Infinite Parking Lots

Abstract

Infinite Parking Lots Kathryn Marie Dudley The question before us, it would seem, is where we are when there's no there there. That is how Gertrude Stein formulates everybody's autobiographical dilemma upon discovering that the place where they came from no longer exists as the place where they once were.1 Encounters with vacancy, we could say, produce perplexity and affective shock. They can induce startling moments of confusion in our embodied movement through space and time. In Stein's case, the jolt was precipitated by a confrontation with the specter of an office park occupying the site in Oakland, California where her childhood home once stood. An event like this, we might suppose, would be hard to miss. But Stein being Stein is who she is because she noticed it. Not everybody does. And there, it seems to me, is intrigue of an anthropological kind. The contributors to this volume have all, each in their own way, noticed the vacancies of late liberalism. They not only notice them but also dwell in the affective break of that shock—that space on the roadside that lies beside, beyond, and underneath imperial desires to condemn and bypass the debris produced by centuries of hubris and ongoing violence.2 This mode of inhabiting the noticed unnoticed—this ethnographic attunement—affords us an instructive opportunity to reflect on the disorienting and reorienting affects that vacancy instantiates. To be agitated by sites of vacancy is [End Page 465] to experience them as uncannily animating and transformative—and not necessarily in a for sale or rent sort of way. Sites of vacancy can arouse us as happenings in their own right. Contrary to the enterprising figure of vacant real estate as a blank slate upon which to scrawl the signs of restoration or renewal, these breaks in the landscape can be said to seethe with struggles over hegemonic regimes of value. If the jack-o-lantern grins of abandoned Main Streets could speak, they would surely say that resale and profitable flipping are never inevitable. No matter how toxic or venerable their histories, vacancies introduce question marks into scenarios of boom, bust, and redevelopment as usual. Whether they become host to community gardens, convention centers, prisons, or encampments of the evicted, the lacunae of accumulation by dispossession resist both the knee-jerk nostalgia of empire's ruins and the historical erasures of capital's boosters.3 In vacancy's gaps—between densely storied pasts and yet-to-be-authored futures—ghostly matters emerge, alerting us to wavering presents in filling our about-to-be-exhaled breath with premonitions of a divergent otherwise.4 It is this—this placement in the midst of things—that gives vacancy, as a situated analytic, traction in my imagination. It echoes Brian Massumi's voicing of a Deleuzian muse to start our inquiries in the middle of transitions from one state of being to another rather than at putative beginnings or ends.5 With all due respect to Gertrude, this vantage point highlights the space-time in between residential bungalows and commercial office parks. These interludes, in contrast to whatever precedes or follows, beckon us toward ever-present histories and futurities that are not yet—and may never be—realized. Vacancy, in other words, situates us where we are now and asks us to wonder: What is here here? And the longer we stay in this place of wonderment, the more surprising the answers can become. Not long ago, I confronted the figure of a parking lot in the least likely of places. I was talking to a desert advocate about habitat fragmentation on public lands in the American West. We were discussing a quarter-million-acre span of high desert that lies between two federally designated antelope sanctuaries. Wild lands and wildlife, I learned, are faced with perils far in excess of the ubiquitous barbed-wire fencing around livestock allotments and the relentless expansion of oil, gas, and mineral mining. More elusive, but ever-intensifying, are the horrors of anthropogenically induced drought, wildfire, and life-extinguishing riparian blight. In these [End Page 466] fragile ecosystems, the Anthropocene's fallout does not land equitably on all multispecies worlds...