1 Introducing urban cosmopolitics
Multiplicity and the search for a
common world
Ignacio Fariôías and Anders Blok
Things move fast in urban studies. Whereas just a few years ago the idea of thinking of the city through actor- network theory (ANT) as a multiplicity of urban assemblages involved a controversial and somewhat eccentric theoretical move (Amin and Thrift 2002, Farías and Bender 2009), today ANT seems to have become part of a widely shared (if not necessarily widely embraced) language to rethink the city and the urban. Notably, notions of urban assemblages and assem-blage urbanism have emerged as promising new additions to the analysis and politics of cities, spurring a proliferation of theoretical and empirical engage-ments across science and technology studies (STS), political science, human geography, cultural anthropology and urban studies (see, e.g., Farías 2011, McFarlane 2011a, McCann, Roy and Ward 2013, Jayne and Ferenčuhová 2013, Harris 2013, kanai and kutz 2013, Ureta 2014, Färber 2014, Shaw 2014, Pow 2014, Blok 2014).
In this, assemblage urbanism thus joins a wider stream of recent urban theory developments (Roy and Ong 2011, McFarlane 2011b), together amounting to a polemical argument against political economy- centric readings of urbanization that reduce the urban to the workings of underlying political- economic structures. Evoking core ANT tenets, this has involved, first, stressing the existence of a recalcitrant and lively more- than-human urban ecology that cannot be read only in terms of participation in overarching capitalist metabolisms. Rather, technolo-gies, materials and various life- forms are read here as concrete and irreducible agents involved in urban life (Hinchliffe et al. 2005, Whatmore 2002). Second, it has required the development of a non- scalar language to grasp new urban topolo-gies involving multiple relations, flows and atmospheres that tie together actors, institutions, sites and processes in new translocal and distributed constellations of cities in the making (Latham and McCormack 2009).
particular sites of practice, brought into being via concrete relations, materials, knowledges and engagements. In consequence, the central proposition of assem-blage urbanism is to reimagine the city as a multiple object- space (Amin and Graham 1997, Latour and Hermant 1998, Farías 2009, on multiplicity see also Mol 2002). Urban studies here no longer deals with ‘the city’ as a bounded object, but rather with a multiplicity of changing, co- existing and mutually interfering urban assemblages. This is not an epistemological claim, in the sense that different actors have different views and understandings of the city as a singular object, but an ontological claim, which suggests that any city exists in multiple, overlapping ways.
In a sense, however, the redescription of the city as a multiplicity of assem-blages only sets the ontological ground for elaborating a new set of conceptualiza-tions. Hence, to fully realize its promise, assemblage urbanism still needs to provide a more ‘affirmative’ description of the urban; a description that focuses on the specific problems, empirical configurations and analytical challenges that the multiplicity inherent to cities poses to urban theory. In other words, we need to move from the question of how ANT changes urban studies (Farías and Bender 2009) to the question of how the situated study of urban life, publics and politics challenges ANT and assemblage thinking to move in new directions (Blok 2012, Farías 2011). As we have both argued, based on our respective empirical work, urban assemblages offer a powerful and generative ontological position that effectively leads to new problematizations of the urban and which in turn have necessitated the elaboration of new conceptual repertoires (Blok 2013, Farías 2014). Such is our starting point and collective ambition for the present volume.
In order to respond to this challenge, we start from the hypothesis that cities constitute privileged sites for studying the search for and composition of common worlds – or, in other words, what Bruno Latour (2004b), following Isabelle Stengers (2005a), calls ‘cosmopolitics’. A cosmopolitical approach to the city focuses on the multiple forces and assemblages that constitute urban common worlds, and on the conflicts and compromises that arise among different ways of composing their forms and limits. It brings into view how urban worlds are always in the process of being subtly transformed, destabilized, decentred, questioned, criticized or even destroyed. As such, it opens up novel questions as to the gradual and contested composition of urban life, thereby forcing us to pay more explicit attention to the politics of urban assemblages (Farías 2011).
how to explore and invent new concepts that allow us to grasp the problem of articulating and reassembling urban co- existence.
Accordingly, our exploration will join those of the after- or post-ANT research collective (Gad and Jensen 2010), which has helped expand and propose new conceptual repertoires as it has travelled and encountered new objects and fields of inquiry (for example, Callon 1998 on markets, Mol 2002 on medicine, Marres 2012 on politics, Latour 2004a on ecology, Hennion 2015 on culture). ANT does not provide a general theory of the social that could be applied to different cases and fields. It rather resembles an experimental concept- machine finely attuned to the specificity of the objects and cases it is exposed to (see Mol 2010). As editors and contributors to this volume, our collective experiment consists of exposing this concept- machine to the urban, to cities, giving it time and closely docu-menting the reactions. By doing this, it appears that we do not just recast cities as multiplicities differently enacted in various urban assemblages, but get also a glimpse of urban common worlds that are constantly articulated, sought for, composed and recomposed.
SETTING THE SCENE: AFTER THE ASSEMBLAGE URBANISM DEBATE
If we were to single out an event that operated as a point of origin for the theo-retical exploration leading to this volume, this was probably the extremely produc-tive debate about the analytical and critical potentials and limitations of so- called ‘assemblage urbanism’ that took place in 2011 in the pages of the journal CITY.1
The debate was initiated by Colin McFarlane’s (2011a) paradoxically provocative thesis (given its conciliatory character) that taking an assemblage perspective on the urban was not necessarily incompatible with more traditional critical urban studies, pointing even to synergies between assemblage and dialectical thinking as developed by Herbert Marcuse. This suggestion opened the way for an exten-sive response by Neil Brenner and colleagues (2011), who argued that an assem-blage perspective is fundamentally incompatible with critical urban theory, as it would be based on a naive realism, a positivist epistemology and an affirmative political position. A detailed response to these somewhat peculiar critiques has already been given (Farías 2011) and we do not need to repeat it here. Instead we would like to highlight two points that this debate made evident and that set the scene for our collective enterprise in this volume.
infrastructures as separated from the wider urban condition, it still recourses to neoliberal privatization processes as the underlying explanatory framework (Coutard and Guy 2007, Coutard 2008). The same analytical effect occurs with key contributions to urban political ecology which build on Haraway’s cyborgs and Latour’s hybrids in order to demonstrate that the urban cannot be separated from the biophysical, and that the city is a key place for the reconfiguration of socio- natures (Heynen et al. 2006). Here again, for all its analytical sophistication and experimentation, dynamics of capitalist accumulation and class politics still operate as the ultimate explanatory framework underlying more or less detailed analyses of urban socio- natural assemblages (Braun 2008, Holifield 2009). To give a third example, in their recent work on policy assemblages, Eugene McCann and kevin Ward emphasize the extent to which urban policies are made of hetero-geneous elements circulating in trans- local networks. McCann states explicitly that ‘[w]e tended toward Neo-Marxian political economy, but through our use of “assemblage” we also take seriously many poststructuralist insights’ (McCann 2011: 145).
In all of these cases, what we find is a genuine and indeed constitutive interest in analytically engaging with the politics of these various infrastructural, meta-bolic and policy assemblages, in terms of how they structure and impact the urban in unequal ways. However, in each case, the search for that politics leads analysts outside the city. Politics, it seems, cannot be grounded in the complicated articulations of urban assemblages as such, but must ultimately be located in the larger and even planetary dynamics of capitalism. Thus, paradoxically, in such approaches urbanity or cityness (Simone 2010) would not in itself pose a funda-mental political problematique, but one that only becomes political through the historical transformation of capitalism into a heavily spatialized, scalar and urban-ized process. On this point, our notion of urban cosmopolitics indeed marks a contrary position, in that it aims at exploring conceptual vocabularies to grasp the politics of urban assemblages in their own right.
Second, the debate on assemblage urbanism on the pages of CITY was not just one between descriptive and ontological uses of the notion of assemblage (although this was certainly also a key conceptual stake). Just as importantly, this debate addressed the performative and critical capacities of the urban assemblages concept. This is of course a central concern in urban studies. After all, this is one of the few fields that since the late 1960s has been shaped by the realization – entirely congenial, we note, to ANT and wider science and technology studies (STS) insights – that knowledge production is never a purely descriptive or analytical practice, but has performative effects, that is, the capacity to transform the objects and subjects it refers to. This has rendered the enterprise of inquiry and thinking cities and urbanization into a politico- critical enterprise.
groups and classes over the appropriation of urban resources and surplus value. In this context, the task of the critical scholar involves deciphering the hidden struc-tural dynamics of urbanization, unveiling the ideologies of the ruling class, and enlightening the deprived and dispossessed about the structural forces lurking behind their apparent concerns. This is perhaps where the strongest contrast to assemblage thinking emerges: in an ontology of urban assemblages, all of these concepts – of structural determination, dominant ideologies and well- defined hierarchies – are reworked within a relational understanding of spatial formations as effects that must be constantly defended, held together, maintained and repaired (Farías 2011). Hence, the critical enterprise morphs as well.
Working broadly in this direction, a second elaboration is provided by McFarlane, who points to the ‘disjunctures between the actual and the possible’ (2011a: 210) to ground the critical potential of assemblage thinking and its capacity to constitute a ‘political subjectivity oriented towards the actualization of ideals and the realisation of potential’ (ibid.: 205). Potentiality is indeed crucial in McFarlane’s critical rendering of assemblages, as it points to the excessive forces that overflow actual arrangements, thus opening up a space for imagining and practicing urban life differently. The critical potential of assemblages thus requires a commitment to making, to imagining and to assembling alternatives that might reshape the urban commons. Interestingly, in both renderings of urban studies as a critical enterprise, the politics of the urban is shaped primarily by what is not explicit, but by what is absent from an actual situation (the underlying, the possible); something that a critical researcher should be able to recognize and work towards its visibilization.
While sympathetic to McFarlane’s politics of the possible, as a starting point for the present volume we nonetheless consider that reimagining the city as a multiplicity of urban assemblages implies a somewhat different (cosmo-)political challenge. This challenge is shaped not by that which is absent, but rather by situ-ations of radical co- presence; situsitu-ations in which the actual is not given and stri-ated, but multiple and uncertain, and where what unfolds is a conflictual politics of actual urban things. In order to address and specify this politics of urban assem-blages, it seems crucial for us to trace and follow the redistribution of the political initiated by the after- and post-ANT research collective. To this effect, three closely related and complementary concepts need first to be introduced: object- centred politics, ontological politics and – as our provisional destination – cosmo-politics. It is time to ask: what is urban cosmopolitics, after all?
REDISTRIBUTING THE POLITICAL IN URBAN ASSEMBLAGES
Latour’s political thinking, Graham Harman (2014) dubs these two views Truth Politics and Power Politics, respectively. In place of these two (false) alternatives, however, Latour proposes a third conception of the political as turning around ‘questions, issues, stakes, things – in the sense of res publica, the public thing – whose surprising consequences leave those who would rather hear nothing about them all mixed up’ (Latour 2013: 352). This proposition, as we shall see, relies heavily on the work of American pragmatist philosophy, particularly that of John Dewey.
Before expanding on this, however, it is worth noting that this very triad – of Truth, Power and Thing Politics – already throws new light onto the debate around assemblage urbanism. It should be self- evident that the political position of crit-ical urban studies relies on a commitment to a form of Truth Politics based on certainties about the ultimate reality of the world. From this perspective, the interest of ANT in materials, objects and artefacts is often misread as guided only by the question of how objects make the social stable, durable or fixed, thus neglecting that ANT is equally (indeed primarily) concerned with the capacities of objects to destabilize and reorder our collectives. This neglect, in turn, easily leads to the false conclusion that assemblage urbanism would be a variant of Power Politics, geared towards affirming what exists and thus tacitly colluding with the powerful. Such a conclusion, we would argue, speaks however less about assemblage urbanism than about the inability of critical theorists to imagine an object- centred politics.
As just noted, and as Noortje Marres (2007) in particular has shown, the key tradition of political philosophy to take into account here is the pragmatist one resulting from Walter Lippmann’s (1922) powerful critique of the modern democratic ideal and John Dewey’s (1927) recasting of democratic publics as constituted by material disruptions of people’s habits and habitats. Modern demo-cratic politics, Lippmann noted, is sustained by the ideal of an omni- competent citizen, interested in all public affairs of his or her community and capable of distinguishing the common good from the private interest – an ideal already untenable in the global technological society of the 1920s. Lippmann clearly saw that public affairs had become largely unfamiliar, the problems highly complex, the causes not well known, and the existing institutions incapable of managing them. Building upon this analysis, Dewey suggested that the new political situ-ations of the time did not necessarily represent a threat for democracy, making it difficult for people to engage, but on the contrary could serve as a breeding bed enabling the formation and involvement of the public. After Dewey, democratic publics are not the expression of some pre- existing community, such as a nation or a city, but groups of strangers who share only one thing, being affected or concerned by the indirect consequences of others’ actions. Such consequences, and the problematic and controversial objects, things and issues in whose shape they materialize, thus enable public life.
(eg. Legg 2011), it is crucial to emphasize that the political capacities attributed to objects in assemblage thinking are fundamentally different from Foucault’s emphasis on how socio- material arrangements subtly discipline subjects and govern populations (Marres, 2012). The objects or issues of Latourian Dingpolitik are not subtly, but overtly political. They are our shared, common, public matters of concern, loaded with moral and political capacities (Latour 2005). As such, they are in fact not ‘objects’ in the standard sense: drawing on the Germanic etymology, the ‘things’ (Ding) of Latourian Dingpolitik are relational and contested socio- material gatherings. Accordingly, the politics of urban asseblages is grounded in the capacities of things to enter into new relationships that surprise and disrupt existing urban worlds. It is a politics shaped by controversies and events. Thus, instead of pointing to structurally determined conflicts and clashes between social groups, the kinds of struggles made visible are those that result from the irruption of ontological and epistemic uncertainties, whose resolution involves the invention of new political arrangements.
This brings us to the second key point: an object- centred politics in this sense involves also a politics of the real, an ontological politics. By taking ontology as that which define the conditions of possibility in which we live, Annemarie Mol (1999) observes that ontologies are multiple and that they do not precede but are instead shaped into being via socio- material and techno- scientific practices. Realities, on this view, are made and remade in practice. The notion of ontological politics accounts for this socio- material construction or enactment of specific realities and, most importantly, it stresses that these are political processes. Indeed, when thinking about institutions such as city governments or real-estate markets, it becomes apparent that different ways of enacting the city as an onto-logical entity within urban assemblages takes into account only certain sets of socio- material relationships, while disregarding others. Studying the ontological politics of urban assemblages thus involves looking at what is included and what is excluded from different enactments of the city, which entities and relationships are made present, and which are made absent. Hence the key political question for an ontological politics of urban assemblages is not first and foremost for whom these function, but rather how shared urban realities are made and remade in various contested practices. This is particularly relevant for the accounts we produce of urban assemblages and their exploratory openness to excluded forces, entities and relationships.
and groups and, second, the given nature of the Earth as a finite physical globe upon which humans reside. Consider kant’s ultimate justification for hospitality: human beings ‘cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must tolerate one another’s company. And no- one originally has any greater right than anyone else to occupy any particular portion of the earth’ (kant 1991: 106). kant’s cosmo-politanism involves thus less a politics of the cosmos, in the sense of an ontological politics, but is rather a proposal for a politics within a given cosmos. The particular cosmos present in cosmopolitanism does not designate what is at stake in political struggles, but the already settled globe within which all politics is imagined (see Latour 2004b).
Notably, while otherwise far removed from kantian idealism, a similarly apolitical cosmos can be seen to underlie the more recent neo-Marxist theory of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner 2013), where the notion of the planet as the ultimate physical scale within which processes of capitalist creative destruction unfold plays a crucial role. The world is imagined here as a ‘planet- encompassing zone of action, imagination, and potentiality that is dialectically coproduced with the urban’ (ibid.: 95, footnote 13). What this approach does, however, is to black box the very question – at the core of any contemporary cosmopolitics – of what ‘the planet’ is in the first place, and how it might be or become otherwise. From this point of view, then, planetary urbanization theory may be said to (dis)miss the way in which planetary processes and earthly forces, from tectonic movements to global warming (Clark 2011), are not just shaped by and shaping urbanization, but how they become political matters in different ways, that is, matters to contest, intervene and experiment with.
Here lies indeed the most radical challenge of cosmopolitics: to conceive of the cosmos, this shifting and provisional articulation of human and non- human cohabitation, as the always problematic, unknown, uncertain object around which all of politics, urban and otherwise, turn. This is precisely Stengers’ coinage of the term: ‘In cosmopolitics, cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple divergent worlds and to the articulation of which they could eventually be capable’ (2005a: 995). Or, as Latour (2004b: 454) summarizes a similar point: ‘The presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics to mean the give- and-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of politics in cosmo-politics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities that must be taken into account. Cosmos protects against the premature closure of politics, and politics against the premature closure of cosmos’.
(Latour 2004b) position that explores how a multiplicity of ontologies come to be constituted, co- exist or interfere with each other. It is important to stress that this ontological multiplicity does not just point to the different furniture of human worlds, but to different ways of ‘being human’, of assembling and enacting humanity. Of more direct importance for our volume, it refers to different ways of assembling and enacting urban worlds, of constituting and articulating cities as relational gatherings of human and non- human cohabitation.
Yet, for all of this, the fundamental break from kantian cosmopolitanism concerns the idea that politics would ultimately be a means to achieve a transcen-dental state, a perpetual peace or just an overarching consensus. Cosmopolitics in the sense of Latour and Stengers is antithetical to any idea of consensus politics, not the least because the parties involved are not just human and because their propositions are not chiefly linguistic, but affective, material and energetic matters of strength and attachment. It is certainly possible to believe Habermas that under specific conditions consensus can be reached by means of words, but as a general notion this remains much too restricted since our claims, our conflicts, indeed our (cosmo-)politics are not about language or interpretations, but about full- blown realities. As Latour (2004b: 455) puts it: ‘We perhaps never differ about opinions, but rather always about things – about what world we inhabit. And very probably, it never happens that adversaries come to agree on opinions: they begin, rather, to inhabit a different world’.
In sum, cosmopolitics as the search and articulation of a common world funda-mentally involves a process of destabilizing existing propositions of the cosmos and opening a space for the possible and the unknown. Composing a common world is not a matter of good will, tolerance or respect, as though it would be a clash of cultures within a unified cosmos. Cosmopolitics begins with the contesta-tion of a unified cosmos and the realizacontesta-tion that it is necessary to reshuffle and recompose the common world. Cosmopolitics involves thus a form of conflict between different ways of arranging and articulating entities and relationships, of composing the common world. It imagines indeed the most radical form of conflict to the extent that it does not take place under the vigilant eye of a final referee, the proverbial ‘external’ and ‘objective’ reality thought to define which ways of articulating the cosmos are right and wrong. Accordingly, it is a process through which an always transitory urban cosmos, open to disruptions and redefi-nitions, is constituted.
UNDERSTANDING URBAN COSMOPOLITICS: CO- PRESENCE, TOPOLOGY AND COMPLEXITY
links the question of cosmopolitics to what he calls the current climate war (Latour 2013) and, more generally, the politics of nature (2004a). Other authors have used the concept to think a variety of other issues, such as indigenous popular move-ments (de la Cadena 2010), environmental controversies (Blok 2010), design (Yaneva and zaera-Polo, forthcoming), smart cities (Tironi and Sanchez Criado, 2015), and so on. In each field, the cosmopolitical question needs to be attuned to the specific features of the case at stake. In this section we attempt to grasp what a specifically urban cosmopolitics entails.
To begin with, it seems necessary to distinguish this question from the generic argument on urban assemblages (Farías & Bender 2009). The latter was made to grasp the co- functioning of ontologically heterogeneous, topographically dispersed and temporally asynchronic entities. ‘The difficult part’, explains Deleuze, ‘is making all the elements of a non- homogeneous set converge, making them function together [. . .] The assemblage is co- functioning, it is a ‘sympathy’, symbiosis’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 51). From the perspective of co- functioning, of collectively enabled action, an assemblage perspective proposes to remain symmetrical towards the converging elements and whether these are human or non- human, past, present or future, close to each other or afar. The aim is to understand urban activities and processes, whatever happens with a city, as medi-ated by a particular urban assemblage. From this perspective, as we have pointed out repeatedly, the city can be conceived as a multiple object- space. However, the upshot of this is that, in cities, a fundamentally different type of cosmopolitical challenge becomes salient and urgent; a challenge, we suggest, that is not prima-rily about the co- functioning of heterogeneous entities, but about co- existence or, more especially, the co- presence of multiple assemblages.
In other words, an urban cosmopolitics should aim to grasp the problem of ‘cityness’. AbdouMaliq Simone has coined this term to precisely make sense of how discrepant urban activities ‘pile upon each other given their proximity’ (2010: 4). Taking the neighbourhood Oju-Elegba in Lagos as an example, Simone argues that ‘[e]ven when each [activity] turns a blind eye to the contradictions or discrepancies that are produced, these activities still find themselves ‘happening upon’ the other [. . .]. Every activity has to know something about the other and to find ways of acknowledging their mutual existence in order for them to take their space’ (2010: 5). Simone’s precise choice of images, of ‘piling up’ and ‘happening upon each other’, makes apparent that we are dealing here with quite different configurations from the ones that shape co- functioning and, to put it in classical ANT language, processes of enrolling, translating and mobilizing. Simone’s cityness does not describe the quality of an urban assemblage, but rather the consequence of their proximate multiplicity, their spatial co- mingling and mutual interferences.2
implications of how urbanity is variously enacted in multiple urban assemblages requires for us to take spatiality seriously. Here, whereas Massey’s concept of ‘sense of place’ (1994) pointed primarily to the practical experience of city dwellers, in terms of how place identities are shaped by the various trajectories that come together in it, her later notion of ‘throwntogetherness’ refers rather to the ‘event of place’ (2005: 149) as such. By this, Massey describes the coming together (the piling up, to use Simone’s felicitous image) of the previously unrelated; situ-ations in which people and things are put in the presence of each other and forced to confront, even if in a collateral way, the multiplicity of the urban. Thrown-togetherness thus designates a problematic situation that requires an opening and a redefinition of the world as we know it. It involves, as Massey stresses, a politics, one that captures well the challenge of urban cosmopolitics. Hence, whereas Massey (and ANT) is right in highlighting that urban sites are not bounded or simply local but rather produced in larger networks of relationships, stories and trajectories, they still pose the question of how to inter- articulate, compose and make co- exist, however precariously, the multiplicity of urban assemblages, entities, relationships, circulations, and sensations that make up the city.
Taking such ideas of spatiality into account allows to further specify the challenge for an ANT of urban politics, in that it will involve the tracing of topological formations that do not necessarily resemble a network. John Law and Annemarie Mol (2001), in particular, have pioneered the introduction of a topological approach to spatialities in ANT. In their view, the production of techno- scientific, medical or artistic objects cannot be studied without taking into account the production of the spaces in which these objects circulate. Thereby, they take a specific interest in topological formations that go beyond networks. Building upon his work with Annemarie Mol and vicky Singleton, Law (2002) describes what he calls fluid and fire topologies; formations that differ both from the network form and from what could be imagined as a place or an urban site in the sense of Simone or Massey.
More importantly for our purpose, however, Law and Mol (2001) maintain an interest, albeit critical, in what might be called bounded places, or what they themselves call a regional topology. Regions, in their language, give shape to a Euclidean version of space. Even as this is not their main focus, Law and Mol thereby propose to conceive of Euclidean geometry not as given, but as a specific topological enactment, working on similar principles as network, fluid and fire spaces. In this context, Law’s key suggestion is that network and regional topolo-gies co- constitute each other: Regions, he argues, are practically made in network spaces of knowing, measuring and mapping regions. At the same time, however, network objects only exist as such if they also exist in regional spaces, if they maintain ‘an unbroken Euclidean shape’ (Law 2002: 97). This topological inter- articulation of regions with networks and other topologies, we argue, precisely mirrors the challenge of urban cosmopolitics, the challenge of composing a multi-plicity of assemblages.
through a translocal network of actors and sites contributing to enacting a partic-ular version of the city, the study of urban cosmopolitics will often require us to (also) ‘stay put’ at the intersection between networks and regions, assemblages and sites, in order to observe how urban realities are assembled and disassembled, to grasp how sites mediate between multiple urban assemblages, to study co- existence in action. To stay put in the ‘site multiple’, as Lepawsky and colleagues (2014) have put it in their tracing of rubbish electronic flows, does not mean that we know for certain where we actually are in topological space or where exactly the bounda-ries of this site could be traced. The ‘site multiple’ is the moving ground of urban cosmopolitics, not a simple point of collision between conflicting social groups, but a matter of public concern in controversies on urban change and development, enabling mixings, entanglements, new forms of collateral articulation and previ-ously unforeseen conflicts.
We find similar topological questions and concerns in the emerging literature on worlding cities. According to Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, worlding practices delineate ‘an art of being global’ (Roy and Ong 2011), set within local and trans-national relations of urban expertise, planning and power in ways that clearly resonate with assemblage thinking (McCann, Roy and Ward 2013). At other times, this literature pays more attention to worlding practices ‘from below’ (Simone 2001), that is, an urbanism based on everyday, alternative, and even subversive circulations, connections, and inter- references among cities around the world. Focusing on how urban worlds are being composed and reimagined in urban situations, this involves experimental and even speculative transformations of urban milieus by changing material infrastructures, political possibilities, or aesthetic styles. Still, for all its potential, theorists have yet to articulate what the politics of worlding entail – thus providing further impetus, we believe, for exploring the cosmopolitical proposal.
In accordance with this basic sentiment, arguably, ANT scholars have been drawn mainly to the study of highly complicated objects and sites (in Latour’s sense): scientific laboratories, socio- technical systems, financial markets, legal courts, hospitals, and so on. In the case of cities, this fascination with the socio- technically complicated has led to new understandings of urban infrastructures and to the discovery of urban ‘oligoptica’ (Latour and Hermant 1998), that is, sites such as traffic control rooms and statistical offices in which urban socio- technical prac-tices and networks are drawn together, visualized and shaped. At the same time, however, this particular attention to socio- technical folds has also meant losing sight of some of the ‘obscurity’ of the social (krarup and Blok 2011) – including, we would argue, the complexity of cities (again, in Latour’s own sense).
In what is presumably her only writing about cities, Stengers (2000) makes precisely the case for understanding the urban as complex. Commenting on Latour, she stresses that the distinction between the complex and the complicated is not a matter of principle, but a device to think with, a contrast, not an opposi-tion, always related to empirical situations. Being a police officer exemplifies, to the extent that it requires following precise rules and conventions, as well as becoming highly skilled in the use of artefacts, objects and materials, a highly complicated task, not a complex one. But every police officer knows that in certain areas of the city, in certain situations, policing can become a complex and uncertain activity. The example is well chosen, since it allows her also to think about modern city- making as based on a wide- ranging and deliberate strategy of fighting complexity with complicatedness. Hence, Stengers proposes, if one was to ‘reinvent the city’, this would require a choice for complexity; a choice that would be ‘vulnerable to the accusation of “playing with fire”, of kindling [attiser] conflicts’ (2000: 8), but an eminently ethical- political choice that urbanists would need to dare. Stengers’ argument is helpful not just to understand the cosmopolitics of modernist urbanism as a war against complexity, but urban cosmopolitics more generally as a commitment to think the multiplicities haunting every urban site.
it is also characteristic of urban situations shaped by the co- presence of assem-blages and propositions, the ‘piling up of activities’ described by Simone and Massey.
Urban cosmopolitics begins then with an encounter of trajectories, with assem-blages that not only enter into actual relationships with each other, but define rather a virtual horizon of indeterminate possibilities and possible becomings. In this respect, it is telling that Latour first introduced his notion of ‘plasma’ to reim-agine the city as a socio- material continuum of potential associations (Latour and Hermant 1998), that is, the city as a space in which entities do not just act through specific assemblages but also make present their capacity to potentially be part of other assemblages. While enacted in multiple assemblages made of complicated associations between things, the city has at the same time the consistency of a plasma, of an unformed matter capable of assuming different forms; a virtual city, material, but potential. In a sense, it is this urban plasma, this urban complexity, that renders urban worlds open- ended, underdetermined and in need of constant work of coordination. It is with this plasma in mind that we should approach the progressive composition of common worlds; a cosmopolitical problem that becomes evident only once we have grasped the radicality of the city as a multiple object. Urban cosmopolitics, in short, is what happens at the interstices, in the conflictual clashes and tentative accommodations of multiple urban worlds.
URBAN COSMOPOLITICAL CONFIGURATIONS: AGENCEMENTS, ASSEMBLIES, ATMOSPHERES
At this point, it is important to stress that cosmopolitics is not simply a matter of conceptually specifying the problematique around which urban politics turns. Rather, and more importantly, it involves also a particular attention to the empir-ical processes through which actors search for and compose an always provisional and precarious common urban world. Accordingly, the sense in which the notion of urban cosmopolitics is used and deployed throughout this volume is not just about a certain urban state of affairs, but crucially about the processes through which a complex urban throwntogetherness or situation of cityness is problema-tized, articulated and shaped in particular ways. We are thus particularly inter-ested in the urban trajectories of cosmopolitical processes, how urban ‘thingly’ issues attain different forms and shape different kinds of politics.
heterogeneous constituents of common worlds. As such, Stengerian cosmopoli-tics is about the opening up of the real towards the unknown, about those situa-tions that put us ‘in the presence’ of shadows, ghosts, excluded entities – and which, via that presence, forces us to stop, to reorient, to ‘slow down’ the proc-esses of thinking and decision making (Stengers 2005a).
Stengers’ key philosophical strategy for thinking about the configurations required for cosmopolitical situations and responses to open up has involved intensive work on two conceptual figures: the idiot and the diplomat. Both are clearly fascinating. Lew Mischkin, Dostoyevsky’s idiot, is someone who simply does not understand the norms, the values, the humour of his society, who does not seem to belong to the common world. He reminds us that, in the Greek coinage of the concept, the idiot is precisely he who speaks an idiom, who does not master the language of the polis. Indeed, at least since ancient Greece, politics came to be defined as the opposite of idiotism, since no public dialogue, no collectively binding decisions and certainly no common world could be shaped with idiots. Dostoyevsky’s novel, however, provides an exception: here, the idiot finds inter-ested people with whom to talk and to speculate about the common world. The result is striking: the presence of the idiot in the collective produces a slowing down of thinking and decision making, an opening up for the unexpected, the abnormal, the ambiguous. Following in the steps of Deleuze, Stengers (2005a) asks whether these should not count as the highest (cosmo-)political virtues; whether the idiot is not precisely the figure with which to challenge unified defini-tions of the common world?
The second key figure in Stengers’ cosmopolitical thought is that of the diplomat. This is a figure which allows us to think about the difficulties, the ambi-guities and the paradoxes involved in every process of composing a common world. Here, in many ways, the diplomat stands instead of the traditional figure of the expert: whereas experts may be imagined as impartial, with no stakes in the issues under discussion, the figure of the diplomat makes clear from the very beginning that actors involved in cosmopolitics come from certain positions and represent specific constituencies. At the same time, however, the diplomat is a risky representative; someone who understands very well the positions of the other party, her enemies, with whom she might have even more things in common than with her own people. The diplomat always balances between striking a sensible compromise and committing what her constituency may view as treason. As such, the in- between role of the diplomat makes apparent the fragility and provisory character of the arrangements sustaining the common world. By defini-tion, diplomacy never ends; it is a form of war by other means. To Stengers, in short, the idiot and the diplomat are more than just fictional characters. Rather, they are figures that, in order for us to imagine them, necessitate a thinking about the socio- material conditions and ecologies of practices (Stengers 2005b) in which they exist and work. In the language of Suchman (2012), then, the figures necessitate a thinking about their wider configurations.
figures, and more on the trajectories of political issues – and hence, as noted, on a certain interpretation of pragmatist political philosophy. Whereas the idiot and the diplomat involve two virtuous modes of the (cosmo-)political, Latour has opted for providing a more general, and in some sense more overtly political, descrip-tion of the actual modalities involved in the shaping of contentious issues. This specification starts, as noted, from his overall notion of an object- centred politics, in which actors clash around conflicting articulations of and attachments to shared matters of concern. At times, Latour (2007b: 103) speaks here of ‘cosmograms’ to denote specific articulations of the relations entailed in a shared cosmos; and cosmopolitics, accordingly, as the ‘agonizing sorting out of conflicting cosmo-grams’ with a view to composing a provisional common world. Like pragmatist political philosophy in general (see Barnett and Bridge 2013), then, Latourian cosmopolitics cannot really be captured in the old distinction between consensus and conflict. Rather, it involves elements of both, as set within specific trajectories and modalities of political issues and encounters.
In a key article called Turning around politics, Latour (2007b) describes five such meanings and modalities of cosmopolitical encounter, labelling each in accordance with the intellectual tradition that first helped detect it. Political-1, in Latour’s language, corresponds to what in STS has often been discussed as sub- politics, that is, the often- times invisible, mute and subtle ways in which techno- scientific decisions shape our common world. Political-2 denotes the pragmatist definition of politics as involving processes of issue formation via the articulation of a concerned public. Invoking Carl Schmitt, political-3 appears when issues enter a regime of sovereignty and are subjected to the discretions and exceptions of state power. Political-4, in turn, involves the reopening of issues to deliberative fora, as theorized by Habermas (1984), in which speech and argumentation become critical for the composition of the common world. Finally, political-5 consists in the administrative governing of issues according to abstract rules and standards, reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s governmentality.
For Latour (2007b), crucially, cosmopolitics involves all of these modalities of the political, and is to be found in all of their socio- material configurations and assemblies. Whereas not everything is political, and certainly not in the same way, there is thus a sense in which, one way or the other, all things, all issues, all matters of shared concern, have their cosmopolitical moments and trajectories. Importantly though, cosmopolitics cannot be simply imagined as the sum of all these political modalities, just as their ordering cannot be taken for granted. What matters is rather the empirical trajectories of issues, and how these are taken over, transformed and translated by each stage and setting, how issues are differently articulated in different configurations.
tinker with their cosmopolitical proposals across various urban settings in order to discover what are in fact the relevant configurations. On the other hand, we also need some scenography, some staging, some sensitizing props in order to get these explorations going in the first place. For this purpose, we have decided to loosely organize our collective experimentation, and hence to invite authors to think and approach the problem of urban cosmopolitics, according to three key provisional conceptual configurations: agencements, assemblies and atmospheres.
The first of these configuration is what we describe as agencements, in the sense emphasized by Michel Callon (2005), who – when writing in English – keeps this French (and Deleuzian) notion, instead of assemblage, in order to reflect how assemblages create particular types of actions and actors, individual and collective. More strongly than assemblage, which points to combinations of human beings with material and technical devices, texts, rules and infrastructures, urban agencements highlight the resulting material- semiotic agencies and their effects in the city. As such, the term allows us to expand the usual sense and register of urban politics, in order to explore the situated and agential effects of, for instance, juridical instruments, urban modelling, economic calculations, meta-bolic flows or infrastructures, in shaping and reshaping wider urban relations of inequality, power, solidarity, justice and co- existence. Agencements, in short, is about thinking urban assemblages as the shaping and forging of agents of urbanity, exerting specific agential effects when engaging in wider cosmopolitical projects of reassembling common worlds. As such, the concept elicits particular forms and instances of organizing life together in the city, in ways that expand well beyond standard senses of where and how ‘politics’ is to be found.
The second configuration in which we propose to capture the unfolding of urban cosmopolitics is what we call assemblies, a term meant to highlight the contingent and situated processes by way of which new urban concerns, constitu-encies and publics come together across difference. As such, the term highlights that urban worlds indeed need to be composed and recomposed; multiple urban assemblages articulated in place; human and non- human entities represented in various ways, precisely because existing urban orderings are subject to criticism, disruptions and crisis. Researching such public disruptions and realignments involves inquiring into the constitution of urban political collectivities and assem-blies that cannot be reduced to structural oppositions between the powerful and the oppressed, the rich and the poor, the planner and the dweller, nor simply to dynamics of oppression, struggle and resistance. A cosmopolitical approach must recognize that multiple public and collective actors are involved in the de- stabilization and re- composition of urban common worlds. Cities and city streets are key spaces for the mobilization of publics in the plural; publics of different types and shapes, driven by different issues and concerns, and sustained by different technologies and atmospheres of assembly. In this way, research on urban cosmopolitics challenges more traditional understandings of the so- called ‘public sphere’ in cities.
highlighted in existing urban studies that pay attention to atmospheres in the phenomenological sense (e.g. Latham and McCormack 2009), places are not simply networked; instead, they involve certain distinguishable ways of assem-bling and articulating sets of entities, relations, experiences and sensations into shared spaces of co- existence. On the other hand, and as Latour (2007a) has himself keenly noted, recent contributions by Peter Sloterdijk (2004, 2011) helped to pave the way for a more encompassing ‘ecological’ discussion of atmospheres, in terms of how socio- material conditions of life- support and survival are held together, or indeed disastrously disrupted, in cities. Sloterdijk’s atmospheres are directly concerned with the limits of the common world, with the material condi-tions required to sustain life in cities, as this involves tracing boundaries and sepa-rations between those entities that can be brought together and those which need to be contained, kept outside human collectives. Engaging with the notion of atmospheres, in short, help push ANT and its associated politics of assemblages to take into account the conflictual composition of breathable and liveable urban worlds – at a time when such worlds have come under pressure from a range of ecological disruptions.
As should be clear, our three conceptual configurations – agencements, assem-blies, atmospheres – do not correspond, in any simply sense, to neither the Stengersian figures nor the Latourian modalities of cosmopolitics. Rather, as noted, they represent our provisional attempt at staging and translating the cosmopo-litical proposal vis-à- vis the settings and concerns of urban studies and realities. In doing so, we hope to have provided a productive springboard for the contribu-tions that follow. Across the individual chapters, the value of the three configura-tions lies not so much, we believe, in their explanatory or even heuristic capacities, but rather in the specific analytical effects elicited as authors engage their associ-ated concerns and questions. In other words, the chapters may be read as responding to the challenges posed by the configurations – even as they move beyond and co- articulate these into broader debates. As such, in short, the config-urations serve largely as anchoring devices, allowing for the empirical and the conceptual to be put into simultaneous play and variation across specific urban (cosmo-)political settings (cf. Jensen 2014).
NOTES
1 We are aware that the ‘productivity’ of this debate has been itself contested. Important figures in the field have expressed their concern that this debate only hardened the lines between assemblage and critical urbanism, intro-ducing a border, a gap and a policing, where there was before an open space for theoretical mixing and experimentation. For our part, we experienced and read this debate as a unique opportunity to learn about our differences, under-standing this exchange as part of a long academic friendship.
2 In Urban Assemblages (Farías & Bender 2009), we implied that assemblages are urban to the extent that they produce versions of the city, that they enact it in one way or another. Cityness is not enacted, it is ‘a virtual presence [. . .] in each and every major and mundane action undertaken to structure urban life’ (Simone 2010: 8). Cityness hence describes the ‘city’s capacity to provoke relations of all kinds [. . .] the capacity for its different people, spaces, activities, and things to interact in ways that exceed any attempt to regulate them’ (2010: 3).
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