JWTC interviews David Theo Goldberg, Director
of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI)
Ten years ago, you initiated a new project called SECT. What
were the reasons behind this new initiative, what is its current state and
where is it going?
SECT (the summer Seminar
in Experimental Critical Theory) was born of a double imperative: one
intellectual and the other fiscal. Critical Theory early in the 21st century
already appeared to be facing challenges. The trajectory that ran from the
Frankfurt School through Foucault, Derrida, and others seemed to be winding
down. It had also attended to questions of the colonial, postcolonial, and
racial at best as secondary and clichéd concerns, oftentimes if at all. So I
was looking for a way, a forum, to animate intellectual engagement around these
sets of issues that for me have been socially constitutive, and so imperative.
Forums like the School of Criticism and Theory seemed still caught up in
this older esteemed paradigm. On the West Coast we were seeking to open a
space of engagement around these issues (it is interesting to note that the
School of Criticism and Theory actually started on the Irvine campus by the
same folks who had initiated UCHRI before moving to Cornell). At the same time,
the University of California was facing recessionary budget cuts (which turned
out to be the first and perhaps least severe of a series of such cuts over the
decade) which threatened to cut into UCHRI's operating university budget. So I
was looking for a forum that at the very least would fund itself. I began a
conversation with Ken Reinhard at UCLA and out of that grew the first SECT,
which focused on psychoanalysis and politics with the likes of Badiou, Zizek,
Joan Copjek and Zizek's Slovenian colleagues, Alenka Stepancek and Mladen
Dolar, among others. It gave me the organizational model even as it perpetuated
something of the older model's avoidance of the issues I was concerned to bring
into critical play. The second SECT accordingly turned to biopolitics, race,
and empire. And the model worked quite marvelously.
Four years ago we took
two additional and somewhat related turns. We had run two-week summer seminars
over five years at the Institute in Irvine. In a sense it was becoming too
easy, too rote, less challenging, a bit safe and stale. The
"experimental" in "experimental critical theory" was
tending to the predictable. Globalization, after all, is not just a
uni-directional set of movements, of sitting at home and watching the world
come to one. I was concerned to ask how the critical questions we pose as well
as the responses to them might shift provocatively and revealingly if we
pursued a SECT elsewhere in the world. I had been to Shanghai for a conference
at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and thought that would be a really
dynamic site. My close friend and colleague, Ackbar Abbas, and his partner, Liu
Sola, the wonderful avant garde composer, singer, and writer, put us in
conversation with the Beijing avant garde, artists like Ai Wei Wei, Liu Dan and
Xu Bing as well as filmmaker Ning Ying and so on, and over two years we put
together what became a really provocative summer institute in Shanghai focusing
on questions of "design." This then opened up a way of partnering
with different institutional sites globally, leading to collaborative engagements
in Beirut this summer, as well as future possibilities in Mexico City,
Bangalore, India, possibly South Africa. The larger theoretical frame pulling
these sites together is what I have designated "living in a critical
condition," how the conventional relations between global south and global
north are upended when one thinks along these lines, how this way of posing
things leads to genuinely new engagements and insights. The work we are doing
around "epistemologies of deception" has emerged directly out of these
collaborative interactions.
The upcoming engagement
with Bangalore--and here Nishant Shah, co-founding director of Bangalore's
Center for Internet and Society, has been instrumental--speaks to the other
direction in which things have moved. At UCHRI we have been deeply engaged with
questions of the digital, and how digital connectivities in all their complex
dimensions transform not just relationality but knowledge making, learning, and
social practices more broadly. We have a thread running through SECT engaging
these questions, from the third SECT in Irvine to our summer institute focusing
on the contributions of the Pacific Rim to these transformations we conducted
in Hawai'i last year, to the forthcoming engagements in India. Here the
interest is exactly at the interface of the technological and epistemological,
the cultural and the critical, power and the political.
How would you characterize the current moment in the field of
'critical theory' in the North?
As I hinted at above, the
prevailing trajectory of critical theory in the North through the latter half
of the twentieth century, as crucially important as that has been, seems to
have run its course. Perhaps that is to be expected, as conditions have so
dramatically shifted since at least the end of the 1980s both politically and
technologically. It is perhaps revealing that the prevailing questions to which
critical theory in this trajectory have turned in the past decade have
concerned the Event, the universal, and affect. There have been some curious
developments of late in response to this sense of exhaustion. One has been a
return among traditionalists in the humanities to formalism. The journal
Representations coming out of Berkeley was quite prescient a year or so back in
identifying this turn in a special issue. This turn to formalism, a re-turn,
has been prompted both by the perceived exhaustion of those pursuits identified
with poststructuralism (most notably but not only deconstruction) as well as by
the less noticed impact on intellectual dispositions of the rapid and
dramatic turn to the digital. The other has been the very recent attention--in
many cases by those who until now have paid no attention other than
dismissively--to issues of race. This latter turn (also a re-turn) is a little
odd: just as conventional socialities and politics declare the moment of
postraciality, some of our colleagues suddenly discover the racial, and do so
with just about no engagement with the voluminous work that has been done on
these issues over the past two plus decades.
In general, then, I would
say we are in a moment of constitutive unsettlement in critical theory, where
the old has exhausted itself but the new, the futures of these pasts, have not
yet been born, are in the process of a difficult birth. Perhaps we should
expect just this. Troubled times produce troubled, and often troubling
responses. Some desperately hold on to what they know, what has made them
comfortable; others grope for anchors, grabbing onto flotsam they barely
comprehend; and some again experience the unsettlement, the shifting ground
beneath our feet, as openings, possibilities to rethink not just what is
happening around us but the very terms of self-understanding, and do so finding
help from bits and pieces of the critical archive without feeling the need for
uncritical deference to the entire project other pieces of which no longer fit
our current condition. This latter mode is what some of us--notably my
colleagues Ackbar Abbas and Kavita Philip--as a theory about theory, have been
calling "poor theory".
Four developments in the
wake of all of this are revealing. The recent slew of work--in too many
instances just fashionable repetition--around precarity/precariousness has in
its most compelling formulations importantly sought to reach beyond the
impasses of conventional theoretical developments. I think most notably of
Judith Butler's work here. The second has been the considerable output on
issues in political theology, which has slowed down of late. Here there were
two or three directions, revealing of the impasses of critical theory
currently. First, there was much the most voluminous of work around issues of
secualrism. As important as this was, it quickly became repetitive. The second
concerned issues of sovereignty which shifted how we thought about political
theory more generally. That too seems to have run its course, though left
critical theory in a different if still troubled state. And the third concerned
a deep rethinking of the history of philosophical thinking, something which is
ongoing and likely to have a much more lasting impact on critical theory. I
think here, among others, of not just Butler's work but of the ongoing
contributions of Achille Mbembe, Ackbar Abbas, Saba Mahmood, and so on.
The third set of critical
foci has concerned a theorizing of neoliberalism in all its varieties and
impacts. Foucault's lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics was formative here,
and more recently Wendy Brown's seminal contributions have been crucial. In all
three cases, the impact of the postcolonial has been more or less visibly
important. It has been only partly so in the case of the fourth focus, which
has been the important emergence of science and technology studies, a fast
developing formation obviously prompted by the enormous shift in dominant
knowledge production to the overriding concerns of science and technology. Here
Bruno Latour's work has been formative but there have been really interesting
recent developments around postcolonial science studies which will have long
lasting shape-shifting impacts on knowledge formation and ultimately on
critical theorizing.
On final thought here.
The way in which interests have shifted so quickly, prevailing objects of
critical knowledge have emerged and dissipated with alarming speed, seems to
mirror modes of political economy, patterns of consumptive fashion. This too
should trouble critical theory.
