Progressive Geographies

The unaccountably overlooked Georges Perec (member of Oulipo) and author of Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces) a great geographical fiction, is the subject of a symposium about his work. The cfp follows:

PEREC’S GEOGRAPHIES / PERECQUIAN GEOGRAPHIES
Interdisciplinary Symposium, University of Sheffield, Friday 6 May, 2016

Georges Perec was one of the most inventive and original geographical writers of the twentieth century. His writing explores cities and streets; homes and apartments; conceptions of space and place; mathematical and textual spaces; imagined, utopian and dystopian spaces; time and the city; landscapes of memory and trauma; consumption and material culture; domestic spaces; everyday life, the everyday, the quotidian; ordinary and ‘infra-ordinary’ places. Perec addressed methods of urban exploration and observation; classification, categorisation and taxonomy; spatial inventories and indexes; and geographical and ethnographic description.

This symposium explores Perec’s Geographies (his own geographical writing) and the wider body of geographical writings…

A couple of months ago [update: in January 2014], I asked three minor questions concerning Foucault’s ‘About the Concept of the Dangerous Individual’ lecture in Toronto in 1977.

• is the version in Dits et écrits the original French, or a re-translation with an uncredited translator?
• was the conference at the Clark Institute or York University, or a joint event?
• why is the paragraph from the course summary discussing the seminar omitted from «Il faut défendre la société» and the subsequent English translation Society Must Be Defended?

Following a useful exchange of comments with Javier Velásquez, it is clear that we have the answer to the first. The text in Dits et écrits is not a translation; but nor is it the entirety of the original French. It is an edited version of the original.

We have constructed a clear chronology of the publication history of this text to help…

Click to access Conio-2015_Occupy-A-People-Yet-To-Come.pdf

“The term Occupy represents a belief in the transformation of the capitalist system through a new heterogenic world of protest and activism that cannot be conceived in terms of liberal democracy, parliamentary systems, class war or vanguard politics. These conceptualisations do not articulate where power is held, nor from where transformation may issue. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars of Deleuze and Guattari examines how capitalism can be understood as a global abstract machine whose effects pervade all of life and how Occupy can be framed as a response to this as a heterogenic movement based on new tactics, revitalised democratic processes and nomadic systems of organisation. Seeing the question as a political tactic aimed at delegitimizing their protest, Occupiers refused to answer the question ‘what do you want?’, produce manifestos, elect leaders or act as a vanguard. Occupy: A People Yet to Come goes…

Isabelle Stengers’ new book, In Catastrophic Times, is available for free as a .pdf download at this site. Here is a description of the book (which you can also buy in hard copy as well following the link above):

There has been an epochal shift: the possibility of a global climate crisis is now upon us. Pollution, the poison of pesticides, the exhaustion of natural resources, falling water tables, growing social inequalities – these are all problems that can no longer be treated separately. The effects of global warming have a cumulative impact, and it is not a matter of a crisis that will “pass” before everything goes back to “normal.”

Our governments are totally incapable of dealing with the situation. Economic warfare obliges them to stick to the goal of irresponsible, even criminal, economic growth, whatever the cost. It is no surprise that people were so struck…