Interview with Thanos Zartaloudis by Davi Weber

Davi Weber AA MA HCT Spring 2015

Interview with Thanos Zartaloudis: On Urban Protocols

At the intersection of law and architecture, the Urban Protocols propose micro-­‐ legislative strategies of development for abandoned properties in Athens. In cooperation with a municipal authority and through the internet interface, a system of rules would be “play-­‐tested” in the archipelago of temporary community programming. Challenging the relationship between user and citizen, the web and state, the experiment introduces a new means of legislation and reassesses the notion of occupancy throughout the city.

DW: In your project Urban Protocols with architect Aristede Antonas, you established Para-topias, or coexistent, adjacent spaces to legal occupancies – such as abandoned lots – in which you wrote the rights for not-for-profit, temporary use. Can you please clarify the difference between these proposed spaces and those for squatters or those acquired through eminent domain?

TZ: Paratopias are derived from the emphasis on the prefix —para, meaning beside or adjacent which aims to suggest the continuous co—existence of potentiality in actuality. And this as the ontological ease of the spatial tactic proposed here. It is a philosophical import but as a means without an end, as Agamben says. Austere actuality has always aimed to exhaust the potentiality of a life to the actualization of this or that, instead. As opposed to a utopia and a dystopia, too, a paratopia thinks lived possibility or potentiality as neither an eschatological end to come (or, as is usual, to be infinitely deferred), nor as an abandonment to actuality, to “a so be it”. There is a similarity in some sense to an occupation by squatters and other examples of commoning past and present, at least in relation to some of the protocols that we have drafted and others to come. The commonality is centered to the extent that the aim is not the claim, in some at least instances, to individual or common exclusive ownership. I think we aim to reflect and learn from such practices.

DW: When constructing the Para-topia, you maintain a laissez-faire, nonprogrammed, non-predisposed, indeterminate, and abstract space, not unlike Cedric Price’s Fun Palace that you mentioned. How flexible are the spaces and to what degree is flexibility necessary to the project; what is the role of serendipity and how might it operate within a series of protocols? I am also thinking perhaps of John Cage’s music in which he established parameters but left the result to chance.

TZ: The relation or similarity to Price and the Fun Palace is accurate to my mind at least. He has been a major inspiration to my learning about architecture and a key figure in the book I am writing titled The Use of Things, in fact. If he was confronted with the question, at least in one sense, of how to “program” a

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“non—program” then I think we share that confrontation. The possibilities as well as the limitations are shared. For me the question is then also — do we have another option but to rethink our confrontation with a limit each time?

And to affirm it? To work with and against it? How can we avoid the impasse of a utopian revolutionary call and equally the reformism facade? How to maintain for potentiality as not exhausted in the actuality of this or that program or site?

Thus flexibility and co—existence of multiple uses is of great concern to us.

But the interesting and challenging matter at the same time remains in each protocol —in their experimental and subtle differences— of how to enable such flexibility and openness within the limitations in which we find ourselves?

One of these limitations is, in the case of Athens and beyond, the predominance of the “sacredness” of private ownership in its legal, cultural and economic senses. Perhaps we see in the current sacralisation of a permanent crisis an opportunity or a possibility of some owners reconsidering their use and ownership in one sense at least of the sites in question, even if out of, initially, mere necessity or desperation. The devaluation of one's property can offer a moment of reconsideration. Even if momentary or temporary this may be enhanced if alternative uses and cognitions become presented and available. An exchange thus could take place, even, security, maintenance, coverage of some costs could be convincing enough for some owners for the semi—public (or in some cases public) reuse of otherwise limited and dormant sites. Indeed the limitations are present but how we confront them is not limited by necessity.

DW: And the openness…

TZ: I think we agree — it is a question for us. We do aim, I believe, at a subtle but crucial variation of the culture of participation (in itself co—opted very often by the market) towards a commoning of uses that keeps limitations to the bare minimum. The protocol is a potentiality, not a command. Yet it is one that aims to be cognisant of how to confront inevitable questions as to how to enable such uses without becoming another exclusionary hub. Not everything can be left to chance, for a chance to take place each time it has to take its place, its site, or parasite as I call it, is to be made. And making things is always painful at least in one sense. There is no thinking or acting without a pain in the eye. The eye a poet once said is a pain in the eye. Yet what if the seeming subtle modification of this or that site and its uses leads also to an encounter with what I consider necessary —self—abdication, a re—cognition?

DW: As Giorgio Agamben has explained, the Franciscans desired to imitate the natural life of animal poverty. While the Franciscans desired to abstain from dominium, the legal term you used in referring to property law, what measures must be taken to ensure the land is returned to its initial state? I wonder what the environmental impact of such a proposition would be on the protocol sites? Or, in other words, if dominium contained the possible acts of

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‘use’, ‘product’, and ‘disposal’, what limitations on use have been established so as to avoid environmental degradation?

TZ: What the Franciscans called apostolic poverty is of interest here as well as the question of the threshold between animal and human life. For them what was at stake, crucially, at least at first, was the abdication of any relation to law as such as Agamben shows so well. And this we know required, in the first place, the abdication of one's will as such. The will it should be noted is a key problem for Agamben in how the self, as well as community, is produced.

Long before the Franciscans, incidentally, the notion of use was captured within the Roman legal imagination at a part of dominium. Yet the Franciscans were not referring to this notion of use, which in any case remains a legal definition of using. In the protocols, for my part, I have kept this in mind, whereby common uses point to a way of life and not a new right. As to your last question here I think I can say that environmental protection has been in our mind from the start in the very important sense that a common use, by definition, would be a commoning of the environment as such. Not just a tactic that fulfils this or that desire but more so a re—cognition as such. We need metamorphoses, not mere trans—formations of the same. But the tactic is an important starting point, it abides to the logic, for me, of a becoming if you like, an 'and' that is ever followed by another 'and' as Deleuze and Guattari once said. And architectural thought can play its part, as long as it thinks of its paratopic existence as such.

DW: Could not-for-profit use still uphold value? For instance, the installation of shading support structures and solar cells in one of your projects claims distance from appropriation, but the addition of such a structure would add value to the properties that benefit. Similarly, would living in proximity to a venue increase property value nearby? There have been examples of artist communities attracting attention to certain land, and then investors purchased the land and displaced these people.

TZ: Attempting a re—cognition of a commoning within the logic and form of the market of our exchange value system will always be confronted with the situation you describe. In a sense the point is to enable co—existent possibilities that can however challenge themselves as well as others. It is an experiment and it is a means, not an end. Sure it cannot challenge the value system as a whole, or even parts of it directly. The market of values after all is not just a mere financial or economic system, it is a part to a whole way of life that machinates the human as such. Indeed as you suggest co—optation, gentrification and the like have or should have taught us well by now, to speak only of recent examples, that the economy of values is ever based of devaluations and revaluations and it has proven ever so capable of capturing whatever is other to it. Or indeed it can itself lead the way to otherization.

Lessons can be learned but we cannot simply bemoan this or that sell out or betrayal of principle. Experimentation need not cease while caution takes also

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its place. There is an enemy but it can no longer be “resisted” anywhere else but in ourselves in our shared destitution, whether we cognise this or not.

There is also another aspect to this. In Agamben's incisive account of the Franciscan failure, they are ultimately criticized for accepting to engage with the legal arguments that they were attacked by, and indeed to go as far as to complete the irony of their anti—juridical claim in claiming it juridically!

Perhaps this is the oldest example of the contradiction of the anti—. Perhaps the —anti has been the other polarity of whatever is posed as its opposite from the start? Heraclitus praised the struggle of opposites or differences but he did not accept some kind of unitary oneness that is actualized, static, and archethetic (commanding). To the One—All he posits the One—Nothing. The Franciscan failure can be a cautionary tale but also an inspiration. Agamben as I understand his view on this would consider perhaps problematic our attempt to express our anti—proprierary or anti—exclusionary logics in the language and practice of protocols. A similar contradiction to that of the Friars. But for me at the moment at least the protocol or other legal means can be thought further against their monopolisation by the legal system. For me the poiesis of institutions, their paratopia, remains of interest. As long as we hold firm that we still do not know what... “law” can do! Was not nomos conceived once as an apportionment without shares?

Dr. Thanos Zartaloudis is a lawyer, writer, and academic who wrote his doctorate in philosophy on the notion of the human in the work of Martin Heidegger. Zartaloudis is a lecturer at the University of Kent Law School and the Architectural Association where he most recently taught Commanding Architecture: Between Life and Government. He was a founding member and presently on the board of Migration Law Network (UK), and the board of Centre for Research in Politico-­‐Legal Theology. Additionally, he serves as co-­‐editor (with Anton Schütz) of the book series Encounters in Law and Philosophy, published by Edinburgh University Press.

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