The politics of urban assemblages Ignacio Faras In this short response I would like to address some of the criticisms

made by Neil Brenner, David Madden and David Wachsmuth (2011) to the program of urban studies presented in the volume Urban Assemblages: How Actor Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (Faras & Bender, 2009). I will do this by addressing some crucial differences between this approach and the project of critical urban studies, which, as Brenner et al. noted, is not thoroughly discussed in the aforementioned volume. I think there are four fundamental matters to be discussed: the style of cognitive engagement (inquiries or critique), the definitions of the object of study (cities or capitalism), the underlying conceptions of the social (assemblages or structures), and the envisaged political projects (democratization or revolution). Obviously these pairs of concepts dont represent clear-cut distinctions. They do, however, signalize differences of emphasis making up the politics of urban assemblagesi. 1. Inquiries One productive starting point for this debate is the question McFarlane (2011) posed at the beginning of his contribution, namely, what kind of contribution can assemblage thinking make to critical urbanism? This is a timely and important question, since it attempts to bring together theoretical models and understandings of the city developed in the wake of Marxian critical thinking with new approaches to cities and urban studies developed since the 1990s in dialogue with contemporary developments in social theory (Amin & Thrift, 2002; Thrift, 1993). Accordingly, one is tempted to pose the opposite question: what can critical urbanism offer to assemblage urbanism? In either case, Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth (2011) have convincingly argued that if we stick to assemblage thinking in its Deleuzian inspiration (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), or to the version of it we find in Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005b), ie., as an ontological argument, this has only little if anything in common with the Marxian-inspired project of critical urbanism. I cant but agree with this conclusion. Assemblage thinking is indeed at odds with an understanding of critique based on a notion of power as a resource a ruling class possesses and of knowledge as an ideological construct that needs to be unveiled (see Brenner, 2009). This is certainly not the project for which assemblage theories, such as actor-network theory (ANT), can be mobilized, as they build on a radically relational understanding of power-knowledge, which messes up the object and standpoint of critiqueii. Indeed, as long as critique remains being made in a theoretical mode (Brenner 2009), it runs the risk of silencing the heterogeneity of human and nonhuman actors involved in the object of critique, and of remaining innocuous. This is not the kind of engagement with the world that ANT and other assemblage perspectives stand for. They promote a more open and explorative form of engagement with the world; in a word, inquiry, not critique. ANTs strong commitment to inquiry has been, however, subject to harsh accusations. The central charge is that inquiring into the assemblage of the urban involves falling into naive objectivism or, even worst, into the trap of ideology. The accusation of naivity is indeed double: ANT would not just simply accept and describe reality as it appears without revealing the hidden forces, contradictions and interests structuring it (Brenner, et al., 2011), but it would stick to a naive positivism insisting upon the possibility of a value-free inquiry (Madden, 2010). This double naivity would bring with it a high price: ANT would become ideological. Like all traditions of urban studies, starting with the Chicago School, and probably all traditions of thought that do not stick to a Marxian-Marcusian version of critique,

ANT would be guilty of affirming the current conditions of cities (Brenner 2009: 198), of implicitly justifying all sort of inequalities and injustices. Before moving to the issue of inquiry, Id like to shortly respond to these accusations. First of all, it is difficult to imagine what would count as a more critical perspective than one that suggests that urban phenomena are objective because they are constructed, and insists that the larger and more complex the assemblages they involve are, the more objective (cf. Latour, 2003), or that not just urban subjects perform and group themselves situationally, but also urban objects, natures, built environments and bodies are enacted in fluid multiple ways depending on the sociotechnical networks and sets of practices they are involved in (cf. Mol, 2002), or that urban studies do not just deliver better or worst theories, descriptions or analyses of city life, but are actively involved in the production of the city (cf. Callon, 1998). Second, and against this background, it becomes evident that stressing the underpinning logics, strategies and contradictions of capitalist urbanization does not really call into question the unity, coherence or objectivity of the real; on the contrary, it accentuates it. Consequently, if there is a naive objectivism, this should be rather predicated of those perspectives that dont engage in an ontological inquiry about the city, that assume having a privileged access to the real facts, structures and contradictions of urban life, and that believe that by unveiling these hidden structures, the strength of the powerful will be combated. Finally, the charges against assemblage urbanism reveal that the only alternative to critique that critical urban studies seem to imagine is the affirmation, that is, the colluded assertion of reality. Inquiry, as a process that eventually involves a problematization of the real, is not even discerned here as a possibility. Inquiry involves an open and explorative engagement with the urban. This is not simply a matter of epistemological options based on whether one assumes that urban facts speak for themselves or require animation through theoretical assumptions and interpretive schemata (Brenner, et al., 2011, p. 20). This is rather a methodological requirement arising from the object we are dealing with: the city. Just as some objects require theoretically-based modelling or certain types of causal inference, the most common phenomena, configurations and problems we deal with in urban studies require open and explorative inquiry for, in most cases, it is practically impossible to know in advance the definitive list of human and nonhuman actors involved, affected or concerned, the scope of their networks or their actual relationships. Urban facts, objects and processes (probably even more than techno-scientific ones), are always highly uncertain, controversial, and conflictive. Indeed, as soon as we start scratching the surface, we encounter emergent groups, multiple lay-expert knowledge forms, programs of action, valuation regimes, fluid topologies. Thus, instead of reducing urban situations and controversies to points of collision (see endnote 2), inquiring into the urban involves recognizing that we, urban students, often confront radically uncertain situations in which we dont know what we are looking for until we find it (cf. Stark, 2009). Inquiry thus involves a commitment to the empirical. This is the leading force. The conceptual languages we mobilize are certainly crucial, for they define what counts as empirical, and should therefore be subordinated to actual inquiries. ANT is indeed extremely helpful for engaging with the empirical, for instead of a general theory of the social, based on fixed concepts, it offers a theory about how to conduct inquiries and how to elaborate concepts. Three methodological principles summarize its commitment to the empirical: follow the actors, forget the contexts, describe, dont explain, and do not switch conceptual repertoires when you describe. These are the actual drivers of ANT and afterANT studies, not their constantly evolving conceptual languages and distinctions. Just recall some of the many names this approach has received: sociology of translation, sociology of

mediation, symmetrical anthropology, flat ontology, performativity program, sociology of associations, hybrid semiotics or, as discussed here, assemblage theory. One last point: inquiry is not at odds with critique, but only with a version of critique that is committed to theory rather than to the empirical. A suggestive example of this is the work of Foucault, which does not rely on any theories about hidden structures, intentions, repressions or oppressions. Instead Foucault proceeds by means of positive descriptions of the enunciates and assemblages mobilized to sustain historical power/knowledge regimes (Deleuze, 1988; Foucault, 1977, 2001). Thus, Foucault opens up the possibility of a fully empirical and positive critique. Apart from this, and this is a further point, inquiry, just as critique, is a transformative activity that starts with a problematization of the real (see Foucault and Dewey on this, in Rabinow, 2011), in which not only urban students engage. Inquiry is also what concerned groups, civic society, urban movements do; inquiry is what underlies the possibility of an active democratic urban public. In this context, follow the actors does not simply mean stick to your object of study, but rather follow their inquiries. 2. Cities A further fundamental discrepancy between the two approaches, which has largely gone unnoticed in this debate so far, has to do with the object of inquiry, with the phenomenon we are trying to accurately describe, make sense of and analyse. I shall suggest that in the case of critical urban studies, the focus on cities and space is only contingent. What is ultimately at stake in those discussions is the organization of contemporary capitalism. Now, if there is one thing we can agree upon with critical urban scholars, it is that the new work in urban studies revolving around assemblage perspectives is not primarily about capitalism. Urban life is obviously tightly entangled with different economic processes, but at stake in this approach are different questions: what do cities consist of, what is urban life made of, how do cities organize collective life? But what does it mean to say that the focus on cities of critical urban studies is contingent? As is well known, the field of critical urban studies as we know it stems from Lefebvres genial answer which even got him out of the French Communist party (Merrifield, 2000) to the classic Marxian question of how advanced capitalism is organised. Different from the orthodox Castells (1974), who would only accept focusing on how industrial production is reorganized in cities, but not the urban as a coherent object of study, Lefebvre (2003[1970]) suggested that capitalism was undergoing an urban revolution, in the sense that the production of (urban) space, and not industrial production, was becoming the main process determining the advancement and functioning of capitalism. The question we need to pose then is not what is critical about critical urbanism, but how committed to studying urbanism it really is. From its own Marxian origin, it becomes clear that the focus on the city is not necessary. As decades of highly sophisticated research on the spatial fix of capitalism (Harvey, 1989), global cities (Sassen, 1991), multiscalar production of space (Brenner, 1998) have shown, the city is one important site, but not the only one. Brenner (2004a, 2004b), for example, has shown the central role played by state spaces in structuring multiple scales of capitalist accumulation to favour the urban scale and actually only some cities. The key role of cities is then a historical contingency that could have been and could also become otherwise. Indeed, the most recent studies on the contemporary organisation of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2006; Carrier & Miller, 1998; Thrift, 2005), the exponential growth of the digital economy or the radical processes of financialization make one wonder whether almost half a century after Lefebvres reflections the urban is still the best place for elaborating a critique of capitalism. This is a worrying issue, for if capitalism is, as it seems, reorganizing itself, then

why should critical urban scholars continue to concentrate on the city? Wouldnt it even be more in the spirit of Lefebvre to challenge the establishment and turn to, say, the digital or even algorithmic fix of capitalism rather than sticking to the city? The central question we need to pose is whether we study cities as an instance of something else, of capitalism in this case, or we engage in an inquiry into the city and urbanization as a positive, actual and self-entitled process. It is for the second case that the notion of urban assemblages has been proposed. But the conceptual repertoire we mobilize is, for the moment, not important. The crucial move is putting this highly complex, multiple and evolving entity, the city, at the core of our inquiries. Certainly, empirical research on cities deals with a wide variety of urban issues: gentrification, tourism, social movements, urban planning, built environment, urban natures, transport systems, urban mobilities, real estate markets, spatial segregation, social exclusion, migration, etc. And, indeed, many of these require detailed attention to the role capitalist political economies play. But the underlying question we need to keep in mind is how through each of these objects, processes and phenomena the city and urban life are literally being reconstructed and remade, how urban materials, technologies and different urban life forms are composed and hold together in practice. Thus, by looking at cities we can learn more about capitalism as a form of life, although not as a global abstract logic imposing its forms into local spaces, but as a concrete process assuming multiple forms even within a city. The city confronts us indeed with fundamental facts of human existence: the transactional relation with the environment (Dewey, 1988 [1925]), dwelling as world-making (Heidegger, 1993), the coming together of heterogeneous life forms (Ingold, 2000). Such a broad definition of the fundamental issues is necessary to avoid narrow delimitations of the field at the expense of other disciplines such as urban history or urban anthropology. We need to address the city as an ecological process. Hereby, it is necessary to move beyond the human ecology of the Chicago School to account for the role of mineral, biological, animal, human entities and processes in the construction of the city (Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw, 2006). The relevance of such an extended ecology becomes particularly evident when we take a historical perspective. DeLandas (2000) interpretation of the evolution of urban forms as marked by processes of mineralization first, sand and stone, then coal and cast iron offers a suggestive example of the city as a metabolic process of matter and energy. Now, as Mumford has observed, the reason why the invention of the city as a socionatural machine has remained invisible to archaeologists is the complete lack of remnants of the main substance of which it was composed, namely, human bodies. This reveals a crucial aspect. An ecological perspective on the city does not just involve symmetrically accounting for the multiple intermingling of human and nonhuman entities, but also, as Ingold (2000) has suggested, requires us to restrain form the common building perspective that assumes that worlds are made before they are lived in, that acts of dwelling are preceded by acts of worldmaking (179). A dwelling perspective instead involves focusing on the dynamic and transactional unit formed by an organism-in-its-environment (we could be quoting Dewey here). Thus, instead of explaining how the socionatural environment of the city is historically constructed, the focus is rather on the multiple ways of dwelling in the city, in the understanding that these involve multiple ways of constructing the city. 3. Assemblages

It is only at this point, after having established the differences regarding the styles of cognitive engagement and the issues at stake, that it becomes possible to explain some of the advantages of the notion of urban assemblages. It should be clear though that we are not discussing a one-concept research program as the label assemblage urbanism suggests. Also the clever observation that the encounter between critical and assemblage urbanism depends on whether we deploy the notion of assemblage as an empirical description, a methodological tool or an ontological perspective (Brenner et al. 2011) gives this impression. But this is not the case. What is at stake is rather an understanding of the real, shared in its core with many different thought and conceptual traditions, such as the old American and the new French pragmatism, the governmental approach, feminist technoscience studies, the new ecological anthropology, and so on. Perhaps the major advantage of introducing the concept of assemblage into the field of urban studies (cf. Bender, 2009; Faras, 2009b; McCann & Ward, 2011; McFarlane, 2011) is that it allows us to move away from a notion of the city as a whole to a notion of the city as multiplicity, from the study of the urban environment to the study of multiple urban assemblages. The concept is thus coined to make sense of processes of construction by which cities, urban phenomena and urban life are constituted. Yet the constructivism underlying the notion of urban assemblages does not reflect an epistemological problem, but is an ontological proposition. It is based on the general assumption that the world is not all in, that it is in the making and that a finished or complete edition of it within which to dwell does not exist. As in Benders title The Unfinished City (2007), the basic notion is that there is no city as a whole, but a multiplicity of processes assembling the city in different ways. The most obvious consequence of this ontology is that it involves accounting for all actual entities involved in such processes of construction, whether human or nonhuman, their interactions and transformations. The most important consequence perhaps is that the notion of assemblage involves no outside, no exteriority. Neither are these systems that can be understood in terms of their difference with an environment (Parsons, Luhmann) nor events that could be seen as contingent actualization of larger sociocultural patterns or structures (Lvi-Strauss). Assemblages are self-contained processes of heterogeneous associations calling for a positive description of their becoming, not external explanations. Indeed, one of the major critiques to the assemblage notion is that it leaves unaddressed important explanatory questions regarding the broader (global, national and regional) structural contexts within which actants are situated and operate (Brenner et al. 2011: XXX). But what exactly are these structural contexts? One such context which critical urbanists put great emphasis on is space. This is an illuminating case, for critical urbanism also understands space as produced by means of specific sets of practices, strategies and circulations. Harvey (1989), Smith (1992) and others have shown that, for example, the circulation of capital is one such key process producing spaces and scales. Yet what is unique to critical urbanism is the understanding that space production and scalar structuration crystallize in spatial or scalar fixes, constraining spatial practices, constituting power relationships and underpinning social life (Brenner, 2001). Spatial and scalar fixes, it is argued, underlie the practices of agents and determine their agency capacities. This underlying implies a separation between agents and such fixes which is not just analytical, but also real and historical. This is what it is meant by saying that spatial scales are historical products. In this context, the key contribution of an assemblage perspective is not insisting upon the idea that there are no scales!, as Thrift (cf. Faras, 2009a) or Smith (2009) do, but rather redefining what we should understand by products. To think about space and scale as products that somehow become independent from the practices and processes originating them this is what crystallization and structuration means might lead to fall into the trap of fetichism, in the sense of taking for

ontologically autonomous something which is rather a quality of actual networks of practices. The notion of urban assemblages instead allows us to think about spatial formations as products that must be constantly defended, held together, maintained, and repaired. Rather than an underlying structure or a structural context, space thus appears as a relational effect. And this, again, makes it necessary to change the focus from the space of the city to the multiple urban assemblages in which urban topologies are made and remade. A further advantage of the notion of urban assemblages is that it provides a framework to study the constitution and distribution of agency capacities. As is well known, the assemblage concept is the inaccurate translation of the French agencement; a notion used by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) that combines the notions of arrangement and agency. It offers a methodological tool not just to account for the intermingling of heterogeneous agencies, but also to facilitate the study of the variety of forms of action these forces are capable of generating. Moreover, because agencements create differentiated agents and positions [], it is possible to trace relationships of domination as they are dynamically established (Caliskan & Callon, 2010, pp. 8-9). This definition clarifies some misunderstandings; for example, that urban assemblages, by promoting a fluid, flat and symmetrical ontology, would end up silencing actual asymmetries, inequalities, injustices, exclusions, hierarchies, domination, and so on. On the contrary, we should say. Precisely because asymmetry is not presumed and explained structurally or contextually, the study of urban assemblages involves unveiling the actual practices, processes, sociomaterial orderings, reproducing asymmetries in the distribution of resources, of power and of agency capacities, opening up black-boxed arrangements and ways in which actors, things, or processes are made present and made absent (see also Law, 2004). Indeed, one of the origins of ANT is precisely as a sociology of power (Law, 1991); a sociology concerned with the question of distribution, not simply of resources, but of agency (Callon & Latour, 1981), and the question of difference, suffering, and silence; a sociology that understands distribution and difference as concrete phenomena assembled in heterogeneous networks, not as abstract structures. Therefore, studying urban assemblages involves accounting for their ontological politics (Mol, 1999) or, as Latour (2004b) would put it, their cosmopolitical dimension. By revealing who and what is taken into account and who or what is not, and how forms of life are composed, subordinated or excluded, the study of urban assemblages seeks to establish a foundation of empirical knowledge available to the public for a democratic politics. It does not aim to offer a structural analysis or theoretical critique. It is intended to support a participatory politics with a richer and more detailed knowledge of the real, including the ways and forms of power shaping city life. 4. Democratization Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth (2011) are correct in criticizing the volume Urban Assemblages for not elaborating on the political consequences of mobilizing this concept to inquiry into the urban. The conclusion though that an assemblage perspective is apolitical or politically ineffective, not to speak of the misplaced accusation of deception with a patina of radical politics (Madden, 2010), is simply wrong. The political project envisaged by ANT is certainly radical, but not in the sense critical urban scholars imagine radicalism to be. Indeed, instead of awaiting for revolutionary theory to chart the path and for revolutionary practice to accomplish such a transformation, as literally stated in Harveys praised words (Brenner, Marcuse, & Mayer, 2010, p. 117), the political project this perspective involves is connected with a redefinition of democracy towards participatory practices that might eventually

recognize and represent humans and nonhumans as political actors (Callon, Lascoumes, & Barthe, 2009; Latour, 2004a; Stengers, 2005). One possible inspiration for this political project is to be found in the Progressive Era and its experimentation with participatory politics. The main goal of political activity here was not the realization of a particular set of values, but the constitution of a democratic public. According to Amin and Thrift (2002), the implication of this project is, quite in accordance with Lefebvre, that the right to the city should be understood primarily as the universal right of access to participation. It is not about an imagined or perfect state shared by all, but about the right to citizenship for all, the right to shape and influence (142). This requires breaking with a number of assumptions of Western democracy. As Lippman (1997 [1922]) pointed out long time ago, representative democracy is built on the assumption that all individuals are administrators and legislators by nature; omnicompetent humans naturally capable of recognizing where private utility and public good are, and of prioritizing between the two. Building on this diagnosis and on Deweys ideal of participatory and deliberative democracy, the right to the city involves building capabilities, creating active publics capable of engaging in the production of knowledge and transformative engagement with the world and public matters. This is what in this context the formula cities for the people, not for profit (Brenner, et al., 2010) means. But, as STS studies have shown, and the notion of urban assemblages certainly makes evident, a major further step towards a democratization of democracy is introducing objects, natures and nonhumans into (urban) politics (Hennion, 2007; Latour, 2005a; Marres, 2007; Stengers, 2010). Urban democratic publics in the plural do not continuously exist in an expecting position. They are rather constituted around specific urban situations, controversies and matters-of-concern. These issues of urban politics are indeed nothing but complex assemblages of objects, natures, technologies, individuals. Urban politics is thus not about subjects, subjectivities or discourses, but about things, complex entangled objects, sociomaterial interminglings. This is what Latour (2005a) calls a Dingpolitik: the understanding that urban politics can no longer be understood as conflict between human or, better, class interests, but involves conflicts over different cosmograms, this is, ways of articulating the elements of the world and their mutual connections (Latour, 2004b; Tresch, 2007). The consequence of this object-oriented politics is that new modes of representations are necessary, as well as new democratic spaces in which complex, controversial and conflictive urban assemblages, instead of human interests alone, can be represented in all their heterogeneity. The politics of urban assemblages is thus attached to new forms of collective experimentation and learning in which multiple forms of knowledge are brought together in new ways, as in the case of hybrid forums (Callon, et al., 2009). As Dewey (1988 [1927]) recognized it very early, the greatest challenge for the constitution of a democratic public is the role of information and knowledge about controversial and highly entangled object-assemblages of politics. Dewey delivered a profound critique to the so-called abstract knowledge or pure science, the glorification of which involves a shirking of responsibility. The true purity of knowledge, argued Dewey instead, is achieved not when things are found out, but when they are also known, and known means here that they are shared, socially accessible, discussable, open. This involves a symmetrization of knowledge positions between experts and laypersons, the redefinition of their identities, valuation criteria and languages (Callon, et al., 2009), and a revalorisation of the figure of the public intellectual. As Dewey envisaged it, intellectuals and scholars in a democracy should ordinarily take their questions from the issues concerning emergent publics and, even though they might draw upon rigorous, but

esoteric disciplinary knowledges, they must rephrase the acquired knowledge in ways that return it to everyday life and ordinary language for democratic discussion, in the understanding that issues are always open to further discussion and revision. The emphasis put here on publics for a democratic politics follows directly from the positions stressed in this paper. Firstly, empirical inquiry, not theoretical critique, is necessary for the constitution and strengthening of urban democratic publics. Secondly, actual urban situations define the space of intervention for an urban democratic public, not capitalism at large. And, finally, urban democratic participation is based on a sense that cities are assembled, not structured; that the city is a universe in which there is real uncertainty and contingency, a world which is not all in, and never will be, a world which in some respect is incomplete and in the making, and which in these respects may be made this way or that according as men [sic] judge, prize, love, and labor (Dewey, 1918, p. 44).

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I am in great debt to Thomas Bender and Manuel Tironi for generous and inspiring suggestions to the first rather inchoate version of this short response. I also would like to thank Antoine Hennion, Endre Dnyi and Isaac Marrero for their precise comments and critiques. Neil Brenner deserves a special thank for his continuous interest in a debate of these issues.

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In order to explicate reflexively its own conditions of emergence (Brenner et al. 2011: XX), critical urban theory requires deciphering the immanent contradictions of capitalist urbanization; a process that, following Harvey, posits the urban as a point of collision between the mobilizations of the deprived, the discontented and the dispossessed, on the one side, and on the other, ruling class strategies to instrumentalize, control and colonize social and natural resources (Brenner et al. 2010: 182). The relational approach of ANT has devastating consequences for this kind of argument. Instead of accepting such clear-cut divisions of society in fixed and bounded groups of individuals as an incontrovertible starting point, ANT focuses on the multiple and even contradictory processes of grouping humans and nonhumans together, paying special attention to how individuals are often made to fit into pre-given categories developed by marketing experts, bank systems, critical theorists, and so on (Latour 2005b: 27ff).