Foucault, Territory, etc.

Posted on October 25, 2010 by stuartelden

Over at Philosophy in a Time of Error, Peter Gratton responds to my update on Chapter One from a couple of days ago. Peter mentions the piece I published on Foucault’s ‘Society Must Be Defended’ back in 2002. That piece, and certainly the 2007 piece on the two governmentality courses ‘Governmentality, Calculation, Territory’, were really the collision of two projects. One is the history of the concept of territory that I am now finishing up. The other is a book I still intend to write on Foucault. At the moment this is under the draft title of Foucault’s Last Decade: A History of the ‘History of Sexuality’. I’ve published several pieces about the lecture courses, and some of the collaborative projects Foucault worked on during the 1970s, with a view to using these together as the basis for a book. It’s a book about a book. It’s not the next book, but my plan is that it is the one after that.

Posted in Michel Foucault, My Publications, The Birth of Territory | 2 Comments

Wendy Brown lecture

Posted on October 25, 2010 by stuartelden

This happened a while ago, and I knew it was on You Tube, but the Vimeo is better as it is complete instead of in several parts. It’s a lecture by Wendy Brown at Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University – with responses by Raia Prokovnik and me, and then a quite extensive discussion.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, dozens of walls have been erected between and within nation-states. Why? What are these walls doing–materially, performatively, symbolically? What is their relationship to the erosion of state sovereignty? What is the nature of state and popular investments in them, especially when they don’t ‘work’?

Posted in Boundaries, Territory, Wendy Brown | 1 Comment

Chapter One

Posted on October 24, 2010 by stuartelden

Chapter One is now in pretty good shape. The issue of word length has meant that I’ve been fairly minimal in terms of what I have added.

The chapter begins with readings of Greek myths of autochthony, drawing on a range of sources – Plato, Euripides, Isocrates, Thucydides, Homer, Heraclitus, Apollodorus, Hyginus, Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Strabo, Aristophanes, Sophocles… Of contemporary writers, I probably draw most on Nicole Loraux. One bit I did add – on the suggestion of Veronica della Dora – was a paragraph on the founding of Alexandria, a story that is told in Plutarch, Arrian and Pseudo-Callisthenes. This is where Alexander is marking out the bounds of this new polis, but has no chalk to do so. So his soldiers suggest that they use the barley from their rations to mark it out. The story is that the birds from the nearby lagoon swooped down and ate the meal. The soothsayers said this would mean not simply that the city would have enough for itself, but could also provide for the neighbouring lands.

The chapter then moves through a longer discussion of Sophocles’ Antigone – which draws in part on a piece I published some time ago on Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim – and a discussion of Kleisthenes’ urban reforms of Athens. That too draws on previously published material – here. The next two sections are readings of Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s Politics, before a concluding section on the polis as site and community. More of this chapter is previously published than any other, but since it was also the oldest material (dating back to a summer at the University of Virginia in 2001) it needed quite a lot of stylistic work.

Chapter Two – on Ancient Rome – should hopefully present less work, since I finished the draft in February this year. Although I did a lot of work on that chapter back in 2006, it took me much longer to work out what I was trying to argue in that chapter so I didn’t begin the actual drafting until autumn 2009.

Posted in The Birth of Territory | 2 Comments

Red Quill Books

Posted on October 24, 2010 by stuartelden

Early days, but Red Quill Books looks like an interesting publishing venture. Have a look at their mission statement, for instance.

Consciousness Raising:  We are committed to disseminating critical academic works to a mass readership in formats that are accessible and that raise awareness and promote political engagement. 

Ecology: We aim to build a sustainable and Green publishing house. Our processes are digital with minimal supply-chain waste.  We are an on-demand producer of books, which also ensures our books are never out of print.

Community:  We will be offering academic prizes and graduate research grants to support the next generation of critical scholars.  We seek to actively promote future critical scholarship. 

…the literary proletarian… who fabricates books… under the direction of his publisher, is a productive labourer; for his product is from the outset subsumed under capital, and comes into being only for the purpose of increasing that capital.      

Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value I

Posted in Karl Marx, Publishing | 1 Comment

Roundup – Cuts, Leaks and Harvey on Method

Posted on October 23, 2010 by stuartelden

K-Punk – Mark Fisher, author of the excellent Capitalist Realism -has an impassioned piece about the UK cuts here.

Over at Open Geography, Jeremy Crampton discusses the new Wikileaks documents.

And David Harvey’s lecture on Marx’s method is available here.

Posted in David Harvey, Jeremy Crampton, Politics | Leave a comment

Irnerius

Posted on October 22, 2010 by stuartelden

In the talk today I will use this image for the first time. It was one I stumbled upon in a book about Philipp Melanchthon (briefly mentioned here). To date this is the best version I have – a scan from the book. There are colour versions of details here and here.

The painting is of the Roman jurist Irnerius, who was one of the first glossators of the Roman law in the eleventh century. It’s a remarkable image for all sorts of reasons, but I particularly like the way that there is a background of a city, landscape and armies, with a priest blessing the troops as they prepare to go to battle. This is the background to the legal work Irnerius is doing in the foreground.

And yet, it is the work of Irnerius and those who followed him (notably Bartolus and Baldus) that provides the basis for the politics of land and conflict that are taking place at the same time. The lawyers are working on behalf of kings and cities, and the influence of their work continues into later legal theorists such as Francisco de Vitoria – who discussed the Spanish conquest of the new world – and Hugo Grotius in his work on the rights of war and peace.

So far I’ve found it difficult to source a better quality colour image of the whole scene – although I have some friends helping out. The painting is by Luigi Serra, and is on the ceiling of one of the rooms of the Palazzo d’Accursio in Bologna.

Posted in Baldus de Ubaldis, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius, Irnerius, Philipp Melanchthon, The Birth of Territory | 1 Comment

University of Washington seminar

Posted on October 21, 2010 by stuartelden

Tomorrow I give my first talk of this North America trip, at the University of Washington. Details here. There will be an informal lunch with postgraduates first, discussing the ‘Land, Terrain, Territory’ paper forthcoming in Progress in Human Geography. Although the audience should be broader at the talk, the paper leads nicely into it so it may allow me to shortcut some of the windup and get straight to the detail.

Posted in Conferences, My Publications, The Birth of Territory | Leave a comment

China Miéville’s ‘Letter to a progressive Liberal Democrat’

Posted on October 21, 2010 by stuartelden

China Miéville reacts to the cuts, and particularly Liberal Democrat complicity. Strong stuff, and strong language, here.

Posted in China Mieville, Politics | 1 Comment

Seattle and the Greeks

Posted on October 20, 2010 by stuartelden

Now in Seattle, at University of Washington. Slowly getting the infrastructure of life and work established, but dealing badly with West-coast jetlag. To be honest part of me is glad to be out of the UK as the comprehensive spending review axe is wielded and British universities adapt to the new dark ages of neoliberal dogma and cultural ignorance.

First job was to read chapter one of ‘The Birth of Territory’ and see what needed doing. It’s the chapter on ancient Greece entitled ‘The Polis and the Khora‘. The good news is that the basic shape of the argument seems sound, and most of the particulars don’t need a lot of work. The less good news is that some of the references are missing details like page extents for chapters and articles, so some hunting to resolve them; some verbal ticks I think I’ve now eradicated from my writing are there (the draft dates from 2001); and there are some semi-cryptic ‘notes for work’ that I now need to decipher. Fortunately even back then I was doing the source references and language checking properly. There is some work to be done on updating references to secondary literature that has appeared in the last decade. I also need to decide whether I have the space or inclination to work in more detailed discussions of some authors who are currently relatively neglected – Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus and Strabo being the key ones. There are references to all of these writers already, and any primary text reading will be rereading, but something to think about.

The libraries here are good (though noisy), and I’ve already made a little progress. Aside from minor detail checking, yesterday’s rereading was Oedipus at Colonus with the thought of perhaps developing the Antigone section to discuss this in more detail. But aside from including the line ‘will they even shroud my body in Theban soil?’ I’ve decided to leave it as it was. To be honest, Lowell Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus does whatever could be said there. I think today I will begin with the Oresteia and take it from there.

Posted in The Birth of Territory, Travel, Universities | Leave a comment

Governing Emergencies – workshop at Durham

Posted on October 20, 2010 by stuartelden

Governing Emergencies

9/10 December 2010 (Starting at 2.00 on the 9th)
Two Day Workshop.
Department of Geography, Durham University

Papers include:

Peter Adey (Keele University), Ben Anderson (Durham University) and Steve Graham (Newcastle): Event and Anticipation: Governing Emergencies in UK Civil Contingencies

Louise Amoore (Durham University) and Marieke de Goede (Amsterdam University). Preemption, Anticipation, Critique.

Nick Bingham and Stephanie Lavau (Open University) In Case of Emergency; Food, Traceability and the Formalisation of the Event

Stephen Collier (The New School) ‘Preparing for a National Emergency’: Inventing the Vulnerable Homeland.

Mick Dillon (Lancaster University). The Politics of the Event

Mark Duffield. (Bristol University). Environmental Terror, Resilience and the Bunker

Derek McCormack (Oxford University) The Futures of Inflation

Ute Tellmann and Sven Optiz (Basel University) Making Futures: Emergencies in Economy and Law

Lisa Smirl (Sussex University): Playing House: Governance Through Domesticity in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Rens Van Munster (Danish Institute for International Studies). Conjectural Reasoning and the Securing of Catastrophic Futures

How do events open up some form of exception to normal social and political life? And how are events governed in advance of their occurrence, as they take place and in retrospect? In this workshop we address the theme of ‘Governing Emergencies’, exploring the contemporary deployment of ‘emergency’ in relation to terror, climate change, finance and trans-species epidemics and its similarity to or differentiation from ‘crisis’, ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’. We do so amid various claims that in a world of complex interdependencies, and circulations, governing through emergency has become central to life in liberal-democratic societies (Dillon 2007; Ophir 2007; Cooper 2010; Anderson 2010; de Goede 2008; Duffield 2008; Graham 2010; Braun 2007). Whilst one aim of the workshop is to develop these claims by unpacking the different logics through which emergencies are intervened on (such as preemption or preparedness), we also want to attend to how this process works through specific practices and to address the ethical and political consequences of governing through emergency and being governed by emergency. In this respect the workshop will develop a range of work across multiple disciplines that has attended to the specific techniques, styles and practices through which futures are known in order to be rendered actionable (see Anderson 2010; Aradau & Van Munster 2007; Davies 2007; Adey 2009; Grusin 2010; Amoore 2009).

Questions to be addressed will include:
 
1: How have specific anticipatory logics been invented, (re)deployed, and/or intensified to govern in and through emergencies e.g. emergency planning, precaution, preparedness, resilience, preemption, adaptation, resilience? And what arts and technologies enable their speculations?
2: What catastrophic and providential relations with life are involved when governing emergencies and governing through emergencies: how is life fostered, abandoned, differentiated, destroyed, made to live, disavowed and so on?    
3: How do emergencies govern? How do emergencies open up – or threaten to open up – a state of exception to some form of already existing and valued order? What forms of legitimacy and authority follow from acting in relation in the ‘interval’ of emergency or invoking a ‘suspension’, ‘threshold’ or a ‘return’? 
4: How to conceptualise the topologies of emergency and the relations between emergency and terms such as catastrophe, crisis or disaster? How to understand emergencies in terms of exceptions, thresholds, suspensions, intervals or emergences?  
5: How are emergencies anticipated? Through what discursive and non-discursive means are future emergencies made present, e.g. through forms of imagination, performance, calculation and so on.
 
Papers will be 30 minutes long with a minimum of 15 minutes for questions and discussions per paper. The workshop is sponsored by the ESRC award: ‘Staging and Performing Emergencies’ (Dr Ben Anderson, Dr Peter Adey, Prof. Steve Graham).  It is free to attend, but places are limited so please contact Ben Anderson to reserve a place (ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk)

Posted in Conferences, Stephen Graham | Leave a comment