The Geopolitics of Spectacle

Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia

Natalie Koch

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781501720932
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Central Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

Why do autocrats build spectacular new capital cities? In The Geopolitics of Spectacle, Natalie Koch considers how autocratic rulers use "spectacular" projects to shape state-society relations, but rather than focus on the standard approach—on the project itself—she considers the unspectacular "others." The contrasting views of those from the poorest regions toward these new national capitals help her develop a geographic approach to spectacle.

Koch uses Astana in Kazakhstan to exemplify her argument, comparing that spectacular city with others from resource-rich, nondemocratic nations in central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. The Geopolitics of Spectacle draws new political-geographic lessons and shows that these spectacles can be understood only from multiple viewpoints, sites, and temporalities. Koch explicitly theorizes spectacle geographically and in so doing extends the analysis of governmentality into new empirical and theoretical terrain.

With cases ranging from Azerbaijan to Qatar and Myanmar, and an intriguing account of reactions to the new capital of Astana from the poverty-stricken Aral Sea region of Kazakhstan, Koch's book provides food for thought for readers in human geography, anthropology, sociology, urban studies, political science, international affairs, and post-Soviet and central Asian studies.

1

APPROACHING SPECTACLE GEOGRAPHICALLY

“The modern Astana is Kazakhstan in miniature,” asserted President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2010. “Different cultures and traditions meet here. East, West, North and South have found their embodiment in glass and concrete here.”1 The city represents many things for Kazakhstan’s longtime president: it is a cultural crossroads, a symbol of future prosperity, and a sign of the independent state’s strength in the post-Soviet era. But in this discussion of the country’s modernization efforts, Nazarbayev’s language is pervaded by the basic image of developments in the city as representative of those in the whole country : “Astana is Kazakhstan in miniature.” The idea of a capital city standing for its country is an old idea, which diplomats and international travelers from across the world understand well. On deeper reflection, most people would readily acknowledge that one city is rarely representative of an entire country’s diversity, but rarely do we dwell on the politics of this synecdoche. In some cases, the idea is relatively banal: asserting that Paris is France or that Washington, D.C., is the United States may gloss over significant regional disparities, but the claim itself would not seem to actively reinforce those disparities. France and the United States both have policies and governance structures that do not unduly prioritize the capital’s development over the state’s other regions.

But in Kazakhstan, the claim that Astana is Kazakhstan has much more political significance. This is especially apparent when viewed from the territorial hinterlands, which have a more antagonistic relationship with the capital because of the intense concentration of federal funds in promoting the city’s development. Take, for example, the North Aral Sea region, which we will encounter in chapter 3. This region is a state-designated “ecological disaster zone.” The sea’s evaporation during Soviet times has resulted in decades of acute environmental problems, accompanied by severe health complications and grinding poverty for the locals. Villages in the region lack the most basic infrastructure, such as adequate medical facilities, roads, waste disposal, and access to clean water (let alone indoor water connections). Kazakhstan’s larger cities have their own infrastructural challenges, as does Astana, but the blatant neglect of the Aral Sea region and other peripheral areas like it suggests a stark imbalance in the state’s developmental policies. For rural residents who have not been able or willing to migrate to the country’s cities, the claim that Astana is Kazakhstan can sometimes be perceived as an affront—so false that it feels like a slap in the face. This is not always the case, though. Many people, if not the majority, choose not to pay attention to the injustice of regional disparities exacerbated by the government’s focus on building up its spectacular capital city. Regardless of whether residents are resigned to the persistence of these inequalities, the situation in the North Aral Sea suggests that Nazarbayev’s seemingly innocuous claim that “Astana is Kazakhstan in miniature” is far more political than it may at first appear.

Nazarbayev is not alone in thinking about the capital city as a miniature model of the country’s development plans. He is one of many in a long line of planners from Ankara to St. Petersburg who have sought to put modernity on display in their capitals. The specific urban forms that have resulted from these development projects are just as diverse as the contexts and people that give them life. But why is the city so frequently privileged in these imaging agendas? The city as a site, scale, and space is attractive for many reasons, but foremost among them is the utility of miniaturization. In places where leaders want to effect rapid and far-reaching social and political transformation, microcosms can be appealing. Utopians of all sorts find miniatures politically useful, but state-based actors often revel in the limited scale of the city because its unique degree of closure facilitates the implementation of projects that would be far too costly if attempted at the larger scale of a country’s entire territory.2 A microcosm offers the unique benefit of excluding complexity in a way that allows a visionary to achieve his or her lofty ideals, usually at a rapid pace that can satisfy short-term demands for action. When their projects are then realized on a diminished scale, the microcosm becomes a convenient icon of success. It can be put on a pedestal and treated as representative of a leader’s vision for a new order, like when Nazarbayev claims that modern Astana is Kazakhstan in miniature. Everywhere but in city-states, the image of the city as a miniature of the state is obviously a fiction. But Nazarbayev here taps into a common trope in which cities, and capitals in particular, are used as a rhetorical device to assert equivalency.3

Political actors also find cities to be useful metaphors because of the advantages of focalization that come with miniaturization. Singular sites or events, like a parade or a monument or a capital city, can substantiate an abstraction. They lend material form to an ideological narrative that is rather more diffuse, tenuous, or perhaps even illusory. Paul Veyne calls this a “focalization effect.” He suggests that the propensity of political leaders to use such a tactic to substantiate their ideology is heightened when they lack the resources to do so in a more spatially, socially, and temporally extensive manner.4 Building a monument to Lenin or Lincoln, for instance, can be quick, easy, and relatively cheap in comparison to the task of developing entire political systems that actually reflect the values of Soviet communism or American liberalism. Fusing ideological narratives (such as democracy or communism) with a material object or site allows people to interact with them more concretely in everyday life. When mapped onto a material site, such as a monument, a building, or even a city, abstract narratives become tangible and are thus easier to visualize. This in turn endows abstract concepts with more symbolic power than if they were to remain at the level of abstraction as people learn to treat the material referent as evidence of its truth or reality.5

The tautological reasoning of focalization is not always as convincing as the architects of such projects may like, nor does it always effectively buttress the desired ideological narrative. For example, under communist rule, citizens of Eastern European countries might have seen Soviet-inspired monuments to Lenin as signs of oppression, rather than as reflections of their commitment to the international brotherhood of socialist states. Regardless of whether it is convincing, focalization works as a rhetorical device to promote certain narratives by mapping them onto newly constructed or already existing sites. Because it is so rooted in material sites, focalization also works to shape particular spatial imaginaries.

As noted in the introduction, the term spatial imaginaries refers to how people think about space to make sense of the social and physical world. Spatial imaginaries are not fixed, since every person has unique ways of thinking about and experiencing space. Specific tropes and metaphors, however, can come to define spatial thought, locally and globally. Focalization, or the idea that a material site represents some abstract concept, is one such case. When applied to cities, focalization works through the metaphor of synecdoche, in which the part is imagined to stand for the whole.6 This is the trope that Nazarbayev is using when he claims that Astana is Kazakhstan. As a metaphorical mode of thinking, synecdoche in this case pushes people to imagine that the capital city of a country is representative of the entire country, that the modernity expressed there is found everywhere, and that the government’s largesse is indicative of its beneficence across its lands and toward all its residents.

Synecdoche cannot be judged on the basis of its validity. Like all metaphors, it is a kind of fiction. Simply unmasking its falseness does not help us grasp its role in allowing people to advance and make sense of the political claims of spectacular urban development. Instead we must ask: How does it operate and what work does it do? Synecdoche is key to understanding how people think about cities and their relationship to the territorial state, what values decision makers accord to the symbolic and built form of urban spaces, and why developing a spectacular capital city becomes popular among certain state planners. Social scientists have never systematically considered synecdoche as it relates to cities and states, or even more generally to centers and peripheries.7 Although offhand references to metonymy or miniaturization are common in urban studies, these tropes do not capture the nuance of synecdoche.8 Nor do they shed light on the enormous amount of mental contortion needed to imagine a city standing for an entire country. Accordingly, this chapter traces the role of synecdoche in ways of thinking about space and time, and begins to unravel some of the implications of synecdochic thinking for the geopolitics of spectacle.

Spatial Imaginaries and Synecdoche

Geographers have explored the geographic imagination from many angles, but relatively few have given explicit attention to metaphor.9 The literature on critical geopolitics, however, offers some useful insights into how certain metaphors and tropes come to dominate particular spatial imaginaries, as well as how they are perpetuated. Critical geopolitics is a subfield of political geography that examines the intersection between geopolitics, identity narratives, and geographic imaginations. One of the main tenets of critical geopolitics is that geography is a field of power/knowledge. This means that apprehending and knowing the world is inherently political because all actors are embedded in particular contexts and filter the world through specific interpretive lenses. As a result, geopolitical thinkers can never be neutral observers, and the field of geopolitics can never innocently describe the world.10 Critical geopolitics eschews depoliticized accounts of global affairs by seeking to ground practitioners and their theories in a political geographic context. Geopolitics in this critical framework is approached as a discourse. An ensemble of rules by which speech acts and material performances are made meaningful, discourses are both shaped by and shape physical objects, individual capabilities, sociocultural resources, and geographic modes of thinking.11 As initially conceptualized by Gearóid Ó Tuathail, critical geopolitics was designed to interrogate these discourses, positing that “how people know, categorize and make sense of the world is an interpretive cultural practice.”12

Political geographers working in this field have also illustrated how certain places are discursively “reduced to security commodities, to geographical abstractions which need to be ‘domesticated,’ controlled, invaded or bombed rather than understood in their complex reality.”13 Such reductionism frequently unfolds through the use of foreign policy metaphors, like those describing a region or place as a “wild zone,” “shatterbelt,” “chessboard,” “satellite,” “quagmire,” or a “den” or “lair” harboring suspicious individuals. Albeit sensational, metaphors like this circulate widely in policy communities, news media, and everyday conversations. These metaphors simultaneously encapsulate and entrench a particular zeitgeist. This is exemplified in the evolution of geopolitical fear-mongering about communism in the United States, from describing the communist threat as an internal “fungus” to the later metaphor “domino theory,” which construed Soviet expansion as a more distant but looming threat of geopolitical balancing. Metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies, and those characterizing Cold War thinking did in fact influence foreign policy doctrines and strategic decisions, both in the United States and globally.14 In studying geopolitical imaginaries, however, critical geopolitics scholars have focused almost exclusively on specific metaphorical tropes, like those of fungal infection or dominoes, rather than root metaphors such as metonymy, synecdoche, or personification.

Root metaphors are inextricably tied to spatial imaginaries because, as the linguistic scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson famously argue, they “govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.” Because metaphors structure our perception of the world, they “create realities for us, especially social realities.” The example that Lakoff and Johnson use most frequently is the cliché that “time is money.” Time is not money, of course, but if we “act as if time is a valuable commodity—a limited resource, even money—we conceive of time that way. Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered.”15 Metaphor not only structures how we think about the world but also shapes how we behave as we interact and move about the world. In effect, metaphors create the reality they allegedly describe.16

Working through the same thought processes, spatial imaginaries consist of various metaphors that structure how people think about the world and define possible courses of action. This structuring effect is central to how scholars now approach the geographic concepts of “territory” and the “state.” Territory, writes the political geographer John Agnew, “is not a simple block of space but a complex set of relationships between local, regional, and national levels of social practice and geographic imagination.”17 The idea of territory as a “simple block of space” is nonetheless how it is most commonly viewed. When people today look at a map, they can usually understand that territorial boundaries are politically constructed. It is much harder to grasp the fact that simply viewing and apprehending the world as an abstract representation via the map or the globe is also socially constructed. The bird’s-eye view of the world is now so pervasive that most people take it for granted. Yet the ability to imagine space in this manner is relatively new, rooted in Renaissance conceptions of perspective, in which an abstract observer is visually and conceptually detached from the world, imagined to have an “objective” view of space.

The contemporary geopolitical imagination hinges on the idea of perspective that allows people to imagine the world as an abstraction—or, rather, to abstract ourselves from the world as separate. Seeing the world in this manner, “as an ordered, structured whole, separates the self who is viewing the world itself. The observer stands outside of terrestrial space, so to speak, and frames the world as apart from and prior to the places and people it contains.”18 The act of dividing the social/mental realm from the material world “out there” is also the foundation of the modernist state system.19 This system simultaneously divides the earth’s surface into individual territories and divides the social stuff from those territorial containers. The resulting “floating-eye” vision of the earth’s surface transforms it into a depopulated vision of what Doreen Massey refers to as “smooth space” and Robert Sack calls “abstract space.”20 Sack elaborates:

[Modernist] territoriality in fact helps create the idea of a socially emptiable space. Take the parcel of vacant land in the city. It is desc...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Spectacular Urbanism and the New Capitals of Asia
• 1. Approaching Spectacle Geographically
• 2. From Almaty to Astana: Capitalizing the Territory in Kazakhstan
• 3. From Astana to Aral: Making Inequality Enchant in Kazakhstan’s Hinterlands
• 4. From Astana to Asia: Spectacular Cities and the New Capitals of Asia Compared
• Conclusion: Synecdoche and the Geopolitics of Spectacular Urbanism in Asia
• Notes
• Index