Modernity and Mobility: Exclusion and Extraction

Elites, Exclusion and the Modern Ideal

Both Schivelbusch and Benjamin discuss Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris. In The Arcades Project (1927-1940), a polyphonic montage of historical voices, Walter Benjamin illuminates the controversy that never ceased to exist about urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891). Critical voices underline how the urban planner destroyed many historical buildings in order to rip his linear, grand avenues through Paris; thereby erecting an abundance of monuments wrapped in a fake neoclassic cover; turning Paris into “the true Babylon, the true arena of intellectual battle, the true temple where evil has its cult and its priesthood; and I am sure that the breath of the archangel of shadows passes over you eternally, like the winds over the infinity of the seas" (142). Haussmann himself would agree that he indeed brought a fresh breeze into the congested, smelly Paris. While several voices critique Haussmann for supporting social injustice in order to maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie, and for turning into Paris into a cosmopolitan Moloch full of bastard architecture in which no one feels home anymore, Benjamin places a “plea for Haussmann” (148) by Fritz Stahl at the end of his chapter about the ‘Haussmannization’. Stahl argues that Haussmann has completed the work of Louis XIV, that he made Paris complete — even due to the fact that he had to sacrifice a lot of beauty. Stahl (and Benjamin too?) admits that Haussmann’s work was the work of a fanatic, but a task of this scope could only have been fulfilled by a fanatic.

As Tenorio-Trillo reports, the Mexican centennial represented an attempt to follow Haussmannian and modernist ideals. Leading up to the 1910 centennial of Mexico’s 1810 declaration of independence, elite-driven fervor over ‘modernity’ and the making of Mexico City into a world-class, cosmopolitan capital (as envisioned by elites) drove heavy-handed attempts at top-down change. Responding to the ideal of capitalist consumption, attempts were made to reduce contentment with simple things and create demand for elaborate, disposable goods. In the modern city, it conditions must be set “so that para vivir tenga que trabajar” (17). Modern hygienic ideals translated into racist eradication of brown and indigenous bodies from the public square, or their commutation into camouflaged spaces. In its physicality, the "modern" city was supposed to reflect its history — following Haussmann, official histories were inscribed into streets, buildings, and ubiquitous monuments. The seeming finality of elite triumph came, ironically, via the revolution which attempted to overthrow the elites. The success of the revolutionaries transformed them into the new elites. Eleven years after the first centennial, in 1921, the revolutionaries threw their own centennial of the end of the war of independence in 1821. Although “what 1921 celebrated was not 1821, but the assumed triumph over what the 1910 celebration meant” (38), the new regime almost immediately echoed the old regime, driven by modernist-extractivist ideals and toasting their success “with champagne and with glasses and plates from the Hapsburg emperor” (39).

In echoes of the cosmopolitan centennial ideals chronicled by Tenorio-Trillo, Merodio explores the metropolization of Mexico City as an elite space within Mexico. Merodio argues that modern technological innovation changed the territorial mapping of political, administrative institutions in Mexico. The geographic centrality of the Distrito Federal within the country coupled with capitalist-extractivist-accumulatory ideology drove its metropolization.

The Urban Condition

In his seminal essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1902) Georg Simmel stages the spectacle of the growing modern metropolis as a threat to the psychological stability of the human being confronting it. "The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life" (130). Thereby he reads the technological and scientific progress of humanity as a two sided sword that on the one hand liberated humanity from historical bonds within the state, religion, morals, and also in economics, but on the other hand forces the individual to specialize his professional skills in order to stay valuable for the market and thus to becomes dependent on the skills of others, because specialization does not allow the subsistence of the individual. This again is a threat to the individual personality: “"Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality […] cannot maintain itself under its impact” (134). In order not to drown (atrophy) in the stream of masses within the metropolis, he has to exaggerate his individuality (hypertrophy) to maintain his ‘personal core’. The blasé attitude is born.

As an equal incision into the human psyche (and life) Wolfgang Schivelbusch assigns to the spread of the railway in the 19^th century, as he argues in his work The Railway Journey (1977). For him the railway infrastructure equals an annihilation of space and time that made the world shrink. The process of shrinking is accompanied by an oppositional process, the growth of the metropolis into (almost) infinite size, by incorporating the whole nation into its framework of infrastructure. Those changes lead to a general rootlessness, e.g. local products lose their aura of naturalness, since the new mobility provided by the rail tracks makes products that were originally only available in a certain region now to have everywhere easily. Further on he argues, as much as the railroad has increased speed and capacity of travelling, the new architectural materials of glass and iron have increased the capacity of buildings. His close analysis of the train station stages it as a space that brings together two totally different worlds: the space of the metropolis and the space of the journey, which with urban development became equally noisy. The reason for that noise is the ideal of circulation that he sees as the fundamental principle of modernity. Everything that circulated, esp. traffic, was seen as vital; everything that did not was seen as archaic and diseased. "The notion that communication, exchange, motion bring to humanity enlightenment and progress, and that isolation and disconnection are the obstacles to be overcome on this course, is as old as the modern age” (197).

Symbols and Identity

Guajardo and Riguzzi follow a modernist, (neo)liberal perspective in presenting the history of railroads in Mexico. The railroads brought modern infrastructure and the rigors of clocked time, without serving most towns. Yet despite their limited geographic coverage, they became a symbol of a public service and a connector of Mexicanness. They were used by revolutionaries in the war and by nationalists after the revolution to further their ideals of Mexicanness. With the neoliberal turn, the unions lost power, layoffs ensued and the railroads were privatized, much, it would seem, to the delight of Guajardo and Riguzzi. The decline of the importance of the railroads in providing public service, supporting working-class jobs, advancing modern progress and as a part of Mexican modern identity has erased their symbology. Yet the salience of the train symbol survives, perhaps, in the Metro of the Distrito Federal.

In a literary-oriented approach to Mexico City as a (hardly) describable city, Villoro also suggests to view the infrastructures, and in particular the metro, as a key to decipher the complexity inherent to modern cities. The author writes: “no place defines such a city as appropriately as the metro” (128), and identifies this infrastructure, intertwined with presence of “Lions”, as central to modernity of the city. These two strong, connected symbols, the metro and “the Lions” (“Hic Sunt Leones”), both represent the unknown (and in the same time the connection of present times to a buried past), the margins, and modernity. The Metro is also a 'symbolic' way to compensate the failure of revolutions, both in Stalin's USSR and in DF (Metro and Revolution happen almost in the same time) as an expression of the 'national greatness'. Finally, an interesting notion of social justice is highlighted by the sentence: “two axes of Mexican life intersect underground : a rhetorical recuperation of the past and a functional racism” (131).

Freeman recounts the story of "Los hijos de la Ford"—the “sons” of the Ford corporation, i.e., its cars. Freeman’s audacity (or else naïveté)—in referring to pollution-machines currently driving both local health crises and global ecological destruction, that kill one million people annually in crashes and that have created arbitrary and devastating social, political and economic inequality, as personified, sympathetic “sons”—is a direct reflection of the extent to which these machines have become a symbol of something other than themselves, and a part of our collective affective identity. As Freeman explains, when cars first appeared in Mexico, nearly all citizens detested them because they were dangerous, loud, and stinky. While some wealthy elites enjoyed driving the early death-machines, others hated cars because they contributed to disorder, in contravention of modern ideals. In contrast to the success of elite domination in other instances, it was only once Fords became cheaply available and purchased by working people that they became accepted in the city. Yet the disorder and unhygienic pollution they apported were not their only contradictions to the modern project: the Mexican modern ideal required the country to reach to its indigenous, rural roots, while the auto represented urban American technology and logic. This conflict was later resolved through the cognitively dissonant process of the auto becoming idolized as a way for citydwellers to explore rural areas and observe peasants and Indians people like so many animals in a zoo. Eventually, the rationality behind this entire set of auto-oriented phenomena became clear, as the government and big business embraced and promoted the car in keeping with globalized modernity and (neo)liberal extraction and accumulation.