Nowhere had he seen officialdom and life as interwoven as they were here, so interwoven that it sometimes even looked as if officialdom and life had changed places.
Franz Kafka
To celebrate our becoming a minority, and to posit an almost-unimaginable parallel urban realm, only opens the door, likely a backdoor, to the faint possibility that there is an imaginary parallel urban realm out there, one yearning to be invented.1 In any flight through the wormhole to another political space-time dimension, into a minor space, physicists will tell you that enormous amounts of negative energy are required to force that hole open, to keep it open, and to permit a time-space crossover to take place. Negative social energy, of course, is a lot of disgruntled and discontented people, fusing themselves together, sometimes fighting one another, oftentimes knowing better what they don’t want than what they do. Negative energy is repulsive in the sense that it’s necessary to keep the wormhole from collapsing, from caving in under gravity, under the oppositional energy of an enemy intent on closing things down. But it’s equally clear that for blazing another cosmic future, a new terrestrial one here on earth, a good deal of positive energy is required, too, energy that’s not only destructive but creative, an affirming power rather than that which simply denounces.
To create the almost-unimaginable, imagination is pretty crucial. One needs an active sense of experimentation, of experiments with society as well as with concepts, of moving beyond simple or even complicated “critiques of capitalist political-economy” and something that expresses only critical negativity. Experimentation gives a deeper sense to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach about changing the world. The point, rather, should be to experiment with the world, people experimenting with how they live in the world, experimenting with what that world might be, experimenting with how they might construct an alternative urban life and how they might make that realm for themselves. To say all this isn’t to voice a utopian yearning: experimentation isn’t to rally around utopianism, not that that is necessarily bad. It’s more that what needs developing is, for want of a better label, an imaginary pragmatics, something neither utopian nor pragmatic as such.
Imagination is vital stuff here. But it’s been serially lacking in the Left’s militancy, in what it wants and how it might get it. It’s hard to know whether the Left’s past inefficacy is because it lacked imagination or whether its inefficacy has throttled its imagination, doused the flames of the Left’s imaginative drive. Some combination of both is probably the case. By imagination, I love Sartre’s citation from The Imaginary (1940), which I mobilized as an epigraph to Magical Marxism: “the act of the imagination is an act of magic.” “It is an incantation,” says Sartre, “destined to make the object of one’s thoughts, the thing one desires, appear in such a way that one can take possession of it.” Needless to say, “there’s always,” Sartre qualifies, “in that act something of the imperious and infantile, a refusal to take account of distance and difficulties.”2 Perhaps it’s just as well: otherwise nothing would happen, nothing would get done, nothing would even be ventured. Thus the word “magic” in Magical Marxism is closely linked with imagination, with imperious desire, with “infantile” yearning to do something else, to invent something else, to do it now, not when the time is right (and ripe), or not when analysis says the moment is pregnant and that the productive forces have reached such and such a level of maturity. There’s another quote I like relating to the imagination. It’s by Spinoza, from Ethics: “Humans strive to imagine only those things which increase their power of acting.”3 So imagination means setting in motion something pragmatic, something around which one can act, a concrete praxis, a magical act, like an occupation becoming viral, using imagination to spark people’s imagination.
But let’s be clear about what “imaginary pragmatics” is and isn’t. It’s not, for instance, a pragmatism of compromise, which is what most pragmatics is; it’s not a pragmatics of the moment, a status quo pragmatism. Instead, it’s an imaginative form of action and activism that constantly tests out and overcomes its own limits, pushes beyond its own limits, and experiments with itself and the world. It’s not that ideas get tested with reality to see if they work (the classic definition of pragmatism) but rather to see if an experimental idea can be tested with one’s own imagination to find out whether it can be made true. Sartre always liked to insist that imagination is something lived, but also lived-beyond. You don’t know in advance what’s going to work and what isn’t. So you experiment. If it works, it pulls unreality on, makes it real; real politics follows imaginary politics. The experiment is frequently geared toward self-expression, often collective self-expression, to a becoming and a growing, and there’s no logical order, no a priori rationality involved here; and, of course, there are plenty of hazards en route. For that reason, it seems mistaken to ask what are “feasible” parallel urban visions to current neoliberal excesses; it’s time for the Left to voice something excessive, mobilize around something not-yet-feasible, and get going on a project that might make it work. What we need is something unfeasible, not necessarily parallel to what “they” do, but superimposed upon what they do, inscribing and reinscribing for ourselves something else; swarming over what they do; creating our urban realm and minor spaces within, above, below, and beyond what they do, beyond their reality; and doing it in another dimension that they can’t access and have no security clearance to access.
One of the great inspirations for Magical Marxism was Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which makes us believe that people are followed by butterflies, live for over a hundred years and can levitate up to heaven. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the patriarch of the spectral city of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendia—a city, remember, that came to him as a “supernatural echo in his dream”—says he could never understand the sense of a political contest in which adversaries agree upon the rules. Moderation usually means losing before you’ve even begun to fight. Why be feasible? José Arcadio Buendia had two aspects of his personality indispensable for the Left: practicality and unbridled imagination, twin powers making for an almost inexhaustible magical source and force. Indeed, practicality and imagination are two aspects of José Arcadio’s personality that animated his spirit of social initiative. He was forever forward-looking, never dwelt on the past, and his insatiable curiosity and desire for adventure convinced friends and comrades to cross the distant mountains, to try to found a new city, a new urban reality. Through sheer will and hope of a better life to come, they kept going, kept hacking through the jungle. The imagery, the metaphor, is uplifting.
Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude gives us a different, “magical” language to frame things, to perceive reality. It led me to believe that the modus operandi of Marxists should be, after José Buendia’s wayward revolutionary son, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, “to sneak about through narrow trails of permanent subversion.” The Left has to construct its own minor trails to sneak through, trails that make Marxism constructive and positive—make it inventive and experimental, probably clandestine, initially gurgling covertly within the interstices of bourgeois society. Aureliano Buendia is a personality dear to the Left’s heart: waging thirty-two battles for the liberal revolutionary cause, he lost every one of them! And yet losing these political battles never impeded his grand existential quest, his grand existential war, which Aureliano won hands down every time over his rightist antagonists. In engaging in struggle, in individual and collective struggle (including the struggle with himself), he forged a new subjectivity, a new radical spirit for himself. In experimenting and acting in the world, in engaging with the world politically and practically, we, too, discover others who are doing likewise and, in the bargain, we transform ourselves. It’s not so much that people organize and then act, as, by acting, people discover other people, and then they begin to organize themselves; and here, again, why limit ourselves to actuality, to the what is, to something rational? Let’s invent our own concept of reality, another reality.
What might this mean today? For a start, imaginary pragmatics within the urban context doesn’t mean building more buildings, let alone more spectacular buildings. It means more occupations. In the United States alone, there’s already a surfeit of vacant buildings and vacant lots resulting from overspeculation, abandonment, and mortgage foreclosures. In Baltimore, there are 42,000 vacant housing units (14 percent of its housing stock) and 17,000 vacant lots; Philadelphia has 60,000 vacant housing units; St. Louis, 6,000 vacant buildings. In 2011, a New York–based grassroots organization, Picture the Homeless, estimated there were 3,551 vacant buildings and 2,489 vacant lots citywide. If these vacant units were redeveloped and rehabbed, there’s a capacity to create nearly 200,000 new dwellings for those in need.4 That’s a lot of steady work for architects and urbanists without anybody ever building anything new again for years and years. But of course it’s not architectural and developmental will that’s needed or indeed lacking: it’s political will. In recent years, even prior to the Occupy movement, we’ve seen glimmers of this political will stirring within civil society, rekindling with a different modus operandi from before, expressing itself more militantly. Born out of a sense of frustration and bewilderment, often verging on disbelief—disbelief over what corporate and financial power is getting away with—disgruntled citizens started to collectively organize. Soon this organizing took shape in the form of groups like Picture the Homeless (founded in 1999 and still run by homeless people) and the nationwide alliance Take Back the Land.5
Take Back the Land borrows its organizing and mobilizing techniques from Latin American social movements, especially Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), with direct-action occupations of land and vacant lots, to claim and reclaim for ordinary people abandoned and foreclosed properties and land across America. “Since the fall of 2008,” the movement says, “the us Government has purchased millions of foreclosed properties from banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). These acquisitions bailed out the financial industry, which was literally on the verge of collapse. The concrete result of the TARP bailout has been the transfer of $1.5 trillion in public wealth into the hands of private institutions and individuals (in the form of bonuses) to preserve their fortunes. While taking money from everyday workers and handing it over to huge, too big to fail, financial institutions helped forestall the collapse of the world’s financial markets, it has not prevented the displacement and dispossession of millions of ordinary families—disproportionately low-income and women of color. In short, the banks have been saved, but people have been abandoned.”6
Take Back the Land’s battle cry says it all: “OCCUPY, RESIST, PRODUCE.” The latter notion to “produce” gives the movement a dynamic, inventive, and active edge, something that affirms self-organizing and experimentation, something that moves in, occupies, resists, and defends. Yet it creates, too, makes things happen, new things, produces a new reality out of the ruins of the old bankrupt reality. The movement has a three-pronged agenda, a different groove from the activism of old: (1) The issue is fundamentally about land, particularly community control of land, and especially control of land by black communities. (2) The government is an integral part of the problem; ordinary folk can’t depend on it for offering solutions. (3) Development isn’t about buildings or technology; it’s about lives and actual people. We might say that the land in question—the spatial question, if you like—is about a “landscape of affect,” an emotional landscape in which people don’t express themselves necessarily in words but in feelings (rage, anger, sadness, love) and, especially, in action: through activity, through collective hustle. That way the physical and social landscape around them isn’t so much a Sartrean practico-inert as a substance of their own everyday lives, a dynamic urban realm expressive of human passions.
More recently, Take Back the Land’s activism has connected with Occupy, dialoguing with them, allying with them, and forming out of the mix a twin-track campaign: #OCCUPY and LIBERATE. On the face of it, these two banners seem similar, even indistinguishable; yet there are significant differences, says Max Rameau, who is seeking to “upgrade” each respective organization. He wants to show how each track can perform unique and critical functions, how strategic thinking can shift the alliance onto a higher plane of immanence. #OCCUPY, Rameau points out, “has mobilized mainly, though not exclusively, disaffected young and impacted working and middle class whites”; LIBERATE comprises mainly low- and middle-income people of color. #OCCUPY’S “primary frame is the economic system and the injustice it produces”; LIBERATE, meanwhile, “frames issues in terms of land control and use (such as housing, farming, and public space).” #OCCUPY targets “those symbols, institutions, and persons responsible for perpetrating the economic crisis—the 1%—through the ‘occupation’ of public and private spaces”; LIBERATE’s base “is the victims of the crisis, who are protected via land liberation and eviction defense.”7
Needless to say, although #OCCUPY and LIBERATE are importantly distinguishable, they complement one another, reinforce one another, and cover one another’s backs. “Two intractable images of the housing crisis,” Rameau says, “include the banks responsible for this financial mess and the homes from which families are evicted.” On each flank, war can be waged, fighting the banks, protesting and occupying them on their own turf, while liberating the spaces these banks have foreclosed, taking control of our turf in the ’hood. Both #OCCUPY and LIBERATE, Rameau says, defiantly occupy the 1 percent and liberate the 99 percent, forging dual tracks and parallel visions—resulting in mutually supportive fused groups.
Take Back the Land and #OCCUPY strike as solider platforms to launch offensives, solider, maybe, than that of the Right to the City. As I’ve suggested throughout this book, it’s time good-guy activists give up on “rights” and refrain from making rights claims. I know this might seem troubling to a lot of dedicated people who see “rights” as fundamental mobilizing platforms—as a strategic masthead to defend people, protesting against arbitrary arrests and unlawful imprisonment and against state-sanctioned torture, wars on terror, and so forth. The idea of “human rights,” after all, appeals to our humane sensibilities, to what it means to suffer as a universal species, and all that understandably touches, moves, and angers people where and whenever abuses are inflicted. So in abandoning that terrain, one might ask, don’t we lose all firm ground from which to engage in a struggle for social justice?
Quite the contrary: the radical ground is much shakier and looser when you invoke “rights” and is more likely to cave in under your feet. As the French historian Marcel Gauchet said in 1980, “les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique” [“the rights of man aren’t a politics”].8 In other words, when rights are so flagrantly and frequently abused, so blatantly and brutally denied, and all done so serially and seemingly at all times, then as a lever for political engagement the “rights” agenda stirs only the bleeding hearts of liberals; it tends to fall on the deaf ear of reactionaries, especially those intent on bullying and business. One could even argue that in our post-9/11 militarist age, with its Washington-inspired consensus of freedom and democracy at 30,000 feet, rights have been subverted by the Right; the language of human rights, then, is likely to backfire or else get fired back.9
Disentangling our rights (good guys) from their rights (bad guys) is hazardous terrain indeed, the more so when one has recourse to a universal benchmark to adjudicate. What is the criterion that demarcates our rights from theirs? Aren’t universal rights more like Plato’s concept of justice from The Republic: those that are advantageous to the stronger? Maybe the Left should sober up and forget about asking for rights, for the rights of man, for human rights, for rights to the city. These are the emptiest of empty political signifiers: too abstract and distant a metaphysical concern, too conciliatory and “reasonable” a political program. Indeed, when anybody makes a rights claim from below, it’s as if they’re asking for something, pleading for something, demanding something, asking somebody to grant something. The claim implies a sympathetic interlocutor, a higher interlocutor, an honest and impartial interlocutor, but it’s not clear who that is. In our society, the interlocutor is willy-nilly a person, a government, or an institution in and with power, a higher court of justice who judges. But why ask them for something one hasn’t got? Why make a pleading claim? Why speak in a conciliatory tone? (José Buendia wouldn’t have been impressed!) Why not just act and affirm? Why not just do without asking, take without making claims to anybody? Why not just take back what has been dispossessed, occupy, and take control of what one wants yet lacks?
The big problem with rights is that they are founded on an implicit principle of recognition, on a theory of recognition, on the mutual acknowledgement of adversaries. “It is only by being ‘recognized’ by another, by many others, or—in the extreme—by all others, that a human being is really human, for himself as well as for others.” So spoke the Marxisant Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève, in his famous seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Kojève, from the Left, was instrumental (and culpable) in emphasizing the question of recognition, using Hegel’s great idealist tome to deepen Marxism metaphysically, bedding his logic down in the “master–slave” dialectic, or what Hegel labeled the conundrum of “Lordship and Bondage.”10 “Man was born and History began,” Kojève says, “with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of a Master and a Slave.”11 Universal history is, for Kojève, “the history of the interaction between warlike Masters and working slaves,” and liberation necessitated a “struggle for recognition,” a “dialectic of the Particular and the Universal in human existence.” On the one hand, the slave can’t be content with attributing a value to himself alone. He wants his particular value, his own worth and dignity, to be recognized by everyone—that is, universally, and above all by the master, who doesn’t deign to recognize him or his rights. On the other hand, the master likewise yearns for universality, but similarly can’t have it so long as he oppresses his other, the slave, the serf, him or her who is dispossessed and who doesn’t acknowledge their master’s authority.
Thus an inextricable antinomy ensues, “two opposed shapes of consciousness,” according to Hegel in Phenomenology: “one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another.”12 The master and slave sit on either side of the great metaphysical fence. But they can recognize themselves only by mutually recognizing one another. So long as the master is opposed to the slave, so long as mastery and slavery exist, Kojève says, “the synthesis of the Particular and the Universal cannot be realized, and human existence will never be ‘satisfied.’”13
The analogy with the rights question is maybe obvious. The realization of rights ceases to be a dream, says Kojève, ceases to be an illusion, an abstract ideal, “only to the extent that they are universally recognized by those whom I recognize as worthy of recognizing them.”14 That is how human rights (and human freedom) are granted: they’re acknowledged, recognized, by the powerful and the weak alike, both of whom become mindful of one another as people, as human beings, as Beings with shared consciousness and self-consciousness. And that is what is problematic with this appeal, with this theory of recognition, even if Kojève was savvy about two things: the supersession of this existential impasse requires a Fight (always capitalized for Kojève) and this Fight could, of course, only be enacted through Action (again capped), through active struggle. (Having truth claims conditioned by action and struggle meant Kojève, here at least, remained very Marxist.) But why should this fight and this activism base itself on mutual recognition?
Marx never saw it like that. In Capital, in the “Working Day” chapter, he gives his own account of how any right might be enacted and how it might be granted. The dialogue he constructs, barely four pages long, between the capitalist and laborer around the length of the working day, vividly demonstrates how questions of rights have no universal meaning, no foundational basis in institutions; nor are they responsive to any moral or legal argument or theory of recognition. Questions of rights are, first and foremost, for Marx, questions of social power, about who wins, almost Nietzschean in going beyond good and evil. “The capitalist takes his stand on the law of commodity-exchange,” Marx says. “Like other buyers, he seeks to extract the maximum possible benefit from the use-value of his commodity. Suddenly, however, there arises the voice of the worker, which had previously been stifled in the sound and the fury of the production process: ‘The commodity I have sold you differs from the ordinary crowd of commodities in that its use creates value, a greater value than it costs. That is why you bought it. What appears on your side as the valorization of capital is on my side an excess of expenditure of labor-power.’”15
What the capitalist gains in labor, Marx says, by putting his employee to work for as long and as hard as possible for the maximum duration of the working day, the worker loses “in substance” through damage to their health and well-being. “Everybody has a right to their property,” the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) has it, and no one can be deprived of this inalienable right. “The capitalist,” Marx says, sticking tight to the UN’s credo, “maintains his right as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible, to make two working days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser.” So the worker responds in kind, and likewise clings on to the UN’s Declaration: “the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to a particular normal length.”16 Consequently, here, Marx concludes, is an “antinomy of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange,” both equally bearing the seal of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. As such, for Marx, “between equal rights force decides.”17 Hence the struggle for rights isn’t something granted from above, nor acknowledged through the courts; neither is it granted through mutual recognition. Instead, for those who have no rights, rights are something that must be taken, that involve struggle and force, a Fight. Thus one must certainly fight for one’s rights, but Fight without asking for these rights to be granted; nobody is going to recognize the displaced, the banished, and the dispossessed apart from the displaced, the banished, and the dispossessed themselves. What has been taken must be reclaimed, by force, reclaimed through practical action, through organized militancy, through spontaneous subversion, through encountering others doing likewise. That is the only means through which one creates a Marxian truth, obtains a Marxian right: through force.
And that is why Marx avoided using the language of rights. There are no rights, no rights to the city, no rights to this and that. We, the people, have no rights as such. There is nobody to recognize what we lack, no mutual recognition, no mutual conciliation, no expectations of anybody granting us anything. And so we should begin again with no expectations, expecting nothing, demanding nothing, taking without asking, taking without being recognized, taking back that which has been dispossessed, and building something else in its stead. Work together, for sure, in mutual recognition of fellow-traveler slaves—the 99 percent—but not with the masters; create alliances with people who have no rights; work with architects and activists, with ordinary people and specialists, with people with common sense and those with a sense of scale. Together, we can develop common notions around adequate ideas. Common notions are different from universal rights; they’re more pragmatic, more concrete, more changing and changeable, deduced and negotiated, relevant to a specific problematic and to a specific group—to a fused group.
And if we don’t need to build buildings, we do need spaces for new encounters, spaces in which people can encounter one another and where new affinities can be met and forged, where new, futuristic magical desires can reanimate urban spaces. Already such spaces are emerging in strange and unforeseen places, in the interstices of planetary urbanization, in minor spaces. In an inexorable drive to urbanize the world, those sprawling strip malls that once went up in rapid succession in the United States are just as quickly folding in succession. “As retailers crawl out of the worst recession since the advent of malls,” the New York Times recently noted, “many are realizing they are overbuilt and are closing at a fast clip.” These strip malls are being stripped down and reinvented for new uses, for planetary urbanized uses, which is to say as community farms and spaces for small organic holdings, as new green spaces and creeks and parks.18 (The prospect takes us back—or else propels us fleetingly forward—to Larry Niven’s sci-fi fantasy of LA’S Wilshire Boulevard grassed over for pedestrians.) What’s getting invented here is new, smaller-scale retailing and nonretailing within overaccumulated and devalued giant retailing. Devalued spaces now revalorize as the downtowns the suburbs never had, as Main Streets on the edge with green space. Creative destruction, at last, might allow for nonpatented creativity.
The prospect of planetary urbanization begetting its other, creating alternative “nonurbanized” spaces precisely because of urbanization, wasn’t lost on Isaac Asimov. One aspect of Trantor’s hypertrophy, he knew, was that if steel domes canopied everywhere and everything, and if high-tech urbanization and postindustrialization meant zilch arable land for cultivation, whither the planet’s food? Where would the behemoth’s food actually come from? Where are the farms for food production, the real farms, not just the corporate factory farms? Asimov recognized Trantor’s vulnerability, its destabilizing dependence: feeding itself. For much of its reign, Trantor had to import its food from outlying planets and was reliant on extraterrestrial suppliers. Later, we begin to hear of strange organic food production existing within its cavernous neighborhoods, like those of the sector Mycogen, in Corbusian buildings, some underground, others vertical and overground, a flourishing of Steiner-style “microfarms with secret yeast supplies.”
This was bio-agriculture that mixed high-tech automation with low-tech “primitive” labor. Hari Seldon remembered “stepping out into a narrow corridor, on each side of which were large thick glass tanks in which roiled cloudy, green water full of swirling, growing algae, moving about through the force of the gas bubbles that streamed up through it. They would be rich in carbon dioxide, he decided.”19 A vivid example, maybe, of what nowadays might be seen as an emerging “vertical farm” movement, which holds that it’s more economically and ecologically viable to cultivate plant life within skyscrapers and in vertical spaces—within, as it were, the very bowels of planetary urban life. Climate-controlled “glass houses” (as John Hix’s canonical text documented) aspire to feed urban populations in more energy-efficient production systems, with less pesticide usage and runoff water pollution, taking advantage of new hydroponic and aeroponic technologies. The theme merits airtime, debate, and development, since there are a lot of vacant floors awaiting cultivation the world over.
These are modest instances of what might be described as morphing encounters, gradual changes that have an evolving and emergent possibility; they signal change, to be sure, but change within disrupted continuity. These transformations represent a constantly adapting landscape and system within the confines of existing social relationships. This is a kind of evolutionary reformism that posits change incrementally, over the longer timescale, an almost-inevitable historical change as human beings respond and adapt to shifting contextual circumstances. (We might wonder whether the recent transformation in Egypt, after Mubarak’s ousting, constitutes such a morphing encounter. Only time will tell.) Meanwhile, within these morphing encounters we also find punctuating encounters: extensive and intensive associations between people that jar and intervene unexpectedly, that produce sudden changes and sudden jumps that last, that burst things asunder, that create grand historical transformations—revolutionary transformations in which nothing is ever the same again. These kinds of encounters induce a “speedism” that produces and reclaims spaces, spaces that fulfill democratic yearnings; these include physical offline spaces as well as those dramatized by online networks between people, new urban kaleidoscopes, and collideorscapes.
Participants here fuse not only as a singularity sharing their passions and affirming their hopes but also as a force that creates its own historical space. It’s not in space that people act: people become space by acting. They are space. (Jackson Pollock claimed he was nature.) In these punctuating encounters, entire spaces become performative spaces; nobody is merely watching or performing for somebody else: everybody is creating an event, an invironment, by transforming the relationship between people, by communicating in space, by transforming space, by engaging in a scenic dialogue with a space. In an invironment the “performance” itself engineers and creates the spatial relations as well as the behavior of every participant; that, in turn, leads to more fluid encounters in which the performance is somehow controlled by the shifting spatial configuration. Invironments are spaces that literally erupt as street drama—as dramatic street theater. The efficacy of this street drama will necessarily depend on the performative activity of creating a space, a space in which actors and spectators unite to know each other as one. Sheer relationships, group rituals, collective rhythms, and repetitions define elemental connections in space as well as fusions between crowds of people and their individual bodies. Separations are overcome and, for a moment, for an instant, for an instant that lasts, a punctuating encounter is glimpsed. The moment lasts because it is an encounter that draws people forward; the encounter doesn’t decompose, doesn’t fall apart into something that took place historically, yesterday, last week, the year before or fifty years ago. With an encounter that lasts nothing is the same ever again: it catapults people into a process of becoming, of becoming something different.
The advent of Occupy over the past year or so has provoked an epistemological rift in the ontological morphing of our social, political, and economic life—that subtle, creeping shift of our being in the world. Something decidedly different has unleashed itself, revealed itself, gotten created, and it is something different from the past, different from 1968. A lot of people have drawn similarities between the Occupy movement and 1968; I’m not so convinced. Things, I’ve argued in this book, are different today: the tactics and tempo of struggle have changed, the terrain of struggle has changed. The world has changed, too, changed enormously since 1968, since the flower power 1960s, and it has changed in very significant political ways. These changes have had their own punctuating refrains. In 1967, on the cusp of student protest, The Doors sang, “We want the world and we want it now.” Exactly a decade on, in 1977, a decade vilified by fiscal crisis and economic slump, the Sex Pistols bawled, “NO FUTURE! NO FUTURE FOR YOU AND ME!” And then, not quite a decade on again, in 1984, during the backend of Ronald Reagan’s first term and in the thick of Thatcherism, Michael Jackson and his USA for Africa harmonized, “We are the World.” A strange, almost inexplicable act of incorporation and co-optation, of universal reabsorption, had taken place. From wanting the world in 1967, there was no world worth having in 1977: it could all go to fuck. Only then, as we hobbled into the 1980s, we were told that now, somehow, we were the world. That same “no future” had been thrown back in our faces: we were this no future, this TINA, and we’ve been living with it ever since.
That infamous Orwellian year of 1984 isn’t a bad starting point to reflect upon this rift. In 1984 in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson announced, among many other things, something significant: “the abolition of critical distance,” the Left’s “most cherished and time-honored formula.”20 Henceforth critical distance finds itself, perhaps for the first time ever, thoroughly outmoded and impotent. There’s no longer any without, only within, no repositioning of ourselves beyond what we progressives are critically analyzing, critically struggling against; now there is no way for us to get critical leverage on the beast whose belly we’re all collectively inside.
This lack of outside—or reframing of what inside and outside might now constitute—likewise preoccupied Salman Rushdie in 1984. In “Outside the Whale,” Rushdie provided a thicker, more humane texturing to what Jameson awkwardly affirmed, taking on George Orwell at the same time. In “Inside the Whale” [1940], Orwell suggested there was an outside to this grubby profane world of ours, a safe haven somewhere, at least an outside for intellectuals who can find warm wombs, proverbial Jonah whales, within their texts and art. Inside this outside, great art is incubated, Orwell said, great art and literature that says bundles about our corrupt and venal political and economic system. But Rushdie had none of this: “The truth is that there is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places; the missiles have made sure of that. So we are left with a fairly straightforward choice. Either we agree to delude ourselves, to lose ourselves in the fantasy of the great fish … or we can do what all human beings do instinctively when they realize that the womb has been lost forever—that is, we can make the very devil of a racket.”21
So maybe 1984 signaled the real end to the 1960s, sealed its fate. The year 1984 meant the end of the without, the end of critical distance, the end of 1968. Or maybe it meant the end of continuing its tradition using the same mindset, with the same frame of reference, and the same militancy. Making a racket 1960s-style no longer seems tenable today, no more seems the required politics to tackle this beast that had absorbed us within it, wholescale and wholesale, lock, stock, and barrel. Something else is needed than the desperation of Zoyd Wheeler, Thomas Pynchon’s hippie antihero from Vineland—which, remember, was also set in 1984—leaping through plate glass windows, breaking on through to the other side, trying to cling on to his government stipend as a mental degenerate. Beneath the cobblestones there’s no longer any beach; and if there is, its waters are now too polluted to permit nude bathing.
Our urban world is a different place from what it was in 1968. It permits different hopes and dreams, poses different threats and possibilities. Paradoxically, today’s neoliberal reality is more easily critiqued than ever before using basic Marxist tools. At the level of analysis, it has never been simpler to adopt a classical Marxist stance and be right. And yet, at the level of political practice, that analysis seems far too facile, far too futile to lead us anywhere constructive. There’s little in this analysis and ensuing critique that leaves us with any guides as to political practice, to practical struggle, to how we might act on this knowledge. One of the difficulties is that the world we think about, the world that functions through a particular economic model, is classically Capital-ist in the sense of Marx’s great text; yet the world we have to act in, the world we progressives have to organize in, is tellingly Kafkaesque. Marxists know how to analyze and criticize this reality; indeed, we know that all-too-well, sometimes a little too well for our own good! But we know less about how to act, how to construct a practical politics from the standpoint of this theoretical knowledge. There’s no direct correlation between the two. We have yet to resolve what I shall call the enigma of revolt.
The present conjuncture is Kafkaesque to the degree that castles and ramparts reign over us everywhere. These castles and ramparts are usually in plain view, frequently palpable to our senses, even inside us, yet at the same time they’re distant and somehow cut off, somehow out of reach and inaccessible; and their occupants are evermore difficult to pin down when we come knocking at their doors, providing we can find the right door to knock on. Kafka was better than Marx at recognizing the thoroughly modern conflict now besieging us under capitalism. Marx understood the general dynamics of the production of castles and the trials this system subjects us to. But he understood less about its corridors of power and how its organizational bureaucracies functioned. Marx understood the difficulty of waging war against a process. However, he wasn’t around long enough to imagine how this process would one day undergo administrative (mis)management—how it would not only get chopped up by massively complex divisions of labor but also beget even more massive bureaucratic compartmentalizations, done by unaccountable and anonymous middle-managers.
Kafka knew how modern conflict wasn’t just an us against other people class affair but an us against a world transformed into an immense and invariably abstract total administration. The shift Kafka makes between his two great novels, The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), makes for a suggestive shift in our own supranational administered world. In The Trial, Joseph K., like a dog, stands accused in a world that’s an omnipotent tribunal, a sort of state-monopoly capitalist system. In The Castle, the protagonist K. populates a world that has suddenly shrunken into a village whose dominating castle on the hill seems even more powerful and elusive than ever before. Perhaps in this village with its castle we can now glimpse our own “global village,” a world shrunken by globalization, a world in which the psychological drama of one man confronting a castle is now really a political parable of us all today—as we have to conceive a collective identity to resolve the dark gothic mystery we ourselves have scripted, an urban mystery in which we are simultaneously inmates and warders. “Direct dealings with the authorities was not particularly difficult,” K. muses,
for well organized as they might be, all they did was guard the distant and invisible interests of distant and invisible masters, while K. fought for something vitally near to him, for himself, and moreover, at least at the very beginning, on his own initiative, for he was the attacker.… But now by the fact that they had at once amply met his wishes in all unimportant matters—and hitherto only unimportant matters had come up—they had robbed him of the possibility of light and easy victories, and with that of the satisfaction which must accompany them and the well-grounded confidence for further and greater struggles which must result from them. Instead, they let K. go anywhere he liked—of course only within the village—and thus pampered and enervated him, ruled out all possibility of conflict, and transported him into an unofficial, totally unrecognized, troubled, and alien existence.… So it came about that while a light and frivolous bearing, a certain deliberate carelessness was sufficient when one came in direct contact with the authorities, one needed in everything else the greatest caution, and had to look round on every side before one made a single step.22
K. marvels at a world that sounds eerily like our own: “Nowhere had he seen officialdom and life as interwoven as they were here, so interwoven that it sometimes even looked as if officialdom and life had changed places” (53, emphasis added). It follows now that progressives need the greatest caution in everything we do; we need to look around on every side before we can make a single step. The gravity of the situation isn’t lost on any of us. But the gravity of this situation nonetheless “pampers” and “enervates” us, too, and tries to rule out all possibility of conflict by absorbing us into its “light and frivolous bearing.” It has integrated us into its reality, a reality that satisfies all our unimportant wishes and desires; it has integrated itself into us as an apparently nonalien force.
In our own times, the Kafkaesque castle has become the Debordian “integrated spectacle,” a phenomenon that permeates all reality. If the dynamics of The Trial exhibited the traits (and the leakiness) of the “concentrated” and “diffuse” spectacles that Debord outlined in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), then The Castle is late-Debord and tallies with the Comments on the Society of the Spectacle he’d make twenty-one years later. “When the spectacle was concentrated,” Debord says, “the greater part of the surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part.”23 The society of the castle and of the integrated spectacle is like a vast whirlpool: it sucks everything into a singular and unified spiraling force, into a seamless web that has effectively collapsed and amalgamated different layers and boundaries. It has created a one-world cell-form of planetary urbanization. Erstwhile distinctions between the political and the economic; between urban and rural; and between form and content, conflict and consent, politics and technocracy have lost their specific gravity, have lost their clarity of meaning. Integration functions through a conflating process of co-optation and corruption, of reappropriation and reabsorption, of blocking off by breaking down. Each realm now simply elides into its other.
Where K. goes astray, and where his quest borders on the hopeless, is that he’s intent on struggling to access the castle’s occupants; he wants to penetrate the castle’s bureaucratic formalities and the “flawlessness” of its inner circle. K. struggles for a way in rather than a way out. Using all the Cartesian tools of a land surveyor, he confronts the castle on the castle’s own terms, on its own ostensible “rational” frame of reference. K.’s demands, consequently, are too restrictive and too unimportant, too conventional and too self-conscious. He wants to render the world of the castle intelligible as opposed to rendering it unacceptable. Instead of trying to enter the inner recesses of our castle, of unpacking its meaning, of demystifying its fetishism, instead of trying to find doors to knock on and people to make rational complaints to, we need to rethink this enigma of revolt under planetary urbanization and to rethink it on our terms, not theirs—not on the castle’s terms, not on the terms of any “logic of capital.”
For, in truth, there is no more an enigma of capital. We have David Harvey to thank for that; he’s already done the steady work, revealed to us that now there can no longer be any fetishism within neoliberal capitalist society.24 Marx exposed bourgeois sleight of hand and revealed for people the hidden world of capitalist alienation, demonstrating the “root” cause of their subjugation and domination. But today people around the world don’t need Marx to reveal the root of their misery, to correct the lacunas in their vision of everyday reality: they know it all too well themselves. They’re bludgeoned by a system that’s all too obvious to them, that’s based on raw, naked, and highly visible power, on brute force that doesn’t need unmasking by anyone. This ruling class wallows in the obviousness of its shenanigans because it knows that its opposition is too weak and feeble to stand up to its power.
Thus there is no enigma of capital, at least not for us. It’s their enigma. For us, their circulation, production, and accumulation by dispossession are not enigmatic: they are obvious, blunderingly obvious, bludgeoningly obvious, an obviousness based on pure power, on obvious power. If there is an enigma, it is how this power is administered, how it’s controlled, how its controlling center has become “occult” (as Guy Debord said). The enigma before us is an administrative conundrum of how to struggle within this total administration, under whose writ politics and economics, the public and the private, state and non-state have all become indistinguishable—indistinguishable in the traditional way we understood these categories. Public spaces are now privatized, public services are privatized, the public is now private; entrepreneurs become politicians, politicians get entrepreneurial; billionaires head up agencies whose budgets dwarf even the biggest supra-international organizations; what was once public is now private. The public realm of what Manuel Castells labeled “collective consumption”—goods consumed collectively, like transport and utilities infrastructure, hospitals, schools, public spaces, and so on—hasn’t so much been abandoned by the state as sold off at bargain prices to private capital. Not only has the state retracted from paying for items of collective consumption but these items have actively been dispossessed, revalorized for profit. The plot thickens, too, as elsewhere public goods become publicized private billboards. In financially strapped urban areas of America, like in Baltimore, efforts to raise the municipal coffers now mean firetrucks are emblazoned with glossy corporate ads; in Philadelphia, subway riders now bear travel cards with McDonald’s ads; Kentucky Fried Chicken logos embellish manhole covers and fire hydrants in urban Indiana; pizza chains advertise on public school buses.25 So it goes, on and on, the medium is the message.
We have to rethink, accordingly, the whole nature of what is the public realm in this age of privatization and neoliberalization, a privatization that Marx saw, in the Communist Manifesto, coming way back. Bourgeois society, he reminded us, would “leave no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.” Bourgeois society would “drown the most heavenly ecstasies of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Bourgeois society would “resolve personal [and public] worth into exchange value.” Bourgeois society would rip away halos of every sort, convert all erstwhile hallowed and holy realms, including the public realm itself, into another money realm, into another means to accumulate capital. Marx leaves us with the bleak task of picking up the pieces of what “the public” realm might still mean.26
We need to redefine its context, redefine not a public realm that is collectively owned and managed by the state but a public realm that is collectively run and managed by the people, irrespective of who actually owns the damn thing. The public realm must somehow be expressive of the people, expressive of their common notions, common notions that Spinoza always insisted were not universal notions or some form of universal rights. Spinoza was dead against an abstract conception of universality, which he said is an inadequate idea. Common notions are general rather than abstract, general in their practical and contextual applicability. From this standpoint, when something is public, its channels for common expression remain open, negotiable, and debatable, political in the sense that they will witness people encountering other people, dialoguing with other people, arguing with other people. In the urban realm these public expressions will likely be more loudly heard and intensely felt. When the whole world has been privatized, I’m certain that the public realm will be defined by this idea of a common notion, of a common practice, of acting and expressing rather than simply being there. As I’ve suggested, twenty-first-century public spaces are urban public spaces not for reasons of their pure concrete physicality, nor because of tenure, but because they are meeting places between virtual and physical worlds, between online and offline conversations, between online and offline encounters. That is why they are public: because they enable public discourses, public conversations to talk to each other, to meet each other. They are public not because they are simply there, in the open, in a city center, but because these spaces are made public by people encountering one another in these spaces.
One of the most interesting things about the Occupy movement, about why it is potentially so radical as well as so potentially flawed, is that it has reframed the whole nature and language of revolt and expression. For a start, it doesn’t make any demands and has no designated leaders. It has unnerved the enemy because it has tried, inadequately for the time being, to utter a different vocabulary of revolt. It does everything that Kafka’s K. tried not to do. K., after all, was obsessed with demanding his rights—“I want no favors from the castle, I want my rights”—and also obsessed with cracking the secret interior of the castle, of gaining entry. He became so obsessed with the castle that he’d begun to internalize its logic, and he was suffused by its logic to the extent that he could only think via its logic. Above all, he wanted clarity, wanted to clear up that which was unclear. It was the wrong question to ask. K. needed to embody the castle, to get into the castle, to penetrate its ramparts; he sought out its physical presence and its representative: Klamm. K. had to humanize the castle somehow and wanted to deal with it on personal terms.
Thankfully, the Occupy movement does none of those things. In fact, it doesn’t pose questions to anyone in particular, doesn’t personalize its grievance; instead, it indicts the system and has tried to infiltrate the capillaries and arteries of power as an abstract entity, an abstract space. And if protagonists occupy space somewhere, these spaces of occupation are curiously new phenomena, too, neither rooted in place nor circulating in space but rather an inseparable combination of the two. The efficacy of these spaces for any global movement is defined by what is going on both inside and outside these spaces, by the here and the there. It’s a dialogue between inside and outside that knows all the while that the dichotomy represents only different moments within a unity of process, a la Marx’s “Introduction” to the Grundrisse. Marx’s famous schema of how capitalist production begets distribution, how distribution begets exchange, exchange consumption, consumption more production, distribution more exchange, exchange more distribution, distribution more production, and so forth, now has to be a vision of the circulation of revolt, of its production and virtual circulation, of its emotional and empathetic exchange, of its consummation, and of how all this hangs together in some complex, enigmatic global flow of counterpower.
And if there is a theoretical project here, it is mapping these flows of revolt, figuring out how to make urban theory more affective and effective. Affective, in the sense that it touches us as human beings, affects us sensually, makes us joyous and angry, compassionate and caring, pissed off and performative; effective, not through understanding these emotions, but by putting these emotions into practice, making them matter in action, through action. How can we not so much organize this action as coordinate this action, coordinate it horizontally, manage the radical fusions between people in specific places, in their minor spaces. Within this project there is no going backward, no invocations of old truths or of old desires for a clear-cut public sector as the antidote to private greed. It is too late to go back now; the yearning for a steady job, as in the good old days, with benefits, belonging to a union, and with old forms of vertical organization, done through representative bodies via old labor institutions, do-good city municipalities—all that seems quaintly nostalgic. More than anything else, there are no more expectations, no system to count on, no bosses or governments to guarantee anybody a living.
Now, we are left with bare life, with the naked truth: how to resolve the enigma of urban revolt ourselves; how to do so without safety nets, without the welfare state, without paternal capitalism; and how to do it without subsidization. (The revolution will never be funded, of course, even if it might yet get televised on You Tube!) An all-new vocabulary is required to resolve this enigma, a new way of seeing, a new structure of feeling. The enigma of revolt is tantamount to discovering (or inventing) a superstring theory of urban revolution, making it empirical, real; a radical Higgs boson whereby some secret dimension unites all hitherto dissociated struggles, an unknown dimension of space-time, an unknown patterning of minor space. But the passage to this alternative political reality isn’t achieved through analyzing what they do, what capital does, as much as analyzing what we do, especially what we might be able to do inside what they do, beyond what they do. It involves a change of heart as well as of tack. It involves an effort to address pragmatically and programmatically that great Sartrean question: Is struggle intelligible? It equally involves an effort to address pragmatically and programmatically that great Kafkaesque question: How do we escape the Castle within us?