Bingo – Shakespeare

Posted on February 18, 2012 by stuartelden

Went to see Edward Bond’s play Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death last night at the Young Vic. Very good, and especially interesting for the playing out of the tensions with the Enclosures Act – perhaps even more so than it being about Shakespeare. Patrick Stewart was excellent, as was Richard McCabe as Ben Jonson. This was only the second night, and I’ve not seen reviews of this run, but here and here are a couple from 2010 – much the same cast.

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Three links to posts on publishing

Posted on February 17, 2012 by stuartelden

John Protevi reflects on the story that the University of Louisiana may lay claim to a part share of the royalties earned by members of faculty there. I particularly like this tangled metaphor from the Professor of English: “It’s sort of a nuclear missile that came up from the horizon out of nowhere and struck everyone by surprise” (in the Chronicle).

Also at New APPS Eric Schliesser pleads for an end to companions, handbooks, etc. – though there is an interesting discussion that follows which shows that there can be a need, and intellectual justification, for these.

And an interesting piece on how projects move at the speed of the slowest contributor (building on an earlier piece by Graham Harman, which I discussed here, and where towards the end, I raise the problem of companions, guidebooks, etc.)…

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New APPS interview with Eduardo Mendieta

Posted on February 15, 2012 by stuartelden

Find it here. A fascinating story of his background and the huge range of things he works on.

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At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean

Posted on February 14, 2012 by stuartelden

Having done some review work for Continuum, one of the books I asked for was Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. The book had been sitting on my desk for a few days before I took it with me on a train trip. It’s a very interesting read, taking a number of different plays to open up issues around the ocean and activities on or in it – fishing, swimming, drowning, and so on. It engages with some of the historical and geographical work on the sea – people like Chris Connolly and Phil Steinburg. It has a very helpful bibliographical essay at the end entitled ‘Reading the New Thassology’. You can read a sample chapter here. I then discovered Steve had been reading this blog for a while, when he commented on a post of mine on Coriolanus. Steve himself has an interesting blog here.

Posted in William Shakespeare | 3 Comments

Derek Gregory – British Academy lecture

Posted on February 14, 2012 by stuartelden

Deadly Embrace: War, Distance and Intimacy

Professor Derek Gregory FBA

Wednesday 14 March, 2012, 6.00-7.15pm The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

It has become commonplace to claim that contemporary wars are fought from a distance: the iconic version is the drone missions flown over Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere from the United States.  Yet wars have been waged at a distance throughout history, and we need a surer sense of the historical curve through which military violence has shaped (and been shaped by) the friction of distance.  But we also need a sharper calibration of war’s geography, including changes in military logistics and command and control systems, the transition from battlefields to battlespaces, the comingling of the military and the civilian, and the emergence of new media to convey the theatre of war to distant audiences.  And yet for all these changes the ‘death of distance’ – and the distance of death – in today’s liquid world has been greatly exaggerated, and there remains a stark intimacy to many killing spaces that requires careful reflection.

About the speaker Derek Gregory is Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver; he was previously University Lecturer in Geography at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College.  He was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 2006.  He is the author of Geographical imaginations, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, and is presently completing a new book, The everywhere war.  His current research focuses on political and cultural histories/geographies of bombing.

6.00pm-7.15pm, followed by a reception. Registration is not required for this event.  Seats will be allocated on arrival. (via here)

 

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Security and Geopolitical Space – readings

Posted on February 14, 2012 by stuartelden

My visit to the University of Kentucky for the Committee on Social Theory is part of a class on ‘Security’. The idea is that the four visiting speakers give public lectures and then have a discussion session with the students taking the class. Class sessions before and after our visits link to the week we are actually present. These are the assigned readings for the block on ‘Security and Geopolitical Space’ that Sue Roberts is leading, which links to my lecture. Sue and I chose the reading around three blocks – basically ‘Territory’; ‘Up’; and ‘Down’ which link to the idea of ‘volume’ I will be lecturing on.

Unit 3: Security and Geopolitical Space (Roberts)

March 23

Readings

  1. Crampton, Jeremy (2010) “Cartographic calculations of territory”, Progress in Human Geography, Vol 35, No 1, pp. 92-103.
  2. Elden, Stuart (2010) “Land, terrain, territory,” Progress in Human Geography Vol 34 No 6, pp. 799-817. See also the exchange between Elden and Antonsich in Vol 35  No 3, pp. 422-29.
  3. Elden, Stuart (2009) Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. xi-xxxii.
  4. Shah, Nisha (2012) “The Territorial Trap of the Territorial Trap: Global Transformation and the Problem of the State’s Two Territories”, International Political Sociology, forthcoming, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00144.x/full

March 30

Public Lecture by Stuart Elden: “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power”

Readings

  1. Gregory, Derek (2011) “Lines of Descent”  Open Democracy, http://www.opendemocracy.net/derek-gregory/lines-of-descent
  2. Graham, Stephen (2004) “Vertical Geopolitics: Baghdad and After,” Antipode Vol 36 No 1, pp. 12-23. Graham’s “Vertigo: for a vertical turn in critical urban social science” podcast is available at: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/12/steve-graham-%E2%80%93-vertigo-for-a-vertical-turn-in-critical-urban-social-science/)
  3. Weizmann, E (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso, pp. 1-16. See also his earlier The politics of verticality at http://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp This is a sequence of 11 short pieces – numbers 1-4 are especially useful.
  4. Adey, Peter (2010) “Vertical Security in the Megacity”, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol 27, No 6, pp. 51-67. Adey also has a podcast “Areal Life: space, substance and ‘being-in-the-air”, available at http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/12/pete-adey-areal-life-space-substance-and-being-in-the-air/

April 6

Readings

  1. Bennett L, (2011) “Bunkerology—a case study in the theory and practice of urban exploration” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Vol 29 No 3, pp. 421-434. See also the exchange between Bennett and Garrett on the www.societyandspace.com open site: http://societyandspace.com/2011/06/10/shallow-excavation-a-response-to-bunkerology-by-bradley-l-garrett/ and http://societyandspace.com/2011/06/10/exploring-the-bunker-a-response-by-luke-bennett-to-%e2%80%98shallow-excavation%e2%80%99/
  2. Garrett, Bradley L. (2010) “Urban explorers: quests for myth, mystery and meaning,” Geography Compass, Vol 4, pp. 1448-1461; along with the linked video article http://vimeo.com/5366045
  3. Gandy, Matt  (2003) Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge: MIT Press, Chapter 1: “Water, Space and Power”.
  4. Marvin, Simon and Medd, Will “Clogged Cities: Sclerotic Infrastructure”, in Stephen Graham (ed.) Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, New York: Routledge, pp. 85-96. (an earlier version appeared in Environment and Planning A, Vol 28 No 2, 2006, pp. 313-24)
Posted in Conferences, Derek Gregory, Society and Space, Stephen Graham, teaching, Territory, The Space of the World | 4 Comments

Foucault on Truth, Knowledge and Publishing

Posted on February 13, 2012 by stuartelden

This will to truth, like other systems of exclusion, relies on institutional support: it is both reinforced and accompanied by whole strata of practices such as pedagogy, of course, such as the book-system, publishing, libraries, such as the learned societies in the past, and laboratories today. But it is probably even more profoundly accompanied by the manner in which knowledge [le savoir] is employed in a society, the ways in which it is exploited, divided and in some ways, attributed.

Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, pp. 19-20. Translation very slightly modified from the Rupert Swyer one in The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 219.

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Political Concepts

Posted on February 13, 2012 by stuartelden

Political Concepts – new online resource/journal. This project appears to be linked to the Tel Aviv University project Mafte’akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought that has some English entries, and some Hebrew translations. (The latter was the group that translated my ‘Land, Terrain, Territory’ piece – see the comments on this here.)

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

Climate Change and War

Posted on February 13, 2012 by stuartelden

A series of articles discussing the relation between climate change and war – in the Journal of Peace Research. Papers are open access until end of February 2012.

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Stuart Hall interview

Posted on February 13, 2012 by stuartelden

In The Guardian:

The examples of this are everywhere, but take as the most pressing the case of the NHS. “How can millions of people have benefited from the NHS and not be on the streets to defend it? Come on. The NHS is one of the most humanitarian acts that has ever been undertaken in peace time. The principle that someone shouldn’t profit from someone else’s ill health has been lost. If someone says an American health company will run the NHS efficiently, nobody can think of the principle to refute that. The guiding principles have been lost.” There was a study recently investigating why America, which spends more per capita on health, has worse outcomes, and the answer was quite clear: when there is a profit motive, the rich are overinvestigated, and the poor are undertreated. People die needlessly.

So there’s quite a sound pragmatic argument against private involvement in health, but Hall’s is a blistering moral statement – who would profit from someone’s ill health? What sort of person would that be? Would you trust them with your budget, let alone your health, or the health of a loved one? The moral case is not being forcefully enough put; indeed, it is not being put at all.

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