Second Nature Comes First: The World According to Capital
摘要
This chapter investigates the spatial effects of capital on built and natural landscapes. Deploying Smith’s understanding of first/second nature and Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis, we will first explore the direct impact of the capitalist production process on contiguous habitats in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. The imposition of the abstract rhythms of second nature over first nature assumes the form of profound environmental degradation, the marginalisation of concrete use-values and an aesthetic reorientation whereby first nature can only see itself in the raiment of exchange-value. We will then telescope the analysis out to understand the role played by capital in the spatial structuring of the city, suburbs and country, focusing particularly upon the motif of the road/car in The Flesheaters as an artery of abstract space. We will conclude by synthesising Althusser and Lefebvre and reading The Glass Canoe’s Sibley as an agent of the representations of abstract space. Bound to the education ideological state apparatus, he employs bourgeois positivist and empiricist social science to systematically fragment, homogenise and hierarchise the drinkers of the Southern Cross Hotel.