Monday Night 02.14.11 – Truth & Politics Series — Event 4
Comments Off on Monday Night 02.14.11 – Truth & Politics Series — Event 4Monday Night 02.14.11 – Truth & Politics Series — Event 4
CONTENTS:
1. About this Monday
2. Note for Event 4
3. Documents from Event 3
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1. About this Monday
When: 7.00 pm, Monday 02.14.11
Who: Free and open to all
Where: 16 Beaver Street 4th floor
What: Discussion
This Monday, we would like to invite all who have been interested in our conversations following Michel Foucault’s 1983 lectures entitled ‘Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia’ to join us. It will be the last of the sessions devoted to Foucault’s lectures. This discussion will attempt to look at the entire seminar, focusing particularly on the latter three sections.
The readings can all be found at:
http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/
Below, you will also find another attempt to introduce this series with what is turning out to be a running commentary on the events unfolding around us, as well as a link to some documents from the last event.
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2. Note for Event 4
It is difficult to deny that what we see unfolding in Egypt and the region portends consequences which will leave their imprints for decades to come. If not in material changes, then with dramatic breaks in the imaginary of a region if not the world.
For at least the last 20 years, the world has been held hostage by two dominant forces/discourses: one on the economic front and the other on the military front.
On the economic front, a (neoliberal) discourse held that great wealth awaited any state which would deregulate and privatize the economic sphere, allowing the so-called-free-market to not only solve economic problems, even extreme ones like poverty in the global south (e.g., micro-loans) but also avert ecological catastrophe (e.g., carbon-trading). This discourse was the victor of the cold-war, and its spoils, the former east and west.
On the second front, a discourse considered somehow isolated and not related to the first, though deeply interconnected (even if sometimes contradictory), held that the world is a terribly dangerous place with ‘evil rulers’ like Saddam Hussein (think the first and second Gulf War), uncontrollable zealots, and haters of democracy who stood against the core values of the West (a clash of civilizations …). This military-industrial-complex was also one of the victors of the cold war, but it now had to invent its new enemies, in many cases relying on previous allies.
In both of these discourses, history had ended, the best solutions had been found, and it was only a matter of helping (even if by force) everyone in on the great secret (‘catch up with history!’).
If 2008 signaled the bankruptcy of the neoliberal discourse: after all, only the gains are privatized and the losses remain public/social. Then, 2011 and these recent events signal the decisive fall of the second leg of this dysfunctional machine: what does it mean to base your foreign policy on the premise of introducing and defending democracy, when it is revealed that, in fact, in the face of democratic acts, you respond (at best) with fear and incredulity?
And this is true not only in Egypt or Tunisia, but also in the streets of Athens, Rome, London, Belgrade, Tirana, and beyond.
Among the questions that remain for any of these movements in North Africa or the Middle East, one is whether they will see themselves within the trajectory of a completed history, and they are merely catching up with the present consensus? Or will they see themselves as an alternate path, breaking with the false choices that have been offered up by the political elites of our time?
Where will, for instance, the question of redistribution or the commons or even equality fall among more familiar words like freedom, human rights, and democracy?
In light of such questions, we could say that among other things …
a consideration of discourses on truth, truth-telling, and criticism in the sphere of politics (in the relations between humans, but also in our relations to the world) and their translation into action, speech, and possibly the mobilization of bodies, the creation of new facts (on the ground) becomes important at this juncture.
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3. Documents from Event 3
‘When the letter arrives …’
For those who are interested in the last event and couldn’t join, we are including a link to the video below.
http://www.sduk.us/16beaver/letters
Although the force of the evening and the discussions which preceded and followed the moments included, were possibly richer, we wanted to put some portion online. Our desire to do so, was for them to circulate and hopefully arrive to friends in Egypt, Tunisia and beyond. It is a document of a moment and makes no pretension to be anything more than that.
contributors include:
sylvester, karen, auj, rene,
harout, noah, brian, ayreen,
andrea, mariagiovanna, walid,
emily & daniel, sarah, kerrie,
jesal, silvia & graeme,
redas w/ DAta miners & travailleurs psychique
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