Living in anachronistic space: Temporalities of displacement in Moscow's Soviet-era standardised housing

In 2017, the Moscow municipality announced the demolition of several thousand remaining Soviet-era, standardised apartments (khrushchevki). Known as the Renovation, the renewal project promises to replace the khrushchevki with new residential districts. Based on fieldwork in Northern Izmailovo, a district targeted for demolition, this article analyses encroaching displacement by foregrounding the temporal experiences of affected residents. Building on literature that explores the political underpinnings of discourse and aesthetics in urban renewal projects, with particular attention to Rancière's temporal politics, the article contends that the Renovation depends on the discursive construction of its targets as spatial anachronisms. This renders the Soviet-era housing blocks, and those who live within them, vulnerable to a spectrum of modernising aestheticising interventions—from minor ornamentation to wholesale demolition. Based on ethnographic data, the article shows how the initial stages of redevelopment have altered a local network of benches. For a group of long-standing, elderly residents, these disruptions have instigated more profound reckonings with their own sense of time in/and space, leading to an understanding that they, too, are seen as anachronistic features of the city. Paying attention to urban materiality on a granular scale, particularly in standardised housing estates, reveals the multifaceted temporalities that inform residents' engagements with the spaces of their home districts. The article argues that doing so counters the exclusionary temporal logic of the discourse of anachronism by denying its ubiquity. In turn, it speaks to growing geographic interest in amplifying alternative temporalities in the face of destructive, terminal change.     

Genealogical narrative and self-knowledge in Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men

SUMMARY

Why did Rousseau cast the substance of the Second Discourse in the form of a genealogy? In this essay the author attempts to work out the relation between the literary form (genealogical narrative, as the author calls it) of the Discourse's two main parts and the content. A key thesis of Rousseau's text concerns our lack of self-knowledge, indeed, our ignorance of our ignorance. The author argues that in a number of ways genealogical narrative is meant to respond to that lack. In the course of his discussion he comments on Rousseau's puzzling remarks in the Second Discourse about his expository method. Further, given the thesis that we lack self-knowledge, Rousseau owes us an account of his genesis as self-knowing genealogist. He attempts to do so in part through his narrative of the ‘illumination of Vincennes’. The author examines that narrative as well, reading it and the Discourse in light of each other. Can Rousseau resolve the problems of self-reference that the philosophical use of genealogy often leads to? The article discusses this complex metaphilosophical problem, along with views about the value of genealogical accounts, in light of recent work by Robert Guay, John Kekes, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Frederick Neuhouser, among others.     

Contesting scale: A space of the political in a post-disaster context

Disasters create spaces for the political to unfold. This paper contributes to the recurring debates on space and the political in geography by providing a novel empirical focus: following a fire in Lærdal, Norway in 2014, contesting discourses on how emergency services should be spatially organized revealed themselves. A scalar discourse of the local, situated in discourses on periphery and rurality in Norway, emerged to contest a neoliberal discourse promoted by the government. I illustrate the scalar discourse of the local through four identified narratives in Norwegian newspapers that emphasize different aspects of the local. This demonstrates how scalar categories are meshed with everyday vocabulary, and hence are important to study. Although a space of the political was realized following the fire, in the last part of the paper I reflect on why the scalar discourse of the local has not gained recognition as legitimate contestation, as reforms aiming to centralize and/or merge continue to be rolled out in Norway.     

Post-politics,crisis, and Ireland's ‘ghost estates’

This paper argues that the global economic recession provides an instructive point to reconsider recent theorisations of post-politics for two reasons. First, theories of the post-political can help us to understand the current neoliberal impasse, and second, current transformations provide us with an empirical basis to test the limits of these explanatory frameworks. While the resurgence of neoliberal policies, evidenced through the state-sponsored rescue of the financial sector and the introduction of harsh austerity measures in many countries, appear to confirm post-politics, various protest movements have testified to a concurrent re-politicisation of the economy. Furthermore, crises constitute periods of disruption to the discursive and symbolic order, which open a space for hegemonic struggle, however fleeting. We focus our analysis on Ireland's ‘ghost estates’ – residential developments left abandoned or unfinished after the property crash – and their treatment within mainstream print media. We argue that in the context of crash, the ‘ghost estate’ functioned as an ‘empty signifier’ through which hegemonic struggles over how to narrate, and thus re-inscribe, the event of the crisis were staged. We explore the double role played by ‘ghost estates’: firstly, as an opening for politics, and secondly, as a vehicle used to discursively contain the crisis through a neoliberal narrative of ‘excess’. We argue that our analysis offers an instructive example of how post-politicisation occurs as a process that is always contingent, contextual, and partial, and reliant on the cooption and coproduction of existing cultural signifiers with emergent narrations of crisis.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

Introduction

Abstract

For all of its political drama, the health care debate appears consumed with bureaucratic minutiae quite distant from political philosophy. Yet in important respects that debate is intimately connected with the founding premises of the modern technological project of the mastery of nature for the relief of man's estate as envisioned by René Descartes and Francis Bacon. This essay uses a recent discussion of the health care debate by bioethicist Daniel Callahan to raise some fundamental questions about the role of technology in our medical culture. It argues that modern health care is the Cartesian project come of age, and it uses Descartes' Discourse on Method to reflect on the possibility of a sensible politics of technology in our time.     

Inventing the “Pygmy”: Representing the “Other”, Presenting the “Self”

In this article, I investigate historical representations of Central African Forest People that have been constructed by explorers, scientists, colonial officers, journalists and the European public in order to provide a historical analysis of the concept of the “Pygmy”. Following Said’s argument regarding Orientalism, that “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormous systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (1995 Said, E. W. 1995. Orientalism, Harmondsworth, , UK: Penguin.  [Google Scholar]: 3), I will draw on representations of Forest People from written accounts of the last 200 years. None of these accounts should be regarded as representative of Forest Peoples’ own representations of themselves, so what I hope to provide is a clear picture of how Forest People have been represented by others through the discourses of race, evolution and colonialism.     

Implementing political agreement in Northern Ireland: Planning issues for Irish language policy

This paper examines the place of the Irish language in the context of the political agreement recently reached in Northern Ireland. Language planning issues are seen to turn on critical relationships between the emergent legislative framework and local Irish-speaking communities in the region. A model for community-based language planning initiatives is proposed as a means of ensuring the effective engagement of language policy with Irish-speakers. It is suggested that the issue of language rights is likely to become much more pressing as the new institutions of state seek to reflect the socio-political diversity of the region.     

中国古代小说话语方式考论

中国古代小说发生、发展的特殊情态,表现为特定情境下确立的话语方式,深刻地支配着艺术思维。从说话艺术的演出“场头”,到以阅读“话本”为主体的“案头”,原来有着重要作用的“看”和“听”,逐渐退隐到“读”之中,成为艺术构思与表达的重要因素。“用画面思考”和“为听而说”的话语方式,是中国小说民族特色的深层结构。     

Sexing the Self: Geographies of engagement and encounter

Geographic research on the construction of sexual identity takes inspiration from two main sources. The first is the post-structural literature that suggests sexual subjects are sutured to identities created in the realms of discourse. The second is a psychoanalytical tradition concerned with the desires and disgusts experienced by sexual subjects as they seek to reconcile their inner selves with the outside world. In this paper an attempt is made to combine these contrasting perspectives by exploring the way sexualities are negotiated by individuals as they encounter a world that is both real and imagined. The utility of this approach is illustrated with reference to the author's research on sex work, which demonstrates that the making of sexual identities involves a dynamic relation between Self and Other--a relation that is subsequently encoded in representations of space. The paper concludes that the making of sexual identities can only be understood by examining the ways that representation and experience entwine in specific places to create sexual identities that are fractured, contested and always becoming.