Mid Sweden University

The article takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy’s character Pierre Bezukhov. His passive presence at the battle of Borodino, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is contrasted with today’s climate activism, exemplified by the Swedish human ecologist Andreas Malm. In his book How to Blow up a Pipeline, Malm argues that global warming forces scientists and scholars to become activists, and activists to turn to violence. This analysis, the article argues, is based on a simplistic notion of action (”one acts or one does not”) and a strong conviction of being right. If this certitude is problematic, it is also typical of our time. Where, then, does this tendency to simplify the complicated, and replace all uncertainty with sureness, come from? One answer is that activism requires determination, which in its turn presupposes access to the truth. Another explanation lies in the binary operations of the digital media we all rely upon. At the most basic level, these operations exclude all approximation, all nuances, all doubt: the options are one or zero. Against this background, it becomes crucial to defend a research practice that refrains from simplifications. In Sloterdijk, the article finds an argument for interrupting the affective impulses that reach us constantly. From Popper, it fetches an understanding of research as an event. Via Marx’s well-known formulation that philosophers must change the world, not just interpret it, the text then moves to Adorno’s defense of theoretical thinking. The question is, however, whether critical theory has any edge left. Has it not just become a part of the academic apparatus it once reacted against? The article finds an answer in Lyotard, and his idea of a theoretical apathy. This idea reminds a lot of the starting point of the article: Pierre Bezukhov’s comic but clear-sighted passivity on the battlefield.

I den følgende samtale forsøger tre af initiativtagerne til Nordiske digtere og kritikere at samle nogle af erfaringerne med projektets tre workshops. Indledningsvis beskrives rammerne for mødet mellem digtere, kritikere og forskere fra fire nordiske lande. Hvilke dynamikker gjorde sig gældende i samtalerne? Hvilke konsekvenser havde den meget åbne form? Hvad var fordele og ulemper ved at gå på tværs af den litterære institutions traditionelle arbejdsdeling og på tværs af nationale grænser? Samtalen udvikler sig herefter i to spor. Det ene angår det kulturkritiske potentiale i at føre en tværgående og ikke formålsrettet samtale om litteratur, det andet gælder udviklingen af måder at læse litteratur på, der ikke alene blander forfatternes, kritikernes og forskernes perspektiver, men tilmed inkluderer forfatterens egen opfattelse af sin tekst. Til slut konkluderes der med en omvending af en herskende magtlogik, der kræver dokumentation forud for praksis, her formuleret med hjælp fra Sara Ahmed: ”Det, vi har gjort med Nordiske digtere og kritikere indtil videre, er, at vi har indledt med at Do the doing – and now we need to do the documents.”

In the following conversation, three of the initiators of Nordic Poets and Critics try to gather some of the experiences from the project’s three workshops. Initially, the framework for the meeting between poets, critics and scholars from four Nordic countries is sketched out. Which dynamics prevailed in the conversations? What consequences did the very open form have? What were the advantages and disadvantages of crossing not only national borders but also the traditional division of labor within the literary institution? The conversation then develops in two tracks: One concerns the cultural critical potential of having a transversal and non-targeted conversation about literature; the other concerns the development of ways of reading literature that not only mix the perspectives of authors, critics and scholars, but even include the author’s own perception of his text. In the end, it is concluded with a reversal of a ruling logic of power that requires documentation prior to practice, here formulated with the help of Sara Ahmed: “What we have done with Nordic poets and critics, so far, is that we have started with Do the doing – and now we need to do the documents.”

Artikeln tar sin utgångspunkt i tre svenska debatter: om videovåldet (på 1980-talet), om ljudbokens konsekvenser och om gangsterrapen. Samtliga kretsar kring konstens autonomi, men det signifikativa är att autonomin förflyttas till subjekten som förväntas göra de distinktioner som är nödvändiga för att skenet av oberoende ska upprätthållas. Samtidigt finns en spridd uppfattning om att dagens konst ska vara ”berörande”. Detta kan tolkas som ett uttryck för att konst handlar om krafter. Artikeln fördjupar sig därefter i kraft-begreppet, via framförallt Christoph Menke, Bernard Stiegler och Gilles Deleuze. Till sist vänder den sig till ett par samtida litterära exempel för att illustrera kraft-begreppets tillämpbarhet. Den tentativa slutsatsen är att kraft-begreppet idag skulle kunna vara mer adekvat än autonomi-begreppet för att förstå litteraturens relevans.

Förmodligen har ingen bok påverkat skandinavisk litteraturvetenskap mer, under de senaste fem åren, än Toril Mois Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Den statusen gör det angeläget att reflektera både över dess styrkor och eventuella brister. Varför är det en viktig bok? Och vilka invändningar väcker den, fyra år efter utgivningen? Det var också ungefär så uppdraget löd inför det seminarium som först föranledde den här texten: peka ut något positivt, något oklart och något negativt i Mois bok! Eftersom den är så innehållsrik, och eftersom den handlar om frågor som upptagit mig under lång tid, var svårigheten snarast att begränsa sig. 

There is a widespread narrative today that, due to climate change, we are living in the end of times. What does this apocalyptic narrative tell us about our relation to death? A peculiarity with the climate discourse is that “we”, i.e., mankind, are given a position that is both external and internal to the problems described. On the one hand, there is an all-encompassing apocalyptic mood, on the other hand, death appears as a scandal, something we had abolished. In order to capture this peculiarity, the article adopts the narratological concept of the “focalizer”. After comparing the way climate change is addressed by the philosophers Martin Hägglund and Roy Scranton, respectively, the article turns to Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil (1945). Here, another perspective on dying and the end of civilization may be found. In that way, Broch’s novel provides a much needed perspective on today’s apocalyptic narratives. With Broch, one may argue that the end of the world takes place all the time.