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... Such regimes are not territorially bound or isolated but are part of value chain structures that stretch across territories. I propose that Karachi's agrarian-urban transformations can be understood as value struggles that pivot on three interconnected processes: (i) strategies of enclosure (Retort 2005;De Angelis 2001 for the production of private property; (ii) accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004) that separates rural populations from the means of subsistence through direct extra-economic force such as the state; and (iii) "value grabbing" or the appropriation and distribution of (surplus) value through rent between diverse state and private actors (Andreucci et al 2017). Given this is a deeply political process, the state's role remains salient in terms of its alliances with varied groupsreal estate developers, politicians, brokers, waderas-to make land available for capital. ...
... The process of alienating common lands to private ownerships emphasises the shared struggles of the dispossessed-from evictees of informal settlements to the displacements of tenant homesteaders and pastoralists-to defend several commons. The literature on enclosure makes visible not only the class basis of capital accumulation, as Thompson (1963: 237) noted enclosures are "a plain enough case of class robbery," but also the gains that can be made through expanding collective ways of being (De Angelis 2004; Retort 2005). Fundamentally, struggles against enclosures resist the conversion of land into the commodity form and are the bluntest frontier of capitalist development. ...
This paper advances new perspectives on peripheral urbanisation in South Asia by drawing attention to Karachi’s rural land transformations. It considers the shift from the metropolis to the agrarian–urban frontier as a process that signals the production of a new value regime centred on the devalorisation of a rural economy and its transformation into urban real estate, as well as the changing priorities and preferences of the state. It proposes that Karachi’s agrarian–urban transformations can be understood as value struggles that pivot on three interconnected processes: strategies of enclosure for the production of private property; accumulation by dispossession that separates rural populations from the means of subsistence through direct extra-economic force such as the state; and “value grabbing” or the appropriation and distribution of (surplus) value through rent between diverse state and private actors. Given that this is a deeply political process, the state’s role remains salient in terms of its alliances with varied groups—real estate developers, politicians, brokers, waderas—to make land available for capital.
... Most glaring here is the darkly ironic vicious circle that Katrina may well in due course be shown to exemplify. This vicious circle goes something like this: First, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the Bush administration's pursuit of unfettered access to, and control over, the world's diminishing oil supplies has been the fundamental geopolitical principle driving its " war on terror " and the associated, and extremely bloody, invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (Retort, 2005). For the Bush administration, " energy security " means controlling these diminishing resources so that America's disproportionate consumption of global oil supplies—25% of all supplies for 5% of the world's population—can be continued. ...
... Such a strategy requires that cheap gas and oil supplies somehow be maintained, even as global supplies diminish, demand burgeons further, and the geopolitics of oil becomes more volatile and contested. Hence, either directly or indirectly, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have allowed U.S. oil companies—and others keen to trade extracted oil in dollars on the U.S. resource markets—to try to increase their control of the world's key remaining reserves in and around the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, at the expense of Chinese, Russian , and French interests (see Retort, 2005). The second turn of the circle is that this strategy has been pursued while systematically denying the overwhelming volume of serious scientific evidence suggesting that growing fossil fuel consumption is a prime contributor to global warming, sealevel rises, the degradation of biodiversity, and intensifying climate chaos (Bush & Rauber, 2004). ...
This intervention explores the paradox that although the Bush administration has repeatedly stressed the purported insecurity of U.S. urbanites to “terroristic” threats since 9/11, it has simultaneously undermined the preparedness and resilience of U.S. cities in the face of catastrophic weather and seismic events. Arguing that Katrina needs to be seen as an event that unerringly exposes the politics of urban security in post-9/11 U.S. cities, the piece explores the relationships between neoconservative, antiurban ideology; the “homeland security” drive; and climate change, catastrophic weather events, and oil geopolitics.
... While the spectacle has been introduced into geopolitical thinking by others in recent years as well (Koch, 2018;RETORT Collective, 2005), others have focused on how the power of spectacle reproduces itself in mundane ways that are dispersed throughout the built environment, rather than classic examples of large-scale events or high-profile entertainment events. Hetherington and Cronin (2008), for instance, discuss how the spectacle informs the spaces of the "entrepreneurial city," including its landscapes of memory and other politics of identity (see other contributions in their edited volume, as well as Chu and Sanyal 2015). ...
In recent years scholars have explored the geopolitics of spectacle in exciting ways. While tourism presents a rich opportunity to think about the intersection of geopolitics and spectacle, only a small but growing number of researchers have explored this area where state-society relations unfold in complex ways. This article draws on this work and other traditions in feminist political geography and non-representational theories to explore the embodied geopolitics of a festival and its tourist landscape in the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. As such, we glimpse a complex set of geopolitical relations at play in the multiple spaces of the Yii Peng Festival. A closer look at the Festival with the theoretical tools proposed here helps reveal ongoing geopolitical forces that shape its many contours, including a multiplicity of difference.
... 11. A fascinating example of what can be accomplished by such means is the book Afflicted Powers (Retort 2005), written by a longstanding San Francisco Bay Area collective. ...
This paper constitutes a manifesto for Generation-X academics, in the form of eight diagnostical and prescriptive theses. It is written in response to shifting conditions at two levels: externally, the hegemony of neoliberalism in the socio-political environment within which North American universities operate, which has spawned the dogma of inter-institutional competitiveness and educational vocationalism; and internally, a generational changing of the guard within universities, which is accompanied by a sense of despondency toward intellectual life and is thereby producing strategies of resigned quietism or instrumental careerism. By contrast, the manifesto proclaims that we must invent a practice of intellectual craftwork and publicly engaged scholarly research, one simultaneously striving for analytical rigour and theoretical boldness in order to convert the academy into a space of critique of the status quo and invention of alternatives.
... El Estado posee una dinámica propia que en determinadas fases puede coincidir con la dinámica económica y dar lugar a un funcionamiento acompasado de la lógica territorial del poder y la lógica capitalista del poder, adquiriendo sus relaciones formas complejas y contradictorias. Asumiendo el planteamiento de Arendt sobre el papel del Estado en el imperialismo de ultramar (2006: 227), Harvey sostiene que la dinámica del Estado consiste en el mantenimiento del poder en un territorio determinado y, para ello, en ocasiones resulta conveniente intervenir mediante sus instituciones en los procesos moleculares de acumulación y favorecer aquellos intereses que actúan en su marco y que refuerzan su poder y contemporáneas que son empleadas para reanimar los procesos de acumulación (entre sus valedores actuales se encuentran Ashman y Callinicos, 2006;Auerbach y Negi, 2009;Bonefeld, 2001;Brenner, 2006;Dalla Costa, 2004;De Angelis, 2001Glassman, 2006;Hart, 2006;Hartsock, 2006;Midnight Notes Collective, 2001;Perelman, 2000;Retort, 2005;Vasudevan et al., 2008). La propuesta de Harvey se encontraría dentro de la segunda línea de argumentación. ...
Approaching the discussion on the production of migrant illegality, this paper analyzes the Spanish case focusing the attention on the consequences of the relations between the logics of political power and economic power in the categorization of undocumented migrants. The first part of the paper briefly reviews the latest and most outstanding contributions to the critical study of illegality, examining which dimensions participate in the process of illegalization according to these proposals. In the second part I suggets that in the age of neoliberalism the production of migrant illegality can be understood as a process of accumulation by dispossession attending to the relation established between the State and capital. Finally, the process of illegalization that has taken place in Spain in the last decades is explored.
Retomando el debate sobre los procesos que participan en la categorización, diferenciación y producción de migrantes irregulares, este trabajo propone realizar un análisis de los factores que han intervenido en las últimas décadas en la producción de irregularidad en el contexto español. En el primer apartado se revisan de forma somera algunas de las aportaciones más relevantes que se han realizado en el estudio crítico de la producción de irregularidad en los últimos años, prestando atención a las dimensiones que según las distintas interpretaciones participan en este proceso. En el segundo apartado se plantea que la producción de irregularidad en la era del neoliberalismo cabe ser interpretada, de la mano de David Harvey, como un proceso de acumulación por desposesión debido a la forma que en él se conjugan las dinámicas del Estado y del capital. Por último, se atiende a la forma en la que se ha concretado el proceso de irregularización en el caso español en las últimas décadas.
... land, water, sea life) are destroyed through the production of fossil fuels, people are forced into a deeper dependency on the market to provide necessities like clean water, food, and safety (Szasz, 2008). At the same time, exploitative economic relationships and branded commodity consumption carry familial and patriarchal affective valences that make them meaningful and charismatic (Moreton, 2009;Retort Collective, 2005). NASCAR once again provides an exaggerated metaphor for this state of affairs. ...
What are the cultural logics linking anti-environmentalism with social conservatism and pro-corporate politics? An investigation of NASCAR (the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) reveals the ways in which this sport embodies a relatively common American structure of feeling and corporeal relation to nature. Industrialization and neoliberal globalization have attenuated place-based identities, ecological affordances and subsistence strategies. As an expression of white American cultural citizenship, NASCAR manages this economic and ecological insecurity through a rearticulation of patriarchal familial commodity consumption and mobility. The evacuation of residual meanings and practices tied to specific ecologies makes the heteronormative nuclear family the privileged site for the type of consumption that signifies national belonging. An expectation of mobility underlines this detached consumption and also constitutes an appropriation of national territory. NASCAR thus represents a genre of American cultural citizenship that is implicated in the cultural politics of environmental protection and other public goods.
... (cf. Retort, 2005) But, more importantly, the national bond sharpened through imperial competition is only possible through war's domestication. At the center of this more complex process of domestication is the successful erasure of colonial violence. ...
This essay takes up the question of a "new" social paradigm by first examining the recent emergence of the U.S. Occupied Movement (OM) as a provocative and inspiring moment of political re-composition, but one that also narrates a more complex unraveling of what W.E.B Du Bois called "democratic despotism." The most recent political tensions and economic "crisis" of the global north point to the disruption of a white "middle class" hegemony alongside inspiring moments of reconstructed conviviality. I suggest that the tension within spaces of occupation and convergence are animated by conviviality that should be read "politically" by noting the emergence of tools in service of community regeneration. Towards that end, I introduce Universidad de la Tierra Califas, a local project somewhere in-between network and collective pedagogies that is also a project of strategic conviviality and a Zapatismo beyond Chiapas.I argue that UT Califas engages a collective subject as part of an epistemological struggle inspired by Indigenous autonomy currently underway throughout Latin America.
... " As Retort comments, the only term that properly describes this combination of permanent war, capitalist accumulation, and the new enclosures is " original accumulation. " For what is most obvious about this military neoliberalism is its overtly colonial character and the brutality with which the appropriation for capital of the " wasted " resources of Iraq has been undertaken through sheer forced dispossession (Retort, 2005, 11, 43, 75). Obviously, a fuller account would need to situate such dispossession within the context of a neoliberalism that has been on the rise for some 40 years and which shows no signs of waning, but I would go further and suggest that the outright warfare through which this dispossession has taken place has been a feature of original accumulation since the inception of capital. ...
Bourgeois thought has been haunted by the idea of waste: waste land, waste persons, and wasted resources. Bourgeois law has facilitated the use of violence to eliminate this waste. This is especially the case with the early laws of war. In this sense, the fabrication of capitalist order was organized through nothing less than a war on waste. It is this war that has been at the heart of original accumulation. This can be seen historically in the work of a range of major and minor thinkers in the bourgeois canon, and remains with us in the present global war.
... 559). Oil also seeps through the accounts by Harvey (2003) and Retort (2005) of the causes of the second Gulf War. However, rather than focus on the privations and dispossessions of Iraqis during the war and understand them as the result of a simple oil grab by an hegemonic power ('blood for oil'), these accounts situate oil as the carrier of a far wider process of restructuring through which the material conditions for expanding the reproduction of capital are reconstituted. ...
This progress report is the first in a series of three on resource geographies, and reflects a renewed interest within human geography and cognate disciplines in classic resource questions of scarcity, access and governance. It focuses on carbon, an element which is fast becoming a common denominator for thinking about the organization of social life in relation to the environment. The report examines how researchers are applying one of resource geography’s principle tenets - that so-called ‘natural resources' are an outcome of political, economic and cultural work - to understand the resource-making processes associated with the ‘carbon economy’. Significantly, it expands this term from its limited association with carbon markets and offsetting to encompass the ‘actually existing’ carbon economy associated with the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. By reading these ‘old’ and ‘new’ carbon economies together, the report considers the making of carbon resources as they extend from the upstream, extractive end of the hydrocarbon commodity chain to the emission, capture and sequestration of carbon downstream. It harnesses the reductionism inherent to ‘carbon’ - its capacity to put apparently different entities on the same page - in order to identify commonalities and connections between the old and new carbon economies that are ordinarily overlooked. The report is organized around three core ‘logics' of resource making that can be identified in recent work: economy, territory and subject formation.
This essay places the work of the art historian TJ Clark in relation to the social and political philosophy of Gillian Rose. It develops an interpretation of the ideas that inform his art history, and of the ways in which they inform his advocacy of a ‘tragic’ approach to what he calls ‘Left’ politics. The latter approach is intended to avoid the dangers that Clark takes to be inherent in the Left's classical focus on shaping the social conditions of the future. The essay shows that Rose's philosophy is also sensitive to such concerns, and that it echoes aspects of Clark's position. In her work, however, this does not come at the cost of abandoning an orientation to the future. These points are developed via a discussion of the two writers’ respective conceptions of modernity, and via a consideration of their differing readings of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin.
This is a part of the introductory essay of the now already canonical study on gaming culture, written by Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig de Peuter - Games o f Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Regardless of the year of publishing, it still represents an extremely useful review that is not without serious critical insights. Placing the culture of video games in the epistemological passe partout determined by the Empire theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the authors had laid one of the key foundations for critical game studies, based on a deep understanding of the logic of virtual games, as well as their teleology and reception. The authors' cultural-political analysis of the media illustrates how central video games have become the very structure of our contemporary global order: both as a means of governing and as a (virtual) space of struggle and resistance.
This article makes two main claims: that Debord's concept of the 'integrated spectacle' is related to end of History narratives and that the related concept of 'disinformation' is manifested in new forms of media-driven warfare. These claims are substantiated through a comparative analysis between Debord's texts and contemporary politics, primarily as described by Adam Curtis and by the RETORT collective. The resulting understanding of our contemporary politics is a situation where subjects who appear to be free, are in fact only free to choose between competing brands of neo-liberalism that manipulate and baffle to obfuscate their true agendas. This situation is termed a 'spectacular malaise'. The article then critiques post-Marxist claims to a re-birth of History and therefore a potential end to the spectacular malaise. It argues that the Arab Spring and Occupy movement did not signal an end to the end of History, as they were unable to articulate an alternative vision. This situation is compared to the last days of the Soviet Union, when change also seemed unimaginable. It identifies Mark Fisher's call for activists to demonstrate alternative possibilities and reveal contingency in apparently natural orders to counter the spectacular malaise. Three art collectives are considered as potential candidates to take up this challenge: Women on Waves, Voina and SUPERFLEX. The article concludes that while making actual social and political change is useful for demonstrating alternative possibilities, it is art's symbolic value that reveals contingency and strikes at the heart of the spectacular malaise.
In attempting to show how visual epistemology is a crucial terrain of political struggle, this article argues that the popular image of the social pyramid renders the idea of a totalizing structure epistemologically available in a mediasphere devoid of such images. The pyramid evokes how social relations are organized and poses the question of their reorganization as a structure–agency problem. Yet, at the same time, the pyramid critically evokes a totalizing whole, it obscures an abstract form of domination specific to capitalist social life by locating the source of domination in hierarchical power relations as such. The article explores this double nature through an investigation of historical and contemporary images of social pyramids. Attempts by social movement actors to update the pyramid so that it more accurately reflects social reality, reveal the potential and the limitations of a visual epistemology for anticapitalist praxis in the present.
A chapter by chapter guide and introduction to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus
Contemporary media, politics, and culture are saturated by figures of the global and globalization. This Introduction emphasizes how many of these figures rest on a particular conception of the global. The editors term this “modern globalism,” within which the earth is grasped as a geometrical totality spanned by economic flows. Despite its prevalence today, modern globalism represents only one among many possible ways in which the global can be imagined; alternative global imaginations abound in the cultural past and at the peripheries of contemporary culture. These “other globes,” explored in the thirteen contributions that follow the Introduction, offer paths for thinking new relations between people, polities, and the planet. Laying the ground for the case studies, the Introduction unpacks alternative names for the global, exploring the cultural significance of earth, world, and planet; undertakes a genealogy of modern globalism, whose historical ascent marginalized other worldviews; and surveys critiques of modern globalism in Marxist, postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical theory.
The chapter begins with an overdue exploration of Godard’s “militant filmmaking” in the context of intellectual history of May 1968 and the debates around political filmmaking in France. The lens through which I analyze Godard’s films of this period is the crisis of aesthetic and political representation translated into experiments with image and sound juxtapositions, within the frame of the Dziga Vertov Group experimentations with the ideologemes of the Left. I also examine the DVG’s use of Maoist techniques such as the logic of contradiction, self-critique or positing the sound/image struggle as analogous to the class struggle. Two questions that persist in the DVG’s films and that are asked in an array of experimental forms relate first to the representability of the political struggle and indignation, and second, to the authority of the voice of the filmmaker as the harbinger of political change.
This essay offers a new and original way of relating to the drift by positing it not simply as a pedestrian activity, something that occurs on streets and in cities (as the SI wanted) but rather as a practice that can be expressed in celluloid – in the rhythms and syncopations of montage. Through a close analysis of Debord's second film Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959), we argue that this cinematic reading of the drift retains and performs its politics through its capacity to disrupt capitalist modernity's temporal regime. For us, such a regime, as it was for Debord, is predicated on the production of an endless present, in which what matters is how attention is seduced and captured by an expanded notion of the cinematic – the ubiquity of networks of screens, consoles, images and data flows. Faced with the continual refrains of ‘24/7 capitalism’ (Jonathan Crary 2014), it is no longer enough to express political content explicitly and/or to highlight, in Brechtian fashion, the structures of the apparatus. Rather by drawing on (amongst others) the work of Jonathan Beller, Bernard Stiegler, and Michael J. Shapiro, we show how Debord's films retain their relevance in the extent to which their drift-like quality, the irregularity of their rhythms, contests the unspoken choreography of what we call, after Henri Lefebvre, capitalist ‘dressage’. Through its interruptions and stoppages, Debord's cinema, we claim, manages to use the drift as a device for producing memory – the temporal lag that contemporary capital is desperate to erase in order to exhibit its own immediacy as a kind of eternity, the only time worth living.
This essay intervenes in debates about the depiction of conflict since 1945, by comparing two highly significant photographic ‘hacks’: Brecht’s War Primer (Kriegsfibel) 1955; and Broomberg & Chanarin’s War Primer 2, 2011. Kriegsfibel is a collection of images, snipped from wartime newspapers and magazines, which Brecht selected and situated alongside the four-line verses that he used to comment upon and re-caption his pictures. These acerbic ‘photo–epigrams’ captured Brecht’s view, firstly, that photography had become a ‘terrible weapon against truth’ and secondly, that by repositioning the individual image, its political instrumentality might be restored. When, more than half a century later, Broomberg & Chanarin decide to re-work Kriegsfibel to produce War Primer 2, they effectively crash into and redouble the Brechtian hack; updating and further complicating Brecht’s insights; re-animating his original concerns with photography as a form of collective historical elucidation and mounting, literally on top of his pictures of wartime conflict, images from the ‘war on terror’. This essay argues that the re-doubling of War Primer performs multiple critical tasks. It explores the Kriegsfibel as a dynamic confrontation with images of war and stages the enduring need to interrogate and actively re-function images of conflict from WW2 to the present day. It re-examines debates about images as weapons of war in themselves, and finally, it situates the Kriegsfibel assemblage in relation to contemporary understandings of ‘post-truth’.
This paper maps out photography’s newer ethics by examining Boris Mikhailov’s Case History that often stirs controversy over its bold depiction of human misery. The paper criticizes the idea that photographers should not represent “the other’s pain”: an idea that has sabotaged the medium’s inherent visual desire in order to prioritize its moral responsibility. In that idea is found a resilient Platonic antagonism against image, a logo-centric prejudice that marks a biased demarcation between art and politics in photography theory. The paper challenges this photographic Platonism through recent arguments that illuminate the medium’s inter-regimic, dialectical, redemptive roles (Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin, Ariella Azoulay, et al.). With this theoretical challenge, the paper aims to outline a new ethics of photography for an era in which the image’s “pandemic” growth is resetting the mode of human communication and the role of photography.
The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2013) is a game that self-reflexively meditates on the relationship between the structure in which choices are presented to the player in first-person exploration games and contemporary concerns over freedom. It takes, as its subject matter, its own ‘variable expressiveness’, yet must also delimit that expressiveness in order to direct the player towards a self-reflexive mindset. The article proposes, by analysing three of the endings in the game, that this endeavour necessitates the game to compromise its ‘gameness’ and to move towards being a Lukácian novel caught in an endless interiority; it must maintain a tension between giving the player freedom and room for expression, on the one hand, and being tightly focused on reflections concerning freedom and meaning, on the other. This reveals something about what computer games must sacrifice in order to grasp at meaning and also what would be required for a work to indicate that in which freedom consists. It will be argued that neither of the two kinds of subjectivity that are detailed by Lukács ((1971) The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press) – the Homeric subject without interiority and the alienated modern subject on a Sisyphean quest for meaning – are compatible with freedom. Instead, the carefully conceived tensions to which The Stanley Parable gives rise initiates a ‘dance’ that gestures towards freedom inhering in a subjectivity which avoids these possibilities. This could only be accomplished by being more than both a game and a novel. The implications bear upon the form of a medium that can most suitably function as a homology for the aforementioned subjectivity that transcends the two Lukácian poles.
Images with Power: Representations of War. Reference, sense and pictorial acts This text presents a study of the power of images through an analysis of war representations, where power and iconicity come together in a revealing way. Firstly, I examine the notions of image that characterise two main perspectives on war representations in the last century: on the one hand, that of postmodern thought, as expressed in the study of the 9.11 attacks, which defines mainly a critical view on images; and on the other hand, that of the positive reception of photographic and cinematographic records of war since the beginning of the 20 th century. From a critique of both ideas of image that thrives on the distinction between iconic sense and reference, I explore how a theory of pictorial acts can account for the ele- ments that would allow images to present their own forms of critical reflection.
Today, forced evictions in the name of ‘progress’ are attracting attention as growing numbers of people in the Global South are ejected and dispossessed from their homes, often through intimidation, coercion and the use of violence. At the same time, we have also witnessed the intensification of a ‘crisis’ urbanism in the Global North characterized by new forms of social inequality, heightened housing insecurity and violent displacement. This introductory chapter examines how these developments have led to an explosion of forced evictions supported by new economic, political and legal mechanisms, and increasingly shaped by intensifying environmental change. It does so with reference to the 8 chapters on forced eviction that follow from across urban Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
This essay deals with the narcissistic attraction of addressing the ‘suffering of others’ through new media campaigns. I argue that the inability of most ‘clicktivism’ campaigns to address their own conditions of possibility turns them into self-celebratory acts. Further, and worse, it is through their happy triumphalism that they obscure and allow for the corroding logic of neoliberalism. The objective here is not to flaunt my critical capacity, but rather to point at the tragedy and unintentionality of these forms of activism, and in doing so draw lessons on systemic violence—the violence in the normality of things.
This chapter considers the twin influences of globalisation and the knowledge economy (KE) and how they have impacted upon the education systems in the region. In the space of just one generation the Middle East countries have had to accommodate profound changes in social organisation and in the expectations of burgeoning youthful population. This population, which has had ready access to social media, films and TV-series from the Global North, has had its awareness raised in respect of the social and democratic freedoms enjoyed by much of the contemporary world, especially in Europe and North America. The young people have begun to question the social and cultural mores of their parents’ generation and this represent a significant shift and a change from the social, religious and cultural attitudes and expectations of previous eras.
In this chapter I explore what I call the event horizon of Bauman’s analyses of contemporary global society. In theoretical physics the idea of the event horizon describes a boundary, or limit, in space–time that blocks the transmission of light. More or less no light passes through this boundary. As such, the event horizon tends to mark the outer limit of the impossible space-time of the black hole that crushes everything that enters its gravitational field. But how does the notion of the event horizon relate to Bauman’s thought? My contention is that an exploration of Bauman’s recent works, from Liquid Modernity (2000) through Society Under Siege (2002) and Wasted Lives (2004a) to Liquid Fear (2006), reveals a dystopic image of contemporary globalization characterised by enormous poverty, explosive violence and crippling anxieties about the new insecure world we inhabit. In the wake of interpretations of the evolution of modern capitalism, such as those of Saskia Sassen (2006), I believe that it is possible to root Bauman’s theory of liquidity in explanations of the rise of what Edward Luttwak (1999) calls turbo capitalism. However, we must be careful in our use of terms which suggest an undialectical theory of the mobility of contemporary society. Consider Paul Virilio’s (2005b) work on speed. Virilio’s works explain that the coincidence of neoliberal capitalism, finance markets and new media technologies should not lead us to imagine that contemporary society is completely mobile.
If we are to discuss radical democracy and the Internet a good place to start is by considering what radical democracy is, or might be. This chapter compares two versions of the concept. The first is associated with the post-Marxist perspectives of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the second with the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who are today the most well-known theorists remaking a tradition of autonomist Marxism. These two accounts are by no means the only interpretations of radical democracy current today.1 But they are two of the most influential. Both respond to the crisis of left politics caused by the collapse of state socialism and the rise of neoliberalism. Both start in Marxism, but depart in heretical directions. Both are influenced by postmodern or post-structuralist thought. And both have been produced over the very period when the Internet, and the digital in general, has become a field of radical activism.
And finally to speed, seen by some as important to politics and policy-making as wealth and necessitating a political economy of speed. We have come a long way from the static perception of maritime governance, passing through various concepts which have become increasingly mobile—change, process, flow—and now arrived at our ultimate destination. Cruising at speed in a way that reflects how the world now works and how the maritime sector needs to be viewed. When we have completed our tour of the dynamism of governance, we can move on to the last chapter where we have a number of issues to consider, not least some models of change in governance, the contradictions that shipping exhibits and their impact upon the governance and policy-making process, and to place it all in context. This chapter has to focus on the work of Paul Virilio but also looks at speed and space, power and policy-making in some detail as considered by others, concluding with a discussion of equilibrium in governance.
In the United States, Geography and the military have never been far apart. Their intertwined history has been essential to the discipline’s institutional reproduction and the workings of U.S. imperialism. Recent instances of militarism in Geography return this history to the fore, posing a number of challenges. They demonstrate the futility of geographical research for its own sake, naïıvely assuming that knowledge of the world produced by geographers is inherently neutral. That same attitude leaves Geography powerless to confront its utility to the military, treating the discipline’s militarization as an inevitable coincidence. The current appearance of militarism in U.S. Geography proves both positions untenable. Confronting the extent of this relationship, both past and present, draws attention to how militarism shapes Geography’s objects of inquiry and methods of research. That effort must be matched by documentation of the variety of ways in which geographical knowledge is appropriated for military ends. The task is enormous and can only be done collectively lest geographers want to blindly surrender the legitimacy of the discipline to its military application.
This article offers an ethnobiographic analysis of one of the most marginalized populations in contemporary US society: impoverished individuals with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or mania hallucinatory bipolar disorder who are imprisoned, first within their minds, and secondly by the state, what I term “the spectacle.” Punishment for their disease, rather than treatment, forces many of them into constant drift-transition between shelters, seedy motels and the streets: the spectacle’s disposable trash. I argue that to be recognized as a rights-worthy human being within the neoliberal spectacle individuals are required to have the financial, social and cultural resources necessary to actively participate in the labor market and the profit-generating activities of consumption and consumerism. The limited economic resources of the mentally ill keep them from being sufficiently active participants to be viewed as socially worthy. Consequently, they become socially unworthy—the socially dead. The seriously mentally ill experience both spatial and moral dislocation. They are cast out as flawed consumers and failed workers, and more importantly, due to the stigmatization of mental illness, they are disavowed of their humanity, rendering them socially dead.
First published in 1913, The Accumulation of Capital represents Rosa Luxemburg’s quintessential contribution to Marxism and an exceptional, yet equally controversial, ‘modification’ to Marx’s original scheme of accumulation. Built on a cordial critique of Marx’s model of expanded reproduction, Luxemburg’s intervention offers not only a new framework to study capitalist economic development, but also a historical and political compass with which the expansion of capitalist social relations through colonialism and imperialism can be expounded. To celebrate the centenary anniversary of the book in 2013, we assess the enduring relevance of key themes developed by Luxemburg in their conceptual implications, but also in their relevance to understanding dynamics within contemporary capitalism. The first part of the article engages with Luxemburg’s theoretical contribution to the analysis of capitalist expansion with reference to the transformation of peripheral spaces. The second part briefly discusses how the book can be utilised as a starting point to examine the characteristics of today’s crisis-ridden global capitalism. We conclude by highlighting a number of contentious points that challenge Luxemburg’s account, but ultimately claim that The Accumulation of Capital is still an invaluable resource for those who are interested in critically examining international political economy and geopolitics.
It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large part in reshaping global imaginings about contemporary acts of terrorism and their Islamic perpetrators. Given this transformation in the understanding of terrorism and terrorists, our objective
in this article is threefold. First we want to present a discussion of the roots of the kind of neo-liberal politics that has grown up alongside acts of terrorism and its global media coverage which has, we argue, resulted in a politics of fear that acts to legitimate ever-increasing legislative
controls. In an attempt to reveal how discourse works to support such regulation, in the second part of this article we offer a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles from the UK about acts of terrorism that have taken place since the suicide bombings on the London transport system on
7 July 2005. Together with an analysis of the political speeches of Bush and Blair, we examine how far these discourses can be said to have reframed notions of inclusion/exclusion for Muslim populations. Finally we present a discussion of the consequences of such terrorist acts and their varied
representations for the future of the British multicultural imaginary.
The article argues that since December 2008, the continuous presence in public space in Athens and the spectacular mediatization in news reports, of various forms of the so-called anomie, as well as (since 2012) of its spectacular and violent repression by the police, were instrumentalized by the Greek austerity government in an attempt to enhance and manipulate already existing feelings of precarity among the population. Organized police operations in public space were turned into ‘media events’. Specifically, ‘affective precarity’ is considered as a way of demobilizing precarity as a politically and economically operative concept. The article adopts Lauren Berlant’s analysis of the relation between precarity and the austerity state.
Is declining US hegemony and China’s rising power a formula for regional and/or global conflict? In this article I address the present conditions and contradictions of US neo-imperialism and the role of China as a potential competitor to and challenger of US global hegemony. Given the entrenched interests of US military neo-imperialism such conflicts appear inevitable.
Au cours de la dernière décennie nous avons observé différentes tentatives pour utiliser l’art comme d’une plate-forme afin de discuter des problèmes politiques et sociaux. Tandis que des mouvements populistes nationaux ont laissé leur empreinte dans plusieurs nations en Europe et après la soi-disant « guerre contre le terrorisme », nous avons assisté à différentes tentatives artistiques pour interpeller l’actuel développement historique. Celui-ci se caractérise par le lancement d’une offensi...
In this article, I consider the practice of teaching with or about the Abu Ghraib images, and argue that such pedagogy is inherently founded on ethical and visual aporiae: dilemmas that are irresolvable but nonetheless demand solutions. These aporiae originate in the inseparability of the torture from its being photographed, as the images are documentary evidence of that violence, but also instruments of it. Because the idea of “transparency” underestimates the complexities of the visual questions posed by Abu Ghraib and misleadingly implies that they can be satisfactorily and permanently answered, I suggest that the first step for any ethical teaching on Abu Ghraib is to query transparency itself and dispense with its concomitant pedagogical emphasis on cultivating “visual literacy” in our students and empowering them to critically decode images. Because our students are already so much more powerful than the subjects of the Abu Ghraib photos, I argue instead for an emphasis on self-reflexivity, visual epistemologies, and the politics of spectatorship. This shift has the potential to illuminate our enmeshment in state visualities and our vexed relationships to the tortured prisoners themselves, rather than forcibly rendering them visible and transparent once again, this time in the name of education.
It is certainly possible to overestimate the practical importance of arguments for the normative legitimacy of global capitalism. But normative arguments continue to circulate in the social world, and it would be foolish to think that they do so without significant social effects. As long as ideological defenses of capitalism continue to be produced, there will be a need for ideology critiques. Arguments for the normative legitimacy of global capitalism unfold in three main stages. A normative principle (or set of principles) must be proposed and defended. It then must be established that a global capitalist order is compatible with, or even necessary for, the adequate institutionalization of that principle. If the global economy is at present flawed from the standpoint of the given principle, this must be shown to be a contingent matter, capable of being reversed through appropriate reforms. In the first section I shall present what I take to be the strongest contemporary version of this argument, combining the normative principle articulated by leading contemporary theorists of global justice with the most significant recent development in mainstream economics, "new growth theory". 1 In the second section I shall present a critical assessment of this position from a Marxian standpoint. In the third section it will be shown that the position is internally incoherent. The paper concludes with a speculation regarding the future course of global capitalism.
Programmes of organized, political violence have always been legitimized and sustained through complex imaginative geographies. These tend to be characterized by stark binaries of place attachment. This article argues that the discursive construction of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ since September 11th 2001 has been deeply marked by attempts to rework imaginative geographies separating the urban places of the US ‘homeland’ and those Arab cities purported to be the sources of ‘terrorist’ threats against US national interests. On the one hand, imaginative geographies of US cities have been reworked to construct them as ‘homeland’ spaces which must be re-engineered to address supposed imperatives of ‘national security’. On the other, Arab cities have been imaginatively constructed as little more than ‘terrorist nest’ targets to soak up US military firepower. Meanwhile, the article shows how both ‘homeland’ and ‘target’ cities are increasingly being treated together as a single, integrated ‘battlespace’ within post 9/11 US military doctrine and techno-science. The article concludes with a discussion of the central roles of urban imaginative geographies, overlaid by transnational architectures of US military technology, in sustaining the colonial territorial configurations of a hyper-militarized US Empire.
Despite a deepening set of socioecological contradictions, it is remarkable that oil's centrality to capitalism persists. In economic geography, the regulation approach has been useful in explaining the persistence of capitalism despite its contradictory tendencies, and scholars have recently applied the regulation approach to the geography of natural resources and environmental governance. In this article, I argue that environmental regulation theory is ill equipped to explain the persistence of petro-capitalism in the United States. This literature has been constructed largely through a critique of regulation theory on two grounds: ignoring the ecological dimension and relying on periodization. Conversely, I aim to show that petro-capitalism can be usefully analyzed through the very classical regulationist lens that environmental appropriations jettison. First, rather than positing nature as an unexamined “extra-economic” dimension, the case of oil reveals how ecology can be integrated into a foundational concept of the regulation approach—the wage relation. Specifically, the Fordist wage relation of mass production for mass consumption was dependent on the construction of a specific kind of “high energy economy.” Massive productivity gains in the labor process, powered by electricity, created larger pressures for an equally energy-intensive geography of consumption. In this respect, oil played a decisive role in the extension of the spaces between home and work through the partial generalization of automobility and single-family home ownership. Second, I attempt to recuperate the method of “periodization” by explaining how a set of institutional supports served to regularize the provision of oil through the domestic oil market from 1935 through 1972. I end with a discussion of the “institutional exhaustion” of a specifically national form of petro-Fordism during the 1970s.
This article compares land dispossession for industrial development under state‐developmentalism and neoliberalism in India. Drawing on interviews, ethnography and archives of industrial development agencies, it compares earlier steel towns and state‐run industrial estates with today's Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and argues that they embody different regimes of dispossession. While steel towns and industrial estates reflected a regime of land for production with pretensions of inclusive social transformation, SEZs represent a neoliberal regime of land for the market in which ‘land broker states’ have emerged to indiscriminately transfer land from peasants to capitalist firms for real estate. The present regime has been unable to achieve the ideological legitimacy of its predecessor, leading to more widespread and successful ‘land wars’. The article argues more broadly that variations in dispossession across space and time can be understood as specific constellations of state roles, economic logics tied to class interests and ideological articulations of the ‘public good’.
This paper poses theoretical and empirical questions to the resurgent litera‐ture on primitive accumulation in critical political economy. The first section outlines the different understandings of capitalism, and of its relationship to primitive accumulation, in the literature, and argues that they complicate efforts to identify instances of primitive accumulation. The second section examines the history of frontier agricultural expansion in Southeast Asia to critique the literature's assumptions about who carries out, and who resists, primitive accumulation. The third section draws on work on Southeast Asian political economy to show that the literature pays insufficient attention to the institutions that govern capitalist social relations. The paper argues that these questions of agency, governance, and the nature of capitalism need to be answered in order to make effective use of the concept of primitive accumulation and to distinguish it from cognate concepts like enclosure and commodification.
The ongoing crisis of global capitalism has served only to intensify the past four decades of neoliberal restructuring of cities across the world. In this paper I critically reflect on a literary aspect of the neoliberalising city academic discourse that is too often left untheorised or underplayed—the prevalence of contemporary urban enclosure. My aim is twofold: to synthesise theories of old and new enclosure with more familiar understandings of neoliberal urban processes; and to then apply this framework to the British housing experience of the past four decades. In doing so, I argue that enclosure is not only a metaphor for contemporary urban policy and processes but also provides an explanation for what is taking place. The paper concludes with some brief thoughts on how today's ‘urban commoners’ might contest the new urban enclosures by finding common cause around visions and practices of a ‘new urban commons’.
Much of the discussion of 9/11 has debated its historical significance, but it is equally important to explore the geographical dimensions of the wars that have been conducted in its shadows. Subsequent transformations in the American way of war have played a major role in the increased militarisation of the planet. Most attention has been focused on Afghanistan and Iraq as the principal theatres of the ‘war on terror’, but one of the characteristics of late modern war is the emergent, ‘event-ful’ quality of military, paramilitary and terrorist violence that can, in principle, occur anywhere. Vulnerabilities are differentially distributed but widely dispersed, and in consequence late modern war is being changed by the slippery spaces through which it is conducted. This paper explores three global borderlands to bring those changes into focus: Afghanistan–Pakistan (particularly the deployment of CIA-controlled drones in Pakistan), US–Mexico (particularly the expansion of Mexico's ‘drug war’ and the US militarisation of the border), and cyberspace (particularly the role of stealth attacks on critical infrastructure and the formation of US Cyber Command).
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