Inhabitation

Our interest in liminalities follows two analytics. One has to do with what we might call the 'urban transversal'. Those rhythms emerging from disparate (pre)occupations that cut through practices, intentions, projectualities and powers, as an affective and material economy. This economy not only holds things together but also generates modes of life and becoming-urban that defy what conventional approaches to the 'economy', the 'social', the 'cultural' make of them (Simone, 2010, 2018). The other analytic is interested in how those same rhythms, in the unfolding of lives at the receiving end of dispossession, extreme poverty and destitution, articulate a tempo beyond their resilience, indicating a specific design for their politics of inhabitation (Lancione, 2016, 2019). At the intersection of these concerns arise our shared interest in the lively lexicon of the urban liminal. Looking for this lexicon means looking for what it has to say in the ways it has to say it. It is about tracing the emergence of its politics by staying with the trouble, and its ontologies (Haraway, 2016), or, from our privileged standpoint, to follow the storylines of those that have to stay with their troubles, as the only possible way to dwell on this planet, positing careful attention to how that staying with can be affirmative and anticipatory, not only of itself but of urbanity as such. And for many, this is an almost indescribable space between the foreclosure of viable inhabitation and a history of, as Audre Lorde put it, having survived everything. At a minimum, as Lauren Berlant (2011) discussed, finding ways to narrate these extended endurances beyond the metanarratives of sustainable salvation is necessary because the 'crisis' has no other side. The 'crisis' exceeds being a matter of repair or recalibration, transcends being the legitimation of transgressive action undertaken to preserve the salience of institutional forms and settled arrangements. The act of 'moving on', in an ordinary emergency, is about prosaic movements within grounds where extractive forms of belonging and becoming interlace in pluriversal ways, where the clear delineation of who extracts what blurs when the sheer volatility of settling and taking things wedges open glimmers, shadows