Bruce Braun

Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation brings together leading scholars to explore how we might know, enact, and struggle for, the conjoined social and ecological transformations we need to achieve just and sustainable futures. The question of transformation, and how it might be achieved, is explored across a variety of topics and geographical sites, and through heterodox analytical and theoretical approaches, in a collective effort to move beyond a form of critique that hands down judgements, to one that brings new ideas and new possibilities to life. Chapters are lively and original engagements with concrete situations that sparkle with creativity. Together, they add up to an impressive study of how to live, and what to struggle for, in the complex socioecological landscapes of the Anthropocene.

This chapter explores the refashioning and reimagining of oysters in New York City today as climate resilient infrastructure through a focus on the State of New York’s ‘Living Breakwaters’ project, heralded as a cutting edge replicable infrastructure adequate to the ‘new normal’ faced by many coastal cities across the world. We argue that ‘oystertecture’ is significant not only because it enrolls nature as infrastructure, but because with it infrastructure gains a new political ontology and temporality. Rather than promising the future, oystertecture functions to ward it off in perpetuity, elegantly adapting to changing conditions so as to keep all other things the same. In this sense, oystertecture is emblematic of a brand of ‘resilient’ infrastructures not meant to be eventful in their own right, but to cancel out or absorb events.

The temporality and politics of resilient infrastructure, we argue, enables it to fulfill the political function of what Carl Schmitt (2003) called the katechon: the warding off of apocalypse as well as deferring with no promise of future redemption or salvation, resulting in a continuous management of crisis in which what is held at bay is generated by the same order that the management of crisis seeks to preserve. To imagine how futurity might be reopened, we turn to Giorgio Agamben’s and Michel Foucault’s philosophies of ‘use’. Instead of ever more ‘resilient’ apparatuses that ward off the future, we propose that what is needed is a mode of living in the middle voice, acting so as to change ourselves in the acting -- to be ‘a’ form of life rather than ‘in’ a form of life -- which may at the same time require accepting the provisional, uncertain and unpredictable work of entering into experimental multispecies collaborations. If dispositifs of resilience leave us suspended in an eternal present, then to jump start history may require that we be deliberately and explicitly post-apocalyptic, living as if the end of times has already arrived, and with it, the end of ‘man’ as we currently know him. This we suggest is not the end of humanity, but our liberation for its recreation.

Keywords: infrastructure, resilience, oysters, apocalypse, katechon, Agamben, Foucault

This chapter contains sections titled: SARS as EventPolitical Physics: Urban Bodies and their CompositionThe Biosocial City as an Unbounded or Polyrhythmic SpaceSARS and the Biopolitical CityConclusionNotesSARS as EventPolitical Physics: Urban Bodies and their CompositionThe Biosocial City as an Unbounded or Polyrhythmic SpaceSARS and the Biopolitical CityConclusionNotes

I Introduction The study ofhuman-environment relations in geography has gone through a dizzying series oftheoretical, philosophical and methodolog-ical transformations in the past 20 years, to the point where it now seems shocking that Margaret Fitzsimmons could have argued, ...

The serried ranks of post-prefixed isms marched their way through human geography during the 1990s. To open the door to yet another may seem the habitual act of a hopelessly trendy discipline, one derivatively preoccupied with what's de rigeur in the social sciences and ...

Government is the right disposition of things . . . I do not think this is a matter of opposing things to men, but rather of showing that what government has to do with is not territory but rather a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things with which in this sense ...

Hybrid Geographies is a book that believes in the world. It marvels at its ongoing fabrication, at the way that ''becomings take, hold and change shape'' (Whatmore 2002:5). It revels in its potential, in worldly futures that are not already given by the past. It is, for these reasons, a ...

This paper explores the relationships between landscape and power, colonialism and its aftermaths, and state territoriality and its contestation, in the work of two popular Northwest Coast landscape painters: Emily Carr and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. The work of both artists is explored in terms of their representation of relations between indigenous peoples, physical landscapes, state power, and modernity, and in the context of ongoing political struggles over land, resources and the environment between First Nations and the Canadian government. The paper also calls attention to the multiple and fractured nature of postcolonial visualities, to the discursive, social, technological and institutional relations that shape how landscapes are experienced and represented, and, ultimately, to the trace of colonial pasts in the environmental and political imaginaries of a postcolonial present.

Willems-Braun social objects (Frankenberg and Mani 1993). 'Postcoloniality,' after all, appears quite different when applied to different social groups within now-independent white settler colonies like the US, to the mestizaje of Latin America or to indigenous peoples in Canada or ...

Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus. Har-mondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Memmi, Albert. 1967. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press. Sandoval, Chela. 1991. US Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Con- ...