Anti-Bourgeois Theory

In his celebrated 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, the Parisian intellectual and theorist Didier Eribon travels home for the first time in thirty years following the death of his father. There he tries to account for the change in politics of his working class family over the period he has been away: from supporting the Communist Party to voting for the National Front. But Eribon also discusses the transition he himself has undergone as a result of having escaped his working class culture and environment through education, and how this has left him unsure whom it is he is actually writing for. He may be addressing the question of what it means to grow up poor and gay, however he is aware few working class people are ever likely to read his book.At the same time, Eribon emphasizes that his non-conforming identity has left him with a sense of just how important it is to display a ‘lack of respect for the rules’ of bourgeois liberal humanist ‘decorum that reign in university circles’, and that insist ‘people follow established norms regarding “intellectual debate” when what is at stake clearly has to do with political struggle’. Together with his friend Édouard Louis and partner Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Eribon wants to ‘rethink’ the antihumanist theoretical tradition of Foucault, Derrida, Cixous et al. to produce a theory ‘in which something is at stake’: a theory that speaks about ‘class, exploitation, violence, repression, domination, intersectionality’, and yet has the potential to generate the same kind of power and excitement as ‘a Kendrick Lamar concert’. With ‘Anti-Bourgeois Theory’ I likewise want to reinvent what it means to theorise by showing a certain lack of respect for the rules of bourgeois decorum the university hardly ever questions. I want do so, however, by also breaking with those bourgeois liberal humanist conventions of intellectual debate that – for all his emphasis on rebelling ‘in and through’ the technologies of knowledge production – continue to govern the antihumanist theoretical tradition Eribon and his collaborators are associated with. Included in these conventions are culturally normative ideas of the human subject, the proprietorial author, the codex print book, critical reflection, linear thought, the long-form argument, self-expression, originality, creativity, fixity and copyright. I will argue that even the current landfill of theoretical literature on the posthuman and the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism that is padded with nonhuman stuffing – technologies, objects, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, microbes, stones, geological formations – to make it appear different. Can we not do better than this?<br/

Book Review: Bourgeois Hinduism, Or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists

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The futures of rural migration in sub-Saharan Africa: A literature review and exploratory essay

In a context where 200 million more people are expected to live in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) alone by 2050, the question of the futures of SSA rural migration is of crucial importance in a region which so far as remained essentially rural, in spite of a growing urbanization process. The first aim of this paper is to undertake a comprehensive review of the literature on the futures of rural migration in SSA. Drawing from 37 studies it provides a picture of anticipated drivers and migration patterns. It shows also that to our knowledge, rural migration in SSA is still largely an underexplored field of research. The second aim of this paper is therefore to provide some more insights about this question developing an essay drawing from general knowledge about population flows and specific scenario work connecting alternative global world orders and plausible scenarios of rural transformation into three alternative narratives about rural migration in SSA. This anticipatory work, with no predictive intention, provides some elements of thought regarding future migration patterns and briefly discuss governance-related implications

Interactive Demand Shifting: in the Context of Emerging Energy Technologies

We are entering a key time period for home energy. While ubiquitous computing takes an increasing space in our daily life, emerging energy technologies including local generation and electric vehicle are leaving the stage of pioneer's users to become more common. This research highlights the potential of new energy behavior supported by digital tools in the context of domestic solar electricity generation