A Case Study of Delhi

This paper makes three propositions on special economic zones as a site for production of new laboring subjects and the simultaneous spatial, social and cognitive reorganization that takes place. It is a contested phenomenon where both the state and the subject reconstitute and redefine themselves. While the state and the corporations want to have an ‘ideal’ laboring subject forged on the basis of their agenda, the subject is not an unquestioning agent. The state constantly strives to perfect its expertise on governing the new subject while the subject tries to preserve its autonomy and challenge the boundaries of the physical zone. In this piece, I build on the arguments made by Timothy Mitchell in Rule of Experts, where he analyzes how experts continue to reproduce the colonial discourse. I take the position that the laboring subject also accumulates knowledge and expertise by challenging the discourse of the experts.

The Pudong zoning pattern provides a privileged perspective from which to consider how the Chinese state articulates its territory. The Shanghai financial center in Pudong and its development as a zone also allows for an exploration of the conflicts between diverse understandings of ‘expertise’ held by different actors investing in the stock exchange. This analysis also focuses attention on the emergence of a contested space, in which labor subjects negotiate their expertise, and allows for an examination of if and how this expertise clashes with the type of expertise required by the state.

1. These few notes are based on my own experience of the Transit Labour project. As someone primarily involved in art and cultural criticism, I am particularly interested in drawing possible connections between the discussions during the platforms and a set of creative practices. In particular, I am interested in looking at the project’s premises and methods as rooted in a practice of experimentation that is central to some of the most critical directions in contemporary art today.

Accumulation in Post-Colonial Capitalism

There is another way to think of the practice of zoning besides as one of exception in space management. Of course a crucial question is to be faced at the outset: Is the question of exception a matter of looking into the production of norm and then looking at the dynamics of exception, or is exception finally a matter of difference? Here I would like to leave the matter to the reader’s or the listener’s philosophical disposition; it will not harm much whichever way the judgement goes, so long as we know what is at stake.