The substance of my Pop Life conversation, which is in fact a body of notes for a book I have in mind, will be the inhabitant. Inhabitants can be found here:

Although Dubai and its neighboring Gulf emirates have posted economic growth in recent years that would embarrass China, much of it is built on an invisible worker army — predominantly South Asian — whose endless toil is crucial to Dubai's massive boom and who are housed in a slum of astonishing proportions, hidden in the dunes between Dubai and Sarjah.

Without Sonapur, as it is called, Dubai's spas and tax-free splendor likely wouldn't exist. It is a Middle Eastern Soweto of as many as 500,000 foreign laborers, mostly from the impoverished rural villages of the Asian subcontinent.

The citizen emerged from the pre-modern (feudal) subject, and from the citizen emerges the postmordern inhabitant. Inhabitants made their first appearance in big, 19th century capitalist centers, and what distinguishes them from the citizen is they live inside of nation but outside of its democratic or governing institutions.

The inhabitant is just a body, a will, a unit not of a state but of organs. With the rise of the inhabitant is the rise of selling body organs. Yet we must not reject the inhabitant and attempt to return to the guarantees of the citizen (as there was a subject soldier, there was also very much so the problematic citizen solider—the price of the right to vote was often death—but there can never be anything like an inhabitant soldier).

By not being committed to democracy in its national form, the inhabitant is in a space, a very open space, to construct a radically new kind of subjectivity. It is at this moment that the inhabitant encounters and passes through its opposite: the stateless cosmopolitanism of the global managerial class. What happens next is something special...

POP LIFE happens this Sunday (Jan 31) at Hidmo Eritrean Cuisine, 2000 South Jackson.

The image is by Robert Paul Young.