Dear Jero
I have to agree with Erik here - to say nothing of the various
readings of Spinoza (by for example Negri, Deleuze, Badiou, Althusser,
Macherey....) that have informed different political projects.
Jero, I do understand your anger about the dire conditions in the
world, and people fight these things on many fronts (even while
engaging in debates that are more metaphysical -- which are also a
site of struggle). But in this case I think the anger is misdirected.
I also worry about any yardstick that measures academic discourse by
its immediate utility -- that is after all the NL strategy, no? To
link the responsibility for outcomes (e.g. employment) to academic
endeavors -- a different answer to the same question that you pose?
Regards
Sue
On 2-Oct-12, at 2:22 AM, Erik Jönsson wrote:
> Dear Jero.
>
> While this particular CFP was quite far from the research I
> personally undertake, I would never react with anything else than
> complete support for the organisers right to undertake whatever kind
> of research, and to initiate whatever kind of scholarly discussions,
> they want. The call to make research "useful" is after all a rather
> dangerous attempt to narrow the range of possible perspectives which
> in the long run could do much more harm to geography than any
> seemingly apolitical CFP. It should be noted that many politically
> relevant scholars have developed their intellectual traejectories
> through works with less obvious direct relevance to political
> struggle. What would Marx be, for example, without engagement in
> length with Democritus and Hegel? Further, many previous widenings
> of how we perceive what is critical or useful scholarship has been
> met with ridicule. Work on animal geographies and histories is a
> telling example of this.
>
> In short, let at least the organiser run their session before
> judging its usefulness (and especially before labelling them
> political enemies!). I must admit I do see some potential for
> exciting discussions in their CFP.
>
> Best,
> Erik Jönsson
> Lund University
> ________________________________________
> Från: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]
> ] för Owain Jones [[log in to unmask]]
> Skickat: den 2 oktober 2012 00:09
> Till: [log in to unmask]
> Ämne: Re: FINAL CFP Will Power: creative ontologies for changing
> difference
>
> Hi Jero
>
> 3 quick responses.
>
> 1. Ideas change the world. New ideas are, by definition, sometimes
> hard to
> get one's head around. Experimentation in thought is not only
> justified but
> essential. The issues you raise had to be ideas before they were
> issues
> (sometimes ideas generated by intellectuals perhaps)
>
> 2. Debating a cfp yes - deriding them not so good (not that you done
> that).
>
> 3. (But) Is talking of "enemies" helpful and productive language?
> Maybe that
> feels like (very) old and tired ideas?? The cfp might contain new
> ideas.
>
> Cheers Owain
>
> Dr Owain Jones
>
> Reader in cultural geography: landscape, place and environment;
> Countryside
> & Community Research Institute / Contact Details
> Publications: Academia.edu/OwainJones
> Associate Editor: Journal of Children’s Geographies
> Committee: Royal Geographical Society Social and Cultural Geography
> Research Group
> Associate: Land2
> Visiting Fellow: School of Arts and Social Sciences, Northumbria
> University
> Sonic Severn
> SevernEstuaryArtAtlas (SEAA)
>
> skype - owainonskype Mobile: 07871 572969
>
> Priston Festival
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: A forum for critical and radical geographers
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jeronimo Montero
> bressan
> Sent: 01 October 2012 22:14
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: FINAL CFP Will Power: creative ontologies for changing
> difference
>
> CPFs like this one make me angry.
>
> What my colleagues do and say strongly influences the importance of
> Geography for the society and for our colleagues in other
> disciplines. As
> such, I claim my right to get angry at someone who, I think,
> practices the
> diversion of intellectual geography (with public money).
>
> Unemployment, human trafficking, slavery, hunger, war, displacement,
> privatisation of resources etc are on the rise. And they are on the
> rise
> EVERYWHERE in the world, perhaps as never before. Geographers have a
> lot to
> say about these and other problems affecting the majorities in the
> world,
> but only the minority of us is doing so! I know it’s difficult to
> say that
> research must be useful, because today the meaning of useful is set by
> research funding boards that lack transparency. But I do think that
> geographers should think of those who pay for their salaries,
> instead of
> looking at their own mental diversion.
>
> In the end our personal histories explain, I guess, why we do what
> we do.
> Some want to abstract from their middle-class past and/or present,
> being
> more or less successful. Others are happy with it. Fair enough, but
> they are
> political enemies for me, and I defend this and every forum as a
> place to
> discuss this too.
>
> Jero
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>
> Dr Jerónimo Montero Bressán
>
> ESRC Post Doctoral Fellow
>
> School of Environment and Development
>
> University of Manchester
>
>
>
> Tel: +44 (0)161 275 8688
>
> http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jeronimo.montero
>
>
>
> Latin American Editor for Human Geography
>
> www.hugeog.com
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: A forum for critical and radical geographers
> [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Krueger, Robert
> [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 01 October 2012 20:00
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: FINAL CFP Will Power: creative ontologies for changing
> difference
>
> Allen,
>
> Had a medium existed years ago when you were doing your "critical"
> research
> I imagine you'd have received some bullying emails like the ones you
> send
> from time to time. While I imagine some space cadets might enjoy you
> attempt at humor--especially those who say social theory is a 'speed
> bump'
> in the history of geography (you know who you are)--we on crit geog,
> I dare
> say, do not.
>
> So, please, feel free to to write your obnoxious retorts, just don't
> send
> them to this list.
>
> Now, for those of you with a sense of humor. Here is a spoof cfp
> written,
> but not sent, some years ago after Thompson died.
>
>
>
> Gonzo Geographies
>
> It's a little known fact that the bestselling geographer on
> Amazon.com is
> gonzo journalist, philanthropist and general debaucherer Hunter S
> Thompson.
> This session pays tribute to the spirit of the great man by examining
> geographies of the mundane made surreal and surreal made mundane.
> Geographers spend too much time talking about other people's
> practices and
> not enough immersing themselves in the paranoia and strangeness of the
> everyday. The timidness of polite ethnographic practice only serves
> to
> highlight the hypocrisy of contemporary geography in its sham of
> openness
> and deviance hidden behind tenure and the nightly retreat into
> middle class
> domesticity.
>
> The ethnographic pretence of washing dirty laundry in public must
> give way
> to the willingness to run around naked covered in one's own
> excrement. We
> demand an end to non-risky risk taking in the academy.
>
> Content as intervention will be good. Formal presentations will not
> be
> tolerated. Performances could last 15 minutes, but will be shorter,
> if
> boring. In lieu of a PowerPoint, please bring one red, rubber nose.
>
> Who's with us?
>
> Rob Krueger
>
>
>
> On 10/1/12 12:03 PM, "Allen J. Scott" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Is this another of those spoof CFPs?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Quoting JD Dewsbury <[log in to unmask]>:
>>
>>> Final Call for papers with extended deadline until 8th October
>>>
>>> Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Los
>>> Angeles CA, April 9-13, 2013
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Will Power: creative ontologies for changing difference
>>>
>>> Organisers: David Bissell, The Australian National University and
>>> J-D
>>> Dewsbury, University of Bristol
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The will is a pervasive trope in debates on social transformation.
>>> Political will, individual will, collective will, and free will are
>>> frequently invoked as the necessary powers of sustenance that are
>>> required in order to effect a transformation. The will has often
>>> been
>>> assumed to be a requirement for a sovereign individual and
>>> fundamentally linked to the question of freedom, where the conscious
>>> volitional power of the mind is a higher capacity that bestows
>>> humans
>>> with the freedom of being capable of regulating the volatile bodily
>>> habits and desires necessary for a moral life. Yet this
>>> still-pervasive enlightenment understanding of will overlooks its
>>> complex genealogy in ontological thought, where different
>>> mobilisations of the trope emphasise a different face of its torsion
>>> of activity and passivity, where to will gestures towards an active
> striving, whilst being willing designates a passive susceptibility.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> This session opens a space to explore what happens to the related
>>> yet
>>> distinct concepts of will and wilfulness when they are refracted
>>> through the lineage of thought that 'renaturalises' the body where
>>> bodies are understood as part of a visceral, affective natural
>>> ecology. Powerful challenges to commonplace understandings of
>>> willing
>>> emerge, for example, in Spinoza's Ethics, where freedom is not
>>> something that follows from the will, but is linked to the striving
>>> of essences. The will for Spinoza is thereby dispersed into a
>>> multitude of essences that strive to preserve and persevere.
>>> Nietzsche too disrupts the notion of a sovereign wilfulness, where
>>> will becomes the outcome of competing drives of compulsion, force,
>>> pressure, resistance and motion rather than being an authentic
>>> expression of conscious volition, signposting other distributed
>>> collectives where will power is a much more emergent quality.
>>> Pascal's wager to believe or not believe in something like God, and
>>> James' consideration of the habits and factors of fear and hope,
>>> prejudice and passion, in our will to believe, indicates that reason
>>> cannot always provide us with answers, so do we will some answers
>>> over others; and from whence does that wilfulness come? The fickle,
>>> distributed teleologies of will are a central part of Foucault's
>>> theorisation of techniques of the self, expressed in terms of
>>> practices of self-stylised care to effect transformations to thought
>>> and action. Yet the freedoms that will affords the self to go beyond
>>> the self might be challenged by the forces that constitute illness,
> obsession, neurosis, when we are supposedly held 'against our will',
> indicating a sustenance and resilience that is in jeopardy.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> In the face of multiple pressing problems within different
>>> ecological
>>> spheres, the development of a radically rematerialised politics that
>>> is faithful to the body's material and affective constitution has
>>> become a vital way of carving out new understandings of social
>>> transformation that are attentive to the complex, distributed
> arrangements of force and matter.
>>> Against this theoretical backdrop, in this session we want to open
>>> up
>>> a space for thinking about the creative possibilities of attending
>>> to
>>> the notion of wilfulness as a way of generating sites of material
>>> transformation, where wilfulness is thus articulated as an audacious
>>> and creative performative constituted by standing against the
>>> status quo.
>>> Refracting the concept of will through these channels invites us to
>>> explore the complex foldings of thought and matter that take place
>>> through willing; where manifestations of will in desires, plans,
>>> aspirations and projects become a key site of ethical concern
>>> through
>>> the way that they must negotiate and be responsive to the virtuality
>>> and immanence of will, through the nurturing and struggling with
> potentials and incipiencies.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> As such, we invite both theoretical and empirically-focused papers
>>> which relate to these themes and help to address the following
>>> questions:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Concepts of will: How might 'will' be conceptualised in more
>>> disruptive, antagonistic ways? How might will and wilfulness as a
>>> locus of questioning and concern allow us to develop ontologies that
>>> help to change difference, rather than simply endure it? In relation
>>> to contemporary science, should we be developing a new ontological
>>> approach to the concept of will, one that incorporates all existence
>>> bringing together the evidencing of the empirical, the agency of the
>>> material, the framing of the social, and the spectrum of animal and
> thinking beings?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Matters of will: How is the notion of a sovereign will destabilised
>>> by theories that show that matter and thought are folded in ways in
>>> which it is clear that no individual entity possesses free will? How
>>> might a conceptual materialisation of the will force us to redraw
>>> our
>>> commonplace notions of sustainability and resilience, so central to
>>> current debates on ecological transformation? And how might a more
>>> visceral, immaterial understanding of will change our
>>> understanding of
> responsibility?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Techniques of will: How might we think of will and wilfulness as
>>> both
>>> torsions and transitions of preservation and destruction,
>>> transformation and retention that carve out and expose a more
>>> radical
>>> ethics of the body? What kinds of practices, mental technologies and
>>> subconscious screens are rewiring, enacting and making manifest new
>>> personal and social modes of wilfulness? How do our personal
>>> understandings of the relationship of the will to the self help us
>>> to
> prepare for the events of existence?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Politics of will: How does thinking through wilfulness as a
>>> performative act standing against the collective will of cultural,
>>> political and ethical normalisation assist us in apprehending more
>>> impactful applications of the micro political? How might new
>>> collective struggles generate new modes of willing as we work with
>>> and through others who share our seemingly wilful acts against the
>>> status
> quo and thus our points of alienation?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Please send an abstract (max 250 words) of your paper and
>>> expressions
>>> of interest to David Bissell ( <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>>> [log in to unmask]) and J-D Dewsbury (
>>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> We'd be very grateful if you could submit abstracts to us by 8th
>>> October so that we have time to get the session organised!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Allen J. Scott,
>> Professor Emeritus,
>> University of California - Los Angeles.
>>
>> http://elgarblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/a-world-in-emergence-
>> cities-
>> and-regi ons-in-the-21st-century-by-allen-j-scott/
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>> This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
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