Definitions:
Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our embodied social practices or relationships with other bodies (including objects).
Place: those specific spaces or locations to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects), through embodied practices of power (biopolitics), and through practices of representation, visualization, and mapping; those spaces or locations that gain meaning through technologies of surveillance.
Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities; the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance; and the imagination or narrativization of self in relation to virtual and actual others or communities.
Questions:
1. I am particularly interested in Hardt and Negri’s assertion that “The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation….Our political task…is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends” (xv). This reminds me of our strategies/tactics discussion from last week. If Empire is not territorially centralized, as they are claiming, then where and how do strategies of sovereignty originate, and what are some tactics that can turn these global processes? I think the answer partially lies in Philip et al.’s discussion of the “productive possibilities of ‘difference’ itself” (7).
2. I’m wondering about how Mezzandra and Neilson’s discussion of the methods emerging out of the material circumstances of borders relates to Hardt and Negri’s argument that Empire “does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers” (xii). Of course this is not to say that there aren’t any borders (although they do argue that Empire has no limits) or that borders do not have material implications, but how are our negotiations of borders and boundaries changing as these shift? What are some of the daily effects of Empire’s reterritorializations?