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Mob deep: The underground current of urban revolution

So much for the ‘collective boson’. That immanent idea has dissipated, as unstable as the boson itself; it seems long forgotten (though it does miraculously comes back on the penultimate page of the book, now as ‘some secret dimension that unites all hitherto dissociated struggles, an unknown dimension of space-time’ [p. 132]). So what do we get in the end? We get a book that argues that we should give up on the right to the city because both rights and cities are useless concepts. We should instead fall like rain (and atoms) and hope for a swerve that lasts because it lasts. We should quit analyzing ‘what they do, what capital does’ and start instead to ‘change [our] heart as well as tack’ (so, we do have the power to ‘swerve’?) (pp. 132–133, original emphasis). And there you have it. A politics of immanence married to a political idealism: that seems to be the best we can hope for. Don’t get me wrong, the book is a fun read. It is Andy Merrifield writing, after all, bidding fair to be geography’s own James Joyce. But it’s as cavalier as anything Lefebvre himself ever wrote (Merrifield’s dismissal of ‘rights’ is embarrassing in its ignorance—ignorance in the sense of Merrifield ignoring 30 years of debate over the theorization, strategic utility, and complex politics, of rights) and it is politically wrongheaded, not because it dismisses rights, but because it dismisses the produced, struggled over, structured, limiting, and in-need-of-physical-transformation, world. There is a radical idealism at work in The Politics of the Encounter that is really quite hard for a geographer to credit, at least any geographer interested in understanding the landscapes of historical and contemporary capitalism, and how they can be transcended.