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Undoing Networks
Get PDFContemporary societies are often described in terms of network metaphors and theories informed by an ‘ethos of connectivity’. Many contemporary social theories (from Luhmann’s systems theory to Deleuze/Guattari’s rhizome analysis to Actor Network Theory) operate with a normative bias toward networking. In recent years, however, diagnoses of over-networking (hyperconnectivity) have increased alongside the search for, and experimentation with, practices and infrastructures of de-networking. The lecture will present some exemplary cases of these phenomena and inquire into the social and media-theoretical relevance of disconnection. What conceptual challenges might be associated with thinking in terms of de-networking? Putting problems of passivity, inactivity, and withdrawal at the centre of theoretical interest, the lecture aims to conceive de-networking not as a romanticizing exit from the network, but rather as a paradoxical operation at the boundary of networking processes. Urs Stäheli is Professor of Sociological Theory at the University of Hamburg. His research areas include poststructuralist and neo-materialist social theory, the sociology of the list, cultural economy, and digital cultures. Publications include: Soziologie der Entnetzung (2021); Spectacular Speculation (2013)
Post-anti-identitarianism:The Forms of Contemporary Gender and Sexuality
Get PDFFeminist, queer, and trans studies are all influenced significantly by anti-identitarian thought. Yet, contemporary gender and sexual identities only seem to be proliferating: nonbinary, graysexual, demigender, and more. This chapter focuses on a series of reference guides that schematize this recent expansion. Often miming reductive reference forms (the dictionary, the A-Z list), these texts and the questions they raise help to rethink the place of ‘identity’ across gender and sexuality studies
White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy
Get PDFThis short essay offers thoughts on bell hooks’s use of the list form in the phrase ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’. While this list suggests that the social forces it contains work together in one unified direction, we can also look to instances in which they pull in opposing directions. However, the function of the list may not be to faithfully map the complexities of social life, but, rather, in its reduction and simplicity, to enable us to believe that social transformation is possible
Errans:Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing
Get PDFToday’s critical discourses and theorizing vanguards agree on the importance of getting lost, of failure, of erring — as do life coaches and business gurus. The taste for a departure from progress and other teleologies, the fascination with disorder, unfocused modes of attention, or improvisational performances cut across wide swaths of scholarly and activist discourses, practices in the arts, but also in business, warfare, and politics. Yet often the laudible failures are only those that are redeemed by subsequent successes. What could it mean to think errancy beyond such restrictions? And what would a radical critique of productivity, success, and fixed determination look like that doesn’t collapse into the infamous ‘I would prefer not to’? This volume looks for an answer in the complicated word field branching and stretching from the Latin errāre. Its contributions explore the implications of embracing error, randomness, failure, non-teleological temporalities across different disciplines, discourses, and practices, with critical attention to the ambivalences such an impossible embrace generates.‘Submit Your References’: Introduction | ARND WEDEMEYER | 1–18The Punakawans Make an Untimely Appearance: In Praise of Caves, Shadows, and Fire (or A Response to Plato’s Doctrine of Truth) | PRECIOSA DE JOYA | 19–47The Animal That Laughs at Itself: False False Alarms about the End of ‘Man’ | JAMES BURTON | 49–74Not Yet: Duration as Detour in Emmanuelle Demoris’s Mafrouza Cycle | ROSA BAROTSI | 75–92Incomplete and Self-Dismantling Structures: The Built Space, the Text, the Body | ANTONIO CASTORE | 93–112Camera Fog; or, The Pendulum of Austerity in Contemporary Portugal | MARIA JOSÉ DE ABREU | 113–40Rinko Kawauchi: Imperfect Photographs | CLARA MASNATTA | 141–58Inbuilt Errans: What Is and Is Not ‘Radical Indifference’ | ZAIRONG XIANG | 159–75Errant Counterpublics: ‘Solidarność’ and the Politics of the Weak | EWA MAJEWSKA | 177–99‘The Exile from the Law’: Keeping and Transgressing the Limits in Jewish Law | FEDERICO DAL BO | 201–3
Anarchival Practices
Get PDFLaunch of the publication series ‘Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation’, featuring Carine Zaayman (author of the premiering WPC book, Anarchival Practices: The Clanwilliam Arts Project as Re-imagining Custodianship of the Past, WPC / ICI Berlin Press 2022) in conversation with Wesley C. Hogan In this chapbook, Carine Zaayman instantiates the Anarchive as a means to reimagine how custodianship of the past is practiced. The Anarchive constellates archives and the absences that attend them in a manner that both centralizes the vastness of absence, and leaves it unreconstructed. The chapbook articulates the implications of the Anarchival constellation for scholarship and artistic practices that draw on archival material. Her argument is founded on an engagement with colonial archives that hold strands of Southern African pasts, and demonstrate its implications by examining the Clanwilliam Arts Project. Through an analysis of this case study, she argues that the Anarchive facilitates a privileging of decolonial forms of custodianship of the past that can lead to communal, co-designed and embodied forms of historical narration
