“It is no small statement to affirm that the richness of this controversy makes ostensible not the insurmountable divergence of the continental and analytic traditions, but rather the wealth and diversity of the discussions of intentionality in the twentieth century”.
Raoul Moati, 2014, Derrida/Searle: Deconstruction and Ordinary Language, Columbia University Press.
I have previously mentioned attending a recent conference on publics and problems at Westminster, where I talked to a forthcoming paper titled Theorising emergent public spheres – well, it is now published, which is nice. The paper works through some ideas about how to think about the values of publicness, in relation to various issues arising from South African politics and public culture. I try to use the South African examples as occasions to think about how the values associated with publicness always arise in contexts of ‘extension’, and therefore of transformation and translation, and not just of ‘application’ (the paper doesn’t actually put in like that though).
This paper sits alongside another one, more explicitly framed around how best to think about the value of public space, which together seek to spell out an analytical framework of sorts, or a set of questions at least, for investigating the formation of public life. These pieces are products of 5 years worth of workshopping around ‘public’ topics, including various ongoing invitations to listen or talk. I’m not sure if sitting around listening to what other people think about publicness, and specifically why they think it matters or not, counts as fieldwork but I have ended up thinking that this has been the ‘methodology’ I have been using to ‘theorise’ about these issues.
My paper is part of a theme issue of a South African journal, based at the University of Free State, called Acta Academica. The special issue on publics arises out of a workshop held in Bloemfontein back in 2012. It is also the first edition of the re-launched journal, which under the editorship of Lis Lange is now framed very clearly as a venue for “Critical views on society, culture and politics”:
“Acta Academica is an academic journal dedicated to scholarship in the humanities. The journal publishes scholarly articles that examine society, culture and politics past and present from a critical social theory perspective. The journal is also interested in scholarly work that examines how the humanities in the 21st Century are responding to the double imperative of theorising the world and changing it.”
The journal is available via the Sabinet platform, and it does also have an Academia.edu page (here). I have copies of the papers in this special issue should you be interested.
“If we look more carefully at injustice, we will not find it any easier to answer the question: Is this a misfortune or an injustice? on any given occasion, but we may be less passively unjust than if we simply match complaints against the rules and come to a quick conclusion. To investigate the victim’s claims in the ways that I have suggested is only a tentative test to guide us, but it is both in keeping with the best impulses of democracy and our only alternative to a complacency that is bound to favor the unjust”.
Judith Shklar, 1990, The Faces of Injustice, Yale University Press.
“If sincerity has lost its former status, if the word itself has for us a hollow sound and seems almost to negate its meaning, that is because it does not propose being true to one’s own self as an end but only a means. If one is true to oneself for the purpose of avoiding falsehood to others, is one being truly true to one’s own self? The moral end in view implies a public end in view, with all that this suggests of the esteem and fair repute that follows upon the correct fulfilment of a public role”.
Lionel Trilling, 1972, Sincerity and Authenticity, Oxford University Press.
“The seriousness of philosophy does not consist in giving men laws and telling them what the ideal city is in which they must live, but in constantly reminding them (those at least who wish to listen, since philosophy’s reality comes only from it being listened to), that the reality of philosophy is to be found in its practices, which are the practices of self on self and, at the same time, those practices of knowledge by which all the modes of knowledge, through which one rises and descends and which one rubs against each other, finally bring one face to face with the reality of Being itself.”
Michel Foucault, 2010, The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983, Picador.
“Kant, of course, warns against treating people as a means without also treating them as an end, which is not the same as excluding using people altogether. But using people has nevertheless acquired an entirely negative connotation (“I feel so used!”).
Barbara Johnson, 2012, Persons and Things, Harvard University Press.
“It should be quite clear, then, that there are no criteria to be laid down in general for distinguishing the real from the not real. How this is to be done must depend on what it is with respect to which the problem arises in particular cases.”
J.L. Austin, 1962, Sense and Sensibilia, Oxford University Press.
“What you’re responsive to, ultimately, are universal edicts that govern obligations toward those with whom you have some particular relation.”
Kwame Anthony Appiah, 2005, The Ethics of Identity, Princeton University Press.
“It turns out that we live in a world in which it is indeed quite easy to recognize the contingency of the self. But it is quite another thing, and a very difficult one at that, to engage in the loving labor of reworking the contingencies that we have become.”
Colin Koopman, 2013, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity, Indiana University Press.
“Settling facilitates striving by helping us to stop vacillating – to prevent us from striving in too many directions at once”.
Robert Goodin, 2012, On Settling, Princeton University Press.
Pop Theory 