Progressive Geographies

Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti discuss the work of the publisher Semiotext(e) at the New Books Network

Best known for its introduction of French theory to American readers, Semiotext(e) has been one of America’s most influential independent presses since its inception more than three decades ago. Publishing works of theory, fiction, madness, economics, satire, sexuality, science fiction, activism and confession. 

In this interview Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti, who run Semitext(e) alongside Sylvère Lotringer, discuss the history of the press.

Thanks to dmf for the link.

Imagining Lost Origins: Migration and the Politics of the Deep Past

Online & River Room, King’s College London, The Strand, London WC2R 2LS, May 19–20, 2023

Culture has always been on the move, but the notion that culture is itself a product of movement is relatively recent. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scholars hypothesised that the world’s cultures developed not by linear evolution, but through migration, invasion, conquest, trade and exchange. Diffusionism became a master paradigm across several disciplines. The fascination and concern with how movement had shaped cultures historically reflected the anxieties of a time that witnessed more global migrations of people than ever before. Further, the modern quest for lost origins was (and is) inherently entangled in contemporary debates about the rights to land and resources.

This conference explores the relation between scientific and artistic imaginings of prehistoric migrations. To map cultural diffusion is also to theorize the relationship between bodies, place, art, and innovation. When investigating societies who have left no written records, the visual has a dual role: it is both the means by which these cultures are reconstructed, and the tool by which knowledge about them is disseminated. We ask how artists and scholars influenced one another in reconstructing lost origins, and probe the ways that these images were embedded in contemporary debates about race and migration.

Registration details and programme here. Thanks to Adalbert Saurma for the link.

Alan Wiig, Kevin Ward, Theresa Enright, Mike Hodson, Hamil Pearsall and Jonathan Silver (eds.), Infrastructuring Urban Futures: The Politics of Remaking Cities – Bristol University Press, May 2023

Update: the book is available open access here

Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanization. 

Considering the climate emergency, economic transformation, public health crises and racialized inequality, the book argues that paying attention to infrastructures’ past, present and future allows us to understand and respond to the current urban condition.

Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times – Yale University Press, August 2023

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time.
 
In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy—a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.

I’m disappointed to hear that WordPress posts will no longer be able to be shared to Twitter automatically. It’s of course possible to do this manually, but it’s still frustrating for me, as someone who has used this blog for several years with this functionality. The reason is Twitter removing the ability for other platforms to do this without a charge. Given that these posts (not just me, of course) generate a lot of content for Twitter with no cost, it seems like they want one side of it, but not the other.

I keep thinking that my days on Twitter are numbered, but then this week the response to the Alexandre Koyré and a network of ideas post was far better there than on any other site. So I’m really reluctant to lose that community, but this feels like another step in the wrong direction. I’ve been trying to make Mastodon work, and there content has to be manually shared, as there isn’t a WordPress-Mastodon link as yet (it’s been long promised). But the engagement on Mastodon is very limited, even though I have quite a lot of followers – I sense a lot of people joined but their accounts are largely dormant. Recently the ability to post project updates on researchgate was removed. Email listserves are largely unusable these days. I see some other people are going down the Substack route, but I’m not sure about that.

I’ve long been aware that most people follow this blog for the information about other people’s work – recent books, conferences, etc. – rather than my own. But I could build an audience through that, and keep a record of stuff I found interesting, which also benefited my work. The advantage of automatic posting was that I could do one post here and it would be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms I don’t use. But take that away, and the idea of manually reposting things across multiple platforms is much less appealing.

How are others who use WordPress going to deal with this?