Heavy, Heavenly, Heaving

Metaphysics is light, perhaps all too light. It abhors heaviness, which it associates with matter. Taken to the extreme, metaphysics has but one aim: to get rid of matter, to purge the material world as a whole, taken to be the corruption of true being. It wishes for thought or a disembodied soul to soar higher than the highest mountain peaks and layers of the atmosphere, higher than space itself, without any impediments. Metaphysical desire perennially germinates in an image and, above all, a feeling, of liberation from everything that pulls one down to Earth, not least the body and its fleshiness. When its sublime appetites are more moderate, metaphysics wishes to spiritualize matter, to elevate it by radically transforming its materiality, to suffuse it with spirit, as if matter were spiritless to begin with; to keep a spiritual body, glorious in its resurrected or heavenly existence. But the flight of metaphysics from heaviness (positively put, a flight toward pure light and lightness—away from the soil and everything that is soiled, from the obscurity, density, and self-enclosure of the Earth) leaves in its trail the heaviest, indigestible, non-decomposable materials that clog the world, the Earth, every organism, ecosystem, and elemental domain. This is the structuring paradox of metaphysical and postmetaphysical desire: the lighter, the heavier. Desire satisfied is desire frustrated, inverted, and perverted in its very realization.

Everything is already here in this opening salvo, which gets off the ground as quickly as metaphysical daydreams. But without forging another relation to heaviness, our references to “matter” and “materiality” ring hollow. It is therefore necessary to move more slowly, ponderously, with somewhat heavier, deliberate, and well-marked steps. Not only with the view to filling in the finer details, but also, and especially, in order to allow thought to experience its weight, which is also the weight of the world, its own fleshy materiality.

In English, the word “ponderous” ties together heaviness and laboriousness, as well as apparent dullness, awkwardness, and a slow-moving progression. To ponder is to think through, to weigh and measure every possibility in thought, to deliberate carefully. Jean-Luc Nancy takes comparable etymological indications in French, while noting that “etymological relations are of limited worth: their weight is only the rather light weight of the contingency of derivations.”1 A light weight is, nonetheless, heavier than no weight whatsoever, and “the contingency of derivations” may well be the only thing there is. We must ponder ponderousness, contend with it both theoretically and practically, when it comes to thought itself and to its effects (be they intended or not) in the world. 

Immediately, another paradox presents itself, namely that the act of philosophizing (often but not always claimed by metaphysics) is both lightning fast and drudgingly slow, eager to both take flight and bear the burden of rules, mostly of the self-imposed variety. Whether leaping or plodding along, philosophy deals with meaning, with the measuring and weighing of meanings. But however heavy that which is weighed, the measure itself is weightless. According to Nancy: “This is not to say that the intimate co-appropriation of thinking and weighing is a mere figure of speech, or the phantasm of a somewhat alchemical materialism. On the contrary, this appropriation is certain and absolute. The act of thinking is an actual weighing; it is the very weighing of the world, of things, of the real as meaning.”2

And what if weighing was “a mere figure of speech”? A metaphor is no less real than a literal signification, because the real too, as Nancy writes, is meaning; it is to be taken as one kind of meaning and weighed as such. The sleight of the metaphysical hand is not slipping a figure of speech in the place of the thing itself, but exempting the real from the exigencies of meaning-making and meaning-receiving, of encryption and interpretation, and assigning to it the status of the absolute, that immeasurable and incommensurable weight. Although brute facts usually fall upon us with the heaviest weight and are apparently free of interpretations, “the heaviest” still belongs on the scales, on which thinking is constantly weighing whatever it thinks.

Beneath a series of steps forming something like a philosophical method (which is itself at odds with the leap of metaphysics), the ground is, therefore, nothing purely substantial; the ground is meaning. Now, the ground of this ground, so to speak, is an act of weighing, a comparison of the heavier and the less heavy shorn of absolute values. This is why inquiring into the meanings of heaviness is analogous to raising the impossible question about the meaning of meaning.

What does it mean to ask: “How heavy is a city?” What exactly do we want to know when we put this question forward? Is it an idle curiosity we are after, the impressive measure abutting tens of trillions of tons? Are we seeking to find out, at bottom, the extent of the city’s earthiness, the gravitational pull of the immense object “city”? Are we wondering how to carry it, how to sustain or subtend it, if not on our shoulders, then in our imagination and practices of inhabiting, living—but also organizing, disorganizing, and reorganizing it?

In lieu of urging a choice among these various hermeneutical options, which may in effect reinforce each other, the questions themselves incite an extravaganza of the possibilities and impossibilities of meaning. This includes the meaning of possibility as something at least in principle realizable (that is to say, hefty outside the order of the actual), and of impossibility as exceedingly light due to its unrealizability. Now, according to its ponderous, carefully calibrated method, philosophy after Kant operates with what I would call “false bottom scales”: in weighing various meanings, thought weighs itself weighing in the absence of any fixed standards. In asking about the meaning of anything, it questions the act of weighing those meanings. The mystery of the transcendental subject and self-consciousness, glancing over the shoulder of consciousness, lies there.

That said, three senses of heaviness, three semantic weights of weight, stand out, particularly when contemplating the heaviness of a city.

1. Gravity: the pull of, and the belonging to, the Earth. More than a fact of physics, this pull has been interpreted metaphysically within the tradition of Judeo-Christian theology. With respect to gravity, matter is negatively spiritualized, so to speak, as that which weighs upon spirit, perverting and corrupting it. Gravity betokens fallenness at the precise point where the moral notion of sin intersects with the material fall of stuff, not least the city. Augustine excels in such literal-allegorical interpretations when he contrasts heavenly and earthly cities, the City of God and Sin City.

2. Indigestion: as, for instance, an aftereffect of a “heavy meal.” Heaviness is a mark of what refuses to pass, to become past and to hand itself over as a passage to the other, to becoming-other. It is a lingering on in a protracted present that, by accumulating psychically, physically/physiologically, economically, environmentally, and ontologically indigestible materials, devastates the possibility of the future. The rhythms of energy’s temporary stabilizations and releases are disrupted, and it is this disruption that is experienced as heavy in the blockages (of traffic, wealth, waste, and finally life itself) that plague a city. In this sense, a heavy city stands in the way of the metabolisms of matter and its forms. It is Dump City, the city as a dump, which—instead of an updated version of the Judeo-Christian tradition’s fallen Sin City, harkening all the way back to Sodom and Gomorrah—is a result of implementing in the world the ideals of incorruptible true being, attributed to the City of God, in actual materials and processes that resist decay or are out of sync with the time scales of organismic and ecosystemic metabolisms.

3. A burden: of responsibility. In Gnosticism, the body weighs as a burden on the soul. In this life, which for the Gnostics is tantamount to a living death, the soul must bear the body it is temporarily coupled with, constantly hiding from the realization that what it carries is a future corpse. Yet, heaviness as a burden—the bearing of it—also has an ineludible ethico-political dimension. Sustainability translated into the discourse of weight, of matter and its measures, far exceeds the task of reconciling economic goals with ecological concerns. The burden is not matter. It is not finitude either, but the form of our relation to them, blocking, or on the contrary, facilitating their inherent possibilities. Sustainable practices ensue from a double weighing: of how heavy an imprint the world can bear and how well we can bear the weight of the world. As an axiom, a city that is metabolically the lightest is also the one that is the heaviest on responsibility.

In Augustine, heaviness-qua-gravity pertains to civitas terrena, the earthly city, which is the city of the lost and subject to eternal damnation—so much so that at times he calls it civitas diaboli, the devilish city. Unlike the Gnostics, however, whom Augustine opposed, he does not wish to dispense with the heavy weight of matter altogether. His metaphysical desire is more moderate, envisioning the spiritualization of matter that would be consistent with the Christian notion of resurrection in the flesh, the fleshy existence of a renewed body in the heavenly city. “Many heavy earthly substances, such as lead,” he writes, “can receive a form from a craftsman which enables them to float in water. Are we to deny, then, that the human body may receive from the Almighty Artist a property which will enable it to be borne up to heaven and to dwell there?” 3 The etherealization of the modern and contemporary city, its idealized vision as a wireless, transparent, glass-and-steel, always-lit, nearly immaterial conglomerate, is yet another way in which the Augustinian dream of a weight uplifted, effortlessly elevated beyond physical heights in a spiritual-material body, has survived up to today.

Curiously, for Augustine, the heaviness of the earthly city is not exhausted in its heedless immersion in matter. It hinges on the rejection of responsibility and responsiveness in favor of mastery. He warns: “We must not pass over in silence the earthly city also: that city which, when it seeks mastery, is itself mastered by the lust for mastery even though all the nations serve it.”4 Libido dominandi, the lust for mastery, is the name Augustine bestows on the desire to dominate others, the desire that ultimately masters the master, dominates over dominators behind their backs. The earthly city seeks just this kind of mastery, namely, to establish dominion over the world, to be at home (domus) in it, to rule despotically and absolutely. More than that, the earthly city is born of libido dominandi, the highest (or, from another perspective, the lowest) expression of the desire to master other humans and other-than-humans. The implosion of this city under its own weight—its fallenness unrelated to the traditional notion of sin—has to do with its imposition on all that is.

It is not enough to rarefy a city that is materially heavy and dense without, at the same time, tackling the heavy burden of responsibility to transform the desire for mastery into responsiveness to the other. The industrial city is a dump, a rapidly massified aggregation of workers’ bodies thrown into overcrowded shantytowns that emerge virtually overnight, together with excrements, disease, and misery. As such, it yields both a mirror image and the engine for the accumulation of capital. Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) testifies to this predicament empirically, while Karl Marx analyzes it theoretically. Heaviness understood as indigestibility makes its appearance in Volume Three of Capital (1894), where Marx notes that “large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself."5 The material dump of the city is the obverse of the immaterial dump of industrial capital and, indeed, of any capital as the indifferent and undifferentiated “mass” (a word Marx uses frequently) of abstract value, sucked out of the singular actualizations of labor. The “rift … of social metabolism” is not an incidental feature; it is the cause and the ever-worsening effect making itself known on both sides of the dump.

Would alleviating the heaviness of the city render it less dump-like? Not quite, because when “all that is solid melts into air,” capital reaches its apogee. Virtuality, near weightlessness, and incorruptibility are the twisted symptoms of indigestibility, while weight, the tending of a body down to the Earth or to other bodies, is nothing other than love, in Augustinian thought, as much as in medieval thought more generally (like in Avicenna’s influential treatise on love). This association of love, thought, and weight is not limited to the medieval period, however: lovingly tending toward wisdom, gravitating toward it, approaching it with the entire bulk of one’s existence is at the heart of ancient philosophy, the love of wisdom that is the weight of thought. For his part, Augustine formulates it beautifully: “For the weight of bodies is, as it were, their love.”6 And, the weight of the body of the city is its love when it is discernment and approach, rather than an undifferentiated mass. The sheer materiality of weight is of a piece with the burden that is ecstatically assumed as love and statically taken on as responsibility. The heavy can be heavenly, after all.  

The indigestion of information, images, materials, emissions, structures, and concepts in a city transformed into a dump disrupts the rhythms of incorporation and expulsion, growth and decay. The weight of things is no longer their love; all the heavier, it dissolves into the indifferent and undifferentiated mass that knows neither love nor hate, neither heavenly nor earthly orientations, neither responsiveness nor responsibility. As I have put it elsewhere: “Mass is matter in bulk and unbearably light, a dump and a desert, the oppressive gravity of weight and the arid ideality of number. You will not recognize the outlines of material entities in it. The mass of the massive throw is not that of an object; it is mass as such. In the gargantuan outpouring of dumped existence, the principle of deindividuation is beyond dispute.”7 The blockages of metabolism and of other energy exchanges turn a city into a dump, regardless of how squeaky-clean it is, its streets shampooed, often using harmful and lingering chemicals, its sidewalks constantly repaved, its façades freshly painted, as they are in authoritarian regimes obsessed with sterility, purity, and heavily policed boundaries (between migrants and locals, between men and women, between plants, animals, and humans).

If lightness is not a viable alternative to heaviness, reproducing as it does spirit’s allergy to matter, among other things that do not live up to heavenly ethereality—and following the capitalist script of a practically implemented abstraction and dematerialization—then heaving might be a better option. Of course, a city, matter, and the entire massive dump of our contemporaneity that swallows them cannot be lifted, elevated, alleviated, relieved, or heaved in the sense of hauling something hefty with great effort. But cities are not actually homogeneous, traversed as they are by minute differentiations and vibrations, obeying rhythms or spasms of falling and rising, during which they become livable and lovable otherwise. In addition to signifying a purposeful effort, heaving is the occasional uplifting of heaviness itself, breathing in the wake of the world. Its impersonal breath animates the physiology of spirit faithful to the body, inspiring and expiring and aspiring; a spirit that does not abjure the law of gravity. A city heaves as much as the sea and the earth do, their elemental domains not exempt from the power of the dump, either. Its heaving relieves and preserves its heaviness.

A heaving city is not a buzzing one; it is not insanely energizing and energized by the insomniac flows of capital. Instead, it is thronging with its masses, whether human or not, whether of its inhabitants or infrastructures. Or, better, although the buzzing drowns out the heaving (sighs, breaths …), it does so incompletely: with enough patience and attention, you may detect the heaving in the upheavals of the dump, of matter, or of the city, rising and falling with the throngs that comprise them. Unblocking the metabolic pathways of being itself happens right there and then, with the rhythmicality of heaving restituting the order of time in a sequence of spasmodic upheavals or less fitful cadences of events.

In a heaving city, the burden (of responsibility, but not only) is sharply felt by the heaving mass itself, by the heaving masses themselves. There isn’t any more separation between the subjects of responsibility and those to whom they are responsible. When Paul Celan wrote, poetically, “The world is gone, I have to carry you [Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen],”8 he still assumed a minimal separation between the carrying and the carried that matched the dividing lines between life and death, not least one’s own. With the biomassification of existence, the bulk of dumped life-death carries itself as it heaves, and it is carried, sustained, and betrayed by its weight, by the gravity of its rising and falling thought. To think responsibly is to join its movements, be they rhythmic or spasmodic, to let the thought one still, by force of habit, calls “one’s own,” heave in the urban, material, elemental dump.