While the DSG blog will certainly be missed, their diagnosis of the changing landscape of activism is spot on. In the UK, the end of 2010 brought with it student protests and a new-found optimism about political change. 2011 has, if anything, witnessed the massification of antagonism. This has, however, been accompanied by a ferocious counter-revolution. The rupturing of the neo-liberal consensus (to borrow the DSG’s own phrasing) from the events of the Arab Spring to the August Riots to the emergence of the Occupy Movement has, in other words, been matched by a violent crackdown on protest and political dissent. The very conditions of possibility for generating tools for struggle has changed.

Over the past few months, I have to admit that I’ve been having similar doubts about this blog. When I started the blog in 2009, I was really excited about the platform and was keen to explore new avenues for writing about the creative possiblities of art, politics, and geography. So much has happened over the past year or so that I find myself wanting to engage more directly and practically with different forms of collective research and scholarship rather than theorizing them out of existence or condemning them to the condescensions of isolated critique.

For the time being, I have chosen to keep the blog going. I am deeply committed to the idea of rigorous scholarship and critical education/pedagogy as a common good and would like to continue to share ideas, concepts, work-in-progress, and other recent scholarly developments. I feel that, if anything, I have a responsibility to do so. At the same time, I would like to see this site less as a space for my own blogging and more as a repository of work – academic, activist, and artistic – that seeks to challenge the baleful conditions of contemporary neo-liberalism. There is much to be done and I look forward to the New Year!

Some excerpts include:

“…neo-liberalism works through producing dispensable populations; it exposes populations to precarity; it establishes modes of work that presume that labour will always be temporary; it decimates long-standing institutions of social democracy, withdraws social services from those who are most radically unprotected – the poor, the homeless, the undocumented – because the value of social services or economic rights to basic provisions like shelter and food has been replaced by an economic calculus that values only the entrepreneurial capacities of individuals and moralizes against all those who are unable to fend for themselves or make capitalism work for them.”

“…the call on the streets is precisely not to “fix” this fiscal crisis, but to insist that the dismantling of neo-liberalism is imperative for the renewal of radical democracy.”

A series of texts from Fordham University Press is coming out which deal primarily with biopolitics and community. Here is the release:

Commonalities, a Fordham University Series
Editor, Timothy Campbell

Is there any concern more pressing today than thinking what it means to have in common? From debates on biotechnology and shared gene pools, to the relation between the digital commons and public culture, to political and theological genealogies of the common and community, to the fraying European Community, one of the most decisive questions for contemporary life concerns what having and being in common entails.

Why? When did the common become a question and not a declaration? The reasons are many. Certainly, the Fall of the Berlin Wall discredited the account Communism had provided of the common. A number of works written in the wake of Communism’s collapse also helped open the common to philosophical investigation: works from Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Roberto Esposito, among others. One effect of their readings was to have made clearer the profound influence a certain language of sovereignty and the law enjoys over how we understand collective life.

Where does that leave the political thought of the common today? Some continue to tell themselves the heart-warming story in which a return to communal life might still be possible and desired. Others sense the end of community, which often becomes the prelude to a hand-wringing Messianism. And then there are others who glimpse in the present moment an opportunity for thought; who believe that we are on the cusp of new modes of being-in-common. The name we will want to give these possibilities for imagining future common forms is “Commonalities.”

Where the common and community are concepts, “commonalities” captures the dynamism of the relations that make up both; the relation of the common not only to subjects and individuals but to other living entities as well as objects. Where perspectives on the common and community are largely indebted to what has been called “political theology,” the perspective provided by “commonalities” is political in the sense that it concerns itself primarily with emerging forms of being together and having together. Not surprisingly, in “commonalities” communication moves to the center but not the protected and ultimately unsatisfying communication that so dominates interactions today. Rather communication among “commonalities” resembles a contamination of approaches and perspectives that leads to new modes of being. Where before there was always and only the common and its privileged form, the community, now a horizon for thought becomes available that is capable of accounting for immanent (and possibly common) singularities. “Commonalities” names a research project in which the common becomes a mode of investigating and writing the political: a way of creating collectively that discloses the immanent singularities that characterize the contemporary moment.

The series Commonalities registers such a moment for thinking the political across the common. Featuring works that take up the question and the promise of the common ecumenically, Commonalities is not limited to any one philosophical tradition. Rather it spotlights the forms that the common assumes in a number of disciplines and traditions: in greater attention to the importance of relationality and interdependence; in bio-political research; and in ongoing critiques of all forms of the common thought merely as instances of political theology. In a word the series is addressed to those interested in imagining possible worlds held in common.

The titles that have already been accepted are:

Remo Bodei, La vita delle cose
Massimo Cacciari, Europe and Empire. Edited by Alessandro Carrera, Translated by Massimo Verdicchio
Roberto Esposito, Categorie Dell’Impolitico
Roberto Esposito, Terms of Politics: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics
Maurizio Ferraris, Documentalità: Perché è necessario lasciar trace
Maurizio Ferraris, Dove sei? Ontologia del telefonino
Jean-Luc Nancy, Identité: Fragments, franchises

Courtesy of the OCA:

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), as commissioner of Norway’s representation at the 54th Biennale di Venezia, would like to announce ‘The State of Things’, a series of public lectures that will be held throughout the Biennale period, reflecting upon themes such as diversity, the environment, peace-making, human rights, capital, migration, asylum, Europe, aesthetics and revolution. Each presentation aims to tackle the ‘state of things’ today, drawing from the speakers’ fields of activity and research, and from what they consider the intellectual and political priorities of today.

The programme takes its cue from the Nansen Passport, created by Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World War I in an attempt to enable refugees to move across borders in search of political and intellectual shelter.

Forthcoming talks:

Wednesday, 7 September / 18:00 
Judith Butler – The Politics of the Street and New Forms of Alliance

Although some have argued that the politics of the street has been replaced by new media politics, it seems that the public sphere within which politics takes place is now defined by a specific mode of bodies interacting with media. Hannah Arendt once argued that there could be no exercise of freedom without the creation of a ‘space of appearance’ and even ‘a right to appear’. How do we understand those new forms of democratic insurgency that form alliances that are not in coalitional forms? Who is the embodied ‘we’ on the street transported through media, and yet in place and at risk?

at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Castello 5252, Venice

Thursday, 8 September / 18:00 
Franco Berardi – The ‘Movimento Studentesco’ and Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Misunderstanding

In 1968 the relation between Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Student Movement in Italy was a troubled one. In the midst of the controversy, Pasolini was accused by the students of being a populist representative of a backward culture, nostalgic of a legendary pre-modern time. This paper will argue that, from today’s perspective, things seem different, and Pasolini can be understood not to have been looking to the past but to the distant future that is now our present: an age characterised by barbarianism and of ignorant aggressiveness. Today, in the age of the televisual and financial dictatorship, reading Pasolini is a way to retrace the genesis of Italy’s present.

at Laboratorio Occupato Morion, Salizada San Francesco della Vigna, Castello 2842,Venice

Thursday, 20 October / 17:30 
Saskia Sassen – When the Acute Challenges of Our Epoch Materialise in Cities

Cities have long been sites for conflicts, including wars, racism, religious hatred and exclusion of the poor. And yet, while national states have historically responded by militarising conflict, cities have tended to triage conflict through commerce and civic activity. Major developments in the current global era signal that cities are losing this capacity, and becoming sites for a whole range of new types of conflicts, such as asymmetric war, urban violence and acute environmental challenges. Further, the dense and conflictive spaces of cities, overwhelmed by inequality and injustice, can become the sites for a variety of secondary, more anomic types of conflicts, from drug wars to the major environmental disasters looming in our immediate futures. All of these challenge the traditional commercial and civic capacity that has allowed cities to avoid war more often than not, when confronted with conflict, and to incorporate diversity of class, culture, religion and ethnicity.

at Aula Tafuri, Palazzo Badoer, Università Iuav di Venezia, Calle della Lacca, San Polo 2468, Venice

Thursday, 17 November / 18:00 
T.J. Clark – The Experience of Defeat

Whether or not the present Restoration is invulnerable, the Left in advanced capitalist countries has lived for the past two decades looking failure square in the face. The disappearance of a Left alternative from the space of politics, or even from the space of political imagination, remains the great fact of our time. Taking its title from Christopher Hill’s great study of radical writing after the English Civil War, this lecture is concerned, as part of that work, with the Left’s sense of progress. It asks what it could mean to a Left politics for it no longer to consider itself ‘on the side of history’ – not to imagine its task, in other words, as the realisation of the baulked potentials of capitalism and/or modernity, not to see its eventual victory written into the DNA of an economic order, not to posit some version of utopia, not, in a word, to ‘have the future in its bones’. Is a Left with no future a contradiction in terms? If not the future, then what? Is it only the Right that can (imaginatively, politically) dispense with the myth of freedom in full possession of technics? What aims and imagery might there be for an ‘un-modernity’ to come?

at Auditorium Santa Margherita, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Campo Santa Margherita, Dorsoduro 3689, Venice

Norway’s representation in Venice in 2011 is commissioned by OCA and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and its associate curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. Norway’s representation at the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, also includes ‘Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS’, a graduate programme by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.

Call for Papers, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG) 2012, New York, February 24^th – 28^th

The Housing Question Revisited

Session Organizers:

Henrik Gutzon Larsen (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Anders Lund Hansen (Lund University, Sweden)

Gordon MacLeod (Durham University, UK)

Tom Slater (University of Edinburgh, UK)

The year 2012 marks the 140^th anniversary of the publication of the article series by Friedrich Engels, which subsequently was published as the pamphlet The Housing Question.  Whilst less renowned than some of his other writings, the pamphlet has nonetheless proved highly influential to the work of numerous analysts of the urban process under capitalism, particularly in enabling a critical investigation of accumulation strategies, speculative landed developer interests, displacement dynamics, struggles over property rights, and the tension between use and exchange value with respect to urban land and housing.  Of course, for Engels, the housing question was never just about ‘housing’ per se, but about the injustices produced by the underlying structure of socio-political interests constituting capitalist urban land economies and policies, and the role of what he called ‘bourgeois socialists’ in reinforcing that structure.  Far from waning in the period since Engels was writing, the injustices he so clearly identified appear to have steadily expanded in scale and intensity, not least if we consider the contemporary urbanization of China, India, Africa and the ‘Middle East’ and ‘Far East’, and the massive displacement of working class people occurring in the name of economic growth, urban renaissance and modernization.  For example, in an influential essay in New Left Review in 2008, David Harvey draws on Engels’s pamphlet to make connections between the forms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in 19th century Paris and mid-twentieth century New York and those taking place in cities like Mumbai and Shanghai today.  Harvey’s essay surely marks an important stepping-stone for further critical analyses, which could prove especially timely in light of the current global financial and economic crisis; one that was intricately intertwined with the housing question through the introduction of financial instruments and innovations in various sectors of housing.

In assessing the enduring relevance of Engels’s contribution, one crucial aim of this session to begin forging a conceptually rigorous approach towards locating the economic and political relations that shape a range of domiciliary forms – gentrification, slum developments, ghettos, condo verticality, gating, and suburbs in all their shapes (pristine, distressed etc) – which at times remain analytically separated in so much research.  In this spirit, we invite theoretically salient and empirically grounded contributions from scholars working on the following topics, where revisiting The Housing Question proves analytically and politically progressive:

-       Rethinking housing, ‘land’ and ‘property’

-       New modes of urbanization and habitat

-       Urban futures: ghettos, gatings, gentrifications, slums

-       Non-profit/social housing – what’s left?

-       Urban commons – what’s left?

-       Housing questions: justice/injustice

-       Urban revolutions: bourgeois and insurgent

-       Housing, land and the state

-       From financial looting to squatting

-       Values of use and exchange: excavating mobilities/Immobilities

Contributors are invited to submit a 250 word abstract by 16^th September to one or more of the organizers:

Henrik Gutzon Larsen (hgl@plan.aau.dk)

Anders Lund Hansen (anders.lund_hansen@keg.lu.se)

Gordon MacLeod (Gordon.MacLeod@durham.ac.uk)

Tom Slater (tom.slater@ed.ac.uk)

In terms of the blog, I promise to keep it updated. I hope to post on the following in the coming months:

1) More on my book-in-progress on the history of squatting in Berlin.

2) Other work that I’ve been doing on the history and politics of squatting in the UK as well as elsewhere in Western Europe and with a particular focus on the proposed criminalization currently being mooted by the coalition government.

3) Broader theoretical reflections on the assembling and composition of a radical urbanism (especially with a view to rethinking conceptual placeholders such as ‘the commons’, ‘antagonism’, and ‘alterity’). I hope there will be a way to connect this up with the ideas and practices of the growing anti-cuts movement in the UK and elsewhere.

4) I would also like to spend more time thinking critically about the affective politics of activism and how hard it is to create meaningful spaces of refuge, resistance, and subversion (especially in the face of exhaustion and burn-out and against a backdrop of economic austerity and precarity).

5) To return to an original motivation for this blog and post regularly on art (exhibitions and criticism)

I look forward to exploring new directions on the blog in coming months and appreciate the support that it has already received.