ABSTRACT
Forest City (Rendering), Johor Bahru
Racism is produced by and produces space, and COVID-related racism is inseparable from its spatiality. Hence, this paper suggests the particularly violent attacks in the Pacific region are related to the histories and physical proximity East Asia, especially China, has with other Pacific cities. The Pacific is made of settler-colonies, China’s 20th century rise, flooded Polynesian nations, Southeast Asia’s colonial nostalgia; and the flows of investments, people and resources in between. Operating with the capitalist-colonial logic of land as economic value, the real estate industry synthesizes these flows into contested spaces (or property), exacerbating spatial inequities and anxieties about rights to the city. COVID-racism emerges from these Transpacific exchanges.
If real estate is key in producing these contested spaces, what can counter it? This paper suggests the field of Planning, which broadly engages with “land”, is a practice that may do so. However, this requires Planning to go beyond its conventional relationships with real estate and the State, and
explore:
Q: What else can Planning (the Plan) do to produce spaces where oppressed bodies may gain greater capacities to act outside the capitalist-colonial spatial-racial reproductions?
The “what else” takes Planning beyond urban design and land-use management, to not treat land as a mute object to be imbued with economic value. Instead, think through the land – how can ecologies and topographies inflect thinking? This shifts Planning-thinking away from representing the future to one of closely observing the formation of contested spaces, and responding/experimenting with immanent tactical immediate actions. The plan produced immanently has innumerable futures with an affective sway, instead of repeating the capitalist-colonialist’s predictable history.
In terms of the paper’s structure, part one further elaborates how Transpacific flows synthesized by capitalist-colonial structures produced contested spaces, and turn spurred racism. Part two responds more to the question of what else can Planning do to counter these contested spaces. As these contested spaces are linked via the Transpacific flows of investments, resources and migrations, countering, one contested site may entail countering others sites. As such, some form of a Transpacific common project among different Pacific struggles may have to be developed to counter these interlinked spaces. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of the Common which is understood as the space-event of different struggles in various locales connecting to share tactics and concepts to enhance their individual push for greater democratic and ethical relations with others and the land may be useful tool in developing the Transpacific Common. Furthermore, because these contested spaces are always shifting with the Transpacific flows, any plans that critically engage with and intervene on them must also remain “unformed”. Being unformed is remaining supple and poised for innumerable motions, allowing for new relations to be made at an instance, spurring new modes of caring and being ethical immanent to the event. This “un-formability” may be the liberative element to counter the capitalist-colonial spatial-racial reproductions. Planning and the Plan takes on new bodies to do so.
This paper hopes to add to this already-ongoing Transpacific Plan.
We conceive of the “Minor Transpacific” as an alternative regional imaginary and a new referential framework that emphasizes the lateral relations among minor histories and minor locations in the Asia Pacific region.[1] - Christine Kim and Helen Hok-Sze Leung, The Minor Transpacific
Othering in the Transpacific Realm
Racism produces and is produced by space. The increasing COVID-related racial violence cannot be separated from its spatiality. The attacks target East Asians especially, and are most virulent in the Pacific region. Why? This paper suggests it is partly due to the histories and physical proximity East Asia, especially China, has with other Pacific Nations. In “Western” Pacific cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sydney and Vancouver, East Asians regardless of actual ethnicity are often reduced to a single “Chinese Viral” body, then attacked. The space of East Asia has collapsed into “China”. Thus the “Asia” in racist phrases like “Go back to Asia!” often means this imaginary China that is invading Western spaces and healthy bodies. The notion of a virus-laden “Asia” becomes tied to particular physical body traits. So much so, in Vancouver, an Indigenous woman with dark hair and olive-tone skin was equated (not just mistaken) as embodying “Chinese-ness” and possibly the “coronavirus”. Her physical appearance was enough to spur her attacker to spew anti-Chinese epithets and strike with rage.[2]
Creating the invasive alien Other is not just in Western cities. In Singapore, some netizens have called for travel bans from Mainland China and avoidance of Mainland Chinese owned businesses in fear of a virus which seem to have a race or ethnicity.[3] Many of those calling for the bans are themselves “local” Chinese-Singaporean who want to distance from themselves from the “wrong” kind of Chinese, the Mainlanders. This process of Othering even occurred in Mainland China itself where Wuhanites are sometimes ostracised in other cities.[4] COVID-related racism is not limited to East Asians. Cases of African migrants in China and Hongkong who are seen as disease carriers perpetuates that perception of dark-skinned persons as being “lesser” within the Sinosphere.[5]
The space and time of COVID-related racism is however not just within the frame of 2020. Its space and time are tied to the longer duration of Transpacific economic, information, natural resource and migrant movements; and the often-contested spaces (or in the form of property) that are formed out of these flows. These contested spaces could be formed by a mix of State-enforced spatial apartheid as well as various communities seeking refuge from a wider cityscape that see them as not-belonging. In Singapore, the early colonial-era Jackson Plan had designated the precise areas where the island’s main races – Europeans, Malays, Indians, Chinese – could live. In today’s Singapore, many construction workers hailing from Bangladesh and nearby Asian countries are housed in dormitories far from the urban centres. This is to spatially and visually distance them from the skyscrapers, parks and plazas their bodies are physically involved in building. Migrant labour and bodies are disassociated from the glitzy outcomes of capitalist-colonial constructions. When COVID struck, this migrant worker population were officially not counted as “local” cases but the distinct category of “temporary work permit cases”. The fear of migrants contaminating urban space is seen in how cities like Vancouver developed anxieties of becoming “Hongcouver”. [6] In late 2016, after Trump’s electoral win, explicitly Alt-Right posters warning White-Vancouverites about the Chinese replacing them and taking over their home(land) appeared.
More on this point about contested spaces, there is a curious study in Vancouver to find out what percentage of the city’s wealthy westside homes had buyers with non-Western Chinese first names. The study’s author, a second-generation Chinese-Canadian, associates non-Western first names as people who had not been in Canada long enough, and are thus like wealthy speculators. (The author has a Western first name.) The study showed that in a span of half a year, of the 172 westside homes sold, 66% were bought by persons with non-western Chinese names. These homes averaged at $3 million in 2016.[7] In 2015, Statistics Canada reported the median household income in the Greater Vancouver region to be $72,600.[8]
Reacting to these cases, there are sentiments calling to cull migrant movements. These views come from private citizens as well as politicians. This is that fear of Hongcouver, to not let the Vancouver-body become Sinicised by the erection of towers. There is a fear of the “local” being replaced. However, the “local” here is often drawn from only one segment of history – primarily settler history. The Milk Bar replaced by a Chinese Gift Shop staffed by Mandarin-speakers; the Singapore Hokkien Noodles Hawker Stall being replaced by a Beijing-Style Hotpot Place; etc. The urban-architectural body is perceived to be falling ill from its Sinicization. References to Indigenous space and history are often discounted from this narrative of the “local”. This notion of the local is part of the wider colonial narrative of growth and progress which legitimates the settlers as the rightful inheritors (property-owners) of the land.[9]
Fearing high housing prices and viruses, settlers retreat to the hinterland where land prices are seen to be more suited for the honest worker. Canadian-ness and Australian-ness are thought to exist in the rural towns, away from the illness of the Sino-Global body. In the case of Singapore which does not have a hinterland, there are Singaporeans (mostly middle-upper class Chinese-Singaporeans) who speak of moving to rural parts of Malaysia or Bali where life is comparatively more affordable.
This retreat to the hinterland, which often have higher Indigenous populations, can be seen as another wave of settling. This retreat is often fuelled by the settlers’ imagination of the reserves and kampongs as idyllic and “natural”. In reality, these places may not receive adequate aid from the central colonial governments, and are often exploited for the labour they supply the urban centres.[10]
There is a conflation of the urban-architectural body of new buildings with the Chinese corporeal body with its perceived eating habits and smells, physiology, sounds, languages, etc. (which has its own spatiality). During COVID, this conflated body is now further conflated with the “Coronavirus body”. Hence, one might say, this three-in-one racialised body is produced by a process of spatialization, economisation (via property development) and viralisation. With this conflation, a building could illicit negative reactions leading to vandalism. But more disturbingly, an East Asian person sitting in a public plaza can be encountered affectively as a virus-laden-capital-investment body that is invading the good stable “local” public space. It does not matter if the East Asian is masked or not: Masked could mean they are hiding their disease with a covering. Not-masked could mean they are intentionally spreading the disease. The biopolitics of mask-wearing (or not) and bearing this triply-conflated body impacts how an East Asian person would navigate through public space. With this conflation, the unfamiliar sound of Mandarin or any East Asian language can be taken as if it is the aural attribute of the virus itself; East Asian tongues become the sound of the invaders announcing their ousting of the locals from their home(land). The encounter with this three-in-one body can generate so much affective forces that a racist may not know how to process that, and instead turn to immediate guttural violence. This guttural violence may be (mis)interpreted by some as defence of home(land), even if the violent-doers have not clearly distinguished what other economic, spatial and historical forces may be present that have also contributed to housing unaffordability, or what sociopolitical and colonial forces they have inherited that led to the negative racialisation of East Asian bodies and spaces.
Affective forces can sway people toward a guttural urgency and desire for transformation, yet often without determination. This is the nature of affects. However, and this is the political dimension of affects, it is a matter of how to harness those affective forces toward the production of new liberative political trajectories. To this point of harnessing affective forces, philosopher Chantal Mouffe suggested that today it is often the Right-wing parties that are actually more capable of harnessing the affective forces that spur people’s urgency and desires toward transformation; then channelling them toward xenophobia and nationalist causes. (Trump politics is one example.) For Mouffe, to counter the Far-Right, the Left needs to address how it can channel affective forces toward the creation of new democratic expressions.[11] (The globally-connected protests toward democracy in Hongkong, America, Canada, Belarus, Santiago, Beirut, Kosovo, etc. have much affective forces emanating from them. The political project then is how the Left can harness these affective forces toward further motions to create new democratic spaces and opportunities for the oppressed to speak and act. This is partly this paper’s aspirations, albeit more restricted in geography to the Pacific Region to address racialised spaces specific to the Asia-Pacific experience.)
To move on to counter racism in the Transpacific, the reality of East Asia’s, especially China’s, rise and expanding economy, military and even actual geographic coverage cannot be avoided. Attending to this is not dismissing the negative biopolitical impacts on East Asians. It is not to curb immigration or retreat to relativism and give free rein to what some Chinese and East Asian nationalists claim to be a “come back” against the West. It is (and this paper aims to be a catalyst) however to get Planners, Architects, researchers, artists, activists and others to exchange points with regards to exploring how the current Transpacific entanglement of land-development and colonial-racist mindsets (on all edges of the Pacific) can be reconfigured toward something else. Being attentive to the Pacific’s diversity, it is not to reduce all Pacific peoples and struggles to one identity that will abide by one masterplan for how the just-city of Pacific must appear like. To become something else is to allow the Pacific’s diversity to proliferate.
PART TWO: COUNTER RACIALISATIONS AND THE TRANSPACIFIC COMMON
We ground ourselves in the “Pacific” – large and fluid as that space is – we strive to make, keep and nurture political, cultural, intellectual, emotional connections with each other and others.[12] - Tereisa L. Teaiwa, L(o)osing the Edge.
The Pacific’s Time as Condition for its Space
Ancient and recent Transpacific flows – the Bering Crossing, Polynesian voyages, Tamils in Fiji, East Asian railroad workers in North America, Japanese-Brazilian artists in Tokyo, Singapore economic migrants to Australia, etc. – create new borders and spaces. Sometimes new hybrid bodies, cultures and modes of caring and being ethical emerge. But sometimes, those finances, natural resources and populations crisscrossing the Pacific can settle into hierarchies and binaries; these often take the form of property acquired through systems created by the ongoing process of colonisation. These are contested and often racialised spaces.
It is not to avoid creating new spaces, insofar as the Pacific is not static and remains constantly traversed. The question is how to create spaces supportive of democratic expressions. Further, how can the lines and strata that constitute those contested spaces be reconfigured. This paper thus suggests it may be possible to devise modes of engaging with the Pacific – ocean and land – that can unsettle these rigid segments, and create relations and spaces that foster spatial justice to the those who inhabit the Pacific, and the Pacific itself. However, due to the geopolitical and economic span of the Pacific, this is necessarily an exercise that will require different peoples with different struggles round the Pacific to connect. As suggested in the Teresia Teaiwa quote above: This is their common project – which is already ongoing. This paper is a small part of this moving Pacific space-event.
To explore the Pacific peoples’ common project, we can adapt and re-configure philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of the “Common” for a Pacific context, and embark on an exploration of what a Transpacific Common (or project to create common connections) can do.
Before exploring the Common, it might be useful to explore the much-related concept of the Multitude. The Multitude for Hardt and Negri, following Baruch Spinoza, is a great mix of individuals and groups that can form alliances without necessarily being reduced to a single identity and/or being commanded by the State or any overarching regime.[13] As connections are made, newer bodies and groups may be formed; this in turn adds even greater diversity to the Multitude. The Multitude is always plural-ising.
Most relevant for the Pacific context, the Multitude can potentially be of a global and transnational scale, insofar as technology today permits such connections. What then can be the Common’s relationship to the Multitude? The Common, for Hardt and Negri, takes shape in the event of these different groups connecting up and tending to mutual care and liberative transformations in their own and each other’s sociopolitical, economic, cultural, geographical and ecological spheres. Thus, one might suggest, the Common is constituted through the event of the Multitude realising its political potential as different peoples connect and affirm new sociopolitical and spatial alliances. However, we should note the connections people make does not need to lead to a “common” land or space, as if all of the Pacific’s oceans and land would become a legal shared property. The Common cannot be reduced to common-property as in being owned by a common-identity “people”. Hardt and Negri note,
The Common does not refer to traditional notions of either the community or the public. It is based on the communication among singularities, and emerges through collaborative social processes of production.[14]
The Common is a sense or tendency of socialibilities forming; more than common identities and common-property. However, it is important to note the Common is not just composed of social relations but also by physical bodies, including non-human ones. Hardt and Negri do point out the Common also has a material physical realm such as natural resources and environments is important too. We should note having a material physical dimension does not make it property. Hardt and Negri point out this aspect:
A democracy of the multitude is imaginable and possible only because we all share and participate in the Common. By “the Common” we mean, first of all, the commonwealth of the material world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty […] More significantly those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth. This notion of the common does not position humanity separate from nature, as either its exploiter or its custodian, but focuses rather on the practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world, promoting the beneficial and limiting the detrimental forms of the common.[15]
To purpose of making explicit the Common’s spatiality (and physicality) is one way to springboard to a discussion on its temporality. To this physical, spatial and material realm, one might include cities and other humanmade spaces in this the material realm. The reason being, for example, a river’s wellness cannot be divorced from how water is marketed and used in urban centres across the globe. Another example, if one is to look at urban protests, the often-guerrilla style utilisation of sidewalks, lampposts, plazas, roads, fences and street furniture are crucial to how protests, and hence the possible dialogues and ideas, take form. The physicality of the environment inflects on thinking. One does not fit the environment into an ideal scheme. Instead the affectivity of the environment transforms thinking.
To discuss more on this intertwined physical and social realm, we can further elaborate on the space-event of a protest. A city, no matter how contested and divided it may be, can affectively transform the protestors’ bodies (and minds), spurring them to move and think in unanticipated manners. A Hongkong protester, in the tropical urban humidity, screaming in solidarity with Black Lives is not merely a political symbol or gesture. The scream emanates from their clenched torso and stretched vocal cords that are transformed by and moving with the affective forces of the urban environment. The scream is always more than the individual-personal. The affectivity of the environment always exceeds the sum of its constitutive elements. Affective forces are born from the “space” in between the sunlight falling on the tiled plaza that burns one’s bare-feet; the hums, roars and corporeal-aural mass of protesters here and on the other side of the Pacific; the graphic loudness of the placard slogans; the intensity of the online images of Black Lives Matter struggles one sees on one’s smartphone, etc. A protester’s scream is the affective forces of the environment moving through their body, combining with their body’s own existing forces, which then spurs the lungs, brain and mouth to act. Of course, this scream also add its own affective aural and corporeal forces to the political vibrations that make up the collective protest-body in Hongkong, as well as those across the Pacific and beyond. Bodies swayed by these affective forces scream, think and even unexpectedly create new strategies and ideas to counter those rigid contested spaces. Barricaded campuses and autonomous zones in Hongkong and Portland, Oregon, the sit-ins against pipelines in Vancouver’s major vehicle intersections are not just strategies to halt the circulation of capital. They are also affective spaces that in turn affect the tensed human bodies that traverse them. Tensed bodies transform the spaces. One does not speak of protests as if the space and the human bodies are truly separate. The affected and affective bodies in a protest exceed political demands; they constitute the Multitude’s propulsion to change its relationship with the land, with economy, with the city, with the current ethical-form, etc. They constitute the Multitude poised for innumerable motions. The screamer noticed their scream have alerted the police who are now making their way toward them – what can the screamer’s body do? What other forces can their body come in relation with to liberate themselves and others from the intolerable?
Besides being spatial, social spaces are also temporal, insofar as our relations take place in time. Our experience of space and each other, even during the event of being affected and affecting others, takes place in time. Time conditions space. It is not so much space being a container that holds movement, but that movement itself gives rise to space’s reality. Not an exception, the space of the Common is also temporal. The “present” is full of uncountable futures. Hence, when thinking about that point of being poised for innumerable motions, how does one begin to map these unquantifiable immense futures? This is not going to be a conventional map. This map does not designate a design or planning epoch that translates to some corresponding urban form (e.g. an “ism”). Innumerable futures are not representable, yet this does not mean one cannot engage in the activity of mapping. But instead of representing what is there or what must be, it may be how graphic and textual marks, the glyphs, vectors and vignettes make the reader wonder “what/where else?”. They help us cultivate an urgency to proliferate this “what/where”. Such maps do not have a model that tells us exactly how to proliferate the “what/where”. There is no master-method. These maps may take many forms, even un-cartographic forms. Anti-colonial-capitalist cartographers may create such maps to press themselves and others to further question and experiment. These maps may have us wonder what else can capital-colonialism’s claim to destiny transform to? How to splinter the capitalist-colonial narrative against itself?
Of course, while these maps do not prescribe the exact future, they do not aim (and are not capable) to stop a future from actualising. A future will actualise, and that future may well be one that can increase (or decrease) some people’s capacities to act and speak. The thing these maps reminds us is that an actualised future can still hold many other unarticulated futures. Actualisation is simultaneously the emergence of potentials.[16] This is because each actualisation intentionally or not will fold new forces and elements into its next-potential form. Time takes care of this next-potential form. It is a matter of how we can help (or embrace) time:
Q: What can a plan do to embrace this “nature” of time, of each actualisation becoming potential again and again?
“The future as always poised for innumerable motions” is the conceptual force that may help those with engaging with land to imagine a Transpacific Realm that is not limited by the capitalist-colonial narrative of progress and historical destiny. The map simply gives us some tools to increase the potential for futures not aligned with capitalist-colonial direction of history to actualise. The unimageable concept of splintering futures offers the “space” for Architects and Planners to question and rethink the relationship between Spatial-Design, land and time itself. This is however not to say we deny the possibility of actualisation. It is simply to suggest even when loose relations and conceptual-inklings actualised into well-defined concepts and courses of action, what is actualised still bear many other openings. And, that “many other openings” can still have an affective sway that can transform the “present”. The affective forces from the innumerable futures fold back into the “present”. This in turn increases the immense quantity and qualities of futures the “present” will bear. For example, the affective forces of the city and protesters as they are channelled into spatial tactics such as the barricaded university campuses or autonomous zones does not mean these actual spatial entities are no longer affective and can no longer spur the emergence of other potential spatial, political, visual, conceptual, corporeal, etc. forms. The cities that will come from these barricaded campuses and autonomous zones exist, today, as an immense potentialities
In design practice, when we speak of actualisations, it does not necessarily mean only one future comes to fruition, in the same way one may say the outcome of a horse-race. In design, futures that do not get actualised into the historical future may still physically actualised as half-drawn plans, social media chatters of other futures, etc. It is from these half-formed things that the liberative moment for the Spatial-Design practices may emerge. One might ask:
In design practice, when we speak of actualisations, it does not necessarily mean only one future comes to fruition, in the same way one may say the outcome of a horse-race. In design, futures that do not get actualised into the historical future may still physically actualised as half-drawn plans, social media chatters of other futures, etc. It is from these half-formed things that the liberative moment for the Spatial-Design practices may emerge. One might ask:
Q: What if the "half-formed" is taken as a design thinking tool to open up futures? How can they be used as tools to deliberately not let the futures repeat capitalist-colonial destiny?
The half-formed is that which might allow Architects, Planners, designers and others involved with the issue of “land” to not repeat those “proven” urban forms, negotiation patterns with developers and the State, by-law and policy generation, which themselves repeat the logic of capitalist-colonial legal, economic and spatial structures. More importantly, the half-formed speaks of a mode of futuring that jams the real estate time-table. By refusing a definitive future through allowing new forces and relations to be formed at each juncture of a process, thus filling the “present” with (the affective forces of) many unarticulated possibilities, the surety of the “roadmap” is disrupted. This presents a break with – a decolonising effort against – the quantised order for construction and occupancy, bank loan repayments, accruement of sufficient profit to venture onto the next project, etc. Jamming the real estate industry’s expedient linear work-time disrupts its economic ground and literally can halt the act of breaking-ground. It can jam and alter the way investments, people and natural resources move and settle. This is especially important with regards to countering contested racialised spaces, which is in part produced because of a capitalist-colonial treatment of time as schedule. This capitalist-colonial time-scheduling can quite literally deprive us the “space of time” (literally the hours and minutes) to more critically engage with the land. Without the sufficiency of this “space of time” to think, Planners and Architects often have only the “proven” formula of treating land as economic value to rely on.
Jamming these flows may require the joint struggles across the Pacific to pull together their different approaches to time and futuring, and collectively jam different segments of the investment, people and resources flows.[17] Practically, the possibility of multiple halts in the Transpacific flows may offer that actual “gap” (“space of time”) for Pacific peoples to contemplate their next step – to intervene on the capitalist-colonial time-schedule and expand their futures beyond that.
As philosopher Simone Bignall noted, it is not a matter of colonised people escaping or retreating to another realm completely detached from their colonised reality. Rather, it is to remake this colonised reality. It is for colonised peoples to take the very “present” fabric – and this can include the contested spaces – they inhabit in order to flood their “present” moment with many futures. It is embracing history as being written in the actions happening in time, and not pre-mapped. Bignall wrote,
Jamming these flows may require the joint struggles across the Pacific to pull together their different approaches to time and futuring, and collectively jam different segments of the investment, people and resources flows.[17] Practically, the possibility of multiple halts in the Transpacific flows may offer that actual “gap” (“space of time”) for Pacific peoples to contemplate their next step – to intervene on the capitalist-colonial time-schedule and expand their futures beyond that.
As philosopher Simone Bignall noted, it is not a matter of colonised people escaping or retreating to another realm completely detached from their colonised reality. Rather, it is to remake this colonised reality. It is for colonised peoples to take the very “present” fabric – and this can include the contested spaces – they inhabit in order to flood their “present” moment with many futures. It is embracing history as being written in the actions happening in time, and not pre-mapped. Bignall wrote,
History is not drawn towards an ideal climax that functions as a transcendental cause, compelling the unfolding of a pre-existing plan or programme of development. Rather, the virtual is an immanent cause of history. The making of history is compelled from within the existing social fabric by the creative potential of the virtual, from which actual things emanate, and which persists in actual things as the conditions of their determination.[18]
It is through this practice of filling the present with many futures that the Transpacific Common – that common project toward greater capacity to experiment, act and speak – sustains itself.
There, the Pacific is half-formed toward something
There, the Pacific is half-formed toward something
The Pacific is there. This “there” is where we are standing, yet where we are standing is always becoming another “there”. The Pacific arrives half-formed because it is there shifting its horizon.
Half-formed things like maps without lines are not unfinished due to laziness, some inherent error in logic or failure, as conventional views tell us. Half-formed is not unfinished. When we say they are half-formed, it does not mean they are unfinished in the way that there is already an established final form waiting to be coloured or filled in. It is certainly not half-houses which final frame is already determined by the Architect, and the future residents simply fill in the blank when they become financially more secured. Half-formed things are more like inklings, senses of things taking shape without being determined. A tending toward. Practically speaking, being half-formed is also being shrew. It is to use the half-formed as a strategy to elude appropriation, depoliticisation and reproduction by capitalist-colonial economic structures.
The Pacific comprises of many half-formed things. Groups connect. Flows, vectors and relations solidify to form spaces. Yet on closer inspection such spaces often have dots for borders, and many passages move through these dotted borders. These flows weave together seemingly disjointed bodies. Half-formed borders bounding half-formed bodies. And they break apart as soon as they combine. This movement is their nature and politics.
If being political involves constantly renewing relations among groups; then these half-formed things edging into each other and edging toward new spaces and bodies can be said to be repoliticising the polis and even the Pacific. The half-formed things are always at the cusp of moving beyond the “present”. The cusp is “motion-like”, because the event of being-at-the-cusp has affective forces that are palpable. That is the pulse of an emerging polis. Here, bodies are transformed when affected and also affecting others. As philosopher Brian Massumi notes,
To affect and to be affected is to be open to the world, to be active in it and to be patient for its return activity. This openness is also taken as primary. It is the cutting edge of change. It is through it that things-in-the-making cut their transformational teeth.[19]
The “things-in-the-making” that Massumi speaks of are the half-formed things which can express a mode of futuring not tethered to capitalist-colonial destiny. The democratic moment is how this openness to possibilities can move beyond the offer of “choices” typical in liberal economies. Pacific people need not choose between Plan A, B or C. Instead, they work collectively to create something that might even be a not-plan. It might be a half-drawn graph, an endless story, etc. A a plan might really be a platform for different groups and individuals to keep imbuing the “present” with many futures.
To further elaborate how things-in-the-making can produce the affective powers that can bear on the current political situation, we can turn to philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s political concept of the “toward”. Although Nancy discusses this “toward” largely in the context of creative writing that is intentionally incomplete, one can take a disciplinary leap to explore how Planning and even the “plan” can express this sense of the “toward”.
For Nancy, what is not-written expresses many other paths. Following this thinking, one might suggest, this could be a story that describes politicised and racialised peoples coming together, the exchanges that might have occurred between them, but deliberately terminates by not-writing a finale. Far from being politically irresponsible, one might follow Nancy and suggest such a text leaves the reader with the material (e.g. textual forces) to write other kinds of futures that are more relevant to the milieu the reader is situated within. Without attempting to address the reader’s “site”, in fact by deliberately making the site absent, this text actually becomes attentive and responsive to those possible new relations and bodies that may form at the reader’s “site” in which the text is encountered. Writing in this way however is not about applying a model to a variety of situations. There is no model, only a montage of forces to be used by those who engage the text. Writing here takes a form that permits it to function not as a direct communication; it does not signify anything on or off its pages. Nancy writes,
We call writing that which does not respond to any model whatsoever of the appropriation of significations, that which opens at one relation and, along with relation, significance itself. [20]
Writing in this mode breaks the assumed stability between the signifier and the signified. The text does not seek an equivalence between the word and a corresponding object beyond its pages. The text may be considered a tool or palette of textual, conceptual forces to open up to new relations. That opening becomes the significance of the text itself – its “sense”. Nancy further elaborates on this sense:
Sense is consequently not the “signified” or the “message”: It is that something like the transmission of a “message” should be possible. It is the relation as such, and nothing else. Thus, it is as relation that sense configures itself – it configures the “toward” that it is (whereas signification figures itself as identity).[21]
This “toward” remains in the text. This is because even if textual, conceptual and maybe graphic forces present in the text are used to create new geographical, sociopolitical, ecological and corporeal bodies and spaces, the text-as-tool is never exhausted. It is not exhausted precisely because it is not a model; it is not something waiting to be replicated in the passing from concept to equivalent object. Its relevance is reinvented. The text’s future is always outside of it; splintering in the innumerable encounters and uses the text will enter and connect with. The “toward” ties each word, sentence and paragraph to its own infinities. For Nancy,
Each language is to be indefinitely tied up into the (k)not of its proper infinity and into the (k)nots of the proper infini-ties of the others.[22]
Crafting a work – a book, poem, painting, song or even a plan – that expresses this “toward” may require letting go of the capitalist-colonial way of futuring. For Architects and Planners, in a much more “practical” register, it may mean letting go of the “right height” for a neighbourhood, the “right floor-area density” to sustain development, the “right racial mix” to maintain harmony, etc., as if the “right” built form can represent destiny. Relinquish the well-tempered city. Instead, explore how the power relations and structures that privileged the settler colonial and capitalist framing of time and destiny can be countered, and brought to express the “toward” Nancy speaks of. We in the Pacific can take this “right” narrative of time and future and splinter it for the many Pacific futures yet to come.
Following Nancy’s notion of how things can be knotted to their own “infini-ties” (that is including all the not-actualised potentials) one might ask,
Q: What form of writing can a plan experiment with so its descriptions of and relations to topographies, other human-bodies, geological systems, animal relationships, etc. can be tied to that pulse to(ward) the manifold futures, even if these futures’ actualisation is absent?
One possible way to address the above question is to experiment with the actual format of the plan. This entails the experimenting with ways texts are assembled, introducing ambiguity and double-meanings in the usage of words, the juxtaposition of text and imagery that produces a sense of something more in the “space” between image and text, etc. However, this paper will focus more on the “content” a plan can engage with to address this question. Thus, one other possible way to address the above question is to treat the land itself as half-formed. One explicitly makes clear in the plan the un-formity of the land that is engaged with. What can “half-formed land” mean? First of all, is land not already half-formed in the sense the geological processes do not really stop? Its geological future in fact embodies innumerable possibilities in that there can actually be more than one way to address climate change or housing affordability crises. Green roofs, Passive-Houses, wider sidewalks, Silicon Valley’s electric cars, international travel-bans and meatless burgers cannot be the only solutions. This is not to discount them, but to acknowledge these present day’s solutions do not spell the entirety of the earth’s time, its possible movements, and entirety of solutions. The earth’s new peoples with new kinds of bodies, new plants, new layering of strata, etc. may not be imageable yet. That said, to be sure, we have to begin reducing fossil fuel usage, being less reliant on capitalist mode of city-building, etc. But these solutions can always find yet-invented and perhaps even unimageable but still complementary ways of not just extending but proliferating the planet’s geological time and futures. The land and earth’s inherent movements are already poised to open for many existences beyond that capitalist-colonial framing of time and future.
It is in this sense that one might say the land is already half-formed. Geologically, culturally, scientifically, the earth and land bear the pulse of many futures. Countering capitalist-colonial futuring does not mean there is only one alternative end-state. Natural resources can indeed be exhausted. But the land’s own futures (put simply the innumerable ways to engage with climate change) can indeed be inexhaustive if there can be more efforts put into exploring how to relate with the land not through the category of us-as-owners and land-as-object. This does not mean we then become passive objects and are merely conditioned entirely by the land’s movements. Instead, it is a matter of how human bodies and the land exchange forces and affective powers, transforming each other. Furthermore, following this idea of splintering futures, it may be less a question of how well one knows the Pacific. Instead, it could be how engaging with the Pacific can one expand their possibilities and modes of knowing.
One senses the emergence of a mode of Planning that does not privilege the human nor the land, and do not treat one as being in the service of the other. Of course, it is also important to not collapse everything into one giant undifferentiated body. There are still multiple bodies, each changing unto itself, but also capable of affecting others. The thing to explore could be:
Q: How can these many manifold bodies combine their force?
Q: How can topographic folds bring topological folds in the human body and mind? What geological, topographical, topological, intellectual, corporeal movements can be generated between the land and the human body to spur both peoples and lands toward greater capacities to act, to affect and be affected?
In these questions, the task of creating new bodies and spaces do not belong to just the human, nor just the land. It is the event’s doing.
The Pacific People’s Common project toward greater capacities to act and democracy will include the Pacific Ocean itself and the lands that are constantly forming around and in it. The half-formed peoples (Multitude) and the half-formed lands (earth in geological processes) connecting thus expresses the form of the Transpacific Common.
Moving from Property to Territory
Here, one should note countering and even reconfiguring capitalist-colonialism’s contested spaces and scheduled time does not necessarily mean the Pacific becomes an undifferentiated field without homes, protections, look-out vantage points, etc. Using the half-formed as a concept to enable us to rethink our relationship to Planning, Architecture and real estate, and to the land, is not a celebration of nomadism in terms of actual modes of living. The half-formed is there to keep the many futures from being exhausted by capitalist-colonial logic of time, history and space. Opening up contested spaces – in other words property – is not to throw the concept of the territory out. Territory is not property. Not approaching land as property does not mean our relations with land cannot be still grasped as territory.
Asking what is one’s territory can be a question of what can particular forces stemming from a particular site compose to the conditions that allow us greater capacity to act, transform, persevere and grow. And importantly, for that site itself to act and persevere. Territorialisation need not mean we own it. Territory is not merely a section of Cartesian space marked by X-Y-Z dimensions. It is composed of physical things as well as actions, intentions, and tendencies. For example, certain physical conditions like humidity, soil type, adjacent plants, and sunlight when mixed with shitake mushroom DNA may spur the mushrooms to respond to stimuli and grow, thus constitute a territory. But more rightly, territory is an act of (constant) re-territorialisation.[23] It is redefining the relations that allow things like those shitake mushrooms to thrive and persevere. A change in those conditions may still produce shitakes, but they may take on a different aroma, texture or toxicity. Likewise, a certain mix of sociocultural relations, urban typologies, education settings, and economic arrangements may create a territory that allows certain kinds of artists to persevere. These artists persevere through the studio and “space of time”, thus gaining capacities to create new works. In persevering newer artistic and spatial concepts may be generated; this in turn can lead to further reconfigurations of the territory they are within. The evolving of the art, the physical studio and relations constitute a changing territory. Territorialisation is akin to an expansion of life’s possibilities, keeping life not-exhausted, half-formed.
Moving from property to territory is an exploration to reconfigure possible stale relations between subject and object – it is to allow thinking to occur in a space that is beyond subject-versus-object. Thus, most importantly, thinking beyond property is at the same time to rethink or even unthink the category of “ownership” and people as “owners”. From this perspective of going beyond subject-versus-object, to persevere need not mean “us” staying unchanged. To persevere is how we may have to change alongside our changed relationships to land, the urban fabric and other bodies.
When property is re-expressed as territory, it assumes the political action to resist land being exhausted by property economics. Resisting land’s economic exhaustion reminds us the future is always becoming undone as it arrives unto itself. This is the future’s “nature”: Any supposedly predetermined future, in reality, is always out of joint with its own time. When the linearity of property economics’ history is brought out of joint with itself, the manifest destiny of capitalist-colonialism may also become yet-manifested, always unformed. This may be when the decolonisation of colonial time occurs; that is also the political event-time of the Pacific – a time outside of capitalist-colonial time. And because the Multitude that dwells in the Pacific vastness is also vast, decolonised time cannot be summarised into a specific period after colonisation. It is not a historical succession after Empire. Decolonised time remains unformed yet this un-formity is its power.
Rewriting Unformed Plans from the Pacific
"Other spaces" being produced within the Well-Tempered City
Despite a destiny-driven narrative of progress, the Pacific’s contested spaces are never as rigid as they seem. For example, State and private controlled spaces can be reappropriated and put toward the pursuit of democracy: Vancouver’s homeless blocking the entrances to posh restaurants in gentrified neighbourhoods; barricaded university campuses during Hongkong’s ongoing struggles; Seattle’s Autonomous Zone during 2020’s Black Lives Matter struggles; Filipino domestic helpers who filled certain parts of Singapore’s shopping district on weekends; etc.
Of course, one must acknowledge the above scenarios are just temporary, sometimes lasting only hours as in how the Filipino helpers’ spaces disappear when they have to return to the Singaporean homes, they are in servitude to. Yet despite their temporariness, they may still be catalysts for spatial-thinking. At least, they aid rethinking what a plan’s form or Planning can do to counter the category of property. In any case, what amounts to spatial justice in the vast Pacific is not a blueprint or model city that Seattle, Sydney, Shanghai or Singapore can all copy. Nonetheless, activist and other groups in these cities can still connect up to pursuit a common project for democracy and spatial justice, even knowing well spatial justice is not an image. One might then ask:
Q: What then can usher different struggles across the Pacific to connect in a common project?
This question’s “what” may be a plan. But it is not necessarily a plan predicated on the typical order of representation of an ideal built-out state which success is weighed on how closely the implementation of this ideal state can be followed. It might be that non-cartographic map we discussed earlier. However, being non-cartographic does not mean this plan forgoes attention to matter of the land. Moreover, being attentive to the Pacific’s flows which can settle into contested spaces, means the geographical and urban registers cannot be downplayed. The plan still regards land because it still relates to the question of what can be done to create spaces that enable greater capacities to act, transform and speak. At the same time, it is not a masterplan that dictates the final “Pacific spatio-political form”. Embracing the Pacific’s vast differentiating geography, such a push contemplates how the intertwined Transpacific socio-policy, corporeal, economic and spatio-urban forms can tend toward their own openness, or else their “reality” as the half-formed or unformed.
There are at least three related reasons that speak to the necessity of this un-formity:
There are at least three related reasons that speak to the necessity of this un-formity:
First, it is the coextensive relationship of the singular to the multiple. This is how the word “Plan” relates to “plans”. In this paper, when we say capital “P” Plan it also refers to plans. However, there is a reason for using the singular even where there is in fact no single masterplan that dictates how each smaller plan or site-specific struggle must look like to counter the Pacific’s contested spaces. Each struggle in its own specific locale and history is a plan. Two or more struggles jointly creating a platform to devise new tactics to intervene on regimented urban spaces thus to create opportunities for more liberative movements of bodies is also a plan. One person hacking real estate websites is also a plan. These are all “smaller plans”. Smaller not in the sense they subordinate to a “Big Plan”. In fact, these smaller plans constitute the capital “P” Plan. This capital “P” Plan is one with, and in fact only emerges when, the smaller plans combine their powers to increase each other’s capacity to act, speak and be transformed and transformative. Thus, insofar as each smaller plan is also opening up to its unformed or half-formed future, so does the capital “P” Plan’s future open up. The Plan is many plans.
Second, it is to stay vigilant against the capitalist-colonial markets’ appropriative capabilities – to avoid being captured and replicated as a symbol or brand of “progressive urbanism”.[24] Acknowledging how contested spaces can have no final form and are mutating, the Plan and plans are intentionally unformed so as to remain supple enough to assume new relations and new forms at a quick moment, in order to effectively intervene into the gaps that may appear very briefly on the contested spaces’ normally well-sealed borders. With a virus’ mutability, the Plan and plans shift with the Pacific’s geopolitical, ecological, geographic, historical and spatial folds to increase its political efficacy. This is why there are no “built out” scenarios with these plans and Plan. It is not that they elusive due to them hiding a “real” agenda. Them being unformed and opened is the “agenda”. As such, this enables them to rope in even accidental forces abound at unexpected moments to craft unanticipated acts of resistance. When their strength is this momentary inventiveness rather than a clear set of policies, codes and even urban forms, it becomes harder for them to be appropriated. It is much easier for mainstream Planning and the real estate industry to turn a Pacific Rim Food Truck Festival into promotion materials to boost land values. It is harder for the real estate industry to make trade-offs with guerrilla activism that may be supplemented by half-drawn maps, half-formed vignettes that mix the histories and aspirations of various Pacific peoples. If the real estate industry does eventually find a way to appropriate that, the Plan and plans must open themselves again. In any case, planning here would be more a matter of increasing the immensity of manifold futures within the “present” moment, rather limit the future by only aligning it with the proven formulas of those successful Pacific cities appearing on the Top-Ten Lists.
Third, it regards the Plan’s and plans’ time and space in relation to the Common and the wider Transpacific Realm. The Plan and plans do not precede the active Pacific, nor do they come after or are apart from it. They are not outside of the Pacific and its many striated spaces. They take form from within the material geographic field of the Pacific, building liberative spaces using the shattered fragments of the many contested spaces they had reconfigured. The Plan(s), the wider Transpacific Realm and the Transpacific Common can be said to be actually coextensive. The relation of the three may be summarised as such:
- The capital “P” Transpacific Plan is the collective will of the smaller plans as they connect to share tactics, concepts and build joint platforms, even temporary ones, to counter the contested spaces at two or more locations in the Pacific Realm. The capital “P” Plan thus takes shape when two or more smaller plans connect. These smaller plans have always been around insofar as decolonising and reconfiguring capitalist-colonial space and time have around. For example, pre-20th century First Nations groups and Japanese and Chinese migrants to Pacific Northwest have long established relations and ways to resist and take refuge from Settler racism.[25] This connection itself is a plan in the long duration of the ongoing Transpacific Plan for spatial justice. This early connection may form the archival-historical materials for future First Nations land rights activists to dialogue with Okinawan and Manchurian activists to exchange notions of sovereignty with regards to the rise of Chinese capital, extractive land practices and neo-settler colonialism. These many connection usher the capital “P” Transpacific Plan. The Transpacific Plan is immanent in the many plans already occurring in the Pacific Realm.
- The Transpacific Common is perhaps the hardest to clearly define. While the Plan can be defined as the smaller plans connecting to strive for more liberative spaces, the Common may be considered to be the “sense” of that immense affectivity from the connections and potentials (including unactualised ones) between the many smaller plans. Since the capital “P” Plan is also the smaller plans, one might say the Common is the sense of affectivity of the Transpacific Plan tending toward its own opening. From this perspective, the Transpacific Common is the “sense” of the affective forces that are comingled with the potentials at the cusp of emanating from the Okinawan-First Nations-Manchurian dialogues (and other connections this may join to).
- The Transpacific Realm (or simply the “Pacific”) is the flow of forces, population, resources and materials between different Pacific Rim cities. They may form many contested spaces. At the same time, those forces and materials can also be the same ones that the Plan and plans use to craft new connections and liberative spaces.
Considering the Plan and plans to be moving in sync with the Pacific Realm so as to effectively intervene on it, it might be helpful to rethink a plan’s moving body, and how else to conduct planning. Spatial theorist Jean Hillier suggested a plan is longer be a representation or model of what must be. Instead,
A plan should always be incomplete so as to be able to respond to the unforeseen moments in what happens in us and to us that open up onto new histories, new paths in the complication of our ways of being. […] A plan constitutes a space whose rules can themselves be altered through what happens in it. The role of the plan is not to predict but to remain attentive to the unknown knocking at the door. [26]
Hillier’s passage aptly describes Planning’s reality that contains many aleatoric paths. She advocates going beyond the reliance on replicability (also known as “best practices”) common in the capitalist-colonial treatment of space. For her, remaining mutable allows plans to turn chance encounters of new forces and relations into tactics for resistance and invention. Beyond this reliance on replicability, it is
to understand the striations and territorialisations which impinge space; to trace and analyse the molar and molecular lines along which individuals and groups are located; to understand actants’ desires and the lines of flight which (may) occur; and to deal collaboratively and inclusively with the immediately practical, the immediately political elements which are stirring individuals, groups and communities.[27]
Mutability is a mode of resistance for decolonisation, so as to not succumb to the allure of the conventional plan or policy form, which often proclaims itself the future and the people. In its proclamation of historical clarity, the conventional plan or policy form actually reproduces the colonial structuring of the future. This is why it is useful for Transpacific plans to maintain an asymmetrical relationship to their own futures, and be critical of how representation works, if its space-making ethics-building process and methods also aims to decolonise capitalist-colonialism’s ahistoricity.
It is representation – equating a conduct-code or built-form with goodness or badness – that often hinders exploration. Representation assumes structuring the future based on today’s knowledge and conditions will entail the complete manifestation of the future without variance. This mode of thinking eliminates the possibility that the future will arrive or actualise with its own relations, transforming it as it emerges. One might suggest, at the moment of actualisation, when the future becomes the present, that future is already transforming in time and already opening up to other futures. Through this reality of time, any relationships between bodies are also at the cusp of proliferating into many future-relationships. A body, and mind, swept up in multiplying relationships is also multiplied. Thinking takes place in time.
Andrej Radman and Marc Boumeester caution that spatial design disciplines should be more attentive to time, and not treat “the city as the clock” where the city’s opened-future is conflated into a quantised already-known schedule. Following Deleuze, Radman and Boumeester ask, what might it be to have “thought without image”? In other words, how can design thinking strategically reject the comfort of using predetermined concepts and processes to lead it, and embrace thinking’s own splintering:[28]
It is representation – equating a conduct-code or built-form with goodness or badness – that often hinders exploration. Representation assumes structuring the future based on today’s knowledge and conditions will entail the complete manifestation of the future without variance. This mode of thinking eliminates the possibility that the future will arrive or actualise with its own relations, transforming it as it emerges. One might suggest, at the moment of actualisation, when the future becomes the present, that future is already transforming in time and already opening up to other futures. Through this reality of time, any relationships between bodies are also at the cusp of proliferating into many future-relationships. A body, and mind, swept up in multiplying relationships is also multiplied. Thinking takes place in time.
Andrej Radman and Marc Boumeester caution that spatial design disciplines should be more attentive to time, and not treat “the city as the clock” where the city’s opened-future is conflated into a quantised already-known schedule. Following Deleuze, Radman and Boumeester ask, what might it be to have “thought without image”? In other words, how can design thinking strategically reject the comfort of using predetermined concepts and processes to lead it, and embrace thinking’s own splintering:[28]
Challenge the predominant homeostatic fixation on structure in architectural thinking in favour of the event-centred ontology of relations.[29]
Time exceeds history, no matter how specific the historicization of the future can get. The “what if” question aids time to exceed history. But sometimes time does that to itself. For example, the unpredicted halting and slowing of Transpacific flows due to COVID already bore severely on the certainty of capitalist-colonialism’s Transpacific future. In this case, a virus has “aided” struggles globally by highlighting the problematics of capitalist-colonial economies. Spatial justice wise, it is possible the virus brought to awareness the toxic relation between housing and debt (e.g. inability to pay rent specifically). The virus also highlighted the fractures in race-relations within liberal economies. The capitalist-colonial masterplan is already out of joint with its own time. Again, resistance is not to return to some form of isolated localism. It is to embrace how there is always a surplus when history – even capitalist-colonial history – propels into its own future:
Q: How would a plan assemble texts, images and other media to embrace history’s surplus, so as to embrace a future out of joint with itself?
This question is really about moving away from colonial time. Responding to this moving time, the plan is rewritten at each turn. Before each sentence in each plan is completed, it would fold in new forces and be already rewritten. Are thoughts not already remade through the acting of typing, writing, drawing, etc. Thoughts are made through the other bodies the designer encounters. The rewrite is not rewriting what has been previously completed. The rewriting keeps things strategically unformed.
The Ethical as New Relations between Bodies
It is time that conditions the possibility for new relations between bodies to form. Through time, the Plan takes its (un)form. Through time, new values and new ways of judging forms. Time conditions the emergence of new modes of relating to the land and others, hence new ways of doing spatial justice. With this element of time, being ethical may have less to do with abiding by good conducts assumed to be universal and transcendental (hence “timeless”). Deleuze contrasts this more rigid mode of conduct that is based on an unchanging morality against “ethics”, which is another mode of living through time and invention:
The Ethical as New Relations between Bodies
It is time that conditions the possibility for new relations between bodies to form. Through time, the Plan takes its (un)form. Through time, new values and new ways of judging forms. Time conditions the emergence of new modes of relating to the land and others, hence new ways of doing spatial justice. With this element of time, being ethical may have less to do with abiding by good conducts assumed to be universal and transcendental (hence “timeless”). Deleuze contrasts this more rigid mode of conduct that is based on an unchanging morality against “ethics”, which is another mode of living through time and invention:
The difference is that morality presents us with a set of constraining rules of a special sort, ones that judge actions and intentions by considering them in relation to transcendent values (this is good, that’s bad…); ethics is a set of optional rules that assess what we do, what we say, in relation to the ways of existing involved.[31]
Opposing morality to ethics does not mean living with absolute abandonment. Rather, being ethical is to craft new spaces and habits practical for the situation, and exhibiting a care for others who are join in that creation of new relations and space. Being ethical is neither “anything be” (hence succumbing to relativism) nor “this must be” (morality). It is rather carefully crafting out “what else can be”. The question about what are these new spaces and habits particular to the Pacific has been asked over and over, but it remains unanswerable. This is because the new spaces and habits remain incompletable. For example, protest sites, autonomous zones, plazas embraced as sites of contestations, etc. all suggests the processes that can lead to some future spatial form that can foster greater capacities to act and speak, but they are not representations of that future spatial form (or forms). This is because the future is always folding in forces and bodies, that one does not know yet. We can map or plan, but never to represent the space. We give half-formed clues, glyphs and passages particular to certain spatial and historical circumstances, but we still embrace the impossibility of a “masterplan”. As we had discussed earlier, the so-called Transpacific Plan is not the cause of the smaller plans, but rather is there because of the smaller plans – it is immanent to the smaller plans responding to the shifting circumstances of the Pacific. An ethical plan is not a master code for how to build. It rather emerges as the “result” of the various smaller series of actions and plans in interaction that occur within (and in proximity to) a problem-area.
For Deleuze, being ethical is transforming the relations and codes constituting one’s milieu in order to invent new ways of caring for oneself and others around. Invention is a creative endeavour as opposed morality which is taken as abidance to pre-established conventions. Morality implies to live the life of another. In contrast, being ethical would be expanding one’s possibilities to live life. Deleuze wrote that to exist is not just being the subject one already is, but to also “make existence a work of art”. Here, creating new ethical boundaries (those “optional rules” Deleuze talked about) and relations is the same act as creating aesthetic movements, motions and forms.[32]
As a mode of creating new possibilities for living, being ethical is not a simply deference to sociocultural or even personal relativism. Relativism is not inventive because it is heavily reliant on sets of fixed perspectives and judgments from which a particular type of life is validated as “right”, as if that life is independent of other relations it actually necessarily enters. Inventing new rules is entering a process of engaging with others and the land by looking at all bodies involved through their particular forces and capacities to connect up rather than letting preestablished identities wholly predetermine the future. This valuation system would be one based on the potentials different bodies can form when joining together. In fact, the valuation may only take place during the event when two or more bodies are actually connecting – how else would one tell a body’s potentials to join productively with one’s own to produce new opportunities to act and speak, if not through an actual connection? The connection itself becomes the evaluative process. And this process is always experimental.
From this perspective of being ethical as a matter of how bodies can connect to produce new spaces and opportunities to speak and act, one might suggest when encountering those contested spaces, we do not begin by treating them as naturally and wholly evil. It is a matter of positions. For instance, is it possible to achieve new relations between Body A and Body B if they are to be positioned differently, so that one Body no longer remains toxic to the other, etc.? This is why plans remain unformed and supple so as to quickly adopt another position and respond at a moment’s notice of any gaps appearing on the contested spaces’ seemingly rigid borders. It is literally where and how, geographically even, these contested spaces might be intervened on that makes them worthwhile bodies to engage with. What parts of these contested spaces, and at what moments in time, can add to the creation of new liberative spaces?
Following this line of thinking, instead of dismissing the Transpacific flows altogether and retreating to some kind of localism, it might for example be a practice of organising dialogues on Transpacific land-uses that relate to displaced persons all over the Pacific. It might be cultivating non-extractive, non-poisonous relations with those very same urban fabric, air, light, water, ecological processes, and certainly other human and non-human bodies. Besides finding gaps in the contested spaces’ borders, it might also be coming into another kind of relationship with the Transpacific flows themselves, to jam and modify those flows so as to even momentarily refuse to let the old stratifications sediment. Pipeline protests have halted global oil trade’s scheduled time more than once. This may further cause fluctuations in investment and oil prices. The various ongoing protests across the globe and COVID might have changed the way investment flows circulate through cities, and thus also impacted the power relations the real estate industry may have with the cities. How can we help the virus?
Following this line of thinking, instead of dismissing the Transpacific flows altogether and retreating to some kind of localism, it might for example be a practice of organising dialogues on Transpacific land-uses that relate to displaced persons all over the Pacific. It might be cultivating non-extractive, non-poisonous relations with those very same urban fabric, air, light, water, ecological processes, and certainly other human and non-human bodies. Besides finding gaps in the contested spaces’ borders, it might also be coming into another kind of relationship with the Transpacific flows themselves, to jam and modify those flows so as to even momentarily refuse to let the old stratifications sediment. Pipeline protests have halted global oil trade’s scheduled time more than once. This may further cause fluctuations in investment and oil prices. The various ongoing protests across the globe and COVID might have changed the way investment flows circulate through cities, and thus also impacted the power relations the real estate industry may have with the cities. How can we help the virus?
Very often these reconfigurations of the contested spaces can only become effective when they occur outside the private sector’s and State’s extent of influence.[33] Outside the domains of the private industry and State, these Transpacific land-use dialogues do not, like government agencies often do, assume because there are dialogues and representations from all involved parties that fairness will prevail. In fact, assuming fairness will prevail with the “right mix” of ethnic, political, gender or socio-economic representation actually does not pay enough attention to the current economy that is mostly reproducing capitalist-colonial power relations. Frequency of numerical representation of minority does not equate spatio-social justice being addressed. In distinction from government held public consultations and dialogues, these alternative dialogues are attentive to who are currently displaced. As such, the currently-displaced may be given more opportunities to speak; perhaps more so than a participating developer who runs a Transpacific development firm. To facilitate these dialogues requires knowing how to configure new rules, boundaries and spaces to aid the displaced gain greater capacity to act and speak. Reducing the air-time of participating real estate developers and government officials at such dialogues is thus not an unethical mode of relating to them. It is to locate the event of letting the displaced speak amidst a wider net of sociopolitical, economic, historical, geographic and cultural settings, then assessing how these settings may have disadvantaged the displaced people, then unsettling and rearranging the forces that gave rise to these settings. It is to ensure the setting of the dialogues do not repeat these settings. Why repeat the structures and procedures of the municipal council, the Planning Department, the urban design advisory panel, the landlord association meetings, the Architectural or Planning Registration Boards’ code of conduct, if these institutions often replicate the implicit will of capitalist-colonialism? It is not to throw these institutions out, but even to reconfigure them, to fracture and splinter the familiar. The panel-chairperson, the jury, the schedules are rearranged, imbued or stripped of powers, in order to create new rules, even temporary ones.
In a decolonisation project, to not repeat the capitalist-colonial structuring of the future, ethics can be a matter of composition – what different bodies together can otherwise produce, including their unactualised potentials. Being ethical is, as Deleuze following Spinoza, suggests:
It is a question of knowing whether relations (and which ones?) can compound directly to form a new, more “extensive” relation, or whether capacities can compound more directly to constitute a more “intense” capacity of power. It is no longer a matter of utilisations or captures, but of socialibilities and communities. How do individuals enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum?[34]
Knowing which relations to enter is a matter of study, examination and curation, of spatial and historical circumstances. It requires a certain amount of planning, almost in the typical sense of involving analyses frequently done in standard Planning practices and the academy. The fundamental question of being ethical is not “what must I do?” in terms of being commanded upon from social structures without, and as if from a higher cause. Instead, given my current capacities and relations, “what can I do?”. More importantly, it is how my current capacities, what current composes me, may combine with others; and in doing so, others and I are transformed toward greater capacity to act against intolerable sociopolitical and other types of structures. The response then to the question of “What can I do?” is a will to live life creatively, to proliferate potentials, actualised or not. Philosopher Daniel Smith notes this situates ethics as within or immanent to actions, rather than ethics as coming from outside the actions.[35]
The “what” is an opening.
Combining with others to gain greater powers to act, however, is not just solely by chance. There is a need to foster the conditions for connections to take place. Even if we do not know the precise outcome, this fostering of the conditions, even calling on experimental means, is kind of plan-making.
If increasing the capacity to act is more effective with others involved, then being ethical is also a collective pursuit. It is not unlike that coming together of different struggles and smaller plans to embark on a common project to transform spaces and flows in the Transpacific Realm. Pursuing life and ethics as creative endeavours do not need to lead to a war of all against all as feared by Thomas Hobbes. For Deleuze as for Spinoza, caring for what one can do also implies a care for what others can do. As Spinoza noted, even when a body or individual seems stable, “what constitutes the form of the individual consists the union of the bodies.” A body’s maintenance is already constituted by the effort of multiple other bodies. Even to maintain itself seemingly unchanged, all the other bodies that constitute it or are linked to it must still be kept with a degree of wellness. Altering one’s body to another form, if wellness for one’s body is to be expected, requires the other constitutive bodies to have a degree of wellness too.[36] The care for self then is a care for those who constitute that “self”. As Deleuze reminds us, it is a matter of “socialibilities and communities” rather than one body vanquishing another by capture or extractive utilisation. Methodologically, it is to co-experiment to find out “in what order and in what manner will the powers, speeds and slowness be composed” to produce socialibilities that can help those bodies involved to have greater capacities to act.[37] Practically, this may mean those bodies involved have to reassess their privilege and position in relation to a wider network. It is to query their socio-cultural, economic and political biases; then take flight away from their current state.
Altering oneself does not mean being coerced into an undesired state. Rather, it might be the body, through the new forces it absorbs, willing itself to be becoming-something else – the body embraces its constant shifts. It embraces time. For the Transpacific development firm or the settler, the decolonisation process might for it really mean a certain reduction in their capacity to act. But this reduction in capacity to act is only present if that development firm or settler insists that the old capitalist-colonial futuring of time and space as the only “right” way ahead:
Q: What if a development firm or settler transform their body, enter into other relations, develop a whole different episteme? What can their body do to gain greater capacity to act in a new trajectory with others in the Pacific?
To conclude this paper, for now, one might ask, with this lens of ethics as experimenting with compositions to create new relations of care, how can we reassess that racist conflation of the Chinese corporeal body, the architectural body of speculation buildings and the virus body into one single invader body? Is it for the ethnic-Chinese to retreat into their own ghettoes, or stop migration? Is punishing the racists (e.g. doxing them) really effective in the broader fight to counter racialised contested spaces? How does the displaced Indigenous people on both sides of the Pacific factor in this contestation of land between anxious settlers and Chinese home-buyers? How can they transform in relation to each other? How can the combined social bodies of Chinese migrants, Indigenous people and Settlers address the negatively racialised public realm stemming from COVID? To do that, one might ask:
Q: How can these connected bodies engaged in a common project to diagnose their privileged and disadvantaged positions?Q: What are these bodies’ existing constitutive forces, and how to recompose them together?Q: How can Pacific People rewrite themselves at each turn, to reinvent their ethical relationships?Q: Lastly, how can Planners, Architects, designers and activists become interlocutors with them?
If the Transpacific Plan is immanent in the event of smaller plans and other modes of struggles and inventions connecting up, then it feels like this paper needs to become part of this Plan by connecting with other papers, writers, Architects, planners, designers, activists and certainly Pacific Peoples, and to be rewritten in the space and time of this connection. Maybe, this paper is part of this already-ongoing Transpacific Plan.
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NOTES
[1] Christine Kim and Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “The Minor Transpacific: A Roundtable Discussion,” BC Studies, No. 198, (Summer 2018): 13-14. This idea of a “minor Transpacific” can open up to more than simply the idea of being a numerical-statistical “minority” people in a country or city. In terms of a decolonisation project, this may imply ways for Pacific peoples to connect with each other that are not yet captured by the dominant colonial and capitalist structures. As such, “minor transpacific” can be a form of resistance that is constantly shifting its position. However, there are some so-called post-colonial states in the Pacific, especially in the Southeast Asia region, that simply puts the once-colonised people into the colonial masters’ position. Often, these states continue to use the same legislative and educational systems. This is where philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s understanding of the term “minority” can be helpful. They noted, “the opposition between minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which” things are evaluated. And often this standard refers to “average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male speaking a standard language”. More importantly, “majority assumes a state of power and domination.” On the other hand, a minority, while even having a higher or significant population than the population is represented by this “standard” position, may not be in a position of power. However, for Deleuze and Guattari, the struggle is not simply to permanently invert the power relations and position so that the minority’s relativist modes of judgment succeed as the new majority. To do so, we remain within the same power structures. They noted, “the problem is never to acquire the majority, even in order to install a new constant.” Instead, a minority is always becoming something else so as to elude capture by the majoritarian forces. “Minorities as subsystems; and the minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming.” Taking Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the minor to engage with illiberal power structures and relations in some Pacific, one might suggest the decolonisation project is to do away with the impulse for one once-colonised group to dominate and subjugate another group to its control, instead it is to invent new positions constantly with each other. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Bria Massumi, (London & New York: Continuum Books, 2004), 116-117.
[2] Michelle Ghoussoub, “Indigenous woman says she was punched, told to 'go back to Asia' while walking in East Vancouver,” Canadian Broadcast Corporation, May 17, 2020. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/indigenous-woman-says-she-was-punched-told-to-go-back-to-asia-while-walking-in-east-vancouver-1.5573835)
[3] Dewey Sim, “As Covid-19 spreads in Singapore, Chinese immigrants fear a repeat of mainland experience,” South China Morning Post, March 10, 2020. (https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3074276/covid-19-spreads-singapore-chinese-immigrants-fear)
[4] Coco Liu and Nikki Sun, “Shunned in China, Hubei natives live in isolation,” Nikkei Asian Review, February 21, 2020. (https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Shunned-in-China-Hubei-natives-live-in-isolation)
[5] Elizabeth Williamson and Vivian Wang, “‘We Need Help’: Coronavirus Fuels Racism Against Black Americans in China,” The New York Times, June 2, 2020. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politics/african-americans-china-coronavirus.html) Also see: Kun Huang, ““Anti-Blackness” in Chinese Racial-Nationalism: Sex/Gender, Reproduction, and Metaphors of Pathology,” Position Politics, June 29, 2020. (http://positionspolitics.org/kun-huang-anti-blackness-in-chinese-racial-nationalism-sex-gender-reproduction-and-metaphors-of-pathology/#comment-154)
[6] Peter S. Li, “Unneighbourly Houses or Unwelcome Chinese: The Social Construction of Race in the Battle over ‘Monster Homes’ in Vancouver, Canada,” International Journal of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, 1 (1994): 47-66.
[7] Andy Yan, “Ownership Patterns of Single Family Home Sales on Selected West Side Neighbourhoods in the City of Vancouver: A Case Study,” Accessed: January 21, 2017, (http://bingthomarchitects.com/btaworks/ownership-patterns-of-single-family-home-sales-on-selected-west-side-neighborhoods-in-the-city-of-vancouver-a-case-study)
[8] “Median Income of Households in Vancouver,” Statistics Canada, Accessed: August 19, 2020, (https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/fogs-spg/Facts-CMA-Eng.cfm?TOPIC=6&LANG=Eng&GK=CMA&GC=933)
[9] Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 35-39. Iyko Day noted a form of “Romantic Anti-Capitalism” actually exists among settlers. Settlers in replacing the Indigenous population see themselves as the rightful owners and destiny as custodians of the colonised lands. In this imagination, the adverse impacts of capitalist colonialism are distorted, deflected and even erased. The areas of the colony perceived as not touched by capital-colonial expansion are positioned as the “good” parts of the land that must be protected against capitalist-colonial expansion. The foreign labourers brought to help build the actual cities for capitalist colonialist structures to function became associated with the ills of capitalism, while settlers are absolved. Similarly, once the investments from East Asian developers and speculators are secured, the “local” developers and even Planning Departments (which created some of the policies that enabled foreign speculations) are seen as trying to protect the “local” urbanscape from the outsiders. The State would, for example, pass foreign-ownership taxes. A private developer would commit to making a certain percentage of their condominium affordable to locals. The settler State separates itself out of capitalist-colonial expansion to assume the neutral regulators of “good urban progress”.
[10] During COVID, there are rural Indigenous communities who had to put up guard-posts and checkpoints around their territory to ward off settlers who wanted to escape the virus. See Nick Wells, “First Nations in B.C. stay firm on stance to seal off communities from tourists,” Canadian Broadcast Corporation, July 13, 2020, (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/first-nations-bc-close-borders-covid-19-1.5647337)
[11] Chantal Mouffe, “The Affects of Democracy,” Eurozine, November 23, 2018, (https://www.eurozine.com/the-affects-of-democracy) When Mouffe calls for the Left to know how to harness the affects she might be making a reference to how philosopher Baruch Spinoza understands the affects. For Spinoza, the affects can generally be distinguished into active affects and passive affects (or what he calls “passions”). Overall, the former gives a body the force to create and invent its body and relations anew. The latter compels the body to simply become passive, and thus can easily be manipulated. When the body encounters affects in the complex environments it is within, it can encounter both kinds. And if striving to act and create is desired, then distinguishing what produced which kind of affects may be important. The affects we then retain, or more conscientiously work to our advantage will be ones we can clearly understand. He wrote, in Book Five of The Ethics, “the more an affect is known to us, then, the more it is in our power, and the less the mind is acted on by it.” For Spinoza, when an affect is thoroughly understood, it is possible even for a passive affect to become one that imbue the body with greater powers to act. “An affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.” See Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Books, 1996), Book V, Proposition 3; and Correlation in Proposition 3.
[12] Teresia K. Teaiwa “L(o)osing the Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific, Vol 13, Number 2 (Fall 2001): 343.
[13] Baruch Spinoza noted in Chapter 7 of A Political Treatise that if people (the “Multitude” or the collective-yet-individually-distinguished body/bodies of the many) could moderate themselves and not be hasty about judgments (hasty judgments are often made by relying on pre-established conventions and codes), it may be possible for them to create new ways of understanding the situation. In this sense, it may not be necessary for the people’s lives to be constantly directed by the set of codes and behaviours that tell them what is right or wrong. It is possible for the people to become “more fit to govern than to be governed.” This figure of the Multitude is of such importance to Spinoza that at points he considers it possible that the State itself can become part of the Multitude insofar as the State is also composed of many bodies, and these bodies can very likely join with bodies outside the formal state-craft. The form and motion of the Multitude – that of different individuals or bodies joining to create greater power to act and persevere – is seen as the natural right or natural character of humans and societies. In Chapter 3 of A Political Treatise, Spinoza wrote, “It is clear that the right of the supreme authorities is nothing else than simple natural right, limited, indeed, by the power, not of every individual, but of the Multitude. Which is guided, as it were, by one mind – that is, as each individual in the state of Nature, so the body and mind of a dominion have as much right as they have power.” Insofar as the State’s power are conditioned by, and not assumed to be anterior to, the Multitude, a new kind of governmental body can be produced. If one is to further explore this notion of the State as part of, and conditioned by, the Multitude, then it becomes possible to see how a new body of Planning can emerge, Planning being an expression of the State. See Baruch Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. Robert H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 341 & 303.
[14] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, (New York: Penguin press, 2004), 204.
[15] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2009), viii.
[16] Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 42-43. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote that time is that which can open not just the future but space itself into a great immense potentiality. Typically, potentials are framed as possibilities such as it is possible that Student A can possibly be a doctor based on their present marks. Possibilities can more easily be quantified, largely based on matching present observations of present conditions to an archive of formalised experiences. As such, Student A has good marks in biology, chemistry and is personable, and these are all important conditions for the possibility of succeeding as a doctor. Deleuze proposed another kind of potential that he terms “Qualitative Multiplicity”. This is a multiplicity that contains a large number of potentials but each potential need not be distinguished clearly from another. It is a “sense” of innumerable potentials forming what can be considered an “immensity” at the verge of emergence or actualisation. That moment is pregnant with many yet-actualisations. Drawing from Henri Bergson’s notion of time as “duration” rather discrete moments that Bergson developed, Deleuze describes Qualitative Multiplicity as such: “In reality, duration divides up and does so constantly: That is why it is a multiplicity. But it does not divide up without changing in kind, it changes in kind in the process of dividing up: This is why it is a nonnumerical multiplicity, where we can speak of “indivisibles” at each stage of the division. There is other without there being several; number exists only potentially.” The potentiality of those “numbers that only exist in potentiality” is more than the numerical – a multiplicity that is uncountable. For Planners and Architects, how do we engage with a space which potential bears such immense multiplicity?
[17] One can for example ask how can Vancouver and South Asian activists can investigate how Transpacific movements of certain fashion brands relate one city to another. For example, what are the possible relations between the construction/expansion of a major Canadian fashion label’s headquarters in Vancouver and abuse of factory workers in South Asia? Could the boost of sales in Western Canada mean the need for increased production in South Asian fashion factories? As such, the increased production could mean the further sacrifice of health for some of the factory workers in South Asia? How could jamming the development of a fashion label’s Western Canadian Headquarters through protests raise awareness of the label’s human rights abuse across the Pacific? As such, can this jam the flows of capital and products, and alter spaces of oppression? What kinds of new spaces for more liberative movements of bodies and voices might be possible through jamming the flows of capital and products? What can activists do to tie this event (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/oct/14/workers-making-lululemon-leggings-claim-they-are-beaten) to this (https://vancouversun.com/business/commercial-real-estate/rezoning-proposal-for-13-storey-lululemon-mothership-set-for-public-hearing-next-week) and this (https://globalnews.ca/news/6846548/lululemon-bat-fried-rice-t-shirt/)?
[18] Simone Bignall, “Deleuze and Foucault on Desire and Power” in Angelaki 13:1 (2008): 129.
[19] Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK & Malden, M.A.: Polity Press, 2015), ix.
[20] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 118.
[21] Nancy, The Sense of the World, 118.
[22] Nancy, The Sense of the World, 121.
[23] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 347.
[24] Geographer Jamie Peck problematising the creative class and liberal economies noted creative strategies often “commodify the arts and cultural resources, even social tolerance itself, suturing them as putative economic assets to evolving regimes of urban competition.” Progressive urbanisation which includes urban grittiness, sometimes assumed to be representable by warehouse apartment lofts and the freelance entrepreneur-economy, and thus things that have not in the past been seen as “traditional” economic generators are repackaged to maximise their “economic utility.” See Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 29.4 (December 2005): 763-764. Similarly, Sociologist Frédéric Vandenberghe wrote, “Capitalism has progressively integrated the critique of capitalism into its mode of functioning.” Critique becomes marketing. Also see Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Deleuzean Capitalism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 34, No.8 (2008): 879.
[25] “Cedar and Bamboo”, Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia, accessed August 20, 2020, http://www.cchsbc.ca/cedar--bamboo.html
[26] Jean Hillier, “Baroque Complexity,” Complexity and Planning: Systems, Assemblages and Simulations, Eds. Gert de Roo, Jean Hillier & Joris van Wezemael (London & New York: Routledge, 2016), 63.
[27] Jean Hillier, “Plan(e) Speaking: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning” Planning Theory, Vol. 7, No.1 (2008): 34.
[28] Andrej Radman and Marc Boumeester, “The Impredicative City,” Deleuze and the City, Eds. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Jonathan Metzger, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 57-58.
[29] Radman and Boumeester, “The Impredicative City”, 47.
[30] Often, governments in liberal society fix the problem with violence in public areas with more policing. The spatial design, the policies and other factors beyond the individual are not considered as contributing to violence. Violence is often treated as a problem with the individual attacker.
[31] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 100.
[32] Deleuze, Negotiations, p.98.
[33] Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 302. Hardt and Negri wrote we can only produce for ourselves new bodies, subjectivities and spaces when we are thoroughly “autonomous from either private/capitalist or public/State authority.” The entanglement many State agencies such as the Planning Department has with private developers makes it difficult to rely solely on the State to deliver public benefits without also tending to private industry interests to raise property values; and hence the State’s neutrality when it speaks of itself as “people”.
[34] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans, Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books), 126. Deleuze’s framing of ethics can be considered to be drawn from Spinoza’s notion that two or more bodies coming together always possess the ability to increase their powers to act with less coercion, and against adversity. Spinoza wrote, “If two come together and unite their strength, they have jointly more power, and consequently more right over nature than both of them separately, and the more there are that have so joined in alliance, the more right they all collectively will possess.” Also see Spinoza, A Political Treatise, Chapter 11, Paragraph 13.
[35] Daniel Smith, “Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Towards an Immanent Theory of Ethics,” Parrhesia, No. 2, (2007): 67.
[36] Spinoza, The Ethics, Book 2, Lemma 4, Demonstration.
[37] Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 126.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2009..
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin press, 2004.
Hillier, Jean. “Baroque Complexity.” In Complexity and Planning: Systems, Assemblages and Simulations. Edited by Gert de Roo, Jean Hillier and Joris van Wezemael. London & New York: Routledge, 2016.
Hillier, Jean. “Plan(e) Speaking: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning.” Planning Theory, Vol. 7, No.1 (2008): 24-50.
Huang, Kun. “Anti-Blackness in Chinese Racial-Nationalism: Sex/Gender, Reproduction, and Metaphors of Pathology.” Position Politics, June 29, 2020. (http://positionspolitics.org/kun-huang-anti-blackness-in-chinese-racial-nationalism-sex-gender-reproduction-and-metaphors-of-pathology/#comment-154)
Kim, Christine and Helen Hok-Sze Leung. “The Minor Transpacific: A Roundtable Discussion.” BC Studies, No. 198, (Summer 2018): 13-36.
Li, Peter S. Li. “Unneighbourly Houses or Unwelcome Chinese: The Social Construction of Race in the Battle over ‘Monster Homes’ in Vancouver, Canada.” International Journal of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, 1 (1994): 47-66.
Liu, Coco and Nikki Sun. “Shunned in China, Hubei natives live in isolation.” Nikkei Asian Review, February 21, 2020. (https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Shunned-in-China-Hubei-natives-live-in-isolation)
Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK & Malden, M.A.: Polity Press. 2015.
Mouffe, Chantal. “The Affects of Democracy.” Eurozine, November 23, 2018. (https://www.eurozine.com/the-affects-of-democracy)
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 29.4 (December 2005): 740-770.
Radman, Andrej and Marc Boumeester. “The Impredicative City.” In Deleuze and the City. Edited by Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Jonathan Metzger. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Sim, Dewey. “As Covid-19 spreads in Singapore, Chinese immigrants fear a repeat of mainland experience.” South China Morning Post, March 10, 2020. (https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3074276/covid-19-spreads-singapore-chinese-immigrants-fear)
Smith, Daniel. “Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Towards an Immanent Theory of Ethics.” Parrhesia, No. 2, (2007): 67-78.
Spinoza, Baruch. A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise. Translated by Robert H.M. Elwes. New York: Dover Publications, 2004.
Spinoza, Baruch. The Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Books, 1996.
Statistics Canada. “Median Income of Households in Vancouver.” Accessed: August 19, 2020, (https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/fogs-spg/Facts-CMA-Eng.cfm?TOPIC=6&LANG=Eng&GK=CMA&GC=933)
Teaiwa, Teresia K. “L(o)osing the Edge.” The Contemporary Pacific Vol 13, Number 2 (Fall 2001): 343-357.
Vandenberghe, Frédéric. “Deleuzean Capitalism.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 34, No.8 (2008): 877-903.
Wells, Nick. “First Nations in B.C. stay firm on stance to seal off communities from tourists.” Canadian Broadcast Corporation, July 13, 2020. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/first-nations-bc-close-borders-covid-19-1.5647337)
Williamson, Elizabeth and Vivian Wang. “‘We Need Help’: Coronavirus Fuels Racism Against Black Americans in China.” The New York Times, June 2, 2020. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politics/african-americans-china-coronavirus.html)
Yan, Andy. “Ownership Patterns of Single-Family Home Sales on Selected West Side Neighbourhoods in the City of Vancouver: A Case Study.” Accessed: January 21, 2017. (http://bingthomarchitects.com/btaworks/ownership-patterns-of-single-family-home-sales-on-selected-west-side-neighborhoods-in-the-city-of-vancouver-a-case-study)
NOTES
[1] Christine Kim and Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “The Minor Transpacific: A Roundtable Discussion,” BC Studies, No. 198, (Summer 2018): 13-14. This idea of a “minor Transpacific” can open up to more than simply the idea of being a numerical-statistical “minority” people in a country or city. In terms of a decolonisation project, this may imply ways for Pacific peoples to connect with each other that are not yet captured by the dominant colonial and capitalist structures. As such, “minor transpacific” can be a form of resistance that is constantly shifting its position. However, there are some so-called post-colonial states in the Pacific, especially in the Southeast Asia region, that simply puts the once-colonised people into the colonial masters’ position. Often, these states continue to use the same legislative and educational systems. This is where philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s understanding of the term “minority” can be helpful. They noted, “the opposition between minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which” things are evaluated. And often this standard refers to “average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male speaking a standard language”. More importantly, “majority assumes a state of power and domination.” On the other hand, a minority, while even having a higher or significant population than the population is represented by this “standard” position, may not be in a position of power. However, for Deleuze and Guattari, the struggle is not simply to permanently invert the power relations and position so that the minority’s relativist modes of judgment succeed as the new majority. To do so, we remain within the same power structures. They noted, “the problem is never to acquire the majority, even in order to install a new constant.” Instead, a minority is always becoming something else so as to elude capture by the majoritarian forces. “Minorities as subsystems; and the minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming.” Taking Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the minor to engage with illiberal power structures and relations in some Pacific, one might suggest the decolonisation project is to do away with the impulse for one once-colonised group to dominate and subjugate another group to its control, instead it is to invent new positions constantly with each other. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Bria Massumi, (London & New York: Continuum Books, 2004), 116-117.
[2] Michelle Ghoussoub, “Indigenous woman says she was punched, told to 'go back to Asia' while walking in East Vancouver,” Canadian Broadcast Corporation, May 17, 2020. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/indigenous-woman-says-she-was-punched-told-to-go-back-to-asia-while-walking-in-east-vancouver-1.5573835)
[3] Dewey Sim, “As Covid-19 spreads in Singapore, Chinese immigrants fear a repeat of mainland experience,” South China Morning Post, March 10, 2020. (https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3074276/covid-19-spreads-singapore-chinese-immigrants-fear)
[4] Coco Liu and Nikki Sun, “Shunned in China, Hubei natives live in isolation,” Nikkei Asian Review, February 21, 2020. (https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Shunned-in-China-Hubei-natives-live-in-isolation)
[5] Elizabeth Williamson and Vivian Wang, “‘We Need Help’: Coronavirus Fuels Racism Against Black Americans in China,” The New York Times, June 2, 2020. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politics/african-americans-china-coronavirus.html) Also see: Kun Huang, ““Anti-Blackness” in Chinese Racial-Nationalism: Sex/Gender, Reproduction, and Metaphors of Pathology,” Position Politics, June 29, 2020. (http://positionspolitics.org/kun-huang-anti-blackness-in-chinese-racial-nationalism-sex-gender-reproduction-and-metaphors-of-pathology/#comment-154)
[6] Peter S. Li, “Unneighbourly Houses or Unwelcome Chinese: The Social Construction of Race in the Battle over ‘Monster Homes’ in Vancouver, Canada,” International Journal of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, 1 (1994): 47-66.
[7] Andy Yan, “Ownership Patterns of Single Family Home Sales on Selected West Side Neighbourhoods in the City of Vancouver: A Case Study,” Accessed: January 21, 2017, (http://bingthomarchitects.com/btaworks/ownership-patterns-of-single-family-home-sales-on-selected-west-side-neighborhoods-in-the-city-of-vancouver-a-case-study)
[8] “Median Income of Households in Vancouver,” Statistics Canada, Accessed: August 19, 2020, (https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/fogs-spg/Facts-CMA-Eng.cfm?TOPIC=6&LANG=Eng&GK=CMA&GC=933)
[9] Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 35-39. Iyko Day noted a form of “Romantic Anti-Capitalism” actually exists among settlers. Settlers in replacing the Indigenous population see themselves as the rightful owners and destiny as custodians of the colonised lands. In this imagination, the adverse impacts of capitalist colonialism are distorted, deflected and even erased. The areas of the colony perceived as not touched by capital-colonial expansion are positioned as the “good” parts of the land that must be protected against capitalist-colonial expansion. The foreign labourers brought to help build the actual cities for capitalist colonialist structures to function became associated with the ills of capitalism, while settlers are absolved. Similarly, once the investments from East Asian developers and speculators are secured, the “local” developers and even Planning Departments (which created some of the policies that enabled foreign speculations) are seen as trying to protect the “local” urbanscape from the outsiders. The State would, for example, pass foreign-ownership taxes. A private developer would commit to making a certain percentage of their condominium affordable to locals. The settler State separates itself out of capitalist-colonial expansion to assume the neutral regulators of “good urban progress”.
[10] During COVID, there are rural Indigenous communities who had to put up guard-posts and checkpoints around their territory to ward off settlers who wanted to escape the virus. See Nick Wells, “First Nations in B.C. stay firm on stance to seal off communities from tourists,” Canadian Broadcast Corporation, July 13, 2020, (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/first-nations-bc-close-borders-covid-19-1.5647337)
[11] Chantal Mouffe, “The Affects of Democracy,” Eurozine, November 23, 2018, (https://www.eurozine.com/the-affects-of-democracy) When Mouffe calls for the Left to know how to harness the affects she might be making a reference to how philosopher Baruch Spinoza understands the affects. For Spinoza, the affects can generally be distinguished into active affects and passive affects (or what he calls “passions”). Overall, the former gives a body the force to create and invent its body and relations anew. The latter compels the body to simply become passive, and thus can easily be manipulated. When the body encounters affects in the complex environments it is within, it can encounter both kinds. And if striving to act and create is desired, then distinguishing what produced which kind of affects may be important. The affects we then retain, or more conscientiously work to our advantage will be ones we can clearly understand. He wrote, in Book Five of The Ethics, “the more an affect is known to us, then, the more it is in our power, and the less the mind is acted on by it.” For Spinoza, when an affect is thoroughly understood, it is possible even for a passive affect to become one that imbue the body with greater powers to act. “An affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.” See Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Books, 1996), Book V, Proposition 3; and Correlation in Proposition 3.
[12] Teresia K. Teaiwa “L(o)osing the Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific, Vol 13, Number 2 (Fall 2001): 343.
[13] Baruch Spinoza noted in Chapter 7 of A Political Treatise that if people (the “Multitude” or the collective-yet-individually-distinguished body/bodies of the many) could moderate themselves and not be hasty about judgments (hasty judgments are often made by relying on pre-established conventions and codes), it may be possible for them to create new ways of understanding the situation. In this sense, it may not be necessary for the people’s lives to be constantly directed by the set of codes and behaviours that tell them what is right or wrong. It is possible for the people to become “more fit to govern than to be governed.” This figure of the Multitude is of such importance to Spinoza that at points he considers it possible that the State itself can become part of the Multitude insofar as the State is also composed of many bodies, and these bodies can very likely join with bodies outside the formal state-craft. The form and motion of the Multitude – that of different individuals or bodies joining to create greater power to act and persevere – is seen as the natural right or natural character of humans and societies. In Chapter 3 of A Political Treatise, Spinoza wrote, “It is clear that the right of the supreme authorities is nothing else than simple natural right, limited, indeed, by the power, not of every individual, but of the Multitude. Which is guided, as it were, by one mind – that is, as each individual in the state of Nature, so the body and mind of a dominion have as much right as they have power.” Insofar as the State’s power are conditioned by, and not assumed to be anterior to, the Multitude, a new kind of governmental body can be produced. If one is to further explore this notion of the State as part of, and conditioned by, the Multitude, then it becomes possible to see how a new body of Planning can emerge, Planning being an expression of the State. See Baruch Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. Robert H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 341 & 303.
[14] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, (New York: Penguin press, 2004), 204.
[15] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2009), viii.
[16] Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 42-43. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote that time is that which can open not just the future but space itself into a great immense potentiality. Typically, potentials are framed as possibilities such as it is possible that Student A can possibly be a doctor based on their present marks. Possibilities can more easily be quantified, largely based on matching present observations of present conditions to an archive of formalised experiences. As such, Student A has good marks in biology, chemistry and is personable, and these are all important conditions for the possibility of succeeding as a doctor. Deleuze proposed another kind of potential that he terms “Qualitative Multiplicity”. This is a multiplicity that contains a large number of potentials but each potential need not be distinguished clearly from another. It is a “sense” of innumerable potentials forming what can be considered an “immensity” at the verge of emergence or actualisation. That moment is pregnant with many yet-actualisations. Drawing from Henri Bergson’s notion of time as “duration” rather discrete moments that Bergson developed, Deleuze describes Qualitative Multiplicity as such: “In reality, duration divides up and does so constantly: That is why it is a multiplicity. But it does not divide up without changing in kind, it changes in kind in the process of dividing up: This is why it is a nonnumerical multiplicity, where we can speak of “indivisibles” at each stage of the division. There is other without there being several; number exists only potentially.” The potentiality of those “numbers that only exist in potentiality” is more than the numerical – a multiplicity that is uncountable. For Planners and Architects, how do we engage with a space which potential bears such immense multiplicity?
[17] One can for example ask how can Vancouver and South Asian activists can investigate how Transpacific movements of certain fashion brands relate one city to another. For example, what are the possible relations between the construction/expansion of a major Canadian fashion label’s headquarters in Vancouver and abuse of factory workers in South Asia? Could the boost of sales in Western Canada mean the need for increased production in South Asian fashion factories? As such, the increased production could mean the further sacrifice of health for some of the factory workers in South Asia? How could jamming the development of a fashion label’s Western Canadian Headquarters through protests raise awareness of the label’s human rights abuse across the Pacific? As such, can this jam the flows of capital and products, and alter spaces of oppression? What kinds of new spaces for more liberative movements of bodies and voices might be possible through jamming the flows of capital and products? What can activists do to tie this event (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/oct/14/workers-making-lululemon-leggings-claim-they-are-beaten) to this (https://vancouversun.com/business/commercial-real-estate/rezoning-proposal-for-13-storey-lululemon-mothership-set-for-public-hearing-next-week) and this (https://globalnews.ca/news/6846548/lululemon-bat-fried-rice-t-shirt/)?
[18] Simone Bignall, “Deleuze and Foucault on Desire and Power” in Angelaki 13:1 (2008): 129.
[19] Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK & Malden, M.A.: Polity Press, 2015), ix.
[20] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 118.
[21] Nancy, The Sense of the World, 118.
[22] Nancy, The Sense of the World, 121.
[23] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 347.
[24] Geographer Jamie Peck problematising the creative class and liberal economies noted creative strategies often “commodify the arts and cultural resources, even social tolerance itself, suturing them as putative economic assets to evolving regimes of urban competition.” Progressive urbanisation which includes urban grittiness, sometimes assumed to be representable by warehouse apartment lofts and the freelance entrepreneur-economy, and thus things that have not in the past been seen as “traditional” economic generators are repackaged to maximise their “economic utility.” See Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 29.4 (December 2005): 763-764. Similarly, Sociologist Frédéric Vandenberghe wrote, “Capitalism has progressively integrated the critique of capitalism into its mode of functioning.” Critique becomes marketing. Also see Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Deleuzean Capitalism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 34, No.8 (2008): 879.
[25] “Cedar and Bamboo”, Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia, accessed August 20, 2020, http://www.cchsbc.ca/cedar--bamboo.html
[26] Jean Hillier, “Baroque Complexity,” Complexity and Planning: Systems, Assemblages and Simulations, Eds. Gert de Roo, Jean Hillier & Joris van Wezemael (London & New York: Routledge, 2016), 63.
[27] Jean Hillier, “Plan(e) Speaking: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning” Planning Theory, Vol. 7, No.1 (2008): 34.
[28] Andrej Radman and Marc Boumeester, “The Impredicative City,” Deleuze and the City, Eds. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Jonathan Metzger, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 57-58.
[29] Radman and Boumeester, “The Impredicative City”, 47.
[30] Often, governments in liberal society fix the problem with violence in public areas with more policing. The spatial design, the policies and other factors beyond the individual are not considered as contributing to violence. Violence is often treated as a problem with the individual attacker.
[31] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 100.
[32] Deleuze, Negotiations, p.98.
[33] Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 302. Hardt and Negri wrote we can only produce for ourselves new bodies, subjectivities and spaces when we are thoroughly “autonomous from either private/capitalist or public/State authority.” The entanglement many State agencies such as the Planning Department has with private developers makes it difficult to rely solely on the State to deliver public benefits without also tending to private industry interests to raise property values; and hence the State’s neutrality when it speaks of itself as “people”.
[34] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans, Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books), 126. Deleuze’s framing of ethics can be considered to be drawn from Spinoza’s notion that two or more bodies coming together always possess the ability to increase their powers to act with less coercion, and against adversity. Spinoza wrote, “If two come together and unite their strength, they have jointly more power, and consequently more right over nature than both of them separately, and the more there are that have so joined in alliance, the more right they all collectively will possess.” Also see Spinoza, A Political Treatise, Chapter 11, Paragraph 13.
[35] Daniel Smith, “Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Towards an Immanent Theory of Ethics,” Parrhesia, No. 2, (2007): 67.
[36] Spinoza, The Ethics, Book 2, Lemma 4, Demonstration.
[37] Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 126.
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