The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City

INTRODUCTION

THE ROSEMAN HYPOTHESIS

THIS IS A STUDY of a manuscript that was never written. The author of the imaginary text is real. His name is Walter Benjamin. Here are a few well-known facts about his life:

Whereas this chronology is factual, the following one is counterfactual, fictional, or hypothetical:

THE TWO QUESTIONS that guide this book are as tricky as they are absurd: What if this is all true and The Manhattan Project does exist? What will we read in this book that was never written? Benjamin really (and cryptically) wrote shortly before his death: "The historical method is a philological method based on the book of life. ‘Read what was never written,’ runs a line in Hofmannsthal. The reader one should think of here is the true historian. If we take Benjamin’s advice literally, we can also take the previous questions seriously, rather than as some postmodern legerdemain. To follow the Roseman Hypothesis means that the proverbial lines dividing reality from fantasy, the text from its commentary, the author from his interpreter, are from this point on suspended. This will definitely raise a question about the text’s voice: Is it him or is it me, or one of the many sources quoted by either of us? To which someone once replied, What does it matter who is speaking."

What follows is my attempt to make sense of the hundreds of loose pages, written in miniature script and somewhat broken English, which the unearthed manuscript comprises. Since further biographical details will be kept to a minimum, and since quotations from the text itself will be restricted to Benjamin’s own citations from his numerous sources, my book is designed as a work of pure textual interpretation. In other words, this is not a reproduction of his Manhattan Project but only its analysis. It may therefore be understood as a work of secondary literature, insofar as we bear two things in mind: first, that Benjamin treats the urban setting as a book that must be constantly read and interpreted; second, that his actual writings are also structured like a metropolis. These are his "city-as-text and text-as-city."

The subject of my book is equal parts an author named Walter Benjamin and a city called New York. Yet its success or failure should be measured by its fidelity to a place more than to a thinker. Like virtually anyone who has ever written anything of value about New York, Benjamin must be relegated to the position of the city’s "ghostwriter." Following Rem Koolhaas, we could say that, like many public figures, the city has neither the time nor will nor ability to contemplate its own life and recount it in orderly chapters. Instead, it hires a host of spectral scribes who are more than happy to do this job for it. Benjamin’s Manhattan Project—this epic montage of quotations from, and reflections on, a seemingly endless array of texts revolving around New York—should certainly earn its ghostly compiler a seat of honor among his shadowy peers. But if this is indeed the case, then I am no more than the ghostwriter of a ghostwriter of a ghostwriter.

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IN GREEK, hypothesis means "that which is placed under." Like The Arcades Project, The Manhattan Project takes an actual place and places it under. These texts can perform this neat trick by not pretending to make a statement about the reality in which we live (a thesis). Instead, they are allowing us to observe what happens to our duly accepted reality once their ideas are placed underneath it. What is placed under can function either as a pillar or as a bomb. Though a hypothesis as such does not make a direct claim for truth, the truth depends on the hypothesis that lies, or lurks, under. Sometimes using a lie is the best way to tell the truth.

But there is another important thing that a hypothesis can do. In ancient theater, the term hypothesis denotes something like the program that, nowadays, is handed out by the ushers before a play begins. A classical hypothesis supplies a compact plot summary, describes the setting, identifies the actors, and gives various notes about the production and the playwright. The Manhattan Project can be understood as a hypothesis in this sense as well, for it is meant to elucidate in a condensed form the elaborate drama that unfolds in front of our eyes—not only in this specific city but also, by synecdoche, in other parts of this world.

"One can read the real like a text, Benjamin writes. We open the book of what happened. But a philosophical book dedicated to a city is different from the scientific Book of Nature. Besides, in the same way that philology is commentary on a text, it is theology that Benjamin treats as commentary on a reality." It is uncertain whether God is still watching us up there, but even if he is, it is possible that he no longer bothers to record our names in the Book of Life and the Book of the Dead. Instead, he probably just peeks at Benjamin’s manuscript from time to time, as theatergoers peek at their playbill whenever the show becomes too confusing or too overbearing.

FIRST PART

Benjamin merges his life into a setting.

—SUSAN SONTAG

FIRST CHAPTER

BENJAMIN IN NEW YORK

"THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write." What we believe to be Benjamin’s last recorded words from 1940 could not have been further from the truth. His tragedy verges on comedy. So before we begin, let me quickly deflate your possible enthusiasm. Reading The Manhattan Project and The Arcades Project side by side might give the impression that these are the brainchildren of two different authors. It is not unlikely that those who are familiar with Benjamin’s early European writings will be taken somewhat aback by the turn his later work took. For the devoted followers of Saint Walter, this is probably going to be sacrilege. Yet it is the spirit, not the letter, of his work on Paris to which his American writings can still be compared.

Consider, in this respect, the circumstantial factors that must have caused his change of heart: the trauma of the war; his new identity, city, language, and culture; the sixteen years of silence while enduring his menial job; the shifting intellectual and political postwar climate; his monastic existence and advancing old age. This is not to suggest that The Manhattan Project can be dismissed as the inconsequential, senescent afterthought of a displaced or disoriented mind. Assuming that the composition of the manuscript under consideration indeed consumed the final three decades of his life, one can only imagine how scrupulous and deliberate his work on his last word was.

"Speech conquers thought, runs Benjamin’s personal motto, but writing commands it." Even though his ascetic lifestyle excluded him from the conversation of his contemporaries and exposed him to only the thinnest sliver of what New York had to offer, his immersion in the endless accounts of the city, readily available and continuously accumulating in the stacks of the Public Library, was apparently enough to satiate his voracious intellect.

"Action can, of course, be as subtle as thought. But a thought must be crude to find its way into action." Benjamin learned this lesson from Brecht in the 1930s. Yet two decades had to pass before he finally found a way to put it into literary practice. In comparison with many of the knotty texts predating his staged suicide, the plain and pragmatic language of his postcontinental work seems to be influenced by some of what American literature has to offer. The prose of The Manhattan Project is like an open fist. Its crude theory can be described as minima philosophia. It deliberately defies our academic expectations.

On the first page of the manuscript is an epigraph from W. H. Auden: "Sad is Eros, builder of cities. In Benjamin’s case builder should be replaced with philosopher." Notice also that, despite his sadness, it is still Eros, the Greek god of love and Freudian symbol of the life instinct, who presides over this urban experiment, or experience. The melancholic angel who hovered over Benjamin’s European texts still visits the New York manuscript occasionally, but Benjamin’s last book project is the product of much more than spleen.

In an essay Arendt wrote about Benjamin in 1968, she recalls that he was not looking forward to his planned trip to America, "where, he used to say, people would probably find nothing to do with him except cart him up and down the country exhibiting him as ‘the last European.’" But as I was reading The Manhattan Project, I began to realize that his fear was unjustified. Although calling Benjamin an American writer would be off the mark, and though not once throughout the manuscript does he explicitly refer to himself as a New Yorker, I couldn’t help imagining him as the last New Yorker, writing his book in between saturnine strolls through the remnants of his beloved city after its entire population has been wiped out by some apocalyptic event, like a flood.

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IN THE SKY OF POSTWAR NEW YORK Benjamin lived his life like a "star devoid of atmosphere." The fact that this invisible man avoided as much human contact as possible, despite dwelling in the most populous spot on earth, could have easily led him to imagine that he was living on a deserted island. For this reason it is not impossible that the initials of Carl Roseman are a reversal of Robinson Crusoe’s. Since a city is often compared to a language, it makes sense that Benjamin was at home neither in New York nor in English. But precisely because he was keeping his distance from his subject matter—while inhabiting its very heart—he managed to see this undeserted island as no one else did.

Think, for example, of how the encounter with the same place during the same period triggered in Adorno his strong critique of "mass culture, his warning to readers of an array of ostensible modern ills ranging from jazz to laughter. Benjamin appreciated Adorno’s ability to reveal many of the insidious traps of twentieth-century life. But unlike those thinkers who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice, and without losing sight of their insights, Benjamin sensed that his own contribution must be different. Following Carl Andre’s distinction between art and culture, he declares at one point: Philosophy is about what we do. Critique is about what is done to us. Adorno’s warning, in a letter from 1935, against Benjamin’s abandonment of the category of Hell" is therefore not entirely unjustified.

In New York, Benjamin was trying to write a report on what he once called an eddy in the stream of becoming. He says as much in a long passage copied from The Arcades Project verbatim, save for his substitution of Manhattan for Paris:

Few things in the history of humanity are as well known to us as the history of Manhattan. Tens of thousands of volumes are dedicated solely to the investigation of this tiny spot on the earth’s surface. . . . Many of the main thoroughfares have their own special literature, and we possess written accounts of thousands of the most inconspicuous houses. . . . At work in the attraction New York exercises on people is the kind of beauty that is proper to great landscapes—more precisely, to volcanic landscapes. Manhattan is a counterpart in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the geographic order: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active hotbed of revolution. But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that cover them, have been transformed into paradisal orchards, so the lava of revolutions provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of art, festivity, fashion.

Another interesting similarity between Benjamin’s analyses of Paris and New York is that both are the fruits of a careful literary montage, intentionally left in fragmentary form. The difference is that the European Benjamin still held on, even if only halfheartedly, to some holistic view of an original, "organic totality." He therefore had to understand the fragment within the context of a tragic reflection or an experience of disaster. The American Benjamin, however, upholds the fragment without reverting as he did in the past to notions of ruin and loss, mourning and catastrophe. Like Walt Whitman’s poetic reflection on the city’s ensemble of specimens, Benjamin’s theoretic diffraction results in a mosaic of forms of life that may still constitute the apparent homogeneous whole that we call New York, but only as a conscious abstraction, only as long as any suggestion of a grand urban narrative is understood as mere fiction. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s portrayal of the metropolitan crowd, this philosophy of New York (or is it a paraphilosophy?) demonstrates that the description of confusion is not the same as a confused description.

SECOND CHAPTER

NOT TO LOOK UPON

THE EVENTS OF ULYSSES take place on June 16, 1904. Today this date is celebrated as Bloomsday, a tribute to Leopold Bloom, the novel’s protagonist. But at the time James Joyce was working on his modernistic masterpiece, it had completely different connotations, similar to those that September 12, 2001, might bring to mind today. Joyce knew that he was setting his narrative on the day after, when newspapers around the world reported on their front page about that most "terrible affair in which all those women and children excursion beanfeast burned and drowned in New York. Holocaust." On June 15, the General Slocum, a steamboat carrying members of St. Mark’s German Lutheran Church from the Lower East Side, caught fire and sank in the shallow waters just off the Bronx shore. More than a thousand of the thirteen hundred passengers were killed. Most were women and children. Until the end of the twentieth century this event was the worst tragedy in the history of New York. Unlike the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Titanic disaster a few years later, General Slocum nearly vanished from the city’s memory. Yet nothing is more telling than an event that should be commemorated but is not. I found this photo of the victims, their faces shrouded in white fabric, at the bottom of the box containing the manuscript of The Manhattan Project. It is the direct gaze of the standing men that I find almost unbearable.

ALTHOUGH BENJAMIN’S THOUGHT is devoted to a city he regarded as the capital of the twentieth century, the dates January 1, 1900, and December 31, 1999, can be only the arbitrary beginning and end points of his investigation. A more convenient and convincing beginning for the New York Century might be the 1898 consolidation of the adjacent municipalities into the five boroughs of the present megacity. But for Benjamin the New York Century really begins only on the day of the General Slocum disaster. The magnitude of the tragedy, he reasons, delivered such a powerful shock to the city’s psyche that, for the first time, New York became conscious of its own significance and was able to contemplate its own worth. Mourning the dead led the living, as it often does, to come to terms with their own existence. Following Joyce, Benjamin sensed that this quintessentially modern trauma (the steam engine, that machine of progress, can also be a machine of mass destruction) presaged what the new century held in store. The odyssey is shipwrecked. But he also noticed that this event became instrumental in focusing the attention of all nations on New York City, which emerged during the same years as the de facto world’s capital.

It is generally accepted that New York reached its apogee in the years following the end of the Second World War, with 1950 often cited as a convenient turning point from the city’s meteoric rise to its almost inevitable decline. If we must locate a certain event that could symbolize this turn, then the "Shot Heard Round the World—when Bobby Thomson hit a home run to win the National League pennant for the New York Giants in the final game against the Brooklyn Dodgers—will do just fine. Isn’t it possible," Don DeLillo asks in Underworld, that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses—the mapped visions that pierce our dreams? DeLillo writes that this baseball game at the uptown Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951, doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life. Or the city’s life, if we were to ask Benjamin, who was not present at the game and did not particularly care about baseball.

As for the symbolic moment the New York Century ended, it must be the other great tragedy in its history, after which the curtain had to fall (though many people remain seated, awaiting a rumored encore). Again, the sense of loss acts as the most effective catalyst for making people appreciate what they no longer have. Disaster works like divine revelation in a society driven by risk. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the public resolved that life would go on and business continue as usual. Still, there is a growing sense today that living in New York somehow resembles an afterlife, just as before the morning of June 15, 1904, the city was, in retrospect, still in its embryonic state.

One could claim that this has been the closure of only one project, that of Manhattan, and that the twenty-first century ushered in a new formation—let’s call it the Brooklyn Project—which operates according to a different constellation of ideas and an alternative set of values. But even though New York was a powerful place before the definitive ninety-seven years in its history and will continue to play a central role for many years to come, its two great catastrophes still serve as the perfect prologue and epilogue for an urban biography so extraordinary that its comparison to another historical city becomes rather obvious. "In one respect, an English visitor observed already in 1776, this town is like Athens: Though it has little or none of its Refinement or its Literature, ‘it is always seeking to hear or see some new thing.’"

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IT IS ONE THING to imagine the day airplanes will crash into skyscrapers, as E. B. White did in Here Is New York, his classic essay from 1949. It is another to analyze in precise terms the city’s future demise through a close reading of White’s text, as Benjamin did in the early 1970s, as the Twin Towers were being built. "It used to be, White writes, that the Statue of Liberty was the signpost that proclaimed New York and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty shares the role with Death." Being-toward-death becomes the modern city’s decisive existential condition, whereas the Enlightenment’s being-toward-freedom (an ideal that belonged to Paris more than to New York) is somehow pushed to the side.

As in Kafka’s Amerika, the Statue of Liberty, that displaced Parisian immigrant, holds not a torch but a sword. Benjamin therefore talks about this "gloomy awareness that along with the great cities has evolved the means to raze them to the ground. The nineteenth-century aristocracy’s fear of the amorphous mob, which turned into the fascination of twentieth-century media with the obscure mobster, is mutating today into the government’s watchful eye over the elusive terrorist. But of course, the true enemies of twenty-first-century New York are less the specters of terrorism—those who turn the city into a lofty target scraping the skies"—than those who pretend to exorcize them. The city’s demise may coincide with the most conspicuous attack on its buildings and people. But the cause of this decline lies elsewhere. The real disaster movie in the history of New York, the one that actually brought it to its knees during Benjamin’s years of living there, features no aliens, no ghosts, no natural forces, and no diabolical villains.

An entire cloud of cynicism can condense into a drop of mortality. In the last lines of his essay, White seems to insinuate that, like the biblical Garden of Eden, modern New York guards within its boundaries nothing less than the Tree of Life, which he describes as an old, battered, barely standing willow in an interior courtyard of a Midtown apartment building. This tree, he insists, must be saved, because "if it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death."

Henry James articulates a similar sentiment when he writes, "What makes the general relation of your adventure with New York is that, at bottom, you are all the while wondering, in presence of the aspects of its genius and its shame, what elements or parts, if any, would be worth its saving, worth carrying off for the fresh embodiment and the better life." The spirit of this advice evidently informed Benjamin’s thought as early as 1939, when he made an attempt to distill his years of intellectual labor on The Arcades Project into a single, short, essential text. It was meant to function as a clearing in the middle of his seemingly boundless forest of quotations and reflections. Inspired by the letters he received from his friends in New York, he titled this piece Central Park.

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THE PERSISTENT DIFFICULTY is to put one’s finger on a plausible explanation for the attraction New York has had on so many. "The right reason, the journalist Joseph Mitchell confesses, is something obscure and way off and I probably don’t even know it myself. It’s like the old farmer who wouldn’t tell the drummer the time of day." The shortest version of this story goes something like this:

An old farmer, carrying a jug of applejack, boarded a train heading back to his home in South Jersey. As the train pulled out of the station, he took his watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and put it right back. Across the aisle sat a young drummer who leaned over and said, Friend, what time is it? The farmer took a look at him and said, Won’t tell you. The drummer was confused by the harsh reply, so he asked again, only louder, but the farmer didn’t budge. Well, look here, for the Lord’s sake, said the drummer, why won’t you tell me the time of day? If I was to tell you, the farmer replied, we’d get into a conversation, and I got a jug of fine applejack next to me, and in a minute I’m going to take a drink, and if we were talking I’d offer you to drink with me, and you would, and eventually we would drink some more, so by the time the train would pull up to my stop I’d invite you to get off as well and spend the afternoon with me, and you would, and we’d get to my front porch and drink and sing until evening, and then my wife would come out and ask you to take supper with the family, and you would, and after we’re done we’d drink some more, and I’d offer you to spend the night in the spare room, and you would, and along about two o’clock in the morning I’d get up to go to the pump, and I’d pass by my daughter’s room, and there you’d be, in there with her, and I’d have to get out my pistol, and my wife would have to get dressed and go down the road and get the preacher, and I don’t want no God-damned son-in-law who don’t own a watch.

THIRD CHAPTER

BACK TO THE FUTURE

"IN A DREAM, Benjamin wrote in the mid-1920s, I took my life with a gun. When it went off, I did not wake up but saw myself lying for a while as a corpse. Only then did I wake." Awakening is the ultimate task of Benjamin’s two monumental book projects. What changes is what is identified as the fantasy and what is identified as the reality. The awakening in his early project assumes that the Paris of the nineteenth century is essentially a dream, even a nightmare, which his twentieth-century reader must snap out of. His theoretical work is presented as a dreamwork of the past. It is meant to help his contemporaries to wake up and smell the bourgeois miasma, to enable them to confront the present situation with eyes wide open.

Born at the end of one century, Benjamin can be read as the voice of a generation that came to its senses at the beginning of another. Writing in uncertain times, he found the European dreams of his parents neither attainable nor desirable. This may explain why his work resonates so powerfully with our confused experience of the twenty-first century, as well as with our skeptical attitude toward the American dreams that suffused the twentieth. Despite its uneasy relationship with the current zeitgeist, the New York manuscript can still be approached with the following advice in mind: "Before we have learned to deal with things in a given position, they have already changed several times. Thus, we always perceive events too late, and philosophy always needs to foresee, so to speak, the past."

Billed as a history of the present, The Manhattan Project is meant to set an alarm clock for its future dozing readers. It is our current state of dogmatic slumber to which Benjamin responds. Every epoch, certainly our own, dreams of the preceding one. Just as retro fashion cites specific decades, it is very likely that before long the entire twentieth century will consolidate in our minds into a distinct point of reference. This temporal comportment can also be conveyed through the title of a movie that was released shortly before Benjamin’s death, Back to the Future—not in the sense of return but of refusal.

The gesture of turning around to gaze at the city from which one flees is so irresistible that, in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, it is stronger than God’s word. It therefore feels as if The Manhattan Project is written in a new, odd tense, the past future, as in, "Tomorrow was the party. This, however, is not an attempt to repeat the past," Gatsby-style, but to make it replete with revolutionary potential.

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IN