“Though a debunking doctrine may be a useful tool in scientific analysis, it cannot provide the basis for political action.”
Franz Neumann, 1944, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944, Oxford University Press.
Category Archives: Politics
Bite Size Theory: Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future
“If we are all democrats today, it is not a very cheerful fate to share. Today, in politics, democracy is the name for what we cannot have – yet cannot cease to want.”
John Dunn, 1979, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, Cambridge University Press.
Bite Size Theory: Define and Rule
“The indirect rule state was not a weak state. Unlike the preceding era of direct rule, its ambitions were vast: to shape the subjectivities of the colonized population and not simply of their elites.”
Mahmood Mamdami, 2013, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Wits University Press.
Bite Size Theory: The Democracy Project
“All societies are communistic at base, and capitalism is best viewed as a bad way of organizing communism.”
David Graeber, 2013, The Democracy Project, Penguin.
Bite Size Theory: Goldilocks’ Dilemma
“Can we find units of government that are “just right” – small enough to facilitate participation and yet large enough to exercise authority so significant as to make participation worthwhile?”
Robert Dahl, 1970, After the Revolution, Yale University Press.
Bite Size Theory: On Contradiction
“Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism, others are not”.
Mao Tse Tung, 1966, On Contradiction.
Bite Size Theory: The Society of Equals
“Symbolically, future generations have replaced the proletariat in the collective imaginary as the focal point of public concern”.
Pierre Rosanvallon, 2013, The Society of Equals, Harvard University Press.
Bite Size Theory: The Visual World of French Theory
“I argue both directly and implicitly that it was the confrontation with the explosion of the art world and its discourses – as well as events on the street and the barricades – that released a generation of philosophers from the ivory tower of the École Normale Supérieure and that their engagement with contemporary art played a crucial role in formulating the new postmodern mindset”.
Sarah Wilson, 2010, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations, Yale University Press.
Theorising emergent public spheres
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.
Bite Size Theory: Fear Itself
“Overall, the New Deal had to travel uncharted territory, often without maps in hand. To comprehend its achievements and their price, we must incorporate uncertainty’s state of doubt, and identify the objects of fear and the effects of being frightened”.
Ira Katznelson, 2013, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, Liveright Publishing.
Pop Theory 