Core+Concepts_pedlt3

I think that this concept will help to tie together:
 * 1) **Timespace** – [|Timespace] is maybe not a very well known concept, and it sounds a bit esoteric. In a nutshell, it marries:
 * Multiple/uneven temporalities
 * Geography
 * Place
 * Representations of/through time
 * The negotiation of different timescales (half-lives, news cycles, and DoE budgets)
 * Representations of and “relations of [ethical] proximity” to future generations and various present populations
 * The definition of the “here and now” (sphere of immediacy, urgency, action)
 * Uneven geographies (e.g., environmental justice concerns)
 * The relation of place science, politics, etc.
 * Socionature, [|mutant ecologies], etc.
 * Forms of prediction
 * Risk
 * Wastelands

> Both concepts imply a concern for the politics and problems of representation (in several senses, perhaps even some of the fundamental exceptions to the “universals” of liberalism—no liberty for unreasonable people like children or the mad, their “interests” must be represented by others) and power. I would love some help teasing out some of the implications of using one concept rather than the other. Can “implicated actor” deal with this issue, or is it a misbegotten problematic in its entirety?
 * 1) **Virtual Subjects / Implicated Actors (or actants?)** – The later is a well known concept, designating actors that are relevant to or affected by a given issue, but who are for one reason or another (like not being born for another few thousand years) not heard or only spoken about/for. This has obvious relevance to intergenerational relations. However, in a paper I wrote last spring (before I had heard about implicated actors), I was struggling to figure out just how to talk about efforts to give future generations a “voice” or “rights” with respect to environmental issues, as well as efforts to “warn the future” at WIPP (nuclear waste dump in NM). “Virtual” (I can already see David cringing) here refers to “[|having the essence or effect but not the appearance or form of]” subjects. In a nutshell, in some (perhaps mostly marginal cases or proposals) future generations are treated as subjects**—**legally, ethically (I suppose in the sense of a non-instrumental obligation for their well being, or something to that effect), and in terms of communication (warning them implies an attempt at communication). When this is the case, “they” have some kind of “agency” or efficacy in the present (didn’t Derrida talk somewhere about the future “haunting” the present or something?). I could use some help here—does this make any sense, or have I gone stark raving mad?


 * 1) **Ethics** – Still working out exactly what this means for me, particularly how it should be related to politics. I am not really interested, at least in terms of this project, about things like “professional ethics” or ethics conceived as rules for right and wrong behavior. I am more interested in ethics in Foucauldian terms, which has to do with the praxis (?) of self-constitution, although I am not as familiar with his ethical turn as I am with some of his earlier work. In [|Timespace], there is a Foucauldian article about “relations of proximity” that has been helpful. I’ll take the extremely lazy way out and quote myself:
 * "Probyn, writing in the same edited volume and exploring concepts of time and space put forward by Foucault, points out the ethical salience and possibilities that a focus on the relations of proximity, which she defines as “the calculus of the distance and closeness between and amongst different social sites,” within timespace allows (2001: 173). “Here” and “now” are not given, in other words, but are defined by their shifting relations of proximity to various “theres” and “thens,” and can be occupied through an active ethical practice confronting and reconfiguring the productive limits of one’s site (ibid.)."

Sorry--this all became more of a rant than I intended!