The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City 2016018916, 9781517901189, 9781517901196

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THE URBAN APPARATUS

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THE      URBAN APPARATUS MEDIAPOLITICS AND THE CITY

Reinhold Martin

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis | London

Earlier versions of chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 appeared in the Forerunners series as Mediators: Aesthetics, Politics, and the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). A version of chapter 2 was previously published as “Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City,” Grey Room 42 (Winter 2011). Chapter 3 was published as “The Thing about Cities,” in and Materials and Money and Crisis, ed. Richard Birkett and Sam Lewitt (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2013). Chapter 4 was published as “Public and Common(s)” in Places (January 2013). An excerpt of chapter 6 was published as “Polis = Oikos” in PNYX, Architectural Association student publication (London, 2015). Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Martin, Reinhold, author. Title: The urban apparatus : mediapolitics and the city / Reinhold Martin. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Portions previously published in various sources. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016018916 | ISBN 978-1-5179-0118-9 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0119-6 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns. Classification: LCC HT151 .M359 2017 | DDC 307.76—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018916

For Kadambari, Neelan, and the #1 train . . .

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CONTENTS

Preface  /  ix Introduction: The Urban Apparatus  /  1 1. City, Country, World  /  29 2. Financial Imaginaries  /  44 3. The Thing about Cities  /  60 4. Public and Common(s)  /  72 5. Horizons of Thought  /  85 6. Polis = Oikos  /  98 7. Notes on the Housing Question  /  109 8. Broken Windows  /  120 9. Beijing in Detroit  /  131 10. Infrastructure and Mediapolitics  /  141 Notes  /  155 Index  /  179

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PREFACE

T

his book consists of two parts: an introductory text that elucidates its main arguments, and ten shorter essays that map different dimensions and functions of what I am calling an “urban apparatus.” What the Introduction theorizes, the essays demonstrate. Each can be thought of as a diagram that explains certain aspects of the “urban” as a material complex and a discursive system, or apparatus. None is exhaustive; each traces specific governing lines in a concise manner. Rather than being displaced or superseded by urbanization, the figure of the “city” emerges from, circulates within, and sometimes disappears into these lines. The Introduction proposes the essay form as a cartographic device by which to navigate the channels of urbanization. It analyzes the “urban” as an aesthetic and sociotechnical operator that orders the world in a particular way, and it offers the category of mediapolitics to explain precisely how. The essays move through urbanization’s channels and take note of certain problems that arise when the city—­any city, but also any particular city—­becomes a thing with which to think and act. By this I mean a component in our cognitive infrastructure, a piece of a material complex that is both a way of knowing and a thing to be known. Each touches on specific mediators, or infrastructural, technical, and social systems that condition experience, delimit  // ix

Preface // x

the field of action, and partition knowledge. These mediators can be statistical reports, urban–­rural transactions, slum-­relocation schemes, iconic buildings, iron cages and steel shells, public housing, suburban subdivisions, parliaments, ruined libraries, satellites, windows, managerial techniques, water pipes, waste, or the rough, reddish landscape of Mars. They differ from the “media” of classical media theory in that they are not exactly or not only technological instruments or systems, but they are not so much more as to include everything under the sun. They differ from the “mediators” of actor–­network theory and assorted “new materialisms” in that they make power relations explicit. And they differ from the “mediations” accomplished by culture, money, language, and other intervening layers in certain Marxisms in that their logic is not always reducible to that of capital, even in the last instance. In fact, at times capital’s logic reduces down to theirs. The book’s two sections partially record more than a decade of teaching and speaking on the subject and its histories, during which time the conversation has unfailingly returned to the question posed by a burgeoning literature: What is a city, today? In response, these sections treat the aesthetic and imaginary life of cities as a determining factor in their political economy, both as input and output for their networked infrastructures and as a key to rethinking the polis. They do so in the mixed, incomplete, and sometimes incommensurable language of media theory, political theory, urban theory, and aesthetics, with the occasional help of telltale architectural or urban fragments. Urbanization is built on massive cracks. A widening gulf between wealth and poverty divides populations on multiple scales, both on the ground and in the social and cultural imagination. Differentials of race, class, and gender crisscross this divide, cutting new crevices and occasionally building bridges. These differentials, and the fissures and bridges they entail, are without exception enacted by material bodies, infrastructures, things. In general, the mediators and their political-­economic entanglements observe the laws of the double bind. That is, they enable one set of possibilities while disabling another, equally

Preface // xi

plausible one, by delineating the horizons within which thought and action take place. In doing so, they reproduce the no-­win scenarios of the double bind by appearing to reconcile mutually exclusive possibilities in a manner that is far more intractable than any ordinary contradiction. But knots can be cut and binds unwound, albeit with difficulty. Each of the essays tries its hand at this by reminding the reader that the rules of the world game are not usually on the table. In examining urban objects, systems, processes, and imaginaries that weave the city, each essay annotates a piece of the recursive planet on which any city, at any scale, revolves. Together, I hope that these annotations amount to something like an excerpt from an unfinished recording, rehearsed but not, for that very reason, definitive; to be repeated, like teaching. I express my gratitude to those whose invitations prompted initial versions of some of the essays included here: Edurne Portela at the Lehigh University Humanities Center; Peter van der Veer at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity, Göttingen; Richard Birkett and Sam Lewitt at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Nancy Levinson at Places; Ljiljana Blagojević at the University of Belgrade; Joseph Bedford, Shumi Bose, and Jessica Reynolds at the Architecture Exchange, London; and Helena Mattsson at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Many others have contributed thoughts, insights, and knowledge in overlapping conversations to which the essays and introduction react, directly or indirectly. Among them I especially thank Stefan Andriopolous, Arjun Appadurai, Pradeep Dalal, Mamadou Diouf, Keller Easterling, Noam Elcott, Mariana Fix, John Harwood, Andrew Herscher, Nikolaus Hirsch, Andreas Huyssen, Anne Kockelkorn, Laura Kurgan, Brian Larkin, Rahul Mehrotra, Jacob Moore, Rosalind Morris, Saskia Sassen, Susanne Schindler, Felicity Scott, Bernhard Siegert, Gayatri Spivak, Georges Teyssot, June Williamson, Mabel Wilson, and Claire Zimmerman. Neil Brenner and Phillip Wegner were exceptionally generous with their time, their critical acumen, and their thoughtful advice in reviewing the manuscript, though I take full responsibility for

Preface // xii

the imperfect results. I am especially grateful to all of the students who have participated in my seminar “Philosophies of the City” at Columbia University, where I first had the opportunity to formulate many of the ideas developed here, and to the two deans, Mark Wigley and Amale Andraos, who supported that work. At the University of Minnesota Press, I thank Danielle Kasprzak and Pieter Martin for their farsightedness and support, and Anne Carter and Rachel Moeller for their assistance with the manuscript. I also thank Tammy Zambo for her expert copy editor’s eye and Douglas Easton for preparing the index. Finally, as ever, I thank my fellow New Yorkers Kadambari Baxi and Neelan Baxi Martin for teaching me more than I can possibly say about cities around the world.

INTRODUCTION THE URBAN APPARATUS

To begin axiomatically, a city is hardware, in all senses. It fol1

lows that a city is not, in the first instance, a space, a place, a territory, or a zone; nor is it, strictly speaking, a social body. To be more precise, all of these categories and others, such as enclosure, separation, connection, density, and proximity, derive from this basic principle. This differs from saying that space, place, territory, or zone and the social relations they engender are technologically determined. It also differs from saying that a city is a transhuman network of material actors, or “actants,” across which agency and responsibility are distributed in a more or less horizontal fashion.2 For identifying a city with hardware—­let us also say infrastructure—­enables us to recognize it, whatever its specifics may be, as a site of sociotechnical life and production where power is encoded, memories are stored, and possible futures are recorded. Not only does this city-­as-­hardware belong to a more general “urban” order that spans the planet; it constitutes and is constituted by that order. But what forms of life does it entail? The city, any city, is a very particular type of hardware. Extensive and intensive rather than spatially bounded, it is an infrastructural scaling device, an instrument for establishing  // 1

Introduction // 2

and calibrating relations that reach, in a nonlinear fashion, well beyond territorial borders while enfolding other borders internally.3 These scalar relations can be mapped. Like the city itself, they are imaginary as well as real, insofar as any map constructs a set of strategic and tactical options, possible pasts and possible futures, pathways to take, and spaces to inhabit, cultivate, exploit, or leave aside. We should call these relations sociotechnical rather than simply social, to recognize the irreducible play of urban infrastructures in constituting the city-­as-­polis, a site in, around, and through which political subjects form and are governed. By infrastructure I do not mean only a tangle of technological connections that extends around the planet but that tends to intensify as one approaches an urban center: roads, bridges, train lines, docks, airports; or sewers, plumbing, wiring, gas lines, telephone lines, fiber-­optic cables, antennas, modems; or their fittings, gaskets, ports, handles, hinges, and circuitry; or the reservoirs, refineries, power plants, satellites, mines, landfills, and garbage dumps that feed them and absorb their effluents. I also mean institutions, sign systems, protocols, and living beings—­human and otherwise—­that are gathered and arranged in particular patterns, embedded, differentiated, or otherwise combined. Orchestrating a world of on–­off switches, valves, scans, and cycles, these infrastructures repeat at different rates, regularly and irregularly. Without necessarily synchronizing their patterns, they combine into what we can call an “urban apparatus”: a set of sociotechnical relations and discursive strategies deployed in response to what Michel Foucault called, in explaining his use of the term dispositif (apparatus), an “urgent need.”4 As in the European nineteenth century studied by Foucault, today this can still mean the need to incorporate a “floating population,” or what Marx called a “reserve army of labor,” into regimes of normalcy as well as social and economic productivity, through education, psychiatric power, and the police. It can also mean the biopolitical management of the human species and its environment. But more generally, it can mean the need to order things, to make the space of human habitation knowable in

Introduction // 3

a certain way such that its constitutive disruptions are brought under control and converted into what we must call, for reasons I shall explain, a nonillusory semblance of order. Such needs appear every day across the planet. Shifting patterns of migration and huge numbers of political, economic, and climate refugees remake not only classically metropolitan space but also the rural, semirural, or exurban terrain that still supports the bulk of human settlement. These patterns are accompanied by and related to logistical, political, and economic transformations associated generally with the neoliberal world order and specifically with the cultivation of human capital and the transfer of sovereignty to multinational or transnational corporate bodies.5 New powers, new amalgams of states and markets, combine to address these patterns: corporations, militaries, aid agencies, sovereign wealth funds, nongovernmental organizations, social and business entrepreneurs, and more. Bound together in relations of dominance and subordination, of wealth and poverty, of saver and saved, and of investor and investment, these powers both depend upon and make possible a particular way of knowing the world. That way of knowing is called “urban”; it invents new categories, such as “urbanization,” and reinvents others, such as “the poor.” The urban apparatus is therefore the discursive and material network through which the “urban” becomes intelligible and functions as a political, economic, social, and spatial strategy. My use of the term apparatus modifies Foucault’s dispositif in that what is specifically “urban” about the infrastructural apparatuses that organize today’s cities and their landscapes is an aesthetic quality as well as a directly governmental and sociotechnical one. This aesthetic dimension names an irreducibly contingent act of differentiation that is repeated over and over again. It is a way of saying “yes” to one thing and “no” to another that cannot be reconciled with anything like subjective “taste” or “pleasure.” This action must be seen as a primary, reiterative instance of power-­knowledge that produces what Foucault calls “grids of intelligibility” but that also recognizes the figure of the “grid” itself—­a quintessentially urban figure—­as an aesthetic

Introduction // 4

operator or a cultural technique.6 Neither mechanistic structure nor vitalistic force, the “urban” therefore designates a mode of cognition. It is a way of seeing, arranging, and knowing the world, of speaking a certain kind of performative truth about how humans live together such that certain historical possibilities come into view and others disappear.7 This cognition is aesthetic in Nietzsche’s sense, which holds that we know what we know not by mere contemplation but as an active, willed process that, to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze explaining the Nietzschean antidialectic, begins with the differentiation of “yes” from “no,” where “[n]egation is opposed to affirmation but affirmation differs from negation.”8 In modernity, the big city has long been usefully thought of as an open series of contradictions that oppose negation to affirmation: servitude to freedom, exploitation to equity, alienation to community. But to know the city or urban society only in this way is already to oppose the aesthetic realm, which Kant identified with a reflective “purposiveness without purpose,” to the unruly world of dissonant excess, or waste, by running the whole thing through the epistemological sanitation system of the dialectic.9 With this operation, it is no surprise that Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were able to write, about the entertainment industry, that “purpose has finally consumed the realm of purposelessness.”10 Instrumental reason—­the bureaucrat’s “yes” or “no”—­wins out not as ideology but as a strategic response to excess, waste, and noise, just as the big city submits “floating populations” and “reserve armies of labor” to the calculus of governmentality. “Yes” or “no” thus tracks back to power, which is not, as it sometimes appears in Nietzsche, a primordial, metaphysically obscure force but, rather, a relation, a struggle, a way of living together and knowing together, concretely and historically.

THE ESSAY AS GRID Nietzsche’s tragic mode has been a recurrent theme for analysts of the modern city preoccupied with the “no.” For the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, an influential voice for architectural

Introduction // 5

theory, the only possible response to the foundational contradictions of the Großstadt, or modern metropolis, is stoic silence. Neither a return to an idyllic past nor transcendent synthesis is possible. Cacciari says of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that he “gazes a long time upon the Metropolis, and remains silent. His problem is to know the Metropolis: to see its time and destiny.” Zarathustra speaks: “There is nothing to better, nothing to worsen.” Cacciari adds: “The tragic vision illuminates a form, a structure, a destiny. A destiny cannot be corrected.”11 That Cacciari’s own destiny would include two separate terms as mayor of Venice suggests that, unlike Zarathustra’s howling “yes!,” when negative thought comes down from the mountain and enters the city, it is sometimes welcomed, warmly. “The city,” Cacciari also writes, “can be comprehended only in the essay form.”12 Fragmentary and impressionistic as it may be, the essay, he claims, unlike the philosophical aphorism, anticipates synthesis. The essay, then, is “the final appearance of the ideology of synthesis, the final attempt to refute the negative, to refute contradiction as negativity.”13 Promising resolution but forever deferring it, the metropolitan essay is therefore, and particularly in the writings of Georg Simmel, a form of “consoled tragedy.” As Cacciari says of Simmel’s short essay “Bridge and Door,” “Thought can always construct a door to define the limits of its home, and hence, at the same time, a perspective from which to measure being, and in conformity with which to build its own roads and bridges.” Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, the essayist remains among the people and builds a home in the street, protected but also connected by imponderable thresholds: bridges and doors. “The essay in this way emerges as tragedy’s most radical consolation.”14 The essays in this collection do not seek consolation; they seek comprehension, precisely in a nonsynthetic manner. Since Montaigne, the essay form has been identified with the melancholy of an observing “I” that can perceive history’s ironies and pick apart their details but cannot act upon the scene it is observing. Essays are therefore “cases” only in the diagnostic sense. Cacciari, a formidable essayist, observes aphoristically

Introduction // 6

that “the aphorism is a line from a tragedy, the essay a fragment of an analysis.”15 Yes, but the tragedy in question is not limited, as in Cacciari, to the incompatibility of individuality and freedom that so preoccupied metropolitan Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, the self-­regarding confines of which deserve an analysis of their own. The tragedy is what repeats daily, in cities, towns, and villages around this fragile planet, in locales and lives that cannot be neatly sorted into Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, organic and artificial, locales and lives so clearly functions of one another that the smell of uncounted deaths competes even with the melancholic odor of Venetian canals. In his essay on Rome, which bears the subtitle “An Aesthetic Analysis,” Simmel, a philosophically trained sociologist, casts a neo-­Kantian eye that dwells in subjective apperception. He describes Rome’s binding multiplicity, “the immense unity of the manifold which is not torn apart by the vast tension of its elements, but whose incomparable force rather is displayed through this very tension.”16 Cacciari finds in this a dubious synthesis, “the confirmation of the supremacy of the whole over the separate parts.”17 For the city to be perceived and comprehended through its fragments, however, does not necessarily require that, as absent presence, it bear the burden of wholeness, completeness, or universality. Let us instead replace anthropocentric universals, modernity’s straw figures, with incommensurable scalar relations within which the observing “I” is merely one integer among many, divisible and multipliable by itself. Let us also replace the principle of the essay as melancholic urban fragment, which Cacciari derives from Walter Benjamin, with the essay as grid, in the infrastructural sense: the essay as a mediator, a “grid of intelligibility” and a scaling device in its own right. Rereading Benjamin, Andreas Huyssen has shown that the modern European city appears most vividly in miniature, as a kind of condensed passage that can be best accessed through the tightly compressed writings of authors such as Rilke or Kafka.18 We might add only that, like the irregular Parisian arcades squeezing their way through medieval crevices that even Haussmann’s wrecking crews could not entirely eradicate,

Introduction // 7

what Huyssen calls “metropolitan miniatures” are not quite (or not yet) urban in the sense we are describing. Rather, like so much in Benjamin, they are ghosts from cities past, made modern as anachronism. Replace the passage with a grid—­a map or diagram rather than a picture or snapshot—­and the urban comes into view. The essay-­as-­grid, pixelated or not, assembles disparate units into patterns that make the city visible as a field of dissonant scales. The intimacy of the elevator (where bankers stand uncomfortably beside housekeepers) is superimposed onto the alienation of the skyscraper (where capital proclaims its phallogocentric individuality) such that neither summarizes the dominant order. Instead, that order is what suppresses the elevator-­ to-­ skyscraper dissonance by securing their correspondence. Such dissonance can appear as a contradiction to be resolved or an antithesis to be synthesized, but only if we take the human psyche and its sensorium as a primary unit that measures both the claustrophobia of the elevator and the will-­ to-­power of the skyscraper. This, before all else, is the work of the melancholic essay: to reestablish the “I” that observes and in observing characterizes, and in characterizing personifies. Take away this “I” by replacing the essayistic passage with an indifferent grid and you have only a filter that separates signal from noise, order from disorder. Its output does not require a “dear” reader (“To the reader” says Montaigne in dedicating his essays to “the private benefit of my friends and kinsmen”19). It can be read by either human or machine operators, including those human-­machines that operate our ever “smarter” cities and those who quietly oppose them. The reconsolidation of the “I,” which brings microcosm and macrocosm into intelligible relation, is the work of the urban apparatus. Remove its scaling filter and when we gaze down a city street, we see not crowds of individuals or individual crowds but a battlefield and a playing field of relations, of activity, of force, of struggle: this particular universe endlessly going through its motions in this particular way, in every body and everybody, every thing and everything.

Introduction // 8

PAINTED SOLDIERS The essay-­as-­grid therefore discloses the “urban” neither as synthesis nor as unchecked affirmation but as a differential repetition that must be comprehended on an aesthetic plane linked directly with material production. In The Birth of Tragedy, the young Nietzsche twice repeats a statement that he would never entirely repudiate: “[O]nly as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified [gerechtfertigt].” This, he claims, confirms the inadequacy of dividing up the world into subjective and objective states, “although, of course, our awareness of our significance in this respect hardly differs from the awareness which painted soldiers have of the battle depicted on the same canvas.”20 By “justified” Nietzsche means bound inexorably to a transhistorical creative will to which human beings are nonidentical, a will that, a decade later, his Zarathustra would rename the “will to power.”21 At this early, Wagnerian stage, Nietzsche argues that only the artistic genius, “during the act of artistic procreation,” has access to this will and comes to resemble “that uncanny image of fairy-­tale which can turn its eyes around and look at itself; now he is at one and the same time subject and object, simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator.”22 Nietzsche’s metaphysics thus doubles back in a self-­canceling, secularizing gesture that propagates across the social field. Arguing that it is meaningless to claim that mere “painted soldiers” have either subjective or objective access to the historical canvas, he must also acknowledge that the artist gains such access only indirectly and paradoxically, by turning himself or herself into a “fairy-­tale” image of subjective–­objective fusion who is poet-­actor-­spectator at once—­a second-­order painted soldier. Rehearsing the “birth” of Attic tragedy, Nietzsche further associates the world, justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, with tragic myth, which “must convince us that even the ugly and disharmonious is an artistic game,” an effect he compares to musical dissonance.23 In Nietzsche’s idiom, dissonance belongs to the Dionysian order, just as image, symbol, and resemblance belong to Apollo. The relation, however, is asymmetrical, be-

Introduction // 9

cause Dionysian dissonance summons Apollonian beauty, the semblance of order, as its human veil: “If you could imagine dissonance assuming human form—­and what else is man?—­this dissonance would need, to be able to live, a magnificent illusion which would spread a veil of beauty over its own nature. This is the true artistic aim of Apollo, in whose name we gather together all those countless illusions of beautiful semblance which, at every moment, make existence at all worth living at every moment and thereby urge us on to experience the next.”24 We know well that Nietzsche assigns the recovery of the Dionysian, mediated by music and humanized by mimesis, to the “German spirit,” which he likens to “a knight who has sunk into slumber” but has now been awakened by Dionysian song. The nationalism of this spirit is a logical consequence of Nietzsche’s aesthetics. It is precisely the “veil of beauty” that renders dissonance humanly bearable and thus restores to its “homeland” a “German genius” previously “estranged from hearth and home.”25 In this, Nietzsche’s argument is essentially antimetropolitan. Despite all claims to the contrary, at this point Apollo and not Dionysus remains his master, precisely because his thought is more comfortable in Bayreuth than in Berlin; not because, as contemporaneous German social theory would have it, the metropolis, or Großstadt, is the seat of administrative rationality as opposed to wild abandon, but because the hoarse roar of the metropolis, rather than the pastoral whisper of the Germanic “hearth and home,” is the roar of Dionysius. For this very reason, Nietzschean aesthetics transposed onto the modern metropolis addresses but also displaces the “urgent need,” felt initially in cities but now wrapping the entire planet, to which the urban apparatus responds: the need to bring order to the heaving, dissonant forces of collective life. To undo the displacement, we must rewrite two of its grounding antitheses.

FIRST ANTITHESIS: TOWN AND COUNTRY In the very same year that Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, Friedrich Engels sarcastically dismissed the restorative therapy of “hearth and home,” specifically the Prou-

Introduction // 10

dhonist idealization of a small-­holding peasantry, as a false resolution to the ideologically formulated “housing question” that masked the underlying expropriation of labor by capitalist industrialization. The Communist Manifesto had already proposed the abolition of the town–­country antithesis, and Engels returned to this point in The Housing Question. This was the same antithesis that Nietzsche later made vivid in the figure of his mountain-­dwelling sage, Zarathustra. In the Grundrisse, Marx historicizes it, beginning with the infrastructural consolidation of “Asiatic” despotism: “[c]ommunal conditions of real appropriation through labor, aqueducts, very important among the Asiatic peoples; means of communication etc. then appear as the work of the higher unity—­of the despotic regime hovering over the little communes.”26 At the agrarian, “Asiatic” stage, community and property are thus assimilated to despotic power through the sublime presence of a unifying infrastructure (“aqueducts”); at the “Roman” stage, the order of public and private property binds individuals to city-­states and establishes the grounds for war; and at a third, “Germanic” stage, town and country enter into a dialectic from which the possibility of urbanization is born.27 Replying to his Proudhonist critics, Engels transposes onto these stages another dialectic, that of utility and waste, by which rural and urban are governed: When one observes how here in London alone a greater quantity of manure than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums, and when one observes what colossal works are necessary to prevent this manure from poisoning the whole of London, then the utopian proposal to abolish the antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis. And even comparatively insignificant Berlin has been wallowing in its own filth for at least thirty years.28

Engels is describing here not only the ecological-­territorial dimension of capital but also a new form of sovereignty, or what Marx called “community,” that, like the “higher unity” of an

Introduction // 11

imagined “Asiatic” order (or an actual colonial empire), is secured by “colossal works,” or infrastructures, which today’s language calls urban.

SECOND ANTITHESIS: NEAR AND FAR Consider, then, this primal scene of urbanization: a stranger enters a village. By 1900, this stranger could well be Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. But according to Simmel, the stranger, who is only a “potential wanderer,” is someone who “comes today and stays tomorrow.”29 He is the very embodiment of the near–­far antithesis, and hence of urbanity, regardless of where he is actually from. This antithesis intersects that of town and country. Referring to the “classical example” of European Jews, Simmel, who was Jewish, suggests that the stranger is archetypally a trader, an intermediary, and never an “owner of soil” in either the strictly economic sense or as a socially fixed “life substance.” Instead, “[r]estriction to intermediary trade, and often (as though sublimated from it) to pure finance, gives him the specific character of mobility.”30 Though his estrangement resembles the metropolitan “blasé attitude,” and although Simmel’s stranger travels along the pathways of capital, he is not abstract. Rather, the stranger embodies what Simmel calls a “unity” of nearness and distance: “[T]he stranger, like the poor and like sundry ‘inner enemies,’ is an element of the group itself.”31 An aesthetic operator par excellence, the stranger shuttles between “yes” and “no.” At once near and far, in the village he is capital’s representative, and in the city he is an “inner enemy” allied with “the poor.” The near–­far antithesis does not resolve the town–­country antithesis; instead, it reveals the latter’s aesthetic dimensions. Like Simmel, and despite the evident disparities, Marx wrote aesthetically about town and country when he ascribed different forms of community to different forms of property. If we recognize aesthetics as the process of giving order to things by excluding or minimizing dissonance, interference, and waste, we can see that Marx correlates the three territorial orders with three orders of subjectivity: “Asiatic,” “Roman,” and “Germanic.” From within this imagined lineage, the dissonant

Introduction // 12

metropolitan stranger, capital’s avatar, generates the urban order by producing nearness and distance, inside and outside, in historically specific ways—­including what Henri Lefebvre would later call the “implosions” and “explosions” that both abolish and maintain the rural–­urban antagonism and codependence, repeatedly.32 Town is not to country, then, as Apollo is to Dionysus. Rather, town–­country (x-­axis) and near–­far (y-­axis) intersect at a grid point, with Apollo–­Dionysus running in the third dimension (z-­axis). As an ordering mechanism, Simmel’s near–­far stranger plays Apollo to both town and country by giving form to the threat (and the promise) of Dionysius. His is a tactical move that draws a piece of the grid, a “bridge and door,” which both secures and spans the town–­country antithesis. Holding off Dionysian dissonance by converting it into an x–­y coordinate, an address, the stranger (the imperial cartographer, the petty capitalist, the immigrant, the refugee) traverses an infrastructural knot to establish distinctions by getting beneath and between them. Nietzsche argues that a properly tragic art produces a “middle world between beauty and truth,” a world alternately “sublime and comical” that takes “a step beyond the world of beautiful semblance.”33 Aesthetics, in this sense, is the skin under your skin. It is the interface through which psychosensory life appears, including the psychosensory life of the great metropolis as analyzed by Simmel. It is a site of conflict and a site of production, where town and country, near and far, are sorting devices—­grids—­that extract order from disorder. To continue in Nietzsche’s language, the aesthetic interplay of Apollonian order and Dionysian dissonance constitutes a truth in and of itself, a truth that does not obey the negative laws of resemblance by which representations are measured against external reality. Rather, it produces those representations as reflections. Its truth is the mirror itself, not what is in it.34 Reading Nietzsche, Deleuze wants us to replace the early antithesis of Apollo–­Dionysus with increasingly nondialectical signifying chains.35 But is it not more true to say that, rather than remaining lodged in the domain of tragic myth, the truth

Introduction // 13

lies in the bond, the line, the operator that establishes the difference between Apollo and Dionysus, between abstraction and the real, between town and country, between near and far in the first place? And is not the aesthetically active “middle world” a wholly real apparatus, a power-­knowledge complex in its own right? In a word, like Marx’s “Asiatic” aqueducts and the “colossal works” that Engels found eliminating London’s waste, does not that apparatus govern?

THE URBAN Signal and noise, Apollo and Dionysius; the urban apparatus redistributes these according to a historically specific logic that reproduces the town–­country antithesis rather than resolves it. This claims a great deal. First, it suggests that the contemporary city, as a thing and as an idea, is a product of the urban apparatus, rather than the other way around. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as today, that apparatus has played a primary role in converting “floating populations” into capital, in response to the urgent need to consolidate and to grow systems of production and accumulation, which otherwise tend toward entropy; but only insofar as the apparatus makes thinkable those social and economic relations whereby a certain body politic—­the city, as polis—­comes into view as a historical possibility, rather than as an a priori entity. This is its aesthetic function. The urban apparatus is therefore prerepresentational. It constitutes the material conditions through which the representations that regulate it appear; but it also manages the dissonant play of forces both fueling and clogging the metropolitan engine, as well as that engine’s noisy hum and toxic emissions, which we now recognize as the unstable ground of human life on an unstable planet. Coded aesthetically as “urban,” these two levels, which enfold the order of representation into the order of production, feed back into the apparatus as both ideology and operating system. Second, if “urban” describes the grids through which the modern city enters the epistemic field as an object to be made, lived in, and governed, then power is bound to knowledge to the

Introduction // 14

extent that each delimits the other’s horizon of possibility. This inverts the empiricist perspective that still prevails in urban studies, for which policies are solutions to problems and cities are primarily sites in which certain problems are most visibly concentrated, and therefore certain policies are implemented or not. It also redirects the more durable hypothesis that, underlying these problems or conflicts is a whole set of social relations that shape cities by giving texture to their streets and supplying constituencies for their politics through class antagonisms. There, the optic that peers into social relations to see law-­abiding relations of production multiplies into a thousand different pathways, so that ultimately there is no such thing as an “industrial city” or an “informational city,” only a becoming-­ city in which forces churn and tables turn. The view in which the city is a social fact before it is anything else is entirely reasonable; but it does not account for the hegemony of the urban as a mode of cognition, a set of material relations through which human life makes itself known and thus makes itself governable in the first place. The urban apparatus names that hegemony. It is infrastructural in that it repeats. When it is said repeatedly, for example, that we live in an age of urbanization, the apparatus is at work; the “urban” becomes a network of performative statements that helps to produce the state of affairs it appears only to describe; not only because it legitimizes extant tendencies within capital that have revalued densification and other “urban” properties on behalf of a new historical subject, such as the “creative class,” which it does, but also because it brings that subject into being. This is the real significance of Lefebvre’s claim, already in 1970, that “[s]ociety has been completely urbanized.”36 The urban, then, is not, in the last instance, a sociological, demographic, or geographic category; it is an epistemological one, a political one, and an aesthetic one. This differs from saying, with Manuel Castells, that the “urban” connotes an ideology. Castells aimed his early intervention devoted to this thesis, The Urban Question (1972, reissued 1977), at two targets. The first was the German sociological

Introduction // 15

tradition originating with Ferdinand Tönnies and passing, via Simmel and Max Weber, into American urban sociology with the work of Robert E. Park, Louis Wirth, and the Chicago school. The second was Lefebvre.37 Castells treats the “urban question” in a manner that self-­consciously reproduces Engels’s treatment of the “housing question,” but without the biting sarcasm that Engels reserved for bourgeois reform. Thus, for Castells, the long-­standing fascination with “urban” conflicts as ciphers for societal ones, accelerated after 1968, masks the properly structural character of what his highly schematic, pseudo-­ Althusserian Marxism considered to be more basic modes of expropriation, production, and accumulation. Accordingly, the Chicago-­school invention of the “city” as a unit of societal analysis belonged symptomatically to a first-­order misreading of social relations under industrial capitalism. Worse, it helped give form to an ideological (state) apparatus that institutionalized, as representation, what we must call, with Althusser, an “imaginary” relation to the “real” conditions of existence under capitalism, thus perpetuating those conditions by neutralizing their contradictions.38 Although Castells later disavowed aspects of this argument, it must not be forgotten that Althusser insisted that all ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) are materially constituted.39 By arguing that the very idea of the “urban,” as ideology, generated an ISA that interpellated class struggle into administration, Castells overlooks the most penetrating implication of his own hypothesis: that the “urban” names a material complex from which ideological formations spring, rather than the other way around. This alternative reorients Althusser’s appareils (apparatuses) in the direction that Foucault set out with his “apparatuses” (dispositifs) and potentially recovers the infrastructural dimensions of Castells’s project, around which his subsequent work on networks and flows would circle, without ever really landing.40 Prone to ideological straitjacketing, Castells names Lefebvre as a “left-­wing” variant on the “culturalist” approach of the Chicago sociologists. In Lefebvre we do get a stageist account—­

Introduction // 16

from agrarian to industrial to urban—­faithful to the Marxian dialectic. But instead of property and production, we get oeuvre (work) and rights, including Lefebvre’s celebrated “right to the city.” As “episteme” (Castells’s term), Lefebvre’s “urban man” therefore grounds a new humanism for which “space, like the whole of society, is the ever-­original work of that freedom of creation that is the attribute of Man.”41 Castells is referring to Lefebvre’s distinction, in Right to the City and elsewhere, between city-­space as oeuvre (work) and city-­space as product. This distinction bears shades of Lefebvre’s earlier involvement with the Situationist International, and particularly Guy Debord, and would go on to inform his later arguments in The Production of Space.42 Castells has no patience for such a “reversal of the materialist problematic [that] sets out from ‘men’ rather than from their social and technological relations of production.”43 In dismissing Lefebvre’s theses so quickly, however, he fails to recognize that such “men,” as active agents, are the material outcome, rather than the illusory mask, of “social and technological relations of production.” New subjects of history brought forth by the urban apparatus, these “men” are artists who bear a genealogical and discursive relation to Nietzsche’s Dionysian genius. Lefebvre paraphrases Marx when he explains his notion of the city as a kind of artwork: The most eminent urban creations, the most “beautiful” oeuvres of urban life (we say “beautiful” because they are oeuvres rather than products) date from epochs previous to that of industrialization. There was the oriental city (linked to the Asiatic mode of production), the antique city (Greek and Roman associated with the possession of slaves) and then the medieval city (in a complex situation embedded in feudal relations but struggling against a landed feudalism).44

With industrialization, says Lefebvre, come concentrated wealth and the town–­country codependency. Knowledge, techniques, and “oeuvres (works of art, monuments)” thus accumulate in cities. In fact, “[t]he city itself is ‘oeuvre,’ a feature which

Introduction // 17

contrasts with the irreversible tendency towards money and commerce, towards exchange and products. Indeed, the oeuvre is use value and the product is exchange value.” So far, so good. But here is the reversal to which Castells objects: “The eminent use of the city, that is, of its streets and squares, edifices and monuments, is la Fête [the festival]”45—­that is, unproductive consumption, pleasure, jouissance. Who, then, is the subject of “urban” rights, including the right to the city itself? Not the laborer, the worker, the housewife, nor the shopkeeper, but Dionysus, the stranger. Yes, this runs against the grain of Lefebvre’s evident affinity with Heidegger, where oeuvre would first be a water jug or a pair of peasant shoes, and the urban subject would be a city dweller before all else. But it coheres with Lefebvre’s later use of Nietzsche in an otherwise contradictory attempt to redirect semiotics by claiming that the lived, everyday, social production of space ultimately links up with both material production (in the classical Marxian sense) and “the freest creative process there is—­the signifying process.”46 Lefebvre cites (eclectically) Nietzsche’s short essay from the same period as The Birth of Tragedy, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-­moral Sense” (1873), on the creative, intuitive nature of metaphor and metonymy. These literary figures, Lefebvre argues, “erect a mental and social architecture above spontaneous life.”47 In the process, they abstract. Nietzsche writes of the need of “every nation” to erect mathematical, conceptual structures that render truth metaphorical: “In this respect man can probably be admired as a mighty architectural genius who succeeds in building an infinitely complicated conceptual cathedral on foundations that move like flowing water; of course, in order to anchor itself to such a foundation, the building must be as light as gossamer—­delicate enough to be carried along by the wave, yet strong enough not to be blown apart by the wind.”48 But, pace Lefebvre, gossamer structures are not abstractions. Referring to the way that this process organizes space and time into inviolable mathematical “perceptions,” Nietzsche asserts that “we produce these perceptions within ourselves and out of ourselves with the same necessity as a spider spins its web.”49 Lefebvre’s

Introduction // 18

attempt to move it toward semiosis notwithstanding, with these floating, gossamer structures we are closer to the human Ariadne than to the god Apollo.

MEDIAPOLITICS IN THE LABYRINTH In that same text Nietzsche asks, “What is a word?,” and answers, “The portrayal of nerve stimuli in sounds.”50 Thus, all words are metaphorical in that they translate across media, in this case from the neuronal to the aural. Nietzsche concludes his later “Dionysian” dithyramb “Ariadne’s Complaint” (all but the last stanza of which was included in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) with Dionysus asking Ariadne to listen but also to “put a clever word [kluges Wort]” in his ears. “I am your labyrinth,” Dionysus, the minotaur, exhorts.51 In this exhortation, which is also a wedding proposition, Deleuze sees a reversal of Ariadne’s thread. Rather than leading out of the labyrinth, it leads deeper in, toward affirmation rather than negation, when Dionysus “not only asks Ariadne to hear but to affirm affirmation.”52 Thus, when Deleuze goes on to say of the word that Ariadne puts in Dionysus’s ear that “[t]he ear is labyrinthine, the ear is the labyrinth of becoming or the maze of affirmation,” he closes the circle. Ariadne’s thread doubles back, repeats, in an eternal return—­not of the same but of difference: “[H]aving herself heard Dionysian affirmation, she makes it the object of a second affirmation heard by Dionysus.”53 This “affirmation of affirmation,” as Deleuze calls it, does not oppose affirmation to negation but, rather, doubles it up in a play of differences by dividing it in two: “the moment of reflection [Ariadne] where a second affirmation takes the first [Dionysus] as its object.”54 When he refers to Ariadne as the “fiancée” of Dionysus, Deleuze certainly risks heteronormatively casting her as a “mirror” or “reflection” in the simplest of gendered stereotypes. But as a material thread or line drawn in the cochlear labyrinth—­“a portrayal of nerve stimuli in sounds”—­Ariadne’s mirror belongs to the order of production: it produces real words and images, gossamer lines, rather than mere reflections of apparent truths. Her thread-­ mirror-­voice is, therefore, a machine that, far from ensnaring

Introduction // 19

its subjects in hermeneutic circles of arbitrary interpretations of arbitrary signs, draws circles and signs and lines over and over again, as translations that produce the things they translate. Side by side with minotaurs, insects, and birds, “man” can therefore occupy the labyrinth only in what Nietzsche calls an “aesthetic stance” that grasps other beings and their subjectivity as metaphor, in “an allusive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign medium. For this, however, in any case a freely fictionalizing and freely inventive middle sphere and middle faculty is necessary.”55 Again, Deleuze wants us to follow the later Nietzsche and exchange the dialectical Dionysus–­Apollo antithesis, along with what he calls the Dionysus–­Ariadne “complementarity,” for a still fuller affirmation, a “yes” for which “no” is also an affirmative.56 But if we linger with Ariadne in this “middle sphere,” replete with mirroring mirrors and gossamer threads, we discover its mediapolitical function, which gives rise to antitheses like oeuvre-­ versus-­product in a manner that is intimately related to, but not identical with, that which Foucault ascribed to a world of dispositifs: Ariadne as apparatus. An apparatus is a machine and a discursive system that says “yes” and “no” at once. It is a double bind.57 It is therefore neither a metaphysical entity nor a mere instrument that, like a cellular telephone, requires “hand-­to-­hand combat” to desacralize its abstractions, as Giorgio Agamben would have it.58 Nor is it only a tangle of crisscrossing, bifurcating lines—­of visibility, of enunciation, of force, of subjectification—­as Deleuze says of the Foucauldian dispositif.59 An apparatus is an assemblage of mediators, of difference engines, that pry things apart such that order reigns. The urban apparatus is one such assemblage. Historically produced and materially constituted, it brings the “urban” into being. The specific ways in which it does so are mediapolitical as well as biopolitical in that they occupy an aesthetic “middle world.” In producing the antitheses of town and country, near and far, villagers and strangers, the urban apparatus, Ariadne’s thread, leads neither into nor out of the labyrinth. It is the labyrinth (“I am your labyrinth,” says Dionysus), but only

Introduction // 20

indirectly, like a gossamer web floating on a flowing river. The labyrinth is the city; but it is also the unnatural roaring river that the city must tame—­through visibility, enunciation, force, subjectification—­so that a polis, a political body, and an oikos—­ an economy, an ecology, a household, and a society—­may come into being. This process, this eternal return of being and becoming on the aesthetic plane, which is also the plane of power-­ knowledge, is mediapolitics.

SCALE A scalar dynamics is basic to the infrastructural apparatuses that compose the urban order and make cities. Unlike measure, which subtends it, scale is relational. We should therefore take terms like global, globalization, and globality at face value, as denoting a shift in scale that integrates the dimensions of the earthly sphere with all the others that have defined human history. This undoes the factitious, reflexive equivalence of globalization with abstraction, derealization, homogenization, or their converse, a distended particularism or pluralism. It also challenges the surprisingly persistent habit that measures all forms of sociality against the arbitrary unit of individual human experience, or of institutions such as the family or the nation, or of bounded spaces such as the town, the city, the territory, or the region. There is nothing inherently alienating or even mildly disorienting about the global or planetary scale as a domain of experience, whether or not one ever leaves the house. The difficulty arises, instead, with the inevitable dissonance among intertwined levels. For decades, geographers, urbanists, and political theorists, informed by the pathbreaking work of Lefebvre, have referred to a “politics of space” or a “production of space” to grasp the contested, dialectical constitution of the urban realm.60 Though still essential, this perspective ultimately posits unalienated human life against abstract technical processes, and thus renders human labor power (or its corollary, ludic release) as a foundational unit of measure, and social alienation as a target of critique. What changes when we replace space with scale,

Introduction // 21

and speak about a “politics of scale” adequate to globality, or the mediapolitical “production of scale” from which bodies emerge at the interface of humans and machines, including individuals as well as assemblies laboring in factories, offices, homes, construction sites, and streets?61 Architecture and the visual arts, too, have struggled with these questions. Particularly symptomatic as a diagram of longed-­for scalar harmony is Powers of Ten (1968, revised 1977), a widely circulated film made by the designers Charles Eames and Ray Eames at the behest, quite tellingly, of International Business Machines (IBM). Elegantly and disarmingly, the film domesticates the unruliness—­we can also say the unhomeliness and the untimeliness—­of scale. Beginning with the human and zooming out and in from there, it makes smooth transitions that convert the cosmos and the microcosmos into a continuum of number: the title’s “powers of ten.” Far from disorienting or “abstracting,” its continuous zoom soothes and reassures. The unimaginable vastness of things, macroscopically and microscopically infinite, is assimilated to the mathematical sublime, where a normally acute combination of pleasure and pain has the contradictory effect of rendering the human observer, as a calculator, at home in the territory now patrolled by IBM’s machines. Compare this rappel à l’ordre to the discordant “miniature metropolis” that Huyssen has found in literature, which, in an earlier era, fed off the paradoxes of mechanized urban life, and you sense the scope of the new, revanchist formation.62 Scale, then, is an effect of apparatuses. Particularly in his later works, Foucault had frequent recourse to the term dispositif (apparatus) to describe the material and discursive systems in which power-­knowledge flows and subjects form.63 For the spatial sciences, the most notable of these is the apparatus of the carceral, with which Foucault provides the diagram (to use Deleuze’s term) for the disciplinary society.64 The social calculus that Foucault describes, by which bodies are rendered docile through concentrated exposure to normalizing regimes, is nothing if not a measuring device. Calibrated against statistically derived norms, the body of the prisoner, the student, or the

Introduction // 22

patient is fixed only in relation to other bodies, which eventually assemble into heterotopias. But at what scale does any given assemblage become heterotopic: at the scale of a house? a city? a nation? a door? To a large degree, Foucault’s actual examples respect the scalar regimes of nineteenth-­century European rationalism as taught to architects at the École des Beaux Arts and to engineers at the École des Ponts et Chaussées, whereby the assemblages—­ prisons, clinics, schools, ships, cemeteries—­could all be grasped in relation to the self-­possessed human body.65 But the nineteenth century also saw that well-­proportioned, measured, calibrated body broken apart, not only by the Victorian apparatus of sexuality that, as Foucault showed, was revealed rather than masked by the “repressive hypothesis,” but also by the material life of the metropolis, which we now call urbanization.66 The urban apparatus emerged in fits and starts worldwide during the long twentieth century. The claim that we live in an “urban age” performatively reproduces its hegemony, as do statements such as “More than half the world’s population is now living in cities,” since even on its face this means that nearly half the world’s population does not live in cities.67 Rarely is it observed that we no longer know what a city is, least of all in the statistical, governmental sense that defined the metropolis of Baudelaire, Simmel, and Benjamin, which lives on anachronistically in such statements. To be sure, events still crowd the urban stage, even as boundaries melt, edges soften, and centers disperse. But history has pulled the rug out from under the modern metropolis and its myths, in place of which creeps a disabling confusion as to what happens, exactly, when we use city to denote a zone of human habitation that is indeterminate by its very nature. Sublime, comical, and deadly at once, as numbers pile up into facts, and facts into experiences, it becomes that much more difficult to distinguish the city as a realm of freedom from the winter palace of a bloated, shapeless new sovereign. An overwhelming sense of awe at the inhuman scale and pace of it all casts a long shadow across the pathway by which the polis, where Apollo plays with Dionysus, leads to the political.

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Thinking of the city as a mixture of incommensurable scales rather than as an integrated or disintegrated body reveals the arbitrariness of prefixes such as mega-­, micro-­, or sub-­, which manufacture a biopolitical, anthropocentric norm as their baseline. It also rewrites the antagonism among the universal and the particular that undergirds the projection globally of analytic categories originating in Western imperialism. Walter Benjamin’s Paris was not only that of Haussmann but also that of colonial administration. Ananya Roy’s salutary proposal, therefore, to remap regionalism in order to foreground the “worlding” and “extraterritoriality” of any given city refocuses the field of vision. Still, she stops short of asking, At what scale, exactly, does a particular geographic or geocultural zone qualify as such?68 Roy’s “worlding” has distinct Lefebvrian echoes, via Heidegger, that beg aesthetic analysis. What is this world but a map, a mirror, a thread? Likewise for Neil Brenner’s important work on the “rescaling” of national and extranational space, which culminates in a “planetary urbanization” ungraspable through reference to the city-­unit.69 For, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us, planetarity is not just enlargement, and the urban is not a telos.70 In asymmetry with the rural, which repeats the planet differently and with a violence of its own, the urban redraws the planet such that urbanization is all that we can see. From this springs a contemporary version of Simmel’s dilemma: Does urbanization separate or connect? Do allegedly integrated wholes, hegemonic stand-­ins for the universal, break apart into irreducible particulars, or is a new totality under construction? Yes, or no? Questions like these invite responses that rewrite their assumptions. When, for example, the anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff advocate for a “theory from the south,” they aim to reverse developmentalist narratives and relocate sub-­Saharan Africa as a harbinger, a paradigm toward which neoliberal Euro-­American capitalism is heading.71 But that no one city, territory, or region can be made to stand for all the rest—­and yet in some sense must—­is made clear in a related debate over the specificity of Johannesburg (and, we should

Introduction // 24

add, of “Johannesburg”) when analyzed from a modified Simmelian perspective. Michael Watts objects that Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttal, and their collaborators mistake the open, flexible “self-­exploitation” of life in Africa’s urban slums for a Baudelairean “self-­conscious styling of the self ” (as in AbdouMalique Simone’s notion of “people as infrastructure”).72 Objecting to this objection, which, they argue, tendentiously pathologizes African cities, Nuttal and Mbembe reply that “the manufacturing of swelling and floating populations of disposable people, marginal to economic production or warehoused in centers of penal confinement—­when they are not purely and simply subjected to capital punishment—­is an integral dimension of the US city.”73 Watts is not wrong, and the comparison that Nuttal and Mbembe make in rejoinder may not be exact, but their point holds, and my effort here is largely complementary to it: to generalize without universalizing, by making strange a number of discursively well-­trodden maps with hints of a thought “from below,” which can mean the American as well as the global South, historically speaking. But we can also ask, Does not a “theory from the south” also imply a theory from the point of view of the rural? or at least, from the subjectivities of all of those who greet urbanization with both fear and hope, both “yes” and “no,” including that half of the world’s population that does not live in cities at all? What epic twist among modernity’s seemingly endless contortions would make sense of a “right to the village,” without nostalgia or paternalism, together with a “right to the city,” running along the rural–­urban interface and in full view of the dialectic of dialectics we have been describing?74 Generalizing from particulars by linking scales is not the same as thinking the universal, which is, strictly speaking, unthinkable. Every scale harbors its negation; out of the resulting tension, and not only through instrumental continuities, biopolitical networks are built. The financialized globe is just as materially circumscribed as is a village toilet. Moreover, the two are intimately connected; neoliberal biopower differentiates them by putting them in relation, and their hardware structures that power, as in a feedback loop. Let us call this feedback mediapo-

Introduction // 25

litical, in the expanded sense of media-­as-­infrastructure, linked up and deployed across both space and time. For every piece of hardware has a history, and every infrastructural system is populated by real virtualities, sociotechnically produced specters that occupy the throne vacated by the imperious, self-­possessed subject.

INFRASTRUCTURAL REPETITION Infrastructure is what repeats. Orchestrating ritual functions, it tends to come into view only when the repetitions cease. When a city dweller turns on the faucet and water does not flow, an entire plumbing system, if not an entire regional watershed, leaps into the cognitive field. Somatically, as a threshold or a set of valves within this matrix, the urban bathroom supports infrastructural repetitions that link the biological body to the social body, from the intimacies of the toothbrush that connect bacteria to beauty, to the empires of waste set in motion, often under the cover of acoustic privacy, with every flush of the toilet. From epochal, anthropogenic droughts that limit its flows, to the sacred individuality of bourgeois hygiene, from matter-­ of-­fact signage and legally specified layouts that precipitously sort male and female, to the stare of unforgiving mirrors, the bathroom seems to say, an entire society begins here. It is not surprising, then, that the insertion of toilets into urban slums is a frequent preoccupation of governments and nongovernmental organizations unable to cope with the larger patterns of unsettlement to which those slums correspond; so, too, for rural villages, where the toilet’s most important fixture is probably the door hinge.75 Through their hardware, infrastructural interfaces orchestrate all-­too-­human social relations that encode masculine and feminine, waste and consumption, health and hygiene, all of which belong ultimately to the polis, a topological rather than strictly spatial body organized around inside–­outside nestings. As industrial commodities par excellence, hinges, fixtures, handles, and other hardware also constitute a functional and symbolic point of contact with systems of production, circulation, and waste, including those that divide

Introduction // 26

the Heraclitean water supply into measurable units, to be billed accordingly. Understood as the click of a water meter rather than as virtualized number, abstraction, which has defined the modern metropolis and its postmodern descendants, shifts in stature from a sort of primary, existential violation to a strategic move in a power struggle. The associated political question expands from a “right to the city” as a public or private territory, or even a “right to have rights” as a sovereign subject, to the means by which government, civil society, and capital form assemblages with the power to demarcate inside from outside, abstract from concrete, ours from theirs, or you from them, and the specific techniques by which these distinctions and their structural asymmetries are achieved and maintained.76 Sociotechnical production becomes the production of relationships rather than of spaces or things; conversely, spaces and things become sociotechnical relationships. The city space dissolves into a matrix of connection and disconnection, encryption and access, here and there, this and that, all of which are given in relative, scalar terms. There is no city as such, no absolute distinction between urban and rural, no definitive threshold.77 There are only multiscalar horizons. Global and local vectors crisscross; house, city, village, and planet come into view only as temporary constellations, concentrations of force within which human life and human labor become intelligible. Histories, including natural histories, intersect, merge, and split. When social relations and technical relations are indistinguishable, the human is not erased but rather redrawn. Like the hands and face of a clock, manual labor, face-­to-­face encounter, and cyclical time appear as technical maneuvers, bits of artifice, rather than as a ground rendered abstract by capital and its instruments. Within this matrix, the everyday conflicts and struggles that define cities acquire a thick material substrate. Extending the traditional media of media philosophy—­gramophone, film, typewriter, and the like—­Bernhard Siegert has shown how to understand an ordinary door as an ordering device.78 In New York in 2013, it was reported that a luxury residential building

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on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, built with tax subsidies that required 20 percent of the units to provide below-­market “affordable” housing, had two entrance doors: one for residents paying market price for their apartments, and another for residents of the “affordable” units. This structurally unequal doubling of doors—­a prominently marked front door and what became known as a “poor door” inconspicuously tucked around the corner—­repeated techniques that had been applied to both rural and urban populations in an American South governed by the Jim Crow laws: one door for whites and the other for blacks.79 The repetition troubled a polity trained by its urbanity to think that such practices were a thing of the past, and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio intervened to rescind the zoning legislation that had permitted the doors in question.80 Mediapolitically, however, the “poor door” was only one of countless iterations of the urban, which doubles things up unevenly in order to split them apart along lines of power-­ knowledge, in response to an urgent need to govern and exploit “floating populations”: two doors, each dividing a different inside from a different outside, a different oikos (household) from a different polis (city), differently. Rather than revealing two sides of the same city, or what de Blasio’s political campaign called a “tale of two cities,” these are two categorically different doors opening onto two superimposed but categorically different cities, where the difference that makes a difference is their nonexchangeability and their nonconvertibility. As devices for making the urban known to itself, and thus governable, these doors and other aesthetico-­material operators like them produce a white city and a black city, a rich city and a poor city, a male city and a female city, an Arab city and a European city, and, at another, ultimately planetary scale, an urban city and a rural city. Though such cities are by no means mutually exclusive, inherently antagonistic, or inevitable, they are not derivable from one another. They are derivable only from the doors. Correspondingly, they are not opposed to one another so much as they repeat one another, not as negative to positive but as door to door. By definition, their doublings are themselves

Introduction // 28

doubled up into iterations of dominant and subordinate, expropriator and expropriated, capital and labor, asymmetrically, side by side, without synthesis or reconciliation. Like so many face-­to-­face mirrors and labyrinthine threads, such doubled-­ up doors—­and their double binds—­govern mediapolitically, by drawing lines that say “yes” and “no” at once. The essays in this book seek to elucidate such binds, hinges, mirrors, knots, and threads. If this introduction has not provided a usable map, a reader’s guide to the territory they cover, that is because the essays themselves are maps intended to guide us through the workings of the urban apparatus described here. The domains they explore overlap with some but not all of its parts. Although they can be read in any order, reading them in sequence most explicitly returns us to the problems with which we began. Most of the essays elaborate or exemplify the claims I have been making, but not all speak the language we have been speaking here. Distractions appear that may seem to lead away from rather than toward the urban or even the city as an object of analysis. None are windows or frames through which to gaze onto some preexisting city, or doors through which to gain access to it. Instead, as maps, grids, or diagrams, all try, in one way or another, to show different ways in which the urban apparatus works, such that windows, doors, bridges, passages, and other infrastructures combine to produce a thing called a city, and with it a polis, or a body politic, as a piece of hardware with which to think, and act.

1 CITY, COUNTRY, WORLD

In some domains, like economics or urban sociology, the preem-

inence of number and the reign of a numerical imaginary occasionally underwrite a comfortable self-­evidence, the decoding of which has largely become the province of the humanities. Add to this the question of sovereignty—­of individual subjects, nations, classes, and other units or groupings—­and the stakes rise. The city, as territory, as infrastructure, or as image, is no less determined by the foundational indeterminacies of counting than it is reliably fixed in space and in time as a knowable entity. The problem of scale, which is only potentially numerical, allows us to grasp this. Thinking about cities, about their physical fabric, their histories, their monuments, the forms of life they do and do not support, and the meanings they do and do not convey, is native, so to speak, to architectural studies, which is where I will begin but not where I will end. As an architectural matter, putting cities and numbers together helps get at the elusiveness of scale, as well as at the bearing that scale and scalability have on the political and economic imagination. I say “scale” and not “size,” because, whereas size is easily made to seem absolute, and independent of historical experience, scale  // 29

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is an inherently relative concept that bears all the burdens of time, place, and epistemological specificity. Think, for example, of the dictum commonly associated with the fifteenth-­century Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti: “[T]he city is like some large house, and the house is in turn like some small city.”1 Returned to its context in the first book of Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria (On the Art of Building in Ten Books, 1452), in which the author describes the lineaments, or the design elements, of a well-­conceived house, this statement is less tautological than it initially sounds. Attributing the insight to unnamed philosophers, Alberti compares the rooms of a house to “miniature buildings” making up an idealized city, or what he elsewhere calls a “single, integral, and well-­composed body.”2 We commonly recognize this as the geometrical body of Renaissance humanism, abstracted and proportionately scaled up as an instrument of quasi-­secular authority. From Alberti to Le Corbusier, the well-­delineated house reflects that body’s scalar range. But what secures the house’s integrity in this famous passage is its comparability to a city, whereas what secures the city’s integrity is its comparability to a house. In Alberti’s day, as for centuries before, the European city’s actual security and hence its integrity were typically guaranteed by the walls and other barriers, such as moats, that surrounded it. His “city” was still a city-­state, like the Florence of the Medicis or the Rome of Nicholas V, to whom Alberti presented his treatise. In this respect, enclosure, rather than measure, proportion, or scalar coordination, is the first prerequisite for the political, economic, and psychic security promised by the city–­house analogy. Rather than necessarily reproducing some anthropocentric ideal, however, the analogy merely recognizes the prerequisite of tangible spatial boundaries as a condition for sovereignty. But you would already have suspected the simplest of pseudohistorical narrative traps, in which standard-­issue humanist types sally forth onto modernity’s stage as straw figures of the sovereign subject and its institutions, only to be undercut by their own discursivity, if not replaced entirely by new and

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more robust figures, such as the capitalist body-­without-­organs. In fact, my purpose in summoning the Albertian city-­as-­house is the contrary: to invoke, in a kind of historical shorthand, the durability of a type of sovereignty, associated with enclosure, that is conserved rather than dismantled with what the political theorist Wendy Brown, echoing many others, has called the “waning” of the nation-­state.3 For Brown, walls that enclose or divide nations, such as the six-­hundred-­mile-­long fence erected at the U.S.–Mexico border, or the wall that divides Israel from Palestine, are paradoxical emblems of what she calls “sovereign failure.” Rather than confirm or consolidate the national space, they enact or perform an exaggerated sovereignty even as the integrity of the nation-­state is undermined by economic globalization and neoimperialism, as well as by networks of nonstate actors of all kinds. From this follows a tense dialectic of economy and security, or destabilizing flows and overcompensating enclosures: deterritorialization and reterritorialization without end. I think Brown is right about this; but I also think that her central paradox is overly dependent on the centuries-­old association of sovereignty with enclosure with which I began. Scaled up from house to city to nation and back down again, this concatenation of spaces provides the infrastructure for jarring encounters between the phantasms of “homeland security” and “free trade” familiar to every airline passenger whose less-­than-­ideal body, positioned with legs spread and arms raised like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, has been penetrated by the electromagnetic radiation of a millimeter-­wave scanner; or, much more urgently, to those migrant workers, subjects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, who are regularly hunted down by vigilantes in the desert borderlands of the American Southwest. Even so, rather than merely residing comfortably in a single skin, each of these individuals, grouped and divided along multiple axes, is an unstable number, a unit in a pulsating calculus for which enclosed spaces are the equivalent of numerical sets, and identities are variables in a parametric equation.

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The same goes for cities. Any city can be described numerically, but the world picture that emerges is quite different from the relational, visibly bounded Albertian city-­as-­house. A seemingly absolute numerical scale, rather than nested, relational scales of enclosure, guides the terminology we typically use to name different types of conurbation: township, city, megacity, and so on. Consequently, problems arise when the city begins to appear boundless, and it becomes more difficult to attribute to it a reliable scale relative to the individual human body, the primary unit by which cities have heretofore been measured. When that unit is multiplied and split into variables and codes, there arises a fierce conflict between the absolute and the relative, or the universal and the particular, which is the proper domain of urban studies. This conflict affects even the nonchalant listing of quantitative information in technical manuals. It shows up, for example, in such unlikely places as the influential UN-­HABITAT State of the World’s Cities reports, begun in 2001 and issued roughly every two years since. These reports document the rise of the world’s megacities and associated conurbations, with an emphasis on the vulnerability of impoverished urbanites and strategies for addressing that vulnerability. The reports are therefore both descriptive and normative in character. They are also the source for the oft-­repeated claim that “half of humanity [or half the world’s population] now lives in cities.” This claim was first made in the introduction to the fourth report (2008–­2009), by Anna K. Tibaijuka, the UN under-­secretary-­general and executive director of UN-­HABITAT. In his foreword to the same document, Secretary-­General Ban Ki-­moon echoed Tibaijuka’s assertion, thereby lending to it the full authority of a world body entrusted with imparting meaning to such statements. The previous report in the UN series, from 2006–­ 2007, set the stage by pointing out rather melodramatically that “sometimes it takes just one human being to tip the scales and change history. At some point in the year 2007, that human being would either move to a city or be born in one,” marking the moment when, for the first time, a majority of humans lived in cities.4

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The same report (2006–­2007) rather more quietly pointed out that what is meant here by “city” is highly counterintuitive. With a strong whiff of redundancy, that report’s opening paragraph observes that “cities, whether small municipalities of 2,000 inhabitants or massive agglomerations of 10 million people or more, are becoming a widespread phenomenon,” thereby collapsing vastly different spaces and forms of life into a single, ambiguous category—­“city”—­with indeterminate boundaries.5 Matters become even more muddled when a methodological note acknowledges that, although the UN has its own criteria for defining an “urban agglomeration,” a “metropolitan area,” or a “city proper,” global demographic generalizations are ultimately dependent on classifications that vary nationally. In other words, the technical definition of a city, according to the United Nations, is a governmental function that varies significantly from state to state. For example, as of 2003, 105 countries based their definition on what are called “administrative criteria,” such as spatial boundaries; 100 countries “define[d] cities by population size or population density,” with some minimums as low as two hundred inhabitants; 25 countries emphasized “economic characteristics” in their definitions (such as, for example, “the proportion of the labour force employed in non-­agricultural activities”); 18 countries used criteria that include the “availability of urban infrastructure”; 25 countries “offer[ed] no definition at all”; and 6 countries “count[ed] their entire population as urban.”6 I am not concerned with the accuracy or inaccuracy of the resulting statistics; I am concerned with the world picture thus conjured. To be precise, it is possible that in 2007 someone moved to or was born in a small town—­or even a village—­somewhere in the world, thus tipping the scales of the dominant historical narrative in the direction of an underspecified and overdetermined “urbanization,” wherein half the world’s population was now deemed by a variety of inconsistent, national criteria to be living in “cities.” There are, of course, many practical reasons for the demographic artifice—­not the least of which is the assessment, again clearly stated, that because of their density and

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connectivity, classically urban areas offer the best opportunities for meeting some of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Exaggerating the shape of urbanization potentially increases the chances of success by attracting attention and resources. As Tibaijuka says in the 2007 report, the improvements in water and sanitation accessible to megacity slum dwellers, for example, can have a “knock-­on” efficiency in terms of health, nutrition, and environment that is less easily attainable in more sparsely populated areas.7 So, to some extent, the UN reports dramatize the pseudohistorical event of a majority urban population partly to highlight long-­standing trends that have become desperately exacerbated, and partly to indicate that cities, as ever, offer more bang for the buck. Buried in all the equivocation, however, is what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling” in which, as he cogently predicted, the long-­standing urban–­rural antagonism and interdependency have entered a new phase. Although he later elaborated the expression more fully, in The Country and the City (1973) Williams uses “structure of feeling” to describe, among other things, the imaginary association of the rural idyll and other “illusory ideas of the rural past” with childhood.8 Within such a frame, urbanization is equivalent to a coming-­of-­age; it is therefore not difficult to read in the technocratic language of the United Nations reports an infantilization of the dispossessed that Williams associated with capitalist expansion, including imperialism. These two UN reports, like the two that preceded them and the two that followed, exhibit an undeniable formalism in their arguments that reinforces such a structure. This formalism is characterized by symmetries of various sorts, beginning with the urban–­rural polarity itself. In the predominantly numerical language of the reports, it is as if a primordial asymmetry has been overcome. Having reached the statistical halfway point, by whatever dubious means, the “city” now equals, if not surpasses, the “country” as the natural ground for human life. This is not to say that naturalized metropolitan narratives necessarily take the place of the rural idyll—­or what Western

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architectural theory has long called the “primitive hut”—­in hegemonic discourse. On the contrary, these UN reports and many other documents like them emphasize the precariousness of life in urban slums. In doing so, however, they transpose the older, aestheticized pathos of rural European poverty onto this new figure of the “urban,” which is to be carefully distinguished from its early twentieth-­ century predecessors, such as the Großstadt, or metropolis. For though the “structure of feeling” associated with these earlier figures entailed a certain precariousness of its own, this precariousness was consistently moored to bourgeois futurity. In the modern metropolis, the removal of certainties, along with psychic and economic insecurity, was oriented toward an open future in which contradictions would progressively resolve, material conditions would rebalance, and the deracinated subject would find a home in the world. As the history of twentieth-­century architecture and urbanism in Europe, North America, East Asia, and the colonial and postcolonial South abundantly demonstrates, classical modernist topoi such as abstraction, estrangement, and the uncanny (unheimlichkeit, or “unhomeliness”) were never ends in themselves but stopping points, or “waystations” (as the Soviet artist-­architect El Lissitzky used to say), en route to a new organic synthesis. Hence the confidence with which even a thinker as alert as Friedrich Engels could associate rural-­to-­urban migration with revolutionary transformation in his treatment of the European housing question. No longer captivated by the master narrative of technosocial integration, the formalism embedded in the statement “Half of humanity now lives in cities” tends to neutralize such futurity while reproducing internally its teleological premises. We are meant to gasp in sublime horror at the assertion, without pausing to ask about the other half or to wonder at the arbitrary significance of the supposed tipping point. Given the ambiguities involved in actually defining a city, and given the imagined association of the rural with infantilized, precapitalist life, the statement could also be read as indicating, with due alarm, that even today, only half of humanity fully participates

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in capitalist Bildung, or personal growth, a process that culminates in urbanization. The contrary, of course, is one of Williams’s main points. The rural, including the imagined rural idyll as the childhood home of humanity, was an integral part of industrial capitalism from the start. In each of its phases, Williams argues, European (in his case, principally British) capitalism reorganized, expropriated, and idealized the agrarian countryside and, later, the colonial and postcolonial “hinterlands” as sites of resource extraction, sources of labor, and objects of aesthetic contemplation. As I have said, many of the reports in the UN series, which began with a study of the urban consequences of accelerated globalization, emphasize the outpacing of rural poverty by its urban equivalent, which is most visible in slums and other types of squatter settlements. In these settlements, it is as if the destitution of a rural landscape, deprived by industrial expansion of its historical means of subsistence, has been reproduced in ramshackle shantytowns that sit cheek by jowl with luxury residential high-­rises, corporate offices, and public spaces otherwise populated by the working and middle classes. Without saying so, the UN reports thus tend to describe the ensuing crisis in terms that reproduce the earlier urban–­ rural partition. Global, regional, national, and municipal data are gathered and displayed in such a way as to blend the village, farm, or small town and their landscapes into an archaic background against which the historical drama of urbanization plays out. Urban destitution shows up as a remainder, a burden of the hinterlands now moved into the city. And yet we know perfectly well, and Williams persistently points out, that during the modern period, restructurings of the relations of production are always both agrarian and mercantile/industrial in character. Such restructurings are also the matrix from which an aesthetics of “modern life” developed in European and North American cities during the late nineteenth century. Despite their frequent revolutionary tone, the aesthetic programs of the modernist avant-­gardes tended to reproduce the categorical

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separation of the rural and the urban and its accompanying hierarchies. Exemplary here are the vivid portraits of nineteenth-­ century Paris that the urban economist David Harvey elicits from the novels of Balzac, and that the art historian T. J. Clark elicits from the paintings of Manet. Both mention the city’s outskirts, or what Clark calls its industrializing “environs.” Although Clark dwells on the city’s indeterminate, petit bourgeois edges, neither goes so far as to analyze the coproduction of an aesthetics of fleeting instabilities with that of rural stasis, a coproduction revealed by the countryside around London mapped by Williams through the literature and poetry of the same period.9 For both Harvey and Clark, by and large, city is to country as figure is to ground, active is to passive, and future is to past; for Williams, the two are locked in a struggle of mutual construction in which the hegemony exercised by modern metropolitan life and industrial capitalism is fundamentally dependent on the active reorganization of the rural, both in the imagination and on the ground. In these kinds of situations, as in the UN reports, aesthetics has a way of imperceptibly trading places with economics. The numbers in which the reports are grounded, including their visualization in graphs, charts, and tables, speak with awe and terror of dynamic, uncontrolled urban growth around which boundaries can no longer be drawn. Brought to life by these sober statistics, the city roils and pulsates like a churning vortex that draws everything irresistibly toward itself. Inside the vortex, the ruins of the Parisian barricades seem to reappear, as the dispossessed struggle for what several of the reports call, with shades of Harvey and of Henri Lefebvre, their “right to the city.” But in the language of the United Nations, this “right” stops short of social and economic equity, or even full access to the resources generated and consumed by the great urban engine. Instead, it merely requests recognition and treatment as proper representatives of the urban “poor” who now occupy the place in the metropolitan imagination formerly held by impoverished farmers. This is a right, for example, to move about—­but not to live in—­the same streets, parks, and “public” amenities

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as the wealthy, but not necessarily to sit in the same classrooms, be cared for in the same hospitals, or sleep in the same buildings. The accompanying reduction of the “city”—­however that category is defined by governmental discourse—­to a shared amenity, or to a sort of generalized streetscape shared by day but not by night, resurfaces in another, surprising form in the 2012–­2013 UN report. That report, which seeks to measure the impact of the Arab uprisings, the Occupy movement, and other revolts against the dominant order, reintroduces the figure of the urban “commons.” Not exactly the commons as reimagined by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the commons invoked by the 2012–­2013 report is roughly equivalent to the natural, social, and informational “environment,” the air flowing through city streets, the water in its pipes, the grass in its parks, and the bits in its networks. Buried more deeply in such references are historical objects and events, principally in this case the common manorial lands cultivated by English farmers according to a complex system of shared husbandry right up to the early nineteenth century. In a parliamentary process that began in the late sixteenth century, these lands were gradually subject to “enclosure,” or expropriation by landowning elites. It is possible, then, that the unenclosed agrarian commons offers an exemplary, potentially repeatable instance of mutuality, communal production, and self-­management—­a type of open, rural alternative to the walled city-­state. However, while acknowledging its many virtues, Williams, in another anticipatory gesture, observes the retrospective tendency to isolate the unenclosed lands from the class structures and other socioeconomic relations in which they were historically embedded. Referring to the example of open-­field villages, Williams avers that “we must be careful not to confuse the techniques of production—­the open-­field strips—­with what can easily be projected from it, an ‘open’ and relatively equal society.”10 Citing a detailed historical account of one such village, he concludes that its social structure was, in miniature, “not, at first sight, so dissimilar from the social struc-

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ture of mature rural capitalism as to suggest a radically different social order,” composed as it was of a local gentry, small entrepreneurs, and the propertyless poor. The rights to common resources of the laborers and tradespeople making up such a population were various and sometimes marginal. Yet they did guarantee a degree of independence and, as Williams puts it, “an important protection against the exposure of total hire.”11 Mutuality was therefore both conditional and genuine, but it was not enclosure alone that sealed its fate. Rather, a whole system of production and ownership, accompanied by the new symbolic order of the country houses and estates, was in formation. The parliamentary enclosure of common lands was, as Williams says, a contributing factor, but it was not the whole story of the conversion of rural life-­in-­common into what he calls a “community of the oppressed,” and the invention, in effect, of a correspondingly new and separate class: “the poor.”12 Through the course of the twentieth century, this historically determined figure, the rural “poor,” has reappeared in different guises as a harbinger of crisis in the heart of the great European and North American metropolises and, more recently, in postcolonial megacities. As is well documented in the UN reports, widespread, desperate poverty, starkly contrasting with ostentatious, predatory wealth, has been a predominant feature of many contemporary cities. But numbers are also bearers of affect and organizers of the perceptual and cognitive field, by means of reproducible “structures of feeling” such as that which positions the material indices of urban poverty in relation to the repressed history of the rural. How does this work? Although their units of enumeration are ultimately individual human bodies, rounded off to the nearest million or half million, the epistemic unit of the UN reports is actually the nation-­state. When the time comes to issue recommendations in response to the thoroughly documented crises, each of the reports seeks to balance the leverage available to national governments with the contextual nuance available to local or municipal authorities. The same goes for the data themselves. It is, after all, the disparate demographic

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policies and practices of individual national bureaucracies that paint the ambiguous picture of half of humanity living in cities in the first place. This default to national sovereignty runs counter to recent trends in which transnational networks of major and minor cities tend to form their own coherent, semisovereign “spaces” of economic and cultural exchange. Like the high-­speed rail lines that often subtend them, these networks stretch across the intervening countryside without really entering it.13 Even when limited to a single nation, linked cities do not necessarily inhabit the same governmental space as their surroundings, saturated as they are by development and tax incentives, as well as by infrastructure and services. Although they largely ignore these external linkages, the UN reports do follow many urban scholars in describing cities “divided” or fragmented internally along economic as well as ethnic lines.14 Although these divisions sometimes coincide with actual and virtual walls breaking up an otherwise continuous urban field into segregated zones or pockets, in reality they are divisions among different, competing sovereignties that may or may not occupy the same space—­an example of which are the “poor” themselves, subjects of urban crisis dispossessed not necessarily of an idyllic, rural world they might otherwise have held in common but of their status as historical actors. Described in the language of statistics, these latter-­day “wretched of the earth” are no longer subjects of a city divided along classically colonial lines (as they were for Frantz Fanon) to whom national emancipation remains an available option. Instead, they are simply the universal “poor,” persons-­without-­qualities whose enforced—­although certainly not actual—­silence and anonymity are offset, pragmatically, by the tireless efforts of bureaucrats and academics alike to insist on the situatedness of destitution by breaking down the numbers nationally and subnationally, often, as in the UN reports, with the help of colorful narrative vignettes highlighting cultural difference. The one narrative element that is systematically absent from these reports and from the discourse that organizes them

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is a structural analysis and critique of transnational capitalism itself. In its place are tautological observations regarding the “irony” that a strong central government, whether democratic or authoritarian, offers the best route to what are frequently referred to as “pro-­poor” urban reforms. Doubling that irony, in the report published immediately before the Arab uprisings of 2011, the governments of Egypt and Tunisia were among the highest ranked in terms of such initiatives.15 As witnessed in the political struggles that followed the revolutions in those two countries, what Brown calls the “waning” (but not disappearance) of post-­Westphalian state-­based sovereignty also entails, in her account, both the desublimation of religious feeling previously contained in the secular state, and the ontotheological emergence of capital as a new, “global sovereign.”16 A key feature of this twin process, which reads in Brown’s argument as both cause and effect, is the displacement of Hobbesian “awe,” which partially underwrote the state’s authority, onto walled monuments to weakened borders. Brown characterizes the theatrical quality of these otherwise redundant or futile walls as performatively theological, in the sense that the walls enact, often in an exaggerated manner, the very futility and obsolescence of the enclosure that they also monumentalize. There is another, related way to think about the decline of the state’s constitutive aura. As Brown reminds us, this decline does not lead to secularization, whether at the hands of capital or at the hands of a transnational polity. Rather, it leads in part to what she calls a “theological political sovereignty” authorized by explicit religious belief or by theologies of the market rather than by the awe elicited by a godlike but secular Leviathan. Political decisions, including those concerning life and death, cannot therefore be thought of as autonomous or prior to economic or religious matters. However, in light of our discussion of enumeration, rather than retain, as Brown does, the Schmittian formulation of the sovereign as “he who decides” in a godlike manner on the friend–­enemy relation, it is possible to rephrase the sovereign as “the one who counts.” And I mean this in both

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senses, that of the one doing the counting and that of the one who is counted. In the earlier forms of what Michel Foucault called governmentality, which culminated, for example, in Adolphe Quetelet’s refinement of statistics as a social science, the arts of governing and the arts of counting occupied one and the same space, which was that of the nation-­state. Something similar can be said in microcosm (in other words, at an internally related scale) about the great, wall-­less metropolises that emerged in Europe and the United States during the same period. New, statistically oriented disciplines such as sociology and urban planning were closely tied to the territorial integrity of the city as a locus of social reform, and to the state in which that city was located. Whether this reform was initiated by the state or by private actors is less important than the fact that the state or the municipality was the primary medium through which biopolitical data were produced and gathered, as shown, for example, by the technical, social, and political significance of the national census. As we have seen, when the city overspills its boundaries, the state does not cede all its enumerative functions to extranational or transnational entities. On the contrary, these entities, including the United Nations as well as such organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, assimilate often incommensurable state-­specific data into master narratives, such as that of global urbanization, that do not merely represent a proportional scaling up of sovereign, bounded space from house to city to country to world. Instead, such narratives, like the one that reads “More than half of humanity now lives in cities,” and the apparatus that generates them reproduce a form of awe specific to the sovereign, and only the sovereign, who counts. The best approximation of this awe remains what Immanuel Kant called the “mathematical sublime.” As Kant puts it, “We call sublime what is absolutely large”—­that is, “something large beyond comparison” or, in the terms we have been using, something with size or magnitude but no scale.17 Mathematically, Kant describes this magnitude in cryptotheological terms as “equal only to itself,” present not in nature but in ideas (or

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“the imagination”) alone. In short, Kant’s mathematical sublime arises only as an unsubstantiated but nonarbitrary judgment for which, as he says, “that is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small.”18 This is the performative aspect of the “more than half ” in the statement “More than half of humanity now lives in cities.” The city, unbound from its walls and from its dialectic with the countryside, even as it reproduces these inside and out, is no longer a finite, sensible object the scale of which is determined by comparison to a house, and vice versa. Having crossed the anthropocentric threshold, the city has lost its unit of measure and has become an object of what Kant calls the “supersensible,” a state of mind grasping toward the absolute. As such, it can be measured but not contained, its inhabitants counted but without certainty. This state of mind, this counting without end, constitutes the new sovereignty. Like the urban, which has not erased or superseded its old antagonism with the rural but rather has internalized it in the form of an unaccountable “poor,” this new sovereign does not rule over enclosures; it operates in the open, in the indeterminate zone where houses and worlds meet. It secures and protects its subjects first by counting them not with transcendent fixity but as variables, infinitely divisible units with a potentially endless series of properties. It is not surprising, then, that the UN reports, which explicitly aim for social justice, do not contain a structural critique of the mutations in transnational capitalism to which many of the urban crises they list can be traced. This is not merely because capital is the new sovereign; it is because such a critique would be a critique of mathematics itself—­not of its truth value but of its capacity to convey the theological content that all sovereignties require. Such a critique cannot be limited to the sciences or the social sciences. It can be undertaken only within the domain of aesthetics.

2 FINANCIAL IMAGINARIES

The aesthetic life of cities entails a volatile mixture. For more

than a century, the social relations of the metropolis have been linked analytically to financial circulation, a connection that is clearly audible in the phrase “global city.” This applies both in the narrow, deterministic sense of center–­periphery relations that measure techno-­economic development, as well as in the broader, more inclusive sense that would assign to social, cultural, and aesthetic processes a semistructural role in shaping the pulsations and interchanges of economic life. In either sense, the city stands as a receptacle, a sort of archaeological site for holding these dynamics in place long enough and firmly enough to study them in all their complexity. This scenario was inherited in part from the great thinkers of modern metropolitan experience—­from Georg Simmel to Max Weber to Walter Benjamin, with Marx and Engels just over the horizon. Their cities, Berlin and Paris (with London, Moscow, and New York hovering outside the frame), gave the term metropolis its phenomenological texture. For his part, Benjamin, reading Charles Baudelaire, was able to imagine the Parisian arcades as paradigmatic of the circulation of both commodities and dream images through the interstices of “modern life,”  // 44

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primarily through the literary device of allegory. This insight would eventually be inverted and transformed in that same city into the Situationist dérive, with the help of which a later cohort of urban thinkers, from Henri Lefebvre to Michel de Certeau, would draw its line in the sand: sous les pavés, la plage. But this tradition, which extracted general principles from what late twentieth-­century urbanists called the “historical center” of European cities (for which the barricades of May 1968 now appear as an ironic emblem), has become a quaint, if not entirely irrelevant, vantage point from which to approach the “world around” dynamics of today, to borrow a phrase from the idiosyncratic lexicon of R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller can stand here as a late representative of the counterproposition, incipient in modern architecture and urbanism and thoroughly manifest in midcentury modernization discourse and its policies and practices, that the metropolis was a node in a much larger, more dispersed network that could be apprehended only from above. Just as the inside-­out, bottom-­up view of the city and of modernity in general, from Benjamin to the Situationists, was enabled by technologies of perception that ranged from the reading glasses of the dandified, pedestrian flâneur, to the plate glass in which the arcades were enclosed, to the vividly painted panoramas that destroyed perspective and enfolded distant horizons, so, too, did the aerial, eventually planetary view have its technical media. These also had partial roots in the European nineteenth century, in aerial photography (as Benjamin intuited) and in imperial cartography, but they would be fully expressed only in the multiscreen, computerized war rooms of the Cold War, mirrored in the control rooms of the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Soviet Soyuz program, and eventually miniaturized in geographic information systems and Google Earth. Historically, our two vantage points—­from the street and from the control room—­developed simultaneously rather than in sequence. Though we might, therefore, be tempted to assign to each a valence—­negative for the dominating, leveling perspective from above; positive for the situated, everyday perspective

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from below—­and hence to oppose them as two terms in a dialectic of modernization, we would do better to recognize the inherent limitations of the analytical frame thereby described. This requires a theorization of media that exchanges the eschatology of a McLuhan—­or, for that matter, the millenarianism of a Baudrillard or a Virilio—­for a materialism descended from Foucauldian archaeology, but with an emphasis on infrastructural systems and artifacts in which ways of seeing and ways of knowing are coproduced. Such a perspective supersedes the endgame that opposes the street to the control room. Far from harboring a ludic freedom diametrically opposed to the panopticism of Haussmann’s boulevards, the street in all its iterations has become a privileged realm of microphysical surveillance, despite is persistent availability as a site of collective political resistance. Similarly, the control room (and the corporate–­state apparatus to which it is appended) is not merely an a priori arena of despotic power; it is, like the empty tower at the center of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a vacuum with theological antecedents that is subject to a demystification as thorough as that accomplished by Zarathustra and his mountain. About fifty years passed before interpreters of modern architecture—­such as the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri and his colleagues in Venice, most notably the philosopher Massimo Cacciari—­had internalized the Simmelian/Weberian analysis of the modern metropolis. By then, however, that very sociological tradition had been transformed, particularly in the North American academy, into the systems sociology associated with Talcott Parsons or, later in Germany, with Niklaus Luhmann. In an untimely exchange, Tafuri’s and Cacciari’s trenchant decodings of the metropolis by way of the modernist avant-­gardes were thus made possible by an earlier sociology of the city that was in the process of being absorbed into the same systems model from which the Italians recoiled in the architecture, city planning, and politics of their own time. Much was learned from these decodings accomplished in the 1970s, which concentrated on the fundamental negativity of metropolitan experience and, hence, on the helplessness

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of the revolutionary or reformist avant-­gardes facing the full force of capitalist development, which architecture was able to reproduce only mimetically. Nevertheless, their historical field of vision was restricted to regions bordering the northern Atlantic, and they did little to account for the pulsating, dynamic globe that echoes through the ambiguous term globalization. In the hands of someone like Fuller, who remains an anomaly for many historians but whose eccentricities are paradigmatic rather than exceptional, this globe was a system of systems to be designed and managed. In that sense, the geodesic dome and its underlying databases are to the “global” or “mega-­” city what the arcades, street signs, and curios were to the modern metropolis. This is true not only because Fuller’s dome optimized the mass-­ production techniques that Benjamin, reading the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, saw in the iron-­and-­glass enclosures of his Passagen; and not only because the geodesic dome, as an air-­conditioned space-­frame built (more often than not) for the military-­industrial complex, represented the purest, most Platonic instance of the airy claustrophobia sublimated into the glass-­enclosed corporate lobby; but also because Fuller’s dome was, first and foremost, an object of the architectural and urban imaginary projected at the scale of the planet and realized in the great cosmological tradition of Western dome building since the Renaissance, an object entirely rational and entirely magical at once. Understood as media, such objects reveal the dynamics of a world that otherwise appears exterior to them. In them, we confront what seems like a different set of problems, posed from a set of vantage points different from those that confronted early twentieth-­century metropolitan thought. Still, to learn from that thought is to learn to see the control room as though it were the street, and vice versa. Aesthetic analysis can accomplish this, but only if it updates the tool kits inherited from the European avant-­gardes and their philosophers, which were still linked (negatively, for the most part) to classical mimesis. In these tool kits was and remains the device, and the phenomenon, known as “abstraction.” Abstraction was modern architecture’s

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antimimetic answer to circulatory capital, wherein the supposed lifelessness of the commodity form was given an aesthetic language of its own. Its most fitting representative was not the German Werkbund or even the Bauhaus, but the Bauhaus Corporation (Bauhaus GmbH), which was set up in 1925 to enable the circulation of the lamps, household fittings, and furniture prototyped at the legendary design school. Alongside this in the urban realm stand the Siedlungen, or functionalist middle-­class housing estates built outside of Berlin and Frankfurt during that same period to train a multitude of Simmelian strangers in the protocols of mechanized domesticity. Underlying this narrative is the premise that capital, fully formed, shapes or provokes a reaction in the sphere of art, or in culture more generally. Intuitively attractive as this premise may be, it excludes or at least downplays the possibility, evoked in the margins by Simmel and others, that aesthetic life partially constitutes (rather than simply derives from) economic life. To elaborate this possibility, we need first to understand more specifically what we mean by abstraction. Further, we need to ask, How, if at all, does abstraction continue to operate aesthetically in today’s cities, and not only in those architectural artworks characterized by a degree of self-­consciousness unavailable in the urban scene more generally? Is this simply a question of progressive, sequential development whereby the synchronized, geometrical “mass ornament” that Siegfried Kracauer found in Weimar-­era spectacles and in the factories that supported them is now to be found in the repetitive hum of business in Shanghai, with the Siedlungen replaced, in the imagination and on the ground, by the hundreds of cities by which the urbanization of the Chinese countryside is now being accomplished? To be sure, insight can be gained from such a transposition. However, not only does its developmentalist narrative (from Berlin to Shanghai) leave too many symptomatic assumptions intact; it also fails to recognize the historicity of abstraction and, indeed, of capital itself, along with associated concepts such as reification and objectification, disenchantment and reenchantment, and alienation and estrangement.

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Alternatively, we could collect a set of worldwide cultural “equivalents” to circulatory, global capital and its many outgrowths and mutations, in a manner similar to what Fredric Jameson has done with his Benjaminian reading of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles.1 Still, though Jameson offers many clues, we would not yet have fully approached a central transformation in the history of modern (and modernist) abstraction: that is, that the relation between part and whole, building and city, culture and capitalism, which is figured unconsciously in the arcades and semiconsciously in the Siedlungen, has become an apparent nonrelation. It has, in other words, become abstract rather than merely contradictory or delinked. The aqueous dreamworlds of the modern European metropolis, in which the outlines of an entire epoch could be discerned, have not simply been frozen into the opaque mirror-­worlds of postmodernity, poignantly captured in the self-­referential corporate hotel; rather, as Jameson suggests but does not fully develop, they have been displaced onto a different plane. So, we cannot be content to compare the hotel lobbies of Pudong circa 2010 to the hotel lobbies of Berlin circa 1930. Instead, we must read urban artifacts not only as tangible, material evidence of the abstraction of modern life generated in the economic sphere, but also as abstraction itself. Take Mumbai. In many ways, this city epitomizes the workings of globalization’s “financial imaginaries,” which we can think of as a modification of what Simmel called the Geistesleben, or “mental life,” of the modern metropolis. Financial imaginaries are sociocultural constructions through which circulate other sociocultural constructions, including “money,” “credit,” and “trust.” All imaginaries belong to the realm of social practice, and my use of the term refers to its development in the work of a variety of thinkers, including Cornelius Castoriadis, Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, and Charles Taylor. Taylor, for one, has emphasized the practical dimensions of what he calls “modern social imaginaries” in making sense of social institutions in a way that enables these institutions to work. The “economy” is one such institution. More radically, Castoriadis speaks of “the

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imaginary institution of society” itself, as well as, reciprocally, the socially produced “instituting imaginaries” that, in effect, bring into being (generally oppressive) institutional forms out of an inchoate presocietal “magma.”2 But we must be clear about what we mean when we expand the notion of social imaginaries—­all of those everyday ways in which a society imagines itself as a society—­in the direction of cultural or aesthetic practices. Like social practices, cultural practices help to define what we mean when we speak, for example, of financialization. Financial capital courses through skyscrapers and slums alike; its presence or absence defines these physical forms but is also defined by them. As the raw material out of which what Appadurai has called “financescapes” are made, financial capital is much more, but also (by virtue of its abstraction) much less, than the sum total of the material goods and services in which it ostensibly trades; it is, strictly speaking, imaginary, though in a very real, material, and practical sense rather than in the sense of an ideological illusion. As a calculatedly abstract relation among signs, value, and material things, financial capital circulates differently in Mumbai, New York, São Paulo, Doha, and Mexico City, constructing relationships among cities while assimilating each city’s relative uniqueness and the different conflicts and communities that each city harbors. In this and other respects, architecture and urbanism form one element in a complex network of cultural practices that not only make financial globalization visible but also help bring it into being in the first place. This is because the imaginary construction and circulation of cultural meaning through material artifacts are a primary characteristic of political-­economic processes, rather than a secondary effect. In this give-­and-­take, site-­specific particulars constantly trade places with general, axiomatic properties in a process that can best be described philosophically. Here I again refer to Simmel, and in particular to Simmel’s canonical 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” which extrapolates out of the empirical qualities of early twentieth-­century European metropolitan life a set of general principles. These qualities include

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permanent restlessness, nervous energy, mechanical movement, and a heightened sense of abstraction associated with the money economy. For Simmel, these elicit an archetypal psychological reaction on the part of the metropolitan subject—­what he calls a “blasé attitude.” In an equally important essay of 1908, Simmel designated as the bearer of this attitude “the stranger,” a prototypical urban figure who “comes today and stays tomorrow” without ever really settling down or fitting in.3 The arguments in these essays are based on Simmel’s magnum opus of 1900, The Philosophy of Money. There, he argued that abstract monetary exchange associated with industrial capitalism found its social basis in a prevailing objectification of everyday urban experience that reflected what he called “the calculating character of modern times.”4 We need only recall the penetration of real estate development schemes into allegedly premodern crevices of urban space, such as slums or favelas, to recognize the continued relevance of this observation. But to understand its implications, we must look more closely at those ciphers in which appears the logic or syntax of finance, which we can provisionally describe as the syntax of credit; because, far more than in Simmel’s time, during the recent phase of accelerated growth, relationships among architecture and credit have structured our understanding of the contemporary city. In New York, as elsewhere, one result of this restructuring has been the elevation of the private real estate developer to near-­mythic status, as occurred in the wake of 9/11 with the intense media attention lavished on the World Trade Center’s developer-­owner, Larry Silverstein. And, as occurred with the subsequent architectural competition for the redesign of the World Trade Center site, this fetishizing of the developer has been accompanied by a comparable elevation of the architect to celebrity status, especially in the case of the “signature architects” who now populate the international scene. Generally, the relationship between these two phenomena is poorly understood: the rise of the developer and the rise of the signature architect go hand in glove, but not only in the sense of each securing access to capital or prestige for the other. Much more

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significant, the rise of these two icons has to do with a religiosity that architecture and money still share. This affinity is based on a common language of “faith,” which, as distinct from any historical religion, is addressed directly to economic abstractions and hence is as universal as the money form. To the extent that financial relations are ultimately relations of faith, in the sense of “faith” in higher forces such as the self-­regulating, autopoietic financial markets that seem to lie outside of human control but are nevertheless constructed as benevolent, this language acquires the force of law. In a city such as Mumbai, which has witnessed an intense privatization of its physical infrastructures as well as of its civic discourse, tacit declarations of faith also furnish a legal or juridical imaginary for urban policy. Privatization policies largely imagine cities in terms of naturalized cycles of growth, much like living organisms. This correlates with the supposed laws driving local, regional, and interregional economies toward unlimited (and, typically, underregulated) expansion. Thus, the competition among both developers and architects in different cities to build the tallest building in the world is not merely a question of egotism; it is the logical, symbolic fulfillment of the organicist myth of unlimited growth: the tallest tree in the unsustainable forests of expansionist capital. So far, then, we have the quasi-­religious faith in the markets, accompanied by an economic organicism—­the supposedly natural law of unregulated, competitive expansion. But the crux of Simmel’s philosophy of money lies in the interplay between abstraction and objectification. In his account, money is by turns a floating signifier and a concrete social (and technical) form. In that sense, we can adapt Marx’s language and call money a concrete abstraction. Disregarding Simmel’s tendency to resolve prematurely the contradictions that are laid bare by his own work, this notion is of particular relevance to his description of persons engaged in an exchange of credit. Simmel describes such persons as united in what he calls a “new, more abstract and comprehensive synthesis.”5 This synthesis is counterintuitively defined by increased distance as well as increased

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proximity. Rather than exchanging goods or even cash, people here exchange credit. As a result, they must trust one another more intimately than if they had exchanged more tangible things. Simmel explains: “In credit transactions the immediacy of value exchange is replaced by a distance whose poles are held together by trust in the same way as religiosity is more intense the greater the distance . . . between God and the individual soul in order to call forth the most considerable degree of belief so as to bridge the distance between them.”6 Thus, the more abstract markets are made to seem, the more they require emotions such as trust, belief, and quasi-­ religious faith to function. Moreover, just as the concrete abstractions of the money economy allowed Simmel a window onto the inner, psychic life of the modern metropolitan subject, so, too, do urban artifacts, analyzed in a particular way, offer a window onto the psychic life of the postmodern, postmetropolitan city dweller, a psychic life that has now moved largely outside, into the light of day. Although those who live in what Mike Davis has called the “planet of slums” might seem relatively indifferent to the mathematical abstractions on which this economy is built, they, too, are subject to these abstractions psychically, and not merely as depersonalized quanta.7 Take, as an example, the Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA) in Mumbai, which oversees the implementation of so-­called slum-­rehabilitation schemes (SRSs), such as the one proposed for Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums. Land is under intense pressure in Mumbai from real estate development; in response, governmental efforts like the SRA have sought to incentivize the private sector to “solve” a massive urban housing crisis by releasing valuable land for speculation. By law, the SRA treats every slum structure existing prior to January 1, 1995, as a protected structure, and every inhabitant of such a structure is eligible for what is called “rehabilitation.”8 In a typical SRS, the developer is effectively “hired” by the slum dwellers so that he may legally exploit them by treating their claim to housing as a form of property that can be exchanged, rather than as a political right to be administered by the state. In

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return for replacing every eligible slum structure with a bare-­ minimum tenement unit (a material improvement on the existing shanties, to be sure), the developer gets development rights on what normally amounts to 50 percent of the land occupied by the slum. Such deals are made, with much political gamesmanship and bullying, simply because Mumbai’s real estate market has made them quite profitable and is likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In addition to contriving to make it seem as though the market simply takes over from the state in providing for the basic needs of the population (which even developers admit is impossible for the city as a whole), this scheme does not so much resolve the underlying class conflict as abstract it into law. A vivid instance of this is found in a complex called the Imperial, a pair of luxury high-­rise residential towers designed by the architect Hafeez Contractor on a slum-­rehabilitation site in Mumbai’s Tardeo neighborhood. This is not a particularly accomplished work of architecture. For Contractor, architecture is a game that is played to win rather than a refined art form. In this case, the game involved making the SRA legislation work on the site by balancing the socioeconomic demands of the luxury real estate market against the political demands of slum dwellers. The result is a monumental fissure running through the site that divides the very wealthy in the towers above from the very poor in the tenements below. The architecture of the complex, which consists mainly of overwrought, neo–­Art Deco ornamentation above and functionalist regimentation below, is used simultaneously to produce and to cover up this fissure. More important, despite the domineering posture of the project’s twin towers, their architecture and that of the “rehabilitated” slum over which they hover stand starkly separated from one another not only because of their contrast of garish to humble but also because of the contrast between one architecture (that of the towers) that attempts to communicate and another architecture (that of the tenements) that does not. This could be conventionally described as a contrast of figurative to abstract. More accurate would be to describe the

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project’s stark, built-­in divide as a concrete abstraction of another sort, a higher level of abstraction comparable to the abstractions of credit. Credit is built around trust, belief, and a quasi-­religious faith—­in the case of this project and of the SRA legislation in general, the faith that the real estate market will resolve the city’s housing crisis or, failing that, that it will allay the sense of crisis by rendering its fault lines ineffable. Here, the movement from use value to exchange value is turned on its head. Exchange value, in the form of luxury real estate, is made to seem capable of yielding surplus use value, in the form of the utilitarian tenements. This inversion, which is the principle according to which many “public–­private” partnerships work, naturalizes the political-­economic proposition underlying the SRA legislation by repositioning the slum dwellers (and, by extension, the public at large) as beneficiaries from whom the markets and their representatives ask only trust and faith. Enabled by the state, the market thus takes over as the biopolitical agent par excellence, and the slum dwellers are caught in a double bind of paternalism and primitive accumulation. In terms of urban realpolitik, they are also pitted against one another and forced to engage in Faustian bargaining for additional square feet based on the leverage acquired by holding out. Thus, the SRS taken as a whole can be described as a fetish: a quasi-­religious object with seemingly magical powers that, like Fuller’s equally metaphysical domes, is the product of rational calculation rather than its opposite. But what does it mean to understand the ensuing relationship between architecture and capital not only as abstract but also as religious? This question moves the analytic frame well beyond patronage (the developer as client) or analogy (that, say, the virtuality of contemporary architecture mimics the virtuality of contemporary finance), though both of these are factors. Nor is it simply that architecture as an art form is now considered a profitable amenity, along the lines of a model that was arguably invented in the 1980s in Houston by the developer Gerald Hines in collaboration with Philip Johnson. Faith is not ideology here; it is a technique. More than just a useful object

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turned fetish in the earlier Marxian sense, as a fragment of the financialized city the Imperial is an epistemic thing, a piece of the system in which the system’s cognitive infrastructure, its way of making sense, is visible. It brazenly pits top against bottom, but in doing so, it warmly solicits trust and faith, delivering sense or meaning as a promissory note in the form of its central feature, the theological fissure that divides wealth from poverty. In unison with financial capital, this metonymic fragment of the city, like the city as a whole, promises abstractly to mean something—­anything. This promise is the other side of capital’s demand for distracted attention that is met by straightforward commodity fetishism. More than Simmel or Weber (and closer to Marx), Benjamin and Kracauer were able to see that commodification entailed not only a process of disenchantment (that is, of abstraction and of objectification) but also a process of reenchantment. Thus Benjamin’s fascination with the dreamworlds harbored by the shopping arcades, which could properly be described as temples of commodities that anticipated the newer, more mythic, and more visibly enchanted department stores themselves. But if the combination of these two earlier building types—­the department store and the arcade—­would eventually yield the shopping mall, it is questionable whether malls carry the same sense of enchantment for today’s shoppers. Instead, in another turn in the cycle of disenchantment and reenchantment, these have given way to representations of sheer quantity, sheer enumeration, as in the big-­box megastores strewn across the suburban United States and well beyond. These spaces, like the mathematical and statistical techniques that structure many academic attempts to analyze the urban phenomena to which they belong, harbor a concealed aesthetic dimension that is central to neoliberal capitalism. Together with the general fascination with all things gigantic or “global,” this dimension gives rise to something like the Kantian mathematical sublime.9 Recall that for Kant, following Edmund Burke, beautiful things are finite and therefore can be framed and represented. By contrast, the sublime is infinite and, by definition, unrepre-

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sentable. This does not mean that it is inconceivable. On the contrary, Kant goes to some length to distinguish between the powers of the senses and the powers of the mind, arguing that the sublime is ultimately a form of thought wherein only the subjective response to an object, and not the object itself, can be properly termed “sublime.” As an experience, it is threatening, for example, when we are presented with the overwhelming force of nature in a turbulent storm, because this force cannot be fully captured in a finite representation. But precisely this threat to the senses—­and, in some cases, to human reason—­gives the sublime its special status, yielding a distinctly mental form of comprehension that can intuit but not quite represent to itself (or picture) the phenomenon. The result is, in Kant’s words, that “the object is apprehended as sublime [and not merely beautiful] with a pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure.”10 This economy of pleasure and pain deriving from an encounter with natural force (or “might”) is typically associated with what Kant calls the dynamically sublime, which elicits “the courage [to believe] that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence.”11 Like natural landscapes, cities can harbor or elicit a sublime economy of pleasure and pain that differs qualitatively from a mimetic economy of resemblance. But, more and more, they do so quantitatively or, in Kant’s terms, mathematically, as units or moments in an iterative series that extends toward the infinite. The consequent sense of mastery that, for example, is experienced paradoxically as quasi-­religious faith in the rational basis of markets derives from “supersensible” reason rather than from physical force: “Sublime [in the mathematical sense] is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.”12 Recognizing the difference allows us to grasp more fully the ways in which “faith” in abstraction constitutes urban real estate and other financial instruments and markets. These markets are not simply conduits, channels for the circulation of mathematical objects such as mortgage-­backed securities or derivatives; they are themselves concretely abstract. Like the “globe” itself, real estate and other financial markets are

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imagined at some level to lie outside representation, but in the nonfigural sense of an iterative series (Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “thousand plateaus”) tending toward infinite ramification. For, where Kant’s media were the telescope and the microscope, which yielded the linear, scalar series by which he explains the mathematical sublime, ours is the computer, which yields the nonlinearities of feedback and of scaleless, data-­driven financial “networks.”13 Correspondingly, like a nineteenth-­ century landscape painting that tries to capture the vastness of nature, architecture produced by and for the real estate markets presents to its many constituents a branching, indefinitely extended calculus performed by a system of systems so vast and encompassing—­ and, ultimately, so threatening—­that it has become sublimely pleasurable to contemplate it. Operating that system, at one end of its spectrum sit manifestly debased efforts such as Hafeez Contractor’s Imperial Towers, while at the other end sit more self-­consciously poetic ones, such as Frank Gehry’s IAC Building in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, or his New York by Gehry luxury residential tower in the city’s Financial District. At both ends and across its span, this spectacle—­which is the spectacle of the contemporary city proper, whether we are speaking of New York or Mumbai—­brings a sense of awe but also, if Kant is right, mastery.14 Even in its most desultory forms, architecture mediates the socio-­aesthetic life of cities to produce this combination of awe and mastery. In this, it shares with money, converted into the social relations of credit, a structural impoverishment of meaning. Rather than affirming this impoverishment, however, architecture today—­that is, all buildings so designated—­ promises meaning through sublime abstraction, by bringing a global calculus to the street. On a sliding scale of conventional artistic merit, this promise recapitulates a counterthesis to Benjamin’s notion of the aura’s decline. Contrary to the expectation that commodification, mass production, and circulatory abstraction empty out cultural meaning into a disenchanted mirror-­play of surface effects, aura tends to increase in direct

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proportion to abstraction. As Simmel’s “calculating character of modern times” approaches the mathematical—­or, more properly, the statistical—­sublime of the credit economy, meaning is permanently promised but also—­a general law of circulation—­ permanently deferred, in an ineluctable dialectic of awe and mastery. By briefly sketching the outlines of such a dialectic, I hope to have given the impression that an aesthetic philosophy of the city is not only possible but required in order to comprehend the transformations undergone by capital from one end of the century to the other.

3 THE THING ABOUT CITIES

Is a city a thing? It may very well be that today, a city is first a

piece of land subdivided into properties on which buildings are erected, to be bought and sold with the help of banks and other information-­processing, storage, and retrieval systems. It may also be that a city is no more than the sum total of those structures, the humans and nonhumans inside them, and the calculations that support them. To be sure, a city is also a social condenser, an infrastructural machine, and a congeries of symbols. But it still seems that now, more than ever, the social “production of space” (in Henri Lefebvre’s terminology) is imprisoned within the iron cage of real estate development: the city as calculation, number, ratio. It is well known that the metaphor of the capitalist “iron cage” is an artifact of translation originating with Talcott Parsons, the American sociologist who, in 1930, undertook the first translation into English of Max Weber’s 1905 book Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism). In the Parsons translation, Weber cautions that, as Calvinist devotion to a vocational calling becomes the basis of the “modern economic order,” humanity risks enclosure in an “iron cage” (stahlhartes Gehäuse).1 Unlike  // 60

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Weber, Parsons was apparently unconcerned with the technical difference between iron (Eisen) and steel (Stahl), and so he chose “iron cage” over the more literal rendering “steel shell” (or more literally still, in a new translation, “shell as hard as steel”).2 Such technical differences notwithstanding, when one thinks about the wrought-­iron or factory-­rolled-­steel frames that supported large, stone-­clad monuments such as the Reichstag building (1894) or the Wertheim department store (1896) in Berlin, it is possible to imagine how, by 1905, European capitals threatened to become rigid cages of bureaucracy and calculation. But even then, Parsons’s choice is somewhat anachronistic, especially given that Weber’s comment was clearly anticipatory, in that he expressed concern that this new order would persist “until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.”3 Ambiguities regarding iron and steel abounded during this period. Two years after Weber’s essay, in 1907, a posthumous book by the German architect Alfred Meyer appeared under the title Eisenbauten, ihre Geschichte und Æstethik (Iron Construction: Its History and Aesthetic), in which Meyer reviewed the achievements of nineteenth-­century engineering in metal-­ frame construction. Meyer did not systematically differentiate wrought iron from the increasingly ubiquitous “mild steel” alloy fabricated with the Bessemer process after 1858 or, via a Franco-­ Prussian business arrangement, the Siemens-­ Martin process after 1865. His book was followed by Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton (Building in France: Iron, Ferro-­Concrete, 1928), which singled out the achievements of nineteenth-­century French engineering, including (as did Meyer) the Eiffel Tower and the Galerie des Machines, both of which were built from rolled-­steel sections for the Paris Exposition of 1889. In the dossier of notes for his Passagenwerk (The Arcades Project, 1927–­40) titled “Iron Construction,” Walter Benjamin makes frequent reference to Meyer and especially to Giedion. Gathered under the epigraph from Jules Michelet, “Each epoch dreams the one to follow,” Benjamin’s notes hint (without saying outright) that the iron-­and-­glass enclosures of the early nineteenth-­century arcades, and the sociotechnical imaginaries

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to which they belonged, prefigured the much vaster, much more refined industrial complexes that were consolidated in the German war economy during the twentieth century’s second decade, under nineteenth-­century names such as Thyssen and Krupp.4 Put differently, iron dreams steel. With steel also come shells and other prosthetic enhancements of human capacity, such as automobiles, the mass production of which was accelerated by what the German writer Ernst Jünger called the “total mobilization” of the First World War. In Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, 1922), Jünger exclaimed that after the Battle of the Somme, “the German soldier wore the steel helmet, and in his features there were chiseled the lines of an energy stretched to the utmost pitch, lines that future generations will perhaps find as fascinating and imposing as those of many heads of classical or Renaissance times.”5 In a 1930 review of a collection of essays Jünger had edited under the title Krieg und Krieger (War and Warrior), Benjamin responded sarcastically that in Jünger’s glorified battlefield landscapes, “every shell crater had become a problem, every wire entanglement an antinomy, every barb a definition, every explosion a thesis; by day the sky was the cosmic interior of the steel helmet, and at night the moral law above,” which Benjamin saw as a perverse “upsurge” of the “German feeling for nature.”6 This is the other, organicist side of Weber’s steel shell: the libidinal economy of war etched into the “chiseled” lines of its machines, in which was encased the cosmic remainder of the “Protestant ethic.” With the Great War, the technocratic calling had become a call to arms on both sides of the Atlantic and at the colonial extremities of the European empires. In its midst were cities. Berlin, where Benjamin, Jünger, and Weber all lived at different times, was on the periphery of the actual war but at the center of its buildup, its management, and its aftermath. This was the Berlin, for example, of Peter Behrens’s Allgemeine Elektricitäts-­Gesellschaft (AEG) turbine factory (1909), located in the working-­class district of Moabit, where a demonstrative steel frame with neoclassical proportions rose above an expansive shop floor on which giant steel turbines for electric genera-

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tors were assembled. A number of AEG’s other factories, which Behrens also designed and which became equally important for “total mobilization,” were located nearby, in “Red” Wedding. In 1914, AEG heir Walther Rathenau was put in charge of organizing and distributing raw materials for German war production, including iron ore and steel alloy from the Ruhr Valley for use in armaments, shells, helmets, and, increasingly after the war, buildings. Other, less conspicuous hardware of metropolitan life was made of steel as well. In Weber’s day, for example, a concierge was frequently to be found regulating the use of keys in the city’s bourgeois neighborhoods, though probably less so in working-­ class Moabit or Wedding. By 1912, an imaginative Prussian locksmith had begun making a special kind of key that, as Bruno Latour has shown, modified social relations among apartment dwellers and concierges.7 This so-­called Berlin key, which could very well have been made from material that originated in the Krupp or Thyssen steelworks, had two heads fitted to a curious, two-­position lock. One turn opened the door and allowed the key to be pushed through the keyhole (rather than removed) upon entry, compelling a second turn, which locked the door before allowing the key to be withdrawn and the inhabitant to proceed on his or her way. The concierge, in possession of a special master key, could turn this mechanism off during the day, allowing the door to remain open and inhabitants and visitors to pass in and out under her watchful eye. Hence, as Latour says, the key fabricated in steel the social relations otherwise contained in the command “Please bolt the door behind you during the night and never during the day.”8 It has been said that the Berlin key, if not Berlin itself, is a “thing” and not an object. This reading, proposed by “thing theorist” Bill Brown, follows Latour in translating Martin Heidegger’s philosophical category of “the thing” (das Ding) out of the premodern world of clay water jugs in which Heidegger finds it, and into the world of modern science and technology. Like the Berlin key, but unlike discrete objects that oppose themselves to discrete subjects, Heidegger’s “things” act. They gather worlds

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around themselves. They socialize. They assemble. They differentiate as well as enfold humans and nonhumans. Indeed, things ultimately cancel the dialectic of subjects and objects, which, as Brown puts it, “has obscured patterns of circulation, transference, translation, and displacement.”9 This view is at odds with what Weber called objectification, or an exaggerated, “ideal” type of social and economic calculus that separates the world’s elements into measurable units assembled out of inert materials such as iron or steel, which do no assembling and no socializing of their own. Weber’s darker moments encourage us to see those Berlin technocrats locking and unlocking their doors with excessively rational keys as objects or automatons passing from one cage to another, condemned to the metallic life of a cog in the machine. Given the probability that many of its users left or entered their apartment lobbies on the way to or from office work or some other vocation that fit squarely into Weber’s “new economic order” dominated by bureaucracy and rationalization, the Berlin key most likely did not unlock many iron cages or steel shells circa 1912. On the contrary, it secured them, as well as their class, race, and gender relations, even as it mediated all of these (as Latour points out) by allowing bourgeois officials to return home late from work and reliably lock the door behind them without waking the concierge. Latour emphasizes that the “program of action” or “script” performed by the key (“Please bolt the door behind you during the night and never during the day”) is milled in steel rather than set to words. In English, we might say that this property allows the Berlin-­key mechanism to carry two meanings of the term “hardware” at once: as a door lock and as an information processor. This puts it in some proximity to a more explicit account of the city itself—­and possibly Berlin in particular—­as a piece of hardware, an account sketched by the German media philosopher Friedrich Kittler in a brief, telegraphic essay written around the same time as Latour’s. Kittler describes the city as a “medium,” by which he means a machine for processing, storing, and transmitting

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information—­essentially, a large computer running population-­ management software based on graph theory, addresses, and networks.10 His sketch draws on Lewis Mumford’s observation, in 1961, that, “compared with the complex human order of the city, our present ingenious electronic mechanisms for storing and transmitting information are crude and limited.”11 It also recalls cybernetic urban-­planning techniques of the 1960s and 1970s, such as those promulgated by the architect Christopher Alexander (whom Kittler also cites) or the MIT computer scientist Jay W. Forrester, in which architects and planners were effectively transformed into systems engineers. Absent Mumford’s humanism, however, Kittler’s description of the city, and especially the post–­World War II European city, as a semiautonomous network of networks substantially limits human agency to a signal–­response function, in the way that a traffic interchange orchestrates behavior along highly regulated infrastructural channels. Kittler rightly sees in the postwar European city a megalopolitan tendency toward decentralization that displaces the symbolic and practical functions of the Hauptstadt, or capital city. Such decentralization, he argues, redistributes the city’s central commands into a dispersed landscape of protocols embedded in interchanges and exchanges, “the wide green spaces and broad arteries of life in the Federal Republic,” infrastructures that originate “from architectural plans during the World Wars to avert the next bomb terror.”12 Kittler’s civil-­defense-­ oriented city-­as-­medium is therefore ultimately a sovereign network of switches, hubs, exchanges, memory banks, and input–­output channels circulating authorless commands that write end-­of-­history scripts. As he points out, the prototype for these commands is the “Hey, you there!” of Althusserian interpellation: the salutation of the state apparatus calling its subjects, converted into signs on the autobahns addressed to painted steel shells driving without destination. In 1988, when his essay was first published, Kittler was teaching in Bochum. But the English translation, which appeared in 1996, is signed emphatically “Wilhelm von Humboldt

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University, Berlin,” where he was teaching at the time, perhaps indicating the presence of that city between the essay’s lines.13 In addition to interrupting Berlin’s transportation networks such as the U-­Bahn and interchanges such as Potsdamer Platz, the Wall and its accompanying territorial arrangement cut off half the symbolic head of German sovereignty. Removed to Bonn, near the border with France, the West German parliament settled for ad hoc architectural arrangements until 1987, when construction began on a new plenary chamber. On the eastern side of the Wall, the other half city’s ongoing function as Hauptstadt was marked, in 1976, by a steel-­and-­mirrored-­glass parliament building, the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), which doubled as a socialist civic center. After 1992, the new German parliament was housed in the plenary chamber in Bonn, an antimonumental, filigreed steel-­ and-­ glass structure that all but shouted “Democracy!” Finally, in 1999, the governing body returned to Berlin and to the renovated Reichstag building, which had been duly equipped by the architect Norman Foster with its own filigreed steel-­and-­glass dome. In calling elsewhere for a democratic “parliament of things,” or a politics of material objects assembling and disassembling publics around themselves (“Dingpolitik”), Latour suggests that the nostalgic “imitation” of earlier parliaments in the renovated Reichstag “doesn’t seem nearly enough to absorb the new masses that are entering political arenas.”14 Perhaps. But in this new steel-and-glass dome, Benjamin’s arcades had returned to the scene of the crime. In place of the old panoramas, a surrealistic mirrored-­glass funnel on the inside of the dome and directly above the plenary chamber reflects, in the round, parliamentary activities below to visitors traversing the dome’s spiral ramp above. Hence, on the outside of the democracy machine, steel, glass, and pseudotransparency; on the inside, an inversion of the glass mirrors wrapping the Palast der Republik. Inevitably, as if to erase any material evidence of a subliminal east–­west technology transfer, the former East German parliament was subsequently demolished. In its place were prepared the foundations for a solid new replica of the site’s old Hohen-

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zollern Palace (Stadtschloss) to rise out of the ruins of socialism: steel and mirrored glass now dreaming stone. To add tragedy to farce, the actual steel salvaged from the demolition of the Palast was melted down and sold to a Turkish manufacturer of structural components for use in Dubai in the construction of the Burj Khalifa luxury apartment tower.15 The problem lies, then, in the different ways in which we might construe things as mediators, and in the different social relations they store. With Latour and Kittler in the 1980s, we have Berlin as hardware in both senses of the term: figured in a key that shapes a city’s social codes but does not unlock its cages, and as a half-­decapitated bureaucratic information-­processing machine. Where Kittler’s tone is vaguely apocalyptic, Latour’s is archaeological. If Kittler is correct, the new Reichstag dome is an anachronism beneath which lie the distributed networks of an informatic, managerial Eurozone built out of the rubble of the two world wars. If Latour is correct, the new dome is an irrelevant distraction from the urgent problem of assembling global publics at a moment when idealized representations of the globe, such as domes, have been rendered obsolete by the messiness of actually existing globalization. Both readings are plausible. The difference is that, for Kittler, media (or things) simply mediate, eventually writing humanistic interfaces such as domes or parliaments out of the equation in a “total mobilization” without commandants, only commands; whereas for Latour, things mediate social relations and vice versa, proliferating hybrid networks of humans and nonhumans in which the pragmatic possibility of a negotiated peace remains on the table. Neither type of mediation, however, fully explains the softening of the city’s hard shell in the great urban experiment that was actually under way in West Berlin during the years these two texts were written: the Internationale Bauausstellung (International Building Exhibition, or IBA), begun in 1978 and formally concluded in 1987. Despite its international pretensions, the IBA, which was run as a quasi-­public agency, entailed a largely municipal effort to adjust social-­housing policy and practice in West Berlin to the requirements of an uncertain

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real estate market while preserving some, but not all, of the protections and guarantees afforded by the postwar welfare state. Its ethos and its aesthetic program were self-­consciously antitechnocratic and were guided by the partnership, unanticipated by Weber, between capitalism and humanism that has come to characterize the neoliberal city. For the IBA’s architects, who came from across Western Europe as well as from the United States, the mandate was “critical reconstruction,” or the rebuilding of the traditional city fabric in an idiom sensitive to the scale and texture of nineteenth-­century Berlin—­Berlin, that is, before iron cages or steel shells, before “total mobilization,” before the Third Reich, and before the Wall. The IBA consisted of two sections: the New Buildings Section, in which were constructed numerous relatively low-­cost, mixed-­income apartment blocks, and the Careful Urban Renewal Section, in which existing social or subsidized housing was retrofitted and existing blocks completed. The retrofits and new construction in the Careful Urban Renewal Section tended to be built or overseen by local housing authorities and involved organized resident input or other mechanisms intended to protect low-­income, often immigrant residents from market-­based speculation. In contrast, most of the new housing in the New Buildings Section was built by private real estate developers (under government subsidy) who had been selected through design competitions run by the IBA GmbH, the publicly funded corporate arm of the IBA, for each project site. Ultimately, the IBA comprised about 3,000 new apartments—­“dwelling units” in English—­and 5,500 renovated ones.16 The IBA New Buildings Section effectively converted parts of West Berlin, such as South Tiergarten and South Friedrichstadt, as well as the more peripheral Tegel, into open-­air architecture museums exhibiting mostly gentle, antisteel interpretations of the Mietskaserne, or traditional perimeter block, imposed by the IBA planners. Inside, the units largely followed formulas stipulated by the developers in consultation with the city’s housing commission, reinforcing the grip of economic calculation on an everyday life that was mediated elsewhere

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(and earlier) by the Berlin key; whereas outside, the humanist “script” written by the facades was made more pronounced by their proximity to the Wall and to the regimented concrete Plattenbauten (prefabricated apartment blocks) on the other side, to which they formed an unambiguous rebuke. In a similar vein, the English translation of Latour’s essay includes a footnote that emphasizes its origins in pre-­1989 West Berlin, “which,” he says, “was at the time besieged by real socialism.”17 By this, one assumes he meant the half city’s isolation within the territory of East Germany and its relation to other kinds of iron cages (and curtains). But there are different “real socialisms,” not all of which can be straightforwardly opposed, as idealist absolutisms, to the pragmatic, democratic assemblage of publics around bourgeois steel keys. And there are also real capitalisms that compel the erection of walls rather than their disassembly, thus furthering the militarization of the city in a not-­so-­distant echo of Jünger’s “total mobilization.” For the latter, see São Paulo, a “city of walls” pockmarked by segregated urban enclaves.18 In the 1980s, when the paint on the IBA housing was still fresh, it became common for wealthy and upper-­middle-­class Paulistanos to enclose themselves in high-­rise housing blocks surrounded by defensive walls. Armed guards often sat, and still sit, at the gates to these compounds. Like Berlin concierges from earlier days, these guards enact a social script written in steel that monitors the comings and goings of residents, their guests, and service workers from the favelas, the difference being that the mediating steel “things” are guns rather than keys. Soaring urban crime and vast income discrepancies associated with privatization and the economics of “structural adjustment” largely explain this state of affairs. But São Paulo’s enclaves are anything but anomalous. They are at the far end of a new norm: the city as a collection of little Berlins, walled or gated enclosures that assemble and enfold entire worlds within, rather than around, themselves. Correspondingly, not all the “real socialisms” stored in Berlin’s hardware come from behind the iron curtain. In the early days of the IBA, the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira

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designed a fragment of housing (in Kreuzberg, near the Schlesisches Tor U-­Bahn station and adjacent to the Wall) that turned a corner and partially restored the continuity of a block that had been heavily damaged by Allied bombs. Shortly after the building was completed, an enigmatic, awkward graffito was anonymously scrawled across its crest: “Bonjour tristesse” (“Hello sadness”), quoted inexplicably from an Otto Preminger film based on a popular French novel. In that scrawl, as in the building itself, is a note of existential resignation. Both seem to indicate that, in West Berlin, the best one could do was to acknowledge the ruined, split polis with the reconstructed urban fragment. In Siza’s hands, in a neighborhood heavily populated by working-­class Turkish immigrants, this meant combining the stripped-­down neoclassicism of Adolf Loos with the rationalist linear blocks, or Zeilenbau, associated with Ernst May: a Weberian architecture if there ever was one, softened and pried open by history. But this modest, solemn piece of “critical reconstruction” also has another past. The setting is the Portuguese spring of 1974. It is a revolutionary moment at a time when revolution had been declared obsolete by the American standard-­bearers of a postmodern, postindustrial society. A semigovernmental housing agency, SAAL (Servicio de Apoio Ambulatorio Local, or Ambulatory Local Support Service), was established by the socialist coalition that emerged after a leftist military coup overthrew the Caetano dictatorship on April 25, 1974, in what is known as the Carnation Revolution. Under the auspices of SAAL, as in limited sections of the IBA (including Siza’s project), neighborhood committees initiated a variety of self-­managed social-­housing schemes, mainly in Oporto and Lisbon. Siza, as part of a “technical brigade” tasked with supporting the needs of resident committees in an often conflictual participatory process, designed two SAAL housing projects in Oporto, the Bouça and São Victor Houses, both of which were completed in 1977. Technically and architecturally, Siza’s IBA housing project in Kreuzberg learns from and reproduces some of these results, as social-­democratic capitalism sublimates socialist experimen-

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tation and West Berlin silently but inexorably commemorates the Portuguese revolution. The translation was limited and mostly abortive; Siza eventually withdrew from designing the actual dwelling units.19 Hence another possible meaning for the graffito “Bonjour tristesse”: an ominous command, like the grinning “Hey, you there!” of capital consolidating its poststeel partnership with the liberal state; but also an ambiguous, automated “Hello” from a thing that has only just awakened. Like computers, things remember. And if cities are things and not merely objects, that is because the memories they store do not all lead to the same place, as Andreas Huyssen has shown with special reference to Berlin.20 Latour’s coy aside about the dangers of “real socialism” notwithstanding, the city’s memory banks indiscriminately store all histories, like a bureaucrat filing papers in a steel drawer or backing up files on a hard drive or in the cloud. Some of these, like the memories recorded in Siza’s building in Kreuzberg, do not follow the dominant script. Meanwhile, in Berlin, as elsewhere, austere commands written in steel have been replaced by warm appellations—­“Hey, you there!”—­addressed to humans by gregarious machines. Among such machines is the swirling outdoor atrium just off the reconstructed Potsdamer Platz—­the new Reichstag’s sociable, commercial companion and the city’s last arcade, built under the sign of Sony and Daimler. Its posthistorical cheerfulness is of a piece with the industrialization of memory not only in the fin de siècle, post–­Cold War amnesia of memorials and museums but also in the dwelling units that constitute the city’s fabric. As calculation, number, ratio, those units record, impassively and with precision, the friendly march of the real estate developer—­ history’s assassin—­into the narrowest crevices of urban life. But they also impolitely remember other times and other places, possibly even in the future, after “the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed,” when the soft shell of capitalist humanism is met by the greeting “Bonjour tristesse.”

4 PUBLIC AND COMMON(S)

Two terms, or really, two groups of terms, seem today to gather

competing ideas as to how anything like a collective, collectivity, or collective space might be conceived. The city figures prominently in both. On the one hand, we have the set of concepts assembled around the term public, as in “public realm,” “public sphere,” “public space,” “public sector,” and “the public” itself. On the other hand is the set of concepts associated with the term common: “the common(s),” “common sense,” and “commonwealth.” The latter set resonates with “communism,” “communal,” and the like. But its usage by environmentalists to debate an oft-­misunderstood “tragedy of the commons” should not be overlooked. Similarly, as the controversy over a potential “public option” in American health-­care reform showed, conventional Anglophone usage associates “public” with the welfare state and with liberal/progressive political reform more generally. Circulating between these two sets is the category of the social, as in “socialism,” but also as used by the philosopher Hannah Arendt to differentiate the modern managerial sphere, including both state-­and market-­based social or behavioral management, from the classical res publica. According to Arendt, modernity is characterized by the preponderance of managerial  // 72

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practices—­“housekeeping,” as she puts it—­that have emerged from the classical domestic sphere, the oikos, to organize and dominate the life of the polis, or city. These practices take as their field of activity a newly constituted object—­society—­thereby blotting out the distinction between public and private life, or the distinction between household management and political life, on which city-­states were founded in classical times. Many commentators have pointed out that, in accepting uncritically this division of labor, Arendt idealizes the Greek polis, in which only male citizens participated in “public” (that is, political) life, with women and slaves confined to the household (the “private” realm, or oikos) and its internal, domestic economy. For Arendt, the polis constitutes a “space of appearance” in which being-­in-­public, or “publicity,” is effectively synonymous with politics. More than simply a public square or forum, the space of appearance is potentially ubiquitous. As she puts it, “appearance—­something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—­constitutes reality,”1 meaning that publics are formed only in the presence of others. In the sort of democratic city-­state that Arendt has in mind, these others are equals to whom fall the responsibilities of governance. Such governance is decidedly agonistic, in that “the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself.”2 This perspectivism renders Arendt’s “public appearance” a kind of struggle among equals for the heart and soul of the polis, which is what differentiates it, for her, from the false “objectivity” of the money economy and of administrative rationality more generally. In passing, Jürgen Habermas associates Arendt’s “rise of the social” with the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere (Öffentlichkeit). This sphere is, again ideally, a social space in which transparent communication among equals occurs in such a manner that these individuals (“private persons,” or Privatmannen) come together to form a public capable of laying claim to state politics. It is also, as Habermas says, the space where “public opinion” (opinion publique, or its analogue, öffentliche

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Meinung) is formed. Remembering the eighteenth-­ century pamphleteer Thomas Paine, we can add that it is also the space in which “common sense” is formed. Its principal matrix comprises the assembled instruments of civil society, such as the press (or media), that accompany the “traffic in commodities and news” characteristic of European capitalism from its mercantilist phase onward. Hence, Habermas’s public is a bourgeois “reading public” who, in the late eighteenth century, frequented libraries, gathered in Berlin cafés to discuss matters of state, and published their opinions in daily broadsheets and in monthly political journals.3 Like Arendt’s, Habermas’s idealizations have been vigorously challenged, not least by feminist theorists who note the hidden exclusions, often determined by gender, by which the bourgeois public sphere is constituted. In one important response that is nevertheless still in considerable sympathy with Habermas’s project, Nancy Fraser has offered the category of “subaltern counterpublics” to throw off balance Habermas’s implicitly male, white, moneyed, and otherwise hegemonic public sphere. By this, Fraser means those groups or categories of citizens and noncitizens which are structurally excluded, usually by combinations of gender, race, and class, from the political commerce of bourgeois capitalism. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translation of the Gramscian “subaltern,” or voiceless subject, for Marxist feminism, Fraser’s “subaltern counterpublics” describes a whole host of potentially incommensurable public spheres, or “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”4 Most critically, these spheres do not simply coexist in a homogeneous gel, a metapublic sphere or space in which their differences can be democratically adjudicated; rather, they occupy a differentiated field of “stronger” and “weaker” powers in which the very constitution of counterpublics subordinates them, by definition, to the pervasive force of bourgeois (that is, masculinist) norms, thus marking what Fraser calls the “limits of actually existing democracy.”

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Arendt uses the section heading “The Public Realm: The Common” to distinguish this category from its private partner, which is subtitled “Property.” In this second sense, running alongside the sense of public as publicity, what is public is, for Arendt, outside the realm of property relations. It is, simply, “the world itself, insofar as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.”5 The gradual, historical erasure of the sharp line dividing public interests from private ones also abolishes the sense of a common world, to be replaced with “mass society” comprising merely unrelated, juxtaposed fragments rather than actual or virtual publics, and capable of relating only at the level of economic exchange or its arithmetic equivalents. It may seem odd, then, that Arendt begins The Human Condition (1958), the work in which she most comprehensively outlines her thesis, with the image of the Soviet Sputnik 1 satellite, humankind’s first instance of mechanized escape from earthly conditions, which was launched in 1957. For Arendt, Sputnik 1 captures the whole modern travesty of enlightened public knowledge (“science,” as she calls it) being enlisted toward realizing long-­held philosophical and religious fantasies of otherworldly life. Likewise, this orbiting machine bears witness to what she understatedly calls the “uncomfortable” political circumstances of the Cold War.6 But precisely because of this, Sputnik 1 and its American counterpart, Explorer 1, were also products of the medium of publicness that was the sine qua non for all sides of the Cold War impasse: the modern state. I pointedly describe the state as a “medium” to steer away from disputes over statist versus nonstatist political models that fetishize abstractions in positive or negative terms, and toward an infrastructural conception of the state and its institutions. By this I mean not a technocratic conception but a pragmatic one—­the state, or the “public sector,” not as an idealized or abstract entity but as a historical constellation of institutions, practices, protocols, and material complexes. Sputnik 1 and its descendants are products of such infrastructures, to use a term that connotes, in its commonest usage, a certain publicness in

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its own right. To put it another way, Sputnik 1 is unthinkable without both the material infrastructures of the state, as well as the imaginaries that circulate through those infrastructures, and the reflexive “apparatuses,” or instruments of societal regulation, in which these two levels join, as described by thinkers like Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Arendt is able to discern in Sputnik 1’s orbit a compelling metaphor for humanity’s efforts to delink from that “space of appearance”—­Earth—­to which public life is ultimately tethered. She is less concerned, however, with the strange fact that the very invention that makes it all possible—­the modern state—­is presumed at both ideological poles to represent whatever is left of her ideal public, as in a distorting mirror. Something like this is also at work in the Habermasian public sphere, as well as in Fraser’s counterpublics. In both, the state sits firmly in the background as the locus of bourgeois political address percolating through civil society, or as the ultimate site of contestation over rights, voice, transparency, and equity first elaborated in counterpublic arenas. In that sense, it is as though the term public shares a fate with the modern state itself. In their collaborative trilogy of Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri take this proposition to its logical conclusion. They argue that during the course of the twentieth century, the world order based on the sovereignty of nation-­states was gradually and unevenly replaced by what they call “imperial sovereignty,” or Empire, a transnational, biopolitical capitalism coursing fluidly through both affective and instrumental channels. For Hardt and Negri, then, the categories of “public” and “private,” linked historically with state socialism or social democracy, on the one hand, and liberal republicanism, on the other, simply connote two different means to the same end: the reproduction of capital. Writing four decades after Sputnik 1, they follow many critics of Soviet socialism in suggesting that this system merely substituted a centralized state for a market oligarchy to manage industrial-­capitalist production, and thus served as a prelude to the decentered sovereignty of neoliberal capital. To confront the

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latter, they propose a political philosophy that substitutes older categories such as “the people” and “the state,” or “private” and “public,” with new ones, such as “multitude” and “commonwealth,” or “singularity” and “common.” Key to this reconceptualization is the claim that the common is not merely a postindustrial upgrade of the modern state, which is historically linked with the rise of industrial capitalism. Hardt and Negri define this common most succinctly as: (1) the natural environment, its resources, and the products they yield; and (2) the products of social interaction, such as codes, languages, affects, information, and other forms of knowledge.7 Especially in this second form, their sense of the common is wholly immanent to biopolitical practice: that is, a common wealth is constantly being produced and circulated in those everyday processes by which life itself is sustained, enhanced, articulated, and otherwise organized in areas as diverse as manufacturing, health care, and housing, on the one hand, and education, scientific research, and the arts, on the other. Hardt and Negri therefore encourage us to look “beyond public and private” for philosophical concepts and political practices capable of challenging and transforming the “republic of property” that underlies both categories. Most frequently, they find models in the insurgent, bottom-­up politics of the counter-­ or alter-­globalization movements that proliferated in the 1990s, or in the autonomous democracy practiced by groups such as the Mexican Zapatistas. They see the heterogeneous, sometimes fractious “multitude” that comes together in these and countless other, less visible movements as the contrary to the homogenized modern masses or an abstract, universal “public.” But it does not merely replace or multiply these. Instead, for Hardt and Negri, the multitude constitutes a novel historical subject that draws its energies from the constant production of common goods and especially common knowledge and services, provoked by resistance to capitalism but not wholly determined by it. What are these goods and services? Hardt and Negri place a great deal of emphasis on the productivity of “immaterial labor,” the type of labor characteristic of what is sometimes

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called the service sector. They have therefore been criticized for deemphasizing or ignoring manual labor and its accompanying subject, the working class. To this charge they argue that it is a matter not of one class or sector replacing another but of one logic—­applying to all classes and sectors—­replacing, or at least displacing, another. Immaterial labor is based, above all, on communication, and it is this that Hardt and Negri seek to release in radically transformative, revolutionary directions. Think of Sputnik 1, then, as a triumph of immaterial labor held captive by the state. Here, too, is an etymological resonance—­“common(s),” “communication”—­that is sharpened when Hardt and Negri claim that “the common does not refer to traditional notions of either the community or the public; it is based on the communication among singularities and emerges through collaborative social processes of production.”8 (In their idiom, a singularity is more like a unique, internally divided and incalculable point, rather than an individual unit.) Elsewhere, they add one more term to the etymological chain by arguing that “what the private is to capitalism and what the public is to socialism, the common is to communism.”9 Hardt and Negri are quick to distinguish this communism from the state-­based authoritarian socialisms to which that term became affixed during the course of the twentieth century. If anything, many of their proposals for “a reformist program for capital” are distinctly neo-­Keynesian: provide the physical, social, and educational infrastructure for biopolitical production; open the intellectual and cultural commons to all; establish “open citizenship” across borders; enhance economic freedom with a guaranteed income; build participatory democracy into all levels of government. For them, “saving” capitalism from its self-­destructiveness in this way is not an end in itself but the first stage of a transition that “requires the growing autonomy of the multitude from both private and public control; the metamorphosis of social subjects through education and training in cooperation, communication, and organizing social encounters; and thus a progressive accumulation of the common.”10

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Less clear, however, is the medium by which “communication” becomes “common.” Unlike many theorists of the communicative public sphere, Hardt and Negri have relatively little to say about the specific forms of mediation by which collective subjectivities are formed. By this I mean not only technological mediation, as in the properties of those communications systems by which a multitude comes into its heterogeneous being-­in-­common, but also other mediating instruments, such as social structures (the family, the nation) and institutions (schools, hospitals, housing, workplaces, prisons, communications networks). If the segmented realm of public and private is to be replaced by the networked realm of the common, what will replace these mediators? In this sense, Hardt and Negri’s “common” is subject to criticisms analogous to those that have been leveled at Habermas’s version of the public sphere: not that it homogenizes otherwise heterogeneous subjectivities or submits them to the rule of an arbitrary norm; but, rather, that in subsuming the dyad singularity–­multiplicity into a common, nonhomogeneous substrate, it potentially underestimates the differentials, interferences, and asymmetries composing that substrate’s communicative infrastructures. From its beginnings, communications theory has emphasized the necessary loss of information in any communicational transaction. Hardt and Negri seem to assume that this loss is ultimately negligible rather than constitutive, and that the interference and distortions that accompany all communication are superseded by the common wealth generated by cooperative labor among singular subjects. I do not wish to argue the contrary, that the inevitable mediations of intersubjective life render any common impossible from the start. Rather, I want to ask whether the exhausted category of the public, and with it the ruined infrastructures of the state—­including Sputnik 1’s descendants—­might be reappropriated as media, or fragmentary elements of a media system, in which life-­in-­ common can take place. At a political level as well as at a philosophical one, this means modulating the directness of direct or participatory

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democracy with a media theory of communications. Hardt and Negri suggest as much when they cite recent scholarship on radically democratic media practices. By no means do they argue that the common emerges out of some primal, unmediated field of social and economic activity; but nowhere do they work through the structural, rather than circumstantial, particulars of the very mediating infrastructures they propose in order to “save” capitalism from itself while simultaneously preparing the ground for its multitudinous alternative. Here is one example. Among the many sites in which Hardt and Negri discern “specters of the common” is the contemporary metropolis, or really the global city. One measure of the city as a site of biopolitical production appears in the vexing problem (for traditional Marxists) of ground rent. In urban economics, a labor theory of value has some difficulty in accounting for the intangibles of location, services, and other “quality of life” factors, which economists sometimes term “externalities.” Hardt and Negri point out that these seeming externalities actually register “the general social circuits of biopolitical production and reproduction of the city,” which are subject to reappropriation.11 The city therefore mediates value production through its material infrastructures. Among other things, these infrastructures typically support transportation, communication, education, security, health, housing, and commerce, and are variously associated with the state, the private sector, or both. Elsewhere, referring to the metropolis as the “inorganic body of the multitude,” Hardt and Negri suggestively argue that “the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial city,” in three ways: first, in that the contemporary city is “the space of the common,” a privileged site in which an “artificial common” of “languages, images, knowledges, affects, codes, habits, and practices” is produced; second, in that the city is (and long has been) a site of aleatory, “joyful” encounter among singularities along the lines of Baudelaire’s flâneur, as well as a site of insurgent political organization; and, finally, in that the contemporary city is, like the factory, a site of exploita-

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tion, antagonism, conflict, and hence of potential rebellion.12 Leaving aside the urban–­rural interdependencies and antagonisms that their account underplays, Hardt and Negri thereby recast the global or globalizing city as a “biopolitical city,” a collective space of productive, life-­or-­death struggle against biopower, or the coercive management of everyday life.13 To illustrate, they single out rent as paradigmatic of the financialization of urban (or exurban) life: “Rent operates through a desocialization of the common, privatizing in the hands of the rich the common wealth produced and consolidated in the metropolis.”14 This contrasts land privatization not with public ownership but with a common that exists beyond or outside of property relations and, hence, outside of such concepts as “private” and “public.” Superficially, their argument shares some characteristics with Garrett Hardin’s much-­invoked “tragedy of the commons,” but only in the inverse. Hardin, a biologist, argued in 1968 that the environmental commons, like the common agricultural lands that had been progressively enclosed as private property in Britain since the sixteenth century, is finite. The “tragedy” to which he refers is the proposition that the free pursuit of self-­interest, such as increasing one’s share in the land’s output, inevitably leads to mutual loss. For Hardin, who assumes the all-­ powerful lawfulness of self-­interest, the commons is therefore a “horror” to be abandoned in favor of privatization or administrative enclosure—­what Arendt calls housekeeping—­which he construes as lesser evils to that of resource depletion, figured mainly in the specter of overpopulation. That Hardin’s most concrete proposal entails eugenic restrictions on the “freedom to breed” directed at the world’s poorest populations, rather than an assault on poverty itself, is enough to remind us that here, too, biopower is at work.15 In contrast, Hardt and Negri construe the common as a sort of force field that overspills those processes which seek to expropriate it. They regard earlier collectivist projects such as socialism, with its state-­centric language of “public” and “private,” as philosophically, if not practically, distinct from what they call a “governance” of the common, accomplished through horizontal

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networks of democratic decision making by an autonomous, self-­organizing multitude of singularities. In a lively exchange, David Harvey has challenged Hardt and Negri’s near-­exclusive emphasis on these relational protocols over representative systems or other regimes of mediation. If the multitude is capable of commandeering biopolitical production toward revolutionary ends, then “how,” Harvey asks, “will this new value be represented and objectified in daily practice?”16 Harvey reminds us, for example, that what Marx terms “fictitious capital” is value objectified as representation, or money, that recirculates in the form of securities and other higher-­ order financial abstractions. He is therefore asking, with some impatience, What will take the place of money, rent, and finance more generally—­as representations of value—­in the new forms of governance that Hardt and Negri envision? Rightly dismissing any romantic notion that conventional regimes might easily be abandoned (“[D]on’t tell me global bartering is feasible”), he implies that, like the socialist state or the communist international before it, the common requires institutions of its own, beginning with a medium of economic exchange. Hardt and Negri certainly acknowledge as much. But they do not preempt this critique simply by suggesting that the abstractions of money and finance could, in principle, be turned against themselves to “provide the instruments for making the multitude from the diverse forms of flexible, mobile, and precarious labor.”17 Their direct reply to Harvey is that, whereas under industrial capitalism it may have been possible to regard economic production (labor and its products) as “real” and finance as “fictitious,” “increasingly today the form of finance is symmetrical to the new processes of biopolitical production of value,” such as codes, languages, and images. The project hence becomes one of “reappropriating socially what finance now possesses.”18 What applies here to banks and financial institutions could presumably be said for other mediating institutions of the biopolitical commons as well, such as schools and universities, museums, libraries, laboratories, and satellites. But how,

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exactly? Hardt and Negri insist repeatedly on the interdependence of revolutionary insurrection and patient institutional transformation, or of a Gramscian “war of movement” (or maneuver) and “war of position.” On the side of institutions, they essentially ask, If socialist identification with the public and its cognates (the people, the proletariat, the state) has become ineffective or obsolete, what, if any, forms of networked mediation might enact globally a “democracy of the common” that is not one of surreptitious enclosure? In response, they argue that the pliable networks governing the neoliberal metropolis might be turned into both revolutionary instruments and genuinely democratic institutions. But, if this is possible, it is also possible that the ruined infrastructures of the socialist city might be more closely interrogated for their transformative potential. From the point of view of the stageist model of history that Hardt and Negri rather too quickly adopt, public education, public health care, and public housing may indeed be vanishing into obsolescence; but these and other remnants of the socialist or reformist state remain very much part of the urban fabric and very much part of collective consciousness in many parts of the world. Emptied of their ideological force, these disused ruins also await reappropriation as instruments to redirect—­to remediate, that is—­the vectors of financial capital and its abstractions.

A PARABLE In 1785, the French architect Étienne-­Louis Boullée responded to a commission to relocate the Bibliothèque du Roi (Royal Library) to the Palace of the Louvre with one of his most well-­known projects: a vast basilica-­like reading room under a skylit vault, lined at its base with four tiers of books running entirely around its perimeter. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, the project to relocate the library was abandoned; the existing Royal Library was nationalized and became public, and the palace became a museum. Boullée’s proposal, which aligned despotic power with classical learning, has retroactively been celebrated as “revolutionary” for giving form to an Enlightenment republic

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of letters, the sort of communicational public sphere thought to be necessary for informed democratic citizenship, on a grand scale. Like the actually existing Royal/National Library, had it been realized, Boullée’s project could possibly have functioned as such. It also could have functioned as an apparatus of state control or as an archetypal medium of immaterial production. As it is, it would be most accurate to regard the project as a ruined monument to monarchy that entered circulation as an enigmatic sign, that is, a nonfictitious unit of rereadable information that is now stored and circulated in books and silicon chips, which are in turn hooked up, rather uncannily in this case, to media complexes into which the project’s dream of universal knowledge—­and communication—­has been tendentiously deformed. Such media complexes are cobbled together from the leftover infrastructures of incomplete or obsolete sovereignties. As Marx famously said of revolutions, “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”19 In Boullée’s day, a real palace, at the brink of revolution, begets an imaginary royal library, which in turn yields to a bourgeois state museum. Today, governments, corporations, and other bits and pieces of modernity combine to produce sovereign networks, all the nodes of which—­including museums and libraries in the great metropolis, and satellites orbiting the earth—­belong to the neoliberal republic of property. If another, common world is to be assembled out of these networks, it would necessarily include the richly textured ruins of the public, as a medium and as a message.

5 HORIZONS OF THOUGHT

Earth is our commons. But it is also, after all, merely a locus,

a locale. As if to remind us of this ineluctable fact, on August 25, 2012, or thereabouts, the Voyager 1 space probe left our solar system. We know this because on that earthly day, the density of ionized plasma particles the probe encountered while hurtling through space decreased sharply, indicating that it had crossed the horizon created by the sun’s magnetic field.1 That horizon forms the heliosphere, a plasma bubble within which our solar system is enclosed. Its radius is approximately 122 astronomical units (AUs). One AU is approximately 150 million kilometers in length, the average distance separating Earth from the sun, which means that the radius of the heliosphere, and hence of the solar system, is roughly 18.3 billion kilometers. Voyager 1 was launched by the American space agency NASA in 1977. Its primary mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn. In late 1980, after passing closely by Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which is of particular scientific interest because of the atmospheric properties it is thought to share with the primeval Earth, the probe began its journey out of the solar system. As it did so, it continued to record observational data, the quantity of which was limited by the capacity of the probe’s 1970s-­style  // 85

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eight-­track-­tape storage bank. Nevertheless, NASA was able to extract sufficient data from the now-­obsolete machine to confirm with relative confidence its historic crossing, which will likely be repeated by its companion probe, Voyager 2. Along with the data comes a certain melancholy. Unlike the ongoing exploration of Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover, or indeed Voyager 1’s earlier encounter with Titan, both of which have tested the possibility of extraterrestrial life or future human habitation, passage beyond the heliosphere suggests little more than profound interstellar loneliness. The echoes of anthropocentrism audible in references to earthly scale, such as the Earth-­to-­sun metric of the astronomical unit, vanish like the diminishing signals from the probe’s transmitter. Any remaining reference to human experience, including the human life span or even humanity’s recorded history, is effectively canceled by the realization that Voyager 1 will not encounter another star, or another solar system, for another forty thousand years or so. My purpose in recounting this story is twofold. First, it recalls the persistence of what the mid-­twentieth century called the “measure of man,” or the habit of describing space, even interplanetary space, in terms relative to perceptible human scale and human experience. Second, it introduces the problem of the horizon in a manner that correlates that scale with certain untimely thoughts. “The time is out of joint” was Jacques Derrida’s way of anachronistically citing Shakespeare to conjure what he called the “specters of Marx” after the fall of the Berlin Wall.2 In that spirit, I want to follow the path of Voyager 1 and try, with the help of another author, to conjure another time entirely, in order to gather some lines that draw our historical present. The year, this time, is 2026. The spaceship Ares carries a multicultural group of one hundred scientists and engineers, plus one stowaway, on a nine-­month journey to colonize Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy—­Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars—­does not quite begin with this scene. Rather, it begins with the assassination some years later of the colonists’ charismatic leader and hints at the power struggle to follow.3 The books’ titles, which encompass some two thousand pages

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of intricate detail in the best utopian tradition, refer to the different stages of Mars colonization: red, for the lifeless, geological purity of the planet as found, without a viable atmosphere to speak of; green, for the network of verdant settlements that appear first under climate-­controlled domes and, later, for the gradual appearance of a manufactured, oxygenated atmosphere along with the artificial thaw of polar ice and the consequent spread of primal vegetation genetically engineered to thrive in the harsh conditions; and blue, for the final planetary melt in a controlled deluge that produces seas and continents, along with a comprehensive, Earthlike atmosphere and weather, in which humans can at last live without prosthetic breathing devices or insulated suits. This vastly accelerated process of warming the red planet, wrapping it in oxygen and nitrogen, and propagating animal and vegetal species is called “terraforming.” It is the source of most, if not all, of the planet’s political turmoil over the course of the three volumes. Terraforming is a science fiction staple, with some basis in extant geoengineering techniques. Of the story’s main characters, whose intertwined lives the narrative follows, nearly all are members or offspring of the “first hundred.” Initially the spaceship Ares is their heterotopia, then Mars itself. Each character figures metonymically with a distinct political shade or position relative to the terraforming process. Many move in and out of the twenty-­plus Martian political parties, either as leaders or as charismatic symbols. At one pole of the political debate are the fundamentalist Reds, who want at all costs to conserve the planet’s barren geology in its primal state; at the other pole are the developmentalist Greens, who advocate “viriditas,” or the inexorable proliferation of life. Both have quasi-­theological dimensions. The most extreme Reds, figured in the renegade geologist Ann Clayborne, practice a monastic asceticism devoted to the primal beauty of the planet’s barren surface, while the more devout Greens hew to a cult of viriditas led by Hiroko Ai, a guru-­like bioengineer. Crisscrossing the Red–­Green polarity is a myriad of other this-­not-­that dialectical oppositions. These include nested

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movements between the secular and the religious, between the rational and the irrational, between pure and applied science, between male and female, and even a somewhat fudged dialectic between capitalism and communism. Each axis in this multidimensional matrix brings its own subplots and contradictions, beginning with the ambiguous political valence of the colors red and green themselves (despite Robinson’s manifest debt to Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star of 1908). But the trilogy’s dialectic is incomplete without the Mars–­Earth axis itself, materialized in the great space elevator installed on Mars at which space shuttles dock in orbit to discharge their loads in order to ease the energy demands of interplanetary travel imposed by gravity and atmospheric friction—­before, that is, the entire elevator winds up wrapped twice around the planet following an act of revolutionary sabotage that takes it down and reorients the narrative toward a violently contested future. I feel comfortable in referring to the dialectical structure of this popular science fiction series because, for one, its author, Kim Stanley Robinson, holds a PhD in English from the University of California at San Diego and is well schooled in dialectical thought. His doctoral thesis, which he completed in 1982, analyzed the novels of Philip K. Dick; among his mentors was the Marxian literary theorist Fredric Jameson. Robinson credits Jameson with introducing him to Marxism and to literary theory.4 In turn, Jameson has written about Robinson’s work, most notably in the concluding chapter of his Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). The title of that chapter, which was first published in 2000, is “‘If I Find One Good City I’ll Spare the Man’: Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.”5 For Jameson, the realism indicated in his subtitle is exemplified by one of the trilogy’s central characters, the problem-­solving scientific polymath Sax Russell, for whom, as Jameson puts it, “external reality organizes itself into a problem” to which science responds. But at some level at some point, the scientific solution or explanation encounters a limit, thus presenting what Jameson calls a “resistance.” Scientific knowledge emerges

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dialectically out of this resistance while remaining ontologically bound by what Robinson’s scientist hero calls “the great unexplainable.”6 The obdurate resistance of reality to comprehensive explanation is both generative and secular. Following the more conventional arc of descriptive literary realisms, which, as in architecture and the visual arts, are commonly said to have been superseded by abstract, reflexive modernism, this resistance is gradually shown, by Jameson, to be a novelistic conceit. It is a fiction comparable to the impenetrable puzzle erected at the outset of a mystery novel only to be solved by the novel’s end. Modernism turns the tables on this type of realism by examining reflexively how it is produced, in the process upending narrative, figuration, and representation. However, even at its most dogmatic, a modernist (and eventually postmodernist) attention to the constructedness of realist narratives, and ultimately of scientific facts, does not automatically cancel or relativize the underlying reality, as simplistic critiques of poststructuralist theory would have it. Instead, it raises that reality to the second degree. As Jameson puts it, still referring indirectly to the pages and pages of scientific and parascientific description packed into Robinson’s Mars trilogy, “Behind the theory of social construction . . . lies praxis and human production itself, which makes a mockery of realism’s staged mystery stories.”7 In short, Mars is a mirror. Terraforming, in this formulation, is a dialectical procedure by which both a particular, a priori reality—­Martian geology—­and its potential human constructions come into view, rather than simply replacing one order of being (geological, primal, Red) with another (biological, cultural, Green). To this dialectic Jameson adds the Earth–­Mars axis. For him, that axis secures the properly utopian character of Robinson’s series, as the dystopia of progressively dire conditions on Earth and the resulting interplanetary migration put increased pressure on the fragile Martian ecosystem. The space elevator, its destruction, replacement, and eventual multiplication, together with the 54.6 million kilometers separating the two planetary orbits and the variety of techno-­social arrangements devised to span

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the distance, is the structural equivalent of the geoengineered trench separating the island of Utopia from the mainland in Thomas More.8 An asymmetrical back-­and-­forth runs between a still-­recognizable Earth, ruled by “metanational” corporations and weak states and subject to extreme global warming and overpopulation, and, following a second revolution, an agonistically democratic and pluralistic Mars. The ensuing Earth–­Mars relationship is, however, only apparently dichotomous. Not only does the Red–­Green dialectic mirror the terms of actually existing environmental politics on today’s Earth, but also the fictional interplay of utopia and dystopia, elaborated in matter-­of-­ fact, realist prose, reflexively marks the limits and blind spots of those same politics. Within this schema, in the trilogy, the literal and figurative distance from Earth elicits, for Jameson, the cognitive estrangement necessary to achieve on Mars what he calls a “polyphonic” utopianism, or “a struggle between a whole range of utopian alternatives, about which [the trilogy] deliberately fails to conclude.”9 Jameson concludes by naming the mysterious abolition of money as the narrative’s most basic, unexplained (and therefore overdetermined) utopian premise. However, neither he nor Robinson directly takes up what is arguably the trilogy’s more vexing epistemological problem. Among its ingenious technological conceits, described in exhaustive parascientific detail, are the exploitation of the Martian planet’s geology and hydrology, the epic harnessing of solar energy with a giant space mirror, the mining of satellites, the chemical construction of an atmosphere, and even the evolution of a new quasi-­species of taller, more agile humans in the diminished Martian gravity. However, given all the detailed technical invention elsewhere, arguably more mysterious even than the abolition of money is the existence of something called the “gerontological treatments,” or merely “the treatments.” These treatments, which have to be readministered every few decades, virtually eliminate disease and prolong human life by an unknown extent, which is thought to be hundreds or even thousands of years. Two of the original Mars scientist-­colonists were instrumental in their develop-

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ment and implementation. From the outset, the longevity treatments are the basis for a socioeconomic apartheid that rebounds racially, gradually constructing two categories of humans. On Earth, access to the treatments requires considerable private means, membership in “metanational” corporate life (which provides the treatments as a sort of employee benefit), or status as a Mars colonist. Anyone without such access is condemned to live entirely outside the sphere in which the trilogy’s principal contest between Red and Green utopias occurs. Vastly increased longevity, even for a minority of Earth’s population, leads quickly to a massive population explosion and, hence, to political pressure to increase Mars migration quotas, particularly from large countries like India and China and their corporate patrons. These migrations in turn threaten the Martian ecology, an effect that generates profound political struggle on Mars and is opposed with particular vehemence by the red planet’s conservationist faction. In this sense, the Earth–­Mars axis poses what Friedrich Engels called the “housing question” at the planetary scale of mass migration, but locates it mainly on the ecological plane. Meanwhile, back on Earth, the situation becomes critical when a subterranean volcanic eruption fractures and melts the West Antarctic ice cap, flooding coastal cities and dramatically accelerating the greenhouse effect, resulting in full-­scale planetary warming. Somewhat less remarked by either Robinson or Jameson are the more immediate consequences of the apartheid, and in particular the biomedical (and hence biopolitical) divisions that it engenders. The starkest division, separating those who have received the treatments from those who have not, potentially leads to more sustained human precariousness than do the divisions separating inland populations from coastal ones after the deluge, or indeed Earth from Mars. In this respect, the epic Red–­Green struggle that unfolds in the Mars trilogy as well as its peaceful resolution are based on a prior distinction between the radically extended species-­being of those who might live a thousand years and the radically attenuated species-­being of those who will not. Nor is life span the sole consequence of the

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new order, for the biomedical apartheid incites a whole range of peripheral conflicts. Countries and metanational managers face intense pressure from below to address their underserved populations, which include both the ageless generations piling up in overcrowded cities and towns, and the subproletariat of the untreated, who are ever present just over the horizon. But when revolution occurs, it occurs on Mars, not on Earth, and not as a result of these raw conflicts but, ostensibly, as a separatist fight over ecological custody of the planet and its resources that devolves into a civil war among two groups—­the Reds and the Greens—­who have already benefited from the longevity treatments and are therefore able to participate in the utopian project in the first place. In this sense, the earthly (or Terran) biopolitical conflict over access to the treatments inverts the terms of the Martian ecological conflict of development-­ versus-­ conservation. On Earth, those who remain closest, medically speaking, to the biological state of nature are at risk of eventually being classified as subhuman in relation to those who have had full access to the longevity treatments. What is most natural is therefore most precarious. Meanwhile, on Mars, the conservationist, naturalist imperative is repeatedly invoked as a moral ideal by those already treated. The changing horizontal stratum at the crest of the planet’s new atmosphere sets the mark, below which is Green construction and above which is Red nature. Thus, the entire dialectic of Red conservationist utopias and Green developmentalist ones—­Mars as a test, a lesson for Earth—­depends on the partition of the earthly human species into two groups: those who have access to the longevity treatments and those who do not. The first, treated group participates in the test, and hence in the contradictions and reflexivity of utopian thought along the doubled-­up Earth–­Mars, Red–­Green axes; the second, untreated group does not, by virtue of having been written out of the equation (and indeed the story) almost entirely. Just as the abolition of money is described but not fully accounted for in the series, the eventual erasure of this divide, with the full Terran population gradually gaining access to the

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treatments, is noted but not explained. Is this the final triumph of the realist utopia, in which problem-­solving scientific enterprise finally domesticates obdurate nature, including the nature of life itself, and transcends the resistance of the political with its solutions? Or is it the opposite: the triumph of the real—­of politics, in the form of structural exclusion—­over even the most dialectically uncompromising, plural, and “polyphonic” utopia? By “real” here, I do not mean natural. I mean prior, preexisting, in the sense that the biomedical, biopolitical apartheid I have been describing preexists and supports the manifest political content of Robinson’s three books. What is real about it is not the scientific or biological plausibility of the gerontological treatments, or even the way in which these mimic or allegorize similar divisions among actually existing earthlings, as when Robinson rather offhandedly describes the splendid touristic isolation of one native Martian visiting the picturesque ruins of Crete: “The rest of Earth, however, was Calcutta.”10 What is real about the biomedical apartheid is the way it circumscribes or limits the political allegory of the Mars trilogy. The apartheid is not in itself dialectical; it marks an a priori horizon, internal to the narrative yet only partially acknowledged by it, which makes the dialectics of “utopia” and “realism” possible in the first place. Elsewhere, Jameson has persuasively argued that the true vocation of utopian thought is not to think utopia but to reveal its very unthinkability under present conditions. The question is therefore not simply “What must change?” but rather “What must change so that change will be thinkable?” Hence, the most forcefully utopian question posed by the Mars trilogy is not “Red or Green?” or even “Earth or Mars?” It is “How could this be?” How could the dialectic of utopia and realism, and hence the mirror/model that is Mars, be built on another, even more stark reality that passes nearly unnoticed by the dialectic? Which returns us to where we began, with Voyager 1’s exit from the heliosphere. Among the most fantastical sections of Robinson’s Mars trilogy are those in the third book, Blue Mars, which describe the further colonization of the outer solar

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system. There, Mars’s original pluralism is multiplied into the diverse characteristics imposed on various terraforming missions by the specific geological, meteorological, and atmospheric conditions of the other planets and their satellites, and the myriad technological, cultural, and political-­economic responses to these conditions. Among the most architecturally innovative is a Superstudio-­esque continuous monument known as Terminator that glides slowly along tracks wrapping Mercury’s equator, its imperceptible, steady movement propelled by the differential expansion of the tracks when exposed to the sun’s intense heat as the planet rotates, keeping the city just beyond the horizon in permanent, protective shadow. Others include Jupiter’s asteroid belt, which now contains mines and settlements carved into individual asteroids, as well as the four big Jovian moons, known as the Galileans—­Callisto, Ganymede, Io, and Europa—­ all with massive illumination projects to compensate for the minimal direct sunlight they receive. Still another is the restless settler colony on Oberon, one of Uranus’s moons, whose inhabitants already have their sights set on Pluto and its largest satellite, Charon. Indeed, by the conclusion of the third book, the entire solar system has become to Mars what Mars once was to Earth: a colonial frontier in which are reflected all the aspirations, conflicts, and ideological struggles of the home planet. Now, however, these are no longer spread in microcosm in small settlements across the Martian landscape; they are spread in macrocosm across the solar system itself. Subsequently, in his quasi-­ sequel, 2312, Robinson has explored the ensuing “balkanization” via an interplanetary whodunit-­cum-­romance that begins in Mercury’s Terminator and ricochets around the solar system.11 Mixed in with Martian, Venusian, Saturnine, Jovian, and Mercurial provincialisms and interdependencies, as well as a whole solar system’s worth of communitarian tensions and alliances, is still the underlying biomedical apartheid, which now separates genetically modified, sexually hybridized “spacers” from multitudinous, untreated earthlings. Periodically, the narrative dwells

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on the persistent and growing gulf between the two, such as when a protagonist passes through a subaltern (and partially submerged) Jersey City and picks up a refugee who, arriving on Venus, becomes pivotal to the story—­a story that rehearses a primary, nondialectical partition imposed on the human species by itself, an internal horizon that the refugee, and only the refugee, crosses. This is where the reality of Voyager 1, having crossed the gaseous frontier and left to hurtle through the interstellar void, joins the utopianism of the Mars trilogy. As a scientific probe, Voyager’s weakening signals, stored on eight-­track tape, continue to record human encounter with the material universe in a fashion as realist as any of Robinson’s fictional scientist heroes. But its hidden utopianism does not lie in the distant promise of one day populating the solar system with human settlements, a promise that, as the Mars trilogy reminds us, merely lays out for inspection all the conflicts and contradictions of present-­day earthly existence. Nor does its utopianism lie in the promise of yet farther horizons. Its utopianism, which is also its realism, lies in what it conceals as much as what it reveals: that the horizons of thought are where the sky and the ground meet. These horizons encompass the 122 AUs that now separate us from Voyager 1. All of human history is contained in that distance, as is the inability to see simultaneously the starry skies and the ground on which we stand. Both are real, but, as the Mars trilogy also implies, truly utopian thought recognizes that the question of how to inhabit the skies is preceded by the question of how to inhabit the Earth, rather than alternative to it. Utopia, then, is a down-­to-­earth thought, as mundane and unexciting as reopening the housing question. When Hannah Arendt began The Human Condition with the image of the Sputnik 1 satellite orbiting Earth, she observed that the event was greeted in the American press by “relief ” about what one report called a “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.” Recognizing that in Sputnik science had merely realized and ratified ordinary dreams, “neither wild nor idle,” that had theretofore been restricted to the “the highly

Horizons of Thought // 96

non-­respectable literature of science fiction,” she warned that “the banality of the statement should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was.”12 Leaving aside the overtones of another “banality” (Arendt, of course, would later write of the “banality of evil” in reference to the perpetrators of the Holocaust), her emphasis on the ordinariness of the sentiment is striking. It is with some irony, then, that history has turned the tables and has led us down a path in which the extraordinary has become an all-­enveloping fact, a planetary prison of our own making. Over the past decade or so, scientists and some historians have begun to characterize the period since 1800 as marking the threshold of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by the vastly expanded impact of human civilizational activity on the biological, chemical, and physical matter of Earth. Many have argued that the period begins with the first phase of industrialization in Europe and in North America, which, by extension, includes industrial capitalism, the nation-­state, modern imperialism, the expansion of the slave trade, the institutionalization of the human sciences and the natural sciences, and numerous socialist experiments, among other things.13 All of these historical processes and many more have played their role in human-­induced, or anthropogenic, changes to Earth’s systems that now threaten what Marx called, in a moment of underappreciated foresight, humanity’s “species-­being.” To limit the damage, some scientists have proposed establishing “planetary boundaries” specific to critical biological and physiochemical processes.14 Allowing environmental change to cross these boundaries risks condemning Earth and its inhabitants to a profoundly uncertain and perilous future. Optimistically, Robinson’s books tell of an escape from such boundaries, if only to find new, even more fragile ones elsewhere as settlers struggle violently over whether and how to replicate Earth’s ecosystems on a geoengineered Mars. Meanwhile, imprisoned on the other end of the Earth–­Mars axis, and reflecting the prospect of a terraformed Earth as a means of reversing the effects of climate change, Robinson describes his work

Horizons of Thought // 97

as an attempt “to write the realism of the 21st century.”15 But even as we acknowledge the reflexivity of Mars-­as-­mirror, we might prefer to consider the Mars trilogy as a counterhistory. On the one hand, the narrative is replete with techniques for rebalancing Earth’s systems that might awaken, in a dialectical fashion, a planetary consciousness adequate to the scale of the anthropogenic crisis. On the other hand, its particular form of utopianism vividly shows Earth’s predialectical internal divisions, blind spots, and horizons being reproduced externally. In so doing, the trilogy, like Voyager 1’s weakening signal transmitted with obsolete hardware, reminds us that where we are going both is and is not where we have been. The ordinariness of this extraordinary fact, which has quietly presided over the centuries in which modernity has unfolded, might cause us, in the spirit of science fictions long gone, to “look backward” at ourselves looking forward, if only to realize that it is here that the real horizons lie.

6 POLIS = OIKOS

C

an political life be described in properly spatial terms? The question has been asked many times, often enough with the classical polis as a principal referent. Not necessarily coincident with the city or the city-­state per se, the polis is, as Hannah Arendt would have it, a “space of appearance” before others for the purposes of “acting and speaking together” in a political fashion.1 Although Arendt uses the term in a general sense, she locates its origins in Periclean Athens, where citizens frequently gathered in the urban space of the agora, or marketplace. Although she notes that “tyrants” had persistently sought to transform the Greek agora into “an assemblage of shops like the bazaars of oriental despotism,” Arendt does not mention the most visible monument to the polis as a site of political speech.2 That would have been the bouleuterion, or council chamber, located in the Athenian agora’s central precinct, where five hundred or so propertied male citizens, serving as representatives of the people (or demos), assembled regularly to debate and vote on day-­to-­day political matters and attend to the daily business of the city-­state. Stretched to its widest scope, this scene constitutes an imaginary ground on which the figure of democracy has been erected over the past three centuries or so in Euro-­American po // 98

Polis = Oikos // 99

litical discourse. It does not, however, account for the topologies that underlie that figure. Reconstructed archaeologically, the bouleuterion exhibits several distinct, although hardly unique, topological characteristics: separation from dwelling houses, inward orientation, and enclosure. Another space, however, more decisively locates the polis as topos. During the city-­state’s periods of democratic rule, once a month, six thousand or so Athenian citizens would gather in a popular assembly on the Pnyx. In contrast to the representative nature of assembly in the bouleuterion, and taking into account the differentiation of the Athenian populace by socioeconomic status and by gender, which limited citizenship and participation in formal political life to male property holders and excluded women and slaves, the Pnyx was nevertheless much closer to being a site of what is now called “direct” democracy. The Pnyx is located on a small hill adjacent to the agora and opposite the ancient Acropolis of Athens. Today it resembles a large earthwork in which a slightly sloped, semicircular, open-­ air auditorium has been cut into the side of the hill, facing inward toward an orator’s podium, or bema. Archaeologists tell us that the Pnyx was constructed in three stages, from the sixth century through the fourth century BCE, although it is unclear whether the third stage was ever completed. Some accounts point out the orientation of the auditorium away from the Acropolis, on the slopes of which earlier assemblies had been held. This seems to indicate a turning away from divine authority in a gesture of what our era might call secularization. Archaeologists do not always agree on how many citizens typically occupied the Pnyx during meetings, although consensus tends toward six thousand, which was the number required for a quorum. All sorts of inducements were tried to encourage or coerce citizens to climb the hill at dawn to attend the meetings, including a stipend for political service not unlike that offered for modern jury service. Relatively little is known about how the assemblies were conducted, including such details as whether participants sat or stood during the deliberations.3 Regardless of these unknowns, it is fair to suggest that the popular assemblies held at the Pnyx

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offer the most accurate paradigm of Arendt’s “space of appearance” in the ancient polis. The popular assemblies also help us to grasp the polis as a set of topological relations—­topological rather than topographical because, by virtue of its location on a hilltop, the Pnyx, like the bouleuterion and like most modern parliaments, though by different means, lies outside the everyday space of the city. It thus helps constitute the polis by way of a primary topological distinction. In Arendt’s schema, as in ancient Athens, the polis stands conceptually differentiated from the household, or oikos, just as the political is differentiated from the social and as outside is differentiated from inside. The household is a site of production and reproduction that, by virtue of being sharply distinguished from the polis while also supporting it, remains subject to despotic rule by the same male citizens who—­in principle, if not in fact—­engaged in monthly democratic deliberations on the Pnyx. In her idealization of the Athenian model, which endorses this division of political life from economic life, or public from private, Arendt tacitly accepts this contradiction. She and many of her interpreters also generalize the underlying topology into an imaginary map or diagram by which any city might be partitioned, in which the “public” space of the polis is opposed to but dependent upon the “private” space of the oikos. To be sure, the opposition of public to private is easily deconstructed, and has been many times. But we might dwell on it for a moment to explore its implications for a political topology adequate to the contemporary city. In a short essay in the exhibition catalog Making Things Public, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, the political theorist Chantal Mouffe summarizes several key aspects of her thought: the irreducible antagonism that defines the political; the differentiation of the political from the social, or the realm of sedimented practices; the role of hegemony in temporarily stabilizing foundational contingencies; and the “taming” of the Schmittian friend–­enemy relation into an agonistic set of we–­ they contests where the adversarial component remains irre-

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ducible but is based on mutual recognition rather than annihilation.4 In a publication for which, in Latour’s introduction, the assembly (and, more surreptitiously, the parliament) acts as a master signifier for political activity, it is not surprising that Mouffe speculates, in the final section of her essay, on what she calls “the consequences for envisaging the public space of the agonistic model of democratic politics.”5 Her answer elaborates the radically democratic pluralism that she and Ernesto Laclau developed as an alternative to the twentieth century’s univocal socialisms, as well as in opposition to a liberal pluralism that equates democracy with an enforced consensus shaped by market-­oriented individualism rather than genuinely adversarial political debate. For an agonistic politics that presupposes irreconcilable positions and interests, Mouffe argues, “public spaces are always plural; the agonistic confrontation takes place on a multiplicity of discursive surfaces.” In acknowledging the evident affinities, she distances herself from Arendt’s agonism, which, notwithstanding its emphasis on plurality and contestation, Mouffe calls an “agonism without antagonism.”6 The problem for Mouffe is that Arendt, like Jürgen Habermas, considers consensus to be the defining feature of political life, albeit via persuasive argumentation rather than rational proof. Hence Mouffe’s concluding exhortation: “What a democratic politics requires is the fostering of a multiplicity of public spaces of agonistic confrontation.”7 This essay succinctly connects the main theses of Mouffe’s work, from the collaboration with Laclau in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy onward, with a spatial imagination by locating the political in a “multiplicity of public spaces.” In taking issue with Arendtian agonism, Mouffe does not explicitly reject the division of public and private on which it is based. On the contrary, she tacitly accepts Arendt’s argument, in The Human Condition, that this distinction, which modernity has gradually obliterated, ontologically grounds the differentiation of the political from the social, however unstable and fugitive that differentiation may be. She and Laclau certainly suggest that “the distinctions public/private, civil society / political society are

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only the result of a certain type of hegemonic articulation.”8 And they define the social as a “non-­sutured space,” crosscut with antagonistic fissures and hence politically constituted.9 Still, it is difficult not to conclude that the “space of appearance” remains paradigmatic of political space as such, for which the Athenian Pnyx stands now as just one among any number of public arenas, large and small, in which the agon, or struggle, might be waged. In some contrast to this notion of the political as lodged in the res publica, which, as Latour reminds us, could just as well be a public “thing” as a public space, a more classically Marxist critique of capitalist modernity would focus on specific sites of production, such as the factory, as topoi of political organization and contestation. During the late 1960s, for example, the Italian workerists responded to the failure of organized labor and the Communist Party to decisively challenge industrial capitalism from the factory floor, by emphasizing historical changes whereby the whole of society had effectively became a site of production. Alternatively formulated as the “social factory” (by Mario Tronti) or the “factory without walls” (by Antonio Negri), this diffusion became central to accounts of informal post-­ Fordist or postindustrial production, in which the older division between workplace and home, or between work and leisure, had, for all practical purposes, been abolished.10 Although most visibly associated with newer forms of intellectual work gathered under the somewhat misleading category of “immaterial labor,” this account of the dispersion or deterritorialization of factory work, and of both exploitation and organized political resistance, is the strict obverse of Arendt’s public sphere. Particularly in its post-­Fordist iterations, the “factory without walls” is nothing other than Arendt’s “household,” or oikos, the realm of the social but also of production and reproduction, generalized. The workerist model, especially as updated by Negri in his recent collaborations with Michael Hardt, thereby matches up with Arendt’s claim that the modern period has seen the replacement of the properly political agon with household administration under the sign of the social.11

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That Hardt and Negri analyze the consequent regime more frequently through the lens of Foucauldian biopolitics than through Arendt’s categories is of lesser importance for us, because, despite their significant differences, the two models converge on this crucial point: Arendt’s animal laborans is the reanimated homo oeconomicus of Foucault’s late reflections on neoliberalism. The economic, in the form of household management, enters into Arendt’s scheme as what Mouffe would call hegemony, as animal laborans overtakes homo faber, the social overtakes the political, and managerial capitalism is consolidated around a human subject reconceived as what Foucault called an entrepreneurial “abilities-­machine” (that is, human capital) in need of biopolitical care.12 Which returns us to Athens. Among the fragmentary evidence that archaeologists have adduced to reconstruct the workings of the Pnyx is a passage from Aristophanes, in his comedy The Assemblywomen, which was most likely written and performed in the fourth century BCE.13 In the play, a group of Athenian women disguised as men leave their respective households at dawn, enter the Pnyx, and join the popular assembly. There, they propose that women rather than men govern the polis, and, because the disguised women are in the majority, they win the vote and assume power. In the play’s opening scene, as the women gather on a city street and don their disguises, they conduct a mock assembly to practice their speeches and decide who among them should address the people. After some unconvincing attempts, the play’s protagonist, Praxagora, emerges as the group’s lead orator. Her practice speech is a blend of accusation (“[Y]ou, the sovereign people, are responsible for this mess!”), logic (“I propose that we turn our governance of the polis to the women, since they are so competent as stewards and treasurers of our households”), and morality (“[T]heir [women’s] character is superior to ours”).14 Aristophanes thus parodies the arts of persuasion around which a properly agonistic polis might form. But what is most interesting for our purposes is that we never see the women at the Pnyx; indeed, we never see the Pnyx at all. Having chosen their

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representative, the women depart for the assembly, and, after a choral interlude and an encounter with the men of Athens dressed in their wives’ clothes (for the women took theirs), the action resumes with Praxagora presiding over a reformed polis. The polis that emerges is essentially communist in that it renders all property common (though slaves remain excluded) and establishes social equality and sexual freedoms. But our question is less how it does so than where it does so. Gradually, the symbolic and practical role of the popular assembly gathered on the Pnyx, by which the new regime was voted in, gives way to sedimented, everyday activities that revolve around food and sex. Whatever political consensus was achieved remains illusory, as it was obtained by deceit. Underlying antagonisms persist. Praxagora makes good on her proposal to “remodel the city . . . into one big household,” but the Pnyx itself remains offstage.15 We can interpret its occult position in three ways: it stands awaiting further political deliberation; it is obsolete, as the postpolitical utopia has been achieved; or it is redundant, as politics has moved into the household. Although the titular characters of Aristophanes’s play are the “assemblywomen” of Athens, their politics are enacted not so much in the assembly, or even in the street where they first rehearse their speeches, as in the day-­to-­day work of governing, where household administration has become paradigmatic. In Mouffe and Laclau’s sense, this is the work of hegemony: the institutionalizing of a dominant regime that brings temporary order to the contingencies around which the agon, or political struggle, plays out. That the rule of women reverses that of men does not fundamentally alter the terms of struggle; it is always possible for the legitimacy of the new government to be debated anew in a popular assembly. The status of the Pnyx as the archetypal space of politics seems thereby preserved, except insofar as women, in the classical polis, are representatives of the social rather than the political. Yes, their actions can most certainly be said to have laid claim on the “space of appearance,” and thereby to have changed valence; but those same actions could equally—­ and quite undecidably—­be said to have annulled that space.

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That is where the constitutive asymmetry lies: in the precedence of public over private in the determination of the polis, and therefore of the political. Remember that one of Praxagora’s arguments to the assembly is that women ought to govern because they are “so competent as stewards and treasurers of our households.” That the assemblywomen achieve their aims in Aristophanes’s play does not simply mean that the historically male polis has been feminized; it also means that the political order as such has been overturned. Already at the alleged point of origin, then, in classical Athens, the polis was capable of being reconceived as a household, an oikos to be governed like a domestic space. That this domestic space writ large could take the place of the “space of appearance” (rather than simply become that space) and still democratically refound the polis is the antiessentialist wager with which we, as moderns, must play. Incomplete and ambiguous though it may be, the possibility announced by Aristophanes is also an answer from within the classical tradition to Mouffe and Laclau’s call to invent new, contingent hegemonies capable of displacing the liberal-­capitalist one that currently presides over the playing fields of the political; not because it puts women in charge but because it designates “housekeeping,” as Arendt derisively called the managerial disposition, as the locus of the political within which—­rather than outside of which—­the agon might occur, in a kind of internalization of the Pnyx made possible by its initial constitution as radically outside: the Pnyx as a paradoxical “space of (dis)appearance.” The wager is also that the social, which, according to Arendt, has neutralized contestation among a plurality of voices, can inaugurate a political topology adequate to Mouffe’s exhortation that we take plurality as foundational rather than circumstantial. This type of political topology, wherein the polis is potentially reconstituted everywhere except in the formal assembly, which remains outside the frame, is related to but also different from that imagined by theorists of a “factory without walls,” in which the social field and the means of production coincide. It shares with these theorists an emphasis on the economic

Polis = Oikos // 106

sphere, in which the social factory—­which Negri would later designate as the “metropolis”—­and the household are one and the same thing. But rather than conceiving the metropolis as a factory writ large, or reverting to the older, Renaissance notion of the city as a large house, it takes seriously the reversal of the political order established by the new hegemony of the social. However much we justly desire and agitate for a more robust public realm, then, such a thing—­a reconstituted res publica—­will remain condemned to repeat its past unless we attend to the more basic repetitions on which it is founded. These are the repetitions of the social: the small, technical rituals by which we are governed and the “abilities” that define human capital, including administrative ones. For hegemony is also repetition; and if we would be wise not to ignore the current order, we would also be wise to consider any hegemony capable of replacing it to be one for which repetition underpins not only political institutions, like the once-­a-­month meetings on the Pnyx, but also social practice, including the day-­to-­day activities of caring for oneself, for others, and for the collective household. Housing is one such repetition. It remains a commonplace among architects and urbanists that housing is a privileged site of political articulation within the city. It would be more accurate to describe it as a site for reproducing the “social,” in Arendt’s sense but also in that of Gilles Deleuze, who, commenting on Jacques Donzelot’s The Policing of Families, described the “rise of the social” as the emergence of a “hybrid form of the public and the private . . . a novel interlacing of interventions and withdrawals of the state.”16 For about a hundred years, the construction and maintenance of housing was a key arena in which socialist and welfare states attempted not only to mitigate the predatory effects of speculative capital but also to “police” (Donzelot’s term) or regulate collective life through the reproduction of social norms, including sexual and gender norms, mainly through the apparatus of the family. Housing has also been a site where these two historical agents—­states and markets—­have brazenly joined forces to secure the reproduc-

Polis = Oikos // 107

tion of capital, predominantly as real estate development. None of this, however, exhausts the real political makeup of what Friedrich Engels called the “housing question.”17 In Engels’s original formulation, that question extended well beyond the proletarianization of workers newly migrated to the great modern metropolis, though this was a motivating concern; it opened onto the inherently political character of the house itself. That, in our own era of informal labor and immaterial production, factory and house seem to have merged only argues further for a thought that is capable of considering the house—­and, with it, housing—­as a site in which the agon repeats, daily. Housing, then, serves not only as a recurrent site of bourgeois reform (as Engels would have it) but also as one among many linked sites in a new political topology. Since the nineteenth century, housing has been most commonly studied typologically, whether in reference to building types or in reference to the social types that inhabit those buildings.18 These types have been naturalized in the halls of culture, including architecture. If Engels regarded both radical and bourgeois responses to the periodic housing shortages afflicting German cities as ideological distractions that obscured capital’s artifice, he nevertheless accepted and deployed the spatial and social typologies with which his discourse equipped him, including that of the worker. Shortly after Engels wrote, around the turn of the twentieth century, iterative spatial techniques for the production of housing became increasingly common. These techniques included standardized unit and building types, construction modules, Taylorized furniture arrangements, factory-­ made fixtures, design standards calibrated to the measurements of statistically “average” or “normal” bodies, and, eventually, prefabricated modular building components. These are the elements through which the social was and still is produced and reproduced with respect to housing. The household, a descendent of the ancient oikos, is the governmental and financial unit of the social. This unit was repeated differently through the course of the twentieth century in modernizing regimes around the world. With each repetition of each household, each housing

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unit, and each standard, the social has been assembled, disassembled, and reassembled. Understood this way, housing is a topological rather than a typological question—­as is the city itself. For we are not speaking of archetypal figures stored in the memory palaces of culture; we are speaking of scaled measurements, statistically derived norms, and regulatory parameters stored in charts, databases, filing cabinets, and hard drives. In these, the apparatuses that formerly distinguished inside from outside, house from city, oikos from polis, “housekeeping” from politics, have been abolished. A universal urbanization, with no absolute inside or outside, has taken their place as the governing hegemony. As Arendt feared, this is the hegemony of the “social,” managed today less by states than by capital. Grasping its topology means tracing the nestings, linkages, networks, inversions, erasures, inclusions, and exclusions through which the new, thoroughly urbanized household, or oikos, is being assembled. Then, and only then, will we have grasped the changing topology of the polis.

7 NOTES ON THE HOUSING QUESTION

In a footnote to the second German edition of The Housing

Question, published in 1887, Friedrich Engels cites a letter from Eleanor Marx Aveling, daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, written from Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 28, 1886: “In, or rather near Kansas City we saw some miserable little wooden huts, containing about three rooms each, still in the wilds; the land cost 600 dollars and was just enough to put the little house on it; the latter cost a further 600 dollars, that is together about 4,800 marks for a miserable little thing, an hour away from the town, in a muddy desert.” To which Engels adds this: “In this way the workers must shoulder heavy mortgage debts in order to obtain even these houses and thus become completely slaves of their employers; they are bound to their houses, they cannot go away, and they are compelled to put up with whatever working conditions are offered them.”1 Eleanor Marx Aveling had been traveling across the United States with her husband, Edward Aveling, and their colleague Wilhelm Liebknecht, lecturing and meeting with American labor organizers to further the socialist project. In an echo of Engels  // 109

Notes on the Housing Question  // 110

reporting on the “condition of the working class” in England in 1844, she recorded the results of her visit in an 1891 publication, coauthored with Aveling and titled The Working Class Movement in America. In a quasi-­ethnographic vein, the authors cite testimony from Bureau of Labor reports published by fifteen states, and they reproduce the epistolary passage quoted by Engels almost verbatim amid a series of quotations from Kansas workers drawn from the first report, which was published by that state’s bureau in 1885.2 By then, there were already two Kansas Cities, joined and split, respectively, by one bridge and by the border separating the state of Kansas and the state of Missouri, with the larger of the cities lying on the Missouri side. On the Kansas side was Wyandotte County, where, in 1879, thousands of “Exodusters,” African American migrants from the post-­Reconstruction south, many of whom were freed slaves or their immediate descendants, arrived via the Missouri River (which divides the cities) in search of Kansan “free soil” for farming or jobs in the two cities’ meat-­packing and railroad industries. Most of the workers quoted in the Bureau of Labor report from which Marx Aveling and Aveling drew were probably white: a plasterer, a tinner, a teamster, a stonemason, a laborer. But they also quote a disconsolate black farmer, a recent migrant and possible Exoduster, who concedes that “I was raised a slave . . . I was better off as a slave.”3 Even the commissioner of labor admitted that “the discontent and dissatisfaction now pervading the country . . . has obtained a strong foothold now upon the soil of Kansas, where only the other day her pioneers were staking out homesteads almost within sight of her capital city.”4 To Marx Aveling’s eyes, that soil was “a wilderness of mud” populated by “bond-­slaves of the large packing and other corporations” as well as by newcomers to “wage-­slavery,” one of whom, a laborer-­minister, she and Aveling cite from the section of the Bureau of Labor report devoted to the Kansas Exodusters: “Their purpose [that is, that of the idle classes] is to keep us poor, so that we shall be compelled to toil for their benefit. I know that our condition is rapidly growing worse, and serious results will surely follow if

Notes on the Housing Question  // 111

something is not done. The coloured people are getting awake on this matter.”5 Aveling and Marx Aveling remark that anyone reading Engels’s earlier writings on the exploitation of workers in Manchester “will see how absolutely parallel are the positions of the English workers in 1844 and of the American in 1887.”6 On this evidence, abject living conditions seem straightforwardly to reflect and reinforce exploitative labor conditions. Correspondingly, Engels regarded the “housing question,” which appeared in European cities as an acute shortage of affordable worker housing, as “among the smaller, secondary evils which result from the present-­day capitalist mode of production.”7 He therefore argued that isolated “solutions” proposed by anarchists like Proudhon or by numerous bourgeois housing experts distracted from the more basic extraction of surplus value from labor.8 Or worse, in promoting social integration through home ownership, these “solutions” drew workers into property relations that bound them to capital, rather than freeing them to organize against it. Engels considered housing, whether rented or owned, as just another commodity in the system of industrial capitalism, subject to the laws of production and circulation that Marx had described for commodities. But was it? When Marx Aveling visited in the mid-­1880s, Kansas City was in the midst of a land-­ speculation boom that resulted in an unprecedented number of new subdivisions, or plats, filed with city government. In this environment, homeowners were investors. Subtly, as African Americans entered the real estate market, often at the most rudimentary level, race acquired an economic meaning that slavery had largely precluded. White middle-­class homeowners and their real estate agents gradually came to regard their black neighbors as indicators of economic risk. Deed restrictions prohibiting black residents became common. In 1903, J. C. Nichols, a recent Harvard graduate, was among those buying land and selling single-­family houses in Wyandotte.9 By 1905, recognizing the opportunities for more lucrative development presented by slum clearance and urban-­

Notes on the Housing Question  // 112

landscaping schemes on the Missouri side, Nichols was developing a ten-­acre tract near a golf course that would become known as the Country Club District, intended for affluent homeowners. There, Nichols systematically applied deed restrictions, including racial covenants excluding prospective African American and Jewish owners, at the scale of an entire community. Among his innovations entailed recording the restrictions both on the property deed granted to the owner and on the corresponding plat maps filed with the state, and supplementing these documents with a well-­organized home owners’ association tasked with enforcing them.10 In consequence, the young real estate developer became known as one of the country’s first, and largest, “community builders.”11 At one level, the whites-­only suburban “communities” that were built across the country by several generations of real estate developers like Nichols conform to Engels’s claim that a house is just another commodity, albeit one in which exclusive social belonging is included in the purchase price. But already race, as an economic category constructed out from underneath the social relations of industrial capitalism, was among the units of exchange: white for white, black for black. If this suggests a biopolitics of housing, it was lodged more firmly in market instruments, such as annotated deeds and plats, than in exclusionary state policy; in Kansas City, racial restrictions on housing circulated much more freely in the property markets than they did in legislation. Despite numerous efforts, white legislators succeeded in passing only one such law.12 At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum from the “communities” secured with these instruments by developers such as Nichols were Kansas City’s working-­class quarters and ghettos. Among the most infamous of the latter was Hell’s Half Acre, along the banks of the Missouri River, which was first settled in the 1860s by black workers building the nearby Hannibal Bridge. Around 1880, Exodusters began moving into shanties in this river “bottoms,” which, though it lacked clean water or sanitation, was near the packinghouses and warehouses in which jobs for unskilled labor were more readily found.13 As an enclave

Notes on the Housing Question  // 113

defined more by class than by race (two-­thirds of its inhabitants were white), Hell’s Half Acre was representative of Kansas City’s mixed racial geography prior to 1900. In the decades that followed, racially charged labor disputes enhanced suspicion and fear, and housing reformers, such as those whom Engels had mocked in Europe for their “moral sermons,” began describing the city’s poor black neighborhoods in terms that linked poverty with moral depravity. Middle-­class white homeowners and their agents linked these factors, in turn, with unstable housing prices.14 By the 1920s, real estate practices tied to this discourse, rather than to exclusionary municipal ordinances (which were relatively few) or to racist terror (which was sporadic), had contributed most durably to residential segregation on the basis of race in Kansas City, Missouri.15 Paradigmatic was Armour Hills, a middle-­class suburb developed by Nichols just south of his Country Club District, again with restrictive covenants barring the sale of houses to blacks.16 Neither the Country Club District nor Armour Hills was “gated” in the sense of fenced in. Instead, the “gates” designed to secure racial homogeneity and to stabilize property values were inscribed on paper, in the deeds and on the plat maps, and guarded by the home owners’ associations. As racist financial instruments such as restrictive covenants and mortgage redlining have been progressively outlawed, however, physical gates unmarked by explicit references to race, ethnicity, or social class—­ but coded thus nonetheless—­have proliferated at the edges of housing developments worldwide. In 1909, the German sociologist Georg Simmel reflected on what he took to be the human propensity for separation and connection, in a short essay titled “Bridge and Door.” Although Simmel likely did not have such examples in mind, we can take the paper gates just described and the physical ones that followed as hardware that “separates the uniform, continuous unity of natural being.”17 As a bridge builder, Simmel says, “the human being is the connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect without separating” while also being “the bordering creature who has no border.” Therefore, “[t]he

Notes on the Housing Question  // 114

enclosure of his or her domestic being by the door means, to be sure, that they have separated out a piece from the uninterrupted unity of natural being. But just as the formless limitation takes on a shape, its limitedness finds its significance and dignity only in that which the mobility of the door illustrates: in the possibility at any moment of stepping out of this limitation into freedom.”18 Twentieth-­century metaphysics called this act of simultaneous separation and interruption “dwelling.” Arjun Appadurai has suggested that, in its materiality, housing literalizes the metaphysics of “dwelling-­ through-­ building” and “building-­ through-­ dwelling” elaborated by philosophers like Martin Heidegger. Although his subject matter is mainly the “communities of garbage” (often surrounded by affluent gated communities) in which residents of today’s Mumbai slums dwell precariously among their own trash and waste as “disposable” citizens of “disposable cities,” Appadurai is, of course, referring to Heidegger’s celebrated address “Building Dwelling Thinking,” delivered to architects at a 1951 conference in Darmstadt titled “Man and Space.”19 Rereading Heidegger, one gets the inescapable impression that he had reread Simmel to prepare for his lecture to the architects. Bridges are everywhere in the lecture, as are, though less visibly, doors. For what is Heideggerian space—­Raum—­if not a room with a door, a gate, a mediating instrument that continuously brings into being “inside” and “outside” even as it connects them, just as a bridge brings into being “here” and “there”? Speaking in the midst of postwar West German reconstruction, Heidegger could not fail to raise the housing question. As he says at the outset of his talk, “In today’s housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today’s houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but—­do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?”20 Heidegger defines housing as a “shelter for the fourfold,” by which he means a building that simultaneously “admits” and “installs” the fourfold unity of “earth and

Notes on the Housing Question  // 115

sky, divinities and mortals.” Counterintuitively, his principal example of a “thing in which one dwells,” with dwelling understood as selfless being rather than mere unalienated life, is not a house but a bridge. In saying of bridges that they are “housings” (Behausungen), in that they define locations by gathering earth and sky, here and there into an interminable relation, Heidegger transfers the housing question to the metaphysical plane.21 Appadurai finds it there and wrests it away from Heidegger’s idealized German peasants on behalf of the residents of Mumbai’s Dharavi and other inhabitants of what Mike Davis has called a “planet of slums.”22 Elsewhere, Appadurai describes the “transcultural bridge-­ building” practices of activist slum dwellers (whose lives, it must be said, ironize the Heideggerian terminology), linked up into interregional and transnational networks, such as the Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), as manifesting a “cosmopolitanism from below.”23 His notion of a “micro-­” or “counter-­” cosmopolitanism free of “an abstract valuation of the idea of humanity”24—­ translocal, multilingual, and aspirational—­ seizes upon what we can call a “right to dwell,” expressed in celebrations such as the “toilet festivals” mounted by the Mumbai Alliance and its constituent groups, the Society for the Protection of Area Resource Centres, Mahila Milan (a housing organization of female sex workers), and the National Slum Dwellers Federation.25 These festivals “feature the exhibition and inauguration not of models, but of functioning public toilets designed by and for the poor, incorporating complex systems of collective payment and maintenance with optimal conditions of safety and cleanliness.”26 As with the resourceful recycling of middle-­class waste materials into the hardware of dwelling that is typical of urban slums, the toilet festivals invert official development discourse, focused on sanitation, into what Appadurai calls a “politics of shit” that relocates the profound infrastructural inadequacies of the urban slums—­the lack of running water, the absence of sewers, the prevalence of waterborne diseases, and the daily gendered humiliations of public defecation—­as a site of “deep democracy,” or the organized, collective process

Notes on the Housing Question  // 116

by which housing residents find “ways to place some distance between their waste and themselves.”27 All of this may seem a far cry from the slums of Kansas City in the 1880s, when Eleanor Marx Aveling visited the city and reported on the condition of its working classes, which, for Engels, came down to the exploitation of working bodies, plain and simple. Rewriting the housing question, Appadurai’s emancipatory poetics of slum dwelling, which he extends elsewhere into an analysis of “spectral” home ownership in a Simmelian “city of cash,” seems to do two things at once.28 First, it offers a post-­Marxist account of subproletarian rural-­to-­urban migrants who, like Kansas City’s Exodusters, improvise their precarious lives in self-­made shacks at the very edges, perhaps the disposable edges, of capitalist development. Second, it attributes to those lives an unromantic dignity by refiguring them in terms of a cosmopolitan right to dwell and, in the process, rescuing, or so it seems, the philosophy of dwelling from its nationalist, racialized overtones. However, reading Simmel’s “Bridge and Door” together with his two slightly earlier essays on the modern metropolis, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) and “The Stranger”(1908), and reading these, in turn, in relation to his magnum opus of 1900, The Philosophy of Money, offers another option. Where the book vividly discerns a modernist aesthetics of calculation in the money form, the two subsequent essays transpose that aesthetics onto the city. Recognizing its modernism, we can call this an “aesthetics of estrangement” quite distinct from Appadurai’s carnivalesque poetics of slum dwelling, in that Simmel associates the “mental” or emotional life of the Großstadt, or metropolis, with detachment (the “blasé attitude”). The social bond he sketches, which is closer to economically enforced trust than to emotive belonging, reverses the valences proposed by Ferdinand Tönnies by subordinating Gemeinschaft (organic community) to Gesellschaft (association). Simmel’s representative figure, the stranger, “comes today and stays tomorrow,” but, like Simmel himself, who was Jewish, the stranger is definitionally subject to nonnegotiable exclusions.29

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Think Appadurai’s countercosmopolitans, then, together with Simmel’s stranger, the houseguest of the money economy. Even more improbably, translate Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city,” which sublimates Heideggerian “building” into the city-­ as-­oeuvre, into a “right to estrangement.”30 And consider this scene, which Appadurai describes: Another “toilet festival” of sorts takes place in 2001, when SDI representatives erect a housing exhibition featuring a model shelter with model toilets, in the lobby of the UN General Assembly in New York. UN secretary-­general Kofi Annan and UN Centre for Human Settlements executive director Anna Tibaijuka mingle in the exhibit with the SDI activists in what Appadurai calls a “magical” instance of the global poor speaking directly, through their material dwellings, to concentrated metropolitan power.31 The modernist UN lobby, the very emblem of “cosmopolitanism from above,” is converted briefly into an urban slum. But one cannot help but imagine that in exchange, the activists—­they too are moderns—­ceded their collective right, if we can call it that, not to speak, not to exhibit their housing, not to show the cosmopolitans how to do it; in short, a right to close the door. Surely from a strategic point of view, this would be folly, or worse. Appadurai robustly emphasizes the widely acknowledged necessity of dispossessed groups gaining and exercising “voice” in negotiating durable political change.32 But on the metaphysical plane where he places that voice in relation to cosmopolitan exchange, the right to estrangement is everything. Presumably the public toilets exhibited at the United Nations had doors, which, among other things, protected the privacy of women who, as Appadurai reminds us, would no longer be forced to defecate in the fields at night. These toilets would thereby also have been bridges, engineered devices that, far from cleaving a nearness of humans to the natural world, produced a rudimentary distance “between their waste and themselves.” This bridging, which is also a separating, is the other side of the cosmopolis; the stranger is defined by the bridges she or he crosses and the doors through which she or he passes, regardless of whether the distance traversed is one meter or half

Notes on the Housing Question  // 118

the globe. The right to close the door in reaffirmation of that distance may seem, like the gates written into the paperwork of American cities, a weapon of the dominant classes. But more deeply, exercising that right may yet gain the freedom of distance for the same subject—­a slum dweller below, a city dweller above—­whose paradoxical humanity it secures: separated and connected at once. That this humanity has often been defined racially, especially when it comes to dwelling, suggests that when we speak of housing, we are not only speaking of ways in which humans exploit other humans through the commodity form; we are also speaking of ways in which the commodity form, as housing, secures humans as subjects who dwell rather than as strangers who do not. This is the “community” built by real estate. But, like the railroad bridge built across the Missouri River by black migrants living in Hell’s Half Acre, its doors are another matter entirely.33 Bernhard Siegert quotes Theodor Adorno from Minima Moralia, who rather innocently surveyed the American scene in 1944: “The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. They live, if not in slums, in bungalows that tomorrow may already be leaf-­huts, trailers, cars, camps, or the open air. The house is past.”34 Adorno, having already concluded that “dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible,” went on less innocently to describe the bombing of European cities and the concentration camps as mere “executors” of the immanent technological obsolescence of houses, which were “now good only to be thrown away like old food cans.”35 Unaware, most likely, of the actual piles of debris upon which actual slum dwellers were already beginning to dwell, Adorno continued by quoting Nietzsche: “It is even part of my good fortune not to be a house-­ owner.” At which he seemed to pause: “Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”36 This sentiment had already been expressed by Engels in the previous century, although more straightforwardly, when he mocked the Proudhonist romance of “hearth and home” as training into capital, an inflection that is also legible in Nietzsche’s irony,

Notes on the Housing Question  // 119

however indirectly. Siegert, associating door handles with the last possibility of dwelling, shows how a paradoxical, homeless “door logic” is embodied in Franz Kafka’s bureaucrat gatekeeper in “Before the Law,” who prevents a man from passing through an open door. Architectural modernism only literalizes this logic by attempting to abolish the door swing, which, belonging to the “epoch of the door handle,” repetitiously secured the laws of inside and outside: “Modern doors have irretrievably forfeited their nomological for a cybernetic function. The basic distinction of inside and outside has been replaced by the distinction between current / no current, on/off.”37 Siegert is referring to the logic gate, of which Jacques Lacan observes, “Once the door is open, it closes [no current]. When it is closed, it opens [current].”38 But is the logic of a gate the same when it comes to the real abolition of dwelling? To an extent yes, if we recall the barriers to entrance into all-­white “communities” established on paper. These were not only mechanical instruments designed to separate an inside from an outside while letting approved persons pass; they were also symbolic ones meant to bind that “community” together. This, we can now say, is the real function of the gates that define today’s gated communities: especially when open, they are closed. These things are mediators, infrastructural elements that secure subjectivity by sheer repetition. Through them, strangers linked and separated by bridges and doors, rather than dwellers in wealth or waste, pose the housing question differently, again.

8 BROKEN WINDOWS

Let x = x. —­Laurie Anderson, Big Science, 1982

H

ere is an equation: Oj = Oj(pj, fj, uj), where O is the number of criminal offenses a given individual, j, is likely to commit during a particular period of time, p is the probability of his or her being convicted per offense, f is the punishment per offense, and u is a “portmanteau variable” representing a cluster of other variables, “such as the income available to him in legal and other illegal activities, the frequency of nuisance arrests, and his willingness to commit an illegal act.” The equation was published by the economist Gary S. Becker in “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” an influential article that first appeared in 1968. When generalized, Becker’s equation describes the “supply” of criminal offenses in a given population, in an approach that “follows the economists’ usual analysis of choice and assumes that a person commits an offense if the expected utility to him exceeds the utility he could get by using his time and other resources at other activities.”1 In other words, Becker translates criminal behavior into a rational economic choice describable in logico-­mathematical terms.  // 120

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In the same article, Becker incorporates the overall number of criminal offenses in a given situation, O, into another equation that describes the total societal loss, L, as follows: L = D(O)+ C(p, O) + bpfO, where D is the net cost or damage per offense, p is again the probability of conviction per offense, C is the cost of combating offenses, and b is a coefficient for determining the severity of punishment, f, per offense. This equation establishes a policy-­oriented criterion, L, which enables more than the intuitive optimization of variables. Here is the Nobel-­ winning economist again, at length: If the aim simply were deterrence, the probability of conviction, p, could be raised close to 1, and punishments, f, could be made to exceed the gain: in this way the number of offenses, O, could be reduced almost at will. However, an increase in p increases the social cost of offenses through its effect on the cost of combatting offenses, C [i.e., more police, etc.], as does an increase in f if b > 0 through the effect on the cost of punishments, bf. At relatively modest values of p and f, these effects might outweigh the social gain from increased deterrence. Similarly, if the aim simply were to make “the punishment fit the crime,” p could be set close to 1, and f could be equated to the harm imposed on the rest of society. Again, however, such a policy ignores the social cost of increases in p and f.2

According to Becker, optimal settings depend in part on the behavioral tendencies of the offenders. Theoretically, “risk preferrers” and “risk avoiders” might respond differently to different values of p (probability of conviction) versus bf (severity of punishment).3 In sum, Becker offers a cost-­benefit analysis of criminal behavior from the perspective of the potential criminal that also measures costs and benefits to the state. Referring to Becker’s article as well as to his later work on human capital, Michel Foucault perceives this perspective as characteristic of neoliberal economics, which begins “from the point of view of the person who decides to work [or to commit a crime] rather than from the point of view of capital or of economic mechanisms.”

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But, Foucault emphasizes, this shift takes effect only insofar as the subject is reconstituted as homo oeconomicus.4 Writing much more recently, in 2011, Becker’s former student the urban economist Edward Glaeser credits Becker for pioneering an economic criminology premised on incentivizing compliance through strict enforcement and strict punitive codes. In New York City, these have included New York State’s 1973 “Rockefeller drug laws,” mandating a fifteen-­year sentence for possession of four ounces of illegal drugs, and “broken windows” policing, initiated to broad acclaim in the 1990s by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner Benjamin Bratton, “which calls for strong penalties for even minor infractions, such as jumping subway turnstiles to avoid paying the fare.”5 The underlying theory of law enforcement associated with the latter approach was first advanced by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson in “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” a widely read nine-­page article that appeared in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic. Kelling, a criminologist, worked for the Metropolitan Transit Authority and consulted with the New York Police Department on the theory’s implementation; Wilson was a political scientist who did his graduate work at the University of Chicago. The passage from which the article—­and the policy—­took its name links crime with visible disorder: Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-­breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-­breakers whereas others are populated by window-­lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)6

Most striking about this passage, and about Kelling and Wilson’s argument in general, is that it moves the source of criminality into the physical environment in a manner that blends social

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constructivism with rational choice.7 Put differently, it locates crime in the city’s physical and institutional infrastructures by refiguring those infrastructures as a series of boundary conditions that, like a window, must be maintained. Failure to do so is, in effect, failure to raise the parameter p, the likelihood of conviction, to a sufficiently high level in Becker’s equation, which the new model assimilated even as it revised the former’s utilitarian premises.8 Kelling and Wilson argue that “breaking more windows costs nothing” when environmental indications, or “signals,” are that petty offenders will go unpunished (that is, that “no one cares”), creating a general impression of lawlessness that encourages escalating cycles of criminality. They do not explain, however, why breaking windows (or crime in general) is “fun” and therefore inevitable, only that it must be dissuaded by strict enforcement tactics, which in practice significantly raise incarceration rates such that order visibly reigns over disorder. The policy was implemented in New York through a crackdown on misdemeanor offenses such as jumping subway turnstiles to avoid paying a fare and, most famously, by targeting the city’s “squeegee men” who, unsolicited, washed car windshields at traffic lights in hopes of being paid for their services. The “broken windows” policy was therefore literally infrastructural, in the sense that its paradigmatic sites were subway turnstiles and street intersections. But more importantly, it was infrastructural in the sense that, as boundary conditions, windows—­both real and imaginary—­served as gateways that, like Maxwell’s demon, separated out two states of being, one orderly, the other disorderly, and with them two subject categories.9 A window, here, is a threshold between environmental order and environmental disorder that takes the form of what Kelling and Wilson call a “signal.” It is also, in their account, a filter between orderly and disorderly beings, “not,” as they say, “violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.”10 More generally, a window is a filter between

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“regulars,” who follow the rules (and who “know their place”), and “strangers,” who are viewed with suspicion.11 Regulars do not break windows; strangers might. Urbanists will recognize these categories and the forms of surveillance to which they correspond as the “eyes on the street” promoted by Jane Jacobs and the “defensible space” of Oscar Newman. To be sure, such distinctions, and such ways of ordering the world—­backed up as they are by an armed police force—­invite a Foucauldian reading that rightly emphasizes their social and discursive production. But equally, they invite a reading that takes the distinction between order and disorder as literally as Kelling and Wilson’s would-­be criminals supposedly take a broken window, and, like “strangers” out to have some “fun” by smashing things up, addresses that distinction on the aesthetic plane. For what is aesthetics here but a struggle between Apollonian order and Dionysian “intoxication,” between sanitized “dreams” enforced by the police and “the tumultuous, wild chase across all the scales of the soul under the influence of narcotic stimulants or when the drives of spring are unleashed?”12 That these words are Friedrich Nietzsche’s reminds us that the sobriety of social science is underpinned by a will to power that rests, to some considerable degree, on aesthetic foundations. That is, the foundations of social science remain embedded in the interplay of imagistic dreams and libidinal intoxication. Breaking windows is “fun,” but for whom? for “disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people”? or in the imaginaries of those who wish, above all, to tame the sublime fear of such people—­the fear of strangers—­through the boundless agencies of art, which in this case entails nothing less than the ordering of the world? A Foucauldian reading of “broken windows” discourse also emphasizes that the subject of the “criminal” is, to a significant degree, produced by the discourse of the police, just as the “delinquent” is an outcome—­rather than an a priori category—­ of the carceral apparatus around which Foucault centers his account of the disciplinary society.13 But, compelling as it is, this does not fully explain the mixture of pleasure and pain—­the cal-

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culated mixture of what Kelling and Wilson call “fun” and what Becker calls “cost”—­around which police discourse is organized. For this mixture is surplus to Foucauldian power-­knowledge, which nevertheless remains among its constituent conditions. In an attempt to account for what he calls the “taming of the tenements,” or of the city’s persistent threats, Glaeser notes the more than threefold increase in incarceration that ran parallel to the implementation of “broken windows” policies nationwide, and observes that “[m]illions of young men have been brought into the prison system for non-­violent drug crimes. Some of these men would have done worse things if they had been free, and their incarceration helped reduce crime rates. But many of them would have led perfectly productive lives. The loss of their freedom and future prospects is the terrible price of reducing crime rates by increasing incarceration rates.”14 Revising the cost-­benefit schema, Glaeser suggests, in effect, optimizing for p (probability of conviction) instead of f (severity of punishment) by increasing the number of police in the streets, as New York City did during the 1990s, an investment on the part of the state that he speculates is “at least as cost-­effective as longer prison stays.”15 To this he adds relatively low-­cost examples of optimizing for more efficient policing through enhanced surveillance technologies and the face-­to-­face approach of enlisting community members in the process, a technique known as “community policing.”16 Glaeser makes these recommendations in a popular book titled Triumph of the City, in which the overall message is that the benefits of urbanization outweigh its costs. As with crime, so with everything else; cities are brimming with entrepreneurs, including would-­be criminals. Adjust the equations to incentivize compliance. Minimize cost, but invest wisely in disincentives when necessary. Moreover, in Glaeser’s eyes, cities are a good investment for another, related reason, for they are populated by human capital, or what Foucault called “abilities-­machines.”17 In a near parody, Glaeser speaks of the “concentrated talent” of the big city and celebrates the resourceful, bootstrapping entrepreneurialism of those living in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas who, as

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rural-­to-­urban migrants or descendants thereof, are following a “path to prosperity” that nevertheless brings “fortune to some and suffering to others.”18 Committed as he is to an actuarial language of pros and cons, which he names the “urban paradox” for its naturalizing of the coexistence of wealth and squalor, Glaeser repeatedly concludes that, from a societal point of view, cities, rather than villages or suburbs, represent the investment most likely to pay off, by making us “richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier,” as his book’s subtitle would have it. In this subtitle, and in Glaeser’s discourse more generally, we find telling evidence of an advance in the career of neoliberalism from that which Foucault sketched out so vividly in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978–­1979 under the title “The Birth of Biopolitics.” There, Foucault speaks of “abilities-­ machines” when discussing Becker’s work on criminality and on human capital as exemplifying the emergence of a neoliberal homo oeconomicus, especially in linking investment to education. Foucault asks, “What constitutes this investment that forms an abilities-­machine?” He answers that it can mean hours spent by a mother with her child, or “the simple time parents spend feeding their children, or giving them affection as an investment which can form human capital.”19 Foucault, like Becker, sees this investment as primarily instrumental or utilitarian in character, wherein “abilities” are constituted functionally by being operationalized: parental affection leads, indirectly, to enhanced economic performance. Family life, education, health care, and mobility all extend economic rationality—­the production of human capital—­into realms previously taken as extraeconomic, if not existential, in nature. Hence, for example, [m]igration is an investment; the migrant is an investor. He is an entrepreneur of himself who incurs expenses by investing to obtain some kind of improvement. The mobility of a population and its ability to make choices of mobility as investment choices for improving income enable the phenomena of migration to be brought back into economic analysis, not as pure and simple effects of economic mechanisms which

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extend beyond individuals and which, as it were, bind them to an immense machine which they do not control, but as behavior in terms of individual enterprise, of enterprise of oneself with investments and incomes.20

The neoliberal extension of such entrepreneurialism to the level of populations and its generalization into extraeconomic spheres partially explain why Foucault titled his lectures “The Birth of Biopolitics” and yet spent most of the year on economic theory, barely touching on biopolitics as it is classically understood (a failure for which he repeatedly apologizes in the lectures). It also correlates with Glaeser’s paean to rural-­to-­urban migration as the “path to prosperity.” But Foucault’s underlying productivism (we could even say functionalism) does not fully explain the qualitative rather than purely quantitative rewards promised by urbanization according to Glaeser, for whom an urban population is, yes, a “richer” one but a “smarter, greener, healthier, and happier” one as well. In a subsequent interview, Glaeser, whose father was an architecture curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, deflected a question regarding neighborhood preservation with a disclaimer: “One of the beauties of being an economist, rather than an architect, is I have no standing on aesthetic issues.”21 On the contrary. Standing on the side of order, he, with Becker, Kelling, Wilson, Bratton, and a host of others in the background, continues to build a politico-­economico-­aesthetic discourse, with associated policies, around taming the drunken delinquents and addicts of the postglobal city. In its most recent form, which Glaeser’s work exemplifies, this discourse converts the calculating, Apollonian, rationally choosing homo oeconomicus into an intoxicated Dionysian god. Disclaimers notwithstanding, this new Dionysus is racially marked, a fact that connects the aesthetics of neoliberal urbanism—­fixing broken windows—­with police violence that targets young black men, and the disproportionate incarceration rates that come with it. In 1979, in France, Foucault said of traditional racism that, when compared to the calculations of investment in human

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capital (he gives the example of sociotechnological genetic selection), “while something to be feared,” it “does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment.”22 But Foucault underestimated the constitutive role played by race in elaborating the concept of human capital in the first place. Becker concludes The Economics of Discrimination, an early, market-­based study of racial discrimination first published in 1957 and revised in 1971, with a laconic summary: employers and employees have variable “tastes for discrimination” that lead them to incur various “non-­pecuniary, psychic costs.” A “discrimination coefficient” can be formulated from these variables. These coefficients are, in turn, “influenced by more fundamental variables,” which may be inferred “[b]y relating discrimination coefficients to an economic analysis of price determination through the market mechanism.”23 Correlating such variables with others, such as the relative concentrations of black and white populations in certain job markets, relative levels of education, residential segregation, and so on, Becker produces “a case study in the quantitative analysis of non-­pecuniary variables.”24 Amadou Diallo was a twenty-­three-year-­old Guinean immigrant, described by the New York Times as a “street peddler,” who was actually a subject of entrepreneurial mobility and, as such, a unit of human capital preparing to study computer programming in New York.25 On a February night in 1999, he was struck by nineteen of forty-­one police bullets while standing in his doorway in the Bronx, reaching for his wallet. Diallo was from the postcolony; it is therefore possible, likely even, that his reaching for his wallet was a gesture of deference to the state, an instance of interpellation that reflected the fatal misrecognition of one form of racially profiled policing—­the one that checks your papers—­for another, which fixes windows. Georg Simmel wrote of the window that, unlike the door, its “teleological emotion . . . is directed almost exclusively from inside to outside: it is there for looking out, not for looking in.”26 Walter Benjamin would later reverse this teleology in glimpses through shop windows along history’s “one-­way street,” which ended in an apocalyptic planetarium.27 “Broken windows” po-

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licing neutralizes that teleology. As a “signal,” a window, broken or unbroken, is there to be looked at and decoded rather than looked through. But it is also a “thing” that gathers and locates. Heidegger complained that the “nature of the thing” is all too often understated: “The consequence, in the course of Western thought, is that the thing is represented as an unknown X to which properties are attached.”28 Neoliberal thought has anticipated this critique by assimilating the pecuniary and nonpecuniary variables in its equations, like the broken or unbroken window, f and p, on and off, one and zero, to an aesthetics that binds these variables to a symbolic order where the presence of order as such, and not the meaning of the symbols, is what matters. A broken window means nothing; it simply constitutes a signifying environment.29 The same holds for a threshold or boundary condition that is in danger of being violated by strangers who belong neither inside or out; it ceases to function as a passage and becomes a screen. “Broken windows” discourse directs police attention to anyone who lingers on this screen as though on an endless bridge or in a revolving door.30 The white plain-­clothes officers who emerged from a car on a darkened street and killed Diallo were members of the Street Crimes Unit (SCU) of the New York City Police Department. The SCU had been enhanced by the Giuliani administration under Police Commissioner Benjamin Bratton, an admirer of Kelling’s and the city’s chief proponent of “broken windows” or “zero-­tolerance” policing, and it was further expanded and oriented around “stop-­and-­frisk” policing by Bratton’s successor, William Safir.31 In the ensuing trial, the officer who had first noticed Diallo testified that the young man, who was standing in the vestibule of his building, fit the description of a known serial rapist and was behaving suspiciously, like a would-­be robber. The officer acknowledged that he and his colleagues did not consider that Diallo might have lived there; nor did they consider the situation from Diallo’s point of view.32 We can infer, then, that Diallo appeared to these police, who at that moment were subjects of the “broken windows” apparatus, just as he was, as a stranger marked by his race, his gender, his location in the city,

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and his position at the threshold between inside and outside—­a “window” about to break. Is it perverse to analyze this tragic scene from an aesthetic point of view? No, not if an aesthetic of urban order partly accounts for its outcome. Such an accounting cannot be summarized by the risk-­and-­reward variables laid out in equations by economists like Becker, but it lurks within them nonetheless; not simply because these equations set the stage for a neoliberal police, and the associated reordering of the urban realm, that recasts its subjects—­citizens and would-­be criminals alike—­as homo oeconomicus, and therefore as subjects of capital; but also because it recasts homo oeconomicus, and also the “abilities-­ machines” of human capital in whom Foucault saw the embodiment of socially constructed economic rationality, as potentially “disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable.” Intoxicated by repeated encounters with such disorderly figures, aesthetics issues forth from the night, gun in hand, and fires.

9 BEIJING IN DETROIT

As a figure of speech, synecdoche runs in both directions.

Detroit is one such figure. We immediately recognize it as the name of a city that stands for the larger, wider distress of deindustrialization across the American “rust belt” and maybe also, in some distant fashion, across the British Midlands or the German Ruhr Valley. Just as quickly, we recognize Detroit to signify an entire industry, that of automobile design and manufacture, to which a good deal of the short “American century” owed its mystique as well as its prosperity. It is an industry that, crippled by international competition for more than three decades, was finally “bailed out” in 2008–­2009 when the U.S. Congress provided emergency financial assistance to the so-­called big three automakers, all of which remain headquartered in or around Detroit: Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. Those names, in turn, have larger connotations all their own: Ford, for the system of production, assembly, and marketing known as Fordism that was virtually synonymous with industrialization during the opening decades of the twentieth century; General Motors, for imperial swagger, as in the slogan “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” attributed (somewhat inaccurately) to that company’s then  // 131

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outgoing chief executive, Charles E. Wilson, in 1952; and Chrysler, as an early beneficiary of congressional bailing out, in the form of the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, which was engineered to stave off a bankruptcy that finally came to pass in 2009. Detroit has, in fact, long had something extraterritorial about it. Looking in from the outside, the Italian political theorist Mario Tronti used the subheading “Marx in Detroit” in the postscript to the second edition of his Operai e capitale (Workers and Capital, 1971). Finding Marx in a city where, during the early years of the New Deal, there were precious few Communists but many consequential labor struggles, Tronti turned the tables on a European left (and a Euro-­Communism) awash in party narratives of class struggle with comparatively little to show for it in labor organization. Acknowledging his debt to Tronti but shifting to the overall world system, the Italian political economist Giovanni Arrighi adapted the formulation for the title of his 2007 study Adam Smith in Beijing.1 In exchanging Marx for Smith and Detroit for Beijing, Arrighi wants us to recognize the continued relevance of Smithian political economy and, in particular, the relevance of Smith’s defense of state intervention in support of a socially productive division of labor in comprehending the distinctive aspects of China’s hegemonic rise. His Adam Smith is less Marx’s ideological rival than a semiclandestine fellow traveler, preaching gradualism to the neoliberals and favoring state programs that improve the fortunes of the workers. The “invisible hand” is that of the state rather than of the market. To find Smith in Beijing tempering rather than abetting capitalist excess is therefore less contradictory than it may seem. A precursor to Arrighi’s Beijing and Tronti’s Detroit is actually Flint, Michigan, where, for forty-­four days in early 1937, workers halted production at a General Motors Fisher Body plant in an action that spread to other factories and forced the company to recognize the United Auto Workers as a legitimate bargaining partner. Chrysler soon followed in this concession, with Ford forced four years later to declare its River Rouge plant

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a “closed shop,” as Detroit was redefined by one of organized labor’s most comprehensive victories. This is the same Detroit that served, in 1952, as the backdrop for former General Motors chief executive Wilson’s perennially misquoted statement to Congress, at his confirmation hearing as Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, to the effect that the interests of General Motors and those of the United States were one and the same. The previous year, construction had begun on the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, just outside the Detroit city limits, designed by Eero Saarinen and Associates. When Saarinen’s GM Tech Center opened, in 1956, Life magazine dubbed it a “Versailles of Industry,” and Architectural Forum an “Industrial Versailles.”2 But, as a white-­collar successor to Albert Kahn’s Ford assembly plant in Highland Park, it was the palace of a new sovereign only in the sense that, by 1954, General Motors had become the country’s—­and the world’s—­largest corporation, and a synecdoche for corporate capitalism in general, as Wilson’s sentiment confirmed. But as a research-­and-­ development campus for the design and engineering of new automobiles, the GM Tech Center was more accurately a finger in the “visible hand” of managerialism, to borrow the business historian Alfred Chandler’s coinage. And Detroit itself was the new Versailles, populated by organization men rather than sun kings. According to Arrighi, when industrial giants such as General Motors ceded the throne to Wal-­Mart, which became the world’s largest corporation in 2002, they effectively exchanged one business “template” for another. This exchange was accompanied by military actions such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and political ones such as the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, both of which tried but failed to secure the economic and political hegemony associated with the earlier regime. Although the vertically integrated General Motors did eventually open factories around the world, it “remained deeply rooted in the U.S. economy, where the bulk of its products were manufactured and sold.” In contrast, Wal-­Mart does not manufacture anything and is much more comprehensively

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transnational. It is, as Arrighi says, “primarily a commercial intermediary between foreign (mostly Asian) subcontractors, who manufacture most of its products, and U.S. consumers, who buy most of them.”3 Wal-­Mart achieved its dominance by driving down wages in its own domain and among suppliers, resisting unionization, and employing a majority of its workers in precarious positions with limited or no access to health care and other benefits.4 The resulting new “template” relies on financial manipulation as well as on the manipulation of labor. As Arrighi put it in 2007, “[T]he rise of Wal-­Mart and its anti-­labor strategies are manifestations of the crisis of the previously dominant industrial corporations on the one side, and of the monetarist counterrevolution that has facilitated the financialization of U.S. capital on the other.” But if Arrighi is right, then America’s status as “the world’s financial clearinghouse” may be only temporary; a longer-­term transition may be under way.5 Although this transition may be most visible in Chinese factories and in the burgeoning cities around them, many older infrastructures of industrial capitalism, including cities like Detroit, have been repurposed to open up new frontiers of speculative development. Small, block-­by-­block moves on history’s chessboard retroactively reveal the garish outlines of a coherent strategy. In 2003, shortly after qualifying as the world’s largest corporation, Wal-­Mart closed its location in Detroit’s Tech Plaza, at the intersection of Twelve-­Mile Road and Van Dyke Avenue in Warren, just opposite the General Motors Technical Center. Although the retailer soon opened another store only two miles north, at the edge of suburban Sterling Heights, and even though all of the action occurred beyond the Detroit city limits, the move was easily read as yet another slap in the face to the “Motor City,” and yet another measure of industrial decline.6 On the chessboard: check. To the extent that Arrighi’s analysis allows us to take Wal-­ Mart as a representative of the latest stage of world capitalism, we can also understand this move in relation to capital’s global tendency toward what David Harvey has called a “spatial fix.”7 In essence, a spatial fix entails the movement of significant

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amounts of capital from one geographic region to another in search of cost savings through lower wages or higher productivity as the rate of profit in the original setting declines inexorably. Clearly, Wal-­Mart’s moving one of its stores two miles up the road is not exactly this. As a nonproducer, Wal-­Mart enjoys profits that are less dependent on local labor costs than on a constantly changing combination of global labor costs and local consumer markets, and the move more likely reflects changes in the latter. Forever in pursuit of growth in volatile markets, the company stated that its reason for moving its store was the lack of available space for expansion into new services. Eight years later, when Wal-­Mart purchased the entire site and reopened a much larger facility, with “parking stations for electric vehicles in a nod to the nearby GM Tech Center,” Warren mayor Jim Fouts declared, “Warren is coming back.”8 In an almost comically literal juxtaposition of Arrighi’s changing “templates,” the GM Technical Center was now outflanked, with a new Wal-­ Mart store immediately adjacent and its offspring, a Wal-­Mart “Supercenter,” two miles up the road. Checkmate. As Warren “came back,” Detroit continued to experience profound disinvestment, making it a shrinking city rife with what Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession” and, by 2013, a candidate for municipal bankruptcy. To the extent that Wal-­Mart is a synecdoche of the newest business template, its movements are locked into a symbolic economy that can help decode the results. As a highly articulate instance of management’s “visible hand” guiding the company’s new research-­and-­ development modules, the architecture of the General Motors Technical Center belongs to an earlier phase. As an “industrial Versailles,” the Tech Center once seemed to stand for—­and to actualize—­all that was Detroit. Now, its modular metal-­and-­ glass body, though it has been added to many times and has attracted the passions of architectural preservationists, is a glistening, fully functioning ruin.9 Its well-­kept lines are only apparently antithetical to the blocks of abandoned houses awaiting demolition in Detroit’s poorer neighborhoods. In the GM Tech Center, London’s Crystal Palace, that great showcase for the

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world’s merchandise and Wal-­Mart’s distant ancestor, has lingered on long after the empire has fallen, populated by middle managers tinkering with obsolete symbols. By contrast, if the adjacent Wal-­Mart and its modular companions can be said to possess an architecture, it is to be found in the seemingly inarticulate logistics of the “big box.”10 Logistics is a form of synecdoche in which part and whole collapse. Unlike the parts that once made up Detroit—­assembly lines, suppliers, designers, engineers, dealers, and corporate campuses—­the parts circulating through Wal-­Mart do not assemble into anything, least of all into a representative product like the automobile. Nor are they in any sense avatars of a new “machine age,” or even of a logistical age. They are simply parts without wholes: “wheels” without cars, “suits” without businesspeople, buildings without cities. In short, Wal-­Mart is Beijing in Detroit—­not “Chinese money” but a new order. According to Arrighi, China’s rise as an economic power followed the historically distinct development path of the East Asian regional economic system (with the exception of Japan) over several centuries. There are many dimensions to this distinction, but a key one is investment in an educated labor pool with a comparably small managerial component. Arrighi attributes this characteristic to a long-­standing rural division of labor that encouraged self-­management, a skill that was transferrable to the factory setting, accompanied more recently by a proportionately large number of knowledge workers and a relatively small managerial class. Rather than recoiling from the threat posed to their own hegemony by Chinese economic growth, as they did with Japan, American corporations have embraced that threat, though in a way that, contrary to the symbolic and material proximity of General Motors to both America and Detroit in earlier times, detaches corporate interests from national or municipal ones. According to Arrighi, this is especially true for Wal-­Mart, which he calls “China’s best customer.”11 In the 1980s, the tendency to decentralize through subcontracting in order to compete with Japanese business “led to the displacement of vertically integrated corporations, such as General Motors, by subcontracting

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corporations, such as Wal-­Mart, as the leading business organization.” Stretching the structural comparison as far as it can go, Arrighi cites research showing that “‘buyer-­driven’ subcontracting arrangements, like Wal-­Mart’s, were a distinctive feature of big business in late imperial China, and remained the dominant form of business organization in Taiwan and Hong Kong up to the present. We may therefore interpret the formation and expansion of U.S. subcontracting networks as another instance of Western convergence towards East Asian patterns.”12 In other words, Wal-­Mart is “China.” Though there are many recent architectural monuments to “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” in China, including countless urban-­housing complexes and office buildings designed by prominent Chinese firms, we have yet to see a significant, replicable East Asian variant on symbolic corporate architecture comparable to that represented by the GM Tech Center and its many American relatives. This is not to say that large corporate campuses or symbolic office buildings do not exist in mainland China; they do, by the thousands. Some are quite ambitious architecturally, and a few may soon acquire iconic status, as those in Hong Kong already have. But Wal-­Mart’s adjacency to the GM Tech Center is not made meaningful by contrast to future monuments erected by its Chinese clients; rather, Wal-­Mart occupies the place of synecdoche in Arrighi’s symbolic economy, in relation to disinvestment in both Detroit and “Detroit.” Notwithstanding the many other factors, including political oppression, that have contributed to China’s rise and to the attendant reorganization of capital through a series of transregional spatial fixes, Beijing’s lesser emphasis on managerialism (unlike, say, Yokohama’s) also casts Detroit’s recent fate in a slightly different light. Sticking with Arrighi’s terminology, present-­day Detroit is a signal instance of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “creative destruction.” This expression usually refers to the replacement of one economic order with another. But as a dimension of Harvey’s “spatial fix,” it can also mean abandoning something here in order to speculate elsewhere. This in turn yields newly vacated ground in the

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original location, which may one day prove fertile for a new round of investment. The difference, or imbalance, between the two sites is a crucial element in economic growth, because capital always needs someplace else to go. Arrighi follows Harvey in suggesting that today, China may be “the most promising site for an effective spatial fix to the ongoing overaccumulation crisis.”13 Accumulated capital, liberated by financialization and by destructive disinvestment as profits fall in places like Detroit, goes east. Meanwhile, the ground is prepared on the western front for its eventual return. This occurs at the symbolic level as well as at the material one. Capital also creates—­and is created by—­imaginaries, frames of reference, narratives, and techniques for grasping the world, some of which must be abandoned in order that new frontiers may be perceived or invented. Creative destruction therefore also entails uprooting certain cognitive structures, like “Detroit,” and setting others into place, both in response to and in advance of what occurs on the ground. Marx’s observation may seem self-­evident that, unlike a bee building a beehive, “the master builder builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.”14 But the reverse is also true: the imagination itself is perpetually under construction; it, too, is subject to change. And aesthetics, as a science of the imagination, is much more than mere icing on the cake of reality; it deals in modes of cognition, ways of being and acting in, as well as shaping, that reality. Hence the cognitive significance of the “emergency management” to which the City of Detroit was subject for almost two years beginning in 2013. With the municipality on the verge of bankruptcy, and having tested the procedure in Flint and other distressed municipalities, in March 2013, the Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, appointed Kevyn Orr, a lawyer who had advised the Chrysler Corporation in its own bankruptcy case, as the city’s unelected “emergency manager” tasked with reversing the city’s fiscal direction. By effectively stripping the city’s elected officials of their authority to govern, the move also stripped Detroit’s citizens of their right to a democratically elected municipal government.

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No doubt, Detroit thus became a flagrant instance of what the Weimar-­era political theorist Carl Schmitt called a “state of exception,” where the state suspends or annuls its governing laws under emergency powers. Giorgio Agamben generalizes Schmitt’s “state of exception” into the means by which sovereign power, grounded ultimately in the power to decide who lives and who dies, is constituted. Almost unnoticeably, the “exception” authorized by an emergency (or a perceived emergency) becomes the norm.15 Schmitt was a National Socialist party member, and, in Agamben’s view, the Nazi death camps were a paradigmatic instance of the constitutive suspension of law that, in present-­day settings such as refugee camps and political prisons, has been transformed into a juridical norm: what may seem exceptional or temporary is actually the basis of sovereign rule. Interpreting Detroit’s emergency management in these terms, as has been done, rightly emphasizes the antidemocratic response to the (contrived) “emergency” of municipal bankruptcy.16 But in Detroit’s “emergency,” that term’s seemingly neutral, technocratic partner—­ “management”—­ secures what may in fact be the event’s lasting outcome: the quiet assumption that suspending democracy is a reasonable response to the destructive consequences of capital’s “spatial fix.” The macroeconomic shifts figured by “Wal-­Mart / Beijing” registered in an intimate, bodily fashion when, in the summer of 2014, Detroit’s emergency manager shut off municipal water service for approximately fifteen thousand residents with overdue utility bills. The shutoff led to widespread suspicion that privatization of the entire water system would follow. The United Nations called it a human rights violation, reinforcing Agamben’s claim that the humanity of those subject to emergency rule is necessarily altered. A year earlier, in 2013, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had filed a federal lawsuit against Michigan governor Snyder and other state officials for violating the voting rights of more than half the state’s African American population by appointing unelected managers in Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, and other municipalities with large African American populations.17 (Orr, Detroit’s

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emergency manager, is African American.) In Detroit’s kitchens and bathrooms, racial politics met the politics of infrastructure to reveal the real emergency: the manager as the new sovereign, vested with the power to decide whose water is on and whose is off. Many of the city’s citizens resisted, standing alongside all of those worldwide who have experienced firsthand the blackmail of economic policies aimed at trade unions and public infrastructures by the managers of “structural adjustment” programs at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But the cleared ground had already been noticed by capital seeking new frontiers inside the formerly industrial cityscape. Under Orr, the city filed for bankruptcy in July 2013 and entered into a “grand bargain” with creditors and municipal retirees that prevented the threatened sale of the Detroit Institute of Art’s holdings, among other things. In July 2014, the New York Times Magazine reported enthusiastically on “privateers” such as Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, buying up properties in the city’s downtown as investments.18 Whether or not the long-­term result is a return to fiscal stability, the price has been twofold, first, in the form of concessions extracted from taxpayers and retirees in order to finance, indirectly, these new “opportunities,” and second, the sanctification of the manager as unelected sovereign. Quietly, Detroit now stands for this sanctification. It does so as synecdoche, a piece of the world system in which the whole is contained as lived, material reality. If we allow Detroit its full figural scope, we can see simultaneously, on the one side, capital’s destructive abandonment and, on the other side, its opportunistic, entrepreneurial dynamism. Its fiscal crisis has ushered in a response that seems perfectly reasonable to many. Subsequent returns to “normalcy” notwithstanding, the manager, not exactly “China,” is Detroit’s new representative and its new master. Until this figure emerges from the political shadows, Detroit will seem like only a memorial to past imperial glories rather than the testing ground for new conquests that it is.

10 INFRASTRUCTURE AND MEDIAPOLITICS

Infrastructure repeats. Railroads, postal services, satellites,

highways, housing, classrooms, prisons, ports, financial markets, sewers, and innumerable other systems operating at every scale all share this property. They repeat sometimes in series, sometimes according to timetables or other schedules, and sometimes irregularly, with the flip of a switch, the turn of a handle, the push of a button, or the click of a mouse. Repetition, here, is not only sequence or meter; it is also sheer persistence. A bridge repeats in that it remains in place, bridging an abyss of infinitesimally small intervals of time—­until one day it collapses, or simply closes, thus ceasing to repeat the apparently ceaseless activity of bridging. This definition of infrastructure comes perilously close to the commonplace assertion that the work of infrastructure remains invisible until it fails. In a revealing survey of the anthropological literature on the “politics and poetics of infrastructure,” Brian Larkin contests this truism by hinting (without exactly using this language) that infrastructure’s visibility, and not only in the obvious case of monuments such as bridges,  // 141

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contributes to a technical specificity that is best grasped through the analytic frameworks of media theory.1 As Larkin points out, electricity can be a symbol of modernity (in one case, in Mongolia, it was initially referred to as “Lenin’s light”); or the water supply can be an object of political contestation, as when residents of Mumbai’s slums name water pipes after the political party that provided them; or infrastructural repetitions can elicit a politically effective competence on the part of their users, as shown by the respect paid by municipal engineers to residents of Soweto for their prowess in hacking water meters.2 In short, infrastructure, in the classically modern sense of municipal services, is constantly brought to the foreground as both a symbol and an instrument, particularly by those with a vested political interest in its functions. Still, in these and similar cases, infrastructure’s cultural valence remains primarily symbolic (or representational)—­of technological development, of political patronage, of resistance to sovereign power—­even as another dimension of its specificity as a media system lies elsewhere. Larkin locates this “elsewhere” in embodied or “ambient” experience, and cites a whole other literature that finds infrastructure producing what he calls “the ambient conditions of everyday life: our sense of temperature, speed, florescence, and the ideas we have associated with these conditions.” This includes again the idea of modernity, where, for instance, in Dutch colonial Indonesia, “[t]he building of colonial infrastructure was the imposition of hard roads—­metal ones for trains, tarmac ones for cars—­over the dirty, muddy, soft paths of Indonesia.”3 In these two ways, then, infrastructure moves between background and foreground: as a symbol or some other type of representation, such as a bridge or a radio tower; and as ambient environment, such as a barely audible heating system. But there is a third characteristic particular to infrastructure that is also both political and poetic in a different sense, namely, its mediating function. Neither symbolic or strictly ambient, nor merely pragmatic or utilitarian, this function or property gives sense to my claim that, underneath their other two dimensions, infra-

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structures are fundamentally repetitive, in that they repeatedly enact relations, such as connection and disconnection, on and off, here and there, this and that, and inside and outside. Seen this way, infrastructural systems bear a resemblance to what media theorists have come to call Kulturtechniken, or “cultural techniques.” As Bernhard Siegert has defined it, “[T]he analysis of cultural techniques observes and describes techniques involved in operationalizing distinctions in the real.”4 Exemplary of such techniques is the simple opening and closing of a door, which, as Siegert says, “allows us to perform, observe, encode, address, and ultimately wire the difference between inside and outside.”5 The same goes for the primordial act of a plow marking a line in the soil. This act of cultivation, from which the term Kultur (culture), of cultural techniques, draws its implications as a media theory of agriculture, is an act of distinction (a line) as well as an act of production (a furrow to be planted).6 To adapt a formulation from Cornelia Vismann, cultural techniques are the verb form of media.7 They are, in every possible sense, mediations. However, where “mediation” normally designates a relation between subjects and objects, in this case it should be understood to designate the agency of objects or systems, of which human subjects form an unexceptional part. When infrastructure repeats, it also repeats us insofar as we repeatedly and rhythmically interact with it. In this semiautonomous fashion, infrastructures enact repetitions of which their human operators or users are, potentially, iterations of the system rather than its sovereign “governors” (to use the language of cybernetics). Thinking this way has important consequences for other, more traditional understandings of infrastructural mediation. The urbanists Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, whom Larkin groups along with Thomas P. Hughes and a number of others as representatives of systems thinking in this area, define infrastructure as a series of networked “scapes” (or landscapes of “transport, telecommunications, energy, water, and streets”) that, as they say, “provide the mediators between nature, culture, and the production of the city.”8 This is a useful definition

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that allows its authors to study the variable inclusions and exclusions of networked landscapes, such as the “‘electropolis’ of energy and power” and the “‘hydropolis’ of water and waste,” under the sign of what they call a “splintering urbanism.”9 But it is theoretically inadequate, in that Graham and Marvin’s sense of mediation is limited to that of a bridge between two preexisting sets of objects and processes, like “nature” and “culture,” rather than a bridge that, in the process of bridging, produces or enables those categories in the first place. But how can a bridge “produce” nature? Clearly, it does not do so in any empirical sense. Rather, it helps us comprehend what was otherwise simply real, namely, the background noise of being. It does so in the sense that the act of bridging, or what we can call the system of bridging—­the road, the terrain, the cars driving across, the bridge itself—­enables a physical and cognitive connection to be made, and to be made meaningful both symbolically and experientially, that could not have been made before. Hence, the bridge and all the elements of its landscape that actively or passively participate in this act of bridging, including, for example, the view to the horizon, enter the realm of knowledge and experience as what Bruno Latour has called nature–­culture hybrids. Simultaneously, those entirely visible but overlooked aspects of both landscape and bridge that the system of bridging does not reveal or make thinkable merely slip back into the background noise of the real, and return to the unthinkable a priori category that we really mean when we say “nature.”10 Infrastructure therefore helps us recognize the cultural production of what we normally call “nature”—­a Heideggerian gathering and enframing at once—­without denying that some sort of nature exists a priori, albeit as a kind of ungraspable blind spot rather than as an object of human cognition. Beyond electrical systems and plumbing, or roads and bridges, this proposition extends into technology or technics in general. Much in the way that a microscope or a telescope shapes scientific knowledge without fully determining it, infrastructural systems structure nature–­culture relationships by making na-

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ture appear differently under different conditions: as an obstacle to be surmounted in the case of a bridge, as a fragile resource in the case of energy networks, or as an economy of utility and waste in the case of water supply and sewage. In the Anglo-­American tradition, the agencies or organizations that build and manage municipal infrastructures such as water or electrical systems are often referred to as “utilities” or “utility companies.” Such terminology makes visible an interplay of utility and waste that is among the primary relations (like inside and outside, or signal and noise) structuring urban life. Siegert’s example of a door opening and closing like a low-­ tech logic gate that modulates the way in which we apprehend the real demonstrates the constitutive function of material conditions in enabling us to think these relations, which in general we have been calling infrastructural. These relations are primary not only at the epistemological level on which Siegert concentrates but also in a political sense, if we take politics as the distribution and deployment of power, where power is a relation rather than a thing to be possessed.11 Among the myriad examples we could choose, struggles over water rights and over the systems by which water circulates offer especially clear insight into what is at stake in the infrastructural production and maintenance of “utility.” One well-­known instance occurred in 2000, when the Bolivian government granted a private water-­supply concession to a company called Aguas del Tunari, an international joint venture controlled by the American infrastructure giant Bechtel, in Cochabamba, a midsize city in the country’s semiarid central region. The concession was just one of a series of privatization programs implemented in Bolivia since the 1990s under sustained pressure from the World Bank to move control over municipal services into the hands of market actors. Among the results was an average increase in water rates of at least 35 percent.12 A heterogeneous coalition of largely indigenous groups organized to resist the privatization, taking to the streets and calling a general strike. The government, under the presidency of former military dictator Hugo Banzer, responded with force. One protester

Infrastructure and Mediapolitics // 146

was killed and others were imprisoned or otherwise punished. Ultimately, the antiprivatization protests prevailed, and control over the city’s water system returned to local government. Similar actions related to natural gas in the area around La Paz, as well as other “water wars” in that city and elsewhere, eventually contributed to the removal of the conservative government and the ascension to power, in 2006, of a government based in the country’s diverse social movements and led by President Evo Morales.13 Scholars have argued that the initial privatization of Cochabamba’s water supply was abetted by governmental decentralization, with further authority granted to local administration, as well as by the withdrawal of the state in favor of market-­based corporate sovereignty.14 They frequently cite the resulting “water wars” as an example of successful resistance against this most overt form of neoliberal redistribution of material resources away from public utilities and toward private ownership. In the broader background are long-­standing patterns in which rate hikes like the one in Cochabamba or limited access to water disproportionately impacts the urban poor, some of whom, as Graham and Marvin report, spend up to 40 percent of their income on access to clean water and adequate sanitation, if indeed that access is available to them at all.15 To make matters worse, for many slum dwellers and other uprooted or dispossessed populations, water is available only through private vendors, sometimes only on the black market, and at much higher prices than those with access to formal networks may pay, even at inflated rates such as those experienced in Bolivia. It makes sense, then, that in their epic project of reclaiming a “common wealth” outside of what they call the “republic of property,” the political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri highlight the Bolivian water wars as a model for the emergence of another kind of modernity (an “altermodernity” or an “alterglobalization”) constituted by a politically active “multiplicity of social singularities” rather than the theoretically homogeneous modern masses16—­a “multitude,” that is, made up of constitutively different racial and cultural identities and

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forms of labor, such as of those who fought the water wars in the streets of Cochabamba. Binding this highly differentiated multitude together, in Hardt and Negri’s view, is a socially produced common—­in this case, water, understood as a locus of production—­rather than the more traditional commons, understood as a natural resource, as in the environmentalist “tragedy of the commons.” In this sense, Hardt and Negri are not very far from an idea of infrastructure (for instance, the water supply) as a mediator of nature–­culture relations and of power relations. For them, biopolitics, understood as the management of life and death by capitalist governmentality, determines access to the common. In Cochabamba, the water, the pipes, the law, and the financing, operated in different measure by Bechtel, the World Bank, and the Bolivian government, reorganized life processes and, indeed, the lives of an entire urban population, in the interests of capital rather than in those of collective control or governance. Underneath it all, in Hardt and Negri’s analysis, infrastructure lurks as a more or less inert product of human labor deployed as a managerial instrument that is subject to reclamation by its actual producers and its actual users. As a product of human labor and a material support for life processes, however, infrastructure is anything but inert. In the Bolivian case, to assign to the water system a mediapolitical function alongside its biopolitical one would be to watch it assume the verb form and become politically active in and of itself, perhaps reinforcing but also perhaps exceeding its role as an apparatus of domination. Were we to pursue this thesis in any detail, we would need to know much more about what the water actually did in Cochabamba: where and how it flowed and did not flow, from where to where, at what rate, with what degree of regularity, and through what mechanisms. Some (though by no means all) of this information is available in public documents, including statements by the Bechtel Corporation explaining its role in the events. Bechtel owned a 50 percent (that is, a controlling) interest in International Water, which in turn owned a 55 percent (that is, a majority) stake in Aguas del Tunari. Pleading innocent, one Bechtel statement points out that Aguas del

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Tunari “did not buy and did not own Cochabamba’s water utility or water resources.” Furthermore, “[i]t did not lease or own the aquifer.” Instead, its subsidiary merely “operat[ed] the city’s water and wastewater system.”17 Which is to say that Aguas del Tunari, Bechtel’s subsidiary, managed the rates of supply and therefore influenced the price, but only indirectly. In essence, Bechtel managed the water system’s repetitions by withdrawing its direct responsibility for price increases and allowing a feedback effect to govern. Company publicity notes that the reforms increased the availability of water by 30 percent and, hence, during the first month, “increased water usage amplified for many customers the effect of higher rates.”18 That is, for whatever percent of the population whose access to water may have increased during the privatization period, that very increase, which presumably was used by the vast majority to meet essential daily needs, led to a higher daily total water consumption. Multiplied by the higher rates per liter, this amplified the effect of the increase, because both the unit rate and the total usage increased simultaneously. In defense of its public image, Bechtel revealed the contradictions buried in this feedback effect: not only does it show the incapacity of the overall scheme to provide an adequate amount of water per day without raising the total cost, hence hardly reducing any economic inefficiencies that may have plagued the original, state-­run version; it also displays a willingness to increase the cost further by attaching to this system a rate increase, justified in the name of paying off government debt (while the consortium profited) and of extending future service (and hence payoff on investment) while no doubt aware of this amplification effect in the present.19 In this way, the private water concession governed from a distance by Bechtel was experienced at the faucets of Cochabamba as an amplification of an already dire situation—­literally, a higher rate, of more rather than fewer repetitions, or clicks of the water meter. And although ultimate responsibility still lies with the system’s human managers, the actual mechanism of exploitation was at least one degree removed, and was relocated in an infrastructural feedback loop of usage and cost. Displaced

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onto the semiautomatic functions of the system itself, any additional water made available to underserved users multiplied the effect of higher rates, and the more daily needs were satisfied, the more exorbitant the total cost became. Much of the water was to be drawn from a reservoir created by a large hydroelectric dam, in a textbook instance of one infrastructural system (water) superimposing itself on or hooking into another (electricity). These systems are Graham and Marvin’s superimposed “scapes,” in this case the “hydropolis,” or the landscape of water supply and sewage, and the “electropolis,” or the landscape of power generation and distribution. The two landscapes coincide in the unbuilt Misicuni Reservoir, over which the Bechtel consortium also exercised a form of sovereignty. The World Bank reports that a private owner was initially sought to operate the water concession from another reservoir; ultimately, the decision to opt for a dam on the Misicuni River was made on the basis of more potential water, though at a greater cost.20 Although Bechtel claims to have demonstrably improved the water supply in the short time its subsidiaries operated the concession, the rate hikes were associated in significant part with the capital required to build the Misicuni Dam and to complete the twenty-­kilometer tunnel to deliver water to the city.21 If the reengineering of the Cochabamba water supply drew a raucous, multitudinous response that, for Hardt and Negri, prefigured a socially produced “common wealth,” it was not resistance to privatization alone that did this; infrastructure as well drew this multitude into being. In that sense, to locate agency solely at the level of political organization risks overlooking the strange mediatory agency of the infrastructural mark or line itself. In Cochabamba, a tunnel cut through the ground, the unbuilt dam itself, and the many valves, pipes, and pumping stations through which financial and political interests imagined that water would eventually pass joined together with their human operators and users into a technopolitical—­or more precisely, a mediapolitical—­ensemble. Removing any one component of this ensemble, whether it be the water, through the

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incompletion of the reservoir, or the users, in the form of civil disobedience or strikes, prevented that system from repeating, and hence brought it and its human users into being as the problematic, unruly nature–­culture hybrids that they are. Whether or not, as some have argued, the Bechtel group agreed to complete the dam as part of its unsolicited bid only in order to satisfy the demands of Cochabamba’s mayor, Manfred Reyes Villa, a former real estate developer notorious for governing by patronage and for personal profit, the repetitions of water-­as-­resource also frequently intersect those of land-­ as-­real-­estate.22 Conceived in its proper verb form, real estate continuously marks the ground. Even as unbuilt land, real estate simply persists; it stays put while changing hands, through property deeds, expropriations, declarations of eminent domain, sales, leases, and so on, as the mark or furrow is repeated through instruments such as surveys, tax maps, mortgages, photographs, liens, listings, and insurance policies. Take these away, and there is no land, no real estate; there is only, again, the background noise of the real, an undifferentiated nature. These lines often repeat in coordination with other, subterranean ones, including those associated with various forms of waste. The structural importance of waste management, as a dimension of the water supply, is evident in the plumbing networks that frequently undergird development. In urban areas, water and household waste typically join in sewers and sometimes merge with storm drains; elsewhere, they leach out into septic fields or simply flow into gullies. These networks pulsate with the cyclical rhythm of toilet flushes, showers, dish washing, and laundry—­the very interior of interior life—­as well as with the irregular environmental cadence of downpours, monsoons, and spring thaws. It is tempting to allow these processes of waste removal simply to stand opposite the usefulness from which the term utility derives and to further define infrastructure as a system for balancing the two. Conceived in terms of repetition, however, the opposition fails. Like other superimposed systems, infrastructures of waste and infrastructures of utility belong

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to the same order of being. The wastewater traveling through sewers is not fundamentally different from the drinking water running through pipes. Each may follow its own rhythms, but each follows the principal law of infrastructure: repeat. And it is not when the repetitions cease that the order of things collapses. Breakdown constitutes an order of its own. Biopolitics becomes mediapolitics when the repetitions that modulate life emit residues. As raw energy is converted into the power of access, of division and subdivision, of connection and disconnection, of inclusion and exclusion, out the other end comes waste, not as the detritus of life but as another of its inputs, to be recirculated in parallel systems that invert the logic of utility while keeping its repetitions intact. Somewhere in this mix of inputs and outputs, the exchanges cease to flow. Something leaks, spills over, or clogs up. Sewage from wealthy neighborhoods contaminates poorer districts; the smog of electrical generation chokes the air that fills urban streets. Traffic jams, emissions escape, noise blocks the channel. At this point, the work of infrastructure becomes second nature, to be rigorously distinguished from the more familiar nature that gathers us into its folds or appears before us enframed as a resource or as a threat. This other, second nature is the empire of waste, of uselessness, of leaks and spills. It is also what distinguishes a planetary awareness from a merely global one: not just solidarity with plants, animals, and other humans wherever on earth they may be, but also a glimpse, a recognition, of the uncontrollable, entropic real, in which the planet itself appears as an enormous, exhausted waste-­removal system gone mad. Alertness to mediapolitics is therefore alertness to the mediations whereby everything solid really does melt into the greenhouse gases that are filling our air. We humans are continuous with these gases and their systems; we are conduits, valves, and interfaces that modulate their implacable repetitions; they enter and leave our bodies. We can therefore take responsibility for managing our waste, our own constitutive leaks and spills, by countering destructive amplification effects and

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short circuits that disconnect and exclude some so that others may profit. Public infrastructural systems under constant threat of privatization, alongside the already private ones, are the ruins of our collective modernity.23 As such, they can be salvaged from their fate and rewired, rather than cast aside like the guts of a dead animal. Even so, waste will be waste; some portion of it will never be assimilated back into the system. We must therefore also learn to live on and with an entropic planet, such that the biopolitical catastrophe of an earth gone mad is met by a mediapolitics that retunes the repetitions and attends to the second nature that envelops us. Access to this second nature further requires sensitivity to an infrastructural aesthetics. This is different from the historical idea that infrastructural elements or systems attract attention by being beautiful or sublime, or ugly and obtrusive.24 Aesthetics is what gets under your skin and organizes the ways in which you grasp the world. In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, an “airborne toxic event” resulting from an unspecified chemical leak threatens the population of a small American college town.25 As an allegory of anthropogenic technoenvironmental devastation, the “white noise” of uncontrolled emissions figured in the cloud comes perilously close to callously ironizing an existential crisis. But it is also what infrastructure looks like: a cloud of toxins; an unfinished, waterless dam; a thin film of inorganic slime that coats a puddle in the alleyway of an urban slum. These are not so much images of breakdown or failure as traces left behind by a system functioning as it has been designed to function: not to leak or explode in some sort of spectacular display, but to slowly, inexorably let off steam, to produce waste so that the repetitive hum of its engines may continue. This waste, this noise, is inherent to all technical systems, of which properly infrastructural ones form a subset. The modulatory rhythms of mediapolitics measure its impact in repetitions that emit toxins of all sorts as they convert the energy that animates the productive and administrative networks of biopower, which channel entire populations into history’s pile of debris. The problem, then, is not merely one of harnessing

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that energy in the interest of life rather than death. Where the drip-­drip-­drip of biopolitics encounters the click-­click-­click of mediapolitics, there arises the problem of grasping the excess, the remainder that escapes from the world system’s joints, gaskets, and seals. As any sanitation engineer can tell you that excess or waste is both part of the system and its limit case. As such, it is everyday evidence of the limits of thinking technology as the extension of productive human labor, rather than the assimilation of that labor and its products into the rhythmic, entropic work of infrastructure.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION   1. Friedrich A. Kittler, “There Is No Software,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, trans. John Johnston (Amsterdam: OPA, 1997), 147–­55.   2. On the “actants” of actor–­network theory, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Arjun Appadurai has recently proposed a modification of the associated “new materialism” with the notion of “mediants.” See Arjun Appadurai, “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity,” Public Culture 27, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 221–­37.   3. I am indebted, by analogy, to my Columbia colleague Katharina Pistor for her description of the law as a “scaling technology” in a working group on scalability.   4. Michel Foucault, in conversation with Alain Grosrichard, Gerard Wajeman, Jacques-­Alain Miller, Guy Le Gaufey, Dominique Celas, Gerard Miller, Catherine Millot, Jocelyne Livi, and Judith Miller, “The Confessions of the Flesh,” in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (London: Harvester Press, 1980), 194–­95.   5. On these two dimensions of neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–­1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).  // 155

Notes to Introduction  //  156

  6. Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), chap. 6, “(Not) in Place: The Grid, or, Cultural Techniques of Ruling Spaces,” 97–­120. Michel Foucault refers repeatedly to “grids of intelligibility [grilles d’intelligibilité],” for example, in “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–­1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 163–­64, 171, 226–­33.   7. On aesthetics as a means of arranging what can be known, see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 7–­45.   8. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 188 (emphasis in original).   9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 64–­84. 10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), chap. 4, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” 128. 11. Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 28. 12. Ibid., 86. 13. Ibid., 81–­82. 14. Ibid., 82. For a different account of the architectural and urban threshold, see Georges Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013). 15. Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism, 85. 16. Georg Simmel, “Rome,” trans. Ulrich Teucher and Thomas M. Kemple, Theory, Culture & Society 24, nos. 7–­8 (December 2007): 34. The essay was first published under the title “Rom: Eine ästhetische Analyse,” in Der Zeit (Vienna) 191 (1898): 137–­39. 17. Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism, 88. 18. Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in the Age of Photography and Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). 19. Michel de Montaigne, “To the Reader” (1580), in The Essays: A Selection, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 2004), 3.

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20. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy” (1872), in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33 (emphasis in original). And later: “I repeat my earlier sentence that only as an aesthetic phenomenon do existence and the world appear justified” (113). 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1961), 136–­38. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 33. 23. Ibid., 113–­14. 24. Ibid., 115. 25. Ibid. 26. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 473–­74 (emphasis in original). Marx continues: “Cities proper here form alongside these villages only at exceptionally good points for external trade; or where the head of the state and his satraps exchange their revenue (surplus product) for labor, spend it as labor-­fund” (474). 27. Here is Marx: “The history of classical antiquity is the history of cities, but of cities founded on landed property and on agriculture; Asiatic history is a kind of indifferent unity of town and countryside (the really large cities must be regarded here merely as royal camps, as works of artifice [Superfötation] erected over the economic construction proper); the Middle Ages (Germanic period) begins with the lands as the seat of history, whose further development then moves forward in the contradiction between town and countryside; the modern [age] is the urbanization of the countryside, not the ruralization of the city as in antiquity” (ibid., 479). 28. Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872–73; repr. New York: International Publishers, n.d.), 95–­96. 29. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger” (1908), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 402 (emphasis in original). 30. Ibid., 403 (emphasis in original). 31. Ibid., 402. On the metropolitan “blasé attitude,” see Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in Sociology of Georg Simmel, 409–­24. 32. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bonnono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 14.

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33. Nietzsche, “Dionysiac World View,” in Birth of Tragedy, 130 (emphasis in original). 34. On mirrors as material infrastructures, see Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 93–­122. 35. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 201n17. 36. Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, 1. 37. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), Part II, “The Urban Ideology,” 73–­112. 38. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,” in “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 162. 39. This is Althusser’s second thesis on ideology: “Ideology has a material existence” (ibid., 165). In the afterword to the reissue of his book, Castells takes some distance from his earlier interpretation of Althusser, but mainly rejects its formalism. Castells, Urban Question, 438–­39. 40. See, for example, Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban–­Regional Process (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), and the other volumes in Castells’s Information Age series. 41. Castells, Urban Question, 92. 42. On Lefebvre and the Situationists, see Łukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 170, 220–­33. 43. Castells, Urban Question, 93. 44. Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 65 (emphasis in original). 45. Ibid., 66 (emphasis in original). 46. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 137. 47. Ibid., 140. 48. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-­moral Sense,” in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. and trans. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 251. 49. Ibid., 253. 50. Ibid., 248.

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51. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ariadne’s Complaint” (“Klage der Ariadne,” 1891), in Dithyrambs of Dionysus, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Anvil Press, 1984), 53–­60. Nietzsche says cryptically in Ecce Homo, “Who besides me knows what Ariadne is!”: Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, in The Anti-­Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 133. 52. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 188. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 189. 55. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” 252. Emphasis in original. 56. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 221n17, 185–­86. 57. On the double bind, see Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972); and, more recently, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1–34. 58. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 15–­19. 59. Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?,” in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, ed. and trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), 159–­68. 60. See Lefebvre, Production of Space, as well as the work of David Harvey and Neil Smith. 61. On a “politics of scale” in Lefebvre, see Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space, 229–­33. See also Neil Smith, “Geography, Difference, and the Politics of Scale,” in Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, ed. Joe Doherty, Elspeth Graham, and Mo Malek (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 57–­79; and Neil Brenner, “The Urban Question as a Scale Question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, Urban Theory, and the Politics of Scale,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (2000): 361–­78. My argument differs from these in its emphasis on the city as a scaling device rather than a scalar unit, stable or not, and hence on a sociotechnical production of scale that displaces rather than correlates with the social production of space. 62. Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis. This aesthetic domestication of metropolitan dissonance correlates, at the level of political economy, with the “revanchist” gentrification of city centers described by Neil Smith in The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996).

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63. See especially Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), and The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). On the term dispositif, or “apparatus,” see Foucault, “Confessions of the Flesh,” 194–­95. Further, see Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” in What Is an Apparatus?, 1–­24; and Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?,” 159–­68. 64. On the Foucauldian “diagram,” see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 34–­44. 65. See, for example, Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 66. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:17. 67. This version of the oft-­repeated statement is quoted from Ricky Burdett and Philipp Rode, “The Urban Age Project,” in The Endless City: The Urban Age Project, ed. Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (London: Phaidon, 2008), 8. 68. Ananya Roy, “The 21st-­Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory,” Regional Studies 43, no. 6 (July 2009): 819–­30. 69. Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Neil Brenner, ed., Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Berlin: Jovis, 2014), esp. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “Planetary Urbanization,” 160–­63, and Neil Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization,” 181–­202. 70. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Imperative to Re-­imagine the Planet,” in Aesthetic Education, 335–­50. 71. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Theory from the South; or, How Euro-­America Is Evolving toward Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2012). 72. Michael Watts, “Baudelaire over Berea, Simmel over Sandton?,” Public Culture 17, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 181, 184. Watts is replying to the essays collected in “Johannesburg—­The Elusive Metropolis,” a special issue of Public Culture edited by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttal, vol. 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004). 73. Sarah Nuttal and Achille Mbembe, “A Blasé Attitude: A Response to Michael Watts,” Public Culture 17, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 195. 74. My questions and terminology are drawn here from a research

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project in Ghana and Kenya titled “The Rural–­Urban Interface,” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Delali Badasu, Aloysius Denkabe, Wanjiru Gichuhi, and Helen Yitah, on which I have collaborated. 75. Here I have in mind an unpublished paper by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, presented at the conference “Housing the Majority” at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University, April 10, 2015. 76. See Siegert, Cultural Techniques, esp. the introduction, “Cultural Techniques; or, The End of the Intellectual Postwar in German Media Theory,” 1–­17, as well as the essays collected in “Cultural Techniques,” special issue edited by Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young, Ilinca Iurascu, and Jussi Parikka, Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (November 2013). See also Reinhold Martin, “Unfolded, Not Opened: On Bernhard Siegert’s Cultural Techniques,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 102–­15. 77. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization,” 194–­96. 78. Siegert, Cultural Techniques, chap. 10, “Door Logic; or, The Materiality of the Symbolic: From Cultural Techniques to Cybernetic Machines,” 192–­205. 79. On the New York “poor door,” see Jacob Moore and Susanne Schindler, “Designing Inequality,” in The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing, and Real Estate—­A Provisional Report, ed. Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore, and Susanne Schindler (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, 2015), 73–­78. See also Mireya Navarro, “‘Poor Door’ in a New York Tower Opens a Fight Over Affordable Housing,” New York Times, August 26, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/nyregion/separate-entryways -for-new-york-condo-buyers-and-renters-create-an-affordable-hous ing-dilemma.html. 80. Mireya Navarro, “New York Zoning Plan Requires More Affordable Homes,” New York Times, September 21, 2015, http://www.ny times.com/2015/09/22/nyregion/new-york-zoning-plan-requiresmore-affordable-homes.html.

1. CITY, COUNTRY, WORLD   1. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (1452; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 23.   2. Ibid., 24.   3. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

Notes to Chapter 1  //  162

  4. United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-­HABITAT), The State of the World’s Cities Report, 2006/2007: 30 Years of Shaping the Habitat Agenda (London: Earthscan, 2006), iv. For a critical analysis of this statement as a “statistical artifact” as well as of its function in authorizing hegemonic narratives, see Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question,” in Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, ed. Neil Brenner (Berlin: Jovis, 2014), 310–­37.   5. UN-­HABITAT, State of the World’s Cities Report, 2006/2007, 6.   6. Ibid., 7.   7. Anna K. Tibaijuka, introduction to ibid., iii.   8. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). On “structures of feeling,” see also Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–­35.   9. See David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003); and T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Clark does deal in some depth with rural life in his earlier, paired volumes, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–­1851 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), and especially Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973). In the latter, he refers to the political-­economic context in which Courbet executed some of his most important work as “a battle for the countryside” (88). 10. Williams, Country and the City, 102. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 104. 13. See Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 14. For example, see Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001). 15. UN-­HABITAT, The State of the World’s Cities Report, 2008/2009: Harmonious Cities (London: Routledge, 2013), 186. 16. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 64 (emphasis in original). 17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 103 (emphasis in original). 18. Ibid., 105 (emphasis in original).

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2. FINANCIAL IMAGINARIES   1. See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July–­August 1984): 53–­92, and Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), as well as “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and Land Speculation” and “Culture and Finance Capital,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–­1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 162–­89, 136–­61.   2. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23–­30, 69–­82; Andreas Huyssen, ed., Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), introduction; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Polity Press, 1987).   3. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) and “The Stranger” (1908), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409–­24, 402–­8.   4. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, 2nd ed. (1907; repr. London: Routledge, 1990), 443.   5. Ibid., 480.   6. Ibid. (emphasis in original).   7. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006). See also Arjun Appadurai, “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” in The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (New York: Verso, 2013), 131–­52.   8. For policy details on SRSs overseen by Mumbai’s SRA, see the Slum Rehabilitation Authority, Mumbai, http://www.sra.gov.in/pge SalientFeatures.aspx, accessed July 1, 2016.   9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 103–­6. 10. Ibid., 117. 11. Ibid., 120. 12. Ibid., 106 (emphasis in original). 13. On Kant’s debt to other optical media (phantasmagoria), see Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013). 14. On Gehry, see the earlier version of this essay, “Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City,” Grey Room 42 (Winter 2011): 60–­79.

Notes to Chapter 3  //  164

3. THE THING ABOUT CITIES My thanks to Andreas Huyssen for his comments on an earlier version of this essay.   1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930; repr., New York: Scribner’s, 1958), 181.   2. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), 121. Baehr has provided a detailed analysis of the issues surrounding the translation of this figure in “The ‘Iron Cage’ and the ‘Shell as Hard as Steel’: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlahrtes Gehäuse Metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” History and Theory 40 (May 2001): 153–­69.   3. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, 121.   4. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 151–­70. By the 1910s, Thyssen & Co. (originating in 1867) and Fried. Krupp AG (originating in 1811) were two of Germany’s largest steelworks.   5. Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Storm-­Troop Officer on the Western Front (New York: Howard Fertig, 1996), 109. In passing, translator Peter Baehr has distinguished Weber’s use of “steel” figuratively, to denote passivity, from Jünger’s more active sense, in “‘Iron Cage,’” 164. In terms of the interdependence of bureaucracy and (“total”) military mobilization, however, the distinction appears less firm. Jünger’s diary was first printed privately in 1920. The first commercial edition is In Stahlgewittern: Aus dem Tagebuch eines Stoßtruppführers (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1922).   6. Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warriors Edited by Ernst Jünger” (1930), trans. Jerolf Witkoff, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–­1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 318–­19.  7. Bruno Latour, “The Berlin Key; or, How to Do Words with Things,” trans. Lydia Davis, in Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture, ed. P. M. Graves-­Brown (London: Routledge, 2000), 10–­21. The earliest version of the article is “Inscrire dans la nature des choses ou la clef berlinoise,” Alliages 6 (1991): 4–­16.   8. Latour, “Berlin Key,” 17.   9. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 12.

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Heidegger’s 1950 lecture “Das Ding” is available in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 161–­80. 10. Friedrich A. Kittler, “The City Is a Medium,” trans. Matthew Griffin, New Literary History 27, no. 4 (1996): 717–­29. 11. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 569. The passage is quoted in Kittler, ibid., 721. 12. Kittler, “City Is a Medium,” 727. 13. Ibid. The original published version of the essay, which does not contain a reference to Berlin, can be found in Dietmar Steiner et al., eds., Geburt einer Hauptstadt am Horizont [The birth of a capital city on the horizon] (Vienna: Edition BuchQuadrat, 1988), 507–­32. 14. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik; or, How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2005), 31. 15. Arno Maierbrugger, “Steel from Historic East German Palace Used to Build Burj Dubai,” Gulf News, August 10, 2008, http://gulfnews. com/business/construction/steel-from-historic-east-german-palace -used-to-build-burj-dubai-1.124124. The name of the Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower) was later changed to Burj Khalifa, in tribute to Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-­Nahayan, president of the United Arab Emirates and emir of Abu Dhabi, which provided bailout funds to ensure the project’s completion. 16. A detailed account of the Internationale Bauausstellung is given in Wallis Miller, “IBA’s ‘Models for a City’: Housing and the Image of Cold-­War Berlin,” Journal of Architectural Education 46, no. 4 (1993): 202–­16. 17. Latour, “Berlin Key,” 21n2. The footnote does not appear in the 1991 French version. 18. See Teresa P. R. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Teresa P. R. Caldeira, “From Modernism to Neoliberalism in São Paulo: Reconfiguring the City and Its Citizens,” in Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 51–­77. 19. Stages in the design of the building are documented in Pier Luigi Nicolin, “Alvaro Siza: Three Projects for Kreuzberg,” Lotus International 32 (1981): 44–­59; in “Wohnbau in Berlin: Internationale Bauausstellung

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Berlin 1984,” Bauforum 17, no. 104 (1984): 22; and in the construction drawings accompanying the reprinting of Nicolin’s account in Alvaro Siza: Poetic Profession (Milan: Edizioni Electa, 1986), 145–­59. 20. See especially the essays related to Berlin in Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), and Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). In “Time and Cultural Memory at Our Fin de Siècle,” the introduction to Twilight Memories, Huyssen writes, “The difficulty in the current conjuncture is to think memory and amnesia together rather than simply to oppose them. . . . Memory is no longer primarily a vital and energizing antidote to capitalist reification via the commodity form, a rejection of the iron cage homogeneity of an earlier culture industry and its consumer markets. It rather represents the attempt to slow down information processing” (7)—­or, we can add, to undo its deletions and restore its erasures.

4. PUBLIC AND COMMON(S)   1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 50. On the polis and the “space of appearance,” see 198–­99.   2. Ibid., 57.   3. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1962; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 1–­26. On the “reading public,” see 43–­56.   4. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 123.   5. Arendt, Human Condition, 52.   6. Ibid., 1–­6.   7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), viii.   8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 204 (emphasis in original).   9. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 273. 10. Ibid., 311; see also discussion on 306–­20. 11. Ibid., 155. 12. Ibid., 249–­50 (emphasis in original). 13. Ibid., 251–­60.

Notes to Chapter 5  //  167

14. Ibid., 258 (emphasis in original). 15. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243–­48. 16. David Harvey, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, “Commonwealth: An Exchange,” Artforum 43, no. 3 (2009): 262. 17. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 295. 18. Hardt and Negri, in Harvey, Hardt, and Negri, “Commonwealth,” 215. 19. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852; repr., New York: International Publishers, 1963), 15.

5. HORIZONS OF THOUGHT   1. Brook Barnes, “In a Breathtaking First, NASA’s Voyager 1 Exits the Solar System,” New York Times, September 12, 2013, http:// www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/science/in-a-breathtaking-first-nasa -craft-exits-the-solar-system.html. See also D. A. Gurnett et al., “In Situ Observations of Interstellar Plasma with Voyager 1,” Science 341, no. 6153 (2013): 1489–­92; and Andrew Grant, “At Last, Voyager 1 Slips into Interstellar Space,” Science News, September 12, 2013, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/353199/description/ At_last_Voyager_1_slips_into_interstellar_space.   2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).   3. Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (New York: Bantam, 1993), Green Mars (New York: Bantam, 1994), Blue Mars (New York: Bantam, 1996).   4. “Future Politics: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson,” by Imre Szeman and Maria Whiteman, Science Fiction Studies 31, no. 93 (2004), http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/robinson93interview .htm.   5. Fredric Jameson, “‘If I Find One Good City I’ll Spare the Man’: Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy,” in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 393–­416.   6. Ibid., 397–­98.   7. Jameson continues: “Production, praxis, even construction as such, in fact require the resistance of some initial raw material, diffused through the situation which itself takes shape under the pickaxe of the original project: it is a formula that combines both requirements, that of the confrontation of an unyielding set of elements, to be inventoried

Notes to Chapter 5  //  168

and described, that of the human pressure that will gradually give them names and the appearance, if not yet of a city, at least of its quarry and foundation pit, an immense building site whose skyline is still unknown” (ibid., 400).   8. On the trench in More’s Utopia as a constitutive contradiction of modernity, see Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 49–­50.   9. Jameson, “‘If I Find One Good City,’” 410. As the narrative progresses, this estrangement increasingly defines the oscillation between the earthly dystopia and what Jameson calls the “‘realm of freedom’ which is the Martian public sphere” (413). 10. Robinson, Blue Mars, 500. 11. Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (New York: Orbit, 2012). 12. Arendt, Human Condition, 1–­2. 13. Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 842–­67; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–­222. 14. Johann Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009), http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/. 15. Kim Stanley Robinson, “Terraforming Earth,” Slate, December 4, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/onearth/ 2012/12/geoengineering_science_fiction_and_fact_kim_stanley_ robinson_on_how_we_are.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_2.

6. POLIS = OIKOS   1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 198.   2. Ibid., 160.   3. On the archaeology of the Pnyx, see the papers collected in Björn Forsén and Greg Stanton, eds., The Pnyx in the History of Athens: Proceedings of an International Colloquium Organized by the Finnish Institute at Athens, 7–­9 October, 1994 (Helsinki: Foundation of the Finnish Institute at Athens, 1996).   4. Chantal Mouffe, “Some Reflections on an Agonistic Approach to the Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 804–­7.

Notes to Chapter 6  //  169

  5. Ibid., 806.   6. Ibid.   7. Ibid., 807.   8. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2001), 185.   9. Ibid., 126. 10. For a useful summary, see Alberto Toscano, “Factory, Territory, Metropolis, Empire,” Angelaki 9, no. 2 (August 2004): 197–­216. 11. See especially Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), as well as the companion volumes, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). 12. On animal laborans, see Arendt, Human Condition, 320–­25; on the transformation of homo oeconomicus from a “partner in an exchange” to an “entrepreneur of himself,” see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–­1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 225–­26; and on homo oeconomicus as an “abilities-­ machine,” see Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 229. 13. For a summary, see P. G. Calligas, “Archaeological Research on the Athenian Pnyx,” and Mogens Herman Hansen, “Reflections on the Number of Citizens Accommodated in the Assembly Place on the Pnyx,” in Forsén and Stanton, Pnyx in the History of Athens, 1–­5 and 24–­33, respectively. 14. Aristophanes, The Assemblywomen, in Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Henderson (New York: Routledge, 1996), 162. 15. Ibid., 178. 16. Gilles Deleuze, “The Rise of the Social,” foreword to Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (1872–73; repr. New York: Pantheon, 1979), x. 17. Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (New York: International Publishers, n.d.). 18. On spatial types and social or “human” types and their relation to normalization, see Georges Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), chap. 2, “Figuring the Invisible,” 31–­82.

Notes to Chapter 7  //  170

7. NOTES ON THE HOUSING QUESTION   1. Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872–73; repr. New York: International Publishers, n.d.), 35.  2. First Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics (Topeka: Kansas Publishing House, 1886), available at http://babel .hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hl4pxx;view=2up;seq=6;skin=mobile.   3. Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, The Working Class Movement in America (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1888), 29–­30. The quotations are drawn from ibid., part 5, “Views of Workingmen,” 101–­2 3.   4. Aveling and Marx Aveling, Working Class Movement in America, 31; First Annual Report, 226.   5. Aveling and Marx Aveling, Working Class Movement in America, 32–­33; First Annual Report, 253.   6. Aveling and Marx Aveling, Working Class Movement in America, 25.   7. Engels, Housing Question, 22 (emphasis in original).   8. Ibid.   9. William S. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), xiii. 10. Sherry Lamb Schirmer, A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900–­1960 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 17. 11. Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 45–­46. 12. Schirmer, City Divided, 75. 13. Ibid., 34. 14. Ibid., 71–­73. On the “moral sermons” of bourgeois housing reform, see Engels, Housing Question, 47–­48. 15. Schirmer, City Divided, 73–­76; 99–­107. 16. Ibid., 107–­9. 17. Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door” (1909), trans. Mark Ritter, Theory, Culture & Society 11, no. 1 (February 1994): 9. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Arjun Appadurai, “Housing and Hope,” in The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (New York: Verso, 2013), 124–­25; Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language,

Notes to Chapter 7  //  171

Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 141–­59. Heidegger presented this text on August 5, 1951, as a lecture at the Darmstadt Colloquium II. 20. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 144 (emphasis in original). 21. Ibid., 155–­56, 147. Hofstadter translates Behausungen as “housings.” It could also be rendered as “dwellings.” Heidegger emphasizes that “these are not necessarily dwelling-­houses [Wohnungen] in the narrower sense” (156). 22. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006). 23. Arjun Appadurai, “Cosmopolitanism from Below: Some Ethical Lessons from the Slums of Mumbai,” in Future as Cultural Fact, 209. 24. Ibid., 198. 25. Arjun Appadurai, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” in Future as Cultural Fact, 169. 26. Ibid., 170. 27. Ibid., 169–­70. 28. Arjun Appadurai, “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” in Future as Cultural Fact, 131–­52. 29. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger” (1908), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 402. 30. Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 61–­181; and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991). 31. Appadurai, “Cosmopolitanism from Below,” 209–­10. 32. Ibid., 213. 33. Bernhard Siegert, “Door Logic; or, The Materiality of the Symbolic: From Cultural Techniques to Cybernetic Machines,” in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­ Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 192–­205. 34. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (1944; repr., New York: Verso, 2005), 39, quoted in ibid., 202. 35. Ibid., 38–­39. 36. Ibid., 39. 37. Siegert, “Door Logic,” 203. 38. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 2, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–­1955, trans.

Notes to Chapter 7  //  172

Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 302, quoted in ibid., 203 (brackets added).

8. BROKEN WINDOWS   1. Gary S. Becker, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” in Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment, ed. Gary S. Becker and William M. Landes (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1974), 9–­10.   2. Ibid., 14.   3. Ibid., 18.   4. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–­1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 252. In contrast, David Harvey, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), focuses his account more consistently on neoliberal political ideology.   5. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 110–­11.   6. George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” The Atlantic, March 1982, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken -windows/304465/.   7. On “order maintenance” and constructivist social theory, see Bernhard E. Harcourt, Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 38–­41.   8. On the utilitarianism of neoliberal thought in Gary S. Becker and Theodor W. Schultz, see Michel Feher, “Self-­Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 21–­41.   9. On “broken windows” policing and the formation of “orderly” and “disorderly” subjects, see Harcourt, Illusion of Order, 127–­84. 10. Kelling and Wilson, “Broken Windows.” 11. Ibid. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Dionysiac World View” (1870), in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 122. 13. For a compellingly detailed Foucauldian analysis along these lines, see Harcourt, Illusion of Order, esp. 150–­59. 14. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 111. 15. Ibid.

Notes to Chapter 8  //  173

16. Ibid., 112–­13. 17. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 229. 18. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 116, 75. 19. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 229. 20. Ibid., 230. 21. Edward Glaeser, “The Trials and Triumphs of the City: Edward Glaeser in Conversation,” by Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, May 21, 2015, available at http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/21/ what-are-cities-doing-so-right-and-so-wrong-the-experts-go-head -to-head. 22. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 228–­29. 23. Gary S. Becker, The Economics of Discrimination, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 153–­54. 24. Ibid., 162. 25. Alexandra Starr, “How the Legacy of Amadou Diallo Lives on in New York’s Immigrant Community,” The World, Public Radio International, February 5, 2014, available at http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02 -05/how-legacy-amadou-diallo-lives-new-yorks-immigrant-community. 26. Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door” (1909), trans. Mark Ritter, Theory, Culture, and Society 11, no. 1 (February 1994): 8. 27. Walter Benjamin, “One-­Way Street” (1928), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1:444–­88. On windows as thresholds, see also Georges Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), esp. chap. 8, “Windows and Screens,” 251–­84. 28. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 151. 29. On neoliberalism and “environmental technology,” see Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 259. 30. Bernhard Siegert, “Door Logic; or, The Materiality of the Symbolic: From Cultural Techniques to Cybernetic Machines,” in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­ Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 201–­3. 31. Harcourt, Illusion of Order, 50. 32. Jane Fritsch, “The Diallo Verdict: The Overview; 4 Officers in Diallo Shooting Are Acquitted of All Charges,” New York Times, February 26, 2000, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/26/ny

Notes to Chapter 8  //  174

region/diallo-verdict-overview-4-officers-diallo-shooting-are-acquit ted-all-charges.html.

9. BEIJING IN DETROIT   1. Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-­ First Century (New York: Verso, 2007), 18n12. See also Mario Tronti, “Workers and Capital,” Telos 14 (Winter 1972): 25–­62.   2. “GM Constructs a ‘Versailles of Industry,’” Life, May 21, 1956, 96–­ 97, 102–­7; and “GM’s Industrial Versailles,” Architectural Forum, May 1956, 122–­27.   3. Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 171.   4. For example, Arrighi cites Paul Krugman, “The War against Wages,” New York Times, October 6, 2006.   5. Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 172; see also chap. 12, “Origins and Dynamic of the Chinese Ascent,” 351–­78.   6. Mitch Hotts, “Walmart to Return to Warren,” Macomb Daily (Clinton Township, Mich.), September 13, 2012, available at http:// www.macombdaily.com/article/20120913/FINANCE01/120919856/ walmart-to-return-to-warren&pager=1.   7. David Harvey, “The Spatial Fix: Hegel, Von Thünen, and Marx,” in Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001), 284–­311. Arrighi makes extensive use of this concept in a chapter titled “The Territorial Logic of Historical Materialism,” in Adam Smith in Beijing, 211–­49.   8. Peggy Walsh Sarnecki, “Walmart to Return to Warren Shopping Center, Add 270–­300 Jobs,” Detroit Free Press, September 13, 2012, available at http://archive.freep.com/article/20120913/NEWS04/3091301 85/Walmart-to-return-to-Warren-shopping-center-add-270–300-jobs.   9. On the efforts of historic preservationists relative to the General Motors Technical Center, see Lindsey Schweinberg, “General Motors Technical Center,” International Committee for the Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement, Do.Co,Mo.Mo_US, August 17, 2012, available at http://www .docomomo-us.org/register/fiche/general_motors_technical_center. 10. On Wal-­ Mart’s decentralized logistics, see Jesse LeCavalier, “All Those Numbers: Logistics, Territory, and Walmart,” Places, May 2010, available at https://placesjournal.org/article/all-those-numbers -logistics-territory-and-walmart/. 11. Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 303. 12. Ibid., 348.

Notes to Chapter 10  //  175

13. Ibid., 219. 14. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:284 (translation slightly modified). 15. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), esp. part 3, “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern,” 119–­88. 16. For an Agambenian interpretation of Detroit’s “emergency manager,” see Jason Stanley, “Detroit’s Drought of Democracy,” The Stone (blog), New York Times, July 29, 2014, available at http://opinionator. blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/detroits-drought-of-democracy/?_r=0. 17. Jon Swaine, “Detroit’s Residents Fight Back over Water Shutoff: ‘It’s a Life-­ or-­ Death Situation,’” The Guardian, July 21, 2014, available at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/21/detroit -water-shutoff-life-or-death. 18. Ben Austen, “The Post-­ Post-­ Apocalyptic Detroit,” New York Times Magazine, July 11, 2014, available at http://www.nytimes.com/ 2014/07/13/magazine/the-post-post-apocalyptic-detroit.html.

10. INFRASTRUCTURE AND MEDIAPOLITICS   1. Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–­43.   2. Ibid., 331, 336.   3. Ibid., 336–­37.   4. Bernhard Siegert, “Cultural Techniques; or, The End of the Intellectual Postwar in German Media Theory,” introduction to Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­ Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 14.   5. Ibid.   6. Ibid., 9.  7. Cornelia Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” trans. Ilinca Iurascu, in “Cultural Techniques,” ed. Geoffrey Winthrop-­ Young, Ilinca Iurascu, and Jussi Parikka, special issue, Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (November 2013): 83.   8. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (New York: Routledge, 2001), 8.   9. Ibid. 10. My use of the expression “the background noise of the real”

Notes to Chapter 10  //  176

differs slightly from Siegert’s “the sounds and noise of the real” in that I associate the unrepresentable real—­i.e., nature—­with what remains after an infrastructurally mediated “nature” enters the cognitive field. See Siegert, “Cultural Techniques,” 15. On nature–­culture hybrids, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), esp. 1–­3, 10–­12, 49–­51, 103–­9. 11. On power as (warlike) relation rather than exchange, see Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–­1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 14–­17. 12. “Bolivia Water Management: A Tale of Three Cities,” Précis: World Bank Operations Evaluation Department 222 (Spring 2002): 3. 13. On the Bolivian “water wars,” see Rocio Bustamenta, Carlos Crespo, and Anna Maria Walnycki, “Seeing through the Concept of Water as a Human Right in Bolivia,” in The Right to Water: Politics, Governance, and Social Struggles, ed. Farhana Sultan and Alex Loftus (New York: Earthscan, 2012), 223–­40; Verónica Perera, “From Cochabamba to Colombia: Travelling Repertoires in Latin American Water Struggles,” in Sultan and Loftus, Right to Water, 241–­56; Thomas Perrault, “From the Guerra Del Agua to the Guerra Del Gas: Resource Governance, Neoliberalism, and Popular Protest in Bolivia,” Antipode 38, no. 1 (January 2006): 150–­72; and Thomas Perrault, “State Restructuring and the Scale Politics of Rural Water Governance in Bolivia,” Environment and Planning A 37 no. 2 (2005): 263–­84. 14. Perrault, “From the Guerra Del Agua to the Guerra Del Gas,” 156. 15. Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, 131. 16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 107–­12. 17. Bechtel Corporation, “Bechtel Perspective on the Aguas Del Tunari Water Concession in Cochabamba, Bolivia,” March 16, 2005, accessed July 1, 2016, at http://www.bechtel.com/newsroom/releases/2005/03/ aguas-del-tunari-water-concession-cochabamba/. 18. The statement further notes that, in response, the government lowered the rates the following month (ibid.). 19. The same Bechtel statement notes, “Half the rate increase was necessitated by such government requirements as paying down more than $30 million in debt accumulated by the public utility that had operated the system so poorly. Rate increases were also needed to finance proper maintenance and expansion of the water system” (ibid.). 20. “Bolivia Water Management,” 3.

Notes to Chapter 10  //  177

21. Bechtel Corporation, “Cochabamba and the Aguas Del Tunari Consortium,” December 2005, accessed July 1, 2016, at http://www .bechtel.com/files/perspective-aguas-del-tunari-water-concession/. 22. William Finnegan, “Leasing the Rain,” The New Yorker, April 8, 2002, available at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/04/08/ leasing-the-rain. 23. On modernism and modernity as a ruined “antiquity,” see T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), introduction, 1–­14. 24. See, for example, David Nye, The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 25. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985).

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INDEX

abilities-machines, 103, 125, 126 abstraction, 13, 20, 47–48, 55 abstract markets, 53, 56 Acropolis, 99 actor–network theory, x, 155n2 Adam Smith in Beijing (Arrighi), 132 Adorno, Theodor W., 4, 118 aesthetics, 9, 11, 12, 19, 20, 27, 36–37, 47, 124, 130, 156n7, 157n20; domain of, 43; modernist, 116; Nietzschean, 9 affects, artificial common of, 80 affirmation, negation and, 4 African Americans, 110, 111, 112, 139–40 Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 139 agonism, 101 Aguas del Tunari, 145, 147–48 Alberti, Leon Battista: on city, 30 Alexander, Christopher, 65 Allgemeine ElektricitätsGesellschaft (AEG), 62–63 alterglobalization, 77, 146

altermodernity, 146 Althusser, Louis, 15, 65, 76, 158n39 Anderson, Benedict, 59 Anderson, Laurie: quote of, 120 animal laborans, 103, 169n12 Annan, Kofi, 117 anthropocentrism, 23, 86, 97 antiprivatization, 146 apartheid: biomedical, 92, 94; biopolitical, 93; socioeconomic, 91 Apollo, 8, 9, 18; Dionysus and, 12, 13, 19, 22 Apollonian order, 9, 12, 124, 127 Appadurai, Arjun, 49, 115–17, 155n2; city of cash and, 116; countercosmopolitans and, 117; financescapes and, 50; housing and, 114 apparatus, 3, 21; ideological state, 15; urban, ix, 2, 3, 14, 19, 28 appearance, space of, 73, 76, 100, 102, 104, 105

 // 179

Index // 180 aqueducts, 10, 13 Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Jameson), 88 Architectural Forum, 133 architecture, 21, 29, 45, 47, 55; capital and, 55–56; corporate, 137; urbanism and, 50 Arendt, Hannah, 72, 74, 95, 108; animal laborans and, 103; banality of evil and, 96; consensus and, 101; household and, 102; housekeeping and, 81, 105; Mouffe and, 101; polis and, 73, 98; public appearance and, 73; public realm and, 75, 102; social and, 73, 105, 106; space of appearance and, 100; Sputnik 1 and, 75 Ariadne, Dionysus and, 18, 19 “Ariadne’s Complaint” (Nietzsche), 18 Aristophanes, 103, 104, 105 Arrighi, Giovanni, 132, 133, 134; China’s rise and, 136; Harvey and, 138; symbolic economy and, 137 Assemblywoman, The (Aristophanes), 103 Athens, 98, 100, 103, 104, 105 Atlantic, The, 122 Attic tragedy, birth of, 8 Aveling, Edward, 110, 111 banality of evil, 96 Ban Ki-moon, 32 bankruptcy, 132, 135, 138, 139 Banzer, Hugo, 145 Baudelaire, Charles, 5, 22, 44, 82

Baudrillard, Jean: millenarianism of, 46 Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton (Giedion), 61 Bauhaus Corporation (Bauhaus GmbH), 48 Bechtel Corporation, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 176n19 Becker, Gary S., 122, 125, 126, 127, 130; on criminal offenses, 120, 121; equation and, 123; racial discrimination and, 128 “Before the Law” (Kafka), 119 Behrens, Peter: AEG and, 62 Beijing, 132, 136, 137 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 22, 23, 44, 47, 66; Berlin and, 62; Meyer and, 61; shopping arcades and, 56; Situationists and, 45; teleology and, 128 Bentham, Jeremy, 46 Berlin, 9, 10, 44, 48, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 165n13; war and, 62 Berlin key, 63, 64, 69 Berlin Wall, 66, 69, 70, 86 Bibliothèque du Roi (Royal Library), 83 big box: logistics of, 136 Big Science (Anderson): quote from, 120 biopolitics, 23, 24, 42, 80, 81, 82, 91, 92, 103, 112, 147, 152; mediapolitics and, 151, 153 biopower, 24, 81, 152 “Birth of Biopolitics, The” (Foucault), 126, 127 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 8, 9, 17

Index // 181 Blue Mars (Robinson), 86, 93 Bogdanov, Alexander, 88 Bonn, 66 Bouça Houses, 70 bouleuterion, 99, 100 Boullée, Étienne-Louis, 83, 84 Bratton, Benjamin, 122, 127, 129 Brenner, Neil, 23, 162n4 “Bridge and Door” (Simmel), 5, 113, 116 bridges, 114, 141–42, 144, 145 “broken windows” policy, 123, 124, 125, 129–30, 172n9 “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” (Kelling and Wilson), 122 Brown, Bill, 63, 64 Brown, Wendy, 31, 41 “Building Dwelling Thinking” (Heidegger), 114 building-through-dwelling, 114 Bureau of Labor, 110 Burj Khalifa, 67, 165n15 Burke, Edmund, 56 Cacciari, Massimo, 5, 6, 46, 47 capital, 14, 49, 51, 82, 121; accumulated, 138; architecture and, 55–56; ecologicalterritorial dimension of, 10; expansionist, 52; human, 3; labor and, 28; ontotheological emergence of, 41; reformist program for, 78; reproduction of, 76, 106; spatial fix and, 134 capitalism, 39, 43, 47, 68, 69, 116, 134; biopolitical, 76; communism and, 88; creative destruction and, 137; culture and, 49; European, 74; indus-

trial, 15, 36, 37, 51, 76, 77, 96; liberal, 105; managerial, 103; neoliberal, 56; political, 103; saving, 78, 80; transnational, 41, 43 Careful Urban Renewal Section (IBA), 68 Carnation Revolution, 70 Castells, Manuel, 14, 15, 16, 17 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 49 Chandler, Alfred, 133 China: Wal-Mart and, 136, 137, 139, 140 Chrysler, 131, 132, 138 Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act (1979), 132 circulation, 58, 59, 64 citizenship, 78, 84, 99 city, 16, 33, 38, 73, 98, 157n26; aesthetic life of, 44; country and, 37; essay form and, 5; European, 45; global, 44, 47, 81; as hardware, 1, 28; historical center of, 45; as house, 31, 32; industrial, 14; informational, 14; as medium, 64–65; mega, 47; postmetropolitan, 53; postmodern, 53; as social condenser, 60; socialist, 83; war and, 62; as zone of human habitation, 22 city-states, 98, 99 civil society, 74, 76, 101 Clark, T. J., 37, 162n9 Cochabamba, 145, 148, 149, 150; water wars and, 146, 147 Cold War, 45, 75 Collège de France, 126 Comaroff, Jean: theory from the south and, 23

Index // 182 Comaroff, John: theory from the south and, 23 commodification, 56, 58 commodities, 25, 56, 118 common, 72, 77; communication and, 78, 79; democracy of, 83; desocialization of, 81; governance of, 81–82; specters of, 80 commons, 72; earth as, 85; environmental, 81; tragedy of, 72, 81, 147; urban, 38 common sense, 72, 74 common wealth, 72, 77, 146 Commonwealth (Hardt and Negri), 76 communications: common and, 78, 79; media theory of, 79, 80; among singularities, 78 communism, 72, 78, 88 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 10 Communist Party, 102 community, 10, 116, 119; gated, 114; real estate and, 118; suburban, 112 connection, 1, 143, 151 Contractor, Hafeez, 54, 58 corporate bodies, multinational/ transnational, 3 cosmopolitanism, 115, 117 countercosmopolitans, 117 counter-globalization movement, 77 counterpublics, 74, 76 Country and the City, The (Williams), 34 Country Club District (Kansas City), 112, 113 Courbet, Gustave, 162n9

credit, 49, 51, 52–53, 55, 59 “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” (Becker), 120 crimes, 120, 121; disorder and, 122; drug, 25; rates/reducing, 125; urban, 69 criminality, 123, 124, 130 critical reconstruction, 68, 70 Crystal Palace, 135 cultural difference, 40 cultural exchange, space of, 40 cultural techniques, 143 culture, x, 15–16, 58, 143, 166n20; capitalism and, 49; halls of, 107; memory palaces of, 108; nature and, 144–45 cybernetics, 119, 143 Darmstadt Colloquium II, 171n19 das Ding, 63–64 “Das Ding” (Heidegger), 165n9 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 31 Davis, Mike, 53, 115 De Blasio, Bill, 27 Debord, Guy, 16 decentralization, 65, 146 De Certeau, Michel, 45 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 12, 18, 106; on dispositif, 19; Foucault and, 21; thousand plateaus and, 58 DeLillo, Don, 152 democracy, 74, 83, 115; of the common, 83; direct/participatory, 79–80, 99; figure of, 98–99 demographic policies, 39–40 De Re Aedificatoria (Alberti), 30 Derrida, Jacques, 86 Detroit, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136,

Index // 183 137; emergency management of, 138, 139, 140; fiscal crisis for, 140; municipal government and, 138 Detroit Institute of Art, 140 Diallo, Amadou, 128, 129 Dick, Philip K., 88 Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus (Weber), 60 Dionysian, 8, 9, 124, 127 Dionysus, 9, 17, 127; Apollo and, 12, 13, 19, 22; Ariadne and, 18, 19; labyrinth and, 19 disconnection, 143, 151 disenchantment, 48; reenchantment and, 56 dispositifs, 2, 3, 15, 19, 21, 160n63 dispossession, 34, 135 distance: freedom of, 118; nearness and, 11 Doha: financial capital in, 50 domes, 67, 87; geodesic, 47; metaphysical, 55, 66 Donzelot, Jacques, 106 dwelling, 114, 171n21 dwelling-through-building, 114 dystopia, 90, 168n9 Eames, Charles, 21 Eames, Ray, 21 Earth, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96; as commons, 85; rebalancing, 97 Earth–Mars axis, 88, 91, 92, 93, 96 East Asian regional economic system, 136, 137 École des Beaux Arts, 22 École des Ponts et Chaussées, 22 economic abstractions, 52, 64

economic choice, rational, 120 economic exchange, 40, 78, 80, 82 economic growth, 136, 138 economic life, pulsations/interchanges of, 44 economic order, 60, 121 economic rationality, 126, 130 Economics of Discrimination, The (Becker), 128 education, 2, 78, 80, 83, 126, 128 Eero Saarinen and Associates, 133 Eiffel Tower, 61 Eisenbauten, ihre Geschichte und Æsthetik (Meyer), 61 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 133 electricity, 142, 149 electropolis, 144, 149 emergency management, 138, 139, 140, 175n16 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 76 enclosures, 1, 30, 31, 32, 38, 39, 41, 43, 47, 60, 61, 69, 81, 83, 99, 114 energy, 144, 145; landscape of, 143 Engels, Friedrich, 9, 13, 44, 91, 108, 109–10, 112, 118; on capital, 10; entrepreneurialism, 3, 127, 140; environmental order/ disorder, 123; housing question and, 15, 107, 111; moral sermons and, 113 environmentalists, 72 epistemological sanitation system, 4 essay-as-grid, 4–7, 8 Euro-Communism, 132 Europa, 94 European Jews, 11 Eurozone, 67 Exodusters, 110, 112, 116

Index // 184 exploitation, 148 Explorer 1: 75 expropriation, 15, 28 exurban life, financialization of, 81 faith: as technique, 55–56; urban real estate and, 57 Fanon, Frantz, 40 financescapes, 50 financial capital, 50, 56, 83 Financial District, 58 financial imaginaries, globalization and, 49 financial markets, 52, 57, 58, 82 Flint, 132, 138, 139 floating populations, 4, 13, 27 Florence: Medicis and, 30 Ford, 131, 133 Fordism, 131 Forrester, Jay W., 65 Foster, Norman, 66 Foucault, Michel, 2, 22, 42, 76, 121, 122, 124, 130, 155n4; abilities-machines and, 125, 126; Deleuze and, 21; dispositif and, 3, 19, 21; grids of intelligibility and, 3; homo oeconomicus and, 103; lectures by, 126, 127; racism and, 127–28 Fouts, Jim, 135 frames, wrought-iron/factoryrolled-steel, 61 Fraser, Nancy, 74, 76 freedom, 6, 22, 114, 168n9 friend-enemy relations, taming of, 100 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 45, 47, 55 functionalism, 48, 54, 127

Galerie des Machines, 61 Gehry, Frank: IAC Building and, 58 Geistesleben, 49 Gemeinschaft, 6; Gesellschaft and, 116 gender, 18, 74, 99, 106, 115 General Motors, 131, 132, 133, 136 General Motors Technical Center, 133, 134, 135, 137, 174n9 Gesellschaft, 6; Gemeinschaft and, 116 Giedion, Sigfried, 47, 61 Gilbert, Dan, 140 Giuliani, Rudolph, 122, 129 Glaeser, Edward, 122, 125, 126, 127 global, 20 globalization, 20, 21, 47, 67; financial, 31, 49, 50 global warming, 90 governmental discourse, 38 governmentality, 4, 73 Graham, Stephen, 143, 144, 146, 149 greenhouse gases, 91, 151 Green Mars (Robinson), 86 Grosßstadt, 5, 9, 35, 116 Grundrisse (Marx), 10 Guattari, Félix, 58 Habermas, Jürgen, 73, 101; public sphere and, 74, 76, 79 Hannibal Bridge, 112 Hardin, Garrett: environmental commons and, 81 Hardt, Michael, 38, 76, 102, 103; biopolitical city and, 81; common and, 79, 81; common wealth and, 149; communism/

Index // 185 socialism and, 78; governance and, 82; immaterial labor and, 77–78; infrastructure and, 147; media practices and, 80; mediation and, 79; on metropolis/multitude, 80; public/ private and, 77; revolutionary insurrection/institutional transformation and, 83; specters of the common and, 80; water wars and, 146 hardware, 64; city as, 1, 28 Harvey, David, 82; accumulation by dispossession and, 135; Arrighi and, 138; city/country and, 37; spatial fix and, 134, 137 Hauptstadt, 65, 66 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 6, 23, 46 health, 25, 80, 83, 126, 134 hegemony, 22, 100, 103, 162n4; governing, 108; as repetition, 106 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe), 101 Heidegger, Martin, 23, 117, 165n9, 171n19; das Ding and, 63–64; dwelling and, 114, 171n21; housing and, 114, 115; Lefebvre and, 17; nature of the thing and, 129; Simmel and, 114 Hell’s Half Acre, 112, 113, 118 heterotopias, 22, 87 Hines, Gerald, 55 Hohenzollern Palace (Stadtschloss), 67 homo faber, 103 homo oeconomicus, 103, 122, 126, 127, 130, 169n12

Horkheimer, Max, 4 house, city as, 31, 32 household, 102; collective, 105, 106 household management, political life and, 73 housekeeping, 73, 81, 105 housing, 80, 106, 113, 115; affordable, 26, 27; biopolitics of, 112; production of, 107; public, 83; racial restrictions on, 112; reform/moral sermons of, 170n14; shortages, 107, 114; social, 67, 68; subsidized, 68; technical obsolescence of, 118 housing developments, coding for, 113 housing question, 10, 15, 91, 107, 111, 115 Housing Question, The (Engels), 10, 108 Hughes, Thomas P., 143 human cognition, 4, 144 Human Condition, The (Arendt), 75, 95, 101 humanism, 30, 68, 71 humanity, 36, 118 human-machines, 7 Huyssen, Andreas, 6, 7, 21, 71, 164, 166n20 hydropolis, 144, 149 IBA. See International Bauausstellung IBM. See International Business Machines identity, 31, 74, 146 ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), 15

Index // 186 imaginaries: financial, 49; social, 49, 50 imperialism, 23, 34, 96 Imperial Towers, 54, 56, 58 incarceration rates, 125, 127 individuality, 6, 7, 25 industrial capitalism, 15, 36, 37, 51, 76, 96, 111, 134; rise of, 77; social relations of, 112 infrastructure, ix, x, 2, 11, 20, 33, 56, 60, 143, 152; background/ foreground and, 142; boundary conditions and, 123; communicative, 79; definition of, 141; human labor and, 147; media as, 25; mediating, 80; municipal, 142, 145; people as, 24; politics/poetics of, 141; principal law of, 151; visibility of, 141–42 International Bauausstellung (IBA), 67, 68, 69, 70, 165n16 International Business Machines (IBM), 21 International Monetary Fund, 42, 140 International Water, 147 iron cage, 60–61, 64, 164n2, 166n20 “Iron Construction” (Benjamin), 61 Jacobs, Jane, 124 Jameson, Fredric, 49, 88, 89, 91; on production/praxis/ construction, 167–68n7; realm of freedom and, 168n9; utopian thought and, 93 Johannesburg: specificity of, 23–24

Johnson, Philip, 55 Jünger, Ernst, 62, 69, 164n5 Kafka, Franz, 6, 119 Kahn, Albert, 133 Kansas City, 109, 110, 112; racial geography of, 113; segregation in, 113; slums of, 116 Kant, Immanuel, 4; mathematical sublime and, 42, 43, 56; media and, 58; phantasmagoria and, 163n13; powers of senses/mind and, 57 Kelling, George L., 124, 125, 127, 129; criminality and, 122; signals and, 123 Kittler, Friedrich, 67; on city as medium, 64–65 knowledge, x, 13, 16, 20, 84, 125; artificial common of, 80; scientific, 88–89 Kracauer, Siegfried, 48, 56 Krieg und Krieger (Jünger), 62 Krupp, 62, 63 Kultur, 143 Kulturtechniken, 143 labor, 20, 26, 78, 147, 153; capital and, 28; conditions/exploitative, 111; cooperative, 79; costs of, 135; dispersion/ deterritorialization of, 102; division of, 73, 132; immaterial, 77–78, 102; informal, 107; reserve army of, 2; unskilled, 112 labor organizations, 102, 132 Lacan, Jacques, 119 Laclau, Ernesto, 101, 104, 105 landscapes, 3, 36, 143

Index // 187 languages, x; artificial common of, 80 Larkin, Brian, 141, 142 Latour, Bruno, 66, 67, 71, 100, 101, 102; Berlin key and, 64; nature-culture hybrids and, 144; social relations and, 63; West Berlin and, 69 Le Corbusier, 30 Lefebvre, Henri, 14, 20, 23, 37, 45, 117; culturalist approach of, 15–16; Heidegger and, 17; implosions/explosions and, 12; Marx and, 16; Nietzsche and, 17–18; production of space and, 60; urban man and, 16 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 109 Life, 133 Lissitzky, El, 35 London, 10, 13, 44, 135 Loos, Adolf, 70 Luhmann, Niklaus, 47 Mahila Milan, 115 Making Things Public (Latour and Weibel), 100 “Man and Space” (conference), 114 Mars: colonization of, 86, 87; ecology of, 90, 92; geoengineered, 96; geology/hydrology of, 90; as mirror, 97; pluralism of, 94 Mars trilogy (Robinson), 86–87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 97 Marvin, Simon, 143, 144, 146, 149 Marx, Karl, 44, 52, 56, 86, 109, 132, 138; “Asiatic” aqueducts and, 13; “Asiatic” despotism

and, 10; on cities, 157n26; fictitious capital and, 82; Lefebvre and, 16; reserve army of labor and, 2; on revolutions, 84 Marx Aveling, Eleanor, 109, 110, 111, 116 Marxism, x, 15, 17, 80, 88, 102 mathematical sublime, 42–43, 56–57 May, Ernst, 70 Mbembe, Achille, 24 McLuhan, Marshall, 46 media, 25, 26, 46, 79, 80, 84, 142 mediapolitics, ix, 27, 147, 149, 152; biopolitics and, 151, 153; in labyrinth, 18–20 media theory, x, 142 mediation, 7, 79, 83, 143 Medicis: Florence and, 30 “metanational” corporations, 90, 91 metropolis, 9, 35, 39, 42, 106; miniature, 21; modern, 26, 107; multitude and, 80; myths of, 22; neoliberal, 83; postmodern, 26; social relations of, 44 “Metropolis and Mental Life, The” (Simmel), 50, 116 metropolitan life, 7, 13, 33, 37, 47 Metropolitan Transit Authority, 122 Mexico City: financial capital in, 50 Meyer, Alfred: Benjamin and, 61 Michelet, Jules, 61 Mietskaserne, 68 migration, 3; as investment, 126–27; rural-to-urban, 126, 127

Index // 188 Millennium Development Goals (UN), 34 Minima Moralia (Adorno), 118 Misicuni Reservoir, 149 Missouri River, 110, 112, 118 modernism, 36, 44–45, 49, 59, 76, 116; architectural, 119; reflexive, 89; as ruined antiquity, 177n23 modernity, 4, 45, 46, 146, 168n8; capitalist, 102; characterization of, 72–73; collective, 152; electricity and, 142; as ruined antiquity, 177n23; straw figures of, 6 Montaigne, Michel de, 5, 7 Morales, Evo, 146 More, Thomas, 90, 168n8 mortgage redlining, 113 Mouffe, Chantal, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105 Multitude (Hardt and Negri), 76 Mumbai, 49, 58, 115; financial capital in, 50; privatization and, 52; real estate market in, 54; SRA in, 53, 163n8; water pipes in, 142 Mumbai Alliance: toilet festivals and, 115 Mumford, Lewis, 65 municipal government, 138 municipal services, infrastructure and, 142 Museum of Modern Art, 127 myth, 22; organicist, 52; tragic, 8, 12 narratives, 30; elements, 40–41, 48; historical, 33; metropolitan, 34–35

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 45, 85, 86 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 139 National Slum Dwellers Federation, 115 nation-state, 31, 39, 42, 76 nature, 143; bridges and, 144 nature–culture hybrids, 144–45, 147, 150 nature of the thing, 129 near–far antithesis, 11–13 negation, affirmation and, 4 Negri, Antonio, 38, 76, 102, 103; biopolitical city and, 81; common and, 79, 81; common wealth and, 149; governance and, 82; immaterial labor and, 77–78; infrastructure and, 147; media practices and, 80; mediation and, 79; metropolis and, 80, 106; public/private and, 77; revolutionary insurrection/ institutional transformation and, 83; specters of the common and, 80; water wars and, 146 neoliberalism, 126, 127, 129, 155n5, 172n4, 173n29; utilitarianism of, 172n8 New Buildings Section (IBA), 68 New Deal, 132 Newman, Oscar: defensible space of, 124 New York City, 44, 58, 125; financial capital in, 50; zoning legislation and, 27

Index // 189 New York Police Department, 122, 129 New York Times, 128 New York Times Magazine, 140 Nicholas V: Rome and, 30 Nichols, J. C., 111, 112, 113 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 11, 118, 124; aesthetics of, 9, 19; antimetropolitan argument of, 9; on artistic genius, 8; cognition and, 4; Dionysian and, 9, 16; gerechtfertight and, 8; Lefebvre and, 17–18; perceptions and, 17; tragic mode of, 4, 12 North American Free Trade Agreement, 31 Nuttal, Sarah, 24 objectification, 48, 51, 52 Occupy movement, 38 öffentliche Meinung, 73–74 Öffentlichkeit, 73 oikos, 20, 27, 73, 102, 107, 108; private space of, 100 “On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense” (Nietzsche), 17 Operai e capitale (Tronti), 132 Orr, Kevyn, 138, 139 pain, economy of, 57 Paine, Thomas, 74 Palace of the Louvre, 83 Palast der Republik, 66, 67 Paris Exposition (1889), 61 Park, Robert E., 15 parliament of things, 66 Parsons, Talcott, 47, 60, 61 Passagen (Giedion), 47 Passagenwerk (The Arcades Project, 1927–40) (Benjamin), 61

paternalism, 24, 55 philosophy: aesthetic, 59; media, 26; political, 77 Philosophy of Money, The (Simmel), 51, 116 Pistor, Katharina: scaling technology and, 155n3 planetary boundaries, 96 planetary urbanization. See urbanization: planetary Plattenbauten, 69 Pnyx, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106, 168n3; internalization of, 105 policing, 2, 106; broken windows, 129; community, 125; neoliberal, 130; stop-and-frisk, 129; zero-tolerance, 129 Policing of Families, The (Donzelot), 106 polis, x, 20, 22, 25, 28, 70, 98, 103, 104; as antiessentialist wager, 105; city as, 13, 27; determination of, 105; public space of, 100; as space of appearance, 73; topology of, 108 political-economic processes, x, 50 political models, statist/nonstatist, 75 political reform, 3, 72, 117 political society, civil society and, 101 politics, 29, 41, 73, 80, 90, 93, 98, 172, 128; housekeeping from, 108; racial, 140 poor door, 27 population size/density, 33 Portuguese revolution, 70, 71 postmodernism, 89 poststructuralist theory, 89

Index // 190 Potsdamer Platz, 66, 71 poverty, x, 35, 37, 39, 113; rural, 36 power, 8, 144, 147; generation/ distribution, 149; labor, 20; psychiatric, 2 power-knowledge complex, 13, 20, 125 Powers of Ten (Eames and Eames), 21 Preminger, Otto, 70 private: public and, 76, 77, 81, 101; state-centric language of, 81 private sector, 73, 78, 80 privatization, 69, 81, 148, 152; indigenous groups and, 145 production, 1, 13, 15, 20, 21, 39, 59, 62, 143, 167–68n7; biopolitical, 80, 82; capitalist mode of, 111; communal, 38; immaterial, 84, 107; industrial-capitalist, 76; mass, 58, 62; social, 2, 16, 17, 78; of space, 60; technological relations of, 16 Production of Space, The (Lefebvre), 16 Project for the New American Century, 133 property, 53, 142; relations, 75; republic of, 77, 84, 146; values, 113 public: actual, 75; ideal, 76; private and, 55, 76, 77, 81, 101; as publicity, 75; state-centric language of, 81; universal, 77; virtual, 75; welfare state and, 72 public life, 73, 76 public sector, 72, 75

public sphere, 72, 73, 76, 84, 102; communicative, 79 Quetelet, Adolphe, 42 race, 111, 112–13, 128 racism, 113, 127–28 Rathenau, Walther, 63 real: abstraction and, 13; sounds/ noise of, 176n10 real estate, 71, 112; community and, 118; development, 51, 52, 60, 107; iron cage of, 60; land as, 150; market, 55, 57 realism, 88, 89, 93, 95, 97 Red Mars (Robinson), 86 Red Star (Bogdanov), 88 reenchantment, 48; disenchantment and, 56 Reichstag, 61, 66, 67, 71 Renaissance, 30, 47, 62 repetition, 141; infrastructural, 25–28, 142, 143 reproduction, 100; biopolitical, 80 Reyes Villa, Manfred, 150 right to have rights, 26 right to the city, 26, 37 Right to the City (Lefebvre), 16 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 6 Rio de Janeiro: favelas of, 125–26 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 90, 91, 96–97; Mars trilogy of, 86–87, 88, 89, 93, 95 “Rockefeller drugs laws” (1973), 122 Rome, 6; Nicholas V and, 30 Roy, Ananya, 23 Royal Library, 83, 84 rural, 3, 24, 34, 35–37, 39; urban

Index // 191 and, 10, 12, 23, 26, 34–35, 36–37 rural–urban antagonism, 12, 23, 26, 34, 43 rural–urban interface, 24 SAAL. See Servicio de Apoio Ambulatorio Local Saarinen, Eero, 133 Safir, William, 129 São Paulo, 69; financial capital in, 50 São Victor Houses, 70 scale, 2, 20–25, 31, 159n61; global, 20; planetary, 20; politics of, 21; production of, 21; scalability and, 29; size and, 29 Schmitt, Carl, 139 Schumpeter, Joseph, 137 secularization, 41, 99 security, 30, 31, 80 self-management, 38, 136 Servicio de Apoio Ambulatorio Local (SAAL), 70 sexual norms, 104, 106 Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), 115, 117 Shakespeare, William, 86 Shanghai, 48 Siedlungen, 48, 49 Siegert, Bernhard, 26, 118, 119, 143, 145, 176n10 Silverstein, Larry, 51 Simmel, Georg, 5, 6, 11, 12, 15, 22, 24, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 113, 116, 117; on credit transactions, 53; on dilemma, 23; Heidegger and, 114; modern times and, 59; on Rome, 6; synthesis and, 52–53; on windows, 128

Simone, AbdouMalique: people as infrastructure and, 24 singularities, 77, 79, 82; communication among, 78 singularity–multiplicity dyad, 79 Situationist International, 16 Situationists, 45 Siza Vieira, Álvaro, 69–70, 71 slavery, 73, 111 slum dwellers, 53, 55, 115, 118 Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA), 53, 54, 55, 163n8 slum-rehabilitation schemes (SRSs), 53, 54–55, 163n8 slums, x, 53, 54; urban, 35, 115, 117 Smith, Adam, 132 Snyder, Rick, 138, 139 social, 50, 80, 105; hegemony of, 106; as “non-sutured space,” 1–2; rise of, 73, 106 social construction, theory of, 89 social imaginaries, 49, 50 socialism, 72, 83, 101; communism and, 78; real, 69, 71; state, 76, 78 social relations, 1, 13, 14, 15, 25, 26, 63, 112 social science, 43, 124 social singularities, multiplicity of, 146 social structure, 38–39 Society for the Protection of Area Resource Centres, 115 sociology, 42, 46; urban, 15, 29 sociotechnical life, 1, 2, 26 sovereignty, 29, 30, 31, 43, 142; corporate, 146; German, 66; imperial, 76; incomplete/ obsolete, 84; national, 40; theological political, 41

Index // 192 space, 1, 16; of appearance, 73, 76, 100, 102, 104, 105; collective, 72; of (dis)appearance, 105; governmental, 40; metropolitan, 3; national/extranational, 23; political, 20, 102; private, 100; production of, 20, 59; public, 36, 72, 100, 101; social, 73; urban, 51 spatial fix, 134, 137, 139 species-being, 91, 96 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 23, 74, 161n75 Sputnik 1, 75, 76, 78, 79, 95 SRA. See Slum Redevelopment Authority SRSs. See slum-rehabilitation schemes State of the World’s Cities (UN-HABITAT), 32 Storm of Steel (Jünger), 62 “Stranger, The” (Simmel), 116 Street Crimes Unit (SCU), 129 structural adjustment, 69, 140 sublime, 10, 12, 22, 35, 56–57, 59, 124, 152; mathematical, 21, 42, 43, 56, 58 subordinate, dominant and, 28 suburban communities, 112 surveillance, 124, 125 symbolic order, 129 symbols, 60 synthesis: abstract/comprehensive, 52; ideology of, 5; organic, 35 Tafuri, Manfredo, 46 Tardeo: slum rehabilitation for, 54 Taylor, Charles, 49

technology, 26, 142, 144; scaling, 155n3; thinking, 253 Tech Plaza (Warren), 134 telecommunications, landscape of, 143 teleology, 35, 128–29 terraforming, 87, 89 theory from the south, 23, 24 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 18 Thyssen, 62, 63 Tibaijuka, Anna K., 32, 34, 117 toilet festivals, 115, 117 toilets, public, 115, 117 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 15, 116 topology, 108; political, 100, 105, 107 total mobilization, 62, 67, 68, 69 town–country antithesis, 9–11 trade unions, economic policies and, 140 tragedy of the commons, 72, 81, 147 transnational networks, 40, 42 transport, 80, 143 Triumph of the City (Glaeser), 125 Tronti, Mario, 102, 132 2312 (Robinson), 94 Twilight Memories (Huyssen), 166n20 unhomeliness, 35 United Auto Workers, 132 United Nations, 32, 34, 36, 38, 42, 139; Centre for Human Settlement, 117; city and, 33, 37; reports by, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 43 United Nations Human Set-

Index // 193 tlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), 32, 162n4 United States Congress: financial assistance from, 131 urban, ix, 1, 3, 4, 8, 13–18, 22; agglomeration, 33; hegemony of, 14; rural and, 26 urban consequences, study of, 36 urban crises, 15, 40, 43 urbanism, 45, 144; architecture and, 50; neoliberal, 127 urbanists, 20, 32, 45, 124 urbanization, ix, x, 3, 10, 14, 22, 33, 36, 48, 157n27; exaggerating shape of, 34; global, 42; planetary, 23; primal scene of, 11; universal, 108 urban life: financialization of, 81; mechanized, 21; structuring, 145 urban order, aesthetic of, 130 urban phenomena, analyzing, 56 urban planning, 42, 65 urban question, 15 Urban Question, The (Castells), 14 urban–rural antagonism, x, 34, 81 urban studies, 14, 32 utility: logic of, 151; maintenance of, 145; polyphonic, 93; postpolitical, 104; realism and, 93; utopia, 90, 95 Virilio, Paul: millenarianism of, 46 Vismann, Cornelia, 143 Vitruvian Man (da Vinci), 31 Von Westphalen, Jenny, 109 Voyager 1: 85, 86, 93, 95, 97 Voyager 2: 86

Wal-Mart, 133, 134, 135; China and, 136, 137, 139 war of movement, 83 war of position, 83 Warren, 133, 134, 135 waste, 11, 144, 151 waste removal, 150, 151 water, 144, 151; landscape of, 143; as resource, 150; supply, 145, 146 water wars, 146–47, 176n13 Watts, Michael, 24 Weber, Max, 15, 44, 56, 60, 61, 68, 164n5; Berlin and, 62, 63; new economic order and, 64; objectification and, 64 Weibel, Peter, 100 welfare state, 68, 72 Wertheim department store, 61 Westin Bonaventure Hotel, 49 White Noise (DeLillo), 152 Williams, Raymond, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39 Wilson, Charles E., 132 Wilson, James Q., 122, 123, 124, 127, 133 Wirth, Louis, 15 Working Class Movement in America, The (Marx Aveling and Aveling), 110 World Bank, 42, 140, 145, 147, 149 World Trade Center, 51 Wyandotte County, 110, 111 Zapatistas, 77 Zarathustra, 8, 10, 11, 46

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Reinhold Martin is professor of architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He was a founding coeditor of the journal Grey Room, and his books include The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space and Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010).