Chris Timms
Willie Doherty, Shifting Ground (The Walls, Derry), 1991. Black and white photograph with text mounted on aluminium. Courtesy the artist, Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Matt’s Gallery, London.
There are few places so utterly implicated in our discontents as this symbol of the ludicrousness of ‘trickle-down’ economics
Canary Wharf, the “second City”, an “evil twin” to London’s financial district, has overtaken its ancient rival, according to the Financial Times. It wouldn’t be altogether surprising if some saw this as a cause for celebration. Canary Wharf, and the 1980s Docklands development of which it was the most successful part, was an enterprise zone, an idea that the current government is trying to revive. As an enterprise zone it was deliberately unplanned, low-tax, and in theory low on “big government”, except for the not-so-small matter of massive public investment projects such as the Docklands Light Railway or the cleaning, dredging and decontaminating of the old industrial sites. Regardless, if it has “worked”, then surely the coalition’s new zones can point to it as some kind of model. One form of industry, the dock labour of the Port of London, was replaced with another, financial services. Around 80,000 jobs in the former, 150,000 in the latter. What could possibly be wrong with this?
Everything. Canary Wharf has been for the last 20 years the most spectacular expression of London’s transformation into a city with levels of inequality that previous generations liked to think they’d fought a war to eliminate. Very, very few of the new jobs went to those who had lost their jobs when the Port of London followed the containers to Tilbury; those that did were the most menial – cleaners, baristas, prostitutes. The new housing that emerged, first as a low-rise trickle in the 80s and 90s followed by a high-rise flood in the 00s, was without exception speculatively built. Inflated prices, dictated by the means of a captive market of bankers, soon forced up rents and mortgages in the surrounding areas, a major cause of London’s current acute housing crisis.
Looked at in the long term, Canary Wharf is the final victory of “old corruption”, the financier-rentier capitalism centred on the City and landowners over industry, literally building its new edifices on top of spaces formerly devoted to manual labour and working class organisation. Thatcherites, early on, liked to think their race-to-the-bottom policies on wages and unions might rejuvenate British industry, but Canary Wharf is the place where that was shown up for the myth it always was. Instead, old money got computers, built itself glass skyscrapers, hid its old-school ties and transformed itself into a gigantic offshore money-making mechanism.
The ludicrous nonsense of “trickle-down economics” is exposed in Canary Wharf more than anywhere else in Europe. A 10-minute walk away is Balfron Tower, a listed, proud but under-maintained tower of council housing, designed by the architect Erno Goldfinger, currently owned by a housing association. Recently it emerged that renovations there would have to be paid for by selling the flats on the open market. There was no other way of raising money, apparently. And just opposite is some of the most apparently overflowing wealth in world history. Around Balfron Tower you can find the largely low-rise Lansbury estate, built as part of the Festival of Britain, similarly covered in grime and pigeon shit and beset by rampant unemployment; or Robin Hood Gardens, where an architectural hoo-ha over impending demolition has masked another incursion of Canary Wharf’s bankers and its values into the area. If anyone in any of these estates has seen anything trickle down it would be an unpleasant-smelling liquid running from a great height.
So how has the myth that this place has done anything for east London other than compounding its misery managed to endure? How, with this massive counter-argument against trickle-down, have similar projects from Manchester to Portsmouth managed to hold it up as a model? Perhaps it’s just the sheer visibility of Canary Wharf, its seductive size and shininess, its malignant growth. It had a false start, and for years, “Thatcher’s cock” stood tumescent but alone.
It was really New Labour that was intensely relaxed about the place, with most of the skyscrapers dating from the 2000s, the years in which it became something yet more malevolent. In a piece published at the start of the financial crisis, the late political essayist Peter Gowan called it “Wall Street’s Guantánamo”, the place where the likes of Lehman Brothers could escape the relative rigours of US law and fully indulge in the fictitious capital of credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. There are few places on earth so completely and utterly implicated in our current discontents, or anywhere so due a serious reckoning. Somehow, rioters missed it last August, the barrier of the arterial road that severs it from Poplar perhaps seeming impassable. Maybe they’ll reach it next time.
Manuel De Landa (b. in Mexico City, 1952), based in New York since 1975, is a philosopher, media artist, programmer and software designer. After studying art in the 1970s, he became known as an independent filmmaker making underground 8mm and 16mm films inspired by critical theory and philosophy. In the 1980s, Manuel De Landa focused on programing, writing computer software, and computer art. After being introduced to the work of Gilles Deleuze, he saw new creative potential in philosophical texts, becoming one of the representatives of the ‘new materialism’.
Manuel De Landa is Adjunct Professor at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School EGS, he was Adjunct Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (New York). He currently lectures extensively in the United States and Europe, and is lecturer at the Canisius College (Buffalo, NY) and at the University of Philadelphia. Manuel De Landa’s essays are published in numerous journals, and he is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006).
Manuel De Landa is one of the most original thinkers writing today. De Landa is never afraid to criticize and reject petrified concepts, believing that orderly behavior can arise spontaneously from matter without being imposed by the rational human mind. Being one of the rare thinkers with the ability to offer a study of history with the priority of long-term historical structures over events, his work focuses on diverse fields such as economics, nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, geology, architecture, self-organizing autonomous systems, artificial intelligence and life, history of science, nonlinear dynamics, and linguistics.
Rejecting the exhausted concept of postmodernism, Manuel De Landa has found a new direction in thinking set by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. He strongly believes they should not be read as philosophers but engineers of the future beginning in fifty years. Focusing his writing on re-elaboration of their main concepts, Manuel De Landa takes the other starting point in the material world itself, and particularly the discoveries about material reality under the influence of psychedelics. According to him, the stabilization in nature happens on levels different from what rational thinking teaches us, and one of the main tasks of the human species is to establish a different connection to the environment by rejecting anthropocentric perspectives. What the exploration of the material world can show us is its stratified nature and Manuel De Landa further defines three main forms matter can take: solid, liquid, or gas. The form with the most potentiality is the liquid one, while the limited dynamics of solid structures as well as the overly dynamic gaseous ones are for him uninteresting. The liquid systems are constantly on the edge of chaos, hence constant creation, and therefore can be seen as natural computers.
Manuel De Landa rejects a simplified interpretation of mystic revelation happening in the so-called state of changed consciousness in psychedelic experience. Under the guidance of his female shaman in Mexico for almost half a century, Manuel De Landa experiences something he believes to be the change of the material state of the brain into a less viscous consistency; or, metaphorically speaking, with the help of mushrooms, the brain becomes ‘liquid’, a type of a super-computer. Changed materiality of the brain structure will allow numerous concepts and calculations to happen, something impossible to achieve in the previous, petrified phase. From the other side, if a person crosses the line and overdoses, the brain will become gaseous and induce paranoia and fear.
Hence, for Manuel De Landa, all action is to be found in the matter that flows. The flowing matter reveals the essential characteristics of the material world: the ability to self-organize and the possibility to show magic if allowed to develop without rational human control of the flow. In this, it even becomes possible to define a new ethics outlined by Manuel De Landa – the pursuit of freedom is seen as a possibility to allow self-organizing processes to take place, while living one’s life at the edge of creative chaos. Seeing humans as species seduced by the stratified structures and rock-solid relationships, Manuel De Landa explains that this is only one of the phases humans have the possibility to enter, following the previous gaseous and liquid ones. Rejecting the progressive logic of human history, he sees new possibilities in abandoning the rigidity of the solid phase. Nevertheless, what should be exercised in this new (liquid) phase is caution, and Manuel De Landa reminds us of Gilles Deleuze’s elaboration of the dangers of total destratification. One should always keep a small piece of territory, always come back to that solid rock in order not to lose touch with reality. Too loose or too rigid rules will not produce anything interesting, and what Manuel De Landa calls ‘organizing chaos’ can only happen in the middle of extremes.
Manuel De Landa’s work, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, offers a valuable merging of philosophical and historical reflection in the variety of forms through which human bodies are deployed, together with materials, and made effective in the history of warfare. According to him, in order to become effective, technological invention needs to be inserted into social practices, turning them into specific war machines that change in different historical periods. Beside the reference to Deleuze and Guattari, the method used follows Michel Foucault’s ‘archaeology’ in the study of long-scale historical phenomena. Two primary ways of functioning of the war machine are centralization, when military commanders centralize power and control over the battlefield, and decentralization, when the responsibility is delegated to individual soldiers. Recent developments in the war machine are something to be careful about, and Manuel De Landa warns us of the possibility of erratic war machines turning into predatory nomads because of a lack of political control. As it turned out, during the era of the Cold War, military programmers had decided to take human players out of the war games due to their refusal to press the imaginary red button and activate nuclear missiles. Nevertheless, his position is not a fatalistic one, refusing to define the evolution of technology as essentially good or bad. Further on, Manuel De Landa takes up the concept of the ‘abstract motor’ as defined by Michel Serres to formulate a new reading of Napoléon Bonaparte’s true innovation: although refusing to implement the steam engine, Napoléon fueled his war machine by the pool of energy produced by the patriotism of the French Revolution. Through this exploitation of the friend/enemy opposition, massive confrontations between nations became possible.
In A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, drawing on the materialist philosophy of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Manuel De Landa develops a bottom-up approach to historiography stemming from a new understanding of material processes as defined by the theory of dynamic systems. Manuel De Landa’s project sees the possibility for human development to be in inclusion of the flows of energy and matter. He rejects the impoverished bottom-up approaches to historiography which ignore synergistic interactions between their parts, as well as the top-down approaches imposing the assumed systems to interpret reality. This fundamentally different approach reveals the generative processes that govern all systems, and opposes the teleological notions of anthropocentric progress. The domains of matter inherent in complex systems inform a view of the world as the self-adaptive, highly interconnected, free-assembling structure of potent matter. Therefore, according to Manuel De Landa, the world is a place of infinite variations.
The crucial importance of Manuel De Landa’s Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy is to be seen in his radical change of the ontology of materialist philosophy. According to Manuel De Landa, the key for understanding the concept of reality is in dynamical processes and their ability to self-organize. The reality of the geological crust on which we walk is to be seen simply as a temporary deceleration of dynamic flows. In this work, Manuel De Landa defines the virtual as a deeply materialist concept which should not be seen as an effect of new technologies. Virtual is not the non-real, but actually the more-real. Manuel De Landa’s latest book, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, starts from the level of individual, personal relations and continues gradually all the way to the level of nation state and beyond. All phenomena are defined as emerging from dynamic systems which are in constant flux. Through defining the contemporary world as an entity of extreme complexity, Manuel De Landa simultaneously criticizes the dominant postmodernist linguistic analysis in social science. This new approach to social ontology should instead assert the autonomous nature of social entities, taking Gilles Deleuze’s theory of assemblages for its main framework. The components in the assemblages are defined by their material dimension and territorializing and deterritorializing axis. They are historically contingent, heterogeneous and self-subsistent, giving the possibility to take one assemblage and insert it into another without destroying its identity. The main characteristics of the relationship between an assemblage and its components are complexity and non-linearity, and Manuel De Landa believes that the task of social science is to analyze them as such.
“For the video installation Immersion Farocki visited a workshop organised by the Institute for Creative Technologies, a research centre for virtual reality and computer-simulations. One of their projects concerns the development of a therapy for war-veterans suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Farocki is interested in the use of virtual realities and games in the recruting, training and now also therapy for soldiers. Farocki explores the connection between virtual reality and the military – how the fictional scenarios of computer games are used both in the training of U.S. troops prior to their deployment in combat zones, and in psychological care for troops suffering battlefield trauma upon their return.”
Immersion, via Steve F.
