°Legal, Tender

October 30, 2009

this cult of continuity, the confident assumption of knowing to whom and to what we owe our existence - whence the importance of the idea of ‘origins’ – Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”

What passes for legal tender is a convention for the reckoning of debts – and a legalised violence steps in where convention falters.


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°Trespass

July 23, 2009

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°Without the crossing there is no border

June 18, 2009


Opening scenes from a film by Ursula Biemann, set in the Mexican-US (maquiladora) border town of Ciudad Juarez - on the feminisation of the border region through a reading of the gendered labor division, prostitution, the entertainment industry, and sexual violence.

See also, elsewhere: SOAS cleaners - deportations, occupations, some success | Calais NoBorder Camp | “Academics plan to boycott new [UK] student immigration rules” | “Australian bosses are racist when it’s time to hire” | Video of deportation from Madrid (awful)


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°Subprime

April 15, 2009

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.


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°oikopolitical

January 28, 2009

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.


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°A real Prince, 2

January 23, 2009

Another few fragments from the oikopolitics piece - because some people think I’ve been uncanny and coincidental. Me, I’m just wondering if someone can send me a url to Obama’s speech, and whether I have the time or inclination to rewrite some of these final paragraphs. Thanks to Eric for a url to the Inaugural. But, yes, storms …. And I forgot to work in a quote from Machiavelli where he talks about the Prince arriving as the redeemer - though it’s implicit.


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°Oikopolitics

January 20, 2009

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.


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