Paper short abstract:

Building on ongoing work, this paper explores how the logistical practice that constitutes evicting makes and remakes the displaceability of life through its own form of becoming liminal.

Paper long abstract:

This paper articulates how forms of urban governance make possible the displacement of urban life through the reproduction of their own margins. Looking at the ongoing work and forms of care of the logistical practices which underpin the work of 'evicting' (Baker 2021) and the policing of urban property, it explores the hypothesis that the practice of displacement exists within its own constant and ongoing self-produced margins in which to operate upon those it displaces. This aims to explain how agents of eviction and the displaceable share and appropriate durations and spaces, and how evicting institutions become necessary to the functioning of urban economies yet also stigmatised. This occurs through both a political theology of 'demonization' involving the production of choice and blame (Kotsko 2017), and forms of perpetual re-iteration, improvisation, and hybridization: an oscillation between the attempt to 'fix' urban space and the continual re-imagining of the boundaries of the legal, technical, and possible. Identifying 'logistics' as both a practice of delivery and a science of property-making (Moten and Harney 2021), I argue the logistical work of evicting makes and remakes the displaceability of life through its own 'demonic' form of liminality.

Baker, A. (2021). From eviction to evicting: Rethinking the technologies, lives and power sustaining displacement. Progress in Human Geography, 45(4), 796-813.

Kotsko, A. (2017). Neoliberalism's Demons. Theory & Event, 20(2), 493-509.

Moten, F. and Harney, S. (2021) All Incomplete. Minor Compositions.