ARCHITECTURE AGAINST

THE POST-POLITICAL

Architecture Against the Post-Political is a timely anthology that reasserts the question of the political
and challenges the current abandonment of the critical project in architectural theory and
practice.
Written by a team of renowned contributors and carefully collated to address the themes
laid out by the editor in his introduction, the book includes theoretical issues concerning the
questions of aesthetics and politics, and examines city and urban strategies within the general
critique of the post-political. By focusing on specic case studies from Warsaw, Barcelona,
Tokyo, and many more, the book consolidates the contributions of a diverse group of
academics, architects, and critics from Europe, the Middle East, and America.
This collection lls the gap in the existing literature on the relation between politics and
aesthetics, and its implications for the theoretical discourse of architecture today. In summary,
this book provides a response to the predominant depoliticization in academic discourse and
is an attempt to reclaim the abandoned critical project in architecture.
Nadir Lahiji is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia.

He is the editor of The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (Bloomsbury,
2014). He previously edited The Political Unconscious: Re-Opening Jamesons Narrative
(Ashgate, 2011) and co-edited Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (Princeton Architectural
Press, 1997). He teaches architecture theory, modernity, and contemporary criticism in the
intersections of philosophy, radical social theory, and psychoanalytical theory.

Architecture Against the Post-Political represents a landmark moment in architectural theory.

Fighting against a strong depoliticization of the theory and criticism surrounding the subject,
this volume brings the full weight of recent critical philosophy to bear on the act of theorizing
architecture.
Todd McGowan, Associate Professor at the
University of Vermont, USA
Can a democratizing and emancipatory architectural theory and practice be reclaimed from
the debilitating debris of post-political consensual technocracy and the obscene jouissance of
post-modern nihilism? This book offers courageous answers and a timely foray into reopening
a political space for architecture.
Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography at the
University of Manchester, UK

ARCHITECTURE
AGAINST THE
POST-POLITICAL
Essays in Reclaiming the
Critical Project

Edited by Nadir Lahiji

AFTERWORD BY JOAN OCKMAN

First edition published 2014

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2014 Nadir Lahiji
The right of Nadir Lahiji to be identied as author of the editorial material, and of
the individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. The purchase of this copyright material confers the right on the
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storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identication
and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Architecture against the post-political: essays in re-claiming the critical project/
edited by Nadir Lahiji; with the collaboration of Elie Haddad; afterword by
Joan Ockman. First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Architecture Philosophy. 2. Architecture Political aspects Case
studies. 3. City planning Political aspects Case studies. I. Lahiji, Nadir,
1948 author, editor of compilation.
NA2500.A7129 2014
720.103--dc23
2013040785
ISBN13: 978-0-415-72537-8 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-72538-5 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-1-315-78037-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans
by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of gures
Notes on contributors
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: the critical project and the post-political suspension
of politics
Nadir Lahiji

vii
ix
xiii
xiv

PART I

Aesthetics, politics, and architecture

1 Metropolitics, or, architecture and the contemporary Left
David Cunningham
2 Modern democracy and aesthetic revolution in the work of
Rancire: reections on historical causality
Gabriel Rockhill

9
11

31

3 Unfaithful reections: re-actualizing Benjamins aestheticism thesis

Libero Andreotti

41

4 Political subjectication and the architectural dispositif

Nadir Lahiji

53

PART II

The political and the critique of architecture

5 Capitalism and the politics of autonomy
Gevork Hartoonian

67
69

vi

Contents

6 Architecture as such: notes on generic(ness) and labor sans phrase

Francesco Marullo
7 Thoughts on agency, utopia, and property in contemporary
architectural and urban theory
George Baird
8 Metalepsis of the site of exception
Donald Kunze

84

111

124

PART III

The post-political and contemporary urbanism

9 The architecture of managerialism: OMA, CCTV, and the
post-political
Douglas Spencer

149

151

10 Zero points: urban space and the political subject

Uta Gelbke

167

11 To ll the earth: architecture in a spaceless universe

Ross Exo Adams

180

12 From post-political to agonistic: Warsaw urban space since 1989

Lidia Klein

198

Afterwor(l)d
Joan Ockman
Bibliography
Index

211

214
229

FIGURES

6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7
6.8
7.1
7.2
7.3
8.1

8.2

8.3

8.4

Albert Kahn, Fisher Body Plant no. 21, Detroit, Michigan, 1919
Albert Kahn, Packard Plant, Detroit, Michigan, 19061911
Albert Kahn, Geo Pierce Arrow Plant, Detroit, Michigan,
19061911
Albert Kahn, Ford Highland Park Plant Old Shop, Detroit,
Michigan, 1908
Albert Kahn, Ford Highland Park Plant Old Shop and New Shop,
Detroit, Michigan, 19081916
Albert Kahn, Ford Highland Park Plant Layout, Detroit, Michigan,
19081916
Mies van der Rohe, Brohaus (Ofce Building), Berlin, 1922
Ludwig Hilberseimer, Vorschlag zur Citybebauung, Berlin,
19281930
View of mature gekekondu in Istanbul
Pencil Building in Kagurazaka, Tokyo
Pencil Building in Ginza, Tokyo
Detached virtuality depends on a logic of inscription by which the
(contradictory) properties of the boundary appear, as an enigma, inside
an interior that is bounded by strict sequence
In terms of the Lucretian concept of reality as an even ow of atoms
along a void, the site of exception interrupts the smooth laminar ow
of activities (utilitas) regulated vertically (rmitas) by challenging the
vertical order and installing a new horizontality as a site of exception
Ernst Jentsch specied two key themes of the uncanny in terms of a
double inscription of opposites the living person drawn to a fatalistic
end (AD) and the momentum of the dead soul past literal death to a
second, symbolic death (DA)
In the reversed predication of the uncanny, between the two deaths,
DA, is framed by the literal and symbolic deaths

92
93
94
94
95
96
99
101
117
119
120

128

131

134
135

viii Figures

8.5

10.1
10.2
10.3
10.4
12.1
12.2
12.3
12.4
12.5

Rear Windows mimetic eld is the interior urban courtyard, which is a

physical model of the anthology that narrates separate half-stories that
will be joined in the end
A public square instead of a corner building a new nodal point within
the narrow street system
Demolition of run-down buildings and construction of the new Rambla
del Raval in 1999
Rambla del Raval during the rice-tasting festival the neighborhood
displays its ethnic diversity
Figure-ground diagram comparison of El Raval in 1956 and 2012; black:
block buildings with private courtyards; white: public space
Lev Rudnev, Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, 19521955
Christian Kerez, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (competition phase
rendering), 2007
Jerzy Skrzypczak, Andrzej Bielobradek, Krzysztof Stefaski, Marriott
Hotel, Warsaw, 1989
Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Marketmeter, 2010
Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Marketmeter, 2010

141
172
173
176
177
201
202
203
207
208

CONTRIBUTORS

Ross Exo Adams earned a Master of Architecture from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam,

NL, and a BS in Biomaterial Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
He has worked as an architect and urban designer in ofces in New York City, Rotterdam,
Mexico City, and London, such as MVRDV, Foster & Partners, Arup, and Productora. The
nal outcome of his Masters thesis, supervised by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Elia Zenghelis,
was exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 2006. He has taught at the Architectural Association,
the Berlage Institute, and Brighton University. His writing and design work has been
published in several journals such as Radical Philosophy, Log, Thresholds, Project Russia, and
others. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the London Consortium, examining the concept
of circulation in order to develop a political ontology of urbanization. He holds the 2011
LKE Ozolins Studentship awarded by the RIBA.
Libero Andreotti is Professor of Architecture and Resident Director of the Georgia Tech
Paris Program at the Ecole Nationale Superieure dArchitecture de Paris La Villette. An architect
and a historian, he holds a PhD in Art Architecture and Environmental Studies from
MIT. His most recent books are SpielRaum: Walter Benjamin et lArchitecture (Paris, Editions
La Villette, 2011) and Le Grand Jeu Venir: Textes situationnnistes sur la ville (Paris, Editions
La Villette, 2007). He is also co-author, with Xavier Costa and others, of Situationists: Art,
Politics, Urbanism (ACTAR, 1997) and Theory of the Drive and Other Situationist Writings on
the City (ACTAR, 1996). His articles have appeared in October, Lotus International, Journal of
Architectural Education, and Grey Room.
George Baird is Emeritus Professor of Architecture and the former Dean of the John H. Daniels
Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He is the founding
principal of the Toronto-based architecture and urban design rm Baird Sampson Neuert
Architects. Prior to becoming Dean at the University of Toronto in 2004, Baird was the
G. Ware Travelstead Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard
University. He has published and lectured widely throughout most parts of the world.
He is co-editor (with Charles Jencks) of Meaning in Architecture (George Brazillar, 1970), and

x Contributors

(with Mark Lewis) of Queues, Rendezvous, Riots (Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994). He is author
of Alvar Aalto (Thames and Hudson, 1970) and The Space of Appearance (MIT Press, 1995).
His latest book: Public Space: Cultural/Political Theory; Street Photography was published by SUN
Publications in Amsterdam in 2011. Bairds consulting rm, Baird Sampson Neuert is the
winner of numerous design awards, including Canadian Architect Magazine awards over many
years, and Governor Generals Awards for Cloud Gardens Park in 1994, Erindale Hall on the
campus of the University of Toronto at Mississauga in 2006, and the French River Visitor
Centre in 2010. Baird is a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and a member
of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He was the recipient of the Toronto Arts
Foundations Architecture and Design Award (1992), the da Vinci Medal of the Ontario
Association of Architects (2000), and the Gold Medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of
Canada (2010). In 2011 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Waterloo.
Most recently, he was selected as the 2012 winner of the Topaz Medallion of the American
Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
David Cunningham is Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture
at the University of Westminster in London, and a member of the editorial collective of the
journal Radical Philosophy. He is co-editor of collections (with Nigel Mapp) on Adorno
(Continuum, 2006) and (with Andrew Fisher and Sas Mays) on photography and literature
(Cambridge Scholars, 2005), as well as of a special issue of the Journal of Architecture on postwar avant-gardes. Other writings on aesthetics, modernism, and urban theory have appeared
in publications including Angelaki, Architectural Design, CITY, Journal of Visual Culture, New
Formations, and SubStance. He is currently completing a book on the concept of the metropolis.
Uta Gelbke is an Assistant Professor in architecture at Graz University of Technology. After

graduating from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, she practiced as an architect in

Germany and Australia, working on a wide range of architectural and urban planning
projects. In 2009 she joined the faculty at Graz University of Technology, where she teaches
architectural design and construction. Her PhD research, predicated on her work experience
in the eld of urban regeneration, is concerned with the relationship between public space
and political interaction within the scope of large urban development projects. She has published
conference papers and journal articles on the economic, political and sociocultural cause and
effect of spatial phenomena such as urban sprawl, density, and urban renewal.
Gevork Hartoonian is Professor of Architecture and Head of Design and Architecture, Faculty

of Arts and Design, University of Canberra, Australia. His research is focused on a critical
archaeology of modern architectures appropriation of the nineteenth-century architectural
discourses, the tectonic in particular. He is the author of numerous books and book chapters.
His most recent book is entitled Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique (Ashgate, 2012).
Lidia Klein is an architectural historian. She received her PhD at the Institute of Art History,

Warsaw University. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Junior Researcher Fellowship (2010/2011)

and a Foundation for Polish Science START scholarship for outstanding young researchers
(2012). Recently, she co-edited a reader on sound, space, and architecture, Making the Walls
Quake, as if they were Dilating with the Secret Knowledge of Great Powers, with Micha Libera (Zachta
National Gallery of Art, 2012), and edited a collection of essays on Polish postmodern

Contributors xi

architecture (December 2013). Currently, she is investigating the relations between contemporary space, politics, and economy at the Graduate Program in Art, Art History & Visual Studies
at Duke University, North Carolina.
Donald Kunze has taught architecture theory and general arts criticism at Penn State

University since 1984 and continues to write, teach, and advise after his retirement in 2011.
He studied architecture at North Carolina State University (B.Arch.) and received his PhD
in cultural geography in 1983. His articles and lectures have engaged a range of topics dealing
with the poetic dimensionalizing of experience. His book on the philosophy of place of
Giambattista Vico (Peter Lang, 1987) studied the operation of metaphoric imagination and
memory. As a Shogren Foundation Fellow, he developed a system of dynamic notation that
adopted the calculus of George Spencer Brown. As the 2003 Reyner Banham Fellow at the
Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, he extended the calculus to a screen
theory, a graphical approach to problems of the boundary in art, architecture, lm, and
geographical imagination. As a Nadine Carter Russell Fellow at the Robert Reich School
of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University, he worked with Kevin Benham
to develop the idea of the surrealist garden following the novel by Raymond Roussel, Locus
Solus.
Nadir Lahiji is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Canberra. He holds

a PhD in architecture theory from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of The
Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Political
Unconscious of Architecture: Re-Opening Jamesons Narrative (Ashgate, 2011). He previously
co-edited (with Daniel S. Friedman) Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (Princeton
Architectural Press, 1997).
Francesco Marullo holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from the
Technische Universiteit Delft, where he is currently developing his PhD research on the
Architecture of Labour and the Spaces of Production within The City as a Project doctoral
program coordinated by Pier Vittorio Aureli. Since 2006 he has collaborated with OMA/
AMO Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, the Department of Architecture
and Urban Studies at the Roma Tre University in Rome, DOGMA Architects in Brussels,
Matteo Mannini Architects in Rotterdam, and The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies
in Architecture and Urban Design in Delft. He is currently teaching at the Technische
Universiteit Delft.
Joan Ockman is a historian and critic who has written widely on modern and contemporary

architecture. She is currently Distinguished Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania

School of Design.
Gabriel Rockhill is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University (Philadelphia),
Directeur de programme at the Collge International de Philosophie in Paris and Chercheur
associ at the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CNRS/EHESS). He is the author
of Logique de lhistoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (Editions Hermann, 2010)
and Radical History and the Politics of Art (Columbia University Press, 2014). He co-authored
Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues (Columbia University Press, 2011), and he

xii Contributors

co-edited and contributed to Jacques Rancire: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Duke University Press,
2009) and Technologies de contrle dans la mondialisation: Enjeux politiques, thiques et esthtiques
(Editions Kim, 2009). He edited and translated Jacques Rancires The Politics of Aesthetics
(Continuum Books, 2004) as well as Cornelius Castoriadis Postscript on Insignicance (Continuum
Books, 2011). He is also the co-founder of the Machete Group, a collective of artists and
intellectuals based in Philadelphia (http://machetegroup.wordpress.com).
Douglas Spencer currently teaches histories and theories of architecture and landscape

urbanism within the graduate school of the Architectural Association (AA), London, UK.
He is also a PhD supervisor at the AA, and at the Royal College of Art, London, UK, and
the University of East London, UK. His research and writing on urbanism, architecture, lm,
and critical theory has been published in journals including Radical Philosophy, The Journal of
Architecture, AA Files, and New Geographies. He has also contributed chapters to a number of
collections on urban design, utopian literature and contemporary architecture. His book, The
Architecture of Neoliberalism, is due to be published by Bloomsbury in 2016.

PREFACE

Contemporary radical thinkers have in various ways reected on the dominant trends in
the political discourse of our time and have declared the end of politics, otherwise named
as the post-political condition. The post-political has effectively desubjectivized the
contemporary subject by subordinating it to the depoliticized neoliberal apparatuses of power.
This process of depoliticization, which began in the last decade of the twentieth century,
coincided with a turn in the discipline of architecture away from the critical discourse that
was the hallmark of the 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1990s radical critique in architecture
was regarded with utter suspicion. Thanks to the so-called discontent with criticality, the
project of radical critique was abandoned. The political, as a subject of study and matter for
concern, was eclipsed in the practice of theory in architecture.
We conceived this project to foreground the political in order to confront the dominant
trend of the post-political, which has crept into architecture with the apology of needing to
align the discourse with the apparatuses of the new spirit of capitalism. We have attempted
to reassert the question of the political and challenge its abandonment. This collection aims
to ll a sizeable gap in contemporary literature on the relation between architecture and politics.
It aims to revisit contemporary radical political theory and philosophy to examine a new and
non-reductive concept of the political to explore the relations between politics and art, politics
and aesthetics, and the place taken up by architecture and theory in between them. In summary,
this anthology is conceived as a response to the predominant depoliticization of academic
discourse and as an attempt to reclaim the abandoned radical critical project in architecture.
The idea for this publication originated from an international symposium we organized
at the Lebanese American University in Beirut in November 2011, entitled Architecture
and the Political. A diverse group of academics, architects, and critics from Europe, the Middle
East, and North America participated in that symposium. Subsequently, we expanded the
intellectual objectives of the conference theme and embarked on the book project, inviting
internationally known theoreticians, critics, and scholars from inside and outside the discipline
to join. The content of the present volume and its title reect our ambition in opening the
topic of architecture and the political to critical and philosophical examinations in which
our contributors were given the opportunity to open the topic to subject it to wider and
more radical scholarly and critical investigations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank rst the participants in the conference that Elie Haddad and I organized
at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in November 2011, whose contributions gave
the impetus to initiate the book project of which this anthology is the result. We re-wrote
the original statement and invited other writers and architectural critics to contribute to the
book project. I thank them for their kind responses and their rich contributions to this
anthology. Among the contributors, my special thanks go to Donald Kunze. I am indebted
to his generosity for helping me directly and indirectly in the preliminary preparation of the
materials in the book for his helpful editorial intervention in the rst draft of the introductory
chapter and my own essay for this volume. I thank Gabriel Rockhill for his kind permission
to include his essay, originally written in French, in this collection; I would like to thank the
translators of his essay in its different stages, Sabine Aoun and Sean Bray.
My special thanks go to the ofce of the Dean of the School of Architecture and Design
at LAU for supporting the conference. I extend my appreciation especially to Elie Haddad
and the entire faculty and student body in Architecture Department who helped us in
organizing the event in Beirut and for their active participation.
At Routledge, I am grateful to Francesca Ford, who took an interest in the initial book
project and gave us her full support. I thank Emma Gadsden for her patience and editorial
assistance throughout the production process of this book. I also thank Gary Smith for his
ne work in copy-editing the text in its early stage. I would specially like to thank the
Production Editor Christina OBrien for her great work and patience throughout the nal
stage of editing the book.
I dedicate this book to my students at LAU with whom I had so much fun.

INTRODUCTION
The critical project and the post-political
suspension of politics
Nadir Lahiji

Today, however, we are dealing with another form of the denegation of the political,
postmodern post-political, which no longer merely represses the political, trying to contain
it and pacify the returns of the repressed, but much more effectively forecloses it.
Slavoj iek, The Ticklish Subject

What does architecture discourse have to do with contemporary political thought? In what
way has this discourse been affected by it? Can the architecture discipline assume a critical
position against the current disorientation of thought that has been identied as post-political
simply understood as the disavowal of the political proper by contemporary critical
philosophers? The post-political suspension of the political, to use Slavoj ieks apt phrase,
which has crept into architecture discourse in the last two decades unknown to the discipline
at large has been triumphantly avowed by those who have been celebrating the end of
the critical theory in the discipline.
Underlying the present anthology is the claim that abandoning the political in architecture
which amounts to surrendering the discipline to the fashion of the post-political is
synonymous with the disavowal of its critical project.
The post-political more to be said on its denition later is responsible for the
disruption of the political subjectivity and its desubjectication of the subject conditioned by late
capitalist apparatuses. We ask: Has the time not now come for architecture to overcome the purity of
its closure from the political, once thought unachievable? In the conjunction of architecture and
politics, can the and be the place where thought circulates between the two? And by politics,
must not we mean an emancipatory project against its technocratic abuses? Why should we
associate architecture with this project in the rst place? And, what are the political
consequences of the separation of the discourse of the discipline from the critique of
contemporary capitalism? A separation that academic discourse has euphorically endorsed has
buried the radical lessons of the 1960s and early 1970s lessons that grounded architectural
critical analysis in the politico-philosophical analysis of the capitalist system. Is it not an ethical
imperative to confront the postmodern perversion of the political as a rst step to reclaiming
the abandoned radical project in the discipline? Our response must be emphatically afrmative.

2 Nadir Lahiji

This afrmation underpins the conviction that led to conceiving this anthology. In this
introduction I will attempt to offer some critical remarks to provide a general background
to the chapters collected in this volume. My remarks will be limited to explaining the
problematic of the post-political as a context for the various arguments and case studies
presented in this collection.
In global terms, the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and, shortly
after, the triumphant embrace of capitalism by those regimes prompted political and
philosophical writers and commentators to declare the end of politics, the end of
ideology, the end of history, and, above all, the end of utopia. As iek has pointed
out, the year of collapse of communism is commonly perceived as the collapse of the political
utopia of communism: Today we live in a post-utopian time of pragmatic administration,
since we learned the hard lessons of how noble political utopias end in totalitarian terror.1
However, iek adds,
the rst thing to remember here is that this alleged collapse of utopia was followed by
the ten-year rule of the last grand utopia, the utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy
as the end of history 9/11 designates the end of this utopia, a return to the real
history of new walls of conict which followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall.2
Further, he says, It is crucial to perceive how the end of utopia repeated itself in a selfreexive gesture: the ultimate utopia was the very notion that, after the end of utopias, we
were at the end of history.3 It can be said that the architecture discipline, which abandoned
the naive modernist utopia associated with the project of modernity in the early decades
of the twentieth century, began to resign itself, by the time of the late 1970s, to being
part of the last grand utopia of the capitalist liberal democracy, only to gradually embrace
the ultimate neoliberal utopia taken as the end of utopias. The end of history that
accompanied the grand utopia brought the discipline to the point of total depoliticization by
happily adopting the post-political discourse, now coupled by the fashionable trend of the
post-critical. I will return to this below.
It was shortly after 1989 that France witnessed a new resurgence of interest in the notion
of political philosophy in connection with a revival of the position of Hannah Arendt, and
that ideological (emancipatory) questions could be put aside and the political rethought in
ethical terms of how best to live together.4 In was around this time that Jacques Rancires
groundbreaking political treatise La Msentente: Politique et philosophie appeared in 1995 (made
available in English in 1999 as Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy).5 The hallmark of Rancires
book is his refutation of the idea of political philosophy and the neo-Aristotelian current
of politics in France.6 As Oliver Davis put it,
Indeed Rancire goes much further than to attack a single philosophers conception
of politics and sets his insights on political philosophy as a whole, which he argues is
fatally awed and inherently conservative because it is unable to accept and think through
the consequences of the basic fact that any given social order is contingent.7
According to Rancire, what political philosophy fails to see, as Oliver puts it, is that
any and every social arrangement is inherently irrational and ultimately contingent. Rancire
indeed goes so far as to suggest that the longstanding ambition of political philosophy is to
dispense with politics altogether.8 What is important not to miss here is that Rancire

Introduction 3

designates the end of politics as consensus politics the transformation of politics into
management or the negation of politics, a trend he discerned operating in France since
the early 1980s.9 Now, the term end of politics is actually another name for the current
use of the term post-political. While a comprehensive discussion of Rancires complex
argument in Disagreement and for that matter his larger work on the concept of aesthetics
and art in conjunction with his novel notion of the distribution of sensible (le partage du
sensible) are beyond the scope of this introduction, more than a few chapters in this volume
directly take up these notions for critical analyses.10 I therefore limit myself to making a few
remarks that are directly related to his notion of the end of politics.
Rancire makes a provocative and unusual distinction between politics and police, and the
notion of democracy. Democracy, for Rancire, is not just one form of political regime
among others; it is rather the essence of politics in contradistinction to the police.11 Rancire
argues that politics can only occur, as Samuel Chambers succinctly puts it,
when the logic of domination intrinsic to any police order (since all police orders are
hierarchical orders) nds itself confronted with a different logic, the logic of equality.
Politics therefore proves to be the demonstration of the assumption of equality.12
Rancire coins the term the part with no part and identies this non-part with the whole
that does not occupy a properly dened place in the hierarchical social order; he uses police
order in a pejorative sense, as that which disturbs the same order as the Universal, where
politics proper begins.13 For Rancire, politics in this sense happens very rarely. His original
example is the demos, a class of citizen within the Greek polis having no xed place in the
social edice. The demos are the people, the part with no part,
whose members lacked any of the traditional attributes thought necessary for active
involvement in the political process (wealth, birth or moral excellence), yet who
nevertheless claimed not only to participate in it on an equal footing with the rich, the
well-born and morally superior but to be the only source of sovereignty in the city.14
As Davis explains,
This usurpatory claim by the demos to govern is their response to the inaugural wrong
(le tort or blaberon) which the city does them by trying to reserve the right to govern
to those with a traditional entitlement to do so, by saying that they do not count in
political life.15
This is similar to the position of proletariat, the part with no part in Marxist tradition.
As iek points out, of course, for Rancire the line of separation between the police and
politics is
always blurred and contested; say, in the Marxist tradition, proletariat can be read as
the subjectivization of the part of no part elevating its injustice to the ultimate test
of universality, and simultaneously, as the operator which will bring about the
establishment of post-political rational society.16

4 Nadir Lahiji

iek adds that Our European tradition contains a series of disavowals of this political
moment, of the proper logic of political conict.17
Rancire articulates three moments, three political concepts, when the political in the
tradition of European political history is disavowed: arch-politics, para-politics, and metapolitics.18 He discusses meta-politics by relating it to the tradition of Marxism and the
notion of the end of politics in the following terms:
Ideology is, nally, the term that allows the place of politics to shift endlessly, right to
the dizzying limit: the declaration of its end. What in police language is called the
end of politics is perhaps nothing more, in fact, than completion of the process whereby
metapolitics, inextricably bound up with politics and binding everything together as
political, evacuates it from the inside, causing the constitutive wrong of politics to
disappear in the name of the critique of all appearance.19
And further,
The end of politics is the ultimate phase of metapolitics interference, the nal afrmation of the emptiness of its truth. The end of politics is the completion of political
philosophy. More precisely, the end of politics is the end of the strained relationship
between politics and metapolitics that has characterized the age of modern democratic
and social revolution.20
In the same line of argument, Rancire then establishes the relation between politics and
the people. He writes: There is politics from the moment there exists the sphere of
appearance of a subject, the people, whose particular attribute is to be different from itself,
internally divided.21 In Lacanian psychoanalytical theory this will be known as the divided
subject, a complex theory that cannot be discussed here.
Before I leave Rancire, I want to cite some passages from his Disagreement without offering
any commentary.
Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution
of a part of those who have no part.22
Politics exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulates
human society.23
To recapitulate: politics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is
disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part. It begins when the
equality of anyone and everyone is inscribed in the liberty of the people.24
The only city is a political one and politics begins with egalitarian contingency.25
Thus Platos city is not political. But a nonpolitical city is no city at all. Plato makes
up a strange monster that imposes the mode of rule of the family on the city. That
Plato needs to eliminate the family in order to do so is a perfectly logical paradox:
eliminating the difference between one and the other means eliminating them both.26
Aside from the numerous commentators who have recently interpreted Rancires political
and aesthetic thoughts in the Anglo-American receptions of his writings, ieks reections

Introduction 5

are particularly important for our purpose because he has specically expanded on the problem
of the end of politics using the term post-political in his extensive writings. He
repeatedly cites Rancires notion of the part with no part. In the following, I cite the
notable places where iek takes up the post-political in his radical critiques.
In The Ticklish Subject, under the heading post-politics, he writes:
In post-politics, the conict of global ideological visions embodied in different parties
which compete for power is replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats
(economics, public opinion specialists . . .) and liberal multiculturalists: via the process
of negotiation of interest, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal
consensus. Post-politics thus emphasizes the need to leave old ideological divisions behind
and confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert knowledge and free
deliberation that takes peoples concrete needs and demands into account.27
In Violence: Six Sideways Reections, iek discusses the post-political in conjunction with
bio-politics and interestingly relates them to the dimension of fear as the only mode of
subjectivity today:
Todays predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics an awesome example
of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: post-political is a politics
which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and instead focus on expert
management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the
security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal. It is clear how these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains is only the
efcient administration of life . . . almost only that. That is to say, with the depoliticized,
socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero level
of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this eld, to actively mobilize people,
is through fear, a basic constituent of todays subjectivity.28
In the same place, iek further points out that this post-political bio-politics is radically
separate from the emancipatory politics. It is not a question of two different visions, he
emphasizes, but rather, it is the difference between politics based on a set of universal axioms
and a politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political,29 based, as
it is, on the dimension of fear, bio-politics as politics of fear: fear of immigrants, fear
of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state itself, with its burden of
high taxation, fear of ecological catastrophe, fear of harassment.30
For iek, post-political is an aspect of todays postmodern disorientation. Elsewhere, with
a specic reference to Rancires work cited above, iek writes:
What denes postmodern post-politics is thus the secret solidarity between its two
opposed Janus faces: on the one hand, the replacement of politics proper by depoliticized
humanitarian operations, on the other hand, the violent outburst of depoliticized
pure Evil in the guise of excessive ethnic or religious fundamentalist violence.
In short, what Rancire proposes here is a new version of the old Hegelian motto
Evil resides in the gaze itself which perceives the object as Evil: the contemporary
gure of Evil, too strong to be accessible to political analysis (the Holocaust, etc.),
appears as such only to the gaze which constitutes it as such (as depoliticized).31

6 Nadir Lahiji

The reections I offered above on the post-political paradigm support the thesis of this
anthology. To reiterate: the evacuation of the political from the architecture discipline is a
corollary to the debunking of the project of critique. From the 1980s to the present, in the postutopian condition, the neoliberal ideologists from inside the discipline, by embracing the
grand utopia of the capitalist liberal democracy, came to celebrate the ultimate utopia of
the end of history (in ieks sense of these terms). They managed to align the discourse
of architecture and theory with the agenda of contemporary postmodern management of
capitalism and to conform to its institutional, discursive, and non-discursive apparatuses. In
paving the way for anti-political disorientation in the discipline, liberal ideologists have
celebrated the defeat of radical Left discourse by embracing the post-critical turn in
contemporary philosophical-politico-cultural discourses. This volume is a direct confrontation
of this post-critical fashion a plea to renew, or rather reclaim, the radical project of the critique
in the discipline. We conceived this volume as a challenge to the hegemonic domination of
the liberal critic-architects who are the ideologues of the depoliticized architecture. Camouaged
as radicals and taking shelter behind fancy techno-philosophical academic jargon, they are
in effect exposing architecture and its discourse to the perverse imperatives of the contemporary
postmodern digital capitalism and its image industry.
This wide gathering of chapters in this anthology on the critique of the contemporary
post-political and relating it to the discourse of architecture and its critical project merits a
few words of explanation about its organization if only because no such collection has ever
before been compiled to tie contemporary architecture discourse to the notion of the postpolitical. While the central notion of the political can be discerned as the common thread
that ties together the diverse topics presented in this anthology, there are nevertheless broader
intellectual-conceptual categories that these chapters have tackled. We have divided the book
into three parts.
Part I, entitled Aesthetics, politics and architecture, contains four theoretical chapters
which analyze issues of political philosophy and aesthetics. The central question of what can
possibly be understood by the political in architecture is introduced comprehensively, ranging
from the twentieth century to contemporary radical philosophers who have dealt with aesthetics
and politics, from (for example) Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno, to Jacques Rancire
and Slavoj iek. This part variously addresses the politics of architecture in relation to
polis, public space, and metropolis.
Chapters in Part II, The Political and the Critique of Architecture, take into account
the recent post-political discourse and explore its implication in architecture. The four
chapters here address the problematic relation between architecture and the economic regime
in which it operates. One chapter revisits the critical project in architecture with special
reference to the work of Manfredo Tafuri, exploring the question of autonomy. Another
takes its cue from the political philosopher Carl Schmitt, going back to the original political
discourse of modernity and the idea of factory to nd a novel analysis of the notion of
generic. A third discusses agency and utopia in reference to the political thought
of Hanna Arendt, offering a critique of the urban condition in late capitalism in Tokyo. A
fourth takes up Jacques Rancires political notion of dissensus within the novel framework
of horizontal and vertical, visible within a comparison of architectural and lmic spaces.
Part III is entitled The Post-Political and Contemporary Urbanism. This part includes
four chapters that deal with politics in urban contexts, analyzing the neoliberal post-political
and its managerial class through the concepts of political subjectivity and political agency.

Introduction 7

Some chapters take up the analyses of urban spaces by referring to concepts derived from
contemporary philosophers, including Jacques Rancire and Chantal Mouffe. Urban politics
is discussed in relation to the parameters that manifest the contemporary neoliberal post-political
tendencies at the level of urban ideology. Various urban and post-urban cities are discussed
in detail including Warsaw, Barcelona, and Beijing.

Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31

See Slavoj iek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London and New York: Verso, 2004, 122.
Ibid., 122123.
Ibid., 123.
See the excellent argument of Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancire, Cambridge: Polity, 2010, 99. For my
reections on the work of Rancire, among a large volume of secondary materials, I mainly rely on
Davis text here.
Jacques Rancire, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, 1999.
It should be noted that Rancire is not alone among the contemporary radical philosophers to refute
the idea of political philosophy. Alain Badiou also has denounced this idea; see his Metapolitics,
London and New York: Verso, 2005.
Davis, Jacques Rancire, 99.
Ibid., 99100.
Ibid., 99100.
Specically, see Gabriel Rockhill and my own chapter in this volume. Other essays also mention
Rancire in different places without going further into comprehensive analysis of his works.
Davis, Jacques Rancire, 80.
See Samuel A. Chambers, Jacques Rancire (1940) in From Agamben to iek, Contemporary Critical
Theories, ed. Jon Simons, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, 199.
For more on this see Slavoj ieks excellent discussion in his Afterword to Jacques Rancires
The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. and introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2004.
Davis, Jacques Rancire, 80.
Ibid., 80.
iek, Afterword 7071, emphasis added.
Ibid., 7071.
Further, see Disagreement and ieks Afterword. Signicantly, iek (ibid., 71) adds a fourth
category to Rancires list by naming it the ultra-politics and denes it as the attempt to depoliticize
conict by way of bringing it to an extreme via the direct materialization of politics: the foreclosed
political returns in the real, in the guise of the attempt to resolve the deadlock of political conict,
of msentenete, by its false radicalization, i.e. by way of reformulating it as a war between Us and
Them, our Enemy, where there is no common ground for symbolic conict. Also see Davis, Jacques
Rancire, and Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire: Creating Equality, University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008.
Rancire, Disagreement, 86.
Ibid.
Ibid., 87.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 16.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid.
Slavoj iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology, London and New York:
Verso, 1999, 198.
Slavoj iek, Violence: Six Sideways Reections, New York: Picador, 2008, 40.
iek, Violence, 40.
iek, Violence, 41.
See iek, Afterword, 73.

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PART I

Aesthetics, politics, and

architecture

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1
METROPOLITICS, OR,
ARCHITECTURE AND THE
CONTEMPORARY LEFT
David Cunningham

When the Geist abandons the simple and direct relations of production, it no longer creates
the city but the Metropolis. It is the Geist, not the individual, that of necessity inhabits the
Metropolis.
Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On
the Philosophy of Modern Architecture

In the wake of a century which was, against the expectations of Marx and others, for the
most part an age not of urban revolutions . . . but of epochal rural uprisings and peasantbased wars of national liberation,1 there has over the last decade been a marked resurgence
of interest among left-wing theorists in the question of the politics of the urban. Hence, for
example, while Slavoj iek suggests that the new forms of social awareness that emerge
from slum collectives will be the germs of the future and the best hope for a properly free
world, Italian post-autonomist Antonio Negri has posited the internally antagonistic spatial
conguration of the advanced metropolis as that which might extend and replace the
privileged place previously accorded to the industrial factory as the crucial site of contemporary
social production, cooperation, and conict.2 Determined as such examples may be by a
contemporary culture of academic Left celebrity, each reects the degree to which the
remarkable global reality of contemporary urbanization has thus given new life to Marxs
own belief that what he called enormous cities might constitute one key condition of both
a spatial concentration and social collectivity in which, no longer an incoherent mass scattered
over the whole country, some new social class strength could grow and it could feel that
strength more.3
The intention of this chapter is, then, to begin some attempt to contextualize the question
of what exactly this might mean for a thinking of a possible politics of architecture today.
This is a question that will, in turn, be framed by three extremely general propositions.
1

All questions of a specically modern architectural politics turn around a transformation

of the architectural itself that has its origins in the nineteenth century. What Beatriz
Colomina says of Adolf Loos, that the subject of [his] architecture is the citizen of the