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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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.