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April 06, 2022
"Metropolis on the Styx" (2007)
by David L. Pike
DEEPSIX
Do I have a plan to approach Pike?
I thought a few snazzy/silly quotes would be in
line, and I of course considered using my usual
randomly choosen page numbers... But then I
thought it might be better to skim for some of
his more pretentious namedrops out of the index
and examine what he had to say about them, like:
Foucault
Freud
Heidegger
There's a problem though, in that Pike's namedrops are often *just*
namedrops, along the lines of: "As Marx, Jesus Christ, John Cleese,
Thomas Jefferson and Johnny Rotten have all made clear, capitalism
is the big fedinkus."
Heidegger gets three page references (p 9, 74 and
154), but in all of them he's in a list of the
same three names, Spengler, Mumford, and
Heidegger. Here's where the trio is introduced:
"Influential antiurban historians and
philosophers such as Lewis Mumford,
Oswald Spengler, and Martin Heidegger
presented the modern city as
irredeemable and pernicious;"
The presence of Spengler in a list of "antiurban
historians" may seem strange-- he's much better (I wonder if strictly
known as a purveyor of wonky theories of cultural speaking this material
evolution-- but Pike (partially) justifies it qualifies as "influential",
with material from a more obscure work by Spengler but let us not quibble--
unless it's to contrive a
more amusing cheapshot.)
The second occurrence of the trio includes
a justification for including Mumford:
"For Lewis Mumford, as for Oswald Spengler, Martin
Heidegger, and others, 'Every man was for himself;
and the Devil, if he did not take the hindmost, at
least reserved for himself the privilege of
building the cities.' " -- p. 73
Why Heidegger's name is in
the list is no where explained. The third index entry
for Heidegger is even
Whatever connection Pike has in mind more slight, it's just
remains a Mystery... (Maybe Heidegger said the phrase "especially
something or other about satanic mills in in Spengler's and
"The Questioning Concerning Technology"?) Heidegger's Germany".
Maybe a more productive approach to trolling in this
index would be to snag some names I'm not tremendously
familiar with, and the go look at something more
reliable and authoritative, like wikipedia pages.
A personal reading list for another day:
o "the French urban sociologist and Marxist
philosopher Henri Lefebvre" -- p. 11
o Georges-Eugène Hausmann
p. 131, 182, 188, 195, 206, 221
"metropolitan improvements"
o Eugène Hénard
p. 204, 210, 312
"urbanism: rationalist movement"
o Pandaemonium
p. 66, 72, 74, 75, 79, 82, 86, 153
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