Siting urban comparativism: The conundrums of the “out there”

That which is to come, that which is to be invented either as new beginning or end, and that which constrains any invention—all intersect in ways that upend clear distinctions between the inside and out, here and there, 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 what Lauren Berlant (2016) calls constant interruptions. From the elongated circuits of interminable migration, to the diffuse and nearly all encompassing insecurities that make up the raison d’etre of gated communities, to the vague aspirations of those willing to jettison relatively secure positions in the urban core to inchoate futures of urban hinterlands, to the febrile imaginations of those living in carceral conditions, often without discernible walls, the “out there” is not only an object of longing or dread, but an increasingly active participant in the here and now.

And so this presence of the “out there” raises the question, “what time is it?” How do we think about this time, if “out there” is another one? Well the answer is, that increasingly we don’t know, as time is urbanized itself—rendered more complex, numerous and all over the place. Despite all the efforts to settle this question, what time is it, once and for all. In the prolongation of settler mentalities that not only attempts to fix an “out there” to a hierarchy of value and use, but also colonize the very possibilities of speech beyond solliquoy, the plantation endures full force, folding in heterogeneous logics of land use to corporate mono-cropping and the circulation of goods and knowledge to logistical systems. What’s left in the way of small farms or workshops is converted into platforms of boutique consumption. To be set lose becomes the defining urban condition for all except the blackest. At the same time, where the plantation may have once “set the clock,” established a form of homogenous time through which human efficacy was to be measured and to which everyday rhythms of what bodies could do with each other were regulated, it is not clear that such temporal discipline works anymore, if ever.

If on the one hand, the simultaneous erasure of time’s heterogeneity and its particularization through intensfied global spatial division appears to be a key characteristic of contemporary urbanization, the extension of urbanization also underlines the simultaneous existence of many temporalities. Here, different ways and rhythms of doing things, transacting, buying and selling, making and distributing, deliberating and deciding are both exposed and extended to each other. Rather than a multiplicity of times being subsumed into a standarized version, across much of the urban world, discrepant temporalities tend to co-exist, even if the terms of co-existence tend to disallow the capacity of any one of them to posit its own trajectories of implication. After all, the colony hasn’t gone anywhere.

Yet, the time of bazaar, the festival, the factory, the neighborhood, the coordinates of modernity, the time of extended family and kinship relations, the time of religious devotion, the time of diurnal and nocturnal markets, the time of administrative bureaucracies all co-exist.  They co-exist not as individual tracts, not as the rhythms of autonomous worlds but as pressure points that avail any operation to the exigencies and operational practices of the other. Here, exposure is both an act of risk and indifference. One pays attention to something just because it is there and can be used without fear of contamination or undo influence. And if exposure means a certain infection, than so what, who is interested in the integrity of things anyway now.

Take for example, the bazaar. The bazaar was a multifaceted commercial system that integrated individual merchants and trades, that provided credit to those unable to access formal banking mechanisms, that mobilized political sentiment, that charted out specific geographies of articulation, that shifted resources across various kinds of social, geographic, and religious ties, that established the price of things based on considerations that far exceeded those of supply and demand, and that shaped the structure and settlement of built environments. The bazaar continues to thrive. In a world of logistics, just-in-time production, and constantly recalibrated commodity chains, the bazaar thrives not on the basis of what it was, and the implications of its own logics and operations, but because those very logics and operations offer a resource to so-called modern economies and to advanced logistical operations when those economies and operations run into difficulty, when they confront choke points or blockage (Neilson et al., 2018).

The implicit design of urban economies is such as to elaborate semi-permeable interfaces amongst such varying temporalities.  There is just enough of a solid, definitive boundary to enable the ongoing recognition of the coherence of a specific time.  But it is a boundary that leaks or that can be “reversed engineered” into incoporating or adhering to discrepant times when need be. Here extensive urbanization is not the unfolding of a single temporal format, not the imposition of a standardized time—although there may indeed be elements of such a process—but rather the extending of diverse temporalities to each other. Here is an urbanization of temporality itself, of a process of switching back and forth, changing temporal gears, accelerating and slowing down as a means of diversifying the rhythms of enactment so as to complexify the sensory field of urban life, to engender a wider range of implications and behavioral possibilities and, as such, modalities of valuation. At least at the temporal level, the out there is in here, and vice-versa.

As such the urban human is subject to multiple rhythms of endurance. Never before have human individuals been so idiosyncratic—and, in part, this idiosyncracy is a product of the infinite running of algorithmic computations that resituate individual life in terms of all others being resituated. Never before has human life been accessible simply as biomass to be expended or securitized. The urban poor are no longer reserve labor but indications of the capacity of states to move bodies around, keep them in line, kill them when necessary, and thus prove their creditworthiness on the international market. The refusal to invest in social reproduction, leaving the poor to fend for themselves under conditions when fending becomes improbable, conveys the willingness of nations to do what is necessary to guarantee the safety of foreign investment. As such, the nation detaches itself from its own coherence in favor of the machinic resonances of continuous incomes streams dutifully laundered. Life for many is what Neferti Tadiar (2022) refers to as “remaindered life,” that which remains after the pursuit of a normative humanity has been exhausted.