Human Cities and the Space of Conflict

CHAPTER HUMAN CITIES AND THE SPACE OF CONFLICT AUTHORS Hagi Kenaan Tel-Aviv (Israel) Abstract he phrase “reclaiming public space” has become popular in recent years and gives voice to an important growing understanding of what “the right to the city” may mean in the twenty-irst century. At the same time, the notion of reclaiming the space of the city, all too often appears in ways that are uncritical and that cover up important questions the answers to which we cannot take for granted. In this paper, I problematize the idea that public space is a uniied space that gives itself to simple forms of “reclaiming”. he paper returns to Plato’s Republic and focuses, speciically, on the Platonic analogy between the structure of the polis and the structure of the human soul. his analogy is relevant for contemporary discussion because it implies that like the human space of the soul, the city too is a space that is conlictual at heart. Conlict, I argue, is thus not just an aberration or an exceptional condition of public space, but, on the contrary, the very form of the Urban. Consequently, I suggest that unless we rethink the urban vis-a-vis the concept of intrinsic conlict, we shall fail to embrace the meaning of Human Cities – of that which makes cities human. 1. INTRODUCTION Just around the corner from the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique in which the “Human Cities” symposium took place, on a Generali building on Rue Ravenstein, a huge dinosaur is roaring at a miniature Manneken Pis. This is that irst time I see an actual work by Bonom (Figure 1). A colleague at the conference tells me about the public debate the ensued when police arrested the street artist a couple of years ago. Is Bonom’s work an act of reclaiming public space? Does Bonom’s work difer, in this sense, from the less artsy – less aesthetic – graiti on the stairway leading to the library? (Figure 2) In what sense is public space a contested space? And, how is the presence of the surveillance cameras that is announced by the street-sign nearby, connected to the contested character of such a public space? (Figure 3) To begin thinking of human cities and struggle over hegemony in urban spaces, I suggest we go back to the 4th century B.C., where, in many ways, our thinking of the he paper thus develops the idea of an “essential conlict” through an elaboration of a notion of plurality that pervades our being-inthe-city and that inds its expression in the phenomenon of graiti. Keywords Contact 37 Street art, graiti, urban sphere, visual interventions, sovereign’s power, conlict, struggle, plurality, human city, Heidegger, Plato Prof. Hagi Kenaan Department of Philosophy, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, [email protected] Figure 1: Bonom, dinosaur roaring at a miniature Menneken Pis. Rue Ravenstein, Brussels (source: http://www.ekosystem.org) R. Houlstan-Hasaerts, B. Tominc, M. Nikšič, B. Goličnik Marušić (Editors) Urbani izziv - publikacije, Ljubljana, May 2012 HUMAN CITIES Civil Society Reclaims Public Space H. Kenaan Figure 2: Graiti at the entrance of the Bibliothque Royale de Belgique, Brussels (photo: Hagi Kenaan) city originates. The context, then, is Plato’s Politeia typically translated to English as the Republic, a title that tends to hide the speciic denotation concerning “the matters of the polis.” Plato’s Politeia ofers indeed a philosophy attending to the matters of the polis and could thus be translated – with a double entendre – as the polis matters, whose alternative title, as the tradition tells us, was “On Justice”. 2. HUMAN CITIES: THE ANALOGY BETWEEN THE POLIS AND THE SOUL In Republic book 2, Socrates is called upon to return to discuss the question of justice which was central to his previous debate with the sophist Thrasymachus and which ultimately never reached closure. The general question of what justice is has by now narrowed itself to more speciic formulations such as “is it without exception better to be just than unjust?” or, is it better “to commit unjustice or to sufer it?” Socrates agrees not to let the question drop, but suggests that it requires a methodological reformulation. What he proposes is that instead of focusing on the individual’s soul, the primary framework for examining the essence of justice should rather be the space of the city. Underlying this methodological shift is Socrates’ understanding that the human soul and the polis are identically structured, that there is an isomorphism between them and thus that their relationship is essentially analogical. In order to construct the analogy, between the city and the human soul, Socrates makes use of a metaphor that has received ample attention by readers of Plato: this is the metaphor of the small and large letters. “The inquiry we are undertaking,” Socrates says, “is no easy one but calls for keen vision... so since we are not clever persons, I think we should employ the method of search that we should use if we, with not very keen vision, were bidden to read small letters from a distance, and then someone had observed that these same letters exist elsewhere larger and on a larger surface. We should have accounted it a godsend, I fancy, to be allowed to read those letters irst, and then examine the smaller, if they are the same.” 1 According to Socrates, the question about the possibility of an ethical subjectivity, i.e., the soul’s ability to be the bearer of justice, leads us to a domain of phenomena whose visibility is tenuous and insubstantial and thus requires a speciically discerning kind of vision which we typically lack. However, whereas our vision is insuicient for penetrating the space of the soul, we are fortunate, according to him, to have access to an analogical model in which the same elements are presented on a much larger and more conspicuous scale. That is, for Socrates, the city relates to the soul just as the large letters relate to the small ones, and as such, provides an indirect, though comprehensive, presentation of the constitutive elements of the soul. Hence, as he continues to explain to his interlocutor, the motivation for drawing this analogy, Socrates says: “I will tell you... There is a justice of one man, we say, and, I suppose, also of an entire city? ... Is not the city larger than the man?... then perhaps there would be more justice in the larger object and more easy to apprehend. If it Figure 3: Camera Surveillance, Street-Sign, Brussels (photo: Hagi Kenaan) HUMAN CITIES AND THE SPACE OF CONFLICT pleases you, then, let us irst look for its quality in states and then only examine it also in the individual looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less.” 2 Socrates’s rhetoric emphasizes the manner in which the city can serve as a prism for interrogating the soul. But, what is important to notice here is that the Socratic analogy works both ways and, furthermore, that on the basis of this analogy, Socrates turns to elaborate a conception of the city that is autonomous and is discussed completely in and of itself. Yet, as Socrates turns to speak of the constitution of the polis, he is, in fact, setting up a paradigm for thinking about cities, one that internalizes the human (the structure of the human soul) as its ultimate measure. This is the origin of our thinking of “human cities”. 3. BEING-IN-THE-CITY AND THE SPACE OF CONFLICT Now, the analogy between the space of the city and the space of the soul is, of course, not one that should be taken for granted. And, indeed, interpreters of Plato often point out, that in operating as a kind of deus ex machina , the small-large letters metaphor ultimately covers up for the lack of any real explanation of why we should embrace this analogy in the irst place. I shall not dwell on this question here, and neither will I follow Socrates detailed discussion of the diferent forces and dimensions of the polis vis-a-vis the structure of the soul. My interest in this analogy stems, rather, from the fact that it provides, in my view, an illuminating key for rethinking the concept of “conlict” within the space of the city. How should we conceptualize the relationship between space, the city (or the urban) and the condition of being contested? The Platonic analogy between polis and soul invites us to rethink the inner complexity of urban space and to do so by overcoming a common, typically implicit, conception of urban space according to which the space of the city is a kind of container, a material or formal setting, in which the elements that bring life to the city are located. In other words, with Plato, we may pose an alternative to a predominant understanding of space as an essentially neutral domain which constantly ills up – like an aquarium – with diferent objects, relationships and forms of interaction that create the actual life of the city: the situations, states of afairs, events that “take place” in the city. The irst step in a critique of such a view may be taken by pondering the signiicance that the word “in” has in the HUMAN CITIES Civil Society Reclaims Public Space phrase ”being in the city.” Here, Martin Heidegger’s work and especially his analysis of the basic structure of human existence as being-in-the-world is an important point of reference. Its importance has to do with Heidegger’s insistence that when we speak of our human being-in-the-world the term “in” does not signify a relationship of physical containment. And as such, the being of humans in the world should be articulated on diferent grounds than the ones by which we speak, for example, of a chair being in a room, a paper in an envelop, liquid in a bottle, etc. Heidegger writes: “What is meant by “Being-in”? ... we are inclined to understand this Being-in as “Being in something”. This latter term designates the kind of Being which an entity has when it is “in” another one, as the water is “in” the glass, or the garment is “in” the cupboard. By this “in” we mean the relationship of Being which two entities extended in space have to each other with regard to their location in that space. Both water and glass, garment and cupboard, are “in” space and “at”a location, and both in the same way.” 3 While this kind of containment-relationship is suitable for describing things that are objectively present, it cannot capture, according to Heidegger, the human signiicance of “being-in” which – in contra-distinction to the objective – is grounded in the existential structure of being human. Heidegger’s explains this in an etymological way: “In” is derived from “innan” –”to reside”, “habitare”, “to dwell”. “An” signiies “I am accustomed”, “I am familiar with”,” “I look after something”… Being-in is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-world as its essential state.” 4 For Heidegger, the “clue” for understanding our being-in-the-world is our ways of involvement, of immersion, in things and meanings. “Being-in-the-world... split[s] itself up into deinite ways of Being-in. The multiplicity of these is indicated by the following examples; having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining…All these ways of Being-in have concern as their kind of Being.” 5 Heidegger’s departure from an objectively spatial interpretation of being-in has opened up ways for a reevaluation of the 39 H. Kenaan character of urban space vis-a-vis an understanding of the meaning of being-in-the-city.6 For our purposes, however, there is one speciic aspect of the city’s non-objective space that concerns us: the question of the relationship between space and conlict. And here, we return to Plato’s analogy between city and the soul. Is conlict an essential part of the city as it is part of human soul? 4. CONFLICT AND HEGEMONY The soul, according to Plato, consists in a plurality. In Republic, Plato elaborates what is known as the tripartite model of the soul. The soul consists of three parts that are in constant interaction: the appetites, the spirited part and reason. Bracketing the details of the exact relationship between these parts, it is important to recall that the essence of the relationship between these parts is a constant struggle. That is, these dimensions of the soul, have diferent agendas, diferent motivations; they pull and push in diferent directions, and ultimately compete for hegemony. For Plato, the question of justice (the just soul) is intrinsically tied to the question of what makes the soul well balanced. For Plato, the soul may arrive at an excellent state of balance when it is ruled by reason. But, for our purposes, it is important to notice, that even when reason rules, the other parts of the soul continue to be active. Moreover, for most people most of the time, it is not reason, but the other parts of the soul that determine its dynamic balance. Plato makes room for discussing these problematic conigurations of the soul, just as he discusses the analogical political conigurations of cities in which reason fails to rule. In other words, the Platonic soul never escapes its essential condition of being a plurality. And consisting in such a plurality, the struggle for hegemony never ceases to be part of the soul’s life. That is, even when the soul achieved a well-tempered balance, even when it is under the aegis of Reason, this state is no more than a “balance” between dynamic forces that continue to be operative. To put this more directly, conlict is internal to the soul and when we speak of the soul as a place of conlict, we need to be careful not to fall into the conceptual trap of thinking of the soul as a place that exists, in and of itself, independently of conlict. No. The soul is not a neutral container in which appetite, spirit and reason struggle for hegemony. The struggle between appetite, spirit and reason, does not take place in a given space called “the soul” but it is this very struggle that constitutes the soul. In other words, the soul is that conlict between a plurality of forces. 5. THE URBAN: ALWAYS IN THE PLURAL In a corollary manner, the Platonic analogy between soul and city invites us to reconsider the place of conlict in urban space. We may put this, more speciically, in a form of a question: are contested urban spaces contested only because they contain certain elements and forces that clash? Does conlict relate to urban space as it relates, for example, to a battle ield which, in itself, may be neutral – until certain forces enter into its coordinates, bringing with them a situation of conlict? Or more simply, is conlict external or internal to urban space, is it an aspect that, at times, dawns on urban spaces or does it intrinsically belong to the being of the urban? My position should be clear by now: I think that the lesson to be gleaned from Plato’s analogy, is that the city is, at heart, a conlictual space, that urban space is, in its essence, conlictual and it is conlictual in a manner that is conceptually prior to any explicit conlict emerging in speciic circumstances. In other words, while there are, of course, all kinds of conlicts and levels of conlicts in cities, conlicts that surface in a variety of (political, ethnical, ethical, economical) settings , we should take notice that the speciicity of these conlicts does not block from our sight an underlying conlictual structure that is always already part of urban space - a plurality present in a complicated unity. It is a singular in the plural or, to us Jean-Luc Nancy’s phrase, it’s being is “singular-plural.” 7 This concrete plurality creates, as such, a heterogeneous space, one that can never be neutral but that is, like the Platonic soul, always already inlected, always wrought by tension, a space contested in its very origin. 6. GRAFFITI AS TRACE I have been arguing that underlying the speciicity of contested urban spaces, there is a depth structure of conlict or tension that is constitutive of urban space and that, as such, needs to be acknowledged. Is this depth structure only a metaphysical postulate or does it also have a phenomenological bearing? What kind of resonance does this depth structure have within the ordinary life of the city? In Platonic terms, where can we recognize, in the city, the inner struggle of the human soul? Are we compelled, as Plato suggests, to be constantly on the move from the small scale surface of letters to the large surface and back again? Or, is there a way to recognize in the large letters (the city) the depth of the small ones (the soul)? Remaining with the image of letters and inscriptions, isn’t graiti – with its extension into unsolicited street art – a speciically interesting trace of this deep tension that concerns us here? Walking from the library to Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, I see HUMAN CITIES Civil Society Reclaims Public Space a window shop that is entirely tagged (Figure 4): a whole range of handwritings, inscription modalities, that are held together by the apparent unity of the window frame, but seem to maintain no dialogue with – have no respect to the voice – of the other. H. Kenaan Why is this not a pleasant view to look at? Facing this window in plurality, I recall a large door of a public building in Tel-Aviv, which I see almost daily and whose dynamics of tagging I try to follow (Figure 5). Does the incessant movement within this matrix, this palimpsest of letters and forms, tell us something about the dynamic, often violent, plurality that constitutes urban space? When I return to the conference’s hotel on Rue du Berger, such questions continue to echo while I take a photo of a big ish swimming in the conlictual life-world of tagging (Figure 6). 7. RECLAIMING PUBLIC SPACE? Figure 4: Graiti, Brussels (photo: Hagi Kenaan) The phrase “reclaiming public space” has become popular in the last few years and gives voice to an important growing understanding of what “the right to the city” may mean in the twenty-irst century. At the same time, the notion of reclaiming the space of the city, all too often appears in ways that are uncritical and that cover up important questions the answers to which we cannot take for granted. In this paper, I have tried to problematize the idea that public space is a uniied space that gives itself to simple forms of “reclaiming”. Figure 5: Graiti, Lincoln Street, Tel-Aviv (photo: Hagi Kenaan) Figure 6: Graiti, Rue du Berger, Brussels (photo: Hagi Kenaan) I have focused on a speciic point in Plato’s Republic, a text that could be read as an interesting document of city planning. Indeed, the planning in the Republic results in a program for an ideal city: this is not an actual act of planning, but more of an articulation of a regulative ideal that could guide eventual city planners. Here, the fact that the project is completely utopic, makes Plato’s point about the conlictual essence of the city even more interesting. That is, Plato could have articulated his ideal vision of the city in a manner that altogether does away with the structure of conlict. He could have, for example, based his conception of the ideal city solely on a rational structure, describing an entirely homogeneous space of reason. However, Plato chose not to do so. And, insisted instead – by embracing the analogy between city and human soul – that the city is conlictual in essence: the city is contested in its very being, that is, also in the best of worlds. Hence, if we agree with Plato that as long as the city continues to bear the mark of the human, conlict will remain constitutive of its space, the question arises of how planning or, alternatively, how a reclaiming-activism, can acknowledge this basic structure? What could such an acknowledgment consist in? In particular, we need to ask ourselves if the discourse of “reclaiming the city”, doesn’t ultimately – and despite itself – lock us into a mirror picture of the city’s master plans, which the act of reclaiming seeks to subvert. Can the idea of “reclaiming” city space actually subvert the hegemonic conception of public space or does it reproduce the ruler’s understanding of that space? That is, can we, in thinking of a city’s possibilities of development – of what it can and should be – make room for the intrinsic tension through which plurality 8 shows itself, i.e., as real conlict? Or, do we ultimately frame the conlictual as an aberrant condition in the city space, an anomaly, irregularity that needs to be eliminated in order to maintain the intrinsic cohesiveness of the city? Can we, in other words, think beyond the liberal vision of plurality as an essentially pleasant diversity? I leave these questions open. Notes 1 2 Plato (1982). Republic, Book 2, section 368c, in Hamilton E. and Cairns H. (Eds) The Collected Dialogues, p.614. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Plato (1982). Republic, Book 2, section 368e, in Hamilton E. and Cairns H. (Eds) The Collected Dialogues, p.615. Princeton, Princeton University Press. 3 Heidegger, M. (1962) (Trans Macquarrie J. and Robinson E.). Being and Time, p.79. New York, Harper & Row. 4 Ibid, p.80 40 5 Ibid, p.83 6 Kofman E. and Lebas E. (1996) (Trans and eds). Writings on Cities. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. 7 See: Nancy J-L. (2000) (Trans Richardson R. and O’byrne A.). Being SingularPlural. Standford, Stanford University Press. On Nancy’s Singular-Plural and the question of the visual, see: Kenaan H. (2000) What Makes an Image Singular Plural: Questions to Jean-Luc Nancy. Journal of Visual Culture, 9 (1), April 2010, pp. 63-72. 8 HUMAN CITIES AND THE SPACE OF CONFLICT On the possibility of a new ethics of alterity and its visual implications, see: Kenaan, H. (2012). Visage(s): Une autre éthique du regard après Levinas. Paris, L’Éclat.