[Nettime-nl] Sebastian Olma: Ideology and the city: Pakhuis De Zwijger as an-aesthetic interface

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Nederlands blad, Engels artikel, sorry!


Uit Amsterdam Alternative, #24, Mei-juni 2019
https://amsterdamalternative.nl/articles/7486


Ideology and the city: De Zwijger as an-aesthetic interface

Unseeing the City

In China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City and the City, a murder mystery 
unfolds in a fascinating dystopian cityscape. There are two cities, 
Beszel and Ul Qoma, separated by a tightly controlled border. The former 
East and West Berlin might come to mind. However, what’s different about 
Beszel and Ul Qoma is that they are not divided by a physical wall or 
fence but by a complex psycho-geographical demarcation. The two separate 
cities are in fact superimposed on one another, with their urban fabric 
tightly interwoven. In certain parts of the metropolis, a neighbour 
within physical proximity, could in fact live as a citizen of the other 
city, while the downstairs shop might also exist on the other side of 
the border.
In order to make such a complex and multifarious border operate, one 
needs something as malleable as the human psyche to intervene and this 
is exactly what happens in Miéville’s novel. From early age, the 
inhabitants of Beszel and Ul Qoma are instructed in what is called 
“unseeing”: they have to train their perception in such a way that they 
only see what’s happening in the space demarcated as their city. There 
are specific codes, colours and styles that are indicative for a person, 
a car, a shop and so on to belong particularly to one of the two cities. 
The citizenry of Beszel and Ul Qoma have internalized these codes with 
flawless perfection: each population see their city and their city only. 
The rest fades away to a dim background blur, effectively unseen.
While it speaks to the prodigious imaginative talent of Miéville to pull 
off a nail-biter in this near impossible absurd setting, his dystopian 
cityscape is fascinating for yet another reason: it reveals a formula 
according to which ideology functions today. Perhaps its most obvious 
articulation can be found in the mobile interface and its radical impact 
on the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Consider, for 
instance, how we navigate through urban space: the GPS-supported map in 
the palm of our hand has merged with the territory and our sense of 
place, causing a partial unseeing of our life world. It doesn’t end 
here, of course. The mobile interface has submitted a previously diverse 
array of social practices – from listening to music, to taking a photo 
or finding a partner – to the same regime of gestures and habits that 
effectively dissipate a good part of the quality of life. The screen 
makes us also unsee the brutal regime on which the interface is built, 
the exploitation, the relentless extraction (of data and resources), the 
behavioural control of our lives and so on (the politically toxicity of 
a product such as Fairphone lies exactly in feigning to be an ‘interface 
for good’, thus symbolically whitewashing the corporate ecosystem in 
which it participates).

Interface and An-Aesthesia

In a recent Amsterdam Alternative talk, the US-American culture critic 
Brian Holmes argued that the ubiquitous use of mobile interfaces has led 
to an alarming cultural shift. He speaks of the emergence of an 
‘interface aesthetic’ that amounts to a cultural an-aesthesia with 
regard to the great political challenges of our time. “The developments 
of cybernetically managed communications technology since the emergence 
of ubiquitous computing”, Holmes argues, “have shown the possibility of 
a thoroughly affective euphoria of mobility, perceptual agility, 
expressive virtuosity, and relational fluidity amidst steady progress 
toward complete ecological breakdown.” Yet, while the ongoing climate 
change protests by post-Millennials around the world could perhaps be 
seen as a first crack in the screen, there are aspects of 
neoliberalism’s ideological interface aesthetic that remain 
enigmatically intact.
This is specifically the case in our own city. If we want to understand 
the current transformation of Amsterdam from a socially diverse, 
culturally exciting habitat for its dwellers to an increasingly 
homogeneous playground for financial investors, real estate speculators 
and the tourism industry, Miéville’s collective unseeing and Holmes’ 
interface an-aesthesia are absolutely crucial. Consider the havoc that 
unchecked gentrification continues to wreak in our city. Without 
illusions or fully endorsing it, we are aware of its effects: 
unaffordable housing, displacement of low and middle income households, 
and exploding rents driving an entire generation of local youth and 
university graduates, together with small businesses and even doctors, 
out of town.
Those with enough interest in the matter are aware of the drivers behind 
this development: neoliberal deregulation and financialisation of the 
economy has led to a staggering accumulation of financial capital that 
is in constant search for investment opportunities. Thanks to low 
interest rates, real estate is where investors prefer to put their 
funds, driving up property and land prices. Add to this ‘innovative’ 
digital business models such as Airbnb and top it up with cheap air 
travel and you get a city suffocating on the approbations of 
neoliberalism.

Financial Vandalism in the Capital of Innovation

Amsterdam shares this kind of distress with cities all over world. What 
makes our city stand out is the glaring absence of political courage to 
effectively deal with this situation. There are many ways in which city 
governments can intervene to put a stop to the vandalism of financial 
capital. New York has recently filed a $21 million lawsuit against a 
group of real estate brokers who ran an illegal Airbnb empire throughout 
Manhattan. Barcelona is severely restricting Airbnb’s operation and has 
stopped hotels from being built in the city centre. In Berlin, a social 
movement is organising formidable demonstrations demanding the 
expropriation of anti-social investors; a corresponding petition has 
attracted tens of thousands of signatures. The mayor of the town of 
Tübingen in the German South is threatening investors with confiscation 
if their property is used for speculation.
Some steps are being taken in Amsterdam as well. The city government 
requests 40 to 80 per cent of new real estate developments to be social 
housing for low and middle incomes. However, as long as housing 
corporations are acting as market players, it’s hard to see how this is 
going to happen. Amsterdam has also begun to impose substantial 
penalties for illicit business activities around Airbnb. That’s a start, 
but not nearly enough. Contentiously, there’s an official stop on the 
building of new hotels that is a total sham, as new hotels are erected 
incessantly all over the city.
Again, what’s missing is the political courage to radically break with 
the functional logic of the housing and real estate market, the tourism 
industry, the energy market and so on that monopolises social resources. 
One of the reasons for this lack of nerve lies in the machinations of a 
coalition of political functionaries, smart entrepreneurs and cultural 
opportunists who were able to install an an-aesthetic interface in 
Amsterdam that has effectively highjacked the city’s public discourse 
through short-term and small-scale pragmatic concession. Instrumental in 
this operation was Pakhuis De Zwijger along with the Amsterdam Economic 
Board and a network of smaller institutions. What they have achieved 
over the course of the past decade is to create a colossal programme to 
permanently manipulate the city’s collective vision in such a way as to 
systematically unsee the political dimension of every societal problem. 
Where in the past, people would see social injustice, power inequities 
or exploitation, De Zwijger & Co taught us to see wicked problems, 
design challenges, opportunities for innovative business models, Big 
Society projects and Smart City programmes. One of the celebrated 
successes of this coalition was Amsterdam’s 2016 nomination as European 
Capital of Innovation. As the marketeers of IAmsterdam, enthusiastically 
exclaim on their website: “Amsterdam serves as an example to the rest of 
the world when it comes to using innovation to solve urban issues.” Yet, 
innovation is not equitable to politics. By instilling economic and 
cultural populism, it performs the task of implementing the neoliberal 
zeitgeist. The network around De Zwijger indeed has an impressive track 
record in this respect. Amsterdam was a forerunner in adapting the 
so-called creative city policy (the use of culture and the arts for the 
purpose of gentrification), a policy that even its intellectual 
forebear, Richard Florida, considers to be one of the crucial causes of 
the current urban crisis.

The Creative City and the Rise of the Populist Right

Make no mistake; there is nothing neoliberalism detests more than the 
composition of schematic democratic politics, understood as the 
meaningful debate about the direction in which a society should move, 
followed by a collective decision leading to rules, regulations, and of 
course, legislation. By pretending to provide an authentic, open forum 
for all citizens, De Zwijger and its exposed network of agents 
successfully managed to degenerate the public debate to the now dominant 
articulation of ‘interests’, smartness and innovation. This is an 
illusory, however dangerous achievement. The dire consequences of this 
system can be observed for instance when the former director of the 
Green Left Party think tank, Dick Pels genuinely argued for a 
continuation of creative city policy as the best way to fight social 
injustice and right-wing resentment (Groene Amsterdammer, 18 March 
2019). In an act of breathtaking political idiocy, Pels dispenses with 
the fact that the creative city is not anything but the cultural 
avant-garde for the interests of financial capital, serving only the 
financial elite (again, even Florida admits this!). Defending ordinary 
people against the powerful was once the political function of left 
politics. De Zwijger’s an-aesthetic interface is part of a machinery 
that has blurred out the democratic struggle because it doesn’t fit the 
schema of neoliberal creativity and innovation. This is how ideology 
functions today: out of sight, out of mind, out of politics. Beszel, Ul 
Qoma, Amsterdam.
Except that there is of course a political movement to which those who 
feel betrayed by their political representatives are gravitating: the 
populist right. This then is where the real danger of De Zwijger & Co 
lies. By perpetuating an an-aesthetised public discourse that sustains a 
neoliberal consensus, they dissipate the energies of a young generation 
yearning for radical change. Each day it continues to inhibit a 
political movement that could effectively fight social injustice and 
rising inequality, De Zwijger is complicit in the further expansion of 
the ideological space of the populist right.
This unintended effect is what everyone who plans to participate in an 
event like We.Make.The.City should be aware of. It doesn’t matter how 
many intelligent and meaningful projects, initiatives, start-ups and 
local activists present their worthwhile cases. Some of them will 
certainly be laudable or even contribute to making the world a better 
place. What is urgent to understand is that We.Make.The.City and its 
host, Pakhuis De Zwijger, operate as an interface created for the 
purpose of putting anyone with real political aspirations to sleep, of 
closing the eyes of those who want to insist on naming social issues by 
their proper name, of unseeing the effects of financial vandalism on our 
city’s urban ecology. What Amsterdam needs is something else entirely: a 
public debate that breaks with this political an-aesthesia and puts 
pressure on the city government to end the unobstructed rule of the 
market.
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