[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 118, Issue 14

[Ross Exo Adams]

Hi again everyone,

Just wanting to come back to Adam's comments on the urban vis-a-vis
the 'unprecedented expansion of life', tying together the discussions
that Davide and Oron bagan. I think this is a very concise way to
depict a trajectory of ‘modernity’; a radical unleashing of an
expansive energy that explodes out of the 18th century struggles in
Europe between ’society’ and the state, all taking place in an already
imploding state form. This energy then only begins to be properly
realized by the mid nineteenth century in a desperate and violent
re-ordering of the entire world—something that has proceeded at an
accelerated rate up until the present and today with little reference
to any Eurocentric ‘origin’ at this point. The aspect of these
expansive energies that I’m interested in tracing is that related to
what I call the urban.

Neil Brenner is a colleague and friend of mine and we have ongoing
discussions about both our different and overlapping understandings of
the urban. I think it is safe to say that he and I are both pursuing
the question ‘what is urbanization?’. His work is wonderful and I’m
very happy that he’s marshaled such a strong group to investigate and
represent contemporary or emergent spatial outcomes of ‘planetary
urbanization’ so beautifully. And, as you note, Lefebvre’s work is of
course fundamental to Brenner’s hypothesis. However, I think it’s here
where a certain divergence in approaches can be seen. While I respect
Lefebvre’s work tremendously, I see its limitations in attempting to
grasp just what the urban is. I’ve written about this in regard to a
recent piece of his that was translated by Brenner for Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space (see
http://societyandspace.com/material/discussion-forum/forum-on-henri-lefebvre-dissolving-city-planetary-metamorphosis/ross-exo-adams-lefebvre-and-urbanization/
). My argument is (and this is very crudely put) that Lefebvre
understands the urban as a social condition—a kind of innate social
relation that, for him, bears potential emancipatory capacities. Yet
at the same time, the ongoing urbanization of the planet that Lefebvre
so powerfully makes visible is also the materialization of capitalist
social relations. Of course all of Lefebvre’s discourse hangs on his
central thesis about the production of space, where he gives for the
first time a spatial history of what had previously been historicized
only in social-economic terms. Put simply, my critique of Brenner’s
work on planetary urbanization is that, by drawing on Lefebvre’s
hypothesis in The Urban Revolution, he, allows the urban to be
understood more or less as the materialization of capitalism. And
because Lefebvre’s work had exposed the tight relation between 20th
century (French) state capitalism and the space of the city, it makes
sense that Brenner’s work has focused more on (global) neoliberal
capitalism and its spatial reproduction. By making the assumption that
the urban, the city, space, etc are all
materializations/spatializations of capitalism (which I would not
dispute), I feel that paradoxically both he and Lefebvre leave the
urban far too untheorized in itself. I won’t rehearse the argument
more here as I’ve elaborated on this debate elsewhere (see
http://societyandspace.com/material/article-extras/theme-section-a-new-apparatus-technology-government-and-the-resilient-city/ross-exo-adams-the-burden-of-the-present-on-the-concept-of-urbanisation/
).

However, my point I suppose is that the urban as a spatio-political
order, can be brought to light by constituting a kind of archeology of
spatio-political orders. I argue that it is an authorless
spatio-political order which emerged somewhere in the nineteenth
century drawing its vitality from the very same expansive
socio-techniological energies that were released at the turn of the
century and put to work thereafter. By understanding the urban
archaeologically, rather than simply as the spatial correlate of
capitalism, a whole host of other questions suddenly emerge which link
space to (infra)structures of power that ushered in a huge political
transformation of the world with the rise of the nation state, civil
society, networks of communication, positive law and, yes, capitalism
too, all of which constitute the legacy of today’s ongoing and
destructive urbanization of the planet. And as we well know by now,
the nature of this form of power is one of controlling life. So the
expansion of life and the ever greater control of it occur
simultaneously through the construction (and expansion—urbanization)
of a sophisticated, technologically managed and machinic spatial
template that can be reproduced across the surface of the planet.

While there’s lots of great work in and around problems of the urban
that tend to pronounce the neoliberal, for me it’s not just a problem
of neoliberalism, but indeed is one whose understanding needs to be
grasped as well outside of the immediate present (as urban studies
almost always does) and through a sustained archaeology of spatial
order in relation to political form—something that immediately
articulates a kind of ‘deep’ history, if that makes sense.

Thanks again Adam!

Ross Exo Adams, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Architecture
College of Design
Iowa State University

595 Design
158 College of Design
Ames, IA 50011

On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 9:00 PM, <empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Re: Mediated Matters and design abjections (Johannes Birringer)
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> Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 13:40:43 +0000
> From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Mediated Matters and design abjections
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> dear all
>
> thanks Adam for going further with your argument & drawing attention to what you call "eco-technologies" within "spatial-political order predicated on limitless expansion," and you seem to include "life" ?  and not the cosmos of the unknown John was referring to in response to us -  into this province of the tinkering with limitless expansion. I am not so happy with the confluences you suggest ; (and  thus with the notion that there is a neoliberal agenda of limitless expansion. National Socialism in the 1930s/1940 declared such expansion as one of the pursuit of "Lebensraum." That ideology of expansion, under the "spatial-political order" of fascism, included severe reduction for lives, in fact it meant, militarily and organizationally, genocide and scaled eugenics programs for undesirables, it stood for extermination).
>
> After reading Davide's complex and fascinating post on datapolitik, I was waiting for the floods of responses from the list, and Davide's elaboration of the (invisible, transspatial order) data emitting entities was indeed very thought-provoking if I understood his ideas on a new predatory regime correctly ?  "dataveillance requires a concrete engagement with technical objects as autonomous actants in the cynegetic powers of predation -- a participation of objects, if you will -- including technologies of detection (i.e., software) and data storage."
>
> Yes, but it's interesting that you call data presence as a "shedding" that no longer needs a subject. A subjectless data politics -   how does code operate by itself (algorithms and programming platforms), who uses them, who writes the code, who takes advantage of the dandruff or installs capture systems (the police? are they the only subjects? capitalism? profiteering industries? states?  there are no more states, citzens?) was the yes/no voting in Scotland done subjectless?
>
> (An analysis of predatory societies, would it not need a political theory of subjects executing biopolitics? cf. Branden Hookway,  Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. Would we not need to ask in whose service the data collection agencies operate?)
>
> Perhaps I got worried when reading the last paragraph, when you casually speak of a "culture"of zombies". The zombie as archetype (in Hollywood movies?).  Meaning whom? us here in the West, others in the less datapolitiked zones, outside the walls of Jericho? Who are these zombies? And if datapolitik is highly controlled (even if rhizomatic), who builds and controls the Trojan horses, if we take your reference to the Homeric story of a war at face value? Who controls the horses of ISIS?
>
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
>
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> End of empyre Digest, Vol 118, Issue 14
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