READINGS 15
[Essay]
HERE COMESEVERYBUDDY
By Andy Merri
eld, from “Crowd Politics,” in theSeptember/October
New Left Review
. Merri
eld isthe author of
Magical Marxism.
T
he hero of James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
isa certain Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,HCE for short, whose dreaming mind becomesthe psychological space of the
Wake
’s drama. If
Ulysses
’s Leopold Bloom is everyday man, thenHCE is every
night
man. Thus the epithet Joycegives him in chapter two: “Here Comes Every-body.” The initials HCE were the “normativeletters,” Joyce said, of a universal dreaming
g-ure, reliving in a single night’s sleep the wholeof human history. “An imposing everybody healways indeed looked,” Joyce jokes of Earwicker,“constantly the same as and equal to himself and magni
cently well worthy of any and allsuch universalization.”For a while I dreamed of writing a book withthe title
Here Comes Everybody.
An urban book,because today urban life is the social environ-ment to which everybody is coming. Only a fewdecades ago, a majority of the world’s populationlived in the countryside; today, most people livein cities, and soon that majority is set to becomealmost everybody; billions of people, inhabitinga vast global
banlieue.
In 2008, Clay Shirky, acommunications professor at New York Univer-sity, beat me to it, publishing his
Here ComesEverybody
with the intriguing subtitle
The Powerof Organizing Without Organizations.
Here ComesEverybody
is an artless book, un-Joycean in itslack of existential depth. Yet perhaps lack of depth is the point, in Shirky’s account of the newforms of sociability engendered by a digital age,a world in which everybody is getting togetheron Facebook and Twitter.
Here Comes Everybody
quickly became a best-selling bible for the social-media movement, witha thesis that could apply as much to the corporatesector as to grassroots activism. Shirky’s appeal washis inclusive “everybody”: social media had thepower to deprofessionalize select sectors, such asjournalism, and create collaborative work for “or-dinary” nonspecialist people. Groups could nowoperate “with a birthday party’s informality and amulti-national’s scope.” This line came under at-tack from Malcolm Gladwell, who argued thatonline activism inspired only “weak-tie” radicalism.It could not provide what social change reallyneeds: people risking life and limb, as with thesit-ins that kick-started the black civil rights move-ment in the Sixties. What mattered was the phys-icality of bodies being present in space—the“strong-tie” connections that bonded people to acause and to one another. Twitter and Facebookhave their advantages, Gladwell wrote, but “we area long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.”Shirky and Gladwell are both right and bothwrong; each thesis is insuf
cient in itself. Is it notpossible to conceive of activism today as at onceweak-tie and high-risk, both online and of
ine atthe same time? If so, would the “strong-tie” spacein which an offline “Here Comes Everybody”expresses itself necessarily be urban?In the Sixties, when the majority of people onearth were still rural dwellers, the “right to the
READINGS
16 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2012
city” was theorized as a radical “cry and demand”by the French urbanist and philosopher HenriLefebvre. In one of his
nal texts, Lefebvre la-mented the end of the traditional city: nobodytoday could write as gaily and lyrically about citylife as Apollinaire had once written about Paris.The more the city had grown and spread itstentacles, the more degraded social relations hadbecome. For Lefebvre, the “menace” was that thisamorphous monster would become a planetarymetamorphosis, totally out of control. As hith-erto rural worlds had been urbanized, traditionalforms of work—secure, decent-paying jobs—seemed to melt into air. Once, people had mi-grated to the city looking for steady factory jobs;but those industries had gone belly-up or clearedout to somewhere cheaper.Millions of peasants and smallholders, thrownoff their land by agribusiness or the dynamics of the world market, came to an alien habitat thatwas now neither meaningfully urban nor rural. Avicious process of dispossession, sucking peopleinto the city while spitting others out of the gen-trifying center, forced poor urban old-timers andvulnerable newcomers onto an expanding periph-ery. At the same time, the notions of citizen andcity-dweller had been wrenched apart. Cities’inhabitants now experience a tragic form of prox-imity without sociability. Lefebvre’s tonalitythroughout the essay is Céline-like in its journeyto the end of the night; yet he could not resist afew Whitmanesque
ourishes, throwing out one
nal thought about what a new democratic vistamight look like. The “right to the city,” he con-cluded, now implied “nothing less than a newrevolutionary conception of citizenship,” in whichcity-dweller and citizen would some-how embrace one another again.
T
he proposition raised as many questionsas it answered. Right to what city? If urban so-ciety is everywhere, does this mean the right tothe metropolitan region, the whole urban ag-glomeration, or just the right to the city’sdowntown? Even if we accept the “urban” as aspecific terrain for political struggle, whatwould the right to the city actually look like?Would it resemble the Paris Commune, a greatfestival of merriment, people storming into thecenter of town (when there was still a center),occupying it, tearing down statues, abolishingrents for a while? Would this really destabilize“the system”?In twentieth-century revolutionary traditions,moreover, wresting control of urban areas wasoften the icing on the cake, the social movement’s
nal, joyous
ing, as revolutionary currents
owedfrom the countryside onto the urban streets. RégisDebray described the city as the “empty head,”deaf to the plight of those who feel accumulationby dispossession the most, in rural hinterlands,mountain jungles, and abandoned
banlieues.
Mao,Che, Castro, Ortega, and Subcomandante Marcoswould doubtless concur: the city does not so muchradicalize as neutralize popular elements.Consider the relative conformity of the world’surban populations today: unemployed, underem-ployed, and multi-employed attendants, cut off from the past yet somehow excluded from thefuture, deadened by hustling a living. This is ageneration of urban dwellers for whom the “rightto the city” serves no purpose—either as a work-[Debate]
SOMETHING INTHE WAY
From comments made at a July 27, 2011, meeting of the Aberdeen, Washington, city council, about a proposal to rename the North Aberdeen Bridge aftercity native Kurt Cobain, the lead singer and guitaristof the band Nirvana, who committed suicide in 1994.The city, which quotes Nirvana’s “Come as You Are”on its welcome sign, voted instead to name a smalllanding near the bridge after Cobain.
I don’t think Kurt earned a bridge.How many times has Kurt Cobain slept underthat bridge? Anybody know? Maybe once?Twice? Three times?In the books that I have read about Mr. Co-bain, he didn’t really care for Aberdeen, so it’s aslap in the face to the people who do like Aber-deen, like myself, like our mayor. He didn’t real-ly think we were that wonderful, obviously.One of the things to consider is that some of his best work was done sitting on a toilet seat ashe injected himself with heroin.What Kurt Cobain is to this city is jobs, jobs,jobs. We have hundreds of people Kurt Cobain’sage who are now in their forties and they comehere, they stop all the time in town, they get anice cream cone or sandwich—that’s jobs here.If someone decides to shoot himself on thatproperty, and it hits my house, I’ll be talking tothe city of Aberdeen to
nd out who’s insuringthat property.
READINGS 17
ing concept or as a political program. It is toovast, because the scale of the city is out of reachfor most people living at street level; yet it is toonarrow as well, because when people do protestand take to the streets en masse, they frequentlyreach out beyond the scale of the city. What isrequired is something closer to home—somethingone can touch and smell and feel—and some-thing larger than life.If the “right to the city” is not working, perhapsthe notion of the “encounter” may be more usefulin a political landscape in which new social mediacan become subversive weaponry. A politics of theencounter utters no rights, voices no claims. It justacts, af
rms, takes back. An example in the Unit-ed States would be Take Back the Land. Begun inMiami in 2006, Take Back the Land has borrowedits organizing and mobilizing techniques fromLatin American social movements, particularlyBrazil’s Rural Landless Workers Movement, stag-ing direct-action occupations of land and vacantlots, claiming and reclaiming abandoned andforeclosed properties for ordinary people, with theslogan “Occupy, Resist, Produce.” The politics of the encounter can mediate between the lived andthe historical; it can overcome the inertia of ap-parent mass and individual powerlessness. Activeaffects somehow replace passive affects; peoplestart to recognize a “singular essence,” especiallyhumiliated and exploited people, who encounterone another not always directly, but through amode of relating to the world, through unstatedforms of solidarity. As people
nd one another,they start to piece together common notions: theyuniversalize, make more coherent what seems, onthe face of it, only speci
c, lived experience. Whatappears particular is in fact general; our plight isthat of many people.The recent upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece,and Spain could be read as a dramatic politics of the encounter. In each case, whether in Tunis,Cairo, Athens, Madrid—or Manhattan, with theOccupy Wall Street protests—encounters un-folded in the heart of the city, yet the stake wasnot about the city per se; rather, it was about de-mocracy, in conditions of capitalist crisis. A lot of
C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T ; D A V I D Z W I R N E R , N E W Y O R K C I T Y ; A N D E I G E N + A R T , B E R L I N A N D L E I P Z I G
Ware,
a painting by Neo Rauch, whose work was on view last December at David Zwirner, in New York City.
Search History:
Result 00 of 00
00 results for result for
p.
Here Comes Everybuddy
shorter version of the New Left Review article, "Crowd Politics" by Merrifield
397
Reads
1
Readcasts
0
Embed Views
Get Scribd Mobile
To get Scribd mobile enter your number and we'll send you a link to the Scribd app for iPhone & Android.We've sent a link to the Scribd app. If you didn't receive it, try again.
We'll never share your phone number.
More From This User
Notes
Load more
