Wendy Brown on Governmentality in the Age of Neoliberalism – video of a lecture in Victoria.
Governmentality in the Age of Neoliberalism
Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley
Video of Professor Wendy Brown’s talk in March 2014 at the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria in Canada on governmentality in the age of neoliberalism.
Rob Kitchin’s book The Data Revolution is forthcoming later this year from Sage.
Traditionally, data has been a scarce commodity which, given its value, has been either jealously guarded or expensively traded. In recent years, technological developments and political lobbying have turned this position on its head. Data now flow as a deep and wide torrent, are low in cost and supported by robust infrastructures, and are increasingly open and accessible.
A data revolution is underway, one that is already reshaping how knowledge is produced, business conducted, and governance enacted, as well as raising many questions concerning surveillance, privacy, security, profiling, social sorting, and intellectual property rights.
In contrast to the hype and hubris of much media and business coverage, The Data Revolution provides a synoptic and critical analysis of the emerging data landscape.
He has now made a companion website available, which includes a very extensive bibliography. It’s good to see all of this – the support material for the book, the sharing of resources, and the critical engagement with these questions. See also the recent commentary at Society and Space on the need for critical data studies.
This is the video recording of my talk at the Extraterritoriality conference of the Exterritory project in Paris in May 2012.
Watching the video recording now, almost two years on, is a strange experience. I said a bit at the time about why giving the talk was difficult.
Sponsored by the Kadist Foundation and the Evens Foundation, it was held in a remarkable space – Le Comptoir Général. As the rain came down, it was somehow directed into channels to water the plants in the room which were growing through holes in the floor. A strange soundtrack to the bi-lingual event. I saw a mouse run between the plants at one point. I delivered a short version of a paper that is largely on Shakespeare, exile, externality and territory. I concentrated on Coriolanus and The Tempest, with some remarks on Titus Andronicus and As You Like It. I cut almost all the discussion of Richard II for time reasons.
I confess I found the technical set-up hard to work with – handheld microphones, an interpreter facing you and speaking into another microphone rather than in an isolation booth, stage lights and an unfamiliar setup for the powerpoint. I usually try to read off the reactions of the audience, but I found this tricky because the lights made it hard to see far into the audience, and because there was a slight timelag between my speaking and most people hearing in French. I think I muddled through okay, but it wasn’t my finest performance. It made me realise how comfortable I am with the standard academic conference/lecture set-up, and how privileged I am to be able to speak in English across the world.
Here it is…
There are more videos from this event, and the project more generally, here.
Apologies for those of you that saw a post, tweet or email earlier today about my updating of the Boko Haram annotated bibliography. I uploaded the extensively revised bibliography, but posted the announcement in error. A fuller announcement will appear on Monday – I want to say a little more about the present context – but the bibliography is accessible, and has over forty new entries, bringing the total number of pieces referenced to over one hundred.
Phil Steinberg provides some analysis of the map on the cover of the report The Land of Scotland and the Common Good.
You can read my initial comments – and see the full map and key – here. Phil is especially good on the ambiguity around the eastern section of the southern boundary.
I’ve made a page with a list of pieces by Kostas Axelos in English with links, along with a few suggestions of secondary reading. It includes all the pieces of which I am aware. Additions or corrections welcome. The picture in this post comes from his publisher site; the painting on the page is from the Voyages to Freedom series by Anna Filini – a series of portraits of Greek figures who fled the country in 1945 on the Mataroa ship, also including Cornelius Castoriadis.
Axelos is a very interesting figure who can perhaps best be described as a ‘left Heideggerian’. He has been important to my thinking of the concept of ‘world’. He was a lifelong Marxist, but connected to a wide range of figures across Europe – from Greece to France and Germany and beyond. Among other things, he was the interpreter when Heideggger met Lacan – picture here – and knew Pablo Picasso well. Much more of his work is available in other European languages – he wrote mainly in French, but also in Greek and German, and there are Italian and Spanish translations of major works. He became editor of the journal Arguments, and launched the Arguments book series with Les Éditions de Minuit, which published works by Barthes, Blanchot, Deleuze, Lefebvre, Lukács and many others.
There is a interesting image on the front cover of the newly released report of The Land Reform Review Group – The Land of Scotland and the Common Good. The report is a 263 page document, but the image is striking for setting out Scotland’s purported maritime boundaries – both the twelve nautical mile ‘Scottish territorial seas’ and what it calls the ‘Scottish Seas’, set at 200 nautical miles. The latter is the legal Exclusive Econonic Zone, but the label chosen is telling. Some of these boundaries are taking the UK boundaries – see, for example, this DEFRA map for fishing rights – to apply to Scotland, but others are intra-UK – between Scotland and England, the Isle of Man, and Northern Ireland. There is also a large sector that is within the ‘civil jurisdiction offshore activities boundary’ but not within the ‘Scottish Seas boundaries’. And, as with the existing UK maps, the continental shelf extends to the West, which has implications especially for drilling rights.
I’ve taken a quick look at some of the text but not yet read the whole report – I was initially interested in questions of property in land and territory on land, but the cover image was very striking. I’m sure my ex-colleagues at Durham’s International Boundaries Research Unit such as Phil Steinberg and Martin Pratt could provide some expert commentary on some of the issues at stake here. This could become a major issue if there is a ‘yes’ vote to Scottish independence.
A recording of a fascinating discussion between Léopold Lambert and Gastón Gordillo, “The Politics of Ruins: What’s Hidden Under Rubble” at The Archipelago – the podcast platform of The Funambulist. Here’s Léopold’s description of the discussion:
In early May, Gastón Gordillo received me at the University of British Columbia, which allowed us to talk about his upcoming book, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, as well as the essay “Nazi Architecture as Affective Weapon” written for The Funambulist Papers series. We talk aboutthe politics of ruins from Albert Speer’s plans for Third Reich Berlin that was meant to generate glorious ruins to the different types of ruins that exist at the foot of the Andes in North Argentina. There, in contrast to the attitude by local authorities, local people do not view ruins as historic relics that should to be preserved but as rubble that evokes the destruction and violence the created the regional geography. We also talk about the production of ruins in the context of proletarian revolution like the 1871 Paris Commune versus the destruction to the very last stone of the Palestinian villages on Israeli territory after the Nakba (1948). Rubble is political for the narrative it tells of its past existence as well as the means of its destruction/production.
The Society and Space open site interview I conducted with Gastón is available here.
I met Léopold this week in New York for a discussion which should be posted on The Archipelago in a couple of weeks. We mainly talked about my ‘Secure the Volume‘ paper, and associated questions such as verticality, the fractured spaces of the West Bank, Paul Virilio’s early work, and then, at the end, my Shakespearean Territories project.
Barry Stocker continues his reading of Foucault’s La société punitive, lecture seven, parts one and two.
