How does one achieve the intellectual emancipation of students, or, for that matter, of anyone, including yourself? The answer most people would probably give to this question, is that it is done through education and learning. To be sure, but what one learns from the French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, is that a great deal depends […]
hierarchy
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The ‘space of flows’ and the social elites of today
In Manuel Castells’s influential book, The Rise of the Network Society (Second edition, 2010, Chapter 6), he devotes a very revealing discussion to what he describes as the dominant spatial form of the network society, namely the “space of flows”. In his theorisation of the novel, now dominant spatial mode – the “space of flows” […]
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The discourses directing our actions
During a discussion at a staff seminar today one of the participants, who teaches public administration, was explaining to the rest of us that in his research on, broadly speaking, the communication between government officials (including ministers) and ordinary citizens comprising various constituencies, he constantly comes across communicational gaps — between the documents released by […]
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Is social equality an illusion?
Some people evidently thought that in my last post I was writing approvingly about Plato’s division of the community/society into three classes (philosopher-kings/queens — yes, he did allow for women in this category; protectors, and producers). Actually, I was not (as my response to Enough Said about classes indicated), although I admire Plato’s wisdom concerning […]
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Rethinking the police
From the infamous LAPD to London’s notorious Special Patrol Group and even further back — two centuries ago to the first ever newspaper reports of “police brutality” — all police forces exist along a continuum of violence. Leaving corruption aside South Africa’s police tend towards the direst part. We may not have the death penalty […]
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Jacques Ranciére – the philosopher of equality
It was about time that someone restored equality to its rightful place in the constellation of philosophical concepts, after decades of the valorisation of “difference” in various forms. And who better than a citizen of the country that gave us the battle-cry, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” Jacques Ranciére is that person, and refreshingly – in a […]