“Ironically, attempts to render technical that which is inherently political are feeding into and amplifying the proliferation of populist politics”.
Gill Hart, 2013, Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press.
“If we look more carefully at injustice, we will not find it any easier to answer the question: Is this a misfortune or an injustice? on any given occasion, but we may be less passively unjust than if we simply match complaints against the rules and come to a quick conclusion. To investigate the victim’s claims in the ways that I have suggested is only a tentative test to guide us, but it is both in keeping with the best impulses of democracy and our only alternative to a complacency that is bound to favor the unjust”.
Judith Shklar, 1990, The Faces of Injustice, Yale University Press.
Dialogues in Human Geography has a debate forum discussing the relevance of the concept of neoliberalism, revolving around a piece by Sally Weller and Phil O’Neill titled ‘An argument with neoliberalism: Australia’s place in a global imaginary‘. They call into question attempts to refine the concept of neoliberalism/ization in terms of ‘variegation’ and related notions, suggesting that it might just be better to think with different concepts entirely. In the course of the debate, I discovered that I have apparently invented a new genre, called ‘neoliberalism in denial‘. Who knew! Does this make me the Bob Dylan of neoliberal studies? (and if so, does it mean that Noel Castree, who apparently followed my lead, is the Donovan of neoliberal studies?). I wonder if social science theories are the sorts of knowledge-formations that you can actually properly be ‘in denial‘ about – they aren’t quite of the same order as explanations of climate change or the etiology of AIDS, are they?
Anyway, the Weller and O’Neill piece is well worth the read, here is the abstract:
“This article argues that the uncritical application of the lens of neoliberalism closes off opportunities for more rigorous analysis of actually existing socio-economic change. We ask whether Australia’s developmental trajectory over the last three decades can be described as neoliberalization and whether the outcome is a variety of neoliberalism. Instead of stitching together a story about variegated neoliberalism, we find an alternative narrative based around the notion of a developmental project more compelling. We document the spatial and political realities that have inhibited the roll-out of neoliberal ideas and practices in the Australian context. We think that instead of expanding the varieties of variegated neoliberalism to accommodate all manner of events and processes in all sorts of places, our task should be to recognize those instances where social, political, cultural or economic changes settle capitalism’s contradictions in ways that diverge from neoliberal frameworks and expectations. Our central point is that the role of academic research is to explain the lived world and to develop abstractions to aid that explanation, rather than to design an abstraction (neoliberalism) and then fit the lived world to its contours.”
“What seems interesting to me is to pull out the profound and serious thought that engages our historical destiny in the institutions that nonetheless give the impression of merely speaking the language of barbarism, archaism, and institutional idiocy”.
Michel Foucault, 2014, Wrong-Doing and Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, University of Chicago Press.
Following up on the earlier post about the IJURR symposium on the theme Where is Urban Politics? I thought I should plug my own paper in this collection. My piece is titled ‘What do cities have to do with democracy?’ (the answer is that ‘it depends’; you’ll have to read the paper to find out what exactly it depends on). I have been giving a version of this paper as my default seminar presentation for about 4 years now, so I’m not quite sure what I will talk about if and when I’m next invited anywhere, but I do hope that this extensive pre-release touring of the paper will boost sales.
This paper is actually the last in a cluster that I have written on themes such as political agency, urban problems, ideas of contestation, and the idea of ‘all affected interests’. When I finished this one (a while ago now), I realised that I really needed to write a book linking these together, since an 8000 word (or so) article is not enough space to elaborate the full sweep of the argument that I have in my head which connects these all together. So that’s what I am doing now, this summer, writing a book about democratic theory, notions of injustice, and the geographical imagination needed to develop open-minded inquiry into these themes – it’s preliminary title is Locating Democracy, contracted with the University of Georgia Press, in their Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series. I’m saying this out loud and in public as a way of imposing some external discipline on myself, to help me along in the task of actually writing the book.
Anyway, anyway, in the meantime, here is the abstract from the IJURR paper:
“The relationship between urbanization and democratization remains under-theorized and under-researched. Radical urban theory has undergone a veritable normative turn, registered in debates about the right to the city, spatial justice and the just city, while critical conceptualizations of neoliberalism present ‘democracy’ as the preferred remedy for injustice. However, these lines of thought remain reluctant to venture too far down the path of political philosophy. The relationship between urban politics and the dynamics of democratization remains under-theorized as a result. It is argued that this relationship can be usefully understood by drawing on lessons from avowedly normative styles of political theorizing, specifically post-Habermasian strands of critical theory. Taking this tradition seriously helps one to notice that discussions of urbanization, democracy, injustice and rights in geography, urban studies and related fields invoke an implicit but unthematized democratic norm, that of all-affected interests. In contemporary critical theory, this norm is conceptualized as a worldly register of political demands. It is argued that the conceptual disaggregation of component values of democracy undertaken through the ‘spatial turn’ in recent critical theory reorients the analysis of the democratic potentials of urban politics around the investigation of the multiple forms of agency which urbanized processes perform in generating, recognizing and acting upon issues of shared concern.”
Newly available on the Early View site at the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, papers from a Symposium on the theme of ‘Where is Urban Politics?’ edited by Scott Rodgers, Allan Cochrane and me. This is one of those collections that has had a very long lead-time, going back to the AAG conference in Las Vegas in 2009. The Symposium has papers by Warren Magnusson, Lisa Hoffman, Doug Young and Roger Kiel, John Allen and Allan Cochrane, and me. The idea behind the collection is to give some expression to both the range of disciplinary approaches to thinking about urban politics (including political theory, anthropology, planning studies, as well as geography) and the range of sites and places in which urban politics can be found, not necessarily all of classically ‘urban’ ones either. Scott, Allan and I try to articulate this rationale in the introductory essay. Here is our pitch:
“Whether defined through its sites and spaces, through the particular sensibilities of the urban as a way of life, through the political problematization of phenomena as urban, or indeed through the activities of local authorities and democratic assemblies, what this collection of articles draws out is the enduring and maybe even expanding relevance of urban processes in learning to challenge, think about and develop new and better ways of living together.”
“The seriousness of philosophy does not consist in giving men laws and telling them what the ideal city is in which they must live, but in constantly reminding them (those at least who wish to listen, since philosophy’s reality comes only from it being listened to), that the reality of philosophy is to be found in its practices, which are the practices of self on self and, at the same time, those practices of knowledge by which all the modes of knowledge, through which one rises and descends and which one rubs against each other, finally bring one face to face with the reality of Being itself.”
Michel Foucault, 2010, The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983, Picador.
“Tocqueville is sometimes guilty of one of the most frustrating defects in a writer, that of not being clear enough to be wrong.”
Jon Elster, 2009, Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist, Cambridge University Press.
“Subjectivity without psychology. There must be ways of getting at the inner life of human subjects, and of gay men in particular, without delving into the peculiar constitution of the individual. The study of social practices, aesthetic practices, styles, tastes, feelings – analyzed so as to disclose their internal structures, formal logic, cultural operation, meaning and distribution – could provide an alternative and fresh approach to human subjectivity.”
David Halperin, 2012, How to be Gay, Harvard University Press.
“Cities are workshops, not playgrounds.”
Michael Storper, 2013, Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development, Princeton University Press.
Pop Theory 