Dialect Anthropol DOI 10.1007/s10624-012-9285-7

OBITUARY

Neil Smith 1954–2012

Eliza Jane Darling

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Neil R. Smith, radical geographer, revolutionary socialist and redoubtable birder, died in New York City on September 29, 2012 at the age of 58. With his passing ebbs a socialism of the spirit long gone and scarce as hen’s teeth in the academic sweatshop Neil trenchantly termed ‘‘the sausage factory.’’ I met him through anthropologist Louise Lennihan in 1998. I was a third-year student in the PhD Program in Anthropology at the City University of New York’s Graduate School and University Center, a fleeting term away from advancement to candidacy. ‘‘By the by,’’ said Louise in her breezy way, ‘‘we’ve got a guest prof coming in next semester and I think you should take his course. Neil Smith. Geographer. Ever heard of him?’’ I hadn’t. He arrived at CUNY on the eventide of the postmodern stampede historian Ellen Meiksens Wood had pegged ‘‘the retreat from class’’ at its high noon under the inveterate capitalist cowboy Reagan, making landfall in a department whose materialist roots in political economy seemed set to wane as an older generation of Marxists dwindled through death, departure or impending retirement. CUNY was still CUNY, the faculty excellent, the reading critical, the students radical. Yet a shadow of doubt hung over us all. The rank revanchism of Rudolph Guiliani’s assault on the university of the poor, the immigrant and the working class was already in the works by the time Neil put a name to its more generalized urban manifestation, but worse, the academic left seemed to give way before its ilk, consumed by a textual cannibalism that left us gorged to bursting on the bitter backwash of neoliberal defeat. I found solace in political ecology (nature, at least, was still solid, wasn’t it?) and prepared for fieldwork, but I hadn’t heard much of anything that truly lit my intellectual fire in a month of Sundays. I’d gone to see our

E. J. Darling (&) Bleecker, New York, USA e-mail: [email protected] 123 E. J. Darling

Head of Department for dissertation advice, which Louise provided with her habitual sagacious enthusiasm. This was an afterthought on my way out the door. ‘‘I know you’re going the rural route and he’s teaching urban social theory, but trust me, you need to meet Neil Smith.’’ I trusted her, and duly signed up for the vaunted Neil Smith experience. Professor Smith pitched up on the first day of class in woebegone trainers and blue jeans with better days behind them, gaping collar providing egress for an errant tuft of chest hair competing for pride of place with his rusty Celtic curls, disputatious eyebrows and unrepentant moustache, a low-rent version of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. I did an inward eye-roll; I’d heard he was a Big Deal and immediately sussed him for a slummer, that particularly odious species of bourgeois posturer who dips a calculated sartorial toe into the plebeian sea from the heights of his lofty academic perch. Then he opened his mouth, and started talking. Within five minutes, it was clear the man couldn’t wear pretension if he tried it on. Half an hour later, I knew this would be the best course I’d ever take in my life. By the time we’d overrun our allotted schedule so far that we’d forgotten the time of day because the debate was too hot and the hour too brief, I decided this guy would be my dissertation advisor come hell or high water, even if I had to leave CUNY at the eleventh hour to work with him. We had him on loan from the Geography Department at Rutgers just across the river, but frankly I would’ve crossed the world. I caught up with him at the elevator to request an appointment. ‘‘Professor Smith!’’ He eye-rolled me right back, knowingly. ‘‘It’s Neil. And you’re Eliza. Let’s talk.’’ It was one of those soul-shifting moments I’ve heard recounted in endless iterations since his death, from students and professors, activists and organizers, socialists and environmentalists, gardeners and twitchers. Some discovered him through his writing, and shouted aloud right there in the sanctity of the library at the revelation. Some approached him nervously at a conference, and were shocked and gratified in equal measure an hour and a pint later for the time and wisdom he shared. Some encountered him in the streets, and forged the bond in the joyful flame of protest. Some found him through their mutual admiration for the Sandhill Crane, or the Senita Cactus. Whatever the vector, no one ever met Neil Smith with a shrug. You walked away blinking, startled; the world looked different—drained of its dull grey shadows and filled up with Kodachrome possibility—because it was. He was born in Leith, a port town on the northern outskirts of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1954. Presaging the restless peripatetic predilections that would define his days, he did not remain there long, though his formative years right up through university at St. Andrews, where he completed a BSc in Geograpaphy in 1977, would be spent somewhere in the vicinity of the Firth of Forth, the great glacial estuary spilling the ancient waters of its riparian namesake into the North Sea— excepting a brief sojourn to Philadelphia during this period, on an exchange to the University of Pennsylvania, that would prove prognostic. Upon completing his undergraduate degree, he moved Stateside to study with David Harvey in Baltimore, where he would earn his PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 1982. From here, Neil moved rapidly up the academic food chain, landing appointments at Columbia, where he was hired to assistant professor fresh from the doctorate, Rutgers, where 123 Neil Smith 1954–2012 he achieved tenure in 1990, and finally CUNY, where he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Anthropology (and later Geography) in 1999, also accepting a part-time post as Sixth Century Chair in Geography and Social Theory at the University of Aberdeen in 2009. Visiting appointments would take him to Belfast and Barcelona, Sheffield and Sao Paolo, Eugene and Utrecht, and many shores besides to accept a preponderance of fellowships, keynote lectures, and assorted honors. Along the way he produced a body of scholarship prolific in its immense quantity but all the more astonishing in its consistent quality, in both intellectual and literary terms, all the while keeping one foot on the terra firma of political organizing in the true vein of the committed scholar-activist. Neil stamped his most indelible mark on scholarship as an urbanist, and he put the boot in early, publishing a broadside derived from his undergraduate research in the radical geography journal Antipode in 1979 (Smith 1979a). Such was his primal perspicuity that this early piece would form the blueprint for his lifelong intellectual architecture, not simply in what he thought, but how he thought, and by extension, how he would teach his students to think by way of example: to dig below the form of appearance, to avoid conflating consequence with causality, to understand how the contours of the local are carved by forces at work on expansive spatial scales, and most importantly, to articulate the political implications of theoretical silences, the better to muster some coherent strategy against them. His window for this quintessentially dialectical way of thinking, which simultaneously historicized and spatialized a temporally and geographically delimited phenomenon, was gentrifi- cation, a term that would come to be associated with his scholarship throughout his life. Gentrification theory was in the awkward throes of adolescence in the late 1970s, dominated by naı¨ve neoclassical economic assumptions pointing to consumption, demand and cultural predilection to account for the alleged ‘‘revitalization’’ of the inner city, a green and pleasant cock-and-bull terminology that both obscured and justified the abject violence inflicted upon those inhabitants displaced by the savage swing of its deracinating plough. Gentrification, for its early archivists, was a product of consumer preference, the choices made by a bekhakied clientele of middle class means in the great shopping mall of urban real estate. This explanation, for Neil, did not explain anything: ‘‘Consumer sovereignty explanations have taken for granted the availability of areas ripe for gentrification when this was precisely what had to be explained’’ (Smith 1979b, pp. 540–541). He would fill this void himself with the development of a concept that would change our thinking about gentrification forever: the rent gap, a terrain of investment opportunity mulched by an overripening of the urban built environment through purposeful decay, the rotten fruit of disinvestment laying fertile ground for the sowing of profitable new seeds of rent extraction. The silence in gentrification theory was capital, its specific cycling in and out and of residential neighborhoods in the context of far greater shifts in the spatial and economic organization of cities through deindustrialization and restructuring in the postwar era. The rent gap made its debut in a 1979 article for the Journal of the American Planning Association whose title took a pointed swipe at demand-side exposition: ‘‘Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People.’’ 123 E. J. Darling

Such a brazen shot fired over the bow of the gentrification establishment could hardly go unanswered, and Neil’s fiery intervention roiled the pot of neoclassical complacency. It both galvanized and divided gentrification theorists, producing some memorable clashes with the champions of taste. The outcome of this discord was the electrification of an urban genre that may otherwise have languished in dreary concurrence as the laundry list of yuppie yearnings grew longer and duller and the agents of capital went about their brutal business unmarked and unchallenged by the chroniclers of conspicuous consumption. Neil’s tip-of-the- iceberg line of inquiry revolutionized urban thinking, compelling a generation of scholars to look with fresh eyes at the structural forces churning below the shifting face of cities across the world. His own gentrification research was nurtured in Rose Street, Edinburgh, took root in Society Hill, Philadelphia and flowered in the neighborhood of Tompkins Square Park, New York, but it mushroomed rapidly outward as scholars brought the question of the rent gap to bear on cities from Adelaide to Vancouver. Given the global ricochet of the rent gap—whether it spurred students of the city to hostility or confederation—it is little wonder that Neil’s name came to be associated with urban social theory by the ripe old age of 25. Yet it would be a vast misinterpretation to pigeonhole his work in the urban niche. His scholarship transcended the intuitive border between the city and its erstwhile foil in ‘‘nature,’’ explicitly theorizing, historicizing and politicizing the natural/social dichotomy through his work on uneven development. This was a progression in his thinking, a digging deep and branching out, rather than the breaking of entirely fresh ground. The term ‘‘uneven development’’ appeared in his work as early as the 1979 Antipode salvo, but in retrospect it is clear Neil had an itch to scratch that would not be satisfied by prolonged scrabbling in the field of gentrification alone. Gentrification was a specimen of some broader, more generalized underlying process, and it was to this substratum that Neil’s mind turned in his doctoral research. It became the subject of his PhD dissertation, another remarkable piece of student scholarship that would achieve canonical status as a cornerstone of radical geography upon its subsequent publication in 1984 as Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Smith 2008a). On the face of it, uneven development signifies a geographical differentiation so thoroughly routinized that even its most spectacular manifestation has become a mundane arrangement in the furniture of the human mind: the spatial juxtaposition of overdevelopment and underdevelopment in the built environment. For Neil, the familiar face of our planet’s jagged social skin—garden and ghetto, factory and farmland, suburb and slum—was too customary for comfort. He was hardly the first Marxist, much less the first scholar, to ponder why some landscapes lay drenched in a pool of capital while others lay parched beneath the desiccating dearth of same. Lenin’s work on imperialism, Luxemburg’s thoughts on the structural relationship between capitalist and non-capitalist societies, and Trotsky’s writing on combined and uneven development were logical starting points for understanding the ebb and tide of capital seepage across space, yet Neil sought to move this work beyond the classical political problem of capitalism’s compulsion to geographical expansion, and the subsequent necessity of internationalism. World systems and dependency 123 Neil Smith 1954–2012 theory, too, constituted spatial modes of thinking to a certain extent, but their evolutionary perspective on national and regional relationships within the global arena left them ill-equipped to handle the problem of spatial recycling at multiple scales. Lefebvre’s revolutionary work on the production of space came closest to the mark, yet it too proved insufficient in an important respect. Neil set out to accomplish no less than the denaturalization of uneven development, and in order to do this, he was compelled to tackle the problem of ‘‘nature’’ itself, the universal stuff of which humanity is made, but to which it increasingly fancies itself external as it grows progressively capable of remaking the environment into which it evolved, and to whose fate it remains inexorably bound. Uneven development took Neil necessarily to ground. There was scarcely a more propitious time to tackle these contradictions than the 1980s, by which time nature had already begun to flounder in the sea of deconstruction. All that was solid had melted into mer, and nature no less than god, society and the kitchen sink stood on the verge of relegation to the hermeneutic cesspool of discursive analysis. Yet apocalypticism (Katz 1995), too, was on the horizon, the hole in the ozone having made its ghastly debut over Antarctica, global warming rising rapidly in the headlines from rumble to roar. Nature, or more pointedly what our species had done with it, seemed out to get us one way or the other, through catastrophic revenge on our profligate abuse of its external pristine bounty or entrapment within the cultural reification of its presumed universal biological dictates—a dialectic philosopher Kate Soper would capture neatly in What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human in 1995 (Soper 1995). Neil’s work neither disavowed nature’s construction nor downplayed its corporeality, but put both in their place: part and parcel of a broader production of nature in which environmental ideologies are inextricably entwined with the structuring and restructuring of the material world through which we milled the first nature we found into the second nature we made, and in so doing remade ourselves. Neil explained uneven development as an outcome of capitalism’s tendency toward differentiation and equalization—as capital struggles to make good on old investments in the built environment and is yet compelled by this very fixity to move investment elsewhere in search of more lucrative profits, a process Neil would call seesawing—the tension between which was an outcome of the deeper contradiction between use value and exchange value. Uneven development is ‘‘the concrete process and pattern of the production of nature under capitalism’’ (Smith 2008a, p. 8) as capital, over time, chases its own tail across space in a perpetual bid to reconcile its immanent contradictions, most notably its need to plonk itself somewhere in the process of production, and its subsequent compulsion to up-sticks to greener pastures when the rent on somewhere becomes too dear to make a worthwhile buck: the defeat of place propelling it inevitably across space. Uneven Development was a complex, and not entirely satisfactory, crack at weaving together a Marxian theory of space, nature and the attendant ideologies of both. But it laid a crucial foundation. It was the production of nature thesis that stuck, partly because nature burgeoned almost astonishingly into an accumulation strategy (Katz 1998) in and of itself in the years following its publication. In retrospect, the production of nature, much like the rent gap, seems obvious. But neither were 123 E. J. Darling obvious at the time, and both would prove downright prescient as the years wore on and the phenomena Neil theorized became so generalized as to seem quotidian. Though it is tempting at face value to read the relation between these preoccupations as an intellectual U-turn, Neil was hardly changing horses midstream. His work on nature and the urban were of a piece, and in more ways than one. Gentrification was itself a product of uneven development, the rent gap a specific example of the seesaw of capital in search of ever higher profit margins. But equally important were the political implications of this work, in terms of both agency and process. Just as urban activists could not effectively oppose gentrification by mistaking its primary agents in landlords, investors, lenders, developers, speculators and the state for its middlemen in yuppie shoppers, environmentalists could not effectively oppose ecological degradation by encour- aging consumers to make greener choices in the marketplace. Just as we could not fight gentrification while mistaking its root cause in disinvestment and reinvestment for its secondary shaping by cultural predilection, the long-lamented human domination of nature did not simply occur through the construction of nature as text, nor could it be undone through the deconstruction of same. Just as the structured disinvestment of the rent gap set the stage for profitable reinvestment, the structured decline of nature and its bourgeois ideological handbill as a lost Arcadia paved the way for a highly profitable reclamation industry from carbon trading to organic farming, both quintessential expressions of creative destruction. Just as gentrifica- tion seemed like an isolated urban anomaly but years anon solidified into a generalized urban strategy, no one, as Neil pointed out in the afterward to the third edition of Uneven Development, could have predicted the extent to which the traffic in nature would grow in the ensuing decades into one of the biggest industries on the planet, and drag the politics of nature inexorably into the mix. And that was the ultimate foresight of the production of nature trope: capitalism makes both nature and space in its own likeness and for its own requirements, and would do the same to environmentalism through its mainstream appropriation, the deradicalization of a once-revolutionary movement accomplished through its general absorption into the warp and weft of capital accumulation itself. As Neil put it some time later, nature had lost its edge: ‘‘We’re all environmentalists now,’’ and the challenge ahead was to ‘‘make environmental politics subversive again’’ (Smith 1998a, p. 272). In this endeavor, Neil found richness and complexity in the writings of Marx, in whose canon he explicitly rejected a radical break, finding rather a developing intricacy in his evolving concept of nature from the Paris Manuscripts to the Grundrisse. The close kinship of this work with that of his advisor David Harvey, who from Baltimore on would become his primary and lifelong mentor, is also clear in this work on multiple fronts. Like Harvey, Neil sought to simultaneously spatialize Marxism and radicalize geography. To boot, Harvey had theorized the geographically suicidal tendencies of capitalism, explaining the specific ways in which capital creates barriers to its own continued accumulation and then finds spatial ways around them. Like Harvey, Neil was interested in how and why capital plants itself in the built environment, how that fixity creates crisis for itself, and how it is subsequently compelled to move on. For both, the vital question about capitalism was not just how it works, but how and why it works for awhile, and then 123 Neil Smith 1954–2012 doesn’t, due to its own successful failure, and what comes next. In all senses Neil’s work was a continuation and elaboration of that of his primary mentor. Having established a canon of superficial eclecticism yet deep-running logic by the time of his first permanent academic appointment, Neil drew to him an exciting cadre of scholars whose collective (and often individual) work belied the tiresome proprietary intellectual patches of urban and rural, nature and society, environmen- talism and socialism. To be sure, students of the city found a place at his table, but so equally did students like me, who’d been mucking about in the general arena of the red and the green in far more pastoral terms, yet through Neil found rich possibility in the connections between urban social theory and rural political ecology. For my own work on wilderness gentrification, both the rent gap and the production of nature renewed and revitalized the old problem of city-and-country, and introduced me to a brilliant circle of scholars working on a critical politics of nature as well as revisiting the more generalized problem of rent. Though no archaeologist, Neil’s work reminded me of that of V. Gordon Childe, a process of excavation both radical and anthropological in its search for root cause and its aim to denaturalize what had come to be manifest. It is partly for this reason that Neil found a natural home in anthropology, a discipline which, at its best, works to denaturalize a host of treasured assumptions, most often ones predicated upon the presumed immutability of nature itself. In more spiritual terms, Neil was a constant if informal ethnographer who travelled incessantly and took people and their places to heart, railing against the violence of displacement that tore them from each other: gentrification, war, the obscenity of accumulation and its spatial manifestation in uneven development. His holistic, polymathic scholarship, too, made him a sure-footed native on anthropological grounds. But more significantly, Neil’s intellectual trajectory right from the gate heeded a call for radicalization resounding through the social sciences in the 1970s: What if that machinery were reversed? What if the habits, problems, actions, and decisions of the wealthy and powerful were daily scrutinized by a thousand systematic researchers, were hourly pried into, analyzed, and cross-referenced, tabulated and published in a hundred inexpensive mass circulation journals and written so that even the fifteen year-old high school dropouts could understand it and predict the actions of their parents’ landlord, manipulate and control him? (Nicolaus 1969). Thus did Neil quote, in the opening volley of his early Antipode intervention, the provocation of sociologist Martin Nicolaus at the 1969 ASA Convention, a striking echo of Laura Nader’s exhortation to study the powerful in what is now a canonical quote in anthropological radicalism: What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty?…If, in reinventing anthropology, we were principally studying the most powerful strata of urban society…we would study the banks and the insurance industry…we would study the landlord class (Nader 1972, pp. 289–290). If Nader penned this philippic in the Golden State, then Berkeley’s grittier sibling on the east coast, or so it has always seemed to me, rose fiercely to the challenge, a 123 E. J. Darling part of the reason I was drawn to CUNY, and a part of the reason why Neil found such a strong rapport in the same milieu. His lifelong work constituted a primer in reversing the machinery, but his position at the CUNY Graduate Center on 34th and Fifth allowed him to launch his spanner from within the very bowels of empire, beneath the long shadow of the edifice that incarnated the urban excesses of its triumphal hubris. A key moment in this intellectual strategy was his timely revival of the concept of revanchism. As with uneven development, Neil did not invent the term. From the French revanche (revenge), the word embodies the nativist retributive territorialism of the nineteenth-century revanchist movement, which mustered a populist nationalism in its efforts to reclaim a France they felt had been stolen from them by a rampant and intolerable liberalism, turning their reactionary vengeance especially upon the Communards. Neil applied it so auspiciously to a latter-day time and place that in radical geography circles it became a byword for the epoch that best personified it: Giuliani’s New York. Neil had been gnawing on revanchism for several years. The concept gave fresh life to his gentrification work in the monograph The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (Smith 1996), providing the lynchpin in his analysis of the political strategy of urban brutality amidst which gentrification re-emerged, stronger and more systematic, in the mid-1990s after a brief flirtation with decline at the dawning of the decade. For those who lived through this savage moment of New York City history, the term revanchism captured the Guiliani zeitgeist with uncanny accuracy. In the best spirit of studying up the convex of culture, the concept conveyed the sense of indignant, enraged, self-righteous entitlement binding the neoliberal alliance of state and capital on alleged behalf of an urban white middle class that imagined itself increasingly disowned and disenfranchised (and in terms of economic erosion, was demonstrably so). But revanchism didn’t boil down to some vague unspecified revenge, a mean hypothesis of meanness. It was a vengeance executed methodically through a geographical offensive that sought to cleanse public space of undesir- ables—from prostitutes to the homeless to squeegee-men—who signified the most visible tokens of neoliberal failure and could therefore be effectively blamed for same in a paradigmatic postmodern bait-and-switch tactic, the symptoms held accountable for the disease. It proceeded, too, through a constitutional crackdown on anyone who dared transgress the new urban order by design, from graffiti artists to protesters to jaywalkers. For New Yorkers especially, revanchism gave us a handle on Giuliani’s systemically spatialized spite, but much like the rent gap, the concept was swiftly appropriated by scholars and applied to other urban and national arenas. For Neil himself, I suspect it laid the groundwork for a deeper consideration of the seemingly antithetical resurrection of American nationalism in the neoliberal sundown of the millennium, with its territorial romanticism and crusade for corn-fed values amidst a steady stream of capital flight that threw the American working class to the dogs with the middle class hard on their heels—a contradiction with which Neil would grapple in his final book. Two years after The New Urban Frontier, Neil would publish an article that demonstrated not only this knack for capturing the essence of a complex and emergent political moment in a discreet turn of phrase without reducing theory to 123 Neil Smith 1954–2012 nominalism, but his masterful writing style, a promise evident in his earliest publications that had only gained strength with experience. Disciples of Neil’s big, brilliant, beautiful prose have their pick of the mix, but for my money it’s ‘‘Giuiliani Time: The Revanchist 1990s’’ (Smith 1998b), a twenty-page tutorial in busting through the comfortable crypt of academic composition, a literary genre that languishes in a tranquillity bred of fear: fear of transgressing orthodoxy, fear of muddling the precision of register, fear of ideological dues unpaid, fear that the word may overstep the data. With a few prominent exceptions, scholarly prose at the dawn of the Information Age had gone largely moribund, afflicted by the same contagion of twitchy angst that was the ironic legacy of the textual turn, with its weaselly disavowal of authority, its sly repudiation and reinscription of metanar- rative. The space where risk should have resided instead crowded up with qualifiers and conditionalities aligned in a great prickly hedgerow of resentful apologetics, or camouflaged behind the bluff of impenetrability. In a writerly climate in which social science cowered on the page, huddled in a corner with its back to the wall, eyes darting frantically to and fro against the slightest prospect of attack, Neil’s words rang like a bell across the rooftops. For students of the nineties, finding their feet on the shifting sands of an increasingly cringing and obfuscating linguistic landscape, here was the ultimate jail break, the monkey-wrench manual for all breeds of academic bullshit: bowed, befogged or beguiling. If Neil’s work taught his students how to think, he also showed many of us that there was another way to write. The brilliance of Neil’s writing would be formally recognized in 2003, when he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography for his third monograph, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Smith 2003). Like gentrification in the 1970s, nature in the 1980s, and revanchism in the 1990s, Neil greeted the millennial daybreak with an intuition almost spooky in its accuracy. Like his previous work, the seeds of this project had been sown long before, and though it constituted an innovative and risky shift in genre, American Empire was not entirely unfamiliar territory. It tugged at several threads long entwined in Neil’s scholarly tapestry, among them intellectual historiography (and particularly the disciplinary history of geography) as well as the strange contradiction of territorial denial in an age when empire—a manifestly geographical process—was hardly in decline but on the ferocious ascent. As Neil noted in the introduction to the first edition of Uneven Development, ‘‘The popular geographical wisdom is that…we are somehow beyond geography’’ (Smith 2008b, p. 4) and American Empire would take that assumption to task, bringing it home to a specific time and place in the paradoxical problem of twentieth-century American imperialism, which, unlike its colonial progenitors, seemed to wield global power through the establishment of a fiduciary Lebensraum of liberalization in which American capital ruled the global roost of debt and patronage, rather than through absolute territorial expansion in which the American state would exercise direct jurisdictional control. If ‘‘Lebensraum’’ meant an expansionary and extractionist national ‘‘living space’’ in the lexicon of Nazi Germany, for the United States it would signify a fundamentally economic habitat, a niche which American capital

123 E. J. Darling would dominate like a keystone species rather than devouring its lesser class kin to its own demise. Within this climate, Isaiah Bowman, Neil’s biographical window on this contradictory spatiality, cut a curious figure: a geographer deep at the heart of an American regime that seemed beyond geography altogether. Bowman was ever in the thick of it, advising especially on Soviet containment, decolonization and development, and the shifting role of the discipline of geography in the simultaneous American reinvention and disavowal of geopolitics, a contradiction with which he never came fully to terms. Yet despite its habitual repudiation of territorial acquisition from McKinley to Rumsfeld, geography still mattered to American empire, but mattered, Neil argued, in a new way. As the absolute global frontier of uneven development closed toward the end of the nineteenth century, a rapidly overaccumulating US capital sought more relational paths for reinvestment through the elasticity of an emergent world order in which development and underdevelopment were structurally rather than haphazardly related. Colonialism ended in part because there was nowhere for the imperial rats to run in the face of expansionary barriers, not least the effective resistance of national liberation movements, but imperialism proceeded apace through capitalistic involution, the recycling of space harbingered at least partially by the scalular theorization of Uneven Development: Historically, the evolving hegemony of real spatial integration at the global scale is associated with the rise of imperialism (different from narrow colonialism) which Lenin discussed, and the origins of the First World War. It is precisely this historical transition from a formal to a real spatial integration that lies behind the transition…from the absolute geographic expansion of capital to the production of space through internal spatial differentiation. Colonialism did function as some sort of ‘‘external’’ spatial fix, however transitory, but in the same measure as spatial integration at the global scale became real and not simply formal, external geographical space was denied its externality. As first nature came to be produced within and as a part of second nature, ‘‘external’’ space was likewise internalized and produced within and as a part of the global geography of capitalism. This is the ‘‘development of underdevelopment,’’ which lies at the heart of uneven development (Smith 2008a, p. 187). Yet in the 1980s, Neil conceived the seesaw of investment and disinvestment driving uneven development as a process manifesting largely at the urban scale, and far less apparent at the national or global one: If the seesawing of capital is quite evident at the urban scale, it is less so at the scale of the nation-state…At the international scale, there is little hint of geographical seesaw in action…The mobility of capital but especially of labor is restricted by the rigidity of nation-state boundaries and by the rigidly opposite conditions of development and underdevelopment (Smith 2008b, pp. 200–201). Though I don’t wish to draw the parallels too closely, in retrospect American Empire might be construed as an attempt to grapple more concretely with the problem of a national rigidity which, in the ensuing years, turned out to be less rigid than Neil supposed, reading ‘‘internal spatial differentiation’’ through the particular lens of an American globalism that exploited just such a strategy yet masked it 123 Neil Smith 1954–2012 through the disavowal of space. If uneven development constitutes the creation and surmounting of spatial barriers to continued capital accumulation, then the limitation of absolute geographical expansion with the fulfillment of colonization constitutes one such barrier to be overcome in innovative ways, the geopolitics of colonialism supplanted by the geo-economics of neoliberal imperialism. The ‘‘end of geography’’ was an ideological conceit rather than a material reality, and Neil sought to establish the lost geographical ‘‘parallax’’ to an American imperialism that had been billed in largely historical terms as an American Century rather than in geographical terms as an American Empire, and in so doing, give the lie to a doctrine of American domain that asserted itself on the basis of its alleged spacelessness. He became, through this book, an ethno-biographer of America’s own strategic geographic amnesia, but as ever, grounded this cultural metaphysics in the spatial requirements of capital. No sooner had Neil put geography back into American empire, and helped us theorize its simultaneous magnitude and obscurity, than the United States invaded Iraq, a spectre sufficiently close to the horizon that he would write, in the introduction to American Empire, that ‘‘it is far from clear, except perhaps in the cases of Iraq and the Palestinians, which states and cities, governments and mountain hamlets, will find themselves in the cross-hairs of global revenge and ambition’’ (Smith 2003, p. 7). When the American scope resolved its site on Baghdad at the last, an addendum was clearly called for. In American Empire, Neil had pronounced the waning decades of the twentieth century the third moment in a series of previously frustrated attempts at US-centered globalization. In The Endgame of Globalization (Smith 2005), his final book, he took up this thread with renewed urgency, defining the war in Iraq, in contradistinction to its billing as a ‘‘war on terrorism,’’ as both the historical culmination and potential defeat of this project. Like American Empire, Endgame situated itself in the longue dure´e of the twentieth century, yet it tackled a conundrum that preyed on the minds of many in the specific moment of the Iraq war: the simultaneity of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, the seemingly antipodal reassertion of narrow American nationalism in the context of the bid for a fundamentally class-based global capitalism. If ‘‘Which side are you on?’’ had become a standard in the pantheon of American labor songs, it seemed strangely applicable to American politicians, of stripes both red and blue, who wanted their nationalist cake and the neoliberal freedom to eat it too. Rejecting a shallow reading of this contradiction as an antipodal smackdown between competing interests in which nationalism and globalization would meet in an existential clash of the titans and devil take the hindmost, Neil argued (somewhat against the Hardt and Negri thesis of empire) that American nationalism and American globalism are instead mutually constitutive, their ultimate roots to be found in classical eighteenth-century liberalism and its immanent contradiction between the primacy of the ‘‘free’’ juridical individual in the abstract marketplace and the primacy of the territorially-bound nation-state into which such individuals are laced by threads both tenuous and ferocious. This contradiction, while not entirely exclusive to the self-described the land of the free, is nonetheless epitomized by the United States, particularly through its 123 E. J. Darling attempt at resolution via the trademark we-are-the-worldism that de facto conflates American interests with the interests of all peoples. In this fantasy of benign American hegemony, dominance logically means liberation, thereby negating the very concept of dominance. As Neil put it, ‘‘The jail of empire is good for you,’’ therefore there is no jail, and no empire either. Little wonder the Bush administration expected its appointed bailiffs to tread a path strewn with rose petals through Iraq. Yet America’s global neoliberalism falls prey to the same contradictions as its national liberalism, for they are ultimately cut from the same cloth: the exclusion of entire groups of people from the god-given universal liberties the United States purports to champion through the confluence of de-Americanization and dehuman- ization, the American national project as much a venture in pathologizing disownment as the American global one. So would the millennial wars be billed as the civilized against the brute, anyone standing against America, which after all stands for humanity, expertly dehumanized in a narrative that would pave the logical way for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Basra, Bagram. The Iraq war, as the culmination of the third moment of American imperialism, was a geo- economic rather than a geopolitical strategy—an attempt to install not a colonial regime but an infrastructure of neoliberal institutions, part and parcel of the broader American Lebensraum—yet proceeded along the territorial lines of invasion in the wake of the millennial shift from the neoliberal to the neoconservative, a slippage rather than a sea-change. And therein, potentially, lay the seeds of its own destruction. The denial of geography notwithstanding, with the Iraq war, whose public sale suffered vastly from the dearth of revanchist propaganda that ‘‘justified’’ the war in Afghanistan for even some among the alleged left, the American empire tipped its hand. Geography counted. And if it counted to the empire, then it logically counted to those who would see a world beyond its defining imperial parameters, a lesson with scalular implications that would be thrown back into the face of a globally-ambitious American imperium years later from the urban rostrum of Tahrir Square. If Neil was always, in his heart of hearts, a geographer, his work (especially in American Empire and The Endgame of Globalization) nonetheless demonstrated a fearless interdisciplinarity. He fought fiercely to radicalize geography, particularly through his passionate commitment to the International Critical Geography Group, but eschewed disciplinary policing, a sentiment reflected not only in his research but his institutional labors, especially in his founding of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics in 2000. These were heady days at the Graduate Center. Geographer Cindi Katz was already there in the Environmental Psychology Program; geographer David Harvey joined the Anthropology Program a short time after Neil, and for awhile the B. Altman building housed one of the best geography departments that never was. The Center, however, embodied Neil’s habitual tendency to break down borders, between the pumpkin patches of narrow scholarship, between the hierarchical ranking of student and professor, between the debilitating boundary separating the academy from the world it professed to analyze. It was, and is, a wonderful place, bringing together scholars and activists to sit round a table, once a week, to discuss and debate and set the world to rights, 123 Neil Smith 1954–2012 much as his comrades did many times around Neil’s kitchen table, wherever that might have been throughout the years. And much like the deceptively folksy trope of the kitchen table, the Center was a fulcrum of critical contestation as much as comradely concurrence. So it was in my day. I joined the Center as a student fellow upon my return from fieldwork in the autumn of 2001, the year the ‘‘crossing borders’’ esprit was formalized, with a vast irony no one could have predicted, into a defining theme. The group met two or three times before the shit hit the fan on September 11. By evening the phones were down all over the city, but by strange chance I was able to reach Neil in New Jersey from my flat in Brooklyn. Both our households were tuned to CNN, which was broadcasting a firefight over Kabul. ‘‘Maybe it’s already begun,’’ he said. It wasn’t the US invasion, not yet, but he could see the horror to come. In the ensuing weeks, Neil was superb. Emotions were running high by the time New York ground back to life and we were all able to meet again, making our way to the Graduate Center through underground corridors still haunted by posters of the missing who would never be found: grief, anger, uncertainty, and an immense fear for the places and people upon which Washington’s vengeance was likely to fall. Neil, and the Center’s director, Omar Dahbour, gave us the space to sort ourselves out—that first day especially, going one-by-one round the table, recounting our arrival stories on the coast of what seemed like a new historical epoch—but pushed us gently, eventually, to analyze, and organize. There was no smug triumphalism in Neil’s take on that awful day—nor historical amnesia, nor callow bafflement, nor hopeless futility, nor cold analytical calculation. He was a solid and reassuring presence, who shared acutely in the sorrow for his beloved adopted city, but was aware from the outset of the brutal revanchism to come, and worked to prevent it. Neil’s scholarship was of a piece with his activism. That alone would be a long tale in the telling, from his early work with the ISO in Baltimore in the seventies and eighties, his support of antigentrification and antiwar activists through the nineties and the aughts, right up to his involvement in Occupy, a movement he embraced with characteristic gusto, holding classes in Zucotti Park and working his teaching schedule around student activism. His political and scholarly endeavors were mutually-formative, his life inseparable into convenient Cartesian bits: scholarship here, activism there, a place for everything and everything in its place. Neil was, as a commentator put it on one of the many tribute sites that sprang up in the wake of his death, a ‘‘socially useful theorist,’’ by instinct and design. There was a genuine dialectic between his activism and his writing, both a means of not only interpreting the world, but changing it. Neil was a walking revolution, startlingly alert to our present condition, ever mindful of the past that produced us, eyes on the prize of the future we might become, and always seeking the spatial parallax without which history’s arc swings like some inexplicable inevitability. As Neil wrote in the eighties: It is not that our goal is some rigidly conceived ‘even development.’ This would make little sense. Rather, the goal is to create socially determined patterns of differentiation and equalization which are driven not by the logic of capital but by genuine social choice. The hope is that in our efforts to step beyond the natural history of society and to produce real social history, we can avoid the complete 123 E. J. Darling obliteration of nature, and society and history with it. It is not merely capital that must be restructured but the political basis of society, in order to produce a genuinely social geography (Smith 2008a, p. 211). A genuinely social geography would require, above all, the vision of a spatial future beyond the neoliberalism he declared ‘‘dominant but dead’’ (Smith 2008b). He recalled us constantly to the revolutionary imperative (Smith 2009), and warned against the left’s dwindling political imagination, blunted by the same suicidal capitalism that was eating itself and threatened to swallow us along with it, if we allowed ourselves to be consumed by despair. If the capitalists of the world had ignited with the self-immolation of the financial crash, this opened up a new space for struggle, but it could only ever be what we make of it: Revolution may, as [CLR] James (1993) suggests, come like a thief in the night, but if there is going to be a heist on capitalism, the thief needs to come with a few tools. Some tools are intellectual ideas; others are tools of the imagination about other possible worlds; still others are our human bodies, but most importantly they are social and political organization for a more humane future. Or as Goethe put it, ‘one earns one’s freedom and life when one takes them everyday by storm’ (Smith 2009, p. 64). There is scarcely a better way to remember Neil himself than through Goethe’s evocation of freedom won through a life lived hell bent for leather. However impressive the vast piles of paperwork documenting his immense life of the mind— to which my slender review doesn’t even begin to do justice—it is impossible to account for Neil Smith without reference to his extraordinary, gargantuan thereness, the life he took everyday by storm, sweeping us all up in his jubilant gale. He grinned widely and frequently and infectiously, though those who knew him came to anticipate from the mischievous glint in his eye the imminence of a deadpan anecdote when he leaned forward to peer earnestly over his spectacles. He could often be heard singing, with raucous political tunes among the most treasured of his repertoire, which included The Jeely Piece Song, The Socialist ABCs, and a particular favorite, The Philosopher’s Drinking Song, with which he concluded my first and only formal class with him at the end of term. He held no truck with pomposity or conceit, for these were inimical to his own nature and he suffered them ill in others. He could polemicize with the best of them (confiding once to me only that he wouldn’t care to tangle with fellow Scott George Galloway, who dressed down the United States Congress in 2005 and reduced Christopher Hitchens to a quivering mess at a public rumble we attended in New York City shortly thereafter), but he rose to anger on the swell of genuine political passion rather than any hedonistic wallowing in the academic blood sport of the withering put-down. He set scholars from the working class—for whom academia can be a strange and lonely land policed by peculiar conventions, arcane rituals, rigid pecking orders, and severe penalties for their transgression—particularly at ease. He moved effortlessly between the peaks of podium and platform, the troughs of tavern and taproom, and the solidarity of street and squat, at home everywhere but in the presence of the cold, the cruel or the imperious. If people are wealthy in their friends, then Neil was richer than capitalist or king, and he reveled in the climate of camaraderie he catalyzed. He was generous with his time, his space, and his heart. 123 Neil Smith 1954–2012

His untimely death leaves a gaping chasm, not only in rigorous intellectual thought, in radical political theory, in robust scholarly writing, but in rare and genuine human fellowship. The sausage factory of our increasingly barren and corporate academia—a metaphor he borrowed from Marx (Smith 2000)—will never be the same without him, but neither will any space he filled up with his kindness, his humor, his playfulness, his rage against injustice, or his inimitable Scottishness, a wholeness his future students, who will doubtless be legion, may now glean only through the words he bequeathed us. Neil’s ‘‘only’’ is a lot. It is a typical mark of the man that this obituary, one of the saddest things I’ll ever write, has also in a weird way been a joy, the rediscovery of his work from an older and (maybe) wiser perspective cause for renewed wonder, respect, and no small amount of giggling, from the thought of this whipsmart undergraduate rabble-rouser going off like a firecracker beneath the unsuspecting arses of neoclassical gentrification theorists back in the seventies to the spectre of his fierce anti-imperial missives lobbed a stone’s throw from the Empire State Building thirty years hence. We inherit from Neil a canon of revolutionary possibility that bespeaks a sentiment he uttered oft and freely, as he did years ago to me that unforgettable day in New York: ‘‘Let’s talk.’’ Though we are devastated for his inability to keep the appointment in person, it will sustain us through the struggle with what we propitiously term ‘‘late capitalism’’ to the other side, the prospect of which he never relinquished hope, and indeed personified. In Neil we glimpsed the world for which we fight. Eliza Jane Darling Bleecker, New York October 2012

References

James, CLR. 1993. Beyond a boundary. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Katz, C. 1995. Under the falling sky: apocalyptic environmentalism and the production of nature. In Marxism in the postmodern age: confronting the new world order, ed. A. Callari, S. Cullenberg, and C. Biewener. New York: The Guilford Press. Katz, C. 1998. Whose nature, whose culture? Private productions of space and the ‘‘preservation’’ of nature. In Remaking reality: nature at the millennium, ed. B. Braun and N. Castree. London and New York: Routledge. Nader, L. 1972. Up the anthropologist: perspectives gained from studying up. In Reinventing anthropology, ed. D. Hymes. New York: Pantheon Books. Nicolaus, M. 1969. Remarks at ASA convention. The American Sociologist 4: 155. Smith, N. 1979a. Gentrification and capital: Practice and ideology in Society Hill. Antipode 11(3): 24–35. Smith, N. 1979b. Toward a theory of gentrification: A back to the city movement by capital, not people. Journal of the American Planning Association 45(4): 538–548. Smith, N. 1996. The new urban frontier: gentrification and the revanchist city. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, N. 1998a. Nature at the millennium: production and re-enchantment. In Remaking reality: nature at the millennium, ed. B. Braun, and N. Castree. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, N. 1998b. Giuliani time: The revanchist 1990s. Social Text 57(Winter): 1–20. Smith, N. 2000. Who rules this sausage factory? Antipode 32(3): 330–339. Smith, N. 2003. American empire: Roosevelt’s geographer and the prelude to globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Smith, N. 2005. The endgame of globalization. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, N. 2008a. Uneven development: nature, capital and the production of space, 3rd ed. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Smith, N. 2008b. Neoliberalism: Dominant but dead. Focaal: European. Journal of Anthropology 51: 155–157. Smith, N. 2009. The revolutionary imperative. Antipode 41(S1): 50–65. Soper, K. 1995. What is nature? Culture, politics and the non-human. Oxford: Blackwell.

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