In the previous chapter, Raban showed us images of the greenhorn,
the newcomer to the city; the newcomer must learn to be an artist in interpreting
signs and making meaning from the surfaces of things. Raban is keeping with the
metaphor of “language.” The greenhorn becomes a “walking legible code, to read,
and as often misinterpreted, by strangers.” In Chapter 3, Raban had argued that
the fundamental process of living in the city is one of melodrama: urban living
occurs according to a script in which human morals are writ large, and on a
stage populated with caricatures and stereotypes. The city forces its inhabitants to interact on a plane that is at
once superficial, illusory, and liberating:
we may take on any role we want and represent our choice of roles
through our choice of clothing. Our clothes, the emblems and signs which signal
our chosen identity, form the language and grammar of urban living, and
synechdoche (the substitution of an easily recognizable part for a more complex
whole) becomes a mode of survival and the urban uniform “may be the most
important way of making possible the individual life, the personal identity.”
Some dozen words into Chapter 4, Raban claims “Identity is presented
as plastic, a matter of possessions and appearances...”. The word “possessions”
links identity formation to consumerism: when we shop, we are not just buying
stuff, we are assembling an image of ourselves to be projected to other people,
an identity to inhabit. This vast potential for individuation seems to counter
past social conventions, which, according to Raban, tended to create and
reinforce a certain kind of “sameness,”
a single, widely adopted style of “romantic unparticularity.” Modern city life
represents a departure from the tyranny of a stable society in which everyone
shared the same values and the same heroes. In differentiation then, there is a
moment of chaos, a lack of order (or at least the lack of the order that had
been established as “Order”). At the same time, this differentiation, this
chaos, is a democratizing process: those previously considered “different” now
have “as good a claim to the limelight and the future as...anyone else.” There
is no common standard.
The relationship between commodification, consumerism, and identity
offers a level of choice and anxiety the amounts to “a new pornography of
taste.” Not only our possessions, but art and literature become personal
accessories; things become the signs that communicate their owners to others, and
“ownership is stretched to include what one likes or believes in as well as
what one can buy.” The “adept city-dweller is engaged in the constant
manipulation of these stylistic quantities, continuously relating his
self-presentation to his audience through the medium of such expressive
objects.” The techniques of mass, differentiated production have made possible
a life that is lived on the level of fantasy and disguise. Raban offers all
this as proof that “in the city personal identity has been rendered soft,
fluid, endlessly open to the exercise of the will and the imagination.”
Raban makes this claim, then counters it with an opposing argument
from the “social determinism” perspective (this is Marcuse’s perspective),
citing Mary Douglas’ idea that entire cosmologies find expression at every
level of society. Ideology works in the same way. Cosmology is a “world view”
that explains why things are the way they are; a system that puts everything in
its place in relation to a controlling narrative. As he did with the city
planners in Chapter 3, Raban brings in Douglas in order to knock down her
argument. For Raban, any such over-arching narrative (such as sociology) cannot
account for the unconstrained freedom made available by the economy of signs at
play in the city; the city is a stage which gives its inhabitants the
simultaneously dangerous and essential freedom to change themselves and the
city. City life is an ever shifting billboard of images which incessantly
signify, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish what lies
underneath. Because the city is “prone to erode that boundary between the
province of imagination and the province of fact.” The city is a real life
stage on which the fantasy life in the mind can be acted out in all the reality
of true life.
According to Raban, we (all of us living in the city) are not that
different from Ronnie Kray, the criminal who turned himself into a gangster and
London into a movie set. We pass from one identity to the next to the next
throughout the day, and though these identities are nowhere near as “glamorous”
as Ronnie’s, they compare “in number and variety.” And between these parts, these moments on stage, “lie stretches
of unbeing” and “empty role-lessness.” It is as if we are “waiting for the next
script to be delivered,” waiting “to become someone again.” Raban insists that this state of affairs is
“a logical product of the way in which cities make us live in them, of the
urban necessity of playing many parts to a succession of short-order audiences.” He comes to the conclusion that the
Invisible Man’s worries “come...easy and often” to those living in cities: “It
was unbelievable,” writes Ellison’s narrator,” but perhaps only the
unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.”
I can not stop thinking about language; largely because Raban keeps
it in our face. If there is a grammar of the city, a an artistic practice of
signification and interpretation that works on the level of the sign,
synechdochally, forming our ideas about the identity of ourselves and others,
then perhaps what the Invisible Man says is true. The role playing that Raban
describes, the adopting of uniforms and identities one after the other, even
over the course of the day, suggests that life occurs on the level of
representation; that there is a “reality” which is never seen, kept at bay,
behind the curtain on the stage. Language is perhaps, then, a form of fiction
very much along the lines of the urban grammar that Raban describes. It works
on the level of illusion, of manufactured uniform or costume which does not
take its meaning from any kind of “reality” underneath, but rather its meaning
is a function of the stage on which it carries out its performance. Language is
the costume that reality wears, like the expert city dweller, and it
continually erodes the boundary between representation and that which is
represented. Language and words become a series of “objects” appropriated in
order to construct an image in order to “live.” It may be that this level of
meaning, on the plane of illusion, is in fact more real than the “real” itself.
It is in this sense that the “truth” might simply be a “lie.” At any rate,
Raban is clear about it: “the city has shaken our confidence in reality.”
The conditions of meaning-making and identity formation are both
liberating and grave in the city. Raban writes that “the street, far from being
a jungle of anonymity, could be the stage for a uniquely personal performance.”
The city as melodrama is lived between two poles of impersonation: the gangster
and the dandy. The timeless and universal concepts of highest possible good and
worst possible evil, formerly the poles that defined the character of the
melodrama, have been reduced to caricatures, cartoons: grossly exaggerated and
stereotypical representations of the possibilities for illusion, more or less
harmless according to which end of the scale the “persona” approaches. The
city, writes Raban, affords “opportunities for fakery and versatile
impersonation “ that are more likely to favor the criminal-who-would-play
gangster than the artistic personality who plays at impersonation for its own
sake. The dandy and the gangster are the images that build the frame within
which the grammar of the city takes on meaning. In addition to the city’s
ability to favor the gangster, it threatens to fragment our identities: “It
sometimes seems as if one might flip over the edge into a deliriously
fragmented confusion of postures and role. In this maelstrom of possibilities,
it is a pressing problem merely to find out who one is- to tease out at least
the semblance of a nature from this heap of masks and rejected scraps of
artifice.”
Raban spends a few pages discussing what he sees as a trend in the
direction of rejecting style. He mentions Orwell and Barthes as examples of
this trend in language use, and he goes on to mention a few other examples. He
cites the cartoon of Mark Boxer, whom, he says, worked to show that the
rejection of style is still a style. Style is unavoidable. Next, he writes
about the urban colonizers, the real-life correspondents to Boxers’
Stringalongs, who move into the city and transform what they find there into
their own style. They seek to identify with, or at least recognize, the culture
of the city by appropriating its artefacts as elements of style. He likens
these people to “pioneers” venturing forth into a “new world.” This journey
ultimately comes with frontier-like privations (the lack of typical city
amenities) and results in “edgy and painful encounters with the indigenous
populations.” Interestingly, as Raban continues to discuss the “illusory”
quality of city life, he continues to offer us examples that hint at the way
social interactions are simultaneously “fake” and at the same time dangerous.
The play-acting that the city’s inhabitants engage in has very real, material
consequences for some members of the society; in this case, “alternately harassed
with eviction notices and raised rents.” These frontier makers adopt a style,
according to Raban, of “urban disengagement.” They deliberately renounce
“almost every possibility afforded by the city.” As with his discussion of melodrama, he defines this phenomenon
as uniquely urban: these people exercise “a series of negative options which
are options only because they exist in the city.” They reject the fluidity of
movement available in the city for an attempt at principled stasis. Clearly, Raban holds these people in a
certain amount of contempt; they live in the city, but not of it. This
attempt at “simplicity” comes at a high price: the goods necessary to project
this image are affordable to only the affluent, whose strained moralism is
contradicted by the specialized level of consumerism necessary to surround
themselves with goods from the emporium of styles. The ability to “create your
own society” is the “prerogative only of the wealthy.” His ultimate argument is
that perhaps criticisms of the city’s spurious nature are spurious themselves,
an attempt at style-lessness in a world in which one cannot possibly escape
from style in some form or another. So - what do all the poor do with their
lives?