• Contester l’ordre et l’héritage colonial avec Manuel Quintín Lame
    https://www.terrestres.org/2024/05/24/contester-lordre-et-lheritage-colonial-avec-manuel-quintin-lame

    Trente ans après avoir été enterré dans la montagne colombienne, un manuscrit est exhumé et publié en 1971. C’est le testament politique et spirituel d’un acteur central des luttes autochtones d’Amérique latine, Manuel Quintín Lame, décédé quelques années plus tôt. Contre la dépossession foncière, économique et politique, une décolonisation ambitieuse reste à mener. Retour sur un livre, une philosophie et un parcours subversifs. L’article Contester l’ordre et l’héritage colonial avec Manuel Quintín Lame est apparu en premier sur Terrestres.

    #Amérique_Latine #Décolonial #Droits_des_peuples_autochtones #Forêt #Modernité #Savoirs #Stratégie

  • Une littérature enchantée
    https://laviedesidees.fr/Fleur-Hopkins-Loferon-Voir-l-invisible

    Dans le premier tiers du XXe siècle, une école littéraire a brillé sous l’appellation de « merveilleux scientifique ». Puisant dans la fiction, la #science et les techniques, elle a nourri les imaginaires de la modernité.

    #Histoire #modernité #littérature
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20240329_enchantement.pdf
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/docx/20240329_enchantement.docx

  • Décoloniser le changement climatique

    Les destructions des écosystèmes se sont accélérées et ont exacerbé les #relations_de_dominations entre Nord et Sud globaux. L’#environnementalisme_occidental, par son exclusion d’une partie des peuples de la Terre, a échoué à proposer des outils théoriques, pratiques et politiques pour véritablement confronter la #crise_écologique globale et construire un monde plus juste. En partant des expériences des #peuples_autochtones et subalternes du Sud et Nord, et des territoires anciennement colonisés y compris des « #Outre-mer », Plurivers offre une approche plurielle des pensées de l’#écologie allant au-delà de la #modernité occidentale. Internationale, interdisciplinaire et plurilingue, cette revue permet de penser les possibilités d’action selon notre position sociale et géographique ; elle dessine différents possibles afin de #faire-monde en commun à l’heure où les conditions d’#habitabilité de la Terre sont en péril.

    https://www.editionsducommun.org/products/plurivers-1-fevrier-2024

    #changement_climatique #climat #revue #décolonial

  • EN COMMUN ! La propriété collective à l’épreuve de la modernité

    Ce film documentaire est issu d’une recherche pluridisciplinaire menée pendant quatre années, sur différents sites en France, par le Centre de recherche en droit Antoine Favre de l’Université Savoie Mont Blanc. A partir d’une pluralité de points de vue, recueillis lors d’entretiens et témoignages, il rend compte de l’évolution et du fonctionnement de propriétés collectives foncières ancestrales, également connues sous le nom de « #communaux » ou « #biens_communaux ». Il s’intéresse en particulier à deux de ces systèmes singuliers et méconnus présents en zone rurale, notamment en région de #montagne : les #sections_de_commune et les #bourgeoisies. Quels rôles ces #communs_fonciers en mutation jouent-ils aujourd’hui à l’échelle des territoires en matière de gestion des ressources naturelles, de cohésion sociale ou de dynamiques patrimoniales ? En quoi ces systèmes peuvent-ils participer à une revivification originale et pertinente de la démocratie locale ? A rebours de l’idée reçue selon laquelle ils seraient condamnés dans la société moderne, le changement de perception dont ils font l’objet à présent les place-t-ils à l’avant-garde de la résolution de certains problèmes territoriaux ou climatiques du XXIème siècle ? Plus largement, à l’intersection de nombreux enjeux de société, ce film alimente une réflexion sur la redéfinition d’un cadre de vie conciliant progrès, #justice_sociale et préservation de l’environnement.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BclZKvhpww4

    #propriété_collective #terres #foncier #modernité #communs #commons #communs #documentaire #film_documentaire #film #forêt #bois #droits_d'usage #France #Alpes #montagne #élevage #sol #usage_du_sol #biens_communs #biens_de_section #Etat #Etat_moderne #municipalisation #droit_public #agriculture #tradition #terres #patrimoine #communalisation #spoliation #pâturage #loi_2013 #loi #commissions_syndicales #accaparement_de_terres #privatisation #corvées #éoliennes #2013 #préfecture #avant-garde #anachronisme #ignorance #chasse #legs #responsabilité #devoirs #bourgeoisie #droit_collectif #mécénat #communs_fonciers #valeurs

  • L’Inexploré - Pierre Legendre
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zkdFbCeRLU

    Pierre Legendre, à l’écart du brouhaha médiatique et des idéologies à la mode, a tracé patiemment, sur plus de soixante ans, le chemin de l’anthropologie dogmatique. Il est revenu, en la maison qui l’a accueilli dans ses premières années d’étude des manuscrits médiévaux, l’École des chartes, pour livrer « à la jeunesse désireuse des lois » le suc de son labeur.

    Dans le droit fil de « De la Société comme texte » (2001) et en résonance avec ses conférences données au Japon en 2004 « Ce que l’Occident ne voit pas de l’Occident », dans un style dépouillé, Pierre Legendre découvre ce qui fait tenir debout, enlacés, l’humain et la société. Quel meilleur guide que Piero della Francesca pour ouvrir nos yeux à l’invisible ?

    https://arsdogmatica.com

    #chrétienté #anthropologie_dogmatique #langue #institution #civilisation #montage #scène #individu #personne #fiction #Piero_della_Francesca #principe_de_réalité #religion #ritualité #pacte_dogmatique #faille_institutionnelle #modernité #droit_naturel #droit_romain #occident #papauté #activisme_juridique #contrat #protestantisme #universalisme_politique #impératif_libéral #révolution_protestante #révolutions #Europe #narration_totémique #chorégraphie #logiques_contraires #tiers-terme

  • #José_Vieira : « La #mémoire des résistances face à l’accaparement des terres a été peu transmise »

    Dans « #Territórios_ocupados », José Vieira revient sur l’#expropriation en #1941 des paysans portugais de leurs #terres_communales pour y planter des #forêts. Cet épisode explique les #mégafeux qui ravagent le pays et résonne avec les #luttes pour la défense des #biens_communs.

    Né au Portugal en 1957 et arrivé enfant en France à l’âge de 7 ans, José Vieira réalise depuis plus de trente ans des documentaires qui racontent une histoire populaire de l’immigration portugaise.

    Bien loin du mythe des Portugais·es qui se seraient « intégré·es » sans le moindre problème en France a contrario d’autres populations, José Vieira s’est attaché à démontrer comment l’#immigration_portugaise a été un #exode violent – voir notamment La Photo déchirée (2001) ou Souvenirs d’un futur radieux (2014) –, synonyme d’un impossible retour.

    Dans son nouveau documentaire, Territórios ocupados, diffusé sur Mediapart, José Vieira a posé sa caméra dans les #montagnes du #Caramulo, au centre du #Portugal, afin de déterrer une histoire oubliée de la #mémoire_collective rurale du pays. Celle de l’expropriation en 1941, par l’État salazariste, de milliers de paysans et de paysannes de leurs terres communales – #baldios en portugais.

    Cette #violence étatique a été opérée au nom d’un vaste #projet_industriel : planter des forêts pour développer économiquement ces #territoires_ruraux et, par le même geste, « civiliser » les villageois et villageoises des #montagnes, encore rétifs au #salariat et à l’ordre social réactionnaire de #Salazar. Un épisode qui résonne aujourd’hui avec les politiques libérales des États qui aident les intérêts privés à accaparer les biens communs.

    Mediapart : Comment avez-vous découvert cette histoire oubliée de l’expropriation des terres communales ou « baldios » au Portugal ?

    José Vieira : Complètement par hasard. J’étais en train de filmer Le pain que le diable a pétri (2012, Zeugma Films) sur les habitants des montagnes au Portugal qui sont partis après-guerre travailler dans les usines à Lisbonne.

    Je demandais à un vieux qui est resté au village, António, quelle était la définition d’un baldio – on voit cet extrait dans le documentaire, où il parle d’un lieu où tout le monde peut aller pour récolter du bois, faire pâturer ses bêtes, etc. Puis il me sort soudain : « Sauf que l’État a occupé tous les baldios, c’était juste avant que je parte au service militaire. »

    J’étais estomaqué, je voulais en savoir plus mais impossible, car dans la foulée, il m’a envoyé baladé en râlant : « De toute façon, je ne te supporte pas aujourd’hui. »

    Qu’avez-vous fait alors ?

    J’ai commencé à fouiller sur Internet et j’ai eu la chance de tomber sur une étude parue dans la revue de sociologie portugaise Análise Social, qui raconte comment dans les années 1940 l’État salazariste avait pour projet initial de boiser 500 000 hectares de biens communaux en expropriant les usagers de ces terres.

    Je devais ensuite trouver des éléments d’histoire locale, dans la Serra do Caramulo, dont je suis originaire. J’ai passé un temps fou le nez dans les archives du journal local, qui était bien sûr à l’époque entièrement dévoué au régime.

    Après la publication de l’avis à la population que les baldios seront expropriés au profit de la plantation de forêts, plus aucune mention des communaux n’apparaît dans la presse. Mais rapidement, des correspondants locaux et des éditorialistes vont s’apercevoir qu’il existe dans ce territoire un malaise, qu’Untel abandonne sa ferme faute de pâturage ou que d’autres partent en ville. En somme, que sans les baldios, les gens ne s’en sortent plus.

    Comment sont perçus les communaux par les tenants du salazarisme ?

    Les ingénieurs forestiers décrivent les paysans de ces territoires comme des « primitifs » qu’il faut « civiliser ». Ils se voient comme des missionnaires du progrès et dénoncent l’oisiveté de ces montagnards peu enclins au salariat.

    À Lisbonne, j’ai trouvé aussi une archive qui parle des baldios comme étant une source de perversion, de mœurs légères qui conduisent à des enfants illégitimes dans des coins où « les familles vivent presque sans travailler ». Un crime dans un régime où le travail est élevé au rang de valeur suprême.

    On retrouve tous ces différents motifs dans le fameux Portrait du colonisé d’Albert Memmi (1957). Car il y a de la part du régime un vrai discours de colonisateur vis-à-vis de ces régions montagneuses où l’État et la religion ont encore peu de prise sur les habitants.

    En somme, l’État salazariste veut faire entrer ces Portugais reculés dans la modernité.

    Il y a eu des résistances face à ces expropriations ?

    Les villageois vont être embauchés pour boiser les baldios. Sauf qu’après avoir semé les pins, il faut attendre vingt ans pour que la forêt pousse.

    Il y a eu alors quelques histoires d’arrachage clandestin d’arbres. Et je raconte dans le film comment une incartade avec un garde forestier a failli virer au drame à cause d’une balle perdue – je rappelle qu’on est alors sous la chape de plomb du salazarisme. D’autres habitants ont aussi tabassé deux gardes forestiers à la sortie d’un bar et leur ont piqué leurs flingues.

    Mais la mémoire de ces résistances a peu été transmise. Aujourd’hui, avec l’émigration, il ne reste plus rien de cette mémoire collective, la plupart des vieux et vieilles que j’ai filmés dans ce documentaire sont déjà morts.

    Comment justement avez-vous travaillé pour ce documentaire ?

    Quand António me raconte cette histoire d’expropriation des baldios par l’État, c’était en 2010 et je tournais un documentaire, Souvenirs d’un futur radieux. Puis lorsqu’en 2014 un premier incendie a calciné le paysage forestier, je me suis dit qu’il fallait que je m’y mette.

    J’ai travaillé doucement, pendant trois ans, sans savoir où j’allais réellement. J’ai filmé un village situé à 15 kilomètres de là où je suis né. J’ai fait le choix d’y suivre des gens qui subsistent encore en pratiquant une agriculture traditionnelle, avec des outils de travail séculaires, comme la roue celte. Ils ont les mêmes pratiques que dans les années 1940, et qui sont respectueuses de l’écosystème, de la ressource en eau, de la terre.

    Vous vous êtes aussi attaché à retracer tel un historien cet épisode de boisement à marche forcée...

    Cette utopie industrialiste date du XIXe siècle, des ingénieurs forestiers parlant déjà de vouloir récupérer ces « terres de personne ». Puis sous Salazar, dans les années 1930, il y a eu un débat intense au sein du régime entre agrairistes et industrialistes. Pour les premiers, boiser ne va pas être rentable et les baldios sont vitaux aux paysans. Pour les seconds, le pays a besoin de l’industrie du bois pour décoller économiquement, et il manque de bras dans les villes pour travailler dans les usines.

    Le pouvoir central a alors même créé un organisme étatique, la Junte de colonisation interne, qui va recenser les baldios et proposer d’installer des personnes en leur donnant à cultiver des terres communales – des colonies de repeuplement pour résumer.

    Finalement, l’industrie du bois et de la cellulose l’a emporté. La loi de boisement des baldios est votée en 1938 et c’est en novembre 1941 que ça va commencer à se mettre en place sur le terrain.

    Une enquête publique a été réalisée, où tout le monde localement s’est prononcé contre. Et comme pour les enquêtes aujourd’hui en France, ils se sont arrangés pour dire que les habitants étaient d’accord.

    Qu’en est-il aujourd’hui de ces forêts ? Subsiste-t-il encore des « baldios » ?

    Les pinèdes sont exploitées par des boîtes privées qui font travailler des prolos qui galèrent en bossant dur. Mais beaucoup de ces forêts ont brûlé ces dernière décennies, notamment lors de la grande vague d’incendies au Portugal de 2017, où des gens du village où je filmais ont failli périr.

    Les feux ont dévoilé les paysages de pierre qu’on voyait auparavant sur les photos d’archives du territoire, avant que des pins de 30 mètres de haut ne bouchent le paysage.

    Quant aux baldios restants, ils sont loués à des entreprises de cellulose qui y plantent de l’eucalyptus. D’autres servent à faire des parcs d’éoliennes. Toutes les lois promues par les différents gouvernements à travers l’histoire du Portugal vont dans le même sens : privatiser les baldios alors que ces gens ont géré pendant des siècles ces espaces de façon collective et très intelligente.

    J’ai fait ce film avec en tête les forêts au Brésil gérées par les peuples autochtones depuis des siècles, TotalEnergies en Ouganda qui déplace 100 000 personnes de leurs terres pour du pétrole ou encore Sainte-Soline, où l’État aide les intérêts privés à accaparer un autre bien commun : l’eau.

    https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/021223/jose-vieira-la-memoire-des-resistances-face-l-accaparement-des-terres-ete-

    #accaparement_de_terres #terre #terres #dictature #histoire #paysannerie #Serra_do_Caramulo #communaux #salazarisme #progrès #colonisation #colonialisme #rural #modernité #résistance #incendie #boisement #utopie_industrialiste #ingénieurs #ingénieurs_forestiers #propriété #industrie_du_bois #Junte_de_colonisation_interne #colonies_de_repeuplement #cellulose #pinèdes #feux #paysage #privatisation #eucalyptus #éoliennes #loi #foncier

  • Épisode 1/4 : Pourquoi reconstituer les étapes de la #croissance ?

    Les économistes s’intéressent aux étapes de la croissance. De nombreux travaux ont été consacrés à la question. A quoi servent-ils donc ?

    En 1960, paraissait Les étapes de la croissance économique. Un manifeste non communiste, un ouvrage rassemblant les conférences données par #William_Rostow à l’Université de Cambridge, puis publiées dans The Economist. L’ouvrage défendait l’idée que le développement économique d’un pays passe nécessairement par cinq phases, allant de la société traditionnelle à société de consommation.
    Une histoire mondiale différente

    Quelques décennies plus tard, l’économiste #Angus_Maddison propose une histoire mondiale différente dans laquelle il reconstitue pour chaque continent les #étapes_de_la_croissance depuis l’An 1. Il montre notamment que la Chine a présenté jusqu’au XIVème siècle un revenu par habitant plus élevé que celui de l’Europe, mais insiste sur « le caractère exceptionnel, dans le développement mondial, de la performance économique sur le long terme de l’Europe occidentale ». « En l’an 1000, indique-t-il, son niveau de revenu était tombé en deçà de celui de l’Asie et de l’Afrique du Nord ; au XIVe siècle, à l’issue d’une longue résurrection, elle avait rattrapé la Chine (premier pays du monde) ; en 1820, ses niveaux de revenu et de productivité étaient plus de deux fois supérieurs à ceux du reste du monde ; en 1913, le niveau de revenu de l’Europe occidentale et des pays d’immigration européenne était plus de six fois supérieur à celui du reste du monde ». Comment expliquer cette évolution ?

    Maddison réfute la thèse de certains de ses prédécesseurs, dont #Paul_Bairoch, selon lesquels l’Europe de l’Ouest aurait été moins riche que la Chine jusqu’en 1800 et aurait, à partir de ce moment, principalement construit sa supériorité sur l’#exploitation des autres pays. Maddison soutient que l’Europe de l’Ouest était déjà riche avant la Révolution industrielle par comparaison aux autres parties du monde, cette position s’expliquant par « son avance scientifique, des siècles de lente accumulation et la solidité de son organisation et de sa #finance ». L’objectif de Maddison est en effet de comprendre les facteurs qui expliquent les divergences entre les pays et notamment l’avancée de certains. Parmi ceux-ci, il souligne la place reconnue à la science au cours de la #modernité occidentale (...)

    https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/le-pourquoi-du-comment-economie-et-social/pourquoi-reconstituer-les-etapes-de-la-croissance-7221905
    #économie #richesse

  • #Baptiste_Morizot, philosophe : “Parler d’anthropocène est historiquement faux et politiquement paralysant”

    Après avoir côtoyé le loup, cet observateur attentif de la nature s’intéresse dans son dernier ouvrage, “L’Inexploré”, à l’activité des #castors. Un modèle dont nous devrions nous inspirer pour rendre notre planète plus habitable.

    (...)

    "je travaille actuellement sur les #rivières, et sur le meilleur ambassadeur pour activer leur #guérison, à savoir le castor. Loin d’être un nuisible ou un animal mignon à fourrure, le castor a transformé la plupart des milieux de plaine depuis des millions d’années : il crée des barrage et, ce faisant, ralentit l’eau sur la terre, la stocke dans les sols et la partage avec toutes les formes de vie. Il se trouve que les sciences hydrologiques contemporaines, confrontées aux sécheresses du changement climatique, défendent l’idée qu’il faut changer de paradigme dans notre gestion des rivières : passer d’une ère du drainage, où l’on a évacué l’eau vers la mer pour assécher les zones humides, à une ère de la réhydratation des continents, pour garder cette eau précieuse sur les terres. La beauté de cette affaire, c’est que ce programme d’action scientifique est ni plus ni moins que ce que fait le castor depuis sept millions d’années- quand on le laisse revenir et activer sa médecine spontanée. Les nuisances qu’il génère en mangeant quelques arbres et en inondant quelques parcelles apparaissent comme dérisoires (et par ailleurs évitables) au vu des enjeux climatiques. Le rapport du Giec 2022 pointait d’ailleurs l’importanée du castor dans nos milieux. Et les chercheurs Emily Fairfax et Chris jordan ont publié l’an passé un article fascinant et convaincant : ils assurent qu’un pan décisif du « plan d’action climat » pour lutter contre sécheresses, inondations et mégafeux aux États-Unis consiste en une alliance avec Je castor."

    –—

    Question : S’allier avec le peuple castor, vraiment ?

    Cela implique une métamorphose philosophique, puisque le propre de la modernité est d’avoir revendiqué pour les seuls humains le privilège d’aménager le territoire - parce que nous avons un gros cerveau ... Si des scientifiques très sérieux, bardés de diplômes et de savoirs, estiment aujourd’hui que la meilleure manière de guérir les rivières est de s’inspirer d’un animal dont le cerveau n’est pas plus gros qu’une .noix, c’est parce qu’il est notre aîné : il transforme les rivières, à leur bénéfice, depuis des millions d’années, quand nous n’avons commencé à les aménager que depuis quelques siècles. Et dans notre seul intérêt. Nous sommes en quelque sorte le jeune prodige de la biodiversité, persuadé, en Occident, de tout savoir. Or ce monde est telle~ent plus ancien que nous, et peuplé de puissances qui savent le guérir~ qu’il faut accepter de se libérer de nos préjugés narcissiques. Et de nous allier avec des forces non humaines.

    https://www.telerama.fr/debats-reportages/baptiste-morizot-philosophe-le-meilleur-ambassadeur-pour-activer-la-gueriso
    #castor #rivières

    • L’inexploré

      « Ce livre n’est pas un livre, c’est une carte. Et ce n’est pas une carte, c’est un atelier de carto­graphe, dans lequel, sous vos yeux, sont dessinées des ébauches de cartes. Et ce n’est pas un atelier, puisque nous sommes chaque fois sur le chemin : c’est le récit fait en direct des parcours d’exploration trébuchants d’un nouveau continent inexploré – qui n’est autre que la Terre vivante, mais qui a brusquement changé de #nature sous nos pieds. »

      Pour la première fois depuis l’avènement de la #modernité, la nature des êtres non humains nous échappe. À notre époque d’extinction et de crise climatique, nos relations aux êtres vivants sont déstabilisées.

      Nous sommes sortis de l’illusion moderne selon laquelle « la #science » aurait stabilisé nos relations au monde. Nous ne savons plus ce que veut dire « nature » et ce que veut dire « #politique ».

      Nous sommes entrés dans le temps de la #métamorphose, dans le temps mythique : ce temps, en-deçà du temps, dans lequel se renégocient nos relations au monde. Entre nature et politique, il nous faut avancer par petits pas errants en quête de l’entre-deux : le continent englouti.

      Cet espace de relations dont on avait occulté l’existence même et nié la possibilité, cet espace d’égards ajustés envers les vivants non humains.

      L’enjeu : recommencer ce monde.

      https://wildproject.org/livres/l-inexplore
      #livre

    • La thèse Chakabartyienne d’une toute nouvelle conscience environnementale planétaire tient-elle mieux la route que celle de la nouveauté de la société du risque ? Non. Le grand récit d’un passage progressif de l’obscurité aux lumières vertes se révèle incorrect au regard des acquis récents en histoire des sciences et des savoirs ainsi qu’en histoire environnementale. Un désormais important corpus d’études a démontré que nous ne vivons pas ce moment unique et récent où les humains se demanderaient pour première fois ce qu’ils font à la planète. De nombreux travaux sont en effet venus ébrécher la thèse d’un clivage passé entre histoire humaine et histoire naturelle que Chakrabarty attribue à la modernité, et dont il prophétise la remise en cause présente.

      [...]

      En somme, les 3e et 4e traits du « planétaire », à savoir les réflexivités environnementales sensibles au temps long de la Terre et à la planétologie comparative, posés comme nouveaux par Chakrabarty, se révèlent des grammaires réflexives bien plus anciennes, par lesquelles les élites impériales ont pensé les conditions et le devenir de leur hégémonie (en inventant notamment des justifications « vertes » à l’impérialisme). Il ne s’agit pas ici de prétendre que les connaissances et environnementales planétaires du début de l’ère moderne ou du XIXe siècle doivent être considérées comme d’héroïques avant-courriers oubliés des actuelles Sciences du Système Terre, du GIEC et de l’Anthropocène ! Il s’agit plutôt d’historiciser la catégorie du « planétaire » et non pas seulement celle du « global ».

      La critique de Bonneuil est bien vue, mais je commence aussi à me dire que ce débat sur la date de départ de notre réflexivité environnementale est un peu inutile. Je pense qu’on peut soutenir à la fois que celle-ci a toujours existé et qu’on en vit une inédite - et pourquoi pas appeler ça planetary turn.

      Le rappel de Bonneuil, Fressoz et co. est utile – il y a toujours eu des gens qui se sont souciés de leur environnement à plus ou moins grande échelle, qui ont alerté et lutté contre les pollutions industrielles en tout genre, qui en ont souffert, qui ont lié questions politiques et environnementales, commerciales et biogéochimiques (?), y compris parmi les élites européennes. Bref, il est utile de rappeler que nous n’avons jamais été modernes (hu hu !). Ce rappel permet de ne pas se couper fondamentalement du passé, de montrer qu’un autre chemin était possible, que les responsables du massacre n’ont pas agi dans une ignorance complète des conséquences.

      Mais, outre les catastrophes qui se multiplient partout, les sciences du système Terre n’offrent-elles pas justement quelque chose de fondamentalement différent dans notre expérience de la planétarité ? Dans le cas du réchauffement en particulier, on parle de gaz invisibles, qui se mélangent rapidement globalement, qui n’ont aucun effet (direct) sur la santé, et dont les effets se produisent sur des décennies, siècles, millénaires. Les sciences viennent rendre visibles, avec une très grande précision, un truc qui sans elles resteraient inconnus, elles nous rendent plus sensibles aux effets de nos activités, redéfinissent les risques comme étant globaux et se jouant sur de grandes échelles de temps. Le futur de l’humanité est discuté à partir de modélisations climatiques, des traités internationaux sont signés sous l’influence de la science.

      (Parmi ces sciences, celle de Claude Lorius (https://seenthis.net/messages/996066) a joué un grand rôle. Les graphes montrant en parallèle les concentrations de co2/méthane et la température sur des centaines de milliers d’années sont devenus iconiques, ils définissent la « base » à partir de laquelle on a gravement dévié et ils nous font connaître le climat de la Terre sur 1 million d’années. La somme de connaissances issues de sa science avec laquelle on se trouve maintenant est phénoménale, alors qu’au début de sa carrière elle était vue comme un truc d’amateurs et que lui voulait surtout aller jouer les aventuriers en Antarctique.)

  • ★ LA MODERNITÉ... - Socialisme libertaire

    Pendant très longtemps, des barrières d’octroi étaient installées aux portes des cités. Pour rentrer dans la ville, les voyageurs devaient acquitter une taxe qu’ils payaient à une sorte de guichetier. La république, bon enfant pour faciliter le commerce supprima cet usage. Cette suppression contentait tout le monde, c’était un progrès, c’était moderne.
    Dans les années 60, l’état français lança un programme de construction d’autoroutes. Pour financer la chose, très vite il fut décidé d’installer des péages. A chaque sortie d’autoroute des guichetiers ont été installés pour prélever cette taxe. Les automobilistes râlèrent bien un peu, mais au moins pensaient-ils « ça fait des chômeurs en moins ».
    Il y a quelques années, l’État pour régler ses problèmes de fin de mois décida de vendre ses autoroutes. Pressé ou distrait, on ne sait, il les brada à un prix largement inférieur à leur valeur réelle. Les acquéreurs remboursèrent très vite leur investissement et depuis ils se gavent (...)

    #modernité #anarchisme #communisme_libertaire #autogestion #émancipation #écologie #antimilitarisme #anticléricalisme #fédéralisme_libertaire #feminisme #antiétatisme #anticapitalisme #antifascisme #internationalisme...

    ⏩ Lire le texte complet…

    ▶️ https://www.socialisme-libertaire.fr/2018/11/la-modernite.html

  • Michael Mann ou la modernité mélancolique
    https://laviedesidees.fr/Michael-Mann-ou-la-modernite-melancolique.html

    À propos de : Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Michael Mann : mirages du contemporain, Flammarion. Des mégalopoles immenses où les individus se perdent, des systèmes froids où les personnages sont de simples rouages, des métiers dans lesquels les hommes s’épuisent : Michael Mann pose un regard acéré et mélancolique sur le monde contemporain.

    #Arts #capitalisme #États-Unis #modernité #cinéma #post-modernité
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/docx/20220513_mann_corrige-4.docx
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20220513_mann_corrige-3.pdf

  • « Les Africains furent au cœur de la construction de notre monde moderne » | Victoria Brittain
    https://afriquexxi.info/article4938.html

    Dans un essai passionnant écrit en anglais, Born in Blackness, Howard W. French, un journaliste américain devenu universitaire, prend à contre-pied l’orthodoxie historique dominante. Grâce à une documentation riche, il démontre que l’Afrique et les Africains réduits en esclavage ont joué un rôle majeur dans la construction de ce que l’on a appelé la « modernité » de l’Occident. Source : Afrique XXI

  • From Form‑Trans‑Inform to Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée. A Discussion with Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou
    Zeppelin
    https://e-zeppelin.ro/en/from-form%e2%80%91trans%e2%80%91inform-to-atelier-darchitecture-autogeree

    Summer 2021

    Interview: Alex Axinte

    Co-founded by Constan­tin Petcou and Doina Petrescu, atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) is “a collective platform of research and action around urban change and emerging cultural, social and political practices in the contemporary city. aaa initiates and supports strategies of ecological transition involving citizen locally and internationally. aaa acts against global crisis (ecological, economic, political, social, etc) by creating the conditions for citizen to participate in the ecological transition and adopting resilient ways of living. aaa functions within an open interdisciplinary network, where different viewpoints cross each other: architects, artists, students, researchers, pensioners, politicians, activists, residents, etc.

    aaa is an international reference in the field of participative architecture and urban resilience, aaa’s projects have been exhibited at Venise Biennale 2012 and 2016, MoMA New York, Berlin Biennale, Pavilion d’Arsenal Paris, Untied Nation Pavilion Geneva, etc. For its activity, aaa has received international recogni­tion and numerous awards across the years including the International Resilient Award Building for Humanity (2018), The Innovation in Politics Award for Ecology (2017) being one of the “100 projects for the climate” selected by the public at COP21 (2015). (Alex Axinte)

    The passages bellow are extracted from a series of conversations I had during several days with Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou. At their studio, at home, in cafes and metros or visiting their projects located in different Paris suburbs, we spoke about their beginnings in Romania, about their current practice atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) and about future plans. While still in school, within the social and political context of 1980’s Romania, they were involved in initiating groups and networks, they engaged in experiment and innovation, building after graduation an alternative practice through a critically approach of architecture.

    Visiting aaa. Drawing by Alex Axinte

    Alex Axinte: Let’s start from the time when you were professionally and humanly trained in Romania within the socialist education system of that time. Has this contributed to what your practice became?

    Doina Petrescu: Certainly it was a seed there, which wasn’t enough by itself, but it was important because this prepared us to face practical situations, knowing everything that a traditional architect should know. And this thing was a solid base, for knowing how to build, knowing about materials, knowing about structure, knowing history, you can see now that this is not taught in schools anymore, that these became specializations, you specialize in such things. We learned them all. And somehow this general formation counted a solid base, as a foundation. On top of this you can add other more sophisticated things, you may try to position yourself, you can take a stand, and you can develop certain interests. So this was one of the good things. Other good thing from the school, not necessarily different from the school, but one that we took or created in the school, was some sort of parallel school, of which Constantin can say more because he initiated it, adding the fact that the school allowed us the freedom to do other things.

    Constantin Petcou: I did two interesting things in school: first is that I walked a lot through Bucharest and I took the street as a teacher. I had also good teachers, but I studied a lot vernacular architecture. And second is that I initiated a group, a sort of school in school, which was called Form-Trans-Inform and which was based on knowledge theory, and other theories as well. [Stratford H, Petrescu D & Petcou C (2008) Form-Trans-Inform: the ‘poetic’ resistance in architecture. arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 12(02)] Basically it was a transdisciplinary group: there were students from scenography, we had interactions with others too, we also organized some events in Club A, we invited philosophes, art critiques, until they spotted me and wanted me to enrol in the party…

    “Inner Gesture“ – happening, Baneasa 1982, team: Constantin Petcou, Constantin Gorcea, Florin Neagoe, Lavinia Marșu, Doru Deacu, Sorin Vatamaniuc, Constantin Fagețean ©Form-Trans-Inform

    AA: What vernacular Bucharest meant?

    CP: It meant some fabulous neighbourhoods, because many they were self-constructed, this being usual in mahalas (ie. popular neighbourhoods). The inhabitants were partly self-sufficient: they were already controlling the household climate, having a lot of courtyards covered with vine, they were trying to produce energy, and there were quite a lot of wind mills, they were trying to produce food by raising pigeons in big cages , which were flying all around… It was like in Garcia Marquez. If you were really sensitive to space and wind and light, you were blown away by how much you could see and feel…

    AA: Is this something that you were looking for also in Paris, or you rather came with this type of looking from Bucharest?

    CP: In Paris you don’t have such a thing. I think it was a root that we came from there.

    DP: Yes, and we applied this later in projects like R-Urban and other projects which we developed later. It was a lesson we have learned, we have understood from those conditions. Also, we still kept having this sensibility to “read” spaces’ potentiality. For example you see a square and some trees: you realise that there is a place there with a certain urban quality and in Bucharest there were many such places with very special qualities due to the urban typologies and ways of living. This mahala type of living was actually a sensitive urban typology.

    Constantin rises on his tops and waters the plants hanging from the studio’s ceiling. We flip through black and white magazines in which there were published some of their projects receiving prizes in paper architecture competitions. They tell me about how they became involved in organizing exhibitions, about working with clothing, about publications which didn’t make it past the 1st issue and where many articles finished with ‘to be continued’. Than, they continued with their architect’s life in Romania before ’89: Doina working in sistematizare (state planning) and Constantin as ‘mister Design’ in a factory of clothing and shoes. Here, with found materials, they worked together for redesigning an office space as a sort of ‘participative deconstructivist’ manifesto, quite provocative at the time. Doina goes out in the courtyard and ransacks bended over some compost containers. Here are their pets, some big earthworms which just received banana peels as their favourite meal. After ’90 they left for Paris guided by the idea to continue their postgraduate studies and than to come back.

    “Catarg towards Ithaca“ –“Honorable mention“ at Shinkenchiku Residential Competition, Japan, 1986. Echipa de proiect/Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Mircea Stefan, Victor Badea

    *The Design section atelier – Valceana Leather Factory, 1988. Project team : Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu ©ConstantinPetcou

    AA: It is a fairly quite spread perception, that architecture is architecture and politics is politics. We are doing our job, we design, we build. If this supports an ideology or not, this is not architecture’s business. How architecture became for you a political acting?

    DP: I think that in a way it was the context that forced us when we started. We started from scratch. And we had to invent ways of negotiating to gain access to space, to gain access to ways of practicing architecture, and we quickly realized that such a negotiation is political and that actually you need to learn to speak with people caring political responsibilities. But at the same time, we realized that the very fact of asking, of doing the practice differently is a political act. There were some things we refused to do, such as the conventional capitalist practice. We wanted to facilitate the inhabitants’ access to space, for any city inhabitant, we wanted to open urban spaces that are closed and that are controlled either by the municipalities or other institutions, and this is already a political act. We managed to ensure access to space, and afterwards, slowly, the self-management of the space, which was also a process, by persuading people that they have to become responsible if they want to use the space, that they need to learn how to manage it, to get along, to organize. This is in fact what Deleuze and Guatarri are calling micro-politics, meaning politics at the level of the subject, transformations at the subjective level. [Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2004), Anti-Oedipus, London: Continuum] We always worked with people. Our architecture always included this subjective and social architecture into the project. The fact that we formed a social group around the project, that people have changed, that they changed their interest, all these are for us part of architecture.

    AA: Do you tend towards consensus in your projects?

    CP: We don’t really use the word consensus. It is about temporary equilibrium. In any such a project, as there are many people involved, and here we speak about governance, co-management and self-management, there are various interests, there are people with different cultural backgrounds – some are employed, others not -­ and people with more or less time. So they cannot have the same vision over the use of space, over the type of activities, and then you need to reach some agreements, some temporary, partial deals, which should not suffocate the others and allow others to emerge. What we do is to give the inhabitants the opportunity to appropriate a space, an equipment, a way of organising time together, of organising the neighbourhood’s life, which are ecological, solidary, all this obviously with some guidance. Because the majority of inhabitants of the banlieue are very much excluded. And we are offering them an emancipatory space, or, in Guatarri’s language, a re-subjectivation capacity, very useful in today’s society which excludes many. [F. Guattari (1977), La révolution Moléculaire, Paris: ed. Recherches] In such spaces they gain new qualities; someone is a gardener, someone else takes care of the chickens, somebody else of the compost, one of the kitchen…

    DP: This is actualy the micro-politics.

    CP: Including until the kids’ level. I remember when we were at the Ecobox I had a lot of keys and a kid asked me, mais Constantin, you have keys from every space in the neighbourhood?! Can you open any space? And obviously that I answered yes, because, for his imaginary it was very important to know that you can open spaces, that you can make this urban space to evolve, which has become now more and more expensive, inaccessible and segregated. Such imaginary is fundamental for the “right to the city”, it is to know that, even for a kid, space could be negotiable, accessible and welcoming, that there are no barriers and walls. Actually, we don’t make walls: we make doors, windows, bridges… this is the kind of things we are building.

    Steering to the passers-by, Doina recollects her diploma project for which she collaborated with an ethnologist to design something which today could be called an ethnological cultural hub. Once arrived in Paris, after a master, they began teaching, being among others the co-founders of Paris-Malaquais architecture school. Step by step, they began to act as citizens, teachers and architects in the neighbourhood where they were living: La Chapelle. This is how aaa started. In the same time, they kept on teaching and initiating projects also in Romania, in Brezoi, but which got stuck. Constantin starts the fire in a small godin in the Agrocite, located in southern Paris, at Bagneux, which is a sort of ecological prototype spatializing aaa’s concepts: short circuits, popular ecology, urban resilience.

    Mobile modules – EcoBox project, 2003. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Denis Favret, Giovanni Piovene ©aaa

    *Eco interstice “Passage 56“ – street view, 2007, Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Raimund Binder, Sandra Pauquet, Nolwenn Marchand ©aaa

    AA: 100 years after Bauhaus, 50 years after the May ’68 revolt and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, within the current global capitalism crisis, all Bauhaus’ principles of how to live and work together are becoming again relevant. In this context, how legitimate is still Bauhaus’s questions if design can change society, and what it means to be modern today?

    DP: So all these ideas are reaching some sort of anniversary and one needs to take them together, one cannot take only Bauhaus ideas, but also other ideas which came after in order to understand what can design do today: participation, global democracy, ecology. Design need to remain open, as Ezio Manzini was saying: ‘design when everybody designs’. There is an acknowledgement of the fact that we are all designing, in our own way, we design our life, we design our decisions. How can you put all those things together in a strategic way, at a moment when the society and the humanity need to take some decisions, need to be prepared for a civilizational change, otherwise we become extinct? I think design has a role in this, by helping, by mediating, by formulating questions, decisions, or solutions together. And how to do design together is the big question, and there is not only one way of doing it, there are many ways. We also need to imagine what are these places where ways of designing together are possible. Which are the new institutions, the new mediating agents? – all these seem to me to be the questions of our times.

    Constantin confesses that Bauhaus changed his life, when, after an exhibition, improbable for that time, where 1:1 modernist furniture was exhibited, he quits the arts high school in Iași and joined the architecture school.

    CP: I am sure that design has an immense capacity to change society until even distorting it (see the tablet, the iPhone…). As architects, we are working a lot in a broader sense of design, and that’s why we are trying to launch not just projects, but also movements like One Planet Site or R-Urban which can be adopted also by others, because we have the capacity and the responsibility, so you have the capacity, but you have also the responsibility to act. It’s like a doctor. If you are in a plane and someone is sick, you have the capacity and responsibility to act. This is the case for us architects: we acted here in the neighbourhood we are living because there were many difficulties. The planet is now in great difficulty and you need to act. We know how to design, to project into the future, to find money, to create a horizon of hope, a model which becomes interesting for others too, so we have this capacity to design, in a broader sense, complex, temporal and functional. All these including re-balancing how much technology, how many resources, how much mutualisation, how much governance, all these are in fact design.

    DP: For example, with R-Urban we proposed a resilience strategy as designers. We have used design and the organization and shaping of space, of making visible specific practices, as a catalyst. We succeed in a way to organize a social group around the project, by giving it also a political dimension, again, by using architecture’s capacity to make visible, to make real the idea of short circuits for example. People could finally see what happens if you collect rain water, where it goes, that you have to think differently about space to make passive heating, and that you need to think differently about the heating system if you want to reduce the fuel consumption. That by using space in a certain way, in 1 year time you will have this amount of reduction of carbon emissions, which is much better than the national rate. So, all these things can be made visible through the way you design their experience. We didn’t just design a building, or a site, but we designed a usage and a way of creating an activity there.

    “ R-Urban “ – Diagrams on the ecological transition principles 2008. Echipa de proiect/Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu cu Nolwenn Marchand, Sara Carlini, Clémence Kempnich ©aaa

    ““Agrocité”—micro-farm for urban agriculture and ecological training, Colombes, 2013-2014

    “Recyclab”—social economy hub, urban waste recycling and eco-design, Colombes, 2013. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Clémence Kempnich

    “Agrocité”—micro-farm for urban agriculture and ecological training, Bagneux, 2019. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Anna Laura Bourguignon, Alex Gaiser, Rémi Buscot, Juliette Hennequin

    AA: So you could say that this means modernity now?

    DP: The concept of modernity is very much contested in fact, but in a way you could say that this means a hope for the future.

    CP: Modernity I think it had the quality of promoting progress, a democratic progress for all, through small prices, standardization, through in fact what they knew back then. And I think that these ideals remain somehow valid. Such as fablabs are in a way a continuity of this progressive modernist ideal of making accessible and democratic the use to technology. And it’s good. But the problem is the excess. When standardization becomes excessive and exploitative. I think modernity needs to be revisited, keeping what is good, like democracy, ethics, progress and others, and readapting it. Because modernity couldn’t address at that time the problems of limited resources issues, climate change, extractive capitalism, or extinction of species; those problems weren’t visible back than.

    AA: What is the relation with technology in your projects?

    DP: We document and present all our technological devices with an interface accessible to the users and we make them with means that makes them transferable and reproducible. I think we need to take into account the democratization of technology and the fact that the reproduction is not made by the industry, but by the masses, everyone being able to take part. What is important is to keep a degree of creativity, of appropriateness, of participative innovation possible at all levels. All these technological devices were conceived together with experts. The grey water filtration system was made together with a specialist in phyto-remediation. What we brought new is that we designed the first prototype used in urban contexts. This approach is also situated, is specific for a certain situation, you work with the specialist to find the solution there, and afterwards you integrate also local and traditional knowledge. For example, for the phyto-remediation device it was very cool that we built it with a team of Romanians having a construction company in France. Due to the fact we were in a flooding area, we needed to raise the device above the ground by 1 meter and we didn’t know how to build it. And then, the team of Romanians which knew how to make… barrels, manage with what we had, with found boards that were boarded like for barrels… and this is how we made the phyto-remediation device. This shows that all skills and ways of knowledge are useful in a certain situation.

    They choose together the tomatoes, than Doina the aubergines and Constantin the potatoes from a temporary market installed in the Paris former mortuary house. This is now a cultural centre, open to everyone and full of life. Recently they participated in the biggest architectural competition organized by the city of Paris which offered some difficult sites for development – “Reinventer Pars”. The brief was very close to the R-Urban model. They haven’t officially won, but their proposal was very good and this is how they were able to develop it in a different location. The project is called Wiki Village Factory (VWF) and is a cluster of technological and social innovation of 7000 sqm which aims to become a sort of central node in the R-Urban network towards developing the city 2.0 (ecological and collaborative).

    “Wiki-Village-Factory” – cluster of social and ecological innovation, Paris, 2016. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Benjamin Poignon, Pierre Marie Cornin, Grégoire Beaumont © aaa-REI-Deswarte

    AA: With WVF for example, how important is for you the materiality and the aesthetics? Or is the program more important?

    CP: Aesthetics for as is a result. You need to take care for the building to be well integrated in the context, you need to express well what’s going on. For example, the coop spaces are trying to make you to wish to collaborate with others; it’s not just like any other office. The ground floor, we try to have it open towards the neighbourhood, despite it is a difficult neighbourhood.

    DP: I would say that aesthetics are trying to express not necessary the programme, but what is important in the program and beyond the program. We are using architecture tactically if you want, as a way of exposing and communicating principles of functioning, of governance, of construction and the ethics of using a building today.

    CP: We are exposing the ecology of the building in fact, and this is beyond function. In order to become more ecologic. This is to make you use fewer materials, less insulation, but count on the passive insulation of the building’ skin. We also succeeded in convincing them to have dry toilets. This will be the largest building with dry toilets in Europe. We will build a special device, like a large scale prototype, which doesn’t exist right now. In fact, although they are on a tight budget, they will put more money into this than into usual toilets, because also the developer and everybody want this aspect to be exemplary. And it will be quite vegetal, with urban agriculture; we will try to remediate the grey waters. All the principles that we are using in R-Urban hubs will be implementing as much as we can also here.

    AA: So, the city 2.0 should look differently because it values and creates hierarchies in a different way?

    DP: Yes, it is important to create a new discourse, but also governance is important, social and ecological governance, that is what we try to express through architecture. There are many layers which add up to the modernist functional layer. And there is also the idea of being reversible, the fact that a building needs to evolve, to adapt, to disappear if necessary after a while, so it is not built to last hundreds of years. Because we need to leave room for future generations to build the architecture they need, don’t we?

    #ville #écologie #participation #auto_gestion #urban_planning

  • J.B. Fressoz et D. Pestre, Risque et société du risque depuis deux siècles, 2011
    https://sniadecki.wordpress.com/2021/09/03/fressoz-pestre-risque

    Le but de cet article n’est pas de nier tout changement, de dire que les continuités sont plus fortes que les ruptures, mais de questionner le hiatus trop hâtivement établi entre ce passé aveugle et nous. Les sociétés européennes du XIXe siècle ont certes largement pollué et enclenché la carbonification de notre économie et de notre atmosphère et, en cela, elles ne semblent pas « réflexives ». Mais cela n’implique pas qu’elles ne se sont jamais posées de questions – ni que notre prise de conscience actuelle nous mène vers un développement qualitativement différent. Notre but est donc double. Il est de pointer les faiblesses historiques d’une thèse qui a construit un passé imaginaire fait d’insouciance et de risques ignorés, mais aussi de revenir sur cette « réflexivité » qui, symétriquement, nous définirait comme tout différents. Notre souci, en remplaçant l’opposition binaire entre « eux » et « nous » par un récit historique plus complexe est donc de donner à « la société du risque » la généalogie qui lui manque, une généalogie qui peut seule permettre de dire comment nous en sommes arrivés à cette évidence que nous sommes aujourd’hui dans des sociétés autres, de miner l’illusion réconfortante de notre exceptionnelle conscience des choses – et d’ainsi mieux se préparer aux défis réels auxquels nous faisons face.

    #Histoire #modernité #pollution #risque #société_du_risque #Ulrich_Beck #Jean-Baptiste_Fressoz #Dominique_Pestre

  • Parution prochaine le 11 juin : Robert Kurz, Raison sanglante. Essais pour une critique émancipatrice de la modernité capitaliste et des Lumières bourgeoises (Editions Crise & Critique)

    http://www.palim-psao.fr/2021/05/parution-prochaine-le-11-juin-robert-kurz-raison-sanglante.essais-pour-un

    Depuis le 11 septembre 2001, c’est avec une arrogance jamais atteinte jusqu’ici que les idéologues de l’économie de marché et de la démocratie invoquent leur enracinement dans la grande philosophie des Lumières. Oubliée la « dialectique de la raison » d’Adorno et Horkheimer, oubliée la critique de l’eurocentrisme : il n’est pas jusqu’à certaines fractions de la gauche qui ne s’accrochent à une prétendue promesse de bonheur bourgeoise, alors même que la mondialisation du capital ravage la planète.

    Robert Kurz qui s’est fait connaître pour ses analyses critiques du capitalisme et de son histoire (La Substance du capital, L’Effondrement de la modernisation), s’attaque ici aux « valeurs occidentales » à contre-courant du mainstream intellectuel dominant et au-delà de la critique passée des Lumières. Dans ces essais théoriques polémiques et fondateurs, on voit s’ébaucher une nouvelle critique radicale de la forme-sujet moderne (déterminée de manière masculine) et ce non pas pour rendre hommage à un romantisme réactionnaire mais afin de montrer que les Lumières et les contre-Lumières bourgeoises ne sont que les deux côtés de la même médaille. L’objectif visé est une « antimodernité émancipatrice » qui refuserait les fausses alternatives se situant toutes sur le terrain du système patriarcal producteur de marchandises.

  • The power of private philanthropy in international development

    In 1959, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations pledged seven million US$ to establish the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) at Los Baños in the Philippines. They planted technologies originating in the US into the Philippines landscape, along with new institutions, infrastructures, and attitudes. Yet this intervention was far from unique, nor was it spectacular relative to other philanthropic ‘missions’ from the 20th century.

    How did philanthropic foundations come to wield such influence over how we think about and do development, despite being so far removed from the poor and their poverty in the Global South?

    In a recent paper published in the journal Economy and Society, we suggest that metaphors – bridge, leapfrog, platform, satellite, interdigitate – are useful for thinking about the machinations of philanthropic foundations. In the Philippines, for example, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations were trying to bridge what they saw as a developmental lag. In endowing new scientific institutions such as IRRI that juxtaposed spaces of modernity and underdevelopment, they saw themselves bringing so-called third world countries into present–day modernity from elsewhere by leapfrogging historical time. In so doing, they purposively bypassed actors that might otherwise have been central: such as post–colonial governments, trade unions, and peasantry, along with their respective interests and demands, while providing platforms for other – preferred – ideas, institutions, and interests to dominate.

    We offer examples, below, from three developmental epochs.

    Scientific development (1940s – 70s)

    From the 1920s, the ‘big three’ US foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie) moved away from traditional notions of charity towards a more systematic approach to grant-making that involved diagnosing and attacking the ‘root causes’ of poverty. These foundations went on to prescribe the transfer of models of science and development that had evolved within a US context – but were nevertheless considered universally applicable – to solve problems in diverse and distant lands. In public health, for example, ‘success against hookworm in the United States helped inspire the belief that such programs could be replicated in other parts of the world, and were indeed expanded to include malaria and yellow fever, among others’. Similarly, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s model of river–basin integrated regional development was replicated in India, Laos, Vietnam, Egypt, Lebanon, Tanzania, and Brazil.

    The chosen strategy of institutional replication can be understood as the development of satellites––as new scientific institutions invested with a distinct local/regional identity remained, nonetheless, within the orbit of the ‘metropolis’. US foundations’ preference for satellite creation was exemplified by the ‘Green Revolution’—an ambitious programme of agricultural modernization in South and Southeast Asia spearheaded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and implemented through international institutions for whom IRRI was the template.

    Such large-scale funding was justified as essential in the fight against communism.

    The Green Revolution offered a technocratic solution to the problem of food shortage in South and Southeast Asia—the frontier of the Cold War. Meanwhile, for developmentalist regimes that, in the Philippines as elsewhere, had superseded post-independence socialist governments, these programmes provided a welcome diversion from redistributive politics. In this context, institutions like IRRI and their ‘miracle seeds’ were showcased as investments in and symbols of modernity and development. Meanwhile, an increasingly transnational agribusiness sector expanded into new markets for seeds, agrichemicals, machinery, and, ultimately, land.

    The turn to partnerships (1970s – 2000s)

    By the 1970s, the era of large–scale investment in technical assistance to developing country governments and public bureaucracies was coming to an end. The Ford Foundation led the way in pioneering a new approach through its population programmes in South Asia. This new ‘partnership’ mode of intervention was a more arms-length form of satellite creation which emphasised the value of local experience. Rather than obstacles to progress, local communities were reimagined as ‘potential reservoirs of entrepreneurship’ that could be mobilized for economic development.

    In Bangladesh, for example, the Ford Foundation partnered with NGOs such as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and Concerned Women for Family Planning (CWFP) to mainstream ‘economic empowerment’ programmes that co-opted local NGOs into service provision to citizens-as-consumers. This approach was epitomised by the rise of microfinance, which merged women’s empowerment with hard-headed pragmatism that saw women as reliable borrowers and opened up new areas of social life to marketization.

    By the late-1990s private sector actors had begun to overshadow civil society organizations in the constitution of development partnerships, where state intervention was necessary to support the market if it was to deliver desirable outcomes. Foundations’ efforts were redirected towards brokering increasingly complex public-private partnerships (PPPs). This mode of philanthropy was exemplified by the Rockefeller Foundation’s role in establishing product development partnerships as the institutional blueprint for global vaccine development. Through a combination of interdigitating (embedding itself in the partnership) and platforming (ensuring its preferred model became the global standard), it enabled the Foundation to continue to wield ‘influence in the health sphere, despite its relative decline in assets’.

    Philanthrocapitalism (2000s – present)

    In the lead up to the 2015 UN Conference at which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were agreed, a consensus formed that private development financing was both desirable and necessary if the ‘trillions’ needed to close the ‘financing gap’ were to be found. For DAC donor countries, the privatization of aid was a way to maintain commitments while implementing economic austerity at home in the wake of the global finance crisis. Philanthrocapitalism emerged to transform philanthropic giving into a ‘profit–oriented investment process’, as grant-making gave way to impact investing.

    The idea of impact investing was hardly new, however. The term had been coined as far back as 2007 at a meeting hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation at its Bellagio Centre. Since then, the mainstreaming of impact investing has occurred in stages, beginning with the aforementioned normalisation of PPPs along with their close relative, blended finance. These strategies served as transit platforms for the formation of networks shaped by financial logics. The final step came with the shift from blended finance as a strategy to impact investing ‘as an asset class’.

    A foundation that embodies the 21st c. transition to philanthrocapitalism is the Omidyar Network, created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar in 2004. The Network is structured both as a non–profit organization and for–profit venture that ‘invests in entities with a broad social mission’. It has successfully interdigitated with ODA agencies to further align development financing with the financial sector. In 2013, for example, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) launched Global Development Innovation Ventures (GDIV), ‘a global investment platform, with Omidyar Network as a founding member’.

    Conclusion

    US foundations have achieved their power by forging development technoscapes centred in purportedly scale–neutral technologies and techniques – from vaccines to ‘miracle seeds’ to management’s ‘one best way’. They have become increasingly sophisticated in their development of ideational and institutional platforms from which to influence, not only how their assets are deployed, but how, when and where public funds are channelled and towards what ends. This is accompanied by strategies for creating dense, interdigitate connections between key actors and imaginaries of the respective epoch. In the process, foundations have been able to influence debates about development financing itself; presenting its own ‘success stories’ as evidence for preferred financing mechanisms, allocating respective roles of public and private sector actors, and representing the most cost–effective way to resource development.

    Whether US foundations maintain their hegemony or are eclipsed by models of elite philanthropy in East Asia and Latin America, remains to be seen. Indications are that emerging philanthropists in these regions may be well placed to leapfrog over transitioning philanthropic sectors in Western countries by ‘aligning their philanthropic giving with the new financialized paradigm’ from the outset.

    Using ‘simple’ metaphors, we have explored their potential and power to map, analyse, theorize, and interpret philanthropic organizations’ disproportionate influence in development. These provide us with a conceptual language that connects with earlier and emergent critiques of philanthropy working both within and somehow above the ‘field’ of development. Use of metaphors in this way is revealing not just of developmental inclusions but also its exclusions: ideascast aside, routes not pursued, and actors excluded.

    https://developingeconomics.org/2021/05/10/the-power-of-private-philanthropy-in-international-development

    #philanthropie #philanthrocapitalisme #développement #coopération_au_développement #aide_au_développement #privatisation #influence #Ford #Rockefeller #Carnegie #soft_power #charité #root_causes #causes_profondes #pauvreté #science #tranfert #technologie #ressources_pédagogiques #réplique #modernisation #fondations #guerre_froide #green_revolution #révolution_verte #développementalisme #modernité #industrie_agro-alimentaire #partnerships #micro-finance #entrepreneuriat #entreprenariat #partenariat_public-privé (#PPP) #privatisation_de_l'aide #histoire #Omidyar_Network #Pierre_Omidyar

  • The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea

    Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world.

    In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item’s purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious – indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 – others, including “awareness” (#18) and “children’s games as adults” (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn’t long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller.

    The founder of the blog was an aspiring comedian and PhD dropout named Christian Lander, who’d been working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles when he launched the site on a whim. In interviews, Lander always acknowledged that his satire had at least as much to do with class as it did with race. His targets, he said, were affluent overeducated urbanites like himself. Yet there’s little doubt that the popularity of the blog, which depended for its humour on the assumption that whiteness was a contentless default identity, had much to do with its frank invocation of race. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab on to,” Lander said in 2009. “Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language.”

    Looking back at Stuff White People Like today, what marks the site’s age is neither the particularities of its irony nor the broad generalities of its targets. There are still plenty of white people with too much time and too much disposable income on their hands, and plenty of them still like yoga (#15), Vespa scooters (#126), and “black music that black people don’t listen to any more” (#116).

    What has changed, however – changed in ways that date Stuff White People Like unmistakably – is the cultural backdrop. Ten years ago, whiteness suffused mainstream culture like a fog: though pervasive to the point of omnipresence, it was almost nowhere distinct. When the sorts of white people for and about whom Lander was writing talked about being white, their conversations tended to span the narrow range between defensiveness and awkwardness. If they weren’t exactly clamouring to dispense with their racial identity, and the privileges that came with it, they were also not eager to embrace, or even discuss it, in public.

    In the years since, especially among the sort of people who might have once counted themselves fans of Lander’s blog, the public significance of whiteness has undergone an almost wholesale re-evaluation. Far from being a punchline for an anxious, cathartic joke, whiteness is now earnestly invoked, like neoliberalism or populism, as a central driver of cultural and political affairs. Whereas Lander could score a bestseller in 2008 with a book mocking whiteness as a bland cultural melange whose greatest sin was to be uninteresting, just nine years later Ta-Nehisi Coates would have his own bestseller that described whiteness as “an existential danger to the country and the world”.

    Much of the change, of course, had to do with Donald Trump, for whom, as Coates put it, “whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic, but is the very core of his power”. But it was not only Trump. Whiteness has been implicated in events on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brexit; mass shootings in Norway, New Zealand and the US; the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings; and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. Alongside these real-world incidents, a bumper crop of scholarship, journalism, art and literature – by Coates, Nell Irvin Painter, Jordan Peele, Eric Foner, Ava DuVernay, Adam Serwer, Barbara and Karen Fields, Kevin Young, David Olusoga, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead and Claudia Rankine, among many others – has spurred the most significant reconsideration of racial whiteness in 50 years.

    This reckoning, as it is sometimes called, has had measurable effects. In a Pew poll last October, nearly a third of white Americans said that the recent attention to racial issues signified a “major change” in American attitudes about race – another 45% said it was a “minor change” – and nearly half believed that those changes would lead to policies that would ameliorate racial inequality. In the UK, a YouGov poll from December suggested that more than a third of Britons reported that they were having more discussions about racism than they had previously.

    At the same time, this new focus on whiteness has prompted much confusion and consternation, especially among white people not used to thinking of themselves in racial terms. The Pew poll found that half of white Americans thought there was “too much” discussion of racial issues, and a similar proportion suggested that seeing racism where it didn’t exist was a bigger problem than not seeing racism where it did.

    What these recent debates have demonstrated more than anything, perhaps, is how little agreement still exists about what whiteness is and what it ought to be. Nearly everywhere in contemporary society “white” is presumed to be a meaningful index of identity that, like age and gender, is important enough to get mentioned in news accounts, tallied in political polls, and recorded in government databases. Yet what that identity is supposed to tell us is still substantially in dispute. In many ways, whiteness resembles time as seen by Saint Augustine: we presume we understand it as long as we’re not asked to explain it, but it becomes inexplicable as soon as we’re put to the test.

    A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.”

    Though radical in its time, Du Bois’s characterisation of what he called the “new religion of whiteness” – a religion founded on the dogma that “of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan” – would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species – as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.

    That had been the view, for instance, of Thomas Jefferson, who had attempted to delineate “the real distinctions which nature has made” between the races, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781. It was also the view that would appear, at least in attenuated form, two centuries later in Charles Murray and Richard J Herrnstein’s Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. Murray and Herrnstein argued that “the most plausible” explanation for the differences between Black and white populations recorded on IQ tests was “some form of mixed gene and environmental source” – in other words, that at least some of the discrepancy owes to natural differences.

    By the time The Bell Curve appeared, Du Bois’s assertion that racial categories were not biologically grounded was widely accepted. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A 2017 study examined the DNA of nearly 6,000 people from around the world and found that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages – for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar – none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race.

    If it’s easy enough for many people today to accept that whiteness is a purely sociological phenomenon – in some quarters, the idea that “race is a social construct” has become a cliche – the same cannot be said for Du Bois’s suggestion that whiteness is a relatively new thing in human history. And yet just as in the case of genetic science, during the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that while Du Bois was off by a few hundred years, he was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.

    Of course, it’s important not to overstate the case: the evolution of the idea of whiteness was messy and often indistinct. As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has cautioned, “white identity didn’t just spring to life full-blown and unchanging”. It had important antecedents that included a growing sense of a pan-European identity; longstanding cultural associations that saw white as a symbol of purity and virtue; and bog-standard ethnocentrism.

    Still, with only slightly exaggerated precision, we can say that one of the most crucial developments in “the discovery of personal whiteness” took place during the second half of the 17th century, on the peripheries of the still-young British empire. What’s more, historians such as Oscar and Mary Handlin, Edmund Morgan and Edward Rugemer have largely confirmed Du Bois’s suspicion that while xenophobia appears to be fairly universal among human groupings, the invention of a white racial identity was motivated from the start by a need to justify the enslavement of Africans. In the words of Eric Williams, a historian who later became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, “slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”.

    If you asked an Englishman in the early part of the 17th century what colour skin he had, he might very well have called it white. But the whiteness of his skin would have suggested no more suitable basis for a collective identity than the roundness of his nose or the baldness of his head. If you asked him to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of the known world, he would probably identify himself, first and most naturally, as an Englishman. If that category proved too narrow – if, say, he needed to describe what it was he had in common with the French and the Dutch that he did not share with Ottomans or Africans – he would almost certainly call himself a Christian instead.

    That religious identity was crucial for the development of the English slave trade – and eventually for the development of racial whiteness. In the early 17th century, plantation owners in the West Indies and in the American colonies largely depended on the labour of European indentured servants. These servants were considered chattel and were often treated brutally – the conditions on Barbados, England’s wealthiest colony, were notorious – but they were fortunate in at least one respect: because they were Christian, by law they could not be held in lifetime captivity unless they were criminals or prisoners of war.

    Africans enjoyed no such privilege. They were understood to be infidels, and thus the “perpetual enemies” of Christian nations, which made it legal to hold them as slaves. By 1640 or so, the rough treatment of indentured servants had started to diminish the supply of Europeans willing to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations, and so the colonists looked increasingly to slavery, and the Atlantic-sized loophole that enabled it, to keep their fantastically profitable operations supplied with labour.

    The plantation owners understood very well that their cruel treatment of indentured Europeans, and their even crueller treatment of enslaved Africans, might lead to thoughts – or worse – of vengeance. Significantly outnumbered, they lived in constant fear of uprisings. They were particularly afraid of incidents such as Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676, which saw indentured Europeans fighting side-by-side with free and enslaved Africans against Virginia’s colonial government.

    To ward off such events, the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their “Christian” servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved “Negroes”. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour – the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina – began to describe the privileged class as “whites” and not as “Christians”.

    One of the more plausible explanations for this change, made by Rugemer and the historian Katharine Gerbner, among others, is that the establishment of whiteness as a legal category solved a religious dilemma. By the 1670s, Christian missionaries, including the Quaker George Fox, were insisting that enslaved Africans should be inducted into the Christian faith. The problem this posed for the planters was obvious: if their African labourers became Christians, and no longer “perpetual enemies” of Christendom, then on what legal grounds could they be enslaved? And what about the colonial laws that gave special privileges to Christians, laws whose authors apparently never contemplated the possibility that Africans might someday join the faith?

    The planters tried to resolve the former dilemma by blocking the conversion of enslaved Africans, on the grounds, as the Barbados Assembly put it in 1680, that such conversion would “endanger the island, inasmuch as converted negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others”. When that didn’t work (the Bishop of London objected) they instead passed laws guaranteeing that baptism could not be invoked as grounds for seeking freedom.

    But the latter question, about privileges for Christians, required the colonialists to think in a new way. No longer could their religious identity separate them and their servants from enslaved Africans. Henceforth they would need what Morgan called “a screen of racial contempt”. Henceforth, they would need to start thinking of themselves as white.

    As late as 1694, a slave-ship captain could still question the racial logic newly employed to justify his trade. (“I can’t think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so,” Thomas Phillips wrote in his diary.) But whiteness quickly proved itself a powerful weapon that allowed transatlantic capitalism to secure the labour – “white” and African – it needed. As the historian Theodore Allen put it, “The plantation bourgeoisie deliberately extended a privileged status to the white poor of all categories as a means of turning to African slavery as the basis of its system of production.”

    The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. What it meant to be white in British Virginia was not identical to what it would mean in New York before the American civil war, in India during the Raj, in Georgia during Jim Crow, in Australia after Federation, or in Germany during the Third Reich. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. As Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister and one of the most committed race ideologists of his time, put it, “race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance”.

    The idea of whiteness, in other words, was identical to the idea of white supremacy. For the three centuries that preceded the civil rights movement, this presumption was accepted at the most refined levels of culture, by people who, in other contexts, were among the most vocal advocates of human liberty and equality. It is well known that Immanuel Kant argued we should treat every other person “always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means”. Less well known is his proposal, in his Lectures on Physical Geography, published in 1802, that “humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites”, or his claim, in his notes for his Lectures on Anthropology, that native “Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus, serve only as slaves”. Even Gandhi, during the early part of his life, accepted the basic lie of whiteness, arguing that “the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan” and that “the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race”.

    As though aware of their own guilty conscience, the evangelists of the religion of whiteness were always desperate to prove that it was something other than mere prejudice. Where the Bible still held sway, they bent the story of Noah’s son Ham into a divine apologia for white supremacy. When anatomy and anthropology gained prestige in the 18th and 19th centuries, they cited pseudo-scientific markers of racial difference like the cephalic index and the norma verticalis. When psychology took over in the 20th, they told themselves flattering stories about divergences in IQ.

    For all their evident success, the devotees of the religion of whiteness were never able to achieve the total vision they longed for. In part, this was because there were always dissenters, including among those who stood to gain from it, who rejected the creed of racial superiority. Alongside those remembered by history – Elizabeth Freeman, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman, Sitting Bull, Franz Boas, Haviva Reik, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela – there were millions of now-forgotten people who used whatever means they possessed to resist it. In part, too, the nonsense logic that regulated the boundaries of whiteness – the one-drop rule in the US, which said that anyone with Black ancestry could not be white; the endless arguments over what “caucasian” was supposed to mean; the “honorary Aryan” status that Hitler extended to the Japanese – was no match for the robust complexities of human society.

    Yet if the religion of whiteness was never able to gain acceptance as an unchallengeable scientific fact, it was still hugely successful at shaping social reality. Some of this success had to do with its flexibility. Thanks to its role in facilitating slavery, whiteness in the US was often defined in opposition to blackness, but between those two extremes was room for tactical accommodations. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin could claim that only the English and Saxons “make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth”, and nearly 80 years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson would insist that the Irish, like the Chinese and the Native American, were not caucasian. Over time, however, the definition of who counted as culturally white expanded to include Catholics from southern Europe, the Irish and even Jews, who for centuries had been seen as quintessential outsiders.

    The religion of whiteness also found success by persuading its adherents that they, and not the people they oppressed, were the real victims. In 1692, colonial legislators in British Barbados complained that “sundry of the Negroes and Slaves of this island, have been long preparing, contriving, conspiring and designing a most horrid, bloody, damnable and detestable rebellion, massacre, assassination and destruction”. From there, it was a more or less straight line to Woodrow Wilson’s claim, in 1903, that the southerners who started the Ku Klux Klan were “aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation”, and to Donald Trump’s warning, when he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, that Mexican immigrants to the US were “bringing drugs. And they’re bringing crime. And they’re rapists.”

    Where the religion of whiteness was not able to win converts with persuasion or fear, it deployed cruder measures to secure its power, conscripting laws, institutions, customs and churches to enforce its prerogatives. Above all, it depended on force. By the middle of the 20th century, the presumption that a race of people called white were superior to all others had supplied the central justification not just for the transatlantic slave trade but also for the near-total extinction of Indians in North America; for Belgian atrocities in Congo; for the bloody colonisation of India, east Africa and Australia by Britain; for the equally bloody colonisation of north and west Africa and south-east Asia by France; for the deployment of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany; and for the apartheid state in South Africa. And those are merely the most extreme examples. Alongside those murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of whiteness, the total number of whom runs at least to nine figures, are an almost unthinkable number of people whose lives were shortened, constrained, antagonised and insulted on a daily basis.

    It was not until the aftermath of the second world war that frank endorsements of white supremacy were broadly rejected in Anglo-American public discourse. That this happened at all was thanks largely to the efforts of civil rights and anti-colonial activists, but the war itself also played a role. Though the horrors of the Nazi regime had been more acute in their intensity than anything happening at the time in the US or the UK, they supplied an unflattering mirror that made it impossible to ignore the racism that was still prevalent in both countries. (A New York Times editorial in 1946 made the connection explicit, arguing that “this is a particularly good year to campaign against the evils of bigotry, prejudice and race hatred because we have recently witnessed the defeat of enemies who tried to found a mastery of the world upon such a cruel and fallacious policy”.)

    Political appeals to white solidarity diminished slowly but certainly. In 1955, for example, Winston Churchill could still imagine that “Keep England White” was a winning general-election theme, and even as late as 1964, Peter Griffiths, a Conservative candidate for parliament, would score a surprise victory after endorsing a nakedly racist slogan. By 1968, however, when Enoch Powell delivered his “Rivers of Blood” speech – in which he approvingly quoted a constituent who lamented that “in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” – he would be greeted by outrage in the Times, which called it an “evil speech”, and expelled from the Conservative shadow cabinet. In the US, too, where a century of racial apartheid had followed a century of slavery, open expressions of racism met with increasing public censure. Throughout the 60s and into the 70s, Congress passed a series of statutes that rendered explicit racial discrimination illegal in many areas of public life.

    This gradual rejection of explicit, government-enforced white supremacy was hugely consequential in terms of public policy. Yet it did not mean that whiteness, as a political force, had lost its appeal: in the weeks after Powell’s speech, to take just one example, a Gallup poll found that 74% of Britons supported his suggestion that brown-skinned immigrants ought to be repatriated. It also left unresolved the more difficult question of whether whiteness was truly separable from its long history of domination.

    Instead of looking too hard at the sordid history of whiteness, many white people found it easier to decide that the civil rights movement had accomplished all the anti-racism work that needed doing. The result was a strange détente. On the one hand, whiteness retreated as a subject of public attention, giving way to a new rhetoric of racial colour-blindness. On the other hand, vast embedded economic and cultural discrepancies allowed white people continue to exercise the institutional and structural power that had accumulated on their behalf across the previous three centuries.

    Similarly, while blatant assertions of white power – such as the 1991 gubernatorial campaign of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, in Louisiana – met with significant elite resistance, what counted as racist (and therefore subject to the taboo) was limited to only the most flagrant instances of racial animus. Among liberals and conservatives, racism was widely understood as a species of hatred, which meant that any white person who could look into his heart and find an absence of open hostility could absolve himself of racism.

    Even the phrase “white supremacy”, which predates the word “racism” in English by 80 years and once described a system of interlocking racial privileges that touched every aspect of life, was redefined to mean something rare and extreme. In 1923, for example, under the headline White Supremacy Menaced, the New York Times would print an article which took at face value a Harvard professor’s warning that “one of the gravest and most acute problems before the world today” was “the problem of saving the white race from submergence in the darker races”. In 1967, the US supreme court invalidated a law that prevented whites from marrying people who were not white, on the grounds that it was “obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy”, and two years later, the critic Albert Murray would use the phrase to describe everything from anti-Black prejudice in police departments to bigoted media representations of Black life to influential academic studies such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family.

    By the 80s and 90s, however, at least in white-dominated media, “white supremacy” was reserved only for the most shocking and retrograde examples of racism. For many people who grew up at that time, as I did, the phrase evoked cross burnings and racist hooligans, rather than an intricate web of laws and norms that maintained disparities of wealth, education, housing, incarceration and access to political power.

    Perhaps most perverse of all was the charge of “reverse racism”, which emboldened critics of affirmative action and other “race-conscious” policies to claim that they, and not the policies’ proponents, were the true heralds of racial equality. In 1986, Ronald Reagan went so far as to defend his opposition to minority-hiring quotas by invoking Martin Luther King Jr: “We want a colour-blind society,” Reagan declared. “A society, that in the words of Dr King, judges people not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

    Of course not everyone accepted this new dispensation, which scholars have variously described as “structural racism”, “symbolic racism” or “racism without racists”. In the decades following the civil rights movement, intellectuals and activists of colour continued to develop the Du Boisian intellectual tradition that understood whiteness as an implement of social domination. In the 80s and 90s, a group of legal scholars that included Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris and Richard Delgado produced a body of research that became known as critical race theory, which was, in Bell’s words, “ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalised in and by law”.

    Alongside critical race theory, and in many ways derived from it, a new academic trend, known as whiteness studies, took shape. Historians working in this subfield demonstrated the myriad ways in which the pursuit of white supremacy – like the pursuit of wealth and the subjection of women – had been one of the central forces that gave shape to Anglo-American history. For many of them, the bill of indictment against whiteness was total: as the historian David Roediger put it, “it is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.”

    In the fall of 1992, a new journal co-founded by Noel Ignatiev, one of the major figures in whiteness studies, appeared in bookstores around Cambridge, Massachusetts. Called Race Traitor, the magazine wore its motto and guiding ethos on its cover: Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity. The issue opened with an editorial whose headline was equally provocative: “Abolish the white race – by any means necessary.” This demand, with its echoes of Sartre by way of Malcolm X, was not, as it turned out, a call for violence, much less for genocide. As Ignatiev and his co-editor, John Garvey, explained, they took as their foundational premise that “the white race is a historically constructed social formation”, a sort of club whose membership “consists of those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society”.

    For Ignatiev and Garvey, whiteness had been identified with white supremacy for so long that it was folly to think it was salvageable. “So long as the white race exists,” they wrote, “all movements against racism are doomed to fail.” What was necessary, in their view, was for the people called “white” – people like them – to forcefully reject that identification and the racial privileges that came with it. Whiteness, they suggested, was a fragile, unstable thing, such that even a small number of determined attacks – objecting to racist educational programmes at a school board meeting, say, or capturing racist police behaviour on video – ought to be able to unsettle the whole edifice.

    But while whiteness studies produced much work that still makes for bracing, illuminating reading, it was soon mocked as one more instance of the very privilege it meant to oppose. “The whole enterprise gives whites a kind of standing in the multicultural paradigm they have never before enjoyed,” Margaret Talbot wrote in the New York Times in 1997. “And it involves them, inevitably, in a journey of self-discovery in which white people’s thoughts about their own whiteness acquire a portentous new legitimacy.” Even Ignatiev would later say he “wanted nothing to do with” it.

    By the mid-2000s, the “colour-blind” ideological system had become so successful that it managed to shield even the more obvious operations of whiteness – the overwhelming numbers of white people in corporate boardrooms, for instance, or in the media and tech industries – from much censure. In the US, when racial disparities could not be ignored, it was often suggested that time was the only reliable remedy: as the numerical proportion of whites dwindled, so too would their political and economic power diminish. (Never mind that whiteness had managed to escape predictions of demographic doom before, by integrating groups it had previously kept on its margins.)

    Meanwhile, younger white liberals, the sort of people who might have read Bell or Crenshaw or Ignatiev at university, tended to duck the subject of their own racial identity with a shuffling awkwardness. Growing up white in the decades after the civil rights movement was a little like having a rich but disreputable cousin: you never knew quite what to make of him, or the extravagant gifts he bought for your birthday, and so you found it easier, in general, just not to say anything.

    The absence of talk about whiteness was so pervasive that it became possible to convince yourself that it constituted one of the central obstacles to racial progress. When I was in graduate school during the early 00s, toward the end of the whiteness-studies boomlet, I often heard – including from my own mouth – the argument that the real problem was that white people weren’t talking enough about their racial identity. If you could get people to acknowledge their whiteness, we told ourselves, then it might be possible to get them to acknowledge the unfair ways in which whiteness had helped them.

    The trouble with this notion would become clear soon enough, when the presidency of Barack Obama offered the surest test to date of the proposition that whiteness had separated itself from its supremacist past. Though Obama’s election was initially hailed by some as proof that the US was entering a new post-racial phase, it took just a few months for the Tea party, a conservative movement ostensibly in favour of small government, to suggest that the opposite was closer to the truth.

    In September 2009, Jimmy Carter caused a stir by suggesting that the Tea party’s opposition was something other than a principled reaction to government spending. “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man,” Carter said. (Carter’s speculation was later backed up by research: the political scientist Ashley Jardina, for instance, found that “more racially resentful whites are far more likely to say they support the Tea party and rate it more positively.”)

    The white backlash to Obama’s presidency continued throughout his two terms, helped along by Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and the Republican party, which won majorities in both houses of Congress by promising to obstruct anything Obama tried to accomplish. Neither project kept Obama from a second term, but this does not mean that they were without effect: though Obama lost white voters by 12% in 2008, four years later he would lose them by 20%, the worst showing among white voters for a successful candidate in US history.

    At the same time, Obama’s victory suggested to some observers the vindication of the demographic argument: the changing racial composition of the US appeared to have successfully neutralised the preferences of the white electorate, at least as far as the presidency was concerned. (“There just are not enough middle-aged white guys that we can scrape together to win,” said one Republican after Obama’s victory.)

    What’s more, the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which attracted international attention in the summer of 2014, prompted a torrent of demonstrative introspection among white people, especially online. As the critic Hua Hsu would write, half-teasingly, in 2015, “it feels as though we are living in the moment when white people, on a generational scale, have become self-aware”.

    Not for the first time, however, what was visible on Twitter was a poor indicator of deeper social trends. As we now know, the ways in which whiteness was becoming most salient at mid-decade were largely not the ways that prompted recent university graduates to announce their support for Rhodes Must Fall on Instagram. Far more momentous was the version of white identity politics that appreciated the advantages of whiteness and worried about them slipping away; that saw in immigration an existential threat; and that wanted, more than anything, to “Take Back Control” and to “Make America Great Again”.

    It was this version of whiteness that helped to power the twin shocks of 2016: first Brexit and then Trump. The latter, especially – not just the fact of Trump’s presidency but the tone of it, the unrestrained vengeance and vituperation that animated it – put paid to any lingering questions about whether whiteness had renounced its superiority complex. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who more than any other single person had been responsible for making the bumbling stereotype of whiteness offered up by Stuff White People Like seem hopelessly myopic, understood what was happening immediately. “Trump truly is something new – the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president,” Coates wrote in the autumn of 2017. “His ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.”

    In 1860, a man who called himself “Ethiop” published an essay in The Anglo-African Magazine, which has been called the first Black literary journal in the US. The author behind the pseudonym was William J Wilson, a former bootmaker who later served as the principal of Brooklyn’s first public school for Black children. Wilson’s essay bore the headline, What Shall We Do with the White People?

    The article was meant in part meant to mock the white authors and statesmen who had endlessly asked themselves a similar question about Black people in the US. But it was not only a spoof. In a tone that mimicked the smug paternalism of his targets, he laid out a comprehensive indictment of white rule in the country: the plunder and murder of the “Aborigines”; the theft and enslavement of Africans; the hypocrisy embodied by the American constitution, government and white churches. At the root of all this, he wrote, was “a long continued, extensive and almost complete system of wrongdoing” that made the men and women who enabled it into “restless, grasping” marauders. “In view of the existing state of things around us,” Wilson proposed at the end, “let our constant thought be, what for the best good of all shall we do with the White people?”

    Much has changed since Wilson’s time, but a century and a half on, his question remains no less pertinent. For some people, such as the political scientist Eric Kaufmann, whiteness is what it has always pretended to be. Though he acknowledges that races are not genetically defined, Kaufmann nevertheless sees them as defensible divisions of humanity that have some natural basis: they emerge, he suggests, “through a blend of unconscious colour-processing and slowly evolved cultural conventions”. In his 2019 book Whiteshift, Kaufmann argues that the history of oppression by white people is “real, but moot”, and he advocates for something he calls “symmetrical multiculturalism”, in which “identifying as white, or with a white tradition of nationhood, is no more racist than identifying as black”. What shall we do with the white people? Kaufmann thinks we should encourage them to take pride in being white, lest they turn to more violent means: “Freezing out legitimate expressions of white identity allows the far right to own it, and acts as a recruiting sergeant for their wilder ideas.”

    From another perspective – my own, most days – whiteness means something different from other racial and ethnic identities because it has had a different history than other racial and ethnic identities. Across three-and-a-half centuries, whiteness has been wielded as a weapon on a global scale; Blackness, by contrast, has often been used as a shield. (As Du Bois put it, what made whiteness new and different was “the imperial width of the thing – the heaven-defying audacity.”) Nor is there much reason to believe that whiteness will ever be content to seek “legitimate expressions”, whatever those might look like. The religion of whiteness had 50 years to reform itself along non-supremacist lines, to prove that it was fit for innocuous coexistence. Instead, it gave us Donald Trump.

    Yet even this does not fully answer Wilson’s question. For if it’s easy enough to agree in theory that the only reasonable moral response to the long and very much non-moot history of white supremacy is the abolitionist stance advocated in the pages of Race Traitor – ie, to make whiteness meaningless as a group identity, to shove it into obsolescence alongside “Prussian” and “Etruscan” – it seems equally apparent that whiteness is not nearly so fragile as Ignatiev and Garvey had imagined. Late in his life, James Baldwin described whiteness as “a moral choice”, as a way of emphasising that it was not a natural fact. But whiteness is more than a moral choice: it is a dense network of moral choices, the vast majority of which have been made for us, often in times and places very distant from our own. In this way whiteness is a problem like climate change or economic inequality: it is so thoroughly imbricated in the structure of our everyday lives that it makes the idea of moral choices look quaint.

    As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world “will not become unracialised by assertion”. (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness “is an idea, not a fact”. Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds.

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea
    #blanchité #races #invention #histoire #race_blanche #modernité

    ping @cede @karine4

  • La fabrique européenne de la race (17e-20e siècles)

    Dans quelle galère sommes-nous allé•es pointer notre nez en nous lançant dans ces réflexions sur la race ? Complaisance à l’air du temps saturé de références au racisme, à la #racialisation des lectures du social, diront certain•es. Nécessaire effort épistémologique pour contribuer à donner du champ pour penser et déconstruire les représentations qui sous-tendent les violences racistes, pensons-nous.

    Moment saturé, on ne peut guère penser mieux… ou pire. Évidemment, nous n’avions pas anticipé l’ampleur des mobilisations contre les #violences_racistes de cet été aux États-Unis, mais nous connaissons leur enracinement dans la longue durée, l’acuité récente des mobilisations, que ce soit « #black_lives_matter » aux États-Unis ou les #mobilisations contre les #violences_policières qui accablent les plus vulnérables en France. L’enracinement aussi des #représentations_racialisées, structurant les fonctionnements sociaux à l’échelle du globe aujourd’hui, d’une façon qui apparaît de plus en plus insupportable en regard des proclamations solennelles d’#égalité_universelle du genre humain. Nous connaissons aussi l’extrême #violence qui cherche à discréditer les #protestations et la #révolte de celles et ceux qui s’expriment comme #minorité victime en tant que telle de #discriminations de races, accusé•es ici de « #terrorisme », là de « #communautarisme », de « #séparatisme », de vouloir dans tous les cas de figure mettre à mal « la » république1. Nous connaissons, associé à cet #antiracisme, l’accusation de #complot dit « #décolonial » ou « postcolonial », qui tente de faire des spécialistes des #colonisations, des #décolonisations et des #rapports_sociaux_racisés des vecteurs de menaces pour l’#unité_nationale, armant le mécontentement des militant•es2. Les propos haineux de celles et ceux qui dénoncent la #haine ne sont plus à lister : chaque jour apporte son lot de jugements aussi méprisants que menaçants. Nous ne donnerons pas de noms. Ils ont suffisamment de porte-voix. Jusqu’à la présidence de la République.

    3L’histoire vise à prendre du champ. Elle n’est pas hors sol, ni hors temps, nous savons cela aussi et tout dossier que nous construisons nous rappelle que nous faisons l’histoire d’une histoire.

    Chaque dossier d’une revue a aussi son histoire, plus ou moins longue, plus ou moins collective. Dans ce Mot de la rédaction, en septembre 2020, introduction d’un numéro polarisé sur « l’invention de la race », nous nous autorisons un peu d’auto-histoire. Les Cahiers cheminent depuis des années avec le souci de croiser l’analyse des différentes formes de domination et des outils théoriques comme politiques qui permettent leur mise en œuvre. Avant que le terme d’« #intersectionnalité » ne fasse vraiment sa place dans les études historiennes en France, l’#histoire_critique a signifié pour le collectif de rédaction des Cahiers la nécessité d’aborder les questions de l’#exploitation, de la #domination dans toutes leurs dimensions socio-économiques, symboliques, dont celles enracinées dans les appartenances de sexe, de genre, dans les #appartenances_de_race. Une recherche dans les numéros mis en ligne montre que le mot « race » apparaît dans plus d’une centaine de publications des Cahiers depuis 2000, exprimant le travail de #visibilisation de cet invisible de la #pensée_universaliste. Les dossiers ont traité d’esclavage, d’histoire coloniale, d’histoire de l’Afrique, d’histoire des États-Unis, de l’importance aussi des corps comme marqueurs d’identité : de multiples façons, nous avons fait lire une histoire dans laquelle le racisme, plus ou moins construit politiquement, légitimé idéologiquement, est un des moteurs des fonctionnements sociaux3. Pourtant, le terme d’ « intersectionnalité » apparaît peu et tard dans les Cahiers. Pour un concept proposé par Kimberlé Crenshaw dans les années 1990, nous mesurons aujourd’hui les distances réelles entre des cultures historiennes, et plus globalement sociopolitiques, entre monde anglophone et francophone, pour dire vite4. Effet d’écarts réels des fonctionnements sociaux, effets de la rareté des échanges, des voyages, des traductions comme le rappelait Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch dans un entretien récent à propos des travaux des africanistes5, effet aussi des constructions idéologiques marquées profondément par un contexte de guerre froide, qui mettent à distance la société des États-Unis comme un autre irréductible. Nous mesurons le décalage entre nos usages des concepts et leur élaboration, souvent dans les luttes de 1968 et des années qui ont suivi. Aux États-Unis, mais aussi en France6. Ce n’est pas le lieu d’évoquer la formidable énergie de la pensée des années 1970, mais la créativité conceptuelle de ces années, notamment à travers l’anthropologie et la sociologie, est progressivement réinvestie dans les travaux historiens au fur et à mesure que les origines socioculturelles des historiens et historiennes se diversifient. L’internationalisation de nos références aux Cahiers s’est développée aussi, pas seulement du côté de l’Afrique, mais du chaudron étatsunien aussi. En 2005, nous avons pris l’initiative d’un dossier sur « L’Histoire de #France vue des États-Unis », dans lequel nous avons traduit et publié un auteur, trop rare en français, Tyler Stovall, alors professeur à l’université de Berkeley : bon connaisseur de l’histoire de France, il développait une analyse de l’historiographie française et de son difficile rapport à la race7. Ce regard extérieur, venant des États-Unis et critique de la tradition universaliste française, avait fait discuter. Le présent dossier s’inscrit donc dans un cheminement, qui est aussi celui de la société française, et dans une cohérence. Ce n’était pas un hasard si en 2017, nous avions répondu à l’interpellation des organisateurs des Rendez-vous de l’histoire de Blois, « Eurêka, inventer, découvrir, innover » en proposant une table ronde intitulée « Inventer la race ». Coordonnée par les deux responsables du présent dossier, David Hamelin et Sébastien Jahan, déjà auteurs de dossiers sur la question coloniale, cette table ronde avait fait salle comble, ce qui nous avait d’emblée convaincus de l’utilité de répondre une attente en préparant un dossier spécifique8. Le présent dossier est le fruit d’un travail qui, au cours de trois années, s’est avéré plus complexe que nous ne l’avions envisagé. Le propos a été précisé, se polarisant sur ce que nous avions voulu montrer dès la table-ronde de 2017 : le racisme tel que nous l’entendons aujourd’hui, basé sur des caractéristiques physiologiques, notamment la couleur de l’épiderme, n’a pas toujours existé. Il s’agit bien d’une « #invention », associée à l’expansion des Européens à travers le monde à l’époque moderne, par laquelle ils justifient leur #domination, mais associée aussi à une conception en termes de #développement, de #progrès de l’histoire humaine. Les historien•nes rassemblée•es ici montrent bien comment le racisme est enkysté dans la #modernité, notamment dans le développement des sciences du 19e siècle, et sa passion pour les #classifications. Histoire relativement courte donc, que celle de ce processus de #racialisation qui advient avec la grande idée neuve de l’égalité naturelle des humains. Pensées entées l’une dans l’autre et en même temps immédiatement en conflit, comme en témoignent des écrits dès le 17e siècle et, parmi d’autres actes, les créations des « #sociétés_des_amis_des_noirs » au 18e siècle. Conflit en cours encore aujourd’hui, avec une acuité renouvelée qui doit moins surprendre que la persistance des réalités de l’#inégalité.

    5Ce numéro 146 tisse de bien d’autres manières ce socle de notre présent. En proposant une synthèse documentée et ambitieuse des travaux en cours sur les renouvellements du projet social portés pour son temps et pour le nôtre par la révolution de 1848, conçue par Jérôme Lamy. En publiant une défense de l’#écriture_inclusive par Éliane Viennot et la présentation de son inscription dans le long combat des femmes par Héloïse Morel9. En suivant les analyses de la nouveauté des aspirations politiques qui s’expriment dans les « #têtes_de_cortège » étudiées par Hugo Melchior. En rappelant à travers expositions, films, romans de l’actualité, les violences de l’exploitation capitaliste du travail, les répressions féroces des forces socialistes, socialisantes, taxées de communistes en contexte de guerre froide, dans « les Cahiers recommandent ». En retrouvant Jack London et ses si suggestives évocations des appartenances de classes à travers le film « Martin Eden » de Pietro Marcello, et bien d’autres évocations, à travers livres, films, expositions, de ce social agi, modelé, remodelé par les luttes, les contradictions, plus ou moins explicites ou sourdes, plus ou moins violentes, qui font pour nous l’histoire vivante. Nouvelle étape de l’exploration du neuf inépuisable des configurations sociales (de) chaque numéro. Le prochain sera consacré à la fois à la puissance de l’Église catholique et aux normes sexuelles. Le suivant à un retour sur l’histoire du Parti communiste dans les moments où il fut neuf, il y a cent ans. À la suite, dans les méandres de ce social toujours en tension, inépuisable source de distance et de volonté de savoir. Pour tenter ensemble de maîtriser les fantômes du passé.

    https://journals.openedition.org/chrhc/14393

    #histoire #race #Europe #revue #racisme

    ping @cede @karine4

  • Dialectique, approches et questionnements

    Louis de Colmar

    https://lavoiedujaguar.net/Dialectique-approches-et-questionnements

    Qu’est-ce que la dialectique ? Je ne dirais pas que c’est la capacité de penser deux choses opposées et de décider : ce serait, au contraire, décider que la façon particulière qui permet d’appréhender une problématique, une réalité, etc. à travers une opposition donnée et historiquement constituée est devenu une impasse. Précisément donc, la question dialectique se pose lorsque les termes d’une opposition qui permettaient jusqu’alors de comprendre une problématique, une réalité, etc. deviennent non significatifs, non opérationnels, non manipulables, et conduisent à des impasses, quelles que soient les manières de tricoter et détricoter les éléments contradictoires.

    La question dialectique intervient lorsque qu’une logique donnée, construite, établie, instituée, ne rend plus compte du réel (alors qu’elle a effectivement été en mesure de le faire jusque-là), et qu’il faille changer de logique pour rétablir un lien avec une réalité reconstruite sur des bases nouvelles (bases nouvelles qui ne sont pas visibles, pas perceptibles, pas rationalisables, etc., dans le contexte de cette première logique, rationalité, etc.). Cette question dialectique est ainsi relativement bien illustrée par le concept de changement de paradigme dans l’approche de Kuhn, ou encore à travers la problématique des structures dissipatives de Prigogine.

    Il ne peut pas y avoir de dialectique dans un processus si ce dernier ne comporte pas un imprévu, une non-linéarité, un non-nécessaire, un illogisme, une non-continuité, etc. (...)

    #dialectique #question #Hegel #Marx #langues #cosmogonies #modernité #civilisations

  • Violente paix. What is violent in urban narrative ?

    Auteurs et autrices : Equipe pédagogique et étudiants du master du Master « International Development Studies (IDS) », Institut d’urbanisme et de géographie alpine et « Création artistique », UFR LLASIC
    Type : Restitution d’atelier recherche-création

    Le quartier de la Presqu’île est stratégique dans la formation de Grenoble en tant que métropole de l’innovation et a intégré l’agenda de la transition écologique des projets urbains de la métropole.
    Le cours est construit sur un atelier immersif et expérimental pour questionner les espaces de la ville et le récit de la #transition, par la #performance. Le récit hégémonique de la transition est questionné par la composition immédiate en danse, par la cartographie à partir d’#exploration_urbaine (#dérive), par le débat sur les concepts de violence, #conflit et #paix, et le rôle qu’ils jouent dans la construction de l’#imaginaire_urbain et qui informe nos interactions quotidiennes dans l’espace. Ce questionnement conduit à proposer des #contre-récits.
    Nous évoquons les situations de violence invisibilisée, d’assignation à la violence de certaines catégories de la population, d’incorporation de normes, d’écriture du #récit national et du besoin de contre-récits de la transition, de la #modernité, de l’#innovation et de l’#espace_public.

    En 2019, l’édition de cet atelier a donné lieu à un livret qui présente la démarche de l’équipe pédagogique et les productions par les étudiant·es des Master in « International Development Studies (IDS) », Institut d’urbanisme et de géographie alpine et « Création artistique », UFR LLASIC

    https://www.modop.org/portfolio-item/violente-paix
    #violente_paix #Presqu'île #Grenoble #recherche-création #violence #paix #atelier_pédagogique #ressources_pédagogiques #villes #urban_matter #géographie_urbaine #urbanisme

  • Crises et métamorphoses sociétales

    Louis de Colmar

    https://lavoiedujaguar.net/Crises-et-metamorphoses-societales

    Qu’est-ce qu’une crise ? Une discordance institutionnelle, structurelle, une incapacité des structures organisationnelles à rester en phase avec une problématique nouvelle, originale, inconnue, qui ne rentre pas, ou que partiellement, dans les cases préétablies de ce qui passait pour la normalité.

    Si l’histoire des humains ne s’inscrit pas, ne peut plus s’inscrire dans une téléologie, cela signifie nécessairement que l’articulation entre différentes sociétés relève du non-nécessaire, qu’il faille y faire intervenir une part d’aléatoire, en tout cas une rupture de paradigme : une société qui prend la suite d’une autre est nécessairement une réponse à une crise existentielle de la première, crise que cette société première n’a pas été en mesure de résoudre, et même de percevoir correctement, avec les armes de sa culture historique spécifique.

    La crise de la société a en partie pour origine, ou du moins s’inscrit dans une crise du récit, qui laisse sur le bas-côté de la route une partie de plus en plus significative de la société, en particulier parce que la société est devenue de fait un melting-pot culturel, un bouillon de racines planétaires interconnectées, est tendue par une créolisation souterraine… La réalité du présent est entrée en contradiction avec son histoire, son histoire ne rendant plus compte du présent (...)

    #crise #société #récit #créolisation #révolution #Lumières #communisme #France #Allemagne #modernité #Philippe_Descola #Louis_Dumont #individualisme

  • L’architecture et la modernité selon Adolf Loos
    https://metropolitiques.eu/L-architecture-et-la-modernite-selon-Adolf-Loos.html

    Dans un ouvrage consacré à la vie et à l’œuvre d’Adolf Loos (1870-1933), Can Onaner dévoile la puissance #critique de l’« #humour masochiste » de l’architecte viennois, qui scrute de manière décalée les rapports entre #architecture et #pouvoir. Modernité masochiste Dans l’imaginaire collectif occidental, la figure de l’architecte moderne est inévitablement associée à un certain nombre de pathologies. On décèle d’ordinaire chez elle les symptômes propres au sociopathe – affichant une hauteur indifférente quant aux #Commentaires

    / architecture, pouvoir, critique, humour, modernité, #architecte

    #modernité