The Syntax of Confinement

Speaker: Neni Panourgiá (Columbia University); Respondent: Elizabeth Davis (Princeton University)

Abstract: I am attempting to write a comprehensive history on the many forms of confinement (it happens to be on Leros) that has never been written until now. By utilizing ethnographic material that I had on Leros that goes back to almost twenty years, I want to think on the question of confinement, a question that stitches all my work together from the beginning, going from the molar to the molecular, as Deleuze and Guattari have it. To think about the concept of confinement writ large, in all of its Benthamian dimensions, but also on its most granular micro-level; to think of the sovereign power that actualizes this confinement, but also to think of the micro-contexts that make its socio-ecologies possible. To look at the decrees, the plans, the architects, but also to give the necessary space to the utterances of the actors of the everyday to breathe. To create a text that brings the sensory, the political, the social onto the same plane of meaning, and look for their complicities and their antagonisms.