Christmas and the Inner State

I am thinking there was a time when the hills around Nashville were indistinct enough. The problem is that you can drive in any direction out of town not knowing if you are on the right interstate or expressway. Searching the geography on either side of the massive roadways does not help, because the low serrations of wooded hills and valleys of one part of this city’s Metro area are indistinguishable from those of any other. Nashville’s concentric suburban sprawl offers little in the way of landmarks; massive prefabricated malls and warehouses look the same on the I-65, the Four-forty or the Twenty-four. A suburb of vinyl houses on the way to Murfreesburo looks pretty much the same as anything in the direction of Ashland City or Springfield. No matter which direction you travel, there is nothing singular or unique in the landscape to help tell where you are.

But as formless as Nashville’s landscape might have appeared to me before, it is not as featureless as what we see now. Lisa is in the passenger seat and I am driving, pushing our dirty white Toyota through the indistinct real estate of northern Georgia. With each mile, it becomes more apparent that whatever might have characterised these hills at one time was obliterated long ago. The land is vast and empty, save for occasional clots of uniform, prefabricated hotels and fast food chains that choke the exits to the interstate. We are on our way to Florida, where Lisa’s parents are spending Christmas in a gated community in Fort Myers, the current foreclosure capital of the U.S. This is not the Christmas either of us had wished for, but we tell ourselves that at least we will be in sunny Florida, and there is the added attraction of abandoned bank buildings, empty strip malls and vacant condominiums. Despite the recession, the asphalt is strung for miles with others leaving the cold Midwest for the Holidays.

Without intended irony, Americans drop the first “t” when they say the word “interstate”, thus situating this network of Eisenhower-era highways at the centre of the country’s psychic structure. As a key to interpreting the United States, the image works; most obviously, there is the empty formlessness of movement and consumption that has always fascinated people in America. The significance of the interstates also resonates in the present, a time when the routes are dominated by long chains of semi-trailers taking plastic goods from China, circulating them to the thousands of outsized big-box stores that surround towns and cities. The roads are a moving index of this trade, with names like Walmart, Lowes, Big Lots and others, painted in huge letters on the sides of the many shipping containers. There is also the transport of food, and here the graphics on the trucks are snappier. Often these trailers are decorated with enormous depictions of ground beef or other cuts of raw meats, attractively arranged. Sometimes a picture of a gargantuan table of cheddar or mozzarella or some other mass dairy food product rattles by at eighty or ninety miles an hour, followed by a rendering of a selection of uniformly soft and crustless breads. Last of all, a truck filled with soft drinks speeds on, and the moveable illustration of the American diet is complete.

As important as the transport of these goods might be to the country’s life, driving the interstates at the end of this century’s first decade reveals the central position of war in American consciousness. From time to time it is possible to glimpse an occasional town spread out along the highway, and sometimes, in a square or park, city fathers have erected some relic of a forgotten war.  In this town, there is a rusting nuclear missile; in another, a tank or jet fighter. On the roads themselves, an overwhelming number of the many hundreds of SUVs, pickup trucks and minivans that pass us bear bumper stickers declaring how much this country’s history of militarism has impacted the lives of so many people. Veterans of different wars display certain coloured ribbons; disabled and wounded veterans also have their own colours to choose from. Families with relatives serving overseas have theirs. I do not know for certain if there is a ribbon for those who have lost someone; I have not seen one yet. Perhaps here, at the moment of the most singular and irredeemable loss, the crass commingling of grief and display of support for foreign intervention ends. I would like to think so, but I have been surprised before at how publicly, and how inextricably, Americans live their emotional and military lives.

Around us, evening is falling. The sky is boiling with bright pinks, corals and fuscia. Here too, somewhere north of Tifton, Georgia, a large proportion of the billions of dollars in stimulus money is being spent. As the light fades, we find ourselves squeezed between concrete barriers and different road construction signs and equipment. At this hour, the fatigue of the many drivers begins to show; ahead of us, a semi careens wildly, narrowly avoiding collision with other trucks. Beside us, a trailer drags a chain along the road that sends sparks flying into the air. As the conditions get worse, we switch off the talk radio we’ve been listening to for the last several hours. It is entertaining enough to listen to Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter when the roads are clear, but as the stakes get higher, these voices become unbearable. Above us, the sky on either side of the interstate is blocked by an unending succession of massive illuminated billboards, all dozens of metres in the air and each the size of the largest shipping container you could possibly imagine. There are advertisements for restaurants and shops that are literally hundreds of miles away; there are ads for gun shops, massage parlours and churches next to signs with biblical passages or billboards that rail against abortion. Alongside them all, the night is overcome by hundreds of blank, illuminated signs advertising nothing but advertising space.

The next evening we arrive in Fort Myers, pulling off the interstate into that city’s unending swamp of speculation and suburban sprawl. The busless roads are choked with Christmas shopping traffic, and it takes a good deal of time to get past the hundreds of prefab stores and malls to Cinnamon Cove, the gated community where Lisa’s parents are staying for the winter. It is exactly as you might expect, and I will not spend any time describing this featureless place for you. We are exhausted, and after a few drinks Lisa and I fall asleep to the frogless and cricketless silence. Sometime in the middle of the night we are awakened by a terrible stench of sewage so powerful that we can hardly breathe. Lisa tries to shut the window but the smell is everywhere, maybe all over Cinnamon Cove and beyond. Laughing, I ask Lisa not to shut the window, because it is too perfect. Here, just before Christmas, the shit is general throughout America.

Time and the City: Exhibit @ Cafe Le Zigoto

Photographs by Rohan Quinby

Le Zigoto Café
5731 ave. du Parc
Montreal, Quebec
10 July – 30 August

new york: spectre

What is the relationship of cities to time? How do cities contain time? How do they express temporality? These are some of the questions I have tried to address in this series of photographs, taken in New York, Dublin, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Vancouver and Montreal. My understanding of urban temporality comes in part from my reading of the great urban theorist Lewis Mumford. Mumford viewed the city as both a material and immaterial container; as such, cities possess the capacity to contain different experiences of temporality. Beyond Mumford’s vision of a simple co-presence of different times, his conception of urban space opens the possibility of times other than the dead, repetitive time of contemporary capitalism. It is an analysis suggesting the development of multiple times within the urban container, times exceeding contemporary capitalism’s apparatuses of capture.

Prints may be purchased for $100.00 cdn each on photographic paper, $175 on canvas.

Email me for more information.

new york: organic time

 

barcelona: house of spirits

 

montreal: jacques cartier

 

chicago: stratigraphy

 

barcelona: veiled

 

hong kong: presenting chungking

 

dublin: remembrance

 

montreal: summer

 

barcelona: shroud

Time against Space

When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught. (Debord, Thesis 9)

Henri Lefebvre broke new ground in urban theory by giving an analytical priority to the consideration of space. Reacting against the overwhelming emphasis on time and history prevalent in critical philosophy at the time, Lefebvre’s work appeared to indicate that capitalist appropriation of space was a key source of alienation in contemporary life. Although he had been Lefebvre’s pupil and was his friend, Debord differed with Lefebvre on the significance of time within the urban order, arguing that despite the importance of space, the principle source of capitalist domination lay in “the spectacle’s seizure and denigration of history and memory”. For Debord, the abstraction of space was a moment of a much larger process; that of capital’s establishment of a universal and equivalent time of the commodity. Demonstrating both the proximity and divergences between Lefebvre and Debord, Merrifield writes that “Lefebvre had brought the commodity form to bear on everyday life, and extended abstract time (value) to incorporate abstract space; now, suggested Debord, everyday abstract space was but one aspect of the spectacle itself”.

The difference between the two writers turns upon Debord’s critique of production as it appears within class society. While Lefebvre produces a sophisticated analysis of the production of space, Debord shows that the production of time is an intrinsic aspect of capital itself. Beginning with the temporal experience of pre-capitalist societies, Debord sees the social appropriation of time as fundamental to domination. As he writes: “the class which organizes the social labor and appropriates the limited surplus value, simultaneously appropriates the temporal surplus value of its organization of social time: it possesses for itself alone the irreversible time of the living” (Thesis 128). Whereas pre-capitalist society expropriated the time of living labour openly, either through coercion of force or tradition, the great achievement of capitalism is that it manages to build the appropriation of time into the process of production itself, albeit invisibly. As David Harvey writes, time “is a vital magnitude under capitalism because social labor time is the measure of value and surplus social labor time lies at the origin of profit” (1989 p 425). Thus hidden within the cloak of production, the advantage to capital is that it accumulates surplus labour-time voluntarily, without recourse to constant coercion. To manage this, however, capital must organise all time so that it reflects the logic of equivalence that is the very secret of commodity production. Debord writes that:

The time of production, commodity-time, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is the abstraction of irreversible time, all of whose segments must prove on the chronometer their merely quantitative equality. This time is in reality exactly what it is in its exchangeable character. In this social domination by commodity-time, “time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of time” (Poverty of Philosophy). This is time devalued, the complete inversion of time as “the field of human development.” (Thesis 147)

Capitalism thus replaces cyclical times of traditional societies with its own ordering of time, one characterised by the positing of an homogenous temporal “direction” or linearity to the flow of time itself. By irreversibility, Debord means to indicate that capital struggles to impose a unified time over the entire field of social subjectivity, thus annihilating any other temporal order that might threaten the domination of capital. The accumulation of abstract, empty and exchangeable time becomes the teleology of capitalist progress, and history becomes capitalist history: all other conceptions of time are swept before the onset of capitalist commodity production.

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a world scale. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is gathered under the development of this time. But this history, which is everywhere simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within history of history itself. What appears the world over as the same day is the time of economic production cut up into equal abstract fragments. (Thesis 145)

Despite the unprecedented force and clarity of his thesis, it could be argued that there is little at this point to distinguish Debord’s analysis of temporality from the writing of Lefebvre or even, should one look carefully enough, from that of Marx himself in the Grundrisse. But it is exactly here that Debord strikes out in an entirely new direction, one that will have significance for our understanding of the relation between capitalism, temporality and the city. As we saw above, one of Debord’s great insights is to recognise that the nature of the capitalist order has changed fundamentally from what it was in Marx’s day. Now, Henri Lefebvre was also attentive to the transformation of capitalism in the late 20th century, but situated this transformation in the emergence of an urban order. Debord, on the other hand, argues that it is the appearance of the spectacle that defines contemporary capitalism. While this distinction might appear simple, in reality it is more complicated than it seems. The Society of the Spectacle links the advent of the spectacular order to the development of the modern capitalist city, and as a result, it might appear as though Debord and Lefebvre have simply arrived at different ways of expressing the same thing. However, the consequence of Debord’s position is that he sees the urban as a spatialisation of the spectacular order, so much so that it is the spectacle’s logic and temporal structure that determines urban reality in late capitalism.

What is most innovative about Debord’s approach is that he is not simply arguing that it is the temporal logic of the classic commodity that determines the physical landscape of the urban. Were this the case, we would need only understand the temporality of classical commodity production in order to grasp the way in which urban space conforms to, and reproduces, the domination of capital. Such an approach fits within the scope of much traditional marxist political economy, concerned as it is with the analysis of the temporal rhythms of capital. It might even be argued that much of David Harvey’s urban geography proceeds in this direction; that is, despite his careful understanding of both space and time, in essence his work imports temporality through the deployment of classical marxist political economy. In his 1973 Social Justice and the City as well as in his 1985 Consciousness and Urban Experience, Harvey exhaustively analyses the relational character of time and space as it relates to urban geography through a deft grasp of marxist economics. While I am certainly not arguing against this method of approach, I am saying that we need to be careful that our understanding of political economy keeps pace with transformations of late capitalism. The strength of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is that it develops our understanding of marxist political economy and the temporality of capitalism by positing the spectacle as a new form of the commodity, one that modifies the conditions of capitalist production and temporality.

As an illustration of the specificity of this spectacular time, let us turn now to a final aspect of Debord’s work, one having to do with his account of how capital struggles to impose its temporality upon all of social life. For Debord, the imposition of capitalist time is akin to a form of “primitive accumulation” or expropriation. However, once capital asserts its social and temporal dominance, it begins the work of returning carefully delimited temporality to the producers in a manner that is more complex than the simple imposition of abstract and homogenous time discussed above. How does it work? Debord understands that this gift of time is not given freely by capital. Rather, as capitalism passes beyond the era of basic industrial manufacture, producers must be gradually converted into consumers. Debord writes that,

The preliminary condition required for propelling workers to the status of “free” producers and consumers of commodity time” was the violent expropriation of their own time. The spectacular return of time became possible only after this first dispossession of the producer. (Thesis 159)

In the section titled “Spectacular Time,” Debord notes that, with the full development of the spectacular society, a particular form of cyclical time is re-introduced into the temporal experience of capitalism. According to Conrad Russell, “in the ‘spectacle’, linear ‘commodity time’ acquires a cyclical double. The surviving rhythms of everyday life do not ‘hang in tatters’ – they are reconstructed as commodified products. As abstract and homogeneous as commodity time itself, they constitute its ‘consumable disguise’” (Russell 2002, p 198). Thus, in addition to abstract and homogenous commodity time, the spectacular order imposes what Debord calls “pseudo-cyclical” time, a time that corresponds to the temporality of the spectacle and one that therefore helps define urban terrain. Reading Debord, it is not difficult to see how the temporal order of spectacular time maps out onto our contemporary urban areas:

Consumable pseudo-cyclical time is spectacular time, both as the time of consumption of images in the narrow sense, and as the image of consumption of time in the broad sense. The time of image-consumption, the medium of all commodities, is inseparably the field where the instruments of the spectacle exert themselves fully, and also their goal, the location and main form of all specific consumption… The social image of the consumption of time, in turn, is exclusively dominated by moments of leisure and vacation, moments presented at a distance and desirable by definition, like every spectacular commodity. Here this commodity is explicitly presented as the moment of real life, and the point is to wait for its cyclical return. What was represented as genuine life reveals itself simply as more genuinely spectacular life. (Debord, Thesis 153)

The multitude as urban

Antonio Negri’s multitude is at least rhetorically identified with the new social movements that announced themselves so spectacularly in cities such as Seattle, Quebec and Genoa. Popular protests in these and other cities highlighted demands of subjects the industrialised West knew only theoretically, particularly the rural poor and indigenous peoples from the developing South. But despite the attention Negri has paid to the global multitude with its billions of rural poor, it is clear that cities are the key terrain in his work.

In Negri’s writing the metropolis is both a problem and a solution, a space of biopolitical exploitation par excellence and a place of potential resistance and creativity. The city is a privileged site of communicative co-operation, affective production and immaterial labour. More: If the urban subject is a tendency, it is a hegemonic tendency. The vicissitudes of urban life therefore help to shape the experience of the contemporary subject; and if it is true that the age of capital has passed and that of Empire has begun, then it is also true that despite the radical heterogeneity of the Multitude, its critical centre lies in the metropolis.

From this point of view, the problem of anti-capitalist transformation must be bound up with the problem of the human subject dwelling within contemporary urban society. Put together in this way it seems to me that Negri opens up a vital new horizon in urban studies, by placing the question of the possibility of transformational subjectivity at their centre. Put another way, Negri writes as though he believed that we must return to a consideration of the urban if we wish to take the possibility of change seriously. What then, do we discover when we read Negri through the eyes of the cosmopolitan urbanist?

Quickly we learn that Negri’s interpretation of the urban is heterogeneous and often the result of acute and irreducibly local political struggle. And despite his careful reading of sociologists such as Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells, two of the most noted commentators on the urban today, Negri’s theorisations of the city are both sophisticated and naïve. Anyone interested in the urban puts down Negri in frustration: where is the city? Where are the suburbs? What is the metropolis? Despite our frustrations, or perhaps because of them, we are compelled to pick him up again.

There is something deeply productive, if not always coherent, about the manner in which Negri elides the distinction between the material and the philosophical in his work. And it is in his characterisation of the urban that we can trace some of the most interesting aspects of this elision, an elision that prompts us to ask what exactly are we doing when we read a philosophical text looking for the contours of a material, historical object? What is a philosopher doing when she employs a philosophical discourse to understand something that is generally made knowable through engineering, social science and the discipline of planning?

Time and the City

What is the relation of the city to time? Analysis of temporality has emerged as a critical theme of contemporary political theory, but thinking about time has not made much of an impact in the field of urban theory. Yet if we understand power as the capacity to determine not only the space, but also the temporality of subjectivity, it seems clear that the vector of time is critical to understanding how urban and suburban spaces work.

The basic mode of understanding the relation between time and the city is that of the city as a site layered with different times. The best source for this account of time and urban space is Lewis Mumford’s conception of the city as both a spatial and temporal container, a physical and spiritual field (or magnet) that produces power, meaning, symbol and time. As Mumford writes in The Culture of Cities:

“Cities are a product of time. They are the molds in which men’s lifetimes have cooled and congealed, giving lasting shape, by way of art, to monuments that would otherwise vanish with the living and give no means of renewal or wider participation behind them. In the city, time becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways, more open than the written record, more subject to the gaze of many men than the scattered artifacts of the countryside, leave an imprint on the minds even of the ignorant or the indifferent. Through the material fact of preservation, time challenges time, time clashes with time: habits and values carry over beyond the living group, streaking with different strata of time the character of any single generation.”

For Mumford, the temporal layering of a city is most often a hierarchical layering, and it is this insight that helps him situate the city as the most important site for the production of power. Despite the simple force of this passage, with its image of the city as a space typified by a kind of archaeological layering, I think it is important to note that Mumford does not simply see the temporality of the city as a uniform field in which remnants of the past are only visible, giving us only a sense of the past as a linear progression littered with historically superseded temporalities. Mumford indicates that the city, perhaps because of its complexity and heterogeneity, may contain different temporal modalities (ie, may contain social ways of being that do not correspond to the most dominant at any given moment).

Thus not only built forms, but also fragments of social worlds corresponding to these forms, may survive in the urban environment. Obviously, older forms of life and associated built environments can exist outside of an urban milieu, but what is unique about the city is its capacity to contain these moments and forms contemporaneously, opening the possibility of a communicative relation between different temporalities. As an example of such a survival, Mumford cites the persistence of medieval life-forms in 18^th and 19^th century Paris.

While much of this may no doubt be true, it can lead to a rather romantic conception of temporality that contrasts the accelerated time of capitalism to the slower time of more traditional or more “organic” societies. Thus a relation is posited between duration and subjectivity, implying that accelerated duration is bad (in the sense that this acceleration is an effect of capitalist command) and slower duration is good (in the sense that elongated temporality opens the possibility of communicative relationships capable of resisting capitalist command.

Perhaps a better way of thinking about time is to think about it spatially; that is, understand capitalist temporality not in terms of its duration, but rather in terms of its tendency to uniformity. Capitalist time is indeed accelerated, but at the same time, and perhaps more importantly, it is also monopolistic, substituting circulation, time-of-consumption, the temporality of the wage and simple time-as-measure for all other experiences of time.

The source of my understanding of time and its relation to subjectivity comes from Negri’s Constitution of Time, as well as through Cesare Casarino’s essay Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben, and the Corporeal. Casarino charts the relationship between Negri’s critique of the traditional metaphysics of time and his project of liberation, showing that the project of transformation rests upon the possibility of resisting the capitalist organisation of time. Capital must colonise and command time, but time is also a refuge and a source of productive creativity vital to the appropriation of wealth. As Casarino writes:

For Negri, the temporality of production – that is, the time most expressive of our productive and creative energies – is at once a temporality that cannot be measured as quantity and yet the temporality that capital endeavours to quantify and to measure all the time so as to control it and employ it in the extraction of surplus-value: the logic of equivalence is identified here as the harness of the incommensurable, as the strategy of containment that becomes instrumental for the continued exploitation of that which is fundamentally uncontainable about time.

On this reading, it would be then possible to think suburban space as a terrain of uniform, capitalist temporality. The production of new suburban built environments is not simply an effort to house the population; it is also an attempt to materially encode capitalist temporality at the expense of the more dense temporal possibilities that inhere in the classic urban environment. Thus it is the uniformity of time, not so much as the duration of time, that must be resisted in the suburban.