Marxism and Urban Culture Marxism and Urban Culture Edited by Benjamin Fraser Foreword by Andy Merrifield LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 FORBES BOULEVARD, SUITE 200, LANHAM, MARYLAND 20706 www.rowman.com 10 THORNBURY ROAD, PLYMOUTH PL6 7PP, UNITED KINGDOM Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-0-7391-9157-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-9158-3 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Acknowledgments This book project is the product of extensive reflections on a central contradiction obscured by the triumphant and triumphalist discourse of interdisciplinarity—as it plays out in academic institutions, in peer-review processes, in scholarly association meetings, and in numerous (if not, necessarily, all) disciplinary contexts. Although this contradiction is not explicitly discussed in the present volume— and although the topic is surely worthy of sustained consideration—it has motivated the selection of chapters and the brief introduction. The contradiction is this: that at the same time that mention of the word “interdisciplinarity” hypnotizes university administrators, hiring departments, job-seekers, editors, and authors, and more, still, it is nonetheless disciplinary knowledge which continues to exercise hegemonic power over scholarly activity, broadly conceived. I will spare the reader the numerous and varied experiences which have led me to this conclusion. Make no mistake: I want neither to tout interdisciplinarity as a panacea nor to dig my heels into the disciplinary landscape that continues to shape the production and reception of scholarly work. Instead, this book has been—from its conception to its final structure—an attempt to expose the dimensions of disciplinary specialization through both the juxtaposition and the cohabitation of different approaches in a single volume. My belief— foregrounded also in the recent formation of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies—is that “the urban” provides a point of encounter where disciplinary specializations can be brought to dialogue with one another. I do not believe that they cannot be fully transcended. But seen together they may help us to understand how it is that disciplinary specialization is, a la Henri Lefebvre, a form of alienation. In this sense, Marxian scholarship, clearly—though it should not necessarily be so—has been no exception to the rule that scholarly writing has tended to fragment a totality into relatively autonomous, manageable areas of expertise. In this light, I would like to take the time to thank those colleagues whose scholarship has been particularly valuable in thinking through disciplinary specialization by working across Hispanic Studies and Urban Studies specifically: Malcolm Alan Compitello, Susan Larson, Araceli Masterson-Algar, Stephen Vilaseca, Monica Degen, Rebecca Haidt, Amanda Holmes, Donald McNeill, Marcy Schwartz, Eugenia Afinoguénova, Edward Baker, Alberto Chamorro, Susan Divine, Matthew Feinberg, Daniel Frost, Leigh Mercer, Carlos Ramos, Nathan Richardson, and Nil Santiáñez. I owe thanks to countless others, of course, in Hispanic Studies and beyond, and to that end I would also like to thank those who have agreed to be on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies. Thanks, too, to Adam David Morton for his encouragement of this book project, and particularly also Andy Merrifield, who graciously agreed to pen this book’s foreword. As always I thank Abby. Foreword Andy Merrifield Urbanism as World Culture and Here Comes Everybody One of the great wish-images of the Communist Manifesto is something Marx calls “world Literature.” World literature, he says, is what everybody and anybody can read. We get it because we’ve somehow helped script it; it’s a literature that’s translatable and communicable—notwithstanding our native tongue. But it isn’t tabloid trash Marx has in mind here; it isn’t narrow-minded, trivial journalism, nothing provincial. Quite the opposite: it’s the broadest of broadsheets, a global literature that hits the newsstands as samizdat, as popular agitprop. Invariably, this literature is a dialectical byproduct, an unintended good thing emerging from an intentional bad thing. It’s a byproduct, Marx knew, of a bourgeoisie intent on business, tapping the world market, exploiting old-established national industries, downsizing these old industries and replacing them with dwindling workforces and new product lines. “In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants,” Marx says. “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.”[1] Marx is adamant that this process isn’t only an earth- moving (and earthshattering) act of material production; it’s also an earth-moving and potentially earthshattering act of “intellectual production.” What’s more, in his eyes, these “intellectual creations of individual nations” have the power to become “common property.”[2] World literature becomes a new sort of commons, for Marx, a collective visual and written language, something we see today as an ever-emergent world culture, as use-values ordinary people everywhere continually have to fight for and struggle to hold on to, especially as human value systems melt into air and get converted into anti-human, hyper-inflated exchange-values. In the Manifesto, Marx sketches out the developmental forces of the mode of production, its historical and geographical mission, its need to urbanize itself, to create industrial cities, to move mountains, to dig canals, to connect everywhere, nestle everywhere, to do all of that because of its inexorable urge, because it, as a mode of production, had to. Within it all, Marx thought urbanization would create a physical and emotional proximity of workers, workers piled on top of one another, beside each other. Cosmopolitanism would thus be a kind of sharing, an awareness of common lived experience. Before us and inside us, urbanism today is a truly cosmopolitan world culture, our very own world literature. It’s the expansive realm, we might say, of Here Comes Everybody, of H.C.E.—Joyce’s sigla from Finnegans Wake—the “normative letters of planet” urban, the social, political, and economic environment to which everybody is coming and which everybody is somehow shaping, even if always unevenly. H.C.E, says Joyce, represents a “manyfeast munificent,” an archetypal image of our collective, desiring unconscious.[3] The dreamer is “more mob than man,” Joyce jokes, “an imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalization.”[4] Perhaps, with a little imagination, we can read Here Comes Everybody as what global citizenship ought to be about, a citizenship conceived of as something urban, as something territorial, yet one in which urban 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, sharing world music together, reading books in every language, watching world cinema, entering Twitter streams, and communing on Facebook. World literature has morphed into world culture, and this world culture is now an urban arena in which a more advanced cosmopolitan citizenship emerges—might emerge—a Here Comes Everybody forever present during its own birth pangs. In this citizenship, perception replaces passport and horizon is almost as important as habitat; a perception and horizon simultaneously in place and in space, off-line somewhere local, and online somewhere planetary, somewhere virtual. If we want to call this perspective a newly formulated cognitive map in our heads, we can. What’s important in this mapping is that it maps the totality, that it works when people see these two realms coming together, when perception and horizon conjoin, encounter one another, and give rise to a collective political awareness. Citizenship therein reveals itself through the negation of distance and the reaching out to distance, through an opening up and a drawing in, a passionate embrace. It’s the point of convergence of both, a dialectic that’s a structure of feeling and a way of seeing—feeling and seeing oneself on the same plane as one’s planet. At the point of convergence, any singularity will be so powerful that no border patrols can ever prevent its rites of passage. Official identity cards aren’t necessary for citizens of the urban universe, for people who know they live somewhere yet feel they belong everywhere. Or who want to feel it. The conjoining of knowing and feeling is what engenders a sense of empathy whose nom de plume might really be citizenship itself. Urbanization makes this new 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. This is the sort of dialectic that Marxism and Urban Culture is trying to work through, tries to look in the face, tarrying with the magical power of the negative, deriving something positive in the process. The assembled essays form a cultural contraflow that roams through historical time and global space, that bed themselves down in Hispanic studies as well as in political science, in Communication studies as well as International Relations, in Madrid as well as in Montreal, in Vienna as well as in Cairo, in Osaka as well as in Los Angeles and Guatemala City, on reel as well as in the real; it’s a peripatetic grand narrative that concerns itself with art as well as protest, with representation as well as mobilization, sometimes in the street, occasionally unto death, but all times with an expressive desire—in Henri Lefebvre’s words—“of metamorphosing the real.” In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre uses a beautiful turn of phrase: “the urban consolidates” [l’urbain rassemble], he says. [5] The urban becomes urban because it creates its own definition, because, as complex web of social relations somehow hanging together, it engenders and expresses a specific kind of sociability. The urban is a bringer together, and the harbinger and transformer of everything in that coming together: capital and goods, people and information, activity and conflict, mass and underground media, confrontation and cooperation. The urban “de-structures and re-structures its elements,” Lefebvre says. As a form, it concentrates and intensifies things, creates simultaneity and difference, difference where no awareness of difference existed; and what were once thought distinct and isolated become conscious of universality, of universality in their particularity. This is why Marx lobbies for its coming, for the becoming of urbanization. The urban consolidates: it is a particle and wave, a flow and thing, its own random uncertainty principle prevailing in everyday life. More than a hundred and fifty years since the Manifesto, what gels people together doesn’t only emerge from the workplace but from the dwelling space—“dwelling” in its broadest sense—dwelling as world culture beyond four walls. World culture forces our four walls open, enlarges their scope, widens their horizon, ensures that living space is now about the totality of political and economic space in which one belongs. Once, seemingly long ago, people went out into the world, discovered the world, often through the world of work; now it seems the world comes to people, discovers us, sometimes whether we like it or not. Nowadays, if people identify with other people it is because of something shared, because of something that cements us together, bonds us across frontiers and