Event overview
At a nascent juncture in the critique of political economy in the 20th and 21st centuries, a diverse array of thinkers converged upon a singular topic: Daoism.
Confirmed participants:
Michael Dutton | Peter Fenves | Colin Gordon | Leigh Jenco | François Jullien | Scott Lash | Julia Ng | Daniel Weiss | Sam Whimster
**Podcasts will be made available after the event here: http://www.gold.ac.uk/podcasts/app/front/podcastsBySeries/36**
Daoism is a philosophical, political and devotional movement that emerged in early China as a critique of Confucian orthodoxy. Sharing an emphasis on paradox, the interconnection of all things, and the dynamic and processual character of the cosmos, the sets of philosophical reflections that accumulated under the name of “Daoism” represented an anti-authoritarian, non-coercive, and counter-governmental alternative to Confucianism’s predilection for paternalistic administration and political management.
Versions of Daoism enjoyed something of a renaissance in the German-speaking intellectual world during the early twentieth century. Max Weber's The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism was written as a sequel to The Protestant Ethic in order to establish that modern industrial capitalism was uniquely facilitated by the religious tradition found in Europe—for which purpose Weber treated Daoism and Confucianism as essentially consistent in their theories of “wu wei” (inactivity, or effortless or non-coercive action) and “dao” (the idea of an order of nature), and similarly devoid of the creative impulse to dominate over nature that he found characteristic of Puritan rationalism. The image conjured by Weber impresses itself upon recent critiques of political economy, as when Michel Foucault notes in The Birth of Biopolitics that the common starting point for both the Ordoliberals and the Frankfurt School was Weber’s displacement of Marx’s concern with the contradictory logic of capital onto the problem of the irrational rationality of capitalism. The obverse of the same image leads towards the problem of how to decipher not only the forms of capitalism that have emerged in contemporary China, but also the mobilization of the Daoist and Confucianist classics—which in nuce outline the resources of political state power—for the articulation and analysis of economic policy in the PRC.
Weber was by no means alone in his interest in Daoist ideas; others, including Benjamin, Bloch, Rosenzweig, Brecht, Scholem and Buber, also found in their non-systematic study of Chinese thought a critique of the theory of action that developed from the Greeks onward. Benjamin’s theory of the religious character of capitalism—an early fragment indebted to Weber’s study of the Protestant Ethic—and his study of non-coercive force and political state power—Towards the Critique of Violence, which was published in a form he did not find entirely satisfactory in Weber’s journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik—invite reconsideration in light of Benjamin’s extension of “non-activity” beyond Weber’s usage of the term. In regard to the theory of action and the associated theories of the image and pre-linguistic purity that were in circulation, the composite, multiply translative texts, ideas, and practices of European literary modernism and German-Jewish modernity accrue into a “Daoism” of sorts. In their variation and non-systematicity, these images of China point towards another orientation of critical theory as developed by the Frankfurt School, one that, contra Schmitt, does not regard politics and ethics as distinct or politics as therefore merely ideology, or imagine the emergence of markets as necessarily coterminous with the withdrawal of government, and that situates the composite image of ancient and modern China at the center of understanding contemporary political economy.
This day-long workshop brings together for the first time experts from sociology, political theory, cultural theory, German literary studies, philosophy, and Jewish studies in discussion of Daoism in contemporary political economy.
Jointly sponsored by the Centre for Cultural Studies, the Department of Art, the Department of Visual Cultures, and Max Weber Studies.
Free and open to the public.
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PROGRAMME
Richard Hoggart Building, Cinema
11:00-12:15
The Theory of (Non-)Action: Benjamin, Rosenzweig
Daniel Weiss (Divinity, Cambridge): Daoism and Messianic Non-Action in Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and Classical Rabbinic Literature
Julia Ng (CCS, Goldsmiths): The Action of Non-Action: Benjamin, Daoism, and the Image
Moderator: John Ackerman (Centre for Research in Political Theology, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London)
1:15-2:30
Max Weber and Daoism: Contemporary Debates
Colin Gordon: Lebensführung and véridiction: Weber, Foucault.
Sam Whimster (Max Weber Studies): Weber on Daoism
2:45-4:00
Becoming Marxist
Leigh Jenco (Political Theory, LSE): New Pasts for New Futures in the work of Li Dazhao: A Temporal Reading of Global Thought
Michael Dutton (Politics, Goldsmiths): The Question of the Political
Moderator: Branwen Jones (Politics, Goldsmiths)
***
Whitehead Building, Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre
4:30-6:00
Benjamin, Studying, China
Peter Fenves (German, Northwestern)
Moderator: Julia Ng
6:15-8:00
Wan wu, or Ten Thousand Things
Scott Lash (CCS, Goldsmiths): Ten Thousand Things: Multiplicity without Identity
Francois Jullien (Philosophy, Paris 7): De l’être au vivre
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SPEAKERS
Michael Dutton is Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, where he specialises in contemporary social and cultural theory as pertaining specifically to China. He is the author of Beijing Time (Harvard UP, 2008), Policing Chinese Politics: A History (Duke UP, 2005), and Streetlife China (Cambridge UP, 1998).
Peter Fenves is Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies at Northwestern University. He has written extensively on Walter Benjamin, contemporary critical thought, and the German philosophical and literary tradition since 1750. He is the author of A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant (Cornell UP, 1991), "Chatter": Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford UP, 1993), Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford UP, 2001), and Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (Routledge, 2003); and most recently The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford UP, 2010), which includes the first English translations of two texts Benjamin wrote under the title of "The Rainbow."
Colin Gordon is the editor and translator (with Graham Burchell and Peter Miller) of The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago UP, 1991) and Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge (Pantheon, 1980). He has written extensively on political theory and history of political thought, social and cultural theory, Foucault and Weber, governmentality, and neoliberalism, and is a contributor to numerous essay collections and journal issues on Foucault’s writings and lectures.
Leigh Jenco is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Government department at the London School of Economics, where she specialises on the intersection of contemporary political theory and modern Chinese thought. She is the author of Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge UP, 2010), and co-editor (with Jun-Hyeok Kwak) of Republicanism in the Northeast Asian Context (Routledge, forthcoming) and of Chinese Thought as Global Theory: Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Harvard UP; under review).
François Jullien is Professor of Philosophy at Paris 7 (Denis Diderot). He has written extensively on the intersection of sinology and philosophy, departing from studies of ancient Chinese thought, neo-Confucianism and literary and aesthetic concepts of classical Chinese to re-examine the history and categories operative in Western thought. He is most recently the author of Cette étrange idée du beau (Grasset, Paris, 2010); L’invention de l’idéal et le destin de l’Europe (Seuil, Paris, 2009) ; De l’universel, de l’uniforme, du commun et du dialogue entre les cultures (Fayard, Paris 2008) and Chemin faisant, connaître la Chine ou relancer la philosophie (Seuil, Paris, 2006); and his latest book, De l'être au vivre, Lexique euro-chinois de la pensée will appear this month with Gallimard.
Scott Lash is Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths, where he researches on social and cultural theory, technological media, and the Chinese city. Most recently he is the co-author (with Michael Keith, Jakob Arnoldi and Tyler Rooker) of China Constructing Capitalism: Economic Life and Urban Change (Routledge, 2014), and author of Intensive Culture: Religion and Social Theory in Contemporary Culture (Sage, 2010).
Julia Ng is Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory at CCS, Goldsmiths, where she researches on the intersection of philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, and literary theory, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin. She has published on Benjamin’s relation to neo-Kantianism, contemporaneous mathematics, and Marx, and is working on two book projects: Conditions of Impossibility and Body, Force, Right: Towards a Literary Theory of Posthumous Life.
Daniel Weiss is Polonsky-Coexist Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge, where he specialises in modern Jewish religious thought (esp. Mendelssohn, Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber and Levinas), theories and practices of interreligious dialogue, the relation between scripture and philosophy, and ethics, hermeneutics, and theopolitics in classical rabbinic literature. He is the author of Paradox and the Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion (Oxford UP, 2012).
Sam Whimster is the editor of Max Weber Studies, and Head of the Culture and Modernisation Programme and Professorial Research Fellow at the Global Policy Institute, London. He specialises in social-economics, historical and comparative sociology, multiple modernities, social theory, Max Weber, and London’s urban sociology, and is the author of Understanding Weber (Routledge, 2007), The Essential Weber (Routledge, 2004), Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy (Palgrave, 1999), and (with Scott Lash) Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (Allen & Unwin, 1987).
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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10 Mar 2015 | 11:00am - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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