Abstract
Andy Merrifield was a colleague of mine at King’s College London in the late 1990s. We worked together for a couple of years and shared a great field trip to Alicante in Spain before he embarked on his journey into the US academy, France and beyond. I enjoyed my time with Andy; we both felt some form of class solidarity in an overwhelmingly class-ridden institution. I used to think of him as a younger version of Mike Davis (denim-clad, ex-working class turned academic). I was constantly reminded of how good a geographer Andy was when a senior colleague would put Andy’s most recent publications, one by one as they came out, in my pigeon hole to both put me in my place and tell me how good my male colleague was. I didn’t need to be told – Andy Merrifield is not only a great geographer he also has the unusual ability to link high theory and philosophy, from both academic texts and novels, to the real world in a way other authors never manage. He is a public intellectual in his own right. I have not seen or spoken to Andy for some time, probably because I often avoid intellectual circles and prefer performing more grounded urban work, so I’d like to take this opportunity to write a letter to him in response to his recent book The Politics of Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization.
Dear Andy,
Welcome back to the UK, to academia, to geography, we must try and meet up again soon. I have followed your career/life while you have been away, I even read your novel The Wisdom of Donkeys (2008) which gave me the idea of living in rural Maine, New England for the past 6 months. Like you I came back, and like you I believe that stepping out of metropolitan urban life into rural life and back again does allow for useful reflection. Thank you for sharing your autobiography at the beginning of the book, it is important for readers to know where authors are coming from, their ‘baggage’. In your case, your ‘therapy’ outside of the academy is instructive even if I think you post-rationalise and romanticise some of the events. The Politics of Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization is an exciting insight into how your mind has shifted somewhat since I last saw you. If not as radical as Harvey’s shift into Marxism, yours is a shift nonetheless, from a belief (for the most part) in Lefebvre’s call for the ‘Right to the City’ to a belief that that banner is no longer any good. The argument you are making is that the city is too narrow a concept in the context of planetary urbanization and that we need to push out into a post-national, ‘mongrelized’, world. You argue that everything is so integrated now that the world and the city no longer make definitional sense and have collapsed into each other. The world is now urban and the urban now the world. Where the city ends and the world begins, nobody knows. You have a point even if it is not a new one. I too have been mulling over ‘the Right to the City’, in London, for two reasons: first, I was being urged to join London’s ‘Right to the City’, and second, I have been fighting for council tenants’ ‘right to the city’ in the face of state-led gentrification as the recipient of the 2012 Antipode Activist-Scholar Award. But I am concerned, like London’s council tenants are, that the ‘Right to the City’ movement is dominated by middle class people and intellectuals who in reality do not understand what is happening on the ground and as such are of limited help in the face of, for example, the social cleansing of council estates in inner London. But I have not made my mind up yet. I guess I still hold out some hope for the movement and more importantly I still think that cities matter. The fact you recognise the difference between the rural and the urban in terms of density and speed does seem at odds with your new ideas about the outdatedness of the city as a concept, that if it is urban everywhere, maybe it’s not urban anywhere?
Your book does a wonderful job of stitching together in a web of signification numerous texts, from Karl Marx’s Grundrisse to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake to Manual Castells’s The Urban Question. You paint your intellectualism, dripping it like Jackson Pollack (whom you refer to) onto the pages of the book. For others this would look like intellectual posturing, but not for you, you seem to ‘feel’ these texts personally and this emotional resonance drips down onto the pages of the book, making for a lucid, stimulating and even in places uplifting read. I think this is because you are a geographer who both understands and moreover wants to understand ‘suffering’, as Marx said: ‘to be passionate it is first necessary to suffer, to feel pain’ (1974: 390). One thing though that surprises me, but then also in a way doesn’t, is your move away from the working class as a revolutionary entity. When I last saw you, you wore your working class identity as a badge of honour – your donkey jacket and Liverpudlian accent gelled with my Joy Division 1980s Mancunian noir sensibilities, but unlike me you were a ‘working class hero’ who drank French wine and ate French food, middle class tastes I did not, and still do not, have. I was confused by your working class badge and your middle class lifestyle (I was young and naïve!), yet liked the fact you did not take academia or academic life seriously. I guess I am now even more confused by both your own class position in the book but also by your lack of theorization of class and class change in the book. Andy, you seem to have gone full circle, not from hippie to yuppie like in David Ley’s (1996) wonderful thesis of political growing up, but rather from Labour to New Labour, Marxist to Post-Marxist? I’d like to hear much more about what you think about your own class identity now, of social class globally, the paradoxes and possibilities of class politics? Tell us more about class consciousness in the new planetary webbing. The book is a working through of what Lefebvre meant by ‘revolutionary citizenship’ but I’d like more detail on this.
The main theme of your book is the shift from the ‘right to the city’ to the ‘politics of encounter’, from what you term the ‘acoustic’ 1968 to the ‘electric’ Occupy movement. You continue to draw on Lefebvre (but I must say I would have liked a much deeper contextualization of his work in the context of French urbanization/urbanism – where the central city was very strong, the French academic system, politics, etc.) to some degree but you stake out contours beyond Lefebvre: ‘a more free floating, dynamic, and relational militancy … “horizontal” in its reach and organization, yet one more apt for our age of diffusive metropolitanization, one more attuned to a political landscape in which new social media have become subversive weaponry’ (p. xviii). I like your idea of a ‘super-string theory of place’ (p. 38). You use wonderfully geographical language – zones, contours, maps, and your method is Lefebvre’s ‘transduction’, not empirical fact gathering or induction, rather a theoretical hypothesis that is supposedly more than deduction, that goes to and fro between what is and what might be. You want to see a move from an epistemology of cities towards an ontology of ‘urban grappling’ with an affective being in a world that is increasingly urbanized. You have gone all new cultural geography on us! But I like this because I think it encapsulates well where we are at during this point in time and we do need to move in a more ontological direction to develop a new politics. I think we have moved into a new ‘planetary’ phase over the last decade and that this term does indeed suggest something more alive, vivid and growing than the moribund ’global’ and ‘globalization’; my fear though is that things are now changing so fast, that the world is speeding up so fast, that it is hard to catch politics within this vortex. How do we locate politics now? I believe that cities remain a privileged terrain for political struggle, they were the physical location of the events in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Tahir Square in Cairo, and Zuccoti Park in Manhattan. But whether they should be privileged sites for a progressive politics is a different question.
The least persuasive aspect of your book, for me, is when you tell us that everything will emerge as a cognitive map in our heads, where perception (structure of feeling) and horizon (way of seeing) will ‘encounter’ each other and give rise to political awareness and activity. This is a rather wish-washy move away from the working class as politically performative, it is an affinity politics that is nothing new in, for example, the sociology of class and politics, and you seem to try too hard to theorise this using classic philosophical texts. This doesn’t work and those texts hold your idea back. Can you conceptualise this cognitive map more geographically and sociologically?
This book shares with us the necessity of rethinking urban theory, of conceiving of the urban as a theoretical object that is no-longer a physical object, of reclaiming a non-object as a political object (p. xv), in light of global urbanism. For you Andy it is the working through and beyond of Lefebvre’s work and this is an important project in light of the number of erstwhile critical geographers stepping, rather uncritically, onto the ‘Right to the City’ bandwagon. A couple of years ago I was invited to the University of Nanterre (where Lefebvre worked from 1965) and was taken aback by the radical atmosphere in comparison to the neoliberal world of British university campuses. But the radicalism seemed old fashioned, almost retro, in the new global world. We desperately need to find a new politics for a new time, and fast. Andy your book gets us thinking.
Thanks, Loretta.