Animated Space
Ash Amin
Paper for Political Lexicon, Minerva Project, May 2013
Abstract
This paper tries to look beyond the prevailing legacy in the West of thinking urban
public spaces as a site of civic and political formation, based on the nature of the
play among strangers in common spaces such as streets, squares, parks, buses and
trains. In this tradition, strangers become subjects and citizens or their opposites
depending on the nature of their affective response towards each other and towards
the space in which they find themselves. In it, the humans do most of the social and
political work. The paper explores the implications of thinking the urban habitat as a
sentient space in its own right, a bearer of more than a politics of harrying crowds,
convivial humans, bartering subjects, revolting citizens, policing orders. It considers
the atmosphere of place itself, as a hum of the landscape animated by inseparable
dependencies between humans and nonhumans, which exceeds and performs its
occupants in far from easily decipherable or straightforward ways. It engages with
the every sociality of phenomena such as software sentience in the ‘smart city’,
haunted streets in Kinshasa, the sermon-filled outdoors of Cairo, and the opiumtrading quarters of 19th century Canton. Through writing on these phenomena, the
social and political charge of public space emerges as a transhuman force, eventful in
a literal sense, simultaneously conditioning and evanescent.
Introduction
The history of thought in the West on the sociality and politics of urban public space
is littered with ambitious expectations. On the positive side, the free mingling of
strangers in streets, squares, parks and other shared spaces has been taken to
encourage a culture of conviviality and other attributes of civic regard and
cohabitation. Similarly, and especially in societies institutionally closed off to public
participation, these spaces have been thought of as important sites of political
struggle and education, enabled by solidarities, skills and voices acquired through
public assembly and deliberation. Thinking along these lines has spawned a long
history of belief among visionaries and planners that the city of welcoming public
spaces open to all is the city of democratic citizenship and social civility. The
experiments of public space, both for their aesthetics of place (manifest, for
example, in arrangements for social encounter, or in symbols of belonging and
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community) and their socio-political achievements, have been often read as the
barometer of progress. Where the particularities of time and place have produced
outcomes that stray from these expectations, the tendency has been to think of
them as deviations from the true purpose and potential of public space.
That urban public space can or should have such magical properties is far from
universally accepted. Dissenting opinion speaks of the progressive displacement,
above all in the modern age, of public spaces as a key site of deliberation and
socialisation by other formative spaces – organised and informal politics, education
and learning, mass media and communication, the globally networked household
and individual, and diverse symbolic and affective arenas. It points to the jostle of
markets, states, parliaments, bureaucracies, books, telephones, television, film,
Internet worlds, ideas, ideals, personal experience, and a lot else, in explaining the
twists and turns of collective culture. It notes that these jostles course through
public space, hybridising and qualifying the socialities of physical co-presence, with
dispositions of social indifference and animosity constantly rubbing up against those
of civility and sociability, even in the most hospitable spaces. In the same way, it
considers the politics of the animated square to be vestigial or exceptional, usually
symptomatic of popular dissatisfaction against the status quo, and certainly
formative for this, but also fragile and evanescent. Here, then, the multiplicities of
place are taken to expose the ‘republican’ perspective on public space as out of
place.
My own thinking has been much closer to the second perspective than to the first
one (Amin, 2008; 2012), but strikingly in both, civitas and demos prevail as the yard
of measure. The life of the street, square, shopping mall, bus or train is reduced to
and/or couplings of private and public, shared and appropriated, civility and
incivility, indifference and recognition, tolerance and antagonism, dissent and
acquiescence, being and becoming (Goffman, 1963; Mitchell, 2003; Sennett, 1986;
Lofland, 1998). If the harrying of people pursuing different things, or the resonances
of the still architecture, or the amplifications of the bodies and entities gathered are
noticed, it is in relation to their implications for human sociality and political
becoming, falling well short of asking whether and how human being itself is shaped
in the occupancy of public space (although Sennett and Simmel are notable
exceptions), or of taking interest in the streets, squares, parks and trains studied as
living ecologies that in their own right inflect the urban experience in quite strong
and distinctive ways. The prosaic eventfulness of urban public space and its life as a
particular kind of habitat are pushed to one side, flattened.
Yet, just to stand in a busy public space in Bamako, Bombay, Beijing or Bangkok is to
witness so much: private life lived on the street; commercial activity of all sorts; the
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jostle of humans, animals and vehicles; multiple activities such as prying, preying,
praying, lingering, passing through, foraging, shopping, watching and listening; the
continual ebb and flow of bodies, uses, smells and sounds; rules and norms set by
callers, clock-time, intermediaries, transport and commercial timetables, and official
and unofficial guardians of that space; and mixes of the expected, novel, emergent
and accumulated. And, in the course of the day, all of this changes so many times.
The street is a microcosm of multiple happenings and resonances from the distant
spatial and temporal, a place of ebb and flow, an assemblage of the human and
nonhuman. This is the measure of what is going on, and it puts into place, literally
and semantically, the relationship between public space and demos/civitas. And
this, not just in the cities of informality, overflow and excess in the South (Simone,
2010), but also in the cities of the North, however more regulated and sanitised. The
jostles may be quieter, the competition less fierce, the disorder more regulated, and
the entities less diverse in the public spaces of Birmingham, Boston or Bologna, but
their compositional character as assemblies of multiplicity is exactly the same. Here
too, the ecology of place is rich, even if not always visible on the surface, and here
too, this richness flows into urban practice, including the form and meaning of
sociality.
Such reciprocities between habitat and sociality are revealingly in this extract from
Filip de Boeck’s (2012: 1) reflections on the nature of infrastructure in Kinshasa:
‘Kinshasa is a city where formal urban planning and architecture have been almost
non-existent, and where the remaining material infrastructures, certainly public ones
such water supply, electricity, road infrastructures, public buildings (administration,
schools etc), are mainly present in their absence; or better, their functionings are,
more often than not, punctuated by constant breakdown, by lack, by paucity, by
failure and fragmentation, by recycling and repair. As such they generate many
shortcomings and impossibilities, but also different opportunities, different kinds of
space, also, that are important subjects of query. Potholes or pools of water on a
public road, to give but one example, may become infrastructural elements in
themselves, because they create thickenings of publics, and offer the possibility of
assembling people, or of slowing them down (so that one might sell something to
them along the road, for example). [….] In this city, it is primarily the much more
ephemeral architecture of the human body, and the relation between the millions of
bodies of its inhabitants, that defines cityness. … The body’s infrastructural
importance becomes obvious, for example, through the ways in which the private
and intimate corporeal realms often reveal themselves to be the public stage par
excellence.
This is the kind of space/body performance that I wish to work with in this paper, for
it reveals public space as lively and formative, perhaps less so as a space of
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democratic and civic becoming, than one in which human being and agency are
reworked in quieter but significant ways, hitherto neglected in social thought. I wish
to recognise streets, squares and their like as environments in which sentience is a
property of the habitat and its dwelling, with habits of thinking, acting and feeling
distributed across entities in relational proximity and exceeding the human body.
Accordingly, urban sociality – the moods, sentiments, dispositions, and attachments
of people formed in public space – can be conceptualised as an interaction between
humans and nonhumans, and the spaces themselves as social in their own right as
the coming together of plural body/space performances. The discussion of urban
public space along these lines is followed by a reflection on its political resonances,
which I suggest both qualify and decentre claims – in the wake of the Arab Spring
and diverse Occupy movements – concerning the return of antagonistic and
antagonistic street politics.
Summoning Space
In recent years, urban studies has see the rise of a ‘relational’ turn that imagines the
city less as a bounded territorial entity overseen by singular logics of development,
than as an assemblage of multiple spatial forms, actor-networks, and logics of
development, whose intersections shape urban outcomes (Amin and Thrift, 2002;
McFarlane, 2011, Farìas, 2011, Simone, 2011; Taylor, 2013). The city and its spaces
are imagined as a ‘complex adaptive assemblage’ (Dovey, 2010), a gathering point
and interactive field of multiple entities and forces, with developments unfolding
simultaneously as recursive and emergent, human and nonhuman, multi-temporal
and multi-spatial, regulated and unplanned. These qualities are claimed for urban
public space too, with the everyday street, park, bus or mall seen as a space of
‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005): multiple, hybrid, and juxtapositional, thus
poised between transparency and opacity, order and disorder, cohabitation and
conflict, and continuity and change (Amin, 2008). The spaces emerge as a force field
in their own right, one in which the play between bodies, objects and matter,
between divergent patterns of use, occupancy and demand, and between many
time-space conjunctions, is seen to do the work.
In this account of public space, the individual elements, whether humans, machines,
buildings, or material flows, are put in their place in a dual sense: firstly as
meaningful only in their interactions, and secondly, as performed through the
composites of a given place. The habitus itself is seen to be formative, active in the
making of urban culture and identity - prosaically and in the background, alongside
other formative arenas, urban and non-urban, but forceful in the moments of
occupancy and as a major part of the urban landscape. As a consequence, staple
categories of urban being/seeing are dislodged from their stable meanings: at one
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end, human being is shown to involve body prosthetics such as personal
technologies and symbolic frames with which subjects moving through public spaces
think, act, feel and associate (Amin, 2012); and, at the other end, traversing
infrastructures are revealed as lively couplings of pipes, matter, maps, code,
hardware and machine intelligence providing much more than background service
(Gandy, 2005; Mackenzie, 2010; Shepard, 2011). The entities present in urban public
space are recognised as agentive hybrids (well before they enter that space) that are
altered and amplified by their rub with each other and by cumulated swirls of place
(e.g. the totality of the kinds of proceedings summarised by De Boeck above). In
their placement, they are re-formed.
I do not believe that the exact character of these ‘summations’ of place can be
named, precisely because of the pluralities and unpredictable combinations
involved. Even public spaces that come to be labelled and performed as singular
summaries, gaining reputations as civic, ordered, unruly, dangerous, seditious,
chaotic, or calm spaces, have their counter-currents – the unforeseen disruption, the
unnoticed and hidden goings on, the changes that take place between day and night.
The happenings, even as aggregations, are not reducible to the label, precisely why
attempts to claim the culture of urban public space as this or that (or to slot
individual spaces into a typology of labels), are fraught with difficulty: they pass
muster by concealing more than they reveal; they are a provocation to
ethnographers of place to prove that the labels – so dear to planners and architects
eager to engineer the atmospheres of place, and to urban scholars for whom demos
and civitas are the measure of achievement - don't fit. Perhaps a safer conjecture to
make might be that the happenings have a summoning effect, a pull on the life
placed in or passing through the public spaces of cities.
Diverse accounts are beginning to emerge on the nature of this pull, particularly on
humans. One focuses on the technologically monitored public space, proposing it as
a sentient habitus in which humans alone no longer do the thinking and acting, as a
result of the extensive involvement of software in the management of the city,
based on chains of intelligent machines communicating with each other. Cities
awash with sensors embedded in street technologies, public infrastructures and
networks, buildings, shops and offices, and in all kinds of mobile device, are
described as enveloped in a ‘code/space’ (Dodge and Kitchin, 2011) continuously
monitoring and adjusting the urban environment, calling upon human intervention
only from time to time (Khan, 2011). In such public spaces ‘imbued with the capacity
to remember, correlate and anticipate’, according to Mark Shepard (2011: 10), ‘we
find ourselves on the cusp of a near-future city capable of reflexively monitoring its
environment and our behaviour within it, becoming an active agent in the
organization of everyday life’.
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Immersion in the monitoring environments of the ‘smart city’ is understood to
stretch the surface of sentience, the meaning of agency. In the smart city, humans
are not just observed by technologies and bureaucracies privy to personal details
scanned from credit cards, Internet usage, and mobile phones, and stepping in
regularly to coax, propose, or discipline. They are understood to be extended
beyond their bodies owing to their ties with nonhumans; enacting the city as
subjects who no longer think, act and feel through their own bodies alone. Moving
through urban space with smart phones that offer a personalised map, along with
images, sounds and conversations that mingle with those of the city, urban dwellers
are seen to navigate the city as subjects formed in the intersections of personal
biography, urban experience, and wireless dwelling (Mackenzie, 2010; Born, 2013).
They are understood to be immersed in multiple fields of intelligence with ‘their own
kinds of vitality, capacities of repetition, variation and adaption, that in turn feed
back into the becomings of sentience’ (Fuller, 2011: 181). According to Nigel Thrift
(2012: 159), the smart city is producing ‘a new kind of inhabitant who can don the
city like a cloak. … Inhabitants start to resemble avatars, at least in the sense that the
persona they don can be expressed in more dimensions’.
What, then, of subjectivity in the technologically less advanced city where the
majority world lives? It is generally assumed that in cities with rudimentary
technologies, poor infrastructures, and failing bureaucracies, humans do the heavy
lifting, parsing without prosthetics and challenged rather than formed by their
habitat. If the habitat of the smart city is now acknowledged as an input of
subjectivity (echoing longer-standing acceptance of human/nature co-dependencies
in the wild), it remains firmly on the outside – usually as an encumbrance – in
thinking on cities where inhabitants face a challenging urban environment. Slums,
suburbs, crowded public spaces, tower blocks, and busy city centres tend to be
narrated as harsh surroundings that urban dwellers learn to negotiate or survive,
distorting sociality by encouraging feral competition, opportunism, watchfulness,
and aggression. If subjectivity is linked to habitat, it is as two incompatible outsides,
rather than as mutually constitutive. But here too, a new genre of urban
ethnography is emerging, showing humans as equally of their habitat, and agency
very much a hybrid of mind, body, machine and matter.
Here we have writing of a distinctly post-humanist kind. It alludes to how in all
cities, ‘built environments engage their users’ (Degen and Rose, 2012: 3273) by
stimulating aesthetic judgements and affective responses that build up as
‘perceptual memories’ which impinge upon daily experience ‘by multiplying, judging
and dulling the sensory encounter’ (p. 3271). It notes the significance of ‘codes of
the street’ learnt in neighbourhoods, equipping individuals with a ‘careful way of
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moving, of acting, of getting up and down the streets’ (Anderson, 1999: 23) in order
to negotiate safe passage and achieve purposeful ends. The learning is explained as
a reciprocal arrangement of honed experience and street signalling (e.g. the visual
iconography of groups gathering, cars slowing down, lighting fading, shops
disappearing – see also Swanton, 2010; Blokland, 2008). It enters fringe spaces such
as cemeteries, derelict parking lots, and unused parks, to find co-dependencies of
built environment, nature and culture (e.g. alternative communities sharing an
overgrown space with unusual plant species, each formed in its way because of the
other – see Gandy, 2011; 2012; 2013): co-dependencies hidden but operative in the
more trammelled spaces of the city.
The ethnographies force us to rethink the material culture of place, the meaning of
agency, and the boundaries of human being in the public spaces of all cities. They
widen the optic and they disturb received categories. This is shown clearly in Filip de
Boeck and Marie-François Plissart’s (2004) study of public spaces in Kinshasa, where
witchcraft enters centre stage, with tales/practices of haunted space and bewitched
subjects framing the city’s many street children as anomalous yet still of the city, but
in turn also empowering the children to live among the dead in cemeteries, forage in
the street, escape into a dream world of spirited adventure at night (see also Pile,
2006, on occult in the West and Sawhney, 2009, on the noir in Delhi). It is shown in
Ravi Sundaram’s (2010) portrayal of poor neighbourhoods of Delhi, where
technology enters centre stage, in shaping social prospects, behaviours and affects,
in the form of life hovering dangerously around the rub of cars, bikes, humans and
animals in narrow streets; pirated technologies enabling access to essential services;
and hopes sustained by worlds accessed by televisions, radios, books, phones and
computers. It is shown in Charles Hirschkind’s (2006) account of public life in Cairo,
where taped sermons heard in streets and cars are key to the momentary
conversion of the harassed subject into ethical citizen, and in Silwa and Riach’s
(2012) study of how the smells of disinfectant, boiled cabbage, or perfume in the
public spaces in Krakow act as proxies of attachment to the city’s communist past or
future in modern Europe. It is shown in Amitav Ghosh’s (2011) vivid portrayal of
street life in Canton in the run up to the Opium Wars, where momentary visual,
aural, and nasal appraisals of all that was going on were the measure of the safety of
the illicit trade and everything that hung on it.
These kinds of summoning illustrate the role of spatial throwntogetherness in
shaping urban public culture. They reveal, for example, that personhood and
sociality are formed in the reciprocities of subjectivity (itself conceived as more than
human) and environment (conceived as more than inactive habitat). Peter Sloterdijk
(2011: 140) hints at this relation when observing that 'where the paths of individuals
cross in everyday interaction … they do not normally lose their composure merely
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through a glance at the individual. It is more likely that this act of seeing will assure
the seer of his secure position in the middle of his own surrounding space; it affirms
him in his distantial, non-merging forms of intercourse with the protagonists and
opponents who populate his human environment'. And so does Georg Simmel, in
proposing that the identity of the ‘metropolitan type’ forming in the expanding city
of the early 20th century ‘does not end with the limits of his physical body or with the
area to which his physical activity is immediately confined, but embraces, rather, the
totality of meaningful effects which emanates from him temporally and spatially’
(Simmel, 2002: 17). Both, I believe, are beginning to see the urban landscape as an
animistic landscape, (Melitopoulos and Lazzarato, 2010), a space of ‘outstincts’ and
‘escalated atmospheres’ that works on identity, sociality, and public culture (Nigel
Thrift, 2013).
Politics of Public Event
Why does it matter to think of urban public space in this way, to acknowledge the
rumours of place? Measured against canonical understandings, it forces us to be
more clear about the sources and duration of feelings and social orientations formed
in public space, and also about the politics of public assembly, a question that has
returned to the fore in these days of street occupancy returning as a weapon of
defence against oppression and elite power in both the democracies and autocracies
of the world. Delving into the animations of place raises questions about the
eventfulness of urban public space.
A small example might help to illustrate my point. In March 2013, I was on a
Eurostar train from London to Brussels at the end of the day, on my way to a twoday European Research Council meeting. For most of the journey, our coach was
quiet and calm, with passengers absorbed in their papers, resting, talking quietly,
gazing into laptop screens, or soothed by headphone music. An atmosphere of place
produced by the merging of circulating sounds, conjoined activities, movement of
the coach, darkness outside, silent breathing, and sedate lighting enveloped us all,
but it did so in the silent mode and as part of the collective unconscious, leaving
each of us immersed in our activities, thoughts and feelings. We were both together
and apart.
Approaching Lille, a sound shattered the silence, and in the minutes that followed,
we were pulled into the same affective space and shared set of concerns. We were
no longer apart. A man let out a loud and prolonged groan, one that prompted the
usual anxiety on a train in the evening with British people on board that the man was
drunk and about to become a nuisance, which in a very British way we would do
nothing about and put up with, but in a bad mood. Instead, the groan was quickly
followed by the man quivering all over and then passing out, eventually sliding off his
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chair into the corridor, where the man sitting opposite him laid him out in recovery
position once someone had shouted out the instruction from elsewhere in the
coach. An announcement was made on the intercom, and soon a heart surgeon and
two nurses (we learnt from their conversation about who could do what), were
attending to the man. After what seemed like an interminably long period, the man
regained his breathing, and eventually his consciousness, and was then whisked off a
few minutes later to hospital to get checked when the train rolled into Lille station.
In the long hiatus, the atmosphere of place had become singular and overwhelming.
The shared space had become an event, pulled into the drama unfolding in one
corner, dominated by the loud voices of the medical volunteers trying to bring the
man round, the train guards speaking into their phones, and the ambulance staff
talking to the man and to his friend and helpers at the end of the episode.
Everywhere on the coach, the eye and the ear were drawn into that corner, and
feelings and concerns into a common sensorium of care towards the vulnerable
body. The situation itself had spoken, its ‘sonorial cartography’, to cite Iain
Chambers (2013) from his book Mediterranean Blues, allowing ‘another story and
unsuspecting landscape to emerge’ (p. 5), drawing all of us through its hyperaffective propensities into becoming one public (Born, 2013).
Once the man left, the coach returned to its previous state of ambient togetherness
and individual separateness. I was surprised how quickly the passengers went back
to what they had been doing before, without hardly any discussion of the event. The
moment had passed. However, I am certain that something remained, and in quite
strong ways (including my choice to remember it here). The new atmosphere of
calm and tranquillity was no return, for into it were incorporated feelings of relief,
shared vulnerability, and human care. Each of us negotiated the remainders in
different ways. Mine was a raga by Kishori Amonkar that my mother used to sing
when I was young, one that happened to come on when I returned to listening to my
iPhone with my sublime Bose headphones. Others would have found their own
ways of absorbing the drama and reflecting on it consciously or unconsciously. Soon,
the train pulled into Brussels, the coach emptied out, as did its atmosphere, I caught
up with the surgeon to thank him and he placed his hand on his heart as is common
in the Middle East, we scampered in all four directions to get to the next destination:
the event evaporated. But in the singularity of the event we had become a unitary
public, affected in the same way by the situation, and in ways that would endure as a
reminder of both our fragility and cooperative power.
I suspect that in any remembering, little will come through of the space itself, for it is
not common to recall space as animated or animating. The episode and its
consequences will be recalled, as will the train journey, but hardly the atmosphere of
the coach. Only the student of public space is likely to go this far, and even then, out
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of conscious duty. But the resonances of the atmosphere are undeniable, and worth
bearing in mind, for public spaces are full of such mixes of eventfulness, background
conditioning, common and individual pursuit, evanescence and duration. To close
this paper, I want to reflect on how such awareness might alter our perspective on
occasions when public spaces become the stage of express political events: first, the
prosaic gathering, and next, the clamorous one.
Market Square in the centre of Durham is anything but a political square, but over
the years it has seen its small share of campaign against injustice. One of these,
returning over a 25 year period up to the Iraq war demonstrations in January 2003,
involved stalls graced by beautiful banners painted by a friend Lotte Shankland and
other political artists, condemning mine closures, nuclear arms, domestic violence,
Apartheid, war in the Middle East, environmental exploitation. Sometimes, the stalls
addressed issues felt strongly locally, such as pit closures or the domestic hardship
caused by Margaret Thatcher’s infamous Poll Tax, so attracting attention was less of
a challenge. On many more occasions, however, the campaigns addressed hidden or
faraway injustices, looking to connect the public in a town in northern England to a
world at war, under threat, crushed in some distant place. They were reaching out
to an unknown, and possibly sceptical or indifferent public, from a stall manned in
small numbers under frequently adverse weather conditions in a busy market
square.
My proposition is that in this space of diverging interests and continuous passage,
the banners became a key political actor. They staged the event, for they were no
ordinary makeshift, but works of art that managed to capture the attention of
people brought to the square for something else. The artists knew that the colours,
the design, the lettering, the choice of words (e.g. ‘ask the cormorants if the Gulf
War isn’t all about oil’, ‘an eye for an eye makes everyone blind’, ‘vital statistics:
27.5% of all women are raped during their lifetime’) had to be perfect. They sensed
that the banners, displayed in an everyday public space, could not preach or
proclaim, but should tell people something they might not know, tap into a common
sense of fairness and justice. The well-crafted banner would leave a trace in the
memory of people passing by, perhaps open respectful conversation among
strangers in that instant formed into a public with common concerns. And this is
how it was, whether the numbers gathered were small or large. Here, there was no
politics of demotic or civic force at work, only an event – in this case staged around a
charismatic technology resembling many others invented by anti-establishment
movements (Amin and Thrift, 2013) - that acted as a gathering point faded away,
lodged itself somewhere in the store of personal memories and social conscience.
This was the nature of the politics of public space.
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I think something similar can be said about the clamorous political event in public
space, returning the world over to kick back at capitalist stealth, elite power, state
neglect and repression. Into the 21st century, the popular struggle for recognition
continues to take to the street, prompted by power closing itself off and becoming
self-referential, anger mounting up against unaddressed injustice and oppression,
and the aggrieved being able to strengthen solidarities through the virtual commons.
The street and the Internet have become once again the parliament of a politics of
dissent, with the official opposition, where it exists, crushed or cowering in the wings
of conformity, fearful of electoral defeat or exposure by the elite-governed media.
Occupy and the Arab Spring shine as the emblems of the new politics of insurgency;
their public spaces reclaimed expression of the unthinkably revolutionary in a
controlled 21st century, to the glee of anarchists, the horror of vested interests, and
the worry of anti-populists.
An obvious conclusion to draw from the occupation of the iconic sites of instituted
power is that it vindicates the legacy of seeing public space as demos, the outdoors
of political formation and struggle (Harvey, 2012). St Paul’s, Zucotti Park, Tahrir
Square and the countless other spaces of public occupation and assembly springing
up today, bear ample witness to the validity, if not return, of this legacy. It would be
a failing not to see these spaces as profoundly political, especially when the staged
event has been long and loud enough for a public to be formed, for antagonistic and
agonistic developments to be sustained, for lives to be altered. Indeed, and
importantly, the events speak to a politics of space itself, where spatiality joins the
repertory of political expression and struggle in quite distinctive ways. As W. J. T.
Mitchell (2012) notes, occupation amounts to more than visibility and physical
presence: ‘It is directly linked to the trope of occupatio, the tactic of anticipating an
adversary’s arguments by preempting them, taking the initiative in a space where
one knows in advance that there will be resistance and counterarguments. … It is a
demand in its own right, a demand for presence, and insistence on being heard,
before any specific political demands are made; a demand that the public be allowed
to gather and remain in public space. But the demand of occupatio is made in the full
knowledge that public space is, in fact, pre-occupied by the state and the police, that
its pacified and democratic character, apparently open to all, is sustained by the
ever-present possibility of violent eviction’ (p. 10, emphasis in original).
This solicitation to grasp occupation as a political art, however, cannot be heeded at
the expense of acknowledging other choreographies of place: the spaces eventually
emptying out, changing back to other uses and atmospheres, the authorities taking
measures against further reclaim. ‘The commons’, as Mitchell (2012: 19) affirms, is
not an empty space that is simply free for the taking but a battleground where the
possibility of democracy and revolutionary change is contested. In this sense, the
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spaces are no different from the train journey to Brussels or the campaign taken to
Market Square in Durham. The politics of the event will have been ambivalent: on
the one hand, full of revolutionary promise and reminder to power and insurgents
that the event can be staged again; and on the other hand, a passing moment, even
if one with traces and resonances.
On the plus side, as Bernard Harcourt (2012) insists, in analysing the Occupy
movement, the absence of leadership, charisma, clear demands, and tangible
victories may not be a sign of weakness or imprecision, but emblematic of a new
grammar of political disobedience in which critique, collective deliberation, and hope
in a radically different future – the process and ambition itself of politics – is the
desire and yield. In addition, the fact of living the occupied space communally,
joyfully, attentively, frugally, against the grain, may be the measure of success, in
challenging vested interests in their own citadels of power, making another kind of
everyday life in public, spreading to the discontented elsewhere, reviving a culture of
radical political activism (Corrigall-Brown, 2012). To cite Mitchell (2012: 10) again,
the ‘Occupy movement is a dramatic performance of the rhetoric of occupatio. It
refuses to describe or define in any detail the world that it wants to create, while
showing this world in its actual presence as a nascent community’, born out of
practices of making space a space of ‘fullness and plenitude’ (ibid.). The spaces
themselves are, and will linger, as the monuments of insurgency.
Here, the space, and the ethnography and traces of the event are testament to a
politics of becoming. But the problem of tangible and sustained achievement
remains, even if the resonances of occupation endure. As Asef Bayat (2013: 47)
ruefully observes of the North African uprisings, ‘Two years after the fall of the
dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, not a great deal had effectively changed in the
states’ institutions or the power bases of the elites’. A politics of the event confined
to itself and to its traces in memory, forgotten by the space in which the event took
place and let down by the absence of a wider and sustained politics of connection,
amplification and reform, is like the politics of dark in-betweens that Ben Rawlence
(2012) describes for war-torn Congo: a polity made up of only localities, where
people learn via the local radio of what is happening in that place and elsewhere in
the world but not the rest of Congo. 'I realise that Congo is like a sea. Each of these
towns is a little island community unto itself, with its own radio, market and military
command. People may have news of nearby islands but beyond that, nobody knows'
(p. 71). In the case of the public protest today, everybody beyond knows, but the
dark in-betweens remain: the spaces of uneventful political transformation (e.g.
institutional reforms, new laws, implemented programmes – see Amin and Thrift,
2013) neglected by the leaders of the insurrectionists and jealously guarded by the
elites in control.
12
Conclusion
The narrative of public space offered in this paper illustrates Peter Sloterdijk’s (2011:
90) observation that 'the spaces that humans allow to contain them have their own
history - albeit a history that has never been told, and whose heroes are eo ipso not
humans themselves, but rather the topoi and spheres as whose function humans
flourish, and from which fall if their unfolding fails'. To see urban public space as
topos and sphere is to find a summoning everyday habitat centrally involved in the
making of human identity and urban public culture, never reducible to associating
humans or formative landscapes alone. It is also to find a politics of place that is
eventful and resonant, but also evanescent and of itself isolated. The rumours of
public space are subtle, its summons complicated.
In this landscape, it is not that humans move about as automatons, dwelling
unthinkingly. As Alva Noë (2012) claims in Varieties of Presence, dwelling is not just
phenomenological, but a skilful practice of negotiating space in meaningful ways.
These skills are tacit and learned, honed through practice and experience. They can
be worked upon through all manner of bodily training, one way of interpreting the
history of attempts to steer the habits of living with diversity through interventions
to control animosity, foster recognition, promote civic behaviour in public space.
But if, as argued in this paper, subjectivity is distributed beyond the body, more
presents itself in the field of possible action, and if this action is intended to work on
affects of togetherness in public space, many possibilities in the backfill of
consciousness offer up for consideration: the smells and sounds of care, the
iconography of solidarity, the technologies of agonism, the slowing down of time and
movement so that things and beings are encountered with attentiveness. And, then,
also the craft of reading, and working through, the material arrangements of public
space: the ‘material dimensions of citizenship and engagement’ (Marres and Lezaun,
2011: 491), the ‘participatory objects, settings, devices and stuff … that in a
particular situation come to play a role on the enactment of public participation (p.
493).
13
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