David Macey

Posted on October 11, 2011 by stuartelden

Some sad news. David Macey, author of the best biography of Foucault, translator of Society Must Be Defended and author of Lacan in Contexts, among other works, has died. The Verso blog has the news and more details. he was supposed to be at the Radical Foucault conference at UEL last month, but was unable to attend due to his illness.

Posted in Michel Foucault | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Ennis on Meillassoux and more

Posted on October 11, 2011 by stuartelden

Interesting interview with Paul Ennis at Fractured Politics. Lots about Meillassoux and speculative realism, but interesting discussions of being a (post-)grad student, and publishing and networking early in career. And there is a nice comment about me at the beginning.

Posted in Publishing, Quentin Meillassoux | Leave a comment

Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street

Posted on October 10, 2011 by stuartelden

The videos are hard work as the crowd repeats every line after he’s said it – did no-one think to provide a microphone or loudhailer? – though as one of the commentators said, it’s a shame they didn’t also do the hand gestures. The Verso blog has the transcript which is much easier going.

[Update: in comments, David explains that the NYPD has prevented amplification, so the crowd repeat what speakers say to circumvent the restriction and avoid having the protest stopped. Now I know. Thanks David.]

Posted in Politics, Slavoj Zizek | 3 Comments

Wanted: audiotapes of Foucault’s 1973 lectures

Posted on October 10, 2011 by stuartelden

reposted from Clare O’Farrell’s Foucault News blog:

The French publishing houses, Le Seuil and Gallimard, publishers of the official edition of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, are seeking copies of any cassette tape recordings that might have been recorded at the Collège de France in Winter and Spring 1973 during Foucault’s lecture series on La société punitive.

These lectures were delivered over the period from January to March 1973. If you have any cassette tapes of these lectures or any information leading to the discovery of such tapes, please contact Caroline Pichon : caroline.pichon@seuil.com, tel: +33 1 41 48 83 43.

As I’ve mentioned before, the 1970-71 lectures were published on the basis of the manuscript as tapes were not available. While that approach certainly made for an interesting volume, there were a few gaps in the manuscript, including the material on Nietzsche. It is good that the editor, Daniel Defert, was able to circumvent legal restrictions and use the manuscript for that course, and that he has made manuscripts of other courses available to their editors so they can supplement the spoken with the written word. But obviously it’s best if both are available. It is a shame though that the publishers have waited this long to issue a public call for the tapes – the editing of Foucault’s lectures began in the mid 1990s, and I suspect many people who attended the early lectures may have around then, but perhaps less likely now, almost forty years on. And whatever tapes might exist will surely have deteriorated still further in the last fifteen years. But let’s hope some tapes are found.

Posted in Michel Foucault, Publishing | Leave a comment

Harman, Clough, Masciandaro audio

Posted on October 10, 2011 by stuartelden

Graham Harman’s talk to Speculative Medievalisms is now available, along with Patricia Clough’s response and Nicola Masciandaro’s closing comments. You can stream or download the audio here. Eileen Joy provides some background and links to the earlier talks here.

Posted in Conferences, Graham Harman, Medieval Studies | Leave a comment

Gibbon on Leibniz

Posted on October 9, 2011 by stuartelden

Edward Gibbon praises Leibniz as “a bold and original spirit” in his “Antiquities of the House of Brunswick”, in Miscellaneous Works, Vol III, 1796, p. 402. This is mentioned by Lewis W. Spitz in his helpful essay “The Significance of Leibniz for Historiography” (Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 13 No 3, 1952, pp. 333-48), who mentions the impact of Leibniz on Gibbon and quotes a few lines from Gibbon’s assessment. I went back to Gibbon’s text and there is a very full discussion which goes on for some pages, and is mainly of the detail Gibbon finds useful in Leibniz’s historical work. But there is a long passage on Leibniz as a whole which is interesting because of Gibbon’s admiration of Leibniz’s breadth, but also critical of what this means for his lack of depth (pp. 400-1):

The genius and studies of Leibnitz have ranked his name with the first philosophic names of his age and country; but his reputation, perhaps, would be more pure and permanent, if he had not ambitiously grasped the whole circuit of human science…  

There is a discussion of him as a theologian, as a philosopher, and as an a metaphysician. But then, for me, it gets more interesting:

He was a Physician, in the large and genuine sense of the word: like his brethren, he amused himself with creating a globe; and his Protogaea, or Primitive Earth, has not be useless to the last hypothesis of Buffon, which prefers the agency of fire to that of water. I am not worthy to praise the Mathematician: but his name is mingled in all the problems and discoveries of the times; the masters of the art were his rivals or disciplines; and if he borrowed from Sir Isaac Newton the sublime method of fluxions, Leibnitz was at least the Prometheus who imparted to mankind the sacred fire which he had stolen from the gods. His curiosity extended to every branch of chemistry, mechanics, and the arts; and the thirst of knowledge was always accompanied with the spirit of improvement. The vigour of his youth had been exercised in the schools of jurisprudence; and while he taught, he aspired to reform, the laws of nature and nations, of Rome and Germany. The annals of Brunswick, of the empire, of the ancient and modern world, were present to the mind of the Historian; and he could turn from the solution of a problem, to the dusty parchments and barbarous style of the records of the middle age. His genius was more nobly directed to investigate the origin of languages and nations; nor could he assume the character of a Grammarian, without forming the project of an universal idiom and alphabet. These various studies were often interrupted by the occasional politics of the times; and his pen was always ready in the cause of the Princes and patrons to whose service he was attached: many hours were consumed in a learned correspondence with all Europe: and the Philosopher amused his leisure in the composition of French and Latin poetry. Such an example may display the extent and powers of the human understanding, but even his powers were dissipated by the multiplicity of his pursuits. He attempted more than he could finish; he designed more than he could execute: his imagination was too easily satisfied with a bold and rapid glance on the subject which he was impatient to leave; and Leibnitz may be compared to those heroes, whose empire has been lost in the ambition of universal conquest.

The bit about Leibniz ‘borrowing’ from Newton in terms of calculus is now discredited, with the consensus seeming to be that they developed work independently, but the line about Prometheus is nice anyway – Leibniz’s notation is closer to what is used today. The final sentence is right on the first two suggestions, though the idea that he was “too easily satisfied with a bold and rapid glance” at any subject seems rather unfair, given the detail of most of Leibniz’s work. And of course, Gibbon was writing when a large amount of Leibniz’s work was not available; even today there is much still unpublished. But the overall assessment of his attempt at universal conquest is not far off.

Posted in Edward Gibbon, Gottfried Leibniz | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

‘Land, Terrain, Territory’ in Hebrew

Posted on October 9, 2011 by stuartelden

My ‘Land, Terrain, Territory’ paper is coming out in Hebrew translation. It will be in issue 4 of  Mafte’akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought  – a project based out of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University. It will appear under a title that would simply translate back into English as ‘Territory’ – territoria. I’ve been told that the Hebrew words chosen for land, terrain, territory are karka, shetakh, territoria. When I’ve given this talk in different places I’ve often asked how ‘Land, Terrain, Territory’ would translate into different languages. The etymological relation between the terms is interesting – some languages such as French are clearly related in all three: Terre, terrain, territoire. Others are related between two. English has two Latin-based words, through Norman roots; and one Old English. But what is interesting is that most Indo-European languages, even with Germanic or other roots, use the Latin word territorium as the basis of their term for ‘territory’. This is the case, for instance, in Danish and Finnish. With German there is the word Territorium, but a complicated set of interrelated terms such as Gebiet (the word used by Max Weber in his famous definition of the state), Land (which sometimes has territorial connotations such as in Landeshoheit) and Flächenstaat. As with English, the word ‘territory’ is a relatively late intrusion into the conceptual vocabulary in many languages.

Translation is therefore a political question. While I’m obviously generally pleased to have my work translated, and appreciate the intellectual labour of the process, had I been asked in advance I’d have suggested something rather different. I’ve given a few talks on territory in Israel (indeed, a version of this paper was given at Ben Gurion University) but I’ve always made my analyses explicitly political and engaged directly with issues in Israel/Palestine when doing that. The Ben Gurion paper was part of three linked talks – one conceptual (this paper); one political (based on the intro and conclusion to Terror and Territory) and one historical (pulling some key themes from The Birth of Territory). Given the politics of knowledge and the charged nature of the academy in Israel, to present this single piece as an objective or definitive take on territory (even just ‘my’ view on it) for a lexicon is, I think, rather misleading. I complained to the publisher and to the original publisher, and apparently this is within the bounds of what they can do, given the contributor agreement I signed.

I’ve expressed my unhappiness about this, which the translator and the editors of Mafte’akh understand. Their argument is that the project has as one of its aims to show the contested, political nature of many seemingly unproblematic terms. (The preface to the project is freely available in English translation here, and is worth a look for those interested in conceptual history.) I am sympathetic to this aim, as you might expect, but I just wish that I’d been able to contribute something that was more political than simply historical/conceptual. As a compromise we’ve agreed that the piece comes with a contextualising statement from me.

This paper was written at the beginning of a three year research fellowhip to write a history of the concept of territory. The book that resulted from this work, The Birth of Territory, is forthcoming in 2012. It is a development of work that was begun in Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, which was a attempt to understand contemporary territorial formations, challenges and changes, especially in the context of the ‘Global War on Terror’. The piece translated here attempts to provide an outline of how we might begin to understand territory historically and conceptually. While it stresses the various political dimensions of this category, it does so without reference to contemporary political examples. For analyses that trade on the arguments here, but also engage directly with political issues, especially within Israel/Palestine and other contested territories, I would urge interested readers to look at Terror and Territory and Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory”, International Political Sociology, Vol 3, No 3, pp. 353-77.

Posted in My Publications, Neil Brenner, Politics, Publishing, Territory, Terror and Territory, The Birth of Territory | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

AAG Political Geography pre-conference

Posted on October 8, 2011 by stuartelden

Vassar College, Poughkeepsie NY, Feb 22-23 2012, with Christian Parenti as keynote. Details here (via here).

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Longer Times, Wider Geographies

Posted on October 6, 2011 by stuartelden

I’ve uploaded an audio recording of my comments to the meeting last night of the Tyneside Stop the War coalition meeting. The meeting was held to mark ten years since the war on Afghanistan started. The first speaker Lindsey German, of Stop the War, talked about that war, and the movement against it. My remarks were an attempt to draw that war into a wider context. The whole event was recorded by the organisers, and I’ll link to that when available. [Update: you can find it here] This is just the audio recording of my comments.

(This is the first time I’ve made a recording on an iPad. It’s not bad, and a little bit of editing in Audacity has made it listenable. But it is a bit hissy on the ‘s’s…)

Update 21 October 2011: the text of my talk is now available here. I typed up the comments I made at the beginning after the event; but the main text is what I’d previously prepared. It therefore differs in some respects from what I actually said.

Posted in Boundaries, Politics, Territory, Terror and Territory | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Stefan Collini on British Higher Education

Posted on October 6, 2011 by stuartelden

Very interesting piece “From Robbins to McKinsey: The Dismantling of the Universities” in the London Review of Books. Lots of good bits, and if you want to know what a mess we’re in, it’s well worth a read. I particularly liked these three paragraphs:

(We shall have to wait until historians can inspect official records from the summer of 2010 to document exactly how it was that Lord Browne’s ‘independent’ review happened to come up with a proposal that fitted so exactly with the coalition’s not yet announced spending plans.) The Browne Report was a shoddy, ill-argued and under-researched document which attracted a firestorm of criticism, but the coalition immediately announced that it would ‘accept’ its main recommendations. (In practice, it has had progressively to abandon several aspects of Browne’s proposals, partly because of political pressure, especially from the Liberal Democrats, partly because the financial implications were frightening, especially to the Conservatives, and partly because they came to seem, when looked at more closely, unworkable.)

One reason the Commons’ vote on 9 December 2010 to remove public funding from teaching and to triple undergraduate fees was a scandal is that such a measure hadn’t been in the election manifesto of any party – indeed, the Liberal Democrats had made a commitment to abolish fees – and hadn’t been subject to proper democratic scrutiny. Another reason was the flagrant disregard of what used to be normal government practice, whereby a measure is first spelled out in some detail in a White Paper, then subject to criticism and consultation, and only then turned into draft legislation to be debated and voted on in Parliament. But on this occasion we were told that the White Paper would follow rather than precede the key legislative decision. It would be published ‘shortly’. ‘Shortly’ came and went. We were told it would appear ‘in March’, then ‘in April’, until finally it was published on 28 June, more than six months after the legislation it was supposed to prepare the way for, and long after universities had been forced by that legislation to draw up financial plans without knowing how the new scheme would operate.

It became clear during this period that the government had made a serious miscalculation even on its own premises. We now know that when the decision was taken to replace the block grant with a loan system, the Treasury (presumably the real driving force behind the change) calculated that the initial expenditure on loans would more or less match current expenditure on the teaching grant if the average fee were no higher than £7500. But the Treasury had assumed that the Office for Fair Access (Offa), which oversees universities’ admissions policies, had the legal power to dictate how much a given university could charge, ensuring that fees would be kept down to the desired average level. But Offa has no such legal power, as its director was obliged to ‘remind’ the government. A great many universities were setting fees of £9000 (as anyone could have told the government they would). It slowly dawned on the government that not only was the scheme not going to reduce expenditure; it was actually going to be a lot more expensive than the present system. Whether one is broadly in favour of the new fee regime or not, there can be no denying that the policy-making process in the last eight months has been a shambles.

I think that’s the key. Even if you agree with the policy it’s been badly handled; and there are many good reasons to disagree with the policy. And the conclusion:

Lionel Robbins, it should be remembered, was a neoclassical economic theorist and no admirer of socialism or left-wing ideas more generally. The case against the White Paper, and against the shift in public discourse that it both reflects and tries to push further, does not involve the repudiation of economic reasoning any more than it involves some supposedly utopian disregard for the financial cost of public services, education included. Similarly, pointing to the damage likely to be done to universities by the application of business-school models of ‘competing producers’ and ‘demanding consumers’ is not to indulge a nostalgic desire to return to the far smaller and more selective higher education system of 30 or 40 years ago. The expansion of the proportion of the age-cohort entering higher education from 6 per cent to 44 per cent is a great democratic gain that this society should not wish to retreat from. To the contrary, we should be seeking to ensure that those now entering universities in still increasing numbers are not cheated of their entitlement to an education, not palmed off, in the name of ‘meeting the needs of employers’, with a narrow training that is thought by right-wing policy-formers to be ‘good enough for the likes of them’, while the children of the privileged classes continue to attend properly resourced universities that can continue to boast of their standing in global league tables. There is nothing fanciful or irresponsible in believing that this great public good of expanded education can and should be largely publicly funded. This White Paper and the legislation already enacted are not about finding ‘fairer’ ways to pay for higher education or, in any meaningful sense, about putting ‘students at the heart of the system’. Rather, they represent the latest instalment in the campaign to replace the assumptions of Robbins’s world with those of McKinsey’s.

 

Posted in Politics, Universities | Leave a comment