Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

5. Writing on the Walls

121 5 Writing on the Walls Embodiment The social contract theorists from John Locke to 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.”1 In such a 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. James Mensch clarifies the point. He 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.”2 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 (Figure 5.1). 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.4 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,” 122 Writing on the Walls 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 (Figure 5.2). Having proposed a space, here as an opening for inserting a different figure or trope, Mensch notes the difficulty of specifying the “architectonic of such thought.”5 Jettisoning the position of 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. They are fundamental to his view that freedom is something we gain by coming in contact with others, in the society of others. Such freedom is always an expression “in context”: Its content is formed by the ways of being and behaving that are shaped by the various projects of individuals and groups. To the point that these projects coincide , there is commonality in the content of freedom. To the point that they do not, interests will clash. Such a clash, however, is always in a context. Thus the excess of the other—the excess stemming from his interpretation of a given situation—involves an overlap. . . . The excess—non-coincidence—is the other’s freedom. It manifests the other’s non-predictability and is the engine of newness in our encounter.6 The architectonics of such interaction cannot be predicated, outlined a priori, and must involve the risk of spatial imagination that has learned to negotiate and coalesce multiple and contradictory points of view. Politics is this art of accommodation. That the site of this accommodation and strife would be the city does not come as a surprise. But it is also a particular city imagination , that of the Greek polis, and its prime public space—the agora or marketplace —where the discussion of public space begins, ending up in spaces other than the marketplace, in the enclosed, bounded spaces of the council chamber, Individual Civil Society State unlimited abstract freedom: right to wage violence truncated freedom: an empty “I want,” right to one’s “person and posession” curtailing “excess” containing freedom attribute: clean predictable permanent freedom violence Figure 5.1. Contract theory’s model of disembodied freedom. Writing on the Walls 123 legislative assembly, and town hall. I want to reconsider this assumption about the architectonics of public space and the attendant understanding of embodiment by reference to Mensch’s point about opening up the space between freedom and violence. That is, I want to examine the spatial imagination that prompts our understanding of public space. Spatial imagination is the process through which a given social group works out the relation between social and physical phenomena, establishing links between physical attributes of people and objects, other sensory attributes...