Adrian Parr

The Deterritorializing Language of Child Detainees Self-harm or embodied graffiti?

The policy of mandatory detention for all asylum seekers who arrive in Australia without a valid visa regardless of age, religion, physical or mental health is uncompromising to say the least. The detention centres are harsh and alienating environments, where free and open communication is severely restricted, and in this context, children, in particular, suffer from a double silencing - unable to speak English, traumatized and often too young to speak for themselves. This article is concerned with how this silencing could be connected to a broader problem of representation. In order to understand how Australia, in the name of sovereignty, transcends its own colonial subjectivity through the systematic colonization of the experiences, bodies and histories of asylum seekers, the article draws on Spivak and Deleuze’s understanding of representation to examine the material and immaterial exploitation of child detainees.

Urban Debt, Neoliberalism and the Politics of the Commons

The rural/metropolitan/wilderness hybrid central to urban shrinkage directly challenges a commonly held belief that a city consists of a dense concentration of people living in a limited geographical area, one where the primary means of production is non-agricultural. In addition, the urban condition of shrinkage tests the dominant current of growth management that has guided urban design, development, and land use. In this essay we will explore how this hybrid presents an alternative to the production and realization of surplus value that predominates throughout the contemporary landscape of neoliberal planetary urbanization. It will be argued that this process of urbanization is premised upon modalities of urban commoning, or practices that bring a variety of social and environmental struggles into relationship with each other, dismantling the apparatuses of capture that bring land-use and the collective energies animating available land under the control of capital.

One nation under surveillance

While visiting my departmental administrator we began talking about why she moved away from New York all the way down south to tiny Savannah. To my astonishment she clearly stated that this decision came in the wake of 9/11. Why? As regular commuters she and her husband no longer felt safe waiting in those endless traffic jams from Long Island to Manhattan; they no longer felt safe in the tunnels that delivered them from one side of the city to the next; they no longer felt safe walking amidst the tall buildings they once admired; and ultimately they no longer felt safe in an urban context – full stop. I sympathized and recounted how I too felt anxious catching the bus in Jerusalem with the sound of my Rabbi’s warning to avoid the bus at all costs ringing in my ears. For a split second I asked myself: perhaps I should pay the extra few shekels for a monit (taxi)? However, I made a conscious decision to catch the bus despite the warning, not because I didn’t believe or respect my Rabbi’s experience and advice but because I was prompted by the question: at what point does an urban environment stop working as one? The short answer: when the cacophony of civic life stalls. It is difficult to grasp the implications of heightened security measures without also considering the viability of urban life. What happens to the urban the moment social and physical spaces are barricaded? The contemporary Western urban environment is a transcultural locality. As a body it is a self-organizing entity producing and reproducing itself through the participation of sensorial and material movements. These include the smells and tastes of different localities, such as trees, gardens, parks and eateries; the rhythms of wind flow, flashing street signs, the pulse of traffic, the circulation of people and goods, the throb of music vibrating throughout streets and buildings; the visual clamor of color, shape, texture, scale, lighting, shade, fashion, building density, branding and the composition of all these elements; the soul of a neighborhood, whether that be the various places of religious worship, forms of sociality, traditions and rituals, or simply the overall tone of collective behavior; and finally modes of economic production and consumption, such as the types of commercial activity defining a particular landscape. At times these characteristics collide and in other instances they proliferate through, or even participate with, each other. There are differences in cultural specificity, social wealth, degrees of racial and ethnic segregation, population density and quality adrian parr

The Art of Privacy: Assaulting the Phallocentric Organization of Capital

A certain type of subjectivity, which I would call capitalistic, is overtaking the whole planet: an equalized subjectivity, with standardized fantasies and massive consumption of infantilizing reassurances. It causes every kind of passivity, degeneration of democratic values, collective racist impulsesu2009…u2009Today it is massively secreted by the media, community centers and alleged cultural institutions. It not only involves conscious ideological formations, but also collective unconscious emotions.1