Exploring a Singularly Plural Urbanism through Jean-Luc Nancy’s Theories of the City

Seunghan Paek

doi:10.22901/trans.2018.11.1.5

In this article, I take French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussions of the city as a threshold, through which I propose a “singularly plural” model of urbanism that could reflect the complexity and multiplicity of the 21stcentury urban environments. In doing so, I pay particular attention to four concepts that are derived from Nancy’s ontological explorations: 1) community 2) spectacle, 3) everyday life, and 4) the public. Followings are the summaries as to how I articulate each concept in its relationship with urban discourses. First, what Nancy means by the term ‘community’ does not necessarily mean a mode of being together that leads to a complete harmony and stability. What arise instead are forms of life that enable the modes of being together in given urban settings in fragmentary and non-hierarchical manners. Second, Nancy critically reinterprets Guy Debord’s influential theory of the spectacle, through which he claims that the materialist urban conditions work as a crucial ground where one is able to speculate about and build the sociality and senses of community. Third, in a similar vein, Nancy explores the multiple meanings of the everyday in the capitalist urban world, in particular, being attentive to its ‘singularity’ that cannot simply be represented or appropriated by other means of expression. Such a claim of the everyday is based on his critical overview of the scholarship of everyday life, which has long been the subfield of ‘Urban Studies’; furthermore, it urges us to explore the multiplicity of urban life that operates through the entanglement of consumerist behaviors and media-driven practices. Fourth, Nancy’s ontology also encourages us to explore the meaning of the public (or publicness) in a broad sense; ordinary experiences of urban infrastructures such as the subway, airports, shopping malls might look trivial in its semantic dimension, but nevertheless bring forth modes of ‘being separate but together’ in a loose sense. Nancy’s discussions of the public also resonate to the phenomenological surveys of ‘place’ in the age of globalization which has been the prominent zeigeist since the 1990s. By taking Nancy’s ontological explorations as a crucial impetus in exploring the ontological possibilities of city space under the overriding moods of globalization and consumer culture, as well as critically reviewing the key urban discourses of the late capitalism that are represented by the theories of ‘alienation’ and ‘commodity fetishism,’ I propose a more resilient model of urbanism.

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