Book : Awaiting stock
1 Pages - Black & White - Published 2012
The State of Things publication will bring together essays coming out from a series of lectures held in Venice in 2011, as part of Norway’s official representation in the 54th edition of the Biennale. The series of lectures aimed to tackle the ‘state of things’ today, drawing from the speaker’ fields of activity and research, and from what they considered the intellectual and political priorities of today. The programme took its cue from the Nansen Passport, created by Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World War I in an attempt to enable refugees to move across borders in search of political and intellectual shelter. Speakers included gender theorist Judith Butler, environmental activist and author Vandana Shiva, media theorist and activist Franco Berardi, art historian T.J. Clark, philosopher Jacques Rancière and architectural theorist Eyal Weizman.
‘The State of Things’ is edited by OCA’s director, Marta Kuzma and OCA’s associate curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London, and will be released in spring 2012.
The State of Things contributions:
Jacques Rancière – In What Time Do We
Live?
The state of things is always a state of time. Issues of domination
and emancipation are encapsulated in some basic questions: in what
time do we live? To what form of historical evolution does our
present belong? What futures does it open? From this point of view,
this paper will analyse the paradigms of temporality that ground
the dominant descriptions of our present, and the ways in which
political action and artistic invention can reframe and disrupt
them.
Leo Bersani – Illegitimacy
'The state creates us by naming us.' These words, which conclude
Pierre Bourdieu's Pascalian Meditations, condense the
lessons of Bourdieu's lifelong work of exposing the hierarchical
classifications by which the social order identifies and
legitimises our social existence. To what degree might an effective
resistance to oppressive social orders depend on our making
ourselves unnamable? And to what extent does this in turn depend on
our refusing to be socially, morally and sexually legitimated by
the networks of power we inescapably inhabit? With references to
Bourdieu, Jean Genet and Todd Haynes's film Safe, this
presentation will attempt to examine strategies of negativity as
pre-conditions for inventing what Michel Foucault called 'new
relational modes'.
Vandana Shiva – The War Against the
Earth
Why does the dominant economic model fail to meet the needs of so
many societies and communities? Why is success measured by economic
growth, so intimately related to increased poverty, hunger and
thirst? As the dominant economy myopically focuses on the working
of the market, it ignores both nature's economy and the sustenance
economy, on which it depends. Not only does the dominant growth
model ignore nature, it is based on a war against the Earth. This
paper will speak about this war, and propose instead manners of
making peace with the Earth through the notion of 'Earth
democracy'. This notion will be articulated through the concrete
practices of Navdanya, the movement for biodiversity conservation
and ecological agriculture. As Navdanya's experience shows,
paradigms and practices that make peace with nature also address
issues of poverty and hunger.
Jan Egeland – Ten Lessons from Ten Peace
Processes
On behalf of the Norwegian Government, the United Nations and
several NGOs, Jan Egeland has been a facilitator or mediator in
numerous peace efforts in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Latin
America. He was part of the team behind the secret Norwegian
Channel between Israel and the PLO that led to the Oslo Accords in
1993, and was involved in the Guatemala Peace Accords in 1996.
Although each war and conflict party is unique, there are some
general lessons that can be drawn from every peace effort for the
benefit of a more effective approach in the future. This lecture
will take such experience as the basis for ten hard-won
lessons.
Fawaz A. Gerges – A Perfect Storm: An Arab
Revolution in the Making?
As the Arab revolutions sweep away autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and
elsewhere, the omnipotence of the Mukhabarat, or
security-controlled state, appears to be crumbling. In particular,
the inability of former President Hosni Mubarak's much-feared
security apparatus to suppress protesters and retain the status quo
signals the beginning of the fall of the Arab authoritarian wall.
Against all odds, millions of Arabs – men and women – have taken to
the streets and called for change and freedom, risking their lives.
Emboldened, protesters are no longer satisfied with minor reforms.
They are demanding substantive political change – restructuring of
closed Arab societies along pluralistic lines. This lecture
addresses the current prospects of a democratisation of the Arab
world, challenging the pretence that Islam and Muslims are
incompatible with democracy.
Eyal Weizman – Forensic Aesthetics
The last decades of the twentieth century, often referred to as
'the era of the witness', were saturated with representation of
testimonies of trauma – written, recorded, filmed archived and
exhibited. This primacy of trauma as a site of history also lead to
a depoliticised 'politics of compassion' apparent in the forums of
transitional justice, truth commissions, human rights and
humanitarianism. However, a recent shift of emphasis from human
testimony to material forensics means that science has begun
invading some of the legal and cultural grounds previously reserved
for the speech of humans. Potentially, therefore, at its most
extreme, new ways of using forensic science have blurred a
previously held distinction: between evidence, when the law speaks
of objects, and that of the witness, referring to subjects. Such
shift has aesthetic, political and ethical implications, dangers
and potentials that will be unpacked in this lecture.
Judith Butler – The Politics of the Street and New
Forms of Alliance
Although some have argued that the politics of the street has been
replaced by new media politics, it seems that the public sphere
within which politics takes place is now defined by a specific mode
of bodies interacting with media. Hannah Arendt once argued that
there could be no exercise of freedom without the creation of a
'space of appearance' and even 'a right to appear'. How do we
understand those new forms of democratic insurgency that form
alliances that are not in coalitional forms? Who is the embodied
'we' on the street transported through media, and yet in place and
at risk?
Franco Berardi – The 'Movimento Studentesco' and
Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Misunderstanding
In 1968 the relation between Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Student
Movement in Italy was a troubled one. In the midst of the
controversy, Pasolini was accused by the students of being a
populist representative of a backward culture, nostalgic of a
legendary pre-modern time. This paper will argue that, from today's
perspective, things seem different, and Pasolini can be understood
not to have been looking to the past but to the distant future that
is now our present: an age characterised by barbarianism and of
ignorant aggressiveness. Today, in the age of the televisual and
financial dictatorship, reading Pasolini is a way to retrace the
genesis of Italy's present.
Saskia Sassen – When the Acute Challenges of Our
Epoch Materialise in Cities
Cities have long been sites for conflicts, including wars, racism,
religious hatred and exclusion of the poor. And yet, while national
states have historically responded by militarising conflict, cities
have tended to triage conflict through commerce and civic activity.
Major developments in the current global era signal that cities are
losing this capacity, and becoming sites for a whole range of new
types of conflicts, such as asymmetric war, urban violence and
acute environmental challenges. Further, the dense and conflictive
spaces of cities, overwhelmed by inequality and injustice, can
become the sites for a variety of secondary, more anomic types of
conflicts, from drug wars to the major environmental disasters
looming in our immediate futures. All of these challenge the
traditional commercial and civic capacity that has allowed cities
to avoid war more often than not, when confronted with conflict,
and to incorporate diversity of class, culture, religion and
ethnicity.
T.J. Clark – The Experience of Defeat
Whether or not the present Restoration is invulnerable, the Left in
advanced capitalist countries has lived for the past two decades
looking failure square in the face. The disappearance of a Left
alternative from the space of politics, or even from the space of
political imagination, remains the great fact of our time. Taking
its title from Christopher Hill's great study of radical writing
after the English Civil War, this lecture is concerned, as part of
that work, with the Left's sense of progress. It asks what it could
mean to a Left politics for it no longer to consider itself 'on the
side of history' – not to imagine its task, in other words, as the
realisation of the baulked potentials of capitalism and/or
modernity, not to see its eventual victory written into the DNA of
an economic order, not to posit some version of utopia, not, in a
word, to 'have the future in its bones'. Is a Left with no future a
contradiction in terms? If not the future, then what? Is it only
the Right that can (imaginatively, politically) dispense with the
myth of freedom in full possession of technics? What aims and
imagery might there be for an 'un-modernity' to come? The public
lectures, given by internationally respected intellectuals,
reflected upon themes such as diversity, Europe, the environment,
peace-making, human rights, capital, sustainability, migration,
asylum, aesthetics and war.
‘The State of Things’ was a programme of public lectures, presented in Venice as part of Norway’s representation for the 54th edition of the Biennale in 2011. The programme begun in the opening days of the Biennale in June 2011, and continued until its closure six months later, in late November. It was organised by OCA and hosted by Venetian cultural and academic institutions, such as the Università Iuav di Venezia, the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia.
‘The State of Things’ has been generously supported by Fritt Ord.
