The following essay is a supplement to Withdrawing from atmosphere: An ontology of air partitioning and affective engineering, by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. The article is from volume 34, issue 1 of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and has been made free to access for the next month.

All images copyright Studio Tomas Saraceno

There has been a surge in the research on atmosphere as a phenomenological emergence (Borch, 2014). These atmospheres are mostly architectural (Zumthor, 2012) but also philosophical (Böhme, 1995), sociological (Sloterdijk, 2013), financial (McCormack, 2015), and socioenvironmental (Choy, 2011). Ever since Anderson’s 2009 article on “Affective Atmospheres,” atmospheres are understood as affective emergences, situated between the subject and the object, apprehended phenomenologically and, especially if appropriately constructed, contributing to human well being. Atmospherics, in other words, have managed to generate their own comfortable atmosphere around them.

I would like to warn against this atmospheric comfort and especially the proliferation of benign atmospheric constructions, smoothly establishing a measurability (of well-being, belonging, social cohesion, integration, and so on) that only serves the perpetuation of the very atmosphere. In the companion piece “Withdrawing from atmosphere: An ontology of air partitioning and affective engineering” published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(1): 150-167, I engage in a critique of atmospheres by, first, moving deeper into atmosphere and specifically its main element, that of air and how it is regularly conditioned and partitioned for the preservation of an atmosphere; second, by critiquing the standard phenomenological construction of atmosphere as complicit to the all-containing atmospheric comfort, and introducing instead an atmospheric ontology; and, third, by engaging with international artist Tomás Saraceno’s art practice in order to render the atmospheric ontology tangible and to indicate ways out of the atmosphere. In this text here, I would like to focus on the latter, by expanding on the subtle ways in which Saraceno’s atmospheric installations can shift from the claustrophobic to the exhilaratingly open.

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The following text is offered by Sophie Gonick as a supplement to her Environment and Planning D: Society and Space article, Indignation and Inclusion: Activism, difference, and emergent urban politics in postcrash Madrid. In the piece, which is currently free to access, Gonick analyses two competing strands of activism around the housing crisis in Madrid from a feminist perspective that sees them as complementary, overlapping, and potentially collaborative.

When I set out to write this piece, Ahora Madrid was in its infancy. I was fairly skeptical about its chances of actually winning. I was clearly, however, proven incorrect—Manuela Carmena is now the mayor of Madrid. In Barcelona, Ada Colau has gone from spokesperson for the anti-evictions movement to the mayor’s office. Meanwhile, Podemos made tremendous strides in the December 2015 national elections; many in its highest ranks emerge directly from urban social movements.

As an addendum to this piece, I want to emphasize two ideas. One is contextual and historical, while the other is perhaps an orientation for future research and the role of scholars in articulating the horizons of possibility for radical democratic praxis.

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In the article “The affect of Jugaad: Frugal innovation and postcolonial practice in India’s mobile phone ecology“, which appears in the current issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and is free to access until 16 January 2016, Amit S. Rai examines the Indian form of workaround called ‘jugaad’ to explore how affect is produced through consumer services and goods to modulate human–technical assemblages for commercial and economic ends. The text below is offered as a supplement to the article by Rai as well as Anisha Saigal and Shiva Thorat, two other researchers working on the project from which the article stems.

The social practice of everyday hacking, digital and mobile workarounds, information piracy, illegal copying and sharing—in a word, jugaad culture—is an increasing feature of post-liberalisation India. But it has a history that must be understood as always involving repeatedly forgotten experiments in techno-perceptual assemblages. This history is marked by regimes of surplus accumulation that over time have effected a seemingly permanent separation of the body from what it can do. Our research into jugaad returns to this question of affect by situating social practices that remain untimely to the regimes of neoliberal development, enforced austerity and perpetual debt. What makes the contemporary moment jugaad time? This is as much a question of the growing Hindu chauvinism vitiating political and social life under Modi (but begun long before him)— what are Modi’s jugaads?—as it is a question of untimely politics. The social practice of jugaad traverses traditional class, caste, gender, and ablist norms of identity, yet while many people practice jugaad, not everyone can openly lay claim to it as some sort of heroic script of emergent power. Indeed, jugaad’s history has been and tactically must remain hidden; for the millions of jugaadu, visibility is a trap.

The reflections on the developing research practice of jugaad highlight several aspects of the social phenomenon in India; the photos present another kind of problem. Partly this problem has to do with representation. How, through what fetishes, codes, contrasts, and analogies, have images of jugaad proliferated in Digital India? Indeed, what images of jugaad in urban contexts point to is a heterogeneous mix of politics, rhythms, resources, infrastructures, and temporalities. The images themselves present contrasts, new connections, makeshift infrastructures that strike the eye at first as a hallucination: that doesn’t belong with that. This tactic of novel conjunctures allows jugaadus to develop improvised responses to material conditions of inequality.

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As Latin America’s “progressive governments” suffer electoral defeat after electoral defeat, a number of analysts today pronounce the end of the political cycle that these governments came to represent. Within this context, the question arises: where does Latin America’s left go from here? In his paper, “Zapatismo: other geographies circa “the end of the world”, Álvaro Reyes explores the often overlooked, and yet, increasingly prescient analysis produced by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) regarding the contemporary global situation and the possibility for a non-state centered spatial strategy for anti-capitalist movements.

We commissioned a translation of Álvaro’s paper to reach Spanish speaking readers — and in solidarity with anticapitalist movements in Mexico, as well as in Central and South America. Please forward this posting and the article widely! The abstract of the paper follows in Spanish and English, and the PDF of the translation is linked to the bottom of this page.

Álvaro’s original article, published in English in the June 2015 issue (33:3), will be open access on the Sage website until February 14, 2016.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, EZLN!

— The Editors

Resumen. Un coro de activistas e intelectuales afirman que el Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional ha dejado de existir o bien se ha vuelto irrelevante desde el punto de vista político para México y para el mundo. En este artículo, propongo otra tesis: a pesar de la enormidad de su tarea, el proyecto zapatista mantiene el pulso y se merece una cuidadosa consideración. A este fin, sostengo, en primer lugar, que gran parte de la confusión con respecto a la “muerte” del zapatismo procede de un cambio en la estrategia zapatista en respuesta a la descomposición de la sociedad mexicana a resultas de la actual crisis global del capitalismo. A continuación, detallo cómo, habiendo previsto esta descomposición, los zapatistas se propusieron teorizar la naturaleza del capitalismo contemporáneo y reconceptualizar en consecuencia la política anticapitalista. Desde principios de la década de 2000, esta reconceptualización ha conducido a un desplazamiento en la estrategia zapatista que, aunque no sea fácilmente inteligible para los medios de comunicación contemporáneos o para buena parte del discurso académico actual, se centra en la construcción de “otras geografías”. Por último, argumento que, a juzgar por los acontecimientos de los últimos años, esta estrategia ha permitido a los zapatistas no sólo perseverar, sino, además, plantear una alternativa concreta a las corrientes dominantes de la izquierda con respecto a la estrategia política y espacial.

Palabras clave: Zapatistas, México, crisis capitalista, territorio, reterritorialización, nuevas territorialidades, anticapitalismo.

Abstract. A chorus of activists and intellectuals claim that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation has either ceased to exist or become politically irrelevant for Mexico and the world. In this paper I put forward the rather different thesis that despite the enormity of their task, the Zapatista project continues apace and merits careful consideration. To this end, I first argue that much of the confusion regarding the ‘death’ of the Zapatistas arises from a change in Zapatista strategy in response to the decomposition of Mexican society resulting from the contemporary global crisis of capitalism. Next, I detail how, having foreseen this decomposition, the Zapatistas set out to both theorize the nature of contemporary capitalism and reconceptualize anticapitalist politics accordingly. Since the early 2000s this reconceptualization has led to a shift in Zapatista strategy that, although not easily intelligible to contemporary media or much academic discourse, centers on the construction of ‘other geographies’. Finally, I argue that judging from the events of the past few years, this strategy has allowed the Zapatistas not only to persevere but also to pose a concrete alternative to the dominant strains of left political and spatial strategy.

Keywords: Zapatistas, Mexico, capitalist crisis, territory, reterritorialization, new territorialities, anticapitalism

Reyes 2015 Zapatistas Otras Geografias

This brief posting supplements the article by Christian Borch, Kristian Bondo Hansen and Ann-Christina Lange in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, volume 33, issue 6. Titled ‘Markets bodies, and rhythms: A rhythmanalysis of financial markets from open-outcry trading to high-frequency trading’, it is free to access until January 6, 2016.

The tale of the wave of commercial ‘ingenuity’ in the financial sector, which undeniably played a profound role in blowing up the housing bubble that led to the 2007–8 financial crisis, has become the emblematic story of a financial sector being a little too creative. Concurrent with the development and proliferation of financial products such as collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and subprime mortgages, parts of the financial markets have experienced significant, but somewhat less-researched changes in the market infrastructure, from trader-mediated to fully automated markets. Whereas the financial crisis generated a broadly shared distrust in and suspicion towards innovative investment bankers, it seems to be the lack of an intermediary in financial transactions that marks the radical structural shift in as well as provokes worries about so-called algorithmic markets.

In our recent Environment and Planning D: Society and Space paper ‘Markets, bodies, and rhythms’, we study this transformation of financial markets. Specifically, we examine how the ‘machine room’ of financial markets has changed dramatically during the past decade or so.

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This commentary supplements the article entitled The warp of the world: Geographies of space and time in the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy by Adam David Morton that appears in Environment and Planning D:  Society & Space, volume 33, issue 5. The article is free to access until December 17, 2015.

Cormac McCarthy has been proclaimed as one of the greatest contemporary writers to herald from the United States and, also, as a writer that can be set historically alongside both John Williams (Butcher’s Crossing) and Oakley Hall (Warlock), in producing a pantheon of masterpieces addressing the borders, landscapes, and geographies of the American west. Such status could be conferred as much by Blood Meridian, marked by its twenty-fifth anniversary this year, as the novels that constitute The Border Trilogy including All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain.

But for those interested in the political economy of space, literature has often received only passing commentary, as I have written elsewhere. Questions of literature and spatiality arise in David Harvey’s historical-geographical materialism but there are just a few references to the novel form within his spatial matrix. Yet the intersection of literature and daily life was held as highly significant for Henri Lefebvre in reflecting on the political economy of space. Persuasively, Lefebvre contends that it is through literature, among other forms, that the idea of everyday life and repetition in daily life enters our reflections. Conceptions of space and how the social relations of production shape society therefore maintain a spatial existence in and beyond literature. Moreover, it is Lefebvre that draws our attention to the unity of society and space and how the production of space is inclusive of the meaning, concepts and consciousness of space, which cannot be separated from the social relations of production of geographical space. Space is thusly regarded as co-implicated with time so that the frontiers of territory and geography maintain embeddedness in conditions of history and time. The result is a deeply spatio-temporal awareness of everyday life.

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This brief commentary and video supplements the article entitled Animal performativity: Exploring the lives of donkeys in Botswana by Martha Geiger and Alice J. Hovorka that appears in Environment and Planning D:  Society & Space, volume 33, issue 6. The article is free to access until December 17, 2015.

Our manuscript on donkeys in Botswana was inspired by the pivotal role of working equids across the global south. Where motorized transport is unavailable or out of reach, communities depend on domesticated animals for livelihood tasks. Research within the fields of animal welfare, veterinary science, international development and human health show the improvement of human health and livelihoods through the use and ownership of especially working donkeys in marginalized communities. At the household level, donkeys are used to transport materials for sale, transport children to school, plough agricultural fields, and fetch water for cooking and livestock. At the community level, donkey transport facilitates access to resources such as hospitals, schools, government institutions and markets; all of which increase human capacity for improved health and wellbeing. Thus, if donkeys are healthy and provided care they are able to act as a vehicle for improving the human condition.

Our manuscript explores the human-donkey relationship in Botswana where smallholder farmers own donkeys as a means of subsistence and income generation. To examine this relationship we apply a feminist posthumanist iteration of performativity to capture who the donkey is, what they experience and how these performances are shaped within the context of Botswana.

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