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Project Mimique London
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Biopolitical regulation of the Shoreditch late-night
economy
Introduction In 2005, Hackney Council put out for consultation the South Shoreditch Draft Action Area Plan (SSDAAP) and its Statement on Licensing Policy 2005 (SLP). Here, planning's preoccupation with the schema of advanced-liberal governance is central to its formulation of policy; this governance is "indelibly spatial" (Huxley) and the urban is revealed as "bastion of the market order" (Catterall). Central to the plan's elaboration is the development of a "defining and recursive technology", an outcome of "a discrepancy between discourse and actuality" (Gordon, 1980, p 250). There is a regulative dynamic between planning and the conditions of the license, where the biopolitical[1] articulation of the subject is a strategic, and open, objective. Planning as strategy is cynical in its synthesis of the heterogenous. This renders planning, as a strategy of power as much as a technology of governance, in the manner of the "improvisational" (Gordon's elaboration) -- "artificial, factitious", off the cuff -- at the same time, "strategy is the exploitation of possibilities which it itself discerns and creates" (ibid, p 251). As a discourse of power the plan effects a certain "anonymity". This paper addresses Appendix A of the SSDAAP, a summary of the Hackney Night-time Economy Study 2004 (NTES)[2], opening out where relevant into these two other key documents. It aims to strike at a point where the "instrumentalisation of the social terrain interacts with its formation by programmes and technologies of power" (Gordon, p 252), to reveal the texture of the chapter's hegemonic construct. With Foucault as trace, it will draw out how planning seeks to operate as a technology in the governance of the late-night economy. The discrepancies between programme and situation are demonstrated in the documents themselves. We are indebted to post-structuralist and neo-Gramscian theories of the state. A few preliminary points can be asserted:
Planning a disciplinary power Risk Planning suffers from a deep fear of inaccuracy and of things not going according to plan, and in defense operates through a series of regulative ideas (Kant) or norms (Foucault). These define the framework of the construction of truth; an advanced-liberal episteme predicated on the paradox of a deepening as well as a decentralisation of state power. In the late-night economy, truth is policed via the license and reinforced by a discourse of moral hazard. Such ideas render reality into a calculable form and make it amenable to particular techniques, here those of the spatial planning and licensing process. Central as a regulative idea is the conception of 'risk', a governmental rationality. Here the institution covers itself -- consideration of risk is a demonstration of competence -- yet alternately reveals its nudity. Threats of conflict and public disorder predominate: an effect of premises expansion, the presence/absence of (trans)national chains, and in relation to the boundaries and saturation criteria that Hackney planning department itself seeks to impose. The NTES also states a risk of crime and injury, of damage to amenity and of the future paucity of state funding to carry out functional proposals. How vulnerable this strategy is! Possibility for error is punctually expedited. Almost as talisman, the NTES foregrounds the experience of stress areas defined by Westminster City Council, where rising property values and rents helped drive out smaller, independent operators. Strangely, these are conceived as contributing to the 'special character' of the area, not as vulnerable enterprises. An urban conservationist ethic pervades the SSDAAP and its appendices, a misconstruction based on organicist fallacy. Project Mimique's thoughts on the plan's architectural conservation proposals can be found here. Risk dominates the gauge of planning and licensing regulation, and the Shoreditch late-night economy is saturated with authoritarian measures. These then become normative to the self-regulation and informal policing activity of the sector. For instance: as a criteria for planning permission, bars are mandated to install and monitor CCTV; bar and club entrepreneurs in Shoreditch must seek the design advice of police crime prevention officers. In the license, they are required to submit an operating schedule[3], a crime prevention strategy, a risk assessment of criminal activity, provide plans of internal designs that minimise the opportunity for crime, provide "appropriate" training for staff and door supervisors (one assumes anti-drugs and anti-disturbance), and use text and radio pagers to enable instant communication with the police. License holders in the Hoxton Square BID will be required to fund extra security patrols through an additional levy. The local authority is charged with setting up a "safety and security" fund, with contributions from the public and private sectors, to fund schemes in close cooperation with the Metropolitan Police (NTES, 2004, p 7). The designation of an Entertainment Management Zone (EMZ) mandates coordinated activity by a variety of council departments, the police and venue operators (ibid, p 2). The police themselves are required to participate in the Night Time Economy Implementation Group. They already run a forum with license holders called PubWatch, operational in the area (ibid, pp 4- 5). Critically, the NTES, a planning document, makes a call for extra police and warden resources. Project Mimique would emphasise that, even by the evidence of this document and its sister publications the SSDAAP and SLP, there is no crisis on the ground that would necessitate such intensive policing. The authors of the NTES note that 73% of people interviewed in Shoreditch feel safe in the area (2004, p 11), and the study is reported to have found that the majority of venues had minimal problems with security (SLP 2005, p 53). Increased incidence of crime could simply be a matter of the Shoreditch area commanding a greater police presence on the look out for youth- or alcohol- related infringements. The NTES also states "Whilst many evening economies throughout the UK are currently suffering from problems associated with price-led competition, binge drinking and associated anti-social behaviour, Shoreditch and Stoke Newington have managed to avoid many of these issues" (2004, p 10). Risk is monitored by a plethora of database interventions, audits, observational patrols and recommendations for further studies. Key here is the proposal in the NTES for a licensed premises database, accessible by the planning, licensing, community safety and environmental health departments in the Council, as well as the police and any other 'appropriate authorities' (2004, pp 16-17). This is the first of a series of 'integrated data collection systems', subject to regular monitoring and review, that will include Metropolitan Police crime statistics (including a record of reported crime by premises) as well as ambient noise monitoring, ambulance call outs and location of CCTV. Particularly insidious is the proposed collection of complaints. Manipulation of this facility by malicious accusation is an all to likely possibility, and will remain as slander in the information domain without a right to contest or prove legally the contrary.
Discipline In these documents, planning reveals itself as a disciplinary power. The NTES combines hierarchical observation, normalising judgement and techniques (often financial or predicated on the obedience of the applicant), and intensive surveillance. Surveillance (partitioning) is both coordinated and cooperative. Integration of policing, licensing inspectors and planning enforcement (with a vigorous street presence to spot violations) point towards the insidious tactics of a secret state. Without a hint of irony, the licensing strategy states "Hackney aims to have an enforcement service that is immediate, intelligent, informative and, when all else fails, intolerant" (2005, p 12). Techniques deployed are deeply individualising and contingent on circumstance. Conditions imposed on license applications are tailored to the individual premises or event concerned. Licensing and planning permissions are integrated as counter law into the production of space, introducing asymmetries and exclusions. In the NTES alone, Project Mimique counted 23 different conditions which can be demanded of those applying for a license, and eleven in the process of planning permission. We counted nearly 50 different criteria in the Statement of Licensing Policy itself. This emphasis on contingency is no random factor, but rather a paradigm of biopolitical governance. The license, with its onus on cooperation with the police and self-monitoring, is revealed as formative of an affirmative subjectivity and a critical and intensive mechanism in the regulation of disturbance. High on the list of planning paradigms is the notion of the 'zone'. The NTES and SSDAAP define a Saturation Zone, an Enterprise Management Zone, a Business Improvement District, and propose several No Drinking Zones. Literature on zoning in the 1960s US context points to the deeply segregating tendencies of zoning criteria. Discussing US suburban zoning, D.R. Mandelker notes "the job of zoning is to preserve the pyramid" (1972, p 273), concluding, "[w]hen we look closely [...] we find embedded within [zoning law] a model of land development which implies social and economic discrimination" (ibid, p 275). Discussing a juridical contestation of nuisance criteria, Mandelker comments: "More likely than not the judgemental basis of the decision will be exposed as the court falls back on crude notions of social order" (ibid, p 274).
The economy of visibility transmigrates into the exercise of power most notably in the production of audits (addressed later below). Saturation and balance Spatial restriction prefigures the self regulation of licensees, a limitation predicated on proximity. A criteria of 'saturation', the second regulative idea, appears arbitrary despite a reliance on rigorous measure; and is arguably a neo-liberal assertion of the rule of law over professional discretion (Tewdwr-Jones, 2002). An application for a new license will not be granted if there is another licensed premises selling hot food or alcohol within 50 metres of street frontage on either side of the road from the proposed development. In the case of existing licensed premises applying for a variation of hours under the new Licensing Act, if the venue is located in an area where there is already another licensed premises within 50 metres, the licensee will have to demonstrate that adequate steps have been taken to minimise impacts of the venue. Planning permission for an A3 or D2 use will not be granted if there is another A3 or D2 use within a 350 metre radius of the proposed development, unless it can be demonstrated that no alternative use for the unit can be found. Permission for an A3 or D2 use will not be granted in a property where there are residential uses on the upper floors or in an adjoining building, unless planning conditions restrict the terminal hours to 11 pm. Permission for residential or hotel use (class C1, C2 or C3) will not be granted in a property where there are existing A3 or D2 uses, or if there are A3 or D2 uses in an adjoining property, unless those uses too have existing restrictions on their opening hours to 11 pm (NTES, 2004, p 6).
Technology The development of planning as a technology is a latent theme in the discourse of the NTES. While eschewing any one dominant planning paradigm, there are notable traces of the atomistic modes of marginalism evident in the document's rationalisation. State use of economic and legal powers to constrain business into pursuing government-set policy goals could be ascribed to incremental corporatism. The Business Improvement District is a feature of decentralism, although the NTES could be characterised as a bureaucratisation of the late-night economy, a contradiction. Mediative and informational aspects indicate the influence of adjunctive planning theory. Certainly, the NTES could be accused of environmental determinism, specifically its proposals toward plot regulation and other saturation criteria. Philip Cooke (1983) regards marginalism as "a particular normative ideal which has difficulties of operationalisation even for markets, but whose practicability is severely prejudiced in the context of public sector decision-making" (ibid, p 38). Needless to say, the paradigms of marginalism are linked to neo-liberal economic theory, and Cooke suggests that atomistic modes "would be appropriate to Friedmanesque government economic policy". One might identify a tactics of power seeking an increase of utility and obedience. The NTES minimises expenditure and operates with a certain caution, yet it aims consciously to maximise the therapeutic intensity of its mechanisms. Measurable success includes the production of institutions and apparatuses; less quantifiable but strategically sought is the creation of the responsible subject. Through the discourse deployed, and the moral thrust of licensing and planning regulation, planning here enacts a code of normalisation. Deployment of moral hazard Scapegoats In their book Bouncers, Violence and Governance in the Night- time Economy, Dick Hobbs, Philip Hadfield, Stuart Lister and Simon Winlow chart the local state promotion of the late-night economy as salvation of the deindustrialised inner city throughout the 1990s. This strategy they view as volatile and blinkered to the "political economy of violence" (2003, p 2) that they regard as intrinsic to the criminality and informal regulation of the sector. Hobbs et al charge the late-night economy "as dependent upon the hedonistic drives cultivated in the alcohol/youth nexus, as industrial society was on the motive power of coal and steam" (ibid, p 36). In the NTES, SSDAAP and SLP, the panoply of disciplinary and productive forms represents a restabilisation of alcohol consumption as public menace. Manipulation of moral hazard has characterised state intervention in working-class enjoyments and crusades for public hygiene for several centuries. Alcohol and working- class festivities are concepts that always return, as the traumatic elements around which bourgeois fantasies are interlaced, and thus articulate the structures which serve as support for public hygiene, a phantasmatic projection of the Other, that fixates on a fictive of the Other's enjoyments (Jaques Alain Miller, quoted by Salecl[4]). Public health movements, and later planning strategists, have built their authority historically by invoking threats of contamination, pollution and population disorder. Contemporary press coverage on the late-night economy has fixated on the immorality of young women. A clampdown on working-class consumption goes hand in hand with a reinforcement of the work ethic for those on state benefits. It's a utilitarian, and rather presbyterian, schema. Paradoxically, alcohol is sanitised in the SSDAAP itself as a rational sensibility to maximise one's individual happiness, a hedonist conception (J.S.Mill). A communitarian ethos, the societal and hegemonic form interpellating planning's managerialist repertoire and the normative framework of its social interventions, is predicated on the need for order, conformity of the individual with commonly-held norms, values and practices and the constitution of human subjectivity as self-responsible and self-controlled. The communitarian subject consciously seeks his/her better health. Rational choice theory was never so intrinsic to the mode of domination as this biopolitical morality. As planning becomes more proletarianised as a discipline, one notes the reinforcement of a communitarian morality as a 'natural' activity of local planning departments themselves. One might note also the circulation of moral scapegoats in the UK media and Home Office statements. Once planners themselves served as pariah in the years of structure planning and the post-war property boom.
Which brings us to a fourth regulative idea expressed in the NTES, that of 'impact', a system variant, and depoliticisation, of conflict. Key impacts stated in this appendix are crime, environmental degradation and noise pollution. Again, in the regulation of conflict, the technocratic pretensions of planning (with a distinct authoritarian inflection) are to the fore. The NTES states: "Any future growth that occurs will be carefully managed to minimise conflicts between uses, maintain a balance of uses and to ensure that there are adequate resources available to support growth. Where the growth of the night time economy is currently considered to be having a negative impact on the environment and residential amenity, such as in Shoreditch, measures will be taken in both the short and long term to minimise further impacts and focus police, cleansing, enforcement and other resources on these areas" (2004, p 3). The functionalist logic of the plan provides an acute instance of the apparatus producing the constitution of conflict in its own terms, and defining the terrain on which diverse interests are played out (the terrain of its own reproduction and restructuring process). Planning is enacted as execution of crisis in anticipation. The potentially disruptive aspects of a concentrated consumption hub are normalised by reference to the self-regulation of externalities. Thus planning's mission becomes a call for prohibitions and fora. But in effect, the consumption activities of the Shoreditch triangle have become defined as nuisance via a process of tolerance (all activities valid), and because the functionalist model simply cannot conceive of any use that does not engender conflict. In this logic, such a conflictual scenario requires brokering by an integrated state, which in turn reinforces the functionalist model with organicist inflections of equilibrium, norm and balance, which bolster the illusion that a system analytic is somehow at stake. The NTES devotes significant space to mitigation of noise disruption, exhaustive enough to appease any resident. Planning permission can require any new residential development to build in effective noise insulation, and that the design of the building minimise the escape of noise and fumes from doors and windows. It can demand of any new A3 or D2 use the installation of an acoustic lobby at entrances and exits, acoustic glazing and acoustically-treated ventilation. Planning conditions can restrict the hours of operation of outside drinking areas, especially in narrower streets where noise reverberations may be more pronounced. Through the licensing application process conditions can be attached to the position of machinery; outlets and amplified equipment must be located away from residential uses; and the license can demand the installation of other equipment that limits noise, fumes and vibration. It is proposed that all venues are required to submit a noise impact report. Other conditions include the prohibition of amplified music, and specific conditions imposed on indoor seating plans. Notices are demanded encouraging people to leave quietly, special staff appointed to patrol the vicinity and to deal with complaints. However, there is little residential property in the Shoreditch triangle, the location of the highest concentration of late-night entertainment uses, and one assumes no residential property at all along the eastern end of Rivington Street where clubs constellate. Bars and restaurants in Hoxton Square are more sedate and already have a curfew of 11 pm. Informal research in the South Shoreditch area suggested little reduction of amenity for local residents: we found almost no litter, little sound nuisance, no clash of pedestrians with traffic. The NTES states early on: "It should be noted that, in Stoke Newington, the survey demonstrated the greatest opposition from residents to further growth in the night time economy -- 15% of residents in Stoke Newington did not want further growth to occur, compared to 12% in Shoreditch and 7% in both Dalston and Hackney Central" (2004, p 2). Which suggests that in Shoreditch, despite the fact that 33% of residents surveyed stated that the late-night economy was regularly disruptive, 88% of residents surveyed were happy enough with the prospect of its expansion. Every aspect of the functional operation of a bar becomes a condition of regulation. It is the intensity with which the license penetrates the business which strikes one as, literally, a state of exception, as cosmopolitan forms of consumption become defined as potential public nuisance. Concerns extra to crime in the awarding of the license demand that those making the application allocate space within the curtilage of the building for refuse storage if the design of building permits, develop a formal arrangement with a licensed taxi firm, use plastic glasses for drinking outside, apply for a special license for placing tables and chairs outside the venue. The license will define any area where tables and chairs can be placed. Through the license, the council can also impose a requirement for operators to collect litter and waste from a defined area around their premises, at specified times of the day or night, and demand that the operator publicise information on public transport. The consumer is defined as crowd, and measures initiated to ensure its dispersion. Planning permission can be subject to the submission of a Transport Impact Statement; subject to whether the venue will contribute towards funding of enhanced public transport (both larger venues only); and subject to the provision of indoor waiting areas. Legal agreements attached to the BID also demand that operators contribute to the provision of creative lighting, a night-time cleansing operation in the Shoreditch area, to the provision of litter bins, and towards provision and maintenance of public toilets or street urinals. Escalation Analysing the policing of drug subculture in Notting Hill in the late 1960s, Jock Young (1971) argues that police action against the marihuana consumer produced a consolidation and accentuation of subcultural values, including an increase in the organisation and cohesion of the recreational drug use socio-economy, and a change in the lifestyle around marihuana consumption, so that certain facets of media stereotype became actuality. What results is a process of escalation (or for Young, 'deviancy amplification') as nightlife subculture responds to criminalisation by embedding the stigmatised actions as a bonding practice. The definition of an area such as South Shoreditch as a nightlife location is part of a process of escalation-segregation- persecution, something that the proposed system of planning regulation is concretising with the coralling of late-night uses for policing imperatives, along with a further escalation in police activity and coopted local business management. Erving Goffman (after Freud) terms this amplification 'overdetermination' as "apparently minor satisfactions come to be defined as great ones", when there is "the sense of a practice being employed merely because it is forbidden", and "the very pursuit of [minor practices which contravene institutional regulation] comes to be a source of satisfaction (the sense of taking the institution on) (1961, p 274-275). Goffman refers to studies of prison inmates and psychiatric patients discussing the "scoring of coffee". He suggests that these infringements reaffirm the subject in her autonomy. Health concerns and repressive policing work to ensure the carceral possibilities of humanitarian intervention. Under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 those arrested for using drugs can be forced to accept treatment as a way to escape prosecution. Integrating licensed premises in the process of surveillance and law enforcement undermines more informed health promotion efforts towards safer use which demand a degree of comfort and openness.
A major recalibration of power relations One might juxtapose here the productivity of power and the reconstitution of subjectivity, prominent features of the governmental processes being proposed in the NTES. "Power relations are integral to the modern productive apparatus, and linked to active program[me]s for the fabricated part of the collective substance of society itself", writes James D. Faubion, "The individual impact of power relations does not limit itself to pure repression but also comprises the intention to teach, to mo[u]ld conduct, to instill forms of self-awareness and identities" (2000, p xix). Entrepreneurial governance Central to the NTES proposals is that of a Business Improvement District (BID) centring on Hoxton Square. The BID comes from the US, centrepiece of 'entrepreneurial governance', the drawing in of commercial interests into the functional maintenance of central city areas. The BID is a rather distorted experiment in advanced-liberal technologies of agency, here the decentralised technologies of citizenship are accorded to business interests acting for the 'benefit' of 'other' citizens. The BID shares little with more democratic models of decentralisation; bureaucratisation and a certain elitism are very acute. And contractual devolution is decorative, a face saver for cash-strapped local government. One might argue that the BID is a bare-faced attempt to undermine any incipient political organisation by businesses that might mobilise against authoritarian implications of the licensing proposals or the increasing fees levied by the local state. It is a strategy to depoliticise conflict as businesses are corralled into discussion with a preset agenda, invited to spend money but with no right to opt out bar mass voting rights over the extra levy. At the same time, the onus is on businesses to reduce conflict with residents[5]. This socialisation of governance permits the integration of institutional agendas with neighbourhood and business interests and constitutes a direct attempt by the state to homogenise social interest (Bonefeld, 1987). Such intervention enables a more flexible, subsidised, and repressive policing of the moral strictures of the communitarian ethic. Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose remark the technologies of 'active' citizenship of advanced-liberal regimes prevalent in the production of an expanded social space mobilising around civic participation. They point to "the communitarian emphasis upon civic commitment as a key factor in economic development, the arguments of social capital theorists that very local features of moral relations (networks, norms, trust, and so forth) facilitate coordination and cooperation, minimise transaction costs, serve as vital sources of economic information, and so on" (1999, p 756). Concerns towards 'safer clubbing', safer drinking, and the presence of local (Shoreditch New Deal Trust supported) spas, fit into the paradigm 'healthy cities'. Osborne and Rose comment: "The domain of health has become a novel and paradigmatic kind of civic space, where the exercise of popular ascetics of self-control will be implanted and augmented through a community politics of healthy living" (ibid, p 753). They note "multiple projects of contemporary urban government", which participate in a "political agonism" predicated on the active practice of citizenship, asserting in an optimistic fashion that: "Strategies of governing through citizenship are inescapably open and modifiable because what they demand of citizens may be refused, or reversed and redirected as a demand from citizens for a modification of the games that govern them, and through which they are supposed to govern themselves" (ibid, p 752). And they point to the emergence of an 'anticitizen'. "the constant enticement, and threat, to the project of citizenship itself; and the enrolling of citizens in practices of crime reduction" (ibid, p 754). Mitchell Dean comments: "It might be argued that the self- determining or free subject has replaced society as the principle of self-limitation of government" (1999, p 164), but concludes that this effect is merely partial. Performance One of the striking things about the NTES proposals is the number of assessment strategies demanded of venue operators as a condition of the license and planning permissions, and the reflex to audits of space and 'danger' when the study authors are caught on the hop. As mentioned above, the NTES can demand of licensees a detailed operating schedule, a crime prevention strategy, a risk assessment of criminal activity, a noise impact report, and a transport impact statement. Planners recommend for themselves further survey and data collection of areas with smaller late-night economies, audits of pavement space to consider outside seating areas, a detailed traffic study to assess potential for pedestrianisation of key routes, lighting audits, the identification of hotspot areas requiring special cleansing, an audit of potential taxi pick-up points, and an audit of night-bus stops to ensure minimisation of conflicts with outdoor seating and drinking areas, as well as the integrated data collection systems discussed earlier. Again, the governing of conduct and the shaping of subjectivity by technical means becomes intrinsic to the "plural technologies of government designed to penetrate the enclosures of expertise fostered under the welfare state and to subsume the substantive domains of expertise [...] to new formal calculative regimes" (Dean p 169, quoting Rose & Miller, 1992). The audit is a form of budgetary calculation transformed into a tally of imminent transgression -- outrage becomes imminent to the locality -- and the "polymorphism" (Dean, p 169) of the audit and various strategies of accounting become implicated in a process whereby 'crime' and conflict are defined, anticipated and counted -- literally, accumulated -- and, one might wager a little heretically, become functional to the system of governance. Such proposals also serve to give legitimacy to further planning restriction. Cohesion Back in a neo-Gramscian paradigm, the planning document is an expression of a biopolitical local state, and confirms Toni Negri's thesis that the state should be analysed as a mediation of the antagonism in the direct production process. Immaterial process is paramount. Cooperation, communication and knowledge are the fundaments of partnership working, and policy becomes one dimensional (endlessly self-repeating and self-validating; and producing its own image of authority). The importance of 'affective labour' in planning, police and regeneration agencies is evident (the word 'affective' refers to networking, the production of forms of community, and what Foucault, and Hardt and Negri, term 'biopower') in the production of compliance to what might appear as a 'new state form'. Project Mimique would suggest, however, that this is in fact a contemporary mediation of class containment strategies emanating from the founding European states, a legitimacy crisis stretching from the 1930s, that underpins the EU's constitution (Bonefeld, 2002). Modified forms of governance, the pivot of integration- repression, homogenisation and consolidation, are hallmarks of a hegemonic project. The local state and planning process are a localised instance (and prove) a global trend in power that Hardt and Negri claim as 'Empire', a discontinuous form of globalising sovereignty that should be considered liminal or marginal. The documents present a simulacra of police state functioning, as the local state and its allies in the repressive apparatus penetrate deep into civil society to restructure their own relationships and forms of operation, bolstered by the spectre of public nuisance and moral hazard which define the interpretive index of proposals and underpin the hegemonic conception. Planning process becomes cohesive factor at a local level in superstate restructuring. The state here one might describe also as 'hyperproductivist', a term coined by Henri Lefebvre, to indicate a process of consolidation of central state steering via a cloak of democratisation, in France under De Gaulle, where "the state's function as agent of commodification of its territory acquires unprecedented supremacy over other regulatory operations" combined with a "major recalibration of the social power relations mediated in and through the state apparatus". One might conclude with Neil Brenner that "current patterns of authoritarian statism entail a significant enhancement of the state's role of mobilising space as a productive force" (2001, p 799). Where does pleasure lie? Limit experience Pleasure haunts the NTES, SSDAAP and SLP, pleasure is their fear. Vigilant of conflict, the marred experiences of local residents, pleasure manifests firstly as repression, then as the transgression of limits (infractions of the communitarian ethic in terms of noise, drug use, and implicitly, staying out late). In contradiction to the SSDAAP, the NTES is more Benthamite in its utilitarian rationalisation, excess is something to be contained, pleasure experienced only in moderation. While both transgression and pleasure come packaged for eC21 youth, this subculture's media representation can be characterised by the term 'limit experience'. Limit experience is "a form historically constituted through 'games of truth'", an activity with the posibility of self transformation yet "a zone full of turbulence" (J. Miller, pp 29-30), a "suffering-pleasure" (Foucault). On investigation Project Mimique found a thanatoculture pivoting around themes of suicide, decomposition, absence, falsification and the voyeur, motivating a largely masculine antagonism to the criminalisations of youth consumption. Our analysis of this rather dejected phenomenon, Overdetermination and VICE Magazine, can be found here. As a game of truth, VICE Magazine can hardly be described as elegant, but it does command the reader's disbelief. Desire One might argue that the licensing policy effects a segregation of masculine pleasure. Hackney Council's Statement of Licensing Policy 2005 demands that the operating schedule, submitted with the license application, state "whether [the operators] propose to have any entertainment involving nudity or striptease or any other activity involving full or partial nudity [...] or sex-related entertainment such as the showing of films or other recordings with an 18-restricted category" (p 30). There is more at stake than sleaze in this tolerated branch of the sex industry and cinematic policy. The relation of desire is a fundamental reversal of power relations, and phantomatic, bound up with the dissimulations of authority. Like demand, desire is in principle insatiable. It is always an effect of the Other, an 'other' with whom it cannot engage, in so far as the Other is not a person but a place, the locus of law, language and the symbolic. The sex worker acts out this displacement, this atopie, this inversion, as a representation of the Other, a form of exorcism which demands the signifier play (desire a logic of the signifier), rather than be abolished. Power here is a dissimulation: stigmatised and denounced as criminal, the sex worker is refused the fundamental rights of the city, including the right of difference. The prevailing form of value discipline thrives on the principle of simulation. Sex working is consistent here and potentially revolutionary as the profession commands a refusal (the lights abruptly off as the artiste whips away the last vestige of bikini) and defines a pay scale to accord with the hierarchies of immaterial labour (cooperation with the client's repressive needs; specific cooperative acts; speaking the way to others' arousal). It can be directly analogous to the process of workers' control (telephone sex an 'aggressive' strategy); and as gratuitous a 'necessity' as the New Deal -- a reversible process as the moralities of the work ethic transmigrate into the manifest falsities of sexual technique. Sex working needs this refusal paramount or risks collapsing into a vortex of kidnapping, abusive violence and slavery.
There is a paradox for anyone seeking to grapple with this confrontation between the mechanics of discipline and a principle of right. "If we are to struggle against disciplines, or rather against disciplinary power, in our search for a non-disciplinary power, we should not be turning to the old right of sovereignty; we should be looking for a new right that is both antidisciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty" (Foucault, 2003, pp 39-40). This goes to the heart of the matter. Consumption is a practice, a liberty, not a right. As such, regulators feel that it is within their own sovereignty to constrain it. But limit experience is critical to human development. A libertarian praxis in planning must move beyond a restrictive toleration and intensive and often privatised policing of the late-night economy. Project Mimique now commits its own (libertine) error:
Project Mimique, May 2007 Footnotes 1. The notion of biopolitics is directly oriented around government attention to questions of public health and its attendant pathologisations (sanitation, race, longevity, population management) that began to appear across Europe in the C18 as part of the arsenal of the (liberal) rationalisation of government and market. From the C20 onwards, biopolitics manifests across Europe via government interventions in public medicine, urban renewal, aggregate housing quotas, and aspects of regional economy. Biopower "is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it and rearticulating it" (Hardt & Negri 2000, p 23). We situate the deployment of 'active' citizenship here. 2. The Hackney Night-time Economy Study was written by consultancy Urban Practitioners. Hackney Council are at pains to point out that it exists as an advisory document and at the time of writing has not yet been adopted as Council policy. 3. SLP LP5 Crime and Disorder "The operating schedule should detail measures to prevent crime and disorder (where relevant), such as: (i) all door supervisors are to be licensed by the Security Industry Authority [...]; (ii) location of any CCTV equipment to be used inside/outside the premises; (iii) provision of adequate search facilities where applicacble to the use of the premises; (iv) measures proposed to prevent possession, supply, or consumption of illegal drugs and possession of weapons. For example, adequate search arrangements and/or spot checks by door supervisors; (v) measures to be implemented to promote sensible drinking and prevent binge drinking. For instance, the display of health warnings, legal warnings and the like; (vi) arrangements for any promotional events such as 'happy hour' or special offers, including their duration, times, location within premises and the measures such as increased security, to be utilised during these events to minimise crime and disorder [...]; (ix) measures aimed at discouraging anti-social behaviour; (x) whether or not the premises will be serving alcohol in glass containers, identify what measures will be implemented to ensure patrons cannot take glass outside the premises; (xi) whether the premises belongs to a local Pub or Club Watch scheme (SLP, pp 30-31). SLP LP7 Public nuisance (a) The operating schedule should demonstrate that problems such as noise, light, odour, litter, anti-social behaviour, flyposting and highway/footpath obstructions can be minimised [...] The application should: (vii) identify whether the activity will generate additional litter (including flyposters and/or illegal placards) in the vicinity of the premises, and measures to deal with them (SLP, p 32) 4. Yet as Renata Salecl herself points out, "this Other is always an Other in my interior, that is my hatred of the part (the surplus) of my own enjoyment which I find unbearable and cannot acknowledge, and which I therefore transpose ('project') into the Other as a fantasy of the Other via a fantasy of the Other's enjoyment" (1993, p 102-103). 5. "To speak of the power of a Government, a Department of State, a local authority, a military commander or a manager in an enterprise is to substantialise that which arises from an assemblage of forces by which particular objectives and injunctions can shape the actions and calculations of others. Again, the notion of translation captures the process whereby this diversity is composed. To the extent that actors have come to understand their situation according to similar language and logic, to construe their goals and their fate as in some way inextricable, they are assembled into mobile and loosely affiliated networks. Shared interests are constructed in and through political discourses, persuasions, negotiations and bargains. Common modes of perception are formed, in which certain events and entities come to be visualised according to particular rhetorics of image or speech. Relations are established between the nature, character and causes of problems facing various individuals and groups [...] such that the problems of one and those of another seem intrinsically linked in their basis and their solution" (N. Rose and P. Miller, Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government, 1991). Bibliography Bonefeld, W. (1987) Reformulation of State Theory, Capital & Class 33 96-127 ------- (2002) European integration: the market, the political and class, Capital and Class 77 117-142 Brenner, N. (2001) State Theory in the Political Conjuncture, Antipode (Oxford) Blackwell Carter, E., J. Donald & J. Squires (eds) (1993) Space and Place, Theories of Identity and Location (London) Lawrence & Weishart Catterall, B. (2007) Is it all coming together? Further thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (10) Spectres, spectacles, actors and actions within and beyond neoliberalism, City 11 1 131-140 (London) Routledge Cohen, S. (ed)(1971) Images of Deviance (Harmondsworth) Penguin Cooke, P. (1983) Theories of Planning and Spatial Development (London) Hutchinson Crampton, J.W. & S. Elden (2007) Space, Knowledge and Power, Foucault and Geography (Aldershot) Ashgate Dean, M. (1999) Governmentality, Power and Rule in Modern Society (London) Sage Dillon, M. (2006) Governing through contingency: The security of biopolitical governance, Political Geography 2006, doi.10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.08.003 Faubion, J.D. (2000) Introduction to Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume 3: Power (London) Penguin Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison (New York) Vintage ------- (1980) Power/Knowledge, Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 (London) Harvester Wheatsheaf ------- (2000) Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume 3: Power (London) Penguin ------- (2003) Society Must Be Defended (London) Penguin Goffman, E. (1961) Asylums (Harmondsworth) Penguin Grosz, E. (1990) Jaques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London) Routledge Gordon, C (1980) Afterword, in M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 (London) Harvester Wheatsheaf Hackney Council (2004) Recommendations from the Hackney Night Time Economy Study (Draft report, December), Appendix A to the South Shoreditch Draft Action Area Plan (London) Hackney Council & Urban Practitioners ------- (2005) South Shoreditch Draft Action Area Plan (London) Hackney Council & Urban Practitioners ------- (2005) Statement of Licensing Policy (London) Hackney Council Hardt, M. & A. Negri (2000) Empire (Cambridge, Mass.) Harvard Hobbs, D., P. Hadfield, S. Lister & S. Winlow (2005) Bouncers, Violence and Governance in the Night-time Economy (Oxford) OUP Huxley, M. (2007) Geographies of Governmentality, in J.W. Crampton & S. Elden, Space, Knowledge and Power, Foucault and Geography (Aldershot) Ashgate Lefebvre, H. (2001) Comment on a New State Form, Antipode (Oxford) Blackwell Mandelker, D.R., (1970) A Rationale for the Zoning Process, in M. Stewart, The City: Problems of Planning (Harmondsworth) Penguin Marx, K. (1994) Selected Writings (Indianapolis) Hackett Mill, J.S. (1998) Utilitarianism (Oxford) OUP Miller, J. ( 1993) The Passion of Michel Foucault (London) Flamingo Miller, P. & N. Rose (1990) Governing economic life, Economy & Society 19 (1): 1-31 Osborne, T. & N. Rose (1999) Governing cities: notes on the spatialisation of virtue, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 17 737-760 Project Mimique (2005) Response to the South Shoreditch Draft Action Area Plan (London) Project Mimique Rose, N. & P. Miller (1992) Political power beyond the state: Problematics of Government, British Journal of Sociology 43 (2): 173-205 Salecl, R. (1993) National Identity and Socialist Moral Majority in E. Carter, J. Donald & J. Squires (eds) Space and Place, Theories of Identity and Location (London) Lawrence & Weishart Saunders, P (1981) Social Theory and the Urban Question (London) Hutchinson Sennett, R. (1996) The Uses of Disorder (London) Faber & Faber Stewart, M. (1970) The City: Problems of Planning (Harmondsworth) Penguin Tewdwr-Jones, M. (2002) The Planning Polity. Planning, Government and the Policy Process (London) Routledge VICE Magazine (no date) Volume 3 Number 5. The Drugs Issue. Found May 18 2005 Young, J. (1971) The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fantasy: some consequences of our present system of drug control as seen in Notting Hill in S. Cohen (ed) Images of Deviance (Harmondsworth) Penguin |
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