tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-93722064719555333.post1618205953109918986..comments2024-02-28T06:32:17.919-08:00Comments on Star Wars Modern: White Walls, Crime Waves (Part 7)starwarsmodernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128785816151813198noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-93722064719555333.post-65142451015392944832021-05-08T19:22:30.698-07:002021-05-08T19:22:30.698-07:00Some thoughts this dredged up for me, apropos of n...Some thoughts this dredged up for me, apropos of nothing in particular:<br /><br />A big part of Mumford's (in)famous critique of Jacobs was that<br /><br /><i>"her ideal city is mainly an organization for the prevention of crime"</i><br /><br />and that her book<br /><br /><i>"reveals an overruling fear of living in the big city she so openly adores, and, as all New Yorkers know, she has considerable reason for her fear."</i> <br /><br />So, the funny thing is, while you are certainly correct that "In 1961 no one could have predicted how intractable a problem urban crime would turn out to be," it must be said that Jacobs did in fact make the eyes-on-the-street stuff a rather central part of her manifesto, enough to get Mumford's goat at least, and perhaps in anticipation of the old lab rat critique of density which he indeed dutifully trots out later on (and which you still hear from time to time). At that point of course they were talking past each other. (I have never been able to shake the feeling that the line <i>"she has considerable reason for her fear"</i> would have been written had she not been a woman. It's impossible to know that for sure, and probably not worth knowing anyway.)<br /><br />Another thought, perusing your sidebar, is that the term Modernism has become quite slippery. The oft-quoted passage from Jacobs about <i>"the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life"</i> is prepared this way:<br /><br /><i>Art has its own peculiar forms of order, and they are rigorous. Artists, whatever their medium, </i>make selections<i> from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist. To be sure, the artist has a sense that the demands of the work (i.e. of the selections of material he has made) control him. The rather miraculous result of this process—if the selectivity, the organization and the control are consistent within themselves—can be art. But the essence of this process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity </i>from<i> life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.</i><br /><br />To me these are profoundly Modernist sentiments, and the final sentence leaves me thinking that Jacobs was not merely constructing a strawman here but, rather, does in fact believe all of this. And if we believe it too, then the various postmodern efforts to substitute life for art (or to bring about their synthesis, e.g. per Debord and the Situationists), are also "mistakes" of "substitution." Which is why I once said to a friend who is more well-versed in all of this than I am that Jacobs struck me as a Modernist. He made this little smirk and was slightly taken aback.<br /><br />Ever since I read Jacobs' later books I haven't been able to think of her as "Jedi" til the end. But that is a whole other story and I've written enough. Thanks for your blog.Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com