Platform1_Documenta11: Selected abstracts
Homi Bhabha
In these past, dark days it has been difficult to draw a line between the outrage and anxiety provoked by terrorist attacks, and the urgent need for some more humane and historical reflection on the tragedy itself. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The appalling images of death, destruction, and daring that invaded our homes on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, left us with no doubt that these unimaginable scenes belonged to a moral universe alien to ours, acts perpetrated by people foreign to the very fibre of our being. But CNN had a sobering tale to tell. While the headline news staggered from one towering inferno to another, the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen interspersed its roll-call of the brave and the dead with lists of Hollywood movies - films that had told a similar story many times before, and new, unreleased movies that were about to tell it again. What was only an action movie last week, turned on Tuesday into acts of war. Same mise-en-sc�ne, different movie.
I have chosen to start with the global genre of the terrorist action film in order to question the widely canvassed cultural assumptions that have come to frame the deadly events. Tuesday's terrorism was a manifestation of a much deeper "clash of civilisations", we were frequently told. One night this week, Benjamin Netanyahu developed this thesis and ended up by placing Israel just off the East Coast of America. The next morning US deputy secretary of defence, Wolfowitz, affirmed wide international support for the US from nations that he described as belonging to the "civilized world" and the "uncivilized world". By returning to CNN's ticker tape of terrorist movies and special effects, we see the futility of framing the event in such a divided and polarised civilizational narrative.
Each of the unimaginable actions we were subjected to on our TV screens on Tuesday has been repeatedly imagined and applauded in movie houses across the country by law-abiding Americans, and successfully exported to other ordinary film-loving folks across the world. The decision to implement terror, whether it is done in the name of god or the state is a political decision, not a civilizational or cultural practice. Ironically, the 'clash of civilizations' is an aggressive discourse often used by totalitarians and terrorists to justify their worst deeds, to induce holy terror and create a debilitating psychosis of persecution amongst oppressed, powerless peoples. When we use the civilizational argument against them, we are, unwittingly perhaps, speaking in the divisive tongue of tyrants. When American foreign and economic policy is conducted in terms of the civilizational divisions of "them" and "us", the nation assumes that hawkish, imperialist aspect that provokes a widespread sense of injustice, indignation and fear.
Once we see terrorism as an organized political action, rather than the expression of cultural or civilizational "difference", we can both fight it and look towards the future. A future that makes common cause between the American victims of terror, and those peoples around the world who are fated to live in countries governed by regimes or organizations that implement such unlawful and inhuman policies. Only those societies that ensure the widest democratic participation and protection for their citizens are in a position to make the deadly difficult decisions that "just" wars demand. To confront the politics of terror, out of a sense of democratic solidarity rather than retaliation, gives us some faint hope for the future. Hope, that we might be able to establish a vision of a global society, informed by civil liberties and human rights, that carries with it the shared obligations and responsibilities of common, collaborative citizenship.
Zhiyuan Cui: 'Machiavelli and the Future of Radical Democracy'
JGA Pocock published his monumental study on the "Atlantic Republican Tradition" in 1975. However, most of the debates triggered by Pocock�s seminal work focused either on the relative importance of liberalism and republicanism or on the difference between humanist and jurist modes of discourse in the early modern time. These debates, though very important in their own right, neglected the potential of republicanism being an institutional alternative to both "capitalism" and "socialism". I propose in this lecture to explore this potential of republican thought for our institutional innovations in the 21st century.
Ernesto Laclau
This talk will concentrate on the relationship between democracy and the constitution of substantive popular identities. It will argue that - against a purely procedural conception of democracy - the construction of a democratic ethos essentially depends on the emergence of popular identities structured around a set of grass-roots demands. These demands are organised according to an equivalential logic and unified around what, in my work, I have called "empty signifiers". A series of conclusions will be derived from this analysis concerning crucial issues of democratic politics in the contemporary world, such as human rights, economic equality and social justice, and levels of democratic participation in what are becoming increasingly heterogeneous political constituencies.
Harbans Mukhia: 'On Democracy as Unity and Plurality'
In some important ways, human history has been a site for the repeated assertion of egalitarian urges, at times manifest in religious, and at others secular ideologies. Examples: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and most recently Marxian socialism. On the other hand, individual acquisitiveness in the context of socialised process of growth and change has resulted in encompassing inequalities.
Clearly then "democracy" has been open to several forms of appropriation. Privileging the Western liberal notion of democracy underscores its triumphal premise, which makes it extremely vulnerable. Its innate ambition of hegemony places it in an interminable conflict with a plurality of patterns of historical development across the globe, each with a legitimate claim to "democracy", and presumes its overarching presence in the ever changing global scenario.
A second problematic: In all history, individual acquisitiveness has been the driving force of change. Is it possible to envisage an alternative to it? Karl Marx did envisage an alternative in the abolition of private property and complete socialisation of production and distribution of wealth. He also visualised technology increasingly displacing human labour, and gradually human intervention altogether, in the process of economic production. While, his latter vision is coming true in some measure, the substitution of the denial of the self for society as motor for production has proved a disaster. Does the experience, however, terminate the search for an alternative to personal acquisition as the guide for economic and social development?
