What if irreducibility and complexity were the intellectual and analytical standard in urban studies? How can we rigorously speak and write of the heterogeneity of the urban without making reference to current standards that rest on received normativities, handed down to us through the tradition of Enlightenment that builds on homogeneity and generalization and requires us to strive for stability, familiarity and spacious arrangements? Do we need the global South to open our vision towards such a new perspective, or is this not also a trap that keeps us pinned down in the vocabulary of the hustle: poverty, endurance, the uninhabitable, the peripheral? Is it a matter of redefining or recontextualizing vocabulary, or is it a matter of radical change of perspective? What exactly does a non-representational perspective entail that makes current trends in the scholarship of the in-between, of the becoming at this historical moment of epochal shift, so relevant? Or is hustling the in-between, the becoming phenomenon which allows us the transition from one perspective to the other? And how to write in this new mode? Don't we also need a new way of meaning making, ‘a trans-entity pidgin’, as Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift write?Footnote 16
I am moved by such questions in my own work, too, currently with a project on Zanzibar where I sort ‘wire spaghetti’, trying to put these ‘new’ urban studies into ethnographic and linguistic practice, and I can see AbdouMaliq Simone grappling with similar questions.
Simone has spent his whole academic life studying cities of what today is called the global South and has contributed substantially to debates about the provincialization and decolonization of urban studies. Now, this book takes us from the uninhabitable (Chapter 1), to jazz between Freetown and Chicago (Chapter 2), improvisation in Jakarta (Chapter 3), Delhi's darkness (Chapter 4), and finally to care as the centre of the periphery (Chapter 5). We are presented with a view that insists on the urban as relations, disconnects and sutures. In its rhythmic meandering through a life and its cities the book is a consistent continuation of Simone's work. New is the explicit reference to the family of non-representational theory.Footnote 17 The turn away from ‘seeing like a state’Footnote 18 seems easy enough, especially if one takes as a starting point the heterogeneity of life in (Southern) cities, but the turn towards ‘seeing like a city’ is still a tough struggle. Simone's new book is testimony to this struggle, sometimes intense, sometimes graceful, tightly knit, or loosely associative.
The problem is always to avoid pinning down again all that has been rendered mobile, fluid, spiralling, shape-shifting in the heterogeneity of the mechanics of the urban post the colonial, the modern, the homogeneous. Donna HarawayFootnote 19 has offered SF – Speculative Fabulations, Science Fiction, Science Fact, String Figures, So Far – as a possible solution:
SF is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come. I work with string figures as a theoretical trope, a way to think-with a host of companions in sympoietic threading, felting, tangling, tracking, and sorting. I work with and in SF as material-semiotic composting, as theory in the mud, as muddle.Footnote 20
Simone's book can be read as a contribution in this new mode of heterogeneous writing that leaves us disoriented and sometimes exasperated; a kind of writing in which the argument is folded into an almost literary flow of consciousness with some philosophical sprinkles, yet based on the experience of a lifetime's hard ethnographic, conceptual and theoretical work that has been concentrated into the nutshell of brilliant writing. In order to give structure to urban practices that are mobile, fluid, heterogeneous and so on, Simone introduces the notion of ‘harmolodics’, of Ornette Coleman and his The Shape of Jazz to Come: ‘Harmolodic modulation is the method of moving the same notes-as-written from one clef to another in order to yield various names accompanied by a parallel modulation where the same notes are played on different instruments in order to realize various sounds’ (p. 35). Simone's account of the urban as improvisation thus points to repetition, refrain, repertoires and rhythm and thus he finds his own way of ‘seeing like a city’ and telling the stories of the urban South.
However, there is a clear difference between Haraway and Amin and Thrift. While the latter – and, with them, Simone – write about the Anthropocene, the age of coming to terms with the human intervention in nature, Haraway writes about the Chthulucene, the age of oddkin or multispecies relations. The Anthropocene grapples with the destructive forces of the human. The Anthropocene sees only the hustling and bustling and living in uninhabitable worlds characterized by poverty, pollution and failed politics in the urban molochs of the South, enduring the instabilities of urban rhythms and trying to make do beyond the hegemonic gaze of elites that anyway are irrelevant to people's lives. It is about ‘Destruktion’ (Heidegger) or ruination (Stoler), from which new phoenixes may rise. In that sense, SF gives us more hopeful instruments to tell the stories of the urban after the Anthropocene than those that can be, ultimately, mistaken as morally purified, romanticized accounts of hustling. Because I don't think that's what AbdouMaliq Simone intended.
