The City and the City: London 2012 Visual (Un)Commons

Abstract

There is the city, and then there is the city. Sharing starts already on the level of perception and sensation; they ground the political. This can be understood in the way in which Jacques Rancière (2004) suggests to understand politics of aesthetics that refers to the distribution of the sensible and conditions participation. But we could actually also say that this is a line from China Miéville’s (2009) fiction novel The City & the City, a weird fantasy of the twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma that are perhaps almost identical in physical space, but perceived as two different cities — where part of belonging to one city is to be able to unsee the other city and its action: a sort of complex, ongoing negotiation at the level of perception of what you see and what you must not see, forming the tension of common and uncommon. Cities are multiple, they overlap. One city multiplies into different zones, experienced in different ways, but also governed, regulated in alternative ways pending on your position, perspective, situation. Miéville is able to show how finely regulated space and commons are in terms of the bodies that inhabit, sense — and hence create — these spaces. This also, to a point, concerns the policing of that common, uncommons, to which I will return at the end of this chapter.