Unreal City, Unreal Law

Abstract

AbstractThe law of the city degrades time to the dimension of space. The cityscape replaces a horizon made by woods, fields and streams with a jagged silhouette of rectilinear buildings, lots and thoroughfares. Geometrically speaking, a city street is a line that has been transected into segments called blocks. Blocks, in turn, are further segmented by the placement of individual buildings, which are enumerated as ‘addresses’ in the manner of sequenced moments on the universal timeline. The city, like the law, is produced by human hands according to the logic of the conceptual pairs which the idea of linear time makes possible: ‘cause and caused’, ‘ground and grounded’ and ‘means and end’. But there is something profoundly unreal about both of these institutional spaces: at the end of the day, the Unreal City mentioned in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land corresponds to a sort of Unreal Law. Both the city and the law manifest freedom’s impossible attempt to realise its own antithesis by substituting space for time, being for becoming, reason for chance, justification for responsibility and redemption for tragedy.