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.Thusby  city I am not referring only to those huge metropolises that we call citiesin the U.S.The kinds of relationship I describe obtain also ideally in thoseplaces we call  towns, where perhaps 10 or 20 thousand people live.As a process of people s relating to one another, city life embodies differ-ence in all the senses I have discussed in this essay.The city obviouslyexhibits the temporal and spatial distancing and differentiation I haveargued the ideal of community seeks to collapse.On the face of the city envi-ronment lies its history and the history of the individuals and groups thathave dwelt within it.Such physical historicity, as well as the functions andgroups that live in the city at any given time, create its spatial differentiation.The city as a network and sedimentation of discretely understood places,such as particular buildings, parks, neighborhoods, and as a physical envi-ronment offers changes and surprises in transition from one place to another.The temporal and spatial differentiation that mark the physical environ-ment of the city produce an experience of aesthetic inexhaustibility.Buildings,squares, the twists and turns of streets and alleys, offer an inexhaustiblestore of individual spaces and things, each with unique aesthetic character-istics.The juxtaposition of incongruous styles and functions that usuallyemerge after a long time in city places contributes to this pleasure in detailand surprise.This is an experience of difference in the sense of always beinginserted.The modern city is without walls; it is not planned and coherent.Dwelling in the city means always having a sense of beyond, that there ismuch human life beyond my experience going on in or near these spaces,and I can never grasp the city as a whole.City life thus also embodies difference as the contrary of the face-to-faceideal expressed by most assertions of community.City life is the  being-together of strangers.Strangers encounter one another, either face to face orthrough media, often remaining strangers and yet acknowledging their con-tiguity in living and the contributions each makes to the others.In suchencountering people are not  internally related, as the community theoristswould have it, and do not understand one another from within their ownperspective.They are externally related, they experience each other as other,different, from different groups, histories, professions, cultures, which theydo not understand.The public spaces of the city are both an image of the total relationships ofcity life and a primary way those relationships are enacted and experienced.A public space is a place accessible to anyone, where people engage inactivity as individuals or in small groups.In public spaces people are awareof each other s presence and even at times attend to it.In a city there are a3118 Ch-18.qxd 11/13/03 9:43 AM Page 202202 Contemporary Political Theorymultitude of such public spaces, streets, restaurants, concert halls, parks.Insuch public spaces the diversity of the city s residents come together anddwell side by side, sometimes appreciating one another, entertaining oneanother, or just chatting, always to go off again as strangers.City parks as wenow experience them often have this character.City life implies a social inexhaustibility quite different from the ideal ofthe face-to-face community in which there is mutual understanding andgroup identification and loyalty.The city consists in a great diversity ofpeople and groups, with a multitude of subcultures and differentiated activ-ities and functions, whose lives and movements mingle and overlap inpublic spaces.People belong to distinct groups or cultures, and interact inneighborhoods and workplaces.They venture out from these locales, how-ever, to public places of entertainment, consumption and politics.They wit-ness one another s cultures and functions in such public interaction, withoutadopting them as their own.The appreciation of ethnic foods or professionalmusicians, for example, consists in the recognition that these transcend thefamiliar everyday world of my life.In the city strangers live side by side in public places, giving to and receiv-ing from one another social and aesthetic products, often mediated by ahuge chain of interactions.This instantiates social relations as difference inthe sense of an understanding of groups and cultures that are different, withexchanging and overlapping interactions that do not issue in community, yetwhich prevent them from being outside of one another.The social differen-tiation of the city also provides a positive inexhaustibility of human rela-tions.The possibility always exists of becoming acquainted with new anddifferent people, with different cultural and social experience; the possibilityalways exists for new groups to form or emerge around specific interests.The unoppressive city is thus defined as openness to unassimilated other-ness.Of course, we do not have such openness to difference in our currentsocial relations.I am asserting an ideal, which consists in a politics of differ-ence.Assuming that group differentiation is a given of social life for us, howcan the relationships of group identities embody justice, respect and theabsence of oppression? The relationship among group identities and culturesin our society is blotted by racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, suspi-cion and mockery.A politics of difference lays down institutional and ideo-logical means for recognizing and affirming differently identifying groups intwo basic senses: giving political representation to group interests and cele-brating the distinctive cultures and characteristics of different groups.11Many questions arise in proposing a politics of difference [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]