Ethics and the spacetime discontinuum

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumEthics and the spacetime discontinuum Grohmann, Steph. 2020. The ethics of space: Homelessness and squatting in urban England. Chicago: Hau Books.Steph GrohmannSteph GrohmannUniversity of Edinburgh Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt is a humbling and exhilarating experience for any junior scholar when colleagues who have spent many years deeply invested in similar questions as oneself not only find one's work worth reading, but also find encouraging things to say about it. Even more so in "these times" (I skip the adjective, they have all been done), and so I cannot thank the contributors to this book symposium enough for their kindness and generosity in engaging with my first foray into ethnographic theory. Ironically, what prevents me from replying to their thoughtful commentaries in the depth they deserve is space, in this case that of the pages given to me. I can therefore only address some of my colleagues' points in somewhat of a telegram style, but I very much hope that the conversations growing from this exchange continue beyond this forum.Joshua Burraway raises the pertinent question of time: do squatters mess with it as much as with space? They certainly do, and, in one sense, their means of doing so are not all that different from those of Burraway's own interlocutors. Perhaps I am an incorrigible spatialist, but the first thing that came to my mind when reflecting on the parallels between our ethnographies was, again, a place-at least a metaphorical one. Bristol squatters were not at all averse to killing time though intoxication. Besides alcohol, the most popular substance in the "scene" was ketamine, a dissociative drug originally developed as a medical anesthetic (Muetzelfeld et al. 2008). In small quantities a mild relaxant, in large enough quantities, "Special K," as one of its street names goes, famously produces a state of consciousness called a "K-hole"-a state of dissociation so deep users experience themselves as completely cut off from their surroundings and their own bodies, as if in a deep place surrounded by walls. Time subjectively stops (or rather, it does things not normally expected of it, like wildly expanding, contracting, and looping in on itself) while "K-holing," and to the observer the user can appear all but dead. A K-hole is thus something of a place beyond the normal flow of time, not so much in the sense of the memory-less eternal now of the "blackout" Burraway describes (2018), but rather its opposite, a radical two-fingers-up to a present deemed insufficiently engaging to be experienced. For its connoisseurs among the squatters, it was a place they liked to visit frequently. I was reminded of it particularly by Burraway's thoughts on the concept of "mineness" and the squat as a "forgetting machine"-there indeed seems to be a resonance between the frequent deliberate journeys to the K-hole, a place decidedly without any "mineness," and the necessary courting of eviction inherent in squatting. He describes his respondents' evictions as unexpected traumatic events, rupturing the flow of past, present, and anticipated (or anticipatable) future. The squatters I encountered were certainly a step ahead of this game by making the rupture their anticipated future. Perhaps there is something to be said for becoming an active agent of one's own forgetting, instead of passively waiting to be eradicated by circumstance, both in drug use and in precarious housing.There is, however, also another way in which squatters messed with time. As Burraway himself concludes, the answer to the question "does squatting need eviction?" must be: in some ways, certainly yes. The urgency of "militant" political struggle is indeed difficult to maintain without the focal point of an common enemy in the shape of an assured adverse event. It is also true that in temporal terms, the "productive" cycles of squatting-assembling a crew, building a memory machine, defending, disassembling, and moving on-depend on being repeated in order to count as squatting, otherwise they become just more or less successful dwelling. At the same time, I fear I have done my interlocutors a disservice by allowing my own psychological downward trajectory in the field to dictate my focus on the "tragedy of the commons" that unfolded in Co-op Road, at the expense of other more positive examples. For one such example, only a mile from the "Room of Gloom," in St. Pauls, stood The Factory, a long-term squat that had turned its productive energy away from territorial defense and toward creating a space for other radical political practices. Territoriality was at once more fictionalized here, as the Factory produced surplus memory for the community in the shape of anarchist film nights, reading groups, and community study projects. Terrritoriality was also outsourced, as inhabitants provided mutual aid to resist eviction elsewhere. The Factory thus ironically had more permeable boundaries to the outside than any other squat I knew, because at the time legal squatting allowed it to exist openly and advertise its program.The residents of the Factory resolved the choice between the "relentless cycle of collapsing futures" and the wastelands of socioeconomic redundancy by creating their very own timeline. Theirs was a distinctly millenarian radical politics that contextualized all their actions in relation to an anticipated revolutionary event in the future, after which capitalism would be no more and all kinds of harmful hierarchy between people would be abolished (again, a forgetting machine). As ill-defined as this event may have been, it put the Factory in a different ontological time zone than the "mainstream society" around it, a countertime contained within the walls of industrial ruins. If the Room of Gloom was thus the spatial equivalent of a blackout, then maybe the Factory, and places like it, are something of the K-holes of neoliberal productive time, places that radically refuse to play by the same temporal rules, as much as spatial rules, and precisely in this way can become sources of unexpected regeneration. Incidentally, ketamine, long frowned upon as a "low status" recreational drug, has recently been discovered by pharmaceutical medicine as a potent antidepressant, especially effective against acute suicidal ideation (Zanos and Gould 2018). Perhaps, sometimes, embracing oblivion is just what it takes to survive.Webb Keane raises far too many important points to do them justice, but I distill his main concern as the question about how we get from the universal embodied self of phenomenology and cognitive science to the particulars of political solidarity. He finds it "puzzling how embodied experience could engender an ethics of social solidarity and concern for other people and social orders beyond the immediacy of the here-and-now-extending in historical time and expanding in social scale beyond me." It is certainly puzzling if, to draw a bit of a caricature, we imagine the embodied self as a monadic lump, condemned to sitting around in self-referential immediacy until someone else steps up and establishes the conditions of intersubjectitivity, let alone ethics or politics. While I won't purport to speak on behalf of phenomenology or cognitive science, much less their diverse anthropological appropriations, I do not think that any approach that begins with the embodied subject necessarily takes such an individualistic view. What attracts me to Axel Honneth's ethics of recognition (1996) in particular is that while he, too, takes as his starting point the individual embodied self, he is also careful to emphasize that this self is embedded in larger social and historical processes quite literally from its inception. It is gestated by sexed bodies under particular social circumstances, grown inside the body of another living person, and finally born into the arms of others who already recognize it as a particular "someone" in relation to themselves.1 Once in the world, the very possibility of developing cognition, or indeed subjectivity, depends upon the presence of an Other, whose subjectivity elicits a, first tentative, then determined, neurological response. Honneth thus arguably uses a much lower bar for the emergence of intersubjectivity than the comparably high-level mode of "giving an account of oneself" entails.2 The "productive motion" between subject and object, the establishing of a common "language" of interaction, the recognition of, and response to, the other's will and vulnerability, are not, for Honneth, a sophisticated form of cognition we must strive to develop in maturity-these are the very basis and condition of our existence. Moreover, as he shows, drawing on psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin (1988), this basic mutuality does not develop outside of, or unaffected by, historical and political forces, because any person that the emergent self interacts with is themself subject to and formed by them. In other words, no part of becoming an embodied self is truly historically or politically naïve, and embodied selves are, from the first moment, shaped by the regimes of gender, race, class, and so on that structure their immediate environment, as much as large-scale historical processes mediating access to material and social resources. A Honnethian analytic therefore does not have to bridge the gap between "the body on its own in space" and a social and political person capable of intersubjectivity, because there is no such thing as a body that is not, by virtue of its being alive, woven into a social order beyond itself.Of course, being part of such an order (or orders) is not the same as recognizing that one is, let alone that others are. We do not have to look far for examples of embodied selves who grossly misrecognize their place in the world and their place vis-à-vis others-Keane's own example of the White couple brandishing guns against BLM protesters is a case in point. But in the same way that the mere recognition of vulnerability as a general human condition will tell us nothing about whether a specific claim to vulnerability, in a particular historical context, is ethically actionable, so the mere knowledge of history will not tell us what specific consequences should follow from it. To determine, to use a popular phrase, "what side of history" we should be on (even if we are not among the immediately affected), we must apply some kind of evaluative framework to its interpretation. The political thus always loops back onto the ethical, in our evaluations of historical rights and wrongs, and our ideas of what should be done about them, as much as our choices as to what claims to vulnerability or harm we should heed and which disregard, and what kind of society we wish to build in the future. Keane is skeptical that any kind of universal model or schema of the embodied self is helpful in doing this work, as it necessarily disregards particular circumstance. I am somewhat more optimistic, given that any political demand that does not in some way take recourse to a universal idea of what being an embodied human affords, and what general standards of conduct should follow from that, runs the risk of descending into an array of subjective standpoint arguments without a way of adjudicating between them, beyond permanent, irresolvable conflict. History, in itself, does not produce moral arguments. We may read in the annals of mankind about the brutal expropriation of the sixteenth-century English peasantry, "written in blood and fire" as Karl Marx would have it; we may even be able to situate our embodied selves in relation to this event-perhaps we are among the late beneficiaries, or those still paying the price. But whether expropriating peasants, on the whole, is a good or a bad thing is impossible to determine without some kind of general idea of how humans, by virtue of the specific affordances of flourishing and suffering their bodies offer, ought to be treated. In that sense, perhaps we agree after all-not all vulnerabilities are politically the same, and for precisely this reason, we need ethics.Kim Hopper wishes I had been more forthcoming when it comes to the circumstances of my own homelessness. Until recently, I would have responded that really, it was a most mundane and unremarkable affair, nothing to write home to your department about. But perhaps that is the point: the reason it seemed unremarkable to me is that at the time, I was already so used to the spatial precarity inherent in being an itinerant early-career academic that another enforced house move (albeit to a squat) seemed hardly worth mentioning. "Mobility" is a generally recognized requirement for any academic career, and so more-or-less voluntarily packing your things and shifting across country or continent is a frequent, normalized occurrence for an early-career scholar. Due to its regional structure and housing market, the United Kingdom also generally has higher internal mobility than most of continental Europe (especially in London), and so frequent moves were par for the course for most of the people I met throughout my doctoral studies. Perhaps I was also somewhat nonchalant about my general spatial status at the time of writing the book: I had begun my doctorate at a time when EU citizens in the United Kingdom still largely lived in a mindset of being locals, and moving from another EU country to the United Kingdom was seen more akin to the move between two cities in the United States than a transnational relocation. As I hint at in the epilogue, this spatial certainty was rudely shattered by Brexit and the sudden demotion of EU-citizens-at-home to barely tolerated aliens, belatedly reminding me that I was an immigrant after all. All of this may have contributed to me not experiencing this eviction as the kind of traumatic rupture that Burraway describes for his respondents-the ubiquity and casualness of displacement in neoliberal England makes it difficult to get too upset about another random eviction.While there is thus not much to see here in terms of the eviction itself, it only occurred to me much later, when I had moved into more conventional homelessness research, how much I had this particular landlord to thank for. Had I planned my research in the way it panned out, be it by deliberately making myself homeless or by posing as a homeless person, I might never have gotten past the ethics committee, and for very good reasons. First of all, posing as homeless would have come with all the common ethical pitfalls of using deception in ethnography, aggravated by the fact that I was not even "studying up." Moreover, in order to get a "realistic" first-hand impression, I would have had also to deceive the various organizations homeless people interact with, from soup kitchens to the Job Centre, opening myself up to justified accusations of everything from "benefit fraud" (a criminal offense) to appropriating resources meant for the actually vulnerable. Really making myself homeless, on the other hand, would have amounted to exactly what Gavin accused me of anyway in my introductory vignette-turning into a game what for others was a bitter and inescapable reality. I am not even sure, in retrospect, whether I could have done this research if my identification "as an anthropologist" had already grown into a full-blown professional identity. Although there is mounting evidence of university lecturers living out of their cars, or sleeping under their desks, there is something about being a professional anthropologist that categorically excludes the kind of predicament I found myself in. You can hang out with homeless people, you may even get away with intentionally making yourself homeless (if you can persuade the ethics committee), but if you're the sort of person who just randomly becomes homeless, you're not really part of the tribe.As Georgina Ramsay observes in a recent article, there is a tendency in anthropology to construct displacement as exceptional, as opposed to a tacitly assumed normality of peaceful spatial belonging (2020). Ramsay argues that this exceptionality attaches to refugees and those seeking asylum, but the same can be said of the homeless, whether they are looked at through the lens of a Douglasian analytic as "people out of place" or following Agamben as "bare life" (I am of course guilty of both). In this kind of exceptionalist framework, "just randomly" becoming homeless may sound inappropriately casual, and yet, to spin the analogy further, just as the successful refugee may discover that citizenship does not necessarily come with the hoped-for legal and economic security, so the homeless often find that being rehoused does not necessarily amount to becoming "at home." In times of ubiquitous uncertainty, the stark difference between the homeless and the housed thus gives way to what one could call a spectrum of housing precarity, where squatting is just a cheaper version of renting, and paying money on the whole only somewhat reduces the frequency of enforced moves. If I could do it all again, I would therefore perhaps adopt an analytic framework similar to that Nina Glick-Schiller (2018) and other migration scholars have proposed, in order to frame displacement not in stark opposition to belonging, but as a nuanced and multifaceted state that does not neatly map onto groups of people, be they anthropologists, homeless people, or both.Finally Alan Smart provides a fascinating ethnographic counterpoint by drawing on his work on squatting in a non-Western context. are certainly important between the squatters we their the or outside of just one. I am to for the around ethics and back to the terms of the moral often we to our sophisticated of what on in ethical onto what are actually much What of the moral outside of the historical and to what Smart as a universal "the way around here the of it, this is a very different claim to the one I my squatters as and for which I must take they are not here to me. If they they might find this to material perhaps more and than the self and its of ethical and political course, as Smart the with to is that can actions were as other for social while squatters were as because they were seen as to the of and a precarious that else had to The a by quite that were the moral of as a for the and they were of course that was exactly the point. The of thus to as much as their and on the of rights from those of the As Smart a moral approach can therefore us a of such while at the same time reminding us that while is a universal (even and have some concept of it does not in and of tell us what should be moral claim to economic therefore necessarily even if it is only is it and thus the whole of questions about and history and politics back to the this point of the moral arguments that squatters in Bristol and those in were making do not appear all that both groups with the of space, and both to this through different In the years that have my the also to have a not to the Smart that it is impossible to all squatters, it has to be seen to be the while squatting in on more or less in have to the state of by the and structure of the with an reflecting the neoliberal so that no one any As one my squatting that a and the of the into and of the as a a home thus as might and are only some thoughts on the many important points in this and I look to those I have not been able to do to here in As a I agree with of the that has an spin onto homelessness and squatting, in a of in has given me a of the and medical response to the as as the of when it comes to to Grohmann, and In general terms, the has without a already to of homelessness and displacement and will continue to do At the time of there is already a political tendency to homelessness and migration as which could to a of In the most positive it could of of homeless in the and as as does not me to on the of squatting in all but as the ethnographic shows, the may be but the is still it may out that we need it now more than is by an from The (or in its most begins the a becomes a social exactly this is subject to for example about the ethics of but we can from the of that the question of when a human becomes of recognition there is already a mode of recognition or present in the between the and those around it, especially the person whose body it We just have to think of the various at establishing to the way or drug is often as on the moral rights of the we to frame an out their need as The only to The of and the of in to out in in Grohmann, and 2020. to and the of The in transnational migration in our A temporal of in Steph. 2020. for the on Hau in 2020. as the in The struggle for The moral of social in through the of and in 2020. and the squatting in England and and and in 2020. and the other in anthropology makes its in and of as an in is a at the for Homelessness and of in from of in is in the of ethical and spatial and the of and in anthropological to the to homelessness and housing Previous articleNext article by of on behalf of the for The for All rights no articles this

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