Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has lectured to academic and popular audiences throughout the world. A contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, Kingwell's work has appeared in numerous publications including: The New York Times Magazine, Adbusters, Utne Reader, and The Globe and Mail.
Kingwell is the author of eight books including: Dreams of Millennium, Better Living, Marginalia, The World We Want, Practical Judgments, and Catch and Release.
His new book Nearest Thing To Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams was recently published by Yale University Press. I reached him in Toronto to speak about the book.
Gerry McCarthy: In Nearest Thing To Heaven you quote Fay Wray. She once said that: "When I'm in New York, I look at the Empire State Building and feel as though it belongs to me, or is it vice versa?" You then add: "Of course, many people feel as though the Empire State belongs to them. It is, we might say, part of its iconic genius that the building, at once so forbidding and so familiar, becomes its own kind of monumental household possession, a shared treasure not just for all New Yorkers, but of anyone who has ever visited New York --in person or, sometimes more powerfully, only via the overwhelming imaginative medium of film." Can you speak to me about this? What was Fay Wray trying to say?
Mark Kingwell: It's both a particular point and general one. The particular one is that much of the tragedy of Fay Wray's life is that she was so completely identified with the 1933 version of King Kong (and the scene at the top of the Empire State Building) that her subsequent career never shook off that identification. It's one of the earliest and most comprehensive examples of typecasting, because she couldn't escape that particular role. So she felt like she belonged to the building. But she also felt the building belonged to her. That's what I was getting at in the rest of the passage.
New York offers people and visitors this experience of first of all being overwhelmed, but then offering particular images, experiences, or buildings that are up for grabs or available in this way. We fold them into our own personal narratives and (and in that sense) make them our own.
What fascinated me about this is that people become quite jealous about it. The way one might be about a neighbourhood restaurant --for example. Where it's mine and you're not allowed to know about it, let alone visit and enjoy it.
Because it's so prominent, central, and available the Empire State Building has this peculiar duality: Everybody treasures their own personal experience of it, but have to acknowledge everybody else is doing the same thing. If you want to extend the point, it becomes a general metaphor for a lot of social and cultural production. You could even say it's about democratic societies generally. For example: You could say that the American Dream is available to everybody. But nevertheless I'm in competition with you as we both pursue it. So there's this tension. The iconic status of the Empire State Building is one of the things that points toward that deep truth for me.
GM: In your chapter on "Moving Pictures" you write about the overwhelming imaginative medium of film. You explain that: "All of us alive at this moment get our sense of life's possibilities in part from the movies. It is the condition of the age that things experienced cinematically are frequently more influential, and emotionally more resonant, than things merely experienced." I thought my family was unusual for quoting lines to each other from films. But I gather that isn't true. Do you think it's good that were influenced by film in this way?
MK: I try to follow Marshall McLuhan's advice when analyzing cultural phenomena: One shouldn't judge morally. But it's inevitable that one does --morally and politically in my case. Part of the approach of the book itself --not just in this chapter on cinema and cinematic appropriations of the building-- was to try to understand the way a three-dimensional physical thing (like a skyscraper which is undeniably material) becomes much larger than that through its reproductions and cultural dissemination. Cinema is only one medium of that dissemination.
But as I argue in the passage, film is hugely powerful because it provides us with those narrative materials. We fold our experience of the Empire State Building into our personal narrative. But in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, that personal narrative is heavily influenced by the narrative we experience at the movies and on television. It's inescapable.
Your example is a good one. We quote to each other lines from films and television shows. I quote to my students lines from The Simpsons or The Matrix. It's not just cultural shorthand. It's a way of creating our peculiar form of community and recognizing these as meaningful touchstones. In that sense it's not a bad thing. I suppose the traditionalist can say it's a bad thing because these experiences are not real. But that's a false trail, because what I experience at the movies --which are popular art-- is as much experience as what I might experience on the street getting there. In the sense that it's shared and structured it's obviously more popular than random, everyday experiences.
GM: In the book you explain that the relationship between New York City and the Empire State building is essential, and coeval. "The promise of the city viewed is that promise of life itself, of the unknown or surprising: not utopia, perhaps, but the heterotopia celebrated by Foucault, the hidden space, the space of otherness, that each one of us seeks in the right-angled heaven that is New York." Early in the book you write about New York City's "weird gravitational pull". Is this something you've experienced?
MK: I think so. I lived in New York on a couple of occasions and visited often. It's certainly for me --and for many others-- a city of aspiration or possibility. But we have to remember that when I write this way about New York (or anybody else writes this way), it's not the real New York. It's a mythic, partly cinematic, literary New York. It's all these layerings that are captured by the idea of New York rather than the workaday, lived reality. Having said that: This is the interplay that fascinates me between what it's like to actually live, work, or be in New York --and these aspirations, dreams, and sense of possibility (or play) that are constantly being opened up.
Obviously New York is not unique in this. It's just the chosen subject of this study. But any great city has this function that it allows its citizens and visitors a sense of play and possibility. It ties into a lot of our contemporary debates about the nature of public space, democracy, or urban activism. A lot of these debates are motivated by this desire to have cities that allow us possibility. Walter Benjamin writes about Paris in the nineteenth century and this figure of the flâneur strolling through the city. Around the next corner is always whatever he desires. He doesn't know what he desires, but he knows it's around the next corner. This continues to pull him along in the strolling. It's a gathering of experience as a connoisseurship of experiencing the world as we walk through it.
GM: At one point you write that: "The Empire State is a powerful symbol of mythic New York, with all the attendant feelings of longing that come naturally when walking New York's thick palimpsest of cultural memory." But cultural memory isn't nostalgia is it?
MK: No. It's important to be careful about this, because a couple of reviews of the book say it's very nostalgic. But I thought I'd taken pains to thematize the problem of nostalgia in such a way that there's a distinction. There's nostalgia as a cultural retrofitting, wallowing in the past, or a yearning for a never-was golden age. That's a dangerous form of nostalgia. But there's a different form, which is the flip of that bad nostalgia. That is an appreciation for the layering of a New World city like New York or Toronto.
Every city is a layering --a sort of archaeological culture. It's that sense of meanings being overlaid constantly and being allowed to replace previous ones or sometimes to fold old ones into new ones. One can view a single street and look at the buildings and how they relate to each other across generations. In the book I quote Vincent Scully who defines architecture as a conversation between generations. Every urban landscape is that conversation. That's the form of cultural meaning or awareness of cultural history that's important as we go forward into our shared future.
Nostalgia wallows or dwells in the past. What I'm talking about is the way we can go forward by thinking or appreciating the past that is still with us.
GM: In the book you write that: "We might say that the reason the building remains a living icon is precisely because, like the idea of America itself, it constantly demands renegotiation and revision of its meanings, its significance. The building may appear to stand still, but in reality it is always moving." That's why the building is an icon isn't it? Because you explain that it's both a monument and an icon.
MK: Yes. That distinction can be drawn along a number of different dimensions. One could say that something is an icon, simply because it's multiply re-produced or cherished. But what makes a cultural icon significant is that constant demand for re-negotiation or revision. That's why something can sustain itself as an icon over generations and decades, because it's different in each generation. When the Empire State Building went up it was --in one sense-- immediately iconic of its public relations myth: The deployment of labour, materials, and all of Al Smith's rhetoric of "America the Great" and technological optimism. That doesn't go away. But it gets wrapped with a new kind of iconic status as we move through the Second World War and into the post-war years. After that there's a new regard for it --but then it becomes kitschy for a while. Faded glory. Then after September 11 it's changing again.
It's fascinating to say that this is all true, because it seems obvious. At the same time the building itself is just the same. It hasn't changed. There's nothing different. That's why it's an icon of America. Because it's changing views are reflections of the nations' self-conception and self-regard. And how that shifts over time.
GM: In the book you write about the 1957 film An Affair to Remember. You remind us that Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr) and Nicky Ferante (Cary Grant) never actually meet at the top of Empire State Building.
MK: No they don't. It's one of those great lacunae in the culture of film like "Play It Again Sam" or a few other things that people think happened or were uttered. So Terry McKay and Nicky Ferante never meet at the top of the Empire State Building, because Terry is struck by a taxicab as she is jaywalking trying to get there.
GM: At the beginning of An Affair To Remember we see the Empire State Building don't we?
MK: It's foreshadowed and the whole film builds to their agreeing to meet (and then the failure of them to meet). The title of my book is taken from Terry MacKay's line where she describes the Empire State Building as the "nearest thing to heaven." But she says it twice. She says it the first time when they plan to meet. He suggests it --and she says: "That's perfect. It's the nearest thing to heaven in New York." She says it again when they're finally re-united after she has been avoiding him, because she is injured and doesn't want to have him love her out of pity. But she says how much she regretted knowing that she couldn't get there to the top of the building and says: "It was the nearest thing to heaven, because you were there."
It's a weepy tearjerker. But it's a wonderful line. Because the first mention says: This is how we think of the skyscraper in the centre of Manhattan. But the second mention humanizes and personalizes it. That's exactly what we were talking about before. She makes it part of her narrative (in this case love narrative) so that it's no longer just the nearest thing to heaven, because it's the tallest building in the city. It's the nearest thing to heaven because he was there.
GM: In your last chapter you write about the United States as Empire and the machine of war. But I thought it was important that you talked about the social machine. "The social machine, or line of control, embodies those forces of expectation or organization that define the limits of the acceptable or appropriate, especially in times of perceived crisis." Later you add, "The social machine functions best not when it is obvious but when it is taken for granted, internalized in the form of common sense, a set of expectations about 'how things are done.'" You say this pervasive "soft control" should worry people concerned about liberty don't you?
MK: Yes. This is again both a specific point and a general one. The specific point has to do with what's happened in terms of the national security state after September 11 and the war on terror. Moreover the rhetorical uses of the idea of freedom in the exportation of democracy. But the general point is one that underwrites most of philosophical reflection, whether it's specifically political or not. Philosophical reflection is in the business of not taking for granted the taken for granted. It goes back to Socrates. It's a demand to say: What is the presupposition of what you are claiming or doing? Are there presuppositions in conflict with one another? Are there internal contradictions or pernicious effects?
I wanted to make that specific political point, but in the general field of this philosophical commitment. The way it ties into the building is not just in the name of empire, but that the building as a tower has implicated in it the notion of surveillance and of control. Every tower in human history has been used to survey a field, usually with some kind of utilitarian view in mind. It might be ballistic: I ascend to a height in order to throw or fire a bomb. But it might also be to create the sight to be able to spot or localize you down on the ground. Nobody is using the Empire State Building for security surveillance now. Nevertheless as a tower it has this implication. That's what I wanted to do at the end of the book.
It's an interesting point that my editor at Yale University Press convinced me that a much longer version of that discussion (which was maybe more forthright politically) ought to be excised. I did publish it separately as an essay and the editor was right to say this, because the book should be focusing on the building. But it's good to remember that this general issue of surveillance and soft control is still present.
GM: In your last chapter you write that: "Empire means violence, the imposition of will. It is not, and cannot be, a program of liberation, no matter what any given inaugural address might say." I thought it was significant that in the bibliographic essay at the end of the book you add: "American conservatives, meanwhile, who might have been thought sympathetic to the Christian moralism underlying this project of liberation, have reacted to recent imperialism with a mix of concern and bitterness, making strange bedfellows with old-fashioned American leftists. The imperial policies of the first years of the twenty-first century seemed to violate the central promise of American politics, namely that it would put Americans first." This is a strange twist isn't it?
MK: It really is. I first noticed it when I gave a lecture in Cleveland in 2004. At the time the initial shock and awe of the Iraq War had worn off. I was listening to a talk radio show out of Cleveland. These conservative commentators were saying: We are disturbed at this foreign adventurism. They were genuine old-fashioned pre-neoconservatives. They were isolationists, exceptionalists, social, and fiscal conservatives. They simply argued that the costs of the Iraqi War were excessive and would devolve to the American people in one form or another.
It was interesting for me to hear that coming from that side of the ideological spectrum, because the same kind of arguments were coming from people like Lewis Lapham who are considered on the liberal-left side. We see that continuing as the consequences of the Iraqi invasion continue to come to view.
I don't know what comes of this, because this book is not the place to address it. But the addiction to oil is the key fact in all of this --whatever the rhetoric you use to justify the invasion, or the false connections or claims made about weapons of mass destruction. Everybody knows that underneath it all is the fact that there's an oil dependency that needs to be protected. I'm not sure any conservative or liberal has a solution to that problem. But many of us find ourselves, strangely enough, agreeing that Christian motivated allegedly democratic invasions are not the way.
GM: In the book you avoided footnotes and other forms of direct reference. Instead you used a bibliographic essay at the end. Was this a hard thing to do?
MK: It was a hard thing to convince a university press to agree to. But it wasn't a hard thing to do. I've done it before. I did it in my book The World We Want. I found it worked beautifully in that book, because it was a book that was very narrative in its deployment of political arguments. A number of readers told me that they enjoy it. It's a nice form, because all the references are there. So anybody who wants to follow up on specific references --or do any further reading-- has every material that he or she needs. But the main text is allowed to stay readable.
The only quibble I received was from a couple of people who said: What about a specific quotation? I said in this age of easy e-mail access I could give you any specific reference you would want. So just send me an e-mail.
I like the bibliographic essay because it allows you to create a parallel text, which is a counterpoint or sometimes even a bit of a destabilization relative to the main text.
GM: Can you speak to me again about what draws you to New York City?
MK: It's such a big topic. I switch back and forth as many people do. Right at the beginning of the book I quote that line from John Updike. I'm not sure it's original to him, but it's attributable to him. "A New Yorker is somebody who thinks that anybody who lives anywhere else must be, in a sense, kidding." It's hard to resist when you have spent any time there. In the sense that any other North American city is somehow in a lower league --however wonderful. I live in Toronto. I've lived more of my life here than anywhere else. But there's a sense that it's a little provincial by comparison.
Anybody who's at all ambitious or drawn to a sense of wanting to be at the centre of things --especially as a young person-- is going to feel that pull.
But as I said before --it's a myth. Which is not to say that it's flatly untrue. That's not what a myth is. A myth is a narrative --a sense of opportunities or area of developments that might be taken. Insofar as New York consistently offers that in its complicated and sometimes unpleasant way, it's still for me "The City."
Gerry McCarthy is Editor of The Social Edge.
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