1 Introduction Oleg Kharkhordin Reassembling Res Publica: How
Introduction
Oleg Kharkhordin Reassembling Res Publica: How things matter together with publics?
Current urgency of technological risks has propelled the development of a new interdisciplinary body of knowledge called STS (science and technology studies). One version of it in particular, called ANT (actor-network theory) and usually associated with the names of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, promises to change conventional political and social science (see Law and Hassard 1999, Latour 2005a). ANT claims that the current imbroglio of most urgent world problems cannot be neatly cut into political and technical parts. Rather, politics enters into the very constitution of technology - say, in decisions embodied in the infrastructure of traditional utility companies (see the by now classic account in Hughes 1983), or in current debates over new information technologies used in everyday life or international markets – (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2005, Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2005). Also, techno-scientific topics constitute a sizable and growing part of conventional political concerns, if we account for the amount of time spent on such debates as, e.g., those over biotech implications, new forms of disease, or debates over ozone layer issues (Vogler 2000, Rabinow 2003, Sandel 2004).
Thus, intertwining of humans and things is of central importance to ANT discourse. It claims that human sciences have been neglecting to seriously consider the role of things, usually assigning them either the role of passive tools for human action, or, alternatively, active agents propelling change, as it happens in the technological determinist versions of conventional social science. However, both of these metaphors - passive tool vs. active agent – fail, when one analyzes the down-to-earth details of real techno-scientific problems facing the world. ANT authors therefore claim that they are looking for another foundational metaphor to better describe the relationship between humans and non-humans, engaged in the technological imbroglios of the present day. For example, Bruno Latour suggested a number of times that we should better employ the renowned Latin term res publica, since its very form has two important components: thɟ word res, meaning “thing”, and the word publica, pointing to the public, its concerns. Finally, a motley collection of attempts to reflect on this couple of words – frequently, in an
1 aesthetic rather than a strictly scientific way – has been collected during the summer of 2005 experimental social science exhibition “Making Things Public”, held at ZKM Karlsruhe, and later published also as a 1000-page long catalogue (Latour and Weibel 2005). In the introduction to this book we read: “In a strange way, political science is mute just at the moment when the objects of concern should be brought in and speak up loudly. Contrary to what the powerful etymology of their most cherished word should imply, their res publica does not seem to be loaded with too many things.” (Latour 2005b: 16)
Latour’s suggestion, however, was never developed in a systematic theoretical way. The present book aims at achieving this goal. First, it would like to systematically explore the changes that political and social sciences might encounter if they pay sufficient attention to res, to tangible and durable things that link people together in their everyday political engagements. Second, it would like to illuminate and correct the shortcomings of the ANT version of science and technology studies in that it rarely pays sufficient attention to the publica part of the expression. In other words, in the more than 2000-year long discourse on res publica both parts of this expression matter.
Let us now clarify these two main dimensions of our research endeavor. First, things matter. Our research project aims at developing usual debates in the theory of collective action so central to conventional political and social science, by adding attention to objects. For example, Mancur Olson (1965) posited a classic question on the non-obvious incentive to join the group: why pay trade union membership fees when a trade union will achieve its goal even without my contribution? Answering this question, successful cases of collective action have been usually explained by either small size of the group (and peer pressure used within it) or credible negative incentives (that is, punishment for non-participation). Recent amendments included attempts to point at spontaneously evolving cooperation strategies and even social psychology experiments, which could allegedly reveal the reasons for successes of group action even in the face of a persistent threat of free-riding. These explanations are far from being exhaustive and are pretty tired by now (for an overview see Ostrom 1998).
However, many simple physical objects may qualify to be an ignored focus of attention of these debates: in many social and political contexts durable and tangible things unite people in such a
2 way that non-participation becomes costly. An obvious example is supplied by many news stories coming from Russia, which experienced a veritable crisis of infrastructure in the 2000s since many parts of it were not attended to since the Soviet days: when heating pipes freeze in a cold winter weather, sitting at home with sick kids and waiting for someone to fix the pipes is not the optimal strategy. In other words, political science of the Mancur Olson type should be corrected with insights from Bruno Latour. For social science methodology this means that phenomenological and social-constructivist accounts that employ Weber’s definition of social action - as primarily oriented towards intentional meaning - should allow for a supplementary theoretical narrative that takes material objects into account as well. Otherwise they fall under the critique that they caricature the social world, which is modeled by them on what might be called the “sauna experience”: actors are depicted as just naked egos producing interpretations and reinterpretations of the meaningful behavior of others.
Second, publics matter. If one can amend political and social sciences - that had been engaged in a protracted search for the solution to the problem of free-riders or for interpreting constructed meanings - with the help of the work of ANT, which cares about objects - then simultaneously ANT can be amended with the help of the classic res publica tradition, which cares about people. Latour’s work on socio-technical networks depends too much on natural philosophy, on figures from Descartes and Leibniz to Bachelard and Serres. But he and his followers largely ignored the classic figures of political philosophy and political history, who wrote about res publica: from Cicero through Machiavelli to a modern republican tradition (see Schofield 1995, Manin 1997, Pettit 1997, Skinner 1998). This tradition is usually taken to be a strictly political discourse on forms of republican institutions, but of course it is simultaneously a consideration of res publicae, i.e. things and affairs that bring the community together. Ignoring this discourse is a certain deficiency for ANT, and Latour might be amended by a close examination of Cicero and Machiavelli, and by the imports of their most important insights into contemporary considerations of techno-political networks.
One caveat is needed here: the objective of this book is not about adding things to agents, or about taking the role of publics in STS seriously. As ANT texts never fail to stress, coordination very often is a re-ordering of human and non-human qualities within a network of capacities (Latour 1999). The present study - largely of the reform of water and heat supply in the Russian
3 city of Cherepovets -- shows how this is the case. Of course, a conventional approach would notice that humans become endowed with object-like qualities and are treated as points of manipulation in the projects of technical reform coming from the mayor’s office, while non- humans seem to behave like tired and capricious humans on the verge of breakdown (e.g. city repair teams listening to the growling and gurgling pipes). What is important, however, is not a familiar objectification of humans or subjectivation (anthropomorphization) of objects. The actual reordering of capacities is more interesting because it goes beyond this dichotomy. It happens in minor struggles over major artifacts - e.g. should the city invest into ultra-violet or ozone water purification systems - when new coordinating agents emerge: e.g. the unified municipal utilities’ bill, the inter-district repair information service or the computerized interactive city utilities’ map. We will explore these cases.
This book is largely based on the findings of the project “Self-Governing Associations in Northwestern Russia: Common Things as the Foundation for Res Publica”, which was carried out under the auspices of the Academy of Finland in 2004-2007. The project has assembled a huge amount of empirical data on the reforms of shared or common things like an apartment block, a courtyard or a city, and on the potential for them to serve as the basis for a self- governing community. Major fieldwork was carried out in 2005-2006 in the cities of Cherepovets and St. Petersburg, where we studied the role of common electricity, heat and water supply during the infrastructure reform period.
Given that in conventional socio-economic and public policy analysis utilitities are usually analyzed as examples of what is called public or common goods, we paid attention to previous research on the issue, and how it is linked to the concerns of ANT and classical Roman theory of res publica. Chapters by Risto Alapuro and Olga Bychkova present these considerations. Case studies followed. First, the chapter by Olga Bychkova and Evgeniia Popova considers the role of communal services in a city, given that serious breakdowns in supply of those precipitates a rather rapid and sizable mobilization of the population. This chapter is largely based on the interviews with the Cherepovets city managers, while the chapter by Olga Kalacheva looks at the same object, based on the interviews with consumers of these services. Second, we studied the way in which a common property regime, introduced in Russia with the adoption of the new Housing Code in 2005, changed sharing of and cooperation over common things among the
4 populace of apartment blocks turned into co-proprietorships. Rosa Vihavainen’s chapter sums up the results.1 Third, we compared how these different versions of commons things function at their respective levels – of a city and a courtyard, or of a singular house. The concluding chapter by Oleg Kharkhordin supplies comparisons and maps ɨut pertinent distinctions.
Notwithstanding sizable difficulties encountered - the initial rejection rate during requests for an interview with municipal officials in Cherepovets in 2005 was close to 70%2 - we gathered a large amount of data. Trying to order and regularize it, we tried to follow the language of respondents and things themselves. Empirical findings thus offered us some new relevant categories. First, trying to juxtapose all relevant examples, we learned that many empirical situations indeed seemed to fit the language of contemporary public policy and public goods literature – in particular, a distinction between the common and the public. That is, both at the levels of a city and of a house it was normal to distinguish between the private, common, club and public goods – based on the two criteria of rivalry and excludability of access. However, studies of rare examples of public mobilization have forced us to introduce a specific distinction between the common and the public that is closer to the Roman perception of res publica than to neoclassical economics. I will say more about it later.
The second distinction, which offered itself during the generalization of results of empirical research, was the one between goods and things in use - just in use, one might stress - and in full possession. Traditionally, goods considered in the literature on common pool resources imply only consumption, leading to a familiar phenomenon of “the tragedy of the commons” or to other consequences of usage. But in our research we frequently encountered objects, which were closer to the Roman category of res. These things entailed not only use, but rather use together with other bundles of rights that constitute a full property title - usus, fructus, abusus, use, control, alienation (see e.g. the use of these Roman categories in Schlager & Ostrom 1992). One can thus try fully examining the implications of this distinction between mere use and full possession for the theory of res publica.
1 Research on co-proprietorships was carried out in St. Petersburg, since at the time of the interviews there was only one registered co-proprietorship in Cherepovets. 2 Reflections on this predicament will be offered in the conclusion to this volume.
5 In the remaining part of this introduction I will thus try to 1) elucidate the categories of Bruno Latour, with which we started our research, 2) comment on those key categories that offered themselves during the collection and processing of empirical data, and 3) will finish with the general outline of an argument on res publica.
Latour’s vintage techniques3
It is hard to speak of a Latourian method, rather, it is a set of techniques of following studied people in their work and everyday life, united by a common style. However, this style may be said to be guided by certain key concerns and to employ certain key categories. Let me first articulate these concerns, and come to key categories that seemed relevant to our study, in the end of this section.
First, I would claim that the overall approach of Latour can be called “new positivism”. Positivist social science was classically conceived as a way of mimicking the indisputable achievements of natural sciences. However, instead of following what the natural scientists were really doing, positivists followed what the natural sciences were telling they were doing. Hence we developed the demands for verification, falsification, operationalization of research questions, causal modeling, hypothesis construction and testing – but all of these clearly are not what the natural scientists are doing in the majority of cases, when one examines the current practice and the history of natural sciences in an anthropological way. For example, Pasteur would have never been satisfied to be proven wrong but scientific during his decisive set of tests at the Pouilly-le- Fort farm - that is, his hypotheses being falsified - he needed victory, not defeat, as latour demonstrates (Latour 1988: 89). Politics of agonistic competition and clash is at the heart of science in action, and social sciences mimicking natural sciences should adopt these as well, not only postfactum rationalizations that both should employ falsification criteria.
Also, as the early books of Latour have shown (see e.g. Latour 1987: 103, Latour 1988: 183), the main logic of science is about a) a proliferation of inscription devices that directly visualize what the things are trying to tell us in a direct and simple way (for example, a graph, written by a stylus of a device measuring the electric charge of a muscle, or traces left in the bubble camera
3 For an extensive and detailed argument, please see Kharkhordin 2005b.
6 by micro-particles) and then amassing and sorting this visual data to infer an object behind the visible traces; and b) constructing black boxes – pieces of working equipment or organizations - that solidify assembled networks of diverse elements into a functioning mechanism that gives these networks durability and tangibility. These features are hard to disentangle, and serve as obvious referents to the successes of natural sciences, according to a widespread wisdom: “see, after we had discovered the laws of gas flow physics and metal resistance, airplanes started to fly, while all your dialectics - or polling techniques, or interpretive methods - do not give us the same durable predictable results.”
Latour himself was practicing this new positivism. For example, his books can be seen as attempts at visualizing, serving as a sort of a inscription device to register the minute workings of science. He is even explicit in the reflexive conclusions to his early texts that his objective is to visualize what the natural sciences are really doing. But his latter-day enterprise can be also interpreted as trying to construct some black boxes that would render the successes of his network building - lying at the heart of his new positivism - durable and tangible. Thus, recent congresses of STS studies in 2004 and 2007 lasted almost a week and brought together a huge crowd of people, and two exhibitions in Karlsruhe aim at effecting and embodying the achievements of STS and ANT. Do not these working engines of the Latourian transformation of science correspond to his own idea of the black box as central to the success of any new science?
The second main feature of Latour's method – or should we say: style? – is that his studies are about faith and belief. In innumerable places Latour mentions that science is a new system of convincing that replaced the previous system (religion), and he is interested how this new type of faith functions. For example, he is concerned with studying how such a small group of people as Pasteur’s lab had managed to persuade us all in the existence of the microbes – and this durable faith immediately and mostly automatically makes us wish to move to another seat, when someone starts protractedly coughing next to us in a metro.
Testing is central to faith. Michel de Certeau once noted that seeing now has become believing: before modernity Christians believed in what they did not see, but in events witnessed and attested by the Apostles, now they trust only what they see themselves and what they tested in their experience (de Certeau 1984: ch.13) As commentators like Cyril Lemieux pointed out,
7 Latour’s theory (together with the one of Boltanski-Thevenot) can be called sociologie de l’epreuve, a sociology of testing or trials. For example, the second part of “Pasteurization of France” presents a reader with a Deleuzian ontology of the world that consists only of trials of strength that establish what we call experience. Ɍhese trials supply us with proofs that something is real, they give us what Ludwig Fleck called Wiederstandaviso, a signal of a resisting entity, on which we can ground our claims of reality, in which we can believe. Following this interpretation, ɚ familiar competition between Kuhn’s paradigms is recast as only one single case among ɚll the possible trials of strength between different networks of elements subsumed under the title of “research programs”: the one that wins overpowers an enemy – most frequently – not by the power of persuasion in a debate, but by a better black box or by developing a larger networks of associated elements. The statements that the winning program produces are hard to challenge in a debate since a production of an alternative statement is too costly for a contender.
Third, Latour develops a theory of truth as fairness. I propose this title on the model of Rawls’s “justice as fairness”, which described a just society as the one where everybody would subscribe (in the original position under the veil of ignorance) to the fair rules of the political game. Latour wishes to establish fair rules for the game of truth. Thus he looks at the pragmatic aspects of making a credible statement (say, that a scientific phenomen X exists) and demands that the costs to produce such a statement should be honestly accounted for. For example, in order to have universals, like a concept of a microbe or electron, which would function in Gabon or Saudi Arabia, one has to extend to these remote places the networks, in which they exist. This is a costly process – after a few years and a million dollars spent one can test in the newly constructed labs the electrons and microbes, as anywhere in the world. Latour’s wish is obvious: “I simply want the cost of these universals and the narrow circuits along which they run to be added to the bill.” (Latour 1988: 220)
Similarly, a delivery of a microbe to a remote French township during the days of Pasteur was like bringing there electricity instead of gas light (Latour 1988: 85 and 263, fn. 29): without extending the “grid” for the production of microbes, that is, supplying every farm with lab equipment, how could one say what was the cause of a cattle disease? Latour offers another analogy (Latour and Woolgar 1986: 186): a steam engine from Newcastle eventually became the railroad network, but no one would expect these engines to run without rails – then why do we
8 adore that a scientific fact proves right in every place, to which the network for the production of these facts has been extended? Why do we forget that the cost for the extension of this network for the production of truthful statements to every locality should be paid for? Indeed, the strength of networks to produce these facts frequently consists in a capacity to pay for such statements. Those networks that can afford to pay then become the winning and the dominating ones, and it is the heavy price not the incorporeal theoretical equations that ensure the victory. Equations and theoretical postualtes would be impossible without these expenditures: “there are no longer any equivalences, reductions or authorities unless the proper price is paid and the work of domination made public.” (Latour 1988: 190) The problem here is that politics of competition between networks is usually unaccounted for, and it is overlooked that “true” statements are those produced by the winners – so, in order to make this truth game fair, one should be clear about its rules and procedures, and one should not take an unfair advantage over other players. This morale, admits Latour, “does not get us very far,” but when a theory moves to another place, it pays its dues (Latour 1988: 189).
If we are true to this dictum, we should ask the following question. How does one move this theory from Latour’s proper field – science studies - to ours, and fully pays one’s dues? Luckily, the answer is contained in the acknowledgment lines of this introduction: it was the money of the grant-giving body that paid for the work of establishing equivalences between what he did and what we were doing, as well as establishing equivalences betweens disparate research items within our own endeavor, holding authors and articles in check, and proving the assemblage workable. Thus our research is “Latourian” in bits and pieces, and here are some key categories that proved movable. Ɉthers are presented in the texts of the articles that follow. However, in no way can we claim that we managed to transpose the whole set of Latourian concepts into a different terrain. This job would require more force and expenditure.
Central among the movable categories is the one of a network. As Latour frequently notes, action is a quality of a network, not of its singular elements of either human or non-human kind: it is the US Air Force that flies, not individual B-52s or individual pilots (Latour 1999: 182). Imagine a couple of service workers forgetting to monitor the quality of fuel an aircraft or to check the reliability of steering mechanisms and you can easily guess the result. However, people habitually ascribe action to functioning black boxes that only crown the gestation of a
9 network; thus, in habitual parlance physics is said to be working since this airplane in the sky is flying now. The role of this piece of machinery that is usually ascribed the effects of a whole network is interesting.
First, this black box appears when many elements are starting to work as one (Latour 1987: 131), and the black box achieves relative independence from observers and opacity towards their gaze. But this black box is just the latest in line among the series of technical inventions that allow solidifying the network and making it rigid and durable. That means, second, that the black box embodies previous elements of the network and in particular what Latour calls “the obligatory points of passage” (Latour 1988: 44 and Latour 1987: 152), through which the network passes in order to transform itself and arrive at a new condition, solidified in a black box. The two obvious examples are the discoveries of microbes and of the triod electronic lamp, which allow for the creation of such black boxes as antiseptic substances in medicine, or a inter-state telephone in the US. Third, even the black box still requires a support network: machines never leave the networks that have created them – they run along their lines (Latour 1987: 246); also, since no machine is idiot-proof (Latour 1987: 137), it needs care in the form of servicing and repairs. The third point is more or less self-evident; so let me analyze the first two points in a more detailed way.
First, on many elements working together: the black box appears when a newly added element allows hooking up some forces in such a way that they can mutually control each other. They thus become a piece of self-contained machinery, embodying a certain number of forces – a “machination of forces,” as Latour says (Latour 1988: 199). Black boxes are the most successful elements in an attempt to stabilize and rigidify a scientific network, to make it real. Up until this moment the network was expanding, by adding more and more allies, which increased its durability, if they were of a technical kind. However, only a black box makes a decisive breakthrough: the form of the phenomena studied, whose claims to reality could be doubted or put into question until now, becomes real – because it is very hard to challenge the soundness of facts against the background of a purring engine that allegedly embodies these facts.
We call these machinations of forces “mechanisms,” says Latour, but this is a bad word, because it implies that all forces are mechanical (when this is not so), and that all mechanisms are made
10 by people (but this is the very point put into question by Latour’s approach). An engine, purring under the hood, is only one form that a conspiracy of forces can take: e.g. Diesel thought that his principles can be well embodied in social engines, that is, organizations. The word “technology” is inadequate as well, since it was applied usually to describe nuts and bolts; what is more important here is that a “technical” element “creates a gradient that obliges other allies to adopt a shape and retain it for the time being.” (Latour 1988: 199) Technical invention, in other words, makes all the diverse empirical characteristics of a phenomenon X, tried out and sorted in experiments, cohere as a stable shape – e.g. as an atom, a microbe, a combustion reaction.
An important point to remember, however, is that this invention is the last in line. Only if we ignore all other forces, to which it was added in the last moment, can we speak of a pure piece of self-sustaining technology: the combined force of all the network is ascribed here to the last- added element (Latour 1988: 200). This implies that a network is not interiorized in a black box, rather it is decisively completed: now it has an element that ensures its stability and durability. In other words, a black box is an embodiment of only certain elements that control each other within it, but not all previous elements get into its composition – it is not the embodiment of a whole network. Rather, it is the last element in the previous development of the network: after some forces get interiorized in it, other elements stay loosely linked to it or adopt the shape of an external support network.
Second, obligatory passage points matter. These are the elements, without which a network could not expand in the way it did. After recognizing microbes as parts of the hygienic network, it made no sense to invest much into collecting all data on the circumstances of outbreaks and variations of diseases, as the hygienists have been doing so far. What mattered was efficient concentration on collection of infectious samples and their analysis in the labs in order to stop the spread of diseases. This redefinition of the hygienists’ activities was further solidified with the invention of new “technical” elements – vaccines, serums, anti-septic bandages – that made the need to pass through these obligatory points even more evident. Medicine became impossible without these vaccines and serums, surgery became impossible without antiseptics – and all of them allegedly embodied knowledge about the functioning of Pasteur’s microbes. In another example, the extension of a telephone network to link the two coasts of the USA became possible through the new obligatory point of passage – a triod, invented to boost the signal which
11 otherwise would not travel far because of the resistance of a copper wire (Latour 1987: 124-128). After that telephone industry and electric research were redefined, while the combined network of both grew. For networks, asserts Latour, what is important is not what they are built of (a disappearance of a sponsor or of a crucial experimental guinea pig may spell death to a research project in equal measure), but their extent – how many elements they unite (Latour 1987: 176). Obligatory passage points allow expanding the networks rapidly in a specific direction, but these extending networks always require more rigid facts to rely upon (Latour 1987: 205), so these durable props are progressively added to the network. Still, only blackboxing seals the question of a reality of a network. A very specific agent runs along the lines of this solidified network – in the case of microbiology it was a microbe-whose-virulence-Pasteurians-varied (Latour 1988: 101): an element, which served initially as just a passage point to a new network, becomes the main currency of a new network.
When a black box breaks down, we might have an insight into the secrets of three different types of networks. First, of a network that was folded into it, second, of another one that serviced its maintenance and, third, of the overall network, of which it was the last decisive element that gave it indisputable durability. As Latour writes (Latour 1999: 192), when we are facing a “technical” problem this means that we might be facing a temporary opening up of a black box that will soon fold back - when this problem will be logically fixed, repackaging the black box - or it might be the ultimate breakdown, when the black box proves to be a labyrinth hiding unruly multitudes. In the first case the adjective “technical” means that we have to make a detour from our main (political or social) goal – just for a short period of time, to fix the recalcitrant mechanism. It also means that the mechanism in question is subordinate to our goals, but is nevertheless indispensable (when the mobile phone battery runs out during a conversation, communication has to be restored somehow): we have to make multiple detours, if the usual one fails (one cannot find a charger, or a public phone booth, or an e-mail outlet, or just let the conversation end interrupted, etc.), and unless one of the detours succeeds, we do not regain our subjectivity (do not return to our disrupted political and social goals).
Our subjectivity in the network is durably reestablished only corollary to repackaging back of a black box: a modern European subject, who follows his or her goals unproblematically, reappears only when all “technical” problems have been solved and the network is once again
12 nicely sliced into intentional subjects and functioning objects. In the second case – when repackaging a black box turns out to be impossible at all – the whole life of a subject or a human collective undergoes the crisis: imagine the effect of the terminal blackout of mobile phone use for a modern St. Petersburg teenager who uses it to constantly coordinate and re-coordinate actions with relevant others (Gladarev and Lonkila, 2008).
Research in the conditions of an imminent breakdown
What made this analysis pertinent in Russia after the end of the 1990s was the infrastructural crisis. Anatoly Chubais, a great reformer, once called it “a problem of 2003”, which was the estimated year when most of the infrastructural failures were about to come in an avalanche. What thus proved to be an imminent danger to cities, houses or other networks, happened to become a site of natural experiment offered for attentive social scientists. Because the black boxes threatened to stop their functioning -- and when they actually did so -- they could thus reveal their networked intestines, as well as the principles of their enveloped or support networks. This happened during the very process of re-packaging, refurbishement and repairs. We have thus concentrated on cases of these black boxes being opened, refurbished and re- packaged, both at the level of the city and at the level of the apartment block. We wanted to study these cases of re-blackboxing in order to draw general conclusions on how networks change, first, and in order to see the conditions of what makes them – and what stops them – from being a public thing, i.e. res publica.
To give a preliminary feel of what such change in the network entails, let us describe in more detail one particular case of a successful repackaging of a network – the case of the city of Cherepovets in Vologda region, which is famous for being perhaps the closest equivalent of a proverbial Steeltown in the United States. It is located 620 km north of Moscow, 475 km southeast of St. Petersburg, and is one of the major industrial towns in northwestern Russia. The main company of the city, Severstal’ (its name is a Russian abbreviation for “Northern Steel”), is the second largest Russian steel producer, bent on expansion after the financial crisis of 1998 made its exports competitive on the world market. Throughout the 2000s it acquired Rouge Steel in Dearborne, Michigan (now Severstal North America), Lucchini Steel in Italy, and in 2006 unsuccessfully fought with Mittal Steel over a merger bid with Arcelor, the main steel producer
13 in Europe. Severstal' pays the biggest share of the regional (Vologda) and city (Cherepovets) budgets, so one could expect a success story in the repairs of the utilities, and thus a model story of a repackaging of a city.
The history of Cherepovets is presented in finer detail in the chapter by Kalacheva. Suffice it to say here that until it became a key center for steel production for Northwestern Russia in mid- XX century, it was a typical small Russian provincial river-based town. Two monks founded a monastery in the XIV century in the place where two local rivers met. A village around the monastery grew until Catherine the Great gave it a status of a town in 1777. In the XIX century this town became a local hub for water and rail communication, which helped attracting students to new nonstate technical and professional schools founded in Cherepovets under count Witte reforms. In early XX century 2,000 out of 10,000 town inhabitants were students, half of them of peasant origin. Good transport links accounted also for a strategic Soviet decision to build a major steel production base, even if it was equally distant from the sites of coal and iron ore mining. In 1955 the first blast furnace started to function, and the population of the town swelled from 30,000 in midwar years to 140,000 in early 1960s, and now amounts to more than 300,000 (Arkhipov 2008: 38-39).
Severstal’ reported very good revenues throughout the 2000s. Still, paraphrasing the opening lines of Anna Karenina, one can say that all rust-belt cities are happy in the same way, but unhappy in their own manner. So, the starting point for the history of the infrastructural reform should be the poor year of 1992 rather than the rich 2000s. The contemporary city of Cherepovets can be said to have finally come into full existence only then, because all buildings, previously owned by the federal ministries, were to be now transferred to city care. That is, until then the city was a minor building owner, and the massive transfer of apartments into its ownership and taking them off the accounts of the now defunct Soviet ministries increased its possessions tenfold, from 0.5 to 5 million square meters. (Zhibort 2004)
This transfer created two problems: money and coordination. Money was an issue since the city hardly had any budget for repairs and maintenance. Major funding was needed, but was largely unavailable, with loans and borrowing arriving only with the serious take off of revenues from steel exports. For example, the Department of the Transfer of Ministerial Housing, created at the
14 mayor’s office to deal with the newly acquired liability, was still dealing with questions of the lack of funds in the late 1990s, and thus borrowed a World Bank loan to help cut the costs of maintenance of these buildings by reducing heating expenses. The $32 mln loan was spent on building automatic heat regulators in the basements of high-rise buildings. Thus, even in 2004 the city owed $ 29mln to the World Bank that it was obliged to repay by using revenues from savings on heat production. (Zhibort 2004)
Second, the task of the day in 1992 was coordination. Since industrial enterprises which had been operated under separate ministries (metallurgical, chemical, fertilizer, etc.) kept their apartment building all around the city, their typical network looked like a star-shaped system: buildings linked by underground communications and utilities with a central office as its head. Once they transferred housing to municipal ownership, the newly created municipal sub-units (such as the municipal housing complex Metallurg, one of the five existing ones in the city) ended up having buildings, wires, pipes, and valves spread all over the city. Separate networks of all the other similar housing complexes built and maintained by separate ministries overlapped. That is, star-shaped systems crisscrossed and frequently nobody was sure, to whom a water pipeline under a given street belonged, given that the documentation might have been stored away or lost.
In Soviet days, one presumes, the relevant enterprises would be repairing the pipes, wires and other links that were constructed together with ministry-owned housing. Now the question of repairs arose: with everything technically belonging to the city, different municipal sub-units were not sure who was in charge of the maintenance of pipes or wires here or there, or where the borders between their objects of care were drawn. With lack of clarity of who was responsible, no one was, and problems arose as a result. A car sank under the street pavement in a no-man zone between two housing complexes, and among other incidents reported in interviews and newspapers, one municipal sub-unit cut the pipes of another one.4 In the last case one may detect a usual method of establishing a property claim during these years: if you dig and find infrastructure of some unidentified owner, cut it and wait – the owner will appear. If nobody shows up, this is loose property up for grabs or destruction.
4 Interviews with respondents 8 and 16 from Bychkova and Popova interview series. Please see the list appended to their chapter for details.
15 The task was then to transform the city into a common thing, to integrate it all into a single coherent whole and – a distant objective – to make it function as an urban machine of sorts, a black box, according to the terminology of Latour. Initially, among truly integrative measures, apart from creating the department of transferred ministerial housing, one finds also a creation of gorodskaia liniia zhalob (the city telephone line for complaints) in 1997-8. The mayor himself spent six months manning this line and sending his personnel to all parts of the city to solve the problems on the spot because the city had raised utility rates. If the city was charging more, it had to guarantee some quality in service delivery, otherwise people would not pay at all or social unrest was possible. This was a step forward from sub-municipal coordination, which proved very insufficient based on the overlapping star-shaped patterns. In one reported case, a hot water supply company began asking taxi company dispatchers to ask their drivers to spot steaming on the streets of winter Cherepovets. Otherwise the company could register the leak, but could not detect its whereabouts quickly enough.5
Immediately after the 1998 financial crisis, municipal funding problems were again particularly acute, so raising utilities’ rates became a key policy, with the goal of trying to redistribute part of the burden onto the shoulders of consumers. Tax collection to fill city coffers became another main goal. The city once again attempted to address these problems by the creation of some common things that would link the city together.
First, the city created a database of land and building possessions to increase tax collection. This database was also used in sales/leases of new properties in 2001-2003. The cost of creating a computer center that runs the database was about 57 million rubles, with the income from tax regularization and new sales and leases amounting to about 250 million, so the center could boast that its cost was recuperated many times soon after its inception (Nenastiev 2005). This system later served as the organizational model for the mapping of overlapping utilities. This mapping of engineering networks was being completed at the time of the interviews, but not yet fully achieved. Data on water, sewage, heating, and electricity networks were in the system already, with data on gas and telephone networks still being added. The intended consequence of the project was giving the city a capacity to solve coordination problems related to utilities' maintenance with the help of a computer database, instead of sending bulky commissions
5 Respondent 11 from Bychkova-Popova series.
16 consisting of people from different municipal firms to physically inspect the problem, and have a dialogue on the spot of the dig. Also, once they mapped utilities they could offer sites for construction where previously a dense intermesh of communications precluded this, precise knowledge of the networks’ layout being not available.
The second integrative measure was an establishment of a common dispatcher service (edinaia dispetcherskaia sluzhba, EDS), which monitors citizens’ queries on breakdowns. Rather than having to first determine to whom a given property belongs, now dialing a single telephone number allows setting the process into motion. The repairs are not initiated by this service: it collects and channels information, giving citizens information on whom to call to start repairs. Each morning the head of the utilities department of the mayoral office listens to all complaints that came in during the previous night and follows up on them during the day, checking whether measures have been already undertaken by relevant municipal sub-units. EDS is described in interviews as a natural outgrowth of the city line for complaints from the late 1990s, which had been created because of higher utilities rates: if you wish to make people pay increased tariffs, give them some understanding of the problems by referring them to the units that should take care of their concerns. According to the city officials' interviews, EDS has also transformed the perception of the utilities issues into a very important, common city concern. Dispatchers were trained not to just send off the callers to some other unit, but call these units themselves, express care, and even talk to TV and radio journalists about utilities.6 Such statements suggest that before the staff would be mostly behaving tongue-in-cheek, while utility breakdowns were hardly considered to be a legitimate common concern worthy of discussions in public: “Your radiator is leaking? – it is your problem, so call your service provider!”
A third integrative measure - introducing a unified payment bill - was developed by the same computer center of the mayoral office based on the address database that they compiled while building the land/property database. The idea was to cut expenses by eliminating the intermediary payment offices of each municipal utility company, which were in charge of calculating the invoices and processing the incoming funds. Furthermore, it intended to make the city a single body, since one pays everything at once and by one payment: the computer center gets all information on projected monthly usage for the year, adds subsidies and waivers that
6 Respondent 16 from Bychkova-Popova series
17 apply to individual families, and compiles a unified bill. Payments were to be made through bank branches that serviced wage payments of Severstal’.
If one believes these accounts of the newspapers and city officials interviews, the following picture of re-packaging of the black box emerges. The network called Cherepovets worked more or less fine surrounded by Soviet-era support networks until 1992, when support networks largely disappeared, and municipally-owned housing grew tenfold. Re-blackboxing took a number of years, but was coming to completion in the mid-2000s.
One sees new elements added to the network, which aimed at expanding it and stabilizing it. In terms of the organic metaphor that is so dear to the students of urbanism, a cadastre of urban networks and properties is a scheme of a skeleton or of a capillary network of the body of the city. EDS tells people in Cherepovets what organ is sick and tells them how to deliver cure. A common utilities bill is the main means of metabolism – it sends currency through the arteries of the system. Overall, the goal of transforming the city into a unified body – a goal that seemed so distant in 1992 – seems to be very close now. The spinal cord of the system is the mayor’s office computer center, which handled the introduction of all cadastres, unified billing, and automated dispatcher journals for dispatchers of the EDS, and – last but not least – maintains a city website, giving the city an image of itself.
This re-packaging, though, even if successful, does not transform this newly emerging black box into res publica. Neither does the opening, re-assembling and re-packaging of another network – the apartment block – as we will see later. The reason for this might lie in the fact that only some specifically structured networks produce an effect of res publica. So perhaps we should have not be even looking for one in such assemblages like a city and an apartment block in contemporary Russia. In order to understand what we can see in the functioning of these urban networks with the help of the concept of res publica we should now also examine the classifications of things and some typical aspects of republican theory.
Common goods and res publica
18 As the chapter by Olga Bychkova reminds us, contemporary political economy classifies goods on the basis of two main criteria: excludability and rivalrousness. Examples are listed in the table below. Private goods are those from consumption of which one can exclude others, and over which rivalry is possible. Common goods are those over which rivalry is possible, but one cannot exclude one’s own rivals from a contest. Club goods are those over which rivalry does not exist, but some could be excluded from consumption of such goods. And, finally, public goods are those that do not entail either exclusion of access or rivalry in consuming them.
Rivalry Rivalry
yes no
Excludability Private goods Club goods Yes ADSL Internet, cable TV Apartments, etc Gasification in villages garbage All utilities for new private houses Common goods Public goods Excludability No Utilities Defense (water, heating) Lighting roads Public TV
However, our research materials, and in particular interviews collected by Olga Kalacheva, have been pointing not only to the contrast between common vs. public, relevant for this table, but also to a distinction between things «just in use» vs. things «in full possession», that includes
19 rights of use, disposal and alienation - usus, fructus, abusus in classical Latin. This second distinction was important in particular when people were describing situations when they would take destiny actively into their own hands or would expect the full power of the people over certain phenomena, not just access or consumption.
Thus, there could be goods in common or public use, and goods in common or public possession. The table that gives examples, relevant for many of the arguments spelled out in this book, looks as follows:
Common Public (obshchii) (obshchestvennyi)
Use Goods Goods in common use in public use (common areas in communal apartments, communal a public park utilities in a city) (e.g. Salt Gardens)
Possession Commonly owned goods Public possessions
Parts of TSZh in common Joint history, events, ownership Real res publicae, (co-proprietorship) which people control together
Goods or things in common use are easy to capture, particularly for a native Russian speaker for whom the colloquial term mesta obschego polzovaniia, “places [or sites] of common use”, carry the derogatory meaning of a common toilet in a communal apartment. At the level of the city, the term “goods in common use”, of course, would apply to common urban things that the citizens
20 use, but do not specifically concern themselves with, unless there is a breakdown in deliveries of those goods, which stalls their consumption. These are water and heat supply, transportation, garbage collection and the like.
When a collective agent, however, has full powers of possession over a thing – rather than just the right of access and use – it can dispose of the thing’s destiny and collectively decide what to do with it, even go as far as considering to alienate it, if it wants to. Such commonly owned goods are obviously those that exist according to the new form of shared ownership of the TSZh inhabitants over the corridors, staircases and other common in-house (rather than an internal apartment) infrastructure like pipes and wires. TSZh, tovarishchestvo sobstvennikov zhiliia – literally, a companionship of the owners of housing, which is conventionally translated into English as “a homeowners’ association” – is in its legal form what the French call coproprieté: apartments of the apartment block house are in private property, but inter-apartment areas and infrastructure is a shared property of the association of the owners of apartments, a specially created legal person. Of course, TSZh cannot alienate the corridors and in-house pipes – say, sell it to some other property holder – without asking apartment owners to consent to alienate their private apartments. But as an owner it has almost all other means of enjoying usus, fructus and abusus. Abuse, at least, it certainly can, letting the pipes rot – if such is a common wish of the owners, expressed during the annual or semi-annual apartment owners’ assembly. Full power of alienation in the case of goods in common possession may exist, perhaps, for some other group- belonging properties, like offices or other types of premises bought by associations and companionships.
So we find obvious examples of goods in common possession at the level of the building or the courtyard. But we do not find ready examples of goods in common possession at the level of the city, save, perhaps, for a de facto control of some city managers over the city. This de facto control is not a de jure control, though. That is, these managers can dispose of city properties and decide their fate in terms of leases, reconstruction and the like, including a decision on sale or privatization of city-belonging buildings or other premises. However, they cannot alienate these properties – unless they engage in illegal transactions - in such a way that the proceeds from sale would end up in their own pockets, and not in the city purse.
21 Common goods presuppose common action, and feelings of being part of a common cause. The previously widespread feeling of working for the common cause, which Kalacheva describes in relation to the Cherepovets metal workers of the Soviet days, arose ɚgainst the background idea of the company and the country as a commonly owned enterprise. This myth was imposed and supported by the Soviet ideology: we are all in the same boat, being co-owners of our enterprise. Furthermore, as co-owners of the country, we do a great job working in this huge metal- producing plant, being part of the common cause of furthering and ensuring USSR grandeur and world status. This feeling of being part of obshchee delo, a common cause or affair, should be distinguished from being part of a public cause, of a matter of public concern – res publica in Latin, or, as one might put it in Russian, delo naroda or delo obshchestvennoe. Indeed, the genuine public cause is manifest, when all are engaged in taking the destiny of their city into their own hands as a public, as a people – e.g. during the overall mobilization to solve the problem of a sudden inundation, frozen utilities, or defending the thing in public use, the existence of which is threatened. Of course, in contemporary Russian life these instances are rare.
Cicero’s theory of res publica
Here one should stress the difference between the public and the common. We remember that contemporary political economy theorizes it on the basis of the criterion of rivalrousness. In political economy both categories describe non-excludable goods, but one may have competing claims for use of common goods resulting in acute rivalry, and one cannot have those in respect of the public goods, which are consumed the way street lighting and broadcast TV are consumed: the rise in my consumption does not diminish yours.
Classical republican thought, however, theorized the difference between the common and the public in a different way. Talking about the difference between several degrees of fellowship among men in De officiis I: 53-57 Cicero first starts with the broadest one, humankind in general, then descends to tribes and tongues. On the next degree of fellowship – the one found in civitas - he says: “More intimate still is that of the same city, as citizens have many things that are shared with one another (multa enim sunt civibus inter se communia): the forum, temples, porticoes and roads, laws and legal rights, law courts and political elections, and besides these
22 acquaintances and companionship, and those business and commercial transactions that many of them make with many others.” Res publica distinguishes itself from these forms of fellowship - as well as from the companionships of friends or relatives - because there is none that is “more serious, and none dearer, than that of each of us with the republic (quae cum re publica est uni cuique nostrum) … What good man would hesitate to face death on her behalf, if it would do her a service?” (Cicero 1991: 21-22)
It follows from these lines in Cicero that people in the city understood as a collection of buildings and common spaces, as urbs or oppidum, stay at the level of just sharing common goods – they share them as members of the contemporary homeowners’ association share common corridors and the staircases - while in res publica they have something bigger, something for which it is worth dying for. Of course, the text in I:53 deliberately says that civitas (and that is why it is different from urbs) shares not only streets and porticoes but, for example, laws, courts and elections. Are these worth dying for? Not necessarily, but they definitely appeal to higher concerns than those that we would now call material elements of the city. In the classic Roman gradation of shared things - for which one should care and perhaps even die for - one definitely starts with housing as the lowest ground. Thus, comparing degrees of fellowship, Cicero writes in I:54 that the first society is a conjugal one between husband and wife, then a society with children, and “then there is the one house in which everything is shared (domus, communia omnia). Indeed this is the principle of the city (principium urbis) and the seed-bed, as it were, of a political community (quasi seminarium rei publicae).”
One should stress two aspects of this statement. First, having common things is the principle of urbs, not civitas. And civitas is a category of public, not common life. One would have to still rise from one level to another. Second, if the quasi-seed, or the quasi-semen of res publica exists in the common facilities and life of the house, then it is the very beginning of it, its foundation, since we need a qualitatively different criterion of action to get us into res publica.
This criterion – willingness to die for the public cause – might seem a bit too demanding for a present day reader, who could take it to be part of an epoch when people merited public glory more than pleasures of private life. Another formulation - a more technical one and fitting contemporary tastes - one may find in the famous definition of res publica as the property of a
23 people, i.e. res populi, in Cicero’s dialogue De re publica I: 39. Malcolm Schofield has suggested that the major contribution of Cicero to political theory consisted in his translation of polis as res publica, which allowed him to bring in the property connotations that the Greek term did not have and thus to formulate the following characteristically Roman proposition: res publica comes into being when there is an owner, populus, which fully controls its res (Schofield 1995). When it does not, there is no res publica. Populus in its own turn is defined in a very specific manner: it is “not a collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice (iuris consensu) and a partnership for the common good (utilitatis communione sociatus)” (Cicero 1928: 65).
The last Latin expression is so linguistically close not only to the common good, but to the contemporary English expression “common utilities”, which a modern city allegedly shares, that one can hypothesize: these common goods are a prerequisite, but not the necessary feature of city inhabitants becoming a populus. It is the second mentioned element, an agreement in matters of law - iuris consensus - which transforms a multitude (that so far has just been sharing common goods) into a populus, and transforms the concerns and things of such a people into res publica.
A detailed argument on res publica, presented elsewhere (Kharkhordin 2007, Kharkhordin forthcoming), which need not not concern us here, can be summed up as follows. There are two criteria for the existence of res publica that distinguish it from just having things in common use in a house or in a city. The second one, based on Cicero’s definition from De re publica I:39, is the presence of a populus that ensures that it is a real owner of its res. In practical terms most of the time this means that there is access of all to the processes of deliberation on the drawing and application of laws that affect all citizens. This is the vinculum iuris that establishes iuris consensus: there is a bond that ties the crowd, the multitude, together into a public – i.e. a people that more or less shares a consensus on laws that bind it, and that allows it to dispose of its own fate and destiny.
And this vinculum is not necessarily metaphorical: for example, in addition to the city infrastructure in common use there should be an infrastructure of access to legal and political
24 deliberation. If there is none – as was the case, for example, when only the bodies of the Decemvirs had access to the clay or bronze tables with written laws and to the sites of deliberation where these laws were applied - then the multitude has the right to raise in revolt, so that access of all citizens’ bodies to these tables and to these law application sites is restored.7 If there is no such tangible vinculum, allowing durable and tangible access to consilium – the site and the proceedings of deliberation - there are only common utilities, and no res publica.
However, there is a more complicated first criterion - the willingness to die for res publica. We can interpret it now also in terms of Cicero’s theory of a populus fully owning its res. Property, wrote Vladimir Bibikhin (1997) – a Russian equivalent of Heidegger in terms of what he did with the help of the Russian language – is not just something to be grabbed and carried away in one’s pocket. In full agreement with its Russian or Latin etymology property is what renders the person or the thing proper to him/her or it-self, which makes an individual himself or herself and a thing itself. Historical sources point in the same direction. The term, according to its root, initially indicated the proper form of something. Thus, in the Latin of republican days proprietas meant “a property, peculiarity, peculiar nature, quality of a thing,” as the classical dictionary of Lewis and Short defines it, and only in imperial days, after Augustus, it came to mean ownership. To have property, then, is not only to use, dispose and possibly alienate something, but first and foremost, is to have a possibility to become oneself. This means that, say, a person and a people become proper to themselves – including the fact that they acquire a proper, and not a generic, name - only when s/he or it enjoys full possession of certain qualities, or as we would say now, properties.
As Hannah Arendt (1958) explained, for the Romans and the Greeks, their proper identity depended on stories of great deeds that established models of grandeur and virtue, which were to be followed by all aspiring to achieve something in life. At the level of an individual life, at least, it was understood that only through such recorded narratives of great deeds could a mortal become closer to gods, that is, pretend to reach a certain degree of immortality, an ultimate
7 Cicero in De rep. II: 61-63 discusses this example of Rome under the Decemvirs. They had been called to draw up a code of laws, but prolonged their rule and then usurped their positions. After they had adopted unjust laws and it became impossible to appeal against the actions of these illustrious ten law-givers, the people had to rise and restore its law-making and law-applying capacity. This event is interpreted in III: 44 as follows: the populus had to rise and restore its control over its res: “There was no ‘property of the people’ (populi nulla res erat); indeed the people rose in revolt (populus egit) to recover its property (et rem suam recuperaret).”
25 achievement in life. The unit that established and maintained such stories of immortal deeds was the polis for the Greeks, and for the Romans – their res publica. Smaller units, like families or circles of sages could not fulfil this function: the extent of their story-making capacity was simply not sufficient to establish and assure credible claims for immortality. Thus, Cicero in his characterization of a willingness to die for res publica might be a down-to-earth realist. A story of a great life could be established at the level of res publica only. Therefore, for many Romans or Greeks it would be simply irrational to reject this opportunity to be immortalized, and thus to realize one’s proper nature to the fullest. Dying for a family or a philosophical school hardly made sense; only res publica had a capacity to commemorate death adequately.
Back to the XXI century
The only things close to res publica, i.e. things in public possession, which our interview narratives registered in the case of contemporary Russian city, appear in the chapter by Olga Kalacheva. First and foremost it is a history of the city, written and rewritten, not by official journalists, but rather the one that exists in hearsay and multiple competing accounts. A common history of the city can be said to be in public possession fro two reasons. First, because access to it as a prop in one’s own identity-making as a Cherepovets inhabitant is open to all. Second, because this is a level when people in their informal conversations decide what are the proper key events in the history of their city. Charles Taylor once wrote of “irreducibly social goods” – those, enjoyment of which is possible only in cooperation with others, like enjoying a rock concert or using a language (1996). The difference of irreducibly social goods from public history-making is that in the latter is not only about enjoying something together, but about taking a thing into one’s own hands together, and deliberating on it together – even if this process happens intermittently, without a specific agora or forum, where it could have been done regularly.
This history-making is dependent, of course, on the existence of key hallmarks, material elements that one can call goods or things in public use. These are mostly objects of historical memory and city monuments that the city inhabitants use to construct the city identity, render their city as not just any other city, but as Cherepovets. Also, the inhabitants rely on these things when they describe their own lives or show their – one’s own, their proper, individual - city to
26 visitors. Thus, an attempt at destruction of any of these hallmarks, which are used in the construction of a city inhabitant idenity – as an inhabitant of Cherepovets – might produce a considerable public outcry: one could imagine what type of mobilization could ensue after a proposal to rebuild a central cathedral, garden, or a bridge, with which memories of generations of Cherepovets inhabitants are linked.
A real attempt to transform and reappropriate parts of the Salt Gardens described in the Kalacheva chapter points to this diagnosis. This garden was a thing in public use, not in public possession, of course. Both parts of the expression “in public use” are important here. It was in use, because people used it for business, rest, leisure or identity construction. And it was public, because it was not any multitude, but people united by the consensus on what is just and unjust, by iuris consensus, that protested its destruction. The full appearance of populus, united by a bond of written law equally promulgated and applied by all, was not there, of course. But people concerned by the loss of one of the props for the process of public history construction – the public, one would say – were there.
Thus, in a contemporary Russian city one easily finds things in common use and sometimes – in common possession. There are also things, which are not-there-yet, or already-not-there: for descriptions of this, refer to the Kalacheva chapter again. Sometimes one finds things in public use, when the public gestates over an issue that brings it together, and elevates the multitude to that level. One even finds a thing in public disuse, like the infamous ecology of Cherepovets that always has a potential to unite the multitude into a people, but after environment amelioration measures were taken in the wake of a public outcry in the late 1980s, the public stays dormant. And one almost never finds the res of the populus, the res publica, things in public possession.
Two worths of liberty
There are two questions that I would like to discuss in the end of this introduction. First, could one get to res publica in contemporary Russia somehow? A direct transition from things in common use to res publica, diagonally across our table 2, is almost impossible in reality: users of communal toilets are too distant from people who actively take destiny into their own hands. Transition from things of public use to things in public possession is easier. Protest that could
27 result in a public reclaiming of the Salt Gardens as a res publica did not go that far, but the direction is obvious.
However, multiplication of things in public use might help to prepare this move. Thus, the only real public protest that shocked the city authorities was a demonstration of the retired people in January 2005, who marched from the House of Metallurgists onto the main bridge and blocked traffic on it. Their protest was over the elimination of subsidized rides on the city transport for the retired, which threatened to transfer transportation, in the language of political economy, from a common good for the retired people (or their club good – in relation of all other users of transportation) into a city-produced private good. Blocking city traffic, the retired made their problem a problem of all inhabitants, and transformed their concern into a common concern for the city inhabitants. At least for a couple of days they also transformed the city transport from the thing in common use to the thing in public use, putting the questions that affect all into the limelight of extensive – and public - discussion.
But of course in this case there was no possession or ownership of a thing or a problem by a public. The public (or the populus) has a realistic chance of appearing only in the extreme cases when all have to take care of a sudden concern for all, like an inundation or a city-wide breakdown of heating or water facilities. And even in these cases since no lasting legal bondage is created, no vinculum iuris is erected – or, should we say: is spawn? - even this faint resemblance of the populus disappears once the overflowing waters recede or the heating is restored. Multitudes, even when they are forced or allowed to take care of their problems, are not used to sustain this condition in a lasting way. But, one should note, they also do not even have an infrastructure to do so.
Here the role of TSZh as a kindergarten of freedom becomes obvious.8 Of course, transition from things in common possession to things in public possession at the level of one TSZh is impossible. The first criterion of having a res publica – a willingness to die for it – is definitely inapplicable: it would be strange or absurd if I wanted to die for things in my courtyard. Not because they are not worth it at all, but simply because the expanse of history-making at this level is generally very small: acts performed in visibility of others here do not usually get you
8 I play on the famous metaphor of Tocqueville, who called a New England township a primary school of liberty (see Tocqueville 1966).
28 immortality. Of course, some stories of a smaller local level – like some commendable examples of the NIMBY movement during the nuclear free zone conflicts or Jose Bové famously setting fire to a MacDonalds or fighting against genetically-moderated plants - might qualify for a grand narrative, but only when they affect history-making at a larger, usually national or even global level. But in general they don’t. Rosa Vihavainen in her chapter discusses the largely failing attempts to produce local symbols and coordinates of existential meaning in a TSZh, which might seem funny if not ludicrous for many observers. There are common, but not public things here.
However, the role of TSZhs is important in that they give access to an experience that units of a larger expanse do not offer: that of possessing things together, because the TSZhs are forced to own their infrastructure by definition. At the level of the city – even at the level of a district or another municipal unit – inhabitants use things, but they do not possess them. De facto they do not own the city or a municipal unit even though the city officials might be telling them fairy tales to the contrary. By contrast, in many TSZhs people possess things in common ownership and they jointly define their fate in relation to these things. That is why they are the kindergartens of freedom. Going directly from a kindergarten a real life of liberty is impossible: as Cicero and Arendt demonstrated, things in public possession require a real public with the capacity to generate life stories that carry existential meaning. But learning to take one’s destiny in one’s own hands – at least, at the level of common things - is possible. For example, if the city nowadays is mostly a good in the de facto common possession of a few city managers, people who have an experience of both a de facto and a de jure possession of a given apartment block, could eventually disagree with the situation that the city inhabitants have a possession of the city just de jure, but never de facto. I leave the level of the country for the reader to ponder.
This, however, brings us to the second question about res publica: even if it could be possible, is it desirable or is it worth it? Scholars studying Russian homeowners’ associations notice that it is not only the lack of payments on the part of the poorer members of the TSZh, or the lack of activists, which stifle the activities of these associations. It is also the need to maintain a border between private and public life – understood here conventionally, not in a classic republican way – that lowers the homeowners’ willingness to participate. Indeed, entering a protracted public debate every time one exits an apartment to dump a garbage bag is cumbersome. A courtyard
29 need not be an agora all of the time, it could be an agora once or twice a year. When we are durably connected by a well-functioning black box, we do not need to coordinate, and there is no need to deliberate. The French hate their coproprieté meetings, but - thank god - they happen only once a year. So having res publica at the level of a courtyard might be highly undesirable.
What about the city level and higher? Res publica might work out there, but is it worth it? The fact that the city affairs are now decided by two or three or a couple of dozen officials who may take decisions affecting all but without involving these all in deliberations, suggests the idea that life could have been diferent, had the populus reclaimed its res from those who have found themselves entrusted with it now. The problem, however, is not only the desirability of such an arrangement, but with the cost of it. In order to establish the lasting vinculum iuris, in order to create tangible and durable ties or bonds of access to deliberation that would allow for the populus to appear, these ties and bonds should perhaps be as materially binding as the pipes, stairs and wires, which tie the TSZh community. The question “is it worth it?” is then recast in the following way: who would build these ties at the level of the city, and how much would they cost? Is building this bond worth the expenditure?
The answers might be practical, rather than theoretical – in every given case, based on concrete calculations. An extension of the infrastructure of freedom should be paid for – and usual theories of liberty do not account for this. As Latour would say, these theories do not pay their dues, thinking that freedom - like scientific truth - can flower anywhere, and does not need a network that would help deliver it to a remote place. I would then suggest that research assembled in this book has contributed to a formulation of a theory of freedom as fairness – on the model of Rawls’s justice as fairness, or Latour’s truth as fairness. Expenditures for the construction of the infrastructure of liberty should be accounted for.
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