Ex-president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic Václav Havel died on Sunday; the North-Korean dictator Kim Jong-il’s death was announced on Monday. If you were the Russian President or Prime Minister, who would you express your condolences to first? To the democratically elected representatives of the Czech people who had lost a much loved champion of democracy who led them to freedom in a bloodless revolution, or to Kim Jong-un, the unelected heir to the throne of an unelected dictator who had tormented his people for decades and had been threatening the world with nuclear weapons? The Kremlin rushed to send its condolences to North Korea, but it has not demonstrated any expression of sympathy towards the Czech people for the second day running. That tells you everything you need to know about the values of the Russian government of today.
Archive for the ‘politics’ Category
Václav Havel or Kim Jong-il?
20 December 2011Material participation
1 December 2011Economy and Society special issue on “Materials and Devices of the Public,” edited by Noortje Marres & Javier Lezaun (h/t STS Oxford):
This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.
Power and anti-knowledge workshop
2 November 2011Workshop organised by the University of Essex Department of Sociology, Centre For Theoretical Studies and Essex Business School, 12-6pm on 10 November 2011 (Seminar Room, Ivor Crewe Lecture Hall).
‘Power and Anti-Knowledge: The Politics of Knowledge in Crisis’
From ‘Climategate’ to ‘Murdochgate,’ explosive political crises dominating media attention in recent years have shared a common denominator: they have centred on the politics of knowledge and nonknowledge. In each case, claims of expertise were predicated on the ability to deny knowing about the effects of contentious decisions. Ignorance – not knowledge – is often harnessed and exploited in order to cement authority, underlining the importance of ‘antiepistemology’ (Galison) in achieving political objectives. The usefulness of nonknowledge as a key resource during political crises – whether ‘natural’ crises such as the BP oil leak, or ‘manufactured’ disasters such as recent rogue trading and phone hacking scandals – has put knowledge itself in crisis. Popular and scholarly perceptions of epistemology are being challenged as a result of the increased recognition of the political usefulness of nonknowledge, ambiguity and uncertainty as tools of governance. This meeting brings together social theorists and philosophers to consider the politics of knowledge and its antitheses.
Speakers
- Andrew Barry, University of Oxford, ‘The political situation’
- Peter Fleming, Queen Mary University, ‘Exit Work: Withdrawing from the Ideology of Labour’
- Andrew Goffey, University of Middlesex, ‘Grey Media and Production of Stupidity’
- Michael Guggenheim, Goldsmiths College, ‘Leviathan and the Water Pump: How Britain Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Disaster Exercises’
- Linsey McGoey, University of Essex, ‘Knowledge alibis’
For further details or to reserve a place, please contact Sian Savage at ssavage@essex.ac.uk
Linking politics, economics and religion
2 November 2011The Occupy London movement is a fabulous case study for the actor-network theory notion of translating and aligning interests and enrolling new allies. The anti-capitalism protesters in front of St Paul’s Cathedral managed to enrol Jesus himself, at least in the way he is incorporated by the Church of England. Suddenly even the mighty City of London (the British Wall Street, as it were) had to back down.
“St Paul’s and Corporation of London halt legal action against Occupy camp” – The Guardian
Cathedral announces U-turn and initiative to ‘reconnect financial with the ethical’ – but corporation qualifies its move as a ‘pause’
“The alarm bells are ringing all over the world. St Paul’s has now heard that call,” said the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, who was called in to help the cathedral change course after its dean, the Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, resigned on Monday following heavy criticism of the decision to close St Paul’s for a week and cut off all contact with the protest camp.
In a statement that drew repeated cheers as protesters read it aloud at their daily assembly, Chartres said the doors of St Paul’s were now instead “most emphatically open to engage with matters concerning not only those encamped around the cathedral but millions of others in this country and around the globe”.
Palestine UNESCO vote
1 November 2011After hearing about the Palestine vote in UNESCO, I became very curious about how various countries voted. I thought the breakdown of the votes would be an interesting snapshot of the balance of power in the world today, possibly revealing some new fault lines and alliances that otherwise would be difficult to detect. The question of Palestine must be among the top international controversies of our day, combining historical, political, economic, religious, military and many other kinds of disagreements. Although I didn’t have time to conduct extensive research, I was surprised how difficult it was to actually find a detailed list of the voting results. What is that about? Surely there must be loads of people wondering how their countries had voted. Yet the international media only mentions a handful of countries, and I couldn’t find any details on the UNESCO or UN website.
Eventually I came across a link to this blog at an unlikely place, the comments section of a Slovakian newspaper, where also a lot of readers were looking for such a list. But even this list is a reconstruction via unofficial sources and guesswork, as far as I can tell (although I’m grateful to the author to have made the effort to assemble it). Let’s assume that the list is correct. First, it is interesting to see is how isolated the “no” voters are. Fourteen countries vastly outnumbered by the “yes” voters and the “abstentions” and “no shows.” And a lot of the “no” countries are very small ones, such as Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. There are only five EU member states among them (Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Sweden). At the same time there are eleven EU countries that have voted “yes”.
One can speculate about which countries fall into which other country’s sphere of influence or which countries would be likely to vote “no” because they have similar problems at home. However, these assumptions don’t seem to work in this case. E.g. I was surprised to see Serbia voting “yes,” considering that one would expect them to be wary of supporting the recognition of new countries in general, given their Kosovo problem. It’s also interesting to see the differences between neighbouring countries with historical ties (e.g. Czech Republic voting “no,” Slovakia abstaining; Austria voting “yes,” Hungary abstaining; the Netherlands voting “no,” Belgium voting “yes”). But I’m not an expert in this field, and according to Sean (who had constructed the list) “most of these are no surprise.”
Update (1-Nov-11)
I suppose what’s particularly disappointing from a European perspective is that the EU is not capable of forming a common position on this foreign policy issue. The European vote was split three ways, which really makes you wonder of the effectiveness of their co-ordinating mechanisms and the strength of the European voice in the world.
Slavoj Žižek interview
28 October 2011Slavoj Žižek on capitalism, communism and other such things, on 26 October 2011. Finally someone (Charlie Rose) who knows how to interview Žižek. Clue: just let the guy talk! (Hat tip Object-Oriented Philosophy.)
Latour on art and politics, in London
25 October 2011Bruno Latour – “Waiting for Gaia: Composing the common world through arts and politics”
5.00pm, Monday 21 November 2011 (free entrance)
French Institute in the UK
17 Queensberry Place
London SW7 2DT
There is no single institution able to cover, oversee, dominate, manage, handle, or simply trace ecological issues of large shape and scope. Many issues are too intractable and too enmeshed in contradictory interests. We have problems, but we don’t have the public that goes with it. How could we imagine agreements amid so many entangled interests? Bruno Latour will review several attempts to tackle ecological problems by connecting the tools of scientific representation with those of arts and politics and present the program of Experimentation in Arts and Politics running at Sciences Po since September 2010.
Conflict of interest
22 October 2011How can politicians be taken seriously as regulators of the economic system, if they have one eye on becoming employed by those they are supposed to regulate? Wouldn’t it make more sense to pay them a bit (or a lot) more but legally prevent them from going over to the other side once they “retire”?
Blair works on makeover for Kazakhstan – FT
Mr Blair, who runs a business called Tony Blair Associates, has a lucrative portfolio of advisory roles. Clients include JPMorgan Chase, the US bank, and Zurich Financial Services, the Swiss insurance group. He has advised the government of Kuwait, UI Energy Corporation, a South Korean oil firm, and Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi investment fund.
The Hungarian Parliament
12 October 2011Continuing on the Hungarian theme, keep an eye on the Installing (Social) Order blog, where Endre Dányi is promising to provide a preview of his doctoral (STS) research on the Hungarian Parliament. The excerpts from his first post below give you an idea about his project and his plans for the guest-blogging.
Sociologists and anthropologists of science know a lot about laboratories, innovation centres, museums, design studios, hospitals, and the politics of related material practices, but curiously there’s hardly any STS work that focuses on explicitly political institutions. Perhaps the most notable exception is the thousand page long Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy catalogue, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel.
(…)
I can’t say I immediately had a clear idea about what an STS-informed research of a parliament would look like, but I knew where it could take place. As someone who grew up in Hungary, I remembered that the parliament building in the centre of Budapest was once the largest (and arguably the most impressive) of its kind – quite bizarre for a country that is not only small, but in most political scientists’ view also counts as a ‘new democracy’. Either they are right, I thought, and then props really don’t matter in politics, or the idea that liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe fell from the sky in 1989 – like in Peter Sloterdijk’s thought experiment – needs to be rethought.
My plan in this space within the Installing (Social) Order blog is not to provide a summary of the dissertation, but to offer some sort of a problem map. First I will focus on architecture, and discuss what we can learn about liberal democracy if we concentrate on the construction of the Hungarian parliament building in the end of the 19th century. Then I will briefly recount what happened to this building (and the political reality it was supposed to hold together) in the 20th century in order to highlight some tensions related to the definition of a political community. I’ll then concentrate on the parliament’s role in the current political regime – the Republic of Hungary – and examine some of the most important aspects of the legislative process. After this, I’ll (re-)introduce my MP friend and summarise what I’ve learned from him about political representation, which sometimes takes place in the parliament building, but some other times in TV studios, party congresses, street demonstrations, and various other places. All of my stories will be full of political objects, but the picture wouldn’t be complete if I remained silent about political subjects.
“I am a Hegelian looking for facts to fit the theory”
16 July 2011“A lot of what I write is blah, blah, bullshit, a diversion from the 700-page book on Hegel I should be writing.” Slavoj Žižek interviewed in The Guardian.
