Archtecture Against the Postpolitical ed. NadirLahiji

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ARCHITECTURE AGAINSTTHE POST-POLITICAL

Architecture Against the Post-Political is a timely anthology that reasserts the question of the politicaland challenges the current abandonment of the critical project in architectural theory andpractice.

Written by a team of renowned contributors and carefully collated to address the themeslaid out by the editor in his introduction, the book includes theoretical issues concerning thequestions of aesthetics and politics, and examines city and urban strategies within the generalcritique of the “post-political.” By focusing on specific case studies from Warsaw, Barcelona,

Tokyo, and many more, the book consolidates the contributions of a diverse group of academics, architects, and critics from Europe, the Middle East, and America.This collection fills the gap in the existing literature on the relation between politics and

aesthetics, and its implications for the theoretical discourse of architecture today. In summary,this book provides a response to the predominant depoliticization in academic discourse andis an attempt to reclaim the abandoned critical project in architecture.

Nadir Lahiji is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia.He is the editor of The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (Bloomsbury,2014). He previously edited The Political Unconscious: Re-Opening Jameson’s Narrative

(Ashgate, 2011) and co-edited Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (Princeton ArchitecturalPress, 1997). He teaches architecture theory, modernity, and contemporary criticism in theintersections of philosophy, radical social theory, and psychoanalytical theory.


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“ Architecture Against the Post-Political represents a landmark moment in architectural theory.Fighting against a strong depoliticization of the theory and criticism surrounding the subject,this volume brings the full weight of recent critical philosophy to bear on the act of theorizingarchitecture.”

Todd McGowan, Associate Professor at theUniversity of Vermont, USA

“Can a democratizing and emancipatory architectural theory and practice be reclaimed fromthe debilitating debris of post-political consensual technocracy and the obscene jouissance of post-modern nihilism? This book offers courageous answers and a timely foray into reopening

a political space for architecture.”Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography at the

University of Manchester, UK


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ARCHITECTUREAGAINST THEPOST-POLITICAL

Essays in Reclaiming the

Critical Project

Edited by Nadir Lahiji

AFTERWORD BY JOAN OCKMAN


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First edition published 2014by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2014 Nadir Lahiji

The right of Nadir Lahiji to be identified as author of the editorial material, and ofthe individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted in accordancewith sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. The purchase of this copyright material confers the right on thepurchasing institution to photocopy pages which bear the photocopy icon and copyrightline at the bottom of the page. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known orhereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any informationstorage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarksor registered trademarks, and are used only for identificationand explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataArchitecture against the post-political: essays in re-claiming the critical project/

edited by Nadir Lahiji; with the collaboration of Elie Haddad; afterword by Joan Ockman. – First edition.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.1. Architecture – Philosophy. 2. Architecture – Political aspects – Case

studies. 3. City planning – Political aspects – Case studies. I. Lahiji, Nadir,1948– author, editor of compilation.NA2500.A7129 2014720.1′03--dc232013040785

ISBN13: 978-0-415-72537-8 (hbk)ISBN13: 978-0-415-72538-5 (pbk)ISBN13: 978-1-315-78037-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sansby Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK


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CONTENTS

List of figures vii

Notes on contributors ixPreface xiii

Acknowledgments xiv

Introduction: the critical project and the post-political suspensionof politics 1Nadir Lahiji

PART IAesthetics, politics, and architecture 9

1 Metropolitics, or, architecture and the contemporary Left 11David Cunningham

2 Modern democracy and aesthetic revolution in the work ofRancière: reflections on historical causality 31Gabriel Rockhill

3 Unfaithful reflections: re-actualizing Benjamin’s aestheticism thesis 41Libero Andreotti

4 Political subjectification and the architectural dispositif 53Nadir Lahiji

PART II

The political and the critique of architecture 67

5 Capitalism and the politics of autonomy 69Gevork Hartoonian

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6 Architecture as such: notes on generic(ness) and labor sans phrase 84Francesco Marullo

7 Thoughts on agency, utopia, and property in contemporary

architectural and urban theory 111George Baird

8 Metalepsis of the site of exception 124Donald Kunze

PART III

The post-political and contemporary urbanism 149

9 The architecture of managerialism: OMA, CCTV, and thepost-political 151Douglas Spencer

10 Zero points: urban space and the political subject 167Uta Gelbke

11 To fill the earth: architecture in a spaceless universe 180Ross Exo Adams

12 From post-political to agonistic: Warsaw urban space since 1989 198Lidia Klein

Afterwor(l)d 211 Joan Ockman

Bibliography 214Index 229

vi Contents

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FIGURES

6.1 Albert Kahn, Fisher Body Plant no. 21, Detroit, Michigan, 1919 926.2 Albert Kahn, Packard Plant, Detroit, Michigan, 1906–1911 936.3 Albert Kahn, Geo Pierce Arrow Plant, Detroit, Michigan,

1906–1911 946.4 Albert Kahn, Ford Highland Park Plant Old Shop, Detroit,

Michigan, 1908 946.5 Albert Kahn, Ford Highland Park Plant Old Shop and New Shop,

Detroit, Michigan, 1908–1916 956.6 Albert Kahn, Ford Highland Park Plant Layout, Detroit, Michigan,1908–1916 96

6.7 Mies van der Rohe, Bürohaus (Office Building), Berlin, 1922 996.8 Ludwig Hilberseimer, Vorschlag zur Citybebauung, Berlin,

1928–1930 1017.1 View of mature “gekekondu” in Istanbul 1177.2 “Pencil Building” in Kagurazaka, Tokyo 1197.3 “Pencil Building” in Ginza, Tokyo 1208.1 Detached virtuality depends on a “logic of inscription” by which the

(contradictory) properties of the boundary appear, as an enigma, insidean interior that is bounded by strict sequence 128

8.2 In terms of the Lucretian concept of reality as an even flow of atomsalong a void, the site of exception interrupts the smooth laminar flowof activities (utilitas) regulated vertically ( firmitas) by challenging thevertical order and installing a new horizontality as a site of exception 131

8.3 Ernst Jentsch specified two key themes of the uncanny in terms of adouble inscription of opposites – the living person drawn to a fatalisticend (AD) and the momentum of the dead soul past literal death to asecond, symbolic death (DA) 134

8.4 In the reversed predication of the uncanny, “between the two deaths,”DA, is framed by the literal and symbolic deaths 135

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8.5 Rear Window ’s mimetic field is the interior urban courtyard, which is aphysical model of the anthology that narrates separate half-stories thatwill be joined in the end 141

10.1 A public square instead of a corner building – a new nodal point within

the narrow street system 17210.2 Demolition of run-down buildings and construction of the new Rambladel Raval in 1999 173

10.3 Rambla del Raval during the rice-tasting festival – the neighborhooddisplays its ethnic diversity 176

10.4 Figure-ground diagram comparison of El Raval in 1956 and 2012; black:block buildings with private courtyards; white: public space 177

12.1 Lev Rudnev, Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, 1952–1955 20112.2 Christian Kerez, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (competition phase

rendering), 2007 202

12.3 Jerzy Skrzypczak, Andrzej Bielobradek, Krzysztof Stefański, MarriottHotel, Warsaw, 1989 20312.4 Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Marketmeter , 2010 20712.5 Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Marketmeter , 2010 208

viii Figures

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CONTRIBUTORS

Ross Exo Adams earned a Master of Architecture from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam,NL, and a BS in Biomaterial Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.He has worked as an architect and urban designer in offices in New York City, Rotterdam,Mexico City, and London, such as MVRDV, Foster & Partners, Arup, and Productora. Thefinal outcome of his Masters thesis, supervised by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Elia Zenghelis,was exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 2006. He has taught at the Architectural Association,the Berlage Institute, and Brighton University. His writing and design work has been

published in several journals such as Radical Philosophy, Log , Thresholds, Project Russia, andothers. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the London Consortium, examining the conceptof circulation in order to develop a political ontology of urbanization. He holds the 2011LKE Ozolins Studentship awarded by the RIBA.

Libero Andreotti is Professor of Architecture and Resident Director of the Georgia TechParis Program at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette. An architectand a historian, he holds a PhD in Art Architecture and Environmental Studies fromMIT. His most recent books are SpielRaum: Walter Benjamin et l’Architecture (Paris, EditionsLa Villette, 2011) and Le Grand Jeu à Venir: Textes situationnnistes sur la ville (Paris, Editions

La Villette, 2007). He is also co-author, with Xavier Costa and others, of Situationists: Art,Politics, Urbanism (ACTAR, 1997) and Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings onthe City (ACTAR, 1996). His articles have appeared in October , Lotus International , Journal of Architectural Education, and Grey Room.

George Baird is Emeritus Professor of Architecture and the former Dean of the John H. DanielsFaculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He is the foundingprincipal of the Toronto-based architecture and urban design firm Baird Sampson NeuertArchitects. Prior to becoming Dean at the University of Toronto in 2004, Baird was theG. Ware Travelstead Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard

University. He has published and lectured widely throughout most parts of the world.He is co-editor (with Charles Jencks) of Meaning in Architecture (George Brazillar, 1970), and


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(with Mark Lewis) of Queues, Rendezvous, Riots (Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994). He is author of Alvar Aalto (Thames and Hudson, 1970) and The Space of Appearance (MIT Press, 1995).His latest book: Public Space: Cultural/Political Theory; Street Photography was published by SUNPublications in Amsterdam in 2011. Baird’s consulting firm, Baird Sampson Neuert is the

winner of numerous design awards, including Canadian Architect Magazine awards over many years, and Governor General’s Awards for Cloud Gardens Park in 1994, Erindale Hall on thecampus of the University of Toronto at Mississauga in 2006, and the French River Visitor Centre in 2010. Baird is a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He was the recipient of the Toronto ArtsFoundation’s Architecture and Design Award (1992), the da Vinci Medal of the OntarioAssociation of Architects (2000), and the Gold Medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (2010). In 2011 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Waterloo.Most recently, he was selected as the 2012 winner of the Topaz Medallion of the AmericanInstitute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

David Cunningham is Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Cultureat the University of Westminster in London, and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy. He is co-editor of collections (with Nigel Mapp) on Adorno(Continuum, 2006) and (with Andrew Fisher and Sas Mays) on photography and literature(Cambridge Scholars, 2005), as well as of a special issue of the Journal of Architecture on post-war avant-gardes. Other writings on aesthetics, modernism, and urban theory have appearedin publications including Angelaki , Architectural Design, CITY , Journal of Visual Culture , New Formations, and SubStance . He is currently completing a book on the concept of the metropolis.

Uta Gelbke is an Assistant Professor in architecture at Graz University of Technology. After graduating from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, she practiced as an architect inGermany and Australia, working on a wide range of architectural and urban planningprojects. In 2009 she joined the faculty at Graz University of Technology, where she teachesarchitectural design and construction. Her PhD research, predicated on her work experiencein the field of urban regeneration, is concerned with the relationship between public spaceand political interaction within the scope of large urban development projects. She has publishedconference papers and journal articles on the economic, political and sociocultural cause andeffect of spatial phenomena such as urban sprawl, density, and urban renewal.

Gevork Hartoonian is Professor of Architecture and Head of Design and Architecture, Facultyof Arts and Design, University of Canberra, Australia. His research is focused on a criticalarchaeology of modern architecture’s appropriation of the nineteenth-century architecturaldiscourses, the tectonic in particular. He is the author of numerous books and book chapters.His most recent book is entitled Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique (Ashgate, 2012).

Lidia Klein is an architectural historian. She received her PhD at the Institute of Art History,Warsaw University. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Junior Researcher Fellowship (2010/2011)and a Foundation for Polish Science START scholarship for outstanding young researchers(2012). Recently, she co-edited a reader on sound, space, and architecture, Making the Walls

Quake, as if they were Dilating with the Secret Knowledge of Great Powers, with Michał Libera (ZachętaNational Gallery of Art, 2012), and edited a collection of essays on Polish postmodern

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architecture (December 2013). Currently, she is investigating the relations between contem-porary space, politics, and economy at the Graduate Program in Art, Art History & Visual Studiesat Duke University, North Carolina.

Donald Kunze has taught architecture theory and general arts criticism at Penn StateUniversity since 1984 and continues to write, teach, and advise after his retirement in 2011.He studied architecture at North Carolina State University (B.Arch.) and received his PhDin cultural geography in 1983. His articles and lectures have engaged a range of topics dealingwith the poetic “dimensionalizing” of experience. His book on the philosophy of place of Giambattista Vico (Peter Lang, 1987) studied the operation of metaphoric imagination andmemory. As a Shogren Foundation Fellow, he developed a system of dynamic notation thatadopted the calculus of George Spencer Brown. As the 2003 Reyner Banham Fellow at theDepartment of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, he extended the calculus to a “screentheory,” a graphical approach to problems of the boundary in art, architecture, film, and

geographical imagination. As a Nadine Carter Russell Fellow at the Robert Reich Schoolof Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University, he worked with Kevin Benhamto develop the idea of the surrealist garden following the novel by Raymond Roussel, LocusSolus.

Nadir Lahiji is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Canberra. He holdsa PhD in architecture theory from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-Opening Jameson’s Narrative (Ashgate, 2011). He previouslyco-edited (with Daniel S. Friedman) Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (Princeton

Architectural Press, 1997).

Francesco Marullo holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from theTechnische Universiteit Delft, where he is currently developing his PhD research on the“Architecture of Labour and the Spaces of Production” within The City as a Project doctoralprogram coordinated by Pier Vittorio Aureli. Since 2006 he has collaborated with OMA/AMO Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, the Department of Architectureand Urban Studies at the Roma Tre University in Rome, DOGMA Architects in Brussels,Matteo Mannini Architects in Rotterdam, and The Berlage Center for Advanced Studiesin Architecture and Urban Design in Delft. He is currently teaching at the Technische

Universiteit Delft.

Joan Ockman is a historian and critic who has written widely on modern and contemporaryarchitecture. She is currently Distinguished Senior Fellow at the University of PennsylvaniaSchool of Design.

Gabriel Rockhill is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University (Philadelphia),Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and Chercheur associé at the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CNRS/EHESS). He is the author of Logique de l’histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (Editions Hermann, 2010)

and Radical History and the Politics of Art (Columbia University Press, 2014). He co-authoredPolitics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues (Columbia University Press, 2011), and he

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co-edited and contributed to Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Duke University Press,2009) and Technologies de contrôle dans la mondialisation: Enjeux politiques, éthiques et esthétiques(Editions Kimé, 2009). He edited and translated Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics(Continuum Books, 2004) as well as Cornelius Castoriadis’ Postscript on Insignificance (Continuum

Books, 2011). He is also the co-founder of the Machete Group, a collective of artists andintellectuals based in Philadelphia (http://machetegroup.wordpress.com).

Douglas Spencer currently teaches histories and theories of architecture and landscapeurbanism within the graduate school of the Architectural Association (AA), London, UK.He is also a PhD supervisor at the AA, and at the Royal College of Art, London, UK, andthe University of East London, UK. His research and writing on urbanism, architecture, film,and critical theory has been published in journals including Radical Philosophy, The Journal of Architecture , AA Files, and New Geographies. He has also contributed chapters to a number of collections on urban design, utopian literature and contemporary architecture. His book, The

Architecture of Neoliberalism, is due to be published by Bloomsbury in 2016.

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PREFACE

Contemporary radical thinkers have in various ways reflected on the dominant trends inthe political discourse of our time and have declared “the end of politics,” otherwise namedas the “post-political” condition. The “post-political” has effectively desubjectivized thecontemporary subject by subordinating it to the depoliticized neoliberal apparatuses of power.This process of depoliticization, which began in the last decade of the twentieth century,coincided with a turn in the discipline of architecture away from the critical discourse thatwas the hallmark of the 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1990s radical critique in architecturewas regarded with utter suspicion. Thanks to the so-called “discontent with criticality,” the

project of radical critique was abandoned. The political, as a subject of study and matter for concern, was eclipsed in the practice of theory in architecture.We conceived this project to foreground the political in order to confront the dominant

trend of the post-political, which has crept into architecture with the apology of needing toalign the discourse with the apparatuses of the “new spirit of capitalism.” We have attemptedto reassert the question of the political and challenge its abandonment. This collection aimsto fill a sizeable gap in contemporary literature on the relation between architecture and politics.It aims to revisit contemporary radical political theory and philosophy to examine a new andnon-reductive concept of the political to explore the relations between politics and art , politicsand aesthetics, and the place taken up by architecture and theory in between them. In summary,

this anthology is conceived as a response to the predominant depoliticization of academicdiscourse and as an attempt to reclaim the abandoned radical critical project in architecture.

The idea for this publication originated from an international symposium we organizedat the Lebanese American University in Beirut in November 2011, entitled “Architectureand the Political.” A diverse group of academics, architects, and critics from Europe, the MiddleEast, and North America participated in that symposium. Subsequently, we expanded theintellectual objectives of the conference theme and embarked on the book project, invitinginternationally known theoreticians, critics, and scholars from inside and outside the disciplineto join. The content of the present volume and its title reflect our ambition in opening thetopic of “architecture and the political” to critical and philosophical examinations in which

our contributors were given the opportunity to open the topic to subject it to wider andmore radical scholarly and critical investigations.


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank first the participants in the conference that Elie Haddad and I organizedat the Lebanese American University (LAU) in November 2011, whose contributions gavethe impetus to initiate the book project of which this anthology is the result. We re-wrotethe original statement and invited other writers and architectural critics to contribute to thebook project. I thank them for their kind responses and their rich contributions to thisanthology. Among the contributors, my special thanks go to Donald Kunze. I am indebtedto his generosity for helping me directly and indirectly in the preliminary preparation of the

materials in the book for his helpful editorial intervention in the first draft of the introductorychapter and my own essay for this volume. I thank Gabriel Rockhill for his kind permissionto include his essay, originally written in French, in this collection; I would like to thank thetranslators of his essay in its different stages, Sabine Aoun and Sean Bray.

My special thanks go to the office of the Dean of the School of Architecture and Designat LAU for supporting the conference. I extend my appreciation especially to Elie Haddadand the entire faculty and student body in Architecture Department who helped us inorganizing the event in Beirut and for their active participation.

At Routledge, I am grateful to Francesca Ford, who took an interest in the initial bookproject and gave us her full support. I thank Emma Gadsden for her patience and editorial

assistance throughout the production process of this book. I also thank Gary Smith for hisfine work in copy-editing the text in its early stage. I would specially like to thank theProduction Editor Christina O’Brien for her great work and patience throughout the finalstage of editing the book.

I dedicate this book to my students at LAU with whom I had so much fun.


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INTRODUCTIONThe critical project and the post-politicalsuspension of politics

Nadir Lahiji

Today, however, we are dealing with another form of the denegation of the political,postmodern post-political , which no longer merely “represses” the political, trying to containit and pacify the “returns of the repressed,” but much more effectively “forecloses” it.

Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject

What does architecture discourse have to do with contemporary political thought? In whatway has this discourse been affected by it? Can the architecture discipline assume a critical

position against the current disorientation of thought that has been identified as post-political – simply understood as the disavowal of the political proper – by contemporary criticalphilosophers? The “post-political suspension of the political,” to use Slavoj Žižek’s apt phrase,which has crept into architecture discourse in the last two decades – unknown to the disciplineat large – has been triumphantly avowed by those who have been celebrating the “end of the critical theory” in the discipline.

Underlying the present anthology is the claim that abandoning the political in architecture – which amounts to surrendering the discipline to the fashion of the post-political – issynonymous with the disavowal of its critical project.

The post-political – more to be said on its definition later – is responsible for the

disruption of the political subjectivity and its desubjectification of the subject conditioned by latecapitalist apparatuses. We ask: Has the time not now come for architecture to overcome the purity of its closure from the political, once thought unachievable? In the conjunction of architecture and politics, can the “and” be the place where thought circulates between the two? And by politics,must not we mean an emancipatory project against its technocratic abuses? Why should weassociate architecture with this project in the first place? And, what are the politicalconsequences of the separation of the discourse of the discipline from the critique of contemporary capitalism? A separation that academic discourse has euphorically endorsed hasburied the radical lessons of the 1960s and early 1970s – lessons that grounded architecturalcritical analysis in the politico-philosophical analysis of the capitalist system. Is it not an ethical

imperative to confront the postmodern perversion of the political as a first step to reclaiming the abandoned radical project in the discipline? Our response must be emphatically affirmative.


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This affirmation underpins the conviction that led to conceiving this anthology. In thisintroduction I will attempt to offer some critical remarks to provide a general backgroundto the chapters collected in this volume. My remarks will be limited to explaining theproblematic of the “post-political” as a context for the various arguments and case studies

presented in this collection.In global terms, the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and, shortlyafter, the triumphant embrace of capitalism by those regimes prompted political andphilosophical writers and commentators to declare the “end of politics,” the “end of ideology,” the “end of history,” and, above all, the “end of utopia.” As Žižek has pointedout, the year of collapse of communism is commonly perceived as the collapse of the “politicalutopia” of communism: “Today we live in a post-utopian time of pragmatic administration,since we learned the hard lessons of how noble political utopias end in totalitarian terror.”1

“However,” Žižek adds,

the first thing to remember here is that this alleged collapse of utopia was followed bythe ten-year rule of the last grand utopia, the utopia of global capitalist liberal democracyas the “end of history” – 9/11 designates the end of this utopia, a return to the realhistory of new walls of conflict which followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall.2

Further, he says, “It is crucial to perceive how the ‘end of utopia’ repeated itself in a self-reflexive gesture: the ultimate utopia was the very notion that, after the end of utopias, wewere at the ‘end of history’.”3 It can be said that the architecture discipline, which abandonedthe “naive” modernist utopia associated with the project of modernity in the early decadesof the twentieth century, began to resign itself, by the time of the late 1970s, to beingpart of the “last grand utopia” of the capitalist liberal democracy, only to gradually embracethe ultimate neoliberal “utopia” taken as “the end of utopias.” The “end of history” thataccompanied the grand utopia brought the discipline to the point of total depoliticization byhappily adopting the post-political discourse, now coupled by the fashionable trend of the“post-critical.” I will return to this below.

It was shortly after 1989 that France witnessed a new resurgence of interest in the notionof “political philosophy” in connection with a revival of the position of Hannah Arendt, andthat “‘ideological’ (emancipatory) questions could be put aside and the political rethought inethical terms of how best to ‘live together’.”4 In was around this time that Jacques Rancière’sgroundbreaking political treatise La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie appeared in 1995 (madeavailable in English in 1999 as Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy).5 The hallmark of Rancière’sbook is his refutation of the idea of “political philosophy” and the neo-Aristotelian currentof politics in France.6 As Oliver Davis put it,

Indeed Rancière goes much further than to attack a single philosopher’s conceptionof politics and sets his insights on political philosophy as a whole, which he argues isfatally flawed and inherently conservative because it is unable to accept and think throughthe consequences of the basic fact that any given social order is contingent.7

According to Rancière, what political philosophy fails to see, as Oliver puts it, “is thatany and every social arrangement is inherently irrational and ultimately contingent. Rancière

indeed goes so far as to suggest that the longstanding ambition of political philosophy is todispense with politics altogether.”8 What is important not to miss here is that Rancière

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designates the end of politics as “consensus politics” – “the transformation of politics intomanagement” – or the “negation” of politics, a trend he discerned operating in France sincethe early 1980s.9 Now, the term “end of politics” is actually another name for the currentuse of the term “post-political.” While a comprehensive discussion of Rancière’s complex

argument in Disagreement – and for that matter his larger work on the concept of aestheticsand art in conjunction with his novel notion of the “distribution of sensible” (“le partage dusensible ”) – are beyond the scope of this introduction, more than a few chapters in this volumedirectly take up these notions for critical analyses.10 I therefore limit myself to making a fewremarks that are directly related to his notion of “the end of politics.”

Rancière makes a provocative and unusual distinction between politics and police , and thenotion of democracy. “Democracy,” for Rancière, “is not just one form of political regimeamong others; it is rather the essence of politics in contradistinction to the police.”11 Rancièreargues that politics can only occur, as Samuel Chambers succinctly puts it,

when the logic of domination intrinsic to any police order (since all police orders arehierarchical orders) finds itself confronted with a different logic, the logic of equality.Politics therefore proves to be the demonstration of the assumption of equality.12

Rancière coins the term “the part with no part” and identifies this non-part with the wholethat does not occupy a properly defined place in the hierarchical social order; he uses policeorder in a pejorative sense, as that which disturbs the same order as the Universal, where politics proper begins.13 For Rancière, politics in this sense happens very rarely. His originalexample is the demos, a class of citizen within the Greek polis having no fixed place in thesocial edifice. The demos are the people, “the part with no part,”

whose members lacked any of the traditional attributes thought necessary for activeinvolvement in the political process (wealth, birth or moral “excellence”), yet whonevertheless claimed not only to participate in it on an equal footing with the rich, thewell-born and morally superior but to be the only source of sovereignty in the city.14

As Davis explains,

This usurpatory claim by the demos to govern is their response to the inaugural “wrong”

(le tort or blaberon) which the city does them by trying to reserve the right to governto those with a traditional entitlement to do so, by saying that they do not “count inpolitical life.”15

This is similar to the position of “proletariat,” the “part with no part” in Marxist tradition.As Žižek points out, of course, for Rancière the line of separation between the police andpolitics is

always blurred and contested; say, in the Marxist tradition, “proletariat” can be read asthe subjectivization of the “part of no part” elevating its injustice to the ultimate test

of universality, and simultaneously, as the operator which will bring about the establishment of post-political rational society.16

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Žižek adds that “Our European tradition contains a series of disavowals of this politicalmoment, of the proper logic of political conflict.”17

Rancière articulates three moments, three political concepts, when the political in thetradition of European political history is disavowed: “arch-politics,” “para-politics,” and “meta-

politics.”18

He discusses “meta-politics” by relating it to the tradition of Marxism and thenotion of the “end of politics” in the following terms:

Ideology is, finally, the term that allows the place of politics to shift endlessly, right tothe dizzying limit: the declaration of its end. What in police language is called “theend of politics” is perhaps nothing more, in fact, than completion of the process wherebymetapolitics, inextricably bound up with politics and binding everything together as“political,” evacuates it from the inside, causing the constitutive wrong of politics todisappear in the name of the critique of all appearance.19

And further,

The “end of politics” is the ultimate phase of metapolitics interference, the final affirma-tion of the emptiness of its truth. The “end of politics” is the completion of politicalphilosophy. More precisely, the “end of politics” is the end of the strained relationshipbetween politics and metapolitics that has characterized the age of modern democraticand social revolution.20

In the same line of argument, Rancière then establishes the relation between politics andthe “people.” He writes: “There is politics from the moment there exists the sphere of appearance of a subject, the people , whose particular attribute is to be different from itself,internally divided.”21 In Lacanian psychoanalytical theory this will be known as the “dividedsubject,” a complex theory that cannot be discussed here.

Before I leave Rancière, I want to cite some passages from his Disagreement without offeringany commentary.

Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institutionof a part of those who have no part.22

Politics exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulateshuman society.23

To recapitulate: politics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society isdisturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part. It begins when theequality of anyone and everyone is inscribed in the liberty of the people. 24

The only city is a political one and politics begins with egalitarian contingency.25

Thus Plato’s city is not political. But a nonpolitical city is no city at all. Plato makesup a strange monster that imposes the mode of rule of the family on the city. ThatPlato needs to eliminate the family in order to do so is a perfectly logical paradox:eliminating the difference between one and the other means eliminating them both.26

Aside from the numerous commentators who have recently interpreted Rancière’s politicaland aesthetic thoughts in the Anglo-American receptions of his writings, Žižek’s reflections

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are particularly important for our purpose because he has specifically expanded on the problemof “the end of politics” – using the term “post-political” – in his extensive writings. Herepeatedly cites Rancière’s notion of “the part with no part.” In the following, I cite thenotable places where Žižek takes up the post-political in his radical critiques.

In The Ticklish Subject , under the heading “post-politics,” he writes:In post-politics, the conflict of global ideological visions embodied in different partieswhich compete for power is replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats(economics, public opinion specialists . . .) and liberal multiculturalists: via the processof negotiation of interest, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universalconsensus. Post-politics thus emphasizes the need to leave old ideological divisions behindand confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert knowledge and freedeliberation that takes people’s concrete needs and demands into account.27

In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Žižek discusses the post-political in conjunction with“bio-politics” and interestingly relates them to the dimension of “fear” as the only mode of subjectivity today:

Today’s predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics – an awesome exampleof theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: “post-political” is a politicswhich claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and instead focus on expertmanagement and administration, while “bio-politics” designates the regulation of thesecurity and welfare of human lives as its primary goal. It is clear how these two dimen-sions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains is only theefficient administration of life . . . almost only that. That is to say, with the depoliticized,

socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero levelof politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people,is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity.28

In the same place, Žižek further points out that this “post-political bio-politics” is radicallyseparate from the emancipatory politics. It is not a question of two “different visions,” heemphasizes, but rather, it is the difference between “politics based on a set of universal axiomsand a politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political,”29 based, asit is, on the dimension of “fear”, “bio-politics as politics of fear”: “fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state itself, with its burden of

high taxation, fear of ecological catastrophe, fear of harassment.”30For Žižek, post-political is an aspect of today’s postmodern disorientation. Elsewhere, with

a specific reference to Rancière’s work cited above, Žižek writes:

What defines “postmodern post-politics” is thus the secret solidarity between its twoopposed Janus faces: on the one hand, the replacement of politics proper by depoliticized“humanitarian” operations, on the other hand, the violent outburst of depoliticized“pure Evil” in the guise of “excessive” ethnic or religious fundamentalist violence.In short, what Rancière proposes here is a new version of the old Hegelian motto“Evil resides in the gaze itself which perceives the object as Evil”: the contemporary

figure of Evil, too “strong” to be accessible to political analysis (the Holocaust, etc.),appears as such only to the gaze which constitutes it as such (as depoliticized).31

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The reflections I offered above on the post-political paradigm support the thesis of thisanthology. To reiterate: the evacuation of the political from the architecture discipline is acorollary to the debunking of the project of critique. From the 1980s to the present, in the “post-utopian” condition, the neoliberal ideologists from inside the discipline, by embracing the

“grand utopia” of the capitalist liberal democracy, came to celebrate the “ultimate utopia” of the “end of history” (in Žižek’s sense of these terms). They managed to align the discourseof architecture and theory with the agenda of contemporary postmodern management of capitalism and to conform to its institutional, discursive, and non-discursive apparatuses. Inpaving the way for anti-political disorientation in the discipline, liberal ideologists havecelebrated the defeat of radical Left discourse by embracing the “post-critical” turn incontemporary philosophical-politico-cultural discourses. This volume is a direct confrontationof this post-critical fashion – a plea to renew, or rather reclaim, the radical project of the critique in the discipline. We conceived this volume as a challenge to the hegemonic domination of the liberal critic-architects who are the ideologues of the depoliticized architecture. Camouflaged

as “radicals” and taking shelter behind fancy techno-philosophical academic jargon, they arein effect exposing architecture and its discourse to the perverse imperatives of the contemporarypostmodern digital capitalism and its image industry.

This wide gathering of chapters in this anthology on the critique of the contemporarypost-political and relating it to the discourse of architecture and its critical project merits afew words of explanation about its organization – if only because no such collection has ever before been compiled to tie contemporary architecture discourse to the notion of the “post-political.” While the central notion of the political can be discerned as the common threadthat ties together the diverse topics presented in this anthology, there are nevertheless broader intellectual-conceptual categories that these chapters have tackled. We have divided the book

into three parts.Part I, entitled “Aesthetics, politics and architecture,” contains four theoretical chapterswhich analyze issues of political philosophy and aesthetics. The central question of what canpossibly be understood by the “political” in architecture is introduced comprehensively, rangingfrom the twentieth century to contemporary radical philosophers who have dealt with aestheticsand politics, from (for example) Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno, to Jacques Rancièreand Slavoj Žižek. This part variously addresses the “politics of architecture” in relation to“polis,” “public space,” and “metropolis.”

Chapters in Part II, “The Political and the Critique of Architecture,” take into accountthe recent “post-political” discourse and explore its implication in architecture. The four

chapters here address the problematic relation between architecture and the economic regimein which it operates. One chapter revisits the critical project in architecture with specialreference to the work of Manfredo Tafuri, exploring the question of “autonomy.” Another takes its cue from the political philosopher Carl Schmitt, going back to the original politicaldiscourse of modernity and the idea of “factory” to find a novel analysis of the notion of “generic.” A third discusses “agency” and “utopia” in reference to the political thoughtof Hanna Arendt, offering a critique of the urban condition in late capitalism in Tokyo. Afourth takes up Jacques Rancière’s political notion of dissensus within the novel frameworkof “horizontal” and “vertical,” visible within a comparison of architectural and filmic spaces.

Part III is entitled “The Post-Political and Contemporary Urbanism.” This part includes

four chapters that deal with politics in “urban” contexts, analyzing the neoliberal post-politicaland its “managerial” class through the concepts of “political subjectivity” and “political agency.”

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Some chapters take up the analyses of urban spaces by referring to concepts derived fromcontemporary philosophers, including Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe. Urban politicsis discussed in relation to the parameters that manifest the contemporary neoliberal post-politicaltendencies at the level of urban ideology. Various urban and post-urban cities are discussed

in detail – including Warsaw, Barcelona, and Beijing.

Notes

1 See Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle , London and New York: Verso, 2004, 122.2 Ibid., 122–123.3 Ibid., 123.4 See the excellent argument of Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancière , Cambridge: Polity, 2010, 99. For my

reflections on the work of Rancière, among a large volume of secondary materials, I mainly rely onDavis’ text here.

5 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, 1999.6 It should be noted that Rancière is not alone among the contemporary radical philosophers to refute

the idea of “political philosophy.” Alain Badiou also has denounced this idea; see his Metapolitics,London and New York: Verso, 2005.

7 Davis, Jacques Rancière , 99.8 Ibid., 99–100.9 Ibid., 99–100.

10 Specifically, see Gabriel Rockhill and my own chapter in this volume. Other essays also mentionRancière in different places without going further into comprehensive analysis of his works.

11 Davis, Jacques Rancière , 80.12 See Samuel A. Chambers, “Jacques Rancière (1940–)” in From Agamben to Žižek, Contemporary Critical

Theories, ed. Jon Simons, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, 199.13 For more on this see Slavoj Žižek’s excellent discussion in his “Afterword” to Jacques Rancière’s

The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. and introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2004.

14 Davis, Jacques Rancière , 80.15 Ibid., 80.16 Žižek, “Afterword” 70–71, emphasis added.17 Ibid., 70–71.18 Further, see Disagreement and Žižek’s “Afterword.” Significantly, Žižek (ibid., 71) adds a fourth

category to Rancière’s list by naming it the “ultra-politics” and defines it as “the attempt to depoliticizeconflict by way of bringing it to an extreme via the direct materialization of politics: the ‘foreclosed’political returns in the real, in the guise of the attempt to resolve the deadlock of political conflict,of mésentenete , by its false radicalization, i.e. by way of reformulating it as a war between ‘Us’ and‘Them,’ our Enemy, where there is no common ground for symbolic conflict.” Also see Davis, JacquesRancière , and Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality, University Park,PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008.

19 Rancière, Disagreement , 86.20 Ibid.21 Ibid., 87.22 Ibid., 11.23 Ibid., 16.24 Ibid., 123.25 Ibid., 71.26 Ibid.27 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology, London and New York:

Verso, 1999, 198.28 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, New York: Picador, 2008, 40.29 Žižek, Violence , 40.30 Žižek, Violence , 41.

31 See Žižek, “Afterword,” 73.

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PART I Aesthetics, politics, andarchitecture


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1

METROPOLITICS, OR,ARCHITECTURE AND THECONTEMPORARY LEFT

David Cunningham

When the Geist abandons the simple and direct relations of production, it no longer createsthe city but the Metropolis. It is the Geist, not the individual, that of necessity inhabits theMetropolis.

Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: Onthe Philosophy of Modern Architecture

In the wake of a century which was, against the expectations of Marx and others, for the

most part “an age not of urban revolutions . . . but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation,”1 there has over the last decade been a marked resurgenceof interest among left-wing theorists in the question of the politics of the urban. Hence, for example, while Slavoj Žižek suggests that “the new forms of social awareness that emergefrom slum collectives will be the germs of the future and the best hope for a properly ‘freeworld’,” Italian post-autonomist Antonio Negri has posited the “internally antagonistic” spatialconfiguration of the advanced metropolis as that which might extend and replace theprivileged place previously accorded to the industrial factory as the crucial site of contemporarysocial production, cooperation, and conflict.2 Determined as such examples may be by acontemporary culture of academic Left celebrity, each reflects the degree to which the

remarkable global reality of contemporary urbanization has thus given new life to Marx’sown belief that what he called “enormous cities” might constitute one key condition of botha spatial concentration and social collectivity in which, no longer “an incoherent mass scatteredover the whole country,” some new social class’ strength could grow and it could feel “thatstrength more.”3

The intention of this chapter is, then, to begin some attempt to contextualize the questionof what exactly this might mean for a thinking of a possible “politics of architecture” today.This is a question that will, in turn, be framed by three extremely general propositions.

1 All questions of a specifically modern architectural politics turn around a transformation

of the “architectural” itself that has its origins in the nineteenth century. What BeatrizColomina says of Adolf Loos, that the “subject of [his] architecture is the citizen of the
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Documents

Archtecture Against the Postpolitical ed. NadirLahiji