ABSTRACT
The name of Baron George-Eugène Haussmann, the Prefect of Paris, is connected to every authoritarian regime in modern times, from the Second Empire to the New Empire. The more his name is conjured away, the more his ghost is exorcised, the more we are haunted by his specter. He is the revenant of every big city in the era of neoliberal capitalism. His name, as Adorno told Benjamin, is of a ‘dialectic,’ at the center of which is the problem of mediation. This means that both camps, the one that loathes him and the one that admires him, have got the name of Baron Hussmann wrong. His name represents a contradiction of opposites that is ‘sublated’ in class struggle, both in the bourgeois order of the Second Empire and in late capitalism today. Both conflicts are staged in the scene of the big city, where technology plays an essential mediating role. There can be no critique of technology without a critique of political economy. This is what we mean by the ‘mediated city.’ The historical materialist critique of it requires that the mediation of the city by technology pass through a critique of political economy, and the name of this mediation is Haussmann.
