The Affective Right to the City Dr Cameron Duff Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow Centre for People, Organisation and Work

Presentation Summary The spatial, affective & material aspects of homelessness. Drawing from recent discussions of the “right to the city”. Who gets to enjoy this right? How is it realised/materialised? Investigating the performative enactment of this right. Drawing from Butler’s “performative theory of assembly”. RTTC is performatively enacted in a ‘space of appearance’. I ground this analysis in ethnographic research conducted among adults experiencing homelessness in Melbourne. Close by recasting the right to the city in affective terms.

The Right to the City Harvey’s reading of Lefebvre’s idea of the “right to the city”. Partially concerned with “what already exists” in cities. Also conveys a right to change the city “after our heart’s desire”. For Harvey, this entails “the right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality”. Concerns the “kinds of social ties, relationships to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire”. Matter of transforming urban life; but what of the “practico- material” realisation of the RTTC? How is this right claimed? Who has this right? How is it exercised? How is it used?

The Right to the City Harvey describes the RTTC as an “empty signifier” whose significance depends on “who gets to fill it with meaning”. This meaning is a function of concomitant struggles over the “definition” and “materialisation” of the RTTC in specific sites. But how is the RTTC ‘materialised’, enacted, expressed? Lefebvre, Harvey, other commentators surprisingly coy on this! Harvey: need to construct a “broad social movement”. Lefebvre: w/class must resist “centres of decision making”. Some sense of goals but little insight into ways & means. Butler’s performative theory of assembly can help.

Lecture series from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 2011. Explores “embodied character of social action & expression”. Interested in “what is made and what is done by certain kinds of bodily enactments” in public. Bodies assembling in public assert a “plural and performative right to appear” a bodily demand. The right to appear grounds the assembly’s political claims. Demands for more just social, political arrangements free of the conditions of precarity.

The Performative Right to Appear Public assemblies neither inherently liberating/democratic, or chaotic, populist, demagogic, fascist. Depends on context. Butler most interested in recent responses to ‘precaritisation’. Struggling for a right to participate in public life, to transform politics, to demand more just social, economic arrangements. These assemblies happen as “bodies in their plurality lay claim to the public, find and reproduce the public through seizing and reconfiguring the matter of material environment” Great description of political effects of public homelessness. Homeless claim to space grounded in a ‘right to appear’

The Performative Right to Appear The right to appear ‘depends on no existing political organisation for its legitimacy’; demands a ‘right to have rights’. The right to appear enacts a: “necessarily morphological moment where the body risks appearance not only in order to speak and act, but to suffer and move as well, to engage other bodies, to negotiate an environment on which one depends, to establish a social organisation for the satisfaction of needs” (87). Right to appear is performatively enacted, ‘called into being’. Same in this respect as RTTC, although Butler much clearer about how the right to appear is actually materialised in place. Right to appear depends on the embodied habitation of place and the particular affordances of the material environment. Lessons here for my interest in how RTTC in materialised.

The Event of the Body in Place

The Event of the Body in Place The homeless body occupying (quasi) public space expresses the force of that body’s “persisting, acting and laying claim to a public sphere from which is has been largely abandoned” (59). In laying claim to public space, precarious bodies like the homeless make a political claim for the ongoing security of “infrastructural and environmental conditions necessary for their living and acting” (65). This claim, and the right to appear that it depends on, must be performatively enacted, called into being by the fact of its appearance. Performative assertion of their right to appear is a critical step by which RTTC is materialised. A practical expression of resistance to precarity. Critical step in the establishment of novel forms of social, affective and material organisation whereby the needs of the homeless may be ventilated and pursued as homeless bodies assemble in public.

Material Environments, Supports for Action

Material Environments and the Support for Action The right to appear always presupposes a space of appearance. Body appearing in public activates this space of affective resonances Appearance involves “seizing and reconfiguring the matter of material environments” (71) putting this space to new uses, expressions. Streets, parks, sidewalks always “part of the action” of appearance, “they themselves act when they become part of the action” (71) All public assemblies are “supported and facilitated by nonhuman objects and their particular capacities for agency” (72). Material environments, nonhuman objects are performatively active in the materialisation of the right to appear, just as they mediate RTTC. Spaces and objects extend what the homeless body can do in public just as they help identify, demarcate, delimit spaces of homeless body.

The Affective Right to the City Butler’s work suggests RTTC is performatively enacted as bodies appear in public and make use of built environment. RTTC is enacted, asserted in the fact of body’s occupation of space & the ways the body uses, transforms, affects space. Suggests RTTC is an affective capacity of bodies/spaces. This is the affective right to the city; a right to affect the city. RTTC is made, materialised as an affective project as bodies affect and are affected by their appearance in public and their manipulations, utilisations of space, objects as supports Grounds for novel affective politics of homelessness.

A Novel Politics of Homelessness Butler’s work suggests right to appear always gives way to a social, collective response to the conditions of precarity. The body on the street persists, but also seeks to find the conditions of its own preservation. Invariably, these conditions are social ones, and demand a radical reorganisation of social life for those who experience their existence as imperilled. How do homeless bodies find conditions of their preservation? Happens in formal & informal modes of collective organisation for the satisfaction of social, affective, material needs. This politics involves an embodied, affective, performative struggle for place, for acceptance, belonging, connection. Butler calls this the problem of cohabitation which must involve practices of ethical recognition, support, connection. Multiplying capacities to affect and be affected?

Thanks for listening…questions, comments? cameron.duff@rmit.edu.au