The Political Unconscious of Architecture

Re-opening Jameson's Narrative

Nadir Lahiji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317020677
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Thirty years have passed since eminent cultural and literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote his classic work, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, in which he insisted that 'there is nothing that is not social and historical - indeed, that everything is "in the last analysis" political'. Bringing together a team of leading scholars including Slavoj Zizek, Joan Ockman, Jane Rendell, and Kojin Karatani, this book critically examines the important contribution made by Jameson to the radical critique of architecture over this period, highlighting its continued importance to contemporary architecture discourse. Jameson's notion of the 'political unconscious' represents one of the most powerful notions in the link between aesthetics and politics in contemporary discourse. Taking this, along with other key concepts from Jameson, as the basis for its chapters, this anthology asks questions such as: Is architecture a place to stage 'class struggle'?, How can architecture act against the conditions that 'affirmatively' produce it? What does 'the critical', and 'the negative', mean in the discourse of architecture? and, How do we prevent architecture from participating in the reproduction of the cultural logic of late capitalism? This book breaks new ground in architectural criticism and offers insights into the interrelationships between politics, culture, space, and architecture and, in doing so, it acts as a counter-balast to the current trend in architectural research where a general aestheticization dominates the discourse.

1

Ban-lieues

Bechir Kenzari

Introduction

Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West…. [This thesis] throws a sinister light on the models by which social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare life (even if it has been transformed and rendered apparently more human) that defined the biopolitics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.¹

For three long weeks in the fall of 2005, angry groups of unemployed youngsters had vandalized property, burned cars and scorched schools in several French towns and suburbia. Triggered by the death by electrocution of two boys fleeing the police in the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois, these émeutes (riots) quickly engulfed other impoverished suburbs throughout the whole country. In reacting to this ‘profound malaise’, as the former French President called it, the government was forced to reactivate the law of the state of emergency for the first time since the Algerian war in 1955. The French public learned, at last, that colonial legislation had never been abrogated and that there has never been a renegotiating of a new social and political project for postcolonial France. Measures to put off the riots were taken but, crucially, no serious long-term solutions were envisaged. Two years later, in the fall of 2007, the same émeutes surfaced again, mostly in the Parisian region, when two teenagers from Villiers-le-Bel, riding on a mini-bike, died after they collided with a police car. Commenting on these events, the French Prime Minister told Parliament that the clashes were incomprehensible.²

While the scale of the 2007 unrest did not compare with the 2005 agitations, it reinforced the thesis that violence in the French suburbs is not a passing event, but a polymorphous phenomenon that constitutes the most visible aspect of the condition of violence in which live the populations of the ghettoized cités.³ Structural factors – such as the accelerated deterioration of the urban environment and public services, massive long-term unemployment and ethnic and geographical stigmatization – appear to underlie this phenomenon which, in its diverse manifestations, mirrors the functioning of a political system where the members of one specific category of French society (mainly of Arab and African origins) have found themselves living as refugees in segregated, dilapidated high-rise housing, routinely stopped by the police for identity checks.

The perception among these unemployed, undereducated youths of being stigmatized and abandoned by the very same State that is supposed to protect and defend them has emphasized the need among scholars to examine suburban violence beyond the arguments of immigration control, delinquency, illegalism and public security. One specific view that needs to be considered first here is the relation between rioting and postcolonial culture. As Rada Ivekoviç has noted, the suburban riots meet the current phenomena in the making of Europe through the refusal to face historic and colonial responsibilities. Whether in the banlieues, or in the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, or on the shores of the island of Lampedusa, extra-constitutional exceptions are being made on a large scale. The endless repression and stigmatization of those who live in the poor outskirts of Paris cannot be isolated from the policies of refoulements (forcing back) and the invisible detention centres for the undocumented, the main purpose of which is the exportation of European borders into neighboring countries, which now function as buffer zones policing for Europe by proxy.⁴

Achille Mbembe draws a similar correlation between state racism at home and French neocolonial policy in African countries. With the complicity of corrupt bourgeoisies and military castes in Africa, there seems to be a near-resurrection of the Code de l’Indigénat (Natives’ Code) that once governed the subjection of colonial peoples. The ‘laws of exception’, the development of a ‘penal state’ and of the quasi-military methods applied by the police and public administration, in those banlieues populated by the descendants of the formerly colonized, are methods that reenact the ‘race war’ and inscribe it within the global context of clashes between the civilizations of the North and the South on the basis of the French colonial tradition whose administrative habits have never been eradicated.⁵ Achille Mbembe calls this phenomenon: the geography of infamy.

Such a new experience of borders and identity is, in truth, engaging a subtle mechanism whereby the postcolonial and post-democratic State tends to monopolize legitimate violence through an included exclusion of some of its subjects. One particular elaboration of this new interpretation sees in the rioting the resurgence (in the post-political, post-democratic, postcolonial, post-national age) of the archaic figure of the bandit, regarded as characteristic of pre-political times. As defended by Kacem Belhaj, the banlieue has become the ban-lieu, that is the space that embodies the fundamental structure of the ban in all its topological and political dimensions.⁶ In the short but interesting book titled La psychose française (French Psychosis), Kacem maintains that to be at the ban ‘does not mean to be outside, excluded from the community as it were; it means to be both inside and outside’.⁷ As a space where a particular class of French society has found itself literally a-ban-donned, like waste in the outskirts of the city, the banlieue has turned into the ultimate ground of the modern pariah.⁸

The metaphor of waste here is significant enough, especially if we remember that the sociology of these difficult neighborhoods, like that of the ghetto, points to the sovereign’s desire to portray poor ethnic groups living in the banlieues as both contaminating and contaminated. Economic exclusion goes hand in hand here with the social ostracization of particular defamed social categories. The declarations of the former Minister of Interior, who derogatorily referred to the young rioters as racailles (‘scum’ or ‘rabble’), suggested that many of the suburbs needed some ‘industrial cleaning’.⁹ The State representative’s urge to ‘cleanse’ these suburbs not only appeals to the sentiments of the poor whites but points to the extent to which the conduct of the police in the banlieues bears a mimetic dimension. As E. Balibar has pointed out, ‘police squads act like gangs fighting other gangs in an escalation of virile exhibitionism – the difference being that they are armed, sent by the state into “hostile territory,” and that their own disproportionate violence (insults, beatings, shootings, arrests, detentions, threats) is inscribed within a more general process of intimidation, profiling, and harassment of legal and illegal immigrants.’¹⁰

Through this continuous relationship with a power that has banished and rendered him/her at every instant exposed to an unconditioned threat, the suburban dweller has become, according to Kacem, an updated version of the ancient figure of homo sacer who is continuously excluded from the community and who could be killed at any time without legal redress. Drawing on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Kacem argues that the structure of the ban means that the sovereign throughout history – even when the sovereign is the ‘people’ – needs this sort of borderline character, or homo sacer, to frame (set up) the order of the State. All this reveals the ‘obscure association binding together sovereign and bandit … It is this specter, Derrida would say, that haunts every political-state system, even a democratic one.’¹¹ Kacem also stresses that the most extreme arrangement of this double structure, binding the sovereign and the homo sacer, is Nazism and the concentration camp.¹² This last point leads us to look at the suburban reality from new angles.¹³

Agamben and the Homo Sacer

The farther we emerge from the inner city, the more political the atmosphere becomes. We reach the docks, the inland harbors, the warehouses, the quarters of poverty, the scattered refuges of wretchedness: the outskirts. Outskirts are the state of emergency of a city.¹⁴

The repositioning in which the suburb echoes the reality of the camp is a specific application of Agamben’s philosophy, to which we now turn. Interrogating the foundations of Western political metaphysics, Agamben starts, in Homo Sacer, by making a distinction between bare life (bios) and political life (zoē).¹⁵ The Greeks, we are told, had no single term to express what we mean by the word ‘life’. Instead, they used two distinct terms: zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group. Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, in particular, would not have used the term zoē, since what was at issue for both thinkers was not simple natural life (zoē) but rather a qualified life, a particular way of life (bios.) To speak, for example, of the zoē politikē of the citizens of Athens would have made no sense. In the classical world, simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined – as merely reproductive life – to the sphere of oikos, or home.¹⁶

But this distinction, Agamben argues, would later disappear, especially at the threshold of the modern era, as stressed by Foucault in The History of Sexuality, when natural life began to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power, that is when politics turned to biopolitics. Agamben also refers to a later lecture by Foucault at the College de France titled ‘Society Must be Defended’ (1977), where the French thinker stresses that what followed this shift ‘is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques. For the first time in history, the possibilities of the social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust.’¹⁷ Agamben concludes that in any case the entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis – the politization of bare life as such – constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought.¹⁸

In trying to dig deeper into the nature of sovereignty and the code of political power in Western thought, Agamben then refers to the ancient figure of the homo sacer who, in accordance with Roman law, is a person who may be killed and yet not sacrificed. Agamben remarks that under both divine and human law, the human life of homo sacer is included in the juridical order solely in the form of an exclusion based on homo sacer’s capacity to be killed without legal redress.¹⁹ For the homo sacer is excluded from the religious community and from all political life. He cannot participate in the rites of his gens, nor can he perform any juridically valid act. His entire existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide. As a consequence, he is in a continuous relationship with the power that banished him precisely insofar as he is at every instant exposed to an unconditioned threat of death. He is pure zoē, but his zoē is caught in the sovereign ban and must reckon with it at every moment. ‘In this sense, no life, as exiles and bandits know well, is more “political” than his.’²⁰

This process (of exclusion) constitutes the concealed foundation of sovereignty w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributers
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Ban-lieues
• 2 The Architecture of Money: Jameson, Abstraction and Form
• 3 The Master’s House
• 4 The Stolen Hope: Reading Jameson’s Critique of Tafuri
• 5 Designing a Second Modernity?
• 6 May Mo(u)rn: A Site-Writing
• 7 Allegories of Late Capitalism: Main Street and Wall Street on the Map of the Global Village
• 8 Rethinking City Planning and Utopianism
• 9 Fredric Jameson and Critical Architecture
• 10 Reloading Ideology Critique of Architecture
• 11 A Photography Not ‘Quite Right’: Fredric Jameson’s Discussion of Architectural Photography in ‘Spatial Equivalents in the World System’
• 12 The Architectural Parallax
• 13 Botanizing the Bonaventura: Base and Superstructure in Jamesonian Architectural Theory
• 14 Jameson, Tafuri, Lefebvre
• Index