Association of the American Geographers Annual Meeting, Feb.2012 – New York
Schizoanalysis of the homeless subject
Keywords: Homeless people, chance of space, Guattari, abstract machine, subjectivity Type: Paper
This work is based upon a ten months ethnographic enquiry in Turin, North-West of Italy, to interrogate homelessness as a subjective condition that emerges from the entanglements of the individual and the city. The theoretical framework adopted in the work relies on two main points. Firstly, on a “more- than-topological” understanding of space, able to acknowledge the chances that actually reside beyond the curtain of the codified context where homelessness take place in the city. Concerning this point, the paper relies on Guattari’s notion of abstract machine, as devices that concretely “extract” something codifying it into something different. Secondly, the paper investigate homelessness through Guattari’s notion of the subject, arguing that interrogating homelessness in a more-than-human fashion a world of multiples subjects emerges, with various attitudes, capabilities, relational and affective characterizations. The presentation will be tight and filled up with many exemplifications taken from the fieldwork. Its relevance for this particular session should not be seen in its major engagement with Guattari’s work, but in the tentative to translate few Guattari’s ideas into valuable research tools to investigate the contemporary urban and its issues.
More on my work on homelessness, here.