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35 CHAPTER THREE The Urban Consolidates Centrality and Citizenship Like many named places . . . it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts. . . . She looked down a slope, needing to squint in the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl. . . . The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. Thomas Pynchon Social relations are revealed in the negation of distance. Henri Lefebvre I. Abstract-Expressive Urbanization The city in history established itself from the cradle of absolute space, developed as an internal force that needed to expand and push outward in order to augment its power. The city in history has modified and been modified by successive modes of production, by advances in social and technical relations of production. Under capitalism, the city became the center of gravity; a whole industrial mode of production pivoted on it. After a while, if we can believe Lefebvre, as the city developed under this industrial mode of production, it actually began to transform that industrial mode of production, even became its own mode of production. And yet, for all this, the city under capitalism could never transform its capitalist basis. How could it? If we thought otherwise, we’d fall back onto the silliest fetishism; Castells’s objection about an “urban revolution ”—with “urban” rather than “revolution” the independent variable—would hold firm. Such modification without transformation meant, for the city, only one dialectical outcome: implosion-eruption. An internal scattering over time, a breaking up and caving in, a progressive earthquake-like spatial rendering, 36 • chapter three a ripping open of the traditional city form. At the same time, a sudden eruption has occurred and red-hot magma has been spewed over vast distances; a kaleidoscope of congealed lava has solidified in its wake, in a form still unfamiliar to us. This implosion-eruption created a city–urban dialectic; from an identifiable city to a circuit-board patterning with a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning. Pynchon’s heroine, Oedipa Maas, from The Crying of Lot 49, puts this shift perfectly. Now we are left wallowing in relativity, searching for clarity, still not quite believing that God plays dice, that the real estate market is our new casino, that our future resides in financial futures and options. Paradoxically, it’s tempting to say that capital now needs fixity more than ordinary people: capital produces the urban as a conceived space and we are left to inhabit it as lived space. Of course, we produce it too: we are all workers, as Herbert Muschamp liked to insist, producing our own factory merely by walking down the street. That was how he summarized Lefebvre’s The Production of Space: human beings collectively make spaces just by encountering other human beings. Capital’s dilemma, though, is the problem of the M–C–M (M =M+∆M) circuit that Marx identified. Money circulates, generating more money and capital. It goes into one end of the process yearning to come out of the other larger than before—as money plus an increment, as capital. Yet to do so some mediation is needed. Money and capital can’t quite accumulate ex nihilo, not quite; money has to touch earth somewhere, metamorphose into a commodity form, if only to dispossess an existent commodity form. It needs to do so in order to accumulate capital on an expanded scale and to recommence the process anew. Capital, Marx says in the Grundrisse (548), “travels through different phases of circulation not as it does in the mind, where one concept turns into the next at the speed of thought, in no time, but rather as situations which are separate in time. It must spend some time as a cocoon before it can take off as a butterfly.” Here the city—or is that the City?—becomes the necessary “bearer” of that moment of circulation, a safe haven, a cocoon from which capital can launch its circulation globally. Capital creates formlessness, yet formlessness unnerves it as a social force, as a ruling class intent on business. It needs the reassurance of absoluteness, in all senses of the term. If God does play dice, that is patently bad for market confidence. Thus capital worries little about its inexorable urge to create spaces of...

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