Imagining cities,others

Introduction

The city is often portrayed as a beacon of refuge from the conditions of servitude, and thus a social space that represents freedom and cosmopolitanism – the birthplace of both positive freedoms and the practices of political autonomy, as well as the development of cultures of hospitality (Berman 1982; Derrida 2000). The city, however, because it brings strangers together, can produce or elicit different imaginings and emotional economies, for example those of anxiety and fear brought about by the proximity of others. This fear and anxiety occurs not simply because of difference, but also out of the sense of ‘brushing past’, of having contact with that which is unfamiliar, strange and thus viewed as potentially dangerous.

This essay explores this constellation of fear and the social forces, assumptions and images that construct it. ¹ The essay’s underlying presupposition is that there are many locations for fear that run parallel to one another in modernity, one of which will be discussed here – the social imaginary of the city. The aim of the essay is to walk, not simply on ‘the wild side’, but also on the negative one, that is, to explore even momentarily an aspect that is available to all of us in a context that may prompt, promote and even foster this particular dimension of the human soul. This is not an attempt, as Judith Shklar would say, of putting cruelty first, but at least of acknowledging it, how it might be mobilized out of an economy of affects, of acknowledging a complexity of the human condition (Shklar 1984; Rundell 2004a, 2012).

This paper begins by exploring two images and ideas of the city, around which the social theoretical tradition has revolved, both of which are linked in some way to its idealization in both positive and negative terms. One image, presented by Weber, constructs the city as a space for the circulation of freedoms, which can be monopolized or contested, that is, a space for power, politics and economic exchange. Another image is portrayed, for example more negatively, by Simmel in his study of the metropolis. The metropolis opens up the problematic of fear and the city through the image of the stranger. The image of the stranger invariably accompanies the one of the alien, as someone who, whilst coming to live in the city, appears always as the outsider, and thus is always at hand as a subject of and for fear. This apparent co-existence between freedom and the known, and the alien and the unknown, generates the apparent inner tension or unease of city life. ²

Strangers in the night

In his The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus gives a gripping portrayal of the other side of Victorian propriety – of sexual perverts, miscreants and pornographers for whom ‘dangerous liaisons’ were not only a way of life removed from the boredom and constraint of bourgeois everyday life, but also an excitement. Whilst Marcus points to the aristocratic dimension of this other ‘Victoria’, it is also one that is constituted in terms of those who also live on the edge of bourgeois society – the working class and the poor – but unlike the aristocracy are constituted by it. This is also the world of Mayhew’s London and its (or his) underworld (Marcus 1969; Mayhew 1951; Quennell 1983; Linebaugh 1993).

Marx, in a more dramatic gesture, and as a way of separating the fearful from his beloved working class, gave voice to an attitude that articulates the fear of the ‘otherness’ of the city. For him, this attitude is summed up in his portrayal of the Lumpenproletariat, the category into which the underbelly is cast. As he says, in one of his most theatrical pieces:

alongside decayed roués of doubtful origin and uncertain means of subsistence, alongside ruined and adventurous scions of the bourgeoisie, there were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged criminals, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, confidence tricksters, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand experts, gamblers, macquereux, brothel keepers, porters, pen-pushers, organ-grinders, rag-and-bone merchants, knife-grinders, tinkers, and beggars: in short the whole indeterminate fragmented mass tossed backwards and forwards, which the French call la bohème. (Marx 1973: 197)

Here, the poor and the indigent are lumped together, not so much because they are outsiders, but because they do not work and are propertyless. As such they are subject to awe, fear, ridicule – and policing (Febvre 1998).

Our contemporary ‘Victorians’ might include many of these people who may continue to instil a sense of fear and/or excitement, but they, nonetheless, would now also include drug addicts and crack-heads, graffiti-artists, refugees and the homeless, not to mention the psychotic and specific and idiosyncratic world of the serial killer, serial rapist or serial gunman who calculatingly stalks the concrete or cyber streets, confirming the always unsettling fact of the indeterminacy of human life, and the indeterminate irrational grasp that each of us has on reality.

The city makes us afraid – of one another, of ourselves, and of the dark, especially of the darkened alleys and doorways, cul-de-sacs and arcades. Let there be light – especially the light of the boulevards and freeways that take us home. The fog may have lifted, but Jack the Ripper still lurks, to strike again.

Daytime: ‘City air makes one free’

Let’s look, though, at a positive portrayal of the city to glean an understanding of what type of city we are talking about, at least in the daytime. If we take Weber’s important reading of cities in The City as a guide – nuances and interpretative moves that are too complex to dwell on here – then the city we are talking about is the modern ‘producer city’, as against the consumer and merchant ones. In the case of consumer cities, according to Weber, the dynamic of the city rests on the purchasing power of large households, often located in and around the court. This location characterizes these cities as ones that are, historically and typologically speaking, subordinated to patrimonial power. Weber, nonetheless, gives some hints that the consumer city may take some modern, contemporary or even postmodern forms, in that contemporary consumers are orientated towards the monetarized imaginary and its revenue sources – property, dividends, shares and credit – and the styles of life through which these can be experienced. Whilst Weber points to the historical interrelation between the merchant and the producer city, he insists on a conceptual distinction. Rather than being reliant on trade and consumption alone, the producer city is one in which purchasing power is based on the production of the goods and services, themselves within the orbit of the city, notwithstanding how extended this orbit may be (Weber 1978a: 1216).

Moreover, Weber characterizes modern producer cities in no less telling, although in more prosaic, terms than Marx in The Communist Manifesto as the most dynamic forms of human habitat. The move from the rural areas to cities produces a population of both mass producers and mass consumers located around the world of factories and productive enterprises, and this world constitutes the dynamic for their self-constituting growth (Weber 1978a: 1216). Modern monetarized development, which in this instance is synonymous with these cities for both Marx and Weber, is not only self-reproducing but also a type of development that subsumes the country to their logic. Moreover, the logic of these modern producer cities also re-orientates life conduct from a military form to an economic one – a combination of instrumental rationality and the money form. In Weber’s terms, this conduct systematized purposive rationality, stability and peace into the conduct and exchanges between human beings. This subsumption and re-orientation occurs through the market which not so much mediates the exchange of goods and services but constitutes their exchange in a very specific way. As he says, it makes the commodity the point of intersection and orientation, rather than personal attributes or value orientations. This makes markets, and by implication modern producer cities, impersonal. The participants in these exchanges ‘do not look towards the persons of each other but only toward the commodity; there are no obligations of brotherliness or reverence, and none of those spontaneous human relations that are sustained by personal unions’ (Weber 1978b: 636).

Simmel makes a similar point in his Philosophy of Money when he argues that modernity is organized around increasingly abstract forms of association of which money is the paradigmatic form. Money as abstract association intricately binds consumption and production together in ever enlarging circles that even extend our sense of time – from the present into the future through more or less permanent credit and indebtedness (Simmel 1978). In this sense, monetarization re-organizes the city along a number of axes – temporally, spatially and experientially. It not only re-organizes these, it also extends their ‘horizons’ and thus becomes a new global phenomenon in the ontological, and not simply the imperializing, sense. ‘Globalization’, as an over-drawn trope for the long-historical reach of the monetarized re-organization of the world, and the economic dynamic of the modern producer – and now new consumer – cities, go hand in hand (Bauman 2007; Smart 2010).

In addition, the impersonality and indifference of abstract monetarization, the market, its rationality and peacefulness, does not entail that, as a social intercourse, it is not without power in the form of monopolizing conduct. Weber’s argument is that the mobilization of power resources is oriented towards the entry or exclusion of social actors, including collective social actors, into the market as either buyers or sellers. It is not only money that is the symbolic expression of either openness or closure, but also contracts in which everything is condensed to a formal-legally legitimated private property right, including knowledge in the form of credentials. In Weber’s view, though, and taken from the vantage point of his historical sociology of domination, market relations and, by implication, producer cities, are ‘essentially open’, although oligarchically orientated and structured, social constellations (Weber 1978b). In the context of Weber’s analysis in The City there is a competition between oligarchically structured and relatively closed economic and political forms of power represented by Renaissance Venice, and relatively open and contestatory political forms in which economic matters become more or less subordinate to these political dramas. For Weber the representative Renaissance cities are Milan, Lucca, Lodi, Pavia, Sienna, Verona, and Bologna (Weber 1978a: 1273–6, 1302–9). ³

The creation of independent and territorially expansive markets by the city also entailed the creation of the modern city’s ability to exercise power and rights of markets and to develop its own economic policies, including those of imperial and colonial expansion. The modern city’s ability to control markets took the form of not only price controls but also its capacity to prevent counter-markets and counter-industries forming outside both the parameters and controls of the city. If, in the long history of power-formations, the state has been at constant war with cities, then modern producer cities, especially, have had an equally more or less permanent war with the countryside (Weber 1978a: 1328–9).

Furthermore, the capacity of the modern city to create an economic independence was also accompanied, more strongly, co-constituted, by its ability to forge a political-legal autonomy. Historically, this city-type has been the hallmark and idealized social form for both the development and expression of politics and political autonomy. In the context of the formation of the Italian Renaissance city-states – one of the predominant sites of idealization – political autonomy was forged against the patrimonial bureaucracy of the Church, the Habsburg empire, and other centralizing state tendencies, in the French or English cases, for example. Again, according to Weber’s ideal-typical historical reconstruction, political and juridical-administrative autonomy was manifest in the creation of autonomous and uniform law that was not subject to the bureaucratic state, and which was applied to the problems of urban land ownership, market relations and trade. More importantly though, this autonomy was manifested by, and identified with, democratic association, legislation, jurisdiction, and contestation– of whatever type, sometimes corporatistic, sometimes representational, sometimes co-optive (Weber 1978a: 1301–9; Rundell 2009a). The creation of political and legal autonomy was also accompanied by the ability of the city to develop its own administrative agencies that stood against the patrimonial state. The formation of independent bureaucratic structures enabled the cities to, amongst other things, levy taxation and raise armies – prerogatives usually reserved for the state.

The coalescence of political, economic and administrative autonomy gave the city an especially powerful ethos and mythic quality summed up in the phrase ‘city air makes one free’ (‘Stadtluft macht frei’). As Weber points out, the occidental city, from antiquity onward was a place where ‘ascent from bondage to freedom by means of monetary means was possible. This was even more true for the medieval city, and especially for the medieval inland city’. As Weber goes on to say, ‘the urban citizenry … usurped the right to dissolve the bonds of seigniorial domination; this was the great – in fact, the revolutionary – innovation which differentiated the medieval occidental cities from all others’ (Weber 1978a: 1238–9).

Distinctions or differences between ‘the free’ and ‘the unfree’ disappeared. Rank was no longer the social category that identified one’s social and political location. Nor were the bonds of familiarity that filled status-based relations the ones that necessarily tied people together. A different category of social actor emerged that signified a world of more or less open possibilities – the contingent stranger. Contingent strangers became bound by new forms of power in terms of the monopolization or fracturing of markets and politics.

Tensions and conflicts, nonetheless, occur that are not caused by markets and politics alone. They also occur because of increases in population density as migrations from the countryside and other parts of the world to cities intensify, which also intensifies, extends and lessens the chains of interdependence between contingent strangers. In the city, as Simmel so tellingly observed, everything is the same, and yet different, or as Elias also points out in a different context, there is, somewhat misleadingly, the diminishing of affective contrasts (or really extremes) and the increase in experiential varieties. There is also a new space of indeterminate creations and, thus, of possibilities. And these possibilities were not only about markets and politics, but also about the constellations of proximity between the inhabitants, old and new, in the city and the fears that these created. ⁴

The experience of the metropolis: From conditional to contingent strangers

With this sense of proximity in mind, we can switch perspective and return to the beginning of this paper, to another and more recent city – not one pre-occupied with the constellation of money and power, but of excitement, fear and contingency. The starting point for this part of our discussion, which also returns us to our core problem and theme of cities, citizens and strangers, can be taken from Janik and Toulmin’s observations on Wittgenstein’s and Freud’s Vienna at the turn of the 20th century – another fin de siecle. Like Weber’s Venice and other Renaissance cities, we can read ‘Vienna’ historically and metaphorically, as a productive city not only of outcastes and an ‘underclass’, but also of new social traffic, new experiences, and new emotional economies (Janik and Toulmin 1973).

As Mennell and I have noted elsewhere, by the end of the long Hapsburg imperial centuries, that is, the central European 19th century, the metropolis or cosmopolitan-producer city had become the centre of gravity for the experience of modern life, especially the ways in which this experience was expressed culturally (Rundell and Mennell 1998: 16–17; Luft 1980; Schorske 1982; Mumford 1961). Elias, for example, points out that an accommodation had been reached between the courtly elite and the haute bourgeoisie that found expression in militaristic clubs and high culture (Elias 1996). However, there was no such accommodation towards the strange and the unfamiliar, which became increasingly diverse and evident, only an unease. Classes and groups that had been more or less distant from and unfamiliar to each other came into closer contact as the cities expanded and were redesigned. There was an increased social visibility of not only the industrial working class, which had achieved certain forms of political representation and power, but also ethnic groups like Jews and others such as the Czechs and the Hungarians, who had their own national aspirations. Drawing on an urban metaphor, there was an increase in social traffic – day and night. This increase brought ressentiment and disdain expressed and constituted more by the avoidance of interaction than by interaction itself (Rundell and Mennell 1998: 16; Schorske 1982: 24–115; Janik and Toulmin 1973: 33–66; Luft 1980: 1–22; Anderson 1992: 1–73).

Robert Musil’s name for a particular case of this experience in Man Without Qualities – Vienna – was Kakania. It means not only ‘Imperial-Royal’ or ‘Imperial and Royal’ but also ‘Excrementia’ and attempted to capture the city’s double-sided nature. Kakania indicates a city that is, ‘African [sic] and hot-blooded, crazy with life, restless, unbeautiful, passionate [in which] … the couples waltz’ in a bachanalian frenzy where lust is let loose and “no God inhibits them”’ (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 34). Moreover, part of this lebenslust is the cosmopolitan character of the city, of cafes, not only populated by fine nobility and bourgeois men and women, but also their sons and daughters – the artists and musicians who made up the cultural life of the city, as well as its bohemian sub-culture. It was, then, a city of hopes, dreams and fantasies. But it was also a city with its rudimentary, harsh and cruel side – of inadequate housing for its working class, of the lack of recognition for its artists and intellectuals, musicians and composers, and its anti-Semitism, embedded as it was in resentment. Resentment manifested itself in hostility to a particular group – to what was perceived as a pariah culture and its people – the Jews. It was also manifested in the nationalities question in which identity was constructed not only in class terms but also, and importantly, in regional and linguistic ones. As Peter Gay also comments, ‘Vienna, never really a city of operettas and flirtations, was the city of ugly rehearsals’ (Gay 1978: 77). ⁵

Within this constellation spanning both fin de siecles – and here Vienna could be any modern metropolitan and cosmopolitan city from London to New York, Sydney to Shanghai, Dublin to Dubai – new relations of inclusion and exclusion are formed and others refigured; in this process, strangers play a key role through their simultaneous closeness and remoteness (Zukin 1995: 259–94).

From the standard classical socio-theoretical standpoint strangeness entails that the stranger is treated not as an individual but — as Simmel said — is abstracted as a certain type, even in the metropole (Simmel 1971b). Strangers are abstracted individuals or groups because characteristics that are not in common with the host group are made prominent, different and potentially demeaned. In other words, specific characteristics are singled out as the basis for differentiation, vulgarization and vilification (Eco 2011). From Simmel’s perspective the host group can share some minimal qualities with the stranger, but these are not enough to integrate or bind the stranger to the host group. Rather, the host group builds itself through organic and necessary internal relations established through ties of kinship, place and historical experience that bind past, present and even future together. This gives the stranger an outsider’s existence, always existing as if he or she was an historical and social accident, like a permanent exile. This is their ontological position (Simmel 1971b).

But is the stranger a type, an abstraction, a permanent exile? Following an essay by Agnes Heller, that because of its pathfinding quality I have discussed elsewhere, a distinction can be made between conditional and contingent strangers (Heller 2011; Rundell 2004b, 2011). ⁶ From the vantage point of the long history of exile, war, trade, and adventurism, conditional strangers can be viewed as travellers, soldiers, sailors or outcasts from a home, a country or a position to which they can potentially return. Conditional strangers maintain their centre of gravity and self-identity because they see themselves as on an existential voyage that includes the homeward journey, even if they are perceived as strange by others who do not understand them. The home which one left and to which one is always really or potentially returning to gives an ontological security to both the stranger and the group with whom he or she is interacting and living. Both know that it is temporary, even if it is a lifelong experience. This was the case with Ulysses, Marco Polo and Ibn Batutta. Home is something to be talked about – because it is always elsewhere (Heller 2011).

The experience of the conditional stranger is not only a pre-modern one; it is also the condition, today, of the modern tourist and her predecessor, the 19th-century flaneur and parvenu so idolized by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, and more recently and ambivalently portrayed by Zygmunt Bauman (Benjamin 1979, 1985; Bauman 2001; Heins 2011). It is, and as significantly, the condition of the contract or illegal migrant workers whose location is temporary and exists in central industries in nation-states which deny them citizenship. The immigrant worker who is without citizenship rights in countries in which he or she is employed is treated by the particular nation-state as a conditional stranger rather than a contingent one. There is a home elsewhere to go to. This is the plight of workforces throughout, for example, the nation-states of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, which draw extensively on the labour markets in India, Pakistan and the Philippines, or of illegal workers from Central and South America who work without a green card in the USA, of the internal immigrants in China, and until very recently of Turks who existed under the guest-worker label in Germany prior to the change in citizen law in 1999 (Syed 2010).

The situation and life experience of the contingent stranger is quite different. The contingent stranger’s voyage is one of disconnection from home and thus also the past. There is no home to which to return. Home is already here, in the present. As already indicated, the conditional stranger identity can be sustained, in the context of the promise of the return, or suspended, especially when a homeward journey can be delayed or waylaid. In the case of the contingent stranger, though, there is no inner support and succour derived from the promise. Nor is there a suspension when the length of time between past, present and future becomes increasingly ‘stretched’. There is simply the emergence of a plurality of perspectives, no longer based on continuities between past, present, and future, or a distinction between host and guest, but discontinuities and distinctions based simply on divisions of perspectives between contingent strangers. All contingent strangers claim identities in the present, where the past is left behind, and the future is always the ‘future present’, as Luhmann would say (see Luhmann 1982; Rundell 2009b).

Seen in this light, the notion of the contingent stranger is a hermeneutical reconstruction, the historicity of which belongs to the specificity of the meaning of the experience and attraction of the modern metropolis, which Heller, for one, views as a coalescence of freedom and contingency. More specifically and as discussed elsewhere, in her view the modern condition is, ontologically speaking, a world of open possibilities in which destiny or a pre-described voyage home cannot be undertaken from birth. This kind of freedom, though, is not the type of positive freedom that Weber describes as revolutionary in his depiction of the early modern city. To be sure, whilst for Heller there is a freedom that is constitutive of the modern period proper, it is a freedom that is empty (Heller 1992: 13; Rundell 2004b).

In this sense we are all contingent strangers. The experience and position of contingent strangers is, thus, not the experience of either outsiders (the old paradigm) or conditional strangers (Rundell 2004b). It is the experience of all people, generally as they nestle uncomfortably within the modern contingent condition that disrupts, disembeds and creates spaces for ‘the new’. These new spaces for creation are not only aesthetic ones but also new modern ones that are more than and different to the monetarized economies described by Marx, Weber and Simmel. They are also the spaces of nation-states, democracies, totalitarian experiments and explosions of techniques from the mastery of nature to the mastery of the sign. Notwithstanding the differentiation of these modern spaces from one another, the space of the producer-metropolitan-cosmopolitan city as a cultural experience and imaginary of contingency and empty and distanciated freedoms and fears helps to constitute and guide our way uneasily through them.

Night and day: Contingency and fear

However, there is not only the experience of the contingency of modern freedom. If producer-metropolitan-cosmopolitan city air makes us free and this freedom is empty, it is also a space in which different imaginings can occur in the context of proximities and the tensions that these proximities give rise to. There are, then, the imaginings, the creations of modern fears. The fear that modern city space engenders is distinct from the fear that the pre-modern contexts propagate with their pre-occupation of the familiar, the household (oikos), the known, and thus the unknown in the form of the magical and the demonic. Producer-metropolitan-cosmopolitan city fear is the fear of contingency and proximity, whether this is articulated in terms of otherness, difference, distinctions, life-styles or ‘life-choices’ that take their form in everyday life. Everything is a possibility, and everything can be a subject of fear. The horrific and the horror genre no longer originate from other-worldliness, but from the combination of this-worldliness and our own imaginings – a generalized ‘kakania’. No longer exorcisms, just The Exorcist.

Notwithstanding the presence of conditional strangerhood, Simmel’s ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ can now be interpreted from the vantage point of the paradigmatic condition of the empty freedom of the contingent stranger, a condition that also throws into relief the lessening and increasing chains of interdependence, of distance and closeness, and the simultaneity of sameness and difference. As discussed elsewhere, Simmel portrays the double-sided nature of metropolitan life, a portrayal that is more complex than the one presented by Weber (Simmel 1971b; Rundell 2004b). For Simmel, metropolitan life is constituted and experienced in a double-sided way. On the one hand, it is experienced as difference, flux, individuality and quality, and on the other as indifference, distance, abstraction, intellectualization, calculating quantification and impersonality. In this latter context individuality is not so much ‘lost’ but abstracted: the metropolitan man or woman becomes ‘a single cog as ever against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces’ (Simmel 1971a: 337). For Simmel this abstraction is encapsulated in the blasé metropolitan attitude, which becomes the normal one that emerges from this experience. ‘The essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference towards the distinctions between things’, and it is the attitude through which we cope with the issue of proximity (Simmel 1971a: 329).

The blasé metropolitan attitude is the generalized attitude of the contingent stranger, once we are all contingent strangers, that is, contingent. From the vantage point of abstraction and ‘intellectualization’ we only interact in highly mediated ways. In Simmel’s insightful analyses these abstract and mediated ways include money, time, and bureaucratic management (Simmel 1978; Rundell 2004b). They also include the abstract medium of citizenship and ‘imagined communities’ of nation-states, sometimes mediated by the vote, as well as technologically mediated interactions by way of telephones, keyboards, and ‘face-to-face’ skyping. These mediated interactions in the real and metaphorical new-world cities are mutualities between contingent strangers. Each, from his/her own perspective, constructs the other as a contingent stranger to him/herself. Each can be viewed with a latent antipathy that is only checked by the distanciation, abstraction and mediation that the blasé attitude itself entails. Cold reserve is the form that productive-metropolitan-cosmopolitan mutuality takes.

This blasé metropolitan attitude is, as already noted, accompanied and co-constituted by another version of empty freedom in modernity (Simmel, Heller). Abstraction assures ‘the individual of a type and a degree of personal freedom to which there is no analogy in other circumstances’ (Simmel 1971a: 332). This personal freedom increases the distance between oneself and others. As Simmel states

in an intellectualized and refined sense, the citizen of the metropolis is ‘free’ in contrast with the trivialities and prejudices which bind the small town person. The mutual reserve and indifference, and the intellectual conditions of life in large social units are never more sharply appreciated in their significance for the independence of the individual than in the dense crowds of the metropolis because the bodily looseness and lack of space make intellectual distance really perceivable for the first time. (Simmel 1971a: 334)

But there is also an accompanying paradoxical fear in the face of this fear of aloneness and isolation, the fear that once an interaction is invoked, which is more than one of aversion, it will be an invasion – the result of which may well be aggression. Once the distance is breached and one experiences the closeness rather than congestion of the city, the close proximity of all differences can be the source and the ground of fear. In this sense, the emotional economy of fear and anxiety and the potential aggression that always accompanies it is the result of a real or potential interaction, particularly with something or someone who is co-present yet unknown. To put it another way, and following Elias’ notion of figuration in this instance, it is not aggression that triggers interaction but interaction, especially fearful ones that trigger aggression (Elias 1982–3: 134). ⁷ In other words, and addressing the specificity of the metropolis of modernity, there is the fear that one’s own selfhood will be encroached, limited or denied. This selfhood is constituted as a contingency. This contingency and the sense of self that is constituted with it can take many forms and representations – from one’s own property, to one’s own body, to one’s own identity. As indicated above, the new horror genres belong here – originating in modern social imaginaries and not only as works of fantasy in the older, more conventional meaning of the term.

There is, thus, not only the creation and creativity of empty and distanciated freedom, but also the creation and creativity of empty and distanciated fear in the context of these interactions. In the producer-metropolitan-cosmopolitan city everything is open to fear and vilification. Anyone or anything can be feared and scapegoated. There are no longer the usual suspects identified by religious or ethnic type, or as the old or new la boheme or dispossessed. These fears and vilifications now include not only the fear of poverty and the indigent. They also include the fears of untidiness, of dissonance, of feeling, of separateness, of loss, of uniqueness, of pain as well as pleasure, and especially of not being in control.

We are no longer contingent strangers simply in the cities of rehearsals, but ones in the increasing fearful imaginary creations of modernity in general, even cyber modernity. In our expanded producer-metropolitan-cosmopolitan city, our modernity in general, fears can be formed of monetarized economies and their fantasies of endless growth, speculation and consumption with their fat-cats and the ‘super-rich’; of technological fantasies, so well depicted by Mary Shelley that now engineer and transform the body as a code and sign of the monstrous; hyper-planned, governed and integrated nation-states that begin to identify and potentially or really exterminate those who are transformed from contingent strangers to new outsiders and deemed enemies in the planful fury of the holocaustal imagination; the uncertainty of the demos and what appears as endless argument and negotiation; and finally the fear of intensified family forms of not only mergence but also of new cruelties where Freddy Kruger no longer stalks the pavement but the corridors of our homes and our imaginings.

‘The fear is out there.’ Except, perhaps, in ‘spaces’ of contemplation and even stillness and silence where new experiences of transcendence may occur – no longer in the cathedrals nor in the extra-mundane in the sense that Charles Taylor means, but in the this-sided new spaces of possibility (Taylor 2007). These new spaces may be constituted, for example, in the listening and creation of music, the absorption in and creation of artwork, or a writing, the listening to and the creation of love, the contemplation of the garden or a piece of ‘nature’ (a non-human animal, for instance) in which one does not need to interfere. However, these spaces are not really about spaces, as such. They are about different relationships, anchored as much in the work of the creativity of one’s radical imaginary as in the quite distinct social and inter-subjective or figurational imaginaries that co-constitute them – of love, friendship, dignity and beauty, where ‘a purposiveness without purpose’ that integrates all of our senses and sensibilities may reign. It is in inter-subjectivities of non-interference, of the specificity of the subject on both sides, as well as in the ‘gap’ between them which cannot or should not be filled immediately, that one confronts fear and may begin to sublate it (Rundell 2013).