Raqs Media Collective

Now here are certain terms that come in the process between the two polar ends: acquisition is a material possession addition, annexing, appropriation, attachment, grab, increase, increment, merger, takeover. Lets not take these two poles as a binary, but two different moments (temporalities) in the life of the city, tensely located within the polar field...extreme positions of the oscillation.

We then have an Incremental incorporation and a Planned aquisition.

At present we see totalising moments of the Planned Acquisition, a moment of acceleration in the "capture" or "seizure" of the incremental.
We have incremental appropriation and incorporation on one polar end; and on the other polar end, a plan, a design and acquisition, within mounting tension.

It is here we have to introduce the problematics of legibility.

James Scott argues that the drive to legibility produced by modern states destroys the form of local knolwedges. That which needs a longer durational translation to know is made legible by changing the code of capture. (enforced stability of names).

This brings the "rule by documents".
"Legal seizure" is a concept that gestures to these moments.

Kaplan makes a further interesting argument:
The technologies of legibility actually produce further illegibility. They do not do away with illegibility. It is not just a conceptual problem but has a material basis in the technologies itself.

Her example was of writing. The most poignant one was one of the children's (playing at/learning to write a) signature... crossing over after writing the name.
Her example needs to be seen in two ways: the technologies produce illegibility (thus courses on handwriting etc) but there is also a desire for illegibility and is activated in the interaction with the technology (children think that a signature should be illegible, that is what makes it a signature. But think here of the cctv camera giving high contrast images - the technology generates an illegible image)

Now we come to the zone of high tension, "indeterminacy and illegibility", a blurring and breakdown of the compact.

Here the totalising tendency of the plans gathers speed and suspends in the air the inner growth of the incremental city. There is an suspension and an indistinction. "The police narrative gets suspend in the mid air over the population" (sort of quoting Ranciere...).

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What are the tools of legibility: Maps, excel sheets, network diagrams, land deeds (identity documents come later)

Map: The aerial view makes the horizontal legible and traceable, but the vertical gets blurred. It makes the vertical illegible.

The excel sheet: divides people in forms of categories (mostly around productivity and property.)

(Not to forget the production of separation. Or more precisely, the marking of possible separation between work and home, man and animal, childhood and work...)

The "interests and competition" diagrams: Here certain negotiated and unstable social arrangement and conflicts are broken down to nodes and players, stakeholders and interests... A neutralisation of assymetries is achieved.
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The technologies of legibility are mobilised with speed and consequential uncertainty. A new terrain of legibility is - constantly - created and documented and stabilised. And some 'subjects' get made through "encounters".

However, another layer of illegibility gathers around this - those other 80%, those people who fall 'outside' the encounter and cannot be made into subjects. The discard - the antonym of incremental, augment.

This is the illegibilty that will come to haunt spaces... The legibility determined by logic of property can go that far but it is hard to go beyond that. The state of exception is then invoked and it moves into the spaces of illegibility where property fails.

Now. The violence is in that zone.

Solomon Benjamin talks about a Hydra kind of formation (from 'below', from the lived life of the city) confronting the unifocal attack of the plan. He argues against "resistance" as a form to engage with the acquisition of the incremental. This, he says, actually makes the "incremental" vulnerable. Resistance best describes the acts of groups that are formed but in using only resistance as a category, the inchoate, indeterminate, goalless acts that the incremental city survives on getsburied.

The hydra was for Benjamin an attempt to give the oppositional force of the incremental city an image, a metaphor. An inchoate practice, moving between legibility and illegibility, visibility and opaqueness ... But forceful, and able to create and oppose the acquisition.

It is an image of the oppositional force of the edge of the zone.

How do we unpack thanatopolitics (acclamatory politics, politics of death, politics of glory)?

(Notes started in Lund, 17th January.)