If journalism is the first draft of history, these three essays might be described as a stab at a second draft. It is an attempt by three scholars from different disciplines, with sharply contrasting methodologies, to provide an account of the protest movements of 2011, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. We deploy the perspectives of ethnography, political thought, and iconology in an effort to produce a multidimensional picture of this momentous year of revolutions, uprisings, mass demonstrations, and—most (...) centrally—the occupations of public space by protest movements. (shrink)

An impressive body of recent literature posits that traditional notions of civil disobedience prevent us from properly considering potentially legitimate types of ‘uncivil’ political lawbreaking. When might uncivil (covert, legally evasive, morally offensive and potentially violent) lawbreaking prove normatively acceptable? If justifiable, what conditions should its practitioners be reasonably expected to meet? Despite some important insights, defenders of uncivil disobedience rely on a narrow and sometimes misleading view of civil disobedience, as previously practiced and theorized. Notwithstanding legitimate skepticism about Rawlsian (...) notions of civil disobedience, they reproduce its troublesome binary or ‘all-or-nothing’ view of political lawbreaking. Uncivil disobedience’s proponents tend to group a vast array of distinctive types of lawbreaking under one amorphous categorical rubric, impeding the suitably complex, nuanced analysis we need. A superior approach would pay careful attention to uncivil disobedience’s ambivalent historical record, a record suggesting that UD is more likely to reproduce authoritarian populism’s disturbing political logic than counteract it. (shrink)

There is a certain allure to the idea that cities allow a person to both feel at home and like a stranger in the same place. That one can know the streets and shops, avenues and alleys, while also going days without being recognized. But as elites fill cities with “smart” technologies—turning them into platforms for the “Internet of Things” : sensors and computation embedded within physical objects that then connect, communicate, and/or transmit information with or between each other through (...) the Internet—there is little escape from a seamless web of surveillance and power. This paper will outline a social theory of the “smart city” by developing our Deleuzian concept of the “spectrum of control.” We present two illustrative examples: biometric surveillance as a form of monitoring, and automated policing as a particularly brutal and exacting form of manipulation. We conclude by offering normative guidelines for governance of the pervasive surveillance and control mechanisms that constitute an emerging critical infrastructure of the “smart city.”. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. Two of the dominant frameworks for criticizing capitalism and liberal democracy in contemporary political theory is Socialist republicanism, on the one hand, and radical democracy, on other hand. Whereas radical democratic thinkers have for decades criticized liberal democracy for being elitist, hierarchical and outright anti-popular, socialist republicans have for the last 10 years developed critiques of capitalism centred on the neo-republican idea of freedom as non-domination and proposed various arguments for workplace democracy and (...) cooperative forms of ownership. Despite the common ambition of uncovering hierarchical relations of economic, political and social power, and creating new egalitarian and participatory modes of political organization, no systematic comparison of socialist republicanism and radical democracy exists. This paper fills this gap by comparing the different understandings of institutions and political action and their diverging historical and political relations to socialism. (shrink)

In this essay, I question the philosophical appropriation of the “street”; much recent critical theory fixes on the “events” of the street as portending ruptural becomings—into being—of the new in the world. I argue that such readings of the “extraordinary” are founded upon a heroic ontologic–epistemology of “abandonment–resurrection” that defines colonial–modern Eurocentric philosophy. Against this preoccupation with the extraordinary, I present a view that reads in the events of the street the ordinariness of the perceived extraordinary and the extraordinariness of (...) the ordinary decoloniality of the everyday as the site of already being otherwise. (shrink)