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- Convenors:
-
Peter Lockwood
(University of Manchester)
Gil Hizi (Goethe University Frankfurt)
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- Format:
- Workshop
Short Abstract:
Amid a contemporary 'polycrisis', this workshop explores ethnographic reflections on the challenge of complicity – contexts where our interlocutors experience an unwanted ‘commonality’ with forces that fundamentally constrain or undermine their capacity to live and (re)produce the ‘commons’ itself.
Long Abstract:
In the contemporary moment of political, economic, and ecological crisis, this workshop explores ethnographic reflections on the challenge of complicity – contexts where our interlocutors find themselves in an unwanted ‘commonality’ with forces that are fundamentally constraining or undermining of their capacity to live good lives and the (re)production of the ‘commons’ itself. Against the backdrop of felt complicity, we invite ethnographic investigations and novel theorisations of the subjectivities and affects this complicity produces including (but not limited to) cynicism, irony, and jadedness. As anthropologists who have confronted our interlocutors’ common recognition of the inequalities of contemporary economic and political orders, we aim to foster further development of an anthropological theory of 'living with complicity'. Inspired by anthropological approaches to subjectivity and self inspired by the discipline’s recent ‘ethical turn’ and political writing that frames distanciated, knowing cynicism as a condition of post-modern subjecthood (Zizek and Eagleton), we aim to ask: What are the material and ideologies conditions that produce cynical subjectivities? To what extent do people recognise their complicity in hegemonic orders? To what extent are criticisms of contemporary crises muted by cynicism and a resigned knowledge of complicity? How do people experience the tension between critique and complicity?
By asking these questions, we aim to respond to the conference’s focus on ‘crises of the post-colonial world order and the effects of an increasingly destructive capitalism’ by examining ambiguous and troubled relations with these forms, defined not by resistance or ignorance, oblivion or entitlement, but by knowing complicity.