A Politics of Worldbuilding

Facts don’t speak for themselves they need to be told. And how and who tells them has significant implications. Recent political events such as the global refugee crisis, the Greek-EU bailout negotiations and the Russia-Ukraine crisis are apt examples of the malleability of facts, showing that truth itself is contested. Since these political events lack an ‘ultimate source of evidence’ (Rorty 1999: 151), the only way to transform vague descriptions into meaningful, coherent interpretations of ‘reality’ is to utilize the persuasive power of storytelling with all its intended and unintended consequences. [...] Cooperation always requires understanding and appreciating each other’s realities. In the context of international relations, this also entails a certain degree of agreement upon facts. In order to achieve global cooperation on any given subject, the parties must first agree on the definition and problematization of the solution to the issue at hand. Making sense of common problems requires a shared view not only on arguments and interests, but also on shared forms of narration. Even though this agreement is not a complete consensus, a policy area with a relatively concordant, intersubjectively constructed number of facts is needed to begin cooperation. Such concordance is possible when registers are shared, similar to what Hannah Arendt calls ‘common world’: A shared and public world of human artifacts, institutions and settings that provide a relatively permanent context for our activities. Understanding politics as a practice of collective storytelling, in which the role of fiction and narrative is a constitutive element instead of being ‘mere rhetoric’, is still under-theorized. From a narrative point of view, the boundaries between reality and fiction are always blurry. Thus, an important but largely ignored part of this common world is shared imageries, which are expressed or represented in stories, myths, legends, and literatures. Complex realities need complex ways of representation. A theoretical engagement with the importance of meaning-giving practices as constitutive elements of politics should not halt at the analysis and the critique of simplifying and simplified versions of the ‘real’. The equally important question is: How and from which sources do we develop alternative and inclusive modes of narration? Against this background, this Global Dialogue focuses on narrative and fiction as a critical, albeit under-researched, element in the social sciences. Despite increasing interest, and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, the role of fiction and narrative in explaining, representing and inventing identities and frames as well as giving meaning to political practices has been largely absent. In order to begin to change this, this publication brings together different disciplines from the social sciences and development studies to literature and cultural studies to reflect on these various matters. This multi-disciplinary publication is the result of a workshop that took place in Duisburg in May 2015, which also sought to expand on how academic work in the social sciences is analyzed, written, and presented. The contributions are inspired and expand on this spirit and the various issues discussed at this event. For the sake of coherence, the texts are ordered in terms of the medium they analyze and the audiences they address.

Anthropological Theory, 2019

2023

New worlds, emergent voices, bodies, intellectual diversity, and embodied expressions are becoming more visible within the various humanist, nontheist, and freethought communities in North America as well as internationally. However, most of the resources available have centered on philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics from the white imagination. This forces the commodification of others into these frameworks in order to engage in conversations with and alongside these spaces. However, these practices that have been in place for several decades must be contested in order to liberate and become inclusive of other ways of thinking, being and relating, whether as peoples or institutions, or even within humanistic communities. This rhizomatic paper illuminates the peripheralized subjectivities and perspectives as analytic to articulate an ethic of liberation and freethought. Considerations for instantiating this ethic within community are also provided.

Facts don’t speak for themselves they need to be told. And how and who tells them has significant implications. Recent political events such as the global refugee crisis, the Greek-EU bailout negotiations and the Russia-Ukraine crisis are apt examples of the malleability of facts, showing that truth itself is contested, and the only way to transform vague descriptions into meaningful, coherent interpretations of 'reality' is to utilize the persuasive power of storytelling with all its intended and unintended consequences. Despite increasing interest, and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, the role of fiction and narrative in explaining, representing and inventing identities and frames as well as giving meaning to political practices has been largely absent. In order to begin to change this, this Global Dialogue focuses on narrative and fiction as a critical, albeit under-researched, element in the social sciences and brings together different disciplines from the social sciences and development studies to literature and cultural studies to reflect on these various matters. This multi-disciplinary publication is the result of a workshop that took place in Duisburg in May 2015, which also sought to expand on how academic work in the social sciences is analyzed, written, and presented. The contributions are inspired and expand on this spirit and the various issues discussed at this event. The interplay between fact and fiction and the impact of narratives on our understanding of politics have significant implications for how politics is perceived and how cooperation becomes an achievable, realistic goal. The contributions of this edition go to show that political life in the 21st century is increasingly complex and can only be grasped by taking these hitherto underrepresented aspects into consideration. We need to take seriously literature, films, video games and other mediums as objects of investigation if we are to begin to fully comprehend the diverse cultural embeddedness of policies. This contribution seeks to do just that, and calls upon scholars to foster a continuing global dialogue on narrative and fiction as constitutive elements in politics.

2019

Despite the global crisis in our democratic systems, with the escalation of fascisms worldwide, we do not seem to have many images of a political world beyond existing institutions. The starting point of this paper is Franco Bifo's diagnostics of a "slow cancellation of the future" (in After the Future): our perception of time changed in the last decades as our expectations about the future gradually decreased and were reduced to infinite rearrangements of the past. Even if we think of all creation as a recombination of what is available, the political possibilities manifest to us are subject to a stricter kind of rearrangement: the partition of the imaginary. This concept is inspired by Jacques Rancière's partition of the sensible, a system of collectively shared self-evident facts of sense perception governing what a community has as visible/invisible and audible/inaudible in society. The partition of the imaginary can be defined as a complementary system that addresses what we imagine as possible/impossible, utopian/dystopian, therefore instituting the boundaries of our political imagination in the same way as the partition of the sensible establishes the supposed limits of our social and political perception. This paper will further explore the implications of the partition of the imaginary, while also trying to address the question: how can we escape the limited arrangements of our imaginary, which revolve around existing democratic institutions, at the same time as we avoid the (re)current returns of fascisms? Addressing the recent destruction of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) due to a fire resulting from decades of political negligence, and the public discourses that followed, I will discuss how narratives about past and present forms of life may either consolidate our current partition of the imaginary, or function as resources for its reconfiguration, expanding the possibilities of future-building.

Literary Geographies, 2020

Handbook of Political Anthropology

Handbook of Political Anthropology, 2018

American Ethnologist, 2003

The Sociological Review, 2010