Experiencing Critique<Superscript>⋆</Superscript>

Over the past two centuries, criticism has assumed an indispensable role in the production of truth in many academic contexts. Furthermore, a dominant conception of critique emerged out of disciplinary truth regimes – evident as much in right wing think tanks as in critical theories. This ‘grammar of critique’ requires critics to judge specific contexts against founded criteria. However, in an epistemological ethos beset by obdurate uncertainty, where disciplinarity is increasingly under attack, a judgmental grammar faces intractable challenges. For one thing, intransigent ambiguities defy the silencing required to achieve certainty, or universal agreement, on ‘founded criteria’. This predicament creates a distinctive semantic disquiet and a unique opportunity to prize critique loose from its previously privileged grammar. Allegorically referring to Derrida’s images of hospitality, this paper offers a different grammar of critique as an experience of imagined prospects, a promise that rallies against ossified thought systems of the now. This experience is structured through the impossible to the extent that it defies absolute definition, finitely encounters infinite possibilities, involves preconceptions, and opens critics up to promises that never fully arrive. As such, critical experiences invite existential anticipations whose contours, paradoxically, are imagined from within, and yet promise an escape from, local historical circumstances.A version of this paper was presented at Birkbeck, University of London, 24th September, 2004. I would like to thank Peter Fitzpatrick, Claire Valier, Ronnie Lippens, Costas Douzinas and Julia Chryssostalis for their helpful comments.     

Mapping Utopias: A Voyage to Placelessness

I have a map which indicates clearly and beyond any doubt the way to Utopia. I start the journey with a survival kit of paradigmatic egalities, noumenal legalities, and nervous ideals. However, the more I move into the uncartographied space, the more I realise that my survival kit is changing, to the point of becoming porous and permeable. The journey to Utopia is condensed to a log of phenomenological bracketing, where the immersion to the Lebenswelt equals the loss of oneself, and where the descent from the Transcendental to the Natural proves to be as meaningful as the escalating bracketing from the Natural to the Transcendental. The negation of Utopia (ou-topos) displaces not only my Utopia but also my egocentric quest for identity: the ‘I’ becomes ‘me’ before it vanishes, space becomes place, intentionality turns back to itself and retraces its path. The more I approach my destination, the more negation devours distance. When I finally arrive to the designated point, where, according to the map, lies Utopia, the only thing I discover is a map, identical to the one I hold, that indicates, clearly and beyond any doubt, the way to Utopia. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Project 0395A.ĐC | Performing disorientation

The end of the Vietnam/American War lead to one of the largest exoduses of the latter part of the twentieth century: more than 3 million people escaped from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos over the course of two decades starting in 1975, many by boat and an estimated 1 million died at sea. How do you witness and retell stories of violence in the aftermath of war and dispossession at sea in the context of U.S. empire and Vietnamese socialist revolution? Project 0395A.?C, a multi-media installation by Vietnamese artist, Ly Hoang Ly, intentionally structures and choreographs disorientation to grapple with the condition of being dispossessed at sea, as the Vietnamese refugee is suspended at sea and entangled in histories of French colonialism and caught at the crux of U.S. imperial war and Vietnamese socialist revolution. I argue that disorientation is a performative experience and method that performs an act of refusal to break voyeuristic modes of consuming histories of violence and reorients the body to another theory of Vietnamese refugee subjectivity. I analyze how Ly creates a performative installation and performs with water as the core aesthetic material used to frame, dialogue, and re-narrate a story of Vietnamese refugee subjectivity.     

Against state terror: lessons on memory,counterterrorism and resistance from the Global South

Critical theory avows that “where there is power there is always resistance”. However, the practical implications and consequences of particular modes of resistance remain, within World Politics, under-theorised. In critical terrorism studies (CTS), this critical imperative to resist has recently emerged in the proposal to remember state terrorism. With this move, CTS aims to disturb the legitimacy of forms of violence/terror that emerge from the state. In this article, I argue that such an agenda of “resistance through memory” has already been put forth in the Global South (specifically, Latin America). Drawing on this historical experience, I elucidate some problems with the critical imperative to resist. More specifically, I show how in Brazil the Global South counter-memorial narratives of state terror share a common ground with the Global North counterterrorism discourses. I do so by analysing three underlying tropes of Brazilian remembrance that replicate Global North representations of terrorists: bestialism, pathology and dehumanisation.     

对公安英语教学的几点思考

公安英语教学既是大学英语教学的一个组成部分,也是公安教育的一个组成部分.加强公安英语教学,是新形势下执法工作、实现服务和对外交流的需要.因此,必须通过努力提高对公安英语教学重要性的认识,大力强化语言基本功训练,认真研究教学方法,努力实践现代化教学手段等措施,加强公安英语教学.     

电力系统恐怖袭击风险的定量分析

国家关键基础设施的安全问题关系到国家的稳定与经济命脉。随着技术的发展,各种基础设施之间的相互依赖性日益增强,使得其脆弱性增加。电力系统作为国家的关键基础设施,是恐怖袭击的重点目标之一。本文对恐怖主义属性进行了描述,采用定量风险分析方法对电力系统遭受恐怖袭击的风险进行评估。通过分析,寻找出电力系统的脆弱性,以便有针对性地采取有效措施降低系统的脆弱性,从而减缓电力系统遭受恐怖袭击风险。     

Reading aloud as performance and its representation on television programmes for children

ABSTRACT

The social practice of reading aloud picture books to children, or shared reading, has been represented on many televisions programmes broadcast across English-speaking countries. This article views shared reading as a performance, and explores its transformation on two television shows for children and the potential of such shows to promote reading engagement and literacy development. Taking a critical multimodal perspective, we analyse shared reading in real life and on television as a social practice, focusing on the ways the participants talk about the picture book, relate it to exterior texts or activities, and legitimise shared reading through the employment of multimodal and interactive strategies. The analysis reveals significant differences between actual adult–child shared reading and its representation on television. The comparison illustrates the potential benefits and limitations of television shows in which picture books are read to the viewer, in terms of promoting shared reading among families and supporting young children’s emergent literacy development.     

Towards a critical realist perspective on African conflicts

With various attempts being made to address religious, ethnic and political conflicts in Africa, one question which continues to feature in public discourses concerns the contributions which the African academic community could make towards the understanding and resolution of conflict. This article demonstrates that ontological issues need to be critical in any attempts at effectively analysing conflicts. The merit of the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, with its ontological concerns, is presented as an important analytical and resolution model which the African academic community can fall back on, to look for effective solutions to conflict on the continent. The thrust in this article is that the properties of the critical realist approach to social research make it practically adequate for analysing conflicts.     

Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Education in the Age of the MOOC

Even as online learning is increasingly embraced by institutions of higher education, the past decade has seen the arrival of yet another new educational vehicle: massive online open courses (MOOCs). These courses are designed to disseminate knowledge at an unprecedented scale — even as they engender concerns about quality, learning efficacy, and the future of higher education. In this article, I discuss the MOOC phenomenon and describe a MOOC on negotiation that I developed and taught, exploring the advantages that such a course offers for negotiation and conflict resolution education in particular.