Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This paper reconsiders the distinction between the concepts of space and place. We argue that, rather than favoring one side of the place – space division, or dissolving the partition between them, the distinction needs to be maintained because it is a key site of Western metaphysics. Specifically, the distinction between space and place cannot be abandoned or easily altered because it remains inextricably entangled with other key concepts. Drawing upon Derrida's notion of différance, we illustrate two such entanglements, the relation of space – place with nature and with economy. We argue that space – place helps to constitute, but in turn is constituted by, nature and economy. The larger point is that none of these metaphysical concepts are separate and independent, but are entwined in complex and changing forms, producing effects that demand critical scrutiny.

Increasingly the focus of social analysis and explanation is falling upon doings, on actions and practices, insofar as they are understood to be the origin rather than the effect of signification and meaning. This paper offers a sympathetic critique of such ‘ontologisation’ of practice, asking what is presumed about the human and the social when practice is taken as the primary social ‘thing’. The critique works by outlining, somewhat tentatively, a ‘phenomenology’ of dreamless sleep; a situation and a state in which a subject cannot be said to be doing anything at all. The figures that will be discussed below lie flat out; for the moment they have no bearing or gait, no focused or dispersed attention, no reflexive, deliberative or tacit understanding. This discussion is developed through a reading of Tim Ingold's (2000) landmark essay “The temporality of the landscape” (in The Perception of the Environment Routledge), here taken as exemplary of a broad range of practice based approaches. While looking specifically at issues around skill, place, and sociality, the overarching claim of the paper is that thinking about sleep and about being a being which sleeps provides a way of touching on the susceptibility and finitude of corporeal existence. A susceptibility and a finitude which, I suggest, are the very condition of possibility of practice and action.

This paper seeks to give expression to notions of excess within economies of climate change. The paper begins by addressing the dominance of scientific modelling in the scientific and political constructions of climate change manifested through general circulation models and scientific visualisation. Considering this ‘digital earth’, the paper further investigates how the unit-based accumulation of earth data has actively secured the production of political responses that have both emulated and reinstated a model of accounting (such as the Stern Review and carbon trading). Considering the rendering of digital earth as a specific assemblage of globalisation produced through digitalisation, I argue that the digital realm is productive of its own forms of excess (expressed in aesthetics and globalism). I suggest how this excessive globality reveals its own fragmentation through negative presentation. Drawing from Georges Bataille's notion of expenditure and Maurice Blanchot's writing of the disaster I seek to describe a terrain of knowledge and loss that breaks with this aforementioned circuit of accounting, and instead considers another kind of relation (Bataille's concept of expenditure) to account for the wasting of the world. The paper concludes with a Bataillean ‘sketch’ to consider how this excess may be recuperated as an emergent ethic within the disaster yet to come.

The last two decades have witnessed, as part of a wider financialisation of British economy and society, a creeping privatisation of social welfare provision. Political justification for the expansion of privatised social insurance markets has frequently been couched in the language of responsibility. However, as the ‘credit crunch’ spectacularly attests and as studies of the dynamics of financialisation have succeeded in showing, financialised capitalism turns on excess. In this paper we explore some of the ways in which the reworking of long-term insurance or life assurance has contributed to the financialisation of everyday life. More particularly, we trace the emergence of what we call ‘lifestyle insurance’. Our purpose here is not only to begin to map the terrain and consider the consequences of this nascent modality of insurance in the UK, but in so doing to contribute to wider debates about the processes of subjectification that underwrite financialisation. In addition to pressing for a greater attention to be given to life assurance the paper suggests, by mobilising the figure of excess, three more areas to which studies of the financialisation of the everyday might productively attend: first, the financialisation of life itself; second, the ways in which financialisation is affectively charged; third, the spatial politics of financialisation.

Against the horizon of Earthly depletion and social exhaustion, miserly thinking is once again on the ascendancy, catching hold of critical and radical thought as well as the popular and conservative imagination. Whatever its ethicopolitical inflection, miserly thought enjoins one to conserve, constrain, and sustain. It is consumed by scarcity: specifically, the inability of the world to accommodate itself to the insatiable demands that are placed upon it. Faced with lack, miserly thought advances its ethic of restraint, the target of which is everything that would exceed the paucity of means placed at our world's disposal. Pitching itself against miserly thinking, the paper unfolds a form of thought animated by excession rather than immiseration, by a world given as excess rather than as privation. This is accomplished in four parts, the first of which dislodges the grip of miserly thinking by recourse to Georges Bataille's notion of general economy. The paper then considers arguably the best-known form of excessful thinking: Marxian political economy, as rendered by David Harvey. Nevertheless, while this successfully reveals how social formations are animated by surplus rather than by scarcity, its desire to restitute excess remains mired in miserly thinking. Consequently, the third part of the paper considers the fate of excess once it suffuses the whole of existence. With its ontology of association, Bruno Latour's actor-network theory has gone the furthest in this regard. However, this ontology runs aground upon an inconsistent excess held in reserve: plasma. The final part of the paper addresses the limitations of Latour's actor-network theory by way of Alain Badiou's ontology of subtraction. In the final analysis, the sequence of ‘lack’, ‘surplus’, and ‘association’ gives way to the constellation of ‘multiplicity’, ‘situation’, and ‘event’, which is illustrated with reference to the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.

Recalling Tony Bennett's plea for a more ‘prosaic’ cultural studies, this paper proposes a redefinition of the concept ‘third space’ as a prosaic space of policy and governmentality. Based on field research in rural China, where cultural heritage has become a central resource in economic development, the paper argues that cultural development cannot be relied upon to produce spaces of resistance, empowerment, or ‘sustainability’. This is, in part, because cultural development tends to conceive of cultural spaces as ‘rooted’ rather than as spaces of translocality. While third space offers an attractive alternative to such a conceptualization, it remains vulnerable to the same alienating spatial abstractions as found in the practices of cultural development. The paper seeks to maintain the critical focus of third space while redefining it in more prosaic terms to better reflect the everyday governmentalized spaces of culture within which people live.

The challenge of producing geographical narrative has recently been enhanced through work under the banners of affect and nonrepresentational theory. This has been registered in a range of topics in cultural, social, and political geography, and impacted in work on landscape. Such work has antecedents in several decades of humanistic geography and is immersed in more recent writings on performance and subjectivity and the critical rethinking of being, dwelling, movement, and place. With those and allied works in mind, this paper interrogates such literatures through writing about walking an urban section (through the port of Plymouth) of Britain's South West Coast Path; one of the few places where any of the twenty demarcated national trails and long-distance routes in the UK intersects a city. The existence of a rich literature on strolling in urban space opens up possibilities and connections. However the approach here is deliberately eclectic and also draws on works from/about geopolitics, natural history, and urban studies. My purpose here is to bring such literatures into closer and productive dialogue, through an account that shifts geographical and temporal scales and perspectives. This is done through the device of an evening's walk along a section of the path: negotiating spaces of capital and sovereignty. Military geography and security/insecurity emerge as master keys to how topography has been shaped here and the paper draws a series of connections between landscape, life, death, and military activities, both near and far. What the paper aims to do, therefore, is to illustrate how geopolitics affects us—to illustrate how the repercussions of militarism, war, and death are folded into the textures of an everyday urban fabric. This has implications for how other landscapes, places, and paths might be understood.

In this paper we argue that nonprofit, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) constitute crucial sites at which welfare state restructuring and neoliberalism are enacted and materialised in everyday life practices. This paper responds to recent calls from geographers to move to finer scales of analysis that enrich our understanding about the geographies of welfare state restructuring and neoliberalism. Our response is based on case-study research of NGOs that provide social services to migrants in Minneapolis-St Paul, USA, and Toronto, Canada. We draw on the concept of ‘translation’ to show the agency of NGOs in articulating macroscale programmes of governance into concrete regulations that govern the conduct of everyday life. The case studies demonstrate the usefulness of seeing NGOs as translation mechanisms to current debates about the role of NGOs amidst welfare state restructuring and the rise of neoliberalism.