Catching the Essential Fact: Recent Geographies

Jeff Derksen

In other words, the problem that is usually being visualized [by economists] is how capitalism administers existing structures, whereas the relevant problem is how it creates and destroys them.

Joseph Schumpeter

The fraught Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter developed the contradictorily poetic term creative destruction to describe an “essential fact about capitalism”: for Schumpeter creative destruction is the process that “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”. [1] Schumpeter arrived at the term as a means to counter the tendency of economists to grasp fragmentary aspects of capitalism and not to analyze it as a whole, as an evolutionary process. But Schumpeter also introduced creative destruction to add a more historical analysis of capitalism – economists, he argued, tended to “accept the data of the momentary situation as if there were no past or future” [2]. Curiously, given Schumpeter’s emphasis on the temporal aspects of capitalist development (a development that is by nature uneven), the Wall Street Journal recently speculated that it is Schumpeter’s moment, that because “it was Schumpeter who worried more than any other modern economist about what might be called the fragile condition of capitalism,” he is the economist to turn to today. [3] Despite the aspects of Schumpeter’s work that makes him attractive to the economic apologists of today, to say that Schumpeter simply identified the fragile aspect of capitalist skirts a more problematic aspect of his work, his argument that capitalism would creatively destroy itself, chew away at its own foundations. And, following the organic aspect of his metaphor, Schumpeter predicted the replacement of capitalism by another system: “The capitalist process not only destroys its own institutional framework but it also creates the conditions for another. Destruction may not be the right word after all. Perhaps I should have spoken of transformation. The outcome of the process is not simply a void that could be filled by whatever might happen to turn up; things and souls are transformed in such a way as to become increasingly amenable to the socialist form of life.” [4]

Aside from the current economic crisis, Schumpeter’s poetical term and his model of process, destruction, and transformation can be usefully brought forward today to talk about cities and their representation. Urban territories and cities are at the center of global change, and the intensification of globalization over the last thirty-five years has also seen a process of the creative destruction of neighbourhoods, commons, and the varied textures of urban life. Globalization, for all of its opening of the world and its deepening of national and local connections, or its erosion of nation-scale politics, focuses its transformational powers on cities, and therefore coheres dramatically in the textures and rhythms of daily life and the production of urban space. Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber’s recent photo-collages capture the paradox of emergent or new urban landscapes that are not newly built, but are newly shaped by urban transformation as it makes its way through economic expansion and creative destruction. These images of „recent geographies“, as Bitter/Weber designate them, are born out of two process: the great expansions and contractions, the ceaseless articulations and disarticulations, and the shifting speculation that global capital has focused on cities; and Bitter/Weber’s aesthetic practice of representing cities and space as processes.

The shift subtlety caught in Bitter/Weber’s work is that „globalized cities“ are obviously not just the major financial and media command posts, but that peripheral cities (peripheral in the global imagination, but in the orbit of global capital) such as Belgrade and Vancouver, and the edges of cities themselves (such as the banlieues of Paris and the state-modernism of New Belgrade) have become sites of new and necessary forms of autogestion as well as laboratories of mercurial accumulation strategies: in these cites, the economic and the everyday rub up against each other in a manner that give a real texture to Schumpeter’s creative destruction. The intensified cities represented in “Recent Geographies” – New Belgrade, Bucharest, Vancouver, Paris, Detroit, and Los Angeles – shift and alter as neoliberalism sparks up the competition for space and the right to the city: yet (and not paradoxically) they are cities that are deeply textured in their particular, beautiful, transitional, and complex ways. The urban texture of such cities takes on the layers pressed into them from globalization – and the drastic reworking of the city in the global system – yet the layers of past planning, and the vectors of past ways of living (or culture) still resonate in the city space. The texture of the future also hover, speaking of what shape the city will take on, of which struggles and opportunities will be won (and this is a texture Schumpeter kept an eye out for).

To brush up against these global-urban textures, „Recent Geographies“ is comprised of spatially complex photo-collages of large-scale postmodern architecture, a video work on the urban plan for Novi Beograde (New Belgrade) devised by Henri Lefebvre in 1986, and photographs of architectural interiors of former state buildings in New Belgrade. [5] „Recent Geographies“ is initiated from the understanding that geographies and their representations are never terra firma or fixed places and images, but are sites and events built and rebuilt, constructed and deconstructed, „done and undone“ by citizens who constantly produce space and social relations through their everyday activities. Yet, at the same time, the event of urban space is also produced by global vectors embedded into everyday life – these vectors carve into urban governmentality, patterns of ownership, and the possible forms of urban democracy and citizenship.

This new integrated body of work begins with images of architecture and urban space from the postmodern aspects of Paris, of downtown Los Angeles, of the state architecture of Romania, from Canada’s representative postmodern city, Vancouver, and from Detroit, a city that caries the mark of race and class, and of the shifts in neoliberalism as deeply as any city. Working through two different logics – one of architectural form and the other of the spatiality of capitalist investment – Bitter and Weber focus on postmodern architecture found in urban territories and economies that are seemingly incompatible: city space planned and produced by socialist Yugoslavia, the social housing on the fringe of Paris which erupted in riot and flames by the socially dispossessed, the highly mediatized urban core of Los Angeles, the grand boulevard of Bucharest, the Pacific Rim cosmopolitan city of Vancouver, and the uncertain centre of Detroit represented by the Renaissance Centre.

Curiously, in these „recent geographies“ of globalization and neoliberal spaces, postmodernism emerges as a style that has crossed very different and even contradictory economies and spaces – a style that called upon to represent very different social and spatial logics and social visions. In one large collage, a grand boulevard in Bucharest bends seamlessly into the social housing project, Abraxas, by Ricardo Bofill in the banlieues of Paris (a building central in Terry Gilliam’s dystopic film Brazil which warned of a totally administered modernity). In another collage, the Genex Tower, an intensely postmodern gate to postsocialist Belgrade and a former state import-export company, merges into Moshe Safdie's new public-private library of Vancouver, a building that is itself a postmodern collage of a Roman coliseum, a shopping complex, and library. All of these sites, – joined together in a collage process that is both unsettling and seamless – are in transition, grappling with the opening of state and city spaces by globalization and its software of administration, neoliberalism.

To catch the complexity of creative destruction and to try and represent this process, „Recent Geographies“ speculates on postmodernism as a style that is flexible, adaptable, or applicable to particular cityscapes and specific planning and civic intentions – as well as a style that goes beyond a single logic. This opens up Fredric Jameson’s famous assertion that postmodernism was more than simply an autonomous style, but is dynamically produced by the economic and social structures of capital and is more properly the „cultural logic of late capitalism“. 6 Bitter/Weber complicate and spatialize this formulation by showing the structural similarities of postmodern architecture in cities and in architectural projects that have not shared such total social logics or economies. Postmodernism, as we see it in „Recent Geographies“, now holds remnants of other logics – in Romania, in former Yugoslavia, in the social housing of Paris, and in the public-private spaces of Vancouver. Rather than proposing architectural style as a marker of an economic and cultural logic, through their collage method and through their research (the careful choosing of buildings and sites), Bitter/Weber show how the cultural logic of architecture is itself produced anew, carrying its sedimentary social and spatial meanings into this present moment of globalization.

Postmodernism then becomes properly historical – the very process it was defined against, the very thing it was said to reject—rather than the pastiche of history. Yet, at the same time, postmodernism seems to have returned – despite its damning architectural critiques and its theoretical relegation – as a logic of neoliberal globalization masked as “populist rhetoric”. Why is potmodernism the style so often turned to as cities are remade, creatively destroyed, as one way of urban life is overlaid with a new one (a new one that often descends from above with little discussion or consultation from citizens)? How has postmodernism as an architectural style survived its withering critiques to float easily in place? In cities such as Vancouver there is a postmodern sameness to the new cityscape, a cityscape driven by the logic of real estate that finds its representation in a form of generic postmodern architecture that historicizes through unimaginative representations of what has been creatively destroyed (buildings with emblematic trees on top, towers with sail-like ornamentation on top, buildings with “sustainable” nature on top, etc., etc.) The ornamented exteriors compensate for the inflated prices (as if more references on the exterior justifies a price) and the reductive historical references or the referential bagage compensate for what is pushed aside in the city (ornamentation, public art, and commemorative markers are the sure signs of this stark process). But this postmodernism, while linked in some global manner, as „Recent Geographies“ shows, is not simply identical. By using collage as research – as a means to make the process of creative destruction visible – Bitter and Weber show the precise tension between difference and sameness in globalized cities, from the postmodernism in New Belgrade, in Bucharest, in the restructuring of Detroit, to the emblematic aspects of Los Angeles, and on to the volatile peripheries of Paris. This spatial component, as a tangle of the present, has a temporal aspect as well: from Jameson’s “always historicize” to Schumpeter’s process of historical transformation, these photo-collages are an aesthetic means to represent, without reduction, the ways that economic and spatial logics shape cities.

A different version of this text was originally written for the exhibition “Recent Geographies” by Sabine Bitter / Helmut Weber at Grita Insam Gallery, Vienna, in March – May 2007

From: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, RIGHT, TO THE CITY, Fotohof edition, Salzburg, 2009 (S. 56 – 60). Translation: Dawn Michelle d´Atri

Endnotes

[1] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. London: Routledge, 1994, p83.

[2] Ibid, p84.

[3] Carl Schramm, „Schumpeter’s Moment“. The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2009.

[4] Op. Cit. p162.

[5] Bitter/Weber produced an artist’s book that presents, in full, the Lefebvre text along with contextualizing essays from Zoran Erić, Ljiljana Blagojević, and Klaus Ronneberger, and a preface by Neil Smith: Autogestion or, Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade. Vancouver/ New York: Fillip Editions and Sternberg Press, 2009.

[6] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.