‘It's a public,I reckon’: Publicness and a Suburban Shopping Mall in Sydney's Southwest

Traditionally, public space has been perceived as an integral part of fully functioning liberal democracy. Yet much research argues that public space is in decline due to regimes of neoliberal governance paralleled with a growth in quasi-public spaces such as shopping malls, casinos and gated communities. It is argued that these new spatial forms posit a commercialised, sanitised and ultimately exclusionary urban form in place of more egalitarian, engaging and ultimately democratic public spaces. Increasingly, however, urban research has questioned the veracity of the claims made about the nature of traditional public space as well as investigating the marginal and contingent nature of publicness as constituted by and enacted in a variety of places. Drawing on Foucault's concept of heterotopic space, this paper reports on a qualitative study based on focus group interviews conducted with users of a suburban shopping mall in Sydney's southwest. The research uncovers both a more complex and less overtly deterministic publicness than has previously been identified in such spaces. From these findings the paper argues for a conception of publicity which moves beyond the zero-sum game approach endemic in much work in this area to one which analyses the qualitative effect quasi-public spaces are having on the nature of publicness in the Australian context. The paper concludes by arguing that a rethinking of publicness allows room for the emergence of a more progressive public ethic.     

The impeachment was a fascist and conservative turn against culture

In this talk, Brazilian media theorist Ivana Bentes (who was briefly Secretary of Citizens’ Rights and Cultural Diversity in Dilma Rousseff’s second government) revisits the protests of 2013, driven by progressive and emancipatory agendas but subsequently hijacked by a media-induced anti-corruption discourse that led to the parliamentary impeachment of the elected head of state and the installation of vice-president Michel Temer at the helm of a right-wing coalition. Why, Bentes asks, has the Left not been able to capitalize on this crisis of representation and what can cultural and media activisms do to rebuild the coalition that took to the streets five years ago against the World Cup and Olympic spending spree and in favour of land rights and the right to the city?     

Black-and-White Photography in Batcham: From a Golden Age to Decline (1970–1990)

In this article, I explore the biographies of three professional black-and-white photographers of the 1970s from Batcham, West Cameroon. They are Edouard Fofou, alias Photo-Edouard; Michel Kenne, also known as Photo-Kmichel and Gaspard Vincent Tatang, alias Tagavince. They and their work stands as an example of the very many African photographers whose work could be archived but probably will not be. If we know of a few celebrated names like Malik Sidibe but not Vincent Tatang it is as much by chance as anything else. This then is an exploration of a possible but unrealized archive. What we could call an archival path not taken.     

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY CONFRONTS THE LONGUE DURÉE

This review of John Potts's Ideas in Time: The Longue Durée in Intellectual History discusses the advantages and disadvantages of writing intellectual histories that embrace the longue durée. It applauds Potts's concise account of historiographical discussions of continuity and discontinuity in the history of ideas in the last seventy-five years but laments his failure to discuss the contributions of historians of science and scholarship to the practices of knowledge-making and to the transmission of ideas. It suggests that the study of discontinuities can also be rich and revealing, and it proposes one approach to understanding the ways in which ideas go out of fashion. It concludes by noting, first, that the models that contemporary historians of ideas adopt also have to do with book-market opportunities and pressures and, second, that we have work to do to engage our contemporaries and students in whatever form of intellectual history we choose to write.     

Towards a trickster science/fiction: complexifying boundaries with Neal Stephenson and Michel Serres

ABSTRACT

This article highlights an intersection between the science fiction of Neal Stephenson and the science philosophy of Michel Serres. As two of the most prolific contemporary advocates of the communication between literature and science, Serres and Stephenson employ permutations of the trickster figure as a potent lens on the epistemological transformations that occur when boundaries are crossed and static systems perturbed. Allegorizing the birth of science and rational consciousness as the intervention of a trickster, Stephenson finds in hackers and couriers the same generative force that Serres associates with the Greek god Hermes and the figure of the parasite. With particular attention to Stephenson’s postcyberpunk novel Snow Crash (Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. London: Penguin Books) and Serres’ Hermes series (1969–1980), the concept of the trickster will be explored as both a personification of the kinship between creation mythologies, information theory, anthropology, and modern physics, and as the template for a productive transdisciplinary mode of cultural inquiry.     

Governmentality and power in politically contested space: refugee farming in Hong Kong's New Territories, 1945–1970

A small proportion of Mainland Chinese refugee flows into British Hong Kong following the 1949 Communist Revolution in the People's Republic of China were vegetable farmers, who by the late 1960s engendered a vegetable revolution in New Territories agricultural space. Heterogeneous actors and their differing modalities of power in the late-colonial government possessed an active managerial role in this vegetable revolution anchored in issues of marketing and land tenure. While post-World War Two developmentalist ontologies help explain government intervention in the post-war agricultural economy, this research focuses primarily on the disciplinary techniques deployed within the governance rationalities of the early Cold War period to cultivate pro-government loyalties among a potentially proletarianized, trans-border refugee farming population perceived by colonial authorities as being susceptible to Communist influence. As ‘experimental space’, marketing innovations were a qualified success, but progress in land reform failed because of the local geopolitical context of colonial rule in the contested space of the New Territories.     

Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental Conservation

Abstract: In this paper I emphasise the financialisation of environmental conservation as 1. the turning of financiers to conservation parameters as a new frontier for investment, and 2. the rewriting of conservation practice and nonhuman worlds in terms of banking and financial categories. I introduce financialisation as a broadly controlling impetus with relevance for environmental conservation. I then note ways in which a spectacular investment frontier in conservation is being opened. I highlight the draw of assertions of lucrative gains, combined with notions of geographical substitutability, in creating tradable indicators of environmental health and harm. I disaggregate financialisation strategies into four categories—nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature derivatives—and assess their implications. The concluding section embraces Marx and Foucault as complementary thinkers in understanding the transforming intensifications of late capitalism in environmental conservation, and diagnosing their associated effects and costs.     

The Maronite Leadership’s Approach toward Syria, 1970–2011: Between Integration,Separation, and Pragmatism

The Maronite–Syria relationship is troublesome, and one can say that the two sides are diametrical opposites. The Maronites, in general, represent the aspiration for an independent Lebanon, while Syria considers Lebanon a part of “Greater Syria” and aspires to annex the Lebanese territories. The Maronite community has consistently resisted these aspirations. However, the Maronite community is not a coherent one, which is reflected in its approach toward Syria. In fact, the Maronite leadership has adopted three different approaches toward Syria: an integrative one that aspires to full cooperation with Syria; a separatist one that strongly considers Lebanon and Syria to be separate states; and a pragmatist one that adheres to intimate or unfriendly ties according to local Lebanese interests. This article introduces the three Maronite approaches and claims that one cannot disassociate these approaches, especially the pragmatist one, from the Syrian policy toward Lebanon, which includes changing alliances according to Syria’s political interests. Moreover, the article suggests that these approaches will remain in place regardless of which Maronite leader supports each one and regardless of who will rule in Syria.     

PEIRCE AND FOUCAULT ON TIME AND HISTORY: THE TASKS OF (DIS)CONTINUITY

Some have recognized an affinity between Pragmatist thought and that of Foucault, though this affinity is typically cashed out in terms of William James and John Dewey and not Charles Sanders Peirce. This article argues that bringing Foucault and Peirce into collaboration not only shows the relevance of Peirce for Foucault, and vice versa, but also enriches the thought of both thinkers—indeed, it also reveals important implications for the theory of history more generally. Specifically, the article crosses the Peircean concept of habit and the Foucauldian concept of practice (as it operates in the arenas of discourse, power, and self), ultimately decoding them in terms of an account of time that derives from Peirce and that gives a fundamental role to discontinuity. In this way the article shows how Peirce can provide Foucault with an account of time that buttresses and grounds his genealogical approach to history, while at the same time revealing how Foucault can provide Peirce with an account of history. The synergy between the two thinkers offers a way to think about the nature of history that goes beyond what each thinker individually provided.     

PINKER AND PROGRESS

Condorcet's classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long‐term decline in person‐on‐person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates the spread of a cultural pattern of self‐restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism. For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad‐news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold‐War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter‐Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti‐Communism.