The politics of the encounter and the urbanization of the world

Abstract

This article encounters the politics of the encounter. It tries to reframe another way of thinking about progressive urban politics. It encounters Althusser, who wrote some of the nicest and profoundest lines on the encounter, and it encounters Lefebvre, with his notion of the urban as the site of encounters. It equally encounters the Occupy movement and in so doing encounters space, urban space, specifically a reworked conception of centrality. Althusser's proverbial rain rains ordinary urban rain, elements that have encountered one another because of a swerve, induced by encounters created by prior swerves, those that created, go on creating, new densities of connections ripe for further swerves. The clinamen strikes, rains rain so hard on the old order, on the old city, that the swerve has created a new world urban order, the plane of immanence for new encounters, for an aleatory materialism of bodies encountering other bodies in public. Such is the Occupy movement. People here encounter other people within and through urban space; the urban confers the reality of the encounter, of the political encounter, and of the possibility for more encounters. It becomes the site as well as the nemesis of the encounter, its positive, unifying capacity as well as its negative, demonic charge of dissociation.