BARRERAS COMERCIALES

375 _{Ibid., 74.}

376 _{Ibid., 75.}

377 _{Harvey, Neoliberalism, 2.} 378 _{Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, 392.}

own increase.”379 _{The commune’s idea of a “programmatic kind of violence” appears entirely in}

keeping with the violence underlying all capital movements: in particular, as the waves of privatizations and the IMF’s SAP programs from the 1970s on demonstrate, the recovery of US economic hegemony on a global scale has entailed a violent redistribution of assets and an equally violent reconfiguration of “pre-existing cultural and social achievements.”380

Consequently, rather than liberating the nation from the fetters of commodity capitalism, the Commune seems to endorse a project which rather sustains the renewal of US capital accumulation process via ‘free-market fundamentalism’ and neoliberal orthodoxy”.381

The Commune’s inability to understand the contradiction at the heart of their project also prevents their recognising the real potential of the drug. Yet, in injecting Bucky with the drug, they enable him to experience its effects. While consigning Bucky to an “unworded void”382_{, the drug allows him to undertake a journey into the heart of the city, journey which}

enables Bucky to foresee the emergence of new spatial, social and economic configurations under the aegis of finance capital.

Bucky’s flaneurish trip across the oldest part of New York provides an account of the historical geography of the city’s commodity capitalism, revealing how human activities under capitalism possess a specific spatial articulation.383 _{Great Jones Street teems with “signs of}

commerce”(18): amidst industrial loft buildings (6), “shipping and receiving”, “export packaging”, “custom tanning”, trucks loading and offloading goods constitute the essence of Great Jones and adjacent streets (18). Great Jones Street clearly revolves around networks of production, exchange and distribution; the image of people gathered around “a cart banked with glowing [apples]” with a toothless vendor yelling “YOU’RE BUYING I’M SELLING”(264) exemplifies how a commodity economy shapes the neighbourhood’s social relations. Great Jones Street “was an old street. Its materials were in fact [its] essence….Paper, yarn, leather, tool, buckles, wire-frame-and novelty”(18). The hard materiality of these elements, Bucky argues, “explai[n] the ugliness” of the street: ugliness and oldness may be recouched as obsolescence, obsolescence which results from the activities that animate Great Jones Street as

380 _{Harvey, New Imperialism, 146-47.} 381 _{Harvey, Neoliberalism, 29} 382 _{Boxall, Don DeLillo, 48.} 383 _{Harvey, Limits to Capital, 374.}

pertaining to a mode of production on the verge of “decline” (18). The “city’s older precincts”(259) are emblems of an industrial Manhattan, where “[p]eople possessed of the utmost diversity of historical experience, liv[e] in an incredible variety of physical circumstances.”384 _{In fact, the neighbourhood is a cauldron of races, African-Americans,}

Latinos, Chinese (260), “the oldest immigrants living in tower blocks…these streets now ruled by darker races of the plains”(259). The city hosts a stratified immigrant labouring population who “have been welded…into a complex unity”385 _{as a result of capital’s requirements over the}

decades. The entire narrative of Bucky’s ‘trip’ evolves around Great Jones Street, Bond Street and Essex Street, names evoking a geography of the archaic. Such names offer a residual “history of immigration, of movement and growth, written spectrally in the streets.”386 _Names

testify to an endless flow of historical-economic changes that have modified the city. New York, Bucky recalls, “seemed older than the cities of Europe”(3). Arguably, the archaic atmosphere pervading this area of the city conjures the spectre of radical transformation looming over both Great Jones Street and the city as a whole. Recall how Bucky had chosen Great Jones Street because the area “hover[ed] on the edge of self-revelation”, its “decline possessing a kind of redemptive tenor, the suggestion of new forms about to evolve”(18). The city appears as “a material text…organised around an immanent possibility [evoking forms of renewal] which have yet to be imagined.”387 _{However, the vision of men “property-hunting” (261) suggests that the}

future of the city has been already appropriated, and the built-in, physical space of the city will be transformed into “property titles…freely traded as a pure financial asset”388 _{in accordance}

with the new capitalist requirements.

Walking southward, Bucky observes the city harbour, a “trading interface between nations and between old and new worlds”389 _{which discloses the “city’s power, its lust for money}

and filth”(262). Here Bucky distinguishes “the lone mellow promise of an island, tender retreat from strait lines, an answering sea-mound. This was the mist's illusion and the harbour's pound of flesh"(262). The lower part of Manhattan, seen as a “promise”, as an “answering sea-mound”, reveals itself as the geographical place where a whole series of new financial conglomerates will be located, whose activities will provide an answer to the structural requirements of US capital.

385 _Idem.

386 _{Boxall, Don DeLillo, 48.} 387 _Idem.

388 _{Harvey, Limits to Capital, 396.} 389 _{Boxall, Don DeLillo, 48.}

The word “promise” evokes the promissory quality of financial operations. In this sense, the potential profits that the harbour’s activities may yield represent “the pound of flesh”, the collateral which backs the promise of financial gains. Furthermore, the image of “the mist’s illusion” already hints at the illusory quality of fictitious capital and to the highest degree of fetishism it embodies.

The suggestion that financial forces have already appropriated the future of the city, and that prior spatial and social values there embedded are bound to be swept away within a new financial economy, gain consistency the moment Bucky rides past “an urban redevelopment project”: “machine-tooth shovels clawed past half finished buildings stuck in mud, tiny balconies stapled on. All spawned by realtor-kings”(263). The bulldozers, as they violently devour old constructions, eradicate the affective values such buildings embodied. Anticipating

Players, DeLillo focuses on real-estate speculation, financed by New York bankers and financial

institutions, as marking beginning of the financialisation of the city, and subsequently of the whole nation.390 _{Such geographical reorganizations leave behind “millions of acres of rubble”,}

rubble, Bucky notes, that the government is very glad to provide as free standing repository of scraps of food for homeless derelicts (262), “a transient population of thunderers and hags, traceless men and women”(263). The derelicts population of the city had already figured prominently in the novel, “often too wasted beg”(13):

Many of them had an arm and a leg in a cast, and the ones with bottles mustered sullenly in doorways, never breaking their empties, leaving them behind as they themselves moved north to forage, or simply disappeared. Two feeble men wrestled quietly, humming wordless curses at each other, and an old woman limped into view, bundled in pounds of rags, an image in the pencilled light of long retreat from Moscow….A black woman emerged from the smear of an abandoned car, talking a scattered song (13,18).

The outcasts possess a striking materiality that Bucky finds difficult to ignore. The derelicts, with their impaired bodies, symbolise an impaired labour class, displaced at the hands of cheaper labour lodged within alternative national, or global sites. The sight of these derelicts clearly conveyed “a sense of failed souls and forgotten lives on a new scale.”391 _{Read against the}

sight of the derelicts, “Great Jones, Bond Street, the Bowery are deserts too”(90), an urban desert which, not unlike the desert in End Zone, offers an adequate burial site for the body of labour.