Public Space as Emancipation: Meditations on Anarchism, Radical Democracy, Neoliberalism and Violence Simon Springer Department of Geography, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; [email protected] Abstract: In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world’s rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular. Keywords: anarchism, civil society, neoliberalism, public space, radical democracy, violence If we are to carry the lessons of the past with us, then, we must conceive and practice struggle not with democracy as an end in view, but democratically in its very unfolding (Todd May 2009:16–17). Introduction In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy and development, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Emancipation, understood here, means perpetual contestation of the alienating effects of contemporary neoliberalization. Central to this is imagining new forms of voluntary association and mutual aid, where pluralism may blossom, democratic engagement might be enhanced, and a liberatory zeitgeist may emerge. The emancipatory thrust inherent to democracy calls for a reclamation of its etymology and a critical re-reading of the diverse contexts and contents—social, cultural, local, national, and global—through which it finds its expression (Kothari 2005). I advocate radical democracy, Antipode Vol. 43 No. 2 2011 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 525–562 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00827.x C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 526 Antipode which contra aggregative and deliberative models, places politics on a path towards the co-constitutive promise of anarchism and non-violence. I argue for a conceptualization of public space that emphasizes an anti-hegemonic, anti-sovereign current, thus offering an opportunity to surmount the technocratic elitism that characterizes neoliberal approaches to development and problematizes civil societies. A move towards development and democracy “from below” is recognized as an affront to both “local” elites and “global” capital. Accordingly, I examine the contested, forever-protean process of radical democracy conceived as public space. Public space is understood as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the rich and poor are set, as well as the object of contestation. Within this realm, violence is acknowledged as both an outcome of attempts to impose an “ordered” view of public space originating “from above”, and often as an act of resistance “from below” by those seeking radical democratic spaces of “unscripted” interaction.1 This violence reveals an apparent paradox of democracy, because although premised on the non-violent mitigation of conflict, contemporary “democracies” are often anti-political and antagonistic, which provokes violent conflict’s possibility. Celebrations of “urban modernity” have resulted in a division between those cities seen as sites for the production of urban theory, and those projected as objects for “development”. This has provided fertile ground for problematic demarcations that divide cities into systems of hierarchy, where the West/First World/global North is imagined through a positive frame of dynamism and innovation, while the non-West/Third World/global South is portrayed negatively as stagnation and stasis. Binary thinking “remains much more a driving idea than a fact of geography” (Slater 2004:9), which suggests the need for a single urban discourse is overdue. Robinson (2006:1) encourages scholars not to ascribe prominence to certain cities or features of particular cities, and instead suggests that “an ordinary-city approach takes the world of cities as its starting point and attends to the diversity and complexity of all cities”. An ordinary cities approach is not meant as a universalization that denies distinctive elements by downplaying the diversity among cities. Rather, “in a world of ordinary cities, ways of being urban and ways of making new kinds of urban futures are diverse and are the product of the inventiveness of people in cities everywhere” (Robinson 2006:1). Given that binary categories continue to retain broad usage in urban theory, while nonetheless being called into question, Slater (2004:10) proposes that they be approached “as if there is a line running through them, canceling them out in their old form, but still allowing them to be read”. This partial erasure encourages scholars to continue to problematize their validity, while remaining open to the possibility of new categories that are more aware of asymmetrical relations, enabling of collective engagement, and take seriously the imbrications between C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 527 “inside” and “outside”. Thus, an ordinary cities approach forms a post- colonial framework for understanding cities, challenging urban theory’s tendency to privilege the experiences of the “West”. Although the ideals of public space and the ways citizens conceive democracy are uniquely shaped by contingent sociocultural histories, my purpose is not to apply a “First World”/“Third World” perspective. Instead, I want to question such dichotomies and bring a more relational approach, precisely because the processes of neoliberalization that are deleteriously affecting the very notion of the public are being challenged in a diverse range of contexts that encompass all areas of the globe. Urban scholars must recall that relational connections across space are established by and constitutive of ostensibly “local” cultures all over the world (Smith 2001). By employing radical notions of public space through an ordinary cities approach, we may improve our understandings of the relational geographies of neoliberalism, where each “local” contestation of public space can be read as a nodal point of interconnection in socially produced space (Massey 2005). Through this, Hart (2008:684) argues, we may “grasp the complex back- and-forth processes of contestation and acquiescence through which multiple, interconnected arenas in state and civil society have been remaking one another—and to the slippages, openings, contradictions, and possibilities for alliances” that exist across space. My purpose then is to acknowledge these relational geographies, wherein incidents like the struggles over water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2000 (Kohl 2006), and the “battle for Seattle” during the World Trade Organization meetings of 1999, must be considered not as isolated events in a “Third World” or “First World” milieu, but as moments tied to the broader assemblage of “global” contestations over “the right to the city” and alternative urban futures (Purcell 2008). An examination of the controversy of public space allows for an understanding of the ongoing struggle for a more radical democracy as fundamentally a clash between the machinations of global capitalism, and the attempts of the poor and marginalized to insert their voices into the development policies and practices that adversely affect their lives. This article is separated into two themes. The first establishes a framework for understanding democracy in non-violent and anarchistic terms by arguing for radical democracy conceived through agonistic public space. I begin by investigating the relationship between anarchism, democracy, and non-violent politics, and contend that a radicalization of democracy’s content and meaning through an insistence on agonism challenges the anti-political modes of aggregative and deliberative democracy, which are considered to legitimize neoliberal rationalities and license hierarchical power structures. I then examine how notions of civil society are presently inadequate in providing for “local” control over democracy, offering limited opportunity for a C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 528 Antipode development agenda to be set by those most directly impacted by it. As a re-imagining of civil societies by insisting on their spatialization, public space is argued to provide the opportunity for a more radical democracy to emerge. This potential is established in the following section, where I recognize the “space of appearance” as vital to democratic representation. Distinction is drawn between public space and the public sphere, the latter of which is comparable to civil society inasmuch as both lack physicality, an essential requirement for individuals to exert pressure in demanding answers to issues of public importance. I also confront the ongoing exclusions of public space, as marginalized groups often find themselves subjected to prohibitions of access, yet their struggles for presence reveal that the democratic potential of public space is never entirely lost. Building on this notion of perpetual struggle, in the second theme I examine public space as a domain of contestation. I begin by recognizing public space as the site where political actors, both rich and poor, and the stratagem of neoliberalized capital continually stake their claims. The inherently contested character of public space reveals that it is never free from the risk of disorder, an observation that places democracy in conflict with the need for “order” so that capital should flow smoothly. The following section examines the interface between public space, democracy, and violence. Public space, while having democratic potential, is often also paradoxically a space of violence. Violence that originates “from below” is frequently driven by a demand for equality, and is thus sometimes considered the only endeavor that can democratize a political system, while violence “from above” intends to preserve the status quo of the established order. Yet we know violence begets violence, and accordingly I examine whether democracy exists in a disquieting nexus or an irreconcilable schism with violence. In the conclusion I contend that when radical democracy is conceived in anarchistic terms and materialized through public space, it offers emancipatory potential from disciplinary neoliberal strictures. Democratic struggle grounded in public space offers a chance not only for those most oppressed by neoliberalism to demand social justice, but for the integral totality of human society to seek a new way forward through agonistic politics. My approach throughout is theoretical, a decision informed by three concerns. First, because Antipode is rich with accounts of contestation to neoliberalization in a wide variety of contexts (see Brand and Wissen 2005; Del Casino and Jocoy 2008; Grimson 2008; Kohl 2006; Mudu 2004), the empirical application of this argument should be relatively obvious to the journal’s readership and the intended audience of critical scholars more generally. Second, I have published an empirical application of this theoretical edifice elsewhere (see Springer 2009b), and want to explore the theoretical implications more thoroughly. C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 529 Finally, although protest movements necessarily occur in terrains that always exceed neoliberalism (Hart 2008; Leitner et al 2007), it is important to think through how a rising tide of contestation can be reinterpreted through a shared sense of betrayal with what can be broadly defined as “neoliberal policy goals”. In going beyond the “facts” of neoliberalization, I align my arguments to the growing recognition that transnational solidarity is inseparable from “local” movements, and must be built upon relational understandings of both resistance to, and the violences of neoliberalism (see Hart 2008; Seoane 2004; Sundberg 2007; Wainwright and Kim 2008). This article contributes to this discussion by arguing that the realization of a radical democratic ideal grounded in public space is of primary importance to the achievement of any emancipatory goal that seeks to transform neoliberalism’s violent geographies of exclusion, inequality, and poverty, but cautions that this process of transformation itself lamentably runs the risk of violence precisely because the political terrain has been so sharply narrowed by neoliberal anti-politics. Thus, while the focus is theory, the underlying concern is always with a view towards praxis. Towards Democracy as Public Space Radicalizing Democracy through Anarchism It is difficult to choose criteria by which one may categorize a political regime as “democratic”. Arat (1991) suggests that the meanings ascribed to democracy vary from “a way of life” to “a form of government”. Schmitter and Karl (1993:40) corroborate this notion, emphasizing that “the specific form democracy takes is contingent upon a country’s socioeconomic conditions as well as its entrenched state structures and policy practices”. But such understandings actually degrade our conceptualization of democracy. Accepting a “cultural relativist” position denies universal meaning to democracy and thereby contributes to indemnifying dictatorships that appropriate the word (Hewison, Rodan and Robison 1993). Orwell (1993:163) once stated: [i]t is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Democracy is thus sometimes said to have a crisis of meaning, used to justify everything from terror to compromise, and revolution to mediocrity. Making matters potentially more confusing, Diamond (1993:4) suggests that “democracy may approach the ‘equilibrium version’ of the process but is open to improvement or deterioration”, C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 530 Antipode while Young (2000:5) calls democracy “a matter of degree”. Dahl (1971) thus chose to eschew democracy altogether, employing the term “polyarchy” to acknowledge that democracy is never a complete project, but rather always in a process of becoming. Although Giddens’ (1999) “third way” treatise was published over 25 years later, in hindsight Dahl’s emphasis on proteanism can be seen as a preemptive strike on deliberative democracy and its atemporal declaration of the end of adversarial politics through an insistence on consensual politics. Dahl’s ideas nonetheless still fall under the umbrella of aggregative democracy, which uses processes like elections to solicit citizens’ preferences to determine policy directions. In contrast to both aggregative and deliberative models, radical democracy emphasizes “agonistic pluralism”, which acknowledges the role of hierarchical and oppressive power relations in society and allows for the ever-present possibility of difference and dissent. The aim of radical democracy is not to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere, but to defuse the potential of human hostilities by providing the possibility for antagonism to be transformed into “agonism” (Mouffe 2004). Agonism refers to the idea that conflict cannot and should not be eradicated in democratic societies. Nor should confrontation take the form of competition between elites or struggle between enemies (antagonism), rather contestation must be between adversaries (agonism). In its radicalized sense, democracy is understood not as a system of rule, but as a particular mode of power. The etymology of democracy (demos— the people; kratia—power) exposes how its institutionalization changes it into something entirely different, into “demoarchy”—a system of rule by multiplicity, and ostensibly by “the people”. The aggregative and deliberative approaches have negative consequences for democratic politics because they seek to eliminate agonism, which Mouffe (2006) appropriately recognizes as ineradicable in politics. Aggregative models strip the soul of democracy by transforming its basis as a mode of power into a system of procedural rule. We might accordingly re-label the oxymoron “representative democracy” as “electoral authoritarianism”, since voting encourages one to reduce opposing positions to hostile caricature that must be suppressed (Graeber 2009). Deliberative democracy in contrast is the “fulfillment of a tendency, inscribed at the very core of liberalism, which, because of its constitutive incapacity to think in truly political terms, must always resort to another type of discourse: economic, moral or juridical” (Mouffe 2004:124–125). Rather than opening political space for those at the margins (see Dryzek 2000), deliberative democracy contributes to an anti-political view of society that reinforces the hegemony of the existing economic order by forestalling our ability to articulate political alternatives. The belief that political questions are of a moral nature, and therefore susceptible to rational treatment, is paramount to deliberative C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 531 democracy. Here the objective of democratic society is reduced to creating rational consensus, and those who question this by maintaining that the political is a domain where one should always expect to find discord are accused of undermining the very possibility of democracy (Mouffe 2004:124).2 Contra deliberative democracy, a well-functioning democracy calls for a confrontation of democratic political positions. This means that democracy always runs the risk of violence, but paradoxically, this potential is actually mitigated by allowing conflict to play an integrative role. In its absence, there is an ever-present danger that “democratic confrontation will be replaced by a battle between non-negotiable moral values or essentialist forms of identifications” (Mouffe 2004:125). This makes any latency of violence much more manifest in “democratic” models that abandon agonism for antagonism, not only because of the hierarchies built into all versions of systematized rule, which institutional “democracies” advocate, but also because the “them” that contrasts the “us” cannot be viewed as respected political adversaries in non-agonistic models of democracy. The “them” can only be defined as moral, economic, and juridical enemies, or enemies of reason, making “them” a “savage them”, rather than legitimate adversaries. Therefore, despite the pronouncements of a “third way” and its benign appearance, only radical democracy can lead to a society rooted in non-violence, which aligns its content very closely to anarchism.3 Although anarchism is often portrayed as a symptom of mental illness rather than a valid political position, such sensationalism is a ploy by its detractors. Far from caricatural depictions of anarchism as the promotion of violence, it is instead the rejection of violence in all its forms. Violence is antithetical to anarchy precisely because all violence involves a form of domination, authority, or system of rule over other individuals. Violence is thus a disavowal of freedom, not its promotion. Through the renunciation of all forms of “archy” (systems of rule), radical democracy can be conceived as a basis for emancipation because it emphasizes non-violence and allows for dissent and difference. In contrast, overemphasizing consensus, coupled with aversion to confrontation “engenders apathy and disaffection with political participation” (Mouffe 2004:125). So while consensus is necessary for societies to function, it must always be accompanied by dissent, which means that democracy is a forever-protean process, where resistance to the integral logics of sovereignty, law, and capitalism becomes a politics of gesture—a permanent “means without end” (Agamben 2000). Mouffe (2004:130) maintains that in order to “establish the conditions for effective democratic self-governance, citizens need to go belong to a demos where they can exercise their rights of citizenship . . . [which] does not mean that political units must be identical with the nation- state”. I agree with the rejection of sovereign power, but I also want C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 532 Antipode to go beyond notions of citizenship by replacing them with the free associations, voluntary cooperation, and the mutual aid of anarchism. As Critchley (2004:231) recognizes: [t]he problem with much thinking about politics is that it is archic, it is obsessed with the moment of foundation, origination, declaration or institution that is linked to the act of government, of sovereignty, most of all decision that presupposes and initiates a sovereign political subject capable of self-government and the government of others. To Rancière (1999), this is the reduction of la politique to the order of la police, and is precisely why, as will become clear below, I develop a distinction between “unscripted”/democratic/anarchic and “ordered”/authoritarian/archic views of public space. Radical democracy should not be about governance, whether directed by the “self” as in governmentality or otherwise. There is no “self” to refer to in an anarchic democracy. Who are “the people” then? Levinas (1979:294) discusses the “anarchy essential to multiplicity”, a multiplicity that is itself essential to politics, where politics is the manifestation of the multiplicity that is the people, of the demos. This is similar to the multitude of Hardt and Negri (2004), where the people cannot be identified or policed in any territorializing sense. Rather, “the people” is comprised by what Rancière (1999) describes as that empty space which exceeds any social quantification, precisely because a democratic politics emerges through a presupposition of equality, meaning democracy is a resistance against the mechanisms of an order that distributes roles hierarchically. As Critchley (2004) contends, “the people are those who do not count, who have no right to govern whether through hereditary entitlement like aristocracy or by wealth and property ownership like bourgeoisie”. In short, the people represent a contradiction to sovereign order and juridical power, being conceived as precisely those who are excluded from civil rights, or what Agamben (1998) refers to as homo sacer. Radical democracy occurs when those who the sovereign deems to not count insist on being counted, not within the existing order, but within a new anti-order, an anarchy. Thus, the anti-political tradition (exemplified by neoliberalism) fears the people in its radical manifestation, not as das Volk shaped by the state, but as die Leute, the people in their bare life liberty and irreducible plurality. The convergence of homo sacer and the presupposition of equality turns existing power relations on their head and overcomes the dangers of “militant particularisms” (Harvey 1996). Identity politics can still function, but they become nonessential to politics as antagonism is transformed into agonism, where everyone is a legitimate and equal claimant through their preconceived equality. This is precisely the C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 533 heterogeneity that Barnett (2004a) misses when he homogenizes the work of Laclau and Mouffe (2001) in arguing that agonism spatializes politics because it relies on clear distinctions between “inside” and “outside” (see Thomassen 2005 for a critique of Barnett). If the contemporary zeitgeist embraces an all-encompassing consensus and therefore the elimination of agonism (Mouffe 2004), then the activity of governance continually risks pacification, order, the state, and what Rancière (1999:135) refers to as the “dark side of the idyll of consensus”. Faith in universal consensus is not only anti- political, it is also the exact mode that constitutes utopian thinking, as is exemplified by neoliberalism’s grand narratives of a harmonious “global village” and the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992). Far from anarchism being utopian, as is the standard critique, anarchy actually represents the very essence of politics, “the primary reality of strife in social life” (Mouffe 2000:113), embracing the openness that the forever protean nature of space–time demands.4 Politics as such is materialized via the public display of dissensus, a dissensus that disrupts the depoliticizing order built by government. As Critchley (2004:232) argues, “[i]f politics can be understood as the manifestation of the anarchic demos, then politics and democracy are two names for the same thing”, where democratization “consists in the manifestation of . . . demonstration as demos-stration”. Democracy then is “the politics of the street”, which necessitates a material grounding in public space (Ferrell 2001; Mitchell 2003b), aligning its content to the direct action of anarchist praxis. But to align democracy to direct action and a material public space is not to suggest a spatiality of limited means, which would reduce the demand for democracy to little more than a theoretical abstraction, unconnected to the complex histories and elaborate geographies that have unfolded to create democratic desire. Instead, when the word “democracy” is used in “the right place, at the right moment, it is fresh, clear, and true” (Lummis 1996:15), precisely because its spatio-temporality takes place in a political moment of globalized expropriation and violent injustice. Consequently, the spatialities of radical democracy conceived as public space are relational, stretching inwards and outwards across a “global sense of place” (Massey 1994).5 So while radical democracy is not about spatialization in the sense of territorialization as Barnett (2004a) argues, it is about the intercalated geographies of space in the sense Massey identifies, as it allows us to “envision new forms of solidarity based on recognized interdependence” (Mouffe 2004:131). The ethics of radical democracy cannot be conceptualized in moralistic terms as is the current (neo)liberal democratic treatment, nor can they be bounded in any sense that implies a sovereign. Radical democracy represents a disturbance of the anti-political order of sovereignty itself, and is thus, in a word, anarchy. C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 534 Antipode Beyond Civil Society? Civil society is often considered as a way to promote democratization through pressure “from below”, simultaneously representing a goal to strive for, a means to achieve it, and a framework for engagement over ends and means (Edwards 2004). Both conceptually and empirically, civil society possesses tremendous internal heterogeneity and is thus more appropriately considered in the plural, with a myriad of meanings imbricated in multiple scalar contexts (McIlwaine 2007). Despite a tendency to homogenize important lines of differentiation, the development literature is extensive in terms of both concrete examples of and different theoretical approaches to civil societies, especially in relation to democracy building.6 Some studies have identified a dialectic between civil societies and states (Glassman and Samatar 1997; Mercer 2002), making depictions that conceptualize civil societies as “outside” the state, encompassing the entire non-state (market-regulated, privately controlled, or voluntary organized) realm increasingly problematic. Civil societies are more appropriately conceived as a public sphere of interaction between state and market, a conduit for “captured polity”, being at once both mediated by and a mediator of the political and the economic. Nevertheless, only a concept of civil societies properly differentiated from the economy (and thus the bourgeois) can form the basis of a critical sociopolitical theory where the market has already or is in the process of developing its own autonomous logic. Otherwise, the undifferentiated version of civil society embedded in the slogan “society versus the state” would lose its critical potential (Cohen and Arato 1992). In other words, for civil societies to retain their dramatic oppositional role (particularly under authoritarianism and democratic transitions), a three-part model distinguishing civil society from both state and economy is required. Yet while such differentiation is a theoretical possibility, the pragmatism of praxis is not as forthcoming. In transitions from authoritarianism, the emergence of a civil society is often considered the turning point from fear to public action in the struggle for democracy. The reason for the emergence or persistence of authoritarian rule to begin with is because powerful elements of society, typically landowners, bankers, and industrialists accept or collaborate with it, and according to Diamond (1992), civil society turns these powerful actors against the state. This alludes to the notion that civil societies can and should replace the “most oppressed” class as the agent of historical change (Lummis 1996). The difference, however, is that unlike what a subjugated class might do, civil societies do not rise up against the state and seize its power for the people as in anarchism. Rather, by rising up a civil society empowers itself (much like a vanguard party would), so that landowners, bankers, and industrialists (the bourgeois) may marginalize and come to control the state. This brings us back to where we started: capital in control of C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 535 the state, orientated in an archic arrangement. This vicious circle is perhaps expected in light of the unremitting theoretical misconception that the state and capital are distinct spheres, rather than integral parts of the totality of capitalism (Yeung 1998). Anderson’s (1991) account of imagined communities lends credence to the conceptual fusion of capital and the state. In this view, the nation—and its subsequent expression as statehood—is founded upon the decidedly capitalist enterprise of colonialism. Although “local” expressions of capitalism were present prior to the colonial encounter, the historical experience of colonialism intensified capitalist relations in the colonies through the very processes of imagining communities. In other words, because civil societies are simultaneously enmeshed in processes of capitalist usurpation and notions of statehood, an interlocking of three thematic nuclei (Slater 1989), they may also be viewed as colonial transplants. Through colonial occupations we can discern a coalescence of this foreign character of civil societies around indigenous elites, who are at once both those groups to whom Habermas (1989) attributes the capacity to commandeer the state, and the class that assimilated and came to embody the logic of capital. Thus, indigenous elites represent the pivots for making the translation of civil societies across cultures. Yet, as Glassman’s (1999) conception of the internationalization of the state recognizes, distinctions between so-called “local” and “global” elites have become increasingly blurred under neoliberalism. What we are left with is a transnational capitalist class (Harvey 2005), and a thoroughly liberal, anti-political, and state-centric version of civil society where politics in this realm is reduced to economic competition among competing elites, both “internal” and “external”. Given the interface between capitalism, the state, and a civil society, the latter is not only easy prey for corporatism (Wiarda 2003); rather corporatism is somewhat constitutive of civil societies. This falls in line with the qualitative hollowing-out processes espoused by the neoliberal agenda where states become differently powerful as emphasis on markets take on primary importance (Peck 2001),7 but it does little to address inequality and certainly does not empower existing marginalized groups. On the other hand, neoliberal prescriptions and their resultant renewed commitment to authoritarianism in a wide variety of contexts may lead to a different fate for civil societies.8 For example, the technocracies of East Asia have spawned civil societies notable for their extent of state regulation, affording little opportunity for the development of a critical public realm as the state functions as gatekeeper to civil discourse (Jones et al 1995). Hughes (2003) describes this situation in the Cambodian context, where the predominant conception of civil society is nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which work closely with government, subjecting them to licensing and surveillance. Although NGOs are a commonplace C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 536 Antipode proxy for civil societies, acknowledging that “NGOization” conditions civil societies does not mean that they are equivalent concepts (Yacobi 2007). Nonetheless, Cambodian civil society suffers from being highly professionalized, legalistic, technocratic, and hierarchical, where the top often represents an international patron, tendentially linking it to neoliberalism. Such civil societies offer another variation of the “from above” perspective, where the agenda is set by government (making the designation “nongovernmental” oxymoronic), an international patron (bilateral donors), or the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). Thus, although many civil societies (ostensibly) embrace a democratic ethos, making them part of the struggle to found a democratic public space, often they not only fail to challenge the status quo of government, but in line with Harvey’s (2005) contention that NGOs can be “Trojan Horses”, civil societies may a fortiori work to reinforce neoliberal hegemony. Hadenius and Uggla (1996:1621) advocate a definition of civil society that “denotes a certain area of society which is dominated by interactions of a certain kind. The area in question is the public space between the state and the individual citizen”. Such spatialized notions of civil societies are becoming increasingly common (see Lewis 2002; McIlwaine 2007), an understanding I advocate not to circumvent the concept altogether, but to infuse it with some precision in bringing civil societies closer to the emancipatory potential they are frequently used to envisage. As Kothari (2005:155) argues, an emancipatory democracy will “work towards a truly radical and transformative orientation of the whole of civil society”. Thus, civil societies should ideally not seek to force the state to establish liberty; rather they should struggle to found democratic space on their own (Lummis 1996), independent of sovereign archy. It is in the making and taking of space and place that allows us to move toward a more radical model of democracy: If . . . place and self are mutually constitutive, then the means of creating the ideal self for sustaining the project of democracy have parallels in place-making. In constructing places we seek to have them match our projects and ideals, both individual and collective. In democracies such ideals include the desire to build places that promote social justice, tolerance, and inclusion and that offer public gathering spaces or places reflecting collective values about community . . . Viewed as a form of life and as a process, democracy involves in part the making, unmaking, and remaking of places (Entrikin 2002:107–108). Since democracy is meant to be inclusive, it is specifically those public spaces and places that are of primary importance. Thus, public space can be understood as the very practice of radical democracy, including agonism, which might rid civil societies of hierarchy, technocracy, international patrons, government appropriation, and co-optation by the C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 537 modern aristocracy. Only a conception of civil society rooted in public space is sufficient for a radical vision of democracy. This relationship between radical democracy and space is crucial, because democracy requires not only spaces where people can gather to discuss the issues of the day (Staeheli and Thompson 1997), but also places where ideas can be contested. A democratic society must value public space as a forum for all social groups, where there should be no structural deterrents prohibiting the ability of individuals to participate in public affairs. Public space as such is the site where collective performance, speech, and agonism must be entrenched (Goheen 1998), thus allowing it to become the primary medium through which identities are created and disputed (Ruddick 1996). The Space of Appearance The idea that public space is important for identity formation is well recognized in human geography (Lees 1994; Massey 1994). This creative process works both ways, as identity is important in forming the contours of public space.9 While public space allows individuals to join collaborative efforts and still maintain distinct voices, representation demands a physical space so that individuals and groups may make their needs known and show themselves as legitimate claimants to public considerations (Mitchell 2003b). Yet the right to representation is not always recognized, as is the case under authoritarianism, and accordingly public space can also refer to the extent of sociopolitical interaction available to a person. Arendt (1958) calls this the “space of appearance”, or the space needed for people to be seen. Action and speech require visibility because for democratic politics to occur, it is not enough for a group of private individuals to vote anonymously as in aggregative democracy. Instead, because belonging to any public requires at least minimal participation, individuals must physically come together and occupy a common space (Howell 1993). While visibility is central to public space, theatricality is also required because wherever people gather, the space of appearance is not just “there,” but is actively (re)produced through recurring performances (Valentine 1996). Theatricality recognizes that space is produced, an idea popularized by Lefebvre (1991), who draws a distinction between the administration of space and its materialization. In Lefebvre’s (1991) terms, public space that is controlled by government or other institutions, or whose use is regulated, is referred to as “representation of space”, whereas public space as it is actually used by social groups is called “representational space”. This distinction draws attention to the difference between the “official” status of a space, and the ability of various individuals and groups to use it (Arefi and Meyers 2003). The power to deem particular spaces “official” runs concomitant to the power to exclude certain groups C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 538 Antipode from such sites on the basis of this very ascription. When might we be certain that any particular space is “official” except when told so by those holding archic power? Yet Lefebvre’s dichotomy also hints at the underlying contestation of public space and its essential condition of agonism by acknowledging its social constructedness, or spatiality. Thus, representation not only demands space, but also creates it. A further benefit of Lefebvre’s theorization is the significance afforded to bodily representations, or lived experiences of space (McCann 1999). This addresses the fundamental difference between public space and the public sphere, which are often mistakenly conflated. The public sphere, which is analogous to civil society insofar as in its original Habermasian sense it is effectively silent on space (Howell 1993), can be defined as the abstract domain of social life, ideally separate from the coercion of state power, where public opinion is formed (Habermas 1989). In contrast, public space must be taken literally as a material space precisely because this dimension provides visibility to political action (Ferrell 2001; Mitchell 2003b). Even aggregative and deliberative democracies bear witness to protests launched “on the ground” in material spaces providing non-electoral feedback into “virtual public space” (ie the public sphere) when democracy is no longer radical. Although a demonstration’s goal may at times be to achieve greater visibility via the public sphere, the media cannot enable such visibility without a political claim first being enacted in public space. Absent this initial physical dimension, claims may be audible or textual to become discursive within the public sphere, but they still lack a space of appearance. Thus, because public space cannot be established in the abstract, newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet are part of the public sphere and not public space. One could further argue against the notion of abstract spaces as public space because they are often highly structured, dominated by corporate and/or government interests, and thus may enhance existing power structures (Calhoun 1998). The Internet in particular has been championed as a revolutionary tool with the potential to invigorate democracy (Crang 2000). Dean (2003) disregards such views, suggesting corporate control has made the Internet a “zero institution”, leading not to democracy, but to “communicative capitalism”. Yet the Internet and other media are still able to provide a network that allows social groups to disseminate information, organize, and mobilize (Castells 2000). The circulation of images, arguments, and ideas through various media, including individual actions carried out in private space, but gaining access to a wider public through the public sphere, can have important effects that may open or even close opportunities for political action. For example, although the public was rarely provided with unedited versions, the impact of Osama Bin Laden releasing videotaped messages has been enormous. Yet despite the power of C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 539 such communications to rally support and opposition through public broadcast, both Al-Qaeda and the United States’ “war on terror” recognized the importance of grounding their political objectives in physical space, hence the horrifying events of 11 September 2001, and the equally appalling invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. All groups, whether subaltern or dominant, cannot constitute themselves unless they produce a material space. As Mitchell (2003b:147) argues, “[a]ll the web communications in the world would not have nearly shut down the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization or destroyed the Genoa talks. But people in the streets did”. Nonetheless, Barnett (2004b:190) takes issue with a so-called “prevailing view” that presumes Habermas’s conceptualization of the public sphere must be grounded in real, material public spaces: The assumption is that Habermas’s original conceptualization of the public sphere depends on a metaphorical understanding of material spaces . . . However, the argument that Habermas’s public sphere is insufficiently material seems wrong-headed. The problem with The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is not that it ignores real spaces, but that it conceptually constructs locals of co-presence as the norm for judging the publicness of historically viable practices of social interaction. Furthermore, geographers’ determination to translate the public sphere into bounded public urban spaces of co-present social interaction . . . illustrates a long-standing underestimation of the significance of communications practices in critical human geography . . . any stark opposition between real material spaces and virtual media spaces does not hold up because it fails to register the extent to which various social movements deploy a range of dramaturgical strategies of protest that construct “real” spaces as stages through which to mobilize media attention and thereby project their presence through spatially extensive media networks. What Barnett is really describing is how social movements use material public space as a co-strategy to achieving further attention via the public sphere, as noted above. Barnett (2004b:191) continues by arguing that “the geography of the public sphere should not be narrowly defined in terms of selected spaces of co-present social interaction . . . [because] the idealization of “real” and “material” spaces closes down a full consideration of the geographical constitution of those strategic practices of needs interpretation and legitimate decision- making that establish the broader conditions of possibility for social interaction guided by norms of civility and respect”. In fact, what is being suggesting here is not novel, and it seems that Barnett is simply playing to semantics in wanting to label this non-material “feedback” of strategic practice as “public space”. Far from negating a thorough contemplation of the extended spatialities of strategic practice employed C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 540 Antipode by social movements, many geographers (see Goheen 1998; Howell 1993; Mitchell 2003b) simply assign this work to the public sphere, which contra Barnett’s claim, is still not tantamount to public space, a concept that is always material. In short, there is no assumption that Habermas’s conception of the public sphere demands a metaphorical understanding of material spaces. Rather, to many geographers the Habermasian public sphere is always a realm of immateriality and simply cannot be confused with material space. Moreover, while Barnett (2004b; see also Keith 1997) may view such promotion of the necessary physicality of public space as a fetish that romanticizes “the street” such critiques are misplaced, serving to undermine the potential radicalism of postmodern politics. As Call (2002:7–8) argues, Habermas “use[s] the terms and categories of the debate about postmodern politics to reinforce the rapidly eroding theoretical and epistemological foundations of the modern liberal state”, where he hopes to do this “by placing instrumental rationality—the ‘rationality’ of concentration camps and hydrogen bombs—within the context of a broader and more hopeful ‘communicative rationality’ which, Habermas asserts, can operate within a kind of cultural and political ‘public sphere’ to produce viable (and implicitly liberal) communities”. What is at stake here is that: Habermas rejects Marxism and the radical materialist perspective in favour of an amalgam of liberal rationalism, conservative sociological theory, and mainstream language philosophy, and he puts aside the revolutionary goal of earlier Frankfurt School thinkers like Marcuse in favour of social democratic accommodation with the “rational” realities of capitalism (Ryan 1989:27). Thus, invocations of Habermas as the alpha and omega of relevant political theory with regard to assessments of the public sphere (misunderstood by Barnett as public space) should be treated with a deep skepticism that recognizes this view’s contribution to reinforcing (neo)liberal rationalities. Ultimately, the Habermasian theory of immateriality cannot be accommodated within the politics of radical democracy, which is necessarily rooted in direct action and the materialism of public space. As Lefebvre (1991:416–417) argues, those ideas, values, or representations that fail to make their mark in space “lose all pith and become mere signs, resolve themselves into abstract descriptions, or mutate into fantasies”. The exclusion of some groups from democratic processes via their failures to attain recognition in public space underlines the critical importance of materiality. Although many scholars recognize the democratic character of public space (Barnett and Low 2004; Henaff and Strong 2001; Howell 1993), this idea is contested, as public space has paradoxically also long been a site of exploitation, oppression, and C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 541 prohibition for women (Bondi 1996; Massey 1994), ethnic minorities (McCann 1999; Ruddick 1996), gays and lesbians (Duncan 1996; Hubbard 2001), the elderly and young (O’Neil 2002; Valentine 1996), the homeless (Del Casino and Jocoy 2008; Mitchell and Staeheli 2006), and people with disabilities (Butler and Bowlby 1997; Freund 2001). Feminist scholars further contest the idea of public space because the public/private dichotomy relates problematically to social constructions of gender and sex (Bondi 1996). In contrast, Fraser (1990) contends that many feminists refer to public space as everything outside the domestic sphere and thus conflate three analytically distinct spheres: the state, the official economy of paid employment, and arenas of public discourse. Aside from their apparent malleability, notions of private and public are further complicated insofar as their meaning and usage are embedded within local specificities of time and place, differing across cultural context (Drummond 2000). This is not to advocate a position of cultural relativism, and we should reject any suggestion that participation, and hence public space, is a distinctive “cultural value”. A desire to participate in community affairs is intrinsic to the human animal as a social being, where recognizing specific contexts of public space requires understanding that any social organization is both the outcome of the “local” politics of the street and their relational geographies to the wider power geometries of “global” space. In negotiating the private/public dichotomy, Henaff and Strong (2001) look to the entrance criteria of a particular space. A space is deemed private when an individual or group is recognized as having the right to establish such criteria, where meaning is imbued through acknowledged “ownership”. A space is public by contrast, precisely because whereas there are admission criteria, the right to enforce those criteria is always in question. Public space is open to those meeting the criteria, but it is not controlled in the sense of being owned and is thus always a contestation over the legitimacy of inclusion and exclusion. Yet as Iveson (2003:215) argues, “exclusions should be interrogated with respect to the processes through which they are politically justified, thus enabling critical theorists to distinguish between different kinds of exclusion”. In particular, the liberal rhetoric of publicness actually reinscribes particular forms of subordination and exclusion as open and supposedly “equitable” access to the public by all individuals is conceived only insofar as they leave their particular subjectivities behind in the private sphere and out of the public realm (Iveson 2003). In the liberal formulation, gays and lesbians are for example deemed to possess the same access rights so long as they keep their sexuality private. This bracketing of status and identity effectively excludes what are some of the most important concerns, by suppressing, devaluing, and truncating the exploration of possible identities (Calhoun 1997), and reinforcing normative subjectivities as universal. Therefore, because C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 542 Antipode Habermas’s liberal impression makes a public look like the public, the public sphere should not be considered as a universally accessible public space; rather, it should be regarded as “the structured setting where cultural and ideological contest among a variety of publics takes place” (Eley 1992:306, my emphasis). Supporting this perspective, although still finding value in deliberative democracy, Young (1990) emphasizes that the primacy of a material and embodied conception of public space rests in its potential to be a site of political participation where diverse publics can interact, thus engendering a more radicalized version of democracy. Arguing against the idea of democracy as public space, Miles (2002:256) inadvertently lends his support when he asks, “when was public space ever a site of mass democracy, except when crowds . . . took matters into their own hands?” While public space may be exclusionary to certain social groups, whereby some groups may even struggle to gain access in ways that impede its usage by others, public space remains the most important site where public claims can be made visible and contested. If at times spaces may change in their role for accommodating different social groups (Atkinson 2003), surely contesting one’s exclusion and taking public space can potentially secure such accommodation and change. To demand inclusion in a space often means forcibly occupying the space of exclusion, reinforcing the idea that public space has never been guaranteed, and by its very definition must be contested. In this sense, an agonistic approach to the political becomes an essential condition for conceiving a more inclusive public space that accepts and celebrates difference (Watson 2006). The Contestation of Public Space Capitalist Machinations Radical democracy is a messy process with an inherent uncertainty reflecting the essential agonism of open public discussion concerning community principles, and the possibility of sudden changes, conflicts, and contradictions in collective goals. The spaces of democratic societies must always be in process, constructions to be maintained and repaired as the collective interest is defined and contested (Entrikin 2002). This processual nature of public space explains why it is and must be the subject of continuous contestation, spanning a fluid spectrum between debate, protest, agonism and at times, lamentably antagonism and violence. Accordingly, it is paramount to view public space as a medium allowing for the contestation of power, focusing on issues of “access” ranging from basic use to more complicated matters, including territoriality and symbolic ownership (Atkinson 2003). Public space is never a complete project, but is instead both C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 543 the product and site of conflict between the competing ideologies of “order” (authoritarianism/archy/representation of space) and “unscripted” interaction (democracy/anarchy/representational space) (Lefebvre 1991; Mitchell 2003b).10 These competing approaches do not result in dichotomous public spaces. Rather, emphasis must be placed on the processual and fluidic character of public space, where any recognizable “outcome” from either the ordered or the unscripted is necessarily temporary, that is, a means without end. Although claiming to advocate democratic public space, Carr et al (1992:xi) exemplify the ordered approach by suggesting public space is “the setting for activities that threaten communities, such as crime and protest”. The ability to protest is what makes public space democratic as it provides those without institutionalized power the opportunity to challenge the status quo. Crime, for its part, is most often conceived in terms of property rights, and accordingly the poor and propertyless are repeatedly cast as transgressors of public space. Hee and Ooi (2003) take a different approach to the ordered view, contending that the public spaces of colonial and post-colonial cities are constructions of the ruling elite. Certainly, colonial administrators and incumbent regimes enforce their representations of space, but this ignores the element of contestation and the possible emergence of representational space. Beijing’s Tiananmen Square offers a case in point, as the people took this controlled space, and, although recaptured by the state, it remains ideologically contested in the public sphere, continuing to fire the imagination of social movements in China and beyond (Lees 1994). Thus, the values embedded in public space are those with which the demos endows it (Goheen 1998), not simply the visualizations and administrations of reigning elites. States, corporations, and IFIs may challenge collectively endowed values and espouse the ordered view because they seek to shape public space in ways that limit the threat of democratic power to dominant socioeconomic interests (Harvey 2000). Although total control over public space is impossible, they do attempt to regulate it by keeping it relatively free of passion (Duncan 1996). To remove the passion from public space, corporate or state planners attempt to create spaces based on a desire for security more than interaction and for entertainment more than democratic politics (Goss 1996), a process Sorkin (1992) calls “the end of public space”. Under the ordered view of public space, premised on a need for surveillance and control over behavior, representations of space come to dominate representational spaces. The processes of increasing surveillance, commodification, and private usage are known in the literature as the “disneyfication” of space, where the urban future looms as a “sanitized, ersatz architecture devoid of geographic specificity” (Lees 1994:446). In this light, the struggle for democracy is inseparable from public space, as where things are said is at least as C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 544 Antipode important as what is said, when it is said, how it is said, and who is saying it. Thus, shielding oneself from political provocation is easily achieved when all the important public gathering places have become highly policed public space, or its corollary, private property (Mitchell 2003a). Relentlessly confronting the arrogation of public space is imperative, because the entrenched power of capital can only be repealed through agonism, whereby a multiplicity of subject positions may be recognized as legitimate claimants to the spaces of the public (Mouffe 2006). When the seemingly everyday, yet “disneyfied” performances of capitalism are ignored as normative values, unexceptional practices, and quotidian sequences they are lent the appearance of insignificance. This is the center of Lefebvre’s (1984:24) critique of everyday life, where such taken for granted succession helps to explain why neoliberalism is often understood as an inevitable, monolithic force. Such a view ignores how hegemony, understood in the sense advocated by Laclau and Mouffe (2001), is a discursively constructed strategy, reproduced through “everyday” practices that are often oppressive, yet frequently go unnoticed as such. This suggests that neoliberalism proceeds through a dialectic of coercion and co-optation, which has significant implications for public space. Most often public space is not the site of momentous clashes between archy and demos, but rather a site of mundanity and routinized conduct. Consequently, everyday life as it is mediated through the continual (re)production of space (Lefebvre 1991), is also the terrain in which power is reified, manipulated, and contested (Cohen and Taylor 1992). It is the everyday forms and uses of public space that inform those moments when extraordinary contestation becomes manifest. So while public protests may initially appear limited in scope, they are often expressions of latent dissatisfactions, which in the current moment, are related primarily to the strains of neoliberalism. The neoliberal assault on all things public is unabashed in the contemporary city (Brenner and Theodore 2002), where control of public space represents a central strategy (Smith and Low 2006). In a world of widespread aggregative-cum-deliberative (neo)liberal democracy, the contestation of public space, although filtered through cultural, religious, national, ethnic, and gender issues, has come to be predominantly about contesting the machinations of capitalism (Brand and Wissen 2005). So while opportunities for taking space steadily diminish as new forms of surveillance, revanchism, and control are implemented, in contrast to the death knell rung by Sorkin (1992), the disneyfication of public space is fiercely contested on a “global” scale, from Quebec City to Cancun and Seattle to Genoa. Occasionally the reclamation of public space is so fierce that it can bring down a government, as happened in Ecuador when protests against the ruling neoliberal order swept through the streets of Quito and Guayaquil in C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 545 2005. Such events undoubtedly contribute to the ongoing profiling of the “Third World” as a site of instability, and hence a threat to “First World” security. Yet far from being a reflection of conditions inherent to “non- Western” peoples, the underscoring of a thinking, reasoning “Western” subject is synchronous to a general avoidance of the devastating impacts of colonialism and the violence it visited and continues to inflict on “non- Western” peoples. This suggests that the entire notion of the “Third World” (and hence a “First World”) was called into being through an imperial gaze that was only able to make a “Third World” flesh insofar as it represents an object of colonial expansion. By analysing the contestation of public space through an ordinary cities approach we are able to move beyond essentialist accusations of “cultures of violence” as responsible for ongoing authoritarianism and conflict in the “global South” (Springer 2009a). Instead, any latent potential for violence should be read not only as a reflection of colonial legacies both past, and present in the form of intensive IFI conditionality and “peacekeeping” missions (Gregory 2004), but also as a discursive ruse invoked to invalidate the legitimacy of entire societies in public politics. Hence we have exclusive groupings like the United Nations Security Council within an institution that supposedly represents all nations as equal. Part of the problem with contemporary development is that rather than seeking similar patterns to diverse struggles that might offer a foundation for solidarity across space and between heterogeneous groups, the entire encounter is frequently seen through an Orientalist lens (Said 2003), framed not only as a process of “self ”-affirmation, but also as a denial of potentially beneficial associations with “others”. In Slater’s (2004:11) view, “[t]his sense of self-affirmation is often associated with a posited superiority which has permeated many discourses, from progress and civilization through to modernization and neoliberal development”. The categories of First World/Third World, West/non-West, global North/global South and so forth, can accordingly be seen as outcomes of the presumption that reason and reflection are qualities of the former in these pairings, while the latter is defined by its supposed lack of these attributes. There is almost no acknowledgement of what has been or might be gained by the “West”, which is insistently imagined as the bearer of progress, civilization, and modernity in contrast to the “non- West”, conceived as a passive or recalcitrant recipient. The recency of colonialism means that while the experiences of the “global North” have been protracted over several centuries, “development” and the contestation of public space that coincides with this “rationalizing” project have been much more acute in the “global South” (Escobar 2004). What this suggests is that contestation in the “Third World” is potentially more agonizing (in its double sense) as societies attempt to cope with the rapidity of this change, which opens the possibility that contestation in these sites may also be more transformative. C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 546 Antipode The importance of this potential and possibility in terms of anarchism’s promise to radicalize democracy is that the historical record demonstrates that actual revolutions tend to occur when the categories of “least alienated” and “most oppressed” vis-à-vis capitalism overlap (Graeber 2009). This hints at the importance of indigenous movements like the Zapatista, as they seem to synchronize these two categories. In building relational geographies that seek to understand the similar difficulties different groups face in various sites of neoliberalization, it appears that the “anti-globalization” movement in the “West” has as much, if not more to gain than the “non-West” from such solidarities. Given the positioning of indigenous groups in the hierarchy of global capitalism, it seems only fitting that they take a leading role in countering its hegemony, the paradox of which is that securing an urban “right to the city” through an agonistic, anarchic, and radical public space has a lot to learn from rural experiences. Nonetheless, as relational solidarities increasingly recognize space as a complex lattice of symbolism and power (Massey 2005), so too grows awareness that hegemony is never fully achieved. As the struggle for democracy emerges, the weapons of the weak will inevitably become more manifest once the visible battle for space begins to take shape, transforming covert hidden transcripts into overt protests, rallies, and other spatially defined arts of resistance (Scott 1990). Furthermore, whatever rights to public space have been won, people willing to break existing laws by exposing them to be oppressive in their geography, have often only achieved them through concerted struggle. In this sense, public space is always a dialectic between its beginning and its end (Mitchell 2003a). Disquieting Nexus or Irreconcilable Schism? The preceding interpretations highlight one central theme: public space is ideally a medium that allows for embodied self-representation.11 When public space is deprived, individuals cannot situate themselves existentially. Consequently, as contestation becomes impermissible, self-representation is disembodied. Public space is in constant flux between those who seek to deprive it, and those seeking to expand it, and where the ordered view comes to dominate, the resulting deprivation has two consequences: 1) the erosion of individual volition resulting in acquiescence, presumably the desired effect by those seeking to undermine public space; or 2) violent outbursts against those who suppress public space, and the undesired effect of the ordered view. Through the privation of public space an individual “acquires an eerie sense of unreality, as happens in a mass society and under tyranny when isolated individuals, thrown back on themselves, live a ‘shadowy’ existence and search for reality in intense private sensations or acts of C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 547 violence” (Parekh 1981:95). To the extent that Arendt (1958) viewed the public and private realms as related to each other, she argued: it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis. Under no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society . . . In all cases, it is the freedom (and in some instances so-called freedom) of society which requires and justifies the restraint of political authority. Freedom is located in the realm of the social, and force or violence becomes the monopoly of government. What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over slaves—and to become free. Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of the world. In other words, in the search for reality (ie political meaning in the world), the expression of violence becomes the only practicable form of public self-representation available. Meaning, in Arendt’s (1958) view, one must engage in violence to enter the public and to be free, and in this sense violence can be a liberating process for those who participate. Outbursts of violence can be conceived as violence “from below”, frequently referred to as political violence, which serves to counteract violence “from above”, often called state violence. Since both the dominant and subordinate pole can engage in violence, and both sides may be politically motivated, each source is appropriately considered political violence. Likewise, the internationalized and internationalizing character of the contemporary state (Glassman 1999) alerts us to the ambiguity of contemporary expressions of state violence, rendering this term equally problematic. Violence from above refers to the methods, including both acute and structural violence, used by the established social-political-economic order to safeguard its privileges. An acute example is the deployment of military force against potential challengers to the existing order’s sovereignty, while a structural example is the prevailing hierarchical political-economic system itself. In contrast, violence from below refers to the anger and resentment felt by the general population towards the structures of the existing political economy. Although violence occurs in public and private spaces, may be categorized in myriad ways reflecting the pursuit and exercise of power, and the above/below dualism cannot capture all conceivable expressions or intents of violence, it nonetheless heuristically points to where violence is impelled within the existing local-cum-global C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 548 Antipode socioeconomic hierarchy. It also hints at the underlying values being promoted or defended in relation to the furtherance or hindrance of democracy. For outbursts of violence from below to have meaning to both the deprived and the deprivers, they must necessarily occur in public, and are thus reassertions of the perpetual contestation of public space. It is often through means or threat of violence that excluded groups have gained access to public space (McCann 1999). This is the paradox of democracy, because without confrontation manifested through an agonistic public space, there cannot be a democratic polity (Mouffe 2000). Yet, any society that sanctions political conflict runs the risk of it becoming too intense, producing discordance that may jeopardize civil peace. Keane (2004) argues that violence is anathema to the spirit and substance of democracy, a position I advance in conceptualizing democracy in anarchic terms. On the one hand, democracy and anarchism are predicated upon the idea of non-violent confrontation, that is agonism rather than antagonism. On the other hand, many so- called “democracies” are born in the violence of revolution (Rapoport and Weinberg 2001), while anarchy is frequently sensationalized as violence incarnate. The problem with violence as a means for either democracy or anarchism is precisely the recognition that public space is a means without end, and thus any achievement made on the back of violence will only see that violence replicate. Since anarchism and democracy are recognized here as the negation of violence, any use of violence necessarily marks their erasure. Nonetheless, violent revolution hints at the seemingly emancipatory potential of violence, as violence from below may generate reallocations of wealth and open paths to political empowerment (Iadicola and Shupe 2003). While this view acknowledges how subordinate groups at times use violence in their attempts at democratization, any “liberationist” use of violence is self-defeating. Violence is an act of domination, and its use aligns an emancipatory agenda to the nomos of the oppressor. In other words, violence is an archic force that defiles the ethos of anarchism and democracy. Moreover, I do not want to imply spontaneity to any such attempts at redistributive violence, as invocations of violence are never performed as sudden inclinations without predetermination or external impulse. Massey’s (2005) relational understanding of space forces us to recognize that any seemingly particular “acts” of violence are always snapshots of existing political, economic, and social relations. Thus, expressions of violence actually represent interlinking nodes along a continuum (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004) whose relational geographies represent a complex interlacing of local-meets- global, sociocultural, and political economic practices (Springer 2008), which tendentially links such manifestations to neoliberalism in the contemporary zeitgeist. C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 549 Although violence is antithetical to democracy and anarchism, what constitutes violence is often defined from above, thus enabling the mistaken idea that some violence is impulsive and irrational. That is, violence is frequently defined as legitimate or illegitimate depending on whether it furthers or threatens the social order of a society. Violence from above is often labeled as “defensive” or “peacekeeping”, allowing archic elites greater ability to commit violence, and the violence they commit more likely to be defined as legitimate (Escobar 2004). Consequently, the exclusion of what is labeled as “violence” from below in public space is frequently not actually violence at all. Instead, this represents a moralistic attempt to remove “the political” and so exclude “disobedient” adversaries, or those a priori defined as illegitimate and thus threatening to the existing order (Mitchell 1996). It is important to recognize that what (neo)liberals call an “adversary” is actually a “competitor”. Liberalism, as Mouffe (2004:126–127) explains, “envisions the field of politics as a neutral terrain in which different groups compete for power; that is, their objective is to dislodge others to occupy their place, without challenging the dominant hegemony and attempting to transform the existing relations of power”. Politics is thus reduced to little more than competition among elites. Such ideas speak not only to the fundamental flaw of deliberative democracy (Mouffe 2000) and the failure of civil society, but also to the deceptive anti- political discourse authority invokes in demonizing anarchism. Moreover, because the existing order increasingly means the economic order, there is an intensifying corporate imprint on the monopoly on violence (Atkinson 2003). In the contemporary context of global capital flows, the corollary of the corporatization of violence is neoliberalism. Thus, the very understanding of “publicness” as something inherently good is increasingly threatened everywhere neoliberalism spreads its wings. The biggest threat to public space comes not from “disorderly” homeless and poor as (neo)liberal discourse suggests, but from the ongoing erosion of the principle of the collective, and the use of corporate control as a apparent solution to social problems (Mitchell 2003b). Amid widespread privatization, cuts to public expenditure, and reduced social transfer programs, violence has become both a conduit of societal bigotry and an attempt by beleaguered states to regain their footing (Goldberg 2009). Violence from above comes attendant to both “roll-back” neoliberalism, where regulatory transformation sees the state narrowly concerned with expanding markets to the peril of social provisions, and “roll-out” neoliberalism which concentrates on disciplining and containment of those marginalized by earlier stages of neoliberalization (Peck and Tickell 2002). While neoliberal proponents suggest that absolute poverty levels have declined since the early 1980s (Dollar and Kraay 2002), the C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 550 Antipode reliability of such statistics has come under fire (Wade 2003). Poverty reduction statistics do not recognize spatial and temporal variations in inflation or purchasing power, and if China is excluded, the 1990s actually show an increase in global poverty (UNDP 2002). Nevertheless, violence explodes most frequently in a sociopolitical atmosphere where programs of regulatory change have been implemented, particularly when the social, economic, or political position of the subordinate group has been improved (Bill 1973). Thus, even if we accept the validity of IFI statistics, the potential for violence is not abated, as neoliberalism ignores the “paradox of prosperity” in assuming that absolute rather than relative affluence is the key to contentment (Rapley 2004). Socioeconomic inequality is on the rise (UNDP 2002), and has been so marked under neoliberalism that Harvey (2005) contends it is structural to the entire project. Accordingly, as egalitarian dreams are continually broken under neoliberalism, violence is an inevitable outcome (Springer 2008). It is not poverty that provides an impetus for violence, a problematic notion not least because poverty is violence (Galtung 1996). Rather, it is relative inequality and its associated humiliations that often spark violence from below, which may proliferate where its use opens avenues to political and economic power (Tilly 2003). Attempts to achieve the ordered view of public space through prohibition of assembly may reduce the frequency of protests in the short-term. Likewise, deliberative democracy’s rejection of agonism in favour of a consensual vision of anti-politics may produce an immediate reduction in confrontation. However, on an extended timeline such practices function to alienate the population, suppress differences provoking more exclusions, increase the likelihood of clashes between police and activists, and ultimately induce an antagonistic politics that is more likely to result in violence (Mouffe 2000). This is why any distortion in access to public space can be so ominous, leading people to feel powerless and frustrated. Violence has a self-replicating character, which counteracts the goal of realizing a non-violent society. So while violence can appear to be an act of liberation that serves to include the excluded, even under the best circumstances, violence is morally ambiguous (Keane 2004). The brutality of violence desecrates not only those directly affected; it also tears the social fabric by subverting the level of trust, interconnectedness, and the very publicness necessary for societies to function. Public space ideally allows for embodiment of the self, but the publicity of violence “brings one to experience one’s own embodiment in a totalizing way that language fails. Violence turns a speaking body dumb” (Bar On 2002:14). Conceptualizing democracy as processual is fitting in this light, as there is always the threat (either latent or manifest) that public violence will ultimately tear it apart. To break this cycle, Mitchell (1996) argues C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 551 that a democracy must recognize the right to protest, which he suggests is paradoxically often only ever achieved through violence. Yet this rendering makes little sense when violence is considered antithetical to democracy. Despite the liberatory potential of violence recognized by Arendt in her earlier work (indicated above), her stance shifted when she wrote On Violence during the height of the Vietnam War. Arendt (1970:52) adopted a more pacifist position, as she was unable to reconcile justifications for violence with actual legitimacy: Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on appeals to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. Scholars like Barnett (2009), Keane (2004) and Young (2006) have picked up on Arendt’s distinction in advancing their own understandings of when violence might be justified by democracies. These are important critiques in going beyond the notion that explanation of violence is tantamount to its legitimation. However, when the idea of revolution is reconceived as permanent resistance, a means without end, it becomes clear that any and all forms of violence lack both legitimacy and justification. Thus, an anarchic model of radical democracy, where agonism replaces antagonism, is precisely the realization of non-violent politics. A means without end view, in conjunction with a relational understanding of geographies, answers Barnett’s (2009) concern for the “ontologization of violence”, and the shared insistence of Keane (2004) and Tilly (2003) that violence must be understood in acute terms. Disregarding the profusion of literature that points to the importance of understanding a continuum between the structural, aesthetic, symbolic, and epistemic conditions of violence and its direct expression as physical force (see Cockburn 2004; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004; Turpin and Kurtz 1996), Barnett (forthcoming) suggests such an integral view does not “address the difficult question of whether it is ever possible not only to recognize violence in human affairs, but to justify the use of violence for political ends”. Contra Barnett’s impoverished conceptualization of the geographies of violence, one that privileges the compartmentalized view of isolated, yet “meaningful” places within an immaterial, “meaningless” space that Massey (2005) rebukes, the confounding effects of violence ensure that it is a phenomena shot through with a certain perceptual blindness. Benjamin (1986) exposed the unremitting tendency to obscure violence in its institutionalized forms, and because of this opacity, the enduring inclination to exclusively regard violence as something we can see through its direct effects. Yet the structural violence resulting from our political and economic systems (Galtung 1996; Iadicola and Shupe 2003), and C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 552 Antipode the symbolic violence born of our discourses (Bourdieu 2001), are something like the dark matter of physics: “invisible, but [they have] to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what might otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective [or direct] violence” (Zizek 2008:2). It is surprising then that Barnett insists his position enables violence to be understood as rational, and thus able to better answer questions of legitimacy, justification, and responsibility. In its instrumental and strategic capacity, violence is undoubtedly a rational phenomenon (Arendt 1970; Foucault 1996), but insisting on an acute understanding of violence does not bring us closer to recognizing violence in human affairs; it actually pushes us farther away by treating violence as an “act”, an occurrence without a history or a geography, decontextualized from the complex social processes that have informed its expression. Conclusion When a society lacks a dynamic public space that allows for agonistic confrontation among diverse political identities, a more nefarious space may open, where alienation fosters alternative identifications along antagonistic divides like nationalism, religion, and ethnicity (Mouffe 2004). This is the “dark side of democracy”, where demos becomes confused with ethnos, and is responsible for some of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and genocide in human history (Mann 2005). Yet the most extreme human mortality has occurred under authoritarian regimes, not democratic ones (Keane 2004). When democracy is radicalized, such comparison of regime types becomes irrelevant, as the desired change is not for a new regime, but an end to systematized rule and the complete renunciation of archy in all its forms. Radical democracy accordingly has the potential to repeal the violence that archies engender by dispersing power more evenly across the entire social body. This occurs when “politics” conceived as an ends oriented project of consensus and/or utopianism is replaced with the perpetual means of democratic process through “the political” and its acknowledgment of agonism. Powerful elites, both authoritarian and those claiming to be “democratic”, will fervently try to impede any move towards a radical vision of democracy. Radical democracy diminishes their institutionalized, hegemonic, and archic grip, reorienting power from hierarchical constructions founded on moral, juridical, and economic frameworks, towards the fluidic voluntary associations and anti-hegemony of anarchism, which recognizes the legitimacy of all political adversaries, and not simply other (capitalist) competitors who wish to play within a system that favours entrenched elites. Radical democracy demystifies democracy by acknowledging that its achievement is not attained through processes of “development” that C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 553 bring about supposedly necessary economic “prerequisites”. Radical democracy does not look to cultural relativism in suggesting that it is an exclusive outcome of “Western” experience or a transplanted practice to be habituated in the “Third World”. Instead, radical democracy proceeds though an ordinary cities approach, where it is recognized as a latent energy found in all cities, a vitality waiting to be set in motion though struggle and the contested politics of the street. Framed within agonistic public space, radical democracy is the very process of exertion, where a path towards social justice might be opened in place of utopia, as this is a passage without destination, a permanent means without end. If violence is recognized as more likely under archy (whether hierarchy, oligarchy, patriarchy or otherwise), then radical democracy founded on anarchism offers a lasting preventive measure against such violence. Freedom from violence is something the institutionalization of power and its closed systems of bounded territories and sovereign protections has always promised, but only the openness of anarchism can potentially achieve through emphasizing continuous contestation, rejecting enclosure in all its forms, and insisting on the protean horizons of space-to-come. As the contemporary zeitgeist of neoliberalization continues to exacerbate the concentration of wealth, reshape political sovereignty, and reorganize economies along increasingly exclusionary lines, the need to establish democratic public spaces is intensified. There is a clear need for a vision of public space that extends beyond the market to communicate alternatives to neoliberal hegemony and its anti-political version of politics that privileges moralistic, econometric, and juridical applications of power. Recognition of neoliberalism’s geographies of poverty, inequality, and violence as intertwined across a multiplicity of sites (Hart 2008; Springer 2008) impels us to view its geographies of protest, resistance, and contestation in the same light. It may be the case that effective transnational solidarity can only be built upon an emancipatory agenda lodged in such a relational understanding of space. Although informed by contextually specific meanings of inclusion and liberation, the struggles that occur in the public spaces of diverse cities across the globe can also be recognized as expressions of profound betrayal with similar “actually existing” circumstances of neoliberalization (Brenner and Theodore 2002). The challenge, to paraphrase Hart (2008), is in coming to grips with how such contestation to neoliberal practices operates on terrains that always exceed neoliberalism, yet nonetheless still extend beyond “local” grievances. Public space offers a spatial medium to the frustrations subalterns feel with regard to systems of archy, neoliberal or otherwise. It allows them to locate their anger in a material sense, thereby opening public space to new visualizations, which may initiate new organizations rooted in the idea of system and management without rule, and co-operation and C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 554 Antipode contestation without repression. If those “from below” perceive those “from above” as unwilling to listen, evidenced through a denial of public space and a refusal to recognize them as legitimate political adversaries, then tensions will mount and may erupt into violence. Contestation of public space is paramount because while elite challenges may be fierce, they are never insurmountable. Dahl’s (1971:15) axiom that, “[t]he likelihood that a government will tolerate an opposition increases as the expected costs of suppression increase”, illustrates that violence from below may not always be necessary to overcome an oppressor, as the threat of civil disobedience may be enough to impel respect for the necessity of agonism. Employing non-violent principles ensures that the reciprocity of reinforcement engendered by violence does not come to characterize the emancipatory process, thereby turning agonism into antagonism. Nonetheless, pressure for democratization still demands ongoing physical presence in public space if dissidents are ever to be seen and heard, which always risks potential for violence (Mitchell 1996). The predominance of neoliberalism means that the ordered vision of public space has become the primary model available to ordinary cities insofar as it represents the interests of capital. What this implies is that the answer to a continuing proclivity for authoritarianism in the “Third Word” is not to be found in culture, but in the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal reforms and the resultant unequal political- economic arrangements of neoliberalization (Canterbury 2005; Springer 2009a). The corollary is that neoliberalization may also help to explain the increasingly authoritarian tendencies found in other settings with an ostensibly longstanding “democratic” tradition (Giroux 2004). Yet in spite of such adverse conditions, through the struggle for social justice and the radicalization of democracy via anarchism, even a people that has been oppressed or mystified into believing that the power of government is a monarchial attribute, a divine punishment, a colonial inheritance, a market commodity, an IFI provision, or something that grows from the barrel of a gun, may still make the discovery that the real source of power is themselves (Lummis 1996). It is in spaces of the public that the discovery of both power and demos is made, and it is in the contestation of public space that democracy lives. Emancipation must accordingly be understood as an awakening, a (re)discovery of power that is deeply rooted in processes of mobilization and transformation, and in this sense, emancipation cannot be conceived as a subject– object relationship in which some are emancipators (revolutionaries, mavericks, academics) and others are being emancipated (the poor, the propertyless, the marginalized) (Kothari 2005). Either the whole of humanity is liberated, or no one is. This may seem an impossible goal to achieve, but thinking so misinterprets what is at stake. It is not a utopian end state resulting from revolution or consensual deliberation C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. Public Space as Emancipation 555 that should be pursued. Instead, through a relational, processual, and forever-protean understanding of space, the aspiration becomes radical democracy viewed as an agonistic means without end. Such is the promise of public space. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Barry Riddell, Peter Goheen, Anne Godlewska, Audrey Kobayashi, Philippe Le Billon, Jamie Peck, Jim Glassman, Sarah de Leeuw, Catherine Nolin, Noel Castree and the anonymous referees. The usual disclaimers apply. Endnotes 1 The categories “from above” and “from below” signify that modern political power has been appropriated from the direct control of the people through systematized rule (hierarchy, patriarchy etc) that strips the majority of their basic freedom. “From above” speaks to rationalities, strategies, technologies, and techniques of power originating from the minority entrenched in position of authority through social, economic, and political “archies”. “From below” represents applications of power originating from locations within the prevailing system where social, economic, and political power has been reduced via the repressions of systematized rule. 2 Such is the position of Habermas, which signals his liberalism, and is why (as discussed below) his public sphere is necessarily deliberative rather than material, and thus inappropriate for conceptualizing radical democracy. 3 The word “anarchy” comes from the Greek anarkhia, meaning “without rule”. In contemporary usage there are many variants of anarchism, with differing interpretations over the re-organization that should occur following anarchism’s achievement. My concern here is the process of emancipation, and accordingly I leave aside questions of post-liberation anarchist form in simply following the Greek etymology. For a recent overview of anarchism’s diversity and its startling invisibility in the academy see Amster et al (2009). 4 Anarchism conceived as means without end is thus an important line of differentiation with Marxism and its utopianist thinking (cf Harvey 2000). 5 Massey (2005:6) refuses the distinction between place as meaningful versus space as an abstract container, encouraging us to view space as the simultaneity of stories-so- far, and place as collections of these stories. This re-conceptualization affords greater understanding to neoliberalism’s relational geographies, where any seemingly “local” contestation in place is necessarily tied to the wider assemblage of space. The reverse implication is that any ostensibly “global” imperative like “neoliberalism-in-general” always combines with place-based experiences in a myriad of hybrid ways (Peck 2004). 6 Alleviating all anxiety concerning civil society is impossible in this limited space. For comprehensive accounts of civil society, see Cohen and Arato (1992); Edwards (2004); Wiarda (2003). 7 Despite local variances, neoliberalism seeks to: eradicate interference with markets; stifle collective initiative and public expenditure via privatization of common assets; advocate individualism, competitiveness, and economic self-sufficiency as fundamental virtues; attenuate or nullify social transfer programs; and actively “recruit” the poor into a flexible labour regime of low-wage employment (Peck 2001; Peck and Tickell 2002). 8 Whether neoliberalism is understood as aligned to authoritarianism/archy or democracy/anarchy depends to some extent upon the context in question. However, if empirically neoliberalism seems to do well in democratic states this speaks to the contemporary abuse of democracy’s etymology. Those favouring institutional versions of “democracy” (ie demoarchy) will be less inclined to associate neoliberalism C 2010 The Author Journal compilation C 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode. 556 Antipode with authoritarianism. Yet seen through the anarchic lens of radical democracy, the authoritarianism of neoliberalism becomes evident, as the aggregations and deliberations of “liberal democracy” strip away individual freedoms via institutionalization. For those readers who remain skeptical, see Canterbury (2005); Giroux (2004); Springer (2009b, 2010). 9 Identity formation also occurs in semi-public spaces, private spaces, and subaltern counterpublics, where subordinate groups formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities (Fraser 1990). 10 All spaces are socially scripted, if not by explicit rules then by competitive regulation. Yet the ideal of unscripted space should nonetheless be aspired to (Harvey 2000), because while unscripted public space is fantasy, the openness, uncertainty, and anarchy embodied in space and place makes them potentially democratic crucibles. The challenge is to treat them this way, as instituting democratic spaces requires the foregrounding of exclusions (Massey 2005). 11 This idealized view of public space is universal inasmuch as humans are social animals desiring embodied connections with others, hence the emergence of language. The ontological priority of life is embodiment, and without a public to share our ideas and a space in which to do this, there would be no need for language. In contextualizing this claim, what is at issue is not the universality of the ideal, but rather what “embodied self-representation” might mean in different sociocultural and geohistorical settings. References Agamben G (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 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