Timely, Timeless, Indelibly Missed

By Kacper Pobłocki

The first thing I noticed about Neil was that when he made a cutting, ironic or seemingly controversial remark, he would often slap himself on the cheek—as if he wanted to say “naughty Neil, you did this again!” He always smiled when he did this and I thought it was very charming. This gesture was Neil in a nutshell—he combined wit and intelligence with congeniality, self-distance and humor. He did that too when I first meet him—it was a chilly Wednesday morning in January 2009. He had just returned from Spain, and I had just arrived to Center for Place, Culture, and Politics as a visiting fellow, and we met at a PCP seminar to discuss Uneven Development. I read the book the year before and it made a deep impression on me—not only because of its philosophical and theoretical profoundness, but also because of its verve. What struck me about Neil’s writings was the way he was able to weld stringent and lucid argumentation with vigorous language. That morning Neil wore one of his yellow shirts (slightly, and extravagantly, unbuttoned as I thought at the time) complete with something resembling a wrangler belt and of course his musketeer mustache. I can’t remember if I tried to picture him as a person before I came to PCP—I think I didn’t. So although I had some smug remark I wanted to throw into the discussion, for the entire session I kept observing Neil and didn’t say a word in the end. And when he slapped himself on the cheek and smiled, in this overwhelmingly cordial way, it all suddenly made sense to me. His combination of strength and meekness, his manly look and enormously tender demeanor, his love for the world and his dissatisfaction with how it was organized, that vividly comes forth through the pages of Uneven Development and that was so compelling to me as a reader, was now sitting next to me in flesh and blood.

Neil was very gregarious, and I think I was not the only one wondering when how he found the time to do all his writing. We all know how tedious research can be, and judging from the prolific record of books and articles, Neil surely experienced this too. But he was not a “library mole” type of a scholar, although I remember seeing him many times going back to his office late in the evening to finish off some work. One of the things Neil would stress (always with a caveat that he knew it came off as cliché) is that he learned most from his students. It always struck me how well versed he was in the state-of-the-art research –I remember him making countless references to unpublished dissertations written by somebody somewhere that was highly interesting but not widely known. And that although he was a famous and established scholar, he always stressed how much he still needed to learn. This is actually not that usual today, even in the age when “new” replaced “good” as the main yardstick of research’s worth. Neil was not interested in picking up new jargon, or juggling with flashy concepts. He simply wanted to understand better how the world—rapidly changing in front of our very eyes—works.   And I think he knew that engaging with people is the best way of going about this. It was this powerful inner drive, it seems to me, that underpinned a lot of his seemingly light-hearted sociability. Again, all this may sound like a cliché to somebody who didn’t know him. But some clichés are simply true.

After I returned from PCP to Europe, I wrote up my dissertation. Neil flew over for my defense, and I remember picking him and Deb at the Budapest airport exactly on my thirtieth birthday. I kept thinking back then that in his thirtieth year, he published Uneven Development. I was so humbled that Neil produced such a mature book at this age. And if we look at Neil’s work as a whole, then it manifests itself as a very coherent and very idiosyncratic oeuvre. Most people acknowledge by now that the entire discussion of “scale” harks back to Neil’s work, and although most Latour gruppies haven’t read Uneven Development, I think they would benefit from recognizing that Neil’s theorization of the “production of nature” came much earlier and remains more sophisticated than most of the so-called ANT literature. But there’s much more than that. Neil’s work, like nobody else’s, shed very important light on how space and geography were critical for the making of the “Short American Century.” The American experience of space, landscape and nature undergirds his theory of uneven development— – and of course this very particular experience was later globalized. This pertains not only to his Bowman and globalization books, but also to his work on gentrification. The very idea of the “new urban frontier” is an explicit link to the colonization of the American territory during the nineteenth century, and Neil described how “cowboy” discourses and practices were urbanized during the early gentrification spree. Neil influenced—both directly and indirectly—many scholars, both those with whom he had been very close for many years and those who didn’t know him personally, and I think it is now our duty to acknowledge and build upon his unquestionable impact.

I owe a great deal to Neil–perhaps much more than he would ever imagine. And I know that there are many people around the world like me. The truth is, of course, that we learned much more from Neil than he could ever learn from us. I remember when we were walking around Budapest—a city I thought I knew pretty well—and Neil would point out things I had missed every day during the years I lived there. It was absolutely fascinating to see Budapest through his eyes. He was actually slated to come over to Poland in late October—still, a week before his sudden illness we were discussing the details of what we would do and see in Warsaw. He was both excited about the travel and very sanguine about the global prospects opened during the annus mirabilis of 2011. It is an unspeakable pity he will neither witness nor participate in that. Back in 2009, after a book party at PCP celebrating the third edition of Uneven Development, we went out and one of us asked Neil if he ever thought the book would get republished. Of course not, he said. Neil, as he put it himself, “resisted the temptation” of re-writing it, and instead added prefaces and afterwords to the new editions. This again shows how both timely and timeless his work was—it spoke to current affairs, yet it could be easily read years after it was written. Again, this is a rare feat in contemporary academia. I am sure Uneven Development will continue to be an inspiration and a beacon for future generation of students and scholars. We joked that in thirty years the length of forewords and afterwords may exceed the length of the actual book, and that he should plan to split it into two volumes. This is still possible, although Neil is no longer with us to do the writing. Nor will he deliver the lecture in Warsaw this October. We decided to leave on empty chair there in his memory, and read out some of his work. This empty chair, reminding all of us of who Neil was, how much we loved him and how much we will miss him, will remain in our hearts forever.

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