1. science
2. social science
3. philosophy

Keith Harris
College of Built Environments
University of Washington
Second Draft: October, 2013
For publication in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Spatial Power
gkh2@uw.edu
Building the Moral City:
Urban Revitalization and the Conscious Capitalist Axiomatic
A recent debate in the journal City highlights some of the tensions between those who are
trying to import Deleuzoguattarian concepts into urban theory and those who remain committed
to a more traditional Marxist understanding of urbanization. On the one hand, there was an
article by Colin McFarlane, a British geographer who argued that the notion of assemblage could
contribute to the critical study of cities, and illuminate potential avenues for creating progressive,
if not radical, alternatives to current patterns of urbanization (McFarlane 2011). On the other,
there was a response – penned by the prominent American urban theorist Neil Brenner and two
of his associates – that began as a particularly thorough peer review. Brenner et al argued that the
notion of assemblage is in fact useful methodologically, but that that as an ontology for urban
studies, it does not address “the key concepts and concerns of radical political economy – for
instance, capital accumulation, class, property relations, land rent, exploitation, commodification,
state power, territorial alliances, growth coalition, structured coherence, uneven spatial
development, spatial divisions of labor and crisis formation, among others” (Brenner, Madden,
and Wachsmuth 2011: 230). This list is robust, to say the least, but the authors make an accurate
critique of McFarlane’s rendering of assemblage, and I have been keeping myself busy
elsewhere trying to bolster his ontological argument for assemblage urbanism via a return to A
Thousand Plateaus. In this chapter, however, I will take a somewhat different approach and
instead argue that schizoanalysis, as constructed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983,
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1987), provides a powerful set of tools for understanding the power dynamics inherent in
contemporary urban revitalization.
Before attempting a schizoanalysis of any regime of spatial power a few introductory
remarks should be made.1 First, one should recall that in an interview following the publication
of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze claims that he and Guattari have renounced the term ‘schizoanalysis’
because it prioritizes a critique of psychoanalytical theory and applauds the subsequent
schizophrenic escape, while the authors have redirected their critique to psychoanalytical
institutions and begun affirming a host of marginal discourses and escapes (Deleuze 2004: 280).
This shift in the object of critique from a theory to an institution is crucial if one proposes to use
a variation of schizoanalysis to examine the dynamics of spatial power, which is certainly the
domain of a wide range of public and private institutions.
Second, this shift is reinforced in A Thousand Plateaus, where schizoanalysis is typically
presented as a synonym for pragmatics. In Plateau Nine, “Micropolitics and Segmentarity,”
Deleuze and Guattari write:
“The study of the dangers of [the zone of power, its surrounding molecular fabric,
and the abstract machine of mutation, flows, and quanta] is the object of
pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to represent,
interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, marking their
mixtures as well as their distinctions.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 227)
Making maps, drawing lines, marking mixtures and distinctions of and between a
dominant force, the relationships in which it is enmeshed, and the desiring flows which power
strives to organize: this the first political task of the refined formulation of schizoanalysis. We
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have moved from the analyst saying to the patient, “tell me about your desiring-machines” to the
diagnostician looking at the institution and asking, “How does it work?”
Third, we must realize that despite these modulations in the definition and function of
schizoanalysis, its original formulation should not be seen as obsolete. For example, in
developing the concept of Affirmative Nomadology, Eugene Holland (2011: xviii) argues that
even though the schizoanalysis of Anti-Oedipus and the nomadology of A Thousand Plateaus are
“not exactly the same thing, […] they are by no means incompatible, either; nomadology does
not simply supersede schizoanalysis.” Moreover, Deleuze himself embraces the ever-shifting
nature of the concepts he and Guattari proffer. Again, from the aforementioned interview:
“Neither Guattari nor myself are very attached to the pursuit or even the
coherence of what we write. We would hope for the contrary, we would hope that
the follow-up to Anti-Oedipus breaks with what preceded it, with the first volume,
and then, if there are things that don’t work in the first volume, it doesn’t matter. I
mean that we are not among those authors who think of what they write as a
whole that must be coherent. If we change, fine, so there’s no point in talking to
us about the past.” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 278)
In light of these statements, one might view the Deleuzoguattarian conceptual machine as
streaking across the face of the earth and leaving a trail of concepts behind, to be picked up,
mixed and modified, used and discarded at the discretion of the researcher encountering their
work. Therefore, schizoanalysis in both its incarnations is a valuable tool for inquiry.
With at least these three modulations in mind, the schizoanalysis of spatial power as
expressed in contemporary urban revitalization projects becomes plausible. Though the point of
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this chapter is to sketch out a direction for future inquiries into the dynamic engine of
urbanization, it will use one particular urban redevelopment project as a case study.
South Lake Union (henceforth SLU) is one of the largest redevelopment projects in the
United States, and is currently under construction immediately to the north of Seattle’s central
business district. Over the last decade, SLU – which has been primarily developed by Vulcan
Inc., the real estate investment arm of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – has grown from a
sleepy light industrial neighborhood to the home of Amazon.com, a burgeoning biotechnology
research hub, a center for Global Health research and advocacy, and an emerging residential
enclave. At its peak, Vulcan owned about 60 acres in the neighborhood and although other
developers and interest groups are becoming increasingly active in the area, it continues to be the
primary manager of activity in SLU. As such, Vulcan has also undertaken a comprehensive
public relations campaign, which is centralized in the South Lake Union Discovery Center,
which one architectural writer describes as a “modular, moveable ‘pavilion in the park’ [that]
sets the sustainable tone for a re-emerging Seattle lakefront neighborhood” (Macaulay 2009: 5).
Under the tagline “Rethink Urban,” the Discovery Center proffers information about the
neighborhood’s history, Vulcan’s vision for its future, its central design tenets, publicity about
some of the newly constructed buildings, as well as a bookshelf where one can find familiar
books by urbanists such as Jane Jacobs and Richard Florida interspersed with books on wine, art,
food, design, and sustainability. The Discovery Center essentially doubles as a crash course in
the values of contemporary urbanism and a sales center for the neighborhood.
While the emergence of this revitalization project undoubtedly hinged on a unique blend
of political and economic factors – notably, two failed attempts to pass referendums to convert
the area into a central park – municipal rezoning and infrastructure investment, the dot-com bust,
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and Vulcan’s access to private and finance capital, an analysis based solely in these two registers
fails to accurately explain how this instance of late capitalist urbanization is unfolding. In
particular, the moral dimensions of the neighborhood’s development – environmentally
sustainable design, increased urban density, access to alternative forms of transportation – as
well as much of the work occurring in the neighborhood – global health philanthropy, vaccine
development, the design and construction of the neighborhood itself – strongly suggests that the
psychodynamic register, and in particular the desire to do ‘good’, is also part of the equation.
This is not exactly the same as saying that subjectivity is at stake, yet subjectivity
nevertheless remains an important concern, as it has been in critical urban studies for some time.
However, instead of relying directly on a theory of the subject or an account of subjectification –
such as ideology and language-based approaches of Althusserian interpellation or Gramscian
variants as they have been developed in cultural studies – this chapter will instead proceed by
mapping parallel investments in the political, economic, and psychodynamic registers. Deleuze
and Guattari’s ontology, which offers the concept of desiring-production as the fundamental
force in nature, is uniquely positioned to track resonances between these separate registers, for as
they write, “social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate
conditions” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 38). Moreover, they consider subjectivity to be an effect
of unconscious psychic investments of desire: “So that’s what I am!” the pervert or kleptomaniac
exclaims upon recognizing their desires. In this way, the notion of subjectivity largely takes on a
negative connotation in Deleuze and Guattari, as it the congealing of entangled and dynamic
desires.
This confluence of the political, economic, and psychodynamic spheres makes a
schizoanalytical approach a promising way to interrogate how the redevelopment of SLU works.
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In the preface to Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Eugene Holland writes, “Schizoanalysis insists
on restoring the full range of social and historical factors to psychoanalytic explanations of
psychic structure and proclivities…At the same time, schizoanalysis insists on including the
psychodynamic factors in historical materialist explanations of social structure and cultural
change” (Holland 1993: xiii). The movements in these registers depend on the parallel processes
of de- and reterritorialization of concrete objects and practices, and decoding and recoding of
representations, all of which are driven by the infinitely additive process of axiomatization.
However, while capitalism primarily decodes and converts all qualitative aspects to a
meaningless quantitative calculus – thus rendering recoding as an undeniably secondary process
– my claim is that in SLU we are witnessing the emergence of increasingly recoded capitalist
urbanization and endeavor.2 These new codes must be, by definition, the product of a new set of
axioms, which in turn constitute what I am calling the conscious capitalist axiomatic and
claiming is being added to the world capitalist axiomatic that Deleuze and Guattari discuss in
both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (cf. 1983: 234, 246 and 1987: 455). After
highlighting several key elements comprising the emerging moral discourses that strive to direct
investments of desire in the psychodynamic realm, we will trace their paths throughout the
political and economic registers before arriving at our own discussion of the production of
subjectivity.
Psychodynamics and Recoding in the Moral City
Holland’s claim that two elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of Lacanian
psychoanalysis are critical for a schizoanalysis of Baudelaire will assist in outlining how we can
effectively use this tool for thinking about urban space. First, “their translation of Lacan’s
structural-linguistic version of psychoanalysis into fully semiotic terms enables us to discuss
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socio-economic and psychological process in a single terminology” (Holland 1993, 17). In short,
this amounts to replacing Lacan’s reliance on a law of signification that structures the
relationships constituting the symbolic order of the unconscious by a variable set of historically
and anthropologically contingent codes that structure the “socio-symbolic order.” That is to say
that a structure still exists, but rather than being located in the family and guaranteed by the
“name-of-the-father,” it is now contingent and subject to “figures-of-the-despot” (politicians,
celebrities, expert discourses, etc.). Deleuze and Guattari’s second displacement follows from the
first, in that it prioritizes these socio-historical determinations over those of the family.
Consequently, the ego is confronted with an even greater risk of disintegration, as its reliance on
the Other in the stable symbolic order becomes increasingly susceptible to modulations in the
broader socio-symbolic order, which include the constant deterritorialization and decoding under
contemporary capitalism. Social decoding, therefore, puts the psyche in direct contact with the
meaningless Real, thereby potentially inducing trauma. Hence the necessity of the recoding
process for protection: it gives meaning to the surrounding world via the imaginary register.
Capitalism, per Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 246), is constituted by the conjunction of
decoded flows and necessarily decodes flows in turn, simultaneously axiomatizing them in an
effort to bind “the schizophrenic charges and energies into a world axiomatic that always
opposes the revolutionary potential of decoded flows with new interior limits.” Yet it is crucial to
distinguish between the purely decoded and quantitative calculus of capitalism as the prevailing
social machine and engine of production, and the actual market, which is still populated by
humans, whom both rely on and have a taste for codes: “the productive essence of capitalism
functions or “speaks” only in the language of signs imposed on it by…the axiomatic of the
market (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 241). Moreover, Holland’s tongue-in-cheek comment (1996:
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21) that “[w]ere it not for the inconvenience of having human workers, managers, and
consumers, capitalism might do very nicely without having any meanings whatsoever” reiterates
the need for some sort of meaning, regardless of its ephemeral nature.
As an increasingly important aspect of capitalism (Lefebvre 2003), urbanization is
necessarily implicated in these movements, and is therefore likely to be caught up in
axiomatization and recoding. Or, put another way, if capitalist urbanization seeks to direct the
investment of desire toward reproducing its own conditions, rather than freeing it up to invest
itself madly, it must recode. Modernist urban theory epitomizes the effort to organize the built
environment in a way consistent with the demands of capitalism, but it nevertheless still relies on
a form of recoding. One need look no further than to Le Corbusier’s excoriations (i.e. 1987: 11)
of past forms of irrational spatial organization to ground Holland’s claim (1985: 300) that in
modernism, “the aesthetic domain is emptied of its conventional, social content and reorganized
according to a new and more abstract master code”: that of rationalization and efficiency.3
The redevelopment of SLU utilizes this same sort of rational approach, though the
recoding effort takes on a more concrete, localized, and moral character. While it undoubtedly
adopts aspects of urban design that emerged from critiques of modernist urbanization – such as
the mixed uses, pedestrian permeability, buildings of various ages, and density that Jane Jacobs
(1992) highlights – it both operationalizes them as part of a development scheme that functions
in a managerial way, and circulates the reasoning behind their use discursively. A photo on the
Discover SLU website of Alley 24 – one of Vulcan’s premier mixed-use developments – speaks
directly to this claim: its caption reads, “Alley 24 epitomizes the development philosophy of
SLU. What’s old and historic is renewed. What’s new and innovative is built. And everything is
in visual and environmental harmony” (Discover SLU: “What’s here”). Overall the
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redevelopment of SLU might be seen as repetition of the urban renewal that Jacobs abhorred, but
as Deleuze (1994) has taught us, repetition is predicated on difference. This wave of
“cataclysmic money” is not situated in state-centered urban renewal efforts that clear ostensible
slums, drive freeways through neighborhoods, and erect skyscrapers surrounded by desolate
plazas. Instead, it acts with a publicized vision to integrate key portions of historic buildings –
such as brick facades and a smokestack from defunct commercial laundries or a former stable for
delivery-wagon horses – into sustainable mid-rise residential and office buildings, construct
infrastructure for alternative modes of transportation, and cultivate sectors of the innovation
economy.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this sort of protection against psychic dissolution
is also being erected in the service of capitalism as such, via the call to recapture its allegedly
neglected moral, beautiful, and heroic essence. In Conscious Capitalism, John Mackey, the coCEO of Whole Foods Market and his co-author, Raj Sisodia, argue that Adam Smith’s ethical
system, which is based on empathy, has been largely ignored, while his economic system has
been embraced. Citing the need to provide a “richer, more holistic, and more humanistic
philosophy and narrative about business” (Mackey and Sisodia 2013: 7-8), the authors share a
quotation from Marc Gafni, the cofounder and director of the Center for World Spirituality:
“The majority of people on the planet work in some form of business. But the
dominant narrative about business is that it is greedy, exploitative, manipulative
and corrupt. The majority of human beings on the planet thus experience
themselves as furthering and supporting greed, exploitation, manipulation and
corruption. When people experience themselves that way, they actually begin to
become that way. But the true narrative is that by participating in business, they
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are creating prosperity and lifting people out of poverty. They are creating stable
conditions for families to be raised, they are helping build communities that can
create schools, they are creating places for people to exchange value, find
meaning, build relationships and experience intimacy and trust” (Gafni 2012,
cited in Mackey and Sisodia 2013: 23-24).
Bringing together, on the one hand, the necessity of the Sisyphean task of recoding in
response to capitalism’s rampant decoding and, on the other, these new age spiritual musings on
an emerging capitalism that simultaneously elevates self-perceptions and creates an improved
world helps us to sketch out the new “socio-symbolic order” that serves as the historical Other by
which producers and users of spaces such as SLU can attain a semblance of psychological unity.
In an intriguing essay, Ian Buchanan (2005) considers the recoding of spaces around the former
World Trade Center site in New York City – the symbolic height of the new Freedom Tower
(1776 feet, in reference to the signing of the Declaration of Independence), the footprints of the
Twin Towers being enshrined as memorials – but his analysis focuses on the aesthetic
dimensions of this reterritorialization, rather than on motivations underlying its production. SLU,
by contrast, undoubtedly involves aesthetic recoding, but by invoking discourses and practices in
the realm of production, it at least raises the possibility that we might be seeing forces at work
that are not purely economic.
This not to say, however, that codes in SLU are economic, for Deleuze and Guattari
(1983: 247) explicitly prohibit this interpretation:
“[A] code is not, and can never be economic: on the contrary, it expresses the
apparent objective movement according to which the economic factors or
productive connections are attributed to an extraeconomic instance as though they
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emanated from it, an instance that serves as a support and an agent of inscription.”
Yet their characterization of capitalism as a system of cynicism and piety nevertheless seems to
have undergone something of a modulation. For them, “cynicism is capital as the means of
extorting surplus labor, but piety is this same capital as God-capital, whence the forces of labor
seem to emanate” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 225). In SLU, however, the piety moment
involves not just capital, but explicitly moral dimensions, as expressed in the statement that
Vulcan’s “management made it clear that [their] plans will be guided by Allen’s desire to be a
positive influence in the world and the real estate group’s triple-bottom-line goals” (Dubbs
2003: 29).6
Turning to the recoding efforts in the political and economic registers of urban studies
will demonstrate how psychodynamics are playing an increasingly centralized role in the
development of SLU. Subsequently, by combining two threads of Michel Foucault’s later work, I
will argue that the political rationality of neoliberalization that is typically invoked in urban
studies from the perspective of a mode of production should also include a consideration of the
production of moral subjects.
Political dynamics
The central political movement – perhaps best understood as a series of de- and
reterritorializations – behind urban revitalization projects such as SLU is clearly neoliberalism,
as the last decade or so of critical writing on cities has amply shown. David Harvey succinctly
defines neoliberalism and its relationship to governance:
“Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that
proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual
entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework
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characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of
the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such
practices.” (Harvey 2005: 2)
Many urban theorists note this dual nature of neoliberalism, which strips away Keynesian
barriers to the ostensibly efficient functioning of the market and installs new policies advancing
the capitalist agenda. Edward Soja and Harvey both set the discipline of geography on its current
path with their respective discussion of restructuring and the shift from managerial to
entrepreneurial forms of governance. Restructuring, Soja writes, “evokes a sequence of breaking
down and building up again, deconstruction and attempted reconstitution” of the orders of social,
economic, and political life (Soja 1987: 178, cited Brenner and Theodore 2005: 101). Harvey
(1989: 3) highlights the ways in which local governments have shifted from managing urban
growth – through “the local provision of services, facilities, and benefits to urban populations,”
for example – to a more entrepreneurial position, in which cities compete with one another to
create the conditions for economic growth. Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell outline the dialectical
movement from “roll-back” to “roll-out” neoliberalism that begins with the atmosphere of
deregulation and union-busting installed during the Reagan and Thatcher years and is epitomized
in the pro-market policies of the Clinton and Blair administrations (Peck and Tickell 2002: 3889), while Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (2002) christen these movements “moments of
destruction” and “moments of creation.” Mark Purcell, however, makes a similar distinction
between the stages of neoliberalism but shifts the argument closer to the realm of
Deleuzoguattarian de- and reterritorialization by claiming:
“While this historical big picture is important to understand, for a given place it is
most useful to think of these two aspects as occurring together in a complex
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mixture of both laissez- and aidez-faire. Neoliberalization is a project to both
destroy impediments and create assistance to capital wherever and whenever
possible.” (Purcell 2008: 15, my italics).
This assertion marks an important point where critical perspectives on the history of
neoliberalism and the state-form diverge. A dialectical account of consecutive movements
accounting for the emergence and resolution of internal contradictions gives way to a history that
“must be conceived in nonlinear fashion as oscillating between two (or among several!) basins of
attraction in an open process that has no single predictable or final outcome” (Holland 2011: x).
Moreover, the decoded and deterritorialized flows of capitalist social production have become
the social body from which the capitalist state emerges: rather than integrating and overcoding
diverse activities – as it did when it was dominant – the state is now subordinated to capitalist
flows, which it strives to coordinate and recode (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 221, 252). For
Holland, this means that the contemporary State oscillates between two neoliberal forms: the
biopolitical or axiomatizing form and a sovereign or neodespotic form, which he characterizes by
the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, respectively.
In the case of SLU, it is – perhaps unsurprisingly – the biopolitical and axiomatizing
variant of neoliberalism that is at work, rather than the neodespotic. John Protevi (2010)
explicitly juxtaposes this Foucauldian account of neoliberalism to Harvey’s analysis by pointing
out the latter is unable to account for how neoliberalization induces practices that constitute
entrepreneurial subjectivities. Conversely, for Foucault, “neoliberal government manages people
qua homo economicus as self-entrepreneur in artificial competitive markets” (Protevi 2010: 4).
To their credit, Peck and Tickell (2002: 389) note that “new social subjectivities are being
fostered,” but without an explicit theory of the subject or subjectification, they have no way of
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explaining how. Moreover, Foucault’s rendering of neoliberalism as a shift in the art of
governing, based not in an ideology that is adopted and circulated with varying degrees of
success, but emerging through the confluence of unique historical practices and discourses,
resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s overall project. However, it is important to note that in
SLU the subjectivities that are being fostered are not just entrepreneurial, but also tend toward a
specific morality, in a qualitative turn that is left unaddressed by the aforementioned discussions
of neoliberalism. This thread will be picked back up and discussed in relation to both Deleuze
and Guattari’s understanding of subjectification and Foucault’s final work on the constitution of
ethical subjects after examining some of the concrete political reterritorializations and recodings
that have occurred in SLU.
Both infrastructure improvements and changes to existing zoning were required to
facilitate the development of SLU. Purcell (2008: 117) notes that the amount of public funds
directed toward infrastructure improvements ranges from $420M to $1B, depending on whether
you listen to the official city line or the Seattle Displacement Coalition. The latter provides a
detailed list which includes the city’s contribution to a streetcar line, major road improvements,
multiple electrical substation upgrades, parking infrastructure, waterfront park improvements,
upgrades to water, wastewater, and solid waste services, and so on (Seattle Displacement
Coalition). Zoning changes supporting Vulcan’s vision also show a clear movement toward
cultivating the growth of the neighborhood. In 2003, the city council amended building codes to
allow greater heights for biotechnology and biomedical research buildings in the neighborhood;
in 2004, it was designated an “urban center,” a classification created in the early 1990s to funnel
75% of Seattle’s projected growth into specific urban areas rather than increasing sprawl. In
2005, it was rezoned to allow residential construction to proceed, and in 2008, studies began that
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recently resulted in increased building height limits (Vulcan 2011: 2). The city’s consultant
estimates that over the period from 2001 to 2022, the tax revenue from development in the
neighborhood will exceed $500M, most of which will be directed to the city’s general fund (Berk
2012: 23).
The dynamics of the recent rezone are also notable. A growing concern about the
availability of affordable housing in the heart of Seattle led the mayor and city council to propose
multiple schemes for requiring either a set-aside of newly constructed space for such housing, or
an in-lieu fee that the developers could pay into a fund for the construction affordable housing.
In the end, the city settled on a requirement of a set-aside of 5% or a fee of almost $22 per square
foot of space built over the current building height limits. For the sake of comparison: “Boston,
Sacramento, and San Francisco require 15 percent set-asides…while New York and Boulder,
Colorado require 20 percent” (Young 2013b). Moreover, for the city to provide affordable
housing at a rate to reach its own goals for keeping pace with similar cities, the in-lieu fee would
need to be almost five times as much (ibid.). Such concessions reinforce Purcell’s assertion
(2008: 116) that “the agendas of the City and Vulcan are converging around the desire to
create…densification and a steep rise in property values in SLU,” and highlight the degree to
which this densification is taking the form of high-tech, high-cost enclave.
In addition to these reterritorialized practices, we should first note the shift in the location
from which recoding emanates. For Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 223), “it is up to the State to
recode as best it can, by means of regular or exceptional operations, the product of the decoded
flows,” but in SLU the State, the private sector, and nonprofit organizations occupying the
interstices between undertake recoding to express the potential, success, and moral nature of the
redevelopment. The SLU Urban Center Neighborhood Plan (2007: 11) was prepared by the
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city’s planning department and provides a list of future neighborhood characteristics, including
“a pervasive human scale ambiance consistent with a vital aesthetically pleasing, safe and
energetic neighborhood which embraces a dynamic intermixing of opportunities for working
living and playing” and “ecologically sound development and life-styles and promotion of
ecologically sound business practices.” A report (Berk 2012) on the public-private investments
in the neighborhood notes the benefits and challenges of “separate, but coordinated” effort to
redevelop the area, as well as the “potentially unrepeatable circumstances” that have made SLU
a promising undertaking. Above all it highlights the uniqueness of finding a developer inclined
and able to take on such a large project: “Having this amount of land control, investment capital,
and a vision for the area that aligned with market demand is extremely uncommon” (Berk 2012,
23).
Private sector recoding expresses a similar sentiment: a feature on Vulcan in Commercial
Property News (2003) begins with “Not many developers are as focused on whether their
projects are the right thing to do and the best thing for the community and environment as they
are on financial return.” Here Vulcan is rendered as actively participating in two realms – the
community and environment – which are typically beyond the purview of business pursuits, and
therefore traditionally fall to government.7 The Daily Journal of Commerce, a local trade journal
that highlights movements in real estate sector, has served as a venue for Vulcan to expound on
its development philosophy. In “Doing well by doing good: Why sustainability lends owners and
developers a competitive edge,” Vulcan’s Senior Development Manager outlines Vulcan’s intent
“to help promote cost-effective and repeatable environmentally sensitive urban development”
(Hazlehurst 2003). In the nonprofit realm, the Downtown Seattle Association, a member-based
group that advocates for the center city and promotes economic development writes of SLU:
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“Having been thought through carefully, this neighborhood has yielded exceptional livable,
walkable spaces with effective transportation, sustainability, and recreation” (DSA).
These statements represent a much larger body of discourse that celebrates Vulcan’s
commitment to creating a “world-class neighborhood,” and while one might object that this sort
of language is common in capitalist pursuits, the fact that multiple interrelated groups are
participating speaks to an increase and diversification of recoding efforts in urban redevelopment
that diminish the State’s prior centrality.8
Economic Dynamics
Per Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history in Anti-Oedipus, the capitalist machine’s
primary function is to destabilize the previously dominant social machines via deterritorialization
and decoding. “Its sovereign production and repression,” they write, “can be achieved in no other
way” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 33). Yet if capitalism hopes to survive, all relative
deterritorializations and decodings must be accompanied by reterritorializations and recodings.
This section will briefly note some of the changing economic practices in relation to SLU and
explore two of the developer’s central attempts at recoding.
Two particular economic reterritorializations are notable in SLU. First, the incredible
success to date has been a windfall for the city and speaks to a possible new model for
redevelopment that can be applied elsewhere – and it may be: Vulcan was recently named the
primary developer for Yesler Terrace, the oldest and most centrally-located public housing
neighborhood in Seattle. The most recent economic report on SLU (Mann 2011: 20), shows that
13,000 permanent jobs have been created since 2004 and that the construction and economic
activity in the neighborhood have also contributed $5 million per year to the city’s coffers,
significantly exceeding the best-case-scenario projections from 2004. For example, this job
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growth represents 72% of the city’s goal for SLU in the year 2024. Although the city’s
consultant highlights the “potentially unrepeatable circumstances” that have led to SLU’s
success, there is nevertheless an effort to repeat part of the success. Yesler Terrace, for example,
will shift from a public housing development that “is within walking distance of downtown and
offers spectacular views of Elliott Bay and Mount Rainier” to one that also includes “3,000 highrise, market-rate apartments and condos on the property, as well as office towers up to 300 feet
tall” (Young 2013a).
The second reterritorialization can be seen in Vulcan’s shift to an entrenched and
committed manager of their space – a maneuver that takes on aspects of a curatorial turn and
which will be reinforced by their constant efforts to recode. While the slew of restaurants
relocating from nearby neighborhoods or expanding into SLU hints at this dimension of the
developer’s strategy, there is some evidence that it is this case. For example, James Schmidt, the
CEO of the fast-food chain Taco Del Mar, and his partner were enticed by “a sweet deal on the
rent for Paddy Coyne’s Irish Pub,” which they opened at the base of Alcyone, Vulcan’s first
residential project in the neighborhood (Young 2008). “‘They wanted a picture. They wanted a
postcard,’ [he says]. They needed a place to illustrate their marketing pitch that South Lake
Union is ‘equal parts amber ale and black Labs’” (ibid).
As for recoding, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a stable, universal code,
it nevertheless constantly recodes in an effort to capture and organize the relations of production
and consumption in a way that maximizes its share of surplus value. Holland (1985: 299) asserts
that “the most pervasive and widely-recognized form of recoding is bureaucratization,” and in
the case of SLU, the bureaucracy at work is primarily constituted by the City and Vulcan, as well
as the latter’s network of fellow developers, public relations experts, architects, designers, and
Harris, 19
contractors. Holland schematically locates recoding processes in three domains: the family, the
sphere of production, and the sphere of consumption. I will save an abbreviated discussion of the
family for the following section and here primarily focus on the sphere of the production of SLU,
though it also directly relates to the sphere of consumption: the role of the developer has shifted
to that of a visionary manager that has taken on part of capitalist State’s previous role of both
directing urban development but also of “invent[ing] codes for decoded flows of money,
commodities, and private property” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 221).
The Discovery Center and the Discover SLU website both contribute to the discourse of
recoding. Upon entering the Center, one is invited to sit in a small theater to watch a highly
stylized informational video about the neighborhood. It begins with time-lapse shots of bustling
city streets and SLU landmarks: modern architecture with lots of glass, trees shimmering in the
wind on a sunny day, out-of-focus crowds of pedestrians, clouds passing behind the onion domes
of an old Russian Orthodox church, an orange streetcar full of passengers passing by, sunlight
fractured by leaves, and window washers working at an astonishing rate. The visual dynamics
are accompanied by atmospheric electronic music gently pulsating, before a male voice
intervenes with, “I am a big believer in smart growth” (Vulcan 2012: 0:10) As the opening of the
video progresses, it is narrated by a sound collage of voices giving testimonials to the “dedicated,
open, generous, original, fresh, bright, vital, innovative, creative, flaky…delicious [laughter],
fun, relaxing but vibrant and very ambitious” nature of the neighborhood (Vulcan 2012: 0:16).
Subsequently, the video features more testimonials by those living, working, and playing in the
neighborhood, and attesting to its the wide range of opportunities for business, research, and
entertainment. Notably, representatives of Vulcan are absent, though the founder of an artisanal
pizzeria located in the neighborhood evokes their shared vision at the conclusion of the video:
Harris, 20
“We had an opportunity to start from scratch, and we have, and we have a thoughtful developer,
who has that same vision. If we can continue to challenge ourselves, and to work towards a
common goal of creating this wonderful, world-class neighborhood, then it all comes together.
And nowhere is more poised to do that than South Lake Union” (Vulcan 2012: 3:50).
A similar theme is present on the website, which in itself is a veritable clearinghouse of
information about the neighborhood, ranging from its history to feature stories about new
commercial tenants, press covering the neighborhood, local events, available residential units,
and so forth. Vulcan acknowledges its “major role” in the life of SLU, but reminds visitors of
“countless other developers, community groups, business owners and involved citizens who take
an active, informed role in the future of their neighborhood” (DiscoverSLU: “Who’s involved”).
Nevertheless, Vulcan reminds the reader that their “role is not the usual one between a developer
and a neighborhood. While most developers are content to build and move on, Vulcan has and
will remain involved in the South Lake Union neighborhood for decades to come” (ibid).
With its focus on environmentally sustainable construction, dense urban living, and
alternative modes of transportation, Vulcan is indeed showing a more thoughtful version of
capitalism, and they seem to be doing it in earnest. This represents, I believe, a displacement of
neoliberalism’s valuation of market exchange as “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide
to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs” (Treanor 2005, cited
in Harvey 2005: 3). Hence, in the case of SLU, many values constituting progressive morality –
care for the environment or helping the less privileged, for example – remain intact, both
materially and discursively. Nevertheless, they are undoubtedly also being used to reinforce
ethical arguments for the further entrenchment of capitalist urbanization, to recode this emerging
mode of urbanization as morally good.
Harris, 21
Subjectification
Though Deleuze and Guattari typically invoke subjectivity as the stifling ‘molarization’
of dynamic or ‘molecular’ becomings, they do not throw the concept out entirely. Instead, they
consider the subject to emerge alongside particular unconscious investments of desire, and note
that it is continually reconstituted as new investments occur. Put differently, Deleuze and
Guattari consider the individual who is frequently taken as a rational subject in many strands of
philosophy to be an effect of desire. Following Wilhelm Reich’s argument that psychic
repression depends on the social repression of desire, Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 118-20) assert
that, under capitalism, the family is the “delegated agent” of said repression, directing the
investment and inscription of desire. Moreover, the notion of recoding is central to the
investment of desire and the consequent production of subjectivity, for as Holland (1996: 83)
writes, the capitalist socius’s “purely abstract quantitative calculus is incompatible with the
formation of subjectivity, which involves qualities, meanings, beliefs.” The immediate question
here then regards how investments of desire, as circumscribed in the family and in relation to the
broader social field, might be brought to bear on the overarching mission of conscious capitalism
as such and in the redevelopment of SLU.
Holland (2011: 45) offers some insight by invoking Norman O. Brown’s assertion that
the biological fact of prolonged infantile dependency on caregivers constructs a psyche with
“exaggerated expectations for physiological and psychological gratification, intense separation
anxiety (since separation from caregivers at this stage means death), and a consequent repression
or refusal of death.” This account jibes with Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of
dependency and the refusal of death under capitalism, but Holland notes that the order of
causality is reversed between these two accounts, with Brown privileging the psychic register
Harris, 22
while Deleuze and Guattari privilege the economic. By bringing these two analyses together,
Holland argues that separation anxiety displaces castration anxiety as the primary mechanism of
repression in the nuclear family, and that instead of searching for causality in the psychological
or economic register, we should instead consider them as autonomous registers that – along with
the political register – resonate with one another.
In the case of the conscious capitalist axiomatic this shift corresponds to adult life no
longer founded on obedience to the Father or boss, but rather to an increasingly comprehensive
form of a capitalism that was already directly linked to biopower in that individuals are
dependent on it to sustain life: “For capitalist society,” Foucault (2001, 137) writes, “it was
biopolitics, the biological, the somatic, the corporal, that mattered more than anything else.” The
conscious capitalist axiomatic takes this relationship one step further and ties not only survival to
capitalism, but also yokes the relatively privileged desire to undertake meaningful work to
companies who have adopted such a program. In this regime, the constant recoding efforts
highlighting the ethical position of the company and the need for other businesses to adopt
similar guiding principles if they wish to survive both solicit affective investments and incite
particular actions, thereby evoking the Deleuzoguattarian and Foucauldian accounts of
subjectification (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987; Foucault 1985, 1986).
Not only has Paul Allen’s desire to be a positive force in the world has led him to develop
SLU and spurred incredible philanthropic projects, his entire relationship to SLU began as
support for an 80-acre public park. In the early 1990s, he loaned the Seattle Commons supporters
$20 million to purchase 11.5 acres of land within the boundaries of the proposed park, which
would be ceded to the city if voters approved of the project. But after two narrowly defeated
attempts to approve a $111 million property-tax levy to fund the remainder of the project (an
Harris, 23
average of $48 per year, per household, over a span of nine years), the property reverted to
Allen, and following the advice of savvy consultants, Vulcan re-envisioned it as an
environmentally sustainable urban home for biotechnology research and mixed-use development
(Historylink). On the philanthropy front, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation contributes to a
wide range of programs, ranging from basic needs, education, and arts funding to the Allen
Institute for Brain Science – which is currently relocating to SLU from another neighborhood –
and the Center for Global Animal Health at Washington State University.
Similarly, PATH – an acronym for the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health –
is an international Global Health NGO located in SLU whose operations rely on contributions
from philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (whose
headquarters is located just west of SLU and from whom PATH has, in the period up to 2007,
received $949M in grants) (McCoy et al, cited in Sparke 2011: 51). Their list of
accomplishments is indeed astounding, and ranges from nutrition applications in Global South –
notably, they have diagnostic technology for detecting malnutrition via simple blood tests and
treating it with fortified rice – to technologies for immunization, water treatment, and
reproductive health (PATH).
These high profile, nonprofit endeavors not only constitute the subjectivities of those
directly involved by channeling their desires and shaping their practices, but also are reinvested
in the political and economic discourses pertaining to the entire Seattle region, thereby directing
and recoding a wider range of desires and practices. Such “philanthro-capitalist” collaborations
have essentially positioned Seattle to become the dominant cluster of the Global Health industry
and, consequently, the city of Seattle is increasingly seeing itself as what Matthew Sparke calls a
hybrid type of world class city: the curative city. Such a conception complexifies Harvey’s
Harris, 24
notion of an entrepreneurial city because, according to Sparke (2011: 65), rather than just
striving to create a business-friendly environment to attract economic activity, the curative city
inverts the logic of investment, which now is now “going outward from Seattle to the rest of the
world and enfolding it in a reconceptualization of planetary space as a staging ground for
Seattle’s global ambition.” In this arrangement, a dimension of local economic development
hinges on the instances of worldwide malaise that the Seattle philanthro-capitalist machine sets
out to cure, simultaneously constituting the population as beneficent while coupling their
dependence on capital to political and economic movements beyond their reach.
In conclusion, the form of urbanization emerging in SLU reinforces the connections
between a capitalism that constantly strives to exist in a pure form but necessarily recodes itself
to ensure its reproduction, a mode of governmentality that both permits and cultivates these
market dynamics while simultaneously trying to organize their effects in tolerable way, and a
psychological coherence that depends on its social and historical context. Mapping de- and
recodings in these three registers is a powerful step toward understanding the recent modulations
of capitalist urbanization. This is, I maintain, the first task of urban theory.
Harris, 25
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Notes
1
I am indebted to Eugene Holland’s comments in the preface and introduction to Nomad
Citizenship for illuminating these shifts in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Moreover, I have relied
heavily on his Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:
Introduction to Schizoanalysis, as will become apparent, to help me construct the arguments
herein.
2
In this chapter I am not addressing affective modulations which would also play an increasingly
important role in the emergence of a conscious capitalist axiomatic.
3
Though de- and re-territorializations occur simultaneously, it is possible that one predominates
in any given place or time. Ian Buchanan (2005) highlights, on the one hand, the relative
preponderance deterritorialization/decoding of postmodernism and the disorientation that Fredric
Jameson (1991) describes in relation to the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, and, on the other,
the relative domination of reterritorialization/recoding of the symbolism embodied in the design
of Freedom Tower, which now stands on the former site of the World Trade Center in New York
City.
Harris, 28
6
The “triple-bottom-line” approach to real estate development uses environmental sustainability,
social benefits to the greater community, and strong financial returns – not necessarily in this
order – as the markers of successful development.
7
See note 3
8
Modifying the preeminent discourse analyst Norman Fairclough’s concept (2003: 32-34) of the
“genre of governance,” I refer elsewhere to this collection of statements as constituting a non
state-centric “genre of governmentality.”