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The VIII Annual Social Theory Forum
April 13 – 14, 2011

Professor Lakshmi Srinivas presents at the Eastern Sociological Society’s Annual Meeting

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:: Department of Sociology

The VIII Annual Social Theory Forum

April 13 – April 14, 2011

The VIII Annual SOCIAL THEORY FORUM at UMass Boston. Italian Social Theory from Antonio Gramsci to Giorgio Agamben. The STF is an annual international conference organized jointly by the sociology and other departments, interested faculty and students at UMass Boston, in order to creatively explore, develop, promote, and publish cross-disciplinary social theory in an applied and critical framework. STF offers faculty and students of UMass Boston and other national and international colleges and universities an interactive medium to discuss various aspects of the way in which particular theoretical traditions can be relevant to present everyday issues, as well as to the current state and the future of social theory.

 

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I will be giving a paper tomorrow entitled “Against Transcendence: The Lay Theology of Suffering of Antonio Negri and Gianni Vattimo” at the 8th Annual Social Theory Forum. Program info is above.

(Though I’m tempted, I will not be there in full New York Yankees regalia as I’m sensitive to how horrible the Red Sox are right now. I’ll show empathy and just give the talk.)

Author: Gianni Vattimo (Published first here in Italian, and translated by Andrea Pavoni)

In times of confrontations between explicitly material interests, and in the absence of any real public debate involving the Italian Government (busy protecting the orgy of power), what could be better than a proper exchange between internationally-renowned philosophers, on the alleged necessity of a military intervention in Libya? In an article published on the 28th of March on Libération, Jean-Luc Nancy defends the Western operation. Bengazi insurgents, he explains, are asking us to defeat the ‘vile murderer’ Gaddafi, and the West is called upon to assume the political responsibility for that desired change. Nancy believes that the non-interventionists’ arguments – the potential collateral risks of the operation, the suspicions about the real interests at stake, the principle of non-interference in the reserved domain of States, the weight of the (recent) colonial past – are de facto no longer valid in this globalised world, which empties the principle of sovereignty of any meaning. In such a world it is rather necessary “to reinvent the act of living together and, before all else, the act of living itself”. This, ultimately, would be what the Arab people are forcing us to acknowledge. Hence the necessity of the intervention, in order to protect the rebels from Gaddafi’s bloody clutches. In the second instance, only in the second one, the Western people (we all) should act so as to neutralise oil, financial and war merchants’ interests, already responsible for bringing and keeping such ‘puppets’ as Gaddafi in power.

The answer to Nancy, coming from a stupefied Alain Badiou, deserves the greatest attention. First, he reminds, in Libya we didn’t face a popular uprising such as the Egyptian and Tunisian ones. In Libya there is no trace of documents and flags of protest of the same character as those employed in Egypt and Tunisia, and no women are to be found among Libyan rebels. Second, since the last autumn British and French secret services have been organising Gaddafi’s fall; this would explain, third, both the weapons of unknown origin, available to the rebels, as well as the sudden formation of a revolutionary council to replace the Raìs’ government. Fourth: in contrast to the other Arab countries, explicit help requests have been coming from Libya. According to Badiou, the Western objective is evident: “to transform a revolution into a war”, to replace the rebels with weapons (heavy weapons, armoured vehicles, war instructors, blue helmets), so as to allow “the despotism of capital” to “reconquest” the effervescence of the Arab world. If this wasn’t the case, Badiou asks – and we ask our regime too – how could those same Western leaders, friends to Gaddafi, perform such a turnaround?

What, then, is to be done? Even in the case we would be willing to concede – and we are far from being persuaded by it – that the humanitarian motivation would suffice to justify the intervention. As Peter Singer contends recalling the catastrophe of Rwanda, it is still impossible to ignore that the UN resolution does not authorise a military intervention (Singer himself reminds that). From a utilitarian perspective – in his consequentialist version, that is – collateral risks do matter indeed. Wouldn’t it have been better to seek to obtain the desired outcome by resorting to deterrent measures and high-efficacy sanctions, emphasising precisely (and uniquely) the humanitarian reasons for opposing to Gaddafi? In any case, Nancy’s solution is wholly unsatisfying: why wait (for the military intervention to succeed) to prevent (only in the second instance) the sordid material interests from coming back onto the political scene? Doing this, Badiou explains, would equate to bowing to the Western will, repressing the “unexpected and intolerable” (for the Western warlords, that is) character of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, and thus the “political autonomy” and “independence” of the Arab revolutionaries.

Badiou is right: as I wrote in this blog some posts ago, the multipolar world has its own needs. It is simply not enough to remind all that the Western Imperialism of the cold-war and post cold-war era can no longer aspire to dominate the world. The true revolution will come when the West will learn to step back, to accept the difference, to realise that in a globalised world the concept of sovereignty has even more significance. Nancy’s is a logic mistake: it is exactly the world we wish for, the (international) society in which we would wish to live – to use the words written by Singer somewhere else – which calls upon us to revisit the traditional criteria of the interventionist logic. The world in which we would wish to live, today and tomorrow, is not that of Sarkozy and Cameron, but rather one in which the Arab countries, likewise those of Latin America and Asia, will be legitimate to build from a position of independence and equal rights with respect to the Western nations.

Related Posts

• Alain Badiou’s reply to Jean-Luc Nancy
• What the Arab peoples signify to us

Ah, imagine we had American intellectuals debating public issues?

Whoever said religion was dying never saw the queues that snake round Apple’s stores when a new product arrives. On Friday night thousands of Britons, some having queued for three days, gathered to pay homage to the second coming of the iPad.

Many emerged holding their products aloft and punching the air. Never mind that iPad 2 was a modest and slightly disappointing upgrade on iPad 1, and that the uninitiated would scarcely be able to tell the difference. The rapturous way it was received had all the air of a revivalist meeting.

Apple’s secret begins with its product. It refused to pay for the sort of spurious market research which often justifies big companies spreading themselves too thin or sinking to the lowest common denominator. Instead, under Steve Jobs, it’s focused on making gadgets so beautifully functional that many people will pay extra to have one around.

It isn’t the only big company to have taken this approach. The US cable channel HBO was chiefly famous for showing boxing matches and film re-runs, but then decided to concentrate all its efforts on producing high-quality drama. By swimming against the tide of mainstream American television, HBO was able to churn out genre-defying successes such as The Sopranos, The Wire and True Blood. Now it’s one of the most profitable TV companies on earth.

Both Apple and HBO have triumphed by producing original, high-end stuff at a time when many of their competitors were travelling in the opposite direction. But somehow they’ve also managed to cultivate a kind of evangelical enthusiasm for their products in the audience. Apple, for example, doesn’t seem to want customers but fans who want to identify themselves with the product. Carrying around an iBook, an iPhone or iPad has become the essential accessory of a certain kind of bourgeois bohemian. Apple fans come in any shapes and sizes, but what unites them is their insistence that they’re somehow different from the mainstream – sleek but quirky, businesslike but iconoclastic. Among the most devout it’s very much like a cult – there’s even a popular website called Cult of Mac.

All this is very convenient for Apple’s marketing department, but what does it say about us that we’re so keen to identify ourselves with its products? More than simply products, gadgets like the iPad and programmes like The Wire have become badges – ways to identify ourselves in a world in which the traditional ways of classifying us by social class and mainstream religion are losing their purchase. On social networks like Facebook, it’s easy to get lost. Profiling ourselves according to the things we really like makes it easy to mark ourselves out from the crowd, and gives us a flock to fly with.

Meanwhile the success of Apple and HBO might give the rest of our struggling retailers pause for thought. Many of the stores which dominated our town centres are fast approaching extinction, and the result has been to leave our high streets resembling ghost towns. If high street retail has a future, it’s likely to see the replacement of those cathedrals of commerce with house churches, each organised around a cultish following.

The distinction between the fall of mainstream religion and the rise of its evangelical variant makes for an interesting analogy. Evangelicals know that the best flocks are manageable enough for members to identify with, and that what works best is to get people together in a live audience. With an infusion of missionary zeal our high streets might even be on the cusp of a new golden age of performance, talk and entertainment – and not just a shivering queue outside the Apple store on a Friday night.

James Harkin’s ‘Niche: Why the Market No Longer Favours The Mainstream’ has just been published by Little, Brown

Technological religion.

Sent via my buddy Mike Porter.

I’m actually going to start a piece looking at how social media and the Internet is looked upon as “sin” or something to “abstain” from during Lent, which I’ve been seeing a lot. This will obviously make it in there.

Thanks CNN! Pilfering of the kind of logic displayed in this article will open by dissertation!

The Race of Time: The Charles Lemert Reader

The Race of Time: The Charles Lemert Reader, by Charles Lemert , edited by Daniel Chaffee, Sam Han . Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010. 230pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9781594516467.

Anthony Moran

La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

a.moran@latrobe.edu.au

Richard Sennett has argued in a recent lecture at Cambridge University that sociology should be good literature, that it should achieve “lived experience on the page.” Like Sennett, Charles Lemert exemplifies this ideal. In books, articles, essays, and in brilliant cameos found in such texts as Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classical Readings, Lemert has written a literary narrative about sociology and social theory, about how we should understand, as he calls them, “social things,” and the limits to any such understandings. In The Race of Time he writes that “good sociology is good literature, in particular, good fiction, as Marx first demonstrated” (p. 83).

This excellent selection of Lemert’s writings, spanning his academic career, is edited by two of his former students Daniel Chaffee and Sam Han, who have also written a fine, contextualizing introduction to guide the reader through the trajectory of Lemert’s thought and major preoccupations. These stretch from early 1970s writings on epistemology, relativism and the relationship between religion and sociology, to a later concentration on the ramifications of globalization. In between there are essays dealing with race and multiculturalism, poverty and inequality, modernity and postmodernism, Durkheim’s legacy (using the evocative notions of “Durkheim’s ghosts,” and of sociology as “theories of lost worlds”), French structuralism, psychoanalysis and the meaning of dreams, the difficulties of living in increasingly deadly, disorienting, globalized worlds, and the fate of individualism.

Lemert frequently intersperses his narratives with stories about the lives of sociologists and social theorists, including his own—the latter most compellingly, and sometimes tragically, in his book Dark Thoughts, represented with three chapters here—but also those of people outside academia who he has known, including family, friends and acquaintances, and from whom he has learned about “social worlds.” The biographical is never far away when Lemert discusses sociology or social theory, and as this collection shows, the stories have become more prominent in his later writing, though this does not make it any less sociological. For, as he writes in the last essay in this book, “The stories that at first seem to be acutely personal are in fact caught up and suspended in social space” (p. 215). The echoes of C. Wright Mills, about whom Lemert has also written insightfully, are unmistakable: the task of the sociological imagination is to show how the personal problem is also a public problem, how biography relates to history and change.

Lemert has always been concerned with the nature and prospects of the discipline of sociology, and several essays here reflect this concern. Two essays dealing with Durkheim probe the hidden dilemmas and doubts that Durkheim himself obscured through his apparent certainty about sociology as a distinct discipline concerned with “social facts.” “Sociology: Prometheus among the Sciences of Man” traces the history and fate of sociology in Europe and America. Lemert uses the metaphor of Prometheus to suggest that sociology had the task of bringing fire to man, and failed after the 1960s because it did not honor that difficult task. Sociology’s uniqueness among the social sciences was its transdisciplinarity—the way that it drew on many other knowledges—and to the extent that it withdrew into the narrow confines of a discipline, it lost its fire and the enthusiasm of those, including students, it originally attracted. Sociology had also put itself in the straightjacket of science, a discipline that crushed its passion, especially in America where it had never had a secure home outside of the university. But this had also been part of its initial success—its alignment with science and with the hope that it inspired within and without the university that it could find the answers to society’s social problems had meant that it had the ears of important decision makers. But the game was up by the 1960s—sociologists didn’t have the answers after all—and the politicians and funding bodies turned elsewhere.

Globalization has become the master narrative of Lemert’s work since the 1990s; he sees it in terms of globalized worlds, not one global world. As he argues in “Whose We? Dark Thoughts on the Universal Self, 1998,” globalization has brought many different social worlds together, in conversation and conflict with each other; in some important instances this has revealed the incommensurability of such worlds, further undermining the idea of universal man, and the “universal we.” Social differences, differences in value and culture, need to be taken seriously. Lemert also addresses these issues in relation to multiculturalism (“Can Worlds Be Changed? Ethics and the Multicultural Dream”), where he argues that any reading of the multicultural, according to its inherent principle, renders the possibility of reaching universal ethical consensus impossible. It also raises serious questions for those who abide by Marx’s eleventh thesis: if the point of philosophy is to change the world, how does this work when we are speaking of myriad worlds rather than a single world, as Marx had imagined it? Relativism, Lemert argues here, is the one truth of our contemporary worlds.

Some of this is troubling, especially for the left whose hopes have been so firmly pinned, Lemert argues, on global enlightenment (or as he calls it, “enwhitenment”), guided by the idea that humanity is (or will be) as one. What is politics like if the left gives up on those ideas? And what of the whole architecture of human rights, built up since the Second World War, that rests upon a concept of common or universal humanity, and the certainty that there are fundamental rights that should not be breached, even if they are achieved in various ways in different social, cultural, economic and political circumstances? What would the true embrace of relativism, the acceptance of a strong notion of social and cultural autonomy (p.169) and really giving up on the belief in a “universal we,” mean for doctrines of global human rights? Lemert does not directly address the latter here, but his embrace of relativism certainly does not lead to him giving up the idea of global economic and social justice. In fact, he argues that elites have an unreserved responsibility to raise their voices in the name of global justice, but are too often silent.

Provocative, eloquent and always engaging, Lemert’s work is well represented in The Race of Time. If you are interested in the fate and future of sociology and social theory, buy and read this book—and after that, go back and read Lemert’s oeuvre.

• © American Sociological Association 2011

I just found out that the most recent issue of Contemporary Sociology has published a wonderful review of a book I co-edited. Happy for me and Daniel but mostly happy for Charles.

A very good explanation of not only counterpoint but also homophonics! Servicey.

I cannot believe I missed this. I’m a big fan of David Rieff’s writing. He’s scary-smart.

While I, and other lefties, view Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia in high regard as their social-democratic policies on healthcare and women’s rights are dazzling, the immigration issue is always a sticking-point. This was made clear with the case of the Pakistani cab drivers in Norway not too long ago.

Utterly damning yet very “reasonable” piece on Rhee here.

I agree with every word by Kahlenberg but I’d like to add that folks on the left, in particular unions, need to call out so-called Dems, who are either tacitly or explicitly aligning themselves with her. Her biggest political brokers are Dems!