faust in late capitalism

The area next to London's City Airport called Silvertown or North Woolwich is an area of the former docklands which is waiting for regeneration since the early 80s. Again and again it is marketed by the LDA as London’s biggest development opportunity. Vast areas previously occupied by dire docks and dirty large scale industrial plants are fenced off and home to shrubs.

Thousands of new apartments and a colossal aquarium on an anyway derelict site with a view offices and shops, as a regeneration project, that sounds all too marvellous to me to be true. Not only because it reminds me of Dubai's gigantism. From Goethe’s Faust we learned, there is always the old couple. Well, where is it, if there is no one left to get rid off/decant or nothing to dynamite? In this case, it won’t be science killing humanity. The proposals put forward (some of them got planning permission already) show no relation to their surrounding. No wonder they don't because when the whole strategy for the docklands was set up under the Thatcher administration no one looked into the existing spaces of the royal docks. According to their neoliberal doctrines they got rid of everything old, especially the state controlled port because the market will do the job most efficiently if it's not disturbed. But the market acts to different rules than space. Lefebvres bible was published roughly at the same time when London Dockland Development Council was conceiving their strategy. Whereas space “subsumes things produced, and encompasses their relative interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity...” - hence it is something incredible complex and hard to define, investment needs security in terms of definition. Space includes the individual and is subjective, pretty hard things to control. Investment can't do without control. In terms of planning, in Silvertown there is no control, no defined perimeter, just 'wild west' do whatever you want. Naturally the proposed developments create their own controlled patches. They are all oriented inwards trying to minimise contact with the undefined context. Secured by design policies and gated communities finalise the scenarios: complete exclusion. It is the local community with is specific needs that is deprived of a real opportunity for overcoming the problems of the second industrial revolution. It's neoliberal thinking and capitalism killing humanity.

about the difficulties of cutting clouds

Earlier I wrote about the toothless tigers of todays theorists who still struggle with the justification of an epic failure called communism. But what is the problem? Why are we not able to address todays problems in a way that we can generate ideas that suggest how to tackle todays crisis?

For example gentrification. No one I know likes gentrification – naturally. Because the only point from where you can observe it, is from the point of the victim. I was always curious how you could stop gentrification. Having street festivals with lots of banners arguing against investment? Causes just the opposite. Shitting on your doorstep would help, but honestly who wants that? The point is, and thats whats Terry Eagleton makes clear, we are fighting against the most abstract thing one can imagine: Money. Fighting money is like trying to fight a cloud. Since money became pure information in the 1970s with no real value behind it, it is probably the most fluid thing we know. At the moment we do not have the right means to control it, because once we think we have it, the cloud changed already. In gentrification one can't stop the money from flowing in, on the other hand it's also impossible to keep it if you want it as a society. Last year I lived together with a computer programmer who scripts software for high speed trading. I asked him about the Tobin Tax. He just laughed at me. A tax that tries to stop high speed trading will just create new and probably even more controversial forms of money making or just move to some countries with doubtful moral principles who grant free flow of capital and low taxation, probably some African dictatorships.

The same situation appears when it comes to social understanding of postmodernity. After the thinking in strict categories, nowadays everything has to be inclusive, pluralistic and the multitude. Because of the dominance of neoliberal thinking the cloud expanded to the last corner of our small world. Everything is possible anywhere and at any time (at least in thought). The cloud has become a foggy soup and for my part I have little orientation at the moment. Of course Mr. Eagleton promises guide me out of the fog. I am curious.