Refusing spatiotemporal unfixity: A response to ‘Inhabiting the extensions’

I must begin by admitting that I am not sure I know what the argument about ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’ is, except that it drew this reader into the ‘bewilderment’ (Simone et al., 2025), whether I wanted to or not. I submit! I let go of my antipathy to the passive voice as well to the idea of the ‘logic’ of things that seem patently illogical, or premised on violence just as much as reason, whether in the form and function of cities or in urban formations that include road networks or massive infrastructural transformations like China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). I jump in, head first, despite a distaste for pinning political hopes on ‘majorities’, given the authoritarianism intrinsic to majoritarian politics from India and Brazil to the USA.

I would like to do three things. I first think about what might be possible theoretically with ‘inhabiting the extensions’ as a response and elaboration of the notion of ‘extended urbanization’. I will then think a bit more about the authors’ sense of ‘bewilderment’, which I read as standing in for a diagnosis of widespread spatial and temporal uncertainty that might be far less bewildering analytically than it is from the perspectives of lives considered in the paper. I will conclude with the brief characterizations of empirical research that we are afforded glimpses of, and that I hope to read in a more fulsome way.

First, the notion of ‘inhabiting the extensions’ seems to derive from a very specific concept; it's not hair extensions or extensions for late assignments, but the idea that the production of the urban beyond city regions or mega-cities is new. Some urbanists call this ‘extensive urbanization’; I cannot do justice to this work, and just to make it clear, I am by no means an urbanist; my thinking has been shaped by agrarian, Southern, and Black Marxist traditions. There is an implicit reference in the concept of ‘extended urbanization’ to Marx's notion of extensive accumulation reliant on what he called ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, which is not so primitive at all, as opposed to the expanded reproduction of capital through the ongoing creative destruction of built geographies, as we know well from Marxist geography and particularly from David Harvey, across his vast corpus (by way of example, see Harvey, 1996: 295–6). Infrastructure studies have made great strides in pointing out that these new geographies are also new natures and new sociotechnical assemblages, but the Marxist point is to insist that they are financialized, speculative, labored, and often involve dispossession or radical transformation of access to land, and in all these senses the production of new geographies is always a bet against their own inevitable destruction. There is no analytical or political value in this perspective in holding onto any kind of teleology about any kind of geographical formation; it is always bound to change, indeed to destruction. The mistake would be in presuming that this destruction always prefigures new rounds of space-making in the interests of accumulation. That is not the case. In our world of race-to-the-bottom labor regimes, destructive environments, and techno-utopianism about AI, there really is no way to imagine capital conquering its limits ad-nauseum, or, as Ruthie Gilmore often puts it, for instance in Gilmore et al. (2022), for ‘capitalism to save capitalism from capitalism’. Instead, this is the time in which more desperate forms of extensive accumulation return in new guise, locking people into increasingly insecure triadic relations of land-labor-capital long prefigured in agrarian Marxist accounts of differentiated forms of agrarian capitalism (Chari, 2022). Might this be the political-analytical context to think more about what it means to ‘inhabit the extensions’?

Second, on the ‘bewilderment’: whose is it? Who is the subject hidden in plain sight? From the critical traditions that have been persuaded by the hermeneutics of suspicion, we should not wonder that prices do not reflect value, that presumed opportunities remain elusive, or that the future is uncertain; we should assume instead that nothing apparent to experience can possibly be what it seems. This is not to say that the world is unintelligible to its denizens, but the idea of the hermeneutics of suspicion presumes that there are dynamics that shape experience that is simply not what immediately meets the eye, touch, taste, and so on. A corollary to this is that the fact of living with a realization of flux, uncertainty, and instability cannot be considered a virtue, or even the best vantage point to launch its critique. And if the critic presumes to extend a hand in solidarity, an extension we cannot do without, we must find a way to refuse the conditions of possibility of perpetual uncertainty and precarity.

As a corollary, I would like to note that AbdouMaliq Simone's oeuvre has made us think more carefully about the way in which people on various margins who are not marginal at all live lives of incredible dexterity and perspicacity. But they do so, as the Marxist adage goes, under conditions not of their making. I have long thought that we should read Simone's propositions about the creativity of the African urban poor (e.g. Simone, 2004), alongside the historical anthropology of Sara Berry (1993), who explains something very similar to this creativity as shaped by specific legacies of African colonial capitalism, and by what she so evocatively terms ‘hegemony on a shoestring’. But that is for another day.

There is more to the question of bewilderment that is specific to our age of political-economic revanchism and climate injustice. I would like to think with a proposition by the late Srinivas Aravamudan, that we live in a time in which ‘the shadow of tomorrow's impending ecological disaster leaps over today and reunites with abandoned conceptions of human finitude from a past rich with apocalyptic nightmares that the Enlightenment had temporarily vanquished’ (2013: 9). Aravamudan calls for a form ‘catachronistic’ as opposed to anachronistic critique; catachronism is the situation in which characterizations of both the past and present have to engage the slow unfolding of a determinate future. The specifics of this future are, of course, unknown, but we know that it will be increasingly and intensively shaped by climate politics. Aravamudan does not reassure us about recuperating prior forms of struggle: no second coming of the proletariat, nothing inevitable about anti-imperialist politics. Rather, he adds, we witness the progressivist hopes bequeathed by the Enlightenment being inexorably undone (Aravamudan, 2013: 8–9). The Marxist tradition has been precisely engaged with this undoing, and this is key to the Black Marxist Geography exemplified best by Ruthie Gilmore's oeuvre. What Aravamudan brings to this problematic is an insistence on thinking about uneven and combined critical forms that faced ‘apocalyptic nightmares’ differently.

Third, none of this is of value unless it is useful to interpret conditions of social and environmental domination through the production of perpetual insecurity and unfixity. As I write elsewhere, Harvey's notion of the spatial fix was always a theory of unfixing, a political argument against the ruse of perpetual or stable capitalist geographies (Chari, 2024). There was always another possibility in the notion of the spatial fix, of ‘being in a fix’ as in living through contradictory conjunctures, and also of ‘getting a fix’ as in a drug-trip or collective hallucination, such as the hallucinations of racism, Hindu supremacy, or transphobia.

The empirical material in ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’ is suggestive, but too truncated. I want more of this research to understand it on its own terms, to understand the different insights of these researchers. I wanted to know more about the forms of habitation in Fort Dauphin that provoke the generalizations offered; or about the insights from life in the terraqueous environs of Ennore given the suggestive window into the fishing labor regime. Rather than being satisfied by composite migrant types, I begged for more detail of concrete relations in rural-urban Bengal as well as theory deployed to elaborate this specificity. The fascinating section on African migrants becoming braccianti in Southern Italy had me wanting more on this labor regime; this was the most persuasive vignette in its deployment of concepts; despite its brevity, it conveyed how the dialectics of settling/unsettling might explain social relations rather than offer an ex-post reflection. I wanted more elaboration on how Amazonian novo cangaço performs being ‘off the radar’; and I was uncertain about which section of the BRI was the site from which the scholar was thinking about temporality, and how this appeared to be the key insight about extensive urbanization through the BRI. These were fascinating bits of accounts, and I encourage the writers to elaborate on them further.

I conclude with the final beguiling story about a ‘young Jakartan woman, Buna’, which the authors characterize as ‘Buna's extended livelihood practices’, with an immediate caution that ‘they [these extended livelihood practices] don’t add up to something greater than the parts’. But if that is the case, then why label these practices at all? What is the point of theoretical engagement if not to offer something that is in some sense critically summative in a way that does not simply describe ‘the parts’? If description were adequate, why not just leave Buna's story in Bahasa Indonesia, in fact? Why learn from it? What are we to make of the statement that ‘she is as actively bisexual as can be viable in the Jakarta context’, if the authors are not implicitly making an evaluative claim about ‘viable bisexuality’ elsewhere? The account is certainly fascinating, but it begs more questions about representation of the subaltern than it clarifies. When the vignette ends with the passage above, that ‘all the components of Buna's extended livelihood practices accompany each other, extending each into new terrain but without putting together a new hybrid or integrated entity’, we can certainly agree that world-making is not an individual act, and that this is not an argument for radical voluntarism. But then, the authors argue that ‘things can happen right next to each other and be completely impervious to what the other is doing’: completely? Is that possible? I share the sense of vertigo that the authors mean the reader to feel, but I am not sure that we can give up on the idea of representation, or there would be no point in engaging in this commentary.

This returns us to what ‘extension’ is meant to express analytically. I am with the authors when they write that we only discern anything in media res, in the (spatiotemporal) middle of things. This is the case in how we discern all things. We can never rewind and start at the very beginning. More than anything, I am curious about what this group of nine authors think about how people inhabit ‘extensive urbanization’ not only as workers, thinkers, lovers, and dreamers but also as people resisting resignation to a world of deepening spatiotemporal unfixity.