Good evening, and thank
you all for being here.
It's really great pleasure to be
able to welcome Professor Erik
Swyngedouw.
I think a lot of
people in the school
are very familiar with
Professor Swyngedouw's writings.
In the context of
a design school,
we're always seeking
people who are
writing about questions
of urbanization,
issues of globalization.
And their writings
can be, really,
both important in
terms of understanding
of those situations,
but also inspiring to us
in terms of values, the
kind of things that matter.
And I think it's really hard
to think of too many people who
are really covering
the types of issues
that Erik has been dealing with
over the last 20 years or so
in his writing that really
touches on questions
of the environment, dealing
with aspects of ecology, water,
many of the things that cross
from architecture to landscape
to urbanization.
And it's really great
that we're finally
able to have him here
and lecture to us.
It's also-- it takes a
certain European perspective,
I suppose, of context of
being raised in Belgium,
and spending time in Holland
and France and the UK,
to go through a sort of
education that starts with, I
suppose, partly agricultural
engineering from the beginning,
then going to urban
planning, and then really
going to geography, and
the political issues.
And I think the
combination of those
produces a very interesting
set of conditions, where
I think, I'm just
assuming, that having
had the interest in
agricultural engineering,
there's something very
specific linked to the land,
and to the way things are
made, and so on and so forth.
And then finally
ending up doing a PhD
with David Harvey at
Johns Hopkins on probably
a much more theoretical, but
nevertheless the value system,
I think, are still
deeply rooted to the kind
of local situations, and
understanding of those themes.
And of course, Erik
has gone on to,
both by himself but also a
lot of times in collaboration
with others, produce an
amazing array of articles,
over hundreds of them
and of course many books.
I also feel, just to do a
little bit of a plug for us,
I feel very lucky that
Erik was able to contribute
to this book,
Ethics of the Urban,
the City and the Spaces
of the Political,
that's just coming
out now, where
he wrote a wonderful essay.
So, we're really happy
that you are here.
Please join me in welcoming
Professor Erik Swyngedouw.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much for
this wonderful introduction.
It's a pleasure to be
here, not only because it
is, of course, a privilege
to be standing here
and to address an
audience like this,
but also because I like talking
to designers, architects,
and planners.
I am not.
I was trained as a
planner a long time ago,
but I'm now institutionalized
as a geographer, which
is this is kind of worldly thing
that no one really knows what
precisely it is, but which
offers me the kind of space
to intellectually do
whatever I really want to do.
And that's exactly
why I like talking
to designers and architects,
because in contrast to me--
I can just think.
My thoughts can just wildly
go wherever my thoughts want
to take me, but
you, guys and girls,
you have to do something.
You ultimately have
to turn thought
into concrete and steel.
And I don't know
exactly, myself,
how I would do that if I
were in your sort of place,
but I think that what you're
doing is extremely important.
So, the articulation between
thought and practice, I think,
is what spaces like this
ought to be all about.
What I want to talk to you
about today is the City of Gods.
But a city as a political
space, the city as polis,
not the city as just an
agglomeration of bodies
and stuff together, but the city
[? called polis, ?] the city
as the space, the
place, the environment,
where [? the ?] [? democratic ?]
is always contested,
fought over, struggled
over, and occasionally,
not that fairly often, put
into some sort of practice.
And I think that is a
challenge for us today,
and is this challenge
that I really
want to talk about,
because I think
we live in very strange times.
And what I want to concentrate
on for the next 50 minutes
or so is a strange
paradox, and the paradox
sounds more as follows.
He said, on the one hand,
a number of interlocutors,
intellectuals, academics,
journalists, and others,
have been arguing for
more than 20 years
now, that we are living
in depoliticizing times,
that there is a general
aversion, oft disdain,
for the political,
that things have
been reduced to the
techno-managerial management
of the situation.
There is no real alternative
possible than living
in the globalized neoliberal
city that we live in.
The only thing we
can do is manage it
to the best of our
techno-managerial abilities.
But the real political
choice is suspended.
That's one side of the argument.
And I would argue, for
example, that to complete this
that Trump in the US, or Le Pen
in France, are, in many ways,
a symptom of displays
of depoliticization.
On the other hand--
and particularly since what
I and others have called
"the magical year
2011," and why it's
magical I'll explain
in a moment--
since the magical year
2011, a growing number
of people worldwide, in cities
in many parts of the world,
have begun to say, "No.
This has to stop.
We are indeed living in
post-democratic times,
but we want to re-conquer
the democratic."
And also, the emanation
of these desires
for the conquest of the
democratic unfolded and then
the [? urban. ?]
So, that's a strange paradox.
On the one hand, we've
already seen so many people
fighting for something
else, for democratization.
And on the other
hand, those argue
there is no real
choice possible.
It's that paradox that
I want to explore.
And I think I can't be in any
better company than Michel
Foucault, who, in one of his
last seminars before he died,
was, of course, addressing the
question of the political a bit
more widely than his earlier
work that all of us know,
and cite profusely, where
he talks about a couple
of constructions
and [? solutions ?]
of everyday power,
to in his later work,
considered the biggest
sort of questions
of geopolitical power.
And in one of those
seminars, he said,
quite controversially,
and very rarely
picked up by scholars of
his work, is, "The people--"
and he means, of course, the
people as a political category,
not the population as a
sociological category--
"The people is
those who, refusing
to be the population
that is the objects
of biopolitical governance,
disrupt the system."
I think that sets the tone
well for what I want to say.
So, the title of my talk
is, Insurgent Architects
and the Spectral
Return of the Political
in the Post-Democratic City.
For people who want
to know more about it,
this one I'll talk
about is part of some
of what is being discussed
at length in these two books.
I have a few chapters
in the light hand one,
Can Architecture Be an
Emancipatory Project?
Interesting question, isn't it?
As is often the case,
it is not academics
who offer us the
most incisive insight
in the situation of our times.
As we all know, it's often
novelists, poets, movie makers,
who in many, many
ways tell us exactly,
do with surgical
precision the analysis
of the condition
that we live in.
We academics are
usually hopelessly
late in diagnosing that.
So, that's why often
referred to novelists.
This is a quote from the
great, late José Saramago,
a great artist of the city.
I'm sure most of you know
his wonderful trilogy
of the urban condition
that we're in,
starting with The
City of the Blind,
and finishing, just a
few years before he died,
with a book that was translated
to English as, Seeing,
but which, in Portuguese,
translates better
as Essay on Lucidity.
And this is a comment
that he made in this book,
that democracy today has become
this sacrosanct principle that
we treat as a piece
of a museum display,
but it cannot be questioned,
nor be interrogated.
Let me just tell you the
story of the novel, Seeing.
It's the story of a city.
It's actually the
same city where,
just a few years earlier,
most all of the citizens
went blind, except for
this one woman, which
was, of course, a parable of
the situation that we are in.
In this third installment
of his urban trilogy,
in the same city where
sight had been restored,
that city was making itself
up for the great festival
of democracy.
The subsequent next Sunday,
the citizens of the city
would vote for the
governors of the city.
And as usual, the pundits
and the journalists
all arguing and debating
whether the party of the left
will gain or lose 1%
or 2%, or whether it
was the party of the right
who will gain 1% or 2%,
or whether it was the
party of the center
that will hold onto power.
Everyone was excited,
and then the thunder
came, really bad thunder.
It was raining, bad weather.
And in the morning, when
those who put themselves up
as candidates to be the
governors of the urban fate
of the citizens
who were anxiously
awaiting the verdict of
the democratic process,
got a bit anxious
because no one showed up
to the polling stations.
But in the afternoon,
people started coming in,
and everyone sighed of relief.
And that evening, when
the votes were counted,
and those who put
themselves up would
know the verdict
of the people, it
turned out that 50%
of the population
had spoiled the ballot.
Panic.
"How can we govern the
city democratically
if we do not have the
full democratic support
of the population?
Something must have gone wrong."
And of course, as we
now know in Europe,
we do this systematically,
if the people vote wrong,
we hold a new election.
The European Union
is very good at that.
It had to do it several
times in Denmark
and in France in the 1990s.
So, the governors decided
to run the election again,
three weeks later.
And three weeks later it was
a beautiful day, a spring day,
and people went to the polling
stations in big droves.
And at night, when the
votes were counted,
it turned out that 80%
had spoiled the ballot.
This time, the governor thought
it was something going on.
"Surely, there must
be a conspiracy
against the sacrosanct
principles of a democracy.
There must be some
hidden terrorist cell
who is masterminding
this perversion
of the democratic process."
And, of course, they went
searching for the culprits.
But the usual tactics of
intimidation, police action,
incarceration,
torture, to find out
those who were trying to
undermine civilization
as we know it.
Couldn't find anyone.
So after three months
of ruthless repression,
the governors
decided that it was
time to teach the citizens
of the city as lesson.
They said, "We, the
governors of the city,
are going to leave
the people alone.
We are going to abandon the
city," expecting, of course,
that in a minimum of time,
without proper governing
of the city, that the city
would descend into anarchy,
and that the
citizens of the city
would beg the
governors to come back
to restore peace and order
in the disintegrating polis.
So, the governors left.
And what happened in the city?
Nothing.
The teachers kept on teaching.
The professors
kept on professing.
The butchers kept on butchering.
The garbage men and women
kept on cleaning the streets.
End of story.
So, I thought this story
actually captures well what
I want to say.
And I'm in good company.
Here is Giorgio Agamben,
Italian philosopher,
who, in 2006,
observed that, "There
is a shift from the model of the
polis founded on a center, that
is, a public center or ogera,
to a new metropolitan's
spatialization that
is certainly invested
in a process of depoliticization
Now, this process of
depoliticization I, and others,
define and describe-- we'll
say a bit more about that
in a moment--
as a process of
post politicization.
So I would argue that we're
living in post-political times,
in post political cities,
increasingly constructed
over the past 20 years or so,
in the global north, primarily,
but with examples to be
found elsewhere, too.
For me, post-politicization
is the gradual imposition
and generalization of the
discourse and practice
of consensual
techno-managerial governance
in post-democratic
forms of governance.
That's a whole mouthful.
We'll explain in a
moment more in detail
what I mean by the
reduction of the political
to questions of
techno-managerial governing.
But then, 2011 came, and
2011 was a magical year,
because it was the year
marked by the beginning
of proliferating sequence
of what I, and many others,
have called urban insurgencies.
Here is my notes on the
insurgent architect.
It began in one of the
usual sort of spaces,
the [INAUDIBLE], which was,
of course quickly dismissed
and understood as the
kind of stuff that happens
in these post-colonial spaces.
In a few weeks time, this
practice of urban insurgency
spread like wildfire.
In Spain, hundreds,
thousands of people
occupied for weeks,
Puerta del Sol in Madrid.
Puerta de la Cataluña,
in Barcelona,
the most well-known but
was happening elsewhere.
Syntagma Square in Athens
was occupied for months
by the outraged, as
they called them.
In the US, it became
known, experimented with,
worked with, under Occupy.
And of course it continued.
It was a strange sort of
outburst of radical discontent
that expressed, however
inchoate and incoherent it
was, a deep discontent with
the state of the situation,
and called in its performative
staging for something else.
But that something
else would operate
under the banner of this
empty signifier of democracy
and equality.
Not all of those outbursts
were, nonetheless,
remotely democratizing
in the sense
that you and I would
like to think of it.
This is my own city.
This is my street.
That's where I live.
In the summer of 2011, just like
it happened in Paris earlier,
we had these violent anarchic
outbursts of violence.
and it went on for three days.
Cameron, at the time, he
called those protesters
outcasts that should
be swept from the city.
Those who are not entitled
to be part of the city.
It's what in ancient Athens
they would call the [INAUDIBLE],
the rabble, those
who are not entitled
to be citizens of the city.
But then many,
like in Spain here,
there were these
practices of what
I call insurgent democracy.
And this is in
Spain, in Barcelona,
demanding "Democracia Real Ya!"
Real democracy now.
That's a bit of a scandalous
statement in Spain.
Spain, that had gone
through a torturous history
in the 20th century, the
longest fascist dictatorship
in continental Europe, went
through a fairly smooth
democratic transition
in the 1980s.
No one would dare to
call Spain undemocratic.
And there, there were these
assorted insurgent architects
asking for real democracy now.
What's going on what
is the articulation,
or the difference, between these
ones with insurgent democracy
on the one hand, and instituted
forms of existing politics?
And that kept on happening.
This was two years
ago for the opening
of the ECB, the European Central
Bank headquarters in Frankfurt,
where they organized a blockupy.
Let me point you to the
image on the right bottom,
and it says, "Let's
choose communism."
Now, in the US, that's
a bit of a banned term.
This is Frankfurt.
20 odd years or so after
we killed that monster,
and there are
those asking today,
"Let's choose communism."
That's quite an
outrageous statement.
What is going on?
And this is Paris this
year, [INAUDIBLE],
also demanding
real democracy now.
Now, many of those
uprisings have died out.
Many were just Bakhtinian,
carnivalesque outbursts
that staged the
urban as a spectacle.
But in many ways, it definitely
itched the powers that be.
As you know, the
elites of the world
meet every year in
this little Swiss town
called Davos, where
they discuss, plan,
organize the
geography of the world
according to their
dreams and desire.
It may not always
work like that,
but there we have
the master architects
of how their dreams can become
geographical in the world.
And of course they're acutely
aware of the barriers,
the obstacles that
resist the making
geographical of their desires.
So, they publish every
year the World Risk Report.
It's a wonderful read
actually, big tome, 600 pages,
usually, where they
document the obstacles
to what they want to do.
In 2012 the title
of the Risk Report
was called Seeds of Dystopia.
And I thought, what the
hell are they talking about?
So, I had to read,
download I think 600 pages,
and they referred precisely
to the proliferation
of these outbursts
of urban discontent.
I, in my naivety,
thought of them
as sort of seeds of
potential rebirth of utopia,
of a different kind than
the ones of the past.
But they called it
Seeds of Dystopia,
just to indicate that it
did itch the powers that be.
So, this sets the
scene, I think,
for exploring the paradox with
which I introduced my talk.
So, the four things I
want to quickly go through
is to, first of all, do
the diagnosis of the times
within, and explore them
in somewhat greater detail
what I mean by the
post-political evacuation
of the political, something
that is very noticeable,
and that in other work I've
explored in empirical detail,
very noticeable in
the way in which
our cities are being governed.
To then say something
about the political.
You may have noticed that
I've used, almost exclusively,
the word "the political"
so far, and not "politics."
The kind of things
that we used to talk
about, urban politics,
or national politics,
and choreographies of power,
representation, et cetera,
the kind of things I hear all
the time and I put on CNN,
they talk about politics.
I'm not particularly interest
in politics these days,
it's utterly irrelevant
and uninteresting.
I'm much more interested
in the political.
So I want to say
something theoretically
about that political diffidence,
as Paul Ricoeur called it,
between politics
and the political.
Because I think
that might help us
to make sense of this
paradoxical situation
that we find in so
many other cities.
I think it will help
us to make sense
of the insurgent democracy
steadily manifested
in these spaces of
urban rebellion.
To conclude, to
ask the question,
great question again
to ask whether we
can think, at the beginning
of the 21st century,
whether we can think of The
Re-Awakening of History,
as Alain Badiou calls it.
That is the question of whether
it is possible to think,
because we in places
like this, we just think.
We don't do that much.
Well, I certainly don't.
I read, I write, and I talk.
So, the question is,
can we think today
the possibility of
a new urbanity where
the practices of emancipations
of freedom, equality,
and solidarity can be practiced.
Or should we give
up on that thought?
Is the only thing we can
do in the 21st century is
to mobilize the best of our
techno-managerial abilities,
and they are
considerable, to massage
the situation that we're in?
That's the challenge.
But my point will be, if
we believe that there's
no other city
possible, we should
stop talking about freedom,
equality, solidarity,
and become good managers,
and leave it at that.
So that's the
intellectual challenge,
I think, I would like to leave
you with at the end of my talk.
So, let me say something
first, about the process
of post-politicization.
I know it's a bit of an
unfortunate turn because
of this funny prefix post,
which of course suggests
a sort of temporal
transformation
that, once upon a time
we were political,
and now are not any longer, just
like post-modernity, sort of.
It's not like that.
That's not the
meaning of the term.
Maybe I should have
used another one,
but other people have
been using this term now,
and I did not want to
confuse matters even further.
Post-politicization is a
particular set of dispositives:
technical, managerial,
institutional dispositive
that suspends, colonizes, or
[INAUDIBLE] the political.
So, it's a set of
dispositives that
lets the political
disappear, apparently.
So, to that, it suggests
what I mean by the political,
it was already embedded
in Michel Foucault's quote
at the beginning.
"For me, the political
of others, the political
refers to the fact that
the people do not exist."
Well, in other words, that
the people are radically,
heterogeneously
constituted, that we
have radically
different desires,
dreams, feelings, sensibilities.
That there is no such thing
as humanity, the people
as a political category.
In fact, that is what
under lies, of course,
the promise of the democratic.
The promise of the
democratic is nothing else
that the recognition that
the people do not exist,
that the people are
split, radically split.
So, post-politicization is a
particular tactic or strategy
to pretend that the split
is not there, to suspend it.
The other tactics of doing
so, Jacques Rancière,
French political philosopher,
identifies at least four
different tactics
of depoliticization.
Let me give you a
few examples of that.
Archae-politics.
Archae-politics
is the dispositive
that argues that the
community is inherently
cohesive and fine, but
it's disintegration,
the heterogeneity that
is expressed in community
is cast by an external intruder.
The extreme form
of that, of course,
is the ultra-politics
of fascism.
Yet Trump is a good
example of that.
We Americans are fine.
But, to that end, the cohesion
of us, the American community,
is of course, the intruded
that comes from outside.
By doing so, this
practice or rhetoric
covers up the
radical heterogeneity
that cuts to the name, American,
or Bostonian, or French.
Meta-politics it is a
tactic that Marxists--
and I'm a bit of a Marxist,
always was, always will be--
it was a tactics that Marxist
politics in the 20th century
often mobilized erroneously.
So, I think the sort of standard
argument where they say,
"It's not politics, you stupid."
Where the dynamics of
change and the possibilities
of a different world, or the
disintegrating world, resides,
it's in the economy.
It is the class relationships.
You want to change the world,
change the class system.
There is nothing
else than a tactic
of displacing the terrain of the
political onto something else,
in this case, class struggle.
Also a form of suspending
the democratic.
So, post-politicization
is one particular tactic,
and it's characterized
by a number of things.
Let me quickly go through
the key characteristics
of post-politicization,
the way it
has become
increasingly entrenched
in our cities over the
past 20 years or so.
First of all,
post-politics is sustained
by the continuous invocation of
a permanent state of emergency,
as Giorgio Agamben
would call it.
The permanent invocation
of a state of crisis,
and that articulates usually
around four key axis:
the economy, migration,
security, and the environment.
Dealing with a state of
emergency, take immigration,
dealing with a
state of emergency
requires urgent and
immediate action,
that of course, of necessity,
suspends the slow, painful,
and difficulty, Kapleau says,
of democratic negotiation
and inter-mediation.
Secondly, situations
characterized
by what Badiou already called in
the late 90s, the economization
of politics.
That means that only those
political choices are possible,
that fit onto a Microsoft
Excel spreadsheet.
In other words, only
those political choices
are deemed reasonable that
fit within a market logic.
Let me give you an
example of that.
I come from Flandres.
I grew up in a very small
village in the 1960s.
I am now a professor
at the University
of Manchester there, and giving
a talk at GSD at Harvard.
I never paid a penny
for my education.
I never paid a penny
for my education.
It was free and self-understood.
Unquestioned where I
come from in Belgium.
I'm still grateful to the
extraordinary fights that
were fought in order
to make possible
that mechanism of
distribution over there,
so that I was the first
one out of my family
to go to university,
could end up
as an emancipated
speaker standing here.
It's quite a trajectory
of emancipation,
would not have happened,
I think, without that.
If I were to say
today, not in the US,
because that would
be unheard of,
but in the UK, that education
should be free for all who
can and wish to
participate in education,
they consider me to
be a dinosaur who
has forgotten that the 20th
century is forever over.
That's what is meant by the
economization of politics.
Because in urban governance,
you see this repeated time
after time again.
And that is strangely
enough, paralleled
by the depoliticized of the
economic slash ecological.
I understand the
ecological, of course,
as the process through which we
transform nature, and allocate
the fruits of that nature.
So, the economy not
a very good term,
it's basically the ecology,
the ecological issue,
that cannot be politicized.
In other words, there
are no public choices
possible about the way we
access nature, transform nature,
and allocate the
product of that, both
the goods and the bads of that.
Or, it can only be
discussed to the extent
that we reduce it to a
techno-managerial issue.
And all that is sustained
by expert management,
by us, who keep on reproducing
these kind of knowledges
as unquestionable.
Why is that done?
What makes it so
attractive, so seductive?
Why do so many of us desire this
depoliticized configuration?
I think Roberto Esposito,
another Italian philosopher,
comes up with
partial answer when
he says that what we have today
is a further deepening of what
Michel Foucault
already identified
as political governance,
to what Esposito
calls an immunological
biopolitical governance.
And immunological
has to be understood
as the process of suspension,
of the obligation to participate
in the community.
That is, right to have
asylum from being piled off
the polity.
Of course, neoliberal
individualism precisely,
the example embedding of that.
But if I take a sort of
more mundane situation,
is the environment,
the ecological issue.
We know is threatening
us, don't we?
And we try to mobilize all
sort of techno-managerial
dispositives in order
to produce asylums,
so that we're shielded
off from the ecological,
or the socio-ecological
excesses that threaten us.
That immunological
biopolitical governance
is, of course, a process of
not just making life, deciding
who is entitled to live.
That's my type.
I live in the gentrified,
ecotopian bubble of Amsterdam.
It's wonderful.
It's sustainable.
And it's damn smart, too.
But that comes extraordinary
expense at the same time.
We produce through that those
who are not immunologized,
those who are exiled.
The bottom of the
Mediterranean Sea
is filled with
those bodies, which
are the flip-side, of course, of
the immunological biopolitical
governance that is
so dominant today.
It's not just a process
of, "make live."
But it's process of
"make live and make
die," as two sides
of the same coin.
And all that is
institutionally sustained
by, what I and
others have called,
autocratic forms of
post-democratic governance
beyond the state.
That is, that the registers
of instituted, quote
unquote, "democratic
governance,"
or increasingly
populated by what
Ulrich Beck called unauthorized
actors and unauthorized agents.
It's what, in the
planning literature,
is usually called public-private
partnerships, urban governance
arrangements, in which not
only the state participates,
but all sorts of private
agents and actors participate,
some private companies
to our beloved NGOs.
But these are
unauthorized actors.
They have absolutely no
democratic or other legitimacy.
Nonetheless, they
increasingly decide
the techno-managerial structure
of everyday governing.
You can feel it
in your body when
you walk around in a city like
Athens, or Thessaloniki today.
You all know, of course,
the chaos and the suffering
that has been inflicted
on the great people,
and which is manifestly
sensible in places
like Athens and Thessaloniki,
for all those who visit it,
they know.
You feel it, you see it,
you touch it, you smell it.
All, of course,
the direct outcome
of post-political
techno-managerial governance.
Where there was no
choice possible.
Indeed, the conditions
of crisis and of fear,
which are continuously nurtured,
the elites keep on telling us,
can be nonetheless
managed, for some,
through demobilization or
techno-managerial dispositives.
And that is further
sustained by what
a colleague of
mine in Manchester
called, "the tyranny
of participation."
In planning, you
find that whole time
that democratization
is understood
as the participation of citizens
in decision making processes
We're telling our beloved
poor in our cities,
in the global north
and global south,
that it can and
should participate
in the decision
making, the stuff that
is important to them.
That's what we tell them.
"Do you participate,
here in Boston,
in the management of your
sewage system, transport system,
educational system, cultural
policies, et cetera?"
Perhaps some of you do.
I don't.
I don't have the time to do so.
I don't want to do
that because it's
techno-managerial exercise, and
has absolutely nothing to do
with the democratic.
The democratic has
to do with the fact
that if my water doesn't flow
in Manchester, pick up the phone
and say, "Hey, 15 minutes and
I want it to be restored."
That's democracy.
So, in this kind
of configuration,
the most important
element of that
is that the cultural
condition that supports that
is one that invites a dispute.
Dispute is not censored.
Dispute is, in fact,
actively invited.
Now, I am the master disputer.
I come up with all these
critical theories and analyses,
and my university loves me.
They pay me handsomely for it.
And I get invited
to elite places
to do this critical dispute of
the situation that we are in.
And people love it.
It's invited.
This is actually the
support structured off.
Of
However, while
dispute is invited,
while we are being invited
to be whoever we want to be,
in gender, cloth,
ethnic, religious terms,
some things are
tabooed, or censored.
That is the dispute,
the radical censors,
as Jacques Rancière
would call it,
over different forms of life,
different forms of urbanity,
that articulate around radically
different political choices.
If I were to say,
"I want to fight
for a city of the common," that
would be just about acceptable,
it I dress it up nicely.
If I were to say, "I
want a communist city,"
I may, next time, not get
a visa to get into the US,
given what I read this
morning in the newspaper.
So, Fukuyama-- for those
old enough may just remember
Fukuyama's idiotic book in
1992, The End of History,
where he got Hegel completely
wrong, I thought at the time,
in my youthful arrogance--
now, 30-odd years
later, Fukuyama
may not have been a
great [INAUDIBLE],
but his announcement
of the end of history
sounds chillingly true today.
Now this strange
sense of consensus
among the liberal elites that
have governed over the past 20
years, that sustain this ideal
of an unfractured possibility,
of unfractured society, is of
course ruthlessly disturbed
by the fragmenting
forces that animate
so much of our urban life.
So, the fragmenting forces,
the flip side, so to speak,
of this attempt to
eradicate the political
from the spaces of
social and policy
encountered all the fragmenting
forces that operate that,
on the one hand, the
lure of identity,
what [INAUDIBLE]
and others called,
"ethnic evil," which, of
course, is animating so much
of our urban everyday lives.
This is a Golden Dawn
in Athens, and you all
know what that
symbol stands for.
That is the eruptions of urban,
violent, dissensual outbursts,
whether you're talking about
terrorist attacks, too just
anarchic outbursts of violence.
These anarchic
outbursts of violence,
such as those in Manchester,
and London, or Paris, Stockholm,
and many other places--
and there will be more, I
promise you there will be more.
Read my lips, you don't
have to be a genius
to know that that will
continue to happen.
However, the elites
keep on insisting
that those who engage in that
are archae scum, like those
who vote for Trump, right?
And of course, it is
that identification
that embodies that
disavowal of the political.
But on the other
hand, the other type
of fragmenting
voices, forces, are
those who want to fight for
the new universalization.
That is, those who's return
to, what Badiou calls
the "Passion of the Real."
The real of the common under
the banner of equality.
Those who, in their
urban insurgent acting,
prefigured tentatively,
hesitantly,
and with many uncertainties,
and without much help
from our types, who
try to prefigure,
democratically, the
practice of being
in common, and who are
experimenting, in many places,
a citizen of the world with new
ways of organizing common life
democratically.
And occasionally,
not very often--
when I gave this talk five
years ago, I couldn't say this--
but today, we can see that
some of these outbursts
are politically performative.
As one, I guess, now
knows, Ada Colau,
the new mayor of Barcelona,
who was just a few years ago
put in jail because he was
protesting with the Indignados.
And, of course, in
Greece, he resides
in power, the first
radical left government
in the postwar period
in Greece, though
not in part of these urban
insurrectional movements.
So, in order to
make sense of that,
I think it's important to make
a distinction between politics
on the one hand, and the
political on the other,
which are two worlds that
coexist simultaneously
in the urban.
In French, we have such
beautifully gendered language.
It's called le politic
and la politic.
It's very difficult to
translate into English,
but it's commonly
translated as politics,
which is the antek, that is, the
empirically verifiable tactics
and strategies of
urban governance,
with its rituals, its
practices, its actors, and ages.
It's the kind of stuff that you
and I are usually very good at.
Now, give me a city
for a week, and I'll
do a the analysis of its
urban governance systems.
I could do that blindfoldedly.
It is the arctic
level of politics.
Now, we seem to have
reduced our thought
about and our considerations
of urban governing
to these practices
of governing, as
if that colonizes the whole
of the political field.
The political, in
contrast, is ontological,
as some of my
interlocutors would argue.
The political is the name, the
word that stands for the fact
that we disagree.
It stands for the radical
heterogeneity that
cuts through the
social, and it is
that that manifests
itself, that becomes
symptomatically present
urban those outbursts,
that's when you see it.
So, theoretically
there are a number
of theoretical genealogies.
It was Paul Ricœur, who
already in the 60s made that
distinction, but now there are
a whole series of philosophical
and political arguments
that circulate around this
post-foundational thought.
Post-foundational thought
that is that the political is
nothing else than
radical heterogeneity
that cuts through the social,
and that manifests itself,
occasionally in antagonism.
What happens if we add
democratic to the political?
And it's something that
we urban theorists,
or urban intellectuals, very
rarely think about again.
How many books are there
about the democratic,
the urban democratic
of the past 20 years
compared to books on urban
politics, and other governance,
so poor I can't
read them anymore.
So, let me remind you of a few
things of what the democratic
is, symptomatically.
What the democratic invention,
contingent as it was,
insisted on.
It insists, of course, on
the empty place of power,
as Claude Leford would have it,
that anyone and everyone can,
at least temporarily,
claim the place of power.
But most importantly,
it presumes equality.
Equality, understood as the
axiomatic capacity of each
and all to act politically.
Contrast that with the
notion of social equality,
we all know we are
socially unequal.
Right?
Marxists, feminists,
post-colonialists
have explored, in great detail,
the various social inequalities
that animate urban life
and progressive politics,
etching itself on
these inequalities set.
We have to remedy that.
That is a perversion
of the democratic.
The foundation of the
democratic is the presumption
of equality of each and all
who are speaking beings,
irrespective of the
social place we take
in the geographical edifice.
And the democratic is nothing
else than the assertion of what
Balibar would
call, "Égaliberté."
Freedom and equality
fused together.
And it is precisely this, what I
would argue, is being suspended
and disavowed in our
post-democratic cities.
And it's precisely
in such a condition,
that the democratic, as
an insurgent practice,
manifests itself occasionally.
So, here we begin to have I
would argue a sense of what
these insurgent architects
are all about in their first
forming act of
insurgent democracy,
because they are acutely
aware, of course, that's
just the [? fundaments. ?]
So, the political,
then, I understand
as a retroactively
revealed moment of eruption.
An event, in Badiou's term.
One that is always placed and
geographical and decidedly
urban that opens up a procedure
that disrupts any given
social spatial order.
It's one that addresses a wrong,
in the name of a contingent
and utterly axiomatic
presumption of equality
of each and every one.
This wrong is a
condition in which
the presumption of equality is
perverted to the institution
of an oligarchic police.
We live today in an
oligarchic police order.
The political advises,
then, in the act
of performatively staging
equality, a procedure that
simultaneously stages
equality, so it's not
us, the master philosophers, who
decide what equality is, but is
in the performative acting,
in the bodily performance
in space, that the very content
and substance of equality
is being defined.
And it demonstrates
the possibility
for the inauguration of
a new instituted order.
This sounds very theoretical.
Let me give you
a simple example.
Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955,
African-American woman called
Rosa Parks--
I'm sure you all
remember her, she
died two or three years ago--
she put African-American bum
on the wrong seat of the bus.
We all know the story?
Many had done this before.
What happened when you
do something like that,
as happened with her?
You get beaten up, thrown off
the bus, put in jail, or worse.
Right?
Why do we remember Rosa Parks
in her minimal displacement,
but which, nonetheless,
constituted,
retroactively, a political
event in which she demonstrated
alone, the initial Italian
order of racialists,
racialized configuration,
and demonstrated equality
at the same time.
It is in the subsequent
universalizing a procedure
whereby other the Americans
and non-Americans,
African-Americans and
non-African-Americans, women
and men, old and young,
said, "I am Rosa Parks too."
And we call it today the
civil rights movement.
Was it a democratizing movement?
Yes, it was.
Is it perfect?
No, not by a long way.
So, we may begin--
I'm going to conclude now-- we
may begin to get a sense here
of what insurgent urban
democratic acting is all about.
For me, the sort
of performativities
where the democratic
is kept alive
against all these
suturing attempts
of the institutional
order to suspend this.
That is, that insurgent
democracy operates,
as Miguel Abensour
argues, against the state,
or at a distance from the state.
It is, as Badiou would call,
a politics of subtraction.
It falls in public space outside
of the institute of spaces,
of governance.
The political is no foundational
place, location, or subject,
it's a process of
common subjectivation.
My Marxist friends hate this
statement, because of course,
Marxists would say,
"It's class, you stupid."
Well, it ain't.
If I look at the composition
of this insurgent, urbanist,
preferly heterogeneous,
the men and women
of all sort of ethnic,
religious composition, that
cut through the
indentitarian embodiments,
in the name of a universalizing
equality, which they consider
to be the very condition of
possibility, to have that
embody differences.
But you have to want it.
It's a desire that
you have to want.
So, that's another thing my
Marxist friends don't like.
It's a process of
becoming subject
that is the will to take sides.
Insurgent democratic
acting is always specific.
It's always concrete.
It's always particular.
Remember Istanbul, 2013,
Gezi Park was about a few
[INAUDIBLE] trees and
a badly designed mosque
that assembled several
hundred thousand people who,
after a few weeks, were
demanding a transformation
of the Constitution.
I would argue we can not
understand what is happening
today in Erdoğan's Turkey,
without taking count
of the performative democratic
acting that was going
on in Taksim Square in 2013.
So specific, it's
concrete, it's particular.
In Sao Paulo it was
about a bus ticket,
the price of a bus ticket.
In Montreal, it
was student fees.
In Hong Kong, the
Umbrella Movement,
it was about the
imposition of China
of a particular
political candidate.
So there's always
specific concrete,
but stands for the metaphorical
condensation of the universe.
It aims at spatialization.
So the process that mediates
the particular and universal,
and is recognized as such,
it's recognized as such.
It's not that
difficult to discern,
aesthetically, the difference
between universalizing,
radically inclusive outburst,
versus exclusive, totalitarian,
identitarian one.
Insurgent democratic
acting either
falls around tropes of
emergence, insurrection,
spatializing equality,
and performative
acting as a located
intervention,
as an interruption.
It's the re-staging of things.
It's an interruption, as
Jacques Rancière calls it,
in the order of the sensible,
in an attempt to reframe
the common sense, to make
common sensical that what is
nonsensical.
Such as, education
should be free for all,
that's nonsensical in the US.
And emancipatory struggle is
to make that common sense.
It's a decidedly aesthetic
affair, I second,
as Jacques Rancière would argue.
And of course, last but
certainly not least,
and certainly not for
an audience like this,
it operates in and through
not only the metaphorical,
but the material reproduction
of its own spatiality.
So, to conclude, do
these proliferations
of urban expressions
of discontent
that point at a horizon
beyond the existing,
or are these just impotent
hysterical outbursts
of carnivalesque behavior
of disgruntled youngsters
and others?
Or, as Badiou asks,
does the proliferation
of these insurgencies
suggest the possibility
of what he calls the
re-awakening of history?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But it's certainly
worth examining,
theoretically and practically.
Certainly if we believe that
a different urbanity has
to be possible.
And I think there
are three issues that
need urgent attention.
We all know, certainly
in this place,
we all know we live in a world
of planetary urbanization.
Neil Brenner keeps
on insisting on this,
on the urbanist
structured in and through
planetary urbanization.
I very much agree with that.
Nonetheless, these outbursts
are highly localized, highly
specific, highly concrete.
I'm certainly not arguing that
Cairo, Istanbul, Athens, New
York, and Amsterdam
are the same.
Nonetheless, they do seem to
express the same democratizing
sentiment, although
articulated around different
[? objectives, ?] as
Jacques would call,
and operating under
very different
institutional context.
Nonetheless, a semblance,
the leapfrogging from
place to place--
last week it was in Minsk, three
weeks ago it was in Budapest.
We never had so many people
any given time coming together
in urban places to
express their discontent
with the oligarchic order that
governs planetary urbanization.
So, the question
is, can we think
through this local
global configuration?
Or are there possibilities,
openings, to the scale,
upscale, re-articulate
these localized
struggles into an upscale
political mobilization?
And as I suggested,
in the case of Spain,
in the case of Greece,
is seems to be possible.
In other places, of
course, foreclosed.
I think with extraordinary urban
political theoretical technical
work could be done here.
Secondly is, that I
think we need urgently
revisit the political names
of emancipating the struggle.
We all, of course, like freedom
and equality and solidarity.
Who doesn't?
Anyone?
Question then is, who are
the political subjects
of its enactment?
Most of us are just
objects of life, of course.
I live most of my
life as objects,
and I do what my
university wants me to do.
That is, I teach
or bring in money,
I go and give talks,
and all the rest.
That's the object.
So, I act as an object of
bio-political governance.
I act all of the academic.
I do this quite well, I think.
Well, my university is
quite happy with me.
They keep on paying
me handsomely for it.
But this is not what
constitutes a political subject.
There is no political
subject evasion
happening in this space.
So, who is it?
In the past, of
course, the names
of emancipatory, the political
names of emancipatory
struggled the subject of that.
Of course, associated with
particular social categories.
The proletarian for Marxists.
Woman for feminists.
[INAUDIBLE] for
post-colonialists.
We all have a privileged
little subject
who has gone and make
the world better.
I think that doesn't
any longer hold
in the pleasant configuration.
The becoming a
political subject,
processes of
planetary urbanization
in the 21st century takes
radically new forms,
radically different forms.
New alliances, new
configurations,
and new spatial
manifestations of that.
Possible, what means
can the fight be fought?
People I speak to,
very few, believe
in the political party, locally,
or regionally or nationally,
as a conduit to enact
democratizing change.
Did that experiment
with new forms
of institutional organization,
mobilization, et cetera?
And they don't know,
and I don't know either,
but I think there's
an urgent task
to think through what
appropriate means
of organization is.
To begin to the lengthy
difficult process of emancipate
the urbanization, and
what to fight for?
What terrain?
In the old days, of
course, it was the state.
Now, the Greeks know
that occupying the state
doesn't do very much.
It takes a bit more.
It takes occupying the city,
the neighborhood, the city,
the state, and indeed other
configurations as well.
But most importantly,
and I conclude with that,
I think we have to
dare to the quilt,
the signifier of equality,
with democratic urbanity.
Equality, I would argue,
political equality,
is what is being censored,
and replaced empty notions
of justice and ethics.
I think we have to re-quilt
the notion of equality,
and the political possibilities
for the new urbanity
that emerge out of that.
And through that, to begin to
think again, the possibility
of a different urbanity.
Not in the Utopian
sense, the way
we did in the 19th and
early 20th century.
We are all familiar with
the critiques of utopia.
But, utopia is that what
is immediately possible,
and materially urgent to do.
And I cannot wait much longer,
given the condition that we are
in.
And most importantly,
I think, therefore,
that we would stop
dwelling in the comfort
of imminent critique.
We are so good at critiquing
what we do not like.
I've developed my whole life
in the critique of urbanity.
I contributed too much
writing on that stuff.
And important as it
is, imminent critique
has become politically
non-performative.
Non-performative in
the absence of quilting
imminent critique with
a positive dialectic
of examining and experimenting
what is possible.
I leave it with that.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Erik, will you take
a few questions,
see if anybody dare
try and challenge you?
Please do.
So, I hope that you will have
some responses, some questions.
One thing that would be, because
of the context of our school,
and because of the fact that
I feel you, in many ways,
at least at the
beginning of your career,
shared some of our labor, some
of our interests, whether it
starts with your
early beginnings,
and then of course, studying
planning, and all of that,
I think when you come
to the end of your talk,
when you're talking about
this concept of re-quilting,
and the relationship to
equality, obviously there
are many references to spatial
condition in your yes project.
And when we think about, for
example of the post-war period,
it's very clear that there
was a very, very particular
understanding of how society had
to rebuild, how the spatial had
to be organized, and how,
through the construction
of certain institutions.
For example, there would
be at least a version
of the democratic that
you are referring to.
And today, there isn't, in a
sense, a very clear dimension
of what democracy
is in spatial terms,
because then there are also
people like Piketty, discussing
the role of capital.
It seems like there is more of
a division between the haves
and the have-nots, through
a certain separation,
a kind of distanciation,
a kind of distancy,
spatial distancy, between
the rich and the poor.
So, how do you, as a
former planner at least,
how do you see your own
recommendations being
spatialized in the context
of a sort of Global Order,
where there seems to
be a kind of tendency
for exactly the opposite of
that happening on a daily basis?
Yes, yes.
As my colleague, Maria Kaika
put it not that long ago, she
argued, the role of the
architect, the designer,
is not just to show
people what to desire,
but also how to do it.
And I would argue in
a post-war period,
and inserted within the kind of
post democratic configuration
of that time, that's precisely
what architects and designers
did in articulation with
other instances of life.
And I fear that these days,
designers and planners are not
any longer mobilizing
their considerable
technical and managerial
skills to do so.
Let me exemplify that.
The weekend before the historic
victory of Syriza in Greece,
I was in Thessaloniki
the Saturday night,
and you could feel
electricity in the air.
This was a moment
of possible change,
of momentous transformation,
of which there
are very few in a lifetime.
These moments are
rare and far between.
And I was sitting in a cafe in
a restaurant with my friends,
architects, planners, designers,
doing what we usually do.
That is, drink and
talk about cities
and being urban intellectuals.
And enthusiasts of
the moment and, "Is it
going to happen or not tomorrow,
is going to happen or not?
We don't know."
But there's the sense
it might happen.
So I asked then, before the
five designers, architects,
and planners, every single
one supported Syriza.
Every single one
hoping that this
would be this magical
moment that would open up
new possibilities.
Not ideal, but a new space.
So I asked them, "Let's assume
that Syriza wins tomorrow
night.
What are you going to
do Monday morning?"
They looked at me as if I
came from another planet.
Mesmerized.
Stunned.
At that moment, I
knew we were lost.
At that moment, I knew
there was no hope.
That is, if the
master planners who
are working there do
not know what to do,
that the best thing
that could come up with
is reproducing what has
been done over the past 20
or 30 years, is the
kind of, as Maria Kaika
would argue against, to
artistic architecture
of individual buildings and
a disconnected urban fabric?
Is that all they could do?
Well, then there is no hope.
And that's why I
think we really,
desperately, need
think through new ways
of organizing the urban.
Thinking through what kind
of urbanity is possible.
Think beyond the building, the
artistic sort of architecture
that characterizes much of
the condition that we are in.
On Saturday, we had the
coference here, a workshop
on environmental things.
And I'm sure that here, in
this splendid environment,
many, many are working
on resilient and adaptive
urbanity.
Who is against resilient
and adaptive urbanity?
Developing the technical
and managerial technologies
of becoming adaptive
and resilient,
so that when you're
adaptive and resilient
and the whatever conditions,
anything can happen to you.
That's why I like the
environmental justice
activist who had this fantastic
campaign in Louisiana.
He said, "Don't call
me resilient again,
because when I'm resilient you
will come up with something
else to do to me."
And that is, I
think-- who believes
that resilient architecture
and urbanity will
stop the combined and social
ecological catastrophe that
is marking the
condition of the earth?
Is it not urgently
needed to think
of new ways of organizing space
beyond the techno-managerial?
Something that requires, in
addition to these technologies,
thinking to institutional and
politically configuration.
That's why I tried to
insist on foregrounding
the political again
in articulation
with the technical
and the managerial.
The political has
indeed been censored.
I have no great answers to
this, but what I do know,
I just came back from six
weeks in South Africa talking
to a variety of communities
who were actively
trying to construct
new ways of organizing,
in this case, waste.
I'm looking at
waste, because one
of the biggest global
environmental diplomats, they
don't know what to do,
and I don't know either.
I don't know either.
And that's why,
I would argue, we
need this extraordinary
intellectual world
to articulate.
I work with the people
in Barcelona, Podemos.
They don't know
either, what to do.
And we're not helping.
Then what new modalities
of organizing the urban
in a democratizing way?
We don't know.
It's an invitation to think,
to think again, to stop acting
and to think again about what
a free equalist modality based
city might look like,
and to take seriously
the various
experimentations that
go on, which we either
can dismiss, as I said,
outburst,
carnivalesque outburst.
Or, that perhaps might
open the beginning
of a new political
sequence that might begin
to deal with the
perverse, uneven,
and combined socio-ecological
catastrophe that we are in.
Ever have a thought of doing
a new architecture of refugee
camps?
The Greeks can do with
that, or, a few weeks ago,
there was this fantastic
design commercial in the US.
I'm sure many of
you have seen it,
because of course,
some of you are
going to build the
wall if it ever comes,
between Mexico and the US.
That's going to be an
architectural masterpiece,
no doubt.
And some of you, generally
speaking, someone's
got to do it, and
they will be found,
and it will be great,
as Trump would call it.
Now, there was
this advertisement
of a US timber company.
It became viral, I
saw it on YouTube,
and it was about
five minutes long.
It started off with a Mexican
woman and her son on their way
to America.
And of course, after a few
days, they came to the wall,
and despair hit.
They walked around and
suddenly, in the wall,
they found this gate,
beautifully designed gate,
to which they
could enter the US.
Turned out that that
gate designed and built
by this US timber company.
Now that was the commercial.
But I thought, here this,
the challenge for designs
in architects, that is
to design and think,
to do technically,
managerially, in terms
of the stuff, the things
that peers through,
the multiple separations
that keep in tact,
the multiple inequalities
that indeed choreograph world,
and the best we seem to be
able to do is either hate them,
as the new right does, or show
compassion, as we usually do.
These are the
affective politics of
the post-political
configuration, that precisely
keep the order intact.
You can only change it
to real concrete material
interventions.
And I think that's a challenge
that designers, architects,
and planners are faced with,
as well as many others.
I think you're not doing
yourself enough justice,
and I think a lot of
people in the room--
by that I mean,
when you mentioned
you've been working on waste,
let's say, or your interest
in water, and a
lot of people here
are working on
different issues--
partly, it seems, that we have
to suggest that today if you're
working on questions
of urbanization,
you're also spending
a lot of time
on the conditions that are part
and parcel of those procedures.
So, waste is one.
The production of
resources is another one.
The way you are handling
water and so on.
So, in some ways it's
different than the notion
of a kind of continuation
of the ideal city
model, which might have
been the post World
War kind of approach.
So, in a way, you are working
on these recommendations,
solutions, the kinds of
things that really respond
to a different
approach to the way
in which we think about cities.
And I actually want to
try and open it up and see
if there are one
or two questions
or comments from the floor.
I see there's a hand up
there, hands up here.
Maybe we can get a
couple of thoughts.
I love the way that Erik
answers things very fully,
so I want to make sure that
we hear from a few people
before I give the
floor back to Erik.
I have a question that would
come with an explanation,
but I promise it
will be very short.
The question is, I
wonder what solidarity
would be in a re-politicized
urban politics.
And the explanation or the
justification for that question
is that, it seems to me that
there is a tension that maybe
needs to be exposed,
and maybe it
needs to be kept alive between
solidarity and the census--
and the census,
or the political.
Because while I
completely agree that we
are in a moment that
needs our vigilant
attention, to re-politicizing
urban politics on so
many scales, from
city municipalities,
to geopolitical
conditions, this is
intention with urban national
and even regional solidarities.
I mean, if I would imagine
the case of the European Union
itself, I would
completely agree that it's
exercising some form of a
techno-managerial despotism
on so many cases.
If I'm a Greek
person, I would revolt
against that technical way
of managing national states.
And yet it is a form of a
geopolitical solidarity,
so what might you say of that?
I'll be very brief.
So, what I mean by
solidarity, is solidarity
with the naked other.
This is precisely the
opposite of humanitarianism.
That is taking care of
the, deserving other,
which of course
is just continuing
in egalitarian conditions.
Solidarity has to be naked.
That is irrespective--
Erik.
Sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
--irrespective of the
bodily inscription,
irrespective of whether
I like the other person.
He or she should be entitled,
equally get treatment.
So, solidarity is not an ethical
or humanitarian injunction,
it has to be blind.
That is what the great challenge
is, to structure solidarity
with the naked other.
And that is the only
way I think to think
of a freer and more equal city.
That's precisely what
opens up the possibility
of radical heterogeneity,
that he or she deserves
to live, irrespective
of his or her condition,
whether he or she is
a nice person or not.
I'll leave it with that.
Did you want to
say something back?
Yeah, actually.
Then take them up.
I completely agree
with that point,
but isn't that one
scale of solidarity,
which is immediate solidarity?
I mean, if we think
about climate change,
we would have to upscale
the different forms
and the different layers
of what solidarity
is, from the naked,
immediate impact of that,
to a geopolitical, and maybe
even atmospheric, level.
Sure, sure, but yeah.
No, I fully agree with you,
but in the present condition--
and the situation is
really pretty bad--
we have to work with the
possibilities that are there.
And there are many of those.
And many of them are
highly localized,
so another invitation I have
to many of us practitioners
is to articulate
with the existing
practices in a perspective
of universalizing them out,
rather than keep on insisting on
that that displaces the terrain
onto something else.
Take climate change,
which we all agree
is a clear and
present danger, that
is highly uneven consequences.
And we keep on insisting that
in order to deal with that,
we have to deal with the
fetishized thing called CO2.
It is carbon that
is the culprit,
and that needs to be
managed, in order to do what?
In order to make sure that
nothing really changes.
So, real politics
of climate change
revolves precisely on displacing
the terrain of struggle
from a concerned with CO2,
to a political and political
ecological concern, with the
mechanisms and procedures,
through which that continuous
build-up of greenhouse gases
is nurtured and sustained.
So, these sort of
displacements, I think,
are vitally needed,
rather than repeating
the sort of fetishized
little order
that is staged at the
dignity of the cause.
Does somebody else have one?
OK.
Please, you go ahead.
Well, I'm just
wondering if you could
expand on the idea of the
techno-managerial governance.
Well, with
techno-managerialism, I
mean that the generally
recognized, hegemonically
recognized issues of great
concern, of which I identified
four: the environment, terrorism
and security, immigration,
and economic
financial conditions.
Yes, there is a consensually
established discourse
that these are issues.
These are issues of
global concern, that
are manifested and lived
through in your everyday urban
condition.
This is consensually
establishing,
consensually agreed
by almost all.
Those who disagree are
relegated to the margin
of intellectual and
cultural respectability.
When Trump says, "Climate
change doesn't happen,"
everyone thinks he's
a fucking idiot.
However, the elites
then say, yes, these
are concerns that
need to be elevated
to the dignity of
a global concern.
But don't worry, we can't
find the technical--
In the case of the
environment, for example--
or managerial, there's
institutional--
like the Kyoto
Protocol for decades
of the environment again--
that we can mobilize in
order to make sure what?
That civilization
as we know it can
continue for a while longer.
So, this kind of
techno-managerialism
does suspend the
opening up of a debate
over alternative
or different ways
of organizing our
socio-energetic system,
a socio-ecological system.
So, for me and many others,
techno-managerialism
is a tactic that
permits, indeed,
to situate generally
agreed issues.
And then today, enough concern
with that simultaneously
suspends the political
debate over it,
and by doing so
suspends the underlying
causes they produced.
So, for the financial, the
economic financial situation,
it was identical.
We needed to have a set of
techno-managerial dispositives,
bailing out automobiles
sent in the United
States and the banks, to
the tune of $1.5 trillion US
dollar, as a
techno-managerial dispositive,
to make sure that civilization
as we know it can continue.
And there was no alternative,
irrespective of the attempts,
and sometimes
politically powerful
attempts, like in the case,
in the case of Greece, that
was not considered to be
reasonable, rational, subject
to political dispute
and descends.
It was a techno-managerialism
of [INAUDIBLE] that
had to be imposed in
order to make sure
that social economic
cohesion could be maintained.
That's what I mean by
techno-manageralism.
Instead of techniques,
dispositives, in the sense
that.
I don't learn gifts to that,
suspends the political, that
is, that suspends recognition
of the radical differences, that
animate any kind of social order
And, Erik, thank you so
much for the lecture.
I'm very interested
on what needs
to be done more
than anything, and I
would like to bring a quick
reference to maybe suggest
my point.
There is this book
on neoliberalism
by [INAUDIBLE], recently
published, that basically he
says that the term
neoliberalism with is
the Koran, a demonic regime
that we are suffering somehow.
It was coined in the
late 30s and it was not,
let's say,
implemented or started
to been deployed until let's
say the mid 70s, right?
So he was kind of late term
for almost like 30, 35 years,
kind of being
prepared for waiting
the right moment to kind of
like flow into the mainstream.
At least this is what Hayek
and freedman and others
like and kind of claim has so
in 2008 we have a huge bread
point then nothing happened and
so him, the regime is mundane,
it continues the same way.
So, I mean what I'm interested
is, I kind of like projective
dimension of these, is like well
what's the problem that was not
an alternative in place?
I mean, we've really failed
over all the problems
that we have been detected,
over the last 30 years.
It was simply not.
Not ready to be implemented so
I'm very interested, of course,
on all your work and
what you presented here,
and it resonates
very well with others
like the Agonistic
Democracy of Chantal Mouffe
and many others that
are very well aligned.
So, I wonder, is our role
to really start developing?
Maybe it's lower than we think
because things takes time,
really slowly both theoretically
regrows, intellectually,
you know like Grambit.
But at the same time,
socially, like embedded
in a way, that really presents
a like a solid counter-proposals
to the regime that we are
living today, are opposed to me,
I mean, and I want to be very
respectful of like some flares,
yes you know Podemos,
I'm from Spain,
I've been living
in that very close.
But still, I mean
is that enough?
Or we should take it
slowly and really treat it
as a predictive problem?
Sorry to--
Can you hold on to that thought?
Because I would like
you to just do one job,
concluding other comments.
So there are two.
If you could keep it vague--
It's impossible.
I try my best.
Thank you so much, Erik, for
the fantastic presentation.
My question is regarding
the place of insurgency.
Because, on one hand, you're
looking at the police,
and of course the
historical significance
of the police as the
place of insurgency,
and also the place
of power manifested
in architecture of the
palace, or the Parliament.
It's very clear.
But at the same
time, we're talking
about techno-managerialism,
and techno-managerialism
historically has been
practiced, and perfected,
arguability in corporations,
transnational corporations
today, that have a tendency to
become more and more invisible
because camouflage is
an important strategy
of incorporation.
So, it's really,
difficult to trace them
after their trademark that we
see every day on their products
and in advertisement.
So, I guess my question
is, and I'm saying this
because I was following this
group of activists called
The Invisible Committee, and
in one of their articles,
basically say, blocked the roads
because power is in logistics.
So, I guess my question
is as these designers
of techno-managerialism
are becoming more and more
invisible, and their place
is becoming completely
to dissolved the entire
planetary urbanization.
And not only the cities.
Where is that place
of insurgency?
Thank you.
I think my question echoes
some aspects of the last one,
and I want to call into
question the focus on urbanity,
and the urban,
because to go back
to the parable of
the blind city,
I think it comes with a
certain blindness to politics
outside the political,
outside the urban.
And if we believe in
planetary urbanization then,
I think there's long histories
of insurgent democratization
that happen at the
sites of plantations,
at the site of minds, at the
sites of hydro-electric power
Downs.
And in very non urban
places, in a sense, far away
peripheral places,
where there have been
struggles of insurgent
democratization
for more than a century,
and histories of that
being passed down.
And at the other
end, we also miss
the scale of the
kind of bio-political
and struggles over
of its, I would
say sexual and racial
embodied politics,
which are also a site of
insurgent democratization.
So rather than dismissing
the kind of post-colonial
and the feminist
political actors,
I would want to draw more
on those philosophies
and histories.
We're going to have one last--
I think it's wonderful.
These are in a sense great
comments and sense statements,
and maybe there are
some questions in them
that you can also--
Set aside you have
the last word.
Oh, I feel the pressure,
thank you Erik.
So, you know I just
wanted to prove
a little more on this very,
very depressing anecdote
that you had.
And I say depressing as
a planning instructor,
because, I mean the city's
a moment in many ways.
You are sitting drinking with
these designers and planners,
and this is the eve of a
historic progressive moment.
In many ways, cities are wins,
and that is a re-politicization
of the political.
And even at that moment,
what are we as the Academy
doing wrong when designers
and planners feel paralyzed?
So, if you could just comment
on, because if it's not
the lack of the political.
There was a
re-politicizing moment,
and still designers and
planners were paralyzed so
what are we doing?
So, sort of I'm going to
certainly not answered
all these fantastic
questions or would
love to continue discussing
each of them opening up
fantastic terrains.
so the three last
ones, I think, can be
captured in the following way.
What we have done
for a long time, that
is to dwell in the
politics of the resistance?
Which demanded the theoretical
and practical location
of power, so that we knew what
to resist, where to resist,
and how to resist.
And while the political subject
of subjectivities of this one
of the systems or whether
it's gender, or class,
or [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] which
are the privileged subjects
through which that resistance
against the locations of power
is organized.
I think that is not any
longer valid, if it ever was.
And that brings us precisely to
the situation where we're in,
where agreed with the karma of
powerlessness so de-centered
that we can't even locate that
anymore let alone fight it.
I think that's not
such a bad idea.
Because ultimately I
would argue historically
all emancipatory
procedures were predicated
upon carving out their own
space and their own spatiality.
And we just finished
with two simple examples,
to illustrate how emancipated
transformation was not
initiated through forms of
the resisting site of power,
but rather through he
construction of one's
own spatiality.
In Europe, in the cities of
Europe in the 19th century,
the workers houses
were absolutely
vital places to
do representation,
to construct a new common
sense, through developing
a new language, new
forms of representation,
new funds of organization.
Of course, in the
20th century, feminism
indeed established itself,
and became symbolized
a ball and a formidable
political force
precisely, to do the material
and symbolic organization
of its own spatiality?
And that is something
very different
from the impotent tactics of
the resistance against power
that characterizes so much of
the shoon likely to be less
of politics today
and that's where
I think a lot of planning,
urbanistic, and design
experiments are
desperately needed
that is the design organization
metaphorically as well
as materially of spatiality
is for the experimentation
of new forms of being together
in the same way as in the past,
the workers did
it, women did it,
settler that didn't dwell in
the politics of resistance,
which indeed has become futile.
Really isn't really
about I would
argue about strengthening
the already existing world
within the world.
As I said in my
introduction, there's
a set of worlds in
the world-- those
of the existing
choreographies of power
and those that animate
desires for change
and try to experiment socially,
geographically, and materially
with other forms of doing it.
Let's choose their side and
see what we can do there.
Erik, I feel this has been
a really special night
because a lot of the times when
we engage in design as you were
saying it, I think that
there is a tendency
to reiterate, to
reuse, to restate
certain conventions that are
very much part and parcel
of the disciplines in a way.
And assume that they always
carry with them their meanings,
and that the
assignation of the line
also carries with it that kind
of the possibilities that we
embed or we refer in
relation to the project.
And I think what I find really
exciting about the discussion,
and there are so many incredible
people who have stayed,
and I think there is a
lot that can happen, is
that is the possibility
that we can really open up
the relationship between the
project and its possibilities,
in a different, way, in a way
that is somehow re-energized
with kind of new forms
of investigation.
I see that as something
exceptionally positive.
I wish you'd given the
talk at like 2:00 o'clock
in the afternoon, and you
would finish by three,
and then everybody could stay
and talk for like four hours
until 6:00, and then we
could go and have a drink.
These kinds of talks shouldn't
start at 6:30 or 6:45.
They really need to
start a lot earlier
and really lead to
a kind of symposium.
And I feel terrible in a
way that we're stopping it,
because I think it's just
beginning in some ways
so it's very, very
exciting and I'm
very happy that they let you in.
I really hope that
they let you out.
So, anyway thank you all very
much and really thanks to Erik,
it's been wonderful.
