Framing the Meeting: Rupturing the Anthro-obscene! The Political Promises of Planetary & Uneven Urban Ecologies

Transcription

1 Framing and preliminary position paper for the meeting. Version 2. More information here: Framing the Meeting: Rupturing the Anthro-obscene! The Political Promises of Planetary & Uneven Urban Ecologies Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw Palo Alto/Cape Town/Stockholm and Manchester March, June and July 2015 Suggested citation of this dcoument in footnote. 1 Abstract. We outline a first framing of a conference and planned edited book: Rupturing the Anthro-Obscene! Political Promises of Planetary & Uneven Urban Ecologies. The book and event (in Stockholm Sept 2015) is an intervention into the field of urban political ecology (UPE) in particular, and critical theory in general. We argue that while UPE has grown since the seminal article on cyborg urbanisation in 1996 (Swyngedouw, 1996), and asserted itself as a key mode of critical enquiry in a world with deepening socio-ecological crises, we have less to offer in terms of what to do; in terms of thinking with activists about new political imaginaries and practices of socio-ecological change. In search of political performative theory, we here start developing three tectonic shifts that the field and our speakers need to address: 1. Planetary and uneven urbanisation; 2. Multipolar world order (including the postcolonial critique of knowledge production); and 3. Pervasive ecological change (that destroys any fantasy of separating nature and culture ). We link these shifts to an argument of the obscene as a playful but maybe necessary aesthetic position to start thinking about equality and freedom anew. Introduction Democracy, in the sense of the power of the people, the power of those who have no special entitlement to exercise power, is the very basis of what makes politics thinkable. /Jacques Rancière (2011, p. 79) The seminar and the planned edited book Rupturing the Anthro-obscene will mark twenty years after Erik Swyngedouw s seminal article from 1996 on The City As a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization, and ten years after the edited volume In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw, 2006) that signalled the maturation of the field. Urban 1 Suggested citation for this document: Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw (2015) Framing: Rupturing the Anthroobscene! The Political Promises of Planetary & Uneven Urban Ecologies, Conference at Teater Reflex September organized by KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Stockholm. Position Paper Version 2. Can be downloaded as PDF at:

2 Political Ecology has grown rapidly since 1996, asserted itself as a key mode of critical enquiry in a world with accelerating planetary urbanization intersected with a fast-forwarding capitalism and deepening socioecological crises. Hundreds of doctoral students have chosen to mobilise this field as their intellectual home. With a wide range of rich case-studies and sophisticated theorisations, scholars from a diversity of epistemological perspectives, but with a shared commitments to articulating critical theoretical analysis with a passion for emancipatory transformation, have contributed to lively debates and inspired new generations of political and social activists. However, the field is also in crisis, and it shares this with large parts of critical and radical theory today. As Swyngedouw has provocatively argued elsewhere, substantive critical urban (and social) theory is not any longer (if it ever was) politically performative in a world of post-political neoliberal consensus and the immanence of new urban politicizing movements. As scholars and students, we have indeed improved our ability to trace sociomaterial flows and quasi-objects like water, waste and food; we have explored how financial capital operates across scales; how economic crises unravel social cohesion and wreck ecological havoc; and just how unequal and unsustainable the world has become. However, we have less to offer in terms of what to do, in terms of thinking with radical political activists about new political imaginaries, forms of political organizing, and practices of socio-ecological change, which are urgently needed across and attuned to different conditions in the world. This meeting aims to revolve around this task, i.e. what emancipatory politics could or even should be about in our times. There is a need to explore the return of the political under the aegis of equality and freedom and do so in a context of proliferating urban political events and insurgencies that may open new avenues for thinking through and strategizing around the possibilitites for an emancipatory transformation in the context of the emergencies unleashed by combined and uneven planetary urbanization. Our seminar and public events in Stockholm September 2015, and the subsequent publication in 2016, align with the field s important tradition of critical and engaged scholarship. However, it also aims to take stock of recent developments in critical theory and local-to-global real-world changes to renew and rethink the field s theoretical and methodological underpinnings. In Stockholm, we are gathering leading scholars who will each respond to the our position paper. Each will respond from the horizon of their own theoretical, practical and empirical interests. Some of these scholars will certainly have been at the centre of the development of UPE, whereas others will be invited based on how their work has been inspirational for advancing a politically performative political ecology. Below we present our preliminary notes for framing the seminar. This revolves around three tectonic shifts that we deem the field will need to face, and three tentative cross sections. The tectonic shits are: 1) Planetary and uneven urbanisation; 2) Emergence of a multipolar world order; and 3) Pervasive socio-ecological change. The cross sections are: i) the tension between unifying or pluralizing theory-making in and through uneven urbanizations; ii) how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism; and, finally and central to our seminar, iii) the conundrum of the political performativity of theory. Together these points will help to frame the seminar and the publication. Three tectonic shifts and the crisis of critical theory Welcome to the Anthropocene! This has become in recent years a popular catch-phrase to inform us that we are now in a new geological era, one in which humans are co-producers of the deep geological time that hitherto had slowly grinded away irrespective of humans dabbling with the earth s surface. Noble Prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term about a decade ago as the successor name of the Holocene.

3 Since the beginning of industrialization, so the Anthropocenic argument goes, humans increasing interactions with their physical conditions of existence has resulted in a qualitative shift in the geo-climatic acting of the earth system. Acidification of oceans, biodiversity transformations, gene displacements and recombinations, climate change, big infrastructures effecting the earth s geodetic dynamics, resulted in knotting together natural and social processes such that humans have become active agents in co-shaping earth s deep geological time. It affirms that humans and nature are co-produced and that the particular historical epoch that goes under the name of capitalism forged this mutual determination. The Anthropocene is indeed just another name for insisting on Nature s death. Nature framed as the imaginary externally conditioning sphere for human existence has come to an end. This cannot be unmade, however hard we try. It is from the position of the radical entanglement of the social and the natural that the environmental conundrum ought to be approached. Such perspectives move the gaze from thinking through a politics of the enviromment to politicizing the environment. This extends the terrain of the political to domains hitherto left to the mechanics of Nature. The non-human world becomes enrolled in a process of politicization. And that is precisely what needs to be fully endorsed. To ground participants political imaginaries and speculations in a material, historical and diverse world, we place the seminar and the planned volume in relation to three tectonic shifts : planetary urbanisation, the emergence and consolidation of a multi-polar world order, and pervasive biophysical changes from climate change to epigenetics. These shifts are ongoing, interrelated, and arguably already effect the field of urban political ecology in various ways including its objects of study, its theories, and its practical and activist goals to nurture ega-libertarian transformations. These shifts have unfolded during the past 20 years, and they will continue to work themselves through our societies and environments in the coming decades. These are shifts of great magnitude and uncertainty of where they take us, which only underlines the importance of grounded political imaginations that are adequate to the present condition. The shifts are truly transformative as they change not only those material flows that constitute a key dimension of urbanisation and any mode of production, be that capitalist, eco-socialist, or small-scale alternative economies, but also its politics and furthermore the politics of knowledge production and the categories by which we think critically about urbanisation and theories of emancipatory change. The seminar proposes these tectonic shifts to provoke reflection beyond known realities and entrenched pratices of thought and action. The seminar and the book aims to speak into a space of what Andy Merrifield (2013: 116) refers to as practicality and unbridled imagination 2 and what Edgar Pieterse (2014) 3 has named theoretical searching a speculative space which can aid to build a vocabulary to sharpen our thinking of what is important, how to study, how to struggle, and how to construct alternative political imaginaries. 1. Planetary and uneven urbanisation Lefebvre s argument has become our reality, i.e. that to understand capitalism we should not only focus on the city (la ville), but have to consider urban society, and ultimately planetary urbanisation, as its key driving force. This was of course always part of UPE as it departed from Lefebvre and other marxist scholars. We are aiming at taking this further. What new empirical analyses has been proposed, what new theoretical constructs, or re-interpretations of already existing perspectives do we have to make sense of this planetary dimension of urbanisation? Although urbanisation and its manifestations in differentially shaped and formed cities, was always about the ability to extract material resources beyond the city, this has arguably reached a new scale and intensity. Thus, while we critically question how this scale of the planetary has been 2 Merrifield (2013) means that these characteristics is something that the Left can learn from José Arcadio Buendia, a character from Gárcia Marquez novel Cien Anos de Solitud. 3 Edgar Pieterse in his GIPCA Great Texts lecture in Cape Town, Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts, 30 April

4 constructed to serve certain knowledge claims, we acknowledge a new dimension of reality which it points towards and which needs to be fully explored of how it operates discursively, ideologically, materially and in terms of political promises. What does this new scale of urbanisation provoke in terms of theory, empirical and comparative work and in practice, in activism and resistance? Importantly, our interest in the planetary is counterbalanced with emphasizing the uneven in urbanisation. This brings home that any radical response need to acknowledge everday experience and how to link them to wider processes across cultural and regional differences. What are the political promises that planetary and uneven urbanization bring? How can those be formulated in relation to our seminar s leitmotif of advancing a politically performative political ecology. 2. Multipolar world order The world is going through quite extraordinary geopolitical changes in the international (capitalist) order with China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Brazil (re-)asserting themselves. What does this mean in relation to how urbanisation unfolds, for critique and struggle, and for theory-making? This is a theme that has not been explicitly tackled in the UPE literature, but which seems to be knocking on the door. What were and are the legacies of critical theory-making from different parts of the world, from Europe, North and Latin America, Africa and Asia, and what can they offer in terms of fresh insights and thoughts on how to grasp such shifts and its effects on urbanisation, sub-urbanization, cities and struggles. Swyngedouw s early work on flexible production, and similar studies that took into account different sites and cities to explain a broader process, could be a potential starting point to explicitly think this through. But also postcolonial governmentality, which tunes into the particularties of capitalism under colonialism and its imprints today (Kooy and Bakker 2008). At the same time we need studies that let these theorizations hit the ground and understand the forms of resistances that are practiced, and how they are and might be interconnected across diverse settings and world regions not just as social or socio-ecological movements, but as politically performative movements that experiment with the production of real alternatives. 4 This latter needs emphasizing as it sits at the core of our seminar: how is the local also worldly and connected, while simultaneously being politically performative across cultural and regional differences? The tectonic shift of a new multipolar world order also brings home another dimension of urban political ecology. While postcolonial critique has been an integral part of urban studies over the last twenty years, it has recently grown in importance, for instance with key events at central geography conferences such as at AAG in 2013, but also books, special issues and a range of publications (Roy 2009; Robinson 2011; Parnell and Oldfield 2014; Pieterse and Simone 2013). Recently Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver (2014) published the article Provincializing Urban Political Ecology in Antipode that explicitly aims to build on such postcolonial urbanism literature to expand UPE to widen the horizon of experiences and intellectual traditions of urbanisation. While the inspiration for UPE has primarily been from critical geography (Harvey 1996; Swyngedouw 1996, 2004; Kaika 2005; Heynen et al. 2006), an expansion and pluralization could include thinking with STS, material semiotics, queer theory, decoloniality, and combinations of these. 5 We note before moving on that the emergence of a new world order is not evolutionary and smooth, but fraught with contestations and conflicts in which millions of people and a wide range of different environments get caught up and re-worked. What do these contestations and contradictions hold for emancipatory change and political movements? 4 As examples of attempts that links everyday environmentalism and urbanism with broader socioecological processes, see for example Loftus (2012); or drawing on Fanon, see Pithouse (2008) and Gibson (2012). 5 The Situated UPE Collective with Ernstson, Silver and Lawhon have during 2014 explored Pluralizing UPE through three special sessions in London, Lexington and Pretoria. See here:

5 3. Pervasive ecological change and its knowledge politics The dynamic biophysical stability under which capitalism and modern societies have developed is in a state of profound change. The most frequent symbolisation of this is of course climate change and global warming, articulated through big science institutions like the IPCC and the IGBP. Another example of pervasive, but perhaps less talked about ecological change is the incredible speed and scale by which new chemical compounds are invented by corporate firms and scientific reserach and circulated in our medicines, food and through our bodies. Alongside this, the IT sector s rise, the constant humming of millions of computers and servers to power the world wide web produces electronic waste shuffled around the world, re-worked by often the least protected, while polluting environments, animals and human bodies? How do these gargantuan changes during the last 50 years relate to UPE and political imaginaries of change? What takes us beyond doom and gloom (which rarely helps in terms of moving towards a horizon beyond the present) towards emancipatory imaginaries and politically performative alternatives? Furthermore, these major biophysical changes are also caught up in knowledge politics and who and what registers are used to make sense of these changes. While, for example, climate change can serve as a signifier for emancipatory mobilisation, it has also firmly been placed within a technology of governing that has depoliticized its effects, from naïve calls for earth stewardship to technocratic visions of earth system governance and the push for green and resilient cities. Indeed, a string of research centres have foregrounded environmental and green concerns, while often de-centring calls for equality, freedom from structural oppression and questions about where power is located in society. This calls for exploring a series of urgent questions about academic research across the social, environmental and natural sciences, alongside the humanities. Perhaps and not least one could clarify this question in relation to ecologists and biologists: What new knowledge production projects can (re-)align the knowledge practices of ecologists and biologists, nudge them from the technocratic to the emancipatory? 6 More generally, what are the knowledge projects that can weld an understanding of ecological changes with politically performative projects to politicize the environment? The anthro-obscene: speaking to our political crisis In bringing these tectonic shifts in conversation with a search for radical political possibilities, we suggest that the seminar works through the figure of the anthro-obscene in an explicit effort to both attest to and undermine the performativity of the utterly depoliticized concept of the Anthropocene. The obscene and vulgar signifies that which is cast aside and placed outside reason. For the reasonable, the obscene is ugly and degenerated and can be pushed off as noise. The Barbarians lived north of the river across which the Romans never conquered and were therefore never placed under Roman law. To cry for and search intellectually for a politics of equality and freedom from oppression today is by many seen as without hope and in vane. We counter the gloomy and pessimistic by using the anthro-obscene to inaugurate a subversive aesthetics that can allow for the formatting of imaginaries of equality and freedom from oppression. Indeed, the birth pains of the politically sanitized term the Anthropocene raise urgently the specter of the obligation to consider what sort of environment we wish to live in, how to produce it, and with what consequences. It calls for a political project that fully endorses human/non-human entanglements and takes responsibility for their nurturing. We know that the environmental catastrophe is already here, that geoclimatic changes and other environmental transformations are already such that they are inimical to the continuation of life in some places and for some people, as well as for non-humans, and this will undoubtedly get worse as climate change intensifies. Nature as the externally conditioning frame for human life an 6 This question is however valid for a broad range of disciplinary knowledge practice. More generally, these questions have been part of political ecology and UPE for some time, not least through the early publications by evoloutionary biologists and Marxists, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin (1985).

6 externalization that permitted the social sciences and humanities to condescendingly leave the matter of Nature to their natural science colleagues has come to an end. The Anthropocenic (or anthro-obscenic) inauguration of a socio-physical historical nature, forces a profound reconsideration and re-scripting of the matter of Nature in political terms. The central question, therefore, is not any longer about bringing environmental issues into the domain of politics as has been the case until now but rather about how to bring the political into the environment. Political philosopher Alain Badiou has recently suggested that the growing consensual concern with nature and the environment should be thought as a contemporary form of opium for the people. This seems, at first sight, not only a scandalous statement, one that conflates ecology with religion in a perverse twisting of Marx s original statement, it also flies in the face of evidence that politics matters environmentally. Ulrich Beck (2010: 263) concurs with this: In the name of indisputable facts portraying a bleak future for humanity, green politics has succeeded in depoliticizing political passions to the point of leaving citizens nothing but gloomy asceticism, a terror of violating nature and an indifference towards the modernization of modernity. In our opening remark and position paper to the seminar, we wish to take Badiou s statement seriously and consider how exactly in the present configuration the elevation of environmental concerns to the status of global humanitarian cause operates as a gigantic operation in the depoliticization of subjects. Furthermore, by drawing on radical democratic thought and Ranciére s distinction between politics and the political the moment when the established distribution of functions, names, obligations and expertise is disturbed and made visible we wich to explore tactics and strategies of the political as a radical emancipatory socio-ecological process. By doing this we hope to clarify what we have here referred to as politically performative theories and the challenges and possibilites this brings to the field of UPE and beyond. But also how emancipatory politics can be formulated that is both local and interconnected across diverse settings and world regions, and that moves towards politically performative movements that experiment with the production of real alternatives. To conclude, we hope that the figure of the anthro-obsence can rupture an established order of how global-tolocal problems, ecological crises and urbanization should be talked about, framed and dealt with. We hope this can be exploited by our participants and provoke reflection beyond reality-as-we-know-it and habits of thought and action, to take our seminar and public event into unbridled imagination and theoretical searching. We are looking to realize that speculative space, which can contribute to building a vocabulary to sharpen our thinking of what is of importance, how to research, how to struggle, and how to participate in constructing alternative political imaginaries of equality for all and freedom from oppression. Afterword: Task for participants From each of you twelve that we invite, we expect that you firstly join us in Stockholm, and secondly that you submit four to six weeks before our meeting a response to our position paper (the opening remark that we have started here). This response will be the first draft of your chapter/article for the edited volume/special issue. You will be given at least 30 minutes to present your paper in Stockholm. Your response should of course be based on your own experience and theoretical strenghts. It does not need to tackle all of the tectonic shifts, but should be aligned to at least one or two of them in explicit terms. We hope it is clear that we like to challenge the field of UPE and take it further (and beyond academia), which is why we have invited a broad field of critical thinkers. Your response could be a possibility to pick up threads from the twenty years of UPE that have been less exploited, or it could be an opportunity to speak back to this field, critique it as a way to take it further. One central departure point of UPE, its emphasis on materiality (including non-humans and infrastructures) and how the material/ecological is also social, cultural and political, is something that we like you to engage explicitly with, which of course can take various forms.

7 Our seminar aims to nurture new intellectual energies and political passions for urban political ecology and cognate fields. As we have emphasized above, you need to explicitly contribute towards discussions around politically performative theories. We will elaborate more on this in our position paper, but we hope you have a good grasp of what we are after. This feeds into the main questions of what emancipatory politics could or even should be about in our times. Or put differently, how emancipatory politics can be formulated that is both local and interconnected across diverse settings and world regions, and which is not merely embodied in social or socio-ecological movements, but as politically performative movements that experiment with the production of real alternatives. /Henrik Ernstson & Erik Swyngedouw Henrik Ernstson is a reserach fellow at KTH with a current postdoc at Stanford University ( ). He is also honorary visiting fellow at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Erik Swyngedouw is professor at the University of Manchester. The KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory is a newly started environmental studies centre at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. For more information, please visit the website The event is funded by a reserach project lead by Henrik Ernstson and funded by Swedish Formas (Ref ). See also: Clarifying political performative theory (added in July to this framing document) Your response should be based on your own experience and theoretical strenghts. It does not need to tackle all of the tectonic shifts, but should be aligned to at least one or two of them in explicit terms. We hope it is clear that we like to challenge the field of UPE and take it further (and beyond academia), which is why we have invited a broad field of critical thinkers. Your response could be a possibility to pick up threads from the twenty years of UPE that have been less exploited, or it could be an opportunity to speak back to this field, critique it as a way to take it further. One central departure point of UPE, its emphasis on materiality (including non-humans and infrastructures) and how the material/ecological is also social, cultural and political, is something that we like you to engage explicitly with, which of course can take various forms. Our seminar aims to nurture new intellectual energies and political passions for urban political ecology and cognate fields. As we have emphasized, you need to explicitly contribute towards discussions around politically performative theories. This feeds into the main questions of what emancipatory politics could or even should be about in our times. Or put differently, how emancipatory politics can be formulated that is both local and interconnected across diverse settings and world regions, and which is not merely embodied in social or socioecological movements, but as politically performative movements that experiment with the production of real alternatives. First clarification 7 In asking us to clarify what we mean with the repeated invocation of the political performativity of theory or a politically perfromative political ecology, Malini was right on track for the kind of discussion we are looking for. She wrote that she was not entirely sure what we mean by this: How exactly are you using the word "performative"? Do you, for instance, expect us to engage with strands of theory that see politics as "performative" (e.g. Ranciere, Judith Butler)? Or are you using "performative" in the broadest sense to mean "salient" or "effective" or "disruptive" or "forceful? I find it difficult to chew on this idea without concrete examples of what political practices or theoretical interventions you see as "performative. 7 All quotes here is from Malini Ranganathan s to Henrik and Erik in early Aug 2015.

8 As organisers of the event and editors of the book we are not wedding you as contributors to any particular theoretical strand. We wrote a broad framing as we are addressing urban political ecologists/critical geographers on the one hand, and political philosophers on the other. We refer to the notion of political performativity in the double sense that you read in it. First, there is a long lineage of critical theory (many strands of for example, Marxism, post-structuralism, feminism, post-colonial theory, etc.) that in a variety of ways often in dispute with one another attempt to demonstrate the political relevance of their particular mode of enquiry and analysis. In doing so, they assume or argue that theory has a political effect, power, or resonance. Much of Marxism is the simplest example of this, whereby Marx s theoretical class analysis presumably charts the terrain for who the privileged political agent is (the proletariat), its mode of political organization (the socialist or communist party) and its objective (taking the state to change the relations of production). Other critical theories have, albeit often in dialogue with or in direct opposition to Marxism, charted trajectories for emancipatory change. In a nutshell, the shared perspective of such perspectives is that substantive critical theorization is believed to be a necessary and crucial part of formulating and engaging in practical emancipatory politics. However, and second, the strand of political philosophers that we have been engaging with Badiou, Rancière, Mouffe, among others question more or less radically this privileged position of theory, while interlocutors like Žižek would go as far as to argue that mainstream critical theory is part of the process of depoliticization itself. These post-foundational theorists situate the political in the event, rupture or process of political acting. Theory can consequently say something about the political as immanence, but these interlocutors deny the performative effect of substantive theorization. Or in other words, emancipatory acting emerges and unfolds in the act. We of course do not in any way wish to diminish the role of thought in the politicizing process; we are more concerned about what needs to be thought today in light of both the above critique of mainstream critical theory and post-foundational political thought. Our own reading of the literature lies with Rancière in terms of the political, which then guides our thinking on what could be deemed to be performative in the sense of having an effect, not on theory, but on the configuration of the political. Succinctly put, we are interested to hear from you, based on your own theoretical grounding and empirical engagements of who is allowed to speak; whose sound and utterances are formatted as voice, whereas others are not seen nor heard, and not counted as belonging to the political community. Here the figure of equality or egaliberté, equality/liberty, is the founding moment/rupture of the political order, or the polis. It is those that have no part that can (re-)institute the political community based on speaking for all in the name of equality. This might sound like high-flying words and empty signifiers but the challenge we are offering is to use your understanding and fill these with ideas of what they could mean. (And this in the context of the four tectonic shifts that we described in the framing document; the idea being to use our Stockholm meeting and book project to push or foreground new concerns, political imaginaries, questions, and modes of enquiry for urban political ecology). We contend that such engagements relate in important ways to the condition we are currently in, a process marked by the deepening of a post-political depoliticized techno-managerial apparatus of neoliberal governance on the one hand and a proliferation of outbursts of radical political discontent on the other. We also contend that the central political questions that we are faced with today (with respect to the economy, the environment, migration, etc ) revolves around this paradoxical co-existence of consensual techno-managerial governance of the distribution of the sensible and the variegated attempts, through political acting, of constructing a new common sense, a different distribution of the sensible, articulated around the signifiers of equality, freedom, and solidarity. However, the above follows of course our reading of the political, indebted to Rancière but also Balibar etc. There are, of course, other responses to this challenge we have posed. For instance Gibson-Graham have

9 explored alternative economic circuits as the kernel for post-capitalist transition, others develop theories about zero-growth or de-growth economies, Pieterse on radical incrementalism, Holston with insurgent citizenship, Honig with foreigner as taker, which could possibly be thought about in political ecological terms. And if performed or enacted, could be used to theorise what political performative theory could mean. So, again while our current discussions engages postfoundational political philosophers that is not necessary for you. Second clarification A second clarification revolved around what we mean or how we distinguish between performativity of politics and/or the performativity of theory. In partifcular the latter requires further clarification. Again, we refer to both and we could have been clearer about this. We write in the framing document about feeling frustrated in reading (and also writing ourselves) yet another paper that traces socio-material flows or quasi-objects (of water, electricity, fat, suburban lawns, plants, etc etc) and from that analytical position approach questions of inequality, oppression or exploitation. For this seminar we hope you can take on the challenge to move us outside this and into thinking about political movements, i.e. organisational features, or other actions that may begin to unravel neoliberal knots, de-politicized configurations, and develop spaces (small or big) of emancipatory politicization of the environment. This could be in terms of Butler, Fanon, Ranciere, Badiou, or maybe in terms of the Haitian revolution, anarchist prefigurative politics, insurgent citizenship or foreigner as taker (Honig s cosmopolitanism) What do these look like? What formal/informal practices are involved in creating such relational spaces of re-politicization? What political and relational materialities and ecologies are involved in the organizing logics and practices that underpin such spaces? What do people and things do to bring them about? And what possible dangers do they face in being shut down? And on another level. We have indeed thought at the smaller scale for long, but as we have seen in the fight, or as many are declaring now, in the war against austerity in Latin America, Europe USA, and service delivery in South Africa and Brazil and other countries, and during the Arab Spring and now recently in Greece, that things at far wider scales can happen. And while many of us know that even if a historic climate change accord might be signed in Paris in December, it won t change much in terms of the many of the world, of those living in the so called margin. So what is instead that needs to be researched and theorised? This is where we position ourselves. In light of the impotence of mainstream critical thought in nudging the existing order in a different direction, the question arises as to what the relationship is (and how can it be thought) between thought/theory and political praxis/practice. Should we be content with analyzing the multiple circuits of uneven power, the combined and uneven development of capitalism, the contentious politics that animate a range of conflicting situations and conditions, the indexing of the multiple bodies of exclusion, precarity and domination? Or is it possible to think things differently. In other words, if we contend that the political is a process immanent in the situation but not reducible to it or in other words, if politics cannot be decided theoretically -- what is the place and position of theory today, and how can or might it articulate with the heterogeneous politicizing movements from indigenous struggles (see e.g. EJOLT database), anti-austerity, occupy, slum-dwellers, anti-racist struggles (in the US) that have been mushrooming in so many places over the past few years. One way to explain what the performativity of theory is, is to say that it is understandings that guide action beyond academia and analysis. Another way to answer this is to bluntly say that communism, in its different guises and problems, proved a while back to be a performative theory. It was clearly a theory (it had developed ideas of what was going on) while it was practiced. If that is a too narrow definition of performative theory, then you might argue of why this is so, how can postcolonial and post-structural theories with less tendency of longer-range explanation, also be viewed as performative. Third clarification

10 Further elaboration is also needed in what we expect in terms of a response from the participants and how that can draw upon our own experiences and theoretical leanings. Malini writes: Can you elaborate on this a little more? Personally, I would like to use my work on struggles around state-sponsored (wet)land grabbing and dispossession in Bangalore to "speak" back to the UPE literature in two ways: (1) how do we theorize urban capital-nature relations in the post-colony? i.e. what do we need that marxist theories of 'accumulation by dispossession' might not solely provide (here I return to postcolonial theories of the state)? (2) what can we learn from subaltern struggles against dispossession in India that are more broadly applicable elsewhere? In response we said that this works well, with the addition that we also like to push you all on providing at least a first answer to performativity of theory : How will your project contribute to also opening up questions and ideas on the performativity of theory in a context of thinking and practicing transformative and emancipatory social change, as developed above. We also reminded to engage the three tectonic shifts as another resource to get going. Last clarification Keep in mind that there will be time to discuss these ideas at the seminar. In this sense, your conference paper can be your first development of an argument that will be discussed in Stockholm and which you can develop further after that. Thus, rather be bold and try something new, than cautious. Everybody who is coming will be interested in what you have to say, and engage and develop it further. References Beck, U Climate for Change, or How to Create Green Modernity. Theory, Culture & Society 27:263. Gibson, N. C What Happened to the Promised Land? A Fanonian Perspective on Post-Apartheid South Africa. Antipode 44 (1): Harvey, D Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Heynen, N. C., M. Kaika, and E. Swyngedouw In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London and New York: Routledge. Kaika, M City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City. London and New York: Routledge. Kooy, M., and K. Bakker Splintered networks: The colonial and contemporary waters of Jakarta. Geoforum 39 (6): Lawhon, M., H. Ernstson, and J. D. Silver Provincialising Urban Political Ecology: Situating UPE through African Urbanism. Antipode 46 (2): Lewontin, R., and R. Levins The Dialectical Biologist. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Loftus, A Everday Environmentalism: Creating and Urban Political Ecology. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Merrifield, A The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Politics and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Parnell, S., and S. Oldfield The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South eds. S. Parnell and S. Oldfield. London and New York: Routledge. Pieterse E. (2014) GIPCA Great Texts lecture in Cape Town at the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts, 30 April 2014, Cape Town. Pieterse, E., and A. Simone eds Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Roy, A The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory. Regional Studies 43 (6): Robinson, J Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1):1 23. Pithouse, R A Politics of the Poor Shack Dwellers Struggles in Durban. (2004). Swyngedouw, E The City As a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization. Capitalism Nature Socialism 7 (2):65 80.