Towards the great transformation: (4) Agrarian and urban rebellion, the 2008 crisis, art/philosophy/science, and Keiller's 'Robinson Crusoe

City

Volumn 16, Issue 6, 2012, Pages 748-757

  Catterall, Bob ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

2008; agrarian and urban; art philosophy science; imaginary; Keiller; Marx; rebellion; Shakespeare

Indexed keywords

EID: 84878206851     PISSN: 13604813     EISSN: 14703629     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2012.753747     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. For lack of space I have given very little attention to Romanticism here. There is a corresponding lack in the socio-spatial sciences. This is deeply serious and relevant to the neglect of the modes of apprehension listed above. This is a theme to which the series will return.
2. The relationship ofthe headings here, though ordered differently, to the five movements of Beethoven's 'Pastoral Symphony' is largely but not entirely accidental. The movements are: Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country, Scene at the brook, Happy gathering of country folk, Thunderstorm, Storm, Shepherds' song, cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm. Though this is clearly idealized, it is still important to recall, while socio-spatial analysts and art critics wear blinkers, that 'the country' is being marginalized and colonized by combine harvesters, factory farms and human prisons, 'the brook' is no longer available to the young Tibetan woman, that 'the country folk' have been sucked into sprawling settlements progressively deprived of many of the qualities (though not without some 'redeeming' features) once correctly attributed to 'the city' and the remaining 'country folk' reduced and isolated among urban incomers seeking 'amenity', 'the storm' is now increasingly 'extreme', and shepherds are now rare, rarely sing and occasions for 'cheerful and thankful feelings' are now attenuated. This is not to deny the extreme hardships of former rural ways of work/life but to reconsider its qualities, the availability of alternative technologies, and the need to ensure - attending also to the developmentsconsideredinour featureonUrban and Peri-Urban Agriculture - that 'late' and totalitarian capitalism is not only late but also currently diseased and imminently deceased.
3. st-century landscape', The Guardian, 30 March, 2012, has been a major influence throughout this discussion. The third, lyrical, passionate and, like Hatherley, deeply political, is Colin Prescod's 'An oasis space at the Robinson Institute', Institute of Race Relations, www.irr.org.uk/ news/an-oasis-space-at-the-robinson-institute/
4. To some this will appear an entirely sentimental take on their work. For alternative views presented in this and the previous series of endpieces see them as recalled and reconsidered in episode (5) of this series (forthcoming, 17.1).
5. www.watershed.co.uk/dshed/patrick-keiller-conversation 1 Sep 2012
6. Doreen Massey, 'Landscape/space/politics: an essay' Quoted in 16.1-2, p. 258.
7. 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.'Note
8. Jason Burke, Special report: Tibetan unrest', The Guardian, 27 March, 2012. This series of Tibetan suicides has continued up to the time of writing. Jason Burke has continued to give it serious attention.
9. I draw here, initially, on Keiller's account in his The Possibility of Life's Survival on the Planet, pp. 60-61, and then on thefilmscript of Robinson in Ruins. From the latterIhavequoted mostofRobinson's accountofit inthe previous episodeofthis series,pp. 618-619.In the book Keiler gives as his principal source: John Walter, 'A Rising of the People'? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596', Past and Present, no.107, May 1985, pp. 90-143. It is evident from various sources (online, emails, a lecture, conversation) that Keiller read widely in the historical literature on the period.
10. This is, of course, a selection of aspects of the 1596 uprising.
11. The story is complex. On the one hand, for example, the avowed intention of at least their leader was to execute the enclosers. On the other, for example: 'In 1597 the Privy Council began a series of prosecutions of the most notorious enclosers and in Parliament, Francis Bacon introduced two bills: An Act against the decaying of Town and Houses of Husbandry and An Act for the Maintenance of Husbandry and Tillage, that became law in 1598' (Keiller, p. 62). Moreover, Francis Bacon was one of the greatest intellectuals of the Renaissance, a fine essayist, late in life the author of the 'utopian novel' The New Atlantis, and sometimes subsequently lauded as one of the forerunners of empiricism.
12. Foakes, see16.5, p. 615
13. Graeber, 16.1-2, pp. 261-20. The three path-breaking studies are: Patterson, A, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Blackwell: Oxford, 1989 Note
14. de Grazia, M. Hamlet without Hamlet Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2007
15. Kott, J. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, Norton: New York, 1974 (originally, 1964 in Polish).
16. 13I concentrate on Marx in the 1850's as background to a reading of his Eighteenth Brumaire which I see as an aid, positive and negative, to an understanding, taken up in a subsequent episode, of post-2008 events.
17. Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera, All the Devils Are Here. Unmasking the Men Who Bankrupted the World', Portfolio/Penguin: London, 2011, p. 362.
18. Santaolalla, Isabel,Domination and Appropriation in The Young One' in PWEvans and I Santaolalla, Luis Bunuel: New Readings,BFI/Palgrave: London, 2004
19. D. Bryden and H Tiffin, Decolonising Fictions, Dangaroo Press: Sydney, Australia and Muldelstrup, Denmark: 1993, p.109.
20. M. Lewis, Boomerang: The Biggest Bust, Penguin: London, 2012, p. 203.
21. Lewis refers in his dedication to an editor, Doug Stumpf, 'without whom it would never have occurred to me to tour the ruins.' Note
22. There is a full and thorough analysis of the state of US cities in Jamie Peck 's paper 'Austerity Urbanism' in this issue - see particularly the section 'When the lights go out: cities under austerity rule'.
23. I have omitted, for simplicity's sake, Whybrow's account of a third layer.
24. Deleuze, followed by Hardt and Negri - as mentioned in our previous episode - added a snake to the menagerie though he kept it exclusive by simultaneously banishing Marx's mole. This occurs in Deleuze's 'Postscript on Control Societies' in his Negotiations, Columbia UP: New York 1995, pp. 177-182. Guattari, though, largely differs from him on the contrast between disciplinary and control societies: 'I wold not make such a sharply contrasted genealogy. They are components of subjectification that coexist with each other.' (see 'The Vertigo of Immanence', an interview with John Johnston, The Guattari Effect, Eric Alliez and Andrew Goffey (eds.), Continuum: London, p. 27 Note