Progressive Geographies

This is the 12th in a series of extended posts on Grégoire Chamayou‘s Théorie du drone and covers the final chapter in Part III: Necro-ethics, called ‘Précisions’; in French the singular means accuracy, as you might expect, but the plural means ‘details’ – which is, of course, where the devil is to be found…

One of the most common claims advanced by those who defend the use of armed drones is that they reduce ‘collateral damage’ because they are so precise.  Following directly from his previous critique of Bradley Jay Strawser, Chamayou cites him again here: ‘Drones, for all their current and potential misuse, have the potential for tremendous moral improvement over the aerial bombardments of earlier eras.’  But he dismisses this as a misleading comparison: if Dresden or Hiroshima are taken as the yardstick against which accuracy is to be measured – or, for that matter, as…

Removing the Monument to Overcoming Walls: Reflections on Contemporary Border Walls and the Politics of De-bordering

by Olivia Mena, London School of Economics and Political Science

On a snowy morning in early March 2013, under the cover of darkness and protection of 250 police officers, construction workers began to take down several segments of the last standing, 1.3-km stretch of the Berlin Wall to make way for luxury high-rise apartments (Birnbaum 2013; The Guardian 2013). Just a week before I had made my first pilgrimage to the remains of the Wall, walking with other tourists along the East Side Gallery, as it’s known, photographing the murals by artists from all over the world that capture the significance, history, and meaning of the Berlin Wall and project alternative visions of a more convivial world without walls. The stretch of cinderblock and the preserved empty dead-zone behind it became the most…

This image attracted a lot of attention around the web today:

The text on the left is from a story in the Washington Post which discusses the FBI’s ability to exploit laptop cameras without enabling the indicator light.  The text on the right is from Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four discussing the dystopian state’s capability to view any given citizen unknowingly through their telescreen. (The comparison was tweeted out by @tinyrevolution.)

To which we can add:

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, page 201.

This was originally published (in French) in 1975, well after Orwell’s book. So Orwell was first with the idea? Not so fast! Foucault is discussing the ideas of the social reformer Jeremy Bentham, who proposed the idea of the “panopticon” (all-seeing) in the late 18th century. According to one history, there are at least 300 prisons worldwide built on panoptic principles. You can see a classic illustration

Some of Richard Sennett’s book review of Foucault from 1979, indicating the original 6-volume plan of the History of Sexuality series.

From the New Yorker, July 16, 1979 issue.

It’s a couple of months now since the first press release announcing plans to rebuild the Crystal Palace. My initial response was amazement that it may be possible in coming years to see the rebuilding of one of the most important buildings of the nineteenth century; but as further details unfurl I, like many others, am increasingly ambivalent about the project, which would see a £500 million investment by a private Chinese corporation into the building and surrounding parkland. While the regeneration of the park seems long-overdue and supported by the local community, the corporation currently have an exclusivity agreement with the local council that prevents other proposals for the site’s development to be submitted until February 2015; during this time there is a call for the community to express their feedback on the scheme but it seems this has come rather late in discussions and from what I’ve read of…