ONE 

In contemporary cultural theory, the city is remade by technology into nodal network spaces of a new economy. Theorists such as David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Castells, for instance, suggest that we have entered a new era in which the city is no longer determined by exploitation; rather, the city is a transnational space of financial capital flows made possible by global telecommunications and cybertechnology—what Castells calls the "Information City": a society "organized around networks" (398). The city, on these terms, is based not on labor but knowledge, and is characterized by highly fluid boundaries between identities, places, images, and information. Such a view of the city, I believe, implies an understanding of the humanities as a post-critical and pragmatic negotiation of signs and sub-cultures. It teaches citizens to understand what "is" but is indifferent to what "could" be, because it disconnects new technologies and spaces from what makes them possible. In the post-critical humanities citizen-workers are taught in the cultural and technical skills required to adjust to capitalism, and thus training for the new needs of capital is substituted for knowledges necessary to understand the totality of capitalist relations and how to collectively transform them. The dominant humanities, in short, simply update the contemporary workforce, by severing skills from the social ends toward which they are put under capitalism—production for profit—thus representing the existing mode of production as natural, inevitable, and above all, unchangeable.

In this paper I put forth an alternative view of urban space, technology and the humanities. The city, I argue, is the space of labor. By this I mean that the productive practices of the people who work in the city, and the relations which structure their practices, serve as the foundation of urban relations, and without addressing these relations, urban cultural theory will be able to provide us only with details of the dense urban fabric, but not an explanation of the conditions under which that fabric came to be, who really benefits from it, and how it might be radically changed. I will thus be developing throughout my paper the concept of the "geography of labor", which I believe provides us with a more effective means of grasping the totality of social relations in the city and beyond. The geography of labor assigns a primary role to the dialectical praxis of labor in the analysis of the city because in the actual material development of human societies, productive practices are the central organizing practices; they are "the most essential historical activity of [humans], the one which…forms the material foundation of their requirements of life" (Dialectics of Nature 19). As Marx and Engels argue in the German Ideology, "life involves before anything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself"—a "fundamental condition of all history, which today as thousands of years ago must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life" (48). Labor not only supplies humans with the necessary means of subsistence, but by acting on nature through labor, people change both nature and themselves (what is possible). Labor continues to be the basis of human society today, but it is mediated by exploitative relations, which radically limit the ends toward which the dialectical praxis of labor can be put. People's labor-power has been transformed into a commodity by capitalism, subjected to the dictates of profit, not human need. And nowhere are the consequences of commodified labor more evident than in the capitalist city, where a few enjoy tremendous wealth at the expense of the vast majority of citizens who produce that wealth yet for whom adequate food, housing, and health remain a dire daily struggle.

I believe the "city" represents the possibility of a future in which no one's needs are met at the expense of others, and that the humanities are an urgent space in which to collectively build the knowledges and practices necessary to realize such a future.[1] But such praxis (and the materialist theory that underlies it) has, of course, been widely de-legitimated by postindustrial theory, which now monopolizes the humanities because of the ways in which it serves the needs of capital, by privileging consumption, cultural difference and technology, and exiling those theories that argue for causal relations between the conditions of the many and those of the few. My paper therefore begins with a discussion of postindustrial theories, in order to unpack their idealist assumptions and social implications. Such a critique is particularly important in the context of urban theory, because these assumptions, whether they are articulated in their earlier, more overt idioms (as in the work of Peter Drucker and Daniel Bell), or the more sophisticated contemporary discourses of Saskia Sassen, underlie dominant notions of (urban) space today, and are being used to justify the complete commodification of urban life. In other words, these theories—which represent the source of wealth as technology, culture and circulation, not (living) labor—are effective alibis of privatization: the transfer of social wealth produced by working people into the private hands of those who own the means of production. My paper brings the idealist assumptions of theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and David Harvey into contestation with the materialist theory of (urban) space provided by Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in developing my argument that the city is most comprehensively understood as the geography of labor, I will be taking as my case study the rebuilding of "ground zero", and the struggles over the interests such rebuilding should prioritize. One of my main arguments throughout this paper is that the humanities (including urban cultural theory) need to be re-understood as lessons in educating critical citizens to understand, critique and work to praxically transform class relations.

In the city of labor, the humanities are the site of critical analysis and critique of existing social relations of production, based on exploitation. They are attentive to the specificity of the local but never take the singular and the specific as given. Instead they demonstrate the ways in which the specific is the product of the dialectical praxis of labor and thus a human culture of freedom and equality can only be built on the freedom of labor from exploitation.

TWO

Dominant theories of the city and technology today are grounded in the post-industrial and post-capitalist theories of a "new" society, elaborated in such texts as Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; Peter Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society; Stuart Hall's New Times; Post-Fordism, edited by Ash Amin; and Nancy Fraser's Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition and Global Networks, Linked Cities, edited by Saskia Sassen. Such texts suggest that in the last 3-4 decades we have entered a new historical moment which is post-production and post-exploitation: that is, a moment, when capitalism has broken from of its former relations of exploitation and entered a new era "free" from the class relations of the past. The new post-capitalist era has been brought about, post-al theorists suggest, by radical changes in technology that have fundamentally altered the ways in which society is organized. They point to the shift from the "rigid" and structured production of the assembly line to "flexible" and "just-in-time" production, the dominance of high tech over low-tech industries, the rapid growth of cybercities and cybersuburbs and the decline of the industrial metropolis, and the rise of the "service" industry as instances, not as shifts in the mode of capital accumulation, as historical materialists argue, but as an index of a fundamental change of the capitalist mode of production.

Such assumptions, which undergird contemporary theory and the humanities, are an articulation of what Mas'ud Zavarzadeh calls "post-ality": the "ensemble of all practices that, as a totality, obscure the production practices of capitalism—which is based on the extraction of surplus labor (the source of accumulation of capital)—by announcing the arrival of a new society which is post-production, post-labor, post-white, and post-capitalism"(1). It is a "regime of class struggle" which "severs the past of capitalism from what it regards to be its radically different and 'new' present (which unlike its past is now free from exploitation)", in order to ideologically solve the social contradictions of capitalism caused by the social division of labor (1). Post-ality, in other words, is a marker of the crisis of labor in capitalism, an attempt to conceal the fundamental economic contradictions of capital by focusing on surface changes in capital in the postwar period—i.e., the changes in managerial strategies, new developments in the division of labor, cybertechnologies, etc., that capitalism must make in order to revolutionize the forces of production and stave off a crisis. The "post" is grasped in contemporary theory as a series of diverse discursive practices with their own autonomous and immanent logic when, in fact, they are all versions of the articulation of the crisis of labor in capitalism. They are all attempts to explain away the structure of capitalism—the conflict between wage-labor and capital over the amount of surplus-labor produced in the working day—by suggesting that capitalism has undergone a "fundamental break" between its "industrial" phase and its "post-industrial" phase and, therefore, requires a new set of concepts in order to explain its effects on culture.

In what is a quintessential articulation of post-al logic, managerial theorist Peter Drucker argues that technology has brought about a society in which knowledge (ideas), not labor, is the source of wealth. In the post-capitalist society, Peter Drucker writes, "the real, controlling resource and the absolutely decisive 'factor of production' is now neither capital nor land nor labor. It is knowledge. Instead of capitalists and proletarians, the classes of the post-capitalist society are knowledge workers and service workers" (Post-Capitalist Society 6). Central to Drucker's argument is the assumption that the economy has shifted from an emphasis on the production of goods to the production of information and services; a moment in which it is no longer "manual" labor and the production of commodities that drives the economy, but "mental" labor and the production of codes, images and "information" evidenced in the rise of the telecommunications, the use of computer technology and, generally speaking the service industry (such as healthcare, advertising, etc). The increasing importance of the processing of information in the cybereconomy, the need for the coding of information and images, etc., are viewed as both the sign of a fundamental break in capitalist relations (such that the relation between exploited and exploiter has been replaced by a differential scale of access to knowledge), and of a break that has been ushered in by technology itself. Technology, in other words, is viewed as a distinct entity, governed by its own laws.

What Drucker proposes as the overcoming of class contradiction through technology is, in actuality, a one-sided analysis of the way in which capitalism was forced by dwindling profits in the North and an increasingly radical resistance in the South to reconfigure the international division of labor in the post-war period. Drucker's arguments come on the heels of significant changes in the post-war economy that involved a reorganization of production, governed primarily by capital's search for cheaper labor power, and the intensification of exploitation, in order to counter the falling rate of profit. With the end of the postwar "long boom" (a time of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity which enabled a large section of the US working class to obtain a relatively high standard of living and led to the funding of public programs), the oil crisis of the early 1970s and a series of subsequent recessions, capital needed to increase its rate of profit through the intensification of exploitation. This involved the introduction of newer technologies to expand the productive forces, increasing the exploitation of the workforce and driving down the cost of labor.

Against the industrial processes and the national economy, post-industrial theorists at the time reflected the new developments in capitalism, arguing for the need to diminish the role of the state in both providing welfare for working people and enforcing corporate regulations, and to allow greater flexibility among corporations to move not only exports (trade) but their production centers around the world in search of cheaper sources of labor and raw material. De-regulation, in other words, was not simply a matter of loosening restrictions. It was, above all, a means of transferring social wealth from workers to owners to increase the rate of profit—which was particularly important for the US in the context of growing competition from Japanese and German corporations, and the inability to access the labor-markets of the socialist bloc. The emphasis of postindustrial theory on technology reflects the ways in which the new cybertechnologies have increasingly been used to restructure the global economy to facilitate faster and greater extractions of surplus labor from workers around the world. Technological developments in and of themselves, such as those based on more "flexible" production processes, thus do not represent a radical break in labor relations; rather, they reflect new ways of accumulating more profit on a transnational scale. That is, new ways of accumulating more unpaid labor from workers around the world. As Faruk Tabak argues, such changes in the way work is experienced (for instance, the shift from the industrial assembly line to cybertechnologies) are driven by the need to make work more "market-mediated" (quoted in Morton 12). It is, as Donald Morton explains, a reflection of capital's need to make production processes more sensitive to quickly shifting market conditions in an increasingly volatile global economy ("Pataphysics of the Closet" 12). By making production more responsive, either by "just-in-time production" (which helps to ensure the realization of surplus value by producing goods on demand, rather than for a relatively unknown market which risks the possibility of not selling the goods), cybercapitalism's new technologies mediate exploitation in newer, more efficient ways.

Like other postindustrial arguments, Drucker articulates the logic of changes in technology in a way that obscures what drives it. His arguments respond to certain social and economic changes, but in a manner that isolates technological change from the broader series of economic relations, the effect of which is to attribute change to technology alone. This isolating out of particular elements of the social totality is based on what Georgi Plekhanov called the "factors" theory, a subjective method which "arbitrarily picks out different sides of social life, hypostasizes them, converts them into forces of a special kind, which, from different sides, and with unequal success, draw the social man along the path of progress" (9). It is in this context that technology takes on a mystical quality, as if technology comes out of the minds of people rather than being produced by people under certain historical conditions.

I have used the concept of "technology" several times thus far and I need to take some time now to clarify what I mean by this concept, and its difference from the post-al theories of technology. Following Marx, I understand technology as the product of (past) human labor; it is "congealed labor". That is to say, technology is the both a product of the transformation of nature and raw material through labor into goods that satisfy human needs, and it is the means through which labor engages this dialectical praxis. The dialectical praxis of labor is in all forms of society the fundamental basis of technological innovation. As Marx argues in Capital, "Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. . . He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature" (283). The relation between labor and technology is a dialectical one, since through the development of labor, technology develops to a point at which new forms of labor are developed and necessary, which in turn leads to new technologies, requiring new modes of labor, etc. And, as the way people labor changes, so too do people: activities and modes of relating to others become possible that were not possible previously, under earlier stages of development of the forces of production.

However, labor and technology are always mediated historically through the labor relations in which they are articulated. Under capitalism, the production of technology (like everything else) is mediated through commodity relations, the production of goods for profit. Under these relations, not only does labor become a commodity (purchased on the market), but technology (which is also produced as a commodity) is used to increase the rate of profit by reducing the amount of workers/wages the capitalist pays out while increasing the productivity of existing workers. This is another way of saying that in commodity relations, which presuppose private ownership of the means of production, the working day is divided into 2 parts: that time during which the worker produces value equivalent to meet her needs (socially necessary labor, which her wage represents) and that part of the day during which the worker works for the capitalist without compensation (surplus labor), the basis of all accumulation. Value, in other words, is produced not by technology but living labor, which is the only commodity which, when consumed, creates more value than itself. The exclusive significance of the commodity of labor power is that it is the only commodity which is "a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. This [e.g. the creation of value] is the specific service the capitalist expects from labour-power" (301). Since the fundamental drive of capital is to increase the amount of capital accumulation, capitalists seek to increase the amount of time during the day in which workers create surplus labor, and to lessen the amount of time spent reproducing the workers needs.

Technology is one of the most important ways in which this intensification of exploitation takes place. By introducing new(er) technologies, capitalists can speed up and intensify the production process, so that more products can be made by fewer workers, which makes possible the firing of now "redundant" workers, workers whose jobs have been taken by machines.[2] This is, of course, what accounts for the continued growth of productivity in the US despite the loss of at least 3 million jobs under the Bush Administration. Moreover, as commodities require less and less labor to produce (since the same labor creates more commodities than it did before the new technology), the commodities produced are less and less valuable, meaning that necessary labor-time to reproduce the means of subsistence is decreased, and workers devote more time producing surplus value for the capitalist. Thus the ratio between what the workers receive in the form of wages (whether or not they are paid at value) and what the capitalist receives grows exponentially. Though technology is produced by labor, the benefits of technology are privatized, rather than used to meet the needs of all. Whether the wages are "fair" (market value) or not, the worker is exploited and increasingly receives less in return for her labor power, while the capitalist receives a greater share of surplus-value. Technology, in other words, is crucial for capitalists because it is on the basis of technological innovation that capitalists can gain a greater competitive edge and increase their profits relative to other capitalists who have not used the same advances in technology. Those capitalists who are on the cutting edge of production can undersell their product relative to other sellers because their product has been made with less labor, and therefore less necessary labor—and the capitalist can accumulate more surplus value. This in fact is the whole basis for the rapid revolutionizing of the forces of production that is specific to capitalism.

But what needs to be emphasized here is that although the innovations of technology are used to increase the rate of exploitation of the worker, this does not eliminate the fundamental property relation, which is a matter of private ownership of means of production (not just specific technologies); private command over surplus labor. The revolutionizing of production in capitalism (the shift from "industrial" to "postindustrial" capitalism) is still based on the exploitation of those who must sell their labor in order to survive. There has, in short, been no "break" in production, separating a later stage of capitalism from its exploitative past. Technology does not produce profit; human labor power does. Technology therefore cannot serve as the basis of capitalism now.

To turn back to Drucker, we can see that his claim that technology is the driving force of history and the implication that the main way to bring about social equality is to train more people in the information technologies corporations require, is based on an idealist theory of technology. For, technology is an ensemble of social relations, not an assemblage of autonomous objects and procedures. The materiality of technology is not in its object body but in the labor relations in which it is produced and used. This is another way of saying that technology does not change class relations. Contrary to post-al theory, technology does not bring about equality, democracy, or freedom, because it is not an autonomous object. Machines are social. They are the extension of the dominant social relations. That is, technology is both produced by human labor and it is the extension of the labor relations of society—the way people produce goods to meet their needs—and the relations that are organized around and determined by their mode of production. For instance, in a socialist society, in which production is not organized for profit but to meet the needs of all, technological advances are used to ensure that all people have access to housing, healthy diets, advanced education, complex culture, convenient public transportation. It is used in the collective interests of society, in order to advance social interests. By contrast, in capitalist society, in which the means of production are owned privately, advances in technology are used to accumulate profits for those who own it, rather than advance the collective interests of all. As a result, the very people who produce and work the technology, become, as Marx argues, appendages of the machines, for the main role of technology in this society is to increase the amount of surplus value produced by the worker. In capitalism all advances in technology are used to increase the wealth of owners, at the expense of the wage-laborers who produce it.

If advances in technology alone actually brought about equality, then the societies in which technology is most advanced would have the most economic equality. But just the reverse is true. The U.S., the most technologically advanced nation in the world, is also one of the most economically polarized. As even such mouthpieces of capital as the New York Times acknowledged at the height of the tech boom, "the growing concentration of American wealth and income challenge a cherished part of the country's self image: They show that rather than being an egalitarian society, the United States has become the most economically stratified of industrial nations" (Bradsher A1). With the crash of the technology bubble, such realizations are ever becoming the norm in bourgeois economic, political and cultural theory.[3]

I will discuss at some length the implications of postindustrial theories for how "space", and in particular urban space, is theorized today. But first it is necessary to emphasize that the idealist assumptions about technology that inform post-industrialist arguments have deeply problematic consequences for how we understand the role of the humanities today. When technology is viewed as autonomous from labor relations, knowledges and skills necessary to use technology become divorced from the ends toward which technology is used. Under these assumptions, humanities are reduced to communication skills—from the highly sophisticated skills of sign manipulations to the more common skills of writing (Teresa Ebert and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh "Hypohumanities"). They become the space of production of pragmatic information management in cyberspace; skills that are severed from critique because they are purely bottom-line oriented and devoid of knowledge regarding how, why and for whom those skills work. The role of the humanities, on these terms, is to prepare a workforce that is literate but post-critical: a workforce that acts efficiently within exiting social relations but is indifferent to their transformation. As a result, core issues such as the commodification of labor, which is the basis of production under capitalism, are entirely taken for granted, and the accumulation of profit for the few is accepted, not only as "natural" but "inevitable"—and thus put beyond question and social inquiry. The main concern of the post-critical humanities is profit and a supply of labor-power that is able to produce profit (surplus-labor) under the current conditions of production, at the current level of development of the forces of production.

Contemporary "communication" skills, it is necessary to point out, presuppose a certain stage in the development of the productive forces. The service industry, which is focused on moving commodities to and from the market, requires on the most basic terms the production of those commodities to exist. If the service industry appears to have taken a significant role in the production process, it is because commodities can be produced at more rapid pace, and more time has to be devoted to circulation, because the global economy has expanded production throughout the world and thus requires a whole apparatus of exchange to move commodities to and from the market. That is, what has made possible the new articulations of the humanities is labor at a specific level of production. Technology is congealed labor (the labor of generations of workers) and, as well, requires certain skills in order to be used. Just because many workers today work with information, images and codes, rather than steel and assembly lines does not mean that labor is no longer the basis of production. For the codes, images and information that are communicated are produced and transmitted by material means; that is, through labor. Moreover, what contemporary theories forget is that "theoretical" knowledge (which is assumed to be entirely distinct from labor) is itself dead labor. As Zavarzadeh argues, postindustrial arguments "take the 'theoretical' knowledge constructed in laboratories but bracket the material conditions of production of these knowledges: not only are the very instruments of experimentation (which lead to theoretical formulations) 'produced' by 'labor' but the conditions of possibility of the 'experiment' itself (as a science event) are provided by the labor of generations of workers. The buildings in which scientists undertake their work are constructed by 'labor'; their food, clothes, cars, telephones, computers…are all 'produced' by labor" (10). Theoretical knowledge ("humanities"), in other words, presupposes a world in which some have been freed from direct participation in manual production in order to engage in theoretical work. Postindustrial theory takes such a world for granted, and promotes a notion of the humanities in which the main question is learning codes—an emphasis on controlling means of signification, not means of production.

The arguments of Daniel Bell are exemplary here. He argues, for instance, that since "the post-industrial society is shaped by an intellectual technology, the major problem for the post-industrial society [is] the development of an appropriate 'infrastructure' for the developing communications networks…of digital information technologies that will tie the post-industrial society together" (such as transportation technologies, energy utilities, oil pipelines, radio, television, etc.) (xv). For the post-industrial labor force, in other words, knowledge is no longer needed to understand the totality of social relations and their interconnections (in fact Bell even suggests that "capitalism" is no longer a coherent concept [xx]), or why society is "tied together" in the way it is. Rather, knowledge should be focused merely on "processing" information (xii) and "codifying knowledge".

In suggesting that the shift from "manual" labor to the "knowledge" economy is what characterizes capitalism today, Bell is basically putting forward the notion of freedom as freedom from (manual) labor ("work"). But not only has manual labor not ceased (it has in many cases simply moved from the North to the South), what Bell is doing is eclipsing the necessity of emancipation of humanity through human labor.[4] Bell suggests that the goal of human history is to relieve people from having to "work", and that capitalism is bringing us closer and closer to such a (utopian) situation. According to Marx, however, the question has never been freeing people from "work", it is a matter of freeing people from exploitative conditions of labor. For it is only through labor that social needs are met—without labor there would be no meeting of any social needs whatsoever. Moreover, if we look at the economy today, the vast majority of people who do work, work not less but more hours and more intensely, and this is not only in "manual labor" but in the knowledge economy as well, where many people must take 2-3 "flexible" jobs to meet the ends that 1 job used to meet. In substituting freedom from work (individual "liberty") for freedom from necessity (freedom from exploitation and poverty), Bell puts forward the interests of the petit-bourgeois managers as the goal of history. He is concerned primarily that capitalism share more of the accumulated surplus value with the "middle class". In conveniently forgetting that, without labor no one could meet any of their basic needs (let alone more complex ones), Bell reveals that his theory presupposes the very capitalist relations that allow the few "liberty" while the many work for them, while claiming that we have moved "beyond" capitalism.

What is at stake here is the underlying pragmatism of the contemporary humanities: the acceptance of "what works" for capital as "what works" for all. These are the ruling class imperatives behind the humanities today, the main drive being the need for surplus-labor for profit and thus the need to "skill" the urban proletariat so that capital has access to a labor-supply that is able to quickly adjust to working under the current level of forces of production (without altering the relations of production). Bill Readings responds to these corporate needs in The University in Ruins, where he argues that, now that "the University is developing toward the status of a transnational corporation" (164), the humanities should be focused on the "tactical use of the space of the university" (18). In other words, with the decline of what he calls the "national cultural mission" (20)—which is a code for the decline of a period of capitalism in which federal funding was used for public programs and services, which have been dismantled in the wake of massive privatization and deregulation—we can only "dwell" "pragmatically" in the "ruins" of the university, rather than attempt to (re)build a university which aspires to any collective aims (what he calls a "romantic" nostalgia): "To dwell in the ruins of the University is to try to do what we can, while leaving a space for what we cannot envisage to emerge" (176), his example being the support of "short term collaborative projects of both teaching and research […] which would be disbanded after a certain period, whatever their success" in order to prevent them from becoming institutionalized, bureaucratic or "disciplined" (176). This is an exemplary articulation of the post-critical humanities. In the guise of a sobering, "realistic", non-utopian approach to new times, its main assumption is that an investigation into the root causes of the "decline" of the university is useless; that it is more important to "get on" with the current restructuring rather than ask too many big questions about the interests the restructuring serves. He calls for a humanities in which we "do what we can", entirely taking for granted that "doing what we can" is increasingly guided by the principles of profit and profit alone. With the commodification of the university, the main demands on university administrators, faculty and students alike are on making the university more efficient in meeting the needs of corporations. Thus, Reading's "short term projects" are perfectly consistent with the new strategies required by transnational corporations for their employees to engage in temporary team work to complete specific projects, team work which is better able to respond to and adapt to need developments in the market. Whatever the asserted "creative" motives under which employers foster these new working climates, such corporate tactics are a response to the increasingly fast pace at which technology is revolutionized and new strategies of accumulation are necessary. "Long term projects", in other words, are not a problem because they become "institutionalized"—after all, the main assumptions on which Readings arguments are based are themselves thoroughly "institutionalized" and "bureaucratic"—they are a problem because they are not "flexible" enough for the university-as-transnational-corporation, and become a drain on profit. It is not a coincidence that in the post-critical humanities, students are taught that what is required today is "a certain opportunism" (176), rather than a struggle for the humanities as the site for advancing the principles of collectivity and solidarity.

THREE 

Post-industrial theories are of course still highly influential today, but they have begun to lose their historical credibility in the wake of the economic crises of the current global downturn that began in the mid 1990s. Increasingly, there has emerged the recognition—even among the most ardent supporters of the new economy—that technology is not the great equalizer it was claimed to be, as the global divisions between rich and poor have drastically increased, not decreased, in the decades since the emergence of the "knowledge society" and cybercapitalism.[5] Bourgeois theories—under the intensification of crisis of wage-labor in capitalism—must account for global economic inequalities and they do so today with theories of "globalization". Theories of globalization foreground the "networks" of the global economy (structured by a hierarchy of unequal nodes), matters of cultural "homogenization", inequalities of trade, and the growing digital divide as a means of coming to terms with the divisions that post-industrial theory forecasted would be resolved as the new economy advanced.

Globalization theories, however, are basically a continuation of post-industrial theories, oftentimes disguised as "critique". Like the older articulations, they sever matters of trade inequalities, geographical inequities, cultural homogenization, concentrations of wealth, etc., from the economics of global capitalism. They suggest, as Duncan Watts does in a recent issue of WIRED magazine edited by architect Rem Koolhaas, that on the basis of the network society people's social position is determined by who they "know" and are in "contact" with, not their position in the social relations of production; that individuals need to be understood "as nodes embedded in a complex web of social, economic, and institutional ties" (136), which are irreducible to class divisions.

In the theory of globalization (networks, trade, etc) the missing term is imperialism: the monopoly stage of capitalism in which giant transnational corporations, increasingly desperate for greater profits, compete for (re)division of the world market and for economic territory. What drives capital around the world in search of new territories, markets and resources is the need to gain control over the labor and resources of lesser developed nations in order to control the rate at which workers in those nations will be exploited. By controlling the rate of exploitation of the South, imperialist nations can control the rate at which these nations' economies grow, and thus ensure the continued dominance of the imperialist nations in the world capitalist system. Imperialism is, at root, a matter of appropriating the surplus labor of the world working class.  What bourgeois theorists call "globalization", in short, is an intra-class war between advanced capitalist economies over a larger share of the surplus-labor produced by the world proletariat.

Imperialism is a necessary concept in understanding world relations today because it explains why there exist tremendous concentrations of wealth on the one hand, and masses of desperately poor people on the other; the irrational overproduction of goods alongside desperate want; and nodes of densely developed areas amidst huge sections of the world that are excluded from developments in science and technology or left in utter ruins. It explains, for instance, why many workers around the world may have only (in)direct "contact" with Bill Gates, yet are nonetheless being exploited by him to increase Gates' own private wealth. That is, why, contrary to Watt's claims, it is not the case that "when not just you but anyone can be connected to anyone else on earth…what goes around comes around—faster than you think" (136). Theories of globalization, in contrast, grasp only the surface levels of the global economy, severing the movements of capital from the international division of labor.

Exemplary of the ways in which theories of globalization are a (re)articulation of postindustrialist assumptions is the work of third way urban sociologist Saskia Sassen, who is perhaps most well known for her research on the "global city", but who is now increasingly turning to matters of networks and digital highways in the transnational urban economy, and has edited books on these issues for the United Nations. Sassen's writings are significant because, on the one hand, they put forward a theory of globalization on the basis of a critique of postindustrial theory's inability to account for concentrations of wealth and resources in cities in the information economy (that is, growing inequalities in and between cities). On the other hand, she has foregrounded the role of "production" in the global economy as a means of intervening into the displacement of the "material" by postindustrial theory. However, both "production" and "material reality" are de-materialized in her writing. They are basically tropes to privilege "services" and "finance" and the local sites through which these circulate. Both in her earlier and her more recent work, Sassen's texts reproduce the postindustrial logic at a new level, by turning the "material" into technology, services and exchange relations, and "class" relations into "occupational" differences, thus erasing the exploitation of labor that is the source of capital accumulation in the first place. The "material" in the geography of labor is fundamentally tied to the economic sphere and the relations of production, which have a historically necessary connection to all other socio-cultural relations. Sassen's theory of the "material", in contrast, focuses primarily on the relations of exchange, and the "materialism" she posits is really a neoempiricist methodology which takes the existing forms of exchange as given, isolating them from the determining relations of production. It is a theory of globalization in which the imperialist expansion of capital has been suspended and wealth is produced by "trade". In covering over the material roots of capitalism in the guise of a more "materialist" analysis, her theory has the effect of evading (and thus legitimating) the basic workings of capital while claiming to be supportive of those who are exploited by it.

Sassen critiques postindustrial and "information society" theories for their implication that technological advance will lead to the growing irrelevance of cities with the expansion of cybercapitalism (The Global City; Global Networks; "Whose City"). Such theories suggest that telecommunications mean that people can live and work "anywhere" and still be connected to their jobs, friends, family, etc, regardless of the distance between them. This was a position taken, for instance, in an early "postindustrial" reading of the city by Melvin M. Webber, "The Post-City Age" (1968). Webber argued that with the development of computers and telecommunications, cities would disappear because the whole world would become increasingly "urbanized", thus superceding the divisions between city, suburbia and country. In fact, Webber suggested that "space" and "place" would cease to have any meaning in such a highly dispersed information society. Many contemporary theorists, such as Paul Virilio (The Lost Dimension), echo these arguments today in their analysis of globalization. On the contrary, Sassen argues that rather than leading to greater spatial dispersion and the supercession of cities, technological progress has led to greater spatial concentrations and greater importance of cities worldwide. Indeed, from Sassen's position, cities (and in particular a core network of very powerful "global cities") have become so integral to the global economy today because of the highly advanced development of technologies necessary for global finance and the service industry. She writes, "The widely accepted notion that agglomeration has become obsolete, now that global telecommunication advances are allowing for maximum dispersal, is only partly correct. It is, I argue, precisely because of the territorial dispersal facilitated by telecommunication advances that agglomeration of centralizing activities has expanded immensely" ("Whose City Is It?" 180-81). In other words, her argument attempts to confront more directly the increasingly stark concentrations of wealth and poverty in the wake of "cybercapitalism", in a way that prior versions of postindustrial theory did not because they privileged technological and spatial dispersion and an inevitable "leveling" of resources.

But how far have Sassen's arguments actually moved beyond postindustrial theory? I have argued that the idealism of postindustrial theory is rooted in its assumption that it is technology and knowledge that is the basis of wealth and social change (that changes in technology have led to knowledge becoming the basis of society). However, if it is the case, as she suggests, that what constitutes the economy today is the predominance of "services" and "finance", and the technologies that have led to their dominance, it is not so much that Sassen disagrees with the fundamental arguments of postindustrial theory, despite her disclaimers.[6] Rather, it is only in the details of how the services and transactions become manifested spatially, and the social inequalities that accompany this new geography, that is her main point of contention. Or put differently, Sassen does not break from the underlying logic of postindustrial theory—she adds other forms of "work" to it. As is evident in her arguments above, in her discourse it is (still) technology that has brought about fundamental changes. This point is made even more explicit in her most recent book, Global Networks, Linked Cities, where she argues that "we are seeing the formation of a transterritorial 'center' constituted via telematics and intense economic transactions" (14). What she opposes is not so much the idea that technology is the agency of change, as the spatial formations posited by postindustrial theorists and information society theorists. Her main concern is primarily an "empirical" one: to "fill in" the holes left by dominant readings of technology, because, "[o]nce these processes are brought in to the analysis, funny things happen; secretaries become part of it, and so do the cleaners of the buildings where professionals work…We recover the material conditions, production sites and place-boundedness that are also part of globalization and the information economy" (Cities 1).

However, the relation of specific laboring activity to its useful effect (that is, the relation of the worker and the specific product of her work) does not explain where class inequality comes from—WHY it exists. This can only be explained by the fact that the worker labors in "a specifically social relation of production". It doesn't matter if a person produces knowledge, empties garbage bins, etc.: what matters is whether she privately owns the means of production and exploits the surplus-labor of others or sells her labor-power and is exploited. This is what determines class inequality. To put this differently, regardless of how many occupations are included to "fill in" the picture of globalization, what gets left out of Sassen's analysis is not only the underlying position in labor relations of high-skilled information technology labor and janitorial work (i.e., wage labor), but the fact that technology ("telematics") is congealed labor, and without this, there would be no economic transactions. It is not just a matter of who operates the technologies (whether it is a computer, phone system, or a broom)—but in who's interest these technologies are being used in the first place.

What is hidden in Sassens' "recovery" work is that the high-tech computers (not to mention the "low-tech" tools used by those who clean buildings) are produced by exploited labor. Without the living labor of workers, the telematics and financial transactions she privileges would not be possible. Moreover, what is being circulated in these transactions, (and what the entire service industry is geared toward facilitating), is the surplus value of workers. And, especially in the case of cybertechnologies, it is produced by workers in the South working under some of the most terrible and physically debilitating conditions, where for instance workers (primarily women) lose their sight within a matter of years. By focusing on cities and the infrastructures of cities that make possible global finance markets (from the law firms and advertising agencies to the nannies and wait people who "serve" the elite workers), what is erased is precisely the global division of labor Sassen claims to be concerned with.

The erasure at the heart of Sassen's highly detailed empirical observations is fundamentally related to Sassen's theory of class. At the center of Sassen's analysis is a Weberian theory of class in which classes are understood in terms of "occupational" differences, or what Weber calls "life-chances on the market". Its emphasis is on the status of various occupations, their wages and their different job "characteristics", and the different kinds of "consumption" that their jobs allow. What is displaced here is the Marxist theory of class in which class is one's position in the social relations of production, that is, where one owns sells her labor power to others or whether one owns the means of production and thereby exploits the labor of others. In the place of such a structural theory of class is a "network" theory of class—class as (hierarchies of) occupation, class as consumption—which takes the structure and causality out of class relations and puts in its place multiple hierarchies of inequalities that are not reducible to the conflict between labor and capital. This is the theory of class that underlies Peter Drucker's argument that "Instead of capitalists and proletarians, the classes of the post-capitalist society are knowledge workers and service workers" (Post-Capitalist Society 6). It is also clearly articulated in Sassen's claim that the main class division in the global city today is between "highly paid professional classes connected to leading sectors in the global economy" and "low-wage service workers", such as cooks, janitors and nannies, who "serve" the professional classes (Cities in a World Economy xiv).[7] What this implies, again, is that a break has occurred in capitalism, in which workers are no longer exploited by capitalists. Instead, classes have become increasingly complex and multiple. To refer back to Watt's phraseology again, all people are "embedded in a complex web of social, economic, and institutional ties". In fact, Sassen suggests that workers are now exploited by each other (not capitalists).

But if workers have ceased to be exploited by capitalists, how is it that profits have continued to increase exponentially, while the number of jobs that pay enough to meet even basic needs has declined significantly over the past three decades? So much so that CEO's (whose salaries are not "wages" but concealed "profit") now earn up to 450 times more than the "average" worker's wage (compared to 46 times more in the 20^th century)? How is it that corporations are able to amass resources and services in cities in greater and greater concentrations? Are we really to believe that there is no causal relation between the growing wealth of the few and the growing poverty of the many? Even if we accept Sassen's suggestion that sectors of the working class "exploit" one another, the gap between what the "elite professionals" earn today and the working poor earn is minimal compared to the gap between both these sectors of workers and the corporate owners, whose annual profits are billions of dollars. The Marxist theory of class explains these divisions in a way Weberian theory cannot, since for Weber there is no causal relation between increasing concentration of profits of the rich and the increasing destitution of the working class. For Weber, profits are not produced by the accumulation of extracted surplus value, but by gradients of power—an answer which leaves the primary question—the source of class power—a mystery whose effects can only be described.

Symptomatically, Sassen, who denies the existence of imperialism, reads global inequities in terms of "trade"; what leads to the concentrations of wealth and economic disparity is a matter of "free trade" versus "fair trade." To say that globalization is a matter of (unfair) trade is, however, to assume that the fundamental problem with globalization is that workers are not paid a fair price for their work, that some companies are able to obtain prices over and above the costs of production, etc., and that its is these kinds of transactional discrepancies in the economy that have led to such deep inequalities. This argument suggests that if all workers received a fair exchange for their work (an exchange of equivalents) and moreover that if fair exchanges were more evenly distributed (rather than concentrated in nodes), then inequalities would be significantly minimized. Such a position mistakes the fact that it is not the exchange of equivalents that produces profit, or that increases the value of capital. Trade does not create profit. What is necessary for capital is a commodity that can produce more than its value. That commodity is labor power. As Marx argues in the Grundrisse, "the simple movement of exchange values, such as is present in pure circulation, can never realize capital" (255). By this he means that the exchange of equivalents (for instance, the exchange of $10 for a $10 commodity) does not produce profit, because what increases value is not exchange but surplus labor:

It is commodities (whether in their particular form, or in the general form of money) which form the presupposition of circulation; they are the realization of a definite labour time and, as such, values; their presupposition, therefore, is both the production of commodities by labour and their production as exchange values. (255)

By erasing the surplus value as the basis of the increase of value in capitalism, theories of "trade" end up positing a theory of "pure circulation", in which the fundamental relations of exploitation through which surplus value is extracted is "extinguished". In other words, the sphere of exchange

proceeds on the surface of the bourgeois world, [and] there and there alone does the motion of exchange values, their circulation, proceed in it's pure form. A worker who buys a loaf of bread and a millionaire who does the same appear in this act only as simple buyers, just as, in respect to them, the grocer appears only as a seller. All other aspects are here extinguished (251).

That is, "Each appears towards the other as an owner of money", who exchange equivalents (246). Extinguished in the space of "pure circulation" in other words are the fundamentally opposed positions of the worker and the capitalists in the relations of labor: the deeply antagonist relations between the individual who buys the bread through wages which she received for her labor power, the other through the profits accumulated from the exploited labor of others.

Why should this "extinguishing" matter for urban cultural theory? Why is it not sufficient to simply "value" exploited workers more, and deny that there is any real difference between workers and those who employ them? It matters because it leads to a "solution" to social problems that do not address the fundamental causes of inequalities. Sassen suggests that it is primarily a matter of increasing workers "income" that will lead to less concentrations of wealth. Focusing on "income" however is to formulate the problems in capitalism as a matter of "fair exchange": as long as there is "fair exchange" in capitalism there is no problem. But even when workers are paid the market value of their labor they are still exploited, and not only does this serve as the basis for all capital accumulation, but the rate of exploitation under imperialism is radically increasing, not decreasing. Neither the dismantling or even the "reforming" of exploitation can simply be "wished" away. Exploitative relations need to be collectively transformed, so that no one has the freedom to exploit another. Framing global capitalism today in terms of "trade" matters because until the social relations of labor are transformed, only the needs of the few will be met.

What Sassen's emphasis on fair exchange misses is that capital is compelled to revolutionize the forces of production through technological innovation. This drive leads to greater investment in means of production (which, as I have argued above, cannot produce profit) versus labor power, which leads, in turn, to a crisis of overproduction and a decline in profit. There is thus an increasing need to export capital and to extend command over the surplus-labor of the world proletariat. This is what explains the imperative of imperialism—and its production of deep unevenness. Sassen's arguments on globalization are basically a pragmatic response to the developments of imperialism: "I can accept the fact that we will always have inequality" she argues in an interview in the University of Chicago Magazine, "but what I find extremely unjust is when a system produces enormous wealth and fails to redistribute a good part of it in the face of extreme poverty—and when people who are very well off have no idea of what misery is and do not bother to understand" (online). That is, despite her insistence that one of the main effects of focusing on place is to be able to account for the "historicity" of changes to the local, when it comes to economic inequality, we must assume this is "natural" and therefore ineradicable. At best we can hope to minimize its most "extreme" contradictions.

Considering, as she herself points out, that the World Bank has recently engaged in a "programmatic effort" to "produce analyses that show how important urban economic productivity is to macroeconomic performance" (Cities 8), Sassen seems quite clearly concerned simply with advocating a notion of the humanities in which the main concern is developing more "complete"/"fuller" descriptions of economic markets; that is, foregrounding an empirical methodology which provides for more "details" of emerging markets. But behind this is a way of reading the world that meets the needs of capital. It translates into producing urban "experts" and "professionals" who are adept at reading the codes of other cultures and can quickly adapt to meet the demands of a volatile transnational marketplace. Such skills are of particular concern in the context of the increasing competition among major cities to gain direct access, bypassing national states, to global markets for resources and activities. Urban analyses simply need to "address these changes" (8). It is therefore necessary to situate Sassen's arguments—taken to be "left" by many theorists—in relation to the arguments of the central organs of transnational capital, such The Economist, which reported that:

It is a measure of the extent to which urban (or "brown") issues, as opposed to rural, or "green" ones, are moving up the international agenda, that UN-HABITAT, the United Nations agency responsible for such matters, was recently promoted from its lowly "center" status to the more exalted "programme" level (the first time this has happened in UN history). A few days ago it celebrated its elevation by holding the first-ever World Urban Forum, an informal think-tank of experts culled from governments, the private sector and voluntary organizations, in Nairobi. (73) 

Sassen's theory works to update the idealist assumptions of the information economy, and serve as a means of providing the emerging labor force with more up-to-date skills for the new needs of transnational capitalism. 

FOUR 

The contemporary humanities, I have suggested, direct citizen-workers to understand only the "local" (superstructural) dimensions of transnational capitalism and its imperialist imperative, focusing on matters of "lifestyle", "consumption" and the complexities of flows of capital and goods across the globe. For example, they focus on the touch, the taste, the "experience" of the city, without accounting for the historicity of the city. This is an empirical approach which takes as given the surface level changes of capitalism, abstracting them from their causes. Whether in the laissez-faire discourse of the conservative City Journal, the writing of third-way urban sociologists like Saskia Sassen, postmarxist urban theorists such as David Harvey, or the aesthetic/architectural discourses of such poststructuralists as Baudrillard, the popular theories of urban space are informed by postindustrial assumptions, and thus accept a similar post-critical humanities. Theories of urban space that follow from this line of argument read the city as a cultural space which is post-exploitative and formed by knowledge and technology, not labor. Urban space, on these terms, is a geography of flows: flows of finance capital, information, workers and commodities, all of which are continually in flux: a highly differentiated space of circulation which is irreducible to the conflict between labor and capital. This is what I call the "geography of circulation and consumption", which focuses primarily on what Marx calls "the daily traffic of bourgeois life": the sphere of exchange.

At the core of the contemporary theories of urban space is the notion that the "concrete" site of praxical transformation is the site of the local, particular, lifestyle, consumption, etc. In other words, "space" is being used here to substitute the physical, psychical, local—in short, the experiential—for explanatory knowledge of the social relations of production. Space and place, in fact, have become the new site to talk about the complexities of everyday life in transnational capitalism. As Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift argue in Thinking Space "Social and cultural theory has recently taken a spatial turn—using geographical concepts and metaphors to think about the currently complex and differentiated world" (i). These theories of space, however, are ultimately idealist, because they abstract the spatial concrete from its underlying relations. They suggest that the most productive way to understand space today is in terms of its "alterity", which requires dispensing with the "abstractness" of "theory" (which is reduced to a "master" narrative, a "Cyclops eye" [3]). The result however is that what is called the "concrete", and posited as the site of spontaneous experience and knowing, is actually an abstraction.

For instance, the emphasis on the "specificity", "contingency" and "sheer multiplicity" of space is not the effect of "space" itself, or new ways of thinking about space. Space and spatial relations, in other words, are not subjective. They are objective. The organization of space reflects and is determined by the relations of production. The emphasis on the specificity of space is an effect of the change in the methods used to exploit workers under capitalism, but not a change in the exploitation of workers' surplus-labor. In the production process of the Fordist assembly line, for example, production time is segmented into regular units and sequences (and the production process of the assembly line takes place in "one" space). Space is largely theorized in "uniform" and even "universal" terms. Under "flexible" accumulation, in contrast, production time and space is no longer standardized—the "contingency" of "space" comes to the foreground because the various stages of the production process become increasingly separated from one another (an effect of the internationalization of labor), while the various stages of production take place "simultaneously". Space becomes theorized increasingly in terms of its specificity because, while the capitalist production processes and division of labor are spread out all over the globe, this requires capital to separate out the phases of the production process in search of the cheapest labor and production costs; to move from one space the next, and to be connected with various site of production, distribution and exchange throughout the world. Beneath the new spatial relations, in short, the production relations of capital remain unchanged. Postindustrial theory, following its "new times" assumptions, abstracts the strategies of capital accumulation from the underlying exploitation of labor by capital, and thus represents the new spatial effects of capitalism as a radically new (post-exploitative, post- bourgeois/proletariat class division) capitalism. By erasing the causes of changes in space, these theories alibi capital's need to find more surplus labor to exploit more intensely, which has become increasingly important as the global economy has entered, once again, a serious stage of crisis, and capital requires new realms to both extract more surplus value from workers as well as realize existing surplus value by opening up new markets.

In opposition to what I am theorizing below as the idealism of the geography of circulation and consumption in the work of Baudrillard and Harvey, I am putting forth the concept of the "geography of labor" in order to grasp the material relations of urban space: the relation between what takes place on the "surface" of daily life under capitalism, and the production processes which, as Marx argues, take place "behind the backs" of workers. Geography of labor foregrounds the social relations of production as the basis of the ways in which urban space and culture are organized. From this position, urban changes, such as the shift by capital from one industry or infrastructure to the next are at root determined by capitalist relations of production, and the needs of capitalists to accumulate surplus value (the basis of profit). On these terms the working and living conditions, the shape of urban architecture, the ongoing gentrification and redevelopment of financial districts, etc. are determined by the struggle between capital and labor over the extraction of surplus value that takes place during the working day. Geography of labor is central to the analysis of (urban) space today, because it enables one to understand the developments of capitalism in the postwar era and its increased need for "flexibility" and expansion in relation to capital accumulation –without separating such "geographical" trends from the labor relations that make them possible.

The contestation between the geography of labor and the geography of circulation and consumption is part of a long-standing debate between idealism and materialism over how space is to be understood. As Lenin argues in Empirio-Criticism, the fundamental question at stake in the issue of space (and time) is: is space objective or is it subjective (a matter of what Kant and Mach refer to as bodily "sensations")? That is, is space, as the world of material objects, a "pure construct" (discourses, representation, etc.) as idealists have argued, or is it, as dialectical materialists such as Engels and Lenin argue based on objective reality? As Lenin explains, "The theory of space and time is inseparably connected with the answer to the fundamental question of epistemology: are our sensations images of bodies and things [materialism], or are bodies complexes of our sensations [idealism]"? (180). In other words, for dialectical materialists, "space and time" are understood to be part of the objective world—"matter in motion independently of our mind". Lenin writes,

Just as things or bodies are not mere phenomena, not complexes of sensations, but objective relations acting on our senses, so space and time are not mere forms of phenomena, but objectively real forms of being. There is nothing in the world but matter in motion, and matter in motion cannot move otherwise than in space and time. Human conceptions of space and time are relative, but these relative conceptions,…, in their development, move towards absolute truth and approach nearer and nearer to it. (177)

Lenin's comments are in direct opposition to the idealist claim that space is a product of human thinking, or bodily sensations (i.e., abstract categories, discourse, feeling, etc.). The Machian Karl Pearson, for instance, argued that "Of time as of space we cannot assert a real existence: it is not in things but in our mode of perceiving them" (as quoted in Lenin 185). If we accept that space is an effect of perception we return to a theory of knowledge based upon experience, in which "experience" remains unmediated and autonomous. If we were to apply this to the city, we would go no further than the immediate experience of urban life: the way it feels, the way it smells, the way it looks, etc. We would not have any knowledge about why the city looks the way it does, why one has a particular experience (and not another) of the city, or the historical relations of the city. Answering such questions (which address the root causes of perception) require going beyond the immediate realm of subjective experience. To understand space in terms of perception is to begin and end with the subject.

Lenin is arguing, in contrast, that humans' conception of space and time reflects the actual, objective relations of space and time; changes in how they understand these relations are, at the same time, determined by the level of productive forces and scientific knowledge. Thus, even when human knowledge is an approximation there still exists matter in dialectical relation independent of human mind and sensations. A dialectical materialist theory of space is based on the understanding that matter has existed prior to human existence, and, moreover, that matter is continually in motion: matter is continually developing. The existence of matter is independent of human existence and consciousness. As Lenin points out, moreover, the argument that space is the product of human thinking leads to the rather ridiculous conclusion that before humans space did not exist; that humans are the creators of space and time, and when they cease to exist so too will space and time.[8]

It is important to point out that Lenin is not suggesting that our understanding of space is unmediated. In fact, the very debates over space (and their changes) indicate that how we understand space is indeed mediated by social relations and social conflicts. However, the fact that ideas of space are mediated (not immediate, spontaneous) does not lead Lenin to the conclusion that there is nothing but "mediation" or that we can never know "space". On the contrary, he argues that our knowledge should seek to understand space more completely in all of its complexity—a knowledge which can only ever approach the "truth" of space and spatial relations. At issue is that "The mutability of human conceptions of space and time no more refutes the objective reality of space and time than the mutability of scientific knowledge of the structure and forms of matter in motion refutes the objective reality of the external world" (Lenin 177).

This understanding of "space" is crucial for historical materialism's theory that it is the social relations of production, not "constructs" or "things" that produce human society. Constructs or things are themselves produced under material relations of production. To say that changes in how we think about space are the basis of changing spatial relations, or the argument that changing objects in space, such as houses, urban streets, malls, public parks, etc, bring about changes in social relations, is a rearticulation of the idealist assumption that it is the local/subjective that is the basis of the world. In other words, for materialism, social space is determined by labor relations (production). It is determined by the ways in which people meet their needs. Different ways of organizing social production will result in different spatial arrangements. A society based on private accumulation will privilege private spaces, which are inevitably unequal; in contrast, a society organized to meet all people's needs, will privilege public, collective space. Space, in short, is never autonomous from the relations of production.

Dominant theories of urban space and planning are primarily idealist theories of space. They focus on the effects of capitalism rather than on its root relations, and they rehearse many of the arguments made centuries before them as "new". The writings of Baudrillard are exemplary of the idealism of "classic" texts of "high theory". In The Singular Objects of Architecture, a recent series of interviews with architect Jean Nouvel, Baudrillard reads space (and in particular, architectural space) in terms of discourse. Following poststructuralist assumptions, Baudrillard suggests that in language there is always a slippage of the signifier, which prevents it from ever being anchored down by any determinate meaning. According to this logic, there is always a textual gap between what is said/written and its meaning, since the object to which language refers is not a "real" object but only another sign in an endless chain of signification. Language, Baudrillard writes, is always a "lost object […] we can never clarify things, we can never say, 'OK, that's behind us' or 'OK that’s ahead of us'" (15).[9] Language always articulates an "enigma"—a "no place" in the place; the "nothing" of space. What he calls "singular objects of architecture" are those architectural works which grasp the "enigmatic" side of space, those that "fool the eye" and "trick the sense" (18), and thus reveal space to be what it does not seem to be. That is, those architectural projects which "reroute our perception of phenomenon from the material to the immaterial" (7). Such a theory of architecture essentially repeats in other terms Baudrillard's main argument that technological advances have led to a point in which there is no longer any "reality" to which signs and images refer, only simulacra.

It is not the social interests the architecture serves, or the ways in which it was produced, that is meaningful here, but precisely the "immaterial" aspects of the structure and its "affect" on the spectator, which defy all (discursive) expectations. In other words, Baudrillard is talking about the "experience" of the building and how it makes one feel, and especially the experiential "vertigo" that some architecture induces. But of course even the "experience" of a building is itself historical. Architecture's ability to defy expectation and subvert established systems of meanings depends on a "norm", according to which one can say precisely what Baudrillard has said is now impossible: "OK, we are beyond this…". In other words, our experience of space is not spontaneous, it is very much conditioned by social relations which go beyond language itself. For instance, the "postmodern" architecture of Frank Gehry, whose recent (1997) Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao uses titanium sheathing and steel frame to produce a free-form style of metal curves—an architectural project which is an effect of a particular stage of development of architectural materials, which presupposes a certain advance in relations of production, etc.[10]—can be read as "enigmatic" only in relation to other styles of architecture, which followed different formal rules, such as Le Corbusier's "Dream for Paris", which features highly structured and uniform buildings, and attempts to govern the "totality" of urban space down to its minor details. Gehry's architecture, which foregrounds spatial complexity and multidimensionality, is the product of a world in which capital is represented as "fluid" and without boundaries (the product of transnational capital); Le Corbusier's plans of the 1920s, in contrast, reflect the high point of industrial capital in its national stage, when technology was viewed as capable of serving the public through rational design, to create "machines for living" to house large sectors of the population. One architectural style creates an "experience" of flows and borderlessness, the other one of "uniformity" and connectivity; but these experiences of space are not isolated from their historical conditions of production. In other words, the "spontaneity" Baudrillard attributes to certain (architectural) spaces is an effect of architecture's historicity, and the social relations in which architecture is situated—not some inherent aspect of language or spatial "experience".

On Baudrillard's terms, all articulations of space are contingent and local: they do not reflect objective relations, since there is no object to which theories of space actually refer (the object is always "lost" to another signifier). Baudrillard's writes, "My comments need to be contrasted with the idea that something could be 'real'" (15). This fundamentally idealist assumption is what underlies his discursive claim that "space has become infinitely indeterminate in every direction" (14). Space, which for Baudrillard is "structured" like the slippage of the signifier along the chain of signification, exceeds all conceptualization, and to struggle for spaces free from inequality and oppression is a futile act of violence against meaning and its inherent slippages. The class extension of this (epistemological) argument is tellingly put by Jean Nouvel when he says "if an architectural object is only the translation of some functionality, if its only the result of an economic situation, it can't have meaning" (9).

This is space as sublime. Space becomes a meditation on the excessiveness of all spaces of the social, which are assumed to be the products of individual thinking. The consequence of this reading is to privilege experience by keeping focus on the surface differences of objects. In this way, Baudrillard is doing the ideological work of exchange value. The reason Baudrillard's arguments (whose emphasis on the subjective experience of space can be traced back to Kant) are read as "new" and still "relevant" is because by focusing on the local and the different they make it appear as though the central question today is not how things are produced, but their "life" on the market. Baudrillard's theory reproduces the logic of the commodity by differentiating among the products of labor and attributing those differences, not to labor, but to things themselves, and attributing the differential experience of the things to a mystical cause ("language"). On these terms, it is the product, and how it is consumed ("experienced"), that matters, not the labor that produced it, and under what conditions. To the extent that Baudrillard's theory continues to have explanatory "power" it is because it articulates the logic of capital, displacing use-value with exchange value. In the same way, "design" and "makeover" shows have emerged at a moment of economic crisis and overproduction, encouraging people to consume, and teaching them that the personal crises they face as a result of economic contradictions can be solved with a new lamp.[11]

Baudrillard has often been read as quite "radical" and "anti-establishment" because he reduces material issues of urban space to matters of language and textual playfulness. But if we take his arguments out of the linguistic space in which Baudrillard articulates all social relations, and implicate them in the actual material relations, what are the consequences? It means that the differences between who lives in the urban "ghetto" and those who live in Central Park West penthouses is reduced to a (life) stylistic difference. That is, it is reduced to different modes of consumption: it is not objective relations of class that separates those who are forced to live in dilapidated, unsafe buildings and those who live in luxury, but how we think about space and use it; how its coded and recoded. Thus, what is necessary to change relations of urban living is to think differently about them; to make local changes to urban slums, rather than address the economic relations which cause slums and gated communities in the first place. In short, in the guise of "theory" issues of poverty and inequality in living conditions are what are actually being mystified here.

Baudrillard's more overtly idealist arguments have in recent years come under scrutiny for their textualization of social relations and for their reduction of social inequalities to relations that need to be merely re-thought, rather than changed. With the growing social divisions that have disrupted the "free play" of transnational capital, textualist arguments have increasingly come under attack, and it is now quite common to find critiques of the primarily textualist arguments, even by those who have been ardent supporters of poststructuralism. There is, in short, increasing objective pressure from the growing class antagonisms in capitalism to address the "material" conditions of globalization and their actual impact on workers.

It is in this context that David Harvey's arguments seem to provide a much more explanatory account of transnational capitalism because of his emphasis on the "concrete" spaces in which "flexible accumulation" plays out and his foregrounding of class inequalities in the urban context. That is, Harvey is widely regarded as one of the main "materialist" thinkers in contemporary theory. However, as I will suggest, especially in his more recent writings, Harvey articulates not so much an analysis of the structures of class exploitation that underlie urban relations—that is, the international division of labor—as the discursive deployment of such concepts as "capital accumulation" and "class" in order to put forth a more pluralized and "flexible" reading of class from within the discourses of the left, a hybrid reading he calls "historical-geographical materialism".[12] This is because Harvey's analytical point of departure is actually the geography of circulation: the sphere of exchange. As a result, what Harvey provides is a map of transnational urban geography devoid of labor.

Harvey's Spaces of Hope is a case in point. He argues that: "The accumulation of capital has always been a profoundly geographical affair. Without the possibilities inherent in geographical expansion, spatial reorganization, and uneven geographical development, capitalism would long ago have ceased to function as a political-economic system" (23-4). This follows from one of Harvey's main arguments, that transnational capital requires a "spatial fix" in order to resolve its crises of profitability. When, for instance, a market becomes saturated, and it is not possible to continue to make a certain rate of profit, a corporation will look to new spaces in order to invest in new technology, new buildings, new infrastructure, etc., to raise the level of profit, oftentimes leaving behind the older, less profitable buildings and structures. This is particularly evident, for instance, in the abandonment of industrial cities such as Detroit (which has resulted in devastating unemployment, poverty and urban "decay"), for more high-tech centers such as Austin, Atlanta, Silicon Valley, and other cities in the South. At a certain point however, these spaces also become less profitable, as other corporations invest in similar spaces, and capital will have to move on to new spaces, in an endless cycle. Space, as a result, is constantly being re-made by capital and technology, and is thus in a continual state of flux. Spatial differences, as Harvey argues elsewhere, are "irreducibly distinct" (Spaces of Capital 24).

The history of capitalism is read on these terms as a history of geographical-technological expansion, as capital goes from one spatial "fix" to another, an expansion Harvey suggests has become particularly striking in the wake of "globalization", when developments in technology have enabled geographic movement to take place even more rapidly and "flexibly". He argues,

the relativism introduced by revolutions in transport and communications coupled with the uneven dynamics of class struggle and uneven resource endowments means that territorial configurations cannot remain stable for long. Flows of commodities, capital, labor and information always render boundaries porous. (Spaces of Hope 34)

In other words, echoing the post-industrialist arguments, Harvey suggests that transformations in technology in the postwar era have led to radical changes in the way space, and especially urban space, is organized. Urban space, on these terms, becomes a space of flows of capital, commodities and labor, not a space determined by the relations of production; a space of "relativism" and contingency not determination.