Progressive Geographies

Martijn Konings, Capital and Time For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason – now out with Stanford University Press

Critics of capitalist finance tend to focus on its speculative character. Our financial markets, they lament, encourage irresponsible bets on the future that reflect no real underlying value. Why is it, then, that opportunities for speculative investment continue to proliferate in the wake of major economic crises? To make sense of this, Capital and Time advances an understanding of economy as a process whereby patterns of order emerge out of the interaction of speculative investments.

Progressive critics have assumed that the state occupies a neutral, external position from which it can step in to constrain speculative behaviors. On the contrary, Martijn Konings argues, the state has always been deeply implicated in the speculative dynamics of economic life. Through these insights, he offers a new interpretation of both the economic problems that emerged during the 1970s and the way that neoliberalism responded to them. Neoliberalism’s strength derives from its intuition that there is no position that transcends the secular logic of risk, and from its insistence that individuals actively engage that logic. Not only is the critique of speculation misleading as a general approach; it is also incapable of recognizing how American capitalism has come to embrace speculation and has thus been able to generate new kinds of order and governance.

Martijn writes:

The book is available in an affordable paperback version, and the two attached flyers (one for direct orders from Stanford University Press, and the other for orders from the UK-based Combined Academic Publishers) offer an additional discount.

Please also note that the book appears in a new series, Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times. Several other titles are scheduled to appear in the near future, and we’re keen to hear from authors whose work fits with the aims of the series.

On Kings by Marshall Sahlins & David Graeber (Hau Press, distributed University of Chicago Press, 2017, 534 pp.) is available as open access pdf in this link; physical copy to buy here.

In anthropology as much as in popular imagination, kings are figures of fascination and intrigue, heroes or tyrants in ways presidents and prime ministers can never be. This collection of essays by two of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists—David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins—explores what kingship actually is, historically and anthropologically. As they show, kings are symbols for more than just sovereignty: indeed, the study of kingship offers a unique window into fundamental dilemmas concerning the very nature of power, meaning, and the human condition.
Reflecting on issues such as temporality, alterity, piracy, and utopia—not to mention the divine, the strange, the numinous, and the bestial—Graeber and Sahlins explore the role of kings as they have existed around the world, from the BaKongo to the Aztec to the Shilluk and beyond. Richly delivered with the wit and sharp analysis characteristic of Graeber and Sahlins, this book opens up new avenues for the anthropological study of this fascinating and ubiquitous political figure.

Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini’s classic book The Prison and the Factory has been reissued as a 40th Anniversary Edition.

This new edition of The Prison and the Factory, a classic work on radical criminology, includes two new, long essays from the authors and a foreword from Professor Jonathan Simon (UC Berkeley). In the two essays, Melossi and Pavarini reflect on the origins, development and fortune of The Prison and the Factory in relation to the debates surrounding mass incarceration that have taken place since this book was first published 40 years ago. The reputation of the original work has long been established worldwide, and this updated version will be of very special interest to scholars of the criminal justice system, penology, and Marxist theory.

This seminal book examines the links between the development of capitalist political economy and changing forms of social control. Melossi and Pavarini analyse the connection between the creation of penal institutions and regimes in Europe and the USA, and the problems generated by the emergence of capitalist soci
al relations. They provide a thorough neo-Marxist view of emergent capitalism and the penal mechanisms which are constructed to deal with the problem of labour.

Contemporary to but independent from the work of Michel Foucault, Melossi and Pavarini combine research on the development of penal philosophies and institutions with a rigorous account of changing forms of capital accumulation, focusing on the use, and the problem, of labour under capitalist relations.

Rob Kitchin, Rules for making decisions on requests for academic work Some very interesting discussion of how to decide what to do, and what not to do,

Last week I posted on my personal blog about the volume of requests I receive to undertake work beyond my allocated load as directed by university managers. Such work includes reviewing for journals and grant agencies, writing references and external examining, serving on advisory boards and working with local communities, and contributing papers to special issues or delivering invited talks.

While undertaking all these tasks are expected of academics as part of their normal load, constituting service work and an important part of the exchange economy of academia (Elden 2008), it is usually undertaken at their discretion. Key questions then are: what requests for labour to accept? What is an acceptable/sensible load? These questions become more pressing as the number of requests increases as an individual’s profile and academic network develop.

Most academics, I sense, find it quite difficult to evaluate and manage requests, and to say ‘no’ to many of them. In part this is because we are trying to balance a sense of obligation to participate in the exchange economy (especially if we know the person making the request), with a strategic approach to career development, and a need for personal well-being. Certainly, I struggle in deciding which requests to accept, and even though I do say ‘no’ to a lot of requests I still feel I take on too much and struggle to deliver on my promises (I typically receive about one new request a day beyond existing commitments).

On social media I was asked about how I go about making decisions on what requests to undertake and how I manage the workload. I didn’t have a ready answer because I’ve never formulated a strategy for decision-making or managing commitments. Instead, I have been using a rough set of unarticulated rules of thumb. It was also suggested that it might be useful for academics to be mentored with regards to dealing with requests.

In an effort to provide some mentoring advice, but also to try and formalise my own rules of thumb, I thought it might be useful to consider how best to deal with external requests for academic labour. [continues here]

Pluto Books Radical Geography series is on sale, with 50% off the three books in the series – Katharyne Mitchell, Making Workers; Stephen Crossley, In their Place and Paul Routledge, Space Invaders. One of the series editors, Danny Dorling, has an introduction here: What is Radical about Geography?

Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen, now out with Rowman and Littlefield

Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth brings together many of the most influential voices in the scholarly and critical debate about post-postmodernism and twenty-first century aesthetics, arts and culture. By relating cutting-edge analyses of contemporary literature, the visual arts and film and television to recent social, technological and economic developments, the volume provides both a map and an itinerary of today’s metamodern cultural landscape. As its organising principle, the book takes Fredric Jameson’s canonical arguments about the waning of historicity, affect and depth in the postmodern culture of western capitalist societies in the twentieth century, and re-evaluates and reconceptualises these notions in a twenty-first century context. In doing so, it shows that the contemporary moment should be regarded as a transitional period from the postmodern and into the metamodern cultural moment.

Acknowledgements / 1. Periodising the 2000s, or, the emergence of metamodernism, Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen / Section I: Historicity / 2. Metamodern Historicity, Robin van den Akker / 3. The metamodern, the quirky, and the challenge of categorization, James MacDowell / 4. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Rise of Historioplastic Metafiction, Josh Toth / 5. Super-hybridity: Non-simultaneity, political power, and multipolar conflict, Jorg Heiser / 6. The Cosmic Artisan: Mannerist Virtuosity and Contemporary Crafts, Sjoerd van Tuinen / Section II: Affect / 7. Metamodern Affect, Alison Gibbons / 8. Four Faces of Post-Irony, Lee Konstantinou / 9. Radical Defenselessness: A new sense of self in the work of David Foster Wallace, Nicoline Timmer / 10. Contemporary Autofiction and Affect, Alison Gibbons / 11. The Joke that Wasn’t funny anymore: Empathy in Contemporary Sitcoms, Gry Rustad and Kai Schwind / Section III: Depth / 12. Metamodern Depth or ‘Depthiness’, Timotheus Vermeulen / 13. Reconstructing Depth: Authentic Fiction and Responsibility, Irmtraud Huber and Wolfgang Funk / 14. Between truth, sincerity and satire: Post-truth politics and the rhetoric of authenticity, Sam Browse / 15. Notes on Performatist Photography: Experiencing beauty and transcendence after postmodernism, Raoul Eshelman / Epilogue / 16. Thoughts on writing about art after postmodernism, James Elkins / References / Index / Contributor Information