everything outside of them as potentially hostile. It is not by chance that these communities build shelters protected by material or symbolic walls with drawbridges that are drawn most of the time. Contemporary gated communities are an obvious example of such an attitude.
If, however, the encounter is part of an effort to embrace otherness without an intermediary phase of mutual recognition and negotiation gestures, we may end up with a virtual extinction or assimilation of otherness. In contemporary consumer culture everybody is forced to be on the move, chasing ever-new products, ever-new sensations. As Zygmunt Bauman points out: “Consumers are first and foremost gatherers of sensations” (1998, 83). What appears a new desirable sensation is a kind of fabricated otherness. Fabricated by the continuous, consumer-oriented education of the senses in the media and advertising images. Towards such an otherness, the citizen-consumer is all too eager to cross the borders. And with a similar attitude, guided by desire-propelling exoticism, the consumer assimilates otherness while touring in a foreign land, only to add new sensation-trophies.
In order to approach otherness in an act of mutual awareness, one needs to carefully dwell on the threshold. In this transitory territory that belongs to neither of the neighboring parts, one understands that it is necessary to feel the distance so as to be able to erect the bridge. Hostility arises from the preservation and increase of this distance while assimilation results from the obliteration of distance. Encounter is realized by keeping the necessary distance while crossing it at the same time. The wisdom hidden in the threshold experience lies in the awareness that otherness can only be approached by opening the borders of identity, forming—so to speak—intermediary zones of doubt, ambivalence, hybridity, and negotiation. As Richard Sennett remarks: “In order to sense the Other, one must do the work of accepting oneself as incomplete” (1993, 148).
These zones may require gestures that are not performed as indices of identity characteristics but mainly as acts of approaching. Therefore, the gestures will have an equally hybrid status, describing an intermediary identity offered as meeting place. This intermediary identity is perhaps what results from the “subjunctive mood” that Turner connects with liminality (Turner 1982, 84). Intermediary identities are performed only to test the other’s will of contact. They are performed not to hide or to deceive but to offer ways to depart from a fenced-in self towards a self constructed through the encounter.
Sennett describes civility as the “treating [of] others as though they were strangers and forging a social bond upon that social distance” (1977, 264). If we understand civility as part of an art of building thresholds between people or social groups, then we can agree with Sennett and his defense of a new public culture. This culture would be characterized by this continuous effort to preserve otherness and to create in-between areas of negotiation. And a curious, difficult-to-define theatricality seems to be performed in such gestures of reconnaissance and mutual approach. Brechtian theatricality seems to dwell in thresholds. One departs from themselves to be an other. This temporary transformation is seen as a gesture—a Gestus, in Brecht’s vocabulary—of seeking to understand what is other than him or herself. Theatricality is the common element in the behavior of liminal actors during rites of passage and contemporary strangers groping their way towards each other through a modern version of civility.
The human ability to become other is at the foundation of such an experience of a “subjunctive mood.” This socially constructed ability helps people to meet others without forcing them into precast identities. Being able to become other, even if one returns again to one’s former self, is being able to accept otherness and, potentially, a position from which to construct a relationship with the other as other. Isn’t imagination after all this curious staging of reality that creates thoughts and feelings out of nonexistent happenings that are actually performed in the mind? And isn’t this an exploratory encounter with otherness in its purest form?
An emancipating spatiality?
This book is divided into four parts that correspond to three interconnected areas of research concerning the threshold spatialities of emancipatory processes. The first part is organized around the idea that contemporary urban space is discontinuous: to understand spatiotemporal experiences we have to work with concepts that may capture this inherent discontinuity. Chapter 1 explains how in this context, rhythm and exception are appropriate terms if we aim at finding not only the characteristics but also the potentialities of the dominant urban model—that of a “city of enclaves.”
The second chapter of this section reveals that both rhythm and exception are not only the means to establish a dominant spatial order but also forms through which spatialities of resistance are created. Focusing on experiences of the aftermath, exile, and immigration, this chapter explores spatiotemporal discontinuity as a possible ground of encounter with otherness. Otherness, understood as a relative term, is shown to prosper in periods in which collective habits are destroyed or suspended.
The second part problematizes the encounter with otherness in the context of urban experience. Making use of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished study of nineteenth-century Paris, the opening chapter attempts to understand the metropolitan experience as inherently dynamic and ambiguous, containing both nightmarish elements and liberating potentialities. Through his description of the bourgeois private individual and the flâneur, two distinctive attitudes towards public and private space are exposed. Both attitudes are compared in terms of their dependence on the manipulation of individualizing traces in metropolitan life as well as their participation in the creation of (private or public) “auratic” urban phantasmagorias. A precarious “study of thresholds” is evoked, considered as a knowledge constructed through the ambiguous experience of the flâneur-as-allegorist. This study explores the dynamics of urban experience by pointing to the revealing trace-aura dialectics that permit the surfacing of a third, in-between element: the threshold. A “city of thresholds” thus describes the possibility of a “redeemed” urban modernity.
The next short chapter focuses on walking, considered as a practice that exposes the experience of otherness in the city, to further explore the spatiality of threshold. Porosity becomes a spatial quality, passages become spatial artifacts, and the act of crossing creates thresholds and activates threshold potentialities.
The following chapter presents one of the most critical points of the book’s argument: thresholds mark processes of transformations of social identity. Anthropology has theorized the difficult relationship between self and other as a culturally determined relationship. Approaching otherness (cultural as well as historical) is a crucial problem in social sciences and is equally so in the tactics of habitation. Having an appropriate distance of encounter is necessary for differences to persist without blocking negotiation and mutual understanding. The ability to recognize the appropriate distances in time and space critically influences the theatricality of social interaction. This ability is acquired and improved in the varied conditions of threshold creation. The in-between space of thresholds is explored in this chapter as a potential stage on which encountering otherness means visiting, rehearsing, testing, and exploring it.
The third part of the book brings together the findings of the two former parts to reveal the importance of threshold in understanding the spatial aspects of emancipating practices. The first chapter of the third part focuses on the threshold character of heterotopia. Reformulating Foucault’s definitions of heterotopia, we can consider all spatial experiences that “rehearse” a future of human emancipation as heterotopic. Beyond and against the city of enclaves, heterotopic spaces mark thresholds in space and time where dominant order and control are questioned.
Testing the idea of heterotopias, understood here as thresholds towards radical otherness, the remaining chapters analyze the words, actions, and practices of two exemplary cases where collective identities were put into crisis: the Zapatista rebellion and the December 2008 youth uprising
