Paper Short Abstract:

This paper proposes to unpack French conceptions of territory, in particular the ways in which territoire has come to signify not only a geographic area but a set of social relations embedded in the locale, by focusing on the role played by territorial diagnostics in urban regeneration. What would writing against territorial diagnostics entail? Drawing from fieldwork undertaken in the 18th arrondissement of Paris – one of the centralities of contemporary urban regeneration in France – this paper turns to abjected spaces and abjected subject positions to formulate a partial critique.

Paper Abstract:

In its efforts to re-engineer abjected urban spaces, French urban experts deploy a range of techniques and technologies geared toward sociocultural and infrastructural change particularly through the repurposing of dormant construction sites or disused industrial facilities. One crucial component of the creation and circulation of knowledge about these spaces and their surrounds is territorial diagnostics. The term signals a medical conception of territory as body politic, one on and within which experts intervene remedially through transplants and sutures, to render space legible and formalize its informality. How can one continue to write about a given space, specifically when it is rendered an object of state and market intervention, without participating in territorial diagnostics? If to write against territorial diagnostics may mean to write with the abjected urban – that which refuses or is prohibited from being enfolded into legitimate desirable urbanity – it remains that such abjected urban retains a right to opacity and that to write remains an activity of rendering legible. That is, in writing about and with interlocutors whose sensibility is to remain within darkness, the ethical gesture of critique replicates the institutional desire to render oblique sociality legible for remediation. Underlying these questions is a general tension about how anthropologists of modern power may become implicated in the very processes that they seek to critique, by way of shared methods with the experts against which they write.