archive : s0metim3s

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.

Bryan - of the always-excellent Subtopia - plays p.123 tag, and having piled hangover upon hangover, I imagine, foolishly, this is going to be a quick and easy post.

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Mine below the fold - and Amie’s and Pom’s, they be tagged.

Some of the talk given at SydneyU earlier this year, and posted in light of current ‘events’.

First, it’s not surprising that the emergence of a so-called global activism was accompanied by debates about activism as such. Much of this turns around the crisis which Brett alluded to earlier: the refinement of ‘crowd control’ techniques that involve massive and often pre-emptive repression, movements increasingly constrained by barricades, designated protest zones, lockdowns and ever-more severe controls on migration during such events. But these are, let’s say, the external conditions of that crisis; whereas the crisis of activism itself runs much deeper. Because activism too has its borders, and the shape of these are not all that different from those more famously exercised upon it. Though it’s important to note that the specific techniques and levels of force do differ, the contours of those limits are remarkably similar.

Discussions of Schmitt’s concept of the political (das politische) prompted a whole series of explorations that turned around the difference between politics and the political or, as rendered in French and Italian, respectively: le politique and la politique, il politico and la politica. I’ll add πολιτικον, πολιτικa - though I’m not sure of how or whether this has traveled or might be read back (and wonder whether I have the tenacity required) through Plato and Aristotle.

Whether the concept of the political can be ascribed to Arendt as well as Schmitt has been a matter of debate, but it’s become more or less accepted that Arendt did indeed write of the political. ( Contrariwise, see eg, Though, if anyone has access to John Ely’s “The Polis and ‘the Political’,” Thesis 11, 46, 1996, I’d be glad of a read.)

Continuing the discussions on human rights (and touching on the brief discussion on Ranciere, as well as Marx’s political anthropology), and so as to think through the complexities by which human rights discourses amount to a depoliticisation, but also are part of the politicisation of life - here are some of my notes on the depoliticisation aspect.

Arendt insists that it is false that “there is something political in man that belongs to his essence.”