Securing Urbanism: Contagion, Power and Risk 9811599637, 9789811599637

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Mark Laurence Jackson Mark Hanlen

Securing Urbanism Contagion, Power and Risk

Securing Urbanism

Mark Laurence Jackson · Mark Hanlen

Securing Urbanism Contagion, Power and Risk

Mark Laurence Jackson Auckland University of Technology Auckland, New Zealand

Mark Hanlen Stephenson and Turner Architects Auckland, New Zealand

ISBN 978-981-15-9963-7 ISBN 978-981-15-9964-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Helen and Brett —MH For Pat and Anne —MJ

Acknowledgements

There is something pleasing, fulfilling, redeeming even, when we ‘authors’ get to the point of thanking those who, in fact, made something possible. Heidegger famously slides between thanking and thinking. And the task of thinking, what calls it and what it calls for, always already imbricates some others, a multitude even. We thank our editor at Springer, Nick Melchoir, for the enthusiasm he demonstrated from the beginning for us to get this project published. His responsiveness to the machinery of publication, along with his ready acceptance of a manuscript considerably longer than the one anticipated, is remarkable. We also acknowledge the assistance of the production team at Springer, headed by Subodh Kumar Mohar Sahu, for the attention paid in getting this book published during a globally dislocating time. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers of our book proposal for their positive responses and important critiques of the project outline. We especially thank the two reviewers of the final manuscript, Stephen Zepke and Michael Tawa, for their insights into the book, its potentials and minor shortcomings. We have benefitted greatly from their comments. We want to thank Mark Jazombek and Stuart Elden for early encouragement with pursuing this research. Their very early responses, in a sense, got this work underway. We also thank Marnie Blank for her early encouragement in pursuing the project. Maria O’Connor undertook a close and critical reading of the final manuscript and we are grateful for her comments and insights. She was also instrumental in discussing chapter developments, along with aspects of the work of Derrida and Blanchot. We also benefitted greatly from discussion with Victoria Jackson-Wyatt on especially detailed relations between the works of Foucault, Deleuze and Blanchot. And we thank Alexander Jackson-Wyatt for his critical response to the manuscript. Finally, we acknowledge the support of Auckland University of Technology in providing research time to complete this project. Auckland, New Zealand August 2020

Mark Hanlen Mark Laurence Jackson

vii

Contents

Part I

Politics of Contagion

1 Urbanizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.1 Two Contentions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.2 Manifold Urbanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Security and Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.1 Post-conflict Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.2 Divided Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.3 Insurgent Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Surveillance and Collectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.1 De-modernization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.2 Unjust Urbanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.3 A Spinozist Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.4 Civil War Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Planetary Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.1 Urban Fabrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.2 The ‘Urban Age’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.3 A New Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.4 New Urban Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.5 Birth of the Urban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.1 Governmentality of the Urban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.2 Urbanizing Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 3 3 6 7 7 11 17 23 23 27 29 33 35 35 40 41 43 45 50 50 53 54

2 Cholera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 Social Medicine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Securing Disease . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Noso-Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 Somatocracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.3 Disease Does not Exist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61 61 61 63 63 66 70 ix

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2.2.4 Living Conditions and Pre-dispositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.5 Infection or Contagion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.6 Aptitude and Immunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.7 Planetary Coding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Pandemics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 The Cholera Epidemics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Treating Disease and Managing Risk: Differential Foci . . . . 2.3.3 Plague as Allegory in Civic Perfection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.4 Urban Sanitation: The Bio-Politics of Liberalism . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Biopolitics and Liberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.1 Governmental Rationality of the Bio-Political: Liberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.2 Neo-Liberalism and Environmental Responsibility . . . . . . . . 2.4.3 Greening the Entrepreneurial Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.1 Post-political Welfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Sub-prime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 Economic Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 Households . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3 Securitizing Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.4 Commercializing Disease . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.5 Technologies of Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Welfare Housing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Urban Determinants of the Global Financial Crisis . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Architectural Agency: The Crisis of Modern Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 The Interventionist City and Truman’s Fair Deal . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.4 Housing the Poor: Self-as-Enterprise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.5 HOPE VI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.6 Section 8: Housing Choice Vouchers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.7 De-concentrating Poverty: Discipline and Control . . . . . . . . 3.3 Neoliberal Housing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Economic Welfare to Laissez-Faire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Subprime: Liberalising Home Ownership and the Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3 Savings and Loans Crises: Secondary Mortgage Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.4 Securitisation: Mortgage Market Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.5 Bad Credit I: Discrimination and Government Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.6 Bad Credit II: Subprime Mortgages and Predatory Lending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

71 72 72 73 74 74 79 82 86 92 92 95 101 104 104 107 113 113 113 115 118 120 123 125 125 128 131 135 138 141 142 144 144 147 148 149 150 152

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3.3.7 Forever Blowing Bubbles: Housing Market Exuberance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.8 Deregulation: The Repeal of Glass-Steagall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 The Global Financial Crash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.1 The End of Risk I: Securitization of Securitization . . . . . . . . 3.4.2 The End of Risk II: Bad Ratings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.3 The End of Risk III: Risk Models and the Rise of Quants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.4 The Return of Risk: The Subprime Collapse . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.1 Developing a Risk-Free Private Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.2 Malthusian Returns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part II

154 156 158 158 160 161 163 165 165 167 168

Securing the Urban

4 Spatiality & Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.1 Questions of Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Reading Foucault . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Requiem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Do not Ask Me Who I Am . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 Fragments of a Will-to-Know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 The Hollow of Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Spatialization and Verbalization: Spaces of Discourse . . . . . 4.3.2 Continuities and Discontinuities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.3 Archive, Episteme, Discourse, Historical a Priori . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 Fabula and Spacing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

175 175 175 181 181 185 188 195 195 200 203 207 207 214

5 Governing Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.1 Aleatory Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Exercise of Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.1 Truth and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 Discipline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.3 The Human Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.4 Normalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Power/Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 Genealogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 Power and Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.3 The Dispositif . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Governmentality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.1 The Dispositif and the Urban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.2 Governmentality and Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

221 221 221 223 223 227 229 232 235 235 240 242 245 245 252

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5.4.3 Raison d’État . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.1 Political Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

258 261 261 267

6 Biopolitical Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.1 Power, Strategy and Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Freedom to Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 A Pre-Emptory ‘Afterword’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.2 Power Over Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Biopower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 Biopower and Bio-Racism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 Bio-Political Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.3 Biopolitics and Discursive Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.4 Movement of Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Destruction of Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.1 Freedom and Historical Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.2 Anonymity of the ‘It Is Said’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.3 Destructing Historical Sources: Governmentality of News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.4 Otherwise Than Who We Are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.5 Alethurgy and Parrh¯esia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ¯ 6.5.1 Ethos and Pathos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

271 271 271 273 273 278 281 281 286 289 291 294 294 298 301 304 306 310 310 315

Part III Post-political Urbanism 7 Indistinct Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.1 This Living Being with Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ¯ 7.2 Al¯etheia Politeia Ethos ...................................... 7.2.1 Transforming the Soul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.2 Ethical Differentiations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.3 The Parrhesiastic Standpoint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.4 Polis Andra Didaskei—The City Makes the Man . . . . . . . . . 7.2.5 L¯eth¯e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 States of Exception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.1 Parrh¯esia and the Urban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.2 States of Exception—Beyond Human Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.3 Threshold: Zo¯e, Bios, and Intrusion of the State . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.4 Bio-Power and the Sacred Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Dislocating Localizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.1 The Indistinct Political . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.2 The ‘Camp’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

323 323 323 325 325 327 329 331 335 337 337 341 345 349 353 353 357

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7.4.3 Space, Politics and Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.4 Foucault/Agamben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5.1 Uselessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

360 364 368 368 369

8 Common Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1.1 The Political Animal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 The Lifedeath of Biopower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.1 Origins and Traces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.2 The Forgetting of Heidegger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.3 Habitability of Lifedeath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 Collectivity of the Multitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.1 Spatialities of Capital-Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.2 Radical Immanence of Being-With . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.3 Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.4 Empire and Biopower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.5 Agamben and Negri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.6 Cities Without Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.7 Hospitality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Needing Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4.1 Stowaway of the Political . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4.2 Use—Xρη´ (khré) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4.3 Slaves to Be-ing’s Forgetting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4.4 Concernful Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5.1 Habitual Impropriety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

375 375 375 376 376 381 383 387 387 390 393 397 401 402 407 409 409 412 415 418 422 422 425

9 Cruel Festival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1.1 Pandemics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 SARS-CoV-2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.1 Covid-19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.2 Global Inadequate Responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.3 Crossroads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2.4 Herd Immunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Communovirus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.1 ‘The Enemy Is Not Outside’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.2 Bio-Cultural ‘Indifference’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.3 A ‘World’ Broken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.4 Breaking Whatever Is Broken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3.5 Bio-Hazardous Humanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 Crypt of the Genome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4.1 Pharmakos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

431 431 431 436 436 438 441 446 449 449 451 453 456 458 462 462

xiv

Contents

9.4.2 Writing Lifedeath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4.3 Writing the Blanks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4.4 Subtracting from Chance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4.5 Viral Writing Surfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5.1 Cruel Festival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5.2 Revolt’s Mythic Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5.3 Viral Returns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

465 468 470 473 474 474 477 478 479

Part I

Politics of Contagion

But cease now, and nevermore hereafter Awaken such lament; For what has happened keeps with it everywhere preserved a decision of completion. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

Chapter 1

Urbanizing

1.1 Introduction 1.1.1 Two Contentions There are two directions or pathways this book takes up, that of late twentieth and early twenty-first century political theory, and that of paradigmatic ways by which the urban may be understood as habitation. The book does not aim to settle on a grand synthesis of these themes, as if the urban may be distilled as an effect of political practice. Nor is the political assayable as condition of or conditioned by the urban. In terms developed by Michel Foucault, there is always something disjunctive, something non-homologous or non-isomorphic, between practices and discourses and, perhaps, it is this disjunctive relation that the book aims at, as one of its effects. The ‘urban’ is not a concrete universal, nor the summation of a heterogeneity of descriptions. ‘It’ is something practiced before ‘it’ is named or known. However, there is the pressing need, today, to give voice to increasing inequities with respect to what is called ‘citizen rights’ and what is deemed necessary for the securitizing of populations. Between that voicing of inequity and that disjunctive effect, Securing Urbanism aims to chart a trajectory of Foucault’s thinking on space and power that others may also have taken up, though perhaps in differing ways, as essential thinking for a politics of urbanizing.1 1 We

want to begin, here at the beginning of this book, with a peculiar distinction made by Martin Heidegger, concerning grammar and translation. For Heidegger, it was especially translation from Greek to Latin. We will return from time to time to Heidegger’s concern with such issues of translation and how they determine a Western metaphysical history of Greek thinking. In this initial note, our concern is with how we ‘say’ the urban, and an essential difference between thinking this notion substantively or verbally, as ‘urbanization’ or ‘urbanizing’. Is this really important, you might ask? Heidegger takes considerable issue with, for example, the difference between thinking ‘being’ as presence or as the participle, ‘presencing’. He suggests the grammatical tense of ‘participle’ is a ‘participating’ encountering with the word, neither strictly nominal nor verbal. In his Heraclitus © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. L. Jackson and M. Hanlen, Securing Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4_1

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1 Urbanizing

This opening chapter to Securing Urbanism has a number of aims. One is to introduce a broad, and at times, conflicting series of contemporary paradigms by which urbanising is understood. This chapter does not aim at resolving differences between competing theories of urbanism or differing accounts of the political dimensions to urban analysis. Indeed, this heterogeneity and its ongoing maintenance, its inhering to difference, to agonistics, is one of the current markers of urban governance regimes, variously described as post-democratic or post-political. Along with introducing a range of contemporary paradigms by which urbanism is understood or theorised, this chapter also introduces a series of paradigms by which the notion of security is currently discussed.2 Some of these frameworks for understanding security come from discursive fields that especially engage contemporary accounts of urban warfare, but also contemporary military planning for urban warfare which is, in part, activated by shifting understandings of urban design, in order to ‘passively’ respond, pre-emptively, to potentials for urban military conflict. This extends to urban policing which in the twenty-first century is more often adopting military or paramilitary tactics and weapons (Basham 2018; Davis 2019; Kaplan and Miller 2019; Krahmann 2005; Nishiyama 2018; Pasquetti 2019; Stavrianakis and Stern 2018; Tahir 2019).3 Under circumstances increasingly planned-for in densely populated cities, there emerges a combined role for policing and military agencies, not simply in countering insurgency or terrorism but in circumstances of everyday policing routines. These phenomena are now well documented by researchers in security studies and urbanism. The notion of security is broad, and pertains as well to more conventional notions of urban governance with respect to the securing of urban services, which may include provision of health care, education, food and shelter, what is generally understood as social security, markedly contrasted by the emergence of the term, homeland security. However, just what constitutes urban services, their make-up, lectures, Heidegger insists that ‘being’ is not ‘heard’ as a substantive, but as a participle. However, settling on hearing ‘being’ as a participle, that is ‘verbally’, Heidegger yet avoids the Latin ‘verbum’: “Instead of verbum (verbal), a term used by Latin grammarians, we will say ‘time-word’” (Heidegger 2018, 46–47). Heidegger emphasises that in every word “being is thought and named, even if we never expressly think about it or speak it” (46). His propensity is to encounter words in their ‘timebeing’, in how they participate in temporalising. Hence, we emphasize there is something more than grammar in differentiating ‘security’ and ‘securing’ or ‘urban’ and ‘urbanizing’. 2 On the notion of ‘paradigm’, it is instructive to look at Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the methods of Michel Foucault, expressly on how Foucault himself engages the paradigmatic (Agamben 2009, 9). This issue is discussed in Chapter 4 of Securing Urbanism, “Spatiality and Power.” While we engage in this current chapter with a series of paradigmatic differences in practices of urbanizing, especially with respect to understandings of epistemologies and ontologies, we do not, in similar fashion, engage with notions of securitizing or securing, though recognise the extent to which differing understandings of ‘the urban’ elicit different emphases or understandings of just what requires securing. The question of security unfolds throughout the book, and is further addressed in the concluding chapter, concerned with contemporary forces of risk and insecurity. 3 While we discuss below literature that directly engages urbanism, policing and militarism, we emphasise a growing body of literature across a spectrum of journals that deals directly with the increasing presence of para-military strategies in everyday urban policing routines. These journals especially include: Security Dialogue, but also Public Culture, The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Conflict, Security and Development.

1.1 Introduction

5

their supply, and their affordance, defines many of the differences in urban studies literature. An aim of this chapter is to indicate a number of those key differences in terms of how security is itself understood and how urbanism is defined. One contention of this book is that contemporary accounts of urbanism or security have strategic bearing on how the mutuality of their agency is to be thought. There is another contention of this book that we are wanting this opening chapter to, at least, introduce, as its argument is slowly developed in the chapters that follow and comes genuinely into focus in the book’s concluding chapter. While we recognise a heterogeneous array of paradigms by which urbanism is understood and discussed, along with implicit or explicit understandings of securitising, our contention is that there is an ontological horizon from which these manifold ways of defining or describing the urban commence. One of the aims of this book is to draw out this ontology of urbanism and security, an ontology whose securing may be determined in the Greek founding of Western metaphysics with Plato and Aristotle, along with Platonic, and especially Aristotelian, understandings of the city and of political thought. This originary horizon privileges Aristotle’s pre-eminent understanding of kinesis as that which relates dynamis to energia—movement, power and what is actual.4 The city is essentially movement, flow, whose securitising at times requires impediments to flow and at other times requires unimpeded flow.5 With Chapter One, we discuss a notion of the Greek city in contexts that are prior to Platonic and Aristotelian thinking. We see that the city was anything but founded on an originary notion of movement. It was founded on something far more obtuse: L¯eth¯e, oblivious forgetting. Our contention, to be introduced here though genuinely discussed at the book’s conclusion, is that perhaps this ontological horizon founded in kinesis, as old as metaphysics itself, is opening to something else, such that a pre-Platonic L¯eth¯e may become recognised as something decidedly urbanizing, yet no longer recognisable as an urbanism—of whatever description—constituted in notions of flow.

4 Though Heidegger engages Aristotle on kinesis, dynamis and energia in a number of locales, our reference point here is Heidegger’s “On the Essence and Concept of Ùσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, I” (Heidegger 1998a, 183–230). Aristotle defines ‘nature’ in terms of movement, itself categorized, in part, as “growth and diminution” or “alteration and change” but also as “rest” as a kind of movement (190). These overlapping ‘appearances’ have, for Aristotle, a “fundamental character” he terms μεταβoλº (metabolism): “Every instance of movedness is a change from something into something” (191). We cannot discuss this fully at the moment, though recognize in the urbanizing paradigms we outline below the extent to which Aristotle’s understanding of ϕÙσις as αρχ ` η´ χινºσως (originary movedness) holds sway. Though, as Heidegger emphasises, Aristotelian understandings of ‘change of place’ have no relation to modernity’s understanding of space as infinite and homogeneous (190). What, for Aristotle, is potentiality and actuality, likewise, require us to rethink our common notions. For discussion on dynamis and energia, see especially 218ff. 5 Again, we emphasise, with Heidegger, the Cartesian break with Aristotelian understanding of movement. See, for example, Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture” (Heidegger 2002, 57–85), discussed further below. In Chapter 8, in a discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘inoperativity’, we return to this Aristotelian understanding of potential and actuality, in what, for Agamben, is a paradigmatic break with its legacy (see Agamben 1999; 2017d, 1077–1288).

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1 Urbanizing

1.1.2 Manifold Urbanisms There are dozens of academic and professional journals devoted to urbanism, urban planning, city design and urban development. There are, equally, numerous book series from a raft of international publishers devoted to urbanism, urban ecology, planning and building. There are also many journals that specialise in security studies, whether that term implicates directly policing and military engagements, or implies social and economic planning, governmental policy or public welfare. Our concern in this introductory chapter is to present a plural register of what we have been able to discern from current and recent English language journal and monograph publications, with the hope that we provide evidence of many of the paradigmatic differences that ‘circulate’ within the broad discursive fields that constitute the discourses of urbanism. Without a doubt, our positioning of the fields cannot be anything but skewed, limited by our particular horizonal disclosure. And, no doubt, there will be, for some, glaring omissions from the limited corpus we aim to discuss. Others, perhaps, have done this survey better than we can.6 However, our bias takes us to an aspect of this book that we consider imperative. The book presents its research in an anything but settled way. We do not want smooth and secure overviews, but rather disruptions and discontinuities to what should perhaps be seen as discursive wholes. From chapter to chapter, the book’s concerns shift direction, introduce new positions, some of which hold, while others are left in speculative openness. So also with this account of various discursive ensembles of the urban. We do not suggest they are each ultimately saying the same thing or addressing the same thing, the same reference points, even as we discern that founding metaphysical ground in kinesis. Nor do we aim to find beneath what they each is saying the truth to what is being said. From this we find the urban as discursive ensemble to be heterogeneous and fractured, not even pieced together in fragments but rather left as a series of differential forms of knowing, whose emergence comes from the exercise of particular accumulations or relations of force, particular institutional sites, and their effects.7 Our concern is not so much with what is discussed in each of the accounts we provide, but rather with how these accounts each have effects within its particular discursive field. In this sense, our aim is to assemble an accumulation of effects, or how practices of urban discourse secure their objects of knowledge. We might call these practices “games

6 We

can especially point to Neil Brenner’s 2019 New urban spaces: Urban theory and the scale question. Brenner’s coverage of literature in the field is encyclopaedic. 7 Our aim in the first chapter is to introduce a range of critical positions regarding a theorising of urban studies, along with issues of security or securitizing of the urban. At the same time, we aim to alert readers to our leaning to aspects of the work of Foucault, in particular, with respect to diagnoses or approaches to these various positions or paradigms. Hence, a Foucauldian ‘vocabulary’ or lexicon secretes its way into discussion. Our aim is to introduce a number of terms or concepts or approaches, especially from Foucault (and Agamben), that will be significantly amplified, discussed and critiqued in subsequent chapters. In this way, we hope to provide some indication in the discussions that follow where or how subsequent chapters extend some of the essential concerns we aim to initially develop here.

1.1 Introduction

7

of truth” rather than the accumulation of ‘evidence’ for an expository or descriptive knowing, concerns with what happens rather than with what is.8

1.2 Security and Order 1.2.1 Post-conflict Cities Our initial discussion throws us into an arena that may appear to be quite marginal to general concerns with orthodox understandings of urbanism. This initial focus is on some of the work of the British researcher, Alice Hills, who is currently visiting professor of conflict and security studies at the universities of Durham and Leeds. Her research background is in urban security operations and police-military relations (Hills 2018, iv). Her book, Policing Post-conflict Cities (Hills 2009), opens with the following observation: Almost every post-conflict city experiences acute insecurity. Baghdad, Kabul, Mogadishu, Monrovia and Sarajevo all saw an increase in looting, revenge attacks, armed robbery and kidnappings. Street level security was minimal as factional leaders positioned themselves, occupying militaries protected themselves, and indigenous police burned their uniforms, or hid in their neighbourhoods. Later, Western attempts to reconstruct indigenous security forces on democratic lines ended in failure. … This book is about the re-emergence of order in such cities, and the challenge of managing it. (Hills 2009, 1)9

8 We

are referencing Foucault here concerning his discussion of two differing regimes of truth, one he terms ‘truth-event’ in distinction to ‘truth–knowledge’. This distinction is essential to Foucault’s understanding of power, in that truth/power is a modality of truth-as-event and of the technology of this truth-event.: “Showing that scientific demonstration is basically only a ritual, that the supposedly universal subject of knowledge is really only an individual historically qualified according to certain modalities, and that the discovery of truth is really a certain modality of the production of truth; putting what is given as the truth of observation or demonstration back on the basis of rituals, of the qualifications of the knowing individual, of the truth-event system, is what I would call the archaeology of knowledge” (Foucault 2006, 238). 9 In The punitive society (2015), Foucault has developed an interesting correlate with Hills. Foucault is discussing and citing P. Colquhoun, who founded the notion of police in the U.K., with his 1795 A treatise on the police of the metropolis. Colquhoun notes: “Wherever proper police attaches, good order and security will prevail; where it does not, confusion, irregularity, outrages, and crimes must be expected.” (Foucault 2015, 108–109). This quote could almost have been cited from Hills on securitizing’s essential concern with disorder. The innovation that Foucault is recognising, with the formation of police, is the forging of a relation between law and morality, something that penal theorists, especially in France, avoided, suggesting that law does not need to address morality, but rather the overall social good. For Colquhoun, law is effective—dealing with social interest—inasmuch as it addresses individual moral action, sanctioning morality (109). Colquhoun was asked to develop approaches to secure the docklands of London, a territory becoming increasingly vulnerable due to the increasing concentration of merchant wealth, wealth now materialising in a new form, that of commodities, brought about by capitalist production and trade. Hence, policing targeted the securitising of the merchant and aristocratic classes. Where policing was formerly concerned especially with vagrancy, the idle, targeting the non-employed, its focus increasingly became the

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1 Urbanizing

Central to Hills’s thesis is establishing an appropriate understanding of the relation between order and security, where security is not so much an end achieved by the institution of order, but more a process through which order itself is incrementally founded (2). Hill’s argument is that contemporary conflict is especially pronounced in urban environments. Though, this argument is complex, and relates to perceptions of how military campaigns are understood and deployed, along with the increasingly complex relations between what has traditionally been understood as the role of policing, distinct from the role of military incursion or presence.10 This background to urbanisation is discussed in Hill’s earlier book, Future war in cities: Rethinking a liberal dilemma (Hills 2004). In a review of this publication, Michael Evans, editor of the Australian army journal, emphasised Hill’s prognosis of the lack of understanding that Western military forces have on the likely frameworks of twenty-first century warfare. Evans notes: There is no coherent strategic theory of urban war, and the military implications of rapid urbanisation have no place in current strategic studies programs. This is a situation that security analysts and operational planners must urgently address. Urban operations require geopolitical insight and an analysis of disciplines that traditionally have lain outside the field of defence and strategic studies. These disciplines include urban studies, disaster management, law enforcement and policing, architecture, anthropology, sociology and geography. Hills argues that the strategic challenges of urban operations must involve military professionals and security practitioners in developing knowledge of the technical-social factors underpinning urban infrastructure and the human geography of cities. (Evans 2005, 292)

The prognosis by military analysts referenced by both Hills and Evans is that with significant increases in urban populations in the global South, with estimates of the world’s population doubling by 2050 (Habitat III Secretariat 2017, 3), military conflict will shift significantly from rural combat zones to urban environments.11 Hills emphasises two things here. One is the necessity for military forces in the West to develop better tactical understanding of how to negotiate conflict in dense urban zones. The other, learnt from late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century ‘working’ class, a class concentration in docklands and factory cities. See Foucault (2015), Lecture 7 February, 99–121. 10 Hills’s book is concerned with empirical analyses of urban environments that have come under civil war conflict or international forces attack. The focus is on the civil structures in the direct aftermath of conflict, and the relations that subtend between security and order. Security, in general, is recognised as a necessary determinant in the establishment of order, though the relations between the two are complex. Emphasis is given to the notion of policing, which is defined as a governmental operation different to the role of military occupation in the aftermath of conflict: “Order results where there is agreement about the rules governing the city concerned, irrespective of the precise state of security obtaining” (27). Emphasis is also given to the fact that generally military training does not cover the basics of policing, that their roles in terms of security and order are different. Though it is equally recognised the range of convergences now operating between military operations and policing operations. 11 The Hills/Evans discussion on localities of warfare, contrasting rural and urban zones, pre-empts discussion that follows in the chapter, concerning the work of the urban theorists, Neil Brenner, Christian Schmid and Ross Adams on this binary rural/urban, which they aim to reconfigure in new understandings of urbanization that are planetary in scale.

1.2 Security and Order

9

urban battle zones, is that current urban military tactics are brutal. Hills herself is brutally matter-of-fact on this: The West’s experience in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq is misleading because it detracts from the fact that urban war is probably the single most difficult form of warfare it can encounter. It remains a brutal and exhausting matter involving significant collateral damage (that is to personnel or property not forming part of an authorised target) and casualties, and the closest the West comes to pre-industrial forms of conflict. The traditional core capability of aggressive close combat—the Hunter-Killer philosophy of “What I find, I can kill”—remains essential for successful operations. (Hills 2009, 3)

We might well say that the kinds of cities that Hills has researched and continues to research, for example, current securitising measures in Mogadishu (Hills 2018), and more broadly in sub-Sahara Africa, have little resemblance to the kinds of cities within which many live in Western metropolitan centres.12 However, a considerable body of literature on urbanism and security suggests otherwise, that the kinds of concerns expressed by Hills and Evans are not extreme, relating only to marginalised or ‘under-developed’ nation-states, but are very much the concerns of political theorists of Western democratic processes and urban environments, that are increasingly being defined in terms of post-democratic processes and post-political governance (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010; Graham 2004, 2010; Swyngedouw 2015, 2018a; Swyngedouw and Wilson 2014; Weizman 2017). These constitute, as well, a body of critical writing on urbanism whose focus is on ‘urbicide’ (See Coward 2008) and processes of ‘de-modernisation’ of conflict cities at various scales of effect (Graham 2010), along with the harnessing of military strategy and architectural knowhow for developing effective alternatives to Hill’s ‘Hunter-Killer’ pre-industrial forms of urban conflict in, for example, Israeli military tactics in the Gaza or those of U.S. forces in occupied Iraq (Weizman 2007; Graham 2010).13 These will be discussed in sections that follow. What is important to consider in the kind of discursive frameworks that Hills assembles, in the specific urban research arenas that become her focus, their margins with respect to Western norms of law and order, along with minimal demands for citizen rights and security, is that it is precisely these Western norms that are most 12 With

respect to the developing of new urban models in Africa, see Côte-Roy and Moser (2019). Their paper, “Does Africa not deserve shiny new cities? The power of seductive rhetoric around new cities in Africa” “investigates the enablers, advocates and boosters of new cities, represented mainly by states, corporations, non-profits and consultants to render visible the complex network of relations and private interests that support and enable the creation and circulation of the new cities model in Africa” (Côte-Roy and Moser 2019, 2391). 13 It is instructive to contrast the discussion by Evans on the military campaign within the city of Fallujah in Iraq with that of Hills and the framing adopted by Graham. See Graham (2005), Evans (2009a, 531; 2009b, 36–38), and Hills (2005). Returning to our earlier discussion on Foucault and truth, as exemplars of the production of truth-events, their differentials open the strategic relations of force upon which truth-as-demonstration, or truth-knowledge rests. ‘Urbicide’ is a term initially coined during the 1960s by Michael Moorcock, and used especially in the U.S. in contexts of urban ‘renewal’. See Martin Coward’s book-length study (Coward 2008) as well as a critical review (Travis 2011).

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challenged. Hills emphasises the ongoing accounts of failed projects at normalization of fundamentally lawless and insecure urban environments.14 Those failures are repeatedly at the hands of Western military and humanitarian efforts to impose security and order.15 Hills’s accounts are not those of a Western late modernity continuing the successful project of colonization of territories yet to yield their investment potentials. Rather, it is the obverse. As Hills emphasises in the “Introduction” to Post-Conflict Cities: The topic is given urgency by the failure of US-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it is of broader relevance than this suggests. Not only do these issues present themselves acutely in cities, but also their development suggests explanations for the meaning of security, the nature of policing, and the relationship between security and development more broadly. And they emphasise the extent to which Western understandings remain rooted in historically specific forms of Westphalian order: law and order are invariably seen as the primary means for managing post-conflict disorder and insecurity. (Hills 2009, 2)16

One of the overarching aims of this book, in referencing the political philosophies of (especially) Foucault and Agamben, is to offer analysis of how alternatives to such Western presumptions on the founding of law and constitution of order may emerge. In what immediately follows, there is an account of a post-conflict city understood in terms radically different to these contemporary accounts.17 14 There is a further Foucauldian theme that emerges here concerning this notion of failure, a theme not addressed by Hills, though apt in providing further dimension to her case-study accounts. In an article by Hills in the journal, Conflict, security and development (Hills 2005), concerning U.K. and U.S. forces in occupied Iraq, Hills does address Foucault’s work concerning power and governmentality. Her discussion is on the failures by U.K. forces in Basra and U.S. forces in Fallujah with respect to achieving political resolution to governance after apparent military success in the overthrow of ‘insurgent’ forces. Hills singles out especially American military understandings of power as a substance that is held or lost, rather than as a relation that is exercised. Hills cites Foucault’s ‘Governmentality’, from the Faubion-edited volume, Power: Essential works of Foucault 1954–84 (Foucault 2001, 201–222). For Hills, the failure lies in equating security with control, rather than with negotiation. Crucially: “Security cannot be provided nor power employed independently of the relationship in which it is exercised.” Hills’s engagement with Foucault’s work is useful though partial. One of the aims in the chapters that follow is to define more clearly the importance of Foucault’s ontology of power and his understanding of security in terms of governmentality. 15 There is a further arena to consider in the dual roles of military incursion and humanitarian aid in terms of targeting ‘developing’ States for explicitly Western democratic ‘reforms’ that accompany economic investment, constituting a thinly veiled politico-economic colonization. See Agboluaje (2005), Duffield (2005), Pupavac (2005), Forster (2005), Alexander and Rowden (2018), Griffiths (2018), Sengupta et al. (2018), and Gurumurthy and Chami (2019). 16 For a detailed discussion on the hegemony of Western concepts of law with respect to international conflict resolution, humanitarian aid or development processes, see Ugo Mattei (2010). Mattei emphasises, in a genealogy of the emergence of the notion of ‘rule of law’, the manner whereby it was applied precisely in the service of defence of property rights over civil rights. The term is inherently divided with respect to a question of rights. Not only are military interventions enacted on the basis of installing a humanitarian rule of law, but organisations such as the World Bank or International Monetary Foundation impose the administrative requirements of rule of law with respect to property rights and contract obligations as a condition for humanitarian aid or development funding (92–94). 17 In 2001, just after the September 11 destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, Agamben wrote a short article for the German newspaper, Allgemeine Zeitung. In it, he discusses the emergence

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1.2.2 Divided Cities We want to provide a somewhat different account of post-conflict cities or, rather, what may well be an originary account of a city in post-conflict turmoil, at least within a history of the West. With this account, we reference Nicole Loraux’s The divided city (2002), though also Agamben’s short monograph Stasis (Agamben 2017b) and his writing on destituent power (Agamben 2014). The subtitle to Loraux’s book is On memory and forgetting in ancient Athens. Loraux’s research is on an event documented in 403 BCE concerning the city of Athens: the overcoming of conflict— stasis or civil war—but most of all a solemn oath to forgetting misdeeds of the past, the constituting of amnesty.18 As Loraux suggests: The initial project, occasionally shelved over the years though never forgotten, was to interrogate in a Greek context the specifically democratic—and therefore, in this case, Athenian— thinking on conflict, insofar as conflict is bound together, whether in opposition or affinity, with the definition of the political. Along the way, I saw that it was necessary to establish and locate conflict in the city, because, under the name of politics, conflict is always already constitutive of the city. It is perhaps this primal link, rather than more recent ‘misfortunes’, that the Greeks—and not only the Greeks—would like to forget in their proclamation of amnesty. (Loraux 2002, 10) of security as a political imperative during the eighteenth century, citing in particular Foucault’s 1978 lectures at the Collège de France (Foucault 2007) where Foucault emphasises the emergence of ‘apparatuses of security’ from earlier State political frameworks of disciplinary order. In summarising Foucault, Agamben notes: “In short, discipline wants to produce order, security wants to regulate disorder. Since measures of security can only function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security accompanies the ideas of liberalism” (Agamben 2001, n.p.) Agamben stresses that a State whose primary focus becomes security engages primarily in the neutralisation of politics, the production of emergency and the provocation to terrorism. Indeed, this, for Agamben, marks the liberalisms of advanced capitalist States. Apart from construing a “clandestine complicity of opponents,” the global reach of security has implications for administering a perpetual planetary disorder as “the end of classical forms of war between sovereign states” and the imposition of a global civil war (Agamben 2001, n.p.). We necessarily need to read Hills’s understanding of relations between security and order in these broader terms, as well as what follows in Agamben’s writing on stasis, or civil war, as original political substance of the West. Foucault’s analyses of discipline and security are discussed in detail in Chapter 5 of this book, “Governing Security.” Agamben is introduced in Chapter 6, “Bio-political Urbanism,” and discussed in detail in Chapter 7, “Indistinct Politics,” and, again, in Chapter 8, “Common Use.” 18 In 403 BCE, Plato would have been around twenty-one years. Our reading of the significance of L¯eth¯e, and of Aletheia as revealing of the polis, informed by the work of Heidegger on Greek ‘inceptual’ thinking—Heraclitus and Parmenides in particular—aims to avoid a Platonic-Aristotelean understanding of the polis and political thought. We note, with Heidegger, that metaphysics itself is inaugurated with Platonic-Aristotelean thinking, a metaphysics that could not but define the polis in ways that render the political substance of Aletheia as a concern with the production of truth as presence. See Heidegger, “The Inception of Occidental Thinking: Heraclitus” in Heidegger (2018, 1–135). Our reading therefore is partially at odds with that of Loraux, who does not draw on the discontinuity between Greek ‘inceptual’ thinking and metaphysics. We also find Agamben is not especially attuned to this Heideggerian reading of Greek thinking, and similarly passes over what for Heidegger is ‘grounding’ in his own thinking concerning Aletheia and L¯eth¯e. See “The realm of the opposition between Aletheia and L¯eth¯e,” Heidegger (1998c, 17–28).

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Loraux’s book is complex, expertly researched and subtly written. This brief engagement with it cannot do justice to the matters it discusses, the philosophical and political avenues it engages, in order to define an inaugural understanding of the emergence of the kratos of the demos, the power or force of the whole citizenry of a city. Kratos is also a god of war. Democracy installs the conflict of the demos at the centre of the city, the polis. The politeia for Platonic-Aristotelian thinking already constituted citizen-rights to governance. Yet, things were never that simple. As Loraux emphasises, her account of the divided city aims to trace something that fundamentally shifts in Greek thinking from the time of Homer’s Iliad to the emergency of amnesty by way of L¯eth¯e, forgetting the misdeeds of one’s enemy. Crucial for Homeric Greece is a notion of justice founded on conflict and trial.19 Though in 404 BCE, conflict erupts in Athens with the overthrow of the oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants and the establishing of democracy. What Greek cities feared more than anything was internal conflict, internal division, termed stasis and translated generally as civil war, notwithstanding the very un-Greek notion of the Roman civitas.20 War, conflict, was to be held at the city-gate, waged with those outside: “The ideal figure of the polis can be distinguished in outline: warlike outside its gates, civil and 19 This is discussed in detail as well in Foucault’s inaugural lecture course at the Collège de France,

Lectures on the will to know 1970–1971 (Foucault 2013), and engaged again in Psychiatric power (Foucault 2015), when discussing truth-event and truth-demonstration. Truth-event is marked by the crisis or moment of ordeal. In the 1970–71 lectures, Foucault discusses the notion of justice administered in terms of the ordeal or trial. See especially the lectures from 3 February to 17 February. He returns to this theme in his 1972–1973 lectures, The punitive society (Foucault 2006). The notion of the Oath is crucial. Justice is administered by the willingness of an accusative party to take an Oath whose falsehood would be punishable by Zeus. There is neither the presentation of evidence nor a judicial apparatus to which disputing parties take their case. It is settled by the ordeal of the oath. The disputing parties, the ordeal of the oath, and the notion of justice are primarily concerns of inter-family rivalry or disputes between families, rather than a dispute between the State or juridical institution and an individual. Lectures on the will to know traces the movement or development of justice from ordeal and oath (Homer and Hesiod), to a new problematic of truth and justice to be found in the independence of a judge and the veracity of witness testimony, coincident with Platonic/Aristotelean inaugurating of metaphysics, and an understanding of truth no longer as Al¯etheia but as o´ μoι´ωσ ις, ground of correctness (see Heidegger 1994, 88). Heidegger notes: “And when in the process of recasting the Greek way of speaking, i.e., in the transformation of the Greek way of thinking and basic attitude toward beings into Roman and later Western modes, αλ ´ ηθεια ´ was translated as veritas, then not only was the established conception of truth as correctness transmitted, but at the same time, through the translation of αλ ´ ηθεια ´ as veritas every resonance of the original essence of truth as αλ ´ ηθεια, ´ unconcealedness, was destroyed” (89). 20 Heidegger (1998c) presents something like a parallel account of the movement of ‘truth’ in Greek thought from Homer and Hesiod to Aristotle. Heidegger emphasises the manner whereby the ‘opposite’ to Al¯etheia was not L¯eth¯e but ψεÜδoς (pseudos) which has been translated as ‘falsity’. Heidegger traces this understanding of the Greek from interpretations based on Latin translation of pseudos by ‘falsum’, which means literally a falling: “The realm of essence decisive for the development of the Latin falsum is the one of the imperium and the ‘imperial’. We will take these words in their strict and original sense. Imperium means ‘command’. … In the essential realm of ‘command’ belongs the Roman ‘law’, ius. … The command is the essential ground of domination and of iustum, as understood in Latin, the ‘to-be-in-the-right’ and ‘to have a right’. Accordingly, iustitia (justice) has a wholly different ground of essence than that of δ´ικη (dik¯e-justice), which arises from αλºθεια” ´ (40). We return to this discussion in greater detail in Chapter 7.

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peaceful within” (Loraux 2002, 32). The enemy was always to be exterior. Thus in 403, in the aftermath of civil war and to resolve threats of retaliation, retribution, or revenge, each of the citizens of Athens swore an oath of forgetting, effectively an oath of amnesty for the enemies within the city divided. Loraux notes a complication to the very remembering of this forgetting, a memorising that would be called the work of history: “Yet the historian of Greece knows that in order to give meaning to the word ‘city’, he must hound out of the polis the forgetting—a founding forgetting—of the division that its unity implies, even if only temporarily” (43). Loraux goes on to cite a reference by Plutarch to the altar to L¯eth¯e, that is, to oblivion. This altar is located in nothing less than the Erechtheion, “the most symbolic of all the Acropolis’s sanctuaries” (43). As it happens, L¯eth¯e is the child of Eris, strife, conflict. The temple celebrates the resolution to the quarrel between Athena and Poseidon in which Poseidon becomes the vanquished, though forgets there ever was enmity. Loraux sums things up in these terms: “politikos is the name of the one who knows how to agree to oblivion; and if myth locates at the origin of Athens a stasis that is quickly erased, it is not by chance that the only counterexample of Poseidon’s moderation Plutarch’s drinkers can find is that of Thrasybulus, the democrat’s leader in 403 BC” (43). We are not far into Loraux’s book at this point, though have indicated enough to thicken the discussion in two directions. In one direction is Agamben’s account of stasis as a political founding of Western governmental structures, an account itself divided between Athenian amnesty and Hobbes’s Leviathan (Agamben 2017b, 251–292). He discusses Loraux’s work, drawing out some questions and limitations, prior to his reading of Hobbes. Our other direction is in exploring the notion of L¯eth¯e and the early Greek notion of truth, Al¯etheia, a notion that itself comes to be forgotten with Platonic and Aristotelian understandings of truth and falsehood. This discussion introduces aspects of the work of Heidegger, his reading of early Greek thinking, particularly that of Parmenides on Al¯etheia, and Heraclitus on polemos, and the implications of this engagement with Greek thought for his understanding of the twentieth century as planetary humanism and the polis as that which is essentially question-worthy.21 These introductory comments are here

21 See Heidegger (1996b, 2018). With Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister” (Heidegger 1996b), Heidegger

notes: “Insofar as human beings venture forth and are everywhere underway, they exceed the site of their historical essence. The π´oλις, therefore, is not some isolated realm, the so-called “political,” within a manifold of other realms of human venture and procedures (π´oρoς). Rather, the π´oλις is the site within whose expansive realm every π´oρoς moves” (89). With this introductory chapter, we will limit ourselves to a few remarks on aspects of the work of Agamben relevant to the problematic developed by Loraux on Greek political thought. Further discussion of Agamben, along with a Heideggerian engagement with L¯eth¯e and Al¯etheia will be taken up in Chapters 7 and 8 of the book, in the context of detailed discussion of Agamben’s work, his own references to Heidegger, along with various critiques of Agamben, in the context of remarks by Jacques Derrida on Agamben’s political thought (Derrida 2009). Importantly, Heideggerian thinking, from its close reading of Greek political philosophy from Heraclitus to Aristotle and beyond, calls into question not only many of the categories by which Loraux will come to analyse the Greek city-state, but also the fundamental distinction that Agamben draws between zo¯e and bios, or natural life and political life of a citizen. The polis, for Heidegger, is defined in other terms, whose legacies in modernity and

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confined to discussing Agamben on stasis. As earlier indicated, Heidegger will be taken up in more detail in later chapters. Agamben’s Stasis: Civil war as a political paradigm is the published version of two lectures he delivered at Princeton university in 2001. It commences with the provocation that a theory of civil war is yet to be developed. The context for his concern is that contemporary conflict globally is precisely the condition of civil war. Citing Roman Schnur’s 1980s observation of a lack of a theory of civil war, a ‘stasiology’ (Schunr 1986), Agamben notes: At thirty years’ distance, this observation has lost none of its topicality: while the very possibility of distinguishing a war between States and an internecine war appears today to have disappeared, specialists continue to carefully avoid any hint of a theory of civil war. It is true that in recent years, owing to the upsurge of wars impossible to define as international, publications concerning so-called ‘internal wars’ have multiplied (above all in the United States); even in these instances, however, the analysis was geared not toward an interpretation of the phenomena, but—in accordance with a practice ever more widespread— toward conditions under which an international intervention becomes possible. (Agamben 2017b, 253)

Agamben does not aim to develop a theory of civil war, but rather wants to address how two moments of Western political thought have encountered it: ancient Greece and the writing of Thomas Hobbs.22 With respect to Greece, Agamben discusses Loraux’s research, mentioning The divided city, though focusing on another text she wrote, published in the same year as her book, an article titled “La guerre dans la famille,” “War within the family,” published in the journal Clio, in an issue devoted to civil war (Loraux 1997). Agamben focuses on this article rather than the book-length study for the reason that it addresses the distinction, important for Greek political thought, between the oikos (family household) and the polis, between the family and the city. Indeed, the question of the governance of the oikos, oikonomia, becomes itself a later and detailed study for Agamben (Agamben 2017c, 363–641). Agamben points out that Loraux’s thesis is that stasis, civil war, is established within families. It is in an originary sense a family matter, or rather a matter of radically reconsidering the present are remarkably prescient. We will contrast Heidegger’s account of L¯eth¯e and Al¯etheia with that of Marcel Detienne (Detienne 1996). 22 Foucault alerts us to the notion of civil war in a number of his Collège de France lecture series. In his 1972–73 lectures, The punitive society, when discussing the emergence of a bourgeoisie and a working class in the early nineteenth century, Foucault characterizes their relations as those of civil war: “So it is the notion of civil war that must be put at the heart of all of these analyses of penality. Civil war, is, I think, philosophically, politically, and historically, a rather poorly developed notion. There are a number of reasons for this. It seems to me that the covering over, the disavowal of civil war, the assertion that civil war does not exist, is one of the first axioms of the exercise of power. This axiom has had a huge theoretical repercussion since, whether we look to Hobbes or Rousseau, we see anyway that civil war is never seen as something positive, central, that can serve as the starting point of an analysis” (Foucault 2015, 13). Foucault returns to the theme of civil war in greater detail in his later lectures from 1975–76, Society must be defended (Foucault 2003), in the context of developing the notions of State racism and the bio-political. We may recognise the extent to which Agamben engages stasis or civil war precisely as a starting point of analysis of the biopolitical West. In what follows, with respect to the work of Erik Swyngedouw, we also see essential conflict constituting the frameworks of democratic process.

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the constitution of relations between the family and the city.23 That relation is one of bloodline: “Civil war is the stasis emphylos; it is the conflict particular to phylon, to blood kindship” (Agamben 2017b, 256). Yet, what produces conflict also contains its possible remedy in family bonds. Hence, for Agamben’s reading of Loraux, civil war is inherent to families and thus inherent to the city, inherent to Greek political life. Agamben cites Loraux’s concluding analysis: We must attempt to think, together with the Greeks, the war within the family. Let us suppose that the city is a phylon; it follows that the stasis is a revealer [Al¯etheia, unconcealer]. Let us make the city an oikos; on the horizon of the oikos polemos [war within the household] thus looms a festival of reconciliation. And let us admit, finally, between these two operations, the tension cannot be resolved. (Loraux cited in Agamben 2017b, 257)24

At this moment, Agamben intervenes in Loraux’s reading of the relation between oikos and polis. From his earlier research culminating in Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (Agamben 2017a, 1–159), he suggests that the founding of Greek political theory rests on the relation between oikos and polis and on the relation of two notions of life, zo¯e and bios, natural life and cultured or political life of the citizen. More essentially, Agamben suggests these twin relations need to be “rethought from scratch” (258). He reads the relation of stasis to oikos and polis not as one of connection, or continuum, as does Loraux, but as one of undecidability, of indistinction between brother and enemy: “In the stasis, the killing of what is most intimate is indistinguishable from the killing of what is most foreign” (259). In this, the stasis is neither inside nor outside oikos or polis but defines a “threshold of indifference” between them, between familial ties and being a citizen of the polis (260). In summary, for Agamben: “This means that in the system of Greek politics civil war functions as a threshold of politicisation and depoliticisation, through which the house is exceeded in the city and the city is depoliticised in the family” (260). With respect to the key motif of Loraux’s The divided city, the role of amnesty, of a version of amnesia with respect to reprisal or revenge, Agamben also provides a philological corrective, concerning the m¯e mn¯esikakein, the amnestic oath. This oath is not to a simple forgetting, but rather concerns not doing harm with memory. Just as for Agamben, zo¯e is included in the juridical life (bios) of the polis as that which is 23 On this relation between family and the city, how it constitutes a truth-event, we note Foucault (2013), especially the lecture of 27 January: “So, in the Greek procedure, enunciation of the truth is an element subject to multiple determinations. Now the effect of these determinations is that truth is not said anywhere, at any time, by anyone, and with regard to anything. The statement of the truth is limited with regard to what it speaks about” (73–74). 24 Though Agamben makes no reference to Furio Jesi in this text or in the Homo sacer series in its entirety, the writings of Jesi, an Italian political theorist and poet of the late 1960s and 70s, were important for Agamben (see Agamben 2019). Jesi’s work especially concerns the notion of the festival, crucial in Loraux and Agamben’s recognition of amnesty as reconciliation of oikos and polis. In his critique of the notion of political autonomy, Jesi develops a notion of the “cruel festival” to account for what Agamben now recognises as planetary stasis. See Jesi (2014, 2020a, b) and Aarons (2019). With the concluding chapter to Securing Urbanism, we discuss Jesi’s notion of the ‘cruel festival’, in relation to contemporary accounts of planetary financializing of securities, the economic philosophy of Elie Ayache (Ayache 2010, 2011, 2015), and Covid-19, the current global pandemic.

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excepted or excluded, so too is the oikos included in the polis as an included exclusion, for which stasis becomes the threshold. Equally, L¯eth¯e, forgetting, and the oath taken to establish amnesty, constitute a memorising precisely of the stasis, though in terms of what must be excepted in that inclusion, what cannot be acted upon or used in that inclusion: “Insofar as it constitutes a political paradigm inherent to the city, which marks the becoming-political of the unpolitical (the oikos) and the becomingunpolitical of the political (the polis), the stasis is not something that can ever be forgotten or repressed; it is the unforgettable which must always remain possible in the city, yet which must not be remembered through trials and resentments” (263).25 Agamben (2014) develops this ‘theme’ of an excluded inclusion, or state of exception (threshold of the stasis) in a short article he composed when considering political events that have recently occurred across the world, what still remain current as citizen revolts, marked by somewhat spontaneous mass uprisings happening in civic locales, public places or city centres. An introductory editorial commentary to this writing suggests: “Responding directly to recent occupations and insurrections—from Cairo to Istanbul to London and New York—Agamben builds upon his existing work in order to develop and clarify his understanding of the political and, in particular, the notion of destituent power” (65). The essay originated as a lecture delivered in France in 2013. Its key concern is to develop a notion of political power at odds with the key formulations of Western political thought, including the work of Antonio Negri on distinguishing constituent power and constituting power (Negri 1999).26 What, then, is destituent power? Though Agamben’s text is short, it is exceedingly dense and we cannot work through everything in detail in this overview. Later in the book, we consider Agamben and Negri in much greater detail and can move more slowly. In terms of what we have already briefly introduced of Agamben’s work on the political and the city, a question remains as to how that ‘excepting’—that excluding inclusion or remembering in order to become inoperative to revenge or reprisal—could possibly make sense. How does an amnesty take effect? Agamben suggests that Walter Benjamin had already broached this question in his essay, “Critique of violence” (Benjamin 1996), concerning how the destitution of law is enacted: “Only a power that is made inoperative and deposed is completely neutralised” (71). Destituent power does not aim at refusing the law in order to constitute new modalities of legality, but rather to inaugurate a ‘new reality’. In this sense, those spontaneous mass movements referenced at the beginning of Agamben’s essay, had no set agenda, demand, or constituting regime. They were not aiming at law-making (arch¯e) but rather at an-archy. In this sense, destituent power is neither destructive nor constituent, wants to neither abolish nor conserve. It defines a threshold of undecidability, of potential for what may remain non-actualized. Its modality is a ‘use’ that is inoperative.27 It is in this sense that, for Agamben, the 25 Inoperability, or non-use, becomes a key issue for Agamben. This is perhaps best explored in the concluding book of the Homo sacer series, The use of bodies (Agamben 2017d, 1077–1288). We discuss this in detail in Chapter 8. 26 This work of Negri is also discussed in detail in Chapter 8. 27 In The use of bodies, Agamben develops the notion of “form-of-life” that, building on an Aristotelian distinction between work and use (ergon and chresis), will return to the late writings of

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amnesty decisive for Loraux’s political history of the West is crucial to understand in terms of the inoperativity of the state of exception. As we will discuss in more detail in Chapters 7 and 8, destituent power of inoperativity is the crucial threshold of the West’s emerging paradigm of global civil war, which is to say a violence that is undecidable, neither State-sanctioned and international nor internecine, a violence that abolishes State-sanctioned identities in the name of other modalities of naming.28

1.2.3 Insurgent Citizens In 2006, Erik Swyngedouw co-edited a book with Nik Heyene and Maria Kaika on urban political theory. In the nature of cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism critically engages those assemblages or governmental mechanisms that have defined the urban explicitly in terms of commodified nature, or what the editors define as “the urbanisation of nature” (6). In terms of mechanisms: “This commodity relation veils and hides the multiple socio-ecological processes of domination/subordination and exploitation/repression that feed the capitalist urbanization process and turn the city into a metabolic socio-environmental process that stretches from the immediate environment to the remotest corners of the globe” (5). Hence the pressing question arises as to how to currently think alternatives to a political ecology seemingly without boundaries. Swyngedouw’s contribution aims to precisely analyse understandings of cities as natural circulations of metabolic processes, and what he terms, after Donna Haraway, ‘cyborg cities’ (Haraway 1991), which is to say, a conflicting heterogeneity constituting an ecology of synthetic natures. In relation to one of the key themes of Securing Urbanism, concerning the emergence and consolidation of an ontology of flows, movements and circuits, Swyngedouw provides a useful genealogy of this emergence, from the end of the eighteenth century, for defining the urban: Both ‘metabolism’ and ‘circulation’ have long conceptual and material histories. ‘Circulation’ gained wide currency after William Harvey’s postulation of the double circulation Foucault on the hermeneutics of the self (Foucault 2005), in particular, a privilege given by Foucault to the work of art: “What we call form-of-life is not defined by its relation to a praxis (energia) or work (ergon) but by a potential (dynamis) and by an inoperativity. … The truth that contemporary art never manages to bring to expression is inoperativity, which it seeks at all cost to make into a work” (1250). We will return to this discussion of Agamben’s referencing the late Foucault in Chapter 8. 28 To return to Hills’s recognition of the failure of U.K. and U.S. forces in Iraq with respect to the building of a political resolution, to a failure to recognise power as relational, its governmentality in Foucault’s sense or its oikonomia in Agamben’s, the political itself is constituted on a threshold that marks an inoperativity recognisable in amnesty, but more essentially in how an un-concealing or revealing of the urban, its Al¯ethiea, is contingent each time on a radical deposing or neutralisation. The very requirement for recognition of the relational milieu suggested by Hills entails an essential deposing of the rule of law at stake in the original instigation of military incursion. This aporia of the political is further encountered and engaged in what follows when discussing the urban political theory of Erik Swyngedouw.

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1 Urbanizing of blood in the body. Movement, flux and conduits rapidly thereafter became formative metaphors that would shape radically new visions of and practices for acting in the world. The concept of ‘metabolism’ arose in the early nineteenth century, particularly in relationship to the material exchanges in the body with respect to respiration. It became extended later to include material exchanges between organism and the environment as well as bio-physical processes within living (and non-living or decaying) entities. (Heynen et al. 2006, 23)29

These concepts migrated to especially materialist social theory in early Marxism, particularly in Marx’s understanding of the material real as foundation to social development (23). Labour is thereby understood as the socially construed and organised transformation of natural materials, putting into circulation dead labour in commodity form. For Swyngedouw, metabolism comprises the transformational capacities of entities in circulation. In this sense, our social-physical world comprises collectives of ongoing “‘co-modifications’ of human and non-human beings” (25). For Swyngedouw, these collectives are Haraway’s ‘cyborgs’ or Bruno Latour’s ‘quasi-objects’ (Latour 1993), that are at once social, physical, cultural, entering into ecological and transformative assemblages. The argument that Swyngedouw draws from this moment of analysis, particularly of a nineteenth-century genealogy of the introduction of physiological bodily processes to develop an understanding of urban assemblages under capitalism, is to crucially recognise that urban development, along with commodity production, cannot be exhaustively analysed through critiques of technological processes, but rather through attending to the manner whereby a political ecology is recognised in the metabolisms of cyborg entities, circulations of processes that are natural along with imbrications into those that are technological. The crucial point is, for Swyngedouw, that at stake is essentially a politics of life, and it is life as transformative circulation that constitutes genuinely democratic and empowering creation: Urbanizing nature, though generally portrayed as a technological-engineering problem is, is fact, as much part of the politics of life as any other social process. The recognition of this political meaning of nature is essential if sustainability is to be combined with a just and empowering urban development; an urban development that returns the city and the city’s environment to its citizens. (37)

We recognise, with Swyngedouw, an emphasis on life that resonates with the work of Agamben, though Swyngedouw does not present the account offered by Agamben 29 Our account of the metaphysical ‘origins’ of these notions would, on the one hand, suggest their grounding or founding role in Aristotelean metaphysics and, on the other hand, thereby affording a recognition of the extent to which the Cartesian understanding of spatiality rethinks the agencies of movement and metabolism in terms of cogito as substance and extension as corporeal object. For Aristotle, there was neither a self-as-subject, nor something-as-object. Heidegger never tires of reminding his students of the legacy of Scholasticism as a thinking that, supposedly, authentically accounted for the thinking of Aristotle, precisely in terms of all of the modifications to thinking inaugurated by the translating of inceptual thinking to the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, and then via further translations, to the thinking of Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Nietzsche: “All this occurred, to be sure, within a unanimity of thinking and in a uniformity of the guiding lines of inquiry, so that, e.g., in spite of the abysmal differences between the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and the last essential thinker of the West, Nietzsche, for both of them the same conception of truth, as a characteristic of judging reason, was authoritative” (Heidegger 1994, 93–94).

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regarding the founding of a bio-political understanding in the West with the Greek separation of natural life and the life of the citizen, along with the threshold that constitutes their difference in an excluded inclusion of natural life in political life. Hence, it is not a destituent power that becomes for Swyngedouw a recourse to the transformation of a planetary stasis as diagnosed by Agamben. Rather, Swyngedouw’s recourse is to a constituent metabolism, a transformative circulation that he names ‘post-political’. If it was the uprisings in various cities across the globe that spurred Agamben to consider the political acuity of destituent power, these same political uprisings led Swyngedouw to develop his 2018 publication, Promises of the political: Insurgent cities in a post-political environment. The publication of that book was marked by a series of review forums, one for the journal Urban Geography (Penny et al. 2019) and one for the journal, City and Society (see Maskovsky 2018). Swyngedouw contributed responses to both. Our comments draw on these discussions, as well as Swyngedouw’s book. An essential aspect to Swyngedouw’s argument is the distinction he draws between the political and politics. The political is not simply or merely the milieu or arena within which politics is practiced. Their difference is more complex and more crucial. In his “Introduction” to Promises of the political, Swyngedouw notes: Articulated around the work of, among others, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Colin Crouch, and others, the book seeks to interrogate critically the forces and mechanisms through which the political—understood as a space of contestation and agonistic engagement—is being progressively colonized by politics—understood as technocratic procedures of consensual immuno-biopolitical governance that operates within relatively unquestioned frameworks of representative democracy, free market economics, and cosmopolitan liberalism. (Swyngedouw 2018a, xxi)

Central to Swyngedouw’s argument, then, is that especially over the past ten years since the events precipitating and events post-dating the 2008 global financial crash, though emerging some decades earlier in the ‘third-way’ liberalism of Blair and Clinton, democracy is practiced through consensus, through agreement arrived at via administrative rather than political means. What’s wrong with ‘consensus’ though? What is the problem with agreement? Again, crucially, for Swyngedouw, there is no consensus without disagreement, conflict, what Agamben would call stasis as the threshold of the political which must be radically deciphered in relation to the empty space, oblivious exclusionary zone of L¯eth¯e. It is, perhaps, not by chance that Swyngedouw has recourse to Heidegger’s ontological difference in order to distinguish the political and politics, a move that then required him to do some careful explaining to his critics who immediately read an elitist privileging of an elusive and ontological understanding of the political at the expense of politics as ontic everyday practices. Indeed, one reads a repetition here of all the misunderstandings that resulted for Heidegger in distinguishing authentic from inauthentic Da-sein.30 Crucial for Heidegger and Swyngedouw, is that neither term can be understood as a 30 See Being and time (Heidegger 1996a): “These two kinds of being of authenticity and inauthenticity—these expressions are terminologically chosen in the strictest sense of the word—are based on the fact that Da-sein is in general determined by always being-mine. But the inauthenticity of Da-sein does not signify a “lesser” being or a “lower” degree of being. Rather, inauthenticity can

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positive entity or substance recognised as different to the other but, rather, there is the necessity to recognise a difference preceding either term that enables any distinction in the first place.31 The contextual milieu for the ontological difference of the political and politics returns Swyngedouw to the key themes of his earlier co-edited book, the essential relations of nature and the city: While theoretically framed within post-foundational thought, the main body of the book is grounded in urban and ecological processes, struggles, and conflicts through which postpoliticising modes of being-in-common became etched into the formal institutional and informal common-sense practices of life. Two central themes and theatres, ‘the city’ and ‘nature’, will be mobilized as emblematic illustrations of the construction of post-democratic modes of governance that foreclose ‘the political’. First, the politics of neoliberal planetary urbanization and the disappearance of the urban qua ‘polis’ will be a central theme. The second entrée into the archaeology of post-politicization will focus on the socio-ecological predicament the world is in. We shall argue that ‘ecology functions today as the new opium of the masses’ (Badiou) and signal how the particular discursive, managerial, and political framings of Nature and the environmental condition we are in contributes to the formation of depoliticizing modes of governance. (Swyngedouw 2018a, xxi–xxii)32

Hence, at stake for Swyngedouw remain analytics that engage with metabolic circulatory change, though from the vantage point of a key recognition of differences enacted by technocratic administrative practices that construe citizen rights in identity politics formulated or mediated in consensus-building as compared with the stasis or combative zones of contested political dissensus.33 Consensus politics is a de-politicising agency, invoking what Swyngedouw terms, after Crouch, postdemocracy.34 In Joe Penny’s terms (Penny et al. 2019, 2) such agency entails: “smothering fundamental conflict with stage-managed institutionalization of consensus.” Crucial for Swyngedouw is a “universalizing axiomatic” defining a human participatory equality essentially understood as an unconditional and universal claim “to the place of power” (2). Reception of the book has had its own dissensus, in particular from urban theorists for whom the book is rich in philosophical and critical determine Da-sein even in its fullest concretion, when it is busy, excited, interested, and capable of pleasure” (40). 31 The Heideggerian scholar and translator, Joan Stambaugh, is especially attuned to this point. In her “Introduction” to Heidegger’s “The Principle of Identity,” (Heidegger 1969), she notes: “What is new about this understanding of identity as a relation is that the relation first determines the manner of being of what is to be related and the how of this relation. It is perhaps difficult for us to think of a relation as being more original than what is related, but this is what Heidegger requires of us” (12). 32 The notion of ‘post-democracy’ is one introduced and discussed by the political theorist, Colin Crouch. By this notion he does not suggest an eclipsing of democratic process. Rather: “under this model, while elections certainly exist and can change governments, public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professional experts in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams” (Crouch 2012). See also Crouch (2019). 33 On dissensus, see Rancière (1999, 2004, 2010). See also, Lahiji (2014). 34 Crouch (2012). In Agamben’s terms (after Foucault), the de-politicising of consensus politics coincides with the illiberalism of globalizing securitizing administration of multiply emerging disorders (Agamben 2014).

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theorising though scant in what could be termed empirical work that either tests out the speculative framing or provides evidence of workable futures. The key ‘case study’ work comes in the book’s third segment, and discusses the political uprisings in various global cities that, for Swyngedouw, lend evidence of something like a return of the political. The difficulty is that this ‘return’ must remain un-nameable with respect to an identity-politics of administrative consensus. It must remain, like L¯eth¯e, something never forgotten yet inoperable. The revealing of the political in the agency of political events—or events of politics—remains, in Agamben’s terms, a threshold of exclusionary inclusion, neither inside nor outside the administrative oikonomia or governmentality of the city or State or planet, yet going by a name that maintains an anonymity of its being-in-common and an amnesty with respect to the solidifying of a constitutive political order. Hence, key motifs of radical and global political consciousness, such as climate change and sustainability are, for Swyngedouw, precisely because of the technocratic and administrative consensus-building that orchestrates them, their mediatisation and their wholesale mediation of humanist causes, radically de-politicising of the spaces of a genuinely political agon.35 Like Agamben, Swyngedouw asks for something ‘new’. Agamben calls it a ‘new reality’ when discussing destituent power, and cites Benjamin on this, the Benjamin for whom the messianic was not to be a return at all, but rather recognition of the lapsus or fall from something that cannot be returned.36 For Agamben, it is not to overcome a world that produces, for example, stateless refugees, but rather to ascribe to the very condition of that statelessness. The coming community, for Agamben, as for Benjamin, is not a redeemed humanity but an ‘inoperative’ and ‘useless’ one.37 Swyngedouw’s term is not a ‘new reality’ but a world within the world: “But ‘the part of no-part’, the Yellow Vests of the world [referencing the 35 In his reply to Penny et al.’s critiques of Promises of the political, Swyngedouw addresses his postfoundational understanding of the difference between politics and the political: “Politics refers to the contingent and incomplete attempt to ground a particular set of power relations (a particular form of social organization) on an ultimately absent foundation. The political, in contrast, is nothing else but the name for this absence, void or gap” (Penny et al. 2019, 14). Hence the recourse, mentioned earlier, to Heidegger’s ontological difference and the nothing that ‘is’ being. However, on this occasion Swyngedouw engages his reader in a quick introduction to the work of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, and the differences, for Lacan, of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real (15). It is not by coincidence that Lacan, too, leans a little on aspects of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. The political finds its equivalence in Lacan’s Real, encounterable only in mediations with the Symbolic dimension of language and law, and the Imaginary dimension of an ideality of self-and-world. 36 Redemption, for Benjamin, was never quite as simple as it was for Marx. When Marx wrote of the commodity as phantasmagoria, Benjamin suggests that it is necessary to question the grounds of enlightenment rationality which allowed for Marx to simply oppose the phantasm to reality (See Cohen 1989, 93–94). What Benjamin calls ‘profane illumination’ shatters the veracity of the image as guarantee of things as they really are. Yet, this is the only critical move possible in awakening to the knowledge that this is how things really are, that is, phantasmagoric (102). 37 The early book by Agamben, The coming community (Agamben 1993), points to a different political project, notwithstanding Swyngedouw’s recourse to aspects of Agamben’s later writings. That project is perhaps linked to terms later adopted by Agamben, such as destituent power or inoperativity, in the curious ‘Appendix’ to The coming community, whose title is “The Irreparable.”

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recent Gilets Jaunes movement in Paris and elsewhere in France], would surely welcome allies, including academics and intellectuals, in the effort to divert the infernal trajectory we are on. This requires sustaining a fidelity to the desire of constructing humanity to come, a new world within the world, out of the contemporary debris called humankind” (Swyngedouw, in Penny et al. 2019, 16).38 As strongly as we support much of what Swyngedouw develops here, we cannot but recognise a number of chasms that seem to separate his genuine political aspirations from those of Foucault and Agamben and, perhaps more obscurely, from some of the philosophical anti-foundational understandings we would take from Heidegger, whose writings from the 1930s onwards concerning the planetary human, nature, technology and the political, construe the problem field of political urbanism in even more catastrophic terms. Swyngedouw concludes his discussion in the City and Society forum with the following: “While staging equality in public squares is a vital moment, the process of transformation requires the slow but unstoppable production of new forms of spatialization quilted around materializing the claims of equality, freedom and solidarity. This is the promise of the return of the political embryonically manifested in insurgent practices” (Swyngedouw 2018b, n.p.). Even with the close and detailed analyses of critical and philosophical mechanisms for what is suggested as ‘unstoppable’ mechanisms for what seems a ‘return’ to Enlightenment precepts of freedom and equality, we cannot but invoke in the face of the forces of this circulatory metabolism, Benjamin’s caesura, so often invoked by Agamben, elsewhere expressed by Benjamin, as putting one’s hand on the emergency brake of Marx’s locomotive of revolution that is, equally, of capitalist development.39 It is such a caesura, an inoperativity, that most intrigues our approach to urban political understanding, an intrigue we aim to sustain throughout this book.

Akin to Benjamin’s ‘Profane Illumination’, Agamben notes: “The irreparable is that things are just as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being” (90). 38 Swyngedouw’s ‘world within a world’ harkens to another classical Greek notion, not that of the polis, but of the Temenos, of that sacred place of the housing of the gods, marked out from the profane life of the city, for which Platonic eidos, being, distinguishes itself from a profane world of becoming. No doubt this is a misguided reading of Swyngedouw’s thinking, though one he inadvertently makes available, wherein, by simple inversion, those public locales of spontaneous uprising become the privileged markers of civic space, the political as such, within an otherwise banal and dangerously de-politicised urbs. We touch again on this notion of a ‘world within a world’ in a later chapter, when addressing the twentieth-century urban design projects of Oswald Mathais Ungers, who may well have been a reference for Swyngedouw. 39 The Benjamin quote is as follows: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely the human race—to activate the emergency brake” (Benjamin 2003, 402). See also, Jameson (2011) for a reference to this.

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1.3 Surveillance and Collectivity 1.3.1 De-modernization The final contribution to Swyngedouw’s co-edited In the nature of cities (2006), discussed earlier, is a chapter by Stephen Graham, “Urban metabolism as target: Contemporary war as forced demodernization.” Graham has an earlier edited book, Cities, war and terrorism: Towards an urban geopolitics (2003). The 2003 book appears in a Blackwell series, “Studies in Urban and Social Change.” It is instructive to note some of the preceding titles within this series to recognise the kind of critical research Graham aimed to bring to urban studies. Titles such as Cities and visitors: Regulating tourists, markets, and city spaces or Free markets and food riots, or Urban poverty and the underclass: A reader are no less critically researched or politically engaged with respect to an urban analytic. However, Graham’s acute focus on security and the urbanization of war brings into sharp focus a series of issues that are more commonly marginalised in considerations of the urban as site of institutional and infrastructural inequities of race or class or gender.40 The concerns especially engaged by Graham, and other contributors to Cities, war and terrorism, recognise the increasingly important shifts in scalar analyses with respect to urban planning, habitation and security. Hence, Graham suggests, under an introductory heading “‘Security’ and the urbanization of war”: While they remain major sites of military, economic and regulatory power, nation-states are becoming increasingly ‘decentered’. Within a context of neoliberal globalization, transnational flows between cities and metropolitan regions, and the growth of transnational governance, are undermining their coherence and meaning. In some cases, modern, developmentalist nation-states have collapsed or ‘failed’ altogether since the end of the Cold War. (Graham 2003, 3)

The focus of Graham’s collection of writings on urbanism engages events in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the declaration of a “war on terror” by George Bush, multiple acts of violence in cities across the globe in the name of terrorism and violent counter-measures by especially U.S. led forces in the Middle-East, Afghanistan, and Iraq. However, in the name of securitizing operations within metropolitan centres, para-military policing goes hand-in-hand with the violence enacted by transnational governmental agencies, such as those cited by Keller Easterling: “slipping between legal jurisdictions, leveraging advantages in the differential value of labour and currency, brandishing national identity one moment and laundering it the next, using lies and disguises to neutralize cultural and political differences” (Easterling 2002, 40 Thus, the very notion of ‘security’ takes a paradigm shift from a notion of broad social security as responsibility of a State in supporting the welfare of its population, whether that be in terms of structural inequities with respect to race, income, gender or the complexity of dissociating juridical processes of State administration from normative and calculative processes associated with the managing of risk, defined in terms of economy or society or their relations. Graham’s understanding of security brings to discussion of the urban all of the urgency invoked, for example, by Agamben, in his prognoses of the future of securitizing measures globally, post 911 (Agamben 2001).

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189; cited in Graham 2003, 7). Graham’s 2006 contribution to In the nature of cities folds these concerns into the key themes of that book concerning circulation, flows, metabolism and, for Graham, the de-stratification of urban infrastructure. Within the techno-managerial administrative institutions of the urban, infrastructure is the name given to those metabolic processes of transformation in circulation, in the amalgamations of various ecologies—natural, technological, social, cultural—in the production of habitations. Graham’s focus is on the manner whereby military tactics are able to bring a modern industrial city to a standstill precisely by targeting essential infrastructures. The case study is Baghdad, significantly bombed in the first Gulf War, 1991, and targeted again in the second Gulf War. The key notion deployed by Graham is demodernization: Increasingly, both formal and informal political violence centre on the deliberate destruction, or manipulation, of the everyday urban infrastructures that are necessary to sustain the circulations and metabolism of modern urban life. As urban life becomes ever more mediated by fixed, sunken infrastructures, so the forced denial of flow or circulation, becomes a powerful political and military weapon. … Beyond such burgeoning debates in the west about ‘asymmetric’ and ‘infrastructural’ terrorism, the forced demodernization of societies through state infrastructural warfare is emerging as a central component of contemporary military strategy. (Graham 2006, 245)

The first Gulf War bombing of Iraqi cities was the largest aerial assault in history. Aerial targets were not foremost military installations or personnel, nor civilian industry, but what were termed dual-use infrastructures, those that served both military and civilians in the circulation of goods and communications. The U.S. military terminology is “network-centric warfare” (Graham 2006, 250; see also Dillon 2002). The key target in the bombing of Baghdad and other major cities in Iraq was electricity generation. All but four percent of generation capacity was destroyed in 1991. The resulting disruption to everyday existence for a modern metropolitan city was devastating. In particular, water supply and sewerage treatment plants became nonoperational, resulting quickly in widespread sanitary crises concerning clean water and the removal of sewerage. Due to ongoing embargoes on the supply of industrial technology to Iraq, the rebuilding of electrical generation capacity was made very difficult (Graham 2006, 258). Gulf War Two, in 2003, saw a repetition of infrastructure demodernization, especially communications systems, along with destruction of some of the newly built electricity generators. While military and civilian casualties during Gulf War I were relatively light due, in part, to precision bombing and infrastructure targeting, it is estimated that up to 111,000 lives were lost due to chronic health epidemics related to unsanitary urban living condition (259). Graham further notes: Using a longer time frame, UNICEF (1999) reported that, between 1991 and 1998, there were, statistically, over 500,000 excess deaths amongst Iraqi children under five—a six-fold increase in death rates for this group occurred between 1990 and 1994. Such figures mean that, ‘in most parts of the Islamic world, the sanctions campaign is considered genocidal’ (Smith 2002, 365). The majority of deaths, from preventable waterborne diseases, were aided by the weakness brought about by widespread malnutrition. (259)

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Graham concludes with three key concerns. The first is that what we take today as background and functioning infrastructures deeply embedded in our everyday practices become sites for geopolitical struggle, especially when these infrastructures are global and corporately owned rather than State-administered. They equally become central to practices of demodernization, as witnessed by current U.S. and Israeli military doctrine (260). The second key concern is that security and securitization are increasingly becoming the predominant concern of network-based urban societies. Graham cites Agamben (2002, 1): “Security thus imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity.” It predominates over what were previously considered as the key securitizing measures for a State: education, health, welfare, economic regulation (262). The third is that contemporary analyses of war need to address more fully what Graham terms the “intersections of infrastructural warfare and forced demodernization” (262). In particular, Graham, picking up on Neil Smith’s observation on the genocidal nature of war-sanctions policies, emphasises contemporary strategies of war on public health that can no longer be understood as constituting ‘collateral’ damage in warfare but, rather, the direct genocidal target of ‘network-centric warfare’. These themes establish the framework for Graham’s 2010 book-length, Cities under siege: The new military urbanism. The book increasingly emphasises the porosity between civilian and military technologies, the non-distinguishing between military and non-military infrastructural targets, and the cybernetic surveillance protocols by which ‘cooperative’ and ‘non-cooperative targets’ are identifiable. Under a heading, resonant with the title to our book, “Urbanizing security,” Graham offers what may be the key thesis of his research: The new military urbanism, in all its complexity and reach, rests on a central idea: militarized techniques of tracking and targeting must permanently colonize the city landscape and the space of everyday life in both the ‘homelands’ and domestic cities of the West as well as the world’s neo-colonial frontiers. To the latest security and military gurus, this is deemed imperative, the only adequate means to address the new realities of what they call ‘asymmetric’ or ‘irregular’ war. (Graham 2010, xiv)

As with prognoses offered by Agamben, Graham emphasises the indistinctions proliferating in contemporary metropolitan centres not only in the West, but also as global phenomena in cities increasingly divested from notions of State governance. These indistinctions are those of everyday juridical policing becoming increasingly blurred with intelligence and military surveillance. Coincident with this becomes a blurring of war and peace, the instigation of order and the management of emergent disorders. These emergent disorders increasingly become a permanent condition of urban administration in the guise of necessary securitising measures for the normalisation of habitation (xv). Again, as with prognoses offered by Agamben, such indistinctions demand that securitisation reconceives citizenship and national borders, constituting precisely what Agamben understands as the conditions of citizens under a state of exception.41 A crucial framework of analysis for Graham is not simply reading 41 Again,

this notion of ‘indistinction’ is key to Agamben’s political theory. It becomes, as well, a key motif for Securing Urbanism’s Chapter 7, “Indistinct Politics.”

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current conjunctures of urbanism symptomatically for processes of global military securitising. Rather, the very design and construction or renewal of urban spaces is conceived of according to these strategies. The inference here is neither conspiratorial nor paranoid, as if every urban planner, architect or landscape designer has signed up for global securitization. It is not the case that every city administration receives its intel and remit from a para-military complex. The relations are less direct, more embedded in what Swyngedouw would term the technocratic consensus-driven administrative protocols of urban governance, the domination of what he terms ‘politics’ over the political.42 The overall structure of Cities under siege overcomes to an extent some of the criticism levelled at Swyngedouw’s book on political urbanism. Along with three initial critical chapters on military planning, environmental design and urban development, Graham provides six case-study chapters documenting just how his understanding of critical frameworks are put into global practice: The first three look at, respectively, the proliferation of borders and surveillance systems within the fabric of urban life; the US military’s ambitions for urban and counterinsurgency warfare based on the deployment of armed robots; and the connection between entertainment, simulation and US military and imperial violence. The final three explore the diffusion of Israeli technology and doctrine in urban warfare and securitization; the links between urban infrastructure and contemporary political violence; and the ways in which Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) culture is embedded within a geopolitical and political-economic setting that links domestic and colonial cities and space. (Graham 2010, xxix–xxx)

In summary, there are five ‘traits’ of the new military urbanism defined by Graham: (i) Ubiquitous urban surveillance, as with the U.K.’s E-border security, to identify ‘targets’ prior to potential security breaches. Here are crossovers between military and civilian applications of advanced technologies, such that civilian applications produce data to be mined by the military, disrupting any semblance of a public/private separation; (ii) Permanent and everyday installation of military surveillance in urban developments as well as in neo-colonial settlements, blurring differentiation between intervention, normal policing and intelligence gathering, along with differentiations between state-sanctioned and private corporate agency, the latter being trans-national, as with the Raytheon Corporation; (iii) From the management of foreign or neocolonial hostilities, technologies of control are introduced (or returned to) first-world urban centres. For example, Israeli technologies deployed in Palestine are introduced to European cities of the global North; (iv) Integral to economic administration and development are surveillance practices in the form of data collecting as a global politico-economic relay, for example with the role of Facebook and Cambridge Analytics in data mining and analysis during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections; (v) As earlier discussed with respect to Graham’s chapter-contribution to In the nature of cities, infrastructure terrorism becomes the key military tactic to de-modernize urban 42 See, for example, the journal Security Dialogue as a source of multiple articles addressing the indi-

rections that operationalise governmentality of the urban and overt military securitizing measures (Davis 2019; Bengtsson et al. 2019; Krasmann and Hentschel 2019; Basham 2018; Stavrianakis and Stern 2018; Öberg 2018; Langenohl 2017; Krahmann 2017; Best 2017). Another key journal is Conflict, Security and Development. See, for example, Agboluaje 2005; Forster 2005; Pupavac 2005; Rangelov and Kaldor 2012).

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populations. Such practices are popularised within the imaginary of urban worlds via an entertainment industry that offers the fantasy of urban destruction, along with it simultaneously becoming a training ground for citizen-soldier transitions.

1.3.2 Unjust Urbanisms There is an early co-edited book by Erik Swyngedouw, this time with the political urban theorist, Andy Merrifield, The urbanization of injustice (1997), that engages a Marxist tradition of urban theory, developed especially from David Harvey’s 1973/2009 Social justice and the city. Though Swyngedouw co-authored the book’s “Introduction,” he does not contribute a chapter. The driver for this project seems very much to be Merrifield, whose concerns with Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord, mentioned in passing in the “Introduction,” become crucial for much of his subsequent critical writing on the politics of urbanism. As Saskia Sassen notes in her review of the book (Sassen 1999), the book emerged from a conference “celebrating” the work of Harvey, some twenty years after the publication of his work on justice and the city. Sassen notes: “Along with Castells’s The Urban Question (1977), Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (1973/2009) revolutionized urban scholarship. One of Harvey’s contributions, and the focus in this collection, was to use the social and economic processes that structure space as his way into a contingent theory of justice, one that could supplant liberal theories” (Sassen 1999, 79). The book’s “Introduction” expresses this difference between liberal and contingent theories of justice initially in terms familiar to Swyngedouw’s later work, with the notions of consensus and dissensus. In relation to the political liberalism of John Rawls (Rawls 1971, 1993), along with Rawls’s appeals to a consensus politics of a “well-ordered society,” Merrifield and Swyngedouw suggest: “In response, we want to suggest that the problematic is maybe best tackled through the ‘reality of dissensus’ – hence the negativity expressed in the book’s title. In other words, by charting the plurality of injustice plaguing the present capitalist urban reality we hope to unravel the sorts of dialogues required for the construction of social institutions that ensure freedom” (Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1997, 3).43 One of their concerns is that what they call ‘postmodern’ and ‘poststructuralist’ critical theory has abrogated any genuine concern with practices of justice: “At its most rhetorical level, power has been diluted to an interrogation of the ways in which particular ‘discourses’ of power are constructed and reproduced. (As if, say, speaking about torture and being tortured are one and the same)” (10). Their target is also ‘language-games’ avoiding “genuine emancipatory political strategy” for “reconstructing the deconstruction” (11). The targets here are not mentioned by name. 43 Merrifield and Swyngedouw contrast the work of Rawls on justice, that emphasises a universalizing, to that of Iris Young: “According to Young, ‘a conception of justice which challenges institutionalized domination and oppression should offer a vision of a heterogeneous public that acknowledges and affirms group differences’.” (Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1997, 7). See Rawls (1971, 1993) and Young (1990).

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They could be Foucault, Jean François Lyotard, any number of Derrideans (though Derrida seems exempted).44 Hence, the recourse to a deep strain of Harvey’s British Marxism, along with the French Marxism of Lefebvre and Debord. Their concluding comment returns us to a key theme that will come to preoccupy Swyngedouw in his later work on political urbanism, concerning public space and political struggle: “The public space of the city has long been the terrain for struggles, encounters, and protests. These are places symbolic of collective solidarity and of collective experience, where political encounter and dissonance is aired” (14). These comments came precisely at the time when the then Conservative government in the U.K. passed the Criminal Justice Act, radically proscribing the right to public assembly. As Merrifield and Swyngedouw conclude: “Yet the struggle for empowerment, for dignity, for more authentic urban life, will not disappear just because it is illegalized. Quite the contrary: this striving will of course go on apace everywhere where injustices reign” (15). Indeed, it is precisely the agency of direct action in the face of illegalities striving against injustices that marks two further key monographs by Merrifield concerning political urbanism, The politics of the encounter: Urban theory and protest under planetary urbanism (2013) and The new urban question (2014). These books establish an important strand of contemporary critical urban theory, one that maintains the key relevance of Marx’s writings, in relation to radical developments in late capitalism, its technologies of planetary scaling, that Merrifield argues were uncannily anticipated by Marx. Equally significant for Merrifield are the writings of Lefebvre on the city and urbanism, in fact on that moment when Lefebvre recognises the usurpation of the notion of the urban over that of the city, a paradigmatic shift in political realisation of critical urban theory (see Lefebvre 1996, 2003). Further to this is the passion Merrifield demonstrates for the urban writings of Debord (Merrifield 2005). In holding onto key political work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Merrifield develops a fundamental ontological dilemma or break with how political urbanism may resist the ubiquity of late capitalism. In the “Preface” to The politics of encounter, Merrifield spells out his book’s two interrelated themes. The initial one details the move Merrifield makes, following Lefebvre, from concerns with rights to the city to a politics of urban society, the latter now understood as planetary.45 These moves are signposted in the shifts Lefebvre himself made from his The 44 There is only conjecture as to their targets. Certainly, they would be mistaken to describe Foucault’s ‘discourse’ as descriptive idealism, rather than a concern with practices of power and bodily inscriptions. It may be Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst who seemed to abandon their Althusserian Marxism for a version of discourse theory which aimed, in a sense, to nullify a distinction between discourse and the ‘object’ of discourse. See Hindess and Hirst (1977). There is also J. F. Lyotard’s engagement with Wittgenstein, with his notion of language games and the ‘differend’. See Lyotard and Thébaud (1985). We suggest the ‘exemption’ of Derrida in the context of a positive reading of Derrida’s ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ from Of Grammatology (Derrida 1976). The ‘nothing’ outside is skewed in favour of Rancière’s understanding of the ‘part of no part’, that ‘nothing’ constituting the un-grounding ‘ground’ of the political. 45 See Agamben’s short essay on human rights (Agamben 2003—originally published in Agamben 2000) which reiterates the position he developed in Homo sacer, and elsewhere, concerning the grave limitation to a notion of ‘right’ based on the sovereignty of citizenship constituted in the social contract. See also, Sikkink (2018), Standing (2018), Söderbäck (2018), and Nayar (2019).

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right to the city (1968/1996) to The urban revolution (1970/2003). It was Lefebvre who coined the term, “planétarisation de l’urbain” (Merrifield 2011, xv). For Merrifield, the radical questioning had everything to do with an ontology of the scale of struggle. If the street marks the locus for public emancipatory struggle, is that street a formal element of a city? Or does it engage something completely different, a countermovement precisely to “the global sway of Wall Street’s and the City of London’s decision makers” (xiv): “Soon, too, the problematisation of the right to the city, both intellectually and politically, led me to believe that a similar problematisation of the city and ‘urban question’ was necessary, an interrogation of the whole role of the city as a theoretical and political object, the site and stake of global social struggle” (xv). The second theme, what Merrifield terms “the major theme,” is to move from a question of ‘rights’ and ‘cities’ to what he terms “the politics of encounter” (xvii). Though Lefebvre emphasises ‘encounter’ in its everydayness, Merrifield’s aim is to forge an ontology of encounter that opens to another understanding of the political, “a more free-floating, dynamic and relational militancy, to be sure, ‘horizontal’ in its reach and organization, yet one more apt for our age of diffuse metropolitanization, one more attuned to a political landscape in which new social media have become subversive weaponry” (xviii).46 There is a brash and compelling naivety to Merrifield, a flight to what he calls ‘ideas’, an appeal to science fiction, literature and art, in scoping out the possibilities for a politics of planetary urbanism.47 Where does it take him? There are three key concerns developed in The politics of encounter that are extended in the later book, The new urban question. We will briefly outline these before getting into the details of the 2014 publication.

1.3.3 A Spinozist Ontology The first concern is with how to rethink this ‘object’ of enquiry when the notion of ‘city’ is dislodged by a notion of an ‘urban’ that is now ‘planetary’. Is this ultimately 46 The notion of ‘encounter’ is itself contingent on an understanding of the plural registers of its possible agency. For Lefebvre, the subject who encounters is the agent for knowing a world of encounterability. That agent, even if militantly Marxist, is transcendent to those things encountered. Though not so for Merrifield who introduces the radical immanence of Spinozian ontology. And not so, either, for a range of contemporary theorists whose work engages Speculative Realism or Object-Oriented Ontology, for whom matter is ‘vibrant’ and for whom ‘things’ are agential, encountering entities. The writings of Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, Quentin Meillassoux, and François Laruelle are important in this regard. See, for example, Mould (2019) and Wilson (2017). 47 The notion of planetary urbanism, rightly located in the work of Lefebvre, is more fully discussed when we approach the work of Neil Brenner and his colleague, Christian Schmid. Merrifield’s textual ‘sources’ are eclectic and heterogeneous. He builds a bricolage from fragments of the science fiction of Asimov, the Nobel Laurate, I. B. Singer, Spinoza, Marx, Baudelaire, Lefebvre, Althusser, John Berger, James Joyce, Robert Neuwirth, Slavoj Žižek, Marshall Berman, Jackson Pollack, along with many others. What is especially engaging is a kind of refusal by Merrifield to authorial privilege, either along the axis of supposed scientific veracity or an axis of literary imagination. While not refusing either crossroads, he, perhaps, refuses ‘privilege’ itself as a hallmark of scholarship.

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semantics, simply the way an entity takes on a new vocabulary, or is there something else going on? Are we now simply talking about networked cities, a metabolism or field of transformations in circulation at a scale simply bigger than that of cities, even where those cities are mega urban conglomerates of up to thirty million inhabitants? For Merrifield, it is more than a quantum jump in scale. It is a shift from an epistemological framework by which habitations are thought to an ontological one: “The best I could come up with is to describe this shift in perspective as a move away from an epistemology of cities toward an ontology of the urban. It’s no longer an issue of trying to develop a new theoretical understanding of cities under capitalism as it is about grappling with an affective being in a world that’s increasingly urbanized … a way of seeing ourselves and our world” (6). By “affective being” Merrifield is posing a radical understanding of not only human being but also how entities in general are to be encountered. Hence, Merrifield has recourse to Spinoza’s understanding of substance, conceivable through its attributes. Attributes express “the reality or being of the substance” (8). Merrifield’s reading here is a little wild and somewhat literal: “What’s getting affirmed here is the urban as a single, indivisible substance whose attributes—the built environment, transportation infrastructure, population densities, topographical features, social mixes, political governance—are all the formal expressions of what pervades it ontologically” (8).48 If the first concern is with articulating how now to think a self and its world, the second concern is with how to now think of political agency at a planetary level, where agency is the becoming-affective of an immanence of essential differences thought as the dissensus of substance attributes. The crucial context is the human thought essentially as labour-power, or labourtime as defined by Marx, at a stage when capitalism is planetary and technology is advanced. The issue is employability, what Agamben engages under the notion of operability or use.49 Merrifield summarises Lefebvre on the structural nature of unemployment: “Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of urbanization and its expansion on a planetary scale, which constitutes the very nature of capitalism as such” (73). Merrifield extrapolates from Marx’s Grundrisse, where Marx reveals the overtaking of labour-time by advanced capitalism at the point where immaterial labour overtakes living labour, when, for Merrifield: “technology ‘suspends’ human beings from the ‘immediate form’ of work and when dead labour valorises living labour—then seemingly only then are we on the brink of something new and possible” (77). This ‘something new’ is marked by the increasing global rise of un48 It is instructive to contrast the Spinozism developed by Merrifield, opening to a new political ontology of planetary urbanism, and the Spinozism developed by Negri and engaged in a series of important books on political theory and the planetary. See also the work of Cesare Casarino. These will be discussed in detail in Chapter 8 of Securing Urbanism. While we recognise the importance of Merrifield’s engagement with ontology, and Spinozism, we cannot accept that his understanding of ‘ontology’ makes the kind of break with metaphysics that Swyngedouw, for example, aims to do with anti-foundational thinking. Our engagements with Heidegger, Agamben and Foucault suggest a more radical understanding of what is required, in what might be called Merrifield’s ontological ‘turn’. 49 See Agamben (2014; 2017d, 1077–1288).

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and under-employment: “living labour is a species en route to extinction. Instead, there’s automation, computer-aided production, computer-aided design, robotics, and a coterie of human appendages; only a relatively small number of salaried jobs exist for the knowledge-based few” (78).50 However, Merrifield sees this as radically transformative of a political movement in self-help, in self-employment, in an immanent political force radically outside anything resembling nation-state governance.51 He notes an OECD statistic that by 2020 “two-thirds of workers of the world will be employed in a planetary system now generically known as ‘Système D’” (79).52 This manifestation of global unemployment as condition of planetary urbanisation is, in Merrifield’s reading of Lefebvre, politically dislocating for his immanent ontology. And here is Merrifield’s radical idealism: If capitalists can do without workers, it’s high time for workers to realise they can do without capitalists, even work without the state. And they can even build urban spaces for themselves, ‘occupy’ urban spaces, construct and reconstruct not only a post-salaried work culture but a ‘postcity’ culture as well. (83)

Merrifield cites Lefebvre at this point on the fact that work does not end in leisure but in non-work, just as the city does not parse itself into the countryside but both city and country are superseded. For Lefebvre, this confluence of non-work and noncity is precisely what he means by the urban: “‘The urban’, he tells us, defined by ‘encounters, gatherings, centrings and de-centerings’” (83). This brings Merrifield’s ‘thesis’ to its third important frame, what might be called a political imaginary, or what he terms, an “imaginary pragmatics,” investing pragmatically in what is almost unimaginable in terms of collective political action, “something neither utopian nor pragmatic as such” (114). Exemplary of this is Merrifield’s interpretative goingbeyond Lefebvre’s post-work/post-city: At this imaginary point, economic self-empowerment would encounter political collectiveempowerment, and the favelas as well as Wall Street, the malls as well as main street, will 50 See the editorial for the 2019 special issue of the journal, Development, on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Dano and Prato 2019). 51 See, for example, Kinder (2016), Fennell (2015), and Fairbanks (2009). These are three projects documented in the U.S., dealing with ‘brownfield’ sites, inner-city landscapes of the old industrial cities of Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia. 52 ‘Système D’ is a term devised by Robert Neuwirth, that signifies what he terms the ‘informal’ economy. Kim (2012) notes: “The informal sector may account for as much as $10 trillion of the world economy, and because it is concentrated in the high population emerging countries, may employ as much as half of the world’s workforce. The informal economy is both a magnet for the enormous worldwide urbanization now underway, and a counterweight to the concentration of wealth that accompanies market based economies”. See Neuwirth (2011). Standing (2018) uses the notion of ‘The Precariat’ to address those included in Neuwirth’s Système D. Standing notes (and we expect Merrifield might agree): “Given that wages cannot be expected to provide the precariat with security, the system must find alternative ways of doing so. We should want what Keynes predicted but which has yet to pass—‘euthanasia of the rentier’. One way of capturing rental income for society would be to bring the commons into policy discourse. In the neoliberal era, the commons—natural, social, civil, cultural, and intellectual—have been plundered via enclosure, commodification, privatization, and colonization. This rent seeking is an injustice and should be reversed” (120).

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1 Urbanizing all get occupied and democratized by an inexorable and an insatiable swarming, by a sheer numbers-game asserting the generalized force of a political subjects-game, channelling itself virtually, connecting itself really, a giant planetary web of communication and just-in-time organization. (87)

These same tropes, emphasised by Merrifield in terms of resistive democratization, those of planetary communications and extra-state global productive organization are, for Graham, precisely the grid of global securitising and surveillance by the one-percent of the ninety-nine percent who, for Merrifield, constitute the swarming multitude. The ‘de-modernization’ emphasised by Graham as a tactic of securitising by decimating infrastructures for sustainability, becomes for Merrifield the very medium or milieu that demonstrates the political agencies of a post-city multitude.53 Merrifield discusses the co-operation and resonance between two movements in the U.S.: Take Back the Land’s “Liberate”, and Occupy. Their relations are complex and diverse: “Occupy targets ‘those symbols, institutions, and persons responsible for perpetuating the economic crisis—the 1%—through the “occupation” of public and private spaces’; Liberate’s base ‘is the victims of the crisis, who are protected via land liberation and eviction defense’” (117). Merrifield abandons the discourse of ‘rights’, civil rights or human rights though not an ethics or politics of the commons. His recourse is again to a distinction essential to Spinoza’s Ethics, a difference between the notion of ‘universals’ and ‘common notions’. The difference goes to the heart of a Spinozist rejection of transcendent claims, for those of a pure immanence.54 For Merrifield, this translates to a redefining of a public realm that is collectively owned and State managed to a realm collectively managed by people “irrespective of who actually owns the damn thing” (133).55 Under the notion of an “enigma of revolt,” Merrifield leaves us with the question as to how political transformations happen without a Welfare State supporting those in greatest need, without a capitalism that operates in the guise of paternalism, and without the security of work and income (134). 53 Exemplary in this regard would be Fairbank’s discussion of the Kensington Recovery House project in post-industrial Philadelphia. With 60,000 vacant properties, a decimated welfare infrastructure, self-help projects for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts constitutes a free-market and unregulated enterprise. See Fairbanks (2009). 54 Agamben’s rejection of a discourse of ‘rights’ runs in tandem with his refiguring of a Spinozist ontology of ‘substance’. In discussing what he means by a ‘form-of-life’ that is inseparable from the possibilities themselves of living, Agamben notes: “Here it is necessary to replace the ontology of substance with an ontology of how, an ontology of modality. The decisive problem is no longer ‘what’ I am, but ‘how’ I am what I am. It is necessary, in this sense, to radicalize the Spinozan thesis according to which there is only being (substance) and its modes or modifications. Substance is not something that precedes the modes and exists independently from them. Being is not other than its modes, substance is only its modifications, its own ‘how’ (its own quomodo)” (Agamben 2014, 73). In our reckoning, this is Agamben’s especially Heideggerian reading of Spinoza, one that seems to us to be at variance to Merrifield’s ‘Spinoza’, notwithstanding the fact that Heidegger never really does ‘read’ Spinoza, or at least never admits to it except in scant passing. See also Adler (2015) on Agamben’s notion of experience. 55 For a radical Spinozist reading of Marx on the notion of a being-in-common, see Casarino (2009) “Universalism of the Common.”

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1.3.4 Civil War Again Merrifield’s The new urban question does not necessarily make an advance on resolving these questions. It more so repeats the problematic of The politics of encounter, the one circulating around a nexus of Marx, Lefebvre and Debord, though with some shifts in nuance that edge his question a little closer to some of the approaches to urban political analysis we have already broached. One of these nuances appears in Chapter Four of the book, “Strategic embellishment and urban civil war” (35–44). Merrifield commences with a reference to Benjamin on the city of Paris, a reference to Haussmann’s streetscape, military barracks and the working class. Haussmann’s planning was to secure the city against civil war: “to provide the shortest route between the barracks and the working class.” Benjamin called it “strategic embellishment” (37). For Merrifield, what has shifted from the nineteenth century is not this dialectic essential to the city, between city planning and staving off insurrection, a perpetual battle between capital and labour, but “the scale of this dialectic.” Maintaining his Spinozist Marxism, Merrifield suggests: This dialectic is immanent in our current urban-global condition, and respective antagonists feed off one another in dramatic ways. They are both immanent within the upheaval of our neoliberal market economy, just as Marx said that a relative surplus population was immanent in the accumulation of capital; and therein, borrowing Benjamin’s valedictory words: ‘we can begin to recognise monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’. As I’ve said, we can pinpoint Haussmann-like acts in every city across the globe, North and South, East and West; but it’s vital to see all this as a process that engineers planetary urban space … neo-Haussmannization, as something consciously planned as well as unconsciously initiated, pretty much everywhere. (37)

When Agamben emphasises that the essential political relations globally are those of stasis, of civil war, it is perhaps viably understood in these terms developed by Merrifield, from out of Benjamin’s acute political understandings of nineteenth century urbanism. Merrifield has recourse to the work of Steve Graham, to his Cities under siege, to the undecidable nature of military and non-military urban tactics. He also references Eric Hazan’s Chronicle of civil war (2003): “nonstop wail of police sirens on the boulevard Barbès, the whistling of F16s high in the sky over Palestine, rumbling tanks rattling the earth in Grozny and Tikrit, armoured bulldozers crushing houses in Rafah, bombs exploding over Baghdad and on buses in Jerusalem, barking attack dogs accompanying security forces on the Paris metro” (40).56 The crucial aspect of this planetary civil war is that it is indifferent to any notion of peace, indifferent to national borders, citizen rights, to governmental juridical measures. Its battle zones are those instigated by the anonymity of administrative 56 As Merrifield notes: Hazan, who trained as a cardiologist and in the 1970s worked as a surgeon in poor Palestinian refugee camps in the Lebanon, now fronts the left publishing house he founded in 1998, La fabrique” (Merrifield 2014, 27). We might contrast Hazan’s ‘evental truth’ to that of two other discursive ensembles that aim at a similar territory. One would be accounts of the global securitization of infrastructure developments. See, for example, Jomo and Chowdhury (2019). The other is the approach taken by Hills on these same conflict cities, in terms of the perceived failures of insurgency forces in recognising how ‘securitising’ order may be found.

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and normative measures, a governmentality of everyday life rather than a governance of a State, what Agamben devoted a book-length study to under the name oikonomia, that zone of indifference between the bloodlines of families and the citizen identities of the State.57 Here Merrifield says something vital concerning that paradigm of understanding the urban as flow, circulation and transformation, something that resonates with Agamben’s understanding of inoperativity: Insurrectional forces must enter into the flow, into the capillaries and arteries of urban power and wealth, enter into its global network to interrupt the circulation and reproduction of capital, to unwind its variable webbing and fixed infrastructure, to occupy its nodes at the most powerful points, while, Leninist-style, decoupling the system’s weakest links. (41–42)

Merrifield might here have mentioned Benjamin yet again, on the caesura, on the emergency brake. But Merrifield never goes too deep into just what ‘interruption’ does, how it operates, what an ontology of force and counter-force looks like. One of the key aims of Securing Urbanism is to work carefully through the kinds of resistances suggested by Merrifield, along with the prognoses offered by Graham and Swyngedouw, and the understandings of order and security essential to the work of Hills, in order to bring a granulated understanding of how a governmentality of planetary urbanism is to be assayed and resisted. In this respect, The New urban question has peculiar overlaps with Securing Urbanism, though the projects diverge in important ways as well. Merrifield problematizes the question of the urban. He develops an interesting ontology of the urban through the thinking of Spinozian radical immanence. We think of Negri here, though Negri moves in different directions. He is concerned with governmentality of the State, though considers governance, power and control from Marxian frameworks. His legacies are Castells and Harvey, more so Harvey’s British Marxism (Harvey 1982, 2009) than Castells’ Althusserian Marxism (Castells 1977). Then there is Ray Pahl’s Weberian analyses of the managerial State and the entrepreneurial State (Pahl 1968). Harvey’s Marxism looks at production and reproduction of the constituents of production rather than at the management of consumption. There is a distinct leaning to French literature in Merrifield’s books—and a distinct leaning to the city of Paris as ‘ur-city’—one that looks at the French revolution, Robespierre, Rousseau, Haussmann, Debord, Lefebvre. Yet Merrifield is wary of “French intellectuals.” His concern is with denouncing representative democracy and inciting insurrectional and participatory democracy, direct action democracy. The urban model is of civil war and of contagion via a parasitic one percent living on the remaining ninety-nine percent. Ground rent transformation is essentially what is required. He does not discuss derivatives financial frameworks in any detail, keeping to a Marxian understanding of contemporary economic conditions. He does not address Foucault, Agamben, Negri or Elie Ayache, even in terms of critique.

57 Agamben’s book on oikonomia, The kingdom and the glory

becomes a detailed engagement with the complex relations in the West between religion and governmental structures, Christian dogma and political strategy.

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1.4 Planetary Urbanism 1.4.1 Urban Fabrics As we have outlined, Andy Merrifield emphasises the work of Lefebvre, and particularly Lefebvre’s The urban revolution, with what Merrifield holds to be an ontological shift from questioning ‘rights’ to the city to abandoning a moribund discourse of rights for other more direct political strategies. For Merrifield, it is a shift from an epistemology of cities, to an ontology of planetary urbanisation. These notions of epistemology and ontology carry particular weight. It is no longer a question of giving definition to the constituents of ‘cityness’, whether they be particular cities or a totalising or universalising definition. The ontological turn is Spinozan, especially inasmuch as Merrifield is able to align Marx with Spinoza.58 And it is Spinoza’s Ethics that becomes the focus: no longer what one knows in order to act but how one acts and in acting how one’s world is something that becomes accessible, though never in a totalising manner. Lefebvre’s shifting emphasis from questions of cities to an understanding of the urban is also essential for the critical urban theorists, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (Brenner 2013, 2019; Brenner and Schmid 2014, 2015). Commencing with Brenner’s “Theses on urbanization” (2014), we recognise the presentation of a core position, or positions, that are repeated, developed and refined in the co-authored texts and in Brenner’s extensive 2019 book-length publication. What are those positions? Developing a genealogy of the ‘urban question’ from lineages of Marxist and Sociologist descent, with particular reference to Castells and the Chicago School of urban sociology, in the work of Louis Wirth (Castells 1977; Wirth 1969), Brenner figures the early twenty-first century’s understanding of urbanism as a field in confusion, as productive as that confusion might become: By contrast [to the population and territory classifications of the urban with the Chicago School], in the early twenty-first century, the urban appears to have become a quintessential floating signifier: devoid of any clear definitional parameters, morphological coherence, or cartographic fixity, it is used to reference a seemingly boundless range of contemporary sociospatial conditions, processes, transformations, trajectories, and potentials. (Brenner 2013, 90)

Merrifield recognises this ‘floating signifier’ precisely as Spinozian ‘substance’, constituted in its attributes and modalities or possible modifications of those attributes. This is to say that he recognises an ontological shift from knowing to acting. Though Brenner, in difference to Merrifield, seems to want to hang on to new epistemological models by which we are able to know processual attributes in their flux. His key motif here is the notion of an urban ‘fabric’: “The emergent process of 58 There

is an important twentieth century history of scholarship that aligns the work of Marx with that of Spinoza, constituting a ‘tussle’ between Hegelian Marxism and a Spinozan Marx. See, for example, Casarino, C. (2011), Dumain, R. (2010), Macherey, P. (2011), Montag, W. and T. Stolze (1997), Negri, A. (1991a, b).

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extended urbanization is producing a variegated urban fabric that, rather than being simply concentrated within nodal points or confined within bounded regions, is now woven unevenly and yet ever more densely across vast stretches of the entire world” (90). The task, then, for Brenner, and in subsequent writings for Schmid, is to get to know how to describe and understand this woven fabric, how it gets woven, and what constitutes its limits. Crucially, the task is to shift from empirical research into cities, understood as natural or naturalised entities waiting to be encountered and understood, to critical and reflexive theoretical investigation into the constructs that give name and understanding to our world. This latter task is essentially a political one of questioning the ‘nature’ of those assumed naturalised entities. Those “empirically oriented researchers” are blind to the entire field’s “decaying epistemological foundations” (91), engendering a fragmentation of the field akin to an “academic Babel” to quote Lefebvre (92). The driver, for Brenner, is capitalism in its capacity to become the engine of sociospatial transformations, along with all manner of inequities. The central concern, then, becomes to determine the multiple relations between that woven urban fabric and capital. The urban, in this respect, becomes a “concrete abstraction” understood as “territoralized” and “generalized”: As conceived here, therefore, the urban is a ‘concrete abstraction’ in which contradictory sociospatial relations of capitalism (commodification, capital circulation, capital accumulation, and associated forms of political regulation/contestation) are at once territorialized (embedded within concrete contexts and thus fragmented) and generalized (extended across place, territory, and scale and thus universalized). (95)

By way of Fredric Jameson, who coined the term from Kevin Lynch, Brenner is in search of a “new cognitive map” that might better delineate that transformative woven fabric by which the urban now needs to be defined.59 Hence, Brenner presents a series of ‘theses’ that aim to define the contours or gradients to this new mapping. There are nine key theses presented here, which are repeated in subsequent texts in various modifications. To simplify their presentation, we will group them a little into relational clusters. The initial three seem to imply one another. Hence, with the first thesis we recognise the cognitive—epistemological—emphasis in that “the urban is a theoretical construct” (96). That is to say, ‘the urban’ is not an empirical thing waiting to be discovered. Its knowing is contingent on the critical constructs brought to extant things. Those ‘things’ are known through a conceptual apparatus.60 59 Kevin Lynch wrote an influential book for the 1960s, on understanding urban terrains that curiously undercut the discourse of experts by commencing with asking children to draw maps of their familiar neighbourhoods, thereby instancing how ‘subjective’ and ‘non-professional’ perceptions of landmarks, distances and journeying were more crucial for lived experience than were objective determinations in mapping. His approach engaged the field of cognitive science and renovated the discourses of a generation of architects and planners (see Lynch 1960). Fredric Jameson takes up a similar concern with everyday subjectivities in coming to recognise how cultural relations are established, maintained and reproduced. He borrows aspects of Lynch’s work, notwithstanding possible confrontations between a ‘cognitive idealism’ that seems to haunt Lynch’s project and a ‘cognitive materialism’ that haunts Jameson’s (see Jameson 1988). 60 We recognise a decided Kantianism in the frameworks of Brenner and Schmid, Kant of the ‘transcendental apperception’ of the First Critique. This will come to be confirmed for us when

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Hence, thesis two, that both site and object of urban research are contested (97). They are necessarily contested because they are theoretically constructed entities and not simply the singular nature of things to be known. Hence also the third thesis, that for the most part urban studies in its predominant sociological empiricism and preference for field study, fails to adopt a reflexively theoretical approach. The next three theses open to a key orientation Brenner develops—along with Schmid—concerning how we are to understand planetary urbanism, the notion that Merrifield (along with Brenner) adopted from Lefebvre. This concerns a deeply entrenched binary: that of the urban and the rural. Hence, thesis four: “Urban studies has traditionally demarcated the urban in contrast to putatively nonurban spaces” (97). This “constitutive outside” to the urban fits neatly into the territorial differentiations and demographic definitions of the urban that are to be challenged by a radical notion of urbanisation that deconstructs the urban/nonurban binary, and refuses the empirical and statistical bases by which sociology has defined territory and habitation. Hence, thesis five is concerned with overcoming precisely these “settlement typologies” in favour of “sociospatial processes,” a move from “nominal essences” to “constitutive essences” (98). The constitutive essences of sociospatial processes are to be understood in the mechanisms of capitalism: “Instead, to grasp the production and relentless transformation of spatial differentiation, urban theory must prioritize the investigation of constitutive essences—the processes through which the variegated landscapes of modern capitalism are produced” (99). This requires new terminology, new language by which urban theory can be parsed, what Brenner calls a “new lexicon of sociospatial differentiation” (99). At stake is nothing less than losing that age-old demarcation of the urban and the rural, replacing it “within a thickening, if unevenly woven, fabric of worldwide urbanization” (99). That “thickening” happens by a “perpetual churning of sociospatial formations under capitalism” (99). The final three theses build on these previous six, though point to something like the grave urgency for getting underway with that new lexicon and with installing that critical and reflexive urban theory. The “churning” of variegated sociospatial landscapes, now recognised within a “deconstruction” of urban effects construed in binary terms, and in terms of sociology’s proclivity for territorial stability and demographic fixity, has produced a “renewed urgency” when we recognise urbanization as “planetary”: “in which the gulf between everyday cognitive maps and worldwide landscapes of creative destruction [how that “churning” might otherwise be ‘cognitively mapped’] appears to be widening” (101). For all of the above, we arrive at thesis eight: “The concept of urbanization requires systematic reinvention” (101).

we recognise a recourse to a ‘reflexivity’ precisely on the subject-object nexus of apperception. Heidegger (1998b) notes what Kant calls “the original synthetic unity” that connects subject and predicate. That unity, for Kant, is not in the positing itself of an ‘is’ or copula, but is “‘to be sought higher up’, above the positing that connects by way of the understanding” (348). This, for Kant, is “the original synthetic unity” already present in all representations or perceptions (348). We may now recognise a “metatheoretical synthesis” invoked by Brenner and Schmid, that of an urban fabric, constituting a peculiar synthesis of apperception: “Because it makes possible the being of beings, or in Kantian terms, the objectivity of objects, it lies higher, beyond the object” (348).

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And thesis nine offers an inroad for beginning that process of “systematic reinvention”: “Urbanization contains two dialectically intertwined moments—concentration and extension” (102). This ‘dialectic’ replaces the old lexicon that divided the urban from the rural. In that old lexicon, the key notion of “agglomeration” or concentration was opposed to an urban ‘outside’ considered in its extensity. Now extensity is better understood in its particular conditions of intensity co-relative to transformative forces of sociospatial organisation comprising concentrations: “within the extended, increasingly worldwide field of urban development, agglomerations form, expand, shrink, and morph continuously, but always via dense webs of relations to other places, territories, and scales, including to realms that are traditionally classified as being outside the urban condition” (103). From these nine theses, Brenner scans three horizons for a possible future ‘lexicon’ that gives vocabulary to a new ‘cognitive mapping’. These horizons turn us to an ethical-political orientation to the urgency at hand in thinking a new epistemological understanding of urbanism. The first focuses on the ‘creative destruction’ of capitalism. It asks two questions: the first concerns the contemporary forms taken by capitalism “across place, territory, and scale” producing “uneven spatial developments” (108). The other question concerns “competing political projects, neoliberal and otherwise” (108). The second horizon concerns that urgency for getting a grip on planetary urbanism: “To what degree has the extended landscape of urbanization, with its increasingly planetary infrastructures of capital circulation, nutrient and energy flow, and resource extraction, today become a strategically essential, if not primary, terrain of capital creative destruction?” (108). The third horizon is what Brenner terms “political.” It concerns shifting the scale of struggle from city-focused rights, expressed in movements for “local commons” to “a broader politics of the global commons.” This latter involves a variegated landscape of extended urbanization, embracing indigenous practices, and peasant cultures that tend to be extraneous to current discourses of urbanization (108). In relation to Brenner, we may reflect back on the writings of Hills or Evans who discuss contemporary theorising of military strategy, opposing tactical procedures for open country (or rural) warfare to close-combat urban warfare, or Graham who focuses particularly on urban infrastructure, demodernization and urbicide, within a strategic and global network of militarisation and surveillance. There is also Agamben, for whom an ontology of destituent power—an opposed to constituent or constituting power—seems at odds with aspects of human agency implicit and explicit for Brenner. And while Merrifield sees the urban itself as a question, his response is not to develop a new epistemology, but new practices from out of a Spinozan ethics. Hills, Graham, Merrifield and Swyngedouw, for all of their critical differences in defining urban practices, each seem to be able to locate quite explicitly how questions of force, or relations of power predominate in defining conditions, underlying or otherwise, for understanding the urban. It is not a monolithic driver named capitalism as much as the military force of U.S. and U.K. invasions of Iraq and the destruction of strategic urban infrastructure, along with strategic genocide.

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Or it is specific public space interventions, happening globally, somewhat spontaneously, expressing a radical sense of a being-in-common of those whose heterogeneous causes speak in singular ways of political inequity. Of course, capital in its various guises, whether global high-tech communications companies, the IMF or World Bank, financialized shadow banking or military imperialism, is omnipresent and incessantly ‘churning’. However, in the name of a new theorisation of planetary urbanism, Brenner seems to be less concerned with questions of practices, hegemonic or resistive, than he is with deciphering an epistemological stronghold. A concern with practice is not a return to sociological empiricism and all of those problems, rightly defined by Brenner, that construed earlier urban theory models. One of the key aims of the chapters that follow in Securing Urbanism is to argue—especially via Foucault—for the necessity to recognise that practices of power simply do not coincide with discourses or technologies of power. As we will come to discuss in detail, Foucault points to how the non-isomorphism of discourses and practices leads to the abandonment of one discourse, one theoretical formulation, in order to invent a new lexicon, a new discursive ensemble, a new epistemological model which aims precisely at ‘capturing’ practices in their specificity and generality. Though that new model, too, in turn will be doomed to abandonment. Brenner recognises entirely this model or ‘treadmill’ of outmoding critical frameworks. He explains the rationale for his set of theses precisely in these terms. However, he is committed to repeating precisely this epistemological rescuing of theory. Hence, the necessity for something other than this treadmill of empirico-rationalism that seems to ultimately confine Brenner’s project.61 61 We have the unmistakable impression from Brenner that a component of the urgency for working through the current chaos of thinking the urban is the emergence of a planetary urbanization that is still, so to speak, of recent origins, certainly recent as a mutation of global capitalist development. In this sense, it is a ‘new’ discourse of the planetary, of globalization, coterminous with mutations of capitalism, that drives the necessity for another urban discourse. We want to make brief reference here to two other frameworks for understanding the planetary, that would bring into question many of the premises grounding or founding Brenner’s theses, along with the prime-moving role he gives to capital. One comes from Foucault and the other from Heidegger. In what he termed “a little history of truth in general,” Foucault discusses two broad notions of the production of truth, “truth as event” and “universal truth” (Foucault 2006, 235–247). For modernity, truth is everywhere to be found: it is a technology of demonstrative truth joined to scientific practice: “There is no black hole in the truth. This means that for a scientific type of knowledge nothing is too small, trivial, ephemeral, or occasional for the question of truth, nothing too distant or close to hand for us to put the question: what are you in truth?” (236). Foucault contrasts this notion of truth-as-demonstration—of something that ‘is’—with truth in the Greek Delphic sense. Delphic truth is not everywhere waiting to be known but is partial, disclosed moment-to-moment. Within his lecture course on psychiatric power, Foucault notes that for Greek, Latin and Medieval medicine, truth comprised the moment of crisis, when a body confronted the ordeal of illness: a truth in what happens and not in what is. “This clash is warlike, a relation of power and not of knowledge” (237). This technology of truth-as-event came to be colonized by a technology of demonstrative truth (239), happening in a shift at the close of the Middle Ages in political administration, from fiscal enquiry to police enquiry, comprising an ever more refined capacity for inquiry, for tightening procedures: “The inquiry, the report, the evidence of several people, the cross-checking of information, the circulation of knowledge … gradually constituted the instrument of the political and economic power of industrial society” (246). This granulation of enquiry is matched by a further dimension: “Moreover, there was not only a local

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1.4.2 The ‘Urban Age’ Though, we need to pursue Brenner’s work a little more, in a couple of co-authored papers he undertakes with Christian Schmid. In the first, “The ‘urban age’ in question,” Brenner and Schmid (2014) quash one of the most ubiquitous mythemes of early twenty-first century urban theory: that sometime around the years 2007 or 2008 the world’s population tilted inexorably towards city living. Nearly everyone, from the United Nations (Habitat III Secretariat 2017) through to Mike Davis in Planet of slums (2006) notes the same thing: “For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural” (Davis 2006, 1; cited in Brenner and Schmid 2014, 734). Even Stephen Graham cites this ‘fact’ in his 2010 study on cities, war and terrorism. What, though, is the problem with this global marker of population movements? We are already able to recognise some of the issues from Brenner’s earlier work: defining urbanism through settlement types and empirical territorial delineations or definitions that subtend the binary of urban and rural. Along with this is population measure itself, its demographic markers and statistical frameworks that, again, favour an empirical measure rather than a critical approach to the more motile ‘churning’ of “variegated landscapes” of twenty-first century capitalism, which no longer itself settles on these demarcations or differences. Urban sociology was dominated by what Brenner and Schmid explain as ‘Urban Population Thresholds’ or UPTs, that came to define the threshold of what constituted a city. Making reference (again) to Wirth and Castells and their uncanny agreement, they point to UPT’s “arbitrary, empiricist, ahistorical” ground, a ground that remains secure in all of those “contemporary versions of the urban age thesis” (739). But even if we do adopt an empirical, statistical approach, Brenner and Schmid point to massive inconsistencies in the manner whereby nation states gather their data, define urban or rural enclaves, as well as when census data is gathered. Hence the U.N. pronouncement on that threshold-crossing was built on an array of data, tightening, but also a planetary extension to the entire surface of the globe. … We can say that from the end of the Middle Ages we have seen the entire surface of the Earth, down to the finest grains of things, bodies, and actions, subjected to generalized investigation: a sort of grand inquisitional parasitism” (246). It is this transformation of a will-to-truth that for Foucault opens an analysis of practices and the effects of discourses of truth that, on the one hand, account for the emergence of practices of industrial capitalism and, on the other hand, constitute a planetary discourse of truth. Foucault emphasises the extent to which his own enquiry aims to maintain the notion of truth-as-event, that enables a pursuit of truth/power rather than truth/knowledge procedures. The other reference is to Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture,” which in many respects resonates with Foucault’s understanding, though the emphases appear to be quite different. The decisive event, for Heidegger, is the Cartesian cogito, whereby human being becomes the sub-stance or subject of knowing such that beings become that which the human stands over and against: “Where the world becomes picture, beings as a whole are set in place as that for which man is prepared; that which, therefore, he correspondingly intends to bring before him, have before him, and, thereby, in a decisive sense, place before him” (Heidegger 2002, 67). What Lefebvre, Merrifield, and now Brenner and Schmid recognise as something of recent origin—planetary urbanization—we would suggest Heidegger recognises with the emergence of Cartesian metaphysics. Note that Heidegger’s notion of ‘world’ or ‘worlding’ used in Being and time, cannot be collapsed into this notion of ‘world’ engaged in his reference to ‘world’ picturing (76).

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some recent and some up to a decade old, with demarcations of city and rural divisions entirely inconsistent. Ultimately, their argument is not to do better and more consistent data gathering but rather to drop the paradigm of defining urbanisation by settlement-type and UPTs, and to take on completely different approaches to understanding urbanization, such as those expressed in Brenner’s earlier series of theses: “This emergent planetary formation of urbanization is deeply uneven and variegated, and emergent patterns and pathways of sociospatial differentiation within and across this worldwide urban fabric surely require sustained investigation at various geographic scales” (747–748). Hence, Brenner and Schmid ask for an “alternative cognitive map” (749), fairly much along the lines of Brenner’s earlier theses: the “theoretical” rather than empirical categories of urbanization; the urban as historical process rather than “universal form” (750); emphases on sociospatial dimensions that are dynamic; the dialectic of concentration and extension; the planetary ‘nature’ of urbanization “that affects the whole territory of the world and not only isolated parts of it … an increasingly worldwide, if unevenly, woven fabric” (751). We need to be attuned to how urbanization produces new differentiations that require a “new vocabulary” (751). However, this “new lexicon of urbanization” is equally required to account for the “rapidly changing geographies of early twenty-first century capitalism” (752). From this we recognise that contemporary capitalism is now given the name ‘planetary urbanism’. It is the motility and dynamism of capital rather than settlement-types and demographics that require assaying in order to get an understanding of processes of urbanization.

1.4.3 A New Epistemology Brenner and Schmid followed up on their 2014 questioning of the veracity, let alone usefulness, of an “urban age” prognosis with the premise of developing or questioning the viability of developing a new epistemology of the urban: “Building on reflexive approaches to critical social theory and our own ongoing research on planetary urbanization, we present a new epistemology of the urban in a series of seven theses” (Brenner and Schmid 2015, 151). They initially address geographies of capitalism prior to introducing the theses, which more or less repeat in more exacting detail the nine theses originally offered by Brenner. The arguments they produce for relating contemporary modalities of global capital and modalities of urbanization are compelling: “Indeed, rather than witnessing the worldwide proliferation of a singular urban form, ‘the’ city, we are instead confronted with new processes of urbanization that are bringing forth diverse socio-economic conditions, territorial formations and socio-metabolic transformations across the planet” (152). Yet, there is nothing particularly ‘new’ in recognising correlations between capitalist development, technology substitutions, scalar isomorphism with respect to impacts and dynamic shifts in the governmentality of nation states. As we have noted, Merrifield cites Marx’s Grundriss on technology substitution, in order to discuss twenty-first century global conditions for employment. In discussing the formation of a bourgeois class and a

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working class at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Foucault (2006) analyses the meticulous procedures whereby industrial capitalism and urbanization have their common emergence from a particular governmental regulatory order he identifies in terms of disciplinary procedures.62 Given that Brenner and Schmid are fully aware of a long association of an analytics of capitalism and the urban, what advance or advantage is offered by the prognosis of a “new epistemology” of urbanization? Wherein is its genuine inventing or eventing? In a middle section to their paper, Brenner and Schmid critique what they term “urban ideologies, old and new” (155–158). These include valorising cities as engines of civilization, which may include exhibitions of techno-science that ultimately “naturalize the forms of sociospatial disorder, enclosure and displacement that have been induced through the last several decades of neoliberal regulatory restructuring and recurrent geo-economic crisis” (157). There are also approaches to sustainability and ecological urbanism which also normalize entrepreneurial governmental approaches that equate earning one’s citizenship by ‘green’ everyday agency while deregulating the control of global industrial giants genuinely responsible for climate crisis. They summarise: The simple message that the city has assumed unprecedented planetary importance has thus come to serve as an all-purpose, largely depoliticized ideological rubric around which, in diverse contexts, aggressively market-oriented and/or authoritarian contemporary projects and prescriptions of urban transformation are being narrated, justified and naturalized. (158)

Yes, we cannot but agree. Though, difficulties emerge in the section that follows on “reflexive epistemological openings,” engaging what they term a “philosophical requirement” to understanding the instability of urban theory’s categories and methods, “conditions of emergence” and “obsolescence” (159). That they cite Archer (2007) on reflexivity is itself a reflection on the absence a significant and massive body of philosophical and political writing on subjectivation and human agency, now half a century old, some of which we have already mentioned.63 This includes the twentieth century’s structuralist turn in psychoanalysis, the philosophical impetus 62 It is in this lecture course that Foucault introduces the twin notions of confinement and civil war. See especially lecture of January 10. We take up the challenge of such an analysis of urbanizing in relation to the motility of late twentieth-century capitalism in Chapter 3 of this book, “Sub-Prime,” and return to this issue in more detail in the book’s concluding chapter, “Cruel Festival,” engaging the spatializing understanding of the philosophical economist, Elie Ayache (2010, 2011, 2015). See also Roffe (2015). 63 See, for example, Swyngedouw’s Badiou, Rancière; Graham’s citing Agamben; Heideggerian, and post-Heideggerian, phenomenological and post phenomenological considerations of subject formation and agency, not to mention object ontology and speculative realism. Archer (2007) notes in her book’s “Introduction” that reflexivity is something neglected in academic social theory, and poorly understood by the “normal lay person” (1). Brenner and Schmid (2015) note: “In Archer’s (2007, 72) more general formulation, a reflexive approach to social theory involves a ‘subject considering an object in relation to itself, bending that object back upon itself in a process which includes the self being able to consider itself as its own object” (159). We have earlier mentioned the Kantianism that seems to ground Brenner and Schmid’s epistemological project. We recognise, equally, with Archer, the Kantian ‘I think’ that supposedly accompanies all of my representations. One wonders what Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitus’s Artemis would make of this flexing Archer (Heidegger 2018)? Or, indeed, what would Brenner and Schmid, or Archer, make of the Lacanian

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of Foucault’s work, the Heideggerian post-structuralism of Derrida, and the political ontology developed by Agamben under the broad rubric of Homo sacer, along with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot on their notions of community (Levinas 1969, 1998; Nancy 1991; Blanchot 1988).64 Hence, there is little attempt at developing an ontology of power productive of the forms of knowing they label “concentrated urbanization,” “extended urbanization” and “differential urbanization,” nor the truth effects of this formulation of what they categorize as “the three ‘moments’ of urbanization” (170).

1.4.4 New Urban Spaces Our final consideration is Brenner’s 2019 monograph publication, New urban spaces: Urban theory and the scale question. At just on 400 pages, this is a colossal work, impressive for the thoroughness of its literature referencing, and the comprehensive treatment it gives to global capital since the 1980s, especially with respect to the emergence of post-Keynesian neoliberalism and its effects of rapidly increasing inequalities, social and ecological violence, and the rise of shadow banking financializing. Yet, as the “Afterword” makes clear, the critical reflexive theorization for this book was established earlier by Brenner and Schmid. This work is a substantive exposition on the very situatedness of the processes of “creative destruction” that require a “new epistemological model” of the urban. That new model is especially focused on developing new ways for “cognitively mapping” the working of contemporary capital. Some critical comments made above to earlier writings by Brenner and Schmid hold as well for this more recent publication. There is one additional comment we want to make concerning this book and the project it foregrounds. At the opening to the “Afterword” Brenner establishes an important methodological position, one that we would want to question: “Crucially, the theoretical lenses into the urban question elaborated in this book have not been derived from an underlying metaphysical position or ontological foundation” (Brenner 2019, 338). Brenner makes this claim for a kind of pluralism or relativism, as the very mechanisms being explored and accounted-for, since the 1980s, are themselves variegated and motile. Yet we find this ‘refusal’ of an underlying metaphysics or foundation curious, as if it subversion of the subject, its splitting between target and aim—recourse to ontological difference— when it comes to the objet a? (Lacan 2006). Rather than considering there to be a deficit of ‘academic’ rumination on the reflexivity of social subjects, we would say this discursive field is excessive, heterogeneous and enlivening. 64 Would the radical ethics of a being-in-common, of a rethinking of the subject-who-knows in relation to the Other, have any bearing on just what is meant by the planetary or a planetary urbanization? Hence, Nancy’s “inoperative community” of difference, Blanchot’s “unavowable community” of the Outside, and Levinas’s radical distinction between the egoistic totality of identity and the radical and unknowable strangeness of the Other, take the very problematique (to use a word favoured by Brenner) of the planetary to regions completely concealed in a renewing of epistemological stakes. There is also Alphonso Lingis, his ‘community’ of those without anything in common. The work of Lingis must be included here.

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might seem defeating for Brenner, in terms of his insistence on a theoretical reflexivity that is willing to concede that the whole critical apparatus at times will fail to account for a current conjuncture, and things have to be completely reconceived: requiring a “new cognitive mapping”. Though Brenner does concede something he terms a “metatheoretical synthesis” which must yet avoid its grounding or founding moment. Again, we see a refusal of an ontological ‘lock-down’: “As with my conceptual explorations in this book, those presented here are not intended to “lock in” an ontologically fixed conception of the urban ‘once and for all’, but as provocations for further debate …” (342). Yet, then, in a comment referencing the work of the historical sociologist, Fouad Makki, we recognise a notion all too common from Brenner and Schmid’s earlier work, that of an “urban fabric.” We offer an extended citation on this: To paraphrase an incisive formulation on the dialectics of combined and uneven development from historical sociologist Fouad Makki, the point here is not simply that urbanization operated differently in different places, but that the capitalist urban fabric as a whole is itself “differently configured, with correspondingly distinct effects, across the socially uneven political multiplicity of the world.” Consequently, the specificity of sociospatial patterns and development pathways within the capitalist urban fabric emerges not simply from a pregiven condition of ontological singularity (whether within places, regions, territories, or cultures), or due to the collision of “opposed national and global forces,” but crystallizes relationally through the “overdetermined uneven and combined conditions of its existence” in world-historical space-time. (344)

We recognise, and agree with, the insistence Brenner has for foregrounding historicity and process over the ahistorical.65 Yet we wonder just what ontological understanding Brenner has for this notion of “the capitalist urban fabric” within which variegated motility happens “in world-historical space-time”? Our reading does suggest that for Brenner there is an ontological ground, an a priori condition for the possibility of the historical as such, wherein “world-historical space-time” necessarily needs to find its equivalence with “the capitalist urban fabric.” Indeed, this becomes the very condition of possibility for that new epistemology of urbanization that is able to sever its lineage to a history of city-formation. Even though Brenner patches up the error he previously made in inferring by planetary urbanism that there was no ‘outside’ to the urban (351, n. 27), from our reckoning, that ‘patch’ was strictly ontic, and not recognising its own ontological ground.66 Ontologically, the being of the very beings of variegated sociospatial landscapes, the metaphysical a priori to the possibility of mutability, is this very notion of ‘urban fabric’ itself, synonymous 65 Though we cannot actually encounter a sustaining discussion by Brenner as to what he means by the historical or historicity, as if either we all know what history is and the question need not be posed, or we all know what history is for Marx, as we will adhere to that doxa. This is not a small point. It is one that will come to preoccupy key aspects of our book on urbanism, especially as this question of history and the agencies of historical enquiry come to ground the political philosophy of Foucault, along with the ontological questioning of the temporalising of temporality as abyssal grounding of any question of history, that develops in Derrida’s engagements with Heideggerian thinking. 66 We earlier discussed the ontological difference in relation to the anti-foundational thinking of Swyngedouw concerning the difference between the political and politics.

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with capitalism, present-to-itself as capitalism. It is that ‘metatheoretical synthetic moment’ of capital and urbanization that founds and grounds this project.67 After all, Western metaphysics is inaugurated on this Platonic distinction between the a priori and the historical, evident—in this case—in the mutability of capital and the given necessity of the fabric.68

1.4.5 Birth of the Urban From a supposed ‘unfounded’ or ‘ungrounded’ ontological position proposed by Brenner concerning the radical absence of any “metaphysical or ontological foundation” to deriving an understanding of the urban, Ross Adams in Circulation and urbanism (2019) details the birth pangs of urbanism itself, from out of a peculiar ‘union’ of the Parisian, Haussmann, and Barcelona’s Ildefonso Cerdá.69 From the beginning, Adam’s project on urbanism has a different undercurrent to the projects 67 Hence,

we see critiques of Brenner from two distinct quarters, from those who do not want to be caught up in this “fabric as a whole”: post-colonialism and queer theory. See Oswin (2018) and Reddy (2018). 68 See Heidegger (2010) for discussion on the relation of the historical to the a priori, under a heading, “On the destruction of the problem of the a priori” (33): “The model Platonic form of the problem of the a priori did not even undergo a radical revision when the historical in its peculiarity stepped into philosophy’s field of vision. … The a priori stands opposed to the changeable, the coming-to-be and passing-away in time” (54). Heidegger’s project is, significantly, aiming at a break with that Platonic legacy of the ‘in time’ of the changeable, in a radical distinction he makes between being-historical and all historiography (see Derrida 2016). What is the historical for Brenner? Does he address the complexity of this question? Even when inveighing Marx’s Hegelian-Spinozan materialist history? But what is that for Brenner and Schmid? 69 Adams titles a final section to the final chapter of his book, in Foucauldian fashion: “Technologies of Territory and the Birth of the Urban” (205). In fact, that title probably should have replaced the ‘and’ with an ‘as’, for this, indeed is Adam’s ‘contribution’ to the field, deploying an account, based in part on the work of Stuart Elden, of a genealogy of ‘territory’ as a technology of power, constituting the oikonomia or governmentality or dispositif of the urban as a specific object of study. On Brenner’s derivation without ontological foundation, Derrida would recognise this as exemplary of Hegelian ‘Absolute Knowledge’ in its ideality, a notion he plays with in Glas (1986), with a double register of the acronym IC. One register is Kant’s “Impératif Catégorique,” (216), and the other is the “Immaculate Conception” (224ff). Both terms have a homophonic register with the French, ‘ici’, a here-and-now of self-presence to one’s self, auto-reflexivity in Archer’s reflex. This would, for Derrida, be the foundational ground of Western metaphysics. There is no other. Derrida’s key target in the deconstruction of Western metaphysics, as a metaphysics of presence, of the self-presence of oneself to oneself, is a proximity that, in the case of Brenner, marks the selfpresence of capital to its urban texture. There is a whole reading to be undertaken, a deconstructive reading, of this weave of a fabric termed sociospatial ‘urban’, its texture as hermeneutic weave, decipherable surface of Capital’s motile play. That text-texture, now planetary, would equate in a peculiar reading of Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text”—in fact Merrifield actually does that reading—as if the question of an ‘outside’, for example that of Blanchot’s “Other Night” or Derrida’s “archi-trace structure” would not infinitely complicate the ease at which reading is supposed to be possible. Then there would be the play Derrida sets in motion in Spurs (1979), a writing on Nietzsche and Heidegger, in which he encounters sexual difference in the undecidability

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undertaken by Brenner and Schmid, or Merrifield or Swyngedouw. On the surface, there are curious and compelling intersections or overlaps concerning, for example, the division, bifurcation or continuity of the rural and the urban, important for Brenner and Schmid, or the question of nature and technology we find rethought in processes of transformational metabolisms, and notion of circulation, in the work of Swyngedouw. And there is the compelling emphases Merrifield gives to Paris, to Haussmann, and to Lefebvre concerning an understanding of territory and city, of not so much transcending the notion of city in a conceiving of the urban as political substance, but of finding the urban as immanent substance to the intensities and extensities of its attributes, and the modalities of material-becoming of those attributes. All of these preoccupy this book on circulation, urbanism and a question of emergence, though do so in such a way that Adams at once amplifies the concerns of these others and undercuts them at the same moment.70 We find that we are closest to Adams, in Securing Urbanism, inasmuch as his undercurrent is decidedly Foucauldian. Though we are wary because he clearly does not sign his work by that name. If anything, he issues a warning, a caveat, about being too much a Foucault, or a Deleuze, or one might say, too much a Lefebvre or a Cerdá: “… this is not a book about Cerdá per se” (Adams 2019, 2).71 Though we do not get the sense that Adams, for all that, of a ‘le’ or a ‘la’ when it comes to voile, veil or sail, all the while teasing out the Schleiermachers, the hermeneuticists and interpreters, as sail-or-veil-makers, the ones who work with fabrics of all kinds, weaves, textures and texts, including those of the urban and the planetary. Concerning what may be in-scripted or styled in the production of a planetary fabric, we note from Spurs: “The question posed by the spurring-operation is more powerful than any content, thesis or meaning. The stylate spur rips through the veil. It rents it in such a way that it not only allows there the vision or production of the very (same) thing, but in fact undoes the sail’s self-opposition, the opposition of veiled/unveiled (sailed/unsailed) which has folded over on itself. Truth in the guise of production, the unveiling/dissimulation of the present product, is dismantled” (107). For further discussion of Derrida’s Spurs as a question of the sexual difference of veiling and sailing, see O’Connor (2007). 70 In what he terms a “portrait” of current urban theory, Adams is critical of those who consider the urban as a “loose signifier” for “zones of academic research” concerning cities; or where “infrastructure uncritically stands in for the urban” in defining the politics of our present; or where “Marxian analyses” define the urban as locale of struggle over resources and social equality in contexts of capitalist accumulation (6). 71 That caveat expressed by Adams concerns a wholesale importing of “pre-existing” discourses into urban theory. Yet, the book has the guise of suggesting that the ‘urban’, its relationship to the political, is something that can be “excavated” from out of itself: “Rather than excavating the concept itself, such critiques of the urban are too often extruded around Marxian critiques of capitalism (the work of both Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey stands out as the most influential within this framework) or plugged into Foucauldian analyses of power (see, among others, Osborne and Rose 1998, or Joyce 2003), or tested through Deleuzian sociologies (McFarlane 2011), in all cases affirming the discourse in question while leaving the urban, as an epistemological, political and historical category, unexamined” (9). For Adams, the urban then simply becomes a cipher for “sentiments that already exist,” which his project aims to avoid. By sentiments that already exist we presume Adams means political and economic critique that develops from the writing of Marx and the complex discursive terrains that have developed during the twentieth century which construe the urban as something that cannot be immured from those productive forces, as if it has its own concept; or a Foucauldian analytics of relations between spatiality and the exercise of power, or even Foucault’s ontologies of knowing, power and subjectification, just about all of which were developed by Foucault in historical

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want his urban birth to be immaculately conceived. Far from it. There is little in this compelling study that does not have a guiding Foucauldian hand. Adams’s project begins with a question, what seems to be for a number of critical theorists of urbanism the necessity of the question, the “what is” question concerning the urban, urbanism or urbanization, the need to secure urbanism within the fold of a question. Hence, we find, as with Merrifield and Brenner, the mark of the question.72 The book is not about the Catalan ‘founder’ of urbanization, Ildefons Cerdá y Suñer, as much as it is an archaeology of a discourse that constitutes the historicity of urbanization: To this end, Cerdá’s work serves more as a way into a project that interrogates a broader set of historical relations between space and power that both prefigure the emergence of the urban and inhere within its seemingly endless reproduction. His work allows us to risk posing a question whose audacity is evident in the way it appears both trivial and perplexing, as commonsensical as it seems unanswerable: What is urbanization? (3)

This archaeology of the emergence of a discursive ensemble, is equally—or more essentially—a genealogy of an exercise of power that refigures spatiality and habitability as forms of knowing whose defining, planning, and governance, were given the name urbanism. That exercise of power, itself, cannot be separated from an understanding of ‘circulation’. Indeed, in Foucauldian terms, what precisely defines an ontology of power in modernity, biopower, is that it is not a ‘substance’ to be contexts of defining the forces and resistances that constituted the habitability of individuated bodies or the emergence of population as a biopolitical and governmental measure of the State. More to the point, Adams may be seen to be doing something of the obverse, foregrounding a category nominally termed the urban, though one secreted through concerns precisely with an archaeology of the emergence of its historical assemblage, and a genealogy of the space and power relations that not simply produce the spatial registers of urbanization but more crucially produce the discursive ensembles by which a normalization of habitability emerges in governmental techniques of planning and colonization. As Adams, himself, notes: “… the analysis this book makes will look at the urban as a spatial correlate of a form of power whose configuration cohered over the course of the nineteenth century. That is to say, it will attempt to frame urbanization as a particular expression of power in a larger genealogical relationship of circulation, power and spatial order” (10). See also Adams (2014, 2016). 72 Would there be something that composes a relation between the notion of the question and the notion of the historical? It seems to us, especially in our encounters with Heidegger and Derrida, that this is an essential ‘question’. As Derrida (2016) emphasises, Heidegger makes a decisive difference between a history that is in time and found in space, a history that is marked in temporal succession and spatial location, and what he calls the history of being, or being-historical. In fact, Derrida considers this to be itself essential to Heidegger’s understanding of ontological difference. And, at the heart of it is how Heidegger comes to think of the notion of repetition, that which would be essential for historicality, as such, to be thinkable, and that by which spatio-temporality is generally thought. On the question of the question—Heidegger and the question—historicality and the question of repetition: “The concept of repetition, if one remembers what has already been said, implies that repetition is something quite other than a becoming-present-again, than a restoration of the past of what has been left behind. We are dealing with the very opposite of a traditionalism or a philosophy of repetition as immobile recommencement or the return to the origin like a falling back into childhood. This is why repetition has its origin in the future; and as repetition is the possibility of an authentic history, history has its possibility in the future and in death as the possibility of the impossible” (294–295).

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held or possessed or seized, but a capillary circulation of productive forces and resistances that are entered into and exercised, that do not so much control repressively but rather normalise productively.73 It is this modernity, emerging in the nineteenth century that constitutes the temporalising of the temporality of Adam’s archaeology and genealogy. His essential thesis comes early in the “Introduction”: When and how did circulation become epistemologically bound up with the knowledge and administration of the city? What relationships are fostered between circulation and urbanization? And, more broadly, what relationships can be traced between circulation and power? Within such an archaeology, what makes the urban unique, I argue, is that, unlike any previous spatial order, the boundary separating spatial order from modes of political subjectification and control disappears almost entirely: urban space is, in its ideal form, unmediated power – a characteristic that has only intensified today with the rise of cybernetic infrastructures and the general climate of crisis in which the urban continues to re-present itself. (5)74

Adams suggests this reading remains obscured by tendencies to understand the urban as trans-historical category, primarily illuminated by empirical enquiry. In this sense, Adams’s ‘birth’ of the urban is not looking for origins, for that essential a priori within which or from which the historical itself emerges as ‘becoming’ (10). Genealogically, and in a Foucauldian sense, the a priori is itself historical, anonymously locatable in the archives of discursive and non-discursive ‘statements’.75 Hence, though the planner, Cerdá, is recognised for inventing something quite new in understanding 73 It is in The punitive society that Foucault initially introduces his revised understanding of power, no longer thought as repressive, as substance, and as control but rather as relation that is exercised rather than held, that is productive of normalizing relations, productive of subjectivities and their knowing. See especially lecture 28 March (Foucault 2006, 225–247). 74 We need to be attentive to Foucault’s understanding of the notion of an ‘ideal figure’ as expression of relations of force. Foucault introduces this notion in his lectures, Psychiatric power (Foucault 2015), in a general discussion on institutions, architecture and power. It is here he initially describes Bentham’s Panopticism, as a diagram of power (see lecture 28 November). Crucially, the ‘ideal form’ mentioned by Adams should not be read explicitly as a spatial figure or building-type, but as a particular exercise of power constitutive of a range of institutional disciplinary apparatuses, whose exercise is constituted in the spatial allocations and controls of bodies—workers, prisoners, soldiers, school children, the sick, the mentally ill. Foucault emphasises that the family is curiously located within this relay of disciplinary mechanism, as vestige of sovereign power, that defines a ‘switching-mechanism’ between one disciplinary regime, one ‘diagram’ and another (see lecture 5 December). We will discuss Foucault on power extensively in Chapter 5 of Securing Urbanism. 75 Our aim in flexing towards Foucault in discussing some of the key notions in the work of Adams, is twofold. One is to indicate the extent to which key analytical notions, if not the overall tenor of Adams’s project, is leaning heavily on the work of Foucault, especially where Foucault, himself, is not directly referenced. The other is to emphasise the importance of working through a series of Foucauldian notions, their archaeology and emergence, along with the extent to which Foucault’s long engagements with space, power and habitability produces precisely the kind of genealogy of the urban that Adams especially values. Those engagements by Foucault are especially evident in his lectures at the Collège de France, from the 1971–72 The punitive society, through to The birth of biopolitics in 1978–79. It is true, Foucault did not design urban schemes, as did Haussmann and Cerdá. Though Adams’s insistence on an immured ‘anonymity’ to the emergence of a discourse of urbanization without undue ‘borrowing’ from other discourses, sets up that peculiar double bind of a tautology. The moment Adams wants to say the urban in all of its evental ‘truth’, he has to invoke the ‘as’ structure: the urban as circulation and power, as politicization of territory, and so

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how territory is to be considered as administrative substance in the mid-nineteenth century, and in doing so, reconsiders just how city and what lies outside it as rural territory could achieve new economic understanding, Adams emphasises that this notion of the urban, which now seems to pervasively define planetary understandings of territory, did not originate with Cerdá: “Of course the appearance of the urban in Cerdá’s work certainly does not constitute an ‘origin’: its invention should instead be seen as unconscious culmination of centuries of spatial, political and social experimentation in Europe and the colonial world …” (11). Again, we recognise the difficulty for Adams in wanting, on the one hand, to hold to a field that does not unduly borrow from other disciplinary ensembles in order to prop itself up, but, on the other hand ‘unconsciously’ ‘recognises’ immense legacies in all manner of knowing, now assayed through archaeology and genealogy. It is as if Adam’s very object, the urban, radically rethought from an inside-out in terms of territory, power and circulation, is the expression of a problem that is more general, one of how a disciplinary field in itself holds onto its specific object, its territory, in the recognition of incursions, of games of truth, of an exercise of power that defines or confines our knowing to particular ensembles. The problem of answering the question of urbanism becomes the problem of the question as such, approached not from the vantage of either philosophy or science, but from the vantage of technicians and bureaucrats of spatiality: The dialogue between [Cerdá] and his unidentified counterpart, Haussmann, had made visible a certain set of techniques, technologies and forms of knowledge from which a new spatial order could be, and indeed was, constructed – a project whose profound epistemological significance was grasped in full by Cerdá and whose consequences we are only now becoming aware of. … This new mode of representing the city, depicted as a multi-layered entity by an anonymous set of technicians, confirms a move away from the epistemological framework of artistic, architectural knowledge that had for centuries placed emphasis on the representational and aesthetic. But, more than this, such a cartographic depiction of the city would, of course, be useful in controlling its space as well. (206)

We recognise the distance between this work of Adams and the various other projects or approaches to urban theory we have outlined above. One review of Adams’s book (Forrest 2019), while entirely approving, comments on something that, perhaps, remains to be done. That remainder takes up aspects of the locales of those other urban approaches we have outlined here: “While not necessarily a flaw of the book, many might be left wondering about the messier histories of how circulation has been disordered and reordered in relation to different geographies of urbanization in different places” (Forrest 2019, 1214). While Adams does engage nineteenth century colonialism, the book does not aim to engage with analytics of space-and-power political complexities of feminism, queer theory or postcolonial theory, nor engage other spatialities such as planetary urbanism’s shadow banking or the contemporary remit of agencies such as the World Bank (see, for example, Alexander and Rowden 2018; Griffiths 2018). This is not its aim. Yet, in part because it did little to foreground on. In the end Cerdá and Haussmann, if they are to avoid becoming grist for a historiography of demonstrative truth, cannot become the locus of a practice that would, in truth, immure the urban as itself that practice.

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the political and historical philosophizing of Foucault, precisely on the question of marginalizations of all kinds in the capillary exercise of a normalising power, Adams makes it all the harder for his reader to move beyond a much simpler reading of his project as historical biography of a pioneer Catalan urban planner, a reading that successfully fills in something missing in nineteenth century urban planning history. The project is much more than this, though the Foucauldian ‘history of the present’ it alludes to ends up becoming a little elusive. Perhaps, for this reason, we see a genuine advantage in delving more thoroughly and systematically into aspects of the work of Foucault, aspects that alert us to the extent to which Foucault, from the beginning, was concerned with an understanding of practices that are spatially enacted before being necessarily defined and understood, hence a recognition of knowledge as itself contingent on an originary spatializing of practices. We approach this detailed spatial engagement with Foucault in Chapters 4 and 5 of our book.

1.5 Conclusion 1.5.1 Governmentality of the Urban76 1.5.1.1

Securing Our Questioning

There are a multitude of other paradigms or approaches we could discuss in this introductory chapter, for example, those concerning ‘smart cities’ or ‘resilient cities’ (Cowley and Caprotti 2019; Ayona and Odendaal 2019), more generally, prognoses on what is termed the fourth industrial revolution (Dano and Prato 2019; Gurumurthy and Chami 2019). There is also a growing body of writing on urbanism and urban landscape that engages contemporary philosophies of speculative realism or object-oriented ontologies. Though neoliberalism has been broached in contexts of

76 How do we read the possessive conjunction of ‘governmentality’ and ‘urban’ in this title? More generally we read it as a subjective genitive. We are concerned with the urban from the vantage point of its ‘governmentality’ though could, for example, substitute other potential qualifiers of the urban by which to study its processes. but then there is another reading of this title that suggests the notion of governmentality itself belongs to the urban or governmentality and urbanizing belong together. It would then be ‘urbanizing’ practices by which governmentality can be assayed or known. Our aim with this heading is to keep an undecidable in play, as if the notion of governmentality, referring not to the governmental structures of a State legislature, but the ubiquitous and anonymous normative and semi-juridical structures by which the regulatory itself happens, whether at home (literally) or in planetary affective measures, cannot be thought or practiced outside of a notion of urbanization, or urbanizing in its present-participle verbal/nominal sense. This would essentially be what we have gleaned from Adams most clearly and from Brenner, Schmid and Merrifield a little obscurely. It is what Hills drives home in her political critiques of the dogged application of Western notions of democracy within nation states for whom it is a peculiar aberration of governmentality. It is what Agamben implies in destituent power, and Graham emphasises in those everyday practices of an undecidable exercise of power at once civilian and military, securing and in-securing.

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Marxian analytical approaches by Merrifield or Brenner and Schmid, or in questioning an ontology of the political in distinction to politics with Swyngedouw, or in discussing cities under siege with Graham, we have not engaged directly in an analysis of especially late twentieth century and early twenty-first century urbanism in terms of the Keynesian State and its political dismantling (Cooper 2019; Jones 2016; Theodore and Peck 2011; Crouch 2009). This discussion would include the emergence of the IMF and World Bank, after World War Two, and their changing roles in planetary development policy, and hence in determining a governmentality of planetary urbanism. We have not broached urban studies or security studies literature explicitly from feminist theory, queer theory or post-colonial theory, literature that increasingly calls into question the normalising apparatus that produces urban theory from especially white, masculinist, Euro-American and heterosexual milieus (See critiques by Oswin 2018 and Reddy 2018). Our ‘sampling’ is skewed, biased, perhaps in the most predictable of ways. However, we consider that what we have touched on, as key concerns with contemporary engagements with urbanism, whether defined as planetary or not, provides us with a series of moments for analysis in developing an understanding of urbanism and security. In concluding this chapter, we want to initially summarise these moments, which then enables us to define a series of critical notions whose archaeology or genealogy we assay in the chapters that follow. We suggest this as a preliminary, if somewhat incomplete, approach to understanding the apparatuses of governmentality of the urban. We aim to avoid—either epistemologically or ontologically—practices of posing questions in the form of ‘what is?’. Hence, we are not concerned with questions such as ‘what is security?’, ‘what is its essential nature?’ such that it preoccupies the governmental structures and practices of governments everywhere. Nor are we asking ‘what is urbanization?’ or ‘what is circulation’ such that their conjuncture produces the political apparatuses of our time. Other kinds of questions preoccupy us, those concerning how a multitude of practices that complicate and codify the subjectifications of bodies as individuated identities—whose legitimacies shuttles between the judicial and the norm—are found to belong or not belong to particular places; thus, how ‘place’ is practiced before it is ‘known’. In this sense, our questioning splinters to how micro-practices precede and determine the macro-spatializing of place. Those micro-practices are neither natural nor free. They happen within a governmentality whose own practices, along with its archaeology and genealogy, become the key concerns of this book. We have accumulated seven components or elements within the mechanisms or apparatuses [dispositifs] we are aiming to delineate, what we have drawn from the above discussion on urban theory, that seem to constitute the series to be found in subsequent chapters of Securing Urbanism. i.

Security and order, whose genealogy defines the emergence of new modalities of the exercise of power at the threshold to the nineteenth century coincident with urbanizing’s emerging industrializing of capital. Those modalities are coincident with the problematizing of urban populations, industrial production, factory towns and the forming of a working class or labouring poor.

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ii.

Family and citizen, whose relations are complex and contingent on an understanding of institutions of disciplinary power, and a vestige of sovereign power that is coupled with the instituting of familial structures in the nineteenth century. Circulations and metabolisms, which constitute modalities of the exercise of power, modalities or technologies of communication, and infrastructures as technologies or techniques of disciplinary mechanisms. These give rise to and are accelerated by the growth of urban populations during the nineteenth century. The political and politics need to be understood as something other than a practice and the name given to what is practiced. These notions need to be recognised in the context of the ‘history’ of Western metaphysics, its founding on a particular understanding of the polis and its ‘other’ in the oikos, the re-inscriptions of polis in the European State’s development of the notion of ‘police’, and of policy, along with the translation of oikonomia to dispositivo, and, later, to apparatus. Infrastructure networks and surveillance become twin notions for a multi-scalar analytics of the geo-politics of urbanizing in terms of ‘creative destruction’, or de-modernization, or global financializing and securitizing. De-modernization as securitising measure aligns with and alerts us to the reality of the physicality of bodies of subjection, along with a return to the public (global media) display of sovereign power in absolute practices of terror. The planetary and worlding define an ontic/ontological conundrum of multiscalar rationality whose ratios express the problematic of a Nietzschean planetary will-to-power.

iii.

iv.

v.

vi.

vii.

The chapters that follow each engage in a critical assaying of aspects of these issues. It is not the case that each chapter thematically draws on or deals with one or another of these. Rather, the book unfolds in a manner whereby this manifold of concerns finds its combinatory effects across critical, historical and political analyses that define the order of exposition, or specific differences between chapters. The following two chapters elaborate on historical dimensions to these issues. Chapter 2 concerns the role of cholera epidemics in England and France in the development of urban infrastructure, regulatory mechanisms and renewal, as well as with the consolidation of a governmentality of liberalism, which continues to define, into the twenty-first century, micro-practices of urban hygiene. Chapter 3 deals, as well, with the notion of contagion during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This chapter analyses the governmentality of welfare housing in the U.S., from the early twentieth century, through to the deregulated housing economy of the end of the twentieth century, that led to the collapse of Wall Street banking and the Global Financial Crash. Chapters 4–6 engage with the work of Foucault, concerning space, power and truth, in urban contexts that Foucault especially draws on. Chapters 7 and 8 engage with developments and transformations of Foucault’s work, with Agamben, Negri, along with aspects of the work of Derrida and Heidegger. Chapter 9 was initially planned to engage with analyses of the relations between ‘planetary urbanization’ and global

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securities financializing, especially through the contingency theory underpinning the work of the philosophical economist, Elie Ayache. However, during the writing of the book, in January 2020, as contingency would have it, the SARS-CoV-2 suddenly emerged as a global pandemic, with significant ramifications for now understanding what we have been terming planetary urbanization, urban securitizing, states of emergency, liberalism and neo-liberalism, more generally, governmentality of the State. Though the final chapter does engage with work Ayache, it does so in the context of this global pandemic, which the chapter initially aims to chronicle. And it is the political writings of Furio Jesi that are especially privileged in bringing discussion to a close. The account of Covid-19 halts abruptly at the end of May 2020, just days prior to the massive upheaval in American cities due to the murder of George Floyd, precipitating the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests throughout the U.S. and globally that seemed to make the event of global pandemic all the more politicized. We recognise that, in this respect, the book remains incomplete, unfinished, though inevitably so, as if anyone could or would has a final word on securing urbanism.

1.5.2 Urbanizing Security We have focused with this opening chapter especially on a questioning of urbanism, on the ‘nature’ of the urban, on a raft of differing approaches to this notion, as if, for some theorists, urbanism or urbanization itself, as a notion or definition, requires ‘securing’. There is a similar discussion to be had on the notion of security, on the broad range of critical approaches to what this notion concerns, as well as epistemological and ontological approaches to what ‘securing’ essentially secures (see Burgess 2012, 2019; Dillon 2002, 2007, 2013, 2015; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2014, Gros 2019, Lundborg 2016). Indeed, one critical avenue emphasises that security, as such, is in perennial need of being secured (Burgess 2019). We will not pursue this literature in this chapter. Rather, the question of security, its epistemic and ontological grounds, will in part be discussed in a number of the chapters that follow, especially in relation to how Foucault engages what he terms ‘apparatuses of security’, or dispositifs de sécurité. We will also engage aspects of Heidegger’s discussion of security in relation to his understanding of power and planetary humanism (see especially Heidegger 2015, 54–61). Though, it is in our concluding chapter, “Cruel Festival,” that we will most thoroughly engage a question of security, precisely in terms of how current discourses of urbanization are productive of effects of securitizing practices. It is not so much that apparatuses of security normalize urbanizing practices, nor the obverse, that urbanizing, understood at whatever ‘scale’, is constitutive of securitizing measures. Rather, and this becomes a focus within our concluding chapter, these dispositifs of urbanizing and securitizing, twin relays of an oikonomia or governmentality of our present, make territory a constituent power of exceptional habitability, while whatever life, territorial belonging as political substance, becomes—as form-of-life—a destituent power—inoperativity—that is neither ‘political’ nor ‘politics’, but rather the ontological difference that un-conceals both (see especially Agamben’s early political writing on community, Agamben [1993]).

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Throughout the above discussion we have made reference, where appropriate, to the various chapters in Securing Urbanism that amplify or extend aspects of the discussion we were broaching. This, hopefully, suffices to provide a sense of what lies ahead, chapter-by-chapter. The book’s overall concerns are developed in three broad parts, each of three chapters. Part I, “Politics of Contagion,” initially develops an understanding of the urban in terms of movement, urban flows, and processes of contagion inevitably resulting from the motility of ‘urban fabrics’. The most common versions of this understanding or model of the urban has urbanism emerging in the nineteenth century, coincident with the emergence of liberalism, with models of contagion, flow or movement dominating much of the twentieth century.77 Where Part I aims at consolidating an understanding of this model, the book overall is concerned with analysing an eclipsing of this paradigm by which the urban has for so long been understood. Hence, Part II, “Securing the Urban,” and Part III, “Postpolitical Urbanism,” develop approaches to urban thinking and political analysis that aim to slowly unhinge this paradigm, bringing it into question, without necessarily providing an ‘answer’ by way of a ‘substitute’ or alternative model by which we are able to name our currency.78

References Adams, R. E. (2014). Natura urbans, natural urbanata: Ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 12–29. Adams, R. E. (2016). An ecology of bodies. In J. Graham (Ed.), Climate: Architecture and the planetary imaginary. Lars Müller: Zurich. Adams, R. E. (2019). Circulation and urbanization. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Adler, A. C. (2015). Deconfabulation: Agamben’s Italian categories and the impossibility of experience. Diacritics, 43(3), 68–94. Agamben, G. (1993). The coming community (M. Hardt, Trans.). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G. (1999). Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2000). Means without end: Notes on politics (V. Binetti & C. Casarino, Trans.). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G. (2001). On security and terror. Accessed 12 January 2020 from: https://libcom.org/ library/on-security-and-terror-giorgio-agamben. Agamben, G. (2003). Beyond human rights. In E. Cadava & A. Levy (Eds.), Cities without citizens (pp. 3–11). Philadelphia: Slough Books. Agamben, G. (2009). What is an apparatus? And other essays (D. Kishik & S. Pedatella, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2014). What is destituent power? (S. Wakefield, Trans.). Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 65–74.

77 The various critical models of, or engagements with, urbanism outlined in this introductory chapter maintain this emphasis on circulation and flow, whether that be of insurgency or transformative metabolisms, or the flows of capital or planetary extensions. 78 This, indeed, returns us to the question of the question.

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Chapter 2

Cholera

2.1 Introduction 2.1.1 Social Medicine As we referenced in Chapter 1, the urban political theorist, Stephen Graham, documents and discusses a range of effects that flowed from the bombing of Bagdad by U.S. forces in Gulf War I and Gulf War II. His focus was especially the 1991 aerial bombardment of key urban infrastructure sites, in particular electricity generation capacity. Graham adopts the term ‘urbicide’ to signal this practice, an urbicide whose effects are demodernization (Graham 2006). As a result of targeting electricity production and distribution infrastructures, Bagdad’s water supply and sewerage treatment facilities were disabled, along with every other service that a modern city has that requires electricity. Resulting from this demodernization of a city with respect to sanitation and water supply was the eruption of epidemics in water-borne diseases, especially cholera. While direct bombing accounted for approximately 30,000 deaths, over the following years deaths from epidemic disease accounted for approximately 111,000 in Bagdad and other cities. Graham cites a UNICEF report from 1999, noting over 500,000 excess deaths among Iraqi children under five, resulting from practices of infrastructure demodernization, that led to waterborne diseases and widespread malnutrition (Graham 2006, 259). This contemporary strategy of demodernization with respect to the militarisation of urban conflict alerts us to processes over the past two hundred years whereby the urban becomes a site or milieu defined by, or sustained by infrastructures that manage flows and contagions of all kinds. Infrastructures are mediums for the conveyance of forces and flows, for the control of movements, and securing of the rates of flow, whether that flow is material or immaterial, communications, sewerage, traffic, commodities, or money. At the end of the eighteenth century, the urban became a milieu of necessary infrastructural strategy, of the management of movements (Donzelot 1979; Gilles 1986; Delaporte 1986; Barry 1996; Graham 2006; Adams 2019). This chapter gives an account not so much of the discourses, both medical and © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. L. Jackson and M. Hanlen, Securing Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4_2

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legal, that constituted the regulatory apparatuses of urbanization, but rather accounts of practices that constituted a know-how of managing contagious flows. As we will see, these practices of knowing, according to particular capillary networks of the exercise of power, were in radical disagreement with one another. Knowledge is not the slow sedimentation of a refinement of truth waiting to be discovered. Rather, it is warlike, practiced as ritual. It is evental.1 The directions taken in the early nineteenth century to produce an urbanizing via infrastructural means was not a necessary and rational outcome of planning, but effects of disorder, a disorderly array of forms of medical knowhow, and disorderly procedures for the management, or governance, of disease. Initially this chapter traces the emergence, from the eighteenth century, of what Foucault terms the ‘birth’ of social medicine. This account was extensively developed by Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France in the early 1970s, especially with regard to the emergence of institutions of disciplinary mechanisms that individualized and segmented populations in procedures that were normalizing. Foucault also gave a series of lectures on social medicine, delivered in Rio de Janeiro, in OctoberNovember, 1974 (Foucault 2000b, 2004, 2007b), along with a further essay from 1976, focusing on the eighteenth century (Foucault 2000a). Foucault emphasises that the rise of medicalization during the nineteenth century as an exercise of power should not be considered as a triumph of individualized medical practice. Medicine’s exercise of power happens in the social administration of medicalizing security, by the wealth classes, whose target was the proletariat, conceived of as threat. The themes of civil war, of the capillary movements of an exercise of power, of the family as central relay between differing disciplinary institutional mechanisms, are elaborated in this account of the emergence of social medicine. The cholera epidemics in Europe in the early nineteenth century, a focus of this chapter, become key moments in assessing the administrative frameworks of a medical power. The chapter further introduces the problematic of this array of knowing in discussing an analysis of the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris, by the Foucauldian historian, François Delaporte (Delaporte 1986). In outlining the competing practices of medical know-how, becoming a veritable civil war or stasis within the medical profession in France at the time, Delaporte traces how the cholera epidemic brought about the wholesale demolition of the living quarters of the urban poor of Paris, defined and segmented urban populations, rethought a fundamental understanding between the urban and rural, and instigated new understandings of disease as spatial practice. This includes practices leading to accounting-for the temporality of incubation of disease, spaces of confinement, and spaces of analysis and treatment. In this sense, the peculiar notion presented by Delaporte, that disease does not exist, only practices, may be understood in terms whereby the very notion of infra-structure needs to be approached in terms of spatializing force. The chapter then moves to a 1 We

discussed in Chapter 1 the distinction Foucault makes between truth as demonstration and truth-event. For truth as demonstration, truth lies ‘out there’ waiting patiently or impatiently to be discovered. For Foucault, truth relates to an exercise of power, contained in or orchestrating practices of power, ritual practices that produce ‘true’ forms of knowing, always contested, as power is an exercise of force and counter-force. See Foucault (2006, 238).

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detailed account of the cholera epidemics in the U.K. in the early and mid-nineteenth century, focusing on newspaper accounts, as an everyday modality of circulation that supposedly informed a general population concerning the circulation of contagion. As we see, the newspaper accounts, while widely informative, were wildly aberrant in their presentation of the disease, and practices for its control. There follows an analysis of the notion of plague as allegory of civic disorder (McKinlay 2009). This analysis is extended and contrasted to Foucault’s account, in his Collège de France lectures, Security territory population (2007), of the biopolitical rationality of liberalism, as it emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, and the governmentality of populations as medicalised entities. This discussion extends to analyses of nineteenth century liberalism in England, and the development of sewerage and water infrastructures as modalities of liberal governance (Osborne 1996). The chapter concludes with discussion of contemporary neo-liberal governmental practices of environmental citizenship, that redefine the notion of citizen from that of inalienable nativity right, to a status that can be won or lost, a contingent ‘right’, now grounded on individuated self-management and self-enhancement, coterminous with environmental management.

2.2 Securing Disease 2.2.1 Noso-Politics We will be addressing three texts by Foucault when discussing developments of the emergence and consolidation of social medicine during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Foucault 2000a, b, 2004). We’ll commence with Foucault’s “The politics of health in the eighteenth century” (2000a), although it postdates the Rio lectures by two years. We will then address the initial two of the Rio lectures, making reference to the third later in this chapter, when discussing the nineteenth-century hospital as a technology of power.2 Concerning the politics of health in the eighteenth century, Foucault commences with two preliminary remarks in order to introduce what he terms a ‘noso-politics’, a political institutionalization of mechanism of control over a population via surveying the social body of health and disease. The initial remark emphasises that the medicalization of the social was not once, in ancient or ‘primitive’ times, a collective practice that becomes individualized with the rise of liberalism and capitalism, in the form of privatized medicine. Nor was the emergence of social medicine the breaking up of privatized clinical practices. Rather, Foucault sees emerging, in the eighteenth century, a “double-sided process” (Foucault 2000a, 90): The growth of private clienteles that develop during the nineteenth century, along with increasing recognition of a politics of health, which 2 The

Rio lectures were, in order of delivery, “The crisis of medicine or the crisis of antimedicine” (2004); “The birth of social medicine” (2000b); and “The incorporation of the hospital into modern technology” (2007b).

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means defining health in terms of economic and political costs. Disease becomes an economic problem that is focused on the poor. Both privatized and social medicine emerge from out of this common ‘noso-politics’ of the costs to be borne with disease and the potentials for social disturbances with the outbreak of epidemics. During the eighteenth century, the mechanisms of control of a noso-politics is not centralized, but dispersed across various institutions: religious organizations, charities, learned societies, academies and statistical societies (92). State intervention is uneven and uncoordinated. However, noso-politics displaces what was key in the seventeenth century, defined as assistance to the “sick poor,” a category defining those who were unable to work, who were ill, paupers, the destitute. All were to be housed in a general hospital (93). Two developments called for a finer categorization and eventual abolition of the notion of the sick poor, along with their confinement. The first was concerned with investment and capitalization in the institution of the general hospital, with the question as to how it returns on its costs. At the same time, a finer grid of surveillance and classification of populations redefined the sick poor in terms of capacity for work, the idle, the genuinely sick. Analysis shifted from that of poverty to that of idleness. Foucault discusses the notion of ‘police’ as a mechanism of administration of health measures, a ‘medical police’, discussed earlier in the second of his Rio lectures, which we will address below, but also discussed in some detail in his 1977–78 lectures at the Collège de France (Foucault 2007a). The importance of an emerging social medicine in the eighteenth century was especially due to economic analyses of the costs of assistance in the policing of health, with a focus on the sickness of the poor as source of disorder, and the general health of the population as a securitizing measure against disorder. Bodies take on a newly defined understanding in terms of usefulness, profitability, investment and training, potentials for survival or death. The biological character of bodies becomes an element in economic management, an apparatus of subjection and utility (95). Foucault here defines two predominant frameworks of eighteenth-century noso-politics. The first becomes a focus on the family, no longer thought as extended heredity line, but as the medicalization of the parent-and-child relation. The focus here is on the management of childhood, beyond the simple concern with infant mortality or survival. Childhood becomes an intensive site for questions of economic costs, investment, the management of this span of life, responsibilities for care, hygiene, clothing and food.3 Hence the family is no longer a kinship network but a site of bodily development to productive adulthood. As Foucault emphasises elsewhere (Foucault 2006, 79–87), the family becomes that essential relay between a panoply of disciplinary mechanisms, the privileged site of surveillance and management, in this case with respect to institutional apparatuses of administrative medicalization. The parent-child 3 It

is significant that Foucault returns precisely to this concern with the cost of childhood when he investigates the emergence of neo-liberalism in the United States, particularly during the 1970s. In his lectures of 1978–79 (Foucault 2008a), discussed later in this chapter, Foucault particularly addresses the work of Theodore Schulz and Gary Becker, who both wrote on human capital and the economic costs of education, understood as investment in the future of a self-as-enterprise. See Foucault (2008a, 285), Becker (1971), and Schultz (1971).

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complex becomes a “crossing-point” between a private ethics of good health and a collective system of hygiene (98). With the second framework for a noso-politics of health, Foucault outlines three elements of an emerging authoritarian intervention and control. The first is a focus on the close connection between the developments of urbanization and the emergence of a social medicine. Medicine functions not so much on bodies directly but on things and their spacing. Hence, urban spaces were perceived as dangerous for populations, requiring ventilation, addressing sewerage, drainage, the locating of abattoirs and cemeteries. The city becomes a medicalized object. In keeping with Hippocratic medical emphases given to climate and geology, to air and terrain as pre-dispositions to disease or its elimination, medicine became a general technique of health, a general pedagogy (100). A medical-administrative knowledge becomes the “core for a ‘social economy and sociology’ of the nineteenth century” (99). Coterminous with this is what Foucault terms a “surplus power” bestowed on doctors as key to social and political reform of the social body. The second element of an administrative medicalization of the social body is a significant shift that happens in understanding the institutional role of hospitals. As mentioned above, in the eighteenth century, we witness a new classification of confinement that is based on labour power rather than poverty, hence developing new bio-medical classifications of individuated bodies. There was also, with the direct focus on the family as instrument of medicalization, less emphasis placed on a vagrant or pauper class that was the target of general confinement. That target now becomes collective hygiene, addressed through a new apparatus that interlaces medical knowhow and procedures with administrative policing and control. The old general hospital was an institution not of cure, but one within which those confined will die. It was replaced by three key mechanisms: firstly, making every family a hospital such that home care reduced the social cost of cure. This required, secondly, the distribution throughout the social body of a trained medical knowhow, charged with administering inexpensive treatment. A third tactic was the necessary distribution of medicines, in dispensaries, a practice developed in England in the mideighteenth century (102). With these reforms, the institution of the hospital was able to take on quite different specialized roles, relative to family health. A series of spatial issues arose with the hospital as a therapeutic technique: Its safe location within an urban milieu, its size and degree of specialization, its internal circulations concerning air, services, movements of doctors and patients, handling of bed linen and hospital waste. The third element of a new medical-administrative mechanism, akin to the new role of hospitals, was the emphasis on the hospital as an instrument of cure, an essential element in medical technology. This is the theme in particular of Foucault’s third Rio lecture. Briefly, the therapeutic function addresses a defined population with specific medical knowledge, classifications and techniques. The hospital becomes a supporting mechanism for a general framework of social or public hygiene, in the relays it sets up between treatments at home, in relation to hospitalization regimes. It is also a training facility for those entering private practice, a site of clinical teaching. In summary, this new role of the hospital is due to four key developments: new spatial problems associated with urbanization; new understandings of a population’s

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biological characteristics; development of the immediate rather than extended family as bio-medical target; and increased density of disciplinary mechanisms associated with institutional structures of confinement or control that aimed at individuation and productivity (104).

2.2.2 Somatocracy With Foucault’s initial Rio lecture on social medicine, he takes up a polemical position with respect to what was then a recent publication by the political thinker, Ivan Illich, on the general harm done by contemporary medicine (Illich 1974). Illich proposed an anti-medicine, refusal of the kinds of medicalization of the body instituted by social medicine that essentially takes away from individuated selves their self-management of illness, especially pain.4 One of the emphases given by Illich is the documented extent of medical error, mis-diagnosis and incorrect treatment or procedure. Foucault’s approach to this discussion addresses Illich in two ways. Firstly, he abandons the implied ‘choice’ we might have of medicine or anti-medicine. His genealogy of the emergence of welfare medicine suggests such a ‘choice’ resolves little. The other aspect is that Foucault does not focus on where the practices of medicine are in error, but precisely where they uphold their efficacy and reason. Though, his starting point is with England during the Second World War, and the development of the Beveridge Plan that would usher in, in 1945, the most comprehensive social welfare scheme that enshrined not so much a right to life, but a right to health (Foucault 2004, 6).5 Foucault engages with four key issues concerning the establishing of the Beveridge Plan, issues that shift something fundamental to administrative medicine. The first was the State taking over complete authority for health. Though this emerges in the eighteenth century, and expands in the nineteenth, that concern was primarily economic and political with respect to labour power and 4 O’Mahony

(2016) provides a detailed background to Illich, to his book, Medical nemesis, its emphases and also to its reception at the time, and now some forty years after publication. Medical nemesis was itself considered polemical and was uniformly dismissed by the medical profession and pharmaceutical companies. Foucault’s response is more complex than dismissal. In fact, his critical understanding of the power-knowledge subjectification of individualized selves by a medicaladministrative apparatus is entirely resonant with the politics of Illich. Though, Foucault recognizes that the problem field of resistance is perhaps more complex that the responses that Illich throws up. Certainly, Foucault’s insistence on a genealogical understanding of the exercise of a medical power from the eighteenth century is at the core of his concern. 5 The development of the Beveridge plan cannot be separated from the developments by J. M. Keynes of a new economic approach to capitalist crisis with his General Theory (1936). For a detailed discussion of Keynes and Beveridge, in light of post-Global Financial Crash global economic policy, see Cooper (2019): “To answer these questions [concerning the breakdown of the Keynesian consensus in the 1970s], we need to understand how Keynesianism as a project of full-employment was combined with Beveridge’s social insurance scheme and how this confluence of economic and social policy interventions gave rise to the post-welfare state” (343). We will come back to Cooper’s analysis in Chapter 3 of Securing Urbanism.

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a productive workforce, along with securing a bourgeoisie from the threat of the lower classes. With the Beveridge Plan, something becomes inverted. The State is in the service of the individual. Secondly, with nineteenth-century moral hygiene, the labouring poor were considered to be lacking in moral stamina and healthy constitution. With the Beveridge Plan, the poor now had the right to be sick, the right to not work. While medical police had been an administrative cost to the State, the scale of intervention with the Beveridge Plan now had health central to a State’s macroeconomic policy. Health insurance became a major State expenditure, funded through taxation. The aim in this was to correct inequities of income and class with universal access to health care. The fourth key shift was to what Foucault terms a “somatocracy,” a governmentality of the individuated body (6). A new series of rights are instigated, along with a new morality, a new body-politics of State intervention at the level of the body. Foucault points to something paradoxical in the universal availability of health services, something resonant with the analyses of Illich. The overall health of populations did not dramatically increase. There was what Foucault referred to as a “stagnation” (7). This is especially puzzling as these health welfare measures in post-war Britain, Europe and the United States, social security measures, coincided with significant advances in antibiotics. He analyses three tendencies in the advancement of administrative medicine, the scientificity and efficacy of medicine, the ‘take off’ of a medicalization of the social, no longer attached to specific diseases or the demands of patients, and the development of the political economy of medicine itself, medicine as a commodity defining a standard of living within a mix of commodities. With respect to the scientific reason of medicine, as mentioned above, Foucault does not draw on a history of scientific errors, making of medical knowledge a dangerous pursuit. Rather, his comments are limited here to discussing what was then contemporary medical research into genetic cell structures and gene modification. Foucault notes the bio-historical implications of this direction in research, whose affects cannot be limited to individuals or even lines of descent, but to effects on the entire human race. Biology and medicine now work on the level of life as fundamental event. Resonant with this, though within the emergence of administrative medicine, is what Foucault termed “undefined medicalization” (12). Where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries medical knowledge acted on the demands of a patient, medical knowledge by the twentieth century is defined by an ‘illness’ that provides a medical “status” to a patient’s demands, legitimizes an individual body as coinciding with the frameworks inscribed by illness. Medicine becomes something imposed, while health becomes medicalized even when not concerning disease. We have covered aspects of this ‘take off’ already in discussing the medicalization of urban spaces, air, infrastructures, construction and terrain, along with the collectivization of medicine in the newly understood institutional role of hospitals, along with the family as locus of care of the sick. These practices are supported by a panoply of administrative techniques, recording of data, and compiling of statistics. The political economy of medicine emerged during the nineteenth century with recognition of the economic and political costs of a labouring poor that was unproductive and disordered. Foucault notes that the Royal Society of Medicine in France was

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established not out of administrative reaction to an epidemic but due to an epizootic event, the outbreak of animal disease and the economic consequences of this (16). He also notes that the development of neurology in the late nineteenth century results from the problem with identifying and then treating genuine illness caused by industrial and railway accidents. It was an economic problem of the costs of medical insurance that drove developments in medical procedures. However, in the late twentieth century, health consumption becomes a major global industry.6 Foucault emphasises the regressive taxation system at work in this. While health care is tax-funded, it is the rich rather than the poor who most access health services, resulting in the poor disproportionately paying for health benefits that go under-utilized. The largest profits go to pharmaceutical companies who effectively use the medical profession, both privatized and public, as a dispensing mechanism. Foucault’s unanswered question is how do we modify this model, whose legacy goes more or less unbroken back to the eighteenth century. How are the links between medicine, economy, power, society to be rethought? In the second of his Rio lectures, “The birth of social medicine” (Foucault 2000b), Foucault perhaps gives greater clarity as to why it was in post-war Britain— rather than in France, for example, or post-war Germany—that the Beveridge Plan emerged, and why it was adopted—albeit modified—in Europe and the United States. Foucault’s orientation to the ‘birth’ of social medicine is to initially emphasise the manner whereby capitalism instituted practices of the body, rather than an ideology. Capitalism socializes the body for its productive capacity, a biopolitical reality for which medicine becomes a biopolitical strategy (137). Foucault then outlines three quite distinct ‘phases’ or directions whereby the ‘take off’ of social medicine was practiced, initially in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with State medicine, then in France at the end of the eighteenth century with Urban medicine, and by the late nineteenth century in England with Labour-force medicine. Germany developed a ‘science of the state’ and a ‘medical police’ prior to such politicoeconomic rationalities being developed in France or England. Foucault suggests that by the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, the role of medical policing included practices of micro-surveillance, the standardization of medical practices and their training, State-administered overseeing and appointment of the medical profession (140–141). Individualized health was not seen as labour power for production, as much as a ‘State-strength’ within the overall order of the State. The ‘take-off’ of social medicine in France was primarily driven by the recognition of crises in urbanization, the disorder and threat of an urban poor, and the necessity to develop public hygiene as a securitizing measure to social medicine. The model for order came from a long history of practices of quarantine that established a spatial and administrative hierarchy, based on the notion that each family has a dwelling, and each individual can be dispersed to a room; each dwelling is locatable within a defined district whose surveillance by a superintendent and medical corp. is centralized (145). Spatial ordering, surveillance and administration have a fixed 6 See O’Mahony (2016) for some startling statistics on this, in relation to prognoses offered by Illich

in the mid-1970s.

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periodicity, such that daily accounts of the movement and eradication of disease can be measured. To achieve this securitizing order, Foucault emphasises three spatializing registers in urban medicine: locating urban practices that threaten health, such as the location of slaughterhouses and cemeteries; controls over the circulation of air and water, with air carrying pathogenic substances and low-lying marshes or bogs harbouring disease and miasmas. The third spatial problem concerned the distribution and sequencing of public facilities, such as water pumps, fountains, wash-houses: How to keep drinking water clean (147–148). Three crucial effects emerged from the development of a medicine of urbanization during the eighteenth century. One was the necessity for medical practices to engage with the sciences of physics and chemistry in order to understand the effects of air, water and organisms on public hygiene. A second was the recognition that medicine was not necessarily focused on human bodies but on things that composed a milieu or living condition: how a living condition affected an organism. The concept of public health emerges as a panoply of practices for modifying environments, a political and economic—but also scientific—control mechanism (150–151). The third development of social medicine, outlined by Foucault, occurs in England and is focused on labour power for capitalist production. Foucault suggests that the Poor Law of 1834 becomes an initial instigator for the development of social medicine in England. The Poor Law was designed as a complex series of social ‘reforms’, aimed at reducing the social cost of poor relief by restricting such relief only to those who could not work, thereby increasing the ‘willingness’ of the urban poor to work, along with measures to control the growth of population of the poor.7 More direct social medical legislation was enacted mid-century, with the establishment of a Medical Officer of Health for the city of London in 1848. Foucault mentions John Simon in this regard, as the first elected Medical Officer. The most pressing reforms were enacted with the 1875 Public Health Act, whose reform measures, like those in France somewhat earlier, focused on urbanization and the control of infrastructures such as sewerage and water supply, along with the development of by-laws for the construction of buildings and new streets. In tandem with these measures, were administrative medical frameworks for the control of vaccinations, the mandatory reporting of epidemic illnesses, and the eradication of unhealthy spaces (154). With the development of the Health Service, public medicine was determined not only for the poor but for the entire population. The efficacy of the English system was that it encompassed medical assistance for the poor, control of labour force health, and general surveillance of the entire population. It also distinguished between welfare medicine for the poor, administrative medicine for the population, and private medicine for the middle classes. Foucault emphasises the advance of the English system over the overly-administrative German system of State medicine, and the failure of France’s Urban medicine to legislate for control over private property (156). 7 A 2019

study, by Gregory Clark and Marianne Page, of the effects of the 1834 Poor Law suggests that it provided little, if any, economic benefit to the middle classes or capitalist economy: “The draconian reforms of the New Poor Law, in place in England until 1906, and dramatized by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist in 1838, had no measurable social benefit” (Clark and Page 2019, 241).

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In what follows we engage closely with an analysis of the 1832 cholera epidemic in France, particularly the reactions of the Parisian medical establishment. In this granulated analysis, we come to recognise how aspects of Foucault’s overall account came to be practiced, along with articulation of aspects of Foucault’s analyses from his research on the emergence of the nineteenth century hospital (Foucault 1973) and the biopolitics of nineteenth century political economy (Foucault 1978).

2.2.3 Disease Does not Exist At the opening of his 1986 book on the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris, Disease and civilization, François Delaporte makes the startling claim that “disease does not exist” (6). Within the introduction to his book, Delaporte outlines a series of principles by which anthropology would go about doing a history of the 1832 epidemic: the universality of disease as a fact of human life; diseases are defined or understood through beliefs, perceptions and cognitions; universally humans develop methods and roles in managing or responding to disease. In contrast to these, Delaporte suggests: Let me simply put my own view as starkly as possible, to emphasise the contrast. I assert, to begin with, that “disease” does not exist. It is therefore illusory to think that one can “develop beliefs” about it or “respond” to it. What does exist is not disease but practices. (Delaporte 1986, 6)

Hence, we emphasise that the approach taken by Delaporte is neither anthropology nor ethnography. Though, what does he mean by ‘practices’? We are reminded a little of the approach taken by Ivan Illich to the tumorous cancer that eventually took his life: “I am not ill, it’s not an illness. It is something completely different – a very complicated relationship” (Illich, quoted in O’Mahony 2016, 135). For Delaporte, disease is simply the name given to a complex series of practices, complicating and competing relations, never settled or fully knowable. In Foucault’s terms, disease is truth-event, rather than demonstrable truth, a matter of power and technologies of a medical-power producing competing forms of knowing via competing rituals for the assaying of the true. Delaporte’s account of cholera in Paris in 1832 is an account of such competing practices, whose concerns were political and economic, spatially reformist and production-centred, rather than concerns with determining the singular aetiology of a disease. Many of the themes we have mentioned from Foucault are developed: the liberal utopianism of State medicine, along with its failures. Paris awaited the arrival of cholera from England and elsewhere in Europe, in order to prove the superiority of its medical hygiene practices, its quarantine procedures and its advanced understanding of disease. The medical establishment had the conviction that cholera would not take hold. When it did, it was held to be generally confined to the working class or urban poor, which was convinced it was being poisoned by the medical establishment, while the middle classes considered the urban poor a threat. The most sustaining discussion by Delaporte concerns the rivalry between those who

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advocated contagion and those who advocated infection as the primary causal agent in the spread of cholera.

2.2.4 Living Conditions and Pre-dispositions Attempts to elaborate a theory of cholera brought into play several dominant themes of early nineteenth-century medicine. There were two sets of measures, one being Sanitary procedures, advocated by Physiologists, and directed against contagion, where disease is spread by bodily contact. The other measure was termed Health procedures that were directed against infection, disease spread through a medium such as air or water (13–14). As Paris and key shipping ports, such as Marseilles, as well as border posts, had established quarantine measures against contagion, the 1832 epidemic seemed to confirm infection rather than contagion, as the disease seemed to simply leap over all quarantine measures, supposedly being carried by miasmas. Delaporte emphasises the vehement dispute that arose. Those favouring quarantine were recognised as conservatives, and despotic in administrative control, working against the capacity of labour to move where needed and goods to freely circulate. Those favouring infection were seen to be liberal progressives, recognising that confinement of bodies leads to economic stagnation, along with fixed concentrations of disease. The 1834 Cholera Enquiry recognised the need for a new Code of Public Health, that fundamentally redefined a number of spatial understandings of the urban, that were relics of Hippocratic medicine, such as the importance of climate and terrain, replacing these with social factors and institutional functions (11). The notion of “living conditions” overtook that of “habitat.” Where habitat was inherited from botany, defining the ideal coincidence of species and soil, terrain and climate, living conditions is concerned with the modalities and arrangements of urban environments, along with their potential for modification. Living conditions comprised two spatial dimensions, those intrinsic to a body and those extrinsic: organic spaces and social spaces (80). With the predominance of cholera infection affecting the urban poor, the notion of pre-disposition was understood as that means whereby extrinsic living conditions translate to intrinsic: how degraded environments become insurmountable in biological terms. This is then understood as the manner whereby a working urban poor internalizes the effects of environment. Recognition was given to income, a comparative anatomy of poverty and wealth as the generator of differentials in intrinsic and extrinsic factors, a comparative anatomy paralleling that of Cuvier (79). The old Hippocratic notion of healthy or unhealthy air dominating seventeenth and eighteenth-century urban planning was replaced by the notion of ‘function’. Now air, sunlight, housing’s fenestrations and spatial arrangements become modifiable functions of ‘inhabiting’, as extrinsic factors of living conditions (85).

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2.2.5 Infection or Contagion There were four competing branches of medicine that each favoured its own understanding of cholera, its symptoms and spread: physiological medicine, experimental medicine, nervous pathology and humoral pathology. Generally, these four branches favoured infection over contagion, as the mucus membranes of the respiratory and digestive systems, rather than skin, seemed to be significant. However, with the development of germ theory, the agent cause of disease with respect to contagion was refined. Hence it was no longer an infected person who ‘gave’ the disease, but the germ carried by the infected, the latter now thought of as ‘vehicle’. Contagion now implied infection of a germ via contact with its cause of transmission (155). The diseased then become ‘sources of infection’, requiring isolation (160). Delaporte discusses the difference in perception between provincial doctors and those in the large cities. The former was committed to a theory of contagion; the latter to infection. Country doctors, with relatively small populations, were able to trace the transmission of disease from individual to individual, knowing a town’s medical history, its spatial and social arrangements. City physicians, with large and dense populations, encountered whole households or districts succumbing to the disease, seemingly simultaneously, suggesting a transmitting vehicle that must itself be circulating, such as air. Yet, with strong evidence of transmission by contagion, why did the medical profession, predominantly city-based, hold tenaciously to a theory of infection? Delaporte emphasises that infection theory coincided with the political and economic reformist measures of governmental administration of urban areas, especially with the eradication of zones of poverty and urban filth. The bourgeoisie wanted the elimination of sources of infection, which they identified as the threat of the living quarters of the urban poor. Such elimination required a social medicine that eliminated poverty, created jobs, making hygiene a part of public education (176).

2.2.6 Aptitude and Immunity Yet, there remained a series of questions that both contagion theorists and infection theorists found difficult to resolve. Within a particular zone of infection by a miasma, there were some who did not contract the infection. Similarly, there were many reported cases of those who came into contact with the disease on multiple occasions who did not contract it. Infection theorists developed the twin notions of pre-disposition and resistance to explain this phenomenon. Contagion theorists developed the twin notions of aptitude and immunity (178). Though these twin pairs of terms may seem to replicate each other, they do not. For infection theory, predisposition and resistance refer to living conditions, the significant domain of social medical intervention. For contagion theorists, aptitude and immunity refer to what they term an ‘organic economy’ of an individual body. Hence, we return to extrinsic and intrinsic differences, along with their domains for the agencies of social medicine.

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The notion of ‘organic economy’ has a complex genealogy. Contagion theorists took over from the field of geography a particular notion of terrain, and linked it to explicitly juridical notions of immunity and aptitude that stem from laws regarding taxation and its exemptions, related to notions of social rank, family and blood ties.8 Hence, immunity and aptitude were natural dispositions, invariant to living conditions, while for infection theory, the notion of living condition preceded and determined an organism’s disposition (180–181). Contagion looked to the sequencing of transmission of a germ while infection looked to the simultaneity of multiple infections via an atmospheric vehicle.

2.2.7 Planetary Coding A new Sanitary Code was developed in 1853, in light of developments made in response to the cholera epidemic. It challenged contagion theory, along with practices of quarantine and isolation. Delaporte quotes from a response to the French ambassador to Austria at the height of the cholera epidemic, extoling the necessity to address the economic costs of quarantine and restriction of movement: Indeed, the needs of commerce and industry, the immense recent progress in the sphere of transport and communication, the rapidity of navigation and international relations made possible by the steamship, all cry out for revision, and in many areas for reform, of current practices in regard to quarantine. (190)

The 1853 Code was an international one, bringing coordination between the States of Europe, inaugurating perhaps a first phase of planetary urbanization, or at least a codification of practices of defining and delimiting a planetary scaling of urban social medicine. Delaporte concludes with a comment resonant with much of Foucault’s analyses of the nineteenth century with respect to the civil war between the urban poor and the middle classes, and resonant as well with the directions social medicine took during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concerning the rise of social welfare and universal social insurance: “The epidemic of 1832 surely marks an historical watershed: the moment when the need to import into the exploited class a health apparatus forged by and for the bourgeoisie became evident – an apparatus, moreover, that remained the instrument of the bourgeoisie’s hegemony” (199–200). In one review of Delaporte’s book (Sussman 1989), George Sussman, while recognising some of the genuine strengths of the book, comments on a range of primary material that Delaporte did not engage, archival material that would have given 8 There

is an important link between this notion of an ‘organic’ economy, coming from early theorizing on the causes of epidemics—though aligned with a more fundamental understanding of the economic in fiscal household terms—and the emergence at the end of the eighteenth century, with the development of political economy, of the notion of ‘homo oeconomius’, of the human as essentially an economic entity. Foucault discusses the emergence of this economic figure of ‘man’ in his 1977–78 lectures (Foucault 2007a). We address this relation again in Chapter 3, that aims at recognizing a proximity in thinking the notion of contagion across health and economic-financial milieus.

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differently nuanced emphases to the account: “Here, as in the latter half of the book, Delaporte’s principal sources are published accounts of the epidemic by physicians. He apparently did not consult the vast archival records of administrative efforts to combat the epidemic, nor even the daily newspaper accounts of its progress” (104).9 Immediately following in this chapter is an account of the cholera epidemics in Britain, initially with the 1831 epidemic and then with the epidemic mid-century. Our account, while aiming at a Foucauldian understanding of archives, places initial focus on the everyday prognoses presented in newspaper accounts of the development of the disease, accounts that testify to the expertise of medical opinion, as well as discursive ensembles that challenge or contradict received medical knowhow. We aim with these to show how cholera appears as evental truths of rituals-of-knowing rather than as undisputed fact, practices that are, as Delaporte especially emphasises in contexts of French medical knowhow, essentially contested.

2.3 Pandemics 2.3.1 The Cholera Epidemics Finally, the examination is at the centre of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge. It is the examination which, by combining hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgement, assures the great disciplinary functions of distribution and classification, maximum extraction of forces and time, continuous genetic accumulation, optimum combination of aptitudes and, thereby, the fabrication of cellular, organic, genetic and combinatory individuality. With it are ritualized those disciplines that may be characterized in a word by saying that they are modalities of power for which individual difference is relevant. (Foucault 1977a, 192) The city became a site of primitive accumulation, not just of wealth, but of statistical data. The city became a laboratory in which power and knowledge were not simply exercised but rethought, applied and re-evaluated. [In] the mid-nineteenth century, the 1832 epidemic was a seminal moment in the state’s assumption of a pastoral role over its population that Foucault termed biopower, the successor to disciplinary power/knowledge. Before 1832, the rules that governed local responses to epidemics had remained unchanged for generations. The open-ended nature of biopower, its relentless accumulation of data and comparisons of the efficacy of different forms of interventions, meant that there could be no equivalent of Defoe’s Journal. The administrator, not the author, was the only figure who could write the authoritative account of plague from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. (McKinlay 2009, 181)

Various discourses concerning hygiene, or the best ways to manage disease outbreaks, emerged from competing diagnoses or accounts of disease—in particular cholera— that ravaged Europe during the nineteenth century. Here we suggest that Foucault never broke with archaeology, with accounts of the evental-truths of discourse. This 9 Along

with Sussman’s review, there is a comprehensive review of the Delaporte book, comparing it with four other books on the 1830s epidemics, two in French and two dealing with the disease in Germany. See Keans (1989).

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then suggests that we need to develop our analyses of governmentality and biopolitics in relation to such an understanding of discursive events. One of our aims in the following accounts of the administration of social medicine and hygiene is precisely to see such development. If we look at the various discursive formations of cholera in the nineteenth century, how the disease was described in newspapers and by medical experts, we see that far from being a simple succession of historical events, there is a wide range of quite different ways of understanding the spread and cause of the disease.10 If we examine the various discourses that existed at the time of major cholera outbreaks in the United Kingdom in 1831 and 1854, we can see that there is no clear understanding of the disease. Much of the understanding is largely speculative, with heavy emphasis on personal experience, and this includes the medical profession of the time. While the nineteenth century is regarded as the birth of modern sciences and social medicine, the discourses of the time regarding cholera are not yet dominated by techniques that we would today regard as medical science.11 For example, the Edinburgh newspaper, The Caledonian Mercury (June 30, 1831), records how a Special Committee of the Royal College of Physicians on “Cholera Morbus” recommended the use of quarantine. What is notable is that, with quarantine, most of the treatments are speculative, the main proposals involving the use of super-oxygenated air, ammonia, and blood-letting, all of which were thought therapeutic. The London paper, The Morning Chronicle (June 23, 1831), speculates that cholera is caused by “filthy smelling vapour” that is accompanied 10 We

may here consider analyses that Foucault undertakes in The birth of the clinic (1973), with its triple registers of constitution, localization and practice, establishing a series of discontinuous moments of analysis, or radical procedures for adjudicating on how discourses of medicine find their coincidence with the localizations of individuated bodies, and correct practices that supposedly coincide with discourse and body. As we will see, it is precisely the heterogeneity of discursive regularities concerning the disease, assumptions about which bodies would and would not be affected, producing subjects of disease, and a threshold moment with respect to discipline and security, or confinement and normalising techniques, or conduct on bodies and conduct on conducts, that mark the following accounts of the incidence of cholera in London between the early 1830s and the 1850s. We discuss Foucault’s The birth of the clinic in more detail in Chapter 4. 11 Barry (1996) notes Ian Hacking’s emphasis on the growth of statistical measures, as part of a more general scientific pursuit of exact calculation: “Statistics, as has been noted elsewhere, became an important technical feature of liberal forms of government. However, interest in greater quantification was not confined to the social sciences. Charles Babbage, for example, in his Economy of machinery and manufacture, argued that: ‘it is the science of calculation—which becomes continually more necessary at each step of our progress and must ultimately govern the whole of the application of science to the arts of life’.” (132). Those techniques of medical science grew out of a new space developed in the late nineteenth century, that of the scientific laboratory that combined the pursuit of accurate data and surveillance of things as a technique that extended to social management and moral order (133). Along with an emphasis given here to the invention of the late-Victorian laboratory, we also need to emphasize George Canguilhem’s recognition of the formalization of the biological sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, in terms that will determine their fundamental irreducibility to physics and chemistry (Canguilhem 1978). As Foucault suggests: “Canguilhem would no doubt accept that the moment which one must consider as strategically decisive in a history of physics is that of formalization and the constitution of theory; but the moment to be privileged in a history of the biological sciences is that of the constitution of the object and the formation of the concept” (Foucault 1980, 59).

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by “swarms of green flies,” and these “filthy little beasts” spread the disease. The Dublin Newspaper, The Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (June 30, 1831), recognises that cholera originated in India, and provides some discussion on the merits or otherwise of bloodletting. Four months later in the same newspaper, there are suggestions that cholera is spread by either poisoned air, bad water, or infected rice, the later caused by insect infestation causing rice to change to black or brown. Similarly, in the 1854 outbreak, much of the discussion of cause and treatment of the disease suggests that such causes are undetermined. However, there are signs of different techniques in understanding the disease. For example, the London paper, The Daily News (August 2, 1854), recorded the numbers of people who were either sick or had died from the disease, along with their symptoms. In each case, the state of the house is described, with a particular concern for odour, as well as the state of sewers, cesspools, privies, and whether or not there is poor drainage. The same newspaper records, a few days later (August 14, 1854), that Lord Jocelyn M. P. had died from cholera. There is recognition that the disease did not just affect the poor and that cholera could affect all classes, warning of the dangers of “bad air” and “bad diet.” The next day there is a suggestion that prevention of the spread of disease could be enhanced by the use of a deodorant using “chloride of lime” (August 15, 1854). A few days later a special “Court of Sewers” is convened, allowing for special powers under the Nuisances Removal and Diseases Removal Act (1848) to force the removal of waste and draining of sewers or cesspools. While there is developing an understanding of a link between sewage and cholera, the specifics of that link are not known. Herbert Randolph speculates, in a letter to the editor of the London paper, The Morning Chronicle (August 22, 1854), that cholera is caused by “fungoid matter floating in the air.” Again, there is a suggestion of insects as carriers of the disease, or “some minute substance” and electricity or oxygen should be used to treat the sick. Though Randolph recognises these are “without giving proof,” he sees benefit in experiments being undertaken. Three days later, in The Daily News (August 25, 1854), the suburb of Bermondsey is profiled: heavily affected by the 1849 cholera epidemic, described as “poverty-stricken,” having poor living conditions, and one of the “ill-ventilated quarters of the town.”12 A week later in the same newspaper, in a letter to the Editor, titled “Cholera: Its Cause and Cure,” A. Mayhew defined a link between cholera and high levels of ozone that correlate with areas of high levels of damp: “It is well known that the cholera ether follows the courses of rivers, or declares itself in damp districts” (September 4, 1854). This is further developed in other articles: “Ozone is destroyed by heat. The cholera disappeared suddenly from Berlin after a fire which consumed 12 See further discussion below on urban projects for the eradication of endemic fevers. This is especially discussed in relation to Osborne (1996). We recognize when comparing these accounts to those analysed by Delaporte, that a preponderant understanding of the spread of the disease is by some form of miasmic infection. As with diagnoses in Paris, emphasises on infection rather than contagion led to eradication approaches that looked to the urban poor, their living conditions and requirements to make them sanitary. Though there was no genuine understanding of the disease, what comprised it, how it needed to be treated, and how it spread.

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many houses.” The article additionally suggests that with the burning of sulphur there is oxidisation of the ozone, transforming it into sulphuric acid, thus allowing for a possible treatment of the disease. An example is given of an American slaveowner who “fumigated his negroes with sulphur, and no one of them suffered from cholera, although in the surrounding plantations the men died ‘like flies’.” A possible treatment would then be using a mixture of sulphuric acid and opium, or keeping a patient in a room of sulphuric acid gas. In this same edition is an announcement from the General Board of Health that there is a widespread epidemic in London. There are “Metropolitan Boards of Guardians” implementing the General Board’s directions with the aim of limiting the spread of disease and “placing of medical aid and general information within the reach of all” (The Daily News, September 4, 1854). In the parish of St. James’, Westminster, where there was a particularly severe outbreak, there were door-to-door visitations, and a scientific investigation being directed by the Board “to embrace both microscopical, meteorological, chemical and medical branches of inquiry.” The Board also lists a range of precautions, ranging from recommendations to avoid poor food or getting wet, avoid damp, fasting too much or too little, drinking in excess, taking un-prescribed medicines or salts, keeping clean and dry. Rooms were to be cleaned, lime-washed, and well ventilated. The public was to “apply to a medical man” if there occurs “looseness of the bowels.” A further recommendation addresses the strategic interlacing of liberal selfregulating with State functioning control: “If there are any dust or dirt heaps, foul drains, bad smells, or other nuisances in the house or neighbourhood, make complaint without delay to the local authorities having legal power to remove them.” Two days later (September 6, 1854), the same newspaper reports that the President of the General Board of Health visited St. Anne’s parish in Soho, and the neighbouring St. James’ parish, inspecting a number of streets, including Broad-street. Of particular interest was water supply, namely the state of the water, and whether it was filtered or not. There was recognition that, in very similar neighbourhoods, there were quite a different number of incidences of the disease, and that a report was to be made whether previous drainage and general improvements had made a difference. The Daily News (September 21, 1854), reported on a study by the Medical Council to the General Board of Health, of the effectiveness of Castor Oil in treating Cholera. The Medical Council tabulated results from various clinics around London to find that Castor Oil was largely ineffectual in the treatment of the disease. Perhaps one of the more interesting articles came from the London paper Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (September 17, 1854), which compares the epidemic of 1854 with that of 1831, quoting heavily from an unnamed article in the Quarterly Review, which the author argues is an “organ of a great party of the most rich and powerful of the community.” The author emphasises the “moral results in the belief in contagion.” He cites an 1831 report on the cholera epidemic that recommended the isolation of houses like a “lazaretto” (an isolation hospital for the treatment of plague). In the event of a cholera outbreak in London, the government needs to “paralyse” commerce. The 1831 text clearly is arguing for the use of quarantine, that “nothing” should stand in the way of flight to country-houses, and advocates the use of surveillance by the “healthpolice” to manage populations. The author of the 1854 text clearly takes exception to

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the use of the word “nothing”: “Nothing? Not the demands of Christian charity? … The principle of cowardly and brutal selfishness was recommended because cholera was thought to be contagious.” The author of the 1854 text, however, stresses that the point of the article is not to “cast odium upon the writer” but to “point out the prodigious change which twenty-three years have made in the feelings in society.” He sees the visitation by the President of the Board of Health to poorer neighbourhoods to be indicative of this moral change: “We were told, in 1831, to meet the Cholera by self-isolation. We have learned, in 1854, to meet the Cholera, and most other social evils, by unselfish brotherhood.”13 The next day, in the London paper, The Morning Chronicle (September 18, 1854), an article presents the findings from a weekly report given to the Register General. In it there is a concern for the state and safety of the water supply from the main London water companies. The report is in many respects more recognisably modern than the then haphazard speculations from the medical profession and well-meaning amateurs. There is significant use of statistical analysis, tabulating data from different time periods and comparisons to other places to extrapolate trends. For example, the report compares the death rates of the 1849 outbreak of cholera with those of 1854, illustrating how the various upgrades at the Lambeth Water Company had led to lower mortality rates in the parish of Lambeth in comparison to the suburb of Bermondsey where the water supply had not been improved from the earlier outbreak. There is also mention of a “Dr Snow” who the article describes as having “devoted much time to the investigation.” John Snow is of particular interest to the birth of the biopolitical for two reasons. The first is his use of scientific methods and, second, is the conclusion that he drew from them. Snow was not particularly well known during the period, better known for his work with anaesthesia. Today he is best known for putting forward the idea that cholera was not an airborne miasma, but a disease spread by polluted water (Chave 1958, 347). And while he had published his theory in a small pamphlet in 1849, later developed into a book, On the mode of transmission of cholera (Snow 1855), what is clear is that at the time of the 1854 epidemic, Snow and his ideas about cholera were not particularly well disseminated or accepted in medical or public hygiene literature (Chave 1958, 347). Several authoritative medical organisations reviewed Snow’s concept—that cholera was transmitted by water. Few, however, were convinced as it ran counter to the prevailing view of the time that 13 In

Dreaming the rational city (1997), M. Christine Boyer introduces an important shift from eighteenth to nineteenth century planning in terms of morality, production, circulation and discipline. She suggests, in opening a chapter on “The Rise of the Planning Mentality”: “To be exposed to the influence of nature, to the order of classical architecture, to the example of moral philanthropy: these were the problems to which the architecture of picturesque parks, civic centres and public buildings, and the inspection of charity organizations and tenement departments responded. The need of industrial production, however, posed another type of metropolitan problem. How could the rules for efficient capital expansion and circulation be internalized in the fabric and form of the city—not as exemplary architectural sitings, spectacular fairs, or uprighteous individuals but by introjecting a disciplinary order within and under the surface of urban form in the most efficient and economical manner?” (Boyer 1997, 59). It is here she refers to Foucault’s work on plague towns in terms of disciplinary interventions of rational order.

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cholera most likely emanated from damp or bad air.14 Chave points to an 1849 review in the medical journal The Lancet, where Snow’s thesis was regarded on the whole as being far from conclusive. At the time of the 1854 cholera outbreak that centred on Soho, The General Board of Health largely disregarded Snow’s position, arguing there was no reason to accept Snow’s views. And in a later official investigation, led by The Royal College of Physicians, following the 1854 epidemic, Snow’s thesis was rejected outright as completely untenable.

2.3.2 Treating Disease and Managing Risk: Differential Foci Today John Snow is best known for his investigations of the Broad Street water pump and the cholera outbreak that was centred around it, in St. James’ parish, Soho—see, for example, The Daily News, September 4 and 6, 1854. The water in London at that time was of quite varying quality. Water provided by water companies was often discoloured and unpleasant to drink, whereas water from the Broad Street pump was well known for its quality, being clean, clear, and slightly effervescent. The liveliness of the water, as Chave indicates, was caused by “the presence of carbonic acid and nitrates, the end products of organic contamination” (Chave 1958, 348).15 Snow was at this point co-opted by the committee investigating the outbreak’s origins, along with a local doctor, Edwin Lankester, and the local curate, Henry Whitehead. The 14 Osborne

(1996) discusses eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century understandings of disease and contagion in relation to closed or confined spaces and the resulting stagnation of air. Research particularly focused on institutional spaces: hospitals, prisons, barracks, ships, fortifications, or more generally strategic institutional spaces of order, particularly within colonial frameworks of military conquest and usurpation. Hence, we recognize the predominant emphasis on miasmas, or foul air in contexts of public health in more open urban settings. It was with the cholera outbreaks in London and other metropolitan centres in the early nineteenth century that other kinds of spaces were researched as causal in contagion, as with, for example, Snow’s emphasis on the public spaces of water pumps. See Osborne (1996), especially 108 ff. Though, as we have seen with Delaporte, in Paris, infection theory—caused by miasmas—held sway, in part to stave off the remedy of contagion theory—quarantine—and to focus on the living conditions of the urban poor as explicit site of urban renewal. 15 One of the most conclusive pieces of evidence for Snow’s findings that the outbreak centred on the Broad Street pump was the death of a widow from cholera in Hampstead, in the West End of London. Hampstead is roughly an hour’s walk northwest from Broad Street. Thus, there was no causal agent due to any close proximity to the infected water supply. The son of the deceased widow informed Snow that she had not been to Broad Street for several months. However, as Snow reports: “A cart went from Broad Street to the West End every day, and it was the custom to take out a large bottle of the water from the pump in Broad Street, as she preferred it” (Snow 1855, 44). The widow was the only death from Cholera in Hampstead during the 1854 epidemic. Similarly, her niece had died from Cholera and was the only death of its kind in Islington, where she lived. The link was that she had recently visited her aunt and drank the same Broad Street water. This led to Snow petitioning the local board of guardians at St. James’ parish for the removal of the handle from the Broad Street pump on the seventh of September 1854. By the morning of the next day the epidemic had already declined sharply. Chave speculates that the handle’s removal may not have had much effect, though it may have prevented another outbreak occurring (Chave 1958, 348).

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curate had discovered that just prior to the outbreak, a baby had died of symptoms very similar to that of cholera and the discharges from the child had been dumped in a poorly-lined cesspool, less than three feet from the Broad Street well, thus making a fairly conclusive link that this was the source of the outbreak. It would take another thirty years before there was recognition of Snow’s insights into the role of polluted water as principal medium of the transmission of cholera. It was only the discovery that cholera was caused by the bacteria cholera vibrio by Robert Koch in 1884 that belief in miasmas was conclusively ended (348). Official recognition of Snow’s work first came from the British Medical Officer of Health, John Simon, in 1890, who acknowledged Snow’s work on the prevention of the spread of epidemics (Snow 2008, 23).16 Snow’s work, however, was largely unknown until the 1930s, when there was a republication of his 1855 book by Wade Hampton Frost, a professor of epidemiology and public health at The Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene in the United States. What is of particular interest to us is the scientific methods Snow undertook— microbiological examination of the water from the Broad Street pump, and use of statistical analysis. He chronologically tabulated the number of deaths and fatal attacks of the disease in the vicinity of Broad Street (Snow 1855, 48). In subsequent tables, Snow lists various suburbs of London, populations, deaths from cholera, deaths per 10,000, and the principal water supplies (58–59). He produced what has become known as the “spot map” used to illustrate topographically where the main concentrations of deaths had occurred during the 1854 outbreak (44–45). The map shows the main water pumps in the vicinity of Broad Street. Where there had been a confirmed death from cholera, the map was inscribed with a black mark or bar (44). Brody et al. (2000) emphasise that the spot map was not used by Snow to provide the likely source of the outbreak, as some have suggested, but rather to visually illustrate his thesis on the pathology of cholera (Brody et al. 2000, 65). That is to say, while Snow was clearly thinking in a spatial manner, the map was largely used to confirm or test his thesis, rather than being instrumental in producing it (68). As Brody et al. suggest, it is best not to project our contemporary understanding of disease and modern medicine onto debate existing at the time of the 1854 cholera epidemic. Such projection, they suggest, misconstrues Snow’s achievements, by turning Snow’s work into a hagiographic account of history, where, for example, Snow is a “… clear-eyed modern thinker who saw the facts, and was opposed by defenders of ancient preconceived theories” (68). They emphasise—and oppose—the tendency to undertake historical accounts by projecting our own discourse onto historical events.17 16 See

also Koch (2008) for defining a series of myths that have been constructed around John Snow’s discovery of the cause of cholera. 17 We recognize in this emphasis by Brody et al. on historiography, similar emphasis given elsewhere by Giorgio Agamben, when discussing how historical formations come about, in relation to Foucault’s reading of Nietzschean genealogy, and in particular his understanding of Franz Overbeck’s destructing of tradition, in his notion of the pre-historical (see Agamben 2009, 84–87). Agamben’s understanding of genealogy is discussed in some detail in Chapter 7 of Securing Urbanism. Those categories of descent and emergence, emphasized by Foucault in his account

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The 1854 cholera outbreak was, in real terms, only one historical instance in the development of a bio-politics of health. Many other examples could be given as equally valid points of emergence in the development of contemporary forms of urban health management, hygiene campaigns, pollution controls, or zoning for particular activities. We could look to governmental efforts into the promotion of health, medical hygiene and epidemiology. We recognise from the 1854 cholera outbreak three principal concerns. The first is that there is a governmental response and this response is largely modern in form, and largely operating in terms we recognise in Foucault’s accounts of nineteenth-century practices of bio-politics within a framework of liberal governmentality. The 1854 epidemic differs from the earlier 1831 outbreak, where the disease was dealt-with mainly by quarantine. This, in part, was necessitated by the surge in growth of the general population, which was increasingly becoming an urban population. Within the United Kingdom, between 1801 and 1901, the urban population grew from twenty per cent to eighty per cent of the general population (Nusteling 1993; Morley 2007). Edwin Chadwick, in his 1843 Report, The sanitary condition of the labouring classes (Chadwick 1843), recognised there were fundamental problems with sanitation in urban settings, in particular with respect to the urban poor. Secondly, there was a moral concern with health and cleanliness. Biopolitical techniques of regulation extended to discursive ensembles and techniques of power developed by a range of religious organisations dedicated to moral cleanliness, clean clothes, emphasis on bathing and good manners (Morley 2007). Religious societies undertook charitable work, and there was the growth of middle-class and upper-class philanthropy, with the aim of helping the poor and their uncleanliness. Thirdly, we can recognise from newspaper accounts that constitute the discourse of cholera, in 1854 there was a wide range of medical speculation—theories of miasma proffered equally by a general public and the medical professionals; speculative theories based on vague scientific concepts though lacking clear scientific methodology; and Snow’s own theory of water being the main form of transmission of the disease. As Brody et al. suggest, there might be a temptation to historicise Snow’s actions crudely against those who advocated miasmatic theories, but even a

of Nietzschean genealogy (Foucault 1977c), are precisely the figures we need to adopt in order to recognize the historicality of Snow as an event, or eventalisation within the twin frames of truthevent and demonstrative truth, truth recognised in the contestations of technologies of power, and truth recognised as forms of knowing. This event-of-truth has its situatedness in the present of its archaeology. We recognise this, as well, in Foucault’s famous opening accounts of medical or penal practices in The birth of the clinic and Discipline and punish. His emphasis is not that former practices of medical treatment or punishment were barbaric, irrational and inhuman with respect to a universal notion of Reason, but that specific rationalities, or reasons are themselves historical and thus, genealogically speaking, fragile and transformative. Hence all of those treatments for miasmas, with blood-letting, sulphur-oxidization of the air, lime-washing of walls and so on, were not so much irrational and misguided as they were disclosive of horizons of specific relations between constitutions, localizations and practices.

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so-called balanced historical analysis is problematic, as Foucault notes in The archaeology of knowledge (1972).18 Placing Snow’s research into a history of hygiene, though important, glosses that fact that Snow’s theories were ignored or rejected and, in many ways, insignificant to the production of public sanitation, roughly what coincides with the production of bio-politics. What is important from a Foucauldian perspective, is not whether Snow’s theory was correct or not, but the milieu from which it emerges. Our present milieu, or episteme, effects how we now appropriate Snow’s work, thus locating Snow as a function or truth-effect in how we view the events of the 1854 cholera epidemic. In a similar way, Foucault’s analyses of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon encounter this figure—a figure that emerges from a predominantly humanist and utilitarian project—and re-figures it as a new technology of power inscribed in a panoply of institutional situations concerned with individuating productive bodies (Foucault 2015).19

2.3.3 Plague as Allegory in Civic Perfection McKinlay (2009) also engages the 1830s and 1850s cholera epidemics in the context of contrasting accounts of these events to an account offered by Daniel Defoe in the eighteenth century. “Foucault, Plague, Defoe” (2009) focuses on Foucault’s discussion of plague in terms of power/knowledge relations and Defoe’s fictional journal account, written in 1772, of the London Plague of 1665, chronicled over the space of a year (Defoe 2003).20 This is contrasted to the 1830s accounts of the cholera epidemic 18 To continue the point being made in the previous footnote, we see in The archaeology of knowledge (1972), Foucault referring to Nietzsche’s genealogy: “To the decentring operated by the Nietzschean genealogy, it opposed the search for an original foundation that would make rationality the telos of mankind, and link the whole history of thought to the preservation of this rationality, to the maintenance of this teleology, and to the ever-necessary return to this foundation” (13). There is no historical analysis that does not pass through this systematic encounter with the continuous, and with human consciousness. 19 Foucault first introduces Bentham’s Panopticon in the lecture of 28 November, in the 1973–74 lecture course, Psychiatric power (Foucault 2015). Panopticism is considered as a general mechanism of disciplinary power. In the context of this discussion, Foucault emphasises the extent to which the family maintains a vestige of sovereign power in relation to a relay of disciplinary mechanisms or apparatuses, in moving from one disciplinary mechanism to another, by way of family members. 20 We note M. Christine Boyer’s Dreaming the rational city (1997) and her reference to Foucault’s work on plague towns. Though there is a possible need for a corrective to a simple over-generalization of Foucault’s understanding of discipline that Boyer employs. Thus, although she appropriately cites Foucault on the plague being at once “real and imaginary” and a disorder with its “medical and political correlative discipline,” (60) this is quickly transposed to a scale of urban understandings that would require more nuanced engagements with Foucault’s own understanding of relations between discipline and security. It is the case that Boyer would not have had available the Collège de France lectures that provided such a nuanced understanding of the birth of liberalism and the biopolitical. Her discussion of “state regulative mechanisms and public welfare provisions” (60) tends to overemphasises the role of the State as governing instrument, thus requiring further discussion on

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in Europe and the 1850s approaches to the treatment of cholera. McKinlay initially outlines Foucault’s contrast of the treatment of leprosy, with banishment, and plague’s containment and segmentation. Thus, plague becomes an historical bridge between the Classical and the Modern ages, between discipline and bio-power (McKinlay 2009, 168). Discipline’s partitioning grids are not devices for including/excluding but means for determining distributions of the sick and the well. With plague, there is a moment of confusion of order, contrived as utopian perfection of a governed city: “Plague, then, was the moment in which the ‘ideal’ of disciplinary power can be thought and, perhaps, approached in practice. For law-makers and administrators, ‘plague’ need not be real but a metaphor for confusion and disorder that allows them to imagine ‘perfect disciplines’” (169). The birth of the clinic suggests that epidemic constitutes a new object of knowledge, discoverable somewhere between an historical individuality and a collective phenomenon. We recognise this doublet of an individuation and a collectivisation reappears as the twin poles of bio-power’s regulating of population and discipline’s confining of bodies.21 In The birth of the clinic, Foucault suggests: “… an epidemic has a sort of historical individuality, hence the need to employ a complex method of observation when dealing with it. Being a collective phenomenon, it requires a multiple gaze; a unique process, it must be described in terms of its special, accidental, unexpected qualities” (Foucault 1973, 25). Accounts of the 1832 cholera epidemic were little different to the accounts offered by Defoe in the eighteenth century, though by 1859 there is a comprehensive statistical approach to medicine for epidemics. Defoe’s A journal of the plague year (1722) was a fictional, though “historically accurate” account of the London plague, written under the pseudonym of HF, a London cobbler (170). The Journal was also an instructive manual, engaging in the literary techniques of everyday reportage—a humanitarian narrative—in the simple descriptions of a journal record of impressions.22 For a hundred years the account was considered as Foucault’s understanding of governmentality as normative and biopolitical administration, excessive to though not eliminative of State regulative mechanisms, with the emergence of liberalism. 21 In this respect, we may consider bio-power more as a spatializing rationality than as a governmental regularity, in the sense that we have discussed above, with respect to The birth of the clinic, the three spatializing registers of a discursive field, a medical gaze and a site of individuated disease. Thus, as Genel (2006) emphasizes, in Foucault’s Society must be defended (2003) and History of sexuality, volume one (1978), he discusses bio-power but not bio-politics, where the overriding theme concerns technologies of the self. As we will engage more fully in Chapter 7, Giorgio Agamben introduces as his key concern, the biopolitical in Foucault’s work as an extension to this discussion of bio-power. 22 Of course, this question of fiction and veracity, anonymity and authorial voice, is the concern of Foucault’s important essay, “What is an author,” appearing initially (in English) in the Bouchard edited collection, Language, counter-memory, practice (1977b). One thinks of Defoe principally as a political allegorist, who produced fictional writings such as Robinson Crusoe (1719). Important for Foucault is that author-function is not a constant, that what required the truth-effects of a text were not always or necessarily an author-inscription. The Defoe account of the seventeenth-century London plague, written in the century following as a journal account that was taken to be an accurate record, inscribes precisely the plays of truth and fiction, the “what matter who speaks,” an anonymity, even in signature-works, that are the stakes of any text. We note that Robinson Crusoe is also something of a journal account that opens in the seventeenth century, though actually written in the century following. It is also one of the two key texts that Jacques Derrida engages in the last

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a genuine memoir, and only in the latter nineteenth century was it recognised as a curious mixture of fact and fiction. McKinlay stresses the paradox that the Journal offered its readers, concerning liberal freedom and its costs: “This, in extremis, is the paradox of the liberal individual, free to choose but constantly anxious about the wisdom and efficacy of his choice. Each closed house spoke of the exile of the individual by and from his peers. HF was, of course, as isolated by this process as those confined to their houses. His freedom of movement [perhaps for Foucault, movement of freedom] was used to bear witness to terrible tragedy and to the alienation of the individual in emerging urban society” (174). While the 1832 cholera epidemic was national in scope, approaches to its control and treatment focused on the city as the primary administrative unit, and within the city, the parish or district as the bio-medical milieu targeted for quarantine, segregation and confinement. McKinlay emphasises the twin rival problematics that resulted in the disease being treated much as plague had been treated in the eighteenth century. One of these was the considered link between poverty and disease: “For a medicine that could understand poverty as pathological, epidemiology was simply impossible” (176).23 Genuine approaches to cause and effect were forestalled. The second was debates between the Benthamites and liberal governmental rationalists. Edwin Chadwick, a Benthamite, recognised that there were no substantial causal links between cholera and poverty. However, opposed to the medical policing tactics of Benthamites, as minimum effective State intervention, were those who advocated political medicine as foundational to public health policies, extending the scope of enquiry well beyond specific disease outbreaks (Chadwick 1843).24 However, those who wanted to maintain a decentralised polity particularly favoured the latter public health policies rather than having centralised administrative procedures. Hence, State administrative interventions were thwarted, resulting in local and piecemeal measures. The conduct of medical administrators during the 1832 outbreak was treated with grave mistrust: Visiting inspectors and doctors travelling to plague towns were treated with a suspicion that occasionally turned violent. For towns on the verge of quarantine, visitors could carry of his lecture series, prior to his death, The beast and the sovereign, volume II (Derrida 2011). The other text, its ‘companion-piece’, is Heidegger’s Fundamental concepts of metaphysics (Heidegger 1995). We will address this lecture series by Derrida in Chapter 8. 23 We return here to those themes emphasized by Delaporte (1986), concerning infection-theory’s understanding of pre-disposition to disease via extrinsic causes of living conditions, that themselves brought about intrinsic or organic causes. Hence the urban poor were pathologically inclined to disease. 24 It is significant that the Poor Law, discussed earlier, was instituted in 1834 as a wholesale reform measure for ensuring increased production from the labouring poor, decreased costs associated with poor relief, along with social policies to decrease the birth rate amongst the poor. The Poor Law Amendment Act was written by Chadwick, Bentham’s former secretary, and the Act was supported by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham (Clark and Page 2019). The Act, in effect, instituted medical administrative measures aimed not at the ‘organic economy’ of the bodies of the urban poor, but at disciplinary mechanisms for these same bodies, that ordered their dispersion, their control and productive capacity. In effect, it was the juridical corollary to panopticism as a normalizing technology of power.

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the plague, and, in extreme cases, were suspected of being cynical Malthusians culling the population. The doctors of 1832 were as powerless to relieve the suffering of cholera victims as their predecessors in 1665. (McKinlay 2009, 178)

Doctors were as suspect as the plague itself. The 1832 preventative measures were unable to operate with the severity of plague control in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. The governable entity was no longer individual conduct, centrally administered. While in 1832 disciplinary mechanisms remained, they were increasingly able to be resisted, requiring another governable entity to emerge, that of population, statistically diagnosed: Within two decades the disciplinary had been replaced, or rather, overlaid by a primitive ‘technologies of population’ based on national infrastructure of inspection, measurement, and statistical comparison. This nascent ‘technology of population’ was as much a grassroots movement as a state-centred process. Local statistical studies of poverty and mortality, for instance, remained wedded to moral, rather than material categories. This conflation of social description and theological prescription did not result in statistical confusion. Rather, we see moral cartographies of cities develop sophisticated methodologies and measures of relative depravity. (179)

By 1860, social mathematics has displaced “miasma” as a diagnosis and the basis of disease control, with the recognition of water supply, sewerage and regulation of food supply as key techniques of social control, which is to say, in Foucault’s terms, bio-power and pastoral care. Plague was managed through disciplinary control, while cholera was deciphered and managed through biopolitical techniques.25 The failure of disciplinary forms of control provides discipline with its inherent dynamism (181). If discipline emerged in the seventeenth century as a condition, if not defining constraint of the city, its failures expose the city, its forms and understandings to other modalities of expression: “Closing the city, dividing it into administrative unity— each responsible for certain actions—and collecting data to be collated and compared centrally, allowed the city and its governance to be imagined in new ways. The city became a site of primitive accumulation, not just of wealth, but also of statistical data. The city became a laboratory in which power and knowledge were not simply exercised but rethought, applied and re-evaluated” (181).

25 We

may begin to recognize the conflicts in diagnosis of the Paris cholera outbreak outlined by Delaporte (1986), conflicts between Sanitary procedures of living conditions associated with infection theory, and Health procedures of contagion theorists, concerned with aptitude and immunity, constituted the medical policing or administrative procedures for a biopolitics of disease. The management of disease, as with social medicine and public hygiene measures, or twentieth-century social insurance for health, are fundamentally technologies of power that produce the truth-events of the well and the sick, securing production in the individuating mechanisms of what Foucault termed, labour-medicine.

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2.3.4 Urban Sanitation: The Bio-Politics of Liberalism We want to now draw together a number of the strands we have been developing in this chapter, concerning the emergence of a biopolitical understanding of a general medicalization of a population, what Foucault considers as a technology of power that disciplines and secures. Foucault’s on-going development of an understanding of the emergence of liberalism necessarily requires these two overarching frameworks. The third strand is the particular focus given by Foucault to the urban as the central milieu for understanding the governmentality of liberalism, and an urbanism that particularly inflects to questions of the management of hygiene and disease. In drawing together these threads, we would like to emphasise two of the main aspects of liberalism engaged by Foucault. One concerns the close developments in the nineteenth century of State racism, along with the emergence of bio-political strategies, within a governmental rationality that strengthened liberalism.26 We aim to do this primarily through a discussion of the developments during the early nineteenth century of Victorian regulatory mechanisms for city sanitary engineering, to be understood as a bringing into concert liberal governmental rationalities and biopolitical apparatuses of security. The second aspect we want to touch on is to briefly introduce some of the precepts Foucault offered for an understanding of neo-liberal governmentality, emerging in Germany during and after World War Two, and in the United States after the War. In discussing neo-liberal rationalities, we will be offering some further discussion on contemporary neo-liberal governmental policies on regulating the urban, particularly with respect to emphases on the eliminating of direct State administration and diverting regulation and responsibility to individual self-interest, recognised in terms of an agency of self-as-enterprise.27 Osborne (1996), in researching the sanitary interventions in Britain’s Victorian cities in the nineteenth century, commences with a Foucauldian question: “How might medical regulation be analysed under the rubric of political technologies and rationalities of government?” (Osborne 1996, 99). Foucault (1982a, b), writing on power and the subject, makes a distinction between relations of struggle and relations of power that is crucially relevant to how we read Osborne’s discussion. When we study power through relations of struggle, we look to institutional antagonisms, as if power’s exercise is a direct correlate and consequence of their struggles. Rather, for Foucault, to engage an analytics-of-power requires that we need to look elsewhere, and see such institutional antagonisms and struggles as effects of power’s productive capacities, rather than as ‘causes’. Hence, Osborne distinguishes between what are most often taken as the starting points for analysing power relations with respect to

26 The notion of State-racism is especially developed in Foucault’s 1975–76 lectures, Society must be defenced (Foucault 2003). Foucault introduces the discourse of race in the third lecture of the series, 21 January, though has the most sustained discussion in the concluding lecture of 17 March. 27 On this latter perspective, see, for example, with respect to urban politics, Murdoch (2004), Pløger (2004), Genel (2006), Brand (2007), Donzelot (2008), McNay (2009), Lemke (2010a, b), MacLeod (2011), and Kornberger (2012).

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medicine and health. These normally start with the antagonisms of a medical profession or medicalization of the State and a social body as its target. Osborne’s starting point is rather the specification of the varied fields of application and modes of objectification of medical discourses, that is, practices of power and their effects, rather than their aims. He brackets out the self-certainties, received traditions and security of sources by which the medical and the social find their spaces of arrangement. He aims to replace the axes of medicine and the social with those of the “vital” and the “political” (Osborne 1996, 99). The bio-political in Foucault’s sense is not merely medical. It encompasses a broad and strategic panoply of domains including health, welfare, security, old age, worked on by social technicians: statisticians, engineers, governmental bureaucrats, architects, as much as doctors (100).28 As we have emphasised already in this chapter, liberalism, with its technologies of security, is a continual encounter with the domains of its own normativity. For liberalism, society has natural laws, and norms proper to those laws. As a governmental rationality, knowledge, such as that of medical hygiene, informs governmental administration as to the norms proper to this domain.29 Such knowledge does not provide a direct rationale for government action in itself. A space necessarily remains between what can be known and what may be done. Liberal circulation of freedom occupies that open space, ultimately understood as a relation of a self to itself, such that it is always already resistive to the conduct exercised on its own conduct. In this sense, liberalism constitutes its own governmental rationality on agonisms that arise over the regulation of life, what, in Chapter 1, we figured as ‘dissensus’. Public health became integral to mechanisms of security that were able to maintain such 28 In

this context, we mention Didier Gille’s “Maceration and Purification” (1986). We recognize aspects of analyses familiar to Foucault, but also to Delaporte and others who have analysed epidemic phenomena. Gille’s essay opens with the following: “Health reports concerning the city in the 19th century are alarming. The city is strewn with stinking wastes from putrid homes, entire neighbourhoods exhale poisonous miasmas, people and objects move about with difficulty, and there is a considerable likelihood of accident. The hygienist movement, which actually began in the late 18th century, exhaustively details this troubling picture of a congested, infected, putrescent city, the poisoned legacy of our ignorant ancestors” (228). Key to hygienist literature, as Foucault also suggests, are emphases on circulation and differentiation, bringing order and movement to the stagnations that constitute overcrowded and infested milieus. Gille’s analysis emphasizes a complex relation between diagnosis of the social and diagnosis of the economic. Stagnation and lack of differentiation is also the root cause of economic crisis, again something emphasized in Foucault’s early lectures in Security, territory, population. The free circulation of gold and differentiations established in economic competition constitute a ‘hygienist’ engagement with capitalist growth. In this, Gille entwines the conditions for urban development with the consolidation of capitalist enterprise. As we will see in concluding this chapter, contemporary neo-liberalism’s self-as-enterprise coincides with an urban environmentalism that suggests a self earns its citizenship through the duty of care to one’s self-as-one’s-milieu. 29 See especially Miller and Rose’s “The Death of the Social? Refiguring the Territory of Government” in Miller and Rose (2008, 84–113) for a sustained discussion on the very notion of the social as such. Citing Jean Baudrillard’s diagnosis of the end of the social, they suggest there is something important in his analysis: “It reminds us, if we should need reminding, that ‘the social’ is invented by history and cathected by political passions: we should be wary of embracing it as an inevitable horizon for our thought or standard for our evaluations” (85). Hence, ‘the social’ is not an existential horizon, nor is it a field governed by its own intrinsic nature.

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a liberal order. Osborne asks: “But where might one look for empirical evidence of such a liberal format in the regulation of life? There are good grounds for seeing the British nineteenth-century revolution in public health and urban sanitation in just such terms; that is, as something of the order of an ‘event’ within the development of liberal technologies of government” (102). Of crucial concern was the link between poverty and disease, whether endemic or epidemic. As we noted in the above discussions on the cholera epidemics, it was not until the mid-century that conclusive evidence suggested there to be no direct causal relation between the poor and disease, a premise we may understand on the basis of what Foucault came to analyse as State-racism.30 Osborne suggests that major change was instigated by reform of the Poor Law that coincided with the cholera epidemic of the 1830s, as we have suggested above. This precipitated the necessity to begin to map the dynamics and characteristics of population, a differentiating tactic based on the perceiving and recording of racial differentiations. Osborne also mentions the instituting of a series of Inspectorates: of factories, prisons, schools, railways, and mines, as well as Chadwick’s 1843 report on the urban poor, also mentioned earlier. There were also instituted the Health of Town Commission reports, and the Public Health Acts of 1848, 1866 and 1875 that emphasised the regulatory procedures for provision of sewerage and water, associated with the work of John Simon. These measures were not laisser-faire liberalism, strictly speaking. But nor were they the developing of State medicalization, as a centralising mechanism of control. Following our earlier discussion of Foucault’s analyses of German, French and English approaches to medicalization of a population and public hygiene, we noted that the English model became the most variegated, accommodating welfare measures for the poor, public hygiene measures for the entire population and private medicine for the middle and upper classes. Medical administration was distributed and diffuse, in relation to the more centralizing approaches of the German and French models. In fact, it was not medicine or medical techniques that were even at stake in these reforms. Rather it was the application of statistics based on a medical problematic, a technical development of public health that in a real sense eliminates disease per se as its primary target and instead targets the minimizing of risk of disease.31 This is in direct contrast to eighteenth-century approaches to minimizing disease. If we look at the application of statistics in the eighteenth century, we see that they were applied for direct State control. They were a component of State administrative 30 Simply put, and in relation to Foucault’s discussion of State racism, a ‘natural’ relation between fevers and the poor would be in Liberalism’s general interest. Through an attrition that was entirely natural, the poor would be systematically eliminated from society, thus alleviating the burden they otherwise cause and the incessant need for State intervention to afford their protection. The enactment of new Poor Laws in the early to mid-nineteenth-century, coupled with the establishment of a dispersed series of Fever Hospitals were met with opposition and resistance from London’s middle and upper classes. 31 This is, perhaps, another reading of Delaporte’s pronouncement that ‘disease’ does not exist, but only practices. For Osborne, administrative medicine no longer targets disease but rather the conditions for its possibility, such that disease will not exist.

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procedure and were thus not publically available. The nineteenth century marks the massive publication of statistics, and a shift in how their governmental rationality was affected: “… liberalism conditioned the ‘mode of existence’ of statistics. The exercise of statistical reason seemed to point to a natural domain resistant to coup d’authorité, a domain with its own inertia, an autonomous dimension of existence, and one to be investigated not just by State bureaucrats but, at its leading edge by amateurs separated from the direct exercise of government” (104). Liberalism recognised a natural relation between disease and economic management. Disease was waste, and mechanisms of security with respect to public hygiene needed to be recognised as entrepreneurial activities and not social philanthropy (105).32 A distinction needs to be made in the discussions by Foucault and Osborne. Foucault gives particular emphasis to European—especially French, but also German—developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with respect to Raison d’État and police, and their subsequent transformations at the end of the eighteenth century to liberal rationalities of security (Foucault 2007a). That development happens somewhat differently in Britain, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with subsequent transformations to Victorian liberalism. Britain had a much stronger tradition of liberalism even in the seventeenth century. We made brief reference to this in Defoe’s account of the London plague of 1665, noting the underlying concerns with liberalism, even with the strict regimes of quarantine and enforced house enclosure, boarding up of all house openings and strict control over individual movements. Osborne emphasises the extent to which liberal hostility to plague quarantine procedures were a commonplace in Britain. He mentions objections to quarantine measures enforced for the 1830s cholera epidemic: “One may witness too the disapproval with which the Privy Council greeted recommendations of the Cholera Board (dominated by the elite of the medical profession), which in 1831 proposed strict police-style powers based upon a rigorous quarantine; ‘it may be necessary to draw troops or a strong body of police around infected places’, and to apply ‘a set of regulations approaching nearly the martial law’” (107). However, by 1853 vaccination against smallpox became compulsory and itself became a dominant issue of political liberty. Approaches to the eradication of endemic disease followed a different trajectory to combative approaches to epidemics, though we may note a strict break in spatial understandings of endemic disease—fevers—from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The incidence and critical concern with endemic disease, its study and aims at eradication, focused 32 This

point is emphasized by Gille in “Maceration and Purification” (1986). The “purification” he refers to happens in the transformations of human relations into social relations, in the process of transforming labourers into wage earners and capitalists into gold producers (surplus profit). That is to say, circulation and differentiation constitutes the hygiene of the social. From another viewpoint, we also recognize this in Boyer (1997). Her account of the emergence of the rational ordering of the American city points to a fundamental shift from early nineteenth century emphasis on the moral philanthropy of church organizations, to economic pragmatism (59ff.). This emphasis on the political and economic cost of diseases of the urban poor is also something we saw, at the beginning of this chapter, in Foucault’s accounts of the emergence of social medicine during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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on enclosed spaces, especially hospitals, but also naval vessels, military camps and prisons, all spaces of confinement, though constructed for public good.33 These wellordered and disciplined authoritarian communities became experimental sites for medical intervention. However, such intervention was more concerned with conduct and order on individuated bodies as techniques for cure, rather than investigative approaches to knowledge of disease, the establishment of right conduct, and discipline. This is to be contrasted with nineteenth-century discourses that focused not on confined or closed spaces, but on open or general spaces of cities or neighbourhoods, and with a correlate concern: not with conduct and discipline, but with a knowledge of the aleatory conditions of disease, its milieu, circulation and risk. Thus, there was not so much rules to preserve health in a governmental rationality of individual conduct but “… the provision of an infrastructure that would provide the individual and collectivity with security in the face of threats to vitality … the nineteenth century posed the problem in terms of water and the proper government of towns and cities” (110). We read this as a governmentality of population, understood as conduct on the conduct of others in ameliorating risk and uncertainty. The urban now becomes a general environment, recognised for positive measures of security, constituting a range of milieus of fever, establishing “fever districts” as bio-racial differentiations of a population. Breaking the link between disease and poverty, such mapping also separated the management of disease from the management of poverty, while maintaining a governing rationale on an understanding of the susceptibility to disease and poverty. However, this required a better concept of disease itself. There developed a new technology of confinement, completely different to eighteenth-century concerns with individual conduct in the putrid conditions of closed spaces. We have already mentioned this development of a new notion of the hospital in terms of ‘function’ when earlier discussing Foucault’s understanding of the emergence of social medicine. Hence, the London Fever Hospital’s fever-wards followed meticulous recording procedures with respect to incidence of disease, diagnosis, and autopsy, developing statistical accumulation of data on fever victims, and new technologies of analysis (112).34 Coupled with this, was a stronger 33 We may consider, with respect to these spaces of confinement, Foucault’s understanding of the heterotopic in relation to these real spaces of otherness, the ship, the prison, the hospital, and the barracks—sites explicitly mentioned in Foucault’s “Of other spaces” (Foucault 2008b), as heterotopias, with their particular spatial and social orders that separate them off from, but also relay them back to, spaces of normalcy. Perhaps it is not simply a coincidence that Foucault produced his essay on heterotopias and his essay on Blanchot, “The thought from outside” (Foucault 1987), in the same year. Foucault would have been familiar with Blanchot’s remarkable novel, The most high, written in 1948 and translated to English in 1966 (Blanchot 1996), concerned with a city under siege from an epidemic or plague, whose sites seem to be peculiarly linked as if they were a series of discontinuous heterotopic locales, each an institutional site of discipline. Indeed, this extraordinary three-hundred page Blanchot text, concerned with the city, with otherness, with a disciplinary order and explicitly with a governmentality of the State, can be read as an encapsulated engagement with the entire body of Foucault’s work from the 1960s to the 1980s. We discuss Foucault’s “Of other spaces” in detail in Chapter 4 of Securing urbanism. 34 The London Fever Hospital was established in 1802, as an auxiliary to the Smallpox Hospital that had been established some sixty years earlier, in 1746. Fevers, a general name for endemic

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spatial understanding of the milieus and environmental effects on fever incidence: “… the location of the most fevered sectors of a city could be predicted from a glance at a map of the water supply. Hence we see the extraordinary emphasis in the nineteenth century on the spatial mapping of disease across urban environments” (113). As mentioned earlier, with liberalism there is a direct emphasis on natural mechanisms and natural laws, a nature that precludes the intervention of artificial mechanisms of governmental interference. Sanitary surveys were understood as natural mechanisms, fundamentally organic, notwithstanding the enormous artificial engineering interventions they required. Reticulation of water and sewerage was understood as an organic coupling: “In short, in this model, the environment has ceased to designate an exterior, the hydraulic city has become a regulated milieu along with the body and the economy” (114). Crucial to the governmentality of liberalism is the manner whereby this infrastructural assemblage conducts conduct entirely in an indirect manner, and thereby affords not only an autonomy for the individuated conduct of bodies but institutionalizes a space of privacy that is sanctioned outside the reach of direct government. Pipes, drains and sewers function to establish sanitary integrity of the private home, without recourse to direct intervention—a strategy of indirect government—that without disciplinary measure or rule of conduct induces moral and physical hygiene through the efficacy of continuous running water. It is the neutral anonymity of pipes and drains that constitutes a technology of power capable of conducting the conduct of others, a technology of power as security from risk of health nuisance, security of home and family for itself, its self-interest. Hence, the aim was to regulate sanitary norms as a non-coercive agency, regulation of normativity via the medium of environmental regulation, establishing nothing more than minimum standards of environment. This, in fact, constitutes biological normativity whereby living beings construe environmental norms as political rule. Hence, we see the series of mechanisms whose rationale converges on naturalism: the natural domain of sanitary laws, separation of organic disease and poverty, organic principles of sanitary infrastructures, naturalisation of the family and private dwelling to be separated from direct government and its inspecting techniques. Osborne makes a concluding point on liberalism itself. Liberalism, even the most virulent laissezfaire rationality, did not suppose no governmental regulation, no governmentality of disease, as distinct from epidemic disease, included smallpox, typhus and enteric fever. With the significant increase in urban density in London in the early nineteenth century, fevers were one of the greatest problems for city governance. By 1815, the Fever Hospital had moved to amalgamate with the Smallpox Hospital. In 1848, both facilities were moved to new premises and the new facility amalgamated with the Royal Free Hospital. Fever hospitals became the first centrally planned hospital service in London. The systematic arrangement of their urban planning is worth noting: “The maximum distance it was thought wise to transport patients in an exhausted state from smallpox was three miles. As the diameter of London was about six miles a triangular system was devised with hospitals at the apices, six miles apart. A circle of half a mile was drawn around each angle, and sites were sought within these near Elephant and Castle, Victoria Park and Regent’s Park. … Sites had to meet several criteria. They had to be as near as possible to the great mass of population without being within it, so that they enjoyed clean air; and the ground had to be about eight acres in extent” (Rivett 2013, n.p.).

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the State by the State. Rather, we see with liberalism no diminution of interventions but rather shifting emphases in the directness or indirectness of conduct on conduct. Mechanisms of security that are always intervening in some way are threats to integral liberalism. But this is nothing more-nor-less than a perpetual tension or agonism, immanent to liberalism itself. The very dynamism of liberalism is constituted in the rationalities and technologies it generates as a principle for the criticism of reality: “Liberalism fails endlessly, and generates interminable oppositions, but the solution to such failures tend to be a reconfiguration of liberal rationalities and principles themselves; liberalism, as a rationality of government, thrives upon its own failure” (117).35

2.4 Biopolitics and Liberalism 2.4.1 Governmental Rationality of the Bio-Political: Liberalism What should now be studied, therefore, is the way in which the specific problems of life and population were raised within a technology of government that, without always being liberal, far from it, has been constantly haunted by the question of liberalism since the end of the eighteenth century. (Foucault 2008a, 323–324)

With this citation above, Foucault concludes the course summary to his 1978–79 The birth of biopolitics. Keeping in mind that Security, territory, population and The birth of biopolitics were both published in French at the same time in 2004, the “Course Context” offered by Michel Senellart for the former discusses the contexts of both volumes in relation to the earlier lecture series, Society must be defended. Foucault had a year’s sabbatical in 1977 and, hence, we find that the concluding lecture of the 1975–76 course and the first lecture of the 1977–78 course are a continuation. The first lecture opens: “This year I would like to begin studying something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power” (Foucault 2007a, 1). In his concluding “Course Context” to the 1977–78 course, Senellart suggests: “So it would seem the two courses [Security, territory, population and The birth of biopolitics] do nothing else but retrace the genesis of this “power over life,” in whose emergence, within the eighteenth century, Foucault saw a “major mutation, undoubtedly one of the most important in the history of human societies” (369). Senellart goes on to outline the 35 We draw attention to discussion by Colin Gordon, on Foucault’s understanding of technologies of power and the extent to which practices of power engage the rationality of discourses and technologies in order to account for failure, reverting to a reformulating of discursive reason or techniques of power, in order to rescue, revise or revive practices. See Gordon, “Other Inquisitions” (1979), especially 34–36. We also refer to Mouffe’s understanding of the governmentality of agonism (Mouffe 2005, 2010), rather than consensus, of radical and non-reconcilable difference, as discussed, for example, in Pløger (2004). We return to discuss this notion of ‘failure’, at the level of discursive rationalities, in Chapter 5 of Securing urbanism.

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swerves and detours taken by Foucault over these two lecture courses in developing a genealogy of the bio-political as a power over life. Initially, in Security, territory, population Foucault introduces the notion of security in a history of technologies centred on the emergence of statistics and management of risk. A biopolitical concern with the State, understood in 1976 in terms of State racism, becomes by the fifth lecture of Security, territory, population, a concern with what Foucault introduces as governmentality of the State, with a preponderant concern with the complex of relations between disciplinary mechanisms and apparatuses of security, as the twin poles earlier identified in terms of an anatomopolitics of the body and a bio-politics of population. The questions of sovereign right and juridical-legal mechanisms also remain. As Senellart suggests, Foucault’s detailed engagements with governmentality more-or-less eclipse discussion of the bio-political entirely: “Breaking with the discourse of the ‘battle’ [the key thematic of Society must be defended] employed from the start of the 1970s, the concept of ‘government’ would mark the first shift, becoming more pronounced from 1980, from the analytics of power to the ethics of the subject” (370). Between Foucault’s detailed discussions on governmentality in Security, territory, population and his ethics of the subject of the early 1980s, there is the crucial development of his work on neo-liberalism. Indeed, this discussion of the neo-liberal ‘subject’ is pivotal in recognising how Foucault subsequently moves his concerns to the hermeneutics of the subject, to then question how to govern oneself and others, and finally how to care for one’s self.36 With The birth of biopolitics (2008a), Foucault describes how he would like to explore bio-politics, which centres on the problem of population, linking the biopolitical to governmental reason, which centres on “economic truth” and the problem of the State and liberalism (22).37 What is noticeable in the 1978–1979 lecture series 36 We discuss aspects of these latter lectures by Foucault that focus on the subject of freedom, and Greco-Roman understandings of caring for one’s self, in Chapters 6 and 7 of Securing urbanism. 37 With Chapter 1, we made brief reference to a number of theorists whose work resonates in various ways with Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics and governmentality. In Chapters 7 and 8 we will focus particularly on how Agamben and Antonio Negri have approached this issue. For the moment, it is worth mentioning a range of differences in approach. Thus McNay (2009) offers an excellent account of Foucault’s discussion on German and American developments of neoliberalism. However, she sees an impasse with Foucault, where he aims to engage the self-interest of neo-liberal enterprise in relation to the ‘self’ explored in his late work on the care of the self. She suggests that Foucault’s development of the relation between law and norm, Sovereign right and Liberal normativity to be a more fruitful, though underdeveloped, avenue. This may be contrasted with McGushin (2005) who takes special focus on Foucault’s final two lecture courses at the Collège de France on askésis, as a practice of the care of the self, and suggests a way to think radical resistance and transformation of the individuated subject of self-interest of neo-liberalism. Perhaps the most sustained engagement comes from the book-length study by Miller and Rose (2008). Governing the present (2008) is one of the most thorough analyses of Foucault’s understanding of governmentality, in contexts of asking fundamental questions of the social and the economic. In their consideration of political power beyond the State, they refuse the entrenched binaries of State and civil society, public and private, government and market, coercion and consent, sovereignty and autonomy (53). They suggest: “Power is not so much a matter of imposing constraints upon citizens as of ‘making up’ citizens capable of bearing a kind of regulated freedom. Personal autonomy is not the antithesis

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is how little time Foucault devotes to the topic of bio-politics: “I would like to assure you that, in spite of everything, I really did intend to talk about biopolitics, and then, things being what they are, I have ended up talking at length, maybe for too long, about neo-liberalism, and neo-liberalism in its German form” (2008a, 185). Foucault explains this change of direction, with regard to the previous research done on governmentality, in that he wants to explore “concrete content” to the exercise of power. He emphasises that power cannot be considered as a principle in itself or an explanatory value outside of its concrete manifestations (2008a, 186). Second to this, Foucault sought to explore how governmentality as an analytical grid of power relations could operate at a series of differing scales. He gives the name “governmentality” to such a grid of power relations, and his analyses especially of the emergence of neo-liberalism in Germany provides a paradigmatic example of such analyses.38 Foucault had been criticised by many, especially Marxists, for his lack of an analytics of the State and a perceived over-emphasis on micro-powers. Though, here we may reference reception to Foucault in the late 1960s, precisely in the context of widespread disillusionment with Marxism as it had become institutionalised in party politics and seemed to be inoperative at the critical moment of revolution39 : “The analysis of micro-powers, or of procedures of governmentality, is not confined by definition to a precise domain determined by a sector of the scale, but should be considered simply as a point of view, a method of decipherment which may be valid for the whole scale, whatever the size” (2008a, 186). In his “Course Summary,” Foucault, somewhat typically, apologises for not delivering what he initially intended: “This year’s course ended up being devoted entirely to what should have been only its introduction. The theme was to have been “biopolitics,” by which I mean the of political power, but a key term in its exercise, the more so because most individuals are not merely the subjects of power but play a part in its operations” (53–54). 38 We take particular note of Agamben’s discussion of “paradigm” in the work of Foucault, the particular way this notion is accessed and used by Foucault. This concern with “paradigm” is central to Agamben’s short book, The signature of all things (2009), referenced earlier in this chapter when mentioning Agamben’s engagement with Franz Overbeck. and forms the major theme of the book’s first chapter, “What is a paradigm?” (9–32). 39 In their extended introduction to Henri Lefebvre’s Writings on cities (1996), Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas emphasize that Lefebvre did not engage in any sustained way with Foucault’s writings on space and the urban (Kofman and Lebas 1996). They note: “Foucault is an obvious though not stated link with Nietzsche, for whom Lefebvre had, on the other hand, little sympathy, calling him, at the height of his invective against structuralism in the 1960s, the ideologue of the system. As with many other Marxists, as well as with Sartre, Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things], published in 1966, was read as a right-wing book, that denied politics and represented a work of Gaullist technocracy” (25). In Lefebvre, love and struggle (1999), Rob Shields cites Lefebvre on Foucault’s The order of things: “The ‘lived’ reference to objects and to the world of objects to situations should fall such that only a system of signs without substance or determination other than their transparency exists. This transparency is not surprising: we have evacuated their contents. To present this as a victory of the intelligible—a mortal victory, the victory of Death—it is this attitude which can be surprising” (124). Shields also notes, in relation to Foucault: “Fundamental to Lefebvre’s hesitation is his difficulty in spatializing power in the manner proposed by Foucault, for example, where power is embedded as force (puissance) in a dense network of bio-powers. For Lefebvre, power is ‘political’ rather than ethical; it is sovereign and conceived from above” (156).

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attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population …” (317). Senellart suggests, in his “Course Context,” that the aim of the lectures was “to show how this liberalism constitutes the condition of intelligibility of bio-politics” (2008a, 327). Foucault’s analysis explores the emergence of political economy: governmental practice shifts from contractualism to the management of population by government (328).

2.4.2 Neo-Liberalism and Environmental Responsibility Foucault’s analysis aims to counter the false ideas which have spread about neo-liberalism and, increasingly, about the relationship between the economic and the social. At the forefront of these erroneous claims about neo-liberalism should be placed, Foucault says, that which would see it as no more than a reactivation of old liberal theories in their original harshness. This is a major misinterpretation since the problem the neo-liberals confront is no longer that of introducing an unregulated space in order to make way for ‘laisser-faire’, but is to work at producing the conditions for competition, without which the market is only an empty word. (Donzelot 2008, 130)

Foucault’s The birth of biopolitics is broadly structured in three series of lectures. The first series, up until the fourth lecture, repeats many of the themes that were amply discussed in Security, territory population, the themes of Raison d’État and emergence of liberalism, towards the end of the eighteenth century, governmental naturalism, the management of liberty, and so on. From the fourth lecture to the eleventh, the majority of the lecture-course is divided between an introduction and discussion of the emergence of German neo-liberalism before, during and after the Second World War, and the development of American neo-liberalism after the War. The final two lectures address an understanding of the governmental rationality of the self in terms of what Foucault names “homo oeconomicus,” retracing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the emergence of Civil society, and species differences between English, French and German problematics with respect to an understanding of interest and self-interest coincident with the emergence of liberalism.40 Our aim in concluding this chapter is to focus on some of the most salient aspects of neo-liberal governmental rationality and how we come to re-inscribe the urban in terms of their specific technologies of power. Foucault asks in his fourth 40 We mentioned, when discussing the account of the cholera epidemic in Paris by Delaporte, his reference to the notion of ‘organic economy’ in relation to contagion theory’s locating of the notions of aptitude and immunity when defining the susceptibility of a body to disease. As Delaporte notes, this notion of ‘economy’ with respect to an organism is transposed from aspects of political economy with respect to aptitude for and immunity from liability to taxation. The notion of homo oeconomicus, central to nineteenth century liberal understanding of economy, thus has its correlate in the field of social medicine. We recognise the extent to which Foucault endeavours to find relays, if not more grounding agency, between technologies of security associated with political economy’s governmentality of a State, and the technologies of power that defined the medicalization of a population. We discuss this figure of ‘economic man’ more fully in Chapter 5 of Securing urbanism.

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lecture of the 1978–79 series: “So, let’s take things as they stand now. What is the nature of today’s liberal, or, as one says, neo-liberal program?” (Foucault 2008a, 78).41 He proceeds to briefly outline the two neo-liberal traditions he aims to study: the German form, developed in response to Nazism and the need for post-war reconstruction; and the American form, emerging in criticism to the New Deal, Federal interventionism and the Democrat aid programmes of Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. What they share is the “common enemy,” Keynes and “the same objects of repulsion, namely, the state-controlled economy, planning, and state interventionism on precisely those overall quantities to which Keynes attached such theoretical and especially practical importance” (79).42 At the centre of German neo-liberalism was the emergence of ordo-liberalism during the 1930s as opposition to the interventionist planning of National Socialism. Foucault notes three major consequences with the development of ordo-liberalism and its implementation immediately into post-war Germany. Firstly, there is a fundamental shift in understanding economy, from a concern with exchange to a concern with competition. Where liberalism saw the market as site of exchange, as a nature of free exchange, in which the State was not to intervene, ordo-liberalism saw this “nature” to be concerned with competition, rather than with exchange.43 41 We

find, with the writings of the Italian sociologist and philosopher, Maurizio Lazzarato (2013, 2014) and his co-authored work with Eric Alliez (2018) a sustained critique of Foucault’s writing on neo-liberalism in The birth of biopolitics. See especially Chapter 7, “The limits of the liberalism of Foucault,” in Alliez and Lazzarato (2018). In relation to the previous footnote, one of their targets in the work of Foucault is the centrality he gives to this figure of homo oeconomicus. We make further mention of the work of Lazzarato on the notion of debt, and the critique of Foucault’s approach to liberalism, in relation to the writings of Agamben and Negri in Chapter 9 of Securing urbanism. 42 John Maynard Keynes developed a fundamentally new understanding of economic systems in a series of key publications in the 1930s (A treatise on money [1930] and The general theory of employment, interest and money [1936]). Specifically, he advocated State intervention in micro-economic activity, necessitating an emphasis on developing macro-economic parameters of economic performance. See Donzelot (1979) for an extraordinary discussion of the impact of Freud and Keynes on French governmental policies on families in the mid twentieth century: “Freud like Keynes, we said. Perhaps there is something more than a simile in this juxtaposition. Keynes theorized about the characteristic ways in which Western societies combined the social and the economic … he made it possible to integrate the social sphere into the general regulation of the market. … Could we not say that Freudianism made a similar operation possible by offering a flexible mechanism of adjustment of the juridical sphere and the medical sphere? There too it was a matter of escaping a dangerous alternative between, on the one hand, a statist consecration of privileges through the power of juridical assets … and on the other, the setting up of a central mechanism of coercion … undertaken in the name of health norms” (231–232). For Keynes, it was a matter of steering between the tenets of pure liberalism and authoritarian centralism. For psychiatry, it was a matter of steering between neo-liberal State right to wealth, and welfare interventions and control of the dispossessed. 43 As Foucault points out, while ordoliberalism does reverse classical eighteenth-century liberalism’s sole concern with maintaining pure and open exchange, nineteenth-century liberalism itself had already concerned itself with the question of the relation of the social to the market, and hence the permeation of the social by the market. Ordoliberalism recognizes the social as a stratification of inequalities open to competition, and hence the State’s intervention was to ensure all inequalities

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What constituted the market was not exchange between equals but competition between inequalities: “They take up this classical conception and the principle that competition and only competition, can ensure economic rationality” (119). But this emphasis on competition was already a precept of nineteenth-century liberalism. However, eighteenth-century emphasis on exchange and nineteenth-century emphasis on competition each drew the same fundamental conclusion: that at the heart of either was the mechanism of laissez-faire, that there is a naturalness to exchange or a naturalness to competition that must not be interfered with by a third party, the State (120). Foucault emphasises the influence of the philosopher, Edmund Husserl, on the development of ordoliberal thinking, in his phenomenological destructuring of “naïve naturalism.” Hence, competition is not a given nature, not a natural law. In this, ordoliberalism determines the limits to economic rationalism: “Economics analyzes the formal processes and history will analyze the systems in which the operation of these formal processes is either possible or impossible” (121). This is the second consequence. The third is, in a sense, its corollary. Because there is no pure, rational and natural law of competition, but rather the historical exigencies of inequities that constitute markets, the role of the State is not to demarcate its agency as that which refuses to interfere with the market, but rather the obverse. The State is that instrumentality that continually engages the market, to ensure that entrepreneurial games are competitive games: “There will not be the market game, which must be left free, and then the domain in which the state begins to intervene, since the market, or rather pure competition, which is the essence of the market, can only appear if it is produced, and if it is produced by an active governmentality. … One must govern for the market, rather than because of the market” (121). It is for these reasons that ordoliberalism reverses a fundamental understanding of political economy. Eighteenth-century emergence of the discourse and practices of political economy were founded on the fundamental question of how the State is to manage economic relations, and the extent to which economic rationality is a product of State governmental rationality. With ordoliberalism, the State itself is a product of economic rationality, to the extent that the State is that governmental rationality that is primarily there to ensure market competitiveness. It does this via social intervention, via an omnipresent interventionist social policy. Crucially, this intervention must not eliminate or attenuate any anti-social effects of the market. It is not protectionist or welfare-centred. Rather, intervention aims at eliminating or avoiding any anti-competitive mechanisms of society (160). The American form of neo-liberalism has similarities and differences to the emergence, development and taking root of ordoliberalism in Germany, and then in France. The similarities concern similar twentieth-century concerns about the growth of State instrumentality, with respect to Civil-society. In the United States, it was the Keynesian welfare approaches of Roosevelt’s New Deal, along with post-war social

were able to compete. American neo-liberalism recognizes the social not so much as stratification of inequalities but, rather, as a stratification of enterprises in competition.

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policies of Truman, Kennedy and Johnson.44 The differences, though, are marked and historically framed. Where European liberalism emerged from Raison d’État or from Polizeiwissenschaft, science of police, American liberalism was a founding principle at the War of Independence, analogous for Foucault to the role of liberalism in Germany in 1948 (217).45 Secondly, liberalism has been, throughout American political history, the central principle of governmentality and political debate. In European history, such debate, at least in the nineteenth century, concerned more questions of national unity, independence, and Rule of Law (218). A third difference is open hostility, on the Left as much as the Right, to any governmental rationality seeming to invoke socialist policies, be they Keynesian economic planning, or policies suggesting an imperialist or military State (218). Foucault stresses that American liberalism should not be considered, at an individuated level, as a governmental rationality for the delivery of services. Rather, it is a way of being, and a way of living. It is for this reason that American liberalism takes neo-liberal market competition into domains of Civil-society, extending economic analysis into domains that were previously un-thought as pertinent to such analysis. In his lectures, Foucault considers two such domains, that of human capital, and that of delinquency and criminality. The arena for our discussion, urban environmental responsibility, may in some ways be adjunct though closely linked to such approaches to human capital and delinquencies within neo-liberal ethico-political frameworks. Foucault notes: “I think the interest of this theory of human capital is that it represents two processes, one that we could call the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic” (219). In brief, neo-liberalism radically reconsiders classical economic theory, which has three fundamental elements: land, capital and labour. The reconsideration focuses on a fundamental understanding of what constitutes labour in economic terms. Labour was either ignored or, for Marx, it was converted to labour time. That is to say, labour was abstracted. Neo-liberal economics begins with the concretization of labour, as a real product of capitalism: “The fundamental, essential problem, anyway the first problem which arises when one wants to analyse labour in economic terms, is how the person who works uses the means available to him. … we will have to study work as economic conduct practiced, implemented, rationalized, and calculated by the person who works” (223). The worker is not an abstracted object with respect to supply and demand but “an active economic subject” (223).46 In this sense, wages, 44 These Keynesian welfare measures in the United States become a focus for Chapter 3 of Securing

urbanism, which analyses Federal U.S. housing policy and economic assistance for the urban poor and minority groups. We recognize how, by the 1970s, Keynesian economic approaches were considered to have failed at a national and global level, ushering in, especially in the U.K. and the U.S., monetarist approaches to economic planning, developed in contexts of neo-liberal policy. 45 Though Raison d’État and Polizeiwissenschaft (Science of Police) have been briefly mentioned already, in discussing the emergence of State medicine, these notions are dealt with in detail when discussing Foucault’s Security, territory, population in Chapter 5 of Securing urbanism. 46 We recognize this concern of Foucault’s with a neo-liberal focus on labour as a concrete economic entity and not an abstract factor in production, already has its grounding understanding in the

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as income, are now considered as return on capital investment, where that capital is one’s own capacities but also the source for future income. Hence, this capital-self is something that needs to be invested in as well, in order to accrue a greater return on capital. The self is a set of abilities, a skill, a “machine,” as well as an “earning stream” (224): “We should therefore view the whole as a machine/stream complex … at the opposite extreme of a conception of labour power sold at the market price to capital invested in an enterprise” (225). Rather, each individual self is its own enterprise, its own self-enterprise. Economies are ensembles of enterprise-units. This is somewhat different to classical economic understanding of economic-man, as that equal partner in exchange. With neo-liberalism, homo oeconomicus is an entrepreneur of herself. Human capital is an assemblage of innate elements, hereditary, and what can be called educational investments, “investments that form an abilities-machine” (229): This means that we thus arrive at a whole environmental analysis, as the Americans say, of the child’s life which it will be possible to calculate, and to a certain extent quantify, or at any rate measure, in terms of possibilities of investment in human capital. … In the same way, we can analyse medical care and, generally speaking, all activities concerning the health of individuals, which will thus appear as so many elements which enable us, first, to improve human capital, and second, to preserve and employ it for as long as possible. Thus, all the problems of health care and public hygiene must, or at any rate, can be rethought as elements which may or may not improve human capital. (229–230)47

We are able to recognise in this the extent to which neo-liberal understandings of economic activity extend to domains that were intrinsically thought to be noneconomic. This is in the sense that classical economic theory and liberalism, that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, recognised a distinction between the domain of economic laws and the domain of the social. As Foucault suggests, at stake was an inversion of the relation of the social to the economic (240). In this, he draws a further distinction between the neo-liberalism of German ordoliberalism and the neo-liberalism in its more radical American form. The ordoliberals recognised the permeation of the social by the market, that enterprise, at whatever level, constituted the competitive nature of the lectures he gave in the early 1970s. From his lectures on the punitive society, on psychiatric power, abnormality, and the defense of society, his focus returns again and again to the economic and political costs of making the urban poor productive with respect to work. With this focus, Foucault maintained a ‘corrective’ to those approaches to the emergence and development of capitalism as ideological. Rather, he emphasized, concerns were with the bodies of the laboring classes, including the costs of raising those bodies from childhood, their training, and the maintenance of their health. In a sense, that body remains a focus in his discussion of self-as-enterprise, what a body is capable of doing and becoming. 47 Foucault’s translator, Graham Burchell, highlights this reference to “machine” in the Foucault text. Burchell notes: “The word ‘machine’ seems to be Foucault’s, an allusion or wink to L’AntiOedipe of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Paris: Minuit, 1972)” (Foucault 2008a, n. 28, 236). Indeed, this mention of the human as an “abilities-machine” by Foucault opens an interesting space of engagement between the work of Deleuze and Guattari on capitalism and those key neo-liberal theorists (Schultz and Becker) who Foucault discusses in detail. It seems that Foucault and Deleuze part company in many ways at this cusp of the 1980s, though there is potentially, in a reading across Foucault’s governmentality of neo-liberalism and the schizo-analyses of Deleuze and Guattari, another kind of rapprochement.

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social. However, they also recognised that the social was composed of elements that exceeded economic rationality, and that the governmentality of the social precisely required a rationality that recognised the limits to economic agency: “In short I would like to emphasize the following: in this idea of a Gesellschaftspolitik there is what I would call an economic-ethical ambiguity around the notion of enterprise itself” (241). The role of State intervention was not with the market, as competitive enterprise, but with the relation of an individual to the enterprise such that no individual, household, firm or family became alienated from her environment. There was an ethico-moral dimension to addressing the calculative aspects of the market. While enterprise economics permeates the entire social field, there is a “compensating” aspect for the impersonal operative characteristics of the market. In short, the individual bears a relation to competitive enterprise (242). With the American model, the individual is that enterprise, and cannot be extracted from it or determined as a relation to it. For this reason, and in its radicality, American neo-liberalism extends economic analysis to every domain of the social, such as education, marriage, criminality, all forms of consumption. Economic activity, to be engaged in terms of self-enterprise, extends to any activity whatsoever, deemed rational or irrational, whose consequences are determinable through some degree of systematicity. Foucault refers here to Gary Becker’s radical version of neo-liberalism: “That is to say, any conduct which responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, in other words, any conduct, as Becker says, which ‘accepts reality,’ must be susceptible to economic analysis. Homo oeconomicus is someone who accepts reality” (269).48 Thus, for Becker, criminality is solely defined in terms of actions taken by an individual calculative of the risks of punishment. Punishment is conduct to induce negative demand on crime. Crime is undertaking profitable action that risks the economic loss associated with penal risk. One no longer really deals with crime or criminals, with psychological or moral types, but with calculative action, risk, elasticity and inelasticity of demand and supply with respect to the human capital of self-enterprise, as well as with negative demand incentives of law enforcement. All of these bear costs and benefits. The aim is never to eliminate criminality but to measure the cost/benefit of actions or the avoidance of actions.49 It is in these terms that we 48 In his discussion on American neo-liberalism, Foucault emphasizes in particular the work of Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker. He notes that both economic theorists published books at about the same time (1971) that aimed at fundamentally challenging Keynesian economic theory by introducing labour into the field of economic analysis (Foucault 2008a, 220). Both books were titled Human Capital; Schultz: Investment in Human Capital: The role of education and research (1971); Becker: Human Capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis with special reference to education (1971). Schultz was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1974, receiving the Nobel Prize for economics in 1979. Gary Becker, some thirty years younger, taught at Columbia University until 1968 and then at Chicago, and received a Nobel Prize for economics in 1992. More recently, there appeared a series of writings on Becker and Foucault, wherein Becker, who was aware of Foucault’s writing at the time, engages with and reflects on Foucault’s commentary and analysis of his neo-liberalism (Becker et al. 2012; Gordon 2013). 49 Foucault notes the extreme form of analysis developed by Becker, which fails to differentiate between types of criminality, or seriousness of particular crimes: “The regulatory principle of penal

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are able to recognise the current governmentality of environmental responsibility with respect to issues of sustainable communities. We want to contrast two arenas of neo-liberal agency with respect to environmental regulation, one concerning environmental sustainable management at urban levels, and the other what we could term post-political urban practices in communities that appear to be completely unsustainable. These measures need to be read within a genealogy of the development of social medicine, public hygiene and State administration of health, that coincided with the emergence of liberalism during the nineteenth century, the welfare state and universal social insurance during the twentieth century, along with the eclipsing of Keynesian economic policy and the rise of new problems of liberalism, individual liberty and economic practice, especially concerning what in the nineteenth century became the ‘functioning’ of ‘living conditions’.

2.4.3 Greening the Entrepreneurial Self Brand (2007) recognises two predominant scales of environmental management that appear to be incommensurate with respect to their respective governmental rationalities. On the one scale, there has been, for decades, increasingly vociferous concern with global environmental problems, generally under the rubric of “climate change.” Strategic measures for addressing global environmental management tend to be national and inter-national. Brand emphasises the difficulty or reluctance of national governments to act, with “international development policies and agencies in disarray” (Brand 2007, 616). In comparison, at an urban level, local administrative policies have had a different uptake: “… the procrastinations of national governments contrast strongly with the performance of city administrations, which embraced the environmental agenda and the ‘clean-green’ city idea with surprising enthusiasm and some effectiveness” (616). Brand emphasises the critical articulation between neo-liberalism and environmentalism, especially developed in sustainablecities discourses.50 Much of the literature on neo-liberalism and environmental issues policy is a simple intervention in the market for crime and in relation to the supply of crime. It is an intervention which will limit the supply of crime solely by a negative demand, the cost of which must obviously never exceed the cost of the supply of the criminality in question. … Consequently, good penal policy does not aim at the extinction of crime, but at a balance between the curves of supply of crime and negative demand” (Foucault 2008a, 256). 50 The literature on neo-liberalism, or liberal economic and political practices and the environment is vast and ranges through a series of political, philosophical and ecological paradigms. We have discussed a range of authors and journals that engage this broad agenda in Chapter 1 of this book. The journal Environmental Politics is, perhaps, exemplary for its ongoing debate on the governmentality of environmentalism. For example, with “Deconstructing Risk Society” (2002) engaging the political consequences of the work done by Ulrich Beck on risk and social theory (Beck 1992), Mark Lacey suggests, concerning a politics of time-analysis in economic risk assessment: “For instance, the seemingly contradictory development strategies of sectors of the fossil fuel industry requires such an approach if it is to be explained; climate politics has been shaped by corporations that—at the same time as they tentatively drive forward to colonise new ecologically modernized markets

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documents the shifts that have taken place, under neo-liberal planning, from emphasises on environmental policy to environmental management, which is to say, from a governmental rationality of normative prescription of the social, to an emphasis on an individuated agency in self-managing responsibility (Keil and Graham 1998; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002; McCathy and Prudham 2004). Brand references Laurie (2006). Such emphasis implies neo-liberal governmental techniques aimed at individuating environmental agency in terms of “active living”: The debate on urban form is illustrative in this sense, as for example discussed by Laurie (2006) in relation to the urban programmes emerging across the U.S. and Europe to promote ‘active living’ by modifying the built environment. She argues the ‘ethical superiority’ of sustainable arguments as against traditional public health rationale as supportive devices for such urban policy, while also observing the potential stigmatization of the overweight and physically imperfect. More explicitly political considerations may concern, for example, government interest in controlling health expenditure by enforcing the ‘duty-to-be-well’ (Greco 1993) on environmental grounds. (Brand 2007, 619)

We have earlier discussed the extent to which neo-liberalism, in either its German or American form, emphasises an understanding of the individuated self as competitive enterprise and, with American neo-liberalism, as human capital, with an economic rationality permeating all aspects of a self’s life, in the sense that a self’s existence is its competing as enterprise for current and future income on the basis of its self-capital investment. In the early 1980s, immediately following his analyses of neo-liberalism, Foucault developed new emphasises on the notion of the subject-offreedom, a notion that might previously have seemed a conundrum for Foucault’s understanding of power, knowledge and subjectification. The relation he develops between power and subjectivity is a notion of a self as a movement-of-freedom, immanent to power’s exercise, inasmuch as power constitutes a conduct on conduct, conduct on the actions of others. Those actions are not fully determinable and are open to resistive measures, constitutive of a self’s relation-to-itself. Foucault’s ‘selfas-enterprise’, against the grain of Becker’s radical neo-liberalism, is this resistive ‘measure’, or its very possibility.51 We recognise in Brand’s Foucauldian approach to neo-liberalism and environmentalism, the extent to which the question of subjection and subjectivity, as a question of governmental rationalities and techniques of power, leads to an essential issue of the governmentality of everyday life, life in its anonymity as the micro-capillary circulation of power, whose effects are subjectivities and counter-movements of resistance: “As argued earlier, the issue of governance and the self-governing citizen converge decisively on that area of social existence (BP becoming Beyond Petroleum, car companies developing advertising campaigns—often coded with globalist imagery—that suggest driving can induce a Zen-like state of being, a vital space of personal security and tranquility in a dangerous world)—they attempt to slow down the pace of eco-modernist transformation through networks of organizations such as The Global Climate Coalition (and its mutations), an organization that has worked hard to construct climate change as an illegitimate risk, in order to sustain regimes of accumulation for the longest possible period, overcoming all limits to growth” (Lacey 2002, 57). 51 We discuss Foucault’s work on the subject of freedom, developed in the early 1980s, in more detail in Chapter 6, “Biopolitical urbanism.”

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which is increasingly the focus of urban environmental management: everyday life” (626).52 In this, Brand distinguishes between the rationalities of environmental policy discourses, developed through scientific and technical interventions, and practices of power understood as individual interests or personal decision processes, microeconomic rationalities of the human capitalist. In terms that we earlier recognised in Osborne’s delineation of liberalism’s constitution on its own failures, and Foucault’s distinctions between discourses and technologies of power and aberrant practices of power, Brand notes: “This raises the question of how ‘irrational modes of behaviour’ can be mobilized in support of ‘rational urban policy’, and with what political effect” (627). Hence, we recognise processes of subject-identity and subject-formation, relations of a self-to-itself, as an “‘ecological identity’ through urban environmental management practices, and their demands, influences and effects on everyday life” (627). The constitution of civic identity, or citizenship, undergoes transformation, from being a judicial instantiation of sovereign right, at the level of the individuated subject, the subject of right, to an altogether different form. This different ‘form’ cannot be simply accounted-for in terms of relations between rights and norms, or the normativity of security—as rights of the governed—and sovereign right. What is suggested by neo-liberal understandings of the self-as-human-capital, and hence its own enterprise, is the constitution of citizenship as an enterprise-task to be earned, where the everyday, constituting the milieu of the personal and domestic, constitutes the focus for an environmental management that becomes the responsibility of the self-governing citizen. As Brand suggests: “My point is that the way in which this has been realized represents a gross distortion of the alternative development and libertarian aspirations of early environmental thought, to such a degree that green awareness has been converted into a form of subjection, minor in its social locus and inconsequential in its broader ecological significance, but politically powerful for the management of neoliberal urban economic and social change” (628).

52 In a quite extraordinary assessment of “Of other spaces,” Foucault’s short text on the heterotopic, James Faubion brings into relief how the arc of Foucault’s movement from anthropology to ontology approaches precisely question of subjectivity and the everyday, as a particular kind of question of the work of art. Faubion notes that, in the 1980s, Foucault returns to a theme of his earliest writings on Hölderlin, Rousseau, Roussel, Klossowski, Blanchot and Mallarmé (Faubion 2008, 38). However, that theme of the subject and the aesthetic is approached somewhat differently: “The subject is instead concrete [rather than utopic] — the adult citizen male of the ancient polis, Baudelaire’s dandy, but also the unnamed men exploring new ‘modes of relationship’ in their bedrooms and cafés of Castro Street” (38). What Faubion emphasizes is how, for Foucault, the heterotopic opens a moment of encounter with the everyday that does not put into opposition an anthropology and an ontology, inflecting towards the binary of the utopian and the quotidian: “[His conception of the heterotopia] is also the dark divination of a conceptual cartography of the cardinal categorical site of a concrete anthropology and sociology of the embedded possibilities of an always already socially and culturally conditioned imagination—this daemon—that threaten the quotidian as much as they bore the utopian” (39). This is what Faubion names “that real space between threat and boredom” that constitutes the governmental possibilities of everyday life.

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2.5 Conclusion 2.5.1 Post-political Welfare53 This understanding of a “green subjectivisation,” tending to constitute a middle-class appropriation of urban norms via risk management, that becomes the prerogative of the human-capitalist, may be starkly contrasted with another version of urban neoliberal techniques of self-enterprise, that point to vanguard movements in a broadening polity of post-democratic and post-political governmental rationalities.54 Fairbanks (2009, 2011) presents contemporary frameworks for urban management in the city of Philadelphia, in neighbourhood zones of brownfield industrial wastelands and vast tracts of vacant housing. In these zones, there are no local welfare measures at all for the dispossessed, unemployed, addicted or alcoholic itinerants, who tend to converge on available vacant dwellings. Fairbanks noted at the time of writing that Philadelphia had sixty thousand vacant homes, including about thirty thousand abandoned row houses. He notes: “In the neighbourhood of Kensington, street-level entrepreneurs have reconfigured hundreds of former working-class row homes to produce the Philadelphia recovery house movement: an extra-legal poverty survival strategy for addicts and alcoholics located in the city’s poorest and most heavily blighted zones” (Fairbanks 2011, 2555). We recognise in the agency of informal operators and a politics of self-help, political rationalities that have taken up the space of State administrative action, vacated by welfare politics, under neo-liberal economic planning. These are new forms of political agency in circumstances where 53 We

introduced and discussed the notion of the post-political in Chapter 1, when especially discussing the urban political theory of Eric Swyngedouw. There are now numerous references to the notions of the “post-political” and “post-democratic.” However, there are also a number of urban and political theorists who do not find either of these terms accurate or particularly useful, inasmuch as we are not over with or finished with “politics” in those situations described as postpolitical or the question of democracy is not buried in post-democratic milieus (Swyngedouw 2009, 2011; Barnett 2012; Dikeç 2012; Gill et al. 2012). 54 See in particular the work of Chantal Mouffe (2005, 2010; Laclau and Mouffe 2001) in developing radical approaches to political democracy and the contemporary nation state. In “The importance of engaging the state” (2010), Mouffe draws a fundamental difference between her work and that of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The difference, in her terms, is between an activism of withdrawal from the State, and an activism of antagonisms: “Radical politics today is often characterized in terms of desertion, exodus and refusal to engage with existing institutions. Whereas I believe that radical politics should instead be concerned with building political engagement, through developing competing, antagonistic political claims” (Mouffe 2010, 230). Mouffe’s work on political agonism is discussed within urban contexts by Ploger in “Strife: Urban Planning and Agonism” (2004). Ploger notes: “Although strife is indicated or mentioned in planning studies, it is not discussed in its own terms. … Following Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) theory of agonism, I will argue that ‘the art of strife’ is what is expected in public planning in a world of agonistic pluralism” (Ploger 2004, 72). Perhaps Hardt and Negri see their 2017 publication, Assembly, as a response to Mouffe’s accusation of refusal. It is the multitude who determine a “constitutive right … a mechanism for composing a social alternative, for taking power differently, through cooperation in social production” (Hardt and Negri 2017, 295). We return to the work of Hardt and Negri in more detail in Chapter 8 of Securing urbanism.

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civic authorities are no longer willing to, or capable of, providing welfare support in communities that have been totally devastated by economic restructure: “Street level entrepreneurs began to transform dilapidated row homes into unlicensed, unregulated recovery houses at a break-neck pace. They were given room to manoeuvre through a variegated regime of city indifference, marked by a conspicuous absence of an official licensure or regulatory board for recovery houses in Pennsylvania” (2557). We are able to recognise in these somewhat ready-made and illicit spaces of confinement, a technology of recovery whose power/knowledge circuits pass through what might be termed the post-welfare State (Valverde 2007). Neo-liberal governmental rationality establishes the frameworks for industrial transformations leading to brownfield sites and vacant working-class housing, well beyond the aspirational desires of urban greening sensibilities. The same neo-liberal rationalities have ensured the disestablishment of functioning welfare programmes, and thus open spaces for postpolitical entrepreneurial illegalities, whose approval ambiguously meets an open political question as to whether they instigate closed spaces in order to effectively concentrate illegalities or in order to overcome them: “Recovery has emerged as the post-welfare anti-poverty mechanism par excellence; assuring subjects that they can change, achieve self-mastery, control their own destiny and transform into the oftrepeated phrase, ‘productive members of society’. By maximising self-interest and empowerment in service of a recovery lifestyle, the conduct of everyday existence is recast as a series of problems to be managed in the informal realm of civil society” (2566).55 These concerns return us to the question of subjects and power, to a movement of freedom immanent to power’s conduct on conduct. Appeal to a “healthy free will” (Sedgwick 1993), assumes a self whose agency is presumed. This biopolitical self has now become its own biopolitical enterprise, whose risks are measured in terms of the calculable return to oneself of expenditure of one’s own human capital, whether that be consumption of narcotics, moving onto a twelve-step plan for recovery or a daily workout and plenty of fresh fruit. This chapter commenced with an outline of disciplinary procedures enacted during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that 55 It is useful to contrast the political critique of post-industrial Philadelphia by Fairbanks with other urban ‘planning’ texts that reinstate a more orthodox form-driven urban design approach. With the latter, there is a palpable erasure of what could be called an accountability for the concrete social practices that seems to be a primary concern of Fairbanks, what Foucault would, perhaps, call the ‘rights of the governed’. Hence, a text such as Andrea Hansen’s “FLUXscape: Remapping Philadelphia’s post-industrial terrain” opens with a mythologizing of urban destabilization by recourse to the notion of the ruin, explicitly a “romancing the ruin” (Hansen 2012, 206). Opening with a short epigraph by Georges Simmel on the ruin, Hansen suggests: “FLUXscape provides the solution to Philadelphia’s problem of post-industrial vacancy by networking ruined sites along infrastructural corridors into catalytic, productive ribbons of flexible, hybrid program that will course life through Philadelphia’s long-dormant veins. In this network, the ruin is given new life within a contemporary context through the insertion of hybrid program, which can dynamically respond to the need of a city in flux” (206). We may note the overt romanticism that couples the ruin to new life, a bio-politics of un-reflected formalism, in contexts that Foucault might frame as the governmentality of life. We also contrast Fairbanks to Hansen, in terms of developing an understanding of how the governmentality of a city brings about “vacancy,” and produces not just sites for renewal but a concatenation of ethico-political accountabilities concerning dispossession and dwelling.

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enabled the emergence of social medicine as a State instrumentality. The chapter traced the nineteenth century emergence of liberalism, in terms Foucault calls ‘security’. This shift from discipline to liberalism is traced by Foucault in his analyses of bio-power and the bio-political. The chapter has engaged methodological concerns of Foucault in determining how an archaeology of the bio-political is considered in terms of questioning the unsaid in historiographical sedimentations, in this case in accounts of cholera in Paris in 1832 and newspaper accounts of the cholera epidemics of the 1830s and 1850s in Britain. With an analysis of these accounts, we are able to recognise shifts in the early nineteenth century from discipline to security, via the deployment of statistics and liberal governmental measures. Further analyses of the urban, as site of implementation of liberal policies of social medicine, are undertaken in reference to accounts of the engineering of sanitary and water management for nineteenth century English cities. Foucault’s discussion, in The birth of biopolitics, to the emergence of neoliberalism in Germany and America during the twentieth century, especially aims at distinguishing the discontinuity between nineteenth century liberalism and twentieth century developments of general oppositions to welfare economics in neoliberal governmental frameworks. The chapter concludes with discussion of applications of neoliberal approaches to the subject, understood as ‘movement of freedom’, and equally understood as a competitive self-enterprise, in two contemporary urban scenarios: that of middle-class urban policies for ‘green cities’ that inscribe good citizenship as that which a self earns by ‘green’ responsibility. This operates primarily as a management of population, precisely in order to conceal the genuine crises of global ecologies. The second scenario described post-political urban ‘development’ in locales decimated by economic catastrophe, ushered in by stringent neoliberal policies. Here populations of unemployed and unemployable addicts and homeless are moved into illegal self-help programmes, established by entrepreneurial agents, outside of State welfare schemes or instrumentalities, in what may be termed post-democratic programmes of urban survival. With Chapter 3, “Subprime,” we engage again with the notion of epidemic and contagion, along with developments from welfare economic practices to neoliberalism, in contexts of housing the urban poor in the United States. Our aim will be to show in some detail how a governmentality of the State, concerned with limiting or extending the juridical and administrative exercise of power of the State—in this case with respect to policies on the financing of low-income housing—resulted in the early twenty-first century with a global economic collapse, comparable in scale and effect to the 1929 crash that ushered in the Great Depression. The chapter traces how a relatively small economic market—by global scale—of the low-income housing sector in the United States, could trigger what was termed a global contagion of national debt reaching 37 trillion dollars.

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Chapter 3

Sub-prime

Alea iacta est

3.1 Introduction 3.1.1 Economic Health At the conclusion of Delaporte’s book on cholera (Delaporte 1986), he mentions that cholera and Algeria arrived in the same year, 1832, that an epidemic disease from ‘elsewhere’ and a French colony coincide. His emphasis in this is to foreground the extent to which European States, plagued by epidemics from ‘elsewhere’, saw the process of colonization as a global approach to social medicine, an approach whose rebound on the colonizing power was precisely eradication of the likelihood of epidemic diseases arriving again, disciplinary measures in the colonies as securitizing for the colonizer. Colonization and contagion, disease and financial empirebuilding, become coincident in a securitizing logic. With the introduction to this chapter, we want to broach this important link between financial powers and technologies of social medicine that see colonization as an essential expansion of European understandings of social medicine and labour power. In Chaps. 1 and 2, we have mentioned on numerous occasions, especially in contexts of Foucault’s genealogical accounts of the nineteenth century, the manner whereby the urban poor became systematically a target for institutional normalization via disciplinary mechanisms associated with punitive measures, ensuring a labour force, and public hygiene (Foucault 2003a, b, 2006, 2015). With Delaporte’s account of the cholera epidemic in Paris, we recognise the urban poor as systematic target. On the one hand, the proletariat was seen as a disorderly threat to the bourgeoisie as source of infectious disease. On the other hand, the poor became the target for a physical and moral hygiene aimed at eliminating the living conditions of this population, along with its supposed laziness and revolutionary threat. As Delaporte emphasised with the 1832 Paris epidemic, the most ferocious debate lay in determining the cause © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. L. Jackson and M. Hanlen, Securing Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4_3

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of the spread of the disease, a medical debate between proponents of contagion theory and those of infection theory. It becomes quickly evident that the differences between these positions was a politico-economic one, rather than an epidemiological one, administrative rather than strictly medical. As the genuine cause of the disease remained a complete mystery for both theories, the debate was primarily concerned with how to mobilize control over the circulation of people and goods, with the maintaining of a labour force and production. With this chapter, we again focus on welfare measures, in this case in the United States, directed to the urban poor, in the name of a normalizing regime with respect to middle class understandings of housing. The history of the policies and practices of these welfare measures during the twentieth century precipitated the failure of the Wall Street banks in 2007, and the global financial crash in 2008. With this chapter, the notion of contagion reappears within a financial vocabulary that terms particular financial products as ‘toxic’, while their spread, along with processes of quarantine and immunization, led to debates that recall those of contagion and infection theorists, their differing targets, understandings of the milieu of financial disease, and approaches to containment, control and securitization. To what extent, though, was a vocabulary drawn from medicine and public hygiene mobilized somewhat metaphorically in discussing financial crisis? Was the medical model or understanding of epidemiology transferrable to discussion of financial modelling in situations where the failure of individual banks seemed to produce a cascading or contagious effect on an entire banking community? There developed two approaches to these kinds of questions. One approach simply asks if an understanding of the transmissibility of infection is at all helpful in determining parameters for understanding the catastrophic ‘pandemic’ effects of the failure of the sub-prime mortgage market in the U.S. Are the terms simply metaphors or is there something deeper? The other approach is more complex, searching for political and economic frameworks that underlie not just the adoption of a vocabulary, but governmental strategy, or a governmentality of both disease and financial products, at national and global levels, that brings both economic crisis and health crisis into a converging discursive ensemble. Hence, this other approach looks not to the demonstrable truths of a coincident framing of health and finance, but the truth-events of a technology of power that recognises both health and finance as global securitizing mechanisms. We will briefly outline both approaches in terms of the frameworks by which they emerged. Needless to say, the demonstrable truths of a presumed convergence of a vocabulary of modelling predominated in the official literature concerning the causes of the banking failures and Eurozone money crisis. The evental truths, crisis-truths of an exercise of power, at a global scale, remain the more compelling, though less recognised, understanding. There is a further aspect of Foucault’s work we need to emphasise in order to fully discuss how we come to recognise something more than simply a coincident vocabulary in linking financial and health crises. In the second of his lectures in his 1977–78 course, Security, territory, population (Foucault 2007), Foucault begins to introduce the differences he is drawing out between discipline and security, what that lecture distinguishes between disciplinary mechanisms and apparatuses of security.

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In order to draw out these differences, Foucault emphasises another difference, a crucial one, between what he terms an individual or series or multiplicity of individuals, and what he calls population. This notion of population, for Foucault, is pivotal, a notion or understanding he needs to explain in some detail, a threshold notion on the horizon of the late eighteenth century, essential for the notion of political economy to emerge, and for the notion of security to find its evental truth, its definitive break with discipline. It is the break between them that we want to focus on. Foucault uses the word ‘caesura’ to define that break. He says: But we will have an absolutely fundamental caesura between a level that is pertinent for the government’s economic-political action, and this is the level of the population, and a different level, which will be that of the series, the multiplicity of individuals, who will not be pertinent, or rather who will only be pertinent to the extent that, properly managed, maintained and encouraged, it will make possible what one wants to obtain at the level that is pertinent. (Foucault 2007, 42)

Foucault immediately emphasises that this caesura is not real in the sense that a series of individuals and population are coincident with respect to actual bodies: “There is not a real distinction between some and others” (42). What, then, is this difference and what is the break or caesura? Here Foucault makes a distinction between what is an objective, a pertinent objective of governmental economic and political agency, and what is an instrument in this agency: “The population is pertinent as the objective, and individuals, the series of individuals, are no longer pertinent as the objective, but simply as the instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the level of population” (42). The caesura marks a fundamental break: “The population as a political subject, as a new collective subject absolutely foreign to the juridical and political thought of earlier centuries is appearing here in its complexity, with its caesuras” (42). We will not recognise the differences between discipline and security without recognising this caesura.

3.1.2 Households This discussion of population and of security is new for Foucault. He had not previously emphasised this break between discipline and security. Discipline emerges in his analyses of the nineteenth century in his 1972–73 lectures, The punitive society (Foucault 2006). In the final lecture of the 28 March, Foucault concludes that lecture series with the following: “Where was I wanting to go? I wanted to analyse a certain system of power: disciplinary power. It seemed to me, in fact, that we live in a society of disciplinary power, that is to say a society equipped with apparatuses whose forms is sequestration, whose purpose is the formation of a labour force, and whose instrument is the acquisition of disciplines and habits” (Foucault 2006, 237). Analyses of disciplinary mechanisms or apparatuses predominate through the next three lectures series, such that the emergence of psychiatry is analysed through the relays of institutions and disciplinary procedures that confine and define individuals: factories, work-houses, school-houses, prisons, asylums, barracks, hospitals, and so

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on, defining in Foucault’s 1974–75 lectures technologies of normalization, in concert with juridical structures of the State. Though the notions of population and security are used between 1972 and 1977, neither term takes on the specialized meaning Foucault gives to it in 1977. Though, that is not to say we cannot recognise how this caesura may be engaged in a retro-active way when re-reading these earlier lectures in light of the latter. Though Foucault suggests in that second lecture of Security, territory, population that he will return in the next lecture to discuss this notion of caesura in more detail, the term itself, this notion of ‘break’, its ontology or truthevent, is never really explored. As pivotal as this break is, in making sense of not just this lecture, but also the subsequent one on biopolitics and neo-liberalism (Foucault 2008), this break goes somewhat unmarked. We want to make some suggestions, in reading back into Foucault’s earlier lectures on disciplinary mechanisms, how potentially to get a stronger sense of what the caesura entails, its peculiar agency, being neither disciplinary nor securitizing in any strict sense.1 Foucault is very interested in the break, but interested in the sense of what happens either side of it, what happens between disciplinary mechanisms and apparatuses of security, between a multiplicity of individuals as instrumental in ordering, and population as object of security.2 What of the break itself? To discuss this, we return to a moment of analysis undertaken by Foucault in Psychiatric power (Foucault 2015). In the lecture of 28 November, to which we have already referred in our previous chapter, Foucault introduces Bentham’s Panopticon and the universalizing administrative ambitions of panopticism with respect to surveillance and discipline: “We live within a generalized panopticism by virtue of the fact that we live within a disciplinary system” (79). Foucault then asks: You will say that this is all very well, but can we really say that disciplinary apparatuses have extended over the whole of society, and that mechanisms, apparatuses and powers of sovereignty have been eliminated by disciplinary mechanisms? (79)

In a provocative understanding of the exercise of familial power, or the family as a technology of power operating in relation to, though distinct from, disciplinary mechanisms, Foucault suggests that the family retains vestiges of a traditional understanding of sovereign power: “It seems to me that the family is a sort of cell within which the power exercised is not, as one usually says, disciplinary, but rather of the same type as the power of sovereignty” (79). This makes the family a complex agency within disciplinary mechanisms. Foucault suggests it is the “hinge, the interlocking point” necessary for the functioning of the disciplinary system (81). The 1 Of

course, the work of Agamben immediately comes to mind when mentioning the notion of caesura, associated so much with the philosophical writings of Walter Benjamin and, in turn, Agamben’s distinct leaning to Benjamin’s understanding of ‘break’ when discussion ‘exception’ or the state of exception. He first engages with Benjamin’s understanding of caesura as counterrhythmic rupture—a notion Benjamin reads from Hölderlin in relation to the tragic—in a short essay in his Idea of prose (1995). Though, Benjamin extends this notion to a messianic ‘now-time’, as break in homogeneous and empty time, while Agamben extends the notion to his understanding of law itself, in relation to sovereignty and its suspension. See also McLoughlin (2009). 2 We discuss Foucault’s lectures from Security, territory, population in some detail in Chapter Five of Securing urbanism. We especially focus on the transitioning from discipline to security.

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family “functions” as the “switch point” between different disciplinary institutions. School, prison, the work house, the hospital, the military intervene at the limits to family sovereign power. They “pin individuals” to disciplinary mechanisms. In this analysis, we are not suggesting that the family, so understood by Foucault, as a functioning relay between institutional sites of disciplinary procedures, now simply constitutes the functioning caesura between discipline and security. The problem is more complex than that. Foucault will go on to say that the family, during the nineteenth century, moves somewhere between the sovereignty of its ‘cell’ and its overtaking by discipline, that sovereignty and discipline, in the figure of the family, constitute a break or caesura that is not ‘really’ a break, as the same individuated bodies are implicated whether recouped or inscribed by discipline, or within familial sovereignty. We suggest that the family does not disappear in the emergence of Foucault’s understanding of population and security. Rather, those analyses Foucault extended to the family when discussing panopticism and discipline may be further extended to security and population. Where discipline individuated and excised, ordering family structures, security aggregates households in terms of population. The family unit, the household, at once the target for social medicine’s disciplinary individuating, becomes as well the figure for a State political economy. In this sense, an ontology of the caesura, its agency, what constitutes the ‘substance’ of the break itself, is within the locus of the family inasmuch as it composes and maintains the three coterminous relations of power emphasised by Foucault in Security, territory, population: sovereign power, discipline and security. The household continues to maintain this ambiguous index into the twentieth century, at once the statistical unit for political economy, and the basic structure of urban habitability. It is our contention, in understanding the events that precipitated the subprime crisis in American financial institutions in 2007, that led to the global financial crisis of 2008, that we need to look to just what is meant by Foucault when he suggests a caesura or break between discipline and security, between population as a technology of political-economic power and population thought of as an aggregate of individuated bodies. To understand how U.S. housing policy for low-income households led to a thirty-seven trillion-dollar global financial crisis, we need to recognise an ontology of that caesura, that exceptional event of households and their financing, which neither an epistemology of derivatives at the time, nor an epistemology of regulative functioning of the economy was able to see. This chapter aims to document an overview of both the regulatory mechanisms and governmental strategies for housing the poor in the U.S. during the twentieth century, as well as present an overview of the development of a series of financial instruments and regulatory changes in banking laws. While the chapter documents a slow convergence of these two, it does not delve into an ontology of what we are calling, after Foucault, that caesura between discipline and security, whose locus, we suggest, resides in the household. We, in fact, return precisely to this in the concluding chapter of this book, where we look more closely at an ontology of financial securitization. The economic philosopher, Elie Ayache (2010, 2011, 2015), provides a simple name for this ‘blank’ space, this break between the freedom of unimpeded circulation in security and the regimes of individuated control in discipline. He gives the name

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‘price’ to this caesura. For Ayache, pricing is pure contingency, while yet an event of individuating control.

3.1.3 Securitizing Health Between 2008 and 2011, a number of economists produced working papers or journal articles delving into the causes of the failure of the Wall Street banks, and the subsequent global financial crisis (GFC) that especially engaged the notion of contagion in discussing the systemic nature of the crisis (for example, Dodd and Mills 2008; Gai and Kapadia 2010; Haldane and May 2011; Johnson 2011; Lux 2011).3 There are also a number of theorists who question, perhaps more thoroughly, systemic relations between health, health policies and financial systems (Peckham 2013; King 2002). These do not present an exhaustive list of causal commentators on the GFC or theorists of health and finance. However, they do present a fair account of the critical field. Our aim is to briefly discuss both discursive frames prior to engaging more closely with the twentieth-century history of U.S. housing policy for the poor, and the financial crisis in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 2008, an advisor and a senior economist for the International Monetary Fund co-authored a short explanatory article on some of the causes of the then unfolding GCF (Dodd and Mills 2008). In an article titled “Outbreak: U.S. subprime contagion,” the authors maintain an analogy of infection and its transmission when discussing the U.S. mortgage market as originator of financial problem that spread globally: Like an epidemic in which an invisible virus infects many people and communities, the financial crisis spread when losses to intermediaries in one non-transparent market raised concerns about liquidity and solvency elsewhere. Just as diseases are passed on by close human contact, pests, and contaminated food, so this financial crisis has been transmitted through connected markets and institutions while leaving others largely untouched. (14)

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are two major book publications that also define financial crises in terms of the notion of contagion: Claessens and Forbes (2001) and Sell (2001). Both books precede the subprime housing mortgage crisis of 2007, and hence their reference point is especially the Asian financial crisis of the later 1990s. As we will see in discussion to follow, this crisis was termed the ‘Asian Flu’. We also note that a review of both books commences: “Emerging market economy financial crisis in recent years have often quickly spread to other countries” (Chui and Taylor, 2002, 566). It is the coincident adopting of the notion of ‘emergence’ for international markets and for overseas diseases during the 1980s that led to this hybrid reading of health and finance. See also Glick (2002) for a review of Claessens and Forbes (2001). Claessens published a 2017 paper for the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, “Global banking: Recent developments and insights from research.” The paper goes into considerable detail in discussing the 2008 GFC and its subsequent effects. There is no use at all of a vocabulary from epidemiology. Though, in terms of prognoses of where global banking regulation is heading, Claessens emphasises a “trilemma” that proves intractable: maintaining global financial stability requiring something like a universalist approach; fostering cross-border financial integration that recognizes territorial authority along with global regulatory measures; and preserving national resolution authority (Claessens, 2017, 1542). This comes down to the impossible resolution of universalism and territoriality.

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They identify the “virus” as the subprime home loan, a lending framework that was designed for low income, or no-income families, whose lending interest rates were higher than standard loans that were not available to the urban poor. In fact, it was not the subprime loan per se that was the virus but the complex process by which the risk attached to this loan was packaged as an asset-backed security, something that investors could buy, hedging against future movements of the market. This assetbacked security itself had risk that could also be packaged and on-sold to investors. This process of derivatives trading became the ‘virus’. Its transmission was in the form of the profitability that seemed endless with the packaging of these financial securities. Hence, the financial risk of subprime mortgages, ordinary household loans, spread throughout the global banking world, as investment was made on the packaging and re-packaging of securities. The crisis happened to the Wall Street banks when U.S. housing prices fell, leading to the inability for individual households to refinance, based on increased asset-value, or on-sell. The multiplication of investments in the risk associated with these mortgages, along with insurance companies who insured against losses, resulted in a cascading chain of banking failures, in a systemic complex that no economic analyst genuinely understood. Dodd and Mills conclude, under a heading “A stubborn strain,” with the question: “What have we learnt from this contagion?” (18). They seem to genuinely downplay what was genuinely there to learn, except to suggest concerning those approaches to the problem that focused on individual banks rather than looking more broadly at systemic risk: “As a result, individually rational actions to ensure survival have resulted in collectively irrational outcomes” (18). A 2010 Working Paper for the Bank of England, titled “Contagion in financial networks,” aimed at developing the mathematical modelling of what the authors term “contagion in financial networks with arbitrary structure” (Gai and Kapadia 2010, 1). As with Dodd and Mills, the use of the term ‘contagion’ references, somewhat analogically, the modes of transmissibility of distress between financial institutions: This paper models two key channels of contagion in financial systems. The primary focus is on how losses may potentially spread via the complex network of direct counterparty exposure following an initial default. … and we also model the potential for this effect to trigger further rounds of default. Contagion due to the direct linkages of interbank claims and obligations may thus be reinforced by indirect contagions on the asset side of the balance sheet – particularly when the market for key financial system assets is illiquid. (3)

What we see emphasised by both Dodd/Mills and Gai/Kapadia is that early diagnoses of the market and its stresses focused on the performance of individual institutions rather than the entire financial system, that over a relatively short timeframe had become highly complex and global. We may even suggest, in Foucauldian terms, that the emergence of asset-backed securities markets, essentially a financializing global shadow banking to the existing banking industry, was approached in its agency in terms of disciplinary mechanisms that segment and contain individual cases of banking failure. What was not recognised was the global securitization precisely of the financial securities market. This is more strongly emphasised in a collaborative paper on the banking crisis, co-authored by a senior banking advisor at the Bank of England, Andrew Haldane, and Robert May, an ecology scientist, who was formerly

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Chief Scientific Advisor to the U.K. government. Their paper appeared not in an economics journal but in the prestigious journal, Nature (Haldane and May 2011). In a paper titled “Systemic risk in banking ecosystems,” the authors note: “Drawing analogies with the dynamics of ecological food webs and with networks within which infectious diseases spread, we explore the interplay between complexity and stability in deliberately simplified models of financial networks” (351). Commencing with a 1960s understanding of dynamic imbalances in ecological systems, as self-correcting mechanisms leading to an optimal steady state as complexity of the system increases, and a more contemporary understanding of the incorrect prognoses of this, that in fact increased complexity leads to greater instability, the authors suggest that the GFC has led to the necessity to understand better the global banking ecosystem at a systemic level, in its complexity and instability, “as distinct from focusing on individual banks” (351). The authors, each expert in his field, recognise the differences between ecosystems and financial systems. Hence the analogical framing takes their argument only so far. This is emphasised in their concluding, and rather unsurprising comment: “It took a generation for ecological models to adapt. The same is likely to be true of banking and finance” (355). Though their analysis does reflect a new emphasis in banking discourse, concerning eco-systemic approaches to the complexity and interlocking nature of global derivatives financial products. Two brief replies to Haldane and May were published in Nature, in the same issue. Neil Johnson, a physicist, whose research deals in analytical modelling of real-world events, is cautious, if not sceptical about the kinds of analogical modelling he sees in figuring financial behaviours in terms of food networks or the spread of viral infection: “The financial model borrowed by Haldane and May is an interesting abstract, complex-systems toy model. However, even the model’s creators emphasized that … their focus was on ‘theoretical concepts’ whose ‘relevance for real markets requires quantitative estimates of parameters’” (302). The other reply is by an economist, Thomas Lux, who takes the ‘toy’ modelling more seriously, emphasising the necessity to develop more robust network theory with respect to the global banking sector. Referring to the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers as a “super-spreader disease,” he notes that extant studies that focus on the interbank market have “identified network structures that are vulnerable to shocks” (303). He also notes the necessity to go beyond analogies and simple mechanical models, “to examine the behavioural micro-foundations of how the agents involved choose their connections in this financial ecosystem” (303). We now turn to two approaches to more foundational understandings, not so much of micro-behavioural agents, but of systemic foundational practices that converge around health and finance.

3.1.4 Commercializing Disease In “Security, disease, commerce,” King (2002) commences with a prognosis made by the U.S. National Intelligence Council on the HIV/AIDS virus in Sub-Saharan

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Africa, suggesting that it, along with other infectious diseases, defined a “nontraditional threat” that would “complicate US and global security over the next 20 years” (King 2002, 763). That threat extended to global interests held by the United States. This intelligence estimate prompted the Clinton administration, in 2000, to designate HIV/AIDS a threat to American national security. King does two things with his analysis. Initially, he defines a long colonial history of the control of disease. As we have emphasised with accounts by Foucault and Delaporte on the developments of social medicine, colonialism and the globalization of social medicine went in tandem, primarily for the securing of European interests in colonial territories and to ensure the supply of productive labour. Though, as King notes: “The medical modernization of native populations, via export of Western medical theories and practices, was part of the ‘ideology of colonial healing’, that justified colonialism as an ultimately humanitarian endeavour” (765). However, what King aims to demonstrate is a paradigm shift in global thinking around disease that happened in the late twentieth century, a shift, whose political and economic consequences, upscale the inequities and exploitations that we recognise in a colonial history of disease. The key notion that signals the paradigm shift is the term ‘emergent’ when applied to disease. The notion of an “emerging diseases worldview” (767) came out of a conference in the U.S., with the world’s leading researchers in public health and microbiology. Its report, Emerging infections: Microbial threats to health in the United States, emphasised that “Americans were no longer insulated from the diseases that they assumed had been relegated to the developing world,” and that, globally, rates of infectious disease were rising (767). As mentioned above, this supposed health threat was linked to American economic and security interests globally. The American Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM) authored a paper in 1997, America’s vital interest in global health, which said, in part: America has a vital interest and direct stake in the health of people around the globe, and … this interest derives from both America’s long and enduring tradition of humanitarian concern and compelling reason of enlightened self-interest. Our considered involvement can serve to protect our citizens, enhance our economy, and advance US interests abroad … America must engage in the fight for global health from its strongest base: its pre-eminence in science and technology. (771)

On the basis of this paper by the IOM on American interests, King engages a complex argument for how post-colonial global dominance of American self-interest in security maintains a more sinister and devastating colonizing technology of power. This latter expression is ours rather than King’s. He does not reference Foucault, though the global measures or strategies outlined for American global surveillance of health, along with the sending into the field of trained medical technicians, the instituting of public health measures and the overseeing of training of health practitioners replicated what Foucault notes as the policy directives for social medicine in Europe more than a century earlier (see King 2002, 774). King further quotes from the IOM report of 1997, that clearly spells out the genuine self-interest of America in global health surveillance: “The United States, particularly the corporate sector, has much to offer in this enterprise. To foster such involvement, the US government, along with its counterparts throughout the world, must ensure that the regulatory, legislative, and

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market conditions necessary to attract private investment in telecommunications, information technology, and information services are in place” (IOM, cited in King 2002, 774). What is of particular interest is the positioning of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry as the global marketplace supplier of medical products.4 As we have emphasised with Foucault, linking social medicine and political economy is not something new, and this is not the genuine innovation suggested by King. Rather it is the notion of ‘emergence’, applied to the surveillance of global disease, not the treatment of disease already established, but the elimination of the threat of disease itself, its pre-emption and securing. And it is the emphasis given to this notion of emergence that becomes the fundamental link to understanding relations between health and finance. In discussing this linkage, we reference Robert Peckham’s “Economies of contagion: Financial crisis and pandemic” (Peckham 2013). Peckham’s question goes something like: When and why did discussion of financial crises adopt the vocabulary of epidemiology? Peckham emphasises that adoption of the language of epidemiology frames how we come to understand financial systems, resulting in policy directions. They are not simply innocent metaphors. The key connector, for Peckham is the term ‘emerging’. His paper has three foci: “the development of financial theories of contagion in relation to ‘emerging markets’; the evolution of theories of ‘emerging disease’; and the formulation of ‘ecological’ 4 See

also Bengtsson, Borg, and Rhinard (2019) for an analysis of European measures of health surveillance in cross-border contexts. Concerning the securitization of health concerns within the European Union, the authors note: “… this article examines how a ‘health security assemblage’ rooted in EU governance has emerged, expanded, and stabilized. At the heart of this assemblage lies a particular knowledge regime, known as epidemic intelligence (EI): a vigilance-oriented approach of early detection and containment drawing on web-scanning tools and other information sources” (115). See also, with respect to new technologies of health surveillance, Peckham and Sinha (2019). Their research concerns the use of military drone technology in public health measures: “… we draw on a number of case studies to explore how the biomedical drone is contributing to re-spatialization of health and to a process of datafication that is set to fundamentally change the nature and scope of health governance” (1204). A third avenue of analysis on global health surveillance is the increased attention being paid by the World Bank to psycho-social wellbeing and mental health. Pupavac (2005) analyses the increasing significance being given to social psychology theories in the World Bank’s investment strategies that have led to the abandonment of global models of industrialization for developing nations, along with the impetus of these models to increased urbanization, to now foster rural subsistence development models, re-evaluating in the process the notion of employment as indicator of sustaining development: “Capital-intensive industrial production was criticized for creating unemployment and as being more exploitative than the older pre-industrial forms … the ILO proposed an investment shift ‘from physical to human capital, from urban to rural development, from capital-intensive to labour-intensive activities, and from the production of non-essential consumer goods to essential ones’” (171). Echoing the concerns raised by both King and Peckham, Sengupta et al. (2018) further analyse the global governance of health, especially emphasizing the increasing financialization of the global economy, which translates to the turning of global health investment into asset-back securitization, such that speculative investment in the form of derivatives opens to shadow banking. The commodification of risks to health, in the form of insurance itself becomes a security to be traded. In resonance with Foucault’s analyses of Becker’s neo-liberalism, discussed in the last chapter, the authors note: “Today, sustained propaganda by the votaries of neoliberalism seek to promote a vision of the human body and of health which is rooted in the principal that all human activities can be converted into market-based contractual relations of a commercial nature” (104).

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approaches to financial systems during the 2007-8 financial crisis and its aftermath” (228). In something of a parallel to King (2002), who he references, Peckham notes that in 1981 the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group dropped the term “Third World” when defining ‘developing’ nations in which it invested. It adopted the term “emerging markets” that denoted a transitioning phase “between developing and developed economic status” (230). Emerging markets, from an investment risk viewpoint, are expected to yield greater profit though have inherent instabilities that are political and judicial. Peckham emphasises that it is in the 1990s that the link is made between finance and disease with the coincident term ‘contagion’. This is linked to the Asian financial crisis, dubbed the ‘Asian Flu’ in the media (230). Financial contagion was linked to the discourse of emerging markets, with their greater risk and cross-border financial relations (230). Crucially, in referencing King (2002), Peckham’s argument follows the convergence in the United States of a discourse of American vital interest in global health surveillance with respect to emerging diseases, and American selfinterest in regulating globally the contagions effected by emerging markets (233). As Peckham emphasises: “The ‘emerging disease’ worldview overlapped in significant ways with the economic discourse of ‘emerging markets’. While disease was equated with economic underdevelopment, inadequate healthcare and the potential diffusion of pandemic infections, these provided a rationale for ‘Western’ intervention to tackle the threat ‘at source’ (234). Citing an IOM report from 2002 that called for an “international public health bank,” Peckham comments: “In the passage above, financial discourse is incorporated into the heart of public health, while the integration of public health into a global economy has not superseded a territorial, boundary-oriented and ‘contagion’-centred epidemiology, but rather reaffirmed it” (235). Hence, the crisis with such prognoses are two-fold. On the one hand, there is precise repetition of boundary-focus on contagion, disciplinary mechanisms rather than security, what was earlier noted as the lack of understanding of systemic or interbanking network relations. The second is the capacity to return economic theory to a theory of natural causes, to natural or biological laws, while simultaneously, turning biology into a ‘manufactured risk’ that constitutes the biopolitical as a technology of power (235–236).

3.1.5 Technologies of Security As we will see in what follows concerning the development of policy and financial assistance in American welfare housing during the twentieth century, we recognise the increasing interlocking of issues concerning public health, public housing and economic recovery. This chapter explores the manner whereby housing, particularly welfare housing since the late nineteenth century, has become, in Foucault’s terms, a technology of security that essentially concerns the management of risk (Massey 2012). By exploring shifting governmental responses to uncertainty and risk, this chapter gives insight into a range of twentieth-century crises in the governmentality of

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habitation that utilized divergent strategies, both welfare-driven and market-driven, for housing the poor. Our aim is to trace through to the present, from post Great Depression legislation in the United States, the extent to which U.S. governmental policies on welfare housing, its financing and accessibility, were crucial for determining macro-structural forces in urban development. We emphasise the extent to which neo-liberal policies on housing the poor coincided with the liberalisation of the banking system in the United States, and were, in part, instrumental for both the 2007–2008 Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis, and the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis. Undertaking a genealogical approach, this chapter explores the shift from Statecentric approaches to social housing in the U.S., that had become predominant especially after World War Two, to new strategies for housing the poor, that occurred with the move from Keynesian economics to neo-liberalism.5 These offer two distinctly different approaches to the problem of uncertainty and risk. The former takes an interventionist approach that collectively governs through techniques of social insurance, such as health, income guarantee and housing. Neo-liberal approaches sought to individualise these risks with an acceptance of, or belief in, the efficiency of the market, actively encouraging via a series of incentive or disincentive strategies to switch from State services to private enterprises. Private enterprise concerns with individual freedom and self-responsibility aim to minimise what is termed ‘moral hazard’, such that individuals can set their own level of risk.6 5 See

Crouch (2009) for a detailed account of this transition that happened especially during the 1970s. Crouch provides a highly explanatory account of the development of Keynesian economic policy in relation to a Fordist production model in the two decades following the Second World War. He especially focuses on the economic differences operating between primarily European countries (Germany, France, Italy) but also Japan, and the U.S. and U.K. Significantly, Crouch is reluctant to simply oppose Keynesianism to neo-liberalism. Rather, he sees that key aspects of Keynesian policy have been retained, though in a manner whereby welfare is no longer State-funded but individuallyfunded: “Instead of governments taking on debt to stimulate the economy, individuals did so. In addition to the housing market there was an extraordinary growth in opportunities for bank loans and credit cards” (390) Crouch emphasises the coincidence of two innovations in especially the U.S. economy. One was the rapid expansion of credit facility to low-income groups, thereby maintaining the buoyancy of consumer spending and escalating household debt. The second was the invention of derivatives as asset-backed securities, a new financial product that made the wealthy extremely wealthy, at the cost of those who were already indebted by over-exposure to credit (390). 6 Moral Hazard is the concept that risky behaviour can actually be caused by insurance. As insurance mitigates the problem of the occurrence of risk or its negative impacts, the insured may engage in further risky behaviour. This further increases the probability of negative-occurrence in turn leading to knock-on effects whereby individual risky behaviour can cause increased cost to society (Rutherford 1992, 273). See Baker (1996) for a genealogy of the term, which has both a technical insurance meaning and a larger cultural meaning, the former originating in nineteenth-century fire insurance, itself based on earlier marine insurance and the growth of probability theory (240). The latter, Baker suggests, frequently appears in op-ed articles in American news media, which take social welfare (as State funded insurance) as a form of moral hazard. Baker suggests these ‘truisms’ led to a counterfactual position where the general argument is that less welfare leads to less poverty (238). This very argument, basically a Utilitarian one deriving from Bentham, dictated the driving impetus for the reform of the Poor Law in Britain in 1834. See Clark and Page (2019): “The English Old Poor Law, which before 1834 provided welfare to the elderly, children, the improvident, and the unfortunate, was a bête noire of the new discipline of Political Economy. Smith, Bentham, Malthus,

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These changing governmental rationalities opened those affected to new uncertainties and new risks. Deregulation of the banking system, coupled with governmental policy that aimed to encourage home ownership, created the ‘sub-prime’ market, essentially a form of higher-risk mortgage lending. The invention of nonvanilla derivatives, such as ‘collateralised debt obligations’ (CDOs), allowed higherrisk activities that were vulnerable to economic change.7 We conclude this chapter with a brief discussion on two points that engage the predominantly Foucauldian perspective of the book: firstly, how governmental rationalities of risk and uncertainty effect and affect the built environment, such that risk and uncertainty are spatializing forces. Secondly, and in taking up concerns of the post-political and post-democratic we more associate with Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, how the question of right and its exercise is to be understood in those provisions that were established for minority groups to access housing finance in the lead-up to the failure of the U.S. banking system.

3.2 Welfare Housing 3.2.1 Urban Determinants of the Global Financial Crisis On the 9th August 2007, The New York Times reported that France’s largest bank, BNP Paribas, suspended three of its hedge funds that had exposure to U.S. subprime housing lending markets. This was due to the concern BNP Paribas had with defining accurate calculations of these assets, caused by problems in the subprime market, noting that “complete evaporation of liquidity” within parts of the U.S. securitisation market made it impossible to accurately value certain assets, regardless of nominated value or credit rating.8 It further noted that several large U.S. companies had made and Ricardo all claimed it created significant social costs and increased rather than reduced poverty. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, drafted by Political Economists, cut payments sharply” (221). The authors, after detailed analysis of the measures undertaken in the reform, note that none of the supposed social costs could be verified, making the harsh treatment dealt to the poor more a matter of instituting measures of control with respect to labour and production. 7 Derivatives are complex financial instruments such as options or futures, which derive value from other financial assets. These are traded on Futures Markets where traders ‘hedge’ against future movements in shares or commodities, as a way to minimise uncertainty of future prices such as options, which give the trader the option of setting an agreed price that “matures” in the future, even if the actual price drops in doing so, thereby minimising risk (see Pass et al. 2005). Vanilla derivatives or Credit Default Swaps (CDS) typically swap credit risk associated with an entity that may be either corporate or sovereign, which is to say, from one party to another. Exotic derivatives are more complex, moving between different entities and dividable into different levels of risk. These “tranche” groups extend from an AAA rating to the lowest, which is unrated. We will explore the impact this had on the subprime market later in the chapter (see O’Kane et al. 2003). 8 Liquidity refers to the characteristic of assets such that they can be exchanged with little change in value, in price, or with minimum loss of value. Money is typically the most liquid of assets, whereas housing has low liquidity as it is not easily convertible into another asset. For an asset to be liquid,

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losses due to exposure to subprime loans, explaining that subprime mortgages were the riskiest types of property loans, often extended to people with payment difficulties or bad credit histories. This relatively short and somewhat innocuous article, recording the suspension of trading of a number of hedge funds, marked the start of what would become the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. What marks the actions taken by BNP Paribas as significant is the signal they immediately sent concerning a localised or contained problem in U.S. subprime markets, escalating to a global crisis.9 ‘Contagion’ rapidly spread this ‘problem’ to overseas capital markets (OECD 2012).10 Barely six weeks after the suspension by BNP Paribas, on 14 September 2007, the British bank, Northern Rock, experienced the first bank run in the U.K. since 1866, with long queues of depositors forming to withdraw their savings from the troubled bank (Shin 2009, 101). While not directly caused by subprime lending, Northern Rock was heavily reliant on non-retail funding, making heavy use of short-term borrowing, effectively the same funding pool as that for subprime lending (102). Furthermore, the bank was highly leveraged, making Northern Rock especially vulnerable to changes in funding conditions (113). Such was the concern of the potential failure of Northern Rock that the British government intervened later that day, with a government bailout guaranteeing all deposits. However, this was not sufficient to guarantee the stability of the bank, ultimately leading to the bank’s nationalisation by the British government a year later, on 22nd September 2008.11 Similarly, Iceland, which had liberalised its banking system, was

it must be able to be exchanged. Securities are liquid so long as they can be traded in an organized market (Rutherford 1992, 239). 9 The United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (USPSI) concluded in its 2011 report into the Global Financial Crisis that while there are potentially a number of candidates for the cause of the crisis, the “most immediate trigger” was the decision by credit rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor (S&P) to downgrade “…hundreds of RMBS and CDO securities …” In doing so, the USPSI believed that these credit agencies acknowledged these high-risk and poorquality mortgages were investments that had the potential to make losses, leading to the collapse of the value of these types of securities (2011, 45–46). While not disagreeing with USPSI’s conclusion, we point to BNP Paribas’ action as the point where the subprime “contagion” became a global crisis. 10 We have earlier discussed Peckham’s analysis of the usage of the word “contagion” during the Global Financial Crisis and how it is used analogously to disease. By this, Peckham is not suggesting a simple correlation between pandemics and financial crises. Rather, the analogy suggests a similitude in understanding ‘risk’ in financial and market analysis, since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (2013, 227). Peckham sees this analogy as problematic, leading to potentially false impressions or expectations for the wider public as to how markets and risk operate (243). In this regard, we may consider Dider Gille’s developed relations between the emergence of urban hygiene as a key concern of the nineteenth century, along with the emergence of capitalism, in terms of both having crucial concerns with flows, the flows of waste, and the blockages and free regulation of capital (Gilles 1986). This would lead us to a Foucauldian concern precisely with disciplinary mechanisms and apparatuses of security in the governmentality of flows with respect to contagion, and the risks associated with its avoidance or occurrence. 11 Cf. Banking (Special Provisions) Act (2008) which paved the way for the nationalisation of several U.K. banks.

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equally vulnerable to ‘contagion’ from external markets.12 Iceland became the first developed country to request assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in thirty years, after three of its main banks collapsed in the same week in October 2008, leading to the collapse of its economy (Danielsson 2009, 9). Throughout 2008, markets struggled with collapse of major financial institutions, forced mergers, or bailouts, such as Bank of America, Bear Stearns, IndyMac Bank, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, among others. In their report into the financial crisis by the United States Senate, the USPSI (2011) noted that within a twoweek period in September 2008, half-a-dozen significant U.S. financial institutions failed, leading to them being either forcibly sold or bailed out by the U.S. government, to prevent a collapse of the U.S. economy (USPSI 2011, 45-47; Longstaff 2010, 436). On the 3rd September 2008, the U.S. government introduced the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that was legislated by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which aimed to prevent further collapse and damage to the U.S. economy with $700 billion being allocated to guarantee the assets of banks, or allow for capital investment or purchase (USPSI 2011, 43–44). TARP was not solely aimed at financial institutions, with several large American manufacturing companies, namely General Motors and Chrysler, receiving money to maintain their solvency (44). ‘Contagion’ started to adversely affect a number of European States by the middle of 2008, sending their economies into recession. This worsened in late 2008, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers into early 2009, by which point the crisis was affecting most global economies. In Europe, for 2008–2009, there was little concern with sovereign debt, but with how best to ‘wade out’ of the global recession (Lane 2012, 55). This changed late in 2009. Concern with recession shifted to a focus on sovereign debt crisis, whereby nation-states were no longer capable of servicing their debt, either by repayment or re-financing. For a variety of reasons that would take too much space to define in their complexity, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain all had economies on the verge of collapse (Lane 2012, 55–56).13 The defaulting economies were given bailouts by the EU and IMF, though these contained a series of 12 In April 2007, prior to the crisis, the OECD released an economic working paper on the financial markets in Iceland. The paper was generally optimistic about Iceland’s banking liberalisation, regarding it as largely beneficial and successful. It noted that there were concerns raised regarding Iceland’s banking stability, though the overall assessment given was positive: “the system is broadly sound” (Tulip 2007, 2). The paper noted that three large financial institutions in 2006, Fitch Ratings, Merrill Lynch, and Danske Bank, had raised concerns about the high level of debt and exposure in Iceland’s banking system (14). This was mitigated by the Icelandic government’s willingness to guarantee its banking system, to the point where the paper questioned whether “… the positions of some financial institutions are too secure …” (15). This paradoxically led to banks engaging in excessive risk-taking practices, in turn causing exposure to the Icelandic public if there was failure (15). The paper warned that banks “considered ‘too big to fail’ … may soon become ‘too big for the government of Iceland to rescue’” (16). This risk would be realised in 2008. 13 The economies of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain were referred to by the acronym PIGS (or PIIGS) economies during the crisis; however there have been efforts within the financial industry to discourage the use of the term. The use of the acronym predates the crisis, and originally referred to the Eurozone’s southern economies, and not Ireland. Roberto Dainotto suggests that it originated during the mid-1990s when the southern economies joined the Schengen Treaty that

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conditions that included structural reforms and fiscal austerity aimed at encouraging growth (57). These measures, in turn, affected employment levels, bringing on higher unemployment or under-employment, destabilised ruling governments, and led to large protest movements. Throughout the crisis, there had been anti-banking and anti-austerity protests. Other events, some global, had their origins in anti-capitalist protests as a response to the crisis, such as protest movements associated with G8 meetings or meetings of the IMF or World Bank, but notably the Occupy Movement in 2011 (Stackpole 2011; Juris 2012).14 While not directly connected, the Arab Spring in 2010, originating in Algeria, had its roots in the political and economic dissatisfaction that was, in part, caused by the changing economic climate (Joffé 2011).15 These protest movements have been characterised by the lack of central organisation and the heavy use of social media (Bennett and Segerberg 2011; Joffé 2011; Juris 2012).

3.2.2 Architectural Agency: The Crisis of Modern Architecture To understand the causes of this global financial crisis and its repercussions for architecture and urban theory, we must turn to analyses of three key issues in the 1970s: firstly, a shift from Keynesian economics to neo-liberal economic policies; secondly, governmental management of and perceived effects and efficiencies of social housing; and thirdly, the perceived failures of modern architecture. We might say that the latter two of these issues were broached by the architectural historian, Charles Jencks, whose famous and decidedly precise declaration ironically suggests: “Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme… [was] given the final coup de grâce by dynamite” (Jencks 1984, 9). The Pruitt-Igoe housing scheme, authorised by the St. Louis Housing Authority, commissioned the architectural practice of Leinweber, Yamasaki and Hellmuth in 1950 (Bristol 1991, 164).16 As Jencks tells us in his book, The language of post-modern architecture (Jencks 1984), in 1951 the American Institute of Architects honoured the housing project with an award for design.17 removed border checks and passport requirements for member States (Dainotto 2007, 2). Lane suggests that this is partly due to inherent structural weaknesses of the Euro and Eurozone member States to weather negative macroeconomic changes (Lane 2012, 49). 14 As Stackpole (2011) notes in writing on the Occupy Wall Street movement, it seems to have been ‘invented’ by the Canadian-based radical consumer group, AdBusters, some two months before the event actually happened in New York. 15 Both Adbusters (2011) and Juris (2012) note the Arab Spring, in particular Tahrir Square, was a direct influence on the Occupy Movement. 16 Minoru Yamasaki also designed the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers, which were destroyed on September 11, 2001 in a terrorist attack. 17 As Bristol points out, Jencks’s belief that Pruitt-Igoe was an award-winning design was, in fact, incorrect (see Bristol, 1991, 168). The language of post-modern architecture was first published in

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By the early 1970s, the scheme had become ‘blighted’ by vandalism and high crime rates to the extent that it was considered more efficient to remove the buildings by demolition than repair them. While the scheme was not honoured with an award by the Institute of Architects, it was honoured and highly commended in a 1951 issue of the important American architecture journal, Architectural Forum, for its modernist, rational and functionalist response to housing needs, reflecting the principles exemplified by The Congresses of International Modern Architects (CIAM).18 Its demolition was also a rationalist and functionalist and, in many respects, a modernist response. In fact, Jencks attributes this decision to the rationalist ideals held by modern architecture and urban planning, in particular those of CIAM. For Jencks, the failure of modern architecture stems from its rejection of traditional built forms and the supplanting of more “rational” forms, often at variance to familiar and recognizable “architectural codes” of inhabitants (8).19 He argues that such codes have a didactic value whereby: “Good form was to lead to good content, or at least good conduct; the intelligent planning of abstract space was to promote healthy behaviour” (Jencks 1984, 9). Jencks has no qualms in describing his critique of modern architecture as a caricature or polemic, to advance his reading for an alternative architecture, namely post-modernism (Jencks 1984. See also Hays 1998, 308).20 However, in doing so, Jencks largely skirts over the causes of Pruitt-Igoe’s failures. The idea that Pruitt-Igoe represented the death of modern architecture has become broadly recognised as part of the discourse of late twentieth-century architectural history, associated with the failure of Modernism, as well as, more locally, the scheme’s insufficiency as an approach to liveable social housing for the poor. Katherine Bristol, in her essay “The Pruitt-Igoe myth” (1991), explores this predominant reading of the Pruitt-Igoe scheme, whereby the architectural approach or design philosophy was seen to be a contributing factor to the failure of the scheme. She suggests that this particular reading originated soon after the demolition of PruittIgoe, starting in 1972, when it had been widely covered by both architectural journals and the wider press (Bristol 1991, 167). In contrast to earlier criticisms of the scheme, which had focused on particular design features rather than the project’s design 1977, and went through eight editions, with the last in 2002 being substantially rewritten, with two additional chapters. See Haddad (2009) for a detailed account of the developments made by Jencks during this period. 18 CIAM is the acronym for the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne, an important European architectural group founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959. Its key instigators were the SwissFrench architect, Le Corbusier, and the architectural theorist and historian, Sigfried Giedion. As the official languages were French and German, the organization was Eurocentric in its orientations to modern architecture. In fact, Le Corbusier abandoned CIAM in 1955 on the pretext that too much English was being used. See Vossoughian (2006), for a detailed analysis of the congress meetings of CIAM during the early 1930s. 19 Jencks only makes mention of one key reference in his analysis of Pruitt-Igoe, namely Oscar Newman’s 1972 book, Defensible space (Jencks 1984, 8). 20 Jencks recognises that his reading is a caricature of modern architecture. He is not aiming to develop a more finely grained reading of generally recognized failures of rationalist architectural frameworks, particularly instrumentalist technological approaches. Nor does he address how such failures open a critique of predominant ideologies and practices that define modern architecture.

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philosophy, the critique that emerged at the time of demolition largely focused on architectural style as cause of failure (166–167). This popular reading was advanced in Oscar Newman’s 1972 book, Defensible space, which used Pruitt-Igoe as a case study for his analysis of the build environment, and its effects on human behaviour (see Bristol 1991, 167; Newman 1972, 1995, 1996; Reynald and Elffers 2009; Donnelly 2010). Newman’s design criticism attacked design principles in their adherence to Modernism (1995, 150; 1996, 9–10). He also drew out particular design flaws of the project, identifying Pruitt-Igoe’s multi-story construction, long corridors, lobbies, and entry and egress points as weaknesses, and cause of high levels of vandalism (Bristol 1991, 167; Newman 1996, 11). What is interesting about Newman’s analysis is that he, in fact, recognises that multistory construction can be successful, even giving the example of middle-income housing, recognising that economic forces rather than an exclusive concern with design features are significant to a project’s success (Newman 1996, 12–13). His focus is on building services and service personnel: “doormen, porters, elevator operators, and resident superintendents” (12), rather than design features, recognising that such services were impossible to afford or sustain with public housing that struggled to fund even full-time maintenance (13). Newman does not ostensibly recognise that it is precisely these service-personnel who maintain and secure the housing scheme, providing a secondary function of surveillance for the building (12). In addition, Bristol suggests that Newman’s environmental behaviourism largely overlooked the economic realities that had affected the communities living in St. Louis and, in particular, at Pruitt-Igoe (Bristol 1991, 167).21 By the time Jencks wrote The language of post-modern architecture, there was already a large body of literature that reinforced the view that the Pruitt-Igoe scheme had failed due to its adoption of and the subsequent failure of Modernist design principles, with much of this literature overlooking the changing economic climate (167).22 Part of the appeal of Pruitt-Igoe, Bristol suggests, is that it provides an 21 In a 1996 republishing of Newman’s Defensible space, under the title, Creating defensible space, there is a brief “Foreword” written by Michael Stegman, the Assistant Secretary for Policy and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In it he signals how Newman’s understanding of ‘defense’ is to be thought: “The appearance of Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space in 1972 signals the establishment of a new criminological subdiscipline that has come to be called by many ‘Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design’ or CPTED” (Newman 1996, iii). Newman’s design understanding has helped “citizens reclaim their urban neighbourhoods” (iii). At the time of writing Defensible space, Foucault was delivering his lectures on the Punitive society (Foucault 2015), which would be a direct correlate to Newman’s understanding of defense, with respect to those disciplinary mechanisms developed from the early nineteenth century, in order to control and normalize the laboring poor. More poignantly, we might contrast Newman’s understanding of defense, with its implication of civil war between the classes, with Foucault’s 1974–75 lectures, Society must be defended (Foucault 2003b), almost a critical and political response to Newman’s criminology of environmental design. 22 Jencks was a British architectural historian and theorist who, at the end of the 1960s, introduced the then emerging field of semiotics (or semiology) to an understanding—or ‘reading’—of architecture (see Jencks and Baird 1970). At the same time, the American architect and theorist, Robert Venturi, was engaging in a parallel, though not coincident, ‘reading’ of architecture in terms equally far removed from the form-function canons of CIAM. His Complexity and contradiction in architecture

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expedient example for new architectural movements that were critical of Modernism, namely post-modernism and environmental behaviourism (170).23 In doing so there was a tendency to overplay the role of the architect as the central agent with respect to architecture and public policy. This shifted the perception of problems that actually existed in housing policy, to the domain of the architectural profession (170).

3.2.3 The Interventionist City and Truman’s Fair Deal If we critically consider Pruitt-Igoe from discursive frameworks other than architectural design history, we find that its origins, along with much of American social housing, to be in welfare and Keynesian economics, introduced with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that were, in part, a response to the Great Depression. Crucial to the New Deal policy was the need for adequate housing for low-income families (Pritchett 2008, 268).24 Pruitt-Igoe, like other social housing schemes, was created (1966) and co-authored Learning from Las Vegas (1972) aimed at deposing any notion of ‘good design’ confined to an architectural elitism. With the aphorism from Complexity and contradiction, “main street is almost alright,” and his serious analysis of the Las Vegas strip, Venturi suggested an approach to architecture that seemed politically egalitarian, accessible and, what he termed ‘ugly and ordinary’. 23 Pruitt-Igoe became iconic, an emblem standing in for public housing as the whole. As one of the largest social housing projects constructed in the United States, and one that never achieved more than sixty percent occupancy, it was the celebrated failure of CIAM’s fundamental methodology for equity in social living. This failure was compounded by the narrow focus of critical analysis that predominantly engaged formal concerns rather than the political economy of design. 24 See Massey “Risk and Regulation in the Financial Architecture of American Houses” (2012), for a more comprehensive overview of the history of home ownership and mortgage lending practices in the U.S., from the late nineteenth century to the 2000s. Massey argues that American home ownership has gone through four principle phases since the late 1800s to the present (22). The first period extended from the late 1800s to after the First World War, with home ownership rates being far lower—forty-six percent of Americans owning their own home—with the rest in rented accommodation. This period was marked by limited opportunities for mortgage lending, restricting growth of the housing market (22). The second period, from the end of World War I to the Great Depression, saw the start of State intervention into the housing market, and the development of more modern mortgage lending practices, with “Home and Loan Associations” that lent a higher proportion of the debt (26). This led to growth in the housing market, with a housing boom that peaked in 1925 (35). However, after 1925 there was increase in home loan foreclosures that worsened with the 1929 stock market crash. The home lending market crashed, with dropping property values and lending became more restrictive (26). The liberalization of credit lending practices during this period allowed for higher home ownership rates, but it also meant that, in instances of financial collapse, it exposed borrowers to risks of fluctuating asset prices (36). The third period was a response to the Depression and saw greater government intervention and the establishment of a secondary mortgage market to guarantee loans, in the 1934 National Housing Act, that established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), providing mortgage insurance to housing and lowcost housing projects (36). The FHA established national Mortgage Associations with the aim of guaranteeing loans, and to allow for greater liquidity for mortgage markets by reducing risk to lenders and borrowers. The first Association, set up in 1938, was the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) (36). The last period Massey identifies is from 1970 to the collapse of the

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under the United States Housing Act (1949) that made funds available for city slum clearance, urban redevelopment and social housing (Bristol 1991, 163). This was, in part, a response to two factors that occurred in American housing post-World War Two. Firstly, we witness the rapid growth of suburban housing, especially among middle-class Americans, predominantly European Americans. The viability of suburban living was a result of availability of affordable automobiles and efficient motorways that opened up cheap rural land for redevelopment (Mees 2010, 12). Secondly, as a consequence of the shift to suburban housing, older inner-city stock provided cheap housing for the rapid migration of lower-income African-Americans, moving from rural to urban centres (Pritchett 2008, 270; Bristol 1991, 163). These inner-city suburbs, as with what was to become the Pruitt-Igoe site in St. Louis, deteriorated into slums due to under-investment (Bristol 1991, 164). This, in turn, had flow-on effects onto surrounding neighbourhoods. As with many other American urban centres in immediate post-war development, slums in St. Louis moved closer to the downtown business district, which led to local business anxiety about depreciation of property prices (164). Quality public housing was seen as a response to ameliorate such concerns, aiming to reverse the spiral of deteriorating inner-city development, and to encourage back middle-class families who had left for the suburbs (164). However, this is not to say that such strategic welfare-driven responses were universally regarded as positive, with on-going conservative political opposition to social housing. This opposition used the specific circumstances of early 1950s America as a further foil to the broader adoption of public housing. There were material shortages caused by the Korean War that meant budgets for social housing administered by the Federal Public Housing Administration (PHA)—later merging with HUD—were severely curtailed. As a consequence, budgetary constraints meant that schemes, such as Pruitt-Igoe, were subject to design changes as part of an “efficiency drive” (164–165). In the case of Pruitt-Igoe, there was the elimination of certain amenities and poorer-quality hardware and fixtures (Schwartz 2010, 134– 135, cited in Bristol 1991, 164–165).25 These exacerbated the rate of deterioration of the housing stock, as was the case with more widespread funding policies American sub-prime market in 2007, that saw the development of new mortgage lending practices, liberalization of banking regulations and the growth of housing speculation and significant exposure to risk (38–41). See also Michney and Winling (2020) for a detailed analysis of the lending practices to African-Americans during the 1930s New Deal program. Michney and Winling re-evaluate the racism of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and its practice of ‘redlining’, as a process of racial segregation. 25 Bristol is citing from the 2010s edition of Schwartz’s Housing policy in the United States. In his third edition, Schwartz (2015), Schwartz cites Newman (1995) when explicitly discussing PruittIgoe: “Newman’s description of St. Louis’ infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project, completed in 1956 and demolished 20 years later, could easily apply to any number of big-city projects” (174). Schwartz goes on to quote Newman from his work on Pruitt-Igoe as exemplary of ‘in-defensible’ space: “The common grounds, which were disassociated from all units, were unsafe. They were soon covered with glass and garbage. The mailboxes on the ground floor were vandalized. The corridors, lobbies, elevators, and stairs were dangerous places to walk through, and were covered in graffiti and littered with garbage and human waste … Women had to get together in groups to take their children to school or for shopping” (Newman 1995, 150 cited in Schwartz 2015, 174).

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of such schemes. Under the 1949 Housing Act, there was an expectation, if not economic imperative, for local authorities to derive ongoing funding for maintenance and upkeep of these projects from tenant rentals. While Pruitt-Igoe initially enjoyed popularity and was much publicized, it soon became underfunded in maintenance levies, due, for the most part, to significant decline in lower-to-middle-class occupation rates as the oversupply of suburban housing and its clearance rate meant that lower socio-economic groups were now able to afford private housing (Bristol 1991, 165–166). This drop of occupation rates resulted in a lack of funding for the scheme. Cost-cutting measures led to delays in basic repairs, combined with poor quality materials used when repairs were actually done. This led to further dilapidation (166). What developed could be termed a death-spiral for Pruitt-Igoe, a thanatopolitics of exceptional acts in the sense that Giorgio Agamben activates the notion (Agamben 1998). With ever-increasing deterioration, those who could move tended to move away, resulting in even less funding for maintenance. Those remaining were the most economically vulnerable, witnessing an increasing encounter with the destitution of bare life (166). It is here we begin to approach the question of urban habitation from the vantage point of the governmentality of housing, the complex of agents, public and private, State-sanctioned and, eventually, post-political, whose competing interests opened a series of games of truth that were also the misfortunes of urban minorities.26 These two flows or forms of migration—an extensive migration of the middleclasses to sprawling suburbs and an intensive migration of the poor to deteriorating inner cities—placed new pressures on American cities. The multi-layered American political system of Local, State and Federal legislatures, legal Constitutions and taxation systems—whose jurisdictions tended to be, at times, wildly divergent and, at others, coincident—was seen as an additional aggravating factor. It was widely recognised that some form of Federal intervention was required (Pritchett 2008, 268). A wide range of Federal programmes were instigated throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s that expanded FDR’s New Deal housing policies (269). The administration of John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s proposed a Federal government agency for housing and urban affairs, though the Kennedy administration was not particularly focused on urban problems. However, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnston, due to increasing problems associated with many American inner cities, and in widespread and urgent political contexts of addressing Civil Rights for African-Americans, established the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 1965. HUD sought to reform local government and region-wide solutions to urban problems, promote racial integration, as well as expand the role of the Federal government 26 Hence, we are suggesting here a biopolitical reading that draws from Foucault’s analyses of State-racism especially from Society must be defended (Foucault 2003b), and Agamben’s broad body of work on Homo sacer, bare life and states of exception (Agamben 1998). As we have already mentioned, Newman’s understanding of defensible space, with its implicit targets being the pathologies of the urban poor, along with the requirements to defend and secure habitable order, is itself open to critique via Foucault’s notion of defence developed in his 1975–76 lectures, along with Foucault’s understanding of governmentality of the habitable, via disciplinary measures that target the urban poor.

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in affordable housing (267). We recognise the extent to which this crucial period in American Civil Rights history has its political rationalities so well inscribed in biopolitical governmentality, and surviving discourses of what Foucault termed State Racism (Foucault 2003b). This cusp of a revolutionary fervour, at the convergence of civil liberties issues, driven on the one hand by a mass-educated middle-class baby-boomer generation, and on the other hand by a politicized and militant black activism, found itself fighting conscription, American war efforts in Vietnam, civil rights abuses with African-Americans and other minority groups. This convergence embraced counterculture philosophies, along with the notion of ‘dropping-out’. Widespread drug and commodity cultures equally defined this demographic. This upheaval in America, emerging in the 1960s and consolidating in the 1970s, coincides with the most radical formulations in economic terms, of harnessing the flows of massive change. What emerged, from this mass of social and political activism, was not an American amalgam of counter-cultural social democracy of the people, as some indeed thought possible, but the grounding logic of neo-liberalism—striving for betterment, according to one’s means, in alignment with one’s goals.27 By the time of HUD’s conception, in the Johnson administration, serious misgivings had already had been raised around the effectiveness of social housing, especially with evaluations of schemes such as Pruitt-Igoe, blighted by violence and vandalism (267). These concerns were coupled with long-term trends in suburban growth, and deindustrialization of traditional manufacturing cities and regions that became known as the “rustbelt” (Hobor 2013, 417). In addition, were increasing inner-city racial tensions and riots—for example, the Watts riots in South Central Los Angeles in 1965—that complicated the task of developing a comprehensive approach to urban American social housing policy (Pritchett 2008, 267). Though by 1968, the scope of HUD had grown in size and complexity, with a broad set of programmes that were highly divergent in nature, from urban redevelopment projects, oversight of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) that had an expanded role for low-income rental accommodation, and the regulation of housing markets (278). Such was the institutional and bureaucratic complexity of HUD, that reflected the irresolvable complexity of housing policy, as intimated above, that by the early 1970s the organisation was seen as a failure (Pritchett 2008, 267). Richard Nixon, campaigning for 27 Perhaps the ‘high-water mark’ of that aspirational hope of a better, more democratic and liberal United States, informed by a new generation of post-war, well-educated youth, was Charles Reich’s The greening of America (1970). In its opening chapter, “The coming American revolution,” Reich emphasises: “This is the revolution of the new generation. Their protest and rebellion, their culture, clothes, music, drugs, ways of thought and liberated life-style are not a passing fad or a form of dissent and refusal, nor are they in any sense irrational” (Reich 1970, 11). However, there is something of a neo-liberalism in this counter-cultural understanding of revolutionary change. Curiously, Reich notes: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only in its final act” (11). This revolution of the ‘individual’ never materialized in the sense hoped for by Reich, though a revolution in neo-liberal political economy did. When we consider the notions of urban political uprising we discussed in Chapter One, especially emphasized by Eric Swyngedouw (2018a, b), we recognise a strategic difference in conceiving political dissensus and change.

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president in 1968, targeted HUD as ineffective and unsatisfactory to deal with the wide range of urban problems that were assigned as its remit. Nixon, in Republican fashion, wanted to decrease Federal governmental mandate. He wanted to return ‘power’ back to State and Local governments (278). By ‘power’ is meant the exercise of a governmental rationality that mobilises more-or-less timely, more-or-less relevant, more-or-less local agencies, normalising techniques, spatializing practices, interventions and regulatory frameworks. Nixon was elected in 1969. Though he had attacked Johnston’s “Great Society” housing policies in his election platform, he initially maintained them and even expanded some (279). However, by 1971 such was the broad range of concerns with the Federal housing programmes, that Nixon froze all urban funding (279). He was heavily criticised for this by the Democrats, primarily for usurping Congressional intent. Though, due to widespread dissatisfaction with the existing urban policy, there was bipartisan support for change (279). In his 1973 State of the Union address, Nixon emphasised the importance of “self-reliance” and reaffirmed his commitment to devolving the role of Federal government programmes to State and Local mandates (280). In 1974, Nixon sought to reduce the high-cost spending of HUD, then evaluated as a poor performer that had little in the way of results (280). That same year, the Senate passed the Housing and Community Development Act (1974), which merged most of the Federal housing programmes into a single grant, the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), leaving HUD with an overseeing role for urban development projects (280). This carried wide bipartisan support in the House of Representatives and the Senate, even gaining support from the former Vice-President, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, who helped implement the Model Cities and Great Society initiatives between 1965 and 1969 (281). Nixon, famously, did not survive 1974 as president, and no doubt had his own concerns about the social and political integrity of another paradigm of housing, that in America goes by the name “The White House.” President Gerald R. Ford signed the Act into law later in 1974, which simultaneously increased funds to local governments for urban development and removed Federal involvement in urban policy (281). The CDBG has been in place for forty years and has been used for a range of urban development programmes including housing developments, such as the HOPE VI scheme, based on Oscar Newman’s concept of defensible space, and Section 8, a housing rent subsidy voucher scheme. We discuss HOPE IV and Section 8 in some detail in what follows.

3.2.4 Housing the Poor: Self-as-Enterprise There is no question that many American social housing schemes have been blighted by crime, violence and vandalism, similar to what occurred at Pruitt-Igoe. However, an evaluation suggesting that the majority of American social housing suffered from such problems would be an incorrect one. In 1989, the U.S. Congress established The National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, to evaluate social or public housing stock. It found that the vast majority of U.S. social housing was

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well maintained and managed, with only six percent of all U.S. social housing stock suffering from those problems generally associated with social housing: crime, poverty, unemployment, and drug dependency (Bennett et al. 2006, 32). However, there were intensive localities, such as in Chicago, where the majority of social housing suffered disproportionally from crime and poverty.28 Of particular notoriety were Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes that had been given a national reputation for high crime-rates and poverty (32).29 While only a small percentage of social housing suffered from problems more generally associated with such schemes, as we have seen, perception that U.S. social housing was a failure had existed for a significant period, at least since the Nixon administration. One may speculate on media perpetuation of such perception, which would extend to both news media’s over-reporting on criminality linked to social housing, as well as fictionalised, particularly cinematic, media whose narratives of ghetto-betterment overcoming of one’s born-to-die roots are a staple of Hollywood film and television serialisations. In spite of this widespread perception, there was no cessation of social housing construction and, as Schwartz (2006) notes, in fact social housing development continued to grow to the 1980s. As noted earlier, social housing was legislated in the Housing Act of 1949, with the Act having a goal of building 810,000 units, a goal reached in 1968 (Schwartz 2006, 28 In Chicago, social housing suffered from severe mismanagement, leading to Federal government intervention, taking direct control from the Chicago Housing Authority during the 1990s (Schwartz 2006, 136). See also Fennell (2015) on post-political management strategies for Chicago’s housing ‘Projects’. 29 One particularly tragic example of the violence in social housing in Chicago was the death of Ruthie Mae McCoy, who was murdered in her apartment in the Grace-Abbott Homes, which was part of the wider CHA-run housing project known as the ABLA, in the near-south-side of Chicago (Bogira 1987). The social housing project was blighted by high crime and drug addiction; furthermore, it was poorly managed and severely dilapidated. Grace-Abbott Homes was largely regarded as being the most dangerous within the ABLA complex. When McCoy called the police regarding an attempted break-in, there was confusion regarding her description of her assailants trying to break through the medicine cabinet in her bathroom. This led to further confusion when the police arrived, finding a locked door and her neighbours unaware of any commotion. As a consequence, her body was not found for several days. Prior to McCoy’s murder, it was common knowledge in ABLA that one could break into apartments through the built-in medicine cabinets. These were loosely fastened into a small pipe chase that led to an adjacent apartment’s medicine cabinet. Intruders could move through multiple apartments without being noticed, via systematic removal of the medicine cabinets, and in some instances moved vertically between floors. This had been utilised by local gangs for selling drugs and evading police. This tactic of moving through walls is an uncanny precursor to Eyal Weizman’s analysis of the Israeli Defence Force’s tactics for moving through densely built-up Palestinian towns or camps (Weizman 2006, 16). Murder in the ABLA project, as Borgia notes, was far from uncommon, averaging a murder a week and up to two to three in warmer months (Bogira 1987). McCoy’s murder was not widely reported. We note the importance of Newman’s “defensible space” in Bogira’s 1987 article, with its emphasis on isolation in modernist social housing, correlating crime rates with building height. This still largely overlooks the pressing problem of lack of adequate security in projects like Grace-Abbott. Corridors and stairwells were completely enclosed, allowing for no natural light and were poorly lit. Residents were terrified of taking the stairs when lifts were out of order—what goes unforeseen in design, remains resistive in bodies.

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126). From the 1980s, concern about the quality of housing stock grew, in part due to the perceived problems of violent crime and vandalism, as well as perceived or reported issues arising from poor quality construction and amenities, along with mismanagement and corruption in some social housing schemes. These issues, whether pertaining to the six percent evaluated in the Commission’s 1989 report, or a widespread and propagated belief in the evils of social housing in general, led to a policy shift in favour of the removal of blighted schemes, resulting in the widespread demolition of social housing. As a consequence of this, the total housing stock of American social housing has contracted since the mid-1990s (126). One clearly reads here the usurping by neo-liberal economic imperatives of genuine inroads into the crisis of egalitarian housing markets in the U.S. That belief in the social evil of the social as such, the socialism aimed at minorities, the poor, people of colour, a socialism that is evident yet cannot be pronounced with any public housing project, marks the peculiarity of American democracy, just what by, for and of mean, when it comes to the ‘people’. The failure of certain American social housing projects has little to do with modern architecture as a design aesthetic or rationalised form-and-function couple. We cannot attribute ‘failure’ to weaknesses in design philosophy, or even to an essential variance of modern architecture to the spatial and formal codes, the sign-systems and semiotic structures, of inhabitants (Jencks 1984). Rather, what affected these schemes, in terms that will preoccupy our approach to spatial analyses in later chapters of this book, is a biopolitical governmentality of habitation, the complex interplay of a range of different forces, such as government policy, the role of economy, the biopower of race, and especially the management of risk, the aleatory or contingency of practices, no better gauged than in the shifting regimes of discipline and security, welfare and liberalism, whose small and local games of truth, as Foucault might say, lead to the openness of resources, which is to say, to a future as possibility. Prosaically put, this always meant a general lack of funds for initial construction and for ongoing maintenance. Throughout the 1990s, the demolition of many high-rise, high-density social housing blocks transformed how the U.S. government sought to house the poor, a shift in the logic of governmental rationality (Foucault 2007, 2008). We will survey two key American policies, firstly, HOPE VI, based on a “New Urbanism” model, itself based on Newman’s concept of defensible space and, secondly, the introduction of welfare-vouchers, to subsidise rental accommodation for the urban poor, the “Section 8 Housing Subsidy” (see Schwartz 2015, 227–264).30 30 Up

to this point we have, on occasion, referenced Schwartz (2006), along with Schwartz (2015) and Schwartz (2010). These are three editions of the same book, Housing policy in the United States, a definitive reference work on the topic. The 2010 edition was written in the immediate aftermath of the housing and finance crisis of 2007–2009. Schwartz notes in the “Introduction” to the second edition: “Whereas the first edition presented what I considered to be ‘settled facts’, the housing and finance crises that erupted in 2007, about a year after publication of the first edition, have washed away many of these ‘facts’” (Schwartz 2010, xiii). The third edition of 2015, in turn, reflects the ensuing shifts in housing policy, financial institutions and governmental responses to social housing. Schwartz notes: “Like the second edition, this volume is shaped by the near-collapse of the housing market in 2007 and the subsequent financial crisis and economic recession … Whereas the second

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3.2.5 HOPE VI In 1993, the U.S. Congress established “The HOPE VI Federal Programme,” in following the recommendations of The National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing.31 HUD administers the HOPE VI grant, which aims to ameliorate severely distressed social housing by the demolition of problematic schemes, allowing for redevelopment (Schwartz 2006, 117–127). HOPE VI housing aimed to be built at a higher standard of amenity than the social housing it replaced. Furthermore, it is designed to be lower-density, as well as mixed-income (143–144). Dwellings were designed specifically not to look like social housing. Rather than taking the formal language of “stripped-down modernism,” eschewing decoration or ornament, as was the case with earlier schemes, HOPE VI featured design elements commonly found in vernacular American middle-class suburban housing, such as front porches, bay windows and gabled rooflines (Schwartz 2006, 144; Newman 1995, 153). Whereas earlier schemes tended to be physically isolated from their surrounding neighbourhoods, in part due to the perceived amenity of high-rise blocks sitting in open green space, this surrounding public space often being nominated as parkland, HOPE VI sought to blend social housing into surrounding neighbourhoods, such that it was less possible to recognise a difference between social housing stock and private housing stock (Schwartz 2006, 144–147). Key to HOPE VI’s design approach has been Newman’s concept of defensible space. As noted earlier in this chapter, this was his critique on modern architecture as having failed to provide adequate housing for the poor, due to use of design features that were ‘indefensible’. By this, Newman argues that the heavy predominance of public space in and around modernist housing schemes, complemented by a lack of private space, did not allow for protection of individuals or family groups (Newman 1995, 150). We recognise in this equivalence of public space and insecurity a simple correlate between public-welfare and private-security, the indefensibility of social space and the apparatus of contingency-management, as securitizing mechanism, geared essentially for privatization. We question the veracity of Newman’s critique of modern architecture, when he implies that schemes such as Pruitt-Igoe failed due to modernism’s inadequate design philosophy. His analyses seem to be far from what we consider pertinent to questions of urban governmentality as political and economic mechanisms, aimed at securing productive low-income labour, in conditions that enabled the reproduction of that labour force, along with mitigating its tendencies to revolt. Yet, Newman does recognise, without specifically stating or correlating it directly, that a critical dimension to higher-density, low-income housing was the issue of security, though primarily security understood from the perspective of the hegemonic normativity of the middle classes (150). Newman’s design ‘solution’ for social housing is its

edition was written during the throes of the crisis, this edition was prepared five to six years after the crisis has affected the nation’s housing challenges …” (Schwartz 2015, xv). 31 HOPE is acronym for Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (Bennett et al. 2006, 31–32).

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invisibility, its inconspicuous presence within its milieu, its surrounding neighbourhood, its asocial sociality, that relies on the insularity of individuals and family groups, coincident with private property ownership and housing, providing security for social housing precisely by de-socialising it, making indefensible any sense of a commons, a being-in-common. This is, no doubt, an ironic ‘hope’ for HOPE VI. HOPE VI, in trying to reconnect and merge into its surroundings, also sought to reduce high concentrations of poverty in mixed-income and mixed-class schemes, encouraging self-sufficiency for inhabitants, perhaps through emulation of their more affluent neighbours, or aspirational drivers in desiring their neighbours’ lifestyles. Encouragement was also given to seek support beyond Federal government funding, by trying to make connections with financing schemes, through Local government, non-profit organisations, and the private sector (Hanlon 2010, 80–83). The HOPE IV process is two-fold. Firstly, there is the demolition and removal of previous social housing blocks, in Stephen Graham’s terms, ‘urbicide’ of existing social housing formations and their milieu of networked interrelations. These are replaced by a gentrified version of social-housing, whose current models aim to normalise prospective inhabitants according to perceived norms of American middleclass suburban dwelling. Secondly, there is the promotion of self-as-enterprise, as a form of governmental rationality or governmentality. This, we argue, occurs on several different levels in the HOPE VI scheme. We have noted the shift from Federal government funding to Local government, non-profits and the private sector. A similar shift occurs with the administration of HOPE VI, which is largely independently-administrated by State or Local-government Public Housing Agencies (PHAs).32 In the past, PHAs would have been centrally administrated at a Federal level. Under HOPE VI, this is often “contracted out” to the private sector (Schwartz 2010, 144–145). This engagement with the private sector goes beyond subcontracting administration, with mixed-financing being regarded as having a key role in the funding of HOPE VI schemes, actively promoted by HUD in the form of PublicPrivate Partnerships as a way to make up for the shortfall of government funding due to higher amenity of the schemes (Schwartz 2010, 144–145; Hanlon 2010, 83). Lastly, the roles and expectations of individuals shift substantially in the HOPE VI scheme. Whereas older social housing typically insured individuals against lack of housing and often carried a secondary role, as we noted earlier, as a planning technique for transforming deteriorated inner-city housing stock, HOPE VI still maintains an aspect of this latter technique of urban regeneration, though with a considerably different target in social housing as such. A key difference lies in the extent to which the role of individuals significantly differs to that in previous social housing. Governmental

32 Note that there is a distinct difference between the Federal Public Housing Administration (PHA)

and Public Housing Agencies (PHAs) (also called Housing Agencies [HAs]). The former administered social housing at Federal level and was merged with HUD in 1965 (Bristol 1991, 170). The latter are either State or Local government agencies that manage housing for low-income residents. These Housing Agencies receive Federal aid distributed through HUD, which also offers technical support.

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disciplinary techniques of examination and self-responsibility are actively encouraged. HOPE VI makes no guarantee for housing those displaced from the demolition of older social housing schemes.33 This leaves individuals either applying to be housed in new HOPE VI housing, or to be moved onto other social housing projects. Alternatively, they can move to private housing markets, utilising Section 8 housing vouchers, or leave social housing entirely (Schwartz 2010, 146). The scheme introduces a series of requirements for applicants, such as undergoing screening tests as potential tenants in new schemes (146). HOPE VI also gives discretionary power to individual schemes for devising their own eligibility criteria, typically higher than for other forms of social housing This results in those applying for housing potentially being rejected due to poor credit histories, for having a criminal record, or lack of suitable housekeeping skills (147). The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), a local government provider of HUD’s HOPE VI scheme, has a policy requiring tenants to work a minimum of thirty hours per week or be enrolled in full-time study (147). This ties into Federal government policy, outlined in The Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998, which sought to reduce the concentration of poverty in social housing. One controversial aspect of the Act was that it required all tenants in HOPE VI developments to undertake eight hours of community service (150). This governmental process of actively promoting responsibilities with tenants has been one defining feature in contemporary American social housing. One of the simplest, though effective, policies has been the One Strike Eviction Policy, introduced by the Clinton administration in 1996, to tackle perceived rates of high violent crime and drug dealing associated with social housing (150– 151). The zero-tolerance tenancy policy made it possible to evict tenants from public housing who had committed just one offense. In some cases, even if they had not been convicted of a crime, under the policy anyone evicted becomes ineligible for readmission into other social housing schemes (150). The policy bans anyone from social housing who has a sex offence or is a current drug user, regardless of conviction. This especially includes those who have manufactured methamphetamine in social housing projects (151). In addition to these requirements, the policy also gives PHAs three options for discretionary exclusion: firstly, those evicted from social housing for drug related offences for up to three years; secondly, indefinite exclusion of persons who have engaged in antisocial behaviour caused by serious drug or drinking problems; and, thirdly, a general category that excludes anyone engaged in drug-related crime, violent crime, or any criminal activity that could be deemed a potential risk by the PHA (151). This policy, while noted for its effectiveness against criminal activity, resulting in decrease in violent crime, is also noted for negatively affecting family members, including children, of those who have broken the one-strike policy and who are subsequently evicted. A further consequence of this policy is the limitation imposed in housing former prisoners (151). We recognise in this panoply of concerns fundamental questions about identity politics and discriminatory politics that go essentially 33 By September 2008, only twenty-four percent of original tenants had been rehoused in HOPE VI schemes (Schwartz 2010, 147).

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to the questions raised by Foucault concerning the rights of the governed, as opposed to citizen rights, and Agamben’s ontological critique of individuated right in the biopolitical exercise of power over life itself (Ferreira-Neto 2017; Foucault 2014; Agamben 1998). We recognise in these disciplinary procedures the transformational moment that enacts a shift from the inalienable sovereign citizen-right of welfare politics to the self-enterprising earning of citizenship through normalising social agency. These issues are further discussed in the chapters that follow.

3.2.6 Section 8: Housing Choice Vouchers Section 8 is America’s largest scheme for housing low-income individuals and families. In contrast to HOPE VI or other social housing schemes, it has no builtform program, nor does it have a design aesthetic that it is trying to pursue or emulate. It requires no government funding for construction, and utilises the existing private housing market to house low-income households by the use of vouchers to subsidise housing rents (Schwartz 2010, 177–207; 2015, 227–260). In contrast to social housing, which is typically fixed to a particular scheme and location or even, in comparison to HOPE VI, that actively has a mixed-income scattershot approach to decentralise concentrations of poverty, Section 8 is completely decentralised and distributed. Section 8 is open to any local rental housing agent who accepts the vouchers within areas that fulfil requirements of local PHAs, generally requirements relating to rental costs not exceeding that allowable for the voucher scheme (Schwartz 2010, 177). This scheme is often cited as less expensive—it has no start-up costs as is the case with the construction of social housing—and it has no on-going maintenance costs associated with public housing projects (Orlebeke 2000, 505). Furthermore, it offers flexibility for tenants to access a wider range of neighbourhoods and housing types (Schwartz 2010, 182–187). While current U.S. voucher-based rental subsidises have their origins in American housing policy of the 1970s, the discourse surrounding the use of rental vouchers or “certificates” as they have now been named, existed as far back as the 1930s, when the real estate industry actively tried to promote a scheme similar to Section 8 as an alternative to government social housing (Schwartz 2010, 177; Orlebeke 2000, 502). However, with the passing of the Housing Act of 1937, also known as the Wagner-Steagall Act, social housing became the dominant technique for housing low-income Americans, with rental vouchers for existing housing playing a relatively minor role at the time. Voucher rental housing was covered in Section 8 of the Act, hence the name (Orlebeke 2000, 502). Nixon’s 1973 memorandum on social housing construction saw the need for new strategies in housing low-income households. Several trials were conducted to test the feasibility of rental-voucher-based schemes as an alternative to social housing. Such was the popularity within the U.S. Congress for a voucher scheme that these trials were cut short and the rental voucher scheme was implemented within a year (Schwartz 2010, 325–326, n.1). The scheme was further expanded after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. His

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administration established a Commission to review social housing. In its findings, the Commission recommended against the further construction of social housing as “unfeasible,” suggesting further broadening the scope of Section 8 as the most efficient way to house low-income Americans (Orlebeke 2000, 505). Regan petitioned Congress to repeal subsections of Section 8 that were concerned with housing production. When passed into law, this left Section 8 as the sole form of Federal housing subsidy. The Act was further amended in 1985, whereby it became possible for tenants under the scheme to pay more than the HUD-assigned market rent, with the difference being the sole responsibility of the tenant (505). There were initially several different types of vouchers under the Section 8 scheme, though these were merged and subsequently renamed in 1999 as the Housing Choice Voucher with the passing of the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 (505). We recognise in this brief account of governmental voucher-welfare schemes, the resulting minimal or no-government neo-liberalism of welfare housing, that leaves it moreor-less to the market to adjust demand and supply for minority and disadvantaged groups, translating government subsidy, in the most direct ways possible, into private enterprise decision processes, what Colin Crouch termed “privatized Keynesianism” (Crouch 2009). Since its implementation in 1974, Section 8 has grown significantly. Many have moved into the scheme with the contraction of U.S. social housing stock, particularly since the mid 1990s, with demolition of deteriorated Projects. While there is some construction of social housing through HOPE VI, these do not come close to replacing the number of units destroyed. It is likely that rental vouchers will remain the dominant way to house low-income Americans for some time (Schwartz 2010, 205–207). While vouchers are promoted as cost-effective and offer more choice to low-income Americans, concerns have been raised that vouchers might place inflationary pressure onto the rental market and, as a consequence, erode the ability of those in rental voucher schemes to find quality housing (205). While most of these concerns have not been borne out, other concerns have been raised. Firstly, there is an issue of possible racial discrimination and segregation as many voucher users are located in predominantly minority neighbourhoods (206). Secondly, there is vulnerability of the scheme to changes in political or budgetary climate. An example of this is the administration of George W Bush, which tried to limit the growth of the scheme by implementing a series of policies with the effect of making it more difficult to access (207).

3.2.7 De-concentrating Poverty: Discipline and Control Both HOPE VI and Rental Vouchers as government policy aim to decrease concentrations of poverty from social housing and their surrounding milieu, by HUD’s introduction of mixed-income requirements, via encouraging higher-income households to enter lower-income housing schemes, as in HOPE VI or, conversely, by promoting lower-income households to move to higher income areas, via the use

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of rental vouchers. In both case, these are seen as ways to racially integrate those who were living in social housing (see Schwartz 2010, 143, 195, 304; 2015, 184– 197; Varady and Walker 2003, 18; Bennett et al. 2006, 9). In both schemes, there is evidence that this shift to mixed-income households has had positive effects as the neighbourhoods typically have better access to, and provision for, public services and tend not to have the concentrations of poverty or high levels of criminal activity, both of which have positive effects on learning outcomes for low-income children (305). From a Foucauldian perspective, these combine elements of disciplinary technologies and apparatuses of security. The former is probably more the case with HOPE VI than with Section 8 rental vouchers, as HOPE VI places greater requirement for inhabitants to engage in forms of self-examination. Overt procedures, requiring selfresponsibility, seek to shape conduct, preventing ‘negative’ behaviours for those in social-housing or assisted voucher schemes. These policies seek to shape the actions of individuals, the “conduct on conduct” in Foucault’s understanding of governmental procedures of normalizing, such as the requirement to fulfil work obligations and commitments with respect to crime.34 Section 8, in contrast, has a governmental rationality we associate with self-as-enterprise, a government of individuals by their own hands. To avoid a residual inference of welfare, Section 8 voucher recipients ‘choose’ the housing that best suits them, and the neighbourhoods they wish to live in, using vouchers as subsidy or full-rental coverage, depending of their sense of social mobility. Both schemes provide compelling emphasis on the shifting logic of governmental agency that has occurred since the 1970s, from welfare approaches of the immediate post-war period to what is typically called neo-liberalism. In the next section, we explore how this shifting policy on social housing affected two key sectors that led to global financial crisis by the end of the first decade of the twentyfirst century. These sectors were the liberalisation of the U.S. banking industry, and the explicit role of housing markets and housing finance in deregulation processes. The political and economic change that occurred during the 1970s had unforeseen consequences, ‘maturing’ some forty years later, in terms of current ongoing and seemingly intractable global debt and exposure to major bank collapses, due to derivatives trading on housing mortgage loans, what ultimately affects the present in ways never possibly predicted by those original policy producers. We recognise the strategic turn that occurred, from Keynesian economics to supply-side economics, accompanied by deregulation commonly associated with neo-liberalism. Though much of the economic structure in housing markets we are discussing here is unique to the U.S., the turn to supply-side economics was global, what we associate with, for example, Thatcher’s Britain, Reagan’s America, Keating’s Australia and the fourth Labour government in New Zealand. Initially we explore the role that policy played in securing home ownership opportunities for low and moderate incomes in

34 See

Flint (2004) for similar analyses of the role of self-responsibility as conduct on conduct for tenants in the U.K. Social housing, in this respect, acts as a ‘technology-of-self’. See Foucault’s discussion of governmentality as “conduct on conduct” in Foucault (2007). We engage more closely with the notion of governmentality in Chapter Five, “Governing Security.”

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the U.S., and how this policy framework ultimately led to predatory lending practices, precisely on those who were to be protected by this policy. Such protection supposedly extended to both the banking industry and prospective home-ownership. Finally, we explore how the secondary mortgage market that originated in the U.S., to encourage lending between banks and the maintaining of a healthy mortgage market, ultimately led to the development of complex derivatives that would crash the global market.

3.3 Neoliberal Housing 3.3.1 Economic Welfare to Laissez-Faire This chapter has, so far, been principally engaged with American housing policy with respect to social or public housing since the 1930s, and has touched on, though not in an explicit manner, developments in economic policies of the U.S. government in the late 1970s. American economic policy from the end of World War Two was shaped according to Keynesian economic principles, though governmental action was not exercised in an explicitly Keynesian manner, as with the use of demandmanagement aimed at stimulating the economy. It took a more passive approach, based on growth modelling through Federal government expenditure on goods and services to maintain aggregate demand. This policy was maintained in particular through military spending, and ensuring high levels of employment as stimulants to economic growth (Rosenberg 2003, 63).35 Internationally, this was maintained by the Bretton Woods system, named after the American town where a key economic conference or ‘summit’ was held, in New Hampshire in 1944. The conference had representation from forty-four nations, and aimed to develop a new monetary and financial framework for the post-War period (83). Key representatives included John Maynard Keynes from the U.K., and Harry Dexter White from the U.S. (84). The goal of the conference was to prevent depressive economic forces, a repetition of what had occurred in the later 1920s and 1930s, prior to and in the wake of the Great Depression. Consensus between the American and U.K. positions argued for relatively open international trade, determined by the market, overseen by a supra-national monetary body to maintain international currency stability based on both the gold standard and the pegging of international currencies with the U.S. dollar. This latter marked a significant benefit to the U.S. economy. While there were disagreements in the detail of how such a supra-national body would operate, this ultimately led to the 35 Aggregate demand is the total spending in the economy from households, companies and government. Keynesian economic policy seeks to balance aggregate demand against savings, taxes and imports to maintain full employment, avoid inflation and promote economic growth (see Pass et al. 2005). For an account of the re-emergence of Keynesianism post 2007, and arguments for a new new-classical economics, see Tuerck (2015). See also Bieler et al. (2019) and White (2015) on post-Keynesian aggregate demand.

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formation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (Rosenberg 2003, 84–86; Skidelsky 2009, 120; Skousen 2007, 147). For the subsequent twentyfive years, the Bretton Woods system saw remarkable growth in countries directly affected by massive destruction in Europe and Japan, as well those who were not directly devastated, such as America, Australia, and Sweden (Skidelsky 2009, 120). However, the structure of the Bretton Woods agreement also contained significant weaknesses that would put the international monetary arrangement under stress, principally from the growth of international liquidity. This stress was manifested in America in two ways: firstly, in the U.S. running large balance of payments deficits and, secondly, in the “gold pledge,” a guarantee by the U.S. to exchange dollars held by foreigners for gold, at a fixed price of $35 (U.S.) per ounce (Rosenberg 2003, 98). This presented the U.S. economy a challenge. The U.S. dollar effectively became internationally used as a reserve currency. Coupled with this, foreign currencies continued to exchange their U.S. dollars for gold, resulting in the depletion of U.S. gold stocks. This, in turn, undermined confidence in the U.S. being able to maintain the gold pledge. Intervening in this vicious circle would mean decreasing the U.S. balance of payment deficits, ultimately leading to new ways in developing liquidity for international trade. Conversely, if the U.S. continued running these large balance of payment deficits, it would have to devalue the dollar in relation to gold (98). Through the first half of the 1960s, the U.S. economy grew with little inflation or major industrial disputation. Unemployment dropped and wages grew along with increases in productivity (104). The on-going Vietnam War, particularly from the mid-to-late 1960s, with massively increasing deployments of ground troops and their accompanying military spending, combined with increases in welfare spending during the Johnson Administration, associated with the Federal Civil Rights address—such as the Great Society policies—had an inflationary effect on the economy. While unemployment continued to fall, there were increases in industrial disputes, whereby productivity and profits fell (98). By the early 1970s, international trade had increased and American consumers were more willing to purchase imported products, in part due to America losing some of its industrial competitiveness along with higher labour costs, as U.S.-made products became more expensive relative to foreign products. Rosenberg (2003) suggests this was indicative that the U.S. no longer dominated an international economy (174). These on-going pressures on the American economy, coupled with the structural flaw with Bretton Woods’ “gold pledge,” led to the situation where American gold reserves were inadequate to maintain the status quo. On 15th August 1971, the U.S. President, Richard Nixon, ‘unmoored’ the dollar from the gold standard and introduced Fiat currency. In doing so, he effectively dismantled the Bretton Woods system (162). This changing economic fortune led to the U.S. experiencing a relatively new phenomenon, stagflation, throughout the 1970s, with the combination of high inflation, high unemployment, and low economic growth (Rutherford 1992, 386; Rosenberg 2003, 183). With the weakening of the American economy, the Oil Producing Exporting Countries (OPEC) found themselves in a position where they were able to leverage higher prices for petroleum. This had an immediate inflationary effect and also meant increased

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outward flow of capital from the U.S., which crucially meant such capital could not be locally invested for economic growth (Rosenberg 2003, 184). Attempts were made at regulatory reform as a strategy to deal with the problems of high inflation in the late 1970s. However, by 1979, there were fears of the collapse of the U.S. dollar (193), though this did not eventuate, and there was a further shift from Keynesian economics with the introduction of monetarist policies at the U.S. Federal Reserve, under Paul Vocker (193). While this switch to monetarist policy led to more confidence in the dollar, this did little to stop stagflation (194).36 By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Keynesian economic policy was widely discredited, and with the election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister in 1979 and Ronald Reagan as U.S. President in 1980, they both sought to end stagflation that was wrecking their respective countries. Both saw government intervention into the economy as inherently problematic (237). Thatcher and Reagan adopted what might be termed laissez-faire policies in that they sought the liberalisation of monetary policy (deregulation), the determination of greater limits to the influence of unions, and deregulation of industry, agriculture, and resource extraction (Harvey 2005, 1). Reagan’s administration introduced tax cuts for all income tax, implementing “supply side” economic policies, which aimed to ‘incentivise’ people to work harder and to save (Rosenberg 2003, 237). The liberalisation of regulations aimed to reduce compliance costs, lowering the price of goods and services, and thus improving productivity (238). Social welfare was cut back (247). Overall, the Reagan administration believed that government had grown too large and that the private sector would be better managed by the private sector (238). These policies became known in the U.S. as Reaganomics and are largely associated with what has now come to be called neo-liberalism (Harvey 2005, 2). Internationally, the series of policies associated with neo-liberalism is often referred to as the “Washington Consensus,” outlined in a series of ten key economic points by the British economist, John Williamson, in 1989, that are associated with neo-liberalism (Harvey 2005, 93; Skidelsky 2009, 120; Williamson 2000, 251).37 36 Monetarism is closely associated with Milton Friedman. It seeks to control monetary supply as its key objective, taking the position that governments should control the amount of money in circulation. Vocker’s shift in U.S. monetary policy, from the Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies that aimed at full employment as their fundamental objective, to concentrate on simply limiting inflation, led to higher rates of unemployment (Harvey 2005, 23). Unlike Keynes’s fiscal policy, which advocates government involvement in the management of the economy to soften the excesses of the business cycle, such as stimulating economy by government spending during depressions, and contracting during booms, Skidelsky points out the growing scepticism in Keynesian policies when dealing with the stagflation of the 1970s, citing British Prime Minister, James Callaghan’s “spending our way out of recession” was no longer an option as in the past. It produced high levels of inflation. Callaghan’s position, Skidelsky contends, marked the end of the Keynesian era (Skidelsky 2009, 125–126). 37 Williamson (2000) outlined how his concept has been appropriated from his original intention that specifically referred to the largely technocratic policy recommendations coming out of Washington, DC regarding Latin American countries. He outlined ten key policies, in 1990.

—Fiscal disciple—A redirection of public expenditure priorities toward fields offering both high economic returns and the potential to improve income distribution, such as primary

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3.3.2 Subprime: Liberalising Home Ownership and the Market These 1980s adjustments to U.S. economic policy echo the shifts we have seen in policy strategies for low-income housing, from Federal welfare approaches of the 1960s, to neo-liberal approaches such as HOPE VI and Section 8, that emphasise decentralisation, public-private investment relationships, stressing the roles and responsibilities of individual recipients.38 With regard to the subprime crisis, we examine the unforeseen consequences and complex interactions that led to collapse of the housing industry, namely the role Federal policy had in encouraging home ownership among low to moderate-income owners, as well as removing barriers to home ownership for minorities groups. There are also factors associated with the growth and transformations that happened to the U.S. secondary mortgage market, from the post-war period to the subprime crisis, the liberalisation of banking practices, the growth of predatory mortgage lending, poor risk-modelling, and poor oversight both at government and corporate levels, that led to the peculiar situation where predominately suburban housing markets broke the global financial market.39 As we have already stressed, the origins of many of America’s home financial institutions and financial structures lie in governmental responses to the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Prior to this, America had experienced a housing boom in 1925, with home loans peaking in 1928. This boom was helped, in part, by the liberalisation of credit lending practices. While more restrictive than today’s standards, loans often only covered sixty percent of property value. Nevertheless, they allowed greater numbers of ordinary Americans into home-ownership (Massey 2012, 35). The 1929 stock market crash placed strain on both borrowers and lenders. Borrowers during this period often needed to have two or more mortgages to cover property values. With the crash, leading to large-scale unemployment and dropping property values, this meant borrowers often could no longer afford to cover mortgage payments, leading to widespread foreclosures (Massey 2012; Schwartz 2006). Banks became increasingly reluctant to lend money, often unwilling to refinance mortgages and requiring borrowers to pay back the principle (Schwartz 2010, 52). The collapse health care, primary education, and infrastructure.—Tax reform (to lower marginal rates and broaden the tax base)—Interest rate liberalisation—A competitive exchange rate— Trade liberalisation—Liberalisation of inflows of foreign direct investment—Privatisation— Deregulation (to abolish barriers to entry and exit)—Secure property rights (Williamson 2000, 252–253). Williamson argues that ‘neo-liberalism’ has become a catchall phrase to describe free-market fundamentalism that is associated with Reagan’s first term (255). 38 Though not discussed here is the significant role that rental housing plays for housing low-income households along with the role tax credits play in U.S. housing. The latter is discussed by Schwartz (2015), where he outlines the impact of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which was established by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (Schwartz 2015, 135–162). 39 We note that due to the varied and complex nature of these interactions that led up to the subprime crisis, the account presented here is necessarily abridged. It can only be covered in a limited way.

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of the housing market led to a lack of liquidity, with banks increasingly unwilling to lend. This placed further strain on the economy, requiring the Federal government to respond to the crisis and to encourage lending. In doing so, it transformed the American housing financial system, and expanded home-ownership rates to the majority of Americans (52). The initial response was the passing of Federal Home Loan Bank Act (1932) by the Hoover administration, to encourage mortgage lending and to provide liquidity for other types of banking institutions, namely for Savings and Loans Associations known as “Thrifts,” which held most American home loans (52–57). As we have detailed, the subsequent Roosevelt administration established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) under the National Housing Act (1934), and sought to encourage employment through house construction (52). Under the Act, it introduced a key aspect to the American home finance system, namely the development of a secondary mortgage market, to guarantee loans. This provided mortgage insurance to housing and to low-cost housing projects, that protected lenders from default if borrowers could no longer keep up with mortgage repayments (Schwartz 2010, 53–54; Massey 2012). The FHA encouraged home construction and made home-ownership more available to Americans after the Great Depression. However, they also introduced risk-based modelling that we may recognise as biopolitical or State-racist governmentality. Risk-modelling was constituted on race, ethnic composition and location, effectively making inner city and predominantly African-American neighbourhoods ineligible for mortgage insurance (Schwartz 2010, 55; Michney and Winling 2020). This underwriting practice was not unique to the FHA. “Redlining,” as the practice was called, got its name from high-risk neighbourhoods being mapped in red. It was effectively a combined form of risk-based geography and institutionalised racial discrimination (Schwartz 2010, 56; Michney and Winling 2020, 150–151). In 1938, the Roosevelt administration set up the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) to purchase FHA insured loans, aiming at providing a new source of funding and liquidity for the U.S. mortgage market. Eventually this would become a key element of the U.S. housing system, where it later became known by its much more colloquial or popular name, “Fannie Mae” (Massey 2012, 36). “Fannie Mae” achieved its centrality in the housing finance market by being authorised to issue bonds to raise capital, that could then be used to purchase FHA-backed mortgages (Schwartz 2010, 57). While Fannie Mae initially had a relatively minor role to play in the American housing market, it would become progressively more important with the growth of the secondary mortgage market (57).

3.3.3 Savings and Loans Crises: Secondary Mortgage Markets This system, that has its origins in the crisis of the Great Depression, worked well and has been a structural part of the U.S. housing financing system. However, disruption

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to the stability of the then existing housing system came about with more recent challenges placed on the U.S. economy. From the 1960s through to the 1980s, as we have already seen, the U.S. economy became more volatile, with growing stagflation, leading to instability in interest rates that, in turn, affected the viability of Savings and Loan Associations (Thrifts) to raise funds for mortgages (58). This situation deteriorated through the 1970s, when inflation reached double digits. In this economic environment, Thrifts struggled, worsened by a Federal-imposed interest rate cap placed on mortgage repayments, aimed at limiting increasing costs to savers. By 1980, the situation had severely affected the profitability of Thrifts, and their ability to supply funding for new mortgages. The Federal government sought to remedy this situation by a series of deregulatory measures that aimed to increase the profitability of Thrifts. The effectiveness of these changes was limited, and led to a situation, in 1989, where the Federal government was required to bailout the Thrift industry after a series of Thrifts collapsed. Under the Financial Institutions, Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA), Thrifts were required to take on a more marginal role in home lending, and in the growth of the secondary mortgage market (59). What became known as the “Savings and Loans Crisis” significantly changed home lending practices in the U.S., and effectively changed who became designated as the main lenders and originators of mortgages.

3.3.4 Securitisation: Mortgage Market Complexity Throughout the 1990s, the secondary mortgage market came to play a much larger role in the U.S. housing system, with Thrifts becoming less significant. This meant a substantial transformation from localised lending institutions to globalised credit practices. Up until this time, the U.S. housing system had been deliberately insulated from global financial markets by Federal government interventions. That market now became fully integrated into the volatility of global finance (61). The secondary mortgage market grew from initially being the preserve of government organisations, such as FHA-backed mortgages and Fannie Mae, to now include private-sector institutions. With this inclusion, these new private-sector banking and investment firms revolutionised the home financial market, through the development of complex derivatives called mortgage-backed securities (61). These “securities” are created from mortgages that are on-sold by mortgage banks to secondary mortgage markets, to be re-packaged into securities (61). As the mortgage market changed, so also did mortgage-lending practices, leading to the development of new categories of high-risk loans, in the climate of highly competitive housing markets (62). In 1968, Fannie Mae was transformed from a government agency into a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), a private company guided by government regulation and oversight (62). This change in its economic and regulatory status meant that it was no longer required to just buy government-backed FHA-insured mortgages and could buy mortgages from the private market as well (62). This change meant that some of the functions that Fannie Mae formerly was required to

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undertake, such as the purchase of certain FHA-insured mortgages and mortgages for government-backed housing schemes, needed a new organisation to undertake them. So, the Federal government established the Government National Mortgage Association or Ginnie Mae (62). In 1970, the Federal government established a third organisation for the second-mortgage market, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation or Freddie Mac. In 1989, under FIRREA, Freddie Mac was made into a GSE, with the aim of shoring-up the secondary mortgage market for mortgages issues by Thrifts, and that had not been insured by FHA (62). As the secondary mortgage market grew, so too did the complexity of securities that were made from on-sold or insured mortgages. Initially these securities were simply pooled-together mortgages, and investors bought shares, thus receiving a dividend on the interest and principal accumulated from individual borrowers (63). These were not a particularly attractive investment for most, due to the risk of default by the debtor, and in some instances fiduciary responsibilities meant investors could not purchase these types of securities due to their high-risk status (63). Recognising these issues, and with the development of new technologies to facilitate new forms of securitisation, Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac and other private secondary mortgage firms created new types of bonds made up of collateralised mortgages (63). Rather than owning a share of the pool of mortgages, as with the earlier securities scheme, these bonds collected mortgages together into an entirely new entity. Profit came from the interest from the total pool, which was further divided into bonds of different maturities, such as short-term, medium and long-term, as well as variable levels of risk that investors were willing to take. These were typically divided into three “tranches”: the lowest “equity tranche,” typically unrated with the highest risk, had the highest pay-out; the second “mezzanine tranche,” with a lower risk, had a commensurate lower pay-out; finally, the “senior tranche” had the lowest risk and the lowest pay-out (O’Kane et al. 2003, 13). While the three GSEs initially controlled the secondary mortgage-backed securities market, they aimed to limit the risk of default. In this sense, they had “… strict eligibility standards for the mortgages they acquired and securitised” (Schwartz 2010, 63). For example, mortgages could not exceed the current value of a property. Mortgages that were within the criteria of GSE guidelines could then be sold off into the secondary market. This situation would not last. Private investment banks quickly saw the potential gains from less secure loans.

3.3.5 Bad Credit I: Discrimination and Government Response If we temporally suspend the discussion on the securitisation of the secondary mortgage market and return to mortgage lending practices, leading up to the subprime crisis, from the 1960s in the U.S., there has been a series of legal and policy changes that aimed to remove discriminatory practices in the real-estate industry, such as the practice of ‘redlining’. Furthermore, throughout this period the Federal government

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enacted or implemented policies to encourage home-ownership among low-income and minority households, by lowering the loan-to-value rate for mortgages (Schwartz 2010, 84). These policies would come to play an unforeseen role in the 2007–2008 subprime crisis, especially when combined with an exuberant housing market, deregulation in the banking industry, and predatory lending practices by some lending organisations. Since the subprime crisis, some American commentators have placed the blame of the collapse wholly on these ‘welfare’ or ‘social’ Federal government housing policies, further contending that these policies led to the collapse of financial and banking institutions (Littrell and Brooks 2010, 418).40 Evidentially, there is little to link such policies (such as CRA lending) to the subprime collapse, which suggests that such policies were unlikely, in themselves, to be in any way the principal cause of the collapse (423).41 However, this is not to suggest that U.S. Federal policy did not play a role in the subprime crisis, part of which was exacerbated by the weakening of home lending policies, such as lowering the loan-to-value threshold, and the deregulation of the banking industry. Both had the intention to encourage home ownership among low-income and minority households and to lower transaction costs to home ownership (Schwartz 2010, 84). Other factors were the weakening or lack of government oversight and regulation in the home lending industry (84). While both the subprime crisis and the subsequent global financial crisis occurred largely due to private sectors actions, they operated within an environment shaped by the public sector. Here the U.S. Federal government’s role is significant, as it has been the shaper of key institutions and instruments of housing finance (84).42 The U.S. housing system, introduced by the New Deal, helped make home ownership affordable for a majority of Americans. Though it was not until the late 1960s that this would extend to minority groups, with the passing of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that aimed to remove discrimination from the U.S. real estate industry (Schwartz 2010, 253), specifically FHA underwriting practices of ‘redlining’ (Schwartz 2010, 55; Littrell and Brooks 2010, 418). Anti-discriminatory measures were further extended with the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) that sought to remove prejudicial behaviour in home lending, requiring lenders to disclose information about their loans and applications (Schwartz 2010, 265). HMDA was extended in 1992 to include lenders other than banks and Thrifts, though significantly not mortgage brokers (Schwartz 2010, 265; Gruenstein-Bocian et al. 2006, 26). Thanks to this succession of legal acts and new policy implementation that aimed to remove 40 The focus of such critiques has been, in particular, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) (1977) (Littrell and Brooks 2010, 418). This Act seeks to remove discriminatory underwriting practices, such as ‘redlining’, that were used by banks and the FHA. The Act tried to foster an equitable and open relationship between the FHA, banks and community groups, aiming to help individuals in low-income neighbourhoods to access home or business loans (418–419). 41 For a fuller assessment, see Littrell and Brooks’ (2010) defence of the Community Reinvestment Act (1977) against such arguments and a useful series of comparative studies of the impact of CRA lending on foreclosure, when contrasted to subprime lending (422–423). 42 In many respects, the U.S. Federal government policy, whether directly or indirectly applied, had effects wholly unforeseen by initial policy makers, due greatly to the deregulated, profit-driven agencies of private sector institutions.

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bias, in particular the passing of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA), the passing of FIRREA, and GSEs changing their criteria to allow for affordable housing in 1992, the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw more minorities move into home ownership (Schwartz 2010, 253). While these policies greatly increased minority households moving into home ownership, a new problem arose. It was no longer access to credit per se but access to equitable and fair-trade credit that became an issue (270–271). In effect, from the early 1990s to 2006, a significantly greater number of minority households were able to access credit for home loans. Yet their ability to access home loans that had fair terms in pricing and structure increasingly pointed to widespread discriminatory practices. Many seeking credit looked for, or were offered, new home loans such as subprime or exotic mortgages (272).

3.3.6 Bad Credit II: Subprime Mortgages and Predatory Lending Throughout the twentieth century, the standard down payment in the U.S. for a mortgage loan had been twenty percent of the value of the property. Prior to the 1990s, those who were unable to reach this target of twenty percent loan-to-value were required to secure private mortgage insurance or a FHA insured loan (Immergluck 2008, 64–65). However, from the 1990s and in an effort to encourage homeownership, government and non-profit organisations sponsored zero-down-payment loans. In 1994, Fannie Mae introduced a three percent equity loan, followed by Freddie Mac in 1998. In 2000, both offered zero-down-payment loans (64–65). These loans were typically aimed at lower income borrowers. In the period 2000 to 2005, there was significant growth, from thirty-five to fifty percent, in FHA-backed loans that were under an initial down payment of five percent (65). As the secondary mortgage market became increasingly more complex, and through the development of securities that were designed to endure higher levels of aggregated risk, the conditions emerged for the development of new types of mortgage loans that did not conform to GSE underwriting regulations (64). This saw the large growth of new high-risk mortgages, namely Zero-down-payment loans, Subprime mortgages, and Exotic mortgages throughout the 1990s, and until 2006 (60). Subprime mortgages initially were intended for refinancing existing mortgages (Schwartz 2010, 67, 272), namely for those who had poor credit histories or erratic employment and, as such, carried higher levels of risk than would be expected by a conventional mortgage, or Prime mortgage, hence sub-prime (272). Due to the higher levels of risk that subprime loans carried, the rate that borrowers were charged tended to be higher, to balance this risk (Immergluck 2008, 60). While this resulted in loans being offered to those who typically would have been rejected in the past, this did not guarantee

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that underwriting practices were fair. Minority groups tended to suffer from unequal lending practices.43 Unlike conventional prime mortgages, typically issued by orthodox lenders such as banks and savings organisations, subprime loans tended to be offered by mortgagebrokers or non-depository mortgage banks (Schwartz 2010, 65–67). Though intended for refinancing existing mortgages, subprime loans throughout the early 2000s became increasingly used for home loans (67). Due, in part, to a highly competitive market, subprime loans increasingly were offered with incentives, such as artificially low interest rates for the first two years of the loan, or flexible payment options that meant payments could be delayed to a later date. Mortgages could temporarily become interest only (67–68). These types of loan incentives and options grew from comprising seven percent to twenty-six percent of the market, from 2004 to 2006. This illustrates how widespread these practices had become in a very short period (Schwartz 2010, 68). At the same time, conventional prime loans that conformed to GSE underwriting, steadily decreased their market share throughout the 2000s from fifty percent of loans in 2001, to less than twenty-three percent in 2006 (69). Along with subprime mortgages, other exotic mortgages emerged in the market place. These offered a raft of different options to borrowers, such as “…interest-only loans, payment-option loans, negative-amortisation loans, piggy-back mortgages, and Alt-A loans” (Immergluck 2008, 60).44 These exotic loans typically carried less risk than subprime mortgages and were offered at or near to prime mortgage interest rates. Borrowers of Alt-A loans would normally have been able to receive a conventional prime loan. However, this exotic mortgage was aimed at borrowers who, for whatever reason, did not want to disclose some or all of their income, their assets, or debt (Immergluck 2008, 60; Schwartz 2010, 63–64). The most extreme form of these low documentation Alt-A loans was the Stated Income Loans, also called “liar loans,” where borrowers would simply state their income without a requirement to verify it to the lender (USHUD 2010, 24). These too came in a range of options. The most notorious of these were the NINA—no income, no assets—and NINJA 43 Minorities generally were a third more likely than American Europeans to be offered higher cost loans such as subprime mortgages even when having comparable credit histories. As such, many minorities missed out on receiving more conventional loans with lower interest rates (GruensteinBocian et al. 2006, 3). Subprime mortgages were held disproportionally by a higher number of minority households who were often vulnerable to predatory lending practices, namely where the ability of borrowers to repay loans was not regarded by the lender as a significant condition for lending (Schwartz 2010, 65). 44 Interest-only loans pay only the interest on the mortgage for a select number of years. Paymentoption loans offer the borrower a range of options of solely paying the interest on the loan, a combination of interest and principal, or another agreed minimum payment. With Negative-amortisation loans or graduated payment mortgages, the borrower initially pays a lower rate that defers paying the full interest on the loan for an agreed period. Over time this means that repayments grow, once the grace period ends. A Piggy-back mortgage is a second mortgage, that while having a higher interest rate allows the borrower to reduce down payments so as to avoid having to pay secondary mortgage insurance. Alt-A loans require little or none of the documentation usually required, such as statements of income and assets. Borrowers pay a higher rate to compensate for potential higher risks they pose (Immergluck 2008, 60, n.2).

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loans—no income, no job, no assets (USHUD 2010, 24; Dodd 2007).45 These types of loans were originally rare and typically aimed at wealthier borrowers, but became increasingly more common leading up to the crisis. With one lender, the Washington Mutual Bank, these types of loans became increasingly predominate. By 2007, fifty percent of its subprime loans were ‘stated income loans’ (USHUD 2010, 24). The growth of the subprime and exotic mortgage market was also fed by demand for securitisation of secondary mortgages for Mortgage Backed Securities. This led some lenders to engage in predatory lending practices that occur when the ability of a borrower to repay a loan is not taken into account at all (Schwartz 2010, 65, 75). This effectively became a form of moral hazard. Importantly, for the lender the ability of a borrower to repay the loan is of little concern. These lenders were typically mortgage-brokers who personally benefitted from the initial fees for the subprime and exotic mortgage. They faced little in the way of risk of default due to the on-selling of that risk to the secondary market (74–75). Minorities were particularly vulnerable to predatory lending from the 1990s onwards. These loans tended to be subprime mortgages, though not all subprime loans were predatory loans (272). Freddie Mac estimated that ten to twenty-five percent of subprime borrowers in fact could have qualified for a prime loan. Hence borrowers were paying significantly more than needed for the risk they carried (276). As mentioned, in 1994 the U.S. Congress had passed the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA), to protect borrowers from predatory lending. It required lenders to fully disclose their terms and conditions and the real costs to borrowers. The law was largely ineffectual as, for example, it only covered about one percent of all subprime loans issued in 2002 (285).

3.3.7 Forever Blowing Bubbles: Housing Market Exuberance Through 1997 to 2005, U.S. homeownership rates rose in every category according to region, age, racial group, or income bracket (Schiller 2008, 5). Not only were homeownership rates booming, so were house prices. From the late 1990s, the housing market in the U.S., as elsewhere in the world, seemed to be a guarantee to financial security (5). Increases in housing prices also made residential housing construction lucrative, which can be seen in the growth of the construction industry in the U.S. economy, prior to the subprime crisis. During the last quarter of 2005, housing construction made up a little over six percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This was the highest level since the 1950–51 housing boom that peaked prior to the Korean War (7). Not only were homeownership numbers up, houses too were growing bigger, with the average floor area for a single-family dwelling growing forty-seven percent from 1525 square feet (141.7 m2 ) in 1973, to 2248 square feet (208.8 m2 ) 45 Along with NINA and NINJA loans other stated income loan options included SISA (stated income, stated assets), NISA (no income, stated assets), NEVA (no income, no job, verify assets) (see Dodd 2007; Dodd and Mills 2008).

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in 2006 (70). This change cannot be explained by the size of an average American family. Since 1960, the average American household has been steadily decreasing at a rate of 0.7% per year. There were 3.29 persons in the average U.S. household in 1960, 2.63 in 1990, and 2.57 in 2000 (Schiller 2008, 7; Nasar et al. 2007, 340). Massey suggests that this increase in the size of American housing could be partly attributed to the development of new styles of housing in the 1980s, that have been disparagingly called McMansions, in part due to their “super-sized” scale and their use of generic signifiers of wealth (Massey 2012, 41). Stylistically, McMansions are largely a pastiche, imitating a variety of historical and vernacular house types, often incorporating elements that would not typically be found together. Overall McMansions mimic what might be conceived of as cultural capital or symbolic wealth. While they may have, for example, high ceilings and glass chandeliers we associate with palatial aristocratic homes or those of the very wealthy, they lack the quality of detailing, material composition and construction methods associated with the dwellings they aim to mimic (41). While McMansions imitate a mansion-type, they share key design elements of earlier conventional suburban housing. They are typically built on greenfield sites, as detached suburban tract housing.46 The fundamental difference is scale, as McMansions are far larger than earlier suburban housing, as we have noted, and can be typically 3000 square feet (280 m2 ) and up to 5000 square feet (465 m2 ) (41). With a trend towards reducing house-site size, McMansions often take up much of the section they occupy (41; Nasar et al. 2007, 340).47 A similar trend toward larger sized housing was the development of the teardown during the 1990s, where existing housing on valuable inner-city sites was demolished, to be replaced by larger and more expensively finished housing, much like the McMansion-type. This was driven more by housing speculation than physical obsolescence or building fabric deterioration (Massey 2012, 41; Nasar et al. 2007, 356). Teardowns became part of a wider popular-cultural trend of real-estate speculation that occurred during the 1990s and early 2000s, which saw the development of numerous Reality Television shows based on the concept of house-flipping such as, “…Flip This House, Flip That House, Property Ladder, Designed to Sell, Flipping Out, Curb Appeal, The Stagers, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” (Massey 2012, 41). These Reality TV shows share the basic premise of house-flipping, where houses were bought, renovated, and quickly on-sold for a profit. Homeowners became positioned no longer simply as owners or even investors in the housing market, but as aspirational property speculators who aimed to maximize return on their investment

46 ‘Tract’ housing discussion often references Levittown, the locale generally considered as the first suburban planned community designed in the United States on New York’s Long Island, just after the Second World War. Commenced in 1947, it became a model for mass-produced suburban housing. The building firm, Levit & Sons, utilized mass-production manufacturing techniques developed for war production, in applications for a mass-produced building industry, incorporating standardisation of components and high repetition of forms. Hence the detrimental and pejorative associations with suburban tract housing developments that were modelled on Levittown construction methods. 47 Between 1987 and 2002, the average U.S. housing section has decreased 6.5% (Nasar et al. 2007, 340).

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by the use of renovation, their ability to judge the likely trends in inflation, and to anticipate changes in demand in property locations (41). Teardowns and house-flipping were just two examples of the trend in U.S. real estate markets from the 1990s, driven by the popular belief that house prices would continue to rise and that this perpetual growth constituted a “new normal.” Robert J. Schiller, a Noble Laureate in Economics, suggests that speculative booms are largely driven by human behaviour, running counter to orthodox economic theory (Schiller 2008, 41).48 He suggests that the subjective experiences of rising house prices helped to fuel the growth of the U.S. housing market, what he terms the “social contagion” of “boom thinking,” where a significant proportion of society believes that the market will continue to grow in an exuberant manner (41). Schiller suggests that the housing bubble cannot be explained by problems of supply, as there had been no significant change in population, construction costs, or interest rates leading up to the subprime crisis (39). He notes that an overly optimistic view of the housing market could explain this change, which was in part driven by observation of the growth of property values, inter-subjective analysis of change in the housing market, and its discursive mediation via news media (45). The combination of these three factors, he suggests, forms a type of feedback loop that further reinforces the perception of market optimism, leading to further demand (46). This market exuberance was, in part, facilitated by the liberalisation of credit and the development of new forms of mortgage lending.

3.3.8 Deregulation: The Repeal of Glass-Steagall Through the early 2000s, subprime and exotic loans became increasingly important to the secondary mortgage market, as these loans were on-sold, combined into mortgage-backed securities. With this significant development, local real-estate became part of the global investment market (Schwartz 2010, 63). As we have noted earlier in the chapter, these securities were transacted in ways similar to more conventional government or corporate bonds. Due to their higher return, they became increasingly popular, thus further feeding the demand for the secondary mortgage industry to ‘securitise’, leading to further growth in the sector (63). This process was a relatively recent financial innovation, and was facilitated by the repeal of the Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall) by the Financial Modernisation Act of 1999 (Gramm-LeachBliley Act) during the presidency of Bill Clinton. This 1999 Act allowed, for the first time since the Great Depression, for banks to undertake investment and depository banking (Littrell and Brooks 2010, 425). The rationale for the original separation, enacted by Glass-Steagall, was to keep high-risk trading, associated with investment 48 The U.S. economist, Robert Schiller, is well known for developing, with Karl Case, Standard & Poor’s Case-Schiller Home Price Index, which analyses long-term trends of the U.S. housing market. When developing the index, Schiller was surprised by how little data existed on long-term housing trends, not just in the U.S. but internationally, especially considering the extent to which housing speculation affects the economy (Schiller 2008, 29–31).

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banking, from depository banking. The 1933 Act also removed a potential conflict of interest that might occur, namely that banks act in their own interest, rather than in the interest of their customers (USPSIC 2011, 321). Similar deregulation had occurred earlier in countries outside the U.S., with most major Western European economies removing the restriction between investment and retail banking during the 1980s (Ferrara 1990, 329).49 The repeal of Glass-Steagall was driven by the American Banking Association, a lobby group representing the U.S. banking industry. It had been able, through a series of legal challenges, to remove many restrictions placed on the banking sector by Glass-Steagall. One effect of ongoing lobbying, prior to the 1999 repeal, was that banks had already made inroads into securities and insurance (United States Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission [USFCIC] 2011, 54). This deregulating manoeuvre was initially resisted by the securities and insurance industry that sought to maintain Glass-Steagall. However, they were unable to halt these changes (54). In 1996, the Securities Industry Association (SIA), representing Wall Street securities firms such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, revised its position, now lending support to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, in part due to ongoing partial deregulating of the Act, that had occurred slowly over the ten years prior to 1996 (54). What ultimately forced the U.S. Congress to repeal GlassSteagall was the proposed merger of America’s then largest bank, Citicorp, with the insurance giant Travellers to form Citigroup in 1998 (54). As the USFCIC notes, this was technically possible under Glass-Steagall legislation at the time.50 However, it would have required the new institution to strip much of its Travellers assets within a five-year period. Congress had to deliberate on whether it would maintain GlassSteagall and break up America’s then largest financial institution or repeal the Act, allowing financial institutions to engage in insurance as well as both commercial and investment banking (54). As we are now well aware, Congress chose to repeal Glass-Steagall, fundamentally changing the organisation and operational frameworks of American financial institutions. This also made Federal oversight more difficult, as transactions became increasingly opaque for regulators to determine the risks, and activities as a whole (55–56). We are reminded of the point Foucault stresses concerning visibility and opacity of the economic market that ushered in a paradigm shift in the governmentality of the State during the eighteenth century, and fostered the philosophical and economic thinking of the Physiocrats (see Foucault 2007, 29–53).51 What precisely constituted 49 This

separation enforced by Glass-Steagall, however, did not affect financial institutions outside the formal banking system, known as the shadow banking system. As Ferrara notes in his 1990 article, some sixteen years prior to the subprime crisis: “banking is already combined with securities, other financial activities, and even general commerce, all of which are outside the formal banking system” (335). Ferrara stresses that corporate borrowers were able to raise funds by going directly to the market by the creation of securities rather than borrowing from banks. Other non-bank corporations were also able to provide credit and loans in a similar manner to banks by pooling loans and issuing securities (335). 50 Namely, the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956. 51 In the second lecture of his 1977–78 lecture course, Foucault introduces the notion of security, differentiating his understanding of apparatuses of security and disciplinary mechanisms. In the

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an ‘opacity’ was given the name ‘population’, and this opacity was with respect to the blindness of a monarch or sovereign. Security became central, as did the management of risk, precisely because a sovereign gaze could not develop its purview over exchange, or rather its purview and controls were counter to the necessary flows of capital, goods and labour. Hence, we recognise the emergence of political economy and the paramount concern of governance becoming a deciphering of the laws of those flows. We see, perhaps ironically, a moment in the first decade of our new millennium, when the State, precisely the neo-liberal State, also becomes unable to recognise the flows. The economic structure now had its double. A shadow structure comes, in a deregulated fashion, to overtake the State’s instrumentalities. By the end of the first decade of this millennium, it appears no one could decipher the flows, neither the State’s instrumentalities, nor the regulatory mechanisms of the regulated financial institutions, nor the predatory instruments of the deregulated shadow banking system.

3.4 The Global Financial Crash 3.4.1 The End of Risk I: Securitization of Securitization As we have discussed earlier in the chapter, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac initially controlled the securitisation of secondary mortgages. However, new actors in the secondary mortgage market would emerge in the 1980s, with the private sector starting to engage in similar activities to the GSEs. Unlike Fannie and Freddie, they were willing to secure home loans that the GSEs regarded as carrying too much risk (USFCIC 2011, 42). This gave significant benefit to commercial banking. With securitization of mortgages and the on-selling of risk as bonds, commercial banks could transfer existing mortgages off their books, resulting in an important adjustment for these banks in the capital equity-to-debt ratios they needed to have. These banks no longer needed to carry as much capital as they would normally be required to carry, in order to cover losses due to bad loans. This had the net effect, on paper, of improving their profits (43). There is a further crucial factor to note in the development of mortgage securities. The growth of the securitisation of mortgages in the secondary mortgage market loan context of this distinction, Foucault discusses the emergence of population as a new object of governmental practice, an object distinct from the individuated body as target of discipline. Here Foucault links up a new governmental technology in political economy to the laissez-faire of Physiocratic economic thinking, to securitizing as concern for State planning, and population as a newly invented object of governmental reason. By ‘apparatus of security’, Foucault refers to a notion of freedom understood as free circulation of peoples and goods, understood as a “physics of power”: “a power thought of as regulation that can only be carried out through and by reliance on the freedom of each … It is not an ideology … First of all and above all it is a technology of power” (Foucault 2007, 49). We discuss the material from this lecture course by Foucault in detail in Chapter Five, “Governing Security.”

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industry was facilitated by the development of computational advances that allowed sophisticated risk modelling to be used, derived from automated credit scores and underwriting (Schwartz 2010, 70). Without advanced computational technologies and algorithm-modelling, the sheer volume of data required to package and on-sell risk derivatives would have made the process infeasible. The growth of subprime and exotic mortgages in the secondary mortgage market led to further growth of Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS). For private institutions, the offering of these MBS securities was particularly attractive as they delivered higher returns than comparable securities that carried a similar amount of risk (Schwartz 2010, 71). These were particularly attractive to foreign investors such as “sovereign wealth funds, foreign owned banks, and national governments,” as they paid higher yields than securities such as U.S. Treasury Bills. By 2006, mortgage backed securities held thirty percent of all U.S. mortgages (71). Although MBSs originated in the 1980s, by the late 1990s these became increasingly more complicated (71). By the early 2000s the initial MBS type of security underwent further innovation, where it was further securitised by grouping it with other MBSs to form a new bond, called a Collateralised Debt Obligation (CDO). CDOs could be divided much like original MBSs into new risk-based tranches that offered what was thought, at least at the time, to be reliable levels of risk (72). While eighty percent of MBSs comprised the senior tranche category, that typically carried an AAA credit-rating, the lower-rated mezzanine and equity tranches, despite giving a better return due to their higher level of risk, were harder to market due to lack of demand for such investments. CDOs offered an attractive way to sell these lower-rated tranches (USFCIC 2011, 127). By bundling these lower-rated tranches together from many MBSs, typically those of BBB or A ratings, a new CDO could be created with a transformed AAA credit rating based on existing risk models (127–128). These financial developments led to further innovation, where an existing CDO could be bundled with another CDO to form a new financial product called a CDO squared. Similarly, when three CDOs were pooled together these formed a CDO cubed (Schwartz 2010, 72). Perhaps what encapsulates the financial (and, indeed, final) alchemy that occurred in the secondary mortgage market was the development of Synthetic CDOs. These were derivatives that mimic “cash” CDOs but do not actually contain any actual mortgages. Instead, these CDOs reference other existing assets, which allowed investors to use Credit Default Swaps (CDS) to hedge on potential growth of the referenced assets (USPSI 2011, 29).52 Through the development of these new financial products, a single mortgage could have multiple linkages 52 An employee at J. P. Morgan, Blythe Masters, developed Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) in the mid-1990s. They were a revolutionary financial product and they were to change how risk was treated in banking and finance (Tett 2009, 51). Historically, financial agencies had been constrained by the problem or risk of default and, prior to these new products, banks minimized risk by trying to make prudent loans, or to diversify a stock portfolio, or to limit how much credit would be lent to a particular sector (51). CDSs are, in effect, insurance on a bond. As bonds carry a risk of default by the bond issuer, the buyer of a CDS pays a third party a fixed fee and, in turn, the buyer is paid out if the bond issuer defaults (321). Though, unlike insurance, CDSs are unregulated derivatives and buyers can speculate on the potential default of the CDS. Another difference is that CDS sellers are not required to have reserves in case of default, as is the case with insurers. This was

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to a raft of different derivatives. While designed in such a way to mitigate risk from these financial products, the increasingly complex and complicating structure of these derivatives meant that while they appeared secure and risk-adverse—that risk had ‘disappeared’—in fact this was merely a mirage. Crucially, these derivatives were structurally vulnerable to change, due their interconnected nature (Bluhm and Overbeck 2007, 299).53

3.4.2 The End of Risk II: Bad Ratings As the securitisation of secondary mortgages became more complex, actually understanding how these derivatives were structured and how to price them accurately became increasingly more difficult. Because of this, the credit rating agencies known as the “Big Three”—Standard & Poor’s (S&P), Moody’s, and Fitch Ratings—came to be integral to the entire process (USFCIC 2011, 43). This relationship between rating agencies and the securitisation industry was fundamental as, without the rating agencies, the selling of mortgage-based derivatives would have been a significantly more difficult proposition. It would have required every investor to undertake due diligence reporting into every financial product purchased. Furthermore, such sales would then have been subject to a series of different Federal and State regulations that restrict the scale of risk investment that certain institutions are able to carry (USPSI 2011, 29). Through the use of letter-grade credit ratings on investments like bonds and securities, these restrictions were removed, thus making derivative bonds much easier to sell. Credit ratings are typically scaled from most secure and least at-risk of default, AAA, AA, A, BBB, BB, B, CCC, CC, C, to D or unrated ratings, the least secure or in default. Generally, AAA to BBB ratings are regarded as investment grade, whereas those under BBB are regarded as below investment grade or junk investments (27). Because credit agencies were integral for the marketing of these financial products, and the potential profits that these credit rating agencies stood to make for offering favourable ratings, this led to the very real situation where conflicts of interest could arise (31). The financial innovation of CDOs transformed and repackaged below investment grade MBS tranches into AAA-rated CDO tranches. This transforming capacity, the situation with America’s largest ‘insurance’ company, which carried $500,000,000,000 of credit risk without having to have any collateral or reserve (USFCIC 2011, 50). The use of CDSs helps to disperse risk, which had been a problem in the Savings and Loans crisis. Many regulators, including Federal bodies, saw this as positive (Tett 2009, 57). In 2000, the U.S. passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that prevented any regulation of swaps such as CDSs (USPSI 2011, 16). 53 Bluhm and Overbeck (2007) note, concerning structured credit and CDOs, that due to CDOs’ interconnectedness, they can be problematic for CDO investors. They term this “cross dependencies.” If one referenced asset or portfolio defaults, it affects many other CDO reference pools, as in the example of Enron’s default that had a catastrophic ripple effect. We note that Bluhm and Overbeck’s book was written prior to the Global Financial Crisis, though the authors clearly recognized potential problems should CDOs default (299).

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along with the potential for conflict of interest between investment banks and rating agencies, led Moody’s CEO to declare: “Everything was investment grade” (31). All tranches were regarded as investable. Effectively, risk was no longer a factor. It did not exist (31). In 2007, such was the growth in securitisation and subsequent credit ratings of MBS and CDO type derivatives that sixty percent were AAA rated according to Fitch Ratings. In comparison, less than one percent of corporate bonds were AAA rated (Lawson 2009, 770).

3.4.3 The End of Risk III: Risk Models and the Rise of Quants The growth of the derivatives market was shaped by highly complex mathematics that helped to facilitate these new financial products and risk models. Prior to the 1980s, investment-banking risk was measured in a largely ad hoc manner, based on past experience and subjective interpretation of data. However, this changed with the development of risk models that sought to analyse credit and market risk through quantitative techniques (Tett 2009, 37). The 1987 stock market crash had led to significant losses for most investment banks, prompting some in the investment industry to explore the potential for accurate risk management. The first investment bank to do so was J.P. Morgan. The bank introduced a daily risk report in 1989 (38). It was called the 4.15 Report, after the time of release, at 4.15 p.m., when markets closed. The 4.15 risk report sought to give an overview of levels of quantified risk that the bank was carrying in all areas of its trading business (38). Initially these reports gave a basic synopsis of potential risk, becoming increasingly sophisticated, with quantitative analysts or Quants being employed to accurately measure potential losses if markets were to drop (38). The Quants were key to many of the innovations leading to the development of more complex financial products. They had become increasingly important to Wall Street from the 1970s, with the use of complicated mathematical modelling and with increases in computer power, allowing for greater complexity in the type of risk modelling undertaken for securitisation (USFCIC 2011, 44). Key to this was the development of Value-at-Risk (VaR) that modelled existing data of past market behaviour. Typically, this would model a standard deviation of past gains and losses, forming a bell curve, familiar to normal or Gaussian distribution. For J. P. Morgan, this was set at ninety-five percent probability, predicting how much money the bank might lose if market prices changed (Tett 2009, 38; USFCIC 2011, 44).54 VaR was 54 As Tett points out, VaR was designed to exclude the lowest 5% probability of failure. This was due to the decision by J. P. Morgan’s CEO, Dennis Weatherstone, and the “quant” team, that there were always unforeseen risks in the market (Tett 2009, 38). By choosing 95%, this represented “bad-to-normal” distribution rather than worst-case scenarios. Had they included these unforeseen risks, it was thought this would unnecessarily limit the bank’s activities. Tett notes, concerning Weatherstone’s thinking on the 95% VaR: “What Weatherstone wanted to know was what levels of risk the bank was running in a bad-to-normal state of affairs, like a farmer who steels himself to

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utilised to measure potential losses and the probability of those losses within a given timeframe, at the ninety-five percent probability level. This was usually the dollar amount that could potentially be lost every twenty trading days, or once a month (USPSI 2011, 383). VaR made it easier for investment banks to manage risk, with the additional benefit for the banks in VaR showing regulators that banks could act responsibly, without the need for governmental oversight (Tett 2009, 39). However, the increased reliance on mathematical modelling brought with it additional problems, not fully recognised until after the subprime collapse, namely that these risk models relied on assumptions based on often-inadequate historical data, and that these models were predicated on the fundamental microeconomic axiom of the rational constancy of human behaviour. Thus, the model assumed that the market relied on constants, rather than modelling the variable nature of human behaviour (USFCIC 2011, 44).55 Along with the investment banks, the Big Three credit rating agencies had developed advanced risk models for MBSs and CDOs. Moody’s developed and even released its risk model CDOROM for public use. However, this openness had the unintended effect of allowing banks, which also had access to these models, to design new financial products that exploited weaknesses within the credit rating agencies’ models. These new financial products aimed to maximise the returns for investors while maintaining the highest credit ratings possible and, at the same time, aimed to carry the highest levels of risk possible on these new products (Tett 2009, 119). That is not to say that the credit rating agencies were not aware that their models were being exploited. As we have seen, the interdependent relationship between investment banks and credit rating agencies meant they were not in a position to challenge the banks, as the rating agencies risked losing the valuable rating fees. This became known as ratings shopping (Tett 2009, 119; USPSI 2011, 287). One challenge that remained for both the credit rating agencies and the investment banks was how to accurately measure the risk of mortgage default on MBSs and CDOs. While both developed models, problems remained with the limited amount of historical data that existed, and the particular concern was the correlation between a single isolated default and the potential ripple or domino effect onto other securities, whereby it caused further defaults, as a single mortgage had been bundled in multiple ways in accruing MBS and CDO derivatives (Tett 2009, 120). This was seemingly overcome in 2000 by a researcher at J. P. Morgan, David X. Li, who developed an algorithm that modelled correlations between a default and the potential repercussions of this event, based on an existing statistical technique, called the Gaussian copula model. It was able to measure the normal probability of an event occurring, in this case the default of a CDO (Tett 2009, 120; Li 2000). The model allowed CDOs to be accurately measured for their potential risk of default, which in turn led to banks producing more CDOs at a faster rate (Tett 2009, 121). The success of expect periodic floods, snowstorms and droughts, but doesn’t worry about an asteroid impact that might bring on Armageddon” (38). 55 Tett notes that when J. P. Morgan developed VaR, it was recognized that these new quantitative models had limitations in real world situations and they should not be solely relied on. This cautionary advice would be ignored in the lead up to the subprime crisis (Tett 2009, 39).

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Gaussian Copula as a risk-predictive measure meant that this technique was quickly implemented by other banks. The widespread application of the model brought with it new risks to the industry that would make it vulnerable to changing economic conditions. The model structured risk in exactly the same way, whether it was one CDO that failed or all CDOs failed (121). That is to say, while the Gaussian Copula measured the normal range of risk well, the model was not suitable for predicting behaviour in the case of radically unforeseen events, such as total systemic failure of CDOs (121). This weakness is due to Gaussian probability being based on existing historical data that tracks past events and derives a normal range from that data. This forms an inductive fallacy, whereby the assumption is made of consistency in change, or structural constancy in change, that future events unfold in the same way they have in the past. Typically, to mitigate this problem of inductive fallacy in statistics, modellers utilise large data sets, as prediction is less likely to be effected by anomalies or outliers. But due to the speed of innovation that occurred in the securitisation industry, such extensive data simply did not exist (121). Some have gone so far as to say that the Copula caused the subprime collapse (see Salmon 2009). However, this claim is doubtful and grossly simplifies the various contingencies and the highly complex nature of the subprime collapse and subsequent financial crisis (USFCIC 2011, xxii–xxv). Furthermore, many within the finance industry recognised the limitations of mathematical modelling (USPCI 2011, 296–297). Li, who developed the use of the Gaussian Copula for measuring potential derivatives defaults, recognised this too (Tett 2009, 122, 154). Though, due to large profits being made at the time, these concerns were often simply overlooked or side-lined (122). There were additional factors to the sheer complexity of what these models were determining or predicting. Not only were the models complicated but there was an over-reliance on them. They became known by some at credit rating agencies as black boxes. Data was inputted and the model would output the result. Often there was little or no understanding of how the model actually worked by those relying on it for investment decisions (USPCI 2011, 296–297). This reliance on models that were often based on insufficient historical data, posed significant risk to already existing weaknesses in the secondary mortgage market while, at the same time, the models gave predictive confidence to those using them.

3.4.4 The Return of Risk: The Subprime Collapse As the mortgage finance system became more complex, it became more vulnerable to shocks such as events that would be described as ‘abnormal’ within the range of historical data constituting the Gaussian Copula. While some raised questions of its stability, many in the system thought they had in some way removed risk and uncertainty from it entirely, or at the very least were prepared to overlook weaknesses for potential financial benefit. The rapid growth of both the subprime market and the securitisation of MBSs, and the various financial products derived from them, had formed what we suggest, following Schiller (2008), to be a confirmation bias, or what

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Schiller also calls a positive feedback loop. There was a belief among those within the mortgage financial system that house prices would continue to grow upward, or if there was a decline, that it would be manageable and short-term, not structural (Schwartz 2010, 74; USPCI 2011, 197). However, this stability was maintained by the housing bubble, that in turn fuelled high-risk lending, the key driver for the securitisation market (25). As we have seen, with the speed of innovation in the securitisation industry, there was little in the way of testing complex financial products with limited historical data. While there was a long history of GSE-conforming loans being tracked through various economic conditions, the same could not be said for exotic mortgages, such as subprime and alt-A loans (Schwartz 2010, 74). This abnormal historical variance was exacerbated further by poor quality underwriting, due to the proliferation of exotic mortgages by predatory lenders who were not concerned with borrower ability to pay or afford mortgages (74). The housing finance industry was weakened by conflicts of interest and moral hazard, known as the principal agency problem, namely exotic mortgage lenders and those in the securitisation industries had no interest in acting responsibly, as the risk was borne by others (75). Effectively those involved in the system bore no risk. Hence there was no interest in limiting high-risk behaviour. Similarly, homeowners who received exotic mortgages, in particular NINA or NINJA loans, could theoretically—and in practice—walk away from their loans as they had little to lose if they defaulted. Subprime lenders or mortgage brokers also carried little risk from default mortgages, as they sold mortgages quickly off to the secondary mortgage market, meaning they had little concern for the long-term performance of these loans. Likewise, the investment banks carried little risk. Financial innovation and risk-modelling allowed them seemingly to spread the risk out and minimise it such that these potential high-risk securities could be on-sold to investors for a profit. Investors received high returns on these collateralised securities, which were thought to be relatively stable as they were AAA-rated from credit rating agencies. Additionally, the credit rating agencies, which could question the soundness of these securities, did not do so as they were paid by investment firms and did not want to lose valuable income (75). With the mid-2000s cooling of the housing market, the belief was that mortgage foreclosure would not be a major problem, even for those with high-risk loans. House prices would continue to rise, allowing for mortgagees to refinance, based on increased asset worth or, in the worst-case scenario, to sell the asset to pay off the mortgage (75). Throughout 2006, as interest rates rose, the numbers of those defaulting on mortgage repayments grew substantially, as did the number of foreclosures. This would only worsen throughout 2007 and again through 2008 and 2009 (75–76). By 2007, house prices started to fall. This led to significant increases in defaults on subprime loans and foreclosures. What quickly followed was the evaporation in investors in the subprime and alt-A MBS markets. This, in turn, led to investment banks radically cutting the number of exotic mortgages they were purchasing. Mortgage banks were now in the situation where they could no longer on-sell their high-risk mortgages, quickly leading to unexpected bankruptcy or closure (75). This put huge strains on the American financial system, with the cessation of subprime and alt-A loans being sold to secondary mortgage markets. Large numbers of lenders

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offering these types of loans ceased operating—167 in 2007. All, except for two, were independent mortgage banks or lenders. Along with this there was a large number of mergers (76). The high numbers of housing mortgage foreclosures resulted in a further depressed value of MBSs, which brought about a lack of liquidity in the large financial institutions. Investors in subprime loans were often highly leveraged in borrowings to purchase MBSs, where they gained profit from interest rate changes on futures. The rising numbers of foreclosures forced the large U.S. investment banks to seek massive margin calls to cover their losses.56 The large financial institutions were no longer willing to provide short-term loans for investors for MBSs, choosing not to renew them or requiring more collateral (77). As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, this led to the collapse of America’s major financial institutions. They had lost billions of dollars on the repackaging of exotic alt-A and subprime loans into MBS and CDO financial products. The U.S. housing finance industry had been devastated due to high-risk lending practices, a lack of governmental oversight, and credit ratings that did not accurately reflect the real level of risk on the collateralised securities. Deregulation of the banking industry, via the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, made conflicts of interest and moral hazard more prevalent. As noted earlier in the chapter, with very large losses by these financial institutions, leading to a series of bankruptcies and mergers, the entire financial industry was so volatile that the U.S. Federal government intervened, passing TARP in September 2008. The Act provided $700-billion of Federal money to shore-up the entire finance industry, giving credence to the idea that these financial institutions had grown so large and so vital that they were “too big to fail” (USPSI 2011, 43–44; USFCIC 2011, 37). As we have seen, the effect of the subprime “contagion” on global markets led to the global financial crisis and, the on-going sovereign debt crisis in several Eurozone countries, such as Greece and Cyprus (Longstaff 2010).

3.5 Conclusion 3.5.1 Developing a Risk-Free Private Sector This chapter has aimed at providing a highly detailed account of the governmentality of the housing market in the United States, with particular emphasis on governmental measures introduced to support minority groups and those on low incomes to achieve housing. Instigated in the early twentieth century as welfare measures, by the early twenty-first century this same sector of the housing market had become 56 Typically, investment brokers make margin calls when the price of a derivative drops. The broker seeks money from investors to cover potential losses. And typically, investors maintain an agreed set ratio on their investment. When margin calls are made, investors have the choice of topping up their investment to the agreed level or they might sell their derivatives on. In the subprime crisis, as MBS and CDO prices dropped and investment bank VaR rates increased, firms such as Goldman Sachs, in mid-2007, made margin calls (USFCIC 2011, 237).

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the most predatory field for corporate greed. The U.S. regulatory measures, with respect to the second-mortgage insurance market, are relatively unique. Certainly, governance of the housing markets in the U.K., the EU, Australia and New Zealand has followed different paths in mortgage security. However, the U.S. housing finance industry and the devastation its collapse wrought on the development of U.S. cities, is an exemplar for how Foucauldian analyses of governmental procedures can be understood. The chapter has aimed at understanding political and economic events in the governmentality of the urban that have led, in part, to the emergence of postdemocratic and post-political processes. These understandings offer frameworks for articulating, in Foucault’s terms, how disciplinary mechanisms and apparatuses of security engage a governmental reason. We also note that as of 2020, finance banking has grown considerably, despite the catastrophic collapse in the U.S. in 2008, as has national debts in derivatives, currently estimated globally at around $600 trillion. Governments in the G8 grouping are all preparing legislation to enforce national ‘bail-in’ measures should the banks too-big-to-fail become insolvent. The question of the future of the urban is more decisively made in the de-regulatory policies of shadow banking than in public/private mechanisms for regulating growth, development, building or dwelling types, public open space and infrastructural support, the panoply of agendas for the stabilizing disciplines of urban design. Post GFC, we are able to note a series of global financial innovations with respect to the role of banking in the development of ‘emerging’ markets (Griffiths 2018; Alexander and Rowden 2018; Jomo and Chowdhury 2019), along with the fate of monetarist policy and Keynesianism, in a global financial world of stagnation and near-zero (or less) interest rates (Cooper 2019; White 2015; Crouch 2009). Alexander and Rowden (2018) report on the 2018 G20 Summit report, ‘Making the Global Financial System Work for All’. Key to the reform measures contained in the report, are investment strategy guidelines for multilateral development banks (MDBs), those financial institutions that aim to invest in developing or emerging international markets, especially on large-scale infrastructure projects. Crucial to the reform measures are proposals for expanding the role of public resources within the developing nation-State, such as taxation, pension funds, user-fees, in order to derisk investment projects for private investment partners: “… financiers securitize the future revenue streams from portfolios or ‘pipelines’ of projects by bundling them into financial instruments for trading in the global capital markets. …Securitization is not possible without ‘de-risking’ development projects, but this can involve transferring unsustainable risk from the private to the public sector” (55). A parallel scenario is analysed by Jomo and Chowdhury (2019) concerning shifts in the World Bank’s development policies. “Under the leadership of its last President, Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank has reinvented itself, from a lender for major development projects, to a broker for private sector investment” (147). Re-iterating Alexander and Rowden on the changing policy for MDBs, Jomo and Chowdhury note: “As securitization of MDB loans involves tradable assets with different credit ratings for investors with diverse ‘risk appetites’, MDBs are being urged to securitize both private and sovereign loans, and to retain stakes in junior tranches to induce private investment” (149). The net outcome of the current World

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Bank’s policy is that the public funds of developing nations must suffer exposure to all the risk associated with major infrastructure projects, while limiting their exposure to profits, which accrue to private investors who have shed all risk for a project failing (152). What we encountered in the United States with the late twentiethcentury securitization of the housing market, and particularly the subprime market for low income housing, has extended in many respect to global lending practices for emerging markets and essential infrastructural projects in developing nation-States. Policy now dictates that governments need to look to incentives for private investment over strategies for public investment in State-owned infrastructures. In doing so, such investments open to the commodification of future risk to profitability in securities markets.

3.5.2 Malthusian Returns In another post-GFC development of global economic thinking, and in contexts of stagnation of the global economy with near-zero or less-than-zero interest rates, Keynesianism has made a return, in the failure of monetarist policy to take effect. Though its return, as Cooper (2019) indicates, is to an aspect of Keynes’s thinking that has not necessarily been previously emphasised. Cooper’s starting point is a presentation by Lawrence Summers to the International Monetary Fund in 2013. Summers was formerly chief economist at the World Bank, and a proponent of monetary policies introduced in the immediate aftermath of the GFC. By 2013, he was moving to Keynesian demand-management in order to stimulate the U.S. economy. Summer’s immediate reference-point was not Keynes, but an American Keynesian economist of the 1930s, Alvin Hansen. Hansen’s approach after the Great Depression, was to look to demographic theory in order to resuscitate consumer demand. As Cooper emphasises, though now in the British context of Beveridge’s welfare state: “Directly responding to the threat of secular stagnation, the architects of the welfare state were convinced that the national birth-rate needed to be increased to sustain economic growth, and to this end imposed a series of qualifying conditions on the social insurance and labour rights of women and racial minorities” (340). We earlier mentioned, in the previous chapter, the Beveridge Plan when discussing one of Foucault’s Rio lectures. Cooper details in depth the complex relation between Beveridge and Keynes. In the 1920s, Keynes was a Malthusian, who held that Britain faced overpopulation, and the birth-rate needed to decline to avoid unemployment and economic decline. At that time Beveridge was director of the London School of Economics, and a proponent of new theoretical understanding of demographics, holding that Britain’s birth-rate for white colonial nationalism was declining (343). Beveridge’s policy was not simply population increase, but increase of the European races, with social welfare discriminatory planning, to decrease the population growth rate of racial minorities: “For if the faltering of demand could be attributed to the reproductive failure of white British citizens, then it was only logical that redistribution would need to be curtailed in specifically gendered and racialized ways to sustain

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the economic and demographic growth of the nation” (346). Thus, racial minorities were discriminated against in social insurance policies, as were women in the workforce, thereby providing a disincentive to work or incentive to bear and raise children. Hence, the significance in Summers, in 2013, referencing Hanson from the 1930s, an all-but-forgotten figure in American welfare economic theory. As Cooper notes: “Directly responding to Summer’s challenge [to declining birth-rates in the U.S.], the economists Coen Teulings and Jason Lu blame the contraceptive pill for precipitating long-term trends toward low interest rates and stagnant growth” (351). Summers reflects this in his valorisation of rural family life, seeing the growth of unemployed white males as the key symptom of American economic stagnation (352). Though Cooper recognises the political imperative at stake in this debate on a demographic economy, one that resonates significantly with the presidency of Donald Trump: “implicit in the thesis of demographic decline is the idea that the reproductive hierarchies have been lost and natural divisions of labour destabilized. The crisis tendencies of capital can then be materialized in the figure of the castrated, underemployed man, the sterile, overemployed woman, or the over (re)productive migrant, all personifications of social surplus who are variously identified as victims or agents of economic stagnation” (353). We are here in the milieu of Foucault’s biopolitical racism and the civil war of a society that must be defended, a society that now has its health and its housing converted to asset-backed securitization, such that private interests can gain their profitability on market transactions whose risks are not borne by individuated insurance costs, but by public funds, borne by the nation-State. In the medium term, after the 2008 GFC, we see, on the one hand, those global financial institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, invented after the Second World War to assist in global nationbuilding and equity redistribution, now becoming the brokers for private investment capital to secure risk-free projects that guarantee, via securitization, derivatives profitability. On the other hand, we find a new Keynesianism aimed at reinvigorating State-racism and inequity of women and minorities, in order to resuscitate the privilege of while masculinity. In the three chapters that follow, we aim to engage more closely with the work of Foucault on spatiality and power, commencing in Chap. 4, with his correlations of space and power particularly in the medicalization of society. With Chap. 5, we focus on his 1977–78 lectures that introduce the notion of security, along with an understanding of governmentality of the State. With Chap. 6, our focus is on developing a depth engagement with what Foucault understands as biopower.

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Part II

Securing the Urban

For metaphysics is a tradition of thought defined in terms of the pursuit of security; with the securing, in fact, of a secure arche, determining principal, beginning or ground, for which its under-standing of truth and its quest for certainty calls. Michael Dillon, Politics of Security

Chapter 4

Spatiality & Power

4.1 Introduction 4.1.1 Questions of Method Eventalising singular ensembles of practices, so as to make them graspable as different regimes of ‘jurisdiction’ and ‘veridiction’. That, to put it in exceedingly barbarous terms, is what I would like to do. You see that this is neither a history of knowledge-contents (connaissances) nor an analysis of the advancing rationalities which rule our society, nor an anthropology of the codifications which, without our knowledge, rule our behaviour. I would like in short to resuscitate the production of true and false at the heart of historical analysis and political critique. (Foucault 1981, 9)

In 1977, Michel Foucault engaged in a round-table debate with a group of historians, a number of whom were close friends and allies, including Francois Ewald, Pasquale Pasquino and Michelle Perrot. This discussion was subsequently edited, translated and published in English in 1981 under the title “Questions of method: an interview with Michel Foucault.” It appeared in the important, though short-lived, journal edited by Colin Gordon, Ideology & Consciousness. That journal title itself purports to say much about the peculiar moment of reception of Foucault in the U.K., as the title seems to hark from an earlier paradigm, that of Marxism and, perhaps, Althusser, a Marxism strongly rooted in British cultural and political theory, and a Marxism quite at odds with what was essential to the work of Foucault.1 We will come to recognise how Foucauldian studies took root in Britain and the extent to which, 1 Exemplary

of the complexity in Britain of the adoption of Althusserian Marxism and its transformation to discourse theory is the short but influential book by Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess, Mode of production and social formation: An auto-critique of pre-capitalist modes of Production (Hindess and Hirst 1977). Hindess and Hirst subject their earlier Althusserian Marxist analysis, in Pre-capitalist modes of production (1975), to a radical epistemological critique from the viewpoint of introducing discourse theory. Thus, they suggest a transformation in conceptualization of the relations between a discourse and its conditions of existence. Theoretical, political or other forms of discourse are determinate forms of social practices with their conditions of existence in other © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. L. Jackson and M. Hanlen, Securing Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4_4

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in the past ten years in particular, there has been an explosion of Foucault studies coming especially from British academics, who have a focus on the urban.2 It was Colin Gordon who edited, at a somewhat strategic moment in 1980, a collection of Foucault essays under the title Power/Knowledge. We may note the emphasis given in this collection to Foucault’s repeated engagements with power and space, or a fundamental understanding of the exercise of power through analyses of spatial distributions.3 But, to return to “Questions of method,” we want to emphasise in more detail what Foucault says here as to how he researches, or the peculiar ‘objects’ that emerge in his studies. We want to emphasise this for the importance it has for taking the ‘urban’ as an object of research. Three preliminary precautions need to be stated before going into detail on Foucault. The first is that Foucault often will take explicit note of his methodological procedures, state them or reflect on them. One of our aims in this chapter and the chapters that follows, is to work through some of these methodological drifts, from archaeology to genealogy, then to the biopolitical and governmentality, and then to a hermeneutics and care of the self. Foucault’s procedures engaging biopolitics and governmentality have especially come to dominate much theorising on the urban and its governance (Brand 2007; Collier 2009; Elden 2006, 2010; Jessop 2007; Kearns and Philo 1993; Kornberger 2012; MacLeod and Jones 2011; Mayhew 2008; McKinlay 2009; Murdoch 2004; Osbourne and Rose 1999, 2004; Pløger 2001, 2004, 2008, 2010; Rose 2007; Stein and Harper 2003).4 There is no particular consistency with respect to Foucault’s notations or reflections social practices. We recognize the close resonance to Foucault’s emphasis on practice in his “Question of method” interview (Foucault 1981): “It is a question of analyzing a ‘regime of practices’ — practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken for granted meet and interconnect” (5). It is also the case that Paul Hirst was one of the first theorists to write expressly on Foucault and architecture, “Foucault and Architecture” (1984). He taught briefly at the Architecture Association in London in the early 1980s, delivering a course on Foucault. 2 Reference to British reception to Foucault does not infer or repeat a ‘colonial’ mentality, acknowledging, for example, the metropolitan capital of British Commonwealth countries. Rather, we recognise how practices of reception are concretely realised, noting that the first Anglophone translations of Foucault, and Anglophonic reception came from the U.K., and thence to journals and bookshops in, for example, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Though in Australia some original early critical work and translation was also done on the work of Foucault, by theorists such as Paul Patton and Meghan Morris. See Michel Foucault: Power, truth, strategy (Morris and Patton 1979). 3 Thus, we note the key texts explicitly engaging with spatiality, “Questions on Geography,” an interview with the editors of Hérodote, that opened Foucault’s work to various fields of geography, particularly urban geography (Foucault 1980a); there was also “The Eye of Power,” concerned explicitly with architecture and power, introducing the transformative understanding of architecture as a technology of power (Foucault 1980b). But we also note his extended essay on the politics of health in the eighteenth century, discussed in Chapter Two, and the extent to which Foucault’s engagements between relations of force, forms of knowing and institutional practices fundamentally concern the spatialization of practice. These essays develop an understanding of spatiality that, at once, localizes the agencies of power/knowledge. See also the essays in Crampton and Elden (2007) for an assaying of Foucault’s contribution to critical approaches to geography and urban studies. 4 We note, in particular, Mayhew (2008). Appearing in the journal, Progress in Human Geography, this is a comprehensive literature search in the field of human geography that overwhelmingly

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on his methods. That is to say, Foucault saw a fundamental necessity in maintaining an immediate response to the materials with which he was engaging, along with the specific situatedness of those engagements, not the rationality of a research process, but reasons for moving in this or that direction.5 Hence, the ‘methods’ of “Questions of method,” like all of Foucault’s engagements with research, are provisional. The second precaution concerns the extent to which this book becomes or ‘is’ ‘Foucauldian’. Inasmuch as we aim to construe a responsiveness to the immediacy of our situatedness, which includes an encounter with a plethora of ‘Foucaults’, an agonistics of Foucauldian engagements, and a movement beyond Foucault to other key thinkers whose works are to be understood in proximity to Foucault, the precaution is against a hypostatizing of Foucault, even in his many guises, as an essential thinking to whom we are bound, as if a centric sway circumscribes the orbit of our trajectory. A third precaution is to be acutely aware of strata always already embedded in Foucault’s work. By this we mean neither the abrupt changes or drifts we associate with methodological shifts that are necessarily negotiated, nor the agon of Foucauldian studies, legacies and ‘camps’ that equally have to be negotiated in ways that do not turn Foucault into a discursive ‘holy font’. By this third precaution, we allude to the need to be cognizant of the heterogeneity of legacies in Foucault’s own thinking that marks some of its originality and complexity: for example, the peculiar ways in which the thinking of Maurice Blanchot, Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem are brought into relation (Gordon 1979; Gutting 1989; Johnson 2006).6 There is, as well, Foucault’s late admission of the singular significance of Heidegger, and in particular Heidegger’s Nietzsche, or Nietzsche maintains an open approach to the work of Foucault. It discusses the literature according to a series of axes: governmentality/disciplinary axis; space/knowledge axis; and discourse/identity axis. 5 Foucault famously wrote at the conclusion to his introduction to The archaeology of knowledge (1972a): “What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing—with a rather shaky hand—a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again” (17). 6 Gary Gutting’s exploration of Foucault’s archaeological method (Gutting 1989), focuses on his relationship to the influences of Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of science and Georges Canguilhem’s history of science, both of which were at the time fairly unknown in Anglophone theory. Gutting thus seeks to demonstrate that rather than recognising Foucault primarily as social theorist and critic, it might be advantageous to consider him as a historian and philosopher of science. Gutting’s proposal is threefold: firstly, rather than thinking of Foucault’s understanding of archaeology as an “… isolated method reflecting his idiosyncratic approach to the history of thought.” (1989, x), he contends that it has its origins in a French tradition of history and philosophy of science, and was developed out of relations to Bachelard and Canguilhem (x–xi). Secondly, Gutting contends that Foucault’s archaeology is “… essentially grounded in historical practice rather than philosophical theory” (xi). Rather than being totalising, it is a method of historical analysis that deals in particular historical problems posed by the history of thought and is, thus, pragmatic and evolutionary. This does not imply Foucault’s historical analyses not having philosophical intent or philosophical issues. Rather, Gutting sees Foucault’s archaeological method as arising from his historical engagement rather than philosophical commitments: “[this is] closely linked to Foucault’s radical reconception of the philosophical enterprise. He rejects the traditional

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and Heidegger in combination (Elden 2001; Milchman and Rosenberg 2003; Rayner 2007).7 Foucault’s persistent focus on the late eighteenth century in European history in relation to a history of the twentieth century, or what he at times nominates as a “history of the present,” requires our recognition of those strata of philosophical thinking that seem to occupy, at once, a margin of concern for Foucault in as much as they do not become an object of study, yet subtend a radical and immediate influence on how his predominant concerns are thought (see Gordon 1980). With those three precautions in mind, what does Foucault say on this occasion concerning his methods and to what extent do we want to claim them as our own? Foucault is asked a question concerning his notion of ‘eventalisation’. We see that the epigraph quotation above commences with the word ‘eventalising’. Perhaps an inelegant word, it does refer to an essential concern with the situatedness of practices, their milieu, the ways one engages with them. The question asked of Foucault is one that attempts to see an overarching link between the various episodes of his research as the locating of a “general history of rationalisation as it progressively takes effect in our society” (Foucault 1981, 8). Foucault begins to respond by suggesting that he goal of ultimate, fundamental Truth and instead construes philosophy as an instrument for realising concrete and local objectives in the struggle for human liberation” (xi). Thirdly, archaeology is not a form of “… universal scepticism or relativism, undermining all pretensions of truth and objectivity” (xi). For Gutting, Foucault’s archaeology was not a form of relativism or determined for its own sake. Rather, his historical work was guided by a “philosophical ethos,” derived from Enlightenment values of human liberation and autonomous human thought as instrument of that liberation (1). While Foucault warns: “… as we must free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of ‘being for or against the Enlightenment’, we must escape the historical and moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment” (Foucault, 1984b, 45). Foucault sees positive content in this philosophical ethos, which consists of a critique of what we enunciate, think and do “… through a historical ontology of ourselves” (45). In Gutting’s account, in the immediate years after World War Two, ‘philosophy of the subject’ was dominated by the phenomenological readings of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, while Bachelard and Canguilhem developed a philosophy of the concept independent from the phenomenological work of Husserl (Gutting 1989, 12). Hence, we see Foucault’s development as contrary to much of the intellectual background of France at the time: “I have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist” (Foucault 1998b, 437). For Gutting, Foucault positions himself with the tradition of French history and philosophy of science from Comte to Bachelard and Canguilhem; the influence of Canguilhem for Foucault is through his “history of concepts,” the status of norms in science and in the history of science, which Gutting contends is “… the most immediate and strongest influence” on Foucault’s historical work (Gutting 1989, 12). Bachelard’s influence can be felt in in his contention that “… reason is best known by reflection on science, and science is best known by reflection on its history” (13). The twin arguments Bachelard raised are, firstly, rather than looking at abstract principals for understanding the structure of reason, that structure is best explored via its concrete utilisation, as in the case with science; secondly, science is best understood in relation to its history which “… lies in the repeated refutation of a priori philosophical ideals of rationality by historical developments” (cited in Gutting 1992, 13). 7 In the interview “The return of morality” (Foucault 1988), Foucault explains the influence that Nietzsche and Heidegger had on his thought: For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher. I began by reading Hegel, then Marx, and I set out to read Heidegger in 1951 or 1952; then in 1952 or 1953—I don’t remember anymore—I read Nietzsche. I still have here the notes that I took when I was reading Heidegger. … My entire philosophical development was determined by my

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is not a researcher who looks for intrinsic notions of rationalisation. On the contrary, there cannot be an absolute against which one begins to compare more-or-less rational systems. Rather, one looks to practices that inscribe rationality as reasons: Rather than measuring this regime against a value-of-reason, I would prefer to analyse it according to two axes: on the one hand, that of codification/prescription (how it forms an ensemble of rules, procedures, means to an end, etc.), and on the other, that of true or false formulation (how it determines a domain of objects about which it is possible to articulate true or false propositions). … To put matters clearly: my problem is to see how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth (I repeat once again that by production of truth I mean not the production of true utterance but the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent). (8–9)

Hence, we have Foucault’s understanding of ‘jurisdiction’ and ‘veridiction’ in terms of a domain of possible objects about which we can have deliberation, and the procedures or methods we employ in order to construct this ensemble or milieu and make it operational, so to speak. Jurisdiction and veridiction are easily assimilable as discursive, as what we understand as ‘findings’ or outcomes. However, they do not at all relate to this. They are entirely concerned with practices, with the procedural methods whereby things are encountered, inscribed and affected.8 Jurisdiction and reading of Heidegger. I nevertheless recognise that Nietzsche outweighed him. I do not know Heidegger well enough: I hardly know Being and Time nor what has been published recently. My knowledge of Nietzsche certainly is better than my knowledge of Heidegger. Nevertheless, these are the two fundamental experiences I have had. It is possible that if I had not read Heidegger, I would not have read Nietzsche. I had tried to read Nietzsche in the fifties but Nietzsche alone did not appeal to me—whereas Nietzsche and Heidegger: that was a philosophical shock! But I have not written anything on Heidegger, and I wrote only a very small article on Nietzsche; these are nevertheless the two authors I have read the most. I think it is important to have a small number of authors with whom one thinks, with whom one works, but about whom one does not write. Perhaps I will write about them one day, but at such a time they will no longer be instruments of thought for me. (250) This extended citation is one of the few instances where Foucault mentions Heidegger at all. It nonetheless suggests the major impact that Heidegger’s thought, with particular reference to Nietzsche, had on Foucault’s theoretical development (Elden 2001, 1). Stuart Elden argues that Foucault’s acknowledged debt to Heidegger suggests that the Foucauldian notions Power/Knowledge parallel Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference (Elden 2001, 153). Dreyfus (1992) agrees, though in his colloquium presentation of this, he had audience disagreement (Dreyfus 1992, 95). Hans Sluga, however, suggests we need to proceed here with more caution. While there are affinities between the two thinkers and their thought, the encounter of the pairs of terms power/knowledge and ontic/ontological also suggests a series of differences: for example, for Foucault discourse operates at the level of the historical a priori, rather than at the level of ontology (Sluga 2003, 219). We agree with Sluga to the extent that while Foucault claims that Heidegger and Nietzsche are instruments of his thought, this does not “… imply that the substance of his thought is Heideggerian or Nietzschean” (Sluga 2003, 220). The importance of Heidegger for Foucault is perhaps found toward the end of the quote, that an unwritten influence is found in the “instruments of thought” that are Heidegger and Nietzsche (Foucault 1988, 250). We will be exploring these unwritten influences with particular reference to history and urban spatiality, how this can give rise to fruitful readings with regard to the city. Our methods work in the interstitial spaces between Foucault, Heidegger and Nietzsche. 8 To emphasise again what is crucially stated in “Questions of method,” with respect to Foucault’s shift in the specific objects of his enquiry (theoretical production) and procedures for research

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veridiction do not refer to themes or topics, but rather conducts and problems, not to what we know or aim to know but to how we proceed with what is at hand. In this sense, we aim to provisionally adopt these notions as a way to proceed such that our aim is not so much to have an already-formed notion of the urban as prescribed object, but rather our enquiry is as much concerned with how such an object of study might emerge and transform. Thus, if we say ‘the city’ or the ‘urban’ is central to our concern, this is less to say we have a starting point, that demarcates this specific object from others, than to ask how does this concern emerge on our horizons of knowing. Indeed, in what follows we may well ask if the ‘city’ is still a possible object of study or whether we need to find other means to define what we normally understand this name to describe with respect to conduct (Foucault 1979, 20; Gallagher 2008, 397; Donzelot 2008, 121).9 We do not want to separate the question of this object ‘the city’ from a certain procedural understanding of Foucault’s methods or, indeed, Foucault as procedural method. In this sense, we commence with an encounter with Foucault’s work precisely as concerns with jurisdiction and veridiction. Or, in our case, with an engagement with Archaeology as that which concerns codifications and prescriptions, ensembles of rules and so on, while veridiction will concern us with Genealogy, successive games of the true and the false by which our rationalities are inscribed into practices. Hence, we fold Foucault’s concern with ‘eventalising’ to our specific concern with discerning the situatedness of Foucault to our particular problematic of a contemporary analytics of the city. Again, to emphasise, we are uncertain as to what we are naming with this word. That uncertainty, not knowing, as a risk at the heart of knowing, seems to construe, in a curious way, what is most contemporary with (rationalities for methodological choices): “in this piece of research on the prison, as in my other earlier work, the target of analysis wasn’t ‘institutions’, ‘theories’ or ‘ideologies’, but practices— with the aim of grasping the conditions which make these acceptable at a given moment; … To analyse ‘regimes of practice’ means to analyse programmes of conduct which have both prescriptive effects regarding what is to be done (effects of ‘jurisdiction’), and codifying effects, regarding what is to be known (effects of ‘veridiction’) (5). We recognise these concerns with regimes of practices and procedures for knowing repeatedly at stake in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures from the early 1970s, in the formation of mechanisms of disciplinary power, and practices that elicit the truth-effects of discursive formations. Though, it is in his lectures at Louvain in 1981 (Foucault 2014) that Foucault makes the most explicit reference to these notions of jurisdiction and veridiction, concerning ‘justice’ and ‘truth’. His concern with ‘avowal’ or confession, as a hermeneutics-ofone’s-self, in the context of justice is traced back to pre-Platonic Greek thinking, in the two notions of dikaion and al¯ethes: “For the first time, it seems to me, there was a direct link between this dikaion and this al¯ethes, between the just and the true, which would become the problem, one could argue the constant problem, of the Western world” (50). We return to discussion of dik¯e and al¯etheia in some detail, with Foucault, Heidegger and Agamben, in Chapters Seven and Eight. 9 Gallagher (2008) emphasizes that the notion of ‘conduct’ as articulation of practice, or “action over action” has been essential for Foucault in his understanding of power and its exercise. In his work on governmentality (Foucault 1979, 2007), Foucault continues to emphasize this understanding of conduct, noted in his “Question of method” interview, in defining governmentality as the “conduct of conduct.” Donzelot (2008) notes, concerning Foucault’s introduction of political economy as a new technique of government: “Instead of commanding men’s actions, one should act on the interactions between them, conduct their conduct, in short, manage rather than control through rules and regulations” (121).

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respect to a philosophical engagement with the conduct of conduct that governs the milieu we would, yet, name the city. Risk is the most philosophically lively notion at the moment, and what we will eventually arrive at in this book’s third section. It would behove us, then, not to begin as if there was no risk involved, no insecurity. Foucault was never done with such a question of risk at the level of research or analysis. In this we feel close.

4.2 Reading Foucault 4.2.1 Requiem In 2010, the American architectural theorist, Sanford Kwinter, published a small book, a series of essays that covered an urban architectural period spanning the last three decades of the twentieth century. The book is curiously titled Requiem for the City at the End of the Millennium, with essays that commence with reflections on the appearance of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in the early 1970s and conclude with a commentary on the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001.10 There is an insistent Foucauldian reading to this short series of essays and the periodicity it establishes. Though, if we suggest a Foucauldian reading, it is not Kwinter’s. His trajectory is, perhaps, more Deleuzian in an emphasis he gives to assemblages and flows, to the immateriality of forces, than to the fixed nature of forms. There is a brief preface, “Articles of Faith,” by Thomas Daniell, an architect, theorist and critic. Daniell notes: “Kwinter’s city is a historical process rather than a stable object, and his focus is on the ominous and optimistic implications of global economic, social and technological systems: the abstract urban field without the concrete metropolitan form, the historical materialism of Karl Marx filtered through the new materialism of Gilles Deleuze” (Kwinter 2010, 10–11). Our initial Foucauldian response concerns the periodicity the book encounters, from Beaubourg to Ground Zero, delineating with two architectural figures the temporality of a fundamental discontinuity within the space of about thirty years. Beaubourg’s emergence coincides with the famous destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe urban housing project between 1972 and 1976. We discussed Pruitt Igoe in Chapter Three, in terms of the governmentality of public housing in the United States in the twentieth century, and the global financial crash of 2008–2009. The demolition of this complex was ‘celebrated’ by the architectural critic, Charles Jencks, in one of the first 10 Other essays in the book critically discuss the city in terms of information architectures, global markets and image saturation, neo-liberal markets and knowledge economies, all of which suggest: “The poverty of much urban thought can be traced to a persistent fallacy: that the city, or Metropolis, expresses itself preeminently in its physical form and that it is amenable to analysis and intervention as a finite concrete object alone. The city, however, is not this but rather a perpetually organizing field of forces in movement, each city a specific and unique combination of historical modalities in dynamic composition” (Kwinter 2010, 58).

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books on postmodern architecture, The language of postmodern architecture (1984) as the inaugurating architectural moment, the death of modernism—3.32 PM, July 15, 1972—in St. Louis, Missouri. His somewhat ironic comment becomes tragically ironic when we recognise that the co-designer for this massive housing project was the American architect, Minoru Yamasaki. Yamasaki also designed the World Trade Centre buildings.11 We might well speculate on September 11, 2001 as the finitude to what Jencks would have called postmodernity. Pruitt Igoe signalled for many a paradigm shift from the strictures of modernist architectural planning. The architectural critics, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, in their important book, Collage City (1978), noted: “The city of modern architecture, both as a psychological construct and a physical model, has been rendered tragically ridiculous … the city of Le Corbusier, the city celebrated by CIAM and advertised by the Athens Charter, the former city of deliverance is found increasingly inadequate” (see Rowe and Koetter 1978, 4–6).12 Beaubourg, contemporaneous with this destruction, would be the antithetical moment, a moment that heralds another paradigm for how one is to understand a city, galvanized not simply and in a surface way through the iconicity of a building, but through something that this building enables us to understand.13 For Kwinter throughout this book, that understanding, in a sense, concerns the dematerialisation of architecture and the city 11 Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986) was an important twentieth-century formalist architect in the United States. Though the designer of a number of iconic modernist buildings, his legacy is imprinted with what are perhaps the two great demolitions of international modernism, each heralding something powerful by way of change. Indeed, the World Trade Centre buildings were completed in the year the Pruitt Igoe housing project (completed in 1955) was demolished. At the time of Pruitt Igoe’s construction, the architecture journal, Architectural Forum, recognized the project as the fruition of the urban planning principles of Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architects (CIAM), which is to say, international modernism (Ramroth 2007, 164). 12 Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City is certainly a book on the failed project of architectural modernism, resonating thematically with much of Kwinter’s Requiem. However, there the comparison stops. This 1978 publication constitutes its critique within all of those frameworks and obsessions with form and form-making that Kwinter will precisely identify as the definitive blockage to a necessary recognition of the city as flow. 13 Although we see Kwinter arguing for Beaubourg (also known as the Pompidou Centre, named after the French President, Georges Pompidou) as a paradigmatic shift, its local reception was anything but that. It was seen as a continuation of modernist tabula rasa planning by many Parisian locals, especially the Situationists and their followers who saw it as a continuation of Corbusier and the destruction of their beloved Les Halles area. Then there is Jean Baudrillard’s attack on it (Baudrillard 1982). Guy Debord refused to visit Beaubourg. Yet, ironically, it was Beaubourg that became the location for the first Situationist exhibition. Guy Debord (1993, 35) called the Pompidou Centre, a “néo-musée” while the building’s architects, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, insisted on calling the Pompidou Centre “Beaubourg,” rather than after a politician (Powell 1999, 93). They insisted that the project was born from ’68. Richard Rogers is quoted as saying: “The building expressed the hopes of ’68 … What happened then still mattered a lot to some of us” (cited in Powell 1999, 93). The essence of Beaubourg would be flexibility, responding to the ever-changing needs of its users, moveable within the frame. This would be posited as a playful, anti-elitist public forum, “an ever-changing framework, a meccano kit, a climbing frame for the old and young, for the amateur and the specialist so that the free and changing performance becomes as much an expression of the architecture as the building itself”

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as modernist form. The shift is to force, flows, connectivity, media, and space, understood no longer as ‘function’ but as programme, programmable space, spaces that are designed for continuous modulations or modifications. Hence, Kwinter suggests concerning the Beaubourg ‘effect’: No more than a couple of times in an era, a building comes along that fully transcends its specialized context—that is, that challenges and intervenes within developments taking place across an entire society. Such a building forces us to acknowledge that the shaping of subjectivity and the organization of (productive and other) forces in a society are dynamic activities, which can be understood as somehow ubiquitous design processes that are guided by invisible hands. (Kwinter 2010, 19)14

Ground Zero, the radical absenting of the World Trade Centre, the concern that closes Kwinter’s book, would similarly mark one of those transcending moments. Ground Zero signifies a fundamental change in how we have come to think about our planet and the possibilities for its future. Kwinter asks successively, through each of the sections of this small book, how the shifts in global communications, finance and understandings of nation-states have impacted fundamentally on how we understand cities to be practices: “From today’s perspective these apparently fecund and anarchic years [the 1970s and 80s image-driven explosion of aesthetic and technical innovation, driven by neo-liberal market deregulation] were simply (96–97). The English group, Archigram, seems an obvious precedent here, though Rogers considered them “disturbingly apolitical” (94). Baudrillard wrote of the Pompidou Centre, “The whole of social discourse is there and on both this level and that of cultural manipulation, Beaubourg is—in total contradiction to its stated objectives—a brilliant monument of modernity. There is pleasure in the realisation that the idea for this was generated not by a revolutionary mind, but by logicians of the establishment wholly lacking in critical spirit, and thus closer to the truth, capable, in their very obstinacy, of setting up a basically uncontrollable mechanism, which even by its success escapes them and offers, through its very contradictions, the most exact reflection possible of the present state of affairs” (Baudrillard 1982, 4). 14 This transcending by a building of “its specialized context” is a further indicator for developing a Foucauldian problematic with Kwinter’s discussion of the city. Beaubourg, like the absence of the World Trade Centre, signals not so much a particular formal arrangement with a defined set of functions, in this sense a monument to be read in its orthodoxy. Rather, this signals what we will come to define, in Chapter Five, with Deleuze’s discussion of Foucault, a diagram of power. Hence, for example, while Foucault makes reference to an architectural figure at the end of the eighteenth century, the Panopticon prison, his understanding of panopticism is as a diagram of power, which means as a defining network of relations of a heterogeneity of un-formalized matter and non-finalized functions (Deleuze 1988, 36). This is how we suggest we need to read Beaubourg and Ground Zero as strategic urban structuration. We cannot dissociate this “Beaubourg effect” from Baudrillard’s “The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence” (Baudrillard 1982). This is the author of Forget Foucault (1987), a response to Foucault’s History of sexuality, volume one: Will to knowledge (1978) and, more generally, the relations developed by both Foucault and Deleuze between power and desire. On Beaubourg, Baudrillard begins: “Beaubourg-Effect … BeaubourgMachine … Beaubourg-Thing—how can we name it? The puzzle of this carcass of signs and flows, of networks and circuits … the ultimate gesture toward translation of the unnamable structure: that of social relations consigned to a system of surface ventilation (animation, self-regulation, information, media) and an in-depth, irreversible implosion” (Baudrillard 1982, 3). This is arguably Kwinter’s dematerialized city of flows, and Deleuze’s understanding of relations of power in the non-formalized and un-finalized functioning of power.

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what Lewis Mumford would have called ‘cultural preparation’, since the City of the 1970s and 1980s was arguably the laboratory—testing and training ground—for the internet-driven, image-glutted, global, deregulated market capitalism of the 1990s” (39). So, what has died and for whom is the requiem? There are, perhaps, three ways to approach these questions, all of which are intimated in Kwinter’s essays. Certainly, the paradigm shift happens in the recognition that so much modernist rhetoric, so much appeal to a kind of rationalism of form, had failed to deliver its social promise of equity and habitability, of what Le Corbusier enthusiastically called “radiant” cities (Le Corbusier 1967). Kwinter explores what happens when we see the wholesale overtaking of physical form with image saturation and excessive circuits and flows of immateriality, the city as data streaming. Hence, a second encounter is with the political economy of modernist architectural hope in welfare planning, in social or socialist approaches to equity of advantage, and what happens in the steady usurpation of liberalism in successive nation-state economic rationalities, deregulation of State-sanctioning or control of markets, and an increasingly pronounced emphasis on globalization, concomitant with a radical questioning of the definition of the nation-state.15 Chapter Three dealt with effects of this understanding of a paradigm shift, that culminated in global crises in finance. The third register happens in Kwinter’s approach to Ground Zero, which turns this event, on the one hand, into a new global order with respect to war on terror, which is to say a total war effort against a non-identifiable or indistinct enemy, a war that cannot be sanctioned or declared directly as there is no enemy nation-state one can explicitly define. One is globally at war with an immaterial materiality.16 The second aspect of Ground Zero is the rapidity with which this actual site became a piece of real estate: “While architects cannot be blamed for the mediocrities that ensued, their failure to pierce the culture of imagery to reconfigure the terms of engagement and set the tone of the discourse, thereby claiming to lead the speculation about cities and what their place in the coming brave new world might be, represents an opportunity lost and one uncertain to come again” (108). 15 See,

for example, the work of Chantel Mouff and Ernesto Laclau: Laclau and Mouffe (2001); Mouffe (1999, 2000, 2005). See also discussion on Mouffe’s understanding of a democracy of the agon in Pløger (2004). On post-democracy in urban planning theory also see MacLeod (2011). The September, 2011 issue of the journal Urban Studies is devoted to a series of critical investigations into what is termed the “new urban politics.” Some of the material from this journal issue will be discussed in subsequent chapters. 16 We emphasised in this context, in Chapter One, the work of Stephen Graham. Graham has especially focused on the paradigmatic shifts in thinking city planning and habitability under conditions of global terror. The French urban and cultural theorists, Baudrillard and Virilio, developed throughout the last decades of the twentieth century critical directions that emphasised an increasing de-materialization of political strategy, from concerns with territories or objects and their mapping or placement, to what Baudrillard popularly termed simulacra and hyper-reality. Virilio’s prognosis, with respect to deterrence technologies, famously suggests, in terms of surveillance-tactics, that if targets are considered locatable or visible, they must be assumed to be already lost. See, for example, Baudrillard (1994, 2002) and Virilio (2002, 2007).

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We mentioned earlier a Foucauldian reading of Kwinter’s book. There are two aspects to this, one stemming from Foucault’s early work and one from his later work. We note in his studies of the clinic and the prison how Foucault, in the opening pages of The birth of the clinic and Discipline and punish, provides a graphic account of practices, in the first instance of a medical gaze and in the second of practices of punishment in relation to an economy of the spectacle. Foucault notes in each case that over the period of eighty years there is a fundamental discontinuity, a break in an epistemic framework such that the entities sought, found, examined and practiced are simply not the same. In one respect, it is possible to read Kwinter’s small book as exacting such a chronicle of epistemic change such that, between the 1960s and the first decade of the new millennium, how we come to understand what a city is, how we come to govern it, define its characteristics and the conduct of its inhabitants undergo some irreversible transformation. We would not say this is a strong correlation with Foucault, in the sense that Foucault will come back time and time again throughout his various projects to that period at the end of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, as the period of transformation. This is certainly far from Kwinter’s project and, perhaps, overstates what can be read into his Requiem, or perhaps contrasts markedly their historiographical enquiries. However, we yet see something homologous, and perhaps more so with respect to a second register, relating to Foucault’s work on the biopolitical and governmentality, with its careful analyses of the emergence of neo-liberalism and the impact of this on how we come to understand the State, the economy, and conduct on conduct, or how the problem of government happens. This work by Foucault has engaged much contemporary critical and theoretical writing on the city, its planning, and its future, extending to notions such as post-democracy and the post-political. Kwinter’s critical journalism opens us to these kinds of considerations. They will be taken up more explicitly as we engage closely with a significant body of contemporary writing on the city that invokes the contributions of Foucault. What follows, though, is an introduction to Foucault’s work, commencing with his notion of archaeology, and then moving, in the next chapter, to his notion of genealogy.

4.2.2 Do not Ask Me Who I Am By the time of his death in 1984, Foucault had made a significant impact on a broad range of research fields and practices. His work traversed disciplinary boundaries, from psychiatry to history, and philosophy. His capacity to traverse discursive boundaries, and his ability to question the self-evidence of beliefs, maintain the acute relevance of his thinking to contemporary critical theory, more than thirty years after his death. With the recent completion of the translation into English of Foucault’s series of annual lecture courses given at the Collège de France, where he held the Chair of The History of Systems of Thought from 1971 to 1984, we have renewed opportunities to engage his research. These lectures so often return to concerns with the urban, with especially nineteenth-century inventions or mutations of habitation,

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and hence with issues defining a genealogy of the emergence in the West of urban formations.17 James Faubion, the editor of the English-language edition of Foucault’s collected short works and interviews, Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, describes the difficulty in trying to narrowly classify or define his work: Who, or what, is Michel Foucault? The possibilities already seem endless: structuralist, idealist, neoconservative, post-structuralist, anti-humanist, irrationalist, radical relativist, theorist of power, missionary of transgression, aestheticist, dying man, saint, or if nothing else ‘post-modern’. (Faubion 1998, xi)18

Gilles Deleuze, in What is a dispositif? (1992), reiterates this multifaceted character of Foucault’s work, suggesting that it is Foucault’s “repudiation of universals” that allows for his work to be read in a number of ways: “It is in this sense that Foucault’s philosophy can be referred to as pragmatism, functionalism, positivism, pluralism” (162).19 Similarly, there has been a wide range of Foucault’s supposed political views or political affinities. Gutting suggests that Foucault enjoyed the fact that he was difficult to define politically (2005, 20). In “Polemics, politics, and problematisations” (Foucault 1997), Foucault points out that while he prefers not to define himself, he is “… amused by the diversity of ways I’ve been judged and classified” (113). He adds that he has been positioned politically in a variety of often-divergent positions: I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares of the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as an anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, and so on…. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean. (113) 17 Though

Foucault seldom discusses urban planning or design in detail, his predominant concern within his lecture series from the early to late 1970s was with, initially, how medical and juridical discourses became increasingly entwined in terms of practices focused on the urban poor that aimed to increasingly organize and defines this population as a working class. The contexts for these discussions are, for the most part, urban, as is the problem-field of the formation of social medicine, implicating urban reform with respect to the lower classes in particular. In the later lectures, concerning biopower and governmentality, Foucault is, at times, even more explicit in discussing urban planning and the implications for considering a range of discourses concerning sovereign territory, disciplinary sequestrations, and securitizing flows with respect to urban governance. These various phases or foci will be especially discussed in Chapters Five and Six. 18 This three-volume collection is a selected translation based on the collection of Foucault’s works, Dits et Écrits, 1954–84, first published in 1994, and edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. 19 The close friendship of Foucault and Deleuze is well documented and is evidenced by “Theatrum philosophicum” (Foucault 1977b), Foucault’s review essay of Deleuze’s major texts, Difference and repetition (1994) and The logic of sense (1990), both appearing in French in 1969, with its famous epiphany in its opening paragraph: “… and perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian” (165). If that indeed may be the case, then Deleuze, in turn, repays a certain homage by writing one of his most concise elaborations of Deleuzian thinking in, perhaps, the finest reading of Foucault’s thinking, with his short book from 1986, Foucault (1988). Though things did not go smoothly for Deleuze and Foucault in the late 1970s. In an extended note to Foucault’s Security, territory, population (2007a), the publication editor, Michel Senellart, provides a detailed account of their irreconcilable falling out in the context of resistance to the extradition from France to Germany in 1977 of the lawyer for Andreas Baader’s Red Army Faction (better known as the Baader-Meinhof Group), Klaus Croissant (see Foucault 2007a, 373 and 393).

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Foucault’s self-reflective interlocutor in The archaeology of knowledge (1972a), spits out “Aren’t you sure what you’re saying? Are you going to change yet again?” (17), to which Foucault responds, “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order” (17). This range of different responses to Foucault’s work is, perhaps, as Gutting explains, part of a desire we have when, typically, seeking to interpret a work or writer, we have a tendency to try to find “… a unifying schema through which we can make overall sense of an author’s work” (Gutting 2003, 1). This seems contrary to Foucault’s aim “[to] escape general interpretative categories” (1). As Gutting notes: … work is ad hoc, fragmentary, and incomplete. Each of his books is determined by concerns and approaches specific to it and should not be understood as developing or deploying a theory or a method that is a general instrument of intellectual progress. In Isaisah Berlin’s adaptation of Archilochus’s metaphor, Foucault is not a hedgehog but a fox. (2; see also n.2, 25)

Importantly, Foucault’s work is shaped by specific concerns rather than by trying to develop a totalised theory or method of approach (2). Methods and theories developed in one work may be discarded or significantly revised in the next. Foucault conceived of theory not as the globalised reading of everything, schematised as a grand unified theory, but as a type of toolkit to explore specific mechanisms of power (1980b, 145).20 Each of these processes seeks to explore the role of the historical relationship between knowledge and power with regard to bodies, to selves. Crucial for our concern with urbanism is how this is, for Foucault, a spatial problem. Gutting frames two main types of interpretation of Foucault’s work: firstly, Foucault the philosophical historian who engages and develops two key and complementary types of historical methods which he employs through his work, as the archaeology of discourse in The history of madness (2006)/Madness and civilisation (1965) The order of things (1970), The birth of the clinic (1973), and The archaeology of knowledge (1972a), and genealogy in Discipline and punish (1977d) and The history of sexuality volume one (1978), and to a lesser extent the problematisation of ethics in The uses of pleasure (1985) and The care of the self (1986).21 20 The ‘toolkit’ is first broached in a discussion between Deleuze and Foucault, published in 1972, under the title, “Intellectuals and power” (Foucault 1977c). It is Deleuze who introduces it: “Precisely. A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment inappropriate” (208). This ‘toolkit’ approach is followed up by Foucault in an interview in 1977, published as “Power and strategies” in Foucault (1980d). Foucault is questioned with regard to Deleuze’s mention of the ‘toolkit’. He replies, in closing remarks to the interview: “The notion of theory as a toolkit means: (i) The theory to be constructed is not a system but an instrument, a logic of the specificity of power relations and the struggles around them; (ii) That this investigation can only be carried out step by step on the basis of reflection (which will necessarily be historical in some aspects) on given situations” (145). 21 Foucault’s History of madness (2006) is the full translation of the 1961 publication in French of his doctoral thesis under Georges Canguilhem, with the title Histoire de la Folie. A significantly truncated version of this publication was translated and published in English in 1965, under the title Madness and civilization. It is also important to recognise that Gutting’s perspective on Foucault’s

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Secondly, as a ‘historicist’ or, in Walter Benjamin’s corrective to this notion, a ‘historical materialist’ philosopher, parallel to his methodological innovation, is the theorisation of knowledge, power and ‘self’ (Gutting 2003, 2). What is fundamental for Foucault is his critique of historical reason and how it has affected the past and, importantly, how it effects the present. While Foucault has been described in a number of different of ways, Gutting finds a converging motif in his work: “With one exception, all his major books are histories of aspects of Western thought, and the exception (AK) [The archaeology of knowledge] is methodological reflection on his historical work” (Gutting 1989, 1).

4.2.3 Fragments of a Will-to-Know When reading Foucault, it is important to keep in mind that the conceptual innovation, even at its most prolix as in The archaeology of knowledge (1972), is not seeking to initiate or develop a science or discipline, but to explore how it is possible to think in a certain way and how far a specific language can be used. This is why so little of what Foucault was to write could be described as an application of concepts or methodological principles and why, having offered accounts of method at certain points, he appears to jettison them or take them up in an entirely different fashion. Methodological codification, in this regard, is best regarded as a summary that revisits and clarifies analysis after the event rather than a rationalistic plan put into practice by analysis. (Dean 1994, 2) Anyone familiar with research in the human sciences knows that, contrary to common opinion, a reflection on method usually follows practical application, rather than preceding it. It is a matter, then, of ultimate or penultimate thoughts, to be discussed among friends and colleagues, which can legitimately be articulated only after extensive research. (Agamben 2009, 7)

The development of Foucault’s thought and general methodological approach changes through his career and has been divided by Arnold Davidson and others into three main phases, archaeology, genealogy and ethics (Davidson 1986). The first of these describes a period, especially from the 1960s, in which Foucault explored the development of the human sciences and their discourses, especially from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.22 Secondly, there is his genealogical work of various frames or approaches or concerns has significantly shifted with the publication in French and English of the Collège de France lectures. While Foucault’s book publications were available to Gutting, the depth and range of his concerns in his annual lectures has come to surprise many Foucault scholars. See, for example, the analysis of each of Foucault’s thirteen lecture courses, undertaken at Columbia University, in a seminar series chaired by Bernard Harcourt, Foucault 13/13 (2016): http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/foucault1313/. 22 See also Foucault’s own pseudonymous entry (attributed to Maurice Florence)—for the Dictionarraire des Philosophes—in an English version reprinted in Foucault (1998a, 459–463). It is also worth noting that reception of Foucault’s work did not necessarily correlate with his own perceptions of it, and he famously rebuked accusations of him being a structuralist. Though his work has been characterised at times as falling into a structuralist phase in the 1960s and, with the emergence of a Nietzschean influence in the 1970s, a post-structuralist phase.

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the 1970s, where he moves away from his earlier focus on discursive practices, to engage power as a diffuse relation, constituting the forces of institutional practices, to shape the human ‘subject’ as an entity that becomes an object of knowledge. As we have indicated in Chapter One, Foucault introduces in the last of his lectures in The punitive society, a notion of power as something exercised rather than held (Foucault 2015). It is in this lecture that he also introduces the notion of discipline and a disciplinary society.23 This understanding of power takes into account the role of knowledge and production of subjects, shifting from more traditional liberal and Marxist frameworks for defining power.24 The final phase of Foucault’s work, from the end of the 1970s to the early 1980s, again shifted its focus to self-examination, or what Foucault calls a hermeneutics of the self, or a history of subjectivity (Foucault 1998b, 461), which explores the various procedures by which “… the subject is led to observe himself, analyse himself, recognise himself as a possible domain of possible knowledge” (461).

23 See lecture 28 March, 1973. Foucault notes: “It is now time to talk about this power. To situate the problem, I would like to note four [types] of theoretical schemas that seem to me to govern analyses of power—and from which I would like to distinguish myself” (Foucault 2015, 227–228). Foucault then goes on to distinguish his understanding of power from, firstly, the notion of power as something held or possessed (228); secondly, that power is to be found in State apparatuses (229); thirdly, power is subordinated to a mode of production (231). Rather, Foucault sees the exercise of power as constitutive of a mode of production, and not an effect; fourthly, that power can only produce ideological effects (233). In fact, power operates such that it produces not ideology but knowledge: “Actually, every point at which power is exercised is, at the same time, a site of formation, not of ideology, but of knowledge (savoir); and, on the other hand, every knowledge formed enables and assures the exercise of power” (233). At the beginning of the subsequent lecture course, Psychiatric power (Foucault 2006), Foucault introduces Bentham’s Panopticon as a spatializing figure of disciplinary mechanisms understood in terms of this exercise of power, that he outlined at the conclusion of The punitive society. This material will come to be fully worked through in Foucault’s 1975 book, Discipline and punish (Foucault 1977d). 24 Foucault’s relation to Marxism is a complex one that needs to account for his dissatisfaction with and, at times, hostility to institutional Marxism with respect to, for example, the French Communist Party or the particularly Maoist strands of Marxism popular in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s. See, for example, Foucault (1980e), “On popular justice: A discussion with Maoists.” Contrasted with this is Foucault’s own work concerning the writings of Marx, particularly Volume II of Capital. See, for example, Foucault’s “Meshes of power,” (Foucault 2007b), published in Crampton and Elden (2007): “How can we try to analyze power in its positive mechanisms? It seems to me that we can find, in a certain number of texts, the fundamental elements for an analysis of this type. … we can obviously also find them in Marx, essentially in Volume II of Capital. It is there, I think, that we can find several elements on which I can draw for the analysis of power in its positive mechanisms” (156). We can also see in Foucault’s lectures of 1972–73, The punitive society (Foucault 2015), definite analyses of class difference, the formation and antagonisms of a bourgeoisie and working class, concerns with what seem to be Althusserian Marxist terms of State apparatuses and ideological formations. Yet, we can also see in these lectures Foucault working with these notions, only too common to French political history and theory at the time, in order to shift from the totalising concerns of a Marxist historical materialism, or Althusserian concerns with the State as instrumental power. Already, Foucault is thinking power in terms that are at odds with Marxism, as something other than a ‘substance’, and the State as an entity whose governance cannot be understood as emanating solely from juridical or sovereign power.

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Each of these periods of research should not be taken as dramatic shifts in methodological procedures but, rather, as shifts in emphasis.25 Underlying each phase is systematic questioning of practices that seek a stable ground of knowing, whether it has to do with history, specific behaviours, or subjectivity. Foucault’s questioning of relations between truth and subjects is, perhaps, a guiding principle of his research.26 Gutting suggests that to undertake such research implies three methodological procedures (Gutting 2003, 12–15). There is, firstly, scepticism toward anthropological universals, though Foucault notes it does mean that specific behaviours or arenas of research are not nothing, but rather they are chimeras or historical constructs (Foucault 1998b, 461). Secondly, there is a questioning of the philosophical tendency to move from the specific to the general. Here Foucault, conversely, works back from the institutionalised practices of knowledge to the point where the subject comprises “… the immanence of a domain of knowledge” (462). Again, Foucault qualifies this by questioning the ground of object/subject relations. Finally, he questions the historical role of specific practices as an arena of research in itself. By doing so, he offers a way of understanding paradigms of thinking and conceiving the relationship between subjects and objects such that, in ascertaining “… the different modes of objectification of the subject that appear through these practices, one understands how important it is to analyse power relations” (463). The subject is ‘objectified’ by various practices of “government,” through these power relations (463). The significance of this is in how Foucault approaches history, which he terms a critical history of thought, constituting not a ‘history of ideas’, which would look to analyse the mistakes or errors of understanding the world made in the past, or the misinterpretations which would lead people to think such ideas. Rather, such a critical history of thought constitutes a form of critical historical interpretation on notions of subjectivity, from the point of view of how we have come to think or act in particular ways (459).27 While this book closely addresses the writings of Foucault, it does so to engage Foucauldian methods, notwithstanding the provisional nature of such a term or the instability of a fixed ground to it. We reference Foucault’s methods of archaeology and genealogy as concerns with that which structure discursive formations at the level of the ‘said’, and that which construe relations of force at the level of practices or 25 See

Gutting (2003). Gutting argues that globalised unifying schemas for an interpretation of Foucault’s corpus are “guaranteed to distort his thought” (1). 26 See, for example, Foucault’s opening lecture (December 9) in the first of his Collège de France lectures, Lectures on the will to know 1970–1971 (2013): “The will to know is the title I would like to give to this year’s lectures. To tell the truth, I think I could also have given this title to most of the historical analyses I have carried out up until now. It could also describe those I would like to undertake. I think all these analyses—past or still to come—could be seen as something like so many ‘fragments for a morphology of the will to know’” (1). 27 In Chapter Two we noted, when discussing Foucault’s lectures on social medicine, his departure from the work of Ivan Illich. It was Illich who set out to emphasize the errors made in medical science and treatment, while Foucault’s concern was with medicine’s specific rationalities with respect to practice. Perhaps this difference exemplifies the point Gutting is making here with respect to a history of ideas open to correction, and a history of rationalities of practices correlated with the relations of power that define them.

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agencies. That is to say, this research engages the pivotal relations between our forms of knowing of the urban and relations of force that produce those discursive forms. We need to emphasise what we have earlier noted, that Foucault’s use of method is not the kind that seeks irrefutable truths or universals. By his own admission, Foucault’s ‘use’ of history is selective and has a distinct aim and agenda that is alien to orthodox historiography. As Gutting points-out with respect to Foucault’s histories of the present: … [they] do not aim at a full and balanced reconstruction of past phenomena in their own terms. They focus selectively on just those aspects of the past that are important for understanding our present intolerable circumstances. (Gutting 2003, 15)

It is precisely these “intolerable circumstances,” as Gutting calls them, that are the targets of Foucault’s analyses. Foucault sees his own work not as dogmatic assertions “…that have to be taken or left en bloc,” (Foucault 1981, 4), or thought of as treatises in philosophy or studies of history. Rather, Foucault sees his work as philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems (4). As he describes in the 1977 interview that opened this chapter: “My work takes place between unfinished abutments and anticipatory strings of dots. I like to open up a space of research, try it out, and then if it doesn’t work, try again somewhere else” (4). In an interview given in 1978, Foucault discusses the process of writing new works as explorative, both conceptually and methodologically: Each of my books is a way of carving out an object and of fabricating a method of analysis. Once my work is finished, through a kind of retrospection on the experience I’ve just gone through, I can extrapolate the method the book ought to have followed—so that I write books I would call exploratory somewhat in alternation with books of method. (Foucault 2000, 240)

Foucault’s somewhat explorative and reflective approach may be seen, at first, to be methodologically problematic, or overly experimental.28 However, we may consider Foucault’s methods, principally those of archaeology and genealogy, not as a general methodology to be applied to this or that subject for analysis, but rather as serving different tactics or strategies within one’s conceptual ‘toolbox’. As Gutting emphasises, Foucault’s distinctiveness as an historian of thought does not lie in his invention of new methods but in his willingness to use whatever methods are at hand to the specific subject matter with which he is engaged, and these can shift and change with context (Gutting 2003, 14). Furthermore, Flynn suggests that with archaeology and genealogy, there is the tracing of a philosophical approach to history and an exploration into the historical shifts regarding the question of power relations (Flynn 2003, 29). Foucault sees these as both complementary and supplementary approaches, rather than as a disavowal of one for the other (Gutting 2003, 14). Each 28 In his “Introduction” to Foucault: A critical reader (1986), David Couzens Hoy points to a series of prominent theorists who suggest that Foucault becomes “trapped” in his methodological procedures. Hoy mentions Jürgen Habermas, Michael Waltzer, Steven Lukes, Charles Taylor, Fredric Jameson, Clifford Geertz (8–11). This ‘trap’ leads to irrationalism and crypto-normativism, on the one hand (Habermas), and “no independent standpoint, no possibility for the development of critical principles” (Walzer), on the other hand (10). The series of essays in Hoy’s edited book go some way to precisely address and counter these hostile critics.

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offers a differing form and aim of analysis. In the interview, “Questions of method,” Foucault comments on his research practices: I don’t try to universalise what I say; conversely, what I don’t say isn’t meant to be thereby disqualified as being of no importance. … On many points — I am thinking especially of the relations between dialectics, genealogy and strategy — I am still working and don’t yet know whether I am going to get anywhere. What I say ought to be taken as ‘propositions’, ‘game openings’ where those who may be interested are invited to join in; they are not meant as dogmatic assertions that have to be taken or left en bloc. My books aren’t treatises in philosophy or studies of history; at most, they are philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems. (Foucault 1981, 4)

The Foucauldian theorist, Sara Mills (Mills 2003), points to a ‘deficient’ approach when engaging Foucault, that we are keen to take into consideration in our research on the urban. For example, rather than recognising panopticism as an abstracted ‘diagram’ of power in modernity, Mills suggests an easy wholesale and somewhat superficial approach to Foucault, is when: “the panopticon is examined as a structuring principal in the layout of libraries, railway stations, supermarkets and so on …” (110).29 Mills suggests six general modes of engaging with Foucault’s work: (i) analysing archival material; (ii) being sceptical, and questioning predominate viewpoints; (iii) not making second-order judgements or allowing political bias to cloud the analysis; (iv) looking for contingencies rather than falling back on simple or simplified causation; (v) investigating problems rather than a subject or particular historical period; (vi) not over-generalising the findings (111–116). In his rough outlines for an approach toward a method of the study, Foucault liked to think of his work as an opening of research, rather than an orthodox tome with rigid declarations (Foucault 1981, 4). A further key to understanding Foucault’s research methods is what Dreyfus and Rabinow term an “interpretative analytics” they use in order to describe the methods employed by Foucault (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 125). These methods, they argue, incorporating Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy,

29 Well, in the way she puts it, Mills may be right or wrong. As a diagram of power, panopticism is a spatializing determinant in disciplinary procedures inasmuch as these procedures adhere to libraries, railway stations or supermarkets. Though the formal arrangements of Bentham’s device are not in themselves determinants of spatial arrangements. We become especially attuned to this complexity in, for example, encountering panopticism as a formal model that is replicated in myriad building types that each in some way invoke surveillance, discipline and production. The emphatic default happens in settling on a question of form as what is essentially at stake in a model and its simulacra. Deleuze, in his writing on Foucault, is particularly sensitive to this in his discussion of panopticism as a diagram of power and not as a form expressed in building types. As a diagram of power, panopticism concerns not the formalization of matter and the finalizing of functions but the receptivity of unformed matter and spontaneity of un-finalized functions. See Deleuze (1988), “Strategies or the non-stratified: The thought of the outside (power).” We would make the same criticism of a text such as Heterotopia and the city: Public space in a postcivil society (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008) that, while productively exploring Foucault’s understanding of the heterotopic, tends to do so reductively by a securing focus on formal analysis rather than analyses of relations of power constitutive of the normalizing processes of the horizon of visibility of the heterotopic as such.

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are informed by but distinct from, prevailing methods of hermeneutics and structuralism (xxvii), maintaining that Foucault’s methods form an interpretative analytic as a “history of the present” (Foucault 1977e, 31), and that he is: … performing an interpretative act, which focuses and articulates, from among the many distresses and dangers, which abound within our society, those which can act as paradigmatic. The resulting interpretation is neither a subjective invention nor an objective description, but it is an act of imagination, analysis and commitment. (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 253)

It is, perhaps, Agamben who has most thoroughly or critically approached the question of method in Foucault’s work, in part for a way to broach the question of method in his own. Agamben sees some essential alignment of his research and Foucault’s, notwithstanding a great deal of heated objection to this by critics who find fault in Agamben’s insistent extending and correcting of Foucault (see Agamben 1998).30 Presently, we make brief reference to Agamben’s discussion of Foucault’s method, in his short text, The signature of all things: On method (2009). In particular, we introduce Agamben’s discussion of the understanding of paradigm in Foucault’s work, as a way of engaging with method. Agamben commences with an understanding of the notion of paradigm in his own research, and the ways this notion was discussed (or not) and applied by Foucault: In the course of my research, I have written on certain figures such as Homo sacer, the Muselmann, the state of exception, and the concentration camp. While these are all actual historical phenomena, I nonetheless treated them as paradigms whose role was to constitute and make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context. (Agamben 2009, 9)

Agamben suggests that commentators mistook these paradigmatic figures for offering “merely historiographical theses or reconstructions” (9). Agamben sees the work of Foucault doing something similar: “Foucault frequently used the term ‘paradigm’ in his writings, even though he never defined it precisely” (9). This notion of paradigm suggests that in the course of historical enquiry, particular actual figures are drawn out in order to present a finding of ‘exemplarity’. The mistake is to read them too literally. Thus, when Agamben references the concentration camps of National Socialism as paradigmatic of contemporary frameworks of the city, we should not read this so much as anthropology, literally looking for the camp in each city, but ontologically, as a radical and essential or primordial question of the relations of an existent to its existence. This would also be the case for Foucault’s panopticism. We emphasise, in this regard, Foucault’s early encounter with existential phenomenology, in his own reading of Heidegger in the early 1950s, and his writing on the existential psychoanalyst—Daseinanalyst—Ludwig Binswanger (Foucault 1993). In writing on Bingswanger, Foucault emphasises his moving from anthropology to ontology.31 Agamben suggests the proximity of Foucault’s ‘paradigm’ to that of Thomas Kuhn, 30 We will be engaging in extensive discussion on Agamben and Foucault in Chapters Six and Seven, including further discussion on questions of method, but also Agamben’s adoption and extension of Foucault’s notions of biopower and the biopolitical. 31 We discuss Foucault’s Binswanger text in more detail in Chapter Six. Agamben discusses directly the importance of Heidegger’s thinking for an ontological approach to an understanding of ‘paradigm’ in terms of the hermeneutic circle: “The aporia [of the vicious circle of hermeneutic

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in the latter’s notion of “scientific paradigm,” whereby the constitution of knowledge, its veracity and jurisdictions, is contingent on the sway of its embedding or situatedness in a “norm process” (Agamben 2009, 10). Agamben emphasises that neither he nor Foucault aimed at historically tracing back modernity in order to find its cause or historical origin (31). Rather, he suggests: “… each time it was a matter of paradigms whose aim was to make intelligible series of phenomena whose kinship had eluded or could elude the historian’s gaze” (31). In this, there is archaeology that has the semblance of historical enquiry, though such historicality is genealogical, concerned with forces more understood in Nietzschean terms than in a sense of arche as first cause. Thus, the “paradigmatic character” is not to be found in the thing to be investigated but nor is it in the mind of a researcher. Rather, suggests Agamben: “The intelligibility in question in the paradigm has an ontological character. It refers not to the cognitive relation between subject and object [anthropology] but to being. There is, then, a paradigmatic ontology” (32). Though he articulates things a little differently, Dean (1994) also folds something essential to his methodological concerns with those of Foucault. In some introductory comments, Dean establishes what we might now term three paradigms, or what Dean calls “forms of intellectual practice” in contemporary uses of “theory” (Dean 1994, 3). These are, firstly, “progressivist theory,” invoking the teleology of reason, orthodox historiography in the most general sense (3). The second is critical theory, developed from the Frankfurt School analyses of instrumental reason, the culture industries, communicative action, establishing a “critical modernism” (3). The third is a “problematizing” theory, concerned with how truth and knowledge themselves are constituted in the milieus of their formation. As Agamben suggests of Foucault (and himself), this problematizing, in Dean’s words: “has the effect of the disturbance of narratives of both progress and reconciliation, finding questions where others had located answers. … It becomes what Foucault, following Nietzsche, called an ‘effective history’, and sets itself against what might be called the colonisation of historical knowledge by these synthetic philosophies of history” (4).32 Hence, Dean aligns his own project on Foucault’s methods and their rapport with the fields of the social sciences, to Foucault’s own “critical and effective history” that “interrogates progressivist narratives of social progress or critical ones of human emancipation” (4). Our own methods also aim to fold with those of Foucault, though under those fragile and fading names, momentarily illuminating something concerning Foucault’s practices, his paradigms and ontologies, that we momentarily seize upon in their singularity, jurisdictions and veridictions.

pre-understandings that depend on their own existential structures] is resolved if we understand that the hermeneutic circle is in actuality a paradigmatic circle. There is no duality here between ‘single phenomenon’ and ‘the whole’ … In the paradigm, intelligibility does not precede the phenomenon; it stands, so to speak, ‘beside’ it (para)” (Agamben 2009, 27). 32 Dean is referring to Foucault’s “Nietzsche, genealogy, history” (Foucault 1977f).

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4.3 The Hollow of Language 4.3.1 Spatialization and Verbalization: Spaces of Discourse This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze. (Foucault 1973, ix)

This is the opening sentence to Foucault’s ‘Preface’ to his The birth of the clinic. What concerns Foucault is the difficult register of how things and words find their simultaneous space of encounter, and how what we find to be visible emerges from the invisible. And with the Clinic, Foucault is particularly concerned with a spacing of the pathological, or how we bring the pathologies of living things into the orbit of practices of reason. Thus, he says a little further into the Preface, where he notes the mutation in a medical gaze that happens between the mid-eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century: In order to determine the moment at which the mutation in discourse took place, we must look beyond its thematic content or its logical modalities to the region where ‘things’ and ‘words’ have not yet been separated, and where—at the most fundamental level of language—seeing and saying are still one. We must examine the original distribution of the visible and invisible insofar as it is linked with the division of what is stated and what remains unsaid. … We must place ourselves, and remain once and for all, at the level of the fundamental spatialization and verbalization of the pathological, where the loquacious gaze with which the doctor observes the poisonous heart of things is born and communes with itself. (xi–xii)

Foucault here refers to “that full space in the hollow of which language assumes volume and size” (xi). He italicizes ‘full’ and ‘hollow’, a kind of reciprocity in which discourse constitutes a doubling and complicating spacing: there is a plenitude construed in the very ways that language hollows out things, filling their radical exteriority with meaning. Language is at once empty and full, a spatializing enigma. We need to read in conjunction here Foucault’s early essay on Maurice Blanchot, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside” (1987), along with Blanchot’s powerful understanding of space in his collection of essays, The space of literature (1989).33 We also need to read Foucault’s introduction to the work of Georges Canguilhem 33 During

the 1960s Foucault published a series of essays that appeared in the journal Tel Quel, concerned with analyses of literary figures. A number of these were collected in Language, countermemory, practice (Foucault 1977a), edited by Donald Bouchard, under the heading “Language and the birth of ‘literature’.” These include essays on Bataille, Blanchot, Hölderlin, and Flaubert. There were other essays as well, on Artaud and Klossowski. Particularly important for Foucault at this time was the writing and theoretical texts of Blanchot, engaged especially by Foucault in “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside” (1987). Foucault makes no later reference to these early engagements in developing a radical approach to language. Deleuze (1988) briefly notes Blanchot’s influence, when discussing Foucault’s understanding of the speaking subject: “Here Foucault echoes Blanchot in denouncing all linguistic personology and seeing the different positions for the speaking subject as located within a deep anonymous murmur. It is within this murmur without beginning or end that Foucault would like to be situated, in the place assigned to him by statements. And perhaps these are Foucault’s most moving statements” (7). This anonymous murmur is the primordial possibility for archaeology. Ann Smock, translator of Blanchot’s 1955

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on the normal and the pathological, “Georges Canguilhem: Philosopher of error” (1980c).34 In this conjunction, we begin to recognise how the said and the unsaid find their possibility in a fundamental spatialization and verbalization of the pathological. Foucault suggests that modernity is founded on this essentially biopolitical relation of things to words, that a medical gaze as a regulating and defining discourse enables a complex series of spatial practices, and in fact brings into concert juridical and medical discourses that establish a whole series of spatializings, from the planning of hospitals as spaces of confinement, to civic ordinances that define building codes related to hygiene and habitation.35 With archaeology, Foucault was not especially concerned with an analysis of power, but rather was concerned with how discursive regimes constitute distributions of the true and the false.36 In a 2008 article, “Foucault’s dispositif and the city” (Pløger 2008), the Danish urban theorist, John Pløger, opens a discussion on some of the implications of Foucault’s The birth of the clinic for planning theory. We have introduced The birth of the clinic above in terms of Foucault’s engagement in the 1960s with language and The space of literature (1989), suggests, concerning the enigmatic difficulty of approaching the spacings of this ‘space’: “Although words such as ‘region’ or ‘domain’ or ‘realm’ are often used to designate this zone, it implies the withdrawal of what is ordinarily meant by ‘place’; it suggests the site of this withdrawal. … No-one enters it, though no one who is at all aware of it can leave: … it is frequently called le dehors, ‘the outside’” (10). It is this space that occupies Foucault in determining how words and things find their cohering, how thinking the outside of what has been thought is at all possible. 34 Georges Canguilhem was the supervisor for Foucault’s major thesis, research that led to the publication of History of madness (2006). We have already referenced, via Gutting, Canguilhem in the context of his and Bachelard’s formative influence on Foucault’s archaeology from the viewpoint of philosophy of science and a history of ideas. Canguilhem’s field of research was the biological sciences, which cannot be formalized in the manner of the physical sciences, or sciences of the inorganic, i.e., with mathematical exactness (Gordon 1979, 31). Rather, the question of truth and falsity follows a different path, one Canguilhem defines, after Bachelard, as “veridical discourses” (31). Gordon notes: “[These are] practices governed by the norm of a specified project for the formulation of true propositions. Such discourses are scientific not directly through the actual truth-content of their proposition but through the veridical normativity of their organization as a practice: not their truth but their relation towards a truth” (31). If we use the notion of “veridiction,” its application references precisely what Foucault learns from Canguilhem concerning ‘truth’ as veridical normativity, an opening to a cleave in the understanding of power as that constituted by judicial-political structures, which is to say sovereign State powers, to one determined from below with respect exclusively to practices determinable through normativity and techniques of normalization. We further discuss these notions of truth-telling in the following chapters. 35 In Chapter Two we have already discussed in some detail Foucault’s account of the introduction of social medicine, as a technology of power, constituting disciplinary mechanisms for ensuring a productive labour force. His lecture series, The punitive society, 1972–73 (Foucault 2015), defines a ‘civil war’ between an emerging bourgeoisie and a working class, along with the imposition of new medico-judicial structures that established new mechanisms for an exercise of power producing new formations or mutations of the individual, to engage the demands of capitalism. Foucault recognises this lecture course as one that transitions his concerns with archaeology to those of a genealogy, to be more fully recognised two years later in the publication of Discipline and punish (Foucault 1977d). 36 In his inaugural lecture course at the Collège de France, Lectures on the will to know 1970–71 (Foucault 2013), Foucault is precisely concerned with articulating a series of fundamental concerns

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space or, in his terms, “spatialization and verbalization” (Foucault 1973, xi–xii). A number of Foucault commentators have emphasised the importance of structuralism for Foucault at that time, which means the centrality given to language and its structuration as that which, from a position of radical exteriority to a self, determines the structuring possibilities for what that self is, how it may understand its world and how it may find meaningful action in that world.37 In general, Foucault’s archaeological ‘period’ engages highly original studies of discourse, understood as a languageformation that defines and distributes the very possibilities of utterance, though ‘language’ not entirely reduced or reducible to a structuralist paradigm.38 Initially we orientate our discussion of archaeology to aspects of Pløger’s text, and then draw more general inferences from, in particular, Foucault’s key ‘methodological’ work at this time, The archaeology of knowledge. Pløger commences his discussion, under a heading “Space and the social (body),” in a way similar to our earlier brief discussion, emphasising Foucault’s concern with tracing the transformation of a spatializing and a medical gaze. He notes that Foucault defines three spatializations in eighteenth-century medicine, making further reference to a 2004 publication by Osborne and Rose that extends this discussion to concerns with the social sciences (Pløger 2008, 60; Osbourne and Rose 2004). The problem for Foucault was to understand how two differing orders of space could regarding an understanding of the true and the false. In reference to his opening lecture, “The discourse on language” (Foucault 1972b), Foucault identifies his key concerns: whether the will to truth operates on (“exercises”) “a role of exclusion” (the true excluding the false) in the sense that reason excludes madness. That is, is there a system of prohibitions? This is to ask if will-to-truth is as profoundly historical as any other system of exclusion, as arbitrary in its roots, as modifiable in its history. Such a system is dependent upon and activated by an institutional network, forming a system of constraints not only on discourses but on other practices. Hence his question becomes: How does will-to-truth show its relations of domination, its violence? (Foucault 2013, 2). 37 In 1970, Foucault wrote a special “Foreword” to the English translation of The order of things (1970). In this he provides a succinct “Directions for Use” (ix). The final ‘direction’ is an abrasive one: “This last point is a request to the English-speaking reader. In France, certain half-witted ‘commentators’ persist in labelling me a ‘structuralist’. I have been unable to get it into their tiny minds that I have used none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis” (xiv). Those ‘commentators’ still persist. Certainly, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) may be recognised as a ‘working-through’ of this vexing issue. But we also note, for example, Saldanha (2008), making a very detailed analysis of the emergence of Foucault’s understanding of the heterotopic precisely from his structuralist work in the 1960s. As we will emphasise in our reading of Foucault’s predominant engagements with language in the 1960s, it is not Saussure that constitutes the grounding influence but, rather, Blanchot. See, for example, Foucault’s “The Language of Space” (2007c), a Blanchotian engagement with the writings of Roger Laporte, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Claude Ollier and Michel Butor, written in 1964 for the journal Critique. 38 Foucault does go on to say in that acerbic “Forward” to The order of things: “There may well be certain similarities between the works of the structuralists and my own work. It would hardly behoove me, of all people, to claim that my discourse is independent of conditions and rules of which I am largely unaware, and which determine other work that is being done today” (Foucault 1970, xiv). In that respect, Foucault sees his own research as a field that in part attempts to engage the very emergence of structuralism itself as a determinant human science. As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) suggest in their Preface: “Foucault told us that the real subtitle of The order of things was An archaeology of structuralism” (vii).

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be superimposed or be assumed to be coincident, and how they need to be thought together and in their specific differences. These two orders are what might be termed the ‘space’ of a disease, how it is conceptualized, its space of configuration within a particular order of knowing and field of discourse. That other space is that of localization of an illness, a specific body exhibiting symptoms. Foucault’s question, in The birth of the clinic, is how a physical, material body in its specificity and singularity finds contiguity with that space of configuration, that order of discourse. How does medical science and an individual who is ill find their locus of convergence (Foucault 1973, 3)? Hence, Foucault defines three different spatializations that may account for a certain dynamic movement between the body of a disease and the body of the sick (3). The primary spatialization, then, is the classificatory space of a disease, a certain space within our order of knowing. Yet, such a ‘space’ does not at all coincide with the space a disease occupies in a body: “The space of the body and the space of the disease possess enough latitude to slide away from one another. … The system of points that defines the relation of the disease to the organism is neither constant nor necessary. They do not pass a common, previously defined space” (10). Hence, from the point of view of the body, one must understand the disease according to entirely new procedures, such that between localization and configuration we find not the converging of a set of characteristics but the definition of their reciprocal freedom (11). We are able to here recognise a medical gaze caught between, on the one hand, a medicine of species, a medicine of general codifications and, on the other hand, the patient whose body conceals and reveals, or distorts and gives free play to what was considered the ordered form of a disease and its functioning. Thus, a tertiary spatialization opens in order to manage, so to speak, the thresholds that distend and bring close the other two spaces. This is a space of practices or “gestures,” practical spaces of confinement and action, concrete spaces of procedures and techniques, designed spaces for managing the threshold spaces of medicine and the ill (16). This is the formation of a social space of medical practice whose laws of formation are of a different order to those that defined the spaces of configuration and the spaces of localization.39

39 The invention of the institutional site for this social space of medicine is the key theme of The birth of the clinic. The clinic or hospital in its modern form did not simply emerge as the logical convergence of the three problematic spaces just mentioned. Far from it. Hospital spaces in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not recognize the coincident ordering of medical knowledge and the spatializing of the hospital. For a comprehensive discussion of this see Foucault’s, “The incorporation of the hospital into modern technology” (Foucault, 2007d, 141–151). Importantly, the 1974 lecture engages Foucault more with questions of techniques of power, disciplinary mechanisms and the twin concerns of individuation and population than was the case with his analyses in The birth of the clinic, with how the spatializations and verbalizations of disease are made to be seen and to speak. In Chapter Two we engaged in some detail, especially in Delaporte’s account of cholera in Paris, with the difficulties for medical practices to bring these spatial differentiations, those of disease and bodies, into alignment. In Delaporte’s account this was especially so given there were four competing understandings of the spatializing of disease, along with emphases, not on the bodies of the ill, but their milieu.

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Osborne and Rose, as discussed by Pløger, suggest a more general form for this trinity of spatializations outlined by Foucault. In general, they recognise that spaces of codification concern precisely the ordering of discourses; secondary spatializations concern a particular recognition of things, such that the opacity of things becomes increasingly transparent to a representing capacity; tertiary spatializations concern investigatory practices which may well include the concretion of techniques or technologies, and procedures. They thus suggest the first concerns modelling of phenomena in the social realm, that all phenomena are able to be engaged spatially; the second concerns realization, giving recognition to how space is made thinkable and space materialized. The third concerns what they call demarcation, the concrete recognition of spatial topologies and differences: for example, how spatial practices demarcate, in their differences, a hospital, a ghetto or a prison (or at times cannot so differentiate between these) (Pløger 2008, 61). Pløger extends this analysis specifically to urban planning: “Extending further, modelling is concerned with how urban life is thought in politics and planning, the secondary realization is the plan and its thought-representation of urban life, and the tertiary is the plan’s materialization in place. Architects and urbanists design the spatial forms that should ‘ensure a certain allocation of people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations’ (Foucault, 1984, 253)” (61).40 It is important to note that these three spatializations seem to persist within Foucault’s thinking, though undergo transformations, as Foucault shifts his methodological concerns to the veridictions of Genealogy, and then to concerns with normalization and techniques of the self. Hence, in the mid-to-late 1970s, Foucault establishes a fundamental relation between three modalities or expressions of power: programmes of power, technologies of power and strategies of power (see Gordon 1979). If we explore the essential differentiations between these three, we recognise a spatialization and articulation that very much reflects the primary, secondary and tertiary spatializations determined in The birth of the clinic, which is to say, firstly, a domain of discursive formations concerned with rational determinations of the true and the false and hence defining norms with respect to pathologies (for example, disease, delinquency, ignorance, habitation); secondly a domain of bodies as ‘subjects’ or ‘objects’ of techniques, technologies and procedures, also rationally determinable, aimed at normalization of a field or milieu of pathologies, whether they be the sick, the criminal, the uneducated or the poorly housed and planned-for; and a tertiary field of practices which aim to find a determination between these spaces, for example, the medical gaze of clinical practice, disciplinary procedures of punitive practices, pedagogical procedures, or techniques and procedures of planning, such that the aberrant or abnormal body is encountered and normalized (Gordon 1979, 35). Gordon (1979) emphasises, with respect to The birth of the clinic, that Foucault’s method is not concerned with determining causal principles for the transformations of medical knowledge during the nineteenth century, principles such as economic analysis or class interest: 40 Pløger

is referencing Foucault’s “Space, knowledge, power” (Foucault 1984a).

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Instead it analyses a multiplicity of political, social, institutional, technical and theoretical conditions of possibility, reconstructing a heterogeneous system of relations and effects whose contingent interlocking makes up what Foucault calls the historical a priori of the ‘clinical gaze’. What it thus achieves is a form of historical intelligibility whose concreteness and materiality resides in the very irreducibility of the distinct orders of events whose relations it plots. (33)

Gordon’s summary of Foucault’s text is as well an excellent summary of the aims of archaeology. Indeed, Gordon suggests that The archaeology of knowledge precisely reworks the procedures in The birth of the clinic into a more general approach concerning “history, ideas and ideology” (33). He also notes, contrary to some readings of Foucault, that the fundamental methods of archaeology remain with Foucault, when he moves to concerns with power and genealogy (34).

4.3.2 Continuities and Discontinuities There are some key notions introduced in The archaeology of knowledge (1972a), what might be called, provisionally, ‘technical terminology’ for Foucault, that require discussing. These include the notions of the “discursive” and the “non-discursive,” which require elucidation in relation to the notions of “enunciation” and “enunciative modalities.” As well, Foucault innovates or renovates what Kant meant by the term a priori, inventing a new way of understanding the a priori as exterior to a self—as ‘historical’. Foucault opens The archaeology of knowledge by evoking how orthodox historians seek to explore and map history as stable systems with an underlying coherence, that can be studied and analysed via inherited models from the techno-sciences. For Foucault, the use of statistics, population data, climate studies, economic modelling and forms of quantitative research allow historians to read this data as various strata of the sedimentation of history (Foucault 1972a, 3). His approach to history seeks to shake the stability of such analyses by countering implicit assumption of progress. In his ‘Introduction’, Foucault suggests there were, at the time he was developing the book, two concurrent formations within a general field of history. On the one hand, there were those he associates with the Annales School, concerned with continuities: For many years now historians have turned their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather forces, and are reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events. (3)41 41 The Annales School dominated French social history and historiography for much of the twentieth century. Key figures were Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, with a fourth generation led by Roger Chartier. Its historiography focused on pre-Revolutionary France and Europe and was concerned with long durations of cultural and economic patterning, discerned particularly through quantitative data analysis. We may also contrast Foucault’s archaeology to the historian,

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Foucault contrasts this immediately with the emergence of something different that has centred on those researching a history of science, history of ideas or history of philosophy. He associates this contrast with contemporary thinkers, as with Bachelard’s “epistemological acts and thresholds,” Canguilhem’s “displacements and transformations,” Michel Serres’s “recurrent distributions” or Martial Guéroult’s “internal coherences … compatibilities” (4–5). In short: The problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations. … How is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation)? (5)

From this emphasis, many commentators recognised Foucault as the great historian of discontinuities. Yet we see in The archaeology of knowledge, on the page following the above citation, the precise moment when Foucault defines the object of analysis that suggests the proximity and distance he has to both the ‘continuists’ and ‘discontinuists’. He would count himself strictly as neither one nor the other. Thus, Foucault suggests: “But we must not be taken in by this apparent interchange. Despite appearances, we must not imagine that certain historical disciplines have moved from the continuous to the discontinuous … that these two great forms of description have crossed without recognising one another” (6). Perhaps Foucault sees a contribution here to what he will call the history of systems of thought, in delineating that meeting-point of recognition, that ‘space’ where the very materiality of practices, encountered within each of these discursive fields, comes to find that space of its otherness. Thus, we recognise the crucial beginning for archaeology: “In fact, the same problems are being posed in either case, but they have provoked opposite effects on the surface. These problems may be summed up in the word: the question of the document” (6). The continuists encounter the document as a voice silenced, and their aim is to enable that document to speak, to enable a memory, a memorializing, a becoming-monument: “history is that which transforms documents into monuments” (7). Hence history is concerned with unities and totalities where documents comprise Niall Ferguson, and his reading of the British Empire as an agent for the development of Modernity. Ferguson’s question “…is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity.” (2003, xxviii). While recognising the British Empire’s role as a conquering power, Ferguson sees empire as having a positive agency, which ties into his critique of modern development. He recognises the role of geographic and economic factors, which he intrinsically links to the positive role the British Empire had on development via the introduction of British common law as well as the economic and political philosophy of Anglophone liberalism towards colonised nations (371). Ferguson traces this by reviewing historical texts and explores economic growth with the use of statistical analysis (379), though little attention is given to why modernity emerged at this period or how it was possible for it to take the formation that it did. Ferguson’s methods have convergence with those of the Annales, though radically different aims. Both, in some respects, are dealing with the emergence of modernity. Ferguson links this to Britain being a stabilising economic and political power (373). In distinction to both, Foucault seeks to critique contemporary claims to knowledge by means of historical analysis.

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memory.42 Opposed to this, the discontinuists see the document in another light. Documents are no longer the memory traces for a consciousness that needs to be resuscitated from out of the past. Rather, documents are the working materials of history or, rather, history is not some account waiting to be rediscovered and verified, but precisely the work done on documents: History is the work expended on material documentation (books, texts, accounts, registers, acts, buildings, institutions, laws, techniques, objects, customs, etc.) that exist, in every time and place, in every society, either in a spontaneous or a consciously organized form. …history is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked. (7)43

Foucault draws four key consequences from these coincident approaches to an understanding of the document, four consequences that constitute the grounds for understanding archaeology, and indeed what follows for Foucault in successive transformations or discontinuous approaches to the field of documents that determine his research. Firstly, he mentions the proliferation of discontinuities within the research fields of histories of ideas. Continuities, unities and totalities no longer form the basis, foundation or starting or end point for historical understanding but rather key concerns become the question of how to establish series, boundaries, thresholds, and regularities with respect to transformations. Secondly, for classical history, discontinuity was always considered precisely as that which required explanation, or overcoming. It was precisely where historical consciousness had an unfortunate gap that needed all the more focus with respect to causalities and origins. This new history no longer sees discontinuity as an “obstacle”: “… where it no longer plays the role of an external condition that must be reduced, but that of a working concept” (9). The third consequence is a transformation of the project or discourse of history from that of a total history to that of what Foucault calls a “general history”: “A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre — a principle, meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of a dispersion” (10). Let us momentarily hold back on the fourth consequence, which is less easy to briefly summarise than these first three. In returning to the three spatializations we discussed from The birth of the clinic, we may recognise some correlations with what Foucault is concerned with in this introduction to The archaeology of knowledge. As Gordon (1979) emphasises, The birth of the clinic does not seek to find unities and totalities, causes and teleologies with respect to 42 Thus, architectural histories become histories of monuments, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, ‘histories of the victors’ that an historical materialist reads against the grain (Benjamin 1968, 256–257). As Benjamin suggests in “Excavate and Remember”: “Memory is not an instrument for the reconnaissance of what is past but rather its medium. It is the medium of that which has been lived out just as the soil is the medium in which old cities lie buried. Whoever seeks to gaze more closely at one’s own buried past must proceed like a man who excavates. Above all, he must not shy away from coming back time and again to one and the same object—scatter it just as one scatters earth, root it up just as one roots up the soil” (cited in Frisby 1985, 223). 43 History is immanent to practices of documenting rather than being work done to the inert matter of things.

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the transformations of medical practices it vividly describes. Rather, it maintains its specific object, a medical gaze, in its dispersion (33). We may begin to read Foucault’s first consequence aligning with what he considered the first spatialization of a medical gaze, a space of configuration of disease as an object of discourse, where that space is thought not in terms of its causal origin but in terms of its boundaries, limits, threshold and transformation, or how ‘disease’ becomes systematised discursively as an object of thought. Secondly, Foucault is concerned with a space of localization, where a specific body becomes the object of a medical gaze, or where the localization of disease may enter into a dispersion that is, for example, proper to its fields of contagion or milieu of incubation, hence, again, an unstable space of transformation. It is here that a medical gaze is not so much a specific object of a discursive strategy but an operational technique that acts on things, where a patient’s body is a document that presents precisely a problem of transparency and opacity. We recognize Foucault’s second and third consequences, outlined in the ‘Introduction’ to The archaeology of knowledge, where discontinuity becomes a working concept and not an obstacle, and specific objects of analysis are understood not in their unity but in their dispersion, as that which construes precisely an understanding of ‘localization’ as a problem space for the historical, determined by a new encounter with the material conditions of documents, their discontinuities, ruptures and dispersions.44 This analysis then suggests that Foucault’s tertiary spatiality in The birth of the clinic correlates with the fourth consequence he outlines in The archaeology of knowledge. When Foucault introduces his fourth consequence of considering the document in its motile and fragile transformation, we re-encounter that tertiary spatiality: “the locus of various dialectics: heterogeneous figures, time lags, political struggles, demands and utopias, economic constraints, social confrontations” (Foucault 1973, 16). This is to say, we encounter the complicating and discontinuous spaces of possible recognition of configurations and localizations, that emphasis given to the methodological procedures of archaeology. These new procedures open spaces of enquiry freed from the overarching rationalities and teleologies of historical developments. They also encounter precisely the open field of contingency or possibility, in determining how spaces of configuration and spaces of localization coincide. We now discuss these procedures and their consequences.

4.3.3 Archive, Episteme, Discourse, Historical a Priori Foucault uses the term archaeology as an open-ended project, which forms a horizon of enquiry exploring discursive formations, analyses of “positivities,” “enunciative fields” and “historical a prioris” (Foucault 1972a). He links this to the idea of the 44 This, in a sense, is how we need to approach the emphasis given by Kwinter to the notion of ‘flows’ in Requiem for the city: “the city [as] a perpetually organizing field of forces in movement, each city a specific and unique combination of historical modalities in dynamic composition” (58).

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archive: “Archaeology describes discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive” (131). This notion of ‘archive’ does not adhere, philologically, to our understanding of archive as arche or the idea of origins or beginnings, nor does it refer to geological excavation. Rather, as Elden suggests: “… in the sense he understands his research, it is closer to being an archiveology” (Elden 2001, 54). Foucault notes in his ‘Introduction’ to The archaeology of knowledge: There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past, aspired to the condition of history, and attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument. (Foucault 1972a, 7)

Foucault begins by introducing a peculiar notion of discourse, a notion that, perhaps, had been most formalized by Émile Benveniste in his highly original publication, Problems in general linguistics (1971).45 Discourse becomes central as a theoretical rather than procedural problem within the general space of what Foucault terms those unsure frontiers of “the history of ideas, or of thought, or of science, or of knowledge” (Foucault 1972a, 21).46 A first task was to rid the notion of discourse of a range of negativities, all of those notions of unity, totality, spirit, origin, authorial 45 Benveniste’s pioneering work on linguistics, in the early-to-mid twentieth century, placed a particular focus on what became known as ‘shifters’ or the performative role of pronouns and adverbial expressions such as ‘here’ or ‘there’ which are context-dependent. This led Benveniste to a fundamental distinction between the ‘énounce’ and the ‘énounciation’, a distinction famously taken up by the French structuralist psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, as the fundamental split in the subject, constituted on the fact that the subject of enunciation never coincides with the enunciating subject. Thus, for Benveniste, there is a fundamental distinction between the context-free statements of language, and the context-embedded discursive instances, in the actualization of discourse. Language itself is, thus, fundamentally discourse. We recognise the extent to which Foucault engages, in his ‘discursive formations’, the statement as the anonymity of an ‘it is said’ of language that constitutes the subject-position of a speaking being. We recognise the difficulty in separating archaeology from structuralism in the coincidence of Foucault’s engagements with discourse, énounce and statement, all taken up in aspects of structuralism following from the work of Benveniste, though equally recognise that discourse, statement and enunciation cannot be reduced to the Saussurian categories of langue and parole. See particularly the “Conclusion” to The archaeology of knowledge for a peculiar exchange-with-himself by Foucault on the relation of Saussure’s langue and structuralism in general, to his notion of discourse (Foucault 1972a, 199–201). 46 Roberto Machado, in his essay “Archaeology and epistemology” (1992), points out that in The order of things (1970), Foucault extends his previous readings of medicine and psychiatry which “… constitute what amounts to a general theory of human sciences” (Machado 1992, 12). Foucault applies and formulates the archaeological method which, for Machado, is quite distinct from the rest of his work prior or after. Central to the understanding of archaeology as a methodology is the role of episteme, best understood in terms of savoir or ‘theoretical’ knowledge (12). The order of things is presented as a history of theoretical knowledge (12). What is new to archaeology is that theoretical knowledge [savoir] has a positive nature: “… the sense attributed to it by epistemology – that is to say, as a quality specific to scientific discourse” (12). This positive science was to be distinguished from the positivism of structuralism, with which Foucault vehemently refused to be associated. Elden perhaps is correct to suggest that Foucault’s archaeological work owed much to the French intellectual scene of the 1960s. However, Elden identifies two fundamental differences between structuralism and Foucault’s work (see Elden 2001, 101). Firstly, structuralism tends to seek out atemporal structures minimising the importance of history, which is contrasted to

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intention, oeuvre, all of the configurations that would lead to continuities, causalities and finalities. What is then left of discourse? What is left is the evidential document in its positivity, what Foucault will call the “statement,” the “it is said”: Once these immediate forms of continuity are suspended, an entire field is set free. A vast field, but one that can be defined nonetheless: this field is made up of the totality of all effective statements (whether spoken or written), in their dispersion as events and in their occurrence that is proper to them. (26–27)

We commenced this chapter with a short epigraph from Foucault’s “Question of method” interview. That quote commenced with the awkward term ‘eventalizing’. There is something essential to an understanding of discourse, statement, archive, enunciation and the ‘it is said’ that hinges on this notion of event, the ‘that it happens’ in its positivity of what will come to be encountered as documents. From the beginning, within the orbit of a concern with a ‘history of ideas’, Foucault’s focus was never on codifications of knowledge as the more-or-less totalising account of what would amount to truth. He was concerned with discourse, not as systematic recounting of what is, but as a practice among other practices. Hence an emphasis on ‘event’ is an emphasis on practices that determine in their heterogeneity, in what is, perhaps, an assumed or ideal space of their convergence—but actually is in the radicality of their dispersions—how it is that formations of knowing or, more basically, words and things find their intersections. Hence, in The archaeology of knowledge, Foucault defines the statement, and again in three key modalities: A statement is always an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust. It is certainly a strange event: first, because … it is linked to writing or the articulation of speech … to the field of memory … or other forms of recording; secondly, like every event, it is unique, yet subject to repetitions, transformations, and reactivations; thirdly because it is linked not only to the situations that provoke it, and to the consequences that it gives rise to, but … to the statements that precede and follow it. (28)

Without wanting to appear at all reductive with respect to Foucault’s thinking, we may again find a resonance between these three conditions of the statement as event, and the three spatializations outlined in The birth of the clinic, spaces of configuration, as with the events of discursive formations of statements and constitutions of archives; spaces of localization, in the unique and singular encounter that is, at the same time, open to repetitions, variations and transformations; and spaces of procedures that enable situated emergence of statements, and their effects in constituting discursive Foucault’s archaeological method that approaches its target from a historico-ontological perspective (101). Secondly, while certain structuralists used spatial metaphors, Foucault conversely investigated actual spaces such as the prison, the clinic or the ship, to contextualise the spaces of history (101). Rather than being shaped by structuralism, Foucault’s archaeological method is shaped by thinkers such as Althusser, Bachelard and Canguilhem. The other major influence is that of Nietzsche and Heidegger (97). Whilst much of his analysis focuses on the sciences, Foucault is able to analyse the epistemological figures and sciences through archaeology, leading to quite a different set of questions and orientations than a more orthodox history of ideas: “it is by questioning the sciences, their history, their strange unity, their dispersion, and their rupture, that the domain of positivities was able to appear, it is in the interstice of scientific discourses that we were able to grasp the play of discursive formations.” (Foucault 1972a, 195).

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regularities.47 The archive is not a repository for the systematic storing or housing of statements. Rather it is the system of formation and transformation of statements. As Foucault suggests: “It designates the general theme of a description that questions the already said at the level of its existence: of the enunciative function that operates within it, of the discursive formation, and the general archive system to which it belongs” (131). The role of archaeology is at the level of the already-said. Hence the archive is a system that constitutes the space of what can be said: “The archive is the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (129). Yet, we cannot separate Foucault’s understanding of archive from the determination he made concerning the a priori. We understand by this term precisely that which must come before experience, in order that there is an essential systematicity to our forms of knowing. Hence, the Kantian a prioris of intuition—space and time—are ‘innate’ so to speak, and make possible any intuition of extension, or any experience of temporality.48 Equally, the a prioris of Understanding are universal determinants, whereby particular intuitions are brought within the certainty of determinant judgement. Kant’s transcendental Faculties rely on the internal systematicity of the a prioris, which are thus, as what comes before experience, atemporal and universal. Thus, there is something quite incongruous with Foucault’s introduction of the notion of ‘historical a prioris’. Elden suggests: Foucault accepts that juxtaposing these two words produces a ‘rather startling effect’ as the standard understanding of a priori is that it is ahistorical, absolute. Foucault’s term does not simply mean that the a priori is also endowed with a history, rather he is introducing a notion of pluralism into the history of ideas, in that there have been several a priori structures in various disciplines, that conditioned possibilities in those subjects. This bears definite comparison with the understanding of the history of science found in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Foucault is, like Nietzsche and the later Heidegger, historicising the Kantian question. Foucault’s understanding of the historical a priori does not function as ‘a condition 47 On the issue of Foucault’s ‘thinking’, whether we are ‘reductive’ or otherwise, we need to proceed

with caution. This is the ‘philosopher’ who opens his “Discourse on language” (1972b) with an appeal to an enigmatic anonymity: “I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it …” (Foucault 1972b, 215). This is also the philosopher who concludes his text “What is an author?” with suggesting, on the one hand the “tiresome repetitions” of “Who is the real author? Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?” and “new questions” to pose: “What are the modes of existence of this discourse? … What matter who’s speaking?” (Foucault 1977g, 138) This is also the philosopher who read with Nietzsche that it is the body that forms the surface into which history is inscribed (Patton 1979, 117). Thus, we want to avoid approaching Foucault as if he is constituted in the continuity of an authorial presence, exemplified in the empirico-rationality of a transcendental ego. 48 The standard reference here is Kant’s Critique of pure reason (1985). In the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements,” Kant provides Part I and Part II. Part I concerns the “Transcendental Aesthetic” dealing with space and time and the a prioris of intuition. Part II deals with the “Transcendental Logic” whose First Division, “Transcendental Analytic” concerns the a prioris of Understanding. Hence, for Kant: “Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experience. … Space is a necessary a priori representation” (Kant 1985, 68).

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of validity for judgements, but a condition of reality for énoncés’. In other words he is not looking to see whether énoncés are true, but how they are possible. (Elden 2001, 96)

While it is possible to have an archive of a particular period, culture, society, or civilisation, it can never be totalising. Importantly, Foucault points out that it is not possible for us to discuss “our” present archive, as it is from the rules with which we speak that it gives to what we say the object of our discourse, with various modes of appearance, existence, co-existence and systems of accumulation, historicity and disappearance. It is these that are shaped by historical a prioris, combining the objectivity of “a priori” which is atemporal and absolute, with the relativity of the “historical” (Foucault 1972a, 126–131). Foucault is able to illuminate the historical formations of discursive practices as not atemporal universal truths, but rather as shaped by the frameworks of knowledge, which exist within a particular epoch (Elden 2001). It is this exploration of discursive formations and underlying structures of thought that led some commentators to link Foucault’s work on archaeology with structuralism (Foucault 1970, xiv). Foucault points out in The archaeology of knowledge that a single discursive field (such as architecture, or planning, or urban design), with its range of overlapping and communicating authors, forms a positivity of their discourse “… and the conditions of operation of the enunciative function” whether conscious of it or not, “… which defines a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical interchange may be deployed. Thus, positivity plays the role of what might be called a historical a priori” (Foucault 1972a, 127).

4.4 Conclusion 4.4.1 Fabula and Spacing In this brief, and partial, account of Foucault’s archaeology, we have especially focused on bringing discussion back to what seems to be an insistent engagement with spatiality in Foucault’s work. In the chapter that follows, we introduce Foucault’s understanding of power, and the relations he determined between power and knowledge. We address there more fully Foucault’s account of his orientation to questions of spatiality and the relative neglect given to space by European philosophy since the Enlightenment. Presently, we discuss Foucault’s more overt engagement with questions of spatiality during the 1960s, where ‘space’ may be read as more than a convenient—though crucial—metaphor, as it possibly could in, for example, The birth of the clinic, with ‘spaces’ of configuration, localization and procedure. Important to a discussion of Foucault’s approach to spatiality during the 1960s is his notion of the heterotopic. Heterotopia is introduced in 1966 in the “Introduction” to The order of things (1970), in the context of Foucault discussing what set him on the path to produce that book, with its curious approach to the question of a systematicity to knowing. It was a text by J. L. Borges, a certain “Chinese Encyclopaedia” that

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disturbed what we would take to be a natural order for the classification of things: “the taxonomy it proposes, lead to a kind of thought without space, to words and categories that lack all life and place, but are rooted in ceremonial space, overburdened with complex figures, with tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, and unexpected communication” (Foucault 1970, xix). Here Foucault contrasts the fabula of spacing into utopias and heterotopias: This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences. (xviii)

In that same year (1966), he delivered a two-part radio broadcast on the topic of heterotopias, that opened to a different space of encounter than that found in The order of things. If this initial mention refers to textual space, or discursive spaces, his radio broadcasts engaged more with social space, or what Foucault comes to differentiate, at the opening to The archaeology of knowledge, as the difference between the theoretical and the procedural.49 Peter Johnson (2006) notes, concerning these broadcasts: The brief 12-minute broadcast is fascinating as it follows the same shape as the later betterknown lecture but with some distinctive features both in content and style. In particular, his opening illustrations of the concept refer to various children’s games played on or under the covers of the parents’ bed. The children’s inventive play produces a different space that at the same time mirrors what is around them. The space reflects and contests simultaneously. (Johnson 2006, 76)

On the enthusiastic reception of this broadcast by a number of French architects, in 1967 Foucault delivered a talk on the topic, Des Espaces Autre, “Of Other Spaces.” It is not a notion that he directly engaged again by name. It does not feature again as an invented concept in his work, though what that concept invents, we suggest, never leaves his preoccupations. In fact, he was a little reluctant to have that lecture from 1967 published, and it was only close to his death that he gave permission, the text first appearing in translation in Diacritics in 1987 (see Foucault 2008). The heterotopic was enthusiastically received once published, and appears in a number of further publications, with two alternative English translations and under two titles, the other one being “Different Spaces.” Architects and urban geographers, particularly from the 1990s, began working with this notion. With resurgence in Foucault studies 49 The opening sentence to Chapter One of The archaeology of knowledge (1972a) notes: “The use of

concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation present all historical analysis not only with questions of procedure, but with theoretical problems. It is these problems that will be studied here (the questions of procedure will be examined in later empirical studies …” (21). Thus, Foucault differentiates this methodological engagement from his earlier studies of madness, the clinic and transformations in the episteme, along with proposed future empirical studies. One then sees the initial introduction of the heterotopic as a ‘theoretical problem’ and his later presentation to architects more as procedural, though it would be a mistake to definitively draw a distinction here, as we see in his research, after The archaeology of knowledge, Foucault does not again attempt a purely methodological exposition.

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in the first decade of this century, the heterotopic has become increasingly popular. There is a book-length study: Heterotopia and the city: Public space in a post-civil society (2008), and numerous articles and references that attempt either to downplay the notion in light of it not being further deployed by Foucault, or to recognize its essential concern with Foucault’s work from beginning to end.50 There’s a surface reading to be done, without a doubt, as with the collection of articles in Heterotopia and the City, that finds in every shopping mall, gated community, multiplex cinema, theme park, cemetery, or gendered space an exemplary locus for pointing to the heterotopic.51 Foucault made this surface reading easy. He suggests that we have spatial arrangements that we encounter in an everyday and unproblematic way, whose laws, procedures, norms and disciplines are in a readyto-hand way, forgotten though enacted. Then there are other spaces, real spaces of occupation and habitation, whose procedures, disciplines, borders and laws have valence in contradistinction to all of the other real spaces we might inhabit. Hence, Foucault proceeds to give exemplars of such heterotopias under headings that include 50 We briefly reference Saldanha (2008), a text that engages a thorough critique of Foucault’s writing

on the heterotopic as enmeshed in structuralist and Hegelian legacies. The text strongly suggests that Foucault saw the dead end he had come to with this notion, which is why he never again referenced it directly: “From a close reading of Foucault’s notes, and with the help of Deleuze, Derrida, and Althusser, it is suggested that the spatiality of Foucault’s heterotopology repeats certain flaws of the structuralism in vogue in 1960s France” (Saldanha 2008, 2080). Saldanha critically discusses some of the major adoptions of the heterotopic by other scholars, including Edward Soja’s Postmodern geographies (1989), Thirdspace (1996) and Soja’s discussion of Lefebvre’s adoption of the term (Soja, 2003). As well, he discusses Hetherington (1997) and Casarino (2002). Johnson (2006) has an altogether different engagement with the emergence of the heterotopic with Foucault. It was not the structuralist vogue of the 1960s but, rather, Foucault’s close engagement with the works of Bachelard, Alexander Koyré (1957) and, especially, Blanchot’s The space of literature (1986) and The most high (1996). He also makes detailed comment on both Lefebvre’s (2003) and Bakhtin’s (1984) engagements with related terms, including a contrast between ‘utopia’ and ‘heterotopy’ for Lefebvre. 51 Having said that, we consider this to be an important book engaging essential Foucauldian scholarship. Its premise coincides to an extent with that of Kwinter (2010) on a requiem for the city or, in this case, requiem for a city understood as the expression of civil society: “At the dawn of the twenty-first century, in the face of the war on terror, global warming as a planetary disaster and the obscene spreading of poverty turning our world into a ‘planet of slums’ (Davis 2006), this debate [over democracy and the welfare state] and the terms under which it was conducted increasingly sound like a requiem for a civil society. … This requiem for the city, the lament of public space, placed the private-public dichotomy at centre stage, but has at the same time worn out its analytical force. … It is on this treacherous terrain that Foucault’s notion of heterotopia can shed a new light” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008, 3). There are three trajectories to this edited collection: (i) the reinvention of the everyday; (ii) the privatization of public space; (iii) post-civil society: heterotopia versus the camp, an allusion to Agamben’s Homo sacer (1998). This latter trajectory is a powerful one when read closely in conjunction with Foucault’s lecture courses 1977–1979 at the Collège de France, on the emergence of liberalism, and especially neo-liberalism in the twentieth century and its relation to the governmentality of the Welfare State. This was key to our analytics in the previous chapter on the U.S. housing market for the poor, and the rise of derivatives as that which kept this high-risk market afloat, at least until the entire banking industry went down. Indeed, introducing the thinking of the heterotopic into the question of governmentality is original and important. Though the texts in this collection, for the most part, do not engage sufficiently

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a range of spaces of deviancy, transgression, risk and play, along with what he terms spaces of ‘other’ times.52 He emphasizes that heterotopias are not constants but vary from culture to culture and may emerge and vanish. Examples he gives are cemeteries, motels, military barracks, boarding schools, parks, ships, ports, brothels, libraries, and cultural theme villages. There is little wonder that spatial disciplines have enthusiastically encountered the heterotopic proliferating as the urban itself. This is particularly so, given that the laws by which we come to understand urban assemblage have been trembling in seismic registers, under the shock of cultural philosophy’s de-structuring of foundations everywhere. Foucault produces this text on the heterotopic at an interesting moment, one that encounters heterogeneity in his own work, construing a topos, a spacing that deserves some attention. On the one hand, Foucault was close to a body of writing engaging the philosophico-literary figures of Klossowski, Roussel, Bataille, but especially Blanchot.53 On the other hand, Foucault was deeply engaged in the enormous legacy, in France at least, of the thinking of Canguilhem’s On the normal and the pathological (1978). Hence, we see in 1966 the coincidence of Foucault’s “Introduction” to Canguilhem’s On the normal and the pathological (1978), his “Maurice Blanchot: The thought from outside,” (Foucault 1987) and his work on the heterotopic. “Of other spaces” construes a peculiar and difficult intersection of essential concerns of Blanchot and Canguilhem, concerns with understandings of spatiality that come from the most exhaustive engagements we see with Blanchot’s somewhat Heideggerian encounter with the space of writing, with the withdrawal of Being (the Outside) and the locus of the outside of the Outside (Foucault 1987).54 But there with that material. They are more ‘procedural’ in Foucault’s distinction, than ‘theoretical’, more empirical form-analysis engagements with urban structuration than methodological consideration of how discursive practices open to relations of force. This, basically, is our criticism. 52 Foucault offers six “principles” for providing definition of heterotopias (18). The first principle is that heterotopias appear in all cultures. They may initially have been “heterotopias of crisis” that are fast disappearing and now becoming “heterotopias of deviation” (18). The second principle holds that a heterotopia, over time, may vary its function within a society. Third principle concerns heterotopias that juxtapose in a single real space “several emplacements that are in themselves incompatible” (19). The fourth principle opens the space of the heterotopic to time, to “heterochronisms” (20). Fifth principle alerts us to the fact that certain real spaces are at once isolated and penetrable, either through constraint or through rites of passage (21). The sixth and last principle suggests that heterotopias have a function in relation to the rest of space, either as places of illusion, exposing all real spaces as even more illusory, or as spaces of definite order, in relation to the disorder of all other places, as spaces of compensation. Foucault concludes: “The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, and the police the pirates” (22). 53 Faubion’s edited Volume Two of the Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984 (Foucault 1998c) has a good collection of Foucault’s writings on Bataille, “A preface to transgression” (69–87); Roussel, “Speaking and seeing in Raymond Roussel” (21–31); Klossowski, “The prose of Actaeon” (123–135); and Blanchot, “The thought from outside” (147–169). These appear in Part One of the collection, under the title, ‘Aesthetics’. For a comprehensive discussion of Foucault’s relations to these thinkers, see Eleanor Kaufman, The delirium of praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (2001). 54 Note that the English title to this work is variously “Thought of the outside” or “The thought from outside.” Blanchot scholarship suggests the latter to be more appropriate, in the sense that,

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is also concern with something essential to a question of life, the living, the true and error, as Canguilhem engaged fundamentally a reversal of our approach to the normal and the pathological, explored especially in Foucault’s “Georges Canguilhem, philosopher of error” (Foucault 1980c). In “Of other spaces,” we note the curious reference to “demography” as the milieu in which the “problem of place or emplacement arises” (Foucault 2008, 15). It is, perhaps, here, in a confluence of Blanchot and Canguilhem, that we are able to recognise the emergence of “biopower” as a paradigmatic ontology for Foucault a decade prior to his introduction of this notion in the Collège de France lectures, Society must be defended 1975–76 (Foucault 2003). In short, “Of other spaces” engages the fundamental pathologies of spatiality, out of which, and through our constant errancy, we construe the normal. Foucault (1987) emphasizes the placeless place in Blanchot’s fictions: not showing the invisible but showing the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible. One is irreducibly outside the Outside. Attraction is precisely that signifying regime that makes clear the Outside is there, open but inaccessible: hence, from for Blanchot, the Outside is precisely what ‘thought’ cannot itself ‘think’, but rather the Outside remains the unthought of thought and thus that from which thinking what yet is unthought ‘comes’. Hence there is the enigma of its spacing. We emphasise the coincident mention in Foucault’s text on Blanchot and in his lecture on the heterotopic, of the crucial notion of ‘emplacement’. The discussion that mentions emplacement in “The thought from outside” (1987) opens a crucial way to think what is ultimately at stake in what Foucault understands as ‘other’ spaces. As we have emphasized throughout this chapter, there is something crucial for Foucault in engaging spatialization and verbalization, the question of their possible encounter. This question is essential in Foucault’s engagements with literature or fiction: “In fact, the event that gave rise to what we call ‘literature’ in the strict sense is only superficially an interiorization; it is far more a question of a passage to the ‘outside’: language escapes the mode of being of discourse—in other words the dynasty of representation—and literary speech develops from itself, forming a network in which each point is distinct, distant from even its closest neighbors, and has a position in relation to every other point in a space that simultaneously holds and separates them all” (12). Already we have the dynamic register of the heterotopic, where each real space of otherness has a relation to all other spaces, crucially considered not from the totality of a structuralist framework but, rather, from a peculiar understanding of language as neutral void: “The reason it is now so necessary to think through fiction—while in the past it was a matter of thinking the truth—is that ‘I speak’ runs counter to ‘I think’. ‘I think’ led to the indubitable certainty of the ‘I’ and its existence; ‘I speak’, on the other hand, distances, disperses, effaces that existence and lets only its empty emplacement appear” (Foucault 1987, 13). We go now to “Of other spaces” (Foucault 2008): “Today the emplacement substitutes extension [another register for the displacement of a Cartesian ‘I think’], which itself had replaced localization. The emplacement is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements … In a still more concrete manner, the problem of place or the emplacement arises for mankind in terms of demography” (15). Foucault goes on to emphasise that it is not “inner space” that concerns him, but “outer space” by which we understand a radical though real otherness, “absolutely other emplacements” (16–17). We note in passing, though it could, in fact, be a topic for considered discussion, the series of exchanges between Elden and Jeff Malpas on the relations between Foucault and Heidegger. Their tussle settles at one point on who has the better translation, or nuanced reading, of Foucault’s deployments of “espacement” (Elden 2003; Malpas 2003). Elden pitches: “The French word espace has a much wider range of meanings than the English ‘space’, and some of those meanings can be understood as akin to our notion of ‘place’. Indeed, the lecture “Of other spaces” is a case in point. The French title is “Des Espaces Autres,” but as this term is a translation of the key term

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sign to ‘clue’ to an enigma.55 The Outside never yields its essence. But it is always distraction and error that carry the person forward. It would have been better to have-stayed-put. Foucault uses the notions of ‘zeal’, ‘solicitude’ and ‘negligence’ to suggest what Blanchot means by attraction to not-staying-put, a kind of withdrawal of withdrawal, in finding ourselves on the outside of the Outside (29–31). Whatever we think concealed, we think it to be elsewhere. We repeat ourselves. There’s carelessness to this, negligence, a constant errancy. All the while we move with zeal and solicitude. Everything seems to be an intentional sign, secret dialogue, spying or entrapment. Yet negligence remains indifferent to what can manifest or conceal, in that any gesture takes on the value of a sign. This is how Foucault conceives of Blanchot, his concerns and his writing.56 Narrative unfolds a placeless place between the narrator and an inseparable companion who does not accompany him; separating a speaking “I” from the “he” he is in his spoken being. It speaks. As for Canguilhem, life is that which is capable of error, the question of anomaly traverses the whole of biology.57 Life concludes in man with a living being who never finds himself wholly in his place, a living being dedicated to err at the root of what makes human thought and its history: error intrinsic to life. Yet error is the permanent heterotopias, we would not be inaccurate to translate it into English as “Of other places.” To police this largely English distinction in a foreign language is enormously problematic—while it may work in German, or at least here in Heidegger’s thought; it would be to read a problematic into Foucault that is not there” (Elden 2003, 222). Our consideration, though, is to dig deeper than Elden suggests, in order to assay the Blanchot-Heidegger ‘understanding’ of ‘space’ that Foucault seems to have in mind. 55 Foucault suggests: “Attraction is no doubt for Blanchot what desire is for Sade, force for Nietzsche, the materiality of thought for Artaud, and transgression for Bataille: the pure, most naked, experience of the outside. … Far from calling on one interiority to draw close to another, attraction makes it imperiously manifest that the outside is there, open, without intimacy, without protection or retention (how could it have any when it has no interiority, and, instead, infinitely unfolds outside any enclosure?), but that one cannot gain access to that opening because the outside never yields its essence” (Foucault 1987, 27–28). 56 We may recognize in Foucault’s discussion of law, sovereignty and conduct, a thinking that emerges from Blanchot that pre-figures, in a sense, Foucault’s understanding of the ‘conduct of conducts’ as a way of expressing his notion of ‘governmentality’ developed in 1977. Foucault asks how is the law both manifest and concealed, by what mechanisms does it emerge, on the one hand, as interior and self-evident consciousness and, on the other hand, as a text whose reading confirms the “solidity of external things” such that it is something to obey or disobey (Foucault 1987, 33). He goes on to say: “In fact, the presence of the law is its concealment. Sovereignly, the law haunts cities, institutions, conduct, and gestures; whatever one does, however great the disorder and carelessness, it has already applied its might” (33). 57 Foucault (1980a) suggests: “The biologist has to grasp what makes of life a specific object of knowledge and, through this, what brings it about that there are, within the realm of living beings, beings which, because they are living, are susceptible of knowing, and of knowing, in the final account, life itself” (59). We can again recognise a displacing of the Cartesian tradition of the certitude of an ‘I think’ in Canguilhem’s philosophy of error: “Phenomenology may well have introduced the body, sexuality, death, the lived world in the field of analysis: the Cogito still remained central here; neither the rationality of science nor the specificity of the sciences of life were able to compromise its founding role. It is to this philosophy of meaning of the subject and lived experience that Georges Canguilhem has opposed a philosophy of error, of the concept and of the living” (61–62).

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chance, tracing out the presence of value and the norm. It is that chance, in errancy, that we see played out in Foucault’s discussion of the possibility of other spacings. And it is for this reason that we must suspend in a way what we might simply take to be a metaphorical allusion to spatiality, with respect to the question of knowing, as distinct to spatializing practices or gestures. As we are by now aware, Foucault precisely problematizes the spatialities of ‘configuration’ and ‘localization’. Thus, the heterotopias of ‘other’ spaces, real other spaces, apply as much to his concerns with The order of things—another publication appearing in 1966—as they do with a medical gaze or disciplinary procedures. This double spacing of errancy that we find in Blanchot, and that is essential to Canguilhem, gives us the specific approach to an understanding of Foucault’s analytics of the episteme in The order of things: … such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or of science: it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards. I am not concerned, therefore, to describe the progress of knowledge towards an objectivity in which today’s science can finally be recognised; what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility; in this account, what should appear are those configurations within the space of knowledge which have given rise to the diverse forms of empirical science. Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of the word, as an ‘archaeology’. (Foucault 1970, xxi–xxii)

This returns us to the notions of event, jurisdiction and veridiction, to practices of ‘speaking’ the true. Though, jurisdictions or veridiction, dik¯e and al¯etheia, are hardly the last words on Foucault. These words are destined to disappear, just as the heterotopic did in the spaces of the said of a Foucauldian archive. We need to remember that the archive is not the totality of things said or recorded but the line of variation or systemic ordering of transiency and appearance, in a language that approaches not the interiority of an essential thinking but the outside of a voided emplacement. It is in the figure of that radical exteriority that Foucault will come to discern how force engages force as productive capacity, how power is to be understood in relation to language and space, and how discourse is, essentially, practice and not a form of knowing. This chapter, “Spatiality and Power,” has focused especially on Foucault’s work of the 1960s. Our aim has been twofold in doing this. On the one hand, we have aimed at introducing the degree to which Foucault’s concerns, from the beginning, have been with fundamental questions of how spatializations and verbalizations find coincidence, and hence the extent to which Foucault is a critical thinker of spatiality. In this, his thinking is a provocation to questions of thinking the urban. On the other hand, we have been concerned with drawing out a question of method, or methodological procedures that engaged Foucault and that we want to draw on. Early in the chapter, we emphasised that the terms jurisdiction and veridiction do not refer so much to themes or already-determined forms of knowing, but rather

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they refer to procedures, conducts and problems: to how we proceed with what we have at hand. This suggests that our object of research, ‘the urban’, is provisionally determined in a study that problematizes precisely the frailty of our methods for uncovering its contours. We have emphasised, from Foucault’s The birth of the clinic, three frames or registers that appear paradigmatic for much of his engagement, concerning a problematizing of relations between three heterogeneous locales: those of particular discursive rationalities, those of localizations of practices, and those of procedural and regulatory spacings. We have suggested that Foucault’s engagements with Blanchot and Canguilhem established the complexity of his understanding of spatiality and language in terms of the determination of a history of practices that, at once, constitutes a history of errancy rather than truth, and a history of exclusions, or margins, rather than stable grounds. In the following chapter, “Governing Security,” we focus especially on Foucault’s shifts to questions of power, the influence of Nietzsche on his understanding of genealogy, and the development, for Foucault in the late 1970s, of the notions of governmentality and biopower. In discussing these developments, we recognise the extent to which his research increasingly engages the urban as ‘object’ for analysis.

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Koyré, A. (1957). From the closed world to the infinite universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kwinter, S. (2010). Requiem: For the city at the end of the millennium. Barcelona and New York: Actar. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2001). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London and New York: Verso. Lefebvre, H. (2003). The urban revolution (R. Bononno, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Machado, R. (1992). Archaeology and epistemology. In T. Armstrong (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Philosopher (pp. 3–18). New York: Routledge. MacLeod, G. (2011). Urban politics reconsidered: Growth machine to post-democratic city? Urban Studies, 48(12), 2629–2660. MacLeod, G., & Jones, M. (2011). Renewing urban politics. Urban Studies, 48(12), 2443–2472. Malpas, J. (2003). On the map: Comments on Stuart Elden’s Mapping the present: Heidegger, Foucault and the problem of mapping a spatial history. Philosophy & Geography, 6(2), 213–218. Mayhew, R. (2008). Historical geography 2007–2008: Foucault’s avatars—Still in (the) driver’s seat. Progress in Human Geography, 33(3), 387–397. McKinlay, A. (2009). Foucault, plague, Defoe. Culture and Organisation, 15(2), 167–184. Milchman, A., & Rosenberg, A. (2003). Foucault and Heidegger: Critical encounters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mills, S. (2003). Michel Foucault. New York: Routledge. Morris, M., & Patton, P. (Eds.). (1979). Michel Foucault: Power, truth, strategy. Sydney: Feral Publications. Mouffe, C. (1999). Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism. Social Research, 66(3), 745–758. Mouffe, C. (2000). The Democratic paradox. London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2005). On the political. London and New York: Routledge. Murdoch, J. (2004). Putting discourse in its place: Planning, sustainability and the urban capacity study. Area, 36(1), 50–58. Osbourne, T., & Rose, N. (1999). Governing cities: Notes on the spatialisation of virtue. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 17, 737–760. Osbourne, T., & Rose, N. (2004). Spatial phenomenoticnics: Making space with Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 22, 209–228. Patton, P. (1979). Of power and prisons. In M. Morris & P. Patton (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Power, truth, strategy (pp. 109–147). Sydney: Feral Publications. Pløger, J. (2001). Millennium urbanism—Discursive planning. European Urban and Regional Studies, 8(1), 63–72. Pløger, J. (2004). Strife: Urban planning and agonism. Planning Theory, 3(1), 71–92. Pløger, J. (2008). Foucault’s dispositif and the city. Planning Theory, 7(1), 51–70. Pløger, J. (2010). Present-experience—The eventalisation of urban space. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 28, 848–866. Powell, K. (1999). Richard Rogers: Complete works: (Vol. 1). London: Phaidon. Ramroth, W. (2007). Planning for disaster: How natural and man-made disasters shape the built environment. New York: Kaplan Publishing. Rayner, T. (2007). Foucault’s Heidegger: Philosophy and transformative experience. London: Continuum. Rose, N. (2007). The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rowe, C., & Koetter, F. (1978). Collage city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Saldanha, A. (2008). Heterotopia and structuralism. Environment and Planning A, 40, 2080–2096. Sluga, H. (2003). Foucault’s encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche. In G. Gutting (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Foucault (pp. 210–239). New York: Cambridge University Press. Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space into critical social theory. London: Verso.

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Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Soja, E. (2003). Writing the city spatially. City, 7(3), 269–280. Stein, S., & Harper, T. (2003). Power, trust, and planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 23, 125–139. Virilio, P. (2002). Desert screen: War at the speed of light. New York: Continuum. Virilio, P. (2007). Strategy of deception. London: Verso.

Chapter 5

Governing Security

5.1 Introduction 5.1.1 Aleatory Language Here is the hypothesis I want to advance, tonight, in order to fix the terrain—or perhaps the very provisional theatre—within which I shall be working. I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its power and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality. (Foucault 1972b, 216)

On the 2nd December 1970, Foucault delivered his inaugural address, “The Discourse on Language,” in taking up his Chair at the Collège de France, at that time vacant due to the death of the distinguished Hegel philosopher, and supervisor of Foucault’s minor thesis, Jean Hyppolite.1 In an extraordinary delivery, Foucault set out his agenda and directions for the future contributions he intended to make at the Collège.2 We see in one of his opening remarks, quoted above, what is perhaps the first clear conjunction of discourse and power, discourse that is “at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed … to avert its power and danger” (216). He introduces the notions of a “will to truth” and a “will to knowledge” that: “thus relies upon 1 Foucault’s

minor thesis on Kant’s anthropology was undertaken under Jean Hyppolite. It is published by Semiotext(e) under the title, Introduction to Kant’s anthropology (2008b). 2 In a “Foreword” to each volume of the publication of Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana provide a brief summary of Foucault’s tenure at the Collège (for example, Foucault 2008a, xiii–xvii). His Chair, “The History of Systems of Thought” was created in 1969, replacing Hyppolite’s “The History of Philosophical Thought.” Foucault taught from January 1971 until his death in June 1984 (xiii). He was required to provide 26 hours of teaching a year, divided between lectures and seminars, disseminating research undertaken during the previous year. Hence, no lecture series could be repeated. Foucault’s lectures generally commenced early January and concluded in March, though sometimes in November or December of one year, stretching to February or March the following. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. L. Jackson and M. Hanlen, Securing Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4_5

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institutional support and distribution, tends to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse” (219).3 We see here the early formulation of what comes to preoccupy Foucault’s research, the development of an understanding of the complex of relations that operate between an exercise of power and forms of knowing.4 Already in “The Discourse on Language,” we recognise how Foucault considers relations between power and knowledge to implicate the institutional. The term Foucault will come to use is dispositif , a word variously translated, often as “apparatus,” or at times in English translations left in its original French. In this chapter, we will discuss this notion and various critical engagements concerning its meaning and centrality to Foucault’s thinking, and the ways it has been problematized in discourses on the urban and urban planning, particularly in the articulation of the notion of “apparatus” in Foucault’s “apparatuses of security,” central to his problematic of the emergence of liberalism and governmentality (see Foucault 2007a, 55ff.). However, initially we want to introduce, in more detail than our earlier preliminary remarks have indicated, the radical innovation Foucault develops for an understanding of power, and the manner whereby his primary concerns with spatialization and verbalization in archaeology become, more so, concerns with spatialization and the productions of ‘verbalizations’ as a will to knowledge, via an exercise of power, at once diffuse, general and unknowable. However, the genuine focus of this chapter is on the emergence for Foucault in the late 1970s of the twin notions of security and governmentality (Foucault 2007a), which develop and extend his understandings of how power, knowledge and institutions are constituted in assemblages or dispositifs. We are aware of the methodological precision by which Foucault will have defined these terms, in a general though concise summary of his overall project. How is it that discourse at once fills and empties our encounter with things, and finds those spaces in which words resound with the character of providing substance and sustenance to a willto-knowledge? On the other hand, how is it that a will-to-knowledge cannot escape an exercise of power that is also a will-to-truth? Thus, words, in the hollow they carve into things, through that empty spacing of language, also become, through an 3 As

we have earlier noted, “The discourse on language” was an inaugurating lecture for what immediately followed as his first lecture series, that focused on desire, knowledge and truth, with particular focus on the philosophy of Aristotle, and the practices of truth-telling in ancient Greece (see Foucault 2013). 4 Again, as we have previously emphasised, Foucault works through the development of his key emphasises on discourse and power, especially during the lecture series up until Society must be defended (Foucault 2003a). It was in The punitive society (2015) that Foucault especially develops an approach to discourse as practice, rather than as knowledge, and defines his understanding of power as anonymous, diffuse and exercised from below. It is in Psychiatric power (2006) that he defines discipline, and disciplinary mechanisms, in the context of discussing Bentham’s Panopticism. And it is especially in Society must be defended (2003a) that he develops the notions of civil war, Stateracism, and biopower. We are able to now recognise that Foucault’s books, which were published much more quickly than the lecture series, in both France and in English translation, drew heavily from lecture courses that preceded their publication. The lectures provide considerable density to the material found in the published books.

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exercise of power, the fullness of games of the true and the false. If, as we discussed in Chap. 4, jurisdictions concern themselves with the resounding spaces that cohere verbalizations in their configurations, localizations and procedures, then veridictions concern that exercise of power, those forces or force-against-force, that is productive of a will to know, coincident with a will to truth.5 Hence, our concern in this chapter is with genealogy, power and self. We emphasised, at the conclusion to Chap. 4, that these terms, as concise and definite as they were momentarily in an interview in 1977, found their expression again in Foucault’s pronouncements on truth-telling and avowal, in lectures he undertook some four years later, in 1981 (Foucault 2014).6

5.2 The Exercise of Power 5.2.1 Truth and Power In a 1977 interview, “Truth and Power,” Foucault notes: In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carrying the force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow, 5 As

we mentioned in Chap. 4, Foucault’s discussion of jurisdiction and veridiction is especially pronounced in the early 1980s in relation to his concerns with how an exercise of power is constitutive of the production of subjects, in processes of the sacrifice of one’s will, constituted in rituals of confession and pastoral power (Foucault 2005, 2014). 6 We need to recognize the significance of Nietzsche for Foucault at this time. In 1971, he had published a brief essay on Nietzsche, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” (see Foucault 1977a) in a collection of essays in memory of Jean Hyppolite. This is an important text, indicating the extent to which Foucault now begins to concern his understandings of archaeology, the document and the anonymity of the statement in terms of a Nietzschean understanding of power, expressed in Nietzsche’s own understanding of ‘genealogy’. As well, he presented a lecture on Nietzsche in 1971, in his inaugural lecture series at the Collège de France. That lecture was not documented. In its place in the published version of these lectures, is a lecture Foucault delivered at Magill University in Montreal (Foucault 2013, 202–223). Foucault’s “Nietzsche, genealogy, history” opens: “Genealogy is grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times. … [Genealogy] opposes itself to the search for origins” (Foucault 1977a, 139). It is with this essay we recognize a shift from archaeology’s concerns with spatialization and verbalization, the “it is said” of statements and discursive formations, to an altogether different localization of the anonymity of bodies and modes of inscription: “The body is the surface of the inscription of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. … [Genealogy’s] task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (148). Concern is no longer with the time of origin but with a particular understanding of space, an understanding of space we have already encountered in Foucault’s reading of Blanchot: “As descent qualifies the strength or weakness of an instinct and its inscription on a body, emergence designates a place of confrontation, but not as a closed field offering the spectacle of a struggle among equals. Rather, as Nietzsche demonstrates in his analysis of good and evil, it is a ‘nonplace’, a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belong to a common space” (150).

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skeletal conception of power, one which has been curiously widespread. If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Foucault 1980a, 119)

We note, initially, Foucault’s early understanding of power in relation to discourse, developed in 1970, which saw power as primarily a controlling mechanism in the production of a will to truth.7 We may contrast this to the position outlined above, wherein power has become a positive notion, in the sense that power is primarily not that which curtails freedom, but that which produces knowing subjects. But in this formulation, it is necessary to radically reconsider the very notion of freedom.8 We need to account for that rethinking of an understanding of power and its relation to knowing. We note that between the publication in France of The archaeology of knowledge in 1969 and Foucault’s next major publication, Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison in 1975 (Foucault 1977b), there is a six-year ‘gap’. In that ‘gap’ we find the lecture series wherein Foucault develops his understanding of the emerging institutional matrix during the nineteenth century of disciplinary mechanisms, along with defining the general ‘model’ of these mechanisms in terms of Bentham’s Panopticism. These lectures, along with Foucault’s increasing engagement with Nietzsche, and his researching of Discipline and punish, constituted the 7 We

are able to chart (almost) the development during his 1972–73 lectures, how Foucault commences quite clearly with a notion of power as substance, as something one holds or seizes, correlative with sovereign power. Through the lecture series, that understanding of power shifts, as power’s exercise becomes increasingly understood as capillary-like rather than as a consolidated or consolidating bloc. Perhaps the transitional moment happens when discussing the shift from eighteenth-century notions of illegalism, to a nineteenth-century understanding of the emergence of delinquency, from practices of illegalism undertaken by workers and the invention of prison as a place of isolation of delinquents. See especially the lecture of 21 February. And, as we have mentioned earlier, by the final lecture, Foucault speaks directly to a new understanding of power. 8 In a pair of lectures delivered in 1976, published in Power/ Knowledge (1980b) as “Two Lectures,” Foucault provides a detailed account of a moment of transformation in his thinking on power and its mechanisms. Firstly, he suggests two general schemas of power, the “contract-oppression schema” we associate with sovereign judicial-political power, and “domination-repression” or “warrepression” schema that Foucault began to develop in working with Nietzsche. He goes on to suggest the need to abandon both schemas altogether, and thereby rethink how the question of freedom might be thought other than by way of an original right given up in the establishment of sovereignty (91–92). In the second of the lectures, Foucault introduces a “non-sovereign power” (105). It is this positive exercise of power that constitutes what Foucault terms “a society of normalization” that comes increasingly into conflict with judicial systems of sovereignty, requiring an arbitrating discourse that constitutes itself as neutral. This is the role of science in the discourses of the human sciences (107). Medicine principally takes up this role: “The developments of medicine, the general medicalization of behaviours, conducts, discourses, desires etc., take place at the point of intersection between two heterogeneous levels of discipline and sovereignty.” With this, Foucault comes to recognize that freedom coincides with the productive techniques, strategies and discourses of disciplinary normalization more so that with a notion of an inalienable freedom that sovereign power curtails or represses, or makes available.

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fundamental ground for Foucault’s shift. On the face of it, that book’s title is not so different from his book on the clinic or even his book on epistemic shifts, each with a subtitle on a ‘birth’. Yet there is something that significantly shifts in his analysis, and there is something that is central to a concern with architecture and the urban at the core of this shift. Initially, we will say something more about Foucault’s understanding of ‘power’ and then discuss further how these are engaged in his research on what he terms “disciplinary mechanisms” (Foucault 1977b, 211). Our general understanding of power suggest that power is a substance, in the sense that it is what we have or don’t have, and that it correlates with freedom and with repression. The sovereign has power invested in his (mostly it is ‘his’ rather than ‘her’) body. With sovereign power, this ‘substance’ is bestowed or distributed. It is an absolute right over life and death. Foucault’s understanding of power is a curious one. His concern has been with transformations, particularly during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, of this understanding of power to something completely different. At times, he will say he is totally uninterested in defining what power is, and, in this sense, the whole thing does not interest him at all. But by this he means that power is not a substance that one has or does not have, and hence something that requires definition.9 By the nineteenth century, power is no longer a substance that can be held or not held, even if orthodox political theory maintained—and still maintains—continuity with this sovereign understanding. Thus, for example, Foucault’s troublesome relation to Marxism, which maintained a substantive ontology of power, as with the working class seizing control of the State, along with the repressive nature of the bourgeoisie.10 If power is not something that one has or does not have, then 9 By

‘substance’ we are suggesting a very particular understanding. Foucault wants to move away from considering power as something one possesses or holds. Again in “Two Lectures” (1980b), he notes in the context of orthodox Marxist understandings of power: “By that I mean that in the case of the classic, juridical theory, power is taken to be a right, which one is able to possess like a commodity, and which one can in consequence transfer or alienate, either wholly or partially, through a legal act or through some act that establishes a right, such as takes place through cession or contract. Power is that concrete power, that which every individual holds, and whose partial or total cession enables political power to sovereignty to be established” (88). It is this ‘substance’ that Foucault will dissolve. The whole question of ‘substance’ becomes complicated when we engage in a broader discussion of Foucault in relation to the political engagements of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as theorists such as Antonio Negri. The complication stems from the latter’s engagements with the philosophical writings of Baruch Spinoza and especially with what is understood by Spinoza as ‘substance’. In Deleuze and Negri’s terms, Foucault’s ontology of power may be said to engage a Spinozian understanding of substance (Deleuze 1990; Negri 1991). We note Foucault’s discussion of Spinoza in his 1970–71 lectures (Foucault 2013). See especially, lecture of 16 December. 10 With Marxism, Foucault recognizes the extent to which political theory makes a decisive break with orthodox understandings of judicial-sovereign relations of power. Yet, what replaces that model equally engages a substantive understanding of power, reduced not to the role of the sovereign, but to the role of the economy: “The economic functionality is present to the extent that power is conceived primarily in terms of the role it plays in the maintenance simultaneously of the relations of production and of class domination which the development and specific forms of the forces of production have rendered possible” (Foucault 1980b, 88–89). He goes on to ask whether we today have available non-economic analyses of power, to which he answers: “there are very few” (89). What would such an analysis mean? What would be its parameters?—“We have in the first place the assertion that power is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and

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what is it? Foucault emphasises, as early as 1970, it is something exercised, not held (see Foucault 1972b).11 This means its existence does not—and cannot—precede productive action. Moreover, power is invisible and unknowable, except through the counter-forces of resistances. If there are no resistances, then an exercise of power is unknowable. Is it any wonder that the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus suggested that what power is for Foucault, being is for Heidegger (Dreyfus 1992)?12 Foucault notes in “The subject and power—How is power exercised?” an afterword to Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982). The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear on permanent structures. This also means that power is not a function of consent. In itself it is not a renunciation of freedom, a transference of right …. (Foucault 1982a, 219–220)

In this text, Foucault emphasises the notion of “conduct” as a way to discuss power: “Perhaps the equivocal nature of the term conduct is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the specificity of power relations” (220). By this he means power is a way of “acting upon an acting subject … a set of actions upon other actions” (219). See also Foucault (1982b). This notion of the “action on action” or the conduct of conduct is precisely how Foucault develops his understanding of governmentality, that emerges from his Collège de France lecture course of 1977–78, Security, territory, population (2007a). We will discuss in more detail how Foucault develops an understanding of the problematic of governmentality from his work on disciplinary mechanisms, towards the end of this chapter. But we note at this point the extent to which the very problem field of governmentality takes up for Foucault a continuation of the enigmatic difficulty of discussing power as a non-substantial relation.

that it only exists in action” (89)—which is to say, in force against force, in what a body does, in a body’s ‘resistances’. 11 Though Foucault does emphasise in “The order of discourse” (1972b) a prohibitive and exclusionary exercise of power, rather than strictly a productive one, crucially, that exercise is not reducible to a judicial structure or an economic determinant, in the last instance. Rather, these substantive structures are explicitly problematized in a delivery that emphasizes more so the anonymity, dispersion and non-place that constitutes the locus of power’s exercise. 12 At a colloquium on Foucault in January 1988, the American philosopher Hubert Dreyfus presented what proved to be a controversial and disputed paper, aimed at exploring a possible alignment between Heidegger’s notion of being and Foucault’s understanding of power: “Heidegger offers a history of Being (Seinsgeschichte) in order to help us understand and overcome our current technological understanding of Being; and Foucault analyses several regimes of power in the course of his genealogy of the biopower which, he claims, dominates modern life” (Dreyfus 1992, 80). Dreyfus reminds us of Foucault’s late admission: “For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher. …My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger” (Foucault 1985, 8, cited in Dreyfus 1992, 80). We earlier referenced Elden’s comment on this same Foucauldian ‘disclosure’.

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5.2.2 Discipline The central chapter of Discipline and punish is titled “Panopticism.” That chapter commences with a spatial problem concerning what happens to the town, the spatialization of the urban, when it is invaded by Plague.13 At once we have the codifications of a medical gaze, but also the acuteness of spaces of pathologies, brought to a general question of the conduct of conduct. How are the actions of subjects, individually and collectively, affected and effected by actions or conducts that Foucault calls disciplinary? Hence Foucault’s detailed descriptions of confinement: “Firstly, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition on leaving the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. … Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere” (Foucault 1977b, 195). Foucault contrasts the management of Leprosy and the management of Plague. The leper was banished from the town, an outside exile; the plague victim was constricted and confined according to a meticulous order of surveillance: “The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations … The first is that of pure community, the second that of a disciplined society” (198). As we have earlier indicated, it was not in Discipline and punish that Foucault introduces the notion of disciplinary power, but in The punitive society, in a lecture given in March 1973 (Foucault 2015, 225–247). This initial mention, in fact, suggests that the lecture series might well have been titled not ‘punitive’ but ‘disciplinary’ society. While the text of the lecture says: “Where was I wanting to go? I wanted to analyse a certain system of power: disciplinary power” (237), the manuscript says: “I wanted the analysis of a form of power I have called punitive, which it would be better to call disciplinary” (237). What, though, does Foucault imply by this term ‘discipline’? Graham Burchell, translator of almost all of Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, makes comments on the translation of the French surveiller, which translates to ‘discipline’. His “Translator’s note” comes at the opening to the 1972–73 lectures, The punitive society (xxiii–xxiv): The practices referred to by the French verb surveiller and the noun surveillance are, of course, fundamental and central in Foucault’s analysis in these lectures, as also in Surveiller 13 For

a detailed discussion of Foucault on the plague in terms of power/knowledge, see “Foucault, Plague, Defoe,” McKinlay (2009), already referenced in Chap. 2. As we earlier discussed, the text reads across Foucault’s accounts of disciplinary measures with plague towns and Daniel Defoe’s fictional Journal account of the London Plague (1722). These are further contrasted to the 1830 cholera epidemic in Europe, and a repeat epidemic in the 1850s. McKinley notes that as late as the 1830s, procedures were still as Dafoe reported from the eighteenth century and as Foucault analyses in his lectures. However, by the 1850s we see a comprehensive statistical approach to medicine for epidemics. Political medicine displaces the model of a city under siege, when population becomes a governable object: technologies of population. By 1860, social mathematics displaces ‘miasma’ as a diagnosis and the basis of disease control, with the regulation of water supply, sewerage, and the regulation of food supply as key techniques of social control, that is, biopower: discipline and pastoral care. In this, the city becomes a site for statistical accumulation, a laboratory for rethinking power/knowledge, while the market fills up the space of positivity left in the annulling of epidemic as the centralizing locus of social mathematics.

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et punir. However, no single English verb or noun captures the range of meanings and family of practices covered by the French terms. The practices picked out by the French terms typically combine an epistemic with a coercive, goal-directed aspect. Depending on the context, the accent falls to a greater or lesser extent on one or other of these aspects, from watching, surveying, inspecting, and monitoring, to keeping watch over, surveillance, overseeing, and active supervision or superintendence (which is the term frequently used in English discussions of police in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). (xxiii)

When we turn to those final pages of the 1972–73 lecture course, to where Foucault offers that corrective to the word ‘punitive’, suggesting it might better be understood as disciplinary, his key notion is not so much surveillance, overseeing, coercion, as it is the notion of habit. Habit seems to have an innocence and an order to it. Good habits are what we are encouraged to form. Bad habits are what we are warned against. Foucault suggests that discipline is a practice of norms and habits. Though how is he understanding that word?14 Initially Foucault suggests that we now live in a society of disciplinary powers. His term is “apparatuses whose form is sequestration” (237). Sequestration is a spatializing-ordering, one we associate with, for example, control measures for epidemics, as we detailed in Chap. 2. Disciplinary power is exercised through ‘apparatuses’, which is to say, through institutional configurations of a particular spatial ordering. The purpose of these apparatuses of sequestration is principally to produce a labour force. This is the key premise of these lectures: practices in the early nineteenth century concerned with the productive formation of docile and trained bodies for labour. The “instrument” for this training and docility is “the acquisition of disciplines or habits”: “It seems to me that since the eighteenth century there has been a constant multiplication, refinement, and specification of

14 We need to remember the importance of Nietzsche for Foucault at this time. In his “Course Context” for Foucault’s 1970–71 lectures (Foucault 2013), Daniel Defert suggests the lectures as a whole were written from a Nietzschean perspective, and within the milieu of a particular triangulation of then recent Nietzschean texts from 1967 to 1969, important for Foucault, from Marcel Detienne (1996), Gilles Deleuze (1994), and Angèle Kremer-Marietti, who published on Nietzsche in 1972, and on Foucault in 1974 (Foucault 2013, 270). See Kremer-Marietti (1985). Defert emphasises a confrontation with Heidegger, and with Heidegger’s Nietzsche, engaged by these authors. Pierre Klossowski’s translation of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche was itself scheduled for publication in 1971. As well, there are the lectures Foucault delivered on Nietzsche within this lecture course, at Magill University and in Rio, in 1971, along with his “Nietzsche Genealogy History” (Foucault 1977a) which also first appeared in 1971. On the confrontation with Heidegger, it appears to be a case of choosing, to some extent, between Heidegger’s Nietzsche as the last metaphysician, and a Nietzschean ontology, recognisible in Foucault’s multiple refusals of a Heideggerian understanding of truth. We aim to return to this encounter of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Heidegger’s Nietzsche in Chap. 7. On Foucault’s reference to habit and the training of a laboring class, in the 1972–73 lectures, we note the following: “We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this is too false. The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances” (Foucault 1977a, 153). We recognize the extent to which Nietzsche’s ‘descent’ that attaches to a body, and ‘emergence’ that engages the confrontation of forces in opposition or at war, are activated in these lectures that define the ‘birth’ of a newly subjugated class, a ‘birth’ that refuses in all of its accounts, any notion of ‘origin’.

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apparatuses for manufacturing disciplines, for imposing coercions, and for instilling habits” (237). Foucault analyses something fundamental in the notion of habit from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. With the eighteenth century—here Foucault references Hume—habit is something derived, an effect of a human nature whose habit is the forming of habits (238). Habit was seen as “traditional obligation” to be usurped by contractual obligation: “To criticize tradition through habit in order to contractualize social bonds, such is the essence of this use of the notion of habit” (238). In the nineteenth century things are somewhat reversed, with startling effect. Habit is now given as something positive, to be acquired. Where the eighteenth century criticized habit as diminishing the social contract, in the nineteenth century it was seen as complementary (238). Though, the notion of ‘contract’ equally shifts. In the nineteenth century, Foucault emphasises that the contract becomes the juridical form binding property owners: “It is the juridical form that guarantees the property of each … a juridical form to exchange” (238). This, then, relegates habit to a different functioning, other than binding individuals to property. It links or binds individuals to production: “it is what binds those who are not property owners to an apparatus they do not own; it is what links them to each other as members, not of a class, but of society as a whole” (238). Foucault sees habit-forming being achieved through coercion and punishment, but also training—schooling, apprenticeships, moral ordering. And, here, Foucault defines this productive and disciplinary effect as the formation of norms: “… the norm is the instrument by which individuals are tied to apparatuses of production … modern sequestration produced the norm and its function is to produce the normal” (239).

5.2.3 The Human Sciences Foucault’s concluding comments to this lecture series focus on differentiating an understanding of power, from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. With the eighteenth century, power is exercised through hierarchy and sovereignty: “Up to the eighteenth century, we had a society in which power took the visual, solemn, and ritual form of hierarchy and sovereignty” (239). With the nineteenth century, there is no longer the ritual display of sovereign power. In its place is habit. In the place of display and ritual is the norm: “in this way it is hidden as power and passes for society” (240). What, for the seventeenth century was “the ceremony of power” is now given the name “social consciousness” (240): “power is exercised through the medium of the system of disciplines, but so that it is concealed and appears as that reality called society” (240). Correlative to this new system for the exercise of power is a new discourse, one that displaces or mythologizes a discourse on power as heroic, one finding the origins of power in bloodline or lineage. This new discourse is that of norm-formation, not a discourse of the king, but one of the master, the supervisor, schoolmaster, judge, doctor, psychiatrist, the ones who decide on the normal and abnormal (240). Foucault give a name to this discourse: the human sciences (241).

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These same themes or concerns are immediately picked up in Foucault’s subsequent lecture series of 1973–74, Psychiatric power (Foucault 2006). The opening lecture, of the 7 November, sets the peculiar aim of the lecture series, doing so in a way that amplifies what was essential to how Foucault understood power’s exercise during the nineteenth century as disciplinary. If the name ‘society’ is given to that anonymous and ubiquitous normalizing power, how can we proceed in an analytic of disciplinary power other than by way of a “psycho-sociological” vocabulary? This is Foucault’s question, when he focuses on the emergence of psychiatry at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a disciplinary apparatus that will come, by the end of the nineteenth century, to be a juridico-medical discourse that arbitrates exclusively and definitively on the normal and abnormal. His concern is with the space of the asylum, what begins to happen in the nineteenth century with the transformation of that space of confinement given over to the insane. He notes that it is no longer the family-model that conditions relations within the asylum, inculcating a new familial bond. Nor does it seem that it is a State-apparatus that defines the process of incarceration within the asylum. Nor can we simply say there is violence done to the insane, to those held within. It is here that Foucault refines his notion of power, a refining that alleviates its understanding from aspects of the notion of coercion: Rather, therefore, than speak of violence, I would prefer to speak of a micro-physics of power; rather than speak of institutions, I would much prefer to try to see what tactics are put to work in these forces which confront each other; rather than speak of the family model or “State apparatuses,” I would like to try to see the strategy of these relations of power and confrontations which unfold within psychiatric practice. (Foucault 2006, 16)

Immediately following, Foucault provides one of his many ‘asides’ with a supposed interlocutor, suggesting that he has changed his vocabulary so as to avoid introducing a psycho-sociological vocabulary, though substituting for this a “pseudo-military vocabulary which is not much better” (16). In the subsequent lecture, Foucault differentiates what he terms a “macrophysics of sovereignty” and a “microphysics of disciplinary power,” while in the lecture of 21 November, he provides a comprehensive summary account of the differences between sovereign power and disciplinary power. Of note in this, is Foucault’s reference to panopticism. Foucault is giving a number of defining characteristics to disciplinary power. In the initial one, he contrasts it with sovereignty: “It we can say the other side of sovereignty was war, I think we can say that the other side of the disciplinary relationship is punishment, both miniscule and continuous punitive pressure” (51). The second characteristic is discipline’s “panoptic character”: “the absolute and constant visibility surrounding the bodies of individuals … seeing everything, everyone, all the time. This meticulous surveillance is not an end in itself, but rather then means for meticulous documenting, record keeping, writing. In combination, continuous punitive and surveying tactics aim to act on potential behaviours, projecting a psyche as hidden object of knowing” (52). Though panopticism is mentioned in the lecture of 21 November, it is in Foucault’s lecture a week later that Jeremy Bentham is discussed in detail: “In actual fact, there was an extremely clear and quite remarkable formalization of this microphysics of disciplinary power. It is found quite simply in Jeremy Bentham’s

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Panopticon” (73). Foucault initially makes clear that Bentham did not design a model for a prison, or for a prison only. His Panopticon was a model for a prison, a school, hospital, workshop, orphanage (76). Bentham calls it a mechanism, and in fact this is the expression we find Foucault adopting when discussing discipline, disciplinary mechanisms. Foucault notes: “The Panopticon is a multiplier; it is an intensifier of power within a series of institutions. It involves giving the greatest intensity, the best distribution, and the most accurate focus to the force of power” (74). The agency of disciplinary mechanisms that Foucault especially emphasises is that it individuates. While power’s exercise is centralized, it never deals with a mass, but is directed at separation, confinement, the elimination of a collective, of communicative encounter, whether that is of medical contagion or moral degeneracy: “Discipline individualizes below; it individualizes those on whom it is brought to bear” (75). Through accounts that are, in fact, those of the required spatial ordering of emerging urban habitation from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, especially in France, though also in England and Germany, Foucault develops his understanding of discipline and disciplinary mechanisms15 (see, for discussion, Stein and Harper 2003; Kornberger 2012; Gallagher 2008; Jessop 2007; Lemke 2010a, b, 2011; Collier 2009; Dupont and Pearce 2001; Donzelot 2008). They are not simply the application of a judicial order, the enforcement of law. Rather, they concern fundamentally something that is productive, despite what appears as a negative connotation with the word discipline. Foucault begins here to recognise how social constructions of normativity, that engage the exercise of power, fundamentally engage aims and procedures different to those of juridical discourses that determine the subject of right (Lemke 2011).16 Between the discourse of right and procedures of normalisation, Foucault will increasingly find a fundamental division that required accounting for.17 This would coincide with our understanding developed in the last chapter between spaces of configuration that define rational discourses and spaces of localization that constitute practices of and on bodies. Disciplinary mechanisms engage bodies, not in 15 In his lecture of 21 November 1973, Foucault offers a genealogy of disciplinary power. He emphasises that discipline did not appear overnight, that in fact it, perhaps, emerges in military discipline at the end of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth century, when the formation of a standing army became strategic (Foucault 2006, 46). 16 Lemke (2011) emphasizes that Foucault does not abandon a discourse of right, that is, a sovereign discourse of power, now transformed to the property rights of the bourgeoisie, in the form of juridical contractual obligation. Rather, he provokes and invokes a singularity and not a universality of rights, a contingency of the universal. He invokes what he terms a ‘right of the governed’ understood as an imposition of rights and not their elimination but with a focus on difference rather than identity, giving rise to deviations linked to behaviours rather than to legal formulations, as in law-norm relations. Rights are thus immanent and not transcendent to power relations. See The birth of biopolitics, Lecture 7 March 1979, note 11, for mention of the first time Foucault theorizes the “right of the governed (…) more precise and more historically determined than human rights” (Foucault 2008a, 208–209). 17 Hence, we have suggested, above, that for Foucault there is something essential in a shift from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century in understanding what the social contract, as grounding ground of ‘right’ comes to mean. This coincides with liberalism, with bourgeois understandings of property right, and with the requirements for making a property-less poor a productive labour force.

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the form of legal subjects of right, vested with a stake in a social contract or sovereign power, but as more or less resistive entities, subject to pathologies and amenable to techniques of normalization. Such disciplinary mechanisms are productive of new forms of knowing, inciting a writing practice in the form of documents, dossiers and reports, detailing the micro-gestures of the body-in-training or in resistance. Between norms and rights there lies a third ‘space’, one of strategies or strategic practices that mobilize techniques such as disciplinary procedures, at times adhering to juridical rights, and, at times, becoming indifferent to them or working against them. This is how we begin to read the political spatialization of Bentham’s Panopticon. Foucault suggests that there was the emergence of this single architectural figure, a technique or technology of spatial confinement that more or less summed up this complex relation between the distributions of sovereign rights and the normalization of pathologies.18 We now provide an extended passage from Foucault’s Discipline and punish, describing panopticism: The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive. Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based. … All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in the central tower and shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. … The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately. (Foucault 1977b, 199–200)19

5.2.4 Normalization As we have emphasised, essential to discipline is an exercise of power—as actionon-actions—producing subjects precisely as subjects of normalization, which is to say ‘subjects’ understood bodily and not essentially as juridical entities. While the architecture is a corrective apparatus, a machine, it works bodily; it individuates and corrects body abnormalities, especially those of a projected or supposed abnormal 18 For a particularly detailed discussion on Foucault’s engagement with Bentham’s panopticon and on Bentham’s original plan, inspired by his brother’s factory in Russia, see Paul Patton, “Of power and prisons,” (Patton 1979). 19 Between Foucault’s initial encounter with Bentham in 1973 and his 1975 account of Bentham in Discipline and punish, he has produced the 1974–75 lecture series, Abnormal (Foucault 2003b), which continues very much with the disciplinary field of psychiatry as it increasingly links up with and comes to dominate juridical discourse, in the form of producing a necessary ‘psy-profile’ or psychological assessment of those accused and awaiting trial. Though Foucault emphasises the norm, and practices of normalization, in his 1973–74 lectures, focus on the defining of abnormality preoccupies his subsequent lectures. Hence, in his 1975 account, we find particular emphasis on the division between the normal and the abnormal.

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psyche, matrix of a resistive self. Foucault recognises that broad and diffuse social functioning happens as a complex series of such ‘machines’ that enact an exercise of power, which means they engage human actions, as potentials, within correctional or normalizing procedures, techniques and milieus. We cannot localize power in any one place. It does not reside, for example, in a central guard tower. After all, as Foucault stresses, the guards are as much caught in the architectural mechanism as the prisoners. They too are productively normalised by the technology or apparatus.20 We quickly recognise the extent to which Foucault’s discussions of disciplinary mechanisms, the twin measures against the leper and the plague victim, the formation of disciplines or habits for the urban poor, and the emergence of panopticism are able to become powerful analytical tools for rethinking the structuration of the city.21 We do not say there is a simple correlation between what one might call a ‘structure’ of power and a structuring of the urban, or even the ontology or ontological grounds for how the urban begins to be thought. The mediating or intermediary requires us to emphasise that power is practiced before it is known, and its practices are spatializing. Spatializing is productive of ‘social’ relations, of the social itself. In a sense, with Chaps. 1–3, we have broached, in a series of discursive frameworks, how the urban has been correlated to an exercise of power that is disciplinary with respect to a medical gaze, itself correlated with a political economy of liberalism and neo-liberalism, an urbanism whose securing comes in an ordering that at times requires the destruction, as much as, or more so than, construction of social relations. And, in the chapters that follow, a key concern is to correlate practices with an exercise of power coterminous with urban formation. This begins, though, with a fundamental reorientation to an understanding of power and how power and space construe their relations, and, therefore, with how power, space, knowledge and self are radically determined. Foucault broaches these issues in an encapsulated way in his short interview “The eye of power” (1980c). In particular, he emphasises the relative importance of engaging with questions of space in his research:

20 The

Foucault interview “The eye of power” (Foucault 1980c, 146–165) concludes with the following exchange between Michelle Perrot and Foucault: (Perrot) “In other words, coming back to the Panopticon, Bentham doesn’t merely formulate the project of a utopian society, he also describes a society that actually exists.” Foucault replies: “He describes, in the utopian form of a general system, particular mechanisms which really exist.” (Perrot) “And there’s no point for the prisoners in taking over the central tower?” To which Foucault responds: “Oh yes, provided that isn’t the final purpose of the operation. Do you think it would be much better to have the prisoners operating the Panoptic apparatus and sitting in the central tower, instead of the guards?” (164–165) We note, on the one hand, a certain interchangeability of guards and prisoners in as much as the anonymity of the architectural machine ‘captures’ everyone within its exercise of power, producing the normalizing regimes of prisoners and guards. On the other hand, we note the extent to which Foucault returns, albeit obliquely, to the heterotopic in the context of defining, with Bentham’s invention, a general system of the utopic with mechanisms that really exist. 21 In fact, in a 2006 unpublished lecture, titled Metropolis, Agamben draws precisely on this distinction between the exclusion of those with leprosy and the confinement of those with plague in order to develop an analytic of the governmentality of biopolitical modernity. We further reference the Agamben text in Chap. 6.

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Among all the reasons which led to space suffering for so long a certain neglect, I will mention just one, which has to do with the discourse of philosophers. At the moment when a considered politics of spaces was starting to develop, at the end of the eighteenth century, the new achievements in theoretical and experimental physics dislodged philosophy from its ancient right to speak of the world, the cosmos, finite or infinite space. This double investment of space by political technology and scientific practice reduced philosophy to the field of a problematic of time. Since Kant, what is to be thought by the philosopher is time. Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger. Along with this goes a correlative devaluation of space, which stands on the side of the understanding, the analytical, the conceptual, the dead, the fixed, the inert. (Foucault 1980c, 149–150)

We get the sense from this comment that Foucault did not see himself as an historian, or even political analyst of a history of systems of thought. Rather, he is invoking an ontological displacement of thinking the essential grounds to philosophical enquiry with respect to ‘history’, ‘ideas’, ‘systems’, ‘thought’ and so on. If, for Heidegger, being is ecstatic temporality (Heidegger 1996); if, for Bergson, matter and memory are essentially duration in its differentiations (Bergson 2005); if, for Hegel, the hard working negative constitutes actuality (Hegel 1977), then for Foucault, it is not that space is a residual and resulting topos or locale of repetitions or thrownness (Heidegger), nor the congealing of duration in matter (Bergson), nor the boundedness of return in identity’s dialectical tussle with difference (Hegel). Spatiality presents an order of discourse with an essential exteriority of thought, such that cogitation recognises that movement that is neither synchronic nor diachronic, but perhaps an essential relation that makes each discernible in its difference. That is to say, for Foucault, there is a thinking of space that construes and makes possible a more fundamental relationality than either structure or genesis, that yet provides the space for their encounter and differentiations. Spatiality, essentially a politics and an ethics, construes the philosophical less as a question of securing and determining what is truth, than it is a demarcating of the spacings within which games of the true and the false are played, a philosophy that is less a formal and universal determination than it is a way of life. In this sense, spatiality invokes an askésis and care of oneself, or the determination, outside all discourses of right and technologies of normalization, what the stakes of oneself might be, oneself as an open possibility (Foucault 1988, 2011; McGushin 2005).22 22 In attempting to develop an understanding of spatiality for Foucault, we again invoke the work of Blanchot, especially the peculiar ontology of the ‘Outside’, which marks a break or caesura with any metaphysical determinations that would understand an outside essentially in relation to interiority. That dialectic, perhaps the essential difference of metaphysics, is refused. McGushin (2005) emphasizes the extent to which Foucault’s 1981–82 course at the Collège de France (Foucault 2005), was concerned with a renewed reading of Descartes in relation to askésis: “As Foucault sees it, Descartes’ Meditations are a spiritual exercise, an askésis meant to transform the subject in order to gain access to being as truth. At the same time, Descartes, as a result of this askésis, is able to define an essentially non-spiritual form of subjectivity. … This new subject possesses in its being qua subject the right and the capacity to know the truth” (638). We also note, from Foucault’s final lecture course (Foucault 2011), the peculiar emphasis he gives to the triple register of politeia, al¯etheia and e¯ thos, to what we have just enumerated as a question of truth-event as constitutive revealing of a differentiating of e¯ thos, itself constituting the governmentality of the polis. We discuss this in greater detail in Chap. 7.

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5.3 Power/Knowledge 5.3.1 Genealogy We earlier mentioned Foucault’s engagement with Nietzschean understandings of genealogy, that centre especially on the time of his inaugural lecture series at the Collège de France. The word is used frequently in the 1970–71 lectures, though almost exclusively in terms of dynastic lineage, as for example with: “Every four years, royal sovereignty had to be reinforced by magical-religious ceremonies: by reciting the king’s genealogy, the exploits of the ancestors or god he reincarnates …” (Foucault 2013, 119). Though, as Defert emphasises when discussing the course title, Lectures on the will to know, the whole series was directed to a Nietzschean genealogy of knowledge (267–269). In many respects, this ‘dynastic’ reference to genealogy is initially carried over to the 1971–72 lectures (Foucault 2015). In the lecture of January 31, Foucault addresses a movement from archaeology to genealogy. The context of discussion is an important one, concerning a relation of force, a power relation, that enables a thinking together of what otherwise would seem to be two heterogeneous series: that of the wage-form of labour, and that of the prison-form. What enables the recognition of a link and possibility of exchange is time. The wage-form and the prison-form constitute discrete quantities of time: “the time of life becomes an exchangeable material” (83). The quantity of time enables equivalences. The crucial point for Foucault is the recognition that “power must have a hold on time” (83). This is not ideological but corporeal. Crucially, it was not the case that wage-labour developed as a representative model for understanding the productivity of prison labour. Rather, because they do “connect up, … the problem is precisely to find this apparatus of power” (83), to find how the prison-form became instrumental to power. At this point, Foucault characterises his research as concerned with finding how institutional forms deviate and join up with one another. He goes on to say: Now it is a matter of finding power relationships that made the historical emergence of something like the prison possible. After an archaeological type of analysis, it is a matter of undertaking a dynastic, genealogical type of analysis, focusing on filiations on the basis of power relations. (84)

There is a lengthy footnote at this point in Foucault’s text, a long entry by the Course editor, Bernard Harcourt (93–94). Harcourt notes: “here we are at a turning point where Foucault develops the genealogical method he had already evoked and announced in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970, L’Ordre du discours; ‘The Order of Discourse,’ and which he will apply two years after these lectures on ‘the punitive society’ in Surveiller et Punir; Discipline and Punish” (93). There is further articulation by Foucault in this lecture series on the differences between archaeology and genealogy, differences that take on added significance when we see by the late 1970s Foucault developing his frameworks for governmentality. In the lecture of February 7, Foucault begins to find a power-knowledge relation that ‘explains’ how the prison-form, arising from a localized religious community, was

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able to spread. He localises two ensembles (as he did earlier with the wage-form and the prison-form). In this case the two are, firstly, a penal ensemble, implicating the State, the law, prohibitions and sanctions. Secondly, there is a punitive ensemble, “characterized by a coercive penitentiary system” (111).23 “The first is deduced, in an archaeologically correct fashion, from the State institutionalization of justice … The other ensemble is formed in a movement of development, not of the State itself, but of the capitalist mode of production; in this second system, we see this mode of production provide itself with the instruments of political power, but also of moral power. The genealogical problem, then, is how these two ensembles, of different origin, came to be added to each other and function within a single tactic” (111). We see in this a curious repetition of the wage-time and prison-time problematic, or rather how Foucault approaches the capitalist mode of production from the orientations of Nietzschean descent and emergence. In his subsequent lecture series, in 1973–74, Foucault offers a further clarification on the relations between archaeology and genealogy. This comes from the lecture of 23 January, to which we have already referred, where Foucault is distinguishing between truth-event and truth-as-demonstration (Foucault 2006, 238–240). Foucault is discussing how, especially since the Renaissance, truth-as-demonstration has, in accelerated fashion, taken over from truth-event, colonising it, taking it over in an irreversible way: “to show how this technology of demonstrative truth colonized and now exercises a relationship of power over this truth whose technology is linked to the event, to strategy, and to the hunt” (239). Foucault then notes: “We would call this the genealogy of knowledge, the indispensable historical other side to the archaeology of knowledge, and which I have tried to show you, very schematically, with some dossiers, not what it might consist of, but how it might be sketched out” (239). Hence, by genealogy, Foucault is concerned with what he here terms “technologies of truth,” truth-events and demonstrable truths as differing relations of force, distributing various games of truth. With the lecture series from 1974 to 1975, Abnormal, Foucault is able to define his genealogical project in three important respects. His concern is with an exercise of power of normalization that cannot simply be reduced to a State apparatus. Secondly, his understanding of power shifts significantly from the notion of repression, to a notion of production. Thirdly, this is undertaken in research whose milieu has shifted to concerns with sexuality and what will come to be termed, biopower. The crucial introduction to these three registers is in the lecture of 15 January 1975 (Foucault 2003b, 42–43). As with examples from the earlier lecture series, Foucault offers us an analysis wherein he locates two ensembles, in order to problematize something that brings them primordially into a milieu. Earlier it was the wage-form and the prison-form, then a State penal ensemble and a punitive ensemble, and then accounts of truth-event and demonstrative truth. Here it is the two ensembles of medical knowledge and juridical knowledge. Foucault 23 It

is important to note that with this lecture series Foucault maintains aspects of what he terms the “repressive hypothesis” with respect to an exercise of power, that power is coercive rather than productive. We will note when Foucault explicitly revises this understanding, with respect to genealogy.

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emphasises the disruptive power that ensues, when these two are brought into concert, concerning legality and normativity: “I want to show that probably it does not derive from a power that is either judicial or medical, but from a different type of power that for the moment I will provisionally call the power of normalization” (42). Foucault’s aim in these lectures is “a genealogy of this curious power” (42). He goes on to say, in the context of a number of other studies devoted to the same arena of concern, studies he characterises as having a repressive theory of power: “I would like to suggest a different conception of power, a different type of analysis of power, through the analyses I will be undertaking of the normalization of sexuality since the seventeenth century” (43). The examples he immediately gives are those of the banishment of lepers and sequestration of plague towns, exclusion and quarantine, repression and production: “producing a healthy population rather than purifying those living in the community” (46). By 1975, Foucault is able to ‘look back’ and reflect on what he has been doing under this name, ‘genealogy’, though he had really only used the term sporadically— though decisively—in the four preceding years. Foucault (2003a), in the first lecture of January 7, provides a sustained discussion on what he has meant by this notion of genealogy (8–12). Once again, in introducing the problematic, Foucault will outline two ensembles, two possible heterogeneous series, and asks how we might begin, genealogically, to recognise an exercise of power underpinning them, or enabling their possibility. The two series are, firstly, what he terms “subjugated knowledges” understood as disqualified scholarly knowledge that is precise and meticulous, though no longer meeting the standards of scientificity. The second comprises “local knowledges” lying fallow or on the margins. Initially Foucault suggests it might seem paradoxical to group these together, though emphasises: “Well, I think it is the coupling together of the buried scholarly knowledge and knowledges that were disqualified by the hierarchy of erudition and sciences that actually gave the discursive critique of the last fifteen years its essential strength” (8). At stake is “a historical knowledge of struggles,” a combat that tends to be kept to the margins: “And so we have the outline of what might be called a genealogy, or of multiple genealogical investigations. We have both a meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights” (8). Foucault assembles a “provisional definition” of genealogy from out of this coupling of scholarly erudition and local knowledges, constituting struggles that recognise the tactics of the contemporary. Foucault’s works, until the late 1970s, are typically described as genealogical, in particular from Discipline and punish (1977b), which explored the shifting understanding and implementation of power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with regards to Foucault’s reading of Bentham’s panopticon. While Foucault’s archaeological method focused on historical frames, genealogy focused on shifts from one period to another, as a history of the present. Foucault’s aim was to account for historical processes, emphasising contingency rather than inevitability or simple causality, in effect exposing a mesh of complex and underlying historical affects which continue to produce the present (Gutting 2003). Gutting suggests that this movement to a question of power with Foucault’s genealogy coincides with the events of May 1968. In the interview “Truth and Power” Foucault notes: “I ask myself

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what else it was I was talking about in Madness and civilisation and The birth of the clinic, but power” (Foucault 1980a, 115). Foucault is responding in that interview to a question concerning his innovation in analyses of discourse beyond those particularly of structuralism that predominantly asked questions as to how meanings are constructed. Rather, he asks questions as to how power and discourse relate, and his response is important. Foucault initially says he did not consider himself the first to pose this and, in fact, is surprised at how difficult it was for him to actually formulate such a relation.24 He continues: “Yet I’m perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never had such a field of analyses at my disposal. I can say that this was an incapacity linked undoubtedly with the political situation we found ourselves in. It is hard to see where, whether on the Right or the Left, this problem of power could then have been posed” (115). If Gutting mentioned May 1968 as a key moment, this would be linked to the massive upheaval in France, particularly Paris, but also reverberating elsewhere in Europe, whereby the fundamental role of political parties, and differences between the Right and Left were brought into question. The very ground of the State, government, legislative authority and party politics was made to tremble. Within this space of upheaval, there were possibilities for the radicality of Foucault’s understanding of the political, power, and the social to find their sites of adherence and relevance.25 Foucault’s interest in panopticism stems from his study of the development of disciplinary procedures that emerged with the Enlightenment, traditionally lauded as the period when modern freedoms were born. In his reflection on Kant’s ‘What is enlightenment’, Foucault’s particular focus is initially on how the very notion of the ‘present’ is thought, as a relation to freedom. He distinguishes Kant’s thinking from 24 It is important to note the significance Foucault gives to Marx with respect to such a formulation of relations between power and discourse. We note that in The archaeology of knowledge (1972a), Marx is given a pivotal role in Foucault’s orientation to discontinuities: “This epistemological mutation of history is not yet complete. But it is not of recent origin either, since its first phase can no doubt be traced back to Marx” (11–12). But also in Foucault’s “The Meshes of Power” (2007b), we recognise the extent to which Foucault acknowledges in Capital Volume II Marx’s own differentiations between a judicial-sovereign power and a non-juridical normalizing regime (156). 25 Perhaps these comments do not adequately express the impact of May ’68. The role of the political party was never as crucial an issue as the disappointment of students and their supporters, in the face of what they saw as a betrayal by the Unions when deals were struck with de Gaulle to end the strikes. This sense of bewilderment forced many changes to left French thought, particularly in repudiation of such things as the logic of Marxism, the importance of the working class as agents of change, and the relevance of Hegel and the resolution of fragmentary thought. These all come under attack after this. It is not so much the difference between the Right and the Left, but rather who now represents the Left. Definitely we confront the question today (what is the difference between Left and Right), but perhaps not so directly as in the immediate aftermath of ’68. There was, more importantly, the sense that something significant had broken the link between philosophy and action, wrought by the practical failure of the uprisings. The question might be “How to think anew,” in other words, that would account for the failure of more accepted versions of revolution. The collapse of Marxism, prefigured in Foucault’s theory (but also in the ’56 denouncement of Stalin), was very significant in France, because it had been the only method for linking thought and action. Even Sartre had to adopt Marxism as a supplement to existentialism if it was to have political agency. This long comment is, perhaps, suggesting that May ’68 might be treated more as rupture, and then a rallying point around Foucauldian, Derridean and Deleuzian positions.

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that of Plato, Augustine and Vico (Foucault 1984a, 33–34). Where for Plato, the present marks a “world era,” for Augustine, a portentous sign of a coming event, and for Vico, the dawning of a new era, for Kant the present is an “exit”: “[Kant] is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?” (34). For Foucault, the Enlightenment is paradoxical. It is a period when new freedoms develop but also marks a pervasive shift in terms of power’s relation to subjects.26 This shift replaces practices of power on individuals, conceived as symbolic displays of sovereign or monarchical power, to new mechanisms of power in surveillance and legislative governance. As Rabinow explains in his Introduction to The Foucault reader (1984): “Michel Foucault in the manner of his critique explores the functions of institutions, which appear neutral and independent; and to critique them so that political violence that is obscure is unmasked so that it is made visible” (Rabinow 1984, 6). The figure of Bentham sits well in such a critique. As an English Utilitarian philosopher and Enlightenment thinker, his work typifies this period’s internal contradictions. He wrote on liberty and the reform of political rights, though very few of his writings appeared in his lifetime. He argued for equal rights for women and advocated humane treatment for animals (20).27 Though, with panopticism, its modus operandi was its working as an auto-disciplining machine, a kind of primitive surveillance system, whose formal structure was that of a circular building, divided into levels and individual cells, facing out toward an inner circular courtyard with a circular viewing tower in the centre. The cells, in contrast to earlier prison types, were designed to be well lit and not dark, with two windows per cell. The exterior window allowed light in and the other faced the central tower. Thus, the prison cell in effect becomes a “… small theatre, where each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible” (Foucault 1977b, 200). The individual in a cell is unable to have contact with neighbouring cells, making the inmate’s relation solely with an observation tower. The supervisor in the observing tower, however, is not visible to inmates. 26 Foucault does not deny that the Enlightenment developed modern liberties; however, it also constituted the development of modern disciplinary practices. Though Foucault’s essay “What is enlightenment” takes leave of Kant. It is equally (or more so) a text on Baudelaire, on what Foucault suggests, when discussing (or dismissing) an epochal understanding of modernity, as a “countermodernity,” a dialectical tussle he will delineate via the Greek notion of ethos (Foucault 1984a, 39). What he recognises in Baudelaire’s “transfiguring play of freedom with reality” he yet confines to ‘inoperativity’: “Baudelaire does not imagine that these have any place in society itself, or in the body politic. They can only be produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art” (42). This “different place” preoccupies Foucault as a “historico-critical attitude” that must also be an “experimental one” (46). This historico-critical project, comprising a genealogy of disciplinary mechanisms is Foucault’s ‘Enlightenment’ project (49) that requires “patient labor,” “work on our limits” concerning “our impatience for liberty” (50). 27 We may recall from discussion in Chap. 3, concerning the development in nineteenth-century England of the Poor Law that, on the one hand, it was to an extent based on Bentham’s utilitarian logic, and Bentham was a key advocate for its passage. On the other hand, it was highly repressive, the cause of increased hardship and brutality for the working poor, and ultimately ineffectual as to its overall aims.

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Hence inmates are never sure whether they are under observation (201). As Rabinow emphasises, prisoners must modify their behaviour, to act as if surveillance was continuous and total. Thus, they become their own supervisor (Rabinow 1984, 19). Key to this for Bentham is that the principle of power should be both visible and unverifiable (Foucault 1977b, 201). The Panopticon operates its surveillance continuously and anonymously, allowing anyone to either operate it or be subjected to it, via constant self-modification of behaviour: In short, to substitute for a power that is manifested throughout the brilliance of those who exercise it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty. (Foucault 1977b, 209)28

5.3.2 Power and Knowledge The Panopticon can be thought to operate via knowledge and power, in the sense that disciplinary mechanisms constitute the threshold of new discursive orders, those of the written document, records of observation, meticulous detailing of behaviours and gestures, statistical accounts of variations in action. As a mechanism, its aim is to limit resistance and to normalise behaviour by observation rather than violent means. The inmates, in effect, are made observable—thus knowable—due to the undisclosed and consistent surveillance that has the effect of normalising behaviour. Discipline shifts power’s exercise from that of violent spectacle of symbolic power, towards new techniques of control: Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘antinomy’ of power, a technology. (Foucault 1984c, 206)

Thus, the exercise of power is the producing of techniques, via disciplinary mechanisms for inscribing or mapping subjects, as well as forming a body of knowledge or dossier, informing on individuals.29 Individuation is a productive effect of discipline. 28 It is again important to stress Foucault’s recognition of a certain kind of anonymity that operates in the assemblage of panopticism and the processes of subjectification that operate in the locales that may be occupied in the machine. This anonymity of power’s exercise has its direct correlate with the anonymity localized in the statement, understood in archaeology’s discursive formations. 29 In “The eye of power” (1980c), Foucault differentiates between a sovereign symbolic exercise of power in architectural monuments, and modern mechanisms of power: “The point, it seems to me, is that architecture begins at the end of the eighteenth century to become involved in problems of population, health and the urban question. Previously, the art of building corresponded to the need to make power, divinity and might manifest. The palace and the church were the great architectural forms, along with the stronghold. Architecture manifested might, the Sovereign, God. Its development was for long centered on these requirements. Then, late in the eighteenth century, new problems emerge: it becomes a question of using the disposition of space for economico-political ends” (148).

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Writing in 1978, for his Collège de France lectures, Foucault (2007a) re-evaluates the figure of the Panopticon: The idea of the panopticon is a modern idea in one sense, but we can also say that it is completely archaic, since the panoptic mechanism basically involves putting in the centre— an eye, a gaze, a principle of surveillance—who will be able to make its sovereignty function over all individuals placed within the machine of power. To that extent we can say that the panopticon is the oldest dream of the sovereign: None of my subjects can escape and none of their actions is unknown to me. (Foucault 2007a, 66)

The Panopticon, revised here by Foucault, does not operate simply as the ‘blueprint’ of modern disciplinary society. Rather, it is more complex. On the one hand, it operates as the “oldest dream,” that is, the sovereign knows and sees all. The modern aspect of the Panopticon is not that of an all-knowing, all-seeing master. It is a diagram of modern political technology, and an idealised one at that (Foucault 1977b, 205). What is important, when considering the Panopticon, is that it operates, for Foucault, as a strategy that both universalises and individualises, at the level of individuals and populations. As we have already mentioned, in Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s design (Foucault 2006, 73–79), he emphasises that it is not simply a concrete example of prison design at the time of the Enlightenment. Rather, it is an exemplar of a strategy for how individuals and populations can be ordered, measured, made productive and normalised.30 The shift from the symbolic violence of the sovereign, to productive power of the Enlightenment is key for Foucault’s critique. The Enlightenment, which in the course of orthodox history is the point where humanism prevails and liberalism emerges, is re-evaluated as a shift in the strategy of power (Foucault 2007a, 66). Foucault’s critique of the Enlightenment and of modernity is that, though humanism and liberalism emerge at this period, so too do normalising disciplines across a broad series of institutional sites.31 That is to say, the question as to what constituted normal behaviour became central to a medico-legal determination of an exercise of 30 Foucault summarizes: “But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is a diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use” (Foucault 1977b, 205). 31 A common example of this is the intelligence quotient, better known as the IQ test, initially named the Stanford-Binet test. The test was developed by Alfred Binet (1858–1911) and Théodore Simon (1872–1961) in 1904. They were commissioned by the French government to develop a system for testing the intelligence of school children to identify ‘slow learners’. The IQ test in effect brought intelligence into the arena of scientific “normal distribution” by using a Gaussian bell curve, to scientifically understand and observe behaviour of subjects, as well allowing for dividing practices. Binet divided these on a scale of intelligence to classify people, the “Binet Scale.” There were, for example, the categories: Moron: IQ 51–70, Imbecile: IQ 26–50, and Idiot: 0–25 (see Barlow and Durand 2015). We may add to this the early twentieth century practices of Eugenics and the forced sterilisation of those who were outside normal distribution. See also Foucault’s 1974–75 lectures at the Collège de France, Abnormal (2003b). Foucault provides considerable detail to how psychiatry and elementary schooling were brought into a common discourse concerning the normal and abnormal in the training of children. See especially lecture of 5 March 1975. On the emergence of a definition of idiocy and mental retardation in children, see Foucault (2006), especially lecture of 16 January 1974.

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power constituting the social. It aligned with the development in the application of statistics as social data, beginning especially in the late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth centuries, and its formation into a modern governmental technology, regulating the sick and the healthy, the productive and unproductive, the educated and illiterate, the homeless, the unemployed, delinquent or criminal.

5.3.3 The Dispositif We earlier mentioned, with Foucault’s 1970 lecture, “The discourse on language,” that he initially considered the complexity of relations between discourses and power in terms of institutional sites.32 Institutions were precisely those spaces where an exercise of power produces forms of knowing. For example, Foucault emphasises in his lectures on psychiatric power this relation between power, knowledge and institution: “It seems to me that the emergence of what we can call a disciplinary practice, this new microphysics of power, will sweep all this away [referring to delirium therapy as a prescribed form of knowing in psychiatric practice] and establish the core elements of all the psychiatric scenes that develop subsequently, and on the basis of which psychiatric theory and the psychiatric institution will be built” (Foucault 2006, 35). Within more conventional understandings of the relations between power and knowledge, we suppose that those who are powerful, or who are able to exercise power, are so, or do so, because of the knowledge they command. “Knowledge produces power” would be its formula. Hence, a doctor exercises a medical gaze because she is medically qualified to speak; a philosopher arbitrates on the conditions of truth because she has grappled with philosophical knowledge. Already in The archaeology of knowledge, Foucault dispelled this arrangement with his understanding of enunciative modalities, the subject-positions one can take up—or not take up—in already prescribed institutional spaces of the clinic, school room, church, prison and so on.33 One’s ‘expertise’ as a knowing subject is itself subject to the institutional locus one can occupy, and an exercise of power that produces this knowing subject so localized. ‘I’ always speak from the locus of a site or space of enunciation, and it is this site, at once concrete and defined, that bestows, so to speak, the authority of ‘my’ voice. This is re-enforced in Foucault’s discussion on panopticism, where 32 Foucault’s initial interlocutor is the “Institution” which suggests that it is the institution that constitutes the space where the ephemerality of an “it is said” finds its materiality “as a written or spoken object” in the anxiety of the aleatory, the uncertainty or risk of discourse’s transitory existence (Foucault 1972b, 216). 33 Hence, in the formation of enunciative modalities, Foucault (1972a, 50–55) establishes three crucial arenas that determine the law operating behind the anonymity of a statement: (a) who is speaking? This is not a return to authorial subjectivity but to the status or expertise that a statement requires in order that it has veridical consistency (50); (b) what are the institutional sites from which a discourse emerges? It is the site that confers the legitimacy on discourses and their points of application (51); and (c) What are the possible positions a subject can occupy in relation to a domain or group of object: a questioning subject, a listening subject? (52).

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those locales of cell and guard’s tower may be occupied interchangeably, though such capability of occupation is not contingent on a subject-who-knows, but on relations of force that define such a subject, already inscribable within the normalised space of an institutional locus. Hence, there is something complex that operates between power and knowledge, a complex Foucault names “dispositif .” Concerning this complex relation of power and knowledge, Agamben suggests in his short text, “What is an Apparatus?” (2009): “The hypothesis that I wish to propose is that the word dispositif , or ‘apparatus’ in English, is a decisive technical term in the strategy of Foucault’s thought. He uses it quite often, especially from the mid 1970s, when he began to concern himself with what he calls ‘governmentality’ or the ‘government of men’” (Agamben 2009, 1). Agamben cites directly from a key interview by Foucault in 1977, “The confession of the flesh,” (Foucault 1980d). Foucault is responding to a question by Alain Grosrichard, asking what is the methodological function of the term dispositif , translated by Colin Gordon as apparatus. Foucault replies: What I’m trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions — in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements … by the term “apparatus” I mean a kind of a formation, so to speak, that at a given historical moment has as its major function the response to an urgency. The apparatus therefore has a dominant strategic function … I said that the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relations of forces, either so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge. (1–2)

With this quotation appearing in his essay, Agamben has assembled Foucault’s replies to more than one question, in order to comment on this definition. We note, from Gordon’s translation of the interview, something important concerning the ontology of space that we mentioned earlier. Earlier, we suggested, in the context of Foucault noting the neglect of space as a philosophical category since Kant, in favour of time, that Foucault, perhaps, discerns a spatiality that is an essential relation preceding the synchronic and the diachronic, that makes their thought, in its difference, possible. This would be a ‘space’ prior to the division of the very notions of genesis and structure. From his response to Grosrichard, more or less cited by Agamben, above, Foucault is asked a subsequent question by Gerard Wajeman: “So an apparatus is defined by a structure of heterogeneous elements [and thus a synchronic dimension], but also by a certain kind of genesis [and with this a diachrony of emergence]?” (Foucault 1980d, 195). Foucault responds by suggesting two moments of genesis: “There is a first moment which is the prevalent influence of a strategic objective” (195). Foucault’s previous comment, cited by Agamben, gives emphasis to this

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strategic functioning. The second moment concerns what he terms a “strategic elaboration.” Between ‘objective’ and ‘elaboration’ there is nothing suggesting homology, cause and effect, origin and telos and so on. Rather, what Foucault is emphasising here is that strategic elaboration engages precisely unforeseen outcomes that may appear irrational with respect to strategic objectives, or may be completely counter to those objectives.34 It does so in a fundamental recognition of contingency and risk— a non-homology of elaboration and objective—and thus an inventing in concrete practices of strategic completions. We can again recognise something in this triad with respect to that earlier triad of configurations, localizations and practices (or gestures), concrete spacings of procedures and techniques. Foucault gives the example from Discipline and punish, where the apparatus of the modern prison, entailing not just an architecture but also a complex series of procedures, governmental approaches, police measures and judicial interventions, led to the constitution of a delinquent milieu as a more or less stable population, leading to a new strategy that engages this delinquent milieu “for diverse political and economic ends” (195–196). Foucault calls this “strategic completion” (196). The apparatus, then, is a network of heterogeneous elements that has a concrete strategic function and is embedded in relations of power. This network is summarised by Agamben as a: “set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on. The apparatus itself is the network that is established between these elements” (Agamben 2009, 2–3). It comprises the discursive and the non-discursive, what we know, as well, as the procedures by which we act. It is in this sense that the milieu of the apparatus brings into relation two heterogeneous series of relations, those of power and those of knowledge.35 34 This

non-homology between objectives and elaborations, between what may have been seen as strategic aims and their operational outcomes, brings into question the rationality of strategy as such. Foucault emphasizes contingency, risk or the aleatory, unforeseen outcomes that are then incorporated or folded back into objectives and elaborations. It is this unforeseen risk that concerns Foucault as the question or problematic of event, or eventalisation, the open question of the ‘space’ between jurisdictions and veridictions. In this sense, event evades the rationality of structure and the causality of genesis. It is this space of contingency that constitutes the espacement of language’s void and the anonymity of power’s mechanisms. The ‘self’ becomes a problem or open question, to the extent that it becomes the hollow of the non-coincidence of these two anonymities. 35 Agamben, in What is an apparatus? (2009), examines the origin of Foucault’s use of apparatus in his work: At the end of the 1960s, more or less at the time when he was writing The archaeology of knowledge, Foucault does not yet use the term “apparatus” in order to define the object of his research. Instead, he uses the term positivité, “positivity,” an etymological neighbour of dispositif , again without offering us a definition. (3) Examining Foucault’s silence on positivity, Agamben suggests that Foucault’s use of the term could have its origins with his former teacher, Jean Hyppolite, who taught him at both the khâgne at the Lycée Henri IV and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (2009). Hyppolite, a Hegelian scholar, was influential on a generation of French thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze, the latter dedicating his first book to him. In fact, the relationship between Foucault and Hyppolite is stronger than Agamben acknowledges in What is an apparatus?, as Hyppolite was Foucault’s supervisor of his

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5.4 Governmentality 5.4.1 The Dispositif and the Urban In Chap. 4, we referred to a 2008 article by the Danish planning theorist, John Pløger. We noted Pløger’s discussion of The birth of the clinic (1973) and, in a further reference to Osborne and Rose (2004), how aspects of that text may be useful in considering structural aspects of social science and urban planning practices. The key theme of Pløger’s text was understanding Foucault’s dispositif in contexts of urban planning. We now aim to further introduce some of this discussion, along with other references concerning urban planning and environmental practices, that particularly engage Foucault’s notions of disciplinary mechanisms, along with power/knowledge relations. Pløger, in fact, commences with a concern for the poverty of thinking secondary thesis on Kant. Agamben’s discussion points to Hyppolite’s Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire de Hegel [Introduction to Hegel’s philosophy of history (1996)] alerting us to its third section: “III. Reason and History: The Ideas of Positivity and Destiny,” in which Hyppolite analyses the use of the term positivity in the work of Hegel. What is specifically of interest to Agamben is Hyppolite’s analysis of the early works of Hegel, at Berne and Frankfurt (1795–96), Life of Jesus, Positivity of the Christian Religion and Spirit of Christianity and Its Destiny. For Hyppolite, Hegel’s earlier concerns regarding the notions of Reason and History are during this period complicated by the key notions of Destiny and Positivity (Hyppolite 1996). As Hyppolite explains, the notion of positivity for Hegel had its origin in its opposition of “natural religion,” a then popular concept at the time of Hegel’s writing, with that of “positive religion.” As Agamben summaries: “While natural religion is concerned with the immediate and general relation of human reason with the divine, positive or historical religion encompasses the set of beliefs, rules, and rites that in a certain society and at a certain historical moment are externally imposed on individuals” (Agamben 2009, 4). Thus, as Hyppolite succinctly puts it: “A positive religion is therefore a historical religion” (1996, 21). As Agamben puts it: “Hyppolite shows how the opposition between nature and positivity corresponds, in this sense, to the dialectics of freedom and obligation, as well as of reason and history” (2009, 5). It is precisely the problem of the historical, with regard to reason, that Hyppolite points to: In other words, in a positive religion there is an externality for practical reason. Man is not free but submits to a law that he has not given to himself. In the same way as for theoretical reason, the positive represents what is imposed outside of thought and what thought ought to receive passively. (Hyppolite 1996, 21) While Agamben gives a relatively short account of a potential link between Hyppolite’s analysis of Hegel, in particular Hegel’s use of the concept of positivity, and Foucault’s use of the term, linked to his later use of dispositif or apparatus, we can build on Agamben’s analysis, again coming from Hyppolite, in particular from how Hegel thinks positivity: The positive, in the pejorative sense of the word, will not be the concrete, historical element that is intimately connected to the development of a religion or a society, which makes contact with them and, therefore, is not imposed outside of them. It will be only the dead element, which has lost its living meaning and is no more than a residue of history. (Hyppolite 1996, 24) The later part of the quote here is important for us. What is seen as “positive” is precisely that which is no longer recognised by a particular tradition or discursive formation. This resonates with Foucault’s use of the term in the Archaeology of knowledge:

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that happens when dispositif is translated to English as ‘apparatus’. This poverty concerns an emphasis on thinking dispositif functionally and technically, as one normally would think of an apparatus. Pløger suggests this significantly limits our understanding of how Foucault’s work might be applied to issues of urban planning. He initially turns to Deleuze’s short book, Foucault (1988). Deleuze uses his own developed notion of ‘assemblage’, in order to more or less translate Foucault’s notion. Through the notion of machine, ‘assemblage’ is developed by Deleuze in collaboration with Felix Guattari, in their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, volume one (1977).36 Initially, we will say something about Deleuze’s extraordinary reading of Foucault and then return to Pløger’s analyses. We have mentioned already, in Chap. 4, something pivotal to Foucault’s archaeology concerning verbalizations and spatializations. Deleuze reads these two as Foucault’s concerns with the discursive and the non-discursive, with the articulable and the non-articulable, with statements

I’m afraid you are making a double mistake: about the discursive practices that I have tried to define and about the role that you yourself accord to human freedom. The positivities that I have tried to establish must not be understood as a set of determinations imposed from the outside on the thought of individuals, or inhabiting it from the inside, in advance as it were; they constitute rather the set of conditions in accordance with which a practice is exercised, in accordance with which that practice gives rise to partially or totally new statements, and in accordance with which it can be modified. These positivities are not so much limitations imposed on the initiative of subjects as the field in which that initiative is articulated (without, however, constituting its centre), rules that it puts into operation (without it having invented or formulated them), relations that provide it with support (without it being either their final result or point of convergence). It is an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their complexity and density; to show that to speak is to do something – something other than to express what one thinks; to translate what one knows, and something other than to play either the structures of a language (langue); to show that to add a statement to a pre-existing series of statements is to perform a complicated and costly gesture, which involves conditions (and not only a situation, a context, and motives), and rules (not the logical and linguistic rules of construction); to show that a change in the order of discourse does not presuppose ‘new ideas’, a little invention and creativity, a different mentality, but transformations in a practice, perhaps also in neighbouring practices, and in their common articulation. I have not denied—far from it—the possibility of changing discourse: I have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it. (Foucault 1972a, 230) For Foucault, here responding to his interlocutor regarding the freedom from positivites in which a particular discourse is situated (229), as with Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel, positivity prefigures the ground of both the subject and the discursive formation. What is of particular note is that Foucault’s understanding of positivities is defined by actual practices, in that it is not to deny that subjects are incapable of modifying a particular discourse. Rather it is to offer a view of, and to complicate, the subject as that which can only be the sole ground of its freedom. See also Hyppolite, 1969. 36 From the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus (1977), Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that their use of the notion of ‘machine’ is not metaphoric or allusive to the social as an industrial mechanism. It is literal: “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (1).

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and visibilities, ultimately with language and light.37 But archaeology’s concerns were with how these two great forms of knowing, in their heterogeneity, determine the problem of truth.38 For the most part, we assume a homology between seeing and saying, between language and visibilities or, with the question of truth, each amounts to finding that common space of their appearance. For Deleuze, the originality of archaeology was that Foucault precisely defined the problem of speaking the true as the problem of the impossibility for a coincident space of seeing and saying.39 If the radical exteriority of their coincidence determines spaces of jurisdiction, the accounting for a possible determination of relations between words and things constitutes the terrain of veridictions: “A system of light and a system of language are not the same form, and do not have the same formation. We begin to understand now why Foucault studies these two forms in his earlier books: the visible and the articulable, as he called them in The Birth of the Clinic …” (Deleuze 1988, 32). Deleuze emphasises that “Form” has two meanings in each case: organizing matter and finalizing functions. Organizing matter constitutes the forms of visibilities: receptivities of light as horizons of disclosure as to what can be knowable. Finalizing functions is more concerned with what is articulable, spontaneity rather than receptivity, as with the regularity of statements in the articulation of new objects.40 If, as Deleuze notes, there is no correspondence or isomorphism between statements and visibilities, how are they yet related? “So how can we explain such a coadaptation? The reason lies in the fact that we can conceive of pure matter and pure functions, abstracting

37 Deleuze

(1988) recognizes with this division a peculiar relation that Foucault has to Kant, a “neo-Kantianism unique to Foucault” (60). He recognizes how, for Foucault, visibilities, or light, constitute the historical a prioris of a Kantian receptivity, and statements, or language, a spontaneity: “But if there is any neo-Kantianism, it is because visibilities together with their conditions form a Receptivity, and statements together with their conditions form a Spontaneity. The spontaneity of language and the receptivity of light” (60). 38 Deleuze (1988) emphasizes that for Foucault there is a fundamental difference between the visible and the articulable, that they do not coincide as the locus or guarantor of truth: “Perhaps this is the first area in which Foucault encounters Blanchot: ‘speaking is not seeing’. But while Blanchot insisted on the primacy of speaking as a determining element, Foucault, contrary to what we might think at first glance, upholds the specificity of seeing, the irreducibility of the visible as a determinable element” (61). 39 Deleuze (1988) goes on to suggest, regarding this non-coincidence of seeing and saying: “Of course we can always dream of isomorphism, either in the form of an epistemological dream—as when the clinic affirms a structural identity ‘between the visible and the articulable’, the symptom and the sign, the spectacle and the word—or in the form of an aesthetic dream, as when a ‘calligram’ gives the same form to both text and drawing, to the linguistic and the plastic, to the statement and the image” (62–63). Perhaps it is the case that our encounters with mapping, knowing and planning the city exist perennially between these two dreams, that of an epistemological dream of knowing the forms and formations, symptoms and signs as coincident relays to the identity of things. Or there is an aesthetic dream engaging the free play of differences, as if image and imagination found their coincident horizon of composition in the invention of new formations. 40 “Knowledge concerns formed matters (substances) and formalized functions, divided up segment by segment according to the two great formal conditions of seeing and speaking” (Deleuze 1988, 73).

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the forms which embody them” (33). This horizon of unformalized matter and nonfinalized functions is how Deleuze understands Foucault’s ontology of power. He suggests Foucault gives the name “diagram” to this: What can we call such a new informal dimension? On one occasion Foucault gives it its most precise name: it is a ‘diagram’, that is to say a ‘functioning, abstract from any obstacle […] or friction [and which] must be detached from any specific use’ (Foucault, 1977: 205) [Deleuze notes that Foucault considered the Panopticon a deficit exemplar when it was reduced to a piece of architecture and a purely optical device, which is to say a form of organized matter and a finalized function]. The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine. It is defined by informal functions and matter, and in terms of form, makes no distinction between content and expression, a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation. It is a machine that is almost blind and mute, even though it makes others see and speak. (34)

Power is nothing other than relations of forces as they traverse the social field, constituting, in fact, whatever comes to be recognised as the social field. Diagrams or assemblages (Deleuze uses the words interchangeably) map these relations outside of the strata of knowing in its two forms, as un-stratified matter and functions. As relations of force, the ‘un-stratified—un-formalized matter and non-finalized functions—are productive of strata or forms of knowing. In this sense power, for Deleuze, is an immanent cause “coextensive with the whole social field” (37). In the realization of the relations of functions and matter, there are the concrete assemblages of organized matter: schools, homes, factories, shopping malls, that integrate resistant bodies in a normalizing functioning: education, domesticity, production, consumption and so on. For Foucault, Panopticism is to be gauged not so much as that which names a particular realization but, rather, as exemplary of a diagram of power. We recognise that “diagram,” “assemblage” and “apparatus” are each articulating what Foucault might have implied by dispositif . Important for Deleuze, and for Pløger, is the non-instrumental understanding of this notion, and the non-deterministic articulations it implies. Rather, there is a common immanent cause that Deleuze understands as Foucault’s ontology of power, or what he will call an “abstract machine” (38). Pløger suggests that Deleuze, as well as Osborne and Rose (1999), engage the notion of ‘diagram’ in Foucault’s sense in terms of a fundamental spatiality that manages or governs the city, a “spatial milieu of immanence” (Pløger 2008, 63; Osborne and Rose 1999, 1). Pløger discusses what he terms two Foucauldian spatial dispositifs: the healthy city and the Panopticon. He cites Foucault’s discussion with Paul Rabinow, “Space, knowledge, power” (1984b): “from the eighteenth century on, every discussion of politics as the art of government of men necessarily includes a chapter or series of chapters on urbanism, collective facilities, on hygiene, and on private architecture” (240). If Agamben, in his discussion of the dispositif , quotes Foucault on strategy as that which responds to urgency, Pløger defines this urgency in terms of a series of dangers or risks for which a spatial dispositif responds with a spatializing order: As Foucault makes clear, the emergence of this politics of urban health and its subsequent spatial mechanisms, is not due to care for the population, but a matter of maintaining power

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through socio-spatial order; that is security. The city was seen as a threat to politics, because of the existence of a poor population, or proletariat, that increased tensions in cities. The regime of health illustrates this point. … The family became the prime responsible actor in developing a healthy work force, but cities also underwent a spatial purification process and diagrammatization through health regulations on public life and living conditions. (Pløger 2008, 64)

While we tend to agree with the gist of Pløger’s analysis and commentary on Foucault’s dispositif and the city, and will discuss this further at the close of this chapter, there is a tendency in his approach to causally hypostatize or totalize many of the ‘objects’ of analysis that, for Foucault and Deleuze, are effects of a dispositif rather than the conditions of its application. Hence, for example, Pløger opens his own analysis to accusations of reintroducing a proletariat as a causal agent, or reducing power to “regimes” understood as formalized strata, in a sense returning the “apparatus” precisely to a “functional” entity that he was so careful to critique in others. As the dispositif engages both un-formalized matter and non-finalized functions, it encounters, relationally, a discursive domain of the sayable, a signifying dispositif of possible statements, opening to meanings conveying values and norms. But equally the dispositif engages domains of the seeable or visibilities, a non-discursive domain of procedures, techniques and practices. We see with panopticism how, on the one hand, there are institutionalized disciplines and the concrete assemblages of their practices but, on the other hand, a panoply of competing normative understandings as to what constitutes the discursive field of a discipline, and its procedures for determining the true and the false, a whole signifying procedure that does not simply fall into a problem of linguistic constructions: “Foucault’s interest was not the word and meaning in itself, but their being part of a greater ensemble of the discursive and non-discursive in space” (66). But again, “in space” is not a simple hypostatizing of spatiality as if “space” is waiting there in advance for things to fill ‘it’. Rather “space” is at once an immanent cause of the dispositif’s network of heterogeneities and, at the same time, an effect of the putting into action of the dispositif’s assemblage. If we are wary of ways in which Foucault’s work becomes hypostatized where, for example, power regimes or class differences become causal agents in determinations of conduct, thereby returning Foucault to some of the ‘continuist’ concerns he was aiming to avoid, we note the extent to which such revisions return a questioning of the governance, order and planning of the urban back to questions of the State, its formal governmental relations, procedures, legitimizations, legalities and procedural implementations. In such a focus on the State and the sanctions it has, the territory it commands and the population it surveys, we return as well to a sovereign understanding of power, centralized as State power with the ensuing problem field of modalities of legitimate distribution of this power, through democratic, socialist or totalitarian functioning. The urban is then understood in its monumental sense as something designed, ordered and maintained principally from above, with its own series of problematics of a downward distribution of legitimate and legitimizing powers, and the ensuing contestations of forms of knowing that supposedly legitimise decision processes. Jessop (2007) addresses this directly, in his analysis of Foucault’s work on governmentality and the State:

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In addition to his general antipathy to Marxism, Foucault also claimed that “I do, I want to, and I must pass on state theory—just as one would with an indigestible meal” (Foucault, 2004b: 78, my translation [Foucault’s The birth of biopolitics]). This is reflected in his wellknown hostility to general theorizations about the state—whether juridico-political, Marxist, or realist—and his grounding of power and control in the modern state, to the extent that the latter exists, in social norms and institutions and distinctive forms of knowledge rather than in sovereign authority. (Jessop 2007, 35)41

As the study of power begins from below, what is studied are not the processes of legitimization of power, but power’s actual practices of subjection where it is exercised; one studies practices and procedures that are diffuse and networked rather than centres or precise ‘locales’ of power (36). In this respect, the State is not a grand causal agent for the governance of its territory and maintenance of its ordering but, rather, it is more so a “mobile effect”: For, in rejecting various essentialist, transhistorical, universal, and deductive analyses of the state and state power, Foucault created a space for exploring its “polymorphous crystallization” in and through interrelated changes in technologies of power, objects of governance, governmental projects, and modes of political calculation. Indeed, he argues that “the state is nothing more than the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities.” (36)

We emphasise that orthodox analyses of the city, or urban planning, have followed an understanding of governance and power entirely within conventional modes of thinking State power, with primary concerns that begin with the legitimization of civic administrative power with respect to State legislative control, and the manner of distributive economies of control, from such centralized institutional matrices, governed by a juridico-political concern about city ordinance legislations, legal challenge to development consent, codification of expert practitioners in city planning, along with planning implementation concerning legitimate modes of citizen participation in planning decision processes.42 We have already noted the extent to which 41 We note that Jessop’s article is a contribution to a special topic, “Rethinking governmentality,” in the January 2007 issue of the journal, Political Geography. Accompanying Jessop’s contribution were contributions from Michael Dillon (2007), Stuart Elden (2007), and an extract from Foucault (2007a), “Spaces of security: The example of the town.” 42 We can take a broad range of books and journal articles on the city, the urban, urban planning, and so on, and recognize at once three primary coincident concerns: (i) emphasis on form-making or design and planning as re-formulation of formal patterns and arrangements; (ii) a humanism with respect to agency and ethics in the role of design and planning, that is, an assumption of an implicit social good derived from and supported by ‘good’ (i.e., correct) planning; and (iii) the role of expertise in design and planning decision processes and, in this, the derived judicial-political understanding of power as that invested in expertise. We see this in publications as varied as Ian Bentley’s Urban transformations: Power, people and urban design (1999), which shuttles between the epistemological dream of the expert form-giver and the aesthetic dream of the artist form-giver; Engin Isin’s edited collection, Democracy, citizenship and the global city (2000), notwithstanding its reference to Foucault’s work on governmentality, or a work like Readings in planning theory, edited by Campbell and Fainstein (1996). More recent work, such as the September 2011 issue of the journal Urban Studies devoted to the “new urban politics,” significantly complicates the discussion on State-driven judicial structures in contexts of failures in State support for de-stratified brown-field urban cities such as Detroit or Pittsburgh. With Chap. 1, we aimed to ‘survey’ a range of contemporary accounts of thinking the urban, planetary or otherwise, in political and critical contexts

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Kwinter, in his Requiem: For the city (2010), makes a fundamental break with such a deductive analysis, producing rather a heterogeneous array of “polymorphous crystallizations” or dispositifs that construe our understanding of a diffuse exercise of power and its productions of visibilities and statements, what can be seen and what can be said in the event—or becoming—of a city’s matter and functions.43 This is not to say the State, the urban, and the city, do not exist in some way as ‘objects’ of political rationality. While the State is not an essence or source of power, it is an effect of a complex array of governmental procedures, practices, strategies that produce a terrain that is anything but fixed, unified or unchanging. Thus, Jessop suggests: “In this sense, while the state is pre-given as an object of governance, it also gets reconstructed as government practices change” (37). By “government practices” we need to ensure we are not simply referring to legislative or elected democratic practices of government; rather, in a micro-physics of power, governmentality turns such legislative and juridical understandings of governmental right into a problem field for normalizing procedures that work in relation to juridico-political structures, but are not coterminous with—or necessarily strategically aligned to—such structures.

that questioned the global maintenance of the nation-State. While concern in the Urban Studies 2011 issue is with the post-political and post-democratic processes of infrastructural management outside of government regulation, there is (yet) a renewed concern for finding a humanist good within the scope of destitution, coupled with the invention of a new panoply of ‘experts’ whose agencies defy any existing disciplinary structures, such as those who find themselves the instigators of self-help collectives and communities. See especially, Dillon (1996), who identifies, with the rise of a globalizing discipline of International Relations, a new field of experts whose agency is ultimately the in-securitizing of political relations, in order to shore up a calculative and technologized understanding of security’s apparatuses of power. 43 In this regard, it is instructive to contrast a book such as Rob Shields’s Places on the margin: Alternative geographies of modernity and many of the concerns of those writing on the new urban politics of post-democracy. In one respect, both engage with a recognition or crisis of the margins of cultural systems, carrying “the image, and stigma, of their marginality” as Shields notes (Shields 1991, 3). Shields’s project is one of a counter-memory to the official sites, locales, icons and histories of spatial modernity, architectural history and planning rationality. Hence, his margins coincide a little with some of Foucault’s heterotopic concerns: the seaside resort and dirty weekends, honeymoon destinations, regional dialects of spatial understandings and so on, a countering of canons with other spaces, whose political investment is disturbing. However, Macleod’s concern in his overview to the new urban politics, “Urban politics reconsidered” (2011), is engaging with something other than reinvesting in an historico-political imaging of counter-canonical modernity. Rather, concerns here are with (relatively) sudden and irreversible destruction of entire communities, the subsequent displacement and abandonment of entire suburban regions, and the drifting of displaced and ‘blighted’ communities into ghettos of unsubsidized existence. There is no counter-memory to monumental history here, and no wry reinventing of an alternative modernity. There is rather an engagement with what MacLeod names the participatory post-politics of neo-liberalism. We find parallels here with the discussions, from Chap. 1, of the accounts of urban demodernization, surveillance and para-military control, offered, for example, by Graham (2004, 2005, 2006, 2010).

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5.4.2 Governmentality and Security In his 1977–78 Collège de France lecture course, Security, territory, population, Foucault (2007a) developed three understandings of government: sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality, concerned more or less successively with sovereign control over territory as the legitimate concern of government, particularly up to the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, to post-Enlightenment liberalism especially of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and welfare economics and neo-liberalism of the twentieth century. We associate Sovereign power with medieval government up until the sixteenth century treatise on government, The prince, by Machiavelli. Much of the first half of the 1977–78 lecture course is taken up with initially introducing “governmentality” as a new problematic, and then discussing Machiavelli, as well as Christianity and the pastorate, as a mode of governmentality. In the latter part of the lecture course, Foucault devotes a series of lectures to the emergence of Raison d’État during the seventeenth century, with the developments of Mercantilism and Cameralism and, particularly in the last two lectures, we find a discussion of the emergence of what he terms a “technological assemblage characteristic of the new art of government according to Raison d’État: police” (Foucault 2007a, x). Though this entire lecture course has compelling pertinence for understanding the developments and transitions Foucault makes in the late 1970s, that open quite new directions in his research, we aim to place particular emphasis on the opening and closing lectures which each provide genuine centrality to questions of the urban as locale of security, and as the site where much of Foucault’s analyses have the most pressing application. The introductory chapter opens to an analysis of what Foucault names “biopower.”44 He offers a series of proposals for how he will go about engaging 44 As earlier discussed, we need to go back to the previous lecture series to find this notion being introduced. This is the 1975–76 series, Society must be defended (Foucault 2003a), keeping in mind that Foucault did not lecture in 1976–77. It is in the lecture, 17 March 1976, that Foucault offers a discussion on a new type of power that emerges during the eighteenth century, one that is not disciplinary, operating on individuated bodies, but a power that operates on the human as a mass. This he calls bio-power, in the context of discussing the biopolitical: “Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new non-disciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species. To be more specific, I would say that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and, if need be, punished. And that the new technology that is being established is addressed to a multiplicity of men not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on … what I would like to call a “biopolitics” of the human race” (242–243). The 1977–78 lecture series has as one of its key concerns to draw out the contours of this new entity, as object of a new technology of the biopolitical. Foucault already gave the name ‘population’ to this entity that emerges at the end of the eighteenth century in his lecture of 17th March 1976. He also distinguished between what he termed “disciplinary mechanisms” and “security mechanisms” with the latter concerned with the aleatory events of population: “in a word, security mechanisms have to be installed around the random elements inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life” (246).

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this notion as an analytic for mechanisms of power. And, importantly, he then goes on to introduce the general themes of the lecture series, particularly introducing the notion of “security” in conjunction with the notion of “apparatus” or dispositif and, hence, developing the term “apparatuses of security” (4).45 In fact, this understanding of security, in relation to his formulation during the early lectures of the notion of governmentality, becomes the major concern of the series. He does not really engage fully with biopower, to the extent that his 1978–79 lecture series will be titled The birth of biopolitics, though he admits at the conclusion of that series that he has not really addressed the biopolitical at all even there.46 We will be discussing Foucault’s work on the biopolitical and engaging with the 1978–79 lecture series in Chap. 6, “Bio-political urbanism.” However, if it is here that Foucault introduces an understanding of what he means by “security,” and its emergence during the eighteenth century as central to a new problematic of governing the State, security and its attendant concerns with risk become the key problematics for this book, with respect to how the urban becomes a question of governmental practices. With his introduction of the notion of apparatuses of security, Foucault is able to open a sustained analytic of the emergence of liberalism. The birth of biopolitics, as we have already discussed in Chap. 2, enables him to focus on the emergence, in the twentieth century, of neo-liberalism. There is a significant body of critical literature on the urban that addresses both governmentality and neo-liberalism from a Foucauldian perspective or, at least, addresses Foucault’s contributions to contemporary debates around the political economy of urban governance (see, for example, Osborne and Rose 1999; Barry et al. 1996; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Brenner 2004; Brand 2005; Crampton and Elden 2007; Miller and Rose 2008; Auvinen 2010; Wichum 2013; Altamirano 2014; Bruzzone 2019). We suggested above, with Jessop (2007), that there are three moments of an exercise of power in government that Foucault identifies with sovereignty, discipline and governmentality. The latter he introduces, initially, as security. In the opening lecture of Security, territory, population, he outlines these three as mechanisms of power, with a caveat on any simple notion of progression from one to the other, substitution of one for another, or erasure of one by a subsequent other. Foucault offers two contextual examples to delineate the relations between these three mechanisms of power; the initial one he suggests is “very simple, very childish” (4). The second is an extended discussion on town planning in the eighteenth century according to three conditions or problematics coincident with each of these three mechanisms of power. But his aim is really to develop an understanding of what he means by security, 45 Almost at the commencement of the lecture of January 11, 1977, Foucault reminds his audience of the title to the lecture series, then noting: “The first question is obviously: What are we to understand by ‘security’?” (Foucault 2003a, 4). He suggests he will be spending the first two lectures outlining what he means by this term. 46 To be more precise on this, clearly, from his lecture of 17 March 1976, where he introduces the notion of biopower, precisely in relation to mechanisms of security, and the emergence of population as an object or target of power’s exercise, all Foucault discusses with the notions of governmentality and security is the biopolitical. The point being made here is that he seldom, if ever, actually uses this word during 1977 to 1979.

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as he emphasises that both sovereignty and discipline have been well discussed in previous lecture courses. In fact (as we have mentioned), security is introduced in the last lecture of the previous lecture series, that lecture of 17 March 1976, in the context of introducing the notion of biopower. Briefly, the “childish” example is a simple one. Someone steals something. Sovereign mechanisms of power, from the Middle Ages, or even before, up to the seventeenth century construct the problem field as a simple juridico-sovereign matter that instigates a simple legal or juridical mechanism: “laying a law and fixing a punishment” (5). The second mechanism has the same law but now something that accompanies the punishment, concerns a whole range of surveillance measures: “The disciplinary mechanism is characterised by the fact that a third personage, the culprit, appears within the binary system of the code, and at the same time outside the code, and outside the legislative act that establishes the law” (5).47 Hence a panoply of normalizing or corrective procedures are put in place. No longer is punishment a spectacle of sovereign will or right but a series of techniques for normalizing a body that involves a whole series of disciplines and disciplinary mechanisms. The crime is no longer an affront to the body of the king, requiring retribution by the sovereign. The crime is against a society requiring defence. With the third, what Foucault comes to call security, things are quite different. Though there is still the penal law, punishment, panoply of surveillance measures and correctional techniques available, there are also a whole other series of questions to ask and procedures to follow: “What is the average rate of criminality of this type? How can we predict statistically the number of thefts at a given moment? … How much does this criminality cost society; what damage does it cause? … What is the cost of repressing these thefts? … What, therefore is the comparative cost of the theft and its repression? What will it cost to punish [the culprit]?” (4–5). Foucault emphasises that, unlike juridical mechanisms of power or disciplinary mechanisms, apparatuses of security place the phenomenon within a series of probable events (6). It ushers in a question of risk, of the aleatory, and of the future. The legal system has functioned from archaic times, discipline from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, and security emerged from the end of the eighteenth century, constituting a threshold to the developments of liberalism and political economy. Foucault goes into some detail as to how juridical mechanisms did have their considerations of discipline and judgements over effects of punishment, just as discipline hardly eliminated juridical measures; while concerns with probabilities and statistics with respect to crime, its effects, costs and likelihood has never moved entirely beyond the confining and surveillance of discipline: So, there is not a series of successive elements, the appearance of the new causing the earlier ones to disappear. There is not a legal age, the disciplinary age, and then the age of security. 47 Though we are not aware of Agamben making specific reference to this passage from Foucault, there may well be an interesting line of analysis that considers this peculiar spatiality of offender with respect to the Sovereign and the Law, constituting what Agamben develops in Homo sacer (1998) as the state of exception. That is to say, the ‘culprit’ has a peculiar locus of externality with respect to the legislative act, is excepted from it, yet included within the code as that which must be excluded from the binding of sovereign and code.

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… In reality you have a series of complex edifices in which, of course, the techniques themselves change and are perfected, … but what changes … is the system of correlations between juridico-legal mechanisms, disciplinary mechanisms, and mechanisms of security. In other words, there is a history of the actual techniques themselves. (8)48

Foucault introduces four key themes by which he will engage with apparatuses of security, commencing with spaces of security, which we will address in terms of Foucault’s discussion of town planning. Second, is what we intimated above as key to security’s fundamental shift as a mechanism of power, that is, the notion of uncertainty, what Foucault calls the “aleatory” (11). This attention to risk or uncertainty becomes our key concern, especially in our concluding chapter. It is by way of the work of Foucault that we initially introduce it.49 While Foucault has emphasised the normalizing regimes that are effected by disciplinary mechanisms, the normalizing procedures of security take a completely different direction. This becomes a key theme for Foucault in determining the emergence of liberalism as a problem for government in the eighteenth century and the question of how the art of government manages the milieu. The fourth concern is the correlation between security and population. But, crucially, population becomes not the object of security so much as an effect of the application of a new mechanism of power: “Population is undoubtedly an idea and a reality that is absolutely modern in relation to the functioning of political power, but also in relation to knowledge and political theory, prior to the eighteenth century” (11). If discipline’s target was individuating bodies, security maintains its mechanisms at the level of the milieu, and with the techniques 48 Collier (2009) engages a close analysis of Foucault’s work on sovereignty, discipline and govern-

mentality, suggesting that from Security, territory, population (STP) there is a break or innovation in Foucault’s work. However, that break is not the introduction of governmentality, as most commentators suggest. Rather, governmentality is a notion already inscribed in Foucault’s work on the power/knowledge dispositif in Discipline and punish. What the later work develops is a new approach to understanding the spatial assemblages in their multiple connective possibilities, that would best be understood by the notion of ‘topology’ borrowed from spatial mathematics. The shift is from epochal understandings of breaks, seen in the early works, to patterns of correlations. Hence, in STP, there is no longer a concern with epochal shift from sovereign to discipline to regulation but rather systems of correlations where all three intersect but remain heterogeneous to one another (95). In this sense, biopolitics is not a governmental logic but a problem of space to be analysed, while neo-liberalism is not a kind of governmentality or a diagram of power or technology of power but rather a form of thinking, a mentalité, aimed at critiquing existing ways of life, or one’s existence (100). 49 We again refer to Collier (2009). He suggests that for Foucault there is a “contingent relationality” that is implicitly linked to his understanding of strategy. Quoting Foucault from The birth of biopolitics, he notes: “A logic of strategy does not stress contradictory terms within a homogeneity that promises their resolution in a unity. The function of strategic logic is to establish possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenization of the contradictory” (103). We have previously discussed Foucault’s notion of the event, or eventalising in terms of contingency or chance, what we cannot dissociate from his concerns with anonymity, the ‘what matter who speaks’ of the statement, or the anonymity of power’s exercise, coupled with the nonhomology and non-causality of visibilities and statements, the irreducibility of seeing to speaking, and the question of truth that arises only due to this impossible contingency, this heterogeneity that is itself irreducible in a logic of strategy.

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of statistics, invents a new horizon of knowing for the agency of those mechanisms in what it comes to name population.50 Foucault introduces his discussion of town planning in terms of the three frameworks we have identified: that of the sovereign and his territory; Raison d’État, disciplinary mechanisms and the techniques of police; and that of security with its questioning of probable events and a future that is not definable. The three planning arrangements concern that of the sovereign survey of territory and the siting of a territory’s capital; secondly, that of constructing new towns or artificial towns, during the eighteenth century, according to mechanisms of segmentation, surveillance and control. The third is the re-modelling, or alteration to, existing towns to accommodate new political and economic imperatives, growth of population, increases in trade and industry and, crucially, attempts to account for future growth that cannot itself be clearly predicted. It is not as if fundamental concerns with mechanisms of power and spatiality fully dislodged the problem of a territory’s capital, with the advent of discipline, or even the sovereign notion of territory. Nor were the rigid series of spatial demarcations and containments of discipline overcome with security.51 Rather, mechanisms of security continue to adopt precisely these problems, but according to new concerns with respect to the aleatory, rather than the symbolic display of sovereign power, or sequestration of bodies. In introducing the notion of sovereign territory, Foucault references a seventeenth-century text by Alexandre Le Maître, La Métropolitée, that discusses the placement of a territory’s capital. The capital must have a geometrical relation to its territory; it must be in the centre. As well: “The capital must be the ornament of the territory … also a moral role … [and] must be the site of luxury so that it is a point of attraction” (14). This Foucault reads in terms of a fundamental concern with circulation: “… an intensity of circulations: circulation of ideas, of wills, and of orders, and also commercial circulations” (15). Le Maitre’s concerns are those of Mercantilism, which addresses how to maximise 50 See particularly the work of Ian Hacking on Foucault’s engagement with risk, contingency and probability, from his 1981 “How should we do the history of statistics” to his books on the history of probability (Hacking 1975, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2006). 51 We recognize the complexity in discussing the notion of territory, and the appearance of its ‘disappearance’ with discipline and security. We note, for example, the emphasis given by Foucault to the family when discussing the emergence of discipline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the panoply of disciplinary mechanisms and institutions that constructed an interlocking network or series of exchanges, between the workhouse, the hospital, the schoolroom, the prison and asylum. As we have previously mentioned, Foucault emphasises that the family becomes a curious switch-point between these disciplinary locales. It retains something of or a vestige of sovereign power’s exercise, while becoming increasingly porous to discipline’s normalizing regimes. In that we recognize, as well, something of a vestige of sovereign territory: “Inasmuch as the family conforms to the nondisciplinary schema of an apparatus (dispositif ) of sovereignty, I think we could say that it is the hinge, the interlocking point, which is absolutely indispensable to the very functioning of all the disciplinary mechanisms” (Foucault 2006, 81). Stuart Elden has pursued an engagement with the notion of territory in the political geography of Foucauldian studies (see Elden 2009, 2013, 2018). We also note Adams (2019) and his Foucauldian discussion of territory, via reference to the work of Elden. We discussed Adams in Chap. 1, in the context of the ‘birth’ of urbanization. Its logic coincides very much with the logic Foucault describes here concerning the adoption of the Roman town axial grid.

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commerce within a rigid and disciplinarian framework of sovereignty. Hence, we see the superimposition of three states, that of the sovereign, that of the territory and that of commerce, with the aim to maximise circulation within the rigidity of segmentations and surveillance. We will discuss these contradictory forces when we address Foucault’s concluding chapter to Security, territory, population, regarding the development of planning under Mercantilism, that led precisely to the emergence of liberalism, apparatuses of security, and the problematic of population defined via the new ‘technologies’ or procedures of statistics. The second example is that of the new towns developed in the eighteenth century “built from scratch” (15).52 The axial grid of the Roman camp was invariably employed in these schemes. The form of the Roman camp was revived along with the structuring subdivision of troops in northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a process of instigating disciplinary mechanisms for standing armies (16). If La Maître’s concern was with the town as a microcosm of the territory, with these new towns there is an inverse concern. The town itself is a macroscopic repetition of its smallest partitioning. Or rather, the town is a systematic and rigid segmentation based on a minimal differentiating order, that of the square or rectangle. Differentiations as to commerce, habitation and circulation are made by simply defining and redefining the resolution of the grid of rectangles, commerce requiring a denser grid of compartmentalisation, and habitation a lesser density.53 The third example concerns the development of existing towns in the eighteenth century, again with a fundamental concern for circulation, but also for new relations of a city to its surrounding region, and with future accommodation of economic and population growth: “… in other words, it was a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximising the good circulation by diminishing the bad” (18).54 If 52 Foucault (2007a) gives the example of the little French town of Richelieu, though he emphasises he could have taken a broad range of examples from a sweeping geographical region, from Holland to Sweden, for example, Kristiania [Oslo] or Gothenburg, “so important in the thought and political theory of the seventeenth century” (15). 53 In the context of this discussion of sovereign territory and new towns by Foucault, it is instructive to look at the discussion by Adams (2019) on Le Maître (123–128), and on the planning of the town of Philadelphia by William Penn (192–203). 54 Foucault (2007a) discusses the river town of Nantes, with its quay and docks. With Nantes, it was a matter of transforming the closed town in order to accommodate a new milieu of circulations. Foucault identifies five: (i) hygiene and ventilation, dispersing too densely developed spaces; (ii) ensuring circulation of trade within the town, thereby eliminating the barrier of city walls; and thereby (iii), connecting streets to external roads with continued maintenance of customs control; (iv) there was surveillance and control of an influx of a floating population since there was no longer a city wall. Finally, (v), there was the invention of a new field of concerns, what we would come to name planning: “This was a problem of the commerce of the quays and what was not yet called the docks. The town is seen as developing: a number of things, events, elements, will arrive or occur. What must be done to meet something that is not exactly known in advance?” (18–19). We have already encountered aspects of this notion of ‘planning’, when looking at Foucault’s discussion of the emergence of public health in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially with a new understanding of the hospital that emerges in the nineteenth century, as a technology of security rather than as a disciplinary mechanism.

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discipline worked on an empty and artificial site of the new towns, security had to manage a complex series of givens, not in order to perfect them but to maximize their possibilities and minimize their costs, their risk: “One will therefore work not only on natural givens, but also on quantities that can be relatively, but never wholly reduced, and, since they can never be nullified, one works on probabilities” (19). In short, Foucault suggests that sovereignty capitalizes a territory, discipline structures and addresses hierarchies of function and distributions of elements, while security plans a milieu “in terms of events or series of events or possible elements, of series that will have been regulated within a multivalent and transformable framework” (20). We recognise with this articulation of security the extent to which Foucault’s own understanding of power as action-upon-action, and as practices within networks and mechanisms, increasingly coincides with an articulation of security as a mechanism of power. While he does not leave behind the notions of discipline and the judicial-political as mechanisms of power, we also see the extent to which both mechanisms are fully integrated into security, or transformed by security’s new problematic, such that dispositif or apparatus becomes the prerogative of security, articulable across the triple register of the juridical, discipline and the aleatory.55 We will presently engage more closely with that transformation during the eighteenth century of discipline’s regimes of order and surveillance, into a field that would forever elude the possibility of discipline’s capture. In this, the art of government and the definition of the sovereign and the sovereign State, coupled with the exclusive role of police in the formation and governance of towns, also undergo fundamental transformations, as does a concern with what that space of government entails. It is here that governmentality emerges for Foucault, and with it a new understanding of the civic, of the social and the urban, the emergency of civil society and the science of political economy.56

5.4.3 Raison d’État When we look at the different objects thus defined as relevant to the practice, intervention, and also reflection of police, and on police, the first thing we can note is that they are all essentially what could be called urban projects. They are urban in the sense that some only 55 We note the extent to which urban planning adopts this triple register, from its inception as a professional discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. See, for example, the historical surveys of the emergence of urban planning in a series of urban planning ‘readers’ that appeared at the turn of the millennium: Campbell and Fainstein (1996), LeGates and Stout (2000), and Miles et al. (2004). 56 We note the extent to which much Foucauldian literature on the city now seems to emphasize the post-civil and post-political as the coincident milieu of neo-liberalism. We have already made reference to Dehaene and De Cauter’s book on the heterotopic city, with its sub-title: Public space and postcivil society (2008). Concerning governmentality of the urban in contexts of the postdemocratic and post-political see also: Cox (2011), Boyle (2011), Brand (2007), Donzelot (2008), Fairbanks (2011), Kornberger (2012), Lemke (2010a, b), MacLeod (2011), MacLeod and Jones (2011), Murdoch (2004), Duffield (2005), Nishiyama (2018), and Burgess (2019).

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exist in the town and because there is a town. These are roads, squares, buildings, the market, commerce, manufacture, the mechanical arts, and so on. Others are objects that are problems falling under police inasmuch as they are especially significant in towns. Health, for example, subsistence, the means for preventing scarcity, [the] presence of beggars, [the] circulation of vagrants—vagrants only become a problem in the countryside at the end of the eighteenth century. Let’s say that all of these are therefore problems of the town. More generally they are problems of coexistence, and of dense coexistence. (Foucault 2007a, 334–335)

As we noted earlier, Foucault’s concluding chapters to Security, territory, population are concerned with a definition of Raison d’État [Reason of the State], its development at the end of the sixteenth century, consolidation during the seventeenth century, and transformation and surpassing by the end of the eighteenth century. If the sixteenth century’s concern was principally with the manifestation of the power of the sovereign over territory, which included all that happened in that territory, with the seventeenth century a new art of government emerges that still has the sovereign’s power and gaze at its centre, but the mechanisms for strengthening the sovereign’s rule are seen to coincide with an ever-more refined engagement with what happens in the territory, such that disciplinary mechanisms compound for the sake of making the State strong and wealthy. In a disciplinary focus on the State, the sovereign, too, would become stronger: “More than the problems of legitimacy of a sovereign’s rights over a territory, what now appears important is the knowledge and development of a state’s forces” (365). Foucault outlines two broad arenas. The first concerns establishing a standing army and diplomatic strategies, which he terms a “military-diplomatic technology,” that manages external relations of a State to other States. The second concerns the constitution of police, aimed at a multiplicity of regulatory functions for the internal order or reason of a State. They both coincide with the great strategic aim for maximizing monetary circulation and commerce.57 Hence, we recognize the effort at increasing population, and thereby increasing a productive workforce, increasing consumption and export, with concomitant increase in external revenue, and enabling the support for a larger standing army. The primary aim of the regulatory mechanisms of police was growth of the State’s productive forces in the establishment of relations between population—though ‘population’ as aggregated individuation and sequestration—and production of commodities (338), constituting the emergence of the market town as intensive site for productive circulation. It is in this sense that Foucault is able to echo contemporary literature at the time: “to police and to urbanise is the same thing” (337).58 Crucial for Foucault in developing an understanding of liberalism, as that which overtakes ‘police’, is his 57 In Chap. 2, we introduced the notion of ‘police’ and a science of police, when discussing Foucault’s

understanding of the emergence of social medicine and public hygiene, initially in Germany, then in France, and finally in England. It is with Germany in particular, in the sixteenth century that a polizeiwissenschaft is developed. Foucault engages again with the transformations in Europe of this science of police from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. 58 Foucault is referencing, in particular, a compendium by Delamare in the early eighteenth century that constituted a collection of ordinances, statutes and regulations pertaining essentially to the urban, that dated back at least to the three previous centuries: “That is to say, the practices and institutions of police often only take up these earlier urban regulations that developed in the Middle Ages and concerned forms of living together, the manufacture of goods, and the sale of food-stuffs.

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emphasis on the fact that police is not a judicial apparatus, but rather a complex regulatory network of disciplinary mechanisms, that locate themselves adjacent to the law, but directly invested by the sovereign.59 Police is not judicial but it is juridical, which is to say the refined network of regulatory procedures take the form of the law, but are outside of the judicial institution: “Commerce, town regulation, and discipline are, I think, the most characteristic elements of police practice as it was understood in the seventeenth century” (341).60 This separation of a complex regulatory mechanism and a judicial apparatus, or two fundamentally different relations to and expressions of sovereign power, will constitute the transformation of police’s disciplinary coercions to what Foucault names apparatuses of security, with the emergence of liberalism. This becomes the fundamental division that cleaves a space of separation between the State as a legal and judicial entity and what came to be known as civil society, or the social. The emergence of governmentality from Raison d’État is the emergence of a fundamental question as to whether there is too much government or too little government, whether the State requires the complex of regulations we associate with police, where there could never be enough regulation, or the recognition that civil society is So seventeenth and eighteenth-century police carries out a sort of extension of this urban regulation” (335). 59 Foucault emphasizes the heterogeneity of law and the regulative mechanisms of police. In this, he cites an eighteenth-century Instructions by Catherine II: “Police regulations are of a completely different kind than other civil laws. The things of police are things of each moment, whereas the things of the law are definitive and permanent” (340). Foucault suggests that in relation to the judicial-political sovereignty of the State, police was a permanent coup d’État that yet is authorized by royal power, a mobile, detailed and permanent regulatory mechanism. Hence, discipline is not reducible to legalities and illegalities, and we distinguish the myriad of regulatory details of urban living from criminality, its causes, effects and treatments. It was not until the ‘surpassing’ of discipline by security that police and policing became the exclusive prerogative of criminality and the sovereign juridical apparatus. 60 Hence the development of regulations on hygiene and building, whose maintenance was separated from concerns with criminality, though whose enforcing was guaranteed by sovereign decree. To infringe civil laws pertaining to building ordinance, though resulting in legally enforceable actions, would remain an open arena of contestation with respect to criminality. We note the political theory of Jacques Rancière, who has introduced a contemporary notion of ‘police’ that bears an interesting relation to the political philosophy of Foucault. We briefly discussed aspects of Rancière’s work in Chap. 1, in the context of discussing the urban political theory of Eric Swyngedouw. Rancière contrasts the agencies of ‘police’ and ‘politics’ (Rancière 1999). See also his “Ten Theses on Police” (2001): “Thesis 7: Politics is specifically opposed to the police. The police is a ‘partition of the sensible’ [le partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement” (n.p.). We may further comment on the question of sovereignty, law, criminality and civil codes, constituted on biopolitical norms. The architect and political theorist, Eyal Weizman, notes that international law pertaining to war crimes has not kept pace with the increasing role of extra-military or civilian-expert advisors in military campaigns. Weizman has researched and documented the role of architects and planners in Israeli attacks against Palestinian settlements and camps: “Architects and planners are and have always been service providers working for all sides. Some architects engage with urban warfare to develop elaborate tools for the military, others to understand, expose and oppose their methods” (Weizman 2003, 192). Weizman goes on to suggest that in time we may well see an architect or planner before the International Tribunal for War Crimes. We discuss Weizman’s work in more detail in Chap. 7, “Indistinct politics.”

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a self-regulating entity that requires little or no intervention by the State’s regulatory mechanisms. What was the process of this transformation?

5.5 Conclusion 5.5.1 Political Economy Foucault offers four theses in developing an understanding of the dismantling of the State regulatory mechanisms of police. That dismantling—apart from demonstrating another reason, completely opposed to the ratio or reason of sovereign will exercised through police—also rethought the urban as the locale invented or made possible by police, and in doing so reinvested an understanding of the problem-field that the urban primarily constituted, that is to say, how density of habitation is maintained, and what informs the proper approaches to the governing of that milieu. If the regulating mechanisms of police had a principal concern with circulation, that new reason that installed itself in an understanding of the art of government displaced ‘circulation’ in favour of a fundamentally new understanding of economy, established on the basis of the natural sciences.61 Hence, economy was to be mathematically precise and based on probability and statistics. As well, it was ultimately governed by a fundamentally new understanding of nature and natural law, a new understanding that constituted the urban mass no longer as population individuated through discipline, but population as a new entity in itself, with its own laws of distribution. In this, the human was to be considered as a species, along with other species. And, in this, we recognise, genealogically, the birth of the biopolitical, as Foucault will come to introduce that term in Society must be defended (2003a) and History of sexuality volume one: Will to knowledge (1978). We engage with developments in the understanding of the biopolitical in the chapters that follow. In a shorthand way, we could say that biopower develops its cogency in an understanding of the political that is fundamentally based on the human as biological species. The emergence of political economy as a science, and a technology of biopower, at the end of the eighteenth century, occurs as a double movement that defines the human as at-once an economic being, whose actions have a logic or ratio that is intrinsically self-interested. But, also, the human is a being to be fundamentally understood at the level of its species. Emerging in the nineteenth century with liberalism, and its concerns with governmentality and with welfare, are the constant strategic and tactical endeavours made on the basis of these twin poles of self-interest and species-interest, but no 61 Foucault compares the emergence of the late eighteenth century governmentality of the économistes with Raison d’État, emphasizing that the raison, the reason of the State, was not eclipsed but transformed: “Economic reason does not replace Raison d’État, but it gives it a new content and so gives new forms to state rationality” (348). Those new forms will be an economic science understood as a natural science, or a science of the nature of things, that fundamentally implicates the human, in particular population and the market.

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longer within an understanding of the individual produced via discipline, nor with population understood as multiplicity requiring segmentation. Rather, the individual, as self-interest, is autonomous freedom, and population is a natural entity to become a study in its own right. What are these four theses proposed by Foucault on the transformation of Mercantilism’s art of government into the governmentality of security? These theses were introduced earlier in the lecture series, in the context of discussing the role of Physiocratic thought during the eighteenth century, in the emergence of security as a new problematic. The focus was on the regulation of grain and a comparative engagement with the regulative mechanisms of police and the new mechanisms proposed in the literature of the économistes (342). Raison d’État regulated grain production and sales to ensure the maximum amount of production at the lowest cost, resulting in policies for maximising population, thus producing the maximum labour force at minimum wages. This results in maximising the cheapest grain with greatest export advantage, thereby returning hard currency in gold to the sovereign. The Physiocrats developed a fundamentally opposed rationality to that of Raison d’État: “If you want to avoid scarcity, that is to say, if you want abundance of grain, first and foremost, it must be well paid for” (342). Thus, the system implies good agricultural profit, good wages for agricultural workers and the value of the land cultivated: “This governmentality not only takes the land into consideration, but it must no longer focus on the market, on the buying and selling of products, on their circulation, but first of all on production” (342). Hence, we recognise an emphasis on production rather than marketing, along with the de-regulation of the disciplining mechanisms that segregated the rural from the urban at the level of production, and that segmented, in a hierarchy, agricultural labour and mercantile labour. The second thesis continues the logic of the first. What price, then, to pay for grain if regulation does not aim to minimise it? The économistes argued that price would not rise indefinitely but would find an optimum, if the market was allowed to adjust freely, thereby maximising the scale of production, price, profit and wages for all. In this, Foucault recognises that what is under attack is not the urban as the specific site of invention of police, as is implied in the first thesis, but the very object of police as an agency, which is to say, regulation per se: “It is no longer the urban object, which was the privileged object of police, which is called into question. It is something else, namely regulation, the main means of the police system, which, as I was just saying, [in the form of] a generalized discipline, was the essential form in which one conceived the possibility and necessity of police intervention” (343). For police, everything was, in a sense, flexible and modifiable according to the will of the sovereign. Hence one could intervene at will in the market via disciplinary mechanisms. What the économistes demonstrate is that everything is not open to intervention. There are forces that must be left to themselves, that are self-regulating, as the laws of physics prove for natural bodies. There is a fundamental nature to the market that can be scientifically expressed in physical laws, and that will each time produce the optimal outcomes for all. It is not so much that the sovereign-will is deposed, but rather it is nullified, as its optimization at the same time necessarily becomes the optimization for all. Moreover, this sovereign-will must

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coincide with a fundamental nature that is external to it, or the sovereign-will results in ruin for the State.62 Thus police regulation, as the agency of sovereign-will, that is, disciplinary mechanisms of Raison d’État, differentiated from sovereign politicojudicial mechanisms of power, becomes pointless, as regulated intervention results in more harm to the State than does allowing events to unfold ‘naturally’. A corollary to theses one and two is that the very understanding of population must change. With police, population was a central strategy, but it was simply understood as maximizing the amount of labour power, increasing population such that there would be minimal wages, maximum local consumption, lowest costs of production and so on. The Physiocrats recognised that population must also be allowed to rise and fall naturally. It will rise when labour is well paid; hence it cannot be too large. It is not an absolute quantity but a complex variable whose governmentality must be accounted for, primarily by statistical inference: “In fact the number of people will adjust itself. It will adjust itself precisely according to the available resources” (345). Again, population is not a quantity to be regulated by the State. To do so will produce disequilibrium. Rather, one suspends the rationale for police and allow population to govern itself. Again, sovereign-will is placed into a framework whereby this ‘nature’ that acts must do so external to the sovereign or, rather, in ways that cannot be brought under a sovereign gaze, or disciplinary mechanism. Police, and its regulatory networks, do not disappear from the functioning of the State, just as sovereign politico-juridical power in the form of the judiciary does not disappear. However, with the effects of a new understanding of the art of governance, which produces a raison, or reason that is scientific and economic, and essentially biopolitical, judicial and disciplinary mechanisms fall into a new relation to a freedom understood, at once, as individuated, in the relaxation of the effectiveness of discipline, but, equally, under the normative and regulatory understanding of the human as a species. If the first three theses primarily concern adjustments to the governmentality of the State, with respect to sovereign law and police regulation, the fourth thesis concerns the relation of the State to other States, in the degree of regulation of trade. Police demanded the logic of maximising the export of commodities in return for maximising currency in the form of gold payment. Such regulation would be defeated without measures to limit imports and the pricing of imports. Again, the économistes argued that maximising profit, production and foreign exchange happens when there is free and unrestricted trade between States. Their argument is that it is far superior to integrate foreign States into regulating functions that happen in each State (346). 62 Again, we are unaware if Agamben makes explicit reference to this passage in Foucault’s Security,

territory, population. Though, we may fruitfully trace out how Foucault locates political economy as a dislocating location, to use a term Agamben employs in describing the state of exception. Foucault’s concern is particularly with how, in the voiding of the functioning of a sovereign gaze, or the developing of a space of opacity, this opaque spacing may open to the possibility of new regimes of power/knowledge that usher in liberalism and the formation of civil society. Under the guise of this opacity to a sovereign gaze, the State will be cleaved between sovereign law and its police, and the panoply of normalizing techniques associated with the birth of the human sciences, the regulating functioning of civil society and the birth of the liberal subject, whose nature is external to sovereign will.

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There is a fundamental shift in an understanding of competition. No longer is it competition between sovereigns who command a territory; nor is it competition between nation-states, regulated by police, whose complex web of regulations aim to maximise circulation of commodities and production with the State as its own end, though a State understood fundamentally as emanating from the will of the sovereign. Rather, there is a fundamentally new agency of competition, linked precisely to the emergence of a new understanding of freedom, and a new entity to be the principal target for that freedom: Competition will be allowed to operate between private individuals, and it is precisely this game of interest of competing private individuals who each seek maximum advantage for themselves that will allow the state, or the group, or the whole population to pocket the profits, as it were, from this conduct of private individuals, that is to say, to have grains at the just price and to have the most favourable economic situation. … It is now a matter of ensuring that the state only intervenes to regulate, or rather to allow the well-being, the interest of each to adjust itself in such a way that it can actually serve all. The state is envisioned as the regulator of interests and no longer as the transcendent and synthetic principle of the transformation of the happiness of each into the happiness of all. (346)

Individual interest can no longer come under the gaze of a sovereign-will and, hence, cannot be regulated by police in the form of disciplinary mechanisms, whose arbitrary interventions happened according to the ratio of a sovereign capability. Individual interest yet follows a regulatory mechanism no less exacting for it being all the more ‘natural’. The governing, or governmentality, of decision happens at the level of a micro-physics of power whose exercise happens through a panoply of new techniques and technologies, but primarily those concerned with understanding the future outcomes of one’s immediate and private interests and actions, in competition with those of all others.63 In short, the question becomes: what does one risk by acting in this way or that? Outside of the regulatory discipline of police, there is nothing prohibiting the freedom of one’s actions. That is to say, the sovereign-will that commands the welfare of the State is suspended, even if regulation of a judicial nature is still managed by a fundamentally new understanding of police. The new technologies of power come in the form of amassing statistical and probabilistic calculations that inform decision processes, concerning market investments, implementation of hygiene measures, inoculation against disease, applying building regulations, registering and licensing professionals, ensuring the training and regulation of a workforce, and so on. See Foucault (2007c). 63 We may recognise in this understanding of interest, self-interest and enterprise, some key or fundamental concerns of Foucault: (i) strategic logic as a logic of the contingent relationality of heterogeneous elements in an assemblage that does not seek to bring about an homogeneity or unity but rather aims at a dispersion; (ii) something essential to Foucault’s understanding of the heterotopic, and in this to Blanchot’s understanding of space, language and self, in that the heterotopic aims at maintaining a relation to all other real spaces, outside of a project of totalization or unification; and (iii) Foucault’s concern with eventalisation, as the aleatory and uncertain encounter of a visibilities irreducible to a statements, and hence recourse to a question of an outside to stratifications of knowing, as a question of the anonymity of language’s non-finalized functioning and visibility’s non-formalized materializing.

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These are techniques or technologies of power that bring to light a ‘naturalness’ invented at the end of the eighteenth century to which Foucault gives great emphasis: “Society as a specific field of naturalness peculiar to man, and which will be called civil society, emerges as the vis-à-vis of the state. What is civil society if not, precisely, something that cannot be thought of as simply the product and result of the state” (349–350). Hence, from the point of view of governmentality, the State becomes a problem-field with respect to the relative autonomy of civil society, but a civil society composed of, or composing, a complex multiplicity of competing private interests. For this reason, the State requires what we have just mentioned as the technologies of power of this ‘naturalness’ that produce scientific knowledge, indispensable for good government. This is not a science of government, but a science external to and absolutely essential for government, what becomes the discipline of economics, upon which government will model its decisions (351). This dependence on science for governmental decision extends to the science of population, demographics, the invention of public medicine and social hygiene: “the population as a collection of subjects is replaced by the population as a set of natural phenomena” (351). A whole new set of concerns become visible for government, opposed directly to the application of disciplinary mechanisms of Raison d’État. Now it was necessary for government to determine the extent of the naturalness of the entities it governs, and absolute limits to its interventions in those fields, such that it allows for those natures in their freedom. Its role, if any, it to recognise those natural processes, get them to work where they are not functioning well, and to work with them. Hence government becomes an art of management and not a mechanism of control: “That is to say, it will be necessary to set up mechanisms of security. The fundamental objective of governmentality will be mechanisms of security or, let’s say, it will be state intervention with the essential function of ensuring the security of the natural phenomena of economic processes or processes intrinsic to population” (353). This will be what Foucault develops as ‘biopower’. Earlier, we discussed Foucault’s engagement with three conditions of town planning during the eighteenth century. Initially we noted a concern with sovereign power and territory in the maintenance of an understanding of the politico-judicial functioning of power, recognised in urban planning, firstly, with an understanding of the display and distribution of power embodied symbolically in the monumental with, for example, the question as to where the seat of power should reside within a territory. This extends to further frameworks for understanding the display of power: the degree of luxury a territory’s capital displays, the amount of land that may be productive or left fallow as a display of wealth and privilege, and the degree of fortification or protection afforded a town as a correlate with the protection of the sovereign’s interest. We do not think, for a moment, that concerns with sovereign displays of wealth, or symbolic demonstrations of power, have been altogether eradicated from contemporary urban development. Far from it. Foucault recognised that this archaic and medieval understanding of the urban, at least until the seventeenth century, undergoes a transformation with Mercantilism’s concern with disciplinary mechanisms and a planning order that systematically segments the urban to maximise circulation of commodities, of people, wealth, productivity. Though this has not extinguished

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symbolic and ritualized displays of sovereignty in monumental aspects of urban planning and architecture. Though, those current displays of conspicuous wealth or consumption at the level of civic design have their correlates in recognising how such technologies of power maintain both disciplinary mechanisms of individuated control, and securitizing assemblages as to new norms of an invented ‘nature’ to the human as biopolitical entity. What we recognise as Foucault’s concerns, from the early 1970s, with the wholesale development of the urban in Europe, with its regulations on hygiene, population, markets and production, ostensibly the collection into regulatory manuals of laws relating to dense habitation, from the fourteenth century on, constitute a fine network of disciplinary mechanisms, whose aim was to individuate an urban mass into ordered productivity. Foucault made particular note of the development of new towns in the eighteenth century, artificial towns based on the Roman camp, with their orthogonal axes and regularity figured on the square or rectangle. We might today call these ‘green-field’ sites. Urban planning has not lost its refinement for segmentation, sequestration, order, surveillance and control. Much of our discussion in Chap. 1 on various approaches to current understanding of the urban, focused precisely on this. Perhaps the urban, constituted in the public spaces of city habitation, has never been so marked as it is today with technologies of disciplinary control. Foucault made further reference to something new happening in the eighteenth century, with the redevelopment of existing towns whose arrangements had become a hindrance to circulation, production and growth. With these developments, Foucault notes that, for the first time, a question is posed as to how one might plan for future production, for something that cannot be at all anticipated in the present. As we have just discussed above, this questioning of openness to a future emphasises not the overregulation of production processes, but rather the aleatory, or open possibility to a future more difficult to predict, that thus carries risk associated with present investment. We developed, in Chap. 3, a small history of that aleatory uncertainly, that risk in urban planning and its regulation, in securing the competitive self-interests of individuals in order to maximize the interest of all. We saw what then ensued. The urban is today site of speculative investment in risk, more so in speculative investment in the risks of risk, in the form of derivatives trading, and securitizations of the local in global investment portfolios. We recognise, with the coincident concerns of these three mechanisms of power, the fundamental conditions or forces that have determined an understanding of the urban for the past two hundred years: metropolitan centres as seats of power, open displays of wealth and power through the monumental. The urban is equally finely grained regulating mechanisms that determine what can and cannot be done. And the urban is speculative development, risk and individuated self-interest in the determinations of the public and the private within urban planning. In this chapter, we have developed an understanding of the emergence of Foucault’s own articulation and understanding of power as relation or process, rather than as substance. With Security, territory, population, Foucault presents a complex discussion of transformations of relations of force, or technologies of power, that have a particular engagement with the urban, such that we come to recognise, in a genealogy of the present, how

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our modern understanding of the governmentality of the urban have emerged. With Chap. 6, we introduce a more detailed discussion of the biopolitical, in relation to the governmentality of the urban, coupled with a more detailed understanding of the emergence of neo-liberalism during the twentieth century, and the impact of this on planning approaches. We also introduce the work of Agamben on biopolitics, and discuss the divergences and convergences of Agamben’s work in relation to Foucault.

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Deleuze, G. (1990). Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2009). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, volume one (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). London and New York: Penguin. Detienne, M. (1996). The masters of truth in archaic Greece (J. Lloyd, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. Dillon, M. (1996). Politics of security: Towards a political philosophy of continental thought. London and New York: Routledge. Dillon, M. (2007). Governing through contingency: The security of biopolitical governance. Political Geography, 26(1), 41–47. Donzelot, J. (2008). Michel Foucault and liberal intelligence. Economy and Society, 37(1), 115–134. Dreyfus, H. (1992). On the ordering of things: Being and power in Heidegger and Foucault. In T. Armstrong (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Philosopher (pp. 80–95). New York: Routledge. Duffield, M. (2005). Getting savages to fight barbarians: Development, security and the colonial present. Conflict, Security & Development, 5(2), 141–159. Dupont, D., & Pearce, F. (2001). Foucault contra Foucault: Rereading the ‘governmentality’ papers. Theoretical Criminology, 5(2), 123–158. Elden, S. (2007). Rethinking governmentality. Political Geography, 26(1), 29–33. Elden, S. (2009). Terror and territory: The spatial extent of sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elden, S. (2013). The birth of territory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Elden, S. (2018). Shakespearean territories. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Fairbanks, R. (2011). The politics of urban informality in Philadelphia’s recovery house movement. Urban Studies, 48(12), 2555–2570. Foucault, M. (1972a). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New York: Harper Torchbooks. Foucault, M. (1972b). The discourse on language (R. Swyer, Trans.). In The archaeology of knowledge (pp. 215–237). New York: Harper Torchbooks. Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (A. M. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1977a). Nietzsche, genealogy, history (D. Bouchard & S. Simon, Trans.). In D. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice (pp. 139–164). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1977b). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of sexuality volume one: The will to knowledge (R. J. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1980a). Truth and power. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews & other writings 1972–1977 (pp. 109–133). New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1980b). Two lectures. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews & other writings 1972–1977 (pp. 78–108). New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1980c). The eye of power. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews & other writings 1972–1977 (pp. 146–165). New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1980d). The confession of the flesh. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews & other writings 1972–1977 (pp. 194–228). New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1982a). The subject and power: Afterword—How is power exercised? In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 216–226). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1982b). The subject and power: Afterword—Why Study Power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208–216). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1984a). What is enlightenment? In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 32–50). New York: Pantheon Books.

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Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). Albany: SUNY Press. Hyppolite, J. (1969). Studies on Marx and Hegel (J. O’Neill, Trans.). New York: Harper Torchbooks. Hyppolite, J. (1996). Introduction to Hegel’s philosophy of history (B. Harris & J. B. Spurlock, Trans.). Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Isin, E. F. (2000). Democracy, citizenship and the global city. London & New York: Routledge. Jessop, B. (2007). From micro-powers to governmentality: Foucault’s work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power. Political Geography, 26(1), 34–40. Kornberger, M. (2012). Governing the city: From planning to urban strategy. Theory, Culture & Society, 29(2), 84–106. Kremer-Marietti, A. (1985). Michel Foucault: Archaeologie et genealogie. Paris: Livre de Poche. Kwinter, S. (2010). Requiem: For the csisty at the end of the millennium. Barcelona and New York: Actar. LeGates, R., & Stout, F. (2000). The city reader. London: Routledge. Lemke, T. (2010a). Foucault, governmentality, and critique. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 14(3), 49–64. Lemke, T. (2010b). Foucault’s hypothesis: From the critique of a juridico-discursive concept of power to an analytic of government. Parrhesia, 9, 31–43. Lemke, T. (2011). Critique and experience in Foucault. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(4), 26–48. MacLeod, G. (2011). Urban politics reconsidered: Growth machine to post-democratic city? Urban Studies, 48(12), 2629–2660. MacLeod, G., & Jones, M. (2011). Renewing urban politics. Urban Studies, 48(12), 2443–2472. McGushin, E. (2005). Foucault and the problem of the subject. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 31(5–6), 623–648. McKinlay, A. (2009). Foucault, plague, defoe. Culture and Organization, 15(2), 167–184. Miles, M., Hall, T., & Borden, I. (Eds.). (2004). The city cultures reader. London and New York: Routledge. Miller, P., & Rose, N. (2008). Governing the present: Administering economic, social and personal life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Murdoch, J. (2004). Putting discourse in its place: Planning, sustainability and the urban capacity study. Area, 36(1), 50–58. Negri, A. (1991). The savage anomaly: The power of Spinoza’s metaphysics and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nishiyama, H. (2018). Crowd surveillance: The (in)securitization of the urban body. Security Dialogue, 49(3), 200–216. Osborne, T., & Rose, N. (1999). Governing cities: Notes on the spatialisation of virtue. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 17, 737–760. Osborne, T., & Rose, N. (2004). Spatial phenomenoticnics: Marking space with Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 22, 209–228. Patton, P. (1979). Of power and prisons. In M. Morris & P. Patton (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Power, truth, strategy (pp. 109–147). Sydney: Feral Publications. Pløger, J. (2008). Foucault’s dispositif and the city. Planning Theory, 7(1), 51–70. Rabinow, P. (1984). Introduction. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 3–29). New York: Pantheon Books. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and philosophy (J. Rose, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ranciere, J. (2001). Ten theses on politics. Theory & Event, 5(3). Accessed 29 February 2020 from: https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2001.0028. Shields, R. (1991). Places on the margin: Alternative geographies of modernity. London and New York: Routledge. Stein, S., & Harper, T. (2003). Power, trust, and planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 23, 125–139. Weizman, E. (2003). Military operations as urban planning. In E. Cadava & A. Levy (Eds.), Cities without citizens (pp. 167–200). Philadelphia: Slought Foundation. Wichum, R. (2013). Security as dispositif: Michel Foucault in the field of security. Foucault Studies, 15, 164–171.

Chapter 6

Biopolitical Urbanism

6.1 Introduction 6.1.1 Power, Strategy and Freedom We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure—prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors—scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. … For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. (Deleuze 1992a, 3–4)

This opening quote comes from a short text by Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the societies of control,” first published in 1990 in the French journal L’Autre, translated and re-published in 1992 in the American journal, October. Though short, the text is complex, folding multiple concerns at many levels on how we take up and work with the critical and political writings of Foucault, particularly his work on shifts in forms of societal administration from discipline to what Deleuze names control.1 In Chapter 5, we referenced in some small detail the penetrating insights Deleuze has 1 As has been emphasized, the Deleuze text is a short one that deals in a compact way with a series of

complex analyses. To gain a perspective on Deleuze’s approach, one would necessarily need to go to the work Deleuze has done with his colleague, Felix Guattari, under the general title, Capitalism and schizophrenia, comprising the two volumes, Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A thousand plateaus (1987). With the latter, we are able to recognize, particularly with the twelfth and thirteenth plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—The War Machine,” and “7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture,” the modes of engagement with relations of force, governmentality and subjectification that form a basis for Deleuze’s understanding of “control societies.” As well, in introducing the terminology © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. L. Jackson and M. Hanlen, Securing Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4_6

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of Foucault’s work, and the manner whereby he translates Foucault into Deleuzian thinking. It is no less the case here, and this ‘translating’ presents us again with a curious approach to Foucault offered by Deleuze, one we need to make some sense of in discussing a number of the issues we raised in the latter part of Chapter 5, on governmentality, and in introducing Foucault’s work on the biopolitical. The Deleuze text is broadly in three sections, under three headings: “Historical, Logic, Program.” The first briefly outlines the sequencing for Foucault, or succession from sovereignty to discipline to control: “But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model [of discipline]: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and function of which were something quite different … But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II” (3). The second, “Logic,” contrasts the differing agents and agencies with respect to discipline and control. With discipline, one moves from one mode of enclosure, one ‘mould’, to the next as if one is starting over: from school to barrack, from barrack to factory. With control, there is “perpetual training.” Discipline moulds, whereas control enacts continuous modulations: “Enclosures are molds [sic], distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point” (4). With discipline, subjects are constituted in relays between an individuated self with a signature and a mass, differentiated in administrative numeration. With control, there is no longer the unique signature opposed to population as administered mass. There is the unique code and regulation by databases: “The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information or reject it. … Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (5). Control construes a continuous social network. Discipline constitutes humans as essentially being-enclosed; control constitutes humans as essentially exposed-to-debt. The third category, “Program,” suggests that at the level of technologies, or programmatic practices, everything changes. Perpetual training suggests a smoothing to a degree of non-differentiation between enclosure and exposure, capture and release. Hence prison systems with electronic collars, or school systems with continuous forms of control, the corporation-model established into every institutional form: “Many young people strangely boast of being ‘motivated’; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines” (7). While Deleuze succinctly and effectively describes a transition, particularly one occurring in the latter half of the twentieth century, of mechanisms of societal stratification, in many respects he does not engage or reference the familiar terms employed by Foucault, nor the same periodicities, nor even the same discerning of the mechanisms or relations of power, as he defines them in sovereignty, discipline and security. Moreover, where Deleuze seems to emphasise succession, though of ‘dividuals’, moulds and modulations, Deleuze is referencing the politico-technology writings of Gilbert Simondon (Simondon 2012, 2017, 2020).

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possible resuscitation of older ‘forms’ of power under new mechanisms, Foucault emphasises a peculiar maintenance of juridical sovereignty, disciplinary civil-judicial procedures and liberal or neo-liberal apparatuses of managing risk, in relay with one another. Their differences open a useful space for engaging with questions of political understanding of the urban as complex site of power, control and management. In introducing this chapter that discusses more fully governmentality and its relation to biopolitics, we want to contrast salient aspects of Deleuze’s control societies with the questioning of power and subjectivity that Foucault presents in 1982, with his “Afterword” publication to Dreyfus and Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (1982).

6.2 Freedom to Act 6.2.1 A Pre-Emptory ‘Afterword’ We need to keep in mind a somewhat skewed unfolding of Foucault’s work for Anglo-American audiences, including those in Australasia. Two years separate the publication of Colin Gordon’s major contribution to the availability of Foucault’s essays on power, Power/Knowledge (1980) and Dreyfus and Rabinow’s book, with its “Afterword.” The writings on power, in the former, stretch from 1972 to 1977, while the “Afterword” is a decade later (1982). While Foucault’s books were translated relatively quickly from the mid-1970s on, it is only in the past fifteen years that Foucault’s lecture courses from the late 1970s, at the Collège de France, have appeared translated, with French editions only a short time prior.2 Hence, between the writings in Gordon’s edited collection on power and the writing of the “Afterword” there are the significant developments in Foucault’s thinking on the emergence of liberalism and the biopolitical, that we have previously noted, from Society must be defended (1975–76), to Security, territory, population (1977–78) and The birth of Biopolitics (1978–79). His lecture courses in the early 1980s shift to a focus on the question of the subject of freedom and of truth, as in fact we see in the essential aspects of the 1982 “Afterword” texts to Dreyfus and Rabinow, and coincident with

2 Adding to this temporal dislocation was the decision to publish Foucault’s 1975–76 lecture course

at the Collège de France, Society must be defended, prior to others in the overall series. Hence, Society must be defended appeared in French as early as 1997, and in English in 2003, well in advance of those subsequent lecture series of 1977–78 and 78–79, jointly published in French in 2004 and in English in 2007 and 2008. The French and English publications of Society must be defended also preceded French and English publication of the 1973–74 and 74–75 lecture series. And it was not until 2011 that Foucault’s inaugural lecture course, Lectures on the will to know, appeared in French, with its translation in 2013; while the second lecture series, Penal theories and institutions, delivered 1971–72, was the last to appear in both French and English, in 2019, completing the series.

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the Collège de France lecture course of 1981–82, The hermeneutics of the subject.3 The final two lecture courses, prior to Foucault’s death in June 1984, maintain this close examination of the subject, particularly through Greek and Roman texts dealing with parrhesia, understood as ethical attitude and technical procedures of a self.4 The “Afterword” is comprised of two texts, “Why study power: The question of the subject,” written by Foucault in English for the publication (Foucault 1982a), and “How is power exercised?” written in French and translated by Leslie Sawyer (Foucault 1982b). These texts emphasise something quite different from the texts of the early to mid-1970s. In those earlier texts, there is a particular concern with an anonymous exercise of power productive of forms of knowing, one of whose effects is the producing of knowing subjects. In this sense, power’s knowing, manifested in resistances and power’s agency, in a reference to Nietzsche, is corporeal. Power inscribes bodies. In a continued legacy of his archaeology, the question of the subject is preceded by the “it speaks” or “what matter who speaks” of enunciative modalities, again with the subject as truth-effect of discourse. It was not that the subject— or question of the subject—is absent from Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy. However, it is subordinated to the anonymity of enunciative modalities, and the relations of force productive of their stratifications. A somewhat different emphasis emerges in the “Afterword” texts, an emphasis explicitly on the subject and on a freedom coincident with the subject that necessarily precedes, in a sense, the very exercise of power. In this account, an understanding of power is greatly refined, if not significantly modified, from earlier accounts. Indeed, just as we note in Foucault’s 1977 interview, “Truth and Power” (1980) in which he asks himself, what was it that he was studying, if not power, through all of his engagements with archaeology, so here in 1982, Foucault suggests: “I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyse the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundation of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made into subjects. … Thus it is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research” (Foucault 1982a, 208–209).5 3 The

transitional lecture series, from those concerning the biopolitical to those concerning the self and freedom, concern how practices of truth-telling constitute domains of subjectivity and the art of government. Hence, the 1979–80 series, On the government of the living (Foucault 2014a) and the 1980–81 series, Subjectivity and truth (Foucault 2017). On completion of the latter series, Foucault almost immediately delivered a further series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain, 12 April to 20 May, 1981, Wrong-doing, truth-telling: The function of avowal in justice (Foucault 2014b). 4 See Foucault (2010, 2011). We will address the concerns of these final lectures later in the chapter. 5 In the 1977 interview, “Truth and Power,” Foucault notes, regarding his concern with the question of power: “When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about, in Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic, but power?” (Foucault 1980, 115). Just as he goes on to note here that he seemed to “scarcely ever use the word” (115), so we might also say with his revelation that he was always concerned with the question as to how human beings become subjects, that he seemed hardly ever to use that word, “subject,” and in fact seemed to prefer to speak of the anonymity of a structuring relation, or the corporeal effects of relations of force, rather than broach a freedom that essentially constitutes a subject.

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Foucault proceeds to note that the human subject is placed in three essential relations, those of production and of signification, and that of power relations.6 While there are disciplinary fields of economics and linguistics to engage the first two, there is no theory of power to define the third, outside of juridical legal frameworks or institutional models of the State. Foucault then asks: “On what basis would we claim that we now need a theory of power, and how would we proceed with its conceptualisation?” (209). It is for this reason that he turns to an analysis of the links between rationalisation and power, beginning with Kant and the Auflkärung: “I think the word rationalization is dangerous. What we have to do is analyse specific rationalities rather than always invoking the progress of rationalization in general. Even if the Auflkärung has been a very important phase in our history and in the development of political technology, I think we have to refer to much more remote processes if we want to understand how we have been trapped in our own history” (210). Specific rationalities refer to empirical modes of resistance, as antagonisms of strategies: “to find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what happens in the field of insanity” (211).7 These antagonisms are not simply considered as anti-authoritarian, as if resistance and power are in continual confrontation. These struggles are more diffuse, more localised, and constitute not the other to power, but 6 In a discussion Foucault undertakes in 1980 in the U.S., in relation to a series of lectures he gives on

what he terms a ‘hermeneutics of the self’, he offers an articulation of how a theory of power differs to a theory of signification: “When one thinks, if you like, of the care with which, in our society, semiotic systems have been questioned to find out the signifying values for lots of different things, I would say that, in comparison, systems of the exercise of power have been relatively neglected, with insufficient attention given to the complex consequences of the linkages they give rise to” (Foucault 2016, 135). Later in this chapter we see where Foucault makes a distinction between power and communication, implicating important differentiations between relations of meaning and relations of force. 7 The discussion of Kant and the Auflkärung needs to be read in conjunction with Foucault’s “response” to Kant’s “What is Enlightenment” with his own text of the same name, “What is Enlightenment” (Foucault 1997, 303–319). We have already mentioned this briefly in the last chapter. Though he recognises the radicality of Kant’s question and the manner of its exposition, Foucault, at the same time, refuses the essential constitution of obligation and responsibility that Kant unfolds. Hence, it was, indeed, radical that a philosopher asks the question, and asks it in a newspaper: what is our present concerned with, or as Foucault poses it: “What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?” (305). Kant’s concern was essentially with the question of his society’s maturity to think, to be awakened from the slumbers of dogmatism and “dare” to self-knowledge and self-freedom. As Rabinow (1997) suggests: “Kant proposed a political contract with the “rational despot” Frederick II: an exchange of political subservience for the free use of the rational faculties. However, this contract was not something Foucault was willing to endorse” (xxxi–xxxii). Foucault’s response, in contrast to Kant, involves looking precisely at this question of one’s present, one’s self and one’s freedom, from the work of the French writer, Charles Baudelaire, and his seminal text, The painter of modern life (1964). Perhaps most famous in this text is Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as composed of two halves, the eternal and the fleeting, though crucially, the eternal was to be found not as that which annulled the fleeting, but rather as that which was essentially the freedom of the present. In this sense, Baudelaire’s artist, like Kant’s thinker, aims to seize the present, but not in order to hold and assay it, but to “transfigure” it. It is this “transfiguration” that preoccupies Foucault: “Baudelaire’s transfiguration entails not the annulling of reality but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom” (311).

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an elucidation of power effects themselves. Struggles are neither for nor against the individual: “they are struggles against the ‘government of individualization’” (212). Equally, they are neither for the certitude of truth, nor question the possibility of truth, but rather struggle against local and particular circulations and functioning of knowing, or how knowing and power find their relations.8 Foucault identifies three ways to understand these struggles, invoking historical frameworks and, coincidently, in complex ways with making sense of what we are in our present. These are struggles against forms of domination, whether those be of ethnicity, religion or sociality; struggles against exploitation, particularly in relations of economic production whereby individuals are severed from what they produce; the third is struggle that divides a self, or ties an individual to the submissions of others (212–213). Foucault suggests we can see an emphasis of the first kind in feudal societies, which predominantly understand power relations in terms of juridical sovereignty, and where territory finds its equivalence in frameworks of racial, religious or civil inclusivity and exclusivity. The second predominates in the nineteenth century’s expansion of labour markets and struggles with exploitation, though imperialism hardly lets up on struggles with forms of domination. The third, perhaps, emerges particularly in the twentieth century in struggles against forms of subjection, coincident with liberalism’s government of individualisation. It is also, perhaps, in this classification, rudimentary though it might be, that we see a correlate with Deleuze’s sovereign rule, discipline and societies of control. However, Foucault now focuses the remainder of this text on what he sees as an essential articulation of struggle, particularly from the sixteenth century, in “a new political form of power [that] has been continuously developing” (213), the State, with its twin roles: “The state’s power (and that’s one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power … individualizing techniques, and

8 As

Rabinow notes: “Foucault sought in Baudelaire the means to invent a different attitude toward the world and the self, one more respectful and ultimately more difficult to achieve. Just as he drew from Kant an attention to the historical singularity of reason as a practice, so, in a parallel way—and one closer to the original text he was interpreting—he drew from Baudelaire a stylization of the self as an exercise ‘in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it’” (xxxii). We may note the extent to which Foucault problematizes Baudelaire’s ‘eternal’ and ‘fleeting’ in his own terms, rather than undertaking a hermeneutical reading of Baudelaire’s ‘painter’. That painter’s existence, or at least the work of art, was fleeting, as the painter was a man of the crowd, the one inscribing the everyday in its banality and curiosity, one Constantine Guy, a newspaper illustrator, whose ‘eternal’ was constituted in the fleeting movement and motile temporalities of his ‘creation’. We have already made brief note of Foucault’s lectures in Louvain in 1981, where he precisely engages with the circulation of truth-telling in contexts of the discerning of wrong-doing, what he terms avowal, or the practice of confession in the emergence of pastoral power. Within these practices, the self becomes—or is produced—as an entity whose control entails the subordination or sacrifice of will. We discuss this more fully towards the end of this chapter, in the context of Foucault’s lectures on the hermeneutics-of-the-self he delivered in the United States (Foucault 2016).

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totalizing procedures” (213). Foucault sees in this the resuscitation of an “old power technique,” pastoral power originating in early Christian institutions.9 We recognise that what Deleuze analyses in “Postscript” is a new articulation of the relay between individual and totality (in “dividuals” and “banks”) that Foucault aims to discuss in the modern Western State, from the eighteenth century in particular, in terms of transformed precepts of pastoral power. However, as we have seen in our previous chapter, the emergence of apparatuses of security and governmentality of the State, that problematize the relations between the government of individuation and the forms that can be taken in State-power, emerge at the end of the eighteenth century rather than predominantly after the Second World War.10 What emerges in 9 We

noted in the last chapter that Security, territory, population engages with an analysis of the emergence of pastoral power, and its transformations by the eighteenth century into discipline and security. These are primarily covered in Chapters 5–9 (see Foucault 2007, 115–230). As we mentioned earlier, we can turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s A thousand plateaus for a detailed discussion on the State and its relation to complex arrays of forces of governmentality, perhaps most succinctly expressed in Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of territorialisation and de-territorialisation with respect to nomadism’s “war machines” and the State’s “sedentary apparatuses”: “The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking. What complicates everything is that this extrinsic power of the war machine tends, under certain circumstances, to become confused with one of the two heads of the State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with the magic violence of the State, at other times with the State’s military institution” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 354). 10 We recognize the difficulty at one level of working between Foucault and Deleuze, as their articulations, the strata of their concerns and the expressions of relations of force take divergent paths. One simply does not find this kind of analysis, level of articulation or method of exposition in Foucault. Nor does one find with Deleuze, or Deleuze and Guattari, a return, again and again, to the key period in European history commencing with the late sixteenth century and up until the emergence of the nineteenth century. Though, we also need to emphasise that after The birth of biopolitics, Foucault very much ‘returns’ to early Greek and Roman texts, along with texts from early Christian doctrine on confession and truth-telling. We say ‘returns’ as Foucault’s inaugural lectures at the Collège de France engaged the relations between desire and truth in archaic and classical Greek thinking. Is seems as if, after a long ‘detour’ through power/knowledge circuits concerning the threshold emergence of modernity’s biopolitical regimes, Foucault moves again within the archive of Greco-Roman/early-Christian texts, though encountering a genealogy of something he discovers in modernity’s biopolitics, a governmentality of the living, and a care—or freedom—of a self whose self-relation constitutes a precedence for (or precedes) games of truth. To this ‘project’ he gives the name: a genealogy of the hermeneutics of the self. We could, more generously, read Deleuze’s essay as an ‘updating’ of Foucault rather than a rereading. In other words, we could say this is an acknowledgement of the work Foucault did around nineteenth-century institutions, but marks a shift towards a more diffused understanding of institutionalised power in the post-World War Two period in Western-capitalist societies. In this sense, perhaps, Deleuze was trying to account for the collapse of these forms of control into less visible ones, for example, in market terms, from mass production to niche marketing, from institutions that define normality by incarcerating abnormalities, to forms of medicalisation within the community, or de-institutionalisations that especially occurred across the Western world in the last decades of the twentieth century. See also Deleuze’s contribution to discussion on Foucault’s notion of dispositif , in Deleuze (1992b).

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the 1950s in Germany and the United States is a modification of the functioning of security, such that a new question of freedom (rather than domination) emerges. Indeed, and as a response to Kant’s invocation to Auflkärung, Foucault suggests a strategy or struggle that aims at moving beyond the impasse of individual and totality, in a way that Deleuze’s text does not seem to offer. Foucault suggests: “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political ‘double bind’, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures” (216). It is in the second text in the “Afterword,” “How is power exercised” (1982b), that Foucault most clearly discusses, in ways significantly different to his mid-1970s discussions on power and in ways quite different to Deleuze, the question of freedom.11

6.2.2 Power Over Others Foucault’s question now becomes: “What happens when individuals exert power over others?” (217), and he immediately makes a distinction between power as a capacity to act, a capability, and power as an action inducing others. He makes a further necessary distinction between power relations as actions inducing others and communication: “no doubt communicating is always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons … whether or not they pass through systems of communication, power relations have a specific nature” (217). He thus notes that power relations should not be confused with relations of communication or capacities or capabilities to act. Certainly, they interlink: “It is a question of three types of relationships which in fact always overlap one another, support one another reciprocally, and use each other mutually as means to an end” (218). Indeed, it is here that we encounter Foucault’s summary or essential formulation of what otherwise develops as three relations or articulations of power: discursive and rational strategies, as communications of power; technologies or rational techniques, as capabilities or capacities of 11 There are a number of urban studies approaches that look to the writings of Deleuze and Guattari for methodological directions, for example, Buchanan and Lambert (2005), Pløger (2006), Ballantyne (2007), Shields (2008), Wood (2009), Gunder (2010), Dewsbury (2011), Fry (2011), Hillier (2011), Legg (2011), Purcell (2013), Araabi (2014), Van Assche et al. (2014), Metzger et al. (2015), Frichot et al. (2016), Midwood (2016), and Araabi and McDonald (2018). The focus for Wood was on a large dockland urban redevelopment project in the Australian city of Melbourne, using the work of Deleuze and Guattari to analyse the manner whereby the planners “departed” from “normal” planning paradigms (Wood 2009, 191). The text considers “what this analysis entails for understandings of urban planning practices; planning’s relationship to capital and desire; the exercise of power in planning; the ‘discursive turn’ in urban studies; and the relevance to planning of Deleuze and Guattari’s privileging of ‘immanence’ over ‘transcendence’” (191). Jean Hillier (2011) in “Encountering Gilles Deleuze in another place,” develops, via Deleuze, new approaches to cartography and spatial planning. She equally works with Foucault’s understandings of genealogy, and applies this methodological approach to a cartographic investigation of the locale of Anthony Gormley’s Crosby Beach installation, “Another Place”.

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power; and practices of power that are, in contrast, irrational, wild and aberrant.12 With this text, Foucault is keen to distinguish between and link up what he defines as relations of strategy and relations of power. Crucially, in distinguishing power relations from strategy or technique, Foucault emphasises that power is not a renunciation of freedom, nor the transference of right. In this he distinguishes between the exercise of power and violence. With violence, there is direct action on others, corporeally, as restraint, coercion, and control. By contrast, power is action, not on others, but on the actions of others.13 Relations of power require the pre-supposition of one who acts or may act autonomously, freely: A power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that “the other” (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible interventions may open up. (220)

Such recognition of a pre-emptory freedom-to-act does not exclude either violence or consent as modalities by which relations of force are engaged, separately or in unison. Though crucially, the exercise-of-power itself is constituted in neither violence nor consent, but via action on the actions of others. Foucault suggests the notion of “conduct” in its active and passive senses—to lead or orchestrate and to behave or compose oneself—that is, one conducts and there is also one’s conduct, a more or less open field of possibilities in which to act: “Power is exercised only over free

12 See

Gordon’s discussion of this in “Other Inquisitions” (1979). In this comprehensive essay, that introduces Foucault’s work on governmentality from the Collège de France lecture series of the previous year, and publishes his lecture on governmentality from that series in English, Gordon traces Foucault’s development of power/knowledge rationalities into “the concepts of strategies, technologies and programmes of power” (Gordon 1979, 35). Their functioning happens in relation to rational discourses, institutional practices and “effects in the social field” (35). We earlier noted, in Chapter 4, Osborne (1996) having recourse to this series of relations in order to characterize the operations of liberalism as a governmental rationality whose effects in the social field engage the perennial failure of the discourses and practices of liberalism, with respect to its conditions of possibility or effects. 13 Foucault seems here to be returning to a theme we referenced earlier: a shift in the ontology of power from thinking an exercise of power dominated by the ‘repressive hypothesis’, that power controls, inhibits, represses, a notion of power’s exercise that itself dominated his early Collège de France lectures, to a notion of power as productive, arrived at especially with the emergence of discipline’s productive field of normalizations, and biopolitical-species security as a technology of power. Here he seems to be now calling an exercise of power that is disciplinary by the term ‘violence’, while biopolitical techniques of security now seem to be the domain of power. Though, this is not an altogether satisfactory account, as there is something new that emerges for Foucault, a concern with freedom of a self, that simply did not seem to be there, even (or especially) with his 1978–79 lectures on neo-liberalism. Though, perhaps, it is precisely this question of a self’s relation to itself, demanded by a critical encounter with neo-liberalism that brought about a changed horizon of questioning. We need to look more closely at the lectures spanning 1979 to 1982, and perhaps especially the lectures he gave in North America in 1980, on developing an understanding of a “hermeneutics of the self” (Foucault 2016). As already mentioned, we discuss Foucault’s ‘beginning’ of a ‘hermeneutics of a self’, later in this chapter.

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subjects, and only so far as they are free” (221).14 Hence, power and freedom are not in confrontation, are not directly opposed. Freedom is not the elimination of power, but rather its supposition, its point of articulation and possibility. Freedom is, in this sense, power’s immanent cause, recognised by power’s effects. Power relations are not a phenomenon to be encountered in addition to the formation of social relations or a social nexus. They constitute, in their diffuse and capillary circulations, the very relationality of the social.15 Since the eighteenth century, we have seen transformations, consolidations and increasingly centralised forms of power relations articulated in terms of the governmentality of the State. What Foucault emphasises here, and in terms of the work he has done on the emergence of liberalism and the freedom of a self, immanent to the exercise and expressive capabilities of power relations, is a necessary and rigorous differentiation between relations of power and relations of strategy. They offer two vantage points by which we can read-off events, either from strategic accounts of histories of struggles, or from the viewpoint of relations of power (226). Foucault emphasises the disparities between these two readings, and how such disparity makes domination visible: Domination is in fact a general structure of power whose ramifications and consequences can sometimes be found descending to the most incalcitrant fibres of society. But at the same time it is a strategic situation more or less taken for granted and consolidated by means of long-term confrontation between adversaries. (226)

For the most part, those who analyse power in terms of confrontation between historically constituted and institutionally inscribed opponents (class, ethnicity, belief systems), who see power as a form of domination to be reversed and who see freedom as release from all domination, mistakenly collapse relations of strategy and relations of power. For certain, relations of strategy may well be thought in terms of adversarial confrontation, though relations of force have an agency that necessarily commences with the immanent capability of the targets of power’s exercise to be freely acting and therefore immanently resistive.16 Analyses of societies of control, as those engaged by Deleuze, necessarily require us to recognise and differentiate strategy from power in this sense, whereby control’s “domination” while strategic, also requires an immanent capacity or capability for the ‘dividual’ to act otherwise than as coded. As Foucault suggests towards the close of the “Afterword”: 14 The translator of this Foucault text notes on this point: “Foucault is playing on the double meaning in French of the verb conduire—to lead or to drive, and se conduire—to behave or conduct oneself, whence la conduit, conduct or behavior” (Foucault 1982b, 221). 15 In this, Foucault is entirely consistent with the discussions he developed in introducing disciplinary mechanisms and panopticism in lectures from 1972 to 1974. 16 Yet again we see Foucault working between two terms, juxtaposing them in order to sift, within the relation or non-relation between them, how an ontology of power—and now an ontology of self—may be thought. We especially recognise something here, in this discussion of power and strategy, strategy’s confrontation of forces, and power’s more essential immanent and resistive self, Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche’s descent and emergence, descent in terms of historical movements, and emergence in terms of a confrontation of forces. This discussion on strategy and power equally opens—or re-opens—Foucault’s earlier analysis of the social field as civil war, discussed especially in Society must be defended (Foucault 2003a).

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Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle … every strategy of confrontation [emergence] dreams of becoming a relationship of power and every relationship of power leans toward the idea that, if it follows its own line of development [descent] and comes up against direct confrontation, it may become the winning strategy. (225–226)

This distinction being drawn here between strategy and power, carefully defined in 1982, underlies, though in less obvious ways, the analysis Foucault undertakes of the biopolitical, during the mid-to-late 1970s.17

6.3 Biopower 6.3.1 Biopower and Bio-Racism The principle underlying the tactics of battle—that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living—has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of the sovereign; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population. (Foucault 1978, 137)

The above quote comes from the final section of Foucault’s History of sexuality volume one: Will to power as knowledge, “Right of death and power over life” (Foucault 1978, 133–159). With this conclusion, Foucault draws out the essential relations he sees between sexuality as a power/knowledge formation, and hence as a technique of power, and a fundamental concern with how life, the biological and power have become entwined, commencing with the end of the eighteenth century. He gives the name “biopolitics” to this technique of power, in a discussion that engages the complex of relations that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century concerning the maintaining of disciplinary mechanisms of the body, along with regulatory functioning at the level of population: In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted, rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these 17 In the 1980 discussion that followed Foucault’s delivery of lectures on the hermeneutics of the self, in the U.S., he offers a very succinct summary of how he, at that point, wanted to articulate the notion of power’s exercise as a relation between individuals. He offers three points of articulation, after emphasizing that power is not a substance, not “a fluid, a metaphysical instance of something like that” (Foucault 2016, 102). He goes on to say: “I think that power is relations, and relations of force between people … those relations are not only pure and nude relations of force: they are organized following certain principles and according to certain techniques, … to certain tactics …. Third point: those power relations … are not equally or randomly distributed, they are orientated and organized by a type of disequilibrium” (102). Hence, the immanent freedom pre-supposing an exercise of power does not imply equality within a milieu. Far from it. Foucault says flatly, where there is power, there is inequality (130).

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poles—the first to be formed, it seems—centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimisation of its capacities … all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanisms of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality … effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population. (139)

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, concerning the reception of Foucault’s work on power, there has been a skewing with respect to the emergence and reception of Foucault’s research that has favoured his specific book publications at the time over his lecture material that, in many cases, defined the locus and details for these publications. Hence, The history of sexuality volume one was published in French in October 1976, after the conclusion of Foucault’s 1975–76 lecture course at the Collège de France, Society must be defended (2003a).18 Society must be defended was delivered in the interval separating the publication of Discipline and punish in France in 1975, and Will to knowledge, in 1976. It marks a transitional moment for Foucault, in taking disciplinary techniques of power in a new direction, with his research on the eighteenth century Physiocrats, and the emergence of population, statistics and liberalism as three new conditions upon which a delineation of the State may be configured. These will become the preoccupations for his research until the early 1980s. The 1975–76 lecture series, and the overall issue of the bio-political, have had a strong impact on critical engagements with urban theory and planning (Stein and Harper 2003; Murdoch 2004; Pløger 2004; Genel 2006; Dillon 2007; Collier 2009; Revel 2009; McKinlay 2009; McNay 2009; Blencowe 2010; Lemke 2011; Kornberger 2012; Mills 2013).19 Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertini suggest, in 18 The

lecture course was published in French in 1997, and in English translation in 2003. It is principally in the concluding lecture to the 1975–76 series, delivered on 17 March 1976, that Foucault most fully develops his understanding of bio-politics. He does so in a detailed discussion on the form the State takes during the nineteenth century, and continues to take into the twentieth century, a form that Foucault terms State-Racism. In fact, although Foucault returns to the concerns of biopower and the biopolitical in his later lecture series, as we have mentioned above, indeed even naming the 1978–79 series The birth of biopolitics, he never does engage as fully or in as analytical a way on this technique of power, as he does in the 17 March 1976 lecture. It is important to recognize that this final lecture runs a little against the grain of the lecture course as a whole. More generally, the lectures have a particular focus on battle, or on relations between sovereignty, territory and a governmental rationality of war, with Hobbes taking up a central locus in the middle lectures. In his series-editor introduction to the English translation, Arnold Davidson suggests: “In studying the historico-political discourse of war in this course, Foucault shows us one way to detach ourselves from the philosophico-juridical discourse of sovereignty and the law that has dominated our thought and political analysis” (Davidson 2003, xvii). We find with the final lecture a transitional movement that squarely opens, via engagements with the biopolitical, the key themes that come to preoccupy Foucault for the next five years or so. 19 There are a number of critical texts that address the importance of the 1975–76 lecture course on Foucault’s development of “governmentality” as a political rationality that accounts for juridical sovereignty as a problem-field of the State, rather than as that which governs a State. See, in particular, Collier (2009) and the writings of Thomas Lemke (Lemke 2010a, b, 2011). As we earlier summarised, Collier (2009) broaches three key themes: (i) Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics as a local (topological) problem of space whose diverse topologies of power may be observed; (ii) a

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the contextualising postscript to the 1975–76 lecture course, that the series may have given Foucault a pause to re-evaluate his current research and thought (2003a, 273). Foucault’s thesis on State racism unfolds from an initial premise that wars in the eighteenth century were predominantly wars between races or, at least, between peoples who recognised that their biological and territorial rights coincided. With what he terms a “national universality” we can associate with Enlightenment thinking, coincident with the precepts of the French Revolution, the nature of war changes, along with an understanding of race (Foucault 2003a, 239). Increasingly, race becomes that which a nation manages, and that which a State regulates. Race becomes no longer what is external, and an adversary, but what essentially defines the internal coherences of a State. It is this to which Foucault gives the name “State racism.”20 Its emergence coincides with the first demographers and first statisticians of population, those who began to measure birth and morbidity rates.21 It is here that biology came under State power. Foucault’s aim is not to develop a political theory of biopower, nor to examine in detail those then current theories of the State. Rather, he changing conception of thinking to situate practices of critical reflection, which may be compared to, for example, the concerns of Lemke (2011) on critique and experience in Foucault’s work; and (iii) an emphasis on governmentality belonging to the period of Discipline and punish, and not an invention emerging in Security, territory, population. It should not be considered a master theme in his late work. Collier discusses the emergence of a normalizing society depicted in Society must be defended, and with its sequel, Security, territory, population, discussion on the artificial town, dovetailing regulation and discipline, the intersecting of norms of disciplining and norms of regulation. From Society must be defended to Security, territory, population, this regulating power is now named “security.” Biopolitics is not a governmental logic, but a problem-space to be analysed. We have already referenced a number of these in earlier chapters, especially discussion of McKinlay (2009) in Chapter 2. Genel (2006) and Blencowe (2010) are discussed in Chapter 7. 20 Foucault notes: “It seems to me that one of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power’s hold over life. What I mean is the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being, that the biological came under State control, that there was at least a certain tendency that leads to what might be termed State control of the biological. And I think that in order to understand what was going on, it helps if we refer to what used to be the classical theory of sovereignty, which ultimately provided us with the backdrop to—a picture of—all of these analyses of war, races, and so on” (Foucault 2003a, 239–240). We emphasise that this State control of the biological, emerging especially at the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, has its particular governmental rationality on the city as its milieu of circulations, and liberalism as its emerging governmental rationality. Hence, we recognise with Chapter 2, the extent to which discussion of the emergence of social medicine and State hygiene measures, at once disciplinary and securing, concern governmental management of the biopolitical, in circumstances of urban epidemic and endemic disease, and approaches to managing disease within increasingly liberal concerns with what Foucault has termed the “movement of freedom” of individuated subjectivities. What else was Foucault discussing in those lectures in Rio on public health, other than biopolitical technologies of power? Though, we recognise the distinction that Collier has made between considering biopolitics as a strategy of power or governmental logic, as much as it is a ‘problem-space’, or dispositif to be analysed. 21 Foucault particularly discusses early statistical accounts of a population’s health in his lecture of 25 January 1978 in Security, territory, population. See especially n. 8 on Bernouilli’s 1760 mathematical justification for inoculation, and n. 10 on Duvillard’s early nineteenth-century work on population statistics (Foucault 2007, 81). Foucault also notes (n. 11) that it was in the City of London that some of the earliest published demographic statistics were produced, in the 1530s (82).

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is interested in studying the functioning and mechanisms of a new form of power that is no longer the exercise of a sovereign right to kill, to take life or spare it, but rather a technique or technology for making life—something the sovereign was unable to do—or to let die. This new power, emerging particularly in the nineteenth century, does not overtake or supersede sovereign right but rather permeates it: And I think that one of the great transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn’t say exactly that the sovereign’s old right—to take life or let live—was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it … the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die. (241)

As we intimated above with respect to Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics outlined in Will to knowledge, in Society must be defended he goes into some detail outlining the two levels or “poles” of techniques or technologies of power that emerge at the end of the eighteenth century, a continuation of the disciplinary mechanisms that emerged with Raison d’État, and security mechanisms that developed with the Physiocrats and liberalism. It is important to note that, while Foucault provides some detail here, in this one concluding lecture to the 1975–76 series, he introduces, in summary fashion, the critical genealogical context for his 1977–78 lectures, which trace in great detail, across the whole series, the establishment of the techniques of discipline and the later establishing of the techniques of regulation of population: What does this new technology of power, this biopolitics, this biopower that is beginning to establish itself, involve? I told you very briefly a moment ago; a set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on … together with a whole series of related economic and political problems … which, in the second half of the eighteenth century, become biopolitics’ first object of knowledge and the targets it seeks to control … the first demographers begin to measure these phenomena in statistical terms. (243)

As Chapter 2 emphasised, moving into the nineteenth century, there are predominant concerns with the medicalization of a population, and with public hygiene. Medicine takes on a new object of study, moving from a deciphering of the causes of epidemics, which seemed, from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, to strike at random. This new object was no longer epidemic but endemic, those illnesses that a people seemed to harbour, live with and never be able to eradicate, “the form, nature, extension, duration, intensity of the illnesses prevalent in a population” (243). Biopolitics’ techniques of power pervaded other fields of intervention, including a broad range of concerns about productivity and labour, from defining childhood to defining old age and infirmity, as well as accidents and anomalies.22 Biopolitical techniques led to the development of insurance schemes, individual and collective 22 All of these were closely analysed and discussed by Foucault in his lectures between 1971 and 1975, especially in Psychiatric power in 1972–73 (Foucault 2006a), and Abnormal in 1973–74 (Foucault 2003b). Hence, there was detailed discussion, within contexts of defining disciplinary apparatuses of judicial and medical control or confinement, of the training of children in view of producing a trained and docile workforce, along with a newly established role of the family within a panoply of disciplinary mechanisms. There was also discussion, at length, of the emergence of norms, and techniques of normalization, as well as the application of psychiatry to the development

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savings, as well as the development of ordinances and codes related to public safety (244).23 Foucault also emphasises a field of interventions of the biopolitical, when the human as race or species is understood in relation to its milieu or environment.24 As previously mentioned, the essential notions of milieu and norm, that are at the heart of apparatuses of security, are themselves notions that emerge in the developing relations of disciplinary techniques and biopolitical regulations. During the first half of the nineteenth century there was a significant emphasis given to techniques of control over the milieus that populations inhabited, in particular developing an understanding of the relations between swamps and epidemics.25 However, the major concern was with developing an understanding of a biopolitics of artificial environments, the of accident insurance procedures. However much these discussions were concerned with living beings, their training and control, Foucault’s emphasis was more so a decidedly Nietzschean one on corporeality, on bodily procedures that mark or inscribe a living being. Curiously, this living being was not discussed in terms of its bios, even though, clearly, discipline, in its individuating attention, worked from the dimension of an accumulation or population of the living. As we have noted, there is something that shifts during the 1974–75 series, that is more than an engagement with a wider field, now called population, or race, or species. What seems to significantly change are the parameters by which Foucault understands how the eventing or crisis of power’s exercise touches on bodies. The key notion that emerges, again as we have stressed, is that of conduct, whereby power is increasingly recognised as non-coercive, to be opposed to violence as an exercise that seizes or takes hold of bodies. Equally, power and strategy are cleaved, such that Foucault no longer wants to discuss strategies of power, but rather relations of power that imply or have potentiality for strategies of struggle, or struggle, confrontations, what Foucault, for example, discussed in terms of civil war in The punitive society (2015) and again in Society must be defended. Struggles’ strategic movements cannot themselves be simply overlaid as force’s relations. It is between strategies of struggle and relations of power that Foucault discovered a ‘problem-space’ that he named the ‘biopolitical’. 23 Duvillard’s work on population statistics was related directly to developing a statistical theoretical basis for insurance and risk management (Foucault 2007, 61). We again note the extensive work done by Ian Hacking on a Foucauldian understanding of statistics, as well as the important work by François Ewald on insurance and risk. The 1991 edited collection, The Foucault effect, has essays by Hacking, Ewald, Daniel Defert and Robert Castel on statistics, insurance and risk. 24 We especially saw the emergence of the problem-field of ‘environment’ or milieu in Delaporte’s account of the differential approaches to the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris. As the ‘infection’ theorists had as their target the living conditions of the urban poor, they defined the movement of disease in terms of new understandings of environment that instituted an understanding of ‘function’ at the level of urban spatiality. 25 There are many accounts of nineteenth-century swamp draining in the U.K., Europe and the United States, as technological innovations in hydraulic engineering were developed. Swamp drainage may be linked to two biopolitical registers. One is an emphasis, in the nineteenth century, to develop programmes for the eradication of endemic disease, also known as fevers. A prevalent one was Malaria, primarily transmitted by mosquito. Drainage of swamps eliminated the breeding milieu for mosquitoes. The other register was the increase in agricultural land with significant population growth in the nineteenth century. Swamplands were marginal, or considered unusable. Though, when drained, they were rich in agricultural yield. Today we refer to these topographical features as wetlands, and recognize the essential roles played by wetlands (or swamps) in sustainable ecosystems, particularly those that produce high nitrogen yields into sub-soils, as with livestock and agricultural production (see, for example, Ash 2017; Sawyer 2010). In global terms, New Zealand has one of the worst records for the destruction of endemic wetlands, having drained approximately eighty-five to ninety percent of its pre-colonial wetland regions. See, for example, Allen et al. (2002) for a discussion on colonial practices of swamp draining and their ecological consequences.

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rapid development of towns, and the rapidly increasing densities of metropolitan centres and national capitals. Foucault identifies three kinds of phenomena when engaging the human at the level of population, those phenomena that only appear at a level of the mass and are relatively constant, those phenomena which are serial though predictable, whose modulations need to be studied over time, and those phenomena that are aleatory and thus unpredictable when taken as individuated events, but collectively display constants: “The phenomena addressed by biopolitics are, essentially, aleatory events that occur within a population that exists over a period of time” (246). This returns the work of Foucault to a complex engagement with continuities and discontinuities, with the contingent and unpredictable within a spectrum of consistencies.

6.3.2 Bio-Political Urbanism In summing up what he defines as two poles of technologies, or techniques, of power, Foucault offers an extended example of the development of the model town. The two series are, firstly, a body–organism–discipline–institution series, as a legacy from the disciplinary mechanisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and, secondly, a population–biological processes–regulatory mechanisms–State series, that emerges at the end of the eighteenth century and forms, for Foucault, the core of a question as to how the State figures in the complex of relations of power it supposedly names and contains. He notes: “I am not trying to introduce a complete dichotomy between State and institutions, because disciplines in fact always tend to escape the institutional or local framework in which they are trapped. What is more, they easily take on a Statist dimension in apparatuses such as the police, for example, which is both a disciplinary apparatus and a State apparatus. … [regulations] are also found at the sub-State level, in a whole series of sub-State institutions such as medical institutions, welfare funds, insurance, and so on” (250). In explaining how these two series do not work at the same level, and can thus dovetail or overlap, Foucault provides the example of town planning: Take, if you like, the example of the town or, more specifically, the rationally planned layout of the model town, the artificial town, the town of utopian reality that was not only dreamed of but actually built in the nineteenth century. What were working-class housing estates, as they existed in the nineteenth century? One can easily see how the very grid pattern, the very layout, of the estate articulated, in a sort of perpendicular way, the disciplinary mechanism that controlled the body, or bodies, by localizing families (one to a house) and individuals (one to a room). The layout, the fact that individuals were made visible, and the normalization of behaviour meant that a sort of spontaneous policing or control was carried out by the spatial layout of the town itself. It is easy to identify a whole series of disciplinary mechanisms in the working-class estate. And then you have a whole series of mechanisms which are, by contrast, regulatory mechanisms, which apply to the population as such and which allow, which encourage patterns of saving related to housing, to the renting of accommodation and, in some cases, their purchase. Health-insurance systems, old-age pensions; rules on hygiene that guarantee the optimal longevity of the population; the pressures that the very organization of the town brings to bear on sexuality and therefore

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procreation; child care, education, et cetera, so you have [certain] disciplinary measures and [certain] regulatory mechanisms. (251)

We may contrast this description of a nineteenth century working-class estate to Foucault’s descriptions of town planning he developed in the subsequent lecture series, Security territory population, that we discussed in the last chapter.26 There Foucault aimed at contrasting an understanding of the development of the town according to the successive regimes of sovereign right, disciplinary measures in artificial towns, and security’s concern with the aleatory and the future, in the case of Nantes. Of course, Foucault equally emphasises that these three regimes or techniques of power do not supersede one another. The example above suggests how, in the nineteenth century, discipline and security overlap in a double series of concerns with individuated bodies and their institutional disciplining, as well as a State’s population and its regulating. No doubt, there is still a sovereign discourse of the State, as a juridical discourse of right, that will link this body and population to territory and law. Sexuality can be understood as that precise point where the disciplinary and the regulatory, where bodies and populations are articulated, while the norm is precisely what circulates between the disciplined body and the regulated population. The norm is applied to both: “A normalizing society is a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation” (253).27 But what is the specific role of race in the biopolitical regulation of populations? Foucault introduces this concluding theme to the lecture (and the series) with a paradoxical inference stemming from the emergence of biopolitical mechanisms for the maintenance and regulation of life: “How, under these conditions, is it possible for a political power to kill, to call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order to kill, and to expose not only its enemies but its own citizens to the risk of death? … It is, I think, at this point that racism intervenes” (254). Racism functions to fragment a species, to differentiate it so as to differentiate superior and inferior, who must live and who can die. More crucially, it functions to construe a relation between my life and the death of others. This relation is not war-like; it is not one of belligerence or enmity. Racism establishes a nature, at the level of population, 26 See particularly the work of architectural historian, Robin Evans, on the development of model working class housing in the U.K. during the nineteenth century (Evans 1997). For a discussion on Evans’s essay, see Mann (2008). 27 One of the most thorough of the Foucauldian studies that engage the complex of relations between the State, judicial procedures, norms and sexuality is Jacques Donzelot’s The policing of families (1979a). Donzelot was a student and colleague of Foucault, and developed a comprehensive study of the governmentality of the family, from the eighteenth century to the Keynesian Welfare State of the early-to-mid twentieth century. Donzelot suggests, in his Preface, that his target audiences or target discourses are those of Marxism, feminism and psychoanalysis, as he brings a critical genealogy to the specific objects of those discourses, in the modern construction of the family as a socio-political entity. In this respect, the family is neither a point of departure nor a monolithic social formation. Rather, it is considered: “as a moving resultant, an uncertain form whose intelligibility can only come from studying the system of relations it maintains with the sociopolitical level” (Donzelot 1979a, xxv). See also Donzelot (2008) for his detailed discussion on Foucault’s work on the emergence of neo-liberalism, along with discussion on Security territory population and The birth of biopolitics. See, as well, Donzelot (1979b) for an early text on Foucault.

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concerning species that are stronger, fitter and more susceptible to survival, and those whose nature is to die out. Survival makes a species healthier and purer: “When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State” (256). From the first half of the nineteenth century, racism develops with colonization and colonial genocide, and from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present, war has been concerned with destroying an enemy race, a war of populations opposing populations, with increasingly less differentiation between a standing army and a citizenry as target.28 The urban becomes increasingly the target of military campaigns.29 A racial strategy also includes the purification of one’s own race through loss. The strong survive: “Racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power” (258).30 28 This,

perhaps, was Foucault’s understanding during the 1970s. Certainly, the colonial and postcolonial wars being waged, particularly the Vietnam war, but also insurgencies in central America and South America, were conspicuously race-wars in Foucault’s sense, especially if we recognise the United States as key agent in these conflicts, operating either overtly or covertly. With Vietnam, it appeared to be aimed at the destruction of a whole population. We may also note, from discussion on war and cities from Chapter 1, that, for example, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the strategic aim at genocide of an Iraqi population, also appears to be consistent with Foucault’s understanding. However, what is stressed in current security studies is that global wars, or confrontations at internation levels are generally not between nation states, but between insurgents or armed forces that are extra-territorial, not necessarily identifying with a sovereign State or its territory. The post-911 ‘war on terror’ marks this new belligerence, this new condition of an exercise of power or relations of force whose relation to strategies of struggle establishes a nebulous non-place of the biopolitical understood as a ‘problem-space’, an exceptional understanding of the living, of bios, whose livingbeing is essentially ungrounded. In network-centric wars, the term is asymmetrical combatants. We will discuss this further in Chapter 7, in contexts of Agamben’s reading of Foucault’s biopolitics. 29 Perhaps no urban theorist has done more work on developing an understanding of military tactics and urban development than the French architect and urbanist, Paul Virilio. From his initial publications, Virilio recognized the complex of relations between technology, politics, territory and the State. See his Speed and politics: An essay on dromology (1977), War and cinema: The logistics of perception (1989), Bunker archaeology (1994), Pure war (1997), The lost dimension (1991), Strategy of deception (2000). He suggests in Strategy of deception: “For want to being able to abolish the bomb, we have decided, then, to abolish the state, a nation state which is now charged with ‘sovereignist’ vices and ‘nationalist’ crimes, thereby exonerating a military-industrial and scientific complex which has spent a whole century innovating in horror and accumulating the most terrifying weapons, not to mention the future ravages of the information bomb or of the genetic bomb that will be capable not merely of abolishing the nation state, but the people, the population, by the ‘genomic’ modification of the human race” (57). His more recent works, such as City of panic (2005), The original accident (2007b) have a greater focus on questions regarding the human as technological prosthetic. 30 There is a close correlation between the governmentality of the urban and the complex issues of race, colonialism and urban settlement. A broad literature exists in post-colonial studies concerning European impositions of urban formations, the taking of land, and dispossession of indigenous peoples with respect to property, family structures and languages. Rabinow (1989) engages these issues directly in his Foucauldian study of the colonial urbanism of Algiers, in

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6.3.3 Biopolitics and Discursive Events In our last two chapters, “Spatiality and Power” and “Governing Security,” we aimed at introducing key aspects of Foucault’s critical contexts and methodological processes, in relation to how an archaeology and a genealogy of our present would be approached with respect to an understanding of the urban. We return, momentarily, to aspects of that discussion on archaeology and genealogy, as well as Foucault’s understanding of event, in relation to Chapter 2’s discussion of cholera epidemics in London and Paris. As we emphasised in Chapter 2, the differences in approach to cholera in London between the 1830s and 1850s outbreaks, along with the medical ‘camps’ in Paris—contagion-theorists and infection-theorists—are paradigmatic of the two poles of modern techniques of power emphasised by Foucault. The former was primarily approached as a problem of confinement and containment, disciplinary measures. The latter was approached as a problem of circulation and regulation, securitizing measures. Here we want to return to key understandings of archaeology, archive and discursive formations, along with some of the structural modalities introduced in The birth of the clinic, and the development of an understanding of a power/knowledge dispositif central to Foucault’s genealogical enquiries.31 While our aim is to maintain an elucidation of governmentality and biopolitics, in activating an archive of those cholera outbreaks in the first half of the nineteenth century, we also aim to bring into the discussion of governmental rationalities and biopolitics what are, yet, primarily still in place from Foucault’s approach to archaeology.32 French modern: Norms and forms of the social environment. See also, Weizman (2003), Standing (2018), Gurumurthy and Chami (2019), and Raco and Tasan-Kok (2019). 31 We earlier discussed the work of Osborne and Rose on Foucault’s The birth of the clinic and the structural framework they developed in relation to that text. This was mentioned in relation to the work of Pløger on a Foucauldian engagement with the city. Osborne and Rose (2004) suggest three spatializations, in keeping with Foucault’s engagements with eighteenth-century medical practice: a primary spatial modelling that finds its equivalence in Foucault’s understanding of a clinical discursive formation; a secondary realization of a spatial ordering, relating to the field of the gaze in which a patient becomes perceptible; and thirdly, the demarcation of a site, again finding a relation to Foucault’s tertiary moment when a specific illness is localized, which is to say when a discursive realm and a spatializing gaze find their moment of conjunction in a patient with a specified disease. For Pløger, this translates to how, primarily, urban life is thought in politics and planning; how, secondarily, a strategic plan is formulated for a ‘thought-representation’ of urban life; and thirdly, how a plan’s materialization occurs in the establishing of a locale or place (Pløger 2008, 60–61). 32 Hence, in short, our aim is not simply to ‘move on’ to new terminology engaged by Foucault, and thereby forego in our analysis the extent to which archaeology and genealogy yet engage elucidations of governmentality and biopower. Just as Foucault himself insisted that security does not eclipse discipline, and discipline does not eclipse sovereignty, though the emergence of new technologies of power has effects on how sovereign juridical power or disciplinary mechanisms operate within securitizing governmentality, or biopolitical regimes, so also, we recognize how we are able to now understand archaeological and genealogical methods in contexts of the emergence, for Foucault, of the problems of subjectivity and truth. Crucial for our project is to recognize the extent to which, from 1980, and with a problem-field of a hermeneutics of the self, or a genealogy of the modern subject of truth, an ontology of space is essentially at-stake or in-play, such that our

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We commence, though perhaps in a sense re-commence, with what could well be a primordial disclosure of Foucauldian methods, an elucidation developed in Giorgio Agamben’s The signature of all things (2009), a text we discussed earlier in Chapter 3, when initially broaching the notion of ‘method’ in Foucault’s work. The signature of all things presents a complex argument on method, across separate, though thematically linked essays.33 There are three aspects to Agamben’s complicated discussion that we want to draw out—and draw on—in order to suggest something essential in how archaeology, power, freedom and the biopolitical can be thought together. This aims to elucidate how accounts of action on the actions of others, in the context of discussion of cholera epidemics—amounting to techniques of power, governmental rationalities, bio-political regulations, and fundamentally a problematic of circulation, milieu, and freedom—concern not so much an anthropology of empirical human phenomena, but an ontology of modal existence—how human beings become subjects.34 The first aspect of Agamben’s text to draw out is his brief discussion on Foucault’s first published essay, a 1954 Preface to Ludwig Binswanger’s Le réve et l’existence/Dream existence (1954/1963), “Dreams, imagination and existence” (Foucault 1993. See Agamben 2009, 103).35 We have already mentioned this briefly analyses of, or prognoses on, the urban essentially elucidate these conditions of ‘modern’ games of truth. 33 Agamben has had an extensive engagement with the work of Foucault, principally from his 1998 Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. There has been considerable discussion on the degree to which Agamben extends Foucault’s project, stymies it, or radically misinterprets it (for example, Genel 2006; Blencowe 2010; McNay 2009). This reception of Agamben will be discussed more fully in Chapter 7, and in Chapter 8 in relation, as well, to the work of Antonio Negri, and his reading of both Foucault and Agamben on the biopolitical. 34 In relation to Nigel Thrift’s critique of Foucault, in terms of a series of ‘blind-spots’ that Foucault exhibits (Thrift 2007), his ‘objections’ are apposite—or opposite—to the directions of our analysis. Thrift’s ‘blind spots’ seem (for us) to emerge from out of a sense of loss of an epistemological ground, where that ‘ground’ would be constituted in some version of subjectivity—as some kind of substance for secured knowing. Hence, a curious collection of the overlooked-by-Foucault emerges: losing Anthropos; ignoring desire-as-affect; limiting spatial analyses; along with ways Foucault discusses ‘things’. The peculiarity of this list is that, from our reckoning, these are precisely the most insightful moments of Foucauldian analysis, which suggests what Thrift laments is a particular mode of exposition of an anthropology, of desire, spatiality and things. We put this down to a fundamental shift, for Foucault, from engaging the Transcendental Schematism of Kant (1985), from the vantage of epistemological ground, in otherwise reading Kantian Critique as opening to ontological modalities of existence. This may well have resulted from Foucault’s early encounter with Heidegger, and the then-extant translation, in the 1950s, of portions of Heidegger’s Kant and the problem of metaphysics, translated in 1953. This is discussed, explicitly, in McQuillan (2017). 35 Foucault’s “Dreams, imagination and existence,” can be criticized at the outset for its concern with essences and origins, a problem encountered, as well, in his first book publication, History of Madness (2006b), wherein “unreason” was held to be an essential ground, a position which Foucault himself would later come to criticize and revise. See, for example, his brief comment, in The archaeology of knowledge (1972): “[The archaeology of knowledge] also includes a number of corrections and internal criticisms. Generally speaking, Madness and civilization [History of Madness] accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I call an ‘experiment’, thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general history” (16).

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in earlier discussion on Foucault. Key to Foucault’s concern in his Preface is to develop an understanding of what comprises an image that would, yet, distance itself from notions of representation, or making-present-to-oneself an absent thing.36 Important, for Foucault, is developing an understanding of a self’s relation to itself and what he terms a “movement of freedom.” Foucault notes, again at the beginning of his Preface: “The theme of inquiry is the human ‘fact’, if one understands by ‘fact’, not some objective sector of a natural universe, but the real content of an existence which is living itself and is experiencing itself, which recognises itself or loses itself, in a world that is at once the plenitude of its own project and the ‘element’ of its situation” (32). After discussion on both Husserl and Freud, with a focus on how phenomenology and psychoanalysis bring the image and its ‘speaking’ into relation—and by ‘image’, Foucault privileges the dream—Foucault emphasises, in considering the dream as primordial genesis of language: To that extent the dream experience cannot be isolated from its ethical content. Not because it may uncover secret inclinations, inadmissible desires, nor because it may release the whole flock of instincts, nor because it might, like Kant’s God, ‘sound our hearts’; but because it restores the movement of freedom in its authentic meaning, showing how it establishes itself or alienates itself, how it constitutes itself as radical responsibility in the world, or how it forgets itself and abandons itself to its plunge into causality. (52)

6.3.4 Movement of Freedom It is this notion of a “movement of freedom” that we want to particularly draw out from this initial discussion, in relation to our concerns at the beginning of this chapter on power and subjects, where power’s immanent cause is a freedom of the actions Hence, while it is acknowledged that Foucault is working in a philosophical milieu from which he will later distance himself, it is significant to note the extent to which specific Heideggerian themes appear, particularly in relation to those aspects of this text that will clearly appear in his last works on the care of the self. This gives some recognition to that final comment by Foucault on the significance of Heidegger as a crucial thinker for him, and a discovery of the extent to which Heidegger’s reading of Kant was itself crucial for Foucault thinking the possibility of the historical a priori. On Heidegger’s own critical comment on the work of Binswanger, developed under the name daseinanalysis, see Heidegger (2001). 36 Foucault emphasises, in the opening paragraphs, the relation of his analysis to the question of anthropology, to what might ‘circumscribe’ this figure of ‘man’: “It is an undertaking that opposes anthropology to any type of psychological positivism claiming to exhaust the significant content of man by the reductive concept of homo natura. It relocates anthropology within the context of an ontological reflection whose major theme is presence-to-being, existence (Existenz), Dasein” (Foucault 1993, 31). Though we suggest there is a Heideggerian engagement in Foucault’s movement from a positivism of anthropology to an ontology, the contexts he foregrounds are Husserl and Freud: “A coincidence of dates is worth underscoring: 1899, Husserl’s Logical Investigations; 1900, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. The twofold attempt by man to recapture his meanings and to recapture himself in his significance” (34). In fact, Heidegger is ‘mentioned’ in passing: “Therefore we may dispense with an introduction which summarizes Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) in numbered paragraphs, and we are free to proceed less rigorously” (33). We return to a question of Foucault’s relation to Heidegger in Chapter 8 of Securing Urbanism.

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of others, productive of subjects as power’s effects. In this, power and freedom are not opposed but suppose one another. What kind of freedom is this? In his text on Binswanger, Foucault is effecting a transition from anthropology to ontology.37 Existence’s ontological foundation is constituted in the fundamental direction of the imagination, and not in a relation of imagination originating as residue of perception. That is, the ‘image’ of imagination is not to be defined by reference to a supposed and juxtaposed real.38 Foucault discusses an example offered by Jean Paul Sartre, where Sartre provides a description of imagining—an image of Peter—where Peter ‘presents’ himself as absent.39 Foucault opposes the Sartrean reading, indicating that this imagination of Peter, this dream-image, is not the imaginary making present of an absent Peter, a real absence, nor an absence in the real, but, more radically, a derealisation of self or presence in this world, to configure an entirely new presenceof-self to this world: I undertake to adopt once more that mode of presence in which the movement of my freedom was not yet caught up in this world towards which it moves, where everything still denoted the constitutive possession of the world of my existence. To imagine what Peter is doing today in some circumstance that concerns us both is not to invoke a perception or a reality; it is primarily to try to recapture that world where everything is conjugated in the first person. (Foucault 1993, 67–68)40

Thus, in ‘my’ imagination of Peter, it is not that I look on or watches from the outside. Rather ‘I’ become that world where he is: “I am the letter he is reading … 37 We stress that the transition from anthropology to ontology is a crucial theme in this discussion, particularly in Foucault’s relation to Kant and Heidegger. We stress again Heidegger’s reading of Kant in Kant and the problem of metaphysics (1962). Heidegger’s reading of Kant, with its pivotal focus on Kantian Imagination and the Faculty of Judgement, enacts precisely this transition from anthropology to ontology. 38 As we have discussed, Foucault problematizes the very notion of a correspondence between perception and knowing. His “visibilities,” the problem of what can be seen, never correspond to “statements,” the “it is said,” in some isomorphism. Indeed, the problem of truth is itself the very irreducibility of visibilities to statements. The (ir)resolution, or acuity, of phenomenology and psychoanalysis is itself and exploration of this very problem field of veridictions and jurisdictions, to be returned-to by Foucault in 1980. 39 Agamben also makes reference to Foucault citing the Sartre text in his discussion of the 1954 Preface to Binswanger’s Dream existence. Agamben notes, concerning the Foucault text: “The text where Foucault perhaps most precisely described—or foresaw—the strategies and gestures of archaeology is the first essay he published, the long 1954 preface to Le Rêve et l’existence by Ludwig Binswanger. Even though the term itself is obviously absent, “the movement of freedom” that Foucault attributes to the dream and imagination shares the meanings and aims of archaeology” (Agamben 2009, 103). 40 In this context, we gain an insight into what Foucault means, ontologically, by the notion of a history of the present. We also note, in passing here, a problem with this ‘reading’ of Heidegger— if, in fact, Heidegger is even being ‘read’ here. A decade later, in 1965 (and still decades before Heidegger’s Being and time would be translated to French in its entirety), Derrida delivered a lecture course on Heidegger, in which he takes pains to demarcate the paucity of understanding and the gross mistranslations of Heidegger in then-extant Heidegger texts. Foucault’s emphasis on presence, rather than presencing, would be typical of a panoply of ‘serious’ mistaken readings, notwithstanding Foucault’s ‘correction’ of Sartre. See Derrida (2016). We return to a reading of Derrida with Foucault with Heidegger in Chapter 8.

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I am the walls of his room that watch him from all sides and hence do not “see” him … I am what he is doing. I am what he is” (69). This imaginary does not add anything new to what I know but it does constitute a new relation of myself to itself. There is transcendence here—in imagination I do not obey myself, but rather come to recognise my freedom and direction—what Foucault calls here “destiny” (68).41 To imagine is “to intend oneself as a movement of freedom which makes itself worldly and finally anchors itself in this world as its destiny … At the very heart of perception it can throw into bright light the secret and hidden power at work in the most manifest forms of presence” (68–69). This movement of freedom, constituting a self’s relation to itself is at the heart of Foucault’s late writings on the self, and this needs to be recognised in the manner whereby Foucault’s historical concerns, with the emergence of liberalism, are equally concerns with how we come to understand a notion of a self’s self-interest in relation to techniques or technologies of power, understood as biopolitical. We are aware that Foucault mentioned, on a number of occasions, that his concern is not with a history of past events but with a history of the present.42 To what extent do we need to understand his project in its entirety as a concern with a movement of freedom in un-concealing a power at work in the most manifest forms of presence? When, for example, Foucault suggests at the beginning of the Archaeology of knowledge: “I have tried to define this blank space from which I speak, and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse that I still feel to be so precarious and so unsure” (Foucault 1972, 17), or when he suggests, concerning a revising of Kantian Enlightenment thinking, that perhaps the point is not to find who we are but to refuse or become otherwise than who we are, we recognise this concern

41 Foucault notes: “But the imaginary gives itself as a transcendence where, without learning anything unknown to me, I can ‘recognize’ my destiny” (68). We may read here a Heideggerian problematic of imagination and projection, in this notion of destiny, bringing the ontic to “be” ontologically ‘present’ —the agency of the metaphysics of presence. See Heidegger (1962): “All projection—and, consequently, even man’s ‘creative’ activity—is thrown, i.e., determined by the dependence of Dasein on the essent in totality, a dependence to which Dasein always submits. This fact of being thrown [dereliction] is not restricted to the mysterious occurrence of the coming-intothe-world of Dasein but governs being-present as such. This is expressed in the movement which has been described as lapsing. This idea of lapsing does not refer to certain negative events of human life which a critique of culture would be disposed to condemn but to an intrinsic character of the transcendental finitude of man, a character which is bound to the nature of projection as ‘thrown’” (244). 42 For example, in his essay “Why Study Power: The Question of the Subject” (1982a), Foucault suggests: “The first thing to check [as an ongoing critical thought] is what I should call the “conceptual needs.” I mean that the conceptualization should not be founded on a theory of the object—the conceptualized object is not the single criterion of a good conceptualization. We have to know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualizations. We need historical awareness of our present circumstances” (209). We cannot stress enough the manner whereby we need, for example, to ask, with respect to the archive concerning cholera and its nineteenth-century eventing, the pivotal question of how the very notion of archive does not imply a repository of documents pertaining to what was, but rather a line of variation of how a self’s derealisation of its present opens the potentials for a reencountering of this present with respect to an archaeology-genealogy of technologies of power of biopolitical existence.

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with a self’s relation to its self.43 We mentioned this earlier, in discussing Foucault’s essay, “Why study power: The question of the subject” (Foucault 1982a). This is our focus for the remainder of this chapter, where we will engage especially with Foucault’s work from 1980, on subjectivity and truth.

6.4 Destruction of Tradition 6.4.1 Freedom and Historical Ontology We recognise how it would not be possible to totalise the Foucauldian project, as its presence at any time is a dissimulating play of masks. But why, then, does Foucault locate so much of his research in a transformative moment during the eighteenth century, on the cusp of the nineteenth? How do we understand this dissimulating ‘presence’ and the historical and archival dimensions to Foucault’s research? We want to address this with a second aspect of Agamben’s thinking. It begins with Foucault’s 1971 essay on Nietzsche, “Nietzsche, genealogy, history,” to which we have already referred in discussing genealogy and power in Foucault’s early Collège de France lectures. We see immediately from this essay that Foucault is not in search of origins (Ursprung). Rather, the genealogist is in search of descent and emergence.44 Agamben cites Foucault on this: 43 See Lorenzini (2020) for a detailed discussion on a revised understanding of Foucault’s genealogy,

one that moves neither in the direction of ‘vindicating’ the emergence of concepts, beliefs or values, nor ‘unmasking’ the contingency and errancy of beliefs and practices (Lorenzini 2020, 2). Lorenzini suggests that the tussle by Foucauldian scholars over this binary has closed down another more fruitful understanding of genealogy, that he terms “possibilising”: “This dimension has passed unnoticed, even though it constitutes an essential aspect of Foucault’s genealogical project from 1978 on, when the notions of ‘counter-conduct’ and ‘critical attitude’ were first coined” (2). He coins the notion from something Foucault emphasises in his writing on Kant’s Enlightenment. Quoting Foucault, he suggests: “[Genealogy] allows us to ‘separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’” (2). In what follows in this chapter on Foucault’s discussion of a hermeneutics of the self, we emphasise something similar, that what, perhaps, we need to encounter or engage is a ‘releasing’ of ourselves from this technology of power, this technique of the self, in determining the truth to ourselves (see Foucault 2016, 14). Indeed, the collective of scholars who provide the “Introduction” to Foucault’s Hermeneutics of the self (Cremonesi et al. 2016), themselves provide a footnote link precisely to the essay on Kant’s Enlightenment and “the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (n34, 17). 44 We earlier suggested that Foucault’s reading of descent and emergence—what he determines as the historical dimension of forces and the confrontation of forces—relates to how he differentiates strategy and power. In an interview with Gèrard Raulet, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” initially published in English in 1983 in the journal, Telos, Foucault (1998) responds to a series of questions directed at his engagement with Nietzsche, and the importance of Nietzsche in his thinking. Foucault notes that he had read Nietzsche in 1953, in relation to the question of how one elaborates a history of reason. Then, on encountering phenomenology, the question becomes renewed: “Is the phenomenological, transhistorical subject able to provide an account of the historicity of reason?

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If Nietzsche refutes the pursuit of the origin it is because Ursprung names ‘the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities; because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession. This search is directed to “that which was already there,” the “very same” of an image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature, and it necessitates the removal of every mask to ultimately disclose an original identity. (Foucault, cited in Agamben 2009, 83)

We recognise in this passage a concern with genealogy and a reading of Nietzsche that coincides with the earlier concern we outlined, with presence and the image. With both, there is a derealisation of my world, not in order to present a world imagined as authentic origin, but in order that this world that is mine might be thought otherwise than as it is. Descent and emergence ultimately concern a relation of a self to itself, in order that it does not secure its identity in an ideal origin. As Agamben suggests: “It is always a matter of following the threads back to something like the moment when knowledge, discourse, and spheres of objects are constituted. Yet this ‘constitution’ takes place, so to speak, in the non-place of the origin” (84). That “non-place of the origin,” like the “blank space from which I speak” is the dissimulating “place” of a present whose relation to a self is the derealisation of that self’s fixed relation to itself, the immanence of a movement of freedom, immanent to any action on the actions of others, constitutive of power. How, then, do we understand Foucault’s repeated return to the eighteenth century, as if this is an originary historical moment through which we come to see the appearance of the liberal subject of self-interest and a population regulated by an artificial ‘nature’ defined by the market, as well as the emergence of the biopolitical in the twin poles of a disciplinary mechanism of individuated welfare, and a governmental regularity at the level of species or race?45 Agamben stresses here not so much the thinking of Nietzsche, but the work of Nietzsche’s close friend, Franz Overbeck and

Here, reading Nietzsche was the point of rupture for me. There is a history of the subject just as there is a history of reason; but we can never demand that the history of reason unfold as a first and founding act of a rationalist subject” (Foucault 1998, 438). Though we question if Heidegger’s da-sein is a ‘transhistorical subject’. Clearly it is not. This simply adds a further note of confusion for us concerning Foucault’s relation to (or reading of) Heidegger. Or even if Heidegger was on his mind when he was mentioning ‘phenomenology’. 45 Foucault suggests a response to this question in his 1980 discussion following his U.S. lectures on a ‘hermeneutics of the self’ (Foucault 2016). He is responding to a question of methodology, posed in terms of historical discontinuities in his early work, and what he is presenting in these current lectures as a long continuity, from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, of techniques of the self, explored in terms of Christian techniques of self-examination. Foucault suggests a third methodological direction that poses the question of Enlightenment at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a major philosophical concern, posing a question of how rationalities and truth find their relations. He notes: “But I have tried to analyze this question [what is Enlightenment] through very concrete historical problems, and that’s the reason why I have always studied this period from the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. All my books were a way to try to answer this question” (113).

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the development by Overbeck of the notion of pre-history.46 Pre-history does not designate what is most ancient or primitive: The fundamental character of prehistory is that it is the history of the moment of arising, and not, as its name might lead one to believe, that it is the most ancient. Indeed, it may even be the most recent, and the fact of being recent or ancient in no way constitutes a quality that belongs to it in an original way. Such a quality is as difficult to perceive in it as any relation to time that belongs to history is attributed to the subjectivity of the observer. Like history in general, prehistory is not tied to any specific site in time. (Overbeck, cited in Agamben 2009, 85)

That “moment of arising” or the “pre” of prehistory refers to what must already be in place in terms of historical consciousness such that the intelligibility of monuments or the veracity of testimony happens.47 Overbeck calls this “tradition”: “prehistory, too, has to do with the past, but with the past in a special sense … the veil that is suspended over every tradition darkens to the point of impenetrability” (86). Every history has its pre-historical structures or frameworks of intelligibility, its tradition that is so ingrained that it is completely concealed. Hence the need for critique of tradition or critique of sources: “the mode in which the past has been constructed into a tradition” (87).48 Such critique concerns itself not with historical origins or beginnings, but with the structure of historical enquiry (87). Agamben references Heidegger from Being and time (1986) on the “destruction of tradition.” We ‘hear’ Heideggerian echoes of Overbeck: When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it ‘transmits’ is made inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand. (Heidegger, cited in Agamben 2009, 88)

46 Franz Overbeck, while a close friend of Nietzsche and, perhaps, especially known for this, was a radical nineteenth-century theologian, whose work eventually influenced the philosophical and theological work of Karl Bath, Karl Löwith and Heidegger. His major theological contribution was in a radical understanding of the historicality of Christianity in terms of a fundamental distension between dogmatism of the Church and early Christianity’s opposition to all forms of history. It is in this radical theological sense that the notion of “pre-history” is developed. There is very little published in English by or on Overbeck (see Overbeck 2002, 2005). 47 This ‘pre’ of Overbeck’s ‘pre-history’ resonates with the pre-hending of phenomenology’s ontological disclosure of a ‘something’ as formally indicative, though yet indeterminate as to anything other than the emergence of a question of a something’s quiddity (see, for example, Heidegger 2005, 81–82). Heidegger emphasises here, with respect to the ‘task’ of phenomenology: “These investigations have the peculiar character of leading out from the discipline to a peculiar connection of phenomena: existence. Becoming free from the discipline for existence itself. This ‘becoming free’ means seizing the possibilities of making this existence itself the theme of a research determined by existence itself . This research is nothing other than a possibility of existence itself” (81). 48 This is a concern with neither structure nor genesis, in a conventional sense, nor with dichotomy as such, as we earlier discussed with respect to Foucault’s archaeology.

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Destruction of tradition has the genealogical aim to disrupt the self-evidence and rationality of a source, such that, in a movement of freedom another relation of self-toself as precisely another rationality or reason may encounter this world in which that source ‘lives’ differently. It is in this sense that we need to recognise Foucault’s return time and again to the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, not as a fixing or fixture of the self-certainty of tradition or self-evidence that comes with a tradition concealed, but quite the reverse.49 These are techniques on the historiography of tradition itself, to un-conceal how the functioning of history happens in the derealisation of rational self-certainties, such that the present, too, as the living situatedness of history, may be thought otherwise and, in turn, present what is yet un-thought.50 This takes us to the third concern of Agamben that we aim to draw on. It is in terms of a movement of freedom he sees in Foucault’s articulation of a relation of imagination to the present, and a recognition of a deliberation on pre-history, discernible in both Nietzsche and Heidegger, that Agamben characterises such historical inquiry by the name “archaeology”: Provisionally we may call ‘archaeology’ that practice which in any historical investigation has to do not with origins but with the moment of a phenomenon’s arising and must therefore engage anew the sources and tradition. It cannot confront tradition without deconstructing the paradigms, techniques, and practices through which tradition regulates the forms of transmission, conditions of access to sources, and in the final analysis determines the very status of the knowing subject. (89)

49 We might consider in this archaeology and destruction an essential Benjaminian theme from the one who gave us the short text on the destructive character, the one who “reduces to rubble” what exists, “not for the sake of rubble but for that of the way leading through it” (Benjamin 1986, 158). This is the same Benjamin whose method was than of archaeo-monadology, an archaeology of returning again and again to the same place: “Memory is not an instrument for the reconnaissance of what is past but rather its medium. It is the medium of that which has been lived out just as the soil is the medium in which old cities lie buried. Whoever seeks to gaze more closely at one’s own buried past must proceed like a man who excavates. Above all, he must not shy away from coming back time and time again to one and the same object —scatter it just as one scatters earth, root it up just as one roots up the soil” (Benjamin, cited in Frisby 1985, 223). Anna Stüssi echoes and extemporizes on this: “Pathways to remembrance lead downward —they lead into the past, into the depths of the earth. The past never lies merely ‘behind’—it has not been disposed of—but rather ‘below’ in the depths. The city still stands in whose ground its own past lies hidden. The present day city transforms itself in the light of remembrance into an excavated one that bears testimony to the time of the past. Archaeology takes place on the showplace of modernity” (Stüssi, cited in Frisby 1985, 225). 50 There is a complication to this discussion that we have yet to broach, one we have hinted-at on a number of occasions, that circulates around Heidegger’s dismissal, within many of his lecture series, of what he terms ‘historiography’, as ontical understanding of the recovery of a past. His refusal of historiography opens to his understanding of being-historical, the finite historicity of being. We will discuss this aspect of Heidegger’s thinking on history, crucial for a critical dialogue with Foucault, in light of Derrida’s discussion of this Heideggerian theme (Derrida 2016). As earlier mentioned, this will be broached in Chapter 8.

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6.4.2 Anonymity of the ‘It Is Said’ Foucault’s archaeology, its concern with the “it is said,” or positivities of statements, is thus a concern with destructing the self-evidence of forms of historical transmission, in order to determine how our present might otherwise think descent and emergence, how a self’s ‘worlding’ is anything but the coincidence of ego and identity. However, in our close deliberation on this Agamben text, or some small portions of it, we have aimed at keeping in continuous movement the heterogeneous yet radically-linked concerns of archaeology, genealogy and ‘operations’ of the subject. These are not ‘phases’ of Foucault’s ‘evolving’ career. Or rather, to frame them as such would be to invoke a notion of subject, archive, tradition and source completely at odds with Foucauldian thinking. But, more crucially, this discussion has not taken place in order for us to get to know Foucault a little better. Rather, our concern is to ask: what do we do in our research on the city or urban conditions? To what extent do we need to engage with the “prehistory” to these phenomena, the self-evident traditions and assured sources from which we construe our ‘historical’ ‘imagination’? The importance of the work of Foucault, as well as Agamben and others we reference, is that they provide methodological procedures for that essential transformative movement from historical anthropology to ontology, from an empirico-rationalist encounter, by a subject of an object, to a more complex questioning of the certainty and stability of either. As Agamben suggests, concerning archaeology: “The moment of arising is objective and subjective at the same time and is indeed situated on the threshold of undecidability between object and subject. It is never the emergence of the fact without at the same time being the emergence of the knowing subject itself: the operation on the origin is at the same time an operation on the subject” (89). This discussion on Foucault’s method leans to an ontological disclosure essential to a self’s relation to itself in the determining of how this world is for that self, in its historical dimension, which is to say, how history is nowise other than a dissimulating presencing. Such a discussion now seems—after the fact—to be a necessary preamble to archival research, for example, on cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century. Newspaper reportage that appeared on a daily basis was not referenced in Chapter 2 in order to reconstruct, as accurately as possible, an historical account of something happening in the nineteenth century. While such accounts are within the orbit or ambit of our research frameworks on the urban, we aim at foregrounding what we have above emphasised as the pre-history of such accounts, a certain destructing of the self-evidence of such historical enquiry, its modes of transmission and the veracity of the sources, in their supposed empirical certitude. We need to commence with the empirical self-evidence of the newspaper archive, as if so much history was simply embedded there waiting to be exhumed by an attentive researcher.51 51 It is useful to be reminded of how Foucault developed his understanding of “archive” which cannot be dissociated from his understanding of historical a prioris: “Instead of seeing, on the great mythical book of history, lines of words that translate in visible characters thoughts that were formed in some other time and place, we have in the density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domains of appearance) and things (with their

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We need to approach the early nineteenth century newspaper itself as a technique or technology of power, its circulation as the construing of a milieu, its reading as a function of discourse, its production as something other than simply an emergent medium of communication. Equally, we need to consider the condition of the archive, its accessibility, its legibility, systematicity and structure as more than a fortuitous aid to the vigilant historian. It, too, is a technique or technology of power that easily aims to make both tradition and source self-evident, as if our forms of knowing were already formed empirical certitudes, awaiting the glance of our attentive eye. We are suggesting here a problematic that seems to be addressed obliquely by Agamben, though is elsewhere addressed directly. Thomas Mercier (2019), engages a reading of Foucault’s biopower in relation to Derrida’s Rogues (Derrida 2005), with its emphasis on the performativity of a power-knowledge that neutralizes the event of a futureto-come.52 It especially concerns how Foucault understands the presentation of the present as that which secures a future: So, even though Foucault strives to distinguish the economy of biopower from the structures of sovereignty and law, and however relevant this distinction might be in theoretical or historiographical terms, biopower and sovereignty still share the need to secure the present (and the future) from the event. It is their ontological milieu, so to say. I am thus tempted to read Foucault’s description of the biopolitical logic together with Derrida’s deconstructive reading of performativity in Rogues—what Derrida calls here, as an implicit nod to Foucault’s analytics, ‘power-knowledge’ and ‘knowledge-power’. As Derrida explains, the (bio)power of the norm must be performative, which supposes the neutralization of the event. (Mercier 2019, 104)

Foucault’s presentation of the present is doubled in this Derridean reading of the performativity of the norm, in its securing of a knowing of a future, as a technology of power whose target is precisely the management of what is to come. As we have suggested above, Foucault’s ‘history’ of the ‘present’ engages or encounters not so much the empirical veracity of a statistically determinable future, but rather the dissimulating presencing of an aleatory errancy, as the milieu within which the norm has its moments of application. Practices of power are aberrant and unstable in Foucault’s ontology of the present. Mercier’s question, in its ‘games of truth’ concerning Foucault and Derrida, comes down to: “Is biopower such as described by Foucault simply an object of critical inquiry (as seems to be Foucault’s conception), or is biopolitical rationality already speaking through Foucault’s analyses— Foucault who was, let it be known, a ‘living being’, and himself subject and object of biopower?” (105). We recognise here the mise-en-abyme of a bio-deconstruction that cannot settle on the ground upon which a living entity comes to encounter the authenticity of its existence, other than as an “auto-hetero-bio-thanatographical own possibility and field of use). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive” (Foucault 1972, 128). 52 Mercier’s essay appears in a special issue of the journal The New Centennial Review, devoted to the publication of a book in 2018 by Francesco Vitale, Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the life sciences. The book is based on research by Vitale on the manuscript of a yet-to-be-published lecture series by Derrida from 1975–76, titled “La vie la mort.” Mercier especially aims to read Foucault with Derrida, rather than Derrida contra Foucault.

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scene” of writing (105). Though, we do not for a moment consider that, for Foucault, ‘biopower’ is ‘simply an object of critical enquiry’. In what we have emphasised above, in discussion of anthropology, ontology, presencing of a present, pre-history’s destructing of the historical as empirical presentation, and a coincidence of concerns across archaeology, genealogy and subjectivity’s truth, we want to complicate any ‘simple’ reading of Foucault to be recouped within a ‘metaphysics of presence’. What we term a ‘metaphysics of presence’, to which one might reduce Foucault’s ‘history of the present’, or biopower’s normative securing of a non-evental future, is addressed deconstructively by Mercier, under the notion of ‘resistance’, in that “there must be something else than the present, something beyond the presence of the present which escapes present norms or conventions … the present resists itself” (106). This would now require a long reading of the extent to which Foucault has discussed, precisely, resistance, an ontology of resistance as an ontology of a self’s relation to itself as a presencing that resists itself. Indeed, power is unknowable, unrecognisable, outside of subjectivity’s ‘truth’, understood explicitly as resistance. Again, we need to keep in play Foucault’s early distinction between demonstrable truth and evental truth, crisis-truth. It would be the former that would make Foucault’s biopower ‘simply’ a critical object. It is the latter, evental truth, crisis truth, that brings into play all of the instabilities, errancies and ‘impossibles’—to use a Derridean notion—that hinge archaeology, genealogy and evental truths to a ‘self’. Our reading of Foucault, on genealogy, biopower, resistance and self, resonates more strongly with aspects of the work of the Foucauldian scholar, Judith Revel, who goes so far as to adopt the term ‘deconstruction’ when discussing Foucault’s work on the biopolitical, and his refusal to engage in a reductive metaphysics. As Revel notes, her concern is with the manner whereby Foucault refuses to recognise notions of identity, nature or life as either originary in a primordial ‘sameness’, nor constituted in the emergence of an originary or primordial ‘force’ (Revel 2009, 45): “These reductions not only fall into species of metaphysics, they fail to recognise the integration of difference and of constitutive rationality in Foucault’s conceptualizations of the process of subjectivation and becoming as historically dynamic and mobile” (45). Hence, for Foucault, political action is constituted from out of resistances-to-self which would also be resistances to a hypostasis of identity, what Revel refers to as “the interiority of resistance to dispositifs of power” (45). There is much more to say about this ‘rapport’ between Foucault and Derrida, a ‘rapport’ mediated in a curious way by a Heidegger, whose debt for Derrida is explicit, if complex and, for Foucault, is obscure almost to the point of confusion. And then there is Agamben, whose writings encounter Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida. The next two chapters will engage with legacies of Agamben, Derrida and Heidegger. In the remainder of this chapter, we want to recap on aspects of Foucault’s urban analyses of the emergence of governmentality. In doing so, we again broach how historical practices may destruct historical sources, what from the above discussion we might term the performativity of encountering a presencing of the event, that recognises whatever might be taken as a priori ground to be itself hermeneutically interpretable, unstable and contingent. From there, we will approach more closely the emergence of a problematic of the subject and truth, precisely out of the problem

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field of biopower and governmentality. With this, a further spatialization comes into view, one that construes truth-telling itself as a technology of power productive of urban subjectivities.

6.4.3 Destructing Historical Sources: Governmentality of News We earlier discussed a distilled question posed by Foucault: “What happens when individuals exert power over others?” (Foucault 1982b, 217). This led to a distinction being drawn between relations of power and communication, but also a distinction between power and strategy, which further led to a crucial distinction akin to what we have been discussing above concerning biopower, genealogy and self. Foucault outlines three types of relations that overlap, reciprocate, and mutually support one another: discursive and rational strategies as communications of power; technologies or rational techniques as capabilities or capacities of power; and practices that are contingent, resistive, aleatory, essentially constitutive of relations of counterconduct. When we apply this granulated analysis of strategy, technology and practice to liberal governmentality of technologies of communications, we engage precisely that reflexive milieu that alerts us to a pre-hending of the historical, as conditions for the presencing of a knowing self, as political stake in developing power-knowledge dispositifs. Hence, we turn to an account offered by the Foucault scholar, Andrew Barry (1996), of the development and introduction of the telegraph service in the United Kingdom, and then in the British Empire and globally, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Barry’s “Lines of communication and spaces of rule” (1996) develops a reading of the telegraph as a technology of power that brings into relation territory, architecture and communications. He emphasises, as we have done, Foucault’s own writings on the governmental rationality of the eighteenth century that focused on cities as a model to be applied to the whole of a territory (126). Barry also suggests, concerning the emergence of biopolitical techniques in the nineteenth century: “At the centre of the concerns of the forms of political rationality that developed in the nineteenth century was not the city or the territory but society. The governmental State was no longer defined in relation to its physical territory, its surface area, but in relation to its social geography, its population and its economy” (126). However, the problem for liberal government in the nineteenth century was how to effectively regulate the social, such that society was yet autonomous from the State (127). If urban space was the privileged milieu for discipline’s mechanisms of power, that is, urban space understood in terms of a physical architecture of enclosure, segmentation and control, another technique of power and another milieu enabling circulation began to dominate nineteenth century concerns with biopolitical regulation, within a governmental rationality of liberalism: “However, from the nineteenth century onwards it was not architecture but communications technology that came to have

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a critical role in regulating the flow of objects, information and persons, thereby facilitating the development of a liberal political and economic space” (127). Barry defines two dimensions to such a relation between the emergence of liberalism and the development of communications technologies. The first concerns the degree to which public authorities were able to inform and be informed with respect to the dispersed space of a territory. Raison d’État’s disciplinary measures aimed precisely at cancelling out circulation—or if not cancelling out, then giving exacting order to circulation—in a sovereign gaze that was all encompassing. Liberalism’s control aimed at maximising circulations and hence the free movement of the social. Yet it required a capability to quell disturbances or intervene in social relations. An emphasis on communication techniques operated a regulating function at the level of population, non-targeting of individuated bodies and thereby minimizing State interventions. Barry notes: “From the nineteenth century onwards public agencies have sought to make rapid response to any apparent risk to the wellbeing of the population, whether this risk be military, economic or biomedical” (128). The second effect of increasing emphasis on communication networks for nineteenth century liberalism is the correlate emphasis it gives to self-governing capacities of society itself, with the individuated subject recognised as its own self-governing enterprise: “In effect, the communication infrastructure came to function as perfect embodiments of the liberal political imagination: maximising density, intensity and spatial extension of interactions within the social body itself while, at the same time, minimising the direct demands made by the State on the people. They enabled society to come to know itself and to govern itself on the basis of its own knowledge” (128). We need to clarify what Barry means by “communications networks” as techniques or technologies of power. It is here we apply the distinction that Foucault made in his “Afterword” essays concerning power and subjects, his distinction between three kinds of relations between peoples, constituting the social, defined as action on the actions of others. Not all of them concerned relations of power. One of those was communication: It is necessary to distinguish power relations from relationships of communication which transmit information by means of language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium. No doubt communicating is always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons. But the production and circulation of elements of meaning can have as their objective or as their consequence certain results in the realm of power; the latter are not simply an aspect of the former. Whether or not they pass through systems of communication, power relations have a specific nature. (Foucault 1982, 217)53 53 As we have earlier mentioned, in his 1979 overview essay on Foucault, “Other Inquisitions” (1979), Gordon further articulates three modalities or concepts of power: “Foucault employs three concepts of general forms of rationality pertinent to the study of power/knowledge: the concepts of strategies, technologies and programmes of power” (Gordon 1979, 35). He goes on to distinguish rational discourses, non-discursive practices, and effects produced in the social field. There is no specific correlation between each of these, no “watertight ontological compartments: the same events can be considered in turn under each of them” (35). However, generally we recognize programmes of power engaging rational discourses, technologies of power enacting non-discursive practices that seek legitimacy in rational programmes, while strategies may well be aberrant effects produced in the social field, as programmes and technologies are wielded in order to undo their own specific

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Clearly, Barry has not collapsed or confused these two sets of relations, as if suggesting that the flows of communication themselves construe decisively, in their empirical givenness and intelligibility, how relations of force play out. This would invert what Foucault has stressed with respect to power/knowledge.54 It is not knowledge that defines the superiority of force but rather relations of force that produce the truth effects of our forms of knowing. Hence, as Barry suggests, it is the very technology that is constitutive of relations of force as capacity or capability. Who is inserted into the blank spaces of its mechanisms is an open question. We need to regard the development of newspaper journalism in the early nineteenth century— along with today’s panoply of communicative media—according to such an analytic of the exercise of power.55 Daily newspapers operated in close relation with the development of forms of liberalism as a means for regulating the social in a manner that defined the social itself as a self-regulating entity. With the biomedical crises of cholera outbreaks in the early nineteenth century in London, newspapers played a considerable role in defining the constitutive agency of public authorities, medical expertise, public responsibility and individual action. They also provided advocacy and resistive discursive frameworks that could voice opposition to the State when it was recognised that State intervention exceeded liberal ‘freedoms’. Newspaper accounts provide competing rationalities, disperse events into myriad and conflicting accounts of emergence. As discourses of power and techniques of power, their appeal is to a supposed, and supposedly consistent, Reason. Their authority hails from such rationality, which we are able to align with a coincident understanding of tradition and source as self-evident certainty. However, as practices of power, newspapers rationalities, as counter-movements or resistances. One finds this complex relay between modalities of power in Barry’s account of the development of the telegraph, and its bearing on the solidification of the relations of force, enabling the securing of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century. 54 As Foucault emphasized in The archaeology of knowledge, knowing cannot be reduced to a subject and truth preceding the field of forces in which that subject is inserted and construed. The knowing subject is an effect of enunciative modalities and enunciative formations, which are local and produced within a microphysics of power. Yet, as Foucault emphasises from 1980 on, this subjectivation of a knowing self is preceded by a movement of freedom that would oppose any understanding of subject as anthropological factuality. It is here that two directions unfold, that of understanding conduct as action on the actions of a self whose primordial disclosure is resistance, understood as a self’s relation to itself. The other direction is that of refusing that long tradition in the West, whose genealogy Foucault calls that of a ‘hermeneutics of the self’, the self as subject of truth, where truth is demonstrative, disclosable and verifiable. In its place is a notion of truth-event as resistive crisis or alethurgy, what Foucault would call the truth of parrhesia (Foucault 2010, 2011). 55 For an engagement that details a Foucauldian approach to the development of mass media, see Mathiesen (1997). Mathiesen coins the notion of synopticism, as a parallel to panopticism, in order to undertake a genealogy of surveillance and the growth of mass media from the eighteenth century. He suggests: “The growth of the newspaper presupposed a comprehensive scientific and technical development which took place at the same time—the train and the steam ship, which facilitated the distribution of newspapers as well as the interchange of news, and the telegraph, which made rapid communication of news possible. It also presupposed important social conditions: a changed political role of the citizens and the development of a large middle class followed by the growth of trade and consequently of large markets” (Mathiesen 1997, 220).

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were—and are—aberrant, wildly inconsistent, countering their own self-assumed rationalities.

6.4.4 Otherwise Than Who We Are We have emphasised a series of complex spatial understandings in Foucault’s accounts of archaeology and genealogy. We have also emphasised that when Foucault broaches concerns with the biopolitical and with governmentality, his historicopolitical engagements are, for the most part, within contexts of an urban milieu. The emergence of apparatuses of security coincide with the growth of urban populations, and requirements for new techniques of conducting conduct, techniques or technologies of power coincident with the consolidation of a panoply of human sciences. Now we aim to outline where Foucault moves in further developing an understanding of governmentality, an understanding that suggests neither discourses nor power were really what was at stake in his analyses. What was at stake was how the notion of conduct of oneself and of others, how a governing of oneself and of others, happens such that a history or genealogy of successive forms of truth and subjectivity determines how our present is capable of being thought, and thought otherwise than as it is. Our question, in this movement to subjectivity and truth, is how we might now recognise an ontology of spatialization in Foucault’s genealogy of techniques of the self, and how an ethico-political understanding of urbanizing might yet be a relevant locus for engaging such a genealogy. From what we have discussed in Chapter 1, concerning a range of paradigms by which a political understanding of the urban is currently thought, we recognise that the impetus towards questioning the urban is no longer ‘contained’ in a question of the city, nor a question of the State, nor some account of a return to a notion of city-State. Rather, urbanizing is planetary. Urbanizing is a name given to a panoply of technologies of a self whose speciesexistence, whose biopolitical stakes are not so much racially divisible—notwithstanding the ongoing dominations, violence and struggle of all manner of racial inequities. Rather, species existence, the one a self now recognises in terms of selfsacrifice, is Anthropos, whose finitude or limit, whose extinction is now horizonally disclosive. Our aim, in this closing section to Part Two of our book, is to briefly present this ‘hermeneutics of a self’ that became the focus of Foucault’s lecture courses between 1979 and 1984. In doing so, we draw out a particularly crucial notion for Foucault, a way of naming a particular understanding of truth—alethurgy—that is complex and at odds with either a notion of objective truth as determination of the physical and human sciences, or subjective truth as the revealing of the depths of an individual’s conscious or unconscious thoughts. Neither objective, nor subjective, this ‘truth’ needs to be read in relation to transformations in archaic and classical Greece of the notions of Al¯etheia and L¯eth¯e.56 Though not identical to what we earlier 56 We

discussed L¯eth¯e in Chapter 1, when discussing the city of Athens, stasis, and recourse to amnesty, as a way for democracy to reconcile the legacies of civil war. As we then mentioned, L¯eth¯e

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described as Foucault’s differentiation of truth as demonstration and as truth-event, this discussion of alethurgy engages, perhaps, a refinement or further deliberation on such a difference. In this, we read between the writing of Marcel Detienne, on truth in archaic Greece (Detienne 1996), and Heidegger on the thinking of Al¯etheia in Greek inceptual thought (Heidegger 1998, 2009, 2018). We aim to read what could be an antagonistic engagement—Detienne and Heidegger—constructively. Foucault relied heavily on Detienne in describing truth-telling in archaic and classical Greece in his inaugural lectures series at the Collège de France (Foucault 2013). In this reading, we draw out, on the one hand, a crucial ‘space’ in Foucault’s thinking, concerning an understanding of a self as a being constructed and modified by itself, in the context of considering the city as that coincident space of a self’s agon, in relation to the conduct or government of others. We will look at the range of paradigms of political urbanism, developed in Chapter 1, in light of this discussion. In introducing the published versions of the two Dartmouth lectures given by Foucault in 1980, “Subjectivity and truth” and “Christianity and confession,” Cremonesi et al. (2016) emphasise that 1980 was a “key year,” a “turning point” for Foucault. They reference his 1979–1980 lectures, On the government of the living (Foucault 2014a), where Foucault introduces the procedures of alethurgy: “‘reflexive’ truth acts, in which the subject is at once actor, witness, and object of the manifestation of truth” (Cremonesi et al. 2016, 3). They suggest that, for Foucault, confession becomes the “purest and historically most important form” of alethurgy (3).57 Though clarification needs to be made concerning what is exactly meant here. We’ll begin that clarification by noting a particular response Foucault gave to a question posed in a discussion session after the Dartmouth lectures. We need to keep in mind that Foucault’s first lecture was on truth-telling in Greece and Rome, while the second lecture dealt with truth-telling, or a genealogy of the subject-of-truth, in early Christian confessional practices, and monastic practices of confession, commencing in the fourth century, and continuing until the sixteenth century. Foucault emphasises both continuities and discontinuities between these three moments of such a means something like forgetting, oblivious forgetting, while Al¯etheia was the common archaic Greek word for truth, meaning unconcealing of what was covered over. As it is the ‘privation’ of L¯eth¯e, we may consider L¯eth¯e to be what constitutes a withdrawing-concealing, such that truth, as such, is at all possible. We will discuss these notions in greater detail in what follows. 57 Foucault notes when initially introducing the word alethurgy that it is ‘coined’ from an adjectival expression, al¯ethourges, “for someone who speaks the truth” (Foucault 2014a, 7). From this, Foucault forges “the fictional word ‘alethurgy’” that means: “the manifestation of truth as the set of possible verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true as opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten.” From this Foucault adds: “… there is no exercise of power without something like an alethurgy” (7). One of the key organizers and presenters at the Columbia University series 13/13 on Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, Jesús Velasco, posted a discussion on Foucault’s coining of this word from the single instance of the use of the adjectival expression in Heraclitus. See Velasco (2016). We expect Heidegger would be in apoplexy concerning this understanding of Heraclitus, Heraclitan ‘logos’ and Heraclitan ‘al¯etheia’. Nothing, for Heidegger, would quite make sense in the way Foucault pronounces on the matter. This would require a long discussion which we will, in part, undertake in a while, when addressing Detienne on Al¯etheia and L¯eth¯e, along with Heidegger’s ‘dissenting’ understanding of things.

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genealogy. The question posed to Foucault suggests that, for Heraclitus, there seems to be a theme of ‘self-examination’, yet Foucault seems to place more emphasis on Christianity’s self-examination than he does on the Greeks. Foucault’s response is important for what it hints at or opens, though it does not—at least for us—sufficiently engage with what it addresses. Foucault replies: I think that in the Greek tradition, the problem of the self as a being is really important, but not the problem of the self as an object. The techniques which permit one to consider oneself as an object of knowledge is not the same thing, of the [same] importance as knowing or showing the self as a being. … And I think that neither in Plato nor in Heraclitus can you find something like the constitution of the self as an object, but that does not mean that the problem of the being of the self is not important. It is …. (Foucault 2016, 111)

6.4.5 Alethurgy and Parrh¯esia Foucault indicated here that there is a kind of transitional moment between Greek alethurgy as a problem of self-being, and Christian monastic practices of selfconfession to one’s spiritual director, revealing that the very crisis of one’s thought might possibly originate from God or from Satan. That intermediary is early Christian penance, which required nothing by way of revealing the nature of one’s sin from within the depths of one’s self, but rather the showing, or public display, that one is a sinner. Penance was a prolonged rite of exposition. Al¯etheia is a revealing or showing of what is self-concealing or withdrawing (L¯eth¯e). Crucially, this truth—Al¯etheia— has nothing to do with subjects and objects. It is not truth of things we encounter, adequate to our understanding, nor truth as subjective determination of how something is or occurs, neither a version of Realism nor Idealism, as these traditions have emerged in Modern philosophy. Truth emerges in the coming-to-appearance of what is—beings—in their being. It has nothing whatsoever to do with a truthfalsity binary. Alethurgy is not the correct appraisal of something, the correct understanding of something. It is the evental disclosing-glimpsing of what, for the most part, is undisclosed, or self-withdrawing as the plenitude of existence, what Heraclitus would think of as phusis, and Heidegger as ‘beings-as-a-whole’. Alethurgy, as concern for self-being, does not aim to find the truth to one’s self as object of knowing, but rather the manner whereby disclosive possibility is manifested in how one acts, thereby revealing one’s existence inseparably from existing. My ‘world’ is what being discloses, in my existential comportments. ‘Truth’ (alethurgy) is the truth-of-being as a force or power that opens my movement of freedom, or possibility to be. This is not the truth of beings, their adequation to understanding, nor truth of a subject as substance or ground of knowing. It is this emphasis on being-acting, on living-as-conduct that construes that space Foucault finds for a genealogy of the forms this conduct of and to oneself has taken, up to the sixteenth century. His earlier lecture series—on a genealogy of disciplinary procedures—would need to be read ‘retroactively’ for how this question of conduct determines how an archaeology of the forms of knowing that dominate our ‘selves’ comes about, along with the

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domains of a nineteenth-century punitive power, or a psychiatric power, or a power of normalization, a biopower or regimes of governmentality. These relentless analyses of genealogy and archaeology encounter a thinking that has never dislodged the ontology of an outside to self-determination. With Foucault’s encounter with Blanchot, this outside of thought predominates. With his encounter with Canguilhem, it is error or pathology that determines the conditions of subjectivity and truth. Before either, was a moment of encountering da-sein as a movement of freedom, in an ontology of the self that dislodges any empirical epistemology determining anthropology. That dislodging is repeated in the last of Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, 1983–84’s The courage of truth (Foucault 2011). If alethurgy is a particular modality of truth, for Foucault it is parrh¯esia that constitutes its modality of truth-telling. Hence, what interests Foucault, commencing especially in his 1981–82 lectures (Foucault 2005), where he introduces the notion of parrh¯esia, is a particular relation of truth-telling that is not concerned with the saying of what something is, knowledge of beings that are, but rather a truth-telling that reflexively says something about the one telling, the manner whereby an existent, in the act-of-speaking, reveals or shows something fundamental to a speaking-being. Foucault puts it this way: Broadly speaking, we could call the analysis of these structures [specific structures of discourses claiming to be and accepted as true, i.e., epist¯eme]an epistemological analysis. On the other hand, it seemed to me that it would be equally interesting to analyse the conditions and forms of the type of act by which the subject manifests himself when speaking the truth, by which I mean, thinks of himself and is recognised by others as speaking the truth. (Foucault 2011, 2–3)

Hence, with this kind of analysis, Foucault is not concerned with how true discourses establish themselves, how science determines the knowledge of things, or how words and things find their correspondences. From such epistemological analyses, Foucault moves to a ‘hermeneutics of the subject’, an ontology of the modalities by which a being unconceals itself in the act of truth-telling. He gives the name alethurgy to the manifesting or revealing truth, and the name parrh¯esia to the act of manifesting: “In contrast with the study of epistemological structures, the analysis of this domain could be called the study of ‘alethurgic’ forms” (3). Parrh¯esia is constituted in practices of truth-telling. Alethurgy concerns the forms taken by truth, when it concerns the showing or revealing of the one who tells.58 Foucault suggests that, all along, this relation between subject and truth has been his concern, this relation between how 58 See the excellent discussion by Michael Dillon (2017), concerning Foucault’s notion of parrh¯ esia

in relation to what Foucault discusses in The courage of truth as “political spirituality.” Dillon suggests: “… Foucault’s analytic of the politics of truth, of the courage of truth (parrhesia), and of political spirituality in particular, begins to disclose an entirely different way of posing questions that modern politics addresses to modern times and modern subjects. It is a project that holds out the prospect of loosening the ties that bind us individually and collectively as subjects of modern rules of truth and truths of rules dominated by security politics, its lethal dangers and the constant global surveillance to which it necessarily subjects us” (Dillon 2017, 79). We have already referenced Dillon’s work on security and politics. Indeed, his project, on a radical interrogation and rethinking of the ‘inter-national’ in international relations, has an uncanny parallel to this book on security and urbanizing, especially in the current context of understanding urbanizing as planetary, which is to say essentially inter-national. Whatever we say concerning the international, however we define

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subjects act, and the truth that subjects disclose in their actions: “Thus: on the basis of what practices, through what types of discourse have we tried to tell the truth about the mad subject or the delinquent subject? On the basis of what discursive practices was the speaking, labouring, and living subject constituted as possible object of knowledge (savoir)? This was the field of study I tried to cover for a period” (3). Foucault indicates a shift from analyses concerning how “we tried to tell the truth” concerning subjects, to a question concerning the discourse of truth which a subject is capable of speaking “about himself” (3). This leads to the project on an analysis of techniques by which a subject determines the truth of its being: “avowal, confession, or examination of conscience” (3). Foucault’s aim is to recognise that the Socratic principle of “know yourself” is not the summation of Greek practices of parrh¯esia, but rather simply one “implication” (4) for much broader practices: “In ancient culture, and therefore well before Christianity, telling the truth about oneself was an activity involving several people, an activity with other people, and even more precisely an activity with one other person, a practice for two. And it is this other person who is present, and necessarily present in the practice of telling the truth about oneself, which caught and held my attention” (5). Yet, how do these techniques of a ‘self’, on the one hand, relate back to the concerns we have noted on an understanding of governmentality as conduct on one’s self and on the conduct of others; and, on the other hand, concern us with anything fundamental to an understanding of urbanizing, planetary or otherwise? And, thirdly, we have arrived at Foucault’s understanding, from both his reading of Kantian Enlightenment and a genealogy of techniques of a ‘self’, that our possibility is to be ‘otherwise’ than as we are, and, perhaps, to abandon something like a technology of the self. How, then, does something Foucault now calls a “courage of truth,” a parrh¯esia, as ‘fearless speaking’ help to determine these? We return to Foucault’s 1980 Dartmouth lectures to get some bearings. Concerning that notion of ‘technique’, that Foucault uses when describing techniques of the self, reference is made (Foucault 2016, 15) to a ‘definition’ given by Foucault in his 1980–81 lectures (Foucault 2017). The context for Foucault is a discussion of what he means by ‘techniques for life’, in reference to a Greek understanding of tekhn¯e and bios. He sharply distinguishes ‘technique’ from anything that might suggest a rule for conduct. The manner whereby the Greeks, for example, comport themselves in marriage implies neither codes, nor theoretical formulations, nor prescriptions: They present themselves as tekhnai (techniques) peri ton bion (whose object is life). We need to dwell on this ‘technique for living’, that is to say something different from ‘rules of conduct’, from what a code of behaviour would be. They are techniques, that is to say ordered procedures, considered ways of doing things that are intended to carry out a certain number of transformations on a determinate object. These transformations are organized by reference to certain ends that are to be reached through these transformations. … Tekhn¯e is not a code of the permitted and prohibited, it is a certain systematic set of actions and a certain mode of action. (Foucault 2017, 251) it, it can no longer be ‘outside’ of what current urban theory terms planetary urbanization. The questioning of securitizing is coincident across both. We return to Dillon’s work in Part III of Securing urbanism.

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This understanding of technique remains ‘operative’ for Foucault, or more precisely, was already deployed in his 1977–78 lectures on governmentality (Foucault 2007). When introducing the notion of conduct, Foucault points to an essential ambiguity that, at the same moment, is indicative of a self’s relations to itself, though this selfrelation is decisive in the exercise of power and counter-conducts of resistance. That ambiguity is discussed by Foucault in Security, territory, population, in the lecture of 1 March. In the previous lecture, he had concluded on suggesting that the Christian pastorate and its institutions were a prelude to governmentality in their constitution of a specific subject “who is subjected to continuous networks of obedience, and who is subjectified through the compulsory extraction of truth” (Foucault 2007, 185). In the March 1 lecture, Foucault gives to this oikonomia psuch¯on, this ‘economy of souls’ of the techniques of pastoral power, the name ‘conduct’, with its ambiguity around being-conducted by others and one’s self-conduct (193). In the 1980 lecture, “Subjectivity and truth,” Foucault clarifies this point concerning conduct and government: “The contact point, where the way individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government … between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed and modified by himself” (Foucault 2016, 25–26). This opens the conceptual space, within the notion of conduct itself, related as it is to technique, for Foucault to engage not with Christian hermeneutics of a self, but with ‘being’: truth as manifestation—Al¯etheia—rather than veritas, or demonstrable knowledge. With alethurgy and parrh¯esia there is a notion of truth that still needs some clarification. In part, an obstacle to this clarification, at least in our reading, is the maintenance of the very words ‘subject’ and ‘self’, as the nominals for that particular being whose existence comes to appearance with Al¯etheia. It is difficult, with the maintaining of ‘subject’, not to recoup whatever notion of ‘truth’ at stake in Foucault’s discussion, as a truth of that substance who grounds knowing, some modality of a Cartesian subiectum. Of course, Foucault discusses Descartes, and recognises that the Greek being who discourses is not a subject, nor a self in any modern sense. So, Foucault, in The courage of truth, discusses especially that dyad constituting alethurgy and parrh¯esia, within a genealogy of the manner whereby human beings become or find themselves precisely as thresholds of tolerance, between coercion and resistance, what ultimately is at stake in creating the undefined possibilities of a transformation of the ‘subject’ as the undefined work of freedom: “I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings” (Foucault 1997, 316). Alethurgy and parrh¯esia concern a type of truth, a force of truth that is essentially, or primordially transformational, for a being, a kind of tekhn¯e or technique whose practice is between two speaking beings. Though what is it? Our aim, momentarily, is to address this same question, this same dyad of two speaking beings, this transformational opening, as it appears in the work of Aristotle, but more crucially, through the philological analyses of this transformational being offered by Heidegger, concerning basic concepts in Aristotelian philosophy (Heidegger 2009). Why turn to Heidegger? We do so for (at least) two reasons.

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Heidegger addresses the question of the beings that are as speaking and listening beings, within Aristotle’s discourses, as entities other than ‘subjects’ and ‘selves’. This enables the disclosure of a question of truth that does not make truth the grounding ground of a subject who speaks. Everything is more complex than that. Secondly, Heidegger, in addressing Aristotle on Rhetoric, clarifies a fundamental distinction between the rhetoric of the Sophists and just what Aristotle is meaning by Rhetoric, thereby providing another complicating engagement to Foucault’s differentiation or separation between rhetoric and parrh¯esia. Crucially, Heidegger emphasizes the notion of truth (Al¯etheia) at stake is not truth concerning the contents of knowing, but, rather, truth concerning the one who is speaking. This very question of truth is that around which the question of the polis and politeia have their transformations. This discussion returns us to a key notion introduced in Chapter 1, concerning the notions of movement and circulation, which we ‘returned’ to kinesis, in Aristotle’s terms. It also requires us to introduce the notion of πιστις (pistis), central to Aristotle’s discussion concerning a particular modality of truth. Though Heidegger does not translate this word as ‘faith’, as it will come to be so translated in early Christianity.59 Although we may have missed it, we do not find this aspect of Greek thinking in Foucault’s genealogy of Greco-Roman practices of truth-telling in their movement to a Christian ‘hermeneutics of the self’.

6.5 Conclusion ¯ 6.5.1 Ethos and Pathos The Heidegger (2009) discussion on Aristotle is detailed, and we will confine our focus to the most salient aspects concerning this speaking between two that most concerns Foucault in alethurgy. Initially, Heidegger emphasises what speaking is for Aristotle and, in doing so, differentiates what for Aristotle is the difference between phon¯e and logos, between animals capable of making sounds to one another, indicative of communicability, including that human beings, and logos as something , ´ λ´oγoν χoν: essentially human, Aristotle’s ζωoν Let us consider Book 1, Chapter 2 of the Politics. The determination of human being as , ζωoν ´ λ´oγoν χoν appears here with an entirely definite aim in the context of demonstrating that the π´oλις (polis) is a being-possibility of human life, a being possibility that is ϕσες ´ (physis). σις ´ is not to be taken in the modern sense of ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘culture’, whereupon one then polemicizes against Aristotle. That is a superficial way of viewing it. σει ´ Ôν is a being that is what it is from out of itself, on the basis of its genuine possibilities. 59 Heidegger

suggests that for Aristotle pistis may be translated as “what is able to speak of the matter”: “[πιστις] is speaking of the matter itself. In speaking, the αληθšς ´ [al¯etheia] should be exhibited, what is ‘unconcealed’ in the very way that the matter is, free of all determinations. And in particular, this αληθšς ´ should be shown ‘on the basis of the occurrences and circumstances that speak for the matter’—an αληθšς ´ that is not opened up through θεωρεν, but rather makes the true visible in what is probable” (Heidegger 2009, 83).

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In the being of human beings themselves lies the basic possibility of being-in-the-π o´ λις. In being-in-the- π o´ λις, Aristotle sees the genuine life of human beings. To show this, he refers to the fact that the being of human beings is λ´oγoν χoν. Implicit in this determination is an entirely peculiar, fundamental mode of the being of human beings characterized as ‘being-with-one-another’, κoινωνια. These beings who speak with the world are, as such, through being-with-others. (32–33)60

In part, Heidegger aims to locate how, for Aristotle, this speaking being is essentially a being-with, such that what is essentially revealed, in what essentially speaks of the matter, is a truth to the speaking being as its possibility to be, whose possibility constitutes the politeria, the polis as possibility of existence. In distinguishing Aristotle’s Rhetoric from the discourses of the Sophists, or any contemporary understandings of what this word might mean, in terms of traditions coming from Hellenism and the Middle Ages, Heidegger suggests that, for Aristotle: “rhetoric is nothing other than the discipline in which self-interpretation of being-there is explicitly fulfilled. Rhetoric is nothing other than the interpretation of concrete being-there, the hermeneutics of being-there itself ” (75).61 By “being-there,” Heidegger opens what is, for him, Aristotle’s ‘basic concept’, Oνσια (ousia), Being, which he interprets as being-present (17).62 Ousia, as Heidegger points out, was a common Greek word for household goods or possessions, things one has, things that belong.63 This havingbelonging became a technical philosophical term for Aristotle, read by Heidegger as how human being is essentially had, in its presencing to itself, as something ‘there’, what Heidegger further characterizes as the manner whereby there is a being-character of being-in-the-world. That being-character of being-in-the-world 60 This reading by Heidegger of Aristotle’s speaking-being, in its relation to the polis, seems, for us, crucial to Agamben’s entire trajectory in Homo sacer. Though we will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 7. 61 Our question becomes one of asking how this Heideggerian hermeneutics of a self, understood primordially as a being-there, coincides or not with Foucault’s understanding of a hermeneutics of the subject-of-truth. This is the direction our own approach to the matter aims to take. 62 We need to emphasize that Heidegger considers this lecture course a ‘philology’ rather than a philosophical engagement or confrontation with Aristotle’s basic concepts. Though Heidegger acknowledges his enormous debt to Aristotelean thinking, he did not consider that Aristotle presents the apogee of Greek thinking. Far from it. Aristotle presents the pivotal moment in the inauguration of Western metaphysics, where logos is fundamentally relegated to the category of logic. Aristotle, in the wake of Plato, marks the threshold moment of decline of Greek inceptual thinking, understood fully in Heraclitan logos and Parmenidean Al¯etheia. At the close of this lecture course on basic Aristotelian concepts, Heidegger questions why, for Aristotle, ousia, Being or substance, the basic concept in Aristotelian thinking, as the beingness-of-beings, was thought of as presence. It is this notion of thinking being-as-presence, in the forgetting of a more primordial understanding of being in relation to Aletheia and L¯eth¯e, understood in the inceptual thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that forms the larger understanding of Heidegger’s reception of Aristotle. In Chapter 8 we undertake further engagement with Heidegger, on his reading of that other Greek inceptual thinker, Anaximander. 63 Heidegger emphasises that the ‘customary’ meaning of ousia did not disappear or be entirely taken over by the terminological meaning given the word by Aristotle. They sat alongside one another: “And according to its customary meaning, oνσια means property, possessions, possessions and goods, estate. It is noteworthy that definite beings—matters such as possessions and household goods—are addressed by the Greeks as genuine things” (18).

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is equally κoινωνια, being-with-one-another. The question remains: what is the essential structure of this with-others such that the hermeneutics of ‘being-there’ manifests? As Heidegger emphasises from Aristotle, rhetoric implies a ‘togetherness’ (παραϕυšς) “what grows up alongside that which is there with discussion of the ½θη (¯ethos), which one can fairly designate as πoλιτικη´ (political).64 Ethics belongs with politics” (87). Heidegger emphasises not to apply any notions of ethics or politics derived from “modern concepts.” Crucially, what is brought to language, what is able to speak to the matter freely, without prior determinations, what un-conceals the truth of this freely speaking, is essentially the e¯ thos of the political, what essentially matters in the being-there of the polis. For Aristotle, it is the essential relations constituting the being-together or belonging-together of the one who speaks and the one who hears, the e¯ thos of the one who speaks and the pathos or affective transformative capability of the one who hears. In discussing ½θη as πιστις, e¯ thos as that which is able to speak to a matter, Heidegger notes: “How is it with speaking that we as hearers take the speaker to be himself what bears witness to the matter that he represents? What is it about the speaking that the speaker speaks for the matter with his person, leaving aside what he says, the concrete arguments that he has brought to bear on something?” (111). This concern for the question of a ‘with his person’ coincides, it seems to us, with Foucault’s concern with a self-showing, a self-unconcealing in parrh¯esia. To this ‘self’, which he designates as a being-there, Heidegger offers the notion of the cultivation of e¯ thos. Aristotle pursues an understanding of e¯ thos by discerning how a speaker who lacks e¯ thos might deceive, by having the wrong perspective on things, by refusing to say everything that needs to be said, by holding back, and by not speaking on a matter with good will, losing the trust of those who listen (112). Regarding παθoς (pathos), as that which concerns what is able to speak of the matter (πιστις), it has three designations, though each concern how a becomingvariable or change happens: firstly, an average immediate meaning of ‘variable condition’; secondly, what Heidegger notes as a “specifically ontological meaning,” important for understanding κινησις (kinesis), a movement that concerns pathos ´ in connection with πασχειν (passion), most often translated as ‘suffering’; there is a third resulting meaning: “variable condition in relation to a definite concrete context. Variable condition within a definite being-region of life: ‘passion’” (113). Aristotle determines a being-structure with respect to pathos and ξις (hexis: disposition/habit): “Thus π αθ oς already has within itself the relation to ξ ις. These two concepts lend themselves to being characterized by Aristotle as fundamental concepts of being” (116). Two further things Heidegger emphasises: pathos is a basic aspect to an analysis of kinesis, movement, “of being in the sense of being-moved” (116). The second emphasis is on the “referring-back” of ξ ις to χις, ‘having’. We now draw together the relations between the e¯ thos of a speaker and the pathos of the one who hears: “The ½θη of the speaker must be something altogether determinate with 64 Heidegger’s

translators provide the following reference: Aristotle, Rhetoric A2, 1356 a 25 sqq. (Heidegger 2009, 87 n.72).

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which he appears to the audience as one who, as a person, in fact speaks for the matter that he represents. … There is no ½θη in the sort of discourse whose sense does not depend on being resolved about something or bringing others to a definite resolve” (114). Those discourses that do not concern being resolved with respect to beingwith-others, concern themselves with whatever is necessary to exhibit the beingcharacter of something. We recognise here something like the difference Foucault drew between truth-event and demonstrable truth, that we addressed in earlier chapters. Heidegger, having made this distinction between a discourse of resolve and a discourse of exhibiting a being-character, makes the following comment, a comment that could well have come from Foucault: Setting down these conditions of discourse at each moment is not something that has been exhausted up to now, as one can ask to what extent, in scientific and philosophical accounts, λoγoς is to be taken simply as δεικνναι ´ (exhibiting, showing) and to what extent there is a πρoαιρε¨ισθαι (a thinking-through or taking-hold) in them. This is not the place to explain these connections more precisely. I am merely pointing out that it would perhaps be in order if philosophers were resolved to reckon what it actually means to speak to others. (114–115)

With regards to the pathos of the one who hears, the one who is moved by the e¯ thos of a speaker, Heidegger suggests that whatever is designated by pathos “defines being-inthe-world in a fundamental sense” (114). With this ‘fundamental sense’, Heidegger emphasises “the cultivation of κρισις,” what is meant by taking a position on a matter, deciding something crucial. This is what Foucault would call evental-truth, crisistruth, truth resulting from an ordeal, from suffering, or the stakes involved in passion. Hence, pathos concerns the “disposition” of the one who hears, the possibility of the one who hears of “finding himself”: “The manner and mode in which we are in a frame of mind also constitutes how we stand with respect to matters, how we see them, how extensively and in what respect. Coming-out-of-one-definite-frameof-mind-into-another relates primarily to the mode of taking-a-position towards the world, of being-in-the-world” (115). This being-in-the-world cannot be separated from logos, from the relations of e¯ thos and pathos, of speaking and hearing, such that being-there is being-with-others.65 Fundamental to the polis, to its inception and constitution, is this fundamental disclosive relation of how a being is ‘there’ in its relation to speaking and listening, to being-with-others. As every being-with, ´ λ´oγoν χoν has language is a being who both speaks and listens, so each ζωoν its fundamental relation to itself in the manner whereby its truth is unconcealed in being-able-to speak to matters, the πιστις of its e¯ thos and pathos. In this way, this 65 We recognise the importance of this analysis of Aristotle for the manner whereby in Being and time (Heidegger 1996), Heidegger defines the equiprimordial structure of da-sein in understanding and mood. We are able to recognize in ‘understanding’ a modality of how Heidegger characterizes e¯ thos with respect to Aristotelean pistis, and mood, or disposition, as a modality of pathos. Concerning Aristotle’s treatment of pathos, Heidegger notes: “This investigation into the παθη ´ was historically quite efficacious. Its influence on the Stoa is evident in the whole doctrine of affects, as they have been handed down to us today. These παθη, ´ ‘affects’, are not states pertaining to ensouled things, but are concerned with a disposition of living things in their world, in the mood of being positioned toward something, allowing a matter to matter to it. The affects play a fundamental role in the determination of being-in-the-world, of being-with-and-towards-others” (83).

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being manifests the truth of its resolve in discourse, while yet maintaining an open disposition to its possibility for finding itself in the manner whereby it has its being. When Foucault engages a genealogy of the self in terms of alethurgy and parrh¯esia, as a being that is fundamentally transformable, transfigurable, with respect to its self-relation, and that this relation of self-to-itself is a matter, all the same, of discourse, of an essential being-with-another, it is in order to open the space for thinking the self as something other than a determinable object within epistemological certitude, but also to think the self as a being essentially open to its possibility to be, to possibility as something other than the fixed immobility of relations of power. Foucault closes the second of his 1980 Dartmouth lectures with the following, resonant with our discussion of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle on a ‘self’s’ being-in-the-world and being-with-others: During the last two centuries the problem has been: what could be the positive foundation for the technologies of the self that we have been developing during centuries and centuries? [This, for Foucault, was the emergence of the human sciences from out of technologies of the self, centered on renunciation of the will as self-sacrifice in Christian confessional practice]. But the moment, maybe, is coming for us to ask, do we need, really, this hermeneutics of the self? Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover a positive self, or the positive foundation of the self. Maybe our problem is now to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built into our history. Maybe the problem is to change those technologies. And in this case, one of the main political problems would be nowadays, in the strict sense of the word, the politics of ourselves. (Foucault 2016, 76)

We have yet to bring the work of Marcel Detienne to this discussion on Foucault’s ‘politics of ourselves’, construed in a refusing of who we are, and a refusing of the positive project of determining the self through technologies of power, correlative with the institutional framing of the human sciences. Detienne’s ‘history’ of Al¯etheia and L¯eth¯e in archaic and classical Greece, coinciding, though in obscure and peculiar ways with Heidegger’s account, seems important for two reasons. The first is that we need better to locate Foucault’s notion of alethurgy within that understanding of truth and its possible modal variances, none of which can be said to be, strictly speaking, what is incorrect, false or un-true. The second reason is that this engagement with Al¯etheia further opens discussion of the complexity of relations between Foucault and Heidegger, especially concerning ethics, politics and the polis. We need also to engage with the series of paradigms of the urban, or urbanizing, that were outlined in Chapter 1, in order to determine how we might relate Foucault’s concern with the ambiguities of conduct, as a government of one’s self and others, or Heidegger’s reading of e¯ thos and pathos as primordial structures for the being-there constitutive of the ethico-politics of the polis. However, we will address these issues in the following chapter, “Indistinct politics,” the opening chapter of Part III, “Post-political urbanism.” With this, we leave Part II, “Securing the urban,” whose three chapters have engaged a close reading of the work of Foucault, especially as it addressed the increasing importance of the urban as locus for constituting techniques of the self, in tandem with technologies of power whose focus has been the biopolitical. With Part III, we engage with a range of political thinkers whose work, in part, relates to, or develops from, or is critical of Foucault’s thinking. Again, our focus

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is on a spatialization or ontology of space, as this opens questions fundamental to understanding the securing of urbanism.

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Simondon, G. (2017). Two lessons on animal and man (D. S. Burk., Trans.). Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. Simondon, G. (2020). Individuation in light of notions of form and information (T. Adkins, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Standing, G. (2018). The precariat: Today’s transformative class? Development, 61, 115–121. Stein, S., & Harper, T. (2003). Power, trust, and planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 23, 125–139. Thrift, N. (2007). Overcome by space: Reworking Foucault. In J. Crampton & S. Elden (Eds.), Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography. Aldershot: Ashgate. Van Assche, K., Duineveld, M., & Beunen, R. (2014). Power and contingency in planning. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 46(10), 2385–2400. Velasco, J. (2016). Forging words. Accessed 12 March 2020 from: http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/ foucault1313/2016/02/07/forging-words/. Virilio, P. (1983). The Lost dimension. New York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (1986). Speed and politics: An essay of dromology. New York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (1989). War and cinema: The logistics of perception. London and New York: Verso. Virilio, P. (1994). Bunker archaeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Virilio, P. (1996). Pure war. New York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (2002). Desert screen: War at the speed of light. New York: Continuum. Virilio, P. (2005). City of panic. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Virilio, P. (2007a). Strategy of deception. London: Verso. Virilio, P. (2007b). The original accident. London: Polity Press. Vitale, F. (2018). Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the life sciences (M. Senatore, Trans.). New York: SUNY Press. Weizman, E. (2003). Military operations as urban planning. In E. Cadava & A. Levy (Eds.), Cities without citizens (pp. 167–200). Philadelphia: Slought Foundation. Wood, S. (2009). Desiring docklands: Deleuze in urban planning discourse. Planning Theory, 8(2), 191–216.

Part III

Post-political Urbanism

The time has come, therefore, to reread from the beginning the myth of the foundation of the modern city from Hobbes to Rousseau. The state of nature is, in truth, a state of exception, in which the city appears for an instant (which is at the same time a chronological interval and a nontemporal moment) tanquam dissoluta. The foundation is thus not an event achieved once and for all but is continuously operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision. What is more, the latter refers immediately to the life (and not the free will) of the citizens, which thus appears as the originary political element, the Urphänomen of politics. Yet, this life is not simply natural reproductive life, the zo¯e of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. It is, rather, the bare life of homo sacer and the wargus, a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer

Chapter 7

Indistinct Politics

7.1 Introduction 7.1.1 This Living Being with Language The nature of warfare has always affected the organization of politics and power. In this case, I think that the relationship between city and sovereign territorial states will radically change. While states define themselves by means of internationally recognized borders, urban warfare will render this physical border redundant. When the line of the border and the surface of the state cease to matter strategically, the political order will cease to be line-based—i.e., dependent on an homogeneous state territory—and become increasingly point-based, dependent on a network system of cities. This is obviously going to help in accelerating the erasure in the economic vitality and spatial coherence of the state. The city model already dominates the global markets. With the influence of urban violence and warfare, we might find ourselves back with the political system of the city-state. (Weizman 2003, 199)1

1 We open Chapter 7 with reference to a series of writings from the edited collection by Aaron Levy and Eduardo Cadava, Cities without citizens (2003). Cadava and Levy themselves begin with the followings:

What is a city? What are the laws or constitutions that make a city a city, that prevent it from becoming something else, even as it inevitably undergoes transformation and change? … How is a city lost, destroyed, abandoned, and then perhaps rebuilt from its ruins, sometimes in other places and in memory of its name and patrimony? … What is the relation between a city and its inhabitants, between a city and its citizens, or between a city and all the people from which it perhaps withholds its protection? What is citizenship and how is it established or lost, asserted or taken away? … These questions have become more urgent than ever, if not more melancholic or eschatological, since today’s city—because of its permeability, because of its relation to the expanding forces of capital, globalization and information technologies—can no longer be said to name the geographical unity of a habitat, or an insulated network of communications, commerce, sociality, or even politics. (Cadava and Levy 2003, xv–xvi) © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. L. Jackson and M. Hanlen, Securing Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4_7

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No, everything isn’t for the best, but for you and for you alone. For the State will know how to use your insubordination, and not only will it take advantage of it, but you, in opposition and revolt, will be its delegate and representative as fully as you would have been in your office, following the law. The only change is that you want change and there won’t be any. What you’d like to call destruction of the State will always appear to you really as a service to the State. What you’ll do to escape the law will still be the force of the law for you. And when the State decides to annihilate you, you’ll know that this annihilation doesn’t sanction your error, doesn’t give you, before history, the vain arrogance of men in revolt, but rather that it makes you one of the modest and correct servants on the dust of whom rests the good of all—and your good as well. (Blanchot 1999, 137)2

This chapter, for the most part, concerns the work of Giorgio Agamben that directly references Foucault’s understanding of the biopolitical. It aims at giving a depth engagement with how Agamben thinks—and re-thinks—Foucault’s relations between power and life. However, prior to introducing Agamben, and in anticipating Agamben’s own approaches to Aristotle and Greek and Roman thinking, we want to return to the discussion that concluded the preceding chapter concerning Foucault’s understanding of alethurgy and parrh¯esia, in relation to Greek notions of Al¯etheia and The title of the collection recalls the fact that cities were founded on the coincident right to citizenship of their inhabitants. There are no cities without their citizens. The space of a city affords rights, obligations and protection of its inhabitants. Thus, for Cadava and Levy, cities can only exist where there are citizens, which also means where citizens and foreigners are distinguished, constituting a belonging and non-belonging, fundamental to the polis. Though, there are limits to citizenship, a complex of limits that articulate nativity, language, and culture (xvii). Thus, there have always been cities without citizens, inhabited by those without patrimony, birth-right, language or culture: “… any assertion of citizenship can only take place by simultaneously defining the limits and conditions of citizenship—by defining, that is, the non-citizen, the foreigner, the alien, the stranger, the immigrant, the refugee, the criminal, the prisoner, or the outsider—and, similarly, that any definition of border of a city must mark what remains within the city but also what is excluded from it” (xvii). We may recognise current developments in cities in the United States, such as Philadelphia or Detroit, as developments in redefining the border-regions of belonging and non-belonging, of redefining citizenship, its rights and obligations such that inhabitants are transformed into aliens, refugees, without legal protection once afforded to them. 2 We have earlier emphasized the importance of Blanchot’s work for Foucault, and here, again, make reference to his novel, The most high (1996), first published in 1948 in French, that serves in a prescient way to many of the developments undertaken by Foucault with respect to a juridicomedical understanding of population, within disciplinary mechanisms and the subsequent emergence of governmentality, as a political analysis of the State. The most high, somewhat allegorically describes European cities in ruins after the 1939–1945 conflict, along with the disintegration of governmental reason. Though the State seems to have been perfected, it is disintegrating everywhere, with proliferation of prisons, enforced hospitalisations, over-policing. The novel presents the State as that fragile entity, subjected to complex apparatuses of its governmentality, from confinements and their disciplinary mechanisms, to the law, its suspension, or re-inscriptions. These concerns, all of them, seem to have concerned Foucault, from his writings in the 1960s on Blanchot and the anonymity of language and a self, to his book on the clinic and the co-incidence of medical and juridical practices that normalise populations, to his research on the great confinements, plagues and endemic diseases, and finally to his writings on apparatuses of security, the urban and the governmentality of the State, and then to his research on an ethics, or aesthetics, of the self, on a ‘care of the self’. Blanchot’s novel opens with the prophetic: “I wasn’t alone, I was anybody. How can you forget that phrase?” (Blanchot 1999, 1). The main character, whose illness we trace throughout the novel and through the city he occupies, is named Sorge. This name is also the German for ‘care’ and

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L¯eth¯e, discussed by both Marcel Detienne and Heidegger. We will then turn to those urban analyses discussed in Part I of this book, before directly addressing the work , ´ of Agamben. In doing this, we aim to say something more about Aristotle’s ζωoν λ´oγoν χoν, this living being having logos, and the manner whereby Heidegger, along with Foucault and Agamben, question or complicate an understanding of this being as an animal that has, in addition to its living, language, that logos is something added to animal-life, in order that life becomes human. This corrective or clarifica, ´ becomes essential for Foucault, in defining the threshold tion of Aristotelian ζωoν of modernity in terms of a new relation of life and power. It is equally essential for Agamben, in disclosing a fundamental discord between zo¯e and bios, that inscribes not so much the threshold of modernity, but the threshold of metaphysics. It is also essential for Heidegger, who refuses to understand the human as an animal who additionally speaks. This discussion is important for moving into how Agamben begins to differentiate his understanding of life and power from that of Foucault. However, we also need to return to those paradigms we discussed in Chapter 1, concerning how the urban is currently theorised and politicized, referencing aspects of Chapter 2, on what we can now term the biopolitical understanding of social medicine, public health and regimes of bio-medicalization of urban populations. There are also pertinent aspects in Chapter 3 to reconsider, with respect to biopolitics, to the provision of welfare housing, and to a neo-liberalism that makes the biopolitical subject the entrepreneur or conductive agent of its own possibilities, its own ends. These various techniques of the self, under a normativity and legislative assemblage of making-live, and within an ongoing vestige of sovereignty concerning the family, with respect to the panoply of institutional disciplinary mechanisms, makes the ageold oikos-polis distinction a complicating one—perhaps even erasing it—whereby political sovereignty of citizen-rights is construed in blood-line, in nativity, while normativity is construed in an oikonomia, a series of dispositifs, that constitute the regulatory functioning of the State, supported by, though not reducible to, judicial apparatuses of law.

¯ 7.2 Al¯etheia Politeia Ethos 7.2.1 Transforming the Soul We return to Foucault’s 1980 Dartmouth lectures. At that time, he agreed to a short interview with Michael Bess, to which we want to make brief reference (Foucault 2016, 127–138). At one point, Bess exclaims: “I confess that I feel a bit lost, without orientation, because there is too much openness” (137). Bess is a little lost because Foucault seems to be refusing to be a prescriptive intellectual, delineating or defining what needs to be done. Bess asks: “What principles guide your actions towards is the key term for Heidegger in Being and time (1996), for the primordial disclosure of da-sein’s being as ‘care’.

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others?”, to which Foucault replies: “I have told you, refusal, curiosity, and innovation” which, for Bess, seem “negative” (136). Foucault aims to clarify a little: “But you know that the only ethic one can have with regards to the exercise of power is the freedom of others. So, once again, I am not going to constrain them by telling them: ‘Make love like this! Have children! Work!’” (137). Foucault wants to “change the game” where intellectuals let everyone know what is good for them: “… it will be up to people to work out, or to conduct themselves spontaneously in such a way that they define for themselves what is good for them … The good is defined, practiced, invented. But this requires the work of not just some, [but] a collective work. Is it clearer now?” (137–138). This brief exchange is curious for how we might come to understand what Foucault is saying and not saying. We need to keep in mind that the lectures he gave prior to this interview had 1500 people turn up, with only half of them able to fit into the lecture theatre. What did Foucault imagine he was saying to them, that would not have been the discourse of the expert intellectual on the ethics and politics of the self? Foucault’s relation as the one speaking to his audience who listens was, perhaps, that of the parrh¯esiasist, rather than the expert on Greco-Roman and early Christian practices of truth-telling. The lectures were less concerned with defining an historical episode in a history of the self, than they were with moving those who listen to another determination of asking who or what they are, not a pedagogy or education in history, but a pedagogy in a transformative politics of self-autonomy. Perhaps Michael Bess was not familiar with intellectuals asking him to enter into that openness where his relation-to-self and not a knowledge of the world is most at stake. This ‘disorienting’ becomes an effect, or affective engagement, not with the truth-content of an historical discourse on the self, but with the e¯ thos of one who speaks, another kind of truth-telling, an unconcealing of how a self’s relation to itself is yet—and perhaps primordially—a relation with the freedom of that self’s others and with its world. Hence, this is not self-interest, but opening to a ‘commons’. In The courage of truth, Foucault (2011) broaches this directly, in discussing what became essential for philosophy from the fifth century BCE to the present, the deep relations developed between al¯etheia, politeia, and e¯ thos (68). We’ll say something more about this, as it seems to intersect, in a puzzling way, with the Heideggerian reading we did of al¯etheia, e¯ thos and pathos with respect to what is essential to the polis. We will then say something more about the ‘fate’ of al¯etheia, along with contemporary political urbanism. This extended introduction to the work of Agamben seems to us useful, in order to establish the manner whereby Agamben’s fundamental approach to reading Foucault’s biopolitics seems to precisely resuscitate this triple register of truth, civic constitution, and decision, though presented as an exceptional sovereignty that constitutes the threshold to juridical and normative modalities of subject-formation. We recognise, as mentioned in the last chapter, that Foucault emphasises a fundamental difference between parrh¯esia and rhetoric, that parrh¯esia is not concerned, in itself, with persuasion, but rather with the disclosing of the truth-event of the one speaking, al¯etheia concerning not what is being said, a content to speaking, but the e¯ thos of the one speaking. We do not, then, see Foucault engaging with Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric. Though Foucault does engage

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with Aristotle on parrh¯esia and democracy, on the difficulty of parrh¯esia in a governance requiring ethical differentiation. Parrh¯esia is that practice that unconceals the e¯ thos of the speaker. Its ethical differentiations have their effects, in affecting those who hear. For Plato—Foucault begins with discussing Plato—the city must be ruled on true discourse, though parrh¯esia leads to the affective registers of flattery and demagogues. Foucault notes: “After the criticism of democratic parrh¯esia, which shows that in democracy there cannot be parrh¯esia in the sense of courageous truth-telling, the Platonic reversal shows therefore that good government, a good politeia, must be founded on a true discourse, which will exclude democracy and demagogues” (46).

7.2.2 Ethical Differentiations Foucault then addresses Aristotle, and an “Aristotelian hesitation” based on the same problem with truth-telling in democracy whereby “democracy cannot make room for the ethical differentiation of speaking, deliberating, and decision-making subjects” (46). Foucault’s focus is on aspects of Aristotle’s Politics, where he differentiates between good and bad monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, where ‘good’ refers to a king or the aristocratic few, or the demos having the city’s interest predominate over their own (46–52). The problem of ethical differentiation remains for democratic forms of governance: “A democratic politeia is a constitution in which the governed always have the possibility of becoming governors. The problem Aristotle poses is how ethical differentiation is possible given this principle of the rotation and alteration of governed/governors” (50). This discussion leads Foucault to the problem of e¯ thos and ethical differentiation, but also to an essential correlate in Greek thinking, ´ between parrh¯esia and the soul, the Greek psukh¯e (ψυχη): It is important to stress the following point. First, with this development—on the one hand, the criticism of democracy as site of parrh¯esia and, on the other, the valorization of monarchy and personal power as site of parrh¯esia—you see that parrh¯esia is not just, as it was in Euripides, a privilege, the exercise of which is inseparable from the honourable citizen’s freedom. Parrh¯esia now appears, not as a right possessed by a subject, but as a practice whose privilege correlate, its first point of application, is not the city or body of citizens which has to be persuaded and led by it, but something which is both a partner to which it is addressed and a domain in which it is effective. This partner to which parrh¯esia is addressed, and this domain in which it is effective, is the individual’s psukh¯e (soul). First thing: we move from the polis to the psukh¯e as the essential correlate of parrh¯esia. (64)

Returning for a moment to Heidegger’s discussion of Aristotle’s understanding of the relations between e¯ thos and pathos, between the e¯ thos of the one who speaks and the pathos of the one listening, how this relation constitutes the being-in-common of a being-in-the-world, and hence the possibility of the polis and politeia, we need ´ the soul, in relation to pathos. Firstly, for to mention how Aristotle figures ψυχη, ´ Aristotle, at least according to Heidegger: “αθoς [pathos] belongs, therefore, to that ‘which comes to be in the soul’. υχη´ is the oσια ´ [the being or substance] of

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,

a ζωoν, ` [a living thing], it constitutes the being of those beings that are characterized as being-in-the-world” (Heidegger 2009, 113). Hence, for Heidegger, pathos is a distinct mode of the coming-to-be of psukh¯e. As we earlier intimated, in relating pathos (mood) to ξις (hexis, active disposition, but also ‘habit’) as the manner in which we are in a mood, ξις also constitutes a modality of the being of psukh¯e. There is a third, diathesis, disposition in a more passive sense.3 Our aim here is not to say Heidegger and Foucault are discussing the same thing, the same questions concerning a speaking being, nor to suggest we arrive at a convergence or concluding remark concerning their proximity. It is rather to disperse (and not gather) what is being said, such that something remains open here concerning the particularities of truth-telling or veridiction, in relation to questions of the political constitution of how our being-in-common is governable, along with the e¯ thos or ethical discriminations that open in such a question of governance. Now, getting back to Foucault, if his first point was that the discourse of parrh¯esia effectively shifts its locus from concern with the governance of the city to the governance of a self, there are two other inferences to be drawn from this. The second correlate is its focus on individuated e¯ thos, on ethical differentiation: “The objective of truth-telling is therefore less the city’s salvation than the individual’s e¯ thos” (65). The third correlate, based on the first two, resulting in parrh¯esia’s object—regarding veridiction—aims at inducing “transformations in the soul” (65). In fact, this is what we precisely see in Aristotle’s emphasis on pathos/hexis as modal possibilities in the kinesis or transformation of the soul. Foucault draws two consequences from this. The first alerts us to particular episodes in Greek thinking that steered parrh¯esia from the politeia, from the question of the government of the city, to a question of the beingin-common of living things having logos. The second consequence is far-reaching. At least it seems so to us. It not only draws in the whole of Western philosophy, which would be, in Heidegger’s account at least, a history of metaphysics. It also squarely ‘locates’ or ‘defines’ Foucault’s ‘project’, though we hesitate in even using these words and in their singularity, when it comes to Foucault. Maybe we are reading too much into what he is saying. Though, what is he saying? We’ll quote him in full: With these shifts and changes in parrh¯esia we are confronted with basically three realities, or at any rate three poles: the pole of al¯etheia and truth telling; the pole of politeia and government; and finally the pole of what, in late Greek texts, is called e¯ thopoi¯esis (the formation of e¯ thos or of a subject). Conditions of and forms of truth-telling on the one hand; structures and rules of the politeia (that is to say, of the organization of relations of power) on the other; and finally, modalities of formation of the e¯ thos in which the individual constitutes himself as moral subject of his conduct: these are the three poles which are both irreducible and irreducibly linked to each other. Al¯etheia, politeia, e¯ thos: the essential irreducibility of these three poles, their necessary and mutual relationship, and the structure of the reciprocal 3 See in particular, “Presentation of the context of the treatment of ξις” (Heidegger (2009, 119–122) We should also keep in mind the particular emphasis given by Foucault in his lectures in the early 1970s, to the notion of habit, its fundamental shift from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. While ξις (hexis) translates to habit, we need to be mindful of not reading into the word its entirely modern understandings with respect to being-in-the-world.

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appeal of one to the other, has underpinned, I believe, the very existence of all philosophical discourse from Greece to the present. (66)

Foucault elaborates on this quite extraordinary claim, in asking how it is that philosophical discourse cannot be reduced solely to science, simply to the question of truth-telling. Equally, how is it that philosophical discourse, as much as it is concerned with the question of how life is to be lived, cannot be reduced solely to a political discourse. Nor can philosophical discourse simply be reduced to a morality or ethics. For Foucault, philosophical discourse, inasmuch as it inquires as to the veracity of discourses, does so equally in terms of the very conditions of discourse, as to an exercise of power that enables its truth-telling, and equally, according to the ethical differentiations of subjects-of-truth at stake in discursive ensembles: “Philosophical discourse, from Greece to the present, exists precisely in the possibility, or rather necessity, of this interplay: never posing the question of al¯etheia without at the same time taking up again, with regard to this truth, the question of politeia and the question of e¯ thos” (67). Do we not have here, succinctly put, precisely Foucault’s concerns with archaeology as the strategic question of the possibility of truth-telling with its correlates to genealogy as the question of the exercise of a power productive of those forms of knowing, along with subjectivity and truth, as the ethical question of a freedom essential to a living being such that it is able to enter into relations of domination? Though, Foucault provides a more exacting categorizing of the possible relations between al¯etheia, politeia, and e¯ thos within that history of Western thinking, that also more exactly characterizes, perhaps, his own investments and directions. He suggests there are four great traditions of philosophical thinking, correlates with the four major forms of truth-telling in Greek culture: prophecy, wisdom, tekhn¯e, and parrh¯esia (67). Prophecy recognises the disjunctive arrangements of al¯etheia, politeia, and e¯ thos, though recognises the “promise” of their final “reconciliation” (68). Wisdom, on the other hand, goes to the essential nature of truth, power and morality, their founding unity. Tekhn¯e, as a philosophical standpoint, sees neither the promised convergence nor essential unity of al¯etheia, politeia, and e¯ thos, but rather their irreducibility, finding in logic formal conditions for truth-telling, in political analysis how power is exercised, and in morality the principles for moral conduct. These are essentially a pedagogy, things to be taught (68).

7.2.3 The Parrhesiastic Standpoint Then, there is Foucault’s fourth ‘standpoint’, the “parrhesiastic standpoint, which tries precisely, stubbornly, and always starting over again, to bring the question of truth back to the question of its political conditions, and the ethical differentiation which gives access to it; which constantly and always brings the question of power back to the question of its relation to truth and knowledge on the one hand, and to ethical differentiation on the other … the irreducibility of truth, power and

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e¯ thos, … their necessary relationship …” (68). We recognise in this how Foucault, perhaps, caricatures his own practices as those of a parrhesiast, how we recognise the complexity of the disjunctive and conjunctive relations between archaeology, genealogy and practices of freedom. Though, it seems crucial to emphasise that what precisely marks Foucault’s practices, refusing the nomination of either philosopher or historian, is his endeavours to trace the fundamental transformations in practices of truth-telling, in political regimes of power, and in how subjects become selves (or selves become subjects). Between Greece and the present, there is not a continuity of descriptions that would always enable us to locate al¯etheia, or politeia or e¯ thos. Far from it.4 We recognise, for example, in accounts given by Detienne, and by Heidegger, the motile transformations in an understanding of al¯etheia, its altogether suppressing in Aristotle, and in its translation to veritas with Latinization of Greek thinking, which dominated its understanding in Scholastic thinking, and then its fundamental break, with Cartesian thinking. See especially Heidegger (2005).5 We would say the same for politeia. Perhaps Agamben, more than anyone, has through intense philological excavation, traced the kinesis, the movements or transformations of governmental procedures from Greece to the present (Agamben 2011), though never that far from Foucault’s own analyses. 4 Concerning

Heidegger, we are intrigued by a certain (or uncertain) resonance that may be found between Foucault’s triple register of philosophy’s essential concerns, along with the four encounters within philosophy of their relations—prophesy, wisdom, tekhn¯e, parrh¯esia—and what Heidegger suggests, during the mid-1930s, concerning the relations between the philosopher, the statesman and the poet in the founding of a State, the philosopher’s questioning of al¯etheia, the statesman as leader, concerning politeia, and the e¯ thopoesis of the poet, the one who opens the word. Each is a creator (Heidegger 2000, 2014). Though, these discussions concern, for Heidegger, a questioning of the polis at the time of National Socialism, at once an acceding to the Gleichschaltung—the ‘fallinginto-line—of Hitler, and an uncanny refusal of the metaphysical ground of the Nazi State (see Phillips 2005, 95–132). Though, with these discussions of the founding of the State, we would find it hard to characterize Heidegger as a prophet-philosopher, notwithstanding his decided emphasis on the futural as opening to da-sein’s possibilities. Nor is he quite the wise-philosopher, aiming for an essential unity. If anything, it was precisely this notion of being-as-unity that he most radically opposed. Is he, then, the technician of thinking? Again, there is nothing more difficult for Heidegger than the translating of logos to logic. Science doesn’t think. Would he, then, be the parrh¯esiasist? We find this a difficult alternative as well, at least in the sense that Foucault holds the term. Though, perhaps, it is within an open region of thinking that may loosely be called Heidegger’s parrh¯esia and that of Foucault—their ethical-differentiations—that a fruitful discussion may begin. And it is perhaps Agamben’s own understanding of the Nazi State that can elucidate how we now think Heidegger’s poets, thinkers and leaders, the ‘camp’ as paradigm of politeia; ‘Hitler’ as form-of-life. 5 Why do we single out Heidegger (2005)? This lecture course from 1923–24, Introduction to phenomenological research, seems especially provocative for the manner whereby its initial question is how does Aristotle come to understand the notion of care, with respect to taking care of the certainty of knowing (care in truth-telling). Heidegger then probes this same question with respect to Husserl. How does Husserl’s phenomenology show what care is, in taking care of the certainty of knowing? This same question is then asked with respect to Descartes. Heidegger concludes with a return to Husserl, demarcating supposed convergences with Descartes but equally explicitly irreconcilable relations. In all of this Heidegger points to the disjunctive relations of the notion of truth-telling with respect to Aristotle, Husserl and Descartes. Needless to say, his genuine provocation is to suggest that the task of phenomenology—at least in how he understands it—is not to take care of the certainly to knowing.

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And, perhaps it is Derrida, in his proximity and distance to Heidegger, who has presented some of the most complex accounts of the modalities by which this living being with language, this z¯oon politikon, comes to thinking (see Derrida 2009). Would these thinkers, Heidegger, Agamben and Derrida, be parrhesiasts in Foucault’s sense? Of course, this question gets us nowhere. We do recognise that Foucault engaged this triple history, this history of the forms truth takes, this history of the relations by which power is exercised, and this history of the manner whereby subjects become selves. Perhaps, this sums up everything he did? This is a question, not a conclusion. Its locus, for Foucault, became the politeia, the urban, inasmuch as the urban became the privileged locus for discourses, programmes, and practices of truth, but equally those of power, and those of self. Initially, in what follows, we will look at Detienne and Heidegger on al¯etheia, on a ‘history’ of its movements and transformations. We will then look to Agamben on how he has approached the question of biopower as a question of transformation in our understanding of politeia, of political governance, in relation to and distinct from Foucault, and how he subsequently addressed, in his own manner, what he understands as the question of governmentality, developed by Foucault in the lectures of 1977–78 (Foucault 2007). In Chapter 8, we will look more closely at Foucault’s understanding of e¯ thos, in relation to aspects of Heidegger’s thinking, especially in relation to Derrida, and in relation to the Spinozism of Toni Negri.

7.2.4 Polis Andra Didaskei—The City Makes the Man This heading comes from Marcel Detienne’s discussion of the Greek sixth-century poet, Simonides. It is something attributed to him, though, for Detienne, we are able to trace with Simonides a fundamental change in how the Greek notion of al¯etheia was understood. Simonides was the first poet to put his ‘art’ on the market. His poems were for sale (Detienne 1996, 107–108). In doing so, something fundamentally shifted in how Greek logos was to be thought. The shift was two-fold. On the one hand, it concerned a transformation in how the work of poets was essentially concerned with al¯etheia in its relation to l¯eth¯e, a relation concerning an essential memorializing or showing of the divine (what stays concealed) in logos. Crucially, the relation between al¯etheia and l¯eth¯e was not one of contradiction or negation, nor of opposition, nor incompatibility. Detienne speaks of their complementarity. One necessarily accompanies and implies the other: “At this level of thought [that of memory, capable of communicating with invisible things], where politics and religion, divination and justice [al¯etheia and dik¯e accompany one another], are intermingled, Al¯etheia is defined—as in poetry—by its fundamental complementarity with L¯eth¯e” (66). This is within archaic Greece, within what Detienne calls archaic “philosophicoreligious sects.”6 For Detienne, Simonides makes a complete break. 6 We will come to emphasize in what follows, when discussing Agamben, the philological objection

he levels against such readings of archaic Greek thinking in terms of a primitivism with respect

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Inasmuch as his poetry was in the marketplace for a price, its concern was not with revelatory truth (al¯etheia) but with invention, fascination, amusement. He likened the word to the image in painting. Words were capable of illusion and truth. His complementarity was with al¯etheia and apat¯e (illusion), with a revelatory truth and with an illusory truth, a falsity (pseudos) that, ambiguously, was something that was also true: “… an ‘image’, a figurative sign functioning to evoke some external reality … Simonides identifies the very moment when the poet, in turn, came to recognise himself through his speech, whose specific character he discovered through the intermediary of painting and sculpture” (109). If this emphasis on apat¯e, illusion, is the first ‘fold’, the second is what this emphasis now opens, concerning the ‘truth’ of logos, the word. In relation to apat¯e, Simonides develops doxa as an essential ambiguity, as a logos that is both al¯eth¯es and pseud¯es, to quote Aristotle, echoing Gorgias and Plato: “It is the only authentic way of approaching things that are born and then perish” (113). Detienne notes that, for Plato in the Politeia (whose title translated as Republic entirely ‘Latinizes’ Greek thinking), the way of Dik¯e is to be opposed to the way of Apat¯e: “is it by justice (dikai) or by crooked deceit (skoliais apatais) that I shall scale the higher tower and so live my life out in fenced and guarded security?” (111–112). Though, crucially for Simonides, doxa did not mean what it did for fifthcentury Greek philosophy, inferring opinion in opposition to epist¯eme: “… opposition between Al¯etheia and doxa relates to a problem internal to poetic thought” (115). In Detienne’s terms, Simonides secularizes the divinity of poetic works, making of memory a technique, rather than that which is bestowed in al¯etheia. For this reason, Simonides is recognised as a ‘forerunner’ of the Sophists. Though, with sophistry and rhetoric, something fundamentally shifts with respect to the playful ambiguity of the word in Apat¯e: “… the Sophist is a theorist able to impose logic on ambiguity and who can transform this logic into an instrument with the power to fascinate one’s opponent and make the weaker triumph over the greater” (117–118). Its key is peith¯o, persuasion, with apat¯e now thought of as trickery. Curiously, Al¯etheia has no part in this. Al¯etheia concerned the revealing of what is, while Logos was simply not a way to know ‘reality’ (118). It is for this reason that Plato condemns the parrh¯esia of the demos, logos that must act by peith¯o and not by Al¯etheia, by persuasion and not by the truth of things. Crucially, though, sophistry, as a technique of logos, shifted the notion of complementarity of contraries to contradictory contraries (119). The Sophists, like the secular poets, were denizens of the city, concerned with political frameworks, with the politeia. As Detienne points out, towards the end of the sixth century, a new ‘philosophicoreligious’ sect emerges, in opposition to the Sophists, a sect occupying the margins of the city, and resurrecting Al¯etheia and memory from older religious thinking, to so-called religious mysticism. Needless to say, Heidegger is scathing of the notion of so-called pre-Socratic thinkers muddling in a primitive and mystical thinking, as if on the path to genuine philosophy in Plato and Aristotle. As we have mentioned, if anything, for Heidegger the opposite is the case concerning the decline of the power of inceptual thinking from the seventh to the fifth centuries, culminating in the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. We’ll discuss Heidegger’s understanding in what follows.

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returning as well to the old opposition between Al¯etheia and L¯eth¯e. Detienne emphasises a reading, culminating in Plato, that infers Al¯etheia’s relation to anamn¯esis, to memory, enabling an escape from Chronos, from time, such that “immutable and eternal being” is unconcealed.7 With this Platonic reading, L¯eth¯e is human errancy, “ignorance and forgetfulness of eternal truths” (121–122). Though, what emerges is a shift in thinking an essential ambiguity and complementarity of Al¯etheia and L¯eth¯e, the implications of one in and for the other, of one already tending to the other. Rather, their difference becomes one of contradiction and hierarchy, with the aim of overcoming L¯eth¯e, in order to achieve Al¯etheia. Al¯etheia is associated closely with Dik¯e, thought of as an essential order of things in how they are, and Pistis, the word that is trustworthy for what it says (124). Al¯etheia no longer concerns a world inherently uncertain and unknowable, but a dualist world, wherein truth concerns a relation of the word, to the ordering of the world. For Detienne, Epimendes of Crete is indicative of the philosophicoreligious sect concerned with ‘salvation’, with Al¯etheia understood as a truth to what is, incompatible entirely with Apat¯e as ambiguity between illusion and what is.8 Detienne sees an “unbridgeable gap” between Epimendes and Parmenides of Elea, the late sixthcentury philosopher, “between the ecstatic magus and the philosopher of Being”: “Parmenides replaces Epimendes’ concerns about salvation, his thought on the soul, and insistence on purification with the problem of the One and the Many and thought about language and logical necessities. The two men’s vocabulary, problem, and level of thought were altogether different” (130). Though, Detienne aims to find continuities within this break in thinking presented by Parmenides, especially in his “Proem” Al¯etheia, where Al¯etheia is addressed as a goddess: “Through its entire history, Al¯etheia is at the heart of the problem of Being. Behind the Al¯etheia of the diviner and the inspired poet we have glimpsed the idea of ‘speech-reality’ and the idea that the Al¯etheia of the philosophicoreligious sects constitutes an early version of Being—that is, the One. For Parmenides, the question of Being is central” (131).9 Logos now becomes what is unstable in whatever separates words and things. The question of Being, what is true, unconcealed in Al¯etheia, needs to be separated from Non-Being, what is illusion. This indicates a “turning point” in an understanding of truth (133). As Detienne emphasises, Epimendes lived on the margins of the polis. For him, Al¯etheia and L¯eth¯e were totally opposed. Parmenides, a philosopher, lives within the polis, which means he engage the political word, logos that is inherently 7 Of

course, Heidegger’s understanding of being and time is entirely opposed to this notion of the eternal at the heart of being, such that chronos is escaped. On the contrary, and in keeping with his reading of archaic Greek thinking, being (a time-word), is the temporalizing of the emerging-andsubmerging coming-to-appearance-and-withdrawing of entities that are. In this al¯etheia-l¯eth¯e is a temporalizing-eventing of what is. See especially his reading of Heraclitus (Heidegger 2018). 8 Epimendes is a sixth or seventh century BCE poet-philosopher. Though Detienne spells his name ‘Epimendes’, it is also spelt ‘Epimenides’. 9 Heidegger is well known for his disagreement on this understanding of Parmenides as the philosopher of the ‘One’. See, for example, Heidegger’s discussion of the Parmenidean fragment “Thinking and being belong together in the Same,” in his essay “The principle of identity” (Heidegger 2002a). Certainly, what Heidegger suggests Parmenides means by the ‘Same’ is not ‘the One’.

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ambiguous. Parmenides contrasts Doxai, deceptive words, to Al¯etheia–Being. For Parmenides, the illusory in logos is not a negativity, but the simultaneity of al¯eth¯es and pseud¯es. Al¯etheia is no longer opposed to L¯eth¯e or Apat¯e. Rather, the ambiguity of logos is something used in discussion: “The radical opposition is now between Being and Non-Being, not between Al¯etheia and Apat¯e” (134). This is truth that can be ‘rationally’ challenged, established in dialogue. While the account offered by Detienne of the transformations of an understanding of Al¯etheia from archaic to classical Greece is not entirely inconsistent with a similar discussion by Heidegger, it is difficult to reconcile the radically different emphases they give to these events, and to the manner whereby an ‘archaeology’ of Greek thinking happens.10 For Heidegger, one cannot overestimate the importance of recouping an understanding of Al¯etheia and L¯eth¯e from Greek inceptual thinking, from especially Heraclitus and Parmenides (Heidegger 1998, 2018).11 Central to Heidegger’s concerns with Western metaphysics and the question of the meaning of being, is the centrality of his thinking of Aleth¯eia, as a Greek manner for naming the truth-of-being, which Heidegger invariably re-expresses as the being-of-truth.12 Crucially, for Heidegger, Western metaphysics is founded on the securing of being as the grounding ground of the beingness of beings, to be revealed in the adequation of the beings that are to what logos, now thought of as logic, discerns in relation to immutable being. For Heidegger, this securing-inaugurating of metaphysics is founded in Platonic eidos, as immutable and unchanging being, and, for Aristotle, in energia, in actuality as the presencing-presence of ousia, being or substance. 10 There is a difference between Detienne and Heidegger on the basis of the kind of ‘history’ each aims at conveying. Heidegger may well characterize Detienne as a story-telling historiographer, while his own account concerns a question of the destining of being—being-historical—in the manner whereby the sayings of being happen. 11 Heidegger tends to refuse to use the more common expression, pre-Socratics, in his discussions concerning Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides, preferring the more provocative term ‘inceptual’ with respect to their ‘thinking,’ which he also refuses to categorize as ‘philosophy’, reserving this latter term for the decline of thinking in the inaugurating of metaphysics. 12 We note that Detienne capitalizes ‘Being’ when referring to Parmenides, the notion of the ‘One’— also capitalized—and Non-Being. Early translations of Heidegger’s lectures, as well as his Being and time, tended to also capitalize ‘Being’ so as to distinguish Heidegger’s notion of ‘Being’ from any notion of being, referring to beings that are, entities in the world, hence facilitating at the level of ‘type’, a reading of ontological difference (difference between beings and being). Crucially, for Heidegger, ‘Being’ is not a being, something that is as an entity in the world. Though, more recent translators have waivered on the capitalizing of ‘Being’ for a number of pertinent reasons. One of them is to precisely avoid a particular privilege afforded to the notion, a privilege we precisely see in Detienne’s account, whereby Being is hypostatized as an eternal unity, or ‘One’. In such a reading, and in Christian-philosophical context, or what Heidegger calls onto-theology, we find Being and God taking proximal relations. Another reason not to capitalize is Heidegger’s insistence on listening to ‘being’ not as a nominal, the naming of an entity that is, but as a verbal participle, something essentially temporalizing in its evental happening. Hence, for Heidegger, ‘being’ is insistently and essentially a transitory moving of withdrawing-unconcealing-withdrawing, a glimpsing, such that beings that are come to appearance and move to obscurity, inasmuch as their horizon of disclosive , possibility comes into view for this being—da-sein, this ζωoν ´ λ´oγoν χoν— for whom its beingin-its-world and its being-with-others is a matter that concerns it, something it needs to take care of. See especially Heidegger (1996) on da-sein’s being-in-the-world.

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Where Detienne traces a development from complementarity of Aleth¯eia and L¯eth¯e or Apat¯e, an essential ambiguity, to contradiction, such that logos is increasingly that by which contradictory positions can be resolved in logic, Heidegger traces this same movement as decline in inceptual thinking, such that being, as essentially question-worthy, is forgotten, though in a radically active sense of being’s , ´ λ´oγoν χoν to rational animal. Heidegger self-withdrawing in the transition of ζωoν discusses Al¯etheia in many lecture courses, though perhaps none better focuses his thinking than his 1942–43 lectures, Parmenides (Heidegger 1998). We will move quickly through the most salient aspects of these lectures. Where Detienne’s account culminates with Parmenides, Heidegger’s begins there, tracing the subsequent movements of the questions of truth and of being in Greek thinking, but also, decisively, in Roman translations of Greek terms, and, further, in Scholastic understandings, and in Descartes’ break with scholasticism.13 Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche are also discussed, within this metaphysical tradition of the subsequent ways whereby being and truth are understood.

7.2.5 L¯eth¯e Heidegger immediately engages with the peculiar character of this word for ‘truth’, a word that seems to name something by indirection, by the use of the privative-a. And of all notions, one might not have expected ‘truth’ to be something secured by such indirection. For it demands us to ask, in pronouncing a ‘privation’ of concealedness, of L¯eth¯e, just what this L¯eth¯e is, such that truth will be its privation. Heidegger reads L¯eth¯e, this concealedness in many possible ways: “as covering and masking, as conserving and putting aside, as closing off and original preserving …” (Heidegger 1998, 15–16). More curious, though, is that, for Heidegger, when Greek discourse locates a counter-word to Al¯etheia as the un-concealing of what is, it is not at all L¯eth¯e, but pseudos (ψευδoς), which we translate as ‘false’, though neither Al¯etheia nor pseudos have much to do with what we today think of as truth and falsity. What, then of L¯eth¯e? Heidegger emphasises its relation to λανθ αν ´ oμαι, a particular Greek way of saying ‘forgetting’: “I am concealed from myself in relation to something which would otherwise be unconcealed to me. This is thereby, for its part, concealed, just as I am in my relation to it” (24). We recognise in this how Al¯etheia comes to be associated with memory. Heidegger suggests we need to recognize in pseudos something other than falsity as opposed to truth. Rather, it translates a Greek understanding of ‘hiding’ or ‘veiling’ in what shows itself (38). Hence, its relatedness to L¯eth¯e. Heidegger proceeds with a focus not on Al¯etheia but on pseudos, on the manner whereby this nuanced understanding of dissembling becomes translated by ‘false’. 13 See

Heidegger (1975) for a range of inceptual thinkers, including Heraclitus, Parmenides and Anaximander, as well as essays on Moira and Logos. In many lecture courses, Heidegger traces this account of the movement from Greek to Roman philosophy, and then to Christian metaphysics, along with the break in Cartesian thinking, and the rise of instrumental science. We already mentioned Heidegger (2005) in this regard.

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Al¯etheia seems to have an ambiguity about it. It is both disclosing of something and that disclosed something. It does something and names something at the same time. Hence, is it logos in disclosing, or is it being as disclosed? Heidegger pursues this indirectly, by asking why we think of the un-true as the false. Heidegger’s account is unsettling for the breadth of its concern, what it brings into constellation, the peculiar emphasis Heidegger gives to the “un-German word ‘false’” (39).14 Heidegger provides an etymological genealogy of the Latin falsum, whose stem, fallo, ´ derives from the Greek σϕαλλω, “to overthrow, to make totter” (39).15 Heidegger emphasises this ‘overthrowing’ implies putting something up, erecting something, such that someone may ‘fall’ for it. Hence an ambiguity arises around a ‘putting up’ that appears as enduring though, in fact, it does not allow for presencing to stand (39). Heidegger asks what might have led Roman translators to encounter fallo, falsum, as bringing to a fall? It is here he discusses the Roman imperium: “Imperium means ‘command’” (40), though ‘command’ in an original sense thought of as commending, commandment, recommending, preserving a territory one has taken over, according to law (ius).16 Roman iustitia, justice, as Heidegger reminds us, “has a wholly different ground of existence than that of διχ η [dik¯e], which arises from αλ ´ ηθ ´ εια [al¯etheia]” (40). Heidegger suggests that we think of the Greek polis and the ‘political’ entirely in the inheritance from Roman ius, law and command: “The essence of the Greek π´oλις will never be grasped within the horizon of the political as understood in Roman ways. As soon as we consider the simple unavoidable essential domains, which are for a historiographer naturally of no consequence, since they are inconspicuous and noiseless, then, but only then, do we see that our usual basic ideas, i.e., Roman, Christian, modern, miserably fail to grasp the primordial essence of ancient Greece” (43).17 Hence, for Heidegger, the fate of Al¯etheia is equally as catastrophic. 14 This insistence on the “un-German” seems to have a perversity to it, to the point where, in providing a range of synonyms for the falsity associated with pseudos, Heidegger mentions ‘trick’, emphasizing that this is an English word: “This bringing to a fall is then subterfuge, ‘trick’ [Trick], which word, not accidentally, comes from the English” (Heidegger 1998, 41). 15 See Dillon (1996) for a discussion on the Greek root to the Latin etymology of security, in securitas, formed from sine cura, meaning ‘without care’. Dillon references Heidegger’s discussion of σϕαλλω ´ (sphallo), meaning bringing to a fall by putting something up (Heidegger 1998, 39– 43). Hence, ασϕαλλω, ´ the privative of such a subterfuge, bears a curious and complex relation to al¯etheia, to truth as the unconcealing of what is. See Dillon (1996, 123–128). 16 See Aureli (2011) for a discussion on territory understood in a Roman way, as distinct from an essentially Greek way. In this distinction, we need to consider dike’s relation to horismos, as disclosive binding or bounding, distinct from ius’s relation to imperium. 17 The point, for Heidegger, was not to return to Greek thinking, as if that were at all possible, but to recognize something in our contemporaneity, our present, that may be thought otherwise than as it is, from out of recognition of the manner whereby metaphysics has determined something essential to how existence is thought. We think there is something similar in Foucault’s attempts to think a possibility of the human, of a relation of self-to-self, outside of the inheritance of an especially Christian hermeneutics of one’s self. To abandon this, and to abandon a particular Enlightenment understanding of how one is to know one’s self, Foucault finds Greek and Roman understandings of a care for one’s self to be founded on different understandings of truth, power and ethics.

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In Parmenides §3, d. (49–54), Heidegger details his considerations for outlining the transformation of al¯etheia since Plato: “The assumption of the ‘representation’ of αλ ´ ηθ ´ εια through o´ μoι´ωσ ις ([resemblance or likeness understood] as rectitudo or ratio into veritas. Rectitudo (iustitia) of ecclesiastical dogmatics and the iustificatio of evangelical theology. The certum and the usus rectus (Descartes). Reference to Kant. The closing of the ring of the history of the essence of truth in the transformation of veritas into ‘justice’ (Nietzsche). The incarceration of αλ ´ ηθ ´ εια in the Roman bastion of veritas, rectitudo, and iustitia” (49). No doubt, this is far too much of a short-hand account of what concerns Heidegger in his understanding of metaphysics’ forgetting the question of being, in its determination of the truth of being—as the beingness (presence) of beings—from out of those beings that are, becoming the certainty of reasoned knowing. Though, we recognise something that resonates with Foucault in this movement of ways whereby truth-telling happens. Of course, the very words employed or deployed by Foucault—veridiction and jurisdiction—are entirely oriented to the problem that Heidegger suggests faces us concerning Greek thought, dominated as it is by veritas and ius. We find Agamben, for all of his philological exactitude, and understanding of Heidegger, to present us with similar concern, in the easy—“inconspicuous and noiseless”—movements between Greece and Rome, or even between Greek and Greek, not to mention an entirely RomanChristian recouping of Greek thinking, as if everything moved the other way round. And this is the Agamben who offered us Overbeck’s astute warning against such dangerous transpositions.

7.3 States of Exception 7.3.1 Parrh¯esia and the Urban We want to return to something in our earlier discussion of Foucault, his suggestion, somewhat surprising for its potentially trans-historical implications, that philosophy, from the Greeks to the present, comprises modalities whereby questions of truth, questions of political analysis, and questions of ethics find their mingling: their potentials for unity, dissipation, technical referral, and contestations. Though, clearly, for Foucault, these are not a priori, trans-historical categories, but rather modalities by which historical a prioris have their movement, their transformational possibilities. Furthermore, Foucault suggested four philosophical discursive realms whereby these three encounter each other: prophesy, predicting the reconcilability of their differences; wisdom, finding an essential unity from out of their differences; tekhn¯e, whose discourses becomes those of a disciplinary difference of discourses of truth, of politics, and of ethics founded on the specificity of the logic of each; and parrh¯esia, which finds neither unity nor logical differentiation, but rather seeks, with respect to questions of truth, their political conditions of existence, and ethical differentiations that makes them possible, the necessity of entirely contingent relations between

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truth, politics and ethics. Our aim at this point is to briefly return to those accounts we offered in Chapter 1, of various urban paradigms, in order to now ask how might each define its circumstances, its discursive ensembles, in terms of questions of truth, of politics and of ethics. How does the polis—which we now engage as a revealing, or unconcealing, of the ‘how’ of a being-in-the world and a being-with-others—how does such a notion of polis, as differential modalities of securing-topos, happen in relation to the discursive realms of al¯etheia, politeia, and e¯ thos. With Chapter 1, we engaged with a series of paradigms by which the political organization of the urban is considered. They may be grouped, firstly, into those that essentially address the question of security from the perspectives of policing, military and paramilitary modalities, concerning insecurity, generally in contexts of external measures to contain insurgency or presumed threat, whether that threat is actual or anticipated. This includes the work done by Alice Hills on post-conflict cities (Hills 2004, 2005, 2009, 2018); the work by Stephen Graham that we generally referenced in terms of processes of demodernization (Graham 2004, 2005, 2006, 2010); but, also, Nicole Loraux’s account of stasis or civil war in Athens (Loraux 1997, 2002), along with Giorgio Agamben’s further commentary on stasis (Agamben 2014, 2017) and destituent power. Perhaps what is especially emphasised with this grouping is the contestation of forces expressed in both ethical differentiations and in the crisis-eventing of truth. The politeia—as political organization—is composed of these confronting differentials, relations that Foucault might define in terms of the cleaving of strategy and power. There is a second grouping that concerns not so much questions of securing urbanism from the vantage of a militarization of the urban, but from an understanding of essential and strategic practices of transformation, interstitial engagements between material processes and political investments, between economic circulations and the movements of bodies. Their focus is on questioning a governmentality of the urban in terms of continuities and disruptions, insurgencies into the motility of an “urbanizing nature” to reference Eric Swyngedouw (2015, 2018a, b) and Swyngedouw and Wilson (2014). Within this grouping, concerned with an understanding of agencies of political dissensus, though within different critical fields, is the urban theorizing of Andy Merrifield (2005, 2011, 2014), on the one hand, holding firm to Marxist analyses we more usually locate in the urban work of David Harvey (1982, 2009). See also Merrifield and Swyngedouw (1997). On the other hand, Merrifield’s legacies are Parisian, the city itself, and French urban theorists, Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord. Merrifield’s political tactics are wild, leaning to post-urban and planetary transformations, ushered in by the precariat, that unstable and unentitled global labour-force whose exercise of power opposes the one-percent ‘holding’ wealth, power and prestige. His politico-philosophical leaning is to Spinozism, though that Spinoza who supposedly influenced Marx in a tussle with Hegel. If we may characterize the initial grouping in terms of confrontation, parrh¯esia, we might consider this second grouping’s concerns with truth-telling, political-organization and ethical differentiations, in terms of prophesy, in terms of how we might yet, from out of the disorders of our current existence, glean a semblance of a future possibility, whether that be a democracy of the precariat, a

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securing of a world-within-a-world, or a planetary ‘commons’ of the ninety-nine percent. We recognise some continuity between Merrifield and the various writings of Neil Brenner (2013, 2019), and those in collaboration with Christian Schmid (2014, 2015). Brenner and Schmid emphasise the need to move beyond some monolithic frameworks that have dominated urban theory for the past century, especially notions that define or segment rural and urban zones of difference according to agglomerations, infrastructure-densities, and population densities. Population measure has been the ‘yardstick’ by which differing urban densities become classified. Their move is to recognise that what determines geo-strategic understandings that define urbanism are political and economic forces on developmental processes that are intrinsic to urbanizing as such. In this respect, intra-national and national forces, whether economic, political, military or ‘cultural’ operate at scalar differentials by which the planetary constitutes their horizon or border. While urbanizing may have its effects locally, its actualizing is not so much encounterable as empirically available. Urbanizing is a politico-economic strategy of “sociospatial formations under capitalism.” And finally, we introduced the work of Ross Adams, whose Foucauldian engagement with the nineteenth century, was cited as a ‘birth’ of the urban. We noted a distance between the analyses undertaken by Adams and the other urban theorists we encountered. His concern is as much with how a disciplinary field—what Brenner and Schmid emphasise as the non-empirical conceptual terrain—holds to its ‘territory’, its specific objects in the telling of its truths, in short how a jurisdiction holds within the multiplicity of games of veridiction. This last grouping seems to suggest those technicians of disciplinary difference, those who would come to offer us a logic of truth, a political theory of the urban, and an ethical understanding of reflexive human behaviour. Between veritas and ius, between a questioning of truth and a rule, order or command over a diction, or spaceof-encounter, or field-of-knowing, urban theory folds, with or without demarcating the seams of that folding “urban fabric,” how a people live and how the possibility of a knowing-of-living happens, the self-showing of an ‘orderability’—whether dik¯e or ius—correlative with a securitizing, cura, care (sine cura—security/being without care), in command (iustitia)—sovereign rule—or in ασ ϕ αλεια, ´ the privative of what we earlier indicated from Heidegger as the Greek σ ϕ αλλω, ´ meaning an in-securingfalling (see Dillon 1996, 123–128). In the discussion that follows concerning Agamben, we should, perhaps, be cognizant of the emphasis Heidegger gives to this fundamental shift in the thinking of truth in archaic Greece, to what in the west we have inherited from Roman law. Heidegger extends his discussion on Roman fallo, falsum, to further discuss the manner whereby Roman imperial expansion happened, not so much in military conquest, but in administrative order, thought in terms of a “pressing-into-service for domination” (Heidegger 1998, 41). In discussing the means whereby “Rome secured its territory and expansion,” Heidegger emphasises: “The fallen are not destroyed but are in a certain way raised up again—within the limits fixed by the dominating ones. This ‘fixing’ is in the Latin pango, whence the word pax—peace. This is, imperially thought, the fixed situation of the fallen … the genuine imperial actio” (42).

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Why should we be taking Heidegger into account when listening to the emphasises given by Agamben to sovereign law, and the force of law, though in an originary context of a Greek—Aristotelian—understanding of life, hence a biopolitical understanding of existence whose compass somewhat coincides with that of Foucault on the triple concerns of aleth¯eia, politeia, and e¯ thos? We are not suggesting that Agamben expressly has this Heideggerian reading in mind. To be honest, we cannot tell. However, we aim to keep both Heidegger and Foucault in mind, when we encounter the reception to Agamben’s work on sovereignty, life and exception. For the most part, reception has been hostile with respect to those who suggest Agamben’s discussion significantly misrepresents Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics, his notion of sovereignty, the epochal reach of his concerns, and what Foucault supposedly did not address (though should have) concerning totalitarianism more generally, and national socialism in particular (See, for example, Lemke 2005; Genel 2006; Ojakangas 2005; Patton 2007; Mills 2008; Blencowe 2010; Bussolini 2010; Frost 2010, 2019; McQuillan 2010; Snoek 2010; Leps 2012; Erlenbusch 2013; Schotten 2015; Smith 2015; Hopkins 2019). There was a special 2005 issue of the journal, Foucault Studies, devoted to the Foucault-Agamben relation. There are also a number of book-length studies that address the issue (See, for example, Calarco and DeCaroli 2007). We found Bussolini (2010) and Smith (2015) especially helpful in clarifying aspects of our discussion, while we engage Genel (2006) in a close reading, after introducing Agamben’s initial engagement with Foucault’s biopower in his Homo sacer (1998). We have already addressed aspects of Agamben’s concerns in Homo sacer, when discussing his notions of stasis, oikos and polis, in the context of Loraux’s account of the founding of democracy in Athens. We will now engage closely with his understanding of the biopolitical. By way of introduction, we mention a short text by Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” (Agamben 2003), that commences with a reference to Hannah Arendt’s 1943 essay on refugees, “We Refugees.”18 Agamben’s focus is on the political status of the refugee as a status defined by the suspension of sovereign citizenship, and thereby constituting a being whose rights are voided. The direction of Agamben’s argument and prognosis is not towards a restitution of rights of the refugee, a repatriating right inalienable to birth itself. Rather, his argument is the obverse, to disestablish any notion of right at all constituted on citizenship, nativity or patrimony: “Before extermination camps are reopened in Europe (something that is already happening), it is necessary that the nation-state finds the courage to question the very principle of the inscription of nativity as well as the trinity state-nation-territory that is founded on that principle. … Only in a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognise the refugee that he or she is—only in such a world is the political survival of humankind today thinkable” (Agamben 2003, 9, 11). It is to the work of Agamben 18 Agamben provides the reference to Arendt’s essay as follows: “In 1943 Hannah Arendt published an article titled “We Refugees” in a small English-language Jewish publication, the Menorah Journal” (Agamben 2003, 3).

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we turn in some depth, particularly in elucidating Agamben’s understanding of the biopolitical frameworks of modernity, developed from the work of Foucault.

7.3.2 States of Exception—Beyond Human Rights Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zo¯e, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested. (Agamben 1998, 9)

In an abbreviated way, this is the basic thesis presented in Agamben’s political philosophy. He suggests his fundamental premise relating bare life to the state of exception has developed from a ‘double bind’ in Foucault’s late political writings on power, subjectivisation and the State. We are aware of the extent to which Foucault aimed to significantly redefine the question of power from out of its localization in juridical and institutional discourses that construed the State and its sovereignty as the seat and origins of power. Rather, as we have outlined in some detail, Foucault sought to determine the mechanisms of power’s exercise in terms of the political techniques of discipline, the agency of police as a productive force and, with the emergence of liberalism, apparatuses of security that concerned the governmentality of populations, a whole register and panoply of techniques, commencing with statistics, demographics and regulations concerning hygiene and the medicalization of a population. If discipline tended to inscribe an individuated body, liberalism sought for an autonomous principle at the level of individuated selves, such that the normalizing techniques, inscribed in security, manage individuated affects, thereby maintaining the semblance of freedom, or an inalienable self, whose conduct is acted upon or sanctioned as conduct on the conduct of others. Between the political techniques of the science of police and technologies of the self, Agamben emphasises that, for Foucault, there is this ‘double bind’ or what he refers to as a non-unitary theory of power: “Clearly these two lines (which carry on two tendencies present in Foucault’s work from the beginning) intersect in many points and refer back to a common centre. … Yet the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely unclear in Foucault’s work, so much so that it has even been claimed that Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power” (Agamben 1998, 5). Though, is it Agamben’s project to find that moment of intersection, that ‘unitary centre’ in a radical distending of Foucault’s writings on bio-power? Certainly, this notion of a ‘unitary theory of power’ is a stumbling point for Foucault scholars who would refuse, along with Foucault himself, to even suggest such a ‘centre’ was achievable. Perhaps Agamben infers something quite different in what he means by ‘unitary’, something closer to a notion of ‘dislocating location’ that he later

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introduces, and we discuss below. Agamben’s thesis, developed in Homo sacer, and extended in a series of subsequent publications, has been thoroughly critiqued, at times condemned, and at times praised for its acute developments of aspects of Foucault’s work.19 We briefly engage with some of these responses to Agamben. However, what is clear is the extent to which the prognosis offered by Agamben for our global humanity appears to be bleak, as we work through Homo Sacer, and this bleakness inflects expressly on the design of our metropolitan centres, our cities, and increased urbanization of the planet. We recognise this bleakness in accounts of Detroit or Philadelphia, but also within settlements in Palestine, or refugee camps in Pakistan, or incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan, or policing in sub-Sahara Africa. Though, perhaps for Agamben, this bleakness is signalled in a more sinister way, within our well-functioning and seemingly untroubled ‘first-world’ metropolitan

19 Agamben’s

work since Homo Sacer has developed in complex ways, at times complicating his initial arguments, at times qualifying them, at times seeming to respond to those who have critiqued him. In one sense, Agamben has built on an even earlier publication, The coming community (1993), which enigmatically sets about a philosophical and ethical project on how a future politics is to be enacted. It is as if all of his following publications establish frameworks for the thinking of such a coming community. Dean (2012), in a feature review article of Agamben’s The kingdom and the glory (2011), develops a comprehensive account of the publishing history of Agamben: … this volume [The kingdom and the glory] presents itself as a successor to [Homo sacer] and, as its title indicates, a second part of Book Two of the series it initiates. Thus, Homo sacer (I) is now followed by State of exception (II, 1), and the present volume (II, 2). In the sense that State of exception drew upon German philosopher Carl Schmitt to examine the state of exception as a permanent technique of government rather than temporary suspension of the law, the present volume brings that project to an end by seeking to open Schmitt’s political theology to questions of governmentality and by drawing upon theologian Erik Peterson’s closure of political theology. The present volume is followed by the recently published The sacrament of language: An archaeology of the oath (II, 3), a small and dense work on the relationship between the performative uses of language and the production of truth within rituals of power characteristic of law and religion. This is then followed by Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive (III), which was first published in English in 1999, and an as yet unpublished volume on ‘the forms of life’. While the first three volumes might be read as focusing on the genealogy of power relations in Occidental thought and politics, the next volume promises to amplify Agamben’s thinking on resistance. (Dean 2012: 146) That final work in the Homo sacer series is now published, The use of bodies (2015), that returns to a notion developed by Agamben in Means without end (2000), the notion of “form-of-life.” There is a helpful discussion of this notion in Smith (2015), in relation to Foucault’s understanding of an aesthetics of the self. We note also that Bussolini (2010) provides a detailed account of Agamben’s The kingdom and the glory, as well as The sacrament of language, in discussion on Foucault’s influences on Agamben’s thinking. The entire Homo sacer series is now published in a single volume by Stanford University Press: The omnibus homo sacer (2017). Homo sacer I comprises the initial Homo sacer. Homo sacer II comprises five volumes: 1. State of exception; 2. Stasis; 3. The sacrament of language; 4. The kingdom and the glory; 5. Opus dei. Homo sacer III comprises Remnants of Auschwitz. Homo sacer IV comprises two volumes: 1. The highest poverty; 2. The use of bodies.

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centres, within the functioning of biopolitical regimes essentially founded on the production of ‘bare life’ and the ‘state of exception’.20 As a very broad summation of his analysis, Agamben seeks to extend Foucault’s reading of the biopolitical, particularly concerning an understanding of life. He argues from a classical Greek notion of life—separating zo¯e and bios, reproductive life of living beings and citizen-life—that maintains separation of sovereign power— politeia and polis—and biological life confined to the oikos, the administering of life with the family household. Modernity is marked by the indistinction of this separation, where politeia, or the political administration of a State no longer has as its object the bios of citizen-life but the zo¯e, the ‘nudity’ of a living being. The bleakness of Homo sacer comes from Agamben regarding this indistinction as placing considerable risk on life itself. Homo sacer thus seeks to explore a genealogy of life— zo¯e—with regard to politeia, the political administration of a State, its dik¯e, thought in terms of ordering arrangement, what infelicitously is translated as jurisdiction, its sovereign command of ius, law: iustitia, justice. Command and law, imperium and ius, law and territory define sovereign power and biopolitics (perhaps more appropriately a zo¯e-politikos). Agamben argued that Foucault seriously overlooked aspects of modern politics in his understanding of the biopolitical (Agamben 1998, 1–3), beginning his critique with analysis of the classical notion of life, and how this has shaped conceptions of human nature and politics: “… zo¯e, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living things (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (1). This difference defines an essential spatial division of life between the polis or citystate and the oikos or home: “In the classical world, however, simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remained confined—as merely reproductive life—to the sphere of the oikos ‘home’” (2).21 This spatial division Agamben , ´ πoλιτικ´oν (zoon politikon), relates to the Aristotelian notion of the human as ζωoν political animal, and with this classical notion, he infers or argues for a biopolitics, thus critiquing Foucault’s formulation of the biopolitical as that which marks 20 See Graham (2012) on an engagement with a ‘state of exception’ coincident with the 2012 London

Olympic Games. Graham’s text opens: “As a metaphor for the London Olympics, it could hardly be more-stark. The much-derided “Wenlock” Olympic mascot is now available in London Olympic stores dressed as a Metropolitan police officer. For £10.25 you, too, can own the ultimate symbol of the Games: a member of by far the biggest and most expensive security operation in recent British history packaged as tourist commodity. Eerily, his single panoptic-style eye, peering out from beneath the police helmet, is reminiscent of the all-seeing eye of God so commonly depicted at the top of Enlightenment paintings. In these, God’s eye maintained a custodial and omniscient surveillance on His unruly subjects far below on terra firma” (Graham 2012, 446). 21 Agamben’s reference is Aristotle’s Politics (1252a, 26–35). We again need to emphasise the possible dismay Heidegger might express in the manner whereby Agamben proceeds with his Greco-Roman understanding of life and sovereignty. He might say that Agamben and Foucault are very much under the sway of a Nietzschean ontology of life, that life and power cannot be separated or pulled apart. See Heidegger’s discussion in his Heraclitus lectures. At one point, he poignantly quotes Nietzsche in a citation apposite to our discussion that is to follow in Chapter 8: “Where I found living things, there also I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master” (Nietzsche, Will to Power Aphorism 582, quoted in Heidegger 2018, 69).

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the emerging threshold to modernity. He thus ‘refines’ Foucault’s understanding, in order to build on Foucault’s conceptualisation of modern notions of power.22 Agamben finds this in Foucault’s The will to knowledge (1978), where Foucault describes a shift from sovereign power, to where practices of government start to be concerned with the biological processes of the individual’s body, and to a general or specific population.23 Quoting Foucault, Agamben points to the threshold of modernity: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question” (Agamben 1998, 3).24 Agamben sees this is, for Foucault, forming a rupture in the classical episteme, around the “two-fold problematic” of life and man (3). This Aristotelian conceptualisation of life shifts: “The ‘threshold of biological modernity’ is situated at the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society’s political strategies” (3). No longer is the human a living animal plus the capability of the political; now the living body as species is the target of political strategy.25 With this, Agamben links Foucault’s biopolitics to Arendt’s homo laborans, from The human condition (1998). In similar fashion, Arendt describes the shifting nature of modern politics so that “… 22 Agamben discusses the use of ‘zoon’ to describe the political animal as opposed to ‘bionai’: “It is

true that in a famous passage of the same work, Aristotle defines man as a politikon zoon (Politics, 1253a, 4), But here (aside from the fact that in Attic Greek the verb bionai is practically never used in the present tense), ‘political’ is not an attribute of the living being as such, but rather a specific difference that determines the genus zoon” (Agamben 1998, 2). 23 Agamben thus notes: “[Foucault] summarises the process by which, at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power, and politics turns into bio-politics” (Agamben 1998, 3). Of course, one wonders if Foucault would agree, disagree or, himself, wonder why Agamben needs to demonstrate his classical philology, as if his observation on an Aristotelian ‘biopolitics’ is not, in a sense, self-evident. In fact, this will be Derrida’s point (as we discuss in the following chapter), along with Aristotle also being a little uncertain on the distinction of zo¯e and bios as such. For Foucault, this claim to a biopolitical threshold was morehumble: “‘game openings’ where those who may be interested are invited to join in … not dogmatic assertions that have to be taken or left en bloc,” as he said in 1972 (Foucault 1981, 4). ‘Population’ as statistical demographics finds its threshold of emergence at the end of the eighteenth century, precisely as a technology or technique, among others, for a normalizing exercise of power. It figures the human as species to be managed via a range of techniques, bio-racism being one. For Agamben, this threshold is not the ‘eventalising’ of population as ontology, but the eclipsing of a distinction between corporeal existing and maintaining an ordering intrinsic to the polis, circumscribed in the political, something residing between a sovereign dik¯e-al¯etheia and an oikonomia, between an ordering-unconcealing of justice, the just city, and the administering of life. Though, this becomes more apparent in Agamben’s subsequent The kingdom and the glory, a book he wrote after reading Foucault’s Security, territory, population (2007). 24 The 1978 English translation differs slightly to Agamben’s version: “…modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being into question” (Foucault 1978, 143). There is a subtle though definite difference between the agency of a ‘call’ and a ‘placement’ or ‘espacement’ that, perhaps, would direct us to Heideggerian ontological difference. 25 Agamben here reads Foucault and the bio-political, as tracing the shift that occurred in Foucault’s work at the Collège de France from 1977 onwards, from the territorial State, to the State of population, and then to the government of men (Agamben 1998, 3).

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biological life as such gradually comes to occupy the very centre of the political scene of modernity” (cited in Agamben 1998, 3). Agamben notes that this similarity between these two thinkers has not been explored, while Foucault made no mention of Arendt when discussing the biopolitical (3). Yet he sees a lacuna in the work of both thinkers with respect to modern politics. Arendt does not make any crossovers between The human condition, with its concern with the biopolitical, and her earlier work on totalitarianism, The origins of totalitarianism, originally published in 1951 (Arendt 1976). Equally, Agamben questions Foucault’s neglect in not discussing the Holocaust, “… that Foucault, in just as striking a fashion, never dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century” (4).26 While Foucault does make reference to Nazism in The history of sexuality, he later questions this general thematic of linking the biopolitical with its telos in the concentration camp, as he especially notes in The birth of biopolitics (2008a, 187–188).27

7.3.3 Threshold: Zo¯e, Bios, and Intrusion of the State Agamben sees this blurring of the distinct natures of zo¯e and bios, in both Arendt’s studies into totalitarianism and Foucault’s analysis of the biopolitical, as a fundamental moment in Western political thought. This blurring of categories of life meant there is no return or recourse to the classical polis in modernity: 26 Numerous critics of Agamben’s reading of Foucault have pointed out exactly where Foucault addresses totalitarianism, the death camps and Nazism, where he qualifies his approach to these significant twentieth-century biopolitical events. Though we also recognize that Agamben’s project is not at all Foucault’s, and the lacunae he finds in what Foucault manages to ‘miss’ reflects neither a harsh misreading of Foucault or a moralizing fault-finding regarding Foucault. We keep in mind the triple register of truth-telling, jurisdiction, and ethical differentiation, al¯etheia, politeia and an e¯ thopoesis that asks us to maintain neither a project of unification nor compromise between them, but an agon directed at our own e¯ thos, its affective possibilities to act: one’s self as ‘transfigurable’. 27 Foucault is momentarily ‘defending’ the State against a series of inflationary tendencies that make of it a “cold, cold, monster” (to quote Nietzsche), a supposed zeal on the part of the State to expand and control. One of these is to align, in a form of “state-phobia,” the administrative State, the Welfare State with the fascist State or totalitarian State (187): “As soon as we accept the existence of this continuity or genetic kinship between different forms of the state, it then becomes possible not only to use different analyses to support each other, but also to refer them back to each other and so deprive them of their specificity. For example, an analysis of social security and the administrative apparatus on which it rests ends up, via some slippage and thanks to some play on words, referring us to the analysis of concentration camps” (187–188). Many critics of Agamben cite this passage in precisely accusing Agamben’s ontological or fundamental grounding of biopower in the “camp” as losing all specificity of situated difference. This is, as well, the argument Foucault brings against the Freiburg ordoliberals who, in the early 1930s, refused to make a distinction between the welfare politics of National Socialism in Germany, Soviet communism with Stalin, British welfare economics with Beveridge, or Truman’s New Deal. All welfare economics led to fascism. Foucault recognised the failure to read the specificity of the techniques and practices (Foucault 2008a, 110). One imagines Foucault recognising Agamben’s proclivity for ontological grounding as equally a slippage, a loose footing—σ ϕ αλλω-fallo-fallacy ´ perhaps—when it comes to specificity.

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… the entry of zo¯e into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such—constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the politicalphilosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. (Agamben 1998, 4)28

Agamben sees the biopolitical as that which may allow for a reinterpretation of the traditional categories of modern politics, such as those traditional binary pairs, which dominate political discourse: left/right, private/public, absolutism/democracy. These have withered and dissolved: “… to the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction—will have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon” (4). The biopolitical, Agamben argues, dominates contemporary political thought despite the various polymorphs that it may take. The fundamental logic of biopolitics is the nexus between “bare life and politics” (4): “One of the most persistent features of Foucault’s work is its decisive abandonment of the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridico-institutional models (the definition of sovereignty, the theory of the State), 28 Bare life is a translation of Agamben’s term vita nuda by Daniel Heller-Roazen, who translated Homo sacer: Il potere soverano e la vita nuda (1995) to English. Note that the term vita nuda is used in the subtitle, and is used throughout the Italian version of the book. However, as Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, in Means without end: Notes on politics (2000), point out, they chose not to follow Heller-Roazen’s translation but, rather, they translate vita nuda as “naked life” (Agamben 2000, 143 n.1). Vita nuda can also be translated as “mere life” (Murray and Whyte 2011, 30). Furthermore, nuda can be also translated as nude, stripped, or plain. In this work, we use the Heller-Roazen translation of vita nuda as bare life, while noting the implications of later translations. It should also be noted that Agamben’s analysis of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of violence” (Benjamin 1996) examines Benjamin’s “divine violence” and “bare life” as two categories that Agamben explores by the “limit figure” of homo sacer—the sacred man, whose liminal existence is both bare life and, paradoxically, the sacred (Agamben 1998, 65–66). We note the 2011 Agamben book, translated by Kishik and Pedatella, titled Nudities. While this is not the place for a detailed examination of the link between Agamben’s book and Benjamin’s “Critique,” Agamben’s reading might plausibly originate from Benjamin’s text. Benjamin’s “mere life”, as it appears in the English translation, echoes Agamben’s use of the term bare life (Benjamin 1996, 297). In the English translation of Homo sacer, Benjamin’s German (bloßes Leben) is translated as bare life (65); Bloße in English can be translated as mere, sole or naked. Bare life operates in Agamben’s usage as a separate and third category to zo¯e and bios. If zo¯e and bios somewhat refer to animal and human life (zo¯e as biological life, bios as ethical or political life), the term bare life is modern political thought’s reduction or blurring of the animal/human relation, so that life becomes reduced to biological processes (Murray and Whyte 2011, 30). Hence, bare life cannot be equated, for example, to Aristotle’s zo¯e, as some commentators suggest. Agamben gives the example of the “werewolf” whose indistinct nature is neither quite human nor animal, which he describes as dwelling in both categories, however not belonging to either (Agamben 1998, 107). Agamben’s study is fundamentally concerned with this indistinct nature of bare life, which is problematic with respect to an ethics and politics of subjectivity, where exist instances of human life denuded of ethical and political imperatives. Exemplary of such instances is sovereign law stripping any right from subjects, as was the case with State-led eugenics, the Holocaust, and the Bosnian War’s ethnic cleansing. Though, crucially, we recognise from earlier discussion in Chapter 1, concerning Agamben’s understanding of stasis and Athenian democracy, that indistinction of oikos and polis, or of zo¯e and bios, where the polis constitutes its existence on the inclusion of oikos as that excluded, and bios as incorporating zo¯e as what it excludes, is understood precisely in the peculiar relation of Al¯etheia to L¯eth¯e, where the memorializing of what must be consigned to forgetting is the founding of

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in favour of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life” (5).29 As we outlined earlier, for Agamben these two lines of inquiry—the intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical—constitute a problem due, in part, to Foucault’s early death whereby he was never able to entirely resolve them. Agamben interrogates these two modalities of power in Homo sacer, with the aim of synthesising Foucault’s reading of power (5): “… the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a bio-political body is the original activity of sovereign power” (6).30 For Agamben, contra Foucault, biopolitical and sovereign powers are equally as old, and the modern nation-state places at its centre the biological-species-nature of humanity to “… bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life” (6). This modern nation-state, combining bare life and politics, poses a significant ethical and political danger to the individual, thus causing the biopolitical to be a fundamental

the politeia of the demos. This peculiar renunciation of what must be included, this in-folding, itself becomes refolded in modernity, such that the very movement of a dislocating-localizing becomes the positive ground of the political substance of the West. 29 Agamben suggests that the linkage of bare life and politics comes to us via Foucault and Benjamin (Agamben 1998, 4). He does not directly reference Benjamin’s concept of “state of emergency,” although it is key to thinking this relationship (c.f., Benjamin 1968, 257). By interrogating bare life and politics Agamben sees that it is possible “… to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its practical calling” (Agamben 1998, 4–5). Agamben’s language is strongly reminiscent of Heidegger, echoing Heidegger’s reading of the concealed nature of being. Heidegger remains a major influence for Agamben. He was an attendee at Heidegger’s Le Thor seminars during the second half of the 1960s (Heidegger 2003), something we will return to at the end of this chapter. In The open: Man and animal (2004), Agamben engages again the question of bare life, this time from a Heideggerian perspective. Returning to Agamben’s quote, we see that he regards the essential nature of the political as hidden by the biopolitical, hence the possibility of rethinking politics, or at least ontologically questioning the nature of the political. In doing so, Agamben hopes to reveal biopolitics as the dominant modality of contemporary political thought. We might read here Agamben’s version of the triple register offered by Foucault concerning al¯etheia, politeia, and e¯ thos. In this, we find a parallel with Foucault, inasmuch as, for Foucault, the biopolitical as a name given to the governmentality of populations and disciplinary practices of normalizing subjects as living beings, is not so much the truth to power-knowledge dispositifs, but that which leads to a question of a self-freedom preceding and making-available strategies of domination. That self, enigmatically presented by Foucault in terms of an ethics- or aesthetics-ofself, perhaps needs to be considered in relation to Agamben’s un-hiding of the political—al¯etheia and politeia—in an e¯ thos he calls ‘form-of-life’. Again, we find Smith (2015) helpful in considering this. 30 We recognise the extent to which Agamben has a decided focus on an individuated self, the biopolitical body. In contrast, as we will be discussing in Chapter 8, Antonio Negri has a focus on the collective, in Marxist terms, class-interest and in Spinoza’s ‘the multitude’. Foucault problematizes security and the biopolitical, in a sense, as the eclipsing of a finalised or finalising distinction between individuated self and population, in that population is governed statistically and normatively, but no less productively (or coercively) than individuated selves, precisely in as much as this governmentality opens a space for the liberalisms of a self’s freedom. Hence his rigorous distinction, by 1982, between violence and an exercise of power, in terms of a conduct on bodies with discipline, and

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and profound danger to being (6–7).31 This shift of the political into the realm of bare life is the fundamental problem of the modern State. Agamben’s strategy, for want of a better word, is to locate bare life back into the Aristotelian reading of the polis, with its concerns for life (z¯en) and the good life (eu z¯en)—the necessary modification of z¯en as eu zen in order to include ‘life’ as excluded-inclusion in the polis—allowing the essential nature of the modern State to come to light (7).32 He interrogates the Aristotelian definition of the good life (eu z¯en) and, in doing so, aims to move past the assumed reading of the telos of the political as the “good life” (7). This leads to the simultaneous double-move of inclusion and exclusion of bare-life in Western politics. Through reading the essential nature of the classical polis, we see that the “… fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zo¯e/bios, exclusion/inclusion” (8). It is with this zo¯e/bios relation that Foucault’s reading of the biopolitical needs “…to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zo¯e in the polis—which is, in itself, absolutely ancient—nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power” (9). By extending, or at least modifying, Foucault’s original thesis, Agamben is able to analyse biopolitics with respect to the “exemplary places” of modern biopolitics—the concentration camp (and no longer the polis). This relation, a conduct on conducts with governmentality and security. To go further, Foucault suggests that he cannot equate violence to power’s exercise at all, or rather, that for him an exercise of power is only a possibility from out of the preceding freedom of a self’s autonomy, its relation-to-self as one of possibility. Agamben does not particularly recognise, or explicitly reference, these limits Foucault places on his own understanding of biopower, violence, self, and the political. 31 For Foucault, biopower is part of the decisive break in modernity from the vestiges of Medieval practices. Agamben, while recognising the decisive shift that occurs in modernity, sees this as linked to the problem of life and sovereign power, which he regards as having a classical origin. The shift in modernity obscured the original nature of the political and the essential role of the good life. In short, Agamben’s concerns just don’t seem to be those that preoccupied Foucault. The crucial disjunction is sovereignty itself. For Foucault, it is more-or-less associated with monarchical and aristocratic exercise of power, as he discussed in lectures dealing especially with shifts between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. He particularly engages with the dissolutions of sovereign power in the emergence of discipline and security. Though sovereignty continues to maintain centrality in the modern State, inasmuch as juridical structures, the rule of law—ius and imperium—constitute the grounding ground of justice, while individuated life is constituted on normalizing disciplines, and population is governed by ever-more sophisticated calculative measures concerning risk. For Agamben, sovereignty’s ‘original nature’ concerns a relation of al¯etheia to dik¯e, which is to say, the disclosure of the being of beings. 32 We again need to emphasise the difficulty of all of this if we embark on a strictly Heideggerian reading of z¯en/zo¯e/bios. We return to his Heraclitan reading of the inceptual understanding of life, from out of the root ζα (za): “For the Greeks, the early foundational words ζîoν (z¯oon) and ζωη´ (zo¯e) have nothing to do with zoology, not even with biology in a broad sense; just as little does the early foundational word ϕσις ´ (phusis) have to do with what is later called physics or the physical” (Heidegger 2014, 72). We realise that Agamben commences with Aristotle, as does Derrida in our discussions that follow. Though we recognise there is another encounter to be had with the question of life, of living and of power, perhaps an essential Heideggerian questions that comes from his relentless ‘pursuit’ of inceptual thinking, that would offer, in this ‘evening’ of Occidental thinking, somethings other that a Nietzschean horizonal disclosure of be-ing.

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predicated on the folding of sovereign power onto the biological, is both ancient and uniquely modern in the indistinction of zo¯e/bios, as with the indistinction of the realms of oikos and polis, producing a third term, bare life, that exists as the indistinct (9).33 Hence, for “modern politics”: the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zo¯e, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. (9)

7.3.4 Bio-Power and the Sacred Man As we have seen, Agamben regards that the political is grounded on the indistinct nature of zo¯e/bios, which produces a condition of bare life in modern subjectivity. The biopolitical is not reducible to a series of disciplinary mechanisms, whether medical practices or welfare techniques, as we would find with Foucault. Nor is it reducible to the understanding of the political substance of modernity as species-race, in the securing of possible futures. Rather, for Agamben, the biopolitical happens in the decisive indecision of the juridical and the normative, in the ‘blurring’ of sovereign power and disciplinary mechanisms.34 Sovereign power becomes the defining factor in determining what is life, such that the State itself becomes the guarantor of life (11–12). Our argument is that, for Agamben, sovereignty needs to be addressed as an ontological disclosure, in transformations from Greek understandings of being human, of being-in-the-world and being-with-others, to decidedly non-Greek disclosive possibilities, which ‘culminate’ or arrive at modernity’s particular biopolitical politeia, whose al¯etheia discloses a living being whose biological existence, that it is alive—its e¯ thos—and not its nativity-right—however right is to be understood—is what essentially becomes the matter for order. This conceptualisation he links to 33 This leads Agamben to suggest that modern democracy has a specific paradox of freedom and happiness with respect to bare life: “…it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place—‘bare life’—that marked their subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that leads to the recognition of rights and formal liberties stands once again the body of the sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed” (1998, 9–10). By this Agamben means that modern politics, in its pursuit of happiness and necessary freedom, introduces an antinomy whereby the subject is reduced to a state of bare life (10). 34 As we have seen in earlier chapters, Foucault reads the shifting logic of government in Security, territory, population (2007) somewhat differently to Agamben. For Foucault, rather than the blurring of sovereign and disciplinary power, he sees shifting interrelations between these two categories, as well as that third category, in apparatuses of security (Foucault 2007, 107). As a number of commentators have pointed out, Agamben’s Homo sacer did not have Foucault’s late 1970s lectures at the Collège de France to reference, as these lectures had not as yet been published. However, Agamben redresses this in The kingdom and the glory, with what Dean suggests as one of his closest readings of a Foucault text, in working though Security, territory, population (Dean 2012). In doing so, Agamben broaches in ways that are absent in Homo sacer, Foucault’s central movements from discipline to security and governmentality.

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the German philosopher and jurist, Carl Schmitt: “The Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception…” (11). Agamben sees this as so enshrined in political thought that it has become the “limit concept” of Law and the State, so much so that “the sphere of life becomes indistinguishable from it” (11) and, as such, the State defines our communal lives (11–12). Agamben sees a paradox in Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, as it is both internal and external to the juridical order. Yet, this is precisely the spatializing paradox he understands in the founding of the Greek city, in relation to the memorializing of what precisely must be forgotten or consigned to oblivion, which itself is that movement of the being of beings in the phainesthai of something coming-to-appearance-and-becoming-obscure: the living being as such in the question of how to live. To remain sovereign (of one’s self, of a city, of a State), one must be external to the law but, conversely, simultaneously internalising the law (15).35 This paradox or ellipsis is the state of exception. It, thus, operates by suspension of law: “It has often been observed that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside” (18). Thus, law internalises the “outside” but rather than simply becoming the neutralisation of what is external, it produces its own space in which to operate (19). The state of exception is neither the external nor internal, but the threshold itself between what is normal and chaos (19), so that the sovereign exception, as juridical suspension, allows for a “… zone of indistinction between nature and right” (21).36 Put simply, the state of exception suspends law, thus allowing for the transgression of itself so, paradoxically, at the same instance it operates internally and externally to itself (21).37 Agamben gives the example of homicide where, under normal circumstances, killing 35 There is a possible avenue of analysis to be done on the question of sovereignty that, to date, Agamben does not particularly seem to have broached, notwithstanding its close connection to the work of Foucault. This is the important understanding Georges Bataille give to sovereignty in his writings, and key reference to this in Foucault’s important 1963 essay on Bataille, “A Preface to Transgression” (1977), precisely on an ontology of law. Indeed, Foucault’s engagement with the radical interiority of Bataille’s “inner experience,” in relation to Blanchot’s radical Outside, presents the dislocating localising of Agamben’s “state of exception” as the prerogative of sovereign suspension of law. This text, as well, localises a series of themes that will become crucial for Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy, concerning an exteriorizing of the gaze, in an eye that must be thought from the outside, resonant with his articulation of a medical gaze, or with an eye of power. Of course, his reference point is Bataille’s 1928 novella, Story of the eye (1987): “The eye, in a philosophy of reflection, derives its capacity to observe the power of becoming always more interior to itself. Lying behind each eye that sees, there exists a more tenuous one, an eye so discreet and yet so agile that its all-powerful glance can be said to eat away at the flesh of its white globe; behind this particular eye, there exists another and, then, still others, each progressively more subtle until we arrive at an eye whose entire substance is nothing but the transparency of its vision … offering to this absence the spectacle of that indestructible core that imprisons the dead glance … the philosophizing subject has been dispossessed and pursued to its limit; and the sovereignty of philosophical language can now be heard from the distance, in the measureless void left behind by the exorbitated subject” (Foucault 1977, 45–46). 36 Original emphasis. 37 We again think of Foucault’s Blanchot, always on the exterior of exteriority, where neither law nor nature is denied but nor are they affirmed. Identity politics becomes strangely suspended between the anonymity of an ‘it speaks’ and the anonymity of power conceived as conduct on conducts. As

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another is forbidden. In the state of exception (for example, war/execution) this can be suspended (21). This operates like a Möbius strip where sovereign power does not distinguish internal or external relations, or difference between nature and law (37). The book’s title comes from Agamben’s analyses of what he calls the “limitfigure” (17) of the classical Roman homo sacer, the sacred or cursed man, who is both internal and external to law (81).38 The Roman homo sacer was a form of punishment, a curse falling on an outcast or banned man (79). As a limit-figure, the life of homo sacer could not be sacrificed but could be killed with no repercussion. Homo sacer is doubly excluded from both sacred and profane realms (82), placed under a sovereign ban, located within an indistinct zone between both categories: “What is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed: homo sacer” (83).39 It is in contra-distinction to this ban that Agamben questions the notion of the social contract, wherein the concept of “ban” might well be of greater analytical use: “The understanding of the Hobbesian mythologeme in terms of contract instead of ban condemned democracy to impotence every time it had to confront the problem of sovereign power and has also rendered modern

we have already mentioned, Blanchot’s novel, The most high, concerning a city in dystopic ‘order’ is exemplary of this dislocating locating of ‘care’. Though, there is also Blanchot’s 1962 Awaiting oblivion: “Waiting and forgetting. Ignorance and thought affirmed that which did not let itself be awaited in waiting, that which did not let itself be forgotten in forgetting, that which ignorance was not ignorant, that which was unthought in thought” (Blanchot 1999, 14). We listen here for that question of being, disclosed in al¯etheia and l¯eth¯e, in a suspension of sovereignty that is the possibility of a self’s relation to the force of law, the force of truth, as Foucault did say on one occasion, where law needs to be thought in the Greek nomos and not as the Roman ius. 38 The ‘bandit’ or ‘outlaw’ has similar meaning in English. Coming from early Germanic law, the Utlagr, was placed outside of the law, being banished and having life made forfeit (Agamben 1998, 104). Though, are we now making any sense in our prognosis or reading of Agamben? Clearly, he seems to be entirely on the side of Roman ius and iustitia. He says nothing at all concerning what seemed to most provoke Heidegger concerning an understanding of the Greek polis. Though, we think Agamben’s project comes to appearance only from out of the disjunctive movements between his Greek and Roman terms, in their essential non-translatability, which then endlessly complicates his projective discussion on Foucault’s modern biopolitics. 39 Again, there is a complex trajectory in discussing the ‘sacred’ that takes us to Foucault’s writing on Bataille, but also to Sade and Klossowski, as well as Agamben’s later writing on the sacred in Profanations (2007). Agamben draws a complex argument around the passage from the sacred to the profane (and its reversal), such that the profane marks the free use of things, a “pure” use, that is free of sacred names (Agamben 2007, 73–74). We need to locate this notion of “use” in the sense that Agamben understands a means without finality or telos, a non-instrumentalism of a fundamental relation to things, inasmuch as Agamben suggests, after Benjamin, that capitalism is religion and capitalism’s things, its commodities are, in this sense sacred, constituting a world of the unprofanable (80–86): “The profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation” (92). This, in a sense, ‘relocates’ homo sacer, from being confined to the realm of Roman banditry, updated by Agamben to the death-camp musselman, to the becoming-available of a twenty-first century on-line supermarket shopper, for whom a world of the available constitutes an unprofanable existence. We discuss Agamben’s understanding of use in more detail in the following chapter.

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democracy constitutionally incapable of truly thinking a politics freed from the form of the State” (109).40 The concept of the ban more clearly defines the role of sovereign power than Hobbes’s contractual understanding of power that acts as the guarantor of individual rights: “The ban is the force of simultaneous attraction and repulsion that ties together the two poles of the sovereign exception: bare life and power, homo sacer and the sovereign” (Agamben 1998, 110). The ban, for Agamben, like homo sacer, reduces our life to a sovereign power predicated on the guarantee of right under the law of that sovereign power itself, thus internalising us to it: We must learn to recognize this structure of the ban in the political relations and public spaces in which we still live. In the city, the banishment of sacred life is more internal than every interiority and more external than every extraneousness. The banishment of sacred life is the sovereign nomos that conditions every rule, the originary spatialisation that governs and makes possible every localisation and every territorialisation. And if in modernity life is more and more clearly placed at the centre of State politics (which now becomes, in Foucault’s terms, biopolitics), if in our age all citizens can be said, in a specific but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri, this is possible only because the relation of ban has constituted the essential structure of sovereign power from the beginning. (111)41

Bare life, as indistinct dividing of zo¯e and bios, is the living-spatializing of sovereignpower, that totalises—as with scalar complexities of planetary urbanizing—spaces of exception (122). For Agamben, the figure of the concentration camp takes this space of exception to the farthest degree. As we noted in earlier discussion of Agamben’s understanding of “paradigm” (Agamben 2009), the camp becomes for Agamben paradigmatic as a diagram of power, precisely in the sense that Panopticism became for Foucault a paradigmatic diagram of power of disciplinary regimes. Just as panopticism was not to be understood as a formal diagram of spatial distributions, but an 40 The Social Contract has a long history in Western philosophy, stretching as far back as the preSocratics of Protagoras, Hippias, and Lycopphron, though it is best known by the early modern political philosophies of Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau. Contemporary thinkers include John Rawls (see Mautner 1996, 577–578). The theoretical underpinning of the Social Contract sees individuals who are, in their very nature, free and equal, agreeing to abandon part of their natural liberty by entering into a contract with civil society, such they become part of the body-politic, and in so doing subject themselves to political authority, such that they gain benefit from it (577–578). Hobbes saw that humans in their nature were naturally equal. However, there is a constant state of conflict that would not allow for the common good, as Hobbes famously describes: “the state of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 2005, 96). By entering into the social contract and renouncing and transferring certain rights, the individual is obligated by a duty to others within the commonwealth (98–101). This is similarly echoed by Rousseau: “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains…” (Rousseau 1987, 49). There is nature to man; however, we are capable of transforming the social order around us, and the natural order is no longer referred to as a theologically-derived conception of political organization. 41 Perhaps to labour the point here, this ‘originary spatialization’ needs to be recognised in an originary and archaic Greek understanding of L¯eth¯e in relation to the divinity of the gods, the unconcealing of what is, in the self-withdrawing of being. Sovereignty is, in this sense, the nothing that makes available whatever is (beings), while the ban is constituted in the nomos, which must be recognised in the force of al¯etheia—force of truth-becoming-force-of-law: al¯etheia-dik¯e—veridiction-jurisdiction.

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abstracted diagram-of-power that left formal considerations open and circumstantial, so too, for Agamben, by ‘camp’ he does not infer a formal configuration of segmentations but an open diagram of potentialities or powers. As with homo sacer, the ‘camp’ exists as a state of bare life, a condition produced by the folding of biopolitics into thanato-politics, as the camp is a total biopolitical space, constituted by the state of exception (122–123).42

7.4 Dislocating Localizations 7.4.1 The Indistinct Political Again, paradoxically, Agamben sees the movement to bare life as being driven largely by the legislative movements of sovereignty to determine rights and liberties of subjects who have produced these spaces. An example is habeas corpus, defined in the 1679 Magna Carta, that requires the indicted body of the subject to appear before the court (123–124).43 This Agamben contrasts to earlier Medieval law, that similarly required a person to appear before the court. However, this did not address the body (corpus) but, rather, person—homine (123).44 A further example is The French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), in which there exists an ambiguity in the relation of Man and Citizen, namely whether they are co-existent or separate 42 Agamben moves very quickly between an ontological category of spatial modality—exception— that would, for Blanchot, be voided, no-place, or exteriority, and an ontical spatializing of exceptional locales in ‘concentration camps’. How do we recognize in this movement a shifting ontological difference, as differentiator of being and beings? Here we find a close resonance with Foucault’s diagram, and especially in Deleuze’s articulation of it in its peculiar Kantian formulation of unformalized matter and non-finalized functions, as assemblage-machines, in Deleuze’s sense, that cut the flows of matter. 43 Agamben points out that while the Magna Carta is the origin of English legal rights of the individual, giving the example of the guarantees that a freeman (homo liber) cannot be made into an outlaw (utlagetur), it paradoxically reduces the individual to bare life (123). 44 The corpus, Agamben argues, is central to the shift of bare life into the political, from Descartes, Newton, Spinoza, Leibniz, and becomes the key metaphor in Hobbes’s Leviathan or Rousseau’s The Social Contract (125): “The great metaphor of the Leviathan, whose body is formed out of all the bodies of individuals, must be read in this light. The absolute capacity of the subjects’ bodies to be killed forms the new political body of the West” (125). Agamben links Arendt (1976), in particular her understanding of the Rights of Man, with biopolitics. Again, this is paradoxical in that, for Foucault, biopolitical modernity, or biopower, emerges precisely when the corpus— individuated body—no longer becomes the specific target of an exercise of power, that now becomes population, to the point of, thereby, differentiating violence and power. In the sense that Agamben activates the corporeal, Foucault might well say that power has always been biopolitical in the sense that living things were always targets. What shifts, though, is not bare life—already discipline’s Nietzschean emphasis—but population that becomes a problem of nation-stock and techniques for its management—national State and civil society—sovereignty constituted on citizen-right, coupled with demographic technologies of power. In this sense, the maintenance of bare life is a political technique, a management problem of demographic definition and scientific calculation.

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and autonomous (126–127). This, too, followed a legalistic shift in conceiving of life, arising from the folding of a juridico-legal framework onto the subject, thus reducing the subject to bare life. During the ancien regime, the subject was conceived of in relation to the sovereign; its status was interconnected to the crown. However, this was not grounded by birth. In effect, zo¯e and bios remained separate (127–128). Contrast this to the Declaration of Rights that specifically grounds citizenship on birth, and the rights that it confers are predicated on nativity. This forms a link between birth and nation—they are no longer separated. The subject as citizen-body is now part of the State itself, blurring the relation of sovereignty and life as such, and constituting movement toward contemporary biopolitics and bare life (128). The Declaration of Rights had other unintended and unforeseen consequences, in placing a birth-quotient onto citizenship, leading to the especially modern problem of identity, in particular with respect to ethnos (129–130). The French Revolution, with its aims toward liberté, égalité, fraternité, will lead, for Agamben, to a situation whereby the State begins to define identity via citizenship. This sets forth a problematic relation of the political to birth, such that nativity becomes key for identity. This further complicates an entangled relation to the nationstate, leading to the modern political problem of who is and who is not a citizen. Agamben emphasises that the National Socialist ideology of “Blood and Soil” (Blut und Boden) was well-known in its aim at determining who is German, especially with respect to birth. Prior to this, an earlier juridical framework existed in Roman law “…ius soli (birth in a certain territory) and ius sanguinis (birth from citizen parents) [that is in fact determined from earlier Athenian law]” (129). This relation was not an essential one but merely a type of category. By the French Revolution, this is no longer the case, in that the facts of birth and citizenship become the fundamental ground for identity and are internal to the nation-state (130). Agamben sees this as key for Nazism and Fascism as they redefine “… the relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible only when situated—no matter how paradoxical it may seem—in the biopolitical context inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights” (130). It is the political designation of citizenship by sovereign power that allows for the production of bare life in modern biopolitics: One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty—non-political life—is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn. Once zo¯e is politicised by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make it possible to isolate a sacred life must be newly defined. And when natural life is wholly included in the polis—and this much has, by now, already happened—these thresholds pass, as we will see, beyond the dark boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a new living dead man, a new sacred man. (131)45

45 That “redefinition” suggested by Agamben is not a sovereign pronouncement but a management process indifferent to sovereignty, a technique more-or-less efficient, rather than a discourse moreor-less true.

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Agamben’s thesis is that the growth of legislative rights also led to the expansion of sovereign power into the arena of human life, so that juridical administration of sovereign power now had a concern with the biological life of the human. We see from this quote above that classical notions of power and its domains no longer have distinction in modernity. Separation of oikos and polis is non-existent, spatially undecidable (131). But then, Agamben suggests, in his writing on stasis, that already for Athenian life, there was the exceptional exteriorizing of oikos from its necessary internalizing within the polis. The polis is founded on this exceptionalizing-indistinction. What shifts from Athens to now? It would be that, to make matters anything but clear, that originary exceptionalizing-indistinction is now suspended, excepted, such that oikos’s nomos, what for Agamben is the theme of oikonomia, no longer becomes what must be forgotten in re-membering a politeia, but becomes the administrative governmentality of a polis now entirely indifferent to sovereignty. Now is the time of a justice that serves none, and an operative machine that is entirely anonymous. Hence, for Agamben, the political task is a destituent power of inoperativity (Agamben 2014). This differs from the Roman concept of the political where, like the Greek model Agamben describes, there are separate domains: the space of home (domus) and the power of the father patria potestas do not coincide with the political space of the city (urbs), and the power of imperium (90). This shift from distinct political domains in classical politics to modernity, where there is a state of “indistinction” between home and city, allows for “bare life, which dwells in the no-man’s-land between the home and the city” (90).46 This operates spatially in a state of exception whereby the “normal juridical ordering” is suspended and placed outside of its order (169–170). Paradoxically, this is not a simple externality to the law, or external even to spatial ordering. Suspension of judicial ordering produces a new norm and, hence, a new type of space (170). The state of exception, like bare life, produces a new indistinct category that is neither internal nor external, where the rights of the subject and juridical projections no longer are intelligible (170). It is the camp, for Agamben, that is most demonstrably the paradigm of contemporary politics, its operation as a state of exception. Its inhabitants, if Jewish, were stripped of their rights as citizens under the Nuremburg Laws, and later denationalised, so that they were reduced to a state of bare life. Hence the camp is “… the most biopolitical space ever to have been realised, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation” (171). The camp allows anything to happen; it is the locus of indistinctions, place of 46 We have a sense of this indistinction of oikos and polis in Foucault’s elaboration of American neo-liberalism, especially in his discussion of Becker’s radical version, where the self-as-enterprise, becoming its own human capital, makes indistinguishable a personalized existence of corporeal existence and a public world of political agency (Foucault 2008a, 226–233). We might also consider Foucault’s lectures from the early 1970s as an archaeology into the processes of making indistinct the home and judicial governance, via the intervention of disciplines. As we have mentioned previously, Foucault, at one point, emphasises the family precisely as a switching mechanism between a panoply of disciplinary institutions—prison, schoolhouse, poorhouse, hospital, clinic—a vestige of sovereign power that made the family something other than an entity wholly taken over by disciplinary mechanisms, though to be subsumed in security according to particular ‘laws’ of the aggregation of households.

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pure possibility, where fact and law are confused (170): “This is why the camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen” (171). Throughout Homo sacer, this theme of the indistinguishable is repeated, between zo¯e and bios, right and nature, the blurring of the zones of internality of lived life and externality of political life. The camp, as state of exception, produces a space whereby the distinction of bare life and juridical rule no longer exists (174). Rather than explore an ethical question as to why it was that humans can commit such heinous crimes against others, Agamben suggests a more “honest” investigation would be to look at the “… juridical procedures and deployments of power…” that allowed for the removal of rights, such that any act against those within the space of the camp no longer appeared as a crime, so that there was a state of open potential: “At this point, in fact, everything had truly become possible” (171). This open possibility is grounded in the ambiguity of political categories. The camp “… is the space of this absolute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule and application, exception and rule, which nevertheless incessantly decides between them” (173). The political now makes decisions on the non-political (173).47 This has spatial ramification, inasmuch as the state of exception is a localisation whereby the law is suspended, allowing for new potentialities: The state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the juridico-political order, now becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by the bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order. The growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new fact of politics in our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction. To an order without localisation (the state of exception, in which law is suspended) there now corresponds a localisation without order (the camp as permanent space of exception). The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical rules in a determinate space, but instead contains at its very centre a dislocating localisation that exceeds it and into which every form of life and every rule can be virtually taken. The camp as dislocating localisation is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d’attentes [waiting areas] of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities. (175)

47 Agamben

develops this from Schmitt’s notion of Führung, which he compares to Pythagoras’s conception of the sovereign as living law (nomos empsuchon), that in the body of the Führer there is no distinction between the body and the political (173). Without wanting to go too much off course, we see something of a parallel here between Heidegger and Agamben, in what Heidegger calls the ‘greatest danger’ and the ‘saving power’. In his 1950 essay, “The question concerning technology” (1977), Heidegger recognizes the devastating implications of technology for the twentieth century, in what he terms Ge-stell, an en-framing of beings such that their horizon of disclosure is solely limited to a standing reserve of raw materials for production. This Ge-stell, as planetary en-framing is the ‘greatest danger’. However, its recognition affords the possibility of a ‘saving power’, in construing another ontological disclosure of the being of beings as poiesis. Agamben, too, sees a planetary en-framing in the camp, which discloses the greatest danger, though the camp, as dislocating locating, equally discloses the greatest open possibility for another disclosure of how beings are essentially appropriated in their being.

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7.4.2 The ‘Camp’ It is the dislocating localisation of the state of exception that Agamben sees multiplied throughout contemporary political space, and consequently throughout our urban centres. Dislocating localisations of states of exception may be compared to Foucault’s heterotopias or the notion of non-place, developed by Marc Augé (Augé 1995).48 These offer descriptions of particular locales that operate on a dislocating principle, whereby power-dynamics shift, or where there are modifications to normative practises, as with Foucault’s heterotopias.49 In our earlier discussion on heterotopias, there was emphasis given to the importance of its reading in relation to Foucault’s Blanchot text, “The thought from outside” (Foucault 1987). There are coincident concerns with an ontological disclosure of a radical otherness to spatiality that are all too easily missed in the specificity of examples Foucault offers in his text on the heterotopic, again emphasising an ontology and not an anthropology or psychology of spatiality. Though Agamben’s pronouncements on the paradigm of the camp seem to be more pressing, more politically insisting, and more violently bleak, we again need to recognise the ontological dimension to Agamben’s enquiry, an ontological engagement with power, force and subjectivation, through which the camp becomes an exemplar.50 Returning to the above quote, Agamben says: “what we call camp is this disjunction.” That is, ‘camp’ is the name given not to the wellformed historical sites of Nazi internment or Stalinist repression, but the name given 48 Augé’s concept of non-place is to be contrasted with his notion of place, as that which is caught within history and identity. Non-place has an essential anonymity with respect to historicality or identity, or a transiency or modulation with respect to the fixity of formal arrangements. Non-place is a late-modern phenomenon, which Augé links to the ubiquity of mass transportation and commodification, and the spaces that they promote such as airports, supermarkets, and cash machines (Augé 1995, 77–79). This reading of non-place is influenced by Michel de Certeau’s distinction between space and place (Augé 1995, 79). Place is that which de Certeau regards as “delimited” or bounded spatiality, which he links to planning practices; whereas space is lived, de Certeau noting: “…space is practiced place” (de Certeau 1984, 117). De Certeau, in turn, is influenced by MerleauPonty’s distinction between “geometrical space” and “anthropological space” (Augé 1995, 79–80; de Certeau 1984, 117). 49 We should note that Foucault does not see heterotopias as either exclusively modern or Western, arguing that it is probable that most cultures have had some forms of heterotopias cf. “Of other spaces” (Foucault 2008b). Agamben and Augé, in their respective readings, take modern or contemporary spaces as their point of inquiry. As Augé notes, non-places present a set of contractual relations to a user, who is individuated, by a set of juridical procedures and disciplinary apparatuses (Augé 1995, 101). He provides the example of processing through customs at airports, whereby individuals present a series of documents, such as tickets, visas, passports, which both act as identification of the individual, and as a contract to allow the individual to move into the non-place of the airport (101–102). 50 The ontological dimension to Agamben’s work becomes the locus for some his most strident critics inasmuch as they are able to accuse him of a kind of ontological “alibi,” perhaps in the sense that Derrida uses this notion in an auto-critique of deconstruction, in Without alibi (2002). Thus, Agamben is able to mention, within a single paradigm, both the Fuehrer and the victims of the Holocaust as exceptions. Their ontic specificity becomes indistinct. We discuss criticism of Agamben’s work in more detail later in this chapter, and in the following chapter.

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to an ontological open, or open possibility-to-be, instituted in the dislocating localisations of dissociations of birth and nation-state. As with panopticism for Foucault, the camp is diffuse, localised, and open. However, where panopticism established a continuous relay between a normalising gaze and a subjectivized body as disciplinary procedure, the ‘camp’ establishes a continuous relay between the conditions of a securing apparatus and its suspension. We earlier briefly introduced Blanchot’s novel, The most high (1999). In a curious way, we can imagine Blanchot folding those concerns of Foucault’s with the Outside and with the heterotopic, along with Agamben’s inscriptions on the camp.51 While it would be erroneous to collapse the heterotopic, Augé’s non-place and Agamben’s ‘camp’, there is some urgency in recognising how each of these modalities of spatial dislocating/locating engages the others and finds its limit. Perhaps returning to Foucault’s triple concern in The courage of truth would shed some light, his concern with an unconcealing al¯etheia, practices of how subjects and truth find one another; the political circumstances of that finding of a truth-telling—for us here a dislocating-localizing—as a topos of politeia; and the ways whereby we are able to say or recognise the human within this spatializing jurisdiction of veridictions: citizen, subject, subject-of-right, bare life, form-of-life, e¯ thopoetic care-of-self, self-as-work-of-art, and so on. We know there is no ‘final word’ here. While Agamben sees there are particular locations of the state of exception in these dislocating localisations, we noted that he extends these to “airports” or “outskirts of our cities.”52 The camp now constitutes an essential element for what Agamben sees as the traditional triad of political belonging in the nation-state, namely the State, the Nation (as linked to birth), and Land (175–176). ‘City’ now comes to mean more than a spatial relation or a proper name for a contained built environment. Rather, it constitutes a form of political relation wherein, effectively, politics has reduced us to bare life: “The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new bio-political nomos of the planet” (176). From this, there are three consequences or ‘theses’ for Agamben: 1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion) 2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zo¯e and bios 3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181) 51 Clearly, this is an interpretative encounter with the novel, as Blanchot’s writing of it in 1948 precedes any of these political and philosophical writings by Foucault or Agamben. One might want to read the implications in the other direction, in terms of the extent to which Blanchot’s own understanding of the ‘open’ to use Agamben’s Heideggerian term, and in the circumstance of engaging the ‘design by destruction’ of Europe that world war brought about, finds the city precisely the milieu where Foucauldian power/knowledge dispositifs have their strongest articulations, where the heterotopic’s espacements abound, and where the ‘camp’ in Agamben’s sense seems ever present. 52 One such example was the former Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong.

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Agamben’s first thesis questions the value of theories of State power that are based on contractual origins. Furthermore, it questions the validity of those theories that seek to base notions of political communities on “belonging,” whether based on national, racial or religious forms of identity (181). His second thesis contrasts with Foucault’s analysis of biopower that originates with a shift in governmental logic at the end of the eighteenth century. Agamben sees that Western politics, inscribed in Aristotelian philosophy and the Athenian City-State, has always had a biopolitical concern. Agamben reads the transformations during the eighteenth century, so important for Foucault, somewhat differently with respect to the emergence of liberalism, civil society, citizen rights and the social contract. Every attempt to ground liberty on the rights of the citizen has being inherently problematic. With the third thesis, Agamben considers the camp, coterminous with the city, as the paradigm of contemporary biopolitics, which poses a radical problem for those who work in the human sciences and, importantly, the built environment, especially those whose political task is revealed to be that of securing the urban. Agamben goes so far as to claim that this political model based on bare life: … throws a sinister light on the models by which social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organise the public space of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very centre 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. (181–182)

Urban studies and architecture, generally grounded on a humanist agency or concern for delivering the good, the social good, by design and planning, are already caught up, whether cognisant or not, in a political agency with bare life (182). That is, architecture and urban design are already caught in reductions of individuals to bare life, shaping space so that space is caught in biopolitical concerns of the management of the living. The urban theory paradigms we earlier mentioned, and more fully discussed in Chapter 1, may, in Agamben’s analyses, be more cogently or soberly approached in terms of the systematic defining or redefining of citizenship in terms of a state of exception. In design terms, we may recognise the forces that led to processes of demodernization in Iraq and Palestine, or the systematic devolution of incomes, housing occupancies and welfare programmes, constituting the transforming potentials for making the urban poor into citizen-refugees. A further example is offered by Eyal Weizman in Cities without citizens (2003). In “Military Operations as Urban Planning,” Weizman traces a history of urban planning based on military strategies for occupying urban centres, commencing with nineteenth century strategies in the occupation of French Algeria. Those strategies were later imported to metropolitan Paris and adopted by Haussmann in the planning of the Parisian boulevards. The strategy is primarily that of destroying entire neighbourhoods, in order to bring control by ‘reshaping’: During the colonial wars, Western powers’ understanding of colonial cities was very rudimentary. All complexities were flattened out, intellectually and physically. Attempts to ‘understand’ local cultures were distorted by an Orientalist and Romantic vision of the Mediterranean Kasbah—a place that can be considered aesthetically fascinating, but that remains

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suspect, deceptive, treacherous, and violent. It was the double-edged fear and fascination that led to a desire to flatten and rationalize it. (Weizman 2003, 175)

Weizman emphasises that military approaches to controlling a city are very similar to those of planners. Increasingly, surveillance and reconnaissance intelligence relating to urban conflicts requires specialist urban and architectural readings. Weizman suggests: “‘Design by destruction’ increasingly involves planners as military personnel in reshaping the battle environment to meet political and strategic objectives. Bombing campaigns rely on architects and planners to recommend building and infrastructure as targets and in order to evaluate the urban effects of their removal” (182). He details in particular the operations of the Israeli military in their systematic destruction of Palestinian settlements or camps and (as we earlier mentioned) notes that International Humanitarian Law pertaining to war crimes and atrocities is out of step with the contemporary agency of non-military architect and planning advisors in extreme military actions: “Crimes relating to the organization of the built environment call for placing an architect/planner for the first time on the accused stand of an international tribunal” (195). Weizman emphasises the direct involvement of planning professionals in the destruction of cities. We want to extend what might be called a corporatization of ‘design by destruction’ to include banking sector professionals and finance administrators whose investment scenarios and strategies bring about equally significant urban destruction. We have already outlined, in Chapter 3, relations between national and global economic forces over the past century along with forces on the design of the urban, in the context of U.S. government welfare policies on public housing, their State-racist effects, along with their progressive dismantling, under pressure from increasing emphases on neoliberal social policies at all levels of government. Agamben’s prognosis is that the now-stable spatial arrangements of the state of exception make possible the opening of scenarios concerning the human, such that it is the bare life of being human that falls in the balance. Life is now as easily dispossessed as possessed, found useful or useless, given identity or anonymity, bestowed with rights or have them relinquished. There is nothing, no ground or substance that decides on these things. All is risk with respect to this being, as its becoming-its-own economic risk. Indeed, this is the “Open,” in an ontological sense, that Agamben references (Agamben 2004).

7.4.3 Space, Politics and Metaphysics Thus, Agamben relates bare life to being, which he further refers to the Greek hapl¯os, whose translation tends towards a notion of ‘pure’ in the sense of being simple, honest ‘unalloyed’. In this sense, for Agamben, hapl¯os corresponds to ‘bare’, with a potential parallel between bare life and the how Western metaphysics defines pure being, its

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primary object and concern.53 Agamben notes: “What constitutes man as a thinking animal has its exact counterpart in what constitutes him as a political animal” (182). This has two consequences. Firstly, it isolates pure Being as “on hapl¯os,” from the multiple meanings of being and, secondly, it separates bare life from other types of “concrete life” (182): “Pure Being, bare life—what is contained in these two concepts, such that both the metaphysics and the politics of the West find their foundation and sense in them and in them alone?” (182).54 Agamben reads metaphysics and politics, limited by pure being and bare life, as hollow and vague concepts. Yet, paradoxically, “[They] safeguard the keys to the historico-political destiny of the West” (182).55 He suggests that there is a type of praxis to such an analysis. That is, by examining both

53 The relation of Agamben’s ontology to Heidegger is important, especially concerning Heidegger’s understanding of Da-sein, from Being and time (1996), as openness-to-being, and as its ‘ownmost possibility to be’. Importantly, Da-sein is not anthropological, an ontical being-conscious. It is an ontological ‘structure’ of possible modalities of be-ing. The openness that opens with exception— as Agamben understands it—is precisely that possibility that cannot be accounted-for by either sovereign juridical structures nor by normalizing techniques, as both have made this existent exceptional, abnormal and extra-legal. In one way, Foucault opens such an ‘open’ in his formulation of the rights of the governed, a notion of ‘right’ that proliferates rather than homogenizes identity correlative with right, and that points to a complex of relations between a subject-of-right and a subject-of-interest (Foucault 2008a, 296). McNay comments on this: “… contra many democratic theorists (e.g., Habermas), civil society is not a quasi-natural space or spontaneous entity where citizens freely associate. Rather, like madness and sexuality, Foucault regards it as a discursive construct or ‘transactional reality’ which represents a pivotal moment in the emergence of increasingly sophisticated governmental technology that must be juridically pegged to an economy. Civil society is the mechanism in which the reconciliation between the subject of right and the subject of interest is effected and new techniques of governmental control refined” (McNay 2009, 75). 54 Agamben provides an un-sourced paraphrased comment by Aristotle regarding his reading of being “which, according to Aristotle, ‘is said in many ways’” (Agamben 1998, 182). Agamben would have been well aware of the utmost significance of this short phrase by Aristotle for Heidegger’s whole philosophical directions. Heidegger explicitly explores Aristotle’s ‘ways’ of saying being, in his 1924–25 lecture course, Plato’s Sophist (Heidegger 1997). The lectures open with Heidegger citing and discussing Aristotle’s five ways of saying being (Heidegger 1997, 15). We also note that, for Heidegger from his earliest lectures, the question of life, of a living situatedness, of a devivification of life-living, in the care taken for the certainty of knowing, in objectivity-as-reification, was crucial inasmuch as what he calls ‘phenomenology’ aims at maintaining the existent existing in/as the question of be-ing (see Heidegger 2005). A 1930s Heideggerian biopolitics—read in relation to Hölderlin’s river hymns—concerned his complex understanding of the German Volk (see, especially, Phillips 2005). Perhaps the best engagement with Heidegger’s relation to zo¯e/bios is David Farrell Krell’s Daimon life: Heidegger and life philosophy (1992). 55 In developing a relation between ‘bare life’ and ‘pure being’, Agamben argues that these terms reach an unthinkable limit: “Yet precisely these two empty and indeterminate concepts seem to safeguard the keys to the historico-political destiny of the West. And it may be that only if we are able to decipher the political meaning of pure Being will we be able to master the bare life that expresses

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pure being and bare life we can shape metaphysics such that it can affect political reality, and politics can move “beyond itself” into theory.56 Agamben concludes his analysis by exploring a series of different “lives,” which reveal the different ways that the dislocating-locating of political relations efface and invest, into the bodies of individuals, particular relations of power: Flamen Diale, Homo Sacer, Führer in the Third Reich, der Musselmann, Wilson the biochemist, Karen Quinlan, each of whom has a different relation of bios and zo¯e inscribed onto her or his body (182–187).57 Agamben questions Foucault’s discussion of biopolitics, in The will to knowledge (Foucault 1978), that centres on sex and sexuality, where they are not simply seen as caught in a deployment of power, but are aberrant and resistant. Foucault allows for the possibility of a “… different economy of bodies and pleasures…” and, therefore, allows for the open possibility for a new type of politics (Foucault 1978, 159; Agamben 1998, 187). Agamben recognises that sexuality and the body are already caught-up in deployments of power, due to the origins of a politics of bare life. The body is “… already a biopolitical body and bare life…” and “sex, sexuality and pleasure are incapable of resisting sovereign power” (187). ‘Body’ becomes, or is the name we give to, that locale of power relations of zo¯e and bios. This is the biopolitical body of the individual, irreducible to anthropology— it is ontological disclosure—which Agamben admits, in its extreme, is the most contemporary form of the classical homo sacer, where the threshold of distinction of law and fact, juridical control and biological life, become increasingly blurred. Individuated manifestation differs as, for example, the bodies of the Führer and campinhabitant experience the transformation of law and biological life in diametrically our subjection to political power, just as it may be, inversely, that only if we understand the theoretical implications of bare life will we be able to solve the enigma of ontology. Brought to the limit of pure Being, metaphysics (thought) passes over into politics (into reality), just as on the threshold of bare life, politics steps beyond itself into theory” (182). This seems a Heideggerian and Nietzschean question of life and being, irreducible to biologism or vitalism. We say something more on this enigmatic formulation, at the close of this chapter. Though, crucially, we recognise that Agamben has in his sights a ‘history’ of metaphysics from Aristotle to the present, a ‘history’ coincident with Heidegger’s questioning of the meaning of being. Though, Agamben chooses notions unfamiliar to Heideggerian thinking, especially where Heidegger seems to have misapprehended the question of the meaning of politeia. 56 This suggests two things: firstly, an e ¯ thos or ethics of the political and, secondly, that the human sciences and construction practices—equally inscribed in a productionist-metaphysics—are already caught up in bare life, or what, in Heideggerian terms, would be related to the essential disclosure of the technological in ge-stell (Heidegger 1977, 19–22). In his 1950 lecture, “The question concerning technology” (1977), Heidegger introduces the ontological dimension to what Becker in the 1970s will define, progressively, as “Human Capital.” Heidegger, in discussing the fundamental or essential ontological disclosure of technology, suggests that ge-stell or ‘en-framing’ constitutes this ground, which is to say that whatever is, in as much as it is an existent, is understood in its essential disclosure—be-ing—as resource for production. Heidegger suggests that humans, too, are enframed as “standing reserve” for production (24–25). 57 Enormous exception is taken to Agamben ‘flattening-out’ these disparate examples to a singular paradigm (Leps 2012). See also Smith’s less virulent reading concerning these “forms-of-life” in relation to his discussion of Foucault’s ‘ethics of the self’, and ‘aesthetics of the self’ (Smith 2015). We return to Smith’s reading at the end of this chapter.

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different ways. With the former, bare life transforms to become law.58 For the latter, law coincides with biological life, such that it is indistinguishable from it (187). There can be no return to the classical polis that would renew Western politics: “Every attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zo¯e and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city” (187).59 Agamben argues that the return to earlier classical categories, argued by Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt (both in different ways), can only have critical utility (187) “There is no return from the camps to classical politics. In the camps, city and house became indistinguishable, and the possibility of differentiating between our biological body and our political body—between what is incommunicable and mute and what is communicable and say-able—was taken from us forever.” (188) Hence, for Agamben, the space between the camp, city and the house is no longer distinguishable, in that the biopolitical movement to bare life operates in such a way as to no-longer distinguish between various political realms and the body. It is in this context that we can recognise, for example, the disaggregation of community, dwelling, family and civil society in collapsing economic infrastructures of cities such as Philadelphia or Detroit, or refugee cities such as Jenin in Palestine. Agamben’s point, however, is to recognise the ubiquity of the camp, not simply in the dystopic or collapsing urban structures in the United States, Middle East, or Africa, but also in the well-functioning middle-class gated suburban communities that do not perceive a threat to civic community, individuated autonomy or exposure to economic risk. Agamben argues that the biopolitics of the West cannot be returned to natural life by a return to the oikos, nor can it be given a new body to allow for overcoming the intertwined relationship of bios and zo¯e:

58 Though he constantly draws on an indistinction that no meta-determination would define, there is

no outside to sovereign power. Nothing resists it. One is immediately reminded of Derrida’s notion (in quite a different context) of a radical undecidability in relation to the text—while there is no origin other than an absenting trace-structure-spacing—there is nothing outside the text. What is this “outside” that is not, and cannot be, construed, as opposed to a simple inside, nor a spatial in-between rind or threshold? We return to Derrida’s critique of Agamben’s multiplication of thresholds, as a deconstruction of Agamben’s unquestioning binaries in the following chapter. 59 There develops a peculiar logic with this “we no longer know anything of the classical distinction …”. While Agamben necessarily has recourse to this classical distinction in defining the political animal—a return of sorts—in order to present the locus of his explanation concerning the threshold to modernity and our present, it seems as if there can be no return of the kind he makes. His very demarcations are, strangely and, at once, in play and out of play, put into play in order to make them voided. It seems we are not permitted to make the return, have the memory, history or categories that constitute the very basis for the differences we would want to make. Though, perhaps, this is nothing more-nor-less than an echo of Heidegger from his Parmenides lectures, who says (almost) the same thing, that we will understand nothing of the Greek polis, nothing at all, while we fail to recognise the decline of inceptual thinking of the question of being, a decline that happens in Aristotelian ousia-as-presence, al¯etheia as representational likeness, and the wholesale translatability of Greek thinking to Roman, and then Christian, onto-theology. Though neither Agamben nor Heidegger seek a re-turn to Greece. Far from it. The problem is not a failure to return.

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This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zo¯e. Here attention will also have to be given to the analogies between politics and the epochal situation of metaphysics. Today bios lies in zo¯e exactly as essence, in the Heideggerian definition of Dasein, lies (liegt) in existence. Yet how can a bios be only its own zo¯e, how can a form of life seize hold of the very haptos that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics? If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it, we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence. First, however, it will be necessary to examine how it was possible for something like a bare life to be conceived within these disciplines, and how the historical development of these very disciplines has brought them to a limit beyond which they cannot venture without risking an unprecedented bio-political catastrophe. (188)

If the camp is nomos of the present age, we recognise from the above quotation the extent to which Agamben aims to raise the Heideggerian understanding of ontological difference to an essential realm of ethical life. That is, Agamben suggests the horizonal disclosure of what he calls a ‘field of research’ beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy or bioscience and jurisprudence, which is to say beyond regional definitions of essential domains. This would be anything but a universal or totalising or absolute knowledge, grounded on the substance of ‘bare life’ as if that preliminary question posed by Agamben—how it is possible for something like bare life to be conceived within these disciplines—suggests a totalizing ground. Of crucial importance is just what Agamben means by that expression ‘form-of-life’, as if it is a ‘saving power’ with respect to that ‘beyond’ of a coming community. There are a number directions we will pursue with respect to this question, in the next chapter. One is a philosophical response by Derrida to Agamben’s thesis, and a highly critical one at that. Another is a response and extension by the political philosopher, Antonio Negri, whose Spinozist framework inflects Agamben’s ontology in specific articulations of understanding a radical polity of individuated and collective subjects. And we will say something more about this notion of ‘formof-life’ that is re-introduced by Agamben in the final book of his Homo sacer series, The use of bodies (2015). Prior to these, and in concluding this chapter, we want to briefly refer to another critical response to Agamben’s ‘correction’ or ‘extension’ to Foucault on the biopolitical.

7.4.4 Foucault/Agamben As we mentioned earlier, there has been a sustained response to Agamben by Foucault scholars, since the publication of Homo sacer, with many strong rebuttals and refusals of Agamben’s engagement, and with a few who take Agamben’s thinking as a genuine contribution to Foucauldian scholarship. We referenced a number of them. For the most part, we recognise that many of those responses to Agamben do not necessarily take in the ontological dimension, and the Heideggerian inflection, to his engagement.

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Or where they do, this further raises ire, concerning a dead-end obfuscating of immediately relevant and pressing political problems, requiring more than more-thinking. The Heideggerian connection adds some fuel to this, given the general prognosis on the failure of Heideggerian thinking when it comes to ethico-political decisionmaking. We don’t agree with many of these readings on Agamben or Heidegger, and do consider that Foucault’s political thinking is crucially engaged when we bring it into questioning regions opened by Agamben’s thinking, that we ‘locate’ between Foucault and Heidegger. In what follows we address a close reading of Agamben and Foucault by Katia Genel (2006), whose engagement hones in on important clarifications concerning both thinkers. There are certainly coincident or overlapping concerns in the writings of Foucault on biopower and Agamben’s extension or development of this notion into a thesis on the biopolitical. However, are their projects coincident with respect to what they appear to have essentially in common, a fundamental articulation of relations between power and life? Genel (2006) commences her critique of Agamben with this question. We recognise that, for Foucault, at least from the emergence of genealogy as a key concern, the question of power, what it is, was an elusive one, and approached in a manner that always avoided a substantive notion of power. Initially, and for the most part, it was something practiced before knowable, becoming in his work on governmentality understood, elusively, as conduct on conduct. Foucault introduces a threshold moment at the end of the eighteenth century, in his writings on biopower, as introducing another technique for foregrounding practices, in terms of designating the question of power. What he terms the “threshold of biological modernity” (Foucault 1978, 143), concerns practices of the management of life at the level of populations. Foucault’s enquiry would not be concerned with an essential ground, origin or unified field to power. Genel emphasises that, for Foucault, biopower and biopolitics are a hypothesis. For Agamben, biopower is a thesis: In Agamben’s work, biopower functions as a thesis rather than a hypothesis, a thesis concerning the very structure of power, the origin of which is directly related to life. The logic of sovereignty is a logic of capturing life, a logic of isolating a “bare life” as an exception. This life is exposed not only to the sovereign’s violence and power over death but also, more generally, to a decision that qualifies it and determines its value. Sovereign power establishes itself and perpetuates itself by producing a ‘biopolitical body’ on which it is exercised. … The question of biopower, which is not Agamben’s central concern, is annexed to another problematic that animates all of his writings: the perpetual definition or redefinition of the human. (Genel 2006, 43–44)

This last point made by Genel is crucial, and is the starting point for her critical response to Agamben’s thesis. For the most part, critical responses to Agamben have focused precisely on how biopower or the biopolitical is articulated and practiced in the relays established between bare life and the state of exception. Where Foucault seemed to radicalise a question of understanding power in modernity, precisely by moving beyond a paradigm of sovereign power, Agamben seems to resuscitate the figure of the Sovereign precisely at the point where it is eclipsed in Foucault’s account. Though, in fact, Agamben’s thesis in effect eclipses every paradigmatic understanding of sovereignty. Genel poses the issue in these terms:

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Biopower is a uniquely modern mechanism that, even if it is bound up with the ‘old sovereign power’ at various times and in various modalities, remains distinct with respect to it. Insofar as it functions through technologies of power, biopower must be analysed in the concrete operations of its most localized procedures as well as in the manner in which it interrogates itself into the more general processes of sovereignty and the law. Is it therefore legitimate or even pertinent for Agamben, who locates the concept of biopower at the very nucleus of the concept of sovereignty, to transpose biopower into sovereignty’s original architecture? Agamben invokes biopower in order to think political space in its entirety, which thus functions according to the matrix of the camp—the paradigm of biopower in the extreme insofar as it is the space of a radical decision on bare life. (44–45)

In effect, as Genel notes, Agamben inverts Foucault’s ‘hypothesis’ in developing his ‘thesis’. Where, for Foucault, “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (Foucault 1978, 143), Agamben’s thesis is that we are “citizens whose very politics is at issue in their natural body” (Agamben 1998, 188). We emphasised in the last chapter the extent to which Foucault, by the early 1980s, had reconsidered the question of power, seemingly central to his work in the 1970s, to become a question of the subject, which he suggests was always at stake in his work. This might suggest that while Foucault introduces the notion of biopower and the biopolitical, his genuine concerns are with a question of life, its maintenance, distributions, controls and regulations, in developing a ‘hermeneutics of the self’, or a care-of-the-self, as a project concerning an essential freedom, in a governmentality of life whose technologies are ‘massifying’ at the level of population, and individuating at the level of enterprise. His approach to an analytic of the biopolitical does not concern directly the juridical-institutional structures of the State, legal models, or practices of power, but rather micro-strategies or diffuse regimes of normalizing practices and techniques or technologies of normalization. Though, crucially in relation to Agamben’s uptake, Foucault does not entirely abandon the legal-institutional structures of the State, articulated in discourses of right. Rather, he aims to precisely proliferate such discourses of right, invoking the traces of sovereign discourses of power, in terms of what he called the rights-of-the-governed, while recognising that such right does not constitute—nor is its origin secured by—the governance of a State. Rather, such ‘right’ is subject to the complex biopolitical spacings of the governmentality of the State. We have developed and discussed this in previous chapters, and extended that discussion to the early sections of this chapter, concerning Foucault’s understanding of an ethics-of-self in terms of alethurgy and parrh¯esia. If, as Genel suggests, Agamben’s pivotal concern is not biopower but the question of being—or becoming—human, to what extent does Agamben’s extension of Foucault’s work on the biopolitical coincide with Foucault’s own transforming concern with a question of an essential freedom of the subject as a subject-of-truth? Equally, to what extent does Agamben’s radical understanding of sovereignty enable us to better recognise where Foucault’s unfolding project on an ontology of the self might have gone? Essential to Agamben’s rethinking of sovereignty is his own ontological reading of Schmitt’s understanding of sovereignty and exception. Genel suggests: Agamben then investigates the topology inherent to the paradox of sovereignty: it is the logic of the exception in the etymological sense—“taking of the outside.” This logic focuses

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precisely on life, which is legible in the sovereign’s right over life and death, the moment in which power has taken control of life either by exploiting it or by suspending its right to kill. It is a question of inscribing exteriority within the body of the nomos—which is to say, the law as conjunction of right and violence in the sovereign or even, as with Schmitt, as the imposition of an order on a location—by which the former animates the latter. It is a question, in short, of the interrogation of those things that had escaped. As a result, the relation between power and life is called a “relation of exception” … the sphere of bare life is produced by this very exclusion. Production of bare life, therefore, is the originary activity of power. (Genel 2006, 51)

To what extent is this remote from Foucault’s work and to what extent is there a resonance? Genel suggests in her concluding remarks: “If Agamben’s understanding of sovereign power was already quite removed from the attention given by Foucault to the techniques and to the play of power, the project of grounding politics in life is entirely foreign to Foucault’s hypothesis” (60–61). In earlier chapters, we suggested a possible approach to Foucault’s work that inscribes, in an ongoing way, responses he made in the 1960s to the work of Blanchot, and a radical engagement with what he called, in relation to Blanchot, the “outside.” We noted a repetition of this rapprochement with Blanchot in Deleuze’s reading of Foucault on exteriority, and the self as an interior. We mentioned, as well, an emphasis Foucault gives, aligning with a Heideggerian reading of Kant, to a shift from anthropology to ontology. It is in this Blanchotian and Heideggerian orientation that we ask: what separates Foucault and Agamben on the state of exception, and an unconcealing (al¯etheia) of the human as bare life? It is certainly the case that Agamben had Heidegger in his sights where he drew-out the doublet of bare life and pure being, a Heideggerian concern with the question of life that opposed biologism or crude vitalism, that asked for a reading of Nietzsche, thus breaking from the worst disservices presented by apologist thinkers of National Socialism. This Heideggerian concern was essentially one of coinciding the question of polis with the question of a Volk.60 Agamben and Foucault were both keenly aware of the devastating pronouncements made by Heidegger in the early 1930s concerning both. Agamben’s project is to squarely un-conceal what those pronouncements failed to recognise. Foucault, too, asks what brings the polis and a people into relations of power and life. While Genel’s critical engagement with Agamben and Foucault is precise in its analysis of power and life, it perhaps understates the ontological dimension to both Foucault and Agamben, perhaps nowhere more so than in asking how inscription of a radical exteriority in Foucault’s ontology of the self might, in fruitful ways, be resonant with precisely how Agamben questions the exception, and poses bare life as the open possibility to be human.61 60 We have mentioned this already, thought note particularly Heidegger’s lecture courses of the early 1930s (Heidegger 2000, 2010, 2014) and his ‘opus magnum’ with the lectures on Nietzsche, 1936-40/41 (Heidegger 1991a, b). The Heidegger translators, Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, have focused especially on Heidegger of the early 1930s. The Nietzsche lectures were primarily translated by Krell. We have already mentioned Krell (1992) for its discussion on Heidegger and bios. See also Phillips (2005) on Heidegger’s Volk. 61 This is the starting point for a series of critiques of Agamben’s recourse to ontology (Ojakangas 2005; Mills 2008; Leps 2012). Leps notes: “Once again, the similarities with Heidegger are striking.

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7.5 Conclusion 7.5.1 Uselessness We have emphasised Agamben’s engagement with metaphysics, from Aristotle to Foucault, an engagement with metaphysics perhaps at odds with that of Heidegger, for whom Aristotelian consolidation of a thinking of logos as logic defines the closure to Greek inceptual thinking of being as phusis-logos in Heraclitan thinking (Heidegger 2018). If, for Heidegger, productionist metaphysics culminates for him by the 1970s as en-framing recognised in consumerism, as production premised on the alreadyconsumed—meaning that all beings inasmuch as they are, and inasmuch as tekhn¯e is the determining-way by which phusis comes to appearance—then living things are essentially, in the be-ing of their being, already nothing other than replaceability. If in the 1930s, Heidegger thought of the essence of ‘equipmentality’ as ‘reliability’ (see Heidegger 2002b), by 1970 his thinking shifts. The disclosive horizon of beings in their being is their already-consumed replacement. To quote the ‘Protocol’ from the Zähringen seminar of 1973: Thus enframing is in no way the product of human machination. It is, on the contrary the most extreme form of the history of metaphysics, that is, of the destiny of being. Within this destiny, man has gone from the epoch of objectivity to that of orderability: in such an epoch, which is now ours, everything and every means of calculation are constantly at the disposal of an ordering. Strictly speaking, there are no longer objects; only ‘consumer goods’ at the disposal of every consumer, who is himself situated in the market of production and consumption. (Heidegger 2003, 74)

In the third Le Thor seminar of 1969, Heidegger had already discussed the replaceable: Today being is being-replaceable. Already the idea of ‘repair’ has become ‘anti-economical’ thought. It is essential for every being of consumption that it be already consumed and thus call for its replacement. (62)

In concluding this discussion, Heidegger notes that “the human is ‘used by being’” (63). He hears in what is meant here by ‘use’, an “echo” of χ ρ η´ (khré) of Parmenides and Anaximander. Khré translates loosely to an ought, or a should, with respect, in this case, to what it exactly is that one needs, in whatever one uses. We might even Just as the former member of the Nazi Party saw the annihilation of beings as one more symptom of the abandonment of Being, Agamben describes the camps as biopolitical experiments on ‘the operators of Being’. After cogently presenting Agamben’s argument, Catherine Mills demonstrates its limits and silences. The double argument about desubjectification elides the intersubjective nature of both language and ethics: ‘given these silences within Agamben’s argument, it appears that his text ultimately betrays that which he is attempting to establish: the unassumable yet unavoidable responsibility of ethics’” (Leps 2012, 30). Leps contrasts Foucault’s care with singularities to Agamben’s lofty pronouncements on fundamental grounds of being: “Multiple, polymorphic and transversal, Foucault’s historically and materially specific practices of the self might well constitute more promising strategies of resistance to biopolitical forces than Agamben’s promise of a coming community of whatever being” (31).

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say a ‘care’ for what something is, inasmuch as its availability comes-to-appearance. We note something similar with Agamben, something he arrives at with the notion of ‘use’ that becomes predominant in the final volume of his Homo sacer series, The use of bodies (2015). Though we also note, in Agamben’s Profanations (2007), a reading of the commodity as sacral, that the political task of the coming community is the profanation of things. This suggests for us that Agamben reads Heidegger’s Da-sein, its supposed authenticity and inauthenticity in terms of an oikonomia, a governmentality or technical-managerial administration of the sacred and profane, and that, within a displacing-thinking of onto-theology, it is precisely a supposed divinity of homo sacer that constitutes the metaphysical ‘destiny’ of living beings in sovereign power, such that profanation is a ‘saving power’ of this human, “the becoming placeholder of the nothing” (Heidegger 2003, 63). We recognise this ‘saving power’ in Smith’s discussion of thinking Agamben’s notion of a ‘form-of-life’ along with Foucault’s care-of-self and aesthetics-of-existence: This figure, the ‘form-of-life’, which I am suggesting also describes the person engaged in an ‘aesthetics of existence’, gives rise to a very special kind of conceptual configuration. By bringing the two terms of an opposition to a point of their total coincidence, such that one cannot be separated from the other, Foucault and Agamben effectively neutralise the distinction between the two concepts. … One can perhaps no longer even distinguish between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, because the subject is only what makes of the empty ‘ought’ that is its freedom, and this ‘ought’ does not demand anything special of the subject … (Smith 2015, 150)

We immediately think of that peculiar notion of ‘use’ suggested by Heidegger, when ´ a notion of ‘use’ that we think ‘secures’ Agamben’s referencing Parmenides’ χρη, thinking of bodies. We also think of Heidegger’s Da-sein, its be-ing, its is-ness, as nothing other than its open possibilities, its openness, to its is-ness, to be-ing. Heidegger thinks of this being, in relation to the artwork, as the most-uncanny of beings, the one most open. Would this being not be a precursor to a Foucauldian ‘care’ and an ‘aesthetics-of-existence’, or a ‘form’ of living? In the following chapter, we continue with discussing critical reception to Agamben’s writings on the biopolitical and the city. In particular, we focus on a sustained response by Derrida from his final lecture series, prior to his death, The beast and the sovereign (2008), along with his writings on living and on death. We also engage in some detail with Negri’s responses to Agamben, as well as work by Hardt and Negri on biopolitical modernity, in its current phase of global capitalism. Concluding the chapter, we return to Heidegger’s Le Thor reference to an archaic Greek understanding of ‘use’ (khré), in the context of his translation and reading of the Anaximander fragment, along with Agamben’s reference to this same fragment, when discussing the use of bodies and form-of-life.

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Chapter 8

Common Use

8.1 Introduction 8.1.1 The Political Animal This argument of Schmitt’s, and this is all I want to retain from it for now, is that there is no politics, no politicity of the political without affirmation of sovereignty, that the privileged if not unique form of that sovereignty is the state, state sovereignty, and that such a political sovereignty in the form of the state presupposes the determination of an enemy; and this determination of the enemy can in no case take place, by definition, in the name of humanity. (Derrida 2009, 77) So, there is an essential link between politicity and the disposition to the logos, they are indissociable. (Derrida 2009, 347) Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire. (Hardt and Negri 2000, xii)

Towards the end of the last chapter, we offered a critique of Agamben’s ‘corrections’ and ‘extensions’ to Foucault’s understanding of biopower. The focus of that critique, one of many engagements with Agamben and Foucault, came from Katia Genel (2006). In our discussion of Genel’s critical approach, we emphasised that she, perhaps, did not sufficiently emphasise the ontological dimensions to Foucault and Agamben. If Genel understates an ontological dimension, this cannot be said of Jacques Derrida, in his somewhat strident critique of Agamben in The beast and the sovereign, volume 1 (2009).1 Derrida is especially critical of Agamben’s analysis of 1 This

lecture series, delivered between 2001 and 2003, was the last by Derrida before his death in 2004. Its key concerns with the political and life need to be engaged in the much broader context of Derrida’s concerns, from his early writings on Husserl and Freud, with a questioning of life, living and death (lifedeath as Derrida might write it). The 2018 book by Vitale, Biodeconstruction, has alerted Derridean scholarship to this ongoing concern. We will address it briefly in what follows, along with other Derrida texts whose concerns are with lifedeath and power, the bio-political and © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. L. Jackson and M. Hanlen, Securing Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4_8

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sovereignty, his understanding of zo¯e and bios, and his reading of Foucault’s understanding of the biopolitical (2009, 92). Derrida is a philosopher of deconstruction and deconstruction essentially concerns a radical questioning of the undecidability of origins, grounds, or foundations. In this regard, deconstruction is nothing founded or invented by Derrida. His ‘claim’ would have been more modest—perhaps that he unconcealed that deconstruction is and has been at work within metaphysics, is inscribed in the text of philosophy, and is the necessary supplement that aims to undo its textual housing, parasitically living on those very texts, undoing them in those precise locales where they appear secured. Except for the consternation it would pose for Derridean readers, one might have recourse to Agamben’s very terminology of ‘dislocating location’ and an ontology of the exception and the camp, in order to circumscribe the spatialisings or dehiscence of deconstruction.

8.2 The Lifedeath of Biopower 8.2.1 Origins and Traces Derrida hones deconstruction in honing-in on claims to origins, originary disclosures, first principles, or first inventions. As we will see, for Derrida, Agamben’s text Homo sacer (1998) had too many ‘firsts’, too many origins, and originary disclosures. Thus, Agamben commences with the founding of sovereignty as a first founding. Derrida is not sparing. In introducing Homo sacer, Derrida invokes his students to read the section in that book on wolves, and werewolves. Derrida’s lecture course concerns the animal and the human. He mentions a couple of wolves that Agamben neglected, those of Plautus and Rousseau. He mentions, with irony, this overlooking: His [Agamben’s] most irrepressible gesture consists regularly in recognizing priorities that have supposedly been overlooked, ignored, neglected, nor known or recognized, for want of knowledge, for want of reading or lucidity or force of thought—priorities, then, first times, inaugural initiatives, instituting events that have supposedly been denied or neglected, and so, in truth, priorities that are primacies, principalities, principle signatures, signed by Princes of Beginning, priorities that everyone, except the author of course, has supposedly missed, so that each time the author of Homo Sacer is, apparently, the first to say who will have been first. (Derrida 2009, 92)2

biopower. Derrida delivered the first half of The beast and the sovereign in 2001–2002 as a seminarlecture series, and it forms the basis of the publication The beast and the sovereign, volume 1 (2009). The beast and the sovereign, volume II (2011) is based on the seminar delivered in 2002–2003. 2 An example of Derrida’s, at times, scathingly critical reading of Agamben’s use of the notion of “firsts”: “If there are ‘firsts’, I would be tempted to think on the contrary that they never present themselves as such. Faced with this distribution of school prizes, prizes for excellence and runnersup, a ceremony [at which] the priest always begins and ends, in princely and sovereign manner, by putting himself first, that is by occupying the place of priest or master who never neglects the dubious pleasure to be had by sermonizing and handing out lessons…” (2009, 95).

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In this way, Derrida critiques the authorial position of Agamben with respect to sovereignty (92).3 He questions Agamben’s reading of ‘life’ by questioning how valid it is to see zo¯e and bios as separate categories. Philologically, in many languages, there are often two separate words for life and living. How is it possible to untangle these terms? (305).4 Here Derrida questions the veracity and validity of Agamben’s reading of Aristotle’s Politics, in particular, an ontological concern with life, zo¯e and logos. He turns to Agamben’s analysis, in Homo sacer, of the differentiation of bios and zo¯e that structures his entire problematic or ‘thesis’ (314–315). Is Agamben correct in emphasising the difference between zo¯e and bios? (316).5 As Derrida points out, the distinction between the two terms is “never so clear and secure” and there are a number of exceptions which Agamben himself admits, as with Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Derrida 2009, 316; Agamben 1998, 1): “Such an insecure semantic distinction cannot serve to determine a historical periodization …” (Derrida 2009: 3 Derrida’s

argument centres on Agamben’s determination of who is first. Derrida indicates that it is precisely this ‘firstness’ that is essential to sovereignty, the claim to inaugurate. Thus, his criticism stems from how Agamben centralises his role as author, as he who can claim to be first to recognise and by doing so institutes himself into a position of sovereign. Another example is Agamben’s reading of Levinas’s 1934 text on the rise of Hitlerism, “Reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism” (1990). Derrida critiques Agamben for his reading of the Levinas text as if it is, in some way, responding to Heidegger’s relationship to Nazism, as well to modern biopolitics (Derrida 2009, 95). It is factually inaccurate or at least based on dubious assumptions (95). Derrida points to a note made in 1991, in Levinas’s reprinted article, that relates to Heidegger and Nazism (this is not found in the English version, translated by Séan Hand). In Homo sacer Agamben claims “…an attentive reader would nonetheless have had to read between the lines…” to see an allusion to Heidegger and Nazism (2009, 95; Derrida’s emphasis; c.f., Agamben 1998, 152). However, as Derrida points out, Levinas never mentions Heidegger in the article, further criticising Agamben for his claim of firsts and positioning himself in an authorial or sovereign position as to what Levinas did or did not say (95–96). 4 See Derrida’s comments on the problem of trying to separate out zo¯ e and bios, or “life” and “living”: “Will we ever manage to untangle, in our tangles, will we succeed in unravelling, disintricating, as it were, unscrambling things between zoology and biology? Between the zoological and the biological, between these two Greek words, which are more than words, and are both translated as ‘life’, zo¯e and bios? Isn’t it too late to try, and aren’t all efforts in that direction doomed, essentially, to failure? Especially in French, but also in German and English and many languages in which there is no distinction between the two words, or even the two concepts, for saying ‘life’ and ‘living’? And isn’t philology too poorly equipped, too unequal to the task, in spite of the grand airs that the lesson givers and the pseudo-experts in this domain sometimes take on? Too unequal to the task, philology, not up to this question, which is more than a question as to meaning and word, between zo¯e and bios, between zoology and biology, the logic of the logos fixing nothing and simplifying nothing, as we shall see, for whoever cares to try to untangle things. And in French, what are we saying when we say ‘life’ (ah, la vie!), and the living? Are we talking of the zoological or the biological? And what would be the difference? To what are we obstinately signalling here with the word ‘life’?” (2009, 305). Derrida, too, has more than a passing preoccupation with the question of life and the living. We will discuss that more fully in what follows in referencing Vitale’s Biodeconstruction (2018b). 5 “All of Agamben’s demonstrative strategy, here and elsewhere, puts its money on a distinction or a radical, clear, univocal exclusion, among the Greeks and in Aristotle in particular, between bare life (zo¯e), common to all living beings (animals, men, and gods), and life qualified as individual or group life (bios: bios theoretikos, for example, contemplative life, bios apolaustikos, life of pleasure, bios politikos, political life)” (Derrida 2009, 316).

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316). Briefly, Agamben’s thesis holds that the clear Aristotelian distinction is blurred at a certain historical juncture or threshold that marks the modern period, entering “a zone of irreducible indistinction” (Agamben 1998, 9). Derrida thus comments: “What is difficult to sustain, in this thesis, is the idea of an entry (a modern entry, then) into a zone of irreducible indifferentiation, when the differentiation has never been secure (I would say Agamben furtively admits as much); and, above all, what remains even more difficult to sustain is the idea that there is something modern or new” (Derrida 2009, 316).6 Derrida’s criticism of Agamben’s reading of zo¯e as “bare life” is withering. He labels it as “audaciously translated as ‘bare life’,” and trying to force the difference of zo¯e and bios in the writing of Aristotle (326). Derrida points to the obvious, that for Aristotle zo¯e, when it comes to being human, is never unqualified, never without qualities, never ‘bare’. It is, essentially, z¯oon politikon, or zo¯e inscribed in the sphere of the polis, what precisely was to mark the threshold of modernity. Already, that threshold is founded on Aristotle’s Poetics. In effect, suggests Derrida, for Aristotle: “the attribute of bare life of the living being called man is political, and that is his specific difference [to other living beings]” (330). Derrida sees Agamben’s constant differentiation of zo¯e and bios as artifice and tenuous: Here the choice is a tough one: you must either demonstrate, which is indeed what Agamben would like to do, that there is a tenable distinction between an attribute and a specific difference (it isn’t easy, I think it’s even impossible), or else admit (which Agamben doesn’t want to do at any price, because it would ruin all the originality and supposed priority of what he is saying) that Aristotle already had in view, had already in his own way thought, the possibility that politics, politicity, could, in certain cases, that of man, qualify or even take hold of bare life (zo¯e), and therefore that Aristotle might already have apprehended or formalised, in his own way, what Foucault and Agamben attribute to modern specificity. (327)

In this, Derrida makes two main observations: firstly, there is not sufficient evidence to support Agamben’s claim of differentiation of zo¯e and bios in Aristotle’s political animal (329). He questions whether this difference is in fact the chasm being proposed, potentially seeing it more as a reciprocal relationship defining our beinghuman: “The specific difference or the attribute of man’s living, in his life as a living being, in his bare life, if you will, is to be political” (330). Secondly, Derrida questions the threshold moment of the development of biopolitics (330). This questioning of periodization, Derrida stresses, does not mean that he is suggesting that “new” things do not occur, but questions when this threshold moment did occur; or, did it occur? Here Derrida questions whether it is contemporary or at the emergence of modernity. He contends that, rather than thinking about the biopolitical in this strictly periodic manner, the conceptual legacy is far earlier than either Foucault and Agamben acknowledge: “So I am not saying that there is no ‘new bio-power’, I am suggesting that ‘bio-power’ itself is not new. There are incredible novelties in bio-power, but bio-power or zoo-power are not new” (330). Derrida recognises

6 See

Agamben’s discussion on the excluded-inclusion of zo¯e into the polis (Agamben 1998, 9).

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that Agamben acknowledges that biopolitics is not simply a product of modernity.7 However, at the same moment, Agamben claims, in Homo sacer, that biopolitics is the “…decisive event of modernity” (330).8 Thus a contradictory double move, stating that the bio-political is historically an “arch-ancient” thing, and then, conversely, stating that the bio-political is the decisive move of the contemporary political field (330–331). Derrida recognises that the series of critiques by Agamben, Foucault and Arendt on power, life and politics are interesting and relevant to his seminar The beast and the sovereign: “They go to the heart of what matters to us in this seminar: sovereign power, life and death, animality, etc.” (331). Though he questions some of the assumptions made with respect to the emergence of biopolitics by both Agamben and Foucault, namely that there should be a tidy correlation between biopolitics and early forms of sovereign punishment at the threshold of modernity. He cites Foucault’s example of the correlation between the decline of the death penalty and the rise of strategies of the biopolitical management of life (Foucault 1978, 137; Derrida 2009, 332).9 At the centre of this is essentially the problem of how one undertakes a reading of the historical: “All of those things compel us, and we have to be grateful to them for this, to reconsider, precisely, a way of thinking history, of doing history, of articulating a logic and a rhetoric onto a thinking of history or the event” (332). Thus, develops a criticism of the understanding of historicality, event, temporality, historical analysis as such.10 Derrida critiques their understanding of the historical event as essentially 7 Namely, Agamben recognises the historical nature of the biopolitical as well as seeing it as caught

up in notions of sovereignty. But Derrida questions Agamben’s efforts in arguing that the biopolitical is the decisive event of modernity (330). 8 Derrida comments: “What surprises me most, incidentally, and constantly disconcerts me in Agamben’s argumentation and rhetoric, is that he clearly recognizes what I have just said, namely that bio-politics is an arch-ancient thing (even if today it has new means and new structures). It is an arch-ancient thing and bound up with the very idea of sovereignty. But then, if one recognises this, why all the effort to pretend to wake politics up to something that is supposedly, I quote, ‘the decisive event of modernity’?” (330). 9 Again, Derrida comments: “So he does not take it, but explains that, if he had, he would have related the decline of the death penalty to the progress of bio-politics and a power that ‘gave itself the function of managing life’. Supposing that things are this way, and that some decline of the death penalty is principally to be explained by the new advent [of bio-politics] (which Foucault dates to the end of the classical age) (which calls for another discussion with Agamben as to the concept of threshold, precisely, of what Agamben, referring to Foucault, calls ‘the decisive event of modernity’ or again the ‘founding event of modernity’, having in mind above all the genocides of the twentieth century, the concentration camps and the Shoah)—[Supposing, I was saying, that things are this way, and that some decline of the death penalty is to be explained principally by the new advent [of bio-politics] (which Foucault dates to the end of the classical age)], we have to wonder what politico-juridical consequence should be drawn, and whether we should regret this decline of the death penalty” (332). 10 An extended citation from Derrida: “To call into question not only the concern to periodise that takes such forms (a modernity about which we don’t know when it begins or ends, a classical age the effects of which are still perceptible, an Ancient Greece whose concepts are more alive and surviving than ever, a supposed ‘decisive event of modernity’ or ‘founding event of modernity’ which only reveals the immemorial, etc.)—[to call into question this concern to periodise that takes such forms] is not to reduce the event-ness or singularity of the event: on the contrary. Rather,

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synchronic.11 Further, we note, their “temptation” to linear history, as successive ruptures in epist¯em¯es (332–333).12

I’m tempted to think that this singularity of the event is all the more irreducible and confusing, as it should be, if we give up that linear history which remains, in spite of all the protests they would no doubt raise against this image, the common temptation of both Foucault and Agamben (the modernity that comes after the classical age, the epistemes that follow on from each other and render each other obsolete, Agamben who comes after Aristotle. etc.)—if we give up this linear history, the idea of a decisive and founding event (especially if we try to rethink and re-evaluate the enduring and aporetic experience of what “decision” means in the logic of sovereign exception), if we give up the alternative of synchronic and diachronic, an alternative that remains presupposed in the texts we have just been reading. To give up the idea of a decisive and founding event is anything but to ignore the event-ness that marks and signs, in my view, what happens, precisely without any foundation or decision coming along to make it certain. Which explains, moreover—at least a supplementary sign of what I am putting forward—that the texts from Aristotle’s Politics, for example, or Bodin, or so many others, and texts that are not always books of philosophy or political science, or even books at all, are to be read, difficult as they may be to decipher, indispensable in all their abyssal stratifications, be they bookish or not, if we want to understand politics and its beyond, and even the bio-powers or zoo-powers of what we call the modernity of ‘our time’.” (332–333). 11 Hence, Derrida deconstructs the ‘threshold’ to threshold as such: “The fact that there is neither simple diachronic succession nor simple synchronic simultaneity here (or that there is both at once), that there is neither continuity of passage nor interruption or mere caesura, that the motifs of the passage of what passes and comes to pass [passe et se passe] in history belong neither to a solid foundation nor to a founding decision, that the passage has no grounding ground and no indivisible line under it, requires us to rethink the very figure of the threshold (ground, foundational solidity, limit between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, etc.). What the texts we have read call for is at least a greater vigilance as to our irrepressible desire for the threshold, a threshold that is a threshold, a single and solid threshold. Perhaps there never is a threshold, any such threshold. Which is perhaps why we remain on it and risk staying on the threshold forever…The abyss is not the bottom, the originary ground (Urgrund), of course, nor the bottomless depth (Ungrund) of some hidden base…The abyss, if there is an abyss, is that there is more than one ground [sol], more than one solid, and more than one single threshold [plus d’un seul seuil] … More than a single single; no more a single single (footnoted: as “plus d’un seul seul” in Derrida’s original typescript) … That’s where we are” (333–334). There is, perhaps, more in common with Derrida, Foucault and Agamben than what supposedly separates them, or a being-in-common constituting a disseminating play of differences, an always more-than-one-threshold of resonating comparisons—more than the pointscoring play of firsts that Derrida, too, plays at. Derrida (though who is he?) inheres Foucault and Agamben, inherits some things here—inventions-of-others—in order to dissimulate his difference or différance. For, surely, he cannot want his identity to be at stake. 12 More than one ghost haunts Derrida in recounting this history of unravelling-linearity, and certainly Heidegger rustles some leaves, scattering some traces (see Derrida 2016). Derrida’s concerns with the linearity of historicity for Foucault and Agamben might, perhaps, ‘stick-to’ Foucault a little, during his earlier archaeological analyses. However, as we discussed in the previous chapter, Foucault understands ‘event’—truth-event—as thinking, construed as ‘Outside’, undecidably synchronic and diachronic, whereby event maintains its latency as phantasm-interpretation or engagement. We’ll come back to this point in what follows.

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8.2.2 The Forgetting of Heidegger Then Derrida points to the Heideggerian legacies in the work of Foucault (unacknowledged) and Agamben (well-inscribed). He notes that there are several key Heideggerian texts which Agamben might well have referenced, and would be aware of, that ultimately would have weakened Agamben’s thesis. Derrida accuses Agamben of selective appropriation of Heidegger and Levinas (324).13 He notes: And yet it goes without saying that when Heidegger on the one hand condemns biologism (and clearly modern biologism), and on the other hand denounces as metaphysical and insufficiently questioning the zoologism of a definition of man as z¯oon logon ekhon or, a fortiori, as z¯oon politikon, he is going exactly in the direction of this whole supposedly new configuration that Agamben credits Foucault with having inaugurated, even if the same Agamben proposes to ‘reconsider’ Foucault’s ‘formulations’ or to ‘complete and correct’ his theses. (324)

Hence, Derrida clarifies that, firstly, Foucault’s analysis never discusses Heidegger’s critique of modern biologism and, secondly, Agamben similarly does not discuss Heidegger explicitly on this point, but rather follows Foucault’s reading of Aristotle’s z¯oon politikon, the human (Man) as living animal with the capacity for political existence (Derrida 2009, 325; Agamben 1998, 7).14 Furthermore, Agamben (as we have seen earlier) claims to correct and complete Foucault (Derrida 2009, 325; Agamben 1998, 9). Derrida contends that the problematic of the bio-political for Agamben 13 “But on all the texts we have just read about the logos, about zo¯ e, the zoological interpretation of man, about metaphysics and technology and Christianity as prevalent interpretations of logos and zo¯e, about the condemnation of biologism, absolute silence from Agamben. I’m sure he knows these texts, even if he seems to have omitted them or needed to omit them, as he well knows that he wouldn’t have been the first to read them, which no doubt discouraged him from looking at them again more closely” (Derrida 2009, 324). 14 Concerning Heidegger and biologism, there are many reference points, especially within his Nietzsche lectures. Though, more generally, and as something of an overview, if modernity’s ‘threshold’ is constituted on the emergence of a ‘new’ biopolitical order, for Heidegger it would be determined in how life-living has its fundamental disclosive horizon in the human as that being who represents life as object, some ‘thing’ to be brought into view. In this respect, ‘life’ is a thing to be produced and consumed, culminating in the human, as well, in an undifferentiated way, becoming a consumed product, whose being is disclosed in replaceability. Though, Heidegger might well see the originary disclosive moment of the bio-political in Aristotle’s discerning of phusis—what emerges from out of itself—in terms of tekhn¯e, in terms of something pro-ducing itself, thereby inaugurating metaphysics as productionist. The Cartesian horizon (modernity’s ‘threshold’) simply places the human as grounding ground—as sub-ject—of whatever is pro-duced. Heidegger’s ‘version’ would not emphasise Aristotle’s distinction of zo¯e and bios, as already both are thought from out of tekhn¯e, and not phusis (or rather, thought as phusistekhn¯e, as Derrida might write it). Hence Heidegger’s recourse to Heraclitus for inceptual thinking of phusis and z¯en (though inceptual thinking is not, for Heidegger, first-thinking in a linearity of historiographical legacies. Its thinking is a culminatingrevealing or disclosing precisely of modernity’s more-than-one-thresholds). From out of inceptual thinking of life—thought as lifedeath, as emerging-submerging—Heidegger will characterize the biologism of race as something disclosed by the essence of technology, along with power thoughtof as machination, essentially technological extraction of energy from whatever is, in Nietzsche’s terms, life-as-will-to-power (see Heidegger’s Bremen lectures (2012), especially “Positionality” and “The danger”).

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is conflicted, between how to define specific characteristics that belong to modern politics or bio-politics—which owe their heritage to Foucault, in particular, the last chapter of The will to knowledge (1978)—and a Heideggerian reading. Agamben seeks to link, in a concrete manner, zo¯e to his conception of “bare life” which is in opposition to bios, something that was “… supposedly missed” by Foucault (Derrida 2009, 325). Perhaps, the only ‘correcting’ left for Agamben, with respect to his legacy in Foucault’s reading of Aristotle, would be for him to prefer “Zoo-politics” or “Z¯oon-politics” than Bio-politics (325). Though, we could suggest Derrida, too, is selective in his reading. Agamben probably would not, in fact, object. We could equally draw out the complexity of ‘temporalising’ for both Foucault and Heidegger, and pace, for Agamben. A simple accusation of “synchrony” and/or “diachrony” is not sustainable. Nor do Foucault’s terminologies of rupture, threshold, epoch and episteme seem to us to be totalizing categories, especially in their coming-and-going, their own ruptures or thresholds of emergence and descent. Derrida deconstructs the array of binaries we see inscribed in Agamben’s text, locating their undecidables at those very moments when they supposedly demonstrate their strategic support. Hence, commencing with zo¯e and bios, moving to the historical periodicity and its threshold privilege of an inside and outside of modernity, of exception, of the ‘bare’ and inscribed as such, of life and power, life and the political, the synchronic and diachronic, ultimately, and in relation to Derrida’s Heideggerian legacies, phusis and tekhn¯e, life as living life, daimon life, living thing, and technology, supplement, prosthesis, ge-stell, the standing reserve, tekhn¯e and logos, ‘Man’ as z¯oon-logos, z¯oon-politikon, bios. These—all of them, their more-thansingle singular thresholding—space an originary trace-structure of the bio-political that already haunts Western metaphysics, inscribed in the canon of political philosophy, with the problems of, positions or position-takings on life, politics, control, contracts and sovereignty. While Foucault’s bio-power is a politico-technical and practical analytic, it is one naming of a phenomenon that occurs (though Derrida does not discuss it in The beast and the sovereign) with the Heideggerian naming of ge-stell, where practices of the living and, hence, the political (and the individual) become en-framed by the techno-institutionalisations of the State. With this, we specify, contra Agamben, not so much a need for ‘corrective’ or ‘extended’ readings of the bio-political. Rather, we recognise an open and undecidable question as to how, and from what vantage points, power and life would come into relational view. The question is otherwise than corrective: would we be able to name that relationality that opens the disclosive possibility of power and life—how would that, at that same moment, not be the essential or primordial possibility of living?15 If there is 15 The great irony of Agamben’s fidelity to Foucault, his aligning resonances with Foucault, is the very choice of terminology he ultimately uses when working with (or on) the political philosopher of normalization and technologies or apparatuses of correction. Agamben corrects Foucault, without for a moment adjusting his task, in a reflection on the very Foucault who determines a biopower that works instrumentally on that substance that is open to adjustment, corporeal humanity. His is a normalizing technique. But one is reminded of Foucault’s wry comment in “The Discourse on Language” (1972), where he suggests that the moment one feels assured of freeing oneself from Hegel, there Hegel is, standing behind, waiting for you to look back over your shoulder, laughing.

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diachrony, it will always be more-than-one. As with synchrony. Hence, and with respect to bios/zo¯e and its (or is it their?) powers, how would life and power, or living and powering, name? Power is power-to-name, and thereby to over-name and to erase a name. To this question of a name, Agamben offers, provisionally and for a while, the name ‘camp’. Other names will, in turn occur. Foucault, with similar provisionality, and for a while, and in a changing series of concerns, names it—living and power—an essential freedom of the self. Derrida is too circumspect—on the very question of the name—to broach a syllable. Even Heidegger crossed out his word of words.

8.2.3 Habitability of Lifedeath In taking stock of Derrida’s critique of Agamben, a critique that inflects to Foucault, we may be forgiven for wondering if we somehow missed something along the way. Didn’t Agamben say, all along, that the biopolitical is inaugurated in Greek habitability, not so much in zo¯e and bios as separated and distinguishable, but rather in a differentiation of oikos and polis, a difference that spatializes these twin notions of living? And, didn’t he explain, again and again, that there is a complicating indifference, or a differing-and-deferring, the moment one actually seeks to define the identity of each? While there appears to be the threshold of household and city, privacy of the oikos and public (political) realm of the polis, the oikos is necessarily secreted to the interior of the polis as that which it needs to harbour, in order to have it excluded. Is this not precisely how Derrida locates the dislocating-locating of the grounding-ground of metaphysics, with its inside/outside boundary or threshold wherein, deconstructively, any identity constituting an interior-belonging must retain what is other, outside, in order to maintain that exteriority, the shoring-up of identity? Is this not precisely what Agamben repeats, from Homo sacer to his text on Stasis, literally from beginning to end of the production of the entire series, even if they are not printed within (or from out of) this linearity? And we thought that what, for Agamben, in a way acceding to Foucault, suggests itself as a ‘threshold’ to modernity, was not this peculiar dislocating-locating of oikos and polis, zo¯e and bios, a legacy of metaphysics itself (which is hardly ruptured by modernity), but the arrival of something else, what he names ‘bare life’, something that is neither zo¯e nor bios, nor the including-exclusion of zo¯e in the constituting of polis, but rather within that indistinction, or as that indistinction, the suspending of nomos. Nomos needs to be thought here in terms of what limits, what apportions or allots. It was in this sense that nomos constituted, for the Greeks, a notion of law, though when translated to Latin as lex, is thought no longer from out of the couple oikos/polis but from domus/civitas, via ius and the Roman imperium. Agamben recognises the lifedeath of homo sacer within this other threshold of Roman law, that really cannot One expects more than one laugh from Foucault, looking on at Agamben, who stares transfixed by the mirror of his own simulacrum.

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be ‘returned’ to Greece. Nothing, it seems, can be returned-to. Though, it seems to us that there are two (at least) threads running through Derrida’s ‘problems’ with Agamben, one concerning that interiority/exteriority ‘spacing’ that is a ‘kernel’ to his deconstructing of the tradition of metaphysics, as a metaphysics of presence. The law of the oikos is central to this, and hence the couplet oikos/polis. The other thread is the couplet life/death, and Derrida’s persistence, from the ‘beginning’ (which means from his 1960s’ engagements with Husserl and Freud) to recognise the ‘living voice’, present-to-itself, or self-consciousness in general, as manifesting a metaphysics of presence. It strikes us that the peculiar notion of ‘spacing’ (espacement) that Derrida develops, relating to both an architectonic and a living-on of metaphysics, coincides with the pincer-movements or double-binding-strangulating he seems to perform on Agamben’s thesis.16 It is, perhaps then, less than a coincidence that the Italian philosopher, Francesco Vitale, published in 2018 two books on Derrida, one concerning a deconstruction of architecture, and the other concerning a deconstruction of life. We will spend a little time on a double-reading of these two texts, as they seem to intersect with our concerns with the biopolitical, the urban, and security. Vitale’s book on architecture takes its title from a comment made by Derrida in 1993, that architecture is “the last fortress of metaphysics” (Vitale 2018a, 1). If architecture is thought of as ‘the last fortress of metaphysics’, this is so, in part, because whatever we recognise as the ‘last’, the ‘lastness’ of the last, that which is most ‘present’ as our presencing, opens to what is most originary or archaic, the arch-archaic. This, at least, Derrida recognises in Heidegger’s understanding of the historical. Hence, the emphasis given by Vitale to the simple recognition given to the polis of archaic Greece, that word, polis, or that name, is more originarily acropolis, that polis, itself, comes from an archaic root, meaning fortress or citadel, that polis, as securing-security of an interiority-opposingan-outside, is equally understood as the nomos of oikos, the law of the household. This securing law, constituting an “architecture of architecture,” points to the inhering of the habitable, whether of ‘meaning’ or ‘living’, whether existing or living-on, to be constructed: “Let us not forget that there is an architecture of architecture. Down to its archaic foundation, the most fundamental concept of architecture has been constructed” (Derrida cited in Vitale 2018a, 1). This naturalized architecture is bequeathed to us: “We inhabit it, it inhabits us, we think it is destined for habitation, and it is no longer an object for us at all” (Derrida 2008, cited in Vitale 2018a, 1). As we earlier mentioned, Vitale emphasises that, for Derrida, metaphysics is founded on a spatial opposition, an inside/outside, that is also a sensible/empirical opposition, that Derrida alerts us to in his writing on Plato’s Pharmakon (see Derrida 1981b, 103–134): “The city’s body proper thus 16 Derrida’s ‘spacing’ is a difficult and easily misconstrued notion, as if he simply shuttles between the ideality and empiricism of distancing, or the interval. See his comments in the interview Positions (1981a): “Spacing designates nothing, nothing this is, no presence at a distance; it is the index of an irreducible exterior, and at the same time of a movement, a displacement that indicates an irreducible alterity” (81). As we have discussed in earlier chapters, we would aim to read this Derridean spacing in relation to or as inhering to both Blanchot and Foucault on the peculiar exteriority of an espacement. On the strangulating double-bind of analysis, see Derrida (1998, 36).

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reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself within the confines of the agora, by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or aggression” (Derrida 1981b, 133, cited in Vitale 2018a, 5).17 Though it is the notion of kh¯ora that becomes central for Derrida, a notion whose meaning, on the one hand, refers to the “civic ground” of the polis, and on the other, a mythic and undecidable spacing or interval that is the distilling-jointure of being and becoming (see Derrida 1986, 1995; Vitale 2018a, 8). Derrida’s concern with securing the polis, as law of the oikos, resonates with our earlier comment on Derrida’s understanding of hospitality and law. It also resonates with Agamben’s emphasis on stasis as originary element in the determining of a politeia, and intersects with Derrida’s (or Vitale’s) understanding of lifedeath in biodeconstruction. Vitale notes from Derrida’s discussion on Socrates and the ideal city: “War and thus the affirmation and defense of one’s identity against the identity of others: this is the goal of the ideal construction of the polis and, therefore, the ground on which the very constitution of the polis lies and organizes itself” (9). He goes on to quote Derrida: To give birth—but this is also war. And therefore death. This desire is also political. How would one animate this representation of the political? … The possibility of war makes the graphic image (hypo graphés)—description—of the ideal city go out, not yet into the living and mobile real, while yet showing a functioning that is internal to the test: war. In all the senses of the word, it is a decisive exposition of the city. (Derrida 1995, 118; Vitale 2018a, 9)

Two notions emerge from Vitale’s discussion of deconstruction and architecture (or, at the very least, two), one being a concern with the possibility of a future-tocome when faced with the instrumentalism of design and planning, tasks concerned with the securing certainty of delivering a future entirely knowable and predictable: “Future, invention, event, that require a re-politicizing deconstruction of the political, must open calculus, project, program, rule and law on what must remain noncalculable” (Derrida 1992, cited in Vitale 2018a, 43). We read this in resonance with Heidegger’s own deconstructing of the calculable, in his disclosing of en-framing and productionist metaphysics. We also recognise aspects of Agamben’s emphases on a potentiality or possibility that is not itself exhausted or used-up in the actualising of a work. Something remains open, even within the calculable, something unfinished, as a future-to-come. As we will see, this too coincides, to a point, with how Negri comes to read ‘constituting power’ in a Spinozist ontology of the potentiality of a being-in-common that aims, in a sense, to stall its own totalising constitution. The second notion to emerge is that of a ‘spacing’ or interval that is also a writing, in the sense of a differing/deferring tracing, constituting a non-linearity, a multidimensionality: “If one allows that the linearity of language entails this vulgar and 17 We

emphasize, in this writing on Plato’s notion of writing as pharmakon, constituting, within the pharmacy life/death matter that imbricates discussion of the oikos and polis, for example, in the purification of Athens, the festival or rite of the pharmaksos, “evil and death, repetition and exclusion” (134).

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mundane concept of temporality (homogeneous, dominated by the form of the now and the ideal of continuous movement, straight or circular) which Heidegger shows to be the intrinsic determining concept of all ontology from Aristotle to Hegel, the mediation upon writing and the deconstruction of the history of philosophy become inseparable” (Derrida 1974, 86; Vitale 2018a, 104). This spacing/alterity, as we earlier commented, cannot be dis-inherited from the espacement of Blanchot, the one that seemed to intoxicate Foucault when discussing an ontology of the Outside. On this count, we think of Blanchot’s The Most High (Blanchot 1996) as a curious rapprochement. We would aim for a rapprochement of Derrida and Foucault on this ‘Outside’ which is no outside at all if we are thinking of it as the identity-of-difference to an inside. Life and death would have that same rapprochement, that same interval or spacing, a deconstructing differing/deferring of one to the other. On this count, we would want to cite, in full, and therefore to repeat, or at least, and indefinitely, live on Derrida’s 1977 text, “Living on /Borderlines” (Derrida 1979), though will offer the following: “Here, economy, the law of the oikos (house, room, tomb, crypt), the law of reserves, reserving, savings, saving: inversion, reversion, revolution of values [valeurs, also “securities,” “meanings”]—or of the course of the sun—in the law of the oikos (Heimlichkeit/ Unheinlichkeit)” (76). Living on performs a complex double-reading of a living-dying across languages, and therefore across the crypts or economies of more than one security-exchange of meanings. Derrida reads the English poet, Shelley, his Triumph of life, a poem left open, incomplete, as Shelley drowned before its completion. Already there, a doubling register of lifedeath. This he reads in relation to Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort—though how to translate that? Literally, the arresting of death, it might lean to or hinge around a triumph of life, in death’s arrest; or it might well hinge the other way, with the arresting of life. The double genitive—giving and taking life! Though, as Vitale emphasises in an extensive treatment of Derrida’s concerns with lifedeath, deconstruction is founded on this oikos, this living crypt. Derrida’s biopolitics is his thano-politics, or rather lifedeath is a spacing-interval of différance. We earlier mentioned Mercier’s reading of Vitale’s book on biodeconstruction, in relation to Foucault’s biopower (Mercier 2019). Vitale (2018b) addresses Derrida’s writings from the 1960s to his last essay, “Learning to live, finally,” though his focus is on a seminar Derrida gave in the mid1970s, in fact coincident with the timing of Foucault’s Society must be defended, with Foucault’s introduction of the biopolitical, concerned with a governmentality of lifedeath. That coincidence was not lost on Mercier, though it is not discussed by Vitale. Michael Nass, the English translator of the Derrida Seminar Lifedeath, comments on one of the main themes of the lecture series: “between life and being” (Nass 2019, 31). Nass quotes Derrida from a later text, H.C. for Life: “… in the philosophical gigantomachia [that runs] from Plato to Descartes, from Nietzsche to Husserl, Bergson, and Heidegger, among others, the only big question whose stakes remain undecided would be to know whether it is necessary to think being [l’être] before life [la vie], beings [l’étant] before the living [le vivant], or the reverse” (Derrida 2002, 77–78; cited in Nass 2019, 31). We consider that in what follows, in our discussions of Negri and Spinoza, or Agamben and Heidegger, we keep this essential question

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from Derrida open. We doubt if this question was settled by Heidegger, while its momentum can be palpably encountered in Negri’s political philosophy of life, and in Agamben’s vexing and shifting terrain of dislocating-locations.

8.3 Collectivity of the Multitude 8.3.1 Spatialities of Capital-Time These essential concerns with living and living-on, with force and law, are broached somewhat differently by the Italian political philosopher, Antonio Negri. From his considerations of a Spinozist ontology, the questions of power, ontology, theos, physis and anthropos are radically reconsidered, since there is an absolute immanence constituting power and the living—radically changing the question that would otherwise have required a transcendent/transcendental analytic. We now discuss Negri’s Spinozist immanentism in terms of a key differentiation Negri develops between constituent power and constituted power. Though, we commence with his comments on Marx and Heidegger, comments that are somewhat tempered in what then follows concerning Heidegger and Spinoza, a philosopher not usually associated with Heidegger’s thinking. Marx’s metaphysics of time is much more radical than Heidegger’s. Time is for both a matter of beings. Social time is the apparatus through which the world is quantified and qualified. But here we are one again, always at the same point: Marx frees what Heidegger imprisons. Marx illuminates with praxis what Heidegger reduces to mysticism. Heideggerian time is the form of being, the indistinctness of an absolute foundation. Marxian time is the production of being and thus the form of an absolute procedure. Marxian temporality represents the means by which a subject formally predisposed to being adequate to an absolute procedure becomes a subject materially capable of becoming a part of this process, of being defined as constituent power (Negri 1999, 30).18

In his 1999 publication, Insurgencies, Negri opens us to a confrontation between Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger. In case we might think this an arcane clash, a quibble between what might be considered incommensurable paradigms, Negri makes things clear. Referring to Benjamin and Arendt, or Sartre as opposed to 18 We have more than a few concerns when it comes to Negri’s comments on Heideggerian temporality. His pronouncement on Marxian temporality as productionist metaphysics seems appropriate enough, and ‘squares’ with Heidegger’s clipped essentializing comment on Marx’s humanism that we will get to later in this chapter. The manner whereby ‘time’, for Heidegger, is a “matter of beings” is complex and indirect, or at least goes by way of ontological difference and, in this sense, an “indistinctness,” though hardly of a “foundation,” absolute or otherwise. Marx may well ‘free’ ‘Man’ to be the “root” of a material constituent power, whose temporalizing is metered in praxis, though it seems to us that this ‘freeing’ is otherwise, and non-foundationally ‘said’ in da-sein’s open possibility (power), not with respect to the pro-ducing of beings, but to its constituting be-ing—its temporalizing. We might well call that “mysticism,” when it seems to run up against metaphysic’s logicians and supply chains.

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Foucault and Deleuze, he suggests: “Through the same clash, one might say, the whole political-constitutional debate of our time takes place as well” (30). But, in fact, Marx and Heidegger are themselves the backdrop for Negri’s articulation of what he suggests as the most viable understanding of the dynamics of contemporary democracy. His key terms are “constituent power” and “constituted power.” Michael Hardt notes in his introductory remarks to Negri’s text: “The first key to understanding constituent power is to contrast it to constituted power. Constituent power names the democratic forces of social transformation, the means by which humans make their own history” (vii). Constituted power, understood in relation to sovereign power, references the apparatuses of power of a State, institutions and regulations for the more-or-less stable exercise of power. Traditional or orthodox theories of the political recognize both of these notions. Generally, this recognition is in terms of the predominance of constituted power, as the ongoing stability of a State, at times and for brief episodes thrown into upheaval, to be reconstituted with renewed institutions and legalities. Negri fundamentally differs here. He recognizes that constituent power is continuous and ongoing as the transformative life of political process, while constituted power is not a stable threshold but, rather, one that always already activates resistances, rebellions and innovations in the political. As Hardt notes: “Constituent power thus requires understanding constitution not as a noun but as a verb, not an immutable structure but an open procedure that is never brought to an end” (viii). The book Insurgencies, sub-titled, Constituent power and the modern state, details five revolutionary transformations of States in Western history: Machiavelli’s Italy, England of the mid-seventeenth century, the American revolution, the French revolution, and the Russian revolution. The chapter on Machiavelli draws out a notion of time crucial for Negri in siding with Marx over Heidegger. However, constituent power and constituted power are, for Negri, the putting into political philosophy what he had been developing for at least ten years, a contemporary theory of the Republic based on his close reading of the philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza. Crucial for Negri is the innovation in the political philosophy of power identified in Spinoza’s work, coupled with Spinoza’s own understanding of republicanism.19 Spinoza developed a practical philosophy, an ethics, and engaged at length with the political milieu of republicanism and Dutch capitalism of the seventeenth century. How does Spinoza’s system get applied? And what made it interesting for Marx? Is application even the right word here? Does one apply Spinoza? We will restrict our comments to his understanding of political process. We need to emphasise the widespread acceptance of contractualism or social-contract theory in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating, in a way, with Rousseau in its legitimization. Fundamentally, the contract is the mechanism that transfers natural right to juridical right, providing the basis for the juridical concept of the State (Negri 19 Ten

years prior to the publication of Insurgencies, Negri had published his major research on the political philosophy of Spinoza. While in prison for his links with the Italian militants, The Red Brigades, Negri researched and wrote his first major work on Spinoza, The Savage Anomaly: The power of Spinoza’s metaphysics and politics (1991). On publication, it was immediately translated into French, with no less than three prefaces or introductions from key French Spinozan intellectuals: Pierre Macherey, Gilles Deleuze and Alexandre Matheron.

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1991, 221).20 Power is here understood as authority, institutionally codified and coercive, power that implicitly signifies alienation of freedom in the exercise of right. In the seventeenth century, those who sought alternatives to social contract theory were looking to alternatives to the absolutist State, generally through republicanism and Protestant democratic radicalism.21 In Negri’s terms, they sought to subordinate the contractual transfer of power (as juridical) to material determinations of the social, multiplying the specificities of power: absolutism no longer of the State but of the social. In both scenarios, right and politics immediately participate in the power of the absolute (223–224). The fundamental question for practical philosophy became: in the absence of the intervention of contractual theory as a formal system of distribution with respect to the absolute, how does one reconcile the absolute with freedom? How can an absolute form of power be compatible with freedom? As Kant was later to emphasize in his practical philosophy, absolute freedom is chaos and war (see Henrich 1992, 20–21). The efficacy of Spinoza’s system is that he tackles this head-on from the beginning. His system is developed to precisely eliminate the tautology of absolute and power. Power is an open determination whose absolute is existence. The existent is the realization of power as its essence. Power’s degrees of capability are a measure of the attributes of Substance. Power and freedom are in this sense not opposed but rather are expressions each of the other from the viewpoints of modalities of being. Hence, the question of power’s tenure and exercise, the stuff of juridical codes, is always already implicit in the intrinsic and extrinsic relations of an existent to its capacity to be. Power is not a Substance to be transferred, but an intensive multiplication of potentials. It is in these terms that Spinoza proposes a “democratic absoluteness” as the highest form (which means the most capable, open and potential form) of natural society as political society (229). The political absolute is what Spinoza names as the multitudo, the multitude, the mass. Though commentators have collapsed this to what Rousseau will come to define as the general will, Negri emphasizes this radically diminishes Spinoza’s thought as to the agency of the political. The general will cannot be thought outside the transcendental juridical nature of the social contract. The multitude is not a transcendent unity of the many, but the immanent collectivity of singularities. It is an elusive juridical subject, creating civil right and constitution as an unsolvable and un-resolvable relationship. The instability of power as potential, the radical incompletion of the actuality of existents, makes the multitudo the very material necessity of what is (232). This is notwithstanding the multitude’s recognition as the absolute of power. This absolute is its actuality as continuous movement in its power, which is to say in its essence as degrees of power, capabilities as attributes of Nature. There is no transcendent principle to right. 20 In

contrast, see Agamben’s reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan, in Stasis, as a contractualist understanding of the State. Derrida, as well, engages a close reading of Hobbes, along with Rousseau, in The beast and the sovereign volume one. 21 Foucault recognises the importance of the Quaker movement, especially in the United States in the seventeenth century, and their development of the penitentiary as a new model of incarceration, especially with respect to the very notions of confession and penance. See especially, Lecture 31 January 1973 in Foucault (2015).

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It is fundamentally a subversion of the social. One can see how Marx, in thinking an understanding of forces of production to relations of production, might be drawn to a philosophy of force as open potential, living labour as constituent power. Relations of production, themselves, while the constitution of existents in their civil right, are essentially incomplete and in constant motility, perpetual revolution. Though we might speculate on Marx’s reading of Spinoza, perhaps the greater effect has been contemporary theory construing Spinoza as Marxian avant la lettre, in a reading of Marx in the milieu of a Spinozan critique of Hegel, as well as critique of Marx’s dialectic and teleology.

8.3.2 Radical Immanence of Being-With In the concluding chapter to Empire (2000), co-authored with Hardt, Negri discusses directly two breaks that are necessary from Aristotle’s understanding of time. One of the breaks is from transcendence, reducing to a measure of the ‘Same’ the collectivity of the multitude, measured as transcendent order, and reduction to social-contract theory. He suggests Kant and Heidegger are located in that Aristotelian legacy. However, by 2006 Negri, perhaps, recognizes Heidegger’s break with transcendence as a standard of measure: Heidegger is not merely the prophet of the destiny of the modern; just as he divides, Heidegger is also a window that can open onto antimodernity. Heidegger, in other words, points to a conception of time as ontologically constitutive, which radically breaks the hegemony of substance and the transcendental and opens it onto a certain kind of power. … Time aspires to be power, it alludes to its productivity, it brushes up against its energy. And when it falls back on the nothing, time does not in any way forget this power. Spinoza reemerges in this articulation and forms a paradoxical relation with Heidegger (Negri 2011, 310–311).22

The second break is coterminous with this. The collective, or multitude—for Negri, ontologically, the bio-political—is thought as an immanent process of constitution. Negri (2011) discusses this in terms of what Heidegger calls being-with, mit-sein.23 The strongest correlation Negri finds with Heidegger and Spinoza is precisely the emphasis each gives ontologically to the constitutive power of “the people.” This 22 We see here Negri reneging on his earlier pronouncements on Heideggerian temporality. One wonders how he, at one point, aligns Heideggerian temporalizing with Aristotle when, from the outset, Aristotle was in Heidegger’s sights with respect to metaphysics and temporality. But, even here we see Negri cannot think outside of productionist metaphysics. Can we really be sure that anyone is able to think outside of productionist metaphysics? Maybe not, though we recognize that both Derrida and Heidegger, in quite different ways, grapple with this. We referenced Heidegger in the last chapter, on consumption-replaceability, as the ge-stell of the existent in its existence. Its constituent ‘power’ is its replaceability. We saw with Derrida the undecidability of phusistekhn¯e, (non)essentially a deconstructing of that binary constituent/constituted, the purported nature of multitude, to be thought otherwise than as the pro-duced artifice of the State. 23 See in particular §26 of Being and time (1996): “The mitda-sein of the others and everyday being with”.

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correlation between them is a being-in-common that does not work from the viewpoint of transcendence or a transcendental principle: “Mind you, this mit-Sein should not be banalized: it towers over every contingent relation as well as over various figures of linguistic circulation” (313). Negri reads this as multitude, and as the biopolitical.24 It seems as if there is a fruitful Heideggerian path that could fold with Spinoza. Yet, Heidegger and Spinoza seem to be antithetical: “Heidegger goes toward the nothing; Spinoza goes toward fullness” (313). For Negri, both are concerned with “presence” but with Spinoza it is presence as excess, for Heidegger, presence as void. Again, we see the separation: Spinoza, on the side of “life” and Heidegger on the side of being-for-death. Moreover, “the qualification of being in Heidegger is as scandalous and perverse as it is radically powerful and hopeful in Spinoza. In the latter, being is qualified as ontological capacity for production” (314). As we have mentioned previously, it is precisely this emphasis by Negri on production that most differentiates his understanding of ontology from Heidegger’s, just as Heidegger’s being-for-death is an essential temporalising of living, and not a one-sided voiding of life. Heidegger does alert us to a pro-ducing thought as a “bringing-forth” that he associates with Greek inceptual thinking, to be opposed to the “changeling-forth” of technological determinism (see Heidegger 1977). It is here that Heidegger has recourse to the German poet, Hölderlin, alerting us to the manner whereby the unconcealing of the be-ing of entities as standing-reserve for production, is at the same moment the revealing of the greatest danger and, hence, a potential for transformative change. It is in this context, of what Marx reveals of the being of entities, that Heidegger comments, not on the political veracity of Marxism, but on the al¯etheia, the unconcealing of a politeia manifested in consuming-replaceability. We would aim to read a Spinozan Heidegger, along with Negri in these terms. That concluding chapter to Empire (2000), concerning the Spinozan multitude, is followed up by Negri and Hardt’s second volume, Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire (Hardt and Negri 2004). Multitude concludes with a curious reference to time, to a “before” and an “after” of Aristotelian time, rather than (say) to an ecstatic temporality we more readily associate with Heidegger or the complexity of a Spinozan sense-event, or even Marx’s capital-time: “We can already recognize that today time is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living—and the yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous. In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future. This will be the real political act of love” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 358). We would need to understand “love” in the significance given to it in Spinoza’s God, as emanating powers of the attributes 24 There is perhaps nothing more controversial with Heidegger that his engagement with mit-sein as

Volk. Negri is correct in thinking Spinoza’s immanence of multitude and Heidegger’s Volk, though Heidegger’s path seems to crash towards National Socialism, even if his Nazi has little to do—or something to do—with that of the German Reich. Again, we reference Phillips (2005) on a careful reading of Heidegger’s mis-sein on this score. It is something Derrida also draws out for its radicality. See also Derrida (2016) on the relation between mit-sein and Volk in Heidegger’s Being and time. What is most interesting here is that Negri reads mit-sein as the biopolitical. This would give us some pause with respect to how we now encounter Heidegger, in terms of Foucault’s triple register of al¯etheia, politeia, and e¯ thos.

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of Substance, as modal powers of an existent, capabilities of being. We can read this Spinozan love in Schelling’s Treatise on human freedom, in Schelling’s absolute as love, where Hegel made knowledge absolute. And we may read Heidegger’s affirmation of Schelling surpassing Hegel in this regard, in his 1936 lecture course on the treatise (see Heidegger 1985, 89).25 Heidegger also discusses the importance of Spinoza’s systematic philosophy for Kant and German Idealism, including Schelling (33–34). We recognise the extent to which Negri’s understanding of the bio-political is contingent on an ontological disclosure of “multitude,” as that ontology is itself developed from the immanence of Spinoza’s philosophy. This marks a possible affinity of Spinoza, Negri and Deleuze, and also marks, in a fundamental way, a schism that will develop between Agamben’s ontology of the bio-political and the articulations of Negri, along with the collaborative writings of Hardt and Negri.26 It would be too reductionist to suggest that Agamben’s ontology of the biopolitical, in its recourse to Heidegger, is marked by Heideggerian reservations concerning Spinoza. Though one could go part way to understanding the dispute between Agamben and Negri following this line. To follow on from our earlier reverie on the functioning of names, with respect to a question of a relation that opens power and life as entities to be 25 But this “love” may well be Hardt and Negri’s name, at least for a while, for the biopolitical constituting of modernity, that confluence of bare life and exception, that camp or movement of freedom, that open, essentially describing love, at least in Schelling’s Spinozist terms, to be appropriated into psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan, precisely as the exception—what I demand of the Other that the Other presisely does not have to give. In this respect, on the question of a demand for what cannot be given, bare life, exception and the open are what Agamben is, perhaps, most indebted to with Aristotle, as an ethics of potentia, an ethics as a potential to not-be (Agamben 1999): “Contrary to the traditional idea of potentiality that is annulled in actuality, here we are confronted with a potentiality that conserves itself and saves itself in actuality. Here potentiality, so to speak, survives actuality and, in this way, gives itself to itself ” (184). We return to this comment in what follows. 26 Notwithstanding our references in what follows to a particular leaning of Hardt and Negri to Deleuze and Guattari, or at least to some of their terminology, in the second chapter of Empire, “Biopolitical Production,” they do a little stock-taking and deck-clearing. Just in case we might have thought they lean too heavily on Foucault or D & G, Hardt and Negri draw some borderlines. With respect to Foucault, they go even further than did Agamben on seeing ‘something’ needing correction or completion. They target what would only have ignited the ire of Foucault (perhaps more than anything else in fact), a supposed structuralism that he could never seem to jettison (Hardt and Negri 2000, 27–28). They neatly contrast Foucault to Deleuze and Guattari, with the latter’s “properly poststructuralist understanding of biopower” (28). But D & G, too, like Foucault, have a lacuna not salvageable even by their ‘poststructuralism’: “Deleuze and Guattari, however, seem to be able to conceive positively only the tendencies toward continuous movement and absolute flows, and thus their thought, too, the creative elements and the radical ontology of the production of the social remain insubstantial and impotent … manage to articulate [productivity of social reproduction] only superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate horizon marked by the ungraspable event” (28). Wow! In a similar manger, and given distinct emphases by Negri especially, to understanding power as ‘potential’ or ‘possibility’, the important distinction made by Deleuze and Guattari concerning the virtual/actual couplet in difference to a possible/real couplet is somewhat papered-over in a supposed ‘salvaging’ of “reality”—“its ontological weight”—from an overly-febrile Bergsonian “creative power.” See Hardt and Negri’s chapter, “Virtualities,” especially 356ff. We want to thank Stephen Zepke for drawing our attention to these reference points.

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related, the political philosophers Negri and Hardt provisionally, and for a while, offered the name “Empire.” We have noted that Agamben’s reading of biopolitics, with its Heideggerian and Benjaminian legacies, sees modernity as a moment where sovereign power intersects with politics, thereby problematizing life, such that life is conceived as bare life, forming a risk to what is proper to the human, with respect to ethics and politics. In contrast to Agamben, Negri and Hardt, from a Marxist tradition, see biopolitics as essentially an aspect of modern capitalism. If Agamben sees that modernity’s paradigm is the camp rather than the polis, Negri and Hardt suggest that contemporary politico-economic frameworks have replaced earlier forms centred on the nation-state, due to the increasing economic and political liberalisations of neo-liberalism, constituting a new hegemonic totality they call Empire (2000, xi).

8.3.3 Empire Movement to this new political formation of Empire is driven by the increasing ease of transportation of goods, capital, people and technology between nationstates, in part due to the removal of trade-tariffs and other mechanisms to modify production, that were once associated with Keynesian and Marxist economic management (xi). Negri and Hardt see that weakening of the nation-state affects sovereign power. Once solely the preserve of the nation-state, it is now diminished. However, sovereign power has not disappeared; rather, it has undergone transformation (xi).27 The sovereign power of Empire is not bound to a nation-state and is thus able to glide to-and-from the scales of the national and supranational (xii).28 Empire becomes an ordering logic that regulates global exchange (xi).29 Negri and Hardt see Empire as a political formation having significant implications for understanding geo-spatiality, with a different spatial logic to earlier nation-states, conceived as spatially-bound, correlative with Western conceptions of sovereign territory. In Negri and Hardt’s thinking, this conception of bounded territory of the nation-state was fundamental to European colonialism and economic expansion that sought to internalise itself and to exclude anything external to its own stability (xii).30 European colonialism also imported its own conception of territory onto the colonised, sectioning what 27 As

Hardt and Negri note: “The decline in sovereignty of nation-states, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined” (2000, xi—original emphasis). 28 Thus, they suggest: “Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire” (xii). 29 “Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world” (xi). 30 On imperialism and colonialism, Hardt and Negri suggest: “The territorial boundaries of the nation delimited the centre of power from which rule was exerted over external foreign territories through a system of channels and barriers that alternately facilitated and obstructed the flows of production and circulation. Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nationstates beyond their own boundaries. Eventually nearly all the world’s territories could be parcelled out and the entire world map could be coded in European colours: red for British territory, blue for

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it occupied, with its ordering procedures, techniques and regimes of veridictions, guaranteed by the sovereign law of an imperial nation-state-colonizer. In contrast, Empire cannot be correlated to an ordering-regime of imperial nation-states, with their trading blocks, that disregarded other blocks, to maintain their specific regimes, based on a centre/periphery model of capital of empire and distributed colonies.31 Nor is Empire concerned at all with space ordered according to boundaries. Rather, Empire operates as a de-territorialised environment that makes the older imperial order largely meaningless: In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred and de-territorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colours of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow. (xii–xiii)

Negri and Hardt suggest a geo-spatial reconfiguring, whose analysis is influenced by the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, concerning flows of capital between first, second and third worlds. In the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, these flows have become smoothed with the advent of globalised free-market economies, such that demarcations between first world and third world are scrambled, with second world now virtually non-existent (xiii).32 We now have: “a world defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenisation, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation” (xiii). These spatialising modifications are coupled with technological developments in economic production, whereby industrial labour-power is less prioritised, and “communicative, cooperative and affective labour” becomes more valued (xiii). This marks a shift from a striated nation-state and industrial modes of production to Empire, ordered on French, green for Portuguese, and so forth. Wherever modern sovereignty took root, it constructed a Leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical territorial boundaries, both to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other” (xii). 31 This can be seen in the rapacious strategizing of imperial powers in the nineteenth century for territory and resources, such as the so-called ‘scramble for Africa’, where European States divided much of Africa among themselves. This was seen as key to maintaining stability and security within Europe. Empires formed a reciprocal relationship with their colonies. With the case of the British Empire, the colonies produced raw materials and goods for Britain, while Britain sold back finished goods. They formed their own free-trade blocks that tried to exclude other imperial trading-blocks, and led to the exclusion of raw material supply to other imperial nation-states. This limiting of trade, in part, led to tensions for those outside the orbit of existing imperial blocks, explaining, to some extent, the imperial ambition of pre-war Japan, who saw itself excluded from the raw materials it needed for economic growth. 32 Hardt and Negri are referencing some of the ‘technical’ language developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A thousand plateaus (1987). They—Deleuze and Guattari—introduce the notions of smooth and striated towards the conclusion of their work (474–500), though this couple cannot be separated from earlier dyads developed in the work, such as nomad and sedentary, territorialized and deterritorialized, the Royal State and the War Machine. Guattari introduced these notions to Deleuze in their collaborative writing of Schizophrenia and capitalism, volume I, Anti-Oedipus (1977).

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smooth space.33 Technological changes in production and labour are now thought in terms of distribution and flows. These new forms of economic production Negri and Hardt link to the biopolitical, which they regard as blurring boundaries between the economic, the political and the cultural in the production of social life (xiii).34 This blurring means that there is not one dominant cultural, political or economic centre and, while Negri and Hardt regard the United States as the dominant contemporary political and economic power under the political formation of Empire, there can be no privileged centre of political power. This contrasts markedly with nineteenth-century models of European empire. With Empire, power is based on distributed networks (xiv).35 They regard Empire as having three fundamental conditions, in addition to its spatial determination of not being limited by territorial boundaries. Firstly, it is or is near to being a global totality (xiv). Secondly, Empire is unbounded by temporality. That is to say, Empire is not bound to historical event in the sense, for example, that it is not framed or determined by conquest; it is outside of history or at the end of history (xiv–xv). Thirdly, they argue that Empire expands through social relations: Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. (xv)

We may well see the Spinozism in this formulation of Empire. Nineteenth-century models of empire are seen as transcendent models, whose relations of force are 33 Deleuze and Guattari (1987) define the smooth and striated in the final ‘plateau’ of their ‘thousand’

plateaus, “1440: The smooth and striated”: “… smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (474). For Negri, biopower becomes something like a ‘floating signifier’ in search of its immanent signified, perhaps like the translations and reversals of the smooth and striated. We mentioned earlier that he seems to find an adequation of biopower with the immanence of a Heideggerian mit-sein or Spinozan multitudo. But equally, in what he terms a third transformation of capitalism, after mercantile and then industrial capitalism, into communications-capitalism, biopower is now adequate to an understanding of capital itself. 34 “In the post-modernisation of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another” (xiii). 35 Negri and Hardt recognise as problematic a reading that presumes the United States as the dominant global power and key example of contemporary economic and political imperialism, overtaking former European empires (xiii). This view, they suggest, figures the United States replacing the United Kingdom as principal global superpower. Such analysis often demarcates the nineteenth century as the “British century” and the twentieth century as the “American century” (xiii). Both proponents and opponents of American economic and political supremacy often hold this view, regarding hegemonic types of power as either ethico-morally positive or negative (xiii). Negri and Hardt argue, conversely, that it is indicative of new forms of sovereignty: “The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the centre of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were” (xiii–xiv). Negri and Hardt outline how the United State did not have the same privileged position as the European empire-states of the nineteenth century. Rather, the United States has remarkable differences. In particular, they link this to its Federalism and the importance of Thomas Jefferson, where power is based on distributed networks (2000: xiv).

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constituted, rather than constituent, whose regulatory mechanisms are contractualist rather than immanentist, whose peoples are distributed by the designation citizen or non-citizen, correlative with the distribution of right, recognition of nativity, inheritance, and sovereign power. Empire is Spinozist in its bearing; it is peopled with a multitude, which is more than just a re-naming exercise. It is an ontological disclosure of another thinking of power as exercised, power-as-emanating, and power-asproductive. If they see in our political contemporaneity new flows and distributions, they still see these in terms of what Foucault suggests as a threshold to modernity, a new relation to life and power.36 Negri and Hardt circumscribe a radical ontology of power, thereby mobilizing in their own way this term of Foucault’s, ‘biopower’. It is the political ontology of Empire. They thus see Empire as bio-power, stable and a-temporal (xv).37 Power and authority have shifted from the nation-state to a supranational globalisation, constituting the principal form of political power: “This is really the point of departure for our study of Empire: a new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts” (9).38 Thus they see this as a paradigm shift in terms of political power and in terms of global capital, arguing against the position that takes capitalism as an inherently global phenomenon (9–10). This has led to a shift in perspective from traditional international law, defined by contracts and treaties, to “a new sovereign, supra-national world power” allowing for the totalising social processes of Empire (10), such that: “juridical transformation functions as a symptom of the modifications of the material biopolitical constitution of our societies. These changes regard not only international law and international relations but also the internal power relations of each country”

36 See Negri (2006) for a depth discussion on Foucault. He emphasises the fundamental importance

of Foucault’s methodology: “With Foucault, historical analysis becomes an action, the knowledge of the past a genealogy, and the perspective-to-come, a dispositif ” (75). He recognises how Foucault “dismantles” Marxism while maintaining focus on the developments of capitalism and transformations of power to biopower. In this he recognises Foucault’s “rejection” of “transcendentalism” (78), hence his immanentism. He emphasises the double-reading of biopower, in terms of “society’s biopolitical response”: “no longer powers [pouvoirs] over life, but the power [puissance] of life as the response to these powers; in sum, real subsumption leads to the insurrection and proliferation of freedom, to the production of subjectivity and the invention of new forms of struggle” (80). 37 This transformation to Empire is complex, not only for the planetary implications of a capitalism that no longer seems bounded by nation-States and their juridical frameworks. In that sense, there is a universalism to capital as a break with the contractualism of State rights. On the other hand, this same phenomenon is open to a radical political reading of a global precariat, somewhat in the sense that we saw with Merrifield in Chapter 1. Hence, there is a possibility of reading this planetary capitalism equally as a transformative possibility to a universal ‘commons’. 38 Negri and Hardt see Empire as a global political formation that is polymorphous. They link Empire with globalisation, which they recognise as being multiple processes that are not “unified or univocal” (xv). Rather than simply resisting these forces, forces of Empire can be subverted so as to “reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends,” to allow for alterative political forms (xv).

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(10).39 Empire is paradigmatic of bio-politics, just as the camp was paradigmatic of bio-politics for Agamben. Empire is a transformation of international and supranational law, questioning sovereignty at the level of the supranational and questioning the very grounds of its legitimisation, which they see as “bringing into focus political, cultural, and finally ontological problems” (10).40

8.3.4 Empire and Biopower For Negri and Hardt the conceptualisation of Empire is based on three principal influences, namely Foucault’s analysis of the biopolitical, which is further complicated by Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the shift of episteme from disciplinary society to societies of control (22–23).41 And lastly, there is the role of a Spinozan understanding of 39 Negri and Hardt are playing on several terminologies: constitution does not only mean a juridical

framework of law codified in a formal constitution, but it is also what they call a material constitution, which is the formation and de-formation of social forces (2000: xiv). 40 Coleman and Agnew (2007) develop a detailed and cogent critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. We cite them in a highly abbreviated summary of their position: “Our point, then, is twofold: first, that Hardt and Negri present a state-centric account of how power works, which requires that power be either territorial or networked, and nothing in between; and, second, that they then go on to annex these two distinct spatialities of power to two distinct temporalities – modernity and postmodernity” (330). We also note the overt privileging—hypostatizing—of biopower as a word, a name, given by Foucault to say something about something, provisionally developed, not used really after SMBD. Even when featuring in the title for a lecture series, the word is not used. What it concerns is discussed, elaborated on, in great detail, though in other words, by other terms. Though, judging by the literature, this word caught on like grass fire in a heatwave. Everyone, for a while, was talking biopolitics. It certainly, for a while, was a cornerstone for Agamben. Though did he mean by the word what Foucault meant? We don’t think so. And does he use it much after the first of the Homo sacer books? Not really. Equally, Hardt and Negri pick up on this word, from out of a Foucauldian reservoir. Though they inflect it differently. It means something a little different, though not unrelated. The word, in a sense, and quite nicely, sums up much of Foucault’s trajectory from his second lecture series to his fourth, a concern with engaging the emergence of capitalism, with the emergence of a bourgeois class and an urban proletariat, institutional mechanisms of training and control, extensions of judicial powers, though ambiguous inasmuch as they are normalizing rather than incarcerating: differential applications of legalities. His meticulous accounts of social mechanisms were in terms that avoided either liberal histories of capitalism or Marxist histories, notwithstanding Foucault’s recourse, at times, to terminology approaching that of Althusser (for example, ‘state apparatuses’). We see where he resists that analysis. Though, it is capitalism he is discussing from the vantage of the corporeality of an emerging labour power, along with the entwining of a medico-juridical complex. We can understand, then, why Negri (with Hardt) makes seemingly interchangeable the expressions ‘biopower’ and ‘capital’. 41 Hardt and Negri comment: “We should understand the society of control, in contrast, as that society (which develops at the far edge of modernity and opens toward the postmodern) in which mechanisms of command become ever more ‘democratic’, ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviours of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorised within the subjects themselves. Power is now exercised through machines that directly organise the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, monitored activities, etc.) toward a

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politics, that we see in Negri’s earlier work. As such, we see the differentiation in how Negri comes to read biopolitics and biopower (Casarino and Negri 2004, 152). This difference, between biopolitics and biopower, is not initially so apparent in English, as we have one word for power. However, this difference does exist in a number of European languages, with Negri distinguishing in Italian between potere and potenza (see Negri 1999, 2, n.3).42 These two terms shape how he will come to understand the difference between biopolitics and biopower, each having a somewhat different emphasis. Potere is closest to how power is thought conventionally in English, with Negri conceiving it as being linked to authority, such as pre-existing and centralised power structures, typically of institutional apparatuses, such as the State (2). Potere is, thus, linked to constituted power with its concern with how power shapes and is modified by political and State institutions. Contrasted to potere is potenza, while translated as ‘strength’ in Insurgencies (1999), is also etymologically closer to the English for ‘potential’ and ‘potentiality’. These correspond to Negri’s concern—with the notion of potenza—for future possibilities and transformative effects, linked to what he terms constituent power. Potenza, in contrast to potere, is decentralised and is linked to the radically democratic forces and desires of the multitude (2, n.3). Here potenza is an open potential, alluding to Spinoza’s conception of potentiality. If we describe this in a (slightly reductionist) Deleuzian sense, potere would be thought as that which territoralises, while potenza deterritoralises. These three influences on Negri’s conceptualisation of the biopolitical thus develop different emphases to Foucault’s understanding. Yet, Negri sees parallels and equivalencies in Foucault’s engagement with the subject as a movement-offreedom (liberalism) in contexts of State racism, leading to a question of biopolitics articulating a process of productive force (potenza), in humans producing themselves as subjects. We cannot underestimate the importance of this for Negri, who is state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity. The society of control might thus be characterised by an intensification and generalisation of the normalising apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks. … Disciplinary society is that society in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices. Putting this society to work and ensuring obedience to its rule and its mechanisms of inclusion and/or exclusion are accomplished through disciplinary institutions (the prison, the factory, the asylum, the hospital, the university, the school, and so forth) that structure the social terrain and present logics adequate to the “reason” of discipline. Disciplinary power rules in effect by structuring the parameters and limits of thought and practice, sanctioning and prescribing normal and/or deviant behaviours” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 23). We recognise the repetition and elaboration on Deleuze’s short text “Societies of control,” that we discussed at the opening to Chapter 6. Our reservations concerning Deleuze’s ‘extending’ of Foucault, without genuinely taking into account what Foucault understands by security and its apparatuses, which from our reading are coterminous with biopower, skews to a one-sided reading of the nexus between disciplinary mechanisms and juridical structures. We would make the same prognosis with Hardt and Negri, though also recognise they are, as well, extending Deleuze’s reading through a more elaborate Spinozan engagement with population as multitude. 42 The Italian potenza and potere correspond to the French puissance and pouvoir, the German macht and vermögen, and the Latin potentia and potestas.

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able to recognise “humanism” after the “end of Man,” in a positive sense (Casarino and Negri 2004, 165). This “humanism,” as discussed in Empire, rejects a transcendental humanism, and thus “reaffirms human power [potenza] as a power [potenza] of the artificial, as the power to build artfully [la potenza del costruire con arte]” (165). This humanism Negri links to the emergence of Renaissance anthropocentrism, as the moment when being-human was seen as productive force (potenza): “a humanism that understands and defines human beings at once as artificers and tools” (165). Negri sees the productive force of potenza with respect to subjectivity. Yet, in his extended interview “It’s a powerful life: A conversation on contemporary philosophy” (2004), his interlocutor, Cesare Casarino, questions his lack of discussion concerning Foucault’s reading of biopolitics in terms of sexuality as a key technology of power in modernity. For Foucault, sexuality is organised and managed via a series of apparatuses instituted in modern government and by capital (165–166). Negri disagrees with Casarino, seeing discourse on sexual difference as over-determined, and Foucault never reducing sexuality to this. Yet, his response still neglects to recognise Foucault’s reading of sexuality as part of a series of apparatuses that have their concern with the management of health and population (166). Negri would rather account for this relation of sexuality and biopolitics in Marxian terms, as conditions of production, where there is a coinciding of reproduction with production (165–166). His reading of biopolitics develops more so from Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, important for his conceptualisation of, as well as deviation from, Foucault (167). Negri moves in a different direction, with a concern for labour and, in doing so, clarifies something in Foucault that he considered undefined, namely, the difference between—or relations of—biopolitics to biopower: “Biopolitics, on the one hand, turns into biopower (biopotere) intended as the institution of a dominion over life, and, on the other hand, turns into biopower (biopotenza) intended as the potentiality of constituent power” (167). The relations of biopower as biopotenza or biopotere therefore further complicate Negri’s reading of biopolitics, such that biopolitics, conceived as biopower (biopotenza), is life (bios) that creates power, whereas biopolitics as biopower (biopotere) is power that creates life (bios) and thus tries to “determine or annul life, that posits itself as power against life” (167).43 Negri’s reading of biopolitics and biopower moves from a Foucauldian reading to one that “attempted to turn it into a fully Spinozist concept” (167). This Spinozan reading of politics, as immanent action, distinguishes Negri’s from more orthodox Marxian readings, whose political theory is typically defined by transcendent categories. Casarino suggests that Negri’s thought is mediated by a series of dualisms in a similar way to Deleuze’s dyad of the virtual and the actual, itself linked to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza (Deleuze 1990) and Henri Bergson’s binary relations to be found in Deleuze’s Bergsonism (1991) (160–161). But, then, Negri stresses that his reading of potestas and potentia 43 We might well encapsulate his differential reading of Spinoza and Heidegger on precisely this difference. Heidegger’s being is an annulling constituted powering over life, while Spinoza’s being is an affirming powering, immanent to life. We would want to complicate this via Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s will-to-power, precisely as a culminating of a tradition of German Idealism whose immanence-as-system is derived from Spinoza.

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does not coincide with Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, seeing it as irrelevant to his Spinozan reading (160–161). In a 2000 interview with Giuseppe Cocco and Maurizio Lazzarato (Negri 2000), Negri explains in more detail the ambivalent relations then held by the United States in terms of its global dominance, with respect to Empire: “There is a hegemony which might look like the hegemony of American capitalism, but I am convinced that Italian capitalism, German capitalism, French capitalism are likewise implicated in this operation” (190). Negri recognises that opposed to this network-capitalism of the “non-place” of Empire, is the multitude. How do we come to recognise this? There are two ‘operables’, or rather two modalities of struggle. One implicates a “desertion,” though in a positive sense of a power of rebelling “against the relations of power or nexus of capital,” producing moments of refusal. The other implicates a “transmutation of values” inasmuch as what we have held to be the differences of public and private—originary oikos and polis—are no longer of value. Their transmutation is to a ‘commons’: “The big problem then is that the transmutation of values must exit and must lead to a decision” (193). Though, now perhaps sounding a little like Derrida (or Heidegger) on ‘decision’, such ‘decision’ is itself evental-process, arising from the very transforming of the world that is the multitude’s commons. Though, in a 2011 interview with Negri by Judith Revel (Revel and Negri 2011), we recognise that Negri has aligned his understanding of the commons in terms of a multiplicity of urban revolts then surfacing, along with recognising an amalgam of a new proletariat “made of precarious and unemployed workers” who “join the middle classes in crisis” (n.p.). He is writing in the context of the global financial crisis, austerity measures in the Euro-zone, and spontaneous public assemblies, such as those we have already discussed in Chapter 1: “These revolts are born, in Egypt, Spain, or England, out of the simultaneous refusal of the subjection, exploitation and plunder this economy has prepared for the lives of entire populations of the world” (n.p.) which Negri terms “biopolitical appropriation.” Hence, his prognoses in Empire seem somewhat confirmed by the global financial crash, which while originating in the U.S., happened because of the complexity of interlocking derivatives debts in a global systemic banking network that no one nation-state controlled.44 It is not, then, surprising that when Negri discusses the insurrection of the Gilets Jaunes in Paris and elsewhere in France, he recognises the presence of the multitude: “There is undoubtedly in France a multitude that is rising up with violence against a new misery wrought by neoliberal reforms. A multitude that protests the reduction of the labour-force to the precariat and the constraints on civil life posed by insufficient public services” (Negri 2018, n.p.). His concluding point to this short blog is that the precariat will never be in the position of “coming to power,” as the proletariat once thought possible. The possibility is otherwise: “systematically keeping an insurrectionist movement open” (n.p.). This, indeed, is the Spinozist potentiality of a constituting politics: to be incomplete and ongoing, to stall any congealing movement towards a constituent power. 44 See also Revel’s extended interview with Negri in 2016, that further complicates an understanding of Negri’s Spinozism, his Marxism, and his understanding of a spiritual life (Revel 2016).

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8.3.5 Agamben and Negri Agamben’s Homo sacer was published some years after the appearance of Negri’s Insurgencies and Agamben offers a brief and curious critique of it in his book. It amounts to an extraordinary valuation of Nergi’s thinking in its potential to eclipse, in toto, Agamben’s entire thesis on the sovereign ban—but not yet. Agamben emphasises the far-reaching implications of Negri’s articulating of constituting power: “the praxis of a constituting act, renewed in freedom, organized in the continuity of a free praxis” (cited in Agamben 1998, 43). Agamben’s question is: what determined the difference between constituting power and sovereign power? (43). Constituent power is not determined by constituted power, nor does it determine it. As “free praxis” it is, as Agamben might say elsewhere, a means without end. Yet Agamben cannot find in Negri’s account how constituent-constituting power would be exterior to the sovereign ban. Though the corrective Agamben immediately applies to this critique of a kind of totalizing bind of the sovereign, is that Negri himself moves all too assuredly from political concepts to ontology, “from political philosophy to first philosophy” (44). Negri abandons his constituency! Constituting power is the articulating of an ontological question of constituting potentiality, which is to say a question of potentiality and actuality. This would be in Negri’s differentiation of potere and potenza. The problem is that there is currently an insufficiently coherent ontology of potentiality for a political ontology of actuality to displace the paradigm of the sovereign ban: Only an entirely new conjunction of possibility and reality, contingency and necessity, and the other pathe tou ontos, will make it possible to cut the knot that binds sovereignty to constituting power. And only if it is possible to think the relation between potentiality and actuality differently—and even to think beyond this relation—will it be possible to think a constituting power wholly released from the sovereign ban. (44)45

This is the case, notwithstanding the good work done already in this direction by Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche and Heidegger (44). One wonders though, given that Agamben is pronouncing on potentiality, constituting powers, power as possibility to be, and actuality, that he has pronounced on the possibility of the “knot” of the sovereign ban being “cut,” and therefore on the possibility of an actuality such that an outside to the paradigm of sovereignty would happen.46 Of course, the moment 45 We recognize that this is precisely what Agamben considers he has done with his counter-notion of destituent power (Agamben 2014), that we have already discussed in Chapter 1. We return, in what follows, to discuss this reworking of potentiality and actuality by Agamben, in his ontological engagement with the notion of ‘use’, along with his radical understanding of inoperativity. We also need to remember from Chapter 1 our discussion on Agamben’s understanding of Greek civil war, itself informed in part by the work of Nicole Loraux (Loraux 2002). 46 It is also the case that Agamben has made it one of his philosophical tasks to engage with Aristotle on potentiality. We have noted his 1999 collection of essays, Potentialities, whose varied and polymorphous themes take us back repeatedly to Aristotle’s fundamental relations of dynamis and energia. Again, we will say something more on this in what follows.

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one thinks the sovereign and sovereign ban in Spinozist terms, as we have addressed earlier, there is no antimony between the absolute and freedom. Thus, Negri points out that Agamben’s main objection actually resides in the juridical-legal basis of this difference (Casarino and Negri 2004, 176). Negri is not even concerned that there is no clear divide between these terms, as his reading of power is not reducible to the problem of law (177). Casarino references Agamben’s position in his Means without end (2000), concerned with the predominant ontological tradition that determines potentiality as means to an end, subordinating potentiality to act. In fact, in Homo sacer, immediately following his discussion on Negri, Agamben references the classical philosophical text on the matter, Aristotle’s Book Theta of the Metaphysics, on dynamis and energia, though he does not refer to Heidegger’s 1931 lecture course on the topic, that seems to thoroughly inform Agamben’s position (Heidegger 1995). Agamben seeks to conceive of potentiality as a force removed from the teleological question of action or event, thus potentially severing as the quest-ion of the act as such, producing a ‘means without ends’ (Casarino and Negri 2004, 179). Casarino agrees up to a point with the “enslaving effect” of conceiving of a telos of potentiality as act. Yet, in breaking this relation, it does not necessarily mean that the whole question of actualisation is dissolved or becomes irrelevant (179). Perhaps there is a radical re-conceptualization of potentiality and act: “as being immanent to each other, that is, as distinct yet indiscernible from each other. It is only by rethinking both at once in such a way that ‘a new and coherent ontology of potentiality’ can at all come into being” (179). Casarino emphasises that Agamben is discussing an ontology-to-come, and suggests that Deleuze offers possible clues to such an ontology of potentiality in the dyad of ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’, as ways of thinking potentiality and act (179).47 The actual is not eliminated, though is suppressed to the virtual. Equally, the virtual is not theorised in isolation to the actual as they constitute an immanent circuit (179, n.15). The virtual and actual allow us to apprehend the same event, just as the actualization of the virtual never constitutes an impoverishment or mortification of the virtual, because such an actualization always produces, in its turn, still other virtualities (179).

8.3.6 Cities Without Citizens Foucault’s theorisation of the biopolitical, as with his other political analyses, questioned the ways power is organised. Rather than seeing power as a static series of relations, as in hierarchical structures or as a substrate, power was seen as exercised, 47 We would suggest that Deleuze encounters Foucault’s ontologies of power and knowledge precisely in these terms, as immanent planes of receptivity of un-formalized matter and spontaneity of non-finalized functions, along with the receptivity of formed matter and spontaneity of finalized functions. And, in this sense, for Foucault, an ontology of self—thought—is an event of an outside: an open possibility to become (see Deleuze 1988).

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fluid, affective force, whose processes interact in a complex manner. The biopolitical is just one governmental strategy, whose principal concerns are the health of populations. As we have seen, this operates on various registers and was linked to the emergence of the biological sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coincident with mercantile and industrial capitalism requiring a docile and trained labour force. As we discussed in Chapter 2, health is conceived not just as a moral and individuated good, but as vital for the stability of the State and the economy. Hence, we recognise the importance of Foucault’s comments on the role of the biopolitical in capitalist society. Rather than it being an egregious strategy by industrialists, it is both a by-product of strategies for growth in population, as well as the need for security, in the management of risk, averting epidemics, endemics and evaluating the economic cost of the ill. While Foucault may not have anticipated the various reapplications of the biopolitical, or even the continued longevity of that word in its circulation, the theorists we have discussed each find similarities, differences, or fault with Foucault, each in his or her appropriation of shifts in terminology, or shifts from politics to ontology, that open new horizons in its (biopolitic’s) usage. Earlier in this chapter we referenced the edited collection by Cadava and Levy, Cities without citizens (2003), and its politically radical project of inventing new paradigms for a politics of belonging. Such a move for the reinvention of the city, contingent on its own future possibility, allows for a radical shift in how we define both city and citizen. In such a redefining, we suggest that ‘city’ shifts in how we potentially understand it, in that sense outlined by Agamben in Homo sacer—the citizen reduced to bare life, indistinction between camp, city, and house, as well as the biological and political body (Agamben 1998, 188): “It is becoming increasingly impossible for it to function, and we must expect not only new camps but also always new and more lunatic regulative definitions of the inscription of life in the city. The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” (176). Agamben, writing in Cities without citizens, perhaps suggests how to reconsider things. He examines the status of the refugee with regard to the weakening of the nation-state and the breakdown of traditional juridical-political categories within it (Agamben 2003, 4).48 For Agamben, this means that the refugee is more than a displaced individual. Rather, the refugee becomes central to the re-conceptualization of the political, such that traditional classifications are no longer operable. The refugee becomes pivotal for thinking the future of political community (4), what Negri would think of as the commons. Agamben relates emerging crises of refugees and stateless peoples, as a “mass-phenomena,” to the dissolution of European empires after World War I, radically changing the relation of individuals to the State (4). No longer was that relation based on what Foucault called, in The will to knowledge, a “society of blood,” as a non-temporal and non-spatial relation of sovereign to subject (Foucault 1978, 147). This relation was replaced by nation-states constituted on demographics and based on language, ethnicity (ethnos) and a relation to territory. 48 As we have previously mentioned, Agamben bases his analysis on Hannah Arendt’s 1943 article “We Refugees”.

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This meant that citizenship could be taken or replaced, determining an individual as refugee or stateless. The former has a State but ‘chooses’ not to reside there for whatever reason—threats of violence or persecution—the latter is based on legal denaturalisation and denationalisation, which served as a dividing practice, designed to remove those deemed not to be part of a nation-state (Agamben 2003, 4–5). Agamben recognises that throughout the twentieth century there were a series of international organisations created to protect the rights of displaced persons, though he sees their overall effectiveness to be limited, due to issues arising from the nature of the nation-state and its juridical ordering (6). Here is especially a crisis moment with respect to the Rights of Man, which relies on a symbiotic relation with the nation-state.49 As such, the figure of the refugee highlights the weakness of this relation, as this is predicated on the rights of the citizen, rather than what might be called an inalienable right to being human, or even to being life.50 Hence, the status of the refugee is seen merely as a temporary condition—once naturalised or repatriated, the refugee is reintegrated into the nationstate (6–7). Human rights were, paradoxically or incongruously, fundamental for the movement of juridical-legal production of bare life in the nation-state (7). Agamben argues that the growth of refugee populations, rather than being marginal, in fact unbinds the tripartite relationship of “state-nation-territory” such that it forms a “limit-concept” for rethinking community (8).51 Thus he argues that in conceiving of political ontology, the refugee must be set apart from the conception of both human rights and asylum (8). The status of the refugee, or stateless individual, is also complicated by the growth of permanent non-citizens or “denizens” who do not desire to be naturalised in the countries where they reside, or be repatriated to the State of their nativity. However, they do wish to benefit either economically or socially from the State in which they live (9).52 In doing so, they raise the question 49 Agamben’s critique is advanced from Arendt’s chapter, “The decline of the nation-state and the end of the Rights of Man,” in the section “Imperialism,” in The origins of totalitarianism (1976). It explores the link between these categories, understanding the weakening of the nation-state, homologous with a decline in the Rights of Man (Agamben 2003, 6). 50 Agamben gives the example of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et citoyen, which embeds an ambiguity as to whether the categories Man and Citizen are distinct or coexistent (Agamben 2003, 6). 51 The refugee camp, Agamben points out, was designed for controlling movements of refugees, and he makes the link between the refugee internment camp and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. In contrast to Agamben’s example, we must not see a direct causal link, or not overly stress this link, between the two. We need to be aware of this, as Agamben tells us of the problematic danger of predicating human rights on the “state-nation-territory” triad, especially when caught up (as was the case in Nazi Germany) with pseudo-scientific notions of ethnos. This is what Foucault describes in The will to knowledge (1978) with the shift from a “society of blood” to a “society of sex,” based on the biological concern for race (Foucault 1978, 147). This “danger” is the danger of thinking’s practices that reductively collapse ethics into a calculative framework, or a calculative way of thinking that does not take ethics, at all, into account. 52 Agamben credits Tomas Hammar with coining the term “denizen” for non-citizen residents. This seems not to be the case, as the word has been in English usage since the fifteenth century, meaning either an inhabitant of a place, or foreign non-citizen resident. Interestingly, the latter meaning, in the U.K., described a granting by letters-patent of denization directly by the Sovereign, as opposed

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of rethinking the nation-state and the role of the ‘native’, or who is ‘native’, with regard to a “state-nation-territory” triad (9). Agamben suggests that while it is problematic to conceive of or predict how this might be actualised, there are examples where these categories are blurred. Jerusalem, with respect to the question of territorial ownership and control, is simultaneously the capital of two States. Its condition is based on “reciprocal extraterritoriality (or … aterritoriality) …” (9). Agamben argues that this could, paradoxically, become a new model for the re-conceptualization of territory and boundary conditions, rather than current models that produce large scale dividing mechanisms, such as the growth of wall constructions in Israel/Palestine or the Mexico/United States borders. Agamben imagines an arrangement where different political communities (States) could exist via a state of reciprocal extraterritorialities (9). We are able to read here that ontology of the “camp” from Homo sacer, that dislocating-locating of the exception, a radical outside or exteriority, as the internality, or essential conditions, of being. However, this resonance with the exception, in extra-territorialities, has a different modulation, a different modifying of the question of power and freedom than we saw in the bleak portrayal of every city understood, paradigmatically, as a camp. One might even say, in an aftermath to Homo sacer, Agamben has learnt to hope. Unlike embassies or territorial oddities, such as the Bangladeshi-Indian enclaves or those of BelgiumNetherlands communities of Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau (as embassies or enclaves exist as territorial pockets within another State), Agamben’s aterritories would not coincide with the territory but co-exist simultaneously as if territory is no longer operational. Perhaps an example of this can be seen in the fictional novel The city and the city (2009) by China Miévielle, which parallels Agamben’s aterritory. In the novel, there are two completely separate cities Bes´zel and Ul Qoma that share exactly the same urban space whilst having completely independent and separate citizens and juridical systems. However, unlike Agamben’s aterritory, citizens in the novel live as if they inhabit two completely separate cities. They have trained themselves to “unsee” the citizens of the respective other city while inhabiting the same urban space. This would be a peculiar ‘panopticism’, a curious disciplinary encounter with blindness. Though, one does see this kind of training or perspectivalism on a daily basis as one encounters, in any and every city, the homeless, the begging poor, and disabled, who often confine themselves to civic squares or parks at the centre of cities. With Miévielle’s novel, such practices of separation are enforced so that inhabitants are punished if they recognise “other” citizens, or recognise that the two cities they inhabit are the same. Agamben’s aterritory, unlike Miéville’s overlaid political communities, operates not according to juridical practices based on Right (ius), or based on citizenship, but based on the refugee (refugium). Agamben sees this as a state of ongoing and open exodus, operating spatially, not in homogenous transnational territory, such as is the case with the 1997 Schengen Agreement that allows to naturalization legislated by the Crown (State), as outlined in The Naturalization Act of 1870. The same Act stripped citizenship from British women who married foreign nationals, indicative of the same juridical process of de-nationalization that Agamben describes.

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free passage for citizens of the European Union within Europe. Rather, the spatiality is radically distending, in a shifting manner, which likens the spatial locating to the topological movements of a Möbius strip (10). This state of exodus would mean the dissolution of citizenship based on birth, further confounding the notion of people that would have to be reconceptualised beyond traditional political categories (10).53 This would mean two things: firstly, that the refugee is the political figure par excellence. As Agamben suggests: “Only in a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognise the refugee that he or she is—only in such a world is the political survival of humankind today thinkable” (11). Secondly, this offers hope for renewal of political categories that seem to be missing from Homo sacer. Certainly, if we stop reading at the point where Agamben declares: “The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” (Agamben 1998, 176), we would fail to recognise that, for Agamben, the camp only seems inescapable in his reading of contemporary politics, and is problematized by the conceptualisation of people. This would, for Agamben, allow for a “fundamental biopolitical fracture within itself” (178). One wonders to what extent Agamben’s “people” owes a conceptualizing debt to Negri’s rigorous thinking through the legacies of Spinoza’s multitudo. It is this “biopolitical fracture” that offers hope of a future community to-come so that: “Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth” (180).54

53 On Negri’s understanding of the ‘power of exodus’, see his interview with Cocco and Lazzarato (Negri 2002). We earlier quoted Negri on a ‘desertion’ or exodus that opens to a ‘transmutation of values’, instantiating the commons. See also Negri’s discussion on the notion of ‘junkspace’ developed by the architect, Rem Koolhaas (Koolhaas 2002), in Negri (2009). 54 Cesare Casarino has published a number of extended discussions with Negri, one of which we have earlier referenced. His 2009 article, “Universalism of the common,” offers a curious difference to Negri’s emphasis on a transvaluing of value as opening to the commons. For Casarino, it is a matter of thinking Marx’s ‘surplus’ but no longer any notion of value: “… the problem with surplus value is not surplus but value … exploitation does not lie in the production of surplus per se but lies instead specifically in the production in and as value” (163). Casarino pits value against common: being valuable or being in-common. The difficulty is to conceive of a political praxis outside of any notion of value, which Casarino thinks in terms of a work of poiesis, a work of art (174). This has an uncanny resonance with Heidegger on two counts. It is Heidegger, who from his first lectures in 1919, railed against any philosophical system (neo-Kantian in this case) based on value, which he understood in terms of calculative reason. Secondly, in order to think again the challenging-forth of calculative-instrumental reason in productionist metaphysics, he poses—with Hölderlin—the poiesis of a bringing-forth. Perhaps there is further room for thinking Spinoza and Heidegger in common. Perhaps the crucial ‘hinge’ is Blanchot, who is quoted at the end of Casarino’s text, precisely on a refusal of a Nietzschean transvaluation of all values (174). See also Casarino (2002) and Casarino and Negri (2008).

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8.3.7 Hospitality The figure of the refugee allows for the possibility to rethink political categories of the citizen. However, it also allows for a re-conceptualization of the city, whereby the condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality would allow cities to “rediscover their ancient vocation of cities of the world” (Agamben 2003, 10). Notwithstanding the antagonisms we have outlined on the part of Derrida to the political writings of Agamben, Agamben’s conception of the refugee may be considered in relation to Derrida’s reading of the foreigner in Of hospitality (2000), that explores the problem in classical thought of the role of hospitality and foreigner. Derrida teases out a paradoxical set of relations between these two categories and, in doing so, complicates their interrelationship. He does this via analysis of the key notions initially undertaken by the French philologist and Structuralist linguist, Émile Benveniste.55 Derrida explores the divergent meaning of the Latin for foreigner “based on the two Latin derivations: the foreigner (hostis) welcomed as guest or as enemy: hospitality, hostility, hospitality” (Derrida 2000, 45). Derrida emphasises how this ambiguity affects our contemporary “techno-political-scientific mutation” (45). In classical thought, the terms “foreigner” and “hospitality” were complicating, and mutually non-contradictory. Whereas we now find, within contemporary political frameworks, as Derrida points out, there is “a rigorous delimitation of thresholds or frontiers” between what is foreign/non-foreign, or the citizen/non-citizen (47–48). Here Derrida makes a link between the logic of law and Kant’s juridical thinking in “Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch” (Kant 2006). For Kant, the role of hospitality is assured, and the foreigner is accepted as a human being. However, this is located within the law. That is to say, it is conditional: “Hospitality is due to the foreigner, certainly, but remains, like the law, conditional, and thus conditioned in its dependence on the unconditionality that is the basis of the law” (71). This would be a point not lost on Agamben, who would see, on the one hand, the violence at work in the law inscribing the welcoming of the foreigner and, on the other hand, the unconditionality of law as precisely that which founds exceptionality. See also Kant (1964) on moral law. Though, here Derrida distinguishes between two types of hospitality, which are based on two differing forms of law, setting up a paradoxical situation, or antinomy, between conditional and unconditional hospitality (77).56 Thus two laws: the law 55 These notions are found in Benveniste (1973), Le vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes/Indo-European language and society. 56 Derrida’s use of the term “antinomy” while actually meaning “paradox,” plays a double-move, in that the etymology of the word comes from the Greek antinomos, literally meaning “against-law,” playing out his concern with Law. With this antimony, there is a curious resonance precisely with Foucault, and especially that Foucault found in need of correcting—or extending—by Agamben. Derrida emphasizes, on the one hand, a legal provision, sovereign law, and on the other hand, a normalizing regime, sovereign juridical procedures and techniques of normalization. These are precisely the two modalities of power that Foucault emphasized undergoing significant modification at the end of the eighteenth century. And it is these two, now determined by Derrida to be’ antinomal’, that Agamben found requiring a unifying theory of power in the sovereign ban.

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of welcoming the foreigner; the other a normative condition that sets space for the foreigner (79–80). This forms an ethical problem for Derrida, namely: how do we, as hosts, respond to the foreigner? (131): “The problem of hospitality was coextensive with the ethical problem. It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home” (2000, 151). While both thinkers engage with different approaches to the question of the refugee or the foreigner, each proposes a type of ethics or ethos of trying to engage, beyond categories of law and territorial demarcations, that are by-productions of juridical practices. Both return to the foreign, but as home, in a sense refusing categories of interior and exterior, belonging and not-belonging. The foreigner is not reducible to the refugee or stateless, until that moment when every being is stateless, as originary possibility-to-be, at which point every belonging is the dispossession of a refugee, and every condition is that of becoming-foreign.57 Agamben, in The coming community (1993), asks if there could be a community without any conditions of belonging, or operating in the absence of conditions, an unconditional community (Agamben 1993, 84). In rejecting all conditions of belonging and identity, inhabitation problematizes key juridical aspects to the State (87). This would be a politics to-come: Language opens the possibility of not-being, but at the same time it also opens a stronger possibility: existence, that something is. What the principle properly says, however, is that existence is not an inert fact that a potius, a power, inheres in it. But this is not a potentiality to be that is opposed to a potentiality to not-be (who would decide between these two?); it is a potentiality to not not-be. The contingent is not simply the non-necessary, that which can not-be, but that which, being the thus, being only its mode of being, is capable of the rather, cannot not-be. (Being-thus is not contingent, it is necessarily contingent. Nor is it necessary; it is contingently necessary). (105)

We recognise a ‘return’, in a sense, to the discussion we earlier had concerning Derrida’s recognition of the law of the oikos as grounding ground of metaphysics’ identity-formation, constituting the double-bind of hospitality and belonging, along with a ‘biodeconstruction’ of lifedeath, that inflects on to Agamben’s understanding of the contingent necessity of be-ing. Though, in the last of his Homo sacer books, Agamben engages more fully with how he thinks destituent power, in terms of the contingent necessity of inoperativity as potentiality to not-be, which comprises a ‘proper’ form-of-life as necessary modality-of-being. We discuss this in some detail in concluding this chapter, in the context of recognising an uncanny repetition or return to Heidegger, in Agamben’s curious philological excavation of the Greek— Aristotelian—understanding of ‘use’. We see that what Agamben calls ‘necessity’ and what he calls ‘use’ have uncanny resonance. 57 The key Heidegger text for both Derrida and Agamben would be his 1942 lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn, “The Ister,” on the Chorus to Sophocles’ Antigone (Heidegger 1996). Heidegger explores the perennial task of humans to becoming-homely within the unhomely (115–122). At one point, Heidegger cites the closing of Hölderlin’s “In beautiful blue”: “Life is death and death is also life” (118). Heidegger reads this in light of a Greek understanding expressed in the words of Antigone: “… she name being itself. This is the ground of being homely, the hearth” (118). In this sense, for Heidegger, being is lifedeath, expressed in the emerging-submerging of the homelyunhomely, what Derrida might recognise as the imbricating of spacing and alterity.

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8.4 Needing Use 8.4.1 Stowaway of the Political Agamben commences his concluding book in the Homo sacer series with a curious prologue, a foreword concerning Guy Debord, the French political theorist and ‘practitioner’ of the city, of the Society of the Spectacle. We may remember from Chapter 1’s discussion of the work of Andy Merrifield, the centrality of Debord to Merrifield’s own intoxication with Paris as ur-city.58 Agamben’s short comment is acute for the manner whereby it draws out, a little obscurely and pre-emptively, what is to become his return to a theme or concern central to a much earlier work, that theme of a ‘form-of-life’ introduced in Means without end (2000), something we referenced towards the end of the last chapter, in terms of Daniel Smith’s likening of this notion to Foucault’s ‘ethics-of-self’ or ‘aesthetics-of-self’.59 Agamben discusses an “insufficiency in private life,” exemplified in Debord’s works, an “intransmissible” and clandestine existing of a life, within which he finds a hidden circuit between the political and a ‘form-of-life’, where this privacy of the clandestine is the becoming-be-stowing of the political: Here there is something like a central contradiction, which the Situationists never succeeded in working out, and at the same time something precious that demands to be taken up again and developed—perhaps the obscure, unavowed awareness that the genuinely political element consists precisely in this incommunicable, almost ridiculous clandestinity of private life. Since clearly it—the clandestine, our form-of-life—is so intimate and close at hand, if we attempt to grasp it, only impenetrable, tedious everydayness is left in our hands. (Agamben 2017, 1021)

This something—a central contradiction—that the Situationists never seemed to ‘work out’ becomes central to Agamben’s understanding of the notion of use, the use of a life that would not itself be absorbed entirely, or entirely used-up, in the works that this life supposedly accomplished. Is there a notion of use that is not fully resolvable in the telos of actuality? Agamben goes further, to wonder if what we might call “genuinely” ‘political’ resides not in the actualizing of works, but in a ‘use’ that is life’s ‘stowaway’, hidden, private. Politics leads to shipwrecks for those 58 See

Merrifield’s book-length engagement, Guy Debord (2005). seems to us to have a curious lineage or line of descent that we cannot entirely see when reading Agamben. We are alerted to it in reading Furio Jesi’s Spartakus, a book we will return to in our concluding chapter. Jesi uses the expression ‘form-of-life’, quoting it from his reference to György Lukács’s Soul and Form. Lukács notes: “A bourgeois profession as a form of life signifies, in the first place, the primacy of ethics in life—life dominated by something that recurs systematically and regularly” (Lukács 2010, 77; Jesi 2014, 25). Though Agamben has written on Jesi (see Agamben 2019), and would be more than familiar with Lukács’s Soul and Form, it is curious he does not reference or mention either when discussing form-of-life in Means without end and The use of bodies. It strikes us that Lukács’s understanding of the notions of ‘form’ and ‘life’, their relations concerning ethics, aesthetics and self-transforming, offers something important. See Farkas (2017), Brown (1989), Crow (1978), and Markus (1977). 59 Form-of-Life

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who stow away,60 while Agamben sees the same old divisions of zo¯e and bios playing themselves out, in their mutuality, divisibility and indeterminacy. His task, the one he pronounces, offers a familiar resonance with the involuting of these doubles: “And yet, only if thought is able to find the political element that has been hidden in the secrecy of singular existence, only if, beyond the split between public and private, political and biographical, zo¯e and bios, it is possible to delineate the contours of a form-of-life and of a common use of bodies, will politics be able to escape from its muteness and individual biography from its idiocy” (1026). The key notion that concerns us is that of the ‘common’, a ‘common use of bodies’, in the sense that we have discussed this when engaging Agamben and Negri. Again, we refer back to Chapter 1’s discussion of Merrifield, his Spinozist ontology of the city, his understanding of the precariat.61 Though, in pursuing this, Agamben, the philologist of ancient Greek, takes note of the way Aristotle’s Politics discusses the city in terms of oikiai, households, defining their “perfect form” in terms of their composition: that of slaves and of those who are free. Aristotle defines the nature of the slave in a peculiar fashion, though one entirely amenable to Agamben’s proclivity for involuting binaries. The slave, in effect, is that being whose work is the use of its body. Aristotle’s expression is he tou somatos chresis, “the use of the body” (1029). In defining the master-slave relation, Aristotle recognises this, more generally, as a relation of the soul (psyche) to the body. Though the soul-body relation is to be distinguished from the mind-passions relation.62 The former essentially reside, like the master-slave relation, within the household, while the latter reside in the polis (1030). Hence, for Agamben: “The caesura that divides the household from the city persists in the same threshold that separates and at the same time unites body and soul, master and slave. And it is only by interrogating this threshold that the relationship between economy and politics among the Greeks can become truly intelligible” (1030).63 Now, for Aristotle, the question is whether or not human beings have work, essentially, other than as a tekhn¯e they learn, such as carpentry or shoemaking, 60 Perhaps, in this regard, Heidegger is paradigmatic of the form-of-life of the stowaway: Ulysses; Blanchot’s sirens. 61 Though we will also recognize, with Heidegger, an essential being-in-common, mit-sein that is da-sein, considered by Negri (for a moment at least) as (almost) a Spinozist Heidegger. 62 Earlier, in Chapter 6, we noted Heidegger’s emphasis on the relation of pathos to passion (π ασ ´ χειν) in recognising the ontological dimension to Aristotle’s understanding of kinesis, movement, as a movement of, or transforming of one’s ‘self’ (see Heidegger 2009, 113). 63 We wonder, at this point, if Agamben is already far removed from Heidegger when it comes to a questioning of Greek thinking. We suspect Agamben wants to say something about the Greeks that Heidegger would, firstly, say is not recoverable and, secondly, that it becomes historiographic distraction from the genuine question concerning the ‘evening’ of Occidental thinking. We also note that this division between oikos and polis, coinciding with a division of the pairs psyche-soma and nous-pathos, opens a further curious involuting, when we consider, as discussed in the preceding chapter, that for Aristotle the polis is established in the logos that binds e¯ thos and pathos (and not phon¯e as vocal sounding), but logos of a z¯oon politikon. Yet, Agamben emphasises that for Aristotle, “the work of the human being is the being-at-work of the soul according to the logos” (Agamben 2017, 1031). This being-at-work of the soul, which yet pertains to the oikos, is in accordance with logos that essentially constitutes the political relations of the city. Political relations, in this sense, are logos, necessarily understood not as simply a speaking-saying of something, but as laying-out

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something in addition to being alive. He responds by saying the work (ergon) of human beings is the logos of the soul, the being-at-work constituted in the psyche’s gathering-laying-out what comes to appearance. Agamben notes the word used by Aristotle—argos—for the notion of human beings who are born without work. The word commonly translates as ‘lingering’. We will see the significance of such a ‘lingering’ in a moment, when discussing Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander’s understanding of chresis (or khré). By contrast, the slave (who is yet human) has an ergon that is not of the soul, but of the body. The slave is constituted in a work that is different to those who are free, as soul is different to body, and master is to slave (1031). The slave doesn’t linger, or idle. Agamben stresses that Plato had already delineated the soul as that which makes use of the body while commanding it.64 Though, it is Aristotle who confines this soul-body relation of use-command to the oikos, the household family, and not to the political. Agamben emphasises that the early Aristotle used the word chresis, in the sense that he would later use the word energia, actuality. This latter term is one Aristotle himself ‘invented’ (1031). Agamben’s pursuit, then, is towards a greater understanding of this term, chresis, that Aristotle seemingly abandoned when defining that movement from potentiality to an existing thing. We will abbreviate the complexity of Agamben’s full discussion, in order to draw out what, for our inclinations, are most salient. Crucial to that discussion, is a difference drawn out by Aristotle with respect to use. For example, we use a musical instrument to make music. On the one hand, there is the using of the instrument, and on the other, the music made, which, too, is useful. Or we build a house. There is the use engaged in building—the act of building—and there is the house as the work done, the outcome, which hopefully is liveable, habitable. Though, in the act of seeing, there is no product apart from the being-at-work of seeing.65 For Aristotle, the slave is precisely such an orgagon of the master, a part of the master, a part of the master’s body, such that the slave has use but no work (outcome). Looking more closely at the expression tou somatos chresis, we note that chresis is a reflexive genitive. It is not entirely objective genitive with respect to bodily use, and not entirely subjective either. Hence Agamben sums up: By putting in use his own body, the slave is, for that reason, used by the master, and in using the body of the slave, the master is really using his own body. The syntagma ‘use of body’ represents a point of indifference not only between subjective genitive and objective genitive but also between one’s own body and that of another. (1039) of what comes-to-appearance, according to how it is apportioned in its having (nomos), comprising both ψυχ η´ and π ασ ´ χειν. However, this essentially points to the involution, not so much of logos, but of morion (Moira), what is shared, divided, apportioned, that is crucial for Agamben’s delineation not only of how a slave belongs—is a part of—its master, but also how the oikos is apportioned, delivered-to, allotted to the polis, precisely in its withdrawal from the polis, as something used that does not ‘work’. See Agamben (2017, 1038). See also, Heidegger’s essay on Moira in Heidegger (1975b). 64 This is Plato’s Alcibiades, the reference that Foucault engages when he, too, discusses this Greek word for ‘use’, chresis. It is this engagement that enables Agamben to entwine Foucault back into his account. The soul ‘lingers’ while the body works. 65 Hence Agamben emphasises: “The distinction between the operation that produces something external and that from which there results only a use to be important for Aristotle …” (1038).

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We now quickly move to how Heidegger explores this ‘simple’ notion of use in the Anaximander fragment.66 This opens the conversation, as well, to the key concern Agamben has with the way in which Foucault mentions this same PlatonicAristotelian context, in relation to a question of care and use. Crucially, what emerges in Heidegger’s reading of the Anaximander fragment is the earliest ‘saying’ of being in inceptual thinking, in xρ η—(khré) ´ use—a saying that essentially engages an understanding of care.

8.4.2 Use—Xρ η´ (khré) At the end of the last chapter, we made a passing remark concerning Heidegger’s Le Thor seminars, and the final seminar at Zähringen (Heidegger 2003). In regard to this, there are three salient points to note, in extending discussion and critique of Agamben’s political philosophy, his dispositif of al¯etheia, politeia and e¯ thos—to keep Foucault ‘in play’. The first is to further engage with our passing reference to Heidegger’s mention of Anaximander and Parmenides concerning xρ η, ´ whose usual translation is ‘necessity’ or ‘use’. Secondly, we emphasise that Agamben attended the Le Thor seminars, and so was present when Heidegger, in a quite unprecedented way, discussed his own philosophical understanding of being, in relation to Marx, to commodity capitalism, and notions of utility.67 Thirdly, and as we briefly emphasised at the close of the last chapter, Heidegger seems to be ‘revising’ his own understanding of ge-stell or ‘en-faming’, that he developed mostly in the 1950s (Heidegger 1977, 23–35), inasmuch as he emphasises there are no longer objects—and, therefore, no longer subjects—whose determination would have been grounded in Cartesianism, as Heidegger discussed that grounding in “The age of the world picture” or “The question concerning technology” (Heidegger 2002, 1977).68 We suggest that it is the open possibility of this break with the ‘subject’, and thus with the ‘object’, 66 We stress, Agamben also addresses this same fragment, after an extended discussion of Heidegger’s Being and time, in order to draw out certain limitations to Heidegger’s thinking. Our perspective is that Agamben is extremely limited in his discussion of Heidegger on the fragment, thereby occluding precisely what is most salient for Agamben’s own discussion: how Heidegger discerns a primordial saying of the relation of use to care. In fact, Agamben says nothing at all concerning this. For this reason, our reading of Heidegger may seem protracted, though the detail, we think, is required, to draw out aspects of the limitations we find to Agamben’s own analyses (see Agamben 2017, 1070–1072). 67 The publication of the seminars at Le Thor and Zähringen mentions those who were in attendance, including “Two young Italian friends, Ginevra Bompiani and Giorgio Agamben …” (Heidegger 2003, 1). As well, in The use of bodies, Agamben actually makes reference to his attendance at Le Thor, his meeting with, and photographing of, Heidegger (Agamben 2017, 1196–1197). 68 See, in particular, Heidegger’s Bremen lectures (Heidegger 2012), delivered in 1949, formative for his 1955 lecture concerning technology (Heidegger 1977) where he engages with the fate of subjects and objects. And in the third of the Le Thor seminars, in 1969, when Marx is broached, in terms of an ‘inverting’ of Hegel (52), discussion develops to Heidegger’s understanding of beings as disposable: “In orderability, the particular being is posited from the ground up and exclusively as disposable—disposable for consumption in the planning of the whole” (62). The translator of

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that concerns Agamben in the trajectory of his entire Homo sacer series, whose essential thinking, or basic concept, is that of (in)operativity, understood, on the one hand, entirely with regard to Aristotle’s energia (actuality), and on the other hand, with an essential break from Aristotle, in a ‘new’ consideration of that other Aristotelian basic concept, dynamis (potentiality).69 Though, the key notion emerging in Agamben’s final book in the Homo sacer series, The use of bodies (Agamben 2017), is chresthai (χ ρ ησ ´ θ αι), a middle-voice grammatical construction, from the Greek root, xρ η. ´ There is an intersecting network—or various avenues—of thinking we need to consider in this, bringing into differing ‘games of truth’ Agamben’s continuing engagements with Foucault, his readings, acknowledged or not, of Heidegger, and an emerging reading of Foucault’s understanding of care—as we discussed at the opening and close of the last chapter—in relation to Agamben’s understanding of use, and Heidegger’s own notions of care and use, developed especially from his reading of Anaximander from 1946 (Heidegger 1975a, 13–58), though also developed as central to Being and time, written some twenty years earlier.70 Concerning his attuning to Greek thinking, Heidegger emphasises: “In our manner of speaking, ‘Greek’ does not designate a particular people or nation, nor a cultural or anthropological group. What is Greek is the dawn of that destiny in which Being illuminates itself in beings and so propounds a certain essence of man; that essence unfolds historically as something fateful, preserved in Being and dispensed by Being, without ever being separated from Being” (25).71 With this concern, Heidegger’s question is whether it is possible for a ‘releasing’ that would bring about a different those lectures, Andrew Mitchell, also translated Heidegger’s Bremen lectures. He especially notes his break, as translator, from earlier translations of Heidegger’s ge-stell as en-framing. Mitchell considers such a translation to be misleading for the manner whereby it enables a thinking of ge-stell as a ‘fixing-in-place’ within a framework, when Heidegger’s inference is to the motility of positioning that ge-stell entails. As Mitchell notes in his “Translator’s Foreword”: “Heidegger explicitly and painstakingly distinguishes what he means by positionality from any sense of ‘enframing’ as the term has previously been translated (Heidegger 2012, xi). 69 Inoperativity, for Agamben, as we earlier discussed with respect to destituent power (Agamben 2014), is not an inactivity or passivity in relation to praxis or action. Inoperativity, as with the other binaries Agamben deploys, in a sense deconstructs the implicit hierarchy and economy of an activepassive distinction. It is what might be called a ‘radical passivity’, whose aim is neither revolution nor re-constitution of a politics. We will discuss this further in relation to Heidegger’s thinking on xρ η, ´ use. On radical passivity, see Wall (1999). On Agamben’s reading of Aristotle’s dynamis, see, in particular, Agamben (1999). See also, Heidegger’s lecture course from 1931 (Heidegger 1995), on Aristotle’s understanding of dynamis and energia. 70 We will see that Agamben discusses both of these in questioning how Heidegger comes to develop a relation between use and care. 71 Concerning the writing of this word, being—which we like to write as be-ing to emphasize the verbal participle way of listening to it—Krell and Capuzzi’s translation capitalizes being to Being. Capitalizing ‘Being’ was common during the 1970s, in part to avoid confusion between being and beings-that-are. Being is not a being! By the 1990s the ‘custom’ had changed to using a small ‘b’, so as to avoid impressing a reader with a ‘sovereign’ understanding of ‘Being’ as substantive ruling concept. Where a citation capitalizes the ‘B’, we have retained it. As Heidegger emphasises in discussing early Greek thinking, ‘Greece’ is not a people or nation. There is no biological reductionism, biologism to race. Greek is an ontological horizon, just as the Volk of Hölderlin’s Germania was not to be confused with the blood-and-soil of German nationalism in the 1930 s, but

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destining of be-ing. What is surprising in the Le Thor seminars is the ‘mannerof-relevance’ Heidegger sees in Marx, with respect to our ‘current’ ‘epoch’, and the manner whereby it discloses the meaning of be-ing.72 His actual wording is curious, given the manner whereby Agamben, in his own way, approaches a similar question in recasting, in a fundamental way, the notion of ‘use’. Heidegger notes, citing Marx: “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself” (Heidegger 2003, 73).73 Heidegger suggests: “Marxism as a whole rests upon this thesis” (73). For Heidegger, this self-production, as social production, “raises the danger of self-destruction” (73). The question, for Heidegger, is how would the human, today, be something other than a producer-consumer, “caught in the increasingly constraining network of the socio-economic ‘imperatives’” which Heidegger ‘reads’ as ‘en-framing’/‘positionality’ (74): How could he manage this without surrendering his own determination as producer? And is such a surrender possible in the horizon of today’s reality? What would such a renunciation signify? It would mean renouncing progress itself, committing to a general restriction of consumption and production. A simple and immediate intuitive example: In the perspective of this renunciation, ‘tourism’ would no longer be possible, instead one would restrict oneself and remain at home. Now, is there still, in these times, something like an ‘at home’, a dwelling, an abode? No, there are ‘dwelling machines’, urban population centres, in short: the industrialized product. But no longer a home. (74)

In the preceding seminar, Heidegger had already made clear how he understood en-framing/positionality as that which demanded of humans their giving-over as producers-consumers. Where we consider technology to be something humans invent and use, Heidegger emphasises that ‘man’ is its ‘plaything’, commensurate with the complete forgetfulness of being, its concealment (63). How is this concealing possible? “Cybernetics becomes a replacement for philosophy and poetry. Political science, sociology, and psychology become prioritized disciplines which no longer bear the slightest relation to their own foundation. In this regard, modern man is a slave to the forgetfulness of being” (63). It is at this moment that Heidegger mentions Anaximander and Parmenides on the Greek root xρ η. ´ Just after mentioning this notion of ‘slave-to-being’s-forgetfulness’, Heidegger emphasises: “Through this, the state of affairs becomes visible (as far as it will let itself be seen) that the human is ‘used by being’ [utilisé—Heidegger is ‘delivering’ in French at Le Thor]. In the word ‘to use’ (Brauchen) we hear an echo of the xρη´ of Parmenides and Anaximander. [Maybe Heidegger shuttles between French, German and Greek]. It thoroughly corresponds to ‘utilisé’, but in the sense that one has need of that which one ‘uses’” (63).

was disclosive of (al¯etheia) the Same, thought essentially in the differentiating e¯ thos of politeia. Again, we emphasise the reading of Volk undertaken by Phillips (2005). 72 The inference of Heidegger’s discussion of Marx is Marx’s ‘surpassing’ of Nietzsche with respect to an essential disclosing of the being of beings as disposability for consumption. 73 See Marx (2010, 182).

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8.4.3 Slaves to Be-ing’s Forgetting There is something surprisingly resonant in the discussion Agamben has concerning Aristotle’s use of chresis with respect to a complex relation of master and slave, and Heidegger’s complex delineation of the relation of being to human beings.74 Agamben notes, concerning the grammatical construction of chresthai: “it expresses the relation that one has with oneself, the affection that one receives insofar as one is in relation with a determinate being” (1053). This emphasises the reflexive nature of this notion of use, and seems to resonate with, to an extent, how e¯ thos and pathos were themselves reflexively related in logos: “Somatos chresthai, ‘to use the body’, will then mean the affection that one receives insofar as one is in relation with one or more bodies” (1053).75 Heidegger, in discussing the Anaximander fragment, commences with two established translations, done some thirty years apart, one by Nietzsche from 1873, and the other by the German classicist, Hermann Diels. Both translations differ only in slight ways. We note Nietzsche’s first, and then Diels’s (see Heidegger 1975a, 13): Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustices, according to the ordinance of time. But when things have their origin, there too their passing away occurs according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty to one another for their recklessness, according to firmly established time.

Needless to say, Heidegger rejects both translations, essentially on the grounds of recognising their importing of a host of ‘modern’ concepts, in order to bring to an understanding Greek thinking, essentially what might be meant by the inceptual thinking of being (Ôν). Keep in mind what we emphasised earlier, concerning Heidegger’s reading of philosophy. He is not aiming at the correct translation.76 He is not wanting to return to Greek thinking as the return to a way of living, a ‘culture’ 74 Does be-ing have a relation at all to human beings? This may seem a distracting and facile question, though takes up an important section of Agamben’s The use of bodies: “Intermezzo II” (1186–1200). While Heidegger engages with da-sein’s relation to be-ing, he emphasises that we should not collapse da-sein and human being, in a humanist reading—overtly ontic—of ontological difference. But, then, the relation of human being to da-sein is a quandary that, according to Agamben, puzzled Heidegger to the end. Our own reading of the matter would go about this discussion quite differently to Agamben, would emphasize different Heidegger material, and inflect the question in other ways, crucially commencing with those lectures preceding Being and time, prior to Heidegger settling on da-sein as his ‘technical term’ for existence, which means prior, at least to 1925. We may have an opportunity to return to this in our concluding chapter. 75 Agamben immediately references the resonance of this with Spinoza concerning the reflexive active verb: “This verbal form expresses an action in which agent and patient, active and passive are identified” (1053). 76 Many commentators would argue that Heidegger is pedantic and idiosyncratic when it comes to translation, and that he does consider his to be the correct one. He often enough disagrees with the given authorities in the field. Our point is the distinction Heidegger continually makes between truth-as-correctness and truth-as-unconcealing. As he refused ‘correctness’ as calculable efficiency in philological deciphering, he leans to a hermeneutic of resonant unconcealing, which makes of the truth of translating something of an event of being, and not the display of classicist erudition.

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or ‘history’. He is aware that for both Nietzsche and Diels, their own approaches to Anaximander were via the privilege given in metaphysics to the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, that Anaximander is ‘pre-Platonic’, and hence encountered as a thinking that grapples with what will come to emerge more fully with metaphysics. Heidegger also cautions against importing modern notions of ethics and jurisprudence when, for example we see the Greek δ´ικη (dik¯e) and αδικ´ ´ ια, normally translated as ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’. We see Nietzsche and Diels translating αδικ´ ´ ια as ‘injustice’.77 Heidegger mentions another difficulty in reading the fragment. It appears in the writings of the Neoplatonist, Simplicus, in about 530 A.D., in a commentary on Aristotle. He included the fragment, having copied it from a writing by Aristotle’s immediate ‘heir’, Theophrastus. Between the ‘uttering’ of the fragment, and its posterior recording by Simplicus, about a millennium had passed. And between Simplicus and our present is another millennium and a half (16). Hence, Heidegger aims initially to excise what he interprets as accretions or additions that seem of a later Greek origin.78 He arrives at three fundamental words needing consideration, δ´ικη, αδικ´ ´ ια and τ ι´σ ις (this latter translated by Nietzsche and Diels as ‘penalty’ though by Heidegger as ‘care’). In arriving at these words, which as yet, at this stage, do not include xρ η, ´ use, Heidegger has touched on what, perhaps, is his essential concern with understanding early Greek thinking. His reference is Homer, though he applies it, as well, to Anaximander. It is how be-ing is to be ‘recognised’. We touched on this earlier, concerning be-ing and beings. The early Greek šo´ ν, being, cannot be encountered in the modern sense of something present in the objective sense of standing before a subject. Rather, šo´ ν is a two-fold indicating of presencing and what is present: “šo´ ντ α … names for the Greeks what is present insofar as it has arrived in the designated sense, to linger within the expanse of unconcealment” (34). Things coming-to-appearance ‘linger’ in an ‘awhiling’, in their emerging and submerging (we think of Aristotle’s argos with respect to human beings whose essence is to not-work—they linger). Heidegger does not read δ´ικη as what is just or right, but rather as what is fitting (as in what can fit-together or belong) in the awhiling of some thing’s presencing: “The presencing of whatever lingers obtrudes into the ‘here’ of its coming, as into the ‘away’ of its going” (41). There is a ‘jointure’ as the separating-between of emerging and submerging, constituting the awhile. What is fitting—belonging—is the transitoriness of some ‘thing’ present coming-to-appearance, its presencing as presence. What, then, of its presence? Heidegger reads ‘presence’ in some thing’s dis-jointing, its αδικ´ ´ ια: “what is present abandons that jointure and is, in terms of what lingers awhile, in disjunction” (42). What is present persists and does not pass away or does not care

77 More correctly, of course, we see Krell and Capuzzi translating Nietzsche and Diels’s German into the English ‘injustice’. We recognize, though, Heidegger’s overall orientation seems consistent with such translation. 78 His appeal to classical philosophy, in this case, is unusual. It is not a German classicist at all, but a Scotsman, John Burnet, best known for his work on Plato. It is Burnet, to whom Heidegger defers, in abbreviating the fragment to its essential words (Heidegger 1975a, 28–29).

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to pass away.79 Jointure, δ´ικη, is order; αδικ´ ´ ια is disorder. Crucially, whatever is ‘present’ is not to be thought of as something ‘sandwiched’ between a before and an after of not being presently present. Rather, the present “… lets itself belong to what is not present” (44). Hence, Heidegger addresses the originating and passing away in the fragment in terms, not of ‘paying a penalty for injustices’, but in terms of how whatever persists—beings: disordering-disorder—yet belongs essentially to the order of presencing, be-ing. But what of penalty, paying a penalty, the normal translation of that other key fragmentary word, τ ι´σ ις ? Heidegger wants to ‘listen’ to what this word, ‘penalty’ might mean in the context of thinking beings as what linger awhile, persist, as disorder to the ordering of presencing, in the transitoriness of beings, their coming and passing. How is that disorder yet a giving-to, a belonging-to-order? T´ισ ις not only means ‘penalty’. It may be translated as ‘esteem’, though in the sense that accommodates ‘penalty’ as the way we esteem, take care of, what is not acceptable. In a broader sense, then, τ ι´σ ις concerns a notion of care. Heidegger ‘unearths’ an old German word, ruoche, meaning solicitude or care, that is translated to English as ‘reck’, the opposite of being reckless. What is present, in its persistence-for-presence, and in order to let order belong, necessarily shows solicitude, takes care of whatever else persists in disorder. Each being “… lets reck pervade its relations with the others” (47).80 Care surmounts disorder as pervading relation-with-others. The Anaximander fragment concerns an essential thinking of what is present, beings-that-are, in relation to their presencing, their be-ing, “coming to presence between a twofold absence” (48). The fragment, as translated by Nietzsche, suggests this ‘originating and passing away’ is “according to necessity,” (κατ α` τ o` χ ρεων). ´ Xρεων ´ (chresis), the word that especially concerns us, is here translated by ‘necessity’. In a preliminary way, Heidegger asks about this ‘necessity’, as it concerns what is essential to thinking in the fragment. Is being necessarily to be thought from what is present? Or is the relation of being to beings to be thought from be-ing? Kατα` means something like “what falls under,” in the sense that what is present is the “befalling” of presencing. Crucially, for Heidegger: “That which lingers a while in presence lingers κατ α` τ o` χ ρεων. ´ No matter how we think of τ o` χ ρεων ´ (whatever is necessary), the word is the earliest name for ´ is the what we have thought as the šo´ ν of šo´ ντ α [the being of beings]; τ o` χ ρεων oldest name in which thinking brings the being of beings to language” (49). Though, how does Heidegger modify its translation from that of Nietzsche and Diels? We see 79 We are struck here by the perverse turning-around of what we normally take, in metaphysical disclosure of the being of beings to be jointure and dis-jointure. We normally look to what endures as grounding ground, to what persists, to belonging-jointure, such that what is transitory is seen in its changing—its appearing and passing-away—as modifications of what is permanent, as disjoining non-belonging. Existence is species of the common in essence. Heidegger sees Anaximander saying something else, that belonging-order is presencing’s transitory emerging-submerging, while dis-order (αδικ´ ´ ια) is persistence, what aims at overcoming lingering-awhiling. 80 This solicitude-care suggests how being-in-common of what, essentially, is not-in-common prevails in being’s presencing of what is present. This relation of disorder-order opens to a primordial disclosure, in the being of beings, of how being-in-common is essentially immanent to the coming-to-appearance of what is.

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here the proximity of Agamben to Heidegger, in the curious way τ o` χ ρεων ´ is to be thought.

8.4.4 Concernful Care To sum up so far, for Heidegger, beings-that-are, as what is present, are ‘reckless’— careless—so to speak, inasmuch as their presence attests to or aims at persistence, a vying for an overturning of an order determined in the very awhiling-lingering ´ ια haunts lingering itself as possithat is presencing.81 As Heidegger puts it, αδικ´ bility (49). Yet, τ ι´σ ις, concernful care, is the letting-belong of order among beings, the surmounting of presencing’s order over reckless disorder.82 However it may be translated, τ o` χ ρεων ´ concerns how presencing’s δ´ικη (order) enjoins ‘reck’ or ´ ια: “The χ ρεων care in surmounting αδικ´ ´ lets such enjoining prevail among present beings and so grants them the manner of their arrival—as the while of whatever lingers awhile” (49). Heidegger reads this word as the inaugural saying of be-ing, which means a saying of the being of beings. He reminds us of what happens in metaphysics when this presencing of what is present is itself separated-out, and thus becomes itself a being, albeit the highest one, and then becomes submerged in the presentness of what is present (representation), such that beings, in their beingness endure: “The essence of presencing, and with it the distinction between presencing and what is present, remains forgotten. The oblivion of Being is oblivion of the distinction between Being and beings” (50). Of course, Heidegger ‘updates’ this in his Le Thor seminar, when discussing Marx’s ‘rootedness of man in man’, to human beings becoming slaves to the forgetting of being.83 Perhaps, though, we need to provide a sharper understanding of the context of this discussion by Heidegger. What has not been emphasised here, in this relating of presenting and what is present, are two ‘things’. One is the logos of the thinker, what some ‘one’ thinks as the unconcealing of 81 We cannot but be reminded here, in this account by Heidegger of the ‘disorder’ of persisting beings something of Nietzsche’s revealing of the being of beings as will-to-power, as the will, in whatever persists to become more. Being is, then, disclosed as essential carelessness, essential recklessness, essential danger to preserving-caring for what is. 82 Though, we can say the ‘irony’ of that ‘order’ is precisely its annulling of the persistence or preserving of beings, inasmuch as that ‘order’ is the emerging-submerging of whatever is, its awhiling-temporalizing. What Heidegger encounters as ‘disorder’ is perhaps what metaphysics, especially in the versions we encounter in modernity, nominates as the orderability of enframing itself, the ready stockpiling of beings in their readiness for production, and the calculable replaceablility of whatever is in inventories-for-production. 83 This reference to ‘slave’ becomes crucial in the discussion that follows concerning Agamben. However, there is no reference given to Hegel’s master/slave dialect in relation to Marx in Heidegger’s seminar, though if we follow the protocol carefully we recognise Heidegger’s honing in on what is essential for Hegel’s thinking, then followed by commentary on Marx, and then a comment on a ‘slave to being’ that would break from all dialectical thinking. Though we find it surprising in what follows that Agamben does not more fully discuss Hegel/Marx on the working class in relation to the use of bodies. We return to this reference to slavery in our concluding chapter.

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all of this. We would call this al¯etheia, what is unconcealed as to the ‘truth’ of being, an essential relation between being and thinking. Human being is that being-that-is whose presencing, whose be-ing is openness to the presencing of what presences. So, at stake for Heidegger, is thinking’s relation to being, to presencing. Then there are beings-that-are. Beings are, whether or not humans think, which means whether or not beings come-to-appearance and persist in their ‘lingering’.84 What is ‘present’ does not at all necessarily come-to-presence. Though, for Heidegger, disorder as that which is not-in-common though essentially belonging to the possibility of beingin-relation, is precisely surmounted in logos, in the laying-out of what comes to appearance, as the presencing-of-whatever-presences: “What is present comes to ´ of αδικ´ ´ ια” (50). Just as presence when it surmounts the dis- of disorder, the αLogos, for Heraclitus, is a name for being.85 Crucially, logos, in this sense, in the sense of al¯etheia, is not the presentation of ‘truth’ in the re-presenting of something, standing before a subject who knows. Heidegger now makes a surprising move. As we are aware, the most persistent refrain in the whole of Heidegger’s lecturing life is the refrain concerning the forgetting of being, that the history of the West—in metaphysics—is genuinely revealed in an understanding of that forgetting. He reminds us in the 1920s and up to Zähringen in 1970. And we suppose that Heidegger aims to recoup something from inceptual thinking, from Anaximander, Parmenides and Heraclitus, in that these thinkers did not forget being, that their thinking is a disclosive revealing of being, its ‘saying’. Though, this is simply not the case. There is a distinction between being and beings, between presencing and presence, though this distinction, this difference itself has, from the earlies naming of being, remained concealed: “Although the two parties to the distinction, what is present and presenting, reveal themselves, they do not do so as distinguished” (50–51). Being keeps to itself, withdraws. So, we don’t discover this distinguishing in Anaximander, nor in any other thinker, including Heidegger himself. This, for Heidegger, is no loss but rather “the richest most prodigious event”—metaphysics (51). Well, we might ask, if this distinction, as such, has never been revealed, how would Heidegger be aware of it at all? He suggests two things. On the one hand, both presencing and what is present reveal themselves, though their difference withdraws, what Heidegger elsewhere called “ontological difference,” a term he came to regret, as it was too easily thought of as somethingthat-is, something ontic, a being. On the other hand, traces of that distinguishing of 84 The aporia suggested by this, with respect to Da-sein, disclosure, be-ing and beings, is directly broached by Albert Hofstadter, in his “Translator’s Introduction” to Heidegger’s 1927 lecture course, The basic problems of phenomenology (Heidegger 1982): “If being is essentially temporal, if even the being that is constituted as extantness (the mere presence, present-at-hand, or at-handness of natural beings) is essentially temporal—and so it would be if it were just plain presence, Anwesenheit—then what would happen to being if the Dasein were to cease to be?” (xxvi). 85 See Heidegger’s 1944 lecture course “Logic: Heraclitus’s doctrine of the logos (Heidegger 2018). When we are discussing the Anaximander fragment, in particular the lingering awhiling of presencing, we adopt the terms we have encountered in Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitus’s inceptual words, phusis and zo¯e, in terms of ‘emerging’ and ‘submerging’. See in particular, Heidegger (2018, §4–§8). We recognise a resonance with the différance of Derrida’s lifedeath.

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presencing and what presences are “preserved in language” (51). Though Heidegger finds inceptual thinking’s early words for being—phusis, logos, chresis, Moira—to be more “illuminating” than later words—eidos, energia, esse, cogito, will. Crucially though: “… yet at no time has the distinction been designated as such” (51). Hence, these names given to being “speak” to the relation of presencing to what is present though cannot reveal the relation as such. It is via this consideration that Heidegger now pursues Anaximander’s word for being, χ ρεων ´ (chresis), though emphasising it will not reveal the oblivion of being, being’s essential withdrawal. As we already noted from Agamben, the grammatical form is a peculiar genitive— Heidegger says “enigmatic, ambiguous”—concerning emergence from presencing to what is present (50). Though the word is translated by “necessity,” Heidegger probes its broader etymology, and more essentially, the ways he is ‘listening’ to the frag´ is related to η´ χ ε´ιρ, the hand, and to χ ρ αω: ´ getting involved ment.86 Thus, χ ρεων with something, reaching for it, but also to pass-over something-to-someone.87 This passing-over yet retains the passing-over in what is handed-over (51–52). With this reading of χ ρεων, ´ Heidegger recognises in presencing the ‘handing-over’ of presence to whatever-is-present. Yet, this handing-over preserves presencing—the handing-over as such—in what is present, a transitoriness immanent to whatever is, what might be called its modal-be-ing.88 Heidegger’s translation shifts to the word “usage” (der Brauch) (52): “… usage now designates the manner in which Being itself presences as the relation to what is present, approaching and becoming involved with what is present as present” (53). That peculiar genitive poses a difficult question as to what happens in usage, in the using of something by something, a mutual belonging in the preserving of a ‘handing-over’ in what has been handedon, of presencing in what is present. That preserving of be-ing thought of as usage, happens in logos, in thinking as the laying-out of what comes-to-appearance in the bounding-apportioning of being-in-common. Something is used though not usedup. Something remains of presencing in what is present. Heidegger understands the belonging, the genitive, as that of the being whose existence is its openness-to-being, belonging to presencing, to which it is an open possibility. Human da-sein is used by be-ing, though in that using being needs da-sein—logos—as trace of its preserving. Indeed, Heidegger concludes his writing on the fragment with an enigmatic question: “But what if Being in its essence needs to use [braucht] the essence of man? If the essence of man consists in thinking the truth of Being?” (58). The profound

86 By ‘listening to’ we don’t simply mean a euphemism for understanding or deciphering the fragment. We mean listening-to more so in that sense emphasized by Heidegger in the relations of e¯ thos to pathos, that we discussed earlier, where pathos is the mood or being-affected, or attunement of the one listening. He listens to the e¯ thos of the saying, in its thinking, its affecting. 87 Agamben mentions this is a tenuous and contested etymology, though clearly, one that suits Heidegger’s discussion of use from Being and time. See Agamben (2017, 1070). 88 Agamben thinks this persisting of a ‘handing-over’, a preserving of ‘it’ when he comes to think Aristotle’s understanding of potentiality and what is actualized. In the passing from potential to actualizing, what remains in potential is preserved, and carried over, rather than expired or used-up, in whatever is actual. We discuss this further at the end of this chapter. See Agamben (1999).

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disclosure is that inasmuch as things become things-of-use, things that are usable, usage is the disclosure of the being of beings. Beings are, inasmuch as they are used. To put it differently, use is not an instrumental and calculable attribute of things. Rather, use is the essential disclosure of how things come-to-appearance at all. Use discloses the lingering of a bounded-ordering of things, inasmuch as the presencing of beings surmounts the disordering of whatever-is-unrelated. Though, use, in this sense, cannot be the using-up of things, the extinguishing of things, for example, as raw materials that seem to disappear into something that is produced. Rather, usage does not produce anything, other than the lingering presencing of an orderingbounding and apportioning of beings—synonymous with logos, with phusis, and with Moira—allotment.89 We then recognise something of Heidegger’s thinking of al¯etheia, politeia, and e¯ thos. From out of the disclosure-unconcealing of beings as usage, we recognise how a being-in-common emerges from out of the ‘disorder’ of present beings, inasmuch as those present beings are encountered as a comingto-presence—encountering as something of use—in presencing, a surmounting of αδικ´ ´ ια by δ´ικη (now thought of, momentarily, as e¯ thos) of differentiations as beingsin-common. The politeia is that differentiating e¯ thos. Though, uncannily, it is being that appropriates—uses—beings. Yet, being ‘needs’ beings for the preserving-tracing of its essential withdrawal, its oblivion. That ‘need’ is expressed, for Heidegger, in the reflexive genitive, in the preserving of a handing-over in what is passed-on. Inasmuch as we are ‘slaves’ to the forgetfulness of being, al¯etheia, unconcealing the truth of being, is revealed in usage, inasmuch as presencing of what comes-to-appearance does so in usage, though this usage does not exhaust beings, annihilate them, but in thinking-logos preserves them. We recognise in this saying by Anaximander the crucial relations Heidegger develops between presencing, presence, thinking, care and what comes-to-appearance, as what is de-distanced in use, in the taking-care of what matters in an existent’s possibilities to be.90 89 See

Moira (Heidegger 1975b). There is no pro-ducing here. recognize some of this from Being and time, and wonder if Heidegger reads Anaximander in 1946, according to his thinking some twenty years earlier, or already though the analytic of da-sein from out of the earliest saying of being. From Being and time, we understand da-sein’s worlding in the de-distancing of handy things such that da-sein can be underway in its possibilities to be. Well, the things are not handy until da-sein’s underwayness ‘recognizes’ beings significant for that project. Present things are a ‘disorder’ until their presencing—usage—enables their presence, though usage is a contingency of da-sein’s project. In a sense, Heidegger ‘converts’ Leibniz’s ‘why is there something rather than nothing’, to ‘why are things useful rather than simply things’. How is it that usage happens? Crucially, in using things, they fall into a forgetfulness, which means they become part of a body, an ‘extension’ (we think here of Moira and the unusual genitive in usage). That forgetfulness is their presencing, in becoming-present. And, equally, useful things constitute a being-in-common, inasmuch as our worlding as our underwayness, comprises a relationality of useful things. That relationality, a being-in-common is equally a being-with-others for whom existence is a matter of concern. Care is not so much our conscious-self taking responsibility for the objects and people we encounter as subjects. Care— τ ι´σ ις—is how usage, disclosive of the being of beings, is the possibility of finding a common-in-things and a common-with-others, a dik¯e—order, neither transcendent nor calculative, but immanent to the presencing of what presences. Da-sein does not value some things because they are useful. The question of value does not arise, as there is no ‘self’, other than a worlding-underwayness of common-being. There is no subject who looks

90 We

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8.5 Conclusion 8.5.1 Habitual Impropriety In a section titled “Use and Care,” (Agamben 2017, 1056–1062), Agamben addresses Foucault’s discussion of chresthai, in The hermeneutics of the subject (Foucault 2005, 55–60). Foucault’s question, from engaging Plato’s Socrates, centres on the heauton, the ‘oneself’ of the Socratic injunction to ‘care for one’s self’: “what is this identical element present as it were on both sides of the care: the subject of the care and the object of the care? What is it?” (53). This question leads Foucault to Plato’s understanding of how the soul and body are in combination.91 In a sense, the body uses itself: “We use our eyes, that is to say there is a part that uses the eyes” (55). What, though, is this ‘part’ that uses? Plato sees the soul (psych¯e) as that which uses the body, though also uses language and uses tools. Though, this notion of use, as we have seen already, is for Foucault unusual: “The French word I employ here, ‘se servir’, [‘use’ in English—GB], is actually the translation of a very important Greek verb with many meanings” (56). Foucault emphasises the reflexive genitive of the verb, in expressions that reference someone using his or her self, as in ‘using’ anger, which means ‘behaving angrily’. Foucault makes a decisive distinction, that Agamben emphasises. In the taking-care of one’s self, and hence in a use of the self, in that taking-care, Foucault distinguishes between a soul-substance and a soulsubject: “When Plato employs this notion of khr¯esis in order to seek the self one must take care of, it is not at all the soul-substance he discovers, but rather the soulsubject” (57).92 Agamben emphasises in this how, for Foucault, the subject is not a substance but a process, or modal possibilities: “It is a question of taking care of oneself as subject of the khr¯esis (with all the word’s polysemy: subject of actions, behaviour, relationships, attitudes)” (57). Agamben also references Frédéric Gros, who wrote the “Course Context” for The hermeneutics of the subject. He quotes Foucault: “The self with which one has the relationship is nothing other than the relationship itself … it is in short the immanence, or better, the ontological adequacy of the self to the relationship” (533).93 Hence, crucial for Agamben’s momentum is at things and says what is valuable and what is not. Usage is not in things but in the disclosive possibility of their be-ing. 91 As we have mentioned earlier, the soul (psych¯ e) is, in Aristotle’s terms the ousia, the essence, of a living being, what is present-to-itself in a living being. Though in the discussion that follows, emphasis falls not to ousia—substance—but to logos, that by which psych¯e has relations to things and others. 92 The implications of this distinction are important, perhaps further recognition of Foucault’s move from anthropology to ontology, though an ontology of immanence, inasmuch as essence (substance) is not thought of as transcendent to existence, but as immanent. This would coincide with Heidegger’s da-sein, as well as Agamben’s insistence that Spinoza’s substance is its modal-being. But, then, we also emphasize Heidegger’s insistence that da-sein is transcendence. He especially emphasises this in his Kant lectures of 1927–28 (see Heidegger 1997). 93 We face a difficulty here in relaying between Foucault’s discussion of care and use, and the one we see developed by Heidegger from the Anaximander fragment. Part of the difficulty is that,

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how Foucault develops a relation between a care-of-one’s-self and a use-of-one’sself, as ontological ‘adequacy’. In this context, he emphasises that while Foucault, especially in his late lectures, concerned himself with a question of care, he did not equally address the notion of use. Taking leave of his discussion of Foucault at this point, Agamben then pursues this relation of care and use in Heidegger’s Being and time. Care is the primordial structure of da-sein, while Heidegger goes into great detail discussing the ‘equipmental’ disclosure of things, that things are grasped in their “handiness” (Agamben 2017, 1065). It is here that Agamben references Heidegger’s Anaximander fragment, its translating chreon with Brauch, use, thereby giving use an ontological “dimension” (1070). Though Agamben’s reading of Heidegger’s Anaximander seems to us to be overly instrumental, overly brief, and negligent—incomplete (though we might sound a little too much like Agamben here pronouncing on Foucault)—given the genuine concern Agamben has with the elusive relation between use and care. He focuses on the ontological disclosure of use in discussion of the fragment, in relation to Heidegger’s discussion of handy things in Being and time. Hence, he does not mention how Heidegger shows the intimate relation of use and care in reading Anaximander, nor how Heidegger’s discussion of dik¯e and adik¯e are disclosive of how we might come to recognise the ontological dimension to authenticity and inauthenticity—what Agamben translates as “proper” and “improper”—with respect to da-sein’s comportment to being (see Agamben 2017, 1068–1069). Agamben emphasises that Heidegger does not discuss what proper/authentic da-sein is, other than as a modification of improper/inauthentic da-sein. Though he does not mention the Anaximander fragment in this regard, that dik¯e is not mentioned at all, but only adik¯e. For Heidegger, dik¯e is a modification of disorder, the not-in-common of present beings. Agamben’s resolution to this difficult relation between care and use introduces the notions of inoperativity and form-of -life, notions we earlier encountered when discussing destituent power, a power that is neither constituting nor constituted, a power that produces nothing other than a relation-to-self, as a care of self-asa-being-in-common (see Agamben 2014). Inoperativity presents the conundrum of use that has preoccupied Agamben’s discussions of Aristotle, of Foucault, Heidegger, along with Spinoza and a few others. However, Agamben’s thinking concerning formof-life, apart from introducing this notion in the earlier Means without end (2000),

for Heidegger, there are no subjects and objects in Socratic-Platonic thinking. Foucault imports, wholesale, philosophical notions from post-Cartesian thinking, not to mention an inference of the truth-of-being as ontological adequation (veritas rather than al¯etheia). Though, let’s pursue a possible reading. If, for Foucault, the ‘self’ is ontologically disclosive as relationality—possibilityto-be—immanent to its being-in-a-world and with-others, its be-ing is that openness, while use— khr¯esis—that to which the ‘self’ is ‘subject’—open—is be-ing, the coming-to-appearance of present things in their presencing, or relationality and significance. What, then, is care, what Heidegger names τ ι´σ ις, concernful care, that Foucault seeks as ontological adequation to khr¯esis? Care is the fitting-together, or belonging, of what that relationality—self—relates. To put it more reflexively, a self—relationality—is the coming-to-relation, belonging, of what is not-in-common (αδικ´ ´ ια), such that a self’s securing is. The self does not so much ‘care’, but is rather taken-into-care, appropriated into care, as coming-to-relation.

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is essentially developed in his essay, from 1986, “On potentiality” (Agamben 1999, 177–184). In The use of bodies, Agamben notes: “What we call form-of-life is not defined by its relation to a praxis (energia) or a work (ergon) but by a potential (dynamis) and by an inoperativity” (1250). The Aristotelian relation of dynamis and energia via kinesis is familiar enough, and constitutes an essential concern for us, one we raised at the commencement to this book. If form-of-life, in its inoperativity, is not defined by the work of what is actual, then how does this form-of-life constitute itself in use? Agamben embarks on bringing into a common thinking two notions more often held radically apart: contemplation and habit.94 Earlier in the book, Agamben discusses, via Aristotle, the notion of habitual use, how it might be thought of as use that does not “pass over into action” (1085).95 The habitual carries with it an aporia of the relations of being and having, which perhaps expresses that reflexivity of a use of one’s self with respect to what one is and what one has, their belonging. The inoperativity of a potential that does not become a work is not simply a passivity or inertia: “The work is not the result or achievement of a potential, which is realized and consumed in it: the work is that in which potential and habit are still present, still in use; it is the dwelling of habit, which does not stop appearing and, as it were, dancing in it, ceaselessly reopening it to a new, possible use” (1085). We are especially interested in this oikos, this dwelling-of-habit, and its relation to the polis and the political. That other term Agamben relates to inoperativity is, perhaps, what enables us to find how, in a form-of-life, there is something that links the clandestine shadows of privacy to political existence, that stowing-away-bestowal of a dwellingof-habit that yet, essentially as usage, opens a self to its possible being-in-common, its politeia. Agamben notes: A living being, which seeks to define itself and give itself form through its own operations is, in fact, condemned to confuse its own life with its own operation, and vice versa. [Hence, I cannot define—care—for myself from out of the products of my labour; nor can those products that supposedly bear my name be attributed to the use peculiar to my own potentiality or possibility to be.] By contrast, there is form-of-life only where there is contemplation of a potential. Certainly there can only be contemplation of a potential in a work. But in contemplation, the work is deactivated and rendered inoperative, and in this way restored to possibility; opened to a new possible use. (1250) 94 We

think, in particular, of Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay (Benjamin 1968). Modifying Alois Riegl’s distinction between the haptic and the optic, Benjamin’s essay on the artwork plays at this distinction in a number of varying tropes, culminating, in discussing the habitual and the contemplative, with respect to architecture: “Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather by touch and by sight … On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit” (240). On Benjamin and Riegl, see Levin (1988) and Vacche (2003, 6–10). 95 We earlier referenced Heidegger’s mention of hexis in Aristotle, in reference to pathos, understood as both disposition and habit. Though, it is also related to the Greek echerin, having. Agamben comments on this relation: “In the concept of hexis-habitus (hexis is the nominalization of echein, ‘to have’), philosophy has thought the constitutive connection that unites being and having, which remains a still uninvestigated chapter in the history of ontology” (Agamben 2017, 1083). Though, perhaps we’d differ on that, as it seems to be something quite important in Heidegger’s writings.

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This same concern is discussed by Agamben in his earlier writing, “On potentiality.” His approach there is also via Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality, and the curious sense that Aristotle arrives at concerning a ster¯esis at the heart of potentiality’s original structure: “To be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own non-Being” (182). Perhaps we are able to hear, in this, a resonance with Heidegger on use, care, and the emergingsubmerging of what is, being and non-being. What Agamben calls ‘contemplation’, Heidegger, perhaps, calls thinking, which he thinks in terms of logos-as-dwelling.96 Crucially, for Agamben’s reading of Aristotle on impotentiality—inoperativity— it cannot be something simply contemplated as essentially prior to potentiality’s actualizing. Rather, impotentiality itself, as potentiality to not-be, must fully pass into potentiality. In this sense, in actuality “it preserves itself ” (183). This, for Agamben, is the care of the self in a use that is essentially inoperative. In actuality, potentiality is not something consumed and used up, but something that “gives itself to itself ” (184).97

References Agamben, G. (1993). The coming community (M. Hardt, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

96 In terms of a thinking of being and having, or the uncanniness of disposition, it is perhaps the much read, sometimes maligned and often overly simplified Heideggerian “Building Dwelling Thinking” that most comes to mind. See Heidegger (1993). 97 There is, perhaps, a productive reading between two recent books on urbanism, when we consider the ground covered in this chapter, from a Spinozan ‘absolute’, to a Heideggerian distinction between the polis and the urbs, between Greek dike and Roman lex, and in Agamben’s radically inoperative understanding of ‘use’. These would be Aureli’s The possibility of an absolute architecture (2011), and Boano’s The ethics of a potential urbanism (2017). For Aureli, urbanization, as the name given to practices of infrastructural planning, along with the administrative management of a population, and its individuated housing, marks the erasure of a political understanding of the city as that which memorializes a people and represents their rights. What once constituted a city, centred on political assembly, is now dispersed in infinitely extendable network infrastructures, what we discerned in Chapter 1 precisely as planetary urbanization. Concomitant with this understanding of the urban, is erasure of an essential understanding of architecture’s relation to the city as political locus of a people. Aureli sees a project in being able to re-encounter architecture in its formal constitution, as something akin to the nomos of Greek political agency, which requires a realigning of our understanding of urbanization and architecture, as a reinvested understanding of the city as that which is politically composed of the parts-within-parts of a formal architecture. In contrast to the possible of Aureli’s architecture, is the potentiality of an ethical urbanism, discussed by Boano along themes that Agamben emphasises concerning potentiality and inoperativity. See also Boano and Astolfo (2015). Their concerns are with a renewed understanding of the ‘common’, fully engaging the work of Agamben, from his The coming community, through to The use of bodies, by way of Profanations and The highest poverty.

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Heidegger, M. (1995). Aristotle’s metaphysics θ 1–3: On the essence and actuality of force. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1996). Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister” (W. McNeill & J. Davis, Trans.). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1997). Phenomenological interpretation of Kant’s Critique of pure reason (P. Emad & K. Maly, Trans.). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1998). Parmenides (A. Schuwer & R. Rojcewicz, Trans.). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2002). The age of the world picture. In J. Young & K. Haynes (Ed. and Trans.), Off the beaten track (pp. 57–85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (2003). Four seminars (A. Mitchell & F. Raffoul, Trans.). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2009). Basic concepts of aristotelian philosophy (R. D. Metcalf & M. B. Tanzer, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2012). Bremen and Freiburg lectures (A. J. Mitchell, Trans.). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2018). Heraclitus (J. G. Assaiante & S. M. Ewegen, Trans.). London and New York: Bloomsbury. Henrich, D. (1992). Aesthetic judgement and the moral image of the world. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jesi, F. (2014). Spartakus: The symbology of revolt (A. Toscano, Trans.). London and New York: Seagull Books. Kant, I. (1964). Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals (H. J. Paton, Trans.). New York: Harper Torchbook. Kant, I. (2006). Toward perpetual peace and other writings on politics, peace, and history (D. L. Colclasure, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press. Koolhaas, R. (2002). Junkspace. October, 100, 175–190. Levin, T. Y. (1988). Walter Benjamin and the theory of art history. October, 47(Winter), 77–83. Levinas, E. (1990). Reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism (S. Hand, Trans.). Critical Inquiry, 17(1), 62–71. Loraux, N. (2002). The divided city: On memory and forgetting in ancient Athens (C. Pache & J. Fort, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. Lukács, G. (2010). Soul and form (A. Bostock, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Markus, G. (1977). The soul and life: The young Lukács and the problem of culture. Telos, 32(Summer), 95–115. Marx, K. (2010). Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law: Introduction (M. Milligan & B. Ruhemann, Trans.). In Marx and Engels: Collected works volume III (pp. 175–187). Digital Edition: Lawrence and Wishart. Mercier, T. (2019). Resisting the present: Biopower in the face of the event (some notes on monstrous lives). The New Centennial Review, 19(3), 99–128. Merrifield, A. (2005). Guy Debord. London: Reaktion Books. Naas, M. (2019). Learning to read “life death” finally: Francesco Vitale’s epigenetic criticism. The New Centennial Review, 19(3), 13–33. Negri, A. (1991). The savage anomaly: The power of Spinoza’s metaphysics and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Negri, A. (1999). Insurgencies: Constituent power and the modern state (M. Boscagli, Trans.). Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press. Negri, A. (2000). Ruptures within empire, the power of exodus (T. Seay, Trans.). Theory, Culture & Society, 19(4), 187–194. Negri, A. (2006). Foucault between past and future (A. Toscano, Trans.). Ephemera, 6(1), 75–82. Negri, A. (2009). On Rem Koolhaas. Radical Philosophy, 154 (March/April), 48–50. Negri, A. (2011). Power and ontology between Heidegger and Spinoza. In D. Vardoulakis (Ed.), Spinoza now (pp. 307–320). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

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Negri, A. (2018, December 8). French insurrection (B. Bowett, Trans.). Verso blog. Accessed 4 April 2020 from: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4158-french-insurrection. Phillips, J. (2005). Heidegger’s Volk: Between national socialism and poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Revel, J. (2016). Transcendence, spirituality, practices, immanence: A conversation with Antonio Negri (A. Bove, Trans.). Rethinking Marxism, 28(3–4), 470–478. Revel, J., & Negri, A. (2011). The common in revolt. Uninomade 2. Accessed 4 April 2020 from: http://www.uninomade.org/commoninrevolt/. Vacche, A. D. (2003). The visual turn: Classical film theory and art history. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Vitale, F. (2018a). The last fortress of metaphysics: Jacques Derrida and the deconstruction of architecture (M. Senatore, Trans.). Albany: SUNY Press. Vitale, F. (2018b). Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the life sciences (M. Senatore, Trans.). Albany: SUNY Press. Wall, T. C. (1999). Radical passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, Agamben. Albany: SUNY Press.

Chapter 9

Cruel Festival

9.1 Introduction 9.1.1 Pandemics Chapter 1 opened with discussion of the research undertaken by Alice Hills, on what she terms ‘post-conflict’ cities, described as cities in crisis with respect to the rule of law and the regulation or governmentality of order. Her research engages especially African cities that have been subjected to civil wars, as well as cities in Iraq and Afganastan, in the aftermath of, especially, U.S. and U.K. military incursion. Discussion followed to more broadly engage with cities in conflict with respect to wide-spread surveillance, increasing indistinction between policing and military intervention, along with post nation-state, or ‘ultra’ nation-state, measures at global surveillance in contexts of neo-colonial financial interests. Emphasis was given to what Stephen Graham defined as ‘de-modernization’ or ‘urbicide’, now global practices identified as much in first-world metropolitan centres as in developing States. The Spinozan understanding of an immanence to community, emphasised by Andy Merrifield, opened analyses of political urbanism to a focus on what Merrifield defined as the precariat, or those whose lives are defined, for example, by ‘System D’, a planetary ‘commons’ of the under-employed, or semi-employed, those for whom employment is insecure, makeshift and vulnerable to economic or social dislocations. With Brenner and Schmid, we recognised arguments for re-scaling our understanding of an ontology of the urban, though their ontological ‘ground’ is not that of Merrifield. Their planetary urban fabric, coterminous with the practices of capitalism, suggests there is no ‘outside’ to the urban, inasmuch as whatever we may hold to be ‘non-urban’ will be given its definition, value and meaning from out of the hegemonic milieus of urbanizing. Brenner and Schmid, importantly, were critical of those defining moments of ‘classical’ urban theory in the early twentieth century, that posed statistical measures of population density, invoking an empirical understanding or definition of the urban, at the cost of more critical theoretical framing. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. L. Jackson and M. Hanlen, Securing Urbanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9964-4_9

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Brenner and Schmid’s emphasis is on re-defining that theoretical understanding of urbanizing. In summing our, admittedly, limited development of paradigms of urban theorizing, we emphasized a series of critical concerns that we thought would carry us through the book. These included concerns with security and order—for Foucault, the normative and the juridical. Another was the distinction of family and citizen—or in Agamben’s terms, oikos and polis, zo¯e and bios. There were also circulation and metabolism, what we especially engaged, in Chapter 1, with the work of Swyngedouw. Circulation, metabolism, movement, are recognised as a defining or grounding moment for understanding processes of urbanizing. We suggest one of our aims has been to recognise where this notion is questioned or dislocated. Circulation, emphasised by Ross Adams, along with Swyngedouw, is most generally thought as a ‘naturalizing’ of—or as—the technological. This ‘nature’ comprises an ontological disclosure of what is actual, as movement from its potential-to-be, from its very possibilities-to-be. The ‘coming undone’ of the circularity of circulation happens in a curious ‘caesura’ or standstill, that would oppose itself to every kinesis, what remains inoperative in everything operable. Later in the book, we suggest there is something in Agamben’s notion of ‘use’ and destituent power that, in a way, begins to address this. What we did not engage, or foresee as critical, or even glean as something we were ignoring or overlooking in the literature, was what happens to, or within, our urbanizing ‘fabrics’, our ‘circulating metabolisms’, our ‘conflictual cities’ or urban stasis, when the planet, more or less simultaneously, or over the ‘space’ of a few months, encounters a pandemic that simply brings most cities on the planet to a halt. It brings global travel to a halt, along with travel internal to nation-states. It seems as if nations once again define the insularity of their borders, tear this planetary ‘urban fabric’ into territorial pieces, in a situation, somewhat ironic and tragic, where a virus becomes a planetary phenomenon. Our aim in this concluding chapter is to critically engage with this ‘halting’, this stark inoperativity of cities, of States and economies, this caesura that aimed at breaking with a pandemic virus, housing itself in just about every nation-state on the planet, potentially in each living body on the planet. It is while we were bringing Chapter 2 to a conclusion, in mid-January 2020, that we noticed the first news report of a single death in China, in the city of Wuhan. The report came from The New York Times correspondent in China, Sui-Lee Wee, on January 15. That death was from pneumonia. By January 16, the same reporter emphasised that two people had died from a newly discovered coronavirus. ‘Corona’ describes the molecular structure of the virus, more-or-less in a crown-shape. Two earlier coronavirus outbreaks were well known, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002–2003, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012.1 1 SARS

and MERS differ from this latest coronavirus in a number of important respects. Both are more-deadly, with higher mortality rates for those who develop symptoms. Importantly, SARS is transmissible only when symptoms appear and those symptoms are severe, requiring hospitalization. Hence, the majority of inadvertent transmissions happened when SARS patients were hospitalized. MERS is even more deadly, with about 50% mortality rate, though transmission happens predominantly from animal-to-humans, via infected camels. This new coronavirus is highly transmissible before symptoms are evident. At times symptoms are mild or those infected may be asymptomatic.

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The New York Times also reported that cases had appeared in Thailand and Japan. January 17, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued its highest global warning on the ‘mysterious’ Chinese coronavirus, after its spread to Japan. The virus appeared in China on the eve of massive population movements within the country, though also into and out of China, for the Chinese New Year. At this time, a reported 41 people were ill. Our initial thoughts when this news ‘broke’ was to add a ‘post-script’ to Chapter 2, that would outline the emergence of this epidemic in China. As events unfolded over the next few days, we realised a post-script would be insufficient. Then, as event unfolded very quickly into early February, we wondered about everything this book seemed to be dealing with, whether these extraordinary global events that focused on cities in crisis, and on a ‘return’ to nation-state territorial strategies, might demand we rewrite much of what we had thought through. Then, on March 11, the WHO announced a global pandemic. We recognised that our concerns throughout the book go some way in defining how current events expose the gravity of the question of ‘securitizing’ the urban. Chapter 2 began with an account, or series of accounts, offered by Michel Foucault, of the emergence of social medicine or State medicine from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It emphasised, as do Foucault’s lectures from the early 1970s, that the impetus for social medicine was the calculation of economic costs of an unhealthy or incapacitated labour-force. Coupled with this calculus of the cost of labour-power, was the sanitation of urban milieus, especially those of the urban poor, understood as breeding ground of urban disease. Social medicine was a disciplinary measure developed by the bourgeoisie, targeting the urban poor, in order to benefit the political economy of the wealthy classes. It was, in terms developed by Foucault in 1975, a biopolitical strategy. The cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century—in fact ‘pandemics’ when we consider their movements from Asia to Europe—were analysed or documented according to, on the one hand, disagreement within the medical profession as to an understanding of the disease, and therefore its transmission and containment. On the other hand, we provided newspaper accounts of the cholera epidemics in the U.K., that focused on the shifts in treatment from the 1831 outbreak and the outbreak mid-century. The earlier outbreak followed the procedures of a century earlier in containing plague, via strict quarantine, policing and governmental disciplinary measures. These were well-documented by Foucault in his early 1970s lectures, and in Discipline and Punish. The later outbreak followed procedures that Foucault would define as securitizing, concerned with understanding disease’s laws and movements through population statistics and their analyses, applying scientific procedures that may well involve quarantine in some cases, though equally attentive to the illiberalism that such measures invoke. The debate within the medical profession, that we discussed with respect to the Paris epidemic of 1832, centred on a division predominantly between urban doctors and rural doctors. Urban doctors tended to adopt precepts of liberalism, concerned especially with the economic costs Equally, there is little understanding of the range of effects of the virus, its severity for some and the significance of autoimmunity developing once infected. The influenza virus is also a coronavirus, though it has a much lower death rate and less severe effects.

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of quarantine measures, with the stifling of movements of labour and commodities as well as materials for production. In their view, the disease was not contagious by human transmission, but was airborne. Hence, treatment especially involved the opening of air to healthy circulation, resulting especially in urban planning reforms and demolition of closed-in and unsanitary quarters occupied by the poorer classes. Rural doctors tended to be more conservative, but also better able to follow pathways of transmission from contact to contact, and thereby trace those with the disease and those with whom they had been in contact. As their prognosis was that the disease is not airborne but contagious by human touch, their mode of treatment tended to be strict quarantine. From a European perspective, epidemic or pandemic disease always came from ‘elsewhere’, from the river deltas of distant trading nations: China, India, Egypt, the Americas. Disease migrated via trading routes, overland or by sea, from port to port, or by standing armies moving across Europe. European cities were destinations for epidemic disease rather than instigators. A significant impetus for colonial expansion was not only the securing of raw materials, an expanded labour force and territories, but also to control what were perceived to be the sources of epidemic diseases that intermittently arrived in European cities. We concluded that chapter with discussion on how contemporary understandings of citizenship incur responsibility for ensuring one’s social-medical wellbeing, not so much as a right-to-health, but as an obligation to becoming one’s own healthy earning-stream. In a sense, the burden of social medicine’s insurance of a labourforce has passed to an individuated obligation to being ready-for-work. Chapter 3 aimed to present a small history of—or genealogy of—events that led to the most serious global financial disaster since the 1929 stock market crash, the 2008–09 Global Financial Crash (GFC). In doing so, it initially looked at how the vocabulary used in defining the planetary event of the GFC was taken from epidemiology. Market collapse seemed to be contagious. Economic analysis and global economic theory had no sure way of understanding how the epidemic or pandemic proportions of contagion happened. There was little understanding of the systemic interactions between economic agents, nor how the forces at work were transmitted from financial entity to entity. We especially looked at the work of King (2002) on how, from the turn of the millennium, U.S. national interests were aggressively served by its commitment to global surveillance of infectious diseases that could pose a threat, especially an economic threat, to the U.S. In fact, global surveillance was especially geared to ensure U.S. pharmaceutical interests at a global level. King cites a 1997 report from the American Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine, concerning America’s interest in global health: America has a vital interest and direct stake in the health of people around the globe, and … this interest derives from both America’s long and enduring tradition of humanitarian concern and compelling reason of enlightened self-interest. Our considered involvement can serve to protect our citizens, enhance our economy, and advance US interests abroad … America must engage in the fight for global health from its strongest base: its pre-eminence in science and technology. (see King 2002, 771)

We noted the work of Peckham on global financial interests and health surveillance (Peckham 2013). We note, as well, his co-authored 2019 paper (with Ria Sinha),

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“Anarchitectures of health: Futures for the biomedical drone.” The paper emphasises a conjoining of discussions we earlier referenced from Graham on global surveillance measures that increasingly blur policing and military operations, along with the kinds of issues raised by King, concerning global financial interests in locating, defining and containing infectious disease: “We develop the notion of ‘anarchitecture’ to describe the formation of these new inverted health landscapes where state infrastructures are entangled with shifting technological networks. In short, we seek to develop a framework for reflecting on the ways in which global health is being reconfigured through the development of remote-sensing technologies and cyberinfrastructures” (Peckham and Sinha 2019, 1204). We also note another 2019 paper by Bengtsson, Borg and Rhinard, that focuses on what they term “epidemic intelligence” (EI) adopted by the European Union, “a vigilance-oriented approach of early detection and containment drawing on web-scanning tools and other informal sources” (115). Its aim is early detection and containment of epidemic disease, rather than prevention. We emphasise here this contemporary literature on especially U.S. and EU interests in the detection of global infectious disease, for the reason that whatever measures were in place, whatever early detection or warning systems that should have alerted European States and the United States to an explosive pandemic threat seemed to fail during the first two months of 2020. Though, as we discover, at least in the U.S., the National Security Agency (NSA) was fully informed in December 2019, of the emergence of an unidentified coronavirus in Wuhan, and reported this to the White House. In fact, the White House need only to have read the China-correspondent of The New York Times to have garnered the same information by mid-January. Though the U.S. president, Donald Trump, had already indicated his low priority for early detection and preparation for a pandemic event in the U.S. He had already curtailed aspects of the international and national programmes of the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), the federal body responsible for the detection and containment of epidemic diseases. A news item, January 22 from Bloomberg, cautiously notes that China’s new coronavirus “is far from being a pandemic,” though warns that ‘we’—the U.S.—should be prepared for when one does arrive, practicing what was learnt from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) pandemic, which killed 774 people globally in 2002–2003. Bloomberg also provided an article on China’s food production, especially meat and poultry production, emphasising that China does not have the same intensive factory-farming methods as seen, for example, in the U.S. The advantage of intensive farming methods is the biosecurity containment they provide, should disease erupt. Extensive farming methods do not allow for the same level of control. At some time in December 2019, there was an outbreak of a viral pneumonia, of unknown etiology in the city of Wuhan, in the Chinese province of Hubei. By January 9 2020, the WHO and Chinese authorities announced the discovery of a novel coronavirus, known as 2019-nCoV. Over the weekend of 11–12 January, the Chinese authorities shared the full sequence of the coronavirus genome with international research facilities.2 The first indication of the severity of the epidemic in China 2 See

Institut Pasteur (2020).

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arrived on January 24, with news that the city of Wuhan, with a population of 11 million people, has been placed on strict quarantine, prohibiting anyone leaving or entering the city. This is only nine days after the first death reported, along with less than 50 cases of pneumonia. Surrounding cities followed similar measures. At this stage, there were 41 reported fatalities from the disease with 1200 patients, indicative of the acceleration of the virus. By January 25, global news reported that China had imposed public health emergency measures on 22 provinces, with approximately 1.1 billion people, with 56 million subjected to internal travel bans. Lockdown meant the closure of public facilities, restaurants, access to public places such as parks, as well as schools, universities and all but essential industry. News also emerged about the chronic shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as face-masks, gowns and protective clothing. Even at this time, virologists and epidemiologists had little understanding of the virus, how it was transmitted, the reporting of a wide range of symptoms, the potential for asymptomatic infections, and the potential for anti-body immunity once infected. Though within two weeks of detection of the novel virus, researchers at a virology laboratory in Wuhan had mapped the genome of the virus, identifying it as a coronavirus, and had circulated this finding globally to research facilities, thereby enabling international efforts to develop a testing procedure for the virus. From our perspective, widespread reporting in the global press seemed, at times, to repeat scenarios that defined measures in dealing with epidemics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some of the same procedures seemed to be followed, the same concerns about maintaining the circulation of labour and commodities, as opposed to confinement and quarantine. What appeared staggeringly different, in this case, was the scale of governmental measures: the quarantining of the largest population on the planet.

9.2 SARS-CoV-2 9.2.1 Covid-19 The first report of what would be designated as COVID-19 (abbreviating ‘Corona Virus December 2019’) arriving in the U.S. appeared on January 22. That case was in Seattle, Washington. A second, third and fourth case quickly followed, in Illinois, two in California and one in Arizona. In a news item posted January 26, someone in Los Angeles County, returning from Wuhan City, was diagnosed with the virus. At this time, it was reported that 56 people had died in China, with another 2000 with the disease. The virus had spread to six countries. January 25, the U.S. government warned Americans not to travel to Hubei province, epicentre of the disease in China. January 30, British Airways suspended all but essential flights to mainland China from the U.K. January 31, Italy suspended all flights to and from China. It reported two coronavirus cases, declaring a state of emergency. February 1, American Airlines and Delta Airlines suspend all flights to China, due to pressure from

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the Allied Pilots Association, who filed for a temporary restraining order to stop flights. United Airlines followed. The CDC ordered a 14-day quarantine for Americans returning from China. Already on January 31, the CDC had advised the potential for the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic. Its director of the National Centre for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, Dr Nancy Messonnier, emphasised: “If we take strong measures now, we may be able to blunt the impact of the virus on the United States” (quoted in Joseph 2020, n.p.) The last U.S. quarantine issued by a federal body was in the 1960s, to contain smallpox. By February 8, reports from China suggested the virus was transmitted to a human initially from a mammal, identified in a preliminary study as a Pangolin. This early reporting has not been corroborated with follow-up studies. 9 February, we have a report that COVID-19 has taken more lives than the SARS outbreak. All deaths, but one, are reported to be in China and Hong Kong, most in Hubei province, with nearly 37,000 confirmed cases. News, February 11, indicated that a high tech Mobile World Congress, to be held in Barcelona, had the major global tech companies (including Amazon, Ericsson, LG, Sony) pulling out due to concerns about travel and the coronavirus. Mid-February reports emerged about the virus taking hold on cruise ships, the first being a February 19 report on the Diamond Princess disembarking those who tested negative in Yokohama, Japan, with an estimated 500 positive cases in quarantine on the ship. February 17, Taiwan confirmed two coronavirus deaths. Deaths had also been reported in France, Japan, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Mid-February, a month since news of the virus ‘broke’, China reported 1666 fatalities, and 68,584 cases. The U.S. had 15 reported cases, with two ‘recoveries’. February 28, we saw an early news report from the U.S. as to the effects of a coronavirus pandemic on the financial markets. Early indicators show significant stock sell-offs, though financial experts are cautions as too little is known about the virus and what will happen. It was generally thought that the U.S. stock market had the most to lose globally (Kaissar 2020). 28 February also marked when a first suspected case of coronavirus was detected in New Zealand, an incoming passenger from Iran. The New Zealand government issued travel restrictions to and from Iran. Restrictions for China travel had already been implemented. Mandatory self-isolation for 14 days would be required. 48 countries by now had detected the coronavirus, with 80,000 confirmed cases globally. South Korea had 256, Italy had 650, with 17 deaths. The New York Times reported, 29 February, on the potential for a pandemic event similar to the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic (which originated in the U.S.), killing somewhere between 50 and 70 million people, and infecting around 500 million. It suggested: “We may have to think about reducing occasions when people are crowded together; that may mean more people working from home to avoid offices, buses and subways” (Kristof 2020, n.p.) This was, for us, the first mention of what came to be known as ‘social distancing’. Going into March, by March 2, we see a report on Italy that suggests a strong surge of cases, jumping overnight from a thousand to 1700, with 34 deaths. In eight days, the cases went from 14 to 1128, and deaths from 1 to 29. Italy, Iran and South Korea are, at this time, epi-centres. March 1, we saw reported the first U.S. coronavirus death in Washington State. The State governor declared a state of emergency. A much later report revealed the first U.S.

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death actually happened in early February, in California, before testing procedures were in place. The victim died from coronary failure rather than respiratory failure, the virus detected only in a post-mortem examination. March 5, Italy shut down schools and universities, and public events such as sporting fixtures. Quarantine measures were put in place in 11 cities in the north. March 6, New Zealand has its fourth case confirmed, with a fifth a day later. March 8, the lockdown in northern Italy was extended to 14 provinces, with about 10 million people. The number of reported cases jumped in a day by 1247 to 5883. By March 9, reports suggested that over 100 countries indicated having coronavirus cases, with a total of 109,600 cases and 3800 fatalities. March 11, the WHO declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic.

9.2.2 Global Inadequate Responses By March 16 we saw significant reporting of dissatisfaction with the U.S. president in how he was directing federal efforts to address the virus, though White House guidelines on social distancing were announced. Criticism was that these guidelines should have been announced, minimally, two weeks earlier, at the beginning of March, when only 11 deaths had been confirmed. As well, these guidelines were soft, in the sense that each State was able to determine its own regulatory response to the virus, making for extreme unevenness with respect to a national approach to maintaining the virus. It was reported that the U.S. president was responsible, in 2018, for closing down the White House Office for overseeing preparation for pandemics. California’s governor issued a State-wide stay-at-home order. There was nationwide emphasis on social distancing, and self-quarantining, though the White House appeared diffident in supporting these measures, the president having dismissed or down-played the pandemic during February as something under control, that will ‘go away soon’. As of March 17, there are 5700 recorded cases in the U.S., and 100 deaths. Globally, there are 168,000 cases and 6600 deaths. There is a report at this time that asymptomatic carriers may be more responsible for transmitting the disease than those with symptoms. Testing carried out on an entire town of 3000 in Italy revealed that the majority of COVID-19 cases were asymptomatic. The watchword became: Act like you already have coronavirus. This ‘watchword’ is repeated by New Zealand’s Prime Minister who, on March 18, announced measures to address the pandemic, which included tight border controls, a ban on cruise ships and, importantly, a 12.1 billion dollar “economy response package” to assist individuals and industry affected by national and global disruptions caused by the virus. 19 March, New Zealand had 28 cases. 21 March, the New Zealand Prime Minister announced a COVID-19 control process, involving four ‘Alert’ levels, indicating that the nation is at Level 2, with those over 70 remaining at home, workplaces to implement social distancing procedures, and limits to all non-essential domestic travel. By this stage, the U.K., along with many European cities, was already in lockdown. Global deaths passed 10,000. A report of March 22 notes that China’s Hubei province, epicentre of the virus outbreak, had no new cases for a fourth day. While China seemed to be halting the spread of the virus, the U.S.

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government proposed a 2.2 trillion-dollar economic package to rescue the American economy faced with shutting down due to the virus. By March 22, there were 263,841 cases globally, with 24,252 cases in the U.S. Reports begin to highlight the crisis in New York, with a third of the nation’s cases and 63 deaths. It was only on 22 March that New York issued its mandatory social distancing regulations. Five States by that stage had issued mandatory stay-at-home orders. Italy recorded a death rate of 651 per day, with cases jumping at nearly ten times that rate per day. The Italian Prime Minister placed a nation-wide ban on movement, and only essential services were to be open (supermarkets, pharmacies, banks, post offices). Greece imposed a nation-wide lockdown prior to any significant case numbers. Spain extended its state of emergency rule, having Europe’s second highest outbreak, after Italy, with 28,572 cases. Travel restrictions were being lifted in Wuhan, for those who showed they had tested negative, indicating that strict quarantine had controlled the spread of the virus. March 23, the New Zealand Prime Minister, having two days earlier announced the 4-Level Alert approach, and earlier a significant economic package, announced the country would go into Level 4 Alert in 48 hours, effectively shutting down the country, making stay-at-home mandatory, closing all but essential businesses, such as those supplying food, pharmaceuticals, and essential services for households. This would be for a 4-week period, and lifted to Level 3 if progress in containment of the virus was successful. By this date there were, globally, 300,000 reported cases to WHO. It took 67 days for the first 100,000 cases, 11 days for second, and 4 days for the third. This emphasised the acceleration of the virus. While the WHO recommended stay-at-home measures to slow the virus, it emphasised the necessity for testing and tracing, testing those suspected and also randomly testing populations for asymptomatic cases, along with tracing the contact-paths of those who had the disease, to control the multiplier effect. This led to a world-wide demand for testing kits and tracing procedures. Those countries with strong quarantine measures, strong testing protocols and tracing methodologies seemed to bring the virus under control: China, South Korea and Taiwan, in particular. European countries were ill-prepared, unprepared for rigid quarantining, under-resourced for testing, and without strong methodologies for tracing. Britain and the U.S. were, surprisingly, even less prepared, with catastrophic results, especially in the U.S. Shortages of PPE, especially face masks, along with shortages of ventilators for those with acute respiratory effects from the virus, were significant markers of the lack of planning and coordination in the U.S. In a New York Times report from March 17, it was apparent that acute shortage of masks brought about the downplaying of the effectiveness of masks for the general public, to lower demand for what was already an insufficient supply for essential medical staff. March 24, New Zealand has 155 coronavirus cases. Reports on China’s economic performance during the coronavirus crisis, which shut down industry and retail throughout the country, indicated the worst quarter on record. Economic activity collapsed during February. Global economic forecasters estimated, on the basis of China’s performance, a global GDP contraction of 10–11%. This was later revised to 15%. We need to keep in mind that at this stage the virus had not escalated to devastating levels in the U.S., and was yet to peak in much of Europe, while China was in

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recovery, as was South Korea and Taiwan. Japan was yet to experience the full effects of the virus, as was Russia and Turkey. South American countries were beginning to take quarantine measures, while the WHO held grave fears for when the virus reaches African countries, with large populations and poor medical infrastructure and services. We read of experimental trials of a vaccine for coronavirus, developed by a biotech firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Earlier research on vaccines for SARS and MERS, also coronaviruses, enabled researchers to fast-track the development of a trial vaccine. However, even with human testing at this stage, it would still be twelve to eighteen months before a vaccine would be ready for distribution. A complicating factor is that the coronavirus is a RNA rather than DNA virus, which means it is capable of significant and frequent mutation, rather than remaining more stable. This, then, suggests that any vaccine may be limited to one strain and would itself require modification for emerging strains (Mullin 2020a, n.p.). At this time, analysis appeared on how Italy had managed and mismanaged the pandemic, with the aim of alerting especially those countries still awaiting the full impact of the virus, to measures that need to be taken. Hence, the virus arrived in the northern industrial and business centres of Italy, centres that have significant trade with China. Early efforts at quarantine were lax, half-measures, with little genuine effect. Health workers were overly exposed to the virus and contracted the disease in significant numbers. When stricter quarantine measures were enforced nationwide, testing was not done systematically, and there was no defined methodology for tracking. The report emphasised that these failings had been repeated in Spain and France, while the U.K., which initially followed a soft-quarantine approach, aiming at ‘herd immunization’ by wide-spread contracting of the virus, has done a reversal and effected strict measures. While it noted that the U.S. has increased testing, the report did not suggest that the U.S. had put in measures to avoid widespread contagion. Already by March 24, 5500 Italian lives were lost, compared with what was then reported as 3300 in China. Italy’s population is 4% that of China. March 28, Italy reports 969 deaths in a day, though the rate of increase in new cases was declining. In four days, the death toll climbed to 9134. The aim globally, with quarantine measures, or social distancing, was to ‘flatten the curve’ that was daily published in each country, tracking the rate of growth of the virus. Flattening the curve meant fewer new cases, less pressure on stretched hospital facilities, and more concentrated focus on tracking new cases, and their contact pathways. Hong Kong had developed an electronic wrist-band tracking system, though found it fallible. Iceland has tested about 50% of its population and found there to be far more asymptomatic carriers than previously thought possible. This shifted perceptions globally concerning the necessity for more random testing and tracking of individuals. We began to see how a biopolitical response to COVID-19 bifurcates, on the one hand, to daily population statistics, showing an upwardly-moving curve, defining the rate of growth of cases, with the aim of depicting, at some future moment, the flattening of the curve. The ‘image’ of the virus is statistically-derived. On the other hand, testing and tracking implicate individuated bodies, their movements and contacts. While overall testing numbers, and testing outcomes, can be presented statistically, the

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intensive effects of—or on—individuals, their multiple contact-points, and susceptibility or vulnerability cannot be. Reports emerged concerning the ‘indifference’ of the virus to race, or class or gender. Though such reports were redressed by empirical evidence of the disproportionate number of Blacks and Hispanic Americans, from poorer or depressed neighbourhood, who were afflicted with the virus. Similar reports emerged from the U.K., and elsewhere. This resurrected discussions we encountered two centuries earlier concerning the greater vulnerability of the urban poor or disenfranchised to chronic disease. By March 30, the U.S. had 122,653 confirmed cases, more than any other country, along with 2112 deaths. New York city and New York State were in crisis, with shortages of medical supplies, hospital beds and morgue facilities. U.K. coronavirus cases were in excess of 17,000, with an additional 260 deaths in a day, bringing the number to a little over 1000. The British Prime Minister was quarantined, and then hospitalized, with the virus. International reports suggested that domestic violence had increased, with requirements for stay-at-home quarantine for most households in Europe, the U.K., the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. We had reports, March 30, of a 500-bed hospital being built in Moscow in response to the pandemic, while the virus has arrived in India, causing the mass exodus of itinerant workers from major cities to rural locations, as lockdown measures came into force. March 31, a field hospital was being constructed in New York City’s Central Park, while in London an emergency coronavirus facility was developed in a convention centre building, capable of accommodating up to 4000 patients. The U.S. death toll reached 6000, with over one million cases globally and 54,000 fatalities. The pharmaceutical giant, Johnson and Johnson, announced it is ready for human trials for a potential vaccine against COVID-19. The U.S. government invested $450 million in that vaccine project.

9.2.3 Crossroads April 3, there is a report that the U.S. president had appointed his son-in-law as head of the White House coronavirus response. News reports were generally hostile to this appointment, seen as misplaced nepotism, at a time of genuine national crisis. Into the second week of Level 4 lockdown, New Zealand reported a total of 950 cases, with 82 new cases reported that day. Though, there was confidence in bringing the virus spread to a close, as widespread testing was in force and a methodology for careful tracking of new cases, along with their transmission-paths, had been developed. As of April 5, only one death had occurred in New Zealand. The U.S. reported in excess of 6500 deaths and 250,000 cases, with New York representing about 40% of these. New predictions for the U.S. suggested a potential death rate of between 100,000 and 200,000, if interventions are made. The U.S. president emphasised the need to follow stay-at-home guidelines, though each of the 50 States had discretion as to mandatory or voluntary lockdown. Modelling of future scenarios suggested that without any intervention the death rate would be between 1.5 million and 2.2 million.

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Some evidence suggested that Italy, France and Spain were ‘flattening’ their curves. Globally there were 1.25 million cases with in excess of 68,000 deaths. With the rapid spread of the virus in the U.S., seemingly going unchecked, and almost as retalitatory blame, attention focused on early reporting in China, back in December 2019, or on China’s failure at reporting, or under-reporting, the severity of the virus and the numbers affected. China revised its counts of infections and deaths, as it recognised greater numbers who died from the virus though were not accounted-for at the time. China seemed to be increasingly held accountable for the emergence and global transmission of the virus, with calls for an international investigation coming from Australia’s Prime Minister, as well as from Britain’s former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Some suggestions emerge that the virus was manufactured in a laboratory facility in Wuhan and released, accidentally or by intention. This version of events was especially promulgated from the White House, contradicting scientific evidence internationally held, along with the White House’s own intelligence services.3 By April 3, 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits due to the pandemic. This added to the 3.3 million who applied the week previously. Expectations were that U.S. unemployment will reach figures only previously encountered with the Great Depression.4 By the end of April, there were 33 million registered for unemployment, or approximately 15% of the U.S. labour force. A further statistic suggested that 50% of all American wage earners had loss of income due to the pandemic. The U.K. stepped up testing to 100,000 per day. April 7, the Czech Republic became the first European State to ease its lockdown restrictions. It was the first State to impose the mandatory use of face masks in public, declaring a state of emergency before any COVID-19 deaths had occurred. As well, by April 7, it was estimated that, globally, 4.5 trillion dollars in emergency funds had been allocated to address the economic catastrophy brought about by quarantine measures throughout the world. This figure would grow substantially over the next month. Controversy developed, April 8, over a supposed treatment for COVID-19: Hydroxychloroquine, a drug developed for auto-immune disease, and related to anti-malaria treatments. The U.S. president was especially promoting this drug, supposedly threatening India with retaliation if it did not export supplies to the United States. Medical authorities emphasised there were no test-results confirming the effectiveness of the drug, and warned against its use, unless there was expert medical guidance.5 The U.S. president was later to promote the potential benefits of some form of ingesting 3 See,

for example, the paper published in Nature, 17 March 2020 (Andersen et al. 2020), that undertook research to determine the likelihood or possibility that the virus was either manufactured or genetically modified from an existing naturally occurring virus. Its conclusion, in part, is that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” (n.p.). 4 By 25 May, unemployment in the U.S. reached close to 40 million individuals who had applied for benefits. This represents approximately 1 in 5 of those who are employable, reaching those levels experienced in the Great Depression, though occurring, catastrophically, within the space of a month. 5 In a news report in late May, the U.S. president informed the press that he has been taking Hydroxychloroquine on a daily basis as a preventative measure. Nationally and internationally medical authorities expressed alarm.

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disinfectant, as well as strong exposure to UV radiation. These were strongly refuted by medical experts as not only impractical, but as serious dangers to health. April 9, Wuhan lifted its 76-day lockdown. Global cases passed 1.5 million, with more than 100,000 fatalities. New Zealand reported its fourth death and 1312 cases, going into its third week of lockdown. All new cases had thorough tracking for potential contact-paths. A report was published April 9, on the impetus for developing improved surveillance technologies due to COVID-19. The report mentioned 30 countries engaged in a range of tactics for improved surveillance methods. In Argentina, the Ministry of Health had developed a mandatory app for those entering the country that tracks their location. This app needed to be installed for a 14day ‘quarantine’ period. Other measures included telephone companies sharing data with governments to analyse population movements, the mandatory use of electronic bracelets connected to a mobile app, for tracking of individuals, the use of drones for surveillance and for aerial disinfecting of neighbourhoods. In China, public camera facial recognition software was used for surveillance and tracking. There was also the use of a smart-phone app that indicates health levels, permitting or refusing entry to locations. An ABC news item in the U.S. suggested that the then-reported 10,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19 greatly underestimated the actual number of deaths. Only those tested as positive were recorded as COVID-19 deaths. With little testing done during January and February, and testing availability in March also difficult, it was likely that the actual death rate was much higher. The number of deaths at home in New York City grew in March by 10-fold from around 20–25 to over 200. These were not reported as virus deaths. Another April 9 report suggested that the U.S. military’s National Centre for Medical Intelligence had circulated a paper in November 2019, alerting the Pentagon and the White House to a widespread virus outbreak in Wuhan province in China, indicating its potential for global impact. A New York Times report of April 11 showed that the U.S. intelligence community, national security aides and government health officials were aware of the threat to the U.S. by early January, and advised the president, who ignored or downplayed that advice. Even when the WHO announced a global pandemic on March 11, the president resisted social distancing measures. By that time, it is now estimated that the city of New York had up to 10,000 undetected cases of COVID-19, though only a handful of known cases and one death. Those cases in New York did not originate from contacts in China, but from Europe. While international travel to China had been suspended in February, travel to and from Europe was, at that time, continuing. A great many of those transmissions originated from carriers in Italy. As well, the majority of American contagions originated from New York, as internal travel was not restricted for several more weeks. Most infections in the United States have been traced to early cases in New York, in the east, and Washington State in the west. While Californians and other west-coast States were infected from Washington, as the virus spread south and east, the spread was much stronger from the east, transmitting to most of the middle-U.S. States. A BBC news item, April 10, discussed efforts in the U.S. for contact-tracing technology (Kelion 2020). Apple and Google aimed at collaborating on a Bluetoothdriven device for cell-phones, that would alert owners to when they had been in

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contagious contact with someone. There would be no dedicated app requiring download, while user-participation would be anonymous and voluntary, with no personal data being recorded. At that time, there was no defined methodology for contact tracing, with some States developing methods, though they needed to be uniform or workable across State borders, if tracking was to be effective. By April 11, the number of confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. surpassed that of Italy, standing at 20,229, with approximately 10% of this as the daily death rate. Even at this point in early April, the president was pushing for the country to re-open, for the economy to recover, for people to get back to work, and to down-play social distancing. Amid a crisis in the over production of oil, and the sudden global halt to oil consumption, due to national stand-stills and quarantine measures, OPEC, along with Russia, the U.S. and Mexico, agree to cut overall production. This did not halt the fall in the price of oil futures, which went below zero for the first time in trading-history. April 15, the U.S. president announced the halting of funding to WHO, due to his perception of the complicity of WHO in China’s early obfuscating of the reality of the virus and its spread. The U.S. is the largest global contributor to WHO, with approximately $450 million annually, or 14% of the overall annual budget. Halting funding at this time, when the WHO was actually seeking considerably more funding to combat the virus globally, was generally condemned by the UN Secretary General, other world leaders, and Bill Gates, whose Foundation was playing a role in supporting efforts to halt the virus spread. It was generally held that the U.S. president was deflecting criticism of his mishandling of the pandemic, by holding China accountable for not initially containing the virus in Wuhan, where it first broke out. This accusation is compounded by the further insistence that the virus was manufactured in a Wuhan laboratory and permitted to ‘escape’. April 15, a report emphasised the problems with testing procedures in the U.S., due in part to the rapid rise of cases, and hence the numbers requiring testing. This was exaccebated by the slowness of getting laboratory processing of tests, backlogs in testing outcomes, and up to 15% unreliability in the actual testing procedures. The report discussed a range of experimental approaches being undertaken to develop a home-testing kit, that would be inexpensive, quick and reliable (Mullins 2020b). While the U.S. had a rapidly climbing number of cases, and death-rate, the New Zealand Prime Minister announced on April 16 that the country will be lowering its lockdown alert, from Level 4 to Level 3. At that time, New Zealand was in its third week of stringent national stay-at-home regulation, and new case numbers had dropped to almost single digits. The month-long Level 4 measure was anticipated to be sufficient to allow for a slow and methodical opening of communities to greater movement. A New York Times report April 14, by two epidemiologists, noted that the imposing of social distancing protocols two weeks earlier, either nationally or State-by-State, would have reduced case numbers, and fatalities, by 60%. Emphasis was again given to the fact that lockdowns and social distancing are not solutions to eradicating the virus. They simply ‘buy time’ in slowing down the rate of increase, in ‘flattening the curve’. That ‘bought’ time contributes to developing tracing methodologies and technologies, along with more efficient testing procedures and vaccines (Jewell and Jewell 2020). By 21 April, there were globally 2.3

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million infections and in excess of 160,000 deaths. Random antibody testing in California produced the startling statistic of there being 50 times the number of cases than those actually reported, suggesting the virus was more widespread in communities than thought possible. Mid-April the U.S. president presented a ‘roadmap’ for reopening the country, which meant relaxing lockdown measures by the end of April. He initially emphasised that the president had the authority to enforce States to relax quarantine regulations, though later retracted or softened that, to suggesting each State governor would be deciding on an appropriate course of action. Most Republican States were aiming to relax social distancing measures by May. Democrat States were aiming at maintaining restrictions at least until mid-May, if not longer. Reports from Bloomberg April 17 and 22 on Germany and France suggested two different approaches in Europe, resulting in significantly different outcomes. Germany developed its own testing kits very early and tested widely, thereby showing very high case numbers, though accurately assessing its population, where the alternatives of sporadic testing, and testing only of those with acute virus symptoms, underestimate population numbers. Germany also developed strict lockdown measures and contact tracing. France was slow in lockdown measures and limited in its testing procedures. The Bloomberg article on Germany especially contrasted Germany’s Angela Merkel to the U.S.’s Donald Trump, in terms of national leadership and collaboration of a federal government with its constituent States. A further Bloomberg article on April 22 was indicative of how the pandemic was being essentially recognised and how it was to be fundamentally managed. Kluth (2020) in a report titled, “If we must build a surveillance state, let’s do it properly,” suggests initially: “The Covid-19 pandemic is in many ways an informational problem … so information is one key to controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2.” The report provided comparative analyses of five different national approaches to data-surveillance in tracking the virus, those of the U.S., China, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan, settling on the approach developed in Taiwan for surveillance of one’s self and others. The report referred to this as “participatory self-surveillance,” whereby the population “voluntarily partnered with the government” to create a network of databases, suggesting an ultra-high-tech democratic process. The American model, driven by its high-tech giants, was deemed elitist, while “masquerading as free.” The Chinese model was “illiberal,” South Korea’s model was too “collectivist,” while Europe suffered from “paranoia” concerning any data gathering whatsoever. While these summations are arguably questionable, for their simple polarisations, Kluth is correct in noting that for contact-tracing to be successful, it must reach minimally 60% of the population. At the time, no national tracing system was anywhere near that target level. Most national approaches were not aiming at containing and eliminating the virus. As New Zealand moved to Level 3 Alert on the 27 April, 78% of all confirmed cases had recovered, with new cases in single digits, and contact-tracing well defined. The New Zealand approach had aimed at full elimination of the virus, along with strong border controls in eliminating the potential entry of new cases. This was in marked contrast to the U.S. methodology, which at no time seemed to approach its handling of the virus with an aim at elimination. Its aim, instead, by the end of April

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seemed to be limiting containment, in the hope that testing and tracing methodologies would improve, and rate of acceleration of cases flatten out. Its ‘hope’ seemed to be entirely in the development of a vaccine to inoculate its population against a virus that may well never disappear. The U.S. president issued a three-phase guideline for ‘re-opening’ America, after almost total shutdown of retail and industry. Phase one was similar to New Zealand’s Alert Level 3, with work-from-home, minimizing non-essential travel, though phase one could feasibly be implemented only if the rate of new cases was dropping. Where people gather, there was to be social distancing. With phase two, non-essential travel could resume, with schools opening, bars and restaurants opening, with social distancing in place. Phase three enabled people to return to workplaces, public venues having limited social distancing, and standard sanitation measures. These guidelines were advisory only. Already, prior to the issuing of guidelines, some States had ‘opened’ and had moved immediately to phase two, or even more relaxed requirements. By late April, news reports focused on the approach Sweden had taken to manage the coronavirus. Rather than opt for lockdown or strict social distancing, its approach was to have the population become infected, a strategy coined as ‘herd immunization’, thereby building a large group with antibodies, while ensuring that those who became seriously ill had access to acute medical care. Population modelling suggested that by May1 there would be up to 600,000 in Stockholm with the virus. There has been no major economic disruption, no national shutdowns that most other countries experienced. Nor has there been curtailments to personal freedom and public movement. However, there has been a more significant death rate than is the case for Sweden’s immediate neighbours in Denmark, Finland and Norway.

9.2.4 Herd Immunities The U.S. was especially interested in this experiment, as it indicated a strategy for reopening the American economy, increasingly the major priority for the White House, a priority greater than that of lowering the rate of contagion (see Clark 2020). April proved to be a cross-roads month for much of the world. A report 28 April warned of a steep rise of COVID-19 cases in Africa. The first diagnosed case was in Egypt, February 13. By the end of April there were 32,000 cases across nearly all of the 54 nations in Africa, with 1423 fatalities. There are less than 5000 intensive care hospital beds across 43 African nations, 5 beds per million, compared with the European average of 4000 beds per million. South Africa had the most cases, 4500, though under 100 deaths, due to an early lockdown, March 26, while Algeria had the highest number of fatalities, at 425. By the end of April, most European States saw a decline in the rate of growth of new cases of the virus, and a corresponding drop in the death rate, with planning in place for safe and measured easing of quarantine restrictions, enabling a slow restarting of national economies. April also saw the emergence of new epicentres of coronavirus outbreaks, especially in Russia, in a number of African States, and in dense urban populations in Brazil. Brazil’s president, from

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the beginning, downplayed the significance of the virus, replicating the piecemeal approach we saw the United States, without a coordinated national plan to address the pandemic. During April, the United States, unlike other nations that had deaths in February and early March, especially those in Asia, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, was not able to lessen the impact of the virus, and still, by the beginning of May, had increasing contagion rates and death rates across most States. Though some States seemed to have plateaued, overall the country was experiencing between 20,000 and 30,000 new cases a day. News reports from the U.S. increasingly focused on the disparities with respect to the effects of the virus. The urban poor, African-Americans and Latinos, along with greater vulnerability to the virus, and unemployment, were, as well, vulnerable to food insecurity due to the quarantine restrictions. These minorities were those most likely to contract the virus, with the largest proportions of fatalities, with least access to adequate medical facilities or testing (Bhatt 2020). A Bloomberg report April 25 undertook a comparison of America’s and New Zealand’s approaches to the coronavirus (Nocera 2020). The report especially contrasted the effectiveness of lockdown measures in New Zealand, coupled with government welfare measures to avoid the massive unemployment rates seen in the U.S. As well, New Zealand’s centralised health system provided an effective national strategy for managing the spread of the virus, and for immediately identifying acute cases requiring intensive care. May 7, the New Zealand Prime Minister announced a plan by the giant tech firm, Microsoft, to open a data centre in New Zealand. The timing of this announcement seemed to us curious. We will discuss this further below, after concluding our COVID19 ‘timeline’. As well, in New Zealand we saw a report questioning the legality of the Level 4 and Level 3 lockdowns. The complexity arises from the fact that it is the Director-General of Health who is authorized to quarantine, on the basis of a law enabling a health official to direct an individual to be quarantined. In the situation of managing COVID-19, it was ‘assumed’ that the Director-General had the authority to direct every individual in the nation to quarantine, though the law never actually took this level of mandate into account. While no-one has contested the practicality of what has happened, and the responsibility demonstrated by the government to act in the way it did, the law itself is fragile and potentially open to abuse. Hence there is recognition of the necessity to legally test it and to strengthen it. Also on May 7, the U.S. CDC reported 1,193,813 cases of COVID-19, with the death toll passing 70,000. In preparation for re-opening the U.S. economy, at a time when the virus numbers were still climbing, there had been a race by many developers of antibody tests to bring their product to market. A CNN report, May 1, suggested that antibody testing procedures were unreliable, even those with FDA approval. May 11, the pharmaceutical company, Johnson and Johnson, reported it will be beginning human trials for a COVID-19 vaccine in September, expecting worldwide distribution of the drug in early 2021. The U.S., by early May, had one third of the world’s cases of the virus, more than 1.3 million, of an estimated 4 million worldwide, though medical authorities expect those numbers are under-reported in both the U.S. and globally. By May 11, almost

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80,000 deaths were reported in the U.S., approximately one quarter of all deaths from the virus. Going into nationwide easing of lockdown restrictions through May, not a single State in the U.S. at that time met minimum federal guidelines for relaxing social distancing and stay-at-home recommendations. Some State Job and Family Services required employers to report on employees currently on benefits who chose not to return to work, even if that reason was concern for health. This created an unethical requirement for at-risk workers to trade-off between undue health-risk to COVID-19 exposure, or loss of any financial support. May 14, we saw reports from the U.S. that States that had especially relaxed social distancing measures in an effort to ‘revive’ their economies, had sharp increases in case-numbers. This was especially so in rural towns in predominantly Republican States that had especially responded to the president’s aim at ‘opening up’ the economy. As of 25 May, the U.S. had 1,680,000 cases and just under 100,000 deaths, with daily increases of 22,784 cases and 1089 deaths. The U.S. was then followed by Brazil, which escalated dramatically over the previous fortnight to 150,000 cases and 22,746 deaths. These countries were followed then by Russia, which was escalating at 344,000 cases and 3541 deaths, though it was reported that deaths were being under-reported. Britain and most European countries have plateaued, with controls on case-testing and tracking. Worldwide, there were 5,400,000 cases and 345,000 deaths.6 Forecast modelling in the U.S. suggested that by the end of June it would have between 130,000 and 180,000 deaths, if social distancing measures were enforced. Widespread news reports from the U.S. suggested that social distancing measures were, in many instances, totally relaxed. In late May, China had a resurgence of new strains of the virus across three cities in the north-east—Shulan, Jilin City and Shengyang—with renewed lockdowns of 100 million people. The new strain takes longer to produce symptoms, making detection more difficult and increasing transmissions-risk while it goes undetected. It is related to the virus strain predominant in Russia, and suggests its possible transmission from Russia to China.7

6 See

COVID-19 25 May Update. to requirements for submission of the manuscript of Securing urbanism, our account of the global developments of COVID-19 need to be somewhat artificially truncated as of the end of May. We recognize that the pandemic continues and that unforeseen and contingent events will come to intervene, such as the significant urban disturbances in the United States—spreading globally— concerning racial justice, under the ‘banner’ of Black Lives Matter, events that were violent in ways that only emphasize much of what Graham has written on relations between militarization and policing within urban milieus. 7 Due

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9.3 Communovirus 9.3.1 ‘The Enemy Is Not Outside’ The foregoing accounts of the virus, from emergence in November 2019, through to May 2020, necessarily remains incomplete, as this particular ‘history of the present’ remains open to what many medical authorities currently recognise or expect to be a long and sustained future for the virus. Expectations are that it will mutate, and that it will return, like influenza, annually, at least until a global vaccination programme is established.8 Though, it is estimated that annual influenza vaccinations have somewhere between 30 and 60% success rates. Hence, eradication of COVID-19, as happened with smallpox in the 1970s, is unlikely. The above accounts of the development of the pandemic have come essentially from daily news feeds, many of which originated in the U.S., and many of which were critical of the Trump administration for its handling of the pandemic. In what follows, we present a series of critical responses to the emergence of the pandemic by philosophers and cultural theorists. We admit, from the beginning, that we were surprised by the naivety of some of the pronouncements or assessments made by important contemporary thinkers, when faced with commenting on ‘breaking news’. We commence with Giorgio Agamben. From discussion of Agamben’s work that started in Chapter 1, on civil war (stasis) and destituent power, to more detailed discussion in Chapters 7 and 8, concerning his 1995 Homo sacer, along with his more recent writings on inoperativity and formof-life, we are aware of his ongoing understanding of the biopolitical, bare life, state of exception and stasis. It would, then, be of no surprise to find that Agamben was unequivocal in condemning the state of emergency declared in Italy in February, at a time when COVID-19 was very limited in its spread, and there were few fatalities. Agamben published a short text “The invention of an epidemic,” on February 26, for Quodlibet (Agamben 2020a). Basing his own prognoses of the disease on an early report by the Italian National Research Council, an organization that initially significantly underplayed the severity of the virus and the dangers it presented with contagion, Agamben, on the one hand, made an assessment that mirrored the one Donald Trump was making at about the same time, that this virus is “a sort of influenza,” with “benign outcomes.” Like Trump, he considered this a situation where “the media and authorities do their utmost to spread a state of panic” (5). Though, for Trump, it was a hostile Democrat party and ‘fake’ news of the New York Times, CNN and ABC News who were attempting to derail the president’s managing of the situation. For Agamben, it was the fulfilment of what he knew all along, that the biopolitical governmentality of the State calls for a crisis state-of-emergency, more or less on a permanent basis, such that the naked life, the very bodily health of citizens, becomes the political substance of government:

8 See,

for example, Hewings-Martin (2020).

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The legislative decree immediately approved by the government ‘for hygiene and public safety reasons’ actually produces an authentic militarization ‘of the municipalities and areas with the presence of at least one person who tests positive and for whom the source of transmission is unknown … It is almost as if with terrorism exhausted as a cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext for scaling them beyond any limitation. (5)

Agamben recognised in a follow-up interview that he made his pronouncement on an initial scientific report that in fact misrepresented the nature of the virus and the severity of its threat to health, along with the virulence of its transmissibility. Agamben participated in an interview March 27, published in Le Monde, “Normalising the state of exception under the Covid-19 epidemic” (Agamben 2020b). By this time, the virus was well established in Italy, with a very significant death toll. He began that interview by making reference to his earlier text, where he suggested the epidemic was “invented.” By this, he qualifies, he did not infer the virus is unreal, nor that the deaths and transmissions were a hoax, but that the invention happens in the “political sphere.” Referencing the work of Foucault, he emphasised that “security governments do not necessarily work by producing the exceptional situation, but by exploiting and manging it when it occurs” (n.p.). His concern was with the ethical and political consequences of this form of government control, likening it to arguments made in the suppressing of terrorism precisely by curtailing or suspending the freedom that terrorism itself was supposedly threatening: “The new fact is that health is becoming a legal obligation that must be fulfilled at all costs” (n.p.). Again, there is something deeply ironic—though irony is probably not the best word—in recognizing the same vociferous calls to violations of freedom in the United States, by protesting militias in Michigan and other States, with Donald Trump tweeting these ultra-right (and ultra-white) organisations to “LIBERATE” their States from lockdown. Trump especially targeted States with Democrat governors. Agamben repeats his earlier emphasis on the biopolitics of naked life, whereby the ‘other’ becomes the ‘biohazard’ to one’s securitizing of one’s own health. His concluding remarks are perhaps the most revealing. Recognizing that wars produce futures marked by militarized inventions (“barbed wire” and “nuclear power”), so too, this civil war (“the enemy is not outside, it is within us”) constitutes a massive global experiment in confinement, where technological prosthetics take up the spacings of touch, such that community is re-constituted on permanent social distancing: “Governments, at the end of the health emergency, will seek to continue the experiments that they have not yet managed to carry out: that universities and schools close and only give online lessons, that we stop gathering and talking for political or cultural reasons and only exchange digital messages, that as far as possible machines replace all contact—all contagion—between human beings” (n.p.). We return to this concern with legacies of the lockdown in what follows.9 9 Though we again raise an irony concerning Agamben’s sense of loss in machinic-communication.

One only has to recognize that Trump’s governmentality of the State, his controlling-disrupting of juridical protocols, happens via tweeting, perhaps a compulsive-obsessive repetition disorder of tele-technological governance.

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Yet, perhaps we expected Agamben to say something more than this, or something different. Already, for twenty-five years he has been emphasising the biopolitics of bare life, the critique of violence, and normativity of exceptionalism. Thus, it is surprising that a global pandemic is now, for Agamben, ‘business as usual’, that this particular event, unmatched for a century in terms of global pandemics and unmatched in terms of the overnight dislocating of capital, coincident with rapidly destabilizing growth of a global precariat, warrants nothing more than pronouncements that defined, for example, practices of urban design in metropolitan centres over the past fifty years. We might have expected Agamben to question something that seems entirely pertinent to his analyses on inoperativity and form-of-life. While globally we saw nation-states enact extraordinary powers to quarantine entire populations, we also saw the entire apparatus of industrial production come to an overnight halt, with government bail-outs currently amounting to, globally, around 10 trillion dollars. This does not account for future losses as a flow-on. The lockdowns also radically shifted, overnight, the everyday habitus of entire city populations, and in that break, opened a question of potential. We might have wondered how Agamben’s understanding of destituent power, and of a potentiality unexpended in actuality, might be brought to bear on this extraordinary global event. Though, we are not simply aiming for a utopic reading here. Far from it, as our critique will show. The day after Agamben’s initial February text, Jean Luc Nancy offered a reply, “Viral exception,” published in Italian in Antinomie (Nancy 2020a). Though he merely states what seemed, even at that time, in late February, to be quite obvious, that this virus was not at all comparable to influenza, that even using the sources accessed by Agamben, it was thirty times more lethal, and without a vaccine. Nancy, though, says something more, in thinking Agamben’s prognoses on the exception becoming a rule: But he fails to note that the exception is indeed becoming the rule in a world where technical interconnections of all kinds (movement, transfers of every type, impregnation or speed of substances, and so on) are reaching a hitherto unknown intensity that is growing at the same rate as the population. Even in rich countries this increase in population entails a longer life expectancy, hence an increase in the number of elderly people and, in general, of people at risk. (7)

9.3.2 Bio-Cultural ‘Indifference’ Nancy reads a multiplicity of pandemics, or viral exceptions, or perhaps a singular ‘viral’ that is indifferently “biological/computer-scientific/cultural.” Nancy, probably unintentionally echoing a Foucauldian response, would recognise a governmentality of the State, rather than a State government as agency: “Governments are nothing more than grim executioners, and taking it out on them seems more like a diversionary manoeuvre than a political reflection” (7). Though, the following day, February 28, still very early in the course of the pandemic, Roberto Esposito offered a reply to Nancy’s brief reply to Agamben (Esposito 2020), with Nancy

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offering a one-sentence reply to Esposito.10 What is emphasised by Esposito is Nancy’s refusal to accept the notion of the biopolitical, a notion that grounds the works of Agamben and Esposito, even if they use the term with different emphases. He recognises this in Nancy’s amalgam of viral exception’s bio-cyber-culturing, perhaps closer to Nancy’s Derridean legacies in a deconstructing of physus/tekhne, or the biological and the technological, which cannot be the simple amalgam category of biotechnology. Though, Esposito objects: “It remains a fact that anyone with eyes to see cannot deny the constant deployment of biopolitics. From the intervention of biotechnology on domains that were once considered exclusively natural, like birth and death, to bioterrorism, the management of immigration and more or less serious epidemics” (8). Esposito’s appeal is not dissimilar to Agamben’s: it seems that the State aims at curing its citizens from risks that it itself defines, thereby constituting, as Agamben would put it, the invention of a political crisis concerning the hazards of one’s biological self. Nancy’s reply to Esposito was brief: Dear Robert, neither ‘biology’ nor ‘politics’ are precisely determined terms today. I would actually say the contrary. That’s why I have no use for their assemblage. Best regards, Jean-Luc. (9)

At about the same time that Agamben did his interview for Le Monde, Nancy provided a blog for Verso (Nancy 2020b). With what reads like a degree of irony, Nancy picks up on how a ‘friend’ referred to the virus as a “communovirus.” It originated from communist China, and response everywhere has demanded a communitarian response: “The virus communitizes us because we have to face it together, even if by isolating ourselves” (n.p.). In digging deeper, he emphasises the peculiar mix in Chinese communism of collective (State) property and private property: “a socialist system with Chinese characteristics.” Though, Nancy indicates Marx’s radical socialism meant the abolition not only of private property but also of collective property. In a sense, ownership per se was to be abolished. In its stead was what Marx termed ‘individual property’. This is not ‘private’ ownership of something, but the realization of individuals to become properly themselves: “‘To realize oneself’ does not mean acquiring material or symbolic goods: it means becoming real, effective, existing in a unique way” (n.p.). For the most part, the event of the coronavirus has precipitated all manner of responses to the questioning of social and private goods, whether they are understood in terms of welfare provisions, forced detentions, or deprivations of accessibility to commodities. Between the surveillance model and the welfare model, the virus, then, remains a “common property.” Nancy’s question, posed in thinking Marx’s ‘individual’ as incomparable singularity, is how, in this moment of what he terms ‘catch-up’ or we might call caesura, can a transcendence of collective and private property happen? Nancy suggests this as a ‘value’, though 10 In a series of book publications, Esposito has developed a political philosophy that focuses, in ways

resonant with Nancy and Agamben, on a radical questioning of community, or the ‘commons’, along with the biopolitical, and with what Esposito understands as ‘immunity’ (Esposito 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013). See Campbell (2006) for an introduction to Esposito’s understanding of immunity. Timothy Campbell edited a Special Issue of the journal Diacritics on the work of Esposito, introducing his political philosophy at that time to American readers. See also Kioupkiolis (2018).

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one that has neither a general equivalent—it cannot be measured—nor surplus. The ‘communovirus’ is an opening to such possibilities. We think back to earlier discussions on Foucault’s ethics-of-one’s self or aesthetics-of-self, along with Agamben’s form-of-life, or even Heidegger’s ‘authentic’ or ‘proper’ da-sein. These seem peculiarly resonant with the Marxian ‘proper’ individual. There is also the communitarian ‘commons’ discussed by Casarino, the one that refuses any notion of ‘value’, which would also be resonant with Nancy’s ‘value’ for which there could be no measure or transmutation. In a reply to Agamben, March 16, Slavoj Žižek also extols a version of communism (Žižek 2020). Initially Žižek wonders about the logic or reasoning in Agamben’s early response to State authoritarian control, state of exception, and deprivation of freedom, with its widespread inciting of panic and fear. Žižek wonders if the reaction actually makes sense, given that, in response, the public demanded from the State that it actually does something to control the pandemic, while the ‘State’ itself seemed to be equally panicked: “Why would state powers be interested in promoting such a panic, which is accompanied by a distrust in state powers (“they are helpless, they are not doing enough …”) and which disturbs the smooth reproduction of capital? Is it really in the interest of capital and state power to trigger a global economic crisis in order to reinvigorate their reign?” (n.p.). Žižek sees reactions of the ‘alt-Right’ and the ‘fake Left’ to each pursue conspiracy theories disproportionate to the genuine agency of State powers in managing populations and the pandemic. Žižek then pronounces on the kind of ‘communism’ he has in mind, taking some distance from that of China, as ‘successful’ as it had been in managing the virus. His touchstone is rather the communique dispatched by the Head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who emphasised the necessity for “a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government” (n.p.). Žižek reads in this not simply a nation-state, bordered territorial approach, but an inter-state, international mobilization. The advent or event of the pandemic demonstrates the limits to, and limitations of, both ‘market globalization’ and ‘nationalist populism’ of statesovereignty.

9.3.3 A ‘World’ Broken In early April, we saw a response to COVID-19 by the philosopher, Levi Bryant, whose research has especially addressed what is termed the ‘democracy’ of objects (Bryant 2020). In a response that appeals at certain moments to aspects of Heidegger’s thinking, especially the Heidegger of Being and time, the Heidegger for whom dasein should not be understood as human existence, but as openness to being, or what Bryant simply calls ‘the Open’. My ‘worlding’, the ‘thereness’ of my being is the open: “When I refer to the Open, I mean the way in which world and ourselves are here for us” (n.p.). Bryant had just emphasised that he is no Heidegger scholar, so we will not quibble at all with how this is being said. In my everydayness, I do not reflect on this ‘thereness’ or ‘Open’. My worlding worlds. Bryant points to

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Heidegger’s understanding in Being and time of the equipmental ‘nature’ of things, their readiness-to-hand, in a kind of forgetfulness of the present-ness of things. Things become present-at-hand when they stop working, when broken, in the sense of a ‘working’ that enables the underwayness of our futural be-ing, or when there is something missing that we need, for that underwayness, or when something gets in the way, becomes obtrusive in that underwayness. We touched on this in Chapter 8, when discussing Agamben on use, and his reference there to Heidegger. When our underwayness is stymied, things present themselves ‘at hand’, simply for inspection. Bryant’s response to COVID-19 is to suggest that our world is now broken: “But tomorrow is gone and it is gone because a world is ending. The opening is closing” (n.p.). Importantly, it is not the world that is ending, but worlding in the sense of a dislocating of a ‘mineness’ in ‘my’ project of being underway. Though, perhaps Heidegger would not say the open ‘closes’, in the sense that Bryant wants to give it. But what he suggests further on is, perhaps, what Heidegger means by being ‘stranded’, when things seem closed off. Bryant suggests: “We have fallen out of time and are therefore radically between times or Opens. Everywhere there are radical transformations unfolding, terrible transformations, but time has nonetheless been suspended” (n.p.). This makes us think of Heidegger’s writing on profound boredom—literally longwhiling—that Agamben succinctly discusses in his small book on Heidegger, The open (Agamben 2004). We know Bryant did not use the word ‘boredom’ or even imply it when suggesting a ‘between time’. It is not ‘boredom’ in the usual sense for Heidegger. We keep wanting to come back to Agamben’s inoperativity, his peculiar understanding of ‘use’ developed in The use of bodies. Heidegger suggests, when discussing profound boredom (Heidegger 1995), that the temporalizing of temporality of profound boredom opens the horizonal disclosure of the meaning of being. Perhaps we are able to recognise in what Bryant is discussing as the horizonal disclosure of ‘between times’, is what Heidegger called ‘Augenblick’ or ‘blink of an eye’: “What we here designate as ‘moment of vision’ is what was really grasped for the first time in philosophy by Kierkegaard—a grasping with which the possibility of a completely new epoch of philosophy begins for the first time since antiquity” (Heidegger 1995, 150). Though, perhaps we might be asking too much of this ‘communovirus’-caesura, this time-out-of-joint, for such epochal disclosure. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is more prosaic, less philosophical, though forecasts a ‘worlding’ equally broken (IMF 2020). As we emphasised back in Chapter 2, epidemics follow trade routes and invading armies. Capital is the carrier. Inasmuch as Tony Negri found a complicit resonance between biopower and capitalism, we recognise the dark irony in a pandemic spread between China and its Asian neighbours, along with the West, in business travel and tourism. From the business centres of Milan and New York, the virus moved with commodity circulation throughout Europe, the Middle East, the U.K. and the United States. Negri also suggested that we are now in a third paradigm of capital: after mercantile and industrial capitalism, we have communications capitalism. It is not that mercantilism and industrialization fall off the map. Though, communications capitalism is the zone of expanding markets and profits. Shoshana Zuboff would revise that to surveillance

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capitalism (Zuboff 2019). We had already discussed the IMF’s role, for example, in financing large-scale infrastructure projects in developing nations. In a 2017 joint paper with the World Bank, “Maximizing finance for development,” the IMF aimed at ensuring private international capital maximized its risk-free profits in securitizing development, via a process of ‘internalizing risks’ as potential losses would be accrued to developing nation-states and not international private capital (Jomo and Chowdhury 2019). Echoing Žižek’s assessment that States panicking themselves into states-of-emergency do not do so in order to precipitate a global financial crisis, but also echoing Agamben’s acute remark, from Foucault, that the inventing of political crises constitutes the tactical seizing of emerging circumstances, we recognise the IMF’s blunt appraisal of the GDP performance of nation-states between 2019 and a forecasted 2021, assessing the impact of COVID-19. One thing that emerges is the curious, almost precipitous timing of this event. We look at some of the global ‘wealth’ indicators: global GDP, new orders in advanced economies, global trade growth, and we see that, for each of these three indicators, there is a high in 2017, with steady decline through 2018, 2019 and expected into 2020. No-one will now know if 2020 was the bottoming-out of the trough, as whatever becomes the ‘new’ global economic ‘normal’ will be rebuilding from a very different economic forecasting. These are indicators showing declines, even from 2015 levels. Coupled with this, were projections on the global impact of U.S.-China trade tensions, expected to impact a world GDP contraction of 0.4%, and contraction of world trade of 1.0%, with the impact on China about 0.6% and on the U.S. about 0.3%. COVID-19 emerged just as China and the U.S. brokered a trade-tariff deal that would have been “challenging” for China to achieve. In one sense, the pandemic came at a time when all economies globally were facing near-zero interest rates and little by way of demand, a carry-over from the 2008–09 GFC that still, ten years on, had not ‘righted’ itself. If the U.S. economy looked impressive, with record low employment levels, this was more due to the Trump administration overly investing in an already strong economy, at a time when his government should have been reducing national debt. Then, again, it was an election year. In their April 2020 report, the IMF emphasised the depth of the shock to all economies: This crisis is like no other. First, the shock is large. The output loss associated with this health emergency and related containment measures likely dwarfs the losses that triggered the global financial crisis. Second, like in war or a political crisis, there is continued severe uncertainty about the duration and intensity of the shock. Third, under current circumstances there is a very different role for economic policy. In normal crises, policymakers try to encourage economic activity by stimulating aggregate demand as quickly as possible. This time, the crisis is to a large extent the consequence of needed containment measures. This makes stimulating activity more challenging and, at least for the most affected sectors, undesirable. (IMF 2020, v)

The IMF report gives a succinct account of the compounding factors that we reported on in the opening section of the chapter: the curtailing of mobility with quarantine measures immediately affecting sectors relying on social mobility—travel, hospitality, entertainment, tourism. With workplace closures, supply-chain disruptions follow. Unemployment levels rise, along with increasing fear of contagion, resulting

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in people spending less, thus compounding further business closures. Health expenditures dramatically increase. These accumulating costs affect global trade partners, increasing macroeconomic effects. With all of this, financial markets begin repricing, reassessing risk, looking for safe assets and liquidity, pushing up borrowing costs. Unemployment increase flows to higher default risk, with financial institutions wary of extending credit. Hence, the measures taken by governments around the world in mortgage payment and credit payment deferments, along with guaranteed minimal income for those unemployed. Weaker global demand drives down commodity prices, with devastating effects on commodity exporters. We mentioned the oil supply crisis. There are similar commodity price crises for copper and other metals. In summary, while the IMF predicts an overall shrinkage of GDP of 3.0%, in a country-by-country breakdown, this is uneven. European States have between 7.0 and 8.0% downturn, while the U.S. has a 5.9% downturn. Advanced economies fare much worse than emerging markets and developing economies. What is surprising is the 2021 forecasting: world output growth of 5.8%, with Europe and the U.S. between 4.0 and 5.0%, while China has a growth of 9.2%. It seems, from the IMF’s viewpoint, the breaking apart of our worlding will be short-lived, with growth predictions back-to-normal in a year’s time.

9.3.4 Breaking Whatever Is Broken A report was published mid-April in the U.S., concerning the impact of COVID-19 on Afro-American populations (Fitzhugh et al. 2020). The report emphasised that before the pandemic Black Americans were already more vulnerable to health risks than were white and Asian Americans. They were more likely to live in circumstances that made households more susceptible to disease, with fewer resources to address healthcare issues, and more vulnerable employment situations, in lower-paid jobs. In addressing the pandemic, the report noted: “Black Americans are almost twice as likely to live in places where, if contagion hit, the pandemic will likely cause outsize disruption” (3). By ‘outsize’ disruption is meant “the highest risk of severe publichealth and economic disruption from the pandemic” (2). Emphasis is given to both the life-threatening aspect of the pandemic, along with significant economic vulnerability caused by public health quarantine measures. Blacks are likely to be more affected by both. The pandemic has provided a ‘platform’ for emphasising inequities in healthcare funding in the U.S., along with inequities in the management of the pandemic. Black workers are more likely to be in low-paid essential service jobs, with greater economic vulnerability should they lose those jobs. With respect to education, and transitions, during quarantine measures, to online learning, black communities have less access to online technologies, coupled with home environments less conducive to learning situations. Hence, the report emphasises: “The pre-existing inequities that disadvantage black Americans makes them more susceptible to severe illness, or even death, due to COVID-19” (4). Access to testing and contact-tracing has been more difficult in general for low-income communities, especially Hispanic and Black

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counties. Black Americans are over-represented in prison populations (33%) and with the homeless (40%), constituting highly vulnerable groups to viral contagion. Blackowned businesses were expected to be under greater threat or be more precarious than businesses aggregated across race. The report compiled statistics on the five hardest-hit sectors (leisure/hospitality; retail; transportation/utilities; construction; other services) determining that 40% of revenues for Black-owned businesses would be affected, compared with 25% of revenues for all firms. A New York Times report of May 7 presented a similar account of the effects of the pandemic in the U.K. (Mueller 2020). In fact, the report is even more telling about disparities in race, class and gender than is the case with the report on Black Americans. When class is not taken into account, Blacks in Briton are twice as likely to die from the coronavirus than are whites. When class is taken into account, along with health differences, that jumps to four times. The prognoses are similar to those developed in the U.S.: “Underlying health and social disparities that drive inequality in health and life expectancy have been there all along, and this virus has just laid them bare” (n.p.). However, the report is startling for other reasons. When we compare the social medicine expenditures in the U.K. and U.S., we recognise the differences between a National Health Scheme, funded by taxation, and what, in the U.S. is a predominantly private insurance requirement, generally funded through employment, with a very small public-insurance scheme. We are reminded of discussion from Chapter 3 on the inculcation of State-racism and gender inequity that constituted the welfare measures and national health insurance policies of the Beveridge plan. While we are able to recognise the systemic inequities in American welfare measures, it is more surprising to see the long-term maintenance of inequities in the U.K.’s NHS. We might say the same for other national health insurance programmes, such as those in Australia and New Zealand, that maintain inequities and health vulnerabilities of especially indigenous populations, but also other socially disadvantaged groups. The New York Times report also emphasised a similar statistic for people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnicities living in the U.K. Emphasis was given to overcrowding and to urban habitation, repeating what we read concerning living conditions some two centuries earlier in the U.K. and France, with respect to the cholera epidemics: “Black people and ethnic minorities are also more likely to live in cities, where the virus arrived first in Britain and spread much more quickly” (n.p.). The report emphasised the increase, rather than decrease, of healthcare inequity over the past decade. A similar conclusive statistic is presented by Giorgio Shani (2020), concerning the disparity in infection-rates of coronavirus between those living in New York’s Queens district and those living in wealthier Manhattan. The difference is a factor of four. Shani draws out two kinds of arguments concerning the global response to the pandemic. One looks to authoritarian States, such as China, for the manner whereby the virus was contained quickly. Even the U.S. president, in February, praised—in no less than 30 communiques—the effectiveness of Xi Jinping’s handling of the response. This may be compared to democratic States that were slow to respond with their own states-of-emergency, quarantine measures, and policing methods. Shani notes: “This suggests that authoritarian states are better able to protect their citizens from the existential threat posed by the virus—and their fellow citizens who

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carry it” (1). Here he emphasises the indistinction that eventuates between the use of military forces and policing measures for internal security. The question posed is how in the future, given this pandemic event, and the fact that most democratic States eventually enacted similar authoritarian measures, will liberal-democracy be rethought. This question is posed in the context, offered by Shani, of considering Agamben’s early prognosis of a loss of ‘humanity’ of the human inasmuch as ‘the other’ becomes the one who potentially has the enemy within. Any being-in-common is marked by the ‘in-securitizing’ threat precisely of that communing. Shani points to populist elected governments in Brazil, Hungry, India, Russia, Turkey, and even Trump’s America. Populist-elected governments are conservative and authoritarian, xenophobic and intolerant of minority groups. As Agamben emphasises, concerning the increasing exposure of citizen-subjects to the precarity of their bare life, that the U.S. constituted a global state of exception post 9/11 with its war-on-terror, that legitimized U.S. detention camps for foreign nationals within foreign territories. The other direction that Shani takes his analysis is in the now-ironic locus of the oikos that constitutes the political spacing of the polis, the polis is now a no-gozone of excluded inclusion within the household itself. We were all told to stay-athome, and to ensure minimum sanitization measures, like washing hands and not touching our faces. The social imaginary of this quarantining measure or confining, is of a middle-class household, certainly with running water and sanitary conditions, with good broadband connectivity and home appliances, and screen-space to ensure work-from-home and home-schooling activities. It also suggests an income flow that won’t be stretched by stocking up on supplies, having on-line home delivery, travelling as little as possible to get what is essential. This social imaginary is that of, predominantly white, bourgeois, well-educated, securely employed households, who will not become exhausted, violent or abusive during prolonged quarantine of one-totwo months. Shani asks: “But what of those who have no home? Or hand sanitizer or face mask? Or access to running water? The referent object of Coronavirus discourse is a homeowner with the economic means to take time off work and stockpile food. For the majority of mankind, this isn’t an option” (2). The pandemic exposes our polity, our politeia, to what Shani cites from Mark Duffield as “disposable populations” (see Duffield 2007). Thinking here of Heidegger’s 1970 prognoses on capitalist production, we might suggest that the aleth¯eia, the unconcealing or evental ‘truth’ of the virus is precisely the ethical differentiations, the e¯ thos of a politeia of the disposable, from the vantage of securitizing economic regularity. Or, as Donald Trump emphasised when quizzed about the threat to life on ‘opening up’ America: in this war against an invisible enemy, Americans are “warriors,” and we can expect loses when fighting to save the economy.

9.3.5 Bio-Hazardous Humanity We find the IMF report on COVID-19 seems to avoid this kind of ‘evental truth’, preferring perhaps the demonstrative truths of a humanism, itself secured in attempts

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at re-regulating economic forces. Though, for the IMF, 5.8% forecast growth for 2021 has a strong caveat concerning the “extreme uncertainty” with respect to how the pandemic is contained, for how long, and the economic costs of long-term drops in demand (1).11 The IMF emphasised the necessity for nation-states to increase healthcare expenditures as a securitizing measure, along with the targeting of “substantial fiscal, monetary, and financial market measures” for those sectors most affected, particularly retail, hospitality and tourism. Further emphasis was given to global central bank coordinated action in providing monetary stimulus and liquidity facilities, to “reduce systemic stress” (1).12 Though, how do we account for his surge back by global markets? In the face of this dislocation, we have seen those who have broached the notion of recognising a ‘green future’ coming out of the chaos, that the halting, overnight, of industry, traffic and tourism gave some of us a glimpse of a simpler world, a quieter world, a world more sensitive to its carbon futures, climate change and global warming. Maybe the great start-up would become a ‘new normal’, one that shifted us away from what we most questioned. However, we find from Naomie Klein some startling possibilities in the aftermath of COVID-19. We have already encountered some prognoses, for example from Agamben, that suggest the outcome of the pandemic quarantine measures, in terms of the governmentality of a population that openly encourages, where possible, business-as-usual, though done from home, using broadband connectivity. Many sectors of the economy, what Negri would perhaps target as communications capitalism-sectors, including the broad education sector, found this entirely plausible, at least as a makeshift and experimental procedure, noting all of its State-racist and minority inequities. As we outlined above, this measure opens a panoply of inequities when we look to what “sheltering-in-place” actually entails. What is, perhaps, more telling, as of May, when many nations were beginning to relax their most stringent lockdown measures, is that workplaces and education facilities are encouraged to maintain their work-from-home regimes, even in circumstances where testing and contact-tracing have identified and curtailed the spread of the virus.

11 A report May 14 from the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, emphasized the utmost severity of the economic shock to the U.S. economy, and the significant hardship, if not destitution, for those whose incomes are below $40,000 per annum. He recommended in the strongest terms significant further welfare measures directed at those least able to weather both health and economic insecurities. The Fed. is anything but a ‘charitable’ institution, one prone to the most conservative of pronouncements, generally serving the interests of the financial sector. This made the report all the more significant. 12 The IMF report notes: “The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the US Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank announced a coordinated action on March 15, 2020, to enhance the provision of liquidity through the standing US-dollar-liquidity swap line arrangement. On March 19, the federal Reserve established temporary US dollar swap lines with the Reserve Bank of Australia, Banco Central do Brasil, Danmarks National Bank, Bank of Korea, Banco de Mexico, Norges Bank, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Sveriges Riksbank. On March 31, the Federal Reserve launched a temporary repurchase agreement facility to enable a wide range of central banks and monetary authorities to exchange US Treasury securities for US dollars” (IMF 2020, 3).

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Klein’s report, published May 9, alerts us to a future scenario for New York State, engineered by its governor, Andrew Cuomo, in concert with Google. We must remember, Cuomo emerged from the frightening effects of the pandemic, in New York City and the wider State, as something of a national hero, in part because he seemed to be proactive in the extreme in the face of the crisis and massive loss of life, and in part from his celebrated clashes with the U.S. president, who appeared to be the antithesis of Cuomo, in terms of taking responsibility for managing the crisis nationally. Hence, the Klein article comes on top of what many perceive to be the humanitarian ethics of a State-governor committed to rescuing a city and State in crisis. Cuomo has announced his plans for how he ‘reimagines’ New York State post COVID-19. That plan has the Chair of Google, Eric Schmidt, at its centre. Klein’s report focuses on three converging accounts. One concerns the background and bigtech aspirations of Schmidt, Google and the other Silicon Valley tech giants. The second focuses on the competitive play-off that Schmidt describes in U.S. investments in Artificial Intelligence technologies, as compared to investments in China, coupled with China’s governmental approach to public-private investments and authoritarian surveillance measures. The third is COVID-19. The pandemic was a ‘game-changer’ for Schmidt’s ambitions for smart-city utopic high-tech futures. In his Chair role on two powerful government committees, the Defence Innovation Board, advising the Department of Defence on AI possible futures, and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, advising Congress, again, on AI futures, the question of national health was not, until the pandemic, seen as significant. The requirements for quarantine, industry closures, massive unemployment, home schooling, on-line shopping and delivery changed that. Now Schmidt’s ‘vision’ for smart city technologies and AI public-private investment partnerships, is to build on the experiment of a city where home became a multi-functional locale of confinement and productivity: office, gym, shopping, schooling, entertainment, with every aspect of productivity, leisure and domesticity in bio-securing self-isolation. This constitutes, in Foucault’s understanding of ‘freedom’, a freedom-of-movement, wherein movement is confined to AI-induced spatializing. Klein especially emphasises the vying with China on the ‘race’ to be one-up on AI development: First in closed-door presentations to lawmakers and later in public-facing op-eds and interviews, the thrust of Schmidt’s argument has been that since the Chinese government is willing to spend limitless public money building the infrastructure of high-tech surveillance, while allowing Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Huawei to pocket profits from commercial applications, the U.S.’s dominant position in the global economy is on the precipice of collapsing. (n.p.)

And we see, blatantly, that this same sophistication in surveillance technology and authoritarian control was entirely adequate in controlling the eruption of the coronavirus for a population four times that of the U.S., with a loss of life, as of early May, of approximately one twentieth, and full containment of the spread of the virus.13 In 13 Though,

we emphasize, as we reported above, that there is a second wave of coronavirus in China’s north-east, that emerged in late May, with characteristics quite unlike those of the Wuhan

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comparison, the U.S. seems incapable of either the authoritarian control of its population, or genuinely informing them of the necessity for voluntary quarantine, such that surveillance tracing of contact paths is even feasible. The performance of the U.S., not simply in terms of healthcare readiness, but in broad governmental strategies to engage democratic procedures for containment, seemingly strengthens the arguments presented by Schmidt for better benign technological processes, ‘smart-city’ technologies, that more efficiently handle population crises of all kinds. Cuomo shares this ‘vision’ for a post-COVID-19 New York State. As Klein suggests: “It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal” [overriding or eclipsing what many imagined as a possible ‘Green New Deal’ emerging from the U.S. 3.3 trillion dollars aid package to address COVID-19’s economic crises]. Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into as the bodies still pile up, treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent—and highly profitable—no-touch future” (n.p.). On the agenda is an expanded telehealth industry, on-line classroom programme, driverless cars, cash-free commerce, and smart-city street-level sensors for the wholesale governability of ‘public’ spaces. Of course, Klein argues against this future, even as Cuomo and Schmidt consolidate a planning process. Her arguments are those of advocacy-democracy, of dissenting publics, of public ownership in publicly-funded research from which private corporations currently have open opportunities for profit-taking. Yet, two things concern us here. Without a doubt, the pandemic is an accelerator for decision processes concerning possible futures and, without a doubt, there is a complex interplay, if not concernful contestation between China and the U.S. over everything from the origins and ‘blame’ of pandemic spread, to the most successful governmentality of the virus, where it is the virus that seems to be both subject and object of governmental tactics. What Klein identifies as dystopic futures, driven by a Silicon Valley cartel, really points to the extent that this ‘future’ is already secured, or secreted into our everyday. Though our genuine concern is in what Klein proposes as the adversary to this, in dissenting democratic agonistics, as if there is still some vestige of difference between ‘public’ and ‘private’ ownership, or between polis and oikos, or between individuated freedom and collective tyranny. It is this quandary in what we call the undecidable that we aim to explore in the concluding sections to this chapter, and, indeed, in concluding this book.

outbreak. However, China, within days of recognizing the new outbreak, has quarantined up to 100 million people, perhaps only emphasizing what Schmidt was aiming to demonstrate.

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9.4 Crypt of the Genome 9.4.1 Pharmakos In Chapter 8, when discussing Derrida’s responses to Agamben and Foucault, from his lecture course on sovereignty and animality (Derrida 2009), we also mentioned Derrida’s much earlier writings on Plato, under the title, “Plato’s pharmacy” (Derrida 1981a). That was in relation to the recent book by Vitale on bio-deconstruction, and Derrida’s philosophical engagements with the différance of lifedeath (Vitale 2018). We now return to further discuss aspects of “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in considering how we are able to respond to COVID-19, and events occurring globally since January this year. In re-introducing and extending our discussion on aspects of Derrida’s understanding of the pharmakon, we also introduce the work of the Italian theorist, Furio Jesi, his own understanding of how to think the différance of lifedeath, and how in doing so he differentiates mythic time from historical time, and the question of revolt from the question of revolution (Jesi 2014, 2020a, b—the latter two are currently in press). As we will come to discuss, for Jesi, whatever now constitutes the dimension of myth, as distinct from the dimension of history, is premised on the topoi of prosthetics, as techno-mythology or ‘mythological-machines’, for which myth’s ‘liberation’ or ‘expenditure’, once constituted in festival, is the becomingpotential of expended cruelty. In order to account for the al¯etheia of our politeia in an e¯ thos of ‘cruel festivals’, we initially turn (once again) to Athens, and to Derrida’s account of the pharmakos, the annual festival of purification of the city of Athens, celebrating its overcoming of plague. Derrida’s writing, “Plato’s pharmacy,” warns its reader, in an opening volute, folded-in somewhere between two borders: its title-page and its first part, “I Pharmacia.” That warning is to “rip apart” a certain being, an “is,” “that couples reading with writing” (64). We suppose a “guiding thread,” even the one Derrida weaves, with which every reader, so inclined, does a little additional embroidery, a little embellishment, adding something on, along the way. Though, without discrimination and prudence, this would simply be adding “any old thing,” a little too much ‘writing’, and too little reading. Then again, a reader too prudent, too concerned with “safeguards of knowledge” might well refrain from committing anything at all, would not really “read at all” (63–64). A steresis, sterility, lifelessness, obtains either way. For this ‘reason’, this writing/reading plays at a certain prescription: a dissimulating that undecidably moves in a doubling of positions, a curative that is, also, a poison, a writing/reading rending apart whatever it stitches together. Who would ever be finished with that game? Curiously, this between-titles, between headings, itself commences with a citation defining the Greek word, κσλαϕoς (kolaphos), which means many things, though generally refers to the procedure of notching or engraving, inscribing, but also a blow, or knock or slap.14 We recognise the printer’s term, colophon, derived from this: a printer’s mark, but also the printing details 14 We

find, a little later, that the Greek, pharma, also means a ‘blow’ or ‘strike’ (132).

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of a publication. Though, Colophon was also an ancient Greek city on the Ionian peninsula, the word, colophon, archaically meaning a summit, after which the city was inscribed. Secreted, perhaps, into the laws of its composition, “Plato’s pharmacy” opens with the inscription of inhabitation, oikos and polis, whose copula will also need ‘ripping apart’ according to the undecidable reactions, or reagents of a pharmakon. We aim to move beyond a ‘literal’ conveying or reading or writing of Derrida’s pharmakon, or Plato’s whole ‘pharmacy’, as if it literally signifies our currency in the race, globally, in May 2020, for a vaccine for COVID-19, knowing full well the lifedeath implications of inoculation of a disease, in order for a body to develop autoimmunity, its anti-body spread.15 Equally, we aim to avoid encountering lifedeath as metaphor of the viral, as something peculiarly not-living, though parasitically living-on something that is. Nor do we want to extend the zootropic play of species transmissions of the not-living to the animot, to that which couples and de-couples the animal to its logos. Neither reading well, nor writing well, avoiding both the literal and the metaphorical, we aim to hone, but also to wear-away, the colophon inscribing our styles, undecidably summit and abyss of the sense we make of our present. The scene Derrida describes is, initially, from Plato’s Phaedrus, the moment when Socrates suggests that the written text Phaedrus has with him is a drug (pharmakon). Derrida notes: “This pharmakon, this ‘medicine’, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence” (70). Derrida emphasises the polysemy of this word: remedy, recipe, poison, drug, philtre (71). However, at stake is the living truth, or truth as that which is unmediated in logos, in a living-speaking, that holds us to a here-andnow and to the one speaking.16 The ‘story’ of writing is the ‘story’ Socrates tells of mythic Egypt, the myth of Theuth, inventor of writing (75). This is the story, as well, of Thamus, the king of all Egypt, of sovereignty’s decision, banishing to exteriority, and to a non-living of truth, something whose value is indeterminable: “The value of writing will not be itself, writing will have no value, unless and to the 15 In a number of political writings Derrida discussed the notion of democracy in terms of différance, in terms of a deferring/differing of a ‘to come’, a democracy-to-come (See, for example, Derrida 1994, 1997, 2005). Particularly after the terrorist event of 911, Derrida’s discussion of democracy took up the notion of immunity, or auto-immunity, in the sense, akin to the pharmakon, that a body— for example, the demos, the people—develops anti-bodies in order to resist infection, instigating a peculiar process of introducing a destructive element in order to save the body. Democracy is an auto-destructive immunizing, in the sense that there is no pure immunity, no pure process of governing or securing a body. Such a process would be lifeless sterility. The undecidability of autoimmunity opens the ‘to come’ of a body to its possibilities for reworking and reiteration. (See, as well, Derrida 2003; Naas 2006; Mitchell 2007; Matthews 2013; Timár 2015; Mitchell 2017). 16 In Chapter 7, we discussed Foucault’s emphasis on the mutuality of address with parrh¯ esia, an emphasis on the e¯ thos of the speaker affecting the psukh¯e or soul of the one listening. We went further with this in looking at Heidegger’s reading of the e¯ thos/pathos couplet in Aristotle. From a Derridean understanding, we recognize this groundwork of ethical exchange as pharmacological contamination of what would want to be the ‘purity’ of an exchange without mediation, apart from a living voice as sign of truth. Derrida would introduce here all of the agents and reagents, contaminants, all of the remedying and poisoning that goes on, in personal and impersonal exchanges.

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extent that god-the-king approves of it. But god-the-king nonetheless experiences the pharmakon as a product, an ergon, which is not his own, which comes to him from outside but also from below, and which awaits his condescending judgement in order to be consecrated in its being and value” (76). In this sense, writing becomes an orphan, fatherless, rejected by the living truth of its lineage, or supposed origin in speech, itself a living sign of a living truth: “In contrast to writing, living logos is alive in that it has a living father (whereas the orphan is already half-dead), a father that is present, standing near it, behind it, within it, sustaining it with his rectitude, attending it in person in his own name” (77). We see, now, who writing poisons: patricide—“deferred murder of the father and rector” (77). Though Derrida wants to keep in play the polysemy he recognises in Plato. He wants to defer decision on a translation that would render pharmakon as remedy or poison: “The translation by remedy can thus be neither accepted nor simply rejected … Writing is no more valuable, says Plato, as a remedy than as a poison” (99). Yet, in general for Plato, the pharmakon, even as remedy, presents itself as an unnatural one, as something artificial to the natural life of sickness. The pharmakon displaces or aggravates (100). It does so for, perhaps, nothing more important than memory, understood as the immediacy of living memory, to be distinguished from all artificial memory devices, such as those of the Sophists, but most of all, by writing: The ‘outside’ does not begin at the point where what we now call the psychic and the physical meet, but at the point where the mn¯em¯e, instead of being present to itself in its life as a movement of truth, is supplanted by the archive, evicted by a sign of re-memoration and com-memoration. The space of writing, space as writing, is opened up in the violent movement of this surrogation, in the difference between mn¯em¯e and hypomn¯esis. The outside is already within the work of memory. (109)17

This, in the ‘space’ of a sentence, spells-out how Derrida recognises the “dangerous supplement,” always already lodged within the city walls, within the oikos, or economy of what is supposedly living, something artificial, non-living, that animates the very possibility of presence-to-itself.18 This oikos, household-economy of lifedeath seems to haunt our cities during this pandemic crisis. At the heart of it would be forgetting, or forgetfulness, ‘alive’ mimesis of ‘living’ memory, as natural as life itself. It is for this reason that Plato would most of all want a living memory entirely unmediated by speech, immediately present to itself, repetition without the substrate, bearing-surface or recognition of mimesis. Though, what is this writing, this spatializing-inscribing, whose archive encrypts while it preserves? We turn here to the pharmakos. 17 In Chapter 1, in discussing Loraux’s The divided city (Loraux 2002), and Agamben’s Stasis (Agamben 2017), we addressed the founding of democracy on amnesty, on a peculiar commemorating of a necessary forgetting of what in fact cannot be forgotten: between the living memory of a memory, and consignment to the crypt, to the living-dead. This will be democracy’s securitizing, in the banishing of the living to the archive of the yet-to-be-dead: mn¯em¯e and hypomn¯esis in a peculiar différance, each differing from and deferring the other, thereby making insecuritizing a dangerous supplement, the archi-writing of biopolitics’ securing. 18 Derrida introduces the ‘dangerous supplement’ in Of Grammatology (2017). See in particular pp. 141–157.

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From the foregoing, we recognise a notion of writing as parasite, as something lodging itself within living speech, some supplement to life, dangerous, secreted to the interior, all the while supposedly being held outside: The restoration of internal purity must thus reconstitute, recite—and this is myth as such, the mythology for example of a logos recounting its origin, going back to the eve of the pharmakographic aggression—that to which the pharmakon should not have had to be added and attached like a literal parasite: a letter installing itself inside a living organism to rob it of its nourishment and to distort [like static, = ‘bruit parasite’] the pure audibility of the voice. Such are the relations between the writing supplement and the logos-z¯oon. (128)

Would this not be what we have recognised over these past four months? This project of restoration, of ‘purification’ and of ‘pharmakographic’ aggression? The two go together, restoration and violence. Daily, since February, we have encountered in newsfeed media animated graphics, comparative ones for countries with the virus, or animated graphs of the various States of the U.S., indicating—by the steepness or flattening of the curve—the rate of contagion or the rate of death. Daily, our capacities for restoration, for remedying or aggravating the virus, are prostheticinducements, artificially-induced, animating graphematics, writing-tekhn¯e simulating a living gradient incline, depiction of a clinamen, an inclination to hold on to, or hold off, to touch or avoid the virus. Daily, we mourned the small movements of those curves, the small statistical movements upwards towards some summit, some final blow that would bring the curve downwards, now pathetically celebrating contagions and deaths. Or we despaired. It seemed as if there might be no outside to which we could move this letter lodged within, nowhere to return this living-on. Exteriority here becomes a supplement we need to do without, what we need to expel, even, in order to restore our interior. Initially it was our borders, shutting them down, keeping an outside rigorously excluded. And then, even within, retreating to the interiors of our interior, keeping the exteriority of our own territories outside. We abolished the polis to the law of the oikos, to make of the public spaces of our cities a dangerous supplement to be exteriorized.

9.4.2 Writing Lifedeath Back in Chapter 8, when discussing Heidegger’s brief comments on Marx, on ‘man being the root of man’, and on the revealing of the being of beings in disposabilityreplacability, we made note of Heidegger giving an ‘off the cuff’ exemplar of what it might actually mean for us to give up on producing: It would mean renouncing progress itself, committing to a general restriction of consumption and production. A simple and immediate intuitive example: In the perspective of this renunciation, ‘tourism’ would no longer be possible, instead one would restrict oneself and remain at home. Now, is there still, in these times, something like an ‘at home’, a dwelling, an abode? No, there are ‘dwelling machines’, urban population centres, in short: the industrialized product. But no longer a home. (Heidegger 2003, 74)

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Since Heidegger’s pronouncement in the 1970s, this seemed a remote, implausible proposition, as tourism expanded globally over the past fifty years. Equally, it seems, our dwellings have increasingly become ‘industrialized machines’. We recognise the extent to which tourism, on the one hand, and dwelling-machines, on the other hand, are contaminations of any simple and decisive regulating of interiority and exteriority.19 The bleak irony of the pandemic seems to be that, for a moment, Heidegger may (finally) be getting what he wanted. Faced with lockdowns and quarantines, along with massive escalations in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, production everywhere shut down and consumption fell away for just about everything but essential food supplies. Our ‘dwelling machines’ became the multi-functioning folding of dwelling to now make indeterminate the category-spacings of domesticity, labourpower, and civic spacing of being-in-common, dominated by what Derrida might call tele-technologies of all kinds.20 And, as we intimated above, being-at-home is constituted on the myth-machine or social imaginary of security, a cruel festival of ‘sheltering-in-place’ (Shani 2020).21 Derrida reminds us that the pharmakos means many things: wizard, magician, poisoner. It is also compared to the scapegoat. Each year the city of Athens would repeat a ritual of purification, in readiness and remembrance of having to rid the city of pestilence or plague: “The city’s body proper thus reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself within the confines of the agora, by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or aggression” (Derrida 1981a, 133). Though the city kept within its walls a number of foreigners, “degraded and useless beings,” at the expense of the city. During times of plague, famine, drought, these “scapegoats” would be sacrificed (133). Hence: “The ceremony of the pharmakos is thus played out on the boundary line between inside and outside, which it has as its function ceaselessly to trace and retrace. Intra muros/extra muros. The origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and projected … Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed” (133). 19 We should not infer from this that Heidegger aimed for a securing purity, a non-contaminating identity, even if there is much that suggests he did. It seems to us doubtful, even where Heidegger alludes to the authentic (or ‘proper’ in Agamben’s translation), that such propriety is anything other than coming to care for what is most inauthentic or improper, for what Heidegger never let up on emphasizing as this most uncanny of beings, this one who is never really at home, who is most ‘proper’ when wandering somewhere foreign, whose ‘truth’ is the unconcealing of its errancy as necessary contingency. 20 See, for example, Derrida (1987), concerned with ‘sendings’, speculative futures and the tekhn¯ e of communicative set-ups, not the least of which is Plato’s peculiar relation to writing ‘Socrates’, along with Heidegger’s peculiar sendings of ‘be-ing’ wherein it is be-ing that supposedly ‘writes’. 21 We need to be especially attuned to a Heideggerian ‘reading’ of homecoming, and the notion of ‘festival’ associated with such return. Heidegger, himself, encounters this through the poetic writings of Hölderlin. See, especially Heidegger’s discussion of Hölderlin’s poeticizing of ‘holidays’ and ‘festivals’ (Heidegger 2018), especially the notion of ‘celebration’ as becoming-free in belonging to the inhabitual: “Celebration is now a being freed from what is stultified and habitual through becoming free for the inhabitual” (66–67). We cannot emphasize enough the importance of the mythos of the festival in Hölderlin’s poeticizing for what we will be discussing from Furio Jesi concerning the advent of the ‘cruel festival’.

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With the pharmakos, we have something undecidably securing and insecuring, something that defines a territorial binding in order that its breeching becomes all the more palpable. Or, rather, any defining of an interior, identity, territory or position happens in it being always-already doubled, always-already alterity, secreting to an interior what must be scapegoated, sacrificed, expelled. We could take a long detour here through a broad range of recent writing on critical security studies and the biopolitics of security (for example, Dillon 2015; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2014; Schlag et al. 2015). They would slowly unravel similar accounts of the aporia of security. We must keep in mind that, for Derrida, aporia is not an abyss, a gulf or bottomless crevasse that threatens whatever edges towards it. Rather, aporia happens when there is more-than-one, when all-the-twos encounter us with decision.22 Decision happens only within the ambit of what is not decidable. And the aporia of COVID-19 is, perhaps, as Jean-Luc Nancy intimated, the unsettling-not-knowing of the biological and the political, how a biopolitics might now be thought, or a biopolitical-economy might now be contained. Is it biological ‘life’ or economic ‘life’ that is most at risk? And how would we now differentiate between them, except by a tactic aimed at an already-doubled inoperativity of ‘COVIDeath’, via the inoperativity of production and consumption. And yet, there is little understanding of living-on, other than by way of commodity production, disposability and replaceability. There is no notion, it seems, where ‘homecoming’ is possible, other than as denial of inalienable freedom to—or for—disposable-replacement. To put it more bluntly, it seems, under lockdown, we are least ‘at-home’ when we are confined to our dwellings. Homecoming is the extra-mural lifeworld of an oikonomia, governmentality, of disposability. Though, how do we figure this pharmakon/writing-genome, no more literal than it is metaphorical? How does writing figure? At a particular moment in “Plato’s pharmacy,” Derrida begins to put the name “Plato” in quotation marks, as if to undermine some assured historical figure, some authority of texts called “Platonic.” Derrida wonders if Plato ever had in his ‘command’, consciously or unconsciously, all of the lexical plays that go on within ‘his’ ‘texts’, for it seems— a text effect—that Plato is unaware, or never does point to the peculiar hinge that appears with the pharmakon: “Plato seems to place no emphasis on the word pharmakon at the point where writing’s effects swerve from positive to negative, when poison, under the eyes of the king, appears as the truth of the remedy” (129).

22 See,

for example, Derrida’s discussion of the aporetic in Finis (Derrida 1993): “Each time the decision concerns the choice between the relation to an other who is its other (that is to say, an other that can be opposed in a couple) and the relation to a wholly, non-opposable, other, that is, an other that is no longer its other. What is at stake in the first place is therefore not the crossing of a given border. Rather, at stake is the double concept of the border, from which this aporia comes to be determined” (18).

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9.4.3 Writing the Blanks Derrida’s point here is far-reaching, concerning what might be called the econospacings of inscription, and the iterability or economic-repetitions of lexical limits: “In a word, we do not believe that there exists, in all rigor, a Platonic text, closed upon itself, complete with its inside and its outside” (130).23 Such recognition of the architrace structure or economy of différance, of a differing/deferring that keeps open the living-on of signifying forces, that maintains the indeterminacy of the binaries of the literal and metaphoric, when it comes to the living and the dead, the natural and the artificial, makes of writing, of every inscribing, in Blanchot’s terms, impersonal: The book that is the Book is one book among others. It is a numerous book, multiplied in itself by a movement unique to it, in which diversity, in accordance with the various depths and space where it develops, is necessarily perfected. The necessary book is subtracted from chance. Escaping chance by its structure and its delimitation, it accomplishes the essence of language, which uses things by transforming them into their absence and by opening this absence to the rhythmic becoming that is the pure movement of relationships. The book without chance is a book without author: impersonal. (Blanchot 2003, 226)

Blanchot is here writing on Mallarmé, on an open—and opening—question to his essay, “The book to come,” in a collection of essays under the same title. That opening question: “The Book: what did Mallarmé mean by this word?” (224). At issue, for Blanchot, is Mallarmé’s understanding of necessity and chance with respect to experimenting with language, to finding what is essential in the word. Mallarmé struggled against chance, which meant struggling against the movement of language to things: “… the search for a necessary work that directs him toward a poetry of absence and negation in which nothing anecdotal, or actual, or fortuitous, can find a place” (226). Hence, Mallarmé emphasised that he creates solely by elimination. Have we now strayed too far from our concerns with COVID-19, wandered too far into errancy, or eliminated precisely what we wanted to move towards? We want to gather these various concerns with writing-as-pharmakon, with chance, necessity, and inscribing, and with that peculiar absence that language makes in things. We introduced this ‘hollowing’ of language back in Chapter 4, when discussing Foucault’s reading of Blanchot. This was also Foucault’s understanding of verbalization and spatialization, of that movement of languages and of bodies, such that a language of disease, its writing, its text-books, its spaces of knowing, and infected bodies, each by chance or contingency occupying heterogeneous spacings, might find their coincident locus, their necessary spacing.24 That writing-of-disease, or disease-of-writing, for Foucault, was equally a body-writing or bodily inscribing, by way of discipline, habit, and labour. Though, what essentially concerns us here 23 For another ‘scene’ of the mimetic faculty, especially where it concerns painting’s salaried returns, see Derrida’s “Economimesis” (Derrida 1981b). 24 Derrida’s essay on Mallarmé, “The double session,” is the one following on from Plato’s pharmacy in the threading of the book he calls Dissemination (Derrida 1981c). See especially his discussion of the ‘blank’ in Mallarmé’s textual spacings a propos our discussion below on writing and pricing, pp. 252ff.

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is the ‘to come’ of the book that Blanchot references, the ‘to come’ of what does happen, necessarily, though its ‘happening’ subtracts ‘itself’ from chance. This ‘to come’ seemed to concern Foucault when he most poignantly suggests a break with the legacies of a hermeneutics of one’s self, and an enlightenment prescription to becoming one’s self. Rather, there is an entirely non-prescriptive open, as to the possibility of an ethics or aesthetics of self. Something similar, resonant, is found, repeatedly, in Derrida’s writings on the ‘to come’ of a future. If, indeed, there is a future, its necessity is contingency or, perhaps, the future is undecidably as much necessity as it is contingency. We especially introduced the above quotation from Blanchot, along with its context, since a fragment of this same quotation appears as the epigraph to a book on economic theory, written in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crash, an economic crisis now dwarfed by the economic forecasts stemming from COVID-19. The book is by Elie Ayache, The blank swan: The end of probability (Ayache 2010). Ayache notes: This is a book about writing, pricing and contingent claims. I hold that the writing process and the pricing process are two special kinds of processes that do not take place in possibility or in probability, like the traditional stochastic processes. They fall completely outside prediction. As processes, they keep re-creating themselves and differentiating themselves, yet they do not unfold in chronological time. For this reason, their Swan bird, or the event that gives them wings, is BLANK. It is neither Black nor White; it is neither loaded with improbability nor with probability. It can only be filled with writing, as when we say ‘to fill in the blanks’. (xv)25

Ayache’s work came to prominence, in part, because his writings on the economic theory of derivatives and the market were informed by the work of a range of philosophers, from Derrida, to Deleuze, to Heidegger and Blanchot, and also the speculative realist, Quentin Meillassoux.26 The blank swan (2010), targeted the fundamental 25 The ‘black swan’ is the subject of book by Nassim Taleb, a former derivative trader and ‘quant’, regarding the problem of probability and uncertainty in the market with respect to statistical analysis. In The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable (2007), Taleb’s central thesis takes aim at certain assumptions based on technologies or rationalities of probability, as implications of the fragility to frameworks of knowing (xvii). The example of the black swan, for Taleb, is a paradigmatic example of the limitations to empirical and statistical analysis. Prior to the first encounter by Europeans of Australia in the eighteenth century, it was believed that swans could only be white. For Taleb, the black swan is a contingent event that radically reconstructs our knowledge of things, in particular, the market. Hence the limitations to empirical analysis in Western thought. Taleb figures that ‘black swan’ events are outside of normal probability, outside prediction, and shaped by uncertainty. Such events have an “extreme impact,” reconstructing our epistemological horizons. Fundamentally, their occurrence can only be described by ‘a-posteriori’ explanations (xvii–xviii). By all reckoning, despite supposed preparations and warnings, COVID-19 is, in Talib’s sense, a black swan. 26 See Meillassoux (2008). Though Ayache does not quite agree with Meillassoux’s ‘absolute’. Indeed, several other theorists have raised concern regarding the logical implications of Meillassoux’s critique, while others have questioned Meillassoux’s theological position as potentially a naïve form of humanism (Crockett 2012), and others question whether Meillassoux’s thought fully resolves the problem of correlationism (Brassier 2007, 89–90, 93–94; Brassier 2010). Others have found fault with Meillassoux’s ‘possibilism’ or hyper-chaos and the problem of temporality (Hägglund 2009, 242–243; Hägglund 2011, 129). Similarly, there is concern as to whether Hume’s

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errors of the major financial institutions who devised derivatives packages, in terms of two ontological determinants: the very use of probability theory, as that which determines the event of pricing, and the ontological disclosure of the locale or place of the event of exchange, that becomes determinable via probabilistic models. His thesis essentially concerns a fundamental ontology of place and of exchange, to which he gives the originary name “market.” Ayache’s argument, or hypothesis, at the outset, is a curious one: pricing, like writing, is outside the domain of probability. It is pure contingency, pure chance. It is for this reason, perhaps, he has as epigraphs to the book, two short quotations from French literary and literary-philosophical figures, Valery and Blanchot. From Blanchot, he quips: “The necessary book is subtracted from chance” (v).

9.4.4 Subtracting from Chance What does Ayache mean here by ‘pricing,’ and how is it remotely relevant to our discussion of COVID-19, security and urbanism? Ayache is especially interested in understanding the economic theory of derivatives. We discussed these market entities in some detail back in Chapter 3, especially in the CDO bundling of derivatives linked to asset-backed securities in the sub-prime housing market, that led to the failure of the Wall Street banks. Derivatives are essentially contracts between buyers and sellers for either purchasing or selling something in the future, rather than trading it in the present. Derivatives as ‘forwards’, ‘options’ or ‘swaps’ are linked back to an ‘underlying’ asset—for example, stock, cash, bonds. Hence, someone, for example, agrees to purchase some stock at some specified time in the future for an agreed price determined in the present. The simple aim is for both buyer and seller to hedge their ‘bets’ on the price moving up or down thus favouring one or the other. While these contracts are indexed to some other thing also traded in the market, they can themselves become an underlying, traded as well, in a sense on-selling the chance that profit (or loss) will accrue at some future time. We see Ayache’s attraction to Mallarmé and Blanchot, on a question of the ‘to come’ of a future as necessity of contingency. But, equally, there is something of Derrida’s notion of writing, and the pharmakon, in this. As Ayache explains in considerable detail, across a range of publications, financial markets dealing in derivatives aim to determine price through probability theory. As we discussed in Chapter 3, probability theory takes into account the history of trading, with the aim of determining the volatility of movements in pricing, such that it can, with greater confidence predict a future price that will, for whoever it benefits, accrue a profitable trade (Ayache 2010, 2011, 2014, 2015). reading of induction would agree with Meillassoux’s absolute contingency (Johnston 2011, 99–100, 104–105, 108). Caputo questions whether Meillassoux’s notion of correlationism in fact correlates with the actual theoretical positions of the post-Kantian philosophers who Meillassoux attacks (Caputo 2013, 114, 194, 198, 200, 210, 284–286n.10, 287–289n.5). He also questions Meillassoux’s analysis of ‘ancestrality’ or ‘arche-fossil’ by which he seeks to problematize post-structuralism (219–220).

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The industry-standard pricing model was initially developed in the 1970s by Black, Scholes and Merton. It is known as the BSM model. Ayache aims to undercut the sheer relevance for probability modelling in price determination. We see in his ‘argument’ something resonant with Mallarmé’s understanding of the ‘word’ that subtracts, eliminates, the world. Ayache’s ‘word’ is ‘price’: “What we call the fundamental principle of the market is that states of the world in the market consist of prices—all the prices and nothing but the prices. States of the market-world cannot be abstract states such as states of the economy, measures of inflation, or labour etc. Such abstract states may be implicit; however, in the market, they must be represented by prices of assets” (Ayache 2014, 524). Ayache points out the difficulty that arises with the application of BSM, a difficulty he characterizes as a “severe philosophical problem” (525). The BSM reduces the price-process to that of the underlying, inasmuch as probability rests on past movements that account for present pricing, but “it denies the second part of the fundamental principle according to which states of the world are all prices” (525). Hence, derivatives prices should not be a function of price of the underlying. How, then, are they priced? Ayache appeals to Deleuze and Bergson, in order to re-think what is at the heart of probability theory: possibility, or possible worlds. John Roffe, in especially drawing out the Deleuzian legacies in Ayache’s work, notes Ayache citing Bergson on this: “For the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted” (Roffe 2014, 614).27 In taking up Roffe’s reading of Ayache, we aim to bring our discussion back to our concerns with the coronavirus pandemic, urban theory and security. Though, already we, perhaps, recognise how Ayache might critique the ‘black swan’ reading of COVID-19, as an event whose probability extended to the improbable, and whose understanding, defining or representing has been primarily statistical and probabilistic, with various modelling scenarios of future (and past) events. Ayache might well want to figure the virus in the way Mallarmé figures the word or he figures price. Ayache eliminated judgement and value from pricing. Its contingency is outside of both. We might say the same for Mallarmé and the word, and for SARS-CoV-2. To explain this a little more, we need to see how Roffe develops an understanding of a general theory of pricing surface (Roffe 2014; See also Malik 2014). We need to remember that prices are written, they are texts, material contracts. The market is text. Hence, for Ayache, as Roffe emphasises, the materiality of the market, on the one hand, differentiates it from the ideality of possibility and, on the other hand, this materiality is the enabler of exchange or transmissions, constituting the market-as-prices as “contingent result” rather than as a “transcendent realm” (Roffe 2014, 621). This makes the market an immanent surface of inscription. Roffe’s understanding of ‘surface’ goes to the heart of Ayache’s concerns with probability. There is no ‘depth’, no valuation or judgement, no recourse, in the contingency of pricing, to what BSM most relies on, a coupling of pricing to whatever it essentially doesn’t

27 Roffe

is citing Ayache (2010, 31). See also Roffe (2015) for his book-length publication on a Deleuzian ontology of the market. It also includes discussion on Meillassoux.

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concern.28 Though Roffe takes things in a different direction. For Ayache, ‘depth’ does not belong to the market. It belongs to the category of possibility. Though Roffe notes: “It would seem to us rather that this depth is aligned with the social function par excellence, evaluation. … it is a crucial part of the organization of society—what is possible is what can be judged—and thus the very regime of possibility presupposes an evaluative volume” (621, n.22). For Roffe, the inscriptive surface is “intensive,” which means the ‘surface’ is immanent to the pricing processes happening ‘there’, or its ‘thereness’, topos, cannot be separated from the process.29 Roffe here acknowledges Deleuze on intensive quantities, pointing as well to Raymond Ruyer (622).30 Market liquidity is a measure of the intensive character of the pricing process.31 Though, we want to ask how we might now consider or understand the significance of that depth to the market, what Ayache sees as irrelevant to pricing’s contingency, and what Roffe recognises as the domain of the social function of the market: judgement and value? Would depth constitute extensity to pricing’s intensive surfacing? Would it introduce a transcendent moment to the immanence of pricing’s topos? Or 28 Hence,

BSM modelling needs to privilege what is precisely extraneous to the contingency of pricing, the social dimension and historical recording of the market. 29 When Ayache addresses his understanding of ‘surface’ or topology, in The blank swan, he turns to the work done by the Heidegger scholar, Jeff Malpas, whose research especially engages with Heidegger’s vexing understanding of an ontology of space (Malpas 2004). It is not for nothing that Ayache draws on Malpas, in order to develop for himself a disclosive ontological horizon for understanding place, self, and event, in terms other than those of transcendent-transcendental structures, what Malpas adroitly draws out in Heidegger’s work up to his 1936–38 Contributions to philosophy (1999), as attempts to arrive at an ontological disclosure of place from the horizonal disclosure of temporality. Ayache recognises uncanny resonance between Malpas’s emphasis on the failures of transcendent/transcendental ontologies and the ontologies of derivatives as probabilistic calculability and the event of the market as temporal disclosure, what Malpas identifies in Heidegger as deficiencies in thinking through ‘projection’ and ‘derivation’. Both Malpas and Ayache emphasise an ontological disclosure of immanence, whereby place becomes a milieu of its own non-originary differentiations, as intensive multiplier of the contingent and non-predictable. In a short-hand way, the ‘urban’ as ‘object’ for disclosure, for the ways in which its being-in-a-world becomes disclosable, has been the ‘object’ of this research, in trajectories that continuously negotiate the transcendent/ transcendental disclosure of this object, along with the immanence of non-originary intensive milieus that reveal ‘urbanizing’. 30 Roffe (2015) discusses the work of Ruyer, and its formative importance for Deleuze. See also Grosz (2012), Ruyer (2016), and Smith (2017). 31 We earlier commented on the IMF report on Federal Reserve or Central Banks ensuring global liquidity during March 2020 in order to lessen the impact of the economic shocks from COVID-19. Holland (2019) briefly comment on the formation of national Central or Reserve Banks, commencing in 1694 with the founding of the national Bank of England “on which all subsequent national central banks (including the US Federal reserve) are modelled” (315). Holland traces this founding to the manner whereby, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the “infinite debt” owed to capital, a debt that is the immanent cause of production and consumption and not an effect, is not transferred to the State but to a central bank that would amortize that debt through private capital borrowings, whose interest or returns were accrued via taxation transfers from the State. See also a range of articles by Maurizio Lazzarato on the political economy of debt (Lazzarato 2012, 2014) as well as Alliez and Lazzarato (2018). With this latter work, Alliez and Lazzarato critique Foucault’s understanding of liberalism and neo-liberalism, especially from their understanding of capital-debt.

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can the social, too, be considered as immanent and material, with surplus thought without value, in the way, for example, Casarino (2009) re-thinks Negri on Spinoza’s multitude?32 To help us here, we turn briefly to a post-script written by the Deleuze scholar, Eugene Holland, concerning Roffe’s Deleuzian thinking on intensive pricing surfaces of Ayache’s economic philosophy (Holland 2019).

9.4.5 Viral Writing Surfaces Roffe considered the pricing surface to be peculiarly one-sided (Roffe 2014, 621). Holland, in a sense, takes what Roffe relegates to ‘depth’, the social and historical, and what Ayache off-loads as the metaphysics of possibility, as the other side to that surface. Holland had already suggested that pricing ends up being seen quite differently from the viewpoint of consumers and investors: … if the market presents an intensive surface to consumers for reasons of subjective evaluation, the surface it presents to investors is equally intensive, but for different reasons … on the inherent unpredictability of investment outcomes and the resulting impossibility of grounding investment decisions on any practicable calculation whatsoever. (Holland 2019, 313)33

Hence, Holland proposes a two-sided and asymmetrical market surface.34 We want to focus on one aspect of Holland’s close rapport with Deleuze and Guattari in discussing the recording surface of the market as an intensive multiplicity that precedes the extended multiplicity of networks of actual producers and consumers. That aspect is the difference developed by Deleuze and Guattari when discussing ‘denumerable sets’ and ‘non-denumerable sets’ (321). Denumerable sets follow an axiom of homogeneity: … it is only as an undifferentiated (decoded) mass of homogeneous ‘equals’ that humans can be counted and human populations quantified so that they can be axiomatised … denumerable sets will be contrasted with non-denumerable sets—a contrast that lies at the heart of Deleuze 32 Our question here is really aiming at how do we begin to recognize COVID-19 as something other than a transcendent moment to our normalizing regimes, that enters and shatters our worlding. From Ayache, Mallarmé, Blanchot and Derrida, we are thinking of the virus as an intensive surface immanent to the social, though one whose understanding is outside of probability or evaluative judgement. It is not that what Roffe calls ‘depth’ is extraneous or unimportant. Though it needs to be understood in addition to the intensive viral surface, rather than as that surface. 33 Holland offers a simple example: The market has a $300 pair of shoes and 20 $15 pairs of shoes. For the consumer, there is considerable disparity or inequality (1 x $300 is not equal to 20 x $15); for the investor $300 = $300 = the liquidity of investment where $1 = $1. 34 Holland discusses the four axioms of capitalist flows: flows of liquid capital and abstract labour, as well as flows of raw materials/energy and flows of human populations. While each of these is a distinctive feature of capitalist markets, it is capital itself that appears yet to be explained. It is at this point that Holland introduces Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the infinite debt that is ‘owed’ to capital, a debt never capable of being serviced, that keeps production happening. In this sense, we understand derivative debt globally, prior to COVID-19, exceeding the world’s total GDP, in some estimates, by a factor of ten. See, for example, Bank of International Settlements (2019).

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and Guattari’s politics, and aligns term-for-term with the distinction between major and minor. (321–322)

This marks the ‘moment’ of Holland’s adjusting of Roffe’s argument.35 For Roffe, non-denumerable sets are so defined because they are uncountable, and always larger than denumerable sets. Holland points out that, for Deleuze and Guattari, this is not the case: “what defines a non-denumerable set is not size but what we might call a particular mode-of-belonging—which is completely irrelevant to denumerable sets,” (322) what Deleuze and Guattari call “masses, multiplicities of escape and flux” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 470). In the axiomatization of human populations from non-denumerable to denumerable sets, the ‘conversion’ entails escape and flux, constituting something like a ‘minor-post-capitalism’, thought of as the minor struggle against the capitalist axiomatic of homogeneous sets.

9.5 Conclusion 9.5.1 Cruel Festival We may now think of the double and asymmetrical surfacing of the market, immanent to the processing of pricing’s liquidity, as comprising on one surface, the denumerable set of population whose underlying asset is now pandemic and whose derivative pricing is the contingency of the pharmakon. The market comprises a book-to-come. On its other surface, is the non-denumerable, composed of the same ‘countable bodies’ as population, though now individuated and singularly inscribed, though this ‘same’ differentiates the necessity of the contingency of writing itself, in this ‘case’ a minor one: a viral seizure of consumption and production that ‘deterritorialized’ habitual modes of belonging. This, in part, is how we come to read, for our contexts, Holland’s reconsideration of Roffe’s pricing surface, taking it as a way of thinking a bio-political-economic understanding of our global pandemic. Holland cites Deleuze and Guattari: The power of the minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system … but [their capacity] to bring to bear the force of the nondenumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets … even if 35 Roffe had already somewhat contaminated Ayache’s ‘purity’ of pricing by introducing the question of ‘depth’ to the price-surface, though at the same time aims, in a sense, to keep Ayache in play, thereby hinging on a pharmakon that must remain yet be somewhat discounted. Holland doesn’t ease the situation, in fact exacerbates it a little, in a peculiar de-numerating of what, clearly for Roffe is a non-denumerable collective. Hence, Holland passes over, in a kind of quantitative ‘easing’ a set of Roffe’s key economists (Keynes, Talib, Ayache, among others) as if they are ‘homogenized’ as Roffe’s, somehow belonging to him. Of course, this passes over the simple incongruity of Ayache and Talib, and the incongruity of Keynes with either. We find these contaminations necessary chances, though ‘chance’ here governing what we might call the pharmacological thread-cutting and re-tying in embroidery’s text-knotting, a kind of lace-making, perhaps.

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they imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 471; Holland 2019, 324)

In this concluding segment to our chapter on COVID-19, and our concluding of Securing Urbanism, we want to give an exemplar of such a minor-politics of nondenumerable force, as a way of introducing what we mean by our chapter title, and this coincident subheading, cruel festival. Our discussion focuses on the writings of Furio Jesi (2014, 2020a, b). Jesi’s political philosophy is complex, and all we can hope for in this conclusion is a brief, though salient overview. For a more thorough engagement with his work, see the special issue of the journal, Theory & Event, that published papers from a conference on Jesi held in 2019 (see Aarons 2019; Agamben 2019; Manera 2019; Noronha 2019; Toscano 2019). Our focus will be on Jesi’s book on the Spartacus revolt that happened in Berlin, in 1919 (Jesi 2014), and how we read into the notion of revolt what he terms the ‘time of the festival’, and in particular, for our contemporary politics, the cruel festival. From our reading, the current global pandemic is paradigmatic and emblematic of the ‘mythological machine’ of authoritarian politics that Jesi terms ‘cruel’. Our reading is not a simple one that associates, as Agamben did, large-scale quarantine measures as repressive. It is, rather, a reading that recognises especially in an escalation, globally, of voices of the far-right, in Italy as much as in the United States, Russia, Central European States, China or Brazil, coincident with authoritarian governmentality, a mythology that makes of the pandemic a subterfuge of the ‘left’, or a plot stemming from the savage violence of the racial ‘other’ (in this instance, China), a bizarre political ‘hoax’ or international racism, that itself supposedly incites a ‘thanatological’ mythology of political and economic inoperativity. But, initially, we need to briefly introduce Jesi, and his writing on the Spartacus revolt. Jesi was an Italian political intellectual who began publishing at the age of fifteen in the field of Egyptology. His research was especially focused on the role of myth in literature, as well as in politics and culture. That research produced his book, Spartakus: The symbology of revolt, on the Berlin political uprising of 29 December 1918, that led to mass demonstrations of half a million Germans, aiming for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist State. It was led by the Spartacus League, itself led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The uprising, discussed by Jesi as a ‘revolt’ rather than ‘revolution’, was brutally subjugated by police and anticommunist paramilitary forces. Jesi saw his book on this event not so much as a detailed history or political analysis of the uprising, but as a continuation, or second volume of an earlier book, Secret Germany (Jesi 2020a). This earlier study engages with the role of myth in German literature, especially from Hölderlin to Thomas Mann, and with how this mythology was seized upon by the political right in Germany in the coming to power of national socialism. With the Spartacus League, his engagement is with how the mythological time of revolt breaks decisively from the historical time of revolution. The myth, in this case, is that of Spartacus, the Roman slave who led a slave revolt against the Roman empire (see Noronha 2019). In developing a tougher political perspective on slavery than we recognised in Agamben’s discussion on chresis, that peculiarly reflexive notion of use, when it

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came to owning slaves, Noronha emphasises: “In his reflections on Politics, Aristotle defines slaves as ‘talking instruments’ and ‘living possessions’, according to the unwritten law by which the spoils of war belong to the victor. This connection between war and slavery was an undisputed fact in the ancient Mediterranean, since armed conflict provided a constant flow of prisoners to be auctioned in specialized markets and employed in all sorts of work” (1087–1088).36 Noronha goes on to detail the uprising led by Spartacus in 73–71 BCE, and then details the 1918–19 Berlin uprising. Crucial to understanding the revolt is the fact that the two leaders of the Spartacists, Liebknecht and Luxemburg, attempted to dissuade the movement from violent action, maintaining that the movement was not strong enough politically, or influential enough with the general population, for the uprising to be a success. They were thinking of the necessity for planned revolution, and for moving incrementally, via gaining parliamentary vote. They were voted down in the collective decision-making, and the uprising proceeded. Both lost their lives, while the uprising played directly into the hands of the conservative Social Democrats, who used it as the pretext to strengthen power and brutally destroy the movement. Though, as we mentioned, Jesi is not aiming at explaining the historical time of this event, but rather its mythological time.37 To understand this, we need to be attuned to Jesi’s emphasis on the political understanding of an egoistic ‘I’ of bourgeois democracy and capitalism, and the destruction of that I in collectivist being, in the immanence of being-in-common.38 That destructive break, for Jesi, alludes to the break from historical time with mythic time. This is also Jesi’s understanding of the lifedeath that occupies such a break: The I, in the moment in which it is conscious of itself, is also permeated with death, and its sinking into death continually takes place during what we usually consider to be the life of man. The I therefore knows life and death, permanence and self-destruction, historical time and mythical time together. It is the common element, the point of intersection between two universes—of life and historical time; of death and mythical time. Such a point of contact takes on a paradoxical reality when we consider that historical time is in constant movement while mythical time is constant stillness. (157)

36 Noronha’s reference on this is Ambler (1987), who discusses Aristotle’s understanding of slavery. 37 See

especially Aarons’ detailed discussion on Jesi’s political diagnosis of the Spartacus revolt. the “I” who breaks with its possible saying, see especially Agamben (2019) who discusses in some detail the epistemological and poetic paradigms in Jesi’s work. It is revealing that Jesi, in the late 1960 s develops the notions of the ‘anthropological machine’ and ‘mythological machine’ whose inoperativity is always at stake. One wonders whether the young Agamben was introduced to the ‘machinery’ of political philosophy by Jesi, when in fact Agamben seemed to be the one who is celebrated for introducing, especially, the ‘anthropological machine’. Then, we also wonder about Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic vocabulary as well, and the resonances, translations, threading and rethreading that have gone into the mythemes of political philosophy more generally.

38 On

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9.5.2 Revolt’s Mythic Time Jesi reserves the notion of revolt, as distinct from revolution, to mark that caesura or crossover from historical to mythical time. There is a political understanding of this time of revolt that Jesi recognises in Nietzsche’s understanding of the eternal return. We recognise in this political understanding of mythical time, both Jesi’s untimeliness of revolt and Blanchot’s ‘to come’ of the book, and for Derrida the ‘perhaps’ or ‘to come’ of a future, auto-immunity, lifedeath of democracy. Jesi puts it this way: revolution plans for ‘tomorrow,’ for what will happen such that the future, the ‘to come’ is prematurely encounterable, knowable and plannable. For Jesi, revolt abandons revolution’s known future, its planning and decision. Revolt does not plan for tomorrow, but for the ‘day after tomorrow,’ precisely for what cannot be known, planned-for or anticipated, for a futurity as such, or a ‘to come’ whose necessity is contingency.39 Jesi explains: In the famous opening lines of Chapter 8 of Beyond Good and Evil, devoted to the prelude of the Master-Singers, Nietzsche writes: ‘This kind of music best expresses what I consider the true of the Germans: they are of the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow—they have as yet no today’. It was this assertion that I had in mind when I placed the Spartacus revolt at the crossroads between the once and for all and the eternal return—not so much of historical time and mythical time (according to the dialectic favoured by Mircea Eliade) but of the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.

Jesi contrasts what he terms the ‘anthropological machine’ of historical time and of the I who speaks its I, with the ‘mythological machine’ of mythic time. Agamben (2019) contrasts them in terms of a mythological machine articulating a ‘void of being’ at its centre, and an ‘I’-machine that has at its centre a “nucleus of nonknowledge”: “And the way in which the knowing and speaking subject holds itself in relation to its own zone of non-knowledge, the strategy through which it experiences and elaborates its own secret—the way in which it cares for itself, in Foucault’s sense—determine the rank and austerity of its knowledge” (1053). This question of knowledge or non-knowledge, or the “rank and austerity” of knowledge, is crucial for understanding the political significance of festival for Jesi, for what he determines as the emergence of the cruel festival. The suspension of a particular knowledge of an I required for collective encounter, coincides with the non-knowledge or mythic time of the festival. As Aarons, suggests, in invoking Agamben’s understanding of the ‘ban’, associated with states of exception: When revolts proliferate in the absence of any ideological horizon of revolution, the insurrectional ban does not disappear, but instead assumes the form of what [Jesi] calls a ‘cruel festival’, the ‘only sui genesis “festival” that remains to us’. This latter concept, developed in Jesi’s late article, “Knowability of the Festival,” describes the fate of the festival in a context deprived of the social conditions of genuine collectivity. The cruel festival is the ‘negative mold of what the “festival” once was’, a suspension of time ‘devoid of any metaphysical implications’” (Aarons 2019, 1038–1039) 39 Jesi’s

‘revolt’ is, in Ayache’s sense, derivative, abandoning the probability of a social ‘depth’, Revolt is intensive and immanent collectivity of the non-denumerable.

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Aarons offers contemporary examples of revolts or protests concerning climate change, imposed austerity measures, outbreaks of civil wars, riots over lynchings (1039). Though these constitute what he terms a “decisional commune,” their beingin-common happens “under the sign of ‘violence and grief’,” such that this violence holds within itself a supposed truth to what Agamben earlier alluded to with the Foucault mention: a loosening of an epistemological ‘I’ in a care of the self as a formof-life that is unknowing. A post-mythological age holds open only an increasing acclimatizing to the violence of authoritarian measures as genuine community, what Jesi recognised in Italy during the 1970s as the repressive mechanisms of government aimed at the destruction of or, in Agamben’s terms, the destitution of myth. As Aarons emphasises: “If it is true that the study of myth can no longer be tasked with providing a positive image of the human community, what it offers instead is a conceptual and ethical methodology by means of what to decipher and interact with the new forms of revolt and political violence in our present” (1040). Toscano (2019) recognises the central importance of time, for Jesi, with respect to the festival, as the moment of transformation of the ‘I’ to its other, to the different. This is opposed to the everyday and the non-festive state, where the known rules with the same.

9.5.3 Viral Returns In a move that echoes Agamben on inoperativity and destituent power, or more correctly, that precedes Agamben, enabling a spacing-chamber in which Agamben is heard as an echo, Jesi emphasises that it is of no use to dismantle or smash those machines—anthropological or mythological—for they would simply re-form, and multiply. Rather, we need to arrive at the inoperative centre of each, non-knowledge and a void of being. Toscano cites Jesi from “The time of the festival”: “To destroy the situation that makes true and productive the machines—the ‘anthropological machine’, the ‘mythological machine’—means, moreover, to push beyond bourgeois culture, not merely to try to slightly deform its frontier barriers” (Toscano 2019, 1119). We recognise how COVID-19 is displayed at the crossroads of an epistemological ‘I’ and a cruel mythology of collective violence, that perhaps ironically harbours still a dream of collective decision. Though, the irony is this. Perhaps never within historical time, within the epistemological understandings of the anthropological machine, has this planet been so ‘united’ in the sense that the WHO almost boasts at the fact that only a tiny handful of nation-states has been ‘spared’ this pandemic virus. The genuine irony is that globally the political economies of nation-states were already intermeshed by shadow banking, by complex supply-chain dependencies and by the global presence of U.S. self-interest in dictating foreign policy. The pandemic conjured the unconscious of mythological time, breaking with the historical time of political economy. At this moment, it is not a pan-state ‘commons’ that emerges, but the resuscitation of nation-state sovereignties, the securing of territorial borders, the realization of the dangers of dependencies on global supply chains—China in particular—and

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the increasing insularity of the U.S. in demonstrating ‘world-leadership’ with respect to the pandemic crisis. What is ‘celebrated’ as being-in-common is in actuality the violence done to under-paid essential service workers and front-line health workers, in the handclapping and cheers in the face of the perennial hopelessness of proletariat workers ever having justice. The cruel festival celebrates the political violence done to minority groups, indigenous, and the poor in ensuring their contagion and death rates exceed those of the bourgeois classes, let along the aristocracy of corporate leadership and government. This precariat has been bolstered, now ballooning, and destined to grow some more. The cruel festival harbours the violence done by those who claim a lack of freedom in quarantine measures, and lies at the crossroads of historical and mythological time that we recognise in the complexity of unprecedented democratic and non-democratic authoritarianism in the policing, surveillance and ongoing tracing of virus carriers. Perhaps, most of all, we recognise that the pandemic does not mark or instigate revolution, does not deliver the future for tomorrow. No-one knows about tomorrow, neither the epistemological I, nor the mythic collective. The pandemic marks revolt, marks the ‘book’ to come, the ‘future’ to come, the day-aftertomorrow that no-one can know. By necessity, it happens, though entirely contingently. The virus, it seems, responds to Nietzsche as the last of the metaphysicians: it is will-to-power as eternal return.

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