It is interesting that you start off wandering through Rome and Bolgna – cities for whom state and church alone are allowed the heights of the city. In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre writes of the monument – that human creation through which a populous memorializes the passage of time and celebrates the incorporation of the new into the already existing – that the monument is the cornerstone of communal life. It is both potent and necessary for the functioning of society. The monument towers over and structures the social being of a populous. While you wrote to me of the squat buildings proffering their allegiance to the Church, I was touring through the red natural arches of Utah. Here, millennia have formed delicate bridges, carvings, and windows upon a soil as austere as anything the banks of London could imagine. By 9:30, the park was swamped with admirers from all over the globe, observing the monumental grandeur of a different sort of passing of time. Here, in the vast, sublime – in the Kantian sense of the word – stretches of the US Southeast, state and church lose much of their meaning. There is simply too much space. The sky it too big. The land too unforgiving. Even the attempts to capture them through the image fail – it is impossible not to be dwarfed and made to feel inconsequential. Until you reach Vegas, that is.
You spoke briefly of letting the sword fall on a given tentacle if the opportunity ever presented itself. It seems to me that tentacular studies, should they ever amount to anything, are more about illumination. The question isn’t so much whether or not we can cut off parts of the tentacle. Rather, it is understanding that the tentacle isn’t just the hooked sucker, but entire system of networks that amount to a tentacle. Urban tentacles map terrain – a prerequisite to any kind of victory.
I’ve been thinking about military metaphors since an earlier conversation with you – are they at all appropriate when trying to think about the necessary steps towards an egalitarian future? Something that struck me while reading Lee Kennett’s A History of Strategic Bombing is the lag between the appearance of new war technology and the understanding of what that weapon should be used for and how. There are ironic sections wherein reluctant militaries decry air warfare, yet are pushed to accept it by a public that is becoming a force in policy decisions for the first time. Struggle and war are two different concepts, obviously. If we think of our Leftist past as a continuous struggle, which we’re encouraged to do by the very construction of our history, then war is but a brief moment in an ancient struggle. With the advent of a new logic of capital, that could be termed, following Castells, the Information Age, we again experience the lag between a new age and an understanding of how best to capture the new time. None of this is new, but presenting it again can sometimes be useful. Many of the tools at our disposal are relics from the 1960’s and previous ages, yet we are surprised that they no longer have the same efficacy that they once had. Well, the structuring logic of capitalism shifts, so the strikes and marches that were once direct blows are now glancing parries. Much of this stems from a failure to adequately understand the terrain that we are struggling on.
It will never be possible to ‘cut off’ a tentacle, and to seek to do that today would be to try to turn back the hands of time. Instead, it is essential to understand that urban settings, such as San Francisco or Bologna, are not just physical locations, but also the length and breadth of its organization. So, SF is not just the Bay Area, but also the global interaction of certain types of venture capital. We often think of maps of cities or nations that are 2 or 3 dimensional, but we need to add the dimensions of time and virtuality as well, so that we can map out a 5-d tentacle (there are, of course, maps of transnational corporations, but these are limited because it is the type of capital, not the type of industry, that determines the essential shape of the tentacle).
You are precisely right that you can’t have just one tentacle. Instead, any urban area can be a hub or a node in a myriad of tentacles – major cities acting as both the hub and node of different types of capitals. These tentacles are not infinite, however. They are very finite, yet also difficult to grasp because we have not yet been trained to see them. It can sometimes be, too, that we can’t make out a discernable shape because we do not yet have the right means of identification at our disposal.
Rebecca Solnit, in Hollow City, describes the hordes of yuppies that swamped San Francisco during the 1980’s: people drawn to a newish form of capital (venture/knowledge based) whose relationship to the city is mediated by their relationship to work. They didn’t know the moral codes of the city and, more importantly, didn’t really care. Worse, there wasn’t anywhere to put these people. There was no urban infrastructure waiting to filled – instead, there was an older – oftentimes dismal – infrastructure whose operators and users had ceased to direct the city’s affairs. Ergo, the eradication of these older forms of public housing and social being in the name of the new productive class of workers. While there were at times effective protests, recognizing the scale and dimensions of the problem rarely happened. Protests, while inevitable, were just as inevitably fallible. In those places where it was successful, at least initially – like the Mission District – we can begin to theorize how to struggle against a particular tentacle that attempts to reorganize and redirect space.
The most terrifying part, which you allude to, is that the tentacle doesn’t think – it does not have a center that could issue commands to be relayed through points. Instead, it thrives on equilibrium, calibrating movements through a complex interplay of inputs and outputs. There is no overwhelming the center and redirecting the tentacles. So, what is to be done? I think that you are absolutely right when you say that no amount of observation or study could ever accurately ascertain the breadth of the problem and that to wait until the right line of attack appears is foolhardy. At the same time, history is littered with belligerents and foes unable to reconcile the gap between a former mode of struggle and a newer mode that had yet to properly develop. Unfortunately, both tendencies have many vociferous proponents who love nothing more than to argue against the other – forgetting that winning points against one’s own side means nothing when the struggle is being poorly waged. Action precipitates questions followed by analysis and, possibly, a form of struggle capable of both defense and offense. In the best of circumstances, praxis makes visible.
