The Ethics of Indifference

Modern social theory has frequently represented city life as isolating, as degrading of social ties and as inimical to community. In another register, however, urban contexts have also been primary sites for imagining and re-imagining forms of community, especially on the basis of shared social spaces or elective identities. The discussion in this article explores this relation between solitude and community in the city. While a language of community has been important for articulating various politics of difference, I suggest that an ethics of indifference also opens up certain rights to the city. The point, however, is not simply to set a conception of indifference or anonymity against one of community or visibility, but rather to think about dissociation as a certain kind of social relation, to consider the solitude of cities as a common, if ambivalent, property. The discussion begins by addressing the nature of indifference and anonymity in urban contexts before turning to New York as the site for recent narratives of a private urban life, and a more public death, in order to explore the complex interplay of difference and indifference, community and solitude, in the city.