Inhabiting the Ruins of Neoliberalism: Space, Catastrophe and Utopia

Abstract

In Robinson in Ruins, the third of Patrick Keiller’s trilogy of fictionalised documentaries concerning the wanderings and speculations of an unseen protagonist, the narrator informs us that Robinson had been reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which ‘locates the origin of twentieth century catastrophe in the development of market society in England’. Polanyi identifies how the self-regulating market is not a naturally emergent social form, but was the product of the active interventions of the state. For Robinson (and for Keiller) the contradictions between displacement and dwelling generated by laissez-faire can be revealed and challenged by an exploration of the relationships between landscape, space and politics. The melancholy tone of this trilogy can also be sensed in one of Henri Lefebvre’s final essays, in which he laments the dissolution of the utopian promise of the urban that he once dramatised through his thesis of the ‘urban revolution’. This article explores the themes that drive Keiller’s approach in the Robinson trilogy and draws out the associations in these works to Lefebvre’s writings on the politics of space, Polanyi’s critique of laissez-faire capitalism, and Walter Benjamin’s response to the historical catastrophe we understand as ‘progress’. I will argue that Keiller’s engagement with the idea of catastrophe, through spatial, social and historical registers, is an attempt to link the material ruins of our present with utopian imaginings of alternative forms of sociality—beyond the conceptual limits of capitalist realism and the catastrophic futures of neoliberal space.