Policing perception: postpolitics and the elusive everyday

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis piece argues that urban postpolitical scholarship should pay greater attention to the everyday lives of urban residents and the everyday spaces of contemporary cities. Recent debates in urban geography have sought in part to expand narrow readings of Jacques Rancière’s politics in particular, creating space for broader and more inclusive analyses of resistance to depoliticizing regimes. This article builds on this work, extending these critiques by suggesting that the quotidian is the most pressing analytical avenue for such expansion. The piece builds on ethnographic and archival fieldwork conducted in Mexico City between 2014 and 2017, demonstrating the dependence of a postpolitical regime on the maintenance of particular relations in the everyday spaces and interactions of the city, and some of the salient ways these trends are experienced, reproduced, and contested by the city’s residents.