Article_ Marta Rosler I- 190

8/6/2019 Article_ Marta Rosler I- 190

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Martha Rosler

Culture Class:Art, Creativity,

Urbanism, Part I

PART ONE: ART AND URBANISM

When Abstract Expressionists explored theterrain of the canvas and Pollock createdsomething of a disorientation map by putting hisunstretched canvases on the floor, few observersand doubtless fewer painters would haveacknowledged a relationship between theirconcerns and real estate, let alone transnationalcapital flows.

Space, as many observers have noted, hasdisplaced time as the operative dimension ofadvanced, globalizing (and post-industrial?)capitalism.1 Time itself, under this economicregime, has been differentiated, spatialized, anddivided into increasingly smaller units.2 Even invirtual regimes, space entails visuality in oneway or another. The connection betweenRenaissance perspective and the enclosures oflate medieval Europe, together with the new ideaof terrain as a real-world space to be negotiated,supplying crossing points for commerce, was

only belatedly apparent. Similarly, the rise ofphotography has been traced to suchphenomena as the encoding of earthly space andthe enclosing of land in the interest of groundrent. For a long time now, art and commerce havenot simply taken place side by side, but haveactively set the terms for one another, creatingand securing worlds and spaces in turn.

Jackson Pollock in his studio.

My task here is to explore the positioning ofwhat urban business evangelist Richard Florida

has branded the creative class, and its role,ascribed and anointed, in reshaping economies

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Paris, May '68.

Meeting of the Situationist International, Gteborg, 1961.

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in cities, regions, and societies. In pursuit of thataim, I will consider a number of theories someof them conflicting of the urban and of forms ofsubjectivity. In reviewing the history of postwarurban transformations, I consider the culture ofthe art world on the one hand, and, on the other,the ways in which the shape of experience andidentity under the regime of the urban renderchimerical the search for certain desirable

attributes in the spaces we visit or inhabit.Considering the creative-class hypothesis ofRichard Florida and others requires us first totease apart and then rejoin the urbanist and thecultural strains of this argument. I wouldmaintain, along with many observers, that in anyunderstanding of postwar capitalism, the role ofculture has become pivotal.I open the discussion with the Frenchphilosopher and sometime Surrealist HenriLefebvre, whose theorization of the creation andcapitalization of types of space has been

enormously productive. Lefebvre begins his bookof 1970, The Urban Revolution, as follows:

Ill begin with the following hypothesis:Society has been completely urbanized.This hypothesis implies a definition: Anurban societyis a society that results froma process of complete urbanization. Thisurbanization is virtual today, but willbecome real in the future.3

Lefebvres book helped usher in a modern versionof political geography, influencing FredricJameson, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells,among other prominent writers and theorists ofboth culture and the urban (Harvey, in turn, iscited as an influence by Richard Florida). In hisintroduction to Lefebvres book, geographer NeilSmith writes that Lefebvre put the urban on theagenda as an explicit locus and target of politicalorganizing.4

Succumbing to neither empiricism norpositivism, Lefebvre did not hesitate to describethe urban as a virtual state whose fullinstantiation in human societies still lay in the

future. In Lefebvres typology, the earliest citieswere political, organized around institutions ofgovernance. The political city was eventuallysupplanted in the Middle Ages by the mercantilecity, organized around the marketplace, and thenby the industrial city, finally entering a criticalzone on the way to a full absorption of theagrarian by the urban. Even in less developed,agrarian societies that do not (yet) appear to beeither industrialized or urban, agriculture issubject to the demands and constraints ofindustrialization. In other words, the urban

paradigm has overtaken and subsumed allothers, determining the social relations and the

conduct of daily life within them. (Indeed, thevery concept of daily life is itself a product ofindustrialism and the urban.)Lefebvres emphasis on the citycontradicted the orderliness of Le Corbusier,whom he charged with having failed to recognizethat the street is the site of a living disorder, aplace, in his words, to play and learn; it is a siteof the informative function, the symbolic

function, the ludic function.5

Lefebvre cites theobservations of the foundational urban observerJane Jacobs, and identifies the street itself, withits bustle and life, as the only security againstviolence and criminality. Finally, Lefebvre notes soon after the events and discourses of May 68in France that revolution takes place in thestreet, creating a new order out of disorder.The complexity of city life often appears,from a governmental standpoint, to be atroublesome Gordian knot to be disentangled orsliced through. A central task of modernity has

been the amelioration and pacification of thecities of the industrializing metropolitan core;the need was already apparent by the middle ofthe nineteenth century, when the primeexamples were those at the epicenter ofindustrialism, London and Manchester.6 Controlof these newly urbanizing populations alsorequired raising them to subsistence level, whichhappened gradually over the succeedingdecades, and not without tremendous strugglesand upheaval. Industrialization also vastlyincreased the flow of people to cities, as itcontinues to do even in poor countries withvery low-income levels per capita to the extentthat Lefebvres prediction regarding fullurbanization is soon to come true; since 2005,there are more people living in cities than in thecountryside.7

In the advanced industrial economies,twentieth-century urban planning encompassednot only the engineering of new transportationmodalities but also the creation of newneighborhoods with improved housing for theworking classes and the poor. For a few briefdecades, the future seemed within the grasp of

the modern. After the Second World War,bombed-out European cities provided somethingof a blank canvas, delighting the likes of W.G.Witteveen, a Rotterdam civil engineer andarchitect who exulted in the possibilitiesprovided by the near-total destruction of thatport city by Nazi bombing in May 1940. In manyintact or nearly intact cities in the US andWestern Europe, both urban renewal andpostwar reconstruction followed a similar plan:clear out the old and narrow, divide or replacethe dilapidated neighborhoods with better roads

and public transport.8 While small industrialproduction continued as the urban economic

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backbone, many cities also invited theburgeoning corporate and financial servicessectors to locate their headquarters there,sweetening their appeal through zoningadjustments and tax breaks. International Stylecommercial skyscrapers sprouted around theworld as cities became concentrations, real andsymbolic, of state and corporate administration.

Paris.

The theoretical underpinning for a

renovated cityscape came primarily from theearlier, utopian millennial and interwar designsof forward-looking, albeit totalizing, plans forremaking the built environment. It was not loston the city poor that so-called urban renewalprojects targeted their neighborhoods and thecultural traditions that enlivened them. Citieswere being remade for the benefit of the middleand upper classes, and the destruction of theolder neighborhoods whether in the interest ofcommercial, civic, or other forces, such asenhanced mobility for trucks and private cars extirpated the haunts of those beyond the reachof law and bourgeois proclivities, adverselyaffecting the lives and culture of the poorerresidents.One may trace the grounding of the mid-century European group the SituationistInternational in a recognition of the growing roleof the visual and its relation to spatiality inmodern capitalism, and thus the complicit role ofart in systems of exploitation. The core Frenchgroup of Situationists Lefebvres sometimestudents (and, some might say, collaborators andcertainly occasional adversaries) attacked, as

Lefebvre had done, the radiant-city visions of LeCorbusier (and by implication other utopianmodernists) for designing a carceral city in whichthe poor are locked up and thrust into a strangelynarrow utopia of light and space, but removedfrom a free social life in the streets. (LeCorbusiers housing projects called UnitsdHabitation, the most famous of which is inMarseille, were elevated above their gardensurrounds on pilotis. The floors were called rues,or streets, and one such street was to bedevoted to shops; kindergartens and at least in

the one I visited, in Firminy, near St. Etienne alow-powered radio station were also located

within the building, together suggesting theconditions of a walled city.)

We will leave Monsieur Le Corbusiers styleto him, a style suitable for factories andhospitals, and no doubt eventually forprisons. (Doesnt he already buildchurches?) Some sort of psychologicalrepression dominates this individual

whose face is as ugly as his conceptions ofthe world such that he wants to squashpeople under ignoble masses of reinforcedconcrete, a noble material that shouldrather be used to enable an aerialarticulation of space that could surpass theflamboyant Gothic style. His cretinizinginfluence is immense. A Le Corbusier modelis the only image that arouses in me theidea of immediate suicide. He is destroyingthe last remnants of joy. And of love,passion, freedom.

Ivan Chetcheglov9

Paul Gavarni,Le Flneur, 1842.

Perhaps it is the primacy of the spatial register,with its emphasis on visuality, but also its turn to

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Photograph by Richard Laymanof poster in the collection of the

Washington, DC, Department ofTransportation.

virtuality, to representation, that also accountsfor architectures return to prominence in theimaginary of the arts, displacing not only musicbut architectures spectral double, the cinema.This change in the conduct of everyday life, andthe centrality of the city to such changes, wereapparent to the Situationists, and Debordsconcept of what he termed the society of thespectacle is larger than any particular instances

of architecture or real estate, and certainly largerthan questions of cinema or television. Debordsspectacle denotes the all-encompassing,controlling nature of modern industrial andpost-industrial culture. Thus, Debord definesthe spectacle not in terms of representationalone but also in terms of the social relations ofcapitalism and its ability to subsume all intorepresentation: The spectacle is not a collectionof images; rather, it is a social relationshipbetween people that is mediated by images.10

Elements of culture were in the forefront, but the

focus was quite properly on the dominant modeof production.The Situationists engagement with city lifeincluded a practice they called the drive. Thedrive, an exploration of urban neighborhoods, aversion of the nineteenth-century tradition of theflneur, and an inversion of the bourgeois

promenade of the boulevards (concerned as thelatter was with visibility to others, while theflneurs was directed toward his ownexperience), hinged on the relatively free flow oforganic life in the neighborhoods, a freedom frombureaucratic control, that dynamic element oflife also powerfully detailed by Lefebvre and JaneJacobs. Both Baudelaire and Benjamin gave theflneurprominence, and by the end of the

twentieth century the flneurwas adopted as afavored, if minor, figure for architects wishing toadd pedestrian cachet to projects such asshopping malls that mimic public plazas thusclosing the book on the unadministered spacesthat the Situationists, at least, were concernedwith defending.The Western art world has periodicallyrediscovered the Situationists, who presentlyoccupy what a friend has described as a quasi-religious position, embodying every aspiringartist/revolutionarys deepest wish to be in

both the political and the artistic vanguardsimultaneously. The ghostly presence of theSituationists, including Debord, Asger Jorn,Raoul Vaneigem, and Constant, predictably tookup residence at the moment the very idea of theartistic vanguard disappeared. The cautionarydilemma they pose is how to combat the power

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of spectacle culture under advancedcapitalism without following their decision toabandon the terrain of art (as Duchamp had doneearlier). To address this question, context andhistory are required. Let us continue with theevents of the 1960s, in the Situationists moment characterized by rising economic expectationsfor the postwar generation in the West andbeyond, but also by riot and revolt, both internal

and external.By the 1960s, deindustrializa tion was onthe horizon of many cities in the US andelsewhere as the flight of manufacturing capitalto nonunion areas and overseas was gatheringsteam, often abetted by state policy. In an era ofdecline for central cities, thanks tosuburbanization and corporate, as well asmiddle-class (white) flight, a new transformationwas required. Dilapidated downtownneighborhoods became the focus of cityadministrations seeking ways to revive them

while simultaneously withdraw ing city servicesfrom the remaining poor residents, ideallywithout fomenting disorder. In Paris, riven byunrest during the Algerian War, the chosensolution encompassed pacification throughpolice mobilization and the evacuation of poorresidents to a new, outer ring of suburbs, orbanlieues, yoking the utopian high-rise schemeto the postwar banishment of the urban poor andthe dangerous classes.11 By 1967, the lack ofeconomic viability of these banlieues, and theparticular stress that put on housewives, waswidely recognized, becoming the subject ofJean-Luc Godards brilliant film Two or ThreeThings I Know About Her.In other countries, conversely, the viabilityof housing projects or council housing inimproving the lives of the urban poor has beenincreasingly challenged, and it is an article ofneoliberal faith that such projects cannotsucceed a prophecy fulfilled by the covertracial policies underlying the siting of theseprojects and the selection of residents, followed,in cities that wish to tear them down, byconsistent underfunding of maintenance and

services. In Britain the Thatcherist solution wasto sell the flats to the residents, with therationale of making the poor into stakeholders,with results yet to be determined (although thepitfalls seem obvious). With the failure of manystate-initiated postwar housing schemes for thepoor supplying a key exhibit in neoliberal urbandoctrine, postmodern architecture showed itselfwilling to jettison humanism in the wake of theruin of the grand claims of utopian modernism. Inthe US, commentator Charles Jencks famouslyidentified as the moment of postmodernism

the phased implosion in 1972 in a bemusingchoreography often replayed today of the

Pruitt-Igoe housing project, a 33-buildingmodernist complex in St. Louis, Missouri. Pruitt-Igoe, commissioned in 1950 during an era ofpostwar optimism, had been built to house thosewho had moved to the city for war work primarily proletarianized African-Americans fromthe rural South.

Pruitt-Igoe housing project in the 1950s and in the process ofimplosion.

The abandonment of the widely heldtwentieth-century paradigm of state- andmunicipality-sponsored housing thus properly

joined the other retreats from utopianism thatconstituted the narratives of postmodernism.Either blowing up or selling off housing projectshas subsequently been adopted enthusiasticallyby many US cities, such as Newark, New Jersey,which happily supplied a mediatized spectacle ofeviction and displacement but so far has notreached my home city, New York, primarilybecause, as a matter of policy, New Yorkshousing projects have never occupied the centerof town. In post-Katrina New Orleans, however,the moment of Schumpeterian creativedestruction allowed for the closure tout court ofthe largely undamaged, 1200-home LafittePublic Housing Development in the Lower NinthWard (the project was demolished withoutfanfare or fireworks in 2008).Throughout the 1960s, as formermetropolitan empires schemed, struggled, andstrong-armed to secure alternative ways tomaintain cheap access to productive resourcesand raw materials in the post-colonial world, the

Western democracies, because of unrest amongyoung people and minorities centering onincreasing demands for political agency, werediagnosed by policy elites as ungovernable. In anumber of cities, as middle-class adults, andsome young hippies, were leaving, groups ofother people, including students and workingclass families, took part in poor peoples housinginitiatives that included sweat equity (in whichthe municipality grants ownership rights to thosewho form collectives to rehabilitate decayedtenement properties, generally the ones in which

they are living) or squatting. In cities that havenot succeeded, as New York and London have

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done, in turning themselves into centers ofcapital concentration through finance,insurance, and real estate, the squattermovement has had a long tail and still figures inmany European cities. In the US, the urbanhomesteading movement, primarilyaccomplished through the individual purchase ofdistressed homes, quickly became recognized asa new, more benign way of colonizing

neighborhoods and driving out the poor. Suchnew middle-class residents were often referredto by real-estate interests and their newspaperflacks not to mention an enthusiastic Mayor EdKoch as urban pioneers, as though the oldneighborhoods could be understood according tothe model of the Wild West. These developmentssurely seemed organic to the individuals movingin; as threatened communities began to resist,however, the process of change quickly enoughgained a name: gentrification.In some major cities, some of the colonizers

were artists, writers, actors, dancers, and poets.Many lived in old tenements; but artists did notso much want apartments as places to work andlive, and the ideal spaces were disused factoriesor manufacturing lofts. In New York, while poets,actors, dancers, and writers were moving to suchold working-class residential areas as the LowerEast Side, many artists took up residence innearby manufacturing-loft neighborhoods.Artists had been living in lofts since at least the1950s, and while the city winked at suchresidents, it still considered their situation to beboth temporary and illegal. But loft-dwellingartists continued agitating for city recognitionand protection, which appeared increasingly

likely to be granted as the 1960s advanced.A canny observer of this process was NewYork City-based urban sociologist Sharon Zukin.In her book Loft Living: Culture and Capital inUrban Change, published in 1982, Zukin writesabout the role of artists in making loft livingcomprehensible, even desirable. She focuses onthe transformation, beginning in the mid-1960s,of New Yorks cast-iron district into an artist

district that was eventually dubbed Soho. In thisremarkable book, Zukin lays out a theory ofurban change in which artists and the entirevisual art sector especially commercialgalleries, artist-run spaces, and museums area main engine for the repurposing of the post-industrial city and the renegotiation of realestate for the benefit of elites. She writes:

Looking at loft living in terms of terrain andmarkets rather than lifestyle linkschanges in the built environment with the

collective appropriation of public goods. studying the formation of markets directs attention to investors rather thanconsumers as the source of change.12

Zukin demonstrates how this policy change wascarried forward by city officials, art supporters,and well-placed art patrons serving on land-usecommissions and occupying other seats ofpower.

The creation of constituencies for historicpreservation and the arts carried over afascination with old buildings and artistsstudios into a collective appropriation of

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VALS chart.

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these spaces for modern residential andcommercial use. In the grand scheme ofthings, loft living gave the coup de grce tothe old manufacturing base of cities likeNew York and brought on the final stage oftheir transformation into service-sectorcapitals.13

Reminding us that by the 1970s, art suggested a

new platform to politicians who were tired ofdealing with urban poverty, Zukin quotes anartist looking back ruefully at the creation ofSoho as a district that addressed the needs ofartists rather than those of the poor:

At the final hearing where the Board ofEstimate voted to approve SoHo as anartists district, there were lots of othergroups giving testimony on other matters.Poor people from the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy complaining about rats, rent control,

and things like that. The board just shelvedthose matters and moved right along. Theydidnt know how to proceed. Then theycame to us. All the press secretaries werethere, and the journalists. The klieg lightswent on, and the cameras started to roll.And all these guys started makingspeeches about the importance of art toNew York City.14

One of Zukins many exhibits is this publishedremark by Dick Netzer, a prominent member ofNew Yorks Municipal Assistance Corporation,the rescue agency set up during New York Citysfiscal near-default:

The arts may be small in economic termseven in this region, but the arts industryis one of our few growth industries Theconcentration of the arts in New York is oneof the attributes that makes it distinctive,and distinctive in a positive sense: the artsin New York are a magnet for the rest of theworld.15

Many cities, especially those lacking significantcultural sectors, established other revitalizationstrategies. Efforts to attract desirablecorporations to post-industrial cities soonprovoked the realization that it was the humancapital in the persons of the managerial eliteswere the ones whose needs and desires shouldbe addressed. The provision of so-called quality-of-life enhancements to attract these highearners became urban doctrine, a formulaconsisting of providing delights for the malemanagers in the form of convention centers and

sports stadia, and for the wives, museums,dance, and the symphony. An early, high-profile

example of the edifice complex as proposedurban enhancement is provided by the JohnPortmandesigned Detroit Renaissance Centerof 1977 a seven-skyscraper riverfront complexowned by General Motors and housing its worldheadquarters, and including the tallest buildingin Michigan meant as a revitalizing engine inthe car city that has more recently been cast asthe poster child for deindustrialization. But

eventually, despite all the bond-funded taxbreaks paradoxically given to these edifices, andall the money devoted to support of the arts,cities were failing to build an adequate corporatetax base, even after the trend toward flight fromcity living had long been reversed. This strategyhas continued to be instituted despite itsfailures, but a better way had to be found. Thesearch for more and better revitalization, andmore and better magnets for high earners andtourists, eventually took a cultural turn, buildingon the success of artists districts in post-

industrial economies.

Detroit Renaissance Center.

During the turbulent 1960s, the risingmiddle-class members of the postwar babyboom constituted a huge cohort of youngpeople. Whereas the older generation lived livesthat seemed primarily to revolve around family

and work, the upcoming generation seemed tocenter theirs primarily on other, more personaland consumerist sources, including thecounterculture: music, newspapers, cheapfashion, and the like, coupled with rejection ofthe corporate rat race, majoritarian rule,repressive behavioral codes, and death culture,or militarism (nuclear war and Vietnam) andoften rejection of urbanism itself. This highlyvisible group was closely watched for its tastes.Advertising and marketing, already at whatseemed like saturation levels, could segment the

market, aiming one set of messages attraditionalist consumers and the other at young

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Advertisement for a RoyLichtenstein exhibition at the

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore,in late 2006.

people, and culture was transformed into anassemblage of purchases. The youth theme wasrevolution political revolution, whetherreal, imaginary, or, as it gradually became, onecentered on consumerism.Constellations of consumer choice werestudied by research institutes such as theStanford Research Institute (SRI) based atStanford, an elite private California university.

Founded by Stanford trustees in 1946 to supporteconomic development in the region, SRIInternational, as it is now officially known,currently describes its mission as discovery andthe application of science and technology forknowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace. Itwas forced off the university campus into stand-alone status in 1970 by students protestingagainst its military research.Lifestyle, an index to the changes in theterrain of consumerism, was a neologism of the1960s that quickly became comfortable in

everyones mouth. In 1978, SRI announced alifestyle metric, the Values and Lifestyles (VALS)psychographic, dubbed byAdvertising Age asone of the ten top market researchbreakthroughs of the 1980s.16 VALS today seeksto find out about a persons product ownership,media preferences, hobbies, additional

demographics, or attitudes (for example, aboutglobal warming).17 (Its categories are innovators,thinkers, achievers, experiencers, believers,strivers, makers, and survivors, which articulatein primary and secondary dimensions.) The VALSwebsite establishes its connection to othersurvey vehicles that provide in-depthinformation, among other preferences, abouthow each of the eight VALS types uses, invests,

and saves money. Such detailed data helpedmarketers early on to determine how to tailortheir pitches even for matters that should besubjects of debate in the public square.Thus, the concept of taste, one of the keymarkers of social class understood here asdetermined by ones economic relation to themeans of production became transformed intosomething apparently lacking in hierarchicalimportance or relationship to power. Rather thanrepresenting membership in an economic or evena social group, taste aligns a person with other

consumer affinities. In the 1960s, theGreenbergian paradigm based in a Kantianschema of faculties in which taste is the keyoperator for people of sensibility, also fell. Whileit would be absurd to conflate the Kantianfaculty of taste with consumer taste, thereremains a case to be made that the ideas

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energizing vanguard art shift along with shifts inthe social worldview. In a pre-postmodernmoment, so to speak, when artists wereexhibiting a certain panic over the relentlesslyascending tide of consumerism and massculture, and Pop art was bidding for a massaudience, the terms of culture shifted.18

Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, 1969.

A great deal has been asked of artists, inevery modern age. In previous eras artists wereasked to edify society by showing forth the good,the true, and the beautiful. But suchexpectations have increasingly come to seemquaint as art has lost its firm connections to thepowers of church and state. Especially since theromantics, artists have routinely harboredmessianic desires, the longing to take a highposition in social matters, to play atransformative role in political affairs; this maybe finally understood as a necessary thoughperhaps only imaginary corrective to theirroles, both uncomfortable and insecure, ashandmaidens to wealth and power. Artistsworking under patronage conditions hadproduced according to command, which leftthem to express their personal dimensionprimarily through the formal elements of thechosen themes. By the nineteenth century,artists, now no longer supported by patronage,were free to devise and follow many differentapproaches both to form and to content,including realism and direct social

commentary.19 Still, the new middle-classcustomers, as well as the state, had their ownpreferences and demands, even if a certaindegree of transgression was both anticipatedand accepted, however provisionally (the Salondes Refuss was, after all, established byNapolon III). The fin de sicle refuge in formalistarguments, in aestheticism, or art for artssake, has been called by such scholars as JohnFekete a defensive maneuver on the part of theeras advanced artists, establishing aprofessional distance from the social and

honoring the preferences of their high-bourgeoismarket following a century marked by European

revolutions and in the midst of industrial-labormilitancy.20 In the US, the lionization of art bysocial and political elites in the new centurysfirst fifty years had been effective in theacculturation of immigrants, and of the nativeworking class to some degree. Especially in thepostwar period, the ramping up of advanced,formalist art provided a secular approach to thetranscendent. The mid-twentieth-century

rhetorics of artistic autonomy, in the US at least,reassured the knowing public that formalism,and, all the more so, abstraction, wouldconstitute a bulwark against totalitarianleanings. This tacit understanding had beenespecially persuasive in keeping prudent artistsaway from political engagement during the ColdWar in the 1950s. Under those conditions, onlyautonomous art could claim to be an art ofcritique, but advanced, let alone abstract, artcould hardly expect to address large numbers ofpeople. Thus, the professionalization of art

also doomed it to be a highly restricteddiscourse.21

Let us look at taste not as a decision

reflecting the well-formedness or virtue of anartistic utterance but through the wider popularmeaning of the exercise of choice among a rangeof goods, tangible and intangible (but mostly theformer) that is, as an expression of lifestyle.Taste has expressed class membership andsocial status in every modern industrial society.In 1983, the American cultural historian andEnglish professor Paul Fussell, author of theacclaimed book The Great War and ModernMemory(1975), published a slim, acerbicallyacute book called Class: A Guide Through the

American Status System.22 There were earliertreatises on ruling elites, such as American

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sociologist C. Wright Millss Power Elite or Britishlinguist Alan Rosss 1954 article on distinctionsbetween U and non-U speech patterns, in whichU refers to the upper class (a discussion thatcaused an Anglo-American stir when picked upby Nancy Mitford) and Arthur Marwicks Class:Image and Reality(1980), cited by Fussell.23

Fussell meant his book as a popular expos thattaste is not a personal attribute so much as an

expression of a definable socioeconomicgrouping, and in his preface he gleefullydescribes the horrified, even explosive, reactionsmiddle-class people displayed to the meremention of class. His scathing description of themissteps of the non-elite are well situated ineconomic class categories; it is only when hearrives at a class of taste he calls Class X ofwhich he considers himself a member that heloses his bearings, besotted by this motley groupof self-actualizing people who are mostlyuniversity-based and float free of the demands

of social codes of dress and behavior, pleasingonly themselves. We should recognize in thisgroup not just the expression of thecounterculture, now grown up and collegeeducated, but also of the gold mine that had justbegun to be intensively lobbied by nichemarketers, the creative class a socialformation and process that seems to haveescaped Fussells notice.A couple of decades later in 2000, theconservative ideologue and US media figureDavid Brooks, in his best-selling book Bobos inParadise: The New Upper Class and How They GotThere, quipped that counter-cultural valueshave infused the business world the onesphere of US life where people still talk aboutfomenting revolution and are taken seriously.24

His thesis is that in this new information age,members of the highly educated elite have onefoot in the bohemian world of creativity andanother foot in the bourgeois realm of ambitionand worldly success.25 Brookss barbedwitticisms claim the triumph of capital over anypossible other political world that young peopledifferent from him, in the Western democracies

and particularly the US, had hoped to create:

Were by now all familiar with modern-dayexecutives who have moved from SDS toCEO, from LSD to IPO. Indeed, sometimesyou get the impression the Free Speechmovement produced more corporateexecutives than Harvard Business School.26

To decode a bit: SDS denotes the emblematic1960s radical group Students for a DemocraticSociety; IPO stands for a corporations initial

public offering; and the Free Speech movementwas the student movement at the elite (though

public) University of California, Berkeley, thatagitated on several fronts, sparking theworldwide student movements of the 1960s.The French intelligentsia have derisivelyextracted Brookss neologism Bobos from hiscelebratory analysis, and the book is worthdwelling on here only because of itsconcentration on taste classes and theirrelationship to power and influence, and, less

centrally, their relevance to literature andcriticism.27 Brooks traces his own intellectualforebears to the world and ideas of the mid-1950s, remarking regressively:

[W]hile the fever and froth of the 1960shave largely burned away, the ideas ofthese 1950s intellectuals [William Whyte,Jane Jacobs, J. K. Galbraith, VancePackard, E. Digby Baltzell] continue toresonate.28

Lowering expectations of rigor, Brooks refers tohis work as comic sociology. He complimentshis readers on their quirky tastes while ignoringthose who do not fit his consumer taste class.The conspicuous consumption pattern firstdescribed by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory ofthe Leisure Class, published in 1899 during therobber baron era, seemingly does not fit thepreferences of the Bobos, who unlike the gilded-age business (but not, it should be noted,technical) class, prefer to spend lots of money onthings that appear to be useful and virtuous an adjective often employed ironically in Bobos.A decade later, the laid-back, tolerantwisdom of the benign Bobo class-in-ascendancy now appears ephemeral, since in theinterim the ostentatious rich have led us intocrushingly expensive wars, destroyed thefinancial markets, restored nepotism, andmobilized the old working class and ruraldwellers using a dangerous breed of hater-malarkey to grab and keep political control, allthe while becoming vastly richer. ReviewingBrooks, Russell Mokhiber writes,

Most people in the United States (let alonethe world) do not share [the Bobos]expanding wealth and may have markedlydifferent views on important issues,including concepts of deservedness,fairness, government regulation, andequitable distribution of wealth. For thismajority of the population, moreconfrontation, not less, could be just whatis in order.29

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Richard Florida on TV.

Soon after the collapse of the millennial NewEconomy that was supposed to raise all boats,Richard Florida, in his best-selling book The Riseof the Creative Class (2002), instituted a way oftalking about the effects of the needs andchoices of Sharon Zukins, as well as, more

broadly, Brookss and Fussells, target group thatframed the positioning of the creative class that cooperative group as a living blueprint forurban planners.30

Turn-of-the-century changes in thecomposition of the productive classes in theUnited States and Western Europe as a result ofglobalization in which mass industrial workshifted East and South and white-collartechnical labor in the developed industries roseto ascendancy during the dot-com boom led tofurther speculation on the nature of theseworkers, but seemingly these were more solidlyempirical efforts than Brookss mischievousrendition. Enter Richard Florida, professor atpostindustrial Pittsburghs Carnegie MellonUniversity, with theories catering to thecontinuing desire of municipalities such asPittsburgh to attract those middle-class high-wage earners.The next installment of this article willaddress Floridas hypotheses and prescriptions. Continued in Culture Class: Art, Creativity,

Urbanism, Part II: Creativity and Its Discontents.This essay is an expanded version of a talk given at the thirdHermes Lecture at Provinciehuis Den Bosch on November 14,2010, arising from a suggestion by Camiel van Winkel toconsider the work of Richard Florida. I thank Stephen Squibbfor his invaluable assistance during the research and editingprocess. Thanks also to Alexander Alberro and StephenWright for their helpful responses.

Martha Rosler is an artist who works with multiplemedia, including photography, sculpture, video, andinstallation. Her interests are centered on the publicsphere and landscapes of everyday life actual andvirtual especially as they affect women. Relatedprojects focus on housing, on the one hand, andsystems of transportation, on the other. She has longproduced works on war and the national securityclimate, connecting everyday experiences at homewith the conduct of war abroad. Other works, from bustours to sculptural recreations of architectural details,

are excavations of history.

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1See, for example, HenriLefebvre, The Production ofSpace, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991),

passim. See also Georg Lukcs,History and ClassConsciousness: Studies inMarxist Dialectics, trans. RodneyLivingstone (London: MerlinPress, 1971); Lukcs,interpreting Marx on thedevelopment of abstract laborunder capitalism, writes that

time sheds its qualitative,variable, flowing nature; itfreezes into an exactlydelimited, quantifiablecontinuum filled withquantifiable things ... in short,it becomes space, 90.

2A more substantial discussionwould need to take account ofhow the space-time continuumprivileges one or the otherdimension and how the primacyof each changes with economicregimes.

3Henri Lefebvre, The Urban

Revolution (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,2003), 1.

4Ibid., vii.

5Ibid., 18.

6Consider such basic matters asthe management of violentcrime, prostitution, sanitation,and disease.

7See Mike Davis, Planet ofSlums, New Left Review 26

(MarchApril 2004): 6. Thepresent urban population (3.2billion) is larger than the totalpopulation of the world in 1960.The global countryside,meanwhile, has reached itsmaximum population (3.2 billion)and will begin to shrink after2020. As a result, cities willaccount for all future worldpopulation growth, which isexpected to peak at about 10billion in 2050. (See also Davisssubsequent book, Planet ofSlums [London: Verso, 2006] forfurther data crunching.)Concomitantly, urban poverty isalso increasing faster than rural

poverty.8I leave out of consideration herethe reconstruction of cities andcountrysides that served primarily or secondarily military and police functions,whether local ones on the orderof Baron Haussmann's mid-nineteenth-centuryreconfiguring of Paris, amongother things securing it againstinsurrections, or more ambitiousnational ones such as theconstruction, under PresidentEisenhower, of the USs ColdWar-oriented interstate highwaysystem.

9

Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary fora New Urbanism, trans. KennKnabb, InternationaleSituationnis te, no. 1 (June1958). Seehttp://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/formulary.html.

10Guy Debord, The Society of theSpectacle, trans. DonaldNicholson-Smith (New York:Zone Books, 1994), 12.

11Today, a few generations on, thedystopian effects of therelegation of the poor and theimmigrant to these high-riseghettos, are there for all to see,if not understood by Frenchxenophobes, in the regulareruptions of fire and revoltamong unemployed young menwith no future. (Today, however,the young of France andelsewhere recognize in this onlya more extreme version of theirown condition of economicprecarity.)

12Sharon Zukin, Loft Living:

Culture and Capital in UrbanChange (New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 1989),190191.

13Ibid., 190.

14Ibid., 117118.

15The Arts: New Yorks BestExport Industry, New York

Affairs 5, no. 2 (1978): 51. Quotedin Zukin, Loft Living, 112.

16See

http://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/about.shtm l.

17Seehttp://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/presurvey.shtml.

18See Alvin Gouldner, The Dialecticof Ideology and Technology: TheOrigins, Grammar, and Future ofIdeology(New York: SeaburyPress, 1976).

19See Caroline A. Joness

interesting study, EyesightAlone: Clement GreenbergsModernism and theBureaucratization of the Senses(Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2006).

20John Fekete, The CriticalTwilight: Explorations in theIdeology of Anglo-AmericanLiterary Theory from Eliot toMcLuhan (Boston: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1977).

21See the analyses of PierreBourdieu in many works,including Distinction: A Social

Critique of the Judgement ofTaste and The Market of

Symbolic Goods, Part One,Chapter One, of The Field ofCultural Production: Essays on

Art and Literature (New York:Columbia University Press,1984); as well as, following him,Jrgen Habermas, Modernity,An Incomplete Project, in HalFoster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic.Essays on Postmodern Culture(Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press,1983).

22

Paul Fussell, Class (New York:Ballantine, 1983). The cover ofthe firstpaper back edition saysClass: A Painfully AccurateGuide Through the AmericanStatus System.

23Alan S. C. Ross, Linguisticclass-indicator s in present-dayEnglish, NeuphilologischeMitteilung en (Helsinki) 55(1954), 113149; Nancy Mitford,ed. Noblesse Oblige (London:Hamish Hamilton, 1956); ArthurMarwick: Class: Image andReality in Britain, France and theU.S.A. Since 1930 (New York:Oxford University Press, 1980).

24David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise:The New Upper Class and HowThey Got There (New York: Simonand Schuster, 2000). Thequotation is taken from a reviewby Russell Mokhiber, YES!magazine, posted Oct 27, 2000,at http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-new-culture-emerges/review-bobos-in-paradise-by-david-brooks.

25Brooks, Bobos, 11.

26Ibid., 39.

27and art. In the section How toBe an Intellectual Giant Brookspoints out that rather thanwriting, say, War and Peace, it isbetter to seek success bypresenting a catchy new idea ina lively format and casting lighton what it all means, a formuladominating art reviewing andinfesting art production, the artssection of periodicals, and muchelse.

28Books like The OrganizationMan, The Death and Life of Great

American Cities, The AffluentSociety, The Status Seekers, andThe Protestant Establishmentwere the first expressions of thenew educated class ethos, andwhile the fever and froth of the1960s have largely burned away,the ideas of these 1950sintellectuals continue toresonate. Brooks, Bobos,Introduction, 1112. Brooks isselective in those whom hecites; several reviews havesuggested his indebtedness tothe work of Csar Graa, aprofessor at UC San Diego,especially Bohemian vs.Bourgeois (New York: BasicBooks, 1964); Graa, who had

studied sociology, anthropology,and urban planning, published

several other works centering onbohemianism and authenticitybut died in a car accident in1986.

29Russell Mokhiber, YES!magazine, posted Oct 27, 2000,at http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-new-culture-emerges/review-bobos-in-paradise-by-david-brooks.

30

Richard Florida, The Rise of theCreative Class: And How It'sTransforming Work, Leisure,Community and Everyday Life(New York: Basic Books, 2002).

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Article_ Marta Rosler I- 190

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