Deserted cities of the heart
In Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, an astrophysicist, radicalized by reading Silent Spring and being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, decides the human race is irredeemable and sells it out to an alien invader. I started reading the book a few weeks ago; now it has become grimly timely. Demagogues now would have us believe that the virus is an alien invasion force while also trying to sell millions of us out to it as quickly as possible. We already have intensive air pollution that ruins lung function and truncates lives; coronavirus just promises to accelerate the process: fast capitalism in its apotheosis.
But the eschatological fantasies of Liu’s anti-humanity cadres are also echoed, if faintly, in the celebration of abandoned urban spaces as some sort of coronavirus consolation. These are not like the images of empty grocery shelves, which are just about participating in panic. They evoke something more sedate, serene. Early on in the crisis, when Italy was the hardest hit, the clarity of Venice’s canals were widely discussed. Without boat traffic in them, the sediment settled, making them nearly transparent. CNN quoted a random person saying, “What a marvel this Venice was; this virus brought something ... beautiful." That sentiment was echoed on lots of Twitter feeds that shared video of the canals, the fish that were suddenly visible. Implied in this sharing was this message: See how nice the world is without tourists, without other people living their lives by their own priorities and privileges? This is the way I like to see the world, with no one but me to see it. The way things “really should be” is the way they are when human activity is subtracted. The canals are supposed to be clear and stagnant.
The clear canals may be taken as emblematic of a broader silencing. In an essay for the Point, Justin E.H. Smith wrote, “We have little idea what the world is going to look like when we get through to the other side of this, but it is already perfectly clear that the ‘discourses’ of our society, such as they had developed up to about March 8 or 9, 2020, in all their frivolity and distractiousness, have been decisively curtailed, like the CO2 emissions from the closed factories and the vacated highways.” He concludes that if an invading alien force came to Earth, there is no reason to believe that it would even have any interest in humanity (even to exterminate it), given that it's only our hubris that leads us to believe that we are “this planet’s true and legitimate representatives.”
The fascination with the images of empty cities is in part a fascination with that hubris — a means of fetishizing it rather than overcoming it or rejecting it. Cities are seen as especially beautiful when rendered useless, because then they appear not as practical spaces in which commerce transpires but as monuments to humanity’s transformational power in the abstract, something that doesn’t require collaboration, competition, or conflict but just seems just to exist as a natural force.
At the same time, the images give the cities the deserted quality that has often been reserved for conventional natural landscapes, where an absence of people becomes a signifier of “naturalness.” Landscape paintings mask whatever alterations humans have made to the land so it can appear as given, as inherent or inevitable. How the land is framed is both foregrounded and effaced: A particular vantage is isolated and idealized as characteristic, as typical, as frameless.
The photos of people-less cities extend that mood of givenness to urban landscapes, suggesting how they endure without us or despite us. We can regard cities as natural environments to which humans have adapted, much like the species at the bottom of the ocean have adapted to life without light. From that point of view, humans are othered, becoming a species for remote observation. By looking at the images, we can see ourselves as exempt, as belonging to an evolution beyond that, the contours of which are emerging in the strange dislocations we are now experiencing in everyday life. Our ability to appreciate these images doesn’t underscore our ultimate harmony or interconnection with the natural world and the life that purportedly re-emerges when the highways are finally vacated. Rather it lets us use mediation (our ability to consume representations) to rearticulate our exceptionality. We can assume the subject position of the camera and pretend that makes us immune to being objects in the world.
The deserted cities allow us to imagine that we’re in a comfortable position from which to enjoy them — that the erasure of humanity doesn’t actually include us. As this Fast Company piece by Cherine Fahd and Sara Oscar notes, “The viewer is looking at a representation of the scene, not the scene itself, from a position of far-off comfort.” This becomes obvious when you actually walk around a deserted city, which is certainly uncanny but inspires more grief than delight. The images let us consume the distance from the emptiness as much as the emptiness itself. Wherever we are can then feel more full.
In this New York Times photo essay on the images of empty public spaces, Michael Kimmelman suggests the photos are hopeful because he claims that in their eerie, ruin-porn-like emptiness they “remind us that beauty requires human interaction.” But that reading strikes me as somewhat idealistic; he dismisses what seems to me their more fundamental allure, that they offer the vicarious experience of “the wonder of bygone explorers coming upon the remains of a lost civilization.” That is, they give viewers a kind of imperial transcendence, a sense of sublime survival. “Beauty” might be, as Kimmelman claims, a thing we “bestow” with social interaction, but the images remind us also that the consumption of beauty can be had unilaterally, placing us at a perspective that provides pleasure by protecting us from complicity or vulnerability.
The empty-cities images remind me of the photos of dead malls that have served over the past decade or so as symbols of the oft-predicted “retail apocalypse.” I spent lots of time working and hanging out in a mall as a teenager, so these sorts of images have always been a form of bracing anti-nostalgia for me, like seeing your childhood home being bulldozed. But I also tend to read the dead-mall images as metonyms for the dead end of consumerism. They depict not the absence of commerce but its negation.
Many people have predicted that one of the lasting effects of the pandemic will be the end of conventional retail, because everyone will have gotten fully acclimated to home delivery and its conveniences. That prediction seems premature; it’s impossible to tell just how drastically our everyday life and our perception of what is convenient will be reworked by the experience of extended isolation.
It's so tempting to treat the images of empty cities as symbols, as evocations, as metaphors, as prophecies, but the most compelling and troubling thing about them is that they can be taken as just direct representations of the world outside as it is. Our old lives are over, where we lived them are ghost towns. The photos seem like documents of something historic and exceptional that we lived through, only we're still living it. There is an apparent finality to total emptiness that might help us pretend that the crisis is already over, and the world is there, where we left it, and not in the social relations and the sorts of choices we're now facing to try to remake it.