Editorial: Grounding technical democracy and critical urban studies

Abstract

‘Nothing guarantees that the fascist option won’t be preferred to revolution’ (The Invisible Committee, ‘To Our Friends’)1‘[C]ontemporary grass-roots revolutionary collectives and urban social movements are seemingly turning away from a post-Marxist critical (urban) theory informed interpretation of our current situation, towards imagining a political project linked to the challenges of technical democracy.’ (Farías and Blok)‘[T]ruth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.’ (Michel Foucault 1977, 146)Critical urban studies has for some time been exposed to some marginalising irritations (perhaps in essence a negative structure of feeling or, more superficially, the zeitgeist). Behind these irritations seems to lie the refusal of Marx's ghost to accept retirement or even domestication, despite much ‘post-Marxist’ ingenuity under such labels as ‘technical democracy’ or even ‘Foucault’. It is time to visit particular grounds on/under which Marx may be supposed to have been placed in search of alternative groundings, old and new.The opening articles in this issue about ‘natural’ problems and disasters, their analysis, contexts and social outcomes—dealing with landslides in Hong Kong, an earthquake and tsunami in the city of Constitución in Chile, climate adaptation in Surat, India, and with ‘more-than-human’ nature itself, universally—provide some locations to be visited (not necessarily in the spirit of exorcism). The ‘post-Marxist’ emphasis is evident in Ignacio Farías and Anders Blok’s introduction to their special feature, ‘Technical democracy as a challenge to urban studies’, as in the second epigraph above, and, as discussed below, in their (cautious) reading of The Invisible Committee's, ‘To Our Friends’. It lies in a silence in Adam Bobbette’s stand-alone paper, ‘Contortions of the unconsolidated: Hong Kong, landslides and the production of urban grounds’, underlying his own intriguing epigraph (quoted in part as an epigraph here, and in full, later) from Foucault.What we undertake here is in effect a progress report, an oblique one, on elements of truth and being as positioned provocatively, as quoted, by Foucault's statement above. How can and should they, truth and being, be placed so as to contribute to analysing and reversing the fascist possibility to which The Invisible Commitee’s To Our Friends, in an italicised passage concluding their manifesto refer?