Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper I provide a reading of Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [the contributions to philosophy (of propriation)] as a contribution to geography. This collection of manuscripts, written between 1936 and 1938, is extremely important in terms of the development of Heidegger's work, his political career, and his rethinking of the relation between space and time. This rethinking is one of the key themes discussed, along with the political and geographical implications of Heidegger's notion of calculation. In order to situate these insights, I first provide a discussion of the context within which Heidegger wrote the work. After outlining this biographical, intellectual, and political situation, I move to the geographical contributions, suggesting ways in which Heidegger's thought can impact on our thinking of environment, nature, globalisation, and measurement.

In this paper I investigate how the effects of the disordered spaces of industrial ruins can interrogate and contest the normative ways in which memory is spatialised in the city. By focusing upon confrontations with the ghosts which haunt ruins, I will suggest that the affective and sensual memories conjured up act as an antidote to the fixed, classified, and commodified memories purveyed in heritage and commemorative spaces. In contradistinction to the didactic and constrained remembering that prevails across Western cities, a form of remembering which is inarticulate, sensual, and conjectural allows improvisatory scope to supplement and challenge ordered forms of social remembering.

In this paper we present a detailed examination of identification codes, their embeddedness in everyday life, and how recent trends are qualitatively altering their nature and power. Developing a Foucaultian analysis we argue that identification codes are key components of governmentality and capitalism. They provide a means of representing, collating, sorting, categorising, matching, profiling, regulating, of generating information, knowledge, and control through processes of abstraction, computation, modeling, and classification. Identification codes now provide a means of uniquely addressing all the entities and processes that make up everyday life—people, material objects, information, transactions, and territories. Moreover, they provide a means of linking these entities and processes together in complex ways to form dense rhizomic assemblages of power/knowledge. At present, however, the information that identification codes provide access to are, at best, oligopticon in nature—that is, they afford only partial and selective views. In the latter part of the paper we outline four trends—wide-scale trawling for data, increased granularity, forever storage, and enhanced processing and analysis—that seek to convert these partial oligopticons into more panoptic arrangements. In turn, we contend that these trends are part of a larger metatrend—the creation of a machine-readable world in which identification codes can be systematically and automatically ‘read’ and acted on by software independent of human control. This metatrend is supported by interlocking discourses such as safety, security, efficiency, antifraud, citizenship and consumer empowerment, productivity, reliability, flexibility, economic rationality, and competitive advantage to construct powerful, supportive discursive regimes.

In this paper I examine intertwined modes of bodily evaluation and genetic understanding evident in relation to ‘modernising’ tendencies in contemporary agriculture, using a case study of pedigree cattle breeding. These modes afford different perspectives on the same bodies. Visual evaluation is associated with aesthetic appreciation of physically present animal bodies, and takes on a particular intensity in the ritual of judging during agricultural shows. Statistical techniques of genetic evaluation are concerned to construct numerical estimates of the genetic ‘worth’ or ‘potential’ of an animal, which can stand for the animal and be transported over space and time. In both instances, animals become understood through a series of relationships between material bodies, semiotic practices, social institutions, and spatialities, and both constitute different sorts of assessment of something of the interiority of animal bodies from the outside. Both draw on different practical understandings of bodies and of bodily quality, which are directly related to breeding practices and the production and constitution of new animal bodies. I explore the production of different knowledge practices associated with these modes of evaluation, and examine the interplay and tensions between them. Simultaneously taking into account aesthetic and technical knowledge practices is suggested to be valuable in considerations of the constitution of bodies embedded in specific nature–society relations. Finally, it is suggested that there is evidence for an intensification of genetic discourse in livestock breeding, implying continuing processes of change in the knowledge practices of breeding and in the locus of decisionmaking and relations of power in agriculture.

In this paper we use research into ecotouristic activities in Kaikoura, New Zealand, to discuss how the nonhuman agency of nature is implicated in the performance and meaning of place. Kaikoura has recently boomed as an ecotourist destination, and its changing nature has been coconstituted by the networked agency of whales and dolphins, whose charismatic animal appeal is a magnet for tourists. We discuss the power of representation to conjure up anticipatory ideas about place practices, the influence of mediating and staging tourist performances, and the importance of unconsidered habits and practices in prompting distinctive performances in particular places. Some tourists leave Kaikoura disappointed because the unpredictability of nature can disrupt anticipated experience. Others, however, in partaking in whale watching and swimming with dolphins, are presented with both educational experience and opportunities for relationally achieved connections with cetaceans which can result in intense experiences of immanence and unreflexive glee. This research poses significant questions about the ability of actor networks and relational assemblages to capture fully the power of the nonhuman to evoke sublime emotional and aesthetic relations with humans.