For weeks now, hundreds of thousands of protesters across France have held the streets, in waves of opposition to Emmanuel Macron’s proposed pension reforms. These reforms, which threaten to raise the age of retirement from 62 to 64, are but one salvo in a larger strategy of ruling class war, where state-induced supply shock calls workers back to ever worsening terms of indefinite employment. Macron’s attempts to smuggle these measures past parliament have instigated a multi-level political crisis of unknowable duration; such that today in France, writes Frédéric Lordon, “the autocrat is separated from the people only by a police line.”
This rapidly fraying seam is visible in the melee at Place de la Concorde; down city corridors narrowed by heaps of uncollected trash; on the barricaded runways of Charles de Gaulle airport; and throughout Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse. A militant unrest spreads apace, and a map of March 28 protests in Le Monde, helpfully colour-coding sources by class interest and estate, looks like a sickly organism underneath a microscope.
These events are impressive by their own account; but the ease and frequency of French upheaval seems to corroborate some more and less satisfactory descriptions of a country shot through with remnants of past insurrections, each unfinished and thus open to revision in the present. In her work on the Paris Commune as a principally spatial event, Kristin Ross depicts France as a key site in a coordinated attempt by the bourgeoisie “to make space geographic,” imposing the subdivisory logics of Baron Haussmann’s Paris on an ever-expanding scale. With this in mind, today’s sequence seems to continue a centuries-long experiment in popular, even improvisatory, civics, where collective movements remap the terrain on which they transpire—even as a countertendency to a colonizing surfeit of design.
This week, watching the protests in France, I thought to share my notes for a 2016 symposium on “The Uses of Utopia” at Clare College, Cambridge, which coincided with the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. This presentation references articles and ideas that appeared in the pages of Utopie, a French journal of radical urbanism and theory, between 1967 and 1978, in consideration of its contribution to two themes, negativity and totality, as they bear on the project of writing and mapping, designing and living, utopia in the present.
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