Matthew G. Hannah

Torture and the Ticking Bomb: The War on Terrorism as a Geographical Imagination of Power/Knowledge

Abstract Torture can be understood as part of a geopolitical response to a discursively inflated threat. Public discussions of torture in the United States between 11 September 2001 and the May 2004 revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison cautiously justified brutal interrogation methods by couching the threat of terrorism in the language of the ticking-bomb scenario. Terrorist acts constitute a real threat to material security, specifically to the “topological” presuppositions of the forms of power/knowledge that Foucault and others have argued are central to modern social orders. Techniques of biopower and governmentality can only operate effectively if “normally empowered” biopolitical subjects allow populations and governing authorities to orient their governing and self-governing activities according to “mappable landscapes of expectation.” The threat of terrorism, especially in the person of the suicide bomber, renders landscapes of expectation more difficult to map, at least locally. The ticking-bomb scenario is the most important vehicle by which the material threat of terrorism has been discursively extended to encompass the entire national territory and intensified to a uniform level of unacceptability. Once this process is recognized, it is possible both to understand torture as a biopolitical technique of compensation for the threat of terrorism in its discursively inflated form and to place torture more firmly within the wider geopolitical account of “Empire” inaugurated by Agamben, Butler, and Hardt and Negri.

Sampling and the Politics of Representation in US Census 2000

Counting of people in official censuses and other social surveys produces representations that are arguably of far greater political importance than the representations produced by voting. The recent controversy around the use of sampling methods in US Census 2000 illustrates some important political-geographical dimensions of our decisions regarding whether and how to be counted in surveys. The argument is intended both to illuminate political features of this very important source of geographical data and to encourage a more self-consciously political engagement with the statisitical surveys through which modern citizens more or less consciously contribute to the shaping of our own lives.

ATTENTION AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL POLITICS OF LANDSCAPE

Abstract This article argues that the inherent directedness of attention is a central and pervasive condition of politics across a wide range of social fields. The subfield of landscape geography serves as an occasion to illustrate what can be gained by attending to attention. The argument begins by reflexively placing the problematic of attention within a brief genealogy of constructions of modern perception. Within this frame, the article takes a closer look at the ambivalent and hesitant response to the problem of attention in phenomenology. This field is best positioned to give a foundational account of the political character of attention and to explain the sense in which its relevance transcends the era in which it was first clearly formulated. However, a strong upsurge of phenomenological interest in attention has only appeared in recent years. A review of this work, particularly in the writings of Bernhard Waldenfels, shows how attending to attention can deepen critical analyses of capitalism and spectacle offered by Benjamin, Debord, Rancière and Beller. The final section of the article illustrates key points by staging an imaginary trip through the corporate agricultural landscapes of California.

Anatomy of debate in human geography

Hannah, M. G., Strohmayer, U. (2001). Anatomy of debate in human geography. Political Geography, 20 (3), 381-404. RAE2008

Ornamentalism : Geography and the labor of language in structuration theory

In an effort to respond to the so-called ‘postmodern challenge’ in a way that continues to allow for an understanding of social interaction in time and space, geographers have increasingly turned to the theory of structuration put forward by Anthony Giddens. This theory paints a picture of the human agent as being constrained by sociohistorical circumstances and yet being fundamentally autonomous. The success of Giddens attempt to transcend the traditional dualism of individual and society seems to have been taken for granted by now. In this paper it is shown that a careful, ‘deconstructive’ scrutiny of key concepts as they appear in Giddenss major texts reveals insurmountable problems inherent in language. Specifically, the categories ‘duality of structure’, ‘practical consciousness’, and ‘mutual knowledge’ are each in their turn required to perform two contradictory tasks: The simultaneous blending and separation of determinism and autonomy. The gist of Giddenss attempts to circumvent this task is outlined through a seemingly thorough consideration of the effects of language, and the continued popularity of structuration theory is speculated on in light of its ultimate failure.

Foucault on Theorizing Specificity

Philo has brought Foucaults early, ‘archaeological’ work to the attention of human geographers as a possible source of help in theorizing specificity. By contrast, in this paper the archaeological project is portrayed as an illuminating failure which holds valuable lessons for geographers. The archaeological period is placed in the context of Foucaults career, and then the Archaeology of Knowledge is situated as the arena for Foucaults most instructive encounters with the problems of necessity, contingency, and human subjectivity. Although Foucaults profound theoretical modesty does not solve the problem of how to theorize specificity, it does suggest that we make significant adjustments in our own attempts to do so. The implications of the argument are given a test drive through a brief reading of recent work by Thrift, after which a recasting of the notion of responsibility is put forward as a means of beginning to deal more bravely with poststrueturalism.

Innovations in the afterlife of the Cold War: German-language human geography

This commentary will coalesce around two main points. First, the articles by Markus Hesse on urban geography, by Annika Mattissek and Georg Glasze on recent developments in discourse-analytic approaches, and by Ulrich Best on the genealogy of radical–Marxist or critical German-language geography all support the contention that key features of Germanophone human geography still mark it out as a ‘Cold War’ human geography. As will become clear, this contention goes well beyond noting the marginality (until recently) of radical–Marxist positions (Belina, B., Best, U., & Naumann, M. (2009). Critical geography in Germany: From exclusion to inclusion via internationalization. Social Geography, 4, 47–58). Second, I will argue that although this configuration has had real costs, including both analytic and ‘civic’ deficits, it has also allowed the development of distinctive strengths and innovative emphases in human geographic research that can and should be engaged by other sub-communities in the international discourse.

State knowledge and recurring patterns of state phobia From fascism to post-politics

This paper identifies some key underlying assumptions of critical political analysis by examining two moments that have brought these assumptions to the fore: the Klaus Croissant affair in West Germany and France in the late 1970s, and Edward Snowden’s revelations in the 21st century regarding the activities of the US National Security Agency. Interesting parallels can be identified between ‘distinction-collapsing discourses’ prominent in the two contexts. The core argument of the paper is that understanding Michel Foucault’s critical stance toward the description of West Germany as ‘fascist’ in 1977 and 1978, and more broadly, toward what he called ‘state phobia’, can help us resist undifferentiated condemnation of state representations under the sign of ‘post-politics’ today. An account of the 1977 Croissant affair, the critical discourses prominent at the time, and Foucault’s critical stance toward the notion of fascism provides an historical parallel for a critical reading of Badiou’s discussion of the state in Being and Event and other works. The final section briefly surveys a number of recent forms of epistemic activism that illustrate the shortcomings of a one-sided reading of state knowledge such as that offered by Badiou and seemingly confirmed by the NSA scandal.

Mapping the Under-Scrutinized: The West German Census Boycott Movement of 1987 and the Dangers of Information-Based Security

Geospatial technologies have been subjected to critique in geography and other fields over the past ten to fifteen years for their actual or potential complicity in providing knowledge for unjust regimes of control or illegitimate warfare. This chapter argues that in the atmosphere of dramatically intensified concern for ‘security’ since 9/11, one of the chief dangers of using geospatial technologies lies not in the knowledge they produce but rather in the ways they tend to transform a lack of knowledge into grounds for the withdrawal of rights from disadvantaged groups. Using some of Foucault’s ideas on ‘race war discourses,’ I suggest that it thus makes sense to see the ‘underscrutinized’ as an emerging ‘race’. The cultural context for this claim is set via a survey of stigmatizations of groups deemed ‘inscrutable’ or ‘subversive’ in US history. The bulk of the chapter is then devoted to setting a second, ‘techno-political’ context through an account of the nationwide census boycott movement in West Germany in 1987. This controversy from an earlier stage in the history of the information age illustrates one of the ways in which the inevitably uneven geographical coverage of a geospatial data set can lead to stigmatization and discrimination against the unregistered, even in the absence of any intent on the part of experts and state authorities.

On shifting preoccupations with ‘security’

Clive Barnett’s important critique of recent critical analyses of securitization is convincing on its own terms. Reframing his argument from within the perspective of a political economy of attention and distraction allows us to see it in a different light. Even if his critique of exclusively negative analyses of security is valid, we should not be at all reassured by it. Recent processes of securitization may indeed involve a healthier dynamic of public debate and action than has hitherto been recognized, but they can still be understood as a damaging case of collective distraction.