 OK. Dobro, ampak, da sem več, smo zelo pošli, da smo bagali, ker bi zelo skupil, da smo načeliš, patošli na kljeni, tako bo bi bilo bolj, da smo v tem, da je nekaj dobro. Zelo, da so vse, in ne zelo vzal. V desetji roj, da se tudi odnijemo, da je to zelo zelo. So, da se so tudi odnijemo. Vzelo, da se zelo zelo zelo. Vzelo, da se zelo zelo. Zelo, da se zelo zelo. Zelo, da se zelo zelo. Zelo, positions of of. Aof geography of the University of of Manchester. In the school of environment and development. Ereak iz from Belgian originality was born in famous speaking Belgian and he knows a fluent in that in four languages that French languages of Belgium, English and English, in spaničnih. Vsi nekaj, ki so se zelo, ki so se v Spanii. Vsi zelo v msku v bioengineeringu, v belgem, v Luvinu, katoliko Universtvo Leuvinu v 1979. in površal se površal drugi mestar, tudi v urbani in regionalnih plenih, tudi v Lervinu. P.H.D. v geografiji in enviromentalnih inginirih z pravami odopravosti bo, da je prijisto carrotu vo operacijenke, nekako je začela, godine, da je prijeva, na svoj Transfer tudi, kako se priiznaje vater, David Harvey, sem zapelo, in David Harvey sa svojem so bil počasovati svoj vzgovor. več zelo naši studenci, ki so naredili, in več izgledali, da je tukaj. Erich je od 88. do 2006. prof. geografija v Oxfordu, svoju universitetu, svoju collega St. Peter. In je v 2006 do Manjšestu, kaj je ještje, da je skupnil, je odličen od nekaj mnogodnih publikacijov, ljudi v artiklu, vse editeti, in vse monografi, environments in ravlj about the lester, where we develop a few teams coming out of that as someone who is developed in the wake of David Harvist work. There is a lot of work with this imprint in cities. Well, also the background in prejdečne, da so neko v paredju, neko v ekipediju, neko v težavke, ki so se pravne izstavili. Ojeve v težavke vseh broj, je neko v editedu, še je Jeffi Wilson, neko sem prišla v letu, a ki je neko naredovati do vseh težavkiho prezentacijana. The title of the book is the Post-Political and its Discontents, Spaces of Depoliticization Specters of Radical Politics. That came out last year and this year again in paperback. Edinburgh University Press. And then his very latest book that came out just at the beginning of the summer, Liquid Power Contested Hydro-Modernities in 20. Century Spain. And here again is Spain that I just mentioned. So without further delay, please join me in welcoming Eric Swingidov. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jill Butte. It's a pleasure to be here and the privilege to have been invited by Soez and Jill Butte to present this lecture this evening. As you've heard from Jill Butte's introduction, I've always been interested in radical politics. And in particular the articulation between radical politics and the urban. The way in which many of us, David Harvey, included have done that over the past 30 years or so since 1970s, 1980s. As well as the following way is that we assumed that a substantive theorization of the social, economic and the urban would give us the instruments, the tools, the tactics, if not the strategies of mobilizing or engaging in radical politics. Marxists have always made this their staple. We have to understand capitalism in order to fight it. And of course feminists, post-colonialists and others have more or less made the same claims. We first have to critically understand the multiple axes around which power the exclusion and unevenness is structured in order to come up with the strategies and tactics that can change potentially the modalities of inequality, disempowerment and exclusion. The point I want to make in a sort of roundabout way this evening is that that may possibly hypothetically have been a mistake. That we might want to revisit this implicit assumption that there is a relationship between substantive critical theorization of the kind that I mentioned and radical or progressive political action. In contrast to that, I'm going to argue that what is urgently required for us intellectuals and theoreticians of the city and urbanization is to foreground the political more centrally, to think through what the political is or might be today at the beginning, it's not any longer the beginning anymore, of the 21st century. And what the relationship, if any, is between your political theorization, political mobilization and the transformation of the urban order. So what I'm not going to do is engage with the sort of work that people like Saskia Sassan have done or Neil Brenner said, well, if you really want to understand urbanization today, you have to do it in the context of the process of planetary urbanization that shape the condition of combined uneven geographical development, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. And through that, a proper understanding of that, we've come up with a better set of tactics and strategies to deal with radical politics in Istanbul, Kathmandu or London. I don't think that's the case. So I'm going to take another tack. I'm going to talk about insurgent practices in the planetary city and to articulate that through examining what I would consider to be a paradoxical situation. And the paradoxical situation is the following. On the one hand, a number of more or less influential authors that put up to here, because there's a lot of late Nobel Prize winning Portuguese novelists. On the one hand, and Russell Brandt and up comedian, all around bad boy, who in their very different ways say exactly the same thing. There's nothing they claim that we can any longer do with the democratic. Just a facade, Salamago says, something he explores wonderfully well in his, in his last novel, seeing where he chronicled the disintegration in a certain way of the democratic spectacle and the reimagining of what the democratic might be by yekronikling the unfolding of a democratic procedure in this little town that he'd been written about at least two more times. Most of you are familiar with the city of the blind. This wonderful novel where situated in this town where everyone went magically, strangely blind, except for one woman, which was basically an allegory of the disintegration of civilization as we know it. It's a democratic condition. It's a story where people do precisely as Russell Brandt calls us to do stop voting. There is no point. This is Jorju Agamben, who also in his own radical philosophical manner tries to explore this strange ye process, of deep politicization where he says that there is a shift that has been a shift from the model of the polis that's because the name, the political name of the city, the city has a political space as a space for civic and public engagement versus the city as this kind of geographical concentration, accumulation of bodies and stuff in places like London. There is a shift on the model of the polis found in a center, there is a public center, a new metropolitan spatialization that is certainly invested in the process of deep politicization. This is quite a common argument made that we all have been over the past decade or so living under conditions of radical deep politicization. Clearly manifested in the fact that most people, certainly my students when I take a straw poll and ask them, did you vote last time? And I get 20-30 percent of university students who exercised their democratic citizenship entitlement. We had elections in Greece just a few weeks ago where the turnout was an all time low for Greek standards which was around 50-55 percent. This is well documented and chronicled. Yet in this sphere of deep politicization we've seen a strange return of massive outbursts of discontent centered around cities, in the world, hopping from center to center from city to city operating under a variety of names operating under very different very heterogeneous social, economic and political conditions. Yet where there seems to be although we don't know precisely how a sort of uncanny affinity when these outbursts of urban discontent are deep frog from Cairo, from Tunis to Cairo from Cairo to Athens from Athens to Thessaloniki from Thessaloniki to Madrid, from Madrid to Barcelona from Barcelona to Istanbul from Istanbul to Santiago to Chile from Santiago to Chile to Tel Aviv from Tel Aviv to Hong Kong from Hong Kong to Hamburg. This is a paradoxical situation where on the one hand there is this argument of deep seat politicization yet, at least since the magical year 2011 and it's aftermath the multiple and massive expression of insurrectional movements that basically say we have enough we do not any longer accept what goes for democracy or what is understood as such in the particular urban and national context in which we operate so these are just a few of the more evocative names that we have become to associate with this multiplication of urban planetary urban political discontent how can we make sense of this apparent paradox this is the most later one in Frankfurt on the occasion of the opening of the new headquarters of the European Central Bank this new sort of European policing agent ask the great people what they think of the democratic nature of this Frankfurt based institution now many would consider these outbursts as impotent impotent outbursts that flare up in which a bunch of people have fun for a while it's a great spectacle of enjoyment that for a few weeks best a few months shake in a certain way in a spectacular way the status quo but then things return to normal well I would like to suggest that perhaps these movements are politically more performative than what one might expect in 2013 in Davos Davos is this name of a little town where the assorted elites of the world come together to chart out to organize the making geographical of their dream of what a good world is all about it's not my dream but they clearly have a dream of how to transform the geographical organization of places and cities and countries according to their own imaginary and of course they all know as well as we know imaginaries do not become real without resistance without all manner of obstacles put in place by people like us so every year at Davos the world risk report is published it's a wonderful read the world risk report because it's of course an analysis of what the greatest obstacles and the risks are for the assembled elites that stand in the way of the potential realization of their bad dream for the world so for example in 2011 of course it was the financial in 2013 the number one risk that the world economic forum identified in their 600 page world risk report was called seeds of dystopia I had to read the whole god damn 600 pages to figure out seeds of dystopia and of course what they meant was the extraordinary proliferation of outbursts of urban discontents of the kind that I was referring to they of course refer to it as seeds of dystopia it's not a kind of metaphor that I would have used for these kind of outbursts but it did suggest that to a certain extent they had a kind of performativity it shook up a bit the certainties that usually accompany these sort of meetings in the aftermath of those insurrectional moments which are of necessity short lived bactinian outburst of great spectacles which of course are not sustainable they cannot be sustained that is of course not the issue you can't go on occupying public squares in cities for the rest of your life because that's not life the whole point of course is to get home and have a life but have a different sort of life so the key question of course is not one of discontinuous, impotent occupying of places and consider them to be really vital but ultimately pre-political events that may or may not and only under certain very specific conditions and configurations may lead to the slow, difficult process of politicization that begins in a variety of ways to change the common sense of everyday life because that is what of course those collected insurgents want to achieve a change in the common sense of the world that what was considered nonsensical today that becomes common sensical the next day so I am very intrigued in the diverse modalities through which under certain circumstances these outbursts might signal and I am uncertain theoretically and empirically how the two actually hang together I don't have an answer but at least I would insist some sort of connectivity between these urban outbursts of radical discontent and processes of emergent repolitizization the kind of process that goes under the variegated name of Ceresa in Greece, Podemos in Spain right to the city movement in Poland and other places the HDP in Turkey or perhaps Coralbin in the UK so, let me try to say something then about these insurgent cities so first I want to explore for a moment theoretically this kind of strange paradoxical situation well on the one hand there is this argument of the argument that I and many others have made that we today living in post democratic post geopolitical configuration the configuration that radically disavows the political which then of course ask the question of what do I mean by the political and I want to say something to briefly about the theoretical perspectives that tries to account for a whole together this strange paradoxical situation between a depoliticized polity on the one hand and the reemergence of the political as manifested in these mass movements of radical discontent and then say something about how this articulates with these insurgent urban movements that I exemplified to conclude to ask myself with Alain Badiou whether what we have seen over the past few years is just a blip or whether it may signal the the beginning, the reawakening as Badiou calls the reawakening of history history understood as the process of emancipatory struggle so let me first say something about the dynamics of depoliticization When I use the word post depoliticization I usually get the classic and fairly trivial objection that the prefix post seems to suggest that once upon a time things were political but that today they're not any longer and I do admit that this prefix of post is somewhat misleading however I like to use it in the way in which people like Zizak and Ranciel are mobilizing the concept of post depoliticization as a particular figure or dispositive of depoliticization so post depoliticization will give some content in a moment is a process of a particular kind by which the political is evacuated from the spaces of public engagement there are other such tactics which Ranciel defines as archipolitics parapolitics or metapolitics let me exemplify one of them metapolitics is the classic Marxist of a certain type Marxist ploy when in argument they tell you if you want to do politics change the economy struggle over the ownership of the means of production that's a metapolitic where the terrain of the political is displaced onto a different terrain in this case the terrain of the social organization the class configuration of production and then saying if we change that everything will be fine that's a metapolitical evacuation of the political we try to explore the contours of the present process of post-gipoliticization something that is very clearly visible in the current structures, practices and mechanisms of urban governance so post-gipoliticization is a process of consensualizing technomanagerial forms of governance whereby the political sphere has been reduced to a set of contest debates over issues that are accepted as contentious yet where only the technomanagerial configuration can be disputed while the frame under which these problems appear cannot be addressed this process of post-gipoliticization has a set of characteristics it is sustained by the invocation of a permanent state of emergency of crisis the tropes around to which emergency becomes continuously staged as one of the vehicles through which radical political dispute becomes evacuated is around four key issues the economy trust us, the elite say we know this iteration is difficult but trust us we have a set of technomanagerial processes ready that will make sure that civilization as we know it can go on the immigration the environment and security the second characteristics of deep politicization and the post-gipolitical conditions is the process by which contentious choices are reduced to excel accountancy spreadsheet it is that only those choices are rendered legitimate that adhere to an economic calculus if I were to say today to my students higher education should be free for all those who are willing and have the capacity to go to higher education most would say that I am a dinosaur who has forgotten that the 20th century is forever finished so this is what is meant by the economization of politics well at the same time there is a process of the deep politicization of the economic sphere that is the modalities through which we organize the transformation of nature the economy the modalities through which we distribute that organization of the transformation of nature and the consequences thereof that the economy the production and distribution of goods and services that cannot be rendered contentious and all this is sustained by expert management the governance today to expert management in which of course the biopolitical happiness of the population is the generally accepted and officially proclaimed objective of policy making these forms of post political governance are increasingly managed to what I and others have called autocratic forms of post democratic governance beyond the state Colin Karauč is probably the one the political sociologist who has paid greatest attention to the evacuation of the democratic substance of the configurations of governance in that govern our cities countries in the region the classic example of that is the European Union or the Troika is that the state? well not quite is it apparatus of governance surely is what is its democratic accountability legitimacy representation scales this transformation of the democratic content of the registers of governance is actually fully endorsed it is fully endorsed this is fully recognized it is fully recognized in the demand for and open invitation for participation participate in the governance has in Europe and elsewhere become one of the key features through which the democratic lacuna ought to be remedied of course what one of my colleagues in Manchester is called the tyranny of participation is nothing else than a symptom of the decline of the democratic and certainly stands in the recipe for the transformation of the non-democratic content of the new registers of post-democratic governance so in such configuration of course dispute is still possible dispute is in fact properly acknowledged and invited but it is dispute over the techno managerial arrangements of the generally recognized problematic next month in Paris we will see yet again a beautiful example of that in Paris when the global leaders will try to deal with the climatic catastrophe we are already in which will invariably unfold over a techno managerial dispute over a few percentage points what is censored is what Shakira will call dissensors the radical disagreement over different ways of organizing the social institutional configuration of our life so in that sense Fukuyama when he more than 20 years ago argued that history is over was actually right history is indeed over however this ideal of a post-democratic form of consensual politics is strangely not continuously disrupted by the fragmenting forces that cut through this ideal of consensus take for example the law of identity and how many of our urban violent outbursts or not all of them but some of them articulated around the law of identity the law of identity that of course is matched by the governing elites in a very particular way remember when Manchester and London were burning what Cameron called those who were protesting skam the French word for that is the old Greek word for that is which stands against the demos the Oglos are those who are not entitled to be part of the polis but of course consensual arrangements of post-political governance is also cut through not just by politics of identity but also by politicizing forms of outbursts of discontent this is a picture of a Madrid in 2011 in Dignados occupied by the Del Sol plus the Catalonia and you can all understand enough Spanish to read the slogan democracia real ya has a bit of an odd slogan is it not in Madrid this is not Kylo but it might make sense this is in Madrid real democracy now this is a scandalous statement given given that Spain has gone through it tremendous and allegedly extraordinarily successful process of democratization after having suffered one of the longest dictatorships of the 20th century in Europe between 1939 and 1975 so no one would question that Spain is a properly constituted democracy and here there are a bunch of people well a few hundred thousand democracy now so there is an odd sort of tension contradiction between the insurgent democratic demands and expressions articulated by these heterogeneous insurgents on the one hand and instituted forms of quote-unquote democratic organization and some of those that I have suggested have begun to translate into performative forms of politicization Turkey, Greece, Spain and it possibly here so how can we make sense of this I think it's useful in this context to recall one of Michel Foucault's later works the last lecture she gave to the College of 1979 in 1980 which was much more centrally concerned with the politics of liberalism and neoliberalism much more than with the capital micro politics that marked his earlier work in one of his lectures he said the people and of course he means here the people as a political category as a democratic political category is those who refusing to be the population is refusing to be the objects of biopolitical governance disrupt the system that's quite an extraordinary statement to make because it does spit insurgent political movements against instituted politics so in order to make theoretical sense of that I found it useful to look at some of the more of the recent post foundational political thought which actually goes back several decades but my distinction is made between politics on the one hand and the political on the other the French the beautifully gendered language it is because it is respectively low politic and low politic political low politic in Spanish deep politic in German the importance of separating these two out is not to suggest that there is some sort of dialectical articulation between instituted politics on the one hand and the disruptive processors that undermine and interrupt these institutions no, they are actually radically distinct and different, there is no connection between the two low politic politics refers to what is the ontic of everyday policy making it is the stuff of political scientists it refers to the rituals of participation to the democratic channels of voting the assemblies from the city council, national parliament european parliament that institutionally organized the analysis of the various sociological agents and actors that shape and structure the policy making process and which is always and of necessity somewhat oligarchic we know that every single one of our substantive theorizations shows us convincingly that any form of governance is to a certain extent unequal disempowering for some while empowering for others in other words is to a certain extent autocratic the political in contrast to that low politic is that, that stands for is the name that stands for the radical heterogeneity that cuts through the social in other words the political is the name, the world that stands for the fact that society does not exist so Thatcher was right here but on very different grounds the political is the name that stands for the fact that we radically disagree that there is no such thing as a coherent society and it's precisely the political that manifests itself so what are the moments when radical disagreement and radical heterogeneity become expressed is the moment when those that disagree stand up and show that disagreement so I would argue that the urban insurgencies that we've seen or nothing else than manifestations of the political at work I don't want to go through the theoretical details of that but I have not yet considered which I want to briefly consider is if the political is the world that stands for radical heterogeneity that manifests itself the moment when the people in the in the vocodian sense of the world that is not the majority of the population that is the moment when those who disagree stand up they remember in 2010-11 when in Cairo the Egyptian people were rising up that was all over the media and I joined the Egyptian people were rising up this was of course a lie or when the Indignada said we the Spanish people that's a lie this is a tiny minority sociologically speaking a few hundred thousand people who metaphorically stand but in no way sociologically or politically stand for the whole of the population in fact they stand exactly for the opposite of that so the democratic the political I would argue insist that the place of power is structurally vacant in other words that anyone and everyone can temporarily occupy the place of power it presumes equality it presumes your political equality that's a presumption axiomatic we know that sociologically speaking we are unequal our sociological theorists have told us that in thousands of different ways we are unequal on gender ethnic class and other terms much of progressive politics was based still on trying to remedy the sociologically observed inequalities now this has nothing to do I would insist to be the notion of political equality which is the presumption of equality it presumes that we are all equal in the face of empirically verifiable inequalities it insists the democratic insist on the egalitarian capacity of each and all politically it affirms that there is no pre-given society in other words it affirms the absent ground of society by re-centering the political as the egalitarian capacity of each and all to act geopolitically that's precisely here that we begin to discern the gap between the democratic and democracy Michel Abensoud argued indeed that the political is an emergent property that operates at a distance from the state that operates versus politics and the police so from that perspective if we now go back to articulating the political as I explored it through these variegated forms of urban insurgencies that have choreographed so much of urban life over the past few years I would argue bitrancier in orders that the political can be understood in the actively revealed moment of eruption an event that opens up a procedure that disrupts any given social spatial order one that addresses her own in the name of an utterly contingent but axiomatic presumption of equality of each and everyone this alone is a condition in which the presumption of equality is perverted through the institution of an always oligarchic police order so the political as an imminent practice appears in the act of performatively staging equality it's a procedure that simultaneously makes visible the long of the given situation transgresses the fantasy of the order that exists that there is no alternative possible and demands the impossible and it does so but inaugurating the potential of instituting a new order my favorite example here is Rosa Parks I guess who put a black bum on the wrong seat of the bus was not the first time that that happened happened many time before she knew precisely what she was doing of course she was at the same time expressing her wrong and performing equality when that happened one usually encounters with the wrath and the violence of governance of the police in this case but only retroactively we can identify it as the inaugural moment of what later would be called the civil rights movement so the political event cannot be decided a priori the political event cannot be decided while it's ongoing only retroactively in the unfolding of the performative procedures of politicization that an event can be identified as a political event that unleashes a process of democratic transformation so what can we then say about the insurgent urban acting as political acting as first of all insurgent democracy operates against the state emerged as a distance from the state but you calls engaged in the politics of subtraction secondly there is no foundational place location of subject insurgent democracy is characterized by a process of common subjectivation that cuts through sociological miracles of political subjectivation that is that these insurgents could not be easily identified as proletarians man, women, young, old it was the appearance of a common political subject the political appears as a very specific very concrete and very particular but stands in its specific concrete particularity as the metaphorical condensation of the universal that's why it can be so readily identified as a democratizing movement against the identitarian expressions of discontent that also accompany the post geopolitical order urban democratic acting revolves around the tropes of emergence insurrection and spatializing equality it's an interruption in the order of the sensible and its main aim is the reframing of a common sense it is the making of a new world within the world and most importantly it does not happen in teatres like this it operates in and through the metaphorical and material production of its own spatiality without spatialization politicization is important so to conclude now can we begin to discern in those movements and the aftermath of the awakening of history I don't know but what I want to conclude to it is a set of questions theoretical questions that I believe are important for those who still believe in the possibility of a radical emancipatory project in the 21st century because that's the choice we're faced with it's the choice we're faced with either we mobilize the best of our humanitarian capabilities to manage the state of the situation to the best of our ability or we inscribe ourselves within the politicizing movements that believe and fight for a transformation of the common sense towards a more egalitarian and solidarity-paced order many interlocutors have argued that these insurgent urban movements are political I have my doubts about that I would call them pre-political but such pre-political outbursts of discontent are absolutely vital and we know some of the contours of that they are highly localized they bring together in a contracted manner all sorts of people in a moment and period of intensified acting which in itself is not sustainable in there coming together in this intense way prefigured some of the modalities of a transformed democratic acting the questions that open up in the aftermath of such insurrectional events that's when the public spaces just be cleared the tents are packed and people go home again to live the ordinary everyday life as they should is how the question becomes how can the practices desires be sustained beyond the Bactinian spectacle how can the particular acting out that you would find in taxim square be universalized and we've seen in Turkey for example how they are doing this with the consequences of that you probably saw the images yesterday which were in some way undoubtedly connected with this process of politicization how can we sustain the transformation and transgression of the symbolic order in other words how can we move indeed to a positive dialectic of transformation and get out of the infernal cycle of resistance which in much of the literature that I come across particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world is the horizon of what is possible how can we move from resistance to an egalitarian order to a process of action transforming in egalitarian order what are the stages and practices of realizing the impossible yet things that are immediately realizable in other words as a geographer I think one of the key questions is how and what form and what condition can the urban event be specialized so that the process of planetary urbanization that we're living in can correspond to politicizing process of universalizing equality in order to do that I think what these insurgents seem to suggest is that the political names of emancipatory struggle that have animated progressive politics in the 19th and 20th century are not any longer performative I would argue that the privileged subject position of the proletarian that animated so much of 1920th century radical politics needs to be visited in light of the heterogeneous form of subjectivation that have animated and still animate the new emancipatory politics I also think that these insurgencies shows and demonstrated that a traditional means of organizing progressive struggle the political party as the organizing vehicle to which to structure organize and strategize with respect to emancipatory politics is not any longer viable and that is an urgent need expressed in practice but where theoretically we have very little to contribute is what is the form of organization adequate to the new forms of politicization that we see and what is the terrain of struggle what is the terrain of power to be occupied and I think what both these insurgents as well as the forms of planetary urbanization suggest is that the state cannot any longer be the single and privileged form of the terrain to which power has to be occupied so how do we confront the day after the day after blues not many of you feel a bit bluesy after the joys of the insurgencies of 2012-2013 after the joy of Syriza winning for the first time the post-war history extreme left wing party winning the elections being smashed so I think there is an urgent agenda here to think through the day after how we can move from the seeds of dystopia that the world economic forum was talking about can move to the alleal of the possible how can the process be sustained what are the political procedures in the form of organization the subjectivities, the terrain around which a progressive politics today has to articulate and most importantly perhaps how do we confront the violence the unspeakable violence that invariably meets the moment that real democratizing political forces show some form of effectiveness over the summer I wasn't al-finish over the summer I was extraordinarily intrigued not being in the UK over the summer but reading is an extraordinary story about Carlebin and the violence the extraordinary violence discursive as it may be there has been mobilized and I don't think if these kind of radical politicizations that have become even more performative if you consider the past between January and July the extraordinary violence and inflicted by the combined national international elites to make sure that nothing really happened so I think this is one of the great intellectual and practical challenges that faces any kind of democratic emancipatory procedures that is how to confront the violence of those who by all means possible will try to make sure that nothing really changes I leave it with that, thank you very much