Rp179 Commentary2 Merrifield Citizensagora

7/28/2019 Rp179 Commentary2 Merrifield Citizensagora

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31R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 7 9 ( M a y / J u n e 2 0 1 3 )

COmmENT

Citizens agora

The new urban questionandy merrifield

What would Rousseau, who penned his classic Dis-course on Inequality in 1755, have made of thingstoday? Had he still been around, had he travelledaround the globe a bit, hed have doubtless despaired of how little civilized society had ameliorated the arti-

cial inequalities that derive from the conventions thatgovern us. Maybe hed have also played a cameo rolein a new documentary, Inequality for All , directed byJacob Kornbluth with economist Robert Reich as theunlikely lead.1 Already a big hit at the 2013 SundanceFilm Festival, Inequality for All follows Reich teach-ing his packed undergraduate class on Wealth andPoverty at the University of California, Berkeley. In1978, says Reich, your typical male worker doing just

ne in the USA was pulling in around $48,000 a year;

your boss back then was probably making around$390,000. Thirty-odd years on, in 2010, the formerstruggles to earn $33,000 a year, while the lattersaverage share has bloated to well over a million bucksa year. Where America leads, Reich says, the rest of the world follows. This same thing is affecting peopleall over the world. If nothing is done to reverse thistrend, Britain will nd itself in exactly the same placeas America in just a few years time. Indeed, as atDecember 2010, 10 per cent of the fattest cats in theUK own 40 per cent of the national wealth; and RoyalBank of Scotland bankers, after nagling Libor interestrates and suffering losses for 2012 of 5.2 billion, nowaward themselves bonuses in excess of 600 million.

Never before has growth especially urban growth depended so centrally on the creation of new mecha-nisms to wheel and deal nance capital and creditmoney, on new deregulated devices, underwritten bythe state, for looting and nagling, for absorbingsurplus capital into real-estate speculation. These dayscapital accumulation predicates itself not so much onproduction as such but ondispossession , on expro-priation.2 In the nineteenth century, Baron Haussmanntore into central Paris, into its poor neighbourhoods,

dispatching denizens to the periphery as he speculatedon the centre; the built urban form became simultane-ously a property machine and a means to divide andrule. Nowadays,neo-Haussmannization is a processthat likewise integrates nancial, corporate and stateinterests, yet tears into the whole globe and seizes landthrough forcible slum clearance and a handy vehicle fordispossession known as eminent domain, wherein thepublic sector expropriates land and then gives it awayfor upscale private reappropriation, letting private eco-nomic interests cash in on what is legalized looting.

In our nouveau rgime that Reich evokes in In equality for All an upper bourgeoisie has risen tosuch prominence, has accumulated such wealth andpower, that now they assume the mantle of a new

aristocracy, an astonishingly rich, new-monied groupof people who behave like a class of old feudal lords,presiding not only over particular companies, but overentire national and supra-international governmentsas well. At the same time, a big chunk of the middleground has caved in, imploded, meaning middlingtypes have slipped into the ranks of thesans-culottes ,

nding it ever more dif cult to make ends meet. Inthe process, the top 1 per cent has decoupled itself from the rest of us and has become the parasitic bearerof merchant and rentier capital, lching pro ts from

unequal exchanges and interest-bearing assets, as wellas claims to absolute rent from class-monopoly controlof urban land.

Fro the city to la cit

In one of the great works on the French Revolution,The Sans-culottes (1968), Albert Soboul points to thein uence Rousseau exerted on the popular revolution -ary throng, even if few had actually read his texts. Yetthe sans-culottes werent a class as such, Soboul says:instead they comprised artisans and small shopkeepers,modest merchants and journeymen [and women] daylabourers along with a bourgeois minority;3 those,


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we might say, whove slipped into the popular ranksand are now, in our day, beginning to know it. Thesans-culottes represented an irresistible force, saysSoboul, undergirding a coalition collectively consciousof a common aristocratic enemy; they propped up astrategic alliance that recognized a common revolution-ary project. Today insurrection must rid itself of a new

aristocracy without a liberal bourgeoisie stepping in inits stead. Any new revolutionary movement against oureconomic absolutism needs asans-culottes leading theway. A passionate desire for equality might cue thismilitancy, drafting, en route, a new social contract. Itis, however, the question of what kind of social contractthis might be that I want to address here.

In The Social Contract (1762), near the end of theSocial Compact ( pacte social ) section, theres afootnote added by the author. In it, Rousseau quali eswhat he means by the idea (and ideal) of citizen , of how

it embodies a particular territorial disposition, and how,in modern times, the real meaning of the word hasbeen almost wholly lost.4 The footnote has one of themost famously quotable lines fromThe Social Con-tract : houses make a town, but citizens make a city.(The most famously quotable, of course, is the openingrefrain: humans are born free; and everywhere theyrein chains.) The notion that houses make a town, butcitizens make a city is the standard English riff onRousseaus original French, passed down the historicalline, unchanged and unchallenged. The phrase gets pre-ceded by this musing: most people mistake a town fora city, and a townsman for a citizen.5 Yet, in our ownmodern times theres something woefully inadequateabout this translation; and Rousseaus concern aboutlosing the real meaning of citizen seems more presci-ent than even he might have ever imagined. Worse, thestandard translation hints at a certain bourgeois reap-propriation and makes Rousseaus radical text sound alot less radical than it still might be. So lets considerhis original text more closely: la plupart prennent une

ville pour une cit, et un bourgeois pour un citoyen.Ils ne savent pas que les maisons font la ville, maisque les citoyens font la cit.6 These two sentences, itstrue, pose dif culty for any Anglo translator. Not leastbecause the word town doesnt really exist in French:

petite ville is often its everyday usage, a small city,but Rousseau isnt using the word petite ville ; he says,quite clearly,ville. On the other hand,cit has no directequivalent in English. And yet, if we move beyondsemantics and get into the spirit of Rousseaus intendedmeaning, the standard translation might satisfy politi-cal scientists and philosophers, but it can no longer beacceptable for radical political urbanists.

For a start, town is a much too archaic term, anda much too limited (and redundant) political jurisdic-tion to have meaning for a contemporary reader; andso, too, is city a problematic basis for a modernconcept of citizenship.Cit , though, does continue tospeak politically, yet only if its domain is reconsideredimaginatively, perhaps even normatively. In that sense,

heres how a contemporary urbanist, a contemporaryphilosopher of the urban, might recalibrate Rousseau:the majority [of people] take a city for thecit and abourgeois for a citizen. (Rousseau, we might note, usesthe politically charged bourgeois not benign towns-man.) He continues: people dont know that housesmake a city, but citizens make acit . Ive left thisnotion of cit untranslated for the moment, because itsthe part that needs a refreshed vocabulary, a contem-porary reloading. And this is what Id like to proposeand develop as a working hypothesis: the majority [of

people] take a city for thecit , and a bourgeois for acitizen. They dont know that houses make a city butcitizens make the urban [la cit ].

The urban, then, might be better suited for Rous-seaus notion of cit : it satis es more accurately, andmore radically, a politically charged concept of citizen-ship that goes beyond nationality and ag waving. ( Cit ,we might equally note, raises the popular spectre inbourgeois circles, pejoratively evokingquartiers dessans-culottes , the no-go zones sensibles , the globalbanlieues .) For the physical and social manifestation of our landscape, for its bricks and mortar, we have whatmost people would deem city. But as a political ideal,as a new social contract around which citizenship


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might cohere, we have something we might call theurban: a more expansive realm for which no passportsare required and around which people the world overmight bond. Citizenship might here be conceived assomething urban, as something territorial, yet one inwhich territoriality is both narrower and broader thancity and nationality; a territory and citizenship

without borders.So maybe the idea of cit a territory both real andideal satis es the jurisdictional ideal of RousseausSocial Contract : the living space of modern democracyin the making. Thats why there are no passports forRousseauian citizens of the urban universe, no pass-ports for those who know they live somewhere yet feel they belong everywhere. Or who want to feel it. Thisconjoining of knowing and feeling is what engendersa sense of empathy whose nom de plume might reallybe citizenship itself. Here we might take the notion of

dwelling in its broadest sense: asthe totality of politi-cal and economic space in which one now belong s.The urban helps af nity grow, helps it become awareof itself, aware that other af nities exist in the world,that af nities can encounter one another, becomeaware of one another assans-culottes , the 99 per cent,in a social network connected by a certain tissuing, bya planetary webbing: an af nity of urban citizenship.Houses make a city, but citizens makela cit .

What Rousseau terms the peoples general willtoday can only ever express itself within this urban[cit ] context. The general will [la volont gnrale ] isthe sum of urban af nities taking shape, an expressionof dissatisfaction en masse, perhaps at rst knowingbetter what this will doesnt like, what it is against,than what its actually for.7 At any rate, Rousseauslogic is rather beautiful: the general will of the people,he explains, is both infallible and fallible:

The general will is always upright and always tendsto the public advantage; but it doesnt follow thatthe deliberations of the people always have the same

rectitude. Our will is always for our own good, butwe dont always see what it is; the people is nevercorrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occa-sions only does it seem to will what is bad.8

Yet how might this general will work itself out? Andhow might the common urban af nities that cementpeople together actually develop today? Where mightthese af nities, and this general will, emerge? How canparticular wills be made aware of themselves as some-thing more general, as a larger collective constituencythat is something greater than the sum of individualparts? What are the institutions through which af nitymight develop? A direct response to these questions

might be: in thecitizens agora , in the space of theurban, in the popular realm where a public might cometogether and express itself as a general will.

Every revolution h s its gor

The citizens agora is something more than the publicspaces of the city; more, even, than the public institu-

tions we once knew as public state institutionsforever under re. One reason for this is that it isntclear any more just what the public domain constitutes,what it is, let alone what it might be. In our day, thepublic realm hasnt so much fallen from grace asgone into wholescale tailspin. Eighty-odd years afterThe Social Contract , and almost sixty after the 9thThermidor counter-revolution, Marx, inThe Com-munist Manifesto , demonstrated what liberal bour-geois democracy had bequeathed us: no other nexusbetween man and man than naked self-interest, thancallous cash payment drowning the most heavenlyecstasies of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistinesentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calcu-lation. Bourgeois society, Marx says, has resolvedpersonal [and public] worth into exchange value, andrips away halos of every sort, converting all erstwhilehallowed and holy realms, including the public realmitself, into another money realm, into another meansto accumulate capital.9 Marx, in a nutshell, leaves uswith the rather bleak task of picking up the pieces of

what the public realm might still mean.Theres a consequent need to rede ne not an urbanpublic realm thats collectively owned and managed bythe state, but a public realm of thecit that is somehowexpressive of the people, expressive of the generalwill a will, maybe, that incorporates an af nity of common notions, notions that Spinoza always insistedwere not universal notions, not universal rights. Spinozawas against such an abstract conception of universality,which he thought was aninadequate idea . Commonnotions are general rather than abstract, general in

their practical and contextual applicability. From thisstandpoint, when something is public, its channels forcommon expression remain open, negotiable and debat-able, political and urban in the sense that they witnesspeople encountering other people, dialoguing withother people, arguing with other people, formulatingan infallible general will.

Twenty- rst-century urban spaces of the cit will bepublic spaces not for reasons of pure concrete physical-ity or centrality, nor even because of land tenure, butbecause they are meeting places between virtual andphysical worlds, between online and of ine conversa -tions, between online and of ine encounters. Space


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wont so much be divided between public and privateas between passive or active ; between a space thatencourages active encounters of people and a spacethat resigns itself to passive encounters, a space thatisnt so much public as the Sartrean practico-inert:it envelops us as passive backdrop, like dead labourfunctions in redundant xed capital, as plain old bricks

and mortar, as concrete and steel. For urban spaces tocome alive, to be public in Rousseaus republican sense(not the Tea Partys), they need to express dynamicsocial relations between people, between people thereand elsewhere, elsewhere in other urban spaces, creat-ing a network of living, conjoined spaces sovereignspaces, we might say not dead zones that alienate andseparate. Thus people in these sovereign spaces mightcome together tocreate a function, to talk and meet, tohang out; sometimes theyll come to protest, to expressthemselves in angry not tender ways. In either sense,

theyre not responding to a function like a crowd of shoppers. In coming together they expressactive ratherthan passive affects; plazas, parks, squares, streets andcivic buildings become what Jeffrey Hou calls, in acontribution to the collection Beyond Zuccotti Park ,insurgent public space. [A]s we envision the futureof public space in North America and beyond, Housays,

it is clear that the focus of our efforts should beequally, if not more, on the making of the public

than on the making of space. While space remainscritical as a vehicle for actions and expressions, it isthrough the actions and the making of a socially andpolitically engaged public that the struggle for publicspace as a forum of political dialogues and expres-sions can be resuscitated and sustained.10

Following Rousseau, the incorruptible Robespierreinsisted that the poor have most need of ensuring itsvoice getsheard , that its needs take priority.11 But tospeak out, in the making of an active public of thekind that Hou articulates, there is rst then a need,

among other things, for a free press, or at least, in ourday, for an alternative free press that reports on thesort of news items peopleought to hear about. Today,this is clearly not the celebrity gossip and right-wingpropaganda mainstream media boom out every day,at every hour, the fear and loathing peddled by thelikes of Fox and News International, but other sources,often online, sometimes clandestine media. If a spaceto petition guarantees a citizens right to be heard,then a free press guarantees a citizens right to hear,to listen to social truths getting circulated within thecit . To speak and to hear correspondingly require anurban space in which to debate and argue, and, above

all, to meet, for citizens to come together. Robespierreacknowledged the need for any democracy to allowpeople to assemble, to do so peaceably and withoutarms; although, of course, if this right is denied, if theprinciples of free urban assembly are opposed, then thesubclause is that citizens ought to be able to assemblethrough any means necessary, peaceable or otherwise.

It is in this space that citizens have the power toact ,to act after being heard, to act after having listened toother citizens; mutually reinforcing public agoras, inother words citizens agora as much experientialspaces as physical locations.

The dilemma here, however, is that the citizensagora is needed either side of urban insurrection: onthe one hand, its required to put in place any revolu-tionary insurrection; its instrumental, in other words,for insurrection itself, for propagandizing and organ-izing it, for spreading the word and for news sharing

even if, sometimes, this organization initially needs tobe discreet, needs to tread cautiously in its propagationof open democracy. New social media can obviouslybe one component for creating a new citizens agora.On the other hand, the day after the insurrectionsuch an agora needs to be inscribed into any writtenconstitution, into any actual urban social contractguaranteeing they remain the rights of all citizens. In away, RousseausSocial Contract seems better attuned,in this sense, to the post-insurrectional epoch, to theaftermath of citizens revolutionary upheaval, whenthe urban carnivals are over, when the insurrection hastriumphed, if it ever triumphs; rights-talk beforehandisnt maybe the best means through which togain onesrights. In fact, one might wonder whether the wholetheme of rights, so prevalent again today rightsof man, right to the city (le droit la ville ), and soon really helps either in changing society or inunderstanding how society changes. Rights-talk caninhibit rather than enable things to happen. Rights canbe positive and negative depending on how you frame

them politically: they are empty signi ers that needlling with content; and once youve lled them their

implications are so indeterminate that opposing partiescan use the same rights language to express absolutelydiffering positions.

Le droit la ville is an unfortunate victim. Atthe United Nations-sponsored World Urban Forum,held in Rio in March 2010, the UN and the WorldBank both incorporated the right to the city intoits charter to address the global poverty trap. On theother side of the street in Rio, at the Urban SocialForum, a peoples popular alternative was also beingstaged; there activists were appalled by the ruling


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classs reappropriation of such a hallowed grassrootsideal, of its right nottheirs . The mainstream has nowconverted its own right into a tactical right that hasoften become a watchword for conservative rule. TheTories in Britain are quick to acknowledge peoplesright to self-management, happily endorsing com-munity rights and citizens right to choose, since

all this means the neoliberal state can desist fromcoughing up for public services. Self-empowermentthereby becomes tantamount to self-subsidization, toself-exploitation, to even more dispossession, molli edas social enterprise and the voluntary third sector.

So rights, including the right to the city, haveno catch-all universal meaning in politics, nor anyfoundational basis in institutions; neither are theyresponsive to any moral or legal argument. Ques-tions of rights are, rst and foremost, questions of social power, about whowins . The struggle for rights

isnt something recognized by some higher, neutralarbiter; instead, for those people who have no rights,rights to thecit must be taken; they involve struggleand force. What has been taken must be reclaimedthrough practical action, through organized militancy,through urban insurrection. A Bill of Rights remainsthe ends not the means for enforcing ones democraticright. Its the joyous product not the guiding light in

the dogged process of struggle: the struggle for the newand necessary citizens agora we have yet to invent.

Notes1. See Carole Cadwalladr, Inequality for All: Another In-

convenient Truth?, Observer , 2 February 2013.2. See David Harvey,The New Imperialism , Oxford Uni-

versity Press, New York, 2003, pp. 137182.

3. Albert Soboul,The Sans-Culottes , Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton NJ, 1980, p. 256.4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,The Social Contract and Dis-

courses , trans. G.D.H. Cole, Dent, London, 1973, p. 192.5. Ibid.6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, ditions So-

ciales, Paris, 1968, p. 68.7. The people, Peter Hallward says, are simply those

who, in any given situation, formulate, assert and sustaina fully common (and thus fully inclusive and egalitar-ian) interest, over and above any divisive and exclusiveinterest. The Will of the People: Towards a DialecticalVoluntarism, Radical Philosophy 155, May/June, 2009,pp. 1729.

8. Rousseau,The Social Contract and Discourses , p. 203.9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Mani-

festo ; www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/com-munist-manifesto/ch01.htm.

10. Jeffrey Hou, Making Public, Beyond Public Space, inRon Shiffman et al., eds, Beyond Zuccotti Park , NewVillage Press, Oakland CA, 2012, p. 94.

11. See Maximilien Robespierre, Le droit de ptition, in Robespierre: pour le bonheur et pour la libert , La Fab-rique, Paris, 2000, pp. 1014.

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Rp179 Commentary2 Merrifield Citizensagora