Cities 07

Ok, let me start by saying that if I can glean anything that’s coherent from this crazed Marxist/post-Marxist(?) babble, I’ll consider myself lucky. Since these pieces are so short, a loose interpretation of each line seems appropriate. The first line appears to be stating that in capitalism’s infancy, the bourgeoisie saw the proletariat in predominately utilitarian terms. Of primary concern was, how can we extract as much productivity from the worker with as little cost to us in terms of his maintenance? They were uninterested in any other facets of his life at this point, namely “his leisure and humanity”. This stage could not last, as evidenced by the excess of commodities produced which needed a market. Production was up, but who was going to buy all this crap? Aha! If we can talk the worker into buying all these commodities, hey it’s a win-win for all. Turning Cyndi Lauper into a Marxist for a sec, once the working day is done, the proletariat will just wanna have fun (as long as that fun involves his meager earnings flowing back into our bottomless pockets). Brilliant! So, in order to do this, that previously scorned facet of the worker’s existence, his leisure and humanity, must be inhabited “with zealous politeness”. If one were to treat him like the scum that he is, we would get nowhere. Hence, the importance of “the humanism of the commodity” begins to become foregrounded in a myriad of ways. Customer service departments, marketing that tries to appeal to how this or that commodity will enrich your life, the conflation of culture with commodity in general (paying to go to a cultural event, drinking in a café or bar, traveling to foreign lands, etc.) all establish the prerequisite of a monetary exchange to gain access to culture. This imperative to infiltrate all spheres of the worker’s existence results in what DeBord refers to as the “perfected denial of man”. What he seems to be positing is that within this ideological framework, man no longer exists, and what remains is solely poly-dialogues between commodities, both organic and inorganic.

Whew, now for the tough part, do I buy it? Well, DeBord is definitely out of my grasp in terms of absolute intelligibility, but from what I can understand, he does seem to hit quite a few nails on the head. His delineation of a shift from our capitalist state, much to the chagrin of Marx’s ghost, to a post-capitalist state of a service economy, is most certainly true. The theorists we have been discussing over the course of the past month have certainly elucidated a variety of nuances that have come as a result of our post-capitalist epoch. For Castells, it’s the urban dichotomy known as the space of flows vis-á-vis the space of places which has created the dual city. Zukin’s accounts of the symbolic economy and it’s manifestations in the implicit racial and class boundaries many urban spaces have put in place as a result of the influence of BIDs is another example. While looking at the work by all these theorists can easily make one feel overwhelmed and subsequently apathetic/hopeless (myself included), once you realize how intertwined all of these institutions are, the better chance one has of beginning to untangle them and make sense of where you want to place yourself within the infinite spheres that have been created. It would be naïve to think that one could upon reading any structuralist/post-structuralist literature all of a sudden transcend this matrix of pressures(duh, I guess). Nevertheless, while readings such as this are often too dense for me to fully comprehend, they do have a certain edifying effect which I appreciate. Ok, final thought: while absolute freedom in all aspects of life is impossible and not even that appealing, the more aware one is of how one is being controlled, the more one can appreciate life in a certain sense (this probably reeks of privileged white male ruminating, but hey, at least I’m copping to it).