![]() ![]() As one of the many journals that help in the proliferation of city, we must critically reflect on the negatives we help to produce. City is one of these persistent symbols (Zeiderman and Dawson Citation2022) though we must be careful in assuming linearity in our contemporary renditions: relationality does not equate to continuity. The critical outcome of deconstruction is transformation and contextual transcendence of oppressive binaries. Some symbols persist, transforming themselves in the process and producing a litany of negatives that are imbued with the relational life of the dead, the marginalised, the abject, the queer. The critical outcome of deconstruction is not the obliteration of any particular symbol. ![]() This should not imply that a scholar's intervention is unnecessary on the contrary, it is one vital way for deconstruction to accelerate its critical outcome. My understanding of deconstruction is not an activity that an academic does, per se, but rather as the inherent progression of symbols they are each already in a process of deconstruction through its circulation or lack thereof, independent of a scholar's intervention. In this sense, all we know of language is bordering and the negative is integral to this practice because inherent in the construction of any symbol is also its deconstruction. I call these moments bordering, a rupturing of the symbolic (dis)order from whence space is unbound, wild and wily, beyond the trappings of symbols in their multiple iterations. I am not necessarily concerned with space but rather the moments when space becomes geography through symbolic action. My emphasis here is on the negative as a spatiality which can be construed as a tool for critical analysis. Such complex plurality is difficult to represent: it is as plural as it is mobile. Like any other symbol, its negative also has histories and geographies. The antonym of ‘city’ is as spatial as it is temporal. Ultimately, my purpose is to provoke reflection about geopolitical implications of the basic assumption of how the urban is defined in our pages and beyond. This is not and cannot be an exhaustive exercise, for borders are geographical and historical. In particular, I’m working through personal experiences in the coastal regions of Guerrero, Mexico, the geography where I grew up and am now conducting long term ethnographic research. In trying to hold on to this question, I assume the position of a rural border dweller in direct contact with the urban, illustrating thus the symbolic and material weight of the urban. The question, ‘what is a city?’, is my starting point for the exploration that follows. The reader, like the writer, will have to embrace this journey taking into consideration that this uncertainty is part of the human experience of working with symbols in all of their iterations. This is an exploratory exercise of the negative, opacity allows me to get lost despite the mappings I may conjure. I am also relating ‘city’ to the urban, understanding that this relation may fall apart in specific conditions. In this editorial I mean to work from the negative of ‘city’ with the assumption that it is not inherently opaque but that its opacity can serve as a generative mystery. As such, the definition of city can be known through the question: what is the antonym of city? Present before me is the definition of ‘city’ which can be defined through its negative, or its antonym, one might say. The negative is defined by its opacity, a vast mystery haunted by the presence of absence (Glissant Citation1997). Through this lens a symbol gains presence or becomes known by its negative that is to say, a symbol is defined by what it is not. I use this particular word because I enjoy working with the hauntings of deconstruction, its fixity on the particularities of language, especially the negative aspects of presence as articulated in Jacques Derrida's ( Citation1994) Specters of Marx. These trends reveal the kinds of struggles we face in defining the kind of city we want to construct and deconstruct. But the weight of the question persists because it speaks to the rigour and ethics of our editorial practice: how does CITY define ‘city’? Rather than definitions, the pages of CITY contain multiple trends in critical urban studies. The answer may be a resounding ‘yes’ from multiple angles, depending of course on the efficacy of our organisational structure in light of structural demands of everyday life (Madden Citation2022).
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