amongst youth, in times on the point of changing, in moments of creative
expression, and so on.
Using this framework amongst others, I want to turn to the embryonic politics
of this chapter by considering some of the ways in which an active, so-called
‘prosocial’ everyday form of kindness might be installed in cities as a value which
goes beyond ‘simple’ civility. This would not consist simply of the installation of
good manners, as in certain middle-class mores, or of the inculcation of a kindness
militant, as in certain religions, or the installation of a forced state project, as in
the proposals to build up ‘social capital’ being proposed by many governments
around the world currently. Rather, it would be a way of producing generosity in
the body from the start by emphasizing what Bloch calls ‘productivity’, the
construction of a new horizon out of the subconscious, the conscious and the not-
yet-conscious. Writing from another context, Diprose (2002) has called the ethical
correlate of this kind of transhuman approach, which privileges emergence and
becoming,^29 ‘corporeal generosity’ but I think that this phrase runs the risk of
falling back into the domestic model of kindness that I am concerned to escape,
a model that too often ignores the fact that force and violence permeate political
life and, to an extent at least, define politics as a domain and that mean, to use a
classically Weberian insight, that nicely honed ethical actions do not necessarily
lead to morally desirable consequences (Warner 2002). This is not, then, intended
to be some starry-eyed account. I am quite clear that such a stance would not only
be utopian in the worst sense but may also be trying to act against the basic features
of interactional intelligence.
Of course, it would be possible to argue that certain kinds of generosity are
being installed in cities continually in the many daily acts of everyday life. For
example, a mother instructs her child not to pull another child’s hair. Or someone
helps a frail person to cross the road. But I want to go a little farther than this
in that it seems to me that a kind city has to work on a number of dimensions, not
all of which are conventionally ‘human’.^30 Kindness has to be extended to other
kinds of urban denizen, including animals. More to the point this kindness has
to be built into the spaces of cities. Thus cities have to be designed as if things
mattered, as if they could be kind too. Cities would then become copying machines
in which a positive affective swirl confirmed its own presence.
So what kinds of relationships should be possible in cities, given that there is
rather more misanthropy than commentators are willing to own up to, and equally
rather too much romantic love?^31 I have tried to argue that too little has been
made of kindness and compassion as a means of structuring cities in the race for
a higher plane which just isn’t there. In turn this suggests a twofold political task.
On one side, we obviously need to continue to pursue a conventional macropolitics
of urban care which draws on the deep wells of caring and compassion that
currently typify many cities, the result of the often unsung work put in by the
employees of various welfare systems, all manner of voluntary workers, and the
strivings of an army of ‘carers’. On the other side, we need an affirmative micro-
politics of productivity which attempts to inject more kindness and compassion
into everyday interaction, the arena on which I will concentrate (see Thrift 200 4 b).
But malice aforethought 215