On The MASA

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...>