to politics. The assessment of post-politicization might be adequate to describe current political narratives proclaiming that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) to politics in the way they are currently conducted. However, the discourse about post-politics offers instruments for grasping the ideological core in current urban concepts such as ‘smart cities’ or the seemingly intractable norm of ‘sustainability’. Urbanism has grown out of modernism as an ide-ology that rests on the belief that it is not ideological. This alleged non-ideology is exactly what the concept of post-politics can reveal and contest. Radical urban theory ultimately is a place for critics of orthodox practices and routines of the production of city in everyday urban planning and urban politics such as new public management and urban resilience. The post-political city offers a possible gateway for orientation and counter-narration within current debates about ‘futures of the city’. Vector #4 The Affective City underscores the role of emotions and passions in urban politics. Following Mouffe’s (2005) claim that the mobilization of passions animates the enactment of radical democratic futures, we consider the affective nature of politics in the post-foundational ontology of negativity to sketch out urban politics as ‘affective dissent’ (Bargetz 2015). To theorize the spectral city as a site of affective, embodied, [un]settling conflict, we encourage the coalition of affect theories and urban studies. Reading the city through a lens of affect – a state of affecting and being affected – complements the debate about post-politics as entrenched by feelings such as fear, anger, hope and anxiety. It activates the notion of ‘affective dissent’ or negative affect to theorize the city as a site of affective contestation. The synthesis of the affective and the haunted makes the [un]settled operative as a potentiality to affectively settle or unsettle urban spaces, politics and architecture. It conceptualizes the affective as haunted, and respectively, considers the haunted as affective. This theoretical triangulation radicalizes both affective and hauntological studies and provides new ways to unpack, and thus understand and explain the persistence or disappearance, ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of political claims, narratives or concrete political measures. Finally, the connection of the affective and the haunted in the supposed post-political condition renders legible how haunted moments of politics and of ‘the political’ affect the kernel of the city. Due to its negative ontology of post-foundationalism, the spectral nature of
affect leaks into the haunted nature of urban subjects and objects. Activating the productive possibilities of conflict and fear, it sets out towards a post-foundational theory of affect. With the four discussed vectors, we unsettle urban foundations in a blaze of glory of negativity and absences. Our aim is to detect a theory exploring the unplanned, the unordered, and the uncertain, entrenched in failure, disagreement and disruption. We suggest considering the constitution of the city not by asking what it ‘is’, but by asking “what prevents it from being” (Laclau 1990, 44). Departing from the notion of a fundamental lack, our proposal goes to the conceptual foundations of urban theory and inverts its deepest assumptions. It ungrounds the notion of the city to reveal the latter as a product of constant [un]settling.
References Bargetz, Brigitte (2015): The Distribution of Emotions. Affective Politics of Emancipation. In: Hypatia 30 (3), pp. 580–596. Derrida, Jacques (1994): Specters of Marx. The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. New York, NY: Routledge. Dikeç, Mustafa (2016): Disruptive politics. In: Urban Studies 54 (1), pp. 49–54. Laclau, Ernesto (1990): New reflections on the revolution of our time. London, New York: Verso (Phronesis). Lefebvre, Henri [1968] (1996): The right to the City. In: Elenore Kofman und Elizabeth Lebas (ed.): Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 61–181. Lefort, Claude (1988): Democracy and political theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Marchart, Oliver (2013): Das unmögliche Objekt. Eine postfundamentalistische Theorie der Ge-sellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft). Mill, John Stuart (1844): Essays on some unsettled questions of political economy. London: John W. Parker. Mouffe, Chantal (2005): On the political. London, New York: Routledge. Roskamm, Nikolai (2015): On the other side of “agonism”. “The enemy,” the “outside,” and the role of antagonism. In: Planning Theory 14 (4), pp. 384–403. Roskamm, Nikolai (2017): Die unbesetzte Stadt. Postfundamentalistisches Denken und das Urba-nistische Feld. Basel: Birkhäuser. Swyngedouw, Erik (2016): Unlocking the mind-trap. Politicising urban theory and practice. In: Urban Studies 54 (1), p. 55–61. Whittaker, Jeremiah (1642) Eirenopoios, Christ the settlement of unsettled times, in a sermon preached before the honourable House of Commons, at their publicke fast in Margarets Church at Westminster.
