but wait, just to return for a second, what's his attack on rhetoric? "and the vocabulary is remarkably stable. access, encounter, participation, care, community, publicness. these words can describe real social relations, but they can also become a way of avoiding the much less attractive question of what exactly has been made." the vocabulary is meant to signal to a liberalized urban class (not liberal, liberalized, will get to this later). this class takes the wording, applies it to mean something else, likely access or navigation, then literally bets on this being an object they're interested in. the reification is set so far ahead of its object, that the terms used to describe something can entirely be discarded. in fact, one could argue it's literally impossible to apply them, because the possible variety of experiences has nothing to do with exactly how society stratifies urban infrastructure.

then the claimability enters, and a political issue is raised around the pool as vidokle notes, some type of liberal project to give some black kids a day off on the pool gets politically scandilized by the media as supposedly being apartheid since the public sphere obviously is somehow seen as a civil setting where staging any type of social intervention is immediately symbolic even if it very much in reality isnt. the claimabilists have a basic concern, the degree to which something can support enforceable claims. they work for the pledgists, since enforcable claims are necessary to speculate on future interest, but again, this future interest itself is largely about the reproducability of an entire pre-calculated urbansphere, not about any actual single object.

so in that sense, vidokle is wrong, because there is not already a pool. i mean yes, the pool is definitely already there, but its not hyped, so its not liberalized, gentrified or psychaitrized, or at best its psychiatrized in the most viable least harmful last instance, just enough to function. by hyped of course it means, it remains unpledged, meaning its an entire, far lesser asset class. that's not really "social welfare" its more like, an assetificaiton of care, because the professional class is in charge of it. of course, it doesnt have to be, but really weird networks at least in the first world govern the assets already and probably already govern how objects are distributed, and they are weird partially because they are extremely reflective of social domination and have intolerably cynical mechanisms of operation. but back to why there aren't already pools as assets, that's because every new pool contests to become the first "really" gentrified product since commodities in general have the charged capacity to scale and lift or otherwise become virtual in weird ways, but beyond that point, even old civil objects can become re-hyped.

attacking anything visible or intentional is the right way to do things, as vidokle does (i mean it). blaming others for having ambitions, that is a move in modernity that will always make sense, because due to the yieldability recurrent in reification, everything we build will consistently be over-represented, and anything well-marinated, with the right degree of representation, is already probably corrupted by the least passionate class, that already treats passion and labour and labour as the most tolerable less eccentric set of actions possible. there is almost a theory of labour as any action that can be properly quantified to the degree that it becomes entirely un-hyped, or in other words, removed from enough assetification to become literally unpledgable, with no promise for better future returns or interests.

in this case, it is an ultimate claim on belonging, which tends to cheapen and be inflated as a result. but labour itself also becomes through the machine theory of value as pasquinelli notes, a self-organizing calculation of future labour agreements or even a technology that rules over its own divisions and so on. but, and so, the over-representative objects are more like arbitrage, they are kind of like civil objects trying to become something else. and in a broader sense, this is all of contemporary art, because its really actually about presenting either events or objects in a way that with enough charge can become commodities, and thats what its all about. with enough hype, one day exhibitions on a regular basis will be able to be swept up by corporate headbrands and find their way into the main art gallery, the supermall, and get their own officially legislated sactimonionized room with all the lights and setups they need. alas, a pool is not an exhbition, but it is clearly still trying to be an artistic object.

vidokle's complaint is that art institutions borrow the visible form of social infrastructure and drop the obligations. a possible response to him, it's of course not that literally civi institutions have been assetified, but a public or governmental problem is no longer a safe bet for that. the economy of communication can become its own virtuality engine. let's try to optimize suffrage, lets see how that goes for us. who are we taking care of, what about those stuck in their apartments partially immobile? "how many resources do we have?"

these are already all questions that point to how the civic crushes the alienated more than it helps them. think about it this way, the city as a dome that sits just besides wars, sometimes hoping they can take the city into the zone where it is the prestiged land between the problem and the solution, just a hanging zone for the alienated. but a civic institution is not a promise for welfare within or outside urban infrastructure, never really was. especially given that most governmental programmes are now non governmental on the level of organizational tactics, and super-governmental on the level of finance. if government means solidified or democraticized public interests, a governmental programme is actually a superliminary, a hosted agent in its own right, even before it becomes involved in trading pledges through investing in assetification as a social technology.

in skopje, halkbank does the same thing but without civic infrastructure, simply through messaging and sponsorship. but sponsorship itself becomes an urban layer, because it overcodes the city's basic vision of itself, so it's really more like, reification materializing as a message, because it can't yet materialize as a commodity. there is no walking halkbank robot, or a piece of cash you can take out to piss like a dog, or a strip of interest that can flow from the ceiling, or money trees only ubertree premium users can use, but as fellow e-flux poster david banks says in "where you live?", the uberification-gentrification split runs on that idea, that the asset eventually needs to acquire globality, but also to acquire a split in how survival functions even for civilians, because the upward/virtual pull of commodities creates genocidifications (basically, mutations that slowly create passive over-time suffering by pulling in/organizing society in a way that benefits what poliks calls empire aka the abuse of capitalism's abstractions) that arbitrize social division itself (literally, likely is a complicated infrastructural networked divider that hands everyones fate in), basically, increasingly absurd reasons for why a gentrified reification behaves differently from a liberal reification. the liberal subject itself asks, "why am i competing?", makes up the reasons, then visits an institution that can hand the answer for a price, a civil price.

the site was chosen because the lotus fountain is the main inspiration for the visual identity of halk ez, the bank's package for 16 to 24 year olds. halkbank's corporate communications director described it in one breath as long-term outdoor branding for the halk ez platform and as "creating value that stays, for the city, for young people, for all of us". the artist called the fountain "a symbol of her childhood, of love, rebelliousness and belonging." of course, a symbol of love and belonging should, ideally, contain the love necessary for people to love it, or the belonging necessary for people to feel that it belongs there. now, you can't win public support in one day, but you can also trivialize it, and in this instance, it doesn't matter what others say. of course, the problem isn't just that the grafitti is corporatized art that looks like a google display image, the issue is that it's in the way of anyone that looks at it by design. its in the way because it wants to be in the way, which makes it the most invasive. this is why an accidental, unplanned, unservicable grafitti is far less reifying of the experience of actually seeing the grafitti.

those who claim these objects, believing they are fighting against pledgability, create more future vested interest just by actually extending these otherwise useless, dead objects in the public sphere, and hypercharging all the available hype into them. there is nothing that contemporary urban objects dread more than a lack of attention. hell, cover our eyes with them, and every living part of us, they would fade the fastest the harder we ignore them, and there is no chance that the cultural acceleration associated with the slopification market of value wouldn't basically cover the whole earth with fake memorabilia, artifical sentiment, possibly an attempt at some type of vested interest. you live in a city, everyone screams at you because they don't know why they exist and are trying to figure out, and it all becomes this game of hyperinflated innocence.

lets return to germany, because there is more, and some stuff even vidokle leaves out. flussbad berlin is this weird project that tries to get all these frenzied germans to swim in the public river, a proposal for a 835-metre public swimming stretch in the spree canal between "schlossplatz and the bode museum". swimming there has been banned since 1925, and a vote on opening the spree is set for 20 september (last verified in may) in the berlin house of representatives, which is actually in a bit over two weeks from the moment this text is being written.

and the detail the essay leaves out: the volksbad, open from 7 august until early october and otherwise free to the public, had also set aside slots for the street social work charity gangway and for flussbad berlin. so a pool appeared in front of a theatre for two months and gave a programme slot to the people who have spent twenty-eight years trying to make swimming in berlin legal. this is of course because, a yield needs a pledge, but a pledge doesn't necessarily need a claim. the city can fund an ngo, the ngo can fund a project, this project can be connected to an already existing civic object, the public can be a part of this problem, and those who claim parts of these objects don't actually determine the whole process. why swim somewhere, and why not? why swim anywhere at all, why not in front of the theatre? why not just turn homes into swimming pools? if suddenly that becomes yieldable, it should be promoted and integrated into civil life. there is no protection that can stop a yield, but there is every protection that can stop a claim, and that's the real way public life is organized. it's organized so well, that everything that isn't public life is a private bid. there is nothing half-public anymore.

what is the proof of this? well there is no real way to tell, because by the time you look outside, everything ideology discards and doesn't transform becomes increasingly arbitrary signage without ever being a symbol, but every new asset is a symbol, and it's territory comes with anything you could possibly pledge, because yielding is already the default mode of new urban development, but pledging isn't necessarily so. in germany again, same region, "manifesta 16 ruhr runs from 21 june to 4 october across duisburg, essen, gelsenkirchen and bochum, transforming twelve abandoned post-war church buildings into communal spaces meant to foster dialogue, community cohesion and artistic innovation". admission is free at all twelve venues, the working title is "this is not a church," and the proposition is that the buildings might become exhibition spaces and whatever other civic meeting space is designated as necessary. a church is already a surviving artifact of what would be a half-public space if they still existed in any functional way, of course whilst no longer being a half-public mode of life.