The politics of the encounter and the urbanization of the world

City

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 269-283

  Merrifield, Andy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Encounters; Expression; Henri lefebvre; Louis althusser; Occupy movement; Public space

Indexed keywords

EID: 84863608206     PISSN: 13604813     EISSN: 14703629     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2012.687869     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, Later Writings, 1978-1987 (London: Verso, 2006), p. 197 (Althusser's emphases). This line of thinking about the transition from feudalism to capitalism had actually been first explicated in Reading Capital, by Etienne Balibar's chapter on primitive accumulation, with an 'encounter' between contingent forces giving rise to the birth of capitalism; all of which demonstrates a theory of the encounter in unexpressed and implied terms.
2. See 'Elements for a Theory of Transition', in Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1979).
3. Althusser, 'The Undercurrent of the Materialism of the Encounter', in Philosophy of the Encounter, p. 167.
4. Clinamen is actually Lucretius' original Latin word, the unforeseen deviation in linear trajectory, the unpredictable, random movement of matter; clinamen translates as 'swerve' in English.
5. Lucretius, The Nature of Things (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), p. 42.
6. Althusser, 'The Undercurrent of the Materialism of the Encounter', p. 169 (emphases in original). Althusser draws a lot from the Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius, whose six books of The Nature of Things expound the earlier ideas of the ancient Greek Epicurus. It's hard not to believe that Althusser hadn't read Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense, too, first published in 1969, because it gives a brilliant summary of Lucretius' clinamen. 'The clinamen', Deleuze writes, 'manifests neither contingency nor indetermination. It manifests something entirely different, that is, the irreducible plurality of causes or of causal series ... the clinamen is the determination of the meaning of causal series, where each causal series is constituted by the movement of the atom and conserves in the encounter its full independence' (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Continuum Books, 2004), pp. 306-307). For a nice recent take on Lucretius' famous swerve, a swerve that arguably gave birth to the Renaissance, to Enlightenment humanism, to a new intellectual dawn
7. see Stephen Greenblatt The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (London: Bodley Head, 2011). As Greenblatt shows, out of Lucretius' gloomy falling rain came the radiant light of reason, rebelling against the crippling orthodoxies of the church and centuries of monastic darkness.
8. Althusser, 'The Undercurrent of the Materialism of the Encounter', p. 193.
9. Althusser, 'The Undercurrent of the Materialism of the Encounter', p. 196.
10. See Andy Merrifield, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization (Athens, GA: Georgia University Press, April 2013).
11. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003), p. 32.
12. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 124.
13. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 125.
14. V for Vendetta (New York: Pocket Star Books, 2005), p. 4. I am citing from the film's novelization by Steve Moore (no relation to Alan), based on a screenplay written by the Wachowski brothers.
15. V for Vendetta, pp. 73-74.
16. V for Vendetta, p. 106.
17. Kalle Lasn, cited in 'Revolution Number 99′, Vanity Fair, February 2012, p. 63.
18. James Carroll, 'Youth Pushed to the Edge', International Herald Tribune, 11 October 2010.
19. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008).
20. Andy Merrifield, 'Crowd Politics, or, Here Comes Everybuddy', New Left Review, No. 171 (September/October 2011), pp. 103-114.
21. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 21. 'When mulk mountynotty man was everybully and the first leal ribberobber that had ever had her ainway everybilly to his lovesaking eyes and everybuddy lived alove with everybiddy else ...' Everybuddy lived alove with everybiddy else, preventing everybully from taking over. There is a formidable digital presence around the world concerned with the occupied movement. As at November 2011, according to the New York Times (24 November 2011), there were 1.7 million videos on YouTube, viewed a total of 73 million times, and more than 400 Facebook pages with 2.7 million buddies around the world. When the wonderful late Gil Scott-Heron sang 'the revolutionary will not be televised', he was rapping to another, older generation of militants.
22. Bill Wasik, 'Crowd Control', Wired, January 2012, p. 112.
23. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Spinoza's Philosophy (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 274.
24. Deleuze, Expressionism in Spinoza's Philosophy, pp. 290-291 (emphasis in original).
25. Deleuze, Expressionism in Spinoza, p. 294.
26. A recentWorld Economic Forum (WEF) report cited the Occupy movement amongst business leaders and policy makers' 'Top Global Risks' for 2012; 'if not addressed', the report warned, they contain 'the seeds of dystopia', 'a place where life is full of hardship and devoid of hope'. According to WEF bigwigs, Occupy exhibits a potentially damaging 'backlash against globalization' and 'the darker side of connectivity', as do cyberhacker groups like Anonymous, whose 'motives for subversion can be as trivial as simple boredom'! (see www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_2012.pdf).
27. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 174.
28. Lefebvre, La pensée marxiste et la ville (Paris: Casterman, 1972), p. 68.
29. Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 705.
30. Lefebvre, La pensée marxiste et la ville, p. 68.