Marxist morphologies

Bibliographic Data

ID2616416
AuthorsMichał Murawski (0000-0001-9988-2960, University College London [email protected], corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume2018
Issue82
Pages16-34
Publication date2018-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFocaal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0920-1297 • E-ISSN: 1558-5263
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/fcl.2018.820102
OpenAlexW2896203731
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited50

This article critiques assumptions made by urban anthropologists and other scholars of cities, focusing on currently fashionable theories of infrastructure, materiality, and complexity. It problematizes how scholarship informed by actor-network theory, assemblage theory and other varieties of (post)postmodernism uses morphological optics and metaphors to represent social life, the material world, and existence itself as necessarily "flat," "complex" or "fuzzy." As a corrective, it proposes reorienting our social morphologies with reference to a Marxist notion of infrastructure, founded on a dynamic understanding of the relationship between determining economic base and determined superstructure. It constructs its theoretical edifice with reference to the remaking of post-1945 Warsaw as a socialist city through property expropriation and monumental architectural and planning works, and post-1989 attempts to unmake its socialist character through property reprivatization and unplanning

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Expropriation · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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