Politics and Ontology CFP

For the Society for Social and Political Philosopy’s meetings to be held in conjunction with:

SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) in 2010.

The SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to:

Politics and Ontology

We seek to explore and challenge the hypothesis that all political theory presupposes an ontology. From the presumption of universal rationality, to the potency of class consciousness, to the privileges shaped by the social existence of race, gender and sexuality, political order always is or implies an ontological order. In many respects, the ontological question is the political question. Struggles for political change are as much about the expansion (or contraction) of shared ontological categories as they are about the rewriting of legislation or the redistribution of power and resources . The traditional allocation of rights, for instance, has been determined almost entirely on the basis of who, or what, one is presumed to be. While ontology and politics share a long, interconnected history, for much of modern history the connection between them has been downplayed or denied, since liberalism is premised on bracketing such supposedly insoluble and inherently conflictual metaphysical questions. In recent decades, however, this has changed. The explicit investigation of political ontology has taken center stage and, as a consequence, what we understand to be political or ontological has changed as well. Politics is no longer limited to the state, but permeates all of social existence to include the terrain of imagination, emotions, and representation. Ontology is no longer an ultimate foundation, but is constituted through relations of power and affects. In the works of such authors as Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, Giorgio Agamben, William Connolly, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, and many others, the subject of political ontology has surfaced in an array of new formulations. For this panel, we invite papers that extend this investigation or that challenge this resurgence, both within the context of work that has already been done and in anticipation of work yet to be conceived.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2010 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2010). The SPEP Conference is scheduled for October 2010, in Montreal, Canada.

Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY.

Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to: papers@sspp.us

Roundtable on Marx’s Capital CFP

Roundtable on Marx’s Capital

Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, February 24-27, 2011

Our second Roundtable will explore Volume One of Marx’s Capital (1867). We chose this text because the resurgence in references to and mentions of Marx – provoked especially by the financial crisis, but presaged by the best-seller status of Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Marx’s surprising victory in the BBC’s “greatest philosopher” poll – has only served to highlight the fact that there have not been any new interpretive or theoretical approaches to this book since Althusser’s in the 1960s.

The question that faces us is this: Does the return of Marx mean that we have been thrust into the past, such that long “obsolete” approaches have a newfound currency, or does in mean, on the contrary, that Marx has something new to say to us, and that new approaches to his text are called for?

The guiding hypothesis of this Roundtable is that if new readings of Capital are called for, then it is new readers who will produce them.

Therefore, we are calling for applications from scholars interested in approaching Marx’s magnum opus with fresh eyes, willing to open it to the first page and read it through to the end without knowing what they might find. Applicants need not be experts in Marx or in Marxism. Applicants must, however, specialize in some area of social or political philosophy. Applicants must also be interested in teaching and learning from their fellows, and in nurturing wide-ranging and diverse inquiries into the history of political thought.

If selected for participation, applicants will deliver a written, roundtable-style presentation on a specific part or theme of the text. Your approach to the text might be driven by historical or contemporary concerns, and it might issue from an interest in a theme or a figure (be it Aristotle or Foucault). Whatever your approach, however, your presentation must centrally investigate some aspect of the text of Capital. Spaces are very limited.

Applicants should send the following materials as email attachments (.doc/.rtf/.pdf) to papers@sspp.us by September 15, 2010:

1. Curriculum Vitae
2. One page statement of interest in the Roundtable. (Please include a discussion of the topics you would be willing to explore in a roundtable presentation. Please also discuss the projected significance of participation for your research and/or teaching.)

Ben Fowkes’ translation of Capital (Viking/Penguin, 1976) is the official translation for the Roundtable, and should be used for page citations. However, applicants are strongly encouraged to review either the German text of Capital (the 2nd edition of 1873 is the basis for most widely available texts) or the French translation (J. Roy, 1872-5), which was the last edition Marx himself oversaw to publication; both of these are widely available on-line.

All applicants will be notified of the outcome of the selection process via email on or before October 15, 2010. Participants will be asked to send a draft or outline of their presentation to papers@sspp.us by January 15, 2011 so that we can finalize the program.

In order to participate in the Roundtable (but not to apply or to be selected), you must be a member of the Society in good standing. You can become a member of the Society by following the membership link at: http://www.sspp.us/

Crazy Life

Life has been pretty crazy the past few weeks. I’ve presented 3 papers at two conferences and I’ve been managing to keep up with my school work pretty well too. Hence, no posts for a while…

I’m going to eventually get some of my 3 papers up on here, but for now, just some good news. A few weeks ago I was invited to give a paper as part of a panel at the 2010 AERA Annual Conference in Denver, CO. I had to submit an abstract and then the panel had to be approved by the big-wigs at AERA. I found out today that it was accepted, so I’ll be giving my first invited paper in late April or early May as part of a panel called, “Unusual Spaces: Exploring unconventional sites for the study of teaching and learning.”

AERA changed its process for reviewing and accepting proposals this year – I’m also serving as Co-chair and Co-program Chair for the Foucault and Education Special Interest Group, so I’m familiar with the updated process – and it was much harder to get accepted than in the past. Last year (2009) there were about 1400 paper sessions; this year (2010) there will only be about 1000, a really big cut. AERA is trying to improve the “quality” of the presentations, which is all part of their effort to become more narrowly scientific, which is all due to pressure from government and policy makers and uninformed members of the public to be of more use to setting “good policy.” Clearly I don’t like this development. So, it’s nice to get accepted, do some radical work, scare some people (no joke, I was told I was scary at the most recent conference I went to), and subvert the agenda a bit.

Here’s the abstract for the paper I’ll be giving:

The Pedagogies of Markets: Rethinking the Educational Role of Capital

Under the contemporary conditions of capitalism, education is a key component that articulates with other forces to create specific conditions for life to exist, particularly as productive life. The thought that man’s purpose may be to not work is perhaps unthinkable in the context of cell phones, laptop computers, wireless internet, and 24-hour connectivity to work.

Following Judith Butler, I will explore the epistemological and ontological questions of “framing” markets. As she notes, “the frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable) are politically saturated” (2009, 1). However, Butler is quick to remind us that this epistemological question is deeply entwined with an ontological one because we have to accompany the question what do we know with what is it that we know?

At issue is the way markets operate in (at least) a triple-layered fashion. At a local farmer’s market, people encounter the physicality of the market itself. Walking through the stalls and talking with vendors, they then encounter a market based on meeting human needs organized largely around use-value exchange. But they also encounter a market that is global, exploitative of labor-power, highly volatile, and normalized through the exchange of money for goods, the sale of non-local products, and the presence of security guarantors such as the police. The experience of the layered market is not an abnormal one in American lives, and must surely have educative impact.

But such an analysis has largely been done before, by Giroux, McLaren, Apple, and others. However, these thinkers tend to homogenize capitalism as something to be resisted, which is, to me, an uncontroversial impulse. Where they tend to fall short, though, is that “the market” is often perceived to be the site of injustice instead of a site that can be re-appropriated as anti-capitalist. Using the works of Hardt and Negri (2001; 2005; 2009), DeLanda (1997; 2006), and Marx (1990), I will discuss the educative epistemological and ontological frames of markets and provide the beginnings of a way to think markets otherwise and perhaps give rise to new educational possibilities.

Works Cited:

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?. New York: Verso, 2009.

DeLanda, M. (1999). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

DeLanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Continuum, 2006.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009.

Marx, K. (1990). Capital, Volume I. New York: Penguin, 1990.

The Commons

I’m part of an architecture class at OSU studying public space in Columbus and, eventually, Rome. It’s a comparative class, obviously, and right now we’re just getting started. I’m really new at thinking about space in both concrete and theoretical perspectives, which is odd since I both live in and create space on a daily basis. My work has mostly been directed at social institutions or politics in the abstract, though, so my recent forays into concrete spaces is new and exciting, but somewhat difficult for me to grasp at times.

Anyway, our first assignment was to follow a time-based continuum and simply walk for an hour. The only guidelines I had were to “document [the walk] by any means necessary,” not to focus on a particular destination, and to follow a few guiding questions:

1) What factors determine how far one walks in an hour?

2) How can you measure specific segments of the path?

3) What are the determinants of your journey?

4) How can the data gathered be visually or conceptually mapped to record your experience?

As I’ve already said, I have been struggling with the conceptual transformation of public space into something on paper. But some interesting themes emerged on my walk. I gave myself a little bit more than an hour, actually, so I could make up for all of the pauses during which I was taking photographs, so I actually walked for an hour and twenty minutes. I’ll eventually be creating a website that documents this journey, and I’ll hopefully keep adding to it as I continue to explore Columbus. So I won’t detail everything here, I’ll just discuss a few themes.

First, my route (in dry, directional terms):

I began my walk at 1:18 pm when I got off the #4 bus at Summit and 7th. I walked South toward 5th, where I made a left. I was officially on the Northernmost border of the Columbus neighborhood, the Italian Village. I headed East on 5th until I approached the railroad tracks, so I turned into the parking lot of 345 5th Avenue and walked parallel to the tracks outside of the private grounds of the Clark Grave Vault property. I exited the parking lot onto 4th Avenue and walked West until I turned South on Summit. West on 3rd, South on High, East on 2nd, South on Hamlet. On Hamlet I discovered that the Columbus Italian Festival was going on, so I continued going South until I hit the festival. After some roaming in that area (between Warren and I – 670) I ended my walk at High Street and Warren.

The overwhelming theme from my walk was this: security and poverty seem to run in opposite directions.

Near 5th Avenue, I encountered strings of vacant homes, numerous buildings with boarded up windows which remained in use (including the Spore Infoshop where I spend some time, occasionally volunteer, and engage in lots of good theoretical discussions about anarchism, Continental philosophy, and Marxism… good stuff). The area was mostly devoid of people outside, children playing, or neighbors conversing. The people I did see walking around tended to be the homeless or the poor, if clothing, the amount of times I was asked for money, or the amount of personal belongings being carried were any indication of social status. But around 3rd and 2nd Avenues I started noticing a shift. Vacant homes next to crisply up-kept, well manicured homes. By the time I turned onto Hamlet I was in gentrified country without a doubt.

The richer the area got, the more signs of securitization I saw, until I encountered a huge police presence at the edges of the Italian Festival. I’m talking dozens of cops, with handfuls at each entrance along with a number of police cars cruising by at regular intervals. Just six blocks North I never saw an officer. In between, the signs of security manifested quite literally on more and more lawns as I headed South – security companies advertise, to more audiences than one, with little lawn signs. The neighborhood gradually comes to read, “Don’t fuck with us, capice?”

The most stark moment of securitized space came for me when I was walking along Hamlet, a public street, until all of a sudden I could do so no longer. I was being charged a $5 admission fee. To keep walking. On the street. Seriously. I didn’t have any cash on me, so I couldn’t enter. Even though they were charging for food, charging for raffle tickets, charging to play bocce, charging for beer, and selling god knows what else, they were also charging me to merely enter the space. I had traveled from the highly politicized space of poverty (5th and 4th Avenues) to the highly biopoliticized space of the bourgeois middle class. My body was proscribed a monetary value, $5, that seemed sufficiently low enough not to draw the ire of the college-educated, BMW-driving crowd that is the target of such festivals, but also sufficiently high enough that it ensured that certain undesirables couldn’t get in. A line was drawn in the sand, space marked out by orange fencing.

This inversion of the space of exception, where the space marked by exception is meant to keep the undesirables out rather than in, is an area of urban dynamics that Agamben leaves untouched. He hints at it, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics:

“…an apparently anodyne place (such as the Hotel Arcade near the Paris airport) delimits instead a space in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of law is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act temporarily as sovereign… In this sense, even certain outskirts of the great postindustrial cities as well as the gated communities of the United States are beginning today to look like camps, in which naked life and political life, at least in determinate moments, enter a zone of absolute indeterminacy.” (p. 41)

This is because our notions of public and private space are both logically founded upon the sovereignty proper to the law of property. Either the space is privately owned and therefore controlled by a very obvious sovereign – the landowner – or the space is publicly owned and therefore administered by a slightly more diffuse set of sovereigns – public officials. This means any public space falls to the arbitrary sovereignty of the police, thereby becoming biopolitical space where bare, naked life meets the brute force of the police (not, though, the law).

YouTube Video Essay – Cross Listed on EPL306 Course Blog

The Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) has a pretty cool project called the Bureau for Open Culture which is hosting Red76, an Oregon-based collective, as part of its Descent to Revolution programming for their fall 2009 semester. Red76 is doing a number of things worth checking out, but an especially interesting project is called the YouTube School for Social Politics (YTSSP). Basically, they’re encouraging people to mine the depths of Youtube to find different videos on similar topics to create video essays. It’s a pretty cool idea rooted in the notion that we live in a society with so much excess stuff, including knowledge and opinion, that you can make pretty creative statements using a bricolage of pre-existing video and other multimedia sources.

I have a deep aversion to putting myself in front of the camera, so this essay will mix some text with video, but is inspired by the YTSSP.

Students in higher education:

Students in K-12:

One entry point into the study of education is to think about students: who are they? where do they come from? when do they come from? in what social/cultural/economic contexts do they exist?

But how do we understand students, and therefore the best ways to teach them, without knowing something else? What is that something else?

Article

The easy answer is… technology.

But discussions of technology often implicit notions of 1) the inherent democracy of technology, 2) that technology is a new thing, and/or 3) digital technologies, in particular, are somehow always already revolutionary.

Students may indeed read fewer books in their lifetimes than they do facebook pages, but is this a good thing? What do we mean by good? What is it that reading a book might help us do that reading Twitter headlines from Iran can’t do? What does reading an actual, physical newspaper do that reading what Cass Sunstein called “The Daily Me” can’t do? Should education as a field engage these debates? Or should educators simply identify changes in society and match their pedagogy to match what society needs? (And what is “society” anyway? And who decides what “it” needs?)

So, we have a digital divide. Basic questions remain unanswered. Why a digital classroom anyway? Can we look deeper and find out why there’s a push to on-line learning? When we no longer meet face-to-face to learn, what are we losing? Is it worth the costs?

What if the reason we’re moving to on-line education in the United States wasn’t about the democratization of education, but is instead a way to further place the financial burden of education on students rather than on the state? If universities don’t have to build buildings or have faculty serve on committees or put on arts programs, and can instead ask the student to pay for their own classroom (a computer), they can become more profitable. But should education be profitable anyway?

EduPunk:

New Orleans, 2007

From The Coming Insurrection

In reference to the 2005 Paris riots:

“The conflagration of November 2005 was not a result of extreme dispossession, as it is often portrayed. It was, on the contrary, a complete possession of a territory. People can burn cars because they are pissed off, but to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in check – to do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly, and share a common language and a common enemy. Mile after mile and week after week, the fire spread. New blazes responded to the original ones, appearing where they least expected. Rumors can’t be wiretapped.”

~The Invisible Committee, “The Coming Insurrection,” p. 37.

BlogCatalog

Wordle

This is a wordle created from the conference call for papers below.

Conference – Violence: Probing the Boundaries

Call for Papers

9th Global Conference – Violence: Probing the Boundaries

Friday 12th March – Sunday 14th March 2010 Salzburg, Austria

Call for Papers

This conference is one of a continuing series that aims to bring together people from a wide range of disciplines to focus on a centrally significant aspect of our social lives: violence. On this multi- and inter-disciplinary basis we aim to produce an evolving body of thought as a contribution to the attempt to understand the nature and place of violence in our lives.

The main themes for the 2010 conference are outlined below: however, we are also pleased to receive proposals that extend or complement these.

1. What Counts as Violence and What’s Wrong with it? ~ Is violence best understood as necessarily physical? ~ If not – if, for example, ‘mental violence’ is not merely a metaphor – then how might the concept be sufficiently restricted so as not to lose all meaning? ~ Violence and force: physical force and the force of argument. ~ Violence and violation – of the person, of our identity, of our integrity; of the environment? ~ Why is violence wrong? Is it always wrong? ~ What does the phenomenon of human violence tell us about the nature of human social life? What does it imply about our understanding of ourselves as ‘rational animals’?

2. Contexts of Violence ~ Domestic violence; everyday violence ~ Offender groups and victim groups: how do these come to be configured? ~ Community violence: ethnicity and ‘race’; nationalism; political violence; religious violence ~ Institutional violence: the military – recruitment, conscription and training; varieties of law enforcement; educational institutions; hospitals and homes; the workplace ~ State violence – internal: the violence of punishment; economic violence?; surveillance and repression; detention without trial ~ State violence – external: pre-emption; self-defence; ‘humanitarian’ intervention; economic sanctions? ~ Violence for peace: resistance movements; human/animal rights ‘extremism’; assassination and ‘targeted killing’; ‘collateral damage’

3. Explaining and Understanding Violence ~ Does violence require explanation? Are there forms of violence – eg torture, genocide, extreme cruelty – that are beyond explanation? ~ What do different forms of explanation of violence – eg cultural, historical, psychological, religious, social – explain; and how might they be combined? ~ What are we doing when we try to understand the phenomenon of violence?

4. Representing Violence ~ How do representations of violence function in relation to acts of violence? ~ ‘Whose image is it?’ Ethical issues around consent, violation and the greater good in relation to making, exhibiting, publishing and curating images of suffering ~ Humour in the context of violence: catharsis or insult? ~ The aesthetics of violence; aestheticisation, incongruity and integrity ~ Violence, heritage, tradition and the creation of (national) identity ~ Heroism and martyrdom: “terrorism” and “suicide” bombers (eg Japanese pilots)

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 25th September 2009. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 5th February 2010.

300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs: Bob Brecher Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics Faculty of Arts, Brighton University, United Kingdom Rob Fisher Network Founder and Leader Inter-Disciplinary.Net Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

The first Diversity within Unity was held in Prague in 1999 and focused on the theme of Human Community and Civil Society. The second conference was held in Oxford in 2000 and focused on the theme of Culture, Conflict, and Belonging. Subsequent conferences have met in Prague and Budapest and looked at the general theme of the Cultures of Violence.

Multiple eBooks and volumes of themed papers have been published or are in press from the previous conference meetings of this project. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.