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May 1, 2007
I don't know Surfaces. I've just stumbled into this electronic Humanities journal, which marks the break with the the traditions of the old scholarly institutions. It indicates that the turn to electronic publishing is the way of the future. Surfaces looks to be very interesting, even though it is no longer being published. Presumably, it ran out of grants under a neo-liberal mode of governance.
What we have is an extensive archive to explore, something we should be thankful for in the transition from print to electronic media. I was looking for material to help me understand redemption and politics and I came across Valeria Wagner's Just Politics: Bill Reading's Impertinent Call in Surfaces (Vol.VI). She says that Bill Readings (The University in Ruins) understands "redemptive" as:
all politics relying on the modernist metanarrative of development and assuming that the aim of politics is to lead society to its perfected state, at which point politics itself would reach its end. Such politics, Bill argues, are inherently exploitative, because they "promise a hereafter" which can justify the pains of today: "submit to your bosses in the factory, the home or the party now, and all will be well later on".
I guess we have all been informed by this one as it informs the grand narratives of both liberalism and Marxism in modernity. It is theology secularized.
Wagner says that:
In so far as this kind of metanarrative understands the perfection of society as the absence of conflicts and the end of politics, it ... is not only exploitative, but also terroristic in its vision of a harmonious "all of us" that would be just in itself. This "all of us" is terroristic not only because it is an "all" which we should become, but also because, in order to enable the model of justice and politics of the perfected society to apply, it must be postulated in the present time as a "dormant" and universal "we" in all, which justice, as it were, actualizes, and which cannot be disavowed.
The assumption of such universal "we", Bill argues repeatedly, "lights the way to terror even as it upholds the torch of human rights". We have stepped into the postmodern.
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