Introduction

The work of Timothy Mitchell defies simple categorization. It has been associated with political economy and economic history, political theory, the material turn and science and technology studies, and Middle East history and postcolonial studies, without ever really belonging entirely to any one of these fields of study. One never gets the sense that Mitchell is, say, a political scientist or an economic historian dabbling in other fields. The sense, rather, is that he is equally at home and a stranger to them all. Consider the range involved in some of his most important work that might go from a study of the colonial roots at the heart of, not just dominant regimes of representation, but our very notion of representation, to a seminal interrogation of the emergence of the seemingly discrete object called ‘the economy’ in a way that pushed well beyond the gains and limits of social construction theory; or from a study of the ‘state effect’ that so sharply demonstrated the limitations of the state debate in contemporary political thought, to a ‘history of oil from the perspective of oil’ that not only challenged how we historically think about the emergence of political rights in our hydrocarbon age but changed how we might theorize the capacity for political action in the first place. Today, there are a number of indispensable concepts that are difficult to think about without Mitchell’s work: representation, the economy, the state, power.

That Mitchell’s work is so resistant to disciplinary boundaries is in no small part because he has so consistently called our critical attention to the bounded separations that make up the invisible, taken-for-granted foundations of our modern world; his work resists being separated into distinct disciplines because it works against the larger separations of which academic disciplines are but one iteration. In their stead there is an attention to what he calls in this interview, following Latour, the ‘assembling of common worlds’; once we rid ourselves of governing dualisms—not least the separation between the material and the conceptual, of which theory itself might be seen as complicit—what we are left to think about are the composite parts that make up our world, and that can never be contained on either side of the matter/meaning divide.

The consistency, here, is not in the reliance on any one methodology or the privileging of one object of study, but rather in how questions are asked. The task is to pose large questions not by starting with a concept and looking for its absence or expression in any one place, but by interrogating the concept from the ground up, with a fine-grained, archival attention to how collective forms of life actually work. Anyone who has read Mitchell will attest not only to the empirical richness of his research but how compellingly this is woven into forms of narrative from which theorization emerges. There is never the sense that the Arab world and Middle East are the ‘practical’ case studies upon which something called theory might be applied. They are rather the grounds from which to produce theory, in a way that calls into question any easy distinction between ‘theory’, on the one hand, and ‘reality’, on the other. Prompted in this interview to consider how this commitment to ‘thinking from the South’ might be thought together with a kind of materialism, Mitchell goes further: taking seriously non-European sites of the production of knowledge means pushing postcolonial thought not only beyond a reckoning with the purported, self-evident universality of a set of concepts or signifiers, but also beyond humanism itself and towards a challenge of the very sovereignty of the concept, as a model or template. ‘To provincialize Europe’, Mitchell tells us, ‘we must provincialize the human.’ A reflection that, if nothing else, reminds us that what travels these days under the name of materiality, might still have a powerful political vocation.

Our interview took place in New York in the spring of 2015. Its outlines emerged, in part, from our shared sense, in our own work, that a cluster of entangled concepts—some new and some old—had opened new pathways for thought, but badly needed further parsing: the city and accumulation; materialism and colonial history; the square, public space and revolt. The interview, then, can be divided into three broad sections. The first looks backwards to consider the shift involved in some of Mitchell’s earlier books but most centrally takes up, in some detail, his current research on capitalization, and how this might offer a distinct way of understanding late capitalism. In the course of this reflection we think about what kind of place the city as an object of analysis has for Mitchell’s work, and how this might differ from understandings of the city in what might be called post-Fordist understandings of contemporary political economy. The second section takes up themes of materiality and method more centrally, and considers how the study of colonial history might benefit from the renewed interest in materiality. The third section focuses on Mitchell’s contribution to political theory more closely. Coming four years after revolts swept through the Arab world, and at a juncture in which many of us are still trying to make sense of just what happened and how thought might catch up, the discussion here delves into Mitchell’s understanding of political action, around ideas of vulnerability, disruption and sabotage, and considers how our current focus on public squares, occupations and cities might be hampering our efforts to understand the shifting conditions of political possibility.

The city and capitalization

I n your earlier work around Colonizing Egypt (Mitchell 1991) you showed a particular interest in questions around the planning and development of cities and urban infrastructures in the Middle East. Can you tell us what your departure point was both in terms of concerns and literature? How central are these notions in your work today?

In Colonizing Egypt, I wrote about the city out of an interest in questions of representation. Understanding modern forms of representation in their relationship to colonialism was a central theme of that book. I wanted to examine the limitations of a certain way of thinking about representation as a universal method of producing meaning, and show that the way in which we think about meaning, about the construction of orders of meaning, is actually something that’s come into being quite recently, over the last couple of hundred years and is tied in a specific way to the history of colonialism. For me, the city was a very good way of exploring that and of exploring the question of representation, of orders of representation, or orders of meaning materially as they are built; so that we could do a kind of conceptual thinking, but do it in terms of concrete forms of collective life, as exemplified by the ordering of urban space. Whether that’s still central to my thinking, I think not in the same way. Not because I don’t think those questions are still absolutely of great importance but I am not myself currently directly concerned with questions around representation, as I was thinking about it then.

Your book Rule of Experts (Mitchell 2002) is testimony to this shift from concerns around questions of representation to forms of expert knowledge, development and the constitution of the ‘economy’ as a discrete and calculable object. In what ways do you think this work, which advanced a keen attention to the material and the technical, opened up new ways of understanding historical and contemporary political and environmental phenomena in the region and beyond?

I did not plan to write Rule of Experts as a study of expert knowledge or the making of ‘the economy’. When I began that book, I was thinking about the problem of the state. I had published an article in the American Political Science Review (which has been cited far more often than Rule of Experts), critiquing the rather mechanical conception of the state in American social science. In Chapters 2 and 3 of the book I developed a different approach to the question of the state. But in the meantime I had been studying the history of development as a way of organizing the relationship between the world and the West, and made the unexpected discovery that before the Second World War Anglo-American economics did not write about an object called the economy or use the term in the sense we now take for granted. I became interested in the discipline of economics, not to critique it—which is easy enough if one does not share its approach to knowledge—but to understand how even its critics came to share the belief in the existence of the economy as a discrete and knowable object.

It was curious to me that the development of critical theory, including postcolonial theory, had scrutinized so many of the key terms of modern social theory—concepts of class, nation, society, culture, modernity and many others—but not the idea of the economy. It was almost as if everyone assumed that, however much the dominant categories of social analysis might be dismantled or reconfigured, the economy would remain as a material order. Implicitly, one could always refer back to a real world of production and consumption, in order to ground the work of cultural critique.

For me, writing Rule of Experts opened up a new way to connect what I had learned from postcolonial theory to questions of political economy. This required, as you say, a close attention to the material and the technical—to the practical details, in the case of Egypt, of irrigating fields, building dams, cultivating sugar cane, combating malaria, raising water buffalo, building houses, claiming land and baking bread, and equally to the properties of fertilizers, the life cycle of malarial mosquitoes, the requirements of cane cultivation and so on. It was equally important to understand how development projects were funded, how technical expertise was gathered and circulated, and how success and failure were measured and reported. To understand, how the worlds of postwar development, or of neoliberal restructuring, were built, I tried to follow and understand interconnections among technical processes, whether the process was horticultural or hydraulic, medical or architectural, moral or financial. I hope the book was able to illustrate the advantages of this altered approach to questions of political economy.

Your current research takes up a notion of capitalization to think through how, in our contemporary moment, a certain future is financially leveraged in the present. A form of speculation that, conversely, is dependent on the construction of physical durable structures in the present. This seems at some level to resonate with the importance of the urban and real estate in readings of post-Fordist economic restructuring. How, then, if at all, does your understanding of capitalization work through a notion of the urban or real estate markets? Or, on the other hand, where do you see a certain limit in the primacy of the city in some accounts of post-Fordism or the neoliberal? Does your work come up against a specificity of the Arab city that confounds some of the Marxist and radical literature on the city (Harvey, Lefebvre etc.)?

I find it useful to use the term capitalization rather than capitalism to think about a central aspect of modern collective life and modern forms of political economy. I’m not the only one who’s turned to the word. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s (2009) most recent book, Capital as Power, has been enormously helpful, though I take the term, capitalization, in a slightly different direction; again, I think perhaps a more material direction, more concerned with materiality and the built.

Let me say a word first about capitalization before relating it to the city. The idea of capitalization points to a particular way of rendering the future available in the present. It refers to a way of building durable structures of accumulation where a certain amount of the income that can be expected in the future is sold to investors in the present. To capitalize future income is a central practice of modern finance, but capitalization has a very interesting and very material history. It is the process that is at the heart, on the one hand, of the joint-stock company—the modern, publicly traded business firm—but also of the modern urban form as well. Both the business corporation and the city developed differently in different parts of the world, whether in the difference between Europe and North America or between different parts of the colonial world or postcolonial world. But in each case we can explore a set of material and calculative practices that allowed capital to be accumulated in the present at the expense of the future labor and livelihoods of others.

To explain better what I mean by capitalization let me give a concrete example. The development of capitalization through the modern joint-stock company is not usually tied to the rise of real estate companies, although it could be. It is usually thought of in relation to the railroad company. In the USA and many other places, the modern corporation came into being largely to organize the building and operation of railroads. Railroads, of course, exemplified the great energy transformations of the 19th century—the arrival of coal-powered steam engines, the development of iron and steel production, and the ability out of these to build a new kind of very durable structure—the large-scale, even transcontinental, railroad. Railroads were significant structures not only in their scale and the complexity of their management—which are the reasons usually given for the rise of the modern corporation in association with the railroad—but because of their durability in time. They have a spatial extent but also a temporal one. Railroad entrepreneurs were building a structure that could promise a revenue not just for, say, one to five years as other enterprises might, but for 10, 20 or 50 years. The entrepreneurs could take the durability of that revenue and sell shares in it in the present. That is the process known as capitalization.

One can think of the railroad firm, then, as a very particular technology or mechanism for moving future earnings, future forms of surplus and selling them to people in the present. In other words, capitalization can be thought of as a certain charge or tax upon the future, imposed directly upon working populations of the future—those who will be working to operate those structures of accumulation, but also those paying for goods and services that are moved around through that transportation system. The cost of all those things in the future will bear this tax, this burden of paying for the speculation—for the fact that it has been possible to construct income in the present by selling shares through a stock market in that future life. The railroad exemplifies this method of moving future income into the present. Indeed, it was the major instance of it in the 19th century.

Capitalization then expanded into many other areas, including ultimately to manufacturing and all other kinds of large-scale, durable, relatively long-term productive life. This was a complete transformation in forms of accumulation, one that Marx begins to grasp the significance of in Volume 3 of Capital. He refers to it using the notion of ‘fictitious capital’. The capital appears fictitious because the surplus that people are trading and accumulating, through the joint-stock company, somehow hasn’t been produced yet. But, I think that the term ‘fictitious’ is unhelpful because it contrasts a real economy, a real accumulation in the present, with something that is artificial, that is unreal. Yet the only difference is in the temporality. Capitalization depends upon the ability to control politically that future. The political control is the point that Nitzan and Bichler insist upon. You have to be able not only, in technical terms, to construct a durable system of revenue through iron and steel and steam power and all the other technical breakthroughs that make that possible, but also politically to control the route of that railroad—through property rights, wars to dispossess native peoples, settlement schemes and so on—or at least be able to promise to investors that you can. I do not think that that process is actually very fictitious. The word fictitious doesn’t capture what is actually a very specific set of both spatial and temporal technologies that come into being with modern forms of energy and control over space and time. It doesn’t only happen with railroads, there are many other large infrastructural projects that provide similar examples. Think of places like Egypt, the building of the Suez Canal, the first Aswan Dam and other large-scale projects that offered the same ability to build durable structures that promise decades of revenue (through shipping tolls on the canal, for example, or speculation in newly irrigated lands below the dam) and then sell shares in that future, realizing income in the present that is going to be a tax on the productive life of future populations.

The other vast world in which capitalization develops is in modern real estate, which operates in a similar way. That is, with the rise of modern urban forms, an entrepreneur can construct a building, let’s say a residential apartment building, that appears to guarantee a flow of income over the next, say, 50 years. The entrepreneur can then realize that future income in the present by selling apartment units, because the price of an apartment will not be what it cost to build, it will be the present value of 50 years of being able to live in that space. The entrepreneur or the investors realize that future income in the present, as the price, or as what appears as the ‘value’ of that housing unit—as I say, not related directly to the material cost of building but a product of the ability to control futures. Again, the durability of that future arises both from the material form of the building and, as with the railroad, from a promise of political control, of a reliable legal political order. It’s a control that depends on planning, on zoning in its various forms, on maintaining the livability of forms of neighborhoods and so on, so that the value of being able to live in that neighborhood does indeed appear to stretch forward over decades. Real estate becomes such a powerful form of capitalization that in most parts of the world it comes to account for at least 50% of this ability to turn future revenue into present forms of speculative income.

To me what’s interesting about thinking in terms of capitalization is that one downplays the notion that such revenue is speculative, or fictive, or somehow based on things that are unreal, that are not solid in the way that, for example, manufacturing or other forms of income are thought to be. It is productive, but what is being manufactured is different; you are not manufacturing short-term or even durable material goods, you are manufacturing this long-term spatial future. That is the usefulness of the term capitalization for thinking about the built environment in a new kind of way.

You asked how that differs from post-Fordist notions of thinking about the specificity of cities today in an era of economic restructuring. I think it’s slightly different and it offers a different way than the approach one finds, for example, in the work of David Harvey and others. It’s hard to do justice to the work of David Harvey in a brief discussion like this, but the key difference is that in work that thinks in post-Fordist terms, first of all, there is often a marked distinction between an age of Fordist manufacturing and a more speculative age in which we live. I think that disjuncture or break can be overemphasized because what happened in that earlier phase of capitalism was still organized in important ways around this same principle of the building of durable futures; under Fordism, large-scale manufacturing in the West happened to offer an additional form of durable future whose surplus, organized under the joint-stock corporation, could be accumulated in the present.

The other point of difference, or difference of emphasis, would be that a lot of scholarship on the city, including the Arab city, thinks in terms of problems of over-accumulation: that there are forms of wealth being generated, for example, through oil production, that then look for outlets in which to invest that surplus. Forms of urban expansion are understood as soaking up a capital that exists and has got nowhere to go. Thinking in terms of capitalization reverses that optic, because capital and its surplus aren’t the problem; what matters is the political ability to construct spatially these forms of future revenue. The capital is revenue that is going to exist in the future, which through the methods of capitalization can be moved into the present; it’s not a capital in the present that exists as a surplus needing somewhere to go. When a speculator decides to erect a very expensive building, he doesn’t run around looking for people who have got millions of dollars bulging in their pockets; he or she sets out a future revenue structure, in collaboration with the banks, who are always closely involved in these forms of future-building. The bank opens up a line of credit and that’s it. The entrepreneur does not have to go to people’s pockets to get the money for this, because that line of credit extends into the future, as the future revenue that is capitalized by the kinds of durable structures that can be built. In other words, speculative property building is not soaking up capital, it is actually expanding credit. The analysis of capitalization offers a different approach to understanding the dynamics of urban expansion than an approach focused on problems of over-accumulation (Figure 1).

Thinking against the sovereignty of the concept

A conversation with Timothy Mitchell

All authors

Nasser Abourahme & Omar Jabary-Salamanca

https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1224486

Published online:

21 December 2016

Figure 1 Frankford elevated railroad. Richard, 2012. Frankford elevated railroad construction, Beach Street, Philadelphia 1913. Enlargement of glass negative. Creative Commons License, Attribution 2.0.

Display full size

How does this differ from a notion of rentierism or rent economies, that’s so prevalent in readings of political economy in the Arab world?

This is a different way of thinking about the city than ways that frame it in terms of a problem of rent and rentierism. Let me explain that difference. The problem with theories of rent and the rentier state is that they tend to oppose a way of thinking about the economic [rentierism] to a normal situation governed by laws of the market; on the one hand there are markets and there are profits from markets, and on the other there is this aberrant system that is based on rent; that is, based on some monopoly or exclusive control of a resource, exemplified whether by oil or by real estate and other resources that are central to many modern Arab economies. I don’t think that’s helpful because forms of monopoly are found everywhere in one shape or another. Rentier theories normalize the idea of the market as a sort of organizing principle of modern capitalism and see rentier states as an exception. I find it more helpful to think about how the process of capitalization has been central to the organization of forms of modern life and to get away from the idea that the problem of monopoly rents distinguishes certain forms of economic life from a norm based upon markets and competition. Capitalization is dependent on a form of monopoly, or at least on forms of political control and not just on the ownership of an asset within a market; the arrangement, the technical world that has that durability through time, and the future for which you want to sell shares in the present. The more you can guarantee that future structure of revenue and accumulation, the more you can profit in the present from that future. That is an aspect of very large areas of collective economic life over the last hundred years or more. Thinking of certain economies as rentier economies, as somehow being different from so-called market economies, is not particularly helpful.

On the specific question of the way in which real estate operates in cities of the Gulf and elsewhere in the Arab world, David Sims’ (2010) work has been important. It’s from him that I’ve learned a particular point about a relationship between the urban and its ecological setting, one that is not unique to the cities of the Arab world but is found there perhaps more frequently: in many Arab states, large cities have developed in circumstances where the hinterland around them, into which they want to expand, tends not to be privately owned but claimed by the state or by various agencies of the state, such as the armed forces. The frontier of urban expansion is a vital one, where a city is developing at its edges, whether onto undeveloped land or redeveloping existing land. That is the critical frontier of capitalization, where the opportunities arise to construct these new long-term revenue structures. So for any city it matters how that development frontier is structured and operates. One of the features of many cities of the Arab world is that the urban frontier consists of arid lands or desert and therefore is not usually subject to direct private ownership. There may be forms of collective or tribal claim over it, but as often as not it is the state that has come to claim uncultivated lands and therefore the state plays a role in the process of capitalization that is much more explicit and much more direct than the way in which it has played that role elsewhere. Simply saying that there is a problem of rentierism in Arab states and in Arab real estate is not helpful. It does not examine the ecological dimension of that; it does not ask how that situates the state differently in relation to the possibilities of making available new tracts for the process of real estate capitalization; and it misses the opportunity to look at the dynamic between that form or role that the state can have and its role in the energy sector and its control of oil, which of course is not unique to the Arab states, but a distinctive feature. The state has not just the oil but a second source of revenue, the urban frontier, concentrated in its hands.

Looking at that relationship between two structures of accumulation, one in real estate and one in oil, is important. A limitation of so much of the rentier state literature when it emerged around oil revenues, as I wrote in Carbon Democracy (Mitchell 2013), is that it didn’t think about the material nature of the oil, it just immediately jumped to the problem that there seemed to be all this cash generated. It was thinking about the money and not the oil. One of the things that are missed is the relationship between oil and real estate. Why is it that the two developed in this particular relationship to each other in contemporary Arab states? How is it different to the way in which real estate worked with other forms of productive life elsewhere in the world? (Figures 2 and 3).

Thinking against the sovereignty of the concept

A conversation with Timothy Mitchell

All authors

Nasser Abourahme & Omar Jabary-Salamanca

https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1224486

Published online:

21 December 2016

Figure 2 Oil refinery. Crude oil and its dispersed points of vulnerability. Hugo Cardoso, 2015. Oil refinery. Creative Commons Public License, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0.

Display full size

Thinking against the sovereignty of the concept

A conversation with Timothy Mitchell

All authors

Nasser Abourahme & Omar Jabary-Salamanca

https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1224486

Published online:

21 December 2016

Figure 3 Saint John. Chris Toe Pher, 2015. Courtenay Bay, Saint John, New Brunswick. Crude oil cars being steamed so they can be pumped. Creative Commons Public License, Attribution-NonDerivs 2.0.

Display full size

Materialism, colonialism and the archive

Your work is strongly associated with a renewed interest in materialism. Another aspect of your work might be thought of as a kind of postcolonial critique that de-centers theory in its tracing of non-European genealogies of thought and practice (we are thinking in particular of Questions of Modernity ( Mitchell 2003 )). How might these two methodological and epistemological commitments—materiality and thinking from the South—be thought together?

That’s an interesting question, to think together the question of materiality and the issue of thinking from the South and I’m not sure I’ve done that explicitly. Let me try to think it through. One of the things one is attempting to do in thinking from the South, as so much of postcolonial theory has shown, is to undermine, destabilize or provincialize the sovereignty of certain forms of Western thought, which is of course the sovereignty of theory. It’s the sovereignty of a set of concepts, a set of key ideas—a concept of democracy, a concept of modernity, a concept of reason. Many of the key terms of modern political thought are taken as a template and then applied to areas outside the West so that non-Western history and politics has to be thought against that template. So, thinking from the South is not just thinking against the sovereignty of a Western model but it’s also thinking against the very idea of a model; thinking against the concept; thinking against the universal in a certain sense—that there is such a thing as an idea, model or concept that arises somewhere and then gets applied to many other places in the world.

That’s the connection to materiality. Materiality is another way of thinking against the concept. It’s saying, for example, I’m not going to write a history of democracy or I’m not going to take the concept of democracy and apply it to some other part of the world; I’m going to ask a set of quite material questions about the ability of populations to interrupt authority or impose a certain accountability on those who govern them. I’m interested in that ability and the instances when it occurs in very material ways, in ways that are not about the spread of an idea of democracy in people’s heads or a culture of accountability, but are looking in practical terms at the way in which certain forms of movement or arrangement or structures of the ways things are accumulated or populations are governed are open to interruption and challenge. So, one can think of materiality itself as ways of attending to the technical, practical, material aspects of collective life; as a particular way of thinking about large questions that doesn’t begin from the concept and therefore in that sense is working against a certain kind of Eurocentrism; because of the way in which Eurocentrism is associated with the concept, with taking a certain idea and then looking for its expression or its absence or its delayed or distorted arrival elsewhere. So, in my mind I think one can relate a certain kind of postcolonial theory and a certain attempt to provincialize Europe and European experience to the method of attending in new ways to the technical and the material.

One has to be careful how one does that because there is another way where one focuses on materiality so that the West is the site of theory and the non-West is merely the site of the practical and the material. That’s not the implication of what I am suggesting at all, because one wants to do exactly the same thing when one turns to think about any of those concepts in the context of studying the West. Whether it’s the question of democracy or any other key idea, one will want to make the same move away from an approach that starts from the study of meanings and concepts, towards the exploration of how the common world is built.

I have been responding to your question about materialism, but I prefer Bruno Latour’s notion of the assembling of common worlds to a term like materiality. We inhabit worlds made of many parts, organic and inorganic, machined and unassembled, capable of independent action and incapable, singular and repetitive, referential and non-referential, tangible and intangible, human and non-human. These worlds cannot usefully be reduced to the material versus the conceptual. It may be useful to explore how that simple duality is continually made to appear self-evident—as I do in Colonizing Egypt, in Rule of Experts and in other writings. But the pursuit of what is called theory usually ends as another re-inscription of such dualisms—the construction of a conceptual model or order in which to organize a set of historical or material processes. Postcolonial critique has offered a powerful way to disrupt the hegemony of the concept, of the attempt to organize the world as the unfolding of a Western conceptual logic. But there is more to do. To provincialize Europe we must provincialize the human. Not because these are powerless or unimportant constructs—on the contrary, but because their power has depended on appearing to constitute almost half the world, and the only significant source of its agency.

In relation to this, is there something in what has been called the ‘material turn’ that talks directly to the specificity of the colonial and its enduring effects and legacies? Might the colonial encounter be understood not only as a territorial conquest and extractive domination but also as the collision of physical and environmental forces and their corollary forms? More specifically, if dispossession is the primary modality of the colonial as many scholars argue, what might a materialist reading of objects add to our understandings of it?

There are several ways in which turns to the material and the technical have allowed us to open up new ways of studying colonialism; or if they are not new, at least they change the emphasis. One example of the ways I have done it in my own work is through being more attentive to questions of nature, disease, the non-human in its various forms—the mosquito, the malaria parasite and so on. And of course, as I say, that’s an example of something that’s not new, there is a long tradition of environmental and ecological history, the history of disease, that has done this work, including scholars studying in the Middle East. I suppose to some extent some of that work has tended to be bracketed as a niche field and not integrated so centrally into the main studies of colonial history; so, one of the things one wants to do is think about how one rewrites works of political economy and works of political history dealing with the colonial world in which the ecological, the non-human, the material is not treated as some separate field of specialization but is used to actually redefine what we mean by political economy, or the political, or political actors. That’s one way in which I’ve tried to think about the possibilities for writing about colonial politics and colonial history, learning from those who have worked in the past on forms of ecological and environmental history, but bringing them into conversation with forms of political, economic and social history.

How that relates to the specifics of settler colonialism and themes of dispossession? I think I could try to approach that question only in terms of specific examples of what one might do differently. One could illustrate the scope to do this, for example, in the history of Palestine. Let me take one example: one of the most influential books dealing with settler colonialism in Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th century is Gershon Shafir’s (1996) Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, an important study of the dynamics of the relationship between the settlers and the Palestinian population. Shafir rewrites the history of Zionism not as the development of a political idea but as a movement shaped by the material problem of surviving on the land. The shape of the conflict, Shafir argues, came from the inability of the European settlers to subsist as farmers in the way that the Palestinian population could, leading them to demand the creation of an economically and racially segregated settler society. But in fact the book says very little about farming and how farming works and about what enables populations to subsist or not subsist. The argument assumes that the European population was accustomed to a higher standard of living than the Palestinian population, and therefore was unable or unwilling to live at the very low income levels that Palestinian farming households endured. This assumption structures the whole argument of the book and a lot of the debate that has followed since.

What is the evidence for the assumption? Might not the Palestinians simply have been better farmers? Perhaps they had a longer relationship to the land and the possibilities of the land—knowledge of certain crops, of what could be planted when and where, that allowed them to enjoy, on a given income, a better standard of living than a European settler on the same income? I don’t know enough about the agrarian and ecological history of that period to answer the question. But this absence of what one might call the material dimension in what is normally taken as a very materialist analysis of the whole history of Zionism leaves the question open. One learns nothing about the actual dynamics of farming, of different kinds of grain, of citrus cultivation and its problems, or the difficulties that beset the Rothschild-funded attempt to develop vineyards in Palestine to replace the French wine industry devastated by the Phylloxera worm. That entire world is missing from what we would think of as a ‘material’ history of Zionism. A properly material account would open up a whole set of questions, including not only the citrus and the olives and the wheat, but also of course the mosquitoes, the malaria, the vines and the worm that ruined the Rothschilds’ French vineyards and pushed them to Palestine, then caught up with them there a generation later. There is so much to be told about that history that is missing. Where there have been good studies, with one or two important exceptions such as Beshara Doumani’s (1995) study of the Nablus olive industry, they have been rather separate specialized studies of those kind of issues (Figure 4).

Thinking against the sovereignty of the concept

A conversation with Timothy Mitchell

All authors

Nasser Abourahme & Omar Jabary-Salamanca

https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1224486

Published online:

21 December 2016

Figure 4 Containers. A different archive—power as logistics. Astrid Westrang, 2011. Containers. Creative Common Public License, Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivs 2.0.

Display full size

Another question about method. Latour often talks about the difficulty of conducting historical research using actor-network theory and its tools. Yet your work has done exactly that, and it has done so in part by going back to, arguably, one of the most representational sites there is: the archive. How does one do archival research and read archival texts in a non-representational frame? How does one re-trace object relations when they exist only, or primarily, in text?

This takes us back to what I was talking about in the beginning, that initially my interest in the city was around questions of representation, in a way that is not quite the same focus anymore. I’d say the same about the archive, and this is where the work of Latour has been very helpful to me. It’s not a question of not being interested in representation or the modes in which the past is represented and can be recuperated from archives and other forms of recording; it’s not, in the case of the city, of being uninterested in the visual forms, the representational forms, or the question of architecture itself, for example. It’s a question of how one situates the representational in relation to all the other aspects of our complex forms of collective existence and, in particular, to not approach the representational as one half of life. One of the problems that I was trying to get at in the very beginning with Colonizing Egypt was with the ways we think about representation and how we divide the world, as it were, into two: reality and its representation, these two orders of being. The answer is not to say that representation doesn’t matter, or conversely that everything must be grasped representationally or symbolically, but to think that representation just one particular form of separation—the separation of an object or text from its referent. Nor is it to say that representational practice, concerned with aspects of meaning and how things take on significance, is not 50% of what matters, it’s not the meaningful dimension of things in relation to the material or the real. Rather, representation is just one of the many things that goes on in collective life. One way to do that is to refer to the many different kinds of practice that all get lumped together into something called representation; so for example, archiving is a practice, it’s a practice of government, it’s a practice of administration, it’s a form of memory and so on. It can be compared and talked alongside other forms, other kinds of practices. Architecture might be one, writing might be another. Multiple forms of reference, of storage, of inscription, of illustration, all of these things that we, in conventional forms of analysis, sort of lump together as being all, in their different ways, concerned with this fundamental question of meaning, of what do things mean, of representation, of how we construct an order of meaning in reference to the real world. We then slip back into this binary or bifurcated world of meaning versus reality, representation versus the real. Now, the answer to that problem of dualism is not to say, well everything’s all mixed up and there’s no difference between anything. No, there are lots of differences. There are differences between archiving, and the building façades of buildings, and forms of literature and many other modes of use, of writing, of inscription, of reference, of memory, of recall and so on that are among the practices that organize our collective life and in many of which the ability to recall, the ability to store and the ability to reference form a part. That’s different from either saying everything is all the same and there’s no such thing as meaning versus reality, and it’s also different from saying the world’s just divided into meaning or culture on the one hand and reality or the material on the other.

Another way to frame the same thing, is to think with Latour in his early work, when he wrote about laboratory science as studying science in action as opposed to work in the philosophy of science; trying to get at what science was by just understanding what scientists do. One way he expressed that was to say, there’s nothing scientific about science, there’s no secret scientificity to the form of production of truth or knowledge that defines science as science. If you want to understand what scientists do, just follow scientists in the lab and look at their forms of practice—the way they write things down, the way they construct machines and devices to bring nature under control, the way they move between the field and laboratory. There’s a whole set of practices that produce this thing called science but you won’t find any ‘science-y’ essence to it. I’d say the same for any other form of life, whether it’s the archive or architecture or planning. One is not going to find some sort of essence of the city or some essence of the historical that is somehow summed up by the archive or summed up by architectural practice and planning. One is going to find a certain coming together of a whole set of different techniques and by following those techniques of planning, inscribing, building and constructing one’s going to get at what’s specific to those in a particular time and place. If one thinks that one can make sense of it by talking about the material here and meaning there, these binary, bifurcated worlds that are given to us by the language of social science, by terms like culture and, unfortunately, by terms like the material itself—as the opposite of culture or what is meaningful—then that just won’t work. That seems to me the way to go.

With regards to the question of how one does archival research and reads archival texts in a non-representational frame, or how one re-traces object relations when they exist only, or primarily, in text: it’s a particular problem for those doing historical forms of research that one seems particularly dependent upon the documentary, on the past as captured through representations of the past. And therefore you are stuck in a world that seems to be constructed as a system of meaning. But I don’t think we have to take that route, even though the sources we’re dealing with lead us down a path concerned with meaning, the meaning of the past and so on. And, again, Latour himself manages to avoid that and he has written studies that are historical, the main example would be The Pasteurization of France (Latour 1993), which is written entirely from historical sources. I would also say in almost all the other work he has done there has been a specific case through which he has explored things and avoided slipping into those dualisms; his essay on ‘Circulating Reference’ in Pandora’s Hope (Latour 1999) is a wonderful example of how you deal with documents, with references. It is actually an essay about a group of scientists—biologists and others—who are concerned with plants and rainforests but also with maps and taxonomies and all sorts of forms of reference. How does one get at that world without assuming that it is a world that consists of reality on the one hand and reference on the other. His notion of circulating reference is precisely a way to do that. Historians can think in similar kinds of ways because the archive doesn’t exist as a representation of the past, it wasn’t put together in order to produce a representation of the past; it’s a particular set of resources that includes in it a lot of work of inscription, of writing, of reference to other inscriptions or other works of writing because archives are organized referentially, one file referring to the next; but also in terms of references to non-written forms, to individuals, to what was said, to what was done and so on. So, as one pays attention to the work that is done to reference, to inscribe, to store, to record and if one thinks of these as social practice one gets away from a simple assumption that the archive is no more than a representation of the past, which, of course, no self-respecting historian would say; but, I think this could be theorized a lot more along these lines.

Political theory, revolt and the square

Another field with which your work consistently engages is political theory. The last five years has seen the Arab world pose some urgent questions to political thought. For one, questions of political action have been re-engaged around a certain notion of public space—most explicitly around the modality of occupation. How does one think strategically about the conditions of possibility for political action in the Arab world today? Does the stunted course of the Arab uprisings point to a need for a deeper engagement with political action that might move us away from symbolic understandings of public space occupations towards a grappling with the material conditions of producing different articulations of power?

The focus on the square, on public space and through that on the city and the urban in thinking about the Arab uprisings was enormously useful for getting us away from older ways of thinking about problems of democracy in the Arab world, where the public space that everybody thought about was inside people’s heads. The problem of democracy was thought to be that somehow people didn’t want it or weren’t conscious of it or hadn’t figured out how to want it enough—all those kinds of things that governed mainstream debates about democracy in the Arab world for so long, and that resurfaced with the invasion of Iraq and so on, that circled around questions of political enlightenment, cultural attitudes and cultural obstacles. So, with the uprisings of 2011 and with that very dramatic seizure of public space the debate shifted; suddenly, there was no problem anymore of consciousness, everybody wanted these forms of political freedom that they somehow seemed not to want before. Democracy or freedom was about the much more practical business of seizing space, occupying space, using the occupation of space to present demands and weaken regimes. That was very positive. But, there’s a danger in extrapolating a particular from that, which is to say that democracy is always going to be about the square, about public space, about a certain configuration of the urban and the ability to seize physical control of that space. That would be the wrong move to make. It would be more useful to understand why at that moment it became possible to seize public spaces. It wasn’t as if people hadn’t tried that before; there was a long history of attempted seizures of control, of demonstrations, in public spaces in Beirut, in Tehran, in Cairo itself. Those lines of trucks with troops sitting in them, always parked just outside the edge of Midan al-Tahrir and other centers of public space, were not there just for show. They were there because there had been earlier attempts, over decades, to seize these sites of public space. And of course, in Palestine also, in the first and second Intifadas and their own pre-histories. Nevertheless, distinctive things happened in 2011 that made it possible to seize public space and for a number of months make those sites the center of a place where people in power were forced to be answerable. If regimes did not answer, then public space was going to be the way that refusal to answer would be made manifest. That moment is gone again, for now. To understand that moment isn’t to focus on public space or occupation as the essential form of politics but to ask what made it possible and why it has gone away again. What other forms of interrupting the regular exercise of power might be possible that used some of the possibilities but were not necessarily focused on the occupation of public space, seeing that the regime realized that that can’t be allowed to happen again and have put in place forms of control to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. That would be useful. Of course, those planning those occupations thought long and hard about how to overcome earlier defenses to such moments of occupation. So, one might want to think about that again but also about what other kinds of challenges are possible. In the case of Egypt, we know, for example, that there were other contestations around police brutality and police power that led up to the moment of 25 January 2011, around the death of Khalid Sa’id in Alexandria, around the occupations of factories, workplace sit-ins, and strikes and so on. There were many other aspects of challenges to political power that were of importance in paving the way to 25 January.

You asked how this relates to my own thinking about democratic politics in Carbon Democracy. What I wanted to understand in Carbon Democracy, and the way I came to understand democracy and democratic politics, was around a problem of vulnerability. What is it that at certain moments briefly makes ruling orders or dominant forms of accumulation vulnerable to interruption? Vulnerable to challenge, to protest, in ways they hadn’t been before? I told the whole story of the emergence of modern mass democracy around a very specific point of vulnerability, between about 1895 and 1915; the history of the general strike, dock workers, coal workers and so on. That opportunity came and went for quite specific reasons, as I tried to articulate. It wasn’t to say that the only way you can ever have democracy is to organize a general strike based on an alliance of coal workers, dock workers and rail workers. That’s not the point, the point is histories of vulnerability or points of vulnerability and trying to identify where those points of vulnerability lie (Figure 5).

Thinking against the sovereignty of the concept

A conversation with Timothy Mitchell

All authors

Nasser Abourahme & Omar Jabary-Salamanca

https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1224486

Published online:

21 December 2016

Figure 5 Tahrir Square. Is democracy always about the seizure of public space? Hossam el-Hamalawy, 2011. Tahrir Square. Creative Commons Public License, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0.

Display full size

Finally, if the majority of the urban poor in the mega cities of the so-called postcolonial world are circumvented by circuits of accumulation (not just informalized but often rendered superfluous), and the general strike is considered by some ineffective as a mode of action, how can we think about a historical–political subject beyond the figure of the proletarian? Is there something in the self-constructed and self-maintained life worlds of the informal poor, in Egypt’s ‘ashwa’iyat (literally ‘haphazard things’) for example, that might point to other enabling conditions for political action in the city and beyond?

There’s been a lot of very interesting work recently thinking about these questions of informality, forms of accumulation that exist outside the organized structure of the economy and so on. You mentioned Vinay Gidwani’s (2008) work in India and there are similar examples for the Arab world. There is a lot more thinking of that sort to be done; work that I myself have not really done. In Rule of Experts I wrote about so-called informality in rural Egypt, both historically and in the present. I think that the question of informal housing, of the communities that live in this broader thing called the informal economy which we think about in relation to the urban and to the city, where as much as 90% of the population are living in houses they built themselves and living lives that are not dependent on any kind of formal employment, is an extraordinary situation. Or, if they have formal employment, it’s not even their main source of income. One shouldn’t forget that what happens in the cities is replicated and even extended in the countryside. The countryside is a world of ‘ashwa’iyat on a vast scale, people still build their own houses or build them with small-scale local entrepreneurs and live outside a world of formal employment and regular wage labor. Or, they have all those things mixed together with owning a little bit of land, or farming pieces of land, having some sort of government job that barely pays, and making some money on the side in an occasional way. So, what we think of as the informal economy of the city, not just in Egypt but in other parts of the Arab world and other parts of the South, actually characterizes far more than just the city. And I don’t think we’ve thought questions of politics and political consciousness and so on adequately in those terms. Subaltern studies, the great school of postcolonial South Asian studies, formed itself around this problem of how to look out for peasant consciousness—it seems like something almost out of the past, though there is another round of debate around it nowadays. It’s surprising how absent that is today in debates about the Arab world. I don’t think we have the terms to do it because the moment we start talking about an object called the peasant and another object called consciousness, then we’re already on the wrong track. But I do think that in some sense we need to think about those two things together—the rural and the urban—and we need to think about the ways in which people do this extraordinary job, whether in the countryside or in the vast informal areas of cities, of making a living, of sustaining themselves, of getting by to an extraordinary extent. That still seems to me one of the most remarkable aspects of the contemporary Arab world, that populations are by and large not dependent on a formally structured economy or the state for making a living, for surviving, for housing themselves, for all those kinds of things. Egypt has built more planned cities than any other country in the world and those cities house almost nobody. Everybody has just got on with it and, as David Sims has shown, actually built a vast amount of housing themselves, in no way connected to the state or even the formal economy of real estate construction and financing that would go with that. We have very little sense of the kind of level really that I’m talking about. We’ve left a lot of the study of it to the anthropologists, which is fine, somebody is doing it; but often with a different set of concerns, away from these issues of the political and political economy, with which we want to think about these things. I think there was this profound sense after the revolutionary period in Egypt from 2011 to 2013, the countryside—what did the revolution mean for the countryside? It was a revolutionary experience in the countryside but how did that connect with what was going on in Tahrir, in the cities? We have a much better sense of the revolutionary life of Alexandria, Port Said and of course Cairo than almost anywhere else even though most people live in those other places. I don’t think I’ve answered your question but I do think it means that this issue of political vulnerability and the vulnerability of regimes is very differently posed in situations where such a large majority of the population is actually not particularly dependent for getting by on a formal economy in any sense (Figure 6).

Thinking against the sovereignty of the concept

A conversation with Timothy Mitchell

All authors

Nasser Abourahme & Omar Jabary-Salamanca

https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1224486

Published online:

21 December 2016

Figure 6 Garbage City. The enduring challenge of self-organized forms of life. Stvnl, 2010. Garbage City, Cairo. Creative Commons Public License, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0.

Display full size