Politics as Vocation

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Weber, Max. 2004. “Politics as Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, edited by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.

Lets face it, Max Weber was sort of a downer. On January 28, 1919, he walks into a Munich lecture hall. It was perhaps the height of Germany’s revolutionary moment. Many thought the country was on the brink of communism. Germany could not have been more politically charged. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been brutally assassinated just two weeks before. Revolution was in the air and, if Weber’s lecture any indication, spurting from everyone’s mouths. A throng of radical students eagerly awaited the words of one of Germany’s most prominent intellectuals. In the opening line, Weber warns the students that his lecture will probably “frustrate” them “in a number of ways” (32). He was surely right. The seething audience sat through a rather technical and abstract lecture, but one also that ends on much more positive, even poetic, note. Continue reading →

Posted in Law, Max Weber, Nation/Nationalism, Power, The State | 7 Comments

Everyday State Formation and Hegemony

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Joseph, Gilbert and Daniel Nugent eds. Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press. [Front Matter, Part I, Florencia Mallón, Part III]

This brilliant collection of essays edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent examine the complex everyday negotiations of resistance and rule in the periods straddling the process of the Mexican Revolution. Jim Scott poses the central question of the collection succinctly: “to what extent has the state’s hegemonic project itself been influenced by the force of popular experience and of mobilized popular expectations of the revolution?” (viii). Although he says the question is rarely posed in the book, my limited reading draws the opposite conclusion. Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Everyday Life, Hegemony, Historical-Geographies, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Nation/Nationalism, Power, Scale, The State, Violence | 2 Comments

Seeing Like a State

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

I can see why James C. Scott’s book has been such a generative work, even if there’s a lot that could be quibbled with—namely, the way states use illegibility and uncertainty just as productively, the no less important political effects of “failure,” and he could’ve delved more deeply into a discussion of scientific science itself. After summarizing some key points, I want to come back to this last point on knowledge by conjugating it with David Turnbull’s book Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers. Continue reading →

Posted in Assemblages, City, Forests, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Maps, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Power, Science & Tech., Spatiality, Violence | 2 Comments

Lefebvre: State, Space, World

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Lefebvre, Henri. 2009. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. [Intro, Ch. 1, 2, 3, 11]

So far, as this particular reading confirmed, no other thinker seems better equipped than Lefebvre to form the main theoretical architecture of my investigation. Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt, Critique, GWF Hegel, Henri Lefebvre, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Karl Marx, Law, Marxism, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Power, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 3 Comments

The Colonial Present

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Gregory, Derek. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. [Ch. 1-3]

I won’t go into a whole lot of detail. I just wanted to read these chapters to get a sense of how Derek Gregory is using and making arguments through Edward Said’s ideas about Orientalism and imaginative geographies. Exploring the “War on Terror” via Orientalism allows Gregory to show how culture in the colonial present is intrinsic to the violent production of political-economic and military geographies. Culture forms the matériel from the making and deployment of an “Other”—a Them and an Us. In this violent Manichaean world, “distance becomes difference” and that difference underwrites, makes possible, and conditions today’s colonial modernity. Continue reading →

Posted in Historical-Geographies, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Power, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory | Comments Off on The Colonial Present

Boundaries, Sovereignty, Necropolitics

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Mbembe, Achille. 2000. “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa.” Public Culture 12(1): 259-284.

———. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15(1): 11-40.

In these two articles, Achille Mbembe explores changing territorial arrangements and configurations of sovereignty. He examines the connections and disjunctures between these two trends across the spaces and times—both plural—of the African continent. His main contention in “Edge of the World” is that the relational dynamics of space and time in globalization are leading to the “material deconstruction of existing territorial frameworks, the excision of conventional boundaries, and the simultaneous creation of mobile spaces and spaces of enclosure” in Africa (284). Domination of space and resources via territorial formations has become the primary means through which what Mbembe calls “world time” (after Heidegger) is being domesticated. Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Carl Schmitt, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The Body, The State, Violence | 2 Comments

State of Exception

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Agamben explores how the state of exception, building from Schmitt as the suspension of law for the preservation of the juridical order, produces and is indeed predicated on the blurring of or the indistinction between legal and illegal, public and private, state and law, war and peace, potestas and auctoritas, law and violence, life and norm, criminal and combatant, the political and the juridical (etc.). In some places of the text, he shows how exception productively articulates and/or disarticulates linkages between these seemingly oppositional terms. “In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside [of the juridical order] do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (23).

Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Carl Schmitt, Illegality, Law, Power, Sovereignty, The State, Violence | 4 Comments

Political Theology

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schmitt defines the essence of sovereignty as the decision over what is an exception and decide the measures taken to eliminate such an exception. The state of exception is both the monopolistic domain of the sovereign and reveals the sovereign itself. But sovereignty, too, then, is also he who defines what’s “the normal.” As Schmitt writes, “for a legal system to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists” (13). The preservation of the normal is precisely the rationale for which the exception is instituted. As such, sovereignty is an inherent theory of the state: “The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation, as one would say” (12). Our coupling of law and order (“Law and Order” soundtrack: bom pom pom pom puuuum) are completely unbundled by Schmitt (12). Continue reading →

Posted in Carl Schmitt, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Power, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 3 Comments

Nomos of the Earth

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Schmitt, Carl. 2006. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York: Telos Press Publishing.

Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth could be called legal genealogy of the territorial spatial ordering of the earth, particularly as it relates to war. The prized moment, in Schmitt’s view was the period between 1492 and 1890, when a true nomos of the earth—a worldwide territorial order—was achieved under the aegis of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (JPE), a hegemonic European legal balance mediating relations between sovereign (European) states. Despite the seeming contradiction, he sees the JPE as Eurocentric global international law (49). This European order, says Schmitt, was also (implicitly) a world order, a nomos of the Earth, including terrestrial land and the seas. Continue reading →

Posted in Carl Schmitt, Illegality, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Power, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The Sea, The State, Violence | 3 Comments

In the Space of Theory

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Sparke’s aptly titled book interrogates how contemporary global affairs have stretched, unglued, glued, reconfigured, and (re)invented the presumed ties between states and their “respective” nations both within their putative borders and across/beyond them. He builds each chapter of the book around a particular, grounded problem-space and a contemporary theorist. His goal is for each of these post-foundational theorists, who in one way or another encompass thinking on deterritorialization, to touch ground. Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Historical-Geographies, Maps, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment