Sedentary metaphysics- Critique to Malkii

No se si esto queda pero fue una noche de hacer una critica a la idea de sedentary metaphysics, para pensar por que me estoy alejando de ese argumento.


The concept of structured mobilities (Grossberg 1992) considers how places are made in tension with one another, as they are shaped through people’s spatial trajectories. I will examine mobility as a bodily spatial practice (Lefebvre 1991, De Certeau 1984), which contests a system of alterity that ascribes indigenous people the status of an internal other of the postcolonial nation-state (Alonso 1994, Ramos 2003). Through a variety of forms of discipline, state agencies have historically tried to “fix” these groups in well-bounded places. From that perspective indigenous mobility is a practice that challenges the “sedentary metaphysics” of the state that assumes that people and social groups are attached to fixed locations (Malkki 1997).
However sedentary metaphysics cannot be considered as the only way in which state constitutes power through and over space. It is also through the control of movement rather than is prevention that state constitutes post disciplinarian forms of power. If movement and displacement of population have been a focus of concern among researchers identifying the effects of the globalization of capital this movements do not necessarily and always contradict the logic of the state and its connection to economy. So if the tension between state and globalization has been considered thoroughly to the point of claiming for the possibility of dissolution of the former (Appadurai), in this context sedentary metaphysics could be regarded both as a reactionary movement and as a logic of a power in dissolution. I want to consider it however as one of the necessary dimensions of the logic and the way nations find their materiality.
At the same time we need to consider that a controlled movement is in the base of the constitution of new forms of power. Deleuze (19xx) proposes that we live in a post disciplinarian society or society of control based on constructing subjects in their relation to things in the word in a way in which there is no sanction but the possibility of moving: always within a given paths and always being monitored. If this type of power is about the control of the flow then sedentarism is not necessarily a logic contributing to shape this form of power but rather what is condensed in the discourse of flow and flexibility, and not in the logic of a positioning and “fixation”.
Sedentary metaphysics can also be complicated through a number of cases in which movement back and forth form the “rural” to the “urban” are not challenging but rather part of state projects, for example of indigenous intellectuals education (Grant 1992: 88), of labour migrations (Gidwani ), or within movements of nationalist intellectuals that rather than threatening the state expand and consolidate it (Anderson) just to mention some cases.
We can link sendentary methaphysiscs with what Grossberg proposes to call the definition of social jurisdictions as an action of machineries territorializing subjects into place. Jurisdictions include not only the places but also the access and connections between them. Jurisdictions define which types of subjectivity (both organized hierarchically and into systems of difference) can access an circulate where, and how much empowered they can become in these movements. With this we can go beyond the mapping of difference in place to consider the way movement gets regulated. However we can critique to Grossberg that stability of this jurisdictions is never at rest. This does not mean that the jurisdictions are negotiated, which in a way they might be, but there is also always unexpected turns that emerge form the encounters in space. There is thus always more complex devises to control the speed of movements and to attempt to canalize them (Virilio). Technologies of control of movement, its canalization and the possibilities of its detention (war) are not the same as redefining jurisdictions. It is in this point that I see power over space operating effectively.