§73 The Guilty in the City

Much contemporary literature sees the city-spaces that are not inherently marked by capitalist exchanges as constituting positive forms of social relationality. Such meeting places including old style neighborhood coffee stores, pubs or perhaps libraries are sometimes called ‘third places’ marked by community ethos.

For Emmanuel Levinas, however, cities have characteristics that inherently make ethical relations impossible. In Levinas’s philosophy, a truly ethical relation can only be born from an awe from the infinitude of the Other, thus making all relations based on reciprocity and utility totalizing and ethically unsavory. The anonymity of cities thus erodes the possibility of this encounter with otherness and reduces it to indifference and disconnection. For him a café is a hallmark of casual relations without ethical responsibility, or a ‘non-place for a non-society’. As city dwellers, we thus all live in an implicit ‘half-guilt’, for we find refuge there for our negligence of those in need by constructing rights and disciplinary protection from those who are cast aside. The city enables our freedom, but at the expense of the indifference that makes those in need invisible.

It feels like there has never been so many social causes brought to a pedestrian’s awareness through ‘facers’ on the streets of Helsinki before. Only by hardening yourself and rendering both the ‘facer’ and the cause faceless can one readily walk through a public square in a single go. While the causes are no doubt good insofar as charity goes, it seems to also performs the evaporation of the Other, both in terms of the faciality of the person and the cause. In a Levinasian sense, where the ‘half-guilt’ peeks into the horizon of thought, indifference is reinforced as an outcome of ‘protection’ one expects of walking in the city.

/Joel Hietanen

Originally published at anowmedia.com on November 9, 2018.