Notes Introduction 1. Dina Rizk Khoury’s “Violence and Spatial Politics between the Local and Imperial: Baghdad, 1778– 1810” references the well- known diversity of nationalities, reli- gions, and cultures of ancient Baghdad and addresses the impact of earlier imperial invasion. 2. For a discussion of the “golden age” of the city’s intellectual and cultural develop- ment, see chapter 5 of Gaston Wiet’s Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate. 3. See also, for instance, Hardt and Negri’s Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, especially their section titled “The Wealth of the Poor”; Planet of Slums (Mike Davis); Dispossessed: Life in Our World’s Urban Slums (Mark Kramer); Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (Robert Nuewirth); and The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It (Paul Collier). 4. I mark this because Benjamin’s work is generally used today precisely to invert the relationship between the senses and the material so as to either give legitimacy to the left celebration of the urban arcades as the space of a new commons or spiritu- alize history. See for instance, Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin’s The Work of Art In The Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media; Tom Cohen’s Ideology and Inscription: ‘Cultural Studies’ after Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin; and Andy Merrifield’s “Walter Benjamin: The City of Profane Illumination” in Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. 5. It is significant in this regard that the “right to the city” was turned into a U.N. project for “managing social transformations,” beginning in 2005, as discussed in “Urban Policies and the Right to the City: Rights, Responsibilities and Citizen- ship,” a U.N. Policy Paper by Alison Brown and Annali Kristiansen (March 2009) that argues for urban “inclusiveness” and “consensus” building among “key actors” for the “reduction” of poverty, while insisting on the need to “recognize” (the legiti- macy of) “economic difference.” Chapter 1 1. For instance, Sassen argues in The Global City, “It is necessary to go beyond the Weberian notion of coordination and Bell’s (1973) notion of the postindustrial society to understand th[e] new urban order” (5). 168 O Notes 2. Even the differences between capitalist societies and socialist societies like Cuba are telling, and we sometimes catch a glimpse of them in institutions and publi- cations usually devoted to representing socialism as the annihilation of “human” freedom (by which is really meant the freedom of the market). For instance, the UN was itself forced to acknowledge, in a “Case Study” of Cuba, the uniqueness of its preparedness for environmental crisis: “Most local and national governments are ill- equipped to manage and adapt to environmental hazards, including climate variability and climate change”; however, “[t]he Cuban population has developed a culture of safety. Many ordinary people see themselves as actors with important roles to play in disaster preparation and response. Education and training, a cul- ture of mobilization and social organization, and a government priority to protect human life in emergencies promote this vision. At the heart of Cuba’s system is a clear political commitment, at every level of government, to safeguard human life. This allows for a centralized decision- making process alongside a decentralized implementation process equally necessary for effective emergency preparedness and response. The system has been tried and tested so many times that high levels of mutual trust and confidence exist between communities and politicians at every level of the system” (“Cuba”). Consequently, 640,000 people were able to be evacu- ated in advance of Hurricane Wilma in October 2005—a violent hurricane that, as a result of the nation’s hard-won preparedness over the course of many years, only lead to one death. Moreover, the report emphasizes, “This was not a one-time response” but one that can be seen throughout the period under review, beginning in 1996 (ibid). This is in stark contrast not only to what notoriously occurred in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina but also to more recent conservative propos- als in the United States to actually cut federal spending on technologies devoted to disaster warnings and response, such as the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (Daly). 3. See especially pp. 781– 802. At the core of Marx’s analysis is that “in proportion as the productivity of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for workers. The over- work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over- work and subjects them to the dictates of capital. The condemna- tion of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the over- work of the other part, and vice versa, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalist, and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the progress of social accumulation” (789– 90). 4. By “geography of labor,” however, I do not mean what Andrew Herod refers to as an approach that analyzes “the spatial distributions of workers across the land- scape to show how this affects the decision-making process of capitalists” (18). The problem with this approach is not that it situates workers as “passive,” as Herod claims, but that it ignores the structural relations between labor and capital and the economic dynamics of space under capitalism. 5. Hyundai, for instance, opened a $1.1 billion state- of- the- art facility in Alabama in 2005. Notes O 169 6. Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart capture this new revisionist urban ethos in the preface to Restless Cities, a collection of essays on the “metropolitan city since the nineteenth century.” The “metropolis,” then and now, they suggest, is “a site of endless making and unmaking: one in which, under the ceaseless influence of capitalist development, identities of all kinds are constantly solidifying, constantly liquefying” (x). 7. The television series began in the fall of 2009 on the cable channel Starz. Chapter 2 1. J. Hillis Miller, for instance, argues in Illustration that “The problem with . symmetrical reversals is that they may, in the end, come to the same thing” (10). Barbara Johnson makes a similar claim in her discussion of Derrida’s critique of metaphysics in the “Translator’s Introduction” to Derrida’s Dissemination: “Derrida does not simply reverse this [logocentric] value system and say that writing is better than speech. Rather he attempts to show that the very possibility of opposing the two terms on the basis of presence vs. absence or immediacy vs. representation is an illusion, since speech is already structured by difference and distance as much as writing is” (ix). 2. Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind and Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight also deploy “blindness” as a textual trope designating highly indeterminate knowledge. 3. For analyses of these cuts in the mainstream press, see Robert Faivre’s “Little Culture, Less History at UAlbany”; Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s “Anti- intellectualism at UAlbany”; and my “Class Distinction.” Chapter 3 1. Perhaps one of the most well- known post- 9/11 signposts of this change in the climate of cultural theory was the well-publicized conference in Chicago held by the editors of Critical Inquiry in April 2003, the papers for which were published in Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004). 2. This turned out to be precisely what has begun to occur. In April 2011 one of the first acts of Emergency Financial Manager Joseph Harris was to announce that he would nullify the authority of elected boards and the city council of the former industrial city of Benton Harbor, an overwhelmingly African American city and a city struggling with high rates of poverty due to the many decades of job loss and federal and state funding cuts. As of June 2011, several lawsuits have been filed in Michigan to challenge the unprecedented authority granted to unelected emer- gency managers—who represent the most overt power grab by capital to ensure every remaining aspect of cities will be privatized. Emergency financial managers, in effect, reflect the Baghdad-ization of U.S. cities, in which unelected managers (not unlike Paul Bremer’s role in Iraq) are installed to strip local communities of representative power, cut services, and make the region safe for a more corporate- friendly regime, regardless of the costs to citizens. 3. A perhaps even more telling index of these trends is documented in Dylan Ratigan’s report “America for Sale: Is Goldman Sachs Buying Your City?,” where he details 170 O Notes many new corporate strategies of privatization, including that of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), “the influential think tank that targets con- servative state and local officials,” which “has launched an initiative called ‘Publi- copoly’, a play on the board game Monopoly. ‘Select your game square’, says the webpage, and ALEC will help you privatize one of seven sectors: government oper- ations, education, transportation and infrastructure, public safety, environment, health, or telecommunications.” 4. “Seeing” from a materialist position, in other words, is understood both as sensory mode of relating to the world and as mediated by labor and the dominant concep- tual schema. “Seeing” is thus always already a metaphor for interpretation. 5. Marx refers to the sphere of circulation or commodity exchange as “a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Capital 280).