The politics of disaster
In the last 30 years, disaster has become the dominant paradigm through which we interpret global political events. Be it the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the devastation brought by the 2010 Haiti earthquake or the current European refugee situation, it seems, as political theorist Bonnie Honig has noted, it is "only through catastrophes that we can imagine political alternatives.”
Since the end of the Cold War, disasters and the ethos of humanitarianism have emerged as privileged political and epistemological sites. Disasters serve as occasions to pass judgement on instances of violence, calamity and crime while the “self-evidence” of suffering has justified interventions both humanitarian and military. While not denying that disaster victims deserve assistance and aid, the workshop explores the contemporary “translation of social reality into a new vocabulary of suffering, compassion, assistance and responsibility to protect” (Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason) and questions its various political applications. What happens when we understand humans primarily as victims rather than as autonomous agents? Which principles has the vocabulary of the victim pushed into the background? How are politics possible in a social world defined by future disasters?
Programme
Three invited speakers will each give a keynote lecture, followed by three parallel workshops that will address themes raised in the lectures in more depth.
Participants are kindly asked to choose in advance which workshop they want to participate in and to state this in the registration email. The individual workshops are:
- Dispersing Disaster (Peter Hallward / CRMEP, Kingston University)
- Architecture and Counterrevolution (Pier Vittorio Aureli / Architectural Association)
- The Rise of the Dark Sun (Rens van Munster / DIIS)
Registration
Please write to gjk792@hum.ku.dk, stating your name and the workshop that you would like to participate in. The event is free, but seating is limited. Please register early to ensure your place.
Keynote lectures
Peter Hallward
Dispersing Disaster: Revolutionary Legacies in Haiti and France
When a catastrophic earthquake destroyed much of Haiti's capital city in January 2010, the initial international reaction prioritised military intervention over humanitarian relief. The consequences of this decision, and of the policies associated with it, continue to shape Haitian politics to this day. This talk aims to reconstruct the mindset and the history that underlies such an approach to the experience of calamity, and that clarifies what remains at stake in the ongoing struggle for democracy.
Pier Vittorio Aureli
Architecture and Counterrevolution
Le Corbusier famously addressed institutions with the dilemma ‘architecture or revolution’. He suggested that if a comprehensive reform of the city would be implemented, revolution could be avoided.
Architecture is not just shelter, but the representation of an idea of order and stability that institutions impose in order to avoid chaos. The more the fear of chaos haunts political institutions, the stronger becomes the desire for stability. Precisely because of this dialectical relationship between chaos and order, architecture beside being the archè - the first principle - is also an implicit acknowledgement of its opposite condition: the possibility of instability and disorder.
It was an acute fear for civic disorder that led the political milieu to which the architect Brunelleschi belonged to seek new forms of stability. These forms of stability were attempted with several means, from ideological ones (the invocation of ancient Rome as noble precedent) to technical strategies such as the re-organization of city space and the promotion of public works.
My hypothesis is that the urge for stability that permeated the politics of the Florentine Republic in the aftermath of late 14th century turmoil led to the invention of architecture as a profession clearly distinguished from the one of the builder. In this presentation I will analyze the dialectic of conflict and order that dominated the emergence of Renaissance architecture by close readings some of the most important architectures by Filippo Brunelleschi.
Rens van Munster
The Rise of a Dark Sun: The Thermonuclear Revolution, Global Catastrophe and Earth Security?
The atomic bomb generated a kaleidoscopic variety of consequences for post-war politics, thought and culture and contributed to an existing sense of outrage produced by total warfare and the Holocaust.
Such concerns deepened over the ensuing decades, when the A-bombs used against Japan developed into unfathomably more destructive hydrogen bombs fitted on missiles with ever-increasing, globe-spanning geographical range. Faced with the spectre of global catastrophe, politicians, generals, intellectuals and the general public searched for ways to navigate the nuclear condition. New courses were charted. Some of these are well known.
In particular, the trajectory of strategic thought, integral to the developing ideological conflict of the superpowers in matters of security, strategy and civil defence, has been widely discussed for its momentous and wide-ranging influence on Cold War politics and disaster management. In this talk, I want to draw attention to another, less well-known perspective - one that linked nuclear weapons to the social and political consequences of technology, the relationship between humans and their environment and the role of the imagination in (reforming) the political worlds we inhabit.
Given the continued danger of nuclear war and the existence of other threats to the planet, this perspective remains highly relevant today.
Moderators: Devika Sharma (UCPH), Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen (UCPH), Peer Illner (UCPH/ Changing Disasters)