Here is an interview with Simon Critchley, on his new book Faith of the Faithless, which in part continues a ‘debate’ with Zizek about violence and non-violence. You could win the book, if you know which football team he supports.
Category Archives: Politics
The Femicide Machine: new book by Sergio González Rodríguez
I have just read a little book, an essay really, by the Mexican writer Sergio González Rodríguez, The Femicide Machine. He is one of a number of writers and journalists who have campaigned for justice for the hundreds of women murdered in Ciudad Juárez over the last two decades, or more. This is a subject that the geographer Melissa Wright has written extensively about, for example. Rodríguez’s book does not provide a load of background to this phenomenon – others, like Charles Bowden and Diana Washington Valdez do that – but it does provide a lite-touch theoretical contextualisation of what at first appears to be an almost incomprehensible level of misogynistic violence, and in particular, of the almost systematic failure of Mexican authorities to address the murders effectively. The language is Deleuzian, providing a sense in which ‘the femicide machine’ thrives in the spaces opened up by the concatenation between ‘the war machine’ (Mexico’s enrollment in ‘the war on drugs’) and ‘the criminal machine’, all in the context of the longer history of maquiladora-based industrial and urban development in northern Mexico (I think he might miss a theoretical trick by not connecting ‘assembly’-based manufacturing with ‘assemblages’, but that might not be the main point of the book). This is the ‘trasnlineal’ space of the US/Mexico ‘transborder’ zone, a space which Rodríguez characterises by quoting Cormac McCarthy’s line that it is here that ‘the probability of the actual is absolute’.
I’m interested in this issue because 7 years ago now (7 years? Where did they go?), I was involved with some filming for an OU course which used the campaigns against femicide in Juárez as a case study for teaching students about the geographies of global responsibility. This was actually before things got really bad, since 2006, with the ratcheting up of militarised anti-drug trafficking on both sides of the border. It was at the time that Amnesty, the UN, Eve Ensler, and others were actively making the Juárez murders into an international issue – this is the issue that we focussed on (along with other issues, such as control of water along the border, the movements of people over the border, and work in the maquiladora – it’s not too late to sign up for the course). It was both a fascinating experience, and at times a very uncomfortable one, not least interviewing women involved in the femicide campaigns; and being detained by the Mexican army, for wandering across the Rio Grande (there was no water in it at the time; technically, we were trying to get into the USA, the U.S. Border Patrol just told us to go back, the Army weren’t pleased).
Actually, I think the most important part of Rodríguez’s book is not the analysis, interesting as it is, so much as the Epilogue, titled ‘Instructions for Taking Textual Photographs’. This consists of a ‘photographic mise-en-scene’ in which he narrates, in the first person voice of one mother, the circumstances surrounding the abduction, murder, and (non-)investigation of her daughter. The narrative here reaffirms the line of the preceding chapters, about how the perpetrators are known and hide in plain sight. This is followed by 20 pages of ‘photographs’; only, there are no photographs – just the captions, a line or a few sentences each, re-iterating the ‘scenes’ from the first person narrative, including ‘photos’ incriminating the perpetrators. It’s an interesting device with which to raise the question about the politics of representation of femicide and it’s victims, certainly. But by presenting the ‘photos’ (which presumably are both real and imagined, judging from their listed content) in this way, he is making the same point about the degree to which the real mystery here is not ‘who did it’ but why so little has been done to address the murders and the demands of victims’ families. The captions indicate the ‘truth’ of the case, the absence of the photos stand as a kind of accusation about a culture of institutionalised impunity – the book is, after all, a manifesto, an intervention.
Either that, or Semiotext(e) just can’t afford to reproduce photos in their books.
Local Politics VII: Coming soon to a place near you
Swindon is suddenly at the centre of a concerted right-wing attack on trade union rights in the public sector. The Tory-led council intends to put into practice the changes demanded by a concerted campaign orchestrated by the Taxpayer’s Alliance, and the newly formed Trade Union Reform Campaign, to attack ‘facility time’, on the grounds that this is a ‘scandalous’ subsidy by taxpayer’s of union activity. The TUC provides a corrective to the claims behind the campaign, and a nation-wide campaign to oppose these moves is quickly being galvanised, apparently.
And they say nothing ever happens here – just remember, they got rid of speed cameras first in Swindon, well before the idea caught on at national government level. What happens in Swindon…
Is stupid really stupid
George Monbiot had a wretched little piece in yesterday’s Guardian, based on a paper in a psychology journal, Bright minds and dark attitudes, which purports to establish that there is a link between cognitive ability, right-wing attitudes, and prejudice. Monbiot took this as the basis for a general argument about how right-wing politics is a medium for stoking and sustaining general levels of stupidity (in so doing, he risks running together various things – the paper he cites is about cognitive abilities, about intelligence – not about people merely not knowing, but about some people not having the capacity to know stuff; and the reference point is prejudice, and a broader set of criteria basically derived from good old fashioned ‘authoritarian personality’ type arguments, but Monbiot extends this to attitudes to policy questions such as tax and spend, not supported at all by the paper).
Now, Monbiot has always seemed to me to be the perfect epitome of a certain style of google-based journalism – that sort of newspaper commentary piece where you can almost see the traces of the google searches that the column is pasted together from. In this case, poor George gives a great deal of credence to a style of psychological research that, if you look at the paper, raises all sorts of methodological and conceptual worries – anyone for a little bit of ‘abstract empiricism’?
Of course, Monbiot’s piece might be self-refuting – it’s an example of crass stupidity, but from the left, which seems to undermine the claim that stupid = right-wing. On the other hand, it might inadvertently confirm its own claim – it’s a basically reactionary argument, based on a set of stupid suppositions and idiotic reasoning, not really an argument belonging to anything meaningfully ‘left’ at all, if that is to include basic precepts of democracy.
Anyway, I take the Monbiot piece to be one example of a broader strand of contemporary self-proclaimed Left ‘know-it-all-ism’ – epitomised perhaps by Ditchkins-style ‘new atheism’, but much broader no doubt. It’s a strand of thought that seems unable to imagine politics as having any other basis than knowledge – good, accurate, rational, critical, knowledge; or bad, manipulated, veiled, ignorance. Left thought suffers terribly from this way of imagining politics – as being all about ‘ideology’, basically, too much of the bad sort, and not enough of the good sort, often wrapped up in cmplex theories of subjectivity or, in this case, research about cognitive abilities and intelligence.
Which is not to say that issues of truth and knowledge are not important to how we think about politics – a new book on Truth and Democracy, via the ever informative Political Theory blog, collects various essays together on this issue; it touches on broader debates about the epistemic value of democratic politics. At some level, the sort of position articulated by Monbiot, but shared I think rather more broadly, which seeks to explain the other side’s political successes by reference not just to the lack of knowledge of some constituencies, but by reference to their credulity, their gullibility, or in this case, their innate lack of cognitive ability, is deeply undemocratic at its very core.
Just thought I’d get that off my chest before going to bed.
New Book: ATLAS: Geography, Architecture and Change in an Interdependent World
A new book, an edited collected, has just been published by Black Dog Publishing – ATLAS: Geography, Architecture and Change in an Interdependent World. It’s edited by Renata Tyszczuk at Sheffield and three of my OU colleagues, Melissa Butcher, Nigel Clark and Joe Smith. This is part of a long-standing and on-going set of collaborations between OU Geography, Architecture at Sheffield, and the New Economics Foundation, as well as others. There is an associated web-site which archives further materials from these projects, and there is a launch event in London on March 13th, New Maps for an Island Planet.
The book is, apart from anything else, very lovely to look at (I have the least visually imaginative essay, all text, no pictures). Here’s the blurb:
Atlas: Geography, Architecture and Change in an Interdependent World helps readers find their way through the practical and ethical challenges presented by globalisation and global environmental change. Atlas: Geography, Architecture and Change in an Interdependent World combines recent thinking on human geography and architecture on global environmental change issues, setting out to develop a reinterpretation of cartography and a reframing of sustainability. The aim is to find a “re-drawing of the earth” and the “making of new maps”. With a focus on the growth and remaking of cities it offers an innovative mix of essays and shorter texts, original artworks and distinctive re-mappings. The Atlas arises out of a unique collaboration between scholars and practitioners from architecture and human geography.
New(ish) book by Hein Marais
Via the excellent Books LIVE, home of South African related literary/publishing news, I have just noticed a link to the Introduction to the new book by Hein Marais, South Africa Pushed to the Limit, actually published last year, I’ve only just found out, a bit out of this world these days, it’s a sequel of sorts to his 1998 book South Africa: Limits to Change. Here too is an interview with him talking about the book from last year at Think Africa Press.
Neoliberalism after governmentality
A good crisis is usually bad news for rigorous thinking, and so it seems as the term ‘neoliberalism’ ossifies into a catch-all popular phrase to describe all the things that right-minded lefties don’t like and blame for current troubles. Oh well. I suspect the systematic mis-representation of the past 40 years or so of politics, policy and economics which the ‘critical conventional wisdom’ on neoliberalism sustains (in both Marxoid and Foucault-inflected variants) is a hindrance to the development of creative alternative visions of democracy and economic life. The ‘critical conventional wisdom’ line is from a new book by Stephen Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Collier is an anthropologist, and has developed a similar line of critical thinking about ‘neoliberalism’ and the use of Foucault to that of James Ferguson – Collier has an excellent 2009 paper in Theory, Culture and Society on the need to move beyond analyses of governmentality that just extend old-style models of ‘power’ (on a related note, Michael Warner’s recent piece on the past and future of queer theory is another reminder of the degree to which political readings of Foucault tend to rush over the problems of thinking about normativity, towards simpler ideas of the power of ‘norms’; or, to put it another way, conventional accounts of governmenality and neoliberalism are remarkably ‘straight’ in the ways in which they think about subjectivity, power, and the like).
The book is a detailed empirical analysis of the restructuring of ordinary spatial infrastructures in Russia over the last two decades, but one which seeks to challenge a series of settled understandings about The Washington Consensus, neoliberalization, and the like. It’s very ‘geographical’, partly in its focus on urban and regional scale issues, but it also has a much more interesting line on how to think about the geographies of ‘neoliberal technologies’ than the standard diffusionist line peddled by many geographers. There are various notable features of Collier’s analysis:
– it looks at ordinary practices of governance, how they arise as problems in specific situations, rather than tracking circulations of policy discourse;
– related to this, he focuses (at last, someone has, one might think), on a set of ‘neoliberal’ thinkers beyond Hayek, Friedman, etc – in this case, James Buchanan and George Stigler; theorists of government, law, regulation, the state, institutions, not ‘markets’; as I have suggested here before, the insistence on thinking of ‘neoliberalism’ as a theory of markets-against-the-state is factually wrong and analytically short-sighted;
– he insists on thinking of neoliberalism as a precise range of ideas and practices, in line with the quite restrictive sense that Foucault deployed in his 1978-79 lectures on biopolitics, and resists the ‘hegemonic’ interpretation which insists that everywhere neoliberalism turns up it must and does become the dominant dynamic (i.e. neoliberalism might not be the most important thing that has been going on, always, and everywhere, once one stops calling all sorts of things ‘neoliberal’);
– and he develops the intriguing thoughts of Foucault on socialist governmentality, focussing ‘methodologically’ on thinking about socialist biopolitics from back in the 1920s, and in terms of the analysis of ‘problematizations’ rather than coherent systems of ‘governmentality’.
The thinking that Collier, Ferguson and others are doing about these issues strikes me as really important – it’s not just ’empirical’, but cuts to the heart of some prevalent ways of doing theory which have arisen around topics such as neoliberalism, concepts such as governmentality and biopolitics, and imperatives for academics to be ‘critical’.
IDS Bulletin on The Pulse of Egypt’s Revolt
Here.
Quentin Skinner interview
From the online journal The Art of Theory, the second part of their interview with Quentin Skinner.
Dr. Gingrich, I presume?
For those interested in such things, here are a couple of, er, ‘appreciations’ of Newt Gingrich’s PhD, on ‘Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960’ (he thought it was OK, really, all things considered), by Adam Hochschild and Robert Paul Wolff.
Pop Theory 