Contributors: Ray Brassier, Emma Hedditch, Matthew Hyland, Anthony Iles, Sara Kaaman, Mattin, Nina Power, Edwin Prévost, Bruce Russell, Matthieu Saladin, Howard Slater, Csaba Toth, Ben Watson

Editors: Mattin & Anthony Iles

‘Noise’ not only designates the no-man’s-land between electro-acoustic investigation, free improvisation, avant-garde experiment, and sound art; more interestingly,it refers to anomalous zones of interference between genres: between post-punk and free jazz; between musique concrète and folk; between stochastic composition and art brut. – Ray Brassier

If the conditions in which we produce our music affects our playing then let’s try to feel through them, understand them as much as possible and, then, change these conditions.

Alienated language is noise, but noise containspossibilities that may, who knows, be more affective than discursive, more enigmatic than dogmatic.

We find ourselves poised between vicariously florid academic criticism, overspecialised niche markets and basements full of anti-intellectual escapists. There is, afterall, ‘a Franco, Churchill, Roosevelt, inside all of us…’ but this book is written neither by chiefs nor generals. Here the non-appointed, not yet disinterested, practitioners in one way or another, autotheorise ways of thinking through the contemporary conditions for making difficult music and opening up to the willfully perverse satisfactions of the auricular drives.

If you wish to receive a printed copy of this book please write or send an email with your postal address to submitting your own feelings about or responses to the words ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Noise’. Any letters, comments, criticisms, records, CDs or contributions in other media related to this book will be gratefully received in exchange. Post: Arteleku, Kristobaldegi 14 (o nuevo P. Ainzieta), Loiola Auzoa, 20014 Donostia - San Sebastián (Spain). Email: arteleku@gipuzkoa.net

This book can be downloaded as a PDF file:
http://www.arteleku.net/audiolab/noise_capitalism.pdf

We are celebrating the publication of the book Noise & Capitalism with a four days experimental gathering: 14-17 September 2009 Arteleku, Kristobaldegi 14, Donostia-San Sebastian (Gipuzkoa, Basque Country) Emma Hedditch, Howard Slater, Anthony Iles & Mattin This event is part of ERTZ festival organised by Audiolab

This book can be downloaded as a PDF file: http://www.arteleku.net/audiolab/noise_capitalism.pdf

If our senses are appropriated by capitalism and put to work in an ‘attention economy’, let’s, then, reappropriate our senses, our capacity to feel, our receptive powers; let’s start the war at the membrane!

Alienated language is noise, but noise contains possibilities that may, who knows, be more affective than discursive, more enigmatic than dogmatic.

Noise and improvisation are practices of risk, a ‘going fragile’. Yet these risks imply a social responsibility that could take us beyond ‘phoney freedom’ and into unities of differing.

Is this what we should explore in this experiment?

Set up to fail, fail to set up, fall-in behind the failsafe; or share and undo ourselves a little?

Everything is possible. But why, from cradle to stage, from classroom to cantina, do we often just do what is expected from us?

What is it that constrains us, pressures us?

What could our scope of action be in each specific moment?

How can we change our social relations at this or that precise moment?

How are our bodies moving through space?

How are our senses informing our thought?

How are our resonances and silences musical?

What does this mean to different people?

How does our class, gender and sexuality determine what we do, what we think and the way we play?

Can we play without instruments as ‘instruments of sensitive living’ without identities?

If the conditions in which we produce our music affects our playing then let’s try to feel through them, understand them as much as possible and, then, change these conditions.

Let’s not use ready-made methods and forms; let’s try to find our own.

Everybody is welcome and is free, to register, get texts and other information please email: arteleku@gipuzkoa.net

http://www.arteleku.net/audiolab/?p=2578

ERTZ #10

Irailaren 9tik 19ra / del 9 al 19 de septiembre

09.09.09 Tabakalera . Donostia-San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa)

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE

10.09.09 Tabakalera . Donostia-San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa)

FRANCISCO LOPEZ

12.09.09 Berako kultur etxea . Bera (Nafarroa)

TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA & IGNAZ SCHICK

ANDER LIPUS, MIREN GAZTAÑAGA & XABI STRUBELL

GREGG KOWALSKY

ALEX MENDIZABAL

TZESNE

13.09.09 Kaxerna gaztetxea . Bera (Nafarroa)

MATTIN, EMMA HEDDITCH, ANTHONY ILES & HOWARD SLATER

ALEX MENDIZABAL, JAKOBA ERROKONDO, JUAN JOSE ARANGUREN

ADI BERA

IÑIGO UGARTEBURU

MURSEGO

14.09.09 Bonberenea . Tolosa (Gipuzkoa)

IMPROVISANDO GAZTETXES

14-17.09.09 Arteleku . Donostia-San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa)

RUIDO Y CAPITALISMO workshop

MATTIN, EMMA HEDDITCH, ANTHONY ILES & HOWARD SLATER

19.09.09 Hazparne (Lapurdi)

AKAUZAZTE

TRIO MORAINE

OIERIA

ISLAIA

> ANTOLATZAILEAK:

ERTZ ekartea (Bera) - Berako Kultur Batzordea - Berako Udala

Arteleku (Donostia)- Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia

Tabakalera (Donostia) - Eihartzea kultur etxea (Hazparne)

Bonberenea (Tolosa)

Barely legible at the bus stop

I’d like to begin to make some cursory notes on the concept of species being. This’ll begin with a list of resources and will proceed, from there, to pile together a small heap of thoughts

Howard Slater’s review of Species Being and Other Stories by Frere Dupont | Internationalist perspectives debate (initiated by Rose) | Marcel Stoetzler’s ‘Adorno, Sex, Non-Identity’ | Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx | Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Special Being’ from Profanations and ‘Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’ from Infancy and History | Benedict Seymour’s ‘Blurred Boundaries: art, sport and activity’

New notes on Species Being

Dupont relates species being as something lifted from Marx’s early writing and the only point at which he does come close to defining it or his particular use of it is to say something like - ‘revolt, that is species being’.

Revolt is central to Dupont’s critique of existing left theory and also at the very centre of the constitution of the human – human essence as change, suffering, refusal, perversity and so on…

‘Revolt exists beyond use-value, and it is manifested beyond useful revolt. It expresses what is human but not as a social value, more as a the injured response… Most Revolutionary Theory thus misrepresents discontent and greivance and attempts to contain it within an ideological framework… but with, at best, only temporary success – revolt also revolts against revolution. Human essence overruns, and so thwarts, all understanding of it…. at the present juncture there is a tendency amongst the proletariat to express the rejection of capitalist relations through prolonged sickness, depression, obsessions, fanaticism, drunkenness, interpersonal violence… rather than say by marching through the streets in protest. For the left this recomposition of struggle into an intimate bodily reaction feels like a retreat – but they are wrong, in fact it is an advance, it is a move closer to the proper ordering of perspective and significance. Revolt is an intimate relatedness to the world, and therefore most real at the level of immediate feeling – it is really felt, it cannot be reduced to a mere political perspective…’ - Frere Dupont, Species Being and other Stories, Ardent Press, 2007

This is also relevant to Dupont’s category of the pre-human – which is much more fully rendered than species being, yet pretty confusing at first. What, I understand now, is that the ‘pre-human’ is everything that cannot be admitted into the current conception of the human and this is closely related to Dupont’s attack on political mileaus – instead wanting to form a politics beginning from everything which cannot be admitted into / cannot be admitted by these mileaus. Dupont would appear to be drawing on / playing on theories of the pre-individual in individuation – the pre-individual that is the mileau and pre-condition for the encounter between I and we and what each draws upon in their individuation.

Species being in the Grundrisse

Initially I’d thought that Species Being is not referred to in the Grundrisse, however the Dyer-Witheford (Species-beings: For Biocommunism
Nick Dyer-Witheford Paper Presented at the Historical Materialism Conference, “Many Marxisms”, London School of Oriental and African Studies, Nov. 7-9, 2008.) cites pages (Nicolaus trans) 243 ‘that their common species-being [Gattungwesen] is acknowledged by all. It does not happen elsewhere that elephants produce for tigers, or animals for other animals.’

p.496 ‘He appears originally as a species-being [Gattungwesen], clan being, herd animal – although in no way whatever as a {GREEK WORD – political being} in the political sense. Exchange itself is a chief means of this individuation [Vereinzelung]. It makes the herd-like existence superfluous and dissolves it… In bourgeois society, the worker e.g. stands there purely without objectivity, subjectively; but the thing which stands opposite him has now become the true community [Gemeinwesen], which he tries to make a meal of, and which makes a meal of him.’ [See Camatte??]

In addition to these two explicit mentions, the ‘all-sided activity’ much cited in Loren Goldner and Benedict Seymour’s recent piece on Sport and Art is explicitly related by the Grundrisse’s translator, Martin Nicolaus, to the idea of species being:

‘Finally, instead of ’species-being’, the Grundrisse speaks of two very broadly and generally defined types of human individuality. The first is the ‘private individual’, meaning the individual as private proprietor […] The place of this type is taken by the social individual, the individual of classless society, a personality type which is not less, but rather more, developed as an individual because of its direct social nature,. As opposed to the empty, impoverished, restricted individuality of capitalist society, the new human being displays an all-sided, full, rich development of needs and capacities, and is universal in character and development.’ Martin Nicolaus, foreword to Grundrisse, p.51.

Nicolaus cites the following pages as referring to this question of ‘rich all-sided individuality’ or species-being. (Grundrisse p. 161-162, 172-3, 325, 487-8, 540-542, 611, 652, 706, 708, 712, 749, 831-2)

and

The key quote is:

‘Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one.’ Marx Grundrisse p.325

More from the Grundrisse

The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product – exchange value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualized, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. Activity, regardless of its individual manifestation, and the product of activity, regardless of its particular make-up, are always exchange value, and exchange value is a generality, in which all individuality and peculiarity are negated and extinguished. This indeed is a condition very different from that in which the individual or the individual member of a family or clan (later, community) directly and naturally reproduces himself, or in which his productive activity and his share in production are bound to a specific form of labour and of product, which determine his relation to others in just that specific way.

The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals. The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual – their mutual interconnection here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things; personal capacity into objective wealth. The less social power the medium of exchange possesses (and at this stage it is still closely bound to the nature of the direct product of labour and the direct needs of the partners in exchange) the greater must be the power of the community which binds the individuals together, the patriarchal relation, the community of antiquity, feudalism and the guild system. (See my Notebook XII, 34 B.)[19] Each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons. Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third. Patriarchal as well as ancient conditions (feudal, also) thus disintegrate with the development of commerce, of luxury, of money, of exchange value, while modern society arises and grows in the same measure.

Grundrisse p156-7?

I found the Internationalist Perspective debate useful and Rose’s [http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_43_species-being.html] description of species-being is very good, if a bit optimistic and instrumental in terms of relatedness to class consciousness. Mac Intosh’s [http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_43_social-being.html] reply is good too and especially in insisting on an historically situated species-being, though he misses the point by assuming that SP refers to an essence tied up at best with primitive communism or at worst bourgeois essentialism/romanticism. Meanwhile, I think Sander’s contribution [http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_43_human-nature.html] manages to relate species-being to the financial crisis and builds a bridge (at least for me) between Dupont’s surrealism and some of the pressing empirical factors acting on the possibilities for its realisation

What is interesting is that neither Rose, nor MacIntosh (nor Dupont) relate the concept to this later appearance and transformation in the Grundrisse.

From the Internationalist Perspective debate on Species Being

by Rose

1) Species Being(1)

To speak of species being and social being means at the outset placing oneself on two different levels. When one speaks of species being, the reference is to a concept of human nature, and a concept is an abstraction. That abstraction only exists concretely when it assumes a form – a social form. If species being represents human nature, human needs, in a large and abstract sense, social being would be the way in which those general tendencies and those needs find a concrete form and expression; a form that is constantly changing and evolving in a dynamic interaction between the historical conditions and the praxis of the human collectivity that lives it. Social being, thus, reflects every aspect of the transformation that this praxis has on the objective conditions that make up the social environment, as well as the effect on the consciousness that the collectivity develops through its own practice. In that sense, it is mistaken to oppose species being to social being: one cannot exist without the other.

But can one speak of a "human nature" or is it created by the very activity of social being? In a sense, one must answer both questions in the affirmative. In effect it seems clear to me that the human species is marked by certain broad features, and that these are essentially the same in all epochs, in all cultures. At the same time, the forms in which these features express themselves depend on the social context within which they are placed. The life force and death force [pulsion], the drive to understand [pulsion épistémophilique] (the need to understand the world), the need to belong to a collectivity and to bond with other members of that collectivity, the need to give and to receive love, creative activity, the aesthetic quest, are all elements that mark our species from the cave paintings of Lascaux to its most formidable technological developments.What puts the human being perpetually in motion, what makes her never stop, what makes him never satisfied, is the quest for, and expression of, his species being through the mediation of her praxis. In that respect, one cannot speak of species being without inscribing it in history, that is to say, in the movement of continual transformation that man effects on his environment in the effort to satisfy his needs.

Here is how Marx defined species being in the 1844 Manuscripts: "To say that man is a species being, is, therefore, to say that man raises himself above his own subjective individuality, that he recognizes in himself the objective universal, and thereby transcends himself as a finite being. Put another way, he is individually the representative of mankind." "Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoretically makes the species – both his own and those of other things – his object, but also – and this is simply another way of saying the same thing – because he looks upon himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being." (2) "The animal is immediately one with its life activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species-being."(3) "It is therefore in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is therefore the objectification of the species-life of man: for man reproduces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created. In tearing away the object of his production from man, estranged labour therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him."(4) Marx defined a human nature, a human essence of man, which is situated beyond modes of production or features of the environment. One of the characteristics of alienation or estrangement, for him, is precisely the loss of this species being. The capitalist mode of production renders the product of production alien to the person who has produced it, thus making man alien to himself – and, therefore, to his human essence; that is to say, alien to the universal, collective, character of the human being, to his need for bonding, for creative activity, for knowledge, for self-consciousness and consciousness of his environment, as well as alien from his capacity to project himself into the future.

2) Social Being: The Individual Alienated By The Capitalist Socio-Economic Matrix

Social being is, therefore, the effort to manifest [révéler] species being, through a determinant social practice, and to satisfy its fundamental needs.

Throughout human history, there has been repression of human needs, exploitation, domination. These social relations have been situated in a context of real scarcity and the submission of human survival to the hazards of nature – even if these two elements have progressively evolved. The capitalist mode of production brought with it a number of fundamentally qualitative changes: for the first time in history, the human collectivity has developed the means to potentially put an end to scarcity, and has potentially succeeded in freeing its survival from the contingencies of nature. Capitalism has made it possible to free us from the reign of necessity. Alas, we know all too well the next chapter of this history. In order to survive, the capitalist system must preserve scarcity. There, resides a fundamental contradiction of the system: it contains within itself its own negation; its evolution and its very development imply its end. That contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the mode of production compels the capitalist system to produce not more freedom for individuals, but more destruction and a growing alienation. "The political economist tells us that everything is bought with labour and that capital is nothing but accumulated labor, but then goes on to say that the worker, far from being in a position to buy everything, must sell himself and his humanity."

In the same movement, there develops, on the subjective level, alienation. Alienation marks a break [coupure] between the activity of man and his species being: in his overall activity, the human being becomes alien to himself, alien to other humans, alien to what constitutes his human essence. He is reified and cut off from his links to nature. And the social relations in which she acts refract this reified image of a human-commodity. Her praxis is no longer the effort to reveal and give shape to her species being, but rather negates species being in an alienated relationship of man to himself. From being creative, human activity has become sterile, and the only perspective for individuals stuck in that social relationship is to … do nothing ("lazy" adolescents, the "whatever" generation). Alienation also entails a loss of the consciousness that the human being has of his species being and of his identity. But the "motor" that makes it possible for man not to lose himself in that alienated relationship to which his daily practice condemns him, is precisely his consciousness and an intuition of his unsatisfied species being. In decadent capitalism, man, overcome by his own creations, is no longer the master of them; she no longer controls the machine, but is controlled by it. The widening gap between the basic needs of one’s species being and their negation by the very practice of men, permits the emergence of a discontent that goes beyond simple economic demands, culminating in a questioning and in a quest for the satisfaction of real needs. The existence of species being, therefore, constitutes a key element in the process of the development of consciousness and of questioning by the proletariat, through the pressure that it exerts on even the most alienated individuals.

"The machine accommodates itself to man’s weakness, in order to turn weak men into a machine. …. [The capitalist] turns the worker into a being with neither needs nor senses and turns the worker’s activity into a pure abstraction from all activity."(6) "This estrangement partly manifests itself in the fact that the refinement of needs and of the means of fulfilling them gives rise to a bestial degeneration and a complete, crude and abstract simplicity of need …."(7) The activity of the worker, far from being a creative activity, where man realizes and affirms himself, is an activity that impoverishes him, "in which he mortifies his body and destroys his spirit." "The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions – eating, drinking and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions he is nothing more than an animal."(8)

Alien to his own nature, man is also alien to his real needs. And to complete this process, the dominant ideology unceasingly diverts the individual from his quest for his human essence and the satisfaction of his needs, and perverts those needs by providing them with false gratifications.

NOTES

1. "Species being" in English, L’etre generique in French, are the accepted translations of Marx’s concept of Gattunswesen in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844).
2. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts(1844) in Karl Marx, Early Writings (New york: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 327.
3. Ibid., p. 328.
4. Ibid., p. 329.
5. Ibid., p. 287.
6. Ibid., p. 360.
7. Ibid., p. 359.
8. Ibid., p. 327.
9. Ibid., p. pp.351-352.
10. In continental Europe today, those on the left who oppose the present forms of globalization, but who acknowledge that a certain globalization of the economy is progressive, style themselves not as anti-globalization, but as "alternative globalists," after alter mondalistes - a distinction not yet current in the Anglophone world.
11. Op. Cit., p. 365.
12. Ibid., p. 356.
13. Ibid., pp. 350-251.

From reply to Rose by Mac Intosh

But what of Marx’s own claim that man has a species being? This was clearly Marx’s view in 1844, a view consonant with his Young Hegelianism of the time. Indeed, that vision seems to me to be integrally linked to a Hegelian philosophical anthropology and philosophy of history, a vision that Marx would largely – though never completely – overcome. The first problem with this vision is that any historicity of species being is a once only phenomenon. It is generated with primitive communism (or with the birth of the human species) and then becomes both innate and unchanging; that is, it then loses its historicity. Human being, in the form of species being, once it emerges, then becomes fixed and a-historical. For me, such a vision constitutes a formidable obstacle to the historicity of human being and social relations that I believe is constitutive of Marxism as a theory. The Hegelian provenance of the young Marx’s conception of species being, Rose’s reliance on the Paris manuscripts of 1844, also leads to a teleological vision of history, in which the end or goal is fixed at the outset, and in which history becomes a narrative of a loss of the paradise of primitive communism, man’s alienation in class society, and the regaining of paradise (albeit on a "higher" level) through the communist revolution. Such a teleological vision, such a philosophy of history, even when Hegel is stood on his feet, bears an uncanny resemblance to Jewish-Christian eschatology, in which the historical process is pre-ordained, and in which, on the one hand, humankind’s freedom to produce itself (one of the bases of Marxism, for me) is implicitly denied, and on the other hand, the "fact" of contingency, the aleatory, in history is replaced by determinism (to me the mortal enemy of Marxism).

The concept of species being, in my opinion, blocks the way to the very historicity of human being that holds out the promise of the revolutionary transformation that can break the links to both the pre-given and existing forms of subjectivity in which humans have been historically trapped.

Sander’s response

‘[…] the more capitalism’s real domination is developed, or in other words, the more it is based on automated mass-production, the smaller the part that attacks on wages, direct pauperization, represents in the totality of ways in which the capitalist crisis affects the working class. The reason is that the more productivity grows, the more the relative cost of wages declines. Today, capitalism’s crisis affects the working class in many ways not as workers specifically but as human beings: Wars, the destruction of the environment, the destruction of social services, the destruction of community, the growth of insecurity and anxiety…Is it not necessary that the working class, in its struggle, develops an understanding of how all these aspects are linked with its fights for wages, employment and other workplace-related issues, in order to grasp the scope of its undertaking? Is it not the case that the revolution is possible because the working class embodies a human nature that is threatened by capitalism, and only it is in a position to defend it?’

From Jacques Camatte, ‘The Wandering of Humanity’

Activity - ‘capital pushes human beings to engage in the most diverse activities’

‘In its perfected state, capital is representation. Its rise to this state is due to its anthropomorphization, namely to its capitalization of human beings’ and in the opposite ‘capital forces human beings to be human’ Footnote [1]

Gemeinwesen – Watchword ‘at present it is capital that is recomposing man’

‘The finite, limited human being, the individual of bourgeois society, is disappearing. People are passionately calling for the liberated human being, a being who is at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen. But at present it is capital that is recomposing man, giving him form and matter; communal being comes in the form of collective worker, individuality in the form of consumer of capital. Since capital is indefinite it allows the human being to have access to a state beyond the finite in an infinite becoming of appropriation which is never realized, renewing at every instant the illusion of total blossoming.’

‘Structurally and biologically man is a supersession because he is an overpowerful being. In other words, human beings are explorers of the possible and are not content with the immediately realizable, especially if it is imposed on them. They lose this passion, this thirst for creation — for
what is the search for the possible if not invention ? — when they are debased, estranged, cut off from their Gemeinwesen and therefore mutilated, reduced to simple individuals. It is only with the real domination of the capitalist mode of production that the human being is completely evacuated.’

Gstaad

The sea pitches endlessly

The role mirrors her pupils

From memory

So mirthful

Swaying of gravity

Expresses a resonance

Of constant desires

I have excuses

And lack strength and courage

influence is a useless thing

She is the most beautiful of the women

On my mind

My Pencil Buckles

My pencil buckles with sadness

big eyes heavy with melancholy

look at sinister names

I think of my murder

between conqueror and conquered

the choice is too easy

strange mixture of suffering

Around me everything sways

with the most grotesque ineptitude

of feet and fists bound painfully

on my bed to the colors of opals

I’ve forgotten nothing of your hands

revolver holster of high society’s

stand to attention at full tide

What are you doing what do you hear

for several weeks 

I have known the bracelet 

of happiness

(Published as Mon crayon se voile, 1957)

Peace

I loved you with a labored smile

The world although surprised

Has hated the distance for five years

To pass over them for at least a moment

Nothing stops them

Why listen to me

I want I want on its face

While squeezing thes five years

I even want to ask

A wretch to listen to me

At the monastery in a sick smile

Facing the cushions where I had my heart

I will never forget my mental hospital

With this intention a royal leg

Of champagne puns

In a dreamy voice

Has regarded the comedy with distrust

I silently mad

With my new wet-fly life

I remember solid gold

Of the jealousy tribunal

By Anthony Iles

A recent festival in Copenhagen dedicated to the cultural politics of
the city escalated into a Dionysian street party-cum-riot. With the
stakes raised by this sudden, if fleeting, show of force, conceptual
discussions around urban activism took on new perspectives — report by
Anthony Iles
*

http://www.metamute.org/en/content/undoing_the_city_and_ourselves

In April 2007 Stewart Home wrote a report from Copenhagen for Mute on a self-organised conference about the legacy of the situationist movement in Scandinavia.i The conference coincided with large scale rioting sparked by the eviction and destruction of the Ungdomshuset (The Youth House) social centre. During the subsequent two years, activists in Copenhagen have continued to build upon the energies catalysed by the defence of a popular social space. Finally, after numerous actions and demos, activists were granted a new social centre by the city council on 11 June 2008.

Image: A street party in the central shopping district of Copenhagen that became a riot, Friday 8 May, 2009

These energies also entail marked attempts by Copenhagen’s activist scene to educate itself and draw in discourses from elsewhere. To this end, I had participated in a two-day workshop on political readings of the financial crisis, Finanaskrise Socialkrise this February. At the time, the Danish press and political elite were confidently issuing statements that the crisis was something happening elsewhere, while at the same time Danish firms were widely using the crisis as an excuse to carry out wage cuts and workforce rationalisation. The crisis is unfolding differently across the specific temporal frameworks of national boundaries – Denmark’s housing bubble peaked in 2006 and its economy went into recession in early 2008 following the collapse of the Roskilde bank.ⁱⁱ It remains to be seen whether the crisis will be used to extend neoliberal reform (ongoing since the 1990s) of Denmark’s almost unique combination of low unemployment, high-level of unionised labour (80 percent) and comparatively strong welfare state.

Such neoliberal reforms extend, of course, to the lock-down of Copenhagen’s ‘slack space’ essential for the self-organisation and survival of people existing at the economic and cultural margins. Undoing the City was a festival dedicated to tracking and strategising the struggles to defend such spaces. Its accompanying conference covered gentrification, squatting, urban gardens, mapping, policing the police, anti-racist organising, actions against detention centres, housing speculation, water and land rights. The festival took the form of a two day seminar accompanied by film screenings, walking tours, distributed actions and workshops across the city over four days. In the end the festival drew a huge amount of press and created a national scandal after a street party in the city centre culminated in riots and property destruction. This event forced a mainstream debate in Denmark around the term ‘gentrification’ for the first time. The action has also been interpreted (as it probably should be) by right wingers in the Parliament and mediasphere as a deliberate provocation by the activists around the Youth House, bringing their struggles and culture to the centre of the city. The Friday night riot was one of several reasons to see this young movement as deliberately breaking the Danish State’s monopoly on violence by mounting asymmetrical attacks against the its very power to define violence.

Whilst intended to be one of the smaller and more playful events in the busy Danish activist calendar, Undoing the City has achieved a significance through the press attention it received and what seemed like a meaningful balance of actions, international participation and theoretical debates. Each of these delved into the specific history of a neighbourhood (Nørrebro) and radicalised understandings of the city based on the potential for change inherent in existing conditions.

That property destruction radicalised what was on the surface a ‘fluffy’ event tailored to fit the artivist niche and fashioned to annex small streams of arts funding seems to be a dynamic peculiar to Copenhagen at the moment. What would seem absolutely impossible and perhaps outmoded elsewhere – Reclaim the Streets-style tactics of multiform antagonistic occupation of public space – seems to have legs in Copenhagen. I attribute this, at least partly, to the fact that actions take place within a context of dialogue, self-critique and reflection missing from the use of similar tactics elsewhere. Throughout the four days there was a welcome questioning of the usual affirmations of activist gatherings I have encountered elsewhere.

Jaya Klara Brekke’s talk on the ‘post-capitalist city’ reflected on different engagements with activism around migrant struggles and squatting. It culminated in the strong proposition that work on urbanism be imaginative and affirmative in its construction of post-enlightenment and post-capitalist forms of living in the city. The presentation by the Hamburg based group Es Regnet Kaviar (It’s Raining Caviar), though full of humour, was less inspiring. The group’s anti-gentrification actions amounted to little more than symbolic subversion and the production of a spectacle of antagonism around spatial privatisation in the city. The group’s actions were often defensive, if playful, and fell short of a meaningful theorisation of what they actually wanted from their city other than to be left alone to enjoy it.

Image: One of Reffen’s constructors at work

Rikke Luther’s presentation on water rights and the transformation of cultures of water use and ownership in and around Copenhagen Harbour drew upon extensive research into the harbour’s history and land reclamation. She also drew on her own experience of living on a self-built, floating platform in the harbour. The history of the production and development of this new land has been determined by changing patterns of sovereignty (from the absolute right of the king, to parliamentary sovereignty, to its privatisation), the shifting needs of military defence and expansion, and the demand for labour. Initially dredgers were powered by convicts and later horses. Now water ownership in Copenhagen Harbour is distributed across three agencies – the military, a private-public consortia which manages Malmo-Copenhagen Harbour and Copenhagen’s municipality. This multi-agency management of the waterway has allowed rampant privatisation of the land around the harbour, giving rise to a swathe of flats and offices, financed by global consortia, that effectively block pedestrian access to the waterfront.

Joen P. Vedel presented ‘Reffen’, a utopian building project on reclaimed/polluted land in the midst of Copenhagen’s harbour. This took the form of a temporary occupation of a public street and surrounding land. The occupiers, or ‘constructors’ as they became known in the press built structures with found and donated materials over a period of three months. These physically and experientially risky buildings briefly found their place between the city’s fortifications, the Queen’s palace, military-owned harbours, PoMo yuppie stables, a container port, an opera house sponsored by the shipping giant Maersk and reclaimed polluted land. Vedel saw this experiment as very much in the original spirit of Christiania. This comparison was made more pertinent because Christiania, now largely overwhelmed by tourists drinking marijuana-flavoured beer, has just lost a major case against the city and is under the impending threat of eviction. The ongoing demise of this once thriving experiment in alternative living was a timely reminder of the need for free space and the human capability to make first one’s own environment and, perhaps secondly, if at all, laws to govern it by. Reffen could be dismissed as a bunch of hippies playing out their survival fantasies, but in the context of Copenhagen’s heritage culture and in the slipstream of the real estate boom and crash, this messy settlement posed the basic question again of who can build and how, on playful and inventive terms.

Artist Lasse Lau’s talk posited male homosexual cruising as spatial contestation. Initially opening a discussion on gay militancy by giving a history of queer and trans activism in New York, Lau then showed video footage of Gay Pride events in different cities that now include floats advertising major corporations, in particular banks and investment funds. This juxtaposition was not developed, but it seemed to be intended as some sort of ominous address to Copenhagen’s militant queer scene and a corrective to its present exuberance. Lau’s own artistic practice, however, did not live up to the militant culture he was surveying. His interventions into heavily policed and controlled cruising spaces were gestural and ineffectual rather than pragmatic and constructive. They failed to negotiate the subversion of public space constituted by acts of ‘improper’ sexual intimacy, and appeared completely compromised by their need to publicise clandestine sexual practices. Yet, if anything was recovered in Lau’s presentation that could be applied to the field of activity engaged by Undoing it was, for me at least, the residue of surreal animality present in a certain anecdote he told about 19^th Century Paris. According to Lau, men seeking temporary partners would meet in the Tuileries before a statue of a wild boar. If anything, this anecdote and the events of the four days suggest to me that the investment of the city with myth, the savage topography drawn daily across ordered and policed space, should be intensified rather than rationalised.

One practical contribution to this project was the ‘surveillance of the Police’ which took place over 24 hours from Thursday morning to Friday night. Imitating the Black Panther tactic of ‘policing the police’, albeit unarmed, groups of observers walked the district of Nørrebro monitoring police activities and stop and search operations. Against a background of intensifying violence in this district – where the sight of gun battles between Hells Angels gangs and local migrant youth is not uncommon – police stop and search operations targeting migrants are rising. The street violence stems largely from a struggle over control of the soft drugs market which has moved in recent years from Christiannia to Nørrebro. The sharpening struggle over this economy seems to relate directly to the migrants’ increasing marginalisation in the job market and exclusion from social provision. The mainstream media reported this surveillance action in a surprisingly positive light, showing ‘concerned citizens’ following police activity in their area, ensuring that the law was carried out correctly and without intimidation. This positive media coverage would later prove an anomaly in light of Friday night’s events, further complexifying ‘public outcry’ over the festival.

On Sunday, Saul Albert and Jakob Jakobsen staged a workshop, Nørrbro Open City, during which the courtyard parks of Nørrebro were mapped using a free editable map of the world called Openstreetmap. The courtyards have an interesting history bound up with local housing activism, and were renewed and turned green during a period of urban renewal lead by housing and community activists. Originally they remained open as thoroughfares and play spaces accessible to all. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s however, and in the context of rising property values, these have become enclosed, private spaces enhancing the property values of the flats which surround them.

During the workshop Jakobsen and Albert used Openstreetmap to locate and mark the courtyards and pose the question of access. There is no equivalent to the UK’s ‘public right of way’, or legally enshrined common ownership under Danish law, making access to such spaces a question of social contestation. Making them accessible to all would significantly improve the quality of life for the many rather than just a select few. There is very little other green space in this area, so opening up the courtyards makes it possible to navigate the area without crossing roads, encountering traffic or police. Shortly after the project was announced many residents approached the organisers with keys and, by the end of the afternoon, nearly all the courtyards in Nørrebro were mapped and their accessibility (open, gated, key available etc.) recorded. The Nørrebro Open City project is continuing and there will soon be a map and a set of keys to the courtyards in the Folkets Hus. A link to the map here shows the green courtyards plotted by those attending the workshop.

The problem of access and marginality in the city was addressed in the project Trampoline House which was a temporary centre for discussion, social activities and self-education for migrants. This initially took the form of a series of workshops in the Danish asylum centres Kongelunden and Sandholm this January and February. The Trampoline House and Asylum Dialog Tank are currently attempting to establish a permanent space in which to continue the activities begun earlier in the year. But by Sunday the exaggerated media and police presence at the festival meant that the planned speakers’ corner was called off. Many of the users of the Trampoline House, however, attended the discussions at the Folkets Hus over the two days, and made some of the more interesting contributions to the ongoing exchange over anti-racist organising and techniques of exclusion in the neoliberal city.

Berlin based group Kanak Attack’s rigorously theorised presentation on the problems of anti-racist/anti-fascist organising, whilst rejecting rights and notions of identity, was central to this exchange. Kanak Attack understand ‘integration’ as the state’s counter-claim to ‘unreasonable’ basic demands. Under the rubric of multiculturalism the state’s injunction to migrants is to ‘assimilate but remain different’. Against this, Kanak Attack theorise political goals in terms of the good life and struggles over access to it, taking a position of ‘no integration’ and promoting the notion of ‘escape routes’ as a replacement for the fetishisation of ‘roots’. This amounts to a refusal of the division of labour and a refusal of the paternalism that lingers in much anti-racist organising. Migration is thus understood as the escape from unbearable conditions and the fixity of identity. This critique of paternalism had a powerful resonance with the question of organisation being thought through by many activists around the Folkets Hus, and spilled out of the seminars and into conversations running across the whole four days.

Action Diritti’s presentation covered similar issues to Kanak Attack’s, albeit with a less theoretical but more concrete relation to similar issues. The group has a strong tradition of organising with migrants in Rome. This has involved establishing squats to provide housing for new migrants as well as setting up shop-front advice centres providing legal advice and a point of contact. In Rome, intense speculation, a lack of coordinated housing policy, high rent and instability all contribute to what the group terms Caravita – life which is ever more expensive. Action Diritti’s response is to wage campaigns of auto-reduction, self-organisation and ‘real’ political representation. Their somewhat schematic plan for ‘new social rights, new welfare and new citizenship’ was of course troubled by Kanak Attack’s prior questioning of these terms.

As is fairly common, there was a palpable disconnect between those from Northern Europe and Action Diritti’s enthusiasm for welfare and rights. In many ways this, and the strength of Italian and Spanish movements around precarity, can be attributed to the relative absence of social housing, healthcare or unemployment benefits in each country. This struggle passes by those of us who have had the dubious privilege of a strong welfare state, and see the need for social struggles to move beyond the compromise it compacts. This raises the question of how to bridge these two discussions and find ways to deal with the local and national characteristics of capitalism. The question is particularly relevant in Denmark, and several of those who participated in the discussion following Kanak Attack’s presentation made the point that existing struggles in Denmark need to go beyond asking the State for equal rights for migrants. Something that, in any case, seems highly unlikely. but also because, as one Kurdish/Iraqi activist saw it, the important thing is to ‘question the state’s very authority to dispense rights’.

It was rewarding to see this discussion of ‘rights’ significantly testing and extending the discourse invoked by the festival’s promotional literature which had deployed the phrase ‘Right to the City’ popularised by Harvey and derived from the work of Robert Park.

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

– Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior, Chicago 1967, p.3.

Taking collective power to reshape the ‘process of urbanisation’ sounds very good, but both Park and Harvey are not always explicit about whose class interests the city is being shaped in. Like many theorists of neoliberal urbanism, Harvey runs the risk of putting his tools of critical analysis in the hands of those uncritically shaping cities through gentrification. A friend once told me how he had overheard a group of young people plotting about their neighbourhood in a pub in Limehouse. Initially excited that this might be some group addressing local problems in the area he quickly recoiled in horror when he realised they were home owners plotting to raise their house prices by engineering the eviction of unruly neighbouring council tenants. There are many actors ‘reshap[ing] the processes of urbanization’ of cities, but by what criteria are we to judge, ethically or otherwise, the truth of their ‘right’ to do so? Since rights are almost always dispensed in an exclusive manner, a privilege of the stakeholder society, what becomes of those excluded from full admission into the citizenry so much in evidence amongst the population of districts like Nørrebro?

I would question whether it is possible to square the truth of this aspiration ‘to change ourselves by changing the city’ with the rejection of a discourse which requests ‘rights’. Democracy in its neoliberal phase is full of so many forms of false dueness; from the ready made forms of identification used to sell yuppies homes, to the forms of governance exercised on populations around regeneration projects, consultations, local democracy etc. By recognising ourselves as the subjects addressed we confirm the power that addresses us and, in the neoliberal city in which no-one belongs, belonging or its simulacrum is endlessly promoted and solicited. When, after a week of media hysteria, three communiques by the organisers of Friday night’s party appeared signed Os der ikke findes (We who do not exist), what was held up as a response was not only a mask of secrecy, the rejection of a stable identity, but also a refusal to be called to account or to reveal that which the public sphere expects and demands.

Image: After the street party, Saturday 8 May, 2009

The programme for Undoing the City had promised ‘street dancing’ and that they would ‘set up an overthrowing ass-shaking to the smell of canny untidiness in the market place. Cheap bars – mad dj’s – open street stylee! Somewhere in the inner city…check your cell phone’. The street party took over a narrow street off Copenhagen’s main shopping thoroughfare blocking it with a van parked sideways and carrying the sound system. Ladders were raised to allow graffiti artists access to two stories of chain storefront as ‘canvas’, sofas, fires and bars were placed on the street. After a few hours of diplomatic negotiation with police the sound system was switched off at 4am (apparently this had more to do with the driver needing to get home to start his day job later that morning). As the sound system wound down the back streets dancers began to pull up their hoods and the sound of imploding shop windows replaced the beats, while choreographed looting was exchanged for the shapes previously being thrown on the dance floor. Practically everybody seemed to know what they were doing except the Danish police and myself, each of us equally unsure whether to get involved and in what capacity. Amidst tumbling glass, bricks and bicycles soaring through the air, the mood felt safe and festive, several people took a break from fighting the police to check I was ok, and make sure I got out of the action and to the nearest good pub safely. The ‘perpetrators’ of the events of Friday night we’re most definitely not a minority of ‘troublemakers’. The organisers stress that they remain invisible in the public life of Denmark and shunned by it and this is clearly a common feeling across whole sections of Copenhagen’s youth. They wish to remain outside of the public gaze, but refuse to be prevented from actively reshaping the material and symbolic fabric of their city. Moreover, what they claim, with a cheeky grasp of political rhetoric that does not preclude seriousness, is a very real politics at odds with the democracy of the market:

Politics is opposition. Politics is to refuse to obey. Dissensus is politics. Consensus is anti-politics. This is why parliamentarism is not politics – but an illegal street party is!

– We do not exist, ‘An explosive force of freedom’ⁱⁱⁱ

Thus the politics of dissensus much discussed at the two day seminars found its clearest expression in the joyous cacophany of a noisy party – it was the catalysing event which forced everyone to shift and reassess their positions. It embodied the struggle over the state’s prerogative to dispense violence and to a small degree briefly broke it. As Alberto Toscano, explaining Badiou’s conception of violence, concurs:

Without the ‘violent’ inscription into the situation of a subjective tendency or force of transformation, which is itself the product of internal divisions and separations, we are left only with the dumb brutality of a structural violence.^iv

This indicates the work that must be done. But, it must also be made clear, random manifestations of constitutive ‘violence’ will not be sufficient to reverse the malign movement which squeezes profits and life out of our cities. Those for whom such ‘radical expressivity’ is merely the icing on the cake of spectacular commodity society will want to shuffle off to the nearest peaceful study lined with Adorno’s books. Those who approve, but contest that street parties, property destruction and proletarian shopping are fun for the few but not for all may be heartened to hear the organisers caveat:

…this vandalism is also an authoritarian expression that is undemocratic and excludes. It is often male dominated. Women and gays also smash windows. But not all can participate in the destruction. Many are excluded from vandalising, but destruction should be for everyone, not only white heterosexual Danish men!

Nonetheless, the party and aftermath was a temporary breach, with the damaged shops claiming record sales the following day. In fact a sofa dragged outside during the party and graffitied was sold, though not, despite the rumour circulating, for more than its original price tag. It is clear that some longer term strategic thinking is required for those wishing to chase the spectre of gentrification from their cities.

Therefore, just as things are a little more complicated than simply declaring opposition to capital – likewise with gentrification we cannot simply extract ourselves from this relationship. Attacking gentrification might also involve, in a certain sense, attacking ourselves as constituted by present conditions.

This statement, given as part of my own presentation, was generated by thinking through the consequences of the crash on the built environment in London, yet it became pertinent in Copenhagen. On the final day of the festival I was interviewed by a feminist collective who were filming the festival for the website Modkraft [modkraft.dk/]. At one point my interviewer asked:

But look what happened, we did an anti-gentrification action, we smashed shops in the centre of town, but this has been recuperated immediately [attracting tourists and shoppers to the scene of the crime]. We gained a new youth house, but this is in a poor area and contributes to the gentrification of the area. How can we really attack gentrification?’

Gentrification is a process born out of the present organisation of capital. In capitalism violence is structural, the destruction and displacement enacted by gentrification is part of a social relation – part and parcel of the contemporary relation between capital and labour. That struggles around gentrification appear to focus on the reproductive sphere and capitalists’ efforts to extract profits from workers’ consumption does not mean these struggles are disconnected from capital’s imperative to reproduce us as ready for work. There is a tendency towards a purely cultural response to gentrification as if gentrification is only a culture rather than a network of relations that derive from vested interests in property, ownership, law-making and the reorganisation of work. Underpinning those relations is a mode of production.

After a decade of project-oriented activism characterised by media stunts and voluntarism, it is clear that longer term approaches are required. There has been little examination on the left of the actual preconditions for involvement in struggles. To understand how struggle against the iniquities of the existing social and economic system that governs our lives starts from real lives, from peoples’ lived circumstances and extends outwards from them is to walk away from activism as practised by specialists. With the current resurgence of struggles in the workplace, factory occupations and strikes across the world, there is the opportunity to link struggles at the point of production to contestation at the point of reproduction – struggles over housing, food, environment, welfare and so on. To make room for these connections might mean giving up ‘activism’ and giving up ‘recuperation’. Giving up on belonging, as theorised by both Kanak Attack and Os der ikke findes, could mean becoming more self-aware about the group identifications that are in circulation and which sediment around class, religion and culture. Recuperation might mean change – actual change that could destabilise the radical identity of an oppositional group. After all, any movement working to make radical change must not fear its ends unintended or otherwise.

Anthony Iles <anthony AT metamute.org> is a contributing editor to Mute

Info

Undoing the City took place at the Folkets Hus and at many other locations across the city of Copenhagen, 7-10 May 2009

Footnotes

the latest discoveries of engineering and science can provide an environment for pleasure and discovery, a place to look at the stars, to eat, stroll, meet and play.

Like many radicals of his time, Price was influenced by the expectation of the ‘new windfall of leisure time’ provided to workers by the introduction of mechanisation and automation. He applied himself to the problem of the ‘brain drain’ that Britain faced in the Post-War years – skilled and educated workers were leaving the UK for employment in Europe and America.  While government planners were concerning themselves with reproducing workers with more free time as ‘workers’ by disciplining them, introducing credit and loan schemes, Price was devising new forms of training and education disguised as ‘leisure’.

The difference in scale between the Fun Palace plans and those of the Olympic Park may seem to make it irrelevant to compare the two, but there are significant overlaps. Price’s plans for the Fun Palace in the Lea Valley Regional Park remained unrealised, yet like many of his projects it became hugely influential. His approach to planning for contingency and spontaneity is shared by Peter Cook (Archigram) currently a consultant for the Olympic stadium. Their architectural principles of flexibility, interdeterminacy, mobility, openness have become the cornerstone of recent building techniques attuned to the political economy of our times.

Price followed through his explicit challenge to existing State-sponsored culture by finding corporate sponsorship to support the Fun Palace project. His (unbuilt) architecture anticipates the turn from an industrial to a service economy. The celebration of this ‘creative economy’ is central to the framing of the London 2012 Games. Price fully intended to nest his vision of the future in the shell of (what was quickly becoming) the industrial past. The ODA designers’ approach has been to erase any industrial heritage along with much of the amateur sports and activities that, until recently, energised the area.

Upon his appointment as head of the Cultural Olympiad, Keith Khan said ‘he was keen to embrace the “iPod generation” with the use of digital technology and concepts used by websites such as MySpace and YouTube.’ The buzz-words of participation and user-generated content are, as with the Millenium Dome, deployed to give a democratic feel to what is ultimately a top-down process of creative branding devoid of any real content or culture. Whilst Price was to employ cybernetics and early computing to enable users to move and programme elements of the building and the activities within it, the ‘flash mobs’ who are expected to populate the Olympic park are conversel shaped by its designers interests and will at best be able to upload their pictures and videos from mobile phones to the big screens which will fill the park and public spaces around it.

Since the lead-up to the Olympic bid the conceptualisation of the building around the games has focussed on the regenerative effects of the games upon East London. The emphasis is upon what will happen after the three weeks of athletics. The plans and extensive composite drawings made by the Olympic Delivery Authority for the Olympic Park in legacy mode do not refer to the concrete outcome but remain only ‘indicative’ of what might happen. However, neither the Park nor the buildings in it respond to its users’ desires, instead, this in-built contingency is predicated on shifting economic conditions, government agendas and the vapidity of its designers’ aims.

In projections for the Olympic Park one views an official playground; managed nature, organised and safe exercise, communication technologies, mobile phones, big screens and water all set against the backdrop of the Docklands and the City – centres of global financial flows. These images are characterised by a multiculturalism peculiar to the visual creations of urban planners – the dream image of difference without conflict, an endless playscape without work or workers. The cleaners and security guards upon whom these spaces depend are placed firmly outside the picture. Whereas Price’s model disposes of labour through automation, the ODA’s vision hides labour in dream-like reflections, screens, glass, water, smoke and mirrors.

As the ongoing financial crisis unravels, there are signs that the liquidity fuelling the building boom in and around the Olympic site is drying up. On Monday 30th June 2008 ODA chief executive David Higgins explained to the Public Accounts Committee that the number of apartments to be built had already been reduced from 4,200 to around 3,300 because of trouble financing the project. Since then that figure has further reduced to 3,000. The speed with which these expectations are being revised suggests that there is plenty of scope for future problems. An indication of the degree of these problems is evident in last November’s announcement of the cancellation of a bespoke Olympics Media Centre – the creative solution is to house the world’s media in retail units for the duration of the games.

If the Fun Palace can be considered a pre-vision of the emerging post-industrial society, we can wager the London Olympics won’t be that society’s crowning success. Rather, these designs represent the return, as farce, of Price’s visionary dream – a plasticated world populated by unreal avatars repeating gestures rehearsed on TV. The very creation of this landscape will be underpinned by debt, exploitation and public bankruptcy. As the scale of the promises, hype and actual building begin to ebb there is the opportunity to reassess the post-Blair UK built landscape.What if we could think like Price and take a visionary stance towards the future? Is it possible to imagine what might be built out of the ruins of the financialised city after the new economy?