![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This article adopts an urban cultural studies method in order to examine the representation of Henri Lefebvre’s urban phenomenon in Belén Gopegui’s Deseo de ser punk (2009). The narrative is focalized through the adolescent perspective of the protagonist/narrator Martina, a resident of Madrid, Spain, and portrays the development of the conflicting material bases of urbanized consciousness formation. Gopegui, moreover, explores how the alienation that attaches to urbanized consciousness can potentially give rise to counterhegemonic urban practices that oppose capital’s conceived city, leading climactically to Martina’s public demand for a renewed, lived city, what the alienated youth calls an acoustic assault.
Notes
1 Belén Gopegui, Deseo de ser punk (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2009), 16. Further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the main text.
2 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1st French ed. La Révolution urbaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1970)]).
3 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Bononno, 28.
4 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Bononno, 35. According to Marx, the commodity form is composed of two contradictory elements: use-value and exchange-value. Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production departs from this foundational contradiction. As such, the contradictory unity between use-value and exchange-value manifests itself in various guises throughout the corpus of his writings. For an extended discussion, see Chapter 1 of Karl Marx, Capital, trans. David Fernbach & Ben Fowkes, 3 vols (London/New York: Penguin, 1982–1992 [1st German ed., Das Kapital. Erster Band. Buch I: Der Produktionsprocess des Kapitals (Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meisner, 1867)]), I (1982), Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes with an intro. by Ernest Mandel.
5 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Bononno, 150.
6 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Bononno, 27.
7 See Juliano Eduardo Moreno et al., Urbanization and Development: Emerging Futures. World Cities Report 2016 (New York: UN-Habitat, 2016), 1–26; available online at <https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/download-manager-files/WCR-2016-WEB.pdf> (accessed 14 January 2021).
8 Marx theorizes that, as the total quantity of capital increases, capitalist accumulation diminishes the proportion of variable capital (labour) in relation to constant capital (materials used in production), producing in the process a ‘relatively redundant working population’ or what he sometimes calls an ‘industrial reserve army’. See Marx, Critique of Political Economy, trans. Fowkes, 782 & 784.
9 David Harvey, ‘The Urbanization of Consciousness’, in his The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1985), 229–55.
10 Benjamin Fraser, Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 91.
11 Harvey, The Urban Experience, 231.
12 See Kevin Loughran, ‘Parks for Profit: The High Line, Growth Machines, and Uneven Development of Urban Public Spaces’, City & Community, 13:1 (2014), 49–68; Marina Peterson, ‘Patrolling the Plaza: Privatized Public Space and the Neoliberal State in Downtown Los Angeles’, in Anthropologies of Urbanization, ed. Julian Brash, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 35:4 (2006), 355–86; and Molly Ball, ‘The Privatization Backlash’, The Atlantic, 23 April 2014, <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/city-state-governments-privatization-contracting-backlash/361016/> (accessed 14 January 2021).
13 Harvey, The Urban Experience, 232.
14 Harvey, The Urban Experience, 231.
15 Anón., ‘Estados Unidos destruye empleo al mayor ritmo en 34 años’, El País, 6 December 2006; available online at <https://elpais.com/diario/2008/12/06/portada/1228518003_850215.html> (accessed 14 January 2021).
16 Harvey, The Urban Experience, 231.
17 Harvey, The Urban Experience, 231.
18 Fraser, Toward an Urban Cultural Studies, 55.
19 Harvey, The Urban Experience, 240.
20 See Manuel Delgado, ‘Desatención cortés y derecho al anonimato’, in his Sociedades movedizas: pasos hacia una antropología de las calles (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2007), 188–201.
21 The definition of capital as value-in-motion is central to Marx’s understanding of capital accumulation. He writes: ‘The transformation of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power is the first phase of the movement undergone by the quantum of value which is going to function as capital. It takes place in the market, within the sphere of circulation. The second phase of the movement, the process of production, is complete as soon as the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and therefore contains the capital originally advanced plus a surplus-value. These commodities must then be thrown back into the sphere of circulation. They must be sold, their value must be realized in money, this money must be transformed once again into capital, and so on, again and again. This cycle, in which the same phases are continually gone through in succession, forms the circulation of capital’ (Marx, Critique of Political Economy, trans. Fowkes, 709).
22 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Bononno, 92.
23 See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 29–142.
24 The song is by the Asturian punk rock band Fe de Ratas.
25 Anon. [Guy Debord], ‘Détournement As Negation and Prelude’ (1958), in Situationist International: Anthology, ed. & trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Public Secrets, 2006), 67–68 (p. 67).
26 Anon. [Debord], ‘Détournement As Negation and Prelude’, 68.
27 Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 92.
28 First to get past reception: ‘Entré en la radio llevando el vinilo en un sobre aparatoso. En la tienda me habían hecho un papel sellado, y en recepción me dijeron que lo dejara ahí. Yo dije que me habían pedido que lo entregara en mano y puse cara de no saber qué hacer. Y un tipo amable me dejó pasar’ (202); Second, to get into the radio studio: ‘Oye, ¿me haces un favor? Tengo que hacer un trabajo para el instituto, ¿puedo pasar contigo al control y ver cómo trabajas?’ (203).
29 This final clause is paraphrased from a quote popularly attributed to Guy Debord but is actually taken from Ivan Chtcheglov: ‘Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit’. See Ivan Chtcheglov, ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ (1953), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Knabb, 1–7 (p. 4).
30 Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 2007), 151–62 (p. 151).
31 See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015).
32 Manuel Castells, João Caraça & Gustavo Cardoso, ‘The Cultures of the Economic Crisis: An Introduction’, in Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis, ed. Manuel Castells, João Caraça & Gustavo Cardoso (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2012), 1–16 (p. 4).
33 Lorraine Ryan, ‘The Economic Degeneration of Masculinity in Rafael Chirbe’s En la orilla’, Romance Quarterly, 62:2 (2015), 83–96 (p. 84).
34 As Pablo Valdivia compellingly argues in his ‘Narrando la crisis financiera de 2008 y sus repercusiones’, 452oF. Journal of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, 15 (2016), 18–36, the economic crisis of 2008 was likewise accompanied by a symbolic crisis, which arose due to ‘un desajuste en la manera en la que nos representamos y construimos discursivamente nuestro lugar en el mundo y los mecanismos mentales sobre los que se articulan nuestras sociedades’ (34). Importantly for our purposes, Valdivia’s rather detailed list of exemplary works of crisis literature does not include Deseo de ser punk, even though Gopegui’s novel almost perfectly aligns with his own formula of the crisis novel: urban space + nostalgia + identity reassessment = crisis novel.
35 See for instance Anón., ‘Territorio rock’, El País, 5 September 2009, <https://elpais.com/diario/2009/09/05/babelia/1252107554_850215.html>; Anón., ‘Belén Gopegui retrata el inconformismo adolescente en “Deseo de ser punk” ’, ABC, 21 September 2009, <https://www.abc.es/cultura/libros/abci-belen-gopegui-retrata-inconformismo-adolescente-deseo-punk-200909210300-10313034935_noticia.html>; and Elena Hevia, ‘Gopegui retrata la rebeldía de los adolescentes’, El Periódico, 5 October 2009, <https://www.elperiodico.com/es/actualidad/20091005/gopegui-retrata-rebeldia-adolescentes-136103> (all accessed 15 January 2021). Jaume Peris Blanes also briefly mentions Deseo de ser punk in his critical essay ‘Cultura, literatura e imaginación política: la verosimilitud va a cambiar de bando’, in Cultura e imaginación política, ed. Jaume Peris (México D.F./Paris: ADEHL, 2018), 1–24 (p. 20).
36 Carlos Peinado, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Attitude’, Revista de Libros de la Fundación Caja Madrid, 159 (2010), 46; available online at <https://www.revistadelibros.com/articulo_imprimible.php?art=4613&t=articulos> (accessed 15 January 2021).
37 Peinado, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Attitude’, 46.
38 Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 80.
39 The other has to do with music. Whereas in Part I the emblematic musical album is High Voltage by AC/DC, in Part II it is Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses. The choice of these particular albums is highly significant, particularly when read in relation to Martina’s urban education: the motif of an interconnected electrical grid encapsulated by the album High Voltage tracks the development of the character’s understanding of the interrelationship between the conflicting material bases of urbanized consciousness formation, while Appetite for Destruction is influential, of course, in terms of Martina’s climactic acoustic assault.
40 See Anón., ‘La recesión económica provoca en octubre la mayor subida del paro en la historia’, El País, 4 November 2008, <https://elpais.com/internacional/2008/11/04/actualidad/1225753208_850215.html> (accessed 15 January 2021).
41 See the collection of essays in CT o la cultura de la transición: crítica a 35 años de cultura española, ed. Guillem Martínez, Kindle eBook (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2012).
42 Guillem Martínez, ‘El concepto CT’, in CT o la cultura de la transición, ed. Martínez, ch. 1, para. 9.
43 Malcolm Alan Compitello, ‘From Planning to Design: The Culture of Flexible Accumulation in Post-Cambio Madrid’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 3 (1999), 199–219 (p. 209).
44 See Francisco Fernández de Alba, Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2020).
45 See Joaquín Estefanía, ‘Mil días de austeridad’, El País, 5 May 2013, <https://elpais.com/economia/2013/05/03/actualidad/1367592834_505488.html> (accessed 15 January 2021).
46 Iñaki I. Prádanos, Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 2018), 1.
47 See Sandra López Letón, ‘La burbuja que embriagó a España’, El País, 24 October 2015, <https://elpais.com/economia/2015/10/20/actualidad/1445359564_057964.html> (accessed 15 January 2021).
48 See José A. Hernández, ‘15.491 familias desahuciadas en el primer trimester de 2011’, El País, 6 June 2011, <https://elpais.com/economia/2011/06/06/actualidad/1307345582_850215.html> (accessed 15 January 2021).
49 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Bononno, 155.
50 Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 68.
51 Henri Lefebvre, ‘Right to the City’ (1968), in Writings on Cities: Henri Lefebvre, selected, ed. & trans. Eleonore Kofman & Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 147–59 (p. 158).
52 Belén Gopegui, ‘Literatura y política bajo el capitalismo’, in Rompiendo algo, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, Kindle eBook (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2019), para. 25.
53 Belén Gopegui, ‘Un colloquio’, in Rompiendo algo, ed. Echevarría, para. 23.
54 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Bononno, 84.
* Disclosure Statement. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.