Fall 2022
Laboratories of Elsewhere
Excerpt from a paper in Ecologies Proseminar
Graduate School of Design
Harvard University
It is the deferral of the presence - when tea, tires, alcohol, makeup, clothing and electronics diffuse through the limits; while some smoke sheesha, others laugh; some bribe the checkpoints, others dodge the landmines; some get blown away with explosions, yet the folklores of the outlaw continue to chime through the air enroute.(1) An unauthorized aberration has infiltrated the state. Beware, the fissure is slowly leaking the closure of its totality.(2) The pests and diseases are beginning to crawl along and across the margins, crafting subversive choreographies through informal, individual and collective networks. They are thriving and breeding on the fringes- the epigenetic peripheries that produce and sustain emergent forms of governance, extralegal economies and intractable patterns and routes for livelihood.(3) Seduced to its center and its stale bureaucratic lethargy, the state apparatus is structurally blind and inherently ignorant to these peripheries.(4) Therefore, these margins become critical sites of organizational mockery where the finitude of the dubious statehood is questioned. We are precisely interested in these illicit ruptures devised through structural obscurity and interfacial irregularities that outrageously defy static repertoires of state reason. These sporadic, yet passionate cybernetic derangements of the state apparatus compose extra-state infrastructures of the outlaw and produce habitats of lies. They engender lunatic temporalities and materialities that are deliberately inscribed with misbehavior through the quotidian. How do the extra-state actors co-create these socio-spatial configurations of disobeyance? How do these experiments on the edge that erupt with spontaneous, frugal infrastructures of malfunction. How do these borders recalibrate time through improvisational temporal registers that are innately erratic and contingent? How is the state conjured and negotiated on these peripheries? How do we create modalities to articulate this deranged urbanism?
Brenner, in his Thesis of Urbanization dismisses the intellectual frameworks that presuppose a territorial discreetness of the urban and settle-ments and read it as a completed process. This necessitates a reorientation of the gaze towards the process rather than the outcome of urbanization, which suffers that static interpretation of a city.(5) A methodological and theoretical obstacle here, however, is the capacity of the political and institutional apparatus to register movement. Movement is classically defined on the basis on points that delineate a path. However, the points possess irreducible statis. Thus, this immobility of the coordinate system of spatial programming misrepresents the migratory figures who permanently lack this fixity of social and territorial membership.(6) Therefore, we ask - how can we disrupt the synoptic view of urban as possessing a certitude of completeness, and devise a legibility towards geographies of un-settlements?
Re-situating ourselves on the periphery, instead of on the center, we intend to offer a reorientation towards contemporary urbanism as relational and soft heteroglot dipped in legal ambiguities and networked through trans-national webs of capital, labor and infrastructure. In the pursuit to create disturbances that disrupt the complacent regimes and hegemonies of modernity, we hope to tune with epistemology of planetary errors and relational subjective syntaxes that produce these vibrant, global laboratories of elsewheres.
References:
1. Scott, James C. 2020. Seeing like a State. Veritas Paperbacks. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
2. Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984, The History of Sexuality. New York, Pantheon Books, 19781988.
3. Ibid.
4.Scott, Felicity D. Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architecture of Counterinsurgency. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
5. Neil Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization,” (Berlin: Jovis, 2014), 14-30, 181-217
6. Nail, Thomas. 2015. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University PRess.
Image Citations:
Aram Karim, DARST: http://darstprojects.com/projects#/smugglers