From: Gandy M. (Ed.) Urban Constellations, Berlin: Jovis, pp. 22-26
“Every revolution has its square”: politicizing the post-political city
Erik Swyngedouw, Geography, School of Environment and Development, University of
Manchester
“…the people is those who, refusing to be the population, disrupt the
system.”1
Tiananmen Square, Place de la Bastille, Red Square, Alexanderplatz, Tahrir Square,
Assaha-al-Khadra, Syntagma Square, Green Square, Wenceslas Square: these are just a few
of the public spaces that have become engrained in our symbolic universe as emblematic sites
of revolutionary geographies. Their names stand as points de capiton that quilt a chain of
meaning through signifiers like democracy, revolution, freedom, being-in-common,
solidarity, emancipation. The emergence of political space, these examples suggest, unfolds
through a political act that stages collectively the presumption of equality and affirms the
ability of ‘the People’ to self-manage and organize its affairs. It is an active process of
intervention through which (public) space is reconfigured and through which – if successful –
a new socio-spatial order is inaugurated. The taking of urban public spaces has indeed always
been, from the Athenian ochlos demanding to be part of the polis to the heroic struggle of the
Tunisian people, the hallmark of emancipatory geo-political trajectories.
Emblematically starting with the French urban revolts during the autumn of 2005,
retaking streets and squares choreographed political struggle over the past few years as
protests jumped around from Copenhagen to Rome and from London to Riga. In the spring
and summer of 2011, the indignados (the outraged) occupied central urban squares in
Madrid, Barcelona, and Athens, among other cities, to demand ‘democracy now’. Urban
revolts and passionate outbursts of discontent have indeed marked the urban scene over the
past decade or so. Rarely in history have so many people voiced their discontent with the
political and economic blueprints of the elites and signaled a desire for an alternative design
of the city and the world, of the polis.
These urban insurrections are indeed telltale symptoms of the contemporary urban order, an
order that began to implode, both physically and socially, with the onslaught, in the fall of
2007, of the deepest crisis of capitalism in the last seventy years, a crisis that finally exposed
the flimsy basis on which the fantasy of a neoliberal design for the city and the world of the
twenty-first century was based. We shall argue that, while the city is alive and thriving, at
least in some of its spaces, the polis as the site for public political encounter and democratic
negotiation, the spacing of (often radical) dissent, and disagreement, and the place where
political subjectivation emerges, is performed and thus literally takes place, seems moribund.
In other words, the polis as a ‘political’ space is retreating while social space is increasingly
colonised or sutured by consensual neo-liberal techno-managerial policies. Urban
insurrections are the flipside of this evacuation of the properly political dimension from the
urban—what will be described below as the post-political condition— and constitutes what I
define as the ZERO-ground of politics2. The leitmotiv of this contribution will indeed be the
figure of a de-politicised post-political and post-democratic city and the re-treating of the
political through new forms of urban insurgency.
The contemporary urban condition is marked by a post-political police order of
managing the spatial distribution and circulation of things and people within a consensually
agreed neo-liberal arrangement3. Rancière associates this condition with the notion of la
police, conceived as a heterogeneous set of technologies and strategies for ordering,
distributing, and allocating people, things, and functions to designated places. These
managerial practices and procedures colonize and evacuate the proper spaces of the political;
la police is about hierarchy, ordering, and distribution4. Spatialized policies (planning,
architecture, urban policies, etc...) are one of the core dispositifs of la police.
Politics, in contrast, inaugurate the re-partitioning of the logic of la police, the reordering of what is visible and audible, registering as voice what was only registered as noise,
and re-framing what is regarded as political5. It occurs in places not allocated to the exercise
of power or the instituted negotiation of recognized differences and interests. As Badiou
insists, politics emerge as an event: the singular act of choreographing egalitarian appearance
of being-in-common at a distance from the State6. Whereas any logic of la police is one of
hierarchy and inequality, the political is marked by the presumption of equality within an
aristocratic order that invariable ‘wronged’ this presumption.
It is within this aporia between la politique/la police and le politique (the political)
that urban insurrections can be framed. While much of the State’s attempts to re-order the
urban through mobilizing discursively a set of signifiers of inclusiveness (social cohesion,
inclusion, emancipation, self-reliance), well-worn clichés of urban doom (exclusion, danger,
crisis, fear) are reproduced in practice. Attempts to produce ‘cohesive’ cities revolve around
choreographing distribution and circulation of activities, things and people such that la police
remains intact. While the state’s discourse and policy recipes frame particular trajectories of
‘inclusion’, they shy away from acknowledging division, polemic, dissensus and, above all,
from endorsing the assumption of equality on which the democratic political rests. Justice,
equality and communality are censored from the script of urban policy prescriptions7.
It is precisely this suturing process that suspends political litigation, voicing or staging
dissent or asserting polemical equality. These cut through la police and tentatively open up
the spaces of the political again. The urban insurgents have no demands; they do not expect
anything from the existing order. They have no program, no pronunciations; neither leader
nor party. Perhaps they are part of what Andy Merrifield calls ‘The Imaginary Party’, one
that is called into being through resonance, viral infection and affiliation, not through
hierarchy, program, and structure8. They do not demand equality, they stage it and, in doing
so, produce, pace Etienne Balibar, equa-libertarian spaces9. This staging of equality and
freedom, the interruption of the normalized geographical order of the sensible, exposes the
aristocratic configuration and in-egalitarian ‘wrongs’ of the given, and invariably encounters
the wrath of la police. Such exposition of equa-liberty cannot remain unnoticed: it either
succeeds or meets with violence, the terror of the State that – in its violent acting – precisely
affirms that some people are not part of ‘The People’, that order of social being is indeed inegalitarian.
This constitutive gap between Politics/la police and The Political needs to be
affirmed. The Political cannot be reduced to managing and ordering space, to consensual
pluralist and institutionalized policy-making. This is the terrain of la police; the ontic
dimension of everyday socio-spatial management. The political – as the staging of equality in
the face of a wrong – is nothing else but the affirmation of impossibility of consensual
management, of autocratic rule; it is an anarchic interruption that affirms the foundation of
the democratic invention, i.e. the equality of each and every one qua speaking beings – a
condition that is predicated upon affirming difference and the dissensual foundation of
politics.
This notion of politics centers on division, conflict, and polemic. Politics appears as a
practice of re-organizing space under the aegis of equality. The key lesson to be learned from
this intervention is, of course, that politics does not arise from the choreography of the social.
On the contrary, the political configures its own theatre, one that opens up a new spatiality
within the given distribution of times and spaces; it appears from within the social and
political order, but acts at a distance from the state of the situation; it emerges where it is not
supposed to be, in public space. Such political events are interventions that transgress the
symbolic order and mark a shift to a new situation that can no longer be thought of in terms
of the old symbolic framings. Proper politics is thus about enunciating demands that lie
beyond the symbolic order of la police; demands that cannot be symbolized within its frame
of reference and, therefore, would necessitate a transformation in and of la police to permit
symbolization to occur. Therefore, the political act is, as Žižek argues, “not simply something
that works well within the framework of existing relations, but something that changes the
very framework that determines how things work …. it changes the very parameters of what
is considered ‘possible’ in the existing constellation”10 This constitutes a proper political
sequence; one that can be thought and practiced irrespective of any substantive social
theorization. It is the political in itself at work. Such new symbolizations are where a possible
re-politicization of public civic space resides. These symbolizations should start from the
premise that the presumption of equality on which democracy rests is ‘wronged’ by the
instituted oligarchic ‘police’ order. It emerges where those who are un-counted and unnamed,
whose fantasies are only registered as noise, produce their own metaphorical and material
space. Such claim to the Polis is what links the urban protests in the Middle East and the
Global North. It signals the ability of ‘The People’ to take hold of their future.
Note
A different version of this contribution is forthcoming in Political Geography.
ENDNOTES
1
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1977-78. New York: Palgrave, page 66.
2
Swyngedouw, E. (2009). The Zero-Ground of Politics: Musings on the Post-Political City,
NewGeographies – After Zero Theme Issue (Harvard University Design School), 1: 52-61.
3
Swyngedouw, E. (2011). Interrogating Post-Democracy: Reclaiming Egalitarian Political
Spaces, Political Geography (forthcoming).
4
Rancière, J. (1998). Disagreement. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
5
Dikeç, M. (2007). Badlands of the Republic. Oxford: Blackwell.
6
Badiou, A. (2010) The Communist Hypothesis. London: Verso.
7
Swyngedouw, E. (2011b). Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis. Civic
City Cahier 5. London: Bedford Press.
8
Merrifield, A. (2011). Magical Marxism. London: Pluto.
9
Balibar, E. (2010). La Proposition de l'Egaliberte. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
10
Žižek S. (1999). The Ticklish Subject. Verson: London, page 199.