Sustaining Humanness: Affirmative Critique
One Day Workshop: 24th June 2009 (10.00-5.00, Room 407, Derman Christopherson Room, Calman Learning Centre)
Organised by Dr Ben Anderson and Prof. Andrea Noble
Co-sponsored by: Institute of Advanced Study (Durham University) and the Social/Spatial Theory Research cluster (Department of Geography).
Keynote Presentations: Prof. William Connolly (John Hopkins University) and Prof. Jane Bennett (John Hopkins University)
"I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes-all the better" (Foucault 1997: 322)
Over the last few years, the extant habits of critical thought have been extensively questioned, contested and reworked by a number of critical, left-orientated, radical thinkers (Gibson-Graham 2006). Sharing a wager that more is needed than moralistic judgment to motivate action, together with a diagnosis of the politically dehabilitating effects of certain forms of critique, a range of work has experimented with techniques, sensibilities, and concepts that aim to care for and create better futures. Critique becomes affirmative - no longer an exercise in debunking or fault finding, in which the critic is separate from the process judged, but a means of cultivating ‘turning points' through which new possibilities or potentialities may be witnessed, invented, and acted on (here we remember the use of the term ‘critical' in medicine to designate a point of danger, a suspension between life and death). These experiments are too various to name here, but they include work on the layering of affect into thinking and attempts to cultivate affects such as enchantment, generosity, care and hope (Bennett 2001; Connolly 2002); reparative ways of being political that queer the paranoid structures of ‘strong theory' (Sedgwick 2003); and a sensitivity to a politics of possibility in relation to diverse economic practices (Gibson-Graham 2006). All share a wager that more is needed than a practice of judgement based on separation and exposure, a commitment to a restless experimentation with other techniques of thinking and acting, and a reorientation of the direction of critical knowledge toward surprising futures. As such, they connect up with a revival of interest across the social sciences in immanent or iconoclastic forms of utopianism that aim to imagine and enact better futures, without reducing the future to a calculable blueprint of a perfect society or polis (Anderson 2006; Kraftl 2007).
The workshop aims to explore the promise and provocation of affirmative ways of being-critical. Specific questions the workshop will address include:
1: How is the repertoire of critical thinking and acting being expanded beyond moralistic judgment - what sensibilities, techniques, and concepts are being experimented with in an effort to produce new ways of being-critical?
2: What do these new orientations or stances attempt to do politically and ethically - welcome new possibilities through an orientation to connections and openings?, foster care for the world?, open up options?, motivate action in the present?, offer a means of enacting and imagining futures?
3: How are affects (hope, wonder, melancholia and so on) folded into affirmative practices of thinking and acting, how do such affects unfold and orientate our ways of acting in the world, and how are different researchers (re)working the relays between thinking, affect, freedom, and engagement with the world?
4: How do different modes of engagement co-exist and thus resonate or interfere with one another? What is the relation between, say, an ethos that wagers that enchantment might foster a care for the world and an ethos that gambles that presumptive generosity towards difference might help foster a form of agonistic pluralism? Or, to draw a different relation, how do reparative ways of knowing based on ‘weak theory' co-exist with forms of immanent utopianism based on imagination?
5: How do different experiments in affirmative techniques feedback and reconfigure our definitions of critcism and critique? How, in particular, to think about different modes of evaluation or judgment if the aim is to care for the world and help create (if only in minor ways) the possibility of different and better worlds?
6: What is the role for the critic in a thinking that opens up possibilities and potentialities? How are new figures and forms of academic authority and expertise emerging in this shift - as well as new forms of collaboration, belonging and attachment? What, to put it differently, are the risks of a move towards an affirmative practice of thinking and acting? What might a criticism that summoned and invented ‘signs of existence' fail to do?
Places are free but limited. Please contact Dr Ben Anderson (ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk) if you are interested in attending.