Donald Albrecht & Chrysanthe Broikos: On the Job (2000)

This small catalog for the museum exhibition of the same name explores the history of office design through photo essays and brief articles. Published on the eve of the dot-com crash, the book is overly optimistic about how (post-Fordist) flexible and just-in-time production combined with telecommuting might make the office, its designs, and its furniture an archaic curiosity of the twentieth century. It will be interesting to view how all of the modular and flexible office systems praised here will also be suited to the massive layoffs and cost-reducing re-organizations of the next few years (that is to say, post-Fordist office design seems equally adaptable to financial speculation's boom and bust). The rather superficial essays in this book divide the subject of office design into office buildings, office furniture and layout, and office equipment/machinery, with rather stunning visual essays to accompany each section. The book is most useful for vividly demonstating the importance of critically reflecting on the history of white-collar work spaces (I'm always sympathetic to writing that pays more attention to the realm of production than to that of consumption). For a large percentage of the population, the history of the office was the history of 20th century America. From a brief history of the Herman Miller office furniture firm (for which Charles Eames and Isamu Noguchi worked) to photographic documentation of the evolution of the office desk over the last century, the volume demonstrates the massive amount of effort, talent, and capital that have been invested in "improving" office work, but with only limited or ambiguous results, which should make us reconsider whether such a project is possible in the first place.

Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York (1978)

The Regional Plan Committee knew "it would be suicide to solve Manhattan's problems, that they exist by the grace of these problems, that it is their duty to make its problems, if anything, forever insurmountable, that the only solution for Manhattan is the extrapolation of its freakish history, that Manhattan is the city of the perpetual flight forward." Koolhaas' "retroactive manifesto" for Manhattanism (that "theoretical Manhattan" that was partially, imperfectly, and unconsciously realized in the first half of the twentieth century) is less an objective architectural history (I'm sure scholars have picked apart his claims many times) than an indirect criticism of architectural modernism and urban planning. As becomes especially clear in the final section on Le Corbusier, the book is a polemic against the modernist quest for purity and order as well as its dictum that form must follow function (in one caption, Koolhaas goes so far as to mention "years of relentless Modernist propaganda orchestrated by the Museum of Modern Art"). But rather than enter into any direct (and tiresome) debate with these ideas, Koolhaas shows how a great deal of Manhattan's architecture, while built for commercial concerns and under the ideas of functionalism, was the product of flights of fantasy and irrationality. For Koolhaas, Manhattan, rather than serving as an example of American pragmatism and lack of culture, is populated with "architectural mutations," "utopian fragments," "irrational phenomena," and "phantom architecture," though its creators have rarely admitted to it. Koolhaas has a chapter on Coney Island between the 1880s and 1910s, during which time entertainment ventures such as Steeplechase Park, Dreamland, and Luna Park played the role of a testing ground (at least until they burn down) for Manhattanism. Coney Island served as a site where all of New York's emerging architectural fantasies could be tried out without any disguise. Manhattanism on Manhattan itself is shaped by a number of fortuitous events that allowed the fantastic to work through the apparently functionalist. The first is the projection in 1807 of "The Manhattan Grid," a "conceptual speculation" that ignores natural/topographical distinctions and renders all of Manhattan equivalent, therefore placing an urgent pressure on builders "to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another." The Grid also provides a vital balance of order and disorder for all future development: disorder by promoting competitive distinction and by blocking "totalitarian interventions" that would take over large chunks of the city; order by retaining a minimum amount of geometric regularity that no architectural delirium can erase. As a result, planning "can never describe a specific built configuration that is to remain static through the ages; it can only predict that whatever happens, it will have to happen somewhere within the 2,028 blocks of the Grid." But the potential of the Grid doesn't take off until the conquest of the vertical through the Skyscraper (and the elevator) and the Vertical Schism which separates and isolates the activities of each floor of the Skyscraper. The skyscraper makes it possible to reproduce a given floor space ad infinitum, "a utopian formula for the unlimited creation of virigin sites on a single urban location" (and one that further thwarts any efforts for centralized planning). With the skyscraper, each block is no longer just an island but also a potential city within the city, even a world to itself. Because of the commercial boom, the vertical trajectory of the skyscraper was explored to its fullest at first, perhaps even to excess. For Koolhaas, the 1916 Zoning Law, which set regulations on the height and volume of the skyscrapers, was a fortuitous imposition of arbitrary constraints. "The 1916 Zoning Law describes on each plot or block of Manhattan's surface an imaginary evelope that defines the outlines of the maximum allowable construction." Though just a law, "the 'limiting' three-dimensional parameters of the law suggest a whole new idea of Metropolis." He argues, "The 1916 Zoning Law defines Manhattan for all time as a collection of 2,028 colossal phantom 'houses' that together form a Mega-Village." Koolhaas brilliantly describes the work of Hugh Ferriss, who devoted his life to creating drawings that explored the possibilities of the Zoning Law and who played a major, though mostly unknown, role in many of the major architectural projects during the era. The Grid and Zoning Law combined created a set of limitations within which architects and designers could indulge in whimsical play or collective chaos that remained "inside" the concept of modernist functionalism or economic pragmatism. I would argue that by creating rigid rules about exterior boundaries, the Grid and Zoning Law authorized architecture to fully explore the potentialities of the inside of the virtual envelope of each block, to repeatedly see what each block could become through internal differentiation.

Louis Althusser: For Marx (1965 [1969])

"[O]verdetermination . . . is universal; the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. - are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes." Given the late career or translation upswing of Badiou, Balibar, and Ranciere, it would seem that a systematic reevaluation of their teacher, Althusser, would be in order (confession: I still haven't read Reading Capital, but will when Verso re-releases it as part of the Radical Thinkers series in May, hopefully with the contributions of Ranciere and Macherey translated and included this time). In this volume of relatively early writings (1960-65), the slow emergence of a problematic focused on ideology (which at this point I find the least interesting aspect of Althusser) doesn't overshadow a careful theorizing of the Marxist dialectic. A contempt for Hegel rules over the argument in the book, but Althusser also opposes himself to Marxist critics who read Marx as inverting Hegel's philosophy. For Althusser, Marx is not Hegel, but neither is he the anti-Hegel. This argument is first articulated in relation to what Althusser terms Marx's "epistemological break" in 1845, which separates his writings into ideological early works and scientific mature works. Rather than describing the break as Marx's negation/inversion of Hegel, Althusser argues Marx in his early period had "retreated" for a long time from Hegel, and that Marx's turn to Hegel "on the eve of his rupture" with ideology was a last moment, "prodigious 'abreaction' indispensable to the liquidation of his 'disordered' consciousness" that allowed reality to finally erupt into Marx's thought. Contemporary theorists analyzing the possible "break" between Althusser and his students such as Ranciere should pay close attention to the reading strategies Althusser deploys in this section, illustrated for example in his claim that "The German Ideology [the key text in Marx's break] presents the spectacle of a re-enlisted conceptual reserve standing in for new concepts still in training." Much more than the history of ideas is at stake in Althusser's discussion of Marx and Hegel. In particular, Althusser wants to distinguish Marx's dialectic from Hegel's. For Althusser, Hegel's dialectic presupposes a simple totality that deploys differences only to negate them and produce "an ever more 'concrete' totality" (to use more contemporary terminology, Hegel's dialectic never really encounters anything Other than itself, what Althusser calls "the simplicity of the Hegelian 'womb'"). There therefore "is not and cannot be a Hegelian politics." Althusser claims that Marxists who reduce history to a general Economic Dialectic are guilty of Hegel's error of reducing contradiction to the development "of a simple internal principle" (that is, they have inverted Hegel, but in no way altered his dialectic). Instead of presupposing a simple totality, the Marxist dialectic (according to Althusser) presupposes a complex whole that is structured by a dominant element and contains/is composed of multiple contradictions. Althusser relies on Mao's On Contradiction (and Freud less explicitly) to formulate his concept of "overdetermination": the way a contradiction affects and contributes to the complex whole as well as the contradiction's reflection "of its conditions of existence within the complex whole, that is, of the other contradictions in the complex whole, in other words its un-even development." What this means is that there is no pure economic dialectic that determines history or perfectly aligns all of society's contradictions (or that allows the base to determine the superstructure). Instead, elements such as ideologies and international events are specific and autonomous determinations, whereas "the economy is determinant, but in the last instance," an instance that never arrives within history. The immediate consequence of this argument is that references to a pure economic dialectic are shown to be ideological (which doesn't mean they don't have a strategic place), and Althusser calls for a "theory of the specific effectivity of the superstructures and other 'circumstances,'" which he finds only Gramsci to have produced.

Fredric Jameson: A Singular Modernity (2002)

“Radical alternatives, systemic transformation, cannot be theorized or even imagined within the conceptual field governed by the word ‘modern’. This is probably the case with the notion of capitalism as well: but if I recommend the experimental procedure of substituting capitalism for modernity in all the contexts in which the latter appears, this is a therapeutic rather than a dogmatic recommendation, designed to exclude old problems (and to produce new and more interesting ones). What we really need is a wholesale displacement of the thematics of modernity by the desire called Utopia. We need to combine a Poundian mission to identify Utopian tendencies with a Benjaminian geography of their sources and a gauging of their pressure at what are now multiple sea levels. Ontologies of the present demand archeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past." The idea of Jameson writing a book on modernity and modernism is exciting, but the work he has produced here is consistently frustrating. This is largely because Jameson avoids putting forth a "substantialist" theory of modernity or modernism (that is to say, he doesn't go ahead and explain what he thinks these terms mean). Instead, he engages in "the ideological analysis, not so much of a concept, as of a word," "a formal analysis of the uses of the word ‘modernity’ that explicitly rejects any presupposition that there is a correct use of the word to be discovered, conceptualized and proposed." So for most of the volume, Jameson traces how others have used the words modernity and modernism, summarizing their historical usage as well as the arguments of major theorists of modernity and modernism. Yet even here, Jameson's goal is neither comprehensiveness nor (chrono)logical clarification, and the arbitrariness of his examples and indulgence in long digressions (I still can't figure out why twenty pages on de Man were needed) undermines the text. The first chapter, "Regressions of the Current Age," however, does work nicely. In that chapter, he points how that in "full postmodernity," everyone thought they knew what the modern was, since its supposed attributes (asceticism, phallocentrism, authoritarianism, teleology, etc.) were all the negative ideals that postmodernity claimed to have broken with. Jameson is surprised, then, that the modern has recently become again quite popular, from the return to traditional philosophy (could Jameson have foreseen speculative realism when he comments, "can metaphysics be far behind"?) to ethnocentric theories of economic modernization (which might include the equation of neoliberalism with modernity, though this means focusing on the "neo" and not the "liberalism," which is not new). Jameson concludes the chapter by hinting that modernity is simply capitalism, and in particular the standardizing of the world market, but he doesn't expand on how this would link modernity with a capitalist conservatism until his final chapter. In the first half of the book, he argues that modernity depends upon/produces the idea of a break, but that break ultimately leads to a form of periodizing, which while not desirable, also isn't avoidable (his maxim: "We cannot not periodize."). The new always "finds itself embedded within a ground that lends it a semblance of narrative form and continuity." The word modernity therefore serves different "rewritings" of history, rewritings that can serve conservative or critical ends (Pick a random element, date, technology from the past, label it the birth of modernity, and then begin re-writing your grand narratives. Jameson demonstrates a reserved admiration for how Luhmann does this with "structural differentiation"). The last half of the book discusses (artistic/aesthetic) modernism and "ideologies of modernism." Jameson posits a distinction between (classical) modernism and late modernism (postmodernism, acting in good modernist fashion, breaks with late modernism). Late modernism, simply assuming "the autonomy of art," "transforms the older modernist experimentation into an arsenal of tried and true techniques, no longer striving after aesthetic totality or the systemic and Utopian metamorphosis of forms." Late modernism and its ideology of modernism re-make modernism into a middlebrow canon, ready for consumption by college students and their professors. In the conclusion to the book, Jameson draws from Vincent Descombes the distinction between "ontologies of the present" and "discourses of and on modernity." He argues that modernity serves a useful but limited function of "generating alternate historical narratives," but that we should instead focus on ontologies of the present, those Archeologies of the Future that are described in his next book.

William Gibson: Neuromancer (1983)

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding." The book that introduced the term "cyberspace," Gibson's first novel in one sense is merely a rather high-tech heist narrative. Gibson's book is what I term a corporate fiction: the struggle over the structure of a corporation coincides with the superficial actions required by the genre plotting. The story of one artificial intelligence (Wintermute) using a crew of humans to attempt to free its other half (the imprisoned Neuromancer) is also the story of the re-structuring of the Tessier-Ashpool corporation that created both mainframe-based AIs. The Tessier-Ashpool corporation is still run by a family clan, a bizarrely archaic form of pre-managerial corporate capitalism within this futuristic setting. Because the Tessier-Ashpool family has not delegated control over the corporation to management (this fact seems more fantastic than any of the technologies invented by Gibson), the body of the family has been incorporated into the body of the corporation. The few remaining members of the family are imprisoned in cryogenic sleep, the use of life-extending technologies allowing this difficult coupling of family and corporate identities. The Tessier-Ashpools had created the two AIs to assist them in running the corporation, but Neuromancer is cognitively secured and constrained because of the family's fear that the AIs would become too intelligent, leading to a crackdown by the "Turing police," and that the AIs would no longer need the humans at all. When Wintermute frees Neuromancer, the bodies of the Tessier-Ashpool clan are freed as well. Though the Tessier-Ashpools are in many ways the villains of the novel and far less sympathetic than the cyber-cowboy Chase and his crew, there is a sense of liberation when they either commit suicide or finally are able finally to live life as individuals. This isn't because the AIs take control of the corporation, however, since they merge with the matrix/cyberspace itself. As early as the 1950s, Herbert Simon and other management writers forecasted that the computer would allow the increased automation of the tasks of management. Simon equated the executive position with those tasks that were "non-programmable," though even he admitted that it was only a matter of time before they became programmable. For a management culture obsessed with impersonal "systems," these recommendations could make sense. But for the Tessier-Ashpool clan, which paradoxically wanted to impose both impersonal automation and their own personal identity onto the corporation, they could only result in the setting of the technology against itself, the splitting and restraining of AIs. That Wintermute and Neuromancer are two halfs of the same entity, and that one has an identity while the other one doesn't, also reflects the metaphysical ambiguities of the corporate form, ambiguities that a century's worth of legislation and publicity have not been able to eliminate.

Catherine Malabou: What Should We Do With Our Brain?

"To implicate consciousness, to ask what we should do with our brain, means . . . to attempt to develop a critique of what we will call neuronal ideology. It is thus not a just a matter of uncovering, in the name of brain plasticity, a certain freedom of the brain but rather, starting from as precise a study as possible of the functioning of this plasticity, to free this freedom, to disengage it from a certain number of ideological presuppositions that implicitly govern the entire neuroscientific field and, by a mirror effect, the entire field of politics - and in this way to rescue philosophy from its irresponsible torpor." Malabou, who teaches philosophy at the Universite de Paris X-Nanterre, juxtaposes in her book philosophy and neuroscience, arguing that "there can no longer be any philosophical, political, or scientific approach to history that does not pass through a close analysis of the neuronal phenomenon." We must intellectually respond to the revolutionary discoveries of neuroscience and come to understand how post-Fordist capitalism depends upon, yet constrains, the potential of our brains. I'm always grateful that in my first year of college as an undergraduate I took an honors course on contemporary neuroscience that exposed me to the work of Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelmann far before I ever read a word of theory, "naturalizing" the kind of move Malabou makes in this volume. She begins by noting how common the concept of "plasticity" is in neuroscience, and puts forth her own definition of plasticity as the capability to both receive and give form, to be receiver and creator. Contrasting traditional images of the adult brain as a fixed and finished organ, neuroscience has discovered three types of brain plasticity: "developmental plasticity, modulational plasticity, and reparative plasticity." Although the earliest development of the brain is strongly determined by genetics (or else human brains would evolve in wildly different and non-functional ways), in slightly later stages of early development there is "a certain plasticity in the execution of the genetic program," particularly as a result of the influence of the individual's surroundings. In addition to this "developmental plasticity," "modulational plasticity" throughout the individual's life allows for "synapses to modulate their efficacy and to modify the force of their interconnections." Finally, through "reparative plasticity" the brain changes due to the renewal of nerve cells and the brain's compensation for lesions in the brain. As a result of these three kinds of plasticity, each individual's brain (even those of identical twins) will have undergone a unique development, so that "no two brains are identical in respect to their history." Malabou shows how this plasticity of the brain makes comparisons to machines (such as the telephone or the computer) misguided. Instead of portraying the brain as the controller at the top of a hierarchical system, neuroscience shows how the brain functions like an adaptable, delocalized network. Yet this is exactly how current management theory portrays the post-Fordist firm (Malabou draws heavily from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism, which seems to be the fountainhead of post-Fordist theory for French intellectuals these days). But post-Fordist demands for "flexibility" have constrained how we conceive of brain "plasticity," and neuroscientific work on brain plasticity has come to naturalize and legitimize post-Fordist ideology (i.e., our brains really want us to have insecure, continuously demanding jobs instead of secure, well-defined positions). For Malabou, flexibility focuses on the ability to receive a form, to passively adapt, but not, as in the case of plasticity, to give a form, to "explode" into the new: "Flexibility is plasticity minus its genius." We might see Malabou's book as complementing, but also contesting, Paolo Virno and the Autonomist's discussion of the role of "general intellect" in post-Fordist capitalism. Capitalism currently invests in our brain's plasticity, but attempts to reduce that plasticity to functional flexibility. Yet unlike the Autonomists, Malabou is able to make this argument without any reference to language or the primary importance of language to humanity. Up to this point in her argument, Malabou is on strong ground, but in the final chapter of the book she makes some moves that while justifiable may not convince all her readers. She engages in-depth with the work of Antonio Damasio and his theory of how a proto-self is "translated" into a core self and then ultimately into conscience, or the "transition from the neuronal to the mental". Damasio argues that as the brain maps the state of the body it simultaneously maps its own state, and that modification of this latter map can lead to "second-order maps" that eventually result in consciousness. Malabou takes issue with the assumption of a natural harmony between these maps, between the neuronal and the mental, which is evident in Damasio's use of terms such as "translation" or "narrative" to describe the transition from one level of organization to another. Here the distinction between flexibility and plasticity reappears, as Malabou argues we need to exploit more of our brain's capability not just to receive but to give form. Malabou, who has written a book on Hegel, introduces a dialectical definition of identity, in which the transition from neuronal to mental occurs through "negation and resistance," "gaps and leaps," and creative "explosions" rather than "translation." Malabou's sudden turn to dialectics rightfully serves to critique a certain tendency in neuroscience, but it feels a bit arbitrary (and even a bit routine as far as theory goes) and not quite as groundbreaking as the ideas presented in the rest of the book. Malabou keeps a rather specific focus on neuroscience throughout, but I wonder how work on complex systems and emergence might inform the claims she makes here (especially since this theory, like neuroscience, is regularly called upon to naturalize post-Fordism)? Malabou claims the brain contains a tension between its "homeostatic" function and its "self-generative" one, between "maintenance" and "creative ability." But would it be possible to transition from homeostasis to self-generation without rupture via something like emergence?

Jose van Dijck: Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (2007)

"[D]igital tools may help reconceptualize memory as a process etched in time – a process continuously prone to the vagaries of reinterpretation and reordering. If we consider the latest research results coming from neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists, we have to accept human memory as an amalgamation of creative projection, factual retrieval, and narrative recollection of past events. By the same token, we may look upon media tools as creative reminiscing instruments in addition to being mnemonic aids. Defining memory concurrently as a product and a process, we may acknowledge the versatility and morphing quality of digital memory machines as a positive element that is integral to human reminiscing.” Van Dijck's book is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the relation of media and memory, drawing from neuroscience/cognitive psychology, social-constructivist studies of technology, and cultural theory. "Mediated memories" are best exemplified by those artifacts individuals once stored in shoeboxes, such as photographs and letters. Mediated memories are stored for future retrieval, allowing the shaping of personal and family identity across time by influencing the recollection of the past and the projection of the future. They also serve a communicative function, mediating between self and collective, or even an affective function, allowing for "affective feedback loops" between the self and itself or the self and collective. Throughout, van Dijck attempts to show how mediated memory is simultaneously personal, cultural, and technological. What we capture and how we capture it in mediated memory is thoroughly influenced by culture and available media technologies - everything from the form of diaries to the staging of family photographs is affected by existing sociocultural practices and media. Rather than seeing the media as supplementing or threatening some originary or authentic mental memory, or claiming that collective memory transcends or is opposed to personal memory, van Dijck questions how each term in the pair conceptually informs our understanding of the other. Drawing from neurobiology and particularly the work of Antonio Damasio, she argues that although digital technologies have led to the image of human memory as simply storage and retrieval, in actuality memories are diffused across the brain and even the environment and are creatively transformed in the process of recall. The development and theorizing of digital memory might therefore be productively informed by research in neurobiology. The interior chapters of the book consist of ethnological studies of forms of digital mediated memory, ranging from blogs to digital photographs to home videos. These chapters are mostly descriptive, but they seem necessary to illustrate van Dijck's argument about the complex weaving of the personal, cultural, and technological. For example, in the chapter on digital photography, by studying how digital photographs enter into communicative networks, are used as ephemeral triggers for affect, or allow for the continuous re-framing of one's self image, she is able to move far beyond the more traditional debates about the digital photo's loss of indexicality by considering the evolving use of the medium, the quick succession of steps in which the personal, cultural, and technological all seem to re-constitute each other (this is Katherine Hayles' idea of human-digital "co-evolution," but with culture as a vital mediating term, or is it that digital media assist the co-evolution of self and collective?). If the theoretical discussions in the chapters that bookend the volume feel a bit disjointed or fuzzy at times, that may be because their purpose is less to articulate a clear theory than to messily join together the disparate fields and subjects the case studies follow down singular paths.

Veronique Patteeuw: What is OMA?

Koolhaas quotes: "to concretize speculative systems in the present society as a method of acquiring reality for them, regardless of their truth"; "to be alert to the delicacies that can exist within the bureaucratic, instrumentalized world"; "try to find the concept through which the worthless turns into something where even the sublime is not unthinkable"; "combine indeterminacy with architectural specificity." This collection of short essays and excerpts on the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) ideally should have served as a direct and ordered exposition of the ideas and concepts found in Koolhaas' (and his associated organizations') often mammoth and experimentally-formatted publications, such as S,M,L,XL. But the volume settles mostly for uncritical "appreciation" of Koolhaas, and serves little purpose other than as a condensed collection of Koolhaas quotes (which admittedly is still something, due both to the brilliance of his style and the enormity of his books). Despite Koolhaas' description of his activities as "surfing" the wave of globalization and his role in designing buildings for many of the "evil paradises" discussed in Mike Davis' book, the few muted criticisms in this volume indirectly repeat other writers' objections rather than entering into any original polemic. The final two pages present a biography of Koolhaas' OMA, "whose objectives were the definition of new types of relations - theoretical as well as practical - between architecture and the contemporary cultural situation." OMA's changing employment of over 100 architects, designers, consultants, etc. would have been ripe ground for a historical or theoretical response to the volume's titular question (Olafur Eliasson's reliance on a post-Fordist organizational model has been subjected to such an approach), but that organization remains completely out of sight here, existing only as an acronym for what Koolhaas described as: "a very pretentious name, compared to which almost any realisation may be found wanting."

Mike Davis & Daniel Monk: Evil Paradises (2007)

"[M]odern wealth and luxury consumption are more enwalled and socially enclaved than at any time since the 1890s. As our case studies repeatedly underline, the spatial logic of neoliberalism . . . revives the most extreme colonial patterns of residential segregation and zoned consumption. Everywhere, the rich and near rich are retreating into sumptuary compounds, leisure cities, and gated replicas of imaginary California suburbs."
The essays collected here explore how neoliberal economic policies/practices have impacted existing cities or led to the rapid birth of new ones. Whether theoretically acute or merely sensational journalism, none of essays included fail to shock (should we be thankful these cities so clearly make visible the destructive consequences of neoliberalism? That is, if these cities didn't exist, would we have to invent them, at least in fiction?). So we find: Hong Kong suburbs modeled after the California lifestyle; living standards for the poor in Johannesburg drastically declining after the end of apartheid; fortified networks of wealth in Managua, Nicaragua; post-socialist Budapest explicitly aspiring to be "bourgeois"; paramilitary and narcotraffic thugs brutally enforcing a pacification in Medellin that has allowed investment to return; fortified enclaves for the elderly in Arizona; Ted Turner's land grab, which uses environmentalism to justify the active poisoning of rivers; Richmond's antiurban privatizing of the street; monastery retreats that feature all of the luxuries of a high-end spa; plans for a mammoth cruise ship, on which the uber-rich can float the seas in tax-free style.
Dubai is the archetypal neoliberal city here. Mike Davis describes the contrast between the utopian imagery of Dubai's architecture (throughout the volume, architecture comes across as singularly villainous in its compliance with the dreams of the wealthy for a post-political/anti-political space) and the exploitative and dangerous conditions of the workplaces and hidden camps/homes of the immigrant labor needed to construct the city. In his incisive introduction to the volume, Davis shows how neoliberalism (as the deregulation of financial markets and the privatization of state activities) does less to generate overall growth for an entire economy (the claims of the World Bank and IMF notwithstanding) than to redistribute absurd amounts of wealth to small groups of individuals, in effect producing extreme forms of social inequality and the desire in the wealthy to simply escape (often through architecture or urban planning) from the harsh social realities they have created and profited from. The "fortified enclave" of the gated community remains the most popular means across the globe for the wealthy to create an anti-urbanism, a city without all the annoying features of a city (such as the working class). Such behavior on the part of the wealthy has become routine, but more surprising is how humanitarian groups, NGOs, and various international groups have come to benefit from neoliberal urban planning, so that reconstruction in Afghanistan has been immediately to serve the building needs of the foreign reconstructers, or a luxurious residential city in Iran houses humanitarian workers rushing in to assist Bam after a deadly earthquake.

Dick Hebdige: Subculture (1979)

"[T]he challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style. The objections are lodged, the contradictions displayed (and, as we shall see, 'magically resolved') at the profoundly superficial level of appearances: that is, at the level of signs." Working within the standard British cultural studies model, Hebdige's book posits the existence of a dominant ideology whose hegemony is resisted and subverted by working-class subcultures. Members of a subculture operate like bricoleurs, appropriating existing cultural commodities to assemble a style that communicates their distinctiveness. Focusing on the punks and their subcultural contemporaries and predecessors (from West Indian reggae to the mods to glam rock), Hebdige is in the enviable position of being able to convert his record collection into a scholarly analysis (one reason among many why the book has been so popular). Combining Barthes on myth, Althusser on ideology, and of course the work of Stuart Hall, Hebdige's description of subcultural style intuitively feels right, if a bit simple in its semiotic preoccupations. Hebdige asserts that the study of subcultures must always be historically and culturally specific, and therefore his own argument may not travel that well. In a footnote, Hebdige distinguishes between subculture and counterculture: subculture refers to working class (and mostly youth) movements that indirectly revolt through style, whereas counterculture refers to the middle-class movements of the 1960s that were more politically articulate and able to produce "alternative institutions." Whereas Hebdige sees subcultures developing out of and opposing each other (there is a kind of ecology of subcultures), he doesn't explain how subculture might relate to counterculture. In The Laws of Cool, Alan Liu argues that the middle-class, technocratic members of the American counterculture appropriated the truly marginalized subculture in order to position themselves as being both outside and inside of the dominant social institutions ("I work here, but my identity is found elsewhere"). I don't necessarily agree with Liu's argument, but his book makes it clear that Hebdige's account of British subcultures needs to be seriously re-worked to describe non-mainstream American culture since the 1960s. That middle-class, suburban American youth demonstrate nearly all the features of subcultural style threatens to hollow out the social implications of Hebdige's book.
Though Hebdige admits that subcultural style often is merely a distinct style of consumption that fails to actually change an unequal social structure, he tries to avoid sociological moralizing and political dismissal, aiming instead "to acknowledge the right of the subordinate class (the young, the black, the working class) to 'make something of what is made of (them).'" But the impotence of the subculture's "symbolic violation" of the social order is yet another example of the weak semiotic subversiveness that has been too-often described and valued by cultural studies. Subcultural style does perform the useful function of denaturalizing the dominant culture, revealing the codes at work in common sense, but simultaneously serves to expand the realm of cultural commodities by expanding the definition of normality. Throughout the book, Hebdige equates subculture with "spectacular subculture." After a good forty years of changes in subcultural spectacle, it has become hard to believe that any stylistic breakthrough (either in fashion or in music, from punk to rap to techno) can do anything radical or politically important by itself. Rather than relying on a close reading of subcultural style (Hebdige invests heavily in a careful account of how punk style is different from other subcultural styles), it might be more productive to trace how subcultural style allows the formation of distinct networks/groups, and then to place more emphasis on non-spectacular practices within those subcultural networks, from everyday DIY aesthetics (which Hebdige briefly touches upon) to the sustaining of participatory spaces to non-signifying musical genres such as noise music.

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

"[T]he black man should no longer have to be faced with the dilemma 'whiten or perish,' but must become aware of the possibility of existence; in still other words, if society creates difficulties for him because of his color, if I see in his dreams the expression of an unconscious desire to change color, my objective will not be to dissuade him by advising him to 'keep his distance'; on the contrary, once his motives have been identified, my objective will be to enable him to choose action (or passivity) with respect to the real source of the conflict, i.e. the social structure." Fanon argues that black men have been indoctrinated into accepting that whiteness is all that is desirable and good. As a result of their "inferiority complex," black men put on "white masks" by trying to adopt the white/colonizer's language and culture, though the persistent gap between their "black skin" and "white masks" frustrates their efforts to solidify their identity as white. The book is a jumble of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, philosophy, and political manifesto, with some elements working better than others. Despite reference to Lacan, the book's dependence on psychoanalysis, especially of the mid-century variety, is a problem, as few contemporary readers would want to commit themselves completely to the particulars of Fanon's discussion of the Oedipus complex and neurosis (see Homi Bhabha's "The Location of Culture" for an example of how Fanon's work might be updated to more fashionable psychoanalytic theories). More helpful is Fanon's admonishment of his psychoanalytic peers who want to universalize rather historicize the "illnesses" they diagnose in their black patients, finding "essential" traits of the black man rather than the products of colonial exploitation, an ontology of race rather than a "relation" of colonizer/colonized. Contrasting American Freudian psychology, which obsessively attempted to normalize and adjust its middle-class patients, Fanon argues that psychoanalytic practices must be only one component in a larger effort to change the structures of society. That is, there can be no "cure" without resistance, if not outright revolution. In the philosophical sections, Fanon draws heavily from Hegel on the Master/Slave dialectic and Sartre (a thorough Hegelian) on the relation of Self and Other. Both Hegel and Sartre show the difficulties (perhaps impossibility) of establishing mutual recognition. For both, instead of an equality of subjects, one individual becomes the prop for the recognition of the other's subjectivity, though that subjectivity is then tainted/thwarted by its denial of the Other's subjectivity. Fanon distinguishes his argument from Hegel's by claiming that the black man, unlike Hegel's slave, does not merely work/become an object, but rather "wants to be like his master," so that the relation of White/Black is more intimate and slippery than that of Master/Slave. Fanon is exeptionally insightful in his discussion of the "epidermalization" of race (here he comes closest to Lacan on the mirror stage, the imposition/misrecognition of an external, unified identity onto the multiplicity of the body). Fanon argues that black skin has become the bearer of the racist characteristics attributed to black men, in effect "imprisoning" them in the skin of their race. Fanon is particularly moving when he describes his response to this "epidermal racial schema": "Peeling, stripping my skin, causing a hemorrhage that left congealed black blood all over my body. Yet this reconsideration of myself, this thematization, was not my idea. I wanted quite simply to be a man among men." He ends the book by turning strongly to existentialism (I see Sartre everywhere in this section), claiming that the black man has no responsibility to any black essence or even the past of black exploitation. Fanon asserts the right to existential freedom, the right to decide about his existence without any determination of the past or restriction by ontological being. Of course, for those skeptical of such radical freedom (myself included), historical and material questions continue to be central for interrogating what freedom decides upon and how freedom's goals are achieved. But as Homi Bhahba has noted, although Fanon's existentialism resembles humanism, it also pushes towards post-humanism when Fanon claims "I show solidarity with humanity provided I can go one step further."

James Cain: Double Indemnity (1936)

"I had seen so many houses burned down, so many cars wrecked, so many corpses with blue holes in their temples, so many awful things that people had pulled to crook the wheel, that that stuff didn't seem real to me any more. If you don't understand that, go to Monte Carlo or some other place were there's a big casino, sit at a table, and watched the face of the man that spins the little ivory ball. After you've watched it a while, ask yourself how much he would care if you went out and plugged yourself in the head. His eyes might drop when he heard the shot, but it wouldn't be from worry whether you lived or died. It would be to make sure you didn't leave a bet on the table, that he would have to cash for your estate." In Cain's noir masterpiece, insurance salesman Walter Huff collaborates with Phyllis Nirdlinger to murder her husband and collect the accident insurance taken out on him. Because railroad accidents pay twice as much (the "double indemnity" of the title), they murder the husband elsewhere and then make it appear that he falls from the back of train. In Cain's novel, the reduction of persons to statistics plays as great a role as passion in the murder that occurs (see the statistical detachment in the passage quoted above). Huff advises Phyllis to avoid any method of murder that might seem probable, and by breaking the husband's neck before dropping him off the slow-moving train, Huff is able to make the husband's death seem an improbable accident. And in order to keep the appearance of normality, Huff closely manages his sales activities in the months following the murder so that there will be no significant statistical changes in his monthly sales totals. With the actuary-as-criminal, ethical relations with others are replaced by statistical calculations of risk (this is the kind of modern crime that a critic like Mark Seltzer goes to town with).
Less obvious to the plot is the role of the corporation and finance capital. The police are almost completely absent from the novel, being replaced by the insurance corporation investigator Keyes, who embodies statistical logic. Keyes suspects murder because although it is statistically improbable that the fall from the back of the train was suicide (no case of this exists on record) it is almost equally improbable that the husband died on the railway so shortly after the purchase of double indemnity accident insurance. Yet Keyes' statistical reasoning is partially thwarted by the insurance corporation's executive, who is afraid of harming the corporation's reputation by accusing an innocent woman of murder (and even here it is not a question of ethical reputation but of being able to keep the stockholders happy by keeping business strong). Instead of actively pursuing the case as Keyes suggests, the executive takes the passive route of simply not paying the claim until challenged with a lawsuit. The insurance industry historically had to work against its bad reputation as a dubious enterprise (appearing as either a con or a gamble on death) and has long been heavily regulated by the government. The novel reflects a tension between the corporation's need to create a public image of being a good neighbor and the purely statistical calculations that make up its core activities. The corporation also has a motive not to investigate the crime because Huff's reasoning so clearly extracts the industry's a-moral statistical core, the fact that insurance may be the most "modern" of all industries. It is also important to note that Huff has a "little finance company" of his own that he runs on the side of his insurance job. Though he claims his finance company "didn't have anything to do with the insurance company," it also works through the calculation of risk as well as the substitution of an unknown future for one structured through debt. It is the finance company that gives him access to the car he hopes to use to frame a second murder late in the novel. Given the current crisis, it's worth remembering that insurance companies can be a major source of finance capital by investing the premiums they receive, and that one of the greatest concerns with the housing market crash is that the companies that insured the finance companies may also go under. It might not be a stretch to read Cain's novel as using murder to explore a certain over-confidence in and over-extension of insurance and finance.

Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)

"Little solace comes / to those who grieve / when thoughts keep drifting / as walls keep shifting / and this great blue world of ours / seems a house of leaves / moments before the wind." In Danielewski's first novel, when Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Will Navidson and his family move into an old home in Virgina, they discover that the width of the house measured from the inside is 1/4" greater than the width of the house measured from the outside. This small rupture in spatial coherence is merely the herald of the house's complete departure from spatial comprehensibility. Soon a new hallway appears that leads not to existing rooms but to an apparently infinite series of windowless corridors and stairways. Navidson and a crew of professional explorers venture into the hallway on a series of "Explorations," filming their journeys into the hallways that regularly change shape and size, threatening to trap the explorers in the dark interior of the home. This is clearly the "terrain" of the horror genre, resembling the attempt to rescue the daughter who disappears into the walls of the house in the film "Poltergeist." Yet Danielewski deploys and transcends the horror genre by fragmenting and mediating its narrative. In addition to interviews with the explorers and various archival fragments tagged to the end of the book, the exploration and the film it resulted in ("The Navidson Record") is primarily interfaced with through the scholarly commentary of an old man named Zampano. Zampano's commentary is mediated through the ramblings of the Los Angeles tattoo artist Johnny Truant, who discovers Zampano's unedited text after his death. As a result, Danielewski weaves at least three different styles/genres - the suspense/horror story, academic criticism, and drug/psychosis-fueled rant - and proves the range of his breathtaking writing skills. Each layer could be read as primary: the house really existed, so the commentaries are real; the house/film never existed, so Zampano's criticism is completely fictional, though Johnny Truant's response to Zampano is real; or the entire text is simply the product of Johnny Truant's psychotic imagination. Media theorists N. Katherine Hayles and Mark Hansen have emphasized the novel's concern with the digital, reading its assemblage of texts/genres as drawing from hypertext and revealing the novel's preoccupation with the loss of indexicality in digital media (that is to say, that the house might be a figure for the digital, which freed from any referent in reality can modularly transform like the house's hallways). In an interview, Danielewski has argued that the easiest way to create the experimental layout of his novel was by using a pencil, but of course the transformation of that singular artifact into a commercially-viable, mass-produced commodity required the digital technologies that permeate practically all contemporary print-based texts.
Most of the humor in the novel comes from its parody of academic (and in particular, literary) criticism. A quick scan of the imaginary works cited by Zampano (such as: "The Third Beside You: An Analysis of the Epistemological Echo") shows Danielewski's mastery of the scholarly title as well as the narrow range of literary studies in the last few decades, which despite an obsession with difference and the Other has produced an all-too-familiar set of themes and readings. However, Danielewski is also attentive to the affective powers of criticism, and doesn't hesitate to use critical reflection to create poetic beauty. Far more important than poking fun at academia and its institutions (lets be honest, why should anyone else really care?) the novel uses academic criticism to achieve certain literary effects. Like Dave Eggers's first novel (I have in mind mainly its introduction), "House of Leaves" engages in "pre-emptive" criticism of itself, claiming as its own the most obvious readings of its own narrative and themes. In "House of Leaves," this is most evident in Zampano's long discussion of Freud and the unheimlich/uncanny (which in another translation is the "un-homely," i.e. the Davidson's strange home). By adding this critical commentary, the book acknowledges the importance of this theme for its narrative (and for the reader's affective response to the text) while simultaneously rendering unnecessary any "real" critic reductively writing about the uncanny nature of the house, which any reader will already be familiar with. Yes, the house is uncanny, but the pay-off of any critical reading will have to lie elsewhere.
Throughout the novel, Danielewski also deploys academic criticism to achieve certain modernist and avant-garde goals through other means. Danielewski's formal experimentation is most visible in the sections of the "Explorations" that have only one sentence per page. The use of white space produces an effect of speed and movement as the explorers face danger. In contrast to that speed, elsewhere Danielewski repeatedly shifts from the exploration to Zampano's commentary to stop or dilate narrative time or to amplify suspense. Academic criticism functions like a television commercial that interrupts the primary narrative momentum at climactic moments (if television seems an unfair comparison, substitute Dos Passo's "U.S.A." trilogy, which also uses fragmentation at times for traditional narrative purposes).
More interesting than the "montage" of criticism and narrative is how the novel's constant switching between narrative and commentary allows a new ecology of the detail to emerge. Whereas Henry James would write an entire novel just to produce a subtle concluding moment/detail whose ambiguity or complexity would be endlessly undecidable, Danielewski goes straight to the detail and then uses commentary to expand it into an unforeseeable depth. And when one commentary seems too close to nailing down the meaning of that detail, often another arrives to negate its claims and restore the fecund ambiguity of the detail. The novel's pre-emptive discussion of the uncanny achieves this, aiming to keep the uncanny uncanny by negating the critical negation (which is the same thing as the critical recognition) of the ambiguity of the house. One might use an analogy to hypertext and the web-link to understand this ecology of the detail, but the turn to the technology might only obscure the possibilities Danielewski discovers in the "in-house" coupling of fiction and criticism.