Space Making as a Common Conquest

Space making as a common conquest How the deconstruction of homo faber can reverse commodification and logical sanitization of space Setareh Noorani 4278178 setarehnoorani.sn@gmail.com 7/6/2018

In response to S.A. Read Sem. II 2017/2018

Space making as a common conquest: how the deconstruction of homo faber can reverse commodification and sanitization of space through logic Keywords

Commodity, Homo Faber, Neoliberalism, Space making, Techne Abstract This paper argues that the responsibility of the homo faber enables the action-based narrative of an inclusive society to shape itself. Social constructions constantly inform this present position, which leads to a possibility of either aiding or inhibiting the subversion of the present situation.

The acting in public of the homo faber could be both the (technological) redistribution of the right to the city and the act of allowing for, or making inclusive physical constructions (techne).

This paper will concentrate itself foremost on the act of (technological) redistribution, based on a deconstruction of the spatial agency, or fetishization of homo faber.

The subverting can be realized through the rethinking of symbolic constructions by contributing to the right to the city and the shaping of techne by the animal laborans, reversing the observed fragmentation and sanitization of space through logic.

Introduction This paper draws on a previous thesis about case studies exploring fragmentation of the public in Neoliberalism through case studies, identifying the public as a mode of productiveness.

Neoliberalism as framework poses the majority of our new urban questions. One of the observed tensions was the economic versus social capital, which is detrimental for democracy in public through the public space as theorized by Arendt. Agencies involved in creating and acting on this tension mainly belong to the class of homo faber, as described in The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt.

Arendt, the German born American political theorist, explored in The Human Condition the distinctions between labour, work, and action, and its public implications. This difference in activity also relates to a socio-political hierarchy in the public, by dividing the activities with their actors. The labourer signifies the animal laborans. The worker, policy maker, or designer of the public is the homo faber. Finally, the zoon politikon is the actor who can practice freedom and democracy by acting in public. The latter is unspecified in a direct public agent, thus carries in its anonymity the intended plurality of political life. Important in this distinction is the apparent responsibility of the homo faber in the constitution of symbolic constructions, forming the public space. Following Arendt, these symbolic constructions enabling action in public are the only remotely technological constructions she describes in The Human Condition (Arendt, 1998).

However, we could understand and interpret these symbolic constructions as mirrored in physical displays of technology. They form together the common fabric, surviving time and shaping our environments. Examples are the city’s meta-fabric consisting of legislations, architectural theories, and urban plans and their respective physical counterparts. This responsibility of the homo faber to create just, democratic, public spaces enables the actionbased, political narrative of a society to shape itself through and in a material form. The recognition that physical counterparts are of equal importance as the symbolic constructions can be read in the essay of Bruno Latour on missing masses of society, in which he argues, “that the material world pushes back on people because of its physical structure and design (Latour, 1992).”

It is an Arendtian ideal, where the public displays democracy by being zoon politikon, acting in common through the agency of plurality. Stating and defending one’s opinion is the path

towards constituting political visibility and rights. In order to emancipate1 the animal laborans and homo faber to become the zoon politikon, it can be theorized that the act of constructing the common ground by the homo faber is crucial. The acting in public of the homo faber could be both the (technological) redistribution of the right to the city and the act of allowing for, or making inclusive physical constructions (techne). This paper will concentrate itself foremost on the act of (technological) redistribution, based on a deconstruction of the spatial agency of homo faber.

Deconstructing the place of homo faber in current Neoliberal politics In the current neoliberal society, symbolic constructions, and subsequently physical constructions, have increasingly enabled power inequalities in the public space to manifest itself.

These inequalities occur not only between citizens in the class triad animal laborans, homo faber, and zoon politikon. They also occurred inter race and inter species, looking at the violences based on our views of which bodies should inhabit space in which way, dating from Enlightenment.

The common space where democracy manifests itself, following Arendt’s thinking, thus increasingly loses out on inclusive material constructions if the appropriate meta-structure is not realized. Material constructions finally embody the essential act of shaping on both metaand physical level. In words by Bruno Latour, this is the ‘missing mass’ of society (Latour, 1992).

The societal condition Neoliberalism is not only a “political slur” (Metcalf, 2017) or an ideological diagnosis stemming from new interpretations of contemporary societal symptoms. It is moreover a capitalist socio-economic downward spiral finding its roots in colonialism, later on mixed with Taylorism.

One of the most blatant appearances of neoliberalism is globalization. Global trade and subsequent competition have been around since the age of colonialism, yet the scale, speed, and tension it surfaces are, in our sensation, quite novel (Browning, 2005). Globalization is directly related to the ideology of imperialism, though it is treated as post-ideological disease of the new transnational age. Inherent to the pace and fragmentation of occurrences in our age, the original dialectics of current ‘post-ideology’ is forgotten. Neoliberalism has turned the world into a stratified global market, where its inhabitants are nothing more but agents set out to secure financial positions and exchange labour. This is a situation, which strongly resembles slavery to our created system. A slavery, which apparently is not alleviated despite political freedoms we enjoy.

This situation of slavery is in Arendt’s words linked to the overtaking of the public by the social.

Arendt believes the public to be the place where people can act in public and in that way express their ontological state of freedom. Most of human life is thus not meant to be a “mechanical” state, the state inflicted by neoliberalism, but “the consequence of action, not work or labour” (Goldfarb, 2015). Humanity is confined to this artificial state of labour, too preoccupied to act in true freedom. The earlier mentioned Arendtian distinction between activities: labour, work, and action form “a complex hierarchy of interdependent concepts that cover a broad range of human experiences” (Norris, 2002).

This observation of a hierarchy in the public is both helpful and problematic in a few ways for the acquiring of democracy through action. The reasons for this mentioned problem will be explained in this paragraph. However, it should be noted that it was never Arendt’s intention to present practically applicable statements in The Human Condition.

The first part of the problem is the necessary autonomy of the animal laborans. The triad of animal laborans, homo faber, and zoon politikon are interdependent for each other’s existence. In this triad, the distinction of labour and work and the different political positions they take are

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Emancipation has a tricky top-down connotation, which I acknowledge in this essay, yet poses room for interesting perspectives on how to subvert that charitable act of giving freedom.

quintessential. Our current society is however overly dependent on the labourer2 who now is the least emancipated. We can see how the ongoing act of labour is encouraged by global governments, yet alienated in radical discussions (Bates, 2009). This inequality can only be undone once they achieve the status of zoon politikon, which however is not possible when certain people are occupied with performing human labour to sustain their fragile position. The difficult part is thus the need for or the pretence of the need for such labour to be performed by members of our society in order to achieve a position where they can take freedom.

In a similar way, the working man stands on the labouring animal, which brings us to a dangerous pattern. As Marx puts it “this division of labour is a necessary condition for the production of commodities”(Marx, 1887, Section 2). Thus, part of neoliberal society must resort to performing ‘bad’ work or labour and this labour is necessary for society, or the public, to uphold itself3. At the same time, work carried out by the homo faber enjoys a more mythical status, which will be deconstructed in the next paragraph.

Secondly, within the societal hierarchy the homo faber has been signified as the one responsible for technological interventions in the built environment, as the policy maker and the practitioner of these legislations. The working man is thus the entity shackling the labouring man to the chain of neoliberalism by the (symbolic) constructions it disperses over the physical built environment. A few examples of these are “neoliberal urban restructuring programmes and urban surveillance practices”, of which welfare programmes belong to the latter category (Martina, 2017). In these cases, legislation and physical appliance go hand in hand to create an urban prison of inequality, as explained in the essay of E. A. Martina. Going back to the symbolic construction of welfare as example, it is provided by the government with the eventual promise to get the citizens back in the tracks of labour, or positive production of commodity. The symbolic constructions of classic neoliberal politics form obstructions, often also physical ones, in the path of acknowledging the precarious position of animal laborans. This is a position or statement, which needs to be discussed in public, as it concerns a political position. Yet, the public is in turn a space fragmented into individualized components by neoliberalism, incapable of expressing democratic transparency. The fragmentation occurring in the fabric of public space increasingly becomes a criterion of production in itself and forms a fixed manifestation of power inequality and exploitation. Ultimately, this is detrimental for democratic space, explained in Arendt’s terms, which needs to harbour communities of plurality, physically present in their retaking of freedom. It can be argued that this process of fragmentation is, although a global occurrence, a tendency felt the deepest in local sense since it attacks traditional communal structures4.

Thirdly, within the public there is a reality of inequality stretching further than classes of labour.

Vulnerable and systematically discriminated groups, like women, migrants, people of colour, and the unable bodied, are often excluded from or unevenly treated within the groups of homo faber and zoon politikon. This is of course interrelated with the missing artefacts, symbolic or physical, needed to address relations in public. As E. A. Martina states, the bodies of “propertied, ablebodied, neurotypical, heterosexual, working, white male architects, planners, and developers” define the legislation and built environment. This furthers the cycle of misunderstanding and misrepresentation, when the artefacts that define our society are misrepresentations. Realizing the former will help build the understanding that the public space plays a key role in political

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The animal laborans that is mentioned throughout this essay is constituted out of urban workers, which in itself are “a very different kind of class formation—fragmented and divided, multiple in its aims and needs, more often itinerant, disorganized and fluid rather than solidly implanted” (Harvey, 2012).

3 We do not only speak about manual labour in this context, which is rooted in colonial structures. In addition, the capitalist immaterial labour as a new form is important to take into consideration, as described by Bates 4 Following, there is not one type of neoliberalism or globalization to be distinguished, both are highly susceptible to regional contexts, anchored in social, economic, and historical pasts. This notion also leads to the fact that there is not one universal type of common to be discerned.

interaction through its “active – the operational or instrumental – role […], as knowledge and action, in the existing mode of production” (Lefebvre, 1991, p.11).

Deconstructing the homo faber as fetishized space-making agent As said in the introduction, policy-makers and -enforcers are a vital part of the homo faber. In traditional sense, they are seen as the sole space makers. They are the creators of their environment and therefor their destiny. This act of space making exists of both physical and virtual/systemic components, also called symbolic constructions. Both make up the fabric of democratic public space5. This fabric informs, counters, and overlays the preconditions created by those symbolic constructions.

Where exactly this physical membrane constitutes itself is highly dependent of the “site of action”, where objects as such manifest themselves and create pressure points in space through their claim on space (Awan et al., 2011, p.55). This social space in creation is a relatively new mode of thinking, springing from a quest “to shape the qualities of daily urban life”, after the reign of the mathematical informed isotropic space (Harvey, 2012). The isotropic space has greatly informed the symbolic constructions by its dominance of the mental. Space has become disconnected from reality and it has become increasingly easier to theorize on objects in space and implement detrimental ruptures without considering the ground level repercussions.

Making space into a product of logic has led to the attribution of “logical coherence, practical consistency, [and] self-regulation” as qualities of this space and subsequently to homo faber as wielders of this logic (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 3). The mentioned cycle of misunderstanding and misrepresentation in the previous paragraph can be related to this sanitization of space at the hands of logic, pushing away the illogical object and disowning the multitude of the public of their agency to co-create space. This constant tension between subject and object, logical space and social space, might be one of the bigger phenomena the homo faber can subvert through its constructions. At the same time, the mental dimension of space creates a desire to understand and subdivide space into typologies and related fields of study, which only distances us from the core of the meaning of space (Lefebvre, 1991). The desire to grasp space by the homo faber and implement its various types in the public is one way to commodify through logic and accumulate through aiding symbolic constructions.

On the other edge of the spectrum of desire, we have the ‘fetishization’ of the act of creation by the homo faber. Homo faber is always described as the skilful, resourceful, inventing man, with a nod to the artisanal and often the artistic genius. Arendt in turn ties the homo faber to worldliness, extra-natural, imprinting itself upon nature (Arendt, 1998). These traits make further association with purity, beauty, sturdiness, and usefulness, or the qualities of architecture according to Vitruvius. A very arresting example of the fetish around homo faber is the current theme of the Venice Biennale 2018, which initially centres itself on the broad theme of ‘freespace’. An exhibition within this biennale is titled ‘Homo Faber: Crafting a More Human Future’, celebrating the “Renaissance ideal of “man as maker””(Sanderson, 2018, par. 3). Yet, it is highly debatable what this “human future” might mean. For whom will it be carved carefully? In which way does the inanimate technological construction aid to a human or humane future?

Deconstructing the fetish around the homo faber is thus the construction of the right to desire and to design in desire for the animal laborans.

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It is also quite interesting to start considering mathematical imaginary spaces and their topologies as part of these democratic spaces divided by class, which should be reattributed. Lefebvre briefly examines the seizing of space by mathematicians and thereafter becoming the domain of philosophers.

Deconstructing the spatial agency of homo faber through the right to the city Through the unearthing of the violences of isotropic space to democratic space, we have constituted that the homo faber contributes to the upkeep of normative, oppressing structures within our current neoliberal society through their fetishization. These oppressing structures are containing the bodies of citizens in the shackles of the fragmented public, or social slavery.

The struggle over the public has been a phenomenon of all time, recurring to the table of discussion whenever the dichotomy between the logical/mental and the social/physical intensifies itself.

For example, the mentioned social slavery has been a continuation from “European feudal order”, exported over the world in the form of colonialism and capitalism, imploding back to a current psychosocial form (Shilliam, 2015, p. 2). Here, “social slavery” [of the animal laborans] is characterized by atomization, negative individualism by differentiation, and apathy, while social health might feature a flourishing of participation in decision-making bodies such as town halls, community boards, unions, or social movements, all of which should allow for meaningful self-expression (Cucharo, 2016, para. 5).

This ongoing search for social health shows that the rights to the city, as described by Lefebvre in the 60’s, are now revisited in theory and action. As David Harvey puts it in his preface to Rebel Cities: They had individually concluded after years of struggling on their own particular issues (homelessness, gentrification and displacement, criminalization of the poor and the different, and so on) that the struggle over the city as a whole framed their own particular struggles (Harvey, 2012, p.9).

We can look at the social slavery described by Shilliam in another perspective to address neoliberalism, its symbolic constructions, and the symptoms shown in the citations above. The public is held in the invisible shackles of privileged ownership by the homo faber, basing itself on the fragmentation and privatisation of space through logic. This leads to the treatment of space as commodity sold on various markets at the same time. “Land, and with it many public housing developments, [have been auctioned off] to private companies for a short-term profit” (Awan et al., 2011, p. 57). This is nothing less than the one pattern of material accumulation and dispossession we may recognize from the capitalist model described by Marx, or the continuation of the feudal system we mentioned before. Public space is of a certain use value, both due to the social and economic values tied to the public and its designated mental space in the respective society. This use value is the basis for the exchange value given to the certain object for another object, in this case the trade in public space occurring in current neoliberalism. On a more abstract level, the public6 is therefor also a place where labour and immaterial (mental) labour accumulates and exchanges, perhaps in the most intensive manner known to us, and the public subsequently derives a new sense of value through its embodied labour.

The commodification of public space leads to the alienation of space and the artefacts it contains from the public who produces it, through the technology of neoliberalism. As Aimé Césaire puts it while speaking on alienation of personhood through plantation slavery, we can use this as an analogy to describe the recent development of the “thingification”, or ‘de-publification’, of public space and its contents (Césaire, 1972). The “thingification” can be related to the increasing obscuring of these technologies’ origin. As mentioned by Latour, “people can ‘‘act at a distance’’ through the technologies they create and implement and how, from a user’s perspective, a technology can appear to determine or compel certain actions” (Latour, 1992). The core for the social health mentioned in the quote by Cucharo is thus the reversing of the alienation by logic.

This could be done through the reclaiming of the right to the city, or the rights to make space, from the fetishized homo faber (Harvey, 2012). Although, “claiming the right to the city is a waystation on the road to that goal. It can never be an end in itself, even if it increasingly looks to be 6

What is meant by the public is in this case the town or city, the constructed area; virgin soil has no labour value.

one of the most propitious paths to take” (Harvey, 2012). Following the deconstruction should be the revisiting of the normalized practices of fragmentation through private accumulation of labour.

The first step of the reclamation of the rights to the city for all layers in the triad, especially the animal laborans, is thus the subversion of the ingrained notion of homo faber as singular spatial or logical agent, especially relating to architects and spatial planners. As Awan, Schneider, and Till say “agency is intractably tied to power” (Awan et al., 2011, p. 32). It also necessarily draws back to the contested matter of which subject to consider in space and the alienation by projection. This is an important matter, as Harvey states “We inevitably have to confront the question of whose rights are being identified, while recognizing, as Marx puts it in Capital, that “between equal rights force decides.”” What happens with the said power or force is interesting in the perspective of how it is attained, how it restructures the hierarchy of subject and object within the space, and how the new mode of power versus agency is made visible.

The first theoretical result of considering bodies outside these normative fields as spatial agents is the transference of power. Transference of power is linked to the claiming of rights. With the word ‘claiming’ we implicitly are pinpointing the discomfort this retrieval may cause as opposed to words like ‘emancipating’. Another frame of thought which we might derive from ‘claiming’ is the denial of participatory planning efforts, which still hold the original neoliberal power structure in place although slightly altered, and the denial that the rethinking of spatial agents “are simply reformist attempts to deal with specific (rather than systemic) issues” (Harvey, 2012). Both of these are symptoms of hegemony, which need to be amended through the claiming of rights. The claim for the right to the city is in its very essence subverting the idea of the trained architect, planner, and legislator as the one in charge of making the (organized) city and therefor its public space. With this transference of power, we ultimately begin to reach the re-appropriation of jargon and the democratisation of tools used for spatial imagination, thus creating a basis for equalized manners of communication within space.

However, the transference can lead to a re-ordering of power within the triad, possibly leading to new grey areas of tension. As mentioned, the hierarchy of subject and object within the space might come to an unstable position until it reaches a new equilibrium. Here it is interesting to look at Harvey’s quote of Capital again, essentially questioning the feasibility of equal rights.

Equality will still lead to people higher in the triad to exert privileges formerly attained, such as capital, status, and education. In this way of thinking we should rather go for equity, defined as “freedom from bias or favouritism” (Merriam-Webster, 2018).

Lastly, the visualization of the new mode of power versus agency can be thought through the rethinking of visibility of ownership in space. Normally this visibility is reserved for the homo faber through the technological artefacts placed in the public, like skyscrapers, real-estate architecture, and fenced parks and squares. These objects are placed in the open to satisfy our warped need for “centrality”, essentially pirating the needed space to “come together to articulate our collective cries and demands” (Harvey, 2012). Therefore, to rethink the exposed (symbolic) constructions that signal the power of the agent would be to imagine a completely new array of techne rethought, reloaded, and redesigned.

Further thoughts This paper has been a small step within a larger dissection of the architect’s and planner’s role in crafting public space as we experience it within our neoliberal reality. Helpful are the political considerations of Hannah Arendt, which can be used as a framework to deconstruct certain roles in society. Essentially this will work towards subverting the current understanding of the aforementioned roles.

A future paper needs to dive deeper into translating the transference of power linked to the claiming of rights towards techne or missing mass, recognizing the power of the artefact in public space.

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