Mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities.
Clay Shirky
It’s in James Joyce’s dazzlingly inventive masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, published on the brink of World War II, where the acronym “HCE” first enters the scene, coined after the book’s antihero, a certain Humphrey Chimpden Ear-wicker, barkeep and man of the world. Throughout Finnegans Wake, Joyce puns and plays with H. C. Earwicker, whose dreaming mind becomes the psychological space in which the Wake’s drama unfolds. If Ulysses’s Leopold Bloom is an Every(day)man, then old Earwicker, old HCE, is an Every(night)man, a universal dreaming figure. Thus the other epithet Joyce gives Humphrey, the other use of the acronym HCE: Here Comes Everybody, the “normative letters,” Joyce says, of a “manyfeast munificent,” a sort of Jungian archetypal image of our collective, desiring unconscious, reliving in a single night’s sleep the whole of human history.1 The dreamer is “more mob than man,” jokes Joyce,2 “an imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalization.”3
For a while I dreamed of calling this book Here Comes Everybody, this urban book, because today those normative letters, this HCE, seem to capture what life on planet Earth actually is: urban life, planet urban. A few years back, however, Clay Shirky, a freelance writer and sometime communications professor at New York University, beat me to it. He penned a book bearing those exact same normative letters—Here Comes Everybody— bearing an intriguing subtitle, The Power of Organizing without Organizations.4 I’d gravitated toward this book, jealously, with eager expectations of high-spirited Joycean inflections, of Joycean influences, of Joycean puns and artistry, and of Joycean desire. In fact, there’s none to be had: it’s as if Earwicker never existed, had never had his great fall. Instead, Here Comes Everybody is an artless book, a superficial book in many ways, un-Joycean in its lack of existential depth about human life; and yet, ironically, or maybe not so ironically, in its very superficiality it makes a pretty convincing case for the new forms of sociability our digital age begets. Perhaps the lack of content is Shirky’s major point, his major strength: that what we have now is a banal world of virtual flows and forms without any content, a deterritorialized world where territoriality doesn’t matter anymore, where everybody really is getting together on Facebook and Twitter; and it’s there, through new digital media, where our collective instinctual behavior is now getting expressed, where our real future becoming resides.
Shirky’s book quickly became a bestselling user guide for the new social media movement; and its thesis applies as much to the corporate sector as the revolutionary sector, to business organization as well as grassroots organization. In this latter respect, we’re not too far removed from John Holloway’s autonomous Marxist chant from 2002: to change the world without taking power, to organize without organizations. Shirky’s great appeal, and doubtless part of the book’s success, is his optimism, his inclusive everybody, his popularism and pluralism. Social media, he reckons, have the potential to empower everybody; they can deprofessionalize certain select sectors of the creative professions (like journalism and photojournalism); engender creative, collaborative work for lots of “ordinary,” nonspecialist people; and they can coordinate unprecedented mass activism and mobilization. As Shirky writes, now “we have groups that operate with a birthday party’s informality and a multinational’s scope” (48).
Shirky’s ideas are hip and contagious, especially when framed around such suggestive and provocative rubrics as: “Cooperation as Infrastructure”; “Ordinary Tools, Extraordinary Effects”; “The Global Talent Pool”; “Rapid and Simple Group Formation”; “A Possible Future for Collective Action”; “Revolution and Coevolution.” Shirky’s optimism spills over into the world of social protest: “Why is so much collective action focused on protest,” he asks, “with its emphasis on relatively short-term and negative goals? One possible explanation is that it is simply easier to destroy than to create; getting things started in a group takes a lot more energy than trying to stop them. That explanation is hard to support, though, given the fecundity of other kinds of social media. Once you know what to look for, evidence of group creativity is everywhere.”5 Collective action, says Shirky, is perhaps more focused on protesting against something than affirming a cause because the latter is simply harder to do; it is harder to build a politics based on sharing and collaboration and then use it positively to create. As a result, Shirky thinks “that collective action requires a much higher commitment to the group and the group’s shared goals than things like sharing of pictures or even collaborative creation of software” (312).
In the pages of the New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell endorses this latter belief while taking Shirky’s central thesis to task. Gladwell is surprisingly radical in his gritty offline bent. He thinks that new social media let the faint-hearted unite within the homely confines of their own four walls. Online activism, Gladwell says, even as a form of protest, of grumbling about things one doesn’t like, is gutless at heart and inspires only “weak-tie” radicalism. It can’t provide what social change really needs: people risking life and limb, as in the 1960s lunch counter sit-ins in Woolworth’s, which kick-started the African American Civil Rights Movement. What mattered most there, according to Gladwell, was the physicality of bodies, bodies being present in space, the “strong-tie” connections that bonded people to a cause and to each other.
Shirky considers online activism an upgrade from the past. “But is it simply a form of organizing weak-tie connections,” Gladwell asks, “that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger? It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any effect.” In high-risk activism, what seems crucial is your personal commitment to a movement, your personal contacts, your “critical friends” who gather, who show up in physical form somewhere, and who get the shit beaten out of them by the cops if you make wrong (or right!) decisions. “The kind of activism associated with social media,” Gladwell says, “isn’t like this at all. Twitter is a way of following people you may have never met. Face-book is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances.… This is in many ways a wonderful thing.… But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.… In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.”6 As such, for Gladwell, the revolution will never be tweeted.
In one sense, Shirky and Gladwell are both right. In another sense, they’re both wrong—wrong because perhaps neither thesis is incommensurate with the other, and each thesis is insufficient in itself. Isn’t it possible, then, to conceive of activism today as at once weak-tie and high-risk, both online and offline, deterritorialized and reterritorialized, invariably at the same time? Dialectical, in other words. Indeed, wouldn’t the Joycean dream space, the normative space of HCE, locate itself somewhere in-between, somewhere that’s both and neither, somehow spaced-out and spaced-in, every day and every night, a flow as well as a thing, taking place here as well as there? (Gladwell might have forgotten that in many countries like Iran and China even weak-tie online activism is a risky business, enough to get you arrested and tortured by the authorities. It, too, requires lots of courage.)
Maybe another way of conceiving online and offline activism, and of Shirky’s and Gladwell’s online and offline modes of thought, is how Marx conceives of the circulation of capital in his introduction to the Grundrisse: as a series of interrelated movements, of dialectical shifts of fixity and flow, of production and distribution, of consumption and exchange. Only instead of capital in motion, what’s getting plotted now is the circulation of revolt, necessarily on a planetary scale. In other words, activism happens someplace, is produced someplace, materializes itself offline, consummates itself somewhere. But it circulates elsewhere; moves virtually, online; and transforms itself emotionally, modifying itself continuously in its overall dialectical groove. “The conclusion we reach,” says Marx, “isn’t that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity.”7 Each supplies the other with its objects, Marx insists; each begets its other. The circulation of immaterial revolt is, in this light, a factor of production in concrete subversion.
Framing the debate thus likewise raises questions about the city itself: Would a book about Here Comes Everybody now necessarily have to be a book about the city? Would the city constitute the “strong-tie” space in which an offline HCE expresses itself? If so, are its normative letters embodied in RTTC, in the right to the city movement? Is HCE really another way of reframing RTTC, which is to say its tautological reconstitution? Or, conversely, if we take Shirky’s thesis to heart rather than to task, if we really run with it, is there still any role for the city at all? Wouldn’t the principal dialectical fault-line lie between a virtual and a terrestrial activism? Isn’t what counts that you’re online, in tune, there in spirit—and, occasionally, just occasionally, there, somewhere, in kind? But where, we might ask, is this somewhere?
When “the right to the city” (RTTC) was voiced as a radical “cry and demand” in the late 1960s, its principal theorist was of course Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre was the first scholar not only to conceptualize this democratic right but also to do so within Marxism, affirming it when the majority of people on Earth were then rural dwellers. But he saw things coming, saw certain things becoming. Fifty years on, though, how does RTTC fare now that Lefebvre’s urban revolution has extended its borders and corroded almost all residues of agrarian life? Lefebvre’s fabled urban revolution has largely consummated itself; but has it equally consumed itself, devouring the city itself, rendering a rethink of the whole question of a right to the city, a rethink in light of the paradox of digital media and planetary urbanization?
Lefebvre’s thesis, first expressed in the mid-1960s, could be distilled into the following proposition: Without a center there can’t be any urbanity; what was taken away must be politically reclaimed. The right to the city was the right to reclaim centrality, the right to the city as a use value, the right to reinvigorate both urban life and Marxist politics. (For Lefebvre the two went hand-in-hand.) Such was the leitmotiv of a series of books he penned, in rapid-fire succession, on the city and urban politics in the latter half of that tumultuous decade. The first was a historical book, La proclamation de la Commune, from 1965, a text that got Lefebvre into trouble with Guy Debord and the Situationists because the latter accused him of plagiarism. The Situationists had drafted their very own “Theses on the Commune” in 1962, fourteen of them, in which they’d made pretty much the same points as Lefebvre: The 1871 Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth century; it was essentially leaderless; and it was “the only realization of a truly revolutionary urbanism to date.”8
Lefebvre, like the Situationists, was interested in the idea of style, the Communards’ revolutionary style. Out of this interest he sketched what he called “the theory of the event”: What constitutes a revolutionary event; what are its objective and subjective moments; what was unique and general to events; and how can we interpret such an event historically and geographically, politically and sociologically? This is what Lefebvre tried to do with the Commune, on the basis of archival work on Communard diaries and historical documents, carried out at Milan’s Feltrinelli Library. With La proclamation de la Commune, Lefebvre suggested that Marxist revolutionary strategy would have a city basis, not a factory basis; it would have a spontaneous, anarchistic moment, too, taking the form of an urban social movement, involving petty bourgeois elements and artisans as well as the “traditional” working class. With this book, which still warrants English translation, it isn’t clear whether Lefebvre was excavating the past or foreseeing the future present (May 1968).
On the run up to 1968, Lefebvre wrote Le droit à la ville with high hopes that his thinking on the city might enter the collective consciousness of soixante-huitards. To a certain extent it did: When one thinks of the student street protests, one instinctively thinks of Lefebvre’s clarion call, “the right to the city.” But Lefebvre’s May 1968 book was actually The Explosion [l’irruption] (1968), written (or dictated) as cars were still smoldering in central Paris and when students were still on the streets.9 The dialogue dramatically lives out a lot of the thesis on the right to the city, even down to being ignored by the French Communist Party. The Explosion in question was really The Eruption, a better title, because that indicates something erupting like a volcano, not exploding like a bomb. A bomb implies something random, something purely stochastic where and when it explodes, whereas a volcano has a certain determinacy, a certain predictability, a certain causality. So, too, with May 1968 as an urban uprising. Lefebvre uses his theory of event taken from his Paris Commune book to look again at what was unique and general in events, at what was old and new, structural and superstructural, urgent and needed.
In all these books, and in The Urban Revolution (1970) and La pensée marxiste et la ville (1972) that followed in the “post-1968 decade,” Lefebvre likens suburbanization and “New Town” expansion to a “de-urbanized” kind of urbanization. It was an explicit class warfare, he insisted, a denial of working-class urbanity, whose rank-and-file in France found themselves decanted and banished to the burgeoning peripheral banlieues, to new high-rise housing estates. At the same time, the rich bourgeois and assorted well-heeled conquered the center, whose playground it henceforth became, dancing to the tune of rentier and financial capital, to real estate speculation, and to “historic” preservation and gentrification. “I have the feeling,” Lefebvre mused back in the late 1960s, “that the center is becoming ‘museumified’ and managerial. Not politically, but financially managerial. The metamorphosis of the city and the urban continue.”10
The practice seemed a lot more appropriate to continental Europe than to North America, of course, where rich and middle-class people, especially white middle-class people, had done precisely the opposite, long ago fleeing the center in favor of the periphery. In much U.S. urbanism, the right to the city, the right to centrality, is precisely what many urban dwellers already have. Needless to say, it’s a right not worth very much, given that those with power and wealth had long suburbanized themselves, leaving to the dispossessed the task of reassembling the motley shards of downtown centrality. To be fair, Lefebvre’s real point still stands solid: in both instances an anti-urban trump card has been played. “The suburbs are urban,” Lefebvre says, “within a dissociated morphology”; they constitute “the empire of separation and scission between elements of what had been created as unity and simultaneity”; the old center, meanwhile, “remains in a state of dispersed and alienated actuality.”11
The city, for Lefebvre, is “an exquisite œuvre of praxis and civilization.”12 This makes “it” very different from any other product, from any other commodity like, say, a car. “This œuvre,” Lefebvre said, “is use value and the product is exchange value.” But the eminent use of the city, that is, of its streets and squares, buildings and monuments, is “la fête (which consumes unproductively, without any other advantage than pleasure and prestige)” (66). And this unproductive pleasure should be a free-for-all, not a perk for the superprivileged. To be sure, throughout history cities have been seats of commerce, places where goods and services got peddled, where spaces were animated by trade and rendered cosmopolitan by markets. Medieval merchants, Lefebvre says, “acted to promote exchange and generalize it, extending the domain of exchange values; yet for them the city was much more than an exchange value” (101). Indeed, it’s only a relatively recent phenomenon that cities themselves have become exchange values, lucre in situ, jostling with other exchange values (cities) nearby, competing with their neighbors to hustle some action—a new office tower here, a new mall there, rich flâneurs downtown, affluent residents uptown.
Industrialization commodified the city, set in motion the decentering of the city, created cleavages at work and in everyday life: “Expelled from the city,” Lefebvre writes, “the proletariat will lose its sense of œuvre. Dispensable from their peripheral enclaves for dispersed enterprises, the proletariat lets its own conscious creative capacity dim. Urban consciousness vanishes” (77). “Only now,” reckoned Lefebvre in the 1960s, with his own emphases, “are we beginning to grasp the specificity of the city,” a product of society and of social relations yet a special feature within those relations (100). Urbanization reacts back on society, for better or for worse, and has run ahead of industrialization itself. It’s only now, Lefebvre adds, again using his own emphases, that the “foremost theoretical problem can be formulated”: “For the working class, victim of segregation and expelled from the traditional city, deprived of a present and possible urban life, a practical problem poses itself, a political one, even if it hasn’t been posed politically, and even if until now the housing question … has masked the problematic of the city and the urban” (100).
The latter allusion is to Frederick Engels’s famous pamphlet The Housing Question (1872), in which Marx’s faithful collaborator denounces those petty-bourgeois reformists who wanted to resolve squalid worker housing conditions without resolving the squalid social relations underwriting them. Although Lefebvre concurs with Engels’s analysis and critique, as well as with his political reasoning, he cannot, circa the late twentieth century, quite adhere to Engels’s practical solution:
The giant metropolis will disappear. It should disappear. Engels possessed this idea in his youth and never let it go. In The Housing Question, he’d already anticipated, “supposing the abolition of the capitalist mode of production,” an equal as possible repatriation of the population over the entire land. His solution to the urban question precludes the big modern city. Engels doesn’t seem to wonder if this dispersion of the city throughout the surrounding countryside, under the form of little communities, doesn’t risk dissolving “urbanity” itself, of ruralizing urban reality.13
“There can’t be any return to the traditional city,” Lefebvre insists, notwithstanding his affection for his native Medieval Navarrenx or his admiration for Engels, just as there can’t be any “headlong flight toward a colossal and shapeless megalopolis” (148). What we must do, he says, is “reach out and steer ourselves toward a new humanism, a new praxis, toward another human being, somebody of urban society” (150). This new humanism will be founded on a new right, the right to an oeuvre, the right to the city, which will emerge “like a cry and demand,” like a militant call-to-arms. This isn’t any pseudo-right, Lefebvre assures us, no simple visiting right; it isn’t a tourist trip down memory lane, gawking at a gentrified old town; nor is it enjoying for the day a city from which you’ve been displaced. This right “can only be formulated,” he says (158), “as a transformed and renewed right to urban life,” a right to renewed centrality. There can be no city without centrality, no urbanity, he believes, without a dynamic core—a vibrant, open public forum, full of lived moments and encounters, disengaged from exchange value. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, “whether the urban fabric encroaches on the countryside nor what survives of peasant life, so long as the ‘urban,’ place of encounter, priority of use value, inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource amongst all resources, finds its morphological base, its practical-material realization” (158).
Lefebvre’s propositions today, forty years on, raise as many questions as they provide answers. The right to the city is a powerful and seductive battle cry; it has been mobilized by many groups across the globe, forged fruitful alliances, and prompted courageous activism. But is it now a battle cry that perhaps shouts in the wrong field of battle, even bawls the wrong refrain, limiting itself by running the wrong ticket? (Lefebvre’s language of the proletariat or working class, meanwhile, also sounds rather quaint.) Recently, urban theorist and planner Peter Marcuse joked that the only word he doesn’t have a problem with in “The Right to the City” is “to.” “The right” and “the city” struck him as singularly problematic, as shibboleths the Left might want to reconsider, might even want to reformulate.14 “A genuine right to the city,” says Marcuse, “requires the abolition of the rule of private finance, and thus with it the rule of private capital, over the economy, and indeed over the world economy as a whole,” and straightway we are propelled onto a much broader political terrain than the city itself. The right to the city is a right, Marcuse reckons, that means “a lot more than the right to Times Square.”15
The right in question isn’t a right for everybody but rather one that must pivot on two axes, on two sections of society, those excluded from the plenty all around them, and those discriminated against; in short, the exploited and the oppressed, the deprived and the discontented. They are the vanguard, as it were, the huge swaths of the world’s population in contemporary times, the Here Comes Everybody. In a real sense, it is not the city that releases people from the daily round of oppression and exploitation but democracy, a democratic society in which people have the right to create one’s own life, wherever one finds oneself. Plainly, getting that far, finding a democracy expressive of peoples’ rights, is a right that, en route, will engender social conflict. Pursuing the right to the city will necessitate and necessarily involve struggle and conflict. The goal cannot be achieved by any consensus, technocratic fix, or compromise of interests nor by co-optation or reappropriation. “Between equal rights,” Marx famously said in Capital, “force decides.” It cannot be anything other than a politically effective confrontation.16
One thing that’s evident from the rights battle nowadays is how it also motivates the Right as well as the Left. If anything, the Right has won the rights fight because it has converted its own rights into a legal force, a tactical right that has become a watchword for conservative rule. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Tory government is quick to give back to people their rights to self-management, to self-empowerment, because this means the state can desist from coughing up for public services. Self-empowerment thereby has become tantamount to self-subsidization and self-exploitation, mollified under the rubric of “community/social enterprise” and the voluntary “third sector.” In a Public Services White Paper (July 2011), Prime Minister David Cameron advocates the need to “loosen the grip of state control,” calling for the opening up of most public services to competition, to enable a “general right to choose.”17 “The human element should be in the driving seat,” the White Paper says, “not politicians or bureaucrats.” “Community rights” are bestowed onto urban communities up and down the United Kingdom; though as Bob Colenutt suggests, “they are not what they seem.” What they signal, what they presage, is continuing local austerity programs mixed with intensified privatization at the national and global scales. It is, in short, neoliberalism without tears, a political and financial bonanza for the Right.
Thus rights can be positive and negative depending on how you swing or on how you frame them politically: they are empty signifiers that need filling with content; and once you fill them their implications can put even the most well-meaning rights demander on the defensive. Thus even the idea of filling rights with content seems a politically bankrupt ploy. Mark Tushnet helps illuminate why: “Once one identifies what counts as a right in a specific setting, it invariably turns out that the right is unstable; significant but relatively small changes in the social setting can make it difficult to sustain the claim that a right remains implicated.” As such, “rights-talk” is “so open and indeterminate that opposing parties can use the same language to express their positions.”18
A noteworthy example of what Tushnet means occurred in March 2010 at the United Nations–organized World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro, where both the UN and the World Bank incorporated “the right to the city” in their charter to address global urban poverty. On the other side of the street in Rio, on the “Left” side, at the Urban Social Forum, a people’s popular alternative was simultaneously being staged, a direct response to the bigwig gathering that activists saw as an urban equivalent to Davos’s World Economic Forum. Activists at the Urban Social Forum were appalled by the ruling class’s reappropriation of a hallowed grassroots ideal, of its right not theirs. David Harvey, who spoke at both events, said when he’d declared that “the concept of the right to the city cannot work within a capitalist system,” fellow panelists at the World Urban Forum fell embarrassingly silent.19 Maybe it’s unsurprising that Harvey’s comment should turn off the mainstream. But maybe what’s more interesting is what this might mean for leftists: Does it imply that the right to the city is a right that can only be expressed in a postcapitalist reality? Is the city the medium or the product of revolutionary assault, the means or the outcome? The language, again, is indeterminate and unstable, and it arguably offers little political leverage.
The question of “the city” is just as tricky as the rights question. Maybe we can express the conundrum as follows: The urban process is now global because it is energized by finance capital; ergo democratization has to be global. However, at the same time, according to right to the city theorists like Lefebvre, and to a certain extent Harvey, we have to separate out the city and give it some political specificity, some political priority in contemporary struggles against neoliberalism, and even some priority with respect to a Marxist politics. So, on one hand, the city needs to be considered globally because urbanization is global, masterminded by transnational finance capital. On the other hand, in this global struggle the city somehow holds the key, though only if it is “considered in the broadest sense of the term,” at its broadest territorial scale. (The revolution “has to be urban,” says Harvey, “or nothing at all.”20) The specificity of the city seems to be that there’s no longer any specificity; the right to the city is a global struggle that needs to be grounded in the urban. Perhaps it’s just me, but isn’t this logic somehow tautological? Aren’t we left going around in circles?
One problem is analytical confusion, the bundling together of “city” and “urban” without any conceptual delineation, let alone political identification. The latter, related problem here emerges when we (correctly) identify the dominant role finance capital plays in global neoliberalism but then, in the same breath, voice some looser political invocation that “the city” (and confusingly “the urban”) must now be the principal site for the implementation of this right. The shift from one to the other doesn’t quite stack up, analytically or politically; in fact, it strikes as a theoretical and political non sequitur.
In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre says generalized urbanization reconstitutes the city at a higher level, that “the urban” supersedes “the city” and that the latter contains the seed form without being able to bring the former into flower. The Lefebvrian urban revolution—at least the “good guy” revolution from the bottom up—is precisely to make the urban flourish from its city basis. It’s true that Lefebvre invariably adds confusion: he opens up the playing field onto an urban plane only to close it back down again when demanding “the right to the city.” The city is a historical entity, he says, a pseudo-concept, a ruined concept. Yet, for all that, he still wants to hold on to this city right, despite himself. In The Urban Question (1977), Manuel Castells says that here Lefebvre “destroys any causal relation between the form (the city) and human creation (the urban),” because after prioritizing content (the urban), he suddenly flips back to affirm the security of form (the city).21 It’s as if, like Einstein, Lefebvre couldn’t quite live with the implications of his own reckoning, with his own brilliant correctness. Castells was less smitten. His grumbles with his former teacher are perhaps more compelling now than they were in the mid-1970s, compelling because they reveal what was wrong yet right in Lefebvre; they also reveal how Castells oddly ended up endorsing a line that tallies with his old maître.
Castells reckons that Lefebvre peddles an ideological thesis; Castells likes neither the reification of the city nor that of urban society. In shifting the ballast toward “the urban,” what we have here, says Castells, is “something very close to Louis Wirth’s thesis concerning the way social relations are produced. It is density, the warmth of concentration that, by increasing action and communication, encourage at one and the same time a free flowering, the unexpected, pleasure, sociability and desire. In order to be able to justify this mechanism of sociability, Lefebvre must advance a mechanistic hypothesis that is quite unjustifiable: the hypothesis according to which ‘social relations are revealed in the negation of distance.’ And that is what the essence of the urban is in the last resort.”22
Castells himself bundles together city and urban, viewing each as ideologically obfuscating for any Marxist politics struggling within late capitalist reality. From Castells’s standpoint, the idea of “the city” and “the urban” as discrete objects of analysis, let alone political demands, makes no theoretical sense. One could argue that it never made any theoretical sense, that treating in isolation the effects of urbanization—of according relative theoretical priority to a process and product so intimately bound up with the dynamics of global capitalism, with its system of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption—was and still is absurd. These days, a lot of urban intellectuals gleefully hail the death of rurality, even the death of nature itself: with ubiquitous urbanization there’s no longer anything that really constitutes “pure” countryside as the former has devoured the latter. They are doubtless right; I am sympathetic to this vision. But if that’s the case, the logic has certain implications: if urban society is everywhere, then perhaps it’s simultaneously nowhere, at least nowhere that merits particular analytical definition. This is the nub of Castells’s counterargument. Why not, then, just drop “the urban” and stick simply with “society”? Isn’t “the urban” a chaotic conception, an inadequate idea (as Spinoza might have said)? Perhaps it means that to go in search of the urban today is to go “in search of a lost object,” especially when one goes in search of it with new social media.
The latter, italicized phrase was written forty years ago by Castells. Whatever way you look at it, Castells says, “the term ‘urban’ is irrelevant.”23 What can we possibly mean by “the city,” he wonders, and by this process we term “the urban process”? Is it the agglomeration, the urban region we’re talking about? If so, how to distinguish between “urban” and “regional,” and why make the distinction anyway? And which aspects are to be studied? “Social classes? Housing satisfaction? The symbolic attraction of historical buildings? Transport? Air pollution? Neighborhood social participation? Voting in local elections? Residential mobility? Industrial location? Neighborhood renewal?” (55–56). As Castells says, the list is theoretically endless, and extremely disparate; and there’s nothing here that’s exclusively “urban” either.
But then one could beg to differ, pointing out that surely it’s the spatial setting, that “space” somehow matters. True enough. Still, if the spatial setting of social and political life is now entirely “urban,” and if this urban is equally “global,” then the subject matter loses its specificity: it becomes limitless. Something urban, say, “urban society” or even “urban sociology,” now becomes general “society” and “sociology.” How could it be otherwise? How could we deny that the fundamental features of “urban society” aren’t the direct consequence of the capitalist mode of production, of industrialization and postindustrialization; that urban contradictions are now social contradictions gone global? But again, one might counter that surely there’s something we could conceivably describe as “urban culture”? Somehow, this doesn’t go either: urban culture, like urban society, is, Castells says, equally redundant; worse, it’s ideological, ideological in the sense that Althusser conceives ideology: an imaginary distortion, “not a system of real relations that governs the existence of individuals.”24
In The Urban Question, Castells claims that urban culture isn’t a concept or a theory but, “strictly speaking, a myth” (83). “It recounts,” he says, “ideologically, the history of the human species. Consequently, the writings of ‘urban society’ which are based directly on this myth, provide keywords of an ideology of modernity, assimilated, in an ethnocentric way, to the social forms of liberal capitalism.” The idea of a definable “urban culture,” Castells thinks, reverts to the cultural and ecological-functionalist approaches of Louis Wirth, and of Robert Park and his Chicago School, all of whom stress the dimension of the city. Urbanism is its very own “way of life”; social contradictions, as such, get displaced into specifically urban contradictions. It’s the spatial structure, not the capitalist social structure, that apparently sucks. This, for Castells, is an imaginary representation of the urban world behind which a real reality resides.
Alas, urban culture as ideology isn’t just restricted to academic tradition or to “official urbanism” (planners, architects, technocrats, etc.); “it penetrates the thoughts of those who set out from a critical reflection on the social forms of urbanization” (86). There’s even a Marxist version of this ideology of urban society, espoused by Lefebvre himself. For Lefebvre, urban society has superseded industrial society; industrialization is subordinate to urbanization, the mode of production to the mode of urbanism. Thus the revolution must now be urban as well. But isn’t this, Castells wonders, just a left-wing rehash of Wirth’s thesis of “urbanism as a way of life,” whereby sheer density and concentration in the city counts most of all, is the means through which social relations are produced and revolutionized? Hasn’t Lefebvre reversed Marx’s materialist problematic? Isn’t this “an urbanistic theorization of the Marxist problematic” rather than “a Marxist analysis of the urban phenomenon” (86–87)? Under these circumstances, the city gets projected, detrimentally, onto the whole terrain of capitalist society, to the degree that the former, rather than serving as an expression of the latter, now shapes it. What we’re left with is a curious form of Marxist spatial fetishism, a theoretical reification of both the city and the urban; in the bargain, the city, in both theory and politics, now functions not as the dependent but as the independent variable.
To be sure, even if we accept the “city” as a specific terrain for political struggle, prioritizing it over a struggle that is first and foremost over social relations, one might ask: What would the right to the city actually resemble? Arguably, the Paris Commune is no longer so instructive, either theoretically or pragmatically, as the great festival of people reclaiming the center of the city, tearing down those statues of the dead bourgeois generations, abolishing rents and property speculation for a while, letting artisans control their own labor process as Proudhon willed. But how to deal with the central banks and all those flows of capital and commodities? (Remember, even a spectacular act of city dismantling—the downing of New York’s World Trade Center—barely stopped world trading for a day.)
What’s more, if we look at twentieth-century revolutionary history, it’s equally clear that wresting control over cities has often been the icing on the revolutionary cake. By then, the social movement had already been built, the bonds already forged; taking control of the city announced the culmination of victory, the storming of the Winter Palace, the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the last battle in a dogged war of position, the social movement’s final, joyous fling; highlighting how, in many ways, the revolutionary juices of modern times haven’t had their source in the city at all but have flowed from the countryside onto the city’s streets.25
It’s almost as Régis Debray said in Revolution in the Revolution (1967): the city has been the “empty head,” largely impotent, deaf to the plight of those who feel accumulation by dispossession the most; it’s the rural hinterlands, mountain jungles, and abandoned banlieues that constitute the “armed fist” of rebellion. “The city, for the guerrilla movement,” wrote Debray, “was a symbol, the purpose of which was to create the conditions for a coup d’état in the capital.”26 Mao, Che, Castro, and Ortega (in Nicaragua) all knew this, and with Subcomandante Marcos they’d doubtless concur: the city doesn’t so much radicalize as neutralize popular elements. The city, in this reading, isn’t so much a Lefebvrian dialectical oeuvre as a Sartrean practico-inert, the prison-house of past actions, the formless form of a passive totality, of inert bricks and mortar that gnaw away, that inhibit active praxis. The practico-inert, says Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason, opposes active activity because its antidialectic announces that dead labor dominates over living labor, that praxis has been absorbed into an objective alien form, into the city itself.27 And while in La métaphilosophie (1965) Lefebvre was critical of Sartre’s formulation of the urban as practico-inert, the latter understanding nonetheless explains the relative conformity of urban populations today, the majority of whom are former peasants and people with rural roots, a millionfold mass such as never existed before—a flow of dynamic people who soon become vagrants or unemployed, subemployed, and multiemployed attendants, trapped in shantytowns, cut off from the past yet somehow excluded from the future, too.
The dialectician Lefebvre often said the urbanization of the countryside is also ruralization of the city, that planetary urbanization means a strange collision and collusion of city and rural worlds, a strange amalgam of entangled loyalties, and a strange existential schizophrenia for those trapped within. In a sense, this same dialectic and dichotomy forms the basis of John Berger’s novel Lilac and Flag (1990), his “old wives’ tale of the city,” a fictionalized rendering of the city-countryside problematic but one that arguably reveals for us a few facts. Berger’s narrator, an aged peasant woman who remains in the village after everybody has left, is leery of the city. For her, when push comes to shove, there are really only two types of people: peasants and those who feed off peasants. Her tale is of Zsuzsa and Sucus, a.k.a. Lilac and Flag, two lovers who are trying to tread their slippery way through the spectral metropolis of Troy, a paradigmatic megacity of expressways and concrete blocks, of money values and deceit, of immense freedom and brutal imprisonment.
Sucus lives with his mother and father on the fourteenth floor of an anonymous high-rise on the periphery. Clement, Sucus’s papa, came from the village as a teenager and worked all his life opening oysters. One day Clement has a freak accident when his TV catches fire; he gets badly burned and slips away in a hospital. Clement has always wondered whether his son could find a job. “There are no jobs,” Sucus tells papa on his deathbed, “except the ones we invent. No jobs. No jobs.” “Go back to the village, that’s what I’d like to do,” says Clement to his son. “See the mountains for the last time.”28 Half the men in the ward, he says, remember either their village or their mothers; that’s all they think about. Sucus’s generation, though, doesn’t know the village, so they can never go back anywhere; and yet this generation can’t quite find itself in the alien city either, even in the city in which it was born. Sucus’s generation can go neither backward nor forward: it has nostalgia for neither the past nor the future. Meantime, they’re not prepared to take the same shit their parents did. Their expectations are different. But their prospects are nonexistent.
Sucus once sold coffee outside the local prison, but somebody, in an organized heist, stole his flask. Then he gets a job as a laborer on a building site. Yet he punches the hard-ass foreman and is sacked. In fact, all Sucus has in life are two things: his wits and his woman, Zsuzsa. But Zsuzsa has even less going for her and lives way out in a makeshift blue shack at Rat Hill, one of Troy’s many shanties. Her brother, Naisi, has a submachine gun and is hip in his smooth leather boots, yet he gets in deep with neighborhood toughies who sell drugs and is later gunned down by the cops. (“We’re born outside the law,” Naisi says, “and whatever we do, we break it.”) Zsuzsa is a happy-go-lucky drifter, a sexy flirt who lives day-to-day and hand-to-mouth. She can’t read words but knows how to read signs in the street and also on peoples’ faces. She calls her lover Sucus “Flag” and wants him to call her “Lilac,” after a song.
Together, Lilac and Flag pilfer passports from an overnight train, a first-class sleeper at the so-called Budapest Station. Against all odds, they consummate their union and spend the booty on a passionate night in an old-money hotel that saw better days a century ago. Yet somehow, among all the drama, we sense that menace lies ahead for at least one of them, that the great white death-ship moored nearby at Troy’s dockside awaits new passengers; and in this heavenly floating palace lifeboats aren’t necessary because now everyone is out of danger.
From firsthand lived experience, Lilac and Flag know our metropolises are run by corrupt politicians and crooked police, by shyster real estate corporations and financial institutions whose corruption is both blatant and legalized. They know the rules of the urban game are rigged against them. Their tragedy is a tragedy of arriving too late (or perhaps too early?). When their parents came there were still steady jobs, such as factory work, to be had. But those industries went bust or cleared out long ago. Berger knows better than anyone how millions of peasants and smallholders across the globe are each year thrown off their rural land by big agribusiness and corporate export farming; so, as “seventh” men and women, they move to the city in search of work that’s increasingly disappearing, migrating to an alien habitat they can little afford or understand.
Their sons and daughters understand this habitat better, well enough to know that now there are no decent jobs left, only insecure, underpaid work and overworked workers everywhere in the city’s informal layers: busboys and valet parkers, waiters and barmen, cleaners and security guards, builders and buskers, hawkers and hustlers. Berger’s Sucus, like his millionfold namesakes the world over, loitering on world market street, is a latent political subject waiting in the wings, perhaps even hoping against hope. Yet he’s waiting for something closer to home, something trivial—something he can touch and smell and feel—and for something larger than life, something that’s also world-historical. He’s waiting, that is, for a praxis that can somehow conjoin both realms at once, square the lived with the historical, meld two sides of a praxis, as Lefebvre frequently said, “that go badly together.”29
If the right to the city won’t do, what else might? Are other ways to frame the debate, other more politically fruitful alternatives, more empowering for a radical politics of today? If a concept didn’t fit or somehow didn’t work, Lefebvre insists we should always ditch that concept, abandon it, or give it up to the enemy. For Lefebvre, the whole political utility of a concept isn’t that it should correspond with reality but that it enables us to experiment with reality, that it helps us to glimpse another reality—a virtual reality that’s there, somewhere, waiting to be born inside us, between us. Maybe the idea of the encounter can spawn a different way of conceiving the urbanization of the world and of straddling the dialectic between the lived and the world-historical. The notion of encounter is a tale of how people come together as human beings, of why collectivities are formed and how solidarity takes hold and takes shape, and also how intersectional politics shapes up urbanly. The encounter is like a twinkling, radiant cosmic constellation, an expression of a plurality of participants who conjoin within an open form (and forum), within a dynamic structured coherence, within a configuration that makes itself rather than simply lies there, preexisting, in a passive state.
Suffice it to say here that the recent tumult in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, and Spain, as well as that of the Occupy movement, expresses itself as a dramatic politics of the encounter. In each case, whether in Tunis or Cairo, in Madrid or Athens, in New York or London, while encounters unfold on capital city streets, the stake itself isn’t about the city per se; rather, it’s about democracy, about democracy in times of capitalist crisis, about something simpler and vaster than city politics as we once knew it. It’s also something more, as I’ll suggest later, than just class struggle. A lot of the activism and organizing was done deterritorially, through Facebook and Twitter, and was essentially leaderless, punctuating a series of radical moments, Lefebvrian moments that intersected and overlapped. People quite simply encountered one another by virtue of an affinity taking hold, just as Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody envisaged. Of course, stuff had been gurgling within the bowels of society: undercurrents, clandestine organization, politicking, subversion, and growing dissatisfaction; but when things explode, when they really erupt, as they did, when the proverbial shit hits the fan, it’s invariably by surprise.
One of the catchiest slogans for young Spaniards who mobilized across their recession-ravaged land was: “no jobs, no houses, no pension, no fear.” (Michael Douglas had Gordon Gekko voice much the same sentiment to young Ivy-leaguers in Wall Street 2: “You’re the NINJA generation,” he goaded at a lecture. “No Income, No Jobs and No Assets.… So what you’re gonna do about it?”) Many in Spain are new kids on the block, new protesters, with little to lose and everything to gain. Yet what they want is more than their city. They’re politically naive but have wised up fast, coming of age together. They are disgusted with unions, who do nothing to represent their interests, and disillusioned with both of Spain’s main parties, who are corrupt and unresponsive. Consequently, they’ve acted en masse. Protests bloomed over Twitter and Facebook, triggered by WikiLeaks documents exposing government officials’ less than forthright behavior; meanwhile, the latter’s attempt to shut down previously legal websites through antipiracy laws riled this new social media generation.
People here encounter one another because of certain situations, because of certain collisions in time and space, because of certain attributes. People discover “interpellated” group commonality because bodies and minds take hold in a space that is at once territorial and deterritorial, in a time that isn’t clock or calendar time but eternal time. One could even say that this coming together of bodies and minds, this common action, is a process that involves subjectivity yet is itself without any subject. But the process will, has to, unfold and take hold somewhere, somewhere urban in its broadest sense. So, yes, we need to rethink “the urban” at its widest and deepest sociospatial manifestation, just as Lefebvre and Harvey urge; as an abstract category, for sure, yet as a category also with definition and content, as something concrete and socially and geographically inclusive, as a new form of centrality and citizenship. Somehow, we’re back to where we were at the end of the previous chapter. But we’re not quite going round in circles, because we’ve advanced our understanding of how we must now frame this centrality and citizenship. We need to build upon Lefebvre’s insights and shortcomings; we need to take onboard Castells’s critique. We need to focus on planetary urbanization as a process that’s begotten skyscrapers as well as unpaved streets, highways and backroads, bywaters and marginal zones that feel the wrath of the world market—its absence as well as its presence. The urban nowadays is loaded with weeds as well as wealth, with undergrowth as well as overgrowth; it’s a vast space where the fight for the transformation of the world will now take place. Yet the urban isn’t a point fixed in absolute space. It’s no longer a fixation on a center, no longer really any point at all, but a space of and for encounters: a space of and for a citizenship that might intervene in the current, rather dubious, neoliberal hegemony.