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

The importance of small details

Posted on October 15, 2010 by stuartelden

As last week’s update on the book said, there were lots of minor things that I wanted to get resolved before I left London. Most of these presented relatively few problems.

A few though caused me considerably more work. With Vitoria I ended up using a bi-lingual German-Latin edition of his Vorlesungen. With the Plutarch quotation that Lipsius uses I was able to track down the ‘Plutarch, Apopht‘ reference to his Moralia (with some help from a friend) and then to find the original. This is the passage I posted a few days ago. I did eventually find Voltaire’s comment about the Holy Roman Empire, but it wasn’t where the reference I’d seen said it was. And I finally found the original place where Baldus says that territory and jurisdiction go together ‘like mist in a swamp’.

The original Greek text of Aelius Aristides’ 26th oration, on Rome, doesn’t appear to have been published in a modern edition. The Loeb library intended to produce bilingual editions, but only the first volume which covers the first two Orations, was published and then it was discontinued. The Opera quae exstant Omnia, edited by Lenz and Behr only appears to have had the first volume—in four parts—published. This covers Orations I-XVI but as far as I can tell no further. In the end I found a 1898 German edition which had the required text. What’s strange is that the English translation which I first read – and wanted to check for some small details – is by Charles Behr, and he says that all the translations are based on the critical edition he’d done. So if he’d done the work, why was the Opera unfinished?

Another challenge – and one that so far remains unresolved – is a passage in Nicholas of Cusa’s De concordantia catholica (III, vi, 343).

We should note that his power to command does not extend beyond the boundaries of his empire [terminus imperii] under him, as is evident in the text Ego Ludovicus, where although Louis describes himself as emperor, he issues commands only to the inhabitants of the kingdom of France and the Lombards who were his de facto subjects. And following this we should say that the emperor is said to be lord of the world as ruler of the empire that the Romans once conquered by their valor, as the text [C.] 28 q. 1 para Ex his says, deriving from that title from the fact that the Romans had the greater part of the world under their rule.

The reference to ‘Ego Ludovicus’ is to Decretum Gratiani, I, lxiii, xxx, in J.P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiæ Latinæ, 1891, Vol 187, columns 339-40.

The bit I can’t trace is the reference to “28 q. 1 para Ex his”. The English editor Sigmund inserts the “[C]”. I wondered if this was a reference to a chapter , or even the Roman law Codex, but neither are right. The Latin text has “C. 28 q. 1 § 2 Virtutibus promererunt imperium (post C. 14)”.  It didn’t seem to be to Decretum Gratiani, I, lxiii, xxviii (that is, very close to the prior reference); and it did not appear to be a reference to Causa 28 quaestio 1 canon 2. That particular hunt continues.

Why does all this matter? I’ve made a decision that I will check everything to the original language; that I will not have references of the style ‘X cited by Y’; and that I’ll try to take nothing on trust or assumption. It’s vastly increased the workload, and there have been many moments when I’ve been sorely tempted by the academic shortcut, but I’ve discovered so many things by following things up and checking everything that I’d hate to abandon this policy. Yes it’s obsessive, and I know that there will still be mistakes. But they will be ones of incompetence rather than inaction.

Posted in Baldus de Ubaldis, Francisco de Vitoria, Nicholas of Cusa, Territory, The Birth of Territory | Leave a comment

Rumours of the cuts to come

Posted on October 15, 2010 by stuartelden

Rumours of the cuts to come to British Higher Education here and here. As I said in my immediate thoughts on the Browne report a few days ago (here), the the unsaid part of the report was the massive cuts coming in the comprehensive spending review. These are now said to be in the region of 80% to the teaching budget, with the aim of making up the shortfall through the increased fees. But from various figures doing the rounds, universities would have to charge £7,000 just to stand still, if – and this is clearly a big if – they are able to maintain recruitment levels. But £7,000 is over the notional £6,000 figure where availability of loan support dries up and levies are made on the amount going to universities.

So, there will be a squeeze there, and it seems optimistic to think that the change in funding will not change student willingness to go to university, do the same courses, and at the same places. In other words, some really big changes are on the horizon.

Steve Smith, VC of Exeter and chair of Universities UK said this:

The biggest worry is simple to state: if Browne fails to get through the Commons, or gets unpicked, or gets accepted but only after major changes are made, we will simply not be able to replace the unprecedented reductions in state funding that are coming in the Spending Review.

So, quite apart from anything else, the shift in the balance that seems to be being attempted here may be out even before the new system has begun. There are also presumably some complications in timing. The cuts will be set for the budgets of future years; the legislation to bring in different fees will take time; and in the first year of implementation only around 1/3 of undergraduate students will be paying the higher fees (a smaller proportion for longer courses and part-time degrees). So it will take a number of years before the whole system is running in the way that this seems to be planned.

Posted in Politics, Universities | Leave a comment

Environment and Planning

Posted on October 15, 2010 by stuartelden

There will be a five volume compilation from the Environment and Planning series of journals coming out with Sage next year. It’s designed for library use. 

There are four volumes devoted to the four journals – A, B, C and D – and one volume that takes papers from each of the series. I’m the managing editor, the editor of the volume on Society and Space, and the lead editor on the fifth ‘Foundations’ volume. Mike Batty is doing EPB: Planning and Design; Bob Bennett is doing EPC: Government and Policy, and the ‘A’ team is Nigel Thrift, Trevor Barnes and Jamie Peck.

Posted in Nigel Thrift, Society and Space | 1 Comment

‘The True Size of Africa’

Posted on October 15, 2010 by stuartelden

This image has been fairly widely circulated.

David Campbell asks a good question here: “in comparing a continent with countries, doesn’t it run the risk of perpetuating the homogenization of Africa’s 61 political territories into one entity?” One way this is seen is in the common undergraduate essay line about “countries like Africa”, but it’s much more widespread. I’ve so far just been to Kenya, Swaziland, South Africa, Morocco and Tunisia, but it looks like I will be there more often in the near future.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

Badiou on Beckett

Posted on October 12, 2010 by stuartelden

At Infinite Thought, Nina Power has posted an announcement that the translation of Badiou’s book On Beckett is now freely available as a pdf here. here.

Posted in Alain Badiou | 1 Comment

The Browne Report

Posted on October 12, 2010 by stuartelden

The Browne report ‘Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education’ is here.

The headlines

  • loans for living costs; grants for families with below £60,000 income
  • no upfront fees for tuition, these too funded by loans
  • repayment of loans to start at £21,000, but 9% of income above that
  • universities can now charge fees as they wish above the current limit of £3290, but £6000 seems to be the new target. Above £6000 universities will pay a levy back to government.

It’s pretty clear that the report is trying to minimise government financial involvement in HE, and that it is doing this by claiming it is in the interests of students, parents and institutions.

There is a lot in here of why this is not a ‘graduate tax’ – the key differences being a pay ceiling (the ‘charge of the degree’) or a time limit (30 years!); and the direct link between the institution and the student rather the treasury and the student.

One thing that is striking is that it takes 2006 and the introduction of fees for tuition as its starting point. The struggles over that – remember it nearly brought down Blair – have long been lost. Having been lost, it becomes a question of whether this should be a free market or a regulated market. There is also the depressing line about who benefits from a degree – “the public also receives a benefit but this is less than the private benefit”. In the part on postgraduates, there is the comment that resources should be targeted “on courses that are a priority for the public interest”. I’d like to see them define that.

There is also a request for some more information to be available to students when they are applying for or choosing (what is now effectively ‘purchasing’) their degree course. Its emphasis is heavy on student evaluations – quantitative, of course – and course information (hours, proportion of this and that, employment percentages, average salary of graduates). Compare the Higher Education Market dot com…

And despite the idea of less government regualtion, there is a new HE Council proposed with regulatory powers. This will replace HEFCE, QAA, OFFA and OIA. Its aims are Investment, Quality, Equity of Access, Competition and Dispute Resolution.

And the unsaid part of the report – massive cuts coming in the comprehensive spending review. A major shift away from a public good toward a market based system.

It’s not a very long report – 64 pages.

Update 11.10: BBC’s Nick Robinson boils the party politics down to their essence:

Here’s what to remember when you hear politicians trading blows about tuition fees:

• Labour introduced them and commissioned the report proposing that the cap on them be lifted, but now says it wants them abolished

• the Tories originally proposed scrapping them, but now backs almost doubling them

• the Lib Dems said they’d vote against any increase in tuition fees, but are now in charge of the department which will do just that

• if Lib Dem ministers and the Tories stick together, these proposals will get through – even if a large number of Lib Dem MPs rebel against their party line

Posted in Politics, Universities | 1 Comment

Ancient boundary dispute resolution

Posted on October 11, 2010 by stuartelden

When the Argives seemed to make out a better case than the Spartans to a land in dispute, he drew his sword and said, ‘He that is master of this can best talk about the boundaries of countries’.

Plutarch, Moralia, 190e5 – on the Spartan general Lysander.

Posted in Boundaries | 1 Comment

The Birth of Territory contents

Posted on October 11, 2010 by stuartelden

This is the proposed contents for The Birth of Territory…

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