Cosmopolitical PerplexitiesSpeculative and Pragmatic Tests for Changing ClimatesJensen, Casper Bruun
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-9809137
Over the last decade, the Anthropocene has overrun the discourses of the humanities and social sciences. Remarkably, two of the most astute commentators, the cross‐disciplinary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith and the unorthodox philosopher Isabelle Stengers, find inspiration for grappling with these issues in the same apparently odd place: the work of the Polish microbiologist and comparative epistemologist Ludwik Fleck. The first part of this essay explores the role of Fleck's radical constructivism in Smith's analyses of perplexing Anthropocene realities and Stengers's arguments for slowing down science and learning to “compose with Gaia.” In conjunction, they generate a pattern of speculative, conceptual, practical, and political motifs for dealing with changing climates. The second half of the essay uses those insights to test a divergent series of proposals for how to conceive science, politics, theory, and environmental relations in the Anthropocene.
Keeping Quiet in Tove Jansson's Fair PlayYamaguchi, Liesl
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-9809151
As a follow‐up to the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism” (15:1 to 16:3), this guest column asks what it means to say nothing. Strictly speaking, to “say nothing” is a contradiction in terms (unless, of course, one says “Nothing,” which is another thing entirely and generally not nothing). This essay explores what it means to say nothing in Tove Jansson's novella Fair Play (first published in Finland Swedish as Rent spel, 1989), an episodic account of the intertwined lives of two elderly artists. Through its careful staging of saying nothing, the text calls attention to the many vital functions that silence serves: exposing tacit expectations, opening up creative and psychological space, enabling otherwise impossible relations. Bringing forth the diversity, complexity, and mystery behind hesitation and reticence, Jansson's novella emerges here as a quiet celebration of conversational practices associated with weakness, redefining the genre of the “love story” along the way.
Introduction: “The First Duty of Grown, Thinking People”Perl, Jeffrey M.
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-9809165
In this piece, the editor of Common Knowledge introduces a long‐term project titled “Antipolitics: Symposium in Memory of György Konrád.” Konrád, who died in 2019, was a founding member of the Common Knowledge editorial board, and the symposium is meant to find present‐day applications for the arguments of his book Antipolitics, published in 1982 in Hungarian. Although written under Cold War conditions and to that extent dated, the book is directed against politics and politicians as such: “What Machiavelli's Prince is to would‐be rulers, Antipolitics should be for those resistant to being ruled — a treasury of axioms and apothegms,” which this editorial collects, updates, and analyzes. Given that democratic systems and constitutions are “open and subject to further development,” Konrád urges us to devise and run experiments in governance that apply “creative imagination” to problems that, in better times, we might leave to politicians to resolve. “The crisis for democracy today,” Perl argues, “is that bad government (as Konrád, Václav Havel, and Adam Michnik defined it in the 1980s) appears to be what various electorates crave and therefore choose.” Realizing that elections produce, as Aristotle said, oligarchy rather than democracy, we should rethink majority rule and experiment with sortition as a counterpolitical means of self‐government.
Truth in AutobiographyKonrád, György; Tucker, Jim
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-9809179
Originally published in Common Knowledge 11, no. 2 (Fall 2005), this essay is reprinted in 2022 as the prelude to the first installment of a project titled “Antipolitics” and dedicated to the author's memory. “To really know” what a writer “is like,” Konrád writes here, “he would have to look back on his biography from after death” — and in this piece he hauntingly does so. Explaining that he composed his first autobiography upon being expelled from university in Hungary after Stalin's death in 1953, he defines the process as “the main event in the ritual of political detention.” In an overview of the writer's life, he describes any act of writing as like scratching one's initials “into the brick of a prison wall” in an effort “to avoid dying completely.” The editors of Common Knowledge, of whose editorial board Konrád was a founding member, chose to reprint this statement at the head of a symposium whose purpose is, in no small part, to help secure his posthumous existence.
Ignorance, Irrationality, Elections, and SortitionPart 1Bouricius, Terrill G.
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-9809193
While elections are, today, widely considered a fundamental feature of democracy, the argument of this two‐part article, published in the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” is that elections are a problematic and even inappropriate way of choosing representatives. Part 1 focuses on factors that make elections ill suited for democracy. These include a variety of human traits studied intently by contemporary psychologists. Part 1 assesses many studies of this type. Discussed as well are the ignorance and inattention of voters, which can be rationally justified by the improbability of a single vote deciding the result of an election. Part 1 deals not only with the psychology of voters but also with the harm that winning an election does to the psyche of the victor and to bodies and offices that are composed of winners. The essay concludes that democracy would be better served by sortition — selection by lottery — than by elections when forming its representative bodies and selecting its leaders.
Three Contemporary Imaginaries of SortitionDeliberative, Antipolitical, and Radically DemocraticAbbas, Nabila; Sintomer, Yves
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-9809207
A contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” this article examines the diverse types of imaginary that support sortition, which is currently at the heart of important debates on the reform of existing democratic institutions. Different and often diametrically opposed actors now advocate sortition as a tool for addressing crises of political representation. How are we to understand this convergence? Over the past two decades, the field of experience and the horizon of expectation of citizens in the global North have profoundly changed, and this article seeks to assess those changes in the context of three ideal types that advocate the use of randomly selected minipublics. This article analyzes, each in turn, the attraction of sortition for supporters and theorists of deliberative democracy, antipolitical democracy, and radical democracy, outlining the elements that unite and divide these imaginaries to help explain the astonishing convergence of voices in defense of sortition in politics.
Contingency All the Way UpMutter, Matthew
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-9809221
This review‐essay examines two books about the history of the modern humanities: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon and Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth‐Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today by Eric Adler. Both studies reconstruct genealogies of discourse and practice by which to understand the “crisis” of the humanities, yet they draw disparate lessons from these reconstructions. The review traces the two monographs’ competing accounts of the historical continuity of humanities practices and the moral dimension of humanistic inquiry. Together, Permanent Crisis and Battle of the Classics describe an antinomy that can be neither resolved nor ignored: the methodological norms of the modern university tend to subvert the humanities’ investment in meaning and value, but without that investment, humanistic study loses the motivations and purposes that define it.