archive : s0metim3s

… there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon a parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so, before him … - William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769).

And here’s a pdf for the frontier household piece.

Here’s the spiel for a workshop, as part of “Seeing Through the Emperor’s New Clothes,” a conference on the GFC in September:

Quite possibly the funniest 7.30 Report story I’ve seen for a while (ok, it’s one of the very few episodes I’ve watched in years) - Greg Hoy’s report on gold, stimuli, inflationary prospects and the UK/AU Governments’ predilection for Keynes versus the PRC’s reading of Marx.

Here’s the pre-print version of the oikopolitics piece, slated for Global South. Apparently I’m supposed to remove the link when it appears in print. I think this is the fragment I like the most:

If the modern financial system is premised on the historical emergence of national debt, the late twentieth witnessed the democratisation of its risks through the household. And yet, as it turns out, the dispersal of risk opened the door to the cascading effects of subprime instability and default. The idealised household had not taken hold in any generalised sense, much as it imposed itself as norm, and beyond any attempt to assume that all of those who defaulted could not pay rather than had decided not to or, more broadly put, did not budget and toil as they ought.

Here’s the abstract for the oikopolitics piece:

In his 2009 Inaugural speech, US President Obama spoke of America’s future by not only invoking We the People’s faith in founding ideals and documents, but he did so – by this time, as his signature rhetoricity – by evoking storms. Every “so often,” he remarked, “the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.” He also spoke of an immeasurable “sapping of confidence” in America’s futurity, alongside “indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics,” such as foreclosures, rising unemployment, and a costly health care. The essay that follows was written just prior to that speech, but it nevertheless attempts to understand how the measurable acquaints itself with the immeasurable (desire and the future) through a meshing of gender, race, sex, labour and desire in the accounting of the household – and the oikos, in all its etymological tightening. The question, in one sense, is how the coincidence of crises financial and climatic might unfold and recompose an oikopolitics. The concept of an oikopolitics is offered here as something far more explanatory of the genealogical and familial than understandings of sovereignty through a biopolitical lens have admitted, and something far less subjectively universal than many accounts of affect and intimacy aspire to. It does not simply point to a blurring of the classical distinction between the public realm of politics and the private domain of the household in the trammeling of arousal to labouring, and a socio-political horizon whose possible forms of relation are those of the national state conceived as home. It is also explanatory of the ways politics assumes the task of securing an intimately normative disposition, the raising of a properly political subject on the grounds of the at once familial and national. It is, in another sense then, a post-autonomist contribution to discussions that, thankfully, remain turbulent.

A couple of paragraphs of an essay - “Oikopolitics, and Storms” - I just hit send on last night. On Fordism and post-Fordism, the coincidence of financial and climatic crises, environmental audits, war and more - but in a more specific sense an argument about why it might be better to think these and other questions through the wider, more complex lens of oikopolitics along with the more narrow (though purportedly neutral) concepts of biopolitics, affect or labour.