Philoctetes Revisited: White Public Space and the Political Geography of Public Safety

Philoctetes was lying in great pain in the Island of Lemnos, where the sons of the Achaeans left him, for he had been bitten by a poisonous water snake.

Poor Philoctetes, Poeas' wretched son,
Whom here I left; for such were my commands
From Grecia's chiefs, when by his fatal wound
Oppressed, his groans and execrations dreadful.

--Sophocles

In this poor grotto. On my bow I lived:
The winged dove, which my sharp arrow slew,
With pain I brought into my little hut,
And feasted there; then from the broken ice
I slaked my thirst, or crept into the wood
For useful fuel; from the stricken flint
I drew the latent spark, that warms me still
And still revives. This with my humble roof
Preserve me, son. But, oh! my wounds remain.
Thou seest an island desolate and waste;
No friendly port nor hopes of gain to tempt,
Nor host to welcome in the traveller;
Few seek the wild inhospitable shore.
By adverse winds, sometimes the unwilling guests,
As well thou mayst suppose, were hither driven;
But when they came, they only pitied me,
Gave me a little food, or better garb
To shield me from the cold; in vain I prayed
That they would bear me to my native soil,
For none would listen. Here for ten long years
Have I remained, whilst misery and famine
Keep fresh my wounds, and double my misfortune.

--Sophocles

Walls

Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.

--Constantine P. Cavafy (1896)

The current fusion of new forms of social marginality and economic peripheralization is transforming the nature of civil society in the United States and Western Europe. This process has been termed advanced marginality, an emergent form of structural violence that stitches together color, class, and place. The typified characteristics are polarized economic growth based on dualization of the labor market, the casualization of employment, the informalization of the economy in communities of color, joblessness precipitating class decomposition or deproletarianization, retrenchment of public services, and the disconnection of wage/labor relations in urban margins from macroeconomic trends such as short-term growths in the wider transnationalized economy. ¹ These structural processes are aided and amended by complementary ideologies of flexible citizenship and civic disability that pathologize the very populations most harmed by these economic transformations and that fetishize their structural displacement as a form of pathologized space and pathologized embodiment.

In the dualized city, deindustrialization is coupled with increasing residential segregation: geographical coordinates have become determinants of differential access to the formal labor market. These factors have effected a profound transformation in kinship in inner-city communities and have weakened ties of solidarity, resulting in transformations in African American and Hispanic extended family structure and in traditional patterns of flexible allocation of kin resources, specifically residential arrangements. The retraction of welfare entitlements and the depredations of drug misuse--which is associated with higher levels of domestic violence--have increased the pressure of maintaining kinship ties, a responsibility that has traditionally resided with women. ² The African American and Hispanic family structures that anchored the great migration to the north no longer play the same supportive role as kinship and extended kin networks become depleted and resource pooling becomes an increasingly fragile practice. The increased stress placed on the informal resources of extended households and the contraction of kinship networks in tandem with the degradation of existing housing stock can be linked to risk factors relating to residential displacement and homelessness.

Alongside and in response to these economic transformations...