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

I’m thinking about the things that you might encounter when taking a walk through a nondescript, “typical” urban environment—an Anywhere, USA-type small city. There’s a portion of paved bike-trail that runs parallel to a now defunct railway, portions of sidewalk running along defunct mid-century strip-mall type commercial areas. In eight blocks, we observe four detached shoe soles—little pieces of plastic and rubber—now fragmented, lonely on the concrete, among the weeds.

Is there such thing as a “weed,” though? It’s said that “weed” is not a botanical term.

Instead, the term describes perceived pests, at the discretion of the observer—at the discretion of the authority, with managerial claim over that land. The agronomist, the rancher, the plantation manager. The weed seemingly wastes space that could otherwise be given to a monoculture cash crop, an “economically significant” plant. The weed interferes with productivity. The weed interrupts the extraction. The weed diminishes value.

The weed doesn’t belong in this place.

People can be framed, by institutions, as perceived pests, too.

A friend asks, “Why are there so many scuffed, detached shoe soles left behind on this particular stretch of sidewalk? There are hardly any homes around here, it’s all asphalt and empty lots, so where are all these people coming from, who apparently pass by frequently enough to leave so many soles?” We ponder how, even though this is a wide expanse without either home residences or any kind of still-operable commercial or recreation space someone would want to visit, these blocks are the straight-line direct path between a low-income apartment complex and a cluster of corporate-owned big-box stores, and there’s no bus line that runs between the two areas.

“But don’t the vast majority of customers of shopping malls and box stores drive vehicles, hence the obscenely massive parking lots?” Sure, customers often drive, but who has to work at those places? People living at that apartment complex with harsh restrictions and cheap amenities, who can’t afford car insurance or who might be too physically disabled to bike, staff the warehouse. And so that apartment complex might function kind of like a de facto “company town,” essentially in confinement. There might be extra “debris”—scattered wrappers, broken reading glasses—present in these blocks because the local bus only passes once an hour; more those people making a cross-town trip to an aid office, they may be stuck for that hour. Beholden to the transportation system, what for a more financially-secure homeowner might’ve constituted a minor thirty-minute errand has now become, for Gordon’s “very-poor,” a tedious half-day undertaking.

It is written into that landscape. The stone can be read.

Then, this spatial layout, this city’s physical environment (and the hostility of the institutions or empires which constructed it), will shape the physical body. This violence writes itself into the flesh.

The way the denim is chafed and discolored on the left shoulder of someone’s jacket from carrying a small backpack around by foot, day after day after day. The way someone develops a painful limp, maybe occasionally depends on a cane, because they had to walk great distances every day to get to work and their shoe sole fell off on the sidewalk, but they can’t replace the shoes because their employer is underpaying them, and they’re forced to stand all day at work anyway, and they already had some modest nerve damage in their foot because can’t afford their prescriptions, and federal medical insurance keeps denying them because their physical letters in the mail always show up too late or not at all.

These “little” miseries add up.

Now they’re hungry, and in pain, because they were forced to walk a little funny for a long time over all those decaying sidewalks, among all those plants—“weeds”—piercing through the concrete.

This little walk brings to mind, for me, the words of Avery Gordon:

[C]oncentration of global wealth and the “extension of hopeless poverties”; […] the intensification of state repression and the growth of police states; the stratification of peoples […]; and the production of surplus populations, such as the landless, the homeless, and the imprisoned, who are treated as social “waste.” […] To be unable to transcend […] the horror […] of such a world order is what hell means […]. Without a glimpse of an elsewhere or an otherwise, we’re living in hell. […] [P]eople are rejecting prison as the ideal model of social order. […] [T]he longings already exist—however muted or marginal […]. But there are no guarantees […]. There are no guarantees of coming millenniums […], only our complicated selves together […]. – Avery F. Gordon, “Some thoughts on the Utopian,” Anthropology & Materialism 3 (2016).

Reminding us that “the mass abandonment of Black, Indigenous, disabled peoples, and people living with mental health issues” is “continually being contested” by mutual support networks, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robin Maynard point to the homeless-support groups of Toronto and Edmonton, the mutual aid organizations of Hamilton and Halifax, and the 21 hunger strikes across Canadian prisons as indicators that resisting social abandonment is the “care work” of “rehearsal,” and that this work, “by virtue of necessity as well as of ethics, is building, always building.”

There is an imperative, here, to look for all of those littler miseries and everyday violences, and to engage in “rehearsal” with others.

Gordon converges on the experience of the prisoner, relegated to condition of “nonperson.” Temporality is implicated intensely. Institutions of captivity are de facto time-motion laboratories in which meal-times are inconveniently scheduled, solitary lockdown disrupts perception of time, and, indeed, the language of imprisonment involves doing time. Gordon describes how, “[i]n the prison, state power renders the distinction between illusion (‘It seems endless’) and reality (‘It is endless’) into a weapon to force the prisoner to serve the time, to assume this alienation.” Invoking the words of Maryland Prisoner Q, Gordon proposes that, “[t]o achieve a measure of agency and possibility […] it is necessary […] ‘to redeem time’ […]. This redemption […] involves refusing to be treated as if one was never born, fated to a life of abandonment.”

Sometimes, we may half-seriously joke about the “ethical imperative to be whimsical”:

“It hurts! We’re being killed! Do we concede joy?”

Scholar Katie Natanel describes a similar challenge: “I think what is sitting in my heart at this moment is how to hold this together: a will to do things otherwise and build things elsewhere, in ways that keep sight of power – and yet refuse it as totalising. [...] [N]ot an abstract theoretical musing [...]. Rather, it is something to be done—a practice that we envision and embody because we must.”

This language is emphasized in similar terms among Gordon’s musings on the afterlives of traumatic violence and the persistence of institutional disavowal:

Haunting […] is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done. […] The something-to-be-done is almost always responding to an emergency -- a situation that requires immediate attention. Nonetheless, it must be approached with an urgency that’s autonomous and self-directed towards ends and aims not wholly given […] by the system’s logics or crises but rather invented elsewhere and otherwise. I take it as axiomatic that we are not merely reactive subjects but that we are, to use Kodwo Eshun’s word, ‘inaugurating’ ones’ […]. 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; to keeping urgent the systematic dismantling of the conditions that produce the crises and the misery in the first place […]. [I]t also involves being or ‘becoming unavailable for servitude’, to use Toni Cade Bambara’s words.

Referring to the afterlives of plantations, McKittrick that “in agriculture, banking, and mining, in trade and tourism, and across colonial and postcolonial spaces—the prison, the city, the resort—a plantation logic […] emerges in the present both ideological and materially.” However, despite the persistence of captivity, McKittrick shares Sylvia Wynter’s encouragement that we think with “secretive histories,” and also acknowledges a voice speaking back: “With this, differential modes of survival emerge” including “the blues, marronage, revolution, and more,” evidencing “complex negotiations of time, space, and terror.”

Modes of survival might also be thought of as modes of refusal.

Indeed, scholar AM Kanngieser proposes exactly that: “The no of refusal is a mode of survival […].” Perhaps similar to McKittrick’s invocation of the blues and marronage, to account for “the immensity of the loss of people and ecologies” and to resist the levelling of “[v]ast ecosystems flattened for plantations […] for the building of nation-states,” Kanngieser also turns to “the myriad, and insuppressible flourishing and alliances” which we might preserve through a “pedagogy of deep engagement.”

Walking down the street, seeing the material debris—the missing shoe soles—and evidences of all the “little” miseries endured, I’m reminded of Robyn Maynard’s words on generative refusal, in which she describes “rehearsal, study, experimentation in form” as “a multiplicity” practiced “every day” by “ordinary people, tired of the horrors of the present.”

Looking for the cracks in the concrete, I’m also reminded of Michel de Certeau’s words: “Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris […] [The hegemonic] order is everywhere punched open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning […]. Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber.”

Similar to de Certeau’s invocation of a slumbering revolution beneath the surface of the everyday, Gordon also looks to those submerged perspective in the everyday: “The impetus […] was to pick up […] those ‘historical alternatives’ that ‘haunt a given society,’ as Herbert Marcuse (1969) wrote; to find the place where, as Patricia Williams (1991) put it, our ‘longings’ are ‘exiled.’”

Kanngieser again offers complimentary thoughts: “Attunement leads us to the gaps and silences and soundings […].” With our attention, “those imaginations of life […] might rise to the surface.”