September 23, 2008
CFP for AAG: ‘Securing the Future’
n.b. this probably is more of interest to readers of VSS but I seem to not have post privileges over there.
CFP: Securing the future: the role of space in impending crises
AAG Las Vegas, March 22-7, 2009
Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)
There has been a noticeable shift in public policy across a range of sectors
from policy focussed on individual (or corporate) responsibility to a focus
on the ‘environment’ (imagined in various guises) as the cause of, and
potential solution to a range of social ills (e.g. obesity, drinking, crime,
terrorism, climate change, etc). Often focussed on (though not restricted
to) the ‘urban’, such policy uses a range of terms (space, environment,
context, etc.) to refer to the combination of spatial relations (social,
cultural, physical, political, economic etc.) deemed responsible for
impending crises. Similar to Foucault’s (2007) use of the term ‘Milieu’,
such ‘environments’ are seen as spaces of intervention and hence as spaces
of security as environments and populations are seen as mutually
constitutive (population understood as a multiplicity bound to the material
relations within which they live).
Thus, according to Foucault, using the example of the construction or
planning of towns as a form of social control, security can be
differentiated from discipline through its particular relationship with both
space and time: “Security will rely on a number of material givens. It
will, of course, work on site with the flows of water, islands, air and so
forth. Thus it works on a given…[which] will not be reconstructed to arrive
at a point of perfection, as in a disciplinary town. … The town will not
be conceived or planned according to a static perception, but will open onto
a future that is not exactly controllable. … The specific space of security
refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and
the uncertain, which have to be inserted into a given space†(2007 p.19-20).
Across the social sciences a range of work has also noted a fundamental
shift in the orientation to the future within recent policy (to pre-emption
and anticipatory governance) and accordingly the adoption of a broad range
of techniques (futures methodologies, multi-level modelling, scenario
planning, etc.) to capture and control future spaces. Such policies and
subsequent interventions (e.g. healthy / green towns) involve a range of
assumptions about the relationships between bodies, spaces, technologies,
natures, etc. which require further investigation. This call is therefore
for papers which explore the spatial and temporal relationships of policies
which claim the ability to secure the future.
Reference: Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at
the College de France 1977-78. Translated by Graham Burchell. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmilan
Papers may address (but are not limited to) the following issues in relation
to such policy:
The temporalities (habit, predictions, everydaylife) and spatialities of security;
The relationship between bodies and spaces;
Methodologies for capturing future spaces;
The role of different populations in securing the future (age, gender, ethnicity, etc);
The construction of urban natures/cultures;
Sites of impending crisis / intervention (city centres, towns, suburbs, etc);
The role of the environment / urban as an ameliorative device;
The construction of impending crises as a result of ‘urban’ spaces / environments;
The role of technologies;
Temporal and spatial aspects of mobilities;
Situating policy within place and time – attempts to apply models of success
from other places;
The conflation of different ‘crises’;
Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)
August 29, 2008
Latour and Foucault
We have been through this before, and I won’t open it up again. But having just written a review of Reassembling the Social – hopefully out soon in Contemporary Sociology – I thought the following was of interest.
As those who have read the book know, Reassembling is a very formal and methodological book. The key idea is that many social scientific concepts posit a reality behind and beyond observed phenomena; that they enable an unwarranted “acceleration” in analysis that does not, therefore, “pay the full price” for tracing associations. I thought, at the time of reading, that this was a pretty good phrase — “pay the full price.”
So lookie here in Birth of Biopolitics: In a discussion of “inflationary” critiques of the state (which he is criticizing), Foucault says the following: “The third factor, the third inflationary mechanism which seems to be characteristic of this type of analysis, is that it enables one to avoid paying the full price of reality and actuality inasmuch as, in the name of this dynamism of the state, something like a kinship or danger, something like the great fantasy of the paranoic and devouring state can always be found. To that extent, ultimately it hardly matters what one’s grasp of reality is or what profile of actuality reality presents. It is enough, through suspicion and, as Francois Ewald would say, ‘denunciation,’ to find something like the fantastical profile of the state and there is no longer any need to analyze actuality. The elision of actuality seems to me [to be] the third inflationary mechanism we find in this critique.”
I highly recommend this entire passage, which is found around pp. 187-189. It is a rippingly satisfying critique of much of what passes for critical theory today. Among other things, I would argue (and am trying to argue in something I am writing at the moment) that it is an implicit critique of Foucault’s own position at the end of Society Must Be Defended when he links biopolitics to the totalitarian experiences of the early 20th century. More on that soon, I hope.
June 1, 2008
Your Sunday Morning Foucault
I know, I’m a total sucker for this stuff, but just a few soaring lines (of both methodological and conceptual interest) from the newly released (in English) Birth of Biopolitics to remind ourselves (at least some of us) why we do this:
“If we want to analyze this absolutely fundamental phenomenon in the history of Western governmentality, this irruption of the market as a principle of veridication, we should simply establish the intelligibility of this process by describing some of the connections between the different phenomena I have just referred to. This would involve showing how it became possible – that is to say, not showing that it was necessary, which is a futile task anyway, nor showing that it is a possibility, one possibility in a determinate field of possibilities….Let’s say that what enables us to make reality intelligible is simply showing that it was possible; establishing the intelligibility of reality consists in showing its possibility. Speaking in general terms, let’s say that in this history of a jurisdictional and then veridictional market we have one of those innumerable intersections between jurisdiction and veridication that is undoubtedly a fundamental phenomenon in the history of the modern west.â€
May 29, 2008
Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur
Whew. Pardon me while I blow the dust off this blog.
If anyone is still out there, let me herewith announce another ARC Working Paper: no 12, “Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur” which is by me, and is part of the project on nanotechnology. I’m keen to have any comments, suggestions, critiques etc… which can be posted here. please.
The initial animus for this paper was that I had written two long papers (soon to be published, I hope) detailing the work of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, and in particular the ways in which it sought to make itself more “responsible” (sometimes, more “ethical”) by making responsibility more doable (Added July 6: And in this project, I was accompanied with inestimable help by Elise McCarthy). There was a lot of vague talk about responsibility, and I don’t think anyone involved (except maybe me) has any stake in being philosophically precise about the term. However, it’s clear that whatever they mean when they talk about responsibility it is not the same thing as what we generally mean by “moral responsibility” today, and hence there is a kind of conceptual reconstruction underway here, mediated by the tools and technologies through which CBEN and others in nanotechnology are becoming more and more concerned with safety, and especially what CBEN scientists call “safety by design.” (If you want to read these papers, email me)
McKeon and Ricoeur are the only two 20th century philosophers I have found that have taken seriously an historical approach to the concept, locating its emergence in the late 18th c. and tracking the transformations in the debates about it. Thus, this paper is a reading of these two pieces with an eye towards reconstructing responsibility in the wake of contemporary “emerging sciences and technologies” and the ways in which they, so to speak, live in the ruins of the fact/value distinction. There are potential overlaps here with thinking about Ewald, Beck and and Stephen’s recent Economy and Society article, as well as on obvious opening to revisit our discussions about concept work, Dewey and Foucault…
January 30, 2008
Two By Two: Migrating ARC
You may notice some changes here at ARC. At a recent meeting in Berkeley, we decided to end the phase of our little experiment that began roughly a year ago. When we created a new website for ARC in December of 2006, the initial plan was to divide up conversations among several blogs, each with a different focus. That experiment had some success–especially at the Vital Systems Security Blog and the Biopower and the Contemporary blog, both of which have attracted a lot of discussion.
The other blogs (Concept Work, UC Berkeley Lab Notes, ARC News, and On The Assembly of Things), have all served different purposes, but we decided that in the interests of creating as much virtual coherence and focus as possible that we should flow all these turbulent streams into a few large tributaries. To wit, I have just merged all of the postings from these other blogs into Biopower and the Contemporary (all but the last, On the Assembly of Things, for which there are New Big Plans), which will serve henceforth as The Voice Of ARC–insofar as it has a voice, multiple, creative, and hopefully expanding.
As might be expected, any blog with the word “biopower” in it is likely to attract some attention, and it seemed to those of us (Paul, Stephen, Anthony, Andrew, Gaymon, Colin, and others) that we should take advantage of this. Hence, the discussions that Stephen, Tobias and Colin so helpfully initiated under the title of “Concept Work” will hopefully continue here, along side the more ephemeral updates and asides.
One housekeeping issue: I want to encourage everyone to use this forum to post things related to ARC and its many and various instantiations. For those of you who were posting at one of these various blogs, and want to continue to do so, contact me (ckelty@rice.edu) to update your account.
January 18, 2008
Nano is officially not organic
“Following the precautionary approach, in line with organic principles, the Soil Association has banned manufactured nanoparticles as ingredients under our organic standards. We are the first organisation in the world to take regulatory action against the use of nanoparticles to safeguard the public. This initiative goes to the core of the organic movement’s values of protecting human health.”Â
The Guardian: Soil Association bans nanomaterials from organic products
Google.org Announces Core Initiatives to Combat Climate Change, Poverty and Emerging Threats
Google Offers a Map for Its Philanthropy
See Google.org for all project areas
One of the 5 areas is named Predict and Prevent:
“Google.org supports efforts to empower communities to predict and prevent events before they become local, regional, or global crises, by identifying “hot spots” and enabling a rapid response.â€
The three most interesting grants within the Predict and Prevent project area:
$5,000,000 multi-year grant to establish this nonprofit organization focused on improving early detection, preparedness, and response capabilities for global health threats and humanitarian crises
Global Health and Security Initiative:
$2,500,000 multi-year grant to strengthen national and sub-regional disease surveillance systems in the Mekong Basin area (Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and China-Yunnan province)
$450,000 multi-year grant to conduct in-depth research into the use of online data sources for disease surveillance
January 16, 2008
History of Present and Anthropology of Contemporary
Following up from many recent discussions I was hoping to take up again the relation between a history of the present and an anthropology of the contemporary. Let’s begin with a few recent texts from amongst ARC participants:
“In this position [of an anthropology of contemporary] the challenge is not to make the present seem contingent, but situating ourselves among contemporary blockages and opportunities the challenge is to reformulate these blockages and opportunities as problems so as to make available a range of possible solutions” (Rabinow/Bennett, “Diagnostic”, p.8).
“In a contemporary situation where so much is already identified as contingent, there may not necessarily be a problem- space static enough to render contingent through, for instance, genealogical work… In a history of the present, something became a problem and through contestation eventually a stable response was formed. The stabilization can be reworked and inquired into in order to find those problematic sites prior to the stabilized response and how those particular responses were possible and under what conditions. In a contemporary mode the aim is to render a space of practices into a problem-space.” (Stavrianakis, “Paraskeue”, pp. 1-2).
I would like to dig a little bit further into the differentiation being proposed here in order to better discern its precise value and relevance, because I am still not entirely clear as to what the import of the distinction is myself. My concern stems from the thought that a history of the present can usefully function to do the kind of work that an anthropology of the contemporary is being taken up for.
Let’s begin with the point about contingency. I regard genealogy, perhaps somewhat against the grain of the best current scholarship, as an attempt not only to show that certain present practices are contingent, but more primarily as an attempt to describe how our present practices have contingently developed. There is at least one crucial difference between demonstrating that x is contingent and inquiring into how x has contingently formed. The latter inquiry can provide amongst its yield the conceptual and practical materials which we would need to transform present situations. Proving that the present is contingent implies that the present can be changed. Showing how the present has been contingently formed gives us materials for reworking the present. I understand Foucault to have been working on the latter (how) more than on the former (that).
If this is a useful way of understanding genealogy (and if we take genealogy to be a paradigm of the history of the present), then I think genealogy indeed offers resources for an anthropology of the contemporary, and is perhaps even an exeemplification of it. Or perhaps not. If not, the question is why not? If the mode of the contemporary concerns the emergence in the present of the practices providing the objects and problematizations we are inquiring into, then perhaps the history of the present does concern the emergence over the course of the past of these practices. But it seems to me that as Foucault took up, for instance, prisons his inquiry was also in part an attempt to specify the contemporary blockages and difficulties which are rendering prisons problematic in the present. A problematization for Foucault faced two ways: it functioned as a clarification of certain historical problematics that had stabilized in the past but it also function as an intensification of these problematics insofar as they continue to be sites of contestation and elaboration in the present.
So a few questions: Is genealogy as I am reading it indeed useful for an inquiry into the contemporary? Is there something that genealogy forces which the mode of the contemporary need avoid? One important remaining difference which I can discern is this: a genealogy is oriented toward taking up present problematizations in terms of their temporal velocity and historical directionality whilst an anthropology of the contemporary can be satisfied to inquire into problematizations without concern for the historical terms of their emergence. The present is a temporal notion whilst, perhaps, the contemporary is not. What is at stake in this distinction, though? And is it a distinction which ought to be pressed very far? If so, what are the advantages of taking it seriously? And what do we lose by taking it too seriously?
January 15, 2008
“The smoking [aerosol] gun” at Ft. Detrick?
A comment from the Sunshine Project biodefense listserve:
“…and there are so many dual-use, offensive-defense projects in the April 2007 CBDP (Department of Defense Chemical and Biological Defense Program) Report that it would take me an entire chapter of another book to go through them all, including aerosolization projects. One even calls for the aerial delivery of an alleged GM vaccine for nerve gas. a sick joke and a fraud. all US armed forces have injectors for nerve gas. you have to inject yourself within about 10 seconds after exposure or you are dead about a minute later. no way you could wait for some alleged vaccine to be delivered by air. you would have died a hideous death by then. no it is clear they are developing a system for the aerial delivery of nerve agents in combat as a weapon. remember: offense (agent) plus defense (vaccine) plus delivery system (aerosolization) equals a weapon.â€
sunshine project: biodefense
link to 2007 CBDP report
Europe equivocates on biofuels
New York Times: Europe May Ban Imports Of Some Biofuels Crops
BBC: Europe rethinks Biofuels Guidelines