Mike Davis - the real McCoy

One of the great figures of the American New Left, Mike Davis, has died.  He was 76 and had been fighting with laryngeal cancer for several years.  

I first encountered Davis's work when I read his monumental and brilliant history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, as a graduate student at Sussex.  I was already interested (but characteristically under-read) in the growing field of Marxist urbanism and geography - featuring writers such as Neil Smith, David Harvey and Edward Soja.   Davis was less a theorist than a historian, but it was always clear that he was steeped in the Marxist tradition, and also that he matched Marx and Engels's marvellous mix of intellectual penetration and omnivorous erudition.   City of Quartz is a history which the novelist James Ellroy and the film-maker Michael Mann would find conducive - a stylish, unblinking exposure of the dark seamy side of the City of Angels, where the American dream is subtended by boosterism, hyper-capitalism, immigration, a notoriously corrupt police force and environmental degradation on an epic scale.   Yet Davis clearly loved Los Angeles, and was endlessly curious about how it worked, its industrial zones as much as its faux Latin suburbs.   If Mann - hardly a leftwing filmmaker - can make thrillers which are also visual paeans to LA's nightscapes, its highways, container farms, warehouses - films like Heat and Collateral - these elements of the megalopolis's anatomy, its skeleton, musculature and innards, also fascinated Davis.

What I didn't know at the time was that City of Quartz was the work of a writer already creating a torrent of essays and books which joyfully, contentiously ignored scholarly boundaries and caused trouble everywhere.    Written in a deliciously mordant, pithy, ruthless noir prose, Davis was on course to become not only the greatest chronicler of the American working class (Prisoners of the American Dream), but also a radical scholar of disaster - Ecology of Fear and Late Victorian Holocausts stand out.    He anticipated global health catastrophe (The Monster Enters), and wrote a brilliant study of the car-bomb (Buda's Wagon).   Even more, Davis was always conscious of the poisoned nexus between capitalism and the environment: he skewered 'green capitalism' before it even had a name.   And he could write the most scathing polemic - 'The Case for Letting Malibu Burn', a chapter of Ecology of Fear, argued that municipal fire safety budgets would be better spent on protecting poor inner-city districts than on preparing to rescue the pampered idiots who had built themselves ugly mansions in remote hillside fire-zones. 

Davis was not only an original scholar but also could absorb, summarize and render accessible the discourses and ideas of disciplines far from his own.   For me, the stand-out here might be 'Cosmic Dancers on History's Stage?  The Permanent Revolution in the Earth Sciences', an extraordinary article surveying, condensing and extrapolating from recent scholarship in earth science.   Most striking in this essay was its explanation of 'coherent catastrophism' - the theory that the planet's geological, biological and maybe even human history has evolved in a complex rhythm shaped in part by elements external to the system - principally, asteroid or comet hits.    

Davis was an activist and union organiser long before he became a scholar, and his work was always firmly grounded in the political realities of the American left.   Although he held academic positions, he also was a MacArthur grant winner, which allowed him a freedom of manoeuvre in intellectual and research terms.   But Davis was a tough driven man, who would always have made his own way.    More than most left scholars, he retained a strong sense of the necessary relationship between putatively 'radical' scholarship, and the nitty-gritty street-fighting world of organisation, campaigning and protest.   A figure of the 'New Left', he never lost touch with the 'old left' of his parents' generation, and he always realised that the academy and the street sit in a dynamic relationship, where the latter is most often in the van.   Here he is, on being called an 'old school socialist':

First, socialism — the belief that the earth belongs to labor — is my moral being. In fact, it is my religion, the values that anchor the commitments that define my life.

Second, “old school” implies putting in work year after year for the good cause. In academia one runs across people who call themselves Marxists and go to lots of conferences but hardly ever march on a picket line, go to a union meeting, throw a brick or simply help wash the dishes after a benefit. What’s even worse, they deign to teach us the “real Marx” but lack the old Moor’s fundamental respect for individual working people and his readiness to become a poor outlaw on their behalf.

Finally, plain “socialist” expresses identification with the broad movement and the dream rather than with a particular program or camp. I have strong, if idiosyncratic, opinions on all the traditional issues — for example, the necessity of an organization of organizers (call it Leninism, if you want) but also the evils of bureaucracy and permanent leaderships (call it anarchism if you wish) — but I try to remind myself that such positions need to be constantly reassessed and calibrated to the conjuncture. One is always negotiating the slippery dialectic between individual reason, which must be intransigently self-critical, and the fact that one needs to be part of a movement or a radical collective in order, as Sartre put it, to “be in history.” Moral dilemmas and hard choices come with the turf and they cannot be evaded with “correct lines.”

Mike Davis was one of the greatest exemplars of the scholar-agitator of recent times.   His death is a huge loss; his work remains a resource to be treasured. 

Conor   

Here is some material by and about Davis:

Obituaries

The Nation  Mike Davis: 1946–2022

The Los Angeles Times    

Arellano: Mike Davis’ final email to me reminded me to write, not mourn

Tariq Ali, for Verso Books

Mike Davis (1946 –2022): Enemy of the State

A brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and ain

Micah Uetricht, at Jacobin

Mike Davis Showed Us What “Old-School Socialism” Looked Like

Badiou on Ukraine - a prophet without honour in his own time

Just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, in February, I had planned to blog about the possibility of war.   I failed to do so - a position of intellectual caution, alas.   Writing or speaking in any way critically of Western policy on Ukraine and Russia has proven, unsurprisingly, not to be the best avenue to the quiet or contemplative life.

An exemplar to the contrary, but ahead of his time, was Alain Badiou, the veteran French philosopher and unrepentant Maoist.    Here is an article he wrote in 2014 - at the time of the coup (usually known as the Maidan rebellion) which brought Zelensky's predecessor to power in that country.    It's well worth revisiting now, as we live with wall-to-wall liberal militancy and mouth-frothing 'I told you so'-ism.   

More on this topic soon -

Conor

"A present defaults – unless the crowd declares itself": Alain Badiou on Ukraine, Egypt and finitude

Thinking the Revolution - A review of Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher's The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution

 Ireland, in spite or even because of its claim to a great literary culture, is not a country much associated with intellectuals.   Two of the country's greatest writers, Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, can justly be called anti-intellectual intellectuals, with their scabrous and ferociously negative portrayals of 'projectors' (Swift) and the revolutionary cabals of the philosophes (Burke).  In the annals of intellectuals dealing in politics, one thinks of O'Connell's brilliant but cruel evisceration of Thomas Davis.   The great cultural revival of the late 19th century was built on the work of scholars, antiquarians, critics, archaeologists, but it is Yeats and Synge whom we now remember.   

It was the signal achievement in more recent times of the late and sadly lamented Seamus Deane to assert the equality - at the very least in his own work - of scholarship and critique with literary activity and expression.    A significant poet and the author of one very fine novel, Deane nevertheless poured the primary energy of his career into scholarship and criticism of the highest order.   Unlike many of his peers, Deane was never afraid to consider Irish literature as a zone not only of aesthetic representation or experience, but of intellectual and even ideological exploration and activism.    He was, therefore, our premier historian of ideas.   

Richard Bourke, a one-time student of Deane's at UCD, has in the course of his career picked up the baton and forced the issue of intellectual history into that amorphous zone, 'Irish Studies', with a rigour and seriousness still rare among his contemporaries.    His most recent book, an anthology entitled The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution, published in an illustrious Cambridge series, and edited with Niamh Gallagher, not only pushes the matter further still, but extends it to pedagogical ends and to a wide readership.   Here the reader will find between the same covers a wide variety of Irish political writing and thinking, of the left and of the right, in defence of the Union, and in condemnation of it.

I review this rich and fascinating collection in the current Dublin Review of Books.   My thanks, as ever, go to Maurice Earls for making this review possible.

Conor

The Primacy of Politics

Adorno - The Repeal of the Bourgeois Era

 

Pro domo nostra 

When during the last war–which like all others, seems peaceful in comparison to its successor–the symphony orchestras of many countries had their vociferous mouths stopped, Stravinsky wrote the Histoire du Soldat for a sparse, shock-maimed chamber ensemble. It turned out to be his best score, the only con­vincing surrealist manifesto, its convulsive, dreamlike compulsion imparting to music an inkling of negative truth. The pre-condition of the piece was poverty: it dismantled official culture so drastically because, denied access to the latter's material goods, it also escaped the ostentation that is inimical to culture. There is here a pointer for intellectual production after the present war, which has left behind in Europe a measure of destruction undreamt of by even the voids in that music. Progress and barbarism are today so matted together in mass culture that only barbaric asceticism towards the latter, and towards progress in technical means, could restore an unbarbaric condition. No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, unless it bear within it repudiation of false riches and high-class production, of colour films and television, millionaire's magazines and Toscanini. The older media, not designed for mass-production, take on a new timeliness: that of exemption and of improvisation. They alone could outflank the united front of trusts and technology. In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination.