Icarian Leap

Michel de Certeau, standing on the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre in NYC, observes that to view a city in its totality is an ecstasy of reading - and we've all been atop tall buildings or hills or in a hot air balloon - well, I haven't done the last, but I want to. And certainly, there is a distinctly pleasurable moment in one's ascent when the city, the streets, the corners where you smoke a fag or the alley that cats pee in, all of this mess and smell, become a clean map, a diagram on which lovers point out their little window on an autumn day. I used to love making maps myself as a kid (should have been a warning to my parents) and would spend hours detailing the metro stops and squares of cities built in my head. Not only those, also side cut-out schemata of things such as submarines, commercial space-jets, underground French fortifications (with homoerotic showers included in the complicated structure. Actually, same with the submarines, not the space-jet though) and naturally whole countries with felt-tip-pen-blue rivers and strictly enforced border controls. A fetish perhaps of some sort is revealed in this child's play, fetishism of the eye above, God, the observer, the narrator-creator. It is also a fatally flawed position, one which tempts plans and grids out of our organic brains, where the space of planning is born, where the misery of thousands is formed, where lives are erased to be put into a quantifiable mould. (read this!)

And what is it that bothers me about it? Well, for one the way in which de Certeau calls going back to street level an 'Icarian Fall', a descent from lofty heights to the squalor and chaos of our ant-farm cities. But I do want to believe that on the contrary, it's exactly this sort of Icarian Leap that we need as thinkers and humans, a voluntary and pleasant descent into that which escapes the total view of the plan, the cat pee and the graffiti, the unplanned, unconscious and unexpected that makes life as a cog bearable. I myself have been unable to complete this leap and still derive pleasure from maps and diagrams, but perhaps thinking about it will foster some sense of humility and familiarity with the street level city and not its abstract cousin.

In a sense, this is a nod to another of de Certeau's legacies - the belief that living everyday lives can profoundly change our society as a tool of resistance; while this thinking may have its appeal, especially to the non-revolutionary young adults of today who participate in social change by liking it on Facebook, it is also problematic. While its efficacy can perhaps be defended in the long term (who knows, maybe using canvas bags really will banish unfairness), it is also partly to blame for the acquiescence with the status quo, providing a comforting reassurance that big action is not necessary, that a critical mass of people using the tiniest forms of resistance can successfully challenge the hidden oppression in our society. But as the recent clearing-out of Occupy XYZ encampments shows, the police and the repressive apparatus of the state-capital still crack down on open, engaged opposition - perhaps this is due to the possibility of its success, which is a good reason to leave the house. And on that note, where are my keys?

Anti Hayek

This morning, I for some reason remembered Hayek (Austrians have featured heavily in my dreams of late), causing in me much righteous anger and resentment.

A long time ago, I admit I read Hayek's The Fatal Conceit and thought, hmm, perhaps this poster-boy of neoliberalism does have a point about the the left's pastoral fantasies of a pre-market society, which I believe he terms as atavistic. I too was often disappointed by this indolent belief that all of man's problems can be solved by a return to an Ovidian Aetas Aurea along the lines of the Fleet Foxes lyric - if I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore. My family have owned orchards and though the work is hard and rewarding, I doubt there are enough orchards for us all to work till we're sore and then alcoholize our bodies in tired happiness. While a pre-market, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial society may present itself as tempting alternative, this is only really viable for a privileged group of kids - the world has been changed and icons such as the Pruitt-Igoe estate pictured here have won; ironic considering the demolition of said estate has been termed as a 'victory against modernism'.

Hayek would of course retort that the sort of brutal spatial planning, the rationalising gaze which has exploded time and harnessed space, is in itself a child of the socialist mind. As such, the neoliberal victory over the excesses of etatist high-modernism is to be welcomed as a liberating force. At best, this sort of victory over the deficiencies of planning can be compared to the neoliberal victory against bigotry, which now has us all enslaved in the same consumerist galley regardless of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. A modernity which, at least in the case of gay subculture, has transformed dingy, illicit loci of sexuality into clean, modern facilities where cards are accepted and where there is to be absolutely no masturbation in the jacuzzi.

A modernity therefore, with a kinder face, a modernity of a more insipid kind. To argue that this modernity is anything but a product of our current mode of production, that of late-capitalism, is impossible. Though high-modernism certainly has been a central thought in societies of planned state-capitalism (such as the USSR), it has just as much been a hallmark of thinking in the so-called free world, as well as the third world. Rationality in planning human society is no more opposed to capitalism than a truly free market is part of it. (For a good example of a truly free market, liberated from the constrains of the state and its rationalising, socialist tendencies, I suggest a stroll through the bustling streets of Mogadishu.)

Hayek remains in my thoughts with his further elaboration on his surprise, feigned no doubt, at the number of educated, intelligent men and women who persist (!!) in their belief in socialism and, by implication, a high-modernist project guided by rational thought. If one then takes this initial outlook and combines it perhaps with a critique of high-modernism such as that of James C. Scott (Seeing like a State, 1998), a neat and comprehensive critique of the rationally planned arises, proposing in its stead an 'organic', self-regulating, 'natural' state. And while Scott's criticism remains an important tool in seeing through state-sponsored fantasies of progress and reform, well-meaning as though they may have been, Hayek's call towards a natural state remains on the other hand, corollary to a different fatal conceit, that of the free market.

Surely, the quest for a natural or organic state is the truly atavistic, and perhaps more worryingly offers a base of legitimacy which is as succinct as it is flawed - the mark of the best sort of political argument. By establishing the link between nature and capitalism (or, the 'free market' as it is called), by extrapolating the history of capitalism beyond even early humanoid societies of give and take into an organic state, a formula is created; capitalism is organic and natural, hence all alternatives are not only unnatural, but will fail with great cost to human life and dignity.
(A good popular-science documentary on this sort of topic is All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis - for the visual types among you)

It is, I am just realising, difficult to avoid the devalued and inflated language of charities and part-time revolutionaries when talking about the 'cost' of capitalism; what more can be said of the human and environmental costs, what eloquence and which language or font can elevate and spell out more clearly the path dependency that holds us from realising our potential? None I'm afraid, because apart from a few hundred brave and freezing bodies occupying (quasi)public spaces in New York, London and elsewhere, we are all at home, all content, all disappointed, nowhere near starving, but stuck in temporary jobs, or jobs we hate, under neon lights that strip away the soul, tadpoles in a big lake.

So really, what should surprise us more is that this great number of perfectly healthy, intelligent and respectable individuals still believe that free market capitalism is the best and most 'natural' option we have.