Stuart Elden

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Scholars, spies and strategic knowledges

Posted by Derek Gregory on October 8, 2012
Posted in: humanities, universities. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading anthropologist/historian Nicholas Dirks on ‘Scholars, spies and global studies’ here.  He’s acutely aware of the origins of ‘area studies’ in the Second World War – and Trevor Barnes‘s brilliant work with Matt Farish has done much to deepen our knowledge of geography’s enlistments too: see here and scroll down to 2006 for their already classic paper – and notes that

“The first great center of area studies in the United States was not located in any university, but in Washington,” McGeorge Bundy, onetime dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and then president of the Ford Foundation, observed in 1964. The [Office of Strategic Services], he said, was “a remarkable institution, half cops-and-robbers and half faculty meeting.”

Invoking the spirit of another stellar anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, Dirks makes it clear that he doesn’t want to go back there:

‘The point now is to recognize the essential distinctiveness — of ourselves and others. That distinctiveness can only be appreciated in global frames and with insistent humanist attention…  I mean here to insist on a radically new way of identifying the core values and aims of humanist education that puts traditional questions on a global stage, along with the studies of social and policy scientists.’

For a fuller treatment of the issues and ideas sketched in this brief essay, see his University Lecture, ‘Scholars and Spies: Worldly knowledge and the predicament of the university’, delivered at Columbia in February 2012 here [fast forward to 7:23]:

But, as I asked in a previous post on our martial Arts, what if that humanist tradition is already, constitutively compromised through its entanglement with military (and now we obviously need to add paramilitary) violence?  Too often, I think, we approach that relationship either in instrumental terms – in the case of my own field, a series of indictments of the ways in which, in Yves Lacoste‘s resonant phrase, la géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre; you can see a similar approach in opposition to the enlistment of anthropologists and others in US counterinsurgency operations and Human Terrain teams – or in philosophical terms (‘epistemological violence’, f,  example).

Both are important, to be sure, but for them to work in concert we also need a political genealogy of the conceptual armatures deployed in (and beyond) the humanities and social sciences, mapping the ways in which the construction of our key concepts circulates in and out of other concrete practices. That’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in Stuart Elden‘s retro-midwifery at ‘The Birth of Territory‘, though I’m drawn more to its adult (and no less bloody) adventures. Those entailments are not purely discretionary, a matter of preferring this concept over that, and without wanting to return to or even supplement Jürgen Habermas‘s delineation of ‘knowledge-constitutive interests’ I’m left wondering how the production of concepts is implicated in the operations of power, including military power, and how their performative potential (practical and rhetorical) is realized.  I’ve never seen the university as an Ivory Tower – and I’m not suggesting it’s a Missile Silo either – but, as I argued in Incendiary knowledges, we need to ‘world’ our ‘worldly knowledges’ and think carefully about the hyphen in power-knowledge.

Bruno Latour once playfully identified four deficiencies in actor-network theory – the three words actor, network and theory, plus the hyphen – which prompts Ilana Gershon to describe the hyphen as a ‘trickster placeholder’.   It’s an artful conceit, but I think we should take the ‘place’ in ‘placeholder’ seriously and think some more about the spaces in which and through which knowledge and military power are entangled.  David Livingstone provides some clues in Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (Chicago, 2003), but military power remains in the wings of his account, while Gerard Toal‘s discussion of the battlefield as one of geography’s ‘venues’ in the SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, edited by Livingstone with John Agnew (Sage, 2011) is substantively closer to what I have in mind, but it’s more concerned with instrumental modalities than the apparatus through which, for example, the historical battlefield morphed into the contemporary battlespace.  That apparatus is at once conceptual and practical, and it is also – crucially – multi-sited, with circulations between (for example) districts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon, and a host of military installations, defence industries and research institutions inside and outside the academy.  In other words, the installation of battlespace – a diffuse, non-linear and unbounded space of military and paramilitary operations – at once exemplifies and engenders the contemporary ‘global’ to which Dirks directs our attention.

It was of course Michel Foucault who reminded us of the circulation ‘between geographical and strategic discourses’ – only natural, he said, because ‘geography grew up in the shadow of the military’ – and in that same interview with the editors of Hérodote (including Lacoste) he suggested that:

‘Once knowledge can be analyzed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the processes by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power.  There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge, relations of power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to transcribe them, lead one to consider forms of domination designated by such notions as field, region or territory.’

Those notions are far more than ‘metaphors’, as he called them in the interview, or at any rate metaphors are rarely purely linguistic plays.  In the case of many of our spatial concepts, these are not only – as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson might say – ‘metaphors we live by’ – but also metaphors through which others are made to (or let) die.  The ‘human’ in human geography has come under increasing pressure in recent years, from both post-structuralism and post-humanism, and my own work on war is indebted to both of them; but my particular concern is the way in which the production and performance of particular spaces is an intrinsic and intimate part of a military violence that is all too human.

‘The terrain as medium of violence’

Posted by Derek Gregory on August 30, 2012
Posted in: conferences, drones. Tagged: , , , , . 1 comment

News from my friend and colleague Gaston Gordillo about his proposed paper for the Violence and Space sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Los Angeles next year.  An extract from the abstract (!) for The Terrain as Medium of Violence:

In this paper, I draw from [Eyal] Weizman and also from Paul Virilio’s work on violence and vision and Derek Gregory’s research on aerial bombing and drones to examine a key principle of a theory of the terrain: the decisive importance of verticality in the deployment of state violence as a three-dimensional vector. The history of aerial bombing and the recent rise in the use of drones reveal that the control of the skies and the atmosphere —and the speed and global reach their spatial smoothness allows for— has become fundamental to imperial power.
Yet the politics of verticality pose spatial paradoxes that can only be appreciated through the actual, tangible material-political terrains in which it operates. Contra the image of absolute deterritorialization it tends to evoke, the verticality created by drones is always-already subsumed to a spatial principle as old as warfare: that the ultimate aim of controlling a higher ground through towers, mountaintops, or the sky is to create a view from above to visualize, localize, and inflict violence upon targets located primarily on the ground. In short, drones patrol the skies not to control high altitudes per se but in order to control an opaque terrain below that limits the state field of vision. And despite their capacity for unleashing massive levels of destruction, drones reveal something else about the terrains of Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen endlessly scanned by their cameras: that imperial ground forces do not control those spaces. This political voiding of imperial space by local insurgencies is made possible by another ancient principle of guerrilla warfare: the fact that the mastery of heavily striated terrain (mountains, forests, urban spaces) by flexible and mobile forces allows them to avoid visual capture by the state and, in the long run, wear down and defeat more powerful militaries. The verticality generated by drones, in short, reveals not only the vast spatial reach of imperial violence but also the profound spatial limits it encounters amid the political and material striations of the global terrain.
More at Gaston’s Space and Politics blog here, with links to his other postings on these ideas and news of his book project, The After-Life of Places: Ruins and the Destruction of Space, forthcoming from Duke.  He promises more to come!
The Violence and Space sessions will evidently be very lively: Stuart Elden has also published his abstract, “Urban Territory: Violent Political Technologies in London and Kano”, on his Progressive Geographies blog here.
Horizontal notes on the vertical: I expect most readers will know of Eyal’s work on the politics of verticality, most obviously through his book Hollow Land: Israel’s architecture of occupation (2007 – paperback out this year), and Stuart has become interested in similar issues: see the video of his Secure the Volume: vertical geopolitics and the depth of power here.  Steve Graham has also called for a ‘vertical turn in urban social science‘: you can listen to it here, and read his essay with Lucy Hewitt, “Getting off the ground: on the politics of urban verticality”, in Progress in human geography (Online First: 25 April 2012) doi:10.1177/0309132512443147.  Enough to make you giddy.

War, Shakespeare and Shylock in Auschwitz

Posted by Derek Gregory on August 29, 2012
Posted in: law, World War II. Tagged: , , . 1 comment

I’ve been thinking more about the relations between theatre and war I started to sketch in the previous post.  Stuart Elden‘s work on Shakespeare and territory (or, rather, ‘Shakespearean territories‘) is of considerable interest here – remember Homi Bhabha’s claim that ‘territory’ derives from both terra (earth) and terrere (to frighten), thus territorium as ‘a place from which people are frightened off.’   Stuart provides a more nuanced genealogy than that, needless to say, but there are also contributions that address Shakespeare’s thematics (and theatrics) of war more directly.

Ros King and Paul Franssen‘s Shakespeare and war (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009) includes King’s own essay on Shakespeare’s use of a contemporary manual of war written by an English mercenary.  Of more interest to me, though, is Theodor Meron‘s Bloody Constraint: war and chivalry in Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1998), which builds on his earlier Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws: perspectives on the law of war in the later Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1994).  As the subtitle indicates, Meron comes at this from an interesting direction: he is a professor of international law, the Charles L. Denison Professor Emeritus at NYU’s School of Law, and serves as President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Presiding Judge of the Appeals Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda.  He is also the man who, as Legal Adviser to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, wrote a secret memorandum just after the 1967 War arguing that establishing Israeli “settlements” in the occupied territories would be a violation of international law.  As all this suggests, Meron’s interest in Shakespeare is not a narrowly historical or textual one – though he shows considerable mastery of both domains –  and he artfully considers Shakespeare’s address to the present and the legacy of chivalry to modern humanitarian law.  What happens, he asks, when technology – and especially artillery – puts an end to the individualism of combat, or at any rate, marginalises face-to-face combat?  (Here Paola Pugliatti‘s more recent Shakespeare the just war tradition [Ashgate, 2010] also has much to offer and, again, considers contemporary notions of discrimination and proportionality; Part Two includes a fascinating discussion of “Theatres of War”, which is what led me down this path in the first place.)

More directly related to my previous post is a new collection of essays that treat that address to the present as a political and cultural performance.  Out next month from the University of Toronto Press is Shakespeare and the Second World War: theatre, culture, identity, edited by Irena Makaryk and Marissa McHugh.  Here’s the blurb:

Shakespeare’s works occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both the high and the low, the national and the foreign, literature and theatre. The Second World War presents a fascinating case study of this phenomenon: most, if not all, of its combatants have laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society’s self-image.

In wartime, such claims frequently brought to the fore a crisis of cultural identity and of competing ownership of this ‘universal’ author. Despite this, the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth. Shakespeare and the Second World War provides the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain. The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 1939–1945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.

Full details are here, but two essays that I’m looking forward to reading are Mark Bayer‘s “Shylock, Palestine and the Second World War” and Tibor Egervari‘s “Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz”.  Egervari is another interesting man: Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz is a play first performed in 1977 and reworked many times since.  Informed by the writings of Primo Levi, it’s an ‘imaginative reconstruction of  what it might have meant to stage the Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz’ (Egervari wryly notes that the Nazis staged the play more than 50 times between 1933  and 1939).  You can download the script here.  The play is many things, but among them is a tart reminder that Giorgio Agamben‘s space of exception – especially as captured in Homo sacer – is almost always a profoundly theatrical space: space as performance rather product.

If this captures your imagination too, you might be interested in Arthur Horowitz‘s “Shylock after Auschwitz: The Merchant of Venice on the post-Holocaust stage – subversion, confrontation and provocation’, Journal for cultural and religious theory 8 (3) (2007) here.