Every Revolution Has Its Square par Erik Swyngedouw
►http://citiesmcr.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/every-revolution-has-its-square
Un cadre théorique pour penser les mobilisations sociales contemporaines (du Moyen-Orient au Nord) - et qui pose justement la question du passage du moment de la mobilisation à celui du changement social, c’est-à-dire le problème que nous voyons sous nos yeux en ce moment-même.
It is within this aporia between la politique (the Police) and le politique (the political) that urban insurrections can be framed. While much of the State’s attempts to re-order the urban through mobilizing discursively a set of signifiers of inclusiveness (social cohesion, inclusion, emancipation, self-reliance), while reproducing in practice well-worn clichés of urban doom (exclusion, danger, crisis, fear). Attempts to produce ‘cohesive’ cities revolve around choreographing distribution and circulation of activities, things and people such that the police order remains intact. While the state’s statements frame particular trajectories of ‘inclusion’, they shy away from acknowledging division, polemic, dissensus and, above all, from endorsing the assumption of equality on which the democratic political rests. Justice, equality and communality are censored from the script of urban policy prescriptions.
It is precisely this suturing process that suspends political litigation, voicing or staging dissent or asserting polemical equality. These cut through the police order and tentatively open up the spaces of the political again. The urban insurgents have no demands; they do not expect anything from the Police. They have no program, no pronunciations; neither leader nor party. Perhaps they are part of something that is called into being through resonance, viral infection and affiliation, not through hierarchy and structure. They do not demand equality, they stage it and, in doing so, produce, pace Balibar, equa-libertarian spaces. This staging of equality and freedom, the interruption of the normalized geographical order of the sensible, exposes the aristocratic configuration and in-egalitarian ‘wrongs’ of the given, and invariably encounters the Police’s wrath. Such exposition of equa-liberty cannot remain unnoticed: it either succeeds or meets with violence, the terror of the State that – in its violent acting – precisely affirms that some people are not part of The People, that the police order is indeed in-egalitarian.
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Proper politics is thus about enunciating demands that lie beyond the symbolic order of the Police; demands that cannot be symbolized within its frame of reference and, therefore, would necessitate a transformation in and of the Police to permit symbolization to occur. Therefore, the political act is, as Žižek argues, “not simply something that works well within the framework of existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work …. it changes the very parameters of what is considered ‘possible’ in the existing constellation”. This constitutes a proper political sequence; one that can be thought and practiced irrespective of any substantive social theorization. It is the political in itself at work. Such new symbolizations are where a possible re-politicization of public civic space resides. These symbolizations should start from the premise that the presumption of equality on which democracy rests is ‘wronged’ by an oligarchic police order. It emerges where those who are un-counted and unnamed, whose fantasies are only registered as noise, produce their metaphorical and material space. Such claim to the Polis is what links the urban protests in the Middle East and the Global North. It signals the ability of The People to take hold of their future.