Temporal, Liminal, Hopeful: A Reading of Public Space

Molly (Hanzi) Meng

Chapter from Indeterminate Edges: A Temporal, Liminal, Hopeful Reading of New York City's Everyday Public Space.

MS Design and Urban Ecologies, Parsons School of Design, 2026.

Seeing Space as A Product of Temporal Practice

A group of older men plays dominoes at the edge of a Queens plaza every afternoon. They are not where the plaza's design told them to sit. They are where they have decided, through return, that the plaza is. Watch them long enough and what becomes visible is not the plaza as a fixed surface but the plaza as something being produced: by their tables, their chairs, their hours, their bodies leaning over a game that the plaza itself does not know is happening.

This is what Hannah Arendt had in mind when she described "spaces of appearance," not as physical stages laid down in advance, but as political realms that come into being the moment people gather to act and speak, and disappear the moment the action ceases (Arendt 1958). The dominoes corner is a small instance of the same dynamic. The corner is not there until they are there. When they are there, it is unmistakable.

What recurs across different sites and different users is the same basic gesture: the introduction of time and bodily consciousness into a space that the design itself does not yet contain. The chess players who settle into a corner do not find a chess corner; they produce one, through return, through rhythm, through the slow accumulation of presence. The person who brings their own chair into a plaza is inventing a neighborhood living room. These acts constitute what Mike Crang describes as "time as plurality with a sense of social vibrancy... not just through how people arrange themselves in time-space but through their creation of different sorts of time-space" (Crang 2001, 204).

The argument applies at scales larger than the corner or the table. In 2023, the New York Times published An Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods, a project by Larry Buchanan, Josh Katz, Rumsey Taylor, and Eve Washington that asked residents to draw the boundaries of their own neighborhoods on a city-wide map (Buchanan et al. 2023). What the project revealed, at the scale of the entire city, is that the lived geography of New York is not the geography of council district lines or census tracts. Neighborhoods emerge from where people say they live, where they have walked daily, where they have shopped, met, returned. They are accumulations of shared narrative, repeated movement, and identification — temporal sediment, not coordinate. The boundaries on the official map are stable. The boundaries the residents draw move, overlap, and sometimes refuse the official ones entirely. What this confirms, at city scale, is what the dominoes corner shows at body scale: space is what temporal practice has made of it.

If we want to read public space adequately, we have to be able to see this kind of production. The dominant frameworks in urban planning, however, are largely built to see something else. Crang's distinction between spatialized time and temporalized space helps name what is being missed (Crang 2001). Spatialized time treats time as a variable mapped onto a pre-fixed space, linear, directional, descriptive of what a space holds. It is the temporality of the survey, the traffic count, the after-occupancy report. This approach dominates urban analysis because it is quantitative and measurable, compatible with spatial analysis across disciplines. It is also structurally limited. It assumes space itself is stable and prior, that time merely flows through space without altering what space is. It can only describe how a space functions. It cannot read how individuals transform a space through the counter-practices they bring to it.

The transformations spatialized time misses are precisely the ones that matter. Temporal-spatial reclamations that are informal, local, and affective — the dominoes corner, the brought chair, the bench reorganized by regulars — fall outside its analytic frame. Spatialized time renders time visible only insofar as time can be standardized. The rest is noise.

What the observations point to is space understood as the product of temporal practice, called into being through use, return, and accumulation. Henri Lefebvre put this most directly: "space is nothing but the inscription of time in the world... the city is the deployment of time" (Lefebvre 1996, cited in May and Thrift 2001, 190). Time, in this reading, is not an external measure applied to space; it is intrinsic to how space takes form at all.

To take this seriously is to need different eyes. The work of reading public space, on this account, is the work of what Lefebvre called the rhythmanalyst: someone able to see how urban temporalities come into adjacency, how different time-spaces meet, negotiate, and coexist within a single physical surface (Lefebvre 2004).

There is a further reason to take the temporal reading seriously, and it has to do with what kind of resource time is. Heidegger, in Being and Time, identifies publicness as one of the fundamental characteristics of time. The "now," in his account, is not the private possession of an individual or group but accessible to all as a horizon for measuring events: it belongs to everyone and thus to no one (Heidegger 1962). Unlike space, which can be enclosed, zoned, or owned, time cannot be fully sealed off. This does not mean time is free from power. Work schedules, attention economies, and event-driven programming have made temporal governance a powerful instrument. But no authority possesses absolute sovereignty over the now.

Michel de Certeau gives this shared resource its political form. In The Practice of Everyday Life, he distinguishes between strategies and tactics. Strategies belong to institutions that have a proper place — the state, the planner, the property owner — and they exercise power by mapping it onto space: making zones, drawing boundaries, organizing flow. Tactics belong to those who have no proper place. They operate not on territory but on time: improvising within the spaces of others, seizing fleeting opportunities, depending on timing rather than authorization (de Certeau 1984, 36–37). What this thesis will go on to call counter-practices — the chess corner that wasn't planned, the chair brought into the plaza, the dominoes table at the Walgreens facade — are tactics in de Certeau's sense. None of them required permission. Each of them depends on return, on knowing when the bus passes, when the corner is shaded, when the morning crowd thickens or the afternoon empties out. Their durability comes not from authorization but from the way they have been practiced, on time, often enough to become legible to others as belonging there.

Attending to the temporal accumulation of spatial making, then, is not a methodological choice. It is the way the practices that produce public space have made themselves available to us.

Creations of Timespace

During an acting class I took when I was eighteen, we were asked to improvise a scene prompted by two characters and a scenario. One student was trying to play a powerful character. During the attempt, he tried multiple things: he raised his voice, paced around, and told the other person what to do. He tried many things to show his command.

When it came time for Semaj's feedback, he said: "A truly powerful person takes their time."

He then slowly walked into the room, sat down, adjusted his clothes, taking nearly a full minute from entering the door to finally lifting his eyes to meet the other actor's gaze. We were all immersed in the temporality he created for us, the unnegotiable presence, the way he commanded the space without saying a word.

After the moment settled, he looked at us sincerely and said:

"Remember, kids, how you approach time is how you approach space."

With the time-space Semaj claimed for himself, he brought the space to his temporality. The space and its boundaries were no longer defined by its walls; they were created through his actions and presence. Everywhere he touched and interacted with became his space.

But there was something else happening in Semaj's demonstration that I only began to understand much later. The power of his performance was not located in the actions themselves, the walking, the sitting, the adjusting of clothes. It lived in the suspensions between them. Each pause was a held interval. The room hung in it. And then a new gesture would arrive, a hand to the collar, a slow lift of the eyes, and the suspension would resolve into the next moment, only to be reopened.

What Semaj was doing was producing time-space not as linear chronos but as a sequence of small events, backed with the suspended temporality he created. Each happening was inspired and fed into the continuum of his performance, held just long enough for us to grasp before it got composted into the world he created. The space he commanded was not made by his presence alone; it was made by his capacity to set the in-between state of the events, enter and exit suspension on his own terms. Each new gesture took from this time-space continuum and was handed back with somewhere to land.

This is the question the next section takes up. What goes on in that in-between state? What happens when that state is not met by the next gesture?

Liminality

The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, threshold. In its classical anthropological usage, it names the middle phase of a rite of passage: the interval between separation from one social state and reincorporation into another. Victor Turner, building on Arnold van Gennep, described this phase as a time of being "betwixt and between," neither what one was nor yet what one will become (Turner 1969; van Gennep 1960). It is in this in-between that established structures are suspended and new forms of relation, identity, and meaning become possible. The threshold is, in this sense, the condition of change. Things cross it; things emerge from it.

This generative reading of the liminal still circulates widely in design, ritual studies, and theories of social transformation. And yet, when one searches today for images of "liminal space," what surfaces is something quite different in mood. Empty hallways under fluorescent light. Closed shopping malls at three in the morning. Stairwells leading to nowhere in particular. Hotel corridors that seem to extend past the edges of the photograph. These spaces are not depicted as generative; they are depicted as haunted. The liminal, in its contemporary visual vernacular, has acquired an atmosphere of suspended dread.

Same threshold form, two opposite feelings. The shift is worth attending to. What separates the generative threshold from the haunted one is not the structure of the in-between itself, but whether it carries a credible promise of resolution, a way out, an arrival, a next phase. The fear underwriting the haunted hallway is not the fear of change. It is the fear that the threshold has lost its exit.

This contemporary mood finds its most precise theoretical articulation in Lauren Berlant's concept of the impasse. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant writes:

Usually an "impasse" designates a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward. In this book's adaptation, the impasse is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one's sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event. (Berlant 2011)

The impasse is the threshold extended past its promised duration, a stretch of time without a narrative genre to give it shape. It is the haunted hallway, theorized: the historical condition in which exit has stopped being a credible promise. Berlant's images for what living inside it feels like are the cul-de-sac, where one walks paradoxically in the same space, and dogpaddling, where one keeps stroking but the water does not yield a shore (Berlant 2011).

But here is where her account opens. For someone dogpaddling in a pool, resolution might be an exit out of the pool entirely. But it might also be a pole within the pool, something to reach for, hold onto, push off from. Better still if they have brought their own pole into the water. The first kind of stay is anxious, structured by the absence of choice. The second is a stay one participates in. The body is still in the water, but its relation to the water has changed.

This is the move on which the rest of the chapter turns. Resolution does not have to mean exit. When exit is no longer credible, when the historical condition is impasse, resolution can take the form of dwelling: a stay made livable by what one can return to within it.

In contemporary cities, the backdrop is saturated with public surfaces — sidewalks, plazas, transit corridors, edges of all kinds. And yet contemporary public space functions as an impasse, not because there is too little of it but because of what holds people inside it: the requirement that destination be paid for, the assumption that a public surface is something one passes through on the way to a transactional somewhere, the policing of any practice that would treat the surface itself as livable. Berlant gives this condition its temporal name:

The neoliberal present is a space of transition, not only between modes of production and modes of life, but between different animating, sustaining fantasies. This shift generates intensities so present that they impose historical consciousness on its subjects as a moment without edges, and recent pasts and near futures blend into a stretched-out time that people move around in to collect evidence and find a nonsovereign footing. (Berlant 2011)

A moment without edges. The phrase names, in temporal language, exactly what privatized public space materializes spatially. The stretched-out time of the neoliberal present meets, in the city, a stretched-out space whose surfaces have been stripped of the edges that would let bodies find footing on them. Two scales of the same condition, registering each other.

The radical question this thesis takes up is whether dwelling within this condition is possible: whether, through the creation of new time-spaces from within the existing public field, the impasse of the present might be remade, not abandoned, but reconstituted from the inside.

The chess players who claim a corner of a plaza, returning every afternoon with their boards and their folding chairs, suggest that it is. They have not exited public space; they have not built a new one. They have produced a recurring time-space inside the existing one. Through repetition, through the slow accumulation of a daily practice, they have reclaimed the possibility that this surface can be inhabited rather than merely traversed. They have taken back, in Lefebvre's phrase, a small quantity of their right to the city, not as a legal claim but as a temporal one, asserted through the ongoing fact of return (Lefebvre 1968).

How is such a resolution physically enacted? Berlant offers one of the clearest answers in Cruel Optimism:

Literally, by changing the sensorial experience of immediate things in the world, this chapter's cases have interfered with that pattern of treading water in the impasse. Interference with the feedback loop of a genre is one version of ideological iconoclasm. It affirms a model of a civil society that is civil, but in a new manner. (Berlant 2011)

The intervention she describes is not at the level of policy, representation, or large-scale spatial redesign. It is at the level of the immediate sensorial, the body's encounter with the things directly around it: the textures, surfaces, and atmospheres through which a public is held in its current relation to itself. This is why edges become the analytic site of this thesis.

Jan Gehl's observational work established the empirical baseline: people overwhelmingly choose to stay along the edges of public spaces rather than in their open centers (Gehl 2011, 149). Richard Sennett extends this politically: edges are where different publics first encounter one another, as in the La Marqueta on the seam between Spanish Harlem and the Upper East Side, a site of routine cross-class proximity precisely because it lies between two otherwise partitioned neighborhoods (Sennett 2006). An edge, in Sennett's reading, both divides and mixes.

A fuller working definition of edge will be developed in the next chapter; here it is enough to note that edge, in the broadest sense, names anything that sits between two states, two materials, two atmospheres, two publics, two regimes of use, and thereby acquires a mediating function. The edge inherits something of the threshold's structure: it is liminal in spatial form. It can be a bench, a curb, a low wall, a planter rim, a doorway, a market on the seam between neighborhoods.

What Gehl and Sennett describe are two of the things edges do. The argument of this thesis is that, in the condition of impasse, a third function becomes especially urgent: edges can serve as anchors, points the body returns to, leans on, negotiates with, in the absence of a clear destination. This is not a more fundamental function than dividing or mixing; it is a function whose political weight is amplified by the historical condition we are in. When the larger public field has become a stretch of forced motion without resolution, the edges within it are where dwelling, when it happens, gets made.

The proposal that follows is not to reclaim privatized space and turn it back into a destination. It is not to build new public space at the urban periphery. It is to identify, within the existing public field already structured as impasse, which street infrastructures are in fact functioning as anchors, which edges are being touched, returned to, and negotiated with by the body. These edges are already doing political work. They are simply not yet named, protected, or recognized as public resources. What this thesis asks for is not the rebuilding of public space. It asks for public space to be seen again.

Hopeful

Why rhythm is not enough

The previous section established the edge as the analytic site of this thesis: the place within the impassed public field where dwelling, when it happens, gets made. What remains to be asked is how the negotiations that occur at the edge are structurally mediated, what kind of temporal form lets a body return to an edge, lean on it, and improvise around it without exiting the larger condition it cannot exit.

The most obvious candidate is rhythm. There is a long tradition in everyday-life theory, running from Simmel through Benjamin, Lefebvre, Nigel Thrift, and Mike Crang, that places rhythm at the center of urban analysis. Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis became the method by which the city could be read not as a static form but as a temporal composition, the cadence of bodies, traffic, labor, and leisure organized into legible patterns (Lefebvre 2004).

But rhythm alone does not point us toward a hopeful future. It describes patterning; it does not, by itself, describe the embodied experience of being inside that pattern. It tells us that a city is cadenced without telling us how a body inhabits the cadence. More troublingly, rhythm can be a vehicle of domination. Capitalism imposes rhythm. State sovereignty imposes rhythm. The schedule of the workday, the timing of the traffic light, the regularity of the rent cycle, these are rhythms, and they are precisely what holds people inside the impasse rather than what releases them from it. Berlant herself notes how rhythm can reinforce trauma, looping subjects inside the cruel optimism of attachments that no longer deliver. A rhythm pushed to certain extremes, a polyrhythm of 11:23, or a metric structure too dense to be felt, ceases to invite participation altogether. It becomes a pattern one can describe but not enter.

Berlant does not abandon rhythmic analysis; she reframes it. She proposes "a rhythmanalysis of a disturbance in the situation of the present and the adaptations improvised around it" (Berlant 2011). Within this disturbance, she gives particular weight to the gesture:

The gesture is a medial act, neither ends- nor means-oriented, a sign of being in the world, in the middle of the world, a sign of sociality. (Berlant 2011)

The gesture does not mark time, if time is a movement forward, but makes time, holding the present open to attention and unpredicted exchange. A situation can grow around it or not, because it makes the smallest opening, a movement-created space. (Berlant 2011)

What we need is something more precise than rhythm and more sustained than gesture: a temporal form that holds an anchor, leaves room for play, and invites a body to participate in its own way. That form, this chapter argues, is most accurately named groove.

Groove

A groove is a repeated rhythmic pattern, but one marked, in its groovier instances, by what Berlant might call thick moments of ongoingness. It does not march forward; it circles. It accents, leans, rests, pulls. It invites appropriation, the listener can move with it, against it, around it, inside it, without ever being expelled from it. This is what makes groove different from rhythm-as-pattern and from gesture-as-singular-opening. Groove is a rhythm with anchors and play, a structure that returns and offers itself to be returned to.

In the summer of 2025, I had the chance to spend a week at The School at Jacob's Pillow's inaugural Creating in Jazz program, alongside twenty-three other dance artists working across House, Waacking, Hip Hop, Tap, Lindy Hop, and Vernacular Jazz, and a faculty of musicians and choreographers from those traditions. Over the course of that week, I asked the dancers and faculty I worked with the same question: "What does 'groove' mean to you?" The answers, taken together, do something that no single theoretical definition can do. They register groove from inside the practice, from the bodies that have spent years in it.

What is striking is how consistently the answers describe groove not as a feature of the music but as a space. Cedric Easton, the drummer and Associate Director at Jazz at Lincoln Center, put it most directly: "Groove is, foundationally, a space. A space where something belongs, where something can exist... a space for socialization, a space for dance, a space for connectivity. Groove creates the opportunity, sort of frames an invisible space for those things to happen" (Easton 2025). Natasha Powell, choreographer and Artistic Director of HOLLA JAZZ, located the same thing more concretely: "Groove is a place. A LOCATION. Wherever that location may be, in between elements, in a piece of music, it is us finding that space in the rhythm of that space, and to find the pleasure in between that space and continue to roll on that" (Powell 2025).

The phrase that recurs across these descriptions is in between. Le'Andre Douglas reached for the same image through the vinyl record: "When you press the record, the song is in this thing, these lines on the record. You would take the needle and put it in between those lines, and that is the groove. So if you were the needle, you would fit in between the vinyl... So the groove is literally fitting in between the music" (Douglas 2025). The dancer's body, in this account, is the needle. Groove is what is encountered when something fits between something else.

Groove is also, repeatedly, described as a kind of release, a state in which agency works differently than it does outside the groove. Thys Armstrong: "There's a certain letting go, and shedding of something, when you fall into a groove. Your intentional, effort side of your body, your trying to do something side of your body, sheds away a little bit. And your innateness comes out, in a way that's kind of euphoric" (Armstrong 2025). Holly Kiang named the same release as a form of attachment outward: "Groove is a feeling and a vibe that allows you to connect to the environment around you, and to other people" (Kiang 2025). And Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies offered an image of fit that is almost architectural: "It made me think of tongue and groove in woodworking. The way in which you build furniture without nails, by fitting the pieces of wood together very, very specifically. I am the tongue, that's the groove. I'm fitting in, and now we are this larger thing together" (MacKenzie-Margulies 2025).

What these descriptions converge on, taken together, is a coherent phenomenology. Groove is a space, not a property of the music alone but a relational field opened up between bodies and a sonic structure. It lives in between, between the beats, between the panels of the sidewalk, between the lines of the vinyl, between one piece of wood and another. Entering it requires a kind of letting go, a shedding of effortful agency in favor of a different mode of participation. And what one finds there is a fit, a way of being in something that simultaneously joins one to a larger whole.

Tiger Roholt, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, gives this convergence its theoretical name. He describes groove as an indeterminate feel, a quality that cannot be fully fixed in notation or in metric description because it lives in the relational space between the beats (Roholt 2014).

This indeterminacy is not a failure of definition; it is the condition of groove's hospitality. Because the groove is not fully determined, there is room inside it for the body to find its own way of moving. The strong beat offers itself as an anchor; the off-beats and accents leave openings; the participant, dancer, listener, fellow musician, improvises within that field. The structure holds, but it does not prescribe. This is what the dancers were describing from inside their practice: a structure made livable precisely because it does not specify how to live inside it.

Groove as the form collectivity takes in the impasse

It is on this point, the political weight of indeterminate, anchored repetition, that groove opens onto something larger than musical aesthetics.

Sylvia Wynter, in Black Metamorphosis, makes a claim of extraordinary precision about what groove does after the dismantling of older social forms:

As these rituals disappeared from contemporary life, and the social arts with which men experience and affirm social being were swept away by bourgeois productive rationality, they served no "economic" purpose, the music which emerged out of these rituals continued as the societal mechanisms by and through which the relation of the self to the social is experienced. The rhythm, the beat was to become the central underlying principle, as if all previous rituals had become condensed in the beat. (Wynter n.d.)

What Wynter is naming is that groove is what remains of social ritual after the institutions of social ritual have been hollowed out. It is the minimum infrastructure of collectivity that survives the dismantling of the larger forms in which collectivity used to be held.

Read alongside Berlant, Wynter's claim becomes still sharper. Groove is what collectivity looks like in the impasse. It does not require a narrative promise, a guaranteed future, or a functioning institutional frame. It does not depend on the state, the market, or the credible expectation of arrival. It only requires bodies in mutual response. This is why, in the historical condition of Black life, a condition in which external resolution (emancipation, equality, justice) has been perpetually deferred, the groove is not entertainment but rebellion. As Katherine McKittrick puts it, the "relational acts of making and engaging black music, grooving, are collaborative rebellion." It embodies "the impulse to resist, the impulse to produce oppositional narratives." "The ethic is the aesthetic," she writes (McKittrick 2016).

Wynter names the same dynamic from the side of the performer:

It is to the extent that the jazz musician affirms his socially repressed self and plays his own individual style that he enables the collective experience of self-fulfillment, self-actualization, at the same time as he experiences the social. (Wynter n.d.)

The jazz musician does not first achieve self-expression and then offer it to a collective. The act of style-making is the act of social-making. Individual and collective are not sequential but simultaneous, held together by the groove as the medium that makes their simultaneity possible.

This is why groove, finally, is not merely a musical aesthetic. It is the structural form that dwelling-within-impasse takes when it succeeds: a temporal-relational practice that maintains collectivity in the absence of the institutions that used to do that work.

What groove does, when it works, can be named more precisely in the phenomenological terms Roholt drew on. Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, describes the body as held in a permanent oscillation between "an attraction to the richness" of the world and an "anxious warning against getting lost or absolved" in the same richness (Merleau-Ponty 1962, paraphrased in Tønder 2013, 119, as cited in Gerçek 2017, 581). The body is never wholly closed and never wholly open. Its unity, in Merleau-Ponty's words, is "always implicit and vague... never hermetically sealed and never left behind" (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 231). What the body needs to live is not pure closure (which suffocates) nor pure openness (which dissolves), but a structure that holds the two in productive relation: enough anchor that the body is not lost, enough opening that it is not sealed.

Groove is one such structure. The clap that returns on the one, the bassline that holds the pocket, gives the body the anchor that lets it risk the syncopation, gives it enough closure to attempt the openness. And the openness, when it happens, is not solitary. Wynter and McKittrick's account of groove as the structural form collectivity takes when it succeeds in holding itself together is, in these terms, the social face of the same phenomenon. A groove sustains, as Gerçek argues following Merleau-Ponty, "the capacity to attend to collective experiences and render them anew" (Gerçek 2017, 584). Groove is not merely the experience of music that feels good. It is the infrastructure through which a collective body negotiates the indeterminacy of being alive together, anchored enough to recognize itself, open enough to become something it has not yet been.

From groove to the city

If groove is the form collectivity takes in the impasse, then it has consequences for how we read public space. The most important consequence is this: the question of what a public space does, whether bodies can dwell in it, whether anything resembling collectivity can take shape on it, cannot be answered through spatial form alone. It has to be asked of the temporal-relational structure that the space affords.

This sits in a difficult relation to one of the field's most powerful frameworks. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Edward Soja argues that justice has a geography, and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right (Soja 2010). The framework has been productive: it has shown how injustice takes spatial form, uneven development, racialized landscapes, differential access to amenity, and it has given urbanists tools to map and contest that form.

What Soja does not directly address, however, is the asymmetry between injustice and justice. Injustice takes spatial form because it is the sediment of historical power relations: it accumulates in built environments, ossifies into zoning and infrastructure, and reproduces itself through inherited spatial arrangements. The geography of injustice is real, and Soja's project of mapping and contesting it is necessary work. But it does not follow that justice is symmetrically spatial. Spatial form is what holds injustice in place. Whether spatial form can also be what generates justice is a separate question, and this thesis suggests that it cannot, at least not on its own.

What groove gives us is one specific account of where the generative work happens instead. Collectivity, in Wynter's reading, did not survive the dismantling of older social rituals because new spaces of ritual were built. It survived because the beat, a temporal-relational structure, took over the work that those rituals used to do. The infrastructure of survival was rhythmic, not spatial; or more precisely, it was spatial only in the sense that rhythm produces a space between bodies and a structure that holds them. Spatial form alone could not have done it. What was needed was an anchor that could be returned to and a margin of indeterminacy in which the body could find its own way of moving.

This is the model this thesis carries back into the city. A public space functions as a groove rather than as an impasse to the extent that its temporal-spatial structure has anchors and leaves room, to the extent that its edges are touchable, its rhythms negotiable, its surfaces hospitable to the small deviations of bodies that wish to dwell in their own time. Where the imposed rhythms of the city are too rigid, too fast, too policed, dwelling cannot occur. Where there are anchors and openings, where the strong beat holds but the off-beats are free, dwelling has something to rehearse against.

Berlant's claim that politics in the impasse lives in the immediate sensorial — in the textures and surfaces through which a public is held in its current relation to itself — gives this argument its city-scale form. If groove is the temporal structure through which a collective body holds the productive relation of openness and closure, then the edge is its spatial form. An edge in the city does what groove does in a piece of music. It anchors. It returns. It is predictable enough that bodies can come back to it, and unfinished enough that they can make something of it when they do. It gives the body in public space the same thing groove gives the body listening to music: an anchor against getting lost, and an opening against being sealed. And like groove, the edge also does work for the collective. It sustains, by being returnable to and by being appropriable, the capacity for a public to attend to itself and to remake itself in forms it has not yet been. The edge, in other words, is where the productive relation of openness and closure gets built into the material world.

The edge, in this light, is the city-scale form of the anchor. It is what the body returns to within a public field that otherwise offers no resolution. The negotiations that happen around it, the leaning, the lingering, the recurring practices of unauthorized use, are the city-scale form of indeterminate participation. Together, anchor and indeterminacy compose the temporal-spatial structure of a public space that can be inhabited rather than only crossed.

Berlant herself, in the closing pages of Cruel Optimism, names something close to what this thesis is reaching for, not a return to the political-as-state-relation, and not a hope for the restoration of a former public, but a more modest and more durable claim about where collectivity now lives:

Cruel Optimism claims that a new ordinary has emerged in the displacement of the political from a state-citizen relation to a something else that is always being encountered and invented among people inventing life together, when they can. (Berlant 2011)

What Berlant calls the ordinary is the same field this thesis has been calling the impassed public. Her claim is that the political has not disappeared from it, only that the political has been displaced from inherited frames (state, citizen, formal public) into a more diffuse, improvised set of practices among "people inventing life together, when they can." The work that remains is not to rebuild the older frames but to find what mediates this displaced political life. Earlier in the same chapter she gives this mediation a name:

Changing the white noise of politics into something focused but polymorphous can magnetize people to a project of inducing images of the good life that emerge from the sense of loose solidarity in the political that now occupies the ordinary amidst the exhausting pragmatics of the everyday. (Berlant 2011)

Focused but polymorphous. A groove is precisely that. It is focused, it has anchors, it returns, it holds. And it is polymorphous, it leaves room, accepts multiple ways of being entered, does not prescribe a single response. The edges of public space, when they function, do this same work at the scale of the body and the street: they magnetize people without homogenizing them; they offer something to gather around without specifying what the gathering must look like.

This is where the analytic work of the next chapter begins. Naming the form is not enough; the question is which edges, in which conditions, are actually doing this work, and which ones, despite appearing as edges, are not. As Berlant frames the task:

But this is what it means to take the measure of the impasse of the present: to see what is halting, stuttering, and aching about being in the middle of detaching from a waning fantasy of the good life; and to produce some better ways of mediating the sense of a historical moment that is affectively felt but undefined in the social world that is supposed to provide some comforts of belonging, so that it would be possible to imagine a potentialized present that does not reproduce all of the conventional collateral damage. (Berlant 2011)

To take the measure of the impasse, in the terms of this thesis, is to look closely at what edges are doing. To see where they are halting, where they are stuttering, where they hold the body and where they fail to. And from that close looking, to produce better ways for edges to mediate the unnamed life of being in public together, not by replacing them with grander forms, but by understanding the small, often unnoticed work they already do, and asking what would let them do it more.

It is in this sense that groove is, finally, hopeful. Not because it promises a resolution of the impasse, there is no exit, but because it provides the form in which the impasse can be inhabited in common. The hope is not that the corridor will end. The hope is that we can find, in the corridor, a beat we can move to together.

References

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Interviews

Armstrong, Thys. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

Douglas, Le'Andre. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

Easton, Cedric. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

Kiang, Holly. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

MacKenzie-Margulies, Hannah. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

Powell, Natasha. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.