Reflexión sobre los Indicadores de Valor Agregado

Whether in delight or protest, the academic Left is generally unified in acknowledging that, since the mid-1970s, there has been a steady erosion of the nation-state in political and economic terms, as well as a corresponding increase in the relevance of the city as a unit of social analysis.45 _{Thatcherism is generally} deemed to have played a central role in this process and, in most accounts, to have compensated for the political and economic action it took to render the borders of the UK more porous—such as dismantling nationalised industries and opening British markets to international competition—by indulging in the kind of cultural nationalism that characterised the aftermath of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict. As we have already seen, Left culturalist figures followed Thatcherism onto this cultural terrain and valorised, in Gilroy’s words, “the role of distinctively urban processes” as a means of combatting its jingoistic

45 _{This is certainly true of Left culturalism too: in his exploration of the decline of the nation state, the}

New Times theorist David Held attributes particular responsibility to “the internationalisation of production finance and other economic resources” for “eroding the capacity of the state to control its own economic future” (Held 194). However, the claim that the nation-state should no longer be the principal focus of political, social and economic analysis has not just been heard on the Left. In her 1986 book Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs criticises Keynesian macro-economic theory for insisting that “national economies are useful and salient entities for understanding how economic life works and what its structure may be” (Jacobs Wealth 29). She contends that this perspective fails to account for the fact that within states there are often multiple economies that usually centre on cities. The latter, she claims, “are unique in their abilities to shape and reshape the economies of other settlements, including those far removed from them geographically” and should therefore take pride of place in any economic analysis (32). As we will see shortly, Jacobs’s contention is very similar to the quarrels of Doreen Massey and Edward Soja with orthodox Marxism, whose exclusively historical materialism they consider limited in its ability to account for the obviously spatial dimension of capitalist development.

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and hypostatised account of national identity. This strategy, as I argued in my reading of The Passion, entailed a celebration of the inner city as a site of social emancipation that embraced the political possibilities of disenfranchisement, and was expressed in Winterson’s novel very much in spatial terms. The plurality of marginalised inner-city communities was considered to possess the potential to resist the nationalism of the New Right because it appeared to provide real-world ballast to the culturalists’ theoretical account of identity- formation as an endless, discursive process in which groups and individuals are perpetually reconstituted by a free play of cultural signifiers that contradict as often as they complement one another. The plural approach to identity was thus

mapped onto the space of the inner city, which became as mercurial as the

populations that called it home, and in this way the flexibility of urban space was perceived to both express and reflect the highest progressive value of cultural complexity.

Like the Left culturalists, many figures connected to Marxism’s spatial turn were centrally concerned with the role of flexibility in post-Fordism.46 _And,

46 _{The transition from Fordism to post-Fordism consisted in the shift away from the mode of capital}

accumulation represented by the practises of Henry Ford and characterised overwhelmingly by rigidity—an emphasis on economies of scale, highly organised labour, and mass production and consumption—to a new mode organised around flexibility and specialisation, and consisting in economies of scope, non-unionised labour, and the specific targeting of consumer demographics. Hall and Jacques urge that the shift from the “rigid” world of Fordism towards the “flexible” one of post-Fordism “must not be understood as exclusively an economic development, in the narrow sense. Just as Fordism represented, not simply a form of economic organisation but a whole culture […] so post-Fordism is also shorthand for a much wider and deeper social and cultural development” (Hall and Jacques New Times 12). As part of their attempt to locate new sites of left- wing inquiry and action in postmodernity, Hall and Jacques sought to resist a tendency across the British Left to dehistoricise Thatcherism and treat it as somehow coterminous with post-Fordism, rather than as a specific response to historical circumstances that were value-free. They provide a rebuttal to the claim that the new economic, political and cultural circumstances rendered the Left irrelevant by urging that post-Fordism never possessed a particular political trajectory, and that it was a major mistake for leftists to have assumed that it did: “It was not just that much of the Left had failed to understand the novelty and specificity of Thatcherism. What is more important is that it failed to distinguish adequately between […] Thatcherism and the world which Thatcherism claimed to represent and aspired to lead […] As a result, the Left failed to recognise the new ground or understand the new world that was being made. That new world and

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like the Left culturalists, they sought to respond to both the challenge presented by the Right’s apparent appropriation of flexible space for its own ends, as well as some of the most antiquated—and deeply-held—assumptions of the Left itself. However, the way in which they formulated this response differed significantly from the methodology of figures such as Hall and Gilroy, who started by analysing flexibility in relation to cultural identity, and then expanded their analysis to exploit the possibilities they perceived in inner-city space. While still maintaining an interest in the cultural dimensions of post-Fordism, thinkers such as David Harvey—whose The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) is a key text of the spatial turn—focused instead on elaborating a theory of space that might be reconciled more readily with an orthodox emphasis on historical materialism.47 _{In other words, for Harvey the starting point was not identity, but} space, time and the relationship between the two. He begins his investigation by characterising the experience of postmodernity as deeply bound up with “new dominant ways in which we experience space and time” that owe much to the emergence of “more flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of ‘time-space compression’ in the organization of capitalism” (Harvey vii). In this way, he identifies this changing experience of time and space as the place to begin in any attempt to describe postmodernity in cultural terms.48 _{This said,} Thatcherism were seen as one and the same thing. The latter, as a consequence, looked omnipotent, as if it was in command of history” (Hall and Jacques New Times 15).

47 _{While many of the Left culturalists challenge the orthodoxy of economic determinism, Harvey}

abides by it and argues that “when set against the basic rules of capitalistic accumulation”, the new economic, political and cultural circumstances that emerged from 1972 onwards—that is, post-Fordism—“appear more as shifts in surface appearance rather than as signs of the emergence of some entirely new postcapitalist or even postindustrial society” (Harvey vii). Postmodernism serves only as a cultural expression of new, post-Fordist economic practices, rather than a gesture beyond the economistic base-superstructure model itself; his aim is merely to “give an account of space and time in social life so as to highlight material links between political-economic and cultural processes” (Harvey 201).

48 _{Harvey identifies the cultural corollary of Fordism in the emphasis on rational organisation as a}

utopian project in, for example, the architectural modernism of Le Corbusier, which—as typified in his slogan “By order bring about freedom” (qtd. in Harvey 31)—appealed to rationality as a means of bringing about social emancipation. Harvey claims that it was just this totalising rationality that came to be opposed by the countercultural movements of the 1960s, which

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Harvey is by no means the only thinker to come upon this revelation, nor to draw on it in shedding light on postmodernity’s cultural dimensions: crucial to Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” is an elucidation of the representation of time and space in postmodernity, and particularly of the flattening and disorientating effects of postmodern architecture, photography and film. In fact, the “reassertion of space in critical social theory”, as Edward Soja subtitles his Postmodern Geographies (1989), was by the end of the decade a well-established theoretical trend within Marxism. In addition to responding, as Harvey suggests, to the new political, economic and cultural circumstances of post-Fordism, this reassertion of space was also informed by a growing awareness of globalisation and its effects: firstly, as trade and migration barriers lifted and revealed the geographical iniquities of wealth and development across cities, countries, continents and the planet; and, consequently, as progressive agendas sought to identify a praxis that was capable of spanning the seemingly unbridgeable distance between the global and the local. Some fundamental questions were asked of the Left by texts such as Doreen Massey’s Spatial Divisions of Labour, in which she argues that “[e]ach country is different, and these differences have geographical implications”; that, even within individual nation-states, “things are more complex than a simple confrontation between capital and labour” (Massey 16-17). In the face of these various geographical differences, Marxism’s rigidly diachronic perspective seemed suddenly myopic: surely uneven development needed to be accounted for synchronically as well? As Soja writes, an exclusively historical materialism “tended to occlude a comparable critical ability to the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the lifeworld of being creatively disdained the “oppressive qualities of scientifically grounded technical-bureaucratic rationality as purveyed through monolithic corporate, state, and other forms of institutionalized power”. Laying down the cultural foundations of postmodernism, these movements emphasised instead “individualized self-realization through a distinctive ‘new Left’ politics, through the embrace of anti-authoritarian gestures, iconoclastic habits (in music, dress, language and lifestyle), and the critique of everyday life” (38). In other words, just those gestures and habits explored by early Left culturalist texts such as Hebdige’s Subculture.

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located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes” (11).

However, as far as the present investigation is concerned, what is crucial about the spatial turn is that it explicitly identified the Right as the agency behind the massive expansion of flexible space in postmodernity, as well as the worrying consequences this entailed. Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) provides the most emotive example of this kind of analysis, 49 _{but more} interesting for us is without doubt Beatrix Campbell’s 1989 foray into Britain’s “New Times Towns”, due to the peculiar nature of its connection with Left culturalism.50 _{In her essay, Campbell visits a number of locations she claims are} expressive of post-Fordist urbanism, and after a discussion of Livingston, Sheffield and Swindon, we end up in Basingstoke, forty-eight miles west of

49 _{At its most dystopian, Davis’s account reads like a Nineteen Eighty-Four of postmodernity. In his}

“Fortress LA”, “municipal policy has taken its lead from the security offensive and the middle-class demand for increased spatial and social insulation” (Davis Quartz 227). The LAPD’s “quixotic quest” to bring safety to sidewalks conceals a brutal spatial dichotomy whose true logic leads inevitably to a massive assault on the public realm: “good citizens, off the streets, enclaved in their high-security private consumption spheres; bad citizens, on the streets (and therefore not engaged in legitimate business)” (253). What is more, there is very little we can do about it. There are no spaces of resistance in Davis’s account, no heterotopias, no enclaves of anti-hegemonic activity. As implied in my reading of The Passion, totalisation is indeed the end of neoliberalism’s spatial project, but this is achieved via an emphasis on precisely the kind of flexibility and indeterminacy that the novel locates at the heart of any attempt to combat such totalisation. The inner cities, which are represented as politically fecund in The Passion, are, in City of Quartz, solely “carceral”; their best expressions located in “pop apocalypses and pulp science fiction” like Escape

from New York, Running Man and Blade Runner(223).

50 _{Campbell herself could not be properly labelled a Left culturalist: she is a left-wing investigative}

journalist whose reports cover a range of subjects from sexual politics to child abuse and the plight of British urban youth. Nonetheless, it is significant that “New Times Towns” was initially published in Marxism Today when the journal was edited by Martin Jacques and heavily influenced by Hall and his culturalist agenda, and subsequently reprinted as part of the collection

New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, which was edited by Hall and Jacques and

anthologised a number of other leading Left culturalists, including Dick Hebdige. Campbell thus operates with sufficient proximity to Left culturalism to be familiar with its agenda while also maintaining a critical distance that enables her to discuss it with an outsider’s trenchancy.

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London. This town, Campbell concludes, is a perfect example of “Thatchergrad”. The historic market centre has been demolished and rebuilt as a fortress of high-tech companies, and so thoroughly privatised is social space that leisure time has been completely domesticated: a wine box and a video at night; car- cleaning and DIY at the weekend. There is a general focus on policing and surveillance, territorial imperatives and forbidden spaces. For example, she writes: “The place dies at night—one evening I counted precisely fourteen people in the town centre—six were at cash points, the rest were on their way to somewhere else […] Legend has it that the Pru[dential financial company]’s security people have rid the place of undesirables” (295). However, for all this obsession with menacing security forces and desolate urban vistas, we should be careful to differentiate Campbell’s vision from the bureaucratised and absurdly violent regimes of a thousand mid-century dystopias.51 _{For the logic of} this dark and dismal urban space has more to do with laissez-faire than with red tape and regulation. Campbell is emphatic in attributing responsibility for this state of affairs to the ruling Conservative council, and draws explicit attention to the retrusion of political impediments to investment and development which, she says with some irony, has produced “a flourishing economy unimpeded by planning, by civic pride, or by community politics”.

In this respect Basingstoke is typical of Thatcherite urban design, which, as we have seen, emphasised the need to sweep away local planning ordinances and the political power that protected them. What is interesting is that the

51 _{Without a doubt, the best-known novels to explore the spatial logic of the post-Fordist city are}

Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1984, 1986, 1988)—William Gibson’s so-

called “Sprawl” trilogy—which is widely perceived to be a crowning achievement of the cyberpunk genre. Decrepit cities, youth subcultures and criminal personalities are staples of cyberpunk literature, which often features near-future dystopias in which multinational corporations wield more power than elected governments. These companies have to be resisted by fugitive outcasts, who are frequently computer hackers that must to negotiate competing— often amoral—interests with the currency of controlled information. All these generic features are present in British author Jeff Noon’s “Vurt” trilogy (Vurt, Pollen and Nymphomation (1993, 1995, 1997)). That rave-era Manchester is such as influence on Noon’s cyberpunk fiction is worth taking note of, as the political (and apolitical) aspects of late 1980s dance subculture will be discussed shortly.

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rhetoric of this agenda relied heavily on the concept of flexibility: for instance, in his 1984 speech to the House of Commons, Environment Secretary Patrick Jenkin urged that “[p]lanning authorities must adopt a flexible and pragmatic approach to meet the ends of versatile enterprises” (qtd. in Brinley et. al. 16). Concluding their study of urban planning during the 1980s—published in the same year as “New Times Towns”—Tim Brindley, Yvonne Rydin and Gerry Stoker argue that going into the 1990s “‘[f]lexbility’ will be the keyword of the new style of trend planning. Development plans will be flexible planning frameworks” (Brinley et. al. 177). And this is the crux of the issue: rather than providing a basis for oppositionality, flexibility becomes the means by which Thatcherism realises its totalising spatial logic. Indeterminate spaces no longer provide the best conditions for realising the concept—much-vaunted by Left culturalism—of cultural complexity. As Campbell writes, “Citizenship has none of the multiple identities implied by the broader vision of the new times theory. Here the citizen is only a consumer” (295). Once, flexibility had been the foundation upon which the cultural Left built its model of resistance, by focusing on the endless flexibility of the subject herself. And, as our discussion of The

Passion suggested, it was out of this flexible account of subjectivity that the

celebration of flexible space arose. But in light of the observations provided by the spatial turn, this account appeared dangerously close to the right-wing logics it was intended to resist, and the celebration of indeterminacy—whether spatial or identitarian—no longer seemed to possess emancipatory promise. Indeed, now flexibility appeared to have become aligned quite explicitly with isolation, atomism—even totalitarianism.