The Politics of Critique Wednesday 18 July – Thursday 19 July, 2012

Conference Programme Wednesday 18 July 09.30 - 10.00 | Registration

10.00 - 11.00 | Keynote Address | M2 Boardroom | Chair: Birgit Hofstätter

Post-colonial imaginaries in impasse: the Arab revolts and the questions of development, democracy, and identity |Amr Abdelrahman, University of Essex,

UK

11.00 - 11.30 | Tea & Coffee

11.30 - 13.15: Parallel Panel Session 1

Panel 1 | Room: M57 | Chair: Andy Knott

The logic of capitalism and politics without theory | John Glassford, Angelo State University, USA

The criminalisation of protesters: Forward intelligence teams & strategic incapacitation | Ian McKim, University of Glamorgan, UK

Occupy Wall Street and the power of symbolic critique | Colm Whelan, National University of Galway, Ireland & Stephen Hughes, Dublin

City University, Ireland

Panel 2 | Room G4 | Chair: Sam Dallyn

Reading Rancière improperly | Tim Huzar, University of Brighton, UK

Rancière‘s lesson | Ian Sinclair, University of Brighton, UK

Adorno on instrumentalisation and experience | Alice Gibson, University of Brighton, UK

13.15 - 14.00 | Lunch

14.00 - 15.00 | Keynote Address 2 | M2 Boardroom | Chair: Birgit Hofstätter

Against immanent criticism | Gordon Finlayson, University of Sussex, UK

15.00 - 16,15: Parallel Panel Session 2

Panel 3 | Room: M57 | Chair: Ian Sinclair

Disagreeing before acting: On the paradoxical uses of critique today | João Cachopo, New University of Lisbon, Portugal

Who's afraid of populism? Resignifications of patriotism and the ethics of mourning in the context of the Greek crisis|Savvas Voutyras, University of Essex,

UK

CRITICAL STUDIES RESEARCH GROUP

University of Brighton

Panel 4 | Room: G4 | Chair: Doug Elsey

Max Stirner, post-anarchism, and the problem of critique | Nathan Fretwell, University of Essex, UK

The emergence of the other: an inquiry into the nature of liberalism and liberation | Kai Kaululaau, University of Bristol, UK

16.15 - 16.45 | Tea & Coffee

16.45 - 17.45 | Keynote Address | M2 Boardroom | Chair: Andy Knott

Life‘s what you make it: vitalism and critique | Ben Noys, University of Chichester, UK

17.45 | Close of Day

19.30 | Conference Dinner

The Wooden Belly, 32 Egremont Place, BN2 0EH

Thursday 19 July 10.00 - 11.00 | Keynote Address | M2 Boardroom | Chair: Doug Elsey

How to do things with education: the political implications of Wittgensteinian ‗training‘ | Daniel Steuer, University of Brighton, UK

11.00 - 11.30 | Tea & Coffee

11.30 - 13.15 : Parallel Panel Session 3

Panel 5 | Room: M57 | Chair: Toby Lovat

Re-thinking emancipation | Svenja Bromberg, Goldsmiths College, UK

Beyond post-political revision? The politics of critique today | Diana Stypinska, Lancaster University, UK

Philosophy and the conditions of critique: Rorty and the boundaries of the liberal universe |Clayton Chin, Queen Mary, UK

Panel 6 | Room: G4 | Chair: Tim Huzar

Albert Camus and rethinking the meaning of critique for a postfoundational world | Maša Mrovlje, University of St. Andrew‘s, UK

Sophocles‘ Antigone: Protest, resistance, ambiguity | Theodore Koulouris, University of Brighton, UK

The historian as post-colonial critic: Dipesh Chakrabarty and the limits of radical history | Ian Gwinn, University of Liverpool, UK

13.15 - 14.00 | Lunch

14.00 - 15.45: Parallel Panel Session 4

Panel 7 | Room: M57 | Chair: Toby Lovat

Challenging ‗capitalist realism‘: a discourse on Marx‘s method | Samuel Grove, University of Nottingham, UK

Ideology and reflexivity: the role of naming in constructing social realities | Sam Dallyn, University of Swansea, UK

Aesthetics, ethics and the realisation of philosophy in the work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International | Tom Bunyard,

Independent Scholar, UK

Panel 8 | Room: G4 | Chair: Doug Elsey

Heterotopie and political action | Alejandro Garcia, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Between reform and operative criticism: architectural crisis | Alejenda Celedon, Architectural Association School of Architecture, UK

Critiquing remembrance and problematising memory: the urgency of theoretical practice | Stefanie Petschick, University of Nottingham, UK

15.45 - 16.15 | Tea & Coffee

16.15 -17.45 | Plenary Session | M2 Boardroom | Chair: Ian Sinclair

Rethinking the limits of radical democracy today

Alan Finlayson, University of East Anglia, UK

Mark Wenman, University of Nottingham, UK

Mark Devenney, University of Brighton, UK

The Politics of Critique

Wednesday 18 July – Thursday 19 July 2012

Conference Abstracts

Svenja Bromberg | Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

Re-thinking emancipation

The thesis of my paper is that any politics of critique today needs a concept of emancipation that enables as well as forces us to think the possibility of living our life

differently and therefore goes beyond critiquing existing forms of domination and alienation. French Post-Marxist thinkers like Badiou and Rancière evoke the notion of

emancipation by linking it to equality, whereas Balibar ties it to equaliberty. On the other hand, contemporary Frankfurt School theorists, most prominently Axel Honneth,

put forward an understanding of emancipation as successful recognition of the individual by the world he or she inhabits that is linked to an immanent form of critique,

rather than to yet another universal. It becomes obvious that the notion of emancipation is much less well-defined than related notions of equality or freedom and that its

import to continental philosophy – despite its increasing prominence not least because of the aforementioned thinkers as well as the emancipatory movements we have

witnessed in recent years – remains vague and unclear, especially since the Marxian anchor point of an alienated human essence has been sufficiently deconstructed by post-

structuralism. What I aim to do in this paper is therefore to revisit the origins of the notion of emancipation in a genealogical manner and to trace how much of its linkage to

slavery and of its conception in the early Marx are retained in the understanding of these contemporary thinkers. This then allows for a perspective on that which a

genealogical examination of the notion itself does not explain in their different uses and a final speculation about what we might gain from further investigations into each

thinker‘s notion and the development of a more coherent concept of emancipation within continental philosophy that is tied to the contemporary conjuncture.

Tom Bunyard | Independent Scholar, UK

Aesthetics, ethics and the realisation of philosophy in the work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International

Contrary to what seems at times to be popular belief, Debord‘s The Society of the Spectacle is not an elaborate diatribe about the mass media, but rather a book about

history; or more accurately, a description of a society characterised by an alienated relation to the construction of its own history. The book contains no less than two, much

neglected chapters on time, plus a third on the connection between historical agency and radical politics, and its overall argument presents, as Debord once remarked,

‗historical time‘ as both the ‗milieu and goal‘ of the revolutionary project (1). This paper will argue that the notions of temporality and agency that underlie these concerns

provide a means of viewing Debord‘s oeuvre holistically, and that doing so can provide a degree of access to the interpretation of Hegelian Marxism that supported his work.

By extension, this approach can also be used to address the aesthetic and tacitly ethical dimensions of his thought, and in order to pursue that possibility the paper will use

the former to consider the theory of spectacle‘s limitations as an account of capitalist social relations, and the latter to highlight the ways in which its political problematic

recasts Young Hegelian concerns pertaining to the famed ‗realisation of philosophy‘ within a modern context (Debord: ‗we have still not resolved the principle problems‘ that

the ‗old comrades [of the 19th Century] put on the agenda‘, (2)). These issues will be framed by way of a discussion of Debord and the S.I.‘s views on councilist organisation;

an aspect of their work that has received a great deal of criticism in recent years, but which can be seen to imply something akin to an existential ethics, i.e. the advocacy of

an effectively ethical ground for the collective praxis that was to supersede the ‗paralysed history‘ (3) of the spectacle.

(1) Debord, Guy, 2004, letter to the Italian section of the S.I. (27th May, 1969), in Correspondance Volume 4: Janvier 1969 – Décembre 1972, Ligugé: Libraire Arthème Fayard

(2) Debord, Guy, 2005, Letter to Jaap Kloosterman (27th August 1973), in Correspondance Volume 5 : Janvier 1973 – Décembre 1978, Ligugé: Libraire Arthème Fayard

(3) Debord, Guy, 1995, The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, New York, p.114; Debord, Guy, 2006, Oeuvres, Gallimard, Malesherbes, p.834

CRITICAL STUDIES RESEARCH GROUP

University of Brighton, UK

João Pedro Cachopo | New University of Lisbon, Portugal

Disagreeing before acting: On the paradoxical uses of critique today

We are bound to realize, as we look back to the past without losing sight of the present, that questioning critique, in both theoretical and practical terms, inevitably amounts

to facing a heterogeneous range of philosophical and political stances that ultimately breaches the alleged unity of the concept. This apparently anodyne indication, however,

might lead us to a crucial hypothesis about the politics of critique: that disagreement lies at the heart of the concept of critique and determines its uses through and through.

We might remember, as point of departure, that Habermas blamed Adorno (along with Foucault) for carrying out a paradoxical ―totalization of critique‖, thus compromising

its normative foundations...

My presentation shall begin with a very brief revision of that polemics in order to positively reassess the notion of a paradoxical use of critique and to bring it together with

the concept of ―disagreement‖ (Rancière), in polemics with those of ―differend‖ (Lyotard) and ―consensus‖ (Habermas). Rather than a flaw, a paradox would be a means of

critique, as it discursively unfolds in order to break generalized consensus, and foster scenes of disagreement in which politics takes place.

From this perspective, and considering the question of how theory imbricates with or becomes practice (the question of the politics of critique), I shall develop the inquiry one

step further, placing it against the background of the recent crisis-driven proliferation of protesting activity (from the occupy movement to the experience of urban riots), to

respond to the current urge to think the articulation of theory and practice far beyond the procrustean bed of a normative critique. One major, twofold question arises: how

could a paradoxical use of critique provide us with a theoretical-practical tool in order both to counter the legal neutralization (e.g. through criminalization) of critical

practices, and inspire – rather than prescribe – new, still untried ones?

Alejandra Celedon | Architectural Association School of Architecture, UK

Between reform and operative criticism: architectural krisis

The idea of ‗critique‘ was central to the project of the Enlightenment as a way to justify the use of reason itself in terms of the distinction of its public and private uses. The

word shares the same etymological root than ‗crisis‘, from the Greek krino (to separate, to choose, to judge, to decide, and also to quarrel, to fight). Krisis (κρίση) meant a

decision, a judgement, and above all a turning point: a crucial moment that would impose choices between blatant alternatives—right or wrong, life or death. Crisis becomes

a supreme signature of modernity. Critique, in these terms, refers to an action of separation whose aim is not only a reform to the status quo, but to an action able to trigger

stark change. This paper sets forth the argument that this is the true potential of criticism (kritik) which has been postponed in architecture either since ‗reform‘ has been

prioritized against ‗revolution‘ (exemplified by Le Corbusier‘s aphorism ‗Architecture or Revolution‘), or because criticism has become instrumental rationality (discussed

through Tafuri‘s operative criticism1). The legacies of the Enlightenment point out a tension within the notion of critique and its political agency, yet criticism in architecture

has been a victim of its ‗ostensible neutrality‘. Criticism, in this way, never ceases from holding certain revolutionary political potential, but in modernity it has been adapted

not as a tool for revolution, but as an ideological tool and a device for reform. Emancipatory promises of freedom from ideologies have proved to fail; consciousness has reified

itself in dogmatisms and reductionisms, yet, as Koselleck has discussed ‗crisis lies hidden in criticism‘ and it is a ‗permanent possibility in history‘. The answer might be that

it is Critique indeed -of reason, of knowledge, of judgement, of society- what allows us to constitute as free driven subjects, but subjects in which the world, as object, is

constituted.

Clayton Chin | Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Philosophy and the conditions of critique: Rorty and the boundaries of the liberal universe

A consideration of the conditions of political thinking is fundamental to the question of the politics of critique. What are the intellectual (epistemic, ontological, etc.) and

political limits of thinking today? How do these constrain our critical thinking about contemporary political issues? Finally, what is the role (and capability) of philosophical

thought in critically analyzing these barriers, especially in an economic and political crisis that is both increasingly polarized and rooted in practical political movements? In

order to begin addressing such broad questions, this paper will narrow its focus to a critical reading of a particular, liberal limitation of critical, philosophical thinking.

Following the critique of Western metaphysical thinking, Richard Rorty offered a social and pragmatic justification of liberal political institutions and culture; one that I will

argue is intuitively connected to a lot of contemporary, mainstream political discourse. For Rorty, in the absence of philosophical foundations, our thinking must be

acknowledged as rooted solely within its social, linguistic, and historical context. With our thinking so grounded, shifts can only occur at the rate at which our language and

social practices change. Much like the contemporary language of non-ideological problem-solving, politics, for Rorty, must be similarly gradual and piecemeal. It must be a

formalization of how social changes actually occur. Consequently, the scope of critique diminishes and the role of theory changes. The former must be circumscribed to small

reformist movements that do not fundamentally depart from the liberal paradigm while the latter must be narrative and positive. They must celebrate the present in order

to reform it. This paper will use Rorty as a critical object to question our assumptions about the grounds of our decisions and about how change occurs in politics. It will

argue that a certain set of philosophical assumptions and dispositions can serve to limit the extent of political critique. Many modern protest movements run up against the

barrier that they seek to change ―too much, too fast.‖ This paper will argue that this opposition to ―revolutionary‖ forms of political critique has intellectual, as well as

political, origins. Rorty is intuitively connected to many of these mainstream assumptions about politics today. This paper will use his work as a site of critique in order to

challenge some of the assumptions that limit both our critiques and our politics within the contemporary crisis.

Sam Dallyn | Swansea University, UK

Ideology and reflexivity: The role of naming in constructing social realities

In this paper I draw out some key tensions around the concept of ideology in social theory and explore how a different theorisation of the concept might overcome these

challenges. The key problem I point to is that researchers, when using the term ideology, have tended to avoid the key question: What is the ideological status of your own

views? I argue that the researcher‘s role in characterising social realities is neglected in much of the existing research employing ideology. By drawing out and making

explicit the researcher‘s role in naming a practice as ideological, I argue that we can develop a more consistent, reflexive and critically attuned notion of the ideological. I

situate the neglect of the position of the researcher in existing critical conceptions of ideology as stemming largely from the ultimately unsustainable distinction between

ideology and science within the Marxist dominant ideology thesis. Drawing out how the position of the researcher is neglected in many existing accounts of ideology, I argue

that this has led to a static bipolar separation which has been a barrier to thinking about the role of the researcher as an embedded and engaged political subject. As an

alternative I develop a reflexive conception of ideology, in which the researcher is explicit in situating their own ideological position when they name the ideological. This in

turn leads to a more politically engaged conception of the researcher as social theorist in which the political stakes of one‘s analysis are rendered explicit. I draw on what I

describe as the coercive ideology of capitalist welfare regulation that characterise UK Job Centres as an illustrative example to show how a reflexive conception of ideology

can be applied to existing organizations and society as a critical tool.

Nathan Fretwell | University of Essex, UK

Stirner, post-anarchism, and the problem of critique

Of all political ideologies few have been quite as maligned or misrepresented in popular culture as that of anarchism. And yet despite this, despite having long been unjustly

vilified and relegated to the margins of political discourse, recent years have witnessed a veritable upsurge of interest in, and attention to, anarchism as a viable force for

social change. A revival intimately connected with the emergence of the anti-capitalist or alter-globalisation movement. Situated squarely within the context of this ‗new‘

anarchism, as David Graeber and others have called it, this paper concentrates on one aspect of this resurgence in particular, an aspect that has proved as controversial as it

has innovative. What I have in mind, here, is the ‗postanarchist turn‘ that is purported to have taken place within anarchist theory and the emergence of postanarchism as a

distinct trend within political philosophy.

There is one problematic feature of the postanarchist turn, in particular, that I draw attention to: the difficulty it has in providing an adequate theoretical basis for political

critique from within the confines of the poststructuralist philosophy from which it ostensibly takes its cue. By following in the footsteps of the poststructuralists and

abandoning humanism, in this case the humanism of so-called ‗classical anarchism‘, the postanarchists, I contend, put their own project at risk, by depriving themselves of

the normative ground on which their critique of authority and power might be anchored. Postanarchism only preserves its status as a radical political critique, I argue, by

appealing to an alternate account of subjectivity as the normative hinge from whence power can be resisted; one exemplified in Max Stirner‘s figure of the Unique One. In

doing so, however, the postanarchists overstep the limits they set themselves with their use of the prefix ‗post‘, by trading on a notion of the self-positing, self-creating subject

that has much more in common with Sartrean existentialism than it does with the anti-subjectivism that marks the high period of poststructuralism.

Alejandro Garcia | Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Heterotopie and political action: A case study about the cultural centre Piso Tres in Bogotá

This paper looks at the relationship between aesthetics and political action through a case study set in Colombia‘s capital, Bogotá: a cultural centre called Piso tres. Despite

some misinformation about its activities, Piso tres used to be ―a space dedicated to young people, their expressions and the spreading of their proposals and projects [...] that

intended to build change in hegemonic social relationships and social values‖. (1)

I argue that Piso Tres was a cultural centre concerned with the transformation of social relationships through the setting of an heterotopie (2) which enabled them to

redefine the boundaries that divide audible discourses from non-audible ones, allowed practices from prohibited practices, persons who are taken into account and those who

are rejected. Piso Tres‘ political activity might present a interesting example of political action outside the logic of institutional recognition and beyond the dichotomy of

revolution and reform.

In first place I will outline the different perspectives on the cultural centre of people in contact with its activities. In second place I will focus on the cultural centre‘s core

group of activists in order to show how they consider State institution incapable of resolving an issue of most importance: social exclusion. Later, I will go over Foucault‘s

concept of heterotopie so we can understand that Piso tres started to become a strategy to overcome social exclusion, which ended up creating its own margins. Finally I will

demonstrate the ways this kind of political action can be understood as a constant struggle against the limits that configure what Jacques Rancière calls the ―partition of the

sensible‖ (3); the sensible limits of a particular aesthetic-political regime.

(1) Gómez, Federico y Vargas, Liliana (2007). ―Nuestra Memoria‖. Bogotá: (unpublished). My own translation.

(2) Foucault, Michel (1967) ―Of space others‖. 09 of April. 2012. http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html

(3) Rancière, Jacques ―(1998). Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy‖ New York. Continuum.

Alice Gibson | University of Brighton, UK

Adorno on instrumentalisation and experience

TBA

John Glassford | Angelo State University, USA

The logic of capitalism and politics without theory

The apparently spontaneous Tea Party ―movement‖ which arose in reaction to the 2008 victory of Barack Obama in 2008 put nearly 30 tea party freshmen into the 2010

Congress. The effect was immediate; a pro-corporate legislation program gathered pace while the brakes were applied to the mildly anti-corporate legislative initiatives of the

Obama administration. Studies of the so-called disappearing moderate middle of the American electoral battleground have noted the further drift to the right of the

Republican Party despite the near complete collapse of the financial sector in September-November 2008.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, on the other hand, showed no indication of having a similar impact on the development of the organized political left. Within months of

the original occupation in Zucotti Park, the protests spread to dozens of cities in the U.S. and then to cities in other countries. The occupy protests certainly kept ―corporate

capitalism‖ in the headlines. Advocates of neo-liberal programs squirmed uncomfortably in news broadcasts all over the world. Never-the-less, it wasn‘t long before the

occupy protests were swept away by city ordinances and by robocops armed with tear gas and pepper spray. This direct repression only seemed to confirm to those on the left

what they already wanted to believe, that the protests were a genuine and effective anti-capitalist protest movement.

In this paper I will question this apparent dialectic of opposition between left and right in civil society. I will suggest that the occupy movement only served to legitimate an

imagined middle-ground of ―decency‖ that inherently served the logic of capitalism that it sought to question. As Žižek has suggested the ethical foundation of politics often

eventually produces its own comic caricature as Other (London Review of Books, Oct, 1999). Ultimately this strategic weakness of the occupy movement was a reflection of its

inability to articulate its own space and thus confront the ideological fantasy of the ―decent‖ middle rather than any failure to fully comprehend the practical difficulties of

protesting against corporate plundering.

Samuel Grove | University of Nottingham, UK

Challenging ‗capitalist realism‘: A discourse on Marx‘s method

The last ten years has seen various challenges to the era of neoliberalism, yet these cracks have only been partially realised at the realm of the discursive. At the discursive

level we are still stuck in the quagmire of what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher has called 'capitalist realism'--an ideological malaise in which it is 'easier to imagine the

end of the world than the end of capitalism' (Frederic Jameson). There is nothing particularly new about the essence of this assumption. In the original hey-day of liberal

economics the discipline of 'economic science' carried with it similar assumptions regarding the natural inevitability of capitalism. What is perhaps unique to this era, is that

with the renowned failure of scientific Marxist socialist regimes to deliver on their promise long before their actual collapse in 1989, it is more difficult to imagine an

alternative to capitalism. My engagement with Marx's method is designed to provide answers to both these problems; the problem of the apparent naturalness of capitalism

on the one hand, and the impossibility of alternatives on the other.

Marx's Capital should be primarily understood as a critique of 'classical liberal economy'. Marx sought to show how not only was it flawed scientifically (it failed to capture

how the system actually operates) and ideologically (it was more interested in serving the interests of capital) but that underlying this artifice was the truth that the system

was a product of man-made institutions, sustained by class exploitation.

Marx‘s emphasis on the contingency of the system gives us a clue as to how we should approach the second question. Marx positively eschews the idea that economics is

amenable to traditional ‗scientific‘ analysis which roots human history in universal laws beyond human agency. Such laws, he argues, are always amenable to corruption and

co-option by the State. Instead he proposes a different sort of universalism than the one proposed by ‗science‘. The universalism of equality and the faith in collective

emancipation.

Ian Gwinn | University of Liverpool, UK

The historian as post-colonial critic: Dipesh Chakrabarty and the limits of radical history

History has proved to be an enduring basis from which to critique present-day inequalities, injustices, and systems of oppression, giving the lie to the assumption that the

current state of affairs is permanent and immutable and to the pessimism that believes that things cannot change. Whether in the form of materialist histories of the

working class, women, and other subordinate groups, or in post-structuralist historical analyses of the formation of subjectivities, concepts and problems, this use of history

as a form of radical or left critique has tried to expose the silences and absences in the official record, and unmask the workings of exploitation and power. Yet today, amidst

the increasing fragmentation of research, the routinizing of critical ideas, and the professionalisation of academic life, it is perhaps harder to envisage how historians might

continue to perform this function than in the past and one wonders whether it is still possible to write history in a critical and radical fashion.

Against this background, this paper considers Dipesh Chakrabarty‘s contribution to debates in historiography and his attempts to wrestle with contemporary political and

intellectual challenges in order to reanimate the critical possibilities of history. A foremost practitioner of postcolonial studies (and member of the Subaltern Studies

collective), his interventions have provided original and critical insights into the dilemmas of Western historiography and political thought. Here I examine several important

strands of Chakrabarty‘s thought, including the connections between history and postcolonial theory, and history and identity politics, as well as his critique of Marxist

‗history from below‘ and the politics of knowledge and academic disciplines. Finally, I consider how Chakbrabarty‘s work may help to clarify the kind of critical role history

can play in the process of rethinking the possibilities of resistance and opposition in the present.

Tim Huzar | University of Brighton, UK

Reading Rancière improperly

This paper analyses what it means to describe Jacques Rancière's work as "improper" (Devenney 2011: 162) and, through a criticism of Gabriel Rockhill, argues that it is only

by taking seriously Rancière's commitment to polemical intervention that the significance of his impropriety can be realised.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Rancière's academic career is his unswerving commitment to polemical intervention. However, too often this commitment is glossed

over, seen as a quaint (perhaps even praiseworthy) methodology but ultimately distinct (and even a distraction) from Rancière's 'proper' political theory, as exemplified by

Rockhill's criticism of Rancière's understanding of democracy (2009: 203-205). However, as Mark Devenney has recently noted, Rancière's political theory is precisely not

proper but rather "improper" (2011: 162). Further, I would argue that this impropriety is not simply at work within Rancière's political theory: instead, Rancière's theory

itself should be understood as improper; as being a form of "trespass" (Devenney 2011: 160) within contemporary intellectual enquiry precisely because his theory is at the

same time a polemical intervention.

Devenney, Mark (2011), 'Property, Propriety and Democracy', Studies in Social Justice, Vol. 5, Iss. 2.

Rockhill, Gabriel (2009), 'The Politics of Aesthetics: History and the Hermeneutics of Art', in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Kai Kaululaau | University of Bristol, UK

Emergence of the other: An inquiry into the nature of liberalism and the philosophy of liberation

In creating entities analogous to the "great powers" of First Nations - neoliberal philosophy and its centre based ideology has largely contributed to the justification of

colonialism, globalization, cultural and ethnic eradication, as well as continued land encroachment. My endeavour is to stimulate a critical perspective on the neoliberal

theoretical frames of political philosophy; frames of thought that has largely dominated and affected the legislative, economic, social and political ideology concerning

marginalized groups from past to present day. For those who continue to occupy space in the marginal, it is crucial to understand the centre based ideologies - its strategies

and tactics used to manifest, enforce and justify their continued economic and regional ascendency on other nations throughout the world.

This presentation will attempt to render an inquiry of the political economy as it relates to: (1) the dynamics of "growth and expansion" concerning land, property and

territories; (2) labour and development theories of the social structure; (3) "economic salience" or "feasibility" and the political dynamics of human rights; (4) the role of

economic and political policy on both the domestic and international level. As such, this study will attempt to employ alternative conceptual structures of political philosophy

that incorporate a historically materialism as well as an ontological base in order to depict the internal and external complexities of political environments. Such alternative

conceptual frameworks seek to create a meaning to political philosophy that is not caprice or naively content-based - but rather, illustrate both epistemological and

ontological underpinnings. The epistemological foundation of this study can be defined as a critical realism that motivates progressive social change; its ontology is

determined by a network approach that interconnects various socio-economic and political syntax of organization and the philosophy of liberation - or, economics of liberation

philosophy.

Theo Koulouris | University of Brighton, UK

Sophocles‘ Antigone: Protest, Resistance, Ambiguity

The Antigone is play about a sister who, in burying her dead brother in defiance of the royal decree, transcends her former identity as a royal daughter and future queen, to

enter into what Howard Caygill defines as ‗resistant subjectivity‘. That said, the play is not only about defiance, protest and resistance; it is also a play about ambiguity, both

in terms of the heroine‘s relationship with the ruling elite of Thebes and, and perhaps more importantly, in terms of her conceptualisation of her own identity: as a sister, as a

woman and as a ‗citizen‘. The legend of Antigone has occupied the thought of philosophers from Hegel and Kierkegaard to Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva and Judith Butler; it has

been adapted, revisited and reworked, for various stages and audiences, by the likes of Carl Orff, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Annuilh and Seamus Heaney; and it has constituted a

central inspirational reference for authors such as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. In this paper, I expand on feminist readings of the play and endeavour to draw a direct

parallel between Antigone as a ‗political agent‘ and the widespread movements of resistance in austerity-ridden Greece of 2012. In doing so, I invoke theoretical approaches

to the notions of ‗the state‘, ‗protest‘ and ‗resistance‘; I also explore the concept of ambiguity which since Aristotle's Politics has underpinned the concept of ‗democracy‘ and its

implied covenant with citizenship and the citizen as a continuous agent of resistance.

Ian McKim | University of Glamorgan, UK

The criminalisation of protesters: Forward Intelligence Teams and strategic incapacitation

Since the G20 protest in London in April 2009, the suspected manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson, the visual exposure of policing tactics through citizen journalism and further

protests, a debate has unfolded in relation to public order policing. There have been calls for a closer examination of the politics of public order policing and tactics used. As a

result of G20 and the death of Ian Tomlinson Her Majesty‘s Chief Inspector of Constabulary produced a report ‗Adapting to Protest: Nurturing the British Model of Policing‘

(2009b), which put forward a number of recommendations. However, at the heart of the HMIC report lie a number of contradictions in terms of the so called ‗British model of

policing‘, particularly in relation to ‗policing by consent‘. This paper sets out to examine an aspect of this, namely, ‗Forward Intelligence Teams‘ and the escalating strategic

incapacitation of political protesters on the left.

Forward Intelligence Teams are used as part of the intelligence arm of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). They monitor individuals/groups and provide

data on what they perceive to be potential actuarial risk; this then forms part of the intelligence product for National Public Order Intelligence Unit and the National

Coordinator for Domestic Extremism (NCDE). Critically, the ‗intelligence product‘ which Forward Intelligence Teams generate through photographic and personal data in

terms of criminal intelligence reports have resulted in individuals being labelled ‗domestic extremists‘; a term that has no legal foundation.

This paper will set out the context of policing public order, in order to provide a framework for analysing the strategy of the police towards the new generation of

demonstrators and activists, before relating this to the role of police intelligence. It is argued that the expansion of police intelligence on activists fits in with the models of

net widening and mission creep in political surveillance first identified by criminologists and sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed the role of police intelligence,

particularly Forward Intelligence Teams will be situated within debates about the state, protest, public order, identification and criminalisation of those on the political left

within the context of classifying individuals/groups as ‗domestic extremists‘. In a post 9/11 landscape of ‗security panic‘ conflating domestic extremism with terrorism raises a

number of ethical questions. Indeed it questions the blurring of the ‗war on terror‘ agenda with political activism; it further highlights the reconfiguration of public order

policing over the past decade and the principle of ‗policing by consent‘.

Maša Mrovlje | University of St. Andrew‘s, UK

Albert Camus and rethinking the meaning of critique for a postfoundational world: creating in the gap between past and future

This paper argues that under the shadow of the still lingering crisis of modernity and in light of sweeping local and global transformations in recent decades contemporary

critical thinking once again finds itself in the gap between a past of injustice and the promise of a better future that can no longer be securely bridged by either moral or

historical standards of judgement. Nevertheless, the reality of this gap has too often been disregarded by teleological interpretations and judgements of either idealist or

realist, modernist or postmodernist kind, which risks obscuring the full import of rebellious politics as well as its present possibilities. To illuminate this challenge and

rethink the meaning of critique in contemporary world, this paper proposes a turn to the work of Albert Camus, who, in response to the crisis of his time, replaced teleological

logic by an 'artistic sensitivity' and conceptualized rebellion in distinctly temporal, existential terms as the expression of the inherent dignity of human existence. This

amounted to a critical thinking that constantly negotiates the gap between past and future by striving to rebel against injustice and to preserve the memory of past wrongs,

without foreclosing the possibility of a common future, beyond the stale divide between victims and executioners. In this way, it does not seek to provide a blueprint for

political action nor explain it away or justify it by appealing to some external standard, but judges every action in its particularity, mindful of the potentialities as well as

risks inherent in human freedom, and, on this basis, offers more space to create new possibilities for resisting oppression, weaving bonds of solidarity, and disclosing grounds

for meaningful dialogue. As such, it is argued, it envisions a promising way to reinvigorate critique for our postfoundational world of plurality, contingency and change in

general, and for societies currently on the brink of democratic change in particular.

Stefanie Petschick | University of Nottingham, UK

Critiquing remembrance and problematising memory: The urgency of theoretical practice

The quandaries that critical thought is currently faced with are to a large extent already contained in Marx‘s dictum about philosophy‘s task being not only to interpret the

world but to change it. The subsequent and on-going debate that problematizes the theory/practice binary to this very day is made all the more pressing and urgent in the

context of contemporary politics which are producing various forms of precarity continually and in the most mundane but radical ways . The urgency of the multiple lived

experiences of precarity, induced by current politics, once again forces the theoretically inclined academic to not only investigate the political status quo and to analyse their

own positionality and investment in it, but to also problematize both and thus politicise and radicalise their critique. An implication to face the question about the

theory/practice binary contemporarily follows. So what are current incarnations of the problems of critique and the problem of viewing the engagement with theory as a form

of practice – a theoretical practice? Is the insistence on critique in the face of this urgency hindrance or perhaps political necessity?

This paper approaches the problems of the position of critique by considering the United Kingdom‘s involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and thus is looking at

one particular context of the production of precarity in the last decade. It is using Judith Butler‘s work on ethics and the concept of frames of war. By applying her theory in

the context of the practices of soldier commemoration in the United Kingdom this paper seeks to do two things. On the one hand it is addressing practices of war

remembrance and its politically reactionary function, and, on the other hand, it is also speaking to a movement within theoretical discourses that developed around the

concept of memory and similarly functions as a reactionary force in being a conservative response to the challenges of poststructuralist thought and politics. Thus, by

addressing contemporary and urgent political problematics of theory and practice this paper is insisting on the necessity for the theoretical practice of critique as part of a

radical challenge to the status quo.

Ian Sinclair | University of Brighton, UK

Rancière‘s lesson

In this paper I explore Rancière‘s theorisation of politics with specific reference to his earliest works, Althusser‘s Lesson and On the Theory of Ideology, in which he criticises

Althusserian Marxism. Although no specific theory of politics is offered in either work, certain implications can be drawn out from the texts and Rancière‘s own reflections

offered as part of recent English translation. I take specific issue with his criticism of Althusser‘s distinction between ‗science‘ and ‗ideology‘. Here, Rancière argues that the

two cannot be conceived as an opposition because the knowledge offered by science is always already deployed in the service of a (dominant) ideology. Whilst recognising that,

contra Althusser, ideology does not exist as a neutral sociological fact but as a class-specific representation, there is a risk that, in turn, science is reduced to an object of

ideological conflict. Furthermore, I suggest that these issues remain in Rancière‘s more sustained political works, with Disagreement the most instructive in this regard.

Indeed, I take him at his word when he suggests that Althusser‘s Lesson displays a concern with themes that would continue to influence his thought. But for this reason I

suggest that issues within these later works can be indicated with reference to his earliest polemics.

Diana Stypinska | Lancaster University, UK

Beyond post-political revision? The politics of critique today

This paper focuses on critique as a central concept in social and political thought, taking as a point of departure a contemporary paradox. There is a plethora of critique in

social thought. Indeed, one could even speak of a ‗culture of critique‘ – everything, every theory and every theorist is subject to constant critique. At the same time, however,

it is equally difficult to see traces of radical critique – critique seems to have become emptied-out, formalized and routinized. I think this paradoxical coincidence – too much

and too little critique – points not only to a lack of critical theory, as such, but also, as Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) suggest, a lack of a theory of critique.

Thus, this paper draws on the theoretical foundations of the concept of critique from Kant onwards in order to re-articulate its contemporary paradox with a reference to its

genealogy and current modality of revision. It argues that a study of an episteme of today's critique is paramount to gaining a clearer understanding of its (post)political

dispositions. It proposes that this conceptual investigation opens up the possibility for reclaiming the untimely promise of critique – that of political emancipation. In this, it

returns to the origins of critique as a concept and asks whether its theoretical framework requires rejuvenation or whether, indeed, this paradox and crisis of critique are

symptomatic of a wider social problem which cannot be resolved by means of critique alone.

Savvas Voutyras | University of Essex, UK

Who's afraid of populism? Resignifications of patriotism and the ethics of mourning in the context of the Greek crisis

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the variety of political responses to the on-going Greek crisis and the different possibilities they made visible. More particularly, I am

interested in the re-emergence and re-significations of national identity vis-à-vis the crisis and the ways in which the latter has been articulated in hegemonic struggles

between competing responses to the crisis. This is something that I intend to do in three steps. First, I focus on the vocabulary that was used for ‗framing‘ the crisis. What is

most important here is the re-emergence of the notions of ‗the nation‘, ‗the motherland‘ and ‗the people‘ as key concepts in shaping the crisis and its public perception as well

as the government policy and measures. I want to show how this vocabulary and its acceptance by actors brought a shift in the political game and enabled the emergence of a

populist type of politics that is, a battle for the production of the ‗people‘. Second, I discuss the affective dimensions that different camps invested their discourses with. I

identify a theme of ‗loss‘ as an important element around which these affects emerge and are played out. By closely looking at these affects and the way they are channelled

around this theme of loss I am rethinking the psychoanalytic categories of mourning and melancholia as different ways of coping with loss that I associate respectively with

the ability or the inability to act. Last, I attempt to move into the realm of ethical critique. What is discussed here is a potential threat in populism which has to do with its

inherent ‗excess‘ and its modes of affective investment. I propose the category of ressentiment as key here for making the necessary distinctions between ethical and non-

ethical responses to the crisis based on the modality of national identifications involved in the various populist discourses.

Colm Whelan | National University of Ireland, Galway

Stephen Hughes | Dublin City University, Ireland

Occupy Wall Street and the power of symbolic critique

The aim of this paper is to discuss the symbolic-discursive power of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The power of this movement works on two levels; its actual

physical presence, which is spatial and temporal, and its symbolic presence, embedded in a cultural network of meaning that is supported by mediated forms like the

internet. The OWS movement embodies a unique form of critique in that its physical presence is secondary to its symbolic presence, but more importantly, as a form of

critique it has the power to set its own agenda and to force other forms of mass media to engage with the discourse of opposition. Drawing from Baudrillard, this paper will

show how OWS uses symbolic critique to short circuit the assumed reality of the system (mass media and the maintenance of capitalist realism), inverting the balances and

orientations of discourse so that the system is forced to attack itself according to its own laws of opposition. At first the mass media ignored OWS, it was not real; but they

could not ignore its growing online presence. Recognising the movement now thrust the system into the realm of the symbolic, confusing its position in the real. As such, the

system‘s violent police response became unstable, no longer fully grounded in the real - the system started to misrecognise itself as the threatening symbolic. Hence we have

the mass media reporting on police brutality. The symbolic critique of OWS has forced the system to misrecognise itself as Other; displayed as their own threat. The media

were seen to attack the status quo by appearing to support OWS (and condemn police brutality) and show that the symbolic power of the law is just that, symbolic and

malleable.