"Insuppressible alliances" (Part 1 of 3): Hostile architecture, haunting histories, and the utopian impulse amidst the abandonment (and care-taking) of the poor

Is stone alive, if not in the literal or technical senses of animacy or sentience, then at least in effect or as affect? Stone speaks. What does it say?

Something must be done [...]. Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (such as with transatlantic slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is continuously denied […] In this, I think, Williams was also right to see that a certain melancholy or what John Berger calls ‘undefeated despair’ is bound to the work of carrying on regardless: to keeping urgent the repair of injustice and the care-taking of the aggrieved and the missing. - Avery F. Gordon, “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity,” borderlands 10:2, 2011.

Early 20th century discourse about vagrants, undesirable aliens, and “vagrant foreigners” [...] produced [...] “new categories of [illegal] people” [...] that cast particular people outside of systems of state aid and protection. [...] [P]ractices of illegalisation impress upon people, “the constant threat of removal, of being coercively forced out and physically removed [...] … an expulsion from life and living itself.” – Rayna Rusenko, “The Vagrancy Concept, Border Control, and Legal Architectures of Human In/Security,” Antipode 56:2 (2023): pp. 628-650.

So what does stone witness and then say to us?

While observing the geological strata of the Isle of Aran in the north of England in the late eighteenth century, so-called godfather-of-geology James Hutton famously deduced principles of uniformity which, in intellectual histories, revolutionized scholarly and popular understanding of the vast scale of deep time, effectively instantiating the birth of geology-as-a-discipline while contributing Victorian-era fixation on lineages of history and the celebration of those ancient stones from which fossil fuels fed ascendant modernization projects.

He read the stones, so to speak.

In her short story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” (1974), Ursula K. Le Guin imagines a fictionalized far-future “Association of Therolinguistics,” a professional scholarly society passionately studying other-than-human languages; in the story, the chairman of this linguistic society wonders “[m]ay there not come even that bolder adventurer—the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, […] cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks […].”^[1] So, if naturally-occurring stones speak about material histories, and we can interpret that speech, then there might also be added gravity, a much clearer dialect and much more potent exclamation spoken by those stones which were deliberately arranged, constructed, and installed by humans. I’m thinking of memorials and the purposeful installation of stones as markers. Indeed, we append to some stones explicit words. Gravestones are inscribed with names and dates; they commemorate very real lives. Some stones might denote or declare; they help to interpret space. “Aber Hall,” the stone might say, attached to the exterior of a building. “Oxford Circus Station,” “Capilano Suspension Bridge Park,” “Smithsonian Institution.”

Other stones might act simultaneously not just as memorials, but as instructions. “This is how you should perceive this space and place. This is how you are expected—or permitted—to use this space,” they tacitly say. These memorial markers are akin to signs, to street-name markers, to posters. Concrete and asphalt might perceived as some of these vocal “stones,” deliberately arranged, conveying instruction. In his examinations of “non-places,” Marc Auge describes those depersonalized of hotel lobbies, shopping malls, supermarkets which proliferated in the twentieth century, and whose architecture induce an alienation not only through their nondescript aesthetics and modernist veneer which lack specificity to regional cultural styles but also through their transactional relationship to passersby, who engage with the environment through implicit “contractual relations with […] the powers that govern it” through “a communication so peculiar.” These spaces provide instructions for use: “Swipe your card. Turn to the right.”

But these spaces are permitted to be accessed in the first place through contractual exchanges: Some spaces cannot be accessed without passport or adequate credit score—like certain apartment rentals or modes of international travel. These words might be inscribed into stone, concrete, bronze, or brick. But what do these signs leave unsaid? Who is obscured when humans choose to inscribe one acknowledgement while eliding another? What histories and lives are acknowledged in officially sanctioned institutional memorials?

Are there gaps or silences in these archives?

Some landscapes have been read, by some administrative authorities and colonial powers, as a communicating an inherent otherness or difference. Describing the significance of obscured narratives and historical processes of extractivist and racialized violence to contemporary material space and dispossession, Katherine McKittrick proposes that “in the sites of toxicity, environmental decay, pollution [and other conditions] inhabited by impoverished communities […] the [contemporary] geographies of the racial other are emptied out of life precisely because the historical constitution of these geographies has cast them as lands of no one,” which, “in our present moment,” means that “some live in the unlivable, and to live in the unlivable condemns the […] marginalized to death over and over again.” While McKittrick describes this as an extraction of life, we might draw a parallel to Macarena Gomez-Barris’s conception of sacrifice zones, those peripheral sites of extraction—the lithium mines of northern Chile, the fossil fuel pipelines on Lakota land—which hegemonic administrations designate as apparently-acceptable losses, with dispossession pushed out of sight of the metropoles of power, affecting most intensely both peripheral ecologies and racialized Others. Historian Tracy Brynne Voyles’s descriptions of uranium and coal extraction on Dine Navajo land as enacted through the colonial process she describes as “wastelanding” is consistent with Gomez-Barris’s reading. In Voyles’s interpretation, the wasteland is “both a racial and a spatial signifier.” The damning of one—the person or the place—enacts an attendant damning of the other. Thus, we can see that the process of making-expendable of peoples and places is not only a material undertaking—uprooting vegetation, rerouting waterways, excavating soils, installing plantation fences, constructing tenement “workforce” housing—but is also an imaginative undertaking, an imaginative and ontological “remaking” of peoples, enforcing their place in a social taxonomy, prescribing their positioniality relative to modernity and power. Voyles’s wastelands also corroborate McKittrick’s proposal which links contemporary dispossession and environmental damages with historical colonial arrangements. Indeed, damnation is a theme in McKittrick’s analysis of the afterlives of plantations. McKittrick finds that “[p]ast colonial encounters created material and imaginative geographies that reified global segregations through ‘damning’ the spaces long occupied Man’s human others” with a “new symbolic construct of race” ascendant after the 1492 encounter.

Succinctly, Voyles reaffirms this link between both material and imaginative processes, as well as between the ontological characterization of both people and place: “Wastelanding reifies—it makes real, material, lived—what might otherwise by only discursive. […] Race and space are connected through a social construction of difference.” If spatial arrangements—the siting of tenements, prisons, plantations, and other spaces of extraction and exclusion—inherit both material and imaginative legacies of past colonial violence, where do we look to perceive lives lived otherwise? How do we avoid complicity in the repeated damning of marginalized peoples?

There are other memorials, other monuments, more ephemeral than commissioned bronze plaques and the master-planned refurbishing of the renovated Concept-City.