Queer urban theories

Abstract

Glitch epistemologies for computational cities provide a useful and important extension of the previous work of Elwood and Leszczynski, decentring the usual suspects that are the focus for (digital) urban critique (e.g. ‘smart cities’, ‘platforms’) by drawing on queer theory and illustrating what this might bring to approaching cities. It is this topic that this commentary will address, first by discussing what is meant by such a queer approach to the urban with glitch epistemologies, and second by considering how this approach can pose questions concerning the temporalities of urban change.

Individually and in collaboration, Leszczynski and Elwood have consistently sought to fashion different discursive realms and conditions of visibility for approaching relationships between digital technologies and space, opening alternative empirical starting points for asking geographical questions. Glitch epistemologies for computational cities provides a useful and important extension of their previous work, decentring the usual suspects that are the focus for (digital) urban critique (e.g. ‘smart cities’, ‘platforms’) by drawing on queer theory and illustrating what this might bring to approaching cities. It is this topic that this commentary will address, first by discussing what is meant by such a queer approach to the urban with glitch epistemologies, and second by considering how this approach can pose questions concerning the temporalities of urban change.

Glitch epistemologies as queer urban theory?

The question of whether glitch epistemologies constitute queer urban theory is not one that is directly posed by Leszczynski and Elwood (2022). It is nonetheless certainly provoked by their text, first because they emphasise the influence of queer theory on glitch epistemologies throughout the article (so much so that it receives a place in the keywords) and second because they suggest that this (queer) approach through glitch epistemologies constitutes a different form of knowledge production on cities. Very basically, the queerness of glitch epistemologies hinges around two seemingly simple moves concerning ‘glitches’: noticing them as transgressions and assessing how these transgressions sit in relation to normative orderings. These two moves of the glitch are of course related because that which is transgressive must necessarily in some way breach the usual order of things. The politics of much queer theory has centred on the ‘creative potentialities intrinsic to the relation between norms and their transgression’. However as Leszczynski and Elwood emphasise with ‘glitch/glitch’, such overstepping may in fact be incorporated into, or otherwise reinforce, these normative orders, so that ‘transgressions’ are in fact non-exceptional parts of the way a prevailing set of codes secures and reproduces itself. Transgression when understood from this perspective thus emphasises what Foucault (1978: 90) termed in The History of Sexuality a ‘much more complex’ and ‘above all much more positive’ understanding of power than one that functions primarily through ‘prohibition’.

Glitch epistemologies then invite attention to how power operates through this ambivalence of transgression, in which examining glitches as ‘queer attunements’ reveals the processes of operation of ‘technocapital’ in cities – the dominant ordering – as always already comprising alternative urban futures, thus challenging the veracity of the prevailing terrain of critique. In this way, glitch epistemologies, at least as so far outlined, are queer in the conditions of visibility that they open up for what is knowable as the urban or indeed as urban theory, rather than in any specific empirical focus on LGBTQ + people in cities, although the two are by no means mutually exclusive (c.f Oswin, 2015). The emphasis on the ‘queer duality’ of glitch/glitch thus resonates with certain recent interventions in the perennial debates on what constitutes ‘critical urban theory’. Instead of creating binaries that set different emphases against each other, Oswin and Pratt (2021: 592, emphasis in original) propose that a more measured approach might be for:

‘Critical urban theorists to encounter [extensive, complicated, longstanding bodies of underrepresented scholarship] so that we might understand global and local, economy and culture, structure and agency, totality and fragment, system and difference, major and minor, whole and residue, and thus equip ourselves and our students and collaborators with tools that aid and are rooted in multiple intertwined fights for justice’.

Their suggestion is that social difference is intrinsic to any critical urban theory because ‘capitalism is inherently racist, colonial and heteropatriarchal’ (Oswin and Pratt, 2021, emphasis in original), meaning that separating approaches into binaries of major/minor, and so on, primarily serves to create artifices that obscure this from view.

Thus, the emphasis on transgression in glitch/glitch means that this should not be read as a duality in the sense of a binary that points to opposing ways of approaching the urban. Instead, this is a dualism comprising that which draws attention to the functioning of a system at the same time as denying its totality. This means that by highlighting the non-exceptional errors, glitch emphasises a prevailing system, in this case technocapital in cities, and yet equally points to practices that can elude the logics and operations of that system. Thus following Jazeel (2018: 415), glitch epistemologies enable the idea of a computational city to be held in ‘interdiction’ – meaning ‘acknowledging its actual existence whilst prohibiting entry onto its conceptual terrain’ – so that it is possible ‘to bring into representation [and foster] quite different socio-spatial processes’. If glitch epistemologies are queer urban theory then, they operate in a similar critical vein to other approaches to the urban that complicate or upset ways of knowing cities that prioritise singular structural logics. One example of such a similar approach has been to emphasise the failure and maintenance of urban infrastructures, considering that which is revealed through the breakdown of a particular socio-technical urban order. Another has been to emphasise the highly complex forms of social and material ordering that comprise urban life beyond official city governance, i.e. the ‘informal’, even as such order is imbricated in and frequently produced in conjunction with any formal ‘authorities’. By encouraging the ‘taking notice of out-of-placeness, or that which does not compute’ in order to reveal the ‘non-inevitability’ of structural scripts, glitch epistemologies thus have parallels in these approaches. Perhaps, a distinctive insight of queer theory that is under-explored by Leszczynski and Elwood so far, though, is how glitch epistemologies might address the temporalities of the urban, and specifically computational cities.

Queer temporalities of a glitchy urbanism

Leszczynski and Elwood provide a sense of what doing glitch epistemologies for computational cities might look like through a focus on ‘seemingly abandoned shared e-bikes’ and ‘performatively ‘ugly’ homes’. The e-bikes and ugly homes are described as ‘material spatialities’ and as ‘urban instances’ that can be read through ‘their evidential traces in social and news media’. These are, then, assembled descriptions of concrete – meaning material – situations through which an out-of-placeness may be observed. They thus upset a particular narrative of urban presence and change, demonstrating the non-linear and disjunctive temporalities of the computational city that is ‘out of sync with its own representations of itself’ (Cockayne and Richardson, 2019: 14). As well as considering or emphasising urban elements that might not usually be the object of urban theory, the process of narrative construction assembling these objects also opens up a temporal politics. Considering the e-bikes and ugly homes to be out-of-place is also an allusion to a time when the e-bikes were not seemingly abandoned or when the ugly aesthetic was rather perceived to be beautiful, pointing to a ‘suturing of two times but leaving both times visible as such’ (Freeman, 2010: 69). This foregrounding of temporal disjuncture has been central to what was called the turn to temporality in queer theory (Dinshaw et al., 2007). Amongst other issues, such discussions in queer theory addressed the necessity to retain in the present often uncomfortable experiences of the past, experiences which were important to senses of struggle that propel political movement. Thus the out-of-placeness that becomes a focal point for glitch epistemologies also poses a similar critical temporal question: ‘how can we know for certain that something is securely done with?’ (Freeman, 2010: 62).

This question challenges any linear temporality to the narration of urban processes, a challenge that is particularly important given the frequent tendency in technocapitalist narratives of the future to erase the multiple and intricate histories of everyday life in cities that remain complexly present in the face of apparent technological ‘disruption’ and ‘transformation’. Indeed, sticking with Freeman (2010: 93), movements – including those seen to be progressive or transgressive – must always be understood to comprise aspects of what she terms ‘temporal drag’. In part, this refers to how an identity or identity-in-relation is ‘constituted and haunted by the failed love-projects that precedes it’, meaning that it is necessary ‘to feel the tug backward as a potentially transformative part of movement itself’ (Freeman, 2010). The persistent resurfacing of past forms of political claim-making in cities, of superseded aesthetics and technologies that were the future once, must be addressed as part of the present urban scene, perhaps especially when these pasts seem anachronistic. When particular modes of imagining futures – or mechanisms enrolling the future as a justification for action in the present – no longer seem desirable, these open up the question of why such a disjuncture has occurred, and how this disjuncture constitutes the contemporary moment in more or less apparent ways. The case of the ‘“ugly” homes’ illustrates this point, where to narrate the glitchy effect through which a particular aesthetic is viewed as undesirable, it might be necessary to integrate another time (or place) in which these styles were en vogue.

In critiquing these linear temporalities of urban change then, glitch also affords possibilities to weave alternative narratives of cities through temporalities that are at odds with a standardised sense of time. Instead of the march of technological progress that is rhythmically marked by the regular ticking of the clock, glitch points to social experiences of time that are not dictated by a uniform and external temporal order but instead allow for more unfamiliar and unexpected senses of the temporal. These queer temporalities include different temporal structures for the social use of technology in cities, for example, in the adaption and recirculation of ‘obsolescent’ digital devices that occurs in diverse reuse economies (Corwin, 2018); or in the creation of shared temporal relations for organising labour through software platforms that exceed those kept by the time of the app (Arubayi, 2021). Narration of computational cities underpinned by such temporal logics demonstrates the ongoing interruptions to ‘the conditions of the reproduction of life’ (Berlant, 2016: 393) that challenge straightforward models of change through distinct generations, by denoting a certain state of continuity amidst a shift. A myriad of simultaneous and asynchronous actions make up more or less contiguously the ‘everyday’ of urban life, creating distinct and disjunctive experiences of shared time in computational cities – such as those of convenience or of waiting – that might be variously intimate, isolated or even exclusionary. Instead of a singular time of progress, ‘the temporal’ that emerges through glitchy urbanism can thus be understood as a structure that ‘operates as a form of social power and a type of social difference’ (Sharma, 2017: 132), requiring more complex stories that see forms of persistence, stasis and getting stuck as inherent to urban change.