Keywords

Something Else Besides

At the height of urban India’s initial stage of the pandemic, there was much attention to the figure of the desperate migrant setting off by foot, often thousands of kilometers from their home villages. Faced with the shutdown of factories operating on non-existent margins and the loss of accommodation as well as livelihood, there was little choice but to head toward settings where they could, as was the common refrain, “figure things out.” Usually caught within the repetitive rhythms of 14-hour shifts with little disposable income to circulate beyond the itineraries of work to hostel to work, there were few opportunities for these workers to grasp the larger setting in which their labor was situated, even when they had resided in a particular city for years. Income was to be remitted elsewhere, as was the directionality of everyday communication, with distant parents, children, and lovers. The artefacts of cheap consumption were usually available at the factory gates.

There were those who, for whatever reason, amid many, did not venture “home,” who remained in the city, even as they were compelled to set off in random circuits in the search for temporary food and shelter. Unable to be stably absorbed into any economic function or provisioning mechanism, these workers wandered across a landscape of details—a sudden burst of arguments between street sellers desperate for a sale, the glittering of rust on an abandoned car in the late afternoon sun, the lines of flowing water from a cracked pipe. All of these details became roadmaps, pointers to take particular directions, and then the discovery of empty schoolyards where one could sleep or the back stairwell where things were half-discarded.

For those who had rarely exercised voice, this landscape of rampant detachment, of all of the ways in which people, buildings, and materials were not connected to each other, provided a tentative platform for their growing confidence to strike up conversations with various passers-by, offer outlandish propositions about money-making schemes, or most usually to comment upon some element of the other person that had imbued them with great significance. Without apparent commitments or attachments, without the luxury to compare themselves to others and refusing the obligation to always think of the others to whom they had been attached, these excursions revealed all varieties of spaces that didn’t seem to be committed or attached to the uses they would seem to purport.

This was not only a matter of schools being turned into vast communal houses, markets into mathematics classrooms for orphaned teenagers, shrines into all night popular political assemblies, or government tax offices into repair shops for homemade inventions. Rather, they were all those spaces in the midst of things, within crowded thoroughfares, jetties, underpasses, hallways, and arenas that didn’t quick fit with what was happening around them. Spaces ever so slightly out of joint, where the anomalous, the marginal, while clearly visible remained ever so slightly indetectable, enough for moments of rest, the rehearsing of some kind of weirdness, a base to build a modicum of confidence to venture forward or back. Instead of being preoccupied with figuring out what would become of them, what would be their final destination, these workers saw themselves like these spaces ever so slightly out of joint; saw themselves as accompaniments to the “normal” goings-on; saw themselves as neither adding nor subtracting, rectifying, or disturbing, but as something else besides what was taking place.

What would happen if we viewed figuring as involving accompaniment, or as always also accompaniment; something that does not discernibly alter the visual and sensual dimensions of an event or entity, that remains apparently aloof from its configuration, but which nevertheless prompts a reorientation of view and engagement; which at least raises a degree of uncertainty about what it is we are confronting in an appearance that otherwise has all the hallmarks of an integrity and coherence. For all of the anxiety often demonstrated about securing definitive boundaries for self and other, for collective lives suffused with sufficient commonality to ensure reciprocal recognition and mutual obligations, accompaniment is permanently out of place, disinterested in whether that which is accompanied assumes a particular figure or not.

For, accompaniment means something that operates aside, on the side, that does not entail obligation, nor a manifestation of mutual desire. If I accompany someone, it does not mean that the person accompanied could not accomplish the task on their own. Someone can still perform the “solo” without missing something essential. Accompaniment is a supplement, that shows up, now and then, goes along for the ride. It is not unaffected by the going along, but it is not essentially invested in the outcome of the task at hand; it does not constitute a debt to which the recipient is owed, even though such a debt economy might ensue from a particular accompaniment.

We are accompanied by an array of “companions” throughout the urban environment. Rather than seeing the built environment as the stage through which to exercise our privileges, or as the concretization of aspirations, needs, and accomplishments, the built environment acts as an accompaniment to whatever we do. It pays attention to our practices; it bears witness to our travails and attainments. There is always something not used or only partially used, something that remains just out of reach, something barely noticeable or deemed irrelevant that accompanies all that is standard operating procedure, all that are demarcated, sectored, and zoned spatial arrangements. Accompaniment is a submergent infrastructure that suggests something else than what is recognized.

Figuring is often construed as a process of things “closing in on themselves,” of accentuating the distinction between figure and ground through which the outlines of a stable entity might be construed; stable in the sense that we might come to know what to expect of it, that is rendered in a form recognizable through multiple iterations, that holds “its own” amid conflicting expectations. Figuring closing in on itself suggests the constitution of a target, something to take aim at, as it also embodies its own aims, and thus further suggests the primacy of straight lines, grids, and probabilities. The generalized conversion of the world into multiple targets, where specific populations are targeted for specific policies and probabilistic action, clearly has intensified the compression of space-time, as everything is reachable through less dense and circuitous mediations (Bishop 2018; Valayden 2016). The generalization of the commodity form and its elicitations and compressions of singular affect turn individuals into entire worlds and, at the same time, fracture them into infinitesimal pieces of codes, biomes, body parts, behaviors, and inclinations (Law 2015; MacKenzie 2016) . Just as the urban, for example, is populated by an exponential explosion of objects, data points, and niche markets, spaciousness is reduced, space closes in on itself.

Acknowledging the accompaniment of figuring is then a restitution of spaciousness, a sense of individuation, of contributing a sense of the improbable to worlds fading in their distinctiveness. As Stiegler (Stiegler 2018) reminds us, the continuous updating of the figure through its subjection to repeated runs of relational calculation, of figuring its constant re-positioning in terms of shifting relations to a constantly expanding set of “neighbors”—of things and events that might have relevance to its operations—produces a generalized blurring. This is a sense where it is not only difficult to figure things out by getting a hold of the figures that might be involved, but where figuration itself dissipates in the profusion of the technical. Rather than zeroing in with the precision of determining the definitive coding and composition of figures, accompaniment potentiates the spaciousness required for figuring to endure its availability to digital architectures and the concomitant simulations and fabrications that can ensue from algorithmic re-composition.

As Denise Ferreira da Silva (Ferreira da Silva 2018) demonstrates in her play of figuring, of subjecting the figures of patriarchy, femininity, and racial identity to their own algebraic inversions, these figures can be decomposed in ways that enable a sense of incalculable spaciousness to emerge. If the figuring of specific bodies is based on contractual, juridical arrangements—the terms of recognition, rights, responsibilities, and value—then potentialities of what exists are appropriable only through extraction, and thus the exercise of violence. The figuring of the juridical-ethical edifice of the properly human figure takes place as propriety through property; in other words, through the proper management of property that is fundamentally unruly, and in need of management. Black life as property, thus, has existed as that fundamentally unruly, chaotic potentiality that needs to be properly managed so that its resource can be extracted and deployed. This potentiality is subject to contract, to a particular set of equations where specific figures embody specific rights of management and sets of obligations. The ability to manage property becomes then the exercise of liberty. What da Silva attempts is a mathematics extricated from contractual relation that frees the figuration of the calculable to incomputable potentialities, imbuing a sense of spaciousness to the process of figuring.

Even within the confines of the contractual relationships which defined the black body as a captured object on which the infliction of violence was necessary in order to bring its potentialities to life, the subsequent deformation of the figuration of gender, its reduction to the amorphousness of flesh, posited possibilities of extensionality of and among bodies that both portends the fungibility of human life yet, at the same time, potentiates other more uncertain formulations of bodies not easily decipherable according to the convention terms of liveliness and scale. For across traditions of American black thought, the sense of accompaniment has been an omnipresent characteristic of everyday life. Rather than viewing the relationships of bodies, land, animals, plants, and other materials as part of an integral ecology or integrated metabolism, there was rather the sense of these things accompanying each other, passing through and among each other; where each could be “called upon” as some available exteriority to lend a hand, to get through a particular conundrum (King 2019; McKittrick 2006; Wynter 2003). Each had its autonomy, its situatedness in other worlds, but at the same time was always on hand, even though what exactly was called upon was often never clear, rarely assumed the figuration of a divine force or a specific identity, but even so, whose presence could be recognized. Across the manifestations of “long walks to freedom,” to cellphone recordings of police violence, to the multitude of minor refusals to being pinned down in the incarceration to proper relations, black lives have accompanied each other in the ebbs and flows of a collective figuration that does not consent to any particular set of recognitions.

In a not dissimilar fashion, Dhanveer Brar (Brar 2021) encourages thought on an ecology of black generativity and constraint far beyond the “caricatured landscapes of post-apocalyptic urbanism.” Grasping the mineral interiors of three instantiations of black electronic music and their embodied sensory intelligence and antagonisms, he focuses on the way in which music operationalizes specific capacities to navigate and refigure the confluence of racialized precarity and enduring capacities to create life beyond the normative vernaculars. Chicago, Detroit, and London are rendered as transversal, oscillating planes of urbanity curating and dispersing sounds, propositions and maneuvers, which not only take blackness to the world, but create an experimental world from blackness that reverberates within the midst of unequivocal oppression, providing an enhanced spaciousness. He calls attention to the ways then that urban residents are living in contexts that both exceed the figures through which we understand them yet which penetrate our very core as metabolism, infection, and vibration. Not simply reducible to spirits of resistance, resilience, or reserves of long-honed creative practice, the navigational instruments operationalized through black music are instead the concerted deployment of machines, reinventions of sonic architectures, as well as the deliberate and systematic workings of bodily and cognitive capacities, whose figurings are less the production of image but force.

Urban Gathering and Arrangements

In Surat l-isra, Allah says, "If mankind and the djinn gathered in order to produce the like of this Qur'an, they could not produce the like of it, even if they were to each other assistants." While pointing to a gathering beyond any specific gathering as that which produces the Quran, implicitly this surah raises the question of what kind of gathering could that be among humans and djinnsFootnote 1, with humans representing a particular consciousness and djinns perhaps embodying what could be called a “worldly sensibility” excessive of the registers of that consciousness.

In this accompaniment of djinn to human, gathering here is a conjunction of actions rather than the cultivation of a higher, interior consciousness. In bringing together the manifestations of distinct forms of sensing, not readily compatible, not readily translatable each to the other, there is a gathering that does not merge, does not integrate. It draws our attention to the ways in which complex urban environments are sensate agencies in and of themselves, even if such environments may not be clearly organized into a series of readily identifiable entities, machines, or agencies. It draws our attention then to the kinds of capacities and sensibilities embodied by particular environments and the use they make of and draw from particular forms of inhabitation and populations of inhabitants—both human and djinn.

This points to a critical question today: How do residents largely unanchored from their long-honed stabilities observe the situations that require from them new ways of seeing, new dispositions of circumnavigation? How do they attempt to reconcile their “blind spots,” to read themselves into the surrounds, into a background that senses their existence in ways inaccessible to them? How do they compose points of views, angles onto things capable of observing prospective trajectories across time and space—where observation is a process of composition that requires gathering up potential collaborators differentially distributed across personal networks and territories of operation?

To use Day and Lury’s (Day and Lury 2014) term, how do residents render, gather up, and turn over or turn out particular visualizations of their urban contexts and urban problems? Particularly in ways that publicize knowing when they do not know, and not knowing when they do, so that their liveliness is not fully captured by the particular and oscillating expectations of capitalist surveillance. With so many factors at different scales at work in rendering places knowable and subject to multiple interventions; with so many alternating interplays of shadow and light, how do residents of volatile, ever-shifting urban terrains garner a sense about how to move, what to do next?

So when I say that djinn might represent the accompaniment of a worldly sensibility to human will, I point to a sensibility that implicates a body or agent (as a unity of experience) in ways that exceed capture of, to or by any definitive institution. Mediated social-technical circuits are not subsumed to the intentionality of any one agent. Our agency, rather, is implicated through and by these circuits. This is an enactment of agency not bifurcated in terms of self and other, human and more-than-human. It is a mode of engagement with an environment not directed by conscious intention, but rather an intersecting of multiple operations. A body recursively incorporates the feelings generated by immersion in crisscrossing data streams into specific embodiments of observation, of attending to the surrounds that exceed the conventional vehicles of sensing or its distribution into the perceptible and imperceptible (Massumi 2017). This is what happens when human and djinn work together.

For our shaping, an enduring performance for the world always must operate through that which cannot be seen, and increasingly the deployments of information environments for purposes of surveillance and domestication make it urgent for there to be bodily operations that might remain imperceptible, under the radar (Citton 2017). As such, the rhythms of endurance are not about the resilience of human life, about the never-ending resourcefulness of a subaltern imagination. It is not about a virtuous general ecology that, in the end, works out a functional recalibration of elements each diminished in their own terms, each insufficient to the replenishment of the other. Rather, endurance also entails the actions of bodies indifferent to their own coherence, where bodies churn and stave off death in their extension toward a liveliness of things in general, and where bodies become a transversal technology, as gesture, sex, gathering, and circulation operate as techniques of prolonging (Wills 2016).

What is it that a person pays attention to in a world where so many things can be attended to; how does one create a spaciousness of operation when life can theoretically be moved and oriented in so many different directions. Here the notion of arrangements becomes critically important. Unlike the predominant use of assemblage to connote the intricate compositions of materials, events, forces, and entities that constitute the salient figure of subjectivity, particularly for urban operations, arrangement seems to decline the primacy of attention to composition and rather amplify acts of accompaniment. As normative protocols of relations remain largely tied to the contractual, to familial forms of obligation, or to the affective intensities of libidinal attachments and the reciprocities of friendships, arrangements, while folding in bits and pieces of conventional contextual categories and relational processes are not subsumed by any of them. In a reflection on the ways in which symbiosis and parasitism characterize relationalities of the biome and viral as metaphorical substrates of the human, Chun-Mei Chung (Chung 2020) points to arrangements as those “intelligence operations and complex linkages that are concealed, dark, secret, and challenging to see, rewriting internal and external boundaries.” While not precisely mapping onto the kinds of urban arrangements I invoke here, Chung, nevertheless, points to the ways in which arrangements straddle uncertain lines between the generative and debilitative, that do not announce themselves transparently as having particular objectives in mind, and which are not clearly mappable in terms of their reach or even in terms of what they do.

This is not to say that genealogies of arrangements are impossible to conduct. For years I have attempted to examine the ways in which production systems that entail vast subcontracting across hundreds of home-based workshops generate large volumes of clothing and hardware. These are certainly arrangements structured by brokerage, monopolistic control of supply and distribution chains, and exploitative pricing systems abetted by skewed regulatory frameworks. But the process of securing the stability of these arrangements, making sure every actor and component adheres to the specified transactions, also seems to entail a process of sporadic and largely indecipherable lateral relations, where workshops elaborate their own largely provisional distribution networks for off-the-grid productions, and where it is not clear who is in charge, nor how the operation in its entirety actually works. For here, little is consistent; sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t. This temporality of the maybe suggests not necessarily a deficit of integration, but a stuttering, a process amenable to interruption and detour, where the different workshops, their workers, the brokers, the stalls in the market where the “illicit” output is eventually sold, and the wildly fluctuating tastes of the usual consumers accompany each other with a looseness that suggest fortuity and chance rather than strategic planning.

In a large night market across multiple streets in Kebayoran Lama (Jakarta) that supplies meat and fresh produce to the hundreds of small local markets across the region, the daily functioning requires a well-orchestrated choreography of directing supply trucks into the market area, unloading the trucks and distributing the goods, of retrieving and setting up tables on which the produce will be displayed, of shifting goods around to meet the needs of regular customers, of extracting various market fees in which to pay off various local officials and police as the operations of the market are officially unsanctioned, and then of dismantling everything and cleaning a large swathe of otherwise public space—for by 8 a.m. there is absolutely no trace that this market even existed. Clearly all of the functions have to be interconnected, arranged, but on any given night those who were porters become sellers, drivers become cleaners, sellers become fee collectors, and so forth in a system that remains unspecified, reliant upon unforeseen initiatives that shift the division of labor around. The plausibility of these shifts are of course anchored in the eventual capacity of everyone involved to do every conceivable job, but there is no underlying reason why this has to be the case, or when it becomes the case. Each actor and function simply appears to accompany the other, both symbiotically but also with a fundamental looseness that detracts from the need for a coherent figuring of the organization of the market. Rather, the market seems held together on the basis of how easily it could fall apart.

Indeed, arrangements sometimes become visible only as they shift over time, when their stagecraft becomes apparent, in the taking to the stage of specific constellations of assessment, brokerage, mutual attentiveness, provisional rules, and collaborative practice. For example, when the implicit governance systems of migrant hostels, no longer articulated to the subsidies and salaries paid out by formal employers, have to shift to new arrangements of resources, social connections, livelihoods, and social identities. Place-based arrangements may be converted to more transversal collaborations; the application of specific lenses of institutional readings of given contexts may necessitate readjustments in the ways in which resources are allocated and adjudicated. Household functions may be redistributed across multiple locations, where a single address serves more the pragmatic function of having an address than representing a coherent household unit. Each re-arrangement has its own subjective condition, which lasts as long as it works, and where how long it works depends upon who is paying attention, in what ways, and for what reasons. Particularly during the pandemic year of 2020, when a slew of restrictions were placed on public mobility and the pursuit of everyday livelihoods, it became evident the extent to which the appearance of predominant forms of social organization were simply a veneer of rationalities that had little traction in the actual ways in which residents organized places to sleep, procedures for attaining and allocating available resources, and tacit rules for the use and distribution of space in ways that continuously contested clear divisions between the proprietary and non-proprietary.

Officially localities might be the conjunctions of formal households, property, zones, discrete institutional competencies, and authority relations, but when faced with exceptional conditions, they were then visualized not just as compensating for these conditions with special arrangements of all kinds, but simply extending, recalibrating, or improvising upon a social economy of off-the-grid arrangements that had already existed over time. While it is certainly possible to elaborate a symbiotic relationship between that official veneer and the plurality of makeshift arrangements that could be seen as underwriting them, it is more a matter of viewing them as mutual accompaniments, only loosely sutured in ways difficult to calculate. For in most respects, drawing upon Harootunian (Harootunian 2000), such arrangements are unremarkable, embodying little subjective depth and rather existing as a series of horizontal displacements, where one concrete manifestation does not clearly translate into any other.

Additionally, a sense of spaciousness can be produced through acts of refusal, of keeping things apart rather than putting things together. Instead of querying puzzles as pieces that must inevitably fit, there are relationalities that may maintain a sense of proximity among processes and problematics that are not necessarily resolvable through integration or synthesis. For example, if specific libidinal attachments remain salient in relationships to family, household, community, and state, what happens to libidinal economies as particular roles and responsibilities are refused. Rather than indicating social breakdown or disintegration, what happens when detachment simply signals a tacit refusal to “tie up” one’s desires into the expected formats. For example, what happens to the desires for familial affection when fathers refuse to attach themselves to the purportedly normative behaviors that constitute fatherhood; what happens when women concretely manifest indifference to the presence of men as an integral aspect of household composition? What happens when the role of “worker” no longer provides a valorized basis through which individuals identify themselves and their worth? What happens when localities refuse to reflect compliance to the prevailing standards of viability? How and to what extent are familiar obligations recalibrated in new terms or simply refused altogether? What kinds of arrangements mark a detachment from the normative tropes of socialization? Here arrangements as matrices of accompaniments do not so much constitute new coherent figures as they work through and around the vestiges of those no longer operative in the ways originally intended. Rather they function as ciphers marking a series of detachments that keep each element in view but without settling into stable forms of clearly delineated features or responsibilities.

Figuring the Extensions

The urban has long ceased coinciding with the figure of the city. If by the city we mean a densification of agglomerations among materials and bodies expressing distinct locational advantages, territorialization of accumulation, and the rise of intensely individuated performances of citizenship and self-fashioning. The city-form is a mode of reflexivity capable of territorially binding the intensities of relations to a coherent synthetic operation based on the integration of differentiation—that is, work detached from the primacy of household-centered economies, re-socialized as industrial labor, continuously elaborated through networks of servicing and management, abstracted as elements of financialized calculation, and availed increasingly individuated opportunities of consumption and social identification.

If the figure of the city disappears, or at least is partially dissipated in the extension of urbanization processes across more pluralized dispositions, through peripheries, hinterlands, corridors, conurbations, and regions, are there appropriate figures capable of marking, cohering, or imagining this process. The typical conventions have been those of volume, such as the “megacity” indicating exponential expansion, or that of a supplement, such as “urban region” as the city plus something else. “Urban periphery” has long been invoked as a way of marking a transitional or liminal space, as that which awaits the city’s “arrival,” or as a modality which transfers the city across space, the very means of its extensionality. Most contemporary theorization of these extensions, however, marks a disjuncture with the figure of the city and views their spatial histories as reflecting more dispersed, erratic, and polyvalent articulations (Keil 2018; Lefebvre 2014; Monte-Mór 2014; Schmid et al. 2018).

It is not a matter of extending the city into new territory but in the simultaneous intercalibration of very different logics of settlement and production, an interweaving of divergent tenure regimes, land uses, and modes of inhabitation that instead of settling into distinct patterns of agglomeration and inter-connectedness are continuously disturbed and re-oriented through additional spatial products and development initiatives. Here, the intensive contiguities among industrial estates, peasant farming, upscale mega-housing developments, the voluminous rollout of cheap pavilion housing, expansions of informal settlement, premium logistical infrastructure, and feral landscapes resist any clear governmental integration despite intricate spatial planning. Projects come and go, often with wildly diverse temporalities and efficacy; ongoing development is not a matter of whether past projects have proved viable or not as they are informed primarily by a sense of eventuality—that is, eventually whatever is developed will acquire some profitability even if the terms for that are not presently available. As such, it doesn’t matter the extent to which industrial zones, housing developments, and commercial estates may remain half-empty, for the addition of more spatial products is seen as engendering a new context for what already exists, in a constant re-positioning of the built environment into something else that may then prove key to a renewed sense of viability.

In Jakarta’s massively expanding urban region, emerging metropolitan areas such as Cikarang embody intensive mixtures of logistical apparatuses—internal ports, high-speed and light rail systems, new freeways and air cargo ports—new town developments, such as the present construction of 250,000 apartment units, six universities, ten hospitals at Meikarta, and an array of tens of thousands of migrant hostels, low-end housing and mid-level commercial zones spread across the metro. All of this is set as yet another iteration of residential and industrial development that has been underway for the past four decades. The subsequent diversity of layering and sedimentation that takes place intersects obdurate economic functions that co-exist with land uses and projects that have changed repeatedly over short time spans. While developments may be spearheaded by the combination of major landholders transitioning into major regional politicians, aided and abetted by the profusion of a new generation of small-time brokers, and Indonesia’s major real estate developments and financial institutions, the political and technical power brought to bear is unable to cohere these extensions within the conventional planning tools or protocols of speculation (Firman and Zul 2017; Herlambang et al. 2019; Shatkin 2019). Rather than work as a series of coherent synergistic or multiplier effects, the discrepant elements seem to simply accompany each other, all exerting some kind of influence in a semi-detached state, but without a clear sense of proportions involved.

For what might be considered subaltern actors in this region, there seems to be a strong reluctance to contribute to any coherent figuring of what is taking place, and rather an investment in capacitating the very looseness of relations among the discrepant elements of the built environment and the different logics of accumulation at work. Along the raised embankment of an irrigation canal that now separates corporately held agricultural land from the almost magical appearance of Meikarta, residents originally from the island of Madura, across from Surabaya, have long operated from hundreds of makeshift compounds, with their various assortments of junk, found and stolen items, including steel beams, bags of concrete, broken door frames, thousands of bolts and screws dismantled from who knows how many infrastructure projects. Renowned as artisans of the “useless” and providers of what anyone needs for almost any kind of project, the Madurese are the consummate archivists, rarely discarding anything, and talking about and arranging their “wares” in such a way as to propose interconnections among things that might often seem outlandish and impossible but nevertheless of potential value to an audience that seems to take many of these propositions sufficiently seriously to maintain these archivists in business. A row of cheap migrant hostels, for example, abandoned because of internecine conflict or simply bad positioning in face of flood drainage, can be completely dismantled in a matter of hours and the components reinserted in wide range of repairs, house extensions, junk markets, and small factories before the day is over.

The Madurese are not only collectors of materiality but also cheap jobs as well. They won’t usually do the jobs themselves because it impinges upon their sense of freedom, but collect them to be distributed to others—for example, particularly porters, janitors, cleaner, and security guards. The objective is not so much job-placement per se, but brokering connections among different jobs as part of an expansive information network, which circulates updates about what is taking place across different factories, construction jobs, internal customs ports, and service centers. Such a network not only facilitates the “just off the truck” acquisitions of materials or the ability to offer “quick solutions”—material inputs—to projects or operations facing unanticipated problems, but concretizes “off grid” relations among places and functions, that is, those that do not fit into any of the prevailing conceptions about how things and places are to be connected to each other.

This positing and materializing of “off grid” relations is not conducted within the register of realizing unexpected potentialities. It doesn’t concern itself with developing alternative worlds or inventive usages. Rather, it functions as intensive artificiality, even noise; a means of interrelating things not informed by a specific vision or even objective. It concerns an infusion of incomputable instrumentality in the intersection of the quotidian experiences of hundreds of “service” workers and laborers across a landscape characterized by moving things around, constantly improvising where they might fit, disrupt, and supplement operations of almost any kind.

The Madurese are constantly on the run. Even within their internal dealings along this irrigation canal, it is unclear what relationships one makeshift compound has with any other, or whether any “project” is simply the result of individual brokerage or some kind of intricate collective choreography among them. It is not clear whether or not a tacit moral economy of sharing markets, a complementing of distinct networks, or a fortuitous interweaving of competition is at work. What is evident is a very loose sense of any affiliation with property. Madurese are stereotypically known as thieves with almost extraordinary powers and agility, as well as being indiscriminate in terms of weighing the relative value of whatever they can get their hands on. Nothing is deemed either waste or luxury, even as they are known for driving a hard bargain around anything they attempt to get rid of. They certainly know the market price and how to set it. But any sense of propriety with property is far removed from daily operations that attempt to draw lines across the “backdoors” of nearly everything that exists in this area.

In amplifying the essential brokenness of the world, of things out of their proper place, no matter where they end up or how they are used, this economy goes beyond reparation to highlight how that brokenness suggests its own propositions devoid of the will to restore functionality. The Madurese, known for breaking the integrity of projects, repurpose elements from that brokenness to dispositions that they have little interest in defining, but rather seek to perpetuate a state of brokenness as generative of a continuous circulation of materials across different hands, different sites, and different uses.

Here, relations are proposed that are detached from obvious genealogy, that compress things conventionally viewed as impossible to be together, and that have no way of knowing whether they will endure or not. This techno-poetics of relationality implicitly addresses the fundamentals of urbanization itself, that is, as a process simultaneously human and inhuman; that does not proceed simply as an artifice of human will, but as a techne both with and without its own registers and affects (Simondon 2009; Simondon 2017). In other words, the technical dimensions of the relationalities of urbanization come from all over the place, and work in different degrees, proportions, and manifestations that come to be associated with it but also do not intrinsically belong to it. This is because there is no essential overarching figuration attributable to urbanization outside of its profusion of technical relationalities—its capacity to continuously repeat everything we might know about it, and upend itself at the same time.

Concluding the Surrounds

In the clamor of countervailing projects and logics at work in generating contemporary urban inhabitation and operation, what constitutes viable modes of figuring able to navigate the intricate physical and social landscapes of discrepant times and strange spatial juxtapositions? Instead of envisioning processes of urbanization as the unfolding of definitive forces of value capture, asset creation, and resource extraction, how are these albeit salient categorizations of spatial production accompanied by a growing multiplicity of entities and their exertions? Particularly at the extensions, just beyond what has customarily been purported to be “the real city,” it is increasingly evident that a continuous recalibration of “projects,” material inputs and residues, and altered ecologies of reciprocal causation are generating landscapes that exceed the salience of available vernaculars of analysis and intervention. Here, intricate landscapes of provisional sutures, half-lives, diffractions, disjuncture, compensation, and transience create unsettled urbanities and populations.

Here there is a play on the interrelationship between figure and (back)ground, even as this couplet is incessantly reproduced. On the one hand, it is clear what is taking place in these extensions of the urban, replete as they are with now easily recognized spatial products. We seem to know where they are going, even when it is likely they may never reach their “destination.” They hold forth a seemingly contradictory promise—that of a capacity to encompass greater numbers of persons into the predominant tropes of urban productivity; providing assets and opportunities, and enhanced logistical proficiencies; and a capacity for any particular instantiation of the built environment to be more than it appears to be. To be constantly fungible, re-doable, and where everything is eventually useful to someone. In this mix of standardization and singularity, figure and ground are constantly being reversed in order to accommodate the duality of this promise. To stand by this promise is not to adhere to its specific figuration but rather to the possibility of a figuring that eventually emerges from a background that cannot be mapped but to which one might be exposed.

For as many of the inhabitants of these extended urban regions I have talked with now frequently point out, it is important to pay attention to the background. For them, the background combines a willingness to suspend the judgment that what you see is what things are, an acknowledgment that beyond the immediacy of a person’s context that there is a field of vision that can be grasped and composed in excess of what is presented, and a belief that this willingness to see in a different way, a way that does not tie everything together into a coherent image, will enable the person to better navigate the ins and outs of everyday urban life. These processes of willingness, acknowledgment, and belief are then often crystalized into a particular working image and constitute a promise.

Thus, while dedicated genealogies may be capable of grasping how particular built environments, spatial dispositions, and fabric got to be the way they manifest themselves, there is something that eludes coherent narratives of development and prospective futures. These are spaces of intensive contiguity of the disparate—disparate forms, functions, and ways of doing things. They are replete with gaps, interstices, breakdowns, contested territories, and sediments of dissonant tenure regimes, financing, legalities, and use. Instead of being able to discern legible articulations among the details of composition, the proliferation of housing, commercial, industrial, logistical, recreational, entrepreneurial, and governmental projects are less subsumed into overarching logics of capital accumulation or neoliberal rationalities as they are “strange accompaniments” to each other, where nothing quite fits according to design, where things dissipate or endure without obvious reason, and where improvised alliances of use and rule continuously reshape what it is possible for any particular individual or institutional actor to do.

I call this mode of accompaniment, of not clearly discernible or translatable territories of operation, the surrounds. The surrounds constitute neither an explanatory context, nor relations of interdependency. They are not strictly geographical phenomenon nor temporal, but can alternate to varying degrees. The surrounds do not surround a given space, project, environment, or ecology as a boundary-limit or some constitutive outside. They are not some alternate reality just over there, just beyond the tracks, or the near horizon. Sometimes they are heterotopic, exceptional, intensely specific, hidden in plain sight, prefigurative, or dissolute. In all instances the surrounds are infrastructural in that they entail the possibilities within any event, situation, setting or project for something incomputable, unanticipated to take (its) place. While such surrounds have always existed within cities, the urban extensions amplify the ways in which they exert both a structuring effect in the rapid coverage of land with multiple projects and a by-product of the tensions and countervailing logics at work in the very construction and composition of these extensions.