- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Bel Paese
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused City
- Transnational City
- Racialized City
- Greenwashed City
- Georgia Heritage
- Mississippi Heritage
- Florida Heritage
- Regional Heritage
- New Mexico Desertscapes
- California Waterscapes
- New York Landscapes
- New York Streetscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- Authentic New Orleans?
- In Progress: Jacksonville
- CONTACT
Capitalism and Place, Yin and Yang
ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
Let's start with a Q&A.
What is this website about?
It's about capitalism and place. To be more specific, it's about how the processes of capital accumulation and place formation shape the geographical landscapes in which we go about our lives. Look around you, everything you see is a co-production of these two processes, the kitchen in which you are making breakfast, the workplace where you spend one-third of your waking hours and the nature trail along which you like to walk at the end of a long day. These spatial configurations seem stable, solid, predictable, reassuring. But appearances can deceive. The dynamics of capitalism and place are ever-changing and easily disrupted. As a result, the spatial configurations co-produced by capitalism and place are in a state of constant churn, subject to "the gale of creative destruction," to borrow a metaphor from the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Capitalism and place form what in physics is called an unstable equilibrium, and in dialectics a contradictory unity. I'll go with the dialectical approach because it sees change as the rule, equilibrium as the exception. According to Marxist geographer David Harvey, a contradictory unity can be said to exist when two or more processes are conjoined in such a way as to simultaneously underpin and undermine each other. If you're looking for an analogy that might clarify this concept, imagine two evenly matched teams engaged in a game of tug of war. Neither team can pull the other over the line, so the tugging continues with no end in sight. Only when the rope snaps and the two teams end up flat on their backs will the game finally conclude in a stalemate, unless someone finds a new rope or, better yet, invents a new game in which everyone pulls in the same direction.
What does the above photo have to do with this website?
It's here to help you visualize what is meant by contradictory unity, just in case the tug-of-war analogy left you scratching your head. The yin-yang earring that my wife Allyson is wearing in this photo represents the ancient Chinese concept of unity in and through difference. It has been appropriated by New Age popular culture across the globe. Don't believe me? Just drop by the nearest tattoo parlor, yoga studio, head shop or craft fair, and I guarantee you'll find plenty of yin-yang swag on display. Let's pretend that this particular earring was discovered in the booth of one such craft fair by a shopper who has decided to buy it as a gift for his wife. He knows she'll love it because the yin-yang symbol projects an ideal near and dear to her heart, namely that beneath the surface froth of life pulsates a universal and timeless force of unity. What neither the giver nor receiver of the gift knows is that the two halves of the earring are held together by a defective weld. When invisible cracks in the weld expand beyond the point of no return, undermining the structural integrity of the whole and causing the two parts to separate along the central fault line, the yin-yang earring will be revealed as a fragile unity, one that is subject to change and prone to rupture—in short, a contradictory unity. So as we peel back the layers of capitalism and place, and get closer to the underlying contradiction uniting them, you might want to reflect on the flawed yin-yang earring whose two parts appear in the photo as an indivisible whole. But the danger lurks that one day, without warning, they will split apart like the ends of our tug-of war rope, and go their separate ways.
How is this website its own contradictory unity?
Capitalism in Place runs along two tracks, the analytical and the personal. On the analytical track, I use documentary photography and Marxist theory to investigate a world being whipsawed by the contradictory unity of capitalism and place. The end result is a Marxist tour guide to places I have visited, some of which are must-sees on any tourist's itinerary, while others are places where the last thing you are going to see is a tourist. On the personal track, I weave into my analysis a somewhat disjointed memoir that tells the story of how I came to be a self-identified Marxist tourist who shortly after his retirement in 2018 decided to spend his golden years traveling, taking pictures and writing about why he took them. Whenever I veer off the beaten analytical track, as I often do in the reflections, and take you on a detour through the backlands of my life story, Capitalism in Place will morph from a tour guide into a time machine. It will enable me to reconnect with my younger selves who have congealed into the person who is typing these words on his keyboard. To those of you might feel whipsawed by the constant back and forth between the analytical and the personal, I can only say welcome to my world—the world of contradictory unity.
Why do I call myself a Marxist tourist and this website a Marxist tour guide?
- Because I believe that the arguments set out by Karl Marx remain the indispensable starting point for any critical inquiry into capitalism.
- Because when I am planning a trip, especially one abroad, I book my transportation, lodging and "experiences" through the multinational corporations that dominate the mass tourism industry.
- Because in recent decades this industry has become increasingly central to both capital accumulation and place formation, constituting a "tourist-real estate regime of accumulation," in the words of Marxist political economist Raoul V. Bianchi.
- Because my goal in traveling is not "to see the sights" or wander the earth, which is what tourists have been doing ever since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, but to understand how the contradictory unity of capitalism and place shapes the world today.
Who will be interested in this website?
If you recognize yourself anywhere in the bullet points below, the chances are good that you'll feel right at home in Capitalism in Place. If you don't, give the website a try anyway. You never know what may catch your eye or awaken some slumbering interest.
- Geographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists.
- Urbanists in general, urban planners in particular.
- Those interested in the "spatial turn" in the human sciences.
- MBAs looking for fresh ideas not to be found on their syllabi.
- Students of critical theory, especially Marxist theory.
- Photographers across the documentary, street, travel and journalistic divides.
- Visual story tellers, e.g. film makers, graphic novelists, street artists, curators.
- Travelers on the lookout for the next cultural experience.
- Tourists on the lookout for the next piña colada.
- Local hosts whose economic survival depends on tourism.
- The corporate big shots of global tourism whose profits depend on local hosts.
- Place-based activists fighting for social justice.
- Anti-capitalist activists across the socialist-anarchist spectrum.
How should you navigate this website?
- Start with the two essays filed under the "Place" and "Capitalism" tabs on the navigation bar. They dive deeper into the Marxist theoretical framework set out above, providing a fuller account of the processes at work in the locations I have visited, photographed and written about. Next, go to the galleries. Each photo has a caption indicating where it was taken and how it illuminates this or that aspect of the process of capitalist place formation. Finish up with the reflections. This is where I step out from behind the double curtain of the camera and the theories in order to reflect on certain personal experiences that have left their mark on the work I am doing here.
- Start with the galleries. If you like the photos and want to know more about the story they tell and why I took them, proceed to the essays and reflections.
- Start and end wherever you please. Perhaps you prefer an unstructured, smorgasbord approach—a gallery here, an essay there, a reflection or two if you have the appetite for it. Or you may choose to wolf down the photos and leave the essays and reflections for another meal. It's up to you. Capitalism in Place is not a fixed menu. Think of it as your friendly neighborhood tapas bar.
Why am I convinced that a website like this one is needed?
Capitalism is a social formation marked by a high degree of resilience and adaptability. It has weathered many a storm in its brief history, and its defenders see nothing but clear skies and smooth sailing ahead. The same could be said of place which seems capable of renewing itself even in the most turbulent and uncertain of times. Yet it is an open question whether capitalism and place, to say nothing of most forms of life on the planet, can survive as we know them in the face of the ecological catastrophe unfolding before our eyes. Inasmuch as this catastrophe is grounded in the contradictory unity of capital accumulation and place formation, I will bring this introduction to a close by posing three questions about the not-so-distant future:
- Is the grow-or-die imperative of capitalism on course to cannibalize its own enabling conditions, and in so doing threaten every place under the sun?
- Are we approaching a point beyond which living under capitalism is no longer compatible with living in place?
- How do we create life-affirming places that operate outside the deadly logic of endless accumulation?
Can this website answer such questions?
No, but it might be able to persuade you they are worth asking.