URBANISATION

___________

An Essayistic sketch concerning

human formalization

Herbert A.C. ten Thij

It took some time and certainly not only that, but now ever so gradually we know little left from essential differences between man and ant. Since the first spoken word and with an alarming, delightful confidence the overwhelming exploitation indeed of the idea of human being lasts already in all sorts of variants that are sometimes just as noble as well as horrible, a matter of mind. A remaining passion, most certainly, but the surprise is that a steady ever-felt necessity for some legitimation of it seems more and more to have ended up in obvious oblivion. Look, industrious as ants, the citizens of the world gather in a crowd, ever forsaking integrity and style in a quest as lifelong as easy-going for pleasantness and satiation, to no-one's use by preference. Just in time - exactly when it does not matter any more - a redemption of a passionate and apparently always inevitable primitive longing demonstrates itself in a hand over hand increasing human formalization, through which it seems as if the possibility of an extreme form of immortality must be reached. A symptom by which all relativities do not need to expand further than the given moment and that is coupled unmistakably with the now practically completed, full urbanisation of 'our' planet.

The definitive impetus to the decisive development of this widely adopted attitude is stemming from the time when the concept of structure first took root. From the historical turns to a state of mind, more often called Romanticism in a conclusive sense or otherwise, which -for that matter- perhaps probably never can change anymore in the over and over again fluctuating, but nonetheless continual recurrences of its shattered growth, by which however, simultaneously, the understanding of the actual embedding of human existence becomes progressively clearer displayed, there has been fully formed at once the mind's zygote that rushes to maturity as a definitive constituent of every horizon of all thinking. But the idea of alienation that accompanies each humanity foal following reigns not a realm of its own in the globe covering urbanisation. Originally already encompassed in language, this notion is also part of the concept of structure and eo ipso by that of design, as a condition coming along with the functionalities that are determined by this ordering. Hence structuring or designing implies a further externalizing of this welfare term. Stuck in this way in a web of functions unicity ends as absolutum falling prey to the principle of repeatability of possibilities. Thus, especially as a result and rather hyperbolically summarized, optimistic spinning mankind seem in the long run, free from famine, house, land and tradition to be happily convicted to the mind giving primacy of society. And for people with an unbearable last little nostalgia there are already alienists and psychologists trained, the experts who treat in easy understandable grief. Sad sorrow. All the rest runs to amusement. Thus, likewise, land that has been once identical with place or with the life's horizon of all needs, is lost in landscape. At last entombed under the affixtures of the city structures the earth's crust functions merely within the scope of technology. So in the urbanisation, as continuous culmination of technological capacity and the massive population growth that goes with it, all further human development materializes definitively irreversible, conditional upon the alienating perspective of mode, to erosion, dislocation, denaturalization or human formalization.

In the urbanised society, that has become by these means a continuing technological design, human formalization suits as the correct opportunist, human self-structuring. By this design human facticity is always functional related. Nearly paradoxical by the nature of a resistance offering self-surrender, the possibility of human facticity is again confirmed in human formalization. Simultaneously however human formalization attached to facticity annihilates the idea of existential contingency. The data in a technological design are determined rather as functional than situational. Or, otherwise, the ant, Latin: formica, has in its nest its place according to its duties which, as far as known meanwhile, are distributed by food ever received or by age. So-called condemnation to freedom is in the urbanised society completely irrelevant. It may be true that in the moment of human formalization a freedom is within reach. But this freedom remains through its very abstraction already merely inadequate.

Ants suck some beetle's glands to find some comfort, as men have resort to what a child hands; what differs, as should be, is one's shivers the other never can see from where it stands. In human formalization as answer, as screening simultaneously from the urbanisation order that compels for that purpose, possibly hides also a new beginning of a thinking still further to be recaptured, if so needed. It is only just what need is. To that perhaps can be added that after Homer no new gods came to live on Olympus.

Nuenen, August 1994

Bucharest, Eindhoven, Stockholm,

September 1994

Translated from the Dutch by the Author.

First published in England 1995 by

Stone Man Press

Gayles

North Yorkshire DL11 7JA

ISBN 1 899977 00 7