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(inter)disciplinarities: theory & crisis
The conference organizers would like to extend our sincerest thanks to the Lansdowne Foundation and Quentin Skinner for generously providing funding for our keynote speaker. We would also like to thank the Dean of Humanities and the Dean of Social Sciences for their support, which has been instrumental.
Panel 1: Identity I Am War: Crisis of Aloneness in the Work of Georges Bataille "I wanted the world to escape me. I have wanted to escape from the world. Georges Bataille, Critique of Heidegger How might we conceptualize the self in aloneness if aloneness stands for the absence of intimacy with others? In his work Inner Experience, Bataille argues that the subject is in part constituted by the same desire that it is denied; the desire for continuity and union with the homogenous whole that transcends its particularity. It is this severing from the whole that is repeatedly experienced as anguish in solitude, and, in turn, it is anguish that fuels a desire to be beside oneself. Instead of overcoming self and identity by reaching outside to external sources of difference and alterity, Bataille locates heterogeneity, the departure from the self, within inner experience. The impetus behind this paper is to understand the crisis of aloneness, together with the desire for evasion from the self that it stimulates, by delving into Bataille's philosophical and literary works on the incomplete system of knowledge and unproductive expenditure as they shed light on inner experience. What is most perplexing about the sacrifice of self within what Bataille theorizes as a sovereign moment is that it is a 'partly failed' experience that does not arrive at pure expenditure; the self cannot exist or persist in immanence. If it partly fails, is inner experience then a transgression of the limits of the self which merely reaffirms its contours in the moment they are exceeded? If so, are Bataille's accounts of heterogeneous expenditure meaningless and irrelevant in the formation of self-identity and in experiences of aloneness?
Death and the Limit of Selfhood in Heidegger and Deleuze The phenomenological horizon of death—or the possibility of that impossibility—occupies a central place in contemporary discussions of identity. There are good reasons for this: death presents itself as an utmost possibility and a limit condition for any notion of self, however conceived. Indeed, in Being and Time Heidegger develops a theory of temporality based on an analysis of existence as being-towards-death: death presents itself as my authentic possibility, and as such, reveals what possibility essentially is, illuminating the nature of time as that which makes possible any particular possibility. It is only in the anticipatory resoluteness of this possibility that an authentic selfhood can emerge, carrying with it notions of guilt, responsibility, and identity. What then, are we to make of the conspicuous absence of death in the temporal schema of Gilles Deleuze, displaced in prominence by notions such as Bergson's "élan vital"? The impulse to oppose Heidegger's "philosophy of death" to Deleuze's "philosophy of life" would obscure the radical difference that underlies their respective notions of temporality and the self. It would also introduce an untenable opposition between "life" and "death" that is inconsistent with Deleuze's own thought. For him, death is primarily an impersonal event—a death—best expressed in the infinitive verb, "to die." As such, it must be contrasted with the state or actuality of death: to die is to never cease dying. On the other hand, the concrete death of any given self—my death—acquires a singularly derivative character: it is the always external, "bad" encounter that returns the body to a level of "background intensity." Above all, whether conceived as a (personal) horizon or as an (impersonal) event, death in no way serves as a ground upon which selfhood, identity, or philosophy itself can be conceived. This understanding of death ultimately frees temporality from the grips of identity: it allows for an infinite and unrelenting proliferation of vital forces that constitute thinking itself.
Looking at Obscurity: A Gadamerian Apporach to Arendt's Political Subject The task of disclosing the political subject's identity is unquestioningly assigned to political theorists. Accepting this duty earnestly, Hannah Arendt devotes several of her works to the study of the appearance of the political subject. She theorizes that the political actor can become visible exclusively in political space, while political space can exist only when the actors appear to each other. Is this paradoxical formulation sufficient to apprehend and expose a political character? Can phenomenology explicate an event and its heroes without appealing to hermeneutics, history, and textuality for help? To clarify the phenomenon of the subject, the Arendtian subject in particular, I intend to employ a Gadamerian approach. Gadamer's theory elucidates the intimate association between phenomenology and hermeneutics, because no appearance can be expressed without a multiplicity of interpretations. Appearance is thus thrust into the obscurity of diverse accounts in an effort to illuminate it. Further driven into crisis with the realization that hermeneutics is supported by textuality, identity is suspended between clarity and confusion. Now that disclosure is distributed between so many poles, the political theorist's monopoly over it should certainly be questioned. Compelled to negotiate between vision, interpretation and narrative, is the revelation of the subject possible or is the subject's appearance doomed to disintegrate? If an account can emerge, which at least considers the three aforementioned elements, can it satisfy Arendt's condition that the political character be maintained as a "who" without reducing it to a "what"?
Thought & Being / Philosophy & Praxis within an Ontology of Pure Immanence "Who the deepest has thought, loves what is most alive" This line, from a Hölderlin poem entitled "Socrates and Alcibiades," expresses a profound sentiment within the relation of thinking and being. On the one side, it articulates a subject, a "who" that thinks. On the other, it expresses a conclusion of the former's thought: "love" for "what is most alive." Being-in-thought, loves "what is most alive." What is the relationship between thought and love? Why does deep thought bring about a love? Secondly, why is that which is loved a "what" and not a "who" or a "he" or she"? Why is the love for a "what", the equivalent of an "it", and what is this what? Is this it something beyond being, beyond the human? And what are its implications for a political praxis? Martin Heidegger writes that great thought returns to being in order to thank it – a process of affirmation, poiesis or love. The opposite process, that which challenges-forth and enframes is one wherein the same being is not rendered faithfully – a process that is not simply an omission but a serious antagonism against beings. Thought has a responsibility to beings which is undermined through its very separation from existence but yet only possible because of that same separation. Therefore, the task for a political philosophy is to not to valorize the transcendental realm of subjects and objects nor to try and escape into immanence through irrationalism, mysticism or festival. Rather, the task must be to narrow the separation or degree of transcendence between our representation and that which is both actually and virtually. We must make lie before us what lies before us by maximizing care and minimizing the harm of this necessarily dangerous procedure. We must usher in "events of appropriation" those definitively fleeting instances or moments of communication where "man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature by losing those qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them." Panel 2: Nature and Ontology The Ontological Crisis of Melancholia: Searching for Foundations in the Ether of Cyberspace In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler argues that the power structures ordering individuals and states alike are predicated on a mourning that cannot be mourned; melancholia permeates the primary ordering structures of the individual and the state. Butler takes up this absence, and alerts us to the state's reliance on citizens' melancholia to support its continued being. The state, constituted by the melancholic, reasserts and normalizes the melancholia responsible for plunging the modern subject into its ontological crisis of Being; it perpetuates the subjects' inability to authentically ground their selfhood. In this paper, I ask whether digital environments are spaces that can facilitate the resolution of modern subjects' ontological crisis, and thus might provoke the reconstitution modern politics. In responding to this inquiry, I take up Butler's analysis of mourning and melancholia and situate her politics of identity in the context of Cyberspace. Specifically, I investigate whether the modern subject can work through their crisis within the plasticity of digital spaces, or if these spaces only superficially present possibilities for working through crisis. In interrogating these possibilities, I consider how psychosocial norms of embodied life are (being) embedded throughout digital spaces, and reflect on the implications of state-held norms being reaffirmed in these new media environments. I conclude by adopting the stance that Cyberspace may enable some individuals to acknowledge their experience of melancholia, but stop short of claiming that the possibilities afforded by this space's plasticity can or will provoke a widespread reconstitution of modern politics.
Making Sense of/with Catastrophe: Affects of Science in Climate Change Discourse Almost every contemporary problematic has been (often uncritically) viewed through the lens of crisis. Within climate change discourse, the trope of crisis has yielded to its darker, sibling notion: catastrophe. Whereas crisis suggests the possibility of recuperation, catastrophe implies destruction of a more irreversible and totalizing nature. The key question of this paper is: "How does the discourse of catastrophe constitute social-material relations within the problematic of climate change?" I offer a discursive interpretation of the scientific staging of catastrophe and its relationship to emotion. 'Discourse' is conceived as social and material practice whereby language is constituted by and, in turn, constitutes socio-cultural and material contexts (Foucault, 2002; Haraway, 2004). Environmental discourse scholars focus particularly on the ways in which language and narratives have world-creating/changing impacts (Dryzek, 1997; Litfin, 1994). Another emerging field of scholarly interest – Emotion Theory – enables an analysis of how we make 'sense' of the world through the 'transmission of affect' (Brennan, 2004). This discourse of catastrophe relies on an uncanny mobilization of 'scientific' certainty and fear/anxiety of the unknown – an occurrence Woodward calls "statistical panic" (1999). My research uses these theoretical frames to explore key popular texts in which catastrophe is the central discourse of climate change (Flannery, 2006; Kolbert, 2006; Monbiot, 2008; Hillman, Fawcett & Rajan, 2007; Smil, 2008). Žižek's imperative to 'step back and think' seems highly pertinent in querying the role of catastrophe as a motivating factor in human responses to this Earthly problematic.
Christianity and the Legacy of Historical Ontology: Foucault's Geranium My presentation will address the problem of thinking what nature is in the context of a global environmental crisis. Problematizing the work of Michel Foucault, my presentation will engage critically with the project of (re)thinking nature from the standpoint of an historical ontology. Foucault's historical ontology refuses any transcendental foundationalism by asserting that any truths -- natural or not-- are bounded to their historical conditions of emergence (both political and epistemic). Foucault is in fact historicizing ontology in hope of exposing arbitrariness in our ways of thinking and thus opening grounds of critique. My presentation will explore the limitations of confining the concept of nature to the framing of historical ontology. To do so, I will expose how the temporal understanding assumed by Foucault can be itself historicized. In particular, I will illustrate how such understanding reflects a secularized Christian conception of linear time, of course stripped of origins, teleology and agency by Foucault; but nevertheless a temporality that places us all in a unique time-space that we must recognize and understand in a specific way if we are to be critical and hence free from the deterministic effects of our history. When it comes to the project of thinking nature otherwise, I shall suggest that Foucault's critical method subsumes our experience of nature under a specific ontology which not only remains anthropocentric in tone, but also culturally biased in scope. As an historical ontology, I shall propose that Foucault's critical project remains inherently modern by deploying two epistemic modalities inherited by the secularization of Christian thought one against the other, namely historicism against scientificism. I will suggest that such ontology forecloses cross-cultural possibilities of imagining nature and alternative patterns of critical thinking. Panel 3: The Urban Broken City Lab: Addressing the City in Crisis through Social Practice Windsor, Ontario is in crisis. Much like other cities across North America with a rapidly changing economy, Windsor is facing incredible job losses, topping the list of unemployment rates across Canada, surrounded by failed planning, and designed with dead-zone aesthetics. In response to the state of the city, I formed Broken City Lab as an art collective / creative research group and operates as a social practice, where the city itself becomes the canvas and the gallery. The lab works collectively to incrementally critique, disrupt, and repair the city and community through creative and aesthetic means. Broken City Lab has partnered with the University of Windsor's School of Visual Arts, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Transit Windsor, the Mayor's Youth Advisory Committee, and many other community stakeholders to accomplish a number of projects throughout the city that engage and interact with its communities and infrastructure. For the (inter)disciplinarities: theory & crisis conference, I propose to present the work of Broken City Lab. More information about Broken City Lab is available at www.brokencitylab.org.
Architecture After Crisis: Normalizing Control Architecture can be used to control. The built environment controls us in our daily interactions with it, allowing for spatial segregation and individuation through the way in which we build in certain types of populations while excluding others. I argue that this type of exclusive building occurs both during and after crisis, and has implications for our ability to practice a politics that is not premised on securing against a crisis. To explore this proposition, I will take two examples: first, the use of architecture in occupied Palestine as explored by Eyal Weizman in Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation. Second, I will address the normalization of similar architectures in Vancouver, B.C. By comparing a place that is supposedly 'in crisis' to a place that is supposedly in a 'normal' condition, I can begin to ask questions about the normalization of securing urban spaces through architectural occupation and control.
Homelessness as Social Crisis: Citizen-Production and the Politics of Community There is broad consensus that a 'crisis of homelessness' is playing out in Canadian urban centres. While this sense of social crisis has often been used to underscore the imperative of immediate action, we should be attentive to the limits this notion of crisis has placed on the types of action envisioned as possible or desirable, and on the types of persons authorized to undertake these actions. Dominant representations of homelessness, which highlight either a public space crisis caused by irresponsible and failed citizens or a health and housing crisis among passive victims of structural inequalities and welfare state retrenchment, share a common response to crisis. Both involve drawing target populations into the fold of normalized citizenship through the models of either the active or the social citizen. The limit of these approaches is that their common aim of integrating target populations through technical knowledge and state power tends to exclude, from the outset, the agency and experiences of these groups. Tent-cities, and the concerns and experiences of tent-city participants, might be described as pushing at the limits of intelligibility of the homelessness as social crisis frame. Claims to community, in particular, challenge dominant notions of citizenship and visions of the social order that is to be restored. Such contestations shift attention away from problems of social inclusion and cohesion towards more properly political questions of recognition and the governance of marginalized citizens. In what ways, for instance, do languages of community involve participants in forms of governmentality intimately linked to neoliberal forms of governance, and what potential does the use of such language have in transgressing these? Panel 4: Media "Because none of us are as cruel as all of us": Anonymity as Subjectivation Technologies of virtualization are reshaping the traditional conception of the subject. Certain technologies, maybe most, do no more than reinforce an identitarian, atomistic, solipsistic subjectivity, but others seem to open the way for novel possibilities. I will examine one particularly dynamic example of technologically mediated subjectivation: last year's Anonymous protests of the Church of Scientology. The protests are of interest because they illustrate that the performance of anonymity online can translate to the performance of anonymity – or, more radically, the performance of non-subjectivity – in real life. The question that guides my research here is the following: does the translation of virtual subjectivity into the real world mean that the traditional identitarian politics of the real world gives way to a novel politics of the virtual? If not, does this mean that the anonymous form of subjectivity that we sometimes see at work online cannot translate into the real world, or only that it has yet to do so? By contrasting the Anonymous protests with the other "less ethical" activities in which Anonymous engages, I will show that a "truly" anonymous subjectivity – that is, a non-subjectivity – has not yet been made physically manifest because it would imply a triple crisis – in subjectivity, in ethics, and in the political. By drawing on Judith Butler's work on performance and subjectivation, I will argue that the arrival of these crises is not to be feared, but encouraged.
Suffering, Off-Camera: The Ideological Function of the Absent Victim Crisis, particularly in the form of violent conflict or atrocity, often occurs beyond our realm of direct experience. For the vast majority of the 'western' world, crisis arrives not through direct experience but through the representative practices of news media and photojournalism. Often described as the 'eyewitnesses of our time', photojournalists capture the visual evidence of foreign suffering for circulation in domestic news sources. While the notion of the photograph as evidence continues to hold broad appeal ('seeing is believing', once removed), photography's objectivity is neither objective nor neutral. The production and circulation of photographs actively build an interpretation of the crisis in question, contributing to the development of the notions of both a dangerous foreign terrain and a comparatively safe domestic sphere. With each phase of the visual economy, political and ideological frames come into play, shaping the field of perceptible reality for both photographer and audience and (re)producing multiple discourses of 'security', 'danger', and 'the Other'. The limits of the visual economy's discursive effects are not limited to the photographs that audience's eventually consume, but extend to the absent photograph, the one that was not taken. Much of the visual coverage of foreign crises remains relatively free of the images of bodily injury and death – an absence that has significant effects on the domestic interpretations of and affective responses to distant suffering. Drawing on David Campbell and Judith Butler, I will apply the concept of a visual economy to mainstream news coverage of the recent Gaza crisis to draw out the multiple frames at work in visually representing (and occluding) the magnitude of the Israeli offensive. Comparing recent with past coverage, I will draw out themes of a 'perpetual' and 'intractable' conflict, one appropriate to a not-so foreign land, and necessary to the production of the stable domestic space.
Walking Through Walls: The IDF's Appropriation of A Thousand Plateaus and the Anarchy of Totalitarianism In his recent book Hollow Land, Eyal Weizman reveals the shocking appropriation of poststructuralist discourses on space and architecture by the Israeli Defence Force. The IDF credit their "walking through walls" tactic in Palestinian neighbourhoods (such as the swarming of Nablus in 2002) to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's conception of smooth and striated spaces, the war machine, and the apparatus of capture. By breaking down the walls behind which the enemy lies secluded instead of entering through the front door, a striated space is reinterpreted as a smooth space, and the advantage of surprise is retained by the aggressor. Weizman however is somewhat skeptical of the necessity of Deleuze and Guattari to the IDF for the notion of "walking through walls", identifying conceptions of the same tactic in military manuals dating back as early as 1849, as well as the Zionist "Begin Gang", which had already cleared "overground tunnels" between house walls during the 1948 battle for Jaffa. (HL, p. 212) What he believes to be most valuable in Deleuze and Guattari to the IDF is rather the philosophical language used to describe the appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus, which with some irony also describes the appropriation of A Thousand Plateaus by the IDF. The use of this abstract, philosophical language, however, has apparently already produced considerable backlash within the IDF itself, with some of the leading proponents of the more philosophical approach to strategising being dismissed from military service after losing some bigger, more important battles. Whether Deleuze and Guattari have been more help or more hindrance to the IDF can obviously not be so easily assessed by an outside observer. Has poststructuralist theory helped to intensify an existing crisis by providing the theoretical tools to better control its outcome, or are the philosophically inclined military strategists of the IDF not only "out of touch" with the real stakes facing the military, but also "out of their league" with regards to the philosophy they believe themselves to be making such subversive use of ? Deleuze and Guattari have often been accused of deliberate obscurantism in their collaborative work. Critics are often quick to reject the nonsensical language of bodies without organs, war machines, lines of flight, etcetera, claiming that behind the veneer of obscure style and terminology lays little or no substance. Is their apparent obscurantism the deliberate result of wanting to hide their true meaning from the casual reader, or the accidental result of requiring new language to express new ideas? And similarly, have the IDF strategists "cracked the code" which most analytic philosophy professors would refuse to acknowledge even exists, or could they just as easily have realised the efficacy of "walking through walls" by watching Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, where the same tactic is deployed for practically the same purpose of striking fear into the hearts of terrorists? Taking Weizman's work on Israel's architecture of occupation as our starting point, we propose to more broadly address the ambiguous historical link between totalitarianism and anarchy in our presentation, in order to shed light on the complementary link between theory and crisis forming the theme of the conference. Panel 5: Metaphysics and Cosmology Technique, Nihilism, and the Reprieve of Nostalgia The paper proceeds from the conviction that if nihilism is manifest in history, then its manifestation is not a species of esoteric thinking, and thus could be seen in the ordinary ways we comport ourselves to each other and the things in the world. Technology presents us with many ways to to carry out ordinary tasks in a safe and seemingly rewarding manner, while the re-orienting of the conditions of our thinking remains opaque. How is it that we (any one of us) can embrace technology and technological change in our everyday lives, can be drawn to activist struggles for emancipation, and yet also quietly read Nietzsche on nihilism and Heidegger on technique (technology = the logos of techne, or the truth of techniques)? In what follows I aim to lay out the way that many of our ordinary excursions and wanderings through the technological apparatuses of daily life, from frankenfoods to safety gear to health policy, manifest nihilism and technique. Working through these everyday artifacts and experiences, we come to reflect on the importance of our nostalgic yearnings. In certain respects, contemporary political theory treats the politics of revenge with disdain while celebrating, and employing, a politics that is decidedly nostalgic. And yet, if we follow Nietzsche’s work regarding the inherent vengefulness of nostalgic political programs, we run into an impasse. Can we navigate the distance between revenge and nostalgia in a way that elucidates provenance that nostalgia holds, as Heidegger thought? Or is the revenge that must haunt nostalgia something that condemns it, and us, to an ever encroaching longest night of nihilism?
Cosmological Crisis and its Critics: On the 20th Century Metaphysics of Being, Beings and the Big Bang A standard etymology relates the concept of 'crisis' to that of decision (through the Greek 'krinein'). In any narrative, a crisis is not so much a difficult period of time as a turning point when a choice has to be made, or, in the closely related yet divergent sense of 'critic' ('krites'), when something has to be judged. Metaphysically, then, a crisis is a constraint that configures how history is made, and a critic is someone who judges this configuration in terms of a history already being made. In my presentation, these two divergent aspects of an historical turning point appear in what can be termed the great 'cosmological crisis' of the mid-20th century. In science, the crisis concerns a set of challenges to the modern understanding of the cosmos as an infinite space beyond human grasp. It finally turns in the post-WWII decade on a decisive battle of rivaling scientific cosmologies: (the losing) Steady State Theory and (the winning) Big Bang Theory. The outcome was a profound reinvention of universal history as such, in terms of a new absolute metaphysical foundation of our culture -- a scientific cosmogony. At the same time, in philosophy, the crisis concerns a critical judgment on the logical foundation of Western thought itself, most prominently through Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze's closely related yet divergent critiques of identity and difference. These critical thinkers, I argue, help us understand how the hegemonic framework of Big Bang Theory is deeply connected to the problem of ontological difference. Moreover, they reveal that what is at stake in both the philosophical and scientific aspects of this modern cosmological crisis -- one which still shapes our world-view -- is not so much what kind of universe we live in, but rather the very idea of the universe itself.
The Quick and the Dead: On State and Nomad War Machines in Virilio and Deleuze Panel 6: The Exception and the Limit Crisis and Limit: Re-visiting the Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade As Georges Bataille observes in his groundbreaking essay "The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade", in the postrevolutionary phase of human emancipation – in addition to political and economic structures – he notes, it will be necessary to organize overtly antireligious and asocial groupings, the goal of which will be "orgiastic participation in different forms of destruction," necessary in order to expel the heterogeneous elements upon which society is organized. These groupings, he asserts, can have no other conception of morality than that avowed by the Marquis de Sade. Such is only one of the instructive dimensions that de Sade's writings offer us in this time of crisis; in truth, his writings present us with a kind of excremental treasure, illuminating a way out of this mass grave of meaning, at the end of history, after the death of God, the subject, and the author. Here, we will explore the notion of the limit as it is developed throughout the writings of de Sade and his exegetes, particularly as this notion is posed upon the horizon of our contemporary crises of culture, crises at once political, textual, philosophical and spiritual. Through an intertexual reading of de Sade and his interpreters then, and in particular by looking at the notions of transgression and the limit that are developed throughout, as a response to these contemporary crises, we will present what we see as the only viable answer to the question: "Where do we go from here?" To the limit.
Infinite Responsibility and Possibility: Settler Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples Contemporary discourses on social movements and resistance increasingly tend to privilege disruption and singularity. In Empire, Hardt and Negri describe anti-imperial struggles as 'events' which 'leap immediately' and 'strike directly' at the heart of Empire. From the perspective of Empire, these events constitute a crisis to which Empire must respond or react. This paper asks what is obscured by understanding crises and disruptions as the defining characteristic of anti-imperial struggle. What is missed when crisis and disruption are assumed to be constitutive of social movements? My analysis offers an account of a subterranean logic that seems to operate in many projects of solidarity and struggle. I draw on interviews with Settlers and Indigenous people across Turtle Island in order to offer an account of some of the more subtle operations of Empire and struggles against it. My argument decenters the paradigm of crisis in order to examine the concept of the 'ally'. I introduce the concept of 'infinite responsibility' in order to clarify the relationship between allies, solidarity and anti-colonial struggle. I will argue that infinite responsibility does not constitute a 'solution' or 'answer' to problems of solidarity, but rather exists in permanent tension with other aspects of solidarity.
Dependance on Independance: Crisis in Carl Schmitt Crisis – both etymologically and politically – is defined by the decisiveness of a given turn of events. Thus the scale, shape and impact of the particular crisis appears to contain within it the force, magnitude and cost of the corresponding 'bailout package'. The crisis is invoked to mark the point at which discourse is closed; where the relation between the sovereign power and political society is disentangled. Nowhere has the crisis (or exception) been so explicitly deployed to construct an independent exterior to political society than in the metaphysics of legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose 1922 Political Theology attempts to define and restore the nature of the 'truly independent' sovereign decision. Taking inspiration from Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt sees a fundamental parallel between the intervention in natural law by God via miracle, and the intervention in political society by the sovereign in the state of exception. Both God and the sovereign straddle the paradoxical position of being 'in, but not of the world' – of influencing, but not being influenced. What Schmitt's argument leaves inapproachable, however, is the question of the sovereign's relation (and accountability) to those from whom their power derives. This paper will re-appraise the Schmittian metaphysics through the ontological immanence available in Spinoza. Denying Schmitt the extra-systemic position his notion of sovereignty requires, Spinoza's politics demonstrates clearly that dependance is the metaphysical precondition of power, not its antithesis. Panel 7: Responses to Crises in Gender and Bodies: Challenging ways of Knowing, Being and Researching Beyond Performativity: Queer Athletic Spaces and the Construction of Identity Essential notions of gender are in crisis. Yet in keeping with the ambivalent nature of all crises, this offers both potential benefit and threatened loss. In order to examine the ways in which this fluidity of gender construction plays out, this pilot study is concerned with the embodied nature of identity construction, specifically through a focus on the experiences of gender variant individuals within a queer athletic space. Butler's theories of performativity provide a basis for such a consideration of embodied identity, yet in their monologic nature they fail to adequately consider the inherently dialogic nature of such identity constructions. To this end, Bakhtin's arguments regarding the dialogic construction of meaning through language are proposed as the basis of an alternate approach to the study of such identity construction, one which acknowledges performative aspects while foregrounding the interactive and contextual nature of such performances. It is argued that such a dialogic perspective allows for a greater understanding of the interactive construction of gender by individuals who reject traditional essentialized options. The goal of this pilot study was thus twofold: to see in what ways this dialogical view of performativity may correspond to, or enable an increased understanding of, the experiences of gender variant individuals within a queer athletic space; and to determine the ways in which such a space enables gender variant individuals to construct embodied identities.
The Ethics of Visual Methods: Photography as a Tool of Power Photography has a long history within anthropological research, and is growing in popularity within the discipline of sociology. Photography enjoys a privileged position in society, often being seen as objective (although this is changing with the advent of digital imaging and manipulation), and nevertheless still maintaining authority as a medium of truth-making. Documentary and ethnographic photography is also embroiled in the power differentials between researcher and participant. As a result, some researchers have been looking for ways to equalize power, including using participatory photography in order to transfer the power to create meaning to the participants. However, the question of whether this does equalize power, and whether the participants feel that it does, has not been answered. Thus a discussion of the ethics of using photography in research with vulnerable populations is crucial in order to facilitate a reflexive use of photography, and other visual research methods.
The Reiteration of Incoherence: Building Alternate Realms of Intelligibility and Community In a society in which gender has constantly been in crisis for a considerable length of time, the discussion of the production and maintenance of gender norms has become a dominant mode of theoretical analysis and discussion. This piece attempts to work through this common focus on heteronormativity to explore the realms considered abject in much of the literature. Building on Judith Butler’s understandings of intelligibility and performativity, the focus is on alternate realms of intelligibility and the possibilities for exploring a subject who becomes intelligible through the reiteration of their incoherence, their inconsistency, and the complexity and fluidity of their bodies. Through the recognition of otherworldly discursive realms of performativity that already exist and flow, the concept of intelligibility is challenged to be understood as having the possibility of not being centred on static regulatory ideals. The possible implications for this understanding of intelligibility are explored in relation to our conceptualizations of communities and their ability to respond and challenge the current crisis of gender.
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