Agora Barcelona:  Politics, aesthetics and space

The research presented in this thesis is grounded in the city of Barcelona, and the methodology combines archival research (a counter-normative history of Barcelona) and field-research within a dissensual space which goes by the name of Agora. The approach examines time and space as being in relation, thus rendering the time-space of Barcelona as an assemblage of ‘parts’. The question that informs the thesis is: what parts does the city ‘remember to forget’? (see Conversi, 1996, Ealham, 2010). By combining critical genealogy and field-based research, this thesis explores a series of discourses and practices that have formed and given an architectural and biopolitical definition to the city of Barcelona, and which also generate the conditions of existence for dissensual politics to emerge beyond and within the limits of an apparatus of power/knowledge framed as Policy (Rancière, 2011). In the midst of Policy is an agonistic struggle between what Rancière calls Policy and what Moten and Harney describe as Planning (2013). It is the latter that characterises the anarchic power of the Agora. From the late 18th century, Barcelona converged with imperial Spain. The bounty of this convergence became a formative factor in Barcelona’s process of industrialisation. This created a set of social relations that attempted to partition a hegemonic bourgeois political culture from an urban proletariat through the imposition of a bio-political technique referred to as ‘urbanism’, which in turn generated a resistant politics among those who Rancière describes as ‘the part of no part’, i.e. those disqualified from part taking (participating) in Policy. In situating the bio political as a technique of what Rancière calls ‘the Police’ (relating to Policy), the thesis applies a critical lens to an enduring, yet fundamentally contingent vii ‘Barcelona Model’, that exists in parallel with the Agora. Emerging from a set of evolving social relations and radical political traditions, the present-day Agora operates as an ‘Undercommons’ (Moten & Harney 2013) that seeks to verify equality and open ‘new ways of being’, and which affords insight into how an emergent dissensus persists at the intersection of politics, space, and aesthetics.

Publisher

University of Galway

Rights

CC BY-NC-ND

cbn

Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)