Monthly Archives: April 2011

Hegemony à la Raymond Williams

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Ch. 6] Williams claims hegemony goes beyond both conceptions of “culture” and “ideology”: for culture, because of “its insistence on relating the ‘whole social process’ to specific distributions of power … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Marxism, Power | Comments Off on Hegemony à la Raymond Williams

Hollow Land and the Politics of ‘Archupation’

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. All military occupations are spatial operations and strategies. But the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and government have managed to make space the continuation of war by other means. New … Continue reading →

Posted in City, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Maps, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Networks, Place, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 4 Comments

Discipline, Punish & Illegalities

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. “‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole … Continue reading →

Posted in Governmentality, Illegality, Law, Michel Foucault, Power, Spatiality, Violence | 4 Comments

Foucault and Geography

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Crampton, Jeremy W. and Stuart Elden, eds. Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. [Selections] The introduction to this collection lays out plainly the importance of spatiality in Foucault’s work. As early as 1967, when the Heteroropias … Continue reading →

Posted in City, David Harvey, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Power, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

The Poverty of Theory Debate

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Thompson, E.P. 1978. “Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors” Anderson, Perry. 1980. Arguments Within English Marxism. London: Verso. Is there any polemic more biting in its wit, rigor and distaste than E.P. Thompson’s (EP) “Poverty of Theory”? Today, … Continue reading →

Posted in Critique, Historical Materialism, Marxism, Political Economy, Power, The State | 2 Comments

Geographical Imaginations

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Gregory, Derek. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. [Ch. 2 & 6] Chapter 2 sets out to explore critiques of the spatial science geography of the 1950s and 1960s from two perspectives: humanism and historical materialism, which were also in tense … Continue reading →

Posted in David Harvey, Gender, Henri Lefebvre, Historical Materialism, Post-Colonial, Race & Ethnicity, Spatiality, The Body | 1 Comment

Territory, Place, Scale, Network

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Jessop, Bob, Neil Brenner, and Martin Jones. 2008. “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(3): 389-401. This is an important article—short and to the point. The authors claim that thinking around sociospatial relations has tended to … Continue reading →

Posted in Historical-Geographies, Networks, Place, Scale, Spatiality, Territory | Comments Off on Territory, Place, Scale, Network

Space of Flows

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. [Ch 6] Considering the historical moment it speaks to, this was a not surprisingly influential book, particularly in terms of the conceptual vocabulary it developed: network society, megacities, metropolitan … Continue reading →

Posted in Networks, Place, Power, Spatiality | Comments Off on Space of Flows

Soja’s Postmodern Geographies

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. [Ch 1-3] I learned a lot from this book. Reading about Marxism and geography feels a bit like peering into a family album. Ed … Continue reading →

Posted in David Harvey, Dialectics, Henri Lefebvre, Historical Materialism, Marxism, Michel Foucault, Spatiality | Comments Off on Soja’s Postmodern Geographies

Spaces of Capital

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Harvey, David. 2001. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge. [Chapters from Part II]. Geography of Capitalist Accumulation (1975) In this first chapter, we can see Harvey beginning to develop much of what later becomes central aspects … Continue reading →

Posted in David Harvey, GWF Hegel, Historical Materialism, Karl Marx, Marxism, Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation, Spatiality, The State | 3 Comments