Reviewed by Christopher Knoll (Cultural Studies), Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

____________________________

[…] to think of space as a whole means to keep it open to everybody. (Stanek: 137)

Ɫukacz Stanek’s book on the French urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre is a detailed, well-researched and balanced account of both Lefebvre’s intellectual biography and the development of his conceptual frameworks.

From agrarian to urban space

Stanek stresses how Lefebvre’s early intellectual interests in agrarian societies [e.g. his study of a Pyrenean village] were methodologically shaped by a combination of the Annales school and dialectical materialism, which lead him to an early insight that neither the production of territory and the production of community, nor mental concepts of spatial planning and the actual way of ‘living space out’, could be separated analytically.

After having written his PhD and becoming professor in Paris, Lefebvre’s focus switched from agrarian planning policies to urban spatial planning, partly because in the early 60s, the authorities of the USSR, Algeria and Cuba denied Lefebvre to carry out empirical research on their agrarian policies.

(Urban) Space as concrete abstraction

During this formative period, Lefebvre developed his concept of space as concrete (’lived’) abstraction, a concept which should critically surpass and dialectically overcome (aufheben) central state urban planning as well as dismantle notions of space and housing that are perceived by Postfordist or Keynesian capitalism as mere reified objects of consumption.

On a theoretical level, this lead to Lefebvre’s critique of both functionalism and structuralism – both, according to Lefebvre, operating as closed, largely unalterable and mentally preconceived systems, either of ‘needs’ for which there are allotments of preconceived ’satisfactions’ (functionalism), or else of preconceived sets of ’signification processes of differentiational signs’ which can be ‘consumed’ (structuralism) – as both symptom and tool of a bureaucratic society.

As Stanek stresses, Lefebvre’s criticism aims at central planning’s ensuing depoliticization, fragmentation and segregation of ‘possible communities’, in other words, the very denial of every citizen’s right to the city as ongoing communal project of co-habitation (Lefebvre writes extensively about the Paris Commune as an attempt at collectivizing the ‘equal right’ to the city for all citizens).

He thus wanted to dismantle ‘Cartesian’-masterplan notions of l’espace conçu (expert knowledges that mentally pre-conceive space for the consumer to live in) in opposing them to notions of space as perceived – l’espace perçu (by the consumers or users), and via open discourse of their mutual incongruencies come to a dialectical understanding of what might be ‘fully lived’ urban spaces of the future – l’espace(s) vécu(s), without risking systemic closures (Lefebvre’s closeness to Derridean and Deleuzian poststructuralism seems evident here).

http://spyvibe.blogspot.com/2009/08/jacques-tati-playtime.html

Lived spaces as concrete utopias

The advantages of Stanek’s book become quickly become clear: He not only embeds Lefebvre’s thinking in the larger context of postwar French thought (Lefebvre’s ongoing discussions with
structuralism, situationism, poststructuralism), but also reproduces, by way of analogy, Lefebvre’s larger dialectic of the production of space in the built-up of the book itself, thus covering the triad of Lefebvre’s immense productiveness in (open) theory, his public interventions by publicly debating and commenting on the consequences of concrete architectural planning procedures both in the present and in history (e.g. the Nanterre campus as functionalist misère playing a major role in declenching the 68′ student revolt, the IKEA -style modularized consumptive petit-bourgeois differentiation à la Bourdieu of the habitat pavillonaire, the segregationist urban planning policies leading to the peripheries of grands ensembles and HLMs; the segregationist policies of a Hausmann in the 1850s indirectly leading to the claims for a right to the city of the Paris Commune) and Lefebvre’s participation in ‘utopian projects’, meaning his co-participation in ‘utopian’ urban planning design such as Ricardo Bofill’s ‘city in space’ or Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon (and thereby demonstrating his own attempt at a praxis of an ‘Aufhebung’ of divisions of labor as regards architectural planning) as well as his analyses of historical utopian planning (e.g. his positive reevaluation of Fourier’s phalanstères as an historical architectural dream enhancing communal solidarity).

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/02/tati-macdonald/

CC: http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/02/tati-macdonald/ [2011-9-13]

The city as œuvre: toward an architecture of communal solidarity

All the way throughout the book, Stanek thus stresses Lefebvre’s search for an urban architecture which would replace social isolationism and antagonism by opening up to possible spaces of solidarity and association. Stanek shows a Lefebvre’s whose take on ’spaces as always unfinished œuvres in process’, in which the individual (Hegel’s concrete universal) can come into discourse with the communal collective and in this way overcoming segregations of work-space and spaces of leisure, remained true to his own humanist marxist version of fighting for an equal right to the city for all its inhabitants.

“]

CC: ricardobofill.com (City in Space) [2011-13-09

It is therefore logical that Stanek concludes, in his afterword, with an outline of a late and unpublished manuscript of Lefebvre’s with the title ‘Toward an Architecture of Jouissance’, in which he departs from both individual and social bodies (still reminscent of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology trying to surpass Cartesian mentalisms) countering their own fragmentation in the division of labor and their identification with ’spectacular images’ referring to other images (Baudrillard’s concept of a mere simulation of the ‘real’ in consumption) in order to envisage a broadened concept of architecture as a ’spatial pedagogy’ of the body and its multifarious rythms: an architecture of jouissance as a prerequisite for an universal formation of the senses.

Further reading:

Davis, Mike (2002). Dead cities and other tales. New York: New Press.
Davis, Mike (2000). Magical urbanism: Latinos reinvent the US city. London: Verso.
Harvey, David (2003). Paris, capital of modernity. New York: Routledge.
Lefebvre, Henri (1996). Writings on cities. Oxford: Blackwell.

Program

Saturday 21st January 2012

11.15-1.00pm ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE USED CLOTHING TRADE
Chair: Professor Nicky Gregson, Durham University
‘
Between A and B: Reprocessing Western second-hand clothing for global markets.’
Julie Botticello (Research Associate, SOAS)

‘The World of Calamity Clothing in Mozambique.’
Andrew Brooks (Geography, King’s College London)

‘The making of Unravel.’
Meghna Gupta (Independent filmmaker)

‘Oxfam Frip Ethique – A social enterprise solution.’
Sarah Farquhar (Head of Retail Brand, Oxfam)

2.00-4.00 pm NEW MODELS: RECYCLING, UPCYCLING AND CLOSING THE LOOP
Chair: Lucy Siegle, Journalist & Broadcaster

‘Fashion and the Community; developing community resources for sustainable fashion and recycling.’
Lizzie Harrison (Founder/Antiform and ReMade in Leeds)

‘The potential of the fashion designer to reduce consumer’s textiles waste.’
Jade Whitson-Smith (University of Leeds)

‘A sneak look behind the curtains of a textile merchant.’
Ross Barry (LMB Business Development Manager)

‘Design for Recycling; closing the loop for textiles.’
Kate Goldsworthy (Textile Futures Research Centre, Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design)

‘Closed Loop or Wear Nothing.’
Cyndi Rhoades (CEO, Worn Again)

The talks will be open to the public on a first come,first served basis. The exhibition opens at 11am
– please arrive promptly to ensure a place.

Please contact Lucy Norris for more information
at lucy.norris [at] ucl.ac.uk
Bargehouse
Oxo Tower Wharf
Bargehouse Street
South Bank
London SE1 9PH

Wednesday, November 09, 2011, from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM, Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street, Room 119

Community Development Graduate Collaborative Program Seminar Series

What does it mean to do community-driven research?   This seemingly innocuous question is overlain with conflicting politics, tensions and ethics along with the potential for social change that attracts many activist-scholars to this form of research in the first place. During this seminar, I will attempt to conceptualize a reflexive assessment of praxis by drawing on five years of participatory action research with community groups, organizations and residents in the inner suburban region of Southeast Scarborough.

My entry to this community, and to this talk, begins with a failed struggle to prevent the demolition and displacement of public space through policy-supported demolition of a community mall. But next I tell the story of how this loss has segued into a grassroots attempt to re-spatialize the barriers of inequality between city and inner suburbs in response to processes of gentrification and suburban decline. With an emphasis on change, I focus on the imbrications between politics, research and activism through exploration of three key questions: How do we, as researchers, maintain long-term commitment to an evolving community development project? How do we build and maintain effective relationships with communities that support residents as experts? How do we deal with struggles, conflict and transition? Through reflection on shared struggles, successes and failures over the course of a long-term community development project, I hope to spark discussion over how we can best position ourselves and evaluate our work as scholar-activists.Vanessa Parlette is a doctoral student in urban geography at the University of Toronto. She has been involved in participatory planning and community projects in Southeast Scarborough for the last five years and has drawn on these experiences to question and contest ongoing processes of inequality that perpetuate the racialization and segregation of poverty in Toronto’s inner suburbs.

via Univ. of Toronto Cities Centre.

Reviewed by Catherine Scheelar, University of Alberta.

In Sound, Space, and the City, anthropologist Marina Peterson explores the process of center-making in Los Angeles through multicultural performance in public space. Positing her work as an ‘anthropology of the center’, of the city rather than in the city, she traces how meaning is made in and around public performances. Based on ethnographic research from 2001 to 2003, her study observes embodied musical practices that constitute the imagining and making of a multicultural city. A free concert series, Grand Performances is situated in the contexts of historical and contemporary urban planning, artistic programming, and the city as lived and imagined.

Acknowledging that ideas of the social sciences seep into everyday life, she challenges the situatedness of disciplinary knowledge and the locations in which anthropological theory has been developed and applied. Grand Performances came into being as a multicultural arts and music project including ethnicity (but excluding class and political affiliations) for the construction of a general, neutral ‘public’, an audience as both a representation and a synecdoche of the city. She draws links between international performance and downtown development, exploring the politics of multiculturalism as part of wider social and political frameworks enacted on municipal, state, and national levels. In recounting her personal experiences of working in the organization and performing onstage with the DaKAH hip hop orchestra, she uses personal narratives and sensual descriptions of experiencing California Plaza.

The concerts are representations of a city imagined and made in practice, as Los Angeles has been perceived as a city lacking real civic life and a central space where people can come together as a public. The history of the space highlights the dynamics of gentrification; the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project removed unruly bodies, replacing particular people with a general public, both activating and cleansing the urban space. California Plaza now exists as private property on public land, the area’s former blight covered with modern sculptures. With ethnicized neighbourhoods surrounding it, the purported neutrality of downtown is brought into being through practice which supports diversity as a normative feature of city. As a civic institution, Grand Performances creates audience members as civic subjects as spaces of belonging are created through inclusion and exclusion. Peterson cites Lefebvre in discussing the urban public as both sonic and spatial processes of the city, as social and musical rhythms are heard and felt in the body.

Are the arts integral to urban growth in the twentieth century? Pederson places Grand Performances in the context of historical American debates about art as an educational medium for the public good and worthy of state support. In analyzing the practice of centre-making through the arts, she acknowledges the imagined public of the city, the interests of the corporate plaza, and the reality of government grant guidelines. Defining the free concerts as nonprofits for the education of the public good shapes meanings of art through intersections of programming, funding, and marketing. Performances are always planned, wavering between a public openness and fear of the public. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is invoked to discuss the disciplining of bodies, construction of consensus, and exclusion of class necessary for a multicultural audience watching a performance of ethnicity. Political performances are also generally excluded for divisive potentialities in the civic space of consensus.

The global city is sounded through media with translocal media spaces acting as motivators of activities, allowing ethnic media to market international programming. The city is in motion, as people and sounds circulate within and between neighbourhoods. Neighbourhood names act as code for social groups in an ethnicized geography, and the success or failure of performances is largely based on the range of ethnic diversity in the audience.

In looking at the tenents of democracy such as representation, recognition, and participation, Peterson explores the relationship between performance and politics, as the neoliberal trope of diversity shows openness to difference, helping to alleviate violence and tensions. While music is a medium for belonging, signifying race, politics, age, etc., cosmopolitanism allows for shifting affiliations in identity-in-process. Modernist notions of neutrality allow for multiple interpretations and claims to higher abstractions. Peterson devotes much space to hip hop orchestra DaKAH, which she purports exists as a musical and social mixture, embodying Los Angeles through the diversity of its members. She asserts that the musical group fosters intergenerational understanding through combining hip hop and orchestra. Civic performance aims to foster spatial and social proximity through music. Genre is negotiatied over musical and social boundaries, with identification understood as mobile processes of becoming.

In a movement from the self to the collective, an audience is constituted through an embodied experience of listening and dancing together, fulfilling urban ideals of diversity through affective, participatiory, and sensory channels. Through sound engineering, sonic and spatial intimacy and proximity are felt in the body. Durkheim’s theory of ritual designates the body as the subjective site where experience generates a collective. Peterson asserts that utopic versions of society are drawn from and necessary for the social; the ideal society is not outside of society but rather already a part of it. Foucault is mentioned in the discussion of the individual body as the locus of aspirations, through which beliefs must be continually performed in order to sustain social beliefs. At Grand Performances, a dancing audience is a sign of approval, as individuals engage in the public performance of a private, affective response.

In concise and accessible language, Peterson successfully highlights parallels between actual multicultural performances and the ideal global city. While she briefly mentions that Grand Performance’s events are outside of everyday life and time, an ideal, ephemeral state counter to the norm, she makes no mention of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s anthropological theories of liminality. Overall though, this work is beneficial to both students and scholars interested in social relations and diversity, public space, urban revitalization, civic life, privatization, suburbanization, and economic and cultural globalization.

- Catherine Scheelar

Franck argues for a new urbanism that focuses on the middle ground of sustainable, compact neighbourhoods rather than focusing only on architecture as individual green buildings, or the city at an metropolitan scale.  I’ve heard this urban commons recently called the “middle landscape”, not detached sprawl, not the hyper-urban central business district but  livable, mid-scaled sets of buildings that demand less energy while remaining functional and convivial.  These example of Asian cities, however, suggests that as the planet moves toward an uban population of around 4.5 billion, it will be in the style and density of cities such as Jakarta, Hong Kong and Shanghai rather than the European ideal of Parisian cityscapes of 6 to 8 storeys.

– Rob

Review Essay by Jim Morrow

Ecological Urbanism is, literally and figuratively, a thick text that merges traditional academic articles with media and design to lay-out the foundation for a new, ecologic approach to urban planning. Its purpose, as the book’s back cover promises, is to draw-up “an imaginative and practical method for addressing existing as well as new cities.”

In many previous texts on urbanism and environmental matters, the city is treated as an unremediable site of critique. It’s seen as an environment that is a ‘blight’, ‘decayed’ or ‘ruined’. And this style of critique has seemingly become a default method in most discussions of urban ecology. And beyond being bleak and depressing, such discussions rarely wander from an apocalyptic narrative that views ecology as a material object – like a verdant place set apart from the machinic life of humanity – when it is, instead, a construct of relations, whether it be human or plant or toxin.

Fourier Phalanastère (Thanks to George Mason Univ.)

Ecological Urbanism has a unique view of the city. Rather than being built on critique, it tries to be conceptual and focus on applications that promote a “new ethics and aesthetics of the urban.” The text’s numerous entries aim to re-purpose ‘design practise’ – a term meant to bring together multiple disciplinary fields that work on the urban, namely architecture, landscape design, planning, and transport – as a functional avant-garde whose aesthetic values can transform the life of a city.

But there are several limits to Ecological Urbanism’s “cross-disciplinary and collaborative” method of blending high academic and aesthetic. The most noticeable limit is the text itself, which often comes-off as a mash-up that lacks coherent purpose. For example, the book includes an entry by Rem Koolhaas, who goes the full Al Gore and mails-in a PowerPoint that has text and visuals that do not reproduce well outside of their native habitat of the lecture hall. Additionally, in trying to balance moral imperative, the aesthetic, and the applied – which may be the design equivalent of Lacan’s psychoanalytic order – the text’s entries read and view as though they are holding-back, unsure of whether they want to create a “future city” or redesign what’s already been built. And this may be a premonition of a common problem if ecological urbanism, the design practise, was to spread off its pages and into the streets.

1. Utopia

Given the growing impossibility of imagining a more sustainable city, it is best to start with a topic Ecological Urbanism did not discuss: Utopia. It’s not that they were wrong to focus on realistic applications, instead it’s that they did not establish an imaginary on which the contributors could use the abstract to point-out what is possible.

By definition, utopia means ‘good place’ or ‘no place’. It is what Henri Lefebvre calls a “virtual object” that’s built “on new foundations, on another scale and in other conditions, in another city”. It’s an imaginary, a dreamscape that’s different from the “old city” and reflects a given historical period’s swank ideas and aspirations, as well as technologies.

In Plato’s Republic, and later More’s Utopia – and to some extent Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’ Leviathan or Locke’s Second Treatise – the utopian imaginary was about the just city and social control. Design and planning were not essential. Rather, morals and laws constituted utopia, with layout being of little concern or consequence.

In the early 19th century, Charles Fourier made designs for a living utopia. His work is significant because it had architecture – it was a significant step in making a virtual ‘no place’ real. According to his sketches, communities would be constructed around Phalanstères that resembled industrial-scale Parisian arcades and would be models of prosperity and social harmony.

In the first half of the 20th century, Le Corbusier drew-up plans for a new Greater Paris. According to his designs, the city would be an ecology of concrete and steel built for speed and technology. In fact, in his models, people are largely absent from the industrial landscape – they’re often represented as small ovals behind the wheel of a speeding car – almost like they’re an afterthought or accessory to the pure, efficient function of technology.

Like Le Corbusier, Albert Speer made plans – however dark and disturbed – for a Nazi utopia, Germania. But unlike Le Corbusier, speed and technology were not the emphasis of Speer’s designs. Instead, his utopia was a monument to the Triumph of the Will and National Socialism: There was no populace present in his models, only structures that garrisoned the Party’s apparatus.

In the second half of the 20th century, with the exception of a few inverse-Caligulan plans to bring Earth to the Moon, utopia became more manageable and focused on individual aspirations. Large-scale schemes were replaced by plans that were self-contained and focused on interior design. For example, in the UK, sections of cities were cleared for council estates or block flats – resembling individual components of Le Corbusier’s architecture – that were part of larger conurbations. Or in the United States, the imaginary became suburban tracts with nostalgic or sylvan names, like ‘Reunion’ or ‘Woodland Hollow’. Likewise, utopia represented an individual aspiration that could be personalised to best serve specific tastes and interests.

At the beginning of the 21st century, utopia continued to reduce in scale to the point that it was designed around single serving, one-off buildings and interior spaces. Instead of redefining everyday life, it is now the facade of the old city; its imaginary replaced by a desire for cultured indulgence.

2. Scale

In the meantime, as utopia has been scaled-down and designed around Brasnäs flatwoven area rugs and granite counter-tops, it has become difficult for architects and planners to imagine a different city. Likewise, if additional matters of concern, like environmental damage and pollution – not to mention a moral imperative – are taken into consideration, the idea of designing a new city seems daft.

Bruno Latour, in his short entry in Ecological Urbanism, warns against getting “lost in a jungle of dreams that never added up to much”. He’s right. But scale is the problem that confronts design practise. The jungle has become overgrown with baroque remnants of failed utopian dreams, not to mention an increasingly toxic environment, that anything short of clear-cut makes it impossible to get a bearing and begin the process of “re-engineering the imagination”.

Sustainable design is limited by scale. As Mohsen Mostafavi says, “LEED certification [the American design standard for sustainable construction] deals with the architectural object, and not with the larger infrastructure of the territory of our cities and towns”. Solid design and construction can aspire to take a building off a national grid that is powered by the worst environmental practises imaginable, yet the grid remains present or expands because urbanisation carries-on. Ecology, therefore, is an urban problem; and design practise has to work on a larger scale than a ‘green’ shed at the allotment.

Laying-out and planning on a large-scale requires letting-go of the architectural object as the purpose of design. And this is a issue handled well by Ecological Urbanism’s contributors. For example, Charles Waldheim notes that a city is not a “collection of objects.” He says the city is, instead, a “continuous system of relational forces and flows”. However, in adapting to an ecologic scale and embracing abstract concepts, like ‘complex relations’, over objects, designers have to also accept root instability – as flows and relations have to be constantly negotiated, unlike objects which have to be stable to be built – which creates added tension between what’s imagined and aesthetic application. Put another way, a change in scale means that design practise has to create a living environment, as opposed to built.

3. Ecology

It’s common to assume that ecology is positive, that it is harmonious and defined by some notion of equilibrium. But such assumptions are misleading. Ecology is qualitative: It is the organisation of a community that comes-of dynamics and relations of different populations, as well as variations in environmental disturbance and resilience. There is no equilibrium, no utopian stability or established order. Likewise, just as there are multiple species and different environmental niches, there are multiple ecologies composed of various and constantly changing relations. As Gregory Bateson points-out “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds…” And it should be added that there’s an ecology of living rooms and flat screen televisions, as there was an ecology of Eichmanns in Speer’s Nazi utopia.

The problem with Ecological Urbanism and its focus on the aesthetics of ecology is that design practise does not inhabit the city; it only creates the form and imaginary of an urban environment. To paraphrase Guattari, within the built environment, the life of a city – it’s other ecologies – reside in its mental and social ‘registers’. And, admittedly, in the case of a text as ambitious as Ecological Urbanism, the task of documenting added ecologies would take multiple, thicker volumes.

By itself, the aethetics and construction of a city are not an environmental problem. It is a symptom of larger ecological disturbances in the life of a city. Likewise, the issue of scale remains; design and planning do not work on a scale that can change the mental and social life of the city, let alone infrastructure. At best, design practice can modify urban form and influence a population’s everyday life – and in Ecological Urbanism, there are some good examples, like pop-up parks, floating gardens, and well thought-out transit solutions. But an ecological urbanism – which is utopic, as it currently exists ‘no place’ – cannot be built without total reorganisation of mental and social ecologies: Everyday life, people’s sensibilities, their habits, their values and culture have to change for the city to change.

For there to be an ecological urbanism, ideas of equilibrium have to go the way of the design object. Instead, it has to address earlier utopian questions of the just city or the political consititution of public space, which means embracing designs that are provisory and capable of adapting to conflicting and constantly changing conditions. Consequently, ecological urbanism is an inherently unstable or agonistic habitus: It has to be built for different, nuanced and dissensual styles of life. It also has to be laid-out in a way that allows relations between constitutients of the urban environment to not be pre-fabricated – which is still a problem of scale, as it implies a multitude of one-off designs. Though, as previously noted, this is not necessarily a design matter, as much as it is a problem with the ecology of living rooms and malls, where relations are habituated and commodified.

4. Concluding Remarks

With ecological urbanism there is matter of moral imperative and aesthetic value: A more ecological city must remediate environmental damage and improve the conditions of everyday life. But a city founded on moral imperative has a problem of being a new city built to solve the aesthetic and particular failures of the old city. This, in turn, implies that the city is a dialectic process, which also means that the city remains a staid built object, and not a lived environment.

For there to be an ecologic city, even if it’s an utopian imaginary, the design object has to be supplanted by a more vitalist imaginary – this is not to say it’s the only option, there are others, but this specific idea is played-with most often in Ecological Urbanism. However, a vitalist city has a multitude of problems and absurdities, the most significant being that it can’t be planned. As Bergson explains, the future is a contingency of unknown possibilities, and laying-out a plan would mean setting a foundation that cannot carry the capacity of future circumstance, which is problem of the contemporary city. Also, in becoming vitalist, design practise has to create space – which itself is oxymoronic – for what Guy Debord called dérive or drift, “for sudden changes in ambiance… within the space of a few metres”, which can give any city a certain uneven quality that already exists in places like Kinshasa or Jakarta. And in choosing vitalism, there also has to be cultural acceptance of a grittiness or carnivalesque that is never present in any urban plan, such as movements of passion or feverish sleeplessness.

Also, the matter of infrastructure remains. Design practise can make a difference in the life of a city. But there can be no significant change in the ecologies of the city, including the mental and social, without total reorganisation of infrastructure. Specifically, infrastructure is a mixed creation or hybrid, it is both an object that has designed material form, but is also vital, as it provides myriad forces and flows that make possible city life. Infrastructure is, therefore, the logical transitional foundation between the old and new city. Utility objects like the energy grid, highways, communications facilities, water supply and waste-water services can be redesigned to alter the nature of goods, services, markets, and forms of care, like education or health care.

Finally, Ecological Urbanism proposes is an aesthetic solution to a political problem. This is not necessarily an urgent matter of concern, but it is akin to using form to manipulate function, and in some ways is technocratic and managerial. And in a risk society, technocratic measures are not necessarily a new or novel solution to old problems. Moreover, as has been painfully learned multiple times, the careful technical calculations of design design can be easily upset by externalities like risk assessment, market forces or even political will, leading to multiple revisions and compromise of the imaginary.

- Jim Morrow

Reviewed by Randi Nixon, University of Alberta (Canada).

Affect has been used in increasingly diffuse ways in various academic discourses; cultural studies, feminist theory, postcolonial theory and several other theoretical strains interested in the social realm have been exploring the possibilities and implications of theorizing affect. However, while affect indeed possesses great theoretical possibilities, elaboration into exactly how the term can be put to work as an analytical tool in theorizing social and political phenomena has largely been absent from the discussion. In Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, John Protevi attempts to ground affect by developing the concept using a variety of theoretical resources. In doing so, he adds insight into how affect can be used to delve deeper into understanding the interconnectedness of the social, the political, the physiological, and the personal.

An impressive and somewhat daunting theoretical complexity is established early on in the book. The first part “A Concept of Bodies Politic” is dedicated to carefully defining and clarifying his concepts. Part II “Bodies Politic as Organisms” further situates his analysis within a long philosophical history by putting Deleuze’s assertion, “the organism is the judgment of God” into a metatheoretical conversation with the work of Aristotle and Kant. The last section of the book “Love, Rage, and Fear” is where the reader finally begins to see the application and relevance of his theoretico-philosophical concepts.

Suffragettes Vote, New York 1917 (thanks to joshiejuice.com).

Protevi bases his analysis around four key concepts which he continuously weaves throughout his case studies: affective cognition, bodies politic, political cognition and political affect. The term affect has many usages; however, in good Deleuzian faith, Protevi follows Spinoza and stresses the ecosocial embeddedness of affect by defining it as a “body’s ability to act and be acted upon”, both in the sense of physiological change or being affected by an encounter with an object, as well as a “felt change in the power of the body” (49). Drawing from work in affective neuroscience, Protevi utilizes the term “affective cognition” to stress that affect does not work alone, but constitutes bodies politic, and is thus inherently political and wrapped up in relations of power (50). The term “bodies politic” means to capture the emergent, embodied and embedded character of both subjects and other systems; in other words, it encompasses how systems (including subjects) are simultaneously produced, bypassed and surpassed in the workings of somatic and social systems (33). While the concept of the “bodies politic” conceptualizes systems (individual, social or other) as tending toward stereotyped behaviour patterns, Protevi stresses the openness of these systems, and their mutual capacity to break and develop new patterns of behaviour. We see this best illustrated in his discussion of the bodies politic Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (the Columbine shooters) created, which enabled them to maintain their subjectivities throughout the act of killing (158).

Through utilizing “political cognition” the author can to refer to the ways in which affective cognitions of individuals are triggered and shaped through politically shaped categories (ie. race, class, gender), reiterating the complex interconnections that exist between subjects, groups and politics (33). Lastly, the term “political affect” stresses the historically and socially embedded aspect of affective cognition, through acknowledgment that individual bodies politic understand situations through collective political categories, thereby connecting the sense-making of both the individual and larger social networks (35). Protevi maintains the sheer complexity of events such as Hurricane Katrina and takes nothing for granted; the elements (sun, wind, water), history (histories of slave revolt and racial tensions), politics (how the state and media responded and triggered these racial fears), and physiology (how both the people of Lousiana and the rest of the nation affectively responded) all impacted the events that led up to and took place after the hurricane.

Protevi draws on several disciplines to ground his cases. While this may result in what some would consider metatheoretical incoherence, the very nature of his problematic necessitates the usage of several ways of knowing as conceptualized by various disciplines. What is noteworthy about this work is the authors’ ontological standpoint, constructed by altering Deleuze’s thermodynamic register in order to make it compatible with complexity theory (11). His Deleuzian materialism is evident in his insistence on open systems, processes and social practice. The poststructural approach to subjectivity indicates that he is cognizant of the ways that embodied subjects are historically formed through discourse, which indicates that he does not believe that there is an ultimate “truth” within or about the subject. His focus on unconscious affective processes (within the subject, group and polity) further indicates his resistance to perspectives that equate experience/emotion with Truth.

By carefully distinguishing affective cognition and political affect from emotion, he exposes the ways that the social and discursive are implicated in the constitution of our thoughts and feelings. That being said, this does not mean that we are completely predetermined (both complexity theory and Deleuze stress the importance of “the new”, “becoming” and “lines of flight” specifically to avoid this kind of reductionism), but that our personal “truths” are in part a function of complex discursive, historical, political and physiological formations.

The book carries an urgency, which is clearly indicated by the case studies examined; choosing to discuss group affective cognition through the Columbine High School shooting and civil affective cognition using Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that for Protevi, the implications of being unaware of the workings of affect can have devastating human consequences. Reference to Fransisco Varela’s “Reflections on the Chilean Civil War” reiterate the point that without the possibility of emergence or the capacity for mutual recognition, many lives can be lost in horrific ways (44). In order to avoid such circumstances, Protevi asserts that adopting “relativistic fallibility” is vital. The notion of “relativistic fallibility” delineates the ability to maintain one’s perspectives while at the same time acknowledging that they are only one of a multitude, are not the Truth, and ultimately have the capacity to be undone. Protevi states that “we have to beware of the tendency toward fixation, especially when we are being forced into stereotyped roles that make possible the regulation and reproduction of unjust social dynamics” (45). Political affect then, is intimately tied up with ethics. Thus, asking how power is tied up in our collective affects may illuminate several aspects of how our social world is organized, and how appalling inequalities can be justified and maintained.

Political Affect is an ambitious work that does not compromise its complexity in an effort to increase readership. Protevi puts Deleuze to work with relevancy and vigour rarely seen by tending to the multiplicity of forces that simultaneously play a role in actualizing events (for example, in his analysis of Hurricane Katrina, not only does he examine the role played by racial triggers and the mainstream media, but also the forces of the sun, river, man-made levees, and the history of Haitian slave revolts). For those interested in Deleuze, affect, or the ways bodies are implicated in and connected to several seemingly disconnected forces, this book is a must read. While the multidisciplinary focus of the book works to strengthen the analytical potency, it could also potentially alienate readers first approaching such topics. However, for the reader looking for depth and a challenge, this book is worth the work.

- Randi

I am writing a paper at the moment where I want to link the practice of home making to thge German notion of Heimat. The first version of this paper will be presented as a lecture at the next European Sociology Degree Summer School in Dresden (12-23 September 2010). The following is uis the abstract:

Being at home is often thought to be possible without having a home. Homeless people can feel at home somewhere too, but I want to argue that today that we should be less focused on being and more on having. This is because I want us to be mindful of the properties of being at home, which are not modalities of being but modalities of having. Moreover, I want to develop the claim that the English word for Eigen, which we tend to be the core of identity: das Eigene, which is “proper” ,has become linked with a notion of cleanliness “being proper” which is linked to developments in the 19th Century, during the confirmation of modern, western, European society. Furthermore,. focusing on the development of the Victorian household (see Ian Roderick’s contribution to the very first issue of Space and Culture on Flow), I want to point out the links between the development of the modern European subject, and an emergent scientific outlook on social ordering. Finally, I want to focus more closely on that dimension of ‘being at home’ that we often forget: the domestic; and argue that the propriety of the domestic , to show that the “becoming homely” of modern Europe has above all become a matter of gendering.

… Joost

Perhaps we should try and link the current riots in England with the so called Arab Spring and we would see other things at stake. Suddenly, criminals would become legitimate protestors fighting against an oppressive state who have turned democracy into a puppet show (is this perhaps the real reason why Spitting Image has disappeared from our television screens: reality is already funny enough?). Do we blame Al Jazeera for being too critical? What is clear among all of this is that analysis is failing in a most rudimentary sense. This, I would argue, is the most powerful indicator that we are dealing with an apocalypse.

In 1997, the second issue of space and culture appeared under the title ‘Apocalypse’ and there I asserted that the apocalypse had already happened, if one were to define it not as a complete and total rapture, but as a ‘cool revelation’ that the world as we know it has come to an end. That was 3 years before the dot.com economy collapsed, 4 years before 9.11, 6 years before the second gulf war, 7 years before the premiere of Team America World Police and the revelation that Kim Jong Ill, the alleged center of the Axis of Evil, is in fact a cockroach, 8 years before the Tsunami, 10 years before the credit crunch, 13 years before Fukushima.
In no way is what we published back in 1997 a prophecy of what was to come. We simply maintained that it had already happened. Everything that followed was nothing more than a repetition of what happened before. As we act like vultures, hovering over the cadavers of meaningless reflection, all we can do is perform the same cycles over and over again.

To go back then to the riots, the most sensible next step would be to stop meaninglessly asserting the meaninglessness of collective violence and start engaging in more meaningflul responses.  If the riots are mere imitations, what is being imitated? Why are these imitations taking place in England and why now? What alternatives can we offer those who are inclined to ’seize the opportunity’ to go out in the streets and engage in collective violence?

… Joost