Make Total Deconstruct

“We will end with an anecdote. With the vast depletion of disposable income and the advancement of new technical forms, Borders has been the first major bookstore chain to need to close their doors. Walking through their stores before the massive closures, one found shelves entirely empty of books, genre signs hanging in disarray, security apparatuses unplugged and hoping to be bought. Even if one had wanted to purchase an item, it would have been utterly impossible since no employees could be found — they were all too busy smoking cigarettes and gossiping. In this moment of crisis, of restructuring, of re-creation we cannot be caught in the traps of glorifying either the dying forms, or the emergent new ones. We are not for the book as physical or electronic commodity. We don’t care about Borders any more than we will care about whatever capitalist enterprise will replace it. Rather, we need to discover the truth hidden in plain site. One need only to look to the banners hanging above the doors of each closing Borders location to read, in bold-face text:

In this way, gentrification is more than creating a SPACE for the progressively more affluent user; rather, it seeks to CREATE the more affluent user, within a moral economy as well as financial economy: the neoliberal citizen, “housing consumption confers an identity and status upon individuals, comprising both aesthetic (good taste) and moral (responsible conduct) judgments”. Policy promotes middle class culture as a signifying system through which social order is communicated and hopefully reproduced.The civilising principle operates on transference through proximity. This is assumed to travel from middle class to working class populations, not vice versa, as the former group is held to have higher stocks in metaphors of capital. Not only can their settlement and homeownership and investment help improve areas, it is also hoped that they will disseminate social and cultural capital. Gentrification is then conferred as the neighbourhood neoliberal hegemony. This becomes a decisive system, which can marginalise existing working class culture and practices as peripheral or ephemeral

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