- Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni. Press.
Focussing here, for reasons presumably obvious to long-term readers of this site, on Chapters 8 (“The spaces of Utopia”, p133-81) and 9 (“Dialectical utopianism”, p182-95) of what is now a vintage part of the David Harvey canon. Reading these pieces really brought home just how long ago the turn of the century really was, both generally and personally… and that’s particularly sobering in the context of Harvey’s topic, which is the neoliberalisation of civic space. He notes that at time of writing, it had been going on for two decades… and of course it’s gone on another two decades since then.
(Which explains my personal fury at claims that it’s “too soon” to talk about the world we want to build after this unfolding clusterfuck of a pandemic gives way to whatever comes next… people have been talking about it for decades, and have always been told it’s “too soon” to “politicise the issues”. The issues were always political, at least for those on the sharp end. Aaaaanyway.)
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The front half of Ch. 8 takes a tour through late-Nineties Baltimore that goes a long way to explaining why The Wire was a story waiting to be told, and then pivots gradually into the historical question of the-city-as-figure, of urban imaginaries, as Harvey sets himself up for a proper workout on utopics from his classically Marxist p.o.v.:
When […] we contemplate urban futures we must always do battle with a wide range of emotive and symbolic meanings that both inform and muddle our sense of ‘the nature of our task.’ As we collectively produce our cities, we collectively produce ourselves. […] Critical reflection on our imaginaries entails, however, both confronting the hidden utopianism and resurrecting it in order to act as conscious architects of our fates rather than as ‘helpless puppets’ of the institutional and imaginative worlds we inhabit.
(p159)
Next we get a bit on More’s foundational Utopia, in which “spatial form controls temporality, an imagined geography controls the possibility of spatial change and history”. However, “[n]ot all forms of temporality are erased” by the utopian banishing of historicity. “The time of ‘eternal return’, of recurrent ritual, is preserved. […] It is the dialectic of social process which is repressed. Time’s arrow, ‘the great principle of history,’ is excluded in favour of perpetuating a happy stationary state.” More conjures a nostalgia for a past which never really was, “a hierarchical mode of social relating that is non-conflictual and harmonious. This nostalgic strain is characteristic of much utopian thinking, even that projected into the future and incorporating futuristic technologies” (p160; no kidding, Dave!)
More’s and subsequent utopias can thus “be characterised as ‘Utopias of social form’ since the temporality of the social process, the dialectics of social change—real history—are excluded, while social stability is assured by a fixed spatial form” (p160); via Marin’s reading of More, “the free play of the imagination, ‘utopics as spatial play,’ became, with More’s initiative, a fertile means to explore and express a vast range of competing ideas about social relationships, moral orderings, political-economic systems and the like” (p161). However, ‘imaginative free play’ [IFP] is of course entangled with already-existing systems of authority and restrictive governance, and the dialectic between “[IFP] and authority and control throws up serious problems,” and “[c]onfronting this relationship […] must, therefore, lie at the heart of any regenerative politics that attempts to resurrect utopian ideals” (p163). Harvey illustrates the point with Jane Jacobs, noting that her critique of modernist planning relied on its own nostalgic notion of the diverse neighbourhood, and thus “contained its own authoritarianism” (p164).
Next we discuss Marin’s notion of the ‘degenerate utopia’, of which the canonical example was Disneyland—degenerate “because it offers no critique of the existing state of affairs on the outside” (p167), a call-back to Harvey’s earlier side-eye at the emerging phenomena of gated communities and tent-pole urbanisms in Baltimore. But can utopias of spatial form ever be anything other than ultimately degenerate, he asks rhetorically? “The multiple degenerate utopias that now surround us—the shopping malls and the ‘bourgeois’ commercialised utopias of the suburbs being paradigmatic—do as much to signal the end of history as the collapose of the Berlin Wall ever did. They instantiate rather than critique the idea that ‘there is no alternative,’ save those given by the conjoining of technological fantasies, commodity culture, and endless capital accumulation” (p168).
Then some stuff about the failed idealism of The New Urbanism, which at time of writing was still a fairly new phenomenon: good intentions, and a then-novel focus on a more organic/holistic ideal for the city/region relationship. But “[t]he new urbanism connects to a facile contemporary attempt to transform large and teeming cities, seemingly so out of control, into an interlinked series of ‘urban villages’ where, it is believed, everyone can relate in a civil and urbane fashion to everyone else” (p170); this barb is all the more pointed for coming at a time when dot-com optimism was at its height, and the associated (mis)readings of McLuhan came with their own utopian vibes. Some more material about the pragmatism of New Urbanist architects and developers, and then: “In practice, most realised Utopias of spatial form have been achieved through the agency of either the state or capital accumulation, with both acting in concert being the norm” (p173); attempting to take “the outside path” tended to result in “a meltdown of [their] principles” and the reabsorption of such projects into the prevailing logic of development. (In terms of the “smart city”, that acting-in-concert of capital and the state has become pretty much de facto, as noted elsewhere—the system quickly adjusts to incorporate former lines-of-flight into the striation of space, to get a bit Deleuzian about it.)
Next section switches from the problematics of materialised utopias to the question of utopia-as-(temporal)-process—which, Harvey suggests, are plentiful, but rarely described as utopian. “Idealized versions of social processes […] usually get expressed in purely temporal terms. They are literally bound to no place whatsoever and are typically specified outside of the constraints of spatiality altogether. The qualities of space and place are totally ignored” (p174). One problem with these “placeless teleologies” is that they “have the habit of getting lost in the romanticism of endlessly open projects that never have to come to a point of closure (within space and place)” (ibid.).
Now we’re getting on to ol’ Karl, starting with his deconstruction of Adam Smith’s utopia-of-process as enshrined in The Wealth of Nations, “in which individual desires, avarice, greed, creativity, and the like could be mobilized through the hidden hand of the perfected market to the social benefit of all” (p175); there’s been a fair amount of recuperation of Smith in recent years, re-emphasising what I understand to be the moral-philosophical side of a text which was (regrettably) left to the libertarians to interpret for far too long, but I think Harvey’s point here still stands. Plus it’s all in the text itself, and Harvey provides a valuable reminder here that Marx recognised that an unregulated free-market system could only continue through draining the vitality from not just the worker but the land itself. (Cf. McKenzie Wark’s recent stuff on the metabolic rift in Marx, which comes out in e.g. Haraway and others.) Blah blah blah, twenty years of neoliberalism (at time of writing); Thatcher, Fukuyama, Gingrich as Hegelians, ho-ho-ho; emerging stigmatisation of market fundamentalism as utopianism (by John Gray, apparently, who more recently has become… well, let’s not go there); “[s]o why such tragic outcomes to such a supposedly benevolent process?” (p176-7)
Because the process has to quite literally come to ground, come to place—and “the conditions and manner of this spatial materialization have all manner of consequences” (p178); something something unevenly distributed, intensification of existing spatial inequalities, egalitarianism of free markets revealed to be no such thing in the long run.
The free market, if it is to work, requires a bundle of institutional arrangements and rules that can only be guaranteed only by something akin to state power. The freedom of the market has to be guaranteed by law, authority, force, and, in extremis, violence. Since state power is usually understood in terms of the monopoly of the forces of violence, the free market requires the state or cognate instituitions if it is to work. Free markets, in short, do not just happen. Nor or they antagonistic to state power in general, though they can, of course, be antagonistic to certain ways in which state power might be used to regulate them.
(p178)
Point being, in a mirror image of the failed materializations of the spatial utopias running into temporality, “the utopianism of process runs afoul of the spatial framings and the particularities of place construction necessary to its materialization” (p179).
So we start the final subsection of Ch. 8 by observing that “materialized utopias of the social process have to negotiate with the spatiality and the geography of place, and in so doing they also lose their ideal character, producing results which are in many instances exactly the opposite of those intended” (p180), and return to Smith-influenced free market systems, which don’t render the state hollow as often assumed, but rather deepen its control and influence over some parts of the social process which chasing it out of other more traditional (and populist) functions. All this “explains why so much of the developmental pattern in a city like Baltimore is justified by an appeal to the rhetoric of free-market competition when it in practice relies on state subsidy and monopolization” (p181), as well as why eras of successful globalisation and free trade have tended to occur in symbiosis with the hegemony of a single dominant power such as Britain or the US:
A surface veneer of competitive capitalism therefore depends on a deep substratum of coerced cooperations and collaborations to ensure a framework for the free market and open trade.
(p181)
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Now, then, Ch. 9—where we explore the challenges of building “a utopianism that is explicitly sociotemporal” (p182) as an attempt to dodge the problematics of place and process when considered in isolation: a “dialectical utopianism”, as Harvey decides to label it.
First we get a bit of jousting with thinkers who were a bit higher on the totem-pole at the time: Lefebvre “refuses to confront the underlying problem” of the spatial-material utopia, namely “that to materialise a space is to engage with closure (however temporary) which is an authoritarian act” (p183), while Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia gets a drubbing which hints at much the same lingering resentment of postmodern theory most often found on the right; the heterotopia was “[e]xtracted by his acolytes as a hidden gem within his extensive oeuvre” (a saucer of milk to the corner table, please, waiter!) and “became one means […] whereby the problem of Utopia could be resurrected and simultaneously evaded” (p183; not a reading of the heterotopia as I recognise it, certainly, but hey, Marxists gonna Marxianise amirite?). It’s not all flicking bogies at the pomos, though, as Harvey concedes that heterotopia “has the virtue of insisting upon a better understanding of the heterogeneity of space”; however (and unsurprisingly), “it gives no clue as to what a more spatiotemporal utopianism might look like” (p185), not least because that was not at all Foucault’s theoretical bag.
Next we turn again to the temporal, and a good few pages engaging with Roberto Unger, who “avoids utopianism by insisting that alternatives should emerge out of critical and practical engagements with the institutions, personal behaviours, and practices that now exist” (p186); Harvey glosses his position as the claim that “[o]nly by changing our institutional world can we change ourselves at the same time, as it is only through the desire to change ourselves that institutional change can occur” (ibid.). Unger’s approach is fundamentally abstracted from the spatial, for which Harvey partly lets him off the hook, but is less forgiving of Unger’s (poststructuralist) hesitation to identify a direction of travel; “like Lefebvre, he wants to keep choices endlessly open” (p188). This is for Harvey a limit and flaw of the anti-authoritarian left:
What the abandonment of all talk of Utopia on the left has done is to leave the question of valid and legitimate authority in abeyance (or, more exactly, to leave it to the moralisms of the conservatives—both of the neoliberal and religious variety). It has left the concept of Utopia […] as a pure signifier without any meaningful referent in the material world.
(p188-9)
Next section, and we get a passing look at utopian fictions (or rather utopias intended as fictions first and foremost): Le Guin (of course), Lessing and Piercy as well as the earlier white-guy canon of the form. No mention here of Moylan or the lineage of sf scholarship, but Harvey clearly identifies the critical utopian modality when he notes that “[s]uch novels typically recognise that societies and spatialities are shaped by continuous processes of struggle”, and that the form “lends itself […] to a much stronger sense of sociotemporal dynamics” (p189). Then a quick (and largely complementary) look at KSR’s Mars trilogy, leavened with a caution (via Levitas, of course) that utopianism cannot be left to art alone, which ends with the claim that KSR’s work “holds out the tantalising prospect of an inner connexion between actual historical-geographical transformations (understood with all the power that a properly constituted historical-geographical materialism can command) and the utopian design of an alternative spatiotemporal dynamics to that which we now experience” (p191). Amen, brother.
The penultimate section sketches Harvey’s program for grounding a utopian project “in both the present and the past”, and it’s not without interest, involving as it does a quick summary of the contradictions inherent to the free-market utopian project that took place under the USian post-ww2 hegemony—but it’s surplus to my requirements for this particular reading and glossing. The very final section contains that sobering reminder I mentioned at the top of the page:
The broad rejection of utopianism over the past two decades or should be understood as a collapse of specific utopian forms, both East and West. Communism has been broadly discredited as a utopian project and now neoliberalism is increasingly seen as a utopian project that cannot succeed.
(p195)
Published twenty years ago. Sheesh.
Should we thus abandon utopianism, asks Harvey to close, or treat it with the same cautious distrust as ol’ Karl? That’s a nope:
Utopian dreams in any case never entirely fade away […] Extracting them from the dark recesses of our minds and turning them into a political force for change may court the danger of the ultimate frustration of those desires. But better that, surely, than giving in to the degenerate utopianism of neoliberalism (and all those interests that give possibility a bad press) and living in craven and supine fear of expressing and pursuing alternative desires at all.
(p195)
To try is to invite failure, but to not try is to ensure it. Twenty years further down the neoliberal mudchute, I think that’s an argument that’s more ready to be heard than ever before.
At least I hope so.
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