(voices of resistance from occupied london)

An unclean introduction

On the 23d of March 2001 a fragrance called "Madaleine" was introduced in three stations of London (St James's Park, Euston and Picadilly Circus) in an effort to make the Underground smell better. Media reported the project was discontinued the next day as it was making people sick. How tempting to speak of a rotting world, how tempting to speak of an authority seized with fright in the face of a crumbling social order whose values are in decay. Yet, step outside the underground and the obnoxious systemic belief in its own perpetual existence is inscribed all over.

One can be assured that in its early years London Underground would have played a similar role in promoting orderly thoroughfare. It still does so, of course, but the changing face of the overground city has overtaken it in pace and might now seem to render this part of its functioning obsolete. This is, of course, far from true: London's fragrances, NYC's extensive network of CCTV cameras and random bag checks... Hints of upcoming, soon-to-be imposed conditions on the ground are often offered to us from (quite literally) the underground. All we need do is listen out for them._

The Metro as a Biopolitical Condition and the Role of Sanitation in the Athenian example

by Christos Filippidis, ch.krumel[at]gmail.com

The presence and reminder of death in the daily urban reality is enforced by constantly increasing elements that illuminate the fragile biology of human nature. The tools required for such an illumination are primarily psychological - investing in the fear of all that is uncontrollable. Fear of death in the everyday, whether triggered by the sight of a dangerous, inflictious being or organised within the spatial limits of a "tainting" area, does not concern the disease in itself but rather the possibility of contagion that one holds. Therefore, fear of the disease (as yet another element amongst the objects surrounding us) concerns the integrity of our very existence; such a condition cannot but hang as a permanent threat and as an integral element of the public sphere. This threat corrupts biological functions and yet, before so doing, it dislocates the process of social reproduction by placing fear at the core of human relationships. It does so by shouting out the organising role of death in the development of these relationships. Death ought to stay outside such relationships and yet this absence becomes central in the way in which life itself anxiously takes shape. Even if such fear takes forms that vary across different societies, it is still established upon relationships concerning some order (life) and the possible breach of this very order (disease, death). The deadly materiality of the disease is soon to be symbolised, subsequently organising its pending communication with the "other" around this heavy symbolism.

The fear of disease arises in places where the biological lens identifies loci of infection as well as other places characterised by an increasing social turmoil, where different bodies and their cultures are intermingled: just like in open squares.

Susan Sontag sheds some light at the symbolic power of the disease by explaining that debauchery, decay, desecration, weakness are identified with it; the disease itself becomes a metaphor. Epidemic diseases were an often-used symbol of social disorder (Sontag: 1989). Constant biological reminders gradually become user protocols, conventions and exclusions. The 'biological', then, carries a heavy social burden... Which is no other than the notion of cleanliness, a notion called to secure the adequacy of bio-social bonds. Biological and social life meet at the horizon of cleanliness and purity: The two are to guarantee healthy biological reproduction, to strengthen the chemical defense of somatic cells, but also, and most importantly, they are to symbolise the preservation of an appropriate social order.

The clean and thus healthy body ought to belong to a 'clean' and 'healthy' society and such a relation can only be fostered in a clean space. From the description of 19th century cities and the moral extensions of the materially clean to the impure human bodies 'sentencing' themselves to death; from the sanitation rituals of non-western societies and the maintenance of their own order to the sanitary quarantine and the concentration camp, cleanliness and purity come to organise bodies, spaces and meanings. They are called, in other words, to reinstate order: Solicitude for the propagation of public hygiene and health can only describe, in bio-political terms, the role of cleanliness in the spatial production and social reproduction. The clean and the healthy derive from the physical and the biological sphere but come to habituate symbolic worlds; they become a moral and social duty and they can only spread via a political operation that does not require executive authorities in order to succeed.

The clean and the healthy, initially to be found within the discrete boundaries of the biological aspect of life, are therefore violently inserted in a social condition which in turn needs them in its quest to enforce its own claims, drawing power from such very objects of biological neutrality. Clean space, a symbol of the healthy body, thus constructs its own qualities upon the virtues of the latter: It composes them around a bequest for the accommodation of a 'clean' social body and its elementary functions. The bio-political dimension of the clean is expressed whilst power demands appropriate relations between the subject and its own body inasmuch as other bodies. Cleanliness as a way of using the body can only suggest ways of use and habitation of space itself: The demand for cleanliness is a demand for order and the appropriate spatial order will ensure, first and foremost, the banishment of the impure body and impure actions that might refuse to comply. British anthropologist Mary Douglas introduced the notion of "matter out of place" in order to explore the rich worlds of the clean and the dirty:

"If we can abstract pathogenecity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity" (Douglas: 1966)

The impure and the diseased do not, therefore, meet in the physical sphere only. Far from that: Suffocating within this sphere, they seem to construct an entire symbolic world and the relations that come with it. The impure and the diseased form concepts that are first and foremost symbolic and should be understood as such. The clean and the dirty (both their spatial and bodily expressions) are transformed from material identifications to conjuring concepts, a transformation that leads to their engagement with mechanisms of social reproduction. From biological properties they are transformed into tools of social classification and in this way, they are (bio)politicised: The most inner relations of body and space gradually become politically negotiable; They ought to reflect the class to which they belong.

How is such a transformation signified in the case of the Athenian Metro? How does the quest for cleanliness and purity leave the biological world and reach to the very heart of the condition of confinement? The character of the construction in question was clearly organised around the displacement of a number of biological functions. What are such functions? The ban on eating and drinking, urinating and defecating within the strictly defined vicinity of a transportation medium affects activities which, by their own nature, produce waste. These are therefore excluded as dis-placed material, 'place' in this case comprising an infrastructure openly showcasing its a-historical nature: it cannot perish, it cannot be defaced, it does not age. The metro as a lust for order comprises a bio-political place to the extent that it undertakes organising the crucial and near-biological human need for transportation. It already, then, holds such a bodily function and a need that is politically negotiable. It already highlights within it an element capable of holding a common denominator of a collective urban identity, some identity articulated in terms of organic movement. It highlights this in face of regulations, protocols of use and laws. The displacement, however, of the aforementioned biological functions from such an infrastructure extends further the bio-political dimension of the metro, bringing it into managerial fields: An entire social construction is organised around the denunciation of a number of bodily functions which (seemingly ostracised as they might be) are involved in this very mechanism through their absence.

Agamben writes in reference to the concentration camp: "[it is] the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule." The concentration camp is included via its very own exception. This underground infrastructure ought first and foremost to hold biological characteristics afar, therefore establishing a social contract in the power of a biological insufficiency. Such a displacement manifests precisely the way in which the biological aspect becomes an object of political negotiation. Cleanliness and sanitation comprise the regulators of this displacement - it is them that will expose the unclean body to the clean space, having first excluded, thanks to their intellectual tools, both the crucial biological functions that entail pollution and any other social behaviour that could disturb the rhythm of this under-world.

The Athenian metro as a spatial condition blazons abroad the authority of the clean. It recalls the lust for order. And it has, admittedly, strong tools to succeed in so doing: From the carefully picked glassy materials to their frantic, constant cleaning, from security units to the closed circuit surveillance system, the metro enunciates its operation under terms of total order, terms of social peace and obedience. The use of the terrorist threat from the part of its administrative authorities offers the pretext for an operation based upon a culture of fear. Death, after all, always awaits and its subtle presence will design the spatial forms as much as the actions that the latter will allow for. The terrorist threat jumps straight to the heart of the bio-political condition. The metro, as a universal urban phenomenon, has time and time again been picked as a target of political attacks; essentially, these are attacks on its very biological content: the accumulation, in other words, of life in this underground bowel. It is this selection that highlights the bio-political façade of the metro and it is this very façade that the Athenian example is also meant to secure and organise. The starting and ending point of this organising process is the demand for cleanliness and purity - for clean use, for clean (dis-)embarking, for clear thoroughfare. The metro lies precisely at the conjuncture between discipline and the bio-political example, where the need for strict control of the bodily position is replaced by the need for control of population flows, some flows demanding clear thoroughfares. It is the mobility of the crowd, then, that ought to remain clear - it is this very crowd that is called to inscribe the demand for order. For this reason statuary positions are to be avoided. Swift passing through becomes a duty of the crowd, some duty fulfilled as a clear-cut movement in a permanently clean space built around fear of the statuary and the always dangerous underground conditions. Cleanliness there exists as substance, as a tireless reminder that everything works according to plan, that everything is in order. Marc Auge's notion of non-place brings to mind precisely such a spatio-timely condition. It concerns spaces with identities lacking continuity: spaces thare are non-historical, non-correlative, where time is in a condition of permament acceleration. What distinguishes the temporary users-residents of the non-place is the common feeling of loneliness, a social impossibility perhaps aptly described by the constant reminder of their brutal and threatened naked biological nature, their existence in a state of bestial fear.

Therefore, what unites the temporary cohabitants of a station or a carriage is the fact of their very own biological existence; the reality, in other words, that they are biologically human - the human hereby understood as a biological essence fulfilling its transportation needs. The humans, in other words, striped of their biological context - not merely their social characteristics but also, as we saw, of a series of biological functions. The human, then, habiting the metro's condition is one of a particular biological context. This is a human that projects at its public appearance elements of another select social behaviour, who obeys the rules and legal frameworks of the non-place hosting them. Cleanliness is once again here to evaporate marks of use, to delete any elements deranging the geometrical and spatial order that set forms and rules have co-shaped. Clean space expresses spaces that have no internal processes - non-historical, non-anthropological spaces.

The space consistently projected without a social context is no other than the space that ought to eliminate all actions materially and socially capable of damaging it. Such space is therefore a space that denies its social involvement and comprises a naked form, a spatial condition outright identifying with its strictly spatial characteristics and rules guaranteeing its operational integrity. Cleanliness coordinates the naked exposition of space (bare of historical marks of use and of social actions) as much as the naked exposition of the temporary user (bare of social characteristics and damaging biological functions). The metro needs to remain clean and for this reason the legal framework of its functioning ought to exclude 'law-breaking' attitudes. Clean space equals clean, uninterrupted transportation.

In many ways such a condition brings to mind the condition of the concentration camp. It recalls the spatial condition politically organising the confinement of a (questionable) biological specificity. This specificity, in the case of the metro, is not identified solely in the presence of a bodily-organic movement or its normalisation but also in the concurrent absence of some biological needs and the continuous effort for their systemic exclusion. In a way the spatio-timely condition of the metro includes a biological negative, a specialised biological machine. In this sense it comprises a space of exclusion, a part that sets itself outside normal order, a spatio-legal condition under which laws and rules suspend biological human 'rights'. Within it, then, characteristics of the biological body comprise crucial political criteria in deciding how such an infrastructure will bring together its functions. In Agamben's study of the concentration camp the state of exception means the suspension of political rights and the subsequent emergence of the biological dimension as a political regulator of this condition of confinement. In the case of the Athenian metro the respective state of exception signals the suspension of biological rights and the emergence of such suspension as a regulator for this underground reality. The uninterrupted thoroughfare and the mute sojourn of the metro user ought to pay for the biological gap created by the aforementioned suspension: A suspension asked to build itself amidst a state of constant self-repression. I am human because I move; for no other biological or socio-political reason. Movement organises the functioning of the metro and capitalist production organises this movement in turn... and it is cleanliness that will define the safe conditions of such organising. The clean metro is, first and foremost, a mechanism of discipline; it is a vehicle for education of the urban ways, it is in the end a way to exist, a way to live...

Agamben, G. (1998): "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life", Stanford: Stanford University Press

Auge, M. (1995): "Non-Places – Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity", London: Verso

Douglas, M. (1966): "Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo", London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

Elias, N. (1985): "The Loneliness of the Dying", Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Sontag, S. (2001): "Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors", New York: Picador