Baltimore as world and representation: Cognitive mapping and capitalism in the wire
by Jeff Kinkle and Alberto Toscano
If the Gods are fucking you, you find a way to fuck them back.
- Commissioner Burrell
Academics? What, they gonna study your study?
- Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin to Dr. David Parenti, U. of Maryland sociologist studying young violent offenders in Baltimore
They gonna tear this building down and they're gonna build some new shit – but people? They don't give a fuck about people.
- Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus
Baltimore all I know. Man gotta live what he know.
- Omar Little
The capitalist city is the arena of the most intense social and political confusions at the same time as it is a monumental testimony to and a moving force within the dialectics of capitalism’s uneven development. How to penetrate the mystery, unravel the confusions, and grasp the contradictions?
- David Harvey, The Urban Experience
Are there cultural or aesthetic forms adequate to analysing, evoking or mapping the dynamics of the contemporary uneven and combined geographical development of capitalism? Is ‘representation’ a suitable concept to grasp the critical and clinical acumen, so to speak, of such forms? This presentation seeks to broach these questions by taking as its object the HBO TV series The Wire (2002-8). Despite a lack of recognition in terms of awards and ratings, The Wire has been the recipient of considerable critical acclaim, as well as scholarly and journalistic scrutiny. Set in inner-city Baltimore, that ‘dark corner of the American experiment’ (Simon) – the 20th largest city in the States with the second highest homicide rate in 2006 – The Wire is most superficially classifiable as a police procedural or crime drama. The show’s five seasons depict the city in remarkable breadth and depth. While the first season largely revolves around the drug trade, subsequent seasons expand the scope of the show to cover de-industrialisation, city hall, the school system, and the media. Each of these ‘worlds’ is mapped both vertically (making explicit internal hierarchies) and horizontally (tracking their interaction with the other ‘worlds’ spread throughout the city). For example, within the world of the drug dealers the show goes from the look out kids all the way up to the heads of each drug gang and then even to the suppliers. Within the police force we go from the snitch, the police on the beat, all the way up to the chief of police. This is repeated with in each world. Then we are also able to see how each world affects the ones around it. How the evaporation of working class jobs leads young men into the drug trade, how the kids of addicts and dealers cope at school, how city hall leans on the police force to employ meaningless policies (in terms of actual crime reduction) in order to ‘cook the books’, etc. The show descends into the hidden abode of street-level drug distribution, not to merely depict the violence and hopelessness that exist in these neighbourhoods, but to expose their complex organisation (1) and their hostile yet symbiotic relationship with the state and neoliberal institutions.Read more...>
Aernout Mik, Middleman, 2001
By David Harvey
Does this crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? My answer is that it depends what you mean by neo-liberalism. My interpretation is that it’s a class project, masked by a lot of neo-liberal rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, privatisation and the free market. These were means, however, towards the restoration and consolidation of class power, and that neo-liberal project has been fairly successful.
One of the basic principles that was set up in the 1970s was that state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. This is the principle that was worked out in New York City crisis in the mid-1970s, and was first defined internationally when Mexico threatened to go bankrupt in 1982. This would have destroyed the New York investment banks, so the US Treasury and the IMF combined to bail Mexico out. But in so doing they mandated austerity for the Mexican population. In other words they protected the banks and destroyed the people, and this has been the standard practice in the IMF ever since. The current bailout is the same old story, one more time, except bigger. Read more...>
Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History
By Nancy Fraser
I would like to use the occasion of this essay to take a broad, sweeping look at second-wave feminism (SWF). Not at this or that current of feminist activism, nor at this or that strand of feminist theorizing. Not at this or that geographical slice of the movement, nor at this or that sociological stratum of women. I want, rather, to try to see SWF whole, as an epochal social phenomenon. Looking back at nearly 40 years of feminist activism, I want to venture an assessment of the movement’s overall trajectory and historical significance. In looking back, however, I hope also to help us look forward. By reconstructing the path we have traveled, I hope to shed light on the challenges we face today–in a time of massive economic crisis, social uncertainty, and political realignment.
I am going to tell a story, then, about the broad contours and overall meaning of SWF. Equal parts historical narrative and social-theoretical analysis, my story is plotted around three points in time, each of which places SWF in relation to a specific moment in the history of capitalism. The first point refers to the movement’s beginnings in the context of what I will call “state-organized capitalism.” Here I propose to chart the emergence of SWF from out of the anti-imperialist New Left as a radical challenge to the pervasive androcentrism of state-led capitalist societies in the postwar era. Read more...>
Elasticity of demand
Reflections on The Wire
By John Kraniauskas
Can’t reason with the pusherman
Finance is all that he understands
Curtis Mayfield, “Little Child Runnin’ Wild”
David Simon and Edward Burns’s TV series The Wire (HBO, 2002–08) opens with a killing and builds from there, over five seasons and sixty hours of television. What it narrates is the present life of a neoliberalized postindustrial city, from the perspective of the bloody ‘corners’ of West Baltimore, USA. The Wire is a continuation of Simon and Burns’s earlier series The Corner (HBO, 2000), a quasi-anthropological reconstruction of real lives, directed by Charles S. Dutton. In fact, in many ways it is a combination and development of two previous TV series: NBC’s cop show Homicide (based on Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, 1991) and The Corner (based on Simon and Burns’ book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, 1997). Read more...>
The War against Pre-Terrorism: The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection
Alberto Toscano
Spectres of Anarchy: Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part Three
Irving Wohlfarth
Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire
John Kraniauskas
Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory; and Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, with Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss and Jonathan Lear
Nina Power
Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century
Harriet Evans
Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation
Jeremy Gilbert
Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life
Nathan Brown
Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics
David Owen
Propaganda Architecture
Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf interviewed by David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun
On Rem Koolhaas
Antonio Negri
Peace, Legality, Democracy
Mihalis Mentinis
Rebellion of Greek Youth
Panagiotis Sotiris
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