This title indicates that in the first place it will be the question of putting Foucault’s famous text Des espaces autres (published only in 1984, but the first version of which goes back to 1967) in the context of the debate involving some of the greatest French thinkers after ‘May 1968’ and which concerns the city as a field of subjective production. Between the founding works of Henri Lefebvre – beginning with Le droit à la ville (1968) – and the founding, in 1967, of CERFI (Centre d’étude, de recherche et de formation institutionnelle), coordinated by Félix Guatari and to which Foucault himself as well as Gilles Deleuze – just to mention those two – will give their support and contribution, emerges an embryo of ambitious and original research on the city as a layout of apparatuses of production of the socius. Recusing all totalisation of the city, which they judge imaginary, all their approaches deconstruct binary approaches according to which one can view the city as two spaces (private/public space, productive space/anti-productive space, space of capital/space of work) to envisage it as an auto-differentiating machine, which produces neither conflictual spaces of a dialectical type nor smooth neutral space, but a series of folds, of local alterations, of heterotypies. Lefebvre’s idea of the ‘production of space’ becomes a crucible, treated by Foucault in all its spectre: the production of political spaces (as in the differentiation between capital cities, disciplined cities, secured cities)[1] the production of disciplinary spaces (the prison – of which the real matrix is the factory,  the psychiatric hospital); the production of ‘counter-sites’ (as the Foucauldian re-evaluation of heterotypies is inseparable from his attempts to identify spaces of ‘counter-subjectivisation´ that preoccupied him in his last years). 

We will test the viability and fertility of these hypotheses, which culminate in Foucault taking up, in 1984, the ‘heterotypies’ of 1967. We will examine other theoretical suggestions such as those of Lefebvre (La Production de l’espace of 1974) as well as those of Guattari (the function of ‘collective equipments’ of the cities as ‘axioms of capital’; the city as body ‘without organs’, the function of writing as political coding originating in urban space), by testing categories such as ‘governance’ or ‘neoliberalism’, which will only gain ascendancy in the last decades of the last century and which largely reconfigure the science of the city making pertinent anew certain elements of the schizo-analytical readings of  Deleuze and Guattari (what is a city as a body without organs, what is a city that does not have a face but perhaps a “faciality” [visageité], what is a city as a ‘density of equipment’, etc.). To put it differently, it is the question of putting together a speculative constellation concerning the city as a field of the production of subjectivities, putting to test the contemporary pronouncements on the capital, urban space and logistical rationalities, pointing out the paradox whereby the autonomy acquired by the question of space over that of time in contemporary thought, hardly translates into its ‘desacralisation’ as Foucault imagined, but on the contrary creates new forms of the ‘sanctuarisation’ of urban space.

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Livio Boni, is an Italian researcher, living and working in France. He is actually associated researcher in Philosophy at the University of Toulouse Le Mirail. Lest three years he worked in a Research Unity at the University of Paris VII about the implications of Psychoanalysis in the field of urbanism, architecture and, more generally speaking, of the constituted knowledges touching at the “city”. He is also Clinical Psychologist and member of the Groupe de Recherches Matérialestes (GRM), a collective subject working since four years to a “conjunctural” reading of theoretical thoughts: how does the theory register, and resist to, and prolong, the revolutionary events ? He also translated into Italian many of the last political and speculative essays of Alain Badiou.

In the early nineteenth century, the northern frontiers of Bengal were still largely untouched by the regulatory regime of colonialism. It was only in the second half of this century that these lands were brought properly into the field of colonial governmentality and the district-space of Jalpaiguri was officially instituted. The making of this district-space was attended by forces of dispossession and deracination for peoples who were not obviously economically and culturally part of ‘Bengal Proper’ — a phrase the colonial administration coined to describe the eastern stretches of their South Asian possessions. The geography, too, was untameable for the purposes of colonial capital. The mixed topography of forests, pastures, and settled agricultural lands were implicated in a political-economic network that was not entirely articulated to the processes of colonial governance. But, the government needed timber for the railways; a landscape suited to tea plantations; and, of course, there was the ubiquitous colonial bias for settled cultivation as the only mode of agricultural production at work, too. Hereon, the history of the making Jalpaiguri could have unfolded as a simple unilinear tale of dispossession of peoples and colonial violence. However, the archives throw in a couple of spanners.  

At one level, there were no momentous disruptions — popular protests or a groundswell — to speak of after the Anglo-Bhutanese war of 1865 had ended. From then onwards, it was a relentless story of crushingly efficient organization, as land revenue settlement was carried out in the Dooars, state forests and tea gardens were formed, and, eventually, the demography of the Dooars was restructured. Efficient ‘taming’, so to speak, of the frontiers showcases a chronicle of untold aggression, as indigenous groups are robbed of their professions, pushed out of their lands and sometimes branded, ironically, as ‘foreigners’. A careful reprisal of the archival trail evidences this violence ineluctably implicit in colonial organization rather than the familiar archetypal twin which marks and mauls instances of resistance and conflict.

At another level, the archives suggest that the policies and the policymakers, who lost their nightly sleep over the exact procedure of carving out this district-space, were often at loggerheads. It is not as if these administrators were pursuing widely different ends: none of them saw the northern frontiers as hardscrabble. In fact, the high hopes were that these terrains would serve as a perfect terroire for timber and plantation even as the fluent spigot of the thriving trade in these parts was channelled into the colonial coffers. The multiple means proposed to achieve these dubious ends, however, scrambled any possibility of a united policy. 

The apparent contradictions in colonial policymaking, of course, did not weaken the thudding force with which colonialism came to bear upon the various indigenous groups. And, indeed, a violent history of dispossession ensued. The point to make is that colonial governmentality, as it is often contrived to be, may not be the product of a single-minded and monolithic will. But the fissured and contradictory implementation of colonial policy seldom makes its force and ferocity labile at the ground level. It is this tale of colonial contradictions and critical collisions that the paper selects from the long history of Jalpaiguri-in-the-making to focus on, beginning with the year 1865 and going up to 1900. While at it, the paper tries to track the history of anxious economies in a nervous state.

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