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doi: 10.1068/d1607pmid: N/A
Human geography critiques of GIS are operationalized under a unique interpretation of ontology and epistemology. Internal to poststructuralism, this metaphysics collapses the traditional separation between ontology and epistemology, reducing ontological questions to epistemological constructs. Although critiques have moved beyond an initial fixation upon positivism, critical/cultural assessments of GIS tendered within the last ten years continue to motivate epistemology as a basis for its deconstruction. The epistemological reductionism of such a reading of the technology inappropriately abstracts GIS from its ontic basis in computing, giving rise to a fundamental ‘disconnect’ of poststructuralist metaphysics to the technology. This disconnect is identified in terms of (1) the epistemic fallacy, which, underwritten by (2) an ‘undoing’ of the metaphysics of presence, culminates in (3) an effective ‘deontologization’ of an immediately ontic entity. This does not negate the poststructuralist critique of GIS, but it necessitates that critical engagements of the technology accord a material ontological ground to the objects of critique.
doi: 10.1068/d5908pmid: N/A
Korean ‘official nationalism’ (as Anderson calls it) arose late, in a context of partition and its inevitable ambiguities, Confucian self-discipline but wildly violent politics, rapid economic growth, and then Korea's pivotal role in the electronics and e-economy booms of the 1980s and 1990s. Seoul had to be constructed as the national capital in the absence of continuity in its represented past, consequent on the attempted total obliteration of Korean identity by the Japanese colonialist regime and subsequent wartime destruction. Its ‘monuments’ are virtually empty of cultural referencing; even the National Assembly is a ‘painted shed’; new cultural production is overwhelmingly either pastiche or electronic; political activity slips from the Third Estate of popular democracy to an emerging Fifth Estate of the Internet and the weblog. While print capitalism may have been a necessary enabling condition for the rise of nationalism in Europe, the Americas, and beyond, as Anderson asserts, in Korea's case we may have the paradox of the weakly defined nation slipping away, into a wider imagined community, even as the dream of Korean distinctiveness cuts ever deeper.
Staeheli, Lynn A; Mitchell, Don; Nagel, Caroline R
doi: 10.1068/d6208pmid: N/A
As groups struggle to gain visibility and voice in the public sphere and as new publics form, they may expand the sense of inclusiveness within a polity, but these new publics may also rub against broader, hegemonic ideals of ‘the’ public sphere. This paper utilises the concept of ‘regimes of publicity’ to explore how marginalised groups are included in the public. Regimes of publicity are the prevailing system of laws, practices, and relations that condition the qualities of a public and the ways that it is situated with respect to other publics. In exploring how publics might be formed and received, we focus on three interlinked elements of regimes of publicity—community and social norms, legitimacy, and the relations that constitute property—as they condition the strategies of activists and the resources that different agents and institutions bring to struggles over entry to the public. The argument we present highlights the ongoing nature of struggles for access to the public realm and the fragmented nature of the public.
doi: 10.1068/d10307pmid: N/A
This paper examines the politics of contemporary encampment within the UK with reference to the positioning of asylum seekers as a group subjected to a biopolitical logic of ‘compassionate repression’. The paper opens by examining the utility of presentations of the asylum seeker as an exemplar of Agamben's figure of the homo sacer. Drawing on recent critiques of the British government's apparent turn to a ‘deliberate policy of destitution’, I argue that through such acts of sovereign abandonment asylum seekers are relegated to a position reliant solely upon the ethical sensibilities of others. I then proceed to consider ways in which such a positioning ‘outside the law’ has been employed by asylum seekers and local campaigners to make ethical claims and demands upon the relational nature of the citizen as a figure of potential bare life. I then close by arguing that such an ethical gesture alone, of ‘assuming bare life’, is not enough and that the outright rejection of logics of distinction which Agamben suggests as a future politics offers little means to politically engage bare life beyond an irreconcilable ethic of the unconditionally hospitable. Opposed to this, I suggest the need to (re)engage with political theories which draw the political as always already an ethical practice in itself. Here, I examine the UK's involvement in the UNHCR Gateway Protection Programme, as an example of a conditional, and imperfect, act of hospitality, one grounded in distinction, yet one which holds both the risks of ethical practice and the possibility of political alteration at its heart.
doi: 10.1068/d5708pmid: N/A
Sinks are a device within environmental studies that describe spaces and processes that capture and channel wastes. This paper first explores sinks both as a cultural figure of environmental understanding and as an important technoscientific instrument within current attempts to describe the global carbon cycle in relation to climate change. The movement of wastes to and through sinks is often characterized as a metabolic operation, and this metabolic framing forms a key part of this investigation. Drawing on Serres's notion of the parasite, the paper considers how waste, noise, and interference may characterize other types of metabolic exchange that allow for a revised approach to sinks. The second section of this paper considers how waste ‘spills’ across environments in space and time. Spills are a way to describe the movement and exchange of wastes that do not conform to a clear trajectory or network, but, rather, express more formless and even disruptive geographies. Three ‘spills’ then structure this examination of the movement and mutation of waste, including the elusive transfer of carbon found within the ‘missing sinks’ in the biosphere, the indistinct exchanges of carbon and other wastes that occur with human and nonhuman bodies, and the uncertain exchanges and accumulations of carbon wastes in the future. In this investigation I argue that sinks point toward the revision of the notion that environments are or should be in metabolic balance, in favor of more complex and hybrid ecologies and exchanges that incorporate the transformative capacities of waste. Concluding with Bennett's discussion of the ‘ecology of matter’, this paper then suggests that the dynamic qualities of waste and matter require renewed attention to environmental exchanges, practices, and imaginings.
doi: 10.1068/d11207pmid: N/A
Witness testimonies provide a singular challenge to historians of Auschwitz. Survivor accounts offer a privileged perspective on the world of the camp, yet as recent conceptual work has shown the performative structure of these texts exceeds and eludes this representational duty. The challenge for historians is that, given their privileged, ‘insider’ status, any equivocality regarding the content of witness testimonies provides space for Holocaust denial. This paper offers a critical reading of one historical strategy for meeting this challenge: Exposing witness accounts to an uncompromising criteria of evidentiality and plausibility, designed to test their representational quality as a means of preempting negationist attempts to manipulate ‘faulty’ accounts. Drawing on Lyotard, I argue that, even as this strategy succeeds in refuting individual cases of denial, by refusing to enter into dialogue with the language game of testimony, and, more importantly, by invalidating any attempt to do so, this strategy actually reiterates the tactics of those deniers it is designed to oppose, thus undermining its own important work. Rather than rejecting this historical approach, I argue that it is compromised only by an historiographical insistence on imposing this ‘evidential’ language game as universal and representational; if we conversely recognise its performative, nonrepresentational status, it is more equipped to refute denial and without making of testimony a collateral damage.
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