Summary
French urban sociologist whose account of a polity based on speed, and whose notion of counter-habitation, frame Edward Said’s Chapter Four, III, “Movements and Migrations” (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.353 / printed p.326).
Details
- The modern pattern of domination is a polity based on speed, instant communication, distant reach, constant emergency and insecurity induced by mounting crises, in which the rapid occupation of real as well as public space — colonization — becomes the central militaristic prerogative of the modern state, as the United States showed when it dispatched a huge army to the Arabian Gulf and commandeered the media to help carry out the operation (PDF p.353 / printed p.326).
- Against that, he suggests that the modernist project of liberating language/speech (la libération de la parole, translation) has a parallel in the liberation of critical spaces — hospitals, universities, theaters, factories, churches, empty buildings — in both of which the fundamental transgressive act is to inhabit the normally uninhabited (PDF p.353 / printed p.326).
- His notion is counter-habitation: to live as migrants do in habitually uninhabited but nevertheless public spaces; Deleuze and Guattari’s treatise on nomadology builds on his work, and the nomadic practice he describes has a power that is not aggressive but transgressive (PDF p.358-359 / printed p.331-332).