“Democratic procedure, which establishes a network of pragmatic considerations, compromises, and discourses of self-understanding and of justice, grounds the presumption that reasonable or fair results are obtained insofar as the flow of relevant information and its proper handling have not been obstructed.”
Jürgen Habermas, 1996, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Polity Press.
“The Enlightenment, confronted by the evil of politics, goes down in a display of true religious pageantry, showing that morality cannot be conceived without the guarantee of some sort of transcendence.”
Pierre Saint-Armand, 1996, The Laws of Hostility, University of Minnesota Press.
“Gros is a professor of philosophy at a French University – at the finest of French Universities, the University of Paris XII, and also at the great Sciences Po – and if you did not know this already you would not have to read much of this book [A Philosophy of Walking] to guess that it was so. […] Instead of historical argument supported by evidence, or chronicle illuminated by interpretation, he gives us oracular assertion, supported by more oracular assertion. In this game, it is batting average that counts: if four out of ten of your oracular assertions are arresting oracular assertions, you’re golden.”
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 1st September 2014.
“I keep novels and detective stories in my bedroom, so that visitors shan’t be tempted to borrow them; the sitting room houses the higher forms of literature (and my jazz books, a far from exhaustive collection), while the hall I reserve for thoroughly worthy items calculated to speed the parting guest.” Philip Larkin, 1983, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, Faber and Faber.
“Acts demolish the alternatives, that is the paradox.”
James Salter, Light Years, 1975, Vintage.
“The history of modern social ideas has misled us into associating piecemeal change with disbelief in institutional reconstruction, and a commitment to such reconstruction with faith in sudden and systematic change.”
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, 2005, What Should the Left Propose?,Verso.
“The author sees the development of a democracy as a long and certainly incomplete struggle to do three closely related things: 1) to check arbitrary rulers, 2) to replace arbitrary rules with just and rational ones, and 3) to obtain a share for the underlying population in the making of rules. The beheading of kings has been the most dramatic and by no means the least important aspect of the first feature. Efforts to establish the rule of law, the power of the legislature, and later to use the state as an engine for social welfare are familiar and famous aspects of the other two.”
Barrington Moore, Jr, 1966, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Allen Lane.
I’ve only just come across the International Geographical Union (IGU) YouTube channel – seems to be about 6 months old. It’s got a bunch of interviews with geographers of a certain significance, shall we say – David Harvey, from 1984, on historical-geographical materialism; Derek Gregory from 1983, Torsten Hagerstrand, Dick Chorley and Michael Chisholm in discussion with Anne Buttimer (and lots of other interviews chaired by her and one with her). Wonderful stuff in a nerdy ‘history and philosophy of geography’ kind of way).
For those interested in space, place, embodiment, intentionality, and such things, the latest, and 25th anniversary issue of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, edited by David Seamon, is available here or here. Includes short essays on phenomenological themes by various people, including Ted Relph, Yi-Fu Tuan, Jef Malpas, and Tim Ingold.
If you’re interested, here is a link to a paper called Media practices and urban politics: conceptualizing the powers of the urban-media nexus, by Scott Rodgers, Allan Cochrane and myself, which is forthcoming soonish in Society and Space. This is the last of a series of things we have written and convened together since 2007, emerging from Scott’s time at the OU on an ESRC Postdoc fellowship and stretching beyond that (remember those?). This includes a symposium on the theme of ‘Where is urban politics?’ and an earlier Debate section of the same journal, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, on ‘Media, Politics and Cities‘.
Here is the abstract for the latest piece:
“The spatial imaginations of media studies and urban studies are increasingly aligned, illustrated by a growing literature on what can be identified as the media-urban nexus. This nexus has attracted scholarly interest not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a site of emergent political dynamics. We suggest that literature on the media-urban nexus points to the always-already present conditions of possibility for a trans-local, relational urban politics. Current conceptualizations of the politics of urbanized media however tend to fall into one of two registers: conflicts over the access to and regulation of urban media spaces; or the silent politics media inscribe into the affective textures of urban life. Both tend to envision media as instrumental supplements to politics, over-estimating the powers of ‘media’ within urban living. Drawing on recent uses of practice theory in media studies, we highlight how thinking of media- in-practices provides a basis for more nuanced conceptualizations of the powers of the media- urban nexus. Fully realizing this conceptualization requires that the restriction of the insights of practice theory to everyday life be lifted. An expanded view of media practices is required, one which emphasizes the coordination between organized fields of communication and everyday urbanized media practices.”
Pop Theory 