Parking and
subjectivity.
Notes on Parasite Parking towards a symbiotic public

Is urban infrastructure made by autonomous individual subjects for autonomous individual subjects? Was it ever created for the human subject at all?

Following Michel Foucault, we can claim that urban infrastructure is a form of power over human subjects. Those who decide where streets should be built and where people may and have to walk, sit, park, enjoy themselves or not, exercise power over bodies, gestures, identities, subjectivities – lives. But not only the autonomous decision of an absolutist sovereign produces lives, but those infrastructures, as dispositifs, do that too. When the “Roi-Soleil’ Louis XIV’s built grand avenues in Paris as a symbol of his power, it literally made the space for the French Revolution1 showing not only that humans can transform their environment, but the environment itself shapes human subjectivity.

Questions arise: When will those streets become revolutionary and how? One answer could be that infrastructure becomes revolutionary when it transforms into a threshold, becoming open and an opening for something new– a space where oppressed subjects can articulate themselves and the streets themselves no longer simply serve power, but not yet a tool for freedom. This is the moment created by a parasitic practice, as a form of intervention, as in Jakob Wirth’s and Alexander Sacharow’s artistic project Parasite Parking, where an object, namely “a multifunctional platform camouflaged as a parking space”2 gains the ability to change our urban environment by disturbing the seemingly clear differentiation between private and public space; public and private property. There is power in the non-human entities of which our society and our public space is built. Parasites, as Michel Serres and Bruno Latour elaborate, become tokens of agency, empowering objects and disarming subjects, transforming networks of power.

Therefore, I would like to consider the non-human agents involved in the parasitic transformation. When an ambiguous object was able to create the threshold space of the parasite, it claimed itself a form of agency. What is more, it did so because it entered into relation with other agent infrastructures that prevail in the city: the parking space itself, and the hybrid car subjects that engage with parking spaces. Understanding the potential of the parking space, as provoked by Parasite Parking, entails understanding it as a more than human space.

With the lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, the shortage of parking space in residential areas of bigger German cities became obvious. There are more cars than parking spaces. This is not an exciting statement, but it shows that, while everyone had to go to work, cars were circulating and the parking spaces were frequently used by different cars in alternation.
Things changed as people could not go to work anymore and cars had to stay at home with them. Parking spaces in residential areas became a rare good and showed social and economic differences. Meanwhile, near office buildings, prisons, cinemas, or wherever so-called normal people are not at night or during lockdown, vast empty spaces appeared.

Most German cities’ infrastructure after World War II was not designed for humans, but for cars, even though humans drive cars. Cars became objects of a specific modern understanding of subjectivity, and thus they were driven by specific modern subjects. We live in cities built for modern subjects which could be described as hybrids of humans and cars. Those human-cars make politics and form hard material urban landscapes. But while people can change their subjectivity quite quickly, in a matter of generations, cities cannot change their infrastructure as fast as people transform. Younger generations in big cities often do not even have a driver’s license anymore.

Therefore, those parking spaces are nothing more to human-cars than … parking spaces. The mentioned entities park their cars in those marked spaces, to transform themselves into “only humans,” leaving their car-part behind, and producing, in that, an object, a car, which at the moment has no use. It disappears. Who would think constantly of their cars if they go for a shopping trip into the city or to meet some friends in a different town, remembering their parked cars all the time? This is not how we work – and that is what Martin Heidegger implies in his tool-use analysis: we only think of things when we are using them if they malfunction. Moreover, for the car, we become car-humans when we drive, and we remain car-humans when we plan a new city quarter, a hotel, etc. because we think about our better part – the car – so much, and at the same time ignore it so strongly, that it becomes invisible. In fact they are very visible indeed. Namely on the streets.

The same goes for the parking space. We do not think about the hundreds and hundreds of spaces in the city, in the streets where we walk, shop or work, not until we need a parking space when arriving (late) to an appointment, a job interview or a date. Then parking spaces, as a rare good, become visible to us car-humans who recognize our entanglement with and dependence on them, while simultaneously repressing that feeling: we are subject to parking spaces. We do not want to see them dominate us. Instead, we get angry about the city’s politics’ making planning decisions that are not suitable for us car-humans.

Parking spaces are two-fold material-semiotic signifiers: they firstly signify the space for the car, showing us if we (our car) will fit or not. In doing so, we become car-humans as the car is an extension of our body and mind. Secondly, they signify the subject plus or minus that extension. They remind us that humans are not enough, rekindling the old philosophical question: what is a human? A chicken without feathers? An animal with or without a car?

Finally, we cannot imagine what else to do with those parking spaces, once we aren’t car-humans anymore. And as usual, we forget that we humans aren’t the only entities in the game. The world, even if we build it that way, is not only for us. We have to share the public space.

So the question arises: what would other species and entities do with the parking space? What is such a parking space to others?

In most cities parking spaces are built on public space and for the public. But who is the public? You guessed it: car-humans. In a world where cars aren‘t subjectivizing anymore, that public space could be shared with non-human and other human entities, not only with cars and their owners. Those parking spaces could become spaces for creativity, social engagement and unpredictable encounters with the other.

In advancing precisely such other uses, “Parasite Parking” reveals the parking space as a space beyond its car-human inflection. The project used a platform the size of a parking space, slightly larger than a car. But on that same surface, a dinner happened, or a game, a talk with an audience; the same space became a bedroom and kitchen. The space could lay flat or be populated by a topography of modular furniture, surfaces offering opportunities of use (intended primarily for humans); it densified the strip between the sidewalk and the active road, in cases, it extended the sidewalk– with its own complex meaning– or created a new private wedge between them, making the spaciousness of this poorly signified area emerge. There were power relations too, that the object shifted or exposed just by dodging the fixed relation of use prescribed between car-humans and parking. As it opens up the visible possibilities of the parking space, this intervention may help us see the features we naturalize or ignore as car-humans.

Imagine plants and insects: the space could feel like a vast space to inhabit. A whole world to live in. As humans transform their surroundings it depends on their form of subjectivity to which extent they include (or exclude) other humans and non-humans.

Every entity has its own view and entanglement with their environment. The environment for car-humans is different from the environment of ants, even if they share the same space, the parking space. They do not even have to meet each other, so different are their environments. Their worldview is shaped by their ant-being and car-human-being. When we understand parking spaces this way, we may see them as ecological urban spaces.

Parking spaces are not only environments for other entities but ecological objects in themselves. In a philosophical approach focused on relations we must understand subjectivity, in this case, not only as car-humans but as car-humans-parking-space. The subject consists of three parts, all related through domination, production, and ideology.

In this complex, the ideology of the parking space is capitalistic in the sense that everyone has an equal chance to conquer that space with their car. The ideology of the car is that it can bring you anywhere and be positioned on hold for your next ride. And finally, the human’s ideology is that they can control and use cars and parking spaces without becoming any different in their subjective essence.

What is lost in translation is the response-ability between human and non-human entities.
In that case, parasites come in handy: they help us to understand to which gods we are subjected. As the Serresian parasite docks into the existing language of the parking space to open it up for its own different action, it displaces the car-god. Through undermining, we understand in which ideological and therefore symbolic orders we are entangled and with whom we are entangled: non-human entities, most of the time. This also means that we humans are hosts for parasites like the car but can use that parasitic agency against our own exploitation of public space.

Reclaiming public space with a platform camouflaged as a parking space is at least two fold: it uses the symbolic structure of the parking space against the car-human as well as against that same symbolic meaning. Parasite Parking reclaims rare space in densely built cities and deconstructs the car-human-subject by giving it the opportunity to become something or someone else: maybe a plant-human growing flowers in that space, or any other subject, or even a form of society integrating human and non-human actants and objects.

To rethink the parking space as an ecological urban space, we have to deconstruct the gods and the symbolic orders of our subjectivity, not in order to purify the object “parking space,” but to force us to think again, to think about what surrounds us and with whom we engage in subjectivity. Parasite Parking, understood as a strategy, is a way to pry open the box of significations/relations between car-humans and parking space. Whatever will make us see this space as a room full of other entities and relations in which we position ourselves as humans. Becoming parasites in our own cities helps to develop a symbiotic public. The key is phrased by Donna Haraway and truly democratic: a symbiotic public rises through “making-with”3, getting involved with others, as in those emerging spaces through Parasite Parking.

The following political practice to rethink the parking space as an ecological urban space, is to deconstruct the gods and the symbolic orders of our subjectivity, not in order to purify the object “parking space,” but to force us to think again, to think about what surrounds us and with whom we engage in subjectivity. To transform our urban environment, we need to be ready to transform our subjectivity.

References

1. Schwarte Ludgar. “The city – A popular Assembly.“ Producing Places, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, no. 5/1 (2014): 73 – 84.
2. Parasite Parking, Guerilla Intervention, Chicago, 2021, Alexander Sacharow and Jakob Wirth: www.parasite-parking.net
3. Paul B. Preciado beschreibt auch das Einnehmen von Testosteron als ‚hacking‘: „Some are taking hormones as part of a protocol to change sex, and others are fooling with it, self-medicating without trying to change their gender legally or going through any psychiatric follow-up. They don’t identify with the term gender dysphorics and declare themselves „gender pirates,“ or „gender hackers“ (2008, 55). Testosteron wird zu einem Code, der die Materie des Körpers von innen verändert.
4. Lembcke 2019
5. Lembcke 2019, 34
6. Braidotti 2014
7. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham/London: Duke UP 2016.