David Chandler – The Problematic of Control in a Global World
Event date: 12 March 2011
Main Building
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
Taking Control
David Chandler (Wesminster) – The Problematic of Control in a Global World
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talk:
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Taking Control – conference page
Event date: 12 March 2011
Main Building
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
Taking Control
This conference is concerned with control. On what it means today – under globalised late capitalism – to take or be in control of institutions, whether political, economic, or academic. We are concerned with theorising how to take control, and on what to do when we take it. We want to focus not on the dangers of control – since the corrupting effects of power have been amply theorized – but rather on what it means to take responsibility and effect change, and what this change could be.
That is, how can a vision for society be enacted in practical terms? What is the role of democratic participation in this process of mastering social change? And how do we remain accountable as we take control. Does taking control mean working against, within or beside the existing institutional structure?
This question remains under-theorised in contemporary critical political theory – which often remains limited to the critique of the status quo. Without the impulse to take responsibility and take control, this critique becomes meaningless – it results in a de facto acceptance. Where projects like the ‘Idea of Communism’ stop, this conference seeks to take the next step. It must be situated along work such as the Turbulence Collective’s ‘What it means to win’ volume and Erik-Olin-Wright’s ‘Envisioning Utopias’.
We are clear that the idea of communism remains important and a project to be fought for. However in the strategic question we are at an impasse, how to take control and implement a new communism? The vanguard model seems discredited, but the model of the multitude seems non-committal, a mere waiting for things to gradually come together, resulting in a de facto withdrawal from the social. Even more than this impasse, in times of late capitalism the very meaning of what being in control entails is no longer clear. We want to move from thinking about the idea of communism to implementing it.
Organised by ES: Philosophy Research Collective
With support from the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS Department of Politics, Goldsmiths
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PROGRAMME:
Keynote Address:
Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith)
The Communist Horizon [AUDIO HERE]
Chair: Saul Newman
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Panel A: Control and the Global
David Chandler (Wesminster)
The Problematic of Control in a Global World
[AUDIO HERE]
Vassilis Fouskas (Richmond)
Deconstructing Hub and Spoke Imperialism
[AUDIO HERE]
Stephen Chan (SOAS) Discussant .
Panel A – questions.
Chair: Alexej Ulbricht
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Panel B: Movements, Violence and Control
Phil Edwards (Manchester Met)
Terrible Beauty seeks Geometric Potency: arms and the law in the anni di plombo
[AUDIO HERE]
Christian Garland
A Dual-power situation? Communization and the Materiality of Anti-power
[AUDIO HERE]
Ben Whitham (Reading)
The Millbank Riot: A Step in the Direction of Control?
[AUDIO HERE]
Panel B – questions.
Chair: Luke Evans
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Panel C: Control and the State
Sumit Chakrabarti (Rabindra Bharati)
From ‘Corporation’ to ‘Crowd’: the rhetoric of control in the politics of West Bengal
[AUDIO HERE]
Önder Çelik (École Normale Supérieure)
Decentralization as a possible way of struggling against late capitalism: the case of Turkish Kurdistan
[AUDIO HERE]
Fabian Balardini (CUNY)
Taking Control and moving beyond the ‘extractivist’ model of development: socialist state-owned National Oil Companies and permanent profitability crisis in the global oil industry
[AUDIO HERE]
Panel C – questions.
Chair: Eleni Harlan
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Panel D: Utopian Horizons
Mao Xin (Kings)
Ethically rethinking utopia in the contemporary world – from a Levinasian perspective
[AUDIO HERE]
Michael Kimaid (Bowling Green State)
Toward a Resistance of Commodified Time and Space
[AUDIO HERE]
Andreas Wittel (Nottingham Trent)
Towards a Higher Education Commons
[AUDIO HERE]
Panel D – questions.
Chair: Matt Mahon
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Closing Roundtable
Chair: Alexej Ulbricht
PLAY
Problematising Danger
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Event Date: 21 – 22 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS
Problematising Danger
ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security
Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University
and the Centre for International Relations, Department of War Studies, King’s College London
Download workshop package here
“There is no liberalism without a culture of danger.” (Foucault)
Threats and risks have become the preferred categories for imagining contemporary security. Practices such as defence, border control and the surveillance of populations, insurance, risk profiling to identify suspicious subjects, and risk assessments to protect objects and systems such as critical infrastructure, rely heavily on well-established paradigms of security. Discourses and practices of threats and risks, with their allied technologies of measurement and calculation, however, relate to the wider problem of danger and its allied concept of ‘uncertainty’. Thinking ‘danger’ relates to understandings of uncertainties, otherness of being, and spaces and environments of protection in excess of those accounted for in the language and metrics of discourses of threats and risks.
What happens, then, if the analysis of security resorts to understandings of ‘danger’, ‘dangerousness’, and processes of ‘endangerment’? Is it possible to think security by referring ideas of danger to understandings of life, livelihoods and lifestyles, instead of ready-made ‘objects’ of security such as sovereignty, territory, the nation-state, citizens, borders, and sociological categories such as class and gender? Is it possible to think security in relation to danger away from utilitarian economic categories such as cost-benefit analysis, risk calculus, and rational choice?
The workshop aims to explore these questions and to challenge participants to wonder if current policy security priorities such as terrorism, climate change, weapons proliferation, resilience and migration can be thought in relation to ‘danger’ outside discourses of threats and risks.
In the first three workshops of this seminar series we began to explore an agenda for contemporary biopolitical security research around problems such as mobilities and circulations, resilience, values and processes of valuations in relation to the technologies through which lifestyles and livelihoods are treated as referents of security. In this fourth workshop we intend to spark a conversation around the implications of thinking dangerousness in relation to security and life.
The workshop is based on participants’ work and invites a reflection on the following questions:
- How are ideas of danger constituted? What forms of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ are involved in constituting a dangerous subject or a dangerous environment?
- What are the preconditions for understanding endangerment in and how do they question the ‘new security challenges’ of for example, terrorism (and cyber-terrorism), proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and health pandemics?
- Can discourses and practices of security be different if reflections on the consequences of endangerment are advanced?
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Programme:
MONDAY 21 FEBRUARY
Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Vivienne Jabri – Introduction
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Panel 1 – Ontologisations of Danger
Chair: Martin Coward (Newcastle University)
discussion:
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Panel 2 – Risk managing the dangerousness of terror
Chair: Claudia Aradau (The Open University)
discussion:
PLAY
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Panel 3 – Danger’s Otherness
Chair: Vivienne Jabri
discussion:
PLAY
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Keynote Address:
Professor Marieke de Goede
Networked Danger and Speculative Security (AUDIO HERE)
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TUESDAY 22 February
Panel 4 – Sites, spaces and strategies of endangerment
Chair: Peter Adey
discussion:
PLAY
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Final Roundtable and Conclusions With:
discussion:
PLAY
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David Chandler – The Ontology of Danger:Recasting the Human Subject in Discourses of Vulnerability and Resilience
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Event Date: 21 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS
Problematising Danger
ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security
Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University
David Chandler
University of Westminster
This paper explores how danger has acquired an ontological status taken as a starting assumption in discourses of global insecurity, particularly at the interventionist nexus of policy-making in relation to state failure, conflict and underdevelopment. The key point it makes is that framings of human rationality are held to make us dangerous subjects – permanently subjected to danger – with the solution to vulnerability being the universalising of preventive intervention with the goal of the empowerment and capacity- or capability-building of the subject to enable resilience to, in and through danger. Modern liberal rationality is constructed as making us vulnerable through the hubris of universalizing, linear, teleological views of progress – and the policy interventions reflective of this. Equally, pre-modern frameworks of rationality, reproduced through the path-dependencies of social orders, are held to make us vulnerable through their role in the reproduction of power relations in states making the transition to liberal modernity. In both cases the rationalities of power and knowledge are held to perpetuate danger reproducing both the frailties and vulnerabilities of peoples and ecosystems. The dominant policy-solution of the empowerment, voice and capability-building of those marginalised from power is held to enable social resilience and the management of vulnerabilities. This perspective which accords danger with grounding ontological status is critically engaged with here, through the work of AmartyaSen, new-institutionalist economics and Foucault’s birth of biopolitics, suggesting that the discourse of vulnerability, empowerment and resilience can easily rationalise the status quo and reinterpret social, economic and political problems in therapeutic frameworks, problematically suggesting that work on the self can resolve problems in the absence of any transformation of social relations.
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