The City is a Medium

Abstract

Capital.3 The name already says it: Capitals are named after the human body. The state (since the Greeks) has been conceived of as an organism, whose head is its capital. This turn, is ruled by a chief, whose name once more means just that, the head. Historically, the analogy can be shown to have been true. The prehistoric implosion of villages or entire countrysides and the subse quent emergence of the city was due, as Mumford illustrates, less to economic necessity than to the arms monopoly of a warlord. Plato, as lawmaker for an ideal city, proposed that its size be limited to the range of a voice, which would broadcast laws or commands. And for centuries?from the prehistoric formation of cities, which was also the beginning of high culture or history, through the residential seats of baroque power?the military head remained architectonically visible: as fortress or acropolis, citadel or palace. Not until the first dustrial revolution did a growth begin, whose spread, Mumford's eyes, changed the face of the city and went, the name of pure technology, beyond the ecological necessity of living together: megalopolis. The description, however, of a digression is often itself a digression. When cling to the clear-cut centrality of the head thinking the concept capital, it may be (as Foucault's thesis in political thought and analysis) that we still have not cut off the head of the king.4 The monarchs, to whom Europe owes most of its capitals, might thereby be said to have transcended architecture and achieved immortality the head of theory itself. But if 'man' with his ecological necessity is only a