'The dream is the royal road to the unconscious,' Sigmund Freud says. Contrary to what one might assume, the unconscious is not a chaotic chaos of drives, but is composed of the building blocks of the known world. Its highest condensation is the city, from which the individual consciousness feeds its imaginations, its fears and desires.

‘Gateway to the world’: it just trips off the tongue, does it not? But if it’s a gateway to the world, where exactly does that put you? Not yet – or no longer – in the world? The seemingly innocent formulation is in fact a paradox. A paradox is something that opens up space for differing opinions. Which is precisely why philosophy enjoys toying with it so much. And not just philosophy. Whenever we think about gates, gateways and thresholds, we come up against fundamental issues pertaining to thinking and therefore to human existence. Indeed, waiting beyond the gate is always the Other, there to challenge all that we consider our own, making us curious, but also frightening us, and questioning us. For example, the threshold of consciousness. Something you are compelled to step across. 

As Sigmund Freund, the founder of psychoanalysis, famously put it, ‘dreams are the royal path to the unconscious’. The dream is the realm of the in-between, the threshold between wakefulness and sleep, the place where you encounter yourself as the Other. As is so often the case with Freud, things are more complicated than they appear at first glance as most of the time he turns the certainties of everyday thinking on their head. The unconscious, then, is not a mystical or even chaotic world located beneath consciousness, as is regularly claimed. It’s actually the exact opposite: the unconscious is structured; it stands there unwaveringly and defines us in our capabilities. Indeed, the fantasies, the things we imagine for ourselves, are all made up from the armoury of the world known to us and surrounding us. Why do I mention this here? Because a city represents these capabilities in their utmost concentration. If there were no media capable of continually beaming us elsewhere, the city we live in would be the blueprint of the unconscious, with individual consciousnesses sketched onto it. A city’s routes and locations, its intersections and constellations provide these fears and desires with visualisation material and, consequently, with ways of combating or fulfilling them – and vice versa. The shape of a city shapes the imaginings we believe to be our own. For us today it is difficult to think in this way because we find ourselves in a tradition of thought that would have us believe that we ourselves are the creators or originators of our fears and desires. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel considered the human being as ‘this empty nothing’ that absorbs all these scenes into itself in a ‘night’ bereft of contemplation, in the darkness of which the pure self has to resolve the conflicts within itself. This self, however, is not pure; rather, it is a place of trans-shipment for conflicting forces of the most secular kind. Being determines consciousness, as Karl Marx once phrased it. And this is true not just of personal economic circumstances, but quite literally of all manner of experience. In the 19th century for instance, there was little consensus, if any, on whether the introduction of street lighting – and, with it, the relinquishment of what was perceived as a natural threshold – was a good idea. The argument raised was the wanton interference with divine creation, but also the need to tame the human inclination to let oneself be led by circumstances and abandon the civilised self.

There is a painting by Francisco de Goya entitled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, and the question is whether sleep is the absence of reason, which is why the monsters emerge, or whether it is not reason itself that creates these monsters in the first place, which then go about their nefarious deeds while we sleep, purely and simply because reason has no truck with them. The question (not just in Hamburg) was whether street lights turned night into day or day into night – and what ultimately would prevail. Does night lighting improve societal control over primal urges or does it in fact provide them with a stage setting? It’s the question of thresholds and gateways between consciousness and the unconscious, as and in the city: how and where we become aware of that which we would rather not think about. As far as night lighting is concerned, the matter has been resolved: Hamburg now has more than 120,000 street lamps, i.e. one lamp to every fifteen inhabitants, as it were. All the more important is the question, then, of where that which resists consciousness manifests itself. For what we repress emerges all the more mercilessly, but not in the places that our consciousness has reserved for it. It is said that there is no place in kitsch for all that is ugly. A city must resist this one-sided imagination and can never be a pure haven of the good and the beautiful; to do so would be to risk losing its vibrancy. It is always worthwhile looking at a city to see how it hides in plain sight that which no one really wants to see. 

In his philosophical miniatures, philosopher and curator Daniel Tyradellis took various constellations of people, objects, and places in HafenCity as his starting point for a reflection on urban living for the audio library of THE GATE (2021). These texts are published here exclusively for the first time. Chapter 3 will be published soon.