Verso’s Olympic reading list

Posted on August 3, 2012 by stuartelden

Some of these are a bit of a stretch, but many good books here. Marc Perelman’s recent Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague looks intriguingly polemical.

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Slavoj Žižek – Signs from the Future

Posted on August 3, 2012 by stuartelden

Žižek has another new book coming out this autumn. There is an excerpt available here. Compared to Less than Nothing it’s a mere pamphlet at 128 pages. Entitled The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, it’s published by Verso.

Posted in Politics, Slavoj Zizek | 3 Comments

Owen Hatherley on The Olympian Landscape

Posted on August 2, 2012 by stuartelden

Owen Hatherley is author of the very good A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Verso have an excerpt from his forthcoming book,  A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain, here. A small taste:

What of the Olympic site itself? Everything is dominated by the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a shocking pink entrail laterally curved around an observation tower, famously commissioned by Boris Johnson in the toilets of a fundraising dinner from steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who provided the metal in return for the monument being named after him. There’s a faintly sick irony in this ex-industrial zone being overlooked by an edifice dedicated to a prolific downsizer and asset-stripper of factories, but that aside, there are buildings to enjoy, if you can keep from your mind the town-planning abortion that has been wreaked upon Stratford.

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments

Posted on August 2, 2012 by stuartelden

Review of Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza at NDPR – plus links to online material in Society and Space.

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Posted on August 1, 2012 by stuartelden

Political Geography forum on open-access publishing.

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Simon Critchley interview

Posted on August 1, 2012 by stuartelden

At Figure/Ground (via Graham Harman). Some interesting discussion of universities, teaching, research, assessment as well as politics and his own writing.

Posted in Politics, Simon Critchley, teaching, Universities | Leave a comment

Leaky Geopolitics: The Ruptures and Transgressions of WikiLeaks

Posted on July 31, 2012 by stuartelden

A series of reflections in Geopolitics – Simon Springer, Heather Chi, Jeremy Crampton, Fiona McConnell, Julie Cupples, Kevin Glynn, Barney Warf & Wes Attewell. Find it here (requires subscription). 

The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for Assange’s assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have WikiLeaks designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization’, amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism. The ‘Wikigate’ scandal thus represents an important occasion to take stock and think critically about what this case tells us about the nature of sovereign power, freedom of information, the limits of democracy, and importantly, the violence of the state when it attempts to manage these considerations. This forum explores a series of challenges inspired by WikiLeaks, which we hope will prompt further debate and reflection within critical geopolitics.

Via Jeremy Crampton’s Open Geography blog, which provides a summary of his piece if you can’t get past the paywall.

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Policing the Olympics – Territorially?

Posted on July 31, 2012 by stuartelden

The Territorial Support Group’s map for policing the Olympics is doing the rounds on Twitter (thanks to Nina Power for the alert). This is an area I know quite well – when I had a visiting post at Queen Mary a few years ago I cycled a lot around this area. I could see the site under construction from my flat’s window too.

The TSG is a controversial police unit involved in large-scale policing operations in London, and providing “anti-terrorism and domestic extremism capability”  – their official site is here. Disturbingly they trumpet that their officers can deploy the following ‘skills’

  • Firearms
  • Public Order Training
  • Rapid entry
  • Taser
  • Plain clothes/Uniform tactics
  • Providing tactical solutions and advice to borough and business group problems.

I know quite a bit has been written about paramilitary policing, but is there any literature examining the curious choice of name?

Posted in Politics, Territory | 1 Comment

Shakespearean Territories – taking shape?

Posted on July 31, 2012 by stuartelden

While in Nigeria I was working on a book proposal for the Shakespearean Territories project, interspersed with re-reading some of the plays that were on my potential list to be included. It’s now looking something like this:

  1. Divided Territories: The Geo-politics of King Lear
  2. Corporeal Territories: The Political Bodies of Coriolanus
  3. Economic Territories: Farming the Realm in Richard II
  4. Contested Territories: Placing the Histories
  5. Colonial Territories: Pericles and The Tempest
  6. Vulnerable Territories: External Powers in Hamlet and Macbeth
  7. Measuring Territories: The Techniques of Rule
  8. Outside Territory: The Forest in As You Like It and Titus Andronicus

Chapters 1, 2, and parts of 3 exist in draft form already, and I’ve given them as talks in New York, Paris, Nottingham and Edinburgh. I have bits towards chapters 5 and 8 and lots of notes. My aim is to have a proposal ready to send to a publisher sometime this summer, with a manuscript by end of 2013. I’m looking at a fairly short book of c. 80,000 words inclusive.

The basic argument is that while Shakespeare only uses the words ‘territory’ and ‘territories’ rarely, the concept is not marginal to his work. A number of his plays are structured around related issues of exile, banishment, land politics, spatial division, contestation, conquest and succession. Shakespeare was writing at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century: a time when the modern conception of sovereign territory was emerging. He therefore helps us understand its variant aspects, tensions, ambiguities and limits. The plays are chosen because they help to exemplify different aspects of the question of territory – conceptually, historically, and politically. In doing so I hope to illustrate the multi-faceted nature of territory as word, concept and practice, and to shed light on the way we understand territory and territorial disputes today.

Posted in Shakespearean Territories, Territory, William Shakespeare | 8 Comments

Taking Stock – The Space of the World project

Posted on July 31, 2012 by stuartelden

I mentioned in the last post that I was unsure where I was going with my The Space of the World project. Part of the reason for this is that I’ve now been rejected on three grant applications to help fund it. Rejection is part of academic life, but it has definitely left me rethinking the project somewhat.

The plan was a book with six chapters that took particular empirical, political or historical questions as ways to engage with philosophies of the world. The argument was that most work on globalisation was theoretically impoverished, but much philosophical work on the ‘world’ which provides useful resources for thinking about ongoing planetary processes was somewhat detached from what was actually going on in the world. So the ‘Volume’ paper was a way of using Paul Virilio’s early work on architecture and Sloterdijk’s work on spheres to think about the politics of space in three dimensions; the ‘Fossils’ talk was to engage with Meillassoux through the history of paleontology; the ‘Earth’ idea was to pick up on themes in Schmitt, Deleuze & Guattari, etc. The other three chapter titles in my plan were ‘Violence’, ‘Wound’ and ‘Play’.

I’m committed to giving a paper with the title ‘Earth’ in Tel Aviv next year, so I’m not giving up on this entirely. And a publisher has expressed interest in the book. But I think I will refocus my attentions on the two other book-length projects I have in mind – one tentatively entitled Foucault’s Last Decade; the other is the Shakespearean Territories one – and push this down the list a bit. More on the Shakespearean Territories project in the next post.

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