Verdad y ficción. Literatura y política

El estatuto lógico de un enunciado literario es diferente al que le corresponde a un acto de comunicación estándar, tanto escrito como oral. Tal distinción remite a dos principios básicos de la Pragmática lingüística, el de cooperación y el de sinceridad. Cuando nos comunicamos con alguien, no solo tendemos a creer lo que nos dice, sino que rechazamos la idea de que su conducta a este respecto pudiera ser la opuesta. Por el contrario, al leer una novela, asumimos voluntariamente la «willing suspensión of disbelief» así definida por Coleridge. Se trata, en definitiva, de la diferencia fundamental existente entre ficción y realidad o verdad. Pero semejante distinción, tan clara, puede ser objeto de revisiones, contradicciones y manipulaciones, cuya incidencia se intensifica cuando desde el universo literario damos el salto a la utilización del lenguaje en la comunicación política.

Why social scientists still need phenomenology

Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’ ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper’s third section asserts that phenomenology’s substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes.

‘I Did Not Wash My Hand for Days’

This article focuses on the reception of revolutionary oratory in what was once known as The People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. Sékou Touré, Guinea’s first president, captivated the nation with fiery, unscripted speeches lasting four, five, or six hours. Guinean audiences were enthralled by his sublime revolutionary rhetoric. In a 2008 coup, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara declared himself president, attempting to recreate the fervour of Guinea’s revolutionary days. Guinean citizens initially provided a willing revolutionary audience, though Camara’s oratory fell far short of Touré’s example. The article explores how the effects of shock and boredom that Ngai describes as ‘stuplimity’ (2005) emerged in reaction to Camara’s performances. Stuplimity was a halfway point between Guineans’ initial ‘revolutionary’ suspension of disbelief regarding the junta’s intentions and their subsequent rejection and anger, which led to the junta’s collapse less than a year after it took power.

Holding a Mirror Up to Theatre

Swiss director Milo Rau holds a mirror up to theatre to call into question its assumptions, conventions, and relationship to daily life. Rau’s nonfictional story of the murder of Ihsane Jarfi takes place within two overarching narratives with different timeframes—what happens on the stage now, and what happened beyond the stage then. His dramaturgy cautions against both suspension of disbelief and catharsis and against confusing the fictional with the real.

Waiting for a deus ex machina: ‘Sustainable extractives’ in a 2°C world

In recent years the oil industry has shifted from climate change denialism to advocacy of the Paris Agreement, championing sustainability in an apparent assertion (rather than rejection) of corporate responsibility. Meanwhile growth forecasts continue unabated to finance the industry’s enthusiasm for upstream ventures in uncharted territories. How do extractive companies, and those who work in them, square this contradiction? Fieldwork among oil company executives points to a new wave of techno-optimism: a deus ex machina that will descend from the labs of corporate research and development (R&D) labs to reconcile these irreconcilable imperatives. Rather than denial, the projection of win-win synergies between growth and sustainability involves a suspension of disbelief; an instrumental faith in the miraculous power of technology that tenders salvation without forsaking fossil fuels, or restructuring markets.