Space, subjectivity, and politics

Alternatives

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 105-134

  Howarth, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Ethics; Politics; Radical democracy; Space; Subjectivity; Time

Indexed keywords

EID: 33746174163     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540603100201     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. This epigraph is taken from David Hume's essay "Of the Original Contract," in his Selectd Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 279.
2. I develop this example from Jeff Malpas, "Uncovering the Space of Disclosedness," in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds., Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 225.
3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 539.
4. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999);
5. Bob Jessop, "Spatial Fixes, Temporal Fixes, and Spatio-Temporal Fixes," published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancaster University at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/soiology/papers/jessop-spatio-temporal-fixes.pdf;
6. Alain Lipietz, "The Structuration of Space, the Problem of Land and Spatial Policy," in John Carney et al., eds., Regions in Crisis (London: Croom Helm, 1980).
7. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question (London: Edward Arnold, 1977);
8. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Spae (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991);
9. Jean Lojkine, "Big Firms' Strategies Urban Policy and Urban Social Movements," In Michael Harloe, ed., Captive Cities (London: John Wley, 1977).
10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
11. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 19, 15.
12. Margaret Kohn, Radical Space (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
13. Lefebvre, note 5. p. 341.
14. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2000);
15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
16. See, respectively, Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), p. 185;
17. Jeff Young, "What Is Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and the Worlding of the World," in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds., Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 173;
18. Kohn, note 8, pp. 6, 93;
19. Hardt and Negri, Empire, note 10, p. 45;
20. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 257;
21. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1994), pp. 130-131.
22. Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 53. My emphasis.
23. Doreen Massey, "Politics and Space-Time," New Left Review 196 (1992): 84.
24. Edward Soja, The Socio-Spatial Dialectic," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70 (1980): 208.
25. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge, MA; Policy, 1984), p. 368. My emphasis.
26. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 15.
27. Peter Saunders, Social Theory and the Urban Question, 2d ed. (London: Unwin Hyman, 1986), p. 277.
28. See Michael De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984);
29. Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991);
30. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990);
31. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
32. Kohn, note 8, pp. 3-4. My emphasis.
33. Ibid., p. 155.
34. Ibid., p. 4.
35. Ibid., pp. 7, 153, 156. My emphasis.
36. Ibid., pp. 4, 90.
37. See Max Jammer, Concepts of Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
38. Kohn, note 8, pp. 6-7.
39. See David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 102.
40. This is the case with certain Deleuzian critiques of space, where the latter is depicted in purely negative terms. See Nathan Widder, "What'i Lacking in the Lack: A Comment on the Virtual," Angelaki 3 (2000):117-138.
41. Laclau, note 18, p. 41.
42. Ibid.
43. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Baail Blackwell, 1962), pp. 31-35;
44. see Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 4.
45. Laclau, note 18, p. 42.
46. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 533).
47. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 309-330.
48. Laclau, note 18, p. 41.
49. Derrida, note 33, p. 13.
50. Ibid.
51. Laclau and Mouffe, note 11, pp. 127-134.
52. There is a fourth aspect here, which is implicit in this general picture, but which I shall not examine in detail. It involves the prevention of "dislocation being registered or rendered visible as a dislocation at all, a situation that approximates what might be termed "structural power, " or what Lukes terms the "third face of power." See Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2d ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005).
53. This idea is developed in Jason Glynos and David Howarth, Theory, Method and Critique in Social Science: Logics of Critical Explanation (London: Routledge, 2007).
54. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
55. Anderson, note 6.
56. Simon Dalby, "Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire," Alternatives 30, no. 4 (2005): 415-441;
57. John Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations," International Organization 47, no. 1 (1993): 139-174.
58. Massey, note 7.
59. David Held, "Democracy and the New International Order," in Daniele Archibugi and Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995);
60. Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2003).
61. Harvey, note 26, pp. 111-112.
62. Andrew Sayer, Realism and Social Science (London: Sage, 2000), pp. 108-130.
63. Martin Heidegger, note 30, p. 147.
64. See Aletta Norval, Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse (London: Verso, 1996);
65. Jennifer Robinson, The Power of Apartheid; State, Power and Space in South African Cities (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996).
66. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 156.
67. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopklns, 1976), p. 44.
68. Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
69. In a similar vein, Jacques Lacan uses topological figures to recon-ceptualize the relationship between inside and outside, showing the inextricable linking of orders and structures rather than their simple separation. A clear instantiation of this is the modeling of the relationship between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary orders as a Borromean knot, which resists any simple division between the three registers that make-up the human subject. Instead, there is a relational linkage between the three registers, and it is their interaction that produces concrete effects.
70. See William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
71. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy ? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
72. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 295.
73. Massey, note 7, pp. 172-176;
74. see also Chantai Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 114.
75. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias," in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 352.
76. Ibid., p. 352.
77. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaelology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. xvii-xviii.
78. Foucault, note 56, p. 354;
79. see Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1997); Harvey, note 15, p. 184.
80. Foucault, note 56, p. 353.
81. Harvey, note 16.
82. Kohn, note 8, p. 91.
83. Kathleen Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 147.
84. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 85.
85. Ibid., p. 101.
86. The argument for complex equality is developed in Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
87. Walzer, note 64, p. 91.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., p. 92.
90. Ibid., pp. 86, 96.
91. Ibid., pp. 98-99.
92. Ibid., p. 100.
93. Ibid., p. 101.
94. Jason Glynos, "Self-transgression and Freedom," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 6, no. 2 (2003): 1-20;
95. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do (London: Verso, 1991).
96. Walzer, note 59, p. 88.
97. Slavoj Žižek, Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 214.
98. I draw inspiration here from Rudi Visker's seminal readings of Heidegger, Foucault, and Levinas. See Rudi Visker, Truth and Singularity (Dordrecht Kluwer, 1999).
99. Žižek cited in Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 109.
100. In the language of Heidegger, this approach taps into his different ways of relating to, and coming to terms with, the nothingness or contingency at the heart of Being. In Being and Time nothingness is met with the idea of an authentic resolution and decision in the face of an all-pervasive nihilism, whereas in his later writings the negotiation of nothingness consists of a "releasement towards things" and an ethos of "dwelling," which is predicated on a transcendence into the plenitude of Being. Both are, nevertheless, expressions of the ultimate contingency at the heart of our experience of Being and may be seen to represent different modalities of our negotiation of absence. In Being and Time, to be human is nothing else but to experience the "da" of "sein"-the "there" of "Being": its "thrownness" or "facticity"-and it is only through its attachments to something, and its "being-held" so, that the "da" can turn into something approximating a subject (even though Heidegger avoids the latter because of its Cartesian and transcendental connotations). See David Howarth, "Towards a Heideggerian Social Science: Heidegger, Kisiel and Wiener on the Limits of Anthropological Discourse," Anthropological Theory 4, no. 2 (2004): 229-247.
101. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 154-169.
102. Glyn Daly, "Introduction: Risking the Impossible, in Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, eds., Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2004), pp. 18-19.
103. Walzer, note 64, p. 102.
104. Ibid.
105. See Friedrich Nietzsche, "Homer's Contest," in Keith Ansell Pearton and Duncan Large, eds., The Nietzsche Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 95-100;
106. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
107. Mouffe, note 56.