Is London fucking the world?
Jul. 4th, 2007 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusNightwaves on Monday began with an interesting talk with Professor Doreen Massey about her new book, World City, which casts a critical eye on the place that London has become.
According to Massey, who's basically a "geographer of inequality" with the Open University -- someone who's applying a topographical model to inequalities usually thought of as purely financial -- London is one of the three big "world cities" which co-ordinate the neo-global economy. The other two are New York and Tokyo. These are the key places from which global neo-liberalism is organized. But in a sense they're not so much places in themselves as machines for transforming -- and displacing -- other places.
Decisions taken in London's skyscrapers -- those centres of finance, law, accounting, and global business service industries -- have major effects all over the world. Decisions of investment and dis-investment have real repercussions in the dislocations of lives, the making and breaking of whole sectors of economies around the world.
One of the things you can't do in London, says Massey, is imagine yourself as the victim of global forces. When you're talking about the relationship between the local and global, it's tempting to think of the local as the victim of the global. The global arrives, a deux ex machina, and wreaks havoc on the local place. That's the victim model. But if every place thinks that then globalization isn't really anywhere, it's just somewhere up in the ether. It's placeless, disembodied completely from any location.
But when you're in London you can't feel like that sort of victim. Because you're right at the centre of that very process. You're in the place that devours other places. Globalization was made here, produced and disseminated here. Londoners can feel that, even if they can't necessarily see the effect their city is having -- a profoundly dislocating effect -- in other parts of the world.
First of all, there's the huge bringing of goods to London every single day, the lopsided consumption of resources. Then there's the leeching of talent, of skills and training, of human labour and enterprise from other places.
London's multiculturalism is one of its triumphs. Nonetheless, people have left other places all over the planet to be part of that "rich ethnic tapestry", and that's had effects in the places those people left. The import of skilled labour comes not just from other parts of the UK but from the global south. Many of these people will use, in London, training that's been paid for elsewhere. London, in this sense, "steals" that education, that talent. It impoverishes the places that paid for it by cherry-picking.
This, then, is the process of geographical inequality caught in action. It's a relatively recent process. For most of the 20th century London was in decline, as the sun set on its vast 19th century empire. London manufacturing wilted, its water traffic and docks collapsed. At the same time, there was a certain kind of social justice in London up until the 1980s. During the 1980s, says Massey, the post-war social democratic settlement, the period of the welfare state, of Keynesianism, of egalitarianism, all of that was falling apart. You see the change in Thatcher's determination to crush the left-wing local council, the GLC, abolished in 1986.
London has since risen from the ashes to become a new imperial city, a centre of the neo-liberal global economy. But this re-invention isn't a "triumphal march towards modernity". It's something rather sad and sinister: the birth of a mega-leech. If you want to get technical about Massey's ideas, they're based on an application of Marxist ideas to geography: the spatial division of labour.
I'm interested in this not only because I lived through -- and wrote albums about, culminating in 1989's disgusted and disillusioned Don't Stop the Night -- London's transformation from a decaying post-imperialist place softened by Keynesian socialism to the neo-imperial hub it now is, but also because I'm fascinated by the idea of places which aren't places, but are better defined as effects on other places. This might be a strange insight, but I think London has something in common with the inside of a jet engine -- a place that, on ignition, becomes a process which radically transforms position -- or... or... a vagina.
A vagina -- or perhaps I mean a womb -- is a small place in the human body. But, with the visit of a penis, it's capable of becoming much more than a place. It can become a person, which is, in one way of looking at it, a living process which alters places, then replaces itself and dies. I'm currently fascinated by these places which are more than places. Places which are processes. London is, then, in a sense, fucking. Fucking the planet, perhaps.
You can hear a Doreen Massey lecture here. She's particularly good on the one-way nature of the supposedly "borderless" world of globalization; the fluidity depends totally on who you are and where you are.
According to Massey, who's basically a "geographer of inequality" with the Open University -- someone who's applying a topographical model to inequalities usually thought of as purely financial -- London is one of the three big "world cities" which co-ordinate the neo-global economy. The other two are New York and Tokyo. These are the key places from which global neo-liberalism is organized. But in a sense they're not so much places in themselves as machines for transforming -- and displacing -- other places.
Decisions taken in London's skyscrapers -- those centres of finance, law, accounting, and global business service industries -- have major effects all over the world. Decisions of investment and dis-investment have real repercussions in the dislocations of lives, the making and breaking of whole sectors of economies around the world.
One of the things you can't do in London, says Massey, is imagine yourself as the victim of global forces. When you're talking about the relationship between the local and global, it's tempting to think of the local as the victim of the global. The global arrives, a deux ex machina, and wreaks havoc on the local place. That's the victim model. But if every place thinks that then globalization isn't really anywhere, it's just somewhere up in the ether. It's placeless, disembodied completely from any location.
But when you're in London you can't feel like that sort of victim. Because you're right at the centre of that very process. You're in the place that devours other places. Globalization was made here, produced and disseminated here. Londoners can feel that, even if they can't necessarily see the effect their city is having -- a profoundly dislocating effect -- in other parts of the world.
First of all, there's the huge bringing of goods to London every single day, the lopsided consumption of resources. Then there's the leeching of talent, of skills and training, of human labour and enterprise from other places.
London's multiculturalism is one of its triumphs. Nonetheless, people have left other places all over the planet to be part of that "rich ethnic tapestry", and that's had effects in the places those people left. The import of skilled labour comes not just from other parts of the UK but from the global south. Many of these people will use, in London, training that's been paid for elsewhere. London, in this sense, "steals" that education, that talent. It impoverishes the places that paid for it by cherry-picking.
This, then, is the process of geographical inequality caught in action. It's a relatively recent process. For most of the 20th century London was in decline, as the sun set on its vast 19th century empire. London manufacturing wilted, its water traffic and docks collapsed. At the same time, there was a certain kind of social justice in London up until the 1980s. During the 1980s, says Massey, the post-war social democratic settlement, the period of the welfare state, of Keynesianism, of egalitarianism, all of that was falling apart. You see the change in Thatcher's determination to crush the left-wing local council, the GLC, abolished in 1986.
London has since risen from the ashes to become a new imperial city, a centre of the neo-liberal global economy. But this re-invention isn't a "triumphal march towards modernity". It's something rather sad and sinister: the birth of a mega-leech. If you want to get technical about Massey's ideas, they're based on an application of Marxist ideas to geography: the spatial division of labour.
I'm interested in this not only because I lived through -- and wrote albums about, culminating in 1989's disgusted and disillusioned Don't Stop the Night -- London's transformation from a decaying post-imperialist place softened by Keynesian socialism to the neo-imperial hub it now is, but also because I'm fascinated by the idea of places which aren't places, but are better defined as effects on other places. This might be a strange insight, but I think London has something in common with the inside of a jet engine -- a place that, on ignition, becomes a process which radically transforms position -- or... or... a vagina.
A vagina -- or perhaps I mean a womb -- is a small place in the human body. But, with the visit of a penis, it's capable of becoming much more than a place. It can become a person, which is, in one way of looking at it, a living process which alters places, then replaces itself and dies. I'm currently fascinated by these places which are more than places. Places which are processes. London is, then, in a sense, fucking. Fucking the planet, perhaps.
You can hear a Doreen Massey lecture here. She's particularly good on the one-way nature of the supposedly "borderless" world of globalization; the fluidity depends totally on who you are and where you are.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 10:45 am (UTC)Mark E Smith
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 11:24 am (UTC)I certainly felt this when I popped out to the post office and the greengrocers a few minutes ago.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 02:42 pm (UTC)LOL WHAT?
Date: 2007-07-04 11:34 am (UTC)Re: LOL WHAT?
Date: 2007-07-04 12:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 12:39 pm (UTC)Re: LOL WHAT?
Date: 2007-07-04 12:57 pm (UTC)Oh, that's just me trying to be cunt-roversial.
lol vaginas
Date: 2007-07-04 02:22 pm (UTC)Fagin's family - who wears the trousers?
Date: 2007-07-04 12:57 pm (UTC)On a tangent, down a Soho lane, after Whimsy's post about the parasitic ghost plant I discovered that some species practice niche construction.
I still like Will Self's idea that the metropolis should be seen as nematodes passing through. I like the analogy of a kettle(for what you may ask). Ignite the filament, boil the water, add a few leafy suburbs and afterwards you have a nice cup of tea.
Re: Fagin's family - who wears the trousers?
Date: 2007-07-04 01:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 01:06 pm (UTC)Massey mentioned that other countries being classed as "developed" and "undeveloped" undermined the cultural differences of the "undeveloped" whilst making pressumption that the capitalist model the west goes by is the only way to develop a nation. Yet, she also stated that shes not against these developing nations aquiring clean water and other such necessities, which are indeed the benifits of capitalism.
She said that this debate needs to be had, and that really begs the question "what other method of development is there?" Surely the first step in achieving this answer is "whats wrong with the current system?"
She mentions economics, Fiscal inequality. She needs to be more specific before I can say I agree with her on this one though. To what extent does she want "equality"? Does everyone want "equality"? It's so easy to have the little guy mentality and feel like the rich are exploiting us and opressing us to get richer, but the real reason nobody does anything about this is because this is the view of the wealthy in denail, and doing something about it would require us to face the truth; We, you and I, we're the rich. We're the rich westerners. Compared to the rest of the world, we're the ones with all the luxery and riches. Its so, so easy to sit there and pretend that changing the world is all about government policy and we can just sit back and buy our cars and laptops and other such luxeries, and live in our consumerist paradises. but for that sort of social change to take place, Its not just about governments making changes, its about the individuals and their mentalities changing too, on every level.
Would I want equality if it meant giving up all the consumerist luxuries I have as a rich westerner? Would you want equality if it meant giving up your Macs and your flights to Japan and all of your luxuries Nick?
I've come across a lot of people who are pro-communism in one of it's many forms (or should that be "reformed capitalism") but I encounter very few people who are willing to part with their riches. Do you not feel somewhat hypocritical enjoying capitalism as it stands, yet, calling for it's reform to end in-equality?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 01:46 pm (UTC)We could perhaps extend this to Japan -- modernity in Japan is, it seems to me, a few degrees less toxic than modernity in the West. And it is qualitatively different, a specifically Japanese way of being "modern". We could also talk about the different approaches the West and China have towards, for instance, development issues in Africa. The West tends to tie up aid with conditions (often unfulfillable) relating to politics, human rights, and the internal structuration of African countries. These conditions take for granted that Western-type social arrangements are "ahead" for every "developing nation". China doesn't do this. It invests in African countries as they are, for both states' mutual and immediate advantage. No strings, but ties.
Massey also says that, rather than seeing developing nations as "behind" and "catching up", we should see our own everyday activities as producing inequality continuously. If there's any change, it's in the deepening and entrenching of those inequalities. Therefore nobody is "catching up" with us. It's a bit like Zeno's paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes#Achilles_and_the_tortoise); every time Achilles seems to be catching up to where the tortoise has been, the tortoise has, in the meantime, moved ahead a bit further.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 03:58 pm (UTC)"China doesn't do this. It invests in African countries as they are, for both states' mutual and immediate advantage. No strings, but ties."
Couldnt you argue that the west is already doing that by taking work to developing countries? ie. sweatshops etc. And what about the poorest areas of Africa that dont necessarily have the anything to offer the west or arent in the position to offer anything? the whole point of some of those strings is to make sure aid gets to the most vulnerable.
You also avoided my question regarding your own personal consumption habits. Can we still enjoy all our capitalist riches on an individual level and still help tackle economic inequality worldwide?
"Massey also says that, rather than seeing developing nations as "behind" and "catching up", we should see our own everyday activities as producing inequality continuously."
But they are behind though. They dont have access to necessities like we do and in that sense, they are behind us because thats the "goal for humanity". That's what Massey would like to see change right?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 04:28 pm (UTC)Well, off the net you could look at books like:
The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy
by T.R. Reid
Penguin, 305 pp., $25.95
The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream
by Jeremy Rifkin
Tarcher/Penguin, 434 pp., $25.95
Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
Random House, 286 pp. $24.95
On the net you could read Tony Judt's review (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17726) of these in the NYRB, or my discussion (http://imomus.livejournal.com/212647.html) of the 032c magazine issue (sorry, I know you hate the mag!) of the distinctiveness of Europe.
Political differences between the EU and US are discussed here (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20254), and for a more sober and pessimistic view you might want to check out a pdf called
Economic Institutions and Policies in the US and the EU: Convergence or Divergence? (http://ies.berkeley.edu/calendar/files/Berkeley-Vienna%20Papers%2005/EC-JPF%20Berkeley%20paper_conference%20version.pdf) which concludes:
"The EU is likely to behave increasingly as the champion of rules in international economic relations, and this may lead to enduring divergence with the US. Labour markets, redistribution and social insurance, pensions, and the provision of public services in education and health care are key areas in which virtually no convergence [between the EU and US] can be observed, and which have not (not yet, at least) been affected by European integration. Consumer protection is another area in which differences are apparent, probably because collective preferences (vis-à-vis environmental or sanitary risks) have not converged. Here lies the true specificity of the European model. But this should not lead [us] to speak of a persistence of diversity in the models of capitalism."
For these writers, then, these are different flavours of the same system.
I can't really go through all your other points now, but suffice to say that I'm much more interested when "hypocrisy" arguments are restated as "dialectics" arguments -- and that in itself is a difference in style between Anglo-Saxon and European thinking!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 04:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-05 04:49 pm (UTC)I don't hate 032c! I hate the price tag. I'm not an OMG INTANATIONAL SUPASTAR like you, I'm just a lowly student; £9 is too much.
Danke for the info.
"I'm much more interested when "hypocrisy" arguments are restated as "dialectics" arguments..."
*COUGH*cop-out*COUGH*
YOU CANT BE A COMMUNIST AND OWN AN iPHONE, MOMUS!!11!! ;o)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 07:01 pm (UTC)With all respect (which is due) I fear you might come to change your mind should you come to live in Japan for a longer period of time... by Japan I really mean Tokyo however. Maybe I'm not digging deep enough but LOHAS and the like seem scant here sadly...
x
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 07:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 03:29 pm (UTC)Proof, I guess, that politics is a big circle and the far left and far right touch - on the opposite side from me.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 03:42 pm (UTC)It's true! I have trouble telling Gandhi from Milton Friedman!
> on the opposite side from me.
Circles don't have sides. And to think, I'd almost signed up to that genius political philosophy of yours.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 06:57 pm (UTC)HELLOES
Date: 2007-07-04 08:51 pm (UTC)Re: HELLOES
Date: 2007-07-05 04:42 pm (UTC)You are subscribing to the mistaken belief that big business in this country is right-wing. In fact it frequently goes begging to the left - for freer immigration, more regulation (to create barriers to entry), socialized healthcare (to shift the insurance expense of mployees with pensions to the state), bigger subsidies, and a lot of other non-free market things.
I'm talking about the forty percent of the electorate that reliably votes Republican - the ones who shut down the Congressional switchboards calling in to oppose the immigration bill. I'm a libertarian, so I think they're as full of crap as Momus on this issue - but they are most assuredly the right wing, worried they'll contaminate us, and he is most assuredly the left, worried we'll contaminate them.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 04:06 pm (UTC)a New Deal for Globalization
Date: 2007-07-04 05:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 11:00 pm (UTC)The cities of consumption for now seem to have been the lucky ones in having something else to do other than manufacturing, saving their economies, and with the corpses of former industrial cities strewn all across the American Midwest's rust belt as a reminder of their mortality.
But if people like James Howard Kunstler are right and we're going to run out of cheap energy soon, the kind of globalism that has developed will not be viable and success of places will one day again depend on mundane things such as their access to a temperate climate, good soil, and water for transportation and irrigation.
This is why Detroit could be the City of the Future after all.
Now let's plant some potatoes!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-05 05:02 am (UTC)For the first five of the ten thousand years of human civilization, wealth and power belonged to villages with green technology, and for the second five thousand years wealth and power belonged to cities with gray technology. Beginning about five hundred years ago, gray technology became increasingly dominant [...] In the last hundred years, wealth and power were even more heavily concentrated in cities as gray technology raced ahead. As cities became richer, rural poverty deepened.
[...] as the continued exploring of genomes gives us better knowledge of the architecture of living creatures, we shall be able to design new species of microbes and plants according to our needs. The way will then be open for green technology to do more cheaply and more cleanly many of the things that gray technology can do, and also to do many things that gray technology has failed to do. [...] An economic system based on green technology could come much closer to the goal of sustainability, using sunlight instead of fossil fuels as the primary source of energy.
[...] Many of the people who call themselves green are passionately opposed to green technology. But in the end, if the technology is developed carefully and deployed with sensitivity [...] it is likely to be accepted by most of the people who will be affected by it, just as the equally unnatural and unfamiliar green technologies of milking cows and plowing soils and fermenting grapes were accepted by our ancestors long ago.
[...]
What has this dream of a resurgent green technology to do with the problem of rural poverty? In the past, green technology has always been rural, based in farms and villages rather than in cities. In the future it will pervade cities as well as countryside, factories as well as forests. It will not be entirely rural. But it will still have a large rural component. After all, the cloning of Dolly occurred in a rural animal-breeding station in Scotland, not in an urban laboratory in Silicon Valley. Green technology will use land and sunlight as its primary sources of raw materials and energy. Land and sunlight cannot be concentrated in cities but are spread more or less evenly over the planet. When industries and technologies are based on land and sunlight, they will bring employment and wealth to rural populations.
In a country like India with a large rural population, bringing wealth to the villages means bringing jobs other than farming. Most of the villagers must cease to be subsistance farmers and become shopkeepers or schoolteachers or bankers or engineers or poets. In the end the villages must become gentrified, as they are today in England, with the old farm workers' cottages converted into garages, and the few remaining farmers converted into highly skilled professionals. It is fortunate that sunlight is most abundant in tropical countries, where a large fraction of the world's people live and where rural poverty is most acute. Since sunlight is distributed more equitably than coal and oil, green technology can be a great equalizer, helping to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries.
My book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999) describes a vision of green technology enriching villages all over the world and halting the migration from villages to megacities. The three components of the vision are all essential: the sun to provide energy where it is needed, the genome to provide plants that can convert sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently, the Internet to end the intellectual and economic isolation of rural populations. With all three components in place, every village in Africa could enjoy its fair share of the blessings of civilization. People who prefer to live in cities would still be free to move from villages to cities, but they would not be compelled to move by economic necessity.
Thanks!
Date: 2007-07-05 03:35 pm (UTC)Simon
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 11:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-05 04:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-05 05:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-07 11:15 am (UTC)But what I was really wanting to ask is can London be seen as a place of triumphal multiculturalism when ethnic groups there tend to fear or be actively hostile towards other ethnic groups? I would think this to be illustrative of a failure of multiculturalism.