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April 19, 2012 3 Comments
The 2012 AAG meeting in New York brought philosopher Elizabeth Grosz into discussion with geographers in a session entitled “Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth- Author meets Critics”. The session was organised by Kathryn Yusoff and chaired by Jamie Lorimer.
The audio recording of the discussions is available in three parts:-
Part one - Jamie Lorimer; Elizabeth Grosz; Nigel H. Clark
Part two - Arun Saldanha; Kathryn Yusoff; Catherine Nash
Part three - Elizabeth Grosz response; discussion
An edited paper drawing on the discussion will appear in the print journal in the near future. In the meantime, we have made the audio recording available. Here’s the description of the session which gives a flavour of the fascinating discussion.
Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection—a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, non-productive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for art’s work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation and life. Drawing from The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely and Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, in this book, Grosz reads Darwin and Nietzsche against each other, taking up the unrealised possibilities of both to compose a new philosophy of life that argues for the generative (and destructive) forces of the environment and embodied difference. This “bioaesthetics” (Saldanha 2009)—that is biospheric and biopolitical—presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly different kind of biopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection, Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise.
January 19, 2012 Leave a comment
January 19, 2012 Leave a comment
December 22, 2011 Leave a comment
Review essay: Nonrepresentational theory and me: notes of an interested sceptic
Tim Cresswell
Not exactly like the phoenix—but rising all the same: reconstructing displaced livelihoods in post-cleanup Harare
Amin Y Kamete
Putting space in place: philosophical topography and relational geography
Jeff Malpas
December 14, 2011 Leave a comment
a new ‘forthcoming’ paper is available
Adrian B Evans, Mara Miele
Contemporary European consumers find themselves at an interesting point in history with regards to their relationships with animals. On the one hand there has been a growth in the acknowledgement of animal sentience, yet on the other hand, largely unabated, we continue to farm, kill, and eat animals for food. In this paper we contend that these ambiguities are played out within everyday embodied practices of preparing, eating, and shopping for food. We begin our account by outlining a novel performative approach to food consumption practices, which we have termed ‘foodsensing’, and we contend that every act of sensing food is always already an act of making sense of food. This approach allows us to examine the complex interplay between material and symbolic dimensions of food consumption practices. Throughout the paper we draw on this notion of foodsensing, in conjunction with empirical material taken from forty-eight focus group discussions conducted across seven European countries, to shed new light on the ways in which farm animals are made to matter (and not matter) within food consumption practices.
November 23, 2011 Leave a comment
Landscapes of performance: stalking as choreography
Elaine Campbell
Received 1 August 2010; in revised form 15 June 2011; published online 23 November 2011
Abstract. Recent advances in nonrepresentational theory (NRT) encourage us to think of landscape as something which is actualised by, in, and through the performativities and affectivities of seeing. While NRT certainly moves us from a static to a more dynamic account of landscape, and along the way introduces an innovative, theoretical vocabulary for talking about and experiencing landscape, it may inhibit more than (or as much as) it facilitates understanding. In this paper, NRT’s contribution to the geographical canon will be critically interrogated; in particular, NRT’s focus on performance, and its preference for practices and materiality over imagery and the symbolic, will be questioned. This provides the important groundwork for considering the broader utility of NRT, most especially its resonance with the concerns of cultural criminology and its burgeoning interest in ‘criminologies of space’. Using the phenomenon of stalking as an exemplar of a performative practice in late modernity, the paper sets out an understanding of landscape as an intersection of representations, discourses, sensibilities, andmaterial practices. In this way it offers a synthesising, hybridised account of landscape which draws on Foster’s notion of choreography to better capture the interrelationalities of the performativity of lived experience(s) and the structuring relations of sociocultural norms, values, and relations of power. Making use of a number of data sources, which include interview material, Hollywood films, and online discussion boards, the paper examines stalking as a choreographic and choreographed process which, amongst other things, engenders a world of imaginary and transgressive landscapes.
Full-text PDF size: 365 Kb
November 14, 2011 Leave a comment
Abstract. Drawing on the extraterritorial and nonstate centric form of power found in Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I contribute to three emerging debates: the extent to which governmentality is a state or nonstate practice, the question of what is being governed, and the relationship between biopolitics and cultural politics. Focusing on the governance strategies of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile (TGiE) based in India, I explore how ideas of governmentality inform an understanding of what kind of polity this is and, in turn, how this case both confirms and challenges understandings of governance practices and the construction of a population. As I examine the range of techniques used by TGiE to bring into visibility the exile Tibetan population, my attention focuses on the simultaneous totalising and individualising strategies of biopolitics, the importance of population given the lack of territory, and the intersection of exile realities with such practices of governmentality. Taking as a framework Hannah’s three ‘moments’ in the cycle of social control—observation, normalising judgment, and regulation—I examine how TGiE seeks to know its population through technologies, imagines and normalises the population through discourses, and manages the population by regulating conduct. Finally, in analysing TGiE’s creation of the ‘population’ as a strategy to legitimise its governance, I conclude by outlining how this study informs debates regarding the cultural context of governmentality and its relationship to territory.
Full-text PDF size: 1497 Kb (requires subscription)
November 9, 2011 Leave a comment
Contesting genetic knowledge-practices in livestock breeding: biopower, biosocial collectivities, and heterogeneous resistances
Lewis Holloway, Carol Morris
Received 7 February 2011; in revised form 15 April 2011; published online 7
November 2011
Abstract. Cattle and sheep breeders in the UK and elsewhere
increasingly draw on genetic techniques in order to make breeding decisions.
Many breeders support such techniques, while others argue against them for a
variety of reasons, including their preference for the ‘traditions’ of
visual-based and pedigree-based selections. Meanwhile, even for those
institutions and breeders who promote genetic techniques, the outcomes are not
always as predicted. We build on our recent use of Foucault’s discussions of
biopower to examine the effects of the introduction of genetic techniques in UK
livestock breeding in order to begin to explore the diffuse and capillary nature
of resistance within relations of biopower. We focus specifically on how
resistance and contestation can be understood through the joint lenses of
biopower and an understanding of livestock breeding as knowledge-practices
enacted within heterogeneous biosocial collectivities. In some instances these
collectivities coalesce around shared endeavour, such as increasing the valency
of genetic evaluation within livestock breeding. Yet such mixed collectivities
also open up opportunities for counter-conduct: heterogeneous resistances to and
contestations of genetic evaluation as something represented as progressive and
inevitable. We focus on exploring such modes of resistance using detailed
empirical research with livestock breeders and breeding institutions. We
demonstrate how in different and specific ways geneticisation becomes
problematised, and is contested and made more complex, through the
knowledge-practices of breeders, the bodies of animals, and the complex
relationships between different institutions in livestock breeding and rearing.
November 3, 2011 Leave a comment
For subscribers, two forthcoming papers are available online:
Mackenzie A, 2011, “More parts than elements: how databases multiply” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space advance online publication, doi:10.1068/d6710
Isin E F, 2011, “Citizens without nations” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space advance online publication, doi:10.1068/d19210
New Papers
