the knotty texts predating his staged suicide, the plain and pragmatic language of his postcontinental work seems to be influenced by some of what American literature has to offer. The prose of The Manhattan Project is like an open fist. Its crude theory can be described as minima philosophia. It deliberately defies our academic expectations.
On the first page of the manuscript is an epigraph from W. H. Auden: "Sad is Eros, builder of cities." In Benjamin's case "builder" should be replaced with "philosopher." Notice also that, despite his sadness, it is still Eros, the Greek god of love and Freudian symbol of the life instinct, who presides over this urban experiment, or experience. The melancholic angel who hovered over Benjamin's European texts still visits the New York manuscript occasionally, but Benjamin's last book project is the product of much more than spleen.
In an essay Arendt wrote about Benjamin in 1968, she recalls that he was not looking forward to his planned trip to America, "where, he used to say, people would probably find nothing to do with him except cart him up and down the country exhibiting him as 'the last European.'" But as I was reading The Manhattan Project, I began to realize that his fear was unjustified. Although calling Benjamin an American writer would be off the mark, and though not once throughout the manuscript does he explicitly refer to himself as a New Yorker, I couldn't help imagining him as "the last New Yorker," writing his book in between saturnine strolls through the remnants of his beloved city after its entire population has been wiped out by some apocalyptic event, like a flood.
* * *
IN THE SKY OF POSTWAR NEW YORK Benjamin lived his life like a "star devoid of atmosphere." The fact that this invisible man avoided as much human contact as possible, despite dwelling in the most populous spot on earth, could have easily led him to imagine that he was living on a deserted island. For this reason it is not impossible that the initials of Carl Roseman are a reversal of Robinson Crusoe's. Since a city is often compared to a language, it makes sense that Benjamin was at home neither in New York nor in English. But precisely because he was keeping his distance from his subject matter—while inhabiting its very heart—he managed to see this undeserted island as no one else did.
Think, for example, of how the encounter with the same place during the same period triggered in Adorno his strong critique of "mass" culture, his warning to readers of an array of ostensible modern ills ranging from jazz to laughter. Benjamin appreciated Adorno's ability to reveal many of the insidious traps of twentieth-century life. But unlike those thinkers "who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice," and without losing sight of their insights, Benjamin sensed that his own contribution must be different. Following Carl Andre's distinction between art and culture, he declares at one point: "Philosophy is about what we do. Critique is about what is done to us." Adorno's warning, in a letter from 1935, against Benjamin's "abandonment of the category of Hell" is therefore not entirely unjustified.
In New York, Benjamin was trying to write a report on what he once called an "eddy in the stream of becoming." He says as much in a long passage copied from The Arcades Project verbatim, save for his substitution of "Manhattan" for "Paris":
Few things in the history of humanity are as well known to us as the history of Manhattan. Tens of thousands of volumes are dedicated solely to the investigation of this tiny spot on the earth's surface.... Many of the main thoroughfares have their own special literature, and we possess written accounts of thousands of the most inconspicuous houses.... At work in the attraction New York exercises on people is the kind of beauty that is proper to great landscapes—more precisely, to volcanic landscapes. Manhattan is a counterpart in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the geographic order: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever- active hotbed of revolution. But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that cover them, have been transformed into paradisal orchards, so the lava of revolutions provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of art, festivity, fashion.
Another interesting similarity between Benjamin's analyses of Paris and New York is that both are the fruits of a careful literary montage, intentionally left in fragmentary form. The difference is that the European Benjamin still held on, even if only halfheartedly, to some holistic view of an original, "organic totality." He therefore had to understand the fragment within the context of a tragic reflection or an experience of disaster. The American Benjamin, however, upholds the fragment without reverting as he did in the past to notions of ruin and loss, mourning and catastrophe. Like Walt Whitman's poetic reflection on the city's ensemble of specimens, Benjamin's theoretic diffraction results in a mosaic of forms of life that may still constitute the apparent homogeneous whole that we call New York, but only as a conscious abstraction, only as long as any suggestion of a grand urban narrative is understood as mere fiction. Like Edgar Allan Poe's portrayal of the metropolitan crowd, this philosophy of New York (or is it a paraphilosophy?) demonstrates that "the description of confusion is not the same as a confused description."
CHAPTER 2NOT TO LOOK UPON
THE EVENTS OF ULYSSES take place on June 16, 1904. Today this date is celebrated as Bloomsday, a tribute to Leopold Bloom, the novel's protagonist. But at the time James Joyce was working on his modernistic masterpiece, it had completely different connotations, similar to those that September 12, 2001, might bring to mind today. Joyce knew that he was setting his narrative on the day after, when newspapers around the world reported on their front page about that most "terrible affair" in which "all those women and children excursion beanfeast burned and drowned in New York. Holocaust." On June 15, the General Slocum, a steamboat carrying members of St. Mark's German Lutheran Church from the Lower East Side, caught fire and sank in the shallow waters just off the Bronx shore. More than a thousand of the thirteen hundred passengers were killed. Most were women and children. Until the end of the twentieth century this event was the worst tragedy in the history of New York. Unlike the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Titanic disaster a few years later, General Slocum nearly vanished from the city's memory. Yet nothing is more telling than an event that should be commemorated but is not. I found this photo of the victims, their faces shrouded in white fabric, at the bottom of the box containing the manuscript of The Manhattan Project. It is the direct gaze of the standing men that I find almost unbearable.
ALTHOUGH BENJAMIN'S THOUGHT is devoted to a city he regarded as the capital of the twentieth century, the dates January 1, 1900, and December 31, 1999, can be only the arbitrary beginning and end points of his investigation. A more convenient and convincing beginning for the New York Century might be the 1898 consolidation of the adjacent municipalities into the five boroughs of the present megacity. But for Benjamin the New York Century really begins only on the day of the General Slocum disaster. The magnitude of the tragedy, he reasons, delivered such a powerful shock to the city's psyche that, for the first time, New York became conscious of its own significance and was able to contemplate its own worth. Mourning the dead led the living, as it often does, to come to terms with their own existence. Following Joyce, Benjamin sensed that this quintessentially modern trauma (the steam engine, that machine of progress, can also be a machine of mass destruction) presaged what the new century held in store. The odyssey is shipwrecked. But he also noticed that this event became instrumental in focusing the attention of all nations on New York City, which emerged during the same years as the de facto world's capital.
It is generally accepted that New York reached its apogee in the years following the end of the Second World War, with 1950 often cited as a convenient turning point from the city's meteoric rise to its almost inevitable decline. If we must locate a certain event that could symbolize this turn, then the "Shot Heard Round the World"—when Bobby Thomson hit a home run to win the National League pennant for the New York Giants in the final game against the Brooklyn Dodgers—will do just fine. "Isn't it possible," Don DeLillo asks in Underworld, "that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses—the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?" DeLillo writes that this baseball game at the uptown Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951, "doesn't change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life." Or the city's life, if we were to ask Benjamin, who was not present at the game and did not particularly care about baseball.
As for the symbolic moment the New York Century ended, it must be the other great tragedy in its history, after which the curtain had to fall (though many people remain seated, awaiting a rumored encore). Again, the sense of loss acts as the most effective catalyst for making people appreciate what they no longer have. Disaster works like divine revelation in a society driven by risk. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the public resolved that life would go on and business continue as usual. Still, there is a growing sense today that living in New York somehow resembles an afterlife, just as before the morning of June 15, 1904, the city was, in retrospect, still in its embryonic state.
One could claim that this has been the closure of only one project, that of Manhattan, and that the twenty-first century ushered in a new formation—let's call it the Brooklyn Project—which operates according to a different constellation of ideas and an alternative set of values. But even though New York was a powerful place before the definitive ninety-seven years in its history and will continue to play a central role for many years to come, its two great catastrophes still serve as the perfect prologue and epilogue for an urban biography so extraordinary that its comparison to another historical city becomes rather obvious. "In one respect," an English visitor observed already in 1776, "this town is like Athens: Though it has little or none of its Refinement or its Literature, 'it is always seeking to hear or see some new thing.'"
* * *
IT IS ONE THING to imagine the day airplanes will crash into skyscrapers, as E. B. White did in "Here Is New York," his classic essay from 1949. It is another to analyze in precise terms the city's future demise through a close reading of White's text, as Benjamin did in the early 1970s, as the Twin Towers were being built. "It used to be," White writes, "that the Statue of Liberty was the signpost that proclaimed New York and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty shares the role with Death." Being-toward-death becomes the modern city's decisive existential condition, whereas the Enlightenment's being-toward-freedom (an ideal that belonged to Paris more than to New York) is somehow pushed to the side.
As in Kafka's Amerika, the Statue of Liberty, that displaced Parisian immigrant, holds not a torch but a sword. Benjamin therefore talks about this "gloomy awareness that along with the great cities has evolved the means to raze them to the ground." The nineteenth-century aristocracy's fear of the amorphous mob, which turned into the fascination of twentieth-century media with the obscure mobster, is mutating today into the government's watchful eye over the elusive terrorist. But of course, the true enemies of twenty-first-century New York are less the specters of terrorism—those who turn the city into a "lofty target scraping the skies"—than those who pretend to exorcize them. The city's demise may coincide with the most conspicuous attack on its buildings and people. But the cause of this decline lies elsewhere. The real disaster movie in the history of New York, the one that actually brought it to its knees during Benjamin's years of living there, features no aliens, no ghosts, no natural forces, and no diabolical villains.
An entire cloud of cynicism can condense into a drop of mortality. In the last lines of his essay, White seems to insinuate that, like the biblical Garden of Eden, modern New York guards within its boundaries nothing less than the Tree of Life, which he describes as an old, battered, barely standing willow in an interior courtyard of a Midtown apartment building. This tree, he insists, must be saved, because "if it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death."
Henry James articulates a similar sentiment when he writes, "What makes the general relation of your adventure with New York is that, at bottom, you are all the while wondering, in presence of the aspects of its genius and its shame, what elements or parts, if any, would be worth its saving, worth carrying off for the fresh embodiment and the better life." The spirit of this advice evidently informed Benjamin's thought as early as 1939, when he made an attempt to distill his years of intellectual labor on The Arcades Project into a single, short, essential text. It was meant to function as a clearing in the middle of his seemingly boundless forest of quotations and reflections. Inspired by the letters he received from his friends in New York, he titled this piece "Central Park."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Manhattan Project by David Kishik. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface. I CAN'T AFFORD TO ? NY,Introduction. THE ROSEMAN HYPOTHESIS,
FIRST PART,
First Chapter. BENJAMIN IN NEW YORK,
Second Chapter. NOT TO LOOK UPON,
Third Chapter. BACK TO THE FUTURE,
Fourth Chapter. THINK LOCALLY,
Fifth Chapter. IMPLOSION,
Sixth Chapter. SHEER LIFE,
Seventh Chapter. A SECRET ABOUT A SECRET,
First Threshold. INTERPENETRATION,
SECOND PART,
Eighth Chapter. LIVINGRY,
Ninth Chapter. THINGIFICATION,
Tenth Chapter. REALITY OVERDOSE,
Eleventh Chapter. THE DISENCHANTED ISLAND,
Twelfth Chapter. DEMOCRACITY,
Thirteenth Chapter. (AD)DRESS,
Fourteenth Chapter. NONARCHITECTURE,
Fifteenth Chapter. TRUTH IS CONCRETE,
Second Threshold. INFRASTRUCTURE,
THIRD PART,
Sixteenth Chapter. EMPIRE,
Seventeenth Chapter. THE URBAN REVOLUTION,
Eighteenth Chapter. HYPOTHESES ON MODERN CITIES,
Nineteenth Chapter. URBAN PHILOSOPHY,
Twentieth Chapter. HOME RULE,
Twenty-First Chapter. CITY OF REFUGE,
Twenty-Second Chapter. ARENDT'S CITY,
Twenty-Third Chapter. HERE COMES EVERYBODY,
Third Threshold. ECOPOLIS,
FOURTH PART,
Twenty-Fourth Chapter. THE LIBRARY,
Twenty-Fifth Chapter. THE ECONOMY OF PHILOSOPHY,
Twenty-Sixth Chapter. BUSINESS ART,
Twenty-Seventh Chapter. MODES OF ASSOCIATED LIFE,
Twenty-Eighth Chapter. JACOBS'S CITY,
Twenty-Ninth Chapter. HOW NEW WORK BEGINS,
Thirtieth Chapter. TRANSACTIONS OF DECLINE,
Thirty-First Chapter. EMINENT DOMAIN,
Fourth Threshold. DEAD-END STREET,
FIFTH PART,
Thirty-Second Chapter. AT NIGHT,
Thirty-Third Chapter. GARBAGE STUDIES,
Thirty-Fourth Chapter. JUNK,
Thirty-Fifth Chapter. LOST,
Thirty-Sixth Chapter. PERFECT DAY,
Thirty-Seventh Chapter. A THEORY OF THE HOMELESS,
Thirty-Eighth Chapter. THE HOMELESS PHILOSOPHER,
Fifth Threshold. A TALE OF TWO CITIES,
SIXTH PART,
Thirty-Ninth Chapter. HARD-KNOCK LIFE,
Fortieth Chapter. SEX AND PHILOSOPHY,
Forty-First Chapter. AN IMAGE OF EXISTENCE,
Forty-Second Chapter. NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS,
Forty-Third Chapter. THE MARRIAGE OF REASON AND SQUALOR,
Forty-Fourth Chapter. CRITIQUE OF PURE MOVEMENT,
Forty-Fifth Chapter. LIFE SENTENCE,
Sixth Threshold. SPINOZA IN NEW AMSTERDAM,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Illustration Credits,
Name Index,
Place Index,
Subject Index,