The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism

Critical encounters between Giorgio Agamben and architecture

Camillo Boano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134883356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben's political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agamben's politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agamben's oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical 'encounter' with architecture's aesthetic-political function.

1Introduction

An architecture inseparable from its form

This book explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben’s political thoughts and writings for the theory and practice of architecture, planning and urban design. It aims to sketch out the potentiality of Agamben’s politics, which can effect change in current architectural and design discourses. The main objective is to highlight the substantial possibilities that Agamben’s work holds for a renewed – radical and emancipatory – architectural and design practice in a time of neo-liberal consensus and uncritical acceptance of the nature of life and society. This work sits within the current debate over the need to reclaim a political, emancipatory project of architecture against a technocratic and biopolitical one. An emancipatory project that is able to reclaim the much-too-early abandoned critique of contemporary capitalism and its production of urban space, without getting trapped in discursive practices that are simply camouflaged as radical, overly disciplinary and constructed specifically to be expert-oriented.

Here, Agamben’s philosophy, which often has been criticized as being nihilistic, pessimistic and suspended in exclusive ontological terms that subordinate to political contestation and material transformations, is offered in a politically positive version. This attempts to reconfigure the matrix of references as it confronts architecture’s comfort zone, suggesting that architecture ‘should become inoperative’, acting to neutralize its ordering forces and make itself available for ‘free uses’. Such inoperative architecture is not a call for a new social project, neither does it refer to the multivariate forms of socially relevant architectural practices. Nor is it a strain of design activism, grounded in expansion of the architect’s role and renewed interest in the agency of architecture’s users, nor still a creative discussion on the act of commoning and the resurgence of ‘do-it-yourself’ tactics.

Agambenian reflections are political, provocative and language-oriented. His contribution to ontological, theoretical and conceptual reflections in political theory, international relations, philosophy and many other disciplinary areas has been highly influential, mainly through his popular Homo Sacer project, where the notion of ‘exception’ and ‘the camp’ suggests the basis for the constitution of extreme spatial organization in the modern metropolis. Never speaking directly on architecture and urbanism, Agamben alludes instead to the contemporary landscape by suggesting that advanced capitalism produces a great accumulation of dispositives: a heterogeneous set of elements (discourses, regulations, institutions, architectures) – and that today, “there are only oikonomie – pure governance, which has the sole purpose of reproducing itself” (Agamben, 2009a: 16).

This book aims to reflect on the possible encounters between architecture and Agamben’s politics. At the end, aside from the different conceptual registers derived from Agamben’s research, it focuses on inoperativity: a key feature of Agamben’s affirmative politics centred on deactivating those dispositives of power in the interest of a “coming community” that is present but yet unrealized, and useful to rescue a political emancipatory project of architecture. Agamben’s theory goes beyond the conventional concept of appropriation and the functionalist/utilitarian understanding of use. It opens up the possibility of a new “free use” (Agamben, 2000a: 116.7) by making it inoperative: that is, without finality.

Alternatively, an inoperative architecture consists of an ethical shift of rendering inoperative: of deactivating its communicative and informative function in order to open it up to new possible uses and possibilities. Agamben’s political thoughts of an inoperative form-of-life are not something to be attained in a reformist or revolutionary praxis, but a subtraction of the subject from the existing apparatuses, whereby they appropriate their own potentiality of whatever being, as essence that always matters. Agamben’s politics are not about mobilization, organization, civil society and aggregation; instead are interested in a contra-hegemonic discussion that is neither insurgent nor populist, but a call for a renewed autonomy. For these reasons, an inoperative architecture is an architecture, an urban design. It is a sous rature praxis – just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositif and mobilize a new theory and project for the urban now to come.

The book investigates and sketches the possibility of an inoperative architecture, intended here as a term to capture a subversive ethos to the dominant ontology of enactment characterizing architectural praxis charged with arrogance, and which relies on creative power to produce and control spatial realities.

For Agamben, this consists of a subtraction from the apparatuses of power that govern identities and prescribed roles and positions, rendering them inoperative and then reclaiming their own inoperativity:

the practice of the artistic avant-garde and of the political movements of our time can be seen as the attempt – so often miserably failed – to carry out a destitution of work that has ended instead with the recreation of powers even more oppressive inasmuch as they had been deprived of any legitimacy.

(Kishik, 2012: 3)

What is argued, then, is a destituent mode of thinking and practising architecture, planning and urban design.

The ethical shift suggested here around an inoperative architecture is to be seen as closer to Eyal Weizman’s “political plastic” (Umolu, 2012), which mobilizes a differential architectural intelligence in investigating the “abyss of the worst architectural possibilities” (Umolu, 2012) than the one framed by Justin McGuirk (2014: 281) on the “activist architect … who creates the conditions in which it is possible to make a meaningful difference and … expanded mode of practice”, or the “insurgent architects” defined by Erik Swyngedouw (2016: 48) as the sole persons entitled to claim an emancipatory role and effective agency in co-animating political events. Although here Agamben does not refer to architecture per se, but to a generic

the painter, the poet, the thinker – and in general, anyone who practices a poiesis and an activity – are not the sovereign subjects of a creative operation and of a work. Rather, they are anonymous living beings who, by always rendering inoperative the works of language, of vision, of bodies, seek to have an experience of themselves and to constitute their life as form-of-life.

(Agamben, 2014a: 313–14)

Agamben argues that politics is messianic, thus “fulfilling” the law, not overcoming or destroying it. It does not seek a revolution or a profound change, but rather a minor one: a small shift that renders inoperative the state of exception and the overall apparatuses of power and oppression. Architecture in this new ethical project becomes a sort of ‘inoperative operation’ that consists of deactivating its communicative and informative function in order to open it up to a new possible use, to new possibilities. It is not a renunciation of action or withdrawal from the pragmatist and material dimension of architecture; rather, it is a different agency that requalifies the act of architecture and its own potency.

In illustrating Agamben’s interventionist idée-forces such as potentiality, inoperativity, use, dispositif, form-of-life and profanation – both in a chronological as well as thematic form – this book aims to offer a reflection on the possible encounters between architecture and Agamben’s politics. The latter are characterized by affirmative gestures that upset the temporality of the political imaginary, suggesting a ‘here-and-now’: an operative focus on the subversion of representation, calling for new subjectivities and forms of life. This particular reading of Agamben intends to offer a reinvigorated political possibility for the field of architecture, and an intense meditation that can be useful to consider how we might think of the political in terms of means rather than ends. In doing so, this work aims to reflect on Agamben’s philosophical thinking as a function of political praxis, and will highlight the task of philosophy to ‘deliver us from the sphere of law and duty, from the faculties of will and intention’ and allow us to ‘see the darkness’ as critical ingredients of a new theory.

Encounters with Agamben and the Italian theory

My encounter with the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben dates back to 2004, when I was working on a book titled Città Nude: Iconografia dei Campi Profughi (Boano and Floris, 2005), after working for several years in the humanitarian and development fields, dealing with shelters, internally displaced peoples and refugee camps, and the complex governmental machinery of aid and its spatial politics. Città Nude, which makes an explicit reference to another key topic in the work of Agamben – nudity – was inspired by his thoughts on inclusion and exclusion and the nature of exception. I started to explore the complex features of camp urbanism and camp exceptionalities that I also used to explore the exceptional nature of Jerusalem’s urban space in subsequent research projects. Agamben’s thoughts have been a locus of my scholarship ever since, as my work has engaged primarily with the philosopher’s books and concepts as a conceit: a way of speaking about political theory from the perspective of architecture and urban design.

I discovered Agamben more or less accidentally, in a desperate moment of finding a way through the difficult task of reflecting politically on space, and on the overall critical project of architecture and its social derivation. For me, activism, the ego and the master role of architects in their power to create – in their potency to intervene in the world – was a simple, new social project where the multivariate forms of socially relevant architectural practices combined social responsibility, market pragmatism and communication dogmatism. Actions and projects carried out in the interests of the common good, but also for the good of business and the preservation of the master role: a version of ‘social’ that is as much about creating new, ethically surcharged markets for professional services as it is about social responsibility, in a sort of seamless potential of how clients are not aware of how much their lives could be improved ‘by (good) design’.

With Agamben’s writings I felt an elective affinity. Through overly erudite, complex and fascinating transdisciplinary writing, Agamben pushed Foucault’s archaeological method to the limit, as he added etymological and genealogical imagination to the work of ‘the archaeologist of knowledge’, excavating the roots of our contemporary condition from a remote antiquity, but not in a mute and impenetrable manner, permanently elucidating the present condition. Together with other intellectuals such as Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Žižek, Agamben has emerged as one of the primary voices in contemporary continental philosophy in the past 25 years. He has been at the crossroads of French theory (Foucault, Nancy, Baudelaire), German philosophy (Theodor Adorno, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin) and the Italian thoughts of Antonio Negri, Massimo Cacciari, the operaismo movement as well as Roberto Esposito and Paolo Virno. This observation is not a simple chronological exercise or a biographical note; rather, it serves to locate Agamben’s work in the thresholds between the ‘social’ dimension of the German philosophical tradition, the ‘text-focused’ one of the French school, and the political praxis of the Italian tradition, in what Esposito defines as ‘performative thoughts’ to highlight the relations between theory and praxis. What Esposito seeks to convey is the fundamental character of Italian philosophy as “un pensiero in atto”: a thought in action that is also a philosophy of action relevant to its time (Esposito, 2012[2010]).

Illustration of the possible encounter of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy and political project with architecture and urban design – searching for an architecture of inoperativity, a ‘whatever architecture’ – has been a risky journey for several reasons. First is the apparent opposite and contradictory nature of architecture and design as operative, practical, masculine, concrete, tangible and problem-solving-oriented when it is confronted with inoperativity. Inoperativity/inoperosity – which Agamben situates at the crux between theology and philosophy – is not to be treated as simple contemplative quietism detached from reality. Rather, it is to be located as a paradox of practice, so situated in-the-praxis-as, different to poiesis, that does not produce something other than itself. It is an action but one that is interrupted, deducted, inward-oriented – not because it is dysfunctional or destructive, but because from the outset it is devoid of any telos, any task. As such, deactivated of its own productivity, it restates the centrality of possibility. Searching for an inoperative architecture could have led to the simplistic claim of a contra-hegemonic project – another historical project, or a renewed humanistic discourse – perhaps a new manifesto for action, rather than reclaiming Herman Melville’s character, Bartleby the Scrivener’s powerful motto, “I would prefer not to” (Agamben, 1993b: 36.7).

Second, Agamben is a philosopher and not an architect or urbanist, who accordingly has not talked architecturally or of architecture in his writing, which positions him not only outside the discipline, but also somehow further away from the field than thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze or Michel Foucault. Contrary to other philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre and Paul Virilio, who devoted more direct and continuous attention to architecture and urban studies (Benjamin, 2000; Stanek, 2011; Armitage, 2015); or Walter Benjamin, Foucault and Martin Heidegger, who used architecture and architectural objects as sites of reflection and are widely cited and used in architectural and urban discourses, Agamben uses some architectural examples as metaphors, explanatory concepts or paradigms.

Conversely, the discipline of architecture, planning and urban design uses Agamben’s reflections to inspire and illustrate spatial exclusionary principles and exceptional topologies in order to elucidate some specific geographies or urban issues. Agamben’s disparate, but not always spatially visible, interests which relate to metaphysics, theology, semiotics, medieval history, literature and cinema, along with his erudite and dense writing style, make him less transparent: an opacity that often has made him less ‘useful’ in answering architectural questions and illuminating spatial problematics. The risk here would have been to simply use Agamben’s concepts architecturally, imported from outside architecture and urban studies, and use them as conceptual gestures rather than framing a critical reflection around the multiple possible encounters that his oeuvre has in imagining alternatives to the complicit and silent predicament of architecture and city production in late capitalism.

As noted by Lahiji, “the recent radical philosophy turn … has yet to take up architectural figures of iconophilia for a critique. Largely because its encounter with an architectural system of illusion, fantasy and functions presiding over contemporary ideologies has fundamentally been missed” (Lahiji, 2014: 9). This book, then, is a suggestion of a possible encounter of a messianic and inoperative politics which can possibly redeem architecture and urban design from its social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism or proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical ‘encounter’ of architecture’s aesthetic-political function, and a ‘little different’ practice.

Third, the risk is of my position as author: I am not a philosopher, but an architect and development practitioner who has been driven to uncover the relevance of Agamben’s architecturality, and to think with, along and beyond Agamben from within a disciplinary realm. The challenge was to avoid escaping from architecture and design thoughts, narrative and methods, overwhelmed by disciplinary self-confidence and the impossibility of an alternative within the present regime of a practice that suppresses the political character of the civitas in favour of a managerial paradigm of economy. However, I have been committed to, and practis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: An architecture inseparable from its form
• Part I Agamben’s burning house
• Part II Giorgio Agamben’s oeuvre
• Part III Towards an inoperative architecture
• References
• Index