small forces

Abstract

This essay discusses cities as composites of small forces of energetic selves. Energetic self here is the dimension of the self that drives one to undertake activities connected to one's desires. These could include collecting strange objects, achieving mundane targets, opposing new ideas, behaving like a spy, counting every tree, tracking obscure data, occupying obscure spaces, and so on. Energetic selves also express themselves in everyday friendships and compassions. These practices go beyond the acts of routine and are considered unproductive in conceptualizing cities. They remain small and are often discarded as stray individual preoccupations, anecdotes, or subjective obsessions. While some of these are related to earnings and occupations, others are simply “useless.” However, everyone seems to have a trip that one lives with and for, and which provides individuals with their energies and cities with their oneiric spaces. Such energies, expressed in absurd quests, unusual obsessions, and bizarre interests cumulatively appear to be producing the city. In many ways the city seems to be a madhouse and madness seems to be running it. The city seems to acquire its generative energy from such small forces. Urban theory and pedagogy have however seldom engaged with an understanding of these small forces or extended it for speculative or projective purposes. Spatial professionals often take up the burden of acting like and being the modern state, which has to operate through modern imperatives of empiricism, technolegality, property regimes, boundaries, and so on. But while these imperatives are limited in understanding life, they are also not completely capable of handling the complexities of the urban. The paper further discusses a variety of ideas like settling; semi-fictional stories and montages; the blur; and transactional capacities to rethink the ways in which one could articulate newer ways to engage with the city.