Across the Barzakh Available to Purchase

This chapter puts proprioception—awareness of the body’s location in space—in dialogue with the Arabic/Persian concept of barzakh—barrier, obstacle, or isthmus. A distributed capacity embedded in broader infrastructures of the urban commons, attention to proprioception on shaken grounds can help critical inquiry move beyond lingering assumptions of stable, inert ground as a stage for the human drama. The politics of proprioception and potentiation invites us to consider what happens—and how to respond—when the ground is upended and dissolves under our feet; and it teaches us to put aside illusions of stability and equilibrium in times when the western project of “civilization” from which the semicivilized were so long excluded collapses upon itself.