(Non)urban humans

One of the most productive strands in contemporary urban research has been the focus on extended urbanization. Here, urbanization not only becomes more extensive as an ongoing, increasingly dominant process of spatial production and realignment, with a coherent set of constitutive dynamics, but also extends itself into a a wider multiplicity of situations and histories (Brenner 2014). It offers a particular working-out of dilemmas, tipping points, and conjectures faced by settlements, and this working-out entails various equations of subsumption, adaptation, erasure, remaking, conciliation, and improvisation. Urbanization is then something that not only spreads out as a function of its own internal operations, but is something contributed to through an intensely differentiated process of encounter, enabling it to change gears and operate through a wider range of appearances and instantiations (McGee and Greenberg 2002, Monte-Mór 2014, Keil 2018, Schmid 2018)

If urbanization is being composed through the interplay of a wider range of processes and sites, to what extent is it still possible to talk about the “human” as that self-reflecting subject that inhabits the urban? Is there not a more extensive repertoire of bodies and subjects that are the consequences of such extensivity? And what do these bodies look like, and how do they operate? What might be a form of the human that stands aside, both articulated and detached from the ways in which the urban proceeds to encompass seemingly everything?

By foregrounding the possibilities of an urban yet to arrive and, at the same time already reaching its limits in terms of geological, atmospheric and human life implications, we posit the notion of (non)urban humans. In other words, what might be the space of inhabitation and becoming that exists within the urban that is not fully apprehendable by it? What exists within disparate yet conjoined processes of urbanization that is disobedient to its own logics, and that perhaps signals its inevitable incompletion, and thus deficit of sovereignty?

I suggest that this (non) urban human concerns ways of human life extending itself through and with the earth, in diverse configurations of sense and embodiment. Instead of the human reflecting an individuated consolidation of capacity, will and self-reflection, the (non) urban is a dispersal of those features through the body extending itself to other figurations of life, as if lending a hand, opening itself up to the metabolisms and sensibilities of multiple entities and form of liveliness. This is what Fanon (1963) would call the more-than-conscious bodies in relation. Such extensionality might draw from the re-engagement with the refrains of so-called “natural worlds”—deserts, seas, and forests—and from histories of blackness, where the endurance of black life was anchored within intricate ecologies of nuturance, tending, and interweaving.

The notion of the (non)urban human is used here as a heuristic device, rather than a definitive category. It points to possibilities of interruption, temporal glitches (Berlant 2016), and provisional detachments in the processual generation of urban space, in urbanization’s seemingly self-generated expansiveness and ability to encompass and enfold everything that exists. While urban areas across the world have incorporated multiple ontologies of inhabitation (Escobar 2016, Alexaides and Peluso 2015, Graham and Penny 2014), the normative figuration of the human as an individuated, self-conscious entity has largely been generalized in terms of the mechanics of territorial governance. But as new forms of territory emerge what kinds of sensoria and ways of paying attention will come to the fore or be deployed to keep open the possibilities of an urban life less destructive, less unequal and thus potentially sustainable past the climatic impasses currently at work?

Whatever viable figure of the human might emerge in the long run will ensue in the intersection of three forms of contemporary non-presence, but a non-presence that may be more than what it appears. In other words, these are the dimensions of urban life that concern that which is to end (an end which could itself be invented), that which is left out, and that which is yet to arrive. Yet, instead of pointing to temporalities and spaces set apart, that which is left out points to a future that is already here, and that which is over or excluded perhaps has not yet arrived (Nancy 2008, Povinelli 2016).

Let’s take a look more closely at these intertwined presences and absences.

First, the (non)urban human refers to persons kept out of the locus of free will and enactment that the urban implicitly promises, such as the capability to chart out a life trajectory as a self-reflexive individual endowed with a basic set of protections and rights.

Second, the (non)urban human refers to a form of life yet to come or, alternately and simultaneously, a form of human enactment that does not yet possess a mode of visibility or a vernacular to be sufficiently recognizable. Here the (non)urban human is not that which exists in a stabilized space external to the urban, such as the rural or peripheral, since the designations of such an outside have been substantially de-stabilized by the extensiveness of urbanization processes. The (non)urban is thus that which exists outside the available frames of recognition, as shadow, absence, immanence, or spirit — or even as undergirding, as the tain of the image, the support or background required to make the visible something that can be seen.

Third, the (non)urban human is a means of mediating  three dimensions of the urban: 1) The urban is the concrete manifestation of the human capacity of continuous self-invention. Urbanization—as the continuous rearrangement and intersection of things—exemplifies the human as something without any fundamental nature, as something open-ended, as process rather than entity, and where the “end” of the human is itself indicative of such open-endedness, i.e. the capacity of the human to decide for itself the terms of its own finitude and of the fundamental distinction between life and nonlife (Povinelli 2017);

2) the urban as the limit of that very capacity of continuous becoming. For, the implications of urbanization posit the real possibilities of human extinction and; 3) the urban as a concrete platform for the unhuman—for a form of inhabitation that does not rely upon the constitution of particular subjects—but rather combinations of force, technicity, flesh, and liveliness (Colebrook 2014). As such, the urban expresses the ways in which the human has always already been unhuman (Colebrook 2015, Weinstein and Colebrook 2018).

All three facets—self-invention, the limits of invention, and the unhuman– sit uneasily with each other. They can be conceptually applied to all of those who are left out of the human fruition the urban promises as well as the limitations of how we imagine what is yet to come. To what extent is the human to come the product of an invention in the present? How could this invention circumvent the limits of human finitude signalled by the rampant destruction of the earth as long as so many humans, not really considered as such, are left out the process of invention, or whose inventions nor finitude really counts? How would that inclusion take place in a form that is not simply the reiteration of the primacy of the self-reflecting subject, of a “we” formed through linguistic solidarity?

That which is to come, that which is to be invented either as new beginning or end, that which constrains any invention, and that which can be considered left out, removed from full participation in human life—all intersect in ways that upend clear distinctions between the inside and out, the urban and non-urban. Yet if these divides persist in both concept and everyday experience, how then to situate a way of being human that is something else besides an all encompassing urbanization—something that co-exists with it in an intimate proximity but yet is not of it, neither as contradiction nor alternative? Something that remains “out there”, of uncertain distance and form. As urbanization becomes more extensive and extended, it would also seem to be moving in the direction of an “out there”, taking on the risk of the interruptions and glitches to which Berlant refers

‘Out there’
One way of thinking about the “out there” mentioned earlier are the temporalities of blackness, which are potentially important because they signal the obdurate inclusive exclusions that are at the heart of modernity, the persistent need to banish and oppress no matter the particularities of the individual human histories involved. But they also signal a way of existing that stands outside of measured time, that holds open the abolition of gradated measures of human worth, of calculating who counts and who doesn’t (Wynter 2003).

Hortense Spillers (2003) has talked about the complicated strategic choices facing black people in the Americas in terms of ensuring their endurance. Blacks could insist upon their humanity in contexts in which this humanity was structurally foreclosed, where the insistence would be construed as evidence of disobedience or the very absence of humanity, but which, nevertheless, in this assertion of will despite the odds and consequences could be construed by a black self, with no official recognition, as evidence of being human.

In contrast, indifference to the value of a self-formed human subject could be manifested in the capacity of the black body to extend itself into the very surrounds, terrain, and materiality of their limited world of operations. Here an extraordinary attunement to the operations of the earth and its varying atmospheres and ways of being signalled a detachment from the need to be human. Here, the processes of social reproduction were experienced in concert with the rhythms of other forms of liveliness (King 2017). What can such extensionality as a black practice indicate to us today in a world of extended urbanization? How can disobedience and extending into the world be simultaneously coupled as a critical urban practice in light of the possible end of urbanity itself?

References

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