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doi: 10.1068/d2902intpmid: N/A
What forms of knowledge and nonknowledge continue to haunt contemporary debates, and in what ways were they ‘known too well’ in the aftermath of 1968 to precipitate the falling out of favor of Marx and Marxism and the recasting of Macherey along with the rest of Althusser's circle as ‘structuralist dinosaurs’? And what might we learn from the staging of this encounter between Hegel and Spinoza, both in terms of the specific points of application and the method of enquiry? Macherey offers an answer to these questions not only in Hegel or Spinoza but also in a series of papers addressing Hegel's prior uptake in France—an engagement that had solidified tendencies in Hegel that were also, not coincidentally, the points of Hegel's misreading of Spinoza. Read together, they offer us a fuller picture of the long shadow—cast initially in Hegel's misinterpretation of Spinoza and amplified subsequently in the uptake of Hegel in France. To return explicitly to Hegel in 1979—even if to ‘surpass’ him—was in part to exhume a corpse, to demonstrate the ways that Hegel continued to haunt philosophy. Hegel or Spinoza was a response to the long and still active legacy of what we might call (borrowing from Macherey) Hegel à la Française.
doi: 10.1068/d6109pmid: N/A
This paper considers the question of what it might mean to resist the ‘imaginative geographies’ of the War on Terror through a reading of the bestselling novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Reading this novel against the claim that we are now at the ‘end’ of the War on Terror, the paper engages with how we might move beyond what Derek Gregory described as the split geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ that represent the violent return of the colonial past. The paper argues that critical attempts at resisting the imaginative geographies of the War on Terror, such as we find in this particular novel, often assume and reproduce an understanding of time as linear and progressive, an idea of time which Gregory points out makes these imaginative geographies possible. The paper argues that this becomes problematic when critical interventions risk reproducing the very understanding of political life that they set out to confront. Whilst it is an important political move to reveal the imaginative geographies at work in the War on Terror, the paper suggests that this approach also risks operating by confirming to a critical readership that which it already knows. We are too easily led to the conclusion that what is needed is better representations of ‘others’ in the world, as just as enlightened, cultured, reasoned as ‘us’. The contention of this paper is that such critical responses fail to do anything to disrupt or trouble the split geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them’; rather, they keep them firmly in place and entrench them further. The paper argues that we need to revisit and unsettle the concept of imagination at work in the idea of ‘imaginative geographies’ to explore a way of thinking coexistence in world politics that cannot be understood within a unifying temporal framework. It is suggested that, despite the closures identified in this novel, postcolonial urban literatures also provide many openings for thinking the “possibility that the field of the political is constitutively not singular” [Chakrabarty, 2000, Provincializing Europe (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) page 148].
doi: 10.1068/d12809pmid: N/A
“Alien still life” examines the conversion of Rocky Flats, a plutonium factory located near Denver, Colorado, from a nuclear weapons plant to a national wildlife refuge. It argues that the territorial and administrative category of ‘wildlife refuge’ aided an incentives-based cleanup and accelerated turnover of the site to the public as a limited-use recreational space, in the process ‘fixing’ waste to external wilderness. Simultaneously, the technique of ‘legacy management’, a response to the growing number of decommissioned and remediated US Department of Energy nuclear facilities, mobilizes the reduction, containment, and/or denial of Rocky Flats's history and toxicity through discursive and territorial means, such as the portrayal of nature as purity. The resultant ‘alien still life’ marks the voids in the public record, the alienation of the environment from former Rocky Flats workers, and the reconceptualization of ethics necessary to challenge the suspension of politics achieved by the nature refuge fix. The paper tracks subtle shifts in the memory, rhetoric, and politics needed to convert the industrial territory of Rocky Flats to a ‘wild’ space. In an effort to counteract the spectacle of nature as purity, and to reimagine an environmental ethics and political ecology attentive to waste, the layered narrative approach seeks to ‘put waste back into nature’, confronting the radioactive legacies of the Cold War.
Clark, Julian R A; Jones, Alun R
doi: 10.1068/d4609pmid: N/A
Building on recent academic exchanges theorising sociospatial relations, we argue that it is not sociospatial concepts or metaphors per se that delineate the substance of such relations—rather it is the different politics by and through which these concepts are conceived, represented, and mobilised by elite actors. We make an empirically founded contribution to these exchanges by examining the context of the European Union's (EU) sociospatialities, illustrated specifically through central European elite activities in the wake of the 2004 accession to the EU. We show how central European elite assertions of sociospatial concepts were embroiled in complex ways with enactments of these sociospatialities—that is, how the assertion and performance of concepts such as space, territory, and positionality by elite actors created novel forms of politics which, subsequently, have become pivotal to the reconfiguration of contemporary EUropean space.
doi: 10.1068/d2010pmid: N/A
Amid a resurgence of interest in histories of scientific fieldwork and in the geographies of the Cold War, this paper presents a comparative history of field practice across the distinct epistemic traditions of geography, archaeology, and folklore. The paper follows the intellectual practices of three research teams attempting to ‘rescue’ Gaelic culture from the development of a missile-testing station in the Scottish Hebrides. The aims of the paper are fivefold: to extend insights from the histories of scientific fieldwork to understand the production of social knowledge, to consider the coconstitution of fieldwork and the region, to expand recent histories of geography in the mid-20th century, to draw out the lingering significance of the ‘salvage paradigm’ in geography and other social sciences, and to reconceptualise this salvage fieldwork as a way of constructing social life as much as rescuing it.
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