Notes for City Life: from Jakarta to Dakar (2010)
Link to book's website
by Abdoumaliq Simone
Link to Simone's website
Good in that it makes clear that we should not only be narrating the machinations of global capital and sovereignty on a mass of passive victim-residents. We should also be paying attention to what residents are doing (e.g. p. 267, 307), to the strategies they are pursuing to survive, often without institutions, laws, services, formal economies, etc. What does it mean to build networks and relations and social projects without these structures that are common in the North? Let's find out, and the way we do so is to pay attention to what people in these environments are actually doing. One thing that surely exists in environments where there are no routinized, automated structures for doing a given thing, where people have to invent structures anew and do the job themselves, by hand, is that people get lots of practice at these activities, their skills (we might even say puissance or constituent power) do not atrophy like they do for people who have something done for them by an automated system...there are skills--in these places without infrastructure--that are gained through practice, and these skills are lacking in more 'advanced' environments (cf. pp. 35ff, 229). We will also discover, as we pay attention to what residents are doing, that the mass of residents are multiple, complex, conflicting and cooperating, with complex social structures. They are not a homogeneous class.
Cityness: the constant churn of the city that cannot be confined to channels of order. It is more or less desiring-production, and it should be said that 90% of his thought process comes straight from D&G, though he acknowledges the debt only glancingly (cf p. 264). The idea that 'something always escapes' (e.g. p. 222) all efforts to impose control on cityness (desiring-production), that these escapes circulate, and come into intersection/connection with others and serve as relays toward other connections, that the city is made up of constantly shifting intensities that are incessantly combining and recombining...all of it is more or less an attempt to narrate global-South cities using D&G's ideas...which is fine, but he should be more explicit about it, and he should be far more specific on the empirics: they usually remain very vague and sweeping...
Clear rejection of fixed identities and stable-category politics (e.g. 259-260, 295), and also of the consensus around liberal individualism in capitalism, in favor of what can only be called pragmatics, after D&G, the restless search by people caught in apparatuses to break free, to connect with others, and to try to create new forms of life. As a result, he tends to want to not offer any a priori ethical rubric for judging good and bad forms of life. New often seems good and old bad. But he does, here and there, reveal a vague progressive-politics sense of better and worse options (e.g. a sense of 'sociality' on p. 299, or p. 320)...tries to cast 'public' in the role of ethical center, but it does not go very well and he drops it...(p. 117ff, 159). He would have benefitted from H&N's 'common' here, I think. Recurring throughout the book also is HL's idea of the glimmer of urban society existing as virtual in the heart of the actual industrial city (e.g. p. 261) (as well as his abstract/differential space, p. 331), but again it is mostly unacknowledged. There is also a fair bit of the book that recalls Ranciere's idea of the partage du sensible's attempt (and failure) to take account of all elements of society, and this connection/debt to Ranciere is entirely unacknowledged (e.g. p. 289, 305).
The book is disappointing as a source of good empirical material about what people are actually doing in the cities he mentions. He generally makes very vague claims, hit-and-run research; he rarely gives any robust context or even shows he has a good idea of what is going on in place x. He seems to have dropped down in multiple places and gone to parties and met a few people on balconies and hazily understood some things and then narrated that understanding, such as it is. There is little empirical material here that one can sink one's teeth into as examples of hopeful politics/possibility.
Black urbanism: a method of seeing that brings to light new ways of living in the city that have been obscured and marginalized (p. 279). It evokes not something essential and realized, but something virtual and imagined, something aspirational, that can nevertheless do work (i.e. posit radically new ways of living in the city) even if it is not concrete. Black urbanism does not try to contain and channel cityness, rather it is enmeshed in it, has been surviving in it for decades, and so black urbanism can be a source of strength (puissance) if we are attentive to it...
At the end mentions the right to the city but, again, vague and unhelpful. Could have put any four other words in and gotten the same meaning...