Arun Saldanha

Reontologising race: the machinic geography of phenotype

In contradistinction to the treatment of race as a problem of epistomology—how is phenotype represented in racial discourse—the author seeks to defend a materialist ontology of race. The creative materiality of race is asserted following the ‘material turn’ in feminism, anthropology, complexity theory, and Deleuze. Race is shown to be an embodied and material event, a ‘machine assemblage’ with a different spatiality than the self/other scheme of Hegel. Taking issue with the calls for the transcendence of race amongst cultural studies scholars such as Paul Gilroy, the author ends the paper by suggesting that the political battle against racial subordination includes a serious engagement with its biological dimensions. Race should not be eliminated, but its energies harnessed through a cosmopolitan ethics which is sensitive to its heterogeneous and dynamic nature.

Trance and visibility at dawn: Racial dynamics in Goa's rave scene

The geography of music has recently turned to questions of embodiment and materiality to account for the sensuous specificity of music. Extending this work, this article emphasizes the constitutive work that embodied experience of music and space does for social differences such as race and gender. It criticizes what is perceived as a limited conception of embodiment in non-representational theory. Using ethnographic evidence from the rave tourism scene in Goa, India, it is argued that precisely during the scenes most mystical and hedonistic moments (what will be called the ‘morning phase’), racial dynamics are at their starkest. It is crucial to understand that racial difference is emergent and not automatic. The article then suggests a Deleuzian musicology which conceives music not as form, language or ideology, but as force. Accounting for the richness of musical materiality involves examining the networks of power and inequality through which it necessarily operates.

Heterotopia and Structuralism

The concept of heterotopia was introduced and immediately abandoned by Michel Foucault in 1966–67, but it quickly diffused across human geography, urban theory, and cultural studies during the 1990s. Notwithstanding the deserved impact of Foucaults overall work on these fields, there are some conceptual problems with the heterotopia concept. While the desire for a single term to probe spatial difference is understandable, the author takes issue with the kind of space envisioned in heterotopology. From a close reading of Foucaults notes, and with the help of Deleuze, Derrida, and Althusser, it is suggested that the spatiality of Foucaults heterotopology repeats certain flaws of the structuralism in vogue in 1960s France. In order for heterotopias to be ‘absolutely different’ from ‘all the rest’ of space, Foucault needs to posit a totality to society and to perform a ‘slice of time‘. The author ends by briefly examining how the structuralist tendency of heterotopology has pervaded some recent Anglophone adoptions of Foucault. As both geography and postcolonial theory have shown, slicing time often conceals particularist suppositions and is therefore inadequate to account for the multiplicity and unevenness of geographical change.

Music tourism and factions of bodies in Goa

Tourism studies has extensively analysed how the ‘tourist gaze’ constructs the experiences and social relationships within tourism. This article seeks to engage entire bodies in the analysis of tourism and shifts away from a focus on vision. Ethnographic details from the psychedelic rave tourism scene in Goa, India, are presented to account for what could happen when differences between bodies at a rave event are considered. In the final theoretical section, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze and Guattari, these ethnographic details are used to make some tentative suggestions as to how music is capable of organizing ‘factions’ of bodies along dynamic socio-spatial boundaries. The main argument is that it is not music itself, but its material connections to bodies, spacetimes and objects, that enable social differentiation in the multiracial touristic environment of Goa.

MUSIC, SPACE, IDENTITY: GEOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH CULTURE IN BANGALORE

This article begins from a perceived lack of empirical evidence in cultural studies, namely the ethnography of cultural globalization in ‘global cities’ other than those of the West. Youth culture among the upper strata of the South-Indian metropolis Bangalore is taken as an instance of how modernity is experienced and produced in the post-colonial Third World. The focus lies on the reception of Western pop music, but music is treated broadly as a practice situated in, and producing, real and imagined space. Two examples of these musical practices serve to elaborate on Indian power relations, Indian modernity and the critical geography of music.

Skin, affect, aggregation: Guattarian variations on fanon

Geography has turned to phenomenology, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis to understand human bodies in non-Cartesian terms as always-already positioned within social formations. But how exactly do we conceive of the constitution of many bodies at once? Specifically, how do bodies ‘aggregate’ into racial formations? ‘The body’ is not a target of socialization—racializing, gendering, disciplining—as if it sits alone until its senses and viscera are stirred by the environment. Bodies never come alone. Racial formations are from the start phenomena of collective embodiment, not ideological structures that secondarily have corporeal effects. In this paper I will argue that racial difference (like all social relations) is a reality involving the interactions, imaginations, and biologies of human bodies. First, Frantz Fanons influential theory of racialization and racial difference is recast in an embodied framework through one of his own examples. This framework will be construed through the concept of affect in Baruch Spinoza, the phenomenology of Michel Henry, and the ‘machinic’ approach to psychoanalysis suggested by Félix Guattari. Aggregation is thereafter explained through the contemporary Spinozism of Antonio Negri and population biology. Finally, the political implications of a machinic theory of race are explored using another concrete example from Fanon.

Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection—a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for arts work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation, and life. In the book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008, Duke University Press, Durham, NC), that is the subject of this panel discussion, Grosz sets out an ontology of art, looking at its forms of emergence as territorialising force, sexual selection, and nonhuman power. In Groszs terms, art is an art of existence. This is not a narrow understanding of art as a practice that is about taste, cultural accomplishment, or a reflection of society, but an art that is—at its most provocative—an extraction from the universe and an elaboration on it. This ‘geoaesthetics’ which is both biospheric and biopolitical, presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time, and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly different kind of biopolitics? And what might Groszs concept of ‘geopower’ offer in terms of a renegotiation of a more active ‘geo’ in geopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise.

The ghost of goa trance : a retrospective

This lively textual symposium offers a collection of formative research on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance). As the first book to address the diverse transnationalism of this contemporary electronic dance music phenomenon, the collection hosts interdisciplinary research addressing psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. Contributing to theories of globalization, postmodernism, counterculture, youth subcultures, neotribes, the carnivalesque, music scenes and technologies, dance ritual and spirituality, chapters introduce psytrance in Goa, the UK, Israel, Japan, the US, Italy, Czech Republic, Portugal and Australia. As a global occurrence indebted to 1960s psychedelia, sharing music production technologies and DJ techniques with electronic dance music scenes, and harnessing the communication capabilities of the Internet, psytrance and its cultural implications are thoroughly discussed in this first scholarly volume of its kind.

Assemblage, materiality, race, capital

The emphasis on assemblage in the social sciences and humanities of late naturally leads to the problem of race, or of how bodies assemble together into unequally positioned racial formations. This commentary argues broadly in line with Deleuze and Guattari that assemblage theory should investigate more than it has its relationship to other materialisms, especially Marxism, biology and feminism. Assemblage theory has enormous potential to overcome binaries such as nature/culture, but only if it understands what novelty it brings.

Review Essay : Actor-Network Theory and Critical Sociology: Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, edited by John Law and Annemarie Mol, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience, by John Law, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, by Annemarie Mol, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002

Single-component bodies useful in fuel cells and other electrochemical devices are provided. In preferred embodiments, the single-component bodies comprise an anodic region at a first side, a cathodic region at a second, non-adjacent side, and an oxygen ion-conducting region substantially free from anodic or cathodic character disposed between said anodic and cathodic regions. The single-component bodies comprise oxide electrolytes such as yttria-stabilized zirconia doped with multivalent cations such as titanium or terbium.