Thinking About Nature's Metropolis, The Pit

Cronon’s “Nature’s Metropolis” had a hard time getting me to care about anything it was saying, until I started to remember some of Norris’ “The Pit.” I read the novel about a year ago, so please forgive any inaccuracies. But “the pit,” in the novel refers to the commercial exchange site, essentially the “floor” of something like the Wall Street Exchange. The novel’s protagonist eventually goes mad with the fever of financial speculation. What makes the Chicago pit interesting (or at least not another Charlie Sheen movie), is the nature of the market at the time. Exchanges, at least in my limited understanding of them, trade mostly in capital. In “The Pit” the suits trade actual physical quantities of grain (or was it corn?). In manipulating the market price they hold back large quantities, so their capital holdings can actually be directly wiped out by weather. It was like a game of Hot Potato, but with grain, or was it corn? Some sort of starch, either way the guy left holding the goods was the loser. Even a good season could wipe a banker out as the market drove the value of his little pantry into the single digits. Suddenly (well, three-quarters in) Cronon actually helps out with understanding the rules of the game back in Norris’ wheat pit. The interconnectedness of various “hinterlands” and marketplaces created considerable competition for the product: A good day for farmers. The metropolis “promoted the communities in its hinterland as much as they promoted it.” But really, competition between different marketplaces was the source of the economic booms. Enter Cronon’s description of central-place-theory: Cities, as market-centers, became rivals. Frankly, this all very dry, and almost matter-of-fact, but it would be useful for a second look at Norris’ book. During my first read the choice of location, Chicago, seemed almost incidental. It’s a little easier to understand now in terms of its centrality to the capitalist frontiers, the sort of commercial tentacles creeping out over the continent. The city there writing its abstract, mathematical formulas of value over basic sources of sustinence. In that way it ties back to Mumford’s talk on the paleotechnic dominance of medieval systems, how the influx of capital ruined the old ways, and how the cities acted as centers of exploitation. I think I need to revisit Mumford as well. It would be also interesting to take a course on the American city of the nineteenth century. So much of the power of Norris’ and Cronon’s visions of Chicago derives from the vast material wealth of the newly-tapped resources of the American continent, as well as the limitations in transportation technology that kept those resources just close enough to speculate on, but far enough out of reach to immediately plunder. In my own mental map of the American city, there is always that endless mass of wilderness surrounding, which is almost comforting, and this contrasts distinctly to the trapped feeling I get when Dickens takes me to London, as if I can not unknow that I am on an island, and that this misery is inescapable as Alcatraz.