# Recovering Sociology from the Trash Heap: Of Waste Politics and the Spatialization of Local Representation in Lagos

Côme Salvaire

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Côme Salvaire. Recovering Sociology from the Trash Heap: Of Waste Politics and the Spatialization of Local Representation in Lagos. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2019, pp. en ligne. 10.1111/1468-2427.12727. hal-03399577

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# RECOVERING SOCIOLOGY FROM THE TRASH HEAP:
Of Waste Politics and the Spatialization of Local
Representation in Lagos

Côme Salvaire

**Author version of original manuscript: Salvaire (C.), « Recovering Sociology from the Trash Heap: Of Waste Politics and the Spatialization of Local Representation in Lagos », *International Journal of Urban and Regional Research*, 43 (2), 2019.**

## Abstract

This article excavates the debate that unfolded during the 1980s between Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu to shed light on the theoretical divide that still cuts across the field of urban studies today. Looking at contemporary Rancièrian scholarship through a Bourdieusian lens, it points to their main theoretical shortcomings and reasserts the value of relational, field-based and empirically grounded approaches to urban politics. At the same time, this article engages seriously Rancière's critique of Bourdieu's failure to account for space in order to question the territoriality inherent to the notion of field. We put this theoretical discussion to the test of Lagos's garbage. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Lagos from 2015 to 2016, we propose analyzing the process of spatialization of the field of local representation by looking at the ways solid waste—here conceived as a political opportunity—is mobilized by different actors. We argue that the deployment of a waste infrastructure in Lagos is congruent with a relative disinvestment in practices of territorial control that reshapes the structure of local representation, reconfiguring the 'stage' on which politics is played out in the Nigerian metropolis.

## Introduction

The field of urban studies is currently witnessing the vigorous contestation of social sciences—sociology in particular—in their capacity to account for urban politics. An important debate has been unfolding regarding the ways urban scholars can and should account for political contestation in cities (Beveridge and Koch, 2017a; 2017b; Dikeç, 2017; Swyngedouw, 2017), rendering more visible an important divide within the field between theorists and sociologists. The polemical and often virulent discussion has exhibited a manifest difficulty for each side to merely capture the critiques put forth by the other side and open up possible windows of conversation. Yet, in fact, the current debate might not be as novel as it seems: it has unfolded in perhaps clearer terms some three decades ago. This article re-explores the contemporary controversy in light of the debate that took place during the 1980s on the French intellectual scene between Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu. My theoretical aim is in no way to reach an illusory—and certainly undesirable—point of consensus, but rather to delineate some important points of contention between theorists and sociologists on the ways we should conceive and study ‘politics’ (the use of this term being central to the debate) in general, and in its urban, spatial dimension in particular. This article does not limit itself to a theoretical inventory, but rather confronts this controversy using an
empirical case. By looking at solid waste politics in Lagos at the level of neighborhood-level representation, I seek, through the navigation of the controversy, to conceptualize and analyze the transformations of the ‘stage’ on which politics is played out in the Nigerian metropolis.

By observing contemporary Rancièrian scholarship through a Bourdieusian lens, I point to its main theoretical shortcomings and reassert the value of relational, field-based and empirically grounded approaches to urban politics. While Rancièrian scholarship has been attempting to treat urban ‘politics’ by means of an ontological

opposition between an exhaustively ordered ‘place’ and a ‘space’ of equality and politics, I argue that Lagos’s political stage can only be conceived in a fragmentary and relational manner if we are to study it empirically. Yet, I take seriously Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu’s failure to account for space to question the territoriality inherent to the notion of field. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Lagos from 2015 to 2016, I propose analyzing the process of *spatialization* of the field of local representation by looking at the ways solid waste—here conceived as a political opportunity—is mobilized by different actors.

Pointing to the sidelining of practices of territorial control that has accompanied the formation of Lagos’s waste infrastructure since 2005, I argue that the current transformations of the field of local representation cannot be accounted for within a strictly territorial logic. *Spatialization* here designates a process through which the field under study gradually loses its territorial anchorage and is reconfigured around the logistical organization of circulations (in this case, of solid waste) that cut across its territorial dimension. The process is necessarily partial and disjointed in that, while triggered by the development of what Michael Mann has termed ‘infrastructural power’ (1984) from the political center, it is operationalized at a micro level by the actors of the field of local representation, who engage with more or less coordination in the *recoding* of territory into space. Moreover, the process of spatialization is nonlinear because it concurrently enables the maintenance of some segments of the field on a territorial dimension, where the ‘despotic power’ (ibid.) of the local state over the field of local representation is further reinforced.<fnref n="1" />

At a micro level, in the district of Mushin, I explore in detail how the deployment of institutional waste channels throughout the city has triggered the spatialization of the field of representation. At a *meso* level, I link the distortion of the field of local representation to the displacement of the local nobility towards the political center, its selective disinvestment in practices of territorial control and center-periphery mediation for new modes of spatial control tied to the local state’s policy production. Finally, I analyze the impact of the spatialization of the field of local representation on the acceleration of state-led destructions in Lagos’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. I show that the transformation of local representation translates into brutal de-territorialization for those communities that lack the resources to develop spatial modes of representation.

<footnote n="1">¹ Michael Mann (1984; 1986) speaks of a dialectic between infrastructural and despotic power. As a state increases its capacity to govern logistically through civil society, it tends to increase its despotic capacities as well. While Mann's conceptualization is potentially very useful to analyze the case of Lagos [see Lucas (1998) for an application to Nigeria], it remains too strictly bounded to the nation state (Ziblatt, 2008) and does not give us enough theoretical leverage to adequately question the transformation of political territorialities in Lagos.</footnote>
On an empirical basis, this article rejects attempts at thinking space (and politics) at once, and insists on the complex, disjointed, reversible and incomplete character of processes of recoding of territory into space. It further emphasizes the need to renew with the relational tradition and refrain from engaging in logics of identification of urban politics. Out of Lagos’s waste politics, I contest sociology’s post-political character: an emancipatory politics of territory ought not to run against the empirical consideration of the stage on which oppression and contestation are played out.

## The territories of the sociologist and the space of the philosopher

We can speculate that the return of the Rancière/Bourdieu debate in today’s context is not a complete accident. Beyond the influence taken by the work of Rancière in Anglo-Saxon universities and the recent English re-editions of some of his works, we can point to similarities in the position of academics faced with urban uprisings then and today. Rancière’s critique of the posture of the savant as he confronts politics in the form of uprisings emerged in May 1968 as he met with disappointment Althusser’s incapacity at opening himself to the event unrolling before his eyes, and deplored his enclosure in a position of mastery (Rancière, [1981] 2012a). Rancière ([1983] 2004) soon discerned a continuity between Althusser and Bourdieu in their relations to noninstitutionalized politics, their incapacity to account for the genuine and momentous character of the political event. The accusation found resonance in France following the arrival to power of the Left in 1981—and especially after the austerity turn of 1983—in which many saw the pacification of the May 1968 legacy amid institutional politics, notably through the design of social and cultural policies (Rancière, [1985] 1991). To Rancière, sociology was complicit in this political neutralization and had sided with the dominant order. Much of his thought has crystalized during this period.

Rancière’s work thus today finds a great echo among urban scholars anxious to fully account for the eruptive character of the recent wave of urban uprisings—from Istanbul to Hong Kong, Cairo to São Paulo—and excavate their political extraordinariness (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017). The Rancière/Bourdieu debate appears to be back at full tension, and bringing it into the present may help us make better sense of the epistemological cleavage cutting across the field of urban studies today. My ambition is not to give an exhaustive account of the debate, and even less so to proceed to a sort of official recounting. Nor do I intend to portray Bourdieu as a father figure from which ‘sociology’ in general could be discussed: such distortion is the product of the debate itself. Before confronting the debate using an empirical case, I seek to rearticulate it in spatial terms to highlight the possibilities and limitations offered by each camp in making sense of urban politics today.

My account begins with Louis Althusser’s central notion of ideological state apparatus ([1971] 2014). Both Rancière and Bourdieu have sought to break with Althusser’s elaboration on the Marxist notion of ideology as well as with the ‘language’ of the apparatus. Only, they have realized this rupture in very different ways, and it is around Althusser that we can make better sense of the points of contention. While Bourdieu (1986) denunciated the Althusserian ‘ritual affirmation of the relative autonomy of “ideologies”’ and aimed at reinscribing them within different specialized and relatively autonomous social domains, Rancière’s ([1981] 2012a) critique was centered on the enclosure of the enterprise of denunciation of domination. Both criticized the absolute functionalism found at the core of the notion of apparatus and its portraying of the state as a ‘machine’, whose predefined intentions fall outside of time and politics (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 94–114; Rancière,
[1995] 1999: 29). While the sociologist criticized Althusser's ordering of institutions and social groups in correspondence with established ends (Bourdieu, 1982: 43), the philosopher broke with the notion of disciplining of bodies attached to the apparatus and moved towards an understanding of 'distribution of places and roles' devoid of the presupposed opposition between state and society (Rancière, [1995] 1999: 29). Hence, while both scholars agreed on disagreeing with Althusser, subtle differences in their answers to the notion of ideological state apparatus would turn into an important chasm.

Rancière’s ([1974] 2011: 73) critique of Althusser emerged in the post-May 1968 context as a rejection of the project of constitution of a revolutionary knowledge without which the system of capitalist oppression could not be overthrown, what he termed a ‘class struggle in theory’. As far as ‘the dominated were maintained in their place by ignorance of the laws of domination’—the ideologies perpetuated by the state apparatus—only the savant could lead them outside of oppression (Rancière, [1981] 2012a: 13). In *Proletarian Nights*, Rancière ([1981] 2012a) accused Marxism of having constructed a proletarian reality that fits admirably with the logic of capital: workers had been reduced to factory life and struggle. In turn, the aspects of their lives that did not fit the model of domination had been left aside. The congruence with the logic of capital and its attempt to limit the life possibilities of workers to the strict needs of capitalist production through the extreme scrutinizing of every aspect of their daily budgets and free time appeared striking: Marxism and capitalism were working hand in hand for the perpetuation of the cycle of domination. Rancière’s project was thus to venture out of the Marxist representation of proletarian life to account—through archival research—for what escaped the logic of domination. He excavated personal accounts, works of fiction, poetry, politics and philosophy that discredited the role of the savant in explaining ‘the secrets of domination’ to the dominated ([1981] 2012a: 15). Workers did not need philosophers and scientists to shed light onto their condition. Their problem lay elsewhere; in claiming back the time and space of self-realization that capitalist domination had taken from them. It was to undermine the channeling of their energies towards the sole purpose of industrial production. In endorsing the role of denunciators, the savants were only confirming an order in which only they could be granted ‘the privilege of the creative imagination and the explanatory word’ (ibid.: 17).

Beyond the theoretical critique, the enterprise in which Rancière engaged did not appear revolutionary to the sociologist. It was notably reminiscent of the work of Erving Goffman (1961) around the concept of ‘underlife’. To Rancière, nonetheless, Bourdieu appeared as Althusser’s heir, and with him the entire social sciences. With the collective *Révoltes Logiques*, he addressed his work more specifically. Through a genealogy of Bourdieu’s sociology, he argued that it had brought together the ‘Marxist denunciation of ideologies on behalf of the proletariat’ and the ‘Weberian skepticism for the judgments of value of Marxist science’ (1984: 45, my translation). In *The inheritors and Reproduction* (Bourdieu and Passeron, [1964] 1979; [1970] 1990), not only had Bourdieu adopted the Althusserian posture of denunciator of the domination that remains invisible to the dominated, but he had coupled it with Max Weber’s postNietzschean pessimism. Further, while renouncing the revolutionary project inherent to Marxism, Bourdieu expanded its economicism to every sphere of social life, into that of symbolic practices. In what he saw as a break with Durkheimian ethics, Bourdieu had—to Rancière—‘produced a strange figure that defines the New Sociology as a militant science: the radical critique of a radically immutable situation’ (1984: 49, my translation). With Bourdieu, sociology had become:

> the disenchanted banality of a bourgeois world that cries out, at every street
corner, the great secret everyone ignores: class struggle has become an eternal truth possessing the double credit of no longer killing anyone, but also of lending to science the eternal denunciation of its eternal forgetting (Rancière, [1983] 2004: 179).

The theory of symbolic violence developed by Bourdieu and Passeron was to Rancière misplacing the violence maintaining the social order. They were further exploiting legitimate violence to construct their own position as scientists, the only ones who could unveil the workings of the structure to its blinded agents (a critique later echoed by feminists). With *The ignorant schoolmaster*, Rancière ([1985] 1991) tackled directly their theorization of internalized, subconscious domination. In their analysis of social reproduction through education, they were perpetuating the ‘temporal and spatial distance [that] separates the pedagogue from the student’ (Ross, [1985] 1991: xix). The pedagogue, as the holder of knowledge, educates the student about her own condition while constantly recreating the distance that separates her from her own realization. For Rancière, this distance was similar to that separating the “‘explicator of the social” from the worker’. The sociologist is engaged in a process of ‘erecting and maintaining the distance separating a future reconciliation from a present inequality’ (ibid.).

It is in this sense that sociology appeared to Rancière ([1990] 2007) as taking us towards the ‘end of politics’. The concept of ‘post-politics’ has been heavily mobilized in recent years and often confused—both by writers and readers—with de-politicization. As Erik Swyngedouw (2017: 56) reminds us, ‘post-politicization’ does not entail the withering away of politics. Rather, it designates its pacification within the realm of the ‘social’. For Rancière ([1995] 1999): 91):

in the modern era, the social has been precisely the place where politics has been played out, the very name it has taken on, wherever it has not simply been identified with the science of government and with the means of taking it over.

Having scavenged its scientificity from an agonizing politics, sociology has worked towards its final resolution in the name of social equality, mirroring the coming reconciliation while perpetuating the distribution of places and role. Sociology has worked hand in hand with the science of government to ‘reduce [politics] to its function as a pacifying procedure between individuals and collectivity by relieving it of the weight and symbols of political division’ (Rancière, [1990] 2007: 11). Such is to Rancière the ‘sociological utopia’, which he paradoxically pictures as the new dominant political philosophy: ‘the final form taken by the strained relationship between philosophy and politics and by the philosophical project of achieving politics by doing away with it’ ([1995] 1999: 92).

For Rancière ([1990] 2007: 20), moving past the post-political world demands that we reclaim politics from the social. Equality ought not to be left to the sociological utopia, whose pursuit of the ‘emancipation of the social’, the prospect of equality, only serves the perpetuation of domination. Equality ought to be conceived as the pregiven, the starting point of politics rather than the utopia that constantly pushes the political away (Rancière, [1985] 1991). The principle of equality of intelligences essentially stands for the neutralization of notions of internalized domination and legitimate violence. The dominated do not need their oppression explained to them: domination and violence lie not in the territories of the social but in the ordering of the sensible. The problem of Rancière’s factory workers-poets is not that of being blind to the structure of domination they are taken into, but rather of contesting the specific distribution of time and space they are confined to, the ‘rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of space where these
occupations are distributed' ([1995] 1999: 29). Their politics lies in the contestation of a given sharing/partition [*partage*] of the sensible that defines a police regime. The social—which social scientists have come to mistake for politics—in fact belongs to the realm of ordering: the police. Reclaiming politics from the post-political city thus demands that we pay attention to the 'immanent manifestations of politicizing' (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017), the surplus—instituted by those who have no *place* in the spatial ordering of the police—that episodically breaks out in the interstices of urban space and disturbs its partition (Rancière, [1995] 1999: 11).

Such has been Rancière's unintended central contribution to urban theory: thinking politics at the verge of the ordering of space (and time) and conceiving domination in relation to the distribution of the sensible. He opened a window onto urban politics through which space could be brought back to the center of our questioning, not solely as the vector of 'politics' but also as the mode of its pacification: 'space ... is as much about inauguration of politics as it is of its containment, as much ruptural as governmental' (Dikeç, 2015: 89). It should thus not come as a surprise that Rancière's conceptualization of the sensible be seized and elaborated upon by urban theorists and geographers. It appears as a radical alternative to the work of urban sociologists and their focus on 'the social', and opens the way for their contestation. The critique of urban sociology we have witnessed in the past years has followed Rancière's path in his critique of Bourdieu. Erik Swyngedouw's (2009; 2011; 2017) virulent attack on urban sociology has pointed to the post-politicization at play in the work of sociologists (very broadly taken). He has called for a break with 'the implicit assumption of [the] sociological edifice': that 'the "political" is instituted by the social' (2009: 603). His 'refusal to accept the social as the foundation of the political' (ibid.: 604) is to translate into the repositioning of the 'properly political' at the heart of urban scholarship. Swyngedouw has more specifically oriented his critique towards the 'socio-environmental', which appears as the new face of the social in the appeasement of the political. Within a global consensus on the perils of environmental change, the socio-environmental has become the new vector of formation of consensus, the new 'middle term' (Rancière, [1990] 2007: 19) foreclosing the emergence of dissensus. The environmental post-politics thesis has been largely echoed in the literature (see notably Imrie, 2013; Kenis, 2016), often prompting a confusion between post-politics as inspired by Rancière's work and James Ferguson's (1994) classic study of the antipolitics machine.

Refusing to engage in a post-political 'diagnosis' and drawing on a very careful reading of Rancière, Mustafa Dikeç has further questioned the capacity of urban sociology to account for the disruption of the spatial order that politics constitute. While refraining from adopting Swyngedouw's (2017: 51) prescriptive conceptualization of politics, he implies that because the interest of social scientists lies in the uncovering of modalities of spatial, cultural or governmental orderings, they are not able to account for politics as the 'excess that keeps breaking out'. Hence, he stresses the need to 'open new ways of thinking about this excess in political terms, rather than as matters of criminology, policing or government' (ibid.: 53). Dikeç's argument has been more consensual, albeit in no way watering down the critique of urban sociology's capacity to 'think' politics. Shall we then all stay in our assigned places? Should social scientists restrict themselves to the study of the vulgarities of urban social structures and institutional arrangements, and leave politics to those really able to account for it?

Bourdieu's response to the radical critique elaborated by Rancière has been partial and rarely frontal. Its incompleteness testifies to the difficulty sociologists have encountered in countering the criticisms voiced by philosophers engaged in the conceptualization of 'the
political' as such. Faced with theorists committed to thinking 'politics' at once, the sociologist and her necessary partial conceptualization of political phenomena can be tempted to abandon the relationality of the sociological concept to a given empirical reality for an engagement with the concept in itself. Faced with the lure of 'politics', it is precisely this path that Bourdieu has sought to avoid. To make sense of the necessary fragmentary answer he provided, we must here again go back to the Althusserian concept of ideological state apparatus (Althusser, 1971: 2014). Despite the unambiguous continuity Rancière pictured between them, Bourdieu proceeded to a clear break with Althusserian thought.

‘Advanced societies, writes Loïc Wacquant, are not a unified cosmos’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 52). Provide the sociologist with grand theoretical concepts and you will find her incapable. Impotent, before a cosmos from which she can delineate no parts nor relations. Bourdieu’s break with the apparatus—and with philosophy—took the form of the field. Complex societies, to Bourdieu, rather than being *commanded* by the apparatus, ‘are made up of a set of intersecting but increasingly self-regulating fields, each with its dominant and its dominated’ (*ibid*.). Instead of a withdrawing from the apparatus, of working around it in search of politics, Bourdieu chooses to break it apart—except, not into parts. While one can identify different components of the apparatus (‘the school system, the state, the church, political parties, unions’; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 102)—which, in Althusser’s functionalist perspective, cannot in themselves put into question the logic of the entire machinery but are rather conceived as its wheels—moving from one field to another ‘entails a genuine qualitative leap’ (*ibid*.: 104). Each field or subfield disposes of a relative autonomy towards the rest of society; it cannot be conceived as a ‘part’ of a broader system: each has a life of its own, albeit not isolated from the rest of society. In the words of Wacquant, ‘in the manner of a prism, it refracts external forces according to its internal structure’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 17). Each field, with its dynamic boundaries, develops its own regulative principles and regularities, values specific kinds of resources tied to the achievement of accepted objectives. While in the apparatus the agent can easily be dismissed as part of the organ, a field only exists as far as it is carried by agents and institutions willing to play by its rules and invest their energies and resources (Bourdieu, 1982: 46–7). A field cannot be studied as such, like the part of a system, but only through the relations of its agents. For the field is above all field of struggle, it is contested from within and outside: ‘[its] hierarchy is continually contested, and the very principles that undergird the structure of the field can be challenged or revoked’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 52). In sum, as put by Bourdieu, there is an ‘essential difference’ separating the field and the apparatus: ‘struggles, and thus historicity!’ (*ibid*.: 102).

Bourdieu’s rupture with the apparatus further implies a break with the superstructure and the related notion of ideology. While Rancière’s critique pointed to the privilege of denunciation granted to the savant by the Althusserian understanding of ideology, Bourdieu here again takes his thinking in a radically different direction. What he questions is not the prevalence of ideologies in processes of domination, but rather their supposed autonomous instrumentality. When laying the foundations of a sociology of law (1986), he engages directly with ‘ideology’ in Althusser’s language: as for ideology, law is conceived as relatively autonomous from the base of society (as part of the superstructure) while being directly determined by power relations; that is, by the requirements of domination. For Althusser, law merely serves the—economic—interests of the dominant class: it is nothing more than an instrument, a tool of domination, purely functional. Bourdieu proposes to unwrap the notion of ideology to question the autonomy and instrumentality of the judicial field. His central argument is that the autonomy of ideologies is not a given of the
superstructure: it is the product of a field that has constructed its own autonomy from the rest of society. Ideologies ought to be studied as products of specific social domains and their actors, rather than as the functional constituents of the autonomous superstructure. If, as for law, a given ideology has come to be recognized as independent from power struggles and processes of domination, we should seek to understand under which social and historical circumstances the actors invested in its production and reproduction have constructed the *form* of independency. Whereas Rancière here again considers that we should fully depart from the notion of ideology and the immutable privilege attached to its denunciation, Bourdieu seeks to bring the concept back to earth, and study it in relation to the bounded territories in which it is produced.

As young intellectuals departing from the shelter of the *Ecole Normale Supérieure*, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière took different paths. Tracing their departures from Althusserian Marxism, the map of the current controversy gradually gains in perspicuity. The continuity Rancière pictured between Althusser and Bourdieu strikes us as an incapacity of the philosopher to account for the sociologist’s fragmentary and relational approach to empirical realities. Bourdieu’s field-based approach has sought to dismantle the reductive, functionalist logic of the apparatus, in search for a sociology of unfolding. Renouncing to thinking society at once together with sociologists such as Michael Mann and Charles Tilly (Mann, 1986; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 16), he has through the notion of field developed new ways to account for a multiplicity of social microcosms, each carried by their own actors, guided by their specific logics. Far from pushing the political away through the social, he has envisaged such fields as terrains of struggle, in which the rules of the game are constantly subject to contestation. Bourdieu has systematically demonstrated the impossible reduction of the field to the part/function, and fought against a mechanical conception of sociology. In this light, Swyngedouw’s (2009: 604) call ‘to recover the notion of the political and the political polis from the debris of contemporary obsessions with governing’ appears as a telling illustration of the paradox found at the core of the Rancièrian critique of sociology. The sociologist is happy with the debris: she is at her best working from a fragmented political reality. But where can Swyngedouw’s reflection on ‘politics’ take hold if not in a consolidated conceptualization of techno-managerial government? The obsession with governing for which he blames sociologists appears as the very precondition of his critique.

Surely, the constant re-emergence of the apparatus in Swyngedouw’s work cannot be blamed on Rancière. By conceiving police and politics by means of an ontological opposition, the latter has simply set the stage for it. As far as politics can only be conceived in opposition to police, accounting for the surplus that breaks out demands thinking *against* the instituted order. The very notion of surplus—those who have no part—implies the consolidation of the police order. Any attempt to account for politics is thus dependent on the a priori reconstruction of the instituted order in which each one is assigned a place, on a careful portraying of the managerial state that only can allow the grasping of politics by means of ontological opposition. The Rancièrian critique is only operational by means of the isolation of the ‘excess’ of the instituted order, the breaking of its relationality with the institutional sphere. It inexorably translates into its hyperbolization, an obsession that takes the completeness of the ‘ensemble’ as its point of departure (Castoriadis, [1975] 1999: 400). The post-political critique of social sciences, the refusal to approach politics through the social, turns into the necessary negation of the work of sociologists of the state faced with the empirical ‘incompleteness of statebuilding processes and the heterogeneity and (always) improvised nature of statehood’ (Bayart 1993; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014: 6).
Hence, from the sociologist's standpoint, Rancièrian thought has not effectively tackled the apparatus: it has circled around it.

Yet beneath the ontological opposition between police and politics lies an even more crucial question, which constitutes Rancière's main rupture not only with Bourdieu, but—remarkably—with Levi-Strauss, Elias or Foucault. In Deleuzian language, Rancière's conceptualization of politics sets apart and opposes 'segments' and 'lines of flights', breaking the relationality between the two terms. 'Where is politics?', asked Rancière. Is it in the factory struggles? Or, rather, does it take place at night, when the worker escapes, through creative imagination, his place in the ordering of space and time? Should we locate politics in the social? Or, rather, have sociologists misplaced it in their attempt to do away with it? These questions are at the core of Rancière's thought, and even the sociologist can acknowledge that they constitute very important interrogations. Nonetheless, they take the critique into an unstoppable logic of localization, of identification. In the very attempt to locate politics, Rancière constructs it as a substantial object. The risk he immediately faces, as noted by Dikeç (2015: 7), is to engage in a quest for pure politics as exemplified by Swyngedouw's (2009: 616) search for a 'genuine politics'. Dikeç refrains from engaging on that path. Rather, he takes Rancière's approach to politics as a way 'to keep the possibility for politics open' without negating institutional politics (2015: 7). Dikeç is receptive to different forms of politics that each deserve attention, yet the logic of identification is still operating. Although open to a variety of political sites, he remains caught up in a sterile question of location.

Rancière's (2012b: 74) relentless effort at distinguishing police from politics runs against the notion, central in Foucault's thought and which he plainly discards, that 'resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power' (Foucault, 1978: 95). The break of relationality found at the heart of Rancièrian thought is indeed best captured in his rejection of the Foucauldian concept of power. Rancière criticizes Foucault for having identified politics with power relationships, that is, 'everything' (Rancière, 1995: 1999: 32). Caught up in a question of identification, Rancière does not appear to realize what Foucault has precisely sought to avoid in order to preserve the relationality at the core of his work: to identify 'politics'. Albeit displacing his focus from the apparatus to the field, Bourdieu similarly refuses to conceive of politics as exogenous to power relations. Hence, where Rancière sees in the May 68 Parisian uprisings the outbreak of a surplus within the police order, Bourdieu fiercely attacks what he terms the 'illusion of spontaneity', whereby 'the critical moment' is studied in isolation from the structural conditions that led to its emergence. Carefully excavating the structural transformations and ensuing conflicts that emerged in the academic field, Bourdieu makes sense of the uprisings by looking at the effect of synchronization that allowed for a crisis specific to a relatively autonomous field ('a regional crisis') to 'extend to other regions of social space and thus become transformed into a general crisis, a historical event' (Bourdieu, 1984: 190: 173, emphasis in original). Far from attempting to reduce the 1968 crisis to its field-specific determinants or to drown the political moment into sociological considerations—as Rancièrians would argue—Bourdieu (ibid.: 185) seeks to capture the 'break with temporal rhythms' characteristic of the strike through which the temporalities and spatialities peculiar to each field come to coincide in the formation of a historical event that connects different regions of the social world. Breaking with the 'illusion of spontaneity' does not imply the pacification of the political moment. On the contrary, it enables the sociologist to capture more closely the crisis as the moment
‘when future prospects appear really contingent, future events really indeterminate, the moment truly instantaneous, suspended, its consequences unpredicted and unpredictable’ (ibid.: 182). Hence, it does not suffice to say, for Ranciérians, that ‘police and politics are enmeshed’ or that ‘politics takes place within the consolidated orders by introducing a spatial rupture’ (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017: 13). Such statements are merely restaging the appearance of a relationality between the ‘police logic’ and the ‘egalitarian logic’ that has initially been broken through the attempt to identify ‘politics’. We cannot help but see in the logic of identification and consequential break with the relational tradition a major drawback in political thought.

Seen in light of Bourdieu’s work, the theoretical tools offered by Rancière appear highly problematic in making sense of urban politics on at least two levels: (1) they fail to dismantle the apparatus and reproduce an obsession with government as the precondition of critique; (2) through the attempt to localize ‘politics’, they break apart the relationality between the structure and the ‘critical moment’. And yet, in spite of these important shortcomings, there is still something in Rancièrian thought that the Bourdieusian critique cannot completely exhaust. What Bourdieu and his followers have never successfully dissipated is Rancière’s critique of what I term the *territoriality* found at the heart of their work.

Rancière’s post-political critique of Bourdieu, as seen above, anchors itself in the claim that domination and violence lie not in the territories of the social but in the ordering of the sensible. We can distinguish two points in this argument: (1) the idea we have already expanded upon that sociologists have misplaced politics in the social, that they have overly focused on the ‘structure of illusion’ (Rancière, 2012b, quoted in Dikeç, 2015: 87) that keeps individuals in their place; and (2) the ensuing critique of the sociologist’s failure at accounting for the role of space in structuring relations of domination. In Rancière’s view, Bourdieu has through the notions of field and social space remained caught up in an overly territorial understanding of social structures which has not been able to account for spatial orderings. Here Rancière’s argument has unmistakably hinged on Foucault’s work on governmentality, although paying more attention to political scenography than to technologies of government. Shifting the focus away from the social dispositions peculiar to the various segments of social space, Rancière sought to emphasize the ordering of space within the police order. Again, his initial argument was that the domination faced by the factory workers he studied was to be understood as produced by the spatial configurations they were confined to within the police order. ‘Space’—or more precisely, *place*—is to Rancière the spatial incarnation of the police. As put by Dikeç (2015: 98), *place* is the embodiment of ‘geometrical reason, administrative rationality, partitioned and aimed at an exhaustive ordering of the whole to be governed’; it is, again, what confines one to a given configuration of *political* space, and organizes the circulation and distribution of its parts. Rancière’s approach to space inherently questions the territoriality of the field in Bourdieu and the modalities of territorial confinement. Bourdieu’s incapacity to account for spatial orderings is in fact most obvious when he tackles physical space directly. When considering the weight of ‘site effects’ in social inequalities, he defines inhabited, physical space ‘as a sort of spontaneous symbolization of social space’ ([1993] 1999: 124), that is merely as a more or less accurate translation of social structures. In Bourdieu’s view ([1993] 1999; 2018), the volume and composition of capital invested in each site reflect the social position of those who appropriate it. Bourdieu here takes us into a metaphorical loop that is difficult to evade: the notion of field carries a territorial metaphor, while physical space is itself conceived as a metaphor of the fields that constitute the ‘regions’ of social space. Strikingly, Bourdieu’s
approach to physical space resembles Michel Foucault’s ([1978] 2009: 32) description of territorial sovereignty, where space—or rather, territory—is ‘capitalized’ (rather than functionalized) by the sovereign (both in materially and symbolically) in order to be ‘well-placed’ within it.<fnref n="2" /> In fact, beyond Rancière and his followers’ own critique, the territoriality inherent to the Bourdieusian notion of field perhaps becomes clearer if we reinscribe it within a Weberian tradition and its emphasis on the territoriality of statehood, which becomes explicit when looking at relations between state and nonstate fields.

A lot of Bourdieu’s work has been concerned with understanding how given fields emerge and develop; yet, as noted by Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam (2012) in *A theory of fields*, much less so with the ways they interact with the links that cut across distant regions of the social world. Bourdieu ([1984] 1990), as we have seen, has pointed to the effects of synchronization that can emerge between distant fields. Bourdieu ([1989] 1998) has also looked at the relations of interdependency between state and nonstate fields, although this question has remained relatively marginal in his work. Fligstein and McAdam (2012: 63) have taken up this point in an effort to reflect upon the increased interconnectedness of fields across physical space. In doing so, they have relied on the classic notion of ‘embeddedness’ (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]; Granovetter, 1985) and attempted to theorize different types of interdependencies between ‘strategic action fields’, most importantly between state and nonstate fields. They have questioned the territorial anchorage of the Bourdieusian notion of field as far as they have argued that increased interconnection between fields led to the partial removal of geographical limitations (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012: 62). Their elaboration on the notion of field has nonetheless remained fiercely anchored in the territorial dimension. They have stuck to a Weberian territorial tradition in considering how states set up ‘the rules for public strategic interaction within a geographically delimited territory’ (ibid.: 70). Their conceptualization of the role of state fields on nonstate fields has limited itself to the question of the rules and procedures—guaranteed on the basis of territorial sovereignty—that enable the creation of new fields, the stabilization of existing ones and the control of their expansion. By linking the notion of field to the sociology of the state, they have made more explicit its territorial premises and its grounding in a territorial understanding of state sovereignty. While the territorial dimension of the state is increasingly placed under scrutiny (Quirk and Vigneswaran, 2015: chapter 1; King and Le Galès, 2017: 12–13), the territorial grounding of the notion of field has remained relatively unquestioned—even in the urban literature.

Rancièrean approaches to urban space hence bear the potential of bringing something to the table in thinking about the territoriality of fields, particularly in their relations to institutions. They open a theoretical window onto spatial orderings, the functionalization and channeling of their parts. Outside of a few Foucauldian endeavors (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002), this question remains relatively unexplored. Yet, the Rancièreian conceptualization of space faces the exact same shortcomings already delineated above: Rancière merely spatializes the ontological opposition between police and politics. He opposes *place*—the proper *place* of the ‘police’—to *space*—the *lieu* or *espace* where there is no ‘proper’, the space of equality, of ‘politics’ (Dikeç, 2005: 182–3). Here again, the possibility to account for the *espace* of politics is contingent on the reconstruction of the partitioned place of the police and its ‘exhaustive ordering’. Again, the critique is only operational by means of the

<footnote n="2">² This further gives grounding to Michael Mann’s (1986: 9) claim that ‘most theorists prefer abstract notions of social structure, so they ignore geographical and sociospatial aspects of societies’.</footnote>
maintenance of a governmental obsession that neglects the empirical work of urban scholars (particularly in cities of the south) who have explored the variety, incompleteness and disjuncture of spatial and territorial modes of control and ordering (Simone, 2004; Fourchard, 2006; 2011; Jáuregui, 2010; Ginisty and Vivet, 2012; Gayer, 2016). The Foucauldian conception of ‘disciplinary space’, that which ‘addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements’ (Foucault, 1978) 2009: 35), is identified as the converse of ‘politics’ (Dikeç, 2005: 173), and stripped of its relationality to the leak (Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004), turned into an ‘excess’, a ‘surplus’ that can be isolated, located. The logic of identification of politics is embraced and the quest for the spontaneous ‘spatial rupture’ appears unstoppable (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017).

Space, in sum, is conceived as a plane, a surface intelligible at once. Has our return to the debate that unfolded between Rancière and Bourdieu in the 1980s thus taken us into a dead end? Beyond the clarification of the theoretical foundations of the current fracture witnessed in the field of urban studies, I here propose to engage the question of space through a field-based approach. In the next section, I engage frontally the question of space as spelled out by Ranciérians within a framework that enables precise empirical investigation, that emphasizes the disjuncture and incompleteness of spatial orders and in which space is conceived *in relation to given territorial configurations*. Through a study of neighborhood leaders in a district of Lagos in their mobilization of a specific political resource—garbage—I analyze the process of spatialization of the field of local representation. My aim is not to establish what space is or is not, to think it at once, but rather to study processes of spatialization within a specific field and around a specific political resource. Looking at a different field, through a different resource—for instance, looking at market trading through yam, or the field of security through crime—one would get a different picture of processes of spatialization of territorial configurations. I here acknowledge the relative autonomy of the field under scrutiny, although linking its transformations to far-ranging political change at a metropolitan level. Similarly, in choosing to focus on local representation, I am not trying to show that it is where politics takes (or does not take) place. Rather, my aim is to understand how the spatialization of the field of local representation reshapes the structure in which urban politics grounds itself, the stage on which oppression and contestation are played out.

## Producing space through waste

We must face a preliminary question: is there such a thing as a field of local representation, and what form does it take in Lagos? In North American metropolises, several sociologists have recently participated in a reconsideration of the field of local representation that engages more frontally the duality increasingly witnessed in its structure between ward-based politics and nongovernmental actors, notably community-based organizations (CBOs). As noted by Carl Levine (2016), CBOs have generally been envisioned as ‘third-party arms of the state’, reduced to a functional role in the implementation of urban services (Smith and Lipsky, 1993). Contrary to this view, Levine’s research in Boston has shown how CBOs have gone as far as to ‘supersed[e] elected officials as the legitimate representatives of poor neighborhoods’ (Levine, 2016). Not just instruments at the service of the higher levels of metropolitan governance, Boston’s CBOs have grown into legitimate local representatives in the eyes of the population as well as in those of bureaucrats and private donors, going as far as to marginalize elected officials. To Levine, CBOs should therefore be thought of as *nonelected* neighborhood representatives rather than service providers, and be considered as part of the field of local representation. In Chicago, John Betancur, Karen Mossberger and
Yue Zhang pointed to a similar duality in the field, divided between ward-based politics and the world of foundations. Unlike Levine in Boston, they did not observe a capture of representative legitimacy by the world of ‘nonelected representation’, but rather the coexistence of the two spheres of local representation, side by side. Following Barbara Ferman (1996), they argue that the failures of Chicago’s machine politics in effectively representing the needs of residents opened the way for alternative forms of representation grounded in community organizing, without eradicating aldermen politics. In Boston and Chicago, the authors put forth a similar development: the emergence of ‘a blended model of policymaking … in which the civic arena has become more important’ (Betancur et al., 2015: 83).

In Lagos, we observe the emergence of a similar duality in the field of local representation, polarized around two types of actors: ward politicians and community development associations (CDAs). Although unequal across the metropolitan area—and combined with a third type of ethnic-based, customary local representation—such duality has been reinforced in the past 15 years. The governorship of Babatunde Fashola (2007–15) is understood as a turning point in the structures of local representation, with the establishment of sustained direct ties between CDAs and the Lagos state.<fnref n="3" /> While we follow the recent North American contributions on local representation in their reconceptualization of the field to account for a diversity of modes of representation, we are not interested in qualifying its (non-)governmental, elected or nonelected character. First, such an entry point into the field of local representation in Lagos would be misleading: while the democratic openness of CDAs varies—and can theoretically go as far as to translate into open elections that include all residents—ward politicians are typically nonelected. Further, even though the task of managing CDAs is left to grassroots efforts, they are recognized as the lowest level of government across the state and their frontiers are defined by local governments. The elected/nonelected or public/ private categories mobilized in North American cities are far from stable across Lagos, and can in many instances be reversed. Second, working from those categories could lead to hasty conclusions on the emergence of a post-political Lagos at the crossing of CDAs and environmental policies (Swyngedouw, 2009: 608), a pitfall we are precisely trying to avoid. I am only interested in the ‘who’ of local representation (Tosi and Vitale, 2013) as far as given actors are conjecturally tied to given *practices* of territorial/spatial representation and control encompassed by these institutional forms. What is at stake here is the *structure of practices* of local representation and the last part of this article will demonstrate how given actors can move across it.

Solid waste is the resource through which I look at practices of local representation. I conceive garbage as a resource in that it constitutes a *political opportunity* on which to lay claims of representation to higher levels of government and reinforce control over a given locality. Methodologically, I apprehend the field of local representation *through* waste, meaning that I only explore the field as far as its actors mobilize the ‘resource’. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Lagos from 2015 to 2016, I sketch a garbage based cross portrait of Demola and Kayode,<fnref n="4" /> two local leaders of Mushin, exploring the modalities of

<footnote n="3">³ Interview with All Progressives Congress (APC) ward politician, Mushin, 15 March 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Interview with All Progressives Congress (APC) ward politician, Mushin, 15 March 2016.</footnote>
their local control and the grounding of their legitimacies as local representatives in the eyes
of the Lagos government.

Mushin is one of the most populated—and densest—districts of Lagos, with an estimated population over 900,000.<fnref n="5" /> A series of villages up until the end of the nineteenth century, Mushin came to be recognized as an urban area in the mid-twentieth century by the colonial administration, with the creation of the Mushin District Council in 1955. As a political community, the district gradually integrated within Lagos’s distributive politics through two types of actors that served as brokers between the political center and urban peripheries: the local nobility and settler leaders (Barnes, 1986: 31–46). As a neighborhood-level politician, Kayode inscribes himself within the history and structure of center-periphery brokerage. Every morning at eight o’clock, Kayode enters the compound of the Mushin Environment and Road Maintenance Committee.

Appointed by the Mushin local government as its deputy executive, Kayode makes sure his teams are set for another day of street sanitation. More specifically, the committee is concerned with abandoned vehicles. A few days earlier, a general meeting had been called at the local government headquarters to remind every member of the committee of the risk inherent to vehicles abandoned on the street: they quickly become privileged spots for waste dumping. The committee’s mission is to intervene as quickly as possible to prevent the formation of open dumps around abandoned cars.<fnref n="6" /> After the morning parade, the members of the committee split into teams of 10, each assigned to a towing truck, and begin their duty. However, none of them receives a salary for the task that takes up most of their days. Being part of the committee is a political position, for which no compensation is received. ‘Everybody [on the committee] is a politician’, Kayode notes, ‘they are all part of the APC’.<fnref n="7" /> To make a living, committee members will have to collect their own ‘stipends’ from car owners, which will be shared at the end of the day.⁸⁸ Therefore, they will make use of the legitimacy of their official mission of street sanitation to deal with vehicles that are in fact far from abandoned by their owners and from whom revenue can be secured through the distribution of fines. For the committee, the presence of refuse on the street constitutes a policing opportunity from which a rent-seeking capacity is extrapolated (Manton, 2013).

Kayode does not partake in the rounds of the Environment and Road Maintenance Committee. Following the departure of his teams, he goes back to his office, on the other side of the compound. Kayode dedicates most of his days to his main political position, that

<footnote n="5">⁵ Estimate for 2017 based on the 2006 federal census data (National Population Commission, available at http://population.gov.ng) and UN Habitat’s estimated annual rate of change for Lagos (UN HABITAT, World Cities Report 2016, available at http://wcr.unhabitat.org), assuming the same rate of growth for all local government areas in the state.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ The APC is the dominant party in Lagos. It was formed in 2013 following an electoral agreement between the northern All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANNP), then headed by Muhammadu Buhari (elected President of Nigeria in 2015) and the southwestern party Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Observation of the symposium of the Mushin Environment and Road Maintenance Committee, 6 March 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Interviews with members of the Mushin Environment and Road Maintenance Committee, 6 and 15 March 2016.</footnote>
of APC ward chairman. He was appointed to this position by the local government chairman and it is for him an ideal status to strengthen his influence in the ward. The door to the APC ward office is always wide open. Residents come to present their grievances, to ask for help, and other party politicians come to discuss the most recent turn of events on the local political scene. Kayode's multiple mobile phones relentlessly interrupt the conversations: ‘Somebody just called me now, as we are discussing, because his vehicle has been towed’. Kayode knows that his teams on the committee are dealing with the situations relating to the calls he receives from distressed residents of his ward; that is where his own duty really begins and is the basis on which he installs his territorial control of the ward. To Kayode, thanks to the territorial sweeping operated by the committee, the presence of refuse on the streets turns into a political opportunity. As the members of the committee patrol his ward distributing fines on an environmental basis, they produce a need for local residents to refer to their ward chairman. Through these organized encounters with the ward population, a demand for political protection is created. In turn, for Kayode, the rounds of the committee open the opportunity for the building of relations of interdependency across his allocated territory. He answers the residents' demands through the granting of derogations from fines (Holland, 2015) or by negotiating ‘discounts’. To him, the mechanics behind the building of these relations of interdependency are very straightforward: ‘They come to you, and if they come to you, definitely during the elections, if you tell them “vote for me” they will, because they need to keep you in power for you to keep helping them’.<fnref n="9" />

Aside from the committee, street sanitation is also handled by the Mushin Environmental Brigade. Unlike the committee, the brigade is made up of civil servants placed under the authority of the local government. The brigade is centrally concerned with the overseeing of market sanitation. Its *modus operandi* is similar to that of the committee: it patrols markets, distributing fines on the basis of an authority extrapolated from the presence of waste in the alleys.<fnref n="10" /> Market traders will similarly seek the political protection of their ward politician and the latter will make sure he secures political support from market leaders, themselves very powerful political players (Barnes, 1986: 159). In the maintenance of his role of political protector, Kayode walks a fine line. He must find a sustainable political balance between protecting his clientele and enabling the members of the committee—on whom he is himself dependent to maintain his territorial control over the ward—to earn a living. Walking this line can get even more arduous when he must deal with the brigade’s civil servants, with whom the relation of interdependence is less direct and must be mediated by higher-level politicians.

In sum, for Kayode, the presence of garbage on the streets (Figure 1) constitutes an opportunity to strengthen and maintain his territorial control over the ward by means of the production of political protection. This protection is reactualized daily by the committee and the brigade through their encounters with the population. In

<footnote n="9">⁹ Interviews with Kayode, 10, 16 and 24 February 2016, 15 March 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Observation of the Mushin Local Government Sanitation Brigade on market sanitation exercise, 8 July 2015; interview with head of the environmental department of the Mushin local government, 7 July 2015; interview with head of Environmental Brigade, 19 February 2016.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1** Cart pushers at work on an open dump, Mushin, Lagos, 2015 (© The Author)</figcaption></figure>

his ward, Kayode plays his part in the reproduction of the party's control over Mushin. Through modalities characteristic of patronage politics (Barnes, 1986; Ginisty and Vivet, 2012), the ward politician is engaged daily in the territorialization of political power.

A few hundred meters away from Kayode's office is one of the most active CDAs in Mushin. Demola has been its chairman for the past two years and is running for a new mandate. The frontiers of CDAs are defined by local governments, and they extend over about 15 streets. Despite their governmental status, CDAs do not receive regular funding and are run by residents and landowners. However, they can gather public and private (often from 'big men' of the area) funding around specific projects. Since 2007 and the beginning of Babatunde Fashola's governorship in Lagos, dormant CDAs have often been granted increased importance by the central government, for whom they represent new allies at the local level. They constitute an alternative to territorial brokers in accompanying the implementation of new public policies—particularly in the environmental sector—and the expansion of the local state's tax base. Over the past decade, Demola's CDA—created some 20 years ago—has been part of this movement and has grown into a central organ governing the life of the neighborhood, notably in the domains of security, health and waste management. Demola's CDA has gradually established itself as the main alternative to ward politics in the daily governance and representation of the neighborhood. As a political opportunity, waste has been a crucial resource in its development. The way Demola mobilizes it, however, stands in stark contrasts with Kayode's territorial control (Table 1).
<table><caption>**Table 1** Characteris tics of local representatives in Mushin</caption><thead><tr><td></td><td>Kayode (ward politician)</td><td>Demola (CDA chairperson)</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Mobilization of solid waste</td><td>Opportunity for territorial control</td><td>Opportunity for spatial control</td></tr><tr><td>Control of local population</td><td>Political protection</td><td>Functionalization of streetscape</td></tr><tr><td>Functions</td><td>Defined by demand</td><td>Established</td></tr><tr><td>Legitimacy towards local state</td><td>Territorial control</td><td>Institutional channel expansion</td></tr><tr><td>Relationship to local state</td><td>Factional</td><td>Policy based</td></tr></tbody></table>

In 2005, the Lagos state engaged in the formation of a formal waste infrastructure by means of the contracting out of 246 local microenterprises in charge of refuse collection. The development of institutional waste channels across the city further relied on new tools of taxation for the collection of a waste fee from each household. By precipitating the deployment of these institutional waste channels, the CDA expanded its control over garbage. On a daily basis, Demola tries to ensure the functioning of the waste channels on various levels. He has become the main interlocutor of the microenterprise in charge of waste collection in the neighborhood. He monitors their activities on the ground, signals any negligence and tries to push the waste collectors towards greater regularity. Conversely, Demola and the rest of his board conduct regular meetings with residents to encourage a greater proportion of them to rely on the state service rather than on alternative, informal waste channels. The CDA's objective is that a greater number of residents agree to pay the waste fee. As Demola puts it, 'we tell them about the importance of waste collection, that if you fail to pay them it's going to lead to the outbreak of diseases'. In addition to information campaigns, the CDA organizes monthly 'cleanups'. The members of the CDA are dressed in uniforms and monitor the clearing of the neighborhood's drainage system to avoid its clogging by solid waste and to ensure the flow of water.<fnref n="11" /> Whereas for Kayode environmental exercises are an opportunity to reproduce his territorial control, Demola's mobilization of garbage aims to organize waste flows—the circulation of garbage across the space of the street. Whereas ward politicians mobilize waste—as a political opportunity—territorially, CDAs resort to garbage spatially, in the production of an organized and functional streetscape. Through his attempt to organize the flow of garbage, Demola grounds his local control by means of the *recoding of territory into space*.

Demola's effort to produce a functional space through waste is reflected in the formation of his own role as local representative. We have seen that Kayode's days are structured by a profusion of phone calls and visits in which residents ask for his assistance and protection; his door is always open, his cell phones always turned on, for his role as ward politician is driven by a demand he himself plays an important role in producing. Demola, however, is very reluctant for residents to bring their demands to him: he attempts to structure his role around specific functions. He complains that residents too often 'bring their personal issues' to him, even though they fall outside of his functions of spatial representative: 'Why

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Interview with Demola, 25 February 2016; interviews with local NGO leader, 17 February and 14 March 2016.</footnote>
me? Why bother me?'.<fnref n="12" /> He expects his legitimacy as a local representative to be driven not by his capacity at ‘helping out’ or protecting the local population, but rather by the *performance* of his CDA in the organization of space. Demola’s spatial mobilization of waste and the functionalization of his role of local representative are one and the same phenomenon.

The CDA's formation as a spatial representative has hinged on a relationship with the local state that breaks with partisan politics as the mediator between the political center and peripheral localities. Our ward politician's legitimacy as a local representative in the eyes of the state is fully dependent on the territorial control he and his faction can secure. He competes with other ward politicians amid fierce factional conflicts in developing his electoral clientele and control localities. It is on this basis that his faction will negotiate resources at the metropolitan level. Kayode can be termed a territorial representative (Bartolini, 2005: 98): he establishes the party's territorial control and is part of the mediation of center-periphery relations through distributive politics. As such, for Kayode, building his legitimacy as local representative towards the higher levels of government equates to securing support from the higher levels of the party hierarchy: his activities are fully absorbed by party structures. In contrast, Demola's legitimacy as a local representative has taken a functional turn: he has positioned himself along institutional waste channels and has accompanied their formation. The development of the waste infrastructure has allowed for the opening of new modalities of local representation centered on the reinforcement of institutional waste channels and the local organization of space on which their functioning is dependent. Demola does not mediate center-periphery relations and the allocation of resources: rather, he capitalizes on the local state's policy production to construct his legitimacy as a functional representative. Whereas Kayode acts as a broker, Demola sees his CDA as a 'bridge between the state and the community'. The reality of Demola's shift away from purely territorial representation is best encapsulated by Kayode when acknowledging the increasing importance of CDAs in the eyes of the local state: 'Every time [the governor] wants to have a briefing, he invites the CDAs and listens to their comments. Because he knows politicians: [we] are always pressing ... The CDAs, whatever they say is the correct picture of how things are in their area'.<fnref n="13" /> The information provided by CDAs to the Lagos government is itself seen as functional. It can be taken as accurate because it is produced outside of center-periphery mediation, within which information cannot be isolated from bargaining on resource allocation. Demola refrains from establishing links of interdependency with political parties and addresses the higher levels of government as such, outside of the territoriality of party structures. In sum, the spatialization/functionalization of local representation in Mushin hinges on the deployment of institutional waste channels that organize the circulation of garbage across the neighborhood. In other terms, *the channel is the mode of de-territorialization of the field*, the basis on which local representation spatializes itself.

The CDA's production of space through waste, its recoding of territory into space is not only processual, it is also radically partial and disjointed. Through the field of local representation, we see how physical space is coded simultaneously as territory and space. Further, the light structures of the CDA are always at risk of being overtaken by the

<footnote n="12">¹² Interview with Demola, 25 February 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Interview with Demola, 25 February 2016.</footnote>
territoriality of partisan politics. Election periods are particularly tense in this regard, as Demola sees local politicians come to him to secure his support: ‘They come to me, to ask our members to vote for them ... I tell them off: “no, go elsewhere, I don’t want you to come here!”’ Kayode indeed acknowledges that CDAs can be ‘very relevant’ politically, and ward politicians will attempt to reintegrate them within party networks. During political campaigns, Demola fears that his efforts at spatial recoding will be undone by the parading of parties through the streets of the neighborhood; their reconquering through the distributions of rice, cash and household appliances. Yet, such disjuncture does not only exist between the various actors of the neighborhood. Demola himself is also involved politically in a faction of the dominant party, and serves as a civil servant on the local government. Again, the duality of political territorialities we excavate through waste is not intrinsically grounded in specific actors. The reinforcement of the role of CDAs as local representatives is only an indicator of the transformation of the structure of the field, of the spatializing effect of a waste collection policy.

By sticking to a strictly territorial understanding of the field of local representation, we would not be able to make sense of its transformation through garbage. A classic field approach would point to an increase in interdependency between state fields and the field of local representation. Our data do not indicate a transformation in the degree of interdependency, but rather a change in their articulation. Further, a strictly territorial approach would not be able to sort out our central finding—that the development of metropolitan institutions through a basic service goes together with a shift away from territorial control at the level of local representation. Therefore, Rancière’s critique of sociological territoriality appears particularly useful in making sense of the spatialization of the field of local representation.

However, accounting for the recoding of territory into space would be equally impossible working from a nonrelational, consolidated understanding of space. Our data fundamentally speak to the disjointed character and incompleteness of space. Space cannot be thought of by means of an ontological opposition between *place* and *espace*, and the case of Mushin strongly contests the idea that there would exist an outside to *place* that would correspond to ‘politics’. Rather, it emphasizes a duality of political territorialities which cannot be isolated from one another.

We must now enlarge our focus—in time and space—to understand how processes of spatialization transform the stage on which urban politics are played out.

## The spatialization of urban politics

In Mushin, the deployment of the local state within the streetscape through garbage collection corresponds to a distortion of the structure of practices of local representation. Spatial modes of control develop on top of territorial ones. By extending from our case study, we reinscribe this transformation within a broader shift in the structure of local representation and explore the main implications of the spatialization of urban politics in Lagos. At a *meso* level, the opening of new opportunities for spatial representation runs concurrently with the displacement of the local nobility towards the political center and its ensuing engagement with practices of spatial control.

The Lagos landed nobility (or *Omo Onile*, ‘sons of the soil’) is composed of extended Awori families considered in Yoruba tradition as the descendants of the first settler of Lagos Island, Aromire. On this basis, the *Omo Onile* have historically been engaged in the constant reassertion of land ownership in the city and family heads occupy the highest ranked
positions of traditional chieftaincy ('white-cap chiefs') (Akinyele, 2009). During colonial rule, the local nobility saw its position in Lagosian society reinforced within the system of indirect rule set up by British administrators. Beyond their traditional authority, the local power of *Omo Onile* families was grounded in their substantial land possessions and the position of dependency of their tenants. These families were taken by the British as the most robust intermediaries in controlling Lagos's mainland (Barnes, 1986: 23–35). To further reinforce their territorial grounding, these families were institutionalized with the creation of the Native Advisory Board of Lagos, later renamed the Central Native Council (ibid.), and their traditional holdings were turned into official land titles by colonial administrators. Today, *Omo Onile* families often base their land claims in courts on colonial reports and journals produced by the colonial administration in the early twentieth century.<fnref n="14" />

The local nobility was sidelined by the colonial administration in the 1930s. The administration had grown increasingly concerned about the degree of control secured by the *Omo Onile* families. The territorial grounding of the nobility was later threatened under the short-lived Second Republic, with the nationalization of land in 1978. Yet, despite postcolonial political instabilities, the nobility managed to maintain its land holdings, based on which it remained a central actor in territorial control across Lagos. The local influence of *Omo Onile* families indeed is still grounded in, classically, the dependence of its tenants, coupled with often violent means of pressure. In Mushin, the Itire family holds most of the land, which makes it an imperative ally for party politicians. Without the support of the family, Kayode's efforts at reproducing his territorial hold through political protection could easily be overthrown by the strong territorial power of the family: 'Politicians always want to have them on their side', he notes. To collect the yearly payments from their tenants, or when leases are renewed, the landowning families rely on the police—which they ‘hire’— and their ‘boys’: the *ajagun gbale*—or land-grabbing soldiers. These soldiers are known for their violent methods as well as their mastery of *juju* (witchcraft). Although centrally built for rent collection, the apparatus at the disposal of the family can also serve political purposes. As Kayode states: ‘if [Oloto, the *de facto* leader of the Itire family] says “ok, this house… vote for APC”, and the house votes PDP,<fnref n="15" /> Oloto will come the next week and order his boys to remove the roof. They will tell you that your lease has expired’.<fnref n="16" /> Prior to elections, state-level politicians therefore make sure to secure the public support of the main *Omo Onile* families. Since indirect rule, the local nobility has remained a central mediator of center-periphery relations because of its strong territorial grip.

Despite the continuing involvement of the local nobility in territorial representation, numerous families have moved away from this role. Over the past decade, powerful families such as the Ojora, Oniru and Elegushi have withdrawn from their role of center-periphery intermediaries and moved towards Lagos's political center. Prominent family members have occupied a growing number of important positions—notably as state commissioners (such as Prince Oniru, Prince Elegushi and Prince Lawal)—in the Lagos government. The displacement of *Omo Onile* families from their localities towards the political center is understood to be part of the local state's growing capacity at spatial control, the development of which they have actively participated in through various fields. The local nobility has

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ See for example the history of the kingdom of Ikateland as recounted by the Elegushi royal family: http://www.hrmelegushi.org/kingdom1.htm.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ People's Democratic Party, the main opposition party in Nigeria.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Interview with Kayode, 15 March 2016.</footnote>
taken part in the promotion of public policies, the strengthening of state agencies and taxation systems and the subsequent reinforcement of the state's capacity at organizing space and the circulation of flows. For these families, practices of spatial control tied to the political center have appeared increasingly attractive relative to their territorial capacities in maintaining their positions, amid fierce competition among the main families of the nobility. As the local state built up its policy capacity, some *Omo Onile* families gradually deserted their positions of territorial brokers to enter 'the orbit of government' (Rokkan, 1970: 99).

Such displacement of the local nobility and their investment in spatial modes of control further reinforce the appeal for spatialized representation in those neighborhoods built on land they own. On Snake Island, a sandbank produced by the dredging of Apapa—Lagos’s industrial port—and owned by the Onisiwo family, a local CDA has been recently developed. In the settlement, territorial representation rests not on party politicians but on the traditional ruler of the Yoruba community, the *baale*, himself appointed by the Onisiwo family. The nascent CDA was based on the political opportunity represented by waste to develop spatial practices of control of the settlement. The CDA negotiated directly with the Lagos Waste Management Agency to develop its connection to the waste infrastructure, organizing the collection of the waste fee and facilitating the weekly collection, operated by boat. Acting for the local state, the CDA organized the flow of garbage in the neighborhood and started monitoring waste dumping; it also recoded the *baale*'s territory into space and built up its role of spatial representative. The CDA’s spokesperson insists on the need to ‘promote good health in the environment’. By the same token, the demonstration of spatial functionality in the settlement was an attempt at strengthening the tenure security of the community, faced with direct threats posed by the construction of a refinery on the island. The work accomplished by the CDA makes them optimistic: ‘[the leaders of the Onisiwo family] love this community because of the level of organization and cleanliness’.<fnref n="17" /> In neighborhoods where party-mediated territorial representation is weak and largely dependent on royal families, the displacement of the nobility towards the political center meant that they too had to make a move. On Snake Island, crossing the *waste frontier* was the first step taken.

Yet, among the member communities of the Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, this settlement stands as an exception—it is the only one to have secured a connection to the waste infrastructure, the only one to have effectively been able to spatialize its local representation. For other vulnerable communities of Lagos, the transformation of the field of local representation rather implied their further marginalization. In localities where institutional channels have not ventured, where opportunities for spatial representation have remained foreclosed, the recoding of territory through the deployment of new spatial practices did not occur. The refusal of the local state to connect these neighborhoods to the waste infrastructure can be explained, first, by their general lack of political integration in partisan politics. They indeed remain highly politically fragmented, divided into many micro neighborhoods, each represented by a traditional ruler. While older settlements such as Mushin have gradually integrated through powerful territorial brokers with vast patronage networks, such processes have not occurred in Lagos’s most vulnerable communities. In localities such as Makoko and Otodo Gbame, political parties are rarely present outside of election periods. The isolated claims of the multiplicity of local leaders maintained at the margins of the field of local representation are easily dismissed by local governments and

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Interview with spokesman of Snake Island CDA, 5 March 2016.</footnote>
state administrations. Second, these neighborhoods are built on valuable land located on the shores of the Lagos lagoon. These parcels of land are actively reclaimed by powerful families of the local nobility. Now able to defend their interests from within the local state, they seek the destruction of these communities and the eviction of their residents.

Makoko and Otodo Gbame are largely built on stilts over the lagoon. While they have not been able to adapt to the distortion of the structure of local representation, the water over which they live—and which provides them a means of subsistence through fishing—is itself being recoded by the Lagos state. In October 2016, Governor Ambode announced a plan to ‘clean up’ the state’s waterways as part of a project to develop water transportation and decongest road traffic. The Commissioner for the Environment indicated that machines had been purchased to rid the lagoon of the ‘aquatic weeds and debris’ in which boats can get entangled. The head of the Lagos State Waterways Authority further noted that the recoding of the lagoon as a space of circulation would demand monitoring of the activities of ‘those who disrespect the waterways through dumping of waste, pollution, defecation and other illegal activities’ (Anonymous, 2016). Waterfront communities were directly targeted based on their negative environmental impact. This declaration happened to take place four days after the announcement of the governor’s decision to demolish ‘all the shanties around the creeks and waterways of Lagos state’, giving their estimated 300,000 inhabitants a seven-day ultimatum to evacuate (Totaro and Ponsford, 2016). For communities lacking access to the institutional waste channels needed to spatialize their local representation, the deterritorialization of the field translates into the threat of destruction. Through their spatial ordering, the waters mirror their own spatial dysfunctionality, constructed discursively by the Lagos state (Björkman, 2014). Where the state’s environmental discourse is not appropriated through the spatialization of local representation, it serves to justify demolitions. As put by a resident of Makoko: ‘If they see that you don’t clean up your environment, that it is dirty, there is nothing you can do’.<fnref n="18" />

Destruction began in the early hours of 9 November 2016 in Otodo Gbame and lethal violence led to the displacement of the Lagos nobility towards the political center of the metropolis. Gangs of *adjagun gbale* allegedly hired and headed by members of the Elegushi family entered the waterfront settlement and set it on fire. The Lagos state security forces soon followed—on the grounds of an ‘ethnic clash’—and blocked land accesses to the settlement. An estimated 30,000 residents were displaced in one day, with more than a dozen shot dead (Mitchell and Salvaire, 2016). From March to April 2017, what was left of the original settlement or any subsequent reconstruction was further destroyed on the orders of the State Commissioner for the Environment.<fnref n="19" /> The Otodo Gbame waterfront was reclaimed by the Elegushi family, while one of its prominent members now serves as State Commissioner for Transportation. The acceleration of destruction in Lagos is understood to be a product of the spatialization of the field of local representation, in which the

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Interview with Makoko resident, 6 February 2016; interview with the *Baale* of one of the Egun communities of Makoko, 11 February 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Joint Press release, Justice Empowerment Initiative and Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, 23 March 2017. Available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/535d0435e4b0586b1fc64b54/t/58f751fb6b8f5b7002884069/1492603488178/ Joint+Press+Statement+%2823+March+2017%29_FINAL.pdf (accessed 26 May 2017).</footnote>
displacement of the local nobility towards the orbit of government has played a central role at a metropolitan level. In Michael Mann’s (1984: 205–6) terms, the increased infrastructural power of the local state has simultaneously reinforced its despotic power over those retained on the territorial dimension of the field of local representation. Such despotic power ‘disappears’ into civil society: it is reappropriated by a dominant urban group, the local nobility.

On 15 November 2016, thousands of residents of waterfront communities took to the streets of Alausa, Lagos’s administrative quarter, to protest against the destructions. Led by the Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, protesters grounded their claims on Habitat III’s New Urban Agenda to demand the termination of forced evictions. Yet, within the evicted population, protestations also drew on a local, territorial repertoire (Tilly, 1981). Local accounts described the destruction as a betrayal of the history of territorial ties bonding the largely Egun community to local customary chiefs.<fnref n="20" /> Moving beyond the illusion of spontaneity and giving up on the attempt to identify an ‘extraordinary’ political moment (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017: 12), we see that what can be concealed behind ‘police’ and ‘politics’, *place* and *espace*, are the incomplete, disjointed and contested processes of recoding of territory on which destructions and their contestation ground themselves. Looking at the protest from a reconstructed theoretical space, shielded from the vulgarity and stench of the heap of garbage, we would miss the complexities found in the transformations of Lagos’s political territorialities. These transformations cannot be studied in isolation from the structural distortions that led to their occurrence: transformations in institutional political structures are not an element of context; they remodel the stage on which oppression and contestation are played out.

Conclusion

Going back to the Bourdieu/Rancière debate and tracing their departures from Althusser, we have highlighted the main theoretical divide that still cuts across the field of urban studies today. I have pointed to two main shortcomings in Rancière’s work that make his theoretical environment inoperative within a sociological perspective: the constant reconstruction of a consolidated police/space that serves as a point of departure to the search for an emancipatory politics; and the attempt to identify such politics/espace that breaks with the relationality between the two terms. Yet, space as conceptualized by Rancièrians fundamentally questions field theory and its territorial underpinnings. Taking seriously Rancière’s spatial critique of Bourdieu, I have proposed studying the processes of spatialization of the field of local representation in Lagos by looking at the way garbage as a political opportunity is mobilized. This was not an attempt at compromise, but a necessary step in making sense of what could be seen— from a territorial perspective—as a puzzling paradox: the development of the local state by means of the shift away from territorial means of control.

The formation of a waste infrastructure in Lagos has indeed triggered a process of spatialization of the field of local representation. New local representatives have emerged along institutional waste channels. Breaking with the practices of territorial control of party-mediated representation, they have engaged in processes of recoding of territory into space, organizing the circulation of waste flows and functionalizing the streetscape. Such recodings

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Interview with resident of Otodo Gbame, 16 November 2016.</footnote>
have been anything but linear—they are overlapping and disjointed processes. The space produced by these new local representatives is full of holes and always subject to reterritorialization. The effect of the organization of waste flows by the local state, however, is clear: institutional waste channels cut across the territories of local representation and spatialize the field.

At a meso level, I linked the spatialization of Lagosian politics to the displacement of the local nobility—traditionally a powerful mediator of center-periphery relations—towards the political center. Selectively giving up strong territorial means of control for spatial ones, the local nobility is playing a central role in the development of the local state's policy production, of its capacity at ordering space by cutting across territorial domains. By entering the orbit of government, the *Omo Onile* have strongly accentuated the transformations of the structure of local representation. For the city's most vulnerable communities, which have remained caught up in the territorial dimension of the field, spatialization increasingly translates into their own brutal deterritorialization. The call to turn the lagoon into a functional space of circulation has mirrored the construction of neighborhoods as dysfunctional spaces, notably on an environmental basis. In making sense of such transformations, it is thus necessary to pay attention to the formation of a policy state and the deployment of environmental policies.

Studying these transformations is not a post-political endeavor: it is not about identifying the science of government with politics, but rather emphasizing a relationality between spatial orderings and territorial formations. While one can acknowledge the vital need for an emancipatory politics of territory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991) that the acceleration of evictions in Lagos only further reinforces, it should not come as antithetical to sociological, empirically grounded studies and the reality they bring forth: the other of space is not politics.

*The author would like to thank the three IJURR referees for their comments on an earlier version of this article.*

Côme Salvaire, Sciences Po, Center for International Studies (CERI), CNRS, 56 rue Jacob, 75006 Paris, France, come.salvaire@sciencespo.fr

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