‘Organize, organize, organize’: The act of surrounding, one to another

Abstract

It has been an honour to have such wonderful scholars, whose work I really respect, put in the work to read and say something about this book. Many salient questions are asked, and points raised in the commentaries. Narayanan Palat invokes the once again controversial notion of ‘the field’ as a medium in which researchers both are surrounded by particular conundrums and surround the everyday practices of those with whom a certain distance is constituted through a practice called ‘research’. What is the surrounds here, they ask, and what are the ethics and politics of a ‘figure’ that both belongs and is detached from a situation, or where neither belonging or detachment is an adequate term for the positionality entailed. Who surrounds who, and where this is not a question that can be attributed to a specific designation or geography? While Lalitha Kamath views the surrounds as an atmospheric condition for a subaltern politics – something to which I might only partially subscribe, they nevertheless, point out the almost intractable dilemmas entailed in apprehending the resourcefulness of the working poor who continue to reinvent the conditions of endurance – but barely. And certainly not in terms that are just or sufficient. Kamath is attentive to the multiple archives of itineraries evident in the working poor peripheries of Mumbai, itineraries that reflect a constant sense of movement; that things don’t stand still; that one is fully captured by a specific position, even as possibilities are intensely gendered and subject to sweeping ‘counterinsurgencies’ by various forms of state power. Here the questions about the extent to which autonomy can be materialized by being left to one’s own devices and the concessions to be made by being ‘taken care of’ through the reciprocal responsibilities of state and citizen are not easily reconciled, and must ‘taken on’ as a matter of a constant re-arrangement of their mutual relations as surrounds. Additionally it is important to emphasize the conceivable ways in which researchers are both imbricated and co-producers of surrounds, the south, and the metropolis, and how these are in an always oscillating relationship with each other. And as they are repeated in some kind of integral relationship – meaning that that the south might surround the metropolis, as the metropolis surrounds the south – as well as researchers being surrounded by often impossible positions from which they nevertheless try to do something – that the surrounds becomes the term for shifting relations of encompassment and detachment, of reciprocity and rupture. This is not just a matter of the perspective of researchers but a structural condition. A structuring that always entails a multiplicity of conceivable conjunctions, of what might be. Even if metropolis and south are limiting terms, their very repetition points to the possibilities of something else besides what we know and assume, that might have been present all along. One can begin quite literally and take ‘the surrounds’ as that atmospheric, morphological, metabolic, architectural, topographical, social and lived space, which surrounds ‘you’, the actor, and