Recent comments in /f/Geography

Minnow OP wrote

Posting this mostly for historical interest. Along with Marxists appearing to erase anarchist geographer history, I had never heard of Debord doing geography until today.

I'm interested otherwise because of the term 'psychogeography', introduced here and further elaborated in other Situationist texts and in the journal "Les Lèvres nues" - "Naked Lips". Psychogeography was a concept used to explore how the geographic environment influences emotions and behaviors - for Situationists it was tied up in the practice of the dérive.

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Minnow OP wrote

Shows how Proudhon was doing a lot of stuff that Deleuze and Guattari do and claims the latter two for anarchism. Includes thinking through Deleuze's abandonment of marxist History for geography.

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Minnow wrote (edited )

The first article in this boxing match, ‘Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist’, (is on the library also and) got a response from Harvey, who is the big daddy Marxist of geography since the 70s when Marxists appropriated radical geography. He's loved by Marxists despite being old-school Marxist in the present (which is nothing short of disgusting). Harvey's response to Springer really showed a total lack of understanding of anarchism, which can make you despondent about the close-mindedness of Marxists. Anyway, if you want to dislike Marxism more, read this exchange.

Simon is also quite good at critiquing them, and has an insurrectionist politics ala Stirner and Deleuze, though he''ll disagree with most people here on a few things.

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Minnow moderator wrote

Just wanted to say, this title isn't a serious one that's actually trying to claim that geography can only be anarchist, it's mocking some Marxist who wrote a paper who said that about Marxism.

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Pax OP wrote

Radical geographers have been preoccupied with Marxism for four decades, largely ignoring an earlier anarchist tradition that thrived a century before radical geography was claimed as Marxist in the 1970s. When anarchism is considered, it is misused as a synonym for violence or derided as a utopian project. Yet it is incorrect to assume anarchism as a project, which instead reflects Marxian thought. Anarchism is more appropriately considered a protean process that perpetually unfolds through the insurrectionary geographies of the everyday and the prefigurative politics of direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary association. Unlike Marxism’s stages of history and revolutionary imperative, which imply an end state, anarchism appreciates the dynamism of the social world. In staking a renewed anarchist claim for radical geography, I attend to the divisions between Marxism and anarchism as two alternative socialisms, wherein the former positions equality alongside an ongoing flirtation with authoritarianism, while the latter maximizes egalitarianism and individual liberty by considering them as mutually reinforcing. Radical geographers would do well to reengage anarchism as there is a vitality to this philosophy that is missing from Marxian analyses that continue to rehash ideas—such as vanguardism and a proletarian dictatorship—that are long past their expiration date.

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