Showing papers in "Theory, Culture & Society in 2010"
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the relationship between the consensual presentation and mainstreaming of the global problem of climate change on the one hand and the debate in political theory/philosophy that centers around the emergence and consolidation of a post-political and post-democratic condition on the other.
Abstract: This article interrogates the relationship between two apparently disjointed themes: the consensual presentation and mainstreaming of the global problem of climate change on the one hand and the debate in political theory/philosophy that centers around the emergence and consolidation of a post-political and post-democratic condition on the other. The argument advanced in this article attempts to tease out this apparently paradoxical condition. On the one hand, the climate is seemingly politicized as never before and has been propelled high on the policy agenda. On the other hand, a number of increasingly influential political philosophers insist on how the post-politicization (or de-politicization) of the public sphere (in parallel and intertwined with processes of neoliberalization) have been key markers of the political process over the past few decades. We proceed in four steps. First, we briefly outline the basic contours of the argument and its premises. Second, we explore the ways in which the present climate conundrum is predominantly staged through the mobilization of particular apocalyptic imaginaries. Third, we argue that this specific (re-)presentation of climate change and its associated policies is sustained by decidedly populist gestures. Finally, we discuss how this particular choreographing of climate change is one of the arenas through which a post-political frame and post-democratic political configuration have been mediated.
989 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that climate change produces discordances in established ways of understanding the human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and opportunities for the interpretive and interpretive interpretation of the human presence in nature.
Abstract: This article argues that climate change produces discordances in established ways of understanding the human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and opportunities for the interpretive ...
630 citations
TL;DR: The authors examine the conservative movement's efforts to undermine climate science and policy in the USA over the last two decades by using this second dimension of power, and argue that reflexive modernization scholars should focus more attention on similar forces of anti-reflexivity that continue to shape the overall direction of our social, political and economic order, and the life chances of many citizens.
Abstract: The American conservative movement is a force of anti-reflexivity insofar as it attacks two key elements of reflexive modernization: the environmental movement and environmental impact science. Learning from its mistakes in overtly attacking environmental regulations in the early 1980s, this countermovement has subsequently exercised a more subtle form of power characterized by non-decision-making. We examine the conservative movement’s efforts to undermine climate science and policy in the USA over the last two decades by using this second dimension of power. The conservative movement has employed four non-decision-making techniques to challenge the legitimacy of climate science and prevent progress in policy-making. We argue that reflexive modernization scholars should focus more attention on similar forces of anti-reflexivity that continue to shape the overall direction of our social, political and economic order, and the life chances of many citizens. Indeed, better understanding of the forces and effectiveness of anti-reflexivity may very well be crucial for societal resilience and adaptation, especially in the face of global environmental problems like climate change.
440 citations
TL;DR: The discourse on climate politics so far is an expert and elitist discourse in which peoples, societies, citizens, workers, voters and their interests, views and voices are very much neglected as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The discourse on climate politics so far is an expert and elitist discourse in which peoples, societies, citizens, workers, voters and their interests, views and voices are very much neglected. So, in order to turn climate change politics from its head onto its feet you have to take sociology into account. There is an important background assumption which shares in the general ignorance concerning environmental issues and, paradoxically, this is in corporated in the specialism of environmental sociology itself — this is the category of ‘the environment’. If ‘the environment’ only includes everything which is not human, not social, then the concept is sociologically empty. If the concept includes human action and society, then it is scientifically mistaken and politically suicidal.
355 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors trace the divergence between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza's affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social body.
Abstract: How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity (or not) of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writings on the scream, as a ...
307 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines some major changes relating to the contemporary conditions of life upon Earth and deals especially with emergent contradictions that stem from shifts within capitalism in the rich North over the course of the last century or so.
Abstract: This article examines some major changes relating to the contemporary conditions of life upon Earth. It deals especially with emergent contradictions that stem from shifts within capitalism in the rich North over the course of the last century or so. These shifts involve moving from low-carbon to high-carbon economies/societies, from societies of discipline to societies of control, and more recently from specialized and differentiated zones of consumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess. Societies become centres of conspicuous, wasteful consumption. The implications of such forms of ‘excess’ consumption are examined for clues as to the nature and characteristics of various futures. Special attention is paid to the interdependent system effects of climate change, the peaking of oil and exceptional growth of urban populations. It is argued that the 20th century has left a bleak legacy for the new century, with a very limited range of possible future scenarios which are briefly described.
189 citations
TL;DR: A general territorology, it is argued, amounts to a sociology of territorial acts and relations, whose aim is to analyze the expressive and functional components of territories, as fixed through their organizational and technological devices.
Abstract: The development of territorology requires the overcoming of the dichotomy between determinist and constructivist approaches, in order to advance towards a general science of territory and territorial phenomena. Insights for this task can come from at least four main threads of research: biology, zooethology and human ethology; human ecology, social psychology and interactionism; human, political and legal geography; and philosophy. In light of the insights derived from these traditions, the article aims to conceptualize territorial components, technologies, movements, effects, and their interplay, in order to establish the main lines of inquiry for territorology. A general territorology, it is argued, amounts to a sociology of territorial acts and relations, whose aim is to analyze the expressive and functional components of territories, as fixed through their organizational and technological devices.
182 citations
TL;DR: The authors place such propositional concerns in the perspective of a different understanding of the relationships between scientific knowledge and public policy issues from the conventional "translation" model, in which prior scientific research and understanding is communicated and translated into corresponding policies.
Abstract: For a long time before the ‘climategate’ emails scandal of late 2009 which cast doubt on the propriety of science underpinning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), attention to climate change science and policy has focused solely upon the truth or falsity of the proposition that human behaviour is responsible for serious global risks from anthropogenic climate change. This article places such propositional concerns in the perspective of a different understanding of the relationships between scientific knowledge and public policy issues from the conventional ‘translation’ model, in which prior scientific research and understanding is communicated and translated into corresponding policies — or not, if it remains disputed and overly uncertain. Explaining some of the key contingencies and bases for uncertainty in IPCC climate projections and human influences, I show how social and technical analysis of climate science is not about denial of the scientific propositional claims at issue, but a...
170 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a series of theses on the "evental" and "atmospheric" quality of contemporary power are presented, focusing on the speculative methodologies used to generate models of the financial and meteorological future.
Abstract: Focusing on the speculative methodologies used to generate models of the financial and meteorological future, this article develops a series of theses on the ‘evental’ and ‘atmospheric’ quality of contemporary power. What is at stake in the circulation of capital today, I argue, is not so much the exchange of equivalents as the universal transmutability of fluctutation. Whether we are dealing with the turbulence of world financial markets or that of complex earth systems, the non-dialectical relation can itself be extracted, recombined and liquefied, as it were, in a dimension of its own. In the same way that financial derivatives price the variable relation between and across national currencies, weather derivatives now make it possible to issue contracts on the unknowable contingencies embedded in complex atmospheric relations. This reconfiguration of value requires a thorough rethinking of classical sociological conceptions of debt, promise and political violence.
166 citations
TL;DR: Social theorists have been dealing with issues of environment and climate change for quite some years, but on which topics have they focused and with whom have they been talking? Many of the articl...
Abstract: Social theorists have been dealing with issues of environment and climate change for quite some years, but on which topics have they focused and with whom have they been talking? Many of the articl...
163 citations
TL;DR: The theoretical and substantive connections between iconicity and consumerism in the field of contemporary iconic architecture within the framework of a critical theory of globalization are explored in this paper. But they do not consider the relationship between architecture and consumer culture.
Abstract: This article explores the theoretical and substantive connections between iconicity and consumerism in the field of contemporary iconic architecture within the framework of a critical theory of globalization. Iconicity in architecture is defined in terms of fame and special symbolic/aesthetic significance as applied to buildings, spaces and in some cases architects themselves. Iconic architecture is conceptualized as a hegemonic project of the transnational capitalist class. In the global era, I argue, iconic architecture strives to turn more or less all public space into consumerist space, not only in the obvious case of shopping malls but more generally in all cultural spaces, notably museums and sports complexes. The inspiration that iconic architecture has provided historically generally coexisted with repressive political and economic systems, and for change to happen an alternative form of non-capitalist globalization is necessary. Under such conditions truly inspiring iconic architecture, including...
TL;DR: This paper argued that climate change is contributing to the dissolution of three modern dualisms: nature-culture (ontology), present-future (epistemology), and global-local (geography).
Abstract: This essay argues for the fruitfulness of Beck's idea of cosmopolitanism for understanding the changing political, sociological and psychological attributes of climate change. This argument is illustrated through brief examinations of how climate change is contributing to the dissolution of three modern dualisms: nature-culture (ontology), present-future (epistemology) and global-local (geography). Not only does the cosmopolitan perspective help to understand the ways in which science and society are mutually constructing the phenomenon of climate change, it also offers us a way of asking 'what can climate change do for us?' rather than 'what can we do for climate change?' Sociologists are needed for answering this question.
TL;DR: In this paper, a discussion of the implications of such conjunctural tightness, one which questions the effectiveness of humanist arguments that have come to the fore in recent years focusing on practices of recognition and reconciliation, is presented.
Abstract: Prompted by the speed with which, in certain historical moments, the hard-won achievements of anti-racism can be comprehensively undone, this article reflects on the mechanisms that keep racial coding and judgement close to the surface, ready to spring into action. It reads the intensity of race in a given present in terms of the play between vernacular legacies of race-coded reception of visible difference and the conjunctural mobilizations of race by biopolitical regimes — state-regulated systems of governing populations — to maintain collective order. The article explains the contemporary trend in the West towards the ‘racialization of everything’ as the product of mutually reinforcing mischief between vernacular and biopolitical racism. It closes with a discussion of the implications of such conjunctural tightness, one which questions the effectiveness of humanist arguments that have come to the fore in recent years focusing on practices of recognition and reconciliation.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the lack of convergence on climate grew almost inevitably from our starkly unequal world, which has created and perpetuated highly divergent ways of thinking (worldviews and causal beliefs) and promoted particularistic notions of fairness.
Abstract: This article seeks to answer why North—South climate negotiations have gone on for decades without producing any substantial results. To address this question, we revisit and seek to integrate insights from several disparate theories, including structuralism (new and old), world systems theory, rational choice institutionalism, and social constructivism. We argue that the lack of convergence on climate grew almost inevitably from our starkly unequal world, which has created and perpetuated highly divergent ways of thinking (worldviews and causal beliefs) and promoted particularistic notions of fairness (principled beliefs). We attempt to integrate structural insights about global inequality with the micro-motives of rational choice institutionalism. The structuralist insight that ‘unchecked inequality undermines cooperation’ suggests climate negotiations must be broadened to include a range of seemingly unrelated development issues such as trade, investment, debt, and intellectual property rights agreemen...
TL;DR: There are three broad positions or discourses within the climate change literature as discussed by the authors : post-carbonism, post-culture and post-materialism (post-culture), post-postmodernism.
Abstract: OCIAL THEORY is faced by a new spectre haunting the ‘globe’ – thechanging of the world’s climate. Such changes are now thought to bebeyond doubt and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPCC), very likely the product of human practices (IPCC, 2007).These practices have generated raised levels of ‘greenhouse gases’ in theatmosphere, which seem to be leading to increased temperatures, which willin turn transform future forms of human life around the world. Even attemptstomonitorand‘mitigate’climatechangearelikelytoinvolvedramaticchangesin social organization: the creation of a global assemblage of internationalagreements, carbon atoms, markets, technologies, weather events and socialpractices.Thereseemsnodoubt:the21stcenturyissettobeonewhereissuesofclimate,resourcesandenergyareparamount.Theworldofcultureandvirtu-ality has met its match; the material world apparently does matter and can‘bite back’. The economies and societies of whole continents may well havetransformedconditionsoflife.Andthehigh-carbonworld initiatedinthe20thcentury could turn out to be a mere passing moment in the long-term pattern-ing of human history. It is not so much post-modernism that we should bedebating but the conditions of possibility of ‘post-carbonism’.There are three broad positions or discourses within the climatechange literature.
TL;DR: The authors argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather, and they trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather.
Abstract: In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narrative I develop a rather different account of the current ecopolitical moment. I first argue that an understanding of anthropogenic climate change must be grounded in a biosemiotic analysis of the evolving metabolism between society and nature, one that is alert to the way that metabolism involves a folded relation between inside and outside, and that recognizes the constant deferral of biosemiotic meaning in ecological systems. I then use a deconstructive reading of climate technics to problematize the distinction between the diagnosis and solution of climate change, and expose modern scientific practices of reading the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of weather’s technological writability. Exploring the notion that previous transformations of the metabolic regime of society have always involved transformations of notions of the human, I conclude by sketching out a different way of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the ‘opening’ of climate change, that problematizes the idea of the human as the end of nature, and that thereby implies a more radical version of climate responsibility.
TL;DR: This article summarized the major arguments of Huffer's 2010 book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, in a two-part article.
Abstract: This two-part article summarizes the major arguments of Lynne Huffer’s 2010 book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. The second part of the piece is a dialogue between Hu...
[...]
TL;DR: The authors argue that despite the strong anti-secular thrust of these positions, these positionings remain thoroughly intrasecular in character and need to be more emphatically acknowledged if the postsecular turn is to be productive.
Abstract: In this article, I engage with three overlapping expressions of the increasingly postsecular cast of social and cultural theory. These currents — guided, respectively, by genealogical critique, neo-vitalist social philosophy and postcolonial anti-historicism — seek to problematize the frame of previous radical theorizing by exposing definite connections between the epistemological and political levels of secular understanding, and by assuming that the nature of those linkages counts heavily against secularism. As well as offering an interpretive overview of these contributions, I suggest that they are traversed by a number of conceptual flaws and inconsistencies. The tensions, I argue, stem from the fact that in spite of appearing to be driven by a strong anti-secular thrust, these positionings remain thoroughly intra-secular in character. This needs to be more emphatically acknowledged if the ‘postsecular turn’ is to be productive.
TL;DR: The authors argue that aesthetics must be considered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realm of what is possible in that politics, as Foucault put it.
Abstract: As environments and their inhabitants undergo a multitude of abrupt changes due to climate, in the aesthetic field there has been a hardening of a few representational figures that stand in for those contested political ecologies. Biodiversity loss and habitat change can be seen to be forcing an acceleration of archival practices that mobilize various images of the ‚"play of the world", including the making of star species to represent planetary loss, and the consolidation of other species into archives implicitly organized around the category of their destruction. The first section of this article looks at Jacques Ranciere's concept of political aesthetics in order to extend an argument about the importance of aesthetics in multispecies living beyond a concentration on practices per se and into a more excessive engagement articulated by Georges Bataille. I argue that aesthetics must be considered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realm of what is possible in that politics. This is to suggest aesthetics as a form of ethics or an "aesthetics of existence", as Foucault put it. The conclusion considers how a biopolitical aesthetic comes into being through such archival practices, and asks what aesthetic shifts would make the ‚ "play of the world" more present in its absences.
TL;DR: This paper argued that megacity security marches to the rotator-beat of the police helicopter, fuelled by military technophilia and in a context of the biopolitical desertion of the megacities' most vulnerable.
Abstract: By excavating the ambiguities of the helicopter’s machinic-prosthetic view, a perspective which may be distant and abstract, while also near and viscerally present, this article will explore how megacity security is increasingly waged and consumed. The article argues that megacity security marches to the rotator-beat of the police helicopter, fuelled by military technophilia and in a context of the biopolitical desertion of the megacities’ most vulnerable. The article takes three aspects, visually expressed and constituted through aerial-helicopter security. Drawing from several megacity examples including Mumbai, Lagos, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the first resolves megacity confusion with legibility. In the following section the article examines the mobilization of the security gaze, and the final section explores how helicopter visuality may hold or territorialize megacity space.
TL;DR: Gaia theory is considered as a useful heuristic to register the ubiquity of bacteria to environmental activity and regulation, and it is argued that bacterial liveliness suggests a profound indifference to human life.
Abstract: Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we typically fail to acknowledge, yet which haunt allconsiderations of environmental change. This article considers Gaia theoryas a useful heuristic to register the ubiquity of bacteria to environmentalactivity and regulation. Bacteria are Gaia theory’s fundamental actants, andthrough symbiosis and symbiogenesis, connect life and matter in biophysi-cal and biosocial entanglements. Emphasizing symbiosis might invoke theexpectation of a re-inscription of the human insofar as the ubiquitous inter-connectivity of life ultimately connects everything to the human. I want toargue toward the opposite conclusion: that bacterial liveliness suggests aprofound indifference to human life. As such, symbiosis does not effacedifference, nor its vigorous refusal to be absorbed within human formula-tions of world-remaking, including environmental change. Bacterial in -difference’s radical asymmetry suggests the need for non-human centredtheories of globality.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore a way of engaging with catastrophic climatic change that stresses the inherent volatility and unpredictability of earth process, and the no-less-inherent vulnerability of the human body.
Abstract: The abrupt climate change thesis suggests that climate passes through threshold transitions, after which change is sudden, runaway and unstoppable. This concurs with recent themes in complexity studies. Data from ice cores indicates that major shifts in global climate regimes have occurred in as little as a decade, and that for most of the span of human existence the climate has oscillated much more violently than it has over the last 10,000 years. This evidence presents enormous challenges for international climate change negotiation and regulation, which has thus far focused on gradual change. It is argued that existing social theoretic engagements with physical agency are insufficiently geared towards dissonant or disastrous physical events. Wagering on the past and future importance of abrupt climate change, the article explores a way of engaging with catastrophic climatic change that stresses the inherent volatility and unpredictability of earth process, and the no-less-inherent vulnerability of the human body. Drawing on Bataille and Derrida, it proposes a way of nestling the issue of environmental justice within a broader sense of immeasurable indebtedness to those humans who endured previous episodes of abrupt climate change, and considers the idea of experimentation and generosity without reserve.
TL;DR: The authors show that Fanon's attempt to transcend European universality through the struggle for a new universality as an exemplary schema that informs their politics of alter-modernity is far more anti- than alter-European, albeit in an ambivalent way.
Abstract: This article is concerned with some of the ramifications of the affective dimension of Fanon's writing. In their latest book, Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri take Fanon's attempt to transcend European universality through the struggle for a 'new universality' as an exemplary schema that informs their politics of alter-modernity. In the article, I show that the affective dimension of Fanon's search for a new universality is far more anti- than alter-European, albeit in an ambivalent way. I analyse how this difference between an affective 'anti' and an intellectual 'alter' arises in Fanon's analysis and experience of racism. I refer to this particular experience as mis-interpellation and analyse the equally particular affect it generates. More generally, I show that if one is to make use of Fanon's work today one cannot separate the intellectual and the affective that are so intertwined in his analytical work as Hardt and Negri do. To do so is to abstract from the serious political ramifications that the presence of this affective dimension entails.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that cities are the frontier spaces for much of what is usually referred to as global governance challenges, and they use the case of asymmetric war to explore the contradictions that arise from this urbanizing.
Abstract: The essay is framed by the proposition that cities are the frontier spaces for much of what is usually referred to as global governance challenges. It uses the case of asymmetric war to explore the contradictions that arise from this urbanizing — most significantly, the limits of superior military power when war moves to cities and the ways in which this makes powerlessness complex rather than elementary. The core of the paper focuses on Mumbai and Gaza as two sites that help us understand the enormous variability of war once it gets urbanized, and thus the multiplicity of types of asymmetric war. The essay concludes with a discussion about larger patterns we can see through the cases examined here, such as the repositioning of territory, authority and rights.
TL;DR: New formats of analysis are offered for these calculative practices and the agential and ontological status of the hybrid urban entities that they register and engender as the ascendance of 'Spatial Data Infrastructures’ (SDIs) is witnessed.
Abstract: In a modern, calculative world, the techniques of tracking are everywhere in the ascendant. Enhanced by algorithmic procedures and analytics, they have been incorporated into distributed network systems, augmented by new sensing and locationing technologies, and embedded into mobile devices, urban structures and environments. Simultaneously, new practices of tracking and sensing have emerged across the consumer, state and corporate sectors. These practices are amplified in the case of megacities as they strive to keep pace with rapid urban development. All movement is subordinated to a condition of 'calculative mobilization’, whereby the urban realm is understood through the spatialization of algorithmic operations. And yet, due to their unique large- and multi-scaled accumulations of data-enhanced actors and their complex, stratified modes of proximity and interoperable relationality, the particular densities of megacities challenge conventional spatial formats of movement and positioning. This article o...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss how patent law works to create discrete, immutable biological objects, which serve the interests of capital, where a stable, unchanging, immutable object goes hand in hand with commodification.
Abstract: This article details how patent law works to create discrete, immutable biological ‘objects’. This socio-legal maneuver is necessary to distinguish these artifacts from the unwieldy (and thus unpatentable) realm of the natural world. The creation of ‘objects’ also serves the interests of capital, where a stable, unchanging, immutable object goes hand in hand with commodification. Yet this stabilization is incomplete. Pointing to a variety of different examples, this article illustrates how biotech patents do not speak to specific, immutable things. Biotech patents, rather, are better understood as ontologically fluid (though, as discussed, this fluidity can only occur within limits), which is to say their identity cannot be ‘fixed’ — or, at least, not without undermining the very existence of today’s biotechnology regime. The article concludes by speaking briefly about how this mutability is perpetuating certain inequalities, particularly between holders of various property forms.
TL;DR: This paper explored the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors, and attempted to contextualize Bauman's insights in what has been called by the historian Yuri Slezkine the "Mercurian" culture of diasporic Jewish life.
Abstract: After having promoted and then tacitly abandoned the rhetoric of postmodernism, Zygmunt Bauman settled on the metaphor of a modernity that was growing more ‘liquid’ and ‘lighter’ than before. This essay explores the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors, and attempts to contextualize Bauman’s insights in what has been called by the historian Yuri Slezkine the ‘Mercurian’ culture of diasporic Jewish life.
TL;DR: In this article, the distinction between anti-colonial longing and postcolonial becoming through a commentary on Antjie Krog's Begging to Be Black is explored, where the epistemology and ontology of post-colonization becoming is the central concern.
Abstract: This article explores the distinction between anti-colonial longing and postcolonial becoming through a commentary on Antjie Krog’s Begging to Be Black. The epistemology and ontology of postcolonial becoming is the central concern. Begging to Be Black is a mytho-poetic narrative in which a world is imagined where King Moshoeshoe, missionaries from the 19th century, Antjie Krog and her friends and colleagues, ANC cadres, the Deleuzian philosopher Paul Patton, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the ANC Youth League are placed in the same narrative space where they can intermingle. And this is done to respond to a crisis of the present — the difficulties South Africans face in grappling with the legacies of colonialism and Apartheid, and the fact that there is a process of un-homing and re-homing that Krog feels white South Africans in particular need to think about more deeply. The article compares Krog’s approach to decolonization with that of the leading South African philosopher of ubuntu, Mogobe Ramose. Both Krog and Ramose offer the epistemological and ontological resources for grappling with the relationship between past, present and future in a decolonizing setting. The article examines how postcolonial critique may take place through liminal figures. Liminality is characterized as central to postcolonial becoming.
TL;DR: For instance, the authors conducted a ten-year interview with Judith Butler and found her to have an impressive ability to speak extemporaneously, and with the broad canvas that this interview afforded her, she ranges, as I had hoped she would, over a wide terrain.
Abstract: IT HAD been ten years or more since the last formal interview I conducted with Judith Butler for TCS, but nonetheless, had she declined, I would not have pressed the point. One among the very many requests sent in her direction – for lectures, manuscripts, articles, comments, responses, endorsements and the like – mine was hopeful rather than insistent. Still, ten years is hardly pestering and, happily, Judith agreed to another demand on her time, asking only a few months more peace from me before we met, at her home in Berkeley, California, to sit for some several hours, drinking tea and taking stock. Living by words doesn’t necessarily make the writer comfortable with the spoken interview format; indeed, the academic interview is a peculiar endeavour, attempting to elicit both spontaneity and brevity that are not the common habits of its subject. Judith Butler, however, has an impressive ability to speak extemporaneously, and with the broad canvas that this interview afforded her, she ranges, as I had hoped she would, over a wide terrain. Making connections between the various philosophies she engages – Foucault, Fanon, Arendt, Laplanche are all mentioned here – as well as with the present political configurations to which she feels one should attend, Judith Butler eloquently conveys a sense of her restless need to think the present, to try to comprehend it through, but also as a question for, philosophy. This, more than any concern for the consistency of argument, characterizes Judith Butler’s work and her own reflections on it. Yet there are some consistencies, concerns that have remained throughout her career to date. The terms of the title we have chosen for the interview – vulnerability, agency, plurality – are offered in an attempt to capture a few of those
TL;DR: In this article, the role of photography in the global work of justice is explored by way of a case study focusing on the publication, in December 2001, of a set of photographs by the Mexican newsweekl...
Abstract: This article explores the role of photography in the global work of justice by way of a case study. It focuses on the publication, in December 2001, of a set of photographs by the Mexican newsweekl...