ABSTRACT
Having moved beyond “law and geography,” the purpose of the present chapter is to begin to develop a set of analytical and interpretive resources with which to investigate nomosphericity. In this chapter and the following chapters I will begin to sketch out some points of ingress. The first of these points centers on a phenomenologically informed sense of “the situation.” Beginning here will facilitate a better understanding of the interplay of nomospheric imaginaries, performativities and spatialities vis-à-vis the workings of power. In this chapter I also contextualize nomic situations with respect to the idea of “everyday life,” as well as to useful critiques of this idea. This section concludes with a brief examination of nomospheric disturbances or disturbing situations with reference to which the often tacit operations of nomosphericity can more clearly be discerned and investigated. In the initial discussion of ICE raids in Chapter One I quoted extensively
from the testimony of a woman who had been rounded up, separated from her small child and flown to the border in Texas. Her recollection began:
It was a Tuesday, we were all working and all of a sudden a whole rush of people entered. I heard someone scream. When I moved back to see I saw a whole bunch of people entering. They were grabbing people … They would grab [the men] and throw them to the floor, even hitting their faces. When I saw this I ran to the first exit I found. When I was going there I saw even more coming in … The word I kept hearing them use was Fuck You.
