photo credit: hide99

Along with my colleagues Angharad Closs-Stephens, Debbie Lisle and Emily Jackson, I am organising a one day workshop at the Imperial War Museum London on 3rd December 2010. The workshop will be a joint BISA Poststructural Politics Working Group and BISA/PSA Art and Politics Group event.

Since my work turned to consider critical infrastructure and I encountered Jane Bennett’s thought provoking account of role of thing-power in the North American Blackout of 2003, I have been intrigued by the question of the materiality of political life – a question that is often only obliquely answered in the disciplines of Politics and International Relations. I hope that the discussions that are started in the December workshop will allow further explanation of the complex ecologies of political subjectivity.

I’m very excited by the group of speakers confirmed at the event so far. I also hope that we will be able to add more in the near future.We are very lucky to have Jane Bennett as well as Jeremy Deller – whose work is currently on display at the Imperial War Museum – as keynote speakers.

For those interested, here are the full details:

The Political Life of Things

A One Day Workshop

The Imperial War Museum, London, UK

3rd December 2010

Keynote 1: Jeremy Deller (Turner Prize Winner, 2004)

Keynote 2: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins, author of Vibrant Matter)

Confirmed speakers include:

Cindy Weber (Sussex University): TBC

Louise Amoore (Durham University): Making things secure: on objects of violence and things of beauty

Lisa Smirl (Sussex University): Drive-by Development: Thinking through the Sports Utility Vehicle in humanitarian assistance

Claudia Aradau (Open University): Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection

Jairus Grove (Johns Hopkins): Improvised Explosive Devices and the New Ecology of War

About the workshop

This workshop starts from the assumption that the subject of politics is always already embodied and exists in the context of a multitude of material objects. Politics thus comprises complex assemblages in which things play a constitutive role. Despite often speaking of the role of things – from ballot papers to missiles – scholars of politics and international relations have largely overlooked their constitutive power. Indeed, the classical agenda of politics scholarship is dominated by an anthropocentrism that locates politics in the figure of the human individual. It is an agenda defined by ideas of agency and rationality that regards things as mere equipment. Despite this seeming neglect, the intersection of materiality and politics has recently become the focus of a number of innovative strands of thought. From Appadurai’s Social Life of Things to Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, via Deleuzian notions of affect and notions of non-representational geographies, new perspectives on what things are and do are re-problematising the constitutive materiality of politics.

Artists and art practitioners, of course, have long been engaged with questions of materiality. Whether it is the embodiment of performance, the tactility of sculpture or the physical nature of imaging media, artists have probed the materiality of the assemblages they create. As such, the intersection between such artistic practice and scholarship on materiality provides a fertile ground for exploring the question of what things are and do in politics.

This one-day workshop brings together scholars engaged in thinking about materiality to explore the nature, role and power of things in the assemblages of politics. In the context of the material culture collected and displayed by the Imperial War Museum, the workshop will explore how we can understand the role of things in war, conflict, violence and everyday practices of resistance.

This workshop will be an interdisciplinary event bringing artists, art practitioners, museum curators, art historians, geographers, anthropologists and international relations scholars together to discuss questions of the political life of things.

Attending the workshop

Attendance at the workshop is free. Light lunch and refreshments will be provided. Due to the costs associated with organising a workshop in London there will unfortunately be no support for travel or accommodation costs.

Places at this workshop are limited. Please contact Emily Jackson (emily.jackson@durham.ac.uk) if you wish to attend.

This workshop is sponsored by BISA, PSA, Durham University, Queens Belfast University and Newcastle University

photo credit: Paolo Margari

Last week I took part in an extremely interesting workshop at the British Library. Citizenship Without Community was hosted by the Open University in collaboration with the BISA poststructural politics working group. The workshop examined ideas concering citizenship, begining with thoughts from Engin Isin (The Open University) and closing with a paper by Étienne Balibar (University of California, Irvine. In between there were a number of thoughful contributions on the nature of contemrpoary citizenship from Vicki Squire (Open University), Angharad Closs Stephens (Durham University), Joe Painter (Durham University), Jonna Pettersson (Lund University), Andrew Schapp (Exeter University), Cindy Weber (Lancaster University), Rutvica Andrijasevic (Open University), Claudia Aradau (Open University), Umut Erel (Open University), and Jef Huysmans (Open University).

For those who weren’t able to be at the workshop podcasts of all of the day’s contributions are now online along with photos of the event. You can find them here.

popular culture become[s] a series of sites at which political meaning is made, where political contestation takes place and where political orthodoxy is reproduced and challenged

I will be giving a paper entitled Zombies and flesh eaters: imagining urban cataclysm in the era of metropolitanisation.

The paper will discuss the relation between the politics of global urbanisation and representations of urban cataclysm in the film 28 Days Later, video game Resident Evil; and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. I argue that novels, films and games are textual artefacts embedded in complex assemblages of things, signs, meanings and affects. As such they are mutually imbricated with the dynamics of delineation and contestation we refer to as ‘politics’.

The paper discusses two particular ideas arising from a reading of these texts:

The project is based at the University of Manchester and Ralf Brand is the principle investigator (with Jon Coaffee as co-investigator and Sara Fregonese as Research Assistant). Overall the aim of the project is to explore the interrelation between the urban environment and  socio-political polarisation. Polarisation is assumed to have links with political violence (including radicalisation). You can read more about the project here.

The project is of interest to me precisely because it suggests that the urban environment has a constitutive role to play in socio-political dynamics. Rather than viewing the urban environment from an anthropocentric perspective, the project seeks to examine how material structures play a role in shaping (while also being shaped by) socio-political polarisation (and attendant dynamics of violence).  In a recent paper arising out of this project Ralf Brand has referred to the urban environment as a  ‘socio-active artefact’ in order to explain the relation between urban environment and socio-political dynamics. This speaks to the interest I have in understanding the manner in which buildings are constitutive of distinctive spaces as well as to the way in which certain forms of political violence attack buildings in order to destroy the spaces they constitute.  It is precisely because the urban environment is ‘socio-active’ that it is targeted, if it were inert (as some anthropocentric accounts assume) it would be of little interest. The idea that the building is a ‘socio-active artefact’ is thus very helpful when thinking about the mechanisms underlying urbicide.

For those interested in reading further, Ralf Brand has a paper in Urban Studies outlining some of the ways in which architecture and polarisation are inter-related: “Written and Unwritten Building Conventions in a Contested City”. There will also be a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology which will include a review of literature concerning urban polarisation.

Further details including a program for the workshop can be found here. Speakers will include Michael J Shapiro, Ash Amin, Joe Painter, Angharad Closs Stephens, Martin Coward, Steve Graham, Vicki Squire, Jennifer Bagelman and Delacey Tedesco.

The event is being jointly organised the Politics-Space-State research cluster, Durham University & the BISA Poststructural Politics Working Group. Angharad Closs Stephens is the main organiser, with additional assistance from myself, Louise Amoore, Michele Lancione and Eduardo Neve-Jimenez.

Places at the workshop are free but limited. Please contact Angharad Closs Stephens if you would like to know more and/or are interested in attending.

My paper will be entitled ‘Agonism, community, urbanity’. It will comprise comments designed to draw together the themes of agonism and community as they have been developed to date in my work. Briefly, it will examine the inter-related concepts of agonism and community in order to outline an understanding of the city as an ontological terrain characterised by provocation and difference. I have argued elsewhere that agonism is a fundamental characteristic of the built environment and, hence, of the city. This point is important because it questions the benign notions of plurality that often characterise urban theorising. Instead it conceives of the city as a continual experience of confrontation and friction which, while not necessarily always violent, poses a deep ontological challenge to individual subjects on a daily basis. This conception of the agonistic nature or city life poses, however, the question of community or being-together (as we must be-together in order to be in provocative relation). Community might seem to be the antithesis of agonism: a haven from the buffeting gale of provocation. However, I will turn to Jean-Luc Nancy to understand how we might reconceptualise community as being-with in order to think through the problem of the relation between agonism and community. I will suggest that a conception of community emerges that helps us to understand how we might respond to urban violence in a manner that shows a certain care for difference rather than a nostalgia for homogeneity.

You can find the notes for my presentation at the workshop here. Please note that these are rough notes prepared for speaking at this event. They are not an academic paper. As such they do not include the usual references and acknowledgements that would be expected in an academic paper. If you want further details about the sources referred to in the notes, please contact me.

I will be talking about what we can learn from the contemporary securitisation of the urban environment. You can find my abstract as well as those of other speakers here. It promises to be a very interesting event.

Although there are many possible themes to investigate regarding climate change and security/violence, I want to explore two in particular:

1. The way in which urban securitisation tells us a lot about the way in which authorities will react to future violences such as those that result from climate change. The various ways in which cities have become the arena for, or target of, military operations tells us a lot about the way in which governments will respond to future insecurities in/of the urban environment. The restriction of circulation and the hardening of urban infrastructure demonstrate the way in which urban fabric is seen as something to which access must be controlled. This is ominous for an era in which climate change could lead to greater rural-urban migration. Such influxes will likely lead to greater hardening of the urban environment and increased attempts to control access to urban fabric.
2. The way in which climate change is itself seen as a potential threat to the city. For example, hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans shows how flooding –an often predicated consequence of climate change – poses a grave risk to the city. But responses to this perceived threat are problematic insofar as they posit a separateness between ‘the environment’ and ‘the city’. This separation is a long standing one that has its roots in the separation of the rural and urban and the positing of the former as ‘natural’ and the latter as ‘man-made’ Unfortunately, this puts the city and nature in a zero-sum relation in which each is exterior to, and competitive with, the other. This is problematic because it hides an intellectual confusion in which ecology and the city are taken to be conceptually separate. But – as I have written elsewhere – the city is characterised by a complex ecology. Investigating the complex ecologies at play in the city: especially the ecological systems of infrastructural support – will tell us much about how we might begin to pose the problems of the urban millennium in a way which sees climate change not as a threat to be excluded, but as a dynamic integral to the development of the future city.

The paper is initially titled ‘Between-us in the city: materiality and the singular political ecologies of contemporary urban subjectivity‘. I’ll be trying to work out some of the conceptual issues that I perceive arising out of the challenge that global urbanisation poses to the discipline (or subject) of International Relations as well as sketching out the complex ecology of political subjectivity that I describe in the conclusion of my book Urbicide.

Here’s the abstract for the paper:

Between-us in the city: materiality and the singular political ecologies of contemporary urban subjectivity

This paper attempts, through a consideration of the conceptual challenges posed by global urbanisation, a dual investigation of the subject of International Relations. On the one hand the subject of international relations can be conceived as the disciplinary field of enquiry of International Relations scholars. Global urbanisation challenges the classical territorial morphologies that have classically defined the disciplinary subject matter of International Relations. On the other hand the subject of international relations can be conceived as the political entity that is the locus of the forces that comprise ‘international relations’ (broadly construed). Global urbanisation challenges the traditional conception of this subject in terms of citizenship and agency. The city comprises a sophisticated actant in which the material plays a constitutive role in subjectivity. Subjectivity can thus only be conceived as a complex ecology or cyborg entity.

Both of these reconceptualisations of the subject of International relations will be taken to comprise a challenge to the classical morphology that has underpinned conceptions of politics in the discipline. At the territorial level this morphology has rested on the notion of a politics of separable units, while at the level of subjectivity, it has rested on notions of autonomy that are predicated on a separability of the agent from context and community. Such a morphology is perpetuated in critical theories such as those inspired by the Levinasian conception of ethics as first philosophy: where the response on which response-ability is predicated is constituted through a recognition and relation that traverses the gap between self and other (a gap that is a necessary condition of the alterity central to this first philosophy). In contrast to these political morphologies I will outline, via Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of the reticulated multiplicity of being singular plural a complex ecology of political subjectivity. Whilst I do not think such a political subjectivity is the ground for ‘another politics’ (after all, this would imply some sort of separation from previous politics) it could be said to comprise the basis for a re-imagining of what it means to ‘be political’.

The symposium runs until March 13th and can be found here (with an index of postings here)