Andy Merrifield
Biographic Data
| ID | 301399 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andy Merrifield |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andy |
| FAMILY NAME | Merrifield |
| SIGNATURE | MERRIFIELD A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Clark University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 381 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Slipping into Gogol's "Overcoat": A Winter's Tale
Andy Merrifield reflects on Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Overcoat," tying it to "a distinctively Marxist problematic." In the protagonist of the tale, a Russian counsellor whose life is forever changed by the acquisition of a new overcoat, Merrifield finds a character who, like Marx, knows firsthand what a single coat can tell us about the structures of society
Gogol's Nose: On the Scent of Our Times
Andy Merrifield explores Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Nose," a satirical tale featuring a puffed-up government official who finds himself suddenly nose-less. As the official pursues his formerly attached schnozz through the streets of St. Petersburg, Gogol bestows upon readers a twisted parable revealing the pettiness and indolence pervading the corridors of power
New York: Forest of Symbols
New York City is facing a crisis in its urban ecosystem. As wealthy developers and real estate mega-projects rupture the connections between people and the social and spatial webs making up the city's once-rich undergrowth, how can city-dwellers nurture and restore their metropolitan habitat
Cooperation Has a Meaning: François Maspero and Monthly Review
In 1970, the French left-wing filmmaker Chris Marker made a twenty-minute documentary about the French left-wing publisher François Maspero. Fleetingly, we catch a glimpse of two publications pinned side by side on one wall, seemingly granted special placement: a copy of The Black Panther newspaper and a Monthly Review. Hardly surprising is this prominence: Maspero's relationship with Monthly Review was always fraternal, both interfaced with one …
A Commodius Vicus of Recirculation: Encountering Marx and Joyce
In the mid-1990s, when I lived in central London, I used to walk past the British Museum nearly every day. More often than not, I would pop in, did so for years, getting thrilled by a couple of things. The first was entering the great Reading Room, for which I had a Reader's Card, glimpsing and even sitting in space G-7. I never ordered any books, had no need to order anything; all I wanted was to sit there, in Karl Marx's seat, and try to feel t…
Mystified Consciousness
The great French Marxist Henri Lefebvre authored sixty-eight books, since translated into thirty languages, making brilliant analyses on dialectics and alienation, everyday life and urbanism, ecology and citizenship. Yet, his La conscience mystifiée(Mystified Consciousness), published in 1936, has seemingly been forgotten in every language, largely ignored everywhere. Though it may well be his most enduring political tract, it was his most presci…
Endgame Marxism (and Urbanism)
Collectivity and individuality express two different aspects of Marxism's humanist tradition, of how they ought to go together. It is another way to frame the dialectic of justice and jouissance, a radical hope for equality on the one side, plus a diversity of self-expression on the other. In a sense, this is not only what Marxism should offer; it is what any city should offer, too. Cities should reconcile problems of freedom and necessity, ought…
All that was directly lived
Departing from Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” from 1967, this chapter develops the problems around the professionalization of life, and the problems of liberal democratic “representation.” By interrogating three forms of representation, money, professional representation, and representative governance, the chapter develops the idea of the amateur as the politically performative subject. Here, “the people” or what I shall call the sha…
What We Talk about When We Talk about Cities (and Love)
Planetary urbanisation: Une affaire de perception
This paper suggests that planetary urbanisation offers an antidote to the narrow-mindedness of our toxic times. It conceives planetary urbanisation as “an affair of perception,” as a vision that begins vast, at the horizon, and sees particular parts (including your own particular part) comprising an interdependent totality. To envision the world through the lens of planetary urbanisation has certain distinct advantages. After all, it’s a viewpoin…
Amateur urbanism
Professionals and wannabe professionals are everywhere in urban studies today, everywhere in the exclusive running and ruining of cities, everywhere in the control of urban economies, everywhere in austerity drives, everywhere in think tanks and institutions who study cities, everywhere mass media have a say about cities, everywhere the grant money flows, the payroll beckons and the spotlight shines. The biggest problem this professionalism poses…
Implosions /Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization
In 1970, Henri Lefebvre put forward the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society, a circumstance that in his view required a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of urbanization processes. Drawing together classic and contemporary texts on the “urbanization question”, this book explores various theoretical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of Lefebvre’s hypothesis. It assem…
The New Urban Question
Preface: Neo-Haussmannization and Its Discontents 1. Whither Urban Studies? 2. Old Urban Questions Revisited (and Reconstituted) 3. Cities Under Tension 4. Strategic Embellishment and Urban Civil War 5. Sentimental Urban Education 6. Urban Jacobinism 7. Old Discourse on New Inequality 8. Every Revolution has Its Agora 9. Taking Back Urban Politics 10. Whose City? The Parasites', of course... Afterword: The Parasitic Mode of Urbanization Notes Ind…
Against accountancy governance: Notes towards a new urban collective consumption
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, power brokers of our urban system assumed other managerial roles, other controlling roles more market-driven, more fiscally prudent. They started to recede from public view, dabbled with privatization, with contracting-out service delivery, doing it at minimum cost. After a while, this dabbling with the public budget became damn right babbling: entrepreneurial managers turned into managerial entrepreneurs and soon …
The entrepreneur's new clothes
The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization
The Politics of Encounter is a spirited interrogation of as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle. The writes Andy Merrifield, remains important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics. And yet, he notes, more than forty years have passed since Henri Lefebvre advanced powerful ideas that still undergird much of our thinking about urbanisation and urban society. Merrifield rethinks in light of vast changes to ou…
Henri Lefebvre
Philosopher, sociologist and urban theorist, Henri Lefebvre is one of the great social theorists of the twentieth century. This accessible and innovative introduction to the work of Lefebvre combines biography and theory in a critical assessment of the dynamics of Lefebvre's character, thought, and times. Exploring key Lefebvrian concepts, Andy Merrifield demonstrates the evolution of Lefebvre's philosophy, while stressing the way his long and ad…
The planetary urbanization of non-work
This paper extends an earlier discussion on 'The Politics of the Encounter and the Urbanization of the World’ ( City 16 (3): 269--283). There, I outlined what a politics of the encounter is and might constitute, how it can be seen as a reframed politics of the urban and how it depends on a certain constituency coming together. With the development of urban society (as Lefebvre outlines it), the possibility for sustained and continued encounters b…
The Urban Question under Planetary Urbanization
In Le Droit à la Ville (1968), Lefebvre projects the urban trajectory of his day into the sci-fi imaginary of Isaac Asimov's remarkable Foundation series, recognizing the germ of 'Trantor' in our midst, the planet of 40 billion inhabitants where urbanization has reached its absolute maximum; all 75 million square miles of Trantor's land surface are a single city. In La Révolution Urbaine (1970), Lefebvre had already begun hinting at a new reality…
The politics of the encounter and the urbanization of the world
This article encounters the politics of the encounter. It tries to reframe another way of thinking about progressive urban politics. It encounters Althusser, who wrote some of the nicest and profoundest lines on the encounter, and it encounters Lefebvre, with his notion of the urban as the site of encounters. It equally encounters the Occupy movement and in so doing encounters space, urban space, specifically a reworked conception of centrality. …
Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination
William W. Bunge (1971) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution . Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co
The right to the city and beyond: Notes on a Lefebvrian re-conceptualization
One of Henri Lefebvre's last essays, “Quand la ville se perd dans une métamorphose planétaire”, published in Le monde diplomatique in 1989, is by far one of his most enigmatic. The title alone says bundles; an atypically downbeat Lefebvre is on show, two-years before death, dying like his cherished traditional city: when the city loses its way, he says, when it goes astray, in a planetary metamorphosis. This article mobilizes Lefebvre's valedicto…
Crowd Politics, Or, ‘Here Comes Everybuddy’
From Joyce to Lefebvre, sign-posts to a morphology of the demonstration in the age of Twitter and Facebook. Is the city still the indispensable arena of any collective uprising, and what would it mean to claim a ‘right’ to it
The Coming of the Coming Insurrection: Notes on a Politics of Neocommunism
A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of autonomous communist activism. A new party is expanding its ranks, The Imaginary Party, which has already unnerved the French establishment, rattled Sarkozy's government, and penned its own intriguing manifesto: The Coming Insurrection. Everybody agrees: current society is about to explode. Even the French daily Le Monde, was forced to admit: “one hasn't seen power become so fearful of a book for a ver…
The Urban Question under Planetary Urbanization
In Le Droit à la Ville (1968), Lefebvre projects the urban trajectory of his day into the sci-fi imaginary of Isaac Asimov's remarkable Foundation series, recognizing the germ of 'Trantor' in our midst, the planet of 40 billion inhabitants where urbanization has reached its absolute maximum; all 75 million square miles of Trantor's land surface are a single city. In La Révolution Urbaine (1970), Lefebvre had already begun hinting at a new reality…
Situated Knowledge Through Exploration: Reflections on Bunge's 'Geographical Expeditions
The right to the city and beyond: Notes on a Lefebvrian re-conceptualization
One of Henri Lefebvre's last essays, “Quand la ville se perd dans une métamorphose planétaire”, published in Le monde diplomatique in 1989, is by far one of his most enigmatic. The title alone says bundles; an atypically downbeat Lefebvre is on show, two-years before death, dying like his cherished traditional city: when the city loses its way, he says, when it goes astray, in a planetary metamorphosis. This article mobilizes Lefebvre's valedicto…
The Dialectics of Dystopia: Disorder and Zero Tolerance in The City
The politics of the encounter and the urbanization of the world
This article encounters the politics of the encounter. It tries to reframe another way of thinking about progressive urban politics. It encounters Althusser, who wrote some of the nicest and profoundest lines on the encounter, and it encounters Lefebvre, with his notion of the urban as the site of encounters. It equally encounters the Occupy movement and in so doing encounters space, urban space, specifically a reworked conception of centrality. …
Planetary urbanisation: Une affaire de perception
This paper suggests that planetary urbanisation offers an antidote to the narrow-mindedness of our toxic times. It conceives planetary urbanisation as “an affair of perception,” as a vision that begins vast, at the horizon, and sees particular parts (including your own particular part) comprising an interdependent totality. To envision the world through the lens of planetary urbanisation has certain distinct advantages. After all, it’s a viewpoin…
The entrepreneur's new clothes
The Canary Wharf Debacle: From 'Tina'-There is No Alternative-To 'THEMBA'-There Must Be an Alternative
In this paper, the recent failure of the Canary Wharf project at London Docklands in the wake of the financial collapse of Canadian property giant, Olympia and York, is critically examined. Some theoretical pointers are offered as to how the Canary Wharf affair arose, the logic through which it was implemented, and the political and financial mechanisms deployed to ride the storm are highlighted. The shifts occurring in the global political econo…
Public space: Integration and exclusion in urban life
Lately, Henri Lefebvre's famous slogan ‘the right to the city’ has been appropriated in revanchist terms: the right to the city now transpires as the right of the rich to walk the streets free from interfering poor and homeless ‘others’. Do the impoverished and disenfranchised, conflict and disorder, disruption and contradiction, have a place in, for example, the British Labour Party's ideal of an acceptable public space? Who's in and who's out? …
The Coming of the Coming Insurrection: Notes on a Politics of Neocommunism
A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of autonomous communist activism. A new party is expanding its ranks, The Imaginary Party, which has already unnerved the French establishment, rattled Sarkozy's government, and penned its own intriguing manifesto: The Coming Insurrection. Everybody agrees: current society is about to explode. Even the French daily Le Monde, was forced to admit: “one hasn't seen power become so fearful of a book for a ver…
Seattle, Quebec, Genoa: Après le Déluge … Henri Lefebvre
Against accountancy governance: Notes towards a new urban collective consumption
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, power brokers of our urban system assumed other managerial roles, other controlling roles more market-driven, more fiscally prudent. They started to recede from public view, dabbled with privatization, with contracting-out service delivery, doing it at minimum cost. After a while, this dabbling with the public budget became damn right babbling: entrepreneurial managers turned into managerial entrepreneurs and soon …
Magical Marxism
Phantoms and Spectres: Capital and Labour at the Millennium
As the financial system tailspins and 'Asian Flu' reverberates everywhere and as 950 million people in South-East Asia struggle to get by on less than one dollar a day, Marx's ideas continue to nourish radical critique and action. If anything, his vision is more economically meaningful and more politically viable today than ever before. In this paper I try to bring Marx's insights on the "laws of motion" of modern capitalism to bear on prevailing…
Lefebvre, Anti‐logos and Nietzsche: An Alternative Reading of the Production of Space
The Urbanization of Labor
Research Article| March 01 2000 The Urbanization of Labor: LIVING-WAGE ACTIVISM IN THE AMERICAN CITY Andy Merrifield Andy Merrifield Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2000) 18 (1 (62)): 31–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-18-1_62-31 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Andy Merrifield; The Urbanization of Labor: LIVING-WAGE ACTIVISM IN THE AMERICAN CITY. Social Text 1 M…
Debord's World
Amateur urbanism
Professionals and wannabe professionals are everywhere in urban studies today, everywhere in the exclusive running and ruining of cities, everywhere in the control of urban economies, everywhere in austerity drives, everywhere in think tanks and institutions who study cities, everywhere mass media have a say about cities, everywhere the grant money flows, the payroll beckons and the spotlight shines. The biggest problem this professionalism poses…
Metropolitan birth pangs: Reflections on Lefebvre's The Urban Revolution
Dialectical Urbanism: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City
Death on Credit
Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, and the Downsizing of America
A lot has been written, and doubtless will continue to get written, about how Marx's ideas of class polarization and worker immiseration are quaint relics of a bygone age, now irrelevant for comprehending the complexities of late twentieth century "postindustrial" America. At first glance, this skepticism isn't entirely surprising. Several years back, for example, the New York Times ran a series of seven special articles called "The Downsizing of…
Mystified Consciousness
The great French Marxist Henri Lefebvre authored sixty-eight books, since translated into thirty languages, making brilliant analyses on dialectics and alienation, everyday life and urbanism, ecology and citizenship. Yet, his La conscience mystifiée(Mystified Consciousness), published in 1936, has seemingly been forgotten in every language, largely ignored everywhere. Though it may well be his most enduring political tract, it was his most presci…
The planetary urbanization of non-work
This paper extends an earlier discussion on 'The Politics of the Encounter and the Urbanization of the World’ ( City 16 (3): 269--283). There, I outlined what a politics of the encounter is and might constitute, how it can be seen as a reframed politics of the urban and how it depends on a certain constituency coming together. With the development of urban society (as Lefebvre outlines it), the possibility for sustained and continued encounters b…
The sentimental city: The lost urbanism of Pierre Mac Orlan and Guy Debord
Behind a high stonewall surrounding a rural farmhouse in Auvergne, Guy Debord, the ex‐Situationist theorist and activist, retreated. The grungy, cheap‐thrill Parisian urbanism of his youth was no more. Paris had died in his arms of a fatal illness that has seen off other great cities. Economic forces and planning initiatives had assassinated his rebel underworld, and culprits are still at large, still awaiting trial in the people's court. This es…
The Canary Wharf Debacle: From 'Tina'-There is No Alternative-To 'THEMBA'-There Must Be an Alternative
In this paper, the recent failure of the Canary Wharf project at London Docklands in the wake of the financial collapse of Canadian property giant, Olympia and York, is critically examined. Some theoretical pointers are offered as to how the Canary Wharf affair arose, the logic through which it was implemented, and the political and financial mechanisms deployed to ride the storm are highlighted. The shifts occurring in the global political econo…
Lefebvre, Anti‐logos and Nietzsche: An Alternative Reading of the Production of Space
Situated Knowledge Through Exploration: Reflections on Bunge's 'Geographical Expeditions
Public space Integration and exclusion in urban life
Public space: Integration and exclusion in urban life
Lately, Henri Lefebvre's famous slogan ‘the right to the city’ has been appropriated in revanchist terms: the right to the city now transpires as the right of the rich to walk the streets free from interfering poor and homeless ‘others’. Do the impoverished and disenfranchised, conflict and disorder, disruption and contradiction, have a place in, for example, the British Labour Party's ideal of an acceptable public space? Who's in and who's out? …
Radical Political Economy: A Critique
Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Questions of Method: Abstract Theory, Counterfactuals and Critical Standpoints. 3. Division of Labour and Economic Power: A Reconceptualisation. 4. Markets and Other Modes of Coordination. 5. Markets: Key Theoretical Debates and Evaluations. 6. Ownership and Control. 7. Non-Capitalist Economic Systems Compared. 8. The Critique Applied: Explanations of Uneven Development. 9. Implications. Conclusion
Between Process and Individuation: Translating Metaphors and Narratives of Urban Space
Metaphors have long been crucial for informing critical understanding about space: Lefebvre speaks of rhythms and waves; Harvey of circulation and flow. Each theorist adopts metaphors that highlight the processual nature of capitalist social space. This paper suggests that when space is redescribed in process terms theorists invariably revert to metaphors of temporality, and all sense of richly textured everyday space disappears. Metaphors of pro…
Notes on Suffering and Freedom: A Marxian and Dostoevskian Encounter
(1999). Notes on Suffering and Freedom: A Marxian and Dostoevskian Encounter. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 72-86
The Urbanization of Injustice
Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, and the Downsizing of America
A lot has been written, and doubtless will continue to get written, about how Marx's ideas of class polarization and worker immiseration are quaint relics of a bygone age, now irrelevant for comprehending the complexities of late twentieth century "postindustrial" America. At first glance, this skepticism isn't entirely surprising. Several years back, for example, the New York Times ran a series of seven special articles called "The Downsizing of…
The General Law of US Capitalist Accumulation: Contingent Work and the Working Class
For several years now, there has been a minor rekindling of interest in the ideas of Karl Marx, hailed in the New Yorker as “the next big thinker.” Like other articles supposedly professing sympathy with Marx, this exhibits a common misconception. It is also underwritten with the following revisionism: Given that the agents of social change–the “modern working class”–are shrinking drastically and disappearing fast, Marx’s revolutionary hopes are …
Chronicle of a City Foretold
Andy Merrifield on Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City. What are the patterns, and what will be the consequences—social, cultural, political—of the massive influx of immigrants from lands south of the Rio Grande into North American cityscapes
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Nobody seems to study Karl Marx anymore. Even in universities, once a bastion of Marxist scholarship and critical thought, students still reading Marx are pretty thin on the ground. Leftleaning young people these days are preoccupied with Derrida, Foucault, and other post-Marxist thinkers. Marx, they say, is old hat, dispatched to the dustbin of history. The working class is dead anyway, and didn't Marx's predictions about worker's revolution com…
Phantoms and Spectres: Capital and Labour at the Millennium
As the financial system tailspins and 'Asian Flu' reverberates everywhere and as 950 million people in South-East Asia struggle to get by on less than one dollar a day, Marx's ideas continue to nourish radical critique and action. If anything, his vision is more economically meaningful and more politically viable today than ever before. In this paper I try to bring Marx's insights on the "laws of motion" of modern capitalism to bear on prevailing…
The Dialectics of Dystopia: Disorder and Zero Tolerance in The City
The Urbanization of Labor
Research Article| March 01 2000 The Urbanization of Labor: LIVING-WAGE ACTIVISM IN THE AMERICAN CITY Andy Merrifield Andy Merrifield Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2000) 18 (1 (62)): 31–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-18-1_62-31 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Andy Merrifield; The Urbanization of Labor: LIVING-WAGE ACTIVISM IN THE AMERICAN CITY. Social Text 1 M…
An American Aboriginal: A Review of C Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings
Metro Marxism, or old and young Marx in the city
(2001). Metro Marxism, or old and young Marx in the city. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 63-84
Seattle, Quebec, Genoa: Après le Déluge … Henri Lefebvre
Metromarxism: A Marxist tale of the city
Dialectical Urbanism: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City
Death on Credit
The sentimental city: The lost urbanism of Pierre Mac Orlan and Guy Debord
Behind a high stonewall surrounding a rural farmhouse in Auvergne, Guy Debord, the ex‐Situationist theorist and activist, retreated. The grungy, cheap‐thrill Parisian urbanism of his youth was no more. Paris had died in his arms of a fatal illness that has seen off other great cities. Economic forces and planning initiatives had assassinated his rebel underworld, and culprits are still at large, still awaiting trial in the people's court. This es…
Debord's World
Dialectical Urbanism: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City
Sociology (34 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · History (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (15 works)