"Precarity, Polarization, Populism" Symposium

https://www.au.dk/en/engtk@cc.au.dk / https://tabishkhair.co.uk

Can literature strengthen democracy and democratic thinking? This paper will argue that it can, and this has nothing to do with the values of the literary text. In other words, even if the text is not about democracy or even if it contains what some might consider undemocratic notions, if it is a literary text and if it is read as literature, the activity is likely to strengthen democracy. I will illustrate this with reference to the role of the other -- in and outside the text -- in literature, and the ways in which literature, when read as literature, counteracts fundamentalist thinking and aids the capacity for contemplation ('nous') that Aristotle considered not just the highest but perhaps the most distinctive of human capacities.

Tabish Khair is a poet, novelist and critic from India. His major books include The Thing About Thugs, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, and The Bus Stopped. He resides in a village outside Aarhus, Denmark where he teaches English literature at Aarhus University. The Thing About Thugs (2010), which has been shortlisted for a number of prizes, including the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature[1] and the Man Asian Literary Prize. His poem Birds of North Europe won first prize in the sixth Poetry Society All India Poetry Competition held in 1995. In 2022, he published a new Sci Fi novel, [The Body by the Shore]. Khair’s most recent book is Literature Against Fundamentalism, "a new and provocative interpretation of how literature is a distinctive, agnostic mode of thinking about the world."

https://www.hivolda.no/en/user/478 / https://timothysaundersdotorg1.wordpress.com

In the early stages of its emergence as a field of enquiry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, aesthetics was intended to provide knowledge about those domains of human experience which could not be subjected solely to logic or rational analysis. In contradistinction to the universal, abstract, unchanging and timeless realm patrolled by mathematics, metaphysics and the like, aesthetic enquiries were to be rooted in the manifold, yet also inconsistent, unreliable and limited capacities of humans to apprehend and make sense of the universe. Whereas “objects of thought” were understood to circulate within a system of fixed laws and necessity, “objects of perception” – the concern of aesthetics – were taken to be immersed in a world of flux, complexity and particularity, which accordingly held out the promise of constituting an arena for human freedom, creativity and choice. Equipped with this origin story, aesthetics would seem to be well composed to meet the challenge posed by the PPP-project: to engage the experience of precarity, polarization and populism without seeking to systematise them out of existence; to crack open the deadening carapace of a perceived lack of viable alternatives within which those three phenomena flourish; and to seek to re-imagine moments of insoluble crisis as moments of consequential choice.

But how? One might question the degree to which aesthetic thinking has in practice lived up to its initial promise or regret the sense that it too has at times undergone the shrinkage that oppresses other aspects of intellectual and social life. The challenge issued by this project to “establish the unique qualities of aesthetic practices and aesthetic critical thinking” provides a welcome opportunity to test any number of the devices and strategies of aesthetic enquiries against the discipline’s originary ambitions and, where appropriate, re-tool them accordingly. In this paper, I will exemplify this process by reflecting on some of the more common reading and writing practices advocated to students in the production of academic essays on English literature. That the essays which result can now be replicated with a certain degree of success by AI language generators indicates that the time may indeed be ripe to develop new forms of what the project description terms “Reflective aesthetic engagement (in, e.g., practices that foreground sensing and the sensible, attentiveness, and which emphasizes exploration, uncertainty, contingency, creativity, play, etc. rather than the structured pursuit of a predetermined goal-oriented ideology).” I will outline some of the ways in which “the structured pursuit of a predetermined goal-oriented ideology” may serve all too well as a definition of the expectations of a contemporary student essay and, as such, suppresses the capacity of several of the aesthetic modes of enquiry which students are also instructed to deploy from foregrounding the processes of exploration, uncertainty, creativity, and so on which they lay claim to encourage. In response to this, I will seek to map out a number of alternative configurations in which practices of reflective aesthetic engagement might be expressed in forms of writing that meet (or at any rate match) standard requirements of academic rigour and in their own way serve as analogues for democratic citizenship.

https://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/4a2bf81c-084a-44f7-b60f-e5d32246ff94

This paper will discuss a new literary theory - the transglossic - that moves beyond the recursive reasoning of post-postmodernisms with their reductive association to the past in order to respond to ethical concerns and a socio-politically energised desire for meaning. Through a close reading of Ali Smith's Seasonal - a quartet of novels which engage with the rise of populism and precarity in a moment of political rupture - it will be suggested that literature can play an emancipatory role in driving the imaginaries of social and political change.

Kristian Shaw is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Lincoln. He is the author of Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction (Palgrave, 2017) and Brexlit: British Literature and the European Project (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is the co-editor of Hari Kunzru: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (MUP, 2023) Kazuo Ishiguro: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (MUP, 2023) and the forthcoming Routledge Handbook to Globalization and Literature (Routledge).

https://en.uit.no/ansatte/person?p_document_id=41510

The phenomenon of suicide tends to both indicate and confirm the precarity of human existence. “To be or not to be” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, probably the most quoted phrase in the history of Western literature, engages with this precarity of the human condition, which we know so well from the Greek tragedies via Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, to the avalanche of suicide literature since Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why in 2007. Despite the prevalence of suicide in literature, this tragic phenomenon of human existence tends to receive limited critical attention. “I began with the desire to speak with the dead”, Stephen Greenblatt states in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988, 1). “All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality”, Harold Bloom argues in The Western Canon (1994, 30). Nevertheless, Bloom and Greenblatt, together with many other critics, pay scant if any attention to suicide in their reflections upon human existence and mortality. This presentation focuses on some recent fiction, e.g. Jay Ahser’s Thirteen Reasons Why and Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive (2015), to meditate upon some questions on precarity, existence, and literature. What are the relations between precarity and suicide? Why can fiction enhance the philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytical approach to suicide? How do we define suicide literature? Why?

We will present how we work with critical aesthetics in our teaching at Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), and discuss the methods by which the students engage in “practices that foreground sensing and the sensible, attentiveness, and which emphasizes exploration, uncertainty, contingency, creativity, play etc.”, to quote the project description for the symposium. 

Lisbeth Funck is Professor at AHO. She leads Studio Positions, one of the school´s masterstudios. The studio aims at investigating new and fundamental approaches to architecture that facilitate more liveable and sustainable futures. It is concerned not only with how architecture is made, but also with the presence of architecture and the aesthetic experience it produces. 

Alma Oftedal is currently a PhD-candidate at Department of Foreign languages at UiB. She has previously taught at AHO, where she was responsible for an elective course series called A Queer Look at Architecture. The series was associated with the studio courses at Studio Positions and directed towards a further immersion in the studio courses' themes and methods.

(hall open from 15:45)

Cinema hall: KP10, Konsertpaleet (55 seats)

https://www.playtimefilms.com/en/productions/la-vie-en-kit

https://www.jingyiwang.org

Jingyi Wang is a performance creator based in Bergen, Norway. She has multi-background in performing arts, journalism and advertisement. Her works are featured by concept-driven, social-political concerned, and interdisciplinary approach.

https://www.uis.no/nb/profile/janne-stigen-drangsholt

Virginia Woolf famously concludes her feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own with the postulation that if we let women live «another century or so» we will be able to see what a free woman looks like (Woolf 1929, 93). This project springs out of the awareness that almost one hundred years later, woman is still not free. In fact, as Roberta Garrett notes in Writing the Modern Family (2021), female freedom has during recent years experienced severe setbacks. These setbacks are particularly rooted int the post-war family structures, and the economic, social and political context of neoliberalism which produced an ideology of the “privatized” family and “intensive” motherhood. This insight lies at the root of Deborah Levy’s living autobiography trilogy, which seeks to imagine a future which enables female freedom in the sense of participatory agency through a consistent focus on woman’s living relationship to family, labour, and singularity, and sets out to explore and illuminate the cultural significance, social practices and power relations carried by just such an idea of female freedom. 

Janne Stigen Drangsholt is an author and professor in the Department of Cultural studies and Languages at the University of Stavanger. She wrote her PhD thesis on British poet Ted Hughes, and has also done research on subjects related to popular culture, narratology and contemporary British and American poetry.

Close reading has, at its heart, indeterminacy and uncertainty: it is a space where readers deliberately engage in the experience of interpretative contingency and uncertainty. This talk introduces one attempt to use this indeterminacy for new shared purposes in a pilot project. Our work involves setting up the structures of the close reading workshop outside the university in order to explore its potential as a space in which collective uncertainty opens up new discursive and interactional possibilities. We focus, in particular, on how the uncertainty of interpretation might alter the tenor of discussions involving questions beset with dogmatism and polarisation, particularly those involving collective responsibility, guilt and accusation, such as climate responsibility.

Luseadra McKerracher is an Assistant Professor at the Department for Public Health at Aarhus University in Denmark. Originally trained as a biological anthropologist, McKerracher now uses mixed methods and approaches from anthropology, sociology, psychology and fine arts to understand people’s changing perspectives and behaviours during times of particular uncertainty and precarity. Times of uncertainty include critical junctures in individual life-courses (like adolescence, pregnancy, and the transition to parenthood) as well as in periods of societal restructuring (like abruptly widening socio-economic inequity following a national or global shock to financial systems). She seeks to use insights from these investigations to develop multi-level complex interventions to support individual and community health during and following uncertain times.

Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Her first book, Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. She writes on modern literature and ethics, and her specific research interests include: public apology in twentieth century writing; ekphrasis; the lyric essay; ecocriticism; and literary attention. She was recently awarded an AIAS-COFUND II Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies. Prior to this, she received a British Academy Rising Star grant for a project on writing and attention, which considered the role of literature in the age of digital distraction and misinformation. Before coming to the ANU, she taught literary criticism at the universities of Nottingham and Cambridge.  

https://en.uit.no/ansatte/person?p_document_id=43820

Precarity, polarization, populism. The three terms seem closely related with an often-assumed trajectory running from growing precarity to an increase in polarization that is then exploited and reinforced by sinister and irresponsible populists. In this understanding populism is a wrong, a deviation, a tool for evil people to exploit hardships and manipulate the masses with the objective of achieving bad things such as undermining democracies, challenging ‘our’ universal values, or threatening whatever rule-based order of the day (see Frank 2021).

In this context, dystopia seems ubiquitous and the worst always just one tiny step away. The current dominance of bleak outlooks in news media and popular culture threatens to ‘petrify politics’ (Pötzsch 2022) by inducing fear and suppressing imaginations of alternatives. This ultimately leads to what Habermas (1985: 161) has termed a “desert of banalities and cluelessness” and leaves us with an implicitly naturalized capitalist realism (Fisher 2009) that seems unassailable lest we challenge the powers that be and create chaos and destruction in the wake of our allegedly irresponsible actions. The overreliance on macro-dystopic outlooks chains us to an implicitly reified status-quo and locks us into an eternal present where everything seems new, and apparently nothing can have a history reaching further back than the time it takes to be triggered by the latest 140-letters message or 30-seconds video clip brought to you by super-rich tech-guys with hoodies and increasingly authoritarian leanings. And the future only exists as an inevitable endless continuation of this eternal present.

In this context, rather than perceiving of populism as a third apocalyptic rider in conjunction with precarity and polarization, I propose presentism as a more suitable culprit capable of explaining how an affectively overcharged manic focus on the here and now precludes historical understanding and the ability to see the world from a perspective other than our own. Releasing populism from the dangerous bind with the other two Ps (and adding presentism at its stead), allows for reconceptualization and repoliticization of societies and their relation to each other and the world.

Today, civil societies in ‘the West’ have already been brought to the brink of breakdown by more than four decades of relentless neoliberalization and media manipulation (Dean 2009, Fraser 2022, Brown 2015, 2019, Roy and Cusack 2016). Few collective structures seem to remain that could oppose and resist the combined onslaught of neo-liberal precarization, technology-induced polarization, and aggressive presentism. The fragmented residues of what once were genuinely popular movements and functioning democracies turn into an increasingly authoritarian liberalism (Chamayou 2019) where an extreme centre (Ali 2015) is allying itself with the unchecked powers of a few tech-bro billionaires who control commercial technologies that can both dissect and reassemble populaces in correspondence with these few men’s shifting interests and allegiances (York 2021). The thus emerging genuinely disturbing brave new world of our own design would make Aldous Huxley turn in his grave in agony over his lack of imagination.

On the background of this polemic opening, I will here attempt to reclaim the term populism as component of a radical politics and emerging solution rather than a root cause of the identified problems. To do this, I will introduce the notions of utopia and dystopia as tightly entangled and consisting of both macro- and micro-variants before focusing the discussion on the three phases of a utopian method devised by Ruth Levitas (2013) – archaeological, ontological, and architectural. Secondly, I will direct attention to the concept of social imaginaries as understood by Cornelius Castoriadis (1995) and argue for its importance for societies’ understandings of potentials vested in the present and for envisioning possible ways towards alternative futures.

Social imaginaries are negotiated and conveyed in and through a cultural sphere. This enables critical attention to cultural expressions that can be seen as either harbingers of a debilitating hegemonic dystopianism petrifying politics and locking us into capitalist realist passivity and presentism or as a way for a radical human capacity to imagine something new and this way re-invigorate democratic institutions, movements, and practices. To achieve this, I argue, we need a progressive form of populism devised by among others Chantal Mouffe (2019) with the capacity to believably convey such radical imaginaries – a genuine populism that is vested in collective utopian visions for better, i.e. more just and less destructive futures.

In the final empirical part of my presentation, I will look at dystopia, utopia, and progressive populism through the lens of different figurations of the road in two graphic novels – Manu Larcenet’s (2024) adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and Partrick Spät’s and Bea Davies’s (2019) biographical account Der König der Vagabunden. While the former conjures up the road as an iteration of a macro-dystopian setting characterized by severe threats posed by everyone else but the closest family kin, the latter brings forth the road as site of hardships but also freedom,

progressive political mobilization, and solidarity beyond the nuclear family. Through its figuration of the road McCarthy’s/Larcenet’s The Road neatly aligns to hegemonic macro-dystopic visions implying a need for authority and hierarchies lest we fall prey to our uncontrollable animalistic urges of wiping out and literally devouring one another in a hyper-Hobbesian homo homini lupus scenario. In contrast to this bleak vision, Spät and Davies’s account of the life and work of Gregor Gog who organized homeless people during the Weimar Republic to demand justice and counter fascist mobilization offers a far more complex outlook that includes attention to a variety of micro-utopian spaces embedded in an increasingly macro-dystopian frame thus working towards a rekindling of democratic politics by genuinely progressive populist means. It is in this context interesting to see that the hegemonic mainstream product – McCarthy’s The Road – has been disseminated in literature, film, and graphic novel, while the more radical and subversive narrative of König der Vagabunden has only been published as a graphic novel by a minor publisher. This difference can be hypothetically explained with the help of Hall’s (1994) encoding/decoding model and an adaptation of Herman and Chomsky’s (2002) filter model to areas of cultural production other than commercial news.

References

Ali, Tariq. 2015. The Extreme Centre: A Second Warning. London: Verso.

Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Brown, Wendy. 2019. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1995. The Imaginary Institution of Society. London: Polity Press.

Chamayou, Gregoire. 2019. Die unregierbare Gesellschaft: Eine Genealogie des autoritären Liberalismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.

Frank, Thomas. 2021. The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. New York: Picador.

Fraser, Nancy. 2022. Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet - and What We Can Do About It. London: Verso Books.

Habermas, Jürgen. 2019 [1985]. Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Kleine politische Schriften V. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Hall, Stuart. 1994. Encoding/Decoding. In Simon During (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader, 91-103. London: Routledge.

Herman, Edward and Chomsky, Noam. 2002. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

McCarthy, Cormac and Larcenet, Manu. 2024. The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. New York: Abrams Comic Art

Levitas, Ruth. 2013. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2019. For a Left Populism. London: Verso.

Pötzsch, Holger. 2022. Towards a Diagnostics of the Present: Popular Culture, Post-Apocalyptic Macro-Dystopia, and the Petrification of Politics. In: Lene Johannessen and Asbjørn Grønstad (eds.) Micro-Dystopia: Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment. London: Lexington Books, 17-40.

Roy, Arundhati and Cusack, John. 2016. Things that Can and Cannot Be Said. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Spät, Patrick and Bea Davis. 2019. Der König der Vagabunden. Berlin: avant-verlag.

York, Jillian C. 2021. Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Durnell Marston.

Holger Pötzsch, PhD, is professor of Media Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His main research interests are games, the relations between propaganda, media and war, educational technologies, and critical theory. Pötzsch currently coordinates the ENCODE research group at UiT and serves as co-editor-in-chief of the journal Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture. His latest book is the anthology Spiel*Kritik published together with Seyda Kurt and Thomas Spies at transcript in 2024.

Email: Holger.potzsch@uit.no

URL: https://en.uit.no/ansatte/person?p_document_id=43820&p_dimension_id=210121

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5533-5014

https://en.uit.no/ansatte/henrik.gustafsson

The paper offers some thoughts on critical aesthetics, understood as a critique of the underlying conditions for perception and appearance, which will be elaborated in relation to the prominence of grids and chromakey screens in the work of three interdisciplinary artists: Hito Steyerl, Cauleen Smith, and Sondra Perry. Pursuing the question of what might constitute an “adequate image” of a situation that is determined by a sustained and systematic antinomy between media technology and human senses, the discussion focuses on how the screen is explored as a potent yet precarious and compromised ground for expression and resistance by the aforementioned artists. 

Henrik Gustafsson is a professor of film, media, and visual culture in the Department of Media and Documentation Science at the Arctic University of Norway. He is the author or editor of five books, including Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography (2019) and Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (co-edited with Asbjørn Grønstad, 2014), and is currently working on a book-length project titled The Sedimented Screen.

“No Country for Young Men? Developing a Humanities Pedagogy to Address the Crisis of Modern Masculinity” 
Nahum Welang (Nord University)

“Towards a Chronotope of Presentism"
Henriette Rørdal (University of Bergen)