Appropriating the Neoliberal City: Populism, Post-Transcendental Phenomenology, and the Problematic of the “World”

ABSTRACT

In the work of Ernesto Laclau, populism is treated as a hegemonic challenge. Hegemony describes the usurpation of the image of society as a totality by a particular and underdetermined social imaginary. Seen through the lens of what Johann P. Arnason terms “post-transcendental phenomenology”, this concerns the way in which a society sees and experiences both itself and the world it inhabits. This article suggests that hegemonic social imaginaries are built into a society’s public spaces, and are in turn experienced by citizens moving through these spaces, meaning that the built environment is central to the development of populist imaginaries. The article discusses how the neoliberal city exemplifies the way social imaginaries are inscribed into the physical landscape by highlighting three moments in the city; the institution of a certain imaginary as dominant; its sedimentation within the urban fabric over time; and finally, the re-activation of the original moment of institution, which opens up the possibility for new beginnings to overwrite the imaginaries encoded in the city. These three moments describe how physical, built spaces make concrete the power relations and horizons of possibility of the hegemonic imaginary—making possible and encouraging certain ways of being while discouraging (and hiding) others. This hegemonic logic of occupying a public space in the name of a particular subset of the population is a not only parallel to the form of populist politics, but populist sentiment is—at least in part—provoked by the experiences of inhabiting these spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• populism
• World Horizon
• phenomenology
• built environment
• neoliberalism
• Ernesto Laclau
• occupation

Introduction

Over the past several decades, there has been a growing chorus of political theorists claiming that liberal democracy is undergoing a crisis. Many of these thinkers link this crisis to the rise of populist movements across Europe and the Americas.¹ This article suggests that paying attention to the built environment provides us with an insight into the populist phenomenon which remains hidden from the perspective of mainstream political theory.

Following Ernesto Laclau, populism can be thought of as a hegemonic challenge. In other words, it involves a pars-pro-toto assertion whereby a section of the total population claims to legitimately represent the “People” as a totality (thus excluding other groups in the process). Essentially, this creates a situation whereby a particular group hegemonically claims to represent society as an abstract universal, yet as its logic increasingly moulds the world in its image, the exclusions it entails become more prominent—creating space for a (populist) backlash by those excluded from this image of the People. This antagonistic relationship between particular and universal, I argue, describes an aesthetic order which is encoded into the built environment, and which is deeply interrelated with the phenomenological experience a society has of itself.

Laclau’s construction of the populist People, I suggest, can be read through the lens of what Johann P. Arnason calls “post-transcendental phenomenology”.² Following Merleau-Ponty’s radicalisation of Husserl’s lifeworld in terms of a world-horizon, post-transcendental phenomenology understands our engagement with the world to contain an important hermeneutic aspect. This regards human encounters with the world they are in as one in need of interpretation—both in the sense of “world-interpreting” and “self-interpreting.”³ Laclau’s conception of populism as articulating a counter-hegemonic collective identity is concerned precisely with such a shared horizon. By establishing the horizons of what is see-able, think-able, and do-able, this political imaginary suggests specific ways of engaging with the world.

After discussing populism with reference to the problematic of the “World”, I turn to the role of the built environment—focusing in particular on neoliberal urban spaces. This discussion will be broken down into three “moments”. The first moment—the moment of institution—highlights how a hegemonic imaginary creates its own public spaces. The second moment, when this hegemonic imaginary becomes sedimented over time, describes how its de facto exclusions from political life are experienced by citizens moving through the built environment. Thirdly, in the moment of re-activation, the contingency of this hegemonic logic is revealed. These three moments highlight the ways in which a society’s experience of itself is constructed, ordered, and revealed through the built environment.

I suggest that the balance between particular/universal and between private/public in any given society is built into their public spaces, and that reactions to their imbalance are—at least in part—provoked by the experiences of inhabiting these spaces. Because of this close relationship between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic political identities and the production of space (and vice versa), a phenomenological emphasis on how the built environment is experienced by different people is necessary to inform normative political theory work regarding populism and the “crisis of liberal democracy”.

Populism

Let us begin with a brief discussion of populism. Populism is an essentially contested concept, and as a result there is no accepted definition to turn to.⁴ Part of the problem with defining it is that a whole range of different movements, whose politics vary wildly, have been called populist. Rather than attempting to develop a definition which encompasses these disparate ideologies and movements, I follow Laclau in thinking about populism as a political logic—specifically, as a counter-hegemonic articulation. From this perspective, populism involves the claim by a particular section of society to be the legitimate representatives of the abstract universality of that society.

Laclau describes this populist logic with reference to a hypothetical industrial city.⁵ He asks us to imagine a large group of migrants living in the slums and shantytowns on the periphery of a city. When these people suffer from inadequate housing, education, electricity, water, or public transport, they petition the relevant authorities for redress. If the authorities meet their demands, then the issue disappears. As Laclau writes. “in so far as a system is able to absorb the demands of the subordinated groups in a ‘transformist’ way … that system will enjoy good health.”⁶ If the institutional system is unable or unwilling to do so, however, it is increasingly likely that people will observe that they are not the only ones whose demands are consistently left unsatisfied.

The more time passes without these problems being addressed, Laclau writes, the more likely we are to see “an accumulation of unfulfilled demands and an increasing inability of the institutional system to absorb them in a differential way (in isolation from the others).”⁷ At this point, a sense of equivalence is likely to be established between these disparate demands, in that the aggrieved recognise their similarity in being rebuffed by an unresponsive institutional system. Because these demands are always directed at somebody—at the institutional structures which supposedly acts on behalf of society as a whole—disregard for these demands leads to a growing rift between the petitioners and the petitioned.

At this point, for Laclau, we have an embryonic form of populism: an equivalential relationship has been established between formerly disparate demands, and this chain of equivalence leads to a frontier between the aggrieved and those who have the power to address these grievances but do not do so (whether because of unwillingness or a lack of capacity). The equivalences between these demands, at this level, do not represent anything more than a “vague feeling of solidarity.”⁸ For populism to properly take hold, these equivalential relations need to “crystallize in a certain discursive identity which no longer represents democratic demands as equivalent, but the equivalential link as such. It is only that moment of crystallisation that constitutes the ‘People’ of populism.”⁹

Where mainstream, non-populist politics functions according to a differential logic and claims to mediate between the interests of individuals as pure particularities, populism, in drawing a frontier between the People and the elite, seeks to construct a common identity to represent society as a totality. As Jan-Werner Müller argues—using terms reminiscent of Roman antiquity—merely standing up for the interests of the plebs, or the popular classes, is not populism. Instead, populism relies on the assertion “that only the plebs … is the Populus.”¹⁰ In other words, it reflects a pars-pro-toto claim, whereby a (downtrodden) part of the population insists that it legitimately represents the whole.

Populism, from this perspective, is not so much a specific political programme, but a logic of doing politics—an antagonistic logic, to be precise, whereby a hegemonic institutional formation allowing society to act as a single actor is challenged by a populist project. Drawing on Gramsci, “hegemony” for Laclau is the “operation of taking up, by a particularity, of an incommensurable universal signification.”¹¹ Hegemony describes the process whereby the worldview and institutional interests of one class become universalised and come to stand in for society as a whole. In other words, it repeats, in its relationship with other groups and individuals in society, the process whereby disparate demands are formed into a chain of equivalence and become represented by an empty signifier. The populist “People” becomes the empty signifier which represents the “People” as an abstract universality.

This pars-pro-toto claim will always fall short, Laclau notes. Society cannot be represented as a unified totality without remainder. The excess escaping the grasp the previously hegemonic social formation was, after all, the contradiction out of which populism grew. Any attempt to represent the people as a totality is therefore: a) fictional and b) insufficient. Seeing as the hegemonic political imaginary is “nothing more than the investment, in a partial object, of a fullness which will always evade us because it is purely mythical,” the horizons of any imaginary both make visible certain viewpoints and perspectives while making others invisible.¹² Certain sectors will be included in the Populus, in that they are a member of the population as a whole, while being excluded from the particular group that stands in for the whole as empty signifier. As a member of these excluded sectors, democratic demands for inclusion—such as those in Laclau’s hypothetical city—remain invisible. This exclusion—and particularly the inability to hear the excluded—always has the potential to develop into renewed populist resistance.

Post-Transcendental Phenomenology

Laclau’s construction of the populist People, I suggest, can be read through the lens of what Johann P. Arnason calls “post-transcendental phenomenology”.¹³ Arnason coined the phrase “post-transcendental phenomenology” in a debate with Jürgen Habermas, disagreeing with the latter’s claim that “the phenomenologists have not yet arrived at their ‘postism’”, and that by failing to renew and transform itself, phenomenology would stagnate and atrophy.¹⁴ Arnason challenged this claim—arguing that the work of third-generation phenomenologists in general, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular, can be characterised as a “sustained and seminal effort to achieve” such a “postism” by moving beyond Husserl’s focus on the transcendental subject.¹⁵ The post-transcendental form of phenomenology which develops through their work emphasises three main themes, which will be discussed in turn: the problematic of “the World”, trans-subjectivity, and the relationship between totality and particularity.

Arnason begins by noting that Husserl’s notion of the lifeworld is “overburdened” by a tension between “life” and “world”.¹⁶ He suggests that the emphasis on the world horizon in Merleau-Ponty functions to separate these two components. While a significant body of literature on Merleau-Ponty focuses on his work on “flesh” and the embodied subject,¹⁷ there is a growing focus on his treatment of the world horizon, “which opens onto the insight that perception is not only embodied but anchored in cultural contexts.”¹⁸ According to Arnason’s reading, Merleau-Ponty develops a theory of perception which is concerned not only with the subject and consciousness, but which emphasises the way in which “the World” reveals itself.¹⁹ This move—even if it is already intimated in the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception—is characterised mainly in the changing emphasis from the embodied subject in this work to the “World” in The Visible and the Invisible. It is this engagement with the “thesis of the World”, and the increasing emphasis on “horizons—those of perception, language and the body, but also history, society and culture”—which Arnason characterises as central to the development of post-transcendental phenomenology.²⁰

The “World”, here, does not denote “everything which is in existence”. Instead, as Arnason describes it, “post-transcendental phenomenology conceives of the world as an open, that is, only partially and discontinuously organized, global horizon that can be totalized from different points of view yet never be reduced to any totality.”²¹ To some extent, perception requires seeing the world as a complete and cohesive image, yet the notion that this image is always underdetermined and incomplete means that it remains possible to interpret the World as otherwise. Arnason draws here on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “World” as the “whole where each “part”, when one takes it for itself, suddenly opens unlimited dimensions—becomes a total part.”²² This relationship between totality or unity on the one hand, and particularity or plurality on the other, is central to post-transcendental approaches to the World.

Merleau-Ponty speaks of the World as a “horizon of all horizons”—or a total view of a diverse set of viewpoints.²³ This unity is sufficiently vague and indeterminate to “become a source of pluralism at its own level.”²⁴ At the same time, however, this totality is “an open totality the synthesis of which is inexhaustible.”²⁵ It treats its perception of the human condition in-the-world as complete, yet can exist alongside alternative (equally complete) perceptions which can nonetheless not be subsumed into its totality. When it comes to these different ways of perceiving and articulating patterns of meaning, Merleau-Ponty suggests that they amount to different worlds existing side by side. Consequently, any claim of totality is dependent on a shared horizon, and does not rule out competing claims. This emphasises that perception does not occur against a given, natural background, but rather one which is underdetermined, and can therefore be interpreted in different ways. As a “total part” of the “World”, every social imaginary “is a different articulation of the (inexhaustible) World.”²⁶

In its treatment of the World as a horizon of horizons, Arnason suggests that the “post-transcendental field” moves away from the individual subject and instead emphasises the interpretation and creation of meaning by society in its trans-subjective dimension—creating an “a-subjective” phenomenology, to use Patočka’s vocabulary.²⁷ Horizons of meaning, from this perspective are created by society as an impersonal and anonymous project. In turn, this horizon becomes the object of interpretation by said society, as well as the background of its self-interpretation. In other words, it speaks to the historicity of collective subjects as always-already in-the-world, as well as to its creativity in re-making its world. As an anonymous and unmotivated dimension of society, however, this creativity cannot be reduced to the intersubjective relations between individual subjects. It operates through individual subjects, but is not dependent on their individual agency. Instead, as Adams writes:

It appears as cultural projects of power that are embedded in institutions—understood here in the broadest sense—and which alter themselves in, through, and as time (and specific forms of temporality). The trans-subjective context thus consists in the interplay of instituted patterns and instituting irruptions of cultural meaning, social power, and collective movement that are both in-the-world and opening-onto-the-world.²⁸

Laclau’s conception of populism as a counter-hegemonic project, as we have seen, is concerned precisely with this interaction between society in its trans-subjective dimension, its negotiation between totality and particularity, and its world as horizon of meaning. Because we cannot see society or the world in its totality, but always see it as a hegemonic articulation, there are different ways a society can conceive of itself and of the world it inhabits. It is this underdetermination which creates space for (counter-)hegemonic politics. This post-phenomenological perspective broadens the way we can approach populism as a phenomenon, in that it emphasises the subject, whether individual or collective, as not only “‘self-interpreting’ … but also world interpreting.”²⁹ In other words, beyond Laclau’s focus on the interpretation and articulation of the identity of the People, this places the People in-the-world—highlighting “world-disclosure, world-appropriation and world-interpretation” as central to (counter-)hegemonic politics.³⁰

The Built Environment

In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote that “[b]ecause we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning.”³¹ Even in this earlier work, this claim is made not in the context of the embodied subject but with regards to the “historical dimension of collective human existence.”³² This emphasises a strong focus on the world-horizon as a background for perception and action—thus moving beyond the focus on perception at the individual level. He writes: “phenomenology’s work is not a resort to the structures of consciousness as the condition of possibility of the world, but an attention to the world as it appears, the world which is there before any possible analysis of mine.”³³ Consequently, he suggests that phenomenology should not be limited to reflection on everyday life, nor should it rely on “lived experience” from a first-person viewpoint. Instead, it should inquire everywhere “‘without restraint’ … including about institutions, historical events, bodies of ideas, and civilizations.”³⁴

When approaching Laclau’s populism through a phenomenological lens, then, the populist People is treated specifically as a People-in-the-world. Specifically, I suggest that we can start turning our attention to the World in relation to populist politics by taking seriously Laclau’s image of the city. Where he describes his hypothetical city largely as a thought-experiment allowing him to build a formalistic theory of populist logic, the ways in which the city reveals itself to its inhabitants is worth exploring in more depth.

Insofar as a political imaginary—whether hegemonic or counter-hegemonic—“distributes and redistributes the categories of the sensible world (the visible and the invisible, the expressible and the inexpressible, the possible and the impossible, etc.)” it describes a regime which is at once political and aesthetic.³⁵ In building a political subjectivity, this imaginary also builds an aesthetic order—distributing people, behaviours, and functions to their “correct” places in society and in the city. Moreover, these different ways of “seeing” a society also lead to different ways of acting within the world. The political imaginary functions as a horizon of what is thinkable or doable, and as such it (re)shapes its environment.

Through the built environment, political imaginaries take on a physical presence which structures the ways people can act in public spaces. It turns discursive significations, such as the construction of an imagined community, into a lived reality. In this sense, “the physical environment is political mythology realised, embodied, materialised.”³⁶ The way these places are designed reflects a process of inclusion/exclusion akin to the construction of the identity of the People. The physical environment of a city reflects the values of the hegemonic imaginary “in terms of division/connection, of centre/periphery, of hierarchy/equality and of comfort/discomfort/misery.”³⁷ Consequently, as several prominent phenomenologists have argued, our perceptions of ourselves and of the world are mediated by the (built) environment.³⁸

To explore the way our aesthetic experience of urban spaces may relate to populist movements, I engage in a discussion of the way populist politics opens-onto-the-world by shaping the urban built environment, and how as a subject-in-the-world the built environment in turn shapes the populist subject. Specifically, I focus on the relationship between populist politics and the neoliberal city. By treating the populist imaginary as a shared horizon of the world, this discussion draws conceptually from the phenomenological tradition. Nonetheless, addressing the problematic of the World necessarily draws us in a sociological direction. While phenomenology centres the transcendental subject as creative of meaning, it has focused less on the role of society as creative of its own worlds of meaning (and therefore as creative of itself). At the same time, however, phenomenology has “emphasized being-in-the-world as central to articulating human meaning, whereas sociology tended to neglect the world problematic.”³⁹ Post-transcendental phenomenology, to a large extent, synthesises these two approaches.

Following Thomas F. Gieryn’s essay What Buildings Do, I divide the discussion of the neoliberal city into three separate “moments”. These three moments draw on concepts used by Husserl which also re-appear in Laclau.⁴⁰ Where Laclau applies these different moments to the way specific discourses and ways of being in-the-world become naturalised, for Gieryn they instead describe the way these discourses are inscribed into the built environment. Gieryn’s first moment, the design of a place, is very similar to Edmund Husserl’s “original institution” (Urstiftung).⁴¹ During this moment, a range of different possible futures for a place or building are reduced to one through the agency of those planning, designing, and building it. The second moment highlights how the place, once built, limits and enables different actions of the people using it, meaning that “agency shifts (analytically) to the building itself.”⁴² We can think of this, again following Husserl, as a “sedimentation” of the logic that was instituted in the first moment, whereby the myriad possible futures present in the first moment are forgotten. In the third moment, people reclaim their agency from the building by reinterpreting and reimagining it—in Husserl’s formulation, “re-activating” the many possible futures present in the first moment.

This is not to suggest that these three moments can in practice be distinguished from each other—they often overlap or occur simultaneously, and do not necessarily follow each other in an ordered fashion. After a space has been designed, for example, it is possible to start re-imagining these spaces before the building process has been fully completed and the dominant discourse has become fully sedimented—leaving these spaces to oscillate between sedimentation and re-activation. Nonetheless, for analytic purposes, it is helpful to look at these ideal-typical categories separately.

Institution

The first “moment” in the life of the city, which this section focuses on, is that which Thomas F. Gieryn calls the “design process” and which Laclau refers to as “institution”—that is, Stiftung, “Husserl’s favourite word.”⁴³ Institution refers the imposition onto our experience of the world of “patterns of determinacy, stability and ideality.”⁴⁴ This moment emphasises the ways that the norms, rituals, and processes of our social and political lives shape the places we build. As Heidegger notes, feeling at home in the world requires a form of place-making—by building places to dwell. “We attain to dwelling,” he writes, “only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal.”⁴⁵ Nonetheless, this goes beyond the mere building of physical structures—“not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places.” Nonetheless, “these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling.”⁴⁶ Even if we do not shelter in these places, we are at home in them by making space for our ways of being. This allows us to see the collective subject—Laclau’s People—as opening-onto-the-world. As the People, we inhabit these spaces, and in doing so makes the city our home. But given that our interpretation this “we” is itself a partial perspective, this same partiality is carried over into the built environment. The home we build is different depending on who is to inhabit it.

For Gieryn, the design process of any building or space is heterogenous, or internally split, in several respects. Firstly, he argues, every design refers both to itself and to social relations more broadly. The design process, whether it be of a building or of a city, is a blueprint not only for the buildings it will create, but also for the social relations it allows or prohibits. It creates, in other words, both “material things” as well as the “resolution of sometimes competing social interests.”⁴⁷

Secondly, when building any space, the designer must balance a multiplicity of different possibilities. Not only do they have to draw a line of inclusion/exclusion when it comes to the materials to work with, but it often also requires resolving competing hopes, wishes, interests, and ideologies. For a final design to be built, this multiplicity must first be reduced to remove any incompatible demands. In other words, of the many possible futures of the public space, only one (or a coalition of several) is capable of being articulated in the final design. This closure operates in a similar way as the hegemonic representation of society by a particular sector of the population—the final design will always be built upon exclusions of certain views, practices, narratives, or people. As Müller writes, “by creating forms and spaces, architecture always both coerces and enables: it keeps some out; it allows some to meet and talk under a shelter; it makes us move in certain ways and blocks others.”⁴⁸ In other words, the patterns of stability it institutes are maintained against a background of indeterminacy—these patterns could well have been otherwise. Nonetheless, this process functions to give concrete form to this imaginary—it shapes its assumptions and preconceptions into a physical structure.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalism has been the hegemonic political imaginary throughout most of Europe and the Americas, and we can clearly identify the way it is creative of the spaces in our cities. Neoliberal discourse itself became hegemonic due to a successful war of position by market populists such as Thatcher and Reagan.⁴⁹ The hegemonic “People” of neoliberalism, in turn, is made up of thoroughly individualised, self-interested subjects—Homo Oeconomicus. This neoliberal subject, Wendy Brown writes, “approaches everything as a market and knows only market conduct; it cannot think public purposes or common problems in a distinctly political way.”⁵⁰

An important aspect of neoliberal forms of governance has been to decentralise the administrative apparatus of the state—leaving the market to carry out this task rather than the state’s bureaucracy. The political sphere as a space where a political community could make collective decisions is unmade and replaced by the laws of supply and demand. Public spaces, as the physical embodiment of the public sphere, suffer the same fate. One of the biggest impacts this free-market logic has had on the city has been the privatisation of previously public spaces. We increasingly see gated communities barring access to entire neighbourhoods, private shopping malls taking over the role of high-streets, and “public” streets being built and owned by developers of surrounding housing developments or office buildings.

This dominance of neoliberalism over other ways of imagining public spaces is clearly visible in the building of “public spaces” in many cities. Increasingly, the street as a public space is being privatised. Margaret Kohn writes of such a process playing out in New York City, “where zoning laws [give] developers of skyscrapers special incentives in exchange for building plazas and arcades.”⁵¹ What is theoretically a public space, then, will be privately owned by the developers of the surrounding office buildings and appartement blocks. It is increasingly common for the development of new neighbourhoods to follow a similar logic. Subdivisions are built from a blank slate, and the streets around which they are planned will be under the control of the Home-Owners Association or Body-Corporates—veritable private governments. Additionally, we can point to the mall as taking over the role that traditional high-streets used to play, simply privatising these spaces.

Even when streets remain in public ownership, their maintenance and administration are increasingly contracted out to private firms. Again, in New York City, the situation is such that “streets in Times Square and in forty neighbourhoods throughout the city are now cleaned and policed by private companies.”⁵² Although these streets are theoretically still “public spaces”, they too saw physical interventions which enable the activities of neoliberal subjects while restricting other uses which do not conform with the hegemonic image of the People. Seating spaces are removed unless they belong to cafes and restaurants, and hostile architecture—such as anti-homeless spikes or anti-homeless benches—are relied on to make these streets unusable for any purpose other than those related to commerce. The ownership and management of streets—and public spaces more broadly—has thus come to follow a market-driven neoliberal logic, and these norms are enforced through interventions in the physical environment. This highlights how a political imaginary becomes instituted within the public spaces of a city. By creating public spaces in our image, the way in which a society interprets and perceives itself becomes stabilised and institutionalised in the built environment.

The “colonisation” of the city by a (neoliberal) imaginary limits the possibility for the imaginary being challenged and treats its axioms as foundational and natural. At its institution, people are certainly aware of the power-imbalances involved within an imaginary, but once these competing narratives are no longer “present-at-hand”, this imaginary can become naturalised. “What once was a malleable plan—an unsettled thing pushed in different directions by competing interests during negotiation and compromise—now attains stability,” Gieryn writes, and “many possibilities become one actuality.”⁵³ The final design is a stabilisation of a hegemonic narrative into the future—it is no longer one discourse among others, but the dominant logic determining the places we inhabit. As the behaviours and norms that were designed into these streets become repeated over time, they become habitual, ritualised, and naturalised.

Sedimentation

The second moment highlights the ways in which the street—ordered as it has been by a neoliberal imaginary—reveals itself to the People. Once instituted, the newly hegemonic perspective “tends to assume the form of a mere objective presence. This is the moment of sedimentation.”⁵⁴ Through the built environment, this discourse begins to take on a physical presence, which structures the ways people can act in these public spaces. In other words, the moment of sedimentation highlights the ways in which the built environment acts upon society. It describes how the built environment is deputised to facilitate ways of being which align with the dominant imaginary, while making other ways of being more difficult.

When a building, community, or neighbourhood is built, it stabilises the intentions of the planner. By giving a relatively durable concrete form to patterns of behaviour, social relations, and socio-political institutions, buildings provide a level of stability against re-invention and change. This is essentially a form of closure. Once a building has been constructed, they “hide the many possibilities that did not get built, as they bury the interests, politics, and power that shaped the one design that did.”⁵⁵ By hiding its contingent origins, Laclau writes, “the instituted tends to assume the form of a mere objective presence.”⁵⁶

Changes to the built environment, such as the erection of fences, hostile architecture, and surveillance systems which tend to accompany the privatisation of public spaces, undoubtedly impacts how the city is experienced. Beyond the notion that societies create their own spaces, this suggests that these spaces also re-create society—it allows us to think of “buildings as simultaneously made and capable of making.”⁵⁷ Lars Botin and Inger Berling Hyams suggest that architecture, in this sense, is a form of technology, and as such it enframes the world.⁵⁸ As Heidegger notes, techne, for the Greeks, meant “neither art nor handicraft but rather: to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that.”⁵⁹ Techne, in this sense, is productive—it reveals the world in a certain way. For Heidegger, “Techne thus conceived has been concealed in the tectonics of architecture since ancient times.”⁶⁰

By revealing public spaces to political subjects in a specific manner, architecture and the built environment encourages certain ways of behaving and being in those spaces while discouraging others. In this manner, the built environment is not only ordered and “requisitioned” to reflect the hegemonic political imaginary, but it also reinforces it.⁶¹ Human subjects may lose themselves in this technological framing and instead come to “manufacture” themselves.⁶² Being drawn into the revealed world of the technology, the subject may become estranged from “Da-sein”—losing awareness of the contingency of the revealed world and only conscious of themselves as an instrument within the functioning of the technology. As it becomes naturalised, then, the imaginary inscribed in public spaces re-makes the community which inhabits these spaces. In other words, the Populus is increasingly shaped in the image of the hegemonic People.

Once the street, or the privatised “public” space taking its place, is viewed through a neoliberal lens, the physical built environment will quickly be moulded in its image. In the neoliberal city, as we have seen, this is largely driven by the privatisation of spaces as well as of the mechanisms that govern them. One example which has received a lot of attention on this front is the shopping mall. Despite fulfilling many of the roles of traditional public spaces, and often using the “architectural vocabulary” of these public spaces, the shopping mall is ultimately a private space.⁶³ Following the supreme court case of Lloyd Corp v Tanner (1972), private places do not need to ensure people have the right to freedom of speech, expression, or assembly—these “negative” rights are understood to prevent a government from encroaching on these rights in public spaces, not to force private actors to uphold them in private spaces.

Shop-owners, as tenants of the mall, may consequently be required to follow regulations regarding the goods they sell and even the design aesthetic and name of their stores. The customers—and particularly younger customers or ethnic minorities—similarly must obey a series of regulations. They are likely to be removed from the mall for doing “anything which is judged by the management to be “disruptive” behaviour, for example, loitering, picketing or protesting,” or even dressing in ways that do not fit in with the desired type of clientele.⁶⁴ Unlike the public high-street it has usurped, where everybody is (in theory) welcome, the mall exists only for Homo Oeconomicus.

Such exclusion of otherness creates neoliberal spaces by “making room for” its ways of being in-the-world—reinforcing hegemonic conceptions of citizenship. As Heidegger writes, spaces of meaning—as “something that has been made room for”—exist within a certain boundary.⁶⁵ The boundary here is not so much “that at which something stops but … that from which something begins its presenting.” In other words, within the boundaries within these spaces, the hegemonic imaginary presents itself. Space has been made for this way of perceiving and being while it is “cleared and free” of that which does not belong to this way of perceiving and being. The neoliberal subject “is let into [the] bounds” of these spaces, while otherness is cleared out.⁶⁶

The elimination of any elements which may disturb the image of neoliberal subjects engaging in retail activities are strictly enforced by security guards, security cameras, and hostile architecture. The mall has taken on the role of the public high street but has purified it of all inconveniences, from political differences to poor people and even bad weather. Despite emulating traditional high-streets both functionally and aesthetically, the mall turns its back on the street—rejecting the fullness of public life. As an imaginary becomes sedimented in space, then, it works to make the world align with its own fiction.

Where sociologists and geographers identified malls in the latter decades of the twentieth century as the most prominent examples of the capitalist spatial order, today malls are slowly disappearing. The logic of the mall, however, has been turned back on the city itself. We see this, firstly, with the attempts to revive the traditional high-street, which had long been in decline at the hand of shopping malls. The mechanisms of purification characteristic to the mall have in many places been transplanted into more traditional public spaces, with ordinances passed to exclude panhandling, loitering, vagrancy, and public expression. Beyond the use of laws, hostile architecture is increasingly used to “deputise” the built environment to enforce these exclusions.⁶⁷ The use of anti-homeless spikes or anti-homeless benches—or in many cases, the removal of benches altogether—make it so that these spaces are more amenable to certain activities (such as shopping) than others (such as meeting, relaxing, or “loitering”).

Beyond the high-street, many suburbs increasingly function in a similar manner. As Pierre Rosanvallon describes, entire communities in the US have legally separated themselves from neighbouring localities in order to achieve a free hand in terms of zoning and to protect their inhabitants from having to pay taxes which go towards public services in (often less affluent) surrounding areas.⁶⁸ As such neighbourhoods market themselves to the fantasy of a society of wealthy individualists, they actively exclude all signs of the social antagonisms that come with a pluralistic society. By excluding “the homeless …, ghetto youth, [and] poor white trash redneck[s],” these neighbourhoods ensure that encounters with those who fall outside of the neoliberal image of the community-as-totality are largely avoided.⁶⁹ Beyond the homelessness of lacking a roof over one’s head, this exclusion entails a broader sense of homelessness within the city. Presence in these privatised public spaces is accepted only insofar as one follows the habits of the hegemonic People who dwell there—it is inhabited by the People, while the Other is never more than visitor. No space is made for them.

The logic of the mall, then, has been turned back onto the streets it initially sought to emulate. We can think of these bounded and purified spaces as turning streets into a fortified worlds unto themselves, insulated from all “excess or dissent.”⁷⁰ This is reminiscent to Husserl’s distinction between the “homeworld” and the “alienworld”—the alien in this case being “everything that is to be found beyond the boundaries of what we may call the “sphere of ownness” (Eigenheitssphäre).”⁷¹ Consequently, such purification of public space “gradually undermines the feeling that people of different classes and cultures live [or ought to live] in the same world.”⁷² The masses are simply hidden from public view—they are only present in their absence. Nonetheless, Kohn writes that:

… suffering exists even if the privileged do not view it; forcing the downtrodden out of sight, banishing them from the places that the privileged pass in everyday life is not the same as solving social problems, and may make the problems more difficult to solve. As long as social problems such as homelessness, poverty, and de facto segregation are only apparent to those who experience them, there will be few programs committed to change.⁷³

This exclusion may lead to an array of demands (democratic or populist) by the masses, but at the same time it reinforces the hegemony of neoliberal institutions. With the excess hidden out of sight, Homo Oeconomicus is not confronted with it. Anything which does not fit the worldview of the neoliberal imaginary remains invisible for the very simple reason that it is moved elsewhere. By enframing the world in a specific way, the built environment is not only created by society, but is also creative of society. By structuring the way people experience the world, and hence suggesting and facilitating certain ways of being in the world, the built environment reveals the hegemonic imaginary as seemingly natural rather than a contingent social construct.

Without contact across social divides, the political imaginary is increasingly blinded to the fact that it does not represent society as an unproblematic totality, without remainder. As both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas emphasize, it is in coming face to face with the other that we are confronted with their alterity.⁷⁴ Alienness, Adams writes, “is characterised by absence and distance.”⁷⁵ An overcoming of distance forces us into a confrontation with otherness. Following Husserl, this creates a situation of “verifiable accessibility of what is inaccessible originally.”⁷⁶ The encounter with the other forces me to look at myself and functions as a break with the imagined totality of society.⁷⁷ While these exclusions may be forgotten to a certain extent as the built environment is deputised to hide alterity, they cannot be fully erased from the built environment, and traces of this absence will always remain present. The possibility that the hidden presence of these exclusions is revealed, therefore, also remains in a latent form.

Re-Activation

This section discusses the moment of re-activation, whereby an instituted and sedimented urban imaginary is challenged by those inhabiting those spaces. While the built environment enframes and reveals the world in a certain way, it never presences itself fully, “does not take a single, definite form, and is characterised by ‘partial concealment’.”⁷⁸ Because any interpretation of the world will always be in the form of a deficient totality, there always remains space for sedimented narratives to become denaturalised and defamiliarised. As Gieryn writes, “buildings stabilize imperfectly. Some fall into ruin, others are destroyed naturally or by human hand, and most are unendingly renovated into something they were not originally … ”⁷⁹ Rather than imposing an immutable set of significations onto the people using these spaces, the narratives attached to these physical structures are constantly (re)interpreted and (re)presented. This leaves space for a re-activation of the initial moment of institution—a process whereby the political interests at play in the planning of certain places, which had become sedimented and forgotten over time, once again become apparent. The awareness that the seemingly “objective” nature of the built environment is in fact little more than the contingent sedimentation of a particular imaginary re-opens possible alternative futures.

As a public space, the street cannot be controlled perfectly—elements excluded by the dominant imaginary keep making their appearance here. Lefebvre writes that “the street is disorder.”⁸⁰ Where actors and actions are sequestered in their correct places in other spheres of life, in the street they are not as constrained. Here the masses are untethered “from their fixed abode”, leaving them free to (re-)imagine and to (re-)act together, crossing from the private into the public and from the periphery to the centre. In the end, the street—or any public space, for that matter—remains outside the complete control of the hegemonic imaginary. Even though political institutions will try to “cordon off” and “repress” the spontaneity and noise of the street, it remains possible to inhabit these spaces in ways that run counter to the norms embedded in them.⁸¹ This essentially functions as an occupation of a public space by a particularity—a hegemonic claim of sorts—which undermines the sedimented logics of this space.

Following Jacques Rancière, by occupying a public place, the occupiers enact a sense of equality which is denied to them (and denied to their habits and ways of being) by the dominant imaginary. “The process of occupation is not simply the takeover of a space: it is a takeover which changes the very use of this space in the distribution of social occupations and social spheres.”⁸² Rather than merely taking over a space and affirming that it belongs to the occupiers, it transforms this “space into a public space.”⁸³ This making public results not from reaffirming the existing definitions of “public” and “private”, but instead by overstepping these boundaries.

A paradigmatic example of such a re-activation of public space can be found in proto-populist movements such as Occupy and the Indignados. In 2011, these movements occupied parks and squares, where they began to repurpose these places to perform an alternative way of being in public—creating common spaces, democratic assemblies, libraries, etc. As Brown describes it, they “repossessed private as public space, occupied what is owned, and above all, rejected the figure of citizenship reduced to sacrificial human capital and neoliberal capitalism as a life-sustaining sacred power.”⁸⁴ While the occupiers questioned the existing spatial order, they did not do so as a “pre-existing collective subject.”⁸⁵ If anything, it was through the process of building common spaces that this collective subject which challenged the neoliberal People was assembled. The spaces they built, in other words, functioned as “part public information booth, part recruitment station.”⁸⁶ It was through the public deliberation amongst the occupiers, the creation of friendships, and the sharing of food and song, that an alternative vision of society was formed, and that individual demands were assembled into a broader populist imaginary. By living as if the world was already otherwise, they began to re-interpret both themselves and the world they inhabited. To inhabit a space in this manner, following Heidegger, is not only to dwell there but also to build anew habitual ways of being—“it is the Gewohnte.”⁸⁷

Ultimately, these movements did not achieve their goals, but for several months they managed to occupy a space and inhabit it as if the world were otherwise. By “living” a different reality in public, they showed that other ways of being are possible. Despite their eventual failure to hold out against the coercive apparatus of the state, these movements were relatively successful in de-naturalising the neoliberal manner of engaging with the world.

This re-made these public spaces in two different ways. Firstly, the occupiers re-imagined the narratives attached to these spaces by re-purposing them. Rather than serving as reprieve for Homo Oeconomicus on their lunchbreak, Zucotti Park became a democratic forum. Essentially, the occupiers built an alternative society and began to create its own space. It erected libraries, public food pantries, spaces for theatrical performances or spiritual services, public healthcare and legal assistance tents, and much more. As Rancière writes, “if you put your tent on a square that is made for urban circulation and make it a space for living and discussing,” you are “beginning politics again, reinventing a public space out of the very disposition of bodies on a ground.”⁸⁸ In this way, we make and re-make spaces by “inhabiting” them—that is, by insistently comporting in a manner which challenges ways of being in these spaces which have become habitual.

Secondly, they made these spaces public by re-opening the question of who the public is. The presence of the masses in places from which they had been cast out by means of hostile architecture, surveillance, and physical force directly confronted Homo Oeconomicus. The encounter with the other essentially forces us to return to the moment of institution by putting “in question the world possessed.”⁸⁹ In other words, the hegemonic imaginary either adapts to address the demands of the excluded or it must re-assert the legitimacy of its claim to legitimately represent the public/the People. This requires dropping the façade of universality and engaging in the political conflict which had previously been forgotten and sedimented. In the case of the Occupy movement, the answer to the claim of the suffering was met in the negative, as militarised police forces were sent in to forcibly evict the occupiers. Where the built environment had been deputised to suspend any questioning of the instituted political settlement, actively subverting the norms inscribed into the built environment brought this political question (and the violence involved in simplifying many possibilities into a single narrative) out into the open.

The reasons provided for the eviction of the Occupy camps—at least in the United States and Canada—was that it was an “illegitimate privatisation” of public space.⁹⁰ As Kohn writes, “the eviction of the occupiers revealed that those ostensibly public places are designed to meet certain needs and not others.”⁹¹ This suggests that the activities for which the occupiers were using the space—shelter and democratic deliberation—were seen as “private” affairs, whereas recreation was considered public. This boundary between public and private is deeply political, and crossing it with a broad oppositional coalition forces the hegemonic discourse into an open conflict about the meanings of public space. The use of police forces to remove the protestors from supposedly “public” places served as a reminder of the usurpation of the identity of the People (and the coercive apparatus of the state) by a particular sector of the total population.

Although it happens in the “public” spaces of the city, the “occupancy” by a subset of the population acting out its citizenship highlights that the “normal” uses of these spaces are equally a form of occupation. The fact that this “public” space treats certain ways of being as acceptable (particularly the movement of capital, consumers, goods, and services) while others are out of place (such as discussion, learning, or building networks of solidarity) highlights that the everyday use of public spaces is always-already a hegemonic usurpation. In this sense, Rancière writes, “the assembly and the tent are the fragments of a lost totality.”⁹² They form a break in the world-horizon of the hegemonic People.

Discussion

The built environment privileges the activities of certain groups and individuals—the hegemonic People—while excluding others. The excluded, by occupying these public spaces, subvert the purposes for which they were designed, thus re-activating the political process wherein these associations were first given to the street. This process is deeply intertwined with the logic of populism. At the very least, we can say that there are two parallel antagonistic processes at play. A section of the population appropriates the identity of the People—and the meanings and purpose of public spaces—while those excluded from this hegemony challenges its logic.

Beyond noting the parallels between these two processes, I suggest that they are deeply intertwined, and that there is a close relationship between political identity and the built environment. As a society, we build spaces in the image of how we perceive ourselves, even though this image is necessarily incomplete. In turn, akin to the function of technology in Heidegger, the built environment structures our experience—working to re-shape society to more closely resemble this incomplete image. The built environment reveals the world in such a way as to encourage certain behaviours and ways of being in these public spaces, which sediments the hegemonic imaginary. While suggesting and encouraging certain ways of being, it discourages others—thus hiding alterity from public sight. This naturalises hegemonic conceptions of citizenship publicity, despite this being only one possible way of seeing among many.

At the same time as reaffirming the “natural attitude” of the hegemonic subject, the built environment shapes the experience of the Other and mediates the experience of their exclusion from the People. We are directly confronted by the power relationships, logics, and discourses built into the street as we move through it, meaning they are central to our experience of belonging to or exclusion from the hegemonic identity. A discussion of the street, or of public spaces more broadly, “immediately calls to mind which of the demos’ bodies are policed in public venues and which are assumed to belong there. American streets are open to free use by some citizens, but when frequented by others those same streets quickly tum into sites of surveillance or control.”⁹³ The incompleteness of society’s self-perception, in this way, is made tangible by experiences of the street as a public space.

This is not to say that there is a direct overlap between populism and challenges to the narratives inscribed into public spaces. Where populism is a hegemonic challenge—it describes a particular group’s attempts to claim the title of universal—an occupation or a re-activation of the institution of spatial narratives need not have this universal aspiration. The occupation of a certain space, for example, has the potential to remain purely localised—building what Michel Foucault would call a heterotopia.⁹⁴ Rather than challenging the hegemonic logic of public space, this is a retreat from hegemony. It creates an in-between space, where the hegemonic logic no longer applies. Additionally, the occupation may effectively highlight a wrong which is promptly addressed. Following a logic of inclusion rather than antagonism, particular sectors of the excluded may then be admitted into the hegemonic coalition to redress the injustice of their exclusion.

Nonetheless, the logic of populism directly answers some of the questions raised by our experience of public spaces. If our experience of the street highlights the contingency of what we deem to be “public”, and that this benefits some while excluding others, it raises a political question which is much broader than the built environment itself. Questions of what is “public” and what “private”, in that sense, overlap with the populist problematisation of the relationship between the particular and the universal. Particularly if the demands of the excluded are not listened to—such as the Occupy camps being violently evicted rather than engaged with by the political establishment—these demands may increasingly begin to follow an equivalential, populist logic. It is not a surprise, therefore, that there is a significant overlap between the language used by Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ left-wing populism—”We are the 99%.”

To conclude, approaching populism through the lens of post-transcendental phenomenology broadens our perspective—emphasising not merely the populist People but instead the People as in-the-world and as opening-onto-the-world. This article explored this relationship between the populist People and their environment by taking seriously and expanding upon Laclau’s image of the city as central to the appearance of populist politics. The discussion of three “moments” in the life of the street highlight how de facto exclusions from political life are inscribed into, and enforced by, the built environment. The way these exclusions are experienced by the body moving through supposedly “public” spaces is one factor (among many, no doubt) leading to demands that these wrongs are righted. It is the very exclusion of the masses from these public spaces, however, that hides their exclusion from the hegemonic People, increasing the likelihood that these demands go unheard, and opening the door for populist sentiments.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council under their Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship scheme.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sebastiaan Bierema

Sebastiaan Bierema is a Doctoral scholar in the School of Political Science and Sociology at the University of Galway. As a political theorist interested in utopianism, social imaginaries, and urban spaces, his thesis interrogates comparisons between contemporary populist movements and early twentieth century utopianism.

Notes

¹ See: Przeworski, Crises of Democracy; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism.

² Arnason, “Merleau-Ponty and Max Weber.”

³ Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation, 7.

⁴ For a more comprehensive discussion on the difficulties of defining populism, see: Moffitt, Global Rise of Populism.

⁵ Laclau, On Populist Reason, 73.

⁶ Laclau, “Structure, History and the Political,” 203.

⁷ Laclau, On Populist Reason, 73.

⁸ Ibid, 93.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Müller, What Is Populism?, 23.

¹¹ Laclau, On Populist Reason, 70.

¹² Ibid, 125.

¹³ Arnason, “Merleau-Ponty and Max Weber.”

¹⁴ Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 3.

¹⁵ Arnason, “Merleau-Ponty and Max Weber,” 83.

¹⁶ Arnason, Praxis and Interpretation.

¹⁷ c.f. Waldenfels, “The Body in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology.”

¹⁸ Adams, “Intercultural Horizons of Arnason’s Phenomenology,” 255; see: Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth; Arnason, Praxis and Interpretation; Rechter, “The Originating Breaks Up.”

¹⁹ It is in this emphasis on world-disclosure that ‘post-transcendental’ phenomenology can be distinguished from ‘post-phenomenology’—an emerging branch of phenomenology which focuses on the ways technology mediates how humans engage with and relate to the world. see: Ihde, Postphenomenology; Botin and Berling Hyams, Postphenomenology and Architecture.

²⁰ Arnason, “Merleau-Ponty and Max Weber,” 94.

²¹ Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute, 255.

²² Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 218.

²³ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 330.

²⁴ Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute, 229.

²⁵ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 219.

²⁶ Rechter, “The Originating Breaks Up,” 40.

²⁷ Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute, 206; Mensch, Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology.

²⁸ Adams, “Beyond a Socio-Centric Concept of Culture,” 100.

²⁹ Adams, “Castoriadis, Arnason, and the Phenomenological Question of the World,” 79.

³⁰ Arnason, “Merleau-Ponty and Max Weber,” 94.

³¹ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xxi.

³² Adams, “Beyond a Socio-Centric Concept of Culture,” 108.

³³ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, x.

³⁴ Rechter, “The Originating Breaks Up,” 29.

³⁵ Rockhill, Interventions in Contemporary Thought, 100.

³⁶ Kohn, Radical Space, 5.

³⁷ Therborn, Cities of Power, 12.

³⁸ See: Casey, Getting Back into Place; Casey, The Fate of Place; Malpas, Place and Experience.

³⁹ Adams, “Beyond a Socio-Centric Concept of Culture,” 98.

⁴⁰ For a discussion on the centrality of Husserl’s concepts of institution, sedimentation, and reactivation in the work of Laclau, see: Marchart, “Institution and Dislocation.”

⁴¹ Laclau, New Reflections, 34; Husserl, Die Krisis Der Europäischen Wissenschaften.

⁴² Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” 53.

⁴³ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 146, note 62.

⁴⁴ Arnason, “Merleau-Ponty and Max Weber,” 96.

⁴⁵ Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 143.

⁴⁶ Heidegger, 143.

⁴⁷ Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” 41–42.

⁴⁸ Müller, “What (If Anything) Is ‘Democratic Architecture’?”

⁴⁹ Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal; Brandes, “The Market’s People.”

⁵⁰ Brown, Undoing the Demos, 39.

⁵¹ Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods, 8.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” 43.

⁵⁴ Marchart, “Institution and Dislocation,” 274–75.

⁵⁵ Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” 38–39.

⁵⁶ Laclau, New Reflections, 34.

⁵⁷ Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” 37.

⁵⁸ Botin and Berling Hyams, Postphenomenology and Architecture, 8.

⁵⁹ Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 157.

⁶⁰ Heidegger, 157.

⁶¹ Lovitt, “Introduction,” xxix.

⁶² Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 26.

⁶³ Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods, 8.

⁶⁴ Hannigan, “Fantasy City,” 306.

⁶⁵ Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 152.

⁶⁶ Heidegger, 152.

⁶⁷ Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space.

⁶⁸ Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, 279.

⁶⁹ Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods, 96; see also: Oliver, Democracy in Suburbia.

⁷⁰ Anderson, Imaginary Cities, 48.

⁷¹ Waldenfels, “Homeworld and Alienworld,” 76.

⁷² Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods, 6.

⁷³ Ibid, 11.

⁷⁴ Reynolds, “Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and the Alterity of the Other.”

⁷⁵ Adams, “Intercultural Horizons of Arnason’s Phenomenology,” 252.

⁷⁶ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 114.

⁷⁷ Morgan, The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas, 65.

⁷⁸ Adams, “Beyond a Socio-Centric Concept of Culture,” 106.

⁷⁹ Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” 35.

⁸⁰ Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 18–19.

⁸¹ Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 51.

⁸² Rancière, “Occupation.”

⁸³ Ibid.

⁸⁴ Brown, Undoing the Demos, 220.

⁸⁵ Frank, The Democratic Sublime, 136.

⁸⁶ Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade, 187.

⁸⁷ Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 146.

⁸⁸ Rancière, “Occupation.”

⁸⁹ Purcell, Levinas and Theology, 101.

⁹⁰ Kohn, “Privatization and Protest,” 100.

⁹¹ Kohn, 99.

⁹² Ibid.

⁹³ Honig, Public Things, 25.

⁹⁴ Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”