[iDC] re-situating the situated bibliography?

[mark bartlett]

I'm new to the list, independent scholar (at the moment) in berkeley,  
ca working on various issues of technoculture, post-critical  
philosophy (see ref below), aesthetics, social thought. I will not be  
going to the upcoming conference, but i hope there is some attention  
paid there to urbanism, poverty, access, and "who" gets "situated"  
and who doesn't, at all, relative to inclusion. the numbers below  
show, i think , that the "over-developed world" represents a very  
narrow bandwidth of humanity, and has _already_ been re-situated by  
the "under-developed world." [quoted terms from Gilroy, see below]  
what is the significance of that to any concept of future directions?

the following could be replaced by any number of other equally  
compelling works, i suggest these as a point of reference for my  
point above.


Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso: 2006

At present, 3.2 billion people are congregated in towns and cities.  
Their numbers are expected to grow to 10 billion in the middle of the  
century. [that's near-future]

Mumbai: 10-12 million squatters and tenements; Mexico City, Dhaka -  
9/10 million  each; Lagos, Cairo, Karachi, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Sao  
Paolo, Shanghai,  Dehli - 7 million each; 4 million each, Cuidad  
Nezahualcoyotl, Chalco, Iztaplapa; 2 million in Caracas; 1.5 million  
in Baghdad; 1.3 in Gaza; 160 million in India; 190 million in China;  
70 percent of the urban populations live in slums in Nigeria,  
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Sudan.

[numbers from Davis, quoted in "Slumland" review, Jan Breman, in  
current issue of New Left Review - see below]

for comparative net- growth, see:
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/census.html
particularly
http://www.conceptualdevices.com/ENG/Human%20World/ 
Internet_Users_Animation.html

and for a potential model of resistance via the net see:
http://www.cluelessmailers.org/spamdemic/index.html


action:
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, Fordham UP, 2005
	addresses moral philosophy in terms of "acting, doing, within a  
contemporary social frame."

contexts:
Paul Gilroy, Between camps : nations, cultures and the allure of  
race /  Routledge, 2004
Paul Gilroy, Against race : imagining political culture beyond the  
color line: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000
	titles are sufficient: posses problems of the "situated" in terms of  
the long standing debates between essentialism, social construction;  
opposes spivak's 		concept of "strategic essentialism" and poses  
instead a "strategic universalism."

New Left Review, 40, July/August 2006
particularly cohesive issue, well worth reading in  its entirety for  
the resonances between articles, but in particular, Gadi Algazi,  
"Offshore Zionism," R. Taggart Murphy, "East Asia's Dollars," and  
Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Curve of US Power."
	begins to re-situate the situation of globalism and power discourse,  
addresses, indirectly, many of the issues saskia sassen raised at  
ISEA for those of you 	heard her speak: the importance of "global  
finance" and its immense "creative" capacity


methods:
David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Prickly  
Paradigm Press, 2005 {downloadable at: http://www.prickly- 
paradigm.com/catalog.html}
	important and imaginative contribution to viability of anarchism as  
political strategy based on direct action network model, advocates,  
not surprisingly, 		completely dumping the situation of centralized  
state, acting not against but elsewhere, _causing_ it to wither away.

David Hoy, Critical Resistance: From poststructuralism to post- 
critique, MIT, 2005
	brings crystalline clarity to the ethical pros and cons of key  
figures: Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Zizek, Leclaou/Mouffe, Butler,  
etc, makes case for ethical 	efficacity of genealogical  
deconstruction (Derrida's term from Aporias). It's a superb primer/ 
teaching tool as well as contribution to this discourse.





mark bartlett, phd
berkeley, ca 94705
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