NOVANEWS
As we know, Das Kapital strives to produce urban landscapes favourable to its own evolution. As David Harvey says, this is natural in the sense that even jaguars in the Amazon and termites in Africa do it. They all build firmer grounds that ground their reproduction.
Why wouldn’t capital do it? The problem is that Kapital’s grounds are always shifting and unstable.
Consider the daily chaos, the ebb and flow of entrepreneurial corporate activity that reproduces the immense wealth of the few, the super-rich. Consider also the building of cities, nations and empires stable enough to order that chaos through the exercise of their power over those that create common wealth fit for appropriation by the few. Kapital and the capitals of the world. In the streets of the latter, a war has raged on for the most part of modern history; from the fall of Tenochtitlán to the spread of Occupy.
It has been an uneven war in an uneven planet producing uneven peoples. And now it is about to end.
For it won’t be too long before the super-rich finally realize their wildest libertarian utopia. Rather than having to share this wretched earth with the rest of us, they’ll move on to the ultimate city-state in the sky. It’ll be a veritable Shangri-La. A citadel of silver and gold skyscrapers designed by Dutch architects and decorated by Italian luxury designers, floating happily above and without the rest of us.
That is, at least, the premise of the science fiction 2013 film Elysium. In the film, the haves honour their name. They have it all. Including, no less, a version of the fountain of youth that the Spanish adventurer Hernando de Soto failed to locate in the Florida peninsula of the sixteenth century, this time in the shape of a Versace-designed healing machine.
This isn’t mere fantasy. After all, the role of speculative literature and cinema has always been to enhance rather than escape those tenets of our society that the powerful would preferred to go unnoticed. The real.
But as David Lynch and Lacanian psychoanalysts know, when the real appears to shatter the comfortable fantasies we take for reality it often does so in the shape of nightmares. Almost always in the most unlikely of places. In Elysium, the nightmare is physical to the exact extent that it is interior: the entire planet that has become a global slum, the entrapment of the body in a heavy metal exoskeleton, the irreparable sacrifice of the youth, the loss of an irreplaceable friend, the violent exhaustion of options to make unsurpassable the limits of choice for those who have little or nothing. Here, in the desert of the real, the former have inherited the earth and the fruits of the earth and now seek to escape the tribulations of ageing. In the meantime the rest of us become, literally, spatially, the wretched of the earth.
Back to the real world. The real does appear in the unlikeliest of places. It happened some months ago as I strolled Rodeo Drive, the out-of-this-earth street in the city of angels. Amidst the fabulous displays and luxurious windows, I spotted the offices of a project named Utopia. The project consists of a flotilla of high-end cruises, constantly hopping from one place to another in the multi-cultural global circuit: from the Carnival in Rio to the festival in Cannes, and from the Formula One Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi to London’s Fashion Week.
Utopia isn’t just another cruise. In fact it isn’t a cruise at all. Utopia looks more like a moving skyscraper, like the space Shangri-La orbiting the earth in Elysium. But here and now. Every room in every ship is the size of a luxury penthouse in New York’s Fifth Avenue. But without the hassle of having to share your urban space with the homeless, the protesters and the masses of the people. Moreover, since Utopia’s perpetual motion-machine is equipped to cater to your every need and desire, from healthcare to food or communications infrastructure, and the potential to spend most of the time in international waters, you have actually rid yourself of the final obstacle: the ordering of urban space by governments and politicians. Utopia is indeed the ultimate libertarian utopia. The rich leaving the earth and the rest to their the wretched fate. Let’s name this real fantasy of the uncoupled and perpetually moving city-state, La Fantasia.
The case can be made that cities like London or New York have de facto seceded from their corresponding countries and become Fantasías, at least to a certain extent. In fact, as every Londoner knows deep down, though he or she might not say it, their London does feel more and more like a retro-futuristic medieval city-state surrounded by undesirable barbarians who vote Ukip: diverse, as the saying goes, which means chic and expensive, with everything there is on offer for the discerning consumer, but also bursting with cultures and peoples to enjoy at a distance. And yet, why move here permanently when it’s possible to maintain a pied-a-terre in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, empty most of the year, visit in time for Wimbledon and the rest of the year hop on and off Utopia to taste at safe distance the best of the best cultures of the planet?
Ditto, at the end of capitalism lies the earth turned into a museum of comparative anthropology to be visited and enjoyed at safe distance.
Yes, there may be some city-states in the planet of which the question can be made whether they are free- pirate islands or else gigantic gated communities. It has been said for instance, that in London the super-rich coming from the world over are out-pricing and effectively displacing ordinary people not only from the Borough of Chelsea & Kensington (who said there were any real people left in Chelsea?) but also in Brixton and Hackney. If that is indeed the case, London may be about to turn into one huge gated community, the first urban-scale comparative anthropology museum. At some point in the near future London will become the British Museum. No longer the city of flâneurs that, together with Paris (now another Borough of London via Eurostar) became the emblem of psychogeography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
But the very question becomes moot once we are confronted by the real case of Elysium-like projects such as Utopia or the kind of London dreamed up by Boris Johnson and the planet’s super-rich, which would make the idea of a free city-state not liberating but merely libertarian.
On the other hand, fantasies like Utopia, Libertarian London or Elysium are only, if at all, one half of the story. The other side of is incarnated in the free town of La Realidad, Chiapas, in today’s southern Mexico. If la Realidad had an entry in Alberto Manguel’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places, it would read thus: “It brought them back to their land, their place, to their being children, to their being campesinos, to their being Mexicans and rebels”. This is how Subcommander Marcos describes it, he of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the rebel and writer invented by Mexican 21st-century indigenous peoples as a hologram. In his description, Marcos refers to a painting by Constable in which “the river is the riverbed of La Realidad, the horse is the mare La Muñeca, Manuel is riding and his sombrero fell off …”
This is the city as homecoming, not only for humans but also for herons. For all of them, humans and not, says Marcos, La Realidad “is an obligatory stop-over, a necessity” or rather “a commitment”. The city as homecoming and commitment, as an engagement rather than just another nod in the network of repetitive accumulation or a distant museum. I like this idea of being engaged to the city as one would be to a lover. Indeed, when turning away from King’s Cross in London to enter Housmans Bookshop, “drawing breath against the conflicted microclimate of the never-satisfied development vortex” that is the city’s central train station described by Iain Sinclair, one solicits the unexpected just as lovers do. In such moments, London and La Realidad become necessities, like sex for lovers. One enters the city as one would a cave and once inside her the feeling is of the miraculous mundane. “The loose paving stone that acts as a trapdoor to the underworld. The terminus that might be terminal”, says Sinclair of London. In it we’re neither herons nor humans but “fragments of an exploded moon, pulverised in the December of the jungle”, says Marcos of La Realidad.
This feeling, this love, is the opposite of the love of money. The latter is the law of Elysium, of the libertarian city, a fantasy that dreams of keeping all things for oneself and no longer having to share the planet. It “makes it possible for stupidity and cynicism to govern in diverse parts of the earth” and allows for no other inclusion than that of subjection to genocide. It distributes death and poverty alone, as Marcos says. The former assembles the city of lovers, La Realidad, in which the space between what is unknown about a person and what is generally known is too small for those engaged to play roles, to lie to each other, just as it happens between lovers.
La Realidad is the name of the village where Heriberto and Eva’s love will be born, as they read books and see pictures brought from London, and take arms against being erased from the history of the city that the money-lovers of the City of London fantasise about. When they see a picture of Constable’s Scene on a Navigable River. The river in the painting is the riverbed of La Realidad, the horse is the mare La Muñeca. Manuel is riding, and his sombrero fell off. That’s it, “for Eva and Heriberto the paintings … are scenes form their land, of their being indigenous and campesinos”. The space between London and La Realidad is too small.
But for the City of London reader of a newspaper that contains the picture of Heriberto and Eva’s death during a massacre in southern Mexico, the situation is different. “This didn’t happen here”, says the reader, “this is Chiapas, Mexico, a historical accident .. and far away”. For him, the never-realised love of Heriberto and Eva is not an absence of reality but an unfortunate anachronism, and their passing, regrettable though it may be, a necessity of history. And yet, from the same photo, the love that never happened between Heriberto and Eva in La Realidad exclaims “Come close! Listen!”
Something other provokes one reader to come closer and the other to go away. “And this something is related to the new division of the world, with the democratisation of death and misery … with the internationalisation of arrogance and the market”, says Marcos. To sum up, it has to do with the love of money that disengages the City of London-dweller from the city. But it also has to do with the decision of Heriberto and Eva, and thousands of people like them to seize a voice that they were denied before, to engage and salvage what is worth from amidst the urban wreckage and found anew the city of La Realidad. This is the city as Blake-like vision.
The indigenous peoples of La Realidad aren’t alone in their vision quest for the city under the City. A similar vision inspires the quest known as Breakaway Brixton, the brain child of Neil Arun and William Aspinall, Londoners, committed Brixtonians, failed revolutionaries. Their short film Unflappable documents Arun and Aspinall’s progress in their attempt to get the Borough of Brixton in South West London to liberate itself and secede from the rest of London and the United Kingdom.
Their revolution was screened at the local cinema, the Ritzy. As with all worthy revolutions, this was a comedy, not a tragedy. In it, a bunch of real-life tricksters sought to take the next step for Brixton, perhaps the only borough of London that already has its own currency, and went on a quest for community, equality, friendship, and the perfect flagpole for the Brixton flag, designed with the help of all Brixtonians. The latter were invited to submit on line their own sketch designs for the coat of arms and flag of liberated Brixton, to go together with the Brixton Pound, a Brixton Constitution, de-privatisation of common assets and self-government by the Brixton-people.
The city as love-object and vision connects London and La Realidad in real time, and set them apart from the fantasies of Utopia and the cold distance of City of London dwellers. It connects Marcos, Heriberto and Eva, Neil and William, with Blake, Defoe, Poe and de Quincey. By the time the latter took a stroll through the streets of London, the visionary literature they created would be the place where psychology and geography collide. Ancient geography became modern psychogeography, the urban discipline of indiscipline and disobedience.
After Poe’s brief stint as a schoolboy in London’s Stoke Newington (why does Stoke Newington produce all modern city rebels, from Mary Shelley and Paine to Poe?) he went on to create The Man of the Crowd. “The crowd is his element, as the air is that of the birds and water of the fishes”, wrote Baudelaire apropos of Poe’s city dweller. “For the perfect flaneur … it’s an immense joy to set up house in the heat of the multitude … in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home, and yet to find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world and yet hidden from the world”.
Reverse the statement and what obtains is the urban condition: “to be at home, and yet to be away from home”. This is the existential condition that escapist haves disavow and breakway have-nothings turn into the ungrounded ground for their projects of liberation here and now.
One of them, today’s representative of Poe in London, China Miéville, wonders in his post-apocalyptic ode London’s Overthrow what happened here, in ground zero of the failed multiplication of the neoliberal experiment. Somewhere between Santiago de Chile in 1973 and today’s London we lost the ground and the city and the city. Now we stroll the streets of Kilburn like downpressed souls stalking the streets of our divided cities, he says.
The neoliberal experiment recalls the conquistadors wondering whether Amerindians had a soul. If so, like the Amerindians of the sixteenth century we too should conduct experiments of our own. Drowning some Elysium dwellers, sometimes in hot sometimes in cold water, we shall ask whether they actually have a body. While they flee to Elysium in a failed attempt to make whole their humpty-dumpty soul, we the wretched and the salvage-savage shall inherit the city.
