Abstract
Several authors have very usefully reviewed Purcell’s book to highlight his very effective contribution on thinking of approaches to counter the hegemony of neo-liberal capitalism and suggest a new direction to the left. There are some key points that other scholars have highlighted and this reviewer will not repeat in any detail: ‘… democracy as a transcendent goal, a process always in a state of becoming, not an end point’ 1 and ‘… Purcell rejects assumptions that democracy is something to be achieved; and that once achieved, people should act within prescribed parameters and if differences between these thinkers (from Deleuze and Guattari to Nietzsche, Gramsci, Hardt and Negri and Ranchiere) are sometime elided, the plural contested nature of what they took democracy to be, with all it’s contradictions and tensions, speak to the very nature of the issues at stake’. 2
In this essay, I will focus on how and why this book is centrally relevant to re-conceptualizing city politics in India. The ‘Down-Deep Delight of Democracy’ is central to re-conceptualizing progressive political space as being necessarily fluid, uncertain and perhaps even messy. Most central, and perhaps not as much considered in Purcell’s work, is a need to take more seriously spaces materially constructed by a popular ‘unsettling’ of property in land and economy and purposeful ‘institutional ambiguity’ (Ho, 2001; Haila, 2007). This additional element does not distract from his argument but strengthens it by providing a substantive material context. It also may make this book relevant to think about political space more generally in Mainland China and quite likely other southern locations. It may also be a way to pose questions of the kind of political spaces that Purcell envisages in ‘northern’ cities: If property in land and economy remain settled (distinct tenure types) and institutional controls over these remain stringently demarcated; related to this, an acceptance by progressive positions of this ‘stability’ and faith in the ‘grid’, the ‘survey’, and thus, property (Blomley, 2003). Purcell’s arguments, drawing on Lefebvre, on ‘transduction’ (p. 23) are then a deeply materialized horizon to be moved towards.
Let us start with India to consider two hugely significant situations – the first being highly visible and shaping national political consciousness and decidedly ‘urban’: The last 4 years has witnessed an extensive mass politics – a surge to claim a non-party political space. Located mostly within all the major metro areas but also small town settings like Udupi in Coastal South India, this public outpouring has been on issues of ‘corruption’. It also shapes the recent rise of the ‘Aam Admi Party’ (AAP) that very recently took power of the Delhi government. Significantly, the AAP seek to portray such political upsurge as ‘anarchic’. It has chosen which many criticize to focus on symbolic events. The springboard of ‘occupy wall street’ that Purcell mobilizes is relevant here in a general way. India’s left but also other mainstream political parties have been confused by this recent political upsurge and forced to review their ground-level mobilization. This is particular in urban metros where the party-based ideas of political mobilization seem unsettled.
Such popular upsurge is not surprising, if we look beyond the recent visible protest and move beyond a ‘party politics’ perspective. This shift in vantage point would allow us to consider political consciousness as linked to two inter-related situations: First, from the crises spurred by the decline of the elected municipal councils (or village councils on the outlying areas of metro cities confronting rapid extensions) as political space. This has its geneses in the politics of land and claims to basic infrastructure. This has been a political space evolved particularly since the late 1960s, which mobilized elected councils, but especially to politicize local administration. Part of this politics is set within the logic of party politics but especially outside it to subvert co-option by party elites. A key element is that these political spaces are embedded in institutional ambiguity via their multiplicity of jurisdictions over land. This, in effect, disrupts the programmatic and policy agendas of high-end administrators now funded and backed by bi- and multi-lateral funding, and cajoled into ‘vision documents’ by international consultant groups.
The point here is that land for mega infrastructure projects or urban renewal is not just made unviable but that the fluid counter-cartographic ‘occupancy’ politics helps to materialize it in different terrains: Of mostly small plots based sub-divisions that house inter-connected again mostly small firm trade and manufacturing economies (Benjamin, 2014). One realm of this is built by subverting singular property forms in land via diverse land tenures that radically rework real estate surpluses. The economy here is not just one that provides most jobs but is constituted by re-engineering to disrupt any possibility of patents or copyright, where again disrupting singular property forms. This is not a politics of singular leaderships but as Purcell locates it, ‘a social order of many souls’ (p. 30). There is then, also a logic that binds what Purcell highlights as ‘autogestion’: In land, the political consciousness imbibed over often decades of settling territory incrementally, each roof extension being not just a physical act but a consequence of working the system; and again, not just individually, through the world of small contractors, touts, agents and street level lawyers (Benjamin, 2005) And in economy, a scape where a product is co-produced of component re-engineered. Perhaps Purcell’s use of Lefebvre’s differential and abstract space (p. 42) is simplistic in the ‘southern’ context: The political substance of the spaces created from unsettling property is not dependent, and more important have their logics posed in oppositional ways to large capital. The revolution is here, and in effect, so is the horizon. My rejection of a necessarily hierarchical order, implicit in Purcell’s work, seems central to open up his own political argument. For instance, Purcell’s position on the oppositional forces of the state seeking to ‘striate’ space out of visionary ‘smooth’ ones (p. 48) becomes complicated or even redundant, if we consider that there are contesting parts of the state, and the meta-capital logics of flows are eventful and disrupted by it’s property on the ground. Simon Springer in his review of Purcell’s book (Dialogues in Human Geography, 2014) reinforces agency, but these ‘corrections’ do not weaken Purcell’s larger arguments. In fact, perhaps these raise another issue: Of northern/western cities whose property in land and economy seem so settled, and planning frames so hegemonic, that the vision of the ‘horizon’ as Purcell usefully puts it, remains out there rather than being ‘active’ and here and now.
To think about the ‘counter-revolutions’ to these spaces, it’s useful to return to the newly created AAP mentioned before. Its main support base, that seeks to extend/capture/discipline a wider political realm, comes in large part from elite residents, corporate groups, the police, high-level bureaucrats and bollywood actors. Most can hardly be expected to have prior connections to the ground-level materialities of land and economy as mentioned above. The AAP’s main proponent Arvind Kejriwal’s rise to fame is backed by middle-class fears of a mass politics of the poor and has a history of an anti-politics located in the language of ‘political reform and corruption’ and propagated by the World Bank of ‘good governance’. This is a language that is rejected by popular groups, when theirs is a politics, following much of Purcell’s mobilization especially of Rancière, of a harder edge of social justice materialized and politicized within administrative realms policed under the guise of policy reforms, planning and good governance.
Purcell’s work then reveals a useful critique of the AAP in the Indian context, in what can be termed to be a bureaucratized popular process that treats political space as spectacle rather than substance located in claims to territory and basic infrastructure and services. This is also an entry to locate Purcell’s work as a critique of some parts of the progressive left in urban India. Indian cities experience harsh ‘neo-liberal’ reforms under the programmatic combine of India’s largest ever urban renewal fund. Seeking to discipline local elected councils, land issues are located quite centrally in these logics by way of new processes of mapping and techno-management: Globally well-connected non-governmental organizations in Bombay (now officially Mumbai) seek geographic information system-based clear property titles to interlace their micro-credit programs. Bangalore also has Google, one of the five sponsors of such efforts to map the poor, and leads with other southern states practices of ‘e-governance’ and digitized land titles. In all these, law meets its disciplining in ‘participatory’ planning. Progressive groups, lawyers, planners and academics share a consensus with these efforts: They see themselves as ‘expert’ to promote ‘counter mapping’ – but an approach that operates within the same logic and at times shares institutional platforms to promote plans, the surveys, the grid and the law with regressive results. Two examples illustrate this point: Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad, major South Indian cities, have efforts of ‘mapping ecologies’ on the assumption that by an enforcement of clear titles (in effect property), rights in systems of wetlands, creeks, beaches, these will open political space. However, in these contested territories, such actions recreate via a cartographic logic, a grid to settle property that perpetuates the language of ‘encroachers’. The result is a police-policy apparatus to evict the poor. The eviction is now turned into a project of ‘resettlement’ a consensus to further absurdity. The other illustration, in Bangalore, Bombay (Mumbai), Chennai and Delhi, is of well-meaning lawyers, planners and activists. While corporate groups like the KPMG and USAid have successfully lobbied for ‘hawking-vending’ zones, these groups pressure public authorities to implement these by cutting out what they call as a vote bank politics. Not surprisingly, the street traders have an uneasy relationship, at times violent opposed those seeking to organize them. Popular politics for this mis-placed progressive actions, and here is where Purcell’s work is central along with Elden’s (2013, op.cit.) argument, is a ‘temporary’ unsettlement to be returned to a disciplined ‘party’/social movement organized form led by their expert knowledge. In effect, political surge posed as chaotic anarchism requires a programmatic ‘reboot’ to be then taken over. Such progressive politics is a politics of old that has been successfully co-opted since the late 1980s under the regime of clearly enforceable rights. The importance of Purcell’s work in the context of cities of the Global South lies in its very significant conceptual contribution to reframing urban politics shaped by the continuing unsettlement and occupancy of property of both land and property. It’s relevant for India cities, perhaps urbans of China and other southern locations, and perhaps a way to think about the closure and political possibilities of the northern ones too.