Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities [1° ed.] 1138629189, 9781138629189

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“What can be done? This book is a must-read for activists, scholars and scholaractivists who struggle for a better and more equal world.” Giorgos Kallis, ICREA professor, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain

URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY IN THE ANTHROPO-​OBSCENE

Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-​obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities centres on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Across its theoretical and empirical chapters, written by leading scholars from anthropology, geography, urban studies, and political science, the book explores new political possibilities that are opening up in an age marked by proliferating contestations, sharpening socio-​ecological inequalities, and planetary processes of urbanization and environmental change. A deepened conversation between urban environmental studies and political theory is mobilized to chart a radically new direction for the field of urban political ecology and cognate disciplines:What could emancipatory politics be about in our time? What does a return of the political under the aegis of equality and freedom signal today in theory and in practice? How do political movements emerge that could re-​invent equality and freedom as actually existing socio-​ecological practices? The hope is to contribute discussions that can expand and rearrange critical environmental studies to remain relevant in a time of deepening depoliticization and the rise of post-​truth politics. Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-​obscene will be of interest to postgraduates, established scholars, and upper level undergraduates from any discipline or field with an interest in the interface between the urban, the environment, and the political, including: geography, urban studies, environmental studies, and political science. Henrik Ernstson is Lecturer in Human Geography at The University of Manchester, UK. Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at The University of Manchester, UK.

QUESTIONING CITIES

The ‘Questioning Cities’ series brings together an unusual mix of urban scholars under the title. Rather than taking a broadly economic approach, planning approach or more socio-​cultural approach, it aims to include titles from a multi-​disciplinary field of those interested in critical urban analysis. The series thus includes authors who draw on contemporary social, urban and critical theory to explore different aspects of the city. It is not therefore a series made up of books which are largely case studies of different cities and predominantly descriptive. It seeks instead to extend current debates through, in most cases, excellent empirical work, and to develop sophisticated understandings of the city from a number of disciplines including geography, sociology, politics, planning, cultural studies, philosophy and literature. The series also aims to be thoroughly international where possible, to be innovative, to surprise, and to challenge received wisdom in urban studies. Overall it will encourage a multi-​disciplinary and international dialogue always bearing in mind that simple description or empirical observation which is not located within a broader theoretical framework would not –​for this series at least –​be enough. Urban Cosmopolitics Agencements, assemblies, atmospheres Edited by Anders Blok and Ignacio Farías Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-​obscene Interruptions and Possibilities Edited by Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​ Questioning-​Cities/​book-​series/​SE0756

URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY IN THE ANTHROPO-​OBSCENE Interruptions and Possibilities Edited by Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​62918-​9  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​62919-​6  (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​21053-​7  (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

List of illustrations  List of contributors  Preface and acknowledgements 

x xii xvii

Introduction 

1

1 Politicizing the environment in the urban century  Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

3

PART I

The political 

23

2 O Tempora! O Mores! Interrupting the Anthropo-​obScene  Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson

25

3 Value, nature, and the vortex of accumulation  Richard Walker and Jason W. Moore

48

4 “Hic Rhodus, hic salta!” Postcolonial remains and the politics of the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene  Andrés Fabián Henao Castro and Henrik Ernstson

69

viii Contents

PART II

The situated 

89

5 Political ecologies of dispossession and anticorruption: A radical politics for the Anthropocene?  Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi

91

6 Uneven racial development and the abolition ecology of the city  Nik Heynen

111

7 Suffocating cities: Climate change as social-​ecological violence  129 Jonathan Silver 8 Multi-​vocal urban political ecology: In search of new sensibilities  Garth Myers

148

9 Paved paradise: The suburb as chief artefact of the Anthropocene and terrain of new political performativities  Roger Keil

165

10 Of ghosts, waste, and the Anthropocene  Marco Armiero

184

PART III

The performative 

203

11 Exhibiting division, seizing the state: The Natural History Museum  Jodi Dean

205

12 All that was directly lived  Andy Merrifield 13 Reclaiming a scholarship of presence: Building alternative socio-​environmental imaginaries  Maria Kaika

223

239

Contents  ix

Conclusion 

253

14 Bringing back the political: Egalitarian acting, performative theory  Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

255

Index 

268

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 7.1 Flooding in Accra, Ghana, in 2015  7.2 The coastal fishing settlement of Nguet Ndar in Saint-​Louis, Senegal  7.3 The Sahel in northern Ghana is becoming increasingly arid due to climate change, which affects electricity provision in the capital, Accra  7.4 The waste(d) infrastructure of Mbale, Uganda. The over-​filled container is marked CDM as it was part of a Clean Development Mechanism project sponsored by the World Bank  9.1 Alison Ruttan’s installation sculpture “A Line in the Sand” at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2015  9.2 Exhibition “Cosmos, Earth, Anthropocene, Tomorrow and Us” (“Cosmos, Terra, Antropoceno, Amanhãs e Nós”) at the Museum of Tomorrow, Rio de Janeiro  10.1 Overview of the chronology of waste management politics in Naples, Italy, from the 1980s to 2012  10.2 Embracing a ghost mood means, like the Wu Ming collective of Italian novelists and leftist activists, to be “transparent with the readers, but opaque to the media” in fighting oppression  11.1 The Natural History Museum, “Will the Story of the 6th Mass Extinction Ever Include the Role of its Sponsors?” 2015. Diorama in an exhibition at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Convention, Atlanta, GA, depicting the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing at the American Museum of Natural History, NY, several hundred years into a dystopian future 

130 135 137 141 168 178 186 190

212

Illustrations  xi

11.2 The Natural History Museum, “Our Climate, Whose Politics?” 2015. Diorama in an exhibition at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Convention, Atlanta, GA, depicting a diorama from a climate change exhibition at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, with the inclusion of a Koch Industries pipeline  11.3 The Natural History Museum workshops train participants to take the view of museum anthropologists who are attuned to the social and political forces shaping nature 

213 215

Table 10.1 Cost of houses per square metre 

192

CONTRIBUTORS

Editors Henrik Ernstson is Lecturer in Human Geography at The University of Manchester.

He is also affiliated to KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and is Honorary Research Associate at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, with previous postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and Stockholm University. He is co-​founder of The Situated Urban Political Ecology Collective and he is developing an interdisciplinary approach to politicize and democratize urban environments. He has led interdisciplinary projects in Cape Town, Kampala, Luanda, New Orleans, and Stockholm, and his collaborative work that stretches from critical environmental studies to sociology and ecology has been published in Antipode, Environment and Planning A, Progress in Planning, Theory, Culture & Society, and Urban Studies, alongside environmental science journals such as Ambio, Global Environmental Change, and Landscape & Urban Planning. The forthcoming co-edited Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies with Sverker Sörlin (MIT Press, 2019) argues for comparative studies across the global South and North by combining urban environmental studies with Southern urbanism. In 2018 he premiered with Jacob von Heland the cinematic ethnography film One Table Two Elephants (84 minutes, 2018, CPH:DOX), which explores through texture and detail how race, nature, and knowledge are intimately intertwined in a postcolonial city. Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at The University of Manchester

and a prolific writer and speaker on political ecology, urban governance, political theory, and radical thought. He was previously Professor of Geography at Oxford University and held in 2014 the Vincent Wright Visiting Professorship at Science Po, Paris, and has also held several other visiting professorships at universities in Belgium, Canada, Greece, and Spain. He has published extensively and some of his recent

Contributors  xiii

books include Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-​modernities in Twentieth-​century Spain (MIT Press, 2015), Designing the Post-​political City and the Insurgent Polis (Bedford Press, 2011), the co-​edited volumes The Post-​political and its Discontents (Edinburgh University Press, 2014, with Jason Wilson), and In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (Routledge, 2005, with N. Heynen and M. Kaika), among others. He holds honorary doctorates from Roskilde University and the University of Malmö.

Authors Marco Armiero is Associate Professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology

in Stockholm, Director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Studies on Mediterranean Societies of the Italian National Research Council. His main topics of study have been environmental conflicts, uses of natural resources, politicization of nature and landscape, and the environmental effects of mass migrations. In English, he has published A Rugged Nation: Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (2011) and co-​authored A History of Environmentalism (2014), Nature and History in Modern Italy (2010), Environmental History of Migrations (2017), and Futures Remains. A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (2017). He has also published articles and special issues in Environment and History, Left History, Radical History Review, Journal of Political Ecology, Capitalism Nature Socialism, and Modern Italy. He has held positions of post-​doctoral fellow and visiting scholar at Yale University, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, the Autonomous University in Barcelona, and the Centre for Social Sciences at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. Jodi Dean holds the Donald R. Harter Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences

at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York. She has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the author or editor of 12 books, including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke University Press, 2009), The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012), and Crowds and Party (Verso 2016). Drawing from Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-​structuralism, she has made major contributions to contemporary political theory, media theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies, most significantly in her account of communicative capitalism as the merger of democracy and capitalism into a single formation. She received her BA in History from Princeton University and her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University. Sapana Doshi is Associate Professor in the School of Geography and Development

and faculty affiliate of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She earned her PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in critical development studies, global urbanization, and feminist and political geography. Most broadly Doshi studies the cultural politics and political geography of capitalism in postcolonial cities. Her

xiv Contributors

publications—​in urban studies volumes and human geography journals including, Annals of the American of Association Geographers, Area, Antipode, Progress in Human Geography, and Geopolitics—​show how class, gender, and ethno-​nationalism shape differential experiences, development governance, and claims-​making practices in cities. Her research focuses on urban social mobilizations, anticorruption politics, and slum redevelopment in India. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2017–​2019 American Council of Learned Societies-​Andrew W. Mellon grant, along with Malini Ranganathan, for a collaborative book project exploring discourses and stories of corruption and urban space across the social sciences and humanities. Andrés Fabián Henao Castro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at

the University of Massachusetts Boston. Before joining UMB, he was the Karl Lowenstein Fellow at Amherst College, and currently holds a Post-​ Doctoral Fellowship at the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna. His research deals with the relationships between ancient and contemporary political theory, via the prisms of decolonial theory, performance philosophy, and poststructuralism. His current book manuscript criticizes the theoretical reception of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, in democratic theory, queer theory, and the theory of biopolitics by foregrounding the settler colonial logics of capitalist accumulation by which subject-​positions are aesthetically distributed in the play and its theoretical reception. His research has been published in Theory & Event, La Deleuziana, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Political Theory, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, among others. He is also a member of the international research network Performance Philosophy and a columnist for the online journal of political analysis, Palabras al Margen (Words at the Margins), in which he has published extensively on the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Nik Heynen is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of

Georgia. His research includes urban geography, urban political ecology, environmental justice, urban social movements, poverty/​inequality, science and technology studies, hunger/​food studies, and intersectional studies of race, class, and gender. He holds a PhD in Geography from Indiana University and has held several editorial and advisory positions in prominent academic journals and organizations. He has written numerous peer-​reviewed articles and book chapters, and the books The Point is to Change It: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of Crisis (Blackwell, 2010; with Castree, Wright, Larner and Chatterton), and In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (Routledge, 2005; with Kaika and Swyngedouw), among other books. Maria Kaika is Professor of Urban, Regional and Environmental Planning at the

University of Amsterdam. She holds a D.Phil. in Geography from the University of Oxford, as well as professional qualifications as an architect, and was previously Professor of Human Geography at The University of Manchester. Her research on urban political ecology, urban infrastructures, and environmental politics focuses on breaking down the binary between nature and the city, and contributes to the

Contributors  xv

promotion of a dialogue between urban studies, geography, environmental studies, and architecture. She is author of City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City (New York: Routledge, 2005) and co-​editor (with Nik Heynen and Erik Swyngedouw) of In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (London: Routledge, 2006). She was Chief co-​editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from 2010 to 2017. Roger Keil is York Research Chair in Global Sub/​Urban Studies at the Faculty of

Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. A former director of York University’s City Institute, he researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, and regional governance. He is the author of Suburban Planet: Making the World Urban from the Outside In (Polity, 2017) and the editor of Suburban Constellations (Jovis, 2013), Suburban Governance: A Global View (University of Toronto Press, 2015, with Pierre Hamel), and The Globalizing Cities Reader (Routledge, 2017, with Xuefei Ren). Andy Merrifield is a writer and independent scholar who formerly taught human

geography at the University of Southampton, King’s College, London, and Clark University in Massachusetts, USA. He has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, The University of Manchester (as Leverhulme Visiting Professor), and the City University of New York (CUNY). He has written biographies of Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre, as well as a bestselling “existential” travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys. He is the author of eleven books; his articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Times, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, New Left Review, Adbusters, Harvard Design Magazine, Radical Philosophy, Monthly Review, and Dissent, among others. His penultimate book, The Amateur:The Pleasures of Doing What You Love, appeared with Verso in May 2017, and his latest book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Cities (and Love), was published in October 2018 by O/​R Books in New York. Jason W. Moore, an environmental historian and historical geographer, is Professor

of Sociology at Binghamton University. He coordinates the World-​ Ecology Research Network and writes frequently on the history of capitalism in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, from the long sixteenth century to the neoliberal era and is the author or editor of seven books, most recently Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), and with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). Garth Myers is Professor in Urban and International Studies at Trinity College.

He is a geographer with expertise in urban planning and African area studies. He has conducted research in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Senegal, South Africa, Finland, and the UK over the past 20 years. His research interests include African urban geography and urban planning, comparative urbanism and comparative urban land politics, urban political ecology, and environmental justice as well

xvi Contributors

as urban environmental governance. He has published various books, including Verandahs of Power (Syracuse, 2003), Disposable Cities (Ashgate, 2005), African Cities (Zed, 2011) and the latest, Urban Environments in Africa (Policy Press of University of Bristol, 2016). Malini Ranganathan is Assistant Professor of Global Environmental Politics in the

School of International Service, Faculty Lead in the Antiracism Center, and a Faculty Fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Center,American University,Washington DC. She earned a PhD in Energy and Resources with an emphasis on Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Most broadly, her scholarship focuses on the political ecology of urban water infrastructure, land, and climate risk, and the particular forms of citizenship articulated at sites of environmental injustice and struggle, including in cities in the global South such as Bangalore in India, as well as those in North America, such as Flint and Washington, DC. Her research is published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Urban Geography, among other journals, as well as in several edited volumes. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2017–​2019 American Council of Learned Societies-​Andrew W. Mellon grant, along with Sapana Doshi, for a collaborative book project exploring discourses and stories of corruption and urban space across the social sciences and humanities. Jonathan Silver is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Urban

Institute at Sheffield University with a doctorate from the Department of Geography, Durham University, where he also worked previously, including at the London School of Economics. His focus is on postcolonial urbanisms and comparative theory of infrastructure and he has done empirical research in cities of Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, UK, and USA and across different infrastructure systems including energy, sanitation, and waste. With co-​workers, he has developed a situated approach to urban political ecology and founded The Situated UPE Collective. His work has been published in Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), and Regional Studies, among others, and he co-​ edited the book Energy, Power and Protest on the Urban Grid: Geographies of the Electric City (Routledge, 2016, with Andrés Luque-​Ayala). Richard Walker is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of

California, Berkeley, where he taught for 40 years. He works in the fields of economic, urban, and environmental geography, chiefly in the United States and California. His books include The Capitalist Imperative (with M. Storper), The New Social Economy (with A. Sayer), The Conquest of Bread, The Country in the City, and the Atlas of California. His latest book is Pictures of a Gone City:Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently director of the Living New Deal project, which documents and maps all public works of the 1930s (https://​livingnewdeal.org/​). Dr Walker splits his time between Berkeley and Burgundy.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-​obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities aims to expand the study of urbanization and environmental politics through the field of urban political ecology (UPE). In particular, the book centres on developing ways to engage more explicitly with the pressing question of how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. While our initial name for this project was UPE+20, which marked 20 plus years after the 1996 article by Erik Swyngedouw on The City as a Hybrid, a key article in the early days of the field, the book is not intended to take stock of the field, nor do a systematic review.1 Rather it calls for bringing back “the political” centre-​stage into our study and engagement with the world. We notice with delight how the contributions in this book extend in provocative and novel ways how UPE and associated fields can be re-​thought in the coming years. Above-​all, we see a wider conversation emerging that links critical geography and urban studies, the origins of UPE, with critical race and postcolonial theory, and—​importantly, with crucial strands of political theory. As the editors, we would like to stretch out a heartfelt thanks to our colleagues for their contributions to this volume: Marco Armiero, Jodi Dean, Sapana Doshi, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, Roger Keil, Andy Merrifield, Jason W. Moore, Garth Myers, Malini Ranganathan, Jonathan Silver, and Richard Walker. Representing different disciplines and generations of scholars, they have shared from their vast field experience and theoretical interests and demonstrated a steadfast commitment and dedication to this project. We are grateful for how they elegantly shaped their chapters so that each carry their particular style, while speaking to the broader themes of the book. It is of course our colleagues and their contributions that have made possibly this stimulating and important volume. We also send a special thanks to Edgar Pieterse who contributed to our initial discussions.

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xviii  Preface and acknowledgements

We thank eminent theatre director Kent Ekberg and producer Kajsa Nordin in Stockholm for their playful and artful solidarity with our project in its early stage. We also thank Mexican illustrator and artist Carlos Carmonamedina based in Washington D.C. for offering his artwork for the cover illustration, and we thank Bruce Baigrie in Cape Town for diligent and tireless preparation of the manuscript for submission. Our Routledge Editor Andrew Mould and Editorial Assistant Egle Zigaite need our praise for their continuous, generous and helpful support throughout this whole process. The labour time involved in a project like this is extensive. The first editor acknowledges generous economic support from the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, which made this book possible, and he thanks the Swedish Research Council Formas (Grant ID: 211-​ 2011-​ 1519; MOVE) for providing funds for travels and meetings. Both editors acknowledge support from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (Grant ID: ES/​M009408/​1; TLR) and we thank our institutions for providing collegial spaces in which we could discuss various parts of this book, including the Department of Geography at The University of Manchester, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. The first editor would also like to specially thank Andrea Eckstein for her support throughout, and, when the second editor visited Cape Town, for sharing dinners and her insights as a therapist of Cape Town’s many psychosocial forms of oppression, liberations and idiosyncrasies. Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw Cape Town and Manchester, January and May 2018

Note 1 See Swyngedouw, Erik. 1996. “The City as a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 7(2): 65–​80.

Introduction

1 POLITICIZING THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE URBAN CENTURY Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

Introduction This book seeks explicitly to engage with the pressing question of how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism.With the accelerating process of planetary and socio-​ecologically deeply uneven urbanization at the turn of the twenty-​first century, combined with growing geopolitical tensions and the rising legitimacy of all manner of identitarian and populist xenophobic-​ nationalist movements, we are confronted with urgent challenges on how to think about and engage in emancipatory and political socio-​ecological transformations. In a world marred by rapid but unevenly truncated socio-​ecological disintegration, the accelerating triaging of people according to their location, socio-​cultural inscription, and political-​economic capabilities, and rising forms of all manner of political and ecological violence, the real possibilities of creating a world and city along more equal, free, and ecologically saner trajectories seem more remote than ever. Nonetheless, in recent years political discontent and protests by activists of a variety of ideological stripes and colours have cut through the promises of the fantasy of a cosy, neoliberal, smart, sustainable, resilient and democratically inclusive world that the elites and other architects of the present socio-​ecological disorder increasingly and desperately portray as the only possible world to come. The choreographies of these protests against the prevailing socio-​ecological order vary from extreme right-​wing anti-​establishment and nativist populism to new forms of progressive and emancipatory politics, often in conjunction with a cornucopia of grassroots movements and widely varying experimentations with alternative socio-​ ecological practices. This book navigates a course within the interstices of this parallax of increasingly desperate socio-​ecological conditions on the one hand, and the political hopes embryonically manifested by radical democratizing insurgents and activists on the other.

4  Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

We contend that urban political ecology (UPE) can offer pathways to think through this situation and create possible openings for and strategies aimed at realizing potential emancipatory horizons. Since its early days, signalled by the 1996 article The City as a Hybrid (Swyngedouw, 1996), and ten years later, the edited volume In the Nature of Cities (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006), UPE has matured through the proliferation of both empirical research and theoretical contributions that focus on the uneven urbanization of nature, the socio-​ecological inequalities that pattern cities, and the perplexing socionatural landscapes that capitalist urbanization produces within, between, and beyond cities. In addition to many other contributions (see for instance, Keil 2003; 2005; Gandy 2005; Swyngedouw and Kaika 2014), UPE has developed, together with scholars and activists worldwide, a rich conceptual apparatus to consider how the interrelated web of socio-​ecological relations that span from the local to the global can be politicized. UPE has focused primarily on how social forms of power transform the environment and how the non-​human becomes actively enrolled in processes of uneven and combined socio-​ecological production and reproduction. UPE’s key ambition has been to tease out who benefits and gains from these mutations and on tracing how cities are shot through and shaped by socio-​spatial and socio-​ physical processes that also co-​produce discourses on nature, society, justice, and forms of rationality. Against mainstream techno-​managerial renderings of ecology as “natural” and “the urban” as essentially “social,” devoid of material agency and biophysical vibrancy, UPE provided ways to comprehend “the urbanization of nature” as an inherently socio-​material and hybrid form of metabolism, whereby social categories such as capital, money, norms, gender, and race are intimately interlinked with material assemblages as in the built environment, urban green spaces, or flows of water, food, energy, and other non-​human matter. Indeed, UPE was an early contributor to what became known as the “material” turn in the social sciences and humanities (see, for example, Bennett and Joyce 2010; Hicks and Beaudry 2010; Pellizzoni 2016). Its main method has been to develop historically and geographically grounded, but theoretically informed, case studies that have served to articulate a socio-​ecologically informed critique of different forms of oppression and exploitation of people and environments (Kaika 2005; Njeru 2006; Ranganathan 2014; Silver 2014; 2015). Throughout this period, UPE has systematically sided with activists to unearth, construct, and build narratives that render legible the intimate solidarities that bind together collective action and emancipatory processes in the direction of more equal and ecologically more viable communities. As such, UPE has asserted itself as a key mode of critical enquiry with recent review articles showing how it has expanded beyond its critical geographical and Marxists roots by embracing feminist, postcolonial, intersectional, and queer analyses (Truelove 2011; Gandy 2012; Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver 2014; Heynen 2014; 2015; 2017; Rademacher 2015; Doshi 2016). With this expansion over the past two decades or so, hundreds of doctoral students have chosen UPE as their intellectual home and together with scholars they have spawned a wide range of rich case studies and sophisticated theorizations, varying from, for instance, studies

Politicizing the urban environment  5

of urban food, water, and sanitation activism, studies tracing expansive planetary geographies of mining and energy that shape urban outcomes, to the worlding practices of housing activism that stretch across the global South and North in ever-​complex ways (see, e.g., Rademacher 2009; Doshi 2013; Ranganathan and Balazs 2015; Arboleda 2016; and studies reviewed in Heynen 2014; 2015; 2017). Indeed, scholars from diverse epistemological perspectives, but with a shared interest in the pivotal role of urbanization, a commitment to critical analysis, and a passion for emancipatory transformation, have contributed to lively debates and inspired, and been inspired by, a new generation of political and social activists whose political vision embraces the pursuit of egalitarian and socio-​ecologically grounded emancipation. However, the field is also in crisis, and it shares this with critical and radical theory more generally. As scholars and students of UPE and related fields, we have improved our ability to trace socio-​material flows and hybrid objects like water, waste, and food. We have explored how financial capital operates across scales, how economic crises unravel social cohesion and wreak ecological havoc, how the presence of (neo)colonial patterns of resource extraction combined with the exploitation of people shape the environment, and just how unequal and unsustainable the world has become. Nonetheless, we have less to offer in terms of what to do, in terms of thinking with radical political activists about new political imaginaries, forms of political organizing, and practices of emancipatory socio-​ecological change. With planetary and uneven urbanization, the emergence of a multi-​polar world order, pervasive socio-​ecological change and deepening and sophisticated forms of depoliticization, there are real challenges on how to think emancipation and how to organize the relation between emancipatory theory and political activism in the twenty-​first century. The idea that critical urban and social theory can be politically performative, that is, that our intellectual labour can articulate with actually existing socio-​political practices to make possible emancipatory ruptures and build socio-​ecological movements, is no longer self-​evident (if it ever was) in our world of post-​political neoliberal consensus on the one hand, and new radical politicizing movements in cities on the other (see Dikeç and Swyngedouw 2017). This book revolves around this task: what could emancipatory politics be about in our time? What does a return of the political under the aegis of equality and freedom signal today in theory and in practice? How do political movements emerge that could re-​ invent equality and freedom as actually existing socio-​ecological practices?

A necessarily obscene interruption This book combines critical geography, urban studies, and political theory to deal with this challenge. It does so through mobilizing the figure of “the Anthropo-​ obScene,” to recognize explicitly that we live in a cyborgian web of human/​ non-​human entanglements, but also to undermine the utterly depoliticized concept of “the Anthropocene.” While we need to recognize the world as thoroughly

6  Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

constituted by the interweaving of human, technological, and non-​ human constellations and assemblages, the current popularization of the mainstream discourse of the Anthropocene renders a wide set of political imaginaries unthinkable. The “obscene,” with its origin in classic Greek theatre’s ob-​skene, signified acts deemed inappropriate and too disturbing to be shown explicitly on stage, like violence, sex, deep anguish, or fear. In spite of this taboo, however, the spectator was still uncannily aware that these obscene acts were taking place, but off the stage, outside the field of vision. Our stuttering term, the Anthropo-​obScene, serves to hack, while rendering insightful, just how the Anthropocene has inaugurated a world stage through which orderly narratives of management, science-​based intervention, and capital can come together to save Earth, people, and the economy as we know it.1 It is absolutely crucial to understand our predicament not primarily in social or ecological terms, but in political terms. This means returning to the centennial question, “What is to be done?” and finding the ways and practices by which to make egalitarian politics possible (again), grappling, in this particular historical junction, with the significance of  “the Anthropocene” in strictly political terms. Following Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016), this means first to recognize how the “shock of the Anthropocene” deepens depoliticizing tendencies. Across a range of fields, from science, arts and humanities, “The Anthropocene” is now deployed to proclaim that profound change is afoot and that we live in a time of radical newness which requires new technologies, new forms of governance, and new ontologies and cosmologies. This proclaimed truth of the Anthropocene, morally and scientifically, inaugurates the necessity of new institutional and techno-​ managerial dispositifs that can assure the continuation of civilization as we know it. In other words, we are summoned to change things radically to make sure that nothing really has to change. We know that humanity’s newly acquired geo-​agency, what the Anthropocene is referencing, is intrinsically entwined with the process of capitalist planetary urbanization. The elite’s pursuit of earthly gain by roaming the Earth and rummaging through its innards, and the concomitant commodification of everything, nurtured the process of planetary urbanization and produced the uneven and combined socio-​ecological dynamics that mark the unequal eco-​geographies of the world (see Chapters 2 and 3). Indeed, the widening and socio-​ecologically embedded circulation of capital and its racial, gendered, and class dynamics was and is predicated upon intensifying proliferations of metabolic vehicles that transform non-​human “stuff ” and re-​order human/​non-​human assemblages in uneven ways and with profound socio-​ecological implications. One good example of how the discourse and the materiality of urbanization in the Anthropocene intersect, lies in the pumped-​up popular and academic discussions of how information technologies and the purportedly de-​materialized affective economies, including social media, Twitter, Instagram, Uber etc., would render urban development “smart” and “sustainable.” While portrayed as useful for handling big data and in facilitating urban planning, transport, and saving energy, there

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is a much darker side to these ICT technologies. This is discernible in the highly materialized and uneven set of practices that goes into producing the necessary hardware behind “smart cities,” which includes the exploitation and circulation of a range of minerals.These include the “Unobtanium”-​like ​mineral Coltan, used for producing micro-​sized tantalum capacitors in mobile phones and almost any other compact electronic device. Named a “conflict-​prone mineral” for its role in funding domestic militias and foreign armies that fight over the control over its feverish extraction, Coltan’s dehumanizing production chains have destroyed landscapes, rivers, and working bodies in already socio-​ecologically vulnerable places in D.R. Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi, superimposing neo-​colonial practices to strengthen the legacies of colonial relations.2 Furthermore, at the end of the life-​span of these devices, which for a cell phone is now down to 2–​5 years, the “recycling” process of tantalum and other materials returns to these regions as toxic e-​waste, dumped and handled by often marginalized people in cities like Lagos and Mumbai—​or Guiyu in China, where children have been measured with higher levels of lead in their blood because of the city’s concentration of imported e-​waste.3 The material underbelly of the virtual worlds of Tweets, Instagram videos, or Uber-​calls, and fantasies of smart urbanism, reveals a dystopian and ruinous socio-​ecological landscape. This geographical tracing, from a phantasmagoria discourse to brutal material realities, only goes to show how uneven planetary urbanization is a key driver of anthropogenic climate change and other socio-​ environmental transformations, including biodiversity loss, soil erosion, deforestation, ocean acidification, the accumulation of micro-​and nano-​plastics, resource extraction and deep-​geological mining, the construction of large dams and energy plants, and the galloping commodification of all manner of natures. What is not contested at the level of global policy, indeed a consensus prevails, is that our urban fate and the transformations of socionatures across the world are irrevocably bound up in an intimate and intensifying metabolic symbiosis. It is indeed precisely because these deteriorating socio-​ecological conditions could very well jeopardize the continuation of civilization as we know it, that urban metabolism has been elevated to the dignity of a global public concern—​and where strong mechanisms of consensus-​making and depoliticization set in. Coming full circle, and in the face of these consensually recognized challenges, a global urban academic and professional technocracy has spurred a frantic search for a “smart” socio-​ecological urbanity including buzz-​words such as eco-​development, retrofitting, sustainable architecture, adaptive and resilient urban governance, inter-​species eco-​topes, ecosystem services, and innovative—​but fundamentally market-​conforming—​eco-​designs. These techno-​managerial dispositifs, experimented with in science labs and splashed out in design magazines, art books, exhibitions, and policy documents, should, however, not simply be taken for what they claim to be. Rather, we need to critically understand them as a response from a global reactionary elite (which includes not merely the 1%, but through silent consent, also urban middle and professional classes) that searches frantically for eco-​prophylactic remedies. This thick canopy of techno-​managerial languages and practices is like the soft

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inside of a TV-​commercial, promising redemption while insisting that no real change is necessary or even possible. Moreover, such language binds together academic, policy, and business sectors so that the hegemonic public discourse through which global warming, run-​away ecological crises, and inequality are addressed, conveniently tries to hide and off-​stage the profoundly capitalist and socio-​ecologically unequal realities of our predicament. Indeed, under a metaphorical billboard of radical techno-​managerial restructuring, the focus is now squarely on how to sustain capitalist urbanity so that nothing really has to change! In addition to this depoliticization, there is another project afoot which is arguably more tricky and difficult to analyse critically, but with potentially profound consequences. In recent years, scholars have proposed and developed new materialist and symmetrical relational ontologies, including object-​oriented, more-​than-​ human, and post-​human perspectives (see e.g., Stengers 2003; Latour 2005; Morton 2013; Harman 2016). While the analytical intent has been to distribute agency beyond humans and overcoming rigid and binary nature-​ society dichotomies, an ambition shared by UPE since its inception, we argue in Chapter 2 (see also Chapter 4 and Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018) that such symmetrical frameworks also risk (albeit by no means necessarily or intentionally so) becoming hijacked into political-​economic imaginaries that have less to do with ethical caring for more-​than-​human constellations, and more with a hysterical attempt at sustaining hyper-​accelerationist eco-​modernist visions. While embracing a more reflexive and symmetrical socio-​ecological cosmology, big science, geo-​engineering, and big capital could more easily gesture to save both Earth and Earthlings. Broadly phrased in this way, the intellectual work that we hope our stuttering term “the Anthropo-obScene” will do is one of interruption, of rendering present that ghostly spectral side of reality that is presently off-​staged and where political possibilities for the construction of more equal socio-environments reside. Indeed, as a term, the Anthropo-​obScene works to disturb and rupture the consolidation of a particular view of conceptualizing, framing, and managing global and local ecological crises and problems, while fully and radically embracing a cyborgian human/​non-​human world. Within the frame of the Anthropo-​ obScene, where that which has been casted off-stage becomes visible, sensible, and intelligible, we contend that a whole set of situated, but geographically and culturally interlinked modes of politics, become not only possible, but practical and necessary.

Seismic transformations of earthly dynamics To place the book and its chapters within a wider socio-​ecological and quickly changing context, we need to discuss at least five major transformations that are shaping contemporary earthly dynamics within which lurk both the constraints and possibilities for emancipatory struggles. While a more nuanced development would be preferable, we sketch below how these transformations can help to frame

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key challenges that UPE and associated fields are facing to remain relevant in producing both knowledge and political possibilities. First, the process of socio-​ecologically uneven planetary urbanization is still little understood in UPE, especially in relation to the political as defined above. How are international and radically democratic political movements built today? From what (urban) spaces, socio-​ ecological contexts, subjectivities, and interruptive events could political movements emerge? Significant scholarly effort has been expended to trace global socio-​ecological flows and networks that are constitutive of the geographical imprint produced through the unfolding of capital’s geo-​agency (see e.g., Brenner and Schmid 2014; Arboleda 2016). However, less attention has been paid to its associated deepening depoliticization—​or, and perhaps more crucially, to considering the political and emancipatory possibilities that rest within capital’s planetary geo-agency. Second, there has been a worrying proliferation of geopolitical tensions and geo-​ecological conflicts that influence political movements in not easily discernible ways. These tensions are often structured around territorially constituted identities that render the “world order” precarious and unstable, including, for instance: the Syrian wars, ISIS, and the growing number of refugees that migrate to Lebanon, Turkey, and the EU; tensions over artificial islands in the South China Sea; the possible breakdown of the Iran nuclear deal; risk of disintegration of Nigeria; and the rise of “strong” leaders and identitarian, racist, nationalist, and fascist mobilizations in several countries, both North and South. The rise of China adds further unpredictable dynamics as it seeks to secure its future demands for materials and energy in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, often in exchange for investments in urban infrastructure, ports, and railways (see e.g., Corkin 2011).While UPE and associated fields have studied these dynamics through the dialects between corporate-​led integration of neoliberal globalization on the one hand, and the fragmenting forces engendered by intensifying inter-​place and inter-​state conflict on the other, there are surely novel dynamics entering the mix in an increasingly multi-​polar world where Bretton Woods and UN-​institutions have less of a grip, and where the megacities of Delhi, Mumbai, Shanghai, São Paulo, and Lagos surpass older “world cities” in both size and economic power. What is the fate and role of urban spaces and ecologies? What new political fault lines are generated? And who benefits from this apparent “unstable” and “insecure” world order? Third, and connected to the former, a slowly but increasingly felt seismic wave is unfolding in the knowledge sphere when, as Achille Mbembe (2017, 1) recently put it, “Europe is no longer the centre of gravity of the world.” For centuries, the West was the cradle of thought, the producer of hegemonic discourse, the universalized “no-​place” from where narratives about the world were launched and diffused. Alongside ships, men, guns, and powder—​and later accompanied by engineers, advanced technologies, and development aid—​the West’s self-​image was bound up in an imperial project, which in turn served as an excuse for the violence at the frontier of this project: the mass enslavement of black peoples of Africa, the land dispossessions from Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Middle

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East and Oceania; and the extinction of peoples and ways of knowing (James 1989 [1938]; Fanon 1963; Said 1983; Wynter 1995; Mamdani 1996; Lalu 2009; Mignolo 2012). In parallel to the return of the ghosts, spectres, and resistances of this history, China, Singapore, Brazil, and India are now emerging as global publication powerhouses, while Western schools of thought are being provincialized and decentred (see e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2011; within UPE and urban studies, see Ernstson and Sörlin, forthcoming; Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver 2014; Roy 2014; Robinson 2016). Postcolonial, Indigeneity, decolonial, and black radical thought, which have all produced crucial critiques of racial capitalism and colonial legacies, and their intimate association with modernity, have entered much more centrally in academic and political debates on environmental, urban and Anthropocene issues (see Chapters 2, 4, 5, 7, and 9; and, e.g., Garuba 2012; Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver 2014; de la Cadena 2015; Green 2015; Heynen 2015; Schulz 2017). What does this seismic shift of decentring Euro-American thought mean in relation to thinking politics? What does it mean in terms of politicizing the environment and life itself? Additionally, it is crucial to remember here that this shift is not just about knowledge production but is to some extent also accompanied by the emergence of several imperial projects. We are now effectively sharing a world in which there are several ongoing imperial projects that in overlapping and competing ways aim to extract resources and project influence over distant territories (Roy and Ong 2011; Roy 2014). Given this distinctly political-​ecological situation, UPE and associated fields need to engage with how these complex and contentious re-​workings of material ecologies and cultural epistemologies influence the living world and the spaces we inhabit—​and ask what possibilities for social and political movements emerge or exist. Fourth, in an increasingly complex geopolitical situation, we need to continue to build wider interpretative optics to understand how big science and the Anthropocene discourse, a supposedly global caring for the world and all its creatures, articulate with a deepening of neoliberal logics and the strengthening of immunological biopolitical governance (Chapter 2, building on Esposito 2008). “Immunological” is here understood as “the suspension of the obligation of mutual communal gift-​g iving” (ibid.) that conjoins with the (neo)liberal injunction to enjoy individual freedom and choice. This wider optic helps to uncover how the search for “smart cities” and other eco-​prophylactic remedies by the elites and professional classes produce vast new urban and suburban geographies with an intimate and “civilized” inside wherein “sustainability” is taken very seriously and debated, while creating its own constitutive outside. This is well-​ illustrated by so-called “eco-​estates” in South Africa (Ballard and Jones 2011). These are well-​guarded and gated housing estates for the super-​wealthy, and predominantly white, and are built under the guise of ethically caring for the environment through all manner of environmental consumerism, while cocooning its inhabitants to remain politically blinded to the fact that their “sustainable” lifestyle is bought at the extraordinarily high price of producing unsustainability elsewhere. The latter is marked by a continuation of capitalist-​colonial violence on black

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bodies, including women, men, and children in the same city who cannot easily access electricity, sanitation, water, or a good basic education (Huchzermeyer 2003; Neocosmos 2012; Benson 2015). In building these “e-​pods,” environmental arguments and eco-​gentrification function as a cover-​up while normalizing neo-​, or eco-​apartheid urban development (Baigrie and Ernstson 2017). This is played out on a global scale, too, where uneven and combined socio-​ecological change keeps intensifying, in part nurtured by the frantic search for eco-​prophylactic techno-​machineries that ostensibly are engineered to better manage a supposedly “sustainable” future, but which often serve to deepen commodification of both human and non-​human “stuff ” including human organs, babies in surrogate mothers, genomes, land, rivers, and the atmosphere. This unfolds in parallel to the small coterie of super-​wealthy “Earth transformers” that are increasingly capable of living in phantasmagorical immunological sanctuaries—​the e-​pods—​of “sustainable” and “smart” enclaves. We need to be attentive to how the elites and professional classes, across nationalist and ethnic signifiers, are carving up the world and the living and in what ways the urban/​suburban/​peri-​urban become crucial spaces for the enactment of this wider transnational and earthly dynamic (see Chapter 9). How is capital mobilized to bend the rules and change public discourse (see Chapter 5)? How does this particular class-​project that nurtures a “sustainable urbanism” of and for the few, while investing lots of energies in creating cosy consensual narratives, materialize on the ground (see for instance Chapters 2, 5, and 13)? A wider material and discursive critique is necessary and political ecology as academic discipline and mode of organizing can play a significant role in fostering such a critique. Our fifth and final point focuses squarely on bringing back the political, a focus on politicization, which represents what is most central to this book. It is also the one that UPE and associated fields have downplayed for too long and that requires most attention. The last few decades have been characterized by profound processes of depoliticization that have to be clearly defined and scrutinized. On the one hand, the neoliberal idyll of a globally integrated and perfectly commoditized world operating in everyone’s best interest is sustained, among others, by a fantasy held of an inclusive and democratic configuration in which everyone can be who they want to be and express different positions and perspectives in institutional settings that nurture participatory and pluralist encounters. On the other hand, radical disagreement and dissensus about the configuration of the present order, whether voiced by radical egalitarians, right-​wing populist or religious fanatics, is censored, rendered unacceptable, and placed outside the “inclusive” liberal democratic order.We are thus approaching an idealized situation in which everything seems to be politicized, i.e. everything can be rendered contentious, yet radical disagreement and the expression of antagonistic socio-​political positions is either banned completely, meets with cynical rejection, or regarded with great suspicion. These antagonistic positions nonetheless demonstrate the profound heterogeneities that cut through the social. It is precisely these constitutive antagonisms that are captured by the signifier “the political” and which must hold greater currency in how we think urban political ecology.

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“The political” is the name that stands for the recognition of the antagonisms that cut through the social. The political manifests itself in moments or events of interruption of or rebellion against the instituted order of actually existing politics (see, Marchart 2007;Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014). It is the political that prevents a fully closed, harmonious, and fully ordered society. The disavowal, repression, or foreclosure of the recognition of such constitutive antagonism is what the term “depoliticization” refers to. Post-​politicization is, therefore, the mobilization of a series of strategies, procedures, and techno-​managerial arrangements that suspend, colonize, or ignore the dimension of the political as defined above. Politics, in contrast, refers to the daily choreographies of instituted politics and policy-​making, including the actors, institutional forms and procedures, and the management of recognized contentious issues. So, while democratic politics as organized dispute is very much alive and legitimized as the institutional corollary to global ecological and economic integration, the political is increasingly colonized by instituted forms of “doing politics,” which, as we argue in Chapter 2, is further amplified by the particular way the Anthropocene has been symbolized and operationalized. Taken together, these five seismic transformations point at the need for a shift of the intellectual gaze of UPE and associated fields. Rather than tracing yet another socio-​material flow or applying yet again a cyborgian perspective of the urbanization of nature, we need to more explicitly address the question of “the political” if we are to contribute toward renewed and performative emancipatory processes (Chapter 14). Indeed, the birth pains of the politically sanitized term “the Anthropocene” raise urgently the spectre of the obligation to consider what sort of environment we wish to live in, how to produce it, and with what consequences. It calls for a political project that fully endorses cyborgian human/​non-​human entanglements and takes responsibility for their nurturing while insisting on the egalitarian presumption that undergirds any democratizing project. The central question, therefore, is not any longer about bringing environmental issues into the domain of politics as has often been the case until now, but how to bring the political into the environment.

Thinking, engaging, politicizing This book and its contributors engage with this field of changing dynamics, profound depoliticization, and egalitarian aspirations. The authors bring their wealth of experience from studies across the global South and North and mobilize neo-​ Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and radical democratic frameworks. While there is considerable debate and difference among the contributing authors, they share the view that “the urban” is pivotal in interrupting mainstream discourses and practices and constitutes a privileged site within a wider complex of dynamics and structures to articulate their work with emancipatory practices.They also share a commitment to offer reflections on politicizing tactics and strategies. Indeed, our emphasis here is on how the dynamics of uneven planetary urbanization co-​shape what is

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referred to as the Anthropocene—​whereby our notion of the Anthropo-​obScene is mobilized in an attempt to foreground what is being silenced and to suggest possible avenues for re-​politicization. To this end, the book is organized along three axes that intersect and communicate with each other: The Political, The Situated, and The Performative. Part I on The Political interrogates how the conceptualization of the Anthropocene in its various alternative formulations deepens the ongoing process of depoliticization. It also explores theoretical ways to encounter egalitarian practices that confront our socio-​ecological predicament. While urbanization was always predicated on the extraction of material resources beyond the city proper and producing significant metabolic rifts, this has arguably reached a new scale and intensity in the present process of planetary and uneven urbanization.The chapters of Part I explore and discuss how these processes operate discursively, ideologically, materially, and in terms of political promises. In Chapter 2, we as editors develop and deploy the term “the Anthropo-​obScene.” We argue that various discourses on the Anthropocene have created a set of stages that disavow certain voices and ways of seeing by rendering some forms of acting (human, non-​human, and more-​than-​human) off-​stage. As well as discourses on geoengineering and resilience, this includes an interrogation on how so-called symmetrical more-​than-​human ontologies also carry the risk of strengthening techno-​ managerial discourses that deepen what Roberto Esposito (2008) has called an immunological biopolitics, the always failing attempt to immunologize life from harmful intruders or potential disintegration.With the Anthropo-​obScene, we seek a politicization of the socio-​ecological conundrum we are in, while fully and radically embracing our interdependence with non-​humans. Richard Walker and Jason W. Moore continue in Chapter 3 to tackle the enigma of nature within an expansive reading of Marxian political economy while mobilizing both historical and contemporary examples. The fate of the Earth is deeply bound up with the accumulation of capital, or what they call “the capitalist vortex,” and they argue for a better integration in Marxist economics of how nature serves as a source of surplus to feed the vortex. Labour and nature are indelibly joined in the production of “free gifts” that come via three frontiers of capitalist expansion—​primitive accumulation, commodity production, and capitalization—​ that proceed along three geographic frontiers across the face of the Earth: extensive, internal, and intensive. They provide theoretical tools to understand why capitalist growth has, for 500 years, meant inexorable extraction, depletion, and devastation of natural resources, while producing landscapes of profit. In this re-​booting of a materialist reading, the authors provide a background to understand many of the geographies, ecologies, and struggles that the book grapples with. In the final chapter of Part I, Chapter 4, Andrés Henao Castro and Henrik Ernstson engage with postcolonial theory as a departure point to interrogate the discourse of the Anthropocene and its depoliticizing effects. They maintain that the way that the Anthropocene discourse has been articulated within parts

14  Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

of postcolonial theory is deeply problematic in that it could make the political categorically unthinkable and ontologically evacuated. In an attempt to disrupt this deadlock, the authors combine post-​foundational and postcolonial theory to propose three performative interruptions against conditions of exclusion—​the politics of time, the politics of translation, and the politics of the stage. These build to re-​launch the political performativity of subaltern experiences in the here and now. Part II, The Situated, counterbalances an often-​misplaced focus on the planetary by exploring how radical democratic responses and politicization of environments are necessarily also locally articulated with identifiable spaces and shaped by historical, regional, and everyday experiences and struggles. Part II starts with Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi in Chapter 5, who examine ecological dispossession in the Anthropocene through the rise of anticorruption movements in urban India, which in quite surprising ways have politicized a central mechanism of private wealth creation through the grabbing, or robbing, of public (wet)lands. With its long discursive career in the post-​colony, the authors argue that corruption continues to be a fraught ethico-​political terrain in which both emancipatory and regressive tendencies are embedded. Placed within the historical and geographical context of a rapidly growing city and a geopolitically increasingly assertive India, the chapter considers head-​on urban socionature under advanced capitalism, the collusion between the super-​wealthy and the state, and the hopes for egalitarian ruptures and movements. Following from this, Nik Heynen, in Chapter 6, argues for paying more attention to deep urban history to better understand the connection between racial capitalism and urban space in order to unravel who decides who will have access to, and who will be excluded from resources or other components of the environment. By excavating the political ecological history of Atlanta, a city in southern USA, he creates a powerful argument for an “abolitionist urban political ecology” that pairs African-​American political thought with UPE to enrich contemporary progressive struggles for antiracist socionatural change. Resonating with AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2011) “black urbanism,” he shows that when those who were always excluded from the making of the official city articulate themselves as the centre, interruption and proper politics can follow. Deepening our understanding of the continuation of racialized capitalism, Jonathan Silver in Chapter 7 combines a distinctly socionatural perspective of urbanization with Frantz Fanon’s (1963) analysis of the violence of colonization as “suffocation.”A form of suffocation of identity, ways of knowing and ability to live at all was imprinted in the way the relation between colonizer and colonized became structured. Silver urges us to see how mechanisms of suffocation are continuing today in the ways climate change and global policy are translated as “adaptation” and market-​based “solutions” in three cities of Africa: sea-​level rise in the coastal city of Saint-​Louis, Senegal; vulnerable electricity infrastructures in Accra, Ghana; and, focusing on a World Bank-​funded waste management programme in Mbale,

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Uganda, how global policy on lowering greenhouse gas emissions undermined the municipality’s response to climate change, while privileging international actors and financial markets. Drawing on these contemporary experiences, he reads the urban spatiality of climate change as “social-​ecological violence” that nurtures the continuation of coloniality, a logic of excluding local knowledge and voices, and a deepening of racialized capitalism. Continuing the unearthing of experiences that are not heard or sensed, Garth Myers in Chapter 8 develops a “multi-​vocal” urban political ecology that takes seriously the “rogue” sensibilities of urban Africa in how environments can be politicized. Based on a wide reading of Africa’s urban landscapes and a case study from Dakar, Senegal, a city demonstrating recent gentrification and continued expansion of self-​constructed neighbourhoods or slums, he explores the tricky spaces of grassroots activism. Often constrained by heavy policing from one-​party states, and with the risk of violent so-called ethnic flare-​ups and leadership vacuums, he sees a possibility for how environmental and political consciousnesses are nonetheless merging through local struggles. This, he argues, could reduce violent confrontations without eliminating a push to make visible what has been off-​staged and reframe how urban environments are known from its multiple peripheries. Roger Keil expands the view from the peripheries in Chapter 9 to focus on how the historical production of vast suburban spaces across the world, from middle-​ class suburbia to self-​constructed slums, are deeply tied up with the Anthropocene and its politics. He argues that while it is clear how suburbanism has been at the core of capitalist production—​especially since the Second World War when it was exported from the USA to revive entire national economies in Turkey, India, and China—​scant attention has been paid to the suburban as a scale of cognition and terrain for political action. Drawing on works of art and scholarly literature, he critiques the now quite stale emphasis on (globalized, gentrified, normalized, densified) city cores as the location for politics and environmental savviness, and insists that suburban spaces are not static, conservative, and a-​historical. Rather than routinely removing suburbia from our political imaginaries, we need to pay more attention to understand the movements and possible urban political ruptures that suburbanization as a planetary condition harbours. Following the cue of unearthing new locations from where to launch political ecological projects, Marco Armiero approaches the spectral lives of real and imaginary ghosts in Chapter 10. He unfolds a hauntology of the Anthropocene through the lens of the many presences of urban waste in Naples. This runs from the rubbish and toxic pollutants in human and non-​human bodies, to its revolutionary potential in how residents have organized to articulate new urban commons. Situating his account within the modern history of Italian political and environmental activism, which partly implicates himself as a ghostly presence, he also reflects on what it means to be or become a revolutionary researcher in the unfolding of global warming and interruptions of the Anthropo-Obscene. Taken together, these chapters propose new readings of the political, disturb the premises on which emancipatory politics is generally discussed, and provide

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material to glean the potential for new forms and modes of bringing the political into the environment across diverse contexts. Part III on The Performative engages explicitly with political theory to forge new modes of scholarly, artistic, and activist collaborations between “the political” and “the ecological.” This final part of the book aims to develop coordinates and sketches for emancipatory politics in a cyborgian world of intense human/​non-​ human entanglements. Jodi Dean, in Chapter 11, focuses on innovative artistic and political practices that force division within public institutions, rather than consensus in relation to socio-​ environmental crisis and global warming. She argues that the colonization of public institutions by private interests has taken deep roots. This has to be challenged not simply from the outside, but from within, reclaiming institutions (from science, art, education to government) in the name of democracy and equality. Learning from and with the art collective Not An Alternative, she interprets their ongoing performance of “The Natural History Museum.” By adopting the legitimating aesthetics, pedagogical models, and presentation forms of natural history museums (within a real museum), they target the knowledge politics of anthropogenic ecological change to “activate” the natural history museum’s claim to serve the common but in a manner that divides the museum from within: anyone connected to the museum sector, those tasked to communicate science and natural history, has to take a side.This clarifies and forces a choice: Do you stand with collectivity and the common, or do you stand with oligarchs, private property, and the fossil fuel industry? The Natural History Museum is thus an example par excellence of a politically performative form of politics, that through its divisive strategy clarifies and creates actually existing democratic spaces. These strategies could proliferate and be up-scaled, opening spaces that reject the post-​political apocalyptic imaginaries associated with climate change, while creating publicly available egalitarian and communal spaces of action and thinking. In Chapter 12, and in resonance with other contributors in the book, Andy Merrifield attacks the problems associated with the professionalization of life and how liberal democratic forms of representation generate deep-​seated flaws in tackling common problems. From the observation that we increasingly live “through a series of ‘spectacular’ images […], messages, sound-​bites,” which we have allowed to speak for us and for our desires, he draws on Guy Debord’s analysis of the spectacle to re-​equip it for its continuing politicizing relevance in late capitalism. He then interrogates three forms of representation—​money, as the only measure of value; professional representation, as the paradigm of truth; and representative governance as the only form of democracy—​and from this he develops the idea of the amateur as the politically performative subject. “The people,” or what Merrifield also calls the “shadow citizenry” (those cast out of a professionalized neoliberal order, the 99%), become the analytical and politicizing location from where a project can be launched to get at those professionals on the inside, forcing this private inside to be answerable to the public outside. In the last chapter of Part III, Chapter 13, Maria Kaika embarks on a search for intellectual responsibility in the age of the Anthropo-​obScene, what she calls

Politicizing the urban environment  17

a “scholarship of presence.” She critiques the rapid ascent of “the Anthropocene” within humanities and social science, arguing that its placement as an imaginary for thinking about history and the future may be the most political thing about this term. Even critical engagements add symbolic power and scholarly weight to a concept that contributes to the formation of a new master narrative that “naturalizes” capitalism, while foreclosing alternative processes of subjectification and possibilities for autonomy. By drawing on her work from contemporary urban Greece, she traces how a renewed intellectual responsibility for the humanities, arts, and social sciences could be configured that instead focuses on co-​ researching and capturing processes of subjectification, claims and embodiment of re-​commoning, and narrates resistance, hope, and alternative configurations, giving them symbolic and ontological gravitas. This scholarship of presence has a long history that pays equal attention to tedious details of everyday life, as it does in developing a broader intellectual and political project. We need to collect stories and data that can put flesh and bone onto abstract ideas. But we also need, as she writes, “to put in the hard labour and courage to symbolize emerging radical imaginaries in ways that can empower them to become narratives performative of creating a new future.” This aims ultimately to participate in constructing “an archaeology for a new future” so that these experiences can start forming alternative master narratives.

Concluding remarks This book seeks to explicitly engage the relation between emancipatory theory and political activism; in short to bring back the political. We believe that our contributors and the wider field of UPE can offer inspiration for this task given rapid urbanization and intensifying anthropogenic ecological change. Through introducing our notion of the Anthropo-​obScene (further developed in Chapter 2) and discussing five dynamic transformations, we have also tried to set the stage for scholarly renewal. Indeed, in the concluding chapter of the book (Chapter 14), we draw on the various chapters to push for a closer engagement between critical urban environmental studies and political theory. This is aimed at nudging, or jolting, scholars to expand their terrain of academic endeavour to move from describing, analysing, and critiquing urban socio-​ecological transformations and movements—​as has been the staple of much of UPE and associated studies so far—​ to developing a vocabulary and grammar that can support politically performative theory and engaging with real existing political movements that are experimenting with the production of egalitarian spaces, elaborating new political subjectivities, and creating socio-​ecological alternatives. In sum, the book’s main objective is to critique and engage with the wide range of knowledge practices that depoliticize the environment during an era when the environment requires more politicization than ever. Our main contention is that urban political ecology and many other critical theoretical perspectives, in the way they have become formalized in the past two decades or so, have tended to ignore the thorny relationship between critical thought and progressive political action.

18  Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

This book is a contribution to the project of re-​politicizing political ecology as a field of study, and points, both theoretically and empirically, towards new political possibilities that can hopefully offer beacons for radical and progressive studies for decades to come.

Notes 1 As we elaborate in Chapter 2, and in Henao Castro and Ernstson in Chapter 4, there are various ways to write and deploy this term, for instance Anthropo-​Obscene, Anthropo-​ obScene, or Anthropo-​ob(S)cene, to emphasize different aspects of the depoliticizing figure of “The Anthropocene.” See also Swyngedouw and Ernstson (2018). 2 For information on the Coltan and tantalum value chain and its tight connection to civil wars and socio-​environmental destruction, see Sutherland (2011), Akiwumi and Hollist (2016) and Klosek (2018), among others. See also Demos (2015). 3 Although the average cell phone only contains about 40 milligrams of tantalum, which is extracted from Coltan, there were nearly 7 billion mobile phone subscriptions in 2015 according to Welfens, Nordmann, and Seibt (2016), which amasses staggering circulation volumes. They continue by saying that less than 10% of mobile phones have been estimated to be recycled worldwide, with Barume (2016) adding that some 15–​20% of total tantalum is recycled. Most e-​waste ends up in African and Asian cities (Tansel 2017) with increased lead levels in blood reported by Watson (2013).

References Akiwumi, Fenda A., and Arthur O. Hollist. 2016. “The New Kid on the Old Block: Coltan, Conflict-​prone Minerals, and Post-​war Reconstruction in Sierra Leone.” The Extractive Industries and Society 3(2): 316–​19. Arboleda, Martín. 2016. “In the Nature of the Non-​city: Expanded Infrastructural Networks and the Political Ecology of Planetary Urbanisation.” Antipode 48: 233–​51. Baigrie, Bruce, and Henrik Ernstson. 2017. “Noordhoek Eco-​estates Protect the Rich from the Reality of Masiphumelele: Apartheid Geography Preserved Behind a Concern for the Environment.” GroundUp, January 23, 2017. Cape Town. Accessed May 15, 2018. www. groundup.org.za/​article/​noordhoek-​eco-​estates-​protect-​r ich-​reality-​masiphumelele/​. Ballard, Richard, and Gareth A. Jones. 2011. “Natural Neighbours: Indigenous Landscapes and Eco-​estates in Durban, South Africa.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101(1): 131–​48. Barume, Bali, Uwe Naeher, Désirée Ruppen, and Philip Schütte. 2016. “Conflict Minerals (3TG): Mining Production, Applications and Recycling.” Current Opinion in Green and Sustainable Chemistry 1: 8–​12. Bennett, Tony and Patrick Joyce, eds. 2010. Material Powers. Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. London: Routledge. Benson, Koni. 2015. “Three Hundred Years of Shackdwelling and Women’s Organised Resistance in Cape Town.” In Out of Order: Popular Mobilisation in Contemporary South Africa, edited by Richard Pithouse and Gary Minkley, 1–​ 46. Fort Hare: Fort Hare University Press. Bonneuil, Christophe and Jean-​Baptiste Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso.

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Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. 2014.“Planetary Urbanization.” In Implosions/​Explosions: Toward a Study of Planetary Urbanization, edited by Neil Brenner, 160–​63. Berlin: Jovis. Cadena, Marisol de la. 2015. “Uncommoning Nature.” E-​Flux Journal 65: 1–​8. Comaroff, Jean and Jean L. Comaroff. 2011. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-​America Is Evolving Toward Africa. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Corkin, Lucy. 2011. “Uneasy Allies: China’s Evolving Relations with Angola.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 29(2): 169–​80. Demos, T.J. 2015. “V. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Gynocene: The Many Names of Resistance.” Still Searching, June 12. Accessed April 20, 2018. www.fotomuseum.ch/​en/​ explore/​still-​searching/​articles/​27015. Dikeç, Mustafa, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2017. “Theorizing the Politicizing City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41(1): 1–​18. Doshi, Sapana. 2013. “The Politics of the Evicted: Redevelopment, Subjectivity, and Difference in Mumbai’s Slum Frontier.” Antipode 45(4): 844–65. Doshi, Sapana. 2016. “Embodied Urban Political Ecology: Five Propositions.” Area 49(1): 125–​28. Ernstson, Henrik and Sverker Sörlin, eds. Forthcoming. Grounding and Worlding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Gandy, Matthew. 2005. “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(1): 26–​49. Gandy, Matthew. 2012. “Queer Ecology: Nature, Sexuality, and Heterotopic Alliances.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30(4): 727–​47. Garuba, Harry. 2012. “On Animism, Modernity/​Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections.” E-​Flux Journal 36: 1–​9. Green, Lesley. 2015. “The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene.” E-​Flux Journal 65: 1–​9. Harman, Graham. 2016. Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heynen, Nik. 2014. “Urban Political Ecology I: The Urban Century.” Progress in Human Geography 38(4): 598–​604. Heynen, Nik. 2015.“Urban Political Ecology II:The Abolitionist Century.” Progress in Human Geography 40(6): 839–​45. Heynen, Nik. 2017. “Urban Political Ecology III:The Feminist and Queer Century.” Progress in Human Geography 42(3): 446–​52. Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw, eds. 2006. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London and New York: Routledge. Hicks, Dam and Mary C. Beaudry, eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huchzermeyer, Marie. 2003. “Housing Rights in South Africa: Invasions, Evictions, the Media and the Courts in the Cases of Grootboom, Alexandra, and Bredell.” Urban Forum 14(1): 80–​107. James, Cyril L.R. 1989 [1938]. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Books. Kaika, Maria. 2005. City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City. London and New York: Routledge. Keil, Roger. 2003. “Progress Report: Urban Political Ecology.” Urban Geography 24(8): 723–​38.

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Keil, Roger. 2005. “Progress Report: Urban Political Ecology.” Urban Geography, 26(7): 640–​51. Klosek, Kamil. 2018. “Catalysts of Violence: How Do Natural Resource Extractive Technologies Influence Civil War Outbreak and Incidence in Sub-​Saharan Africa?” The Extractive Industries and Society 5(2): 344–​53. Lalu, Premesh. 2009. The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawhon, Mary, Henrik Ernstson, and Jonathan Silver. 2014. “Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE through African Urbanism.” Antipode 46(2): 497–​516. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. New Jersey and Kampala: Princeton University Press and Fountain Publishers. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-​foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Johannesburg:Wits University Press & Duke University Press. Mignolo, Walter D. 2012. Local Histories/​Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. 2nd edn. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Neocosmos, Michael. 2012. “Are Those-​who-​do-​not-​count Capable of Reason? Thinking Political Subjectivity in the (Neo-​)colonial World and the Limits of History.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(5): 530–​47. Njeru, Jeremia. 2006. “The Urban Political Ecology of Plastic Bag Waste Problem in Nairobi, Kenya.” Geoforum 37(6): 1046–​58. Pellizzoni, Luigi. 2016. “Catching Up With Things? Environmental Sociology and the Material Turn in Social Theory.” Environmental Sociology 2(4): 312–​21. Rademacher, Anne. 2009. “When Is Housing an Environmental Problem? Reforming Informality in Kathmandu.” Current Anthropology 50(4): 513–33. Rademacher, Anne. 2015. “Urban Political Ecology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44(1): 137–​52. Ranganathan, Malini. 2014. “Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(2): 590–​608. Ranganathan, Malini, and Carolina Balazs. 2015. “Water Marginalization at the Urban Fringe: Environmental Justice and Urban Political Ecology across the North–South Divide.” Urban Geography 36(3): 403–23. Robinson, Jennifer. 2016. “Thinking Cities through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics for a More Global Urban Studies.” Progress in Human Geography 40(1): 3–​29. Roy, Ananya. 2014. “Worlding the South: Toward a Postcolonial Urban Theory.” In The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, edited by Sue Parnell and Sophie Oldfield, 9–​20. London and New York: Routledge. Roy, Ananya, and Aihwa Ong, eds. 2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Said, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schulz, Karsten A. 2017. “Decolonizing Political Ecology: Ontology, Technology and ‘Critical’ Enchantment.” Political Ecology 24: 125–​43.

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Silver, Jonathan. 2014. “Incremental Infrastructures: Material Improvisation and Social Collaboration across Post-​Colonial Accra.” Urban Geography 35(6): 788–​804. Silver, Jonathan. 2015. “Disrupted Infrastructures: An Urban Political Ecology of Interrupted Electricity in Accra.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(5): 984–​1003. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2011. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads. London: Routledge. Stengers, Isabelle. 2003. Cosmopolitiques. Paris: La Découverte. Sutherland, Ewan. 2011. Coltan, the Congo andYour Cell-​phone. University of the Witwatersrand, LINK Centre. Accessed on April 29, 2018. http://​web.mit.edu/​12.000/​www/​m2016/​ pdf/​coltan.pdf. Swyngedouw, Erik. 1996. “The City as a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 7(2): 65–​80. Swyngedouw, Erik, and Henrik Ernstson. 2018. “Interrupting the Anthropo-​obscene: Immuno-​biopolitics and Depoliticizing Ontologies in the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture and Society, First Online, February 13, 2018. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​ 0263276418757314. Swyngedouw, Erik, and Maria Kaika. 2014. “Urban Political Ecology. Great Promises, Deadlock… and New Beginnings?” Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica 60(3): 459–​81. Tansel, Berrin. 2017. “From Electronic Consumer Products to E-​wastes: Global Outlook, Waste Quantities, Recycling Challenges.” Environment International 98: 35–​45. Truelove, Yaffa. 2011. (Re-​ )conceptualizing Water Inequality in Delhi, India through a Feminist Political Ecology Framework. Geoforum 42(2): 143–​52. Watson, Ivan. 2013. “China: The Electronic Wastebasket of the World.” CNN International Edition. Accessed on April 29, 2018. https://​edition.cnn.com/​2013/​05/​30/​world/​asia/​ china-​electronic-​waste-​e-​waste/​index.html. Welfens, Jolanta, Julia Nordmann, and Alexandra Seibt. 2016.“Drivers and Barriers to Return and Recycling of Mobile Phones. Case Studies of Communications and Collection Campaigns.” Journal of Cleaner Production 132: 108–​21. Wilson, Japhy, and Erik Swyngedouw, eds. 2014. The Post-​political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 1995. “1492: A New World View.” In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–​57. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

PART I

The political

2 O TEMPORA! O MORES! Interrupting the Anthropo-​obScene Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson

Introduction1 “The Anthropocene” has become a popularized term to denote a proposed new geological era during which humans have arguably acquired planetary geophysical agency. Despite wide-​ranging engagement with the term by natural scientists and geo-​engineers to social scientists and humanities scholars (see e.g. Castree 2014a; 2014b; 2014c; Hamilton, Bonneuil and Gemenne 2015), which seemingly indicates the term’s heterogeneous and contentious meaning, we intend to show how the Anthropocene is a depoliticizing notion that risks deepening further an already disastrous capitalist project and its exploitative socio-​ecological relations. This disavowal of the political operates, we contend, through the creation of particular “earthly” narratives that lay claim on how humans and non-​human materials and organisms interrelate and function as assembled imbroglios. These narratives, albeit by no means homogeneous, constitute what we refer to as “AnthropoScenes” that on-​stage certain relations and possibilities, while off-​staging others. In contradistinction to the Anthropocene, we propose the term the Anthropo-​obScene. Awkward as it may sound, this signifier hacks a popularized term to render its uncanny underbelly visible and sensible. The term draws upon classic Greek theatre’s understanding of “the obscene,” which precisely meant the off-​staging of dramatic action that was considered to be too emotionally intense to be shown explicitly, such as sexual conduct, extreme violence, or expressing deep anguish and fear. These acts were still performed, however, but hidden behind a curtain or behind the stage. Out of view and off-​staged, the spectator was nonetheless uncannily aware of their invisible and disturbing presence. It is from this perspective that we mobilize “the Anthropo-​ obScene” as our tactic to both attest to and undermine the performativity of the utterly depoliticizing stories of the Anthropocene.

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In the following, we shall first argue that the Anthropocene constructs a set of stages and performances that disavows a range of voices and ways of seeing. Its ontological constitution renders some forms of acting (human, non-​human, and more-​ than-​ human) off-​ stage. More specifically, we interrogate how much Anthropocene-​talk has forced things and beings, human and non-​human, into a relational and all-​inclusive straightjacket that does not allow a remainder, an excess, or outside, thereby permitting and nurturing specific ways of seeing and doing, while prohibiting others. To politicize urbanization and its planetary socio-​ ecological metabolism, will require, we contend, the foregrounding of how such off-​staging is a decidedly political gesture, followed by voicing, naming, and making sensible what has been censored and rendered obscene. In this chapter, we build on a post-​foundational view of the political. This perspective understands the political in terms of performance and following Jacques Rancière we view politics as non-​ontological and radically contingent.2 The political is understood as the interruptive staging of equality by the “part that has no-​part” (Rancière 1998). The political appears when those that are not normally counted make themselves heard and seen—​that is, as perceptible and countable—​in the name of equality. The political as performance is thus more concerned with forms of appearance than with existing institutions or processes of policy formulation and mediation (see Žižek 1999; Kalyvas 2009; Swyngedouw 2011). It is this notion of the political, as a form of interruptive acting over and beyond what holds socio-​ecological assemblages together, that we are interested in bringing into urban political ecology (UPE) and “Anthropocene”-​discussions more generally. Political acting subtracts—​or adds—​from what is given in any situation. It is the voice, the body, the critter, the organ, the process, for which the normalized order has no name and which cannot be symbolized within the existing order of the sensible. Put simply, the political is the signifier that stands for the immanent rupturing of relations, thereby exploding the myth of the possibility of a fully closed relational constellation.3 With this strictly performative perspective of politics, there is no grounding in any current or historical order or ontological logic, based on, say, race or class, or the Anthropocene, but the political turns into an aesthetic affair understood as the ability to disrupt, disturb, and reconfigure what is perceptible, sensible, and countable. To politicize thus means to focus on supernumerary forms of acting—​human, non-​human, more-​than-​human—​that trespass, undermine, and exceed existing situations and relational configurations. This is the dividing line we are seeking to make explicit. We argue that the Anthropocene hinges on a fully closed relational configuration that disavows the political as interruptive performance, making the political unthinkable and un-​actable. Our key intervention is to move from a political ontology that grounds itself in certain Anthropocenic narratives, to a situation that foregrounds an ontology of the political as performative (see Pellizzoni 2015). The chapter is organized in three parts. In the first part, we engage with “the event of the Anthropocene” as Bonneuil and Fressoz (2013; 2016) call it. They suggest how this event inaugurates the recognition of the active role of humans

Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene  27

in co-​constructing Earth’s deep geo-​historical time and problematize this new ontological framing of relational symmetry between humans and non-​humans. Yesterday’s ontology was, or so the Anthropocene argument goes, predicated upon externalizing Nature (while nonetheless increasingly socializing the non-​human) in a manner that nurtured human mastery over Nature. In the second part, we interrogate how this emergent symmetrical relational ontology, variously referred to as more-​than-​human or object-​oriented ontology, which accompanies part of the Anthropocenic narratives, fuels the possibility of a new cosmology, a new ordering of socionatural relations (Stengers 2003; Latour 2005; Coole and Frost 2010; Braun and Whatmore 2010; Morton 2013). Despite its radical presumptions, we contend that this new cosmology permits deepening particular capitalist forms of human/​ non-​human entanglements and that it can be re-​inscribed in a hyper-​accelerationist eco-​modernist vision and practice in which big science and big capital can gesture to be joining hands to save Earth and humanity within a broadening neoliberal frame. We shall argue how such a symmetrical framing articulates with a deepening of what Roberto Esposito (2008) calls an immunological biopolitics, the always failing attempt to immunologize life from harmful intruders or potential disintegration. In the third part, we develop the Anthropo-​obScene as a discourse and performance that aims to recast the depoliticized story of the Anthropocene. Here we explore the contours of a new politicization of the socio-​ecological conundrum we are in, while fully and radically embracing our interdependence with non-​humans. It is a view that recognizes exteriority and separation as the condition of possibility for interdependence and relationality. We insist that relationality implies a certain separation and, thereby, the always-​immanent possibility of acting that undermines, transforms, or supersedes the existing relational configuration. This opening of the political is predicated on foregrounding the alterities, the radical differences, and heterogeneities that both sustain and undermine any relational configuration and that open up all manner of possibilities for excessive acting that cut through any relational assemblage and render it ultimately unstable and precarious. This is a form of politicization that does not legitimize itself on the basis of an ontology of Nature, whether Anthropocenic or otherwise, but through the performative staging of equality.

AnthropoScenes: Staging the Anthropocene As Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-​Baptiste Fressoz observed, the notion of the Anthropocene implies an AnthropoScene, the staging of a narrative (or set of narratives) with profound implications that require careful attention (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). They offer a range of alternative narratives such as, among others, thermocene, thanatocene, phagocene, capitalocene, and polemocene. William Cronon had already remarked, more than 20 years ago, that any environmental history and re-​presentation implies a storyline with its theatrical setting that stages a particular cast of key actors, agents, props, and relations, while of necessity excluding other potential performers and relations (Cronon 1992). Such staged narratives, in

28  Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson

both their showing and non-​showing, obscure as much as they elucidate. The irremediable gap between history, as the unfolding of the Real of history on the one hand, and the Story as history’s fractured symbolic reconstruction on the other, has to be fundamentally endorsed in an attempt at revealing the Imaginary that desperately tries to cover up the gap, so that we may discern the abyss, the uncanny remainder, that lurks in-​between.4 Of course, the notion of the Anthropocene resonates widely among scientific and lay publics alike. Its appeal and rapid proliferation, from discussions among climate change scientists, environmental humanists and artists, to a catchword among social scientists and politicians, the signifier “Anthropocene” conveys a particular set of messages and signals and potential courses for future action (Castree 2014c). Let us delve into some of the key contours of the AnthropoScenic stage-​set and its underbelly.

A temporal disjuncture First, the stories of the Anthropocene reflect a strange temporal disjuncture that splits modernity into two—​the before and the after. Irrespective of the ongoing debate over the exact moment of its inauguration (Lewis and Maslin 2015; Steffen et al. 2011a), the event of the Anthropocene presumably announces a new socio-​ geophysical era, one that recognizes that human kind, as a species, has acquired deep-​time geological agency.5 This gesture prompted Dipesh Chakrabarty, among many others, to call for a retroactive re-​writing of the world’s environmental-​cum-​ social history (Chakrabarty 2009; 2014; 2015) where humans as a generic category have to be inserted in the world’s geophysical history as active agents in the making of their own combined earthly past and future. With this move, the “modernist” split between the physical world and humans is finally relegated to the dustbin as an archaic, uneducated view that can be transcended through a new relational web of mutual determination between humans and nature—​or so it seems. What we note here however is how this retroactive re-​writing of the world’s geo-​social history radically obscures and silences what has been an integral part of the modernist trajectory all along. Throughout modernity, many interlocutors already recognized the role of (some) humans as active agents of Earth’s transformation, and this has been a key ingredient of many modernist visions and analytical frameworks. At least since the eighteenth century, political economics and geo-​scientists avant la lettre insisted on how human history is a history of rekindling the Earth in an intimate relational articulation. Marx (1959 [1844]) famously quipped: “That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” Charles Fourier, another nineteenth century thinker, lamented in his De la déterioration materielle de la planète (1847 [1821]) that “climate disorders are a vice inherent to civilized culture,” going on to argue that a more socio-​ecological benign Earth would require a transformation of this civilization (cf. Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, 257; Fressoz and Locher 2010). In fact, Bonneuil and Fressoz demonstrate how modernity has been marked by a continuous battle unfolding between, on one the hand, advocates of a sustained society–​ nature

Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene  29

dichotomy and man’s (sic) manifest destiny to be master and commander of his external conditions of existence and, on the other hand, proponents of a more modest and socio-​ecologically sensitive mode of conduct and engagement, a process that would require a transformation of both social and ecological relations.6 The long genealogy of intellectuals, who already in the nineteenth century called for what we might today label an AnthropoScenic storyline, one that emphasizes co-​ construction between humans and nature, continue to be scripted out and silenced, thereby skilfully forgetting—​yet again—​that the nature–​society split that is customarily deemed to belong uniquely to the singular core and backbone of modernization, signals just the victory of one side in a fierce confrontation between radically opposing views (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). It is for this reason that Bonneuil and Fressoz suggest the name “Polemocene” ’ to signal the deeply polemical, contested, and conflicting cosmologies and political views that animated and still animate the unfolding of modernity and the making of the Anthropocene. The event of the Anthropocene is nonetheless foregrounded by most analysts as a moment of rupture of the temporality of modernity understood as monolithic and total, thereby dividing its history in an arguably un-​reflexive (pre-​)modernity and a post-​evental reflexive (post-​)modernity, a simple before and after. It is just a matter for the International Commission on Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences to decide on the exact date. The proposed rupture splits time and its geo-​history into two. In doing so, modernization as an internally fractured and highly contentious process of continuous conflicting and politically contested transformations becomes reframed as a singular and teleological movement of the unfolding of modernity’s history.Yet modernity is not a single-​headed process that now has been surpassed. As Frédéric Neyrat (2016, 117, our translation) attests: Instead of a division of modernity between a before and an after [the event of the Anthropocene], a modernity initially ignorant, but later educated, it is a division in modernity that we need to consider. In place of a chronological division, [it is] a political division. It is the double-​headed internal struggle between those that view nature as outside, as extra-​terrestrials, and those who fight from the inside, as Earthlings working in and with the non-​human, where the political battle-​lines need to be drawn and which predate as well as postdate the event of the Anthropocene. This includes recognizing that the Earthlings are configured within heterogeneous and power-​ laden inter-​human and non-​human constellations and their constitutive, and often conflictive, relations.

A symmetrical ontology Second, much of AnthropoScenic thought has adopted a symmetrical relational ontological displacement away from a human-​centred ontology. This ontological shift, in turn, announces allegedly a new political ontology that articulates around

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hyper-​reflexivity, horizontality, immanence, contingency, and symmetry that calls for and is supported by an ethics of care. The development of post-​human thought as a critique of capital and its power to shape the trajectory of modernity, not least from the likes of Haraway (2015) and Garuba (2012), is certainly crucial in shaping revolutionary subjectivities against capitalist, patriarchal, and neo-​colonial structures of knowledge. However, what is troubling is how others, from what might be called a “de-​caffeinated” post-​human school (including as diverse thinkers as Chakrabarty 2009; Morton 2013; Hamilton 2015a; Latour 2015a; 2015b), can at times be mobilized and certainly misread in support for eco-​modernist projects. Quite at work is an interweaving between Promethean geo-​engineering and reconstruction of the Earth’s more-​than-​human dynamics and a symmetrical, mutualistic ontology that can render Earth an intricate intertwined socio-​ecological imbroglio that with proper and loving supervision and careful techno-​natural nurturing and manicuring, permit an imaginary that promises both a more modest and an egalitarian future. For example, is it not telling that the belated recognition of Gaia as an Earth system’s science in which humans and non-​humans interweave, seems to also offer the best guarantee for the blinkered (eco-​)modernist call of a total management and careful “adaptive” massaging of the Earth system, to not only support, but indeed accelerate, a capitalist project? The nurturing of a symmetrical view comes at a time when the infernal consequences and theoretical trappings of the dualist trajectory of relating to nature, the victorious ontology of capitalist modernization, became all too evident to ignore in the Real of the actually existing climatic and environmental catastrophe. The hegemonic Promethean and dualist vision of the human/​non-​human relationship had to be revisited and revised if civilization as we know it is to continue for a while longer. Indeed, the accelerating enrolment of non-​human matters and lives within the circuits of capital circulation and accumulation throughout modernity has produced a series of both anticipated and unexpected outcomes. These dynamics not only propelled the ecological condition to a major concern of a global elite, but it also ruptured the very ontological foundation of the nature–​ society split that had served them so precociously in nurturing and legitimizing the deepening of human/​non-​human entanglements during the past few centuries. While the Promethean dualistic symbolization of the world permitted precisely the knotting of the social and the physical as control and mastery, the gap between this symbolization and the excessive acting of the intensifying socio-​ ecological transformation of Earth and its socio-​physical-​ecological dynamics could no longer be covered up by a fantasy of hierarchical and total control of a presumably external nature. The horrifying consequences of man’s (sic) intervention became all too clear and sensible. The current re-​ordering of the elite’s cosmology imposes itself with great urgency in a bid to make sure that nothing really has to change. And it is one that has to be in line with the most recent insights of Earth systems and cognate scientific insights, and into which hand newly fashioned symmetrical ontologies risk playing. What is at stake here is precisely how the promise of a fast-​forwarding capitalist modernization can

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proceed unheeded through an altered ontological premise, and with a different storyline to mask what is really at stake. In this shift from a Promethean relation to nature to a symmetrical one, the expert protagonist changes from the engineer to the ecologist. Ecology is the science of biophysical relations, a scientific discourse much more in tune with the breathing rhythm of life than engineering ever was. And while many ecologists have used their science to critique the nexus of capital and power (for example, Rachel Carson and Richard Lewontin), the discipline also carries a long legacy of nurturing an imaginary of itself as capable of assuming a global supervisory role in managing the world’s local and global ecologies. Peder Anker’s Imperial Ecology, for example, narrates how ecology grew within the British Empire from the early 1900s onwards into the science par excellence that gestured to be able to integrate all other sciences—​natural and social—​into a meta-​framework for manicuring, controlling, and exploiting optimally the environments and peoples of the colonies, often with racist and moralizing overtones (Anker 2001). Ecologists and British intellectuals Julian Huxley and Herbert George Wells popularized the discipline further. Inspired by and in collaboration with George Tansley himself, often deemed the father of ecology and the coiner of the term “the ecosystem” in the late 1800s, they argued in the 1930s for “creating,” as phrased by Anker, “a scientific brotherhood or a board of directors of the economy of nature to steer the world” (Anker 2001, 235). In the 1960s, this pattern was repeated with the ecology-​ inspired book A Guide for the New Masters of the World, with “masters” referring to these new managers-​cum-​scientists.While further treatment is needed on how this history has shaped contemporary ecology, we here note how an influential sub-​ set of contemporary ecologists have made the unrelenting call for “Earth system Governance” (Biermann 2007; Biermann et al. 2012) and “Planetary Stewardship” (Steffen et al. 2011b) that conjures on stage the role of supervisors, experts, and “masters,” albeit cushioned rhetorically within ideas of “adaptive” co-​management and governance. While there are notable differences from their predecessors, this urge to take on the burden to help navigate the world in a beneficial direction—​ and without foregrounding a critique of capital, knowledge, or patriarchy—​seems to run as a thread through the discipline of ecology, especially the perspective that is concerned with resilience and complex adaptive systems theory.7 As before, critique is evacuated, and a stage is built on which ecologists and climatologists can claim expert knowledge, although this time around it is not the material needs of Empire that intermingles with their claims, but the story of the importance of producing a “good Anthropocene” (Hamilton 2015b).

A new cosmology Third, these symmetrical and flat ontologies provide for the formulation of a new cosmology of the Earth’s bio/​geophysical system and are staged as a necessary relational perspective that can foster a continuation of civilization as we know it.While in earlier dominant accounts, non-​humans were considered to be recalcitrant,

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uncooperative, and prone to revengeful action when marshalled into capital’s subordination and use, the symmetrical ontology of the AnthropoScene permits—​at least in discourse and imaginary—​a potentially more benign, mutually supporting, and sustainable assembling of human/​non-​human relations, a constellation that would permit capitalism to propel forward to even greater heights of socio-​ecological knotting. Here we encounter the promise of a renewed and ecologically sensitive capitalism that takes seriously both the geophysical force of humans and the material acting of the non-​human, while redeeming the sins of the past. Indeed, in the staging of this AnthropoScene as the “good” Anthropocene, the new symmetrical relational ontology with its veil of radical newness runs the risk of functioning as a philosophical quilt for sustaining and advocating an accelerationist hyper-​ modernizing and neo-​Promethean manifesto (Ellis 2011; Hamilton 2015b). Saving both capital and nature now squarely resides in deepening our socio-​ecological assemblages, in intensifying our relationship with nature. An early example is undoubtedly the UK’s Royal Society 2009 Policy document, Geoengineering the Climate, with its mixture of Promethean promises and can-​do fervour (The Royal Society 2009). We need not less capitalism, but a deeper, a more intense and radically reflexive form of capitalism (Moore 2016). One of the most iconic bearers of this view is the Breakthrough Institute (BI) and its intellectual protagonists (Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2007; 2011). Drawing upon, and at times misreading post-​human theorists, the Breakthrough Institute is a vocal proponent of what we refer to as a hyper-​accelerationist view and helps to clarify what is at stake. For them and fellow “eco-​pragmatists,” the intensification of nuclear energy use, shale gas exploitation, large-​scale climatic geo-​engineering, bio-​engineering, and the intensified development of new eco-​ techno-​machineries points to the promises to be both unleashed by and realized in the Anthropocene while making sure that the existing capitalo-​parliamentary order, as Alain Badiou would call it, remains intact and unchallenged as a universal order.These accelerationist manifestos mobilize a reflexive relational understanding of society–​ nature relationships to underpin an environmentally Promethean-​ modernist platform that calls for a radical geo-​engineering of a more-​than-​human Earth in an effort to save both planet and capitalism.8 And it is precisely through such geo-​constructionist strategy, so their argument goes, that humans’ impact on nature can be minimized and a more reflexive and nurturing relationship can be sustained. Although some interlocutors fully recognize the depoliticizing tenure of the “good” Anthropocene (see Latour 2015b), the same interlocutors disavow what is at stake politically and economically, namely the socio-​ecological survival of capitalist civilization as we know it. What is often missed is how the apparently new and revolutionary symmetrical ontologies offer a storyline, a new symbolization of the Earth’s past and future that performs the ideological groundwork that capitalism urgently needs in order to continue what it does despite the fact that we know that the uneven and combined socio-​ecological geographies that sustain capitalist development will only intensify.9 In other words, the various ontological politics inaugurated by the Anthropocene are decidedly Janus-​faced.

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The connection between big capital (as in geo-​engineering), big science (as in Earth system Science), and the partial enrolment of newly fashioned symmetrical ontologies to shape various AnthropoScenes (as in critical social theory and humanities), can be traced to the deep crisis of capitalism in the 1970s. Following Bruce Braun (2015), who draws on Sara Nelson (2014; 2015), both the consolidation of non-​deterministic geo-​sciences (including complexity science and resilience theory) and the new materialisms associated with more-​than-​human and object-​oriented ontologies rose to prominence in the context of the deep crisis of capitalism in the 1970s and its attempts to search for a fix to the malaise in the process of neoliberalization (see also Walker and Cooper 2011; von Heland and Sörlin 2012; Protevi 2013; Pellizzoni 2016). While parts of the social sciences and humanities developed a “flatter” and radically symmetrical ontology, the natural sciences had already discarded the linear systems model of Cold War cybernetics, one that promised command and control for every step on the road if initial conditions were known, to nurture new grand narratives based on complex adaptive systems theory that emerged and replaced the linear model.10 This apolitical version of science and ecology resonated strongly with chaos mathematics, network analytics, and non-​equilibrium economics, theories that became increasingly influential from the 1980s and onwards, composing as it were, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and what Francis Fukuyama had proposed as “the end of history” (Fukuyama 1992), a scientific way forward for grand thinking that was environmentally sensitive in a post-​ ideological time, but retained a strong techno-​managerial focus. A key ingredient in its making and success is how this framework permits the ontological integration of everything into a “social-​ecological system,” which conceptually and materially includes all things human and non-​human, while advocating, superficially at least, a more modest ambition not of total control, but of “adaptive governance,” a dynamic self-​organizing, decentered and decentralized, and inclusive multi-​scaled “Panarchy” system (Holling and Gunderson 2002; Folke et al. 2005).11 As theory and storyline, this discourse can fully recognize on one hand “true uncertainty” of socionatural entanglements, but on the other hand still proceed to develop grand management procedures, from the local to the global. “True uncertainty” becomes the raison d’être, the quilting point around which “resilience” and “adaptive governance” turns with the effect of stretching out this ecological or “resilience thinking” into nooks and crannies of the social, the ecological, and the political. Because of “true uncertainty,” its pundits would claim, the active involvement of all parts of society is needed to carry out management procedures. While debates and denouncements exist among climate scientists of geo-​engineering (Barrett et  al. 2014), it forms part of the storylines of a well and adaptively managed planet:“Earth stewardship and geo-​engineering are not necessarily in conflict, but instead could be viewed as complementary approaches” to “combat climate change” (Galaz 2012, 24). Crutzen (2002) himself did not rule out geo-​engineering projects “to ‘optimize’ [the] climate” and insisted that the Anthropocene inaugurated a shift from manipulating the environment in the interest of humanity, to the promises of a geo-​engineering of Earth as an entangled human/​non-​human whole. His fateful,

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yet adjuring concluding remarks in his 2002 article The Geology of Mankind rings of Huxley and Wells’ suggestion of “a scientific brotherhood” to steer the world from the 1930s: A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene. This will require appropriate human behaviour at all scales, and may well involve internationally accepted, large-​scale geo-​engineering projects, for instance to “optimize” climate. Crutzen (2002, 23) We have so far demonstrated how three aspects of the AnthropoScene—​a temporal disjuncture, a symmetrical ontology, and a new cosmology—​set particular narrative stages with the effect of depoliticizing our socio-​ecological predicament and leaving it in the hands of experts. We now move to interrogate how the Anthropocene has been inserted into the art of governing.

From biopolitical governance to necropolitics The staging of the AnthropoScene inserts humans as active agents into what hitherto was largely understood as an inert field of non-​human forces. This opens up, as we have outlined above, all manner of new possibilities, ranging from calls for a more modest and “adaptive” human/​non-​human articulation, to advocating geo-​ engineering and geo-​management perspectives to manicure the dynamics of the Earth system. Understood from the perspective of capital, however, what becomes visible and within reach is an extraordinary new frontier, this time in the name of saving not just humanity but the whole Earth with it. We are here at the dawn, therefore, of a deeply disturbing reinterpretation. A new worldly cosmology is taking shape whereby critical ontologies of post-​human relationality, post-​modern hyper reflexivity, and “true uncertainty” of complex systems are mobilized in a manner that is radically conservative, one deviously blind to the multiple asymmetries that shape the socio-​ecological dynamics of an earthly world co-​constituted through human action. While the practices from yesteryear and based on the old nature–​society split had put the socio-​ecological Earth system onto a highway to Armageddon, with the termination of human life at the horizon, the spectre opened by the name of the Anthropocene has actively been used to promise humans’ active co-​construction of Earth’s deep geophysical forces. This in turn has come to prefigure the possibility to turn the prospect of apocalyptic annihilation into the potential for accelerating civilization as we know it, provided that the right metabolic vehicles and the correct geo-​engineered technical intermediaries are put into place. In what follows in this second section of our chapter, we will first argue that the promise of this horizontal relational ontological perspective permits reproducing and deepening the immunological desire upon which an already existing liberal

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biopolitical governance regime was founded. This possibility is nonetheless, and second, predicated upon positing a strict symmetrical relationality that no longer allows for a constitutive outside. It is a relationality that permits a phantasmagorical scripting of a fully socialized nature, one that finally can be manicured through “adaptive” micro-​and macro-​engineering of human/​non-​human relations. The AnthropoScene truly puts the non-​human off-​stage. We conclude that there is a profound re-​articulation of environmental politics unfolding, one that is primarily aimed at depoliticizing the environmental question but doing so in a highly politicized manner.

The depoliticized politics of the Anthropocene: An immuno-​biopolitical fantasy As suggested above, the AnthropoScene provides for an apparently immunological prophylactic against the threat of an irredeemably external and revengeful nature, a more-​than-​human material acting that has Really leapt out of the bounds in which the Cartesian dualist “mastery of nature” tried to cocoon it symbolically. Nonetheless, we still have to account for the AnthropoScene’s formidable performativity and its discursive success as a signifier that is popular and scientific, horrifying and promising, potentially radical yet utterly reactionary. How can this god-​like trick be accounted for? And how can we cut through this deadlock whereby apparent critical and radical thought can be marshalled into the service of a reactionary continuation, if not deepening, of the obscene trajectory on which “humanity,” or rather a particular social and geographically situated sub-​set of humanity, embarked a long time ago? Roberto Esposito’s analysis of biopolitical governmentality, enhanced by Frédéric Neyrat’s psychoanalytical interpretation, may begin to shed some light on this deadlock (Esposito 2008; 2011; Neyrat 2010). Esposito’s main claim expands on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitical governmentality as the quintessential form of modern liberal state governance by demonstrating how this biopolitical frame is increasingly sutured by an immunological drive, a mission to seal off objects of government (the population) from possibly harmful intruders and recalcitrant or destabilizing outsiders that threaten the bio-​social happiness and socio-​ecological integrity, if not sheer survival, of the population. “Immunological” has to be understood here as the suspension of the obligation of mutual communal gift-​g iving, a form of asylum that suspends one’s obligation to participate in the rights and obligations of the commons, of the community. The (neo)liberal injunction to enjoy individual freedom and choice is precisely the founding gesture of such an immunological biopolitics, i.e. the accelerating ring-​fencing of the fragmented body from its insertion in the obligations and violence that bonds community or common life, from the socio-​ecological imbroglios that we inhabit (Brossat 2003). And it is precisely immunitary biopolitical governance apparatuses, i.e. a set of practices, rules, institutions, and techno-​managerial proceedings, that work to create an imaginary sense of protection and sequestration.

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Immuno-​politics are clearly at work, for example, in hegemonic Western practices around immigration, health, or international terrorism. A rapidly expanding arsenal of soft and hard technologies is put in place in an ever-​denser layering of immunological technical, infrastructural, digital, and institutional-​ legal dispositifs—​ from tighter immigration law and continuous surveillance and big-​data profiling to the actual construction of steel and concrete walls and barriers, and the proliferation of all sorts of camps and other militarized or policed enclosures.12 Similar examples can be identified in the strict cordoning off when infectious diseases threaten to spatialize in manners that could penetrate the immuno-​engineered eco-​topian bubbles of the elite’s local life. For us, we see a parallel in that much of the sustainability and eco-​managerial practices that populate ecological interventions, smart technologies, and governance practices are precisely aimed at re-​enforcing the immunological prowess of the immune system of the body politic against recalcitrant, if not threatening, outsiders (like CO2, waste, bacteria, refugees, viruses, ozone, financial crises, pollution, and the like) so that life as we know it can continue. Immuno-​biopolitics deepens biopolitical governance in an era of uncertainty and recognized perpetual risk (Neyrat 2008). As Pierre-​Oliver Garcia (2015, 321, our translation) puts it: “An immunitary power takes control of the risks, dangers and fragilities of individuals to make them live in a peaceful manner while obscuring any form of dissensus.” Roberto Esposito and Alain Brossat (2003) call this “immunitary democracy.” This is a social configuration operating as an immunity system that guarantees not being touched, of being immunized. It is a fantasy of a total protection and securitization of life, without exposure to “risk.” For Brossat, this is a dangerous fantasy, as the immunitary logic entails nothing else than the destruction of community, of being-​in-​common. Necessarily, this logic creates the continuous production of the exposed (the non-​immunized) as the flipside of the immunized body and leads to depoliticization; the immunized becoming mere spectators of the suffering of others from the cocoon of their sanctuary spaces. As Maria Kaika (2017) argues, such immunological sanctity space offers only either hate or compassion for the threatening intruder, while sustaining their expulsion into the peripheral zones of refugee camps, migration enclaves, and imposed exclusion where life remains bare. Of course, as Neyrat (2008) insists, the immunitary dispositif does not Really function as the exposure to risks affects all, albeit not all to the same extent. In relation to refugees, (bio-​)security, and economic-​financial collapse, the immuno-​ biopolitical gesture often succeeds in translocating risks and fear of collapse and disintegration (while nurturing them all the same) into a terrain of a crisis to be governed or a situation to adapt to or become resilient against. However, this immuno-​biopolitical dispositif of crisis management is rapidly disintegrating in the face of the Really existing uneven and combined socio-​ecological catastrophe. Indeed, with respect to our socio-​ecological condition, the standard apparatuses of neoliberal governance that sustain and nurture the immuno-​biopolitical desire that Esposito points to as the primary logic of neoliberal governmentality become increasingly ineffective. Few believe, for example, that limiting global temperature

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rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a threshold set by the “international community,” will be achieved irrespective of the number of COP meetings on climate change that the United Nations will organize.13 Is it not the case that the immuno-​biopolitical managerial tactics of Earth system governance, geo-​engineering, and other eco-​ governance arrangements leave an uncanny remainder? Are we not left with the gnawing feeling that, despite the elevation of the ecological condition to the dignity of a global public concern, the socio-​ecological parameters keep eroding further? In spite of the combination of market-​led adaptation and mitigation strategies that were argued to provide a safety-​wall against further climate change, the Real of the ecological disintegration still gallops forward. While other “risks” (economic, refugee, or geopolitical/​security crises) are subject to immuno-​biopolitical gestures that promise life unencumbered (for the included, thereby re-​producing and expanding the exposed) in the face of potentially lethal threats by means of deepening immunological management, screening, and techno-​ shielding, the environmental biopolitical masquerade—​invariably captured by empty signifiers of sustainability, adaptation, resilience, smart development, or retro-​eco-​engineering—​ secures at best a palliative for temporary relief. The insistent intrusion of the Real of socio-​ecological destruction undermines terminally this immunological fantasy script, exposes its unstable core, uncovers the gap between the Symbolic presentation of a sustainable earth-​in-​the-​making and the Real of rapidly degrading socio-​ecological conditions in many parts of the world, and undermines its supporting discursive matrix, thereby threatening the coherence of the prevalent socio-​ecological order. The incessant return of the Real of ecological disintegration might fatally undermine our drive’s primordial energy as we are increasingly caught up in the horrifying vortex of radical and irreversible socio-​ecological disintegration. The fantasy of eternal life meets the Real of its unavoidable but always premature end. A radical re-​imagination of the socio-​geophysical constellation of the Earth system was therefore urgently called for, barring the unbearable Reality of an untimely death that is now firmly on the horizon. The uncanny feeling of anxiety that all is not as it should be, that keeps gnawing, is sublimated and objectified in the horrifying “thing” around which both fear and desire become articulated. As Roberto Esposito argues, the immunological biopolitical dispositif turns indeed into a thanato-politics, of who should live or die. This revives for Achille Mbembe the long history of necropolitics, which, as in slavery, is imposed on the excluded as indeed the flipside of the immunological biopolitical fantasy. While liberal biopolitics revolved around “making live and let die,” immunological necropolitics triages humanity around “letting live and make die” (Mbembe 2003; Gržinic 2016). In the excessive acting of the immunological drive, the dispositif turns against that which it should protect. It becomes self-​destructive in a process of auto-​immunization. The very mechanisms that permitted biopolitical governance in the twentieth century—​the thermocene of unbridled carbon metabolization and energy production to fuel both capital accumulation and middle-​class mass consumption—​turned into an auto-​destructive process. This auto-​immunization

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process, in turn, isolates the pathological syndrome and treats it as an externalized “bad” that requires isolation and sequestration (Garcia 2015, 352–​53). In other words, the mechanisms that permit making and securing life end up threatening its very continuation. This infernal dialectic, Frédéric Neyrat argues, is predicated upon re-​doubling the fantasy of absolute immunization, the fact that despite the fact we know very well we shall die, we act and organize things as if life will go on forever (Neyrat and Johnson 2014). It is precisely at a time when the Real of the excessive acting of an externalized threat, in particular in the form of CO2, cannot any longer be contained and ignored that a widening and intensification of the immunological biopolitical drive is called for (Neyrat 2014), a procedure predicated upon an ontological reversal that internalizes again the pathological outsider in order to render it “governable,” while re-​doubling the phantasmagorical desire for absolute immunization, a process that deepens further a thanato-​political auto-​ immunization process. It is in this fantasy space, sustained by a human exceptionalism as the sole species capable of preventing its own death, that both the modest and more radically accelerationist geo-​imaginaries that accompany the inauguration of the Anthropocene find their ultimate ground (Neyrat 2014). The symmetrical human/​non-​human foundation (compared with the ontological split between nature and culture of yesteryear) on which many of the AnthropoScenes rest, promises indeed to cut through the unbearable deadlock between immuno-​and thanato-​politics without really having to alter the trajectory of socio-​ecological change. In fact, it deepens it. In psycho-​analytical terms, the immuno-​biopolitical prophylactic that the AnthropoScene discloses circulates around the death drive, the obsessive pursuit of desire that permits covering up the inevitability of “death”; it is the process that makes sure that we can go on living without staring the Real of eventual (ex-​)termination in the eye. While the pursuit of happiness lies in avoiding pain, the death drive, sustained by desire and the promise of enjoyment, propels us forward as if we would live forever irrespective of (and even moved along by) the threats, risks, and obstacles we encounter on our journey to the end. The energy of the drive is fuelled by the disavowal of a certain death. It is the hysterical position that guarantees that death remains obscure and distant, an obscene impossibility. The AnthropoScenic promise of a geo-​engineered Earth, or—​for a more modest and nurturing society–​nature relationship—​the fulfilment of a constructivist symmetrical materialist ontology, brings finally the whole of nature, the Earth system as a totality, within an immuno-​biopolitical frame that guarantees the sustainability of civilization as we know it, the continuation of life’s drive. The outsider that threatens the integrity of our socio-​spatial matrix (Nature as we knew it) is duly brought within an ontological frame that opens the possibility for its total incorporation. Such phantasmagorical staging of the AnthropoScene depoliticizes the matter of nature. We can survive and do so without the necessity of facing political actions and radically different political choices. A shift in the techno-​managerial apparatuses, supported by a new political ontology of a more-​than-​human world that acknowledges uncertainty, contingency, and risk will suffice.

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This gesture confidently projects our survival into eternity without considering the need or potential for a transformation of socionatural relations themselves, for the need to think and practice a new politics; it invites and nurtures techno-​ managerial adaptions to assure the “sustainability” or “resilience” of the existing. The class, gender, and neo-​colonial conflicts and struggles that are an integral and defining part of the uneven and combined socio-​ecological process called capitalism are disavowed or repressed and political struggles around questions of equality, freedom, and emancipation foreclosed as the promise of a different socio-​ecological governance and management regime will suffice to secure the survival of the world as we know it. While previous socio-​technical arrangements and intermediaries to mitigate human’s eco-​physical imprint (from carbon trading to the manufacturing of carbon sinks and alternative energy sources) could at best only provide a palliative to postpone for a while the Endgame of an inhabitable Earth, the AnthropoScene, in its eco-​modernizing straightjacket, offers the promise of radical reinterpretation so that nothing really has to change; it promises the crafting of a manageable inhabitable Earth, one that guarantees our survival, freed from the uncertainties (while fully endorsing a reflexive consideration of the associated risks) and destructive acting of an external nature, one radically split from the human, and rapidly veering out of control (Neyrat 2016). It is in this context that the presumably radical and critical ontological edifice in which the AnthropoScenes are vested requires careful scrutiny. In the transcendence of the nature–​society split or dualism, promised by introducing a human/​ non-​human ontology, the radical otherness upon which relationality is necessarily conditioned is strangely suspended. In other words, the move to a relational new materialism sutures things such that the exteriority that undergirds relationality runs the risk of disavowal. Or, differently put: the effort to contain and transcend the nature–​society split or dualism through ontologies of internal relationality disavows the separation upon which relationality is constituted (Neyrat 2016, 266ff.).

A relationality without excess While a more-​than-​human cosmology embraces a relational ontology that disavows exteriority, and thereby subscribes to a relational unity between the human and non-​human, it opens up the spectre of annihilating relationality itself. And with this, the off-​staging of the political itself. What needs to be foregrounded, therefore, is the exteriority or separation that renders a relationship possible. This is a gesture comparable to Luce Irigaray’s position that the dominant structuring of gender relations, occasionally reproduced by feminist thought itself, renders the female invisible and mute, as the male-​dominated configuration defines both man and woman (Irigaray 1985). Patriarchal gender relations render woman non-​existent, mute, or void. Similarly, the symbiotic relationship that goes under the signifier of “class” is equally one that renders the worker invisible and non-​acting.The capital–​ labour relation, whereby capital produces both content and substance to the body of the “worker,” defines his or her properties. Feminist or working-​class politics—​the

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becoming of feminist of proletarian political subjects—​in contrast, resides precisely in the process by which the exteriority of the relationship is affirmed, whereby the separation between genders or between capitalists and workers is foregrounded. This manifests itself when “woman” or “worker” refuse to continue to assume the role and place assigned by the class or patriarchal relations through which these places and functions are assigned.The immanence of exteriority become symptomatically sensible when women become feminists and workers proletarians, a move by which the relational symmetry that announced the non-​existence of the other is interrupted or subverted by forms of acting, doing, and saying what cannot any longer be contained within the existing relational matrix. These are moments that open up potentially new possibilities of emancipatory politicization. This too holds for socionatural constellations. While the one-​ dimensional Promethean and modernist myth of the human–​nature split has to be abandoned fully, the radical difference, the condition of exteriority, between and among heterogeneous humans and heterogeneous non-​humans has to be recognized and fully endorsed. Without abandoning a relational perspective that transcends the binary split of the nature–​society divide, the focus needs to be squarely on considering the ontology of the relational frame. A relationality that recognizes separation as a condition of possibility for creating relations, requires us to insist on the immanent possibilities of excessive, supernumerary acting of all sorts of both humans and non-​humans in the unfolding of the socio-​geo-​ecological past and possible futures. Or in other words, our human and non-​human alliances and networks produce outcomes that are, of necessity, not fully integrated within the relations that produced them. There is always a remainder, a gap, an inconsistency, a hard bone or stain that resists incorporation, something that stubbornly refuses to be a cooperative actor in the relational assemblage. It is those remainders that open up possible forms of acting that supersede, transform, and occasionally undermine the very stability of the relational configuration. To put it simply, natures as well as humans will continue to act in strange, unaccounted for, excessive manners, subtracted from the relational configuration, which preclude the sort of Anthropocenic control and management some pundits foreground. It is precisely this excess to the relation, the acting over-​and-​beyond the ones sustained by the relational frame, which will keep haunting and propel the earth system and Earthlings in all manner of different, and largely unpredictable, possible future trajectories. It is within this whimsical acting that sides have to be taken, choices made, and through which political subjectivation unfolds. This, we would insist, is part of the AnthropoScenic stage while simultaneously hiding the very truth of its own script. The signifier of the Anthropocene heralds the advent of a socio-​ecological symmetrical ontology in the unfolding of the Earth’s history, past and future. The genesis of the term points to a moment in the past (still under dispute) as the founding moment, the year Zero, from whence onwards the external relationality—​the split—​between humans and their environment turned into an internal relationality of complex mutual determination and co-​ transformation.Yet, it is precisely the actual history of the Anthropocene that signals

Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene  41

the truth of the relational exteriority. As many, from Marx onwards have argued, the Earth’s futures are socio-​ecologically scripted, whereby the heterogeneous supernumerary actings of multiple players produce all manner of different possible trajectories and thus possible future histories. It is the excessive, supernumerary acting, the acting over and beyond the bounds of the relational assemblages, that pulls time forward, precisely by interrupting the symmetrical co-​existence while nonetheless accepting contingency and uncertainty. These are the moments and places from where transformation is enacted. This unsymbolized acting is, in Žižekian terms, the moment of the return of the Real, the violent intrusion of the non-​symbolized and non-​symbolizable excessive component, the stain that disrupts the smooth surface and interrupts the state of affairs. In doing so, the truth of the situation, the properly obscene character of the AnthropoScene is revealed for what it is, merely an already failing attempt of subsuming the newly found socionatural imbroglios within the intensifying and accelerating circuits of metabolic transformation on which the circulation of capital necessarily rests.

Acting ≠ political acting: Re-​centring the political in the Anthropocene The exteriority of the relational configuration may be what Jane Bennett understands as the political matter of matter (Bennett 2010). Non-​human “stuff ” acts in not always entirely predictable manners within a socionatural relationship and asserts the possibility for supernumerary acting, the excess of the relational configuration, and the stubborn refusal of its annihilation in a strictly symmetrical assemblage. Indeed, plastic piles up in the oceans, dams break down, nuclear reactors melt, planes fall out of the sky, infrastructure networks fail, GMOs inserted in the environment rekindle DNAs in non-​predictable manners, particulate matter settles in lungs, nano-​particles and new materials mingle with human organs and non-​human things, or new virus strains emerge. In doing so, natures’ heterogeneous acting transgresses the bounds of the human/​non-​human constellations, destabilizes the order of things, and interrupts the smooth functioning of the human/​non-​ human imbroglios. Such acting outside the bounds of the socio-​ecological matrix is undoubtedly performative. It has all manner of consequences, both for humans and non-​humans as well as for human–​human and human–​non-​human relationships. It is this excessive performativity that nurtures concern with risk, adaptation, resilience or immunization. In this sense, the supernumerary acting of various natures sustains all manner of anxieties and a feeling of uncanny risks—​something that the Anthropocenic forcing may have intensified—​that are sublimated in a permanent fear of breakdown, intrusion, and possible collapse. As argued above, it is precisely here that the immuno-​biopolitics of the Anthropocene may perform its most incisive work, the impossible promise of a fully managed and manicured Earth system. Nonetheless, nature’s acting out of the bounds of its relational constitution should not be equalled with political acting. While having profound and always uneven consequences, which invariably enter the theatre of politics, political acting

42  Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson

should be understood as the interruptive acting under the aegis of equality and freedom that radically affirms the capacity of each and everybody to govern the commons collectively (Swyngedouw 2014). While the controversies over the Anthropocene are mobilized in all manner of ways, suggesting indeed a politicization of the stuff of things, the “political” cannot and should not be grounded on the eventual truth of the Anthropocene. There is no code, injunction, or ontology that can found and thus legitimize a new political ecology. The ultimate depoliticizing gesture resides precisely in letting the naming of a geo-​ social epoch decide our politics. It is yet again a failing and obscene attempt to ground a new politics on a contested truth of nature. “The political,” as we understand it, is nothing else than the signifier of the radical heterogeneity that cuts through the “us” or the “we,” and affirms the radical heterogeneity that separates “the human” from itself, that signals the ruptures and struggles that divide the social.The political, in the end, can only be founded on the absence of the “we,” “our,” or “us” and on the recognition that the “we” and the “us” are irrevocably fractured within often conflicting or antagonistic class, gender, age, and racialized relations, and traversed by radically different fantasies of what might constitute a “good” Anthropocene. It is precisely this lack, the gaps that render the “we” and the “us” impossible, that the Anthropocene and its AnthropoScenes cover up, by relentlessly insisting there is a “we,” a terrestrial human/​non-​human constellation of mutually interrelating Earthlings without surplus, remainder, or gap that prevents a smooth-​functioning whole. While fully endorsing the performativity of the whimsical, recalcitrant, and never fully accounted for non-​human forms of acting, political action can only be legitimized in relationship to itself and not on the basis of a thoroughly symbolized nature. The claims made above about the AnthropoScenes and their performativity in no way suggest ignoring, let alone forgetting, the Real of natures or, more precisely, the diverse, multiple, whimsical, contingent, and often unpredictable socio-​ ecological relations of which we are part. The claim we make is about the urgent need to question the legitimacy of all manner of socio-​environmental politics, policies, and interventions in the name of a thoroughly imagined and symbolized humanized Nature, a procedure that necessarily forecloses a political frame through which such imaginaries become constituted and hegemonized and disavows the constitutive split of the people by erasing the spaces of agonistic encounter (Mouffe 2005). The above re-​conceptualization urges us to accept the extraordinary variability of natures, insists on the need to make “a wager” on natures, to force political choices between this rather than that nature. To the extent that there is an earthly politics, it will have to be one that attests to the heterogeneities that cut through the social, destabilize any community, and—​in doing so—​proposes and works through forging new human/​non-​human entanglements.

Acknowledgements We thank colleagues that have given input, including Nate Millington, Maria Kaíka, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, and Irma Allen. A different version of this

Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene  43

argument was published in Theory, Culture and Society in 2018 and we thank three anonymous reviewers for their input. We acknowledge the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (Grant ref: ES/​M009408/​1; TLR). The second author acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council Formas (Dnr: 211-​ 2011-​1519; MOVE) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation.

Notes 1 Another version of this chapter was published in Theory, Culture and Society (Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018). 2 Two schools of thought have developed in viewing politics as performative with an important difference in relation to the ontological. While Hannah Arendt (1958) departs “from identifiable ontological modes of being” in relating politics to performance (e.g., work, home, action), as described by Henao Castro and Ernstson in Chapter 4 of this book (note 14), such ontological modes (and their borders) are not necessary for Rancière’s notion of politics but are in fact radically resisted. Politics can burst open anywhere and by anybody; it is radically contingent and has no ontological grounding. 3 For further development of Rancière’s argument for the need for a performative and non-​ ontological foundational premise for politics, see Henao Castro and Ernstson (Chapter 4). 4 We are here drawing on Lacanian categories, using capital letters for these concepts. 5 The idea that humans can change the Earth’s climate can be traced as far back as 1873 to Antonio Stoppani, an Italian geologist, who referred to an ‘anthropozoic era’. The current use of the term “Anthropocene,” is from a later date, first used by biologist Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s and then developed in collaboration with climatologist Paul Crutzen. Together they wrote the first publication that explicitly made use of the term in a newsletter in 2000 for the International Geosphere-​Biosphere Programme. The name Anthropocene, from its Greek roots of “anthropos” and “scene,” means “human” and “new” and follows how geologists have named geological time periods, as in Holocene and Pleistocene (see Crutzen 2002). 6 Those on the other end of the modernist divide insisted of course on a split between the human and the physical world and would pursue the Promethean myth of man [sic] as possessor and master of Earth, paving the golden road to freedom and civilization. The galloping acceleration of capitalism’s expansion would eventually render the Promethean cosmology victorious, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its victory was seemingly so total that human domination over nature and, through this, humanity’s increasing emancipation from nature became scripted as the singular content and premise of the modernist project, embraced equally enthusiastically by really existing socialism, fascist totalitarianisms as well as by liberal capitalism. In the process, the highly politicized charges levied against this injunction by then-​contemporary and successive generations of scholars, activists, and philosophers were symptomatically and systematically silenced. 7 The second author recognizes his collaboration with Joshua Lewis in this section, partly summed up in the unpublished manuscript “The Alchemy of Transformation: On the Impoverishment of Socio-​ecological Imaginaries” (Ernstson and Lewis 2013). 8 For a review, see Hamilton (2013). Interestingly, there is also a Marxist variation of the accelerationist world-​view in Williams and Srnicek (2013). 9 Both Clive Hamilton and Bruno Latour (2015b) keep on insisting that it is not the Real of capital that forced the Anthropocene on the Earth’s stage, but rather the symbolic narratives of mastery, control, and separation upon which capitalism’s possibility rested. While these symbolizations do indeed matter, the historical dynamics of capitalism shows

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nonetheless how its intellectual apologists change narrative and ontological position as easily as consumers change their mobile phones. 10 Complex adaptive systems theory is often said to develop from non-​linear ecology as developed by C.S. Holling (1973), but this misses earlier developments in theoretical ecology, in particular Richard Lewontin’s 1969 essay on which Holling built. This is crucial to note since Lewontin developed with Richard Levins a dialectical, Marxist, and historical interpretation of non-​equilibrium ecology (Lewontin and Levins 1985), while Holling advanced a strikingly managerial version known more commonly as “resilience thinking” (Folke 2006). The latter emerged victorious in the mainstream and at many universities, embedded as an apolitical version of ecology firmly embedded within a “neoliberal counterrevolution” (Nelson 2014) and part of the building of the depoliticized stage of “the Anthropocene.” 11 It can briefly be mentioned that resilience and complex adaptive systems discourse grew from local-​to-​regional ecosystem studies in the late 1990s to the level of the planet through collaborations between ecologists, geologists, and climatologists. Key institutions were the Resilience Alliance, founded in 1999, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, established in 2008, and the International Geosphere-​Biosphere Programme (IGBP, 1986–​2015), which included collaborations between Paul Crutzen,Will Steffen, Stephen Gunderson, and Carl Folke, among others, and political scientists entering the fray from around 2005 with Frank Biermann and Victor Galaz nurturing ideas of “Earth system Governance” and “Planetary Stewardship.” 12 From Foucault, we mean with dispositif and apparatus “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble” of institutional, physical, and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures that enhance and sustain the exercise of power to shape conduct, speech, thought, and imaginary (cf. Foucault 1980). 13 COP, Conference of Parties in the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

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Neyrat, Frédéric. 2010. “The Birth of Immunopolitics” Parrhesia 10: 31–​38. Neyrat, Frédéric. 2014. “Critique du géo-​ constructivisme Anthropocène and géo-​ ingénierie.” In Multitudes 56. Accessed March 4, 2018. www.multitudes.net/​critique-​du-​ geo-​constructivisme-​anthropocene-​geo-​ingenierie/​. Neyrat, Frédéric. 2016 La part inconstructible de la terre. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Neyrat, Frédéric, and Elisabeth Johnson. 2014. “On The Political Unconscious of the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Frédéric Neyrat.” in Society and Space Open Site. Accessed May 5, 2018. https://​societyandspace.com/​material/​interviews/​neyrat-​by-​ johnson/​. Pellizzoni, Luigi. 2015. Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature. Farnham: Ashgate. Pellizzoni, Luigi. 2016. “Catching up with Things? Environmental Sociology and the Material Turn in Social Theory.” Environmental Sociology 2(4): 312–​21. Protevi, John. 2013. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1998. Disagreement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Royal Society. 2009. Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty. London: The Royal Society. Shellenberger, Michael, and Ted Nordhaus, eds. 2011. Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Oakland: The Breakthrough Institute. Shellenberger, Michael, and Ted Nordhaus. 2007. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Steffen,Will, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill. 2011a.“The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science 369: 842–​67. Steffen, Will, Åsa Persson, Lisa Deutsch, Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Katherine Richardson, Carole Crumley et al. 2011. “The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship.” Ambio 40: 739–​61. Stengers, Isabelle. 2003. Cosmopolitiques. Paris: La Découverte. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2011. “Interrogating Post-​democracy: Reclaiming Egalitarian Political Spaces.” Political Geography 30: 370–​80. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2014. “Anthropocenic Politicization: From the Politics of the Environment to Politicizing Environments.” In Green Utopianism: Politics, Practices and Perspectives, edited by Karen Bradley and Johan Hedrén, 23–​27. London: Routledge. Swyngedouw, Erik, and Henrik Ernstson. 2018. “Interrupting the Anthropo-​ obScene: Immuno-​biopolitics and Depoliticizing Ontologies in the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture and Society. First Online February 13, 2018. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​0263276418757314. Walker, Jeremy and Melinda Cooper. 2010. “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation.” Security Dialogue 42(2): 143–​60. Williams, Alex, and Nick Srnicek. 2013. “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.” Published online at Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013. Accessed May 2, 2018. http://​criticallegalthinking.com/​2013/​05/​14/​accelerate-​ manifesto-​for-​an-​accelerationist-​politics/​. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject:The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso.

3 VALUE, NATURE, AND THE VORTEX OF ACCUMULATION Richard Walker and Jason W. Moore

Introduction Of all the domains of Marxian political economy, nature is by far the most vexing. Is nature an economic input as in the notion of natural resources; is it the object of labour in the process of production; or is it something broader, as in the idea of land and the territory upon which capitalism develops? Such questions rest on a conception of extra-​human nature, but some have argued that because people are part of nature, then resources, labour, and conditions of production include the social integument of built environments, levels of education, and the work of families. But does this go far enough? Perhaps capitalism should be thought of as a “life process” that unfolds within the web of life? But even there lies a crucial debate about whether the chief problem of political economy is the fundamental rift between capitalism and nature or whether the web of life is imbricated in every accumulation strategy and the crisis-​prone process of capitalist expansion. These are some of the key questions posed by Marxist theory since the 1980s (Walker 1979; 2016; Smith 1984; O’Connor 1998; Harvey 1996; Burkett 1999; Foster 2000; Moore 2015a; Foster, Clark and York 2010). This chapter grows out of our long conversation around the relations of nature and capital. It takes shape out of our conviction that political economy has too often taken a back seat to larger musings in which philosophy has been foregrounded and economic theory treated as derivative rather than requiring additional argumentation. This tendency has at times discouraged a clear analytical reckoning with the fundamentals of Marxian theory such as capital accumulation, the labour process, commodity circulation, and the theory of value. Our purpose here is to elaborate a model of capital-​in-​nature outlined in Capitalism in the Web of Life, but which remains preliminary (Moore 2015a). Why bother with value theory? When the classical political economists began to deploy a theory of value to understand the economy it was because the

Value, nature, and accumulation  49

generalization of markets meant that commodity prices had come to be regulated by exchange. For the classicals, value was an objective foundation behind the vagaries of prices, and in a pre-​industrial era of handicraft or “manufacture,” labour time was the obvious standard determining value. At the same time, however, they were engaged in fierce debates with opposing views of economy, state, and society. In these debates, the theory of value was mobilized as a weapon of social change, which is why it was called political economy (Varney 2012; Farber 2006). Marx trod in the footsteps of his predecessors. The labour theory of value was the obvious starting point on a long analytic journey to uncover the workings of capital. For Marx, value was not just the basis of price determination, but the key to unlocking the source of profits, class struggle, and capital accumulation. Along the way, he made technical corrections to the classical theory of value to account for the greater complexity of nineteenth-​century industrial capitalism (Marx 1977).1 Most of all, he made two great discoveries: how surplus value could arise in a system of equal exchange and how generalized value turned into capital accumulation. After Marx, the neoclassical counter-​ revolution jettisoned value theory for equilibrium prices and “utility.” The neoclassicals argued that labour has no special standing, capital is productive, there is no exploitation, and profit is zero at the margin. This is why mainstream economics cannot come to grips with class inequality, exploitation, and the capitalist thirst for surplus value. It has no idea of capital as a social relation replete with conflict nor of the vortex of accumulation at the heart of modern growth (Vaggi and Groenewegen 2006). Hence, an essential step to recovering the lost spirit of political economy is to return to a Marxian concept of value. But to make it relevant for today’s politics and economics, we have to incorporate nature into the calculus and ask what it means for the fate of the Earth.

The co-​production of value The key to the reconciliation of value theory and the wealth of nature is to go back to the foundation of economic life: production. The starting point has to be the unity of labour and nature in all work and, more broadly, all social production (and reproduction). Nature is always there. As Marx says, human labour confronts nature as one of its forces and transforms it through labour. Nonetheless, the standard Marxist answer to the role of nature in production is to say that labour creates (exchange) value and nature only counts on the use-​value side of the commodity. This dualism will not suffice (Marx 1977, 7; Robertson, Morgan and Wainwright 2013; Moore 2015a). Marx defined value as “socially necessary labour time.” We might think of this as the average labour time embedded in the average commodity. It is an average of how much work is required to produce any manufactured good and a prevailing mean that imposes itself on competing producers. Value is “a real abstraction,” an abstract force with concrete effects revealed all the time (in the same way as “the market” and “the economy” are real abstractions, too, even if they have an imaginary/​ideological side). In this it is like “average global temperature”: a statistic

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assembled from many specific measurements and a real force felt worldwide despite wide variations across time and space. Labour time is a simple measure, common to all modern commodity production. By contrast, there is no easy way to measure nature’s extraordinarily diverse contributions to production by reducing them to a single numeraire as elegant as labour time.2 But that is not sufficient reason to put nature’s contribution aside and focus only on labour. To begin with, labour is not addressing an inert nature or simply working alongside natural forces. Nature is an active participant in every labour process: the web of life, both visible and invisible to humans, is always at work.Yeast transforms grain into alcohol in brewing, crystal lattices form in metal alloys, and electrons run through circuits on silicon chips—​not to mention the metabolism working behind the scenes to animate the human and horse. All are natural, productive forces. In short, labour and nature work together, hand-​in-​hand, in a synthetic way. They are two moments of a singular, historical nature. We have always been cyborgs, as Haraway (1991) puts it. But we wish to push the point farther: if the labour process is a dialectical unity, how is value to be measured? “Labour time” is always unified labour-​nature time. Capitalism is a way of putting natures of every kind to work. That work pivots on social necessary labour time, but labour time itself is fundamentally shaped by unpaid work of humans and nature as a whole, which we consider later in this chapter.That is, nature’s value is already reckoned in the calculus of labour value because the average labour time includes the socially necessary amounts of unpaid work, performed by humans and the rest of nature.. The right amounts and qualities of materials, energy, chemical reactions, growing period, and so forth must be present for labour to proceed in the normal (average) way.This is obvious in the case of a mine, where the quality of the ore is critical to the relative labour time involved in extracting and processing it into metal. But it is equally true of a steel mill and how the quality of the ore, alloys, and furnaces contribute to the metallurgical transformations involved in making steel of average cost and quality.3 This levelling across both labour and non-​labour inputs is what the market and competition bring about and why one can speak of a “law” of value in generalized commodity production. (It is a “law” in the sense of a broad historical tendency.) Labour-​nature time is the coin of the capitalist realm of production. It is, furthermore, no different from the reduction of skilled labour to a common denominator, a puzzle that has bothered Marxists for a century. The idea that high skill labour is more productive of value than low skill labour—​which even Marx toys with—​is untenable. The skill required is already part of the market’s competitive evaluation; socially necessary labour time already presumes that workers have the appropriate level of skill for the task at hand (Braverman 1974).4 Environmentalists may object that in this solution nature seems to disappear into labour, but that’s not the case. Humans are a miniscule part of a universe dominated by the processes of the web of life. Only within the limited domain of social production are things reversed (just as the law of entropy can be reversed within limited domains). Even here, such reversals are temporary. Human beings

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are necessarily the initiating partners in social labour, who put other natural forces and materials to work in a predetermined manner. This is not to say that natural forces and things do not exist apart from humans, but in the labour process they must be harnessed, set in motion, and engaged to work with people. It is not runaway humanism to say that there is a dominant element in the combination of labour-​nature relation; it is good dialectics. While labour cannot function without its natural partner and labour does not have absolute command over natural forces (whatever humans may imagine!), social labour-​nature time is still the measure imposed by the market and accepted by capitalists as they harness labour and nature to work for them in the modern economy (Walker 2016; Moore 2017). Capitalism may begin with generalized value but it does not stop there. Capital feeds off surplus value and capitalists push to expand the rate of surplus value. How they do that will lead us beyond the boundaries of everyday capitalist production and to the geographical dynamics of capital accumulation.

The drive for surplus value Surplus value is the crux of value theory. The theory of surplus value divides conventional economics, in which capital is a productive factor, from Marxist theory, in which capital ownership allows the boss to pocket the labour surplus. Surplus value is the excess of the value of any commodity over the value of its labour inputs. Profit is redistributed surplus value spread over the amount of capital invested (both fixed and circulating). The trick, for Marx, was to show that at equilibrium, where every commodity exchanges at its rightful value, surplus value is still realized by the capitalist. In so doing, Marx turned classical political economy on its head, showing that the division of wages and profits was not fair but based on exploitation of the workers by the capitalists. The idea of a surplus is straightforward, regardless of whether it is put in terms of value theory or not. In market terms, the surplus derived from producing and selling a commodity is the difference between the (unit) price of the good and (unit) cost of production (over all inputs). The necessity of a surplus is clear: employers would not produce anything if the return were less than the cost. No exploitation, no profit. Broadly speaking, this applies equally to labour and nature. That ploughman’s horse had better produce more in grain than it consumes, or it will be put out to pasture; and the same is true of the wageworker. Both the horse and the ploughman, or the chemist and her polymers, do more work than they cost on the market, and the difference goes to the employer. What really matters is that both kinds of surplus are “free gifts” to the capitalist of the extra work done beyond the costs of reproduction.5 Now let’s put the same idea in terms of value. In a labour-​nature value theory, labour works in tandem with natural materials and forces. The work done by each is impossible to disentangle. What counts as the market measure, however, is necessary labour time. Similarly, all forms of surplus work done by labour and nature are

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present in the commodity, but the common measure is surplus labour time. Surplus value is an amalgam of labour-​nature work and exploitation. There is no separate accounting of the surplus appropriated from nature, yet the free work of nature is embodied in surplus labour time, and hence surplus value. Here, we use the term exploitation in a strictly analytical sense as the production of surplus value. Of course, in a more expansive—​and polemical—​sense, nature is exploited in production and beyond. We “exploit” the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the bacteria in our guts. There is also extensive “exploitation” of the unpaid work of social reproduction done largely by women. But value theory only applies directly to labour under capitalism. The real abstraction of value as labour time under capitalism is both relational and ideological. That is, only some work is valued: work done within the cash nexus (wage work, simple commodity production). Hence the negative dialectic that the valuation of paid labour is simultaneously the devaluation of unpaid work—​the work of “women, nature, and colonies” (Mies 1986).6 Workers are exploited by capitalists, and therein lies the foundation for modern class society and class struggle, according to Marx. But there is more to his use of the concept of surplus value. Because surplus value is the basis of profit, capitalists have every interest in exploiting labour and nature to extract the maximum amount of surplus value possible, and the drive to intensify the exploitation of labour-​nature is pivotal to the dynamics of capitalism. It compels capital to exploit every input to the maximum and to push relentlessly at the envelope of technology. The simplest route to obtaining a higher rate of surplus value, according to Marx, is “absolute” surplus value, or extending the working day, without improving the methods of production. Absolute exploitation has been ruthlessly applied everywhere capitalism has taken root, and it played a vital role in the British Industrial Revolution. Moreover, as Marx denounced in no uncertain terms, it has repeatedly led industrialists to work people to death. Notably, he compared this directly to the capitalist farmer exhausting the soil in pursuit of quick returns (Marglin 1974; Marx 1977, 376–​78, 636–​38; Moore 2015a, 221–​40). A second path to a higher rate of exploitation is “relative” surplus value, which derives from raising the productivity of labour-​nature. Relative surplus value is generated as the value of wage-​labour falls due to cheapening of consumer goods because of rising productivity in those sectors. Agricultural revolutions are a prime example of this process, as cheapening food reduces the reproduction costs of labour power. Marx saw that all capitalists gain from the diffusion of a new technology that lowers the value of labour power by reducing the value of food, housing, clothing, and other basic elements of social reproduction. Furthermore, the same insight can be applied to improved productivity that reduces the cost of other inputs, including machinery, material inputs, and energy. Cheap energy reduces transportation costs for workers—​variable capital—​as well as the value of machinery and raw materials—​fixed and circulating capital. In the latter case, the rate of profit is increased rather than the rate of surplus value (less capital required for the same amount of surplus value), but the principle is exactly the same.

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Still, why do individual capitalists introduce technical change with such a passion? In the narrow sense they feel the sting of competition.The firm that comes up with an innovation gains an extra measure of profit over its competitors. The capitalist that fails to adopt newer and better methods over time will be driven out of business. This is true whether the innovation is a quality product that sells better, a machine that increases worker productivity, a more efficient energy source, or a new material that reduces unit costs or improves quality.7 So the exploitation of workers and natural forces by capitalists necessarily leads to a process of technical advance in production.The sources of such heightened productivity are many and diverse, from better machinery to improved organization of work to improved metallurgy.The umbrella term is “technological innovation,” and the unrelenting search for better technologies is the reason why capitalism has been such a dynamic production system. Technological progress is embodied in products and processes, but it represents the application of abstract human learning (scientific and practical) to specific problems, and technology is perhaps the greatest of the free gifts appropriated by the capitalists.8 But the advancing productivity and innovation requires investment, which we call “the capitalization frontier,” for reasons that will become clear in short order.

Rising productivity and the growth of throughput Marx made brilliant use of the theory of relative surplus value to explain the appearance of large-​scale industry—​a crucial task at the time he was writing.9 He also had a clear idea of the way capitalism draws in new waves of “physically uncorrupted” workers from the countryside as it grows, in what he called “expanded reproduction” (Marx 1977, 380, 726–​870; 1978, 565–​99).The implications of rising labour productivity for the rest of nature were hinted at—​and are implicit in the overall theory of value—​but not systematically developed. The drive for increased labour productivity has profound implications that go beyond direct exploitation of labour-​nature in modern industry: increased resource throughput, the search for new supplies of resources, the development of qualitatively new resources, greater waste output, and pressure on the rate of profit. First, rising labour productivity entails something quite simple: every unit of labour time attaches to an ever-​g rowing mass of materials and energy, setting in motion exponential growth curves of inputs such as wood, fibre, metals, water, and energy. This tendency was set in motion by the long sixteenth century but amplified in successive industrial revolutions. These growth curves have found popular expression in the ubiquitous “hockey stick” charts offered by Earth system scientists in recent years. There is, of course, a countervailing process of improving efficiency of use and technical substitution. But rising efficiency—​sometimes called the Jevons Paradox—​tends to reduce the value composition of inputs and advance labour productivity, thereby enhancing the rate of surplus value. Efficiency, then, scarcely reverses the geometrically rising uptake of material and energy flows (Barnett, Harold and Morse 1963; Steffen et al. 2015).

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Second, it follows that capitalists engage in an ever-​widening pursuit of new sources of supply. Capitalists have also improved the methods of search, discovery, and extraction of natural resources, which has added to the ability to extend the tentacles of resource extraction to new areas and new depths around the world. This has made capitalism the most geographically dynamic system in history, yet the Marxist tradition has emphasized global expansion via the need to sell excess goods and the export of surplus capital, while rarely talking about resource frontiers—​a curious imbalance of outputs over inputs in the model. In recent years, the search for cheaper labour has come to the fore with the industrialization of Asia, and the thirst for oil has been a common cry among those opposed to imperialism and war in the Middle East. Historically, the renewed quest for Cheap Natures—​including labour-​power—​has been tightly linked to “new imperialisms,” typically as new waves of industrialization unfold, as in the later nineteenth century and today. But a generalized Marxist model of resource and labour demand is still wanting (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005; Bridge and Le Billon 2013). Third, rising throughput generates disproportionately rising waste. This assumes varied forms, including by-​products along the production chain, such as carbon emissions and wastewater, and consumption waste at the end of the line. Waste output is overwhelmingly concentrated in the first moment: for every ton of waste in consumption, there is another 25 tons in production and extraction (Meadows, Meadows and Randers 1992). Every new phase of capitalism generates not only a quantitative expansion of waste, but a qualitative movement towards new forms of toxification. Mining effluents such as mercury and lead poisoned streams across the early modern Atlantic, but these pale in comparison to cyanide gold mining. Across the long twentieth century, mass industrialization has depended as much on chemicalization as mechanization. This inevitably creates another dimension of the waste problem: new and exotic by-​products that are toxic to life. Some of the waste is dumped on land, in the waters or in the air as a means of externalizing it from market calculus—​get rid of it is as cheaply as possible by relying on the absorptive capacity of the Earth. But there’s another pathway. Capital’s twisted genius is the ability to turn some waste—​including deadly by-​products—​into profitable commodities, assuring their diffusion far and wide. This represents greater productivity per unit of input, as well as new products embodying new value and surplus value—​literally, turning dross into gold (Rogers 2005; Romero 2015). Both paths ultimately put more waste into humans and the rest of nature, where the evolving quantitative and qualitative mix activates negative-​value: forms of nature such as superweeds, new diseases, and even climate change that cannot be fixed through technical innovation or by securing new waste frontiers (Moore 2015b). A fourth effect of rising productivity is to put pressure on the rate of profit. This was Marx’s pivotal idea in third volume of Capital. Marx (1981, 317–​75) argues that advancing productivity requires greater capital inputs relative to labour, or what he called a “rising composition of capital” (in contemporary terms, a higher capital/​ labour ratio). This, in turn, puts downward pressure on the rate of profit (where profit = surplus value/​capital investment per unit time). Marxists have generally

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thought of the rising capital/​labour ratio in terms of more machinery (fixed capital), but it also means more resource inputs, or circulating capital. Marx mentions in passing that capitalists have a means of countering the rising cost of circulating capital by obtaining inputs at below their value (i.e., cost of (re)production within the market economy). Cheap labour and food generate more surplus value, while cheap energy and materials raise the rate of profit by lowering the cost of circulating capital. It follows from this that capitalists have every incentive to seek out new sources of cheap inputs such as displaced farmers and immigrants, fresh lodes and unploughed soils, or virgin forests and untapped oilfields. Unfortunately, Marx did not pursue the implications of this insight.10

Cheap inputs and the commodity frontier The “commodity frontier” is the process of going beyond the highly capitalized zones of production to secure sources of labour, food, energy, and raw materials at below the prevailing average cost. The easiest way to obtain cheaper inputs is to look to those domains of life relatively independent of the circuits of capital. In these zones, resources can be obtained without paying prevailing average costs of re/​production. The same is true of cheaper labour, which raises the rate of surplus value: take the search outside the boundaries of normal capitalist reproduction. The search for the Four Cheaps (labour-​power, energy, materials, and food) has been an accumulation strategy at the heart of capital’s global expansion for centuries (Moore 2010a; 2010b). Unfortunately, the search for cheap and better inputs has remained secondary in Marxian theory, relegated to counter-​tendencies to the falling rate of profit. Traditional Marxism has stepped over this forward wave of capitalist growth in order to get to the more “modern” problem of the industrial revolution, but Marxist political economy today requires a major historical-​ geographical rethink to deal with the long and deadly trail of capitalist expansion across the Earth. Incorporating the search for cheaper inputs into the theory of value and capital is a powerful idea because it allows a unified approach to capitalist and extra-​capitalist sources of surplus work and surplus value. In this model, capital not only exploits labour and nature within the sphere of modern industry, it benefits from the work done by human and extra-​human natures outside the realm of capitalist production. The latter is vital because it cheapens the cost of inputs and thereby raises the rate of surplus value and profit indirectly. We call the latter process the appropriation of the work of extra-​capitalist labour and natures, in contrast to direct exploitation. Appropriation, in this sense, differs somewhat from Marx’s use of the term, which was synonymous with exploitation, yet the two moments are tightly connected. If exploitation generates the demand for appropriation, conversely appropriation leads the way to further exploitation. Appropriation names the extra-​economic processes needed to identify, secure, and channel unpaid work outside the commodity system into the circuits of capital. Primitive accumulation (or dispossession) is an essential foundation to this, serving to cut people, land, and resources loose

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from previous social orders and turn them into commodities (private property and wage-​labour). But much more is involved, extending all the way to the scientific, cartographic, and botanical revolutions of the modern era. Arriving at a unified model of appropriation and exploitation means taking on board feminist and green critiques of Marxism and incorporating them within a theory of value, capital, and growth. Feminists have long balked at factories, wage-​labour, and the industrial revolution as the sum of economic life and pivot of labour exploitation. They rightly ask about the labour of daily and intergenerational reproduction. Indeed, as Seccombe (1992) notes, historical materialism has long suffered from a “bilateral reduction: the effective omission of labour power as humanity’s first productive force … and the marginalization of raw materials supplied by nature.” How does the unpaid work of women and households figure in the theory of value and capital (Mies 1986; Seccombe 1992; Federici 2012; Dunaway 2014; Fraser 2014)? Similarly, environmentalists have wondered what happened to all the natural inputs and forces that human beings harness to help produce the commodities flowing into world markets (Cronon 1991; Bunker and Ciccantell 2005). The problem for critical political economy is to move beyond the capitalist fallacy that “the economy” stops at the boundaries of the market and firms (Gibson-​Graham 1996; Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004). Rather, the spheres of production and reproduction, formal and informal economies, social and ecological, require a unified theory of exploitation within and appropriation beyond the cash nexus.11 If Capitalism in the Web of Life (Moore 2015a) outlines a unified approach to exploitation and appropriation, a fully articulated Marxist value model demands further clarification and extension on three fronts: commodification, value extraction, and capitalization. First, we need to specify what happens at the commodity frontier to turn non-​marketized work of labour and nature into commodified work that can be appropriated by capital. Appropriation requires commodification, or integration into the market, to be properly exploited by capitalist industry. Since these new commodities must be cheaper than those (re)produced within the circuits of capital, labour and nature must do their work outside the market before materials, energy, bodies or products appear as commodities. The uptake of such new commodities allows the appropriation of the surplus/​free work of households and natures. There are two main paths: direct appropriation via capitalist production and indirect appropriation via non-​capitalist households, or what Marx called “petty commodity production.” The direct appropriation of cheap inputs takes place where capitalist enterprises using wage-​ labour utilize new resources or labour forces. There are, broadly speaking, two sites of such uptake. One is at the point of extraction of natural resources: mines, plantations, sawmills, oil wells, and so forth. In this case, the land, forests, deposits, and workers come cheap because they have been seized, conquered, displaced, enslaved, or otherwise taken without (adequate) compensation, whether for the ecological work of growing trees, the geological processes that create fossil

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fuels, or the human work of raising children. The other site of direct appropriation is in the centres of capitalist industry being fed from afar by the migration of displaced peasants, artisans, and indigenes. This has been the path taken by millions of rural people over the course of capitalist history and it still goes on today. In this case, the labour-​power is not just reproduced outside the formal economy; it is delivered directly to the factory gate without the capitalist having to do anything. Migrant streams are free gifts that keep on giving. Indirect appropriation occurs where the means of production remain in the hands of small owners or households who do the work of farming, mining, processing, crafting, etc.Their products enter world markets as commodities, which can flow long distances to feed the maw of capitalist production and reproduction in the major centres of industry. As students of agrarian change have long argued, such small producers can survive for long periods of time through long hours and low remuneration. The other site of commodification is at the households in the midst of the developed centres of capitalism that create and maintain the wage-​labour force. Here, the unpaid work of mothers, wives, and other household members reduces the cost of feeding and housing workers on a daily basis, raising children to enter the workforce, and caring for the sick, aged, and incapacitated who would otherwise be a burden on capital (Kautsky 1988[1902]; Hochschild 1989). Second, a unified theory of appropriation and exploitation needs to be synched within the theory of value. How are the resources and labour flowing into the commodity system valued? We think the answer is straightforward for both direct and indirect appropriation. If direct capitalist production is involved, the usual calculus of socially necessary labour-​nature time obtains. If the labour-​power has been recruited from non-​ capitalist milieux, it is obtained more cheaply: the new worker, say from peasant society, represents accumulated unpaid work—​all the work necessary to raise a human from infancy to adulthood. Such workers represent a net subsidy to accumulation relative to workers born, raised, and educated at capitalist expense. This makes for an extra margin of (relative) surplus value—​and where easily exploitable immigrant workers are involved, probably an extra dose of absolute surplus value from overwork, as well. If material inputs are cheapened because companies have not paid an average value for them, as when land is seized from indigenous people, a pittance is paid for an oil lease, or a mining claim yields an unexpectedly rich ore, then this means an extra measure of profit for that enterprise. In both cases, the outputs will be cheapened. To the degree that these outputs are generalized across the system—​e.g. cheaper coal means cheaper steel means cheaper fixed capital—​ other capitalists benefit from cheaper inputs. For instance, as raw material prices fell during the 1980s and 1990s, the costs of fixed capital fell dramatically, by as much as 25–​40% in the US and Japan (Bank for International Settlements 2006, 24). The case of indirect appropriation via simple commodity producers is different. This is an old problem in agrarian studies, where agricultural output comes to be priced in global terms and households struggle to survive as their products are devalued (often called “declining terms of trade” for primary products). There are

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three devaluations involved, as far as the world market is concerned. The labour-​ power (and tools) originate outside the market and have no value; the household is not a capitalist enterprise, so their labour time is not evaluated as “socially necessary”; hence the products entering the market fall below the “socially necessary” average on the world scale, thereby registering as cheap inputs in the centres of production and accumulation. Third, appropriation needs to be understood as more than a complement to the process of raising productivity in capitalist production; it is deeply implicated in dynamics of industrialization. Capitalists continue to seek ways to exploit labour-​ nature more effectively by raising the rate of productivity and hence the rate of surplus value. Normally, this means more investment, or capitalization of production, to advance technology; hence we call it the capitalization frontier. Appropriation is called forth by capitalization in successive phases of boom and bust, but also facilitates and embodies the process, in turn. It is easy to think of capitalization and appropriation as alternatives, a choice of technical progress versus cheap inputs, but in fact they usually work in synchrony. Throughout the long history of capitalist development, the two have gone hand in hand, or rather been caught up in a kind of dance in which capital calls the tune. Cheap inputs have regularly allowed capitalists to invest more in machinery precisely because other costs have been lower, and new, cheaper labour forces have usually been the most pliant in the face of new forms of production, as in the introduction of Bessemer steel and Fordist mass assembly. Cheap coal and cotton made possible the massive technical recomposition of capital in nineteenth century textiles in Manchester, which is why von Tunzelmann (1981) and others argue that the first phase of the Industrial Revolution was more capital-​saving than labour-​ saving—​when the new methods so obviously raised the productivity of labour.12 Moreover, there is no contradiction between terrible absolute exploitation of labour and cutting-​edge machine technology. Meanwhile, as commodity frontiers yield cheaper resources and labour, they are also commonly precocious sites of advanced industrial organization and technological innovation. That is, they are both commodity and capitalization frontiers. In early capitalism, for instance, the sugar plantation was a key forerunner of large-​scale industry, and the seventeenth century’s only industrial structures worthy of the name were large-​scale sugar refineries. Mining—​the paradigmatic frontier industry—​was the principal driver of systemic technological innovation until the end of the eighteenth century, as exemplified by the way the steam engine developed at the pithead of English coal mines (Mumford 1934; Freese 2003). The industrially advanced character of commodity frontiers has been enabled only partly by capital itself. It has been crucially dependent on complex weaves of territorial power and new scientific knowledge alongside capital, which are necessary to secure and reproduce the Four Cheaps. In this, the food/​labour nexus is especially important. A crucial means of reducing the value of labour-​power is through agricultural revolutions that produce a rising aggregate volume with a declining amount of labour. Of course, agriculture yields more than just calories, insofar as it

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produces raw materials it resembles extractive sectors, a reality underscored by the petro-​farming model that has dominated capitalist agriculture since 1945 (Walker 2004; Moore 2010c).

Geographies at the frontiers of accumulation A theory of capitalist exploitation and appropriation of labour and nature must be posed in geographical terms. In this section we lay out some spatial dynamics of commodity and capitalization frontiers that break with simple dualisms of centre and periphery that plague so much of the discussion of capitalist geography. Capitalism has been a spatially expansive system from the outset. The term “frontier” normally implies a movement outward, away from established territories of capitalist industry, cities, and states. While the search for markets is important, as is the export of surplus capital, an essential element in any such explanation has to be the commodity frontier, as capital seeks out new sources of cheap materials, energy, and food, along with new worker bodies (the Four Cheaps). New resources and labour supplies have repeatedly been sought by conquest and markets penetration into little known territory, opening up access, securing property rights, and displacing indigenous occupiers, from the Carolinas to the Congo. As Marx put it, capital comes into the world “dripping head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx 1977, 925). Indeed, the process of primitive accumulation, or dispossession, still goes on full tilt on the outer edges of the world economy, whether in the Amazon, New Guinea, or the Arctic (Harvey 1975; Luxemburg 2003 [1913]). Hard on the heels of primitive accumulation, commoditization opens up production for the market. Capitalism’s geographic expansion has often been led by small commercial operators, as in timber extraction in Norway in the sixteenth century or the North American family farmers in the nineteenth. Similarly, the use of slave or indentured labour has been commonplace, from the tobacco farms of the Chesapeake Bay in the seventeenth century to the rubber plantations in Malaya in the nineteenth. The tin mines of Bolivia and the shrimp boats of Thailand today are hardly better. Extraction at distant commodity frontiers does not have to be mediated, however; it can be undertaken by capitalist enterprises using wage-​labour, as in the silver mines of Bohemia in the early modern era and the gold mines of Irian Jaya today. It has been common, however, for such frontier exploiters to utilize labour-​intensive, technologically simple methods, as in tropical forest clearing. Nevertheless, the commodity frontier can also be a capitalization frontier. That is, resource extraction is frequently a frontier of technological advance and modern industry, as it was in the mines of Bohemia in the early sixteenth century, the sugar mills of Barbados in the seventeenth century, and the American Midwest in the nineteenth century, all of which gave birth to new and better ways of putting nature to work that flowed back from the periphery to the older industrial centres. The same has been true from the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts to advanced electronics factories of the Pearl River Delta, China, both taking advantage of

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masses of wage-​labour newly displaced from farmlands of the interior. Raising productivity has been central to the capitalist project from the get-​go, and such capitalization has always involved a process of opening up new industrial spaces, whether for resource extraction or automobile assembly, as economic geographers have long argued.13 Conversely, new frontiers of appropriation and exploitation need not occur far away from capitalist centres; they can arise in the heartland or nearby edges of advanced capitalist territories. A striking characteristic of early modern resource frontiers is that they unfolded within Europe as much as across the Atlantic. These frontiers swept from the Baltic in the north, to Bohemia and Poland to the east, and Spain and Italy to the south. This is why it was said of the enrichment of the Dutch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that “Amsterdam is standing on Norway” (Moore 2010a; 2010b). Just as striking are the internal resource frontiers that developed across eighteenth-​and ninteenth-​century Britain, which became the world’s biggest producer of raw materials and energy, as well as textiles and iron. How could that be? After all, Britain is an island nation and not, by world standards, terribly well-​endowed with natural resources (Coyle 2010). Similarly, the United States dominated resource production for a century after 1850. This is usually attributed to the continent’s “natural endowments,” but if that is so, then why was there so little mining in North America before 1850? The usual explanation is westward expansion, as if Conestoga wagons turned the wheels of commerce. The real reason was capitalization of the commodity frontier. There was, of course, rampant dispossession of the native peoples and a small commodity frontier of settlement and extraction, but the key to the US resource explosion was industrialization. American capitalists had the money and the machines to carve up the Earth, cut down trees or plough the soil at unprecedented rates. Drills, dynamite, harvesters, railroads, hydraulic pumps, elevators, and other capital equipment did their work and did it well. Resource prices fell (Wright 1990; Page and Walker 1991; Walker  2001). Capital-​intensive frontiers unfolded inside and outside national economies. The development of domestic resources proceeded apace while Britain and America were busy plundering the world via distant colonies and commerce to secure even cheaper inputs. It was far more than a matter of “centre and periphery.” The new imperialism of the late nineteenth century was so prodigious and so rapid in its transformation of planetary life because it produced so many peripheries, new centres, and new patterns of interaction across multiple scales (Barraclough 1967; Davis 2001). This is the way we need to think about the complex geography of capitalist expansion.14 Our model overcomes the previous popular dualism of centre and periphery, intensive and extensive development. Hence, the debate about whether the colonies drove European development or Europe drove the colonies is moot (see, among others, O’Brien 1982; Wallerstein 1983). Both were at work, and the qualitative and quantitative transformations were a product of their combined development acting reciprocally. So, too, can we jettison the arid debate about whether US economic

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development shifted from extensive to intensive accumulation. It was always both: a process of continental conquest and of industrialization that leapfrogged across and around the American continental economy (Aglietta 1979; Page and Walker 1991). In short, capitalism since the long sixteenth century has witnessed successive waves of geographical expansion that work by combining productivity and plunder (Storper and Walker 1989; Moore 2015a).

The accumulation vortex and the ends of the Earth A final element of value theory relevant to the use and abuse of nature is the accumulation of capital. One of Marx’s greatest insights is how the age of capitalism unleashed a limitless process of growth that catapulted humankind to an entirely new level of social wealth and exploitation. But why is accumulation such an inexorable, dynamic, and rapacious process? Marx’s reasoning follows from value theory in ways that are often misunderstood. As Marx saw, value may be an abstraction, hidden behind the everyday workings of the market, but it has to be concretized in the form of money for the keeping of accounts and mediation of exchange. Money steps in as the universal equivalent and intermediary, providing a measure of price. Money is another “concrete abstraction,” being at once an abstract accounting of trillions of units on electronic registers and flows of material currencies like dollars. As value’s form of appearance, money comes to play a central role in market economies. As Marx put it, the generalized commodity system “sweats money from every pore” in the process of now trillions of exchanges (Marx 1977, 178–​87). But money does something more. It piles up as a store of value and it has the power to command all other commodities. Then it can be used to turn the process of exchange on its head, as money-​holders re-​enter the commodity market in order to make more money. As Marx’s simple but powerful formula expresses it, C-​M-​C' becomes M-​C-​M', the same thing seen from a different starting point, but revealing a wholly different logic. As money is invested to make more money, capital is born, and as capital penetrates ever-​more dimensions of life, it turns general commodity circulation into generalized capital circulation.15 The circulation of money as capital is peculiar. Capitalists, unlike all previous ruling classes, use money to make money and measure their wealth in monetary terms, which is why they are more than misers, money-​lenders, or landed aristocrats, and ultimately more powerful than lords and emperors. They are money-​makers, and there is no limit to what they can accumulate. Accumulation of capital becomes the driver of the modern economy, an unlimited spiral of investment, profit, and piling up of monetary wealth by individuals, families, enterprises, and corporations. Yes, competition matters, but the pursuit of accumulation precedes competition, which develops out of the accumulation of contending capitals (Marx 1977, 188–​ 244; Harvey 1982, 157–​66).16 Surplus value is what propels accumulation. The greater the surplus, the faster the spiral spins upward and outward. The exploitation and appropriation of labour

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and nature is the lifeblood of capital and it can only want more. Because free gifts of labour and nature can issue forth from factories and farms, mines and wells, rivers and forests, capital will search out every source it can get its hands on. The capitalist vortex is a maelstrom passing over the Earth and sucking up everything in its path. During capitalist booms, technical and organizational innovation within the circuits of commodity production links up with socio-​ecological restructuring and geographical expansion. Together, these effect a virtuous circle. On the one hand, labour productivity surges in the capitalist centres—​think shipbuilding, textile manufacturing, or Fordist assembly lines in their respective eras. Material throughput rises sharply in such moments, especially when measured per quanta of socially necessary labour time, and new, expanded, working classes emerge. On the other hand, agricultural, scientific, and extractive revolutions cheapen food, energy, and raw materials, even as the material volume of supply mounts up. Meanwhile, new geographic frontiers open up, rapidly displacing peoples through direct conquest and expulsion and the indirect effects of markets, as when cheap American grain destabilized eastern and southern European societies at the end of the nineteenth century (Wolf 1982). Capitalism is at once a temporal and geographical regime. Because capital is the investment of value with the intent of securing more value in the future (M-​C-​ M'), accumulation operates as a system of temporal deferment. As capital piles up, however, it becomes increasingly difficult for individual capitalists to find profitable investment outlets. This is the problem of overaccumulation. When surplus capital mounts up to the point where there is a generalized crisis of profitability—​as during the 1970s—​capitalists intensify the search for new technologies and for the Four Cheaps—​usually through alliances with state and imperial power (e.g., research subsidies, patent protections, trade liberalization, debt regimes, privatizations, new enclosures, etc.). This is the truly general law of accumulation: endless search, continual absorption, unrelenting exploitation, unlimited horizons, unprecedented productivity, and growth without limit.17 Accumulation crises take shape when the virtuous circle turns vicious. This is the inverse of Marx’s observation about cheap cotton and large-​scale industry that we encountered earlier. The sources of accumulation crises are many and complex, but one crucial—​and almost universally ignored—​moment is the relationship between surplus capital and Cheap Nature. The argument that capital must go out and scour the world for cheap resources as a result of accumulation crises has long been recognized. Less well understood is that the formation of accumulation crises is linked to the rising value composition of the circulating moment of fixed capital—​thus capital’s relation to (and within) extra-​human natures is intimately tied to the rising value composition of capital, and the tendentially falling rate of profit. In sum, the rising value composition of raw materials—​impacting both the value of circulating capital and fixed capital (e.g. the price of oil affects the price of both consumer-​and capital-​goods)—​effects two problems for capital as a whole. It affects the rate of profit, to be sure. But it also puts the brakes on the expansion of profitable investment opportunities that characterize booms.

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Marxist political economy has not dealt effectively with this problem of rising input costs, effectively ceding the terrain of “scarcity” to neo-​Malthusian arguments. Of course, Marx hated the language of scarcity—​the stain of Malthus on economics is still with us—​but he didn’t evade the issue (Meadows, Meadows and Randers 1992). Often overlooked in Marx’s account are his observations on a “general law” of underproduction. In this model, “the rate of profit is inversely proportional to the value of the raw materials,” i.e., the cheaper the raw materials and energy, the higher the rate of profit (Marx 1967, 111). But there’s more to it than that. Circulating capital is the forgotten moment in Marx’s model. Recall that “constant” capital (as opposed to “variable” capital, or labour-​power) comprises more than fixed capital, or machinery, factories and equipment. It also consists of energy and raw materials used up during a production cycle: circulating capital. Capitalism’s productive dynamism leads the: portion of constant capital that consists of fixed capital … [to] run significantly ahead of the portion consisting of organic raw materials, so that the demand for these raw materials grows more rapidly than their supply. Marx (1967, 118–​19)18 In short, the “overproduction” of machinery (fixed capital) finds its dialectical antagonism in the “underproduction” of raw materials (circulating capital). The issue, then, is not overproduction or underproduction, but how the two fit together in successive eras of accumulation. The idea of underproduction crises can be joined with the theory of commodity frontiers to suggest an elementary barrier to capital accumulation—​not inadequate flows of this resource or that, but insufficient cheapness of inputs in general. Whether or not capitalism in a moment of crisis can restore the Four Cheaps sufficiently to launch a new wave of accumulation remains an open question. To this must be added the political element in economic reasoning. Capitalists are driven to exploit and appropriate labour and nature to the maximum until stopped by social protest, state control or warfare. In fact, this has been another dimension of the general law of capitalist development: the productive consumption of resources and labour with devastating rapidity, resulting in widespread destruction and extermination, undermining the reproduction of ecosystems and even whole societies. While all capitalist transformation of nature is not negative—​it is vital to acknowledge what nature does for capitalism before moving to what capitalism does to nature. Nevertheless, the term “plunder” is not too harsh for what capitalism does to the Earth—​and its creatures. If capitalism cannot stop itself from feeding off surplus value and accumulating, who will stand up against the vortex of accumulation? Workers have fought back to put limits on working people to death, but, all the same, the levels of exploitation of migrant, slave, and child labour around the world today are chilling. Similarly, environmentalists have fought to limit the digging up, killing off, and befouling of the web of life, but capital keeps leaping over and battering down such barriers to

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new terrains of destruction, from Indonesian forests to Canadian tar sands. There is the temptation to posit these as a separate set of struggles, but, as a unified value theory indicates, it will take a very wide swath of people to rise up to stop the madness (Kovel 2007; Klein 2014; Seabrook 2015).

Notes 1 Simple labour value made sense in the era of classical political economy when most commodities were made by handicraft (the manufacturing era). By the time Marx was writing, machines (capital goods) had to be worked into the calculus through the transformation to prices of production—​ with all the difficulties subsequent economists have had with the labour theory of value. The problem has grown worse in our own time, with the massive increase in indirect, extensive production systems. See more in Sayer and Walker (1992). 2 The problem is commensurability: what do iron and yeast have in common? Given the pervasiveness of energy inputs, BTUs (British thermal units) might serve as a proxy for a universal measure, as proposed by Georgescu-​Roegen (1971). But this is no more satisfactory than letting labour time stand in for the rest. 3 “Socially necessary labour-​time forms through the dialectic of capital-​labour relations and the appropriation of unpaid work [of human and extra-​human natures] […] We are working with a double internality: of labour-​in-​nature and nature-​in-​labour, not with the Cartesian coupling of Nature/​Society […] Value relations form and re-​form through the active relation of life-​making—​the oikeios.Value in motion is value-​in-​nature. Socially necessary labour-​time is [therefore] determined by more than commodification [and more than commodified labour-​power]” (Moore 2015, 199 and passim). 4 There are even trickier problems in valuing labour time in complex production systems with extensive divisions of direct and indirect labour, which no one has tackled. See Sayer and Walker (1992). 5 The term “free gifts” comes from Engels, not Marx. We disagree with each other over the term. For Walker the term resonates. For Moore, the term suggests that extra-​human natures exist as “low hanging fruit,” thereby underestimating the work it takes to mobilize the work of extra-​human nature for capital accumulation (see Moore 2018). 6 The argument on “socially necessary unpaid work” is elaborated in Moore (2018). 7 A point overlooked by Marx but taken up by Schumpeter is product innovation, which opens up new markets and profits—​or new fields of value and surplus value (Walker 1995; also Arrighi 1994). 8 On capitalism and technical progress, see von Tunzelmann (1995). In mainstream and Schumpeterian economics, by contrast, technological innovation chiefly arises outside the market and is adopted by capitalist entrepreneurs (Walker 1995). Among Marx’s great contributions is the analysis of the internal logic of capitalist growth, as well as the internal contradictions that generate problems and periodic crises, rather than attributing its successes and failures to external forces (Harvey 1982). 9 Conventional economic history has two major explanations for the industrial revolution, neither of which is as satisfactory as Marx’s: the exogenous development of science and technology or resource scarcity that led to deeper coal mines—​both of which led to the invention of the steam engine. See, e.g. Landes (1970). 10 If Marx’s virtue was to provide a holistic model of capitalism, the flip side of that is neglecting things outside the frame (which he meant to get to but never did).

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11 The exclusion of the useful work of women, ecosystems, and fossil fuels from value production is not just a failure of traditional Marxist theory. This is how capitalist valuation actually operates—​work only has value if performed in service of the market and capital, making saleable commodities under capitalist supervision. But such commodity production always depends on the appropriation of unpaid work. 12 Similarly, Marx (1971, 368) observed that, “it was only the large fall in the price of cotton which enabled the cotton industry to develop in the way that it did.” 13 A critical blind-​spot in Marxist theory has been the neglect of “resource industrialization” (Page, Brian and Walker 1991; Walker 2001). As a result, most Marxist historians have failed to recognize the “great labour productivity revolution” of early capitalism (Moore 2015a, 71). On geographical industrialization, see Storper and Walker (1989). 14 This process occurs at all possible scales, as recent spatial theory insists (e.g. Herod 2010). 15 Because neoclassical utility theory ignores the material foundations of production behind exchange, it ends up with no serious theory of money (the so-​called Money Veil). Statist theories of money, by contrast, forget the essential link back to value in modern market systems (Ingham 2004). 16 Marx barely mentions competition until well into volume I of Capital. 17 Marx’s use of the term refers chiefly to the transformation of all workers into wage-​ labour but needs to be expanded to all labour-​nature inputs (Marx 1977, Chapter 25). 18 Perelman (1996) sees the tendency towards the rising value composition of capital as Marx’s answer to Malthus.

References Aglietta, Michel. 1979. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation. London: New Left Books. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century. London and New York: Verso. Bank for International Settlements. 2006. 76th Annual Report. Basel: BIS. Barnett, Harold J., and Chandler Morse. 1963. Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press for Resources for the Future. Barraclough, Geoffrey. 1967. An Introduction to Contemporary History. New York: Penguin. Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labour and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Bridge, Gavin, and Phillipe Le Billon. 2013. Oil. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bunker, Stephen G., and Paul S. Ciccantell. 2005. Globalization and the Race for Resources. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Burkett, Paul. 1999. Marx and Nature. New York: St Martin’s. Coyle, Geoff. 2010. The Riches Beneath Our Feet: How Mining Shaped Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cronon,William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Chicago:WW Norton. Davis, Mike. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts. London and New York: Verso. Dunaway, Wilma, ed. 2014. Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women’s Work and Households in Global Production. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Farber, Lianna. 2006. An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Federici, Silvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press. Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. 2010. Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press. Fraser, Nancy. 2014. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode.” New Left Review 86: 55–​74.

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Freese, Barbara. 2003. Coal: A Human History. New York: Basic. Georgescu-​Roegen, Nicholas. 1971. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gibson-​Graham, Julie Katherine. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We Know It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London and New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1975. “The Geography of Capital Accumulation.” Antipode 7(2): 9–​21. Harvey, David. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Herod, Andrew. 2010. Scale. London and New York: Routledge. Hochschild, Arlie. 1989. The Second Shift: Inside the Two-​job Marriage. New York: Viking. Ingham, Geoffrey. 2004. The Nature of Money. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kautsky, Karl. 1988 [1902]. The Agrarian Question. London: Zwan Publications. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kovel, Joel. 2007. The Enemy of Nature:The End of Capitalism or the End of the Earth? London: Zed Books. Landes, David S. 1970. The Unbound Prometheus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003 [1913]. The Accumulation of Capital. London and New York: Routledge. Marglin, Stephen A. 1974. “What Do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production.” Review of Radical Political Economics 6(2): 60–​112. Marx, Karl. 1967. Capital:Volume III. New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1971. Theories of Surplus Value:Volume III. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital. New York: Penguin. Marx, Karl. 1978. Capital:Volume II. New York: Penguin. Marx, Karl. 1981. Capital:Volume III. New York: Penguin. Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, and Jørgen Randers. 1992. Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Post Mills: Chelsea Green Pub Co. Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. London: Zed Books. Mitchell, Katharyne, Sallie A. Marston, and Cindi Katz, eds. 2004. Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell/​Antipode. Moore, Jason W. 2010a. “Amsterdam Is Standing on Norway, Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire, and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545–​1648.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10(1):  33–​68. Moore, Jason W. 2010b. “Amsterdam is Standing on Norway, Part II: The Global North Atlantic in the Ecological Revolution of the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10(2): 188–​227. Moore, Jason W. 2010c. “The End of the Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-​Ecology, 1450–​2010.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10(3): 389–​413. Moore, Jason W. 2015a. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London and New York: Verso. Moore, Jason W. 2015b. “Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Negative Value to Surplus Value in the Capitalist World-​Ecology.” Critical Historical Studies 2(1): 1–​42. Moore, Jason W. 2017.“Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-​ Historical Method.” Theory and Society 46(4): 285–318. Moore, Jason W. 2018. “The Capitalocene, Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/​Energy.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45(2): 237–79.

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Mumford, Lewis. 1934. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. O’Brien, Patrick. 1982. “European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery.” Economic History Review 35(1): 1–​18. O’Connor, James R, ed. 1998. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford Press. Page, Brian, and Richard Walker. 1991. “From Settlement to Fordism: The Agro-​industrial Revolution in the American Midwest.” Economic Geography 67(4): 281–​315. Perelman, Michael. 1996. “Marx and Resource Scarcity.” In The Greening of Marxism, edited by Ted Benton, 64–​80. New York: Guilford Press. Robertson, Morgan M., and Joel D. Wainwright. 2013. “The Value of Nature to the State.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(2): 1–​16. Rogers, Heather. 2005. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: The New Press. Romero, Adam. 2015. The Alchemy of Capital: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of United States Agriculture. Doctoral dissertation. Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley. Sayer, R. Andrew, and Richard Walker. 1992. The New Social Economy: Reworking the Division of Labour. Cambridge: Blackwell. Seabrook, Jeremy. 2015. The Song of the Shirt:The High Price of Cheap Garments from Blackburn to Bangladesh. New Delhi: Navayana. Seccombe,Wally. 1992. A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe. London and New York: Verso. Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development. Oxford: Blackwell. Steffen, Will, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig. 2015. “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.” The Anthropocene Review 2(1):  81–​98. Storper, Michael, and Richard Walker. 1989. The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology and Growth. Cambridge: Blackwell. Tunzelmann, G. Nick von. 1981. “Technological Progress During the Industrial Revolution.” In The Economic History of Britain since 1700, Vol. 1, edited by Roderick Floud and Dierdre McCloskey, 271. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tunzelmann, G. Nick von. 1995. Technology and Industrial Progress. Aldershot: Edward Elgar Publishing. Vaggi, Gianni, and Peter Groenewegen. 2006. A Concise History of Economic Thought: From Mercantilism to Monetarism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Varney, Liana. 2012. The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Richard. 1979. “Editor’s Introduction [For Special Issue on Natural Resources and Environment.]” Antipode 11(2): 1–​16. Walker, Richard. 1995. “Regulation and Flexible Specialization as Theories of Capitalist Development: Challengers to Marx and Schumpeter?” In Spatial Practices: Markets, Politics and Community Life, edited by Helen Liggett and David Perry, 167–​208. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Walker, Richard. 2001. “California’s Golden Road to Riches: Natural Resources and Regional Capitalism, 1848–​1940.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 9(1): 167–​99. Walker, Richard. 2004. The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of California Agribusiness. New York: The New Press. Walker, Richard. 2016. “Value and Nature: From Value theory to the Fate of the Earth.” Human Geography 9(1): 1–​15.

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Wallerstein, Manuel. 1983. European Economic Development: A Comment on O’Brien.” Economic History Review 36(4): 580–​83. Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wright, Gavin. 1990. “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879–​1940.” American Economic Review 80(4): 651–​68.

4 “HIC RHODUS, HIC SALTA!” Postcolonial remains and the politics of the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene Andrés Fabián Henao Castro and Henrik Ernstson

From Sonora to disruption When crossing the Sonora desert without authorization, working class-​ women from Central and South America are transformed into undocumented immigrants in North America. They become hunted bodies, policed through heavily militarized borderlands, rendering their lives disposable. Making the crossing despite the precariousness of the conditions, they also embody one of today’s subaltern experiences that, when placed in view, interrupts not only the smooth surface of late capitalism and globalization—​showing the underbelly of the “vibrant” cities of the North—​but also current discussions on climate change. According to Humane Borders,1 the majority of women’s deaths in the desert are due to dehydration or are considered to be heat-​related; conditions that are never “natural” but fabricated through the militarization of the border that forces immigrants to take greater risks when crossing in increasing temperatures partly due to climate change. The mortal spectre of climate change is not a future but a present reality, one that conspires against their lives as they embark on the crossing. Our focus in this chapter will be to examine how the discursive figure of “the Anthropocene”—​the idea that humans are acting as a geological force with climate change as but the most notorious manifestation—​depoliticizes this equation of mortality and disposability by means of a temporal, epistemological, and practical displacement of subaltern experiences to a secondary stage.2 More concretely, we are interested in discussing how postcolonial theory, primarily in the works of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ian Baucom, has tried to integrate this condition of the Anthropocene at the cost of failing to position the subaltern experiences that these women represent at the centre of its epistemological and normative preoccupations, against its grid.3 We argue that it does so, first and foremost, because the

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Anthropocene seeks a depoliticized techno-​managerial solution to the problem that it identifies, one in which the voices of these women are, once again, rendered silent. Second, the postcolonial reception of the discourse of the Anthropocene fails them because the urgency of their present precarious position is devalued vis-​à-​vis the “fully-​inclusive” human and human/​non-​human universality of the future for which the discourse of the Anthropocene speaks. Temporally displaced and politically neutralized, subaltern experiences are, once again, ontologically deflated and marginalized within the constitutive parameters of the discourse of the Anthropocene. Departing from the experiences of migrant women, we are interested in contesting the theoretical assumptions that render such experiences unintelligible within the discourse on the Anthropocene.4 In response, we contribute what we call a politics of the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene. This politics hinges on how the Anthropocene has been discursively constructed and “rigged” as a scene—​as a stage—​g iving way to what can be referred to as a post-​political death space. A death space is where political change in the here and now is denied as it gets displaced into the future. Indeed, we argue that there is a risk that the political itself becomes categorically unthinkable when scholars—​and here postcolonial scholars in particular—​try to integrate the Anthropocene as a radically “new” condition. Here we follow Robert Young (2012) who, against constant efforts at pronouncing the death of postcolonial theory, emphasizes the resilience of subaltern experiences to remain and trouble the politics of knowledge, quite at work in the language of the Anthropocene, by “articulating the unauthorised knowledge, and histories, of those whose knowledge is not allowed to count” (Young 2012, 23). Our politics of the Anthropo-​ ob(S)cene works to clarify the political performativity of the postcolonial remains and how they trouble our contemporary times by means of three performative interruptions in the present. The first interruption is about the politics of time and aims to trouble the ways of being that are rendered invisible within the claims to a supra-​historical time in which an all-​encompassing notion of humanity co-​participates homogeneously in the same geological force. Building on this, the politics of translation within the second interruption troubles the ways of speaking, which are rendered inaudible within the claims to a scientific consensus around the universal condition of the Anthropocene into which we are included irrespective of our constructed differences based on class, race, gender, and other socio-​cultural differences. Finally, the politics of the stage, in the last interruption, works to trouble the ways of acting that delivers the proper scale to the experts’ gaze but not to those who engage in the active contestation of their conditions of exclusion. To this end, our chapter is divided into two main sections. In the first we re-​stage a debate between Chakrabarty and Baucom that demonstrates different receptions to the Anthropocene in postcolonial theory. In the second we introduce the three performative disruptions—​of time, of knowledge, and that of the political itself—​ that outline the contours of our politics of the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene.

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Eclipsing politics What happens with emancipatory projects if we take as fact that humanity is a geological force on a par with the movements of continents, the evolution of species variation, and the mixing of the lithosphere with the atmosphere? This political question has produced radically divergent responses.5 To us, an especially revealing debate which makes visible a whole set of issues that are at stake, is the “Anthropocene debate” between Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009; 2012; 2014) and Ian Baucom (2014). While brilliant thinkers both of them, in the end their (dis) agreement misses the point and risks evacuating and removing the political in a deeply ontological and categorical sense. To start unpacking this, while approaching the political, we will first move our attention to how Chakrabarty and Baucom could be said to clash over whether humanity can see itself as a “species.” Central to their debate is Marx’s Hegelian sounding idea of “species-​being.” This was introduced in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx 1978) and did not simply refer to the reproductive biology of humanity, but to a collective and emancipatory power—​in “making life activity itself an object of will and consciousness” (Marx 1978, 76). In particular, they contest the hyphen that grants “being” to the species, which for Marx is directly linked to emancipatory politics.6 Chakrabarty (2009) parts with Marx and argues that we cannot experience ourselves as a species, as the non-​ human, a “force of nature” on par and in interaction with plate tectonics and evolution. He means that we can only experience our being through the social roles that society has produced over historical time, for instance the capitalist and the worker, the colonialist and the colonized. From this it follows, posits Chakrabarty, that under the Anthropocene there is no history left for us to make. Since all major projects of freedom and human emancipation are historical—​carried out by real human beings that occupy certain social roles—​there is no way we can create and interpret what a human project of freedom at the scale of the Anthropocene would mean since according to scientific descriptions this project needs to operate at the scale of humans as a species. Chakrabarty’s diagnosis, we believe, will risk eclipsing the possibility of politics altogether. We can (with Baucom) arrive at this by returning to “the younger” Chakrabarty’s work where he developed his political thinking in close conversation with the rupturing possibility of postcolonial remains, something we believe “the older” Chakrabarty is now deserting. In Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty (2000) had famously re-​written the old confrontation of labour against capital, use value against exchange value, as the confrontation of History 2 against the totalizing grip of History 1. While most progressive historians and social scientists had firmly focused on how the logic of capital had produced a global and world-​historical abstraction of labour (History 1), Chakrabarty (2000, 48) argued that instead of thinking that the abstraction of labour “eventually cancels out or neutralizes the contingent differences between specific histories,” there is instead a confrontation between the forces that work towards the abstraction of labour (History 1), and the

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affective form of subaltern history as belonging to differential life-​worlds (History 2).This means History 2 is a productive part in the making of history, not simply an “effect”—​and that subaltern experiences and life-​worlds are performative and harbour projects of freedom. In other words, there is a dissensual postcolonial remain or leftover that is constantly at work and that produces emancipatory imaginaries and practices.7 The subaltern’s becoming of living labour was made to interrupt the totalizing thrust of abstract labour. Such interruption was possible because both histories (History 1 and History 2) were, as Chakrabarty (2014, 5) claimed in his reply to Baucom’s article, “ontologically available to us […] accessible to us directly through our shared (and evolved) human capacity to experience space and time.” For the historian this means there are archives—​from written sources to oral histories—​that can be pressed into service to understand emancipatory projects. The theoretically devastating challenge of the Anthropocene, which for Chakrabarty rendered 25 years of critical scholarship lacking, rested in that no human can experience the planet as such, no history in its proper sense can be made nor written.8 This new condition, a non-​ontological mode of existence, severed and cut-​off the hyphen and it led Chakrabarty (2014, 6) to affirm, rather categorically, that “we cannot experience ourselves as a species.” Unlike the irresolvable confrontation between History 1 and History 2, in which a shared experience in the form of abstract labour was always interrupted by a differential experience in the form of living labour, the new formulation eclipsed such a dissensual participation in the making of History. In front of a historically impossible-​to-​experience new non-​historical time of Anthropoceneity, History 1 and History 2 reappear as shared experiences, but with no dissensual leftover. Thus, while Chakrabarty (2012, 14) acknowledges that “[a]‌place thus remains for struggles around questions on intrahuman justice regarding the uneven impacts of climate change,” the “constant interruption” by History 2 of History 1 has in his view been cancelled in awe of the supra-​historical order of the Anthropocene. Baucom in his turn, contests this conclusion. He uses post-​humanist literature and its development of non-​human otherness and companion species to politically recharge the situation. He challenges the unitary “orientation of extinction” of Chakrabarty and directs us towards a wider search of more-​than-​human notions of freedom, and what Jill Bennett (2013, 245) expressed as “the will to belong […] as one species on the planet among numerous others.” Baucom insists that we can recycle young Chakrabarty who argued “that neither ontology nor the ontology of time is singular but plural” (Baucom 2014, 141) and that we can rightfully insist that time is still “out of joint.” For Baucom this means “the historian’s code remains inadequate to an accounting of our ‘situation’ ” and that political action is still possible if we reconsider Earth as another figure of the post-​human that shares the repertoire of political attributes which has until now been wrongly attached exclusively to the human. Augmenting young Chakrabarty, Baucom suggests a History 4°, a methodological notion á la Hegel, capable of picking up the modernist confrontation between human history (History 1 versus History 2) and braiding it

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with the non-​historical time of humanity as a geological agent (what Baucom calls History 3).9 Drawing on post-​humanist literature and object-​oriented ontology (e.g. Harman 2009; Morton 2013), Baucom believes that being can be attached to this new form of the “species” in the era of the Anthropocene, extending History 2 to non-​human actants to form a proper History 3. Our intervention also relies on recycling “young” Chakrabarty. However, unlike Baucom’s attempt to repair the older Chakrabarty’s a-​ historical Anthropocene with the young Chakrabarty’s conception of History 2 that includes non-​humans to form History 3, we work with a “split-​Chakrabarty” that is more agonistic than reconciliatory. We do not seek to accommodate the newly won geological agency of a cyborgian humanity (for which object-​oriented-​ontology and actor-​ network theory had already prepared the way in Bauman’s interpretation) within Chakrabarty’s work, salvaging postcolonial theory from Chakrabarty’s own seemingly funeral oration. Instead, we want to focus squarely on the political. As we will explain, our politics of the Anthropo-​ ob(S)cene thoroughly undermines Chakrabarty’s (2012, 14) own claim that “unlike the problem of the hole in the ozone layer, climate change is ultimately all about politics.” In contrast, we posit that his “all about politics” comes from a view of the Anthropocene as a non-​ontological mode of existence, which we argue precisely, and in deeply problematic terms, participates in strengthening the very depoliticizing language that he has otherwise sought to contest. This brings us to our second section.

The politics of the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene: Three interruptions Our politics of the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene—​which aims to return to the political and recharge postcolonial remains—​ is based on three performative disruptions that structure the rest of the chapter. The first disruption aims to trouble the notion of time. It accentuates the anthropos in the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene and seeks to interrogate the temporal displacement of this new human universal into a futurity that, once again, neutralizes the ability to act politically in the here and now, a political hic et nunc of differential history-​makings. The present differences of the anthropos are, so to speak, put off-​stage by the all-​inclusive metaphor of a massive absence into which “we all belong” in the apocalyptic futurity of the world without us, even if belonging is precisely what is troubled by the Anthropocene. The second disruption accentuates the phonetic power of the “-​ob(S)” within the semantic neutrality of the Anthropocene. This second disruption troubles the epistemic authority granted to scientific knowledge as once again the language of universality. First articulated by postcolonial theory, we invoke the politics of translation as a performative mode to politically confront the planetary condition of the Anthropocene. The third section is on disruption itself. We accentuate the obscene in the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene, the performativity of the political, by reinterpreting the stages of history in the progressive/​linear time of historicism. The figure of the Anthropocene shares several features with the stages of history in the theatrical-​contingent sense of the term. Obscenity carries a different performative force within this interruption; it refers to

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the making-​present of that unaccounted supplementary part, to borrow from Jacques Rancière (2004; 2010), that upsets the aesthetic “decency” of a techno-​managerial neoliberal regime of power. Obscenity names the stage that leaps; a stage that is not working to separate and organize time into the past-​present-​future chronological order of (past) revolution and (future) catastrophe, but collapses that time into the historical leap of Marx’s “Hic Rhodus, hic salta!” as a verification of equality by those who are not counted in the hic et nunc of their staged disagreement.10

First interruption: The politics of time—​against the futurism of the Anthropocene What about time, future, and emancipation? What does the human condition now mean under the Anthropocene? How are we defined and what powers do we hold? The World Without Us is the intriguing title of Alan Weisman’s bestselling book on climate change. Chakrabarty refers to this title in his opening and closing remarks in his 2009 article. He was however no longer concerned with the “us” that was articulated within this projected futurity, but the ways in which the present-​ness of this newly discovered condition of the human as nature, as a geophysical force, both forces “[us] to insert ourselves into a future ‘without us’ in order to be able to visualize it,” and destroys “our general sense of history” (our emphasis, Chakrabarty 2009, 198).That concern resonates with the ending of Chakrabarty’s (2012) follow-​up article on “Postcolonial studies and the challenge of climate change.” There he invokes, with a distinctive rhetorical inflection, Hannah Arendt’s words of the “fundamental change in the human condition” brought up by the event of the Sputnik satellite that was sent up by the Soviet Union in 1957 (Chakrabarty 2012, 15). Chakrabarty interpreted Arendt’s diagnosis of modernity as ambivalent. On the pessimistic side, he meant, Arendt was mourning the spiritual decay of the “mass society” in which the political had shrunk with the disappearance of public spaces and the increasing subordination—​in both capitalist and socialist nation-​states—​of the domain of action to the domains of work and labour in the newly formed “society of labourers” (Arendt 1998, 46). On the optimistic side, Chakrabarty recuperated Arendt for the universal project of undoing History 1 á la Marx and claimed that the Sputnik-​empowered conception of humankind meant that “the survival of the species could [now] be guaranteed on a worldwide scale” (Arendt 1998, 46). Once again, we note that the political (which we understand that Arendt was yearning for) gets displaced by Chakrabarty to the negative pole of pessimism. However, we are surprised to see Arendt enlisted as the theory in charge of suturing the Marxist concern of the worldwide scale of labour’s survival under capitalism, with the universal scale of Earth’s geography. But what if we invert this interpretation and go against Chakrabarty? What if we make the plurality of the political, which Arendt mourns in The Human Condition—​ the closing down of action, the disappearance of public spaces—​into the positive project that she wanted to revive? And the universal, which in Chakrabarty’s view Arendt optimistically embraces, into her ironic warning against philosophical and scientific tendencies that want to substitute political contestation with technical

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expertise? This other Arendt (1998, 9–​10) was also the one, against Chakrabarty’s interpretation, who claimed the following: [T]‌he human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature […] In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what’ […] On the other hand, the conditions of human existence—​life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—​can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely. The question that this other Arendt might be posing in relation to the hyphen of “species-​being,” could be formulated as follows: Is the Anthropocene not the language with which science has successfully substituted the divine in its ability to speak about a who as though it were a what? Arendt, after all, sounded very much like Marx when she claimed that the conditions of human existence never condition us absolutely. Indeed, as Marx said in the famous passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that Baucom also used to organize his debate with Chakrabarty: humans still make their own history even if they do it under circumstances transmitted by the past. Rather than asking if that absolute conditioning has already been reached with the spatial-​temporal limits of the Anthropocene, we should interrogate the anti-​ political effects of this theoretical frame. What is the effect of saying that the Anthropocene has conditioned us in a way that we can no longer access emancipatory politics? As representative of a wider mood and thinking, take for instance how Ben Dibley (2012, 3) describes Jeffrey Sachs’ (2008) formulation of the advent of a geological era of the human species’ own making: While, for most of human history, economic activity did not throw the planetary systems into jeopardy, if globalisation continues unreformed, the human species [quoting Sachs], “will hit very harsh boundaries that will do great damage to human well-​being, to the earth, and to vast numbers, literally millions, of other species on the planet” ([page] 57). It is in this context that [again quoting Sachs] “the defining challenge of the twenty-​first century” is made apparent: that, Sachs contends, of facing “the reality that humanity shares a common fate” ([page] 3, Italics in [Sach’s] original). Notice the temporal displacement, the conditional “if,” which has the effect of projecting human catastrophe to the future of an unreformed globalization, as if “great damage to human well-​being, to the Earth, and to vast numbers, literally millions, of other species on the planet” was not a present reality but an expected consequence of not reforming globalization. Moreover, notice the rhetorical force

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of the common fate, which “in this context” all of “humanity” now shares regardless of class, race, and gender (or what Chakrabarty problematically calls “anthropological differences”). The temporal inflection of the Anthropocene effects a sort of distorted Derridean différance, in which differences are cancelled in the present through a projected homogeneity in the future catastrophe into which they are deferred. As in front of God, as in front of extinction—​we are all alike. Sachs, Dibley, and others are trying to hide the situated and particular within the universal of this projected futurity. In that sense Chakrabarty (2009, 221) is more transparent in how this hiding is done when he claims that, “unlike in the crisis of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged.”This explains how the futurism of the Anthropocene is simply that, a delusion to put awe into us. If climate change is not a dystopia of today, if the conditions of severe dehydration that migrants need to include in their calculations are not a political question of now, it is because lifeboats still exist for the rich and the privileged. The anti-​ political effect of this frame, used to properly assess the scale of the problem, is to silently make the rich and the privileged the standard with which to measure the all-​encompassing humanity yet-​to-​come. Once again, the universal becomes an attribute of the possessor, not of the dispossessed, and once again, the universal disavows its own particularity by attributing to itself the “all” of “humanity.” That this all-​encompassing futurity provides a stronger motivation to act than particular experiences of subalterns in the present, means that the only act that truly matters for this theoretical frame is the one in which the possessors engage, but not the dispossessed. Otherwise committed to subaltern politics, Chakrabarty’s depoliticizing framework ultimately betrays the same conclusion, since the politics of the particular are abandoned to the meta-​politics of a universal that does not even make sense within the parameters of human sensuousness and consciousness, hence requires the expert to speak on behalf of it.This leads us to our second interruption.

Second interruption: The politics of translation—​against the universalism of the Anthropocene Science gestures to occupy the middle point between systems of references—and through this same gesture it denies and hides its own particularity. Chapter 3 of Provincializing Europe wonderfully develops the critique of the ideal of objectivity entertained by Newtonian science. This ideal “aspires to achieve a status of transparency with regard to particular human knowledges” and claims that “translation between different languages” can only be mediated by the “higher language of science itself.” (Chakrabarty 2000, 75) Chakrabarty’s example is that of translating the Hindi pani and the English water by means of the scientific notation H2O. The question that we entertain here is if the Anthropocene, even in Chakrabarty’s articulation of the problem, has not become the H2O of climate change? The depoliticizing consequences of the Anthropocene are quite noticeable in the very quotation of Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) that Chakrabarty (2012, 211) includes but fails to interrogate:

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[M]‌ankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come. To develop a worldwide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human-​induced stresses will be one of the great future tasks of mankind, requiring intensive research efforts and wise application of knowledge thus acquired. Crutzen and Stoermer (2000, no page numbers given) Instead of revolution, protest, and political mobilization, Crutzen and Stoermer want more “intensive research efforts” and more “wise application of knowledge.” One wonders what is the “unwise” application of knowledge that is silently enunciated as a scientific warning in this formulation, and why is this way of framing the worldwide accepted strategy never questioned in Chakrabarty’s work, which is otherwise so effective at destabilizing the scientific aspiration to transparency? Rather than questioning the very subject-​position that speaks here, in the form of the researcher as the site of the universal, Chakrabarty opts for defending science, claiming against an unnamed contradictor that these are “not necessarily anti-​capitalist scholars, and yet they are not for business-​as-​usual capitalism either” (2009, 219). Obviously, the public institution of science can play, and often has played, a significant role in the struggle against capitalism and inequality, moreover when it makes visible the ways in which climate change affects populations differentially in the present and not homogeneously in the future (Camacho 1998; Klein 2014; Dean in Chapter 11, this volume). That science can, and often has, played such a role is different from letting science’s claim to universality pass unexamined, especially when it carries such a strong depoliticizing force, suggesting research funding rather than public contestation.11 This also hides that the first critical discourse on climate change was not articulated by scientists, but by those forms of indigenous knowledge whose claims to truth have been, and continue to be, devalued as not quite “proper” knowledge. One wonders here what remains—​if anything at all—​of the (young) Chakrabarty that troubled the scientific attribution of universality in its linguistic capacity of becoming the middle term that was capable of translating all particular languages, in relation to the (old) Chakrabarty that feels the need to defend science’s framework against those critics of globalization that have not yet grasped the proper scale of the problem. If anything of the postcolonial remains, it is indeed its ability to contest such claims to universality by means of articulating unauthorized knowledge. In the case of climate change, this knowledge refers to indigenous forms of knowledge that once again appear as too old, outdated, passé—​an exclusion in which even postcolonial criticism participates.12 This is what Chakrabarty seems to be claiming, that the troubling of History 1 by History 2 cannot reach the proper scale of the problem because: [T]‌hese critiques [e.g. indigenous knowledge] do not give us an adequate hold on human history once we accept that the crisis of climate change is here with us and may exist as part of this planet for much longer than

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capitalism or long after capitalism has undergone many more historic mutations. Chakrabarty (2009, 212) Chakrabarty’s underlying assumption is that we can only understand the scale of the problem if we properly place it in the pre-​and post-​capitalist scale in which the Anthropocene operates, or in other words, that the boundary parameters of human existence are not only independent of capitalism and socialism but actually rest beyond human history. We wonder, what is the hold here and who does the holding? Furthermore, we note that when the very possibility of agency abandons the human and becomes transformed into a geophysical force, then it is apparently only researchers that are able to assess the situation and determine the proper scale of the problem.13 We should clarify that we are not questioning Chakrabarty’s (2009, 213) invitation—​which we welcome—​when he claims that: [T]‌he task of placing, historically, the crisis of climate change thus requires us to bring together intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital. Chakrabarty (2009, 213) The problem lies in the depoliticizing deliverance of truth to a scientific language that wants funding and wise application instead of political mobilization and public contestation of the status quo. To uncritically accept that science holds the proper locus of knowledge is only one part of the problem with the politics of translation. Chakrabarty (2000, 57ff.) has earlier recognized his indebtedness to Spivak’s seminal article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), when he abandoned what he characterized as the theoretically innocent position of the subaltern studies collective, which was trying to make the subaltern into the “subject” of his or her own history. Spivak had successfully challenged the very idea of subjecthood that, once again, had rendered the subaltern speechless as the subaltern’s deeds and actions were already coded in the colonial or nativist discourses available. Chakrabarty abandoned the very uncritical attempt at “upgrading” the subaltern to the full status of European “subjecthood.” Yet, the way in which speechlessness is structured by the discursive binary from Spivak’s analysis did not translate into Chakrabarty’s articulation of climate change within postcolonial theory. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the section that precedes his discussion of the Anthropocene, entitled, “The Human in Postcolonial Criticism Today” (Chakrabarty 2012, 5). This section opens with Chakrabarty’s endorsement of Homi Bhabha’s description of “the new subaltern classes of today” (p. 5), being in Bhabha’s words: the stateless, migrant workers, minorities, asylum seekers, and refugees. What surprises Chakrabarty, in a positive sense, is Bhabha’s turn to the deprivation that the human condition suffers in such circumstances. Against

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Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) celebration of this precarious condition as the promise of a post-​imperial form of emancipatory nomadism beyond the grip of the nation-​state, Bhabha (2008) reads the subaltern politics of cultural survival “not only as [a]‌zone of creativity and improvisation—​which it is—​ but also as an area of privation and disenfranchisement” (Chakrabarty 2012, 6). Following Bhabha’s more ambivalent analysis of the new subalterns than that of Negri and Hardt, Chakrabarty nevertheless reproduces the very distribution of the real and the ideal, of real deprivation in the form of cultural survival and ideal enfranchisement according to the framework of the bourgeois state that the subaltern’s theory was seeking to contest. Like Spivak’s subaltern, the new subaltern classes with which we also opened this chapter are trapped and silenced between the two discourses available: (i) either a rejection of the human abstraction of the enlightened subject in Negri and Hardt, which rendered their deprivation illegible in an apparently uncritical celebration of their creativity; or (ii) the legibility of their precarious condition that continues to posit full inclusion within that very European form of subjecthood as the aspirational ideal. Against the temporal displacement of subaltern agency (in our first interruption) and its political neutralization (here in the second), the politics of the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene proposes an alternative route to recharge postcolonial remains. We now turn towards such an interpretation, which rests on the relationship between the political and the performative.

Third interruption: The politics of the performative—​against the Anthropocene The performative has been linked with the political. That is to say, actions that take place in front of others (i.e. an audience of some form) can change or rupture the organization and definition of what is in common and who are equals. This performative conception of the political has been traditionally interpreted as referring to an ontological mode of existence, a tendency that can be traced from Aristotle to Arendt, Marx to Heidegger, and Chakrabarty to Virno.14 Within this tradition the political always describes a specific form of being, different from others. By doing so, this tradition inevitably makes the very border that separates one mode of existence from another, to a border between proper political space and pre-​or non-​political space. It is precisely because of this that Rancière’s post-​foundational performative theory of the political is so important to us.15 Politics, although still performatively linked to aesthetics, is non-​ontological in Rancière’s work; it needs no ground and it is radically contingent. It is also through this insight that we can understand how deeply depoliticizing the current reception of the Anthropocene has been in postcolonial discourse, but also how postcolonial remains can be made politically active again. For Rancière, a (non)ontological mode of existence is always first and foremost expressive of a non-​totalizable arrangement of the sensible world, one in which something about that world is rendered non-​sensible or supplementary. This is the crucial difference between theories of the political influenced by a Heideggerian

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hermeneutics of being (Arendt,Virno, and Chakrabarty) and the renovated theory of the political advanced by Rancière. While the former works with already agreed upon ideas of where politics takes place, this reliance is cast into suspicion by Rancière. Politics, according to Rancière (2004), takes place when the part that exceeds the count of the parts, hence has no part in the ontological distribution of existence, makes an appearance that troubles the totalizing count. This supplementary part, by means of its very appearance, renders contingent the regime of power that organizes the distribution of the parts, of some bodies to the working space and others to the space of leisure, of some bodies to the private sphere and others to the public one, of some bodies to the first-​class migration of the rich in private airplanes supplied with lifeboats and others to the vulnerable journey across potentially lethal and severely (para)militarized deserts (Cacho 2012). The performativity of the political is no longer an ontological attribute of an already existing space, but the dissensual capacity to trouble the configuration of a particular space. The space of labour, for example the factory, can always become a political space once the dominant logic that organizes and distributes which bodies are seen, governs what they can do, and polices what can they say, is upset by a different articulation of that space. This happens when workers emerge as proletarians in the midst of a factory strike, rearranging the distribution of intelligence on how to run the factory and the (national) economy; or when a desert exists simultaneously as the site for the exercise of national sovereignty and as the site for the resilient affirmation of people’s freedom of movement. This alternative articulation of a space can render any distribution unstable and call into question the legitimacy of its foundation. This means that there is no archi-​political principle of the political. Instead, the arkhê of the order is always artificial, revisable, undoable. As Rancière (2010, 35) claims in his sixth thesis on politics: “the essential object of political dispute is the very existence of politics itself.” This form of politics has no ontological foundation; all we are left with is conflict, the contingent dissensus that emerges whenever the world of equality clashes with the world of inequality. This occurs whenever migrants’ affirmation of their equal freedom to move clashes with the sovereign reproduction of hierarchy through the fantasy of policing an arid borderland. In this case, what politics first troubles, as Rancière’s third thesis on politics states, is the very necessity of that property with which the community organizes the distribution of its parts and its shares, the arkhê, which could for instance be the document that authorizes one to cross a border, only to de-​authorize another (De Genova and Peutz 2010). Expressed by Rancière as the “the distribution of the sensible,” politics disrupts the taken-​for-​g ranted configuration of perception, meaning, sensibilities that allow a community to recognize itself. This distribution of the sensible conditions what arguments can be made, which voices can be heard, and which bodies can be seen and felt—​and recognized as such (as legitimate arguments, voices, bodies) by the community. It is in this sense that politics is always an-​arkhic, that is, it is always dissensual with respect to the “proper” principle that organizes what can and cannot be sensed by the community. The an-​arkhic

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form of the political is always performative, as the assertion of a common world happens “through a paradoxical mise-​en-​scène that brings the community and the noncommunity together,” as claimed by Rancière (1999, 55). In bringing this into our chapter, we claim that the potential grouping together of History 1 and History 2 into a shared space in front of what Baucom calls History 3 (the Anthropocene form of humanity’s species agency that Chakrabarty refuses to consider as a History in sensu stricto) constitutes the new arkhê with which to cancel today’s dissensus.16 In other words, Baucom’s solution with History 3 is also deeply depoliticizing and flawed. Rather, the two worlds that clash in todays’ paradoxical mise en scène are the Anthropocenic world of “full-​inclusion,” and the Anthropo-​ob(S)cenic world of differences; the world in which the impossibility of the rich having lifeboats grants its overreaching universality, and the world where individuals participate asymmetrically in the oppressive effects of climate change in the now. Rancière qualifies the political act that stages dissensus as scandalous. Those who were put in the shadows, as unauthorized migrants, acquire visibility through their contentious occupation of the public spaces from which they are disavowed. In being, speaking, and acting where they are not supposed to, because they lack the proper documents to do so, they redistribute the order of saying, the order of doing, and the order of being—​and this is done through their very acts. Migrant organizations, and more concretely their demonstrations of equality in the performative sense, of the irrelevance of the “proper” in organizing the terms of belonging to the community, constitute an exemplary case of today’s politics of the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene. The obscenity of the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene refers to this sense of scandalous appearance. Obscene comes from the Greek ob-​skene, which means off-​stage, more accurately the space hidden from view in which sexual violence, grief, and strong feelings were enacted in classical Greek tragedy. Sexual violence has frequently been reported, for instance, by women crossing the Sonora desert, many of them taking contraceptive pills in anticipation of the sexual violence they know they will suffer. Foregrounding the otherwise unnoticed obscenity in the Anthropocene means refusing the distribution of the sensible that grants visibility to “proper” bodies such as climate change scientists, but not to other highly vulnerable but still capable bodies. The obscenity of this other “anthropos” makes present what is now subordinated to the past in a theory of the Anthropocene that over-​invests in the future. This obscenity rearranges and struggles for equal voice with those who are not quite at the proper scale of the problem, nor quite at the right level of scientific expertise.The political today is the refusal of History 2 to be History 2; to be reduced to playing the role of pure difference, yet not having its constituents fully counted within the all-​encompassing accountability of Anthropocenic time. The political departs today from a resolute refusal to futurism, to the constant deferral of equality into the future by means of its verification in the present. Such verification of equality requires a troubling of the logic of inequality at work in the very distribution of intelligence among those researchers properly situated in the present conjuncture of the human

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as a geophysical force, at the expense of the outdated conceptual repertoire of the rest, still trapped within the leftovers of History 2 versus History 1. Obscenity carries a different performative force within this, our last interruption, as it refers to the scandalous claim to the equality of knowledge and being of those “improper” bodies. It upsets the protocols of “decency” that naturalize the epistemic locus of scientific discourse as the authorial site of claims to knowledge. There is no proper foundation, neither humanistic, nor geological.That is the scandalous obscenity with which the subaltern anthropos—​the claim to universality from the disavowed position of History 2—​works to continuously trouble the cancellation of its dissensual capacity not by the archi-​political form of History 1, but now by the meta-​political form of History 3. Against the distribution of the past to History 2, the present to History 1 and the future to History 3, the obscenity of the subaltern anthropos enacts the hic et nunc, a political/​theatrical performance of equality in the here and now that brings all the times together in the present rupture of the arkhê. The dissensual power of History 2 can still interrupt the allure of an undifferentiated anthropos that results from a politics-​free scientific standpoint. Such dissensual power can still exercise the historical leap that Marx (1852) famously enunciated with the performative statement “Hic Rhodus, hic salta!” (Here is the rose, dance here!). Against the temporal deferral of the problem to the future, against what Lee Edelman (2007) has criticized as the ideology of reproductive futurism, the Anthropo-​ob(S)cene replies: here is climate change, dance here!

Conclusion With their lives conditioned by militarized borderlands, migrant and unauthorized women of the Sonora desert tie together wider political ecologies that run through their heat-​stressed bodies as they cross the desert. Here we have foregrounded these embodied experiences as an entry point to interrupt the Anthropocene. Against pronouncing the death of postcolonial theory, we have tried to understand first and foremost how subaltern experiences can remain to trouble the post-​political death space of the Anthropocene where real political change in the here and now is denied as it gets displaced into the future. In this sense our chapter should be read as engaged in the necessary mode of autocritique that Young (2012) attributes to postcolonial theory, seeking to show how Chakrabarty’s framework of the Anthropocene limits the reach of his own radical politics. The political is gone, to the extent that its proper location in the future is yet-​to-​come. Baucom, in his turn, contests this conclusion and tries to use post-​humanist literature to update Chakrabarty, who in his earlier writings has argued that subaltern and postcolonial experiences can indeed become platforms for emancipatory projects.What should be accentuated, however, is less a methodological notion of History 4° that supplements Chakrabarty, which is what Baucom suggests, than a rethinking of the political towards a politics of the Anthropo-​ob(S) cene of the present.

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The necessary tasks lie in developing situated accounts of struggles against conditions of exclusion. But beyond that, we must also build toward re-​launching the political performativity of subaltern experiences, which lies at the centre of postcolonial theory and its epistemological and political preoccupations. Occupied with the questions of temporality and scale, the epistemological translations among different forms of knowledge-​production, and the location of dissensual politics across scenes of disruption in varied geographies and ecologies, such as a desert, a street, a store, or a shop floor, “the postcolonial” remains a radical theoretical source for proper politics in the here and now.

Notes 1 Based on official reports from medical examiners, county sheriffs, and border patrols, Humane Borders, ​a US-​based organization founded in 2000, ​has created maps of where 2269 migrants died in the Sonora desert between October 1, 1999 and March 28, 2012. Based on the maps, the organization has placed water stations in the desert to help migrants survive and it has proposed where to place cell phone masts to increase coverage for migrants to make emergency calls. See www.humaneborders.org and, for maps, https://​ dabrownstein.files.wordpress.com/​2013/​08/​migrant-​deaths-​and-​water-​stations-​1999–​ 2012.jpg. Accessed May 20, 2018. 2 We have chosen to write the concept in upper case for consistency with the rest of the book. For references on its history, see Chapter 2 in this volume. 3 We have chosen to use the term postcolonial since it is the term used in the debate between Baucom and Chakrabarty, which is the debate we use as the entry point to our discussion. However, we are sensitive to the critiques of both Anne McClintock (1992) and Gayatri Spivak (1988) of the widely employed term of postcolonial theory. Quite early McClintock adequately exposed how postcolonial theory problematically re-​centred global history around the single rubric of European colonialism, granting it the site of proper history (the rest being pre or post) and subordinating all other differences to their positionality vis-​à-​vis a colonial order that was declared dead despite continual forms of economic dependency, new forms of postcolonial US imperialism, and remaining forms of settler colonialism (as in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory or US occupation of Puerto Rico). An alternative term for us, with some modifications, could have been decoloniality, see for instance Maldonado-​Torres (2006). 4 We take inspiration from the courageous effort of these women at defying today’s global apartheid through their migratory strategies.We also acknowledge our privileged position and we are by no means saying that we are speaking for these women. Our responsibility in this chapter lies in departing from their location to launch a political reading of how globalization, urbanization, and ecological crisis are intertwined. 5 See other chapters of this book, in particular Chapters 1 and 2. 6 Note that Chakrabarty states that he never used the word “species-​being” but only “species” as “I do not claim that a species can have a ‘being’ that becomes itself over time (as the young Marx suggested in his 1844 manuscripts)” (Chakrabarty 2014, 2–​3). 7 If Marx’s analytics of capital gave Chakrabarty the tools for reinterpreting History 1, and Heidegger’s hermeneutics of being gave him the tools for understanding History 2, it was the Subaltern Studies tradition, and more specifically Gayatri Spivak’s crucial contribution to it, that provided him with the most important political insight: that of reinterpreting the “standing fight” between the being of capital and the becoming of living labour, not in the

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form of a “dialectics of the other” but in that of a “constant interruption” (Chakrabarty 2000, 60ff.). 8 There is a revealing quote where Chakrabarty (2009, 199) honestly states that in spite of all his readings in “theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-​five years,” he had not received the intellectual tools to confront the idea that humanity could be a geological force. 9 Baucom’s connotation is History 4°, i.e. history four degrees, which is in reference to the average number of degrees Celsius that the planet could heat up due to climate change. 10 Marx’s “Hic Rhodus, hic salta!” is a version of Hegel’s translations of the Greek maxim from Aesop’s fable of a boasting athlete. Marx adds quickly in German, “Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!”, which is not really a translation but a spin on Hegel’s idea that when overwhelmed by the shear enormousness of their task, people do not act “until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Here is the rose, dance here!” (Chapter 1 in Marx 1963 [1852]). 11 It is not the case that to deny the universality of scientific language, and to contest the position of authority that it derives from occupying and reproducing such locus of enunciation in the current hierarchical organization of knowledge, is in any way equivalent with denying climate change. Such a risk, notwithstanding, might be one of the motivating forces in many uncritical defences of scientific knowledge and in relation to climate change in particular. 12 As Young (2012, 24) argues, “indigenous activism uses a whole set of paradigms that do not fit easily with postcolonial presuppositions and theories—​for example, ideas of the sacred and attachment to ancestral land. This disjunction, however, only illustrates the degree to which there has never been a unitary postcolonial theory—​the right of return to sacred or ancestral land, for example, espoused by indigenous groups in Australia or the Palestinian people, never fitted easily with the postmodern Caribbean celebration of delocalised hybrid identities.” One should also keep in mind that it is through these forms of knowledge that Baucom suggests History 3 as a more expansive form of History 2, able to accommodate the scales of geophysical agency characteristic of the Anthropocene. See also von Heland and Sörlin (2012), who used the screen play Avatar to stage the contestation and ontological politics between Western science and indigenous forms of knowledge in relation to climate change and so-called “planetary boundaries.” 13 There is no space here to develop how science, in various ways has increasingly been wedded to neoliberalism. A balanced and historically grounded account is given by Moore et al. (2011) who show how industrial-​capitalist interest has since the 1970s increased its influence over science as a “quasi-​autonomous” field. This includes how the advent of a knowledge economy pushed forward an “academic capitalism,” a view of universities as capitalist productive units with increasing use of business related managerial procedures to steer academic departments. But also the far-​reaching tendency of breaking down public policy in narrower and more expert-​laden fields. This has pushed forward what Jürgen Habermas as early as 1970 called a “scientization” in politics that involved an increasing orientation of state actors “to strictly scientific recommendations in the exercise of their public functions” (Habermas 1970, 62), what later authors explored as “New Public Management” (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). Politically this “scientization” and “expertization” have placed the management and decision-​making of public concerns, both environmental or social, outside of democratic people-​elected structures. Broader-​based issues of justice or equality, which tend to place social groups and classes in agonistic relation to each other, have been replaced (within these narrower fields) with terms such as efficiency, accountability, and measurability, terms that are not only framed by scientific experts, but

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that can only also be answered by them, leading to an increasing dependency on “experts.” While Moore et al. (2011) show how social movements have been able to exploit some of the deliberative arenas that have emerged as an effect, this tactic is still conditioned broadly by terms set by experts. Erik Swyngedouw (2009) takes New Public Management as a hallmark of the consolidation of what he refers to as “post-​political arrangements,” which “runs parallel to the rise of a neoliberal governmentality that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic management” (Swyngedouw 2009, 604; for applied analysis, see e.g. Ernstson and Sörlin (2013) on “ecosystem services,” and von Heland and Sörlin (2012) on “planetary boundaries”). For us here, it means that to proclaim that agency has abandoned the humans, while simultaneously gesturing that the interpretation of our situation lies primarily in the hands of scientists, should be viewed within a context of a deepening scientization of our public and people-​elected agencies, something which quite surprisingly, neither Chakrabarty nor Baucom reflects upon. 14 Arendt (1998), based on Aristotle’s distinction between poiesis and praxis, distinguished three ontological modes of being—​action, work, and labour. Labour refers to the organic reproducibility of the human body and work to the artificial fabrication of a world capable of housing that human body. Action, which was the space of politics, refers to the artificial invention of a “space of appearance,” where humans in the plural were able to collectively and agonistically co-​create their symbolic identities in shared actions and discourses. Chakrabarty in turn drew upon Heidegger to identify his politics of difference, namely the distinction between humans’ relationships towards their tools. Naming them History 1 and History 2, he identified the political with the conflictive interaction between the instrumental and objectified way of using tools (as in the factory) on the one hand, and the everyday and pre-​analytical ways of using them on the other hand, as in the “intimate and mutually productive relationship between one’s very particular musical ear and particular forms of music” (Chakrabarty 2000, 68). Like Chakrabarty,  Virno (2004) also problematized Marx’s view of the musician as representing “unproductive labour.” He linked the political and the social through the image of the virtuosity of labour, which undoes the Arendtian ontological separation between action, work, and labour that was considered no longer tenable under postFordist conditions of capitalist accumulation. While Arendt, Chakrabarty, and Virno all invest in the performativity of politics, they depart from identifiable ontological modes of being, which Rancière’s notion of politics breaks with. 15 There are other post-​foundational political thinkers, although with important differences (Marchart 2007). 16 This clarifies how “new materialism” and object-​oriented ontologies, which Baucom draws upon, work to cancel in certain instances the political in deeply problematic ways. For further treatment of this, see Chapter 2 of this volume, which show how object-​ oriented ontologies run the risk of disavowing proper politics.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baucom, Ian. 2014. “History 4°: Postcolonial Method and Anthropocene Time.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1(1): 123–​42. Bennet, Jill. 2013. “Earthling, Now and Forever?” In Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse, and Reg Beatty, 245–​46. New York: Punctum Books.

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Bhabha, Homi K. 2008. “Notes on Globalization and Ambivalence.” In Cultural Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity and Innovation, edited by David Held and Henrietta L. Moore, 39–​40. Oxford: Oneworld. Cacho, Lisa Marie. 2012. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press. Camacho, David E., ed. 1998. Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles: Race, Class and the Environment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35(2): 197–​222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2012. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History 43(1): 1–​18. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2014. “Baucom’s Critique: A Brief Response.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1(2): 245–​51. Crutzen, Paul and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “Have We Entered the ‘Anthropocene’?” International Geosphere-​ Biosphere Programme Global Change Magazine Newsletter 41(17). Accessed October 11, 2018. www.igbp.net/​news/​opinion/​opinion/​haveweenteredthea nthropocene.5.d8b4c3c12bf3be638a8000578.html. Dibley, Ben. 2012. “ ‘Nature Is Us’: The Anthropocene and Species-​Being.” Transformations 21:  1–​20. Edelman, Lee. 2007. “Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3): 469–​76. Ernstson, Henrik and Sverker Sörlin. 2013. “Ecosystem Services as Technology of Globalization: On Articulating Values in Urban Nature.” Ecological Economics 86: 274–​84. Genova, Nicholas de, and Nathalie Peutz. 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1970. Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harman, Graham. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re:press. Heland, Jacob von and Sverker Sörlin. 2012. “Works of Doubt and Leaps of Faith: An Augustinian Challenge to Planetary Boundaries.” Journal for the Study of Nature, Religion, and Culture 6(2): 151–​75. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon and Schuster. McClintock, Anne. 1992. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism’.” Social Text 31/​32:  84–​98. Maldonado-​Torres, Nelson. 2006.“Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn.” Radical Philosophy Review 9(2): 111–​39. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-​foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marx, Karl. 1963 [1852]. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1978. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In The Marx-​Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 66–​125. London: W.W. Norton & Company. Moore, Kelly, Daniel Lee Kleinman, David Hess, and Scott Frickel. 2011.“Science and Neoliberal Globalization: A Political Sociological Approach.” Theory and Society 40(5): 505–​32. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Pollitt, Christopher, and Geert Bouckaert. 2011. Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis: New Public Management, Governance, and the Neo-​Weberian State. 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Sachs, Jeffrey. 2008. Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. New York: Penguin. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 24–​ 28. London: Macmillan. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2009. “The Antinomies of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental Production.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(3): 601–​20. Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Young, Robert, J.C. 2012. “Postcolonial Remains.” New Literary History 43: 19–​42.

PART II

The situated

5 POLITICAL ECOLOGIES OF DISPOSSESSION AND ANTICORRUPTION A radical politics for the Anthropocene? Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi

Introduction In his critique of what he calls the “anti-​politics” of the “neoliberal Anthropocene,” Jedidiah Purdy (2015, 49) suggests that what we make of the Anthropocene imaginary—​one that is increasingly dominant in global culture—​is an unavoidably political question. For the Earth scientists who coined it, the term “Anthropocene” marks a new era in which human action on the Earth has been so dramatic that humanity itself (the “anthropos”) must be considered a geological force in its own right (Crutzen 2002). As critics have pointed out, such musings would not be a problem if they were restricted to the academic conversations of geologists and Earth scientists. However, the challenge arises when the “Anthropocene” and its various assumptions are taken as statement of fact—​as a prescriptive framework for action—​rather than merely as a slogan for an age of environmental change (Hartley 2015; Purdy 2015). Taking the Anthropocene as a statement of fact eviscerates the horizon of politics for multiple reasons, two of which are salient for the argument of this paper. First, in the Anthropocene discourse, faceless human forces (“urbanization,”  “population growth,” “technological advancement,” etc.) starting from the Industrial Revolution are assumed as key drivers of environmental change. Such a teleological “black box” version of history masks specific—​and much longer, as Jason Moore (2015) argues—​lineages of accumulation, violence, and dispossession that were, and continue to be, core to capital–​nature relations. Second, in suggesting that an amorphous “anthropos” has been responsible for environmental change, the Anthropocene narrative paints a “we’re all in this together” picture as if particular social groups are not more or less vulnerable to—​and others are not more or less culpable for—​environmental destruction. For Purdy (2015, 49), the neoliberal Anthropocene is thus a state of affairs that is “implicitly committed to man-​ made ecologies that amplify existing inequality.” Questions of power and political

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economy invariably get written out of the mainstream Anthropocenic account of environmental transformation. This chapter writes against dominant and post-​political Anthropocene framings. Instead, it asks what kind of politics we should imagine for the Anthropocene, particularly in the urban context where struggles are increasingly being staged against wealth-​amassing environmental and resource usurpations (Özkaynak et al. 2015). Like Purdy, we do not assume that a taken-​for-​g ranted notion of “democracy” as inherently good must be the solution to the Anthropocene’s apolitical impasse. As radical political theorist Alain Badiou has argued, the promoters of liberal democratic capitalism posit that everything about democracy is “good,” taking as self-​ evident everything outside of democracy as “evil”: We are made to believe that the global spread of capitalism and what gets called “democracy” is the dream of all humanity. We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian—​where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone—​that is presented to us as ideal. Badiou (2001, no page number) If, then, as Purdy (2015, 271) states in his conclusion, in the age of the Anthropocene we must craft “a democracy less beholden to money,” then what would such a politics look like? In this chapter, we critically evaluate the emergence of urban environmental politics in India centred on anticorruption—​in many ways, as we argue here, a political discourse and strategy for crafting “a democracy less beholden to money.” Progressive anticorruption discourse and mobilizations do not narrowly equate corruption with individual acts of bribery or the misdemeanours of the poor and lower level state actors—​a conceptualization long advanced by middle-​class and elite groups as well as the policy literature on corruption. “Corruption,” as we discovered through critical ethnographic research on grassroots mobilizations over the last decade in Bangalore and Mumbai, is a discourse that names the immoral “nexus” between the state and capital, one that is hijacking the “public interest.” Corruption discourse articulates discontent over a number of wealth amassing structural relations that are seen as immoral, even if they are not always illegal. We are particularly interested in anticorruption mobilizations surrounding “wetland grabs,” or the usurpation of urban wetlands by state and private actors for real estate profits at the expense of a number of environmental and social outcomes, including increased flood risk, loss of housing, and loss of public space. We ask: do anticorruption politics against wetland grabs present a radical politics for the Anthropocene? Do new anticorruption politics “performatively stage equality, a procedure that simultaneously makes visible the ‘wrong’ of the given situation” (Swyngedouw 2011, 374)? Can the politics of the Anthropocene be more than simply “an opiate for the masses” (ibid.)? Ultimately, we argue that anticorruption discourse’s greatest promise is that it holds the potential to unmask unethical and flexible urban governance regimes

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under advanced capitalism. By “flexible governance regimes,” we mean the blurring of legal and extra-​legal modalities of rule—​for example the bending of zoning regulations, the reclassification of land use designations, and the auctioning off of public resources to private actors at a pittance—​to facilitate privatization. In this respect, anticorruption discourse lays bare the nefarious mechanisms that state and private actors (who themselves are blurred entities) use to consolidate resources. But whether such anticorruption campaigns are genuinely emancipatory in the sense of advancing egalitarian and redistributive agendas depends largely on whether different grassroots actors can perform beyond their narrow class, caste, ethnic, religious, and other situated interests. As such, anticorruption politics are an open-​ended and constantly shifting political, moral, and discursive terrain in which both emancipatory and regressive tendencies are embedded. Going forward, an important research agenda for critical social scientists is to appraise the various permutations of anticorruption politics transpiring across urban contexts. In the next section, we expand on our theoretical framework of corruption and the flexible governance of urban natures. Like mainstream Anthropocene narratives, mainstream corruption narratives are problematic in their assumptions and prescriptions. We discuss some problematic aspects of mainstream framings before turning to critical theories that emphasize corruption as a shifting moral-​ discursive terrain rather than a fixed attribute of underdeveloped societies. Next, to situate new corruption discourse in our two cities, we turn to the literature on urban informality, contending that such literature can usefully be brought into conversation with empirical work on the “flexible governance” of nature in cities of the global South on which little exists in the political-​ecological literature.We find that flexible modes of governing nature beyond “formal” mechanisms lie not outside of capitalism, but are fundamental to the specific ways in which capital encloses nature. Having done that, we turn to our empirical research on wetland grabs in Bangalore and Mumbai, discussing the informalities that have made possible a series of wealth-​ amassing wetland-​usurping collusions.We discuss anticorruption mobilizations that have challenged these wetland grabs, and also evaluate their emancipatory potential. Finally, we end by reflecting on how such research can enrich urban political ecology’s contributions to a radical politics for the Anthropocene.

Theories of corruption Much like mainstream Anthropocene framings, mainstream corruption framings delimit problems in particular ways so as to render them amenable to technocratic and market-​based fixes. By the late 1990s, a new consensus had emerged on corruption. As Johnston (2005, 6) puts it, this consensus treated: corruption mostly as bribery by the state, and as both effect and cause of incomplete, uneven, or ineffective economic liberalization, with the state judged primarily in terms of the extent to which it aids or impedes market progress.

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Tracing the epistemology of the new consensus, Wedel (2012) argues that it was built on Cold War-​era modernization theory—​an evolutionary understanding of the world that as states transition from “traditional” to “modern” democratic societies, they develop more clearly demarcated public and private spheres. The new consensus reinforced this evolutionary view, holding that corruption was “one of the foremost problems in the developing world” (Klitgaard 1988, x). Plagued by problems of underdevelopment and absent “a formal separation between the state and the rest of society,” officials there “use their position of public trust for private gain” (Rose-​Ackerman 1996, 365). The work of economists and political scientists working in this tradition, notably Klitgaard and Rose-​Ackerman, heavily influenced the World Bank’s (1997, 7) definition of corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain.” Because of these intellectual lineages, corruption came to be equated with discrete acts of public sector bribery and individualized venality largely in the developing world. It followed from this problem framing that the solution to corruption was market-​ oriented reform so as to reduce opportunities for payoffs to public officials—​a suggestion that no doubt animated “good governance” reforms in the 1990s. Put bluntly, “anticorruption strategies should focus on policies such as reducing the role of government in the economy” (Rose-​Ackerman 1996). That the anticorruption “industry”—​an assemblage of development actors, business elites, and attractive metrics coding the developing world as “corrupt” (Sampson 2010)—​flourished with the rollout of neoliberal reforms across the world is no coincidence: many of the same actors orchestrating macroeconomic adjustment, liberalization, and the downsizing of the public sector in post-​socialist and developing states were also at the helm of anticorruption programmes (Brown and Cloke 2004; Hindess 2005). Three decades on, the results of the anticorruption industry are dubious. Geographers Brown and Cloke (2005) report, for instance, that market-​driven anticorruption efforts in Nicaragua in the late 1980s provided sources of patronage for the existing clientelistic political system. A failure to come to grips with the country’s complex political culture—​itself a legacy of Cold War geopolitics—​ resulted in the exacerbation of some of the worst elements of Nicaragua’s political landscape. More generally, critical scholars have lamented that the corruption consensus has stunted scholarly and policy inquiry into the subject along two related lines, both of which are crucial for the contribution we seek to make here. First, without resorting to cultural relativism, anthropologists have nevertheless argued that when various illegible practices in postcolonial and postsocialist polities are named as “corruption” a priori—​i.e. without carefully examining the cultural, moral, and historical specificity of those practices—​ we fundamentally misread actually existing modes of rule, exchange, and sociality in most of the world (Gupta 1995; Olivier de Sardan 1999; Jeffrey 2010; Jeffrey and Young 2014). Actually existing modes of sociality comprise what J.P. Olivier de Sardan (1999) has usefully referred to as a “corruption complex.” The corruption complex includes practices such as improvisation, informal exchange, bribery, nepotism, gift giving, and influence peddling that bear a family resemblance to each other but might not

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actually constitute immoral behaviour in the eyes of the perpetrator. In other words, what gets called corruption is contingent, determined more or less by the moral barometer and social positionality of the beholder, and the political stakes of the moment, rather than outsider-​imposed definitions. Second, critical corruption theorists have called for carefully examining practices that might not otherwise be construed as “corruption” but that are certainly perceived by ordinary people as unjust, dispossessing, and downright immoral. Against the “othering” tendency of mainstream approaches (in which corruption is equated with illegality and construed as endemic to the developing world), scholars have shown corruption to be alive and well in the North, though often cloaked in a veneer of legality (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Wedel 2012). This is true for a vast number of corporate transactions, campaign financing strategies, predatory lending, and tax evasions enabled in and by the West, for instance; what anthropologist Wedel (2012) refers to as “legal” corruption. Legal corruption, in which insider elites, officials, bankers, and financiers assume roles that fuse state and private sectors, is in fact rarely named as “corruption” unless a moment of crisis erupts, or the political stakes are high, as we have seen since 2016 in the United States’ election season (Krugman 2002; Teachout 2014; Reich 2015). In sum, critical scholarship has argued that what gets called “corruption” might not in fact be seen as “corruption,” whereas what does not get called corruption might very well be understood as “corruption” by situated actors. What these two critical bodies of literature reveal for our purposes is that “corruption” is indeed a malleable and shifting discursive field subject to politically strategic interpretations. In India, the activities of the poor—​for instance, settling informally on government land or a wetland, or paying petty bribes for housing and water, or election-​time gift giving—​get called “corruption” by elites, whereas the nefarious high-​end real estate deals and backdoor transactions (legal or illegal) of the wealthy do not (Björkman 2014). Why, then, in this moment has there been an inversion of corruption discourse in which lower income groups are referring to wealthy real estate grabs that combine both legal and extra-​legal mechanisms as “corruption”? To better understand and situate this emergent discourse, we turn to the critical literature on urban informality, bringing it to bear on urban natures.

Informality and the flexible governance of urban natures Urban informality is everywhere. We see informality in the sprawling “unauthorized layouts” at Bangalore’s outskirts where sewage winds its way through open drains and water is delivered by tractors. We see informality in the dense “slum” settlements of Mumbai tucked under towering gated apartment complexes that may themselves be informal.We see informality in the gleaming, glass-​faced luxury mall that violates building and environmental codes. We see informality in the illegible relationships between water tanker owners, state water board employees, and municipal councillors. And we see informality in the development of ultra-​luxurious real estate on sensitive wetlands (discussed in this chapter). As Roy (2009) has noted,

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informality is best seen as a flexible and deregulated mode of metropolitan development rather than a specific outcome which, more often than not, is collapsed with the habits and habitats of the poor. Rather than sitting outside of legal protocols or official state apparatuses, and rather than merely being equivalent to the politics of the poor, informality is the selective application of planning and governance regimes. In one moment vulnerable groups may be protected by informality; in another they may be exploited by it. In one moment, particular groups may lambast informality; in another they may benefit from it. For our purposes, informality is also the discretionary policing and disciplining of urban development—​and, implicitly, the various “urban natures” that are enrolled in such development. In the simplest terms, informality is core to actually existing urban political economy. The inherent flexibility of informality finds its roots deep in colonial regimes of indirect rule across vast swathes of the world wherein Europeans and native elites were governed via liberal modalities, while poorer native populations were governed via local despots and informal sovereigns (Mamdani 1996; Hansen and Stepputat 2006). More recently, flexible governance has been unabashedly exploited by elite interests to the detriment of the poor. While, for instance, an unauthorized “encroachment” inhabited by lower class groups might be penalized, elite informality might go unquestioned (Weinstein 2008; Roy 2009; Ghertner 2010). While slums on lake banks might be evicted in the name of flood protection, high-​r ise apartment complexes on those same lake banks might obtain court stay orders. And while the evicted poor are bussed out to the peripheries of the city without assurance of livelihood or transit, the wealthy make a killing on nefarious real estate deals in former slum areas. In other words, flexible governance is facilitating what David Harvey (2008) has called “accumulation by dispossession.” In his many writings, Harvey has suggested that the predatory actions of capital seeking new markets and frontiers for growth is a category of extractive political economy that he calls “accumulation by dispossession” (ABD) to highlight its continuous character. Harvey has reworked his theory of ABD to shed light on the urban dimensions of extraction, drawing commonalities between, for instance, the sub-​prime mortgage crisis in American city regions and slum evictions in Mumbai (Harvey 2008; Banerjee-​Guha 2010). The focus of Harvey’s work has not been on the “extra-​economic” mechanisms undergirding ABD, the use of force, violence, and extra-​legal measures, though he does mention the importance of these via Luxemburg’s (1968) writing. But empirically grounded scholarship on Indian cities drawing on Harvey has further reworked ABD to account for the prevalence of extra-​economic logics. That is, recent urban transformations have taken place not solely through “normal” economic-​cum-​legal logics (e.g. the normal functioning of the market and liberal law), but also through a variety of extra-​legal modalities of land usurpations (e.g. strong arm force, eminent domain protocols that justify land appropriation, court-​ordered clearance of slums, and elite-​oriented developments that flout zoning designations). The literature on Indian cities has thus deepened ABD empirically to discuss urban transformations that cannot be attributed to

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normal economic drivers like gentrification (Baviskar and Gidwani 2011; Ghertner 2014; Doshi 2015). We find this empirical grounding of ABD, together with an expansive reading of urban informality, invaluable for better understanding the flexible governance surrounding wetland grabs in Bangalore and Mumbai. Much of the political-​ ecological literature has focused on the “formal” political-​economic transformations under late capitalism that have enclosed and commodified urban natures (McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Swyngedouw 2005; Heynen et al. 2006; Loftus 2006)—​though not without recognizing the “uncooperativeness” of nature’s materiality (Bakker 2004; Bakker and Bridge 2006). Few contributions in this lineage have drawn out the informal, extra-​legal, and flexible modes of governance that lie not outside of capitalism but are fundamental to the specific ways in which capital encloses nature. This lacuna is part of a more general shortcoming that Ranganathan (2014a) has observed in political-​ecological scholarship around the lack of robust theorization of the postcolonial state and its heterogeneity and complexity, particularly in societies marked by a long history of postcolonial colonial rule and hybrid regimes of government (for exceptions see Anand 2011; 2015). We seek to bring the empirically oriented literature on ABD and the postcolonial literature on urban informality to bear on the enclosure of wetlands in Mumbai and Bangalore. As we will show below, wetland grabs have been facilitated through a series of legally dubious manipulations that run the spectrum from formal to informal, and they are also relentlessly accumulationist and dispossession producing. It is the combination of elite informality and the dispossession it produces that is being challenged on ethical grounds as “corruption.” In the next section, we first focus on the first stages of development of a high-​ end special economic zone on Bangalore’s most sensitive and largest wetland chain. We next turn to a fully completed development known as the Bandra-​ Kurla Complex in Mumbai.

Wetland grabs and contestations in Bangalore and Mumbai Bangalore’s Mantri Techzone You cannot build an industry at the cost of public and environment. [The] SEZ is not more important than the lake. Justice Subhash Adi1 Justice Subhash Adi is a stern-​looking moustachioed lawyer with a penchant for sniffing out rot. He is the deputy convener for the Karnataka Lokayukta, a state-​ level ombudsman charged with investigating public grievances against corruption. In December 2013, Adi held a meeting to look into activist charges of corruption against an 32-​hectare real estate project (about three times the size of Google’s headquarters in California), the “Mantri Techzone,” ostensibly a “Special Economic

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Zone” (SEZ), being built on the marshy land connecting two of Bangalore’s largest wetlands, the Bellandur and Agara lakes. The activists, mainly progressive middle-​ class residents of south Bangalore, had charged various government departments for permitting the project without environmental and utility clearances and in contravention of land use designations. Adding fuel to activist claims was a damning report by prominent ecologists (commissioned by the activists themselves) from the Indian Institute of Science (Ramachandra et al. 2013). The report, titled “Conservation of Bellandur Wetlands: Obligation of Decision Makers to Ensure Intergenerational Equity,” referred to the SEZ real estate development as an “ecological disaster,” pinpointing, in particular, its alteration of storm water channels and grave threat to flooding throughout the city (the city has suffered from chronic flooding over the last decade). Multiple debates erupted at the meeting. Who gave permission for the project, now rapidly in the construction phase? Was the wetland—​ostensibly, a public resource—​acquired legally? If so, how was that even possible? How can the project be referred to as an “SEZ,” a title once reserved for employment-​generating industrial projects benefiting the “public interest,” when this development is, in fact, a glitzy real estate venture with a multi-​level car park (for 17,000 cars), technology back offices, private hospitals, malls, luxury hotels, and condominium complexes? Why did construction commence despite lack of clearances? Most poignant was Adi’s admonition about the development coming at the “cost of public and environment.” High-​end real estate is the frontier for capitalist development in India today. It not only racks up the largest profit margin of any sector, but since the liberalization of India’s economy in the 1990s, real estate has also seen substantial foreign investment. To understand the genesis of this shady SEZ project, we must go back to an “investor meet” in 2000, an event held every so often to get international investors, developers, and land acquisition agents in the same chandelier-​clad room. In her ethnographic work, Searle (2014, 63) describes an investor meet as “a courting ritual between foreign capital and Indian elites.” In 2000, precisely such a courting ritual brought the Dubai-​based property development firm, ETA Star, together with Indian land banking giant Century Real Estate, today owner of one of the largest land banks in the city.2 According to Ranganathan’s interviews with the activists contesting the project, at the 2000 investor meet, those vying for the SEZ project must have “already been eying the wetland” and successfully coaxed the state land acquisition agency, the Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board (KIADB), to allot it to them at a “throwaway price,” which the agency eventually did. But was the land (really wetland) available for allotment and sale in the first place? The answer to this question is shrouded in murky details, but forms the crux of the theoretical point we are trying to make here about the flexible governance of urban natures and the accumulation and dispossession entailed. This project, like the Mumbai one we discuss below, is a microcosm of the conjoined processes of ABD, flexible governance, and enclosure of nature we seek to describe. The wetland originally belonged to farmers and was classified as agricultural land.3 When

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the state acquired the land through eminent domain, it compensated the farmers to some degree, though the extent to which the compensation was fair is not fully known (and judging by the history of compensations to farmers for SEZ projects, was likely not to have been). Eventually, the land was turned over for private profit because, according to KIADB state agents, their job is “to promote industry at all costs.” KIADB agents thus initiated a sale amounting to a pittance to the real estate giants. A few years later, when construction had not begun as yet, the master-​ planning agency for the city, the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), began to consider the most appropriate land use reclassification for the wetland. After several alterations, including first classifying it as a “protected,” no-​development valley zone in 2005, the BDA ultimately settled on the category “sensitive residential land” in 2007 which allows real estate development under certain circumstances. Herein lies the rub. As an investigative journalist put it,“the BDA’s actions cannot be termed ‘illegal’…” but there is speculation that the BDA’s random change in land classification to “accommodate the already approved project” (Navya 2013b). This is the crux of what we are calling the flexible governance of urban natures: state agents in collusion with private real estate developers are increasingly manipulating legal regimes so as to make capital accumulation eminently possible. This is not illegal practice as the journalist points out (and thus raises the interesting question of why, then, it is being prosecuted in an anticorruption court, which we take up here). But this is what Roy (2009, 84) refers to as “a calculated informality” that “exists at the very heart of the state and is an integral part of the territorial practices of the state power.” In addition to calculated informality shrouding the project, there were a series of more blatant violations that added fuel to the anticorruption framing. Most egregious was the water consumption violation. The water requirement for the project is immense, amounting to more water than currently consumed by a neighbouring ward comprising some 35,000 residents. Large parts of Bangalore, particularly poorer areas, already suffer from grossly inadequate official water supply and must instead depend on a variety of water tankers, borewells, and bottled water options. The developer for the SEZ project was meant to have received “environmental clearance” for various environmental impacts, including for water, and to do this, it was supposed to have received clearance from the state water board, the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB). Right to Information petitions filed by journalists and activists, revealed, however, that the developer submitted fraudulent calculations (Navya 2013a). It submitted an estimate for only a fraction (less than a tenth) of its water requirement. In other words, it deliberately withheld information on the project’s total water requirement, using a much smaller amount to seek environmental clearance. Again, journalists and activists speculate that environmental clearance officers, too, knowingly granted clearances immorally despite the absurdity of this so-​called water calculation. In addition to the water issue, a number of other environmental “irregularities” have come to light, including the project’s failure to leave a buffer zone separating it from a major storm water drain, alteration of the topography of the area, and failure to get permission to start

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building residential complexes from the elected city government. In short, the project is replete with both technically “legal” manipulations, as well as unlawful and unauthorized manoeuvres. As one activist interviewed put it: the project “shouts scam!” at every turn. Following on the heels of a series of negative pronouncements on the project, and incensed at government inaction, in early 2014 tens of thousands of residents in southeast Bangalore took to the streets to protest the project, garnering support from anticorruption coalitions across the city. Among other demands, activists insisted that the state rein in the corruption of the state-​developer nexus and the widespread abuse of corporate power in the grabbing of the city’s wetlands. Press coverage of the protest reported: “The residents feel the project has displayed scant respect for laws, by violating the zoning regulations and presenting untruth to get specific clearances” (Shree 2014). In a talk show on the local Kannada television station TV9 in the days following the protest, participants were invited to discuss their anti-​SEZ campaign and the protest they organized.4 On TV, one participant lamented that this case revealed the “reach of the building lobby” and the “rot in the system.” Another made a comparison with national anticorruption politics: If Arvind Kejriwal [the leader of the Delhi-​based Aam Admi anticorruption party] has said that Mukesh Ambani [a natural gas tycoon] is running the government of India, then this is a case where builders are running the government of Bangalore! M. Rao on TV9, March 25, 2014 Crucially, these activists were not willing to simply decry lower level government officers and politicians as “corrupt” as urban elites so often do in India. On the contrary, one narrated a story of an “honest and upright” lower level police officer who stood his ground in the face of pressuring by the building lobby to halt the protest. “These guys, [referring to the corporate executives behind the project] are using tactics better suited for the gutter than the board room,” one of the activists reflected during the talk show. The most significant anticorruption action taken by activists was the filing of a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) against the SEZ.5 After detailing the various environmental infractions of the SEZ, the official PIL petition,6 which Ranganathan obtained a copy of in 2014, makes its accusation in no uncertain terms: It is submitted that in the name and garb of industrialization, agricultural lands are being acquired by State agencies and thereafter, leased and/​or sold for real estate purposes. [This is] a fraud on power. As one activist explained further, the idea of “fraud on power” was specifically used to refer to “a bunch of guys who have bypassed the law or bent the law or made the law at every opportunity.” Reflecting about the economic destruction wrought by the project, the activist went on:

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The original mandate [in such projects] was to acquire land for industrial purposes that would lead to employment on a mass scale. Now this particular project would not lead to any employment in any way, shape, or form.7 The activist’s critique is one that has also been reported in scholarly accounts (Levien 2012); indeed, India’s new landscape of real estate development departs significantly from earlier periods in which wide employment generation was seen as a key goal. Today, only a select minority enjoys the benefits of land development. Here, then, is an attempt by the activists to articulate a critique of a system beholden to money. As a result of the PIL and another court case filed in the National Green Tribunal (a national court that prosecutes environmental crimes), the developers involved in the Mantri Techzone project were fined with penalties amounting to Rs. 117 crore (~$19 million). While this is a temporary victory, it is not clear whether the project will continue as planned: the project has not been halted completely; rather, the Tribunal has temporarily stayed construction on the project until the developer obtains fresh environmental clearances (Shree 2016). In light of these outcomes—​and the imaginations, discourses, and strategies used to achieve them—​what is the radical potential of such anticorruption politics? In many ways, the discourses we observed in this case seek to “make visible the ‘wrong’ of a given situation” (Swyngedouw 2011) by exposing the specific modalities of flexible governance that state and real estate actors exploit to usurp public resources. As we showed here, anticorruption discourse is particularly powerful in laying bare the “nexus” that is driving the flexible governance of urban nature. This finding is consistent with research by Kamath and Vijayabaskar (2014, 166), which suggests that middle-​class groups in Bangalore find “common cause in mobilizing against the collusion of the state with private developers in the name of environmental sustainability.” At the same time, it is also worth noting that anticorruption mobilizations by middle-​class groups are not always justice-​oriented per se. For instance, in this case, the target of critique has not been the loss of housing and livelihood for the poor, but rather the overall environmental and economic dangers Bangalore will face as a result of state-​developer collusions. That is, rather than being empathetic to the dispossession of the poor being wrought by this and other land grabs—​and the state-​led eviction drives that typically take place every few years—​anticorruption narratives by middle-​class groups in Bangalore seem to be targeting a broader erosion of the “public interest.” At the same time, some segments of the middle-​class—​particularly those who represent the lower and more informalized middle-​class that Ranganathan (2014b) has elsewhere called the “peripheralized middle class”—​are acutely aware of the hypocrisy inherent in policing the encroachments of lower class groups, while absolving elite informalities. Informal middle-​class residents identify a double standard. Lower income groups often get penalized (via hefty regularization penalties) for settling in “protected areas” or areas that are designated as ecologically sensitive, or for not getting the

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requisite permissions for their buildings even though their settlements are established out of necessity (there is a dire lack of housing options in the city). Yet, according to lower middle-​class narratives, it is the “black money fuelled nexus of politicians, government officials, developers and real estate agents” who are really guilty of encroachment. Thus, we see that while anticorruption discourse does not make redistributive demands, it nevertheless represents a critique of power that is not only more structural than mainstream anticorruption narratives, but also, at times, provides an opening to push for more egalitarian claims. In the following case, we discuss discourses leveraged by lower income traders and slum-​based groups against a luxury complex on Mumbai’s wetlands that exacerbated one of the worst flood disasters in the city.

Mumbai’s Bandra-​Kurla Complex Our second case is of a fully developed and vast commercial park, the Bandra-​Kurla Complex (BKC), spanning some 360 hectares of marshland (part of the Mithi River basin, adjacent to the Vakola Canal and Mahim Creek) in the centre of Mumbai. Developed over the past four decades to decongest pricey and overcrowded south Mumbai, the BKC area has seen significant growth of businesses and supporting transport infrastructures over the last 15 years as liberalization has spurred real estate markets (Nijman 2000). Today, BKC is home to numerous national and transnational corporate headquarters (including Dow, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, and Wockhardt), the Indian stock exchange, several government bureaucracies, 5-​star hotels, and special event grounds. The area plays a central role in ambitions to promote Mumbai as India’s premier finance capital. In a city where commercial office space rates are higher than Tapei, Seoul, and Sydney, and comparable to Singapore, the BKC represented a real estate bonanza for developers and lease-​derived funds for the State of Maharashtra. Mumbai has a long history of wetland and ocean reclamation that has led to the consolidation of seven islands into what is now metropolitan Mumbai. Vast tracts of marshes and mangroves—​natural “sponges” that prevent flooding—​have been destroyed over years of development and reclamation but especially intensely due to the concretization of the Bandra-​Kurla wetlands. A final straw that led to political-​ecological crisis came with the development of the G-​block of the BKC in the early 2000s as the key site for the state government’s International Financial Services Centre initiative. The area was filled-​in in violation of coastal protection protocols. As we saw above with the Bangalore case, such environmental violations are not uncommon in Indian cities especially for priority projects. Zoning and other laws are usually quietly adjusted after projects are completed. What brought the BKC’s violations to the spotlight, however, was the great flood of 2005. On July 26, 2005, just a few days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Mumbai suffered one of the worst floods in its history. A record-​breaking downpour of 944 mm within a 24-​hour period combined with the high tide to deluge the city. The worse affected areas were the Bandra, Kurla, and Kalina areas around

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the Mithi River basin where the BKC sits. Waterlogging devastated low-​lying slum settlements killing thousands and leaving many more homeless. In contrast to past disasters, it was not only the poor but also middle income groups that were affected as commuters and school children were stranded on site or on their way home, with several drowning in jam-​locked cars. The city’s lifeline trains halted, airports shut, arterial roads made impassable, and cell and other lines of communications cut. In the immediate aftermath, public outrage erupted at the dismal response of government agencies in taking life-​saving measures and rescuing and distributing much needed supplies to stranded populations (Anjaria 2006). Built up garbage, contaminated water supplies, and rotting carcasses threatened a public health crisis in the following weeks (Katakam, Bavadam and Bunsha 2005). The government’s much-​touted world city urban projects seeking to emulate the rapid development successes of Shanghai and Singapore fell flat as a number of theories on the human-​ made nature of the disaster bubbled up in popular and media discourses. Mired in opposition-​driven derision and a crisis of legitimacy, state officials scrambled to take “damage control” measures. One of the first major efforts focused on the so-​called slum “encroachments” located along the banks of the Mithi River. In other words, vulnerable groups provided the target of the flood-​ control offensive undertaken in the name of environmental protection. The state government claimed that solid wastes and sewerage dumped into the river by these settlements was the principal cause of waterlogging. A special task force of the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA), the Mithi River Development and Protection Authority (MRDPA), was established to implement an ambitious plan to “protect” the river by removing all structures and relocating residents and businesses on the eastern coastline. The “bourgeois environmentalist” pattern of blaming the lower classes for environmental problems is now a well-​documented phenomenon in Indian cities that is advanced by state violence (Baviskar 2003).Yet the fissures, contradictions, and contestations of such processes receive less attention. On May 16, 2006, government bulldozers descended on hundreds of structures along the banks of the river. Before completing the plan to remove 3600 structures located within 30 metres of the river’s banks, a court case and vigorous protests by occupants and supporting organizations ensued. Among the most active protestors were a group of shop owners, collectively known as the Kalina Merchants Welfare Association, who filed a suit against then MMRDA Commissioner, T. Chandrashekhar, known for his aggressive tactics of slum removal in various infrastructure projects. They complained that the demolition had proceeded without due process, highlighting, in particular, the MMRDA’s failure to provide adequate resettlement and rehabilitation. The MMRDA indicated a site for relocation 15 kilometres away on the fringes of the city in the Mandala area of an eastern suburb. Located along Mumbai’s mangrove-​lined coast, this eastern suburb is seen as the poorest ward in the city with very high concentrations of slums. Since 2005, it has also emerged as a resettlement ghetto

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for upwards of 60,000 households that have been displaced by various transport infrastructure projects. The shop owners complained that their livelihoods would be destroyed in this locale and demanded resettlement in a comparable nearby plot. The conflict corroborates recent observations that it is not just poor workers but also domestic and smaller scale “cottage” industries and informal economies that are being expulsed by the imperatives of corporate and finance capital (Sanyal 2007; Sassen 2014). Building on the grievances of individualized harm, the shop owners’ mobilization levelled a number of critiques that broadened understandings of dispossession and linked them to charges of corruption. For instance, the shop owners highlighted the fact that only one side of the river was being targeted for widening and clearance. The other side was spared, they argued, due to the commercial interest-​driven pressures of a locally elected official, already mired in corruption scams related to land grabbing and redevelopment in the area (Times News Network 2003). The Kalina merchants also yoked their corruption charges to citywide environmental harms including flood risks caused by the BKC and haphazard resettlement. In so doing, they highlighted a major hypocrisy of the Mithi River “cleanup strategy” of flood prevention. The merchants’ court petition contained several photos of the site chosen for resettlement, for instance, documenting truckloads of toxic silt and trash dug up from the Mithi River basin and dumped on the site to the fill in the marshlands and mangroves of the distant site. The Kalina Merchants also targeted the BKC and the MMRDA for reckless environmental endangerment of the city. In particular, the petition argued that the G-​block portion of the BKC (slated for the construction of Mumbai’s new International Financial Services Centre) violated coastal regulations by reclaiming land through narrowing and channelizing the Mithi River. Along with left-​leaning activists and journalists, they cited five independent expert studies that warned of the dangers of reclaiming land along the river for the BKC. The petition claimed that the MMRDA: deliberately suppressed these vital facts and reports … that clearly indicate irregular acts … [of the MMRDA] as the major cause of flooding instead making a scapegoat out of the poor people who were situated on the banks since decades.8 It is noteworthy here how, much like the Bangalore case, claims of environmental harm are stitched together with claims of corruption. And as above, the activists attempted to articulate a critique of a system beholden to money. To add fuel to the anticorruption charges, the lawyer, Raj Awasthi, who filed cases on behalf of the merchants, as well as corruption suits for evictees of other projects, was arrested in 2006 under false charges. The arrest galvanized contestations especially from the National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements, led by world-​renowned anti-​displacement activist, Medha Patkar. The Mithi River mobilization was soon yoked with other slum clearance struggles that year including a citywide slum

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demolition sweep and a World Bank funded project that was suspended due to irregularities and alleged corruption. Can we call this urban struggle radical? What the BKC case demonstrates is how a moment of converging dispossessions—​livelihood, housing, and environmental devastation—​produced contestations over elite-​biased modalities of urban accumulation and development. Much of these struggles are couched in a discourse of corruption that exposes hypocritical state practices of removing the encroachments of less powerful groups and advancing reclamations in terms of environmental preservation, while condoning the elite informalities of powerful groups. The shop owners’ struggle was successful to a certain degree; some have been resettled in a much closer locale while others continue to occupy the banks of the river and face periodic threats of eviction.Yet, while there are clear admonitions of elite developments and informalities and the various dispossessions they entail, it would be naïve to unequivocally endorse these movements as a radical politics for the Anthropocene. It has been difficult to sustain anti-​capitalist mobilizations and anti-​displacement coalitions. The BKC remains intact, with construction slowing only because economic downturns have depressed land values since its height in 2008. Still, struggles over urban land grabs and the dispossessing effects of slum redevelopment have rekindled a corruption-​inflected critique over BKC and other elite developments in Mumbai. Such mobilizations escalated from 2011 to 2014, a period of vigorous anticorruption activism throughout Indian cities, during which time activists again targeted the environmentally damaging irregularities, hypocrisies, and inequalities embedded in the BKC. As in Bangalore, the situated class and other positionalities of those contesting environmental harm and corruption are key. For instance, slums, although often homogenized as “poor,” are religiously, ethnically, and economically diverse and thriving cities in and of themselves. This means that not all who have a stake in the existence of the slum will be fighting for similar goals. Informal areas in Bangalore, which have fewer slums for historical reasons, but a great number of “unauthorized” layouts, are similarly diverse with a range of lower and middle-​income groups, not to mention linguistic, ethnic, religious, and economic diversity. Those who take up particular struggles against wetland grabbing are likely to be interested in advancing their individual interests, and not an overall pro-​egalitarian agenda of social housing or redistribution in the city. At the same time, it is worth paying attention to anticorruption politics especially because of the specific historical and geographic moment of crisis and political legitimacy, not just in India, but also in many other parts of the world. Here is a moment marked by an unparalleled concentration of land-​related wealth. Consideration of what Antonio Gramsci called the “terrain of the conjunctural”—​the coming-​together of social and political forces to establish hegemonic regimes and new opportunities for contestation—​is crucial; after all, fields (of corruption or otherwise) are not fixed but constantly shift, and are subject to moulding by myriad political, social, and economic pressures. In the conclusion to this chapter, we discuss the limits and potential of anticorruption politics as an antidote to the “post-​political” of the Anthropocene.

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Conclusion It is clear that environmental struggles are not simply “environmental,” amenable to being fixed by “green” and market-​led solutions. Cities across the world concentrate a great variety of urban natures, enrolled and produced through long political-​ economic and social histories of power and struggle. These urban natures, and the human systems they are intertwined with, are in peril.This is not because of faceless forces such as “urbanization” or “population growth,” but because of the specific ways in which resources are, and have been, inequitably exploited, commodified, and wasted. If as Rory Rowan (2014, 448) has argued: “the Anthropocene marks an occasion to return to fundamental questions of political thought, but within an expanded conceptual horizon produced by a new planetary circumstance,” then what might those contours of political thought be? We concur with Purdy that those contours of thought must attempt to reframe a democratic system “less beholden to money.” We have tried to show here that “anticorruption” is perhaps one step in this direction. Anticorruption is a critical stance that can be employed in progressive ways, as it has by groups across urban India to draw attention to the immorality of wetland grabs being perpetuated by blurred private and public elites and their remarkable ability to refashion and wield flexible governance regimes. In Bangalore, we showed through the case of the Mantri Techzone SEZ under construction on the Bellandur-​Agara wetlands that middle-​class activists are acutely tuned into the “fraud on power” mechanisms that real estate elites use to usurp wetlands. The case is being fought on anticorruption grounds and has made modest gains so far, particularly in the temporary court stay order on the SEZ. However, we also cautioned that the politics of such middle-​class groups are not “pro-​poor” per se in that they are not simultaneously articulating an agenda for social housing, equitable services, or land redistribution. What we can say for certain is anticorruption politics around wetland grabbing in Bangalore is powerful in laying bare the modalities of flexible governance and in articulating the hypocrisies inherent in penalizing the informal encroachments of the poor while absolving those of the wealthy. In Mumbai, we discussed the blatant ecological dispossession (in the form of flood risk) wrought by a mega-​commercial complex on the Bandra-​Kurla wetlands and banks of the Mithi River. The BKC, a visual signifier of Mumbai’s proclaimed status as India’s finance capital, has eroded the city’s flood buffering capacity, leading to its worst (and likely not last) flood disaster in 2005. Informal vendors fought the outright double standard that took hold in the aftermath of the flood: the sanctioning of BKC, a flood-​ inducing real estate behemoth and simultaneous eviction and resettlement of lower income settlements on the riverbank. These grassroots activists were successful insofar as they received an alternative, closer destination for resettlement and were able to maintain their transportation linkages and sources of livelihood. Again, though, it would be a romanticization to claim that this anticorruption struggle is a template for a more radical form of Anthropocenic politics. Mumbai’s merchants, like middle-​class activists in Bangalore, will have to forge

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a much wider class coalition against corruption in order to genuinely reconstruct a democracy less beholden to money. In the final analysis, anticorruption politics are not a “silver bullet” solution to the post-​political condition of the Anthropocene. Just as anticorruption politics have been repurposed to contest the nexus binding together of real estate and state elites in the usurpation of (wet)land, it is possible that such a discourse can be repurposed again for more regressive aims. We are already seeing a few strains of this tendency in the politics of India’s recently elected Hindu conservative and pro-​private sector Prime Minister, Narendar Modi. Many Indian business elites backed Modi from both within India and abroad in the run-​up to the election in 2014–​15 because of his promise to “clean up” India, which can read as code language for anything from expelling minorities, to building sanitation infrastructure, to shrinking government and social welfare. In short, what we find is that “corruption” finds semantic power precisely because it is such an open-​ended, malleable political field. What we have tried to show here is that at a particular historical moment of widening inequality and massive land-​related wealth concentration in cities of India, corruption does and can provide a rubric to decipher the unjust power relations animating the Anthropocene.

Notes 1 The judge is quoted in an online article by Malusare (2013). 2 Subsequently, the principal project developer was listed as Manipal ETA Infotech Ltd (a company floated by Century), which was later changed to Mantri Techzone Private Ltd with joint venture participation from Mantri Builders, a real estate construction firm, and Coremind Software and Services, a tech firm. 3 Wetlands are unique, materially and jurisdictionally speaking, and are part of the vanishing commons in a great many cities. They are semi-​wet parcels of land that technically fall under the category of government land, but in Bangalore a conflicting array of state agencies, villages, and private land owners lay claim to wetlands, making them highly exploitable. 4 The show, aired in March 2014, featured Subramaniam Vincent, the editor of the e-​zine Citizen Matters; Nitin Seshadri, one of the main activists behind the protest; Murali Rao and Suresh Yathri, residents-​turned-​activists; and Ms Nair (first name not given), a freelance writer. 5 In Indian law, a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) is legal action for the protection of something broadly defined in the “public’s interest.” Article 32 of the Indian constitution contains a tool that directly joins the public with judiciary. A PIL may be introduced in a court of law by the court itself, rather than the aggrieved party or a third party. 6 Writ Petition 36574 of 2013. Filed under Article 226 of the Constitution of India. 7 Ibid. 8 Kalina Merchant Welfare Association v. T. Chandrashekhar and Ors. High Court of Mumbai (2007).

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6 UNEVEN RACIAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE ABOLITION ECOLOGY OF THE CITY Nik Heynen

Introduction In the opening of the Communist Manifesto, Marx (1848, 50) memorably wrote: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave [emphasis added], patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-​master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Two years later, in 1850, the United States’ Congress passed into law the Fugitive Slave Law (or Fugitive Slave Act). According to Foner (2015), the act was part of the Compromise of 1850 between white supremacist Southern interests intent on maintaining slavery and Northern interests who while often engaging in abolitionist rhetoric, were too passive to help abolitionist aspirations materialize into law. The act required all citizens of the US, regardless of their position on slavery, to aid in the capture and return of any and all escaped slaves. Because residents of free states were unwittingly implicated in slavery through this act, it led to a watershed moment in US abolitionist history, and simultaneously shaped the trajectory of US urbanization. Now held accountable to Federal Law for helping runaway slaves, Northerners started to speak up and increasingly agitate for emancipatory change. As Marx (1976 [1867]) discussed uneven development in Capital Volume 1, the contradictions contained within capitalism present themselves through the concurrent development of affluence for those with enough social power to harness capitalist processes and at the same time the proliferation of poverty for people who do not (Smith 2008). There continues to be inadequate discussion of these

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long-​existing forms of racial capitalism relative to other dimensions of political economy, especially as related to how colonial and racial oppression have long shaped explicitly uneven racial development (Robinson 1983). According to Blackburn (2011), the campaign to radicalize the resistance to Southern secession—​to turn the US Civil War into a social revolution, into the Second American Revolution—​ had a major impact on both Marx’s political imagination and his writing. During the 1860s Marx increased his use of “emancipation.” He had used the word in his earlier writing, but had discontinued doing so during the late 1840s by the time he wrote the Manifesto. Then, according to Blackburn, in the 1860s returning to this language, Marx changed how he wrote about liberation via “emancipation” in line with US abolitionist struggles, as he wrote about the Civil War in his journalism, and because he was inspired by the political possibilities of the Second American Revolution. For many early abolitionists, the word “emancipation” invoked the idea of the “Emancipator,” which at that time many imagined to be President Lincoln, or perhaps God given the oppressive conditions slaves were living within, as an external agent carrying out the process of liberation. In contrast to this, Marx believed the new working class would be the agent of its own liberation. While he was inspired by abolitionist politics and their goals, he infused his writing about it with a more proletarian political vision of the changes that were possible, that is, he argued that oppressed individuals and their comrades should see themselves as the engine of change as opposed to waiting for that change to be done for them. This resonates still within many struggles against racial capitalism, even if heterodox political framings of Marxism and abolitionist politics require greater dialogue, synthesis, and solidarity under the banner of abolishing racial capitalism. I want to set up this chapter by illustrating the importance for abolitionist politics and attention to uneven racial development through the context of Atlanta. Atlanta is the only major North American city to have been destroyed through an act of war, and the “Battle of Atlanta” which occurred on July 22, 1864 left only 400 of the city’s buildings standing. Union forces, under the command of  William T. Sherman, wanting to crush what had become the most important transportation and supply hub of the Confederacy, defeated Confederate forces defending the city. After ordering the evacuation of the city, Sherman ordered that most of the buildings in the city be burned to the ground.This act of metabolic transformation is different from other examples we have as urban political ecology (UPE) continues to evolve. Prior to its razing, Atlanta owed its origins to two important episodes: capitalist transportation infrastructure and colonial displacement. In the 1830s the US forcibly removed Indigenous people, specifically the Cherokee and Creeks Nations, from northwest Georgia and extended railroad lines into the state’s interior. These twin moves of capital investment and what would be tantamount to genocide through the harrowing “Trail of Tears” that relocated surviving Native Americans to Oklahoma led to Atlanta’s founding. Robinson (1983, 77) means that colonial and racial capitalist ideology is deeply embedded within Atlanta’s history:

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The violent event of colonial aggression and its corollary of “Indian” slavery had already been transmuted in Franklin’s neo-​nativistic “American” mind into a relationship of supplication secured by an economic rationale; indeed, the dependence of “new Comers” on natives already reversed. Robinson clarifies the logics of racial capitalism by then saying: The curtain of supremacist ideology had by now begun its descent on American thought, obscuring from the historically unconscious generations of descendants of colonialists and later immigrants the oppressive violence and exploitation interwoven in the structure of the republic. This ideology manifests in the urban built environment when the milepost that marked the south-​eastern end point, or terminus, of the Western and Atlantic Railroad led to the founding of the city, initially named “Terminus.” In 1845 however Terminus adopted the new name, “Atlanta,” which was a feminine version of the word “Atlantic.” The fall of Atlanta in 1864 was a critical moment in the Civil War, giving the North a confident edge over the South, which led to the eventual surrender of the Confederacy. The capture of the “Gate City of the South” was especially important for the re-​election of President Abraham Lincoln as he was in a contentious election campaign against the Democratic opponent George B. McClellan. Thus the razing of Atlanta is tied directly to Lincoln’s re-​election and thus the legal abolition of slavery in the US. Atlanta emerged from the ashes—​hence the city’s official symbol, the phoenix—​ and was gradually rebuilt, as its population increased rapidly after the war. Atlanta received migrants from surrounding counties and states: from 1860 to 1870 it doubled in population, from 14,427 to 33,336. In a pattern seen across the US South after the Civil War, many freed slaves moved from plantations to towns or cities for work, including Atlanta which went from 20.5% African-​American in 1860 to 45.7% African-​American in 1870.These racialized population shifts created new forms of urbanization. Through the creation of many new jobs, employment boomed, and Atlanta soon became the industrial and commercial centre of the US South again. Many of these new African-​American residents clustered in segregated neighbourhoods adjacent to emerging black institutions of higher education. Elsewhere, black Atlantans were largely confined to low-​lying, flood-​prone areas and other less desirable sections of the city. In an 1879 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Ingersoll discusses one of the three main areas in the City where African-​Americans had begun to cluster by saying: A feature of the city to which no well-​ordered resident will be likely to direct a stranger’s attention is “Shermantown” –​a random collection of huts forming a dense negro settlement in the heart of an otherwise attractive portion of the place.

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By the turn of the century, “Jim Crow” segregation ordinances and regulations were firmly in place to keep racial groups apart and define their respective rights, privileges, and social status. The phoenix at the centre of the City’s official emblem is just as much symbolic of the metabolic processes through which it has been produced, as it is anything else. In Imagineering Atlanta:The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams, Rutheiser (1996, 19) suggests: In a rhetorical turn that gives a rather literal twist to Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction,” the sacking of Atlanta is now ritually invoked as point of reference and justification for virtually every municipally sanctioned spasm of demolition and displacement. Having been destroyed once, Atlantans have learned to embrace such tragedy as a necessary, and even desirable, virtue. Atlantans, like the Greeks and Egyptians who invoked the mighty Phoenix before them, have not paid sufficient attention to the uneven and oppressive socionatural relations that actually led to the renewal, the rising from the ashes, in the same way scholars working with UPE have yet to pay sufficient attention to uneven racial development of cities or the political possibilities that can spring from these processes in response to them.

Uneven racial development and the metabolization of urbanizing nature The early foundations of UPE were decidedly built upon Marxist urban political economy (Keil 2003, 2005; Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003; Heynen 2014). As opposed to this being a limiting factor as some have suggested, I think the dialectical logic central to Marxist approaches allows for the deliberate expansion of UPE to more systematically internalize not only more traditional attention to the contradictions of capitalism, but also the contradictions of white supremacy as articulated within the “Black Geographies” tradition (McKittrick and Woods 2007). This is a point Harvey (1998, 407) sets up when he says: Who exactly gets inserted where is a detailed historical-​geographical question that defies any simple theoretical answer. But Marx is plainly aware that bodies are differentiated and marked by different physical productive capacities and qualities according to history, geography, culture, and tradition. He [Marx] is also aware that signs of race, ethnicity, age, and gender are used as external measures of what certain kind of labourer is capable of or permitted to do. Swyngedouw’s (1996, 66) early framing of UPE also offers the theoretical dynamism that allows, actually demands, the deliberate and explicit political opening of UPE when he suggested that cities bound together society and nature in “inseparable” and “infinitely bound up” ways, but ways that were “full of contradictions, tensions and conflicts.”

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Because UPE provides an integrated and relational approach, it is an ideal avenue for unravelling, if only for a second, over and over, the disempowering and empowering ways racial capitalism, legacies of white supremacy, and what is often called environmental injustice together go to form highly uneven urban landscapes in ways that are more than thinking about any one of these concepts will allow. Because the historical collisions of these socio-​ecological relations go to foster uneven racial development, and always have in the US, deliberately inserting them into our analyses of the ever-​changing constellations of urban space is necessary for the sake of producing the varieties of revolutionary theory and praxis that abolitionists are still fighting for in the city. The central notion of metabolism within UPE helps analyse, through a dialectical, or relational approach, these tousled and messy interconnected economic, political, social, and ecological processes that simultaneously churn to generate highly uneven racialized urban landscapes. In the preface of In the Nature of Cities (Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006), Smith (2006, xiii) wrote: The notion of metabolism set up the circulation of matter, value and representations as the vortex of social nature. But, as the original German term, “Stoffwechsel,” better suggests, this is not simply a repetitive process of circulation through already established pathways. Habitual circulation there certainly is, but no sense of long-​term or even necessarily short-​term equilibrium. Rather, “Stoffwechsel” expresses a sense of creativity. This notion of “creativity” that Smith highlights is important and has yet to be taken up in serious ways but offers important opportunities for bridging between UPE and Black Geographies.This creativity implies that urban environmental consumption, production, and restructuring are not at all a static circulation and recirculation of materials as much urban theory implies. Rather, the metabolic processes that are driven through presses and pulses of uneven racial development, are the same dynamic process through which new socio-​spatial formations, intertwinings, and collaborative enmeshing of racialized nature and white supremacist society emerge and are explicitly created. We can further develop this notion by drawing on Williams’s (2001 [1961], 43) genealogical efforts with “the creative idea” through which he works to show how creativity and human expression, in constant tension with nature, offer the ongoing “struggle to remake ourselves—​to change our personal organization so that we may love in proper relation to our environment” and that this effort “is in fact often painful.”The creative idea, what I am saying Smith helps us see at the centre of metabolic processes central to uneven racial development, is at the core of what Williams (2001 [1961], 141) articulates as the “long revolution.” Thus, this moment of creativity explodes with both oppressive and emancipatory possibilities, because it is indeed open to whichever power relations are dominant and most expansive, whether that is white-​supremacist socionatural relations so dominant in the past and today, or hopefully, the increasingly powerful currents of abolitionist socionatural relations.

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Within the Black Geographies tradition, McKittrick (2013) has shown the nuanced ways in which “plantation geographies” continue to provide foundations for contemporary urbanism and racial capitalism and can be used to better historically situate the creativity inherent in the metabolization of racialized urban nature. McKittrick helps to think about how the resulting urban form of Atlanta is always part of its racialized past, a logic she calls “plantation futures”: [Plantation futures is] a conceptualisation of time-​space that tracks the plantation toward the prison and the impoverished and destroyed city sectors and, consequently, brings into sharp focus the ways the plantation is an ongoing locus of antiblack violence and death that can no longer analytically sustain this violence. McKittrick (2013, 2) McKittrick thus provides tools for us within UPE to more explicitly address how race, space, and history hang together, opening towards a connection with decolonial activism and thinking of contemporary groups like Black Lives Matter. Perhaps unwittingly, she starts setting an agenda for the study of uneven racial development and abolitionist UPE when she further expands upon the connections between plantation futures and urbanization (McKittrick 2013, 13): The plantation spatialises early conceptions of urban life within the context of a racial economy: The plantation that anticipates the city, does not necessarily posit that things have gotten better as racial violence haunts, but rather that the struggles we face, intellectually, are a continuation of plantation narratives that dichotomise geographies into us/​them and hide secretive histories that undo the teleological and biocentric underpinnings of spatiality. While Black Geographies and discussions of race have started to figure in UPE (Heynen 2016) they have mostly done so as a result of uneven development or an “add on,” in a longer list of “other” dynamics at play driving urban processes. It is urgent for UPE, if it aims to continue to remain politically valuable, to develop more robust theorizing of how the underlying histories of racial capitalism and uneven racial development have shaped metabolic processes that produce urban nature. Other resources for such a project are also developing around subaltern and postcolonial urbanism (Roy 2011; Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014). In particular Roy’s (2011) discussion of subaltern urbanism offers an important frame for connecting the urban history of a city like Atlanta with the existing body of UPE in forward thinking ways. In her essay on “rethinking subaltern urbanism” Roy (2011, 231) pushes for a theoretical project that breaks with “ontological and topological understandings of subalternity,” and sketches a path forward that can help think through uneven racial development in a city like Atlanta. While Roy’s work and that of many others have developed within a thrust of rethinking urbanization through global South experiences (Lawhon, Ernstson

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and Silver 2014), its robust heterogeneity and openness helps to also frame a city like Atlanta. Through the same register of subaltern urbanity, from Gramsci, Spivak (1999) to Roy and beyond, we find tools to articulate the unseen, unheard, and not yet integrated socionatural processes that connect the plantation with the city through “plantation futures.” It is in this sense that I read McKittrick (2006, 75 and 77) as pushing Smith’s point on uneven development by showing how the logics of racialization inherent in uneven development and the production of space must be embedded within efforts at understanding the creativity inherent in urban metabolization: If the plantation represents the scale of the town, the auction block figuratively and materially displays a smaller scale—​the body or bodies—​within the town.The Slave auction block therefore contributes to the economic and ideological borders of the area because it is necessarily implicit to the town economy. This spatial reconfiguration of racial capitalism, “block” by “block,” opens up insights about the uneven racial development and metabolization of cities amidst racial capitalism. This reverberates in Max Shachtman’s classic account from 1933 on urbanization in Race and Revolution when he discusses the “universal segregation” of African-​Americans into the unhealthiest, least desirable, and relatively most expensive sections of US cities (Shachtman 1933, 42). The manner in which slavery prefigured these forms of urbanization by impeding the currents of creativity through exclusion is important. To this point, we can also turn to Wade’s (1967) discussion from Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–​1860 when he draws on a range of historical analyses to show how slaves who were able to spend time in cities had broader opportunities to intermingle with other African-​Americans and whites. Through these interactions, Wade discusses how being in cities offered the chance to talk and learn more about emancipatory political ideas as well as banal discussion of the everyday. Thus, the city offered revolutionary potential whereas rural slaves were insulated from the early abolitionist currents. Wade (1967, 245) argues that: “The city, with its intelligence and enterprise, is a dangerous place for the slave” and then discussed that this “danger” came about as slaves were exposed to “knowledge of human rights” and an increased sense of mobility that fuelled abolitionist aspirations. To prevent opportunities for interaction is thus about impeding particular kinds of creativity that come together to both form revolutionary action and facilitate the accompanying forms of socionatural metabolic changes that occur within and shape urbanizing spaces. As bluntly put by Wade (1967, 245), and as a recipe for white supremacist policy: “It is found expedient, almost necessary, to remove the slave from these influences, and send him back to the intellectual stagnation and gloom of the plantation.” The social processes and spatial forms central to Wade’s discussion of Slavery in the Cities also open up other contemporary threads scholars working within urban

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theory continue to struggle with regarding the limited and static definitions of what constitutes “the city” and urban form more generally (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015; Brenner and Schmid 2015; Peck 2015). The interactions that Wade speaks to at the intersection of the rural and urban in the political lives of slaves and their possibilities demonstrate how uneven racial development of urban nature is always an emergent process; that we should foreground ideas of urbanizing space that contrast to stale, singular, polycentric, narrow representations of the kinds of “methodological cityism” discussed by Angelo and Wachsmuth (2015). Woods (2002, 64) interestingly prefigured much of this debate when he argued for the importance of studying regions that included urban and rural space. His driving logic was based in the ways power in rural space was entangled with proximate uneven metropolitan power-​relations through “the weight of history.” When we look more deeply at the urbanization of many US Southern cities, especially Atlanta, that African-​American labour was essential to create cities along the logics of white supremacist goals. In Black Reconstruction Du Bois (1998 [1935], 5) opens up these labouring dynamics when he says: Black labour became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a worldwide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labour, and a new labour problem, involving all white labour, arose both in Europe and America. Robinson (1983, 212) adds to this point, by saying: For Blacks, in sociological and political terms, one of the most important events in American history at the time of the First World War was the migration to the sites of urban and particularly northern industry. The confluence of past white supremacist logics with the proliferation of racial capitalist dynamics both provided an explosive context for uneven racial development to inform the metabolic interactions across urban US Southern and Northern urbanization. At the same time, just like the slaves were coming to the cities, these interactions across larger scales sowed the seeds of a revolutionary possibility due to the oppressive forms of urbanism that continued to be reproduced through this broader spatial context. In line with Chakrabarty’s (2009) sentiments within Provincializing Europe, and other efforts by scholars working in subaltern and postcolonial urban studies, I take seriously the need to think more deeply about the categories of thought that can help urban political ecology reach deeper into the political matters that drive uneven racial development and the metabolization of urbanizing space amidst racial capitalism. As such, I now want to move toward developing the idea of “abolition ecology.”

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Toward an abolition ecology Historically we know that race is imbricated in every episode, artefact, and institution within US urban history, as Gilmore (2002), McKittrick (2006; 2013), Pulido (2015; 2016), Wilson (2000), Woods (1998; 2002), and others have shown. Taking uneven racial development more seriously then, resonates with Roy’s efforts toward further developing subaltern urbanism when she argues for (2011, 228): an important correction to the silences of urban historiography and theory […] that has repeatedly ignored the urbanism that is the life and livelihood of much of the world’s humanity. Roy’s sentiments are in line with nascent efforts within explicitly UPE research to grapple with and better internalize “Southern theory” for the sake of expanding the range of political contexts that have yet to be fully articulated into how we approach urban nature. I am thinking specifically about the work of Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver (2014, 2) who seek to “problematize the application of Northern theories uncritically to Southern contexts to highlight that UPE tends to overlook the situated understandings of the environment, knowledge and power…” As Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver (2014) show, Southern theory starts from the idea that a reorientation is necessary such that analytical concepts generated within socio-​spatial contexts of the “global North” are not simply applied to the “global South” (Connell 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). Southern theoretical discussion within UPE and beyond is deliberately working not to create competing factions across theory, but rather to create wider, further reaching understandings of urbanizing nature. This move has been associated with others who are developing similar ways to better articulate the effect of uneven racial development and the metabolization of racialized urban natures (Myers 1994; Robinson 2006; Roy 2009; Robinson and Parnell 2011). Southern theory, with its decentring effects, has much to offer notions of abolitionist politics given the ways white supremacist ideology has oppressed, and forever changed, African-​American identity, ideology, and political action through enslavement. New political theorizing and organizing that led to the Second American Revolution through abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others were long ago made possible by harnessing these impulses we talk about today in more theoretical terms. The historic lack of attention to uneven racial development in US urban history can benefit greatly from recognizing Black Geographies within the US and offer similar spatial relationships to those as theorized at the interstices of the metropole and colony within postcolonial theorizations of empire. Abolition ecologies offer sources of theory building and explanation for world historical events in ways that are not limited to their spatial position in the “north” because in reality, slavery, Emancipation, Reconstruction after the Civil War, Jim Crow, and

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many other black geographic processes have produced spaces much more akin to the “global South” than “North” for many African-​Americans. We can better articulate these spatial relations through understanding how the logic of US inner cities maintains and reinforces the metropole to colonial spatial logics through the creation of internal colonies, that is, spaces of political economic exclusion, oppression, and disciplining, that have long been central undercurrents to Black Power narratives. While there are long and varied discussions about internal colonialism that initiated out of South African and Latin American contexts (Marquard 1957; Casanova 1965;Wolpe 1975) these relations have clearly extended to the “global North” (Hechter 1975; Peckham 2004). To this end, in a provocative essay simply entitled “Community Imperialism,” which was used as a political education pamphlet in the late 1960s, Black Panther Party Minister of Education Eldridge Cleaver wrote (n.d.): In our struggle for national liberation, we are now in the phase of community liberation, to free black communities from the imperialistic control exercised over them by the racist exploiting cliques within white communities, to free our people, locked up as they are in Urban Dungeons, from the imperialism of the white suburbs. He continued: Ours is a struggle against Community Imperialism. Our black communities are colonised and controlled from the outside … We have been “organised” into the poverty. We must “organise” ourselves out of it. We are cut off, blocked from the sources of wealth. We have no control over the land and that contains the natural resources out of which goods and products are manufactured. Just as Cleaver worked to raise the consciousness of people living in Oakland and other US inner city communities, he also offers scholars of urban theory and UPE critical insights into the thought categories we can use to better articulate a politics of race and space, of abolition ecology. As such I put forward the idea of abolition ecology as a way of thinking through the emancipatory metabolization of racialized urban nature and as a theoretical effort that is implicitly concerned with the subaltern strategies to revolt against the oppressions inherent in the metabolization of racialized urban nature (Heynen 2016). Abolition ecology seizes and builds upon the growth of scholarship at the intersection of urban and environmental history and geography (Smith 2008; Nixon 2011) as it is increasingly informed by theories of racial capitalism (Robinson 1983; Gilmore 2002; Pulido 2015; 2016). Building abolition ecology necessitates exposing the deep history of urban nature from the vantage point of the unrealized objectives of the abolitionists who not only fought to end slavery, but fought to have a more egalitarian form of US democracy and society writ

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large, including an urban environment that would conform to contemporary narratives of “sustainability.” The theoretical impetus from this idea is rooted directly in W.E.B. Du Bois’ (1998 [1935]) discussion of “abolition democracy.” In Black Reconstruction in America Du Bois illustrates how the dreams of freedom underlying African-​Americans’ fighting against the Confederacy were dashed through the collective recognition that the self-​determination they sought would be implausible if the very democratic fabric of the US was not also simultaneously abolished along with slavery given its inherently white supremacist logics and traditions. Du Bois calls this political vision “abolition democracy” (Foner 1990; Lipsitz 2004; Davis 2005). Du Bois is in part motivated to think about the urban environmental history of Atlanta from 1865 to today by Shulman’s (2008, 27) jarring assertion in his book American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture when he says: It is strange really: Theorists read Agamben or Arendt on a genocide that Americans did not cause or experience directly, but do not read [Frederick] Douglass [2000], W.E.B. Du Bois, [James] Baldwin, or [Toni] Morrison, who draw on prophetic idioms to address the racial holocaust that Americans caused and experienced directly, whose legacy still grips the life of each and all. Building on Du Bois for thinking explicitly about the uneven racial development of Atlanta leads to my efforts to build up and historically embody the notion of abolition ecology. How can abolitionist ideals inform contemporary urban political ecological struggles around air quality, soil quality, water pollution, inadequate shelter, food insecurity, and hunger that continue to ravage communities of colour? How has this protracted struggle around abolishing white supremacist logics that have produced the fabric of US urban space intersected with the possibility of creating urban environments that allow people of colour, and others, to thrive? This task takes stock of the important ideas related to “environmental justice,” but without the privileging of liberal notions of private property rights so often found with this literature given these rights’ connection to white supremacist logics and histories (Pulido 2000). Taylor (2008) proclaims: to get the full intention of Du Bois requires closer reading. His clarity on the dialectic of race and class in capitalist economy is unmatched. He sees clearly that the context for the development of the vitriolic racism that then underpinned all of American politics was the scramble for unprecedented wealth. Du Bois shows just how important it is for contemporarily theorizing the political possibilities of urban nature by showing the steps through which the political rights of African-​Americans were articulated and implemented. One of the most important results of this, as Taylor helps to bring into focus, was the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which was created to establish the political rights of freed African-​Americans as citizens (Perry 2001; Epps 2006). The

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Fourteenth Amendment was one of three amendments to the Constitution adopted after the Civil War to guarantee African-​American rights. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth granted citizenship to people once enslaved, and the Fifteenth guaranteed black men the right to vote.The Fourteenth Amendment was passed by Congress in June 1866 and ratified by the states in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment worked in theory by granting citizenship to anyone born in the US and it barred states from denying or curtailing the rights or protections of citizens of the US. As Taylor (2008) discusses, this was necessary since the 1857 Dred Scott decision determined African-​American were “property not people.” As Taylor details, without the fundamental rights of citizenship, African-​ Americans would not be able to protect themselves from the violence enacted by white-​supremacist governments. Another crucial step Du Bois puts in this context of abolition democracy is that the US Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1866. This act legislated that former slaves were entitled to “the full and equal benefits of all laws.” Importantly, all Civil Rights legislation that would follow the Act of 1866 empowered federal courts to intervene when the state, municipal, and other forms of local governments failed to grant these rights to African-​American citizens (Lipsitz 2004; Olson 2004; Balfour 2011). An essential element of abolition ecology builds on direct action traditions that began in the abolitionist movement, but were also core tactics during the civil rights movement, and continue to be important today amidst Black Lives Matter. As human history shows, rights are rarely just granted; they are won through struggle. Nowhere have the collective spatial tactics of direct action and community organizing been better acknowledged than in Mississippi during the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement (Zinn 1964; Payne 2007). The legitimacy of the political discourse, as demonstrated through these tactics, was almost universally recognized, except within the US South where white supremacist ideology continued to have a tight grip on status quo consciousness. The legitimacy of direct action methods was controversial, precisely because it was being used to prefigure emancipatory practices that had not yet taken root. Sit-​ins and the freedom rides, that many say helped transform collective consciousness, were largely seen as controversial and overly adversarial. Just like abolitionist struggles against slavery, sit-​ins, freedom rides, and non-​violent forms of civil disobedience during the Civil Rights movement was the ongoing struggle of the long Second American Revolution, the effort to abolish racial capitalism and uneven racial development. C.L.R. James (1992) helps us in UPE to connect the interdependencies and interconnectedness of these ongoing abolitionist politics in an essay titled “Black People in Urban Areas of the United States” in which he wrote (James 1992, 375): The people who dominate the inner cities numerically cannot possibly work out a plan or have any programme by which they can improve their own situation which does not take into consideration the city as a whole.

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James discussed those who he thought had contributed most to politically theorizing urban politics in the preceding decades, including Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, The Black Panther Party, and specifically George Jackson. James (1992, 376) then wrote: there is evidence that in those urban areas there are today being developed political persons, not of the literary type of which Du Bois is the most notable example; but rather there are black people who living in the midst of one of the most developed societies of the world, develop an understanding and penetration into the fundamental realities of their own particular situation and of the world in general. He then goes on to say that, whereas Marx and Lenin were key to thinking about freedom and emancipation at an earlier time in history, political theory of the city in the US was benefiting from these other new theorists. The reason for his assertion is clearly related to the way African-​American political theorists were better integrating the uneven power relations of racial capitalism and “plantation futures” within their understanding of what we can consider revolutionary metabolism within UPE and the forms of direct action necessary to prefigure revolutionary change and abolitionist consciousness raising.

Conclusions In the spirit of Swyngedouw’s (1996, 66) early articulation of urban political ecology, 150 years after Atlanta was largely burned to the ground in the effort to abolish slavery in the US, “this hybrid socionatural ‘thing’ called city is [still] full of contradictions, tensions and conflicts.” This becomes strikingly clear by overlaying just a handful of interconnected, racialized, socionatural processes that help us think about the city through UPE. Take, for instance that Atlanta, now the ninth largest metro in the US, not only has the largest urban forest of any major city in the US (Miller, Hauer and Werner 2015), but also has the highest income inequality of any US metro, rivalled only by New Orleans (Bannon 2014) and it is punctuated by race. At the same time 88% of Atlanta’s poor live in the suburbs (Kneebone and Berube 2013), which simultaneously houses one of the US’s largest concentrations of the African-​American middle-​classes (Semuels 2015), which has long led to it being referenced as “a Black Mecca” (Sjoquist 2000; Pooley 2015). And because Atlanta has long been one of the most sprawling US metros (Bullard, Johnson and Torres 2000), this expansive urban landscape now contributes to its own urban induced climatological patterns and hydrological cycling (Dixon and Mote 2003; Shepherd 2005) which simultaneously both contribute to disastrous flooding events (Shepherd et al. 2011) and exist within a region that increasingly experiences pronounced cycles of drought (Dixon and Mote 2003), and a time when projected population will exceed water availability. If the Phoenix has indeed risen out of the ashes it has done so very much in line with the logics of uneven racial development.

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Agyeman and McEntee (2014, 217) suggest, “race, class, and gender are already established parameters of UPE.” I agree with this sentiment. At the same time, I agree with the sentiment that this broader framing of UPE is more implicit than explicit. The rich traditions of Marxist urban theory have contributed important insights into characterizing difficult and oppressive problems many people face in their lives connected to the uneven production of urban environments. Much of this literature has also highlighted many of the political stakes that are worth fighting for. However, there remain important issues from this body of work that have not yet adequately been internalized and taken up. Take for instance how Smith (1996, 77) suggests: “uneven development should be conceived as a quite specific process that is both unique to capitalist societies and rooted directly in the fundamental social relations of this mode of production.” At the same time, Smith did not engage in the ways slavery and Jim Crow are still the underlying “social relations of this mode of production.”This is not a critique, rather an effort to stage a conversation between this body of theory, Robinson’s (1983) discussion of racial capitalism, and McKittrick’s notion of plantation futures in order to better inform UPE and abolition ecology. Smith’s implicit, as opposed to explicit understanding of racial capitalism still requires the kind of shifting that Marx deliberately made toward emancipation as steeped in abolitionist struggles. To better articulate the ineffable contradictions of uneven racial development, I have argued that because urban nature and urban society do not, that is cannot, exist independently of each other, discussions of urban nature in the US that do not deliberately engage with racial capitalism and uneven racial development are narrow and will miss crucial dynamics. UPE has evolved toward expanding the political possibilities of a more comprehensive appreciation of how processes of racialization and colonialism come together in cities to both facilitate and impede the creativity central to metabolization of urban nature at many different levels. To this end, in 1966 Meier and Rudwick, writing in what was considered at the time a progressive manner, suggested (1976, 356–​57): The plantation system has all but disappeared [and] it will vanish completely in the next few years. In cities, North and South, the political strength of the black ghetto is growing stronger, as is evident in the rising number of Negro officeholders […] Will the ghetto, like the plantation, disappear as the focus of Negro life? Or will it remain as a cohesive community, at the core of the nation’s largest cities? In response, McKittrick (2013) shows us that the plantation has indeed not disappeared. Likewise, within the US’s largest cities like Atlanta, urban environmental inequality as is often conveyed in the shorthand of the ghetto, continues to proliferate unabated. While scholars working within urban political ecology have talked about the importance of focusing on what or who needs to be sustained, in this chapter I have made the case that more can be made of this through paying attention to what’s at stake in the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution.This I hope could bring

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in the prefigurative abolitionist logics of direct action and analysis as another lens through which to work toward urban democratic and urban ecological goals. Given the socio-​ecological process at play within the metabolization of racialized nature and uneven racial development of Atlanta as I have developed here, it seems necessary not only to build upon the traditional logics of human geographers to think through these issues, but also to go beyond. What we need is an extension of UPE to include a wider array of thinkers and experiences; drawing on scholars as those I have made room for here. My reframing of Du Bois’ notion of abolition democracy toward abolition ecology is thus an effort in this regard. It seeks to take abolitionist ideas created through hard-​fought struggles as contemporary tools to better frame the racialized questions of who gains from and who pays for, who benefits from and who suffers from particular processes of urban socio-​environmental change.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw for bringing us together to write these chapters and this book. I would also like to thank Henrik Ernstson for comments on earlier versions of this chapter and Bruce Baigrie for editorial assistance.

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Marx, Karl, and Fredrick Engels. 1848/​1967. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Alan J.P. Taylor. London: Penguin. Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. 1976. From Plantation to Ghetto. London: Macmillan. Miller, Robert W., Richard J. Hauer, and Les P. Werner. 2015. Urban Forestry: Planning and Managing Urban Greenspaces. Long Grove: Waveland Press. Myers, Garth Andrew. 1994.“Eurocentrism and African Urbanization:The Case of Zanzibar’s Other Side.” Antipode 26(3): 195–​215. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Olson, Joel. 2004. The Abolition of White Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Payne, Charles M. 2007. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom:The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peck, Jamie. 2015. “Cities Beyond Compare?” Regional Studies 49(1): 160–​82. Peckham, Robert Shannan. 2004. “Internal Colonialism: Nation and Region in Nineteenth-​ Century Greece.” In Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory, edited by Maria Todorova, 41–​59. New York: New York University Press. Perry, Michael J. 2001. We the People:The Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pooley, Karen. 2015. “Segregation’s New Geography: The Atlanta Metro Region, Race, and the Declining Prospects for Upward Mobility.” Southern Spaces, April 15. Accessed May 3, 2018. https://​southernspaces.org/​2015/​segregations-​new-​geography-​atlanta-​metro-​ region-​race-​and-​declining-​prospects-​upward-​mobility. Pulido, Laura. 2000. “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(1):  12–​40. Pulido, Laura. 2015. “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity I: White Supremacy vs White Privilege in Environmental Racism Research.” Progress in Human Geography 39(6): 809–​17. Pulido, Laura. 2016. “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity II: Environmental Racism, Racial Capitalism and State-​sanctioned Violence.” Progress in Human Geography 41(4): 524–​33. Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Berkeley: University of North Carolina Press. Robinson, Jennifer. 2006. Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London and New York: Routledge. Robinson, Jennifer, and Sue Parnell. 2011. “Traveling Theory: Embracing Post-​neoliberalism through Southern Cities.” In The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 521–​31. Oxford: Blackwell. Roy, Ananya. 2009. “The 21st-​century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory.” Regional Studies 43(6): 819–​30. Roy, Ananya. 2011. “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(2): 223–​38. Rutheiser, Charles. 1996. Imagineering Atlanta:The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams. London and New York: Verso. Semuels, Alana. 2015. “Suburbs and the New American Poverty.” The Atlantic, January 7. Accessed May 3, 2018. www.theatlantic.com/​business/​archive/​2015/​01/​suburbs-​and-​ the-​new-​american-​poverty/​384259/​. Shachtman, Max, and Christopher Phelps. 1933/​2003. Race and Revolution. New York and London: Verso.

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7 SUFFOCATING CITIES Climate change as social-​ecological violence Jonathan Silver

Introduction In June 2015 Accra experienced severe rainfall that continued for a number of sodden days, creating widespread flooding across many parts of the city (Figure 7.1). When the rains eventually cleared, the landscape was a scene of devastation. At Malam Junction a bridge collapsed under the torrential downpour, killing several people. Cars had been carried down the hill, scattered randomly by the surging waters, many of the roads were covered with debris, and significant damage was visible among the low-​lying properties of the neighbourhood. In central Accra the highest profile of the many tragedies that were to unfold led to 152 lives being lost when floodwaters carrying fuel from a petrol station caught fire, creating an explosive fireball visible from many kilometres away. Across the metropolis over 8000 people were displaced, movement, business, and everyday life were brought to a standstill and over US$100 million of damage caused to the built environment of this West African city. As the floods were at the worst, the Mayor of Accra, Alfred Oko Vanderpuije, was hosting a meeting and celebrating his recent award as “Best Mayor of Africa.” Many in the city found it distasteful that such an event, proclaimed among the storm-​beaten banners attached to streetlights throughout the city, was continuing amidst a widespread emergency. But it also highlighted the inability of politicians to fully grasp the foreboding signs of future troubles. This was one of the worst flood events in Accra’s recent history and a harbinger of the extreme socionatural conditions that cities across sub-​Saharan Africa will increasingly have to confront. Callers into Accra’s popular radio stations, like Joy FM, were in no doubt as to the cause of the flooding. Uncontrolled development across the city (Grant 2009) and lack of sufficient storm water drainage across the varied topography of Ghana’s capital meant flood protection was non-​existent for many of this urban region’s 4 million residents. Public knowledge concerning the consequences of incessant and ongoing urbanization had done little over the preceding years to halt the pace of

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FIGURE 7.1   Flooding

in Accra, Ghana, in 2015

Source: Photo by author.

construction across this sprawling city. The floods of 2015 in Accra then are clearly not what we would regard as a “natural” phenomenon. Rather, these experiences faced by the city have come about through, what urban political ecology (UPE) terms, the “socionatural” urbanization process (see for example Pelling 1999 on flooding in urban Guyana). Such a perspective draws together the torrential rainfall experienced across the Gulf of Guinea and the politics of a built environment that has not been engineered to manage such large, and often redirected, flows of storm water. And yet to explain the city’s floods in Accra as solely the result of unplanned growth and the failure to deliver the required infrastructure to underpin this expansion, misses a crucial phenomenon. As Accra attempts to address flood management and breakneck growth there is an unpredictable socionature unleashed with climate change, an intensifying dynamic that is intersecting with urbanization and may reverse much of the purported development of Africa’s so-​called “Rising Star” (Addo 2013; Douglas et al. 2008). Forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tell of an increased frequency and intensity of rainfall and flooding, such as those occurring during the wet season in the Gulf of Guinea (IPCC 2013). Based on climate change models from the 2007 IPCC assessment, Toulmin (2009) argues that climate change will expose up to 40% of West African urban dwellers who live in coastal regions to

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sea-​level rises and growing flood events. Temperatures across the continent have been projected to rise by between 3.2 °C in East Africa and 3.6 °C in the Sahara by 2080 (Christensen et al. 2012). Such climate turbulence could lead to more profound changes in local and regional ecosystems, putting pressure on already precarious livelihoods with escalating resource conflicts, displacement, and possibly large-​scale migrations from rural to urban areas and across national borders (Black et al. 2011). These disruptive dynamics play deeply into an historically produced, global inequality on a continent that has contributed only 2.3% of historic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and where contemporary CO2 emissions per person are nearly 20 times lower than that of the USA (UNDP 2008). Of further notice is that climate change dynamics are intensifying as the continent experiences a rapid and little-​understood urbanization process. What Parnell and Pieterse (2014) denote as “Africa’s urban revolution” adds a further imperative to understand how a climate changed future has already become a nightmarish present for many of Africa’s cities: “Right now, the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people are keenly feeling the impacts of climate change,” asserts Christina Figueres of the UNFCCC Executive Secretary (quoted in Castán Broto et al. 2015, v) In this chapter I draw upon UPE to consider the geographies of climate change across sub-​Saharan Africa cities. My starting point is what Christian Parenti (2012, 7) describes as the, “collision of political, economic and environmental disasters” into what he terms, “the catastrophic convergence.” While this somewhat alarmist expression could point to a site of resignation I will attempt to combine the socionatural perspective of urbanization developed within UPE over the last two decades (Swyngedouw 2004; Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006; Loftus 2012), with Frantz Fanon’s (1961) analysis of the violence of colonization. In doing so I argue for an understanding of climate change as socio-​ecological violence. My use of the conjunction “as” aims to emphasize that while climate change itself is often debated publicly and academically, what is also ongoing, but less explicitly addressed, is a particular form of violence that is being produced across the variegated and shifting urban geographies of the region. Fanon’s (1961; 1967) work on colonial violence offers a politicized starting point to a spatial approach to the climate crisis. As Wenzel (2015, 152) argues, “Fanon’s condemnation of centuries of underdevelopment remains timely in an age of resource wars and climate change.” Fanon made clear that colonialism and racism are spatialized and that, “colonial space must be understood as a historical-​process and as a strategy of appropriating and transforming space and of time” (Kipfer 2007, 708). We can bring together Fanon’s ideas of colonial violence, which continues to shape the trajectories of urbanization across African cities (Mamdani 2007), with an UPE perspective of the climate crisis. To do so helps to elucidate an understanding of various forms of socio-​ecological violence as suffocation.With suffocation as a central term, I try to capture how Fanon (1961) in Wretched of the Earth theorized the experience of living under colonialism. From this we can develop an approach to climate change that foregrounds its “oppressive reality” (Gibson 2016, 6), while acknowledging how ongoing spatial processes of African urbanization

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are transforming socionatures partly in response to seeking lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. From the growing carbon dioxide levels across cities, to the everyday precarity of the marginalized, climate change as an urban experience is perhaps more than anything a struggle to survive. Or, as Fanon (1967) writes to “breathe” in the face of ever intensifying conditions of suffocation. By using various case studies across urban Africa, I will suggest that there are intensifying conditions of suffocation across cities in the region linked to climate change. This chapter will develop this position through tracing the logics and mechanisms of suffocation by examining three distinct but interlinked processes of social-​ ecological violence across urban Africa. First, through what I call direct impacts caused by climate change, which I examine through exploring the uncertain future of Saint-​Louis, Senegal, where sea-​level rise exposes large parts of the city to intensified hazards. I will then turn to secondary impacts of climate change that focuses on how dense and often precarious infrastructure networks that sustain urban life (McFarlane 2008) interact with climate change.The disruption of Accra’s electricity supply, which can be traced to the growing aridity in the Sahel region due to global warming, serves as a good example (Silver 2014) of how climate change works to reinforce a splintered urbanism (Graham and Marvin 2001) across the city. Finally, there is a particular form of violence operating through international attempts to limit GHG emissions into the atmosphere. By drawing on a case study from waste management in Mbale, Uganda, I will illustrate how the compounding marginality and exclusion in African cities interacts with an attempt to connect the metabolism of waste with global carbon and financial markets that also had the disturbing effect of limiting the capacity of municipalities to respond to climate change.The chapter concludes by offering three ways of politicization that I see by bringing together UPE with the work of Fanon in considering the climate crisis and its suffocating spatialities.These are the socionatures of ongoing coloniality, the multiple scales and temporalities of urban circulation—​and the urgency of revolt.

The urban political ecologies of the climate crisis UPE has the potential to address the political dimensions of the climate crisis across African cities through its socio-​material, capital-​centric understanding of the urbanization process (Swyngedouw 2004). Championing a notion that cities are neither social nor natural, but stitched together through extended socio-​material flows, UPE offers a framework to understand global and local dynamics not as hierarchical and detached, but as intimately connected. While there has been a range of established and new studies focused on cities in the global South (see for example Ranganathan 2015; Silver 2015), it is somewhat surprising how little work has been undertaken at the intersection of climate change and urbanization in urban Africa, in spite of the growing shadow such dynamics are casting on people and environments. Rather than piecemeal studies of particular technologies or policies, or particular ecosystems or neighbourhoods, UPE offers an extensive geographical understanding; how the local and the global are connected and how shifts in

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socio-​material flows at multiple scales come to produce and uphold unequal socio-​ spatial relations (Swyngedouw 2004; Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006). This makes a study of urban Africa and climate change from a UPE perspective important as it draws attention to the planetary scale of climate change and how it impacts within and beyond particular urban boundaries (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015; Arboleda 2015). Recent developments also put the focus on how wider socio-​material flows are governed and how they are shaped by everyday practices (Loftus 2012; Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014), or what Pieterse (2011) has termed “rogue urbanisms.” Encouragingly, there are emerging UPE orientated studies of urban climate change that, while not on African cities, make connections between capital and carbon measurement (Rice 2014) and low-​carbon housing (Edwards and Bulkeley 2015). This chapter builds on this work to develop a line of study that politicizes turbulent and climate changed socionatures in urban Africa. The urban political will have to be recast when we pay attention to how climate change impacts everyday life across African cities. One crucially mediated point lies in how we view infrastructure, and my suggestion is that by reading Fanon with UPE we can frame climate change as socio-​ecological violence to better account for how wider socionatures connect across and beyond the networked city to affect everyday life. From different starting points, Anand (2012) and Lewis and Ernstson (2018) have similarly expanded understandings of infrastructure in relation to structural forms of violence. Williams and Srnicek (2015, 145) clarify that infrastructure, as material objects “carry a politics within them,” and that hegemony is not just linked to the ideas of a society but, also to “the built environment and technologies that surround us.” This advances an understanding of infrastructure as constitutive of power (McFarlane and Rutherford 2008; Swyngedouw 2004) and in extension, a materiality through which violence is produced and exerted. Rodgers and O’Neil (2012, 407) differentiate between an “active” and “passive” infrastructural violence, highlighting infrastructure that actively generates violence on one hand, and “the socially harmful effects [that] derive from infrastructure’s limitations,” on the other. And yet the politicization that extends from notions of infrastructural violence may in some ways be limited in what it offers to understand the intersection of infrastructure and climate change in African cities. Here I try to emphasize how we can place climate change as socio-​ecological violence with a closer incorporation of Fanon’s work on the violence of colonization. Violence is then seen as unbounded from infrastructure, positioned as a dialectical, multi-​scalar and historical process of socio-​ecological transformation that takes into account the co-​produced natures of climate change with what Robinson already in 1983 named “racial capitalism.” This means three things in particular. First, to pay attention to the multiple and unequal socio-​environmental hazards—​droughts, floods, famines, mudslides—​ brought forth through GHG emission-​generated changes to the atmosphere, which undoubtedly have created new and sharpened vulnerabilities (Satterthwaite et al. 2007). But, second, we must extend and consider the secondary impacts that climate change is instigating and how these biophysical transformations interact with the

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networked infrastructures of urban Africa. These secondary effects have tended to be obscured by a focus on more tangible impacts such as the flooding or failure of the drainage systems, with which I started this chapter. And yet secondary impacts on families and households, including lack of access to electricity and water provision, offer an equally important part of analysis that connects with Rodgers and O’Neil’s (2012) notion of “passive infrastructural violence.” This means not only thinking about access to certain resources, but also how changes in socio-​material circulation shape and re-​engineer the reproduction of urban life in structural and everyday ways. Third, paying attention to the global response to the climate crisis, increasingly centred on what has been called “urban carbon governance” (Bulkeley and Newell 2015), offers yet another component of climate change as violence. In this case we see municipal urban service provision and infrastructure operation controlled from afar with populations displaced and dispossessed through attempts to control global GHG circulations. Taken together, and as I will demonstrate in the next sections, UPE in conversation with Fanon’s notions of violence helps to elucidate climate change as socio-​ecological violence, a violence that is dynamic and deeply politicized.

The violence of direct impacts: Saint-​Louis drowning At its highest, Saint-​Louis is less than 4 metres above sea level (UN-​Habitat 2011). Like many cities along coastal regions, it is facing a precarious future as global transformations instigated by climate change are bringing the ocean higher and closer. UN Habitat’s Alioune Badiane designated Saint-​Louis, “the city most threatened by rising sea levels in the whole of Africa” (BBC 2008). Even small shifts in the sea level are beginning to have profound impacts on the balance between the river and the ocean, causing problems such as seawater infiltration and increased flooding events (Diagne 2007; Seck 2010). Saint-​Louis’s hinterlands are equally at risk as the Langue de Barbarie, a dune strip along the coast begins to disintegrate into the Atlantic. The actions of state officials have exacerbated the situation, with attempts in 2003 to create a channel to shift the flows of water away from the city through creating a 4-​metre-​wide channel. But this has now expanded to nearly 2 kilometres with the movements between the ocean and the river rapidly increasing and exacerbating an already tenuous situation (UN-​Habitat 2011; Figure 7.2). With over 210,000 people experiencing risk from sea-​level rises across the wider city (ReliefWeb 2016), climate change in Saint-​Louis produces a form of socio-​ecological violence that is highly uneven, affecting particularly the poor of the city. Perhaps most exposed, although with a long history of living from and close to the fierce Atlantic Ocean, is a community of over 50,000 in Nguet Ndar. This is a low-​income settlement and the traditional home of the fishing industry whose trade networks span as a far as Bamako, Mali. Nguet Ndar is also one of the densest urban areas in West Africa, located on less than 1 square kilometre on precarious land facing both the river and the ocean and already confronting increasing damage to the built environment due to sea-​level rise and flooding from intensified

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FIGURE 7.2  The

coastal fishing settlement of Nguet Ndar in Saint-​Louis, Senegal

Source: Photo by author.

rainfall, including the loss of homes and businesses. The population of this neighbourhood stares at a hazardous present and a bleak future of displacement, including the disappearance of its economic base. Poor communities are already experiencing the direct impacts of climate change, struggling to sustain their livelihoods as sea-​levels rise and homes are submerged, overwhelming and even erasing parts of neighbourhoods like Nguet Ndar from the map. These direct impacts of climate change must however not simply be viewed as a “crisis” or “catastrophe” or “threat” that is a fait accompli. Rather we need to trace the historic and geographic socionatures that caused such conditions and understand the politicized forms of urbanization produced in relation to climate change. This means to recognize the politics of such urban transformation as an extended form of socio-​ecological violence. One starting point is the last 200 years of industrial capitalism, which has produced GHG emissions mainly from the global North. This has not only compounded global inequality and distributed the risks of climate change in uneven ways, but industrial capitalism was also built upon and was a vital engine of colonization, which in turn has left ongoing and violent reverberations of coloniality, an inscription of a social hierarchy into the colour of one’s skin (Fanon 1967). These geographies, from industrialization and its extension as colonization, draw our attention to the continued (and new) inequalities of centre-​periphery, socionatural relations.

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In considering violence, this pushes us toward an acknowledgement of a relational urbanization (Jacobs 2012) involved in the socio-​ecological (re)production of cities. It is impossible to consider climate change in Saint-​Louis without connecting to the colonial, capitalist growth of the metropole and the surplus capital generated in French industrial cities, such as Lille, through exploitation of what Moore (2015) would call “cheap natures” in the colonies. The ensuing socio-​ecological violence of direct impacts, as in sea-​level rise and floods, illustrates the multi-​scalar, historically produced inequalities and power relations of climate change across and beyond African cities. From the everyday lives of fisherman in Nguet Ndar to the uneven, carbon-​intensive development of French industrialization interlinked with colonialism, climate change draws together analytically and concretely new socio-​ ecological processes as a distinct, violent, and new phase of urbanization within the longue durée of racial capitalism (Robinson 1983) and coloniality (Fanon 1961; 1967).

The violence of secondary impacts: Accra’s disrupted energy system The next aspect of climate change as violence reflects what can broadly be considered the secondary impacts that are being instigated through new socio-​ ecological arrangements shaped by a changing climate. I wish to draw attention to the ways in which the climate crisis is shaping the socionature(s) of urbanization across African cities beyond the highly visible shocks of disaster and to extend further Rodgers and O’Neil’s (2012) notion of “passive infrastructural violence” into a socio-​ecological interpretation. Rather than dramatic floods or scorching fires, attention here turns to seemingly mundane intersections between shifting climate conditions and various socionatures and technological systems. Creating both new and intensified conditions of fragility across urban life, we might consider such violence through a UPE frame as a disruption or interruption of the circulations of urban resource flows.This connects to a different temporality in thinking climate change in urban Africa. If we return to Accra and focus on its energy geographies, we see that much of the electricity used for everyday life is produced through hydro-​powered generation. Such reliance on this form of electricity generation has left urban populations vulnerable to ongoing disruption caused by climate change. The experience of disruption is of course deeply unequal, leaving the urban poor struggling with new and intensified forms of everyday precarity that links to new urban geographies of the climate crisis and another facet of socio-​ecological violence. The catchments that provide water for electricity production to Accra via the Akosombo Dam are becoming increasingly unstable as an effect of regional climate change (Kandji,Verchot and Mackensen 2006). The Sahel areas of northern Ghana, alongside other West African countries that make up the Volta Water Basin have already recorded a 20% drop in rainfall over the last 20 years (Dazé 2007). This lack of rainfall and growing aridity is partly because of deforestation and desertification over the last century, which is closely linked to regional urbanization through the energy needs of urban dwellers using charcoal (Figure 7.3). Furthermore, regional

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FIGURE 7.3  The

Sahel in northern Ghana is becoming increasingly arid due to climate change, which affects electricity provision in the capital, Accra Source: Photo by author.

climate change is expected to increase aridity (Gyau-​Boakye 2001), cause further reduction of rainfall by up to 27% (Dazé 2007), and reduce water flows to the Akosombo Dam by up to 30 to 40% (EPA 2000, 6). This is estimated to reduce electricity output by up to 59% (Government of Ghana 2000), which compounds an already dire energy generation capacity for Accra with records of interruptions. In 2008, water flow to Akosombo Dam dropped below 30,000 square cubic metres a second and lowered electricity generation by 60% causing widespread load-​ shedding. The historical over-​reliance by Ghana on hydroelectric production (the Akosombo Dam contributes 55% of the whole country’s electrical generation capacity) means that ongoing and future disruption of the electricity network in Accra is closely associated with the growing effects of climate change in the region. When the electricity network is disrupted, the urban poor of Accra face direct material consequences. A utility employee explained: “[L]‌ights-​out affects a lot of people and business [in low-​income neighbourhoods], and much revenue is lost during these episodes, interrupting people’s lives and ruining appliances and businesses.” One resident described the intimate link between electricity and everyday life of simply getting on: We depend on light for our everyday activities.Without light or energy there were many problems for people trying to make money or for people to get by in the family compound.

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Many of the urban poor in Accra are forced to find multiple low-​cost responses to ongoing disruptions at household and community scales, which often fail to counter the impact of such interruptions. This is in direct contrast to middle and higher income households, who are able to buy generators and solar panels as back-​up technologies. It is this splintered urbanism (Graham and Marvin 2001) that illustrates how the seemingly mundane intersections of climate change and urbanization can also be understood as a form of socio-​ecological violence. Here we see how households struggle to sustain vital flows of energy necessary for social reproduction and everyday urban life. A school child is without light when doing her homework, criminality increases with the darkness of interruption, a business has to close earlier, and daily incomes are lost. Compared with the shocks of direct impacts, all these must be considered as slow forms of socio-​ecological violence emanating from climate change. They illustrate the connection back to the carbon complex that pollutes and instigates extended processes of inequality and everyday struggles through fossil-​based capital accumulation. These secondary effects of course intersect with the ongoing violent geographies of structural adjustment and neoliberal urban development (Grant 2009), that have left “surplus,” poor populations navigating survival in Accra (Gillespie 2016), compounding existing inequality and opening new dynamics of precarity. They prompt more attention to the incremental, lived experiences of populations in urban Africa in relation to the multiple and shifting materialities of the city (Simone 2004; Pieterse 2011; Silver 2014; McFarlane and Silver 2017; see also Chapter 8 in this volume) as neighbourhoods and households become destabilized and disposable through global and regional climate change dynamics. Across the circulations of various resource flows, such as energy, food or water, there is a series of transformations that call for new strategies and household-​level responses to be developed in the face of precarious conditions. In rapidly growing urban regions such as Accra these incremental everyday geographies constitute an important focus in politicizing climate change and a crucial scale for UPE in examining climate change as urban populations face new conditions of violence emanating from disruption of urban resource flows (cf., Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014). This socio-​ecological understanding offered by UPE helps to illustrate how the energyscape of Accra is produced and mediated, via the urbanization of nature, and is, like in Saint-​Louis, connected to carbon-​based, capital accumulation. Historical GHG emissions, produced mainly in countries of the global North, suggest that centuries of racialized capitalism shapes urbanization, for instance through changes to the fragile bio-​physical geographies of regions such as the Sahel. These spaces beyond the city boundaries are integral to the life-​support of urbanization. In this case, we can see how global shifts in circulations of carbon and resultant hydrological dynamics become key metabolisms through which energy disruptions are produced in Accra, linking the city to socionatural processes across Northern Ghana, the wider Sahel region and at a planetary scale through an atmosphere transformed through capitalism. Reliance on hydro-​powered energy has set the conditions for climate change-​driven disruption that generate new struggles for survival and social

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reproduction among the city’s marginalized populations, reinforcing the splintered urbanisms (Graham and Marvin 2001) that have already fractured and fragmented Accra (Grant 2009). And so, the socio-​ecological violence of climate change spills out across various scales, reconfiguring resource flows across the city that can push households and neighbourhoods already close to the edge over the precipice. The climate crisis in urban Africa cannot just be understood as a series of dramatic events. This would off-​stage quiet and seemingly mundane shifts to urban circulation that reinforce the ongoing violent experience of urban poverty and precarity for many who are living through the continent’s rapid urbanization (Parnell and Pieterse 2014).

The violence of response: Restructuring Mbale The final aspect of climate change as socio-​ecological violence is one that operates through wider institutional configurations and material interventions that have been set up to supposedly support the needs of poorer regions in decarbonization. In pushing for “helping” the poor or developing countries more broadly in managing carbon, through marketized logics of governing circulations of GHG in the city, violence is produced—​but also hidden in new socionatural arrangements. The climate crisis is leading to increasing attempts at developing an urban carbon governance, intervening across the metabolisms of the city (cf., Newell and Bulkeley 2015). Seeking to develop these new material geographies of low-​carbon urbanization has forestalled a reconfiguration of the infrastructures of circulation—​energy systems, waste collections—​creating new contestations and conflicts concerning the management of urban resource flows. Investment in a waste management project in Mbale, Uganda, illustrates how institutional and technical investment to limit GHG emissions shapes new forms of social-​ecological violence in curbing climate change. Efforts to connect between waste management on the ground and new financial circulations from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) have placed this rapidly urbanizing East African town at the forefront of urban experiments (Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013). On the surface the Uganda Municipal Waste to Compost Program appears to offer the best of all worlds. The municipality is provided with an opportunity to upgrade its waste system.This is predicated on the collection of waste at 25 points across Mbale on a regular basis, with the waste being taken to a nearby facility and transformed into compost rather than the GHG methane, which would have been released if the waste was just dumped.The transformation of waste into compost would seemingly extract economic value from Mbale’s rubbish, and crucially, stop methane emissions from leaving the waste site (World Bank 2007). Furthermore, these GHG “savings,” converted into so-​called “carbon credits,” could be traded via the CDM on global carbon markets, into an economic revenue stream that can be reinvested in the town’s infrastructure systems, which is another apparent benefit of connecting to this dominant form of climate action. But such transformations of urban resource circulation, such as waste and methane, necessary

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to support global action on GHG emission reduction, also configure new forms of violence to some of the town’s most marginalized people while reinforcing historic relations of underdevelopment between “peripheral” Mbale and various global governance actors. The restructuring of waste infrastructure in Mbale has not come about through a democratic or open process of planning for low-​carbon urbanization. Rather this way of managing the waste system vis-​à-​vis the CDM has been imposed through a powerful transnational actor that has shaped the possibilities and scope of managing metabolisms of waste and methane. The World Bank has played a dominating role in the governance of these urban flows, giving the municipality little opportunity to participate and leading to accusations by a municipal official of “throwing their weight around.” Under the fiscal conditions and multiple urban imperatives faced by Mbale we can see that responses to the climate crisis allow the World Bank to impose its vision of low-​carbon through exploiting weak local structures and capacity in Africa’s towns and cities. In such contexts institutional concerns and those of its corporate and financial backers come to take precedence over the local scale, which is left exposed to the potential failure in the operation of this system. Such impositions connect to, and unfold under, the longer histories of colonialism and structural adjustment that continue to forcefully configure particular forms of governance in Uganda (Branch and Mampilly 2015). And the operation of this new low-​carbon intervention has not gone according to plan (Figure 7.4).The failure to pay the workers during parts of 2012, 2013, 2014, and into 2015 had meant that they have regularly been on strike.This appropriation of wages has meant the workers have suffered a terrible price including: struggling to pay rents on housing leading to risk of evictions, having credit discontinued at local shops meaning everyday food requirements have become difficult to secure, and evidently struggling with bad health. Beyond the workers the most visible form of violence was the displacement of waste-​pickers from the site. Numbering up to 25 on the site, these waste-​pickers were able to generate vital income for everyday livelihoods through the collection of a number of waste products, including plastic bottles, at a municipal dump site more popularly called the “waste commons” (Lane 2011). With the CDM and World Bank project, a fence was constructed to restrict access, the waste-​pickers were dispersed—​or perhaps more correctly described by a local community leader, “chased off ” the land. While one can certainly discuss if the labour conditions of waste-​pickers or site workers is worth fighting for in the longer term, the point here is that the institutional arrangement neglected these groups and left them facing intensified conditions of precarity. In effect low-​carbon restructuring has led to an acceleration of fragile conditions for people already struggling to navigate the challenges of securing income and food, rent and school fees. Here we can see how responses to the climate crisis predicate new forms of violence and expulsion into the existing everyday geographies of Mbale’s most impoverished residents. The experience in Mbale shows that concern over global and local environment change is mobilized as a way to justify taking control away from municipalities and

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FIGURE 7.4  The

waste(d) infrastructure of Mbale, Uganda. The over-​filled container is marked CDM as it was part of a Clean Development Mechanism project sponsored by the World Bank Source: Photo by author.

imposing particular infrastructural solutions to the climate crisis.The emergency of climate change is understood as overriding other concerns to warrant new forms of urban governance, located far away from any such notion of a democratic local politics. In effect Mbale has experienced multiple displacements, in which the local is expelled on behalf of the planet, the municipality from decision making and the waste-​pickers from the site. The over-​r iding logic of creating value through metabolic transformation and financialization on carbon markets illustrates a larger wave of structural adjustment to limit circulations of GHG emissions into the atmosphere. These urban transformations suggest a marketized notion of a low carbon future (While and Whitehead 2013), generating new forms of control and domination by international institutions and everyday violence for marginalized groups. Control and its violent repercussions connect to longer histories of structural adjustment and take-​over of urban management by institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (Harris and Fabricius 2005).And this socio-​ ecological violence is likely to grow as attempts to limit GHG emissions predicate large-​scale re-​engineering of infrastructures across the urbanization process (Betsill and Bulkeley 2007). Through the mobilizing of concern about the climate crisis from global governance actors like the World Bank, municipalities like Mbale and

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groups such as the waste-​pickers, who have barely contributed to the growing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, are faced with intensified marginality. Such violence may compound that experienced by the direct and secondary impacts described above and helps to further Parenti’s (2012) idea of the “catastrophic convergence” through illustrating how African urban populations are exposed to multifaceted, violent experiences of urbanization and climate change.

Suffocating cities In seeking to expand Fanon’s (1961) notion of suffocation to politicize climate change vis-​à-​vis UPE, and view suffocation as socio-​ecological violence, we arrive at a number of considerations. First, we must interrogate urbanization as a material expression of the socionatures of ongoing forms of coloniality across urban Africa; that is, the enrichment of the metropole at the expense of the periphery. The political economy of the climate crisis and urbanization allows us to see the suffocation of African cities as a variegated experience, one that creates new trajectories of under-​development through planetary segregation, or what some have termed “eco-​apartheid” (Checker 2008). Fanon (1961, 39) argues: The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity … they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. Here, Fanon draws attention to the “spatial separation” (Kipfer 2007) that shapes colonial urban space. We can establish this division through a UPE framing within the climate crisis. As we witnessed in Saint-​Louis, cities, already central sites of exploitation through historic and ongoing forms of racial capitalism (Robinson 1983), again face intensified forms of socio-​ecological violence. Fanon’s (1961) description of the “settler town” and the “native town” are re-​entrenched through climate change, where the cities responsible for climate change are better secured against its violence, while those, like Saint-​Louis, that were not responsible for climate change are left vulnerable. The violence of climate change is therefore every bit as explicit and powerful in its spatial demarcation as colonialism, for its origins lie in the very same processes of underdevelopment and racial capitalism that shaped African urbanization (Myers 2005). Second, if we consider the climate crisis through the various facets of violence examined in this chapter we see the multi-​scalar natures of suffocation across Africa’s rapid urbanization processes. A UPE imaginary brings together the planetary and the everyday through the various circulations that shape the city across a series of different spatio-​temporal rhythms. This includes considering how urbanization is a crucial force in instigating climate change (Swyngedouw and Kaika 2014) as a historic process of global accumulation. It means being able to think within but also beyond urban boundaries (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015)—​an analytic and political imaginary always part of UPE (Swyngedouw 1997)—​at how urbanization

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and climate change reorder territories, hinterlands, and regional geographies. It covers the politics and governing of city as a bounded space at an urban scale as leaders, social movements, and engineers contest the circulation of resource flows and confront socionatures threatening to smother urban Africa under new extreme conditions.The splintered, socionatures of urbanization in the climate crisis become ever more pronounced through “premium ecological enclaves” (Hodson and Marvin 2014) that fence off the rich from the poor, again drawing us to consider and update Fanon’s (1961) description of the “settler town” and the “native town.” For instance, in Accra the Mayor later mobilized the flooding and climate change to justify evictions and demolitions in Old Fadima. One of the city’s largest popular neighbourhoods, its future re-​imagined, through new flows of international capital, architectural fantasy, and climate risk discourse. In its place a secure, segregated zone of green urbanism and high-​income living that its current residents have little chance of accessing as they are expelled from prime development land in the name of a sustainable future. UPE must then attend to the climate crisis as a distinct phase of urbanization operating at a series of connected scales. Such a perspective opens up the new socionatural, urban divisions between the poor and the elite and the politics of compounding historical power relations between African cities and powerful international institutions. And it takes into account the need to research the everyday, often mundane and hidden ways through which climate change is generating new forms of precarity, forestalling responses by marginalized populations that seek to reshape, in incremental ways, the contours of everyday life. Such urbanization from below always takes place in conversation with the city of flow and circulation (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014; Silver 2015). These scales and temporalities overlap and intersect but they also offer a means to politicize the suffocating effects of socionatures unleashed through climate change. Through UPE we can chart the multiple and contested configurations of circulation through which socio-​ecological violence is generated and show the often-​extended geographies implicated in what could be written a climate change(d) urbanization process, i.e., a process of urbanization already deeply and forever changed by climate change. Third, the notion of suffocation offers a sense of urgency across urban Africa in revolting against the socio-​ecological violence of climate change. The crisis, as we have seen, is not a future horizon; rather its various facets of violence examined in this chapter are already compounding marginality and exclusion, death and destruction across the African city, and as Fanon argues, in thinking about colonialism, this is of course disproportionately centred on the black body. As Mora et al. (2013) illustrate, through integrating all current climate data, the tropics are expected to enter a phase of “permanent catastrophe” from 2020. This means that the rapid urbanization under way in many African towns and cities, likely to treble urban populations by 2050 (Parnell and Pieterse 2014) must be understood as inseparable from a climate change(d) world in which up to 400,000 deaths are caused annually (and unequally) worldwide (DARA 2012). The various facets of socio-​ecological violence explored in this chapter have become deeply integrated

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into the various flows and circulations of urbanization across African towns and cities. Historical and contemporary urban political ecologies have left these places with a “catastrophic convergence” (Parenti 2012) that is now an everyday reality for millions as the violent, systemic, and socionatural remaking of urban regions intensifies and accelerates. Black lives don’t matter when it comes to the systemic violence of climate change across urban Africa and those who seek to escape it through the graveyard of the Mediterranean Sea. But these conditions will produce a dialectical force to contest such suffocation. Again turning to Fanon’s (1967, 226) powerful prose, born out of his own experience: “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” We have three sightlines of politicization that emerge from reflecting on the suffocation of African cities under the violence of the climate crisis: the socionatures of ongoing coloniality; the multiple scales and temporalities of urban circulation; and the urgency of revolt. UPE, in conversation with decolonial thinkers such as Fanon, provides an important tool to help uncover and expose the multiple geographies of climate change and urbanization. Heynen (2016, 845) has asked urban political ecologists to engage, and to my mind attack, “the authority of racial capitalism and colonial rule on urban nature.” The climate crisis demands such an approach. The ability to produce knowledges to underpin a politicized understanding of these global, urban processes places new imperatives on UPE in interrogating the injustices within and beyond African cities as they suffocate under ongoing socionatural inequalities and the emerging extremities of the climate crisis.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Harriet Bulkeley and Cheryl McEwan for launching me into my long-​term journey of thinking about climate change, the numerous research participants and collaborators, and Henrik Ernstson for his editorial support and constructive engagement.

References Addo, Kwasi Appeaning. 2013. “Assessing Coastal Vulnerability Index to Climate Change: The Case of Accra–​Ghana.” Journal of Coastal Research 65(2): 1892–​97. Anand, Nikhil. 2012 “Municipal Disconnect: On Abject Water and its Urban Infrastructures.” Ethnography 13(4): 487–​509. Angelo, Hillary, and David Wachsmuth. 2015. “Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(1):  16–​27. Arboleda, Martin. 2015.“Financialization,Totality and Planetary Urbanization in the Chilean Andes.” Geoforum 67, 4–​13. BBC. 2008. “Senegal City is ‘Most Threatened.’” The BBC, June 13. Accessed May 14, 2018. http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​2/​hi/​africa/​7452352.stm. Betsill, Michele, and Harriet Bulkeley. 2007. “Looking Back and Thinking Ahead: A Decade of Cities and Climate Change Research.” Local Environment 12(5): 447–​56.

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Black, Richard, Stephen R.G. Bennett, Sandy M. Thomas, and John R. Beddington. 2011. “Climate Change: Migration as Adaptation.” Nature 478(7370): 447–​49. Branch, Adam, and Zachary Mampilly. 2015. Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change. London: Zed. Bulkeley, Harriet, and Peter Newell. 2015. Governing Climate Change. London and New York: Routledge. Bulkeley, Harriet, and Vanesa Castán Broto. 2013. “Government by Experiment? Global Cities and the Governing of Climate Change.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(3): 361–​75. Broto, Vanesa Castán, Jonathan Ensor, Emily Boyd, Charlotte Allen, Carlos Seventine, and Domingos Augusto Macucule, eds. 2015. Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique. London: UCL Press. Checker, Melissa. 2008. “Eco-​ apartheid and Global Greenwaves: African Diasporic Environmental Justice Movements.” Souls 10(4): 390–​408. Christensen, Jens Hesselbjerg, Bruce Hewitson, Aristita Busuioc, Anthony Chen, Xuejie Gao, R. Held, R. Jones et al. 2012. “Regional Climate Projections.” In Climate Change, 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 847–​940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DARA. 2012. Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2nd Edition: A Guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet. Madrid: Fundacion DARA Internacional. Dazé, Angie. 2007. Climate Change and Poverty in Ghana. CARE International, Accra, Ghana. Diagne, K. 2007. “Governance and Natural Disasters: Addressing Flooding in Saint Louis, Senegal.” Environment and Urbanization 19(2): 552–​62. Douglas, Ian, Kurshid Alam, MaryAnne Maghenda,Yasmin Mcdonnell, Louise McLean, and Jack Campbell. 2008. “Unjust Waters: Climate Change, Flooding and the Urban Poor in Africa.” Environment and Urbanization 20(1): 187–​205. Edwards, Gareth AS, and Harriet Bulkeley. 2015. “Urban Political Ecologies of Housing and Climate Change: The ‘Coolest Block’ Contest in Philadelphia.” Urban Studies 54(5): 1126–​41. Environment Protection Agency. 2000. Ghana National Submission to UNFCCC. Accra: Ghana National Government. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin,White Masks. London: Penguin. Gibson, Nigel, ed. 2016. Living Fanon: Global Perspectives. London: Springer. Gillespie, Tom. 2016. “Accumulation by Urban Dispossession: Struggles over Urban space in Accra, Ghana.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41(1): 66–​77. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintered Urbanism. London and New York: Routledge. Grant, Richard. 2009. Globalizing City:The Urban and Economic Transformation of Accra, Ghana. New York: Syracuse University Press. Gyau-​Boakye, P. 2001.“Environmental Impacts of the Akosombo Dam and Effects of Climate Change on the Lake Levels.” Environment, Development and Sustainability 3(1): 17–​29. Harris, Nigel, and Ida Fabricius, eds. 2005. Cities and Structural Adjustment. London and New York: Routledge. Heynen, Nik. 2016.“Urban Political Ecology II:The Abolitionist Century.” Progress in Human Geography 40(6): 839–​45. Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2006. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London: Taylor and Francis.

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8 MULTI-​VOCAL URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY In search of new sensibilities Garth Myers

Emergent urban realities The multi-​vocality of the grassroots of Africa’s urban environments is pregnant with sensibilities that are crucial for developing an urban political ecology (UPE) that is in tune with the world’s emergent urban realities. In this chapter I develop an argument that takes its strength from studies across the continent, and I draw in particular on my studies of grassroots level socio-​environmental organization from Pikine in Dakar, Senegal. My argument follows that of environmental justice and urban political ecology scholars, namely that grassroots are crucial for addressing urban environmental issues. Here, though, I try to dig into the texture of studies in African cities, while keeping in mind more structural factors that shape the particularity of African urbanization. As we will see there is an important multi-​vocality to these grassroots initiatives—​i.e., a range of ways, views, and voices emerging among the grassroots, from informal waste pickers and hip hop artists to organized women—​that provide entry-​points to rethink urban political ecology in a manner more in tune with urban Africa’s layers of complexity. With this in mind, the chapter first surveys some of the structural factors and wider processes that shape urbanization in Africa, followed by an engagement with the intellectual terrain of urban political ecology and its efforts to provincialize both the study of UPE (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014) and theories of emancipatory change, in particular Edgar Pieterse’s (2008) suggestion of “radical incrementalism.” I argue that UPE operationalized in African urbanism necessitates great caution both against a unidirectional understanding of the path and causation for incremental change and against the sense—​implicit in some political ecology studies—​of univocal grassroots and radical solidarity among the marginalized. I then turn to my in-​depth study of Dakar and Pikine, as an illustration of the value of a multi-​vocal understanding of grassroots action.This is followed by a conclusion where I outline

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how the study of environmental grassroots in African cities can contribute new sensibilities toward a multi-​vocal urban political ecology.

Africa’s urban grassroots Urban Africa in the twenty-​first century has been a terrain of struggle, but where productive moments for grassroots environmental concerns have tended to fade into the background. In cities engulfed in war and civil strife followed by decolonization and liberation struggles—​whether for months and years like Tripoli, Benghazi, and Abidjan or, in the case of Mogadishu, for decades—​basic questions of urban environmental management like what to do with solid waste or how to handle sanitation, let alone questions about the monitoring of air and water quality, have become untenable, or even unaskable. One question for critical scholars, from geographers, sociologists to political scientists, seems to be how to sustain “productive moments” of dynamic grassroots engagement with the environment (Fredericks 2009, 4). For some this includes questions on when and how such dynamics also gain State support, including at times the support of private sector or philanthropic actors, i.e., to understand how to grow the grassroots, if you will, in a manner that leads to longer-​term and systemic engagement with socio-​environmental sustainability and environmental justice. Across the continent, over and over, what we see instead are “productive moments” that come crashing down far too soon. Across the northern tier of the continent, the Arab Spring seems to have passed fall into its own form of winter, and the glimmers of possibility for grassroots organizing to produce environmentally sustainable, deeply democratic, equitable cityscapes have largely faded (Bayat 2013). What Asef Bayat (2013, 189) calls the “Refo-​lutions” that replaced the blooms of spring led him to offer a rich critique of the mistaken assumption that “there is an urban ecological and cultural affinity between the habitus of the urban poor and militant Islamism.” Caught between reactionary, military authoritarianism and Islamist movements which, Bayat (2013) contends, have shown little real convergence with the agendas of marginalized urban poor communities, the grassroots of the continent’s north have been stifled and scorched. Other cities on the continent have seen variations of this spring-​into-​winter scenario, from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (Farge and Felix 2014) to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Bjerkli 2015, 18) to Lagos, Nigeria (Branch and Mampilly 2015). In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, anything resembling a spring was dramatically slowed down by the country’s dispirited and de facto single-​party politics, joined by elite disinterest and a long history of government intrusion into (and effort to shape and control) non-​governmental organizations. In Nairobi, grassroots activism has been extraordinary, and the urban environment has figured centrally for many organizations. However, Carolina for Kibera, Mathare Valley Football Club, Kwani Trust, and other grassroots organizations face many challenges, especially in relationships with the State (Njeru 2012). Zanzibar or Lusaka, by contrast, exhibit markedly less environmental activism at the grassroots.

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More generally speaking, most grassroots organizing in African cities has over the last 15–​20 years been overwhelmingly focused on either cultural issues (ethnic and identity politics for instance) or (party) political in their focus to contest for State power. Branch and Mampilly (2015, 78) make a comparable division between narrow “localized protests” built around cultural or not-​in-​my-​back-​yard issues and chaotic “general uprisings” aimed at overthrowing the State. In my own study of African Cities (Myers 2011) it became clear that most communities and their grassroots remain reluctant to participate in environmental conservation or sustainability programmes, or for that matter to initiate their own environmentally focused campaigns. Following this survey, I am interested in understanding what it takes for grassroots urban environmental activism to come to the fore, which I think lies in forging alliances between what could be called an “environmental consciousness” and a “political consciousness.” This means to develop sensibilities that can somehow reduce violent confrontations (which are very common and destructive), without eliminating the strengths of a “rogue sensibility” of understanding one’s city and its dynamics and that is often present in grassroots activism. Indeed, for grassroots environmental activism to gain political traction, it is not enough to obstruct and contest only, but there also needs to be a set of sensibilities that can engage the State in productive, collaborative, and peaceful ways (at both local and national levels). This spells out a tricky balancing act of being radical, while believing in—​and holding those in power to—​incremental emancipatory change (Pieterse 2008; Ernstson 2013). My search for such sensibilities is tied to grassroots and lived realities, but also takes inspiration from contemporary theorization of African urbanism and political ecology.

Rogue sensibility, radical incrementalism, and multi-​vocality “Rogue urbanism” is the fitting name that Edgar Pieterse and AbdouMaliq Simone have given the ongoing urban revolution of Africa, an era where “dynamics … are so unruly, unpredictable, surprising, confounding and yet, pregnant with possibility” (Pieterse 2013, 12; Pieterse and Simone 2013), The power, creativity, dynamism, and capacity to shape the cityscape at the grassroots are extraordinary in cities of Africa, but so is the possibility for going “rogue” in a negative sense, whether led by rogue states, rogue elites, rogue outsiders, or rogue groups at the grassroots. The implications of this “rogue sensibility” (Pieterse 2013, 12) for the urban environment are precarious and uncertain, and not much explored. The continent shows us everything from inspiring examples of grassroots organizing that leads to environmentally sustainable development, to violence-​ridden, paralysed communities sinking into the mire—​and even dying in it, as in the March 2017 garbage pile collapse in Addis Ababa which claimed more than 60 lives—​with incapacitated or fractious grassroots facing authoritarian states and global capital. Political ecology in Africa has often attended to the “rogue” margins. Marginalized people and environments are frequently at the centre of the analysis, often championed as the wellspring of liberation. Political ecologists explicitly or

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implicitly take the side of the marginalized rural poor in their core arguments. In urban political ecology from outside of Africa, the marginalized are also there, but often more obtusely. Swyngedouw (1996, 67) saw UPE as a way to tell “the story” of a city’s “people, and the socio-​ecological processes that produce the urban and its spaces of privilege and exclusion.” He says forthrightly that “emancipatory democratic politics” are his principal interest within UPE (Swyngedouw 2011). Many UPE scholars clearly seek ways to combat injustice, promote inclusion, and expand emancipatory politics for the grassroots, yet too often without entering enough into actual everyday policy and political realities in cities, which tends to disconnect such analyses from the tricky balancing act of being radical, while engaging the powers that be. Within Africa, most work that calls itself UPE is done in South Africa, often with clear theoretical and empirical preoccupations from UPE that were produced mainly in global North settings. A good example is Alex Loftus’ (2012, 42) in-​depth study of water, life, and politics in Inanda in eThekwini (Durban) where he sees a “politics born out of desperation and anger,” but with a potential. Drawing on Gramscian thought, Loftus (2012, 107) articulates “how a latent volcanic anger might be turned into a coherent and slow-​burning rage capable of achieving a lasting transformation of the real world.” However, while such a lofty statement might hold some truth in some instances (see Ballard, Habib and Valodia 2006), most experiences speak, instead, to a deep frustration in post-​apartheid South African cities with efforts to coalesce this anger at the grassroots into a longer-​term transformative power (Ernstson, Lawhon and Duminy 2014). Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver (2014) have argued for “provincializing” and “situating” UPE in dialogue with African urban studies, because of the difficulties of fitting Western theoretical and empirical fixations on to cities of Africa. The questions surrounding how best to approach the grassroots of Africa’s cities loom large in this provincializing and situating. UPE’s deployment of Marxist theories of power, analysis of networked infrastructure, and critique of capitalism do not always mesh comfortably with African urban realities. All three foci imply the shaping of unjust cities that marginalize the poor and working class, in particular ways. While these foci are not necessarily entirely off target, one ideological consequence of focusing the research this way is that less attention goes to identify specific policy strategies that can create a more equal distribution of power (Bjerkli 2015, 19). Bjerkli (2015, 20) argues that in African urban contexts like Addis Ababa where she works, UPE means “exploring everyday practices and processes in which power in its various forms is exercised and negotiated at various scales.” But as Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver (2014, 502) contend, most urban political ecology has “failed so far to provide critiques which do more than point to the need for change—​instead, studies often conclude with non-​systemic suggestions for change.” How do we get there, to critical analyses of environmental politics that do more than nod at the need to overthrow capitalism? Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver (2014) suggest ways of building from the study of African urbanism to produce situated UPE that can potentially analyse change factors more rigorously, and with an eye

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toward policy as well as politics. Lawhon (2013, 133), for example, critiques the potential utility of “reframing of livelihoods struggles into environmental struggles” in studies of South African urban environments, arguing that “this reframing actually limits the potential for grassroots mobilization around such issues,” for instance in the ineffectiveness of South Africa’s “environmental justice movement in working with the labour movement.” Her argument is that trying to force a conceptualization of the problems that originate from outside of the context ignores the obvious gaps in or misappropriations of the outside concepts. Instead, she argues for thinking from South African urban experience, theorizing the grounds for struggles from the particular, situated, and networked environmental movements and senses of place. Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver (2014, 506) extend this argument, contending that a situated UPE would still focus on power relationships, but as situated in everyday practices and experiences, as a part of a critique of “city-​making,” and as part of what they term, borrowing from Pieterse (2008, 6), “radical incrementalism toward recursive empowerment and systemic change.” Where most UPE works derived from structural Marxist theorization of power “leave progressive scholars either depressed at the lack of revolutionary options, or supporting minor changes to the system,” they argue that a framework that starts from the “everyday practices” and seeks “radical incrementalism … gives us more hope” (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014, 510). Their vision of radical incrementalism (drawing on Ernstson’s 2013 use of the term) as “a situated, unfolding process which differs over time and across space” is intriguing and inspiring (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014, 511). Pieterse (2008, 6) defined radical incrementalism as “a disposition and sensibility that believes in deliberate actions of social transformation but through a multiplicity of processes and imaginations,” because “we cannot wish into existence an overnight revolution that will make everything all right in the world.” I think these authors are on to an extremely important idea of situating UPE in Africa that I seek to take into my discussion of the Senegalese case study later in the chapter; but it too has limitations, some of which Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver (2014) discuss. For example, how exactly do those “everyday modalities” or “platforms of engagement” (Ernstson, Lawhon and Duminy 2014) function, linking people together to provide, not only for urban livelihoods and economies, but also for (new) forms of power. Most significantly, it is still crucial to resist the simple, monochromatic lens on the poor and marginalized. The first things we see when we study the everyday modalities at the grassroots in urban Africa may be their dysfunctional fractures, the vast gulf between them and strategies for radical incrementalism that would result in greater equity, broader socio-​economic justice, or deeper democracy. As Pieterse (2008, 173) put it,“radical incrementalism has little prospect if civil society organizations that represent and champion the poor are weak, unorganized and ineffectual.” In those all-​too-​common circumstances, alongside the “quiet encroachment of the everyday” (Bayat 2000), we may often find the loud encroachment of discord and debilitating conflict. The key is to recognize from the beginning that the grassroots are quite multi-​vocal.

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Piers Blaikie (1995) encourages us to envision the landscape of knowledge production in political ecology as an interactionist, almost theatrical set of encounters. Many agendas and actors interact and intersect in particular urban African environments and environmental issues. For example, many grassroots activists in urban Africa are actually unconcerned with environmental issues. Other grassroots groups engage in environmentally destructive actions. Still others are problematic in violent or unproductively politically destabilizing ways. Moreover, grassroots groups can be highly authoritarian, patriarchal, or sectarian in practice. It is crucial to avoid championing some unproblematized grassroots, and instead to sift through these multivocal, multi-​directional interactive landscapes. This brings us round to Dakar, to show the value of attending to the rogue sensibilities at the grassroots in developing a more Africa-​centred and multi-​vocal urban political ecology. Its satellite informal city of Pikine, especially, offers possibilities for seeing how vital an interactionist, multi-​vocal approach is for UPE in Africa’s cities.

Through waste dumps and hip hop Dakar is the largest city in Senegal, with an estimated population of 2.9 million in 2010 that the UN expects to reach 4.2 million by 2020. It is a city of glaring contrasts. Its downtown area, Le Plateau, “compares easily with any European city” in terms of its built environment, form, and level of environmental services (Myers, Owusu and Subulwa 2012, 362). This core of the city began from French occupation of the Cap Vert peninsula in 1857 and the first layout of 1862 by colonial town planners (Bigon 2009; 2014). As one moves up the narrow peninsula from the Plateau and “Dakar-​ville” of that 1862 plan, it widens through the area known as the Medina—​a high density working class area planned and laid out in 1914 for Africans (mainly the Lebou cultural group) that the French displaced from the Plateau and Dakar-​ville areas—​and then into Grand Dakar. At lower elevations farther away from the Plateau lie the bidonvilles and the historic Lebou settlement at Ouakam. Many of the outer areas of Dakar itself, like Yoff, Ngor, Sicap, Liberté VI, and even Ouakam have been sites for gentrification, as Senegalese traders in the diaspora build an ever-​increasing set of “nearly always unfinished and … often uninhabited” structures that Caroline Melly (2010, 38) calls “not-​yet houses.” The speculation boom set in motion by the construction, even as the houses remain largely unoccupied, has increased housing prices in Dakar dramatically, pushing marginalized people farther out of the city. And, farther out, we reach Pikine. A number of settlements and about 8000 residents were present in this area before the formal start of Pikine’s urban existence in 1952. Marc Verniere (1973, 107) characterized Pikine as a case of “pseudo-​ urbanization” that had “sprung from nothing,” because of the degree to which, even early on, its informal settlements outnumbered its planned areas. By 1973, the population exceeded 140,000, and by the 2002 census Pikine’s three arrondissements (called Dagoudane, Niayes, and Thiaroye) had a combined population of nearly

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800,000 people. During my field work in 2012 and 2013, most officials and experts estimated the population to be more than 1 million in Pikine, the overwhelming majority residing outside of formally planned parts. Each of Pikine’s four largest communes d’arrondissement (Djidah Thiaroye Kao, Yeumbeul Nord, Yeumbeul Sud, and Diamaguene Sicap Mbao) had more than 100,000 people, and all but the latter were entirely unplanned settlements. In fact, Pikine grew rapidly because of the combined drivers of expulsion from re-​planned areas of Dakar in the segregationist colonial post-​war master plan in 1951 (Bigon 2009), and then because of droughts and rural poverty after independence that caused waves of migration into the urban areas (Salem 1992). Its later but continued growth stems in good measure from the speculative boom in real estate in Dakar. And the largest and most informal of the communes d’arrondissement, especially Djidah Thiaroye Kao, were in low-​lying land highly vulnerable to severe seasonal flooding; as these settlements grew, more and more people built in obvious flood zones. Unlike most cities in Africa, though, Dakar—​and even Pikine—​is a city which has been managed within an ostensibly democratic political framework from independence onward; while to some extent Dakar’s local government has been overshadowed by the capital city functions, Dakar has had much more engaged and involved popular local democratic politics than many African cities (Diop 2012). Moreover, urban management has been central to the furtherance and deepening of democracy, with a specific high point in solid waste management. Activists and artists (writers, musicians, hip hop artists, sculptors, muralists, DJs, and more) have had especially important roles in Dakar’s democratization and its environmental management (Fredericks 2009; 2014). This has also been the case in Pikine, along with other banlieue settlements. In local leader Abdurahmane Diallo’s words, in Pikine: “[Y]‌ou have to be connected.You have to have relations.Your capital should be in people, not money. If you don’t have people, you have nothing. This is where the solidarity works” (A. Diallo, interview, December 31, 2012). Part of this solidarity has its roots in Pikine’s communities that existed before the 1952 colonial plan for the area. Several of Pikine’s communities grew around extant Lebou villages, such as Thiaroye Gare and Yeumbeul, and most area place-​names are the Lebou names of former agricultural fields. Even after a 1998 reorganization of local government, these settlements retain some semblance of traditional Lebou leadership. But most segments of today’s Pikine long outgrew the confines of Lebou settlement structures and their ability to manage political and environmental processes (Chef du Village of Thiaroye Gare, interview January 7, 2013). Most of Pikine’s communes d’arrondissements are now incredibly diverse settings in terms of cultural, regional, and even national origins. Despite the lively democratic politics of Pikine and Dakar, many people remain disenfranchised or marginalized, particularly those living in the urban peripheries. Electoral democracy and peace have not meant that Pikine has remotely adequate urban environmental services, for water, sanitation or solid waste. Pikine’s municipal government had a budget of 6 billion CFA, or about $10 per person, in 2012, and even in the realm of security, Pikine had one police officer for every

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10,000 residents—​waste and sanitation services were even further down on the list of municipal priorities, comprising less than 2% of the Pikine city budget (A. Diouck, interview, January 4, 2013). Most residential solid waste is uncollected, and it piles up in empty or abandoned plots. Those who live near the sea or any of the wetland areas or flood ponds of Pikine dump their wastes in the water. Waste and sanitation issues are especially severe in Kiayes (Keur Massar, where the Mbeubuess Trash Mountain, Senegal’s largest dump, is located), but are rampant throughout Pikine (Cissé 2012; B. Diop, pers. comm., January 4, 2013). In the absence of effective environmental services from the state or the private sector, many Pikinois have to make their own plans. As put by Alasse Elhadji Diop (pers. comm., December 30, 2012), resident of Djidah Thiaroye Kao: “[T]‌he government basically doesn’t give a damn about what happens here.” Within some communes d’arrondissements, there is only a limited degree of grassroots organizing, or the community groups that do exist have extremely limited influence. With so many residents coming from diverse rural areas mixing with urbanites displaced from Dakar, community organizing has been fraught with potential conflicts or leadership vacuums (A. Diallo, interview, December 31, 2012). Chefs du quartier, appointed residential neighbourhood chiefs, for example, have no legal authority to allocate land, but “we find they do it anyway” in most of Pikine, including land allocation in hazardous floodplains (A. Diallo, interview, December 31, 2012). A recent survey in conjunction with home demolitions for highway construction through Pikine found that fewer than 10 of the 125 houses slated for demolition had legal papers or titles for land, houses, or properties (A. Niang, interview, January 4, 2013). Donor-​funded efforts to regularize land control have barely made a dent (Director, Centre Polyvalent de Thiaroye Gare, interview, January 7, 2013). Only six of Djidah Thiaroye Kao’s 66 neighbourhoods, for example, belong to “regularized” Pikine—​ the other 60 are “irregular” settlements (A. Diouck, interview, January 4, 2013). One strong community institution both invested in the improvement of the urban environment in Pikine and engaged in political-​ecological activism is the artists’ cooperative known as Africulturban. Based in the Leopold Senghor Centre in Pikine West, Africulturban is a cultural centre for artists, dancers, musicians, rappers, and other performers. It houses a radio station, handicrafts centre, recording studio, dance studio, art studio, stages, and arts classrooms (J. Sall, interview, January 9, 2013). There is other artist-​related activism in affiliation with Thiaroye’s Jacque Chirac Centre, for example, but Africulturban has been especially inspirational and influential with Pikine’s youth (B. Diop, pers. comm., January 4, 2013). Its core founder, the rapper, Matador, has gained a significant following in Pikine and political influence in Dakar and in Senegal as a whole alongside a number of younger rappers (A. Diouck, interview, January 4, 2013).The mayor of Djidah Thiaroye Kao, Alioune Diouck, explained that: Pikine has a spirit of revolt. A lot of rap groups give voice to this lack of representation. Hip-​hop groups are … a good thing … Government actors have some distance from the reality of people’s lives. The hip-​hop artists can

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articulate the underground philosophy of the lower class, like in America, they denounce the lack of schools, health care, and so on. A. Diouck, interview, January 4, 2013 Rappers were central to the 2012 election results in Senegal, in mobilizing opposition to the incumbent President Abdoulaye Wade’s failed attempt to gain a third term as Senegal’s President (Fredericks 2014). Of particular significance was the collective, Y’en a Marre (Enough is Enough, or We Are Sick of It), led by half a dozen rappers and one journalist, emanating out of the neighbourhood of Parcelles Assainies, bordering Pikine (Fredericks 2014; Mbaye 2014). But Y’en a Marre and the activism of rappers were always about much more than electoral politics. Fredericks (2014, 132) shows that rappers and young musicians in Pikine, Dakar, and elsewhere created “a locus of political identity formation for youth through offering a language of geographical critique and a spatial practice of alternative placemaking.” While hip hop’s earliest stars in Senegal were from Dakar, by the 2010s the dominant voices in the genre belonged to the city’s edge, especially Pikine (Fredericks 2014). And their call to action was wrapped around the lack of urban environmental service provision in their neighbourhoods. Hip hop performance signals a form of “ownership over the neighbourhood, a claim to the rights and rewards of the city through occupying its physical space and the space of public dialogue” (Fredericks 2014, 139). This hip hop activism in Pikine and Dakar serves as an effective African example of rogue urbanism practising radical incrementalism in environmental politics. Hip hop is also, though, a highly diverse and multi-​vocal genre of art, even just within Dakar and Pikine (Mbaye 2014). Not all of its stars in Dakar and Pikine aim toward radical incrementalism or environmental politics at all. But within what Jenny Mbaye (2014, 399) terms Dakar’s “hip hop music with a message,” Matador, co-​ founder of the rap group, Wa BMG 44, has one of the more prominent voices that is aimed that way. In “Hip Hop Attitude,” Matador raps that “hip hop is a way of living … [that] ain’t made for empty minds,” and he ends the song arguing that rappers like him are “serving others before oneself—​eradicating stress, uplifting the morale of population—​in times we so need it” (Mbaye 2014, 400). Along with rappers like Thiat, Foumelade, or Positive Black Soul’s Didier Awadi, Matador has fused his music with his politics, but also his geography. In my interview with him, Matador said: [I]‌f you think people from the US or Europe are going to get you a job or the government is going to provide for you, think again, you have to struggle, [and] build things for yourself. Matador stretched this further in an earlier interview with Mbaye (2014, 402), saying that his group wanted to use hip hop to help young people to be “aware of their surroundings,” to “make the youth understand that they should not wait for the state and should act to maintain their own environment.”

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Matador stressed to Mbaye (2014, 404) that he saw rappers as not just truth-​ tellers “but … also workers and developers.” Part of the “developer” side comes with Africulturban, which Fredericks calls “a pioneer in community building” from its founding in Pikine in 2006.The rapper Foumelade similarly co-​founded a community arts center in 2013, GHip Hop, in his banlieue, Guediawaye (Fredericks 2014, 139).The rappers in the leadership of the Y’en a Marre movement are likewise deeply invested in what Fredericks (2014, 141) calls the “intimate geographies of place-​making (not just representing)” in Parcelles. The esprits (spirits) of Y’en a Marre, their informal local branches, became enormously influential in electoral politics in 2011–​12, but, again, the elections were only a part of their pull. People in the banlieues used the Y’en a Marre forums to discuss, prominently, “garbage and sanitation” (Fredericks 2014, 143). One of the movement’s most famous (and violent) demonstrations happened in the edge “neighborhood of Cambérène, over the government’s inaction in repairing a broken sewer main which flooded the neighbourhood.” Well after the elections of 2012 were done, the “brigades” of Y’en a Marre were engaged to “clean up the city” of waste and refuse. Some of the environmental activism of hip hop artists has been related directly to floods. This is especially so for rappers from low-​lying Pikine. More than 50 years ago, Pikine supplied drinking water to Dakar, but the groundwater today has become too contaminated. The water table is itself so high in Djidah Thiaroye Kao that one barely has to scratch the surface to get to water, but it is unfit for human consumption. Ironically, Pikine is subjected to what has become an annual cycle of flooding. In 2009, more than 300,000 residents were temporarily displaced. In some parts of Djidah Thiaroye Kao in 2012, more than 8000 residents were forced to reside in their waterlogged homes because they perceived that they had nowhere to go—​in one case, 30 residents of one structure remained in a home that had half a metre of standing water on its ground floor for more than a month. More than 800 flood-​damaged homes stood abandoned in Djidah Thiaroye Kao in January 2013. Hip hop artist-​activists were highly conducive to flood relief, in leveraging funds and mobilizing the people in the diaspora (A. Fall, interview, January 7, 2013; Matador, interview, January 9, 2013; J. Sall, interview, January 9, 2013). Pikine offers a setting where many contradictory factors play out at the grassroots level. Some of the positive aspects of rogue sensibility were quite evident in 2013 in Mbeubeuss, on the Trash Mountain. More than 2000 scavengers worked as a part of a lively informal union, separating out plastics, bottles, paper, used clothing, tyres, and other things for use and re-​use.The President of the union told us proudly (pers. comm., January 2, 2013) that everything he was wearing, including his watch, came from the mountain. There were people mining soil from the Trash Mountain by a sifting method, other people were farming the wetland at its base, and still others were building houses into that wetland. Many of the residents were Senegalese from all over the country, but some Malians and other foreigners were there as well. It was clearly a site of some tensions, but one that also offered further inspirational examples of rogue urbanism and practices of radical incrementalism. Grassroots

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organizing here might help to improve both the quality of life of the marginalized poor and the environment. Mbeubeuss is constantly on the verge of closure; closing it might improve the overall environmental health, yet kill what is worthwhile in the rogue sensibility of its people. Furthermore, Pikine’s political environments offer us a segue into further explication of the importance of seeing multi-​vocality in the city. Just as not all hip hop artists offer the same radical political environmental voice as Matador’s, there are contentious and contradictory views within grassroots communities about what to do with Mbeubuess, and what to do with trash in the Dakar region as a whole. Many people in marginalized communities in Pikine—​even grassroots activists themselves sometimes—​feel distinctly disempowered and dispirited. The Deputy Mayor of Thiaroye went so far as to claim that: the solidarity that is so important to African society is no more [in Thiaroye]. It is now to each his own and God for all … People are afraid of  Thiaroye. If you say you are from here, people are afraid. A. Fall, interview, January 7, 2013 One of the leaders of a cooperative of traders in Thiaroye’s massive, unruly market said: “every God-​g iven day I hear about somebody getting killed or robbed here, and I never heard of that in the rural areas.” As to Thiaroye’s government, “they always promise but they do nothing. There is help but it only goes to those close to the mayor” (A. Louw, interview, January 9, 2013). The charismatic mayor of nearby Djidah Thiaroye Kao became defensive when told of comments like these from grassroots organizers. In the 2009 floods, he said: We found more than 8000 homes abandoned. People get angry. People say the government is not acceptable; … people say negative things about me. I try to communicate with people. I get on the radio and say, you need to calm down … In 2009, I had … just been elected and two months later, floods, and more than 800 people flood the mayor’s office … They want me to go to the police, but I said, no, the government cannot help us; we need to struggle on our own. But many of these problems in [similar] bidonvilles around the world, where people do whatever they want, well, these problems are the result A. Diouck, interview, January 4, 2013 The leaders of Pikine’s community groups usually recognize the power of the local State, but, in their eyes it is the grassroots that in effect run Pikine, because no one else will. But there are genuinely problematic aspects of this, when grassroots actions are poorly coordinated, in conflict, or underfunded. Djibril Djiallo (interview, January 9, 2013) was the President of a cooperative of dozens of community development groups at the grassroots that started over 20 years ago as a response to floods in the 1990s. Four different organizations, previously unknown to each other, met through a donor who convinced them that they should work together, which

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resulted in an organization with the abbreviation CADD in 1999–​2000. By 2013 CADD-​affiliated groups were involved in politics, training, education, and women’s micro-​finance organizations. At first people did not trust that this ad hoc umbrella organization would last. However, women’s organizations became very important to CADD’s survival; in researching CADD, Djiallo helped me and my field work team to bring together the leaders of 20 women’s groups, including those with an environmental emphasis.This focus group highlighted one of the most crucial dimensions of multi-​vocality at the grassroots: gender differences. In prefacing the focus group discussion, Djiallo said: [I]‌f you say you can develop Djidah Thiaroye Kao without women, that is impossible. Women are more reliable with money, with fighting poverty, helping families, and meeting all the family’s needs. D. Djiallo, interview, January 9, 2013 Miriam Mbaye, head of the association of women in Djidah Thiaroye Kao and a Vice-​Mayor, interrupted Djiallo, probably sensing that he and the other male head of CADD were attempting to control the focus group: Women are very tired.Very tired of how we are living. If men are tired, then by comparison women are dead! The mayor said [that we should] form an organization, so we did.We engage in micro-​finance and job training.Women need both. We don’t have space, houses or places to make money, places for business, for women to engage in hairdressing, tincture, agro-​processing, or a bank that would finance women. If you want to hear about the problems of women you will be here all night.You might have to stay the night. M. Mbaye, interview, January 9, 2013 Many women in the focus group were much more concerned with very basic survival and sustenance, rather than grand questions of deeper democracy or environmental justice. As Ndeye Niang said in this focus group: “women have a real problem to express themselves in society. Our husbands don’t want us to join women’s groups because they fear being replaced and losing power over us.” This is not to say that grassroots organizing for environmental politics is a failure in Dakar—​far from it. The hip hop collectives and artists discussed above are obviously a major counter-​ example. Probably the most famous counter-​ example of such organizing emerging as a success environmentally and politically belongs to the Set/​Setal (Be Clean/​Make Clean) movement of the 1980s, where a youth clean-​up movement impacted Dakar and Senegal in unprecedented ways (Fredericks 2009, 2). Fredericks (2009, 4) sees in Set/​Setal one of those “productive moments in which key political, economic, and social factors crystallize and new configurations of social relations are negotiated.” Another productive moment came when Dakar’s trash workers succeeded, from the grassroots, in winning a strong collective bargaining agreement from the Dakar government in 2014 against the trend

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toward greater cutbacks in support for grassroots groups like theirs (Fredericks 2018). However, most gains have been tenuous and uncertain. Vitally, there are those in Dakar and Pikine, and in grassroots organizations, who vigorously opposed the trash workers. Even in one of Africa’s most democratic, politically stable cities with well-​developed rogue sensibilities honed for radical incrementalism at the grassroots, there are many conflicting voices which do not sing in unison.

Conclusion This chapter has aimed at a rethinking of UPE as theorized or conceptualized from the complicated everyday environmentalism of marginalized urban African communities like those of Dakar and Pikine.There is a dialectic process at work in Dakar and Pikine, as in much of urban Africa, one that rubs contradictory elements—​ from grassroots as sites and causes of debilitating fracture, to grassroots as mode of revolution—​toward one another. This is happening on a continual basis and in a range of different ways, and this is also where hope resides for a liberatory radical incrementalism. Vijay Prashad (2015, 4) has written, in relation to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, that there is a “consistent hope in the Arab political landscape,” that this will be (here echoing the words of a Syrian poet) “the generation that will defeat defeat.” It doesn’t always feel that way in Pikine’s grassroots environmental politics, nor in the similarly situated grassroots across the cities of Africa; but without such hope there is little purpose in a situated, multi-​vocal Africa-​centred UPE in the first place. Power is relational. It operates in networks. These networks are constantly shifting and in tension. At the grassroots in marginalized poor urban communities, which constitute the majority in most of the continent of Africa’s cities, these networks hold less power in the overt world. Yet they are ultimately responsible for a great deal of the production of urban space, and therefore for the urbanization of nature and naturalization of the urban. Pieterse (2010) pushes his affirmative outlook that “I have no doubt that the street, the slum, the waste dump, the taxi rank, the mosque and church will become the catalysts of an emancipated African urbanism.” From Pikine to Cairo to Addis to Nairobi to Cape Town, we see that marginal communities do have the potential for transformational energies and dynamism that produce radical incrementalism and forms of emancipation, albeit not in the same form as in previous urban revolutions. But their successes are often fleeting, their emancipatory potential often transitory or ephemeral. The rogue sensibilities of marginalized urban communities, which we have visited in this chapter, and which constitute the majority-​ experience, are unpredictable and difficult to harness into revolutionary moments that are sustained. The task ahead is to develop analytical and methodological tools to understand them better, and work to sustain them, which is itself an explicit component of the situatedness of UPE in African contexts (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014). The literature on the cities of the global South and Southern urban planning makes plain that practice and engagement for urban change ought to be constituent elements of any theory (Watson 2009; Myers

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2011; Ernstson, Lawhon and Duminy 2014; Parnell and Oldfield 2014). Facing the panoply of ideas that my multi-​vocal approach throws up can be paralysing. We might in effect be stopped by what Robinson (2016) refers to as singularities, where each story is different, and thus might require different theories, or lead to different ideas or solutions to environmental issues. Instead, can we think of these instances, spaces, and realms of urban environments as revisable, contextual, nuanced, and negotiated? Such an approach would commonsensically suggest, instead of an incomparable mess, that in different cities, in different parts of these cities, at different times, with different issues, different approaches are called for; but that at the same time, seeing and reading the inter-​relationships of political and environmental consciousness (and unconsciousness) in a given place and time may provide opportunities for more socially and environmentally sustainable and liberatory urban development. This lens thus may help produce Pieterse’s (2008) “radical incrementalism.” Swyngedouw (2014, 133) rightly argues that the key question is “what happens when the squares are cleared, the tents removed and the energies dissipate, when the dream is over and the dawn of ‘ordinary’ everyday life begins again.” The next step must involve, he contends: painstaking organisation, sustained political action and a committed fidelity to universalising the egalitarian trajectory for the management of the commons; a process that has to consider carefully the persistent obstacles and often-​ violent strategies of resistance orchestrated by those who wish to hang on to the existing state of the situation. Urban political ecology demands hard work on the most difficult issues facing the world for human and non-​human alike. It must be open to revision, and aware of spaces in between city and countryside as well as seamless ties across scale. It should not shy away from the multi-​vocality at the grassroots virtually anywhere while remaining rooted in the progressive and practical realm of a radical incrementalism.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Tom Hanlon, Birame Diop, and the entire research team affiliated with Partners Senegal with whom I conducted this field research. In particular, I thank Alasse Elhaji Diop, whose interpretative and translation services for Wolof discussions and interviews proved invaluable. Many thanks to Henrik Ernstson for feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

References Ballard, Richard, Adam Habib, Imraan Valodia, and Elke Zuern. 2006. “From Anti-​Apartheid to Post-​ Apartheid Social Movements.” In Voices of Protest: Social Movements in Post-​ Apartheid South Africa, edited by Richard Ballard, Adam Habib and Imraan Valodia, 1–​21. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-​Natal Press.

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Bayat, Asef. 2013. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. 2nd edn. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bayat, Asef. 2000. “From ‘Dangerous Classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels.’” International Sociology 15(3): 533–​57. Bigon, Liora. 2014. “From Metropolitan to Colonial Planning: Dakar between Garden City and ité-​jardin.” In Garden Cities and Colonial Planning: Transnationality and Urban Ideas in Africa and Palestine, edited by Liora Bigon and Yossi Katz, 50–​73. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bigon, Liora. 2009. “Urban Planning, Colonial Doctrines and Street Naming in French Dakar and British Lagos, c. 1850–​1930.” Urban History 36(3): 426–​48. Bjerkli, Camilla. 2015. “Power in Waste: Conflicting Agendas in Planning for Integrated Solid Waste Management in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskriftt 69(1): 18–​27. Blaikie, Piers. 1995. “Changing Environments or Changing Views? A Political Ecology for Developing Countries.” Geography 80(3): 203–​14. Branch, Adam, and Zachariah Cherian Mampilly. 2015. Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change. London: Zed Books. Cissé, Oumar, ed. 2012. Les décharges d’ordures en Afrique: Mbeubeuss à Dakar au Sénégal. Paris: Karthala. Diop, Abdurahmane. 2012. “Dakar.” In Capital Cities in Africa: Power and Powerlessness, edited by Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn, 32–​44. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Ernstson, Henrik. 2013. “Re-​translating Nature in Post-​Apartheid Cape Town: The Material Semiotics of People and Plants at Bottom Road.” In Actor-​Network Theory for Development: Working Paper Series, edited by Richard Heeks, Paper 4/​2013. Manchester: Institute for Development Policy and Management, SED, The University of Manchester. Ernstson, Henrik, Mary Lawhon, and James Duminy. 2014. “Conceptual Vectors of African Urbanism: ‘Engaged Theory-​Making’ and ‘Platforms of Engagement.’” 48(9): 1563–​77. Farge, Emma, and Bate Felix. 2014. “Beyond Burkina Faso, Africa’s ‘Black Spring’ Hopes may be Premature.” Reuters. Accessed May 21, 2018. www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​ burkina-​politics-​africa-​analysis/​beyond-​burkina-​f aso-​africas-​black-​spring-​hopes-​may-​ be-​premature-​idUSKBN0IQ1ZE20141106. Fredericks, Rosalind Cooke. 2009. Doing the Dirty Work: The Cultural Politics of Garbage Collection in Dakar, Senegal. PhD thesis. University of California, Berkeley. Fredericks, Rosalind Cooke. 2014. “‘The Old Man is Dead’: Hip-​Hop and the Arts of Citizenship of Senegalese Youth.” Antipode 46(1): 130–​48. Fredericks, Rosalind Cooke. 2016. Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lawhon, Mary. 2013. “Situated, Networked Environmentalisms: A Case for Environmental Theory from the South.” Geography Compass 7(2): 128–​38. Lawhon, Mary, Henrik Ernstson, and Jonathan Silver. 2014. “Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE through African Urbanism.” Antipode 46(2): 497–​516. Loftus, Alex. 2012. Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mbaye, Jenny. 2014.“Hip Hop Politics: Recognizing Southern Complexity.” In The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, edited by Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield, 396–​ 412. London and New York: Routledge. Melly, Caroline. 2010. “Inside-​out Houses: Urban Belonging and Imagined Futures in Dakar, Senegal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5(1): 37–​65. Myers, Garth. 2011. African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice. London: Zed Books.

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Myers, Garth, Francis Owusu, and Angela Gray Subulwa. 2012. “Cities of Sub-​Saharan Africa.” In Cities of the World, 5th edn, edited by Stanley Brunn, Maureen Hays-​Mitchell and Donald Zeigler, 331–​79. Landam: Rowman and Littlefield. Njeru, Jeremia. 2012. “Mobilization and Protest: The Struggle to Save Karura Forest in Nairobi, Kenya.” African Geographical Review 31(1): 17–​32. Parnell, Susan, and Sophie Oldfield, eds. 2014. The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South. London and New York: Routledge. Pieterse, Edgar. 2008. City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development. London: Zed Books. Pieterse, Edgar. 2010. “Cityness and African Urban Development.” Urban Forum 21: 205–​19. Pieterse, Edgar. 2013. “Introducing Rogue Urbanism.” In Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities, edited by Edgar Pieterse and AbdouMaliq Simone, 12–​15. Cape Town: Jacana Media and African Centre for Cities. Pieterse, Edgar, and AbdouMaliq Simone, eds. 2013. Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities. Cape Town: Jacana Media and African Centre for Cities. Prashad, Vijay. 2015. “Republic of Tahrir.” Frontline, April 3. Accessed April 22, 2018. www. frontline.in/​world-​affairs/​republic-​of-​tahrir/​article6993815.ece?homepage=true. Robinson, Jennifer. 2016. “Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40 (1): 187–​99. Salem, Gérard. 1992. “Crise urbaine et contrôle social à Pikine: bornes-​ fontaines et clientélisme.” Politique Africaine, 45: 21–​38. Swyngedouw, Erik. 1996. “The City as a Hybrid: On Nature, Society, and Cyborg Urbanization.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 7(2): 65–​80. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2011. “H2O Does not Exist!? Retooling the Washington-​ Brussels Consensus.” The Water and Sanitation Symposium, STEPS Centre, University of Sussex. Accessed April 17, 2018. www.youtube.com/​watch?v=pQPak5tyHKg. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2014. “Where is the Political? Insurgent Mobilisations and the Incipient ‘Return of the Political’.” Space and Polity 18(2): 122–​36. Verniere, Marc. 1973. “Pikine, ‘ville nouvelle’ de Dakar, un cas de pseudo-​urbanisation.” L’Espace Géographique 2: 107–​26. Watson,Vanessa. 2009. “Seeing from the South: Refocusing Urban Planning on the Globe’s Central Urban Issues.” Urban Studies 46(11): 2259–​75.

Interviews Chef du Village of Thiaroye Gare. 2013. Focus group interview at Commune d’arrondissement, Municipality of Pikine, Dakar, Senegal. January 7. Diallo, Abdurahmane. 2012. Focus group interview with Abdourahmane Diallo at US Agency for International Development. Dakar, December 31. Diouck Alioune. 2013. Focus group interview with Alioune Diouck, Mayor of Djidah Thiaroye Kao Commune d’arrondissement. City of Pikine, Dakar. January 4. Director, Centre Polyvalent de Thiaroye Gare. 2013. Focus group interview with the Director of the Centre Polyvalent de Thiaroye Gare. City of Pikine, Dakar, January 7. Djiallo, Djibril. 2013. Focus group interview with Djibril Djiallo, President of the Djidah Thiaroye Kao coalition of community groups. January 9. Fall, Abdoulaye. 2013. Focus group interview with Abdoulaye Fall, Vice-​Mayor of Thiaroye Gare commune d’arrondissement. City of Pikine, Dakar. January 7 Louw, Allah. 2013. Focus group interview with Allah Louw, mechanic, resident of Djidah Thiaroye Kao, City of Pikine, Dakar. January 9.

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Matador 2013. Focus group interview with the rapper, Matador, at Africulturban, in Pikine West, City of Pikine, Dakar. January 9. Mbaye, Miriam. 2013. Focus group interview with Miriam Mbaye, Head of the Women’s Association of Djidah Thiaroye Kao. January 9. Niang, Niang. 2013. Focus group interview with Ndeye Niang, women’s NGO activist, Djidah Thiaroye Kao. January 9. Sall, Jibril. 2013. Focus group interview with Jibril Sall, Director, Centre Leopold Senghor, Africulturban, in Pikine West, City of Pikine, Dakar. January 9.

9 PAVED PARADISE The suburb as chief artefact of the Anthropocene and terrain of new political performativities Roger Keil

The imminent collapse of our civilization is standing in two key aspects of our civilization that are driving it over the edge: suburban living and the obsession with the automobile. Suburban life style and living with cars is the core of modern life representing the “nemesis” of modern civilisation, in the way that our society insistently follow out their lifestyle desires and specifically how the car becomes a dimension of their personality that reflects their responsibility away from a sustainable future. The impact of the collapse on the urban settlements has been reflected on the phenomenon of spread city or urban sprawl around the world, in which the extensive landscapes will continue to be occupied by the remains of modernity with periphery urban areas, called suburbia. It is expect [sic] that much of the urban structure of today all around the world being abandoned or with greatly reduced populations clustering on urban edges or in new peri-​urban towns. Antonio Zumelzu (2011, 5) At the other side of the spectrum, in the receiving end of the networks supplying raw materials torn from extraction sites, we find ourselves before a world of megacities, suburbs, and various sorts of concentrated agglomerations, where the capitalist mode of production ceaselessly spawns veils upon these dense metabolic exchanges and hides them in plain sight. Martín Arboleda (2016, 238)

Introduction Common assumptions in critical urban studies foreground the central place as the hub of metabolisms and the location of relevant politics. The last mile, premium network spaces, financial institutions, knowledge production, etc. all represent

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urban political ecology (UPE) as spatially central. In terms of performing the political, central places and urban centres have been privileged in UPE as locations for meaningful disruptions. With the profound change in modalities of urbanization, it may instead be useful to expand such political geographies to “the street,” the mall, the suburban neighbourhood as places aspiring to centrality. This would call for taking into account particular performative politics by often overlooked polities and constituencies that are involved in rapidly emerging metabolisms at the cities’—​and often at the world’s—​edge. This chapter focuses on global suburbanization (Keil 2013) with the aim to understand what a decentred UPE and critical urbanist thought could look like in the Anthropocene. The chapter aims to provoke a view of extended suburbanized regions, not only as constituting the basis for capitalist production, but also a scale of cognition and a terrain for action. This I mean has two immediate consequences. First, I am looking at suburbanization as one of the defining processes of the Anthropocene. The suburbs entail capital switching at the cost of both human life and ecological devastation (climate change, etc.).1 Capital switching involves the redirection of capital accumulation from the production process into circulation and related spheres of consumption such as the production of space, the production of nature, education, and so forth. The virtuous cycles of investment embedded in suburbanization seemed self-​propelling for about half a century in the Fordist West, especially in the USA. Such virtuous cycles have since been repackaged as recipes for entire national economies in countries such as Turkey, India or China (Guney, Keil, and Ucoglu forthcoming). While this historical materialist trajectory is pretty well known, what I would like to more clearly contest is the notion that suburbanization also comes, at first glance, packaged with exemplary depoliticization. The formation of suburbia, so the argument goes, is connected with indebtedness, dependence on organized consumption (as in the mall), extended metropolitan connectivities (and disconnectivities), which brings isolation, control, and disjunction from the political in the conventional sense. The second consequence is that, while urbanism has tended to emphasize the positive environmental effects of creative economies in central (globalized, gentrified, normalized) cores, we now know from a range of scholars that some of the most dynamic changes—​socially and politically—​in today’s urban world occur at the cities’ peripheries and through suburbanization (Caldeira 2013; Keil 2013; 2017; Ranganathan 2014; Hamel and Keil 2015; Ranganathan and Balazs 2015; Roy 2015). This leads to two related thoughts that I will develop in this chapter: First, those peripheries and their boundaries deserve more study. We know little about how the new sub/​urbanites engage the metabolisms of their everyday lives beyond caricatures of suburban lifestyles that are bandied about uncritically and often in blatantly reactionary ways by urban-​centred political ecologists. We need better theoretical and empirical work to help us understand how everyday suburbanisms function and contribute to the urban world in which we live. Second, and relatedly, this leads to positing that the urban political ecologies of suburbanization in a global

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urban world are not static, conservative, and ahistorical but that they are, in many ways, the hotbeds of new political ruptures and eruptions themselves. In the following I will first foreground how suburbanization is intimately connected to both planetary urbanization and the Anthropocene. This situates suburbanization as something we cannot omit in our analysis of political ecology and leads to a second section on debates that have focused on decentring UPE. In the final section, while aware of how important revolt and disruption have been in the development of radical urban politics, I point to the political possibilities of everyday sub/​urbanisms, arguing for a view that allows a recognition of how the geography of political performativity has moved to the periphery where urban growth (but sometimes also shrinkage) is changing the terrain of the political in demographic, economic, social, cultural, and environmental terms.

Suburbanization and the Anthropocene The suburbs—​as a form, a certain idea, and materiality of how cities grow—​are identified as a major contributor to the anthropocenic, or if you will anthropo-​ obscene, realities we find ourselves in at the beginning of the twenty-​first century. And, in as much as they are seen in a planetary context, they are subsumed in what Brenner and Schmid (2014; 2015; Brenner 2014), with reference to earlier work by Henri Lefebvre, have come to call “planetary urbanization.” Arboleda bemoans the consequences of that development for what he calls “the ecologies of the Anthropocene” and adds that “the planetary urban fetish becomes the more ruthless, the more remote the exploited and plundered ecosystems are from the point of consumption” (Arboleda 2016, 7). Yet, there is no single cause or source for this fetishization. There is no simple material or substance to blame but, in its heart, anthropocenic destruction has to be laid at the feet of capitalism, not the human species (Demos 2015a). Moore therefore proposes to rename it “the Capitalocene” (Moore 2017).We can add to this fundamental causality the production of urban space as a major process through which capital accumulation “takes place” and through which it generates all manner of systemic inequalities as well as climate change-​relevant perturbations of major proportions. Mark Whitehead therefore suggests naming it the Metropocene instead: “a period defined by the dynamics and demands of urbanization” (Whitehead 2014, 100). So, we are moving the narrative from the consequences of anthropocenic expansion to the modalities through which we built the world in which we live. If there are going to be 10 billion humans on the Earth, as one current projection holds, we know for sure that “[e]‌very last one of those 10 billion human beings is going to need a place to live” (Greenfield 2016). Most of the future inhabitants of the Earth’s crust will be living in entirely new cities and many more of those who already live in cities will live in new, mostly suburban environments. The building and rebuilding of cities and suburbs, and their roles in housing our life, work, and play in capitalist society contribute to the planetary ecological problems we face today. But this insight itself merely names the complex problem,

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often in sophisticated scientific terms, but it does not solve it (Seto et al. 2012). This argument receives nuance by differentiating between metropolitan and global scale impacts envisioned to be the consequence of urbanization. Not everything that appears as a local problem can be understood in those terms but needs to be viewed in its global context (Cohen 2014; Arboleda 2016; Wachsmuth, Cohen and Angelo 2016). Speaking about the Anthropocene is, in the first instance, a look back at the impact of past practice. One question could be: how did we end up with a warming planet? In a recent series of essays, Demos examines the aesthetics of climate change art (for want of a better word). Contrasting, for example, the photography of Edward Burtynsky with that of Richard Misrach,2 Demos (2015b) observes that artists have very different aesthetic strategies of capturing “the growing antagonism between petrocapitalism and its environmentalist opposition—​a political relationality otherwise absent in Anthropocene discourse.”  In a striking set of sculptures called “A Line in the Sand” (see a sample in Figure 9.1), artist Alison Ruttan moves beyond the aestheticization of the destructive force of the sub/​urbanization, automobilization dynamics and gives a strategic direction which bundles these forces into a highway to hell that directly connects the oil fields with the consumption spaces back home (Newcity Art 2015). This is less about general culpability and more about understanding specific causalities. It is not the species at fault but its involvement in processes of capital accumulation through particular spatial forms and ways of

FIGURE 9.1   Alison

Ruttan’s installation sculpture “A Line in the Sand” at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2015 Source: Photo by author.

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life. Through this mode of sensitizing the viewer, there is a possible shift away from reading our present moment through the abstract terms or “black boxes” of industrialization, urbanization, population, and so forth and beyond a consequentialist bias in viewing the period we live in (Moore 2017). Urbanization has been made into the process that defines our age (Brenner and Schmid 2014; 2015). From this insight springs the notion that how we build cities and how those cities contribute to climate change and social injustice is a core concern in climate change adaptation and remediation efforts (Hodson and Marvin 2010; Whitehead 2014). What we call urbanization today is generally seen in line with industrialization (Lefebvre 2003), and the rates of urbanization rose sharply after the year 1800, which is also often seen as the starting date of what many consider the Anthropocene today (Crutzen 2005; Swyngedouw 2011; Zumelzu 2011). While Moore’s definition of the Capitalocene suggests that “the origins of today’s crisis lie in the epoch-​making transformations of capital, power, and nature that began in the ‘long’ sixteenth century” (Moore 2017, 1), industrial era urbanization is therefore largely coincident with what Moore may call the consequentialist definition of the Anthropocene (Barau and Ludin 2012). I take no issue, in general, with Moore’s cautioning against this consequentialist bias, and applaud his project of shifting attention from a human-​technology-​ centric perspective to a capital-​centric perspective, but note that it is exactly through the production of urban space typical for the industrial period that capital accumulates at the rates that have made it particularly aggressive in “its extraordinary reshaping of global natures” (Moore 2017). While ninteenth century urbanization (the period associated with coal and steam) had devastating impacts on local, regional, and global environments (including human ones), it got much worse during the century that followed, particularly during its second half. Not surprisingly, the “great acceleration” of climate relevant changes from the Anthropocene occurs after the Second World War, a period which coincides with the Fordist-​Keynesian regime of accumulation for which the “suburban solution” represented a major regulatory mechanism for both economic crisis and social unrest (Walker 1977; Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill 2007, 618). The suburbs have carried the chief load in both conversations: they are considered failures in building sustainability and contributors to social inequality. More recently, they have also been prime targets for surgical intervention—​typically involving attempts at retrofitting malls and other commercial properties, developing land currently used for parking lots, incentivizing multi-​unit housing, and encouraging transit-​oriented development—​in order to produce more sustainability (Schultz 2001; Dunham-​ Jones and Williamson 2011). The relationship of urbanization and the Anthropocene is contradictory as cities are seen as equally causing climate change and providing the socio-​technical and political environment to come to terms with it, as the work of the C40 group of cities demonstrates (Hodson and Marvin 2010, 289).3 By some accounts,“cities” are in the position to save the world “trillions” of dollars through “aggressive policies and changes—​including low-​carbon innovation, reduced fossil fuel subsidies and

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carbon pricing” and especially reforms and innovation in the transportation sector (Stanley 2015). However, while suburbia and suburbanites are definitely considered to be among the chief “causes,” they rarely get included in the catalogue of the sites or origins for “innovative responses” to the problem. They remain firmly on the debit side of the anthropocenic equation. Central to understanding extended urbanization is the question of land (Harris and Lehrer 2018). In the era of land grabs in which we find ourselves today, this has particular currency (Lazarus 2014). The lands secured through “a geopolitically complicated cast of transnational corporations, investment funds, government agencies and other buyers” (Lazarus 2014, 74) are meant to contribute to the feeding and provisioning of urban populations often at large distances from the “farmland, savannas and forests across Asia, Africa and Latin America” where land grabs occur (Lazarus 2014, 74). The insatiable appetite for resources and energy of urban-​based capital accumulation colonizes the planet in unprecedented ways and leads to stresses on the biosphere of all kinds including “biodiversity loss, disruption of ecosystem services, spread of exotic species, and pollution of land and water” (Armestro 2010, 148). Sub/​urbanization processes in some parts of the world have increased vulnerability to infectious disease outbreaks as has recently been the case in West Africa, where the peripheral extension of urban settlement has created inroads for the Ebola virus during the 2014 pandemic or in Brazil, where urbanization has been named one possible cause of the rapid spread of the Zika virus in 2015 (Ali et al. 2016). But the possibility of some kind of collective agency to save us from the consequences of our own humanly caused damage is built in to the discourse on anthropocentric climate change from its inception (Castree 2014). Calls to action and appeals to intervention, however, often echo the postpolitical condition that some have argued is generally at work in today’s political arena (Swyngedouw 2011). A broad spectrum of urbanists and environmentalists have accepted: “a virtually unchallenged consensus over the need to be more ‘environmentally’ sustainable if disaster is to be avoided” (Swyngedouw 2011, 262). In this spectrum, there is also consensus that cities are generally “quilting points” (Swyngedouw 2011, 257) of the climate change conundrum. Yet, [h]‌owever trendy “urban infill” and densification may be in our faculties of architecture, polities in the developed world are no longer willing to countenance the kind of conditions that inevitably result when hundreds of thousands of human bodies are packed into every square mile. Greenfield (2016) Neither the dystopian refugee camps that can’t be cities nor the utopian massive housing projects that grace the peripheries of emerging cities in Africa, Turkey, India, and China that won’t be “urban” in the classical sense would be acceptable to the chorus of global northern density advocates that sit in the safe spaces of their academic, architectural, and planning offices (Greenfield 2016). But as

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Hodson and Marvin (2010, 301) state insightfully, “the metalogistical systems that make the very notion of cities possible are actually reshaping global planetary ecologies through resource depletion, carbon production and pollution.” While urban form itself hardly carries with it specific ecological damages, the way it is delivered certainly does. Extending the speed and scale of Fordist-​Keynesian or Soviet era massive suburbanization through innovative technologies such as the 3D printing of construction elements, “China’s world-​historical rush of citymaking appears if anything to be accelerating” (Greenfield 2016). While remarkably pulling the brakes on the private authoritarianism of gated communities and the vanity of “weird” architecture (Li 2016), the Chinese government will hardly be able to stem the tide of fundamentally altering the capitalocenic impact of pouring concrete at such unprecedented pace into urban forms that are themselves hardly sustainable in any foreseeable future. If one adds the anticipated (and already experienced) rates of destruction at generational speed, the material ecologies and flow metabolisms involved are beyond anybody’s imagination and far in extension of even the most brutal Corbusian excesses of the twentieth century.

Pressure points of sub/​urban political ecology To foster a critical decentred thought within UPE requires an expansive view on the relation between urbanization and ecology. Like Swyngedouw and Kaika (2014, 462), therefore, I am “not so much concerned with the question of nature IN the city, but rather with the urbanization OF nature” (Swyngedouw and Kaika 2014, 462–​63). This follows Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver (2014, 500) who characterize the urbanization of nature as “the social, cultural, and political relations through which material and biophysical entities become transformed in the making of often unequal cities.” Different observers, depending on their analysis, will attempt to find different pressure points from where they think the emerging transnational sub/​urban political ecology can be decentred or opened to political pressure and influence. For the “situated urban political ecologists,” this surely must be the place where they are active in situ. For the ones critiquing UPE for its “city-​ism,” however, that place is more difficult to pin down (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015). For still others, who stretch the notion of extended urbanization to the mines and fields in all corners of the Earth from where concentrated forms of urbanization (i.e. cities and suburbs) are being provisioned, the political leverage comes from afar, “because there is an immense emancipatory potential underlying the relentless urban explosion that follows investment flows for resource extraction” in those material sources in the “world-​ecological uncanny” (Arboleda 2016, 238).4 What lies in common is to try to grasp a wide-​ranging process that metabolizes all sorts of nature through social, economic, and political processes to support urbanization. Central to my efforts is to understand how the suburbanization of nature is part of the problem and in the modalities of governance and politics from which solutions can be sought. The suburbs as a place of alienation and separation from nature, therefore, are to be understood themselves as a place of a larger chain of activities that constitute

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the extended urban political ecology. But, as I argue here, the suburbs can only be understood partially when using a style of analysis that takes as its origin a generalized urban that rests on particular centralities. As Merrifield has so convincingly argued, the: new reality is the result of a push-​pull effect, a vicious dialectic of dispossession, sucking people into the city while spitting others out of the gentrifying centre, forcing poor urban old-​timers and vulnerable newcomers to embrace each other out on the periphery, out on assorted zones of social marginalization, out on the global banlieue. Merrifield (2011, 469) The suburban is understood here in two ways. At one level, suburbanization is a process of city building and re-​building at the metropolitan edge including processes of post-​suburbanization: “a process of de-​densification (classical suburbanization) is partly converted, inverted or subverted into a process that involves densification, complexification and diversification of the suburbanization process” (Charmes and Keil 2015, 581). This is happening around the world in a variety of modalities of governance, involving a broad array of land markets and infrastructural constellations (Keil 2013). In the Anglo-​Saxon core, where suburbanization in its twentieth century form was historically brought to life and turned hegemonic, the term suburbia has continued to carry with it distinction from the notion of “inner city”; both, however, are increasingly imprecise constructs and chaotic terms. In fact, even in the United States, suburbanization is now diverse in terms of demography and urban form (Anacker 2015). Much more, though, suburbanization pretty much everywhere else in the world has long displayed a mix of built forms (from cottages to high-​r ises, from small village cores to giant industrial facilities) and has been home to a wide variety of residents and economic activities. We have been encountering massive suburbanization everywhere in industrialized and industrializing countries, especially since the beginning of the twenty-​first century, which has seen sub/​ urbanization at an unprecedented level in population-​r ich countries such as China, India, Turkey,Vietnam, Brazil, and Russia (Guney, Keil and Ucoglu forthcoming). At a second level, we are dealing with new everyday suburbanisms, new suburban ways of life that are central to understanding the link of planetary sub/​urbanization and the Anthropocene. It is in the everyday behaviour of the suburbanites that the “suburban problem” finds its most common expression. This is a point that has similarly been expressed in the emerging discussion on “situated UPE” (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014, 506). The problems associated with capitalocenic consequences appear to have a chief culprit: global suburban consumerism which visits misery and destruction on social natures elsewhere. In Arboleda’s account of Huasco, a Chilean mining town from which far-​flung parts of the world are being provisioned with the material commodities of growth, everydayness is fraught with death and disease, ostensibly as a result of a production process that safeguards the everyday well-​being of people elsewhere. For the people of Huasco,“everydayness is

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marked by loss and tragedy, as they all claim to have friends or relatives who are dying or have died from cancer, tumours or any other catastrophic disease” as a result of mining (Arboleda 2016, 12). This victimized everydayness relates to, but is spatially and otherwise removed from the locality of the places of consumption downstream. While the everydayness of the suburban is a place where metabolic rifts become visible in the environment of the “world-​ecological uncanny,” there is much variety in the field of extended urbanization. The suburban silicon valleys and alleys in the global North are, in fact, connected intimately to “the socio-​ecologically dystopian geographies of Mumbai’s or Dhaka’s informal suburban wastelands” (Swyngedouw and Kaika 2014, 463). Suburbs both, but of a different kind. Still, they share to some extent a moment of political disempowerment. Both the suburban production and consumption spaces in the suburban global North and the peripheries of the global South are repositioned in the hierarchies of global economies that they do not control.They are part of an extended urbanization serving a more central economy and being left out of the master narrative of the central urban economies that matter in urbanist discourse. Extended urbanization here: refers to the construction of operational networks beyond the immediate zones of agglomeration through the mobilisation and circulation of […] labour power, commodities, resources and nutrients, political and cultural forms. Sevilla-​Buitrago (2014, 237) This is part of what Roberto Monte-​Mor (2014a, 112) has called “the combined process of metropolization and extended urbanization” and is an expression of the “dialectical unity of urban centre and urban fabric” (ibid., 111). It must be added that the everyday suburban life is not without its contradictions and we are looking at a dynamic and rapidly changing situation in the global suburban field: Peripheral territories that are already integrated within urbanized operational landscapes undergo successive rounds of ongoing extended urbanization, as core agglomerations mediate new waves of spatial creative destruction as they confront new accumulation crises. This complex, nonlinear character of urbanization should therefore be regarded as a central aspect of the capitalist mode of territorialisation. Sevilla-​Buitrago (2014, 244) This new centrality of the peripheral also casts a fresh light on who inhabits and uses these spaces. The suburbs, a major part of the operational landscapes of the extended urban society, are not inhabited by immobilized suburbanites whose only political reflex is to defend their privileges. The question of extended urbanization is both spatial and political: In the Lefebvrian sense, “the urban question had become the spatial question itself ” as a consequence of the emergence of “urban society” (Monte-​Mor 2014b, 265). But this poses immediate political questions such as how the extension of the urban political space, when “extended to regional

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space, reinforces popular concerns over the quality of daily life, the environment, and the expanded reproduction of life” (Monte-​Mor 2014b, 265). Leaning heavily on Lefebvre’s original formulation of extended urbanization, Monte-​Mor (2014b, 265) concludes that “the repoliticization of urban life becomes a repoliticization of social space as a whole.” The politicization of the extended urban spaces that most people around the world now call home is characterized and limited by the centre-​periphery dichotomies in which our political imaginaries are caught.There is, for once, the “split into two overly self-​referential worlds—​one urban, one rural,” which is refracted in a wide spectrum of the (post)colonial condition (Goonewardena 2014, 229; Sevilla-​ Buitrago 2014). There is also the continued normative centre-​dominated discourse along which certain highly valued urban forms and economies are juxtaposed vis-​ à-​vis sprawling suburban forms, across the world both in the global North and global South. Furthermore, the ultimate question of the political in the extended suburban political ecologies we are engaging is whether we are actually operating with the right metaphors and concepts in seeking alternative futures in the sub/​ urban century. Some pragmatic voices, like the planning theorist John Friedmann, have located those futures between the regional level of generalized infrastructure and the life-​world of the local (urban) community (Keil 2016). Still, perhaps the spatial imaginary at the basis of our political imagination needs to be shaken up more profoundly. The planetary urbanization patterns of today may not be the only ones we can imagine in the future. We may have to think more of fields than of towers: “Large modern megacities, [b]‌eing so big, rather than having a smooth metabolism with their peripheries, they disrupt them radically […] Megacities can hardly serve as ecological arks” (Ajl 2014, 541 and 546). Critical urbanism, even if we only consider the Marxist legacy, is full of examples of thinking the future of human settlement in and beyond capitalism differently (and without retreating to a binary, vulgar, and static city-​countryside distinction or succumbing to the belief in the power of the countryside over the city as Maoist China seemed to have proposed (Lefebvre 2003)). The French urban political ecologist Alain Lipietz (1991) had a different vision for the globalizing post-​Fordist city. He called out the megacity euphoria long before it became fashionable to speak in terms of total (and mega) urbanization. Instead, he floated the notion of a thoroughly urbanized society of regional communities based on community democracy and inter-​territorial solidarity. Amadeo Bordiga (2016a [1978]; 2016b [1978]), a generation earlier, espoused an even more radical understanding of a globally urbanized society. To him, in a clear statement against the mega-​urbanization trends of mid-​ twentieth century global capitalism:“[C]apitalism is verticality. Communism will be ‘horizontality’ ” (Bordiga 2016a). An architect and engineer himself, and a native of highly compact Naples, Bordiga was interested in different densities from the ones imagined by the urbanists of today: The revolutionary fight for the destruction of the dreadful tentacular urban agglomerations can be so defined: communist oxygen versus capitalist cesspool.

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Space versus cement. The race toward higher density is not due to the lack of space. Despite human prolificity, and the outcrop of class oppression, space abounds everywhere.What causes the race toward density is the requirements of the mode of capitalist production that inexorably pushes always farther its prospecting of labour within the masses.5 Although he condemned the “drugged” capitalism of the Fordist-​Keynesian period, Bordiga’s image of communist social space showed more affinities with the densities of the burbs than with the hyper-​densities of the burghs. Similarly, Lefebvre’s idea of complete urbanization must not be caricatured, as Andy Merrifield (2013, 1–​5) has pointed out, as a death planet circling the sun like Asimov’s Trantor, a tennis ball covered in high rises, a dystopian Hong Kongified Earth, which has literally no outside but the universe. Further reading Lefebvre through Merrifield, we must understand that “centres and peripheries are immanent within the accumulation of capital itself, immanent within its ‘secondary circuit of capital’ ” (Merrifield 2013, 15; emphasis in the original). Rather than hitching our political imaginaries to the extremes of hyper density and super sprawl, it is possible and much more plausible to imagine an entirely urbanized world society in a variety of morphologies and densities to nurture a plurality of tantalizing political possibilities in and beyond the Capitalocene. This may also give us a glimpse of the performative politics of the (decentralized) everyday and of the (central) revolt at the edge of the anthropocenic suburbanization we witness today.

Decentralizing the centre Horizontalized politics of this kind needs some rethinking of the dialectics of spectacular (or operatic) and everyday politics. Keenly aware of the moment of revolt and disruption as major markers in the theory of radical urban politics, I nonetheless point to the everyday sub/​urbanisms that breed both accommodation/​acquiescence and new critical polities at this conjuncture. I remain doubtful, for example, whether “outbursts of radical political discontent” can be thought of outside of or in pure contradistinction to “the deepening of a post-​political depoliticized techno-​ managerial apparatus of neoliberal governance.”6 I have at least two reservations. One is linked to a long held immanent critique I have applied to neoliberal (or post-​neoliberal) politics which has made me believe that much of what we are encountering at this conjuncture of neoliberal crisis is to be understood best by a lingering process of “roll-​with-​it”-​neoliberalization (Keil 2009). Importantly, this re-​situates neoliberalization from a process of realizing a Western master-​discourse to a set of co-​produced practices, inter-​references, and decentralized engagements with fragments of travelling theory (Robinson and Parnell 2011; Roy 2011). The second reservation has to do with doubts as to the reliance on action (or worse activism) as a signifier of change as if such action was dislodged from the larger systemic changes from which it springs. I am especially critical of interpretations that see new ecologies (or performativities) of struggle erupt in particular central

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places without contextualizing those eruptions in the larger political ecologies and landscapes of grievances that lead to systemic contradictions and felt/​experienced and ultimately expressed dissatisfactions. This second point, which reiterates the argument put forth above that we are now experiencing political challenges at the sub/​urban everyday that are at once local, regional, and global (Monte-​Mor 2014a), has three dimensions.7 I critique, in the first instance, the tendency in the relevant literature to romanticize activism and the activist, and to fetishize civil society-​based action, often against both conventional institutional politics and societal structures (and theoretical structuralists; see Shaw (2015) for an excellent, if ironically titled “intelligent woman’s guide” on these debates). The second dimension is that aspirational analyses have far outpaced sincere and thorough political economic analysis of societal impact of protest and revolts that have undoubtedly characterized the past few years. The third dimension, and the most important one for my argument here, extends to the notion of the geography of protest and contestation. Where is politics performed and how do we recognize it as important? The geography of political performativity has moved to the periphery where urban growth (and sometimes shrinkage) dynamically changes the terrain of the political, in demographic, economic, social, cultural, and environmental terms. This is true for the traditional middle-​class suburb as much as for the rapidly expanding poor peripheries of expanding Southern metropolises. It also holds for the self-​built, “informal” urban peripheries and squatter settlements, as well as the in-​between postsuburban landscapes that have become the majority habitat in many (eastern and western) European and American cities. Similarly, the new towns in East Asia that mirror and perfect the modernist suburban tower neighbourhoods of the second half of the twentieth century, themselves anticipate their postsuburban moment in a generation’s time. In fact, for some globally important politics, the peripheral has now become a strategic space as, for example, evidenced in the protests at airports across the United States against President Donald Trump’s travel ban against six majority Muslim countries in early 2017 (Hawthorne 2017). The shift in focus inherent in this third dimension entails also a change in focusing on coming to terms with the specific challenges posed by the periphery to the capitalocenic climate change problematic. Put differently, this means that while the focus is now on the periphery as a problem to be solved by ideas and actions from the centre, the periphery takes its fate into its own hands by accepting, realistically, that if we can’t address the problems of the most unsustainable places, the sprawling expanses of our suburbanizing world (Ross 2011), we have no choice at all. The suburban makes us ask questions about the region as networked “urban territory” as the basis for collective life, not the neighbourhood (see the discussion on this in Stanek 2014, xliv) and reminds us of what Swyngedouw and Kaika (2014, 471) noted more generally about UPE: “The urbanization of nature is extensively multi-​scaled and spatially networked.” Suburbia is a conflicted landscape of enjoyment (Lefebvre 2014), and it is part of Lefebvre’s dreaded “habitat,” an alienated product of complex modalities of governance between the state, capital

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accumulation, and private authoritarianism (Hamel and Keil 2015). At the same time, the suburban has consistently been a wellspring of environmental activism and resistance (Sellers 2012; 2015). Gated communities and banlieues are two sides of the same twisted coin. They add up to the “negative utopia” of the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” (Lefebvre 2003, 2) and the aspirational “arrival city” of the sub/​urban century (Saunders 2010). The range of everyday political ecologies is defined broadly through the suburban “explosion” between aspirations of middle-​class life and a generalized “architecture of enjoyment” and the camps and squatter settlements at the outskirts of many cities around the globe today. The suburban form creates its own boundaries as it expands. It also creates a new totality. For the North American case the traditional city has been subsumed under “a suburban-​like order of horizontality and dispersal” (Quinby 2011, 128). The suburban is provisioned by extended urbanizations (such as the kind Arboleda describes for Huasco), while also being that extended urbanization. This conceptual unity is lost in common depictions of the suburban as a net winner (and hence culprit) in anthropocenic excess. Its boundaries are always regional and transnational.

Conclusion Looking at the suburban political ecologies in this more complex way allows a view beyond Lefebvre’s habitat towards the suburbs as a terrain internal to Castells’ (1975) “wild city” where social movements are supposed to safeguard against the deterioration of urban life. Yet, in the suburban, we tend to see more the political potential of everyday revolts and less of the spectacular events of rupture that the discussion on performative politics seems to focus on. Urbanist discourse (including more mainstream urban environmentalism) views everyday suburbanism as the structural source of climate change and environmental destruction here and there, near and far and there is much truth in that. But it must also be seen as a site and terrain of political ecological action. An important aspect of this problematique is the debate on density and infrastructures (Tonkiss 2013; Keil 2015). We can posit that between the exostructures of the global urban political ecologies that sustain both Huasco and the suburbs of Toronto (for example) and people as infrastructures (Simone 2004), there is real life, politics, and potential for change. The suburbs are not remnant dead spaces in the shadow of the dynamic urban squares where revolt is allegedly “naturally” at home. The suburban is not a peripheral or marginal place, nor a marginal topic. Large majorities of urban society now claim the suburban as home, workplace or landscape of jouissance. The “centralities” of these landscapes for today’s urban political ecologies need to be one starting point for understanding and enacting urban and social change (perhaps in terms of “radical incrementalism” (Lawhon et al. 2014, 510, with reference to Pieterse 2008) or “insurgent citizenship” (Holston 2008)). While everyone likes a good revolution, a square filled with people waving banners, a parliament stormed by the masses, the quotidian revolutions in the sub/​urban

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political ecologies of everyday life deserve much more of our attention. Here, we can perhaps help reconcile seemingly opposing claims between situated UPE and the call for a post-​cityist UPE. Arboleda (2016) is correct in drawing our attention to the “operational landscapes” of Huasco which he calls “a metabolic vehicle of planetary urbanization.” Such operational landscapes have, of course, been around as long as the industrializing/​urbanizing dynamics have determined life on this planet (Price et   al. 2011).8 Yet just as mining and logging sites are part of the invisible landscape of planetary urbanization, the suburbs with their dumps and warehouses, their land uses that have been expelled from the inner city, are, too. Everyone sees the airport terminals, but nobody sees the aerotropolis. Those aspects of the suburban remain part of the “urban uncanny” (Kaika 2015). The view extends from the capitalocentric past into an uncharted future. In the newly opened Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, built by Santiago Calatrava, an exhibit makes the visitor move through the histories of the cosmos and the geographies of the Anthropocene to the future we humans might envision together (Figure 9.2). In the crescendo-​style build-​up towards the state of crisis we find ourselves in at this stage of the Anthropocene, skyscrapers give way to a display of Dubai’s Palm, an artificial suburban strip gained from the sea. From there, the visitor moves quickly towards the end of the building where it juts out over the bay along

FIGURE 9.2   Exhibition “Cosmos, Earth, Anthropocene, Tomorrow

and Us” (“Cosmos, Terra, Antropoceno, Amanhãs e Nós”) at the Museum of Tomorrow, Rio de Janeiro Source: Photo by author.

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which Rio’s asfalto and favela neighbourhoods expand into the plains and climb up the hills. Staring into the glaring sun, there is little to see that gives clues about how to manage Tomorrow. Except, perhaps, that a politics of the Anthropocene might have to be reimagined in those global suburbs that now house the majority of us, and where the Capitalocene derives its metabolic dynamism.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jenny Lugar for research assistance for this chapter and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding through the MCRI Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century. Henrik Ernstson is thanked for feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes 1 Interestingly, while the suburbs can be viewed as the most complete, self-​propelling product of the capitalist accumulation process, a landscape of interlocking virtuous cycles of growth and dependence on debt, some observers revel in pointing to the alleged socialist utopian origins of suburbia (Ross 2014). 2 The images can be seen here: http://​blog.fotomuseum.ch/​2015/​06/​iv-​capitalocene-​ violence/​.  Accessed March 1, 2016. 3 C40 is a network of the world’s megacities committed to addressing climate change. See www.c40.org. 4 Arboleda counts Tsing’s work in Indonesia as one of his main influences as he develops a dynamic geography of local and global in his research on Chile: “As Tsing (2005) observed in the case of Indonesia, the phenomenon of temporary work in extraction sites mixes locals and migrants in an anti-​local regionality, resulting in a tendency to obliterate local places, knowledges, flora and fauna” (Arboleda 2016, 243). 5 Both texts cited here by Bordiga were published originally in Italian in the 1950s. The texts quoted from here are translations by N. Shaffer from their French version published by Payot in Paris, 1978 in a book with the title Espèce humaine et croûte terrestre, Payot, Paris, 1978. The translations are unpublished and can be obtained from author. 6 Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw.“Clarifications on Political Performative Theory.” Personal communication. August 3, 2015. 7 I am grateful to Henrik Ernstson for helping me to clarify this point. 8 “In Great Britain, the geomorphical and geological resources of the Earth have provided the raw materials to support the expansion of human population. These needs include the provision of raw materials for shelter, energy, technology and the space for the disposal of wastes. Population growth, industrial expansion and urbanization are, therefore, intimately linked to the direct impact of human activity on the landscape” (Price et al. 2011, 1060).

References Ajl, Max. 2014. “The Hypertrophic City Versus the Planet of Fields.” In Implosions/​Explosions, edited by Neil Brenner, 533–​50. Berlin: Jovis. Ali, Harris, Barlu Dumbuya, Michaela Hynie, Pablo Idahosa, Roger Keil, and Patricia Perkins. 2016. “The Social and Political Dimensions of the Ebola Response: Global Inequality,

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Climate Change, and Infectious Disease.” In Climate Change and Health: Improving Resilience and Reducing Risks, edited by Walter Leal Filho, Ulisses M. Azeiteiro, and Fátima Alves, 151–​70. Cham: Springer. Anacker, Katrin B., ed. 2015. The New American Suburb: Poverty, Race and the Economic Crisis. Farnham and Burlington,VT: Ashgate. Angelo, Hillary, and David Wachsmuth. 2015. “Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(1):  16–​27. Arboleda, Martín. 2016. “In the Nature of the Non-​ city: Expanded Infrastructural Networks and the Political Ecology of Planetary Urbanization.” Antipode 48(2): 233–​51. Armesto, Juan J., Daniela Manuschevich, Alejandra Mora, Cecilia Smith-​Ramirez, Ricardo Rozzi, Ana M. Abarzúa, and Pablo A. Marquet. 2010. “From the Holocene to the Anthropocene: A Historical Framework for Land Cover Change in Southwestern South America in the Past 15,000 years.” Land Use Policy 27(2): 148–​60. Barau, Aliyu Salisu, and Ahmad N.M. Ludin. 2012. “Intersection of Landscape, Anthropocene and Fourth Paradigm.” Living Reviews in Landscape Research 6: 5–​30. Bordiga, Amadeo. 2016a [1978]. “Space versus Cement.” Translated by Nathan Schaffer from Espèce humaine et croûte terrestre. Paris: Payot. Bordiga, Amadeo. 2016b [1978]. “The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust.” Translated by Nathan Schaffer from Espèce humaine et croûte terrestre. Paris: Payot. Brenner, Neil, ed. 2014. Implosions/​Explosions. Berlin: Jovis. Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. 2014. “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(3): 731–​55. Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. 2015. “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?” City 19(2–​3): 151–​82. Castells, Manuel. 1975. “The Wild City.” Kapitalistate 4(5): 2–​30. Castree, Noel. 2014. “Geography and the Anthropocene II: Current Contributions.” Geography Compass 8(7): 450–​63. Cohen, Daniel A. 2014. “Seize the Hamptons.” Jacobin Magazine 15/​16: 151–​159. Crutzen, Paul J. 2005. “Human Impact on Climate has Made This the ‘Anthropocene Age’.” New Perspectives Quarterly 22(2): 14–​16. Demos, T.J. 2015a. “V. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Gynocene: The Many Names of Resistance.” Still Searching, June 12. Accessed April 20, 2018. www.fotomuseum.ch/​en/​ explore/​still-​searching/​articles/​27015. Demos,T.J. 2015b. “IV. Capitalocene Violence.” Still Searching, June 5. Accessed May 10, 2018. www.fotomuseum.ch/​en/​explore/​still-​searching/​articles/​27014. Dunham-​Jones, Ellen, and June Williamson. 2011. Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. Updated edn. Hoboken: Wiley and Sons. Goonewardena, Kanishka. 2014. “The Country and the City in the Urban Revolution.” In Implosions/​Explosions, edited by Neil Brenner, 218–​31. Berlin: Jovis. Greenfield, Adam. 2016. “Where Are the World’s Newest Cities … and Why Do They All Look the Same?” The Guardian Cities, January 28. Accessed April 21, 2018. www. theguardian.com/​cities/​2016/​jan/​28/​where-​world-​newest-​cities-​look-​same. Guney, K. Murat, Roger Keil, and Murat Üçoğlu, eds. Forthcoming. Massive Suburbanization: (Re)Building the Global Periphery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hamel, Pierre, and Roger Keil, eds. 2015. Suburban Governance: A Global View. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Harris, Richard and Ute Lehrer, eds. 2018. The Suburban Land Question: A Global Survey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Hawthorne, Christopher. 2017. Building Type: The Airport as Public Square and Protest Central. Los Angeles Times, February 21. Accessed April 19, 2018. www.latimes.com/​ entertainment/​arts/​la-​ca-​cm-​building-​type-​4-​2017-​02-​05-​story.html. Hodson, Mike, and Simon Marvin. 2010. “Urbanism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Urbanism or Premium Ecological Enclaves?” City 14(3): 298–​313. Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kaika, Maria. 2015.“The Uncanny Materialities of the Everyday: Domesticated Nature as the Invisible ‘Other’.” In Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context, edited by Stephen Graham and Colin McFarlane, 139–​52. London and New York: Routledge, Earthscan. Keil, Roger. 2009. “The Urban Politics of Roll-​With-​It Neoliberalization,” City 13(2–​3): 231–​45. Keil, Roger, ed. 2013. Suburban Constellations: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century. Berlin: Jovis Verlag. Keil, Roger. 2015. “Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden: Peripheral Densities, Metropolitan Scales and the Political Cultures of Post-​suburbia.” Built Environment 41(4): 579–​96. Keil, Roger. 2016. “The Prospect of Suburbs: Rethinking the Urban Field in a Planet of Cities.” In Insurgencies and Revolutions: Reflections on John Friedmann’s Contributions to Planning Theory and Practice, edited by Haripriya Rangan, Mee Kam NG, Libby Porter and Jacquelyn Chase, Chapter 12. London and New York: Routledge. Keil, Roger. 2017. Suburban Planet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lawhon, Mary, Henrik Ernstson, and Jonathan Silver. 2014. “Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE through African Urbanism.” Antipode 46(2): 497–​516. Lazarus, Eli D. 2014. “Land Grabbing as a Driver of Environmental Change.” Area 46(1):  74–​82. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 2014. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, edited by Łukasz Stanek. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Li, Cao. 2016. “China Moves to Halt ‘Weird’ Architecture.” The New York Times, February 22. Accessed April 26, 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2016/​02/​23/​world/​asia/​china-​weird-​ architecture.html?_​r=0. Lipietz, Alain. 1991. “Die Zukunft der städtischen Ökologie.” In Stadt-​Räume, edited by Martin Wentz, 129–​36. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Merrifield, Andy. 2011. “The Right to the City and Beyond. Notes on a Lefebvrian Re-​ conceptualization.” City 15(3–​4): 468–​76. Merrifield, Andy. 2013. The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Monte-​Mor, Roberto Luis. 2014a. “Extended Urbanization and Settlement Patterns in Brazil: An Environmental Approach.” In Implosions/​Explosions, edited by Neil Brenner, 109–​20. Berlin: Jovis. Monte-​Mor, Roberto Luis. 2014b. “What is the Urban in the Contemporary World?” In Implosions/​Explosions, edited Neil Brenner, 260–​67. Berlin: Jovis. Moore, Jason, W. 2017. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(3): 594–630. Newcity Art. 2015. “Portrait of the Artist: Alison Ruttan.” Newcity Art, March 9. Accessed April 1, 2018. http://​art.newcity.com/​2015/​03/​09/​portrait-​of-​the-​artist-​alison-​ruttan/​. Pieterse, Edgar. 2008. City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development. London: Zed. Price, Simon J., Jonathan R. Ford, Anthony H. Cooper, and Catherine Neal. 2011. “Humans as Major Geological and Geomorphological Agents in the Anthropocene: The

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Significance of Artificial Ground in Great Britain.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369(1938): 1056–​84. Quinby, Rohan. 2011. Time and the Suburbs:The Politics of Built Environments and the Future of Dissent. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing. Ranganathan, Malini. 2014. “Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(2): 590–​608. Ranganathan, Malini, and Carolina Balazs. 2015. “Water Marginalization at the Urban Fringe: Environmental Justice and Urban Political Ecology across the North–​South Divide.” Urban Geography 36(3): 403–​23. Robinson, Jennifer, and Sue Parnell. 2011. “Traveling Theory: Embracing Post-​neoliberalism through Southern Cities.” In The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 521–​31. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing. Ross, Andrew. 2011. Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ross, Benjamin. 2014. Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roy, Ananya. 2011. “Urbanisms, Worlding Practices and the Theory of Planning.” Planning Theory 10(1): 6–​15. Roy, Ananya. 2015. “Governing the Postcolonial Suburbs.” In Suburban Governance: A Global View, edited by Pierre Hamel and Roger Keil, 337–​348. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Saunders, Doug. 2010. Arrival City:The Final Migration and Our Next World. Toronto: Vintage Canada. Schultz, Warren. 2001. The Organic Suburbanite: An Environmentally Friendly Way to Live the American Dream. Emmaus: Rodale. Sellers, Christopher C. 2012. Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Sellers, Christopher C. 2015. “Ecological Preservation in Suburban Atlanta.” In Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, edited by John Archer, Paul J.P. Sandul and Katherine Solomonson, 63–​78. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Seto, Karen C., Burak Güneralp, and Lucy R. Hutyra. 2012. “Global Forecasts of Urban Expansion to 2030 and Direct Impacts on Biodiversity and Carbon Pools.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(40): 16083–​88. Sevilla-​ Buitrago, Álvaro. 2014. “Urbs in Rure: Historical Enclosure and the Extended Urbanization of the Countryside.” In Implosions/​Explosions, edited by Neil Brenner, 236–​ 59. Berlin: Jovis. Shaw, Kate. 2015. “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to the Urban Question.” City 19(6): 781–​800. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16(3): 407–​29. Stanek, Łukasz. 2014. “Introduction: A Manuscript Found In Saragossa: Toward an Architecture.” In Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, Henri Lefebvre, edited by Łukasz Stanek, xi–​lxi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stanley, Jenn. 2015. “How Cities Can Save the World $17 Trillion.” Next City, September 9. Accessed April 13, 2018. https://​nextcity.org/​daily/​entry/​cities-​can​save-​the-​world-​17-​trillion-​by-​going-​g reen. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36(8): 614–​21.

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10 OF GHOSTS, WASTE, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE Marco Armiero

Marx thought, to be sure, on his side, from the other side, that the dividing line between the ghost and actuality ought to be crossed, like utopia itself, by a realisation, that is, by a revolution. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1994, 47)

Prelude Once upon a time there was a spectre haunting Europe, and maybe the whole world. Now other fears and invisible presences have occupied this space in our imaginations, projecting their shadows into the future. CO2 emissions are probably the most significant of those presences. These spectres menace the present without aiming to subvert it. To paraphrase Marx, they seem more like an unwanted side effect of a laboratory experiment rather than an invisible army aiming to overthrow those in power. Building on my experience as a researcher working on the waste crisis in Campania, the most densely populated region of Italy, and its capital Naples, in this chapter I will reflect on our own presence as radical scholars among activists. I will argue that the figure of the ghost might lend us a possibility to better understand the relation between theory-​making and academic discourse on the one hand, and story-​telling practices among activists and communities on the other. Developing from this, I will suggest a difference between engaged researchers and militant researchers. At the end, I will close the chapter proposing that not science but alchemy is actually the leading approach of the new era; alchemy because the Anthropocene discourse reifies relationships and aims to change “the thing” rather than the relationships producing that very thing, whether climate change, the Anthropocene or any other incarnation of environmental apocalypse.

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Ghosts’ stories: Setting the scene At least from the early 1990s Naples and its region, Campania, have been haunted by a particular kind of ghost: waste (Figure 10.1). At the beginning it materialized as the piles of trash abandoned everywhere, especially in the poorest and more marginal areas of the city and its hinterland, due to the crisis affecting the entire waste processing system in the region—​several landfills were exhausted or closed because they were improperly managed. Indeed, it was a peculiar ghost, haunting the spaces of collective and private daily life in a very visible and material way. Maybe it reassembled the amorphous yet pervasive blob of some science-​fiction movie more than the austere spectre of the Nordic folktales. Nonetheless, soon waste, as a ghost, started to populate the lives and homes of the Campania citizens beyond the heaps of trash in the streets. It was, of course, the stench saturating the air of the city (Armiero and de Rosa 2017), invisible and present as a well-​trained ghost, but, it was much more than that. While at the beginning of the so-​called waste emergency, state authorities and public opinion focused only on the urban garbage, working to free the streets of Naples from the heaps of trash, later the attention has shifted towards the issue of toxic waste and public health. Thanks to the work of grassroots activists, writers, NGOs, public prosecutors, and a few scientists, the actually scary ghost of toxic waste has become visible. According to the data provided by the Italian NGO Legambiente, 10 million tonnes of toxic waste have been illegally disposed of in the so-​called Land of Fires, the area between the cities of Naples and Caserta (Legambiente 2013). Several criminal investigations have proved that industrialists, mainly from northern Italy, have employed the Camorra, that is, the Neapolitan version of Mafia, to dispose of their toxic waste, dramatically lowering their cost: 10 euro-​cents per kilo vs. the 21–​62 euro-​cents per kilo of the legal market (de Rosa 2017). In 2007 the regional agency for environmental protection listed almost 4000 potentially contaminated sites in Campania (Arpac 2007). Toxic waste leaking into the aquifers, travelling across species (Armiero and Fava 2016), saturating the sky with pestilent smoke, penetrating the cells of human bodies (Iengo and Armiero 2017) is the invisible and yet so material ghost at the very root of the story presented in this chapter. And, like every worthy and respected ghost, this spectre of trash lives in the places as much as it does in their stories.

Ghosts’ stories: Meeting your ghosts I started working on the waste crisis in Campania while I was still living in the United States. I was, and I am still, convinced that the only way to uncover the stories of both contamination and resistance inscribed in that “crisis” was to listen to the voices of affected people mobilizing for environmental justice. After the US, I moved to Barcelona, in Spain; therefore, remaining a rather ghostly presence in the local environmentalist landscape, present through emails and writings but much less in flesh and bones—​or I might say in glasses, clothes, beard, and gestures,

newgenrtpdf

FIGURE 10.1   Overview

of the chronology of waste management politics in Naples, Italy, from the 1980s to 2012

Of ghosts, waste, and the Anthropocene  187

features much more visible and telling than flesh and bones. It was during one of my fieldwork visits that I had my first—​and so far unique—​transcorporeal experience. Indeed, I met myself. One activist, whom I had never met before, was framing her understanding of the waste crisis as a case of environmental injustice and when I asked for some clarification about the genealogy of that concept, she referred to an American or Italo-​American guy—​she was not sure herself—​who a few years earlier had started to employ that category to talk about the crisis in Campania. That guy was me while I was still living in California. At that time I was sending messages to the galaxy of the activists in Campania trying to convince them to be part of my planned oral history project. On another occasion Egidio, one of the leaders of the Stop Biocide coalition, introduced me to a crowd gathered to commemorate seven years of struggles against a landfill. He introduced me as the person who had told them who they really were, referring to a series of seminars that I had offered them on the global struggles for environmental justice. Meeting my own ghost haunting the space of the Neapolitan activists has been a revealing experience. The fact that I started my research far away, while I was in the US, made me the ideal ghost. I was mainly a virtual presence; for age and geographical reasons I was not connected to this new wave of activism. My voice arrived without a body and this implied also some diffidence from the activists’ side. Apparently, someone had spread the rumour that I was working for the intelligence services, collecting crucial data about activists. In the end, I met my ghosts, and they were almost a whole legion.There was the American professor, the spy, the old communist (after all Naples is not such a big city and people can easily get information about who you are), the middle-​class guy from the upper-​class district—​my place within the geographies of the urban setting mattered—​the academic caring for his career, the traitor who left his community. Indeed, I even appear in a book entitled Napoli dai molti tradimenti (Naples’ Many Betrayals), where it is said that I have chosen the easy path to be a Marxist on the West Coast of the USA, instead of staying in Naples (Scotto di Luzio 2008).1 Those ghosts—​well actually all but the spy since I have never worked for any intelligence service—​were haunting me as much as the activists’ imaginary of me. The contradictions of leaving and staying, joining and retiring to a safe distance, careering and rioting were all there. When one leaves the comfort zone of the academy, to engage and contribute to real-​world struggles, who one is—​address, academic affiliation, clothes, glasses, maybe also the beard—​becomes relevant. I start this chapter with a peculiar ghost story because I believe that it says something about the engagement of our intellectual work with concrete daily struggles. Apart from uncannily referencing the old communist spectre, for me, speaking of ghosts is a way to address a few things that I believe are relevant in rethinking critical environmental studies. First, the unpredictability of our contribution in the sense that what we contribute becomes part of the collective narrative from where we crafted our contribution in the first place.We do not control how people will appropriate and employ our works and sometimes ourselves as “experts” in the dynamics of struggles and knowledge production and legitimation. Second,

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it is crucial to start rethinking the non-​rational part of any experience of intellectual and political engagement. That is to say, to integrate and take seriously the connections, feelings, and impressions that are ill-​adapted to a discourse on theory, but which are significant while experimenting with theories. My own ghost story proves that in being political the personal is also academic in the sense that connections, fears, emotions, and belongings blend into the research, co-​producing not just knowledge but also identities. Who I am now, my belongings, my identities, my affections are not the same as those when I started to haunt the wastelands of Campania—​or maybe when those wastelands started haunting me. Third, and intimately connected, the figure of the ghost offers me the opportunity to argue for the power of story-​telling within and beyond theoretical work, while directly experimenting with it in the very writing of this chapter—​which, hopefully, is not following the usual academic template.

Other ghosts present I did not plan to become a ghost haunting the wasteland of Naples. It happened by accident, mainly due to the odd combination of my ancestral familiarity with Naples and my intellectual and very material distance. After all, and although I have published in Italian also, I was, and I am still articulating my relationship with the “object” of my study by using a foreign language and being dependent to a large extent on a foreign intellectual vocabulary. Sometimes forcing your stories into a grammar and lexicon which come from elsewhere is a distressful struggle. So often the native speaker editors, policing the borders of what is correct and make sense in the Anglo-​Saxon academic empire, have decided that some words I was using were not the right ones, they did not “work” in English. But with the words the academic imperial language was also imposing meanings or, at least, excluding some from the range of possibilities. For instance, in the translation often territory and territorial struggles had to become community and communities’ struggles, while the Italian word presidio—​that is, the occupation of a public space as part of a resisting mobilization—​was translated into picket, losing both its military and temporally stable connotation (Armiero and Sgueglia 2016). As I will discuss later, the most challenging of these translations is the exportation of the concept of environmental justice outside the US, where it was born from its strongly racially segregated society. In contrast to me becoming a ghost, but without planning it, there are others who planned and embraced the ghost mood in a more conscious way and for political reasons. For instance, in the early 2000s, a strange row of letters appeared and was distributed throughout the Internet (Armiero 2011). The letters were addressing the communities resisting the construction of the high-​speed railway in the Susa Valley (the so-​called NoTav movement),2 in the Alps, and signed by Fra Dolcino and Margherita, two heretics who were burnt at the stake in the fourteenth century in that very valley. A ghost, actually two ghosts, were mobilized to build a narrative of resistance and disobedience. This story was able to speak from

Of ghosts, waste, and the Anthropocene  189

the past and into the present, becoming performative and active by tapping into the lived memories and presences of past events in that landscape. This ghostly way of building collective action is more common than most might think. In my book on the making of the Italian mountains, I have explored how the ghost of Dolcino has haunted that landscape, entering and exiting from the memory of place and people. In the Susa Valley also the memory of the resistance against the Nazi-​fascists has been re-​made to haunt and to mobilize, becoming crucial to the NoTav movement. There are also ghosts from the peasant rebels of the south, the soldiers of the Great War, the partisans’ fights against the fascists, the thousands of victims of the Vajont (the 1963 dam disaster which killed almost 2000 people); all have a presence in the landscape, an agency of sorts, influencing what we as living, breathing humans can see and can do within and with that landscape (Armiero 2011). More broadly, to embrace a ghost mood is a well-​known and at times highly effective way of mobilizing. The Wu Ming collective of Italian novelists and leftist activists embraced it in quite a radical way from 1995 to 1999, while they were still using the collective name Luther Blissett. Later, when they took on the identity of Wu Ming, they softened this position, choosing to be “transparent with the readers, but opaque to the media” (Wu Ming 2, personal communication); that is, avoiding appearances on TV and newspapers while continuing to sign their works as a collective (Figure 10.2). The Zapatistas and Subcomandante Marcos in the Selva Lacandona in the Mexican Chiapas are another evident reference—​hiding the individual identity to assume a collective one, being invisible to become visible.The Invisible Committee is the other recent influential case in which a progressive or, better, a truly revolutionary agenda has been articulated through what I have called here a ghost mode. In fact, the Invisible Committee is the name protecting the identity of the author(s) of two revolutionary books, The Coming Insurrection (2009) and To Our Friends (2015), which offer a plan for a radical subversion of neoliberal capitalism.

A success story? I have not been the only scholar that has engaged with the waste struggles in Campania and Naples. A cohort of researchers has employed Naples as an open lab to discuss everything from democracy to Mafia, from environmental justice to epidemiology. Naples is not new to these kinds of inquiries; the city has been an open lab for social scientists at least since the cholera epidemics in the 1880s. The majority were not radical scholars, but just engaged experts (I will elaborate on this distinction below). But some were radicals. We, and I include myself in the group, were attracted by the strength of resistance. Radical scholars seem to have a fascination with resistance. Naples and its region were in flames. Barricades marked the urban landscape; people were claiming their right to decide over their communities, experimenting with new forms of commoning. After decades of political desert, this was a paradise, at least for some of us.

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FIGURE 10.2   Embracing

a ghost mood means, like the Wu Ming collective of Italian novelists and leftist activists, to be “transparent with the readers, but opaque to the media” in fighting oppression Source: Illustration from Wu Ming. Licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

As I have indicated with my own ghost story, radical scholars can at times offer a critical vocabulary that in turn can enter into the daily life of activists, assisting them with how they view the world and their place within it, and possibly connect them with other struggles and places. Environmental justice (including here environmental racism) is probably one of the most powerful of these concepts. Although it is obviously impossible to be certain, my informants—​I would prefer saying my comrades as the academic jargon “informants” reassembles too closely that of intelligence—​confirm my own impression, telling me that before 2008 no one in the movement had employed those categories to name what they were up to. Writing this chapter, I have realized that although I have worked for several years on the waste struggles in Naples, I am not sure about the evolution of the activists’ analysis. While some turning points are clear—​for instance the discovery of the toxic waste issue, the connection between a wider ecology or ecosystems and human health, the experience of State violence (see more in Armiero 2014b)—​it is not so easy to trace the evolution of how activists have shifted and developed the explanation of what happened to their communities.

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I would argue that before framing the issue in terms of environmental (in)justice and racism, the narrative was centred on corruption and inefficiency, arguments that echoed a wider disaffection with politicians and the state of politics. However, when the government started to open landfills, especially in lower-​class neighbourhoods, in order to solve the so-​called waste emergency, activists started to read this choice in terms of the supremacy of the metropolis—​Naples—​over the rest of the region. Indeed, using its powers, in 1994 the State established a state of emergency in relation to the management of waste, which shifted legal powers from the local administrations to an ad hoc agency, the Commissariato di Governo per l’emergenza Rifiuti (Commissariat for the Waste Emergency in Campania) (D’Alisa et al. 2010). Facing the challenges of a state of exception, the activists found precious allies in a few legal scholars who engineered a critique of the emergency procedures which, they argued, did not leave any room for democratic participation regarding the allocation of waste infrastructures. This is not to say that translating between researchers and their more international discourse on environmental justice, and those active with the struggle on the ground, has always been easy and without friction. I remember very well the reaction of a woman who was strongly engaged in the struggles against a landfill in her community. When I went there to present the Italian version of Joan Martinez Alier’s The Environmentalism of the Poor (2002), which I had edited in 2009, she proudly stated: “We are neither poor nor ignorant.” For her, the title of the book—​ in Italian Ecologia dei poveri—​was somehow offensive or, at least, unable to grasp her social condition. Personally, I have always been reluctant to employ “poor” as a category, partially because it is too catholic for my taste, but mainly because it is rather controversial to say who is poor, and in relation to what or whom.3 In the Campania case, everybody involved in the struggle was white and reluctant to define herself or himself as being poor. This also illustrates how racial issues, which have been so central in the environmental justice literature with its origin in US race-​ based segregated cities, carried less resonance with the struggling communities and networks that I was engaging in Italy. Here references to ethnic identities was less important, both in building mobilization, as well as in understanding what types of neighbourhoods were targeted for landfill sites. When it comes to poverty, the lines are also blurred. Although income per capita is a useful broad parameter, which by and large confirms the usual pattern regarding the targeting of low-​income communities as locations for landfill sites and other harmful waste infrastructures, the reference to numbers would probably not convince the woman that her newly found environmentalism was coming from the fact that she was poor in relative terms.4 Neither would it really help her and her neighbours in developing their struggle. Environmental justice discourse, although informed by on-​the-​ground struggles from various places in the world, is in many ways a construct by scholars and sometimes that discourse does not easily translate between academic and community. While I do believe that class—​and race, gender, or so-​called structural forms of oppression—​matters in order to understand environmental injustice broadly

192  Marco Armiero TABLE 10.1  Cost of houses per square metre

Area

Cost per square metre (€)

Giugliano* Terzigno* Vomero Posillipo Chiaiano*

1540 1059 2801 5107 1675

* Areas affected by waste facilities.

speaking, and in the case of Campania in particular, I also think that there are other variables that must be considered when “sacrifice communities” are constructed, i.e. communities targeted by State and business interests to serve as dumping grounds. Beyond the income of the individual residents, all neighbourhoods included in my study in Campania also had a very low level of social capital. This means poor infrastructures in almost every field, from sewage to public transport, from schools to sidewalks. For these reasons, the cost of housing in those areas is generally lower than in the rest of city, especially in proportion to living wages and what households can actually afford to buy (Table 10.1). However, these areas should not be seen simply as some kind of urban nightmare. Some of them, for instance, offer an alternative to overcrowded Neapolitan districts, a sort of American suburb with single houses and backyards, only a few steps away from the beaches or a lake. To view them simply as poor and derelict neighbourhoods, as one might be tempted to do, would miss important facets of their ecologies and annihilate the subjective experience of those living there. In a book I edited in 2014, two Neapolitan activists, Gigliola and Doriana share the same kind of experience (Armiero 2014b); they had moved into the suburbs looking for a lifestyle that the city could not provide, discovering only later that their affordable free-​standing houses were built on the edge of gigantic (and sometimes underground and invisible) dumps. As a native of Naples I had gone through the same kind of choice. I remember that my partner and I were also tempted by the possibility to move to the suburbs where we could have afforded a larger house with a nice patio. Many of our friends did make that choice. When in 1999 we bought our 100-​square metre apartment in the city, some friends bought for the same price a four-​storey house, probably 400 square metres in one of the more peripheral areas.The social capital of the area made the difference, building a subaltern class that goes beyond the difference in income between us and our friends. Moving in those neighbourhoods, people like Gigliola and Doriana became by default second class citizens, many times experiencing the disorienting condition of inhabiting middle-​class individual spaces—​their homes and families—​and underclass collective spaces—​the neighbourhood and its services. In respect to the metropolitan centre—​whether Naples or northern Italy—​those people were structurally subalterns, their ZIP code said it, no matter what was written on their pay cheques. After all, the subalternity of those areas is

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confirmed by the astonishing ignorance of so many urban middle-​class people—​ including Doriana, Gigliola, and my friends—​regarding the socio-​environmental metabolism of the city.The fact that they did not have a clue that they were buying their American suburban dream-​house within a Disneyland for toxic polluters is a poignant proof of the hierarchies of metropolitan spaces where most often the middle-​and elite classes not only protect their interests but simply ignore what occurs out of their sight (and of their wallet). We need to tell the biographies of people traversing the borders of the metropolitan space as well as the stories of the waste travelling through those same spaces. The city’s metabolism blends and combines people and materials in hybrid ways. It is in those hybrid biographies of people and waste, of toxins and bodies that a new kind of subjectification is in the making, a subjectification which, I argue, has the potential to become a revolutionary identity (Armiero and De Angelis 2017). In a recent document with the unequivocal title “Neapolitan Zapatism” (Insurgencia 2016), the grassroots organization Insurgencia, one of the most active groups in the Stop Biocide coalition in Campania,5 has claimed a connection to the Chiapas revolutionary experience in terms of autonomous zones resisting global capitalism (a delegation from Insurgencia actually travelled to Chiapas to learn from that experience). Crucial to my argument is the reference in that document to what they refer to as the “colonial” condition of the Italian South, and the racialization of social inequalities. Claiming a subaltern identity, the activists of Insurgencia have constructed a political space for themselves and the Italian South from which they can start to speak back against the “colonial” otherness under which they live. The most radical from the Neapolitan activist universe have in this sense reclaimed their subaltern identities in function of an autonomous agenda, sometimes in open opposition to the wider nation-​state project of Italy and the region. Claiming an identity that is anchored in the specific history and geography of the Italian South does not mean that this subaltern identity is contained within that specific region. Instead, that political project makes explicit connection to other subaltern communities in the world, for instance the Zapatistas in Chiapas and more recently the Kurds in Rojava.6 Furthermore, their reasoning on racialization in reference to the disposal of toxic waste and the exploitation of areas of the Italian South resonates with the writings of radical scholars who have experimented with the category of environmental racism in Campania, and, I would argue, with the European context more broadly. According to the sociologist Antonello Petrillo (2009), the framing of southern Italians as an inferior race is part of a historical path that since the unification of the country in 1861 has produced its own provincial orientalism. Writing with the ecological economist Giacomo D’Alisa, I have also argued that the mainstream discourse on the waste emergency in Naples has largely been built upon a racist assumption concerning the uncivilized attitude of southern Italians and their inability to manage their garbage (obviously, this kind of rhetoric was especially strong among leaders of the xenophobic, right-​wing party Lega Nord) (see Armiero and D’Alisa 2013; 2014).

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Subaltern subjects, environmental racism, and environmental justice have been the most significant categories that have transited between researchers and activists. Another crucial space of contamination between theory and practice has been that of the commons. I once interviewed a middle-​aged woman from a lower-​class neighbourhood about her involvement in the grassroots mobilization against a dump. When I asked her how and why she became interested in the issue of waste, she answered rather upset: “I am not interested in garbage. I am an activist for the commons [actually using the English word].” In the interview she explained that she was part of the so-​called Rete Commons (the Commons Network), a coalition of grassroots organizations formed, as she said, by women and the “social kids,” meaning with this beautiful expression the activists from the Centri Sociali (the Social Centres), the most leftist activists in the galaxy of the Neapolitan mobilization.7 The fact that she was framing the mobilization on waste—​or more correctly, her focus on a specific dump site in a specific neighbourhood—​in terms of commons, was particularly astonishing considering that she did not have any higher education background but a vocational training, and still, through her use of the commons, she elegantly connected what are often viewed as separate struggles for public health services and a clean environment. Her own framing had mainly emerged through a practice of translation and re-​invention between contemporary theoretical work on the commons, and experiments in her activist milieu, the Rete Commons. It is here time to recognize another ghost that was hovering over the agitated waters of the Neapolitan social landscape; that of Toni Negri and his persistent significance in the Italian radical left. It is perhaps dubious to speak of Negri as a ghost since he is present with his writings and rather often in flesh and words everywhere in the Italian Centri Sociali. But he is also a presence coming from the past and he needs mediums, people who can communicate between the two worlds of theory and activist practices. The woman I interviewed had never read Common Wealth (Hardt and Negri 2009)—​nor Empire or Multitude for what it’s worth—​but somehow she had a vague sense of Negri’s arguments, and was able to articulate her political experience within the framework of the commons. More than speaking of some specific doctrinal programme, this story demonstrates a diffuse atmosphere of experimentation and reflection on the theme of the urban commons. The political result of such mobilization has been astonishing. In 2016 a coalition of grassroots movements supported the re-​election of the mayor of Naples on a radical leftist platform, explicitly referring to the Zapatista notions of autonomy and bottom-​up democracy. That municipal government is supporting the experiences of commoning that the Centri Sociali explored in the city. In 2015 the municipal government issued a decree recognizing what they called the rights to the urban commons, experimenting with hybrid forms of management for common spaces. According to scholar and activist Nicola Capone (2016), the local government has chosen to support those urban common uses, granting the right to manage squatted buildings “for the advantage of the local community” following a logic which goes beyond private as well as public property.

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The list of examples of the cross-​fertilization between researchers and activists in Naples could be expanded, starting with acknowledging the extensive use of the environmental justice framework by most of the groups in the region. Researchers and activists have cooperated in the organization of Toxic Tours, bringing cohorts of international scholars to Naples on many occasions, especially thanks to two EU projects involving people working with the Neapolitan case.8 The rate of cooperative research has even increased in the last few years with my own guerrilla narrative project Teresa e le altre (Teresa and the Others; Armiero 2014a), which was published as a book in 2014, and has now been extended into the co-​research project Toxic Bios which is involving grassroots associations, individuals, schools, and researchers.9 When I first sat down to write this chapter, I was travelling to Naples to hold the first national meeting of environmental justice groups, organized by an odd panel composed by Insurgentia, CDCA (an Italian NGO), the University of Lund in Sweden, and the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE).10 Summing up, I could tell the story of the waste struggles in Campania as a success story. Radical scholars, including myself, have been able to affect the movement, providing a critical vocabulary including concepts and tools such as environmental justice, environmental racism, subaltern subjects, the commons, and popular epidemiology. We have also contributed in placing those struggles in a wider picture connecting the local and the global. But is this the whole story? I would like to complicate what seems to be an overly simplistic narrative with a few thoughts. First, who affected whom? I am not so sure that the radical scholars are here the subjects, or at least the only and main subjects. In my own case, the movement itself pushed me towards political ecology in the first place. After all, I was a much quieter environmental historian before I began to work on waste in Campania. While I have always been a Marxist historian, I was at that point rather disenchanted and extremely isolated. Therefore, I am sure it was for me as well as others, a dialectical rather than a one-​way relationship between research “object” and “subject.” Furthermore, the very distinction between activists and scholars is blurry in the Neapolitan case and not just because of the notion of co-​production, but on a more trivial scale because several young activists also went ahead, as the struggle intensified, to start their PhD, thus embodying in their personal lives, the blend of different identities. And I would also argue that it is precisely within the space of training where established scholars may contribute in fostering an emancipatory (yes, a revolutionary) pedagogical agenda. Second, is this about analysis or perspective? As radical scholars, we have been able to offer a critical vocabulary to call things by new names that somehow has helped to more appropriately capture what is going on. Today, in the Campania case instead of speaking of corruption and inefficiency, people speak of capitalism, environmental injustice, and racism, connecting to longer forms of historical exclusion, placing themselves in a longer lineage of activists and active citizenry. Having noted that, though, I am less sure that we as scholars have contributed to a vision for radical transformations, one that places those that are last, first. Indeed, even a notion like that of “environmental justice” can be co-​opted and mean different

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things. After all, its implementation is one of the tasks of the US Environmental Protection Agency, which to me does not look much like a revolutionary agent. How to push our imaginaries further and explore them as concrete agents of revolutionary change? Third, is this science or politics? Sometimes I have had the impression that the activists I was working with were rather disappointed with my contribution to their cause. They did not need a political ecologist telling them that they were caught up in the pipeline of capitalism in its bulimic incorporation of both life and social relationships. Rather they wanted to know how waste was disposed of in California or about the regulations governing incineration emissions in Europe. Practical stuff; offer solutions on practical problems, or how to organize more effectively. Of course, most importantly, they needed medical researchers proving that their sickness was caused by toxic waste. Once, during one of the usual toxic tours, I was stuck in a complicated discussion with a group of activists. I was trying to make the point that science is always political; however, for them there was only the “good science,” the one which would support their claims, versus the “political science,” that is, the science subservient to power.

Of science, or engagement without stakes Seveso is almost synonymous with industrial disaster in Europe.The chemical plant accident in July 1976 in this north Italian town caused extremely high dioxin contamination to the surrounding population and the EU legislation to prevent such industrial and chemical accidents is named after the accident (Walker et al. 1999).11 However, there is another story linked to Seveso that helps to illustrate my last point about the difference between engaged researchers and militant researchers. In the aftermath of the dioxin contamination, scientists, psychologists, lawyers, and physicians arrived in Seveso and organized the so-​called Comitato Scientifico Popolare (the People’s Scientific Committee; see Bettini and Commoner 1976; Centemeri 2006).That committee was heavily controlled by the Italian Communist Party and by other smaller groups of the Italian radical left, such as Democrazia Proletaria (Proletarian Democracy). This Committee sought to develop not only an understanding of the industrial accident, but also build science that could question and possibly transform the social relations of power that controlled production in Seveso and beyond. The Catholic Church, with a traditional conservative agenda, also arrived in Seveso. The result was a town split into two, a sort of microcosm of what was occurring in large parts of the world during the Cold War. In Seveso, however, the Iron Curtain passed through the body of the people, already soaked in the slow violence (Nixon 2011) of industrial capitalism as it haunted everything with its invisible dioxin. In particular, women’s bodies were at the centre of the controversy; being the biological place of reproduction those bodies were at the frontline of the capitalistic violence forcing women to choose between the possibility of unhealthy newborns or abortion. This “freedom of choice” is of course absurd but in the capitalistic regime the possibility of individual

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choice is not necessarily synonymous with freedom. Being forced to make an individual choice while trapped in the violence of contamination and exploitation is the perfect metaphor of the capitalistic idea of freedom, reassembling more the possibility to move in a cage rather than break free from it. All the experts and volunteers arriving in Seveso, the mainstream ones from the company, the State, and the Church, and the radical ones forming the Comitato Scientifico Popolare, not only offered material support to the victims of the industrial disaster, but also—​in the same breath and through the same token—​proposed their own vision of the world and their own theory of what had occurred in that community. The bodies of women were both the battleground and the lens through which opposing visions of the world made sense of the capitalist violence of contamination. It is clear that Seveso is a story from a different era. We could perhaps call it the Politicocene, when (real) parties—​based on ideological fault lines between the left and the right—​were still alive and especially the communist parties were strong and active. In Italy the Communist Party used to have a school for cadres where many Italian intellectuals were trained or had taught. Workers also acquired their education in the party’s school. But then things changed. In the 1980s everybody celebrated the end of ideologies, soon communism was defeated, and the “political” became a bad word. It was around that time that being an intellectual started to sound like an insult, an assumption which is still quite powerful in Italy today (but I believe also elsewhere). The sub-​variety of “leftist snobbish intellectuals” became especially relevant. Someone should trace when and how this narrative was fabricated and imposed. Impressionistically, I would say that television shows and movies were extremely influential in building that narrative (after all isn’t Italy Berlusconiland?). The basic message was that leftist intellectuals do not have a clue about reality, they are rich and privileged, and they despise ordinary people. I do not deny that some of those claims might have been true, maybe especially among the institutionalized intellectuals, the academics, but the construction of this narrative was a deliberate strategy to break the solidarity between intellectuals and workers, which had been extremely strong, especially in Italy. Between Seveso in 1970s and the garbage crisis in Naples in the 1990s and 2000s, the entire world has changed. While I have mentioned the activism of the leftist parties in the aftermath of Seveso, only grassroots organizations were involved in the Campania waste crisis. No leftist party created in Campania anything similar to the Comitato Scientifico Popolare active in Seveso.This does not imply that scientists have not been involved in the waste crisis but only that they were not mobilized on the basis of parties’ belongings, not even of strict ideological identities. The Assise di Palazzo Marigliano has been the most influential experience of experts’ mobilization in the Neapolitan waste crisis, but it was not linked to any political party and it maintained a rather open ideological inclusiveness (Armiero 2008; Capone 2013). The engagement of scientists and experts in the Campania case confirms that something has changed in the relationships between knowledge production and societal challenges from the 1980s when the disengagement between scholars and activists became nearly total. Currently even institutional agencies

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strongly ask scholars to engage with the so-​called big societal challenges. This is a truth that every scholar who has tried to apply for grants during the last decade knows very well. But this is the age of experts and opinion makers, not of organic intellectuals or militant scientists. It would be unthinkable to create a people’s scientific committee today—​a comitato scientifico popolare. Hence, what is the difference? I think that the difference lies between experts contributing to solve the problem and militant scholars proposing a theory of what is happening and envisioning not solutions but revolutions. The experts involved in the waste mobilization in Naples have been in most cases extremely useful for the activists’ cause. I am thinking of a geologist who has helped the communities to oppose governmental decisions; the physicians who have collected data on abnormal diffusion of diseases; lawyers who have filed the judicial complaints. Nonetheless, I still think that it is appropriate to ask whether they would consider themselves militants serving a progressive (revolutionary?) agenda. It is challenging to stay between the concrete, local controversies and the wider anti-​capitalist conflict. I believe that radical leftist activists—​the “social kids,” as my informant called them—​have worked in this direction better than radical scholars. They have connected different local controversies under one coherent umbrella, intertwining solidarities and personal bounds. No one better than the Invisible Committee has stated the need to go beyond the local vs. global dichotomy: The local is not the reassuring alternative to globalisation, but its universal product […] Local is the name of a possibility of sharing, combined with the sharing of a dispossession. It’s a contradiction of the global, which we can give a consistency to or not. Reducing to the rather insignificant category of “local struggles”—​akin to the pleasantly folkloric “local color—​struggles like those of the Susa Valley, Chalkidiki, or the Mapuche, who have recreated a territory and a people with a planetary aura, is a classic operation of neutralisation. For the state, on the pretext that these territories are situated at its margins, it’s a matter of marginalizing them politically. Aside from the Mexican state, who would think of categorising the Zapatista uprising and the adventure that followed from it as a “local struggle?” Invisible Committee (2015, 189)

Alchemic Anthropocene The Anthropocene is a global narrative. It’s a story just like any other with its characters, heroes, and villains. This does not mean to deny real material changes that are occurring and that we must engage with. However, to state that “the Anthropocene is a global narrative,” does mean to say that it doesn’t deal with the specificities of local issues. It is not interested in differences. It does not care for the nuances of social construction of science. It insists that CO2 emissions and rising sea levels are material and global conditions; their reality is a scientific truth that should go beyond opinions. Thus, after decades of post-​modernist turns, the

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global and the material seem to be back in force. Today stating in public that the Anthropocene is a discourse would look awfully close to the arguments of climate change deniers and scientists on the payroll of fossil fuel corporations. In brief, to oppose the Anthropocene has become equivalent to opposing the scientific truth of climate change.12 I think that once again we are playing defence. As radical scholars, we did not propose a global, materialistic narrative but we are reacting to the one that has been imposed. And we are extremely good at analysing, dissecting, and explaining mainstream ideas.What does the Anthropocene narrative do to the socio-​ecological crisis? I would argue that the Anthropocene is a reification of social relations. A specific organization of property, production, and power is transformed from a process—​in which there are struggles, resistance, alternatives—​into a thing, a geological era. Changing a thing is not the same as changing relations. Because reification seems to move the discussion towards alchemy; humans must change the thing, its nature, rather than transforming social relations.The difference is that a process is not given, you do not live in a relation but rather through a relation, and the power at work in those relations shifts and affects the process.While trumpeting the ultimate power of humans, able to affect the whole planet, the Anthropocene leaves no room for the agency of different groups in shaping the relationships producing what has been called the Anthropocene. This is why I see the Anthropocene as the age of alchemy, because invoking that age implies a tension to change the nature of things and not the relations among social-​ecological configurations, or if you wish, among classes. After all, isn’t there something alchemic about the dream of geo-​engineering the entire planet? My provocation is to frame the Anthropocene as the age of a new alchemy, based on too much “scientification” of public discourse. But I would argue that the opposite of alchemy is not science, but politics. The framing in terms of ages pushes us to look for a post-​Anthropocene age, as people have been talking of a post-​capitalist age. Or maybe, for the more regressive or romantic, for a going back to a pre-​Anthropocene age, the good old times before capitalism. The problem with the “post thing”—​or for that matter with the “pre thing”—​is that it does not have any specification. To go beyond the Anthropocene/​Capitalocene (Moore 2016) is not enough; for an eco-​socialist like me we need to do much more work in order to start realizing an anti-​capitalistic communal project of some kind. In this chapter I have summoned the power of ghosts. It is the invisible ghost of toxic contamination haunting the bodies and lives of subaltern people in Campania. It is the ghost of the rebels, hiding in the jungles of wherever periphery of capitalism. It is the ghost of past struggles still embodied into the nowadays landscapes of resistance and oppression. It is the ghost of radical scholars and intellectuals blending with the bricolage of practices and collective reflections of activists. Indeed, one might say that the challenge is to make visible what has been invisibilized and silenced by power oppression; though this has been my aim for so long while uncovering the environmental injustice of Campania, I would like to contemplate the possibility that instead maintaining the ghost mode might also be a valuable

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option. The point is that something or someone becomes a ghost only when it is actually visible. Without some visibility there is no ghost. The story I have narrated proves that even what is well visible in front of our eyes might remain concealed more than ghosts. Heaps of garbage in the streets or black smoke in the skies needed the ghost of the invisible dioxin contamination in order to be seen. Rebels must become like ghosts hiding in the remote jungles of Mexico or in the post-​industrial jungles of our cities in order to be visible.The Invisible Committee is so visible that even Fox News fell into the trap and talked about it. Indeed, be aware: the ghost is back and it is everywhere.

Acknowledgements Research for this paper has received funding from the European Union’s ITN Marie Curie Program Enhance, grant agreement No. 642935. Many thanks to Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw for their suggestions.

Notes 1 What was so easy about migrating to another country remains a mystery to me, struggling to express myself in a foreign language, instead of getting a nice academic position in Italy. Nonetheless, clearly the staying vs. leaving trope is crucial in the drawing of belongings and alienation. And I did leave in order to remain who I am. 2 The high-​speed train should connect Lyon in France to Turin in Italy, affecting the entire ecosystem of the Susa Valley. The resistance against the project questions its environmental impacts, the possible harms to public health (with massive release into the atmosphere of asbestos, uranium, and other dangerous particles from the excavation of the tunnels), and its economic logic. On the movement against the high-​speed train see Wu Ming 1 (2016) and della Porta and Piazza (2008). 3 I also proposed alternative titles for the Italian translation of Martinez Alier’s book that came out in Italian in 2010. 4 Employing the 2009 data, all the communities chosen by Naples’ officials to host waste infrastructures, including landfills, had a per capita income below that of Naples. Data available at www.comuni-​italiani.it/​063/​statistiche/​redditic2009.html. Accessed May 14, 2018. 5 Stop Biocidio is a coalition of grassroots environmentalist organizations active in the struggles against toxic waste contamination in Campania (See de Rosa 2013). 6 Activists from Insurgencia have travelled to Kobane building a strong cooperation with the Kurds which culminated in 2016 with the granting of the honorary citizenship of Naples to Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan. 7 The Centri Sociali (Social Centers) are old abandoned buildings squatted by young activists and transformed into centres for political, cultural, and recreational activities. On this experience see Mudu (2004), or the documentary film Massimo Rispetto, directed by Paolo Virzì (1994). On anti-​globalization movements and the environment, see Merchant (2005 [1992], 223–​47). 8 The two European projects are: the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) and the Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT).

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9 Toxic Bios is a research project founded by the Swedish Seed Box initiative at Linköping University. The project aims to produce and make available on an open access platform stories of contamination and resistance. 10 Information about this event at http://​entitleblog.org/​2016/​01/​18/​agora-​dei-​ movimenti-​in-​difesa-​dei-​territori-​e-​per-​la-​g iustizia-​ambientale-​napoli-​4-​6-​marzo-​ 2016/​. Accessed May 14, 2018. 11 On July 10, 1976 an accident at a chemical plant in Seveso caused the emission to the atmosphere of 2,3,7,8-​tetrachlorodibenzo-​p-​dioxin (TCDD). The population of the areas around the factory was exposed to extremely high levels of dioxin contamination, and, as always in cases like this, struggled with contrasting information and messages from the authorities and the corporation. 12 See Swyngedouw and Ernstson (Chapter 2, this volume) on the Anthropocene as a narrative stage and its political effects.

References Armiero, Marco. 2008.“Seeing Like a Protester: Nature, Power, and Environmental Struggles.” Left History 13(1): 59–​76. Armiero, Marco. 2011. A Rugged Nation. Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy. Cambridge: White Horse Press. Armiero, Marco, ed. 2014a. Teresa e le altre. Storie di donne nella Terra dei Fuochi. Milano: Jacabook. Armiero, Marco. 2014b. “Is There an Indigenous Knowledge in the Urban North? Re/​inventing Local Knowledge and Communities in the Struggles over Garbage and Incinerators in Campania, Italy.” Estudos de Sociologia 1(20). Armiero, Marco, and Giacomo D’Alisa. 2013. “Voices, Clues, Numbers: Roaming Among Waste in Campania.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 24(4): 7–​16. Armiero, Marco, and Giacomo D’Alisa. 2014. “Rights of Resistance: The Garbage Struggles for Environmental Justice in Campania, Italy.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 23(4): 52–​68. Armiero, Marco and Massimo de Angelis. 2017. “Anthropocene: Victims, Narrators, and Revolutionaries.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 116(2): 345–​61. Armiero, Marco and Salvatore Paolo de Rosa. 2017. “Political Effluvia: Smells, Revelations, and the Politicization of Daily Experience in Naples, Italy.” In Methodological Challenges in Nature-​Culture and Environmental History Research, edited by Stephanie Rutherford, L. Anders Sandberg, and Jocelyn Thorpe, 173–​86. London and New York: Routledge. Armiero, Marco and Anna Fava. 2016. “Of Humans, Sheep, and Dioxin: A History of Contamination and Transformation in Acerra, Italy.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27(2):  67–​82. Armiero, Marco and Leandro Sgueglia. 2016. Wasted Spaces, Resisting People. The Politics of Waste in Naples, Italy. Unpublished manuscript. Arpac, 2007. “Siti contaminati.” Annuario dati ambientali Campania: 165–​80. Accessed March 8, 2018. www.arpacampania.it/​documents/​30626/​52630/​7-​Siti+contaminati.pdf. Bettini, Virginio and Barry Commoner. 1976. Ecologia e lotte sociali. Ambiente, popolazione, inquinamento. Milano: Feltrinelli. Capone, Nicola. 2016. “Uso civico urbano Beni pubblici e usi collettivi nella propsettiva costituzionale.” In Trasformazioni della democrazia, edited by Laura Bazzicalupo, Valeria Giordano, Francesco Mancuso, and Geminello Preterossi. Milano: Mimesis. Capone, Nicola. 2013. “The Assemblies of the City of Naples: A Long Battle to Defend the Landscape and Environment.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 24(4): 46–​54.

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Centemeri, Laura. 2006. Ritorno a Seveso: il danno ambientale, il suo riconoscimento, la sua riparazione. Milano: Bruno Mondadori. D’Alisa, Giacomo, David Burgalassi, Hali Healy, and Mariana Walter. 2010. “Conflict in Campania: Waste Emergency or Crisis of Democracy.” Ecological Economics 70(2): 239–​49. Derrida, Jacques. 1993/​1994. Specters of Marx:The State of the Debt,The Work of Mourning, and The New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge. Hardt, Michael and Toni Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Iengo, Ilenia and Marco Armiero. 2017. “The Politicization of Ill Bodies in Campania, Italy.” Journal of Political Ecology 24: 44–​58. Insurgencia 2016. “Zapatismo partenopeo.” Global Project, February 25. Accessed April 20, 2018. www.globalproject.info/​it/​in_​movimento/​zapatismo-​partenopeo/​19906. Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Invisible Committee. 2015. To Our Friends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Legambiente. 2013. “Ecco cifre, dati e numeri delle rotte dal Nord verso la Terra dei Fuochi.” Legambiente, November 15. Accessed April 20, 2018. www.legambiente.it/​contenuti/​ comunicati/​ecco-​cifre-​dati-​e-​numeri-​delle-​rotte-​dal-​nord-​verso-​la-​terra-​dei-​fuochi- ​ domani-​. Martinez-​Alier, Joan. 2002. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Value. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Martinez Alier, Joan. 2010. Ecologia dei poveri. Italian edition by Marco Armiero. Milano: Jacabook. Merchant, Carolyn. 2005 [1992]. Radical Ecology:The Search for a Liveable World New York and London: Routledge. Moore, Jason W., ed. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: Kairos. Mudu, Pier Paolo. 2004. “Resisting and Challenging Neoliberalism: The Development of Italian Social Centers.” Antipode 36(5): 917–​41. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Petrillo,Antonello, ed. 2009. Biopolitica di un rifiuto: le rivolte anti-​discarica a Napoli e in Campania. Verona: Ombre Corte. Porta, Donatella della and Gianni Piazza. 2008. Voices of the Valley, Voices of the Straits: How Protest Creates Communities. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Rosa, Salvatore Paolo de. 2013. “The ‘Raging River’ Unites Struggles Against Waste Disposal and Biocide in Campania.” EJOLT –​Environmental Justice Organizations Liabilities and Trade. Accessed February 22, 2018. www.ejolt.org/​2013/​11/​waste-​conflicts-​in-​ campania-​and-​the-​common-​struggle-​against-​biocide-​join-​hands/​. Rosa, Salvatore Paolo de. 2017. “Competing Territorializations: The Spatiality of Waste Conflicts in Campania, Italy.” In Reclaiming Territory. Knowledge Generation and Spatial Practices of Grassroots Environmental Movements in the Waste Conflicts of Campania, Italy. PhD Dissertation. Lund: Lund University. Scotto di Luzio, Adolfo. 2008. Napoli dai molti tradimenti. Bologna: Il Mulino. Virzì, Paolo. 1994. Massimo Rispetto. YouTube, December 10. Accessed May 20, 2018. www.youtube.com/​watch?v=YSf4SsGwLHI. Walker, Gordon, Peter Simmons, Alan Irwin, and Brian Wynne. 1999.“Risk Communication, Public Participation and the Seveso II Directive.” Journal of Hazardous Materials 65(1): 179–​90. Wu Ming 1. 2016. Un viaggio che promettiamo non breve. Torino: Einaudi.

PART III

The performative

11 EXHIBITING DIVISION, SEIZING THE STATE The Natural History Museum Jodi Dean

The anamorphic politics of climate change The challenge of politics in the Anthropocene is a matter of perspective: we can’t look at climate change directly. We look for patterns and estimate probabilities, relying on multiple disparate measurements. We see in parts: the melting ice caps, glaciers, and permafrost; the advancing deserts and diminishing coral reefs; the disappearing coastlines and the migrating species. Evidence becomes a matter of extremes as extremes themselves become evidence of an encroaching catastrophe that has already happened: the highest recorded temperatures; the hockey stick of predicted warming, sea level rise, and extinction. Once we see it—​the “it” of climate change encapsulated into a data-​point or disastrous image—​it’s too late. For what and for whom remains unsaid, unknowable.1 Erik Swyngedouw (2010) draws out the depoliticizing effects of the apocalyptic imaginaries of climate change. Spectres of annihilation cultivate “ecologies of fear”—​a world without water, devastating wildfires, and rampant epidemics of horrifying diseases.There are the bizarre couplings of BP and New Age post-​materialists singing in one voice of the need to align with nature and preserve the planet, the political differences between their positions effaced under the benign love for nature. Desire is incited for an apocalypse the shape of which perpetually shifts: are we facing the end of civilization or just another techno-​managerial opportunity? Neither has a space for politics. Furthermore, the techno-​managerialism of climate change manifests as the singular object onto which climate anxiety attaches: CO2. Swyngedouw (2010, 230) notes that the “fetishistic disavowal of the multiple and complex relations through which environmental changes unfold finds its completion in the double reductionism to this singular socio-​chemical component (CO2).” To the impossible whole of global ecological apocalypse corresponds the impossible partial object of intensified investment—​financial as well as affective—​CO2. In

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sum, the impossible terrain of planetary disaster is envisioned, produced, as a post-​ political terrain, one lacking spaces, opportunities, or agents of politics. Recent salvos in climate politics cut through this illusory post-​political whole. They don’t focus on CO2. Neither do they purport to unravel the multiple and complex relations of biologic, geologic, geographic, and atmospheric processes. Instead, they engage politically, from the perspective of a divisive anti-​capitalism. For example, Christian Parenti (2011) emphasizes the “catastrophic convergence” of poverty, violence, and climate change. He draws out the uneven and unequal impacts of planetary warming on areas already devastated by capitalism, racism, colonialism, and militarism. In a similar vein but on a different scale, activists focused on pipeline and oil and gas storage projects target the fossil fuel industry as the infrastructure of climate change, the central component of warming’s means of reproduction. Instead of exemplifying a tired politics of locality, infrastructure struggles confront capitalist industries that sacrifice people to profit. The Natural History Museum, the new project of the art, activist, and theory collective, Not An Alternative, likewise rejects the post-​political apocalyptic imaginary. In this ongoing performance, Not An Alternative adopts the legitimating aesthetics, pedagogical models, and presentation forms of natural history museums in support of a divisive perspective on science, nature, and capitalism. With The Natural History Museum, Not An Alternative does not try to present climate change directly or nature as a whole. Instead, the project examines labour history, social movements, public relations, and practices of science communication. The Natural History Museum puts displays on display, transferring our attention to the infrastructures supporting what and how we see. Its avowedly partisan approach politicizes climate change as it appears in the context of a museum culture that revels in its “authoritative neutrality.” The Natural History Museum activates the natural history museum’s claim to serve the common thereby dividing the museum from within: anyone connected to the museum sector, anyone tasked with communicating science and natural history to a wider public, has to take a side. Do they stand with collectivity and the common or with oligarchs, private property, and the fossil fuel industry? The Natural History Museum is thus a performative political project that targets the knowledge politics of anthropogenic ecological change.This chapter focuses on the innovative artistic and political practice that it models. I situate the project in Not An Alternative’s work as politically engaged artists, attending to some of the ways The Natural History Museum responds to problems that arise in the overlap of socially engaged art and institutional critique, understanding this response as lessons for politics in the Anthropocene.2 The Natural History Museum is, first, a platform for political organizing that treats the museum, science, and nature as sites of struggle. As a platform, The Natural History Museum moves beyond socially engaged art’s creation of experiences and valuation of participation for its own sake to function as an organizing tool for building divisive political power. The Natural History Museum, second, is an artistic project that confiscates the form of the natural history museum in order to direct us toward what the museum as an institution excludes, namely, the place of power and politics in determining how

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we see and what is possible. Extending institutional critique (work from artists such as Hans Haacke, Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, and others), The Natural History Museum locates the limits to a system within the system.The repercussion is that working within a system becomes not co-​optation and complicity but occupation and seizure. Consequently, third, The Natural History Museum is a theoretical laboratory for experiments in seizing the state by seizing the institutions that transmit knowledge and legitimacy, experiments, in other words, in the building of a counter-​power infrastructure. The wide array of operations that constitute the project demonstrate a capacity for political organization and strategy, one that can be adopted, amplified, and extended. In contrast with the post-​politics of ecologic apocalypticism, lessons in institutionality hold open the promise of and need for collective struggle.

Institutionality, at a minimum As is clear from their name, Not An Alternative twists Margaret Thatcher’s infamous “there is no alternative” to shift from something in the negative to nothing in the positive. This “nothing” is an interior antagonism, an object’s non-​identity with itself, the inherent limit of a system, or the gap constitutive of the subject. Not An Alternative’s projects aim to find and occupy the impossible instances of a given system, splitting the system by forcing its internal limits back onto it, and seizing the common, egalitarian potential that is already present.3 Forcing of a lack opens the space of the subject; seizing the common demonstrates fidelity to the people as that subject. Not An Alternative developed its position in part via a critique of communicative capitalism, more specifically, via a critique of the injunction to participate that infuses the contemporary intertwining of democracy and capitalism. In a context where activists and artists were repeating communicative capitalism’s demand for participation as if participation were in and of itself a radical or emancipatory act, Not An Alternative emphasized how networked media involves us in building the traps that ensnare us. The group explains: We come up with new forms and they are integrated directly as fuel for a system that is fundamentally unsustainable. Our solutions are sucked into the brand identities of institutions. As Not An Alternative, we are not interested in the production of solutions or the inclusion of new subjectivities or symbols, but rather the excavation and occupation of existing ones, revealing an inherent split. Donovan (2011, no page number given) Under conditions of the proliferation of memes and images, of capitalist efforts to identify and monetize whatever is new and different, and of intense competition for positions, recognition, and capital, producing the new feeds the system. In the name of democratic participation, artists and activists end up reinforcing dominant

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processes of multiplication and diffusion (see also Bishop 2012). Treating democracy as the value to be realized, they proceed as if politics were nothing more than social engagement. The role of the artist then becomes creating new openings through which people might engage and be engaged. Not An Alternative breaks with socially engaged art in that it views politics antagonistically. Political art should occupy division and force the institution to take a side. Not An Alternative’s work takes the form of installations, interventions in arts institutions and public spaces, and political collaborations. Collaborations have been with community groups (for example, Occupy Sandy and Picture the Homeless, a housing advocacy group in New York City), activist campaigns (Strike Debt), and social movements (Occupy Wall Street, anti-​foreclosure, climate justice). In these collaborations, Not An Alternative has two aims: to find the limits of a given system and to assemble a symbolic infrastructure that links groups and actions, making disparate actions and campaigns legible as fronts in one struggle. So even as Not An Alternative’s work stretches from video and performance, through museums and urban spaces, to research and organizing, it is marked by what Yates McKee (2013) calls a “militant uniformity.”This militant uniformity comes from the common, the visual systems that continue to signify some minimal degree of institutionality in our setting of the decline of symbolic efficiency. Not An Alternative came up with Occupy’s black-​and-​yellow symbolic infrastructure (McKee 2014). This infrastructure takes the colour scheme and style associated with public works such as construction sites and highway caution signage and puts it in the hands of the people. With this visual infrastructure, Not An Alternative presented the occupation in terms of what was common: common tactics carried out under a name in common. Rather than a marker left by capitalism and the state, the signage points to the common interest of the people, to the division they share in common. When activists reappropriate warning tape and caution signage, they force the question: in whose interest is power exercised? During Occupy, the “militant uniformity” of the yellow and black helped make a collective subject present to itself, enabling it to feel itself as a collective force. Likewise, in contrast with the familiar critique of representation, Not An Alternative demonstrated the power of representation (Dean and Jones 2012). It pulled out a visual element of the movement—​tents—​forcing acknowledgement of the way tents already functioned as clear symbols of occupation. Where various activist, artistic, and theoretical voices reject representation for its inevitable omissions, a rejection anchored in the fantasy of a pure, complete, and direction representation, a fantasy of absolute and unmediated inclusion, Not An Alternative recognizes that representations attempt to produce their subjects (Steyerl 2009).4 A shared image or point of identification, a name in common, affects those who identify it as a marker of collectivity—​whether they identify with it as their own or see it as designating an enemy. Because of Occupy, tents assumed a political meaning that had remained implicit in their range of appearings in refugee camps and the temporary encampments that sprung up outside US cities in the economic downturn. People were asserting themselves in places where they did not belong,

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refusing to accept any longer the barriers posed by capital and the state.Whether or not every occupier was actually living in a tent, tents signified occupation, pressing the divisive claim of the people against the 1%. Not An Alternative’s “mili-​tents,” carried in actions and attached to walls even after police had cleared all the occupiers out of Zuccotti Park, both pointed to the fundamental division in capitalism that Occupy asserted and highlighted the symbolic infrastructure the movement itself was producing. Not An Alternative’s practice is situated in the overlap between socially engaged art and “institutional critique.” Initially appearing at the end of the 1960s, institutional critique has gone through two and arguably even three waves (Raunig and Ray 2009). Given current discussion of these waves, it is perhaps most accurate to locate Not An Alternative’s practice in the critique of institutional critique that emerged in second and third waves in the 1990s and 2000s, to locate it, in other words, in institutional critique’s own self-​reflection. The first wave of institutional critique developed an immanent critique of the institution of art, applying to museums the normative criteria the museums themselves claimed to hold. Crucial to this critique was the exposure not simply of the market dimension of art but of the role of class in determining what counts as art and the role of art in establishing the signifiers of class (Rosler 2011). Artists such as Hans Haacke, a key influence on Not An Alternative, extended the idea of the “institution” beyond spaces for the teaching, viewing, production, and selling of art to encompass “the network of social and economic relationships between them” (Fraser 2011, 412). The second wave of institutional critique focused on the limits of institutional critique. Did institutional critique’s dependence on the institution it was critiquing in some way compromise it, making it just as guilty and complicit as the gallery or museum? Did attempts to find loci of independence backfire when an institution happily sponsored “external” critical perspectives as aesthetic events from which the institution itself was critically shielded or immunized, its political credentials established by the fact of its sponsorship? As Fraser argues in her influential 2005 essay (published in Fraser (2011, 414)): It is artists—​as much as museums or the market—​who, in their very efforts to escape the institution of art, have driven its expansion. With each attempt to evade the limits of institutional determination, to embrace an outside, to redefine art or reintegrate it into everyday life, to reach “everyday” people and work in the “real” world, we expand our frame and bring more of the world into it. But we never escape it. Inclusion in the institution serves as the very means by which political effects are precluded, de-​activated. Expanding the frame spreads political de-​activation. Once everything is art, included within and supporting the institutional frame, nothing is political. Not An Alternative accepts Fraser’s point that escape is impossible—​there is no outside. With Lacanian theory as an explicit part of its practice, Not An Alternative

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locates the limit within the institution (Not An Alternative 2015). No institution is fully self-​identical. Institutions are split between the ideals they espouse and their actual practices, between the practices they openly acknowledge and the obscene rituals they have to deny. Not An Alternative thus turns the institution against itself, siding with its better nature, and forcing others to take a side. It looks for allies, “double agents” already working within the institution, reinforces them, and in so doing activates the power that is already there. So rather than just making complicity with state and capital visible, Not An Alternative treats institutions as forms to be seized and connected into a counter-​power infrastructure. Fraser (2011, 416) writes: It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalise, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Emphasizing the “we,” Fraser points to the necessity of a partisan position. Not just any values, and certainly not all values, are politically compatible with the institution “we” are. The institution is the site of a larger struggle, a territory or apparatus that can be commandeered. This is the overlap between Not An Alternative’s critique of participation and its institutional critique. In each case, Not An Alternative emphasizes the importance of division. Not An Alternative rejects the supposition of some socially engaged art that the goal is creative experience and inclusive participation. Instead, it embraces militant opposition, tight organizational forms, and the aggregated power of institutions. It insists as well on the struggle that continues within any group, form, or institution. Division goes all the way down. Self-​identity is a fantasy. Not An Alternative further rejects both the melancholic claims of contemporary depoliticization and a politics thought in terms of resistance, insurrection, playful aesthetic disruptions, and the establishment of momentary relations of community and belonging. It aims to occupy institutions, build counter-​power infrastructure, and develop strategies. Not An Alternative rejects familiar calls for innovation. Instead, it salvages the generic images, practices, institutions, and forms that have already compiled and stored collective power. Here it claims the continued power of communism as the name for an anti-​capitalism oriented toward the collective desire for collectivity (Dean 2012). To sum up, for Not An Alternative, institutions are sites of collective power. It models a Leninist strategy for seizing the state under conditions of communicative capitalism as it takes over available signifying modes and reclaims the communicative common of language, ideas, knowledge, and effects. This is a politics of organization, infrastructure, and counter-​power. To the extent that Not An Alternative’s projects do not simply create momentary social relations or open and participatory social spaces but actually build a partisan counter-​power infrastructure, their work moves beyond socially engaged art to the art of political engagement, an art that, no

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longer confined with the suppositions of a democratic imaginary, takes communism as its horizon.

Being the museum Not An Alternative’s current multi-​ year project, The Natural History Museum, employs the visual and communicative practices of natural history museums to perform a sort of “people’s natural history,” that is to say, a natural history that includes the struggles of the oppressed and labouring classes. Instead of relying on aesthetic gestures of critique, irony, or the retreat into poetic reverie found in some ecological art, Not An Alternative takes on the generic form of the natural history museum. Becoming the institution allows it to incorporate sincerity, commitment, partisanship, and truth into a politically engaged artwork. The Natural History Museum isn’t a joke or a stunt. It’s a registered member of the American Alliance of Museums. It has a board that includes prominent scientists (James Powell), artists (Mark Dion), and environmental activists (Naomi Klein). It doesn’t exist as a building. It exists as an insistent collective perspective on the common. As an artistic project, The Natural History Museum installs a gap between the expectations associated with the natural history museum form and its own displays. These include recreations of dioramas from other natural history museums as well as letters, petitions, campaigns, articles, and events authorized by the museum. By exhibiting how nature appears, The Natural History Museum not only opens up the irreducibility of nature to its appearing, but also the gap of human systems, perceptions, and institutions within nature. This gap forces “visitors” (whether construed as the specific museum professionals addressed in some exhibitions and organizing efforts or more broadly as anyone who comes in contact with the name “The Natural History Museum”) to acknowledge the place from which they see. The museum as an institution works allegorically as a screen through which to access the realm of political antagonism occluded in the moralizing and technocratic discourses of the Anthropocene. A natural history museum is a collective perspective on a common world.Visitors to The Natural History Museum encounter themselves as a collective in their act of looking: how does the common appear in this institution dedicated to fostering appreciation of the natural world and how is what is common excluded? With this reflexive torsion, The Natural History Museum holds open the gap it installs, politicizing it as a collective desire for collectivity. The Natural History Museum functions as a campaign and as a counter-​institution. As a political campaign, it challenges fossil fuel industry green-​washing in natural history museums. Here it provides a platform for calls for fossil fuel divestment. The Natural History Museum’s specific targets are the cultural institutions that communicate knowledge of science and nature, museums that retain a great deal of public trust but which provide legitimating opportunities for coal, oil, and gas companies. Fossil fuel oligarchs like David H. Koch have sat on the boards of and made major donations to such influential museums as the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.

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FIGURE 11.1   The

Natural History Museum, “Will the Story of the 6th Mass Extinction Ever Include the Role of its Sponsors?” 2015. Diorama in an exhibition at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Convention, Atlanta, GA, depicting the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing at the American Museum of Natural History, NY, several hundred years into a dystopian future Source: Photo by NHM.

The dinosaur wing in the American Museum of Natural History, for example, is named after Koch, who donated 20 million dollars to the museum. To combat this oligarchic influence, The Natural History Museum organizes scientists, museum workers, and museum visitors to stand with and for the common over and against capitalist extraction, exploitation, and expropriation (Figures 11.1–​11.3). Although it does not have a permanent brick-​and-​mortar (or steel and glass) base, The Natural History Museum does have a bus. It uses the bus for expeditions to sites such as Sunset Park, Brooklyn, an area within New York City’s storm surge zone; to the 11 oil wells in the Big Cypress National Reserve in the Florida swampland; and to Washington, DC for the delivery of a petition with over 400,000 signatories demanding that the Smithsonian Institute remove Koch from its board (Geiling 2015). Reports of The Natural History Museum’s expeditions appear regularly on its website. Launched to coincide with the People’s Climate March, The Natural History Museum opened in September 2014 with an exhibition and discussion series in the New York City building at the Queens Museum. The Natural History Museum’s opening exhibition was set inside a 20-​metre tent inside the building. It featured a series of light boxes with photographs of dioramas from various natural history museums. The diorama is the aesthetic form most associated with the

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FIGURE 11.2   The

Natural History Museum, “Our Climate, Whose Politics?” 2015. Diorama in an exhibition at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Convention, Atlanta, GA, depicting a diorama from a climate change exhibition at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, with the inclusion of a Koch Industries pipeline Source: Photo by NHM.

twentieth-​century natural history museum. It doesn’t attempt to impart information so much as it tries to convey feelings of wonder. Its romantic, idealized, and hyper-​realistic displays bring the aura of nature into the museum. The Natural History Museum’s light boxes showed this display. Some of the photographs included the people looking at the dioramas. Others seemed to emanate from within the dioramas. The Natural History Museum’s opening also included a two-​month discussion series. Taking place inside the tent, the series included artists, writers, and activists organized into panels on institutional critique, the Anthropocene, museum patronage, urban planning, and climate justice. The enormous tent gave the feeling of both an exhibition and an expedition. It resonated with Occupy, linking the occupation of the Queens Museum to the political movement, and making the natural history museum legible as a political form for climate change struggle. There are natural history museums all over the world, a pre-​existing infrastructure ready to be activated against those who would use it to legitimate continued drilling, fracking, and coal, oil, and gas production. In the position of political collectivity, the tent amplifies the affective engagement that accompanies the “diorama feeling” of nature’s power and vulnerability, otherness and awe. Under the same tent, visitors become part of the collective that is splitting the museum between the people and the corporation, oligarchy, or industry seeking to present knowledge in its interest. The Natural History Museum’s tent turns visitors

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into occupiers, implicating them in a counter-​power infrastructure. It divides the space of its installation within itself, creating a new, divisive collectivity. As I mentioned, The Natural History Museum is a dues-​paying member of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). Less than six months after The Natural History Museum’s launch, its director was invited to serve as a guest author of the blog of the AAM’s key initiatives (The Natural History Museum 2015a). At the MuseumExpo accompanying the AAM’s 2015 annual meeting, The Natural History Museum had the largest exhibition space. It brought its bus and enormous tent into the Georgia World Congress Centre in Atlanta where it highlighted fossil fuel industry green-​washing in science and natural history museums. Volunteers from The Natural History Museum distributed fliers to visitors with answers to questions commonly posed to museum professionals trying to navigate through the funding pressures of neoliberal capitalism and the ideology of “authoritative neutrality” in the context of climate change. One large installation recreated the famous polar bear diorama from New York’s American Museum of Natural History’s 2009 climate change exhibition. The Natural History Museum’s version included previously excluded political-​economic content regarding David Koch, who at the time served as a member of the board of the American Museum of Natural History. Where the original diorama featured a polar bear confronting the detritus of consumerism, The Natural History Museum’s diorama exposed what lies beneath the surface: a large oil pipe from Koch Industries (Figure 11.2). The Natural History Museum pushes to the surface the infrastructure that the American Museum of Natural History would prefer to keep submerged: the fossil fuel industry driving climate change also supports the American Museum of Natural History. A second installation gestured to Hans Haacke’s 2014 show at the Paula Cooper gallery. Not only did Haacke exhibit a number of water pieces, but he also showed a new work attacking the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its new David H. Koch Plaza.This work displayed fake hundred-​dollar bills flowing down out of images of the new Koch fountain. The Natural History Museum installation continued the deployment of fountains, water, tubing, and Koch’s use of the cultural capital of museums to deflect critique from his consistent use of the political system to thwart environmental regulations (see, e.g., Mayer, 2010). The installation featured a water system comprising two tanks and a water fountain. One tank was identified as water from the American Museum of Natural History. Its accompanying description, modelled after a similar description used at the American Museum of Natural History, commends the cleanliness of New York City water. The second tank of water is identified as coming from North Pole, Arkansas. This water is contaminated by sulfolane, a chemical from a Koch-​owned refinery that leaked for years into the community’s groundwater, making it undrinkable.5 The Natural History Museum’s water system displays the pipes and tubes, the infrastructure, connecting the tanks and the fountain (itself a direct replica of one in the American Museum of Natural History). In March 2015, The Natural History Museum released an open letter to museums of science and natural history signed by dozens of the world’s top scientists, including

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FIGURE 11.3   The

Natural History Museum workshops train participants to take the view of museum anthropologists who are attuned to the social and political forces shaping nature Source: Photo by NHM.

several Nobel laureates (The Natural History Museum 2015b). The letter urged museums to cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and with funders of climate obfuscation. After its release, hundreds of scientists added their names. News of the letter went viral, appearing on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times and featuring in the Guardian, Forbes, Salon, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. A leading climate change denial and obfuscation organization, the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (2015), countered with a petition of its own. One of the signatories is Willie Soon, a solar-​physicist who works at the Harvard-​Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, and who attributes climate change to sunspots. Soon has received over a million dollars in funding from the fossil fuel sector, including the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation (Gills and Schwartz 2015). Later in the summer of 2015, The Natural History Museum’s bus operated as a platform for speakers delivering a petition with over 400,000 signatories demanding that the Smithsonian Institute remove David Koch from their board. By the end of the summer, it was clear The Natural History Museum was having an impact: the California Academy of Sciences, one of the science institutions specifically targeted in a joint initiative of The Natural History Museum and 350.org, announced that it was phasing out investments in and relations with the fossil fuel sector. Just a few months later, Koch himself stepped down from his spot on the board of the American Museum of Natural History. Although a spokesperson from the museum said that the campaign

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against Koch “absolutely did not factor in his decision,” all of the coverage of his resignation noted that it was a symbolic victory for the activists (Landsbaum 2016).

The art of political engagement Not An Alternative’s art of political engagement takes shape as four inter-​related elements of The Natural History Museum: collectivity, division, infrastructure, and truth. Each element is expressed along the three dimensions I mentioned at the outset: political organizing, artistic project, and theoretical laboratory.

Collectivity The premise of The Natural History Museum as an organizing platform is that institutions matter as combined and intensified expressions of power. More than just the aggregation of individuals, they are individuals plus the force of their aggregation. Because institutions remain concentrations of authority that can be salvaged and put to use, it makes political sense to occupy rather than ignore or abandon them. We can repurpose trusted or taken-​for-​g ranted forms. Natural history and science museums are interesting sites for political seizure and occupation. They retain public confidence as vehicles for science education. At the same time, they are threatened by budget cuts and market imperatives. So, they are typically non-​profit, donor and grant dependent organizations, focused on cultural rather than commodity production.Yet they are forced to compete for visitors in the dense marketplace of entertainment. This subjects their staffs and boards to a particular pressure: how to retain their commitment to truth and the collective good in the face of opposing political and economic demands. The Natural History Museum makes this split within museums explicit. It uses it to organize museum workers, scientists, and visitors. Crucial to this endeavour have been the scientist sign-​on letter and the petition calling for museums to break ties with the fossil fuel industry. Aggregated through The Natural History Museum, previously disconnected scientists present themselves as a collective force against climate denialism, obfuscation, evasion, and green-​washing. Even more, they are a collective force. The Natural History Museum treats its visitors (understood broadly) as split between an understanding that something is wrong with the world and their own position within the world. After 30 years of neoliberalism’s intensification of individualism, visitors are likely to relate to the world as individuals and to think of the world’s problems as particular (crises, threats, events) rather than as systemic, interconnected. They are unlikely to see themselves as part of a collective that experiences these problems together and as differently—​unevenly, unequally—​together. Some museum professionals (whether consciously or not) reinforce individualist and individualizing expectations.They conceive exhibitions in terms of individual affective response.They model displays on the basis of individual use of screens and information acquisition. They attend to individual consumption opportunities (souvenirs). In contrast, The Natural History Museum presumes an unconscious desire for collectivity. Even if they

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don’t know it, visitors come to the museum looking for connection to a collective and a world from which they feel alienated: in a setting of deep cultural cynicism and mistrust, natural history museums remain among the most trusted institutions. Expressed in psychoanalytic terms, the consumer-​orientation of funds-​hungry contemporary museums depends on keeping visitors stuck in the drive. It focuses them on spectacles of climate change (extinction, extreme weather) and the ever-​ receding “great unknown” in nature. In contrast, The Natural History Museum incites their desire. Pointing at the capitalist system as the interior limit of what is considered nature, The Natural History Museum inscribes a gap in the great unknown. It presents the particular horrors of the world as connected (as systemic). Nature isn’t some kind of awesome exterior. It’s interior to human economic and political systems. The Natural History Museum, then, operates in one respect as an activist organization, a pop-​up museum and alternative institution with a mailing list, social media presence, and menu of cultural offerings. Yet it is also the generic museum that is present in every museum of natural history. It exists to force the already present split toward the common that every particular museum of natural history operating in a capitalist setting is forced to occlude.

Division The Natural History Museum mobilizes division as it organizes scientists and museum professionals against fossil fuel green-​washing. One of the challenges of this work is the hegemony of the claim that scientists and museums must be neutral, objective, “above” politics. The Natural History Museum confronts this claim by pointing out the claim’s own limit in the purpose of the museum. As asserted in the Code of Ethics for Museums, the museum is responsible for fostering “an informed appreciation of the rich and diverse world we have inherited” (Lyons and Economopoulos 2015). It is obligated to preserve this inheritance for posterity, providing a common resource for humankind. To this end, natural history museums must not generate legitimacy for those who would undermine the very possibility of a future. The Natural History Museum compels the institution to serve the people. Or, better, it enables the institution to function as one of the means through which the people serve themselves, taking care neither to promote the particular interests of billionaires and oligarchs nor to refrain from addressing issues of urgent collective concern. As The Natural History Museum emphasizes in the flier it distributed to museum professionals at the MuseumExpo as well as in an editorial in The Guardian, neutrality is a myth. It hides from view the process determining the alternatives toward which it is ostensibly required to be neutral. This process is political. It benefits some and harms others. As Steve Lyons and Beka Economopoulos (2015) explain: [T]‌he claim to authoritative neutrality is dangerous, precisely because it prevents institutions from seriously re-​evaluating their roles in a time of climate crisis. At a time when powerful lobbies representing the interests of the

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fossil fuel industry seek not only to influence public policy but also buy the next election, we can only see neutrality as another word for resignation. In the face of conflict over the truth, the museum loses credibility when it fails to take the side of science. Even worse, it betrays the trust inseparable from its institutional form. Some view nature in terms of the privilege of the few, the few who can own it, and the few who can access it. Others view nature in terms of all of us, as if we were not divided in our relation to nature, as if nature were not violent, ruptured, cataclysmic. The Natural History Museum takes its orientation to nature from two basic insights: nature is common and what is common is divided. We struggle over what is common. We fight to keep it common. The fact of this struggle alerts us to division, conflict, antagonism: nature has never been in balance. Nature doesn’t just exist. It insists beyond the limits of the known. What we can’t see and don’t know impresses itself on how and what we see. The Natural History Museum thus brings out the politics excluded from representations of nature as either originally in balance or external to human life. Any demarcation of a field is divisive, an inclusion and an exclusion. The Natural History Museum’s insistence on division, then, is not in the interest of some fantasy of full-​inclusion but rather for the purpose of mobilizing the exterior back within the institution. The excluded becomes inflected back in a torsion that repurposes, even reprograms, the institution.

Infrastructure The Natural History Museum seizes and repurposes the generic form of the museum as a set of institutionalized expectations, meanings, and practices that embody and transmit collective power. Cultural institutions tasked with science education become legible in their role in climate change, as sites of green-​washing and of counter-​power. In this latter sense, The Natural History Museum takes hold of the collective that is already present (as institutionality), redirecting against that which exploit it (Not An Alternative 2015). Just as the museum is a site in the infrastructure of capitalist class power—​with its donors and galas and named halls—​so can it be a medium in the production of a counter-​power infrastructure that challenges, shames, and dismantles the very class and sector that would use what is common for private benefit. The aesthetics of The Natural History Museum, then, is political. The intent is not to create a transformational experience or new appreciation of community. It is to achieve concrete political goals: divestment from fossil fuels, organization of scientists into a divisive collective, appropriation of the museum form in climate change struggle, seizure of institutions of knowledge production and cultural transmission, and building a counter-​power infrastructure. Here The Natural History Museum has more in common with the historic avant-​garde than it does with the participatory art of the 1990s. As Claire Bishop argues, the former positioned itself in relation to primarily communist party politics. The latter hyped itself in communicative capitalist terms that equated participation with democracy even as it lacked both a social

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and an artistic target (Bishop 2012, 283–​84). The Natural History Museum doesn’t promote awareness and debate. It pushes collective will formation. And it does so by giving name and form to such a divisive will. As an avant-​garde artistic project linked explicitly to ongoing political movement, The Natural History Museum exposes an omission or failure on the contemporary left: the lack of a revolutionary party or common name and form for the global struggle of the proletarianized.

Truth The Natural History Museum states that its mission is: [T]‌o affirm the truth of science. By looking at the presentation of natural history, the museum demonstrates principles fundamental to scientific inquiry, principles such as the commonality of knowledge and the unavoidability of the unknown.6 This mission is a generic statement of the fact that the credibility of museums of natural history comes from their fidelity to truth. Truth is partisan. It’s not a matter of consensus. Scientific truth forces itself beyond and through the practices and intentions of those who labour in its name. It is not identical with what scientists do and hence not reducible to its instrumentalization by capitalism and the state. In the theoretical language of Not An Alternative: science is not identical with itself. It is pushed and shaped by the Real of a truth exterior to it. T.J. Demos notes the dilemma that climate denialism poses for environmental activists. When we appeal to scientific expertise, we defer responsibility, giving up science to the dominance of states and capitals able to fund and deploy it; when we resist scientific expertise, we begin the slide into an inadvertent alliance with climate denialism, with the eco-​thugs of extractive industry who spend billions to protect their interests by any means necessary. Demos (2009, 18) argues: [F]‌acing this dilemma, one must be aware of the fact that whatever we know about the environment—​knowledge that will determine our future actions and chances of survival—​we owe to the diverse practices that represent it. The Natural History Museum locates itself at the site of these representational practices. Its wager is that insofar as science is shaped by a truth exterior to it, science cannot itself communicate its partisanship. Even as scientists are involved in practices through which they “fight to the death,” or in other words, in which they pursue and defend findings and methods as if their life depended on it, they tend to support a view of scientific practice as a whole as neutral and objective. Critics of corporate-​funded science, industry-​funded science, state-​funded science, racist science, sexist science, colonialist, and imperialist science rightly and repeatedly demonstrate the falsity of this claim. All these particular enactments of scientific practice propel themselves by enclosing what is common within the limits enabling the practice. The practice of

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science is configured by its settings, settings to which it contributes. But the truth of science is not the same as the practice of science.To affirm this truth is to force a gap within scientific practice, making science the truth of a subject. The Natural History Museum produces an elaborate staging not just of what natural history museums could be but of what the form of the natural history museum promises. It promises a collective encounter with a world, a universe, a knowledge common even when distant and unknown. It holds out the force of a truth that impacts and shapes us in ways that are unknown and unpredictable not because they are outside of or distanced from human representations, institutions, systems, and struggles but because they are indelibly inscribed within them. Such a truth can only be accessed indirectly, through the screen of the museum as a form faithful to its communication. Because it is tethered to this truth, The Natural History Museum doesn’t invite cynicism. It doesn’t try to mobilize doubt. On the contrary, it hails viewers (and, indeed, the museum itself) as likewise faithful to the truth, as those who would be and are outraged when institutions that communicate scientific knowledge are compromised and corrupted. The Natural History Museum takes the subjects of truth and organizes them as the subject of a politics.

Conclusion The Natural History Museum demonstrates how institutions are forms of collectivity that matter and that can be seized. Their missions, styles, structures, and personnel, their very form, can be conscripted into a service they may not know that they support. The Natural History Museum confirms the existence of a truth that its visitors already know, such that this truth becomes something more than an individual hunch, something with symbolic registration. Their perspective, like the system itself, is already collective.The challenge is for whom: for individuated visitors or for partisans in organized political struggle? The Natural History Museum arranges collectivity, division, infrastructure, and truth so as to cut through the paralysis of ecological apocalypticism. As an activist platform, it does the work of political organization. It doesn’t get lost in cynicism, failure, melancholia, or the endless circuit of critique. It doesn’t aim to democratize or pluralize. It doesn’t aim to activate passive spectators but rather to organize active scientists and museum workers. The Natural History Museum enables them to take the side they are already on as it mobilizes natural history museums as politicized camps in a class war against the fossil fuel sector at the heart of the capitalist system.Targeting the institution, it salvages a pre-​existing language and infrastructure, claiming it as a common resource. It thereby provides an experiment in seizing the state that can, and must, be replicated.

Notes 1 A wide array of contemporary thinkers, activists, and artists are working with thematics of climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene. My aim is not to criticize a particular

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person or work but to name a current that is present to greater or lesser degrees in the larger conversation or cultural milieu that has resulted from the uptake of the Anthropocene as the name for a problematic within the humanities. Examples could thus include Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine’s self-​published manifesto Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009); Bill McKibben, Eaarth (2010); Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (2013); Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life (2014); Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009); William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things (2013); McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red (2015); the contributions to Art in the Anthropocene, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (2015), and many others. 2 For an overview of the wide array of artistic practices brought together under the umbrella of socially engaged art, see Thompson (2012). Read more at http://​thenatural historymuseum.org/​about/​. Accessed April 22,  2018. 3 Holland Cotter and Robert Smith include Not An Alternative in their “The Best of Art in 2015,” the New York Times, December 9, 2015. 4 See also the periodization in the preface by the editors Raunig and Ray (Steyerl 2009) of that same book. 5 The contamination of North Pole has been widely reported and has been the subject of legal hearings. See, for instance, Atkin (2014). 6 The quote is from their website: http://​thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/​about/​. Accessed April 22, 2018.

References Atkin, Emily. 2014. “North Pole Sues Koch-Owned Oil Company Over Contaminated Water.” ThinkProgress, December 4. Accesssed August 16, 2018. https://thinkprogress.org/ north-pole-sues-koch-owned-oil-company-over-contaminated-water-c61d67ac06f9/. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London and New York: Verso. Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. 2015. “To the Museums of Science and Natural History—​ An Open Response.” CO2 Science, April 16. Accessed February 22, 2018. www.co2science.org/​articles/​V18/​apr/​museumletter response.php. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35(2): 197–​222. Connolly, William E. 2013. The Fragility of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cotter, Holland, and Roberta Smith. 2015. “The Best of Art in 2015.” New York Times, December 9. Accessed April 22, 2018. www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2015/​12/​09/​arts/​ design/​best-​art-​2015.html?_​r=0. Davis, Heather, and Etienne Turpin. 2015. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press. Dean, Jodi, and Jason Jones. 2012. “Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Representation.” Chto Delat 10: 34. Dean, Jodi. 2012. The Communist Horizon. London and New York: Verso. Demos, T.J. 2009. “The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology.” In Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–​20, edited by Francesco Manacorda, 17–​30. London: Barbican Art Gallery, Koenig Books. Donovan,Thom. 2011. “5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Not An Alternative.” Art21, May 19. Accessed April 22, 2018. http://​blog.art21.org/​2011/​05/​19/​5-​questions-​ for-​contemporary-​practice-​with-​not-​an-​alternative/​#.VAxzBvldWSo. Evans, Brad, and Julian Reid. 2014. Resilient Life. Cambridge: Polity.

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Fraser, Andrea. 2011. “From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique.” In Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, 408–​17. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Geiling, Natasha. 2015. “Protesters Urge the Smithsonian Institution to Cut Ties with Climate Denier David Koch.” Think Progress, June 15. Accessed April 22, 2018. https://​thinkprogress.org/​protesters-​urge-​the-​smithsonian-​institution-​to-​cut-​ties-​ with-​climate-​denier-​david-​koch-​c55ffa425d3f#.v3to7ssyf. Gills, Justin, and John Schwartz. 2015. “Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher.” New York Times, Feb 21. Accessed April 22, 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2015/​ 02/​22/​us/​ties-​to-​corporate-​cash-​for-​climate-​change-​researcher-​Wei-​Hock-​Soon.html. Kingsnorth, Paul, and Dougald Hine. 2009. Uncivilisation:The Dark Mountain Manifesto.The Dark Mountain Project. Accessed April 22, 2018. http://​dark-​mountain.net/​about/​manifesto/​. Landsbaum, Claire. 2016. “Climate Denier David H. Koch Leaves American Museum of Natural History’s Board.” New York Magazine, January 21. Accessed April 22, 2018. http://​nymag.com/​daily/​intelligencer/​2016/​01/​david-​koch-​exits-​museum-​of-​natural-​ history-​board.html. Lyons, Steve, and Beka Economopoulos. 2015. “Museums Must Take a Stand and Cut Ties to Fossil Fuels.” The Guardian, May 7. Accessed April 22, 2018. www.theguardian.com/​ environment/​2015/​may/​07/​museums-​must-​take-​a-​stand-​and-​cut-​ties-​to-​fossil-​fuels. McKee, Yates. 2014. “Art after Occupy: Climate Justice, BDS, and Beyond.” Waging Nonviolence, July 30. Accessed April 22, 2018. http://​wagingnonviolence.org/​feature/​art-​ after-​occupy/​. McKee, Yates. 2013. “DEBT: Occupy, Postcontemporary Art, and the Aesthetics of Debt Resistance.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 112(4): 784–​803. McKibben, Bill. 2010. Eaarth. New York: Times Books. Mayer, Jane. 2010. “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama.” The New Yorker, August 30. Accessed August 16, 2018. www.newyorker. com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations, accessed August 16, 2018. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. Not An Alternative. 2015. “The Radical Subject of the Post-​apocalyptic Generation.” In The Art of the Real: Visual Studies and New Materialisms, edited by Roger Rothman and Ian Verstegen, 86–​100. Newcastle-​upon-​Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Parenti, Christian. 2011. Tropics of Chaos. New York: Nation Books. Raunig, Gene, and Gerold Ray, eds. 2009. Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. London: MayFlyBooks. Rosler, Martha. 2011. “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers.” In Institutional Critique, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, 206–​35. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Steyerl, Hito. 2009. “The Institution of Critique.” In Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, edited by Gene Raunig and Gerold Ray, 17. London: MayFlyBooks. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2010. “Apocalypse Forever? Post-​political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change.” Theory, Culture, and Society 27(2–​3): 213–​32. The Natural History Museum. 2015a. “The Limits of Neutrality: A message from The Natural History Museum.” Center for the Future of Museums, April 23. Accessed April 22, 2018. http://​futureofmuseums.blogspot.com/​2015/​04/​the-​limits-​of-​neutrality-​message-​ from.html. The Natural History Museum. 2015b. “An Open Letter to Museums from Members of the Scientific Community.” March 24. Accessed October 11, 2018. http://​ thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/​open-​letter-​to-​museums-​from-​scientists/​. Thompson, Nato. 2012. Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991–​2011. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2015. Molecular Red. London: Verso.

12 ALL THAT WAS DIRECTLY LIVED Andy Merrifield

Our representative must at the same time appear as our master, as an authority over us … [that] sends rain and sunshine from above. Karl Marx (1978 [1852], 608)1 Our era of technicians makes abundant use of the nominalised adjective “professional”: it seems to believe that therein lies some kind of guarantee. Guy Debord (1990) “The time of life is short! … And if we live, we live to tread on kings.” William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Act 5, Scene 2 (lines 2856 and 2860)

Introduction One of the greatest lines of modern political philosophy comes from one of its greatest works: Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), a dialectical prose poem of extraordinary lyrical beauty. Listen to the second refrain of its opening thesis: “All that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”2 Once, seemingly long ago, we directly lived our life, participated in its own making, more or less. Now, life gets refracted through a series of “spectacular” images, with electronic screens following us everywhere we go, everywhere we look; we imbibe mediatized messages, soundbites, let them speak for us, for our desires. Debord’s spectacle is the representation of our branded lives, a professional “expert” preoccupation. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation, into a representation done for and by professionals, done from above and foisted downwards from above; it’s they who send us rain and sunshine, from above. Now, professionals know best. Professional economists, accountants, and bankers know

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best about affecting economic policy, about good government and urban governance, about knowing the economic facts of austerity. And professionals brook no dissent, particularly from dissenting amateurs, from people who don’t operate on “objective” facts but are riven with disturbing and destabilizing subjective sentiments. Professionals are realists; everybody else lives in cloud-​cuckoo land. The Society of the Spectacle mobilizes representation in its full panoply of meaning: from a depiction of reality to a depiction that “speaks for” all reality, that represents people, that silences people. Behind every representative image is a form of representation; whenever people lose their capacity to see for themselves, to represent themselves, a professional expert steps forth to offer absolute reassurance, absolute representation. “Spectacular society,” said Debord (1970, Thesis 23), “is the diplomatic representation of hierarchical society in front of itself, where all other speech is banished.” The breach here is the breach between spectacular representation and peoples’ everyday life—​the directly lived. Everything moves further and further away into a representation, into a representation that assumes three pathological Debordian guises. Let’s list them here: (I) Money as the only representation of value; (II) Professional representation as the only paradigm of truth; and (III) Representative government as the only representation of democracy. Let’s try to develop each in turn.

Money as the only representation of value In a way this is obvious, almost goes without saying. Anybody who’s ever read Karl Polanyi’s magisterial analysis on the “political and economic origins of our time,” The Great Transformation (1957 [1944]), a work that seems to anticipate the Anthropocene, will know how, since the Stone Age, human life has been geared around money. Money, from its beginning, followed society, developed organically as social relations developed organically, from barter and truck systems, to simple economies in which money was a means of exchange, a mere token of equivalent worth. Money was always “embedded” in social relations, whose institutional and political structure “regulated” what money could and couldn’t do. The value of money, in other words, had its limits. But near the end of the eighteenth-​ century something happened; this relative stability shifted. What emerged was “self-​regulation,” a sort of incipient deregulation, a profound transformation of the structure of society. We’re still coming to terms with this transformation—​ the “Great Transformation”—​a transformation that, at the end of the twentieth century, made the “disembedded” economy seem perfectly natural, perfectly normal, a perfectly functioning economy, as professional economic pundits now like to insist. Inherent vices embed themselves in this disembedded economy. Money, land, and labour are vital parts of our commodity system, of our speculative hunger games; but, said Polanyi, money, land, and labour “are obviously not commodities” (Polyani 1957, 72). “Land is only another name for nature, which isn’t produced by man”; “labour is only another name for human activity which goes with life itself ”; and “money is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, isn’t produced at all, but comes

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into being through the mechanism of banking and state finance.” So “the commodity description of labour, land and money is entirely fictitious,” a commodity fiction, the fiction of commodities. Still, the fiction of money as the only representation of value has reached new all-​too-​believable heights, and depths. Just as we’ve fracked deep into the Earth and power-​drilled monetized value from nature, we’ve begun fracking deeply into human nature as well, power-​drilling value from different aspects of our everyday life. Frack capitalism really comes into its own, really begins to define its own deep down monetary law of value, through the innovative way it has power-​hosed the public coffers and extorted value from realization as well as from production. This especially since the financial crisis of 2007–​2008, when advanced economies nose-​dived in unprecedented financial turbulence. The causes and consequences of these disruptions have been hotly debated.Yet few people seem to understand what financial traders and bankers were up to; few seem able to penetrate the obfuscating economic jargon that professional financiers brandish.What is a “subprime housing market” anyway? How to know an Arbitrage from an Absolute Return, a Hedge Fund from a Haircut? Moreover, how can anybody justify, through classic economic theory, those mysterious charges gouged out of ordinary people: from ever more expensive “service” charges on utility bills to admin fees for online credit card transactions; saying nothing about the “convenience fees,” “confirmation fees,” “reference fees,” etc. when we book anything in cultural and social life that involves a corporate institution. The list goes on, and on, ad nauseam. That’s what’s meant by value accruing through realization, at the point exchange, in circulation: I mean legalized extortion, fracketeering, a redistribution and dispossession of value already created elsewhere.That’s how capital accumulates in zero growth conditions, in crisis economies; that’s how it defies gravity. Is frack activity productive for the economy? Is it hard earned money, deserved income, as CEOs and financiers like to think? Maybe creative accountancy and the creative ways to avoid paying tax are entrepreneurial? And the creative finagling of stock markets and LIBOR rates?3 Or the creative destruction of competition by corporations like Microsoft and Amazon to garner inflated monopoly rents and profits? Maybe one of the most dynamic and innovative entrepreneurial activities is the creative excuse that banks and financial institutions invent to cadge money from the state? Maybe these players are the real creative classes that urbanist Richard Florida talks about? On the other hand, isn’t this the pretence of entrepreneurship and creativity? Isn’t the problem that we’ve all been playing along with this pretence, like the townsfolk of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale? We’ve believed The Wall Street Journal’s ideological distortions, absorbed its notion that obscene wealth is achieved through hard earned graft, through entrepreneurship, through innovation and creation. But the emperor entrepreneur doesn’t have new clothes on; he’s starkers, and we’ve all been had. We’ve been had, too, because addressing the glitches of this frack economy the state has been a first line of defence, a veritable executive committee for managing

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the common affairs of a neo-​aristocratic super-​elite—​baling out the bankrupted corporations, the too-​big-​to-​fail financial institutions. One way it gets away with this is through “austerity governance,” the latest form of ruling class manufactured consent, enabling parasitic predilections to flourish by opening up fresh market niches. It lets primitive accumulation continue apace, condoning the flogging off of public sector assets, the free giveaways of land and public infrastructure, the privatizations, all done in the name of cost control, of trimming bloated public budgets. What were once untouchable, non-​negotiable collective use-​values are now fair game for re-​commodification, for snapping up cheaply only to resell dearer. Collective public resources have morphed into individualized private commodities. As the state divests from its apparent systemic requirement to subsidize and fund public goods, as it divests from its role of ensuring extended social reproduction, erstwhile public goods have become accessible only via the market, hence at a monetary price, a profitable price. A debt economy flourishes, both publicly and privately, and is profitable on both supply and demand sides. On the one hand, municipalities experience budget and service cuts; libraries and sports centres close, education funding is slashed; public facilities are sold off to private, for-​profit interests, for-​profit vultures who then valorize knockdown price public infrastructure. On the other hand, people are compelled to pay more on council tax, more on education, more on healthcare, more on services now driven by accountancy exigencies rather than people’s real needs. So it’s no coincidence that major public goods—​education, housing, and health—​are items now featuring on the ever-​ growing list of household debt burden. Money values, then, provide us with the vital organizing principle of our whole society, of our only true representation of value. Fiction remains the truth, and fictitious truth needs defending, needs perpetuating; the postulate must be forcibly yet legitimately kept in place. But kept in place how, and by whom? By, we might say, a whole professional administration, by a whole professional cadre, by a whole professional apparatus that both props up and prospers from these fictitious times, and interpellates us as obedient class subjects. As such, professionalism is the new regulation of deregulation, the new management of mismanagement, the only real representation of Truth.

Professional representation as the only paradigm of truth A staggering array of professional and specialist bodies these days dominate the implementation of social needs and adjudication of public utility. Expert managers and specialist middle-​managers step up to the plate to bat at all levels of government; ditto economic policy; ditto health systems; ditto educational policy; ditto the business of science, its research and development, its scientific patents and intellectual property rights. Unaccountable agents head up the upper echelons of the Ministry of Finance and its regime of Accountancy Governance; elite technocrats and cabinet plutocrats, economists and accountants, consultants and advisers, think-​ tank hacks offer not-​ so-​ laissez-​ faire encouragement to self-​ regulating market

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intensity; it’s these professional actors who try to maintain the functioning credibility and sustained viability of this fictitious commodity system, a reality of lies wherein economic crises are terribly truthful. Professionals and wannabe professionals are everywhere in urban studies, everywhere in the exclusive running (and ruining) of cities, everywhere in the control of urban economies, everywhere in mayors’ imagination, everywhere in think-​tanks and institutions who study cities (especially in right-​leaning, lavishly funded ones), everywhere mass media have a say about cities, everywhere in the thinking (and non-​thinking) about cities, about cities and climate change, about cities and health, everyplace the grant money flows, the payroll beckons and the spotlight shines, everyplace you plead for the poor while placating the rich. We know, too, how university academics and their bosses desperately want a piece of this professional action, of this lover’s embrace with corporatism, of offshore educational franchising, of lucrative consultancies, of creative and smart city enterprises, of the professional branding of your centre, of your “Urban Age” programme. Only professionals get a look in, get promoted to Urban Chairs of this and that. Some career academics have so many Chairs around the world that they’re caricatures of the old Woody Allen gag (from Annie Hall): soon they’ll be able to assemble whole dining room sets. Indeed, they have plenty of chairs and dining room sets already, enough to furnish a large amphitheatre, for one of their TEDx talks. Professionals knowing best is blood stained in urban history. We’ve had all sorts of quack ideas schemed in professional boardrooms and imposed on people’s everyday lives. One of the most notorious came from the US: “Planned Shrinkage,” masterminded in 1976 by Roger Starr, then New York City’s Housing Commissioner and chief Urban Affairs columnist at The New York Times. Planned Shrinkage became the received professional wisdom of Federal government’s urban policy: the purposeful running down of blighted neighbourhoods, of those seen as no longer economically “viable,” as too costly and too much of a Federal burden to save. “Shrinkage” was a cover for elimination, for the deliberately engineered destruction of “bad” communities across America. Bad because pros said so, apparently proved so. To bolster Planned Shrinkage, Roger Starr peddled RAND Institute data, manipulated and doctored data as it happened, the pure pseudo-​science of the right-​wing think-​tank’s political leanings, unsurprising given it was part of the RAND Corporation’s empire. RAND used statistical systems analysis in the South Bronx and elsewhere that was far too complicated for the average amateur citizen to understand; alas, it was far too complicated for the RAND Institute to comprehend as well, so they cut corners, made assumptions that came from no other proven source than RAND scientists’ own heads. RAND built “game theory” models to replicate where, when, and how often fires broke out, and predicted how quickly (or slowly) New York’s Fire Department (FDNY) responded. Response time, though, was a silly measure of firefighting operations. It assumed that FDNY was always available from their firehouses, a rarity in places like the Bronx, where every company in the neighbourhood, sometimes in the entire borough, could

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be out fighting fires at the same time. Meanwhile, traffic wasn’t factored in to affect response time! Nevertheless, all this could be easily quantified by RAND, and quantification, remember, is scientific.4 The whole professional “logic” of Starr and RAND’s Planned Shrinkage was, in short, scientifically baseless, purely politically motivated: a ruling class war against public services. It signalled the beginnings of the hatchet job that neocons Reagan and Thatcher would soon wage, soon make their own. In Britain, in the 1980s, the Tories leapt on the bandwagon, and recycled Planned Shrinkage in Liverpool after the 1981 Toxteth riots. Thatcher’s Chancellor Geoffrey Howe—​Lord Howe, now the late Lord Howe—​thought Liverpool a lost cause. He schemed spending cuts under so-​called “Managed Decline.” The Howe revelation only became public in 2011, under the 30-​year ruling, which allows general access to National Archive files and Cabinet minutes. The problem of Liverpool, Howe felt, was “the concentration of hopelessness,” and its self-​inflicted woes, what with industrial strife and denizens ransacking their own neighbourhoods. “I cannot help feeling,” Howe said, “that the option of Managed Decline is one which we should not forget altogether. We must not expend all our limited resources trying to make water flow uphill” (BBC 2011). Fast forward 40 years, Planned Shrinkage is now reloaded as “austerity urbanism,” mimicking its antecedent in two ways. First is an overriding goal to rundown and/​ or plunder the public sector, to make “unproductive” public services productive for vested unproductive interests—​you know, for financial parasites on the make. Second, it justifies its programme through made up “evidence,” through professional representations of truth that are really fabricated lies. For austerity, just as for Planned Shrinkage, economists and technocrats are the redoubtable professional voice of authority, the voice of absolute truth, of “science.” Not long ago, the Harvard economic duo of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published “Growth in a Time of Debt” in the American Economic Review (2010), suggesting that economic slump is a good time to slash public spending. Nations with a public debt burden of more than 90% of their gross domestic product (GDP), Reinhart and Rogoff said, will experience withered growth and economic stagnation. So debt must be purged—​public debt they mean.When crisis hits and hurts, rather than use state spending to support needy people, Reinhart and Rogoff invoke data to authorize further public sector downsizing, for right-​sizing the business economy. Yet this data has been picked apart, shown to be spurious, emphasizing how the entire basis of Reinhart and Rogoff ’s article is utterly without foundation. In a detailed study, Robert Pollin, Michael Ash and Thomas Herndon (2013) replicate Reinhart and Rogoff ’s models and “find,” they say, that coding errors, selective exclusion of available data and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-​war period. Our finding is that when properly calculated, the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a

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public-​debt-​to-​GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not –​0.1 percent as published in Reinhart and Rogoff. That is, contrary to RR, average GDP growth at public debt/​GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/​GDP ratios are lower. Overall, the evidence we review contradicts Reinhart and Rogoff ’s claim to have identified an important stylised fact, that public debt loads greater than 90 percent of GDP consistently reduce GDP growth. Pollin, Ash and Herndon (2013, 1) All the same, like Oxford professor Nassau W. Senior’s “last hour” from the nineteenth century (satirized by Marx in Capital), who cares if it’s spurious and unfounded. In fact, Nassau W. Senior was a lot like Reinhart and Rogoff: a “so-​ called ‘bel-​esprit’ of economics … well-​known,” Marx says (1967 [1887], 153), “for his economic ‘science’.” Indeed, manufacturers “elected Nassau as their champion,” much as financiers today elect Reinhart and Rogoff as theirs. All three told their patrons “scientifically” what they wanted to hear. Thus to reduce the working day to 10 hours would, of course, be bad science, much as not to slash public budgets would be learnedly unwise. Don’t people know that in the 11th hour the worker reproduces their wages and in the 12th manufacturers’ profit? To cut the day to 10 hours would eliminate both. As Marx says, “and the Professor calls this ‘analysis!’ ” (Marx 1967 [1887], 154) Not surprisingly, Reinhart and Rogoff ’s 90% “analysis” has been music to the ears of ruling class professionals, to austerity honchos, to those who seize upon anything “scientific” to justify their own biases and class interests.

Representative government as the only representation of democracy The schism between professionals asserting representation and amateurs struggling for participation gets depicted in mainstream media as a battle between two paradigms of social reality: the “sobriety” of moderation versus the “excesses” of extremism. The former refrain is uttered by people in power everywhere, by government officials, by professional technocracies, by European Central Bankers, by the European Commission, by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. We hear it voiced by the European business community, intent on propping up the Euro; hear it firmly yet calmly from Europe’s ruling classes.We hear it as the Voice of Reason, used to quell protest, to quell extremist protest—​no matter what kind.The Voice of Reason is for European integration, for growth, for austerity. The Voice of Reason has a commonly identified programme: to reduce debt and prune budgets, to flog off public infrastructure, to do anything and everything to improve flagging competitivity. To do it at all costs because market confidence must be restored and economic fears allayed. Professional politicians and accountants, economists and administrators have now become anti-​philosophy-​espousing pragmatists, conditioned not so much by deep concerns of morality and equity as shallow dictates of profitability and market

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vitality. They’ve become custodians not of people’s consciences but of business confidences, converting paternalism into directorship, state governance into accountancy dominance, convening in corporate boardrooms and official chambers far away from any public agora. Extremism here is the extent to which they now abhor democracy, fear democracy; extremism here is the utter failure to implement representative democracy, to even pretend to implement representative democracy, even as representative governance gets resolutely proclaimed as the only possible representation of democracy. In the 1990s, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pinpointed a split between what he called the left and right hands of the state; it’s a drama, Bourdieu said, played out between the left hand, a dwindling bunch of frontline elected politicians answerable to their constituents who still try to uphold some semblance of local democracy, and the right hand, a “state nobility” of senior technocrats and cabinet plutocrats, of finance ministers and public-​private bankers who no longer even pretend to want to change anything meaningful for citizens. Bourdieu said the left hand and right hand no longer know one another; worse, the right-​hand side no longer wants to know what the left-​hand side does. As budgetary shackles tighten, it no longer gives the left-​hand side the chance to do what it once did. Bourdieu (2012) suggests that the right hand is now a meta-​power [méta-​pouvoir] victorious in its struggle over “the bureaucratic field” [le champ bureaucratique]. In fact, this “bureaucratic field” prevails over the “political field” as such. Elite technocrats and bureaucrats dominate the decision-​making scene and constitute a new rentier aristocracy. They have all the privileges and authority of a nobility in the medieval sense of the word and look upon their authority and privileges (and over-​pay) as some God-​given right, as the result of merit, as just reward. Representatives in the political field, meanwhile, those who once presided over the “providential state”—​ the left-​hand side—​now cower before their bureaucratic and technocratic masters. The right hand of the British state is a curious affair, dominated by an accountancy profession who now cook the government’s books and almost single-​handedly manage Britain’s entire National Health Service (NHS); it’s hard to keep track of those spinning doors, between private plunder and public health. In 2002, a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) accountant, Simon Leary, was seconded to head up strategy at the Department of Health. Once on the inside, Adrian Masters, another PwC man, followed him, becoming Director of the Health Team at Blair’s Delivery Unit. Masters has since gone on to run the health service regulator, Monitor, illustrating how even the regulators require careful regulation. In 2009, moving in the opposite direction, Gary Belfield, Head of Commissioning at the Department of Health (under Gordon Brown), joined another accountancy firm KPMG, soon followed by his former colleague at the Department of Health, Mark Britnell. As those doors spin, the public silver gets raided, evermore plundered by mysterious hybrid public-​private bodies called Private Finance Initiatives (PFI), the brainchild of John Major in 1992. PFIs have subsequently helped themselves to public infrastructure—​ports, roads, schools, railways, electricity grids, seemingly the entire NHS, and God knows what else—​not only in Britain but throughout

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the world. In 1997, Blair’s inaugural Labour government was, on principle, dead against PFIs; a year or so on they had a change of heart, realizing they were a principled government—​ indeed, they had many!—​ and soon began to peddle PFIs more aggressively than even the Tories themselves. When the going’s good, PFIs—​government-​sponsored private companies, managed by accountants with zero public accountability—​amass considerable booty; when things go belly-​up, the government steps in to bail them out because they serve a vital public necessity and can’t go under. It’s an all-​win situation for everybody, for everybody apart from the ordinary taxpayer and amateur citizen. Meantime, the big four accountancy firms—​Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PwC—​have reputedly pocketed a cool billion pounds from their interests in PFIs. Accountants have a massive and growing stake in the delivery and management of Britain’s public services. Though it’s always back scene, always off some corridor or another, a corridor off a corridor; it’s always through the mediation of some subcontractor or another. It’s hard to gain access to what accountants really get up to. The public doesn’t hear; it’s secret, done on the sly. Not long ago, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a revealing exposé called “The Accountant Kings,” focusing on the state of public play in the city of Birmingham (BBC 2014). “The public sector is undergoing a massive transformation,” begins reporter Simon Cox. “Do you know who’s running your [Birmingham’s] services here? Do you still think it’s the council?” Only the wily know that it’s no longer the council, that it’s a private company in charge, Capita. “Capita are doing all the finances, aren’t they?” says one of Birmingham’s concerned citizens. “They’re controlling all the money.” Firms like Capita started emptying bins in the Blairite 1990s, but nowadays they do a lot more than collect trash, taking over big swathes of local government with the help of accountants. Today, Capita is a giant cleaning, IT, and call centre operator, as well as a massive refuse collection subcontractor dominating municipalities’ public services up and down the country. Ernst & Young secures all Capita’s local authority contracts—​in return for a fat commission. Since 2006, Birmingham has an outsourcing contract with Capita, worth £126 million a year. Yet few councillors have a clue about how that money is spent. The actual contract document is crammed with dense price structuring equations and abstruse financial calculations and projections, running well over a thousand pages long. It’s purposefully complex—​or so believes local Labour councillor John Clancy—​ incomprehensible to all but the savviest professional accountant. Creative accountancy is the key to business success: being able to quantify, to charge councils and people for answering phone calls, to collect trash and set council taxes through complex deals few mortals can understand. Capita’s wheeling and dealings are shrouded in secrecy, utterly beyond public remit, let alone left-​hand elected representatives. “I’ve lost control of the future,” admits Clancy (BBC 2014). Shocking stuff for a public servant to admit on record. Public representatives don’t control our future. Rest assured that the future resides in Ernst & Young’s hands, and in Capita’s. We can all sleep well at night! Only one thing is less murky: Capita’s profit comes at a time when councils are everywhere

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forced into drastic austerity cuts to save millions of pounds each year. “I think increasingly I feel that as a citizen,” says Trevor Rawles of  West Birmingham’s East Quinton Citizen Tenant Panel, “we have no control and at the moment those elected representatives don’t seem to either have the control over the contracts or wish to exert control over the contracts” (BBC 2014).

The dialectics of representation and participation Perhaps it’s time for “the people,” for an amateur constituency I shall call the shadow citizenry (Merrifield 2015), to analytically and politically point the critical finger at this select committee of administrators who preside over our privatized public culture; it’s they who pull the strings in our political Great Game.5 The shadow citizenry on the outside needs to somehow get at those professionals on the inside, force this private inside to be answerable to the public outside. The shadow citizenry needs to access the inside, to enter their HQs, inside their centres of technocratic and financial power, get transparency on what goes on in this inside, get information about right hand disinformation. And, if necessary, evict these insiders as professional trespassers on amateurs’ land, prosecute them as illegal squatters, as expropriators of public property. The shadow citizenry is a territorial reserve army of foot soldiers, a relative surplus population of ordinary people who want in but are forced out, defiant yet disunited, disgruntled and raging in a global civil war of austerity and high frequency piracy. Shadow citizens exist in the realm where social exclusion meets spatial marginality and are a minority that’s increasingly a majority, a new majority: if anything, shadow citizens are the new norm, the new global default position. They’re the periphery in the core, the core of the periphery. So many people have been pushed off-​limits that it has extended the limit of limits, created an even larger social space for a new concept of citizenship, one yet to be invented (Merrifield 2015). Pressure from the outside, from this shadowy undercurrent, might give left-​hand floating professionals the courage to step out of the closet, to take back democracy from technocracy, to break the historical inevitability professed by the doyens of frack capitalism. It might let floating professionals become amateurs again, restore more intimate meaning to what they do, embolden them to become less alienated, less powerless, and less compliant. Resistance from the outside might hook up this inside to the outside. “Official” representatives in government, in the council chambers on the left-​hand side, might be kept on their toes by a shadow citizens’ social movement exerting its pressure from without, in the public square, in alternative media, across clandestine airwaves, forcing the right side of the state to respond to a reinvigorated left side. Out of this darkness we might find natural light; what might emerge is an inside left, a dialectical left that straddles the representative-​ participatory democratic divide. What shadow citizens have before us—​what we have enveloping us—​is a sort of shadow ruling class, our Other, a specialist professional force that controls the visible

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administrative apparatus yet does so out of sight, does so unaccountably, essentially in secret. Shadow citizens need to shine our own light on dubious private sector management and mismanagement, on its covert financial wheeling and dealings, on its professional incompetence. (That’s the other thing: we tend to think “professionals” know what they’re doing; they don’t. They serially fuck up on the job.) We need an amateur citizens’ global registry of financial assets, greater democratic knowledge of who owns what, as well as who tots up the figures for those who own what, opening up the state’s books and scrutinizing the shenanigans of accountants and their partisan administrators. It’s a programme warranting initiation so that ordinary citizens—​not professional accountants—​might monitor the public coffers. But it’s hard to do. Probing amateurs now need to be at once sophisticated forensic scientists, skilled lawyers, and able accountants—​if only to keep track of those shady professionally negotiated contracts, with their secret equations and legal small print. The large print giveth, the small print taketh away. A major problem here, aside from the knowledge base, is the time base. Being a well-​intentioned amateur takes up a lot of evenings and weekends, as Oscar Wilde warned, and involves lots of dedication and commitment. For ordinary citizens to break on through to the inside, to create an inside left, we need to muster enough energy to surmount neoliberal road blocks. We need to appoint some of Plato’s trusty “Scrutineers,” who star in Book XII of The Laws, delegates from the shadow citizens’ outside who might establish a “Nocturnal Council” (Plato’s term). We can rejig Plato’s idea, make it sound less autocratic and more democratic, more popular, more popular in a way that safeguards against popularism, that safeguards against power abuses both on the inside and the outside. The Nocturnal Council might consist of elected Scrutineers, salt of the earth amateurs, men and women who, according to Plato, “are better than the officials they scrutinise, and display irreproachable integrity.” Marx once spoke of the need to “educate the educators”; here we’re talking about regulating the regulators, regulating regulators who refuse to regulate big business, who kowtow to big business, who are big business. What we need are Scrutineers who oversee the overseers, those inept and dishonest overseers, Scrutineers who might replace those inept and dishonest overseers, ensuring that democracy is restored, that citizens participate in representative democracy. The Nocturnal Council would uphold what’s best from a philosophical awareness: the spirit of fairness and equity around matters of state and civil society. The Nocturnal Council might convene to discuss the billions drained from the public finances because of corporate tax avoidance.You don’t have to be Socrates to get it: Governments insist on belt-​tightening austerity policies across Europe, run down collective consumption provision, yet do so while they turn a blind eye to tax dodging corporations and super-​r ich individuals, do so as they clamp down hard on weaker players, on easier targets, auditing and monitoring the little guys, the smaller enterprises, the independents and freelancers, the poor, people who don’t have accountants at their beck and call, who are squeezed for tax revenue, for the peanuts they apparently owe.

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Such a system of taxation needs a complete overhaul, a thorough reconstitution on a new democratic basis, on equitable and progressive principles. Equity here means applying the same progressive logic to capital as to work, taxing the huge gainers from global capital transactions, from currency and stock markets, from property speculation and predatory rental extraction. The Nocturnal Council might try to execute the necessary Planned Shrinkage of the financial sector, of the bloated and unproductive financial sector everywhere, waging war on its monetary blood sucking in the same vein as we’ve seen the ruling classes wage war on “unproductive” public services in the 1970s and 1980s. Plato may have been damning of poets in the polis; but he hated spendthrifts and idle embezzlers there as well, the parasites who “disturb the social constitution, just as phlegm and bile disturb the body.” Any wise-​lawgiver, Plato said, must take careful precautions against them, first for not letting them get into the city; second, if frustrated in the first care, cutting them and their cells out as speedily as possible. Lately, there are encouraging signs of a left-​hand comeback in the struggle over representative democracy. It’s as if Spike Lee’s Radio Raheem from Do the Right Thing has marched back on to the political block, fighting the power, shadow boxing in the street, punching with his right and left hands, trusting out HATE on the right side and LOVE on the left side. For the moment, LOVE might be getting the upper hand. Jeremy Corbyn’s emergence as Labour Party leader and his “surprising” rise to popular acclaim is indicative here. (The mirror image across the pond is Bernie Sanders.) People are evidently fed up with post-​Blairite spin, with Milibandism, with Tory crimes and misdemeanours. Promising to renationalize a lot of privatized public stock, to abolish student fees, to reinstigate democracy and curb corporate greed, Corbyn’s old lefty line sounds honest and novelly new, especially to a young and hitherto disenfranchised electorate. (Young people in the US also love Sanders because he sounds like an old record; and worn vinyl is preferable any day to canned, slick professional noise.)

Reasons to be cheerful Since Corbyn become leader, more than 60,000 people have signed up to the Labour Party, mostly younger people and women. Britain seems to be witnessing a mini-​revival of socialism as a mass movement, with a mass base and a coherent and convincing set of ideas. On the run-​up to Labour leadership, Corbyn campaigned for a different paradigm of representative democracy, one pushing for participation. On the “Future of the North,” the Corbyn team emailed every registered Labour supporter in the north of England, asking them for ideas for a northern policy. They got 1,200 replies, duly filtered and compiled into a policy document that was then published, inviting further input from supporters and a wider public. Something markedly more interesting and vital than recruiting a policy wonk,

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or McKinsey’s, or some think-​tank or panel of “experts,” paying them dearly to formulate banal policy from on high. Sometimes it’s not even as good as banal: it’s darn right awful. Companies and governments contract at immense expense consultants like McKinsey’s, with “global research and information professionals,” or hire communications “experts” and “specialists” and frequently what you get are botched jobs, done by young, inexperienced people who have little feel for the work involved. The Corbyn factor follows in the wake of a mini-​backlash to the perennial plundering of public resources; we’ve glimpsed this the world over. It’s like critics said all along: with outsourcing, service delivery worsens, and public costs inflate. And all the goodies amassed are privately reappropriated, creamed off as professional shareholder dividends or Chief Exec bonuses, at ordinary taxpayers’ expense. In the UK, in 2011, over half of 140 local councils thought taking services back from the private sector a bright idea. In 2010, Paris “remunicipalized” its water supply. Here remunicipalization means greater control by the elected authority, greater accountability; amateur citizens at least get some say again in the running of stuff that’s crucial to public well-​being. Similar things are happening in Germany with energy distribution networks and waste disposal. Ditto in the Netherlands, Norway, Italy, and Belgium. In the UK, Newcastle City Council recently staved off municipal privatization of IT services and refuse collection. The local branch of the public-​sector workers’ union (UNISON) stepped in, and helped galvanize a campaign of rank-​and-​file amateur dissent and outside public pressure on elected insider politicians; the latter eventually relented, passing a resolution for in-​house management, one proposed by the people. “The Newcastle experience,” says Hilary Wainwright in an enlightening report called The Tragedy of the Private, The Potential of the Public, “takes our thinking about democratization further, opening up and democratizing the normally hidden, taken-​ for-​ granted internal process of managing public resources” (Wainwright 2014, 31). So there’s a sense that philosophy is changing, changing because of public outcry, because of union outcry, because amateurs want more engaged participation in public decision-​making, because the deeper question of “public values” is now getting debated. There’s an emergent concern, too, for public service workers as well as public service users, who’re frequently one and the same constituency. Crappy public services generally correlate with crappy pay within the public service industry. In Uruguay and Brazil, subcontracted service workers and citizens contesting poor and high-​cost service delivery coalesced to keep water management public. “Public-​public partnerships” offer another democratic paradigm of urban collective consumption, a new moment of opportunity. Public-​public partnerships underwrite an inspiring initiative springing up in Norway, spearheaded by the Norwegian municipal public workers’ union, Fagforbundet. The enemy has been the familiar privatization of public services; yet the union has been more visionary and ambitious in mobilizing its amateur base, transforming the internal organization of public administration through

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a “Model Municipality Experiment.” Public sector workers have developed enough collective muscle that they’ve been able to participate alongside official representatives in service delivery decision-​making. Well-​organized outsiders can participate as insiders, and creative ways can be engineered to balance urban budgets and equitably redistribute services—​not hand them over to capital to privately exploit. It’s a perpetual struggle of amateur outsiders forcing open the doors of the inside, pushing for a publicly led public service revolution, doing so militantly. In this sense, here it’s possible to see the state as Nicos Poulantzas once saw it: as the “material condensation of class forces.” The state, Poulantzas (1978) said in State, Power, Socialism, is never simply an instrument of the moneyed classes, of the right hand, despite often seeming so: The struggle of the popular masses […] does not seek to create an effective dual power [à la Lenin], parallel and external to the state, but brings itself to bear on the internal contradictions of the state […] The state is neither a thing-​instrument that must be taken away nor a fortress that may be penetrated by means of a wooden horse, nor yet a safe that may be cracked by burglary: it is the heart of the exercise of political power. Poulantzas (1978, 257–​58) Poulantzas said this inner struggle must express itself alongside the development of popular movements and self-​managed communes, run by amateurs: “This is the real alternative and it isn’t the simple opposition between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ struggle” (Poulantzas 1978, 260). In any radical participatory future, the two forms must be combined. At issue isn’t the bourgeois state on one side and its democratic nemesis, the people, rank amateurs, on the other. Rather, it’s double-​action democracy: the swarming outside democratizes the state’s inside. Peoples’ assemblies must muster sufficient outsider (and comradely insider) power to overwhelm that inside; opaque council chambers become transparent cells of democratic assembly—​and stay so. More than anything else, it’s a struggle against finance capital, against the professional administration of finance capital, against professional politicians and representatives who have given up even thinking about representing amateurs. It’s a struggle against professionals on the payroll of the administration of finance capital, in cahoots with professional politicians, in cahoots with the professional grant-​g ivers and professional think-​tanks. It’s a struggle against the professionalization of our economic, political, and social life that sometimes seems as much Kafkaesque as Marxist (Merrifield 2017), a struggle for our rights when representatives no longer represent, when all rights seem denied, when we’ve no right even to ask for our rights. So why ask? Why not take, why not invent and reinvent? Why not tread on kings, on accountancy kings? The time of life is short.

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Notes 1 I have slightly tweaked the original translation of the quote where it says “their/​them” to “our/​us.” This captures better how Marx is referring not to someone else, but to us right now. 2 The Society of the Spectacle has no page numbers as such. Instead, 221 strange, elegant “theses” give it its compelling power. My favourite English version is Fredy Perlman’s bootlegged translation from 1970, run off in his own Detroit front-​room, by the anarchist collective Black & Red Books. Perlman’s isn’t the most accurate translation, yet it’s the rawest and most revolutionary; with zany graphics, it retains a wonderful 1960s shtick. 3 LIBOR is the average interbank interest rate at which a selection of banks on the London money market are prepared to lend to one another. 4 For a telling damnation of Planned Shrinkage in the Bronx, see Flood’s (2010) book, The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City—​and Determined the Future of Cities; Roger Starr’s (1967) own urban vision can be glimpsed in Urban Choices: The City and Its Critics, a series of essays that framed things very much from the professional urbanist’s standpoint. The book is revealing for the scorn heaped on “well-​intentioned amateurs,” as Starr responds to “the hundred critics” who dared question city officials, planners and architects, private developers, realtors, and of course Roger Starr himself. His roster of interferers reads like a Who’s Who of popular urbanists: Jane Jacobs, Saul Alinsky, Lewis Mumford, Ada Louise Huxtable, William H. Whyte, and Herbert Gans. 5 In Comments on the Society of Spectacle, Guy Debord (1991) likens contemporary capitalism to a “Great Game,” after Rudyard Kipling, who, in Kim, a novel from 1901, described the covert machinations of English colonialism in India and Central Asia. What we are seeing now is the latest round of an eternally recurring ruling class practice.

References BBC. 2011. “Toxteth Riots: Howe Proposed ‘Managed Decline’ for City.” The BBC, December 30. Accessed April 21, 2018. www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​england-​merseyside-​ 16355281. BBC. 2014. “The Accountant Kings.” The BBC, March 4. Accessed April 21, 2018. http://​ news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​shared/​bsp/​hi/​pdfs/​04_​03_​14_​fo4_​theaccountantkings.pdf. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2012. Sur l’état: cours au Collège de France, 1989–​1992. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Debord, Guy. 1967. La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. Debord, Guy. 1970 [1967]. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Fredy Perlman. Detroit, MI: Black & Red Books. Debord, Guy. 1990. Panegyric. London and New York: Verso. Debord, Guy. 1991. Comments on the Society of Spectacle. London and New York: Verso. Flood, Joe. 2010. The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City—​and Determined the Future of Cities. New York: Riverhead. Herndon, Thomas, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. 2013. “Does high public debt consistently stifle economic growth? A critique of Reinhart and Rogoff.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 38(2): 257–​79. Marx, Karl. 1967 [1887]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. Reprint, New York: International Publishers.

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Marx, Karl. (1852) 1978. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In The Marx-​ Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker. Reprint, New York: W.W. Norton. Merrifield, Andy. 2015. “The Shadow Citizenry.” Eurozine Magazine, July 24. Accessed April 21, 2018. www.eurozine.com/​articles/​2015-​07-​24-​merrifield-​en.html. Merrifield, Andy. 2017. The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love. London and New York: Verso. Polanyi, Karl. 1957 [1944]. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston MA: Beacon Press. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978. State, Power, Socialism. London and New York: Verso. Reinhart, Carmen, and Kenneth Rogoff. 2010. “Growth in a Time of Debt.” American Economic Review 100(2): 573–​78. Shakespeare, William. 2005. King Henry IV. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Starr, Roger. 1967. Urban Choices: The City and Its Critics. Harmondsworth, London: Penguin. Wainwright, Hilary. 2014. The Tragedy of the Private, The Potential of the Public. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute.

13 RECLAIMING A SCHOLARSHIP OF PRESENCE Building alternative socio-​environmental imaginaries Maria Kaika

Nature and imaginary A few years ago, the New York Times (Kulish 2009) featured an article about 25 long-​term unemployed and homeless men in Poland.The tone of the article was—​ surprisingly—​not despair, but vision. It was the story of how these men set out, with almost no resources, to build a boat that would eventually enable them to sail around the world. For these 25 men, nature (in the form of the sea) featured as a symbolic and material frontier that had to be conquered as part of a process of transcending their current condition of unemployment and homelessness. Their dream to conquer “nature,” to leave their mark on the physical world, is certainly not new. From the mythical figures of Prometheus (conquering fire), Ulysses, and Captain Ahab (mastering the sea and its creatures), to the real life Promethean figures of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott (reaching the South Pole; see Katz and Kirby 1991) or Edward Teller (reshaping Alaska with hydrogen bomb blasts; see Kirsch and Mitchel 1998) and Richard Branson (in search of capital expansion to the “ultimate’ frontier”—​space), conquering nature has been throughout much of human history and mythology an act of simultaneous liberation of the self and dominance of others; an act of asserting power (economic or other) and human (mostly male) superiority over other beings. Indeed, the history of the modern Western world is a history of conquering nature and, as I detail in City of Flows (Kaika 2005), the history of  Western urbanization too is a history of urbanization of nature. Modernity made possible the creation and expansion of cities only by piercing mountains, damming rivers, deep drilling into the ocean floor, rummaging through landscapes and—​more recently—​ fracking and blasting. Since the Industrial Revolution, this relentless creative destruction (Berman 1971) and production of “second natures” (Lefebvre 1974; Smith 1984) has extended in ways that affected global geophysical transformations

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to such an extent that humanity is now considered to be not simply one of Earth’s biological factors, but a geological actor too; an actor that shapes geophysical transformations on the Earth’s stratigraphy the way only “natural” forces used to do in Earth’s previous long history (Dalby 1992). So, we might as well call this relentless, intense, and intensifying imprint of human activity on the Earth a new geological epoch. We might as well name it after humans, after Anthropos, on the grounds that within this epoch human activity became such a powerful influence on the Earth that it will leave everlasting imprints on the planet’s stratigraphy.This is precisely what the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy announced in August 2016. The working group is currently working towards dividing Earth’s story into two parts: “one in which humans are a geological superpower—​an epoch called the Anthropocene—​and the other encompassing all that came before our species had a major influence on Earth’s functioning” (Ellis et al. 2016, 192). Predictably, the Anthropocene’s working group announcement of a new geological epoch stirred intense debate in Earth and environmental sciences receiving both applause and criticism (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). Geologists will probably be busy for the rest of the century tracing the imprints and signature of this epoch onto the Earth’s strata. But less predictably and perhaps more interestingly, the discussion over the Anthropocene already gathered weight way beyond the chambers of geological societies and arcane scientific conferences. Within a remarkably short period of time the concept generated mass media and academic attention from human geography to design, cultural studies, politics, international law, urban studies, and planning. Research teaching and training curricula in the arts and humanities are currently revised so that students can be taught how to design and plan cities “for the Anthropocene,” how to manage the environment or the economy in the Anthropocene (Head 2016); how to govern in the Anthropocene, or how to live in the Anthropocene (Gibson, Rose and Fincher 2015). Out of a total of 523 Web of Science articles featuring the “Anthropocene” in their title in May 2016, 35.5% (186) are in the arts, humanities, and social sciences journals, with the highest count in human geography and area studies (44), followed by literature and linguistics (36), political sciences (27), international relations and law (20), sociology and interdisciplinary social sciences (23), philosophy (22), history (12), archaeology (11), and architecture planning and urban studies (9). So, even before the Anthropocene is confirmed as the name of a new geological epoch, it has already conquered our imaginary like few other concepts have in the course of the twentieth century. And because of this conquest of the imaginary, the Anthropocene is already acquiring status and weight of character. It is praised for raising awareness on the current environmental crisis (Hamilton, Bonneuil and Gemenne 2015), or for inspiring us to be more alert to climate change (Bristow 2015). But it is also accused of being arrogant (the ultimate hubris against nature), universalist (assuming that all humans will be equally affected) (Moore 2015; Purdy 2015), and capitalist/​technocratic (depicts human/​natural history as a succession of

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technological innovations, thus ignoring the social relations that drive this history) (Moore 2015; Purdy 2015; see also Macfarlane 2016). Awareness-​raising, inspiring, arrogant, universalist, capitalist-​technocratic … all or none of the above. This conquest of the imaginary and the weight of character offered to the concept through intense engagement matters arguably more than any negative or positive characteristic that we may assign to the fact of the Anthropocene. What I argue in this essay is that the emerging imaginary of the Anthropocene itself may in fact be the most political thing about the Anthropocene. The proliferating debate beyond geological societies raises it to a matter of contested public concern and is fast becoming more relevant in policy and political discussions, than its actual adaptation (or not) as an official name. My point is that our collective engagement with the Anthropocene offers it the status of an emerging master narrative (or rather, several master narratives—​see Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016)), which is already becoming performative even before the concept is officially instituted. Our concern should be on the making of this radical imaginary that demands to be institutionalized; on the effects of this process; and then, as I argue, to simply move beyond it and take our concerns elsewhere.

The weight of the imaginary The proliferating literature around the Anthropocene in the arts, humanities, and social sciences is mostly critical. However, this critical engagement, or what I would call over-​engagement, seems to have—​for the time being—​one clear political and troubling consequence: it adds symbolic power and scholarly weight to a concept, which could contribute towards “naturalizing” capitalism. By rubber stamping Nature as endlessly malleable by the geological force called humankind, the Anthropocene becomes a new imaginary, a new scheme of signification that depicts the production of second natures through technology, labour, and capital investment (the pierced mountains, embanked rivers, the fracked landscapes, and the dammed waterways) as naturalized spatial ontologies. The concept demands that the effects of perpetual capital expansion are seen as stratographic evidence that acquires the same ontological status as rocks, fossils, minerals, and tectonic plates. The stigmata of the latest geological force: humankind. Once accomplished, naturalized spatial ontologies institute a social configuration of power that in turn re-​produce these spatial ontologies as real “natural” existing things. Jason W. Moore (2015) compellingly suggests the name “Capitalocene” instead, as it better captures the socio-​economic processes of capital that affected Earth processes to unprecedented levels leading to socio-​ environmental devastation. The Anthropocene name, Moore continues, can only endorse and perpetuate the current status quo and the search for technological rather than social solutions to continuous practices of socio-​environmental destruction. The institutionalization of the Anthropocene as a dominant social imaginary for twenty-​ first century capitalism becomes the means for ensuring that any debate over social change is saturated by a debate over mitigating climate change

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and environmental destruction (Whitehead 2014; Purdy 2015). If only we could find the right technology, the smartest city, the greenest design, the most techno-​ environmentally friendly city form, we would all live happily ever after in Earth’s new geological epoch. The Anthropocene is becoming a deterministic and teleological way of thinking about the future of the Earth and of human and more-​than-​ human beings. In short, the emerging imaginary of the Anthropocene rubber-​stamps not just capitalism as the only possible mode of socio-​economic organization for the epoch. It also reproduces capitalist socio-​environmental relations as the only imaginary possible for the future; it forecloses alternative processes of subjectivization and possibilities for autonomy. It becomes a totem that indicates to society what to desire and how to desire it (Kaika 2011); or to even stop desiring an alternative socio-​ environmental organization. However, much of the humanities’ and social sciences’ critical engagement with the Anthropocene is also trying to win over this war of the imaginary. It tries to turn the nomination of a new geological era into an opportunity to think differently about the human/​more-​than-​human/​environmental nexus. Many authors engage in a search for an alternative politics for the Anthropocene (Purdy 2015); exploring whether it can become the ignition point for developing more inclusive ontologies and epistemologies (Latimer and Miele 2016); or multispecies ethnographies (Watson 2014) that undercut the dominant power relations, including the socially constructed dichotomy between humans and non-​humans. Yusoff (2016) sees in the concept a driver for searching/​scripting a new history of human origin. The Anthropocene is also seen as a contingency to reassess the dichotomy between social and human sciences (Rose 2013) and to radically rethink the division of disciplines that can lead to a better understanding of the root-​cause and proposed solutions to climate change (Szerszynski 2010).

Overinvesting in “the Anthropocene” It is politically important to de-​colonize the imaginary of the Anthropocene from technocratic solutions. As the authors just mentioned are doing, there is political point in troubling the simplicity of the concept, and adding symbolic weight to explore it as a potentially alternative radical imaginary, an alternative way of thinking and doing socio-​environmental politics that can support radical demands and social mobilization. Instead of foreclosing the potential for change and asserting techno-​ economic solutions as the only way forward, the Anthropocene can potentially expand the scope of political action and link it to everyday practices. Everything seems to be up for grabs at the moment. We have all heard of or remember Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), a book that significantly breathed life into the environmental movement. Not simply because it offered a compelling scientific analysis of the effects of pesticide use on bird populations per se, but rather because it offered a powerful symbolization (notably its title) that forced us to link everyday life (birds tweeting in the spring)

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to the politics and practices of the post-​war chemical industry that led to environmental destruction (the silence of birds). Carson’s research was in fact prompted by the everyday. She started researching Silent Spring after receiving a copy of the letter a friend had sent to the Boston Herald newspaper, where she reported the death of birds around her property after aeroplanes had sprayed the grounds with DDT. Can the Anthropocene do something similar? Can it become the quilting concept around which we can link everyday practices to global political and economic processes of socio-​environmental destruction? Can it become a banner for emancipatory socio-​environmental change? Or will it end up an empty signifier like so many other buzzwords that preceded it, notably “sustainability?” Our experience with sustainability is disheartening, but it serves as a lesson of thinking twice before over-​investing in a concept. Although “sustainable development” has ruled policy and academic debates for over three decades, and generated a lot of hope and optimism among environmental activists, it has in large parts simply produced further technocratic “solutions” from within a well-​known developmentalist logic (smart cities, green cities, resilient cities, etc.). Unlike Silent Spring, furthermore, the Anthropocene did not even emerge from an urgency rooted in everyday life. It is a scientific hypothesis and a nomination. Can it then, become anything beyond just that, beyond a name-​change of a geological epoch? I agree that there is a task for academics and public intellectuals to take on the challenge of trying to win the war of the imaginary; to link the concept to contemporary demands and struggles over socio-​environmental change. However, if we want to take seriously our own criticism of the Anthropocene and its inadequateness to describe our situation, we should also take seriously the fact that whether the epoch is called Anthropocene or not is irrelevant if viewed from the perspective of the necessity for socio-​environmental change. More importantly is to move beyond the Anthropocene debate—​ignore it, in fact—​and turn our attention and focus on emerging practices and alternative radical imaginaries that demand or enact socio-​ environmental change. In short, the urgent task is not to add symbolic weight to the concept of the Anthropocene itself (either through critiquing it, renaming it, or re-​signifying it), but to focus on and engage with emerging socio-​political demands that try to disrupt the power landscapes of our era and that through everyday practices are resisting the forces (aka capitalism) that continue to dominate the Earth, humans and non-​humans alike.

De-​colonize the imaginary at times of crisis There are many such practices and imaginaries. Most of the actors involved in these practices are neither driven nor inspired by the Anthropocene per se. In fact, many altogether ignore the concept. They are driven by the necessity—​at times despair even—​induced by prolonged social exclusion and inequality. Take, for example, the 25 homeless Poles I mentioned at the beginning. Unlike Ulysses, Captain Ahab, Edward Teller or Richard Branson, their project to conquer nature in the form of the sea was something over and above an act of asserting

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power and dominance. It was an act of necessity. It was born out of the need to challenge and change their relationship to the world; it was about asserting that they are still alive and still worth a place in a society that had largely forgotten about them and written them off. It is a project that stages equality within an increasingly uneven and unequal world. Similarly, in Romania, a 15-​year-​long anti-​mining struggle in Rosia Montana, has given birth to new subjectivities that are performed as demands against representational and consensual politics and as prompts to rethink what environmental justice means. The local residents and anti-​mining activists, the Rosieni, repeatedly refused invitations to “participate” alongside representatives of the government and the mining company.They challenged the reduction of environmental justice to representational and consensual politics; to “sitting around the table” with predefined roles and power relations (Velicu and Kaika 2017). They demanded, through their everyday performative acts, visibility instead of participation, and chose autonomy over redistribution of profits from the destruction of their environmental and social values. As Velicu and Kaika (2017) show, they demanded a profound rethinking of what environmental justice and participation mean, showing through their politics that these concepts merely express the relentless exploitation of humans and non-​ humans alike in the name of development. From Greece we have a third important example. The coalition against the privatization of EYATH, the municipal water company of Greece’s second largest city of Thessaloniki, raised capital, nominally 136 euros per city inhabitant, and they put in a bid to buy back the public water company when it came up for privatization. In a long drawn out struggle, the trade union of the water company (SEEYATH), which was joined by a broader coalition of movements and activists, notably Initiative K136 and the Soste to Nero, asked of citizens to each transform 136 euros from mere consuming and purchasing power, into flows of autonomous subjectivization (Lazzarato 2007). These acts radically shifted the terrain of power, turning powerless indebted citizens into a potentially powerful collective decision maker with the ambition to manage their commons. Resonating with the Anthropocene (or whatever the era will be called), the water company sale was announced precisely in the name of the need for adaptation and resilience in the face of environmental destruction. Taking the “tragedy of the commons” thesis at face value (a thesis that has been continuously disputed and disproven), the privatization of the water company was imposed under the rhetoric that it was a more efficient means to manage common resources. The citizens’ movements that emerged, and gained collective purchasing power, offered alternative imaginaries that presented socially, environmentally, and economically more efficient means to manage common resources. In Spain too, the Platform for Mortgage-​Affected people (in Catalan, Platforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca, PAH, with origin in Barcelona) reset the standards for how to demand the right to produce housing as part of the urban commons. The PAH was formed out of the necessity to protect and sometimes rehouse hundreds of thousands of families (over 200,000 since 2008) who have been evicted because

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they could not service their mortgage debt (Colau and Alemany 2012; García Lamarca and Kaika 2016). Like the Rosieni and like the Thessaloniki water coalition, the PAH refuses to “participate” under predetermined formats, terms, conditions, and roles. They neither negotiate nor plead with power (the government or banks). Either of these strategies would acknowledge evicted people as powerless objects but would also acknowledge the state or banks as legitimate actors with the power to evict households or grant charity in the form of debt relief or alternative housing rights. Instead, the PAH demands housing not as charity but as a right for all. They refuse to plead or “participate.” Instead, they actively re-​house evicted families in squatted buildings owned by banks; they film the violence of evictions and display it in the public domain; they take the notion of evictions out of the sphere of private tragedy and turn it into a public affair and a collective responsibility. In short, they make social inequality everybody’s business. What the movements described above share in common is that they (like other movements across the world) go beyond protesting to develop methods and practices that enable citizens to perform politically and to act above and beyond the role of “invited participants” with predetermined and fixed roles in negotiations over poverty, debt or environmental destruction.These practices contribute towards a bulwark to avoid us all accepting the powerless role of discredited political subjects that are incapable of producing our own history in the face of the new, old or any geological era. Similar processes of resistance and subjectivization proliferate across the world (Martinez-​Alier 2003; Reynolds and Szerszynski 2016). In demanding equality and institutional and social change, a radical stance against socio-​environmental degradation in late capitalism has become central (Brand 2007).These movements and their practices are inspiring reminders that during moments of crisis, the constructing of, the performing, embodying or enacting of a new vision, a new socio-​ecological imaginary, becomes central in the construction of a new myth that can sustain the future and give meaning to the present.

Reclaiming a scholarship of presence Although musings over the Anthropocene are far removed from these struggles and political commitments, the practices and methods of solidarity described above offer concrete alternative ways of perceiving and performing the role of humans and other beings during our epoch, regardless of its name. They offer concrete methods that defy technical solutions to environmental ills (from smart cites to geo-​ engineering) and put forward radical demands for socio-​environmental equality. What is clear is that the naming of a geological epoch has nothing to do with whether we can offer a different future for humans and more than humans on the Earth. Refusing to spend 136 euros to buy ten new jumpers and spending it instead in buying back our commons (the water in Thessaloniki) is a radical act that redefines our role in the power equation of capitalist expansion. Refusing to sit around the

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table to negotiate our environment and livelihoods in return for some “redistribution” of mining profits and jobs (as in Rosia Montana) does the same. Refusing to beg for housing and mortgage debt relief on an individual basis, and claiming housing instead as the socio-​environmental global commons does the same. Even if or when their militancy withers away, the above movements will have put into gear a process of subject formation that challenges the social fatalism of a deepening socio-​environmental crisis; a process that can become a generative force for a broader socio-​ecological transformation that can potentially prevent an anthropological as well as a geological catastrophe. These alternatives demonstrate the paradox character when capitalism calls upon science and technology to save us from capitalism. And herein lies the intellectual responsibility of the humanities, arts, and social sciences: to (instead) add gravitas to these emerging imaginaries. To engage more systematically in symbolizing and narrating these proliferating alternative socio-​ spatial and socio-​environmental imaginaries, and to add symbolic weight to the narratives that show that we can think and desire in new ways. Let us consider, again, Carson’s Silent Spring, or any of the books and authors that have inspired and driven our research and intellectual agendas. For me, for example, this would include—​ among others—​ Marx and Engels, Simmel and Arendt, Benjamin, Debord and Lefebvre, Carson and Jacobs, Harvey and Irigaray. Let us search for common characteristics in the intellectual work and scholarly method of the people who inspired us. From my list, I can identify at least three common characteristics. First, they worked outside and beyond disciplinary boundaries, and often in opposition to mainstream academic discourse. Second, their work was not a response to funding streams or academic assessments; it was politically driven and linked to everyday life. Third, their intellectual labour was a hard labour of love, as the saying goes. Whether they were documenting the conditions of the working class in nineteenth-​century Manchester (Engels), the psycho-​geographies of Metropolitan Life (Simmel), the role of hot dog vendors on the street corners of New York (Jacobs), or the silencing of birds (Carson), their intellectual labour was a hard-​going rigorous and embodied process, in which they moved continuously from a frog’s to an eagle’s perspective. That is, from being present, down there, zooming into the streets, collecting details of everyday life, day in day out, mapping and documenting nitty-​g ritty facts, minute empirical details; to zooming out to acquire an eagle’s perspective to see the broader picture and make connections between different territories and localities, to conceptualize processes that consolidated power relations and accentuated socio-​environmental inequalities. In this metaphor, the eagle cannot exist without the frog; and vice versa. This relentless zooming in and out, this continuous metamorphosis from eagle to frog and back, this hard labour of love can only be politically as well as intellectually driven. Such a politically engaging, necessity-​driven, empirically and conceptually rigorous, and deeply embodied explication of cities and environments is what we need today, too. These are characteristics that make up what I call a scholarship of presence. A scholarship that pays equal attention to seemingly tedious details

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of everyday life (the number of inhabitants per room in Manchester’s Victorian tenements, the number of New York street vendors, the declining number of birds in a neighbourhood), as it does to developing a broader intellectual and political project that can produce new radical imaginaries for socio-​environmental change. This scholarship of presence is the reason why the work of the scholars I mentioned earlier resonates with us. And this scholarship of presence is precisely what we need more of today. We need a move from frog to eagle that will enable us to collect the stories and the data that can put flesh and bone onto abstract ideas. But we also need to put in the hard labour and courage to symbolize emerging radical imaginaries in ways that can empower them to become narratives performative of creating a new future. Narratives that not only make sense of the present, but also of constructing an archaeology for a new future; in short, to help them become alternative master narratives. Needless to say, this is easier said than done. We may have today more research funding available than ever before, more publication outlets than ever before, a toolbox of methods larger than ever before, and a repository of concepts fuller than ever before. But after having rejected the conviction that ideas can change the world, after having spent over three decades discrediting and deconstructing our once intellectual heroes, after having witnessed the demise of ideas that some had hoped would lead to alternative socio-​environmental praxis (from communism and socialism to sustainability and neoliberalism), we are understandably reluctant to propose or support new grand ideas, narratives, and social imaginaries. The failed utopias of the past are weighing heavily upon our shoulders as we pull ourselves up to construct the utopias of tomorrow. Moreover, as we are embedded in academic institutions that are fast becoming part of the power landscapes of a corporatized world it is attractive to turn from public intellectuals into professionals; our social impact measured through predefined parameters and metrics. Importantly, this institutional shift means that it is more attractive for us as scholars today to become contrarians, adversaries, or opponents of particular concepts or ideas that we can discredit in order to earn citation counts, attention, etc., than to do the labour of being auxiliaries, supporters, deputies, ambassadors of emerging political practices. It is more tempting and professionally more beneficial to be a professional public critic, or to engage critically with the latest neologism, than to be a public intellectual; that is, to invest energy in empirical work and in building new narratives out of real life empirics. I am as culpable as every other academic in doing just that. But maybe this spells out a tactic or strategy in relation to the Anthropocene. This is where our intellectual role lies. Not in criticizing the concept per se; but in ignoring it altogether as an act of defiance to the newly emerging master narrative of capitalism. Maybe we should shift focus and energy, and instead work to symbolize the alternative imaginaries that emerge across the world and that need our immediate attention. At times like these, times of environmental crisis and general spread of fear, a new project for autonomy, and the construction of alternative radical imaginaries emerge

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not as an intellectual exercise, but as a necessity for transformation and change. We need to be present again, co-​researching, capturing processes of subjectification, new claims of re-​commoning of cities and natures alike. We need to document and then narrate these stories, give them symbolic and ontological gravitas. We may all love to hate geo-​engineering advocates for their technological determinism, but we cannot capture dominant discourse and praxis without operationalizing our own qualitative or quantitative research. Engaging in a scholarship of presence, which I described above, is the only way we can recapture the authority to speak about environmental change from economists, geo-​scientists, or technocrats. Rigorous empirical work and hard labour to advance emerging concepts and methods is what is required if we as scholars and urban practitioners want to retake our role as co-​producers of alternative socio-​environmental futures. Resetting teaching and training agendas is equally important for de-​colonizing education and influencing a new generation of thinkers from the now all-​prevailing social imaginary of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene. We need again to become the frog that splashes into the murky waters of empirics in order to resurface with narratives of radical new practices. We need to be the eagle again, unafraid of abstracting from the militant particularism or empirics, in order to show how these historically geographically specific stories do in fact matter to the rest of the world; they can act performatively as new paradigms if they gain enough symbolic weight and exposure. Acts of defiance performed in the everyday and demanding new socio-​environmental subject positions need our attention. They exist and will continue to exist regardless of the naming or re-​ naming of our epoch. Like the Salt March led by Gandhi in India in 1930, which attracted global attention and fuelled India’s fight for independence; like Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit in her “proper place” on a bus in Alabama in 1955, which set in motion the Montgomery Bus Boycott that ultimately led to the desegregation of bus seating allocation in the US; like the black-​gloved fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, medallists at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, who raised them to protest against racism to the tune of the US national anthem. From Romania to Sao Paolo, and from Greece and Spain to China, such acts of defiance are performed every day (Crawshaw, Jackson and Havel 2010). Let us take these more seriously than any confirmed or unconfirmed renaming of the epoch. Let us perform the labour of love requested to document and put them into narrative, add symbolic weight to their practice. Let us—​as Lucy Irigaray suggested—​militate intellectually and politically for the impossible (Deutscher 2002). Let us give symbolic form to wants and claims that do not yet exist and let us make these the only possible futures. It is the thing we can do best. Let us do just that.

The significance of ruins The Anthropocene debate may lead to new ways of thinking and acting regarding human and more-​than-​human relations. But, the Anthropocene (like other concepts

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before it) can also become capitalism’s latest apology; a new master narrative, and as politically vacuous and complacent as, say, “sustainability.” What I have suggested in this chapter is that while there is a pressing need for the humanities and social sciences to engage with the Anthropocene debate, perhaps there is an equal intellectual and political need to move beyond the dominant narrative that the Anthropocene is becoming. I suggest shifting focus and energy instead into adding symbolism and ontological weight to alternative imaginaries of socio-​environmental organization that emerge across the world and that are less likely to be co-​opted. Even if these new radical imaginaries fail to deliver desirable socio-​environmental changes, they will have put in place processes of subjectification that matter politically and socially more than the renaming of a geological epoch.The key measure of transformative quality of any new vision, or utopian project, I would argue, is not by how well it succeeds, but by how gracefully it can fail. The quality of its ruins is the ultimate judge of the quality of any idea or vision for socio-​environmental change. So, as Samuel Beckett (1983) suggested, let us try again. And if we fail again, let us just try to fail better next time.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw for the inspiration, as well as for offering valuable comments and edits for this chapter. With kind permission from the Editor of European Planning Studies, this chapter is a reprint (slight changes) of the journal article: Maria Kaika (2018) “Between the frog and the eagle: claiming a ‘Scholarship of Presence’ for the Anthropocene,” European Planning Studies 26(9): 1714–​27, https://doi.org/10.1080/​09654313.2018.1484893.

References Beckett, Samuel. 1983. Worstward Ho. London: John Calder. Berman, Marshall. 1971. The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society. London: Allen and Unwin. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-​Baptiste Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. London and New York: Verso Books. Brand, Peter. 2007. “Green Subjection: The Politics of Neoliberal Urban Environmental Management.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31(3): 616–​32. Bristow, Tom. 2015. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Colau, Ada, and Adrià Alemany. 2012. Vidas hipotecadas: De la burbuja immobiliaria al derecho a la vivienda. Barcelona: Cuadrilátero de Libros. Crawshaw, Steve, and John Jackson. 2010. Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World. New York and London: Union Square. Dalby, Simon. 1992. “Ecopolitical Discourse: ‘Environmental Security’ and Political Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 16(4): 503–​22. Deutscher, Penelope. 2002. A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Ellis, Erle, Mark Maslin, Nicole L. Boivin, and Andrew Bauer. 2016. “Involve Social Scientists in Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 540(7632): 192–​93. García Lamarca, Melissa, and Maria Kaika. 2016. “‘Mortgaged Lives’: The Biopolitics of Debt and Housing Financialization.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41(3): 313–​27. Gibson, Katherine, Deborah Bird Rose, Ruth Fincher, J. K. Gibson-​Graham, Ethan Miller, Jessica K. Weir, Kurt Iveson et al. 2015. Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene. New York: punctum books. Hamilton, Clive, François Gemenne, and Christophe Bonneuil, eds. 2015. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch. London and New York: Routledge. Head, Lesley. 2016. Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-​ conceptualising Human-​ Nature Relations. London and New York: Routledge. Kaika, Maria. 2005. City of Flows: Nature, Modernity and the City. London and New York: Routledge. Kaika, Maria. 2011. “Autistic Architecture: The Fall of the Icon and the Rise of the Serial Object of Architecture.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(6): 968–​92. Katz, Cindi, and Andrew Kirby. 1991. “In the Nature of Things: The Environment and Everyday Life.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16(3): 259–​71. Kirsch, Scott, and Don Mitchell. 1998. “Earth-​Moving as the ‘Measure of Man’: Edward Teller, Geographical Engineering, and the Matter of Progress.” Social Text 54: 100–​34. Kulish, Nicholas. 2009. “Homeless in Poland, Preparing an Odyssey at Sea.” New York Times, August 1. Accessed April 22, 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2009/​08/​02/​world/​europe/​ 02poland.html. Latimer, Joana, and Mara Miele. 2016.“Naturecultures? Science, Affect and the Non-​human.” Theory, Culture and Society 30(7–​8):  5–​31. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2007. The Making of the Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), MIT Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. Macfarlane, Robert. 2016. “Generation Anthropocene: How Humans have Altered the Planet Forever.” The Guardian: Science and Nature, April 1. Accessed April 22, 2018. www. theguardian.com/​books/​2016/​apr/​01/​generation-​anthropocene-​altered-​planet-​for-​ever. Martinez-​Alier, Joan. 2003. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London and New York: Verso. Purdy, Jedediah. 2015. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reynolds, Larry, and Bronislaw Szerszynski. 2016.“The Post-​political and the End of Nature: The Genetically Modified Organism.” In The Post-​political and its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics, edited by Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw, 48–​65. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rose, Nikolas. 2013. “The Human Sciences in a Biological Age.” Theory, Culture and Society 30(1):  3–​34. Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2010. “Reading and Writing the Weather: Climate Technics and the Moment of Responsibility.” Theory, Culture and Society 27(2–​3):  9–​30.

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Velicu, Irina, and Maria Kaika. 2017. “Undoing Environmental Justice: Re-​ imagining Equality in the Rosia Montana Anti-​mining Movement.” Geoforum 84(August): 305–​15. Watson, Matthews C. 2014. “Derrida, Stengers, Latour, and Subalternist Cosmopolitics.” Theory, Culture and Society 31(1): 75–​98. Whitehead, Mark. 2014. Environmental Transformations: A Geography of the Anthropocene. London and New York: Routledge. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2016. “Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture and Society 33(2): 3–​28. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Colin Waters, and Martin J. Head. 2017. “Anthropocene: Its Stratigraphic Basis.” Nature 541: 289.

Conclusion

14 BRINGING BACK THE POLITICAL Egalitarian acting, performative theory Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

Introduction The central question around which this book revolves is not so much about how to bring environmental issues into the domain of politics, as is the case with much political ecological and environmental research, but rather how to bring the political into the environment. The main argument centres on the need to move from environmental or “sustainability” science as a basis to discuss, formulate, and develop environmental policies, to politicizing the environment. The latter requires foregrounding the splits, internal obstacles, limits, and divisions that run through any sense of community, from local to global, in order to think, develop, and organize forms of renewed political agency and subjectivation as the necessary foundation to enact progressive socio-​ecological transformation. This interest in politicization is also our approach to push, expand, and hopefully assist in rearranging urban political ecology (UPE) and cognate fields to remain relevant in a time of deepening depoliticization and the rise of post-​ truth politics. Political philosopher Alain Badiou (2008) has suggested that the growing consensual concern with nature and the environment should be thought of as a contemporary form of opium of the people. This seems, at first sight, not only a scandalous statement, one that conflates ecology with religion in a perverse twisting of Marx’s original statement, but one that also flies in the face of evidence that politics matters environmentally and that environmental matters are profoundly political. Nonetheless, Ulrich Beck (2010, 263) concurs with the depoliticizing force of much environmental concern: In the name of indisputable facts portraying a bleak future for humanity, green politics has succeeded in depoliticizing political passions to the point of leaving citizens nothing but gloomy asceticism, a terror of violating nature and an indifference towards the modernization of modernity.

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With this book, we sought to unearth and discuss the contours of what the politicization of the environment might mean in an attempt to bring environmental matters to the core of political consideration and contestation. This is the exact opposite of attempts in recent decades to render policies and politics more sensitive to environmental concerns. Entire academic fields, alongside an array of professions, protocols, and procedures, supervise and enact a process of depoliticization whereby our socio-​ecological condition is conceived as a problem (phrased for instance as climate change, loss of biodiversity, water crisis, depleting fish stocks, waste management, air pollution, etc.) that requires a series of techno-​managerial adjustments in order to “solve,” or at least manage, the consensually agreed upon problem. While this scientific approach is not false or un-​true in any categorical sense, it participates in translating contested issues into scripted sets of supposedly non-​political acts of social management and technological adjustments that perpetuate the existing order rather than considering our socio-​ecological situation as politically deeply contested and radically heterogeneous. Politicizing the environment is precisely about foregrounding the contentious and antagonistic character of the environment itself. In doing so, the plainly depoliticizing process of elevating the matter of nature to the dignity of a global public concern is not only exposed, what Badiou identifies as “a gigantic operation in the depoliticization of subjects” (Badiou 2008, 139), but the contours for a re-​ politicization of the environment are foregrounded as a necessary antidote for the techno-​scientific rationale that dominates contemporary environmental research and policy-​making. Indeed, throughout the book, contributors argue and demonstrate that the unwavering attempts to establish a secure and sound foundation to what nature and its complex dynamics really are—as a necessary precursor and foundation to formulate adequate socio-​ecological responses to the environmental deadlock the world is in—an integral part of pervasive processes of depoliticization. This book aspires to cut through this deadlock and considers how it is precisely this contested nature of nature that keeps socio-​ecologically futures radically open. This heterogeneity is perceptible, among others, in the range of ways by which “Nature” is known to and symbolized by different peoples, in the variety of cosmological constellations and material consequences associated with different epistemic communities, in the proliferation of radically different imaginaries of what constitutes a just, equal, or liveable environment, and—​perhaps most importantly—​in the uneven socio-​ecological positions different humans and non-​humans occupy in the circulatory metabolic process that sustains capital accumulation. Against such strategies to evacuate the political from the environment and from spaces of public encounter, this book draws on insights from radical democratic thought for understanding and contributing to the politicization of the environment and life itself. Politics is the immanent moment when the established distribution of functions, names, obligations, and expertise is disturbed by those who do not count, as elegantly phrased by Jacques Rancière (1999; 2010) from whom we find inspiration for our politicizing approach. Politics is further, in his view, categorically performative and manifests itself when the non-​heard and those casted as not part of the

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drama transgress their non-​perceptible presence to become visible, hear-​able, and radically present in staging change in the name of equality. Thus, rather than centring the debate about how to account for the environment or “Nature,” what “it” contains and what type of science to mobilize to articulate with it, or how it effects social groups or “stakeholders” differently, we start by asking what the political is and how collective life becomes politicized. Such a starting point, we contend, also politicizes “the environment.” It is against the spectre of a bleak dystopian future without egalitarian political encounters that this book explores tactics and strategies of the political as a radical emancipatory socio-​ecological process. In this concluding chapter, we draw on the chapters that make up the book to suggest what a politically performative theory might be and what challenges and possibilities it brings to the process of (re-​)politicization.

Performative The political is a form of appearance, an interruptive act that demonstrates equality and exposes a wrong. This opens up the thorny issue of the relationship between theory and practice. For us, politically performative theory, while caught in the iron cage of representation and symbolization, can and should articulate and resonate with actual and embodied performative political acting.1 In the tension between practice and thought—​or, say, activism and scholarship, acknowledging that such labelling gives the appearance of neat divisions of labour that never existed—​ politically performative theory has emerged in various forms across time and place. Furthermore, while we write theory, we merely use this singular form as a placeholder for something that emerges and is embodied and practised in multiple forms, that is, as theories. Political performativity can, based on these initial remarks, be approached in two ways. First, there is a long lineage of critical theory—​many strands of, for example, Marxism, feminism, post-​structuralism, and postcolonial studies—​that in a variety of ways, often in vicious dispute with one another, and in different places and times, have attempted to demonstrate the relevance and potency of their particular mode of enquiry and analysis for political action and strategy. In doing so, they assume or argue that theory has a political effect in the sense that such thought is a necessary foundation for “correct” political action and strategy. Much of Marxism is a straightforward example of this, whereby Marx’s theoretical class analysis arguably charts the terrain for who the privileged political agent is (the proletariat), its mode of political organization (the socialist or communist party), and its objective (occupying the State to change the relations of production). Other critical theories have, often in dialogue with or in direct opposition to Marxism, charted alternative trajectories for emancipatory change.2 In a nutshell, such standpoints share the view that substantive critical theorization is understood to be a necessary and crucial part for formulating and engaging in practical emancipatory politics. Second, against this notion, there is a strand of political philosophers, from Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière to Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe, among others,

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that question more or less radically this privileged position of theory and, consequently, the position of the philosopher-​king to arbitrate what constitutes radical political actors or actions, while interlocutors like Slavoj Žižek would go as far as to argue that “mainstream” critical theory is part of the process of depoliticization itself. The latter is particularly visible in the way that critical theory has become celebrated, policed, and placed within curricula across the liberal democratic (and now increasingly neoliberal) university. In contrast to foregrounding theory and analysis (of politics, the “social base,” patriarchy, etc.), post-​foundational political thinkers focus on situating “the political” in the event, in the rupture, in the process of political acting and forms of subjectivation. They dispute the presence of a firm ontological basis for founding the political.Theory can consequently say something about “the political” as immanence and appearance, but these interlocutors deny the performative effect of substantive theorization. Emancipatory political action requires no ontological grounding in social position, in time, space or nature, or in a belief system. In other words, emancipatory acting emerges and unfolds through the act.3 We of course do not in any way wish to diminish the role of thought in the politicizing process.4 Rather, we are more concerned about what needs to be thought today in light of both our socio-​ecological predicament and the above critique by post-​foundational thought of “mainstream” critical theory. In a Rancièrian sense, we are concerned with the question of who is allowed to speak; whose sound and utterances are formatted as voice when others are neither seen or heard nor sensed, not counted as belonging to or being part of the political community.The political, then, is discernible in moments when such orders of the sensible are interrupted through the demand of equality, the founding democratic moment that introduces a rupture of and in the political community. The political is here categorically and fundamentally performative. Those that have no part do not demand equality as a right within a policed order, which cannot and never has recognized them, they stage equality and consequently produce egalibertarian spaces that become locations from where equality and liberty can be thought and acted out (Balibar 2010). This interrupts the established socio-​ecological order, ways of thinking and doing, who is counted and who is not, and exposes the in-​egalitarian “wrongs” of the given. Such acts are necessarily noticed, and either succeed or are met with violence that precisely affirms the in-​egalitarian order of being and that renders visible and perceptible the part that has no part. It is in this strict sense that we can understand the political subject, not as a person, individual or group, but, quoting Rancière (2014, 45), “a political subject is an agent of the division of the arkhê [the political community]”; it “is a singular noun for the operation that redivides the arkhê through a new mode of counting the uncounted and including the excluded.” The production of egalibertarian spaces, the creation of conditions for a different way of building relations between humans, and between humans and non-​humans, are spaces that build “particular cases of universality” (Rancière 2014, 45) that can re-​constitute the political community along lines of equality. Equality is the axiomatic condition for democracy, an empty

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signifier that exposes a split, a rupture, and reveals the antagonisms, heterogeneities, limitations, and conflicts that reside within the order of being. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall read across the various contributions in this book to encounter hints, openings, and suggestions about where, how, and by what and whom the political appears as rupture, as interruption.

Political The book centres first on a politicizing approach in relation to the question of “the Anthropocene.” Indeed, the book’s various contributors have aspired to pervert, interrupt, and re-​order the way the Anthropocene is framed, discussed, and rendered performative in a range of academic disciplines and social or artistic practices.  The common vision and perspective shared by the contributors to this book, is the imperative to politicize the disastrous socio-​ecological condition of many of the human and non-​human constituents that make up the Earth’s constellations. This requires not only a semantic or symbolic re-​scripting of the age we are in as in the proliferating alternative suggestions for naming and ontologically grasping the Anthropocene (see e.g., Johnson et al. 2014), but rather the refusal to let our politics be shaped or determined by the contested naming of a historical epoch. The opening three chapters all revolved, in different ways, around disrupting what is probably the depoliticizing gesture par excellence, namely the attempts to re-​found the political through the making of a new ontology. Every attempt to ontologize politics simultaneously runs the risk of relegating it to the discerning eye of the master-​philosopher, who is yet again staged as the final arbiter to triage between “good” and “bad” politics. This book has in various ways tried to de-​ontologize the political, remove it from the terrain of philosophical musings to the immanent and performative possibilities that always lurk within the gaps, the inconsistencies, and the excesses of contemporary thought and of existing material and symbolic constellations. The political becomes this moment of surprise, of unexpected resurgence, of immanent acting that can never be fully accounted for by the givens of the situation. A first tactical manoeuvre of our own argument (Chapter 2) was indeed to point to the obscene underbelly of the Anthropocene’s cacophonous debate, the uncanny presences of the unsaid, unspoken, yet disturbingly present vampires, zombies, and ghosts that haunt the actually existing conditions in what was always a more-​than-​human world and which no scientific, indigenous, or other framework can account for, although they might gesture to do precisely that. It is the surfacing, or rather the on-​staging, of these subterranean ghosts, the obscene possibilities that any ontologizing effort tries to hide from view, around which politicization unfolds. Two clear threads run through the book on the theme of on/​off-​staging. One is how Earth systems science, and climate science in particular, has moved beyond the physical earthly boundaries it used to study through the narrative vehicle of “the Anthropocene.” Politically, this means that a master-​narrative has been established, here in the form of science to which we expect to turn to know what we ought to

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do: “Taking the Anthropocene as a statement of fact,” as Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi write (Chapter 5), “eviscerates the horizon of politics,” both through a teleological version of history that hides particular forms of accumulation, violence, and dispossession that created environmental change in the first place, and by insisting that “we are all in the same boat.” To politicize the present lies precisely, as developed by Andrés Henao Castro and Henrik Ernstson (Chapter 4), in troubling the “supra-​historical time” on which Anthropocene-​thinking and talking rests, a teleological way of narrating time (and space) that tries to orchestrate and dominate all other public discussions. Only a tiny fraction of humanity are the active architects of the geological force that “humanity” has become, and likewise, few participate in narrating how this moment should be understood and acted upon. This opens a much more general path to politicize the environment, which revolves around what Henao Castro and Ernstson call a politics of translation whereby performative acting by the non-​counted and subaltern undermines ways of speaking demarcated by scientific or economic consensus. Marco Armiero (Chapter 10) develops this further as he explores modes of politicization through foregrounding how differential positionalities relate and experience socio-​ecological conditions. In unearthing the ghostly presences of toxic waste in Naples, he foregrounds how residents are building collective spaces to make sensible new modes of knowing and, in a politically interruptive and performative way, organizing collective life in the here and now to deal with polluted soils and corrupt governments. This political ecological way of organizing and articulating new ways of knowing is developed further by Garth Myers (Chapter 8) in his attempt to decentre Western thought to expand and enrich urban political ecology (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014; Heynen, Chapter 6). He traces something similar to Armiero’s argument when he excavates the radical “multi-​vocality” of environmental activism across cities in Africa, inspired by his in-​depth engagement with hip hop artists, waste pickers, and women’s saving circles. “Local” struggles become possible sites for launching revolts against consensual arrangements, where new modes of counting the uncounted and including the excluded are embodied and experimented with, and where particular cases of universality are elaborated. Roger Keil (Chapter 9) also grapples with “the peripheries” in examining the political performativity manifest in suburban landscapes. While their varied spatial forms have contributed immensely to climate change and environmental destruction, he insists that there is a bias in current spatial imaginaries of revolt and emancipation towards the centre, the square, while, in fact, the world is increasingly suburbanized, mainly in the form of traditional middle-​class suburbs or self-​built squatter settlements. Rather than writing off suburban spaces, we should engage with a grounded study of how politics and subjectivities articulate from a multitude of peripheries, maybe something akin to Myer’s “multi-​vocality.” Indeed, several authors foreground the messiness and uncertainty by which claims are made and staged, while underlining how expert-​driven master narratives can still be disrupted by a range of urban actors that are historically situated in their relations to humans and non-​humans, forging novel ways of knowing, organizing, and acting.

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The second thread that relates to on/​off-​staging engages critically with new materialist ontologies, which have emerged in parallel to and partly inspired by the inauguration of “the Anthropocene” (see Chapter 2). In their claim for a more-​ than-​human and fully relational co-​constitution of earthly matters, these ontologies risk suspending the gaps, the separations, and the conflicts that we tried to foreground in this collection as a necessary condition to rupture the prevalent socio-​ environmental trajectory the Earth is on. Instead, they seem to invite narratives of a fully reflexive, adaptive, and manicured more-​than-​human arrangement, nurturing a phantasmagoria of a “good Anthropocene” in which supposedly every critter is seen and cared for. It is the ability, or rather inability, to rupture the cosy relation between government, big science, and big corporations that needs to be laid at the feet of new materialist ontologies in their claims to radicalism (Henao Castro and Ernstson, Chapter 4). Following this, and writing categorically against gestures of all-​ inclusive imaginaries, Jodi Dean (Chapter 11) insists instead on the “importance of division” in her chapter on artistic practices and global warming, where politicization lies in forcing all to take a stand: “[D]‌ivision, then, is not in the interest of some fantasy of full-​inclusion but rather for the purpose of mobilizing the exterior [the excluded] back within the institution” (Chapter 11, our emphasis). Resisting the mainstream call for “innovation,” the art collective Not An Alternative “salvages the generic images, practices, institutions, and forms that have already compiled and stored collective power” to repurpose institutions to become a site of counter-​power. The challenge lies not in finding the ontology from which, and within which we can all (peacefully) be accommodated, but to produce “infrastructure that challenges, shames, and dismantles the very class and sector that would use what is common for private benefit” (Chapter 11). A real risk of these new materialist ontologies lies exactly in providing discursive material to repress, foreclose, or disavow deep conflicts, open wounds, and irredeemable gaps that cut through any socio-​ecological constellation. As several contributors to this book demonstrated, it is precisely these gaps, wounds, and separations that need to be foregrounded. Any relational configuration, we argue, is one predicated upon division and separation, a certain distancing, an uncanny distantiation, out of which new political possibilities emerge. It is the separation, the division, or the gap that permits relationality, while providing possibilities for contesting uneven power and for re-​drawing unequal positionalities. A politics not of belonging, but of division.

Interruption The second major theme of the book focuses precisely on politicization through interruption, the moment when what has been off-​staged appears on-​stage in full view. Proper politics, which pushes to rearrange what is sensed and felt and who has voice is manifested in immanent outbursts that appear as excess or surplus to the prevailing situation. Something exceeds the present and forges in the process

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a new present. These forms of acting do not deepen entrenched positionalities, do not pursue particular partisan interests or solidify existing power positions. Rather, they tentatively construct and experiment with new egalitarian relations within the cracks and fissures that mark the conflicting realities through which “the Anthropocene” came into being and produces earthly futures. In the process, a new emancipatory imaginary might be slowly constituted. Political acting exceeds given identities by demonstrating the egalitarian possibilities and necessities rendered impossible by the given condition. It is precisely this affirmation of performative acting that demonstrates possibilities and practices for egalitarian relationality that might politicize “the Anthropocene,” rendering its obscene underbelly as the stage, The Scene, from where action originates. Perhaps it also hints at the necessity, as Maria Kaika argues (Chapter 13), to refuse to use, to abolish the name of “the Anthropocene” and its avatars completely and instead call for a new politics of staging whereby the consensual expert apparatus and dispositif is replaced with those who, as Henao Castro and Ernstson (Chapter 4) write in resonance with Kaika, “engage in the active contestation of their conditions of exclusion.” To interrupt the consensual order requires a multiplicity of voices and a plethora of experimentation, some of which are articulated between the covers of this book. Richard Walker and Jason W. Moore (Chapter 3), for example, insist on how the particular entanglements of the human and non-​human have been and continue to be forged through the class relations that drive the machinery of capitalist accumulation and its predatory desire for an insatiable excess of surplus value. Their re-​booting of a historical materialist radical view demonstrates how this excess of surplus value is predicated upon a geological deepening, a geographical widening, and a biological intimization of the entanglements of the human and non-​human, orchestrated through pervasive forms of privatization, enclosing, and economically de-​valuing both human labour and non-​human stuff. The excess of surplus value is only mirrored in the surplus enjoyment of those caught in capitalism’s desiring machine. These capitalist logics underpinned Moore’s shift to the signifier of “the Capitalocene” in an attempt to register the seismic transformation of an Earth terraformed by the assembling of money, labour, and the non-​human in metabolic circulations that produce qualitative transformations but do so in both socially and ecologically deeply disruptive and uneven manners. The uneven socio-​ecologies of the Anthropocene were forged across expansive temporal and geographical constellations, which open possibilities for politicization. Along these lines of thinking, Nik Heynen (Chapter 6) demonstrates how a focus on racialized capitalism, forged through a plantation economy in the US, helps to make sensible separations and divisions, while foregrounding the living and embodied archive of struggle and resistance. In his chapter he carefully approaches the US Southern city of Atlanta through a lens of African-​American intellectual history and activism, pushing for an expansion of UPE to engage more explicitly with the articulation between race, colonialism, and nature. This “abolitionist urban political ecology” can first expose the deep antagonisms that run through a racialized urban landscape, which spatially and ecologically was prefigured by

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the plantation economy based on enslavement, and, second, help to grasp and performatively stage those separations, divisions, and spaces through which both city and society can be politicized. Radical democratic practices can emerge out of a contestation of what appears as consensually agreed upon issues and problems. Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi’s analysis of “wetland grabs” in urban India (Chapter 5) starts from anticorruption mobilization. What at the surface might appear as quite remotely attached to the “urban environment,” is shown to be a vehicle for naming and shaming structural “wealth amassing” relations between state and capital that sits at the heart of producing the wider urban landscape and its uneven distributions of housing, flood risk, and access to public space.The authors see the potential (as Marco Armiero also does in Chapter 10 for urban Italy) that anticorruption mobilizations can unmask “flexible governance regimes” that blur legal and extra-​legal ways of reclassifying land and auctioning off public resources. As such, the politicization of “wetland grabs,” developed and staged by so-called marginalized and poor families and based on their everyday practices, becomes a way of attacking the mechanism by which state and private actors consolidate and enclose public resources. Within global policy and academic discourse, climate change and “climate adaptation” have become thoroughly technocratic issues, which only occasionally recognize environmental justice. In contrast, and drawing on Frantz Fanon, Jonathan Silver (Chapter 7) discerns several lines of politicization that emerge from reflecting on how the climate crisis, both directly and through its configuration within global policy arrangements, re-​creates colonial patterns of violence and “suffocation” of African cities. This resonates with what we discussed in Chapter 2 as an “immunological biopolitics,” the more general pattern of how governing technologies work to secure the lives of some while sacrificing others, thus reproducing, as Silver shows, brutal lines of local and global inclusion and exclusion in an ongoing pattern of coloniality. A mode of politicization thus lies in interrupting sanitized narratives of the “adaptive” or “resilient” city by resolutely viewing the climate crisis as a distinct phase of uneven urbanization, thereby making African and other urban landscapes possible spaces for politicization. The general theme reverberating across these contributions lies precisely in how to bring the political into the environment, to on-​stage in the name of equality what cannot be seen or sensed, the obscene, to politicize through interruption. Both scholars and activists will grapple with understanding how the forging of a new egalitarian voice is possible in the cacophony that marks big city life, and how it might become politically performative. But as many politicizing movements have shown, it is and must be possible. For example, recent, and at first distinctly city-based movements like Black Lives Matter in the US and Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa clearly did not ignite from any sanitized or policed version of “the environment.” However, the effect of their political work—​building on a long historical experience of direct action to on-​stage what had been off-​staged in terms of legacies of colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy—​is still, and importantly, that urban environments become deeply politicized. They didn’t start with the environment. But the environment (also) became politicized.

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Possibilities Performative emancipatory possibilities may indeed crystallize by teasing out how off-​staged and forgotten voices, hidden gaps, incoherent arrangements, and interstitial spaces, become on-​staged. As contemporary geographies and ecologies form part of a wider and historical unequal terraforming process that intersects with neo-​colonial practices, gender and sexual exclusions, racialized and class-​based practices, any space and location offer conditions of possibility for politicization. Such political possibilities and their enactment is precisely the terrain of the final three chapters of the book, which together offer some pointers for a political ecological agenda that might begin to centre-​stage what has been off-​staged. As mentioned already, Jodi Dean (Chapter 11), who opens Part III, demonstrates how an art collective “does the work of political organization” to interrupt the endless circuit of critique. Going beyond critique, the art collective demonstrates a method—​or rather, they embody a politically performative theory—​on how to re-​purpose existing public institutions into de facto collective resources that can force a choice between serving private interests or the common good. She calls for a repetition of such politicizing performative experiments bent on seizing the state and, thereby, cutting through the deadlock of the Anthropocenic condition, one sutured by melancholia, failure, and cynicism. The final two chapters, by Andy Merrifield and Maria Kaika respectively, focus directly on such engagements. Both, in their different ways, advocate abolishing the scholar-​as-​expert, the academic as philosopher-​king. Andy Merrifield (Chapter 12) unfolds how the articulation between money as the only source of value under capitalism, rampant expertocracy, and the deepening of professionalized representation as the instituted form of democracy require usurping. Debunking professionalism, he argues, operates through the constitution of a shadow citizenry of ordinary people “who want in but are forced out, defiant yet disunited, disgruntled and raging in a global civil war of austerity and high frequency piracy.” It is precisely these new global margins that have now become the norm, the majority, the new centre. It is those who are off-​limits that experiment with and fight for a new concept and practice of citizenship, one yet to be invented so that a new inside can be created capable of keeping the professional expertocrats at bay. Maria Kaika (Chapter 13), finally, makes a case for a “scholarship of presence,” one that takes seriously emerging practices and alternative radical imaginaries that demand or enact socio-​environmental change. She questions the obsession with engaging with the concept of the Anthropocene as doing this only intensifies its symbolic weight. Instead, her scholarship of presence engages with emerging everyday socio-​political practices that try to disrupt the power landscape and resist the forces that continue to dominate the human and non-​human inhabitants of the Earth. By engaging in forms of co-researching, as scholars we can participate in giving weight and “ontological gravitas” to emergent and radically emancipatory master-narratives.

Conclusion—​in the here and now These chronicles of a politicizing political ecology have attempted in a variety of ways to reopen a space where emancipatory politics once more becomes thinkable

Bringing back the political  265

and do-​able. There is no blueprint for this. The immanence of the present is always up for grabs and it is precisely this void of “the political” that sustains an open-​ endedness through which new worlds are forged. When philosophers, scientists, artists, and experts tell us that what we need, but yet don’t have, is “a political institution at the scale of the phenomena [of the Anthropocene]” (Latour 2015), we should be wary of what comes next. The desire and gesture to grasp the totality of the situation, to place all and everybody (human, non-​human, and their combinations and agencies) within view, comes with a long baggage that stretches from the Leviathan to the modern state and racialized colonial order. Politics proper does not emerge from within status quo, from philosopher-​kings or -​queens, but from an excessive or subtracted outside that makes itself heard and sensed through performative acting in the name of equality. This draws a line for UPE and associated fields. We could go down the route of further instituting a politics in the name of a “new epoch,” naming seminars, courses, books, and special sessions in relation to “the Anthropocene” (e.g., Johnson et al. 2014). Or, we could insist in engaging the obscene, on-​staging the off-​staged, elaborating performative political theories, and keep alive the urge of emancipatory politicization. Indeed, the contributions of this book have troubled the thickening of fashionable ontologies, worked against the closure pursued by geo-​engineering-​ adaptation pundits, and subverted sustainability advocates for whom no other future is possible than an extension of the present with some socio-​ecological techno-​managerial re-​alignments, and instead insist on the radical openness of the present. In following the thinking of the contributors, their references to places, scholars, and struggles, their unearthing of embodied archives of radical egalitarian practices that are not lost, but here with us in the present, this book invites an imaginary of radical openness, of interruptive acting in the here and now. These practices are always excessive to the situation, interrupt the conditions of the present, and in the process forge new socionatural assemblages and constellations.

Epilogue This book emerged out of an engagement with urban political ecology as it unfolded over the past decade or so. Rather than revelling in the scholarly achievements of UPE and its gradual sedimentation within the academic curricula of urban studies, planning, sociology, or geography, its presence at global conferences and its articulation with socio-​ecological practices, this book attempted to focus on the gaps, the uncanny feeling many of us share in realizing the world is in a still deepening socio-​ ecological quagmire that no critical theorization of the present situation manages to even dent. Our agenda here is one that aspires—​but undoubtedly fails—​to foreground political agency and political struggle as the terrain capable of transforming socio-​ecological relations in a more equitable, solidarity-​based, and democratic manner. Rather than bringing environmental issues into politics, we must insist on directing our energies towards situations, acts, and events that bring the political

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into the environment, on-​staging what has been off-​staged, centring dissensus and divisions, and remembering that egalitarian political action requires no ontological grounding in social position, in time, space or nature, in the name of an epoch, or in a belief system, because the political unfolds through the performative act of equality. It is from this vantage point that we view the contributors of this book as rejecting the cynicism inscribed in a critical tradition that remains caught in the negative dialectic of critique and fails to open new spaces of engagement. Rather we embrace what Peter Sloterdijk (1987 [1983]) calls a “kynical” practice.While the cynic has given up on hope, we think of kynics as the critical activist-​cum-​theorists that, while not afraid of failing, muster the courage to remain hopeful.

Notes 1 See, for example, Butler and Athanasiou (2013) or Glass and Rose-​Redwood (2014) for extended discussions on performativity and politics. 2 In the liberation against colonial oppressors, for instance, the theory in charge was that the colonized subject becomes the subaltern capable of launching a nationalist liberation struggle to overtake the colonial State and turn it into a revolutionary socialist or a social democratic developmental State. In feminist theory, this articulates around building horizontal militant collectives that through a myriad of struggles aim to undermine the totality of patriarchal relations in the home, the workplace, and the public sphere. 3 For an introduction to different schools of post-​ foundational political thought, see Marchart (2007). 4 Examples of work that has contributed to a politicizing process, include such classics as Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967), or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1989 [1952]), which excavated and reflected on subjugated positionalities to turn such reflections into tools for identifying and forging a revolutionary subject capable of action.

References Badiou, Alain. 2008. “The Communist Hypothesis.” New Left Review 49: 29–​42. Badiou Alain. 2008. “Live Badiou: Interview with Alain Badiou, Paris, December 2007.” In: Alain Badiou: Live Theory, edited by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum. Balibar, Etienne. 2010. La proposition de l’egaliberte. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1989 [1952]. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books. Beck, Ulrich. 2010. “Climate for Change, Or How to Create a Green Modernity.” Theory, Culture and Society 27(2–​3): 254–​66. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity Press.Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin,White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Glass, Michael R., and Reuben Rose-​Redwood, eds. 2014. Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space. London: Routledge. Johnson, Elizabeth, Harlan Morehouse, Simon Dalby, Jessi Lehman, Sara Nelson, Rory Rowan, Stephanie Wakefield et al. 2014.“After the Anthropocene: Politics and Geographic Inquiry for a New Epoch.” Progress in Human Geography 38 (3): 439–​56. Lawhon, Mary, Henrik Ernstson and Jonathan D. Silver. 2014. “Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE through African Urbanism.” Antipode 46(2): 497–​516.

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Latour, Bruno. 2015.“‘Fifty Shades of Green’: Bruno Latour on the Ecomodernist Manifesto.” In Breakthrough Dialogue, Sausalito, June 2015, 1–​7. Published at ENTITLE Blog. Accessed May 20, 2018. https://​entitleblog.org/​2015/​06/​27/​fifty-​shades-​of-​green-​bruno-​latour-​ on-​the-​ecomodernist-​manifesto/​. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-​foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Rancière, Jacques. 2014. Moments Politiques. New York: Seven Stories Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987 [1983]. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic refer to figures. ABD (accumulation by dispossession) 96–97, 98 abolition democracy 121–22, 124, 125 abolition ecologies 119–21, 122, 124, 125 abolitionist politics 112, 119, 122–23 Accra, Ghana 14, 129–30, 132, 136–39, 143 accumulation by dispossession see ABD accumulation crises 62 Africa 129–32, 149–50, 151, 260, 263; see also urban Africa African-Americans 113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121–22, 123, 262 Africulturban (an artist cooperative) 155–56, 157 alchemy 184, 199 “A Line in the Sand” (installation sculpture, Ruttan) 168 Anker, Peder 31 Anthropocene 5–6, 10, 17, 27–29, 34, 40–42, 69–70, 91–92, 107, 169, 198–99, 240–43, 245–50, 264 Anthropocene debate 71–73, 75–76, 81, 82, 243, 248, 249, 259 Anthropo-obScene 5, 6, 8, 13, 16–17, 25, 27, 73 Anthropo-ob(S)cene, politics of 70, 73, 79, 81, 82–83 AnthropoScene 25, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 42 anticorruption 92–93, 94, 101, 102, 106

anticorruption mobilizations 14, 92, 93, 94, 263 anticorruption politics 92, 93, 105, 106, 107 anti-mining, Romania 244, 246 anti-privatization, Greece 244, 245 appropriation 55–58, 59, 60, 63 Arboleda, Martin 167, 172–73, 178 Arendt, Hannah 74–75, 246 Armiero, Marco 15, 184, 187–88, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 196, 199–200, 260 Ash, Michael 228–29 Atlanta, US 14, 112, 113–14, 116–17, 123, 125, 262 austerity urbanism 228–29 Badiou, Alain 32, 92, 255, 256 Bandra-Kurla Complex, Mumbai, India 97, 102–5, 106–7 Bangalore, India 92, 93, 95, 97, 105; Mantri Techzone 97–102, 106 Baucom, Ian 69, 75, 81, 82; Anthropocene debate 71, 72–73, 82 Bayat, Asef 149 Beck, Ulrich 255 Bennett, Jane 41 Bhabha, Homi 78, 79 BI (Breakthrough Institute) 32 big science 10 biopolitical governance 10, 34–39 Blackburn, Robin 112

Index  269

Black Geographies 114, 115, 116, 119 Bonneuil, Christophe 8, 26–27, 28–29 Bordiga, Amadeo 174–75 Bourdieu, Pierre 230 Breakthrough Institute see BI Britain 60, 230–32, 234–35 Brossat, Alain 36 Campania, Italy 192–93, 194, 195, 196, 199; Naples 15, 184, 185–87, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194–95, 260 Capita, Britain 231–32 capital accumulation 13, 37, 49, 51, 61–64, 166, 167, 168–69, 256, 262 capitalism 32–33, 39–40, 48, 50–55, 59, 61, 62, 246, 247 capitalist expansion 13, 48, 55, 59, 60, 61–62, 245 capitalist vortex 13, 61 capitalization frontier 53, 58, 59–60 Capitalocene 167, 169, 172, 175, 199, 241, 248, 262 Carson, Rachel 242–43, 246 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 28, 69, 74, 76, 77–78, 79, 81, 82; Anthropocene debate 71–72, 73, 82 Civil Rights Movement, US 122 Cleaver, Eldridge 120 climate change 14–15, 36–37, 77–78, 81, 130–34, 142–43, 169, 184, 198–99, 205–6, 241–42, 263; see also Accra, Ghana; Mbale, Uganda; Saint-Louis, Senegal climate change art 168 colonial violence 131, 263 colonization 10, 14, 142, 143 Coltan (conflict-prone mineral) 7 Comitato Scientifico Popolare, Italy 196, 197 commodification 56, 59 commodity frontiers 55, 56, 58–59, 63 corruption 14, 92, 93–95, 107 “Cosmos, Earth, Anthropocene, Tomorrow and Us,” Museum of Tomorrow, Rio de Janeiro 178–79 creativity 115, 117 critical theory 257, 258 Cronon, William 27 Crutzen, Paul 33–34, 76–77 Dakar, Senegal 15, 148, 153, 156, 159–60 Dean, Jodi 16, 261, 264 Debord, Guy 16, 223, 224, 246 democracy 16, 92, 152, 207–8, 230, 233, 264

Demos, T.J. 168, 219 depoliticization 5, 7–8, 9, 11, 13, 25, 35, 42, 81, 166, 255–56, 258 devaluation 58 dioxin contamination, Seveso, Italy 196–97 direct appropriation 56–57 Doshi, Sapana 14, 260, 263 Du Bois, W.E.B. 118, 121, 122 Earth system 6, 13, 30–31, 34, 38–39, 40, 41 eco-estates, South Africa 10–11 eco-geographies 6 ecology 4, 31, 33, 175–76 emancipation 5, 39, 112 emancipatory politics 3, 15–16, 40, 71, 117, 151, 257, 258, 264–65 emancipatory theory 3, 5, 17 environmental change 91, 248, 260 environmental destruction 91, 177, 241–42, 243, 244 environmental injustice 115, 187, 191–92 environmental justice 188, 190, 191–92, 194, 195–96, 244 environmental racism 193, 194 Ernstson, Henrik 13–14, 119, 151, 152, 171, 260 Esposito, Roberto 13, 27, 35, 36, 37 e-waste 7 exploitation 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63 extended urbanization 170, 171, 173, 174, 177 exteriority 27, 39–41 Fanon, Frantz 14, 131, 134, 142, 143, 144, 263 flexible governance 93–94, 96, 97, 98, 106, 263; nature 93, 99, 101 Foucault, Michel 35 Fraser, Andrea 209, 210 Fredericks, Rosalind Cooke 156, 157, 159 Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste 8, 26–27, 28–29 Fugitive Slave Law (Fugitive Slave Act), US 111 gender relations 39–40 geo-engineering 33–34, 38 ghost mode 188–89, 199–200 global suburbanization 166 grassroots organizations 148, 149–50, 151, 152, 153, 160; Pikine 155–59, 160 Greece 17; anti-privatization 244, 245 Hardt, Michael 78–79, 194 Harvey, David 96, 114, 246 Henao Castro, Andrés 13–14, 260

270 Index

Herndon, Thomas 228–29 Heynen, Nikolas 14, 144, 262–63 housing, Campania, Italy 192 Huasco, Chile 172–73, 177, 178 imaginaries 28, 240–41, 243; alternative radical 242, 243, 247–48, 249, 256, 264 immigrant women 69, 70, 81, 82 immunitary democracy 36 immunological biopolitics 10, 13, 27, 35–39 India 14, 92, 95, 96, 98, 107, 263; Bangalore 92, 93, 95, 97–102, 105, 106; Mumbai 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 102–5, 106–7 indigenous knowledge 77–78 indirect appropriation 56, 57–58 industrialization 54, 58, 60, 61, 135–36, 169 information technologies 6–7 infrastructural violence 133, 134 institutional critique 205–6, 209–10 Invisible Committee 189, 198, 200 Italy 193, 196–97; see also Campania, Italy James, C.L.R. 122–23 Kaika, Maria 16–17, 36, 171, 176, 262, 264 Keil, Roger 15, 260 knowledge 9–10, 77–78, 153 Koch, David H. 211–12, 214, 215–16 labour 13, 49, 50–52, 55, 56, 63 labour time 49, 50–51, 52, 53, 57, 58 land grabs 170 Lawhon, Mary 119, 151–52, 171 Lefebvre, Henri 175, 176–77, 246 Loftus, Alex 151 McKittrick, Katherine 116, 117, 124 Mantri Techzone, Bangalore, India 97–102, 106 Marx, Karl 28, 53, 54, 59, 63, 71, 111, 246, 257; emancipation 112, 124; value 49, 51, 55, 61 Marxian political economy 13, 48, 55, 63 Mbale, Uganda 14–15, 132, 139–42 Mbembe, Achille 9, 37 Merrifield, Andy 16, 172, 175, 264 mili-tents 208–9 modernity 10, 28–29, 30, 74, 239, 255 money 16, 61, 224–26, 264 Monte-Mor, Roberto Luis 173, 174 Moore, Jason W. 13, 91, 136, 167, 169, 241, 262 movements 244–45, 246 multi-vocality 148, 158, 159, 161, 260

Mumbai, India 92, 93, 95, 96, 97; BandraKurla Complex 97, 102–5, 106–7 Myers, Garth 15, 260 Naples, Campania, Italy 15, 184, 185–87, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194–95, 260 National Health Service (NHS), Britain see NHS Natural History Museum, The (Not An Alternative) 16, 25, 206–7, 211, 212–15, 216–20 natural history museums 16, 205–6, 211, 213, 214–16, 217, 220 natural resources 13, 48, 54, 59–60 nature 13, 28, 29, 30, 32, 35, 40, 41–42, 48, 256–57; conquering 27, 239–40, 243–44; flexible governance 93, 99, 101; labour 49, 50–52, 55, 56, 63; urbanization of 7, 12, 138, 160, 171 necropolitics 37 Negri, Antonio 78–79, 194 neoliberalization 33, 175 new cosmology 27, 31–32, 34 Neyrat, Frédéric 29, 35, 36, 38 NHS (National Health Service), Britain 230 Nicaragua 94 Nocturnal Council 233, 234 Norway 235–36 Not An Alternative (art collective) 16, 207, 208, 209–11, 261, 264 NoTav movement 188–89 obscenity 73–74, 81, 82 Occupy movement 208, 209 O’Neil, Bruce 133, 134 Parenti, Christian 131, 206 performative interruptions 70, 73, 74–82, 83, 260 Pieterse, Edgar 133, 148, 150, 152, 160, 161 Pikine, Dakar, Senegal 148, 153–59, 160 Planetary Stewardship 31 planetary urbanization 6, 7, 9, 12–13, 167, 174, 178 Planned Shrinkage 227–28 plantation futures 116, 117, 123, 124, 262–63 Platform for Mortgage-Affected people (PAH), Spain 244–45, 246 Plato 233, 234 Poland 239, 243–44 Polanyi, Karl 224 the political 12, 13, 16, 26, 42, 70, 79–81, 257, 258, 259–61, 265

Index  271

political activism 3, 5, 17 political ecology 11, 17–18, 153, 167, 174, 176, 177, 264–65 political economy 48–49, 56; Marxian 13, 48, 55, 63 political imaginaries 6, 15, 174, 175 politically performative theory 17, 257–59, 264 politicization 11, 13, 27, 133, 144, 255–56, 258, 259–62, 263, 264 politics 8, 12, 26, 79, 80–81, 205, 256–57, 260, 265 Pollin, Robert 228–29 postcolonial theory 13–14, 69, 70, 73, 82, 83 Poulantzas, Nicos 236 Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) 230–31 production 49, 50, 51 productivity 52, 53, 54–55, 58, 60 professional representation 16, 224, 226–27 professionals 16, 223–24, 226–27, 229–30, 236, 247 profit, rate of 52, 53, 54–55, 62, 63 public-public partnerships 235–36 public services 16, 226, 228, 230–32, 234, 235–36 Purdy, Jedidiah 92 racial capitalism 10, 14–15, 111–13, 115–18, 122, 123–24, 133, 142, 262–63 racial development, uneven 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125 radical imaginaries, alternative 242, 243, 247–48, 249, 256, 264 radical incrementalism 148, 152, 160, 161 Rancière, Jacques 26, 74, 79, 80, 81, 256 RAND Institute 227–28 Ranganathan, Malini 14, 97, 98, 100, 101, 260, 263 Reinhart, Carmen 228, 229 relationality 39, 40, 261 relational ontologies 34–35, 39; symmetrical 8, 27, 29–31, 32–33, 40 relative surplus value 52, 53 representation 16, 115, 208, 223, 224; see also money; professional representation representative governance 16, 224, 229–31, 234, 236 resilience 31, 33, 39 Robinson, Cedric 112–13, 118, 124, 133 Robinson, Jennifer 161 Rodgers, Dennis 133, 134 Rogoff, Kenneth 228, 229 rogue sensibilities 15, 150, 160

rogue urbanisms 133, 150–51, 156 Romania 244, 246 Roy, Ananya 95–96, 99, 116–17, 119 Saint-Louis, Senegal 14, 132, 134–36, 142 science 33, 76–77, 78 Scrutineers 233 separation 27, 39–40, 261 Seveso, Italy 196–97 Shachtman, Max 117 shadow citizenry 16, 232–34, 264 Silver, Jonathan D. 14–15, 119, 151, 152, 171, 263 Simone, AbdouMaliq 14, 150 slavery 37, 111, 113, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124 Smith, Neil 115, 117, 124 socio-ecological order 3, 37 socio-ecological transformation 3, 5, 28, 246, 255 socio-ecological violence 15, 131, 133, 134, 142, 143–44; Accra 136, 138, 139; Mbale 139; Saint-Louis 134, 135, 136 socio-environmental change 7, 125, 243, 247, 249 socionatural relations see new cosmology South Africa 10–11, 151, 152, 263 Southern theory 119 Spain 244–45, 246 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 78 Starr, Roger 227, 228 Stoermer, Eugene F. 76–77 subaltern 14, 72, 76, 79, 116, 192–93, 194, 260 subaltern experiences 69, 70, 82, 83 subaltern urbanism 116–17 subjectification 17, 193, 248 suburbanization 15, 166–68, 169–72, 177, 260 suburban spaces 15, 171–72, 173, 176–77, 178, 260 suffocation 14, 131, 132, 142, 143, 144, 263 surplus value 49, 51–53, 57, 61–62, 63, 262 sustainability 10, 11, 36, 37, 39, 149, 169, 243 Swyngedouw, Erik 114, 123, 151, 161, 171, 176, 205 symmetrical relational ontologies 8, 27, 29–31, 32–33, 40 Taylor, Alan J.P. 121, 122 technological innovation 53, 58 thanato-politics 37, 38 toxic waste 185, 193, 196, 260 true uncertainty 33, 34

272 Index

underproduction 63 United Kingdom see Britain UPE (urban political ecology) 4–5, 8–12, 17, 114–16, 124–25, 132–33, 143, 144, 151, 161, 165–66, 171–72, 177–78, 265–66 urban Africa 15, 131–32, 133, 134, 142, 143, 148, 149, 153, 160, 263 urban carbon governance 134, 139 urban informality 93, 95–96, 97 urbanism 118, 166, 175 urbanization 3–8, 13, 26, 116, 135, 138, 142–44, 160–61, 166, 168–71, 173, 176, 239 urban natures 14, 96, 101, 106, 116, 118, 120, 124 urban spaces 14, 115, 167, 169, 173–75 US (United States) 60–61, 112–13, 115, 119, 120–22, 263; slavery 111, 113, 117, 120, 121

value 16, 49–50, 61, 224–26, 264 value theory 48–49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 61, 64 Wade, Richard C. 117–18 Walker, Richard 13, 262 waste management 15, 54; Campania 193, 194, 195, 196; e-waste 7; Mbale 132, 139–42; Naples 184, 185, 186, 189, 191, 193, 198; toxic waste 185, 193, 196, 260 Wedel, Janine R. 94, 95 Wenzel, Jennifer 131 West Africa 130–31 wetland grabs 93, 97, 263; Bandra-Kurla Complex 97, 102–5, 106–7; Mantri Techzone 97–102, 106 white supremacy 114, 115, 118, 121 world order 9, 11 Wu Ming collective 189, 190 Young, Robert 76, 82