Re-Imagining our Sociological Contemporaneity: What is the Age of Re-embodiments?
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on January 24, 2010 |
Re-Imagining our Sociological Contemporaneity: What is the Age of Re-embodiments?
BSA - Theory Study Group Symposium
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Call for Contributions
The topicality of climate justice is indisputable. Debates on the shape of post-Kyoto treaties for climate and social equity abound. Similarly, popular initiatives to set up tribunals to fight those responsible for climate forcing and reclaim ecological debts are on the rise. The goal is balance and equity whilst the issue that needs addressing is Man’s poor relation with his local and global environments.
Such a panorama tentatively depicts our contemporaneity at large. Namely, established institutions no longer know how to grapple with the question of Western Man and his externalized others -’nature,’ ‘women,’ ‘aboriginal man,’ ‘the sacred.’ This is a situation which obviously engenders much social and ecological unrest. Social theory largely partakes of this disconcerting tension. To be sure, a ruling body of modern categories appears surrounded by a constellation of critical responses that only in relation to the former endeavour to destabilize the prevailing –modern— canon. The postmodern condition is a conspicuous case in point. Whilst it manages to move away from the much-celebrated prowess of reason and it introduces much-needed perspectivism, postmodernity largely signifies the crowning of modernity. Theses such as ‘the end of history’ testify to this truism.
Against this background, this symposium posits that the tension at issue needs urgent recasting. Modernity –and, for that matter, postmodernity— is exhausted. Western/ised anthropocentrism no longer can operate as point of reference; it only entails systematic destruction of both cultural and biological diversity. No wonder that Man’s categorical position is in the course of being decentred. Man’s own developed abilities to both disembody his tread on the Planet from ecocycles and biorythmes alike, and disembed politics from bioregional constituencies are questioning his validity as point of reference. This is occurring in both praxis and theoria, as the findings and teachings from chiefly ecofeminism, Polanyian political economy and ethno-ecology attest.
While the challenge of disembodiment follows from the Neolithic Revolution and a fortiori the practice of metallurgy, it is a more recent series of industrial revolutions that have perilously intensified it: At what rates of dis/embodiment are human societies –or some of their groups— willing to operate in order to erect what kind of global civilization? The heightened ecocidal nature of our contemporaneity, to be sure, seems to prescribe that Western/ized societies engage in the opposite exercise and start re-embodying and re-embed their lifestyles. It may thus be wise to recentre theory around this process which popular struggles around the world have already initiated: we need a sociological imagination of the Age of Re-embodiments.
It seems, therefore, that to unthink our intellectual fetters and welcome this new spatiality, a root-and-branch debate akin to that which took place at the entrance of modern times is due. Just as eighteenth-century Germany asked ‘Was ist Aufklärung?,’ so too twenty-first-century critique should inquire: ‘What is re-embodying?’ ‘How shall social theory register and further hone the Age of Re-embodiments?’
1/ Can anthropogenic climate change be addressed with a disembodied, disembedded theoretical body: What is your proposal to embody and embed social theory?
2/ The adoption of an Age-of-Re-embodiments perspective recategorizes modern and postmodern theory as classical bodies of knowledge: Which classical authors offer leads on which to build the theoretical basis of this Age?
3/ How may this Age relate to classical theory: does the emerging link necessarily form a linear progression?
4/ Do we need a grand theory of the Age of Re-embodiments or rather a complementarity of piecemeal contributions? Are we aiming at an addition of disciplinary jargon and/or the creation of new categories of knowledge? Do we need to uphold disciplinary boundaries: sociology separated from anthropology, political science, ecology, etc., or should we aim at a counter- supra-discipline which emphasizes completely distinctive cognitive aspects, as for instance suggested by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of the Human Sciences? Which cognitive aspects are relevant for the Age of Re-embodiments?
5/ Is nature/culture, and, for that matter, scientia/philosophia, a divide to keep abiding by? How does the re-embodiment of theory relate to (social) constructionism and (natural) realism? Which conclusions does sociology draw as it converses with ecology and other natural sciences, and which should ecology and other natural sciences draw as they interact with sociology?
6/ The re-enchantment of the world has often been spoken of as a prerequisite for re-embodiment. Is re-embodiment a profane and/or sacred affair? How do Emile Durkheim and Max Weber relate to the theory of this Age?
7/ What might be the role that non-Western/ized cosmologies play in re-informing social theory in this Age? What should theory learn from popular struggles for re-embodiment around the world? How is lay knowledge to re-inform social theory?
8/ How are we to map out power relations and monitor the steady, abrupt or absent global entrance into the Age of Re-embodiments?
9/ How is ecomarxism, largely concerned with production relations and the (re)distribution of capital, to reinscribe its theses in the prescriptive horizon of this Age?
10/ If dis/embodiment speaks of a finite qualitative continuum, it then implies that the production of knowledge and the exercise of critique must be one and the same endeavour —somehow completing the task initiated by the young Marx. Should this core of knowledge-critique be value neutral or does the Age of Re-embodiments need a cognitive reconstruction with an unashamed value basis? Which set of prescriptive values should the Age of Re-embodiments endorse?
11/ How is theory to tackle the reality of high levels of consumption in the cores vis-à-vis the heightened severity of ecocides in the peripheries?
12/ How is historical sociology to re/write its narratives and ethnographies from the angle and prescriptions provided by this Age?
The production of technology –a fortiori high-tech— entails appropriations of resources that go far beyond the area where the pieces of technology are being used as the work of, for instance, Alf Hornborg has pointedly noted. What are the implications of re-embodying technology and the science that informs it?
13/ What are the continuities and ruptures between the institutional project of sustainable development/sustainability and this Age?
14/ These are some of the circumstances –constraining and productive at a time— of our sociological imagination at present. Or so is the contention of this symposium.
Keynote Speaker
Dr. Ariel Salleh, University of Sydney, Australia, ‘Ecology and Materially Embodied Knowledge’ (tbc)
Speakers
Dr. Patrick Curry, University of Wales – ‘What is Enchantment?’
Dr. Larry Lohmann, the Corner House, ‘Climate Justice & the Social Sciences’ (tbc)
Vito de Lucia, Eco Pax Mundi, ‘The Re-embodiment of Technology in the Climate Regime’ (tbc)
Prof Mary Mellor, Northumbria University, ‘Embodiment & Ecofeminist Political Economy’
Ruth Thomas-Pellicer, University of Surrey – ‘What is Re-embodiment or the Victorious Assertion of Loci Standi over the Barbarism of Instrumenti Movendi.’
Prof Wendy Wheeler, London Metropolitan University - ‘Understanding the Sacred: Reason, Knowledge and Transcendence in the Age of Re-embodiments’
Participants
Entrance is free for BSA-members, and at a cost of £10 for non-members to be paid at the entrance on the symposium day. Note that the BSA London Meeting Room only seats 35 people. E-mail the convenor (r.thomas-pellicer@surrey.ac.uk) to make sure that there is a seat available for you.
Venue
BSA London Meeting Room, Suite 2,
2 Station Court,
Imperial Wharf,
Townmead Road,
Fulham SW6 2PY
http://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/meetingroom.htm
Edited Collection
This symposium should lead to an edited collection named after the title of the event. Speakers are expected to submit a 6,000-word paper.
Network of the ‘Age of Re-embodiments’
In this symposium it will be debated whether there is sufficient interest to establish the ‘Age of Re-embodiments Network.’ The main remit of this network should be the study of this overarching social phenomenon called re-embodiment that cuts across the social and natural sciences and largely recentres both. As the bullet points in the Call for Contributions suggest, the study of re-embodiment may be pursued from several angles. Members of this network would be obviously expected to contribute from the perspective of their research interests. It should indeed be network members that assign specific tasks and research commitments to this group. Our initiatives could also lead to individual and joint publications. Last but not least, the formalization of this network may enable us to obtain funding for our meetings and additional research activities.
Convenor
Ruth Thomas-Pellicer
Department of Sociology jointly with Centre for Environmental Strategy
University of Surrey
GU2 7XH Guildford (Surrey), England
r.thomas-pellicer@surrey.ac.uk
