Re-Thinking War in the 21st Century

The Nietzsche Network has been kind enough to share audio files of the keynote speakers from their recent conference, 'Re-Thinking War in the 21st Century'. The event featured Julian Reid and Manabrata Guha - two preeminent thinkers of the changing nature of warfare. (Note: Manabrata's talk was through a video-link and so the audio quality suffers a bit, but it is still certainly listenable.)

Session #1: [MP3]
a) Keynote: Julian Reid, 'Refusing Peace, Affirming War: On the Importance of Thinking Biopolitics Polemologically'
b) Respondent: Lele Leonardi
c) Discussion

Session #2: [MP3]
a) Keynote: Manabrata Guha, 'Intensive War: ...Not the Beginning, Not the Middle, Not the End...'
b) Respondent: Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
c) Discussion

Both Sessions: [MP3] [Streaming]

(Image shamelessly borrowed from Manabrata!)

CFP: Immigration against the Empire

Interesting new call for papers from a new journal/magazine. Details below:

about pro/visions
pro/visions is a new magazine/journal (double blind peer-reviewed) that seeks to push critical theory beyond the academy and into the streets. Therefore the content will reflect rigorous (and playful) thought but using language that is accessible to anyone. We seek to create a space for theory to meet praxis (and the ivory tower the people/s). Think Gramsci's "organic intellectual" meets Chuck D and they get into a fist fight--with the world.

"immigration against the Empire"

This issue situates immigration (and other forms of nomadism) as a disruptive event against Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's concept of Empire. Between Arizona's new immigration law in the United States and the French government's response to immigration, it would seem that as the "Third World" pops up in the "First World" neo-liberal policing comes into view of the Global North. In light of the various reactions to these events, responses from the radical Left, in and outside of academia, need to be formulated in order to map resistances and the role of the immigrant and the exile within the Empire.

Articles should be connected to the following suggested topics:

• Specific case scenarios of immigration in and between geopolitical regions around the globe.
• Legal, ethical and political controvery/ies concerning immigration policy.
• The political role of the undocumented worker within U.S. and global paradigms
• Underground immigrant support networks and their clashes with the "minutemen"
• Conceptions of identity in relation to immigration
• Spanglish (or other creoles) as political act
• Strategies for immigrant solidarity, locally and globally
• Immigration as a response to neo-liberal forces
• Illegal immigration as a form of resistance to politics and ideology
• Systems of race, gender and other social norms within nomadism

submission guidelines
Submissions are welcome in all languages, with a preference toward English, Spanish and Spanglish.
Articles must be between 2,000 and 3,000 words in length with endnotes and a bibliography. Citations should follow the latest version of MLA.
Abstracts must be between 150 and 300 words.
A short biographical description of 3-5 lines should be included.

contact
If you are interested in submitting to pro/visions, please send an abstract by email to provisions.editors@gmail.com no later than July 1, 2010. Final versions of articles will be due August 1, 2010.

Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze: Re-Thinking War in the 21st Century

A really interesting call for papers and conference coming up in London, Ontario soon. Absolutely wish I could make it, though with any luck the organizers (hint, hint!) will have some recordings or texts made available after. Featuring two of the most interesting writers on the linkages between modern war and contemporary philosophy: Manav Guha (Reimagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-Centric Warfare) and Julian Reid (The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies).

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The Nietzsche Workshop @ Western:
"Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze: Re-Thinking War in the 21st Century"

Thursday, May 6, 2010
Faculty of Social Science, Dean’s Boardroom
The University of Western Ontario
9am-5pm

"The present European War is sometimes closely connected with Nietzsche. It is even called Nietzsche in Action, or the Euro-Nietzschean War" (Salter, 1917).

The theme of the second Nietzsche Workshop @ Western brings Salter’s early statement to bear on the (perhaps novel) forms of war characteristic of the 21st century. The aim of this workshop (more specifically) is to investigate the problematic relation between war in the bio-technological era and the critical socio-political insights of Nietzsche and his two most influential successors, the post-Nietzscheans Foucault and Deleuze.

Topics of interest to the conference would include:

• the concept of polemos (war) in Nietzsche, Foucault and/or Deleuze
• the militarization of peace
• war, terror, and bio-politics
• war and/as the ‘becoming’ of life
• the ‘subject’ of war and/or terror
• new tactics of war and/or terror

Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Manabrata Guha, author of Reimagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-Centric Warfare (Routledge 2010), Assistant Professor of International Security and Strategic Studies at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, India, and
Dr. Julian Reid, author of The Biopolitics of the War on Terror (Manchester University Press, 2007), co-author of The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (Routledge, 2009), Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words are to be sent to Nandita Biswas Mellamphy c/o the.nietzsche.network[at]gmail.com no later than April 10, 2010. For more information, visit the Nietzsche Netwørk on facebook, at http://groups.to/nietzsche (where links to the Nietzsche Worskhop @ Western event-page and other pertinent information can be found).

Conflict Networks

Blogging obviously has slowed to a crawl here, in no small part due to an overwhelming amount of work both for my PhD and for other commitments. With any luck it will pick back up once I get a few responsibilities over with and have some free time again.

But in the meantime, I just wanted to point any interested readers over to an article I just had published in the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies. The issue includes a number of really impressive names including Saskia Sassen, Leo Panitch, Christian Marazzi, Saul Newman and Faisal Devji - so definitely check the whole thing out!

I'll also be posting my presentation from yesterday's Symposium on Non-Philosophy from the University of Warwick soon. It was a terrific event, so keep an eye on Speculative Heresy for recordings, texts, and pictures from the event.

Here's the abstract for my paper:

Recent decades have seen a dual and simultaneous shift in conflict trends. With the end of the Cold War and superpower support, conflicts have become increasingly intrastate and increasingly localized, dependent for their sustenance upon local assistance and national resources. Yet this localization of conflict has coincided with the increasingly international aspect of conflicts, with humanitarian intervention and UN peacekeeping becoming ever more prevalent. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for understanding these shifting relations between the global and the local. This is accomplished through an analysis of actor-network theory and its rejoinders to reductionist understandings of conflict. Rather than reducing the eruption of violence down to greed, grievance, or ancient hatred, actor-network theory aims to examine conflict networks and their specific composition of local, material, and global actors. Three aspects of these networks are highlighted in particular: the personal networks of local individuals, the material actors, and the conflict network as a system. With these clarified the final section turns to an analysis of some of the primary modalities through which global actors relate and embed themselves within local networks.

CFP - The Philosophy of Networks

A Call for Papers on Social Networks and Philosophy:

At the 2010 International Sunbelt Social Networks Conference <http://insna.org/sunbelt/>, to take place at Riva del Garda, Trento, Italy, from June 29 to July 4, 2010, we would like to organise a session on the philosophy of social networks. This session might cover multidisciplinary issues surrounding the theorization of social networks, objects and relations, which is coming from diverse fields such as philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, Actor-Network Theory, Science and Technology Studies, etc. This session will provide an opportunity for scholars in both social networks and philosophy to increase their understanding of network processes through an exchange of ideas and knowledge with others sharing similar interests in social sciences, humanities, mathematics and computer science. In particular, those working on ontology, semantics, Object-Oriented Philosophy and Speculative Realism, either from an analytical or continental philosophical perspective, a cognitive or cultural approach, a metaphysical or political point of view etc., might be interested in participating in this session.

Potential contributors are kindly invited to contact us before the end of November 2009, because the deadline for submission of abstracts of contributed papers at the conference is December 1, 2009. However, we need to hear from you before then so that we might be able to organize a successful session on philosophy and social networks research.

Please contact:

Moses Boudourides, University of Patras, Greece, at <Moses.Boudourides[at]gmail[dot]com>

and/or

Nick Srnicek, London School of Economics, UK, at <nsrnicek[at]gmail[dot]com

Institutionalizing Revolution

While I've not always been a fan of Zizek's political analyses, I have to say, his latest book is terrific. There's any number of really great ideas by him in it, but I'll just point out two of them here. First, is the emphasis on the importance of the Included/Excluded division to understanding any political response to the contemporary world's problems:

"[The four antagonisms of modern capitalism:] the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called 'intellectual property'; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums." (91)

"In the series of four antagonisms then, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one. Without it, all others lose their subversive edge - ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded. [...] One can well imagine a society which somehow resolves the first three antagonisms through authoritarian measures which not only maintain but in fact strengthen existing social hierarchies, divisions and exclusions. [...] As this logic reaches its extreme, would it not be reasonable to bring it to its self-negation: is not a system which renders 80 percent of people irrelevant and useless itself irrelevant and of no use?" (98/103)

Second is his move beyond the limitations of 'direct participatory action' and the romanticism given to revolutionary moments, in favour of actively constructing a new order, a new institutionalized order:

"My suggestion is rather this: what if today's global capitalism, precisely insofar as it is 'world-less', involving a constant disruption of all fixed order, opens up the space for a revolution which will break the vicious cycle of revolt and its reinscription, which will, in other words, no longer follow the pattern of an evental explosion followed by a return to normality, but will instead assume the task of a new 'ordering' against the global capitalist disorder? Out of revolt we should shamelessly pass to enforcing a new order." (130)

"The key test of every radical emancipatory movement is [...] to what extent it transforms on a daily basis the practico-inert institutional practices which gain the upper hand once the fervor of the struggle is over and people return to business as usual. The success of a revolution should not be measured by the sublime awe of its ecstatic moments, but by the changes the big Event leaves at the level of the everyday, the day after the insurrection." (154)

To which I say: yes, yes, and yes.

My only real problem with the book is twofold: Zizek explicitly argues that the terrain of politics is ideology, in some parts of the book. (Though this is belied by his comments in other parts of the book.) While ideology is important, too much focus on it leads us to neglect material factors. Secondly, and related, is that the general ideas of 'ideology' and 'capitalism' are far too baggy to grasp onto real concrete political action. This would take a lot of work to demonstrate, but something like actor-network theory is immensely more useful for understanding how to work with the conduits through which ideology passes. As an empirical study of specific political situations, actor-network theory is well-suited to actively working in the world.

New Simondon PDF

A long while ago on this blog, I posted up a PDF of the only English translation of Gilbert Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. But my lack of technical skills meant that the original PDF was an image that readers were unable to copy and paste selections from. However, one intrepid reader, Angelos, undertook the effort to convert it to text, and added an index and clickable footnotes, making it a much more user-friendly PDF. So I'm posting up Angelos' new version, with a sincere thanks for his work on this:

http://nsrnicek.googlepages.com/SimondonGilbert.OnTheModeOfExistence.pdf

Genocide Monitoring and Early Warning

In light of discussions about militancy, responsibility, activism, and the usefulness (or not) of various academic writing, it seems really appropriate to point to a quick way you can make a significant difference right now.

Google is currently taking votes for Project 10 to the 100, where a number of projects are up for voting, with the winner receiving $10 million of funding and the support of Google's impressive technical team.

Far and away the most important idea is to create a genocide monitoring and alert system, where the entire international community can coordinate and become aware of the potential for genocides before they occur.

From Google:

"Much of the necessary technology and data-gathering methodology already exists both for general crisis mapping and for early warning systems capable of preventing mass atrocities. A key remaining step is to make this data more widely available to strengthen international aid agency coordination, improve resource allocation, develop timely policy and help evaluate current humanitarian practices."

PLEASE VOTE HERE - The deadline for voting is October 8th, so don't put it off; take the 10 seconds to vote.

(h/t Stop Genocide Blog)

Deontologistics

Just a quick note to highlight a new Deleuze-focused blog, Deontologistics. A few excellent posts up already, with promises of more to come on Badiou and Brandom. He also self-professes that he's "been known to dabble in speculative realism, though [he doesn't] inhale."

Also, it looks as though I will be giving a short talk at Goldsmith's on September 30th, along with some of the brightest people I know. The event will be based around Dominic Fox's fascinating book, Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria. I'll have moved to England the day before, so hopefully some fun jetlag-induced hijinks will follow. I'll post up more details as they become finalized.

[UPDATE:]

Militant Dysphoria

Wednesday September 30th, 2009

Room RHB 256, Goldmsiths, University of London 2-6 PM

Facebook Event page

Featuring:

Dominic Fox

Nathan Brown

Mark Fisher

Nick Srnicek

James Trafford

Alex Williams

An event to discuss some of the issues raised by Domininc Fox's Cold World: The aesthetics of dejection and the politics of militant dysphoria, due to be published by zer0 at the end of September. What is meant by 'militant dysphoria', and in what ways can the concept help us move beyond the impasses of contemporary politics? How might disaffection be converted into militancy? What political potentials are there in dysphoric music such as Black Metal? The event will also explore the relationship between politics and Speculative Realism.

This will not be a formal academic conference. Instead, it will follow the pattern set by the Weird events at Goldsmiths and the recent UEL symposium on the hardcore continuum. There will be short semi-formal presentations by speakers, but the emphasis will be on discussion of concepts rather than on presenting of papers etc.

The event is free but anyone interested in attending should register with Mark Fisher (k_punk99[AT]hotmail.com). Places are limited. In addition, if anyone would like to give a semi-formal presentation, please let me know.

Berlusconi in Tehran

Slavoj Zizek has a new piece up in the London Review of Books, focused on Iran and Berlusconi. Elsewhere, Graham Harman is undertaking a live-blogging of the writing of his new book - an immensely helpful set of posts that help to de-mystify the writing process. And Michael O'Neill Burns has just written on Peter Hallward's latest intriguing piece on 'The Will of the People'. Hallward's project has always been interesting and daring for its breaks with what is currently fashionable in philosophy, and I hope to soon put up a post about this latest essay. And this has been around the politics blogosphere lately, but in case you missed it, Marc Lynch has an international relations reading of the feud between Jay-Z and The Game and its relation to American hegemony - easily one of the best blog posts in the last little while. Finally, I've been having a fascinating and productive online discussion with Nate and Duncan about non-philosophy and Ray Brassier's work. Definitely a lot to think about throughout the discussion, and ideally I'll try to systematize some of the thoughts at some future point. I'm busy with a couple other, off-line, projects right now, so posting will remain unfortunately light for the foreseeable future.