Governing Uncertainty in a Secular Age: Rationalities of Violence, Theodicy and Torture

This article explores the problem of governing uncertainty in a secular age by focusing on the theological notion of ‘theodicy’ as the underlying rationale for the use of torture in the so-called ‘war on terror’. With God’s departure from the world, the problem of uncertainty acquires new salience as human beings can no longer explain tragic events as part of a transcendent order and must find immanent causes for the ‘evils’ that surround them. Taking a cue from Max Weber, I discuss how the problem of theodicy – how to reconcile the existence of God with the presence of evil in the world – does not disappear in the secular age but is mobilized through a Foucauldian biopolitical logic. Secular theodicy governs uncertainty through the production of economies of knowledge that rationalize processes of criminalization and securitization of entire groups and justify the use of violence. This process is particularly striking when analysing the use of torture in the so-called ‘war on terror’. Through a comparison with medieval practices and focusing on the cases of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the article shows how secular torture is the product of a biopolitical theodicy aimed at governing uncertainty through the construction of the tortured as immanent evils who threaten our ‘good life’ and ‘deserve’ their treatment. Secular theodicy turns torture into an extreme form of governmentality of uncertainty in which the disciplining of conduct becomes the construction of subjectivities based on essentialist, stereotypical and racist – and for these very reasons, reassuring – economies of knowledge

The social imaginary in theory and practice

This essay lays out the case for the approach developed by Manfred Steger (2008). It suggests that his definition of the social imaginary as a patterned convocation of the social whole through which people express their social existence—for example in the figure of the globe, of the nation, or even of the abstracted order (or disorder) of our time—provides a point of departure for handing the complexities that have inevitably arisen with using a far-ranging term, especially one that carries so much baggage. Here a number of key questions need to be answered: 1. If a social imaginary is defined as an evocation of the social whole, how can we relate this definition to the tendency to turn the imaginary into one of the following: 1. the basic process by which each human being comes to know him or herself as a whole being in relation to others (Lacan’s layering of the imaginary with the symbolic); 2. the constitutive basis of everything social Castoriadis’s over-reach); or 3. the singular defining condition of an epoch (Albrow’s category error)? 2. What is the relationship between a social imaginary as a relatively taken-for-granted way of framing meaning and the cacophony of discourses contesting social meaning that we call ‘ideologies’? 3. What is the relationship between a social imaginary and an ontological formation such as modernity (that treats concepts such as spirit of the times as largely immanent notions made by social practice)? 4. How can the practical dynamics that determine the lived reality of an ontological formation (such as modernity) be elaborated without simply adding factor to factor in a flat descriptive elaboration? This essay will track some of the background to these questions, and set up an alternative model based upon the work of Manfred Steger. Any adequate alternative approach needs to be able to deal with these questions. However, in order to understand the origins of current problems concerning the social imaginary we need first to go back briefly to the notion of ‘the spirit of the age’ and the process by which its philosophical and analytical use shifted from a cosmological-metaphorical or traditional frame to a modern frame. Many of the contemporary problems with the concept of the ‘imaginary’ arise from a tendency to conflate these two orientations

The British constitution resettled? Parliamentary sovereignty after the EU Referendum

The evidence from parliamentary and legal processes flowing from the European Union referendum in June 2016 and the vote to leave - including invoking Article 50 and subsequent Withdrawal Bill votes, nuancing of party positions in Parliament, adopting parliamentary scrutiny through ongoing party competition and subsequent legislation - suggests a strong resettling of Parliament’s sovereignty based on a potentially new, enhanced constitutional settlement. Two significant precedented, historical constitutional forms, strongly dependent upon Burke’s and Dicey’s view of government by consent, prove central to the further resettling of parliamentary sovereignty following the European Union referendum. This approach contrasts with theories asserting that sovereignty is being challenged by unwieldy executive authority, popular sovereignty, or democratic nostalgia. When the United Kingdom’s present day, post-1973 constitutional form is in conflict with a new feature, as in the case of the European Union referendum, a contemporary resettling of parliamentary sovereignty occurs

Metaphors for the Nation: Conceptualization of Its BODY and/or PERSON

One of the key-complexes for conceptualizing national identity is that of the metaphor of the nation as a body or a person. Such nation-embodiment and -personalization have a long conceptual history in English-speaking cultures and still figure in present-day political discourse. However, do metaphor users from different cultures understand such metaphors in the same way as English-L1-speakers? Empirical evidence from an intercultural metaphor interpretation survey conducted in English-as-lingua franca provides evidence of variation in Nation-embodiment and-personalization on the reception-side. Five scenarios of interpretive conceptualization can be identified, which are variably distributed across different national/linguistic cohorts: nation as body, as geobody, as part of a larger body, as part of ego’s body and as a person. This chapter focuses on comparing such scenarios across the English-L1 and Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese)-L1 cohorts. The results show differences in scenario distribution, as well as in the use of irony and humor and of topical references to socio-economic and political developments or national stereotypes. In conclusion, we discuss how these differences are related to culture-specific discourse traditions