"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..."