Towards the great transformation: (1) beyond 'the urban revolution'

City

Volumn 16, Issue 1-2, 2012, Pages 253-263

  Catterall, Bob ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84860341229     PISSN: 13604813     EISSN: 14703629     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2012.680310     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda:The true story of radical Islam, London: Penguin, 2004, pp. 239-240) The new series was outlined in the editorial to 15.6. as picking up on the brief discussion of labour as commodity in Polanyi's The Great Transformation in 15.5, planning to extend it to Polanyi's lifelong dialogue with Marx and Marxism, and to its role in a project, 'The future of living landscape and the moving image' (AH/E510566/1) to which Patrick Keiller's semi-fictional documentary Robinson in Ruins(2010) and a paper by Doreen Massey, 'Landscape/space/politics: an essay' (there is a 7page summary in the BFI booklet that accompanies the dvd and the full text can be downloaded from the dvd) are central.
2. Paul Dave's valuable review ' Robinson in Ruins: New materialism and the archeological imagination', Radical Philosophy, 169 (Sept-Oct, 2011, pp. 19-35) to which reference is also made here, includes discussion of Polanyi, Keiller and Massey relating them to some preoccupations of new materialisms and assemblage theory. The series continues, though not explicitly at this point, the much of the discussion in a series of special features on 'Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis' in CITY, 15.2, 15.3-4, 15.5, 15.6. My thanks to Colin McFarlane, Dan Swanton and Neil Brenner for the major contributions they made to that series. An earlier discussion that owes much to Derrida's'hauntological' work on spectres.
3. Jason Burke, Special report: Tibetan unrest', The Guardian, 27 march, 2012. Emails, 20-21 March, 2012.
4. Patrick Keiller, 'Introduction', p.1, in a booklet accompanying the BFI dvd of Robinson in Ruins. I discussed his earlier two films in 'Endreview: new spaces' in CITY, 4.1, 2000, pp. 162-168
5. Owen Hatherley, 'How Patrick Keiller is mapping the 21st-century landscape', The Guardian, 30 March. 2012.
6. The exhibition, Patrick Keiller: The Robinson Institute is at the Tate Britain, 27 March-14 October, 2012.
7. Doreen Massey, "Landscape/space/politics: an essay". Keiller used a similar sentence in his film London (1994): 'Robinson believed that, if he looked at it hard enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.'italics added. (I intend to take this up on another occasion.) Keiller's discussion is in an interview (Time Out, http://www.timeout.com/film/features/show-feature/3841/Patrick_Keillerinterview.html) about an exhibition, 'The City of the Future, 'related to his film London (1994). My thanks to him for referring me to this interview (email 25 March, 2012).
8. See also Keiller's article 'The City of the Future' in CITY 7.3 (2003), pp. 376-386
9. Colleague Melissa Wilson comments: 'A very significant statement, highlighting the productive functioning of nature, not as 'nice scenery', but as the basis of our survival.' I suggest in the above review of the earlier films that Keiller's viewpoint is 'simultaneously Ironic and post-ironic.' This follows a comment by Steve Bell: 'There was a large amount of ludicrous posturing on the left during the seventies, and much of it was prepost-ironic.' (p.164). Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds.) New materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics Durham and London: Duke University Press.
10. We featured Elvin Wyly's photograph, from the Vancouver OWS demonstration of 19 October 2011, of a child carrying a clearly self-made poster, 'We are not commodities' on the cover of CITY 15.5 including reference to it, Polanyi's discussion of this fictitious commodity, and the insufficiently critical consideration of it in Working Capital: Life and Labour in Contemporary London, in the endpiece to that issue (pp. 610-612).
11. The reference here is to Atwood's Payback: Debt and the shadow side of wealth (2008). Her two related speculative fictions, Oryx and Crake (2003)and The Year of the Flood (2009), are taken up subsequently.
12. David Graeber, a chapter, 'The Greek Debt Crisis in almost unimaginably long-term perspective' in Vradis and Dalakaglou (eds) Revolt and Crisis in Greece (2011). This book, but not so far this chapter, has been discussed in the endpieces to 15.3-4 and 15.5)To be considered in future episodes is Graeber's path-breaking study Debt: The First 5,000 Years(2011).
13. Graeber, Debt, p. 329.
14. Abram, Becoming Animal, New York: Vintage Books, p. 1.