Controlling Urban Events

Law, Ethics and the Material

Andrea Pavoni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317240686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

How does order emerge out of the multiplicity of bodies, objects, ideas and practices that constitute the urban? This book explores the relation between space, law and control in the contemporary city – and particularly in the context of urban 'mega events' – through a combined geographical and normative analysis. Informed by the recent spatial, affective and material 'turns' in the humanities and social sciences, Andrea Pavoni addresses this question by pursuing an innovative and trans-disciplinary approach, capable of accounting for the emergence of order in urban space both at the conceptual and empirical levels. Two overarching objectives are pursued. First, to account for the increasing convergence of logics, techniques and technologies of law, security and marketing into novel, potentially oppressive spatial configurations. Second, to envisage a consistent ethico-political strategy to counter this evolution, by rethinking originally and in radically spatial terms the notion of justice. Forging a sophisticated and original analysis, this book offers an analysis that will be of considerable interest to those working in critical urban geography, critical legal studies, critical event studies, surveillance and control studies.

Chapter 1
Space matter event

The relational turn in social sciences and, more deeply, the philosophical age of correlation, is the theoretical battleground this chapter engages with, in order to sketch the ontological approach which grounds the book. This is done through three steps.

First, I begin sketching the unorthodox sociology of Tarde, tracing its indir ect influence into the ‘sociology of association’ of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), traversing Heidegger’s spatial intuition and following their explicitation in Sloterdijk’s Sphereology. Whilst I emphasise the relevance of these approaches in decisively moving beyond the binary impasse of contractualist (or individualistic) and organicistic (or holistic) understandings of the social, a question keeps resonating: where is the event? Networks and spheres produce flat and uneventful ontologies, as such drastically de-politicised and thus cooptable by conservative thinking.

Second, taking inspiration from Quentin Meillassoux’s cry against correlation, I engage in a brief confrontation with Harman and, via a brief parenthesis on Parmenides, I explain how the claustrophobic outcomes of relationalism are archetypically retraceable to the paradigmatic split introduced by the Philosopher of Elea. Following Agamben, I do not under stand the ‘paradigm’ as a hypothesis through which explaining ‘modernity by tracing it back to something like a cause or historical origin’, or as a ‘signifier’ whereby joining heterogeneous phenomena into a smooth syncretism. Instead, I assume it as a ‘singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble whose homogeneity it itself constitutes’.¹ A specific example, that is, by means of being exposed, ‘gives life to a new problematic context’, and therefore enters in analogical (and thus non-dichotomous, i.e. beyond the general/particular dichotomy) relation with other examples, not by flattening their differences but rather expressing the shared problematic fields out of which they strategically emerge. In this sense I explain the Parmenidean separation as the production of a problematic field in which politics is reduced to a post-political praxis of manipulating a matter (a life, a space, a common…) which is negatively posited as neutral and innocent (i.e. beyond power relations).²

Third, through Deleuze’s elaboration of the notions of virtual and event, I introduce demonic vitalism, an ontology of being-together that assumes bodies as simultaneously singular and in-relation, always taken into concatenations and yet never ‘exhausted’ by them. The chapter may present at times an excessive degree of theoretical density, which however will gradually rarefy as the book progresses, and its methodological and ethical implications become apparent

1.1 To exist is to differ.³

In the last decades, many critical and innovative works have contributed to a move decidedly beyond contractualist and organicistic understandings of the social. The first de-spatialises social relations, by projecting in an ideal co-existence of rational individuals engaged in enlightened deliberations aimed at harmonising and safeguarding particular interests, a de-politicising vision today actualised in neo-liberal rhetorics of inclusion and partici pation. The second assumes society as an autonomous organism encompassing and subsuming its members via institutional apparatuses. Classic is Émile Durkheim’s conception of society as a transcendent, mono-spherical container, to which individuals are bound by means of sharing ‘social facts’, collective representations which are external to them, preexisting – and thus unexplained – conditions for human agency.⁴

A long-forgotten, lately rediscovered and recently popularised figure of late-nineteenth century French thought, Gabriel Tarde developed a social theory resolutely transversal vis-à-vis the binary just exposed. A contemporary and leading opponent of Durkheim, Tarde denies the existence of ‘transcendent’ social facts, collectively shared among human beings as result of the existence of a ‘society’ which would supersede them.⁵ Against the presupposition of a uniform, coherent and homogenous society, he asserts that ‘facts (including social facts) are contingent compositions emer ging out of a complex of difference and repetition’.⁶ Against the presupposition of a self-contained, self-identical individual, he assumes ‘difference’ as the original condition of existence, with identity being only a modality of difference, thus wholly inadequate as explanatory principle. Employing Leibniz’s term, Tarde suggests that monads, rather than individuals, are the minimal component of society: monads are not given subjects, but rather agencies, such as notions and prejudices, perceptions and expressions, knowledge and desires. As Latour summarises:

In the same way as Tarde refuses to take society as a higher, more complex, order than the individual monad, he refuses to take the individual human agent as the real stuff out of which society is made: a brain, a mind, a soul, a body is itself composed of myriads of ‘little persons’, or agencies, each of them endowed with faith and desire, and actively promoting one’s total version of the world.⁷

There is no society at all, in fact, but rather sociality, in other words, an imma nent and contingent process of emergence of social formations, heterogeneous agglomerations of human and non-human bodies, affects, ideas, opinions, traditions, assumptions, things. This does not imply chaos, however. The social always crystallises around stable distributions of ideas, feelings, opinions, practices: orderings, or tunings. Differently from Leibniz’s monadology, there is no transcendent God who guarantees universal harmony. In Tarde’s neo-monadology orderings emerge out of the ‘immanent and constitutive action of every monad’.⁸ Under the influ ence of late-nineteenth-century studies on hypnotism, Tarde controversially gives the notions of imitation and repetition a crucial role in accounting for the way ideas (‘inventions’) spread and order emerges in the social: ‘any specific innovation – for example the pronunciation of a word or behavioural patterns for standing in line – may radiate and create resonances by being repeated by many humans or other species, over and over again’.⁹ Thus we have a ‘socio-biological’ model: as in multi-cellular organisms, sociality is constituted by the imitative repetition and propagation of singular acts, or events, generating assemblages which are always potentially variable (they are not given), to some extent unpredictable (we are never able to fully forecast if a single act, or idea, will spread enough to form a crystallisation), performative (dependent on repetition, movement, action), contingent (immanent to a spatio-temporal situation, to certain human and non-human agglomerations), and exposed to processes of standardisation through routinisation, hierarchisation and reification into rules.

1.2 Heterogeneity, not homogeneity, is at the heart of things … things are not born alike, they become alike.¹⁰

A few years after Tarde’s death, the Portuguese philosopher Leonardo Coimbra was developing a similar neo-monadological theory. His ‘rythmontology’, suspended between Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Henri Bergson, assumes every being, or monad, as vibrating according to a given rhythm, oscillating between the slavery of the monotonous rhythm of sensation, and the potential of a superior synthetic activity, which would allow the overcoming material limits by releasing the ‘rhythmical excesses’ where free and creative activity lies. Although the concept of rhythmical excess is relevant, Coimbra’s dialectical understanding of creation, invention and change remains within the boundaries of individualism, situating these processes firmly within the single monad, and its synthetic capacity to transcend its own limits.¹¹

Tarde’s approach seemingly avoids this impasse. His microsociology, by means of refusing notions of collective consciousness and pre-existent social laws in favour of the continuous co-interactions of sociality, offers a promising way beyond the individual/society binary.¹² An opposite problem however surfaces, when aligning the functioning of social interaction around suggestion and imitation. Namely, the implicit assumption of social beings as passive automatons, taken into processes of social contagion as some sort of hypnotised sleepwalker.¹³ As Andrea Mubi Brighenti notes, moreover,

The corollary of the idea of automatic obedience is the idea of an individual origin of the repeated elements … What is repeated through imitation, for Tarde, has an origin somewhere, and such origin is deemed to be individual and private.¹⁴

Seemingly unable to leave behind the heritage of positivist criminology and hypnotist psychology, Tarde would ultimately relapse on an ‘implicit methodological individualism’. The individual has been fragmented in multiple ‘little persons’, yet in this ‘neuro-horizontal’ model of a ‘society of minds’ composed of a population of ‘autonomous agents’, the axiom of individual origin is left unchallenged, and merely shifted into a smaller dimension.¹⁵ An a-spatial understanding seemingly predating the naïvety of the network-society theory in which, either praising or regretting the ‘elimination’ of space supposedly brought about by ITs, the ontological materiality of the social is unaccounted for. This problem often surfaces in recent strands of Tarde’s revival, where the reliance on psychological automatism reproduces ‘bodily closures’ typical of individualistic models.¹⁶

In fact, there is a debate over who is responsible (Tarde or his ‘followers’) for reverting into individualism. Certainly the spatial blindness of recent mentalist interpretations did not help unfolding the ontological quality ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Space matter event
• 2 Atmosphere rhythm tuning
• 3 Law space justice
• 4 Control urban event
• 5 Tuning the city
• 6 Law profanation justice
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index