Bringing Back the Political: Egalitarian Acting, Performative Theory

This is the author manuscript version of the now published chapter.

Cite as:

Henao Castro, Andrés, and Henrik Ernstson. 2019. “‘Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!’

Postcolonial Remains and the Politics of the Anthropo-Ob(S)Cene.” In Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities, edited by Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw, 69–87. Abingdon & New York:

Routledge.

Chapter 14

Bringing Back the Political: Egalitarian Acting, Performative Theory Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw

Abstract. The political is categorically and fundamentally performative. Those that gain a

voice as equals do not do so by demanding a right to speak within an already policed order, they stage equality and produce new spaces from where equality and freedom can be thought and acted out. This notion of the political, we argue, has to (again) become central in radical and critical theory, urban political ecology (UPE) and associated fields in the coming decade. This concluding essay draws on the chapters of the book to discuss what “politically performative theory” could mean and what challenges and possibilities it brings to a reconfigured UPE and in politicizing the environment.

Introduction

The central question around which this book revolves is not so much about how to bring

environmental issues into the domain of politics, as is the case with much political ecological

and environmental research, but rather how to bring the political into the environment. The

main argument centres on the need to move from environmental or ‘sustainability’ science as a

basis to discuss, formulate, and develop environmental policies, to politicizing the environment. The latter requires foregrounding the splits, internal obstacles, limits, and divisions that run through any sense of community, from local to global, in order to think, develop, and organise forms of renewed political agency and subjectivation as the necessary foundation to enact progressive socio-ecological transformation. This interest in politicization is also our approach to push, expand, and hopefully assist in rearranging Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and cognate fields to remain relevant in a time of deepening de-politicization and the rise of post-truth politics. Political philosopher Alain Badiou (2008) has suggested that the growing consensual concern with nature and the environment should be thought as a contemporary form of opium of the people. This seems, at first sight, not only a scandalous statement, one that conflates ecology with religion in a perverse twisting of Marx’s original statement, but it also flies in the face of evidence that politics matters environmentally and that environmental matters are profoundly political. Nonetheless, Ulrich Beck (2010, 263) concurs with the depoliticizing force of much environmental concern:

In the name of indisputable facts portraying a bleak future for humanity, green politics has succeeded in de-politicizing political passions to the point of leaving citizens nothing but gloomy asceticism, a terror of violating nature and an indifference towards the modernization of modernity.

With this book, we sought to unearth and discuss the contours of what the politicization of the

environment might mean in an attempt to bring environmental matters to the core of political

consideration and contestation. This is the exact opposite of attempts in recent decades to

render policies and politics more sensitive to environmental concerns. Entire academic fields,

alongside an array of professions, protocols, and procedures, supervise and enact a process of

de-politicization whereby our socio-ecological condition is conceived as a problem (phrased for instance as climate change, loss of biodiversity, water crisis, depleting fish stocks, waste management, air pollution, etc.) that requires a series of techno-managerial adjustments in order to ‘solve’ the consensually agreed upon problem. While this scientific approach is not false or un-true in any categorical sense, it participates in translating contested issues into scripted sets of supposedly non-political acts of social management and technological adjustments that perpetuate the existing order rather than considering our socio-ecological situation as politically deeply contested and radically heterogeneous.

Politicizing the environment is precisely about foregrounding the contentious and antagonistic character of the environment itself. In doing so, the plainly de-politicizing process of elevating the matter of nature to the dignity of a global public concern is not only exposed, what Badiou identifies as “a gigantic operation in the depoliticization of subjects (Badiou 2008, 139),” but the contours for a re-politicization of the environment is foregrounded as a necessary antidote for the techno-scientific rationale that dominates environmental research and policy making.

Indeed, throughout the book, contributors argue and demonstrate that the unwavering attempts to establish a secure and sound foundation to what nature and its complex dynamics really are as a necessary precursor and foundation to formulate adequate socio-ecological

responses to the environmental deadlock the world is in, are an integral part of pervasive processes of de-politicization. This book aspires to cut through this deadlock and considers how it is precisely this contested nature of nature that keeps socio-ecologically futures radically open. This heterogeneity is perceptible, among others, in the range of ways by which ‘Nature’

is known to and symbolised by different peoples, in the variety of cosmological constellations

and material consequences associated with different epistemic communities, in the proliferation

of radically different imaginaries of what constitutes a just, equal, or liveable environment,

and—perhaps most importantly—in the uneven socio-ecological positions different humans and non-humans occupy in the circulatory metabolic process that sustains capital accumulation.

Against such strategies to evacuate the political from the environment and from spaces of public encounter, this book draws on insights from radical democratic thought for understanding and contributing to the politicization of the environment and life itself.

In particular, we find inspiration in Jacques Rancière’s elegant and helpful definition of politics as the immanent moment when the established distribution of functions, names, obligations, and expertise is disturbed by those who do not count. It manifests itself when the non-heard and those casted as not part of the drama transgress their non-perceptible presence to become visible, hear-able, and radically present in staging change in the name of equality (Rancière 1999, 2010). Thus, rather than centring the debate about how to account for the environment or ‘Nature’, what it contains and what science to mobilize to articulate with it, or how it effects social groups or ‘stakeholders’ differently, we start from asking what the political is and how collective life becomes politicized. Such gesture, we contend, also politicizes ‘the

environment.’ It is against the spectre of a bleak dystopian future without egalitarian political encounters that this book explores tactics and strategies of the political as a radical

emancipatory socio-ecological process. In this concluding chapter, we draw on the chapters that make up the book to suggest what a politically performative theory might be and what challenges and possibilities it brings to the process of (re-)politicization.

Performative

We insist that the political is a form of appearance, an interruptive act that demonstrates

equality and exposes a wrong. This opens up the thorny issue of the relationship between

theory and practice. For us, politically performative theory, while caught in the iron cage of

representation and symbolization, can and should articulate and resonate with actual and embodied performative political acting.

In the tension between practice and thought—or, say, activism and scholarship, acknowledging that such labelling gives the appearance of neat divisions of labour that never existed—politically performative theory has emerged in various forms across time and in different places. Furthermore, while we write theory, we merely use this singular form as a placeholder for something that emerges and is embodied and practiced in multiple forms, that is, as theories.

From these initial remarks, we can approach the term ‘political performativity’ in two ways.

First, there is a long lineage of critical theory—many strands of for example, Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism, and postcolonial studies—that in a variety of ways, often in vicious dispute with one another, and in different places and times, have attempted to demonstrate the relevance and potency of their particular mode of enquiry and analysis for political action and strategy. In doing so, they assume or argue that theory has a political effect in the sense that such thought is a necessary foundation for ‘correct’ political action and strategy. Much of Marxism is a straightforward example of this, whereby Marx’s theoretical class analysis arguably charts the terrain for who the privileged political agent is (the

proletariat), its mode of political organization (the socialist or communist party) and its objective (occupying the State to change the relations of production). Other critical theories have, often in dialogue with or in direct opposition to Marxism, charted alternative trajectories for emancipatory change.

In a nutshell, such standpoints share the view that substantive critical

1

See, for example, Butler and Athanasiou (2013) or Glass and Rose-Redwood (2014) for extended discussions on performativity and politics.

2

In postcolonial theory, for instance, the colonized subject becomes the subaltern capable of launching a nationalist

liberation struggle to overtake the colonial State and turn it into a revolutionary socialist or a social democratic

developmental State. In feminist theory, this articulates around building horizontal militant and semi-militant

collectives that through a myriad of struggles aim to undermine the totality of patriarchical relations in the home,

the work-place, and the public sphere.

theorization is understood to be a necessary and crucial part for formulating and engaging in practical emancipatory politics.

Against this notion however, and second, there is a strand of political philosophers, from Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière to Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe, amongst others, that question more or less radically this privileged position of theory and, consequently, the position of the philosopher-king to arbitrate what constitutes radical political actors or actions, while interlocutors like Slavoj Žižek would go as far as to argue that ‘mainstream’ critical theory is part of the process of depoliticization itself. The latter is particularly visible in the way that critical theory has become celebrated, policed, and placed within curricula across the liberal democratic (and now increasingly neo-liberal) university. In contrast to foregrounding theory and analysis (of politics, the ‘social base’, patriarchy etc.), post-foundational political thinkers focus on situating ‘the political’ in the event, in the rupture, in the process of political acting and forms of subjectivation. They dispute the presence of a firm ontological basis for founding the political. Theory can consequently say something about ‘the political’ as immanence and appearance, but these interlocutors deny the performative effect of substantive theorization.

Emancipatory political action requires no ontological grounding in social position, in time, space or nature, or in a belief system. In other words, emancipatory acting emerges and unfolds through the act.

We of course do not in any way wish to diminish the role of thought in the politicizing process

; we are more concerned about what needs to be thought today in light of both our

3

For an introduction to different schools of postfoundational political thought, see Marchart (2007).

4

Examples of work that has contributed to a politicizing process, includes, for instance, such classics as Frantz

Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967), or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (2009 [1949]), who excavated and

reflected on subjugated positionalities to turn such reflections into tools for identifying and forging a revolutionary

subject capable of action.

socioecological predicament and the above critique by post-foundational thought of

‘mainstream’ critical theory. In a Rancièrian sense, we are concerned with the question of who is allowed to speak; whose sound and utterances are formatted as voice, whereas others are neither seen or heard nor sensed, and not counted as belonging to or being part of the political community. The political, then, is discernible in moments when such orders of the sensible are interrupted through the demand of equality, the founding moment that introduces a rupture of and in the political community.

The political is here categorically and fundamentally performative. Those that have no part do not demand equality as a right within a policed order, which cannot and never has recognized them, they stage equality and consequently produce egalibertarian spaces that become locations from where equality and liberty can be thought and acted out (Balibar 2010). This interrupts the established socioecological order, ways of thinking and doing, who is counted and who is not, and exposes the in-egalitarian ‘wrongs’ of the given. Such acts are necessarily noticed, and either succeed or are met with violence that precisely affirms the in-egalitarian order of being and that renders visible and perceptible the part that has no part.

It is in this strict sense that we can understand the political subject, not as a person, individual or group, but, quoting Rancière (2014, 45), “a political subject is an agent of the division of the arche [the political community]”; it “is a singular noun for the operation that redivides the arche

through a new mode of counting the uncounted and including the excluded” (Ibid., 45). The production of egalibertarian spaces, the creation of conditions for a different way of building relations between humans, and between humans and nonhumans, are spaces that build

“particular cases of universality” (Ibid., 45) that can re-constitute the political community along

lines of equality. Equality is the axiomatic condition for democracy, an empty signifier that

exposes a split, a rupture, and reveals the antagonisms, heterogeneities, limitations, and conflicts that reside within the order of being.

In the remainder of this chapter, we shall read across the various contributions in this book to encounter hints, openings, and suggestions about where, how, and by whom the political appears as rupture, as interruption.

Politicizing

A first major theme of the book centres on a politicizing approach in relation to the question of

‘the Anthropocene’. Indeed, the book’s various contributors have aspired to pervert, interrupt, and re-order the way the Anthropocene is framed, discussed, and rendered performative in a range of academic disciplines and social or artistic practices. The common vision and

perspective shared by the contributors to this book, is the imperative to politicize the disastrous socio-ecological condition many of the human and non-human constituents that make up the Earth’s constellations are in. This requires not only a semantic or symbolic re-scripting of the age we are in as in the proliferating alternative suggestions for naming the Anthropocene, but rather the refusal to let our politics be shaped or determined by the contested naming of an historical epoch.

The opening three chapters all revolved, in different ways, around disrupting what is probably

the de-politicizing gesture par excellence, namely the attempts to re-found the political through

the making of a new ontology. Every attempt to ontologize politics simultaneously runs the risk

of relegating it to the discerning eye of the master-philosopher, who is yet again staged as the

final arbiter to triage between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ politics. This book has in various ways tried to

de-ontologize the political, remove it from the terrain of philosophical musings to the

immanent and performative possibilities that always lurk within the gaps, the inconsistencies, and the excesses of contemporary thought and of existing material and symbolic constellations.

The political becomes this moment of surprise, of unexpected resurgence, of immanent acting that can never be fully accounted for by the givens of the situation. A first tactical manoeuvre of our own argument (Chapter 2) was indeed to point to the obscene underbelly of the

Anthropocene’s cacophonous debate, the uncanny presences of the unsaid, unspoken, yet disturbingly present vampires, zombies, and ghosts that haunt the actually existing conditions in what was always a more-than-human world and which no scientific, indigenous, or other framework can account for, although they might gesture to do precisely that. It is the surfacing, or rather the on-staging, of these subterranean ghosts, the obscene possibilities that any

ontologizing effort tries to hide from view, around which politicization unfolds.

Two clear threads run through the book on the theme of on/off-staging. One is how geo- science, and climate science in particular, has moved far outside its physical earthly boundaries through the narrative vehicle of ‘the Anthropocene.’ Politically, this means that a master- narrative has been established, here in the form of science to which we expect to turn to know what we ought to do: “Taking the Anthropocene as a statement of fact,” as Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi write (Chapter 5), “eviscerates the horizon of politics” through a teleological version of history that hides particular forms of accumulation, violence, and dispossession that created environmental change in the first place and by insisting that “we are all in the same boat”.

To politicize the present lies precisely, as developed by Andrés Henao Castro and Henrik

Ernstson (Chapter 4), in troubling the ‘supra-historical time’ on which Anthropocene-thinking

and talking rests, a teleological way of narrating time (and space) that tries to orchestrate and

dominate all other public discussions. Only a tiny fraction of humanity are the active architects of the geological force that ‘humanity’ has become, and likewise, few participate in narrating how this moment should be understood and acted upon. This opens a much more general path to politicize the environment, which revolves around what Henao Castro and Ernstson call a politics of translation whereby performative acting by the non-counted and subaltern undermines ways of speaking demarcated by scientific or economic consensus.

Marco Armiero (Chapter 10) develops this further as he explores modes of politicization through foregrounding how differential positionalities relate and experience socio-ecological conditions. In unearthing the ghostly presences of toxic waste in Naples, he foregrounds how residents are building collective spaces to make sensible new modes of knowing and, in a politically interruptive and performative way, organising collective life in the here and now to deal with polluted soils and corrupt governments. This political ecological way of organizing and articulating new ways of knowing is developed further by Garth Myers (Chapter 8) in his attempt to decentre Western thought to expand and enrich urban political ecology (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver 2014; Heynen, this book). He traces something similar to Armiero’s argument when he excavates the radical “multi-vocality” of environmental activism across cities in Africa, inspired by his in-depth engagement with hip hop artists, waste pickers, and women saving circles. ‘Local’ struggles become possible sites for launching revolts against consensual arrangements, where new modes of counting the uncounted and including the excluded are embodied and experimented with, and where particular cases of universality are elaborated.

Roger Keil (Chapter 9) also grapples with “the peripheries” in examining the political performativity manifest in suburban landscapes. While their varied spatial forms have

contributed immensely to climate change and environmental destruction, he insists that there is

a bias in current spatial imaginaries of revolt and emancipation towards the centre, the square,

while, in fact, the world is increasingly suburbanized, mainly in the form of traditional middle- class suburbs or self-built squatter settlements. Rather than writing off suburban spaces, we should engage with a grounded study of how politics and subjectivities articulate from a multitude of peripheries, maybe something akin to Myer’s “multi-vocality”. Indeed, several authors foreground the messiness and uncertainty by which claims are made and staged, while underlining how expert-driven master narratives can still be disrupted by a range of urban actors that are historically situated in their relations to humans and nonhumans, forging novel ways of knowing, organizing, and acting.

The second thread that relates to on/off-staging engages critically with new materialist ontologies, which have emerged in parallel to and partly inspired by the inauguration of ‘the Anthropocene’ (see Chapter 2). In their claim for a more-than-human and fully relational co- constitution of earthly matters, these ontologies risk suspending the gaps, the splits, and the conflicts that we tried to foreground in this collection as necessary condition to rupture the prevalent socio-environmental trajectory the earth is on. Instead, they seem to invite narratives of a fully reflexive, adaptive, and manicured more-than-human arrangement, nurturing a phantasmagoria of a ‘good Anthropocene’ in which supposedly every critter is seen and cared for. It is the ability, or rather inability, to rupture the cosy relation between government, big science, and big corporations that needs to be laid at the feet of new materialist ontologies in their claims to radicalism (Henao Castro and Ernstson, Chapter 4).

Following this, and writing categorically against gestures of all-inclusive imaginaries, Jodi Dean

(Chapter 11) insists instead on the “importance of division” in her chapter on artistic practices

and global warming where politicization lies in forcing all to take a stand: [D]ivision, then, is

not in the interest of some fantasy of full-inclusion but rather for the purpose of mobilising the

exterior [the excluded] back within the institution” (Chapter 11, our emphasis). Resisting the

mainstream call for “innovation,” the art collective Not An Alternative “salvages the generic images, practices, institutions, and forms that have already compiled and stored collective power” to repurpose institutions to become a site of counter-power. The challenge lies not in finding the ontology from which, and within which we can all peacefully be accommodated, but to produce “infrastructures [that] challenges, shames, and dismantles the very class and sector that would use what is common for private benefit” (Chapter 11).

A real risk of these new materialist ontologies lies exactly in providing discursive material to repress, foreclose, or disavow deep conflicts, open wounds, and irredeemable gaps that cut through any socio-ecological constellation. As several contributors to this book demonstrated, it is precisely these gaps, wounds, and splits that need to be foregrounded. Any relational configuration, we argue, is one predicated upon division and split, a certain distancing, an uncanny distantiation, out of which new political possibilities emerge. It is the split that permits relationality, while providing possibilities for contesting uneven power and for re-drawing unequal positionalities. A politics not of belonging, but of division.

Interruption

The second major theme of the book focuses precisely on politicization through interruption,

the moment when what has been off-staged appears on-stage in full view. Proper politics,

which pushes to rearrange what is sensed and felt and who has voice is manifested in immanent

outbursts that appear as excess or surplus to the prevailing situation. Something exceeds the

present and forges in the process a new present. These forms of acting do not deepen

entrenched positionalities, do not pursue particular partisan interests or existing power

positions. Rather, they tentatively construct and experiment with new egalitarian relations

within the cracks and fissures that mark the split realities through which ‘the Anthropocene’

came into being and produces earthly futures. In the process, a new emancipatory imaginary might be slowly constituted. Political acting exceeds given identities by demonstrating the egalitarian possibilities and necessities rendered impossible by the given condition.

It is precisely this affirmation of performative acting that demonstrates possibilities and practices for egalitarian relationality that might politicize ‘the Anthropocene’, rendering its obscene underbelly as the stage, The Scene, from where action originates. Perhaps it also hints at the necessity, as Maria Kaika argues (Chapter 13), to abolish the name of ‘the Anthropocene’

and its avatars completely and instead call for a new politics of staging whereby the consensual expert apparatus and dispositif is replaced with those who “engage in the active contestation of their conditions of exclusion” (Henao Castro and Ernstson, Chapter 4).

Of course, this requires too a multiplicity of voices and a plethora of experimentation, some of which are articulated between the covers of this book. Richard Walker and Jason Moore (Chapter 3), for example, insist on how the particular entanglements of the human and non- human have been and continue to be forged through the class relations that drive the machinery of capitalist accumulation and its predatory desire for an insatiable excess of surplus value.

Their re-booting of a historical materialist radical view demonstrates how this excess of surplus

value is predicated upon a geological deepening, a geographical widening, and a biological

intimization of the entanglements of the human and non-human, orchestrated through pervasive

forms of privatization, enclosing, and economically de-valuing both human labour and non-

human stuff. The excess of surplus-value is only mirrored in the surplus-enjoyment of those

caught in capitalism’s desiring machine. These capitalist performances underpinned Moore’s

shift to the signifier of ‘the Capitalocene’ in an attempt to register the seismic transformation of

an earth terraformed by the assembling of money, labour, and the non-human in metabolic circulations that produce qualitative transformations but do so in both socially and ecologically deeply disruptive and uneven manners.

Needless to say, these dynamics intersect with other produced power relations and

geographical constellations through which the socionatural ecologies of the Anthropocene are forged. One such entry point for politicisation—to make sensible splits and divisions—

foregrounds racialized capitalism. Nik Heynen (Chapter 6), in pushing for an expansion of UPE to engage more explicitly with the articulation between race, colonialism, and nature, carefully approaches the U.S. Southern city of Atlanta through the lens of an African American

intellectual history and activism. He develops an “abolitionist urban political ecology”, firstly to expose the deep antagonisms that run through a racialized urban landscape spatially and

ecologically prefigured by the plantation economy based on enslavement. And, secondly, an abolitionist political ecology permits grasping how those splits are precisely the spaces through which the entire city and society can be—and is—politicized.

Radical democratic practices can emerge out of a contestation of what appears as consensually

agreed upon issues and problems. Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi’s analysis of “wetland

grabs” in urban India (Chapter 5) starts from anticorruption mobilization. What at the surface

might appear as quite remotely attached to the ‘urban environment,’ is showed to be a vehicle

for naming and shaming structural “wealth amassing” relations between state and capital that sits

at the heart of producing the wider urban landscape and its uneven distributions of housing,

flood risk, and access to public space. The authors see the potential (as Marco Armiero also

does in Chapter 10 for urban Italy) that anticorruption mobilizations can unmask “flexible

governance regimes” that blur legal and extra-legal ways of reclassifying land and auctioning off

public resources. As such, the politicization of “wetland grabs,” situated among everyday and often poor families lives, becomes a way of attacking the mechanism by which state and private actors consolidate and enclose public resources.

Within global policy and academic discourse, climate change and “climate adaptation” have become thoroughly technocratic issues, which might at times nod to environmental justice.

However, sedimented power relations that reside in the core of these processes need to be on- staged. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Jonathan Silver (Chapter 7), discerns several lines of politicization that emerge from reflecting on how the climate crisis, both directly and through its configuration within global policy arrangements, re-creates colonial patterns of violence and

“suffocation” of African cities. This resonates with what we discussed in Chapter 2 as an

“immunological bio-politics,” the more general pattern of how governing technologies work to secure the lives of some while sacrificing others, thus reproducing, as Silver shows, brutal lines of inclusion and exclusion in an ongoing pattern of coloniality. A mode of politicization thus lies in interrupting sanitized narratives of the “adaptive” or “resilient” city and resolutely view the climate crisis as a distinct phase sustained by uneven urbanization.

The general theme reverberating across these contributions lies precisely in how to bring the

political into the environment, to on-stage in the name of equality what cannot be seen or

sensed, the obscene, to politicize through interruption. Both scholars and activists will of

course need to grapple with understanding how the forging of a new egalitarian voice is possible

in the cacophony that marks big city life, and how it might become politically performative. But

as many urban-based politicizing movements have shown, it is and must be possible. For

example, movements like Black Lives Matter in the U.S. and Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa,

clearly did not ignite from any sanitized or policed version of ‘the environment.’ However, the

effect of their political work—building on a long historical experience of direct action to on- stage what had been off-staged in terms of legacies of colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy—is still, and importantly, that urban environments become deeply politicized.

Possibilities

Neo-colonial practices, gender and sexual exclusions, and a wide range of racialized practices produce, alongside and intertwined with the power of money and the spectral presence of still dominant class relations, the actually existing geographies of an unequal terraforming process.

Several chapters in the book explore these relational dynamics and tease out the forgotten voices, the hidden gaps, the incoherent arrangements, and interstitial spaces and moments through which a performative emancipatory politics may crystallize. Such political possibilities and their enactment is precisely the terrain of the final tree chapters of the book that provide just some pointers for a political ecological agenda that might begin to centre-stage what has been off-staged. As mentioned already, Jodi Dean (Chapter 11), who opens the third section, demonstrates how an art collective “does the work of political organisation” to interrupt the endless circuit of critique. These experiments to re-purpose existing institutions operates as a de facto collective resource to demonstrate how ‘the state’ can and has to be seized. She calls for a repetition of such politicizing performative experiments bent on seizing the state and,

thereby, cutting through the deadlock of the Anthropocenic condition, one sutured by

melancholia, failure, and cynicism. The final two chapters, by Andy Merrifield and Maria Kaika

respectively, focus directly on scholarly engagement. Both, in their different ways, advocate

abolishing the scholar-as-expert, the academic as philosopher-king. Andy Merrifield (Chapter

12) unfolds how the articulation between money as the only source of value, rampant

expertocracy, and the deepening of professionalized representation as the instituted form of

democracy require usurping. Debunking professionalism, he argues, operates through the

constitution of a shadow citizenry of ordinary people “who want in but are forced out, defiant yet disunited, disgruntled and raging in a global civil war of austerity and high frequency piracy.” It is precisely these new global margins that have now become the norm, the majority.

It is those who are off-limits that experiment with and fight for a new concept and practice of citizenship, one yet to be invented so that a new inside can be created capable of keeping the professional expertocrats at bay. Maria Kaika (Chapter 13) makes a case for a “scholarship of presence”, one that takes seriously emerging practices and alternative radical imaginaries that demand or enact socio-environmental change. She questions the obsession with engaging with the concept of the Anthropocene as doing this only intensifies its symbolic weight. Instead, her scholarship of presence engages with emerging everyday socio-political practices that try to disrupt the power landscape and resist the forces that continue to dominate the human and non- human inhabitants of the earth.

Concluding

These chronicles of a politicizing political ecology attempt in a variety of ways to reopen a space

where emancipatory politics once more becomes thinkable and do-able. There is no blueprint

for this. The future is always up for grabs and it is precisely this void of ‘the political’ that

sustains an open-endedness through which a future is to be forged within the interstices of the

present. Against the closure pursued by geo-engineering-adaptation pundits and sustainability

advocates for whom no other future is possible than an extension of the present with some

socio-ecological techno-managerial re-alignments, the contributions in this book insist on the

radical openness of tomorrow, but an openness that can only be sustained through practices of

radical egalitarian democratization. These practices are always excessive to the situation,

interrupt the conditions of the present, and in the process forge new socio-natural assemblages

and constellations.

This book emerged out of an engagement with urban political ecology as it unfolded over the past decade or so. Rather than revelling in the scholarly achievements of UPE and its gradual sedimentation within the academic curricula of urban studies, planning, or geography courses, its presence at global conferences and its articulation with socio-ecological practices, this book attempted to focus on the gaps, the uncanny feeling many of us share in realizing the world is in a still deepening socio-ecological quagmire that no critical theorization of the present situation manages to even dent. Our agenda here is one that aspires—but undoubtedly fails—to foreground political agency and political struggle as the terrain capable of transforming socio- ecological relations in a more equitable, solidarity-based, and democratic manner. Rather than bringing environmental issues into politics, we must insist on directing our energies towards situations, acts and events that brings the political into the environment, on-staging what has been off-staged, centring dissensus and divisions, and remembering that egalitarian political action requires no ontological grounding in social position, in time, space or nature, or in a belief system, as the political unfolds through the performative act of equality. It is from this vantagepoint that we view the contributors of this book as rejecting the cynicism inscribed in a critical tradition that remains caught in the negative dialectic of critique and fails to open new spaces of engagement. Rather we embrace what Peter Sloterdijk (1987 [1983]) calls a ‘kynical’

practice. While the cynic has given up on hope, we think of kynics as the critical activist-cum- theorists that, while not afraid of failing, muster the courage to remain hopeful.

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