Cities Excorporate and Encounters Conflated

        Russian émigré and prodigious American writer Isaac Asimov, in his Robot series of novels, envisions a future history in which his adopted city of New York has, together with Philadelphia and Baltimore, long ago been subsumed by a single domed megalopolis, the distinctiveness of suburban and rural landscapes and territorialities (including the whole of the once state of New Jersey) having disappeared into a densely multi-tiered urban meshwork, the surplus of centuries having accreted as steel architecture of decentralized, multidimensional growth, such that ancient buildings perform as latticeworks vertically bisected and intersected by uncountable strata of flowing traffic, extending from the underside of the dome downward into the bowels of the Earth, :"microstates" (per Balbo, cited by Harvey), of slum and wealth both, stacked one upon another in organic profusion.  

    Asimov's Caves of Steel portend a process of urbanization not merely "obliterating step by step the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across national territory, if not beyond"¹    (David Harvey, citing to Lebefvre), but ultimately consuming town and country undigested and forgotten to generations knowing no other spatiality.  This vision of culminate urbanization, "another kind of world--including a different kind of urban experience" (Harvey), together with my own experiences in the historically redlined suburban ghetto of New Cassel, played in the background as I read Harvey's "The Right to the City".

    Sunder Rajan, meanwhile, in the introduction to Biocapital²   , through an explication of Marx's discussion of "the mystical and magical nature of the commodity" (Sunder Rajan) reproduces, and in so doing brings into sharp relief, the error of the Mineresque³    magical gloss enacted by Marxism.  Unlike the legerdemain employed by Marx in his discussion of the purported "estrangement" of labor, in which Marx conflates labor-as-such with sentiment attaching to an object of labor as mediated by a mode of production⁴   , where the metaphysical thinking is definitely on the part of the author, here Marx (as channeled by Sunder Rajan) reaches for a magical-thinking theory of money, as he attributes to the "interaction between either worker or capitalist and money or commodity" an "uncanny kernel of abstraction that eludes capture in purely materialistic terms."  

    Here we see performed a different conflation than that occurring in the "estrangement" account, this time of money/commodity--as embodied in currency, coin, and/or other material product and excorporated⁵    through an assemblage undergirding both its use and exchange values--with a encounter of such materiality as a phenomenological agent⁶    which might "become the mediator of social bonds" (Sunder Rajan).  Doing for Western cultures overtly (out of their own confounded understanding) what Miner did only clandestinely (as an exercise in a pedagogy of clarity) Marx/Sunder-Rajan declare "fetish" in their account of this conflated material-existential, appealing to "abstraction" to account for what appears, in its confused presentation, to be "full of metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" (Marx, quoted by Sunder Rajan).  

    That there is something "uncanny" here is not in dispute.  Rather, that the uncanniness invests in the money/commodity, and not in the encountering of such as agent of social mediation (a priori to any "abstraction" that might be conjured in efforts to dispel such uncanniness), continues a tradition of analysis that fetishizes abstraction as a talisman to contain the impurities introduced not in the encounter of phenomenological agents as such, but only in the mentalization of such material encounters by an objectivity blind to the objectivist's own capacities for the deployment of sentiments in social relation with a broad category of potential phenomenological agents, of which money, commodities, cities, and megalopolises are but a small sampling.

notes

¹ In his Foundation series of novels, set centuries after the Robot books, the galactic capitol is the city-planet of Trantor, a single domed complex "girding the globe" (as per Harvey).  Such themes of mutivocal complexity run throughout Asimov's work.  For instance, in an epic short story anticipating the Internet, search engines, and handheld computers, Asimov's "Multivac" outgrows first its mountain facility, then mountain, state, the North American continent, the planet Earth, and eventually three-dimensional space itself.  The themes of psychohistory, the Zeroth Law of Robots (and its consequences as developed in both his future history and a one-off alternative thereto), and Gaia/Galaxia (as developed by other authors authorized by his estate) operate in the same vein.

² In which the author's (but not the editor's)  ignorance of political geography may be forgiven.  Syosset, although admittedly small (one out of three ain't bad), is neither a town nor in upstate New York, but rather is an unincorporated hamlet (having only nominally more of a distinct political identity than a mere census designated place) within the Town of Oyster Bay, Nassau County, said town itself, together with Cold Spring Harbor (an even smaller hamlet, located in the Town of Huntington, Suffolk County--the Labs therefor named actually being sited in the Village of Laurel Hollow, also Nassau County) both to be found on Long Island, not even north of the Bronx, let alone "upstate".

³ In his "Body Ritual among the Narcirema", published in American Anthropologist, vol. 58 (1956), pp. 503-507, Miner applies the tropes of then contemporary anthropological accounts of magical thinking among non-Western cultures to an anynmically identified North American people.

⁴ A logical fallacy we shall not elaborate further upon here--it being beyond the scope of our present concern--except to note that in disentangling such conflation we might then ask whose sentiment(s) may be at issue, what sentiment may differently attach to labor-as-such, what derivative sentiments may play upon any or all such inflections, and whether and how any such sentiments might be situated culturally and/or temperamentally.

⁵ Deploying, in an expanded sense, a term neologized by Annamarie Mol and John Law in their 2004 "Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies:  The Example of Hypoglycemia", Body & Society, Vol. 10(2-3), 43-62.

⁶ i.e., the object of a capacity for agency perception, as made potential by a certain tolerance for ambiguity (as experienced in uncanniness) in said perception particular to the human animal, in theory emergent of heuristic adaptations to domestication, allowing for the deployment of affective social repertoires in relation to organisms possessed of non-human body plans.  The theory of agency perception is more fully elaborated by this author in other writings.