“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 modified and
rebuilt 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 very 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 had 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
experiences of the French
Revolution to increase the means of maintaining law and order in the streets have finally
culminated in the suppression of the streets. 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 in accordance with 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
pseudo-community. The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell,
where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with the
dominant
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 designed specifically 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 decision-making
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
genetic modification
(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 erected in the middle of
nowhere and surrounded by acres of parking space. 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
apart from 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 revolutionary merits of the bourgeoisie
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
been the
historical battleground of the struggle for freedom, but it has yet to host its
victory. 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 pseudo-countryside
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 today’s “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 peasantry in that its apathy
must now be historically manufactured and maintained; natural ignorance has been
replaced by the organized spectacle of falsifications. The new
cities inhabited by this technological pseudo-peasantry are a glaring expression of
the repression of historical time on which they have been built. Their motto could be:
Nothing will ever happen here, and nothing ever has. The forces of historical
absence have begun 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 will be able to 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,
thereby reviving 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, which can be effective only if they
transform existing conditions in their entirety, 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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