Operaciones y logística. Infraestructura (O)

As we have seen, landsc^geiscomplex and multifaceted, both a site to be struggled over and an ideology that seeks to govern^QurJived-ielatiops. In this sense we can see the landscape as a "vortex" within which swirl all manner of contests - between classes, over gender structures, around issues of race and ethnicity, over meaning and representation, and over built form and social use. The landscape serves all at once as mediator, integrator, and actor in these struggles. "As a produced object, landscape is like a commodity in which evident, temporarily stable, form masks the facts of its production, and its status as social relation. As both form and symbol, landscape is expected by those who attempt to define its meanings to speak unambiguously for itself" (Mitchell 1996a: 30). In this sense, the form of the landscape actively incorpor- ates the struggles over it. "Landscape is thus a fragmentation of space and a totalization of it. People make sense of their fractured world by seeing it as a whole, by seeking to impose meanings and connections" (1996a: 31). We all do read the landscape, but we are not all equal in the process of "authoring" it - nor in 12 The best analysis of the aestheticization of politics in the realm of cultural production is still Benjamin (1968 [1936]).

140 T H E P O L I T I C A L L A N D S C A P E

controlling its meanings. Landscape representations serve precisely to create (or attempt to create) a total and naturalized environment. If the landscape is a text, then it is a very powerful one indeed. And if it is a theater or stage, then it is one in which the director is power itself.13

If that is what landscape is, then the question arises again as to what it does. To answer that question, it is important to remember that despite all the fragmentation, the diversity, the continual ebb, flow, and transformation of social life, we live in a world that is a "social totality": there are aspects of social life - political, economic, and cultural aspects - that are global and universal (or at least have pretensions to be so).14 One of those overarching processes, contested as it undeniably always is, is the drive to accumulate capital - a drive that, as Marx rightly showed long ago, is no respecter of pre-existing social, political, economic, or cultural boundaries, or of pre- existing "ways of life." Yet the accumulation of capital can only occur to the degree that it uses those pre-existing ways of life and turns them to its own advantage. As Marx (1987: 537) put it, in a statement both admirably simple and exceptionally profound in its implications (implications that Marx himself never fully grasped): the "maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and ever must be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital." On the one hand, Marx (1987: 537) argued that the reproduction of the working class - of labor-power - could be left "safe- l y . . . to the labourer's instinct for self-preservation." On the other hand, he under- stood (1987: 168) that such a statement was too simple. The reproduction of the working class, he argued, everywhere and always possesses an "historical and moral element," which may appear as a set of "natural" or "necessary wants," but, because it is "historical and moral," is clearly socially constructed. The historical and "moral" development of the working classes in any place - in short, its "culture" - is itself a continual site of struggle. To what degree do workers (whether called working or middle class does not matter) "need," for example, detached houses and cars; to what extent do they "need" wages sufficient for them to become constant consumers? By contrast, when is it "historically" or "morally" "natural" for workers to live in shacks and to subsist on wages of under a dollar a day? And what is the relationship between the places in which these two worlds exist?

Sharon Zukin (1991: 16) argues that landscape "connotes the entire panorama of what we see: both the landscape of the powerful - cathedrals, factories, and sky- scrapers - and the subordinate, resistant or expressive vernacular of the powerless - village chapel, shantytowns, and tenements." But note that in this description, Zukin holds the two landscapes spatially separate, seeing the "high culture" of production and symbolic development as disconnected from the powerless integrity of the verna- cular. In reality, each sort of landscape depends on the other: our ability to consume is predicated on "their" low wages and the miserable conditions that exist elsewhere. Or to use one of Zukin's own examples, the development of a landscape of skyscrapers is a product of social struggle both within and outside them: struggles over the condi- tions of labor and labor reproduction (who will construct, clean, and staff the 13 As we will see below, it is deceptive to speak of "power" in general and universal terms. Power works in and through particular historically- and geographically-specific social formations.

14 The best analyses of the world as a social totality remain Lukacs (1971), and Debord (1994). This section draws on Mitchell (1994 and 1996a: chapter 1).

buildings? where will these workers live? how will they eat and with whom will they socialize?); struggles over land use (where will urban renewal, and where will gentri- fication occur? how strong are neighborhood organizations both where the sky- scrapers are built and elsewhere in the city? what will the social costs of commuting be - and who will bear them?), and issues of race, gender, and citizenship (who will be allowed in the "public" space of the corporate plazas? how will the value of the buildings be maintained in the face of the changing demographic nature of the city?). Each of these struggles has its obverse in struggles over the nature of the places in which the skyscraper workers will live (city or suburb? small town exurb or down- town tenement?), and in the far-flung places that will provide them their sustenance (the bananas for their cereal, the shoes on their feet, the building materials for their own houses). Indeed, the answer to this second set of struggles will also be answers to the first set - and the chain of connection between and across landscapes is nearly infinite. The production of any landscape requires the constant reproduction of other landscapes in other places. The reproduction of labor-power in one place is impos- sible without its (always socially different) reproduction in other places.

But within this social totality, there exist important contradictions. At each place in the chain - in the building, maintenance, and staffing of the skyscraper, in the factory making Nikes or the plantation growing bananas, in the shantytowns on the banks of the Rio Grande and Harlem rivers, in the suburban tract homes of Piscataway, New Jersey, or the council houses of Paisley, Scotland - the reproduction of the inequality that makes the whole totality possible is always subject to revolt. If productive landscapes are to be maintained under capitalism (or for that matter, any other political-economic system), then possibilities for revolt must be minimized. This provides marginalized social actors with an important degree of power - indeed an essential degree because their status as a threat must always be neutralized. As a social and obfuscatory mediation, as both an input to and outcome of all these social struggles, landscapes are built as an attempt to insure this neutralization. Like culture, then, the landscape acts as a site of social integration, and therefore of social hegemony. The landscape emerges as a social compromise between threat and dom- ination, between the imposition of social power and the subversion of social order. In turn, the very form of landscape results from these interactions and contested imposi- tions. The landscape itself, as a unitary, "solid" form, is therefore a contradiction, held in uneasy truce (unless actively contested at some moment in time). Ongoing and everyday social struggle - along with all the mundane aspects of everyday life itself, like shopping, playing, and working - forms and reforms the landscape. Landscape reifies (at least momentarily) the "natural" social order. And landscape, therefore, becomes the "stage" for the social reproduction of not only labor-power, but society itself.

Yet the reproduction of labor-power remains important. By defining the reified "natural" relations of place, landscape materially affects the equation of surplus value extraction within a region (that is, it greatly affects the conditions under which firms will or will not be profitable). To the degree that social unrest, various social demands, or movements for self-determination or autonomy within a region can be stilled by pressing in on people the "naturalness" of existing social relations, surplus value can be expanded; reproduction is not threatened. If it can be successfully asserted that workers in Johnstown have no choice but to accept

142 T H E P O L I T I C A L L A N D S C A P E

declining wages (because the old mills and new pollution requirements drive up costs; or because cheap foreign steel is flooding the market), to the degree that they can be convinced that making their mortgage is their own individual problem despite their employer shutting them out of a job, then to that degree, either in Johnstown itself or more "globally," capital can continue to function. The production of a landscape, by objectifying, rationalizing, and naturalizing what is really social, can have the effect of stopping resistance in its tracks. As social values are naturalized in place, they are historically made concrete. If, as David Harvey has argued, the landscapes of cap- italism are often a barrier to further accumulation (as with Johnstown) and have to be creatively destroyed (wiping out heavy industry and sanitizing space to make it attractive to tourists, for example), it is also the case that a landscape can become a great facilitator to capital (since it determines the "nature" of labor).