Progressive Geographies

Robert J. Mayhew and Charles W. J. Withers (eds.), Geographies of Knowledge: Science, Scale, and Spatiality in the Nineteenth Century – Johns Hopkins University Press, August 2020

There is a short blog post about the collection here.

Over the past twenty years, scholars have increasingly questioned not just historical presumptions about the putative rise of modern science during the long nineteenth century but also the geographical contexts for and variability of science during the era. In Geographies of Knowledge, an internationally distinguished array of historians and geographers examine the spatialization of science in the period, tracing the ways in which scale and space are crucial to understanding the production, dissemination, and reception of scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century.

Engaging with and extending the influential work of David Livingstone and others on science’s spatial dimensions, the book touches on themes of empire, gender, religion, Darwinism, and much more. In exploring the practice of science across four continents, these essays illuminate the importance of geographical perspectives to the study of science and knowledge, and how these ideas made and contested locally could travel the globe.

Dealing with everything from the local spaces of the Surrey countryside to the global negotiations that proposed a single prime meridian, from imperial knowledge creation and exploration in Burma, India, and Africa to studies of metropolitan scientific-cum-theological tussles in Belfast and in Confederate America, Geographies of Knowledge outlines an interdisciplinary agenda for the study of science as geographically situated sets of practices in the era of its modern disciplinary construction. More than that, it outlines new possibilities for all those interested in knowledge’s spatial characteristics in other periods. 

Contributors: John A. Agnew, Vinita Damodaran, Diarmid A. Finnegan, Nuala C. Johnson, Dane Kennedy, Robert J. Mayhew, Mark Noll, Ronald L. Numbers, Nicolaas Rupke, Yvonne Sherratt, Charles W. J. Withers

Celia Lury, Problem Spaces: How and Why Methodology Matters – Polity, November 2020

In this innovative book, Celia Lury argues that the time has come for us to explore the world not only with new methods, but with a new approach to methodology itself. Fundamental changes are taking place in how we produce knowledge, how we communicate it and, indeed, what we consider to be knowledge. These changes demand innovative and creative responses to research questions.   

Lury’s rethinking of the nature of social inquiry starts by reconceptualizing the ‘problem space’. Problems are not static or a ‘given’; rather, they are created and continually recomposed as part of the methodological process itself. Following the line of thought that methods are practices that articulate as much as capture a social problem, Lury further develops the notion of compositional methodology to think through its implications. With remarkable fluency, the book draws into conversation a range of hot-button issues, both longstanding and novel, from observation, reflexivity, recursive measurement and feminist methodologies, to participation, context, datafication and platformization.   

Always with an eye to the methodological potential of new trends, the book provides a strong challenge to much received wisdom and argues that a combination of techniques can contribute to better understanding of the problem spaces we all inhabit.

Mark Neocleous, A Critical Theory of Police Power – new edition, Verso, January 2021

[update – discussion of the new edition at the New Books podcast]

Putting police power into the centre of the picture of capitalism

The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power.

Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.

“If you want to understand the origins and purpose of police powers, and their relation to law, to the state, and to bourgeois social order, there is no better author than Mark Neocleous and no better book than this.”

– David Correia, author of Police: A Field Guide

“Mark Neocleous’s modern classic has never been more timely. The substantial new Introduction takes this pioneering text into the present with a trenchant discussion of recent events and debates. In its coruscating critique of the failures of a liberal response to police power, it is, again, a provocative and urgent intervention.”

– Stuart Elden

“Neocleous explodes the liberal myth that police exist to to keep us safe or to enforce the law. Instead, they constantly reproduce a social order rooted in race and class exploitation at the heart of racial capitalism.”

– Alex Vitale

Illan rua Wall, Law and Disorder: Sovereignty, Protest, Atmosphere – Routledge, December 2020

Focusing on the moment when social unrest takes hold of a populace, Law and Disorder offers a new account of sovereignty with an affective theory of public order and protest.
 
In a state of unrest, the affective architecture of the sovereign order begins to crumble. The everyday peace and calm of public space is shattered as sovereign peace is challenged. In response, the state unleashes the full force of its exceptionality, and the violence of public order policing is deployed to restore the affects and atmospheres of habitual social relations. This book is a work of contemporary critical legal theory. It develops an affective theory of sovereign orders by focusing on the government of affective life and popular encounters with sovereignty. The chapters explore public order as a key articulation between sovereignty and government. In particular, policing of public order is exposed as a contemporary mode of exceptionality cast in the fires of colonial subjection. The state of unrest helps us see the ordinary effects of the sovereign order, but it also points to crowds as the essential component in the production of unrest. The atmospheres produced by crowds seep out from the squares and parks of occupation, settling on cities and states. In these new atmospheres, new possibilities of political and social organisation begin to appear. In short, crowds create the affective condition in which the settlement at the heart of the sovereign order can be revisited. This text thus develops a theory of sovereignty which places protest at its heart, and a theory of protest which starts from the affective valence of crowds. 
 
This book’s examination of the relationship between sovereignty and protest is of considerable interest to readers in law, politics and cultural studies, as well as to more general readers interested in contemporary forms of political resistance.

Matthew J Dennis, Cultivating our Passionate Attachments – Routledge, 2020

Does a flourishing life involve pursuing passionate attachments? Can we choose what these passionate attachments will be? This book offers an original theory of how we can actively cultivate our passionate attachments. The author argues that not only do we have reason to view passionate attachments as susceptible to growth, change, and improvement, but we should view these entities as amenable to self- cultivation. He uses Pierre Hadot’s and Michel Foucault’s accounts of Hellenistic self-cultivation as vital conceptual tools to formulate a theory of cultivating our passionate attachments. First, their accounts offer the conceptual resources for a philosophical theory of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments. Second, the exercises of self- cultivation they focus on allow us to outline a practical method though which we can cultivate our passionate character. Doing this brings out a significantly new dimension to the role of the passionate attachments in the flourishing life and offers theoretical and practical accounts of how we can cultivate them based on the Hellenistic conception of self-directed character change.

Cultivating Our Passionate Attachments will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working in virtue ethics, moral philosophy, and ancient philosophy.

Historical Materialism Online 2020: Deutscher prize lecture – Brett Christophers, who won the 2019 Deutscher Memorial Prize with his The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso).

The pre-recorded lecture is following by a live discussion – November 13, 6-8pm (GMT) – details and registration here. [update: the recording is now below]

You can view the Deutscher lecture here: 

Discussants: Brett Christophers, Mary Robertson and Grace Blakeley 

PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider making a donation, which would help us enormously in covering the costs of putting of this programme of events. You can donate by selecting the ‘donation’ ticket type at registration. 

Accessibility is important for us, and we are looking into using Live Captions, but availability will depend on our financial capacities and on your support. Thank you. 

Once you have registered, a link to the live session will be emailed to you on the day of the event. For any technical queries please contact historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk

Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima

Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence – Duke University Press, November 2020

In Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human Joseph Pugliese examines the concept of the biopolitical through a nonanthropocentric lens, arguing that more-than-human entities—from soil and orchards to animals and water—are actors and agents in their own right with legitimate claims to justice. Examining occupied Palestine, Guantánamo, and sites of US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, Pugliese challenges notions of human exceptionalism by arguing that more-than-human victims of war and colonialism are entangled with and subject to the same violent biopolitical regimes as humans. He also draws on Indigenous epistemologies that invest more-than-human entities with judicial standing to argue for an ethico-legal framework that will enable the realization of ecological justice. Bringing the more-than-human world into the purview of justice, Pugliese makes visible the ecological effects of human war that would otherwise remain outside the domains of biopolitics and law.

More November books from Duke here.