Summary of Mike Davis's City of Quartz

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 To call Los Angeles an intellectual capital is to imply that it is fertile cultural soil that cannot produce any homegrown intellectuals. However, this is not entirely true. Los Angeles has become the world capital of an immense Culture Industry that has imported countless talented writers, filmmakers, artists, and visionaries.

#2 Los Angeles has been a site of both massive subordination of intellectuals to the programs of capital, as well as their sharpest critiques of the culture of late capitalism.

#3 The city of Los Angeles has been shaped by the migration of intellectuals, who have contributed to the creation and destruction of the city’s mythography. The so-called Arroyo Set created a comprehensive fiction of Southern California as the promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon racial odyssey, while the post-war witch hunt decimated Hollywood progressives.

#4 The noir vision of Los Angeles, and the exiles’ criticism of its counterfeit urbanity, inflicted a great deal of damage on the city’s accumulated ideological capital. As Los Angeles has rushed forward to Manhattanize its skylines, it has attempted to Manhattanize its cultural super-structure.

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E-kirja: 6. elokuuta 2022