Forms of (Collective) Life: The Ontoethics of Inhabitation

Abstract

Is there space for an ontological urban design? Or better still, following the words of Elisabeth Grosz, is there space for an “ontoethics” of the urban? While contributing to the reflection on the role of ethics as a relational practice, this paper is digging back into the notion of forms-of-life in Giorgio Agamben’s political reflections, aiming to foreground a possible ethics of the city. This aims to highlight the implications that ontology and ethics have in constructing a politics of life as they bring differences in how we live, act, what we value and how we produce and design. Particularly, to substantiate such ethics, three key characteristics of an affirmative life are put forward: the capacity to care and to connect; the capacity to repair, endure and hold together; as well as to imagine and experiment alternative life-forces to oppose politics of oppression and capitalist extraction of values.

Keywords:

• forms-of-life
• ontology
• collective life
• ethics

Acknowledgements

Thanks to reviewers who helped with comments to sharpen the argument and Lorens Holms, Cameron McEwan and Suzanne Ewing for the help on editing the paper. Thanks to Jane Rendell, David Roberts and Yael Padan with whom we shared discussion on ethics and architecture at the AHRA conference in 2019 in Dundee.

Notes

1. Batoul Yassine, Howayda Al-Harithy, and Camillo Boano, “‘Refugees Hosting Other Refugees’ in Ouzaii (Lebanon): Endurance and Maintenance of Care,” The Journal of Refugee Studies (2019).

2. The vast literature on differences, nuances of urbanism in the Global south includes: Susan Parnell and Jenny Robinson, “(Re)theorizing Cities from the Global South: Looking Beyond Neoliberalism,” Urban Geography 33, no. 4 (2012): 593; Vanessa Watson, “Seeing from the South: Refocusing Urban Planning on the Globe’s Central Urban Issues,” Urban Studies, 46, no. 11 (2009): 2259; Oren Yiftachel, “Re-engaging Planning Theory? Towards South-Eastern Perspectives,” Planning Theory 5 (2015): 211.

3. This paper was written many months before the COVID-19 crisis and the resultant urban discourse and its effects on the city, bound by an epidemiological vision of space, in which attention is placed on the system of relationships that define our practices of dwelling and space production, rather than on the inhabitant or society as a whole. The paper does not consider this scenario as it would have resulted in a very different reflection although the centrality of collective life is way more important now than ever.

4. Abdoumaliq Simone, Improvised Lives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).

5. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005).

6. Ariela Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso, 2012), 52.

7. Elizabeth Povinelli, “Geontologies of the Otherwise,” Cultural Anthropology, 2014. http://culanth.org/fieldsights/465-geontologies-of-the-otherwise.

8. AbdouMaliq Simone, “Ensembles of the Uninhabitable,” in Smuts Memorial Lecture Series: The Uninhabitable: Afterlives of the Urban South. 2017.

9. Jane Rendell, “Giving an Account of Oneself: Architecturally,” Journal of Visual Cultures, 15, no. 3 (2016): 334.

10. Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matters. A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

11. See Camillo Boano, “From Exclusion to Inhabitation: Response to Gray Benjamin. Citizenship as Barrier and Opportunity for Ancient Greek and Modern Refugees,” Humanities 8, no. 125 (2019): 1; Camillo Boano and Giovanna Astolfo, “Notes around Hospitality as Inhabitation. Engaging with the Politics of Care and Refugees’ Dwelling Practices in the Italian Urban Context,” Migration and Society 3 (2020): 222; Camillo Boano and Giovanna Astolfo, “Inhabitation as More-Then-Dwelling. Notes for a Renewed Grammar,” International Journal of Housing Policy.

12. The word affirmation is used in the direct reference to Esposito and Agamben’s thinking, dependent upon the possibility of life beside the negative capture of powers. As Noys suggests “the contemporary dominance of affirmationism in continental theory can be read as a sign of […] the political ability to disrupt and resist the false transcendental regime of capitalism. It is the affirmation of immanence, particularly as the locus of power and production, which is supposed to deliver the re-establishment of the grandeur of philosophy and the possibility of a new post-Nietzschean ‘great politics’ ” (2010:1). I used the term in the text to reaffirm an articulation of agency, of possibility and potentials as a point of orientation that allows a life to emerge as difference. This is important as with Noys “it challenges the notion of difference as constituting a possible counter-ontology to capital, insisting on the need for a positive point of orientation to truly disrupt the void or absence of determinations at the heart of capitalism” (2010:15) and it can be traced back to Deleuze’s suggestion of continual engagement with the political problems of the present. Negativity is thought as the dismissal of possibility (e.g., marginalization, violence and capitalism) and therefore as the condition for re-thinking agency.

13. Mathew Abbott, “No Life Is Bare, the Ordinary Is Exceptional: Giorgio Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology,” Pharressia 14 (2012): 24.

14. Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Ernesto Viveiros de Castro, The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2012).

15. Mario Blaser, “Ontology and Indigeneity: On the Political Ontology of Heterogeneous Assemblages,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 49.

16. Colin McFarlane, “The City as Assemblage,” Environment and Planning D, 29, no. 4 (2012): 649; Neil Brenner, David Madden, and David Wachsmuth, “Assemblage Urbanism and the Challenges of Critical Urban Theory,” City 15, no. 2 (2011): 225.

17. Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan, and Thomas Nail, “What Is New Materialism?” Angelaki, 24, no. 6 (2019): 111–134.

18. Peg Rawes, “Aesthetic Geometries of Life,” Textual Practice, 33 (2019): 787; Peg Rawes, “Non Human Architectural Ontologies,” in Is There an Object-Oriented Architecture? Grham Harman, ed. J. Bedford (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 111.

19. Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies. Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

20. Arturo Escobar, “Habitability and Design: Radical Interdependencies and the Re-earthing of Cities,” Geoforum, 101 (2019): 132.

21. Ibid.

22. Arturo Escobar, Design for the Pluriverse (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

23. Escobar, “Habitability and Design,” 133.

24. Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal. Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 311.

25. Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions,” Cultural Anthropology. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions

26. Mario Blaser, “Political Ontology: Cultural Studies without ‘Cultures’?” Cultural Studies 23 (2009): 877.

27. Povinelli, “Geontologies of the Otherwise.”

28. Grosz, The Incorporeal, 11.

29. Ibid.

30. Vicky Bell, “An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: ‘The Incorporeal’,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 7–8 (2017): 242.

31. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 90.

32. Gamble, Hanan, and Nail, “What is New Materialism?,” 122.

33. Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, Spacetime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” Derrida Today, 3, no. 2 (2010): 265.

34. Roberto Esposito, “Pensiero Istituente. Tre paradigmi di Ontologia Politica,” in Crisi dell'immanenza. Potere, conflitto, Istituzione. Almanacco di Filosofia e Politica 1, ed. M. Di Pierro and F. Marchesi (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), 23.

35. Ibid., 24.

36. Boano and Astolfo, “Inhabitation as More-Then-Dwelling.”

37. Giorgio Agamben, Abitare e Costruire, 9 July 2019. Available at https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-abitare-e-costruire.

38. Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973).

39. Boano, “From Exclusion to Inhabitation,” 1.

40. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 188.

41. Ibid.

42. Camillo Boano, The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism. Critical Encounters between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2017), 93.

43. Abbott, “No Life Is Bare, the Ordinary Is Exceptional,” 24.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3, 4.

47. Boano, The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism, 163.

48. Agamben, Means Without End, 3, 4.

49. Boano, The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism, 163.

50. Roberto Ciccarelli, “Abitare l’immanenza. Logica, Storia e Politica di un Concetto nel Pensiero Italiano,” in Differenze Italiane. Politica e Filosophia: Mappe e Sconfinamenti, eds. D. Gentile and E. Stimilli (Roma: Derive Approdi, 2015), 151.

51. Boano and Astolfo, “Inhabitation as More-Then-Dwelling.”

52. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017).

53. Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (London: Routledge, 1993).

54. Valeria Graziano and Kim Trogal, “The Politics of Collective Repair: Examining Object-Relations in a Postwork Society,” Cultural Studies 31, no. 15 (2019): 634.

55. Gautam Bahn, “Notes on a Southern Urban Practice,” Environment and Urbanization 3, no. 2 (2019): 639.

56. Thomas Clement Mercier, “Uses of “the Pluriverse”: Cosmos, Interrupted – or the Others of Humanities,” Ostium 15 (2019), 2.

57. Escobar, “Habitability and Design: Radical Interdependencies and the Re-earthing of Cities.”

58. Mercier, “Uses of “the Pluriverse”,” 6.

59. Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places, November 2018. http://www.Placesjournal.org/article/maintenance- and-care/

60. Mercier, “Uses of “the Pluriverse”,” 6.

61. Grosz, The Incorporeal, 109.

62. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 43.

63. Povinelli, “Geontologies of the Otherwise.”

64. Boano and Astolfo, “Inhabitation as More-Then-Dwelling.”

65. Esposito, “Pensiero Istituente,” 24. Translation by author.

66. Elizabeth Grosz and Rebecca Hill, “Onto-Ethics and Difference: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz,” Australian Feminist Law Journal, 43, no. 1 (2017): 9.

67. Ibid., 8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Camillo Boano

Camillo Boano is a Professor of Urban Design and Critical Theory at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL and Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio, Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He is Co-Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. Camillo’s research has centered on the complex encounters between critical theory, radical philosophy and urban design processes, specifically engaging with informal urbanisations, urban collective actions, as well as crisis-generated urbanisms. He is working on a series of interconnected research projects in Latin America, South East Asia and the Middle East on urban infrastructures, habitability and city-wide upgrade. He is author of The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism: Critical Encounters Between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture (2017), and two edited books Urban Geopolitics. Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities (2018) with Jonathan Rokem and Neoliberalism and Urban Development in Latin America: The Case of Santiago (2018) with Francisco Vergara-Perucich and a number of articles in several journals on architecture, design, critical theory, camps and housing.