Rethinking Scholarship
New Imperial Neoliberalism: Adventure Novels, Video Games, and Neo-Fascist Culture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chris Cartright, Jane Rago
Cultural discourses influence public policy. Late nineteenth-century adventure novels like King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Treasure Island (1882) provided a cultural mythology which justified the oppression of western colonial subjects through imperial labor relations and segregationist social policies. Today, twenty-first-century popular media like the Tomb Raider (1996-present) and Uncharted (2007-present) video game franchises provide the same cultural justification for neoliberalism. These media narratives justify market-oriented international policy that often limits the democratic sovereignty of developing nations to address poverty and climate change. At their worst, neoliberalism enriches transnational corporations by maintaining global conflicts and social inequities. Further, these imperial and neoliberal discourses lay the cultural groundwork for neo-fascist movements in the twenty-first century. This study examines imperial and neoliberal myths, their relationships to specific policy initiatives, and avenues for resistance.
Pueblo and Exteriority: On the Thought of Enrique Dusse
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mario Saenz
In this essay I examine whether the concept of pueblo elaborated by Dussel in his philosophy of liberation is capable of situating the interstitial space between a subjectivist agency and a posthuman process of production. I hope to show that the concept of pueblo helps us decolonize the concept of people. Nevertheless, it reproduces essentialism through an opaque concept of the Other; on the one hand, in its Levinasian reading, it reduces subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and social relations to the egotism of a closed off totality; on the other hand, the critique of the totality is done from outside the totality by an alterity immune to self-criticism.
From Globalization to Post-globalization: Constructing a New Model of Nation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yury Asochakov
This paper is intended to discuss the prospects and the ways of constructing a new model of nation in global development in a situation of factual and theoretical uncertainty indicated in social and political science by the concept of post-globalization. It analyzes the critical and theoretical potential of the concept of post-globalization for understanding the direction of shifting the paradigms of conceptualization of the future of nation state and its potential effect on political agendas and social policies of international and national administrations. I focus on the political and heuristic erosion of the concept of globalization and demonstrate it through the analyses of the emerging competing conceptions – such as the “new imperialism/empire” and “global capitalism”. I proceed to the study of the emergence and the content of the post-globalization concept, showing that as a result of socio-political, international, and theoretical developments of the last three decades. My research results in determining the heuristic and constructive value/potential of the post-globalization concept for configuring the foundations of the modeling present-day concept of nation state, global policies of international institutions, national administrations, and the principles of their coordination. From this, recommendations can be drawn for more accurate interpretation of the existing projects as well as for developing new ones currently needed.
Virocene Imaginaries: Some Critical Reflections
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rodanthi Tzanelli
In my analysis I observe ‘Anthropocene’s’ potentially recurring overlap with another phenomenon: ‘the Virocene’. The Anthropocene is posited as a geological age or period commencing with the Industrial Revolution, during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Contrariwise with this historically incremental, if at times discontinuous or non-linear imaginary, the Virocene involves the episodic governing of human fortunes, sidelining again environmental concerns. Rather than thinking of the ‘Virocene’ as a self-contained period, we should consider it as an unpredictable rhizomatic phenomenon. Exposing the limitations of technology and science, the global onset of COVID-19 as a catastrophic évènement, suggested that Virocenic discharges enmesh and corrupt various autonomous imaginaries of mobility (including travel, social connectivity and global political solidarity). I focus on three distinctive Virocenic characteristics to reconsider theories of mobility and globalisation (of risk): (a) we must think in terms of ‘events’ or ‘episodes’ of civilizational development or decline, not ‘ages’ (la longue durée) (b) learn to track the ends of Virocene’s rhizomes, as these enable the uncontrolled growth of risks across and within borders, and (c) focus on cultures of control, rather than surveillance, to manage human responses to such biomedical phenomena in democratic ways.
