Semi-live blogging from the Faculty research conference.
Yet more 1000-mile questions.
In general, academics need to learn that not keeping to time is unprofessional and disrespectful of colleagues and audience.
Roger Griffin on Nomic modernity. Cites Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, as well as old and new academic writers in a compelling whirl of suggestions about the paradoxes of modernity. He suggests that human beings have an excess of consciouness (called reflexivity) which makes us aware of our impending death. Nomos creates a “totalising magic reality”, a world view and serves as a psychic duvet. Given the human condition, the absence of depression is a mystery. Should we have a belief system that celebrates rather than emiserates?. Becker, Berger, Eliade, Jung, Nietzche are his touchstones. Modernity, Griffin argues, is a nexus of forces that undermines nomos. One loses a sense of space: all that is solid melts into air (Marx); modernity is nomocidal (Weber, Bauman) achieving permanent liminality without closure: liquefaction. This leads to a permanent crisis of identity: “liminoidality” changes the quality of time: empty homogeneous time (W Benjamin). Unstable syntheses of different moral codes (hedonism/family/religions). Modernity incubates addictive behaviours (what is the evidence, asks Juliet Henderson?). Addiction deals with time: temporal anesthesia. Beleaguered cultures protect themselves through violence. How does modernity stand outside the nomos? (Martin Groves). Barrie Axford asks, “What is the theory”.
Chris Lloyd, Department of Law (see Critical Legal Thinking), reads a paper “old school): Retort to Norrie: Derrida, Law and the socio political. Distinguishes between politics (la politique) and “the political” (le politie). Asserts that Derrida’s legal theory neglects the material structures that gives rise to a melencholy. Deconstruction simply happens. Criticises Norrie’s critique of Derrida. See Dick and Kofman “Derrida”). The “trace”: the space between the sign and the symbol, gives you everything: the present being of all things, the origin of sense in general. What gives us entities also undoes them. The nature of being is called into question, So someone finally asks what is the pragmatic implication? This has to be a thpousand-mile question.
Gary Browning now moves to Rousseau and Derrida. Rousseau is a critic of modernity. Crisis, conflict and meaning. Modernity is a crisis. Rousseau sets up many dualisims. Most salient to this talk is Nature :: Society. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. Series of paradoxes: we should be forced to be free. For Derrida there can be no absolute “truth” “out there”. There is a paradox of modern politics. You cannot critique or change from within. Are there multiple modernities? Gary Browning claims a particular reading of modernity in reading Rousseau’s understanding of modernity. Modernity is the sum of ways of thinking about modernity. Derrida takes a hermeneutic reading and then deconstructs this.
But are we not left with a totalising assertion of anti-totalisation which can only produce anomie?
Doerthe Rosenow on the Politics of “crisis speak”: towards a new understanding of radicalism in environmental activism. Emerges from anti GMO activism. Is it all about the politics of catastrophe? Does this position not lead to passivity. Is there a Foucauldian consensus in critiquing the politics of catastrophe. We cannot talk about knowledge outside power. (As an aside I ask, Is a non-interventionist small state necessarily a right-wing position?). She asks us to move to a new understanding of radicalism that avoids either millennialism or co-operation with dominant power. So I ask again, “No? is it not about resistance to co-option and colonialism. Everything is corruptable…? (see Mark Duffield and William Connolly).
Jason Danely, “When crisis is the norm: imagining Japanese eldercare”. We are in an age of mass care-giving to the elderly. What about robotic care givers? Lack of community and identity leading to increased prison population of elderly offenders – not aging lifers.
Carina Bartleet, Drama. “Mythologising violence: a crisis of feminist representation onstage in 21st century”. Based in the work of Sarah Daniels … (writer and script editor on Grange Hill). Talk focuses on Morning Glory (2001) and Dust (2002). In your face theatre from late ’90s early ’00s. Daniels is not an in-your-face writer but shares much with those who are. Morning Glory subverts stereotypes. Draws on myth of Osiris and Isis.
Alex Finnen, Russia’s use of ambiguous and unrestricted warfare. Unambiguous concern with “real” power. This paper challenges – implicitly – Rosenow’s paper and to some extent provides support for Griffin’s and in a different way, Bartleet’s position. Theorising perspectives that invoke power as an abstraction is one thing. Revealing the depth of real power is another.
Susannah Wright, Creating world citizens in British Schools 1919-1939. League of Nations Societies.
Rico Isaacs, Exit, voice, loyality and sanctions in Kazakhstan. interested in authoritarianism and the persistence of authoritarianism. What is the agency of ruling elites and their mechanisms for control; and what are the choices for opposition elites. Hirschman’s model of “exit, voice and loyality”. The choices around concepts of exit and voice act as feedback mechanisms for authoritarian regimes.
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