Force, Dwelling, and the Personhood of Things in Urban Malaysia

Vertigo

Nothing ever holds still in Kuala Lumpur. The effect of this fact is that one gets the sense that everything in the city, including the built environment itself, can potentially act as an agent. This is not particularly distinct from the accounts any urban dweller in Southeast Asia will give when asked to describe his or her form of living. What is remarkable about Kuala Lumpur is the sheer unexpectedness, the seemingly malevolent and intentional arrhythmia, of ordinary urban life and the fact that the problem is not simply an inability to move but the anxiety that everything can move and is moving.

Any researcher willing to sink into an ordinary life marked in this way will not be immune to the deranging effects of this vertigo. This admission should not be read as a confession; it is rather an empirical finding. The focus of my long-term research in the city has been on the reverberating effects of aggressive, unanticipated changes in urban space on ordinary life. Taking seriously claims that the very buildings of the city often feel like they are literally moving, I have suggested previously that what is at stake is the ability to form some belief in the world that would allow for the navigation of what Gilles Deleuze has termed “the immanent plane of existence.”¹ Belief in this formulation pertains less to religiosity or intentionality prior to action than to the relations between sense, evidence, and ethical action in ordinary life. Lacking the ability to reliably assimilate what one senses in the world with what one knows about the world severely risks the coherence of the subject; it is my contention that the material character of everyday urban life in KL often threatens to rupture this very coherence and the forms of life that necessarily emerge out of a subject’s relations to other subjects and to the world.²

This framework of understanding does not answer every question the evidence raises. Specifically, what about the buildings themselves? What is it about the character, or even behavior, of physical structures such as houses, blocks of flats, and office buildings that would prove to be unexpected, disorienting, and disturbing to city residents? Related to this, how can actual dwellings provide an avenue of expressing one’s anxieties, frustrations, and even pain in a manner that the human beings who inhabit such buildings struggle to find when speaking of themselves or other human persons around them?

To make the question more precise, I ask here how dwellings themselves constitute a force in ordinary urban environments. This force is activated relationally via the demand for interpretation that structures elicit from the human beings who build, inhabit, and circulate within and between them. Following Miguel Tamen, I regard the act of interpretation in a very special way in that interpretation stands as a process of person-making. In short, the force that dwellings possess in urban environments such as Kuala Lumpur is located in the fact that they are often perceived as nonhuman persons capable of exerting certain forms of force proper to them within these environments. This claim should in no way be taken as a finding that my interlocutors “fetishized” buildings or were confused about the ontological status of their dwellings; they knew perfectly well that structures were neither humans nor animals. Rather, I am saying that a critical element of their own emplacement within, and belief in, their ordinary life worlds was the necessity to interpret the character of their dwellings, which were, in turn, acts that attributed certain elements we would typically associate with persons. Thus, this article is a reflection on the personhood of things, the various intensities of force that such thing-persons exert on human forms of living, and the outcomes that result when this ability to act disrupts or contradicts the interpretative frameworks that made them agents of sorts in the first place.

Perhaps counterintuitively, my claim that dwellings in Brickfields, a neighborhood immediately adjacent to central Kuala Lumpur, are endowed with forms of personhood proper to their status as nonhuman, nonliving...