Forming, Deforming, Un-forming the Political
Rereading Warren Magnusson from the Streets of Mexico City
Julie-Anne Boudreau (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
A political science student's annotations in The Search for Political Space (1996). Photo: Julie-Anne Boudreau.
In order to write these lines, I went back to The Search for Political Space (1996), which I read at the beginning 1997 while finishing writing my M.A. thesis in political science. Apart from the awkward feeling of seeing my annotations from almost thirty years ago, rereading Warren Magnusson was incredibly refreshing (figure 1). Warren was a political theorist who flirted all his life with urbanists. His roots are European classical philosophical texts, not the street. As an urban ethnographer who thinks from the sweat and dirt of everyday life, exchanging with Warren has meant displacing my source of thought. And it was worth it. His reflections on “urbanism as a way of life” and “seeing like a city” came not from ethnography but from a careful deconstruction of classic philosophical texts, which led him to reveal how state-centric conceptions of politics enclose the political.
“From the vantage point of the state (which is the normal vantage point of political analysis),” he writes, “the institutionalization of social movements is simply a matter of regularizing their political form” (Magnusson 1996, 67). The resonance of these lines three decades later, now that I live in Mexico City and work in an Institute of Geography, is astounding. From political philosophy, Warren speaks a geographical language of enclosure and form; he pleads for institutional flexibility in order not to suffocate the political process. Reading this from the streets of Mexico City, where the stuff of political life is all about negotiating in(form)ality, makes much sense. What is most interesting to me is that Warren Magnusson came to this conclusion on the basis of classical European texts.
The irresistible impulse to shape and give form to the political is perhaps the most visible characteristic of today’s urban geopolitical moment. Indeed, authoritarian impulses exhibited by Donald Trump, Javier Milei and the likes can be read as reactions to everything that foregoes the need for coherence, all of what resists being formed. And where does this unformed politics take place? On the streets, in what AbdouMaliq Simone (2022) calls the surround. “The question is whether we can constitute our activities without reifying them;” writes Magnusson, “give them form and presence while ensuring that they don’t become things that dominate our lives; open possibilities without foreclosing our means to reconstitute our activities in accordance with our changing needs and desires” (1996, 101). Warren always understood the dangers of the authoritarian impulse inherent to state-centric politics. This is crystal clear today with the growth of authoritarian regimes; it was not so obvious from the standpoint of comfortable liberal democratic regimes thirty years ago. This is why he dedicated all his writing to “seeing like a city.” The unformed causes discomfort. And as we can witness today, authoritarian impulses to form and shape street politics are generally also anti-urban.
Three decades ago, as a young political science student, I met Warren Magnusson during a summer school at York University in Toronto. His thought had a long-lasting influence on my work, which culminated in an intense series of exchanges with him as I was finalizing my Global Urban Politics book (Boudreau, 2017). Warren taught me many things: that one can be a political scientist and an urbanist. But perhaps more interestingly, he taught me how to combine the philosophical text and the street, how to conjugate the feeling and the form of politics.
References
Boudreau, Julie-Anne. 2017. Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Magnusson, Warren 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2022. The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture. Duke University Press.
Julie-Anne Boudreau is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Geography at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).