“Whoever becomes the ruler of a
city that is accustomed to freedom and does not destroy
it can expect to be destroyed by it, for it can always
find a pretext for rebellion in the name of its former
freedom and age-old customs, which are never forgotten
despite the passage of time or any benefits it has received.
No matter what the ruler does or what precautions he takes,
the inhabitants will never forget that freedom or those
customs — unless they are separated or dispersed . . .”
Machiavelli, The Prince
165
Capitalist production has unified space, breaking down
the boundaries between one society and the next. This unification
is at the same time an extensive and intensive process of
banalization. Just as the accumulation of commodities
mass-produced for the abstract space of the market shattered
all regional and legal barriers and all the Medieval guild
restrictions that maintained the quality of craft
production, it also undermined the autonomy and quality
of places. This homogenizing power is the heavy
artillery that has battered down all the walls of China.
166
The free space of commodities is constantly being
altered and redesigned in order to become ever more identical
to itself, to get as close as possible to motionless monotony.
167
While eliminating geographical distance, this society produces
a new internal distance in the form of spectacular separation.
168
Tourism human circulation packaged for consumption,
a by-product of the circulation of commodities is
the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized. The
economic organization of travel to different places already
guarantees their equivalence. The modernization
that has eliminated the time involved in travel has simultaneously
eliminated any real space from it.
169
The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has evolved
its own special technique for molding its own territory,
which constitutes the material underpinning for all the
facets of this project. Urbanism — “city planning”
— is capitalisms method for taking over the natural
and human environment. Following its logical development
toward total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion
the totality of space into its own particular decor.
170
The capitalist need that is satisfied by urbanisms
conspicuous petrification of life can be described in Hegelian
terms as a total predominance of a peaceful coexistence
within space over the restless becoming that
takes place in the progression of time.
171
While all the technical forces of capitalism contribute
toward various forms of separation, urbanism provides the
material foundation for those forces and prepares the ground
for their deployment. It is the very technology of separation.
172
Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem
of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers who
have been dangerously brought together by the conditions
of urban production. The constant struggle that has had
to be waged against anything that might lead to such coming
together has found urbanism to be its most effective field
of operation. The efforts of all the established powers
since the French Revolution to increase the means of maintaining
law and order in the streets have finally culminated in
the suppression of the street itself. Describing what he
terms a one-way system, Lewis Mumford points
out that “with the present means of long-distance mass communication,
sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method
of keeping a population under control” (The City in History).
But the general trend toward isolation, which is the underlying
essence of urbanism, must also include a controlled reintegration
of the workers based on the planned needs of production
and consumption. This reintegration into the system means
bringing isolated individuals together as isolated individuals.
Factories, cultural centers, tourist resorts and housing
developments are specifically designed to foster this type
of pseudocommunity. The same collective isolation prevails
even within the family cell, where the omnipresent
receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with
the ruling images images that derive their full power
precisely from that isolation.
173
In all previous periods architectural innovations were
designed exclusively for the ruling classes. Now for the
first time a new architecture has been specifically designed
for the poor. The aesthetic poverty and vast proliferation
of this new experience in habitation stem from its mass
character, which character in turn stems both from its function
and from the modern conditions of construction. The obvious
core of these conditions is the authoritarian decisionmaking
which abstractly converts the environment into an environment
of abstraction. The same architecture appears everywhere
as soon as industrialization has begun, even in the countries
that are furthest behind in this regard, as an essential
foundation for implanting the new type of social existence.
The contradiction between the growth of societys material
powers and the continued lack of progress toward
any conscious control of those powers is revealed as glaringly
by the developments of urbanism as by the issues of thermonuclear
weapons or of birth control (where the possibility of manipulating
heredity is already on the horizon).
174
The self-destruction of the urban environment is already
well under way. The explosion of cities into the countryside,
covering it with what Mumford calls a formless mass
of thinly spread semi-urban tissue, is directly governed
by the imperatives of consumption. The dictatorship of the
automobile — the pilot product of the first stage of commodity
abundance — has left its mark on the landscape with the
dominance of freeways, which tear up the old urban centers
and promote an ever-wider dispersal. Within this process
various forms of partially reconstituted urban fabric fleetingly
crystallize around distribution factories
giant shopping centers built in the middle of nowhere and
surrounded by acres of parking lots. These temples of frenetic
consumption are subject to the same irresistible centrifugal
momentum, which casts them aside as soon as they have engendered
enough surrounding development to become overburdened secondary
centers in their turn. But the technical organization of
consumption is only the most visible aspect of the general
process of decomposition that has brought the city to the
point of consuming itself.
175
Economic history, whose entire previous development centered
around the opposition between city and country, has now
progressed to the point of nullifying both. As a result
of the current paralysis of any historical development
beyond the independent movement of the economy, the incipient
disappearance of city and country does not represent a transcendence
of their separation, but their simultaneous collapse. The
mutual erosion of city and country, resulting from the failure
of the historical movement through which existing urban
reality could have been overcome, is reflected in the eclectic
mixture of their decomposed fragments that blanket the most
industrialized regions of the world.
176
Universal history was born in cities, and it reached maturity
with the citys decisive victory over the country.
For Marx, one of the greatest merits of the bourgeoisie
as a revolutionary class was the fact that it subjected
the country to the city, whose very air is liberating.
But if the history of the city is a history of freedom,
it is also a history of tyranny — a history of state administrations
controlling not only the countryside but the cities themselves.
The city has served as the historical battleground for the
struggle for freedom without yet having been able to win
it. The city is the focal point of history because
it embodies both a concentration of social power, which
is what makes historical enterprises possible, and a consciousness
of the past. The current destruction of the city is thus
merely one more reflection of humanitys failure, thus
far, to subordinate the economy to historical consciousness;
of societys failure to unify itself by reappropriating
the powers that have been alienated from it.
177
The country represents the complete opposite: isolation
and separation (The German Ideology). As
urbanism destroys the cities, it recreates a pseudocountryside
devoid both of the natural relations of the traditional
countryside and of the direct (and directly challenged)
social relations of the historical city. The conditions
of habitation and spectacular control in todays planned
environment have created an artificial neopeasantry.
The geographical dispersal and the narrow-mindedness that
have always prevented the peasantry from undertaking independent
action and becoming a creative historical force are equally
characteristic of these modern producers, for whom a world
of their own making is as inaccessible as were the natural
rhythms of work in agrarian societies. The peasantry was
the steadfast foundation of Oriental despotism,
in that its inherent fragmentation gave rise to a natural
tendency toward bureaucratic centralization. The neopeasantry
produced by the increasing bureaucratization of the modern
state differs from the old in that its apathy must
now be historically manufactured and maintained;
natural ignorance has been replaced by the organized spectacle
of falsification. The landscape of the new cities
inhabited by this technological pseudopeasantry is a glaring
expression of the repression of historical time on which
they have been built. Their motto could be: Nothing
has ever happened here, and nothing ever will. The
forces of historical absence have been able to
create their own landscape because historical liberation,
which must take place in the cities, has not yet occurred.
178
The history that threatens this twilight world could potentially
subject space to a directly experienced time. Proletarian
revolution is this critique of human geography
through which individuals and communities could create places
and events commensurate with the appropriation no longer
just of their work, but of their entire history. The ever-changing
playing field of this new world and the freely chosen variations
in the rules of the game will regenerate a diversity of
local scenes that are independent without being insular.
And this diversity will revive the possibility of authentic
journeys — journeys within an authentic life that
is itself understood as a journey containing its whole meaning
within itself.
179
The most revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not
itself urbanistic, technological or aesthetic. It is the
project of reconstructing the entire environment in accordance
with the needs of the power of workers councils, of the
antistate dictatorship of the proletariat, of executory
dialogue. Such councils can be effective only if they transform
existing conditions in their entirety; and they cannot set
themselves any lesser task if they wish to be recognized
and to recognize themselves in a world of their
own making.
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