Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of autonomous communist activism. A new party is expanding its ranks, The Imaginary Party, which has already unnerved the French establishment, rattled Sarkozy's government, and penned its own intriguing manifesto: The Coming Insurrection. Everybody agrees: current society is about to explode. Even the French daily Le Monde, was forced to admit: “one hasn't seen power become so fearful of a book for a very long time.” Semiotext(e)‘s recent English translation has rattled the Anglo-Saxon establishment, too, unleashing a spate of bourgeois paranoia, highlighting for all to see what intelligent people knew already: how very flimsy their hegemony really is, how weak their grip is on political reality. This article examines the coming of The Coming Insurrection, its theoretical basis, and its revolutionary potential. It suggests this uncompromising text is in the ‘vanguard’ of disseminating a new brand of Marxism, a non-class-based Marxism, a runaway Marxism that has at its core an incipient neocommunist impulse, one currently pitting its wits against an intransigent neoliberalism. Its card-carrying membership thrives off nonaffiliated people, whose platform is grounded in everyday life, not at the workplace. Importantly, The Coming Insurrection employs a vitality of spirit and a principle of hope, as well as the direct action anarchism necessary to reinvigorate classical Marxism. Yes, everyone agrees: an exodus from capitalism has already begun.

In principle, the European Union provides for the free movements of workers between its member states. No worker should be discriminated against based solely on nationality, and this applies to most jobs in the public sector. In practice, however, the elimination of nationality criteria for public sector work applies only to workers from EU member states. In the French public health care system, discrimination based on nationality, either of the worker or the worker's diploma, remains salient for ‘third-country’ medical professionals whose qualifications must undergo a lengthy recognition process. In the context of expanding EU integration and anxieties over postcolonial medical migration into Europe, the historical and geographical context for nationality criteria warrants greater attention. This paper suggests that the persistence of nationality restrictions, and their effects on medical professionals seeking recognition for their qualifications in France, lies in the occluded colonial context for their development. This perspective on medical migration requires moving outside the European frame in which nationality restrictions, instantiated in French law during the Third Republic (1870 – 1914) and strengthened further under the Vichy Regime (1940 – 44), have been addressed by historians and policy makers. A more explicitly postcolonial perspective on medical migration's implications for citizenship productively demonstrates how colonial distinctions between French citizens and colonial subjects helped shape the regulatory frameworks that continue to regulate the medical professions in contemporary France.

This paper is located within attempts to debate the contested notion of community and its relevance to diasporic/migrant communities. In particular, this paper furthers such debates by exploring how those in diaspora negotiate the politics of identity, belonging, and unity within their daily lives. It stresses the importance of considering diasporic communities as fluid, positioned, and symbolic, in which negotiations of identity are actively carried out. In the process, it considers not only the importance of community as a unifying space, but also its potential for tensions and constructions of difference. It does this using an in-depth qualitative case study of diasporic Palestinians living in Athens, Greece.

This paper analyzes at the level of space the invention and management of homelessness in postsocialist cities. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides shelter space in Bucharest, Romania, this paper foregrounds the political significance of placing homeless populations to better understand neoliberal governance as a set of spatially minded practices, arguing (ultimately) that space is a key domain through which homeless populations become managed. This paper, in the end, focuses on ‘the place’ of homelessness to bring the dynamics of postsocialist liberalization into clearer relief.

This paper takes as its starting point the centrality of nonrepresentational registers of communication and comprehension to understanding how everyday experiences of travelling with others by public transport unfolds. Drawing on extensive primary research, it explores how different affective atmospheres erupt and decay in the space of the train carriage; the modes of affective transmission that might take place; and the character of the collectives that are mobilised and cohere through these atmospheres. Acknowledging that these atmospheres have powerful effects, this paper focuses on the trajectories of particular misanthropic affective relations; and how such negative relations emerge from a complex set of forces which prime passengers to act. Yet this call to action is often met with a reticent passivity that transposes these negative affective relations, often in ways that intensify their force. In expanding the realm of that which is often taken to constitute the ‘social’, the paper concludes by considering how the demands of collective responsibility fold through contemporary understandings of community.

Islands embody a contradictory geography. Although insularity has negative connotations, the related aspects of uniqueness, smallness, secrecy, security, isolation, and remoteness all have strategic roles in situating Australia's production of licit narcotics as an international success with poppy cultivation confined to the island state of Tasmania. Through the boundaries and dualisms inscribed in the discourses of islandness and drug rhetoric, the state's ultramodern manufacture of pharmaceuticals is contrasted with others elsewhere, including opium and illegal drug production. Their representations simplify the more intricate and challenging geopolitical realities that link this industry to transnational corporations, state and federal governments, their agencies, and various UN organisations. In a poststructural reading, the secrets of islands and drugs are suggested to comprise what Derrida terms aporia or impossible situations: Tasmania and its poppy industry are isolated from a global otherness yet entwine different peoples and places in connecting complex material practices both licit and illicit at multiple scales all around the world. However, these aporia also present new political and ethical openings with significance for island studies as well as for narcotics production and its regulation.

This paper concerns the treatment of place attachments in social science through an examination of their expression in literature and poetry. It challenges the notion that place attachments are essentially regressive and are signifiers of insularity and exclusion. The paper discusses the artistic expression of the ‘local’ as the search for insight into the problem of how we dwell in landscapes and communities in the context of larger human settings. These ideas are investigated through an examination of the novels and poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, one of the foremost Irish literary figures of the 20th century. In particular, the paper charts the development of Kavanagh's ‘parochial imagination’. Kavanagh's artistic project is situated in an understanding of his local attachments, his Irish Catholic identity, and his place in Irish literary culture. It demonstrates how Kavanagh's concern was with articulating the local and the universal in ways which cast an illuminating light on the debates about place attachments found in social science.

The paper brings together Peter Sloterdijk's ‘theory of spheres' with urban studies literature on the forms and effects of the contemporary urban security agenda, in order to investigate the relationships between the material and (atmo)spherical dimensions of the splintering spaces of security in the contemporary fortress city. The paper hence seeks to conceptualise securitisation strategies not only as spatially articulated measures of surveillance and separation but also as sphere-creating forces in their own right. In this view the paper places particular emphasis on Sloterdijk's conceptualisation of ‘foam’, thus elucidating the contemporary fortress city as a highly fragmented, polyspherical patchwork of more or less hermetically enclosed and purified security spheres. These spheres are bound together by relations of cofragility and reciprocal implications, and are to different degrees oriented towards the more or less economically motivated collection and management of co-isolated individuals.

This paper examines the recent growth in projects designed to enable individuals to ‘do their bit’ in the struggle to limit climate change. It discusses them in relation to a long-standing critique of trends towards individualisation amongst environmentalists. It suggests that this critique misses the complex way that subjects are produced by these practices and proposes to analyse subjectification in relation to climate change through the lens of governmentality. The paper then proceeds to examine five specific sorts of practice: carbon footprinting; carbon offsetting; carbon dieting; Carbon Reduction Action Groups; and Personal Carbon Allowances. By drawing on the concept of governmentality we show how contemporary forms of carbon government work through calculative practices that simultaneously totalise (aggregating social practices, overall greenhouse gas emissions) and individualise (producing reflexive subjects actively managing their greenhouse gas practices).

Current approaches to valuing nature within environmental and natural resource management are based on and limited by Eurocentric knowledge and experience of northern temperate nature. Methods based on separation and domination marginalise other ways of knowing nature and thinking about value. The aims of this paper are to unsettle current ways of thinking about water values; to decentre Eurocentric thinking about water management; and to present a different way of thinking about values associated with water, based on an empirical study of the Lake Eyre Basin in central Australia. The paper takes a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on multiple knowledges of Australian water, including indigenous, local settler, and scientific knowledge, and on lessons from Australian Aboriginal people and the academic discourse of Aboriginal Studies. In particular, it considers how a focus on variability—a concept emerging from the Australian landscape (rather than from northern temperate landscapes)—might foster different thinking about water and value. Variability takes as a starting point the diversity, change, and complexity of water and values, as opposed to separation and domination. This focus highlights two points currently marginalised in dominant practice of environmental valuation: that the variability of Australian water regimes is valued, and that values themselves are characterised by variability.