Agamben and the Migrations of Glory

Abstract

In the American political imagination, there is a longstanding and wide-ranging discussion about the separation of church and state. Though Americans argue about whether it should be a ‘‘high wall,’’ or whether certain ‘‘breaches’’ in it might be desirable, they all take ‘‘separation’’ to describe an institutional arrangement. From Giorgio Agamben's perspective, however, ‘‘separation’’ is an image that conceals much more than it reveals about the religious character of the state and the global economy. Agamben traces ‘‘the migrations of glory’’ from church, to state, to global capitalism. For part of this task, Agamben accepts Michel Foucault's diagnostic approach to power. By one reading, certainly, governmentality has us in its grip. But now government itself is overshadowed by the power of global capitalism. While Foucault sought only to make us ‘‘a little less governed,’’ Agamben is interested in a deeper iconoclasm and a greater emancipation. According to Agamben, our less-than-free condition can be illuminated by reflection on: (1) the state of exception and the camp, which are only made possible by a form of idolatry in which the sovereign assumes to themself a power that they should not have; (2) On another of the ‘‘maps’’ drawn by Agamben, however, there is a further ‘‘migration of glory,’’ away from national sovereignty, toward postmodern global capitalism; (3) The Coming Community provides the barest sketch of Agamben's hope for a remedy, while his reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans in The Time that Remains brings a more visible kind of messianic expectation or vocation back into the discussion of political life. A concluding section discusses five sorts of questions that might be put to Agamben about the overall shape of his project.     

Human Security as ontological security: a post-colonial approach

ABSTRACT

This article will critically interrogate the relationship between Human Security and Ontological Security from a broadly postcolonial perspective. The dislocation engendered by successive waves of neo-liberal globalisation has resulted in the deracination of many of the world's inhabitants, resulting in a state of collective ‘existential anxiety’ [Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991]. Under such conditions, the search for ontological security becomes paramount. However, conventional understandings of Human Security as ‘freedom from fear and want’ are unable – from a post-colonial perspective – to provide ontological security since they operate within a culturally specific, Eurocentric understanding of the ‘human’ as ‘bare life’ [Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998]. It will then be argued that post-secular conceptions of Human Security [Giorgio Shani, Religion, Identity and Human Security, London and New York: Routledge, 2014] by acknowledging the role which culture and religion can play in providing answers to existential questions concerning the ‘basic parameters of human life’ are better able to ‘protect’ ontological security in times of rapid global transformation given the centrality of religion to post-colonial subjectivity. This will be illustrated by the case of the global Sikh community. It will be argued that ontological, and therefore, Human Security rests on reintegrating the ‘secular’ and ‘temporal’ dimensions of Sikhi, which had been severed as a result of the colonial encounter.     

The comfort of the river: understanding the affective geographies of angling waterscapes in young people’s coping practices

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on ethnographic research with angling intervention programmes working with ‘disaffected’ young people in the UK to demonstrate how young people use the affective geographies of waterscapes to regulate their feelings and escape stressful lives. But rather than interpret the restorative or therapeutic quality of waterscapes as the consequence of (passive) immersion into green/blue spaces, we argue that ‘comfort’ is derived from an ongoing, active engagement with(in) the world. Drawing on works influenced by phenomenological theories and relational understandings of the more-than-human world, we illustrate how the affectual qualities of waterscapes are continually ‘woven’ into being through the material and embodied practices of young anglers. However, understanding why waterscapes ‘matter’ to young people also requires accounting for those assemblages originating in the past that shape these co-experienced worlds.     

The camp

Walter Benjamin has famously pointed out that we are living in a society in which the exception has become a norm. Giorgio Agamben adds to this claim another one, that the spatial ordering principle for this new order is the camp. This article focuses on this diagnosis. We do not, however, discuss its validity but rather unpack what is meant when the concept of camp is used. The camp is, we argue, given by three structuring principles that might contradict and overlap in various ways: a disciplinary disposit if according to which a distinction between inside and outside is established; a logic of transgression according to which the inside‐outside distinction is deliberately blurred; and finally a biopolitical rationale according to which the distinction between inside and outside is re‐established on each side so that the included are included as excluded (as bodies to be governed) and the excluded are excluded as included (within the realm of power). Finally, we claim that it is the combination of these three principles — discipline, transgression and biopolitics — that leads to a society in which the exception has become the norm. Such ‘society’ is, we show, given by a strange and paradoxical overlapping of bonding and un‐bonding, of distinction and indistinction.     

The challenge of proximity: the (un)attractiveness of near-home tourism destinations

ABSTRACT

Imaginaries of touristic otherness have traditionally been closely related to geographical distance and travel far away from the everyday. But in today's context of sustainable tourism, a moral and behavioral shift may be expected, toward traveling near home. Distance may actually become a disadvantage and proximity a new commodity. This implies a need to disentangle subjective understandings of both distance and proximity in relation to perceived attractiveness of and touristic behavior in places near home. Thus, it is aimed to shed light on how ‘proximity tourism’ is constructed, endorsed and appreciated (or not).

An online survey (N = 913) was administered to residents of the Dutch province of Friesland, exploring their attitudes toward their home province as tourism destination and representations of proximity and distance in relation to preferred vacation destinations. We grouped respondents into four categories, reflecting destination preferences: (1) proximate, (2) distant, (3) intermediate and (4) mixed. These groups were differentiated and characterized using quantitative and qualitative analyses. The ‘proximate’ and ‘distant’ preference groups, respectively, were most and least engaged in proximity tourism. However, the perceptions of proximity and distance expressed by the ‘intermediate’ and ‘mixed’ preference groups were associated in a nonlinear way with appreciation of the home region as a tourism destination. Additionally, respondents used proximity and distance in various ways as push, pull, keep and repel factors motivating their destination preferences.

Interpretations of both proximity and distance were thus important in determining engagement in proximity tourism and, in turn, the potential for proximity tourism development in the region. This implies that such development will require a balanced consideration of the relative, temporally sensitive ways that people negotiate distance and proximity in their perceptions of being at home and away. Our results advance the discussion about imaginaries of travel, distance and proximity, and their impact on regional tourism.     

Political Differentiability

The urgent task of political ontology is, I believe, neither to investigate the nature of the political nor to define politics; instead, the pressing task is to put into question the political difference itself between the political and politics. The subject of my inquiry is, in other words, the political difference as political difference. To demonstrate this thesis, I examine Oliver Marchart’s and Giorgio Agamben’s positions. The political difference takes in Marchart the form of the never-ending play between the political and politics and in Agamben the constantly renewed sovereign decision between life and law. Besides reformulating Marchart’s and Agamben’s positions, I want to show that the never-ending play and the sovereign decision fail to capture the political difference, because it is approached through the differentiated—whether between the political and politics or between life and law. Drawing on the diverse works of Agamben, I argue that the political difference becomes intelligible as the political differentiability that points to the power of differentiation, to the ability of the political differencing to differentiate. And the task of thinking and of political practice is neither the thinking itself nor the political practice itself, but rather to experience political differentiability as the shared field of thinking and practice, as the common dimension of philosophy and politics. I argue that experiencing political differentiability, ontology and politics can avoid falling prey, respectively, to intellectualism and to wild practicism.     

Hopeful possibilities in spaces of ‘the-not-yet-become’: relational encounters in volunteer tourism

Volunteer tourism has rapidly emerged as a pervasive form of contemporary global tourism. This paper examines the importance of incorporating non-representational theories into analyses of volunteer tourism. Discussions of volunteer tourism are often framed within fixed notions of culture, identity and power relations. In this paper I argue that attention to embodiment, affect and emotion can provide more nuanced insights into the ambiguities of volunteer experiences and encounters. Drawing on fieldwork from a small coastal town in Peru, the study focuses on the encounters between volunteers and locals and the role of emotions in the framing of their experiences. While emotions and expectations are often framed by development aid discourses that characterise volunteers and locals into neo-colonial binaries, there are also numerous possibilities for how volunteers and locals are ‘affected’. By attending to the ‘more than rational’ dimensions of the volunteer tourism experience I draw out the relationship between embodiment, affect and what philosopher of hope Bloch (1986) calls the ‘ontology of the-not-yet’. It is within the embodied encounters in spaces of ‘the-not-yet-become’ where hopeful possibilities in volunteer tourism are found’ This opens up new ways of understanding volunteer tourism. This may, in turn, facilitate more responsible and equitable practice in volunteer tourism projects.     

Enclaves in tourism: producing and governing exclusive spaces for tourism

Abstract

Exclusively planned tourism destinations, such as all-inclusive resorts, gated resort communities, private cruise liner-owned islands and privatized beaches, have increased over the last few decades. Researchers have analyzed these kinds of tourism environments as enclaves, which are typically driven by external forces and actors, strongly supported by globalization and the current neoliberal market economy. Existing research shows that tourism enclaves are characterized by active border-making, power issues and material and/or symbolic separation from the surrounding socio-cultural realities, leading to weak linkages with host communities and the local economy. Tourism enclaves involve power inequalities, injustices and unsustainable practices that often have serious negative impacts on local socio-economic development. The articles of the special issue focus on tourism enclaves in different theoretical and geographical contexts and they contribute to our understanding of how these exclusive spaces are created and transformed and how they shape places and place identities. The individual research articles are contextualized and discussed with the key theoretical perspectives and empirical findings on tourism enclaves. Future research needs include analysis of linkages and flows of labor, goods, ideas and capital in different scales; policymaking, planning and regulations; environmental impacts; and locals’ land and resource access in the respect of bordering, privatization and land grabbing. By focusing on these topics, the tourism industry could be guided towards more responsible and sustainable development path.     

Performative Chineseness and Culinary Tourism in Chinese Restaurants in Newfoundland,Canada

Abstract

This article explores Chinese culinary practice in Newfoundland by including a non-Chinese perspective in the sense of ‘culinary tourism’. As it is an open, multivocal, and incomplete system, both Chinese and non-Chinese participate in the everyday negotiation of Chinese foodways, shaping their different and sometimes conflicting understandings of Chineseness in response to various global or local socio-cultural circumstances. In this process, a diasporic Chinese identity is mutually constructed, while a creolized, cosmopolitan sense of being Newfoundlanders—based on shared culinary experience—also emerges.     

Moral assemblages of volunteer tourism development in Cusco,Peru

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we develop a conceptual approach from which to examine the moral landscape of volunteer tourism development in Cusco, Peru. Drawing from recent work on assemblage theory in geography and tourism studies, we explore how assemblage thinking can facilitate new understandings of volunteer tourism development. Using assemblage as an analytical framework allows us to understand volunteer tourism as a series of relational, processual, unequal and mobile practices. These practices, we argue, are constituted through a broader aggregation of human and non-human actors that co-construct moral landscapes of place. Thus, reconsidering volunteer tourism as assemblage allows for more inclusive and nuanced understandings of how geopolitical discourses as well as historical, political, economic and cultural conjunctures mediate volunteer tourism development, planning and policy. Finally, this paper calls for further research that integrates assemblage theory and tourism planning and development.     

Towards ‘Embedded Non-creative Work’? Administration,digitisation and the recorded music industry

Abstract

For contemporary cultural policy, ‘non-creative’ work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of ‘embedded creativity’ with a more situated view of work’s cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this ‘embeddedness’, taking a ‘cultural economy’ approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of ‘admin’ to recorded music industries, after ‘digital disruption’. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing ‘creative industries’ as such. The intention is not to show that ‘embedded non-creative workers’ are in fact ‘creative’ but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of ‘cultural’ labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural ‘administration’ in the contemporary ‘creative economy’.     

Enclavic tourism spaces: territorialization and bordering in tourism destination development and planning

ABSTRACT

Enclave tourism is a growing field of research. In general, tourism enclaves are seen as products of global capitalism and a non-locally-driven neoliberal market economy. Enclaves also manifest certain kinds of tourism planning and development modes in destination societies. The enclaves are exclusively planned spaces that usually contain the vast majority of facilities and services needed for tourists who have limited possibilities or desire to leave the enclave. At the same time, the locals' access to these spaces can be limited or otherwise controlled. Therefore, there are always power issues and processes of inequalities and uneven development involved, which calls for a further understanding of enclaves and their evolution and governance in tourism planning and development. This paper aims to discuss and synthesize the conceptual idea of enclaves in tourism and get an overview of some of the key theoretical perspectives on how enclavic spaces are produced, bordered, and governed in contemporary tourism planning and development. It is concluded that in critical situations the enclave tourism spaces with all-inclusive products can turn out to be all-exclusive for local communities in development. To understand the nature and development of enclave tourism and to guide their transformation in more sustainable directions, further research on policy and governance aspects of enclave tourism is needed.     

Abandoned spaces and bare life in the enclaves of the India–Bangladesh border

Based on an ethnography of the enclaves in India and Bangladesh, this paper explores enclave dwellers lived experiences of vulnerability where life is trapped in-between two states. These enclaves are geographically located in one country but politically and legally belong to another. The absence of a home country's rule of law and the irregular presence of the host country's sovereign power and control construct, in Giorgio Agamben's terms, a ‘space of exception’ where everyday life is characterised by exclusion from legal rights, but nonetheless subject to law, socio-political exploitation and gendered violence. By situating Agamben's ‘bare life’ in these enclaves, this paper argues that the conceptualisation of bare life as solely a sovereign production paints an inadequate picture of the zone of abandonment. The paper argues that in addition to the sovereign creation of bare life, social and gendered dimensions are essential for a nuanced approach to this concept.     

Hospitality workers and the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility

ABSTRACT

Building on the recent interest among labor geographers for workers’ ability to strategize around their mobility, and tourism researchers’ longstanding examination of mobile tourism workers, this paper explores the mobility agency of differently positioned hospitality workers. The findings suggest that workers are not always ‘strategic’ in relation to labor mobility, and that labor mobility and career paths must be recognized as fragmented, happenstance and erratic. Furthermore, this article argues for an approach to the study of mobile tourism workers that takes the relational as well as temporal aspects into account. This endeavor is in particular guided by the notion of stories-so-far and the understanding of people as both being and becoming. The empirical basis of this paper consists of 22 interviews with hospitality workers in four hotel workplaces in Sweden; the luxury city hotel, the suburban chain hotel, the city chain hotel and the seasonal hotel. Ultimately, I suggest that the multifaceted complex of considerations which workers negotiate, could be conceptualized as the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility.     

‘Uncircumcised boys’ and ‘girl Spartans’: Youth,Gender and Generation in Colonial Insurgencies and Counterinsurgency,c. 1954–59

Both male and female youth were significant actors in anti-colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies due to the marginalisation of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses in two British colonies, Kenya and Cyprus, in 1954-59, providing a gendered and relational study of youth as cohort, as liberation generation, as life stage and as kinship position. It argues that a ‘gen[d]erational’ lens is necessary to properly understand how age and gender intersected to shape boys' and girls’ experiences of youth insurgency, and how colonial states punished and tried to ‘rehabilitate’ such rebellious youths. This article argues that colonial responses to youth in insurgency were implicitly shaped by colonial understandings of gender and generation as well as by race and ethnicity, but that counterinsurgency policies failed to effectively integrate gendered and generational perspectives sufficiently into either their security, peno-legal or welfare and developmental responses. The only successful ‘rehabilitation’ programmes focused on male youth, and combined colonial and local understandings of age and gender to provided pathways towards the forms of adulthood desired by youth, rather than just treating them as unthinking, impressionable or irrecoverable children.     

Agamben in the Ogaden: Violence and sovereignty in the Ethiopian–Somali frontier

This paper asks what makes the periphery or the frontier a prime locus of the “inclusionary exclusion” that is, according to Giorgio Agamben, so constitutive of the state of exception. By applying Agamben’s analytics to the Ogaden – a frontier province of the Ethiopian state – we propose an interpretation of the political history of the Ethiopian Ogaden as a recurrent government by exception that spans the Imperial rule (c. 1890–1974), the socialist dictatorship of the Derg (1974–1991), and the current revolutionary democratic regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) (1991–today). Drawing attention to the historical continuities in the exercise of (Ethiopian) state sovereignty in its (Somali) frontier, we offer a genealogy of the violent incorporation of the Ogaden into the Ethiopian body politic. We identify recurring practices of sovereign power by successive Ethiopian regimes that are constitutive of the state of exception, namely a conflation between law and lawlessness, the politics of bare life and an encampment strategy. By doing so, this paper insists on the constitutive importance of land appropriation – Carl Schmitt’s Landnahme – in performances of sovereignty and territorialization at the margins of the postcolonial state.     

Marketing Destinations with Prolonged Negative Images: Towards a Theoretical Model

Abstract

While there is a great deal of research on destination branding in general, the study of tourism marketing that deals specifically with destinations suffering from prolonged image problems is less well developed. We integrated theories from crisis communication, image restoration and destination marketing to examine media strategies used by such destinations to attract tourism, and then classified them. We utilized qualitative content analysis of tourism campaigns for destinations – primarily in problematic areas such as the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe – that appeared in international tourism magazines, destinations’ websites and video-sharing websites. We classified two approaches of media strategies: the ‘cosmetic approach’, relating to strategies that focus mainly on altering the destination's image and the ‘strategic approach’, relating to strategies that take comprehensive action, changing both the negative image and the problems causing it.     

Remapping disclosure: gay men's segmented journeys of moving out and coming out

Drawing on recent work that examines the contingent, personal nature of queer migration, this paper provides empirical support for recent claims that coming-out journeys are more complex than the linear, often rural-to-urban typologies that have framed them during the past two decades. Since coming-out journeys are rarely elaborated beyond a conceptual level, overly teleological understandings involving homophobic, rural places, inclusive urban homelands, and one-time, linear ‘flights’ and ‘escapes’ persist. Employing the migration narratives of 48 self-identified gay men who settled in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC, USA, this paper challenges the linearity and finality of coming-out migration by highlighting particular segments of the journey. These include short-term trips to scout the gay life potentials of places, migrations that result in a degree of re-entry into ‘the closet,’ relocations that allow men to test or try on different places and identities, and moves (or imminent moves) that ‘trigger’—rather than stem from—a coming-out process. Taken together, these segments suggest that coming-out journeys are ongoing, relational, and often discontinuous journeys influenced by both queer individuals' intersectional subjectivities (e.g., age, race, and class) and the social contexts of the places they encounter.