Someday I Will Draw a Map of Idiocies

A journalistic note on the sublime

I have decided to post the beginning of the introduction to my term paper for an independent study I did this past semester in theory. This work shows that I am a poor critic, because I divert extensively from actually introducing the topic of the paper. And yet, I find it so impossible to resist the complexity of idiocy that such diversions help to indicate. Happy.

In the vacuum of modernism’s failed idealism, the infrastructure of the modern city is, in its global-economic situation, an infrastructure of the super-modern city. It is no mystery that the development of cities runs in tandem with the development of economies; this has always been the case. Even through tracing the history of capitalism, it is indisputable that the cities of the Renaissance thrived according to their mercantilist prowess, and colonial cities of the 18th and 19th centuries according to their locations en route between trade capitals. When capitalism latched onto the global-economic ideal, as only it could, following the trauma and opportunities of World War II, it brought with it a new idealism for the global-economic city, a step—or many steps—more ambitious than the domestic-scaled, comparatively modest union between technology and livelihood and living that Corbusier dreamt.
Within this new idealism, Corbusier’s vision matured and gave way to its natural zenith, just as capitalism gave way to a global economy, metastasizing into a deeper unity between worldwide forces and universal notions of the human condition, in which it posited the consumer as the commodity while providing the terrain for its harvesting regardless of place. Implicit with this vision is the selection and distinction of human ranks—who would do the production?; who would do the consuming?; what would be consumed?; and what are the spaces necessary to effect these relationships as necessity? In addressing these questions a hierarchy emerged within the global economy that invariably identified human geographies of control and others of ‘otherness.’ What I mean by using ‘human geographies’ is referencing the incredible link between terrain boundaries—political and, within these, social and often ethnic—and the capitalization of space. It was from the western powers that the free-market apotheosis developed, but the persistent accumulation that fed it was deployed across a different human geography, in which it could be “burned off” or incubated for future exploitation.
Rosa Luxemburg noted that “the keen dialectics of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation into appropriation of other peoples’ property, how commodity-exchange turns into exploitation, and equally becomes class rule.” David Harvey, in The New Imperialism calls the link between accumulation of capital and the tactics of using it to generate more capital, accumulation by dispossession. The term can be legitimately interpreted in a number of significant ways. On the one hand, Harvey speaks of the distribution of capital across spatial absorption, such as built infrastructure and labor forces, while noting that this absorption is, to some extent, speculative in that it can reenter the market as developed capital. On the other, the term intimates at the ‘dispossession’ by capitalistic institutions of the communities on which it depends to provide resources and consumption. Moreover, this begs the ethical conundrums of capitalism that illustrate the incredible social and psychological destruction that these exploitative tactics leave in their wake, witnessing the breakdown of cultural identities large and small and the uprooting of people groups from landscapes of belonging.
It is the combination of these two aspects of Harvey’s term that interests me most, in that it understands accumulation by dispossession as the continuous seeking and reaping of new locales of resources and consumption, like a turbine that can only speed up but needs an exponentially increasing feed of locales in order to make it run at all. The resulting forces embody, in a diagram, a spherical globe of dependency, requiring that all nodes in the weave be functional lest the entire network collapse. The sustainability of such a system grows more infeasible and perilous as the weave itself expands, forcing out the institutions and practices—be they businesses or local networks—that don’t have the resources to risk in participating—even paying the admissions deposit—in such a dizzying web of interdependency. The subdivision of peoples and classes fuels the turbines necessary to generate the economic vision of the global-economic city and characterizes the spatial infrastructure from which it operates. David Harvey writes on the political components necessary for this vision in The New Imperialism. I will not write directly about these components—hegemony and neo-colonialism/imperialism—but Harvey has many insights into the social and spatial implications of global-economic idealism, and in discussing political considerations succeeds in indicating (a mere taste of) its complexity.
In the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, the urbanism of the modernist city is eerily compared to the architecture of a microchip. The comparison, of course, is not intended for juxtaposition; it is a very editorial sequence despite (filmmaker’s name) insistence that the film, charting the destructive will of human exploitation of resources and its social and spiritual consequences, takes no such editorial position. The global-economic city is a microchip, machine-built for transferability and mass movement across infrastructure and economy. Transferability not only of commodities and technology but of individuals as well occurs at a sublime scale—in cars, snaking through freeway corridors like whitewater canyons, and in the public domain, walking atomistically across the vast, windswept plazas of modernist urbanism in which the only place to go is the building-object at the end of plaza. Through control, there is no alternative exit route. Both instances of individual transferability contributed to the economic gerrymandering of cities, in which spatial choking assured that people, as economic entities, would be appropriately directed—the car and the plaza, two edges of the same sword.
Each worked at extremes. The modernist plaza emphasized space for individual isolation, or, in the case of the housing project, the stockpiling of family units, while the freeway provided for the safe transfer of individuals across the city (and economic) boundaries and beyond, emphasizing the networks of a depopulated infrastructure, where only the destination mattered and the transit to the terminus. It was the middle ground that was eliminated at the cost of these polarized spaces; encounters of individual to individual and the communities that they formed were routed out by these spatial control strategies. It is such small-scale, quotidian interaction that is the irrelevant breed of transferability under the guise of the global-economic city. It is increasingly castigated as a ‘sentimentality’ prohibitive of progress, development—growth—and is conceded to only in illusion—a bone thrown to desires for a vital and prolific public realm.
This effect is demonstrated in a number of American cities, both large and small. Towards this influential and hard-to-control sentimentality, the global-economic city is presenting certain strategies of deference that operate according to the social categorizations that fuel its progress. Luxury condos fronting the pre-global-economic wastelands of industry are fitted with scarcely-occupiable balconies, and global chains occupy the ground floor and street front of parking structures. The so-called (and so-marketed) “lifestyle center” animates a contrived “lifestyle” experience. Strip malls with pastiche, pseudo-nostalgic individual façades surround parking bays that open up through the exit-lane narrows to the ocean of global-economic marketing dysfunction. Yet despite the apparent sentimentality of these product innovations, the origin of their economic niche stems from localized balances of capital within the global economy—a spatio-economic instance. Entire neighborhoods in American cities are experiencing economic regeneration according to the marketability of urban lifestyle development. But much like the suburban lifestyle center, they too are terrains of accumulation by dispossession, fortifying undeveloped or underdeveloped land with excess capital in the guise of credit backed and accounted for by both development financiers and the consumers that will amass within its spatio-economic boundaries.
The irony is rarely noted. Pseudo-traditional architectural façades of pre-cast, airbrushed concrete conceal the spatio-temporal fix behind a sentimental veneer. They are not mere architectural affronts; they are façades of information—credit systems; digital networks of commerce and information tracking; identity marking and identity proof; height and weight on the driver’s license linked to blood type on the birth certificate, and the social security number on the same linked to the credit report, linked to buying power and credit limits, consumer class and marketing demographic—and façades of community—security cameras and surveillance, canned music of popular imagination and totem communality as mechanisms of the marketing psychology—and façades of transferability—so your neighbor sells you a new garment over small talk down at the boutique; its foreign creditors affirm the dispossessive stratagem of their manufacturing operations within third-world labor pools.
But even these deferences are deployed within the polar framework of control described earlier. It was the architecture of modernism and its particular and strategic place in modernist urbanism that removed the planes of individual expression and tangibility, accentuating and rather forcefully asserting the neutrality of constructed space. The posture of this neutrality is towards the propensity of the individual to inhabit to her surroundings according to the spatial modes of control that architecture facilitates. An architecture of neutral assembled spaces—both public (the windswept plaza) and private (the housing block apartment)—is one that resists the autonomy of an individual and limits her capacity to respond; it is a cap on personal volition in an environment where the architecture, both alone and within its urban framework, requires the lack of volition by its very assembly, its very purpose for assembly—to scourge the middle ground, the places of meaningful cultural interaction between individuals in what amounts to a sort of micro-localism antithetical to the spatio-economic paradox of individuality by de-individuality.
Therefore, a conception of the human condition in a theoretical or speculative sense was necessary to effect such spatio-economic strategies within the global-economic ideal. The early application of modernist dogma was, after all, a utopian application, in its purest form a dream of human liberation by the machine and the I-beam. But as suggested earlier, it was capitalism that latched onto this dream and expanded—by realizing—its scope and methodologies. Before long, the old bottom-up folk conceptions necessary for vital culture were more akin to the modernist dream in its own origin, becoming a folk tale itself, espousing the utility of humans to comply to the programmatic diagrams of dwelling and communities of dwellings within its own cultural platform. Modernism missed its historical origins and fancied itself a self-born, autonomous entity, indicated by the philosophical champions and fore-founders of modernism—Nietzsche, perhaps Kant—in assuring that history up to the apotheosis of humanity is a story of sickness and the denial of sheer autonomy and the pure will to power. Kant would remind us that phenomena are distinctly autonomous, being disjoined from any noumenal ontology.

Chanson: Air, Dead Bodies