Philosophical Hangouts!

Lugones frames the strategic occupation against the institutional, structural violence as “hanging out.” She writes, “I am looking for a spatiality that does not mystify territorial enclosures and purities of peoples, languages, traditions. As I think of such conditions, I am proposing the spatial practice of hanging out because it is a practice that is in transgression of territorial enclosures.” (Lugones, 220) In my opinion, we need to transgress the territorial enclosures not only by breaking the forced borders of the social structures physically, but also intellectually.

First, if we need to talk about physical challenges for a purpose as a philosophic and strategic movement, Lugones suggest hanging out as an option. By this way, we may also challenge “the given dichotomy.” (Lugones, 207) She claims that if we become street walkers as a part of tactical strategies to challenge oppressions, we may manage “to learn, to listen, to transmit information, to participate in communicative creations of intentionality, to gains social depth.” (Lugones, 209) According to her, being a streetwalker for this specific purpose, “theorizing understands and moves resistance to intermeshed oppressions.” (Lugones, 210) It seems like with a strategic motivation, hanging out action has a mutation and became an active resistance and philosophical movement. We may even say that by becoming a streetwalker for the purpose of “transgression of territorial enclosures” can save us from having Sartre’s famous arguments of bad faith. As Lugones claims, “Hanging out opens attention to transmutations of sense, borders of meaning, without the enclosures and exclusions that have characterized a politics of sameness… The occupation of space is defined by movement in and between hangouts where resistant sense was/is made in practice by active subjects.” (Lugones, 220) It sounds almost like a civil disobedience, but I do not want to label it by this way to not put limitations on its wider meanings and functions.

Moreover, if we link Lugones arguments with Davis, it is better to mention one more argument from her. At the end of the Streetwalker section, she argues that “The street walker theorist walks in illegitimate refusal to legitimate oppressive arrangements and logics. In tense negotiations, she is watchful of opportunities taken up in the devious interventions of the oppressed.” (Lugones, 221) I argue that we need to do these strategic hangouts intellectually, too. We need to be streetwalkers in the land of philosophy, sociology and history. Lugones’ this hangout argument reminded me one of the critiques of Davis about the lack of alternatives and lack of philosophical, sociological imagination for prison industry complex. She claims, “Ironically, even the anti-death penalty campaign tends to rely on the assumption that life imprisonment is the most rational alternative to capital punishment.” (Davis, 106) She criticized the dichotomy behind this mentality. She continues her argument by mentioning, “The first step then would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system to punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.” (Davis, 106) It is possible to link this ironic position of the anti-death penalty campaign supporters and Davis’ critiques about problem of not being able to produce new options against prison with Lugones’ hangouts option. The intellectuals need to do more philosophical hangouts and (metaphorical) street walks to produce new options to break the either/or cycle in this violent system. If we can produce more intellectual streetwalkers in our society, we can produce more options to abolish prison and other forced fences.