Nowhere is this ethos more pronounced than in Chongqing, whose leadership has vowed to develop so-called "red GDP". This is a codeword for economic development that is geared toward the needs of the masses - and not dictated by the greed of privileged classes such as the country's estimated 30 million millionaires.

One in every four combat soldiers quit the Afghan National Army (ANA) during the year ending in September, published data by the US Defense Department and the Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan reveals.
(...) As serious as the turnover rate was in 2009-2009, turnover in the first two or three years of the ANA was much worse. ANA recruitment and reenlistment figures show that 18,000 of the first 25,000 troops recruited from 2003 to 2005 deserted.

Just two years removed from slavery, Blacks were elected to state governments and Congress. All told, 600 Black Republicans joined state legislatures, 14 went to the U.S. House of Representatives, and 2 went to the U.S. Senate. Six African Americans became lieutenant governors, and thousands more held lesser offices, including judges and sheriffs.
(...) It highlights the complexity of the creation of the racial order that would dominate politics in the South for 100 years after the Civil War. Many people think that after the Civil War, Jim Crow became the law of the land. On the contrary, Jim Crow laws came into existence almost 30 years after the Civil War as a counterrevolution against the attempt at multiracial democratic rule across the South.

But there was a lingering problem we had with the argument on civilian government spending. If the past three decades have been ones of retrenchment for labor and the left, growing inequality, increased power of capital over the government, and massive and successful attacks on government programs that serve the poor and working class, how could civilian government spending as a percentage of GDP have remained stable at around 14 percent? Should it not have declined? A good part of the seeming paradox is explained by other sources of spending with very strong political backing such as various subsidies going to agriculture, highways, and business, and the need to maintain at least the basic services and workings of civilian government. While much of civilian government spending as a percentage of GDP has been constrained over the past thirty plus years — especially social services — other areas that benefit the ruling order directly have increased.
One area in particular that has been on the receiving end of ever increasing public funds has been police, courts, prisons, and jails — what is euphemistically termed “public order and safety.” As chart 2 demonstrates, the share of such penal state spending has nearly doubled as a percentage of civilian government spending over the past fifty years and now stands at 15 percent of the latter. Because total civilian government spending stayed pretty constant as a portion of GDP, this sharp increase in penal state spending has had the effect of crowding out other forms of civilian government spending.

emile durkheim, suicide

editor's introduction (13-)

(13): "a short appraisal is still possible because throughout Durkheim's work on each and all of these topics subsidiary to suicide, is the basic theme that suicide which appears to be a phenomenon relating to the individual is actually explicable aetiologically with reference to the social structure and its ramifying functions."

(14): "it is these social concomitants of suicide which for Durkheim will serve to place any individual suicide in its proper aetiological setting."

(14): egoistic suicide--"which results from lack of integration of the individual into society."

(15): altruistic suicide--which "results from the individual's taking his own life because of higher commandments."

(15): anomic suicide--"when this regulation of the individual is upset so that his horizon is broadened beyond what he can endure, or contrariwise contracted unduly..."

(16): the "collective inclination [to suicide] conforms, Durkheim believes, to his definition of a social fact... that is, this inclination is a reality in itself, exterior to the individual and exercising a coercive effect upon him."

(17): "for durkheim all ameliorative measures must go to the question of social structure. egoistic suicide can be reduced by reintegrating the individual into group-life, giving him strong allegiances through a strengthened collective conscience."

preface

(37-38): "sociological method as we practice it rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual. there is no principle for which we have received more criticism; but none is more fundamental."

(38): "it is not realized that there can be no sociology unless societies exist, and that societies cannot exist if there are only individuals."

book two: social causes and social types

chapter one, how to determine social causes and social types (145-151)

(145): "the results of the preceding book are not wholly negative. we have in fact shown that for each social group there is a specific tendency to suicide explained neither by the organic-psyhcic constitution of individuals nor the nature of the physical environment. consequently, by elimination, it must necessarily depend upon social causes and be in itself a collective phenomenon; some of the facts examined, especially the geographic and seasonal variations of suicide, had definitely led us to this conclusion."

(146): doesn't make sense to proceed from the psychological-individual. so "let us reverse the order of study... consequently, we shall be able to determine the social types of suicide by classifying them not directly by their preliminarily described characteristics, but by the causes which produce them."

(147): "in a word, instead of being morphological, our classification will from the start be aetiological."

(148): more of the same--"if one wants to know the several tributaries of suicide as a collective phenomenon one must regard it in its collective form, that is, through statistical data, from the start."

(151): "the reasons ascribed for suicide, therefore, or those to which the suicide himself ascribes his act, are usually only apparent causes. not only are the reasons merely individual repercussions of a general state, but they express the general stats very unfaithfully, since they are identical while it is not..."

(151): his key methodological innovation--"we shall try to determine the productive causes of suicide directly, without concerning ourselves with the forms they can assume in particular individuals. disregarding the individual as such, his motives and his ideas, we shall seek directly the states of the various social environments (religious confessions, family..., etc.) in terms of which the variations of suicide occur. only then returning to the indivdiual, shall we study how these general causes become individualized..."

chapter two, egoistic suicide (152-)

(152-154): catholic vs. protestantism

(157): "the only essential difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the second permits free inquiry to a far greater degree than the first..."

(158): "we thus reach our first conclusion, that the proclivity of Protestantism for suicide must relate to the spirit of free inquiry that animates this religion... for the latter involves as much sorrow as happiness."

(159): catholicism, by comparison, "socializes men only by attaching them completely to an identical body of doctrine and socializes them in proportion as this body of doctrine is extensive and firm."

(160): the Jewish community, too, is "a small, compact, and coherent society with a strong feeling of self-consciousness and unity..."

(160-161): england vs. germany

(162): "... the progressive weakening of collective and customary prejudices produces a trend to suicide..."

(163-164): tied to individual learning, pursuit of knowledge? "does the craving for knowledge to the degree that it corresponds to a weakening of common faith really develop as does suicide?... the law can not only be verified by comparison of one faith with the other but also be observed within each religious confession..."

(167-168): hmm -- "the jew... seeks to learn, not in order to replace his collective prejudices by reflective thought, but merely to be better armed for the struggle..." [i..e, this is why they do not commit suicide in high numbers, despite being well-educated--a little bit of twisting/contorting to make the argument fit, but okay]

(168): important, two important conclusions

1. "first, we see why as a rule suicide increases with knowledge... man seeks to learn and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning. it is certainly not the learning he acquires that disorganizes religion; but the desire for knowledge wakens because religion becomes disorganized..."
   
2. "... if religion protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him with arguments sui generis; but because it is a society..."
   

(169): "far from knoweldge being the source of the evil, it is its remedy, the only remedy we have..." [an interesting paragraph, here, in general--"let those who view anxiously and sadly the ruins of ancient beliefs... not ascribe to science an evil it has not caused but rather which it tries to cure!"]

chapter three, egoistic suicide con't (171-

(171): "if religion preserves men from suicide only because and in so far as it is a societ, other societies probably have the same effect. from this point of view, let us consider the family and political society..."

(198): "from this table and the preceding remarks it appears that marriage has indeed a preservative effect of its own againt suicide. but it is very limited and also benefits onesex only... the fact remains that the family is the essential factor in the immunity of married persons... reserving the special effect of marriage for later study, we shall say that domestic society, like religious society, is a powerful counteragent against suicide."

(202): "our previous conclusion may thus be completed to read: just as the family is a powerful safeguard against suicide, so the more strongly it is constituted the greater its protection."

(203): "great political upheavals are sometimes said to increase the number of suicides. but morselli has conclusively shown that facts contradict this view."

(208): in sum, "we have thus successively set up three following propositions:

1. suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of religious society.
   
2. suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of domestic society.
   
3. suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of political society.
   

(209): "the only quality satisfying this condition is that they ar all strongly integrated social groups."

(209): and thus--"the more weakened the groups to which he belongs, the less he depends on them.. if we agree to call this state egoism, in which the individual ego asserts itself to excess in the face of the social ego and at its expense, we may call egoistic the special type of suicide springing from excessive individualism."

(209): "when society is strongly integrated, it holds individuals under its control, considers them at its service, and thus forbids them to dispose wilfully of themselves. accordingly, it opposes their evading their duties to it through death. but how could society impose its supremacy upon them when they refuse to accept this subordination as legitimate?"

(210-211): "we may push back the frontier for some generations, force our name to endure for some years or centuries longer than our body; a moment too soon for most men, always comes when it will be nothing..."

(212): hmm -- the more one thinks, the less one believes. the less one believes, the more one asks "the exasperating and agonizing question: to what purpose?"

(214): even still, one's plight can never be exclusively individual -- "however individualized a man may be, there is always something collective remaining--the very depression and melancholy resulting from this same exaggerated individualism."

chapter four, altruistic suicide (217-)

(217-218): danish warriors considered it an ignominy to die in bed.

(219): though egoistic suicide was not known to ancient societies, altruistic suicide was--"when a person kills himself... not because he assumes the right to do so but, on the contrary, because it is his duty..."

(221): "we thus confront a type of suicide differing by incisive qualities from the preceding one. whereas the latter is due to excessive individuation, the former is caused by too rudimentary individuation...."

chapter five, anomic suicide (241-

(241-242): financial crisis suicides--but they don't have to do with increased hardship...


(246): an equilibrium theory of suicide--"if therefore industrial or financial crises increase suicides, this is not because they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is because they are crises, that is disturbances of the collective order."

(250): equation of being docile to collective authority with "a wholesome moral constitution" -- this is, perhaps, somewhat lost in translation...

(250-251): with a different spin, what he is discussing here could quite easily be formulated as a theory of hegemony...

(251): natural ability objection to equality--borrrrrring.

(252): "man's greatest privilege is that the bond he acceptes is not physical but moral; that is, social. he is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels..."

(253): disequilibrium in event of crisis

(254): "poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraing in itself" [but this is emphatically false, insofar as poverty is the cause of many a suicide. what do we do with this?]

(254): "if anomy never appeared except, as in the above instances, in intermittent spurts and acute crisis, it might cause the social suicide rate to vary from time to time, but it would not be a regular, constant factor. in one sphere of social life, however--the sphere of trade and industry--it is actually in a chronic state."

"The water is no longer fit for human consumption, with analysis and international studies showing that just 10 percent of water in the Gaza Strip is usable... threatening the lives of Palestinians," Munzir Shiblak warned.

“Under the new law, Taliban will be deemed terrorists unless they prove themselves otherwise,” he said, adding that the “burden of proof” would now be shifted to the accused under the special law.

Since then, the C.I.A. bombardments have continued at a rapid pace. According to a just completed study by the New America Foundation, the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President. During his first nine and a half months in office, he has authorized as many C.I.A. aerial attacks in Pakistan as George W. Bush did in his final three years in office. The study’s authors, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, report that the Obama Administration has sanctioned at least forty-one C.I.A. missile strikes in Pakistan since taking office—a rate of approximately one bombing a week. So far this year, various estimates suggest, the C.I.A. attacks have killed between three hundred and twenty-six and five hundred and thirty-eight people. Critics say that many of the victims have been innocent bystanders, including children.

Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance drones -- the ones with the chill-you-to-your-bones sci-fi names of Predators and Reapers (as in Grim) -- whole new surveillance capabilities will soon be available. Their newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed Gorgon Stare after the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turned its victims to stone. According to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gorgon Stare will offer a "pilot" back in good ol' Langley, VA, headquarters of the CIA, the ability to "stare" via 12 video feeds (where only one now exists) at a 1.5 mile square area, and then, with Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of it into rubble. Within the year, that viewing capacity is expected to double to three square miles.
(...) Of course, you know the results of this sort of magical thinking about wonder weapons (or technologies) and their properties just as well as I do. The atomic bomb ended nothing, but led to an almost half-century-long nuclear superpower standoff/nightmare, to nuclear proliferation, and so to the possibility that, someday, even terrorists might possess such weapons. The electronic battlefield was incapable of staving off defeat in Vietnam. That impermeable anti-missile shield never came even faintly close to making it into our skies. Those "smart bombs" of the Gulf War proved remarkably dumb, while the 50 "decapitation" strikes the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein's regime on the first day of the 2003 invasion of Iraq took out not a single Iraqi leader, but "dozens" of civilians. And the history of the netcentric military in Iraq is well known. Its "success" sent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld into retirement and ignominy.

Most senior Afghan government officials and political figures are loath to discuss how Zahid Walid has won all these contracts -- at least publicly. On a recent visit to the Ministry of Commerce, I asked Noor Mohammed Wafa, the general director of oil products and liquid gas, about them. He promptly claimed that he had never even heard of the company. He then shot a glance at my Afghan assistant and said in Dari: "That's Marshal Fahim's company, isn't it?" When I asked whether the rules were different for powerful political figures -- as everyone in Kabul knows is the case -- Wafa politely denied any suggestion of favoritism in the awarding of import licenses.

neil brenner, new state spaces

chapter one, introduction (1-27)

(2): important--"this book is intended to broaden and deepen the geographical imagination of contemporary state theory by investigating the major role of urban regions as key sites of contemporary state institutional and spatial restructuring. rather than treating cities and city-regions as mere subunits of national administrative systems, i suggest that urban policy--broadly defined to encompas all state activities oriented towards the regulation of capitalist urbanization--has become an essential political mechanism through which a profound institutional and geographical transformation of national states has been occurring. my claim is not simply that the institutional infrastructure of urban governance is being re-defined but, more generally, that transformations of urban policy have figured crucially within a fundamental reworking of national statehood since the early 1970s. a geographically attuned and scale-sensitive approach to state theory is required in order to decipher the new state spaces that are being produced under contemporary capitalism."

(2): we are talking about the last three decades, of course, following the decline of "spatial keynesianism." (faced with challenges of urban industrial decline, welfare state retrenchment, european integration, and economic globalization). "as of the early 1980s, national states began to introduce new, post-Keynesian spatial policies intended to reconcentrate productive capacities and specialized, high-performance infrastructural investments into the most globally competitivve city-regions within their territories." -- the need to (a) enhance global competitive advantages and (b) attract mobile capital.

(3): to what extent, though, will we be romanticizing the postwar period, here? "the postwar project of national territorial equalization and sociospatial redistribution has thus been superseded..."

(3): two arguments outlined here:

1. that city-regions "have become key institutional sites in which a major rescaling of national state power has been unfolding."
   
2. that "national state institutions continue to play key roles in formulating, implementing, coordinating, and supervising urban policy initiatives, even as the primacy of the national scale of political-economic life is decentered."
   

(4): let's try and think about this a bit more, particularly wrt to other ways in which the state has been theorized; surely we're not abandoning schematics that do use the state, singular?--"i believe that the generic concept of the state has become increasingly problematic. the notion of statehood seems to me a more precise basis for describing modern political institutions, because it does not ontologically prejudge..."

(5-7): three trends

1. global economic integration--"national territorial economies are becoming more permeable to supranational, continental, and global flows of investment."
   
2. urban and regional resurgence--"a renewed importance for major fractions of industrial, financial, and service capital..." (citing the global city, industrial districts, learning regions, offshore centers, etc.)
3. the consolidation of new supranational and cross border-institutions--EU, NAFTA, APEC, ASEAN, MERCOSUR, IMF, World Bank, G8, etc., etc.
   

(8): three methodological challenges

1. scale as a proccess, rather than fixed thing
2. intrinsic relationality of all scales, and their embeddedness within broader hierarchies (this is emphasized again in box 1.2)
   
3. postdisciplinary challenge

(12-13): definition of uneven geographic development--"the circumstance that social political, and economic processes under capitalism are not distributed uniformly or homogenously across the earth's surface, but are always organized within distinct sociospatial configurations--such as urban agglomeration regional clusters, rural zones, national territories, supranational economic blocs, and so forth--that are characterized by divergent socioeconomic conditions, developmental capacities, and institutional arrangements..."--outlniing the contradictory interplay of equalization and differentiation...

(14-15): important--we will clearly need an account of the interests that move states, for here, so far, we are seeing the state as a hammer--it can be wielded to alleviate or exacerbate uneven geographic development. turning point was the late-1970s.

(16): KEY--"during the fordist-keynesian period, the problem of uneven geographical development was generally construed as a matter of redressing 'insufficient' or 'imbalanced' industrialization on a national scale. the task of state spatial intervention, under these conditions, was to mold the geography of capital investment into a more balanced, cohesive, and integrated locational pattern throughout the national territory. by contrast, with the rescaling of state space and the proliferation of urban locational policies during the post-1970s period, this project of national territorial equalizaiton has been fundamentally inverted. it is no longer capital that is to be molded into the geogrphay of state space, but state space that is to be molded into the geography of capital." [again, though, this formulation sets us up as keynesians, when we would really like to break the chains]

(16-17): why, with post-keynesian, we can expect crises [well, but what about keynesianism?]

(18): state rescaling as 'ideal-type', or 'real abstraction'? setting the theoretical stage.

(18-21): three levels of abstraction (see box on page 19)

1. abstract--capital accumulation, class struggle
   
2. meso--keynesianism, neoliberalism
   
3. concrete--actual policies
   

(21): in this book, mainly concerned with meso level (but of course, involves other levels, too)

(24): citing jessop as postdisciplinary take on the State

chapter two, the globalization debates (27-

(28-29): globalization as an opportunity to bring space back in to analyses of capitalism--and, obviously, an opportunity to dispose of the 'cartesian' notion of the fixed, nation-state--"to challenge the iron-grip of the nation-state on the social imagination'"

(29): KEY--"thus, one of the central intellectual barriers to a more adequate understanding of contemporary global transformations is that we currently lack appropriately historical and dynamic conceptualizations of social space..."

(30): not 'deterritorialization', but 'reterritorialization'

(30): important, the crux of the contention: we need to transcend the imaginary of the nation-state, and move toward an understanding of the new sociospatial configurations. importantly, "the effort to transcend state-centric modes of analysis does not entail a denial of the national state's continued relevance as a major locus of political-economic regulation."

(30): this chapter sets out its stall to critique the 'global territorialist' approach, and the 'deterritorialization' approach

(31): "the notion of globalization is first and foremost a descriptive category denoting, at the most general level, the spatial extension of social interdependencies on a worldwide scale."

(32): "in other words, all aspects of social space under modern capitalism must be understood as presuppositions, arenas, and outcomes of dynamic processes of continual social contestation and transformation." [bringing the 'social' in, but, like harvey, it seems ever-so-abstract...]

(33): important--insofar as we will be thinking about 'causes' behind global transformation, the dynamics seem to be located in capitalism's inherent tendency to see 'every limit... as a barrier to be overcome'. in other words, we need to think carefully about how this will dovetail with the question of shifting state strategy (if the keynesian and then post-keynesian paradigms were indeed driven, in his argument, by the notion that this was what was (a) best for national ecomonic growth, and/or (b) best for labor). how, in other words, to bring the State into a capital-centric account?

(33): we have a deterritorialization-reterritorialization chronology--first, capital annihilates barriers; then, second, it fixes itself in space as a means to extending its orbit.

(34): these spatial configuration as 'forces of production' (now we are wading into knotty theoretical formulations--though this begins with harvey, of course.)

(35): this particular deterritorialization-reterritorialization is part of the "longue duree dynamic of deterritorialization, reterritorializaiton, and uneven geographic development that has underpinned the production of capitliast spatiality throughout the modern era."

(35-36): six implications of this broad theorization

1. global restructuring as a conflictual, uneven, dialectical process
2. global restructuring as both spatial and temporal
3. global restructuring unfolding upon multiple spatial scales
4. not involving total obliteration of sociospatial scales (i.e., the state), but their reconfiguration
5. stems from a diverse range of political-economic causes (reogranization of capital accumulation, consolidation of neoliberalism, financial deregulation, accelerated technological change, new population movements, geopolitical shifts, transformation of global labor force...) [how do we move to a coherent account of what actually happened, as the capital-centric account initially implied? or is this very much a case of overdetermination by all of this?]
6. states as essential geographical arenas

(37-38): important--here begins the section on the epistemology of state-centrism, which has three most essential spatial assumptions (see box 2.1)

1. space as static platform, not social (spatial fetishism)
   
2. social relations organized within containers (methodological territorialism)
   
3. assumption that social relations are organized at a national scale (methodological nationalism)
   

(41): the intellectual plausibility of this frame, he's arguing, was contingent--it can be traced to "the late nineteenth and early twentieth century historical-geographical context in which the social sciences first emerged, during which the territorial state's role in encaging socioeconomic and politicocultural relations within its boundaries dramatically intensified."

(43): and even then, there was a tendency to see what you expected to see, through it--reify it, rather than see a tendency in operation ("to conflate the historical tendency toward the territorialization of social relations on a national scale--which has undoubtedly intensified during much of the twentieth century--with its full historical realization")

(44): important--the two (mistaken) assumptions of the deterritorialization thesis

1. that globalization is non-territorial, borderless, supraterritorial.
2. that globalization entails the contraction of state power, or its erosion.

(45): first mention of 'glocalization' (swyngedouw)

(45): the relativization of scales (jessop)

(47-48): the (nonsense) notion of integration into 'global society'

(48-49): more profound critique of those who see globalization as preconstituted structures, rather than qualitative re-structuring...

(49-52): important, critique of wallerstein as 'state-centric'--"however, considering wallerstein's avowed concern to transcend state-centric models of capitalist modernity, national state territories occupy a surprisingly pivotal theoretical position within his conceptual framework... wallerstein's conceptuion of global space is.. most precisely described as an inter-state division of labor... in this sense, wallerstein's concern to analyze the global scale as a distinctive unit of analysis does not lead to any qualitative modification in the way in which this space is conceptualized... the global and the national scales are viewed as structural analogs of a single spatial form--territoriality... to be sure, wallerstein conceives global space as a complex historical product of capitalist expansion, but he acknowledges its historicity only in a limited sense, in contrast to previous historical systems such as world-empires. for within the cpaitalist historical system, space appears to be frozen into a single geometric crystallization."

(52-53): two general methodological conclusions:

1. emphasis on the global spatial scale does not necessarily lead to the overcoming of state-centrism
2. state-centric conceptions of global space mask the national state's own crucial role as a site and agent of global restructuring.
   

(55): the prospect of 'placelessness' (!)

(56): important--three serious deficiences of deterritorialization approaches

1. historicity of territoriality is an either/or, presence or absence (?)
2. telationship btw global space and national territoriality is a zero-sum game
3. most crucially, "deterritorialization approaches bracket the various forms of spatial fixity, spatial embedding, rescaling, and reterritorialization upon which global flows are premised."
   

(57): important--"a major agenda of this book is to advance an interpretation of contemporary global restructuring as a rescaling of the nationally organized sociospatial configurations that have long served as the underlying geographical scaffolding for capitalist development."

(57): important--remember, two types of deterritorialization under discusssion: of capitalism, and of the state.

1. of capital (57-60): more-or-less asserting that a territorialization moment is unavoidable, still. "we are witnessing, rather, a profoundly uneven rescaling and reterritorialization of the historically entrenched, state-centric geographical infrastructures that underpinned the last century of capitalist industrialization." capital cannot ever enjoy pure placelessness.
   
2. of the state (60-64): the state, also, is most definitely not dead. "national states began actively to facilitate the process of geoeconomic integration through a variety of policy strategies..." as panitch writes, "capitalist globalization... takes place in, through, and under the aegis of states."

(63): and why the urban? well, "as we shall see, large-scale urban regions represent crucial geographical, institutional, and political arenas in which the rescaled geographies of statehood under contemporary capitalism are being forged and contested."

(66-67): in sum, four methodological challenges:

1. historicity of social space--"historically specific character of national state territoriality as a form of sociospatial organization."
   
2. polymorphic geographies--"national state territoriality is today being intertwined with... an immense variety of emergent forms (supranational institutions, etc.)"
   
3. the new political economy of scale--decentering of the national scale of political-economic life
   
4. the remaking of state space--key role of national states in promoting sociospatial transformations.

chapter three, the state spatial process under capitalism (69-113)

(70): "just as a fish is unlikely to discover water, most postwar social scientists viewed national state territories as pregiven natural environments for sociopolitical life." -- the 'territorial trap'

(70): fordist-keynesian period as a period of historically unprecedented attempt at closure [we can interrogate this, since it ought to give us some clue what 'closed' and 'open' denote; not absence of world trade, certainly]

(70): at times, though, there seems to be a simplified periodization (more simplified, in other words, than the harvey narrative)--we have moved from westphalian, to post-westphalian [if we wanted to draw the periodization out, i am worried that it, as abstract narrative, doesn't match the concrete level] -- this is emphatically misleading, though, for he does also went to stress its indeterminacy during the modern period (see 76)

(72): critical--"of particular importance, in this context, is a sustained inquiry into the conditions under which inherited geographies of state space may be transformed from relatively fixed, stabilized settings in which state regulatory operations occur into potentially malleable stakes of sociopolitical contestation. concomitantly, there is an equally urgent need for a more explicit theoretical conceptualization of the determinate social, political, and economic processes through which transformations of state space unfold."

(72): KEY--"i argue that state space is best conceptualized as an arena, medium and outcome of spatially selective political strategies" [how does this work, then, with the argument that it is potentially malleable and open to political contestation? because it is difficult to argue that its rescaling in the neoliberal period was a response to political contestation--it was in the service of capital. so a kind of political influence, but there is no role for understanding it as a tool to be wielded, in this account, correct? in other words, the question is: is it that capital has captured the state, in the neoliberal period? or is it that the state has decided to go with capital?]

(75): citing Ollman on the dialectic, in order to emphasize process over fixity

(76): "while Weber was highly sensitive to the historical specificity of modern state territoriality relative to premodern political geogrphies, he was considerably less interested in its evolution within the modern interstate system."

(77): five functions of the modern state

1. war-making and military defense
2. the containment and enhancement of national wealth
3. the promotion of national identities
4. institutionalization of democratic forms of legitimation
5. the provision of social welfare

(77): spatial scales are tied to "regulatory strategies"

(78-80): important, state space:

1. in the narrow sense--changing configuration of state border, boundaries, frontiers
   
2. in the integral sense--changing substantive ways in which institutions are mobilized to regulate social relations (state inverventions into economic process, etc.)

(81): critical--"the crucial point, therefore, is that the question of which scale of regulatory activity is primary within a given configuration of state power is essentially an empirical-historical one, and not a matter that can be settled on an a priori basis."

(84): important--summarizing his understanding of jessop's notion of strategic-relational theory of the state--"most crucially, neither the state's spatial form nor historically specific forms of state spatiality are ever structurally pregiven; rather, they represent arenas and outcomes of spatially selective political strategies. this conceptualization forms a theoretical linchpin [of this book]" [see also 89]

(84): underdetermined nature of the value form

(85): the state form as analagous

(85): KEY--according to jessop, "the separation of the state from the circuit of capital may seriously constrain its ability to function as an agent of capitalist interests." (the state, then, as a site of contestation). "the state form is an undeteremined condensation of continual strategic interactions regarding the nature of state inteverention, political representation, and ideological hegeony within capitalist society. accordingly, 'there can be no inherent substantive unity to the staet...; its always relative unity must be created...' for jessop, the funcitonal unity and organization coherence of the state are never pregiven, but must be viewed as emergent, contingent, contested... it is only through the mobilization and consolidation of state projects... that the image of the state as a unified organizationl entity can be projected into civil society." (SEE FIGURE 3.4, pg. 86)

(87): state as site of strategies, as generator of strategies, and as product of strategies.

(91-93): important:

1. state spatial form (defined with reference to the principle of territoriality--it is territoriality that underpins the potential autonomy of state institutions from other social forces within civil society)
2. state spatial projects (oriented toward state's institutional structure--initiatives to differentiate state territoriality into a functionally coordinated, coherent regulatory geography)
   
3. and state spatial strategies (oriented towards circuit of capital--influence the geographies of development, reshape geographies of capital accumulation)

(95): two dimensions

1. a scalar dimension (a hierarchy among a variety of scales)
   
2. a territorial dimension (jurisdictional units)

(96): "the relation of state institutions to patterns of uneven spatial development is frequently an object of intense sociopolitical contestation." [but, and i think we would all agree, it is possible to push this to lengths that would be absurd--we are still talking about a state that is in the broad interests of capital, perhaps more in the way althusser specified...]

(104): all of this is becoming frustratingly formal!

chapter four, urban governance and the nationalization of state space ()

(114-115): ok--"state rescaling has emerged as an important political strategy through which diverse governmental coalitions have attempted to manage the disruptive consequences of a deeply rooted socioeconomic crisis." [again, question of response to politics and contestation, or in line with capital's broad interests]

(115): definition of spatial keynesianism--"spatial keynesianism was a multifaceted, multiscalar, and contradictory amalgamation of staet spatial projects and state spatial strategies that were constructed in response to some of the major regulatory dilemmas associated with postwar fordist urban-entrenched patterns of uneven spatial development by spreading urban growth as evenly as possible across the entire surface of each national territory.."

(116): in this chapter, wants to 'get at' the state by looking at the way in which it strove to regulate urban development/urbanization.

(117): key--"I argue that spatial Keynesianism was composed of a variety of spatially selective political strategies through which wester European antional states attempted to manage the distinctive patterns of urbanization and uneven spatial development that crystallized across western Europe during the Fordist-Keynesian period..."

(120): urban development in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evolution of capitalism from liberal-competitive to state-managed; a new industrial geography of the second industrial revolution

(122): fordist period as the high-water mark of national capitalism

(128): see box, "key axes of regulation under fordist-keynesian capitalism"

(130): here, a point at which to ask the question of the place of labor in pushing the State--"the goal of state action, in this context, was less to enhance the productive force of capitalist sociospatial configurations than to spread the industrialization process as evenly as possible across the entire surface of the national territory."

(133): compensatory mechanisms, myrdal -- targeting of peripheralized spaces (136)

(171): "spatial keynesianism was not dismantled through a single, catastrophic rupture. rather, its constitutive elemnts were eroded due to a confluence of distinct processes of restructuring, leading in turn to path dependent, politically contested regulatory realignments and institutional modifications within each national state apparatus."

chapter five, interlocality competition as a state project

(172-173): "in contrast to the redistributive agenda associated with the Kenesian welfare national state, the competition state attempts to promote economic regeneration by enhancing the global competitive advantages of its territory..."

(176): we have seen--

1. state spatial projects--establish customized, place-specific regulatory capacities in major cities, city-regions, and industrial districts and more generally, to decentralize key aspects of economic regulation to subnatinoal institutional levels.
   
2. state spatial strategies--reconcentration of socioeconomic assets and advanced infrastructural investments within globally competitive city-regions.
   

chapter six, alternative rescaling strategies

(257-261): SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

1. ABSTRACT: A. curret round of global restructuring represents an intensification and re-workign of uneven spatial development / B. state influences this through diverse political strategies / C. towards a processual concpetualization of state spatiality, which calcify into distinct sociospatial configurations
2. MESO-LEVEL: A. post-1980s western europe, which has facilitated transnational corporate accumulation strategies... has produced intense economic dynamism within a select group of powerful, globally interlinked cities... / B. an inverstion of state appraoches to the regulation of uneven development; redistribution abandoned, competetiveness prioritized. / C. patterns of state spatial selectivity have been transformed; new projects and strateiges designed to make major cities competitive. (towards RCSR--rescaled competition state regime)

(261): this configuration, it is argued, is permeated by crisis-tendencies.

(304): from second-cut, to third-cut RCSR?

wacquant, urban outcasts (2008)

ghetto, banlieu, favela, etc. (1-12)

(1-2): key point--"urban marginality is not everywhere woven of the same cloth, and, all things considered, there is nothing suprising in that. the generic mechanisms that produce it, like the specific forms it assumes, become fully intelligible once one takes caution to embed them in the historical matrix of class, state, and space..."

(3): important--from the communal ghetto ("a compact and shaprly circumscribed sociospatial formation to which blacks of all classes were consigned and bound together by a broad complement of instituions specific to the group and its reserrved space"), to the fin-de-siecle hyperghetto ("novel, decentralized, territorial and organizational configuration characterized by conjugated segregation on the basis of race and class in the context of the double retrenchment of the labour market and the welfare state from the urban core, necessitating and eliciting the corresponding deployment of an intrusive and omnipresent police and penal apparatus.")

(3-4): important claim--"in the final analysis, however, it is the collapse of public institutions, resulting from state policies of urban abandonment and leading to the punitive containment of the black (sub-)proletariat, that emerges as the most potent and most distinctive cause of entrenched marginality in the American metropolis... the implosion of America's dark ghetto... [is] economically underdetermined and politically overdetermined: properly diagnosed, hyperghettoization is primarily a chapter in political sociology."

(5): Black Belt ("spatial relegation... operate[s] on the basis of race first and foremost, modulated by class position after the break of the 1960s, and both are anchored and aggravated by public policies of urban triage and neglect)" vs. Red Belt ("it is just about the reverse... where marginalization is primarily the product of a class logic, in part redoubled by ethnonational origin and in part attenuated by state action") [i forsee two questions here, already: (1) what does it mean for race and class to be distinct logics? can race stand on its own, outside of class?; (2) how can we speak of the state at once effecting this, and also autonomous from it?]

(5): working-class banlieues in France heterogenous; in US, stark monotony to the ghetto.

(5): important claim--"specifically racial dimension of urban marginality in the American metropolis." and it is this specifically racial character in America, he is stressing, that tells us that state structures and policies play a decisive role in "the differential stitching together of inequalities."

(7): and further key claim, re: periodization--thesis of the emergence of a new regime of urban poverty... "post-fordist poverty... is fueled by the growing instability and heterogeneity of the wage-labour relation in the context of rising inequality; increasingly disconnected from the short-term cyclical fluctuations of the national economy and accentuated by the recoiling of the social welfare state; and tends to concentrate in defamed and desolate districts where the erosion of a sense of 'place'... and the absence of a collective idiom of claims-making exacerbate the experience and effects of deproletarianization and destitution."

(7): neoliberalism as a challenge to the possibility of citzenship (can we indict capitalism? because it doesn't seem like we're rehabilitating the fordist moment, either?) not promising that the positive project is van parijs and the 'basic income.' total cop-out.

(8-12): five recommendations

1. and foremost--clearer separation between "folk concepts" used by decision makers and residents and the "analytical concepts" that social scientists must construct.
2. situate it in time--"in the diachronic sequence of historical transformations... [not] to forget that urban space is a historical and political construction in the strong sense of the term..."
3. ethnographic observation as an indispensable tool (a surreptitious swipe at the others in the field, too)
   
4. distinguish between social condition, position in hierarchy of places, and function for broader metropolitan system
5. the degree and form of state penetration

(12): police fetishism--criminalization of a social problem

(12): hint at state responsibility for the fact of urban outcasts (this is important--again, because it raises the question of how the state can be both implicated in, and attenuating, the same process)

chapter one, the return of the repressed (15-39)

(15-16): the ideology of the fordist years (w. w. rostow and daniel bell)--'democratic' in tocqueville's sense; the meritocracy; poverty as the residue of past inequities. welfare state in europe, free-market with targeted assistance in the US.

(17): lyndon johnson promising an end to poverty by 1976

(17-18): very unkind, here, to Marxism, arguing that it couldn't make sense of the continued salience of race. but whatever.

(20): est. damage following rodney king riots--one billion dollars!

(20): question--can we say anything about this periodization? that all of a sudden fordist society woke to the shocks of the riots of the last two decades of the 20th century? does this not elide the upheavals of the 60s (civil rights movement, most notably)?

(22): 1980s and 1990s riots driven by two logics, to varying degrees depending on country: (1) a logic of protest against ethnoracial injustics; (2) a class logic pushing the impoverished working class to rise up against economic deprivation.

(24): violence is typically viewed as violence from below (the product of the pathologies of the underclass)--"yet, far from being irrational expressions of impenitent incivility..., the public disorders caused by dispossessed youthsin the cities... over these past dozen years constitue a (socio)logical response to the massive structural violence unleashed upon them by a set of mutually reinforcing economic and sociopolitical changes..."

(25): three types of violence from above, then:

1. mass unemployment; labor precariousness and deproletarianzation.
   
2. relegation to decaying neighborhoods (disinvestment, etc.)
3. heightened stigmatization in daily life as well as in public discourse

(25): and the structural argument, which is critical--"this return of the repressed... must be understood as the result of the uneven, disarticulating development of the most advanced sectors of capitalist societies..." [again, i am concerned that we are not going to be able to explain, properly, widespread discontent in the 'fordist' moment if our operative variable is neoliberalization]

(27): 'deproletarianization' as the "outright denial of access to wage-earning activities..." a rise in the unemployed; but also in the long-term unemployed, who aren't captured by these figures, remember.

(27): notion of the formation of an 'excess reserve army of labor' (citing cardoso!), which arises through this widespread exclusion from wage-labor.

(28): new immigrants in this economy, "tend to congregate in the poorer neighbourhoods of large urban centres..." what's more, their arrival has coincided with 'flight' from the city centres, thus resulting in greater social polarization [again, i think he would be the first to admit that we are dealing in generalities, here]

(29): unemployment in S. Central LA up to 60% in 1992

(29): 'territorial stigma', not to be underestimated

(30): "lastly,there is the curse of being poor in the midst of a rich society in which participation in the sphere of consumption has become a sine qua non of social dignity -- a passport to personhood if not citizenship..."

(30-31): important--the infra-political is taking the place of the actively political--"formal means of pressure on the state have declined along with the disruption and decomposition of traditional machineries of political representation of the poor."

(31-33): role/place of the police -- "whenever the police come to be considered as an alien force by the population they are supposed to protect, they become unable to fulfil any role other than a purely repressive one..."

(34): the problem can be criminalized, or politicized--it is the former in the US, the latter in France, and somewhere in between in the UK

(35): important--but even in France, he's noting, the commitment to address these issues politically does not go far enough (because they focused solely on "urban redevelopment/housing")--"it does nothing to attack its root causes: the fragmentation of wage labour feeding unemployment and casual employment." [there is an important implication, here, about the radical nature of the kinds of reforms that would work--which makes this universal basic income advocacy seem out-of-place]

(37): identifying, again, the epochal transformation of the economies concerned as cause of urban disorder--"deregulation of financial markets, desocialization of wage work, revamping of labor to impose 'flexibility.', social polarizatio of the cities, and state policies that have promoted corporate expansion over social redistribution...

(38): noting, here, that the African-Americans were the "exception" in the Fordist compromise; what are the theoretical consequences of this 'exceptionality'? -- but isn't this all highly dubious? a romanticizing of the conjuncture, for sure, no? but maybe we don't want to overstate the rejoinder, either?

chapter two, the state and fate of the dark ghetto at century's close (43-)

(43): 'slow rioting' of internal social decay and endemic crime

(44): the image of the "underclass"

(44): from war on poverty, to war on welfare -- and decline of black social movements.

(44): Moynihan calling for 'benign neglect', rather than the massive state intervention called for by the Kerner Commssion (though this is in 1968, don't forget. sort of undercuts the notion that the Fordist period had this resolved--though, at the same time, he has already made an exception for african-americans)

(46): critical--for all of this questioning of his periodization, he has made the point quite clear: the contemporary american ghetto (the "hyperghetto") is substantively distinct from the ghetto of the Fordist years (the "communal ghetto"), in ways already elucidated. and this makes sense, so long as we are willing to make this explicit (i.e., the perpetual failure of capitalism to resolve this question..) [this is quite aside, of course, from what we might want to ask about his picture of the communal ghetto, which seems overly romanticized--and this is important, for it serves as a point of comparison.]

(47): key--America's black belt... "is the product of a novel political articulation of racial cleavage, class inequality, and urban space in both dominant discourse and objective reality." (and not simply economic, ecological change...)

(47-48): going to concentrate, here, on the external conditions of this development (and makes the reasons explicit)

(48): takes a swipe at cornel west, for using the idiom of the 'underclass' [there is the odd nativity game going on, which might just interact with wacquant's arrogance in interesting ways]

(49): three caveats, before looking at the ghetto

1. "not simply a topographic entity... but an institutional form... a distinctive, spatially based, concatenation of mechanisms of ethnoracial closure and control..."
2. not something to be exoticized
3. ghetto does not suffer from disorganization, but differential organization [reminds me of Simmel, no?]

(51-52): blacks as only group to have undergone ghettoization (others lived in ethnic clusters)--"total, involuntary, and perpetual segregation"

(52): (1) spatial decentering and institutional differentiation of the ghetto [what does this all mean, exactly?]; (2) the scale of the involution.

(54): important--"yet the most significant brute fact of everyday life in the fin-de-siecle ghetto is without contest the extraordinary prevalence of physical danger and the acute sense of insecurity that pervades its streets." "this is a "reasoned response" (both in the sense of echo and retort) to various kinds of violence from above."

(55): males in bangladesh over age 35 had a higher probability of survival than their counterparts in harlem in 1990s

(58): involution following the trend of increasing joblessness (from about half of the population employed in south side in 1950, to more than 77% of those above the age of 16 left w/o a job in 1980)

(58-59): the rise and fall of the communal ghetto (first, blacks of all classes were put together; than as 'white flight' opened up some space, the petty bourgeoisie, etc., fled)--"by the late 1970s, the urban colour line had effectively been redrawn along a class fracture at the behest of the government."

(59): in sum, a three-fold movement that has resulted in the present conjuncture

1. "the out-migration of stably employed african-american families made possible by state-sponsored white flight to the suburbs"
2. "the crowding of public housing in black areas;"
   
3. "the rapid deproletarianization of the remaining ghetto residents."
   

(62): "oppressive as it was, the traditional ghetto formed 'a milieu for negro americans in which they could imbue their lives with meaning." [come on, we are broaching the outlandish here--this is not necessary for the larger argument, as far as i'm concerned]

(63): 82 percent of adults without a savings account in the late 1980s (the wealth gap is extraordinary, in general, let's not forget)

(64): informalization, here too as survival strategy (in other words, need to pin-down what is happening here vs. third world--is the mike davis narrative distinction overstated, in a sense?)

(66): yes--this is the other side of the entrepreneurial coin (don't let them forget it!)

(67): drug economy as a "subterranean welfare system"

(69): important--as far as "causes" of hyperghettoization go:

1. the transition of the american economy from fordist system of production for a mass-market, to more open/decentralized/service-intesnive system geared to increasingly differentiated consumption patterns (70-75)
   
2. rigid residential segregation, deliberate stacking of public housing in urban areas (75-80)
   
3. widespread retrenchment of an already miserly welfare state. (80-83)
   
4. turnaround in federal and local urban policy; 'planned shrinkage' of public services in historically black districts. (83-88)
   

(71): the ghetto no longer plays the role of reservoir of cheap industrial labor, as it did in a previous era (owing to deindustrialization; suburbanization of opportunities; shift to 'higher-education' jobs; continued racial segmentation of low-wage labor)

(74): the "stigma" that accompanies being associated with the ghetto

(75): this claim is confused, no? "the perpetuation of the exclusionary mission of the ghetto is first and foremost the concrete expression of the persistence of the 'colour line' in the metropolis even as it became overlaid by a class divide to produce a dual structure of black entrapment composed of a (sub)proletarian core and a middle-class periphery" [but all the same--descriptively this is all very valid; it is just fields' point about mistaking explanandum for explanans...]

(78-79): very useful account of how state was complicit in the ghettoization by focusing on massively subsidizing middle- and upper-class housing in the suburbs, and also by fostering public housing authorities within the bounds of the historic ghetto (kerner commission: 'federal housing programs concentrate the most impoverished and dependent segments of the population into the central-city ghettos wehre there is already a critical gap...').

(79): wow--"to this day, the united states remains the only advanced country in the world without significant state support for low-income housing in the world without significant state support for low-income housing, despite the glaring fact that nowhere have private developers bulit for the poor--in 1980, publicly owned or managed housing represented about 1 per cent of the US housing supply, compared to some 46 per cent in england and 37 per cent in france."

(80): "contrary to popular neoconservative rhetoric, the last quarter of the century was not a period of expansion and generosity for welfare but one of blanket retraction..."

(82): total abandonment/disinvestment by the public housing authorities

(82-83): regressive fiscal policies, on the part of the revanchist state

(84): nixon undoing the minimal interventions of johnson's war on poverty

(84): a window into our earlier discussions--"the political isolation of the cities, in turn, reinforced their role as entrepreneurs at the expense of their mission as social services providers, further fragmenting the revenue base on which the financing of public institutions rests..."

(84): planned shrinkage--recalls 'gentrification'

(85): public schools as custodial institutions, rather than educational institutions

(88): infants born in the poorest black districts of chicago are three times more likely to die than those born in wealthiest white districts; black men aged 15-45 die at six times the rate of men in white affluent neighborhoods

(89): grave mistake, following portes, has been to impute psychological reality to social phenomena -- "transform sociological conditions into psychological traits [of individuals"

(90): taking on william julius wilson for ignoring the role of the state and the decline of public institutions (he focuses instead on the disappearance of work)

(90): accusing massey of ignoring the distinctions between segregation and ghettoization, the communal ghetto and the hyperghetto.

(91): important--"it is this policy of state abandonment and punitive containment that best explains..." [it is unclear how much work we want to attribute to this, exclusively--in part it seems like he has to distinguish himself from the rest]

chapter three, the cost of racial and class exclusion in 'bronzeville' (92-118)

(92): in the mind of the neocon, poor as a "formless aggregate of pathological cases."

(93-94): in sum: "...the central argument of this chapter is that the vague and morally pernicious neologism of 'underclass' and its behavioral-cum-cultural slant mask a phenomenon pertaining to the macrostructural order: the ghetto has experienced a crisis not because the macrostructures of the family and individual conduct have suddenly collapsed or because a 'welfare ethos' has mysteriously taken hold of its residents, but because joblessness and economic exclusion, by rising to extreme levels against the backdrop of rigid racial segregation and state abandonment, have triggered a process of 'hyperghettoization'--in the sense of an exacerbation of the exclusionary logic of the ghetto as an instrument of ethnoracial control."

(94): wow--in 1980, 38% of poor african americans in the largest ten cities lived in ghettos (where 40% live below poverty line), compared to 22 percent in 1970 and only 6 percent of whites. [but again: ethnoracial exclusion cannot be your explanation for this--this is what you must explain]

(97): important--here we have a more useful explanation: "the most powerful vector behind the irresistible economic pauperization and social marginalization of large segments of the population penned in the segregated heart of chicago is a set of mutually reinforcing spatial and industrial changes in the country's urban political economy that converged during the 1960s and 1970s to undercut the material foundations of the ghetto by stripping it of its traditional role as reservoir of unskilled labour."

(98): but does he want to say that it is this, plus ethnoracial discrimination? which is true, of course, but not perhaps theoretically interesting... how do we want to frame this?

(98): blacks traditionally relied on manufacturing and blue-collar employment--its end, then, has led to 'labor market exclusion'

(101): what does this mean, though? that organizational changes in the economy "have combined with the black rejection of the caste regime through the Civil rights movement to break up the social structure of the traditional ghetto and set off a process of hyperghettoization."

(102): violent crime, drug consumption, etc., have all reached qualitatively different proportions in the hyperghetto

(104): "thus, when we counterpose extreme-poverty areas with moderate-poverty areas, we are in effect comparing the historic heart of the ghetto, born in the industrial era, with it postindustrial periphery."

(105): "the first major difference between the historic core of the ghetto and its rim areas pertains to their class structure. a sizable majority of the residents of the peripheral zones of the black belt are integrated into the wage-labour economy..."

(108): contours of the 'welfare trajectory'

(110): and particularly for the jobless, who have been locked into welfare dependence by lack of opportunities

(111): "thus, if the likelihood of tapping public aid increases sharply as one crosses the line between the employed and the jobless, it remains the case that, at each level of the class structure, welfare receipt is notably more frequent at the core of the ghetto than at its rim, especially among the unemployed and among women."

(112): wow--wealth table

(114): lower social capital--"all in all, then, the concentration of poverty at the core of the crumbling ghetto has the effect of systematically devaluing the social capital of those who live in its midst."

(116): most male companions have jobs, even though the vast majority of males don't--"being unemployed radically devalues men..."

(117): he's noting general economic growth in the rest of chicago, but a fracturing of that economic fate from the fate of the ghetto--we can ask about sassen's global city observation, here

chapter four, west-side story (119-132)

(119): important--"the united states can rightfully lay claim to being the first society of advanced insecurity in history. not just because it engenders... levels of lethal criminality incomparably greater than those prevailing in other postindustrial societies..., but in the sense that it has elevated insecurity as an organizing principle of collective life and a key mode of regulation of individual conduct..." (privilege as enjoying a social position outside this web of insecurity)

(122): 1/3 of the built environment in north lawndale are unsound/unfit for human habitation

(124): the US 'semi-welfare state'

(124): key--"this is to say that welfare recipients--who are forbidden to work for pay on pain of seeing this miserly aid withdrawn [in 1990, standard aid packaged in chicago fell 16% below survival threshold]--are sentenced to a long term of state poverty. by the same token, they are fated, whether they want it or not, to turn to the informal economy, legal and illegal, which has experienced spectacular development of late."

(126-127): wow; violence--"residents of the five african-american police districts in chicago... are eleven times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the... residents of the two white districts covering the north and south-west sectors of the city..."

(128): come on, what's the point of a hobbes citation?

(129-130): police corruption

chapter five, from conflation to comparison--how banleues and ghetto converge and contrast (135-162)

(135-136): critical--"...two profoundly different processes and scales on the two sides of the atlantic... [1] the cumulative incidence of segregation, poverty, isolation and violence assumes a wholly different intensity in the United States. [2] on the other hand, and this is the more crucial point, banlieues and ghettos are the legacies of different urban trajectories and arise from disparate criteria of classification and forms of social sorting: sorting operates first and foremost on the basis of class position... in the first case, and of ethnoracial membership in a historically pariah group... in the second. [3] finally, the french red belt and the american black belt have been the object of diametrically opposed political constructions and bureaucratic managements in the 1980s and 1990s. this is to say that the chasm that separates these two sociospatial constellations is not only of a quantitative order but pertains more fundamentally to the sociohistorical and institutional registers." [a place, clearly, to problematize the race/class confounding]

(137): "i wish above all to urge the utmost caution in the transatlantic transfer of concepts and theories pertaining to the articulation of racial domination, class inequality, and the structuration of space..."

(141): as in the US, linked in france, to "the relentless rise of unemployment and assorted forms of underemployment linked to the 'flexibilization' of the labor market..." [but he is pushing back against the equation in general, so this isn't to be taken out of context]

(145): "we will now demonstrate that such assimilation is in several respects fradulent, even dangerous. it proceeds simultaneously from ignorance about the black american ghetto and its historical trajectory (especially in the period following the civil rights revolution and the great riots of 1965-1968) and from an incomplete and incorrect diagnosis of the french working-class banlieues."

(145): noting, first, though that there are surface-level similarities (social morphology (145-147), and lived experience (147-150)

(146): remember--these areas have experienced de-population, not other way round

(147): between '68 and '84, la corurneuve lost 10,000 of 18,000 manual labor jobs. "ghetto and banlieue are thus both territories ravaged by deindustrialization."

(150): but this is all a "surface convergence..." there are five key differences:

1. disparate organizational ecologies (150-152): enormous difference in size, which expresses also the fact that the american ghetto really is a self-contained city, whereas the french banlieue is more of a 'residential island'
2. racial cloistering and uniformity, vs. ethnic dispersion (152-155): "whereas the popular banlieues of france are fundamentally pluri-ethnic zones where a multiplicity of nationalities rub elbows..., the US ghetto is totally homogeneous in ethnoracial terms..."
3. divergent rates and degrees of poverty (155-156)
   
4. criminality and dangerousness (156-158)
5. urban policy and the degredation of daily surroundings (158-160): "parlous state of housing stock and public infrastructure."
   

(150): interesting, gesturing towards reality/possiblity of a latino hyperghetto (this requires that we re-assess, no, the notion that ethnoracial domination is a cause?)

(152): wow--97 percent of black women marry black men, which is very different from the situation in france

(153): critical--"the ghetto is above all else a mechanism of racial confinement, an apparatus aimed at enclosing a stigmatized category in a reserved physical and social space that will prevent it from mixing with others and thus risk 'tainting' them..." [another excellent place to problematize race/class--this is the purpose of the ghetto!?]

(155): con't--"the confinement of blacks inside the ghetto is the expression of a racial dualism that cuts across the gamut of institutions of US society and is barely inflected as they climb up the class ladder: increasing education and income did not significantly lower the isolation of african americans from whites after the 1960s..."

(155): con't--"racial basis of their exclusion... explains why ghetto residents experience poverty rates and degrees of destitution with no equivalent in france..." [do we accept this? i think not--he is, again, confusing explanandum and explanans. or, rather, he's caught in a tautology--what's your evidence for racial exclusion. segregation. what's your explanation for segregation? racial exclusion. and on, and on, and on]

(159-160): important--in france, a different, more meaningful attempt at state support for these communities--"bear[s] witness to a collective will and sense of political responsibility that is diametrically opposed to the attitude of 'benign neglect' adopted by the american authorities..."

(161): important--admits "the historical specificity of the ethnoracial division of US society..." [about this there's no disagreement, just about the work we can make this do--i.e., does it take on a life of it's own, essentially]

chapter six, stigma and division, from the core of chicago to the margins of paris (163-197)

(163): the 'new poverty' and its contours--"all of these phenomena can be observed, to varying degrees, in nearly all advanced societies."

(166): purpose here is to evaluate the thesis of "transatlantic convergence" through a cross-national comparison

(168): again--"to simplify: relegation operates on the basis of ethnoracial membership reinforced by both social class and state in the fin-de-siecle black belt, whereas it proceeds principally on the basis of class and is partly mitigated by public policy in the red belt."

(169): important--'public taint', following bourdeiu, which "allows us to identify the main factors accounting for the muted social potency of ethnoracial categorization in the red belt..." [this is interesting--must follow this to make the c-arg complete]

(171): i am not following this claim, though--what does it mean for joblessness to produce 'taint'? discrimination on the basis of address, association. [but let's be careful to understand this as consequence, as 'ideology'...]

(179): important--talking about a triple disjuncture between objective conditions and this ideology of intolerance--reasons it 'weighs more heavily in france, than in US'

1. in france, institutionalized social inferiority stands in violation of french notions of unitary citizensihp; much more acceptable to americans
2. US has much more individualistic conception of causation (no one being penalized, really)
3. "a third and perhaps the most crucial difference between Red Belt and Black Belt relates to the nature of the stigma they carry: this stigma is essentially residential in the former but jointly and inseparably spatial-cum-racial in the latter." [ok, this is perfect place to tease out the shortcomings of this distinction--so clearly this is a consequence of the way in which these communities have formed, not a cause of their distinctive formation]
   

(182): critical place to question--ghetto as a "specifically racial formation"--"designed to encase a bounded category that has spawned a society-wide web of material and symbolic associations between colour, place, and a host of negatively valued social properties."

(184): and here, too--"negative representations and sociofugal practices then become articulated to set off a deadly self-fulfilling prophecy through which public taint and collective dishonour end up producing that which they claim merely to record: namely, social atomism, community 'disorganization' and cultural anomie."

(185): preliminary response--i suppose my position would simply be that the more theoretically coherent claim is to suggest that their homogeneity explains the severity of ethnoracial domination, rather than ethnoracial domination explains their homogeneity--and then the task is to understand homogeneity (and through that, one can understand ethnoracial domination, too)

(186): seeing 'race' everywhere in the ghetto--in the 'objectivity' of space?

(188): he is saying in france you have a perception that is youths arrayed against society, rather than it being racialized (but insofar as he is being descriptive, ok; insofar as he is appealing to folk concepts, he is forcing himself to ignore possible paths toward 'racialization'?...)

(190): noting racism in a british working-class town -- well what of american exceptionality, then?

(193): key, explaining lack of this ethnoracial notion in france--not just (1) the comparatively heterogeneous character of the Red Belt, but (2) also the notion that ethnic difference is not a legitimate idiom in the french state [are we sure that this can do the work we want it to? how can you perform a notwithstanding le pen?], and (3) the notion that there is much more assimilation going on in these areas than in the US.

(196): argument that in france, the social schism between these communities and the working-class is narrowing, whereas in the US it is getting greater and greater...

(198): "racial separation... radicalizes the objective and subjective reality of urban exclusion..."

georg simmel, on individuality and social forms

introduction, by donald levine (ix-lxiii)

(x): re: his noncomformity, contrast between Simmel and Durkheim "could scarcely be more conspicuous"

(xii): "he believed that the ultimate justification for scholarship lies in the materials it provides for the cultivation of educated individuals."

(xiii): "simmel's creativity was continuously exercised along three discernible lines"

1. origins, essences, and destinies of cultural forms.
   
2. "origins and structural properties of diverse social forms."
   
3. "the formal properties of fulfilled personality."

(xiv): three periods of intellectual development

1. early 1890s, influenced by social darwinism
2. neo-Kantian position for analysis of social and cultural forms
3. in his last years, concerned with "developing a philosophy of life"

(xiv-xv): important--for simmel, the study of social forms is sociology. so while he had a theory of culture, as well, it was not systematically integrated into his sociology--"it will, however, become apparent that his modes of analyzing social and cultural forms... are essentially similar..."

(xv): starting point is distinction between form and content

(xvi-xvii): key--"forms emerge to shape contents when the undifferentiated unity of immediate experience is ruptured by some sort of stress. the experiencing self divides into a self-conscious subject and a confronted object..." [a la Heidegger, at this level of generality]. this is the first level of cultural development, when culture is still 'pegged' to practical, structural interests. but, the more successful of these forms can take on a life of their own, and become 'objects of cultivation' themselves. [of course, there is a clear question raised by this question of success]. past this second level of cultural development, we come to a third--where "worlds" [of experience] can be formed.

(xviii): on individuality--"...individual persons are only limited realizations of their ideal selves--ideal not in the sense of a projection of the actual tendencies and syntheses manifested in each individual's own existence. the attainment of individuality is thus not a matter of arbitrary subjectivity, but rather a movement toward the realization of a determinat objective form."

(xix-xx): "objective culture" ("the complex of ideal and actualized [cultural] products") vs. "subjective culture" ("the extent to which individuals assimilate and make use of these products...")

(xx-xxi): 'it is our task not to complain or to condone but only to understand...'

(xxi): philosophy, for simmel, "operates at such a level of abstraction... that it does not matter if the general propositions it asserts are contradicted by data obtained form a position much nearer to things."

(xxii): important--anti-positivist understanding of history, insofar as history is not simply an accumulation of events that have actually occured (i.e., as content), but is a form-giving science--it is "a special way of constructing reality... history is that way of ordering the world that selects certain contents..." [at the same time, levine is arguing, he takes it so far that it is insulated from all other sciences, and becomes radically subjectivist in its implications--unlike weber]

(xxiii): important--roots of sociology, for simmel, lie in class conflict--it is the appearence of the analytical importance of the social environment that followed, which has set the stage for sociology as a science of social structures. within sociology, the form/content binary resurfaces--"'contents' take on a special meaning here: they are the needs, drives, and purposes which lead individuals to enter into continuing association with one another. 'forms' are the synthesizing processes by which individuals combine into supraindividual unities... the task of sociology properly understood is studying the forms of human sociality." [he is trying to delimit its scope at the same time agree that this is important, it seems...]

(xxv-xxvii): important--from (1) protoformal level (elementary social action), to (2) the level of institutionalized structures (in which "objectification of social forms that remains closely tied to praxis"), to (3) autonomous 'play' forms, to (4) the generic form of society itself.

(xxvii): important--"society," in simmel--"the concept of society is analogous... not to the concept of culture in general but to one of the world-forming cultural categories like religion, art... society exists as one of the ways in which all experience can potentially be organized. a given number of individuals therefore, can be society to a greater or lesser degree, just as agiven number of sounds can be music to a greater or lesser degree. society as a form presents the ideality of a world awaiting actualization. "

(xxix): "it is the nature of both history and sociology that they deal with contents which have already been given form. both of them study the already formed contents of human experience..."

(xxxi): important, Simmel's method--"His method is to select some bounded, finite phenomenon from the world of flux; to examine the multiplicity of elements which compose it; and to ascertain the cause of their coherence by disclosing its form. secondarily, he investigates the origins of this form and its structural implications."

(xxxii): "[his method[ does not force all phenomena together into a general scheme nor does it molest them with arbitrary or rigid categories; at the same time it avoids mindless empiricsim by providing a context of meanings for sets of observations. it enhances discovery."

(xxxii-xxxvii): four basic presuppositions

1. form--"the world consists of innumerable contents which are given determinate identity.. through the imposition of forms which man has created in the course of his experience..." [exist as methodological tools or as lived realities or as both?]
2. reciprocity--"no thing or event has a fixed, intrinsic meaning; its meaning only emerges through interaction with other things or events" [proto-structuralism?]
   
3. distance--"the properties of forms and the meanings of things are a function of the relative distances between individuals and other individuals or things." (forms arise, remember, when the unity of experience is "disrupted and a distance is interposed between subject and object.")
4. dualism--"the world can best be understood in terms of conflicts and contrasts between opposed categories." [a kind of primitive dialectic?]

(xxxvii): interesting amendment to Kant--"human mind is not a passive receptor of external stimuli", yes, but it can go so far as to create the categories with which it structures experience.

(xxxix): this sounds marxist, almost--"once created, forms are rigid. they are incapable of adapting to the continuous oscillations of subjective need. the conflict between established forms and vital needs produces a perpetual tension, a tension which is nevertheless the source of the dialectical development or replacement of social structures and cultural forms throughout history."

(xl-xlii): important, the twin 'tragedies'--(1) "Simmel sees the existence of individuality attacked and threatened by the very forms which individual creativity has produced--objective culture and sociality... the conflict between the forms of individuality and sociality is self-generated and inescapable; it constitutes the 'sociological tragedy.'" (2) "modern facilities and organization have made possible an unparalleled development of autonomous objective culture. this has greatly magnified the distance between subject and object.... man stands to become alienated from the most advanced products of his creative spirit..." [the 'cultural tragedy'--formally alienation, clearly]

(xlviii): "it is clear that Simmel's ideas enjoyed a privileged position in German sociology, until sociology in general and Simmel's books in particular were suppressed by the Nazis."

(liii): Park's appropriation of Simmel included a shift in definition of sociology which wasn't inconsequential--"by relegating competition and conflict to the sphere of the presocial, or subsocial, it led to an identification of sociality with consensus, rather than a conception of all social facts as inherently based on fundamental dualisms."

(lvi): lewis wirth identifying simmel's essay as 'the most important single article on the city from the sociological standpoint..'

(lvi): important angle into chicago school--"all these extension of simmel's ideas by Park's students... deal with social relationships, not sith social process."

(lxi): a kind of in sum: "Simmel's image of society may provide a continuing challenge to conceptions of social facts and social order which lay primary emphasis on systemic requirements and normative constraints, offering the counterparadigm of a luctuating field of self-regulating transactions--an alternative which stresses the phenomenology of individual experience and the dimension of distance in social relations..."

(lxiii-lxv): chapter summaries

--- --- --- --- --- --- ---

chapter one, "how is history possible?" [1905] (3-6)

(3): a critique of postivist history -- of "historical realism," which provides a mirror image of the past 'as it really was'

(3-4): possible, then, in the way that Kant's understanding of 'nature' is possible--the triumph of the 'ego': "inasmuch as the ego produces nature as its conception, and the general laws constitutive of nature are nothing other than the forms of our mind, natural existence has been subordinated to the sovereign ego."

(4): important--"man, as something known, is made by nature and history; but man, as knower, makes nature and history."

(5): in sum, the argument of this essay: "that form in which all psychic reality comes to consciousness, which emerges as the history of every ego, is itself a product of the creative ego. mind becomes aware of itself in the stream of becoming, but mind has already marked out the banks and currents of that stream and thereby made it into 'history.' the investigations which follow serve the general objective of preserving the freedom of the human spirit --that is, form-giving creativity--over against historicism in the same way that Kant did with respect to naturalism."

chapter two, how is society possible? [1908] (6-22)

(7): important: taking the nature-society comparison further--"the unity of nature emerges in the observing subject exclusively; ... by contrast, the unity of society needs no observer. it is directly realized by its own elements because these elements are themselves conscious and synthesizing units." [in other words, there is a distinction between where the form-giving function resides, in the two accounts]

(8): "the question of how society is possible... is answered by the conditions which reside a priori in the elements themselves, through which they combine... into the synthesis, society."

(9): two functions of the "sociological apriorities": (1) "more or less completely determine the actual process of sociation..."; (2) they are the ideational, logical presuppositions for the perfect society [is this a methodological / normative list? ]

(9-10): a necessary incompleteness in our perception of the Other (the necessity of classifying him not in terms of his singularity alone, but also "in terms of a general category" which cannot cover him fully).

(10): "all of us are fragments, not only of general man, but also of ourselves..."

(11): "the practice of life urges us to make the picture of a man only from the real pieces that we empirically know of him, but it is precisely the practice of life which is based on these modifications and supplementations, on the transformation of the given fragments into the generality of a type and into the completeness of the ideal personality... every member of a group... sees every other member not just empirically, but on the basis of an aprioric principle which the group imposes on every one of its participants..." [practice demands, in a sense, that we organize experience in this way--but again it's a practice that is independent of us. important to distinguish from the Kantian account of nature, as he said]

(11-12): "The civilian who meets an officer cannot free himself from his knowledge of the fact that this individual is an officer..."

(12): important--the question of reality: "in all these cases, reality is veiled by social generalization, which in a highly differentiated society, makes discovering it altogether impossible... but the very alterations and new formations which preclude this knowledge of him are, actgually, the conditions which make possible the sort of relations we call social. the phenomenon recalls Kant's conception of the categories: they form immediate data into new objects, but they alone make the given world into a knowable world."

(13): "for the social environment does not surround all of the individual. we know of the bureaucrat that he is not only a bureaucrat... this extrasocial nature--a man's temperament, fate, interests, worth as a personality--gives a certain nuance to the picture formed by all who meet him." [qua personality, counterposed to individual in society]

(13-14): "actually, individuals, as well as occupations and social situation, are differentiated according to how much of the non-social element they possess or allow along with their social content" [couple in love vs. catholic priest--but look to the text for explanation of this, because it's not what you'd think. or example of market exchange, later, wherein "the individual, inasmuch as he produces, buys, sells, and in general performs anything, approaches the ideal of absolute objectivity..."]

(14-15): important--"a society is, therefore, a structure which consists of beings who stand inside and outside of it at the same time... the individual can never stay within a unit which he does not at the same time stay out of..." [e.g., "to be one with God is conditioned in its very significance by being other than God." he applies, this, too the phenomenon of being both determined by nature, and free from its constraints]

(16): "on the one hand, we see ourselves as products of society... on the other hand, we see ourselves as members of society..."

(17-18): important--"the two--social and individual--are only two different categories under which the same content is subsumed." and man, of course, exists only as the synthesis of these two form--man is a "synthetic category." [the dual position--"the individual is contained in sociation, and, at the same time, finds himself confronted by it." to what extent, though, is this important as an analytical, rather than simply descriptive claim? i mean, it's clear he understand it as epistemologically terribly important, but--to an extent--it sidesteps the problem, no? or have we resigned ourselves to sidestepping the problem?]

(18): silly, standard reflections on equality

(21): reflections on the notion of "vocation"

(22): hmm... -- "the nexus by which each social element (each individual) is interwoven with the life and activities of every other, and by which the external framework of society is produced, is a causal nexus. but it is transformed into a teleological nexus as soon as it is considered from the perspective of the elements that carry and produce it--individuals... it is the dual nexus which supplies the individual consciousness with a fundamental category and thus transforms it into a social element."

chapter three, the problem of sociology [1908] (22-35)

(23): important, society is constituted by reciprocity--"the whole world could not be called one if each of its parts did not somehow influence every other part..."

(24): "in any given social phenomenon, content and societal form constitute one reality. a social form severed from all content can no more attain existence than a spatial form can exist without a material whose form it is."

(25): critical, spelling out his understanding of the science of society--"to separate, by scientific abstraction, these two factors of form and content which are in reality inseparably united; to detach by analysis the forms of interaction or sociation from their contents...; and to bring them together systematically under a consistent scientific viewpoint--this seems to me the basis for the only, as well as the entire, possibility of a special science of society as such."

(26): methodologically (or epistemologically?), there are two provisions which make this science possible, which are "undeniable facts": (1): the forms should be observable in diverse contents; (2) the content should manifest itself in diverse forms.

(27): "this conception of society implies a further proposition: a given number of individuals may be society to a greater or smaller degree."

(28): like the ideal-type, or not? -- "sociological forms, if they are to be even approximately definite, can apply only to a limited range of phenomena... what is needed is the study of specific kinds of superordination and subordination, and of the specific forms in which they are realized. through such a study, of course, these forms would losein applicability what they would gain in definiteness."

(28-29): need to mediate, too, between the abstract ("the object abstracted from reality may be examined in regard to laws entirely inhering in the objective nature of the elements") and the concrete ("the forms of sociation may be examined... in regard to their occurence at specific places and at specific times...")

(30-31): important--there is only ever an 'approximate' match between form and content [this clearly marks out his antipositivist orientation, even if it was already evident]... as he writes later, "there is no means of teaching, and, under certain conditions, even of performing the analysis of form and content into sociological elements."

(33): "there is always one reality and we cannot grasp it scientifically in its immediacy and wholeness but must consider it from a number of different viewpoints and thereby make it into a plurality of mutually independent scientific subject matters."

(33-36): important--distinction between sociological and psychological categories [corresponds to social/individual?]: "in this sense, then, the givens of sociology are psychological processes whose immediate reality presents itself first of all under psychological categories. but these psychological categories, although indispensable for the description of the facts, remains outside the purpose of sociological investigation. it is to this end that we direct our study to the objective reality of sociation, a reality which, to be sure, is embodied in psychic processes and can often be described only by means of them."

chapter five, exchange [1907] (43-70)

(43): exchange, at the highest level of generality, seems to stand in for the notion of necessary reciprocity outlined earlier.

(44): distinction between economic and other forms of exchange; "of all kinds of exchange, the exchange of economic values is the least free of some tinge of sacrifice."

(46): "considered with reference to its immediate content, exchange is nothing more than the causally connected repetition of the fact that an actor now has something which he previously did not have, and for that has lost something which he previously did have."

(46): weak rejoinder to the marxist theory of exploitation, here

(46): he wants to look at exchange subjectively--"it is extremely important to carry through this reduction of the economic process to that which takes place in actuality, that is, within the psyche of every economic actor... to the process of balancing two subjective events within an individual."

(47): subjectively, then, "exchange is just as productive... as is so-called production." [this is where weber et. al. were ripping out their hair, i'm sure]

(48-49): sacrifice/value? "...sacrifice is the condition of all value; not only the price to be paid for individual values that are already established, but that through which alone values can come into being."

(49): effectively, a 'non-labor' theory of value (what we give up)

(50): relativity of value--much like a line cannot be 'long' in and of itself, but only in relation to other lines.

(52): a theory, in effect, of non-exploitation--"the value which an actor surrenders for another value can never be greater, for the subject himself under the actual circumstances of that moment, than that for which it is given."

(53): is he using the orgasm as a heuristic?

(54): important--again, relativity of value: "economic value as such does not inhere in an object in its isolated self-existence, but comes to an object only through the expenditure of another object which is given to it."

(55): not simply subjective, desire is not enough--"[it is] certain that desire in and of itself could not establish any value if it did not encounter obstacles..."

(56-57): key, in sum--"the possibility of economy is at the same time the possibility of the objects of economy. the very transaction between two possessors of objects... which brings them into the so-called economic reation, namely, reciprocal sacrifice, at the same time elevates each of these objects into the category of value. the logical difficulty raised by the argument that values must first exist, and exist as values... is now removed. it is removed thanks to the significance we have perceived in that psychic relationsihp we designated as the distance between us and things... economic values thus emerge through the same reciprocity and relativity in which the economic condition of values consists."

(57): "there is no need to invoke a prior process of valuation... what is required for this valuation takes place in the very act of exchange itself."

(58): using 'primitives' and children to establish, again, the importance of subjective desire in the notion of value.

(59): again, he is stretching the subjective explanation to breaking point ("starvation wages" preferable to not working--thus, work 'valued' as equivalent to "starvation wages") [after all, how do you stop the subjective explanation from becoming a total non-explanation? it's not clear if you can, in fact]

(60): there is value formed from the traditions of society, and value formed from the individual. but we make a mistake thinking that the former is explicable by objective rules. they are both subjective, just have unfolded at different scales [this is my interpretation, at least]

(61): important--we can speak of standards of value (here about labor-power, socially necessary labor time), but he is really making clear that he is after the metaphysics of value, which has to be rooted in some kind of relation to subjective assessments of 'sacrifice/gain.'

(61-62): not a bit tautological?--essentially, what it means for things to exchange is for them to be valued equally. but what is the evidence that they've been valued equally? well that they exchange, of course!

(62): arguing that absolute value can be understood in these terms, as well: "exchange is, indeed, nothing other than the interindividual attempt to improve an unfavorable situation arising out of a shortage of goods; that is, to reduce as much as possible the amount of subjective abstinence by the mode of distributing the available supply."

(65): using Italy and the Orient to show the origins of exchange-value: "this shows clearly how the set price emerges out of the counterposition of subjects--the whole thing represents an intrusion of precommercial relations into a going exchange economy, but one that has not yet been consistently realized."

(66-67): in sum, the same point--"in this sense which holds true of all cultural development, then, exchange is originally a matter of social arrangements, until individuals become sufficiently acquainted with objects.. there may be doubt that these socially legislated rates... could only have resulted from numerous previous transactions which initially took place in irregular and unfixed form among individuals. this objection holds for exchange, however, no more than it does for language, custom, law... for all the fundamental forms of life... for a long time these forms, too, could only be explained as the inventions of individuals, whereas they surely arose from the very beginning as interindividual formations, as the product of interaction between individual and collectivity, so that no individual is to be credited with their origin."

(68): "by no means does it follow logically from those... properties of things which we call utility and scarcity... the meaning that an object has for an individual always rests soley in it desirability. for whatever an object is to accomplish for us, its qualitative desire is decisive."

(68-69): in an unintended way, he is making an important point about the always-social nature of scarcity, here

(69): in sum--"the difficulty of attainment, that is, the magnitude of the sacrifice involved in exchange is, thus the element that peculiarly constitues value."

(69): in sum--"we may examine an object ever so closely with respect to its self-sufficient properties, but we shall not find its economic value. for this consists exclusively in the reciprocal relationship which comes into being among several objects on the basis of these properties..."

chapter six, conflict [1908] (70-95)

(70): conflict, of course, is a form of sociation

(70-71): "conflict is thus designed to resolve divergent dualisms; it is a way of achieving some kind of unity, even if it be through the annihilation of one of the conflicting parties..." it is not purely negative, a la indifference--it contains something positive.

the sociological relevance of conflict (71-72)

(72): where you have unity, you also have discord--"an absolutely centripetal and harmonious groupd, a pure 'unification', not only is empirically unreal, it could show no real life process." [yin-yang sociology, i feel--but would be instructive to properly tease out distinction with dialectics]

unity and discord (73-74)

(73): there is an analytical mistake insofar as "what is eventually left standing is [seen] as the result of the subtraction of the two (while in reality it must rather be designated as the reslut of their addition.)"

conflict as an integrative force in the group (74-76)

(74): using this approach to 'understand' marriage and caste

(75): important--again, groups are characterized as much by their cooperation as they are by their mutual replusion--"the disappearence... of repulsive energeis does by no means always result in a richer and fuller social life... but in a different and unrealizable a phenomenon as if the group were deprived of the forces of cooperation." (see 76)

(76): and the 'urban'--"without such aversion, we could not imagine what form modern urban life, which every day brings everybody in contact with innumerable others, might possibly take. the whole inner organization of urban interaction is based on an extremely complex hierarchy of sympathies, indifferences, and aversions of both the most short-lived and the most enduring kind."

homogeneity and heterogeneity in social relations (77-80)

(77): important--"relations of conflict do not by themselves produce a social structure, but only in cooperation with unifying forces."

(79): it is also possible that we are unable to grasp the underlying consistency--"the structure may be sui generis, it smotivation and form being wholly self-consistent, and only in order to be able to describe and understand it, do we put it together, post factum, out of two tendencies, one monistic, the other antagonistic." (example given is nobility working for the king & being compelled to defend their interests against the king)

antagonism as an element in sociation (80-83)

(80): "while antagonism by itself does not produce sociation, it is a sociological element almost never absent in it."

(81): sociology vs. ethics

(81): interesting--"if... there is any consideration, any limit to violence, there already exists a socializing factor, even though only as the qualification of violence."

(82-83): only a fight for its own sake, it seems, is "wholly free from the admixture of other forms of relation."

antagonistic games (83-84)

(83): the single case where the fascination of the fight is the exclusive motivation--yet, even here: "one unites in order to fight, and one fights under the mutually recognized control of norms and rules. to repeat, these unifications do not enter into the motivation of the undertaking, even though it is through them that it takes shape." [this is actually a place where we can interrogate the methodological/analytical/normative question]

legal conflict (84-86)

(85): legal petifoggery!

(85): important--"legal conflict rests on a broad basis of unities and agreements between the enemies. the reason is that both parties are equally subordinated to the law..." [but again, there needs to be a distinction between this as consent, and this as coerced subordination--in what way are people freely subject to the law, after all? this is a distinction that his framework seems incapable of making.]

conflicts over causes (86-90)

(87-88): interesting, in particular, because here he is speaking about Marx and Marxism: "ever since marx, the social struggle has developed into this form [of wholly decisive victories, and where peace is treason], despite infinite differences in other respects." [there is a question, too, about how one mediates between objective and subjective--do you see the entrepreneur as a person or in his social role?]

(88): "an interesting example of this correlation is the workers' boycott of the berlin breweries in 1894. this was one of the most violent local fights in recent decades, carried out wit the utmost foce by both sides, but without any personal hatred of the brewers by the leaders of the boycott... it thus appears that conflict can exclude all subjective factors... at the same time we see that this common basis increases, rather than decreases, the intensity, irreconcilability, and stubborn consistency of the fight" [this framing, though, is of course highly dubious--in what way do the respective parties share a 'common basis'? this could be his own political intervention.]

common qualities vs. common membershp in larger social structures as basis of conflict (90-92)

(90-91): "two kinds of commonality may be the bases of particularly intense antagonisms: common qualities, and common membership in a larger social structure."

(91): too true--"people who have many common features often do one another worse or 'wronger' wrong than complete strangers do... we confront the stranger, with whom we share neither characteristics nor broader interests, objectively; we hold our personalities in resrve; and thus a particular difference does not involve us in our totalities... the more we have in common with another as whole persons, however, the more easily will our totality be involved in every single relation to him..."

conflict in intimate relations (92-95)

(92-94): odd relationship science, here

(95): hmm, maybe need to re-read the class conflict section in light of this point--"the degeneration of a difference in convictions into hatred and fight ordinarily occurs only when there were essential, original similarities between the parties. the (sociologically very significant) 'respect for the enemy' is usually absent where the hostility has arisen on the basis of previous solidarity."

chapter 18, group expansion and the development of individuality [1908] (251-293)

(251-252): "rather than pursuing a single abstracted form in the phenomena where it happens to appear, ... this chapter presents a particular correlation, an interactionally determined pattern of development among forms of association."

(252): "individuality in being and action generally increases to the degree that the social circle encompassing the individual expands."

(253): abstract solidarities between groups--socialist internationals and aristocratic cabals, both

(254): the fall of the guilds, rise of capital/labor divide

(255): division of labor, internal differentiation--" as soon as the boundaries of the group are ruptured and it enters into trade in special products with another group, internal differentiation develops between those who produce for export and those who produce for domestic consumption--two wholly opposed inner modes of being."

(255): account of dissolving of feudalism traces this process through the emancipation of the serfs (i.e., the process whereby they're divested of the means of production)

(256): thus, "differentiation and individualization loosen the bond of the individual with those who are most near in order to weave in its place a new one... with those who are more distant..."

(256): this is quite painful, these apologetics for the current order

(256-257): important--"these examples hint at a relation that will be found everywhere in the course of this inquiry. the nonindividuation of elements in the narrower circle and their differentiation in the wider one are phenomena that are found, synchornically, among coexistent groups and group elements, just as they appear, diachronicaly, in the sequence of stages through which a single group develops."

(257): basic thesis, it seems--"the narrower the circle to which we commit ourselves, the less freedom of individuality we possess; however, this narrower circle is itself something individual... correspondingly, if the circle in which we are active... enlarges, there is more room in it for the development of our individuality; but as parts of this whole, we have less uniqueness: hte larger whole is less individual as a social group. thus, the leveling of individual differences correpsnds not only to the relative smallness... of the collectivity, but also... to its own individualistic coloring." [i.e., infuriating, nested dualisms abound. also, note that he is advocating we use this as a kind of ideal type.]

(258): quakers; north vs. south

(259): crux--"we lead... a halved existence. we live as an individual within a social circle, with tangible separation from its other members, but also as a member of this circle, with separation from everything that does not belong to it." this gives rise to a contradictory impulse--the more we want to distinguish ourselves from others in our group, the more we undercut the unity of the group (from which we also find satisfaction, don't forget)

(259-260): employing this as a heuristic--again, a very loose claim on what is actually happening (this gets us back to the normative/methodological questions)

(262): the family

(263): expanding to the animal kingdom -- in other words, the contingency of his argument is a non-issue, in his opinion

(263): family, con't--it's sociological duality: "on the one hand, it is an extension of one's own personality... on the other hand, the family also constitutes a complex within which the individual distinguishes himself from all others..."

(265): methodologically, then, we're dealing with nested circles, which makes analysis complex. he is arguing, though, that "it is always precisely the intermediate structure that exhibits the pattern in question."

(266): there is, of course, an intederminacy to how this individuality drive might emerge

(267): tracing the general pattern through a general model of three concentric circles: "one might sacrifice oneself for a single human being...; and then again, for an incomprehensible multitude; but for a hundred people, hardly anyone brings himself to martyrdom..." [this may sound neat, but it's all hogwash]

(269): key--"the larger circle encourages freedom, the smaller one restricts it."

(269): speaking about spouses and our ability to be picky--"a more profound meaning of freedom emerges here: individual freedom is freedom that is limited by individuality."

(270): in sum--"the relatively undeveloped condition certainly imposed a social constraint on the individual; however, this was linked to the negative freedom of nondifferentiation... in the more advanced state, on the other hand, social possibilities are much enhanced, but now they are restricted by the positive meaning of freedom in which every choice is... the unambiguously determined expression of an unalterable kind of personality."

(271-272): two meanings of individuality--(1--an 18t century variant) "individuality in the sense of the freedom and responsibility for oneself that comes from a broad and fluid social environment..."; freedom from external influence (2--a 19th century variant) "means that the single human being distinguishes himself from all others; that his being and conduct.. suit him alone..."; freedom in individual flowering

(272): french revolution, and unions

(273): 'the objective mind', which gives birth to 'tradition' and objective culture

(274): individualism of equality vs. individualism of inequality [?]

(274): individualism and cosmopolitanism

(275): differentiation/expansion as 'cause' of collapse of holy roman empire?!

(277-278): cash economy and differentiation/expansion: "money is the connection that relates maximal expansion of the economic group to maximal differentiation of its members, both in the dimension of freedom and a sense of responsibility for oneself, and in the dimension of a qualitative differentiation of labor."

(278): enclosures--ugh, what the fuck.

(279): e.g., absolutism and the end of the guild/corporation

(279): despotism and leveling, republicanism and tyranny: "the shattering of group constraints within a whole that somehow belongs together is so intimately related to the accentuation of individuality that both the cohesion of the ruling personality and the individual freedom of all group members center upon it like two variations on a single theme."

(280-281): tracing this dynamic through the question of representation (as you get larger, more differentiated, administration demands rule of a single man...)

(283): through law--smaller collectivities do not distinguish, unlike larger ones, between public authority and private life

(284-285): a corollary, which was mentioned earlier, too--"as man as individual... comes to replace man as social element..., the bond must tighten that pulls him... toward all that is human, suggesting to him the notion of an ideal unity of mankind."

(285-286): important--seemingly setting up an opposition between pursuit of individuality and pursuit of equality (but i think this is more complicated that we might think, at first glance)--example is increased education: "it seeks to eliminate glaring differences in mental level and, precisely via the creation of a certain equality, to secure for each person the previously denied chance of making good his individual capacities..." again, the two different understandings of individuality are key--the first, freedom from external constraint, he deems compatible with inequality; the second, however, is not at all compatible.

(287): a la durkheim, seeing society as an organism

(289-290): forshadowing the tragic?--"...when the individual's relations begin to exceed a certain extensiveness, he becomes all the more thrown back upon himself..."

(291): even if there has been a certain leveling of personality, he's arguing, "life in a wider circle and interaction with it develop, in and of themselves, more consciousness of personality than arises in a narrower circle." we become conscious of ourselves, as constant ego, the greater the variability of the world around us.

(292): again, a la durkheim--"the generation of functional organs is the means wehreby the cohesion of the group is united with the greatest freedom of individuals." the individual finds his niche. [my god i hate this hogwash]

chapter twenty, the metropolis and mental life [1903] (324-339)

(324): key--"the deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society..." [prefiguring the tragedy]. in each movement for emancipation (from Nietzsche to the Socialists), Simmel sees "the same fundamental motive [at work], namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the socio-technological mechanism."

(325): important--the classic definition of the 'urban'/rural: "to the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions--with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life--it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatrues dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence."

(326): the metropolitan type that emerges is less emotional, more rational (as protection, it seems...). corresponds to emotional relationships vs. objective relationships.

(327): a kind of commodity fetishism-line, though not really: noting that now people are provided for and produce for producers/consumers that they don't know. "thereby, the interests of each party acquire a relentless matter-of-factness."

(328): the city as a "firmly fixed framework" above and all subjective elements, possibly

(328): punctuality, calculability, exactness, condition the "exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impluses which originally seek to determine the form of life from within instead of receiving it from without." this is why Nietzsche hated the city.

(329): the blase outlook, without which life in the metropolis would be impossible (see 331-332, also)

(330): money as the frightful leveler [that] "hollows out the core of things, their pecularities..."

(332): re: the blase outlook--"what appears here directly as dissociation is in reality only one of the elementary forms of socialization."

(333): same argument as last essay--the small town as panopticon

(334): "for here, as elsewhere, it is by no means necessary that the freedom of man reflect itself in his emotional life only as a pleasant experience."

(334): a 'geometric' model re: the "urban"--the ecological critique is very apt, here

(335): something like the "urban effect"--"...the city exists only in the totality of the effects which transcend their immediate sphere."

(335-336): the city as site for most extensive division of labor

(336): "all this leads to the narrower type of intellectual individuation of mental qualities to which the city give rise in proportion to its size."

(337): important--again, an allusion to the modern tragedy (the creation of man as a "cog")--"the development of modern culture is characterized by the predominance of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjetive; that is... there is embodied a sort of spirit, the daily growth of which is followed only imperfectly and with an even greater lag by the intellectual development of the individual." spirituality and value escape their subjective existence, and become objective reality. culture "has outgrown every personal element."

(338): "the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture lies at the root of the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, directed against the metropolis."

(339): summary passage, in which the metropolis is read as the site in which the two understandings of individuality (the 18th and 19th century-versions) meet, collide--"it is the function of the metropolis to make a place for the conflict and for the attempts at unification of both of these in the sense that its own peculiar conditions have been revealed to us as the occasion and stimulus for the development of both."

chapter twenty-two, social forms and inner needs [1908] (351-352)

(351): "a basic dualism" afflicts all sociation--"a relation, which is a fluctuating, constantly developing life-process, nevertheless receives a relatively stable external form." [again, this passage provides ample opportunity to work out normative/methodological/analytical/epistemological]

(352): we give 'form' to our "inner life", yet these "forms... do not express or shape an ideal, a contrast with life's reality, but this life itself."

(352): forms can outrun content, just as content can outrun forms [example of a new political constitution]

chapter twenty-four, the conflict in modern culture [1918] (375-393)

(375): key--here, gesturing towards the tragic: "...these forms [cultural forms] encompass the flow of life and provide it with content and form, freedom and order. but although these forms arise out of the life process, because of their unique constellation they do not share the restless rhythm of life... these forms are frameworks for the creative life, which, however, soon transcends them... this new rifidity inevitably places them at a distance from the spiritual dynamic which created them and which makes them independent."

(376): "each cultural form, once it is created, is gnawed at varying rates by the forces of life.... life constantly struggles against its own products..."

(376): fits the Marxist narrative into this larger framework

(377): "life is always in a latent opposition to the form" [here, again, clearly 'real', this form/content -- relevant for the normative/methodological question.]

(377): important, a unique conjuncture?--"... what is happening is not only a negative, passive dying out of traditional forms, but simultaneously a fully positive drive towards life which is actively repressing these forms."

(378): notion of the 'central idea' / 'secret being' of an epoch (378-379: history of this development, across epochs)

(380): "i will now illustrate... the uniqueness of the cultural situation we are undergoing..."

(381-382): in art, expressionism--"artist replaces his model with the impluse lying behind the model... according to the artist's intention, the form represents only a necessary evil."

(384): van gogh

(385): in philosophy, pragmatism--truth is that which sustains life; "there is no originally independent truth... the purest expression of life as a central idea is reached when it is viewed as the metaphysical basic fact, as the essence of all being..."

(388): a turn away form classicism, which "is the ideology of form."

(388): towards a new erotic life

(390): in religion--"tendency for forms of religious belief to dissolve into modes of religious life, into religiosity as a purely functional justification of of religion"

(392-393): important, a restatement of the fundamental contradiction of our age--"life must either produce forms or proceed through forms... life is inseparably charged with contradiction. it can enter reality only through the form of its antithesis, that is, only in the form of form.... the forms themselves, however, deny this contradiction: in their rigidly individual shapes, in the demands of their imprescriptible rights, they boldly present themselves as the true meaning and value of our existence... life wishes here to obtain something which it cannot reach. it desires to transcend all forms and appear in its naked immediacy. yet the processes of thinking, wishing and forming can only substitute one form for another. they can never replace the form as such by life which as such transcends the form..."

(393): hinting at a dialectic, rather than simple dualism, in a sense: "in short, the present is too full of contradictions to stand still. this itself is a more fundamental change than the reformations of times past..." [how to integrate this with the earlier reflections?]