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WORK TITLE: The Amateur
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1960
WEBSITE: https://andymerrifield.org/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1960.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Independent scholar, researcher, and writer.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Nation, Harper’s magazine, New Left Review, Adbusters, Brooklyn Rail, Radical Philosophy, and Dissent.
SIDELIGHTS
Andy Merrifield is an independent scholar whose essays have appeared in the Nation, Harper’s magazine, New Left Review, Adbusters, Brooklyn Rail, Radical Philosophy, and Dissent. His first book two book, Dialectical Urbanism: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City and Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, were both published in 2002.
Metromarxism
The latter title examines the challenges of Marxism and urbanism, and Merrifield explains that Marxism in practice tends to alternately avoid issues of urbanism and dismiss cities as centers for the bourgeoisie. Yet, Merrifield finds that principles of Marxism can be applied to the city, and he attempts to reconcile the issue by presenting several possible theories. Along the way, the author provides an overview of existing Marxist thought and leading Marxist thinkers.
Praising Metromarxism in the Canadian Geographer, Imre Szeman announced: “Splendidly and energetically written, the book also functions as an introduction to the themes and tropes animating radical geography.” The critic went on to state that “Metromarxism makes clear not only why the city needs Marxism but why Marxism must take into account the space of the urban—a space that promises to be even more prominent in this century than in the last.” Richard Harris, writing in H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, was also positive, and he found that “the strengths of Metromarxism are immediately apparent. Merrifield is a lively, engaging, and sometimes humorous writer. He brings his subjects alive, and effectively suggests how their thinking was shaped by the cities in which they lived. He says enough about their ideas to pique our interest, concisely, and with the minimum of jargon.”
The Wisdom of Donkeys
Following the success of Metromarxism, Merrifield authored the critical biographies Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction, in 2005 and 2006, respectively. Next, in 2008, Merrifield released The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World, a philosophical travelogue that meditation on the author’s journey through southern France with a donkey named Gribouille. The author uses this journey as a jumping-off point for a discussion of art, philosophy, and beauty, reflecting on his four-legged traveling companion along the way. Merrifiled also comments on famous donkeys in literature and history, most notably Modestine in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson. Don Quixote is mentioned as well. Indeed, portrayals of the donkey in literature abound, and Merrifield cites the Bible and the Qur’an, as well as works by such writers as Anne Sexton, G.K. Chesterton, and George Orwell. From there, the author comments on the visceral joys of donkeys themselves, including their habits and personalities.
As Library Journal corespondent Graham Christian, The Wisdom of Donkeys is an “affecting and eloquent account of a man and a chocolate-colored donkey.” June Sawyers, writing in Booklist, was equally laudatory, and she remarked: “Can a donkey be a philosopher? Merrifield believes so and, with this modest, lovely little book, makes us believe so, too.”
Magical Marxism
Merrifield returns to the topic of Marxism with his 2011 volume, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination. With this book, Merrifield proposes a kinder, gentler Marxism, one that eschews statist, bureaucratic constructs and instead offers a freethinking and liberal ethos. Magical Marxism, the author writes, is the Marxism of poets and artists. Merrifield writes that this proposal is not a fantasy, and he explains Magical Marxism was in effect in Nicaragua during the 1980s.
In the words of online Reviews in Cultural Theory correspondent Sarah Hamblin, Merrifield “proposes an alternate vision that leaves behind some of Marxism’s most well-worn notions in favor of an affirmative utopianism that uses the imagination as the foundation from which to begin the act of living ‘post-capitalistically.'” Merrifield added: “Magical Marxism surveys existent models of alternate living that challenge both capitalist hegemony and certain tenants of traditional Marxist thought.” Another positive assessment was proffered in the New Internationalist, and a critic advised that “Merrifield is an exciting writer who brings a fresh perspective to the political debate.”
The Amateur
In 2012, Merrifield released the biography John Berger, and the next year he authored The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. The author also expanded on questions of urbanism in his 2014 book The New Urban Question. Next, in 2017, Merrifield published The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love, and intellectual treatise that takes on the problems of professionalism. According to the author, following the proscribed paths to success is a form of drudgery that supports capitalist and hierarchal hegemonies, thus creating an endless series of yes-men who do and say what they’ve been told to do and say. This applies to every aspect of modern life, especially in the political system, but also in higher education. The author argues that outside, amateur perspectives are essential for creativity and innovation, not to mention upending the status quo. From there Merrifield cites the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, Laurence Sterne, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Karl Marx, and Plato. All were wildly successful amateurs, the author claims.
Reviews of The Amateur were largely positive, and online Pop Matters correspondent Hans Rollman found that the volume “presents itself as a celebration of amateurism in all fields: from politics to intellectualism to the arts and beyond. In fact, the book tackles much more serious and important terrain than simply offering chicken soup for the hobbyist’s soul.” Rollman then commented: “Merrifield ends on a discussion of the merits of ‘professional revolutionaries’ versus ‘amateurs’, but makes a more important point before he reaches such insurrectionary concluding thoughts. Before we can challenge professionals, we have to challenge ourselves. Those of us who pursue professionalism in any field of endeavor have come to accept the hegemony of professionalism and its demands as a way of coming to live with ourselves and the soul-and-imagination-killing mediocrity of this approach to life. It’s a subjective attitude that we need to recognize and confront within ourselves, just as much as we need to confront it in wider society.” Commending the volume further in the Guardian Online, Sukhdev Sandhu declared that Merrifield “writes with a brio and wit often missing in professional academics.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Biography, spring, 2008, review of The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World.
Booklist, January 1, 2008, June Sawyers, review of The Wisdom of Donkeys.
Canadian Geographer, fall, 2004, Imre Szeman, review of Metromarxism: a Marxist Tale of the City.
Canadian Journal of Urban Research, June, 2000, review of The Urbanization of Injustice.
Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, May, 1999, Uli Locher, review of The Urbanization of Injustice.
Guardian (London England), November 12, 2005, Ian Pindar, review of Guy Debord.
Labour/Le Travail, spring, 2004,Andrew Herod, review of Dialectical Urbanism: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City.
Library Journal, January 1, 2008, Graham Christian, review of The Wisdom of Donkeys.
New Internationalist, May, 2011, review of Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination.
Publishers Weekly, March 13, 2017, review of The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (May 14, 2017), Sukhdev Sandhu, review of The Amateur.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org (February 1, 2003), Richard Harris, review of Metromarxism.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (August 30, 2017), Hans Rollman, review of The Amateur.
Reviews in Cultural Theory, http://reviewsinculture.com/ (March 15, 2012), Sarah Hamblin, review of Magical Marxism.
Stuart Schrader, http://www.stuartschrader.com/ (April 1, 2006), review of Guy Debord.
About
img_0442 I’m an independent scholar and author of ten books and numerous articles, essays and reviews in The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, New Left Review, Adbusters, Brooklyn Rail, Radical Philosophy and Dissent. My books have been translated into French, German, Turkish, Polish, Russian, Chinese, and Korean. I have spent decades teaching and writing about urbanism, social theory and literature, both inside and outside of a conventional university setting. I’ve also published three intellectual biographies on Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and John Berger, as well as a popular existential travelogue called The Wisdom of Donkeys. I’m a regular speaker at scholarly, literary and political events on and off-campus. Over the years, I’ve led a somewhat nomadic existence, residing in the UK, the US, France and Brazil. I’ve tried to live, think and write, as my one of my heroes James Joyce once said, “in the broadest way immarginable.”
“Andy Merrifield is a wizard and a poet and an inspiration” – Kalle Lasn, Editor, Adbusters
Magical Marxism
Andy Merrifield
New Internationalist. .442 (May 2011): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org
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(Pluto Press ISBN 9780745330594)
I must admit to having low expectations of a book called Magical Marxism written by an author with The Wisdom of Donkeys in his back catalogue. However, once you move beyond his naff choice of titles, it becomes obvious that Andy Merrifield is an exciting writer who brings a fresh perspective to the political debate.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In arguing for the concept of 'Magical Marxism', Merrifield challenges the staid nostrums of a strait jacketed, statist Marxism; one of bureaucracy and commissars. Against this ossified politics he proposes a liberated, freethinking Marxism of poets and artists; one that might spring, for instance, from the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or that, arguably, existed in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
I am so persuaded by Merrifield's argument that, as a non-Marxist, I am mildly annoyed that he finds the need to tie his theory to Marxism at all. Perhaps a better summary of his notion might be found in his subtitle: 'Subversive Politics and the Imagination'. I heartily subscribe to his concept of the 'Imaginary Party', millions strong and consisting of all those 'stray, non-aligned mischief-makers who want to do something radical, who want to invent another world because they know this one sucks.' Amen to that - sign me up immediately!
[VERY GOOD] PW
www.plutobooks.com
Merrifield, Andy
Review: Paperbacks: Non-fiction
The Guardian (London, England). (Nov. 12, 2005): Arts and Entertainment: p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
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Byline: Ian Pindar, Harriet Castor, John Dugdale
Guy Debord by Andy Merrifield (Reaktion Books, pounds 10.95)
Guy Debord's masterpiece The Society of the Spectacle (1967) warns of a new phase of capitalism that seduces and appropriates, pervading our consciousnesses to an unparalleled degree. It's a prophetic book, argues Merrifield in this affectionate biography, anticipating our era of hyper-modern capitalism. It was also a favourite text of the students and radicals who turned Paris into a battlefield in May 1968. Merrifield traces the development of Debord's ideas and explains how, in 1957, Debord became the leader of the Situationist International. The Situationists went on derives (aimlessly drifting through the streets) and deployed detournements (parodic plagiarism and sloganising graffiti) in an attempt to bring about a revolution in everyday life. Yet for all his radicalism, Debord was somewhat conservative in his nostalgia for a pre-capitalist past. In the end, this self-proclaimed "doctor of nothing" became a recluse, suffering from alcoholic polyneuritis, and shot himself in 1994. "I have written much less than most people who write," Debord once admitted, "but I have drunk much more than most people who drink." Ian Pindar
The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You
Love
Publishers Weekly.
264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p70.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love
Andy Merrifield. Verso, $24.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-78663-106-0
This treatise against commercialism, professionalism, and paid work partakes of the grand tradition of political literary
criticism. Merrifield (Magical Marxism) finds the drudgery of today's world was predicted and portrayed in the words
of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, Laurence Sterne, and even the Grimm brothers. He also charges society with
failing to heed the well-meaning directives of such great thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Karl Marx, and
Plato. These true "amateurs" and their fictional doppelgangers, claims Merrifield, retained a quality of irreverence and
joy needed to avoid "bourgeois values and professional pretensions." With the help of these hallowed names, the author
paints a vividly dystopian vision of higher education, city planning, the political system, big data, and numerous other
modern phenomena. The beauty of this book is in its delightfully derisive phrases: "The political doors between the
public and private don't just revolve; they spin like washing machines." Who cares if the conceit of "amateur" vs.
"professional" feels forced, or that the solutions--community land trusts as community builders, a new Greek agora--
seem fantastical? The book is a satisfying celebration of the "great romantic dream ... a society that breaks free of the
vicious circle of undefined productivity." (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 70+. General OneFile,
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The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in
a Chaotic World
June Sawyers
Booklist.
104.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2008): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2008 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World. By Andy Merrifield. Feb. 2008. 256p. Walker,
$19.95 (0-8027-1593-I). 914.4.
Donkeys are misunderstood. At least, that's the impression left by Merrifield's gentle meditation on life, art, and the
meaning of beauty, which crucially involves journeying through the hills of southern France and "daydreaming in the
open air" with floppy-eared Gribouille's faithful companionship. Merrifield's donkey recalls another, more famous
member of the breed, Robert Louis Stevenson's Modestine in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Merrifield
references Stevenson's travel classic often, also mentioning the work of other artists, including Cervantes, filmmaker
Robert Bresson, G. K. Chesterton, George Orwell, and Anne Sexton, in which donkeys were important characters or
the image of a donkey was an effective device. Even the Old and New Testaments and the Qur'an are cited. Watching
donkeys graze in the middle of nowhere is, Merrifield concludes, a type of therapy. He discusses donkeys' habits and
idiosyncracies, especially their distinctive braying, and insists that when you're with a donkey, time slows down. Can a
donkey be a philosopher? Merrifield believes so and, with this modest, lovely little book, makes us believe so, too.--
June Sawyers
Sawyers, June
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sawyers, June. "The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2008, p. 36.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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Merrifield, Andy. The Wisdom of Donkeys:
Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World
Graham Christian
Library Journal.
133.1 (Jan. 1, 2008): p75.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Merrifield, Andy. The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World. Walker. Feb. 2008. c.256p. ISBN
978-08027-1593-7. $19.95. REL
It is too seldom that the Spiritual Living section of LJ has an opportunity to read and review a real love story, but this is
such a book, the affecting and eloquent account of a man and a chocolate-colored donkey named Gribouille.
Merrifield, author of important biocritical studies of Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord, as well as Metromarxism: A
Marxist Tale of the City, tells the tale of his wander through the Haute-Avergne in southern France, learning the ways
of his patient, strong, and stubborn donkey companion, who gradually shows him that "real happiness comes in
unforeseen places, through surprising twists and turns, through honesty." Highly recommended.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Graham Christian is formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Cambridge, MA
Christian, Graham
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Christian, Graham. "Merrifield, Andy. The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World." Library
Journal, 1 Jan. 2008, p. 75+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA175064057&it=r&asid=0ba070fef2e8e077c24ebf9beccf6aa4.
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Merrifield, Andy: The Wisdom of Donkeys:
Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World
Biography.
31.2 (Spring 2008): p339.
COPYRIGHT 2008 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Full Text:
Merrifield, Andy The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World. Andy Merrifield. Vancouver:
GreyStone, 2008. 240 pp. $22.95.
The Wisdom of Donkeys is the story of Merrifield's "foot travels through the Auvergne region of southern France,"
with his donkey, Gribouille. Merrifield undertakes his journey to "simplify his existence, and in so doing to come to
terms with the psychological ravages of his past." The reviewer commends the book for "its gravelly conversational
prose, its longings and generosity, its intrinsic poetry and profound poignancy as a memoir," ultimately finding it
"compelling but uneven."
Charles Wilkins. Globe and Mail, March 22, 2008: D6.
Mitchell, Joni. See King, Carol.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Merrifield, Andy: The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World." Biography, vol. 31, no. 2, 2008,
p. 339+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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Metromarxism: a Marxist Tale of the City
Imre Szeman
The Canadian Geographer.
48.3 (Fall 2004): p378.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Canadian Association of Geographers
http://cag-acg.ca
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by Andy Merrifield, Routledge, London and New York, 2002, xii+221 pp., cloth C$120.00 (ISBN 0-415-93348-X),
paper $32.95 (ISBN 0-415-93349-8)
Andy Merrifield's engaging Metromarxism offers an overview of Marxist engagements with the city from the sketchy
urban theories of Marx to the revolutionary work of contemporary urbanists like Manuel Castells and David Harvey.
Splendidly and energetically written, the book also functions as an introduction to the themes and tropes animating
radical geography, to Marxist theories of totality and to the work of the eight thinkers on whom Merrifield
concentrates. In addition to Marx, Castells and Harvey, Metromarxism features chapters on Frederick Engels, Walter
Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and Marshall Berman. Though one could argue with the decision to devote as
much space to Berman (largely on the strength of All That is Solid Melts into Air) as to Lefebvre or Benjamin, readers
will find much of interest in every chapter, especially chapters approaching cultural geography or urban theory from
the vantage point of critical theory or cultural studies.
The marriage of Marxism and urbanism has long been a problematic one, as Merrifield admits at the outset of the book.
On the one hand, Marxism--especially 'actually existing' Marxisms such as Mao's China or Castro's Cuba--either have
eschewed theorising the city or have been openly hostile to it. For revolutionary Marxist projects and their theorists,
the city has largely been viewed with suspicion as the home of the decadent bourgeoisie who had to await the influx of
authentic political energy from the countryside for real change to occur. On the other side of the equation, the
discipline of urban studies has been largely anti-Marxist and indeed, paradoxically, anti-urban as well (as expressed
famously in Louis Mumford's view of the modern city as a 'necropolis'). With the goal of introducing readers to the
spirit and liveliness of contemporary Marxist-inflected critical urbanism, Merrifield traces the historical and theoretical
stages in the creation of a 'metropolitan dialectic' that is both pro-Marxist and pro-urban--alive to the possibilities and
virtues of contemporary urban life, while simultaneously aware of the important role played by cities within capitalism
and the toll that urban life exacts on much of the population.
The chapters on Marx, Engels and Benjamin set the stage for the real breakthroughs in Marxist urbanism in the work of
Lefebvre, Castells and Harvey. Though the book is organised around the examination of the ideas (and lives) of
specific thinkers, Merrifield is nevertheless careful to highlight the gradual unfolding of a set of theoretical principles
that can be said to define a Marxist theory of the city as such. The Marxist urbanism that emerges in Metromarxism has
several defining features: it challenges the positivism that has characterised much of urban studies, insisting on the city
as a space shaped by politics in the context of a global capitalist system; it views space relationally rather than
absolutely, i.e., as the outcome of specific human practices and histories which are of necessity malleable and open to
change; it understands the city as a place of both potential freedom and an incredible, real lack of freedom; and it
insists on the need to see the city and urbanism as an integral part of capitalism and, thus, of Marxist theory, too. It is
with respect to this last point that the theories of Castells and Harvey in particular leap to life in Merrifield's book. A
Marxism that is unable to account for the crucial role played by land speculation in cities (especially in the zones of
redevelopment and gentrification) and its link to the cycle of capital accumulation and overproduction is theoretical
impoverished. Metromarxism makes clear not only why the city needs Marxism but why Marxism must take into
account the space of the urban--a space that promises to be even more prominent in this century than in the last.
IMRE SZEMAN
McMaster University
Szeman, Imre
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Szeman, Imre. "Metromarxism: a Marxist Tale of the City." The Canadian Geographer, vol. 48, no. 3, 2004, p. 378+.
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Andy Merrifield, Dialectical Urbanism: Social
Struggles in the Capitalist City
Andrew Herod
Labour/Le Travail.
.53 (Spring 2004): p354.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/
Full Text:
Andy Merrifield, Dialectical Urbanism: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City (New York: Monthly Review Press
2002)
DIALECTICAL URBANISM contains a number of previously published (and rewritten) articles, together with some
new materials, which Andy Merrifield has melded together to tell a particular story about the contemporary urban
experience within the advanced capitalist city. The central theme of the book is that this contemporary urban
experience is one riven by a number of contradictions. Specifically, as suggested by its title, Merrifield seeks to explore
what he calls the dialectic of urbanism and urbanization, by which he means the dialectic between the experiences of
living in the contemporary, post-industrial metropolis and the ways in which the urban built environment is physically
constructed as part of the accumulation process under capitalism. Three tenets run through the book, as outlined by
Merrifield in its introduction: first, "truth claims about cities must be conceived from the bottom upward, must be
located and grounded in the street, in urban public space, in everyday life"; second, the built environment is an
inherently political social product and different sorts of organizing and localized action are necessary to construct more
socially just cities; and third, there is an ambiguous metaphysical condition to the urban experience in which both
optimistic and dysfunctional aspects of modern life are expressed--cities can be simultaneously liberatory and
oppressive, utopian and dystopian, full of pessimism or full of hopeful potential.
After laying out the conceptual structure for the book, there are then five chapters which examine a number of
contemporary conflicts within several US and British cities. In Chapter 2 Merrifield explores conflicts over the creation
of the bourgeois playground of Baltimore's Inner Harbor, particularly as it has impacted the area around the old
American Can Company plant. The chapter recounts how federal government urban policy has been hijacked during
the past twenty years or so by large financial interests and how speculative investments in the spaces of the built
environment have encouraged the gentrification of old industrial facilities. Merrifield examines how a local community
group sought to intervene in the built environment to save the American Can plant from being demolished so that it
would retain both its corporeal and psychic position within the local community's lifeworld. For Merrifield, part of the
paradox of this conflict between developers and local community activists is that whilst the community activists took
on the power of speculative capital (and so might be seen by some on the left as heroic proletarians) they were also, in
many ways, quite racist, bigoted, and nationalistic in their politics--many supported the first Gulf War and were quite
explicit that they did not want "Jewish parasite developers" destroying their neighborhood. Merrifield calls this
situation (racist and nationalistic proletarians fighting the forces of capital) a "political dilemma" for the left, for it
complicates some representations which see working-class community activists who challenge the power of capital as
flawless heroic figures--though ultimately the dilemma may stem more from the left's idealized notion of how
proletarians should act and its failure to understand the power of patriotism for many working-class people than from
the actual practices of community activists and workers themselves.
In Chapter 3 Merrifield looks at the conflicts that have divided neighbours within the poorer parts of Liverpool,
England. In particular, whereas the majority of residents within the poorest of Liverpool's inner-city neighborhoods are
white, struggles for social justice have usually been portrayed as an issue particularly for mobilizing black Britons and
non-white immigrants, and questions of class have tended to disappear from local political organizing agendas which
have been articulated by many non-white community activists. One of the questions for Merrifield, then, is how to
celebrate ethnic difference amongst urban subjects whilst simultaneously trying to maintain some sense of
commonality and cohesion amongst workers who share similar class positions. As a way of exploring this question
further, perhaps, in Chapter 4 Merrifield recounts the living- wage activism in Los Angeles in which janitors and other
low-wage workers--who are mostly non-Anglo--have managed to organize around issues both of class and ethnicity.
For Merrifield, continuing the theme of urban dialectics, the living-wage campaigns which have arisen in over one
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hundred US cities represent American workers' antithesis to capital's assault on their standards of living. They are the
working-class response as many jobs and services have been sub-contracted out by a downsizing corporate America
and by local governments during the past twenty years.
Having spent some time in the book investigating conflicts within the contemporary city, Merrifield then ponders in
Chapter 5 the issue of order and disorder in the city, contrasting the writings of 19th-century writers such as Marx and
Dostoevsky with 20th-century writers such as Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford. In particular, Merrifield argues that
both a certain amount of order and disorder are essential for a vibrant urban culture, an argument that he delves into
through an analysis of the transformation of 42nd Street/Times Square in New York City. Continuing the focus on
NYC, Chapter 6 scrutinizes what has been happening to Single-Room-Occupancy (SRO) tenants as many
neighbourhoods in the city become gentrified as the city reinvents itself as a post-industrial, financial services, and
tourist-destination metropolitan centre. Finally, Chapter 7 serves as a conclusion to probe what Merrifield calls the
"negative dialectic of the city" and the conflicts under capitalism between use-values and exchange-values in the built
environment.
In summing up, although Merrifield is not the first to make the argument that there are deep contradictions within
cities, he writes about the topics covered in the book with great passion and aplomb. The book is easy to read--
Merrifield is an evocative writer--and the prose flows in such a manner that you want to turn the page to find out what
happens next. The book would be appropriate for students of all levels, from first-year undergraduates to graduate
students, who are dealing with urban issues across a wide range of social science or humanities disciplines, particularly
for those interested in reading about case studies of contemporary urban struggles. One criticism of the book, however,
relates to the copy-editing. Although most books have some typographical errors (in this one the reader might be left
wondering whether the "ballet boxes" of page 72 relate to voting or to dancing ), there is a significant problem with the
footnoting in Chapter 2--48 footnotes appear in the prose but there are only 47 footnotes for the chapter at the end of
the book (it appears that the inconsistency begins around footnote 36). If a second edition of the book is planned, this
inconsistency should be corrected.
Andrew Herod
University of Georgia
Herod, Andrew
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Herod, Andrew. "Andy Merrifield, Dialectical Urbanism: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City." Labour/Le Travail,
no. 53, 2004, p. 354+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA117040348&it=r&asid=9c01acd6e7b41dd4ef1a01add285e819.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
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Urbanization of injustice
Canadian Journal of Urban Research.
9.1 (June 2000): p122-6.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Institute of Urban Studies
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/events/cjur.html
Full Text:
Merrifield, Andy and Erik Swyngedouw, eds.
The Urbanization of Injustice. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 256 pp. ISBN: 0-8147-5575-5 (Cloth).
ISBN: 0-8147-5576 (PB). $50.00 U.S. (Cloth)/$17.50 U.S. (PB).
Certainly, to have the 20th anniversary of David Harvey's 1973 Social Justice in the City commemorated with a
Conference on Social Justice and Fin de Siecle Urbanism at Oxford University is not particularly surprising. That
book, and Harvey's subsequent contributions, have had, and continue to have, profound impacts on urbanists in many
fields. The Urbanization of Injustice, edited by Andy Merrifield and Erik Swyngedouw, is the published outcome of
that conference. The editors' intent, as they quickly make clear, is not "some kind of mantra to Harvey's work" (2), but
rather an effort to look critically at Harvey's arguments 20 years on, in the very different political and intellectual
contexts of late twentieth century capitalism. Among the key characteristics of this context are critical scholars'
engagement with post-modernist critiques, and the implications of recognizing "difference," while grappling with
social justice in contemporary urban areas, in what the editors describe as "western cities."
Evaluating the extent to which this collection succeeds in meeting these objectives is likely to elicit a variety of
opinions, depending on each reader's level of interest in social theory, cultural studies and sympathy with broadly "left"
perspectives. The articles might be read in at least two different ways, the first involving a serious engagement with the
editors' own distinctions among the articles. The second involves using each article as a somewhat distinct
contribution, albeit in a context where urban and social justice issues are being explored more generally. I will return to
this latter option at the end of this review.
The Urbanization of Injustice has been organized into three sections. Part I, "The Contested Terrain of Justice,"
consists of articles by Susan Fainstein, Ira Katznelson and David Harvey. It is followed in Part II, "City Injustices,"
with papers by Doreen Massey, Neil Smith and Michael Keith; and in Part III, "Justice and the Cultural Politics of
Difference," with contributions from Marshall Berman, Edward Soja, Andy Merrifield and Sharon Zukin. According to
Merrifield and Swyngedouw, this arrangement is meant to highlight the different types of contributions that the various
authors make to examinations of social justice and urbanization, and the ways in which they might be juxtaposed
against one another.
"The Contested Terrain of Justice" consists of three very powerful articles, each identifying fundamental issues on how
one proceeds to link conceptual frameworks that recognize spatiality, diversity, equality and democracy, while
attempting to privilege social justice concerns. Each author makes a unique contribution and explores a somewhat
different terrain, but there are important sites of agreement as well. In all three cases, there is an effort to "ground" the
discussion in real people and real places and thus, to make the case for spatialized, as well as temporally sensitive,
analysis. All three want to look difficult problems squarely "in the eye" and name the complexities that doing so
engenders. Finally, all three make the case for some kind of universalistic discourse about social justice, however much
they also agree that difference and diversity need to be acknowledged and incorporated.
In "The Creation of Urban Space," Susan Fainstein uses "political economy," "post-structuralism" and "urban
populism" to distinguish discussions of urban space since the 1970s, and evaluate them vis-a-vis their perspectives on
social justice, primarily in an American context. She provocatively argues that, while political economists may have
the most to say analytically, given their attention to economic factors, their neglect of individuals' felt concerns around
identity and place has been a fatal flaw. Post-structuralists' close attention to culture and difference is portrayed in
sharp contrast to political economy, and their lack of attention to structural inequalities is presented as problematic. As
she puts it: "But who decides who is oppressed? Without an universalistic discourse, oppression is in the eyes of the
beholder" (29). "Urban populism" is portrayed as the strand of urban studies most concerned about democracy, most
attractive to popular preference, and most likely to eschew social theory for the practice of opposing public ownership
or urban redevelopment. Here, she points to the irony of a movement that uses the language of democracy and "rights"
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to promote intolerance and exclusion. Her conclusion, at least as provocative as any other element in her analysis, is
that "[al movement for social justice, if it is to mobilize large numbers of people, must focus less on the protection of
the most deprived and more on broad benefits, less on the rights of the oppressed and more on security" (38).
Ira Katznelson's article, "Social Justice, Liberalism, and the City: Considerations on David Harvey, John Rawls, and
Karl Polanyi," also is an enormously useful contribution. He begins by contrasting the trajectories of two key
publications of the early 1970s: Social Justice and the City and John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. Both were highly
influential; yet, while Harvey dealt critically with Rawls' a-spatial approach, Rawls and his followers seemed entirely
unaware of Harvey's critique. Katznelson takes up this issue in his discussion, not only in terms of Rawls' original
contribution but also with regard to his more recent Political Liberalism. Yet, despite his strong arguments about the
impossibility of liberalism without the city, he makes equally convincing arguments about all that is lost when
liberalism is rejected out of hand, as in Social Justice in the City. In other words, he argues strongly about the need for
liberalism in cities, albeit a liberalism imbued with materialist sensibilities pace Polanyi, and spatialized sensibilities
pace Harvey.
"The Environment of Justice" completes Part I and does so in a manner that equally challenges simplistic assumptions
and alignments, this time about environment and justice. Although this chapter is also part of Harvey's Justice, Nature
and the Geography of Difference, it works well in conjunction with the Fainstein and Katznelson pieces. Harvey
grounds his discussion in an examination of three approaches to dealing with environmental issues: the "standard"
view, ecological modernization and environmental justice. The standard view applies remedies after the fact of
environmental problems, the result of being seen as "side issues" to the main focus of economic growth. This approach
is contrasted with ecological modernization, seen to work proactively, based on the view that economic activity
inextricably generates environmental problems but that these can be minimized if dealt with systematically.
Environmental racism takes its analysis from an altogether different logic: moral, rather than financial or scientific.
Harvey carefully examines the implications of each point of view and, in similar fashion to his Part I co-authors, comes
to provocative conclusions in favour of a complex and unstable form of ecological modernization, "that recognizes
how environmental and social justice must be sought by a rational ordering of activities at different scales" (97).
The approach, scale and messages in Part II, "City Injustices," all provide a clear contrast to those in the first section.
Massey, Smith and Keith write about the ways in which cities are unjust and problematic places for some of their
inhabitants, and how their difficulties become understandable only by looking at each city from a variety of differently
scaled perspectives. Moreover, they too point out the indeterminacy of any "solutions." The distinct analytic style of
each author is another intriguing way in which to compare and contrast these articles. Intuitively, there likely are
multiple implicit links with the Part I articles, but personally, I would have appreciated a better road map from the
editors as guidance for how best to link the conceptual richness of the Part I contributions with the textured
examinations in Part II. Their explanation in the introduction that "[t]he chapters on the urbanization of injustices in
Part II will set the tone for Part III which broadly focuses on culture and the politics of group difference, and how
visions of justice (Part I), and the mechanisms of urban injustices (Part II), can be turned into an enabling urban politics
and policy" (2-3), sadly miss an opportunity to consider Fainstein, Katznelson and Harvey's challenges in more depth.
Indeed, this collection is one place where editors' introductions to each section would have been very much
appreciated.
In Part III, three of the authors (Berman, Merrifield and Zukin) again focus on particular sites and issues, this time to
examine the implications of culture for social justice. In these articles, there is a stronger focus on variation between
places and over time, and the ways that cultural artifacts might signify highly disparate meanings as time or place
changes. Berman does this in a masterful fashion through the medium of rap, as does Zukin through the use of
economic development focused on culture. Merrifield's focus on working toward social justice in marginalized
communities in Liverpool had the potential to "take up" myriad issues raised in Part 1, but its placement as the second
last reading in Part III does nothing to highlight this fact. Soja's consideration of the themes of Social Justice in the
City in the light of the "new cultural studies" sits somewhat uneasily in Part III--it perhaps would have been better
placed in Part 1, although there, it would have perhaps disrupted the common messages of the other authors. The
observations about the Part II papers also apply here--again, an editors' introduction to this section would have been a
welcome contribution.
Nonetheless, the collection includes very strong papers that could easily be used in the context of a graduate urban
studies seminar, to explore recent contributions to urban analysis that focus on cultural studies and political economy
themes. The Urbanization of Injustice is a valuable teaching resource, both in the manner planned by its editors, but
also as a useful group of readings. The choice will depend on the objectives of the instructor, but be warned, the
instructor should be willing to engage in debates about interpretation that sometimes are quite unexpected. My one
experience in this regard was both enjoyable and surprising. For example, my favorable assessment of Berman's
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personal and sympathetic portrayal of urban rap and his use of the term "organic intellectual" in a Gramscian sense,
was quite a contrast to the students' negative reactions to his "expertise" in interpreting certain songs and groups. Such
disparate reactions should not be surprising, given the authors' interest in avoiding simplistic interpretations and
conclusions. The book also is a useful addition to one's bookshelf, especially if the interactions between cultural
studies, political economy and questions of social justice are of interest. Although the authors' limiting of their
discussions almost entirely to "western cities" (except for Massey to some extent) might be criticized, within the
parameters of their goal the collection succeeds quite well. I recommend it highly.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Urbanization of injustice." Canadian Journal of Urban Research, vol. 9, no. 1, 2000, pp. 122-6. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA30501743&it=r&asid=da04d9ec82d4401fc8ed7992ef2f61d9.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
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The Urbanization of Injustice
Uli Locher
The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology.
36.2 (May 1999): p303.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Canadian Sociological Association
http://www.csa-scs.ca/crs-home/
Full Text:
ANDY MERRIFIELD and ERIK SWYNGEDOUW (eds.). New York: New York University Press, 1997, vii + 245 p.
Like the Marxist analysis it propagates, this book will divide the audience. For some readers it will be the state of the
art of contemporary urban analysis, an enterprise revolutionized through the works of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey,
Manuel Castells and other radical writers and an enterprise which focusses on exploitative structures, disadvantaged
groups and protest movements. For other readers it will represent all that is wrong with whatever Marxism survives
today: it is openly ideological, devotes more space to theoretical debates than to empirical reality and hardly ever
attempts to provide a balanced treatment of the topics under review.
This collection contains eleven papers presented at a conference at Oxford University commemorating the twentieth
anniversary of British geographer David Harvey's book Social Justice and the City (1973). The authors are united not
only in their world view, admiration for Harvey and concern for social justice but also in their devotion to praxis. The
stated purpose of the book is to rethink the relationships between spaciality, power and justice, following Harvey's
lead. By doing so the authors push for the development of socially just urban practices (3). For Harvey the city is an
enormous machine continually producing more inequality and injustice. The engaged intellectuals writing here deplore
"late capitalist urbanization" and would like to change things, presumably in and beyond those British and American
cities they write about.
After an introductory piece by the editors, the book contains a first part on "The contested terrain of justice," with
chapters by Susan Fainstein, Ira Katznelson and David Harvey. Fainstein provides an overview of works by Harvey,
Castells, Sennett and Gans and their thoughts concerning equality, diversity and democracy - three elements central to
the concept of social justice. Katznelson pushes conceptual abstraction to new heights in his chapter on social justice
and liberalism, to the point where intrasectarian debate eliminates any concern with empirical reality. At one point we
get treated to what Katznelson thinks of what Harvey thinks of what Polanyi thinks of what Marx thinks of the
economy (59); reader beware{ Harvey himself stands head and shoulders above such futility. His chapter on the
environment of justice comes across as lucid, free of jargon, and concrete almost to the point of empiricism. He relates
environmental abuse and injustice to the social processes inherent in "unrelenting capital accumulation" and ends up
asking the "environmental justice movement" for more "radical political action" (97).
Part Two on "City injustices" contains selections by Doreen Massey on the "articulations of identity/spaciality/power,"
by Neil Smith on "the revanchist city" and by Michael Keith on "street sensibility." While Massey is carefully staying
away from overdrawn polarizations, realizing that "most people's lives are still lived somewhere in the middle" (105),
Smith has no such scruples. His polemical generalizations are grand even by radical writers' standards. To him New
York is like Beirut, a Los Angeles riot is an 'uprising" (cited as a "black intifada" elsewhere, 12), "the city" plagued by
"mass homelessness" launches a "war" against the homeless, 1991 brought a "crippling economic depression" and "of
course, it is the free market that is the source of the problem" (117-35).
Part Three on "Justice and the cultural politics of difference" takes us back to calmer waters, with an original analysis
by Marshall Berman of rap as a protest and identity movement, a chapter on new cultural politics by Edward Soja, a
thoughtful presentation by Andy Merrifield of the struggles of an impoverished, socially heterogeneous area in
Liverpool, and some stimulating reporting by Sharon Zukin on, among other things, the de facto privatization of public
space occurring in New York through "business improvement district" (BID) programs. Even though these pieces have
little more in common than their authors' ideological commitment they are at least in part about real people living in
real cities, a welcome change from the demagogical hyperbole of Part Two of the collection.
Does this book achieve its purpose? I think it does, and it does so in a thought-provoking way. Following up on
Harvey's seminal work, there is much reflection here on how the idea and the reality of social justice are produced,
adapted, manipulated and, of course, never realized. There is also a radical ideological commitment, a sense of outrage
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over what "Capital" does to humanity, and a conviction that all social science has a political finality. All these elements
were certainly already present in Harvey's earlier writings and especially in his shift from liberalism to socialism,
which is documented in Social Justice and the City; they are discussed in this volume on the background of a rapidly
changing urban world. Fellow Marxist academics will love this collection. It speaks the esoteric language of postmodernism
and post-structuralism, it confirms their socialist values and applies their deductive analytical methods, and
it subscribes to their view of the world as a grand conspiracy.
Will this book convince other analysts studying the conventional mainline issues of importance to urbanization and
urban living - those anthropologists carefully studying social networks and migration chains and subcultures, or those
demographers calculating primacy rates and dependency ratios and fertility transitions, or those economists examining
what it would take to extend today's unprecedented urban prosperity to the also unprecedented numbers of the poor? I
don't think any of those social scientists will be convinced. They spend their lives building and verifying theories, not
proclaiming them, and to them confirmation comes through empirical tests and reality checks, not through quotes from
Engels (136), Gramsci (162) or bell hooks (189). As to the editors' hope that the "readership will not just be academics"
(244), who else, today, would possibly put up with such a combination of arcane language, sectarian debate and
preaching to the converted?
Uli Locher McGill University
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Locher, Uli. "The Urbanization of Injustice." The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 36, no. 2,
1999, p. 303+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA54681991&it=r&asid=8b12babd74644b23ccc0c884caf7dfff.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
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The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love – review
Andy Merrifield’s paean to society’s enthusiasts works both as a counterblast to capitalism and a moving memoir
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Sukhdev Sandhu
Sunday 14 May 2017 07.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.34 EDT
Amateurs are toffs, half-arsed dabblers, irrelevant for the needs of hi-tech, hyper-specialist 21st-century capitalism. That’s one story. Andy Merrifield tells another: here amateurs (a word derived from the Latin “to love”) are non-alienated citizens; enthusiasts, who counter the mechanical expertise and technical formalism of modern society; passionate obsessives standing up for values that need defending. Merrifield, an urban theorist who writes with a brio and wit often missing in professional academics, offers an idiosyncratic canon (Dostoevsky, Jane Jacobs, Edward Said) in which he holds up amateurs as outside-the-box thinkers, inter- and post-disciplinary radicals. It’s a stirring book whose critique of contemporary work culture will be instantly recognisable. It also doubles as a moving memoir of a working-class intellectual. One caveat: another person to be sceptical about experts is Donald Trump. Perhaps best not to go there.
• Amateur by Andy Merrifield is published by Verso (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
It's Time to Confront the Tyranny of the Professional Class
BY HANS ROLLMAN
30 August 2017
THE AMATEUR ARGUES THAT PROFESSIONALS -- AND THE ROLES THEY ASSUME -- FACILITATE THE WEALTH GENERATION OF THOSE IN POWER IN OUR NEOLIBERAL HIERARCHY.
cover art
THE AMATEUR: THE PLEASURES OF DOING WHAT YOU LOVE
ANDY MERRIFIELD
(VERSO)
US: MAY 2017
AMAZON Most professionalism is simply playacting.
Andy Merrifield’s provocative treatise The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love presents itself as a celebration of amateurism in all fields: from politics to intellectualism to the arts and beyond. In fact, the book tackles much more serious and important terrain than simply offering chicken soup for the hobbyist’s soul.
Merrifield’s mission is not so much to extol the virtues of amateurs as to decry the role of professionals in modern society. He argues that most ‘professionalism’ is simply play-acting. Those who go through the motions of a role, performing all the right actions (obtaining graduate degrees, working their way through public service, advancing through the corporate world) are eventually granted a certain privileged status, reflected both in wealth and financial security, but more importantly in an assumption of wisdom and leadership.
It’s our society’s critical flaw, warns Merrifield—the only thing those people have really demonstrated is their ability to conform, unthinkingly, to the expectations of others (who in their turn conformed). Consequently we are left with a class of professionals—corporate, academic, political, bureaucratic—who may have little to no actual talent beyond the ability to mimic the forms demanded by their roles, and on the basis of which they have been invested with tremendous public authority and trust. The result is a class of leadership—political, civil, academic, corporate, military—whose key quality is the ability to say what their superiors want to hear. For society, it’s a recipe for disaster.
Worst of all, it appears that some of the professional think they have ability and talent to be in their station; they’ve come to believe in the myth of their own success. They have to: in order to subjugate their own innate curiosity and imagination they’ve had to conform to the soul-killing dictates of professionalism: go through the mindless routines of obtaining their PhDs, inch forward through the bureaucracy, promote ones’ self through the auspicies of the corporation. We try to put a positive spin on the routines—calling this perseverance, discipline, what have you—but really it’s a bunch of pointless vacuity. As they obediently do what they’re told is expected of them, the only way these nascent professionals can suffer through such soul-killing mediocrity is to convince themselves that their efforts have some meaning or value. Otherwise they would realize just how thoroughly they’re wasting their own lives and potential talent.
Society has always been saddled with the burden of form-fitting professionals, to greater or lesser degrees. The growing contemporary problem, however, is that our present society takes professionalism far too seriously, and increasingly denies legitimacy to those who don’t conform to those professional expectations. It’s more likely to value the opinion of a political scientist than an average member of the voting public; more likely to value a securely tenured academic who studies precarious work over someone who experiences precarious work themselves. There has been a closure of the public space to those who don’t have the professional credentials to play the role that is expected of them, and this is critically starving our society of innovation, insight, ability and creativity. It’s also starving us of genuine democratic dialogue.
Complicit in this closure of public space are a number of gatekeepers—often themselves also ‘professionals’ in media, academics, politics with a vested interest in maintaining the myth of their own legitimacy, and of the broad ‘professional’ class. And it’s getting worse. Instead of consulting the public on matters of public affairs, supposedly democratic governments hire consultants like Ernst & Young to conduct studies and make policy proposals instead. Instead of crafting fiscal policies around the demands of the electorate, governments craft policies based on what credit-rating agencies like Moodys or S&P (Standard & Poors) tell them to do. Instead of facilitating public dialogues between members of the public, media and journalists host talk-shows pitching ‘professionals’ in staged verbal jousting matches with each other. Everyone is simply play-acting their professional roles; nobody is substantively acting with curiosity, creativity, imagination. Our society—and the individuals of which it is comprised—are withering as a result.
Overthrowing the Professional Class
What can we do about it? That’s the problem, and Merrifield doesn’t have a clear answer. He suggests we could do with ‘jesters’ and ‘wild cards’ to shake up the established system. Yes, but that merely shakes it up, it doesn’t change or transform anything. When it comes time do get down to business, the court jester can always be shooed out of the room after providing a bit of entertainment.
Merrifield points to the growing movement around anti-work politics, and this is a more promising approach. Anti-work politics is all about overturning the archaic sense of virtue in employment, and pushing for Guaranteed Annual Incomes and other ways of reducing work while boosting freely accessible social welfare. This holds promise, especially insofar as it could help to reduce the gap between ‘professionals’ (as a product of privilege) and everyone else. Anti-work politics isn’t about laziness (associating work with virtue is one of those archaic value-sets that enabled wealthy elites to profit off the exploitation of the masses) but about ensuring all of society is able to benefit from the advances of modern technology, not just the lazy rich and elites.
He provides the example of the ‘Happy Unemployed’ (Chomeurs Heureux) movement in France and Germany. He looks (briefly) at other nascent movements of popular empowerment, past and present—from anarchists in Sweden to activists in Greece—and mines philosophical notions like Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ (an expression of participatory democracy) or the notion of ‘shadow citizenry’ (the shared identity of the disenfranchised the world over, waiting for its turn to emerge triumphant over the crumbling tyranny of borders and passports).
But these are merely morale-boosting suggestions; he doesn’t so much offer solutions as explain why it is so foolish for us to go on entrusting our societies and our futures to a ‘professional’ class which is more about self-promotion than societal improvement. It’s a vital and important critique, and even without providing solutions still serves a critically important role by throwing out the question and exploring it in a series of thoughtful reflections.
Of course, in doing so he draws on the ideas of a number of great thinkers—ironically, they are mostly professionals themselves, or today deemed to have been such. Figures like Pierre Bourdieu, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and so on may have aligned themselves at various points in their lives with a critique of the professional class, but they could hardly be considered ‘amateurs’.
Indeed, it’s the notion of ‘amateur’ which is perhaps most awkward about the book. Merrifield extols the virtues of curiosity, innovation, imagination, of non-conformity and of self-driven generalism across a range of fields rather than institutionalized immersion into any one particular field. That’s all very well, but is it really captured by the term ‘amateur’? For that matter, can the idea of an ‘amateur’ exist in any discrete fashion, outside of a dialectical relationship with its antithesis, the ‘professional’? (Maybe it shouldn’t: Merrifield notes that amateurs often rely on other amateurs, and that this requisite solidarity and unity against the professional class might provide another route to shaking up the hegemony of that professional class.)
Perhaps the clearer route toward overthrowing the stultifying and socially regressive tyranny of the professional class is to reject ‘professionalism’ and ‘amateurism’ alike; to promote a fundamentally different way of thinking about how we think and act. Perhaps this is what Merrifield is driving toward. What that would look like is anyone’s guess. And the keyword is ‘anyone’.
Other terms have emerged in recent years that capture equal parts of what Merrifield is driving toward. ‘Generalist’; ‘freelancer’; ‘jack-of-all-trades’; ‘renaissance person’. These terms aim to valorize a particular type of identity, but they’re also an implicit critique of the identity against which they must be contrasted: that of the professional.
Merrifield’s book doesn’t necessarily convince that we need a society of amateurs, but it does provide a much needed take-down of the social legitimacy and sense of virtue with which the professional class has been endowed. It’s an critique of professionalism—and an urgently needed one. It’s also a critique on the sociology and political economy of neoliberalism, which Merrifield accurately implies is upheld and reinforced by the legitimization of professionalism. The thing about professionals is that their status (and the way to achieve that status) is defined by whoever is in power; and that means contemporary professionalis—and the roles professionals must assume—is defined in such a way as to facilitate the wealth generation of those in power in the neoliberal hierarchy. Professionalism offers a route to advancement for a few—in politics, academics, business, media and journalism, the arts—provided they perform the expected roles of reinforcing the broader system of neoliberal capitalist exploitation that defines what a professional is in any given field. So long as you do what you’re told and don’t bite the hand that feeds you too hard (a few playful nips are always acceptable), you will be tolerated in your chosen professional status.
Merrifield ends on a discussion of the merits of ‘professional revolutionaries’ versus ‘amateurs’, but makes a more important point before he reaches such insurrectionary concluding thoughts. Before we can challenge professionals, we have to challenge ourselves. Those of us who pursue professionalism in any field of endeavor have come to accept the hegemony of professionalism and its demands as a way of coming to live with ourselves and the soul-and-imagination-killing mediocrity of this approach to life. It’s a subjective attitude that we need to recognize and confront within ourselves, just as much as we need to confront it in wider society.
“A slave to the present is a slave to the facticity of life, a slave to the here and now, to the what is and only is. A slave to the intractability of facts,” writes Merrifield, drawing on Sartre. “To assert amateurism is to break out of the daydream world that we’re entranced by, that we’re contracted into; the world that won’t let us slow down.”
“Some professionals who condition our lives, in business and in the state, are outside of us, above us, beyond our reach. They are true believers that have to be politically confronted. But other professionals are inside us, and sometimes are us. We are not powerless there. Professional apparatuses are constituted by professional agents; the apparatus functions only insofar as we accept interpellation, accept our hailing, the recruitment to our station, as a compliant professional subject. Can we turn the other way when we hear that call?”
THE AMATEUR: THE PLEASURES OF DOING WHAT YOU LOVE
8/10 stars
Fantastic Materialism
By SARAH HAMBLIN
Andy Merrifield. Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination. London: Pluto, 2011. 220 pp.
Andy Merrifield’s Magical Marxism arises from what he describes as “a double dissatisfaction”: an obvious dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary society and a more delicate frustration with the revolutionary potential of actually existing Marxism (xii). Discontent with the resolute negativity of traditional Marxism, Magical Marxism instead proposes an alternate vision that leaves behind some of Marxism’s most well-worn notions in favor of an affirmative utopianism that uses the imagination as the foundation from which to begin the act of living “post-capitalistically” (73). As such, the book is in conversation with other recent attempts to reinvigorate Marxism, most of which have been published as part of Verso’s Communist Hypothesis series. Merrifield’s contribution to these debates centers on the affirmative politics of living differently. Thus, alongside its critique of traditional Marxism and its theorization of a new international – one inspired by magic and surrealism and which sees Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Guy Debord as its guiding thinkers – Magical Marxism surveys existent models of alternate living that challenge both capitalist hegemony and certain tenants of traditional Marxist thought.
At the core of the book is Merrifield’s attempt to reconnect critique and praxis, a link that has been lost as Marxism becomes an increasingly and exclusively negative practice. For Merrifield, this emphasis on negativity is, in part, the legacy of Marxism’s adherence to dialectical thought, where the positive can only ever be “an outcome, not a starting point” (111). Moreover, it is reinforced through basic Marxist concepts – the idea that the proletariat is the class proper to revolution, the theory of fetishism, and the tension between appearance and essence – all of which stem from the belief that there is a truth of material conditions that only (scientific) Marxist analysis can uncover through political critique. As a result, Merrifield maintains, Marxism has become obsessed with capitalism’s contradictions and crises, with its “darker, negative side” (112) and its mission has become simply to “monitor a failing global system, to soberly and coolly analyze capitalist machinations, to revel in clinical critical negativity (146). “Historically,” Merrifield argues, “negative thinking has been a collective prison-house and individual straightjacket” (110) that has resulted in a “gutless and worthless” Marxism, one “without a future, without hope, without hope of inspiring hope, without any discernible characteristics to pass on to anyone” (146).
Turning away from the canon of traditional Marxist concepts and the stultified negative Marxism inspired by them, Merrifield posits instead an “ontology of action,” a positive subversion that affirms utopian desire and attempts to bring it into being through the act of living differently (119). The source for this desire is the poetic imagination, which enables us to imagine radically new worlds and non-traditional ways of being that can then materialize. “Never, perhaps, have we lived in such unpoetic times” (162), laments Merrifield, and it is essential that we reconnect with our creative, utopian spirit if we are to transform the world. For Magical Marxists, poetry “becomes something ontological […], a state of Being- and Becoming-in-the-world, the invention of life and the shrugging off of tyrannical forces that are wielded over that life. Poetic lives destabilize accepted notions of order and respectability, of cool rationality and restraint” (11-12). Channeling André Breton and the surrealists of the early twentieth century, Merrifield champions their poetic power of “absolute nonconformity and marvelous unreality” as the source of new ways of being (12). Tracing this thinking back to the Grundrisse, Merrifield maintains that this magical imagination is “something more than idealism, something more than simple wishful thinking and naïve optimism” (143). Rather, it is a powerful material force where “‘real materialism” is conditioned by “the will (and hope) of ‘fictitious’ idealism” (16), it “drag[s] present reality along with it, […] leaping across the ontological gap between the here and the there, between the now and the time to come” to actively create the future (12). Thus the Magical Marxist project is, in the Blochian sense, conditioned by invention rather than discovery; it is a large-scale détournement of reality where “the source of creation is always reality, always somehow embedded in reality, yet a reality in which imagination is an instrument in its production and recreation” (29).
This poetic transformation of reality breaks with the traditional Marxist model of the seizure of power since “society isn’t so much overthrown as reinvented” (12). Rather than focusing on the negation of capitalism, Magical Marxism proposes affirmative invention through spontaneous subversion, or what John Holloway elsewhere calls “an anti-politics of event rather than a politics of organization”(Holloway 214). The influence of anarchism and the self-determined politics of 1968 loom large in this emphasis on anti-power. Indeed, Merrifield’s Marxism is founded on the desire for autonomy, for Lefebrvre’s notion of the autogestion of life; that is, “a spontaneous subjectivation from the standpoint of social reproduction … [where] people construct their own objective structures to life,” and where “their agency and even their wishful thinking drive them forward, compel them to act, have them strive for collective autonomy” (101). The result is a movement characterized by a revolutionary energy that “resonates” affectively and non-teleologically (74), that is adaptable, non-dogmatic, fully self-determined, “unperfect”[1] and spontaneous. Significantly
Sarah Hamblin is a PhD candidate at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on transnational art cinema, emphasizing the relationship between aesthetics, affect, and radical politics. Her publications include a forthcoming essay on Abderrahmane Sissako in Black Camera and an entry on Sissako in the African volume of the Directory of World Cinema.
Harris on Merrifield, 'Metromarxism. A Marxist Tale of the City'
Author:
Andy Merrifield
Reviewer:
Richard Harris
Andy Merrifield. Metromarxism. A Marxist Tale of the City. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 212 pp. $35.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-93349-0; $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-93348-3.
Reviewed by Richard Harris (School of Geography and Geology, McMaster University)
Published on H-Urban (February, 2003)
A Taste of Urbane Marxism
A TASTE OF URBANE MARXISM
What can Marxists tell us about cities? North American urban historians seem to believe that the answer is "very little."
The research of historians (and of fellow-travelers such as historical geographers) has rarely been driven by theoretical questions, and the wave of Marxism that invigorated urban studies in the 1970s and early 1980s had less influence on history than it did on other academic disciplines. Then in the 1990s, on an ebb tide, the shifting currents of academic fashion stranded some Marxist theoreticians like supertankers that were unable negotiate the newly-visible intellectual reefs. Today, Marxism may appear to be a discourse of the past, irrelevant to the current concerns with culture, ethnicity, and the environment, or to the fate of cities in a post 9/11 world.
Andy Merrifield, a geographer at Clark University, is one of a newer generation of scholars who believe that if history is not dead, neither is Marxism. In Metromarxism he tries to show how Marxist ideas are still relevant to our time, and our understanding of cities. (He also shows how cities are relevant to our understanding of Marxism, though this is an aspect to his argument that may interest fewer urbanists.) The conventional way of doing this would have been to survey Marxist thinking about cities, probably beginning with an analysis of how cities facilitate the production and circulation of capital, and concluding with urban culture and politics. Instead, Merrifield offers a biographical and (he would argue) dialectical treatment that readers who are new to Marxist thought may find more stimulating and intriguing.
Merrifield shows us Marxism through the words and lives of eight Marxists, beginning with Marx and Engels (fl. 1840s-1880s) themselves, continuing with the German Jew Walter Benjamin (1920s-1930s), the French Catholic sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1930s-1970s) his younger countryman Guy Debord (1960s-1970s), the Spanish-born urban sociologist Manuel Castells (1960s-), and the British geographer David Harvey (1960s-), before concluding with the American urbanist Marshall Berman (1970s-). Most of these writers did not try to build upon the work of their predecessors, in the sense of constructing a single intellectual edifice, but they were aware of the work of earlier writers within the Marxist tradition, and it makes sense to discuss them, as Merrifield does, in chronological order. In each case he tells us as much about their lives as their ideas, and in particular about their responses to the cities in which they lived. For the earlier writers these cities were, disproportionately, Berlin, London and, above all, Paris; later, New York and Baltimore made their presences felt. Merrifield is also careful to point out the sometimes diverse intellectual influences that shaped the thinking of these writers. He notes, for example, the debt that Benjamin owed to Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukacs, as well as to Marx. These, then, are linked mini-biographies, rather than staging posts on a linear intellectual progression.
With the possible exception of Debord, the writers that Merrifield has chosen are all prime candidates for inclusion in such a book. Each has had a substantial impact on the way that urban scholars have viewed cities. Marx himself said less about the character and significance of cities than we might expect, given that the rapid growth of industrial cities was the most striking features of nineteenth century capitalism, and that they were also the notable centers of political resistance, notably in the Paris Commune. Engels said more, but even his comments are suggestive rather than comprehensive. It was not until a century later that Harvey articulated a theory of capitalist urbanization that extends the largely non-spatial language of Marx's masterpiece, Capital. Merrifield has great respect for Harvey's achievement, and it is perhaps because Harvey's work is so obviously central to the modern Marxist urban tradition that he plays up the writings of those writers who drew more extensively on non-Marxist intellectual traditions, who were fascinated by the culture of cities, and who responded unpredictably and sometimes poetically to the urban scene. His eloquent discussions of Benjamen, Lefebvre, and Debord show a Marxist urban tradition that will be new to many, and which are apparently intended to leaven the still-popular image of Marxism as stolid, narrow, and doctrinaire. In an era when the cultural approach to cities is still strong, this may indeed be an effective way of making Marxism more relevant to a new generation of urban scholars.
A couple of the writers surveyed by Merrifield have dabbled in historical research, but none in a sustained way. It is regrettable that he did not include a serious historical scholar, since one of the strengths of the Marxist approach is its historical character. Except for a passing reference (pp. 170-1) he did not even refer to the work of Mike Davis, one of the most influential of the urban Marxists who are currently active, and whose historical interests, though based on secondary sources, have been sustained. This, and a couple of sophomore errors in the use "nineteenth century" to refer to the 1900s, may limit the appeal of the book to some historians, but this would be unfortunate.
The strengths of Metromarxism are immediately apparent. Merrifield is a lively, engaging, and sometimes humorous writer. He brings his subjects alive, and effectively suggests how their thinking was shaped by the cities in which they lived. He says enough about their ideas to pique our interest, concisely, and with the minimum of jargon. His judgments are consistently sound, and the selected references useful. The book will be most useful to those who have little or no exposure to Marxist thought, but even those who are familiar with the writings of some of the writers will find something new. More taster than primer, this book nicely fills a niche.
Copyright 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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Citation: Richard Harris. Review of Merrifield, Andy, Metromarxism. A Marxist Tale of the City. H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. February, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7223
Copyright © 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
Book Review: Guy Debord
Maximum Rocknroll
275, April 2006
Guy Debord
Andy Merrifield
Reaktion Books, Critical Lives Series
Writing a good biography, like Andy Merrifield’s Guy Debord, requires a balance of humility and hubris. The latter is necessary to undertake the project of capturing and synthesizing a subject’s entire life, but the former must offset the potential for hubris itself to cloud a writer’s judgment about the subject. Guy Debord himself balanced hubris and humility with aplomb. As a writer, Debord never sought the material rewards capitalist society bestows upon its darlings exactly because, as a revolutionary, he sought the destruction of that society. In 1979, twelve years after the publication of Debord’s most important work, The Society of the Spectacle, he explained the purpose of the book in the preface to an Italian edition: “Those who really want to shake an established society must formulate a theory that fundamentally explains it.” Debord wrote in 1992 that readers of that theory, “should bear in mind that it was written with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society.” The hubris. “There was never anything outrageous, however, about what it had to say.” The humility.
Merrifield’s is the third biography of Debord in English and it is the first to convey a feeling of Debord’s milieux, from his youth and the Letterist International years in Paris, through the Situationist International (SI) years and the revolutionary period of 1968, and the years after, which he spent in Paris and the French countryside as well as in Italy and Spain. Over the last decade, in reading nearly every text by Debord and the SI translated into English as well as a great deal of interpretive work, it has struck me that the key to understanding Debord is that he was deeply hurt by the destruction of both tangible and intangible elements of Paris that came with France’s entry into post-industrial capitalism. The whole country was uneasy with the developments of the postwar period, including the colonial disasters in Algeria and Indochina. Debord trenchantly described the changes in the urban environment, everyday life of the worker, the world of art, and the relationship between France and global capitalism, and he described what was to be done about these changes.
The rapid modernization of France and its attendant dislocations and unevenness is arguably the best overarching explanation for why the country was, in May 1968, the site of both the largest wildcat general strike in an industrialized country and, as Debord wrote, “the increasingly complete withering of state power for nearly two weeks.” His thought navigates a terrain between nostalgia for the loss of what in nonpolitical terms might be called “home” and hopefulness for the future’s resolutions to the problems this loss engendered. We know now, as Debord’s 1988 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle argues, that the future revolutions that would transform society have grown only more distant with the worldwide consolidation of spectacular power and its destruction of alternatives. Merrifield, with his many glosses of the references and quotations in Debord’s writing, captures Debord’s fascination with plumbing history in an effort to supersede the present. For a complex exegesis on the Hegelian origins of Debord’s ideas, read Anselm Jappe’s Guy Debord. For a peek into what made this brilliant revolutionary tick, read Merrifield’s book.
I have two minor complaints, however. First, Merrifield seems to have translated some passages of Debord’s writing rather differently from any of the available English translations. In some cases, I can understand why he would do this (there are some bad translations out there), but, for example, Merrifield’s “The spectacle is capital to such a degree that accumulation has become an image,” is quite different from Ken Knabb’s “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.” If I understand what Merrifield’s rendition means, it’s a far less radical thesis than Knabb’s version. Second, I wish this book were a bit more academic. As Merrifield notes, Debord hated the academy and was never a member of it, but that doesn’t mean his biographer should eschew footnotes for previously unpublished biographical details! Even if Debord’s widow had related the anecdote, I wish I knew she was the source. Anyway, this is a complaint that will not bother most readers.
Everyone, in the end, benefits from Merrifield’s excursions into Spanish poetry, the history of the perpetually dispossessed Roma, and the French weather, because these are among the things that inspired Debord even though he may have written about them only in passing. I recommend that anyone who reads The Society of the Spectacle also check out this biography. It is not perfect; it should have been longer, with more in-depth political history of the eras of Debord’s life (and of the world) pre- and post-’68 and perhaps a bit on Debord’s legacy. But the book will nevertheless be much appreciated between first and second reads of The Society of the Spectacle. The power of Debord’s writing when I first encountered it was that it seemed so stark and original. Knowing that it has historical antecedents and was the product of a specific time and place does not diminish that power. Instead, it makes it all the more impressive that such cool, clear prose could come from someone so passionate about the world he loved even as he watched it disappear. Merrifield captures much of what is left unsaid by Debord, the happiness and melancholy that are abstractly present beneath the surface of his political theories.