Rus in Urbe

Levine's use of the image comparing the bust of Shakespeare to the “Cannibal New Zealand Chief” is hard to forget. He misses an opportunity though to implicate science in the process of cultural distinction and the invention of refinement. In order to take effect Culture (in its “low” or anthropological sense, as well as for the partisans of “high” culture) must become naturalized. Perhaps the height of artifice in Levine’s book is his account of the public parks which were created to refine those who walked through them (202-205). These were places where an industrially managed image of Nature was intended to improve people. Ideologically, this is an important development because the very thing from which we were supposed to “lift ourselves” was annexed into its defense: what was “good” was simultaneously highly cultivated and absolutely naturalized (perfect fodder for the social Darwinists).

We can’t ignore the invention of the pastoral (from Theocritus on) as a recurring supplement to the “bustle” and “degeneracy” of cosmopolitan life. The non-human world is infinitely more complicated than the sphere of human culture and yet the practice of reducing it to a simple, balanced, harmonious, static, and unchanging realm is a way of spatializing social and cultural anxieties, supporting the fantasy that somewhere everything makes sense and is available to human senses and that there is a natural order against which we might judge what we perceive as deviance in our own societies.

Levine demonstrates how the park was used to inscribe the social order into the natural order. He writes that “oases of culture were necessary because disorder was embodied in the very structure and appearance of the nation’s cities.” He quotes Olmsted who complains that the image of the capital is “broken” and represents “disunity.” “Architects and planners,” he writes, “struggled to reorder society, to fight chaos, to create meaning out of what they conceived to be the frightening anarchy of urban life” (203). His project, it would seem, would be to produce an image of the city and its public life in which all the antagonisms and contradictions were reconciled in a separate sphere of harmonious order.

I would be interested in knowing more about how these images of scientific and “natural order” became useful to the purveyors of cultural hierarchy. Levine offers us a detailed account of cultural critics’ debates among themselves but I would like to place this within a larger framework. Thoreau in Walking, for instance, linked great cultural traditions and creative virility (his examples are the Ancient Greeks, Romans, specific indigenous cultures, and Confucius) with closeness and engagement with non-human natures and landscapes. His engagement with and deployment of the category of Wildness certainly informed his democratic politics. This seems a stark contrast to the domesticated walk-thru’s aimed at a cultural urban elite.