Living in a Critical Position part two

JWTC interview with David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI)continues…

The UCHRI, of which you are the Director, has initiated various modalities of collaboration with nodes of critical thought in various parts of the global South (Johannesburg, Beyrouth, Shanghai, Mexico). What is the purpose of these collaborative endeavours and to what extent do they differ from the old North-South models?

The question brings together threads from my responses to the initial two questions.  It has long been the case, as Ann Stoler has repeatedly reminded us in her own work, that metropolitan modernity--and what we now identify as the global north--has been constitutively produced and constituted in significant part through relational interaction with the colonies, and now the global south. We must complicate this view by insisting that the global norths and souths (each is plural) now more than ever find themselves in and through each other, stamping deep, visible and not so visible, constitutive elements and conditions on the making and remaking of each other. We cannot think and know ourselves without thinking with and understanding the other, the global north in the global south and the global south in the north. And engaged in this way, questions and responses to these overlapping and interactive conditions of our time are posed differently, provide insights, open up possibilities for thinking our world critically that would not be available, which would remain obscure, but for these ways of thinking productively, critically together. It is these conjoint, intersecting modes of "living in a critical condition" which I think demands this open and honest engagement together.

This is different than even a decade ago when those from global north might be invited to China and other sites to discuss the question of modernity, of modernization; to bring the truth of the north to the south, when knowledge production would emulate political and economic power and be overwhelmingly unidirectional, arrogant, and ultimately close down as much as it opened up. It produced all sorts of embarrassing expressions.  Clearly the world has in many ways been turned upside down. Thinking our overlapping and intersecting conditions together, with, in and through all their unevenness, has become imperative. It entails a very different set of dispositions, a modesty, an openness, different modes of critical engagement, working out together what the themes will be, what questions are productive, how to proceed critically, what modes of inquiry and indeed experience and sensitivities are most productively revealing.

The title of the Platform you and Meg Samuelson have crafted for the 2012 Session of the JWTC is Oceans|Islands|Littorals|Beaches. Why do you think a critical analysis of these formations might tell us something about the futures of nature in general?

Meg, to her credit, has taken the lead on this. There is a small but growing body of work on oceans, a longer if still small tradition focused on islands, and very little critical work on littorals and beaches (I think of Mick Taussig's wonderful fictional essay on the beach). Ocean and sea water make up something like 70 percent of the earth's surface.  Islands and their "clean" beaches have long been these outposts of supposed civilization, exotic sites for modernity's self-making or recreational excess. Today islands have assumed a doubled importance. For one, they have become the sort of "canary in the coal mine" of the effects of global warming. We see this most obviously in the case of the Maldives, threatened literally (and perhaps littorally) with drowning. Islands and beach coastlines are most vulnerable to these impacts. Oceans and seas represent both effects of our lack of stewardship of nature and the agentive intervention in response, interactive effect and cause. Attending to these formations will reveal the critical conditions in which we find ourselves: the brittleness of the food chain; the dramatically changing weather patterns and devastating "natural" events (which now are deeply "naturalcultural," as Donna Haraway has put it); the threat not just to ways of life but to life itself on very large scales; the wastefulness of those who have overwhelmingly at the expense of those who don't; the impacts on futures and natures of work, ways of being in the world and on the world itself; the signal of the range of vulnerabilities we face and the deep relation of these vulnerabilities to each other across spaces, places, and scales. It is so often the case that the least attended condition turns out to be the most deeply revealing, and I think a focus on the earth's water surface, which we have taken for granted for so long, bears this out. 

In your view, can current debates on the futures of nature help to refigure our understandings of the futures of race?

This is a terrifically provocative way of posing the question.  Across the long duree of modernity until at least the mid-twentieth century, race was taken up variously as either natural or naturalizing condition, as a condition of nature itself. Critical work on race in the last quarter of the twentieth century came to see race not just as social product but as helping to reveal how nature and naturalizing processes were deeply culturally inflected and constituted. So in one sense it could be said that Haraway's provocative formulation of "naturculture" comes out of these insights about race, sex, and gender, about their co-constituting natural-cultural condition. Nature is constitutively culturalized and culture likewise naturalized. At the same time, to some degree the deeply cultural focus on racial makings and workings lost sight of its naturalizing condition. Race and nature, as conceptions, are thus deeply tied up with each other, the one revealing of features of the other.  Thinking about the futures of nature--not just its cultural constructedness but what forms nature will assume, what worlds it gives rise to, what potentialities it opens up and what it closes down, how all of this is connected to political economy as both cause and effect, and so on--all of this cannot but help have an impact, is already having an impact, on how we think or ought to be thinking about the racial, about race-making and its possibilities and what it closes down, about the significance and limits of postraciality and the work the notion of "the postracial" performs as racial condition, and how all of this is related, as cause and effect, to political economy as well as to the postcolonial and the postcolony.

There is no doubt we live in interesting times, as the Chinese proverb exhorts. What the proverbs silently hints at is that the most interesting of times are likely also the most unsettled and unsettling, and so too also the most troubling and challenging. The challenge of critical theory today, as it has generally been in times past, is to rise to the occasion of comprehending and so possibly helping to work out what it means to intervene productively in the troubling times we face today.

Living in a Critical Position - part one

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.

Past and future of South African social theory

An interview with Belinda Bozzoli, Special Advisor to the Vice Chancellor and Acting Director of WISER.

A major feature of the South African intellectual landscape in the 1980s was The History Workshop, of which you were one of the key drivers. Can you tell us how The History Workshop came to be and what was your personal implication in its founding?

The History Workshop actually started in 1977 and I coordinated it for its first ten years or so together with a wonderfully enthusiastic group of colleagues, most of whom went on to other things, but some of whom have remained involved. It was a movement of its time, linked strongly to the powerfully emerging labour movement and inspired by the British History Workshop Movement, which also emerged from links between academics and labour. We later found a considerable degree of compatibility with the American Social History project, also a labour-connected academic grouping based in New York, and with academic left thinking of the time, which emphasised the need for academic work to find a connection that was more than just symbolic, with the concerns and plight of the very poor, marginalised and disadvantaged, and which abjured the emerging ANC-based nationalism and populism of the time.

All of us in the History Workshop had other interests – it was not really a full-time preoccupation – and so each member had his or her own trajectory of thought subsequently.

History as a discipline then occupied a central place in debates about the future of South Africa. How do you explain this hegemonic position and what were the causes of its subsequent decline in the post-Apartheid era?

These are somewhat loaded questions, I think. In fact historians were not the only people involved in left-wing academic work of the time. A range of disciplines including sociology, politics, anthropology, education, political economy, economics and the like, all contributed. Marxism was a huge inspiration and its very epistemology compelled us not to bow to the disciplinary boundaries common in academe. Of course Marxism requires historical thinking for it to make sense – the world is seen to be in constant flux, and the past is the harbinger of the present and future.  But that is not the same as talking about “history as a discipline”. 

The “decline” of history as a discipline is an odd way of expressing how the contemporary academic world works. It seems to imply that a) we all have and are attached to our disciplines; and b) that some disciplines are more prominent than others at any one time. And yet surely the reality is that different epistemologies, rather than different disciplines, rise and fall. Often this is not just a matter of whim or fashion (though it sometimes feels like that) but of the nature of the social forces that drive society. Thus Post-colonialism is itself a deeply historical approach, but one which is compelled by the nature of the world today, and by its own logic, to examine, for example, the surfaces presented by cultural forces, rather than the subterranean economic drivers which preoccupied Marxists.  

It has often been said that The History Workshop project was anti-theoretical. Is it true that theory as understood by members of the collective started and ended with Gramsci and E.P. Thompson?

The History Workshop was not coterminous with left wing academic thought of the time. There were multiple strands of thinking, and the degree to which academic work was explicitly conceptually inspired varied. I would say Marxism was the most profound and deeply conceptualised influence on the entire movement; and that various schools of Marxist thought then generated different types of analytical responses. Gramsci indeed inspired one of them; the Marxism of the Fourth International another; the “cultural Marxists”, of whom Thompson was one of many, another; and of course structural Marxism a fourth.  All very typical of left movements, fragmenting into a million different strands.

How was ‘race’ being mobilized politically and intellectually at the time? And to what extent did the link with the emerging labour movement help the History Workshop to attend, in its work, to historical processes of racialization?

“Race” was considered with a certain amount of intellectual scepticism in politics, in the labour movement and in left academic circles. It was thought to be a dead concept, a knee-jerk mirroring of the versions of history promulgated by our race-obsessed rulers at the time. Its implicit and, in the views of some, inevitable, connections to the probable future mobilisation of right wing forms of African nationalism were regarded with a certain amount of trepidation. (Some might say these fears have been vindicated.)

To what extent is the apparent conflict between ‘theory’ and ‘empiricism’ a false conflict?

We need to make the distinction between the “empirical” and “empiricism”. No self-respecting researcher would wish to claim “empiricism” as a virtue, for it  degrades the academic enterprise by its naïve, positivistic belief that “the facts will speak for themselves”, and that the accumulation of empirical evidence will in the end, in and of itself,  lead to the development of greater truths and understanding. However being “empirical” is a vastly different thing, more closely aligned to a realist epistemology than a positivist one, a philosophy in which the interplay between the conceptual and the empirical is a dialectical one.

Why didn’t The History Workshop achieve the same international impact as the Subaltern Studies project in India?

I hope JWTC doesn’t design survey questionnaires (very unlikely anyway), because this is another loaded question.

I think subaltern studies became well known in the US because its main advocates emigrated to US universities and because there they were able to find some compatibility there with the powerfully prevalent post-structuralist and post-modern thinking. This compatibility was difficult to find in the case of the Marxism still implicitly present in South Africa – indeed there has been something of an unfortunate stand-off between the two world views. 

In your view, does theory has a future in contemporary South Africa?

Well, does contemporary South Africa itself have a future? We are now confronted so compellingly by the failures of post-apartheid South Africa that this will, I believe, have a fundamental effect on academic theory and will challenge all of us to revisit our conceptual assumptions. I predict an upheaval in South African social theory in the near future.

Theorizing from Johannesburg

AN INTERVIEW WITH DEAN OF THE HUMANITIES PROFESSOR TAWANA KUPE

The story is that you and the Vice Chancellor, Professor Loyiso Nongxa, provided the seed money that helped to set up the JWTC in 2009. What did you see in that project that warranted your support?

In the JWTC, we saw an opportunity for Wits to showcase, coordinate and launch new intellectual dialogues and forms of knowledge production from its position as a significant intellectual force in the Global South. We also knew that Professor Achille Mbembe in particular was a key intellectual and critical thinker. His commitment to the initiative would enable new thinking and theoretical reflection and experimentation. We wanted Wits to consolidate its position at the forefront of those institutions in the South which endeavour to turn conventional thinking on its head and shed new light on contemporary issues.

What started as a modest intervention has since then become one of the main destinations in the global nodes of critical theory. In your view, what are the reasons why the JWTC has been so successful?

A number of things. An intellectually enabling, vibrant, even vibrating context that Wits, the Faculty of Humanities and WISER provide. The presence of Achille Mbembe and his colleagues Kelly Gillespie, Julia Hornberger, Prishani Naidoo and others in the intellectual collective that hatched the intellectual bomb we call the JWTC in this space. The energy that a city like Johannesburg, with its complex mix of potential and possibilities, does allow. Ours is indeed a city that is both a part of its locality and also ‘removed’ from it.  The enthusiastic response by local and international scholars and students to this initiative is a testimony to its success. What the JWTC offers is a platform they are invited to inhabit. To attend the JWTC Workshops is to immerse oneself in a theoretical journey without a pre-fixed destination.  

Wits University has long been the premier institution in social sciences and the humanities in Africa. This position is now forcefully challenged by other universities in SA. Any idea about how to keep the edge?

Without sounding dismissive or immodest, I have very serious doubts that there is any forceful challenge at this point in time. But it is true that once you are successful at something, you might inspire others to better you at your own game and that you have a responsibility to keep the edge and even to better yourself. So in pursuant of keeping ahead of the pack, WIts uses its not inconsiderable intellectual ‘capital’ to build on its current success. We are also trying to place the JWTC on a firmer administrative ground with a resource base. We will also draw in more of our colleagues within Wits, across Africa and the global South. This is how we can enrich the debate. We will also be bolder in drawing on the energy of Johannesburg to fuel new ways of critical thinking.

What does the fact of being in a massive city-region such as Johannesburg do for the work of theory?

It challenges it. It energises. It turns theory on its head. It disorients and even disturbs. It provokes creative ways of rethinking and thinking concepts and paradigms. 

What do you want to be your main legacy as a Dean of the Humanities?

A Dean who could recognise and embrace innovative ways of ‘performing’ the humanities in the 21^st Century.