Masters of the universe

Planetarity is having a moment. While scholars and commentators of various stripes usher in the Anthropocene, a new collective subject is being reaffirmed: the universal, species-level “we” (see Chakrabarty, 2009). The once hip “globalization” now seems tragically passé, evoking familiar diagrams of commodity chains and stodgy discussion of the intricacies of trade policy. If globalization suggested connected, place-based nodes in a network with variegated degrees of influence resting atop a globe that serves as mere backdrop (think: World Cities), planetarity refuses the nature–culture binary, asserting a deep relationality between the social and a more-than-ecological ¹ natural world. “The globe,” writes Spivak, “is on our computer. No one lives there.” But to be a planetary subject is to be reminded that alterity, or difference, is fundamental to us, living as we do on a planet that is part of “another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan” (Spivak, 2003: 72).

It is easy enough to see why the planet has supplanted the globe in the present conjuncture. The idea of erecting walls and refashioning borders to disrupt flows of goods and people appears to have profound political power at the moment, at least in the West. (Think: Trump and Brexit). Yet there’s a growing, if begrudging, recognition that protectionism and xenophobia can’t stave off drought and sea level rise. ² Thus planetarity suggests an appreciation of the inescapability of the shared (if wildly unevenly) fact of nature’s metabolism in the Capitalocene (Moore, 2015). Or as Chakrabarty (2009) puts it, a recognition of the fact that “we” are no longer merely biological agents, but are now geological agents, at once capable and guilty of permanently transforming the geochemistry of the planet and imprinting ourselves on the earth’s permanent record.

At first blush, the planetary urbanization thesis, popularized by Brenner and Schmid (2014) and Merrifield (2013), might seem to have little to do with postcolonial or geological invocations of planetarity, other than a shared vocabulary of the cosmic zeitgeist. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s observation about urbanization and capitalism (see Buckley and Strauss), Brenner and Schmid forcefully argue against “methodological cityism” or the idea that the political boundaries of cities contain the processes that characterize “the urban.” Instead, they argue for a relational conception of urbanization that not only exceeds the city proper, but renders the totality of the planet intimately and inescapably connected. Their language is evocative of the Anthropocene when they write: “In every region of the globe, erstwhile ‘wilderness’ spaces are being transformed and degraded through the cumulative socio-ecological consequences of unfettered worldwide urbanization. In this way, the world’s oceans, alpine regions, the equatorial rainforests, major deserts, the arctic and polar zones and even the earth’s atmosphere itself, are increasingly interconnected with the rhythms of planetary urbanization at every scale, from the local to the global” (Brenner and Schmid, 2014: 162).

This emergent reality necessitates an analytical vantage point up to the task of comprehending the phenomenon at the scale of its expression – a planetary phenomenon demands a planetary gaze. As Buckley and Strauss (2016) point out, the rejection of methodological cityism requires the construction of the urban as an abstraction. Indeed, abstraction itself is a necessary part of theory building and the stuff of critique, lest we fall into a trap Roy (2011) describes convincingly in her critique of a strand of urban theory she calls “slumdog urbanism.” Studies in this vein fetishize and valorize the lived experience of the urban subaltern as though their existence and persistence is political, without endeavoring to make knowledge about the relationships between and across scales and geographies; that is, without abstraction. Yet the necessity of abstraction to theory building requires no analogous claim regarding the authority of that abstraction for explaining the social totality, as Gibson-Graham (1996) make clear. We can say much with abstractions – like class, gender, and race – without making claims to their relationship to the “final instance.” Indeed, feminist have argued for and executed such an approach for decades. Katz, for example, argues for “minor theory” or theories that refuse mastery in order to create “renegade cartographies at once situated, fluid and incorporative” (Katz, 1996: 495).

The planetary urbanization thesis has taken the opposite tack. Instead of offering a new cut through the social totality that might learn from or be in conversation with other “counter-topographies,” (Katz, 2001), the fact of planetary urbanization offers “generalized urbanization” as a new totalizing analytic, one that can contain and metabolize the social totality, supplanting capitalism’s explanatory power. Even though the rationale for the approach is borne in part out of a perceived need to confront the multiplicity of forms that urbanization is taking in the present conjuncture, Brenner and Schmid attempt to reassemble and contain this multiplicity under a rescaled concept of “generalized urbanization” (2015: 155). Merrifield, for his part, offers up the urban as a “single, indivisible substance.”

The desire to explain the world in its totality – to master the universe – is hard to resist, but is a conceit in which only some can luxuriate. To experience being rendered invisible by “scopic regimes” that imagine themselves complete is to intuitively understand the limits of such a project, as Katz describes in her own experiences of reading theory (1996). The embodied relationship to the limits of mastery is an epistemological lesson feminists and post-colonial scholars have taken pains to illustrate, theorize, and crucially politicize. In this respect, it is jarring indeed to encounter a “new epistemology of the urban” that absorbs concepts of relationality and hybridity while jettisoning the political-epistemological corollary that there is no “innocent” or objective place from which to know.

Feminist scholars have worked this ground at length and constructively, arguing for minor theories, counter-topographies (Katz, 1996, 2001), situated knowledge (Haraway, 1990), and oppositional consciousness (Sandoval, 2000). Central to this work has been a refusal to participate in the creation of knowledge that contributes to the erasure and marginalization of subjects, subjectivities, and politics that can’t be seen in the totalized, unitary or generalized explanatory abstractions. Some have even turned to the concept of the “planetary” to elaborate this proposition. Spivak, for example, insists that “if we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents … alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away” (73). Both Spivak and Haraway write of “responsibility” (or as Haraway, 2012 puts it “response-ability”) as an ethical/epistemological posture that intentionally creates discursive space for the possibility of Others (i.e., other ways of knowing, other ways of being, other true things). In the tradition of feminist thought and postcolonial scholarship, Katz, Spivak, Haraway, and Roy are attempting to dwell with the always constitutive nature of the “outside” and the impossibility of an inclusive, transparent, political “we.” Planetary urbanization can be read as having an inverse impulse, to fetishize the “urban we,” and in so doing, collapsing always-present alterity into a falsely coherent subject.

Ranciere’s conception of the political is also useful for understanding the political implications of celestial knowing and the negation of the “outside,” as well as for considering whether and how planetary urbanization gets us closer to a contemporary politics of urbanization. Ranciere (1999) argues that social formations are best understood as an order of “the police” that necessarily takes shape in relation to a constitutive outside, or what he calls the “part of those that have no part.” While this has been the subject of much controversy (see Beveridge and Koch, 2017; Derickson, 2017; McCarthy, 2013), the political, for Rancière, is very specifically and narrowly constituted by ephemeral moments in which “the part of those that have no part” produce a rupture in the order of the police, rendering themselves visible, seeable, and temporarily knowable. This is a substantively different conception of “the political” than that which has characterized much contemporary scholarship – feminist and otherwise – which has focused on mundane acts of survival, perseverance, and persistence as an important site of politics. ³ Indeed, Ranciere’s privileging of “rupture” can read as a muscular obsession with the performance of antagonism. And while these critiques of Ranciere’s conception (and others, see Derickson and MacKinnon, 2015) are worth considering, it is worthwhile to dwell with Ranciere’s conception of politics in relation to the question of planetary urbanization.

Crucially, Rancière’s conception of politics requires a conjunctural analysis. There are many different forms the order of the police can take: Politics is that which challenges the totality that the order of the police purports to encompass. Rancière forces us to reckon with the always incomplete conception of the social totality and the way in which it necessarily produces an outside. Moreover, his conception of politics resists the conflation between being “right-thinking” and being political. In my reading of Rancière, a Marxist critique of political economy is equally as capable of producing a constitutive outside as any other framework. As I have argued elsewhere, channeling Third World feminism and feminist epistemology (Derickson and MacKinnon, 2015), Rancière’s conception of politics should prompt us to be concerned with how we go about knowing and whether or not our knowing sets the stage for the possibility of rupture. ⁴ In other words, do we know in ways that make politics, in Rancière’s terms, more or less possible?

From this perspective, it seems clear that planetary urbanization forecloses more than it proliferates new channels for the subaltern, marginalized, or part of those that have no part to know much of anything at all. While I share their interest in and concern with the relational and hybrid nature of social relations and their interconnectedness, and a concomitant rejection of the kind of dualisms that urban/non-urban that concern those taking up the planetary urbanization thesis, if these findings are to be effectively political, there are important implications for the production of knowledge. Indeed, as Andrew Sayer argues, merely identifying binaries and rejecting binaries doesn’t “amount to an argument for or against anything, though it can play upon the guilt of men” (Sayer, 2000: 56). I don’t know if Rancière has ever been accused of using guilt in lieu of analysis, but his work forces us to consider how creating insides, with logics and grammars of their own, necessarily creates outsides, about which we are ignorant by definition. Such analysis needs to extend to the production of knowledge itself. As I have argued in depth elsewhere (Derickson and MacKinnon, 2015; Derickson, 2017), the planetary urbanization thesis is firmly rooted in the geographies of European urbanization, both with respect to the history and trajectories of capitalist urbanization it draws on, as well as the thinkers whose ideas propel it. Perhaps more importantly, however, it is proffered as totalizing analytical frame; there is “no longer any outside to the urban world” (Brenner and Schmid, 2014: 750). Read alongside Merrifield’s claim that the urban is a “single indivisible substance” (2013: 6) and Lefebvre’s claim to the “complete urbanization of society” planetary urbanization appears to offer a singular and totalizing theory of social relations with a singular, coherent subject.

At the risk of coming off like a broken record, feminist approaches might offer a useful way forward. The best feminist analysis directs us to think conjuncturally, like planetary urbanization, but also dialectically, between everyday lived experience and the genealogical (Povinelli, 2011) social totality. Feminist work on the dialectic of the everyday and the social formation, like Melissa Wright’s (2006) work on maquiladoras and Marion Werner’s (2016) work on trade, gender and the Caribbean shows us that we cannot understand why capital flows in the ways that it does without understanding the causal role that difference plays in producing labor markets and the factory floor. In a similar vein, Buckley (2014) shows that we cannot, for example, understand urbanization in Dubai if we don’t understand how axes of difference shape and condition the possibilities under which urbanization happens. In addition to providing a better account of labor, trade, and urbanization, these accounts privilege an inductive approach to apprehending the social totality, one that is deeply attuned to the way the political subjects (and social difference) are made or rendered unseeable through the praxis of knowledge production.

The cry from the streets in the United States that Black Lives Matter is one of the more powerful recent exemplifications of Rancière’s conception of the political. The phrase and its associated praxis has rendered seeable and sayable a re-imagined Black political subject, one that has been the constitutive outside of white supremacy and the racial state (Bonds and Inwood, 2016). The plaintive and simple claim to matter, ⁵ alongside its predictable refusal that “all lives matter” (see, for example Rudy Guiliani) ⁶ pierces the persistent and original lie of American liberalism and invites a reckoning with systemic racism in the US. This political rupture has had the consequential effect of bringing to light the practice of American municipalities using their police forces as revenue raising battalions. Analyses of the neoliberalization of urban governance failed to recognize that with which most African Americans in Ferguson, MO and elsewhere were intimately familiar: the city was extracting money from poor Black residents to fund basic city functions. While we might be well prepared to trace the genealogy of the implementation of these practices and policies, to, in Clyde Woods’ (2002) words, conduct autopsies, Ferguson suggests to me that we need to be more urgently concerned with reflecting on what we’re actually doing here: what our knowledge is for, what it does and doesn’t do, and who we recognize as “knowers”. In this sense, the fact that has been pointed out by myself and others (Catterall, 2014; Derickson, 2017), that work in the planetary urbanization tradition is shockingly reliant on the work of European male thinkers writing and thinking from the Global North becomes relevant, especially in light of its claims to offering a totalizing vision.

Planetary urbanization has thus picked up on some key feminist concepts, but it hasn’t fully grappled with what I take to be the real questions that feminism poses for scholarship: What is knowledge for, what projects does it advance, what logics render it possible, what grammars are reified in its production? And how are various knowledges complicit in warding off, rather than enabling, the kinds of rupture that Rancière calls for – when the part of those that have no part can render themselves seeable and sayable? The limitations of the epistemological move of creating a totalizing abstraction and a singular urban subject on the basis of European writers and thinkers become clear when read against the feminist tradition. If “grammar” refers here to the background assumptions, logics, and relationships that allow us to make sense of related concepts, planetary urbanization can be understood to rely on grammars of Eurocentrism.

The God trick (Haraway, 1990) is a fantasy whether one seeks to get outside the natural world, the social world, capitalism or white supremacy. Contra Andrew Sayer, attention to the way that the grammars and logics of knowledge production is not about making the truth tellers feel guilty – it is to attempt to wrangle them into confronting the limitations of their own possible knowings and in so doing, enhancing their empirical and theoretical rigor. We understand municipal governance and neoliberalization better when we are positioned to hear the cries of the streets and poised to respond epistemologically to the kinds of ruptures the Movement for Black Lives represents. Feminist interventions are not only cultivating better politics, they are also about producing better accounts. The planetary urbanization theses invert the feminist intervention, coopting feminist conceptions of relationality and hybridity while evacuating them of their political – and, crucially, their epistemological – force.