Workshop "Imaginaries of Connectivity & the Creation of Novel Spaces"

On Wednesday 1 and Thursday 2 November 2017, the chair group History and Theory of International Relations organised its annual Modes of Reasoning workshop. This time the workshop brings together the three interrelated problems of connectivity, novelty, and spatiality to reflect on the creation of spaces of governance in time.

The theme

Whereas the study of international relations has traditionally focused on the role of agency and structure in power relations, the affects, beliefs, attitudes, and practices that intervene in how groups of people connect in given times (their imaginaries of connectivity), have not attracted much scholarly attention. Thus, for example, the political denomination of (maritime) spaces such as the North Sea, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, to name but some; as well as the creation of virtual spaces such as the Internet, social media, and the cyber domain, relate to particular imaginaries of connectivity that are rarely reflected upon. Doing so opens up the possibility of understanding the situatedness of power relations as event.

Inasmuch as new spaces of connectivity are understood as created, they relate also to claims of novelty, as the human ability ‘to introduce absolute beginnings into reality’ (Blumenberg 1985, 169). Similarly, for Arendt, it is action – as a mode of human togetherness – that introduces novelty into the world (Arendt 1998). While the possibility of the new is thus a necessary condition for politics, the human capacity for novelty has also historically produced large-scale destruction of both existing human societies and the planetary environment. On the other hand, novelty as a particularly human capacity has been recently called into question by various nonanthropocentric perspectives (Roudavski and McCormack 2016; Braidotti 2013; Harman 2005). Dislocating the production of novelty from the human subject poses important questions regarding the possibility of governing such novel spaces as well as the possibility of practicing politics in their midst.

Keynote: Ricardo Padron, University of Viriginia

Programme