- Timothy Mitchell suggests that one of the distinctive aspects of the political discourse of the state is that a "state effect" is created in the public realm that isolates state and society as distinct entities, while the state emerges as a metaphysical, super-objective entity, "a subjective belief" disconnected with the society (so as to operationalize its so-called "disciplines") in the everyday life. He challanges this representation of the state by saying that the state is in fact a very empirical phenomenon, reproduced "in visible everyday forms, such as the language of legal practice, the architecture of public buildings, the wearing of military uniforms, or the marking and policing of frontiers..." I hope that we can unpack some of this tomorrow in relation to the making of places in the landscape and the construction of spaces in the urban landscape, located state spectacles at those sites, and as spatial practices that aspire to make the state visible in the material world.
- Can we bring together Mitchell's concept of the "state-effect" with the idea of the mapping of the stately networks of power onto the landscape, where landscape is understood as a spatio-temporal world of places a la Dorreen Massey and where landscapes and places are rescued from the traditional natural-cultural, real-cognitive, material-mental bifurcations? How does it help to speak about landscapes and places as events?
- Doreen Massey's proposed mobility of landscape features like mountains, animals and plants, let alone humans dislocate what is "indigenous" and what is "natural" at a place, therefore completely deconstruct nation-state ideologies and their claims to particular "homelands"!... Somebody please please write about this! or speak up!
- Long live THROWNTOGETHERNESS!..
- It would be really interesting to approach the politics of place, between thinking of places as places where a variey of different human practices are gathered up, where various trajectories come together, and of places as transformed into intelligible wholes by the intervention of stately spectacles. This argument would surely benefit from James Scott's concept of legibility. How are the meanings, identities, symbolic associations of the place negotiated among social groups, power structures, social actors, etc ?.
Three (event-)places (I and Brad will talk about):
