Like many named places … it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts.… She looked down a slope, needing to squint in the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl.… The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.
Thomas Pynchon
Social relations are revealed in the negation of distance.
Henri Lefebvre
The city in history established itself from the cradle of absolute space, developed as an internal force that needed to expand and push outward in order to augment its power. The city in history has modified and been modified by successive modes of production, by advances in social and technical relations of production. Under capitalism, the city became the center of gravity; a whole industrial mode of production pivoted on it. After a while, if we can believe Lefebvre, as the city developed under this industrial mode of production, it actually began to transform that industrial mode of production, even became its own mode of production. And yet, for all this, the city under capitalism could never transform its capitalist basis. How could it? If we thought otherwise, we’d fall back onto the silliest fetishism; Castells’s objection about an “urban revolution”—with “urban” rather than “revolution” the independent variable—would hold firm. Such modification without transformation meant, for the city, only one dialectical outcome: implosion-eruption. An internal scattering over time, a breaking up and caving in, a progressive earthquake-like spatial rendering, a ripping open of the traditional city form. At the same time, a sudden eruption has occurred and red-hot magma has been spewed over vast distances; a kaleidoscope of congealed lava has solidified in its wake, in a form still unfamiliar to us.
This implosion-eruption created a city–urban dialectic; from an identifiable city to a circuit-board patterning with a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning. Pynchon’s heroine, Oedipa Maas, from The Crying of Lot 49, puts this shift perfectly. Now we are left wallowing in relativity, searching for clarity, still not quite believing that God plays dice, that the real estate market is our new casino, that our future resides in financial futures and options. Paradoxically, it’s tempting to say that capital now needs fixity more than ordinary people: capital produces the urban as a conceived space and we are left to inhabit it as lived space. Of course, we produce it too: we are all workers, as Herbert Muschamp liked to insist, producing our own factory merely by walking down the street. That was how he summarized Lefebvre’s The Production of Space: human beings collectively make spaces just by encountering other human beings.
Capital’s dilemma, though, is the problem of the M–C–M (M =M+ΔM) circuit that Marx identified. Money circulates, generating more money and capital. It goes into one end of the process yearning to come out of the other larger than before—as money plus an increment, as capital. Yet to do so some mediation is needed. Money and capital can’t quite accumulate ex nihilo, not quite; money has to touch earth somewhere, metamorphose into a commodity form, if only to dispossess an existent commodity form. It needs to do so in order to accumulate capital on an expanded scale and to recommence the process anew. Capital, Marx says in the Grundrisse (548), “travels through different phases of circulation not as it does in the mind, where one concept turns into the next at the speed of thought, in no time, but rather as situations which are separate in time. It must spend some time as a cocoon before it can take off as a butterfly.”
Here the city—or is that the City?—becomes the necessary “bearer” of that moment of circulation, a safe haven, a cocoon from which capital can launch its circulation globally. Capital creates formlessness, yet formlessness unnerves it as a social force, as a ruling class intent on business. It needs the reassurance of absoluteness, in all senses of the term. If God does play dice, that is patently bad for market confidence. Thus capital worries little about its inexorable urge to create spaces of relativity, such as chaotic spaces of the world market; yet it has a hard time living with it, even with a competitive relativity and insecurity among its own, within its citadel. This is why the stakes of the city (City) have changed in our age of planetary urbanization: rather than keeping people inside the citadel, people must now be kept out. So the walls go up, the barricaded zones, the barbed wire fences. In our global monetary system, zones of absolute security proliferate as control stations that now resemble wartime bunkers. Market universes may be somehow extraterrestrial and high-tech; yet medieval fiefdoms seem to prop up that system on the ground. Capital now needs solidity and security more than we, the people, do. They’re on the defensive, interiorizing themselves through fear, which is justifiable because they have a lot to lose, much more than we do. It isn’t so much their desire for centrality as their ruthless quest for centralization.
Hence the dialectical possibility for real people today: contrary to the rhetoric that capital commands space and people only have place as their battleground, have only some subordinate locale rather than a larger planetary stake, it’s perhaps the other way around. Rather than populate “the city,” we, as a collectivity, are compelled, often willy-nilly, to inhabit urban space. We are relative whether we like it or not. Planetary urban society is now inside us, each time we switch on a TV set, listen to the radio, go online, enter a Twitter stream, SMS someone. Our horizons have opened up. Meanwhile, those of capital’s, as a class, now need fire-walling and need to be closed down.1
The revolution will certainly be urban, but it’s a very special notion of “urban” and “revolution” that’s now at stake. It’s actually to agree with Castells: the urban is nothing in itself, nothing outside dynamic social relations, nothing outside of a coming together of people. The urban isn’t the passive surface over which people encounter other people, nor over which capital simply circulates: the sheer proximity of people to other people, the sheer simultaneity of activities, of events and chance meetings, is the very definition of urban society itself. In encountering one another, people produce space—relative urban space. They become urban people, Lefebvre says: “polyvalent, poly-sensorial, capable of complex and transparent relationships with the ‘world.’”2 They become “people of the world,” Baudelaire might have said, of the “whole world.”3
In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre uses a beautiful turn of phrase: “the urban consolidates” [l’urbain rassemble”], he says.4 The urban becomes urban because it creates its own definition, because, as a complex web of social relations, hanging together somehow, it engenders and expresses a specific kind of sociability. The urban is a bringer together and a transformer of everything in that coming together: capital and goods, people and information, activity and conflict, confrontation and cooperation. The urban concentrates things, intensifies, creates simultaneity and difference, creates difference where no awareness of difference existed; and ditto, what was once distinct and isolated becomes conscious of its own universality in that particularity. This is why Marx endorses its coming, the becoming of urbanization. The urban consolidates: it is both particle and wave, flow and thing; its own random uncertainty principle that prevails in everyday life.
Therein Lefebvre’s other great expression, the one Castells hated, speaks volumes: “social relations are revealed in the negation of distance.”5 Not only is this a brilliant definition of what urban society is today, and how any revolution might come about; it also mimics to a T Manuel Castells’s celebrated thesis that late capitalism operates predominantly as a “space of flows,” as a “network society.” Everything he negatively attributed to his elder in The Urban Question is now something Castells himself practices; although instead of the “urban” it is “the network” that is decisive. Instead of space being the quasi-independent variable, as he once condemned Lefebvre for positing, for Castells technology is now the quasi-independent variable, the driver not the driven; what was once urban space for one is now the space of technology for the other. And yet, the brilliance of the two men is that, together, unwittingly, in their push–pull complementarity, they founded a superstring theory of space, a holistic theory of the dynamics of planetary urban space in the era of digital media—if only we lace them up with one another.
Urban society is characterized, perhaps above all else, by this network society, this abstract-expressive space of flows. Castells’s description of the concept he’s patented over recent years describes perfectly the way we must reconfigure the becoming of Lefebvre’s urban society:
The space of flows refers to the technological and organizational possibility of practicing simultaneity without contiguity. It also refers to the possibility of asynchronous interaction in chosen time, at a distance.… However, the space of flows is not placeless. It is made of nodes and networks; that is, of places connected by electronically powered communication networks through which flows of information that ensure the time-sharing of practices processed in such a space circulate and interact. While in the space of places, based on contiguity of practice, meaning, function, and locality are closely inter-related, in the space of flows places receive their meaning and function from their nodal role in the specific networks to which they belong. Thus, the space of flows is not the same for financial activities as for science, for media networks as for political power networks … the space of the network society is made up of an articulation between three elements: the places where activities (and people enacting them) are located; the material communication networks linking these activities; and the content and geometry of the flows of information that perform the activities in terms of function and meaning. This is the space of flows.6
This is equally the space of urban society. The space of flows expresses itself urbanly through the idea of fabric or tissue. Flows are the capillaries and arteries of blood and energy that nourish this vital urban tissue, that keep its cells alive, or that sometimes leave them partly dead; that simultaneously provide overnutrition and undernutrition, that enable cells to pulsate and squirm, to flicker and flare up, depending on which part of the tissue we’re talking about and where it’s situated vis-à-vis the rest of the urban’s inorganic body. Such an understanding lets us see the urban’s complex circuit card, its networked tissue, its mosaic and fractal form, stitched together with pieces of delicate fabric. Outside of human woof and weft, the urban creates nothing, is nothing. The urban serves no purpose and has no reality outside of a human reality, outside of exchange, outside of union, outside of human proximity and human concentration, outside of human encounter. “The signs of the urban,” Lefebvre says in The Urban Revolution (118), “are signs of assembly: the things that promote assembly (the street and its surface, stone, asphalt, sidewalks) and the requirements for assembly (seats, lights).” The urban is, he says,
pure form: a place of encounter, assembly, simultaneity. This form has no specific content, but is a center of attraction and life. It is an abstraction, but unlike a metaphysical entity, the urban is a concrete abstraction, associated with practice. Living creatures, the products of industry, technology and wealth, works of culture, ways of living, situations, the modulations and ruptures of the everyday—the urban accumulates all content. But it is more than and different from accumulation. Its contents (things, objects, people, situations) are mutually exclusive because they are diverse, but inclusive because they are brought together and imply their mutual presence. The urban is both form and receptacle, void and plenitude, superobject and nonobject, superconsciousnesses and the totality of consciousness. (118–119)
Few, perhaps, have so beautifully defined something so indefinable.
Given all this, the manner in which Lefebvre conceived centrality in The Right to the City now strikes as both inappropriate and wrong, both analytically and politically. In the 1970s he seemed to sense this himself. He began to nudge along the debate about centrality in The Urban Revolution, and then took it a little further again in The Production of Space, published four years on. While writing the former book, Lefebvre had already started to envisage in his imagination the latter book; he’d already envisaged the need for this latter book on space. But what kind of book? A curious footnote—Lefebvre was never a big footnoter—to the important “Urban Form” chapter of The Urban Revolution offers clues.7 There, Lefebvre notes, “form unifies three aspects of the city. The ‘right to the city’ becomes the right to centrality, the right to not be excluded from urban form, if only with respect to the decisions and actions of power.”
The allusion is hasty and done flippantly. But Lefebvre tries to cover his back; he tells us “these topics will be discussed in further detail in my Théorie de l’espace urbain.” This “Theory of Urban Space,” of course, eventually materialized as The Production of Space. Mysteriously, “the urban” had now dropped out of the equation. Why? Perhaps because a title like The Production of Urban Space would have been a tautology, adding another redundant word “urban”—redundant because it is already implicit in any definition of space, not only in the text but in the world. Indeed, even as early as the 1970s, around the time of the 1973 oil crisis, on the eve of fiscal crisis of the state, the production of space was, de facto, the production of urban space; any theory of the spatial production could only ever henceforth be a theory of global-urban spatial production. And yet, as ever with Lefebvre, that footnote leaves us wondering, necessitates we work a bit to figure out its intent. “The right to the city,” he says, “becomes the right to centrality.” But what is this right to centrality? “The right not to be excluded from urban form,” Lefebvre rejoins. The problem here is that the right to the city and the right not to be excluded from urban form are theoretical gestalts that don’t add up to a single political image; they’re irreconcilable. Between The Right to the City and The Urban Revolution, “the city” had morphed into “the urban.” The absolute form of the city had, in the bargain, become relatively formless. Thereafter the formless urban morphed simply into “space.” What was once absolute now became relative; what once had a definable form now became relatively formless, became planetary, was everywhere, was space tout court. What had gone analytically was both absoluteness and form. So, too, in politics, apparently. Lefebvre had decentered his own concept of the city, only to recenter it as “the urban,” which has a different understanding of centrality and center. The right not to be excluded from the urban does not equate to the right to the city, despite what Lefebvre says: radical analysis and politics cannot, and should not, hold on to both ideals at once. One has to go to move forward, to embrace the possibility of urban society. If one loses the right to the city, or voluntarily gives up this right, if one desists from thinking in terms of solid “city,” as an absolute, then one gains renewed capacity to forge a politics based on something else, something more open-ended and dynamic; riskier, perhaps, because it lacks a clear basis and definitional space. Yet this risky, open-ended politics is more apt for our age of formless urbanization and more attuned to a political landscape in which less contiguous modes of communication are subversive tools for organizing new kinds of centrality and horizontal concentration.
In The Production of Space, Lefebvre makes an interesting comparison between Marx’s Capital (volume 1) and his Grundrisse notebooks, preferring the latter because of its analytical openness and formlessness and its prospective politics. In Capital, says Lefebvre, Marx concerns himself with exposition rather than content; he clings to a strict formal structuring, to a logical rigor of argument, which impoverishes, Lefebvre says, because of its reductionism and its rigid and closed nature. “Whereas Capital stresses a homogenizing rationality founded on the quasi-‘pure’ form … the Grundrisse insists at all levels on difference.” Less rigorous, Lefebvre admits of the Grundrisse, “less emphasis on logical consistency, and hence a less elaborate formalization and axiomatization”; but this “leaves the door open to more concrete themes, especially in connection with dialectical relations.”8 Capital moves inward, inside a bounded frame; the Grundrisse pushes outward, toward the periphery, annihilates space by time, and time by space, like the process of urbanization itself, like a new notion of centrality.
What, then, might centrality constitute in this vast, networked urban society, in this abstract-expressive space of flows? To begin with, centrality can no longer be about being at the center of things. We must give up the ghost of this line of thinking: the search for centrality as a journey to the center of the Earth is a fruitless quest, a mission seeking a nonexistent holy grail. We must reposition ourselves elsewhere, in a new space, one without an absolute center, not geographically located in bounded space. Instead, centrality should be thought of as a locus of actions that attract and repel, that structure and organize a social space, that define the urban. Centrality isn’t the way Lefebvre defined it in the 1960s, as an absolute center of a city that needs taking back, like the Communards reclaiming central Paris; urban politics can’t invoke that model anymore. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre hints as much, even if he never says so straight up. Instead, centrality is something that is the cell form of the urban, its atomic structuring, its sine qua non. Centrality calls out for content, for people and acts, for situations and practical relationships. It implies simultaneity, a simultaneity of everything that comes together in a social act at a point or around that point, and at a certain time. To that degree, centrality is movable, always relative, never fixed, and always in a state of constant mobilization and negotiation; sometimes it decenters itself.
To say “urban space” is, accordingly, to say center and centrality in a counterintuitive voice, to say that “it doesn’t matter whether centrality is actual or merely possible, saturated, broken up or under fire, for we are speaking here of a dialectical centrality.”9 The production of centrality resembles a spider’s web, a collective of spiders, the sum of their bodies and spaces, of how they make their webs, how they are attached to them, dependent on them. The production of centrality is akin to how a spider spins its web as an extension of its body, with its symmetric and asymmetric structuring, the silky strands that are woven, secreted; this web is at once the spider’s terrain and a tool of its actions, its own social network.
Centrality, Lefebvre says, “is a gathering-together and meeting of whatever coexists in a given space. What does coexist in this way? Everything that can be named and enumerated. Centrality is therefore a form, empty in itself but calling for contents—for objects, natural or artificial beings, things, products and works, signs and symbols, people, acts, situations, practical relationships.”10 As a form, centrality implies a form of simultaneity, of networks cohering, hanging together, a weblike conjoining somewhere: “the simultaneity of ‘everything’ that is susceptible of coming together—and thus of accumulating—in a social act, at a point or around a point,” a point where accumulated energies must eventually erupt.
Centrality must blow centralization asunder. Centrality shouldn’t be conflated with centralization. The latter fulfills a “totalizing” mission of control and domination, a striving to concentrate wealth and knowledge, information and power; the former must give birth to a new democratic logic and strategy, to a new capacity for concentration mediated by information, communication, and concentration both near and far, contiguous and virtual, through the negation of distance and a reaching out to distance. Centrality must fill in the pores of urban space, fill them in with people, with people assembled, encountering one another, communicating with one another, acting with one another. A human flow.
Centrality is where people encounter one another as the nemesis of centralization. Yet any centrality, once established, is destined—as is true for lots of occupations and assemblies of people—to suffer dispersal, to dissolve or to implode from efforts of saturation, attrition, and outside aggression. (The latter may be labeled more pithily: eviction.) The basis of centrality can never, should never, become fixed, but it might be in a constant state of mobilization, of regrouping and reconcentration, of centering and recentering itself, of cohering here and juxtaposing itself there—a spatial play of repetition and difference. At that point, around that point, centrality expresses itself as an encounter between citizens. Citizenship, much like centrality, reveals itself through the negation of distance and through the reaching out to distance. It’s the point of convergence of both, a dialectic that is both a perception and a horizon, a structure of feeling as well as a way of seeing—seeing oneself and one’s planet. Its singularity around the point at which it occurs, if it occurs, will be so powerful and clear-cut that it will be self-sufficient; no border patrols can ever prevent its passage.
Lefebvre’s declaration that the right to the city implies nothing less than a new revolutionary concept of citizenship, mentioned in chapter 1, thus doesn’t hold water. Revolutionary citizenship has to imply something else than the right to the city, which is too inward in its political expressiveness. Citizenship must be conceived as something urban, as something territorial, yet one in which territoriality is narrower and broader than both “city” and “nationality.” A citizen of the block, of the neighborhood, becomes a citizen of the world, a universal citizen rooted in place, encountering fellow citizens across the corridor and at the other end of the planet.11 Urbanization, ironically, makes this sense of belonging possible, makes it both broader and narrower, even as it sometimes rips up the foundation of one’s own dwelling space, dwelling in a narrow sense. (In a way, this is what Marx meant in the Manifesto when he lobbied for a cosmopolitan “world literature,” for a moment when “intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.”) This kind of citizenship is one in which perception replaces passport and horizon becomes almost as important as habitat. This perception is simultaneously in place and in space, offline somewhere local and online somewhere planetary, somewhere virtual. If we want to call this perception a newly formulated cognitive map in our heads, we can. What is important in this mapping is that it maps the totality, that it works when people see these two realms coming together, when perception (as a structure of feeling) and horizon (as a way of seeing) conjoin and somehow meet one another, encounter one another, suddenly give rise to a singular political awareness and to a potential political activity. Suddenly, the paint drips, the canvas take shape; suddenly, we recognize that we are in the frame, that we are the painter, the painter of modern life, the spiritual citizen of the universe.
There are no passports for spiritual citizens of the urban universe, no passports for those who know they live somewhere yet feel they belong everywhere. Or who want to feel it. This conjoining of knowing and feeling is what engenders a sense of empathy whose nom de plume might really be citizenship itself. In today’s urban realm, this citizenship is more likely to be based on affinity rather than any notion of class. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx was brilliant at charting the developmental forces of the mode of production, its historical and geographical expansion, and its need to urbanize itself—to create industrial cities, move mountains, dig canals, connect everywhere, nestle everywhere—to do all of that because of its inexorable urge, because it, as a mode of production, had to. All of this had a unifying effect, due to the (often) unintended outcome of a drive to forge a world market, to manufacture a world in which soon manufacture would become outmoded, would pull the rug from beneath itself, would bite off its own tail, killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Within this depiction, Marx welcomed urbanization because it would create a physical and emotional proximity of workers, workers piled on top of one another, beside each other. Cosmopolitanism would thus equate to a kind of sharing, an awareness of common lived experience. It would create a form of collective-consciousness, Marx said, class-consciousness, wherein people would rise up, become aware, “with sober senses,” of “their real conditions of life.”12
Analytically, Marx was dead right in his capitalist narrative, save for one thing: his proposed ending. The idea of the working class as the ultimate nemesis of bourgeois society is no longer politically performative in Marx’s story, and it will no longer be the principal stuff that unites one person with another within some kind of revolutionary citizenship. If the working class remains an object of cultural curiosity, it can, at the same time, no longer be regarded as a political subject. What gels people together nowadays is something more and something less than class, something both more complex and simpler, something that doesn’t only emerge from the workplace but from a dwelling space—this time “dwelling” in its broadest sense. It isn’t something necessarily about living space as about the totality of political and economic space in which one now belongs. Once, people went out into the world and discovered it, often through the world of work; now the world comes to people and discovers us, sometimes whether we like it or not. Nowadays, if people identify with other people it is because of something else shared, because of something that cements us together and bonds us across frontiers and barriers. I’m not sure the world of work is where this bonding takes place for a lot of people. Is it, then, an urban-consciousness rather than a class-consciousness that bonds? Yes and no. It is affinity that bonds, and the urban is the site though which this affinity takes place: a staging, to be sure, but not a passive staging when the curtain goes up and the play actually commences. The urban somehow helps affinity grow and helps it become aware of itself, aware that other affinities exist in the world, that affinities can encounter one another and become aware of one another in a social network connected by a certain tissuing, by a spider’s webbing, by a planetary webbing.
In the 1970s, around the time of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism argued that the affinity group “could easily be regarded as a new type of extended family, in which kinship ties are replaced by deeply empathetic human relationships—relationships nourished by common revolutionary ideas and practice.” These groups, says Bookchin, “proliferate on a molecular level and have their own ‘Brownian movement.’”13 Affinity groups don’t assume the role of a vanguard, Bookchin reckons, but function as catalysts within a popular movement. They provide initiative and consciousness, not leadership and dictatorship. They offer sensitive appreciation of solidarity within everyday behavior. There is no bureaucratic fiat from a distant party committee room but a looser, autonomous hanging together of participants, adaptive to changing political and social circumstances. In affinity group encounters, “class” perhaps evokes something meaningful only in the context of class-conscious ruling elite. Those who don’t rule, the bulk of us, are an assorted and fragmented layering of disparate peoples who are neither conscious of class nor motivated to act in the name of any class. Nonetheless, these people, which is to say “us,” are often motivated by a desire to act against a ruling class, to take action against an undemocratic system that this class so evidently props up. We who encounter one another, who find affinity with one another, aren’t so much class-conscious as collectively conscious of an enemy, collectively conscious of a desire to do something about that enemy, and collectively conscious about wanting no truck with that enemy’s game.
This is a different tack to Marx’s in the Communist Manifesto. There, Marx spoke of the “modern working class,” a group, Marshall Berman points out, “that has always been afflicted with a case of mistaken identity.” “Many of Marx’s readers,” Berman says, “have always thought that ‘working class’ meant only men in boots—in factories, in industry, with blue collars, with calloused hands, lean and hungry. These readers then note the changing nature of the workforce: increasingly white-collar, working in human services … and they infer the Death of the Subject, and conclude that the working class is disappearing and all hopes for it are doomed. Marx did not think the working class was shrinking: in all industrial countries it was already, or in the process of becoming, ‘the immense majority.’”14 The basis for Marx’s political arithmetic is a logic that’s rather simple: the modern working class “is a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are commodities, like every other article of commerce, and are constantly exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition and the fluctuations of the market.” The crucial factor isn’t working in a factory, or with your hands; neither is it necessarily anything to do with being poor. Rather, the crucial reality is, Berman says (11), a “need to sell your labor in order to live, to carve up your personality for sale, to look at yourself in the mirror and think, ‘Now what have I got that I can sell?’”
One of the great virtues of this definition of the working class is its inclusiveness, its flexibility. By this reckoning, when we do the sums, when we tote things up, it seems that this working class isn’t just you and me, it’s practically everybody else, practically here comes everybody. It’s a definition that hinges on our relationship to the means of production and to the global system of capital accumulation. Almost all of us have to carve ourselves up, look at ourselves in the mirror, Berman suggests, and ask ourselves how much we’re worth. Still, what seems a great conceptual virtue is also its major drawback, its potential failing. If the working class is now pretty much everybody, everywhere, then, like the city itself, it is at the same time pretty much nowhere, now bursting its seams as something formless. And if the working class is now everybody, its definition serves no analytical or political function anymore; it no longer has any identifiable specificity within itself or any kind of object yearning to be a subject. In other words, the concept serves no strategic purpose, has no organizing pull, because we are no longer sure around what basis it will organize itself. The working class is thus a kind of lumpenconcept, setting itself free from its object like Marx’s industrial reserve army: it is too loose a notion, too flabby an understanding, to reveal anything meaningful to us, other than we all need to find work to live. This is hardly news.
If anything, what’s equally evident is that for millions of the world’s population, they know they’ll never find work again or even find work for the first time—“No work, no work, no work,” said Berger’s Sucus. Instead, they have to invent it for themselves, find the means to bend the rules, to work the system for themselves.15 Others actively disaffiliate themselves from any laboring public as we once knew it; in so doing they create another life form for themselves and for their families and enter the ever-swelling ranks of a constituency André Gorz provocatively labels a “non-class.”16 The latent political muscle that Marx accorded to the working class hasn’t disappeared, Gorz says:
Instead, it has been displaced and has acquired a more radical form in a new social arena.… It has the added advantage over Marx’s working class of being immediately conscious of itself; its existence is at once indissolubly subjective and objective, collective and individual. This non-class encompasses all those who have been expelled from production by the abolition of work, or whose capacities are under-employed as a result of the industrialization (in this case, the automation and computerization) of intellectual work. It includes all the supernumeraries of present-day social production, who are potentially or actually unemployed, whether permanently or temporarily, partially or completely. It results from the decomposition of the old society based upon the dignity, value, social utility and desirability of work.17
Berman himself counters, claiming, “Marx understands that many people in this working class don’t know their address.… They may not discover who they are, and where they belong, until they are laid-off or fired—or outsourced, or deskilled, or downsized. And other workers, lacking credentials, not dressed so nicely, may not get the fact that many who push them around are really in their class, despite their pretensions, share their vulnerability. How can this reality be put across to people who don’t get it, or can’t bear it? The complexity of these ideas helped create a new vocation, central to modern society: the organizer.”18
But here again, this idea seems conceived from a past age, from a golden age of labor organizing, a lament from an age when organizing was a professional occupation—like a photojournalist, like a newspaper book critic. Is this still the case today? Doesn’t organization somehow organize itself, especially when it really matters? A major strength of Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody is precisely this “do-it-yourself-with-others” spirit, this idea that grassroots organizing no longer needs any mediator, no Leninist intellectual to reveal “with sober senses, one’s real conditions of life,” one’s true class status. A lot of people already know this. And even if they don’t know it, they can still manage to organize themselves—or actually get organized without even consciously knowing it. People create group commonality because of a taking hold of bodies and minds in space, face-to-face through “strong-tie” offline activism but also through online “weak-tie” association. The two flanks strengthen one another, glue the notion of affinity, and give a new dimension to the idea of a group taking hold, of group consummation: speed, the speed at which crowds assemble, the speed at which demos take place, the speed at which people of different groups and ages today encounter each other, organize one another.
The emergent Here Comes Everybody, glimmers of which we’ve recently witnessed in the Occupy movement, is expressive of an affinity politics, of associative ties latent within everyday life. In lots of instances, affinity groups aren’t so much concerned with seizing power as having people regain control over their own lives. That’s the crux of a desire to be citizens again: to regain control over one’s life and to do so in some kind of participatory democracy, one in which we’re able to collectively call the shots and somehow able to express ourselves. What bonds one affinity group to another, what compels an affinity group encounter to “take hold”? Common notions, we might say, using the term in the Spinozian sense. Affinity group unity won’t likely be founded on some simple class-consciousness, nor even on any particular place-consciousness (like a right to the city); instead, it will be founded on notions that Spinoza says are common to us when we piece together a certain way of seeing our lives vis-à-vis others’ lives, or when we see ourselves in relationship with other people along the same horizon; our circumstances are really their circumstances. We share those circumstances; it is our common circumstance of life on earth; our “I” becomes equally a “non-I,” an every “I,” an everybody.
Murray Bookchin’s ideas about affinity still retain considerable analytical force, but his vision of citizenship and idea that rampant urbanization is destroying cherished citification seem backward-looking and politically passé. His own accusation that ossified classical Marxism draws its inspiration from the past comes back to haunt Bookchin himself. Bookchin says affinity groups are always rooted in the popular movement, which seems bang-on; however, he says that localism grounds affinity groups, that affinity is gelled by face-to-face interaction, by the power of localized autonomy. This was said pre-Internet and pre–digital media. Bookchin’s common notions of affinity consequently strikes as nostalgic; and his quest for a common citizenship sounds a lot like a search for lost time and space, for the romanticism of authentic encounter, when authenticity meant unmediated encounter, unmediated social relations, being present and only present, a presence without absence. Bookchin couldn’t have seen how, one day—our day—absence and presence would actually go together, form a powerful unity of expression, and voice a program here as well as there, simultaneously as wave and particle. Ironically, nostalgia itself is a way not to be present in the present: because rather than yearning for an absent future, one immanent within the present, nostalgia yearns for an absent past that’s long gone.
“We have lost sight,” says Bookchin in From Urbanization to Cities, “of the historic source and principal arena of any authentic politics—the city. We not only confuse urbanization with citification, but we have literally dropped the city out of the history of ideas—both in terms of the way it explains the present human condition and the systems of public governance it creates.”19 Bookchin’s lament is a return to cities, to citification, in the face of pathological urbanization; urbanization, he says, is somehow against cities. The process has devoured the product, and Bookchin wants that old product back. Moreover, this product, if refound, if reclaimed, can even act as a buttress against the process, can keep it at bay, dam its inexorable tide—if only the walls of the citadel are tall and thick enough, and if only they can be reconstructed at some larger, regional scale. Bookchin’s penchant is Hellenic: Aristotle’s polis is the free city, the Paris Commune, a confederation of neighborhood assemblies, stretched out regionally, revolving around an agora, a vibrant civic center. There, weekly participatory meetings would debate planning and administrative issues, do so without unwieldy bureaucracies, “in a consciously amateur system of governance.” All of which would be “face-to-face democracy of the most radical kind.”20
“A consciously amateur system of governance” is intriguing; but to frame it around an entity called “the city” seems altogether wrong. To expect futuristic modes of life to be face-to-face and nothing but is ludicrous in the extreme, more utopian than any Asimovian science fiction. Back in the mid-1980s, Book-chin didn’t use the term “resilience” à la mode of certain urban planning and architectural circles today; but his program nonetheless strikes as such. Roger Keil, a geographer and urbanist from Toronto, recently critiqued resilience and what he says there seems equally true against Bookchin: “This use of resilience implies the emphasis on regionally defined socio-spatial relations as the basis for resilience against the uprooting and de-centering effects of larger scale processes of restructuring and change. Yet, instead of building defensive bulwarks against globalization and its implied disturbances, resilience must be about sustaining open and creative relationships of humans amongst one another.”21
Bookchin’s desire is to keep centrality at the absolute center, to confine the polis to a village-like milieu, to affirm closure and enclosure. Yet this is to shy away from the trials and tribulations of planetary urbanization. It is to voice political ambition without any real political ambition, without any real engagement with the new reality before us, within the new political landscape opening up around us, quite literally, which is stretching our horizons laterally and letting us grow worldwide. Why close it down? Why look backward? Why break the big down into little bits?
Bookchin pits the urbanization of sprawl against the compactness of the polis. But, as Keil notes, “the reality of today’s urban world offers a more differentiated landscape than the one suggested in the typical, caricatured, and widely used dichotomy of sprawl and compactness,” of urbanization versus citification:
The everyday lives we live in this complex landscape straddle the sustainable and the unsustainable all the time. What and who my communities are during one day and how they need to be sustained changes continuously. In order to find my way through the maze of relationships, I need to start where I am and not in an imaginary place that is either reviled (like sprawl) or celebrated (like the compact city).… Ultimately, life in the expanding urban fringe is now the reality in which strategies of sustainability are being negotiated. If we are moving away from the condemnation of sprawl and accepting its reality as a discursive plane on which negotiation over our future will have to take place, we are forced to [think and] act differently.22
For Bookchin, the urban megalopolis isn’t human-scale, nor is it a controllable or viable form of city life. Perhaps the loaded words here aren’t “controllable” or “viable” at all, but “city life”? It is this term that needs reframing: life is city-based, and the city should be an unmediated life-form, place-bound. Reconciling personal life with city life around only locality is to truncate individuality, is to abandon the complexities and possibilities of nonplace technological and social life, is to delimit the broad and wide-ranging social networks people can and do actually have each and every day. Manuel Castells has offered his own, surprisingly anarchistic vision of a network society, a corrective to and “rehashing” (#) of Bookchin’s: “Technology turns out to be anarchism’s ally more so than Marxism’s. Instead of large factories and gigantic bureaucracies (socialism’s material base), the economy increasingly operates through networks (the material foundation of organizational autonomy). And instead of the nation-state controlling territory, we have city-states managing the interchange between territories. All this is based on the internet, mobile phones, satellites, and informational networks that allow local-global communication and transport at a planetary scale.”23 Global whole or urban-local part? Isn’t the former now just the indivisible extension of the latter, its substance?
Just as there was an empowering irony to Parisian nineteenth-century Haussmannization, so, too, is there empowering irony to global neo-Haussmannization in our day. Haussmann’s urbanization tore out the heart of old medieval Paris and reinvented the concept of center, of a downtown of bright lights and conspicuous consumption. Center and periphery would change forever. An erstwhile pesky proletariat took to the shovels, manned the building sites, and stopped making trouble. Soon they found themselves dispatched to a rapidly expanding banlieue, to the new suburbs mushrooming in the distance, banished from the center they created through their own act of labor. In one sense, Paris gained as an independent work of art, as an aesthetic experience admired to this day by every tourist and visitor. Yet, in another, it lost something as a living democratic organism, as a site of generalized liberty. Hence Hauss-mann not only patented what we’d now call “gentrification,” with its commodification of space. He also pioneered an urban practice, bankrolled by the state, in cahoots with a financial and rentier elite: divide-and-rule gerrymandering through urbanization itself, gutting the city according to a rational economic and political plan. The logic of the city would never be the same again.
Writ large were contradictions. These contradictions would become urban contradictions—nineteenth-century contradictions that have since intensified and diversified into twenty-first-century global-urban contradictions. In All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman took Baudelaire under his wing to highlight how Haussmann’s infamous boulevards prized open a modern form of urban publicity. “The new Parisian boulevard,” Berman says, “was the most spectacular innovation of the nineteenth-century, and the decisive breakthrough in the modernization of the traditional city.”24 The boulevards, of course, wreaked devastating destruction, smashed through whole neighborhoods that had lived and evolved, tightly knitted, for centuries. Now, though, for the first time in history, these broad and long boulevards had opened up the whole city to its inhabitants. “Now,” writes Berman (151), “after centuries of life as a cluster of isolated cells, Paris was becoming a unified physical and human space.”
For Berman, Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen poem, “The Eyes of the Poor,” vividly shows what this new kind of extroverted urbanization can do to private bodies in public space (and to public bodies in private space). Two young lovers sit near the window of a dazzling new café, lining one of Haussmann’s newly minted boulevards. They dreamily look at each other. They’re inside, sharing one another’s company, admiring one another, yet they’re able to survey through the window the gaiety outside, the street activity, the delightful bustle of la nouvelle vie parisienne. After a while, a ragged homeless family passes by. Enamored by the café’s garish opulence, they stop. They peer in; the kids press their noses against the gleaming windowpane, admiring the decor and people inside. “How beautiful it is!” Baudelaire has his ragpickers explain. “How beautiful it is!” But they know it’s not for them, not for their type. Yet their fascination, Berman says (149), “carries no hostile undertones; their vision of the gulf between the two worlds is sorrowful, not militant, not resentful but resigned.” (Collective resentment would culminate a decade or so later.) The male lover is touched by “this family of eyes” outside; he feels a strange kinship with them, a strange affinity, despite the social distance. But his lover is unmoved; she wants the patron to shoo them away, to move them on, somewhere else, anywhere so long as it’s out of her sight. “These people with their great saucer eyes,” Baudelaire has her declaim, “are unbearable!” At that moment the two lovers love each other a little less.
Haussmann’s urban reality is romantic and magical; private joys sprung from wide-open public spaces. One can henceforth be private in the crowd, alone yet amid people; one can be inside while outside, outside while inside. There are walls and there is transparency. There is social closure and physical openness. There is public invisibility and private visibility. Berman says that Baudelaire’s “Eyes of the Poor” poem evokes a “primal scene,” a primal scene “that reveals some of the deepest ironies and contradictions” of modern capitalist urbanization (149–150). It’s the “and” that expresses the duplicity; the coexistence between apparently contradictory realities isn’t a “but” but an “and.” They go together, inextricably. For Berman, the setting that now “makes all urban humanity a great extended ‘family of eyes’ also brings forth the discarded stepchildren of that family. The physical and social transformations that drove the poor out of sight now bring them back directly into everyone’s line of vision. Hauss-mann, in tearing down the old medieval slums, inadvertently broke down the self-enclosed and hermetically sealed world of traditional urban poverty. The boulevards, blasting great holes through the poorest neighborhoods, enable the poor to walk through the holes and out of their ravaged neighborhoods, to discover for the first time what the rest of their city and the rest of life are like.”25 They are but one step away from asserting themselves as citizens, citizens of a wider universe, citizens expressing adequate ideas about all kinds of common notions they’re now capable of developing.
Haussmannization and its neo-Haussmannization counterpart share a historical and geographical lineage. But the primal scene of its progeny needs updating and upgrading; now it involves superstructural software as well as infrastructural hardware. Those boulevards still flow with people and traffic, even if the boulevard is now reincarnated in the highway, and that highway is more often at a standstill, gridlocked and log-jammed at every hour. The significant change is how today’s Grands Boulevards flow with energy and finance, with information and communication; they are frequently fiber-optic and digitalized, ripping through cyberspace as well as physical space. Neo-Haussmannization is now a global-urban strategy that has peripheralized millions of people everywhere; Baron Haussmann’s spade work pales alongside it. Neo-Haussmannization has peripheralized so many people, in fact, that it makes no sense anymore to talk about these peoples being peripheral. As cities have exploded into megacities, and as urban centers—even in the poorest countries—have gotten decentered, gotten glitzy and internationalized, “Bonapartism” projects its urban tradition onto twenty-first-century planetary space. The “family of eyes” has gone global. Those “great saucer eyes” are media eyes, all seeing, and, with the Internet and WikiLeaks, often all-knowing too. People can now see the global elite along this planetary information and communication boulevard, see them through the windowpanes of postmodern global-urban life; people can see them and their own reflections as though they were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. We might even say that a global family of eyes now truly encounters itself as a family, as an emerging citizenry, as an affinity group that yearns to repossess what has been dispossessed. Their big saucer eyes now look on with indignation, in the public realm, doing so with animosity as well as awe. Now, there’s not so much a world to win as a whole world to occupy. A whole world that’s really people’s own backyard.