Anti-Bourgeois Theory

Resumen

In his celebrated 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, the Parisian intellectual and theorist Didier Eribon travels home for the first time in thirty years following the death of his father. There he tries to account for the change in politics of his working class family over the period he has been away: from supporting the Communist Party to voting for the National Front. (It’s a shift towards the populist nationalism of the far right that is apparent in many countries today – UK, US, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Brazil – with the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico a notable exception.) But Eribon also discusses the transition he himself has undergone as a result of having escaped his working class environment through study and education, and how this has left him unsure whom it is he is actually writing for. He may be addressing the question of what it means to grow up poor and gay, yet he is aware few people from the working social class are ever likely to read his book.

At the same time, Eribon emphasizes that his non-conforming identity has left him with a sense of how important it is to display a ‘lack of respect for the rules’ of bourgeois liberal humanist ‘decorum that reign in university circles’, and that insist ‘people follow established norms regarding “intellectual debate” when what is at stake clearly has to do with political struggle’. Together with his friend Édouard Louis and partner Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Eribon wants to ‘rethink’ the antihumanist theoretical tradition of Cixous, Derrida Foucault et al., to produce a theory ‘in which something is at stake’: a theory that speaks about ‘class, exploitation, violence, repression, domination, intersectionality’, and yet has the potential to generate the excitement of ‘a Kendrick Lamar concert’.

In this keynote talk I likewise want to reinvent what it means to theorise by showing a certain lack of respect for the rules of bourgeois decorum the university hardly ever questions. I want do so, however, by also breaking with those bourgeois liberal humanist conventions of intellectual debate that – for all his emphasis on rebelling ‘in and through the production of knowledge’ – continue to govern the antihumanist theoretical tradition Eribon and his collaborators are associated with. Included in these conventions are normative ideas of the human subject, the proprietorial author, the codex print book, critical reflection, linear thought, self-expression, originality and copyright. I will argue that even the current landfill of theoretical literature on the material object, the posthuman and the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism that is padded with nonhuman stuffing – technologies, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, microbes, stones, geological formations – to make it merely appear different. Can we not do better than that?

Biografía

Gary Hall is a writer, philosopher and cultural theorist working (and making) in the areas of digital media, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Coventry University, UK, where he directs the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (a disruptive iteration of the Centre for Disruptive Media he directed previously), and the postdigital arts and humanities research studio The Post Office. Currently he is also external examiner for the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths College of Art, University of London.
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