The 21st century began with the first planetary uprising of the digital age: the antiglobalization, or altermondialisation movement. Though it was largely brought to a halt following the events of 9/11, one decade lat... more abstractThe 21st century began with the first planetary uprising of the digital age: the antiglobalization, or altermondialisation movement. Though it was largely brought to a halt following the events of 9/11, one decade later Occupy Wall Street has signaled the renewal and reinvention of global dissidence. In this book, cultural and political theorist Jason Adams considers the significance of the events through one of the primary temporal and technocultural elements that made them possible: the condition of realtime. Moving beyond generalized discourses of speed and acceleration, Adams focuses instead on the speed-limit, the temporality of instantaneity that has altered thought, control and resistance alike, providing an opportunity to renew and reimagine the ancient Greek concept of kairos. Centered upon the work of the French technocultural theorist Paul Virilio, Occupy Time investigates the manner in which a digitized habitus of sharing and commenting, tweeting and texting, blogging and streaming has circumvented logics of speed and acceleration, producing an immediacy that collapses time, space and perception alike, for better and for worse. Although centered upon Virilio's writings, Adams does not merely defend them, but thinks with and against, juxtaposing his thought to philosophers from Kant to Deleuze, Marx to Agamben, Benjamin to Merleau-Ponty and Arendt to Foucault. In doing so, he delivers fresh insight into an often-misunderstood body of work, demonstrating through the example of the Occupy Wall Street movement that far from merely theorizing a technocultural dystopia, a full consideration of Virilio's writings contributes instead to a time-sensitive, materialist theory of resistance. (PDF is from original Critical Inquiry version)

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Cultural Studies, Music, Media Studies, Cultural Theory, Race and Ethnicity, and 2 more

More Info: Jason Adams and Arun Saldanha, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Officially accepted for publication, January 2012. *** The original call for papers: "While the relevance of Gilles Deleuze for a materialist feminism has been amply demonstrated in the last two decades or so, what this key philosopher of difference and desire can do for the theorization of race and racism has received surprisingly little attention. This is despite the explicit formulation of a materialist theory of race as instantiated in colonization, sensation, capitalism and culture, particularly in Deleuze's collaborative work with Félix Guattari. Part of the explanation of why there has been a relative silence on Deleuze within critical race and colonial studies is that the philosophical impetus for overcoming eugenics and nationalism have for decades been anchored in the conventional readings of Kant and Hegel, which Deleuze laboured to displace. Through the vocabularies of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and moral philosophy, even the more sophisticated theorizations of race today continue the neo-Kantian/neo-Hegelian programme of retrieving a cosmopolitan universality beneath the ostensibly inconsequential differences called race. Opposing this idealism, Deleuze instead asks whether the conceptual basis for this program, however commendable, does not foreclose its political aims, particularly in its avoidance of the material relations it seeks to change. The representationalism and oversimplified dialectical frameworks guiding the dominant antiracist programme actively suppress an immanentist legacy which according to Deleuze is far better suited to grasping how power and desire differentiate bodies and populations: the legacies of Spinoza, Marx and Nietzsche; biology and archeology; Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac; cinema, architecture, and the fleshy paintings of Francis Bacon. It is symptomatic too, that Foucault's influential notion of biopolitics, so close to Deleuze and Guattari's writings on the state, is usually taken up without its explicit grounding in race, territory and capitalist exchange. Similarly, those (like Negri) that twist biopolitics into a mainly Marxian category, meanwhile, lose the Deleuzoguattarian emphasis on racial and sexual entanglement. It would seem then, that it is high time for a rigorous engagement with the many conceptual ties between Foucault's lectures on biopolitics, Deleuze and Guattari, and Deleuze-influenced feminism, to obtain a new materialist framework for studying racialization as well as the ontopolitics of becoming from which it emerges. While it will inevitably overlap in a few ways, this collection will differ from work done under the "postcolonial" rubric for a number of important reasons. First, instead of the mental, cultural, therapeutic, or scientific representations of racial difference usually analyzed in postcolonial studies, it will seek to investigate racial difference "in itself", as it persists as a biocultural, biopolitical force amid other forces. For Deleuze and Guattari, as for Nietzsche before them, race is far from inconsequential, though this does not mean it is set in stone."

Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Anarchist Studies, and Alterglobalisation

More Info: "The Constellation of Opposition". D. Rousselle and S. Evren, eds. Post-Anarchism: a Reader (Pluto Press: London, 2011) Originally, I was the editor of (what later became) this book, which I began collecting proposals and chapters for in 2003, while completing my MA research. I eventually handed the project off to Duane Rousselle and Sureyyya Evren in 2006, who went on to complete the majority of the necessary labor between them. Although I moved on in order to concentrate on completing my PhD, I did contribute a chapter, originally written in 2003, which considers the network-centric, "anarchistic" organizational structure of the post-Seattle alterglobalization movement through the work of Alberto Melucci, Michel Foucault, Peyman Vehabzadeh, Giorgio Agamben and others. *** Book description: "Post-anarchism has been of considerable importance in the discussions of radical intellectuals across the globe in the last decade. In its most popular form, it demonstrates a desire to blend the most promising aspects of traditional anarchist theory with developments in post-structuralist and post-modernist thought. Post-Anarchism: A Reader includes the most comprehensive collection of essays about this emergent body of thought, making it an essential and accessible resource for academics, intellectuals, activists and anarchists interested in radical philosophy. Many of the chapters have been formative to the development of a distinctly 'post-anarchist' approach to politics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Others respond to the so-called 'post-anarchist turn' with caution and scepticism. The book also includes original contributions from several of today's 'post-anarchists', inviting further debate and new ways of conceiving post-anarchism across a number of disciplines." *** 2003 Call for Papers: "The Postanarchism Reader: Writings at the Intersection of Anarchism and Poststructuralism" edited by Jason Adams Deadline for Paper Proposals: November 2003 This callout is for a book proposal that I am putting together for a publisher in NYC on the intersections between poststructuralism and anarchism; the proposal is for it to be a sort of anthology of writings by various radical theorists who have looked at this issue either directly in terms of articulating or critiquing the idea of a "poststructuralist anarchism" (Todd May, Saul Newman, Lewis Call, etc.) or by using both poststructuralist and anarchist theorists together in the same essay in a way that might be thought of as a "postructuralist anarchist critique" of some aspect of politics, history, society or culture. So far I have secured contributions from Saul Newman, Jesse Cohn, Shawn Wilbur, Ian Angus and Ashanti Alston amongst others - if you or someone you know would be interested in contributing an essay for this, please contact Jason Adams at xxxxxxxxxxs@yahoo.com From the information I have at this point it seems that this proposal will be put in the "serious consideration" pile as soon as it is received. So what I need right now is an idea of who would be interested, what they would write about and what title they might tentatively give to the essay they would contribute. For further information either email me at the contact listed above or visit the postanarchism listserv and homepage which is linked at http://www.spooncollective.org *** Excerpt from my contribution: "The protests that occurred around the world on November 30, 1999 (N30) were truly without precedent. They mark an important turning point in what had become increasingly fragmented struggles of new social movements constructed around various forms of antiauthoritarian politics, identity politics and ecological politics as well as traditional class struggle politics. In the cultural rebound against universalism after the 1960s, new social movements continuously sought to create autonomous space for the particularity of youth, queers, women and people of color as well as for the general ecology of the planet. While there have been enormous strides made since that time, the downside has been that in general, they have not succesfully articulated the intersectionalities of these various oppressions and resistances. This failure has resulted in fragmented, single-issue politics with n

Critical Theory, Philosophy of Technology, Political Theory, Cultural Theory, Martin Heidegger, and 2 more

More Info: "The Aesthetics of Resistance". Commentary chapter on Virilio's concept of grey ecology, in P. Virilio, H. Von Amelunxen and D. Burk, Grey Ecology (Atropos Press: New York, 2009). *** Virilio's earliest description of "Grey Ecology": "Today, when the extreme proximity of telecommunications is putting paid to the extreme speed limit of supersonic communication tools, would it not be appropriate to set up a grey ecology alongside the green? ...an ecology that would be concerned not only with the air and noise pollution of the big cities but, first and foremost, the sudden eruption of the 'world-city', totally dependent on telecommunications, that is being put in place at the end of the millennium" (Open Sky) *** Excerpt from my contribution, originally composed in 2003, centered on how Virilio imagines the arts could begin to reintroduce perspective into what had been presented as absolute, objective perception. As a side note, the excerpt is primarily expository rather than polemic: "From the basis of these critiques then, it can be inferred that a 'pitiful' aesthetics of resistance would be one that would mount a popular defense of the body, of alterity and of the aura of the original piece, since, as Virilio notes, 'what, at first glance, distinguishes the true work of art, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, is its 'infinite solitude', the enigmatic attraction of a uniqueness which, paradoxically, offers the multitude of its sensory adequations to those who, in looking at them, produce half the picture'. Which is why he sees Impressionism as having been such an important form of divergence when photography was first being introduced; as he explains, 'for one brief moment Impressionism - in painting and music - was able to retrieve the flavor of the ephemeral before the nihilism of contemporary technology wiped it out'. So, instead of the nihilistic embrace of acceleration, individuation and violence, Virilio argues that it is now time to reclaim the legacy of artistic resistance as seen in pitiful artists such as Debussy, Coltrane, Monet, Bonnard, Chaplin, Dylan and others of this ilk; as he puts it, 'it is once again necessary to diverge. It is necessary to become a critic. Impressionism was a critique of photography and documentary filmmaking a critique of propaganda. So today we have to institute an art criticism of the technosciences'. Just as 'Joyce, Beckett and Kafka were writers who diverged writing' even amongst the typically pitiless artists of cinema and television there have been those who have subverted the primary function of the medium, including such examples as Wiseman, Rosellini, Godard, and Loach; while he may be largely negative about the emancipatory potential of technique he clearly does not write it off altogether, it would be incorrect to assert that Virilio is some sort of technological reductionist,. However, although he has conceded the possibility of divergent music and film, it is no secret that Virilio is primarily interested in art forms which he sees as reinscribing the animal, social and territorial bodies within the hic et nunc of being; as he puts it, 'to think about the here and now, the temporality and presence of art, is to oppose its disappearance, to refuse being a collaborator'."

Critical Theory, Philosophy of Technology, Perception, New Media, Political Theory, and 7 more

More Info: "Speed", "Technology", "Perception/Perspective" and "State of Emergency" entries. J. Armitage, ed., The Virilio Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2012) *** Virilio sources I draw upon for entry on Speed: "Since speed was relative in the first democratic society, many men were needed to maneuver the triere, or to row. The need for manpower allowed for a fair distribution. This has been true of all relative speeds up to the plane" (Politics of the Very Worst) / "you don't have speed, you are speed" (Aesthetics of Disappearance) / "What, in fact, is the true tree? The one perceived in a pause, every detail of which can be visually itemized, every branch and leaf; or the one glimpsed flashing past in the stroboscopic unfolding of the car windscreen, or else through the strange skylight of television?" (Open Sky) Virilio sources I draw upon for entry on Technology: "Without the freedom to criticize technology, there is no 'technical progress' either, only a conditioning…and when this conditioning becomes cybernetic, as is happening today with the new technologies, the threat becomes considerable" (Politiics of the Very Worst) / "From now on, it seems necessary to determine what is negative in what seems positive. We know that we can only advance in technology by recognizing its specific accident" (Politiics of the Very Worst) / "I am not a prophet of doom, but simply a true lover of the new technologies" (Politiics of the Very Worst) / "it would be unforgiveable to allow ourselves to be deceived by the kind of utopia which insinuates that technology will ultimately bring about happiness and a greater sense of humanity. Apart from Hannah Arendt, no one has really re-entered this debate" (Politiics of the Very Worst) Virilio sources I draw upon for entry on Perception/Perspective: "The urbanization of real time is in fact first the urbanization of one's own body plugged into various interfaces" (Open Sky) / "Confusion of near and far, of inside and outside, disorders in common perception that will gravely affect the way we think…right here and now, life-size is no longer the yard stick of the real. The real is hidden in the reduction of images on the screen" (Open Sky) / "Critical mass, critical moment, critical temperature. You don't hear much about critical space, though. Why is this if not because we have not yet digested relativity, the very notion of space-time?" (Open Sky) / "speed not only allows us to get around more easily; it enables us above all too see, to hear, to perceive and to conceive the present world more intensely" (Open Sky) Virilio sources I draw upon for entry on State of Emergency: "The transition from the state of siege of wars of space to the state of emergency of the war of time only took several decades, during which the political era of the statesman was replaced by the apolitical era of the State apparatus." / "The loss of material space leads to the government of nothing but time." / "The more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases... [which] has caused the margins of political security to narrow still further, bringing us closer to the critical threshold where the possibilities for properly human political action will disappear in a 'State of Emergency'." / "War has thus moved from the action stage to the conception stage that, as we know, characterizes automation. Unable to control the emergence of new means of destruction, deterrence, for us, is tantamount to setting in place a series of automatisms, reactionary industrial and scientific procedures from which all political choice is absent." (all quotes from Speed and Politics, 1977).

Social Movements, Organizational Theory, Social Media, Media Theory, and Political Organization

More Info: "Liberal Organizations", and "Conservative Organizations", in G. Barnett and G. Golson, eds. Encyclopedia of Social Networks (London: Sage, September 2011). *** Book description: "This two-volume encyclopedia provides a thorough introduction to the wide-ranging, fast-developing field of social networking, a much-needed resource at a time when new social networks or "communities" seem to spring up on the internet every day. Social networks, or groupings of individuals tied by one or more specific types of interests or interdependencies ranging from likes and dislikes, or disease transmission to the "old boy" network or overlapping circles of friends, have been in existence for longer than services such as Facebook or YouTube; analysis of these networks emphasizes the relationships within the network. The Encyclopedia of Social Networks offers comprehensive coverage of the theory and research within the social sciences that has sprung from the analysis of such groupings, with accompanying definitions, measures, and research. Featuring approximately 350 signed entries, along with approximately 40 media clips, organized alphabetically and offering cross-references and suggestions for further readings, this encyclopedia opens with a thematic reader's guide in the front that groups related entries by topics. A chronology offers the reader historical perspective on the study of social networks. This two-volume reference work is a must-have resource for libraries serving researchers interested in the various fields related to social networks, including sociology, social psychology and communication and media studies." *** Excerpt from my contribution on Liberal Organizations: "The decline of chain and hub-styled networks that underpinned single-issue economic and identity politics that brought about the rise of the all-channel network coincided with transformations in the media environment as well, most notably the Internet. Particularly after its Web 2.0 version brought together what had been a disconnected mode of online presence based on discrete webpages as well as the convergence of earlier communication mediums into the newly all-channel-networked ones, what occurred simultaneously in the world of power conflict was a “political convergence”. This of course, matched the approach of liberal organizations well, because ideologically-speaking they typically affirm open-ended, cross-cultural political relations, rather than the predefined, culturally-bounded ones of social context. For whereas conservative organizations’ ties to the defense of existing power structures requires their involvement in both networks and hierarchies, liberal organizations have increasingly affirmed decentralization and pluralism itself as a political good. Because social networks become more complex along with the breakdown of hierarchy, the primary division in the forms they give rise to is that that between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary organizations."

Political Economy, Indigenous Studies, Intellectual Property, Music Technology, Copyright History, and 7 more

More Info: "United States Intellectual Property Policy" entry w/ Deborah Halbert & Subir Kole in Governing America: Major Policies and Decisions of Federal, State, and Local Government (New York: Facts on File, May 2011) *** Book description: "Much of the controversy and debate in modern American life revolves around such public policy issues as abortion, gun control, health care, and immigration. Governing America is a new, three-volume collection of essays designed to give readers the complete story behind the major policy issues of the 21st century. This comprehensive resource takes a unique perspective on public policy issues and presents them in historical context. Controversial issues along with the history of the U.S. government's involvement in these debates are examined in great detail by experts in the field." *** Excerpt from my contribution on Intellectual Property (w Deborah Halbert & Subir Kole): "The general trend of post-Lanham Act trademark policy has been towards extending the private domain into areas including all media platforms and sensory environments. From the perspective of many trademark holders, if they are to maintain the distinctiveness of their products in a rapidly changing world, broad protection is a necessary development. For instance, the Celia Clarke case might be read to suggest that a product's distinctiveness would become blurred if another manufacturer were to mark an otherwise nondescript product with a similar scent. Similarly, the free allocation of domain names might be said to create "confusion" amongst indiscriminate Internet users, as Panavision International v. Toeppen argued. Critics, however, charge that extensive trademarking impoverishes the diversity of human experience by universalizing “branding.” This perspective was popularized by Naomi Klein in No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies and by Adbusters magazine, both of which have garnered a significant audience. Whereas copyrights and patents are subject to termination after a certain period, trademarks last as long as the products to which they are attached continue to circulate in the marketplace. This means that those aspects of the world susceptible to the branding phenomenon remain under the control of the corporation indefinitely and do not enter the public domain as other forms of intellectual property would when their term of protection ends. The potentially unbounded lifespan of trademarks means that greater and greater areas of exchange become subject to privatization by commercial interests. However, the courts have not always ruled in favor of increased privatization, but have often affirmed the need to balance public and private interests."

Critical Theory, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Space, Karl Marx, and 3 more

More Info: Radical Philosophy 171 (Jan/Feb 2012) Shorter version of Critical Inquiry/In the Moment piece, from November 2011, included in Radical Philosophy's special Occupy issue. *** Excerpt: "Rather than maintaining this spatial strategy at all costs, what is most interesting about Occupy Wall Street now is that it is increasingly complicating static images of space: it is, in short, occupying time. This has meant a shift to a more fluid, tactical approach, one not only appropriate to the specifics of constantly changing situations deployed from above, but one that more importantly, allows it to bring forth new ones, from below. Indeed, the initial introduction of an open duration for the Occupy events already oriented the subsequent events primarily towards the temporal and the tactical rather than the spatial and strategic. This was truly its greatest strength and is the major reason the spatial strategy did as well as it did."

Critical Theory, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Space, Karl Marx, and 3 more

More Info: Critical Inquiry / In the Moment: November 2011 *** Excerpt: "Rather than maintaining this spatial strategy at all costs, what is most interesting about Occupy Wall Street now is that it is increasingly complicating static images of space: it is, in short, occupying time. This has meant a shift to a more fluid, tactical approach, one not only appropriate to the specifics of constantly changing situations deployed from above, but one that more importantly, allows it to bring forth new ones, from below. Indeed, the initial introduction of an open duration for the Occupy events already oriented the subsequent events primarily towards the temporal and the tactical rather than the spatial and strategic. This was truly its greatest strength and is the major reason the spatial strategy did as well as it did."

Military History, Cultural Studies, Social Movements, Media Studies, Political Theory, and 7 more

More Info: Boundary 2, 37:1 (2010). *** Excerpt: "This interview was conducted on the assumption that for all their seeming pessimism, Virilio's technocultural writings are more productively understood as a "Dionysian yes" than as a simple assertion of the no as such. In other words, they presuppose that the specificity of his thought derives not from "the political" itself (as it is explicitly stated) but from the aesthetic as itself political. The interview considers the extent to which Virilio in Deleuze's terms, "has placed the negative at the service of the power of affirming," even though he has done so in a subterranean manner that largely remains unnoticed by most of his commentators. The assumption that his concept of speed is unidimensional, that he conceives no alternative to the contemporary technoscientific order, and that all forms of mass culture are denounced as equally complicit with late modern power are thus destabilized with the first several questions. Similarly, the notion that Virilio holds that the manipulation of emotion negates democratic possibility as such, that citizenship is entirely incompatible with globalization, and that the only option in our time is to either entirely converge virtual and actual reality or to abandon one in favor of the other are complicated in the remaining ones. Overall, the interview suggests that Virilio himself must be considered as a vector whose concepts are always already in motion, indeed as one who may seem to be making a definitive statement at one moment, but who complicates that very assumption at another. Thus, while the many criticisms of his work are certainly formidable, it seeks to show that they can never adequately represent the composite nature of his thought itself, even when they go to great pains to avoid the suppression of ambiguity."

Political Theory, Anarchism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Postanarchism

More Info: Review essay of John Moore and Spencer Sunshine, eds. "I Am Not a Man, I am Dynamite: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition", published in Theory & Event (2008). *** Excerpt: "Like many of the other contributors to I Am Not a Man I Am Dynamite, Newman assembles an alternate deployment of anarchism, a post-anarchism that does not deny but instead affirms the reality of the will to power. This deployment assumes the full implications of Bakunin's famous maxim (as summarized by Lord Acton) that "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and counters the tradition's Manichean foundation with a more complex ethos of opposition, not simply to "power as such" but to domination in particular (that is, domination understood as the "assemblage of different power relations that have become congealed" [120]). In unblocking the flow of such forces, Newman holds, the will to power that informs all relations thereby circumvents the logic of domination, affirming instead the self-overcoming of rigidly-defined, essentialist political identities. If it didn't proceed to produce yet another "ism", perhaps it might thereby enable the emergence of a political resonance machine more capable of countering that which is so often thrown into motion by the Right.vi This is the power of Leigh Starcross' contribution, which also affirms the will to power, while positing an alternate anarchism by mining Emma Goldman's writings on Nietzsche. Goldman, Starcross notes, heralded the withering away of not only political “old values" but also cultural ones, in the "new literature" spearheaded by those whom she held to be "the most daring of the young iconoclasts."(30) Starcross emphasizes in particular the significance of an encounter with the music critic James Huneker, who mirrored the dominant reading of the thinker by insisting that Nietzsche was simply an aristocrat whose writings bear no political consequence. Goldman's pithy reply to the contrary, vindicated the politics of his aesthetics: "Nietzsche was not a social theorist but a poet, a rebel and an innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was of the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats."

Social Movements, Political Economy, Indigenous Studies, World Systems Analysis, Anarchist Studies, and 7 more

More Info: A. Starr and J. Adams, New Political Science 25:1 (2003) *** Excerpt: "Unlike the New Left, contemporary autonomous movements reject the seizure of power as a strategy just as surely as they reject the elusive politics of mass struggle; instead they work towards a “revolution of everyday life.”42 As George Katsiaficas documents, these movements appeared first in an autonomous version of the traditional class struggle movement of Autonomia in the late 1970s in Italy. Then, as Autonomia began to decline in the 1980s, the far more diverse form of the Autonomen first arose in the metropoles of Germany. Similar movements have since emerged in other areas of Europe, South America, North America, Asia and other parts of the world. The best-known and most influential of these newer autonomous movements is undoubtedly the Zapatista movement, based in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The Zapatistas have staked out a unique political space that goes beyond that of the autonomous movements that preceded them, while maintaining their strongest features. Like Autonomia and the Autonomen, the Zapatistas directly challenge neoliberal capitalism and defend the autonomy of local communities. The primary tactic they have employed has been the municipo libre (autonomous municipality) in which a majority of the residents vote to declare it autonomous from the state, which is promptly denounced as illegitimate. The Zapatistas have initiated a widely flung network of 38 core municipalities which control over a third of the political territory of Chiapas.43 The tactical logic at work here is nothing new; as one Zapatista remarked, “Zapata championed and fought for Indigenous ownership of land (which at that time, as now, meant removing the mestizo capitalist owners), and autonomous local political control.”44 But in taking up this old struggle, they also go far beyond it, effectively tearing open a new social and political space which encourages local, national, regional, and global networks of autonomous local groupings—not only municipo libres, but also affinity groups, subsistence cooperatives, collectivized clinics, autonomous schools, independent media groups, and other directly democratic community structures. This is the space from which a “triangular agrarista alliance began to evolve… between a periodically active village mass, the local militants, and… anarchist urban intellectuals and workers.”45 Now, eight years after the initial uprising, the Zapatistas are but one of many such autonomous movements in Mexico. Employing the municipo libre tactics, dozens of communities have declared themselves autonomous since 1995; while communities in neighboring states of Oaxaca, Hidalgo, Morelos, Michoacan, Mexico D.F., Tabasco, and Guerrero are laying the groundwork for such activity. 46 In Zapata’s home state of Morelos, for instance, inspired women of the new United Community of Tepotzlan (CUT) near Mexico City declared their town autonomous and defended it for over three years from attempted police incursions. In Tabasco, over 100 indigenous Chontales went to prison for seizing government buildings and declaring their region autonomous from both the state and the clutches of PEMEX Oil. In the state of Mexico, D.F., the 800,000 strong suburb of Nezahualcoyotl declared itself autonomous in 1998, as did the smaller community of San Nicolas Ecatepec. And in early 2002 the city of San Salvador Atenco was declared autonomous and defended in pitched battles following a victory against the building of a new international airport that would have appropriated 5000 hectares of farmland and displaced 4375 families."

Cultural Studies, American Politics, Political Economy, Indigenous Studies, Media Studies, and 12 more

More Info: PhD Dissertation, University of Hawaii, October 2010. *** Abstract: "Critiquing the Rawlsian use of Kant's philosophy of experience, which emphasizes a disembodied, disaffected image of citizenship, this dissertation draws on Benjamin's and Deleuze's intervention into the Critique of Judgment in order to affirm a "higher experience”, beyond that through which postwar American citizen-subjectivity is assembled. Specifically, it engages the dominant habits of perception and recollection as they emerged in the period with respect to sight, sound and smell, within the domains of indigeneity, raciality and ethnicity. In doing so, it challenges the Rawlsian approach to citizenship that emphasizes legal change alone, so as to emphasize the interconnection of legal and cultural transformation. New media technologies are emphasized, to demonstrate how they alter the collective memory of legal changes, particularly the Termination Act, the Immigration Act and the Civil Rights Act. Instead of a merely pluralist mode of political belonging, which Rawls tends to affirm (in which the new multicultural order can be understood as sufficient, so long as it does not challenge disembodied liberalism) it articulates one that is pluralizing, thinking through what it might mean to belong to becoming rather than being."

Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, American Politics, Media Studies, Internet Studies, and 5 more

More Info: MA Thesis, Simon Fraser University, November 2003. *** Abstract: "The argument that technological progress has been complementary to the fight against totalitarian forms of government is repeated often within the social sciences, based largely upon the notion that it had brought people from the most distant corners of the earth "together" in such a way as to inscribe the liberal democratic values of liberty, equality, fraternity at a global level for the first time. What these arguments ignore however, are the ties that bind the Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism to the mass liberal democracies under which we live today through their common embrace of the ideology of progress, under which all that is external to technology is redefined as raw material for its "inevitable" expansion. This thesis considers the shape that this complicity has taken over the course of the twentieth century through an engagement with the thought of Paul Virilio, whose life's work has demonstrated that technologization has depended upon the uprooting, fragmentation and totalization of the "animal bodies" of men, women and children , the "social bodies" of families, cities and nations, and the "territorial bodies" of forests, oceans and mountains. By drawing attention to this aspect of his thought, the study demonstrates the bases on which Virilio stakes his claim that the lived bodily experiences of the territorial and social ecologies has been subordinated to the artificial prosthetic experience of the technical ecology, thus laying the groundwork for a totalitarian individualism to take over where the conviviality of the "political body" left off. The study not only analyzes the deconstructive effects of technology on political community, but also investigates the many attempts of civilian populations to mount a popular defense against such incursions, while also considering the question of how the disassembled political body might be reconstructed through the reinvention of art, architecture and the city. Ultimately, the thesis concludes that while Virilio is pessimistic about the liberating potentiality of technology under fascism, Communism and liberalism, he nevertheless allows for the possibility of a "new politics" and a "new technology" through his uniquely phenomenological and anarchist approach."

American Politics, New Media, Political Theory, International Studies, Border Studies, and 3 more

More Info: Borderlands 5:2 (2006). *** Excerpt: "Shortly before the 'real' state of emergency that occurred with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, which was not immediately declared even after it occurred, two state governors in the American Southwest declared a preemptive 'state of emergency' of their own. The difference was that in the latter, the action was ostensibly intended to stem the flow of migrant bodies from 'outside' into the territorialities over which they presided 'inside', so as to maintain the illusion of an unambiguous polity. In doing so, they released millions of dollars of federal monies to their aid, which was then used to impress upon local municipalities the 'need' to govern their jurisdictions in line with the policy of the state in which they operated, while also setting the stage for HR-4437, the draconian anti-immigration bill supported by Republicans. Opportunistic events of this order are certainly nothing new - they build on the considerable hysteria that has persistently recurred in the United States over migration from Mexico into the Southwestern border-states, which in the past has led lawmakers to such lengths as California's 'Proposition 187' (Shapiro, 1997). Like the more recent bills, 'Proposition 187' essentially denied migrants the right to basic human services such as healthcare and education, while effectively turning public servants of all kinds into border patrol agents and infinitely pluralizing the locality of the 'border' itself."

Cultural Studies, American Politics, Media Studies, Political Theory, Technology and Society, and 1 more

More Info: CTheory TD45 (2006). Review essay of Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, Michael Degener, trans., London: Continuum, 2005 and Paul Virilio, City of Panic, Julie Rose, trans., Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. *** Excerpt: "Over the course of the year leading up to the Hurricane Katrina event, a multiplicity of so-called "natural disasters" swept East Asia and South Asia. Each of these disasters appeared almost instantaneously in popular culture as stabilized meaning-events: the 100,000 dead from the Southeast Asian Tsunami, the 35,000 dead from the Pakistan Earthquake and then, in the North American context, the nearly 500,000 displaced from Hurricane Katrina, emerged not so much as the objectified subjects of an instrumental political structure concerned primarily with abstract figures and statistics so as to render its governability intelligible, but rather as merely "unfortunate" bodies who found themselves in "the wrong place at the wrong time". Such reckless naturalizations of what are in fact "nature-cultures" (Latour) are also for that very reason wholly political disasters (the considerable effects of which could have been massively reduced). They obfuscate the way in which the technobureaucratic logic of the late modern epoch has grafted itself onto nearly every remaining pretense of "democracy" in the early 21st century, particularly that of "citizenship".[2] Indeed, in the increasingly biopolitical moment in which we live, it is more and more as if the concept of freedom itself has become synonymous with that of emergency as its necessary correlate, just as being a "citizen" no longer signifies "participation" but rather "subjectification." In such a political environment, the "natural disaster" actually becomes crucial to the survival of a state wracked by a constantly deepening crisis of legitimacy. Is this not precisely the subtextual foundation of the ubiquitous American bumpersticker that interpellates the nation's highway populations with the slogan "Freedom Is Not Free"? In moments such as these, the post-9/11 reorganization of American cultural memory negates not only Muslims and Arabs who have been unofficially declared enemies of the state, but extends this dichotomization to the thousands of black bodies in New Orleans left to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, while legitimizing the securitization of "life as such" for the foreseeable future."

Political Theory, Early Christianity, Giorgio Agamben, Political Theology, Slavoj Zizek, and 2 more

More Info: Journal of Philosophy & Scripture 3:1 (2005). *** Excerpt: "There is however, a history of the subject that can be mined for insights into the history of the citizen, one that emerges out of the work of Martin Heidegger on the one hand, for whom the temporality of being-in-the-world was most revealing, and that of Louis Althusser on the other, whom, in his celebrated essay on interpellation, made a special point to consider the peculiarity of the Christian contribution to that project, arguing that because of its demand for belief it actually serves as the 'number one' example of an Ideological State Apparatus.6 His student Michel Foucault can be understood as having extended and radicalized the work of both, producing an extensive corpus that can be read as a genealogy of the subject as such, stretching from Dream and Existence to Confessions of the Flesh.7 While his earlier work tended to suggest that the subject emerged only with the Enlightenment period, coinciding with the birth of the modern state in the post-Westphalian dispensation, the later volumes on the History of Sexuality, which were intended as his magnum opus, mark the first ventures into the question of governmentality, which he always insisted upon having originated with 'Christianity'in late antiquity. What this history suggests, is that one cannot understand the governmentalization of the state, and thereby of its modern citizensubject, without also appreciating the extent to which what Nikolas Rose called 'the governing of the soul', began not in the modern period, but with the confessional practices of early Christianity, which was itself a redeployment of the earlier Platonic practices of the self in ancient Greece. As his remarks on the Anabaptists indicate, Foucault believed that an emancipatory theological strand emerged at various times and places within the history of Christianity, a tendency I identify in the conclusion as indicative of the failure of the Roman Empire's redeployment of Pauline 'Christianity' to completely recuperate it, a strange reversal in which what had began as an anti-identitarian heretical movement within Judaism was instrumentally redeployed as the most virulent subsumption of difference in the history of the Occident.8 Indeed, if one revisits the archive, it quickly becomes clear that this is precisely the moment in which the confessional basis of the authority of the Catholic Church, which Foucault called 'pastoral power', meant that one must recognize the 'truth' of oneself as a sinner in the positive sense, thus laying the foundation for the productivity of subjectivity in modern liberal modes of governance."

Location: Arkansas State University Political Science

More Info: My lecture notes for the talk.

Event Date: Feb 11, 2011

Organization: Open Forum on the Tunisian and Egyptian Uprisings

More Info: This is the flyer from my upcoming course at Arkansas State University.