Session 4: Multiplicity and Solidarity
Session 4: Multiplicity and Solidarity
Chair: Laura Ceia-Minjares
Thinking the Multiple: Michel Serres and the Deconstruction of Social Unities
Kelvin Clayton
Department of Philosophy, Staffordshire University, United Kingdom
In his book Genesis, Michel Serres offers “a new object for philosophy”, the multiple as such. His aim, he says, is “to raise the brackets and parentheses…whereby we shove multiplicities under unities” and warns of the dangers of subsuming “multiplicity under unity”. This paper will explore this challenging idea in relation to Nicholas Gane’s recent call for “a new conceptual vocabulary, one better equipped to negotiate the daunting complexity of the contemporary [social] world than the classical one that is still commonplace today” and Bruno Latour’s claim that “what is blocking the whole interpretation of the social is the macro and micro distinction”. It will argue that by applying Serres work to the social we are forced to challenge traditional concepts concerning social unities, whether they be social ‘wholes’, such as distinct societies, cultures or nation states, or individual social actors and ‘selves’. This paper will further argue that Serres’ work, with its focus on relations in general, and on those between the local/micro and the global/macro in particular (all within the context of non-linear dynamic systems) provides a general methodology that can be made specific to the social by developing his notion of social exchange (found in his essay on Dom Juan) into that of the social expectation – a development aided by reference to Gilles Deleuze’s and Dennis Wrong’s use of the term ‘expectation’, and to the role played by the ‘statement’ in Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse. This paper will conclude by arguing that this radical re-conceptualisation of the social, of notions of the ‘self’, the ‘other’, and of nations, has the potential to resolve many of the contemporary problems associated with multiculturalism, nationalism and fundamentalism.
Fukuyama’s Folly: Why Europe Can’t Securitize Solidarity
Pathik Pathak
Roehampton University, United Kingdom
This paper answers to Francis Fukuyama’s recent insistence that Western European nations need to inspire US-style patriotism to survive as modern democracies. It responds in two ways. Firstly, it says that Fukuyama’s nationalistic prescriptions derive from a misreading of the character of second and third generation immigrant European identity. Obsessing over the phantom of Muslim inassimability, it translates all expressions of cultural identity into demands for the political ‘recognition’ of difference. This anxiety obscures the fact that younger generations of immigrant descent are not brought to existential crisis by the conflict between their inherited and citizenly identities. Since assumed divisions of prestige between ‘thick’ primordial and ‘thin’ constitutional identities are in fact reversible, social scientists should consider retiring Charles Taylor’s foundational ideas about contemporary identity. Secondly, it suggests that where younger immigrant generations are alienated from national solidarities this is only exacerbated by attempts to coerce them into obedience to prefabricated national identities. This is a flawed strategy that attempts to insulate national societies from the confessional divides that animate global politics. The answer, it suggests, lies in redirecting governance in counter-intuitive directions. Instead of policing the private sphere, it calls for a bold liberation of the public sphere.
Drawing on Craig Calhoun’s reworking of the idea of constitution, (2002) it argues that we have to bring those confessional and ethical divides into our public sphere so as to make it a space for ‘world-making’ and the creation of new culture. It also mandates a re-imagining of European belonging that eclipses national boundaries, informed, possibly, by a continental ethics of refuge. Europe cannot securitise solidarity, but it can create a new cohort of stakeholders in an idea of what Europe could become.
South African Interfaith Solidarity: A Model for Social Transformation
Jonathan D Smith
Humanities Department, Lebanese American University, Chouran Beirut, Lebanon
Drawing on the theory of social capital and research on religious groups and social transformation in South Africa, the paper presents a model demonstrating that interfaith partnerships there can effectively transcend boundaries of social exclusion and inequality by creating diverse communities of care. Interfaith solidarity, defined as multi-religious and religious-secular coalitions unified around common goals, has long been a characteristic of peaceful social movements, e.g., Indian independence, the U.S. civil rights movement, Polish Solidarity. It played a key role in the anti-apartheid struggle that resulted in transition to democracy in 1994. Still, more than a decade later, South Africa is one of the world’s most unequal societies. In this context, religious communities are underutilized as a force for social transformation, despite being one of the strongest multi-racial affiliations among South Africans. Recent research suggests that they are among the most trusted institutions and are uniquely poised to address issues of exclusion such as service delivery and health. The trust religious groups engender springs from bonding capital, the creation of strong ties of care through lived value systems in local communities. Interfaith solidarity adds the dimension of bridging capital across cultural and religious boundaries through participation in pluralistic partnerships at the local level. Furthermore, interfaith solidarity generates linking capital by vertically connecting local and often disempowered religious communities to national movements for advocacy and development. Through this interface, religious communities can infuse the larger society with the moral values needed for transformation and be challenged to adopt structures of transformation themselves. The model of interfaith solidarity is illustrated by the coalition effort to care for South African HIV/AIDS patients and to advocate for government adoption of more aggressive policies to stem the tide of the disease. The model suggested here has potential applications to similar contexts of exclusion elsewhere
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