Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City

2. Visualizing the Body Politic

44 2. Visualizing the Body Politic Swati Chattopadhyay The concept of public space in modern political theory is remarkably impoverished. It largely ignores the material attributes of space—its architectonics and physical-sensorial dimensions that enable habitation—and the process of social production that creates the “publicness” of public space. Such imagination of public space is disembodied in keeping with the disembodied , abstract imagination of the modern state. When it does consider material attributes and the bodies of citizens at work in shaping public space, it assumes a particular delimited imagination of the Greek polis. Both ignore the possibilities of a political vernacular that might enable us to expand the imagination of public space and its attendant materiality. “To be embodied,” writes James Mensch, “is to be physically situated.” By that logic it is also to “exclude other persons from the position that one occupies in viewing the world.”1 This produces a plurality of viewpoints that we must accommodate, because we are also “dependent” on others to inhabit this world. To be embodied is to be aware of the vulnerability of the flesh. An embodied understanding of politics and public space thus requires attention to the conditions of our physical situatedness in relation to other bodies and objects. It involves an understanding of our position in a given space, our movement and ability to access space, what we can see, hear, feel, and touch: our vulnerability as well as our capacity to manipulate and change the aforementioned conditions. These states of vulnerability and capacity that actualize our political freedom set the parameters of our relation to fellow subjects. These material conditions (and their limits) are the bases of our political subjectivity and enable our political imagination. 45 Visualizing the Body Politic In this chapter I examine the recent prohibition of political wall writing in India as an instance of the ill-understood relation between political subjectivity and public space. I focus on the materiality of public space and on the relation among bodies, space, text, and the quest for political freedom that produced a political vernacular in the twentieth century. Before I turn to those examples, allow me to clarify the point about the imagination of public space that appears in Mensch’s critique of contract theory. Embodiment The social contract theorists from John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau have understood freedom as innate, a preexisting attribute of the individual, a priori to social formation. Thus, in contract theory “politics begins with the agreement to limit this original liberty.”2 In such form, liberty works as a dual move of an empty “I want” and the right to “our person and possessions.” This is the basis of politics as the need to limit freedom and to secure private property. Mensch notes that the assumptions of contract theory invariably lead to equating political freedom with sovereignty—that is, self-sufficiency and mastery achieved through violence: “both the violence that establishes it and the violence that preserves it.” The state is established through violence and arrogates to itself the right of self-preservation through violence. Given the original empty conception of freedom, in the hands of the state it takes the form of unlimited abstract freedom. This conjunction of violence and freedom implies that “politics consists not so much in expressing, as in containing freedom.”3 Mensch opposes this notion of freedom by proposing a form of embodied political freedom: freedom as a “gift of others” that flows contrary to the idioms of mastery and self-sufficiency that drive contract theories. Working primarily from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “intertwining” of the world within and without, and Hannah Arendt’s proposition of the political as the space of “appearance,” Mensch describes the body politic as the bodily “I can,” residing in our ability to act and change the world. He suggests that if we break the connection between sovereignty and violence, we open up a space between authority and physical power. Having proposed a space, here as an opening for inserting a different figure/trope, Mensch notes the difficulty of specifying the “architectonic of such thought.” Jettisoning the position of an abstract disembodied point of view and authority, the new notion of freedom must be articulated through a crooked line of thought. These spatial and architectural analogies and metaphors are not accidental. It is 46 SWATI CHATTOPADHYAY fundamental to Mensch’s view that freedom is something we gain...