Posthuman Urbanism

Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space

Debra Benita Shaw

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783480814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

The World Health Organisation estimates that, by 2030, six out of every ten people in the world will live in a city. But what does it mean to inhabit the city in the twenty-first century? Posthuman Urbanism evaluates the relevance and usefulness of posthuman theory to understanding the urban subject and its conditions of possibility. It argues that contemporary science and technology is radically changing the way that we understand our bodies and that understanding ourselves as 'posthuman' offers new insights into urban inequalities. By analysing the relationship between the biological sciences and cities from the nineteenth-century onward as it is expressed in architecture, popular culture and case studies of contemporary insurgent practices, a case is made for posthuman urbanism as a significant concept for changing the meaning of urban space. It answers the question of how we can change ourselves to change the way we live with others, both human and non-human, in a rapidly urbanising world.

Part I

POLITICAL ANATOMIES OF BODIES AND CITIES

Introduction

As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, we are reaching a tipping point beyond which the majority of the world’s population will live in cities. At the same time, we are witnessing extremes of wealth and poverty with attendant rising levels of homelessness and other deprivations no longer alleviated by a shrinking welfare state. Distrustful populations thrown together by the effects of war and poverty and prone to volatility are easy prey for ideologies which divide along the lines of race, class, sexuality and religion. Neoliberal economics has created global elites without personal investment in neighbourhoods or communities. Under the terms of what Stephen Graham calls the ‘new military urbanism’ (Graham 2010, 65), cities are ‘battlespace’ (31), designated problem areas by military theorists who propagate the idea that cities are somehow, by their very nature, a breeding ground for violent insurgency. The overused and somewhat meaningless term ‘radicalisation’ encodes a fear of anti-state agitators embedded within seemingly ‘normal’ family homes. This has the effect of recasting the notion of privacy as a lack of transparency. Hence, the increased surveillance capacities of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) supported by anti terror legislation which has the effect of bringing everyone who inhabits urban space under suspicion. At the same time, police forces, equipped with enhanced powers and the weaponry to enact them, increasingly take on the character of occupying armies. ‘In the absence of a uniform-wearing enemy’, writes Graham, ‘urban publics themselves become the prime enemy’ (Graham 2010, 96).

A study by The Guardian found that 1,134 people were killed by U.S. police officers in 2015, a disproportionate number being young African American males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four.¹ Under these conditions, we need to question anew how we conceive of ideas like civilisation, community and human rights. We need to conceive a politics of urban space, which takes into account not only the diversity of urban publics but also the way in which the urban environment has responded to historical change and how this impacts on how these publics conceive of themselves and others. We need to ask questions like who (or what) the city is for; how does power circulate in urban space? What are its effects? What kinds of oppositional strategies make sense in the fight for self-determination in a militarised urban environment?

Many of these questions are, of course, not new. Henri Lefebvre’s well-known ‘Right to the City’ (originally published in 1968) is essentially an argument for the production of urban space through a bottom-up (working-class) movement which privileges urban inhabitation as the ground on which class politics is fought. ‘Only groups, social classes and class fractions capable of revolutionary initiative’, he writes, ‘can take over and realize to fruition solutions to urban problems’ (Lefebvre 1996, 154). Top-down solutions, proposed by architects and urban planners, as Lefebvre points out, not only presuppose the subject for whom they build but, despite their best efforts, they must also inevitably be subservient to the forces of capitalist production. On the face of it, this makes clear political sense. It is those who inhabit the city on a daily basis, who must negotiate its particularities and are invested in it as a space of lived experience, who must appropriate the means of urban production. This is, in fact, echoed by David Harvey in an essay also called ‘Right to the City’ published during the 2008 global financial crash. For Harvey, it is the producers of the surpluses on which capitalism thrives and which are returned to the city in massive infrastructure projects who need to claim control of those surpluses and the right, over the rights of capital investors, to direct how they are used. Harvey saw the potential to claim this right as part of the fallout from the crash, a time of insecurity when the energies that have produced urban space are laid bare and when the people who have literally made the city recognise that it has for too long been controlled by elites who have shaped it to benefit themselves.

Nevertheless, the idea of a ‘right’ to the city evokes something enshrined in law, something that can be taken away or revoked and that can be forfeited under a given set of circumstances. As I will shortly demonstrate, this idea of rights as conferred according to specific, and often arbitrary, performances of citizenship has increasingly legitimated the bunker mentality which contributes to the balkanisation of contemporary urban space where the apparatus of neoliberalism constructs a hostile environment for certain groups of urban inhabitants. At the same time, while Lefebvre, from his perspective in the late twentieth century, can be confident about what he means when he refers to the working class, Harvey is less sure about the constituency he means to address. What Harvey calls ‘this revitalized conception of the proletariat’ (Harvey 2012, 138) is a broadening of the concept to include the precarious labourers of twenty-first-century industry as well as forms of work that cross the divide between home and work life, production and reproduction. But how these diverse relationships to the apparatus of production meld into a coherent subject, a self-recognised bearer of rights, is not sufficiently addressed.

However, shifting the focus from traditional work to all forms of labour does bring into focus the web of relations that constitute everyday life and the way in which they are entangled with the materialities of built space. This was certainly appreciated by the Occupy movement which, in its appropriation of public squares and parks for a simple experiment in living otherwise, drew attention to the importance of inhabitation as a focus for political action. In a later essay, Harvey celebrated the tactics of the Occupy movement by pointing out what he considers to be ‘an obvious truth: that it is bodies on the street and in the squares, not the babble of sentiments on Twitter and Facebook, that really matter’ (Harvey 2012, 160). But what he overlooks here is not only the role that social media played in making Occupy a truly global movement but also the sense in which concepts of space have been irrevocably changed by the advent of digital mass communications. The Occupy tent cities were largely coordinated online and were, in fact, only the visible presence of a larger network which included hackers, bloggers and other supporters as well as journalists who posted to Occupy news sites² from within the camps while the mainstream press was kept on the periphery. In other words, the form of the movement should be considered inseparable from its strategies of communication.³ Like the London riots in 2011, which were largely coordinated using the Blackberry instant messaging service originally designed for business use, Occupy was a recognition of electronic networks as the model for how space is intuited, mapped and organised. The journalist Paul Mason, reporting from the front line of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, observed that network technology ‘focuses their struggle on the creation of new meanings and narratives, beyond the head-to-head confrontations with the old order on its own terrain’ (Mason 2012, 139). Another way of putting this is that the confrontation with the old order is beside the point. What matters about Occupy and the Arab Spring is that they realised a new terrain brought about by the hybrid space of contemporary urbanism (de Souza e Silva 2006). The urban now is augmented reality, the terrain of the old order overlaid by multiple, mutable new cartographies.

Under these conditions, Lefebvre’s ‘perceived, conceived, lived’ (Lefebvre 1991, 39) triad bears re-examination. This describes the relationship between the overcoded ‘abstract’ (51) space of the capitalist state, the space of the body and the spaces of symbolic self-identification. For Lefebvre, knowledge of space requires that it be understood as a process which responds to power relations and their expression in cultural forms. What Lefebvre inaugurated, in fact, was a means to understand the relationship between space and subjectivisation. If space were to be an ‘object’ of study, he theorised, the opposing ‘subject’ could not be presupposed. Differentiating between ‘representations of space’, which emerge from the relations of production and are thus coded according to dominant ideologies, and ‘representational spaces’ (33, emphasis in original), which belong to the realm of desire, the unconscious and artistic and literary expression, he writes:

Knowledge falls into a trap when it makes representations of space the basis for the study of ‘life’, for in doing so it reduces lived experience. The object of knowledge is, precisely, the fragmented and uncertain connection between elaborated representations of space on the one hand and representational spaces (along with their underpinnings) on the other; and this ‘object’ implies (and explains) a subject – that subject in whom lived, perceived and conceived (known) come together within a spatial practice. (Lefebvre 1991, 230, emphasis in original)

Spatial practice then describes the lived everyday reality of subjects engaged in the reproduction of social life and the circulations of power through which they are defined and constrained. In Lefebvrian terms, it is possible to argue that new representational spaces emerge from the terrain of the networks where spatial practice constructs a correspondence between information space and the lived space of the body. Following Deleuze and Guattari, Andy Merrifield suggests that ‘something like a deterritorialization of the body occurs in that strange, liminal reality found in virtual space’ (Merrifield 2013, 110), such that identification in terms of specific locations gives way to a distributed self which, perhaps briefly but nevertheless significantly, cannot be contained by the abstract space of the old order dependent on the ideology of territorial rights.

In a later publication, Merrifield suggests correspondences between contemporary urban space and ancient Greek cities, ‘excepting that the agora has now gotten bigger and vaster – a virtual and physical world combined into one’ (Merrifield 2014, 10). Of course, the idea of the Internet as a new commons was a founding principle of the techno-utopianism of the late twentieth century and events since have proved its primary function as a playground for capital rather than a space where a new democracy may emerge. However, there is something persuasive in Merrifield’s idea of the ‘universal citizen’ (2014, 9) as an inhabitant of the hybrid city because it suggests a common ground and experience which coexists with a recognition of differences. Indeed, the solidarity and mutual recognition which suffused social media at the height of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements certainly felt like the emergence of something like a universal citizenship, albeit brief and seemingly unsustainable. It is also worth remembering that Occupy movement, in particular, was plagued, in some locations, by sexual harassment, a problem some might have thought belonged to the old order. Nevertheless, these were social movements that combined a critical awareness of thinking space differently with a commitment to social change. Together with the idea of the deterritorialised body, something begins to emerge here which suggests what Harvey’s revitalised proletarian subject might look like, or at least how we might begin to conceive of contemporary urban subjectivities and the spatial practices through which they are produced.

This book then is a contribution to critical urban theory which takes as its basic premise that both bodies and the way that they inhabit urban space are profoundly affected by what Donna J. Haraway has called ‘the social relations of science and technology’ (1991, 163). This refers not only to the technologies that mediate our lived reality and produce contemporary representations of space but also to the way in which contemporary science rewrites bodies as post-organic assemblages of viral, genetic and bacteriological data. Under these conditions, the criteria which have previously secured a distinction between humans and other animals and humans and machines are proving increasingly unstable, to the extent that accepted cartographies of both bodies and cities are brought into doubt. It is the space opened up by this blurring of conceptual boundaries which posthuman theory takes advantage of. Rather than question what it means to be human, posthumanists are concerned with troubling the concepts that have produced something called the human as a category in the first place. What I am concerned with here is how these ideas can contribute towards a new politics of urban space. As Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, bodies and cities are mutually constitutive (Grosz 1995, 103–10). How then might new mappings of urban space which engage with divergent ontologies contribute to thinking social relations differently? What are the political possibilities of conceiving of ourselves as ‘posthuman’? My approach will be to engage with these questions bearing in mind always that who ‘we’ are in this scenario is not to be taken for granted nor is a new politics of space simply given in the merging of bodies and advanced technologies. Posthuman urbanism, as I will demonstrate, is a way of describing the mutual constitution of bodies and cities under contemporary conditions, a critical approach which exposes the contradictions between these conditions and the radical urban forms that ‘are latent, yet systematically suppressed, within contemporary cities’ (Brenner 2009, 204) as well as a move towards exploring what, in Rosi Braidotti’s words, ‘posthuman bodies can do’ (Braidotti 2013, 104, my emphasis).

STRANGE ZONES

In this introduction, I will begin by exploring what urban space means at this point in the second decade of the twenty-first century. What kind of idea is ‘the city’ if there is no longer any substantial ‘outside’ from which it might be defined? Graham’s stark analysis of cities as battlespace is certainly accurate, particularly given the fallout from the Arab Spring which, in Syria in particular, has resulted in unprecedented escalations of urban warfare directed against largely civilian populations. At the same time, as Graham makes clear, the techniques through which urban space is militarised also aid neoliberal agendas of deindustrialisation, privatisation and the deliberate inflation of the service economy. The city as a recognised centre of administrative and political power recedes and is replaced by a series of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘strange zones … where it is impossible to decide what is private and what is public’ (2005). Strange zones emerge where public space has been sold into corporate ownership, where the open spaces and streets of the city are controlled by surveillance and rules of access. They are also the zones where accepted distinctions between public and private no longer make sense because the non-presence of electronic communication has superseded the presence of the body as a determinant of urban organisation. This was prefigured in William Gibson’s 1986 SF novel Neuromancer where he invites us to ‘program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen’.

Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. (Gibson 1986, 57)

What Gibson is describing here is a form of what the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler calls ‘posturbanism’ (Vidler 1992, 177), which is characterised by a loss of the familiar coordinates of the modern city. In Gibson’s map, the implication is that 100-year-old industrial parks have been repurposed as server farms which are the production hot houses of post-industrial wealth. The exchange of data, controlled by algorithms and indifferent to spatial and temporal constraints, has largely supplanted the labouring body which was the central figure for Marx and his followers and around which the social and spatial relations of the modern city were organised. Posturbanism signifies the passing of modernist utopian projections which built monuments to a future that would never be and thus the end of a particular form of urban anticipation in which the world to come was inscribed in built forms: ‘a mechanism’, as Vidler points out, ‘learned from cartography and applied by architecture since the reinvention of perspective’ (1992, 182).

Agamben refers to the posturban city as ‘metropolis … a space where a huge process of creation of subjectivity is taking place’ (2005). It is this process which he believes we need to understand, not on the level of economic or social structures but on ‘the ontological level or Spinozian level that puts under question the subjects’ ability/power to act’. For Agamben, metropolis has a specific meaning. He uses the term to differentiate between the ancient Greek polis and ‘the new urban fabric’ which emerged with the shift to modern biopower or governmentality as defined by Michel Foucault. In other words, the question is to be posed in terms of how contemporary urban forms produce and are produced by the action of discourse on bodies and how techniques which characterise urban life are internalised in the process of subject formation. My response to Agamben’s call for an analysis of metropolis as ‘a dispositif or a group of dispositifs’ (2005), therefore, is to explore the cognitive cartography of urban space as it is produced through scientific discourse, specifically the discourses of the biological sciences. This will enable me to demonstrate how the developing field of posthuman theory can open a space for re-examination of urban politics. In what follows, I will propose:

That the concept of the posturban should be extended to account for the new spaces of representation which I have suggested are produced by the concatenation of networked and urban space. This includes the redefinition of the city as battlespace and the architectural and institutional structures which contribute to what Merrifield calls the ‘neo-Haussmanization’ (Merrifield 2014, xii) of the contemporary city. Haussmanization is a term generally employed to refer to the restructuring of Paris by Georges-Eugène (Baron) Haussmann in the nineteenth century. Under the patronage of Napoleon III, Haussmann replaced the winding medieval streets of the city with wide, straight boulevards. He also considerably improved the street lighting and installed a railway system that would facilitate the smooth movement of goods and people. At the same time, he effectively banished the poor from the city centre and instituted a system of social control that contributed to the eventual failure of the Paris Commune of 1871. ‘Famously’, writes James Donald, ‘the boulevards provided the shortest routes between the barracks and working class districts’ (Donald 1999, 46). Neo-Haussmanization then, for Merrifield, is a similar process effected by neoliberal economics on a global scale where whole populations are disenfranchised by disconnection from social structures, monetary elites hold sway over urban space, its architecture and organisation and military urbanism keeps populations in check. In other words, and as I will further explain in the next part of this introduction, the posturban does the work of referring to the socio-economic conditions under which the spectacle of the contemporary city is realised as well as describing the effects of those conditions on the materiality of urban space. Further, I propose:

That the power relations of posturbanism can be read through the new cartographies of bodily distribution that it produces. Mapping should be understood here as a political activity which not only positions bodies according to race, gender, sexuality and physical ability but also actively produces how those bodies should be understood. The question here is: given the posturban, what form is given to Agamben’s ‘group of dispositifs’ and how do they construct the relationship between modes of inhabitation and corporeal forms? This gives rise to a further proposition which is:

That the production of strategic norms for bodies and their modes of inhabitation are dependent on the relationship between built space and the discourse of the biological sciences. Architecture and urban planning presuppose specific bodies and their appropriate modes of behaviour as ratified by the ‘human’ sciences. These, I would argue, are the powerful discourses which largely structure Agamben’s group of dispositifs. As subsequent chapters will make clear, the sedimentation of urban forms through modernity is largely inseparable from the way that the human has been conceived, historically, as a morphological entity. At the same time, the relationship between capital and everyday life exerts pressure on these forms, forcing them to restructure to accommodate new modes of communication and living and working practices...