That's A Link

Two articles from my ‘Wet Ontologies’ project, both co-authored with Kimberley Peters, are due for publication in the next month or two: ‘Wet Ontologies, Fluid Dynamics: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking’, which will be published in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, and a companion paper, ‘Volume and Vision: Toward a Wet Ontology’, which will be published in Harvard Design Magazine.

Phil Steinberg has been a crucial voice in kritik debates on the oceans topic, and his recent work has proven just as incisive as his earlier critical investigations of oceans, ideology, and constructions of the 'void.' According to today's blog post, he'll be putting out two more articles in the very near future -- be sure to grab them as soon as they come out.

Well, it's been several months since I've posted anything, but I wanted to forward along the news of the latest Society & Space: Environment & Planning D issue. I don't have access to it, so I've had to email a few friends for article copies, but nearly every title looks interesting. A few I'll point out:

"Rancière, politics, and the Occupy movement," by Keith Bassett, appears to (obviously) discuss Ranciere in context of Occupy, and addresses implications of state engagement or disengagement. Ranciere is a criminally underrecognized position with solid link arguments versus both normal policy affs and several strands of critical thought, and this article probably provides some good game on the alt debate.

"Governing vitalities and the security state," by Gerry Kearns, develops a criticism of Foucault's alleged "state-centric" (rather than states-centric) analysis of biopolitics. Judging by the abstract, I would guess it probably could be used for the security K against economy or hegemony impacts.

"Intensive mobilities: figurations of the nomad in contemporary theory," by Thomas Sutherland, discusses the concept of the nomad as established by Deleuze & Guattari and expanded upon by writers such as Rosi Braidotti, and seems to advance a critique premised on a reintroduction of history against the presupposed universality of fluidity and becoming.

As is typical for me, I basically forgot about this blog thing for several months, but hopefully today will get me back in the swing of things. There's a new issue of Games and Culture out, and it includes a couple interesting pieces, including one on the excellent Portal series of video games. While debate isn't a video game, it is probably a game (to some extent) and so debaters may be interested in the article "The Construction of Play: Rules, Restrictions, and the Repressive Hypothesis" for framework debates. The author contests the "repressive hypothesis" of rules, which takes them to be mere negative constraints, and argues instead for a more positive understanding of rules as both enabling and disabling certain practices. I would hazard a guess that this could be used to defend limits standards against some postmodern-ish critical affs. 

Bruno Latour - "War and Peace in Time of Ecological Conflicts"

I read this piece on philosopher-ish Nick Land today, and I really enjoyed it. I still feel like nothing I say really does justice to Land's work, so I'll just provide this quote as a preview [I think it says enough]:

"Here was a young lecturer, working in arguably one of the most staid disciplines in the academy, who in the mid-90s energetically addressed issues that at the time were decidedly outré, but are now a staple of debate: biotechnology, radical Islam, the internet as an addictive drug, the rise of China as an economic power – all make appearances in Fanged Noumena, in texts penned while Land’s peers rattled on about (at best) poetry and painting, Presence and the history of metaphysics.

In case you haven't heard, US air strikes have killed 50+ alleged militants and civilians in Yemen over the past few days, a number that positions this flurry of attacks as some of the deadliest in the Yemen during the War on Terror. There's an interesting post on Just Security doing a near-line-by-line annotation of the NYT article on the subject. 2014 had been a relatively restrained year for drone strikes thus far, with the US instituting what appears to be an indefinite ban on strikes in Pakistan, and with Yemen banning non-CIA strikes within its borders [against the wishes of those who would transfer all targeted killing authority away from the CIA over concerns that it is becoming a 'paramilitary' force and not an intelligence agency]. Whether Obama is abiding by his "new rules" for drone strikes announced in a speech at the National Defense University last May is unclear, and desires for greater transparency and accountability over the process remain fleeting.

Now would be as good a time as any to watch Jeremy Scahill's "Dirty Wars," just posted on Netflix. Dirty Wars shines in its overview of some of the institutional dynamics of targeted killing, and in particular is great in portraying the rise of JSOC's role within the War on Terror, especially under Obama's presidency. Like many documentaries, I thought it focused a bit too much on the narrator, Scahill, but I guess you have to present information somehow. Overall, I highly recommend it.

Dirty Wars also works as a great visual representation of some of the ideas proposed in Derek Gregory's recent essay in Radical Philosophy, "Drone Geographies." Although the iPhone app Gregory discusses in his introduction has since been approved by Apple (contrary to Gregory's point, that the American public finds info about victims of drone strikes to appalling to see or hear), the rest of the piece is a pretty strong outline of some of the "matrices of military violence" at play in proposing, justifying, and carrying out drone strikes. For Gregory, drone strikes rely on a kind of geographical distancing, wherein legalist technocracy distracts and diverts the public gaze away from the material circumstances of the strikes themselves -- the smoke, the rubble, smells of burning, the death and injury, psychological trauma, and so on - onto more abstract terms of discussion like "transparency and accountability." I think this section of Gregory's piece is extremely powerful:

"...when you ask people who live under the drones what they want, Tahir continues, They do not say ‘transparency and accountability’. They say they want the killing to stop."

In this short excerpt from an upcoming book, Gastón Gordillo proposes that we think the limitless becoming of the ocean as void, an impenetrable and opaque depth that is material but ungrounded. Against modernist views of the ocean as a fluid space of nature to be tamed by human culture, Gordillo begins to trace the operation of the ocean as one kind of terrain among others, like grass, mountains, bridges, buildings, and so on.

"The ocean is certainly the largest expression of liquid space on Earth. Comprising over two-thirds of the surface of the planet, the oceanic void has been one of the most powerful and determining spatial forces in human history. Its most defining feature is that, for the human body, it creates the generalized ungrounding we call drowning. The history of imperial and capitalist expansion into the totality of the planet has revolved, to a great extent, around technological efforts to counter this ungrounding created by the eternal, ever-mobile becoming of liquid space."

An interesting exchange proceeds in the comments section, wherein Philip Steinberg suggests that this term 'void' is too wedded to a sense of emptiness or indeterminacy that may ideological obscure important and socially-relevant material processes occurring within oceanic space. Gordillo clarifies that his preference for this concept of 'void' draws from its usage by Badiou, who stresses the multiple and pluralising character of the void in set theory.