Technique urbanistique et fiction opérationnelle
Authors: Goldblum Charles 
Published: October 2016

Town-Planning policy and operational fiction.

An international expert on traffic matters in a city considered technically perfect in its conception and operation is fascinated to discover that a political conflict has developed there between two factions. His activities take on a political coloration in spite of himself, as if he were being manipulated like a piece on a chess-board. The metaphor (the «as if» aspect) is exposed and denounced by the expert himself. Unfortunately, the chess-game turns out to be the reality, and he himself, the traffic expert, is the knight, the most mobile piece on the board. This tale, told in a novel by J. Brunner entitled The Square of the City, serves as introduction to an essay on town-planning technique, rationality and the state, along the lines indicated below. The technician and the developing crisis of technique. Does the current malaise, as described by the technicians of planning and development, act as a factor provoking a crisis of technique itself ? — 2. From this angle, should the crisis be regarded as producing a «new» field of technique — a contradictory and extensive field of choice and of give-and-take where the technician finds himself in the position of one of the stakes ? — 3. The mirror-field appears to offer the technicians no longer the idealized image of the rationality in which he loved to reflect (or be reflected) and to move (or be seen moving), but rather the polymorphous outbreak of the conflict. Is this an advance sign of the end of technology, of the coliapse of the technological rationality ? Perhaps what we are witnessing here is the onset of a new species of legitimation in which technology would play upon the developing crisis of the technicians in order to favor the deployment of its own forces, its own categories of thought ? The magic of rationality : technological ideality and rhetorical techniques.

1. Over and above the concept of the technician working in the field of rationality and constantly reasoning about reality, there is a kind of magic procedure that operates in the area of prevision, considered more as an area of the perfectible than of the possible. Hovering over it all is the idea of the basic human imperfection of the world — of the incompleteness of a rationality that abhors a vacuum, legitimating both its necessary technological fulfillment and the necessary failure of its ideal-type. — 2. Does the magic of the mirror — which acts by the magic of words and comes down to the ritual of the programmed choice : the rhetoric of programs in which the politician, regardless of his place on the chessboard , becomes a technician of needs — do anything more than feed a huge game of signs, of interchangeable symbols, in which all references are finally confounded ? The paradox of the technician and the experience of limits : The State and the vicissitudes of rationality. 1. Can a «habitus» of the state be discovered in its differential expressions and is it connected with the technological logic ? Or is there rather a «locus solus», confined within its territorial limits and hierarchies ? These two versions of the same question can be combined in the following one : in the era of technological reproduction, does not every state tend to proliferate wherever it plays a role on the level of technology ? Does not regional planning operate in that space where the centralism of the state (whether or not the political system be centralized) «lossens up» the better to proliferate ? — 2. The will to confine (or to delimit) the state within its boundaries, even while such proliferation is under way, might well constitue little more than a kind of show set-up enabling it to operate as a magic center from which one could, in line with the technological model, define the rules of its know-how, of its accepted customs. — 3. The technocratic face that makes its appearance here corresponds then to a sort mirror-play of the planning mechanism referred to above, by which the politician could achieve, through the technocratic state, the technician's frustrated essence. The conflict of logics and the logic of conflict. 1. Does the inability of mathematical logic to solve the problems raised by the technological aspects of regional planning and development result in the resort to a logic of failure, of an eternally-expected defeat, since positive achievement requires something more than a beautiful but abstract design ? — 2. The supposed conflict, whether in the introjected form of an identity crisis for the technicians or in the reactivation of social bodies (the action of utilizer's groups, of environmental defense groups, of ecology movements) would then seem to constitute a moment of energy recycling : the moment when failure-behavior assumes the form of a productive force. — 3. The postponed production of technological logic, its momentary suspension on the conflict-torn stage of political legitimation, points up a double tendency : The entrance of the technological into the logic of representation, no longer merely through the underlying categories (subject/objet, man/nature), but also from the viewpoint of their political operationally ; the entrance of the political into the logic of representation, not merely in the sense of representativity, but also in the sense of its underlying categories.