Posted on August 1, 2012 by stuartelden

Political Geography forum on open-access publishing.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in Shakespearean Territories, The Space of the World | Leave a comment

2013 publications

Posted on July 31, 2012 by stuartelden

There will be three journal articles out in 2013, along with The Birth of Territory. Two of the articles are related to that book, but take arguments in different directions and link to future projects on Shakespeare and Foucault. The third links to The Space of World project – though I am unsure where that is going at the moment.

– ‘The Geopolitics of King Lear: Territory, Land, Earth’, for Law and Literature. There will be commentaries on this piece and a response.

– ‘How should we do the history of territory?’ for the launch issue of the new R.S.A. journal Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper was initially intended for an edited book coming out of The Foucault Effect 1991-2011 conference, but I was told that wasn’t going ahead so I was looking for another outlet. John Agnew asked if I might have something to submit to the journal and, after a round of reviews and some fairly small revisions, has just accepted it.

– ‘Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power’ for Political Geography. This is an edited version of the lecture I gave in Edinburgh at the RGS. It will have commentaries from Peter Adey and Gavin Bridge, and a response from me.

Posted in Michel Foucault, My Publications, Territory, The Birth of Territory, The Space of the World, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

Global Politics: A New Introduction – second edition

Posted on July 30, 2012 by stuartelden

Routledge now have a page up for the second edition of this textbook – 696 pages. It is due out in December. There are a number of new chapters, and revisions to the others. I have a chapter in here entitled ‘Why is the World Divided Territorially?’ The first edition had some really positive reviews, and I’ve heard good things about its usefulness in the classroom – each chapter is written as an answer to a question, which came from the editors talking to students about what they expected to learn. The first edition had a companion website with supplementary material. I guess that will be updated soon. An interesting- and, I think, successful – approach. Writing the chapter was a challenge though.

Posted in My Publications, Politics, teaching, Territory | Leave a comment

Michel Foucault – Le beau danger

Posted on July 28, 2012 by stuartelden

Interesting short book of an interview – which breaks off incomplete – with Claude Bonnefoy from 1968. Relates to Foucault’s books of the 1960s, especially History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things and the soon-to-be-published The Archaeology of Knowledge. The introduction suggests that the plan of Foucault and Bonnefoy was to publish a book of interviews, but this idea was abandoned. The book is with a prestigious press, and the introduction is by Philippe Artières (who has worked with IMEC) and he thanks both Daniel Defert and Foucault’s family. Clearly a further relaxation of the ‘no posthumous publications’ request…

Posted in Michel Foucault | Leave a comment

Eyal Weizman – Mengele’s Skull and Forensic Architecture

Posted on July 28, 2012 by stuartelden

Eyal Weizman’s The Least of All Possible Evils is getting much attention at the moment, but his short co-authored book with Thomas Keenan, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics is well worth a read too.

In 1985, the body of Josef Mengele, one of the last Nazi war criminals still at large, was unearthed in Brazil. The ensuing process of identifying the bones in question opened up what can now be seen as a third narrative in war crime investigations—not that of the document or the witness but rather the birth of a forensic approach to understanding war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In the period coinciding with the discovery of Mengele’s skeleton, scientists began to appear in human rights cases as expert witnesses, called to interpret and speak on behalf of things—often bones and human remains. But the aesthetic, political, and ethical complications that emerge with the introduction of the thing in war crimes trials indicate that this innovation is not simply one in which the solid object provides a stable and fixed alternative to human uncertainties, ambiguities, and anxieties.

The complexities associated with testimony—that of the subject—are echoed in the presentation of the object. Human remains are the kind of things from which the trace of the subject cannot be fully removed. Their appearance and presentation in the courts of law and public opinion has in fact blurred something of the distinction between objects and subjects, evidence and testimony.

Also recently available is a short essay – bi-lingual English and German – entitled Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums. His Society and Space lecture – also on the Forensic Architecture project – should be available on video soon. I’ll link to it as soon as it’s online.

Posted in Eyal Weizman, Society and Space | 3 Comments