The Universality of Non-Belonging: Todd McGowan in conversation with Jana Bacevic

Recording of live webinar hosted by The Philosopher, the UK's longest running public philosophy journal, on 10 November 2020. Join future free live events & learn how to subscribe on our website: www.thephilosopher1923.org/
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What does it mean not to belong? Belonging, we are told, is essential for citizenship and participation in modern societies. Belonging invokes solidarity, but also uniformity and conformism. This conversation will explore the intersections between universality and particularity through an emphasis on the universality of non-belonging, and its role in rethinking political futures.
Thanks to philosophers in the last half of the 20th century, universality has received very bad press. It is understood as an external force that dominates particular identities by forcing them to conform to its singular ideal. But the problem isn’t universality. It is this conception of it. What is universal is not what dominates us but the point of absence within the social structure. This necessary structural absence is where we find what doesn’t belong, and this non-belonging itself is universal. We share in our failure to belong, even though some experience this failure more directly than others. It is the point from which social movements take up their energy and ask us to see the universality of non-belonging as a way of restructuring society.
This event is part of a week-long special series to coincide with the publication of our autumn issue that asks the question, "What is We?" The issue will feature contributions from an exciting range of philosophers, classicists, historians, and English scholars, including Dan Zahavi, Brooke Holmes, Todd McGowan, Serene Khader, Fay Bound Alberti, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Thomas Szanto, and Donovan Irven. It will be published in mid-October.
Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. The unifying thread of his research is the belief that theory has the ability to shed fresh light on what seems firmly established and that it can enrich both our lives and our creative endeavours. His new book Universality and Identity Politics was published this year.
Jana Bacevic is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Durham University. Her work is in social theory, sociology of knowledge, and politics of knowledge production; she has published extensively on the relationship between knowledge, education and processes of social and political transformation. jana_bacevic

[@nhajas1]

Todd mentioned that non-belonging is related to but not exactly the idea of split subject, would've been nice some extrapolation on that, to me at least it seems a much less problematic base for universality than this non-belonging that always includes the struggle for belonging / doesn't really do away with belonging. Great event, I'm subscribed!

[@billyteabag111]

This weirdly alleviated the social anx that I awoke with. The concept seems so natural and obvious but is foreshadowed by how my subjectivity situates me within the big other (which feels at times like the vast endless monolithic other). Thankyou

[@MotorcyclePhaedrus]

I think what todd says is therapeutic and more helpful than psychology. As far as i understand this school of thought and despite my newbie status. I remember reading camus and getting hit in the solar plexus with regards to an existential perspective on human loneliness. Michel Houellebecq s musings on modern alienation is really depressing but todds perspective on it is more sensible and uplifting.

[@shtefanru]

I understood not belonging as an existential experience of not fully fitting into the social (symbolic) order... and not a member of state

[@nightoftheworld]

Todd’s library is absolutely emasculating..

[@reubencanningfinkel5922]

fucks me up too

[@litcrit6704]

How does reading emasculate you?

[@nightoftheworld]

@@litcrit6704 it’s a joke-that Todd’s library is very large. It isn’t reading itself which is emasculating, it’s that his library size implies a well-read mind.

[@litcrit6704]

@@nightoftheworld Sorry! I misread that comment! With youtube comments you always end up assuming the worst in people.

[@nightoftheworld]

@@litcrit6704 yes always easy to misread on here, no inflections either for sarcasm etc. thanks for defending reading tho hah

[@rustyroche1921]

i can't believe milner would make such an incorrect generalization about the relation of communism to peasants. communism survived and eventually won in china due to support in the countryside after the massacre and defeat in the urban-industrial areas

[@HelsinkiFINketeli_berlin_com]

Communism is not as generally thought a worker's or peasant's movement, it is that only namely. In reality it's vice versa a movement of the peasants/workers by the cadre of not-succeeded-to-belong and then not-even-willing-to-belong 'intelligentsija', often belonging to the over-excess of the educated of the society, the drop-outs for the different reasons, not the most brilliant ones. The movement of the peasants/workers meaning the constant mobilization and transforming of them by those cadres, in the name of them, yet only namely. The purpose of the communists is not so much to change the society, but the people. They want to create a new kind of man, to create them to be the images of them in a way, just without any intelligence of them, or any other intelligence, for that matter, the own intelligence the least. Its only a myth the communist cadres know what they are doing and where they are heading to. In reality they don't know nothing about the goal they are pictureing to their object of mobilization and transforming, the masses. They are fundamentally reactionary only, and one of the main necessities for the communists in power is to cover and camouflage that by all the means they have. That produces all that kitsch and all the tasteless and child esque ridiculities there is to the outside observer's eye, and mind, to try to make sense of the nonsensity which is trying to appear as the highest and the last, and then as the everlasting, sense there is.

[@telemahos2]

@@HelsinkiFINketeli_berlin_com lol. what do you smoke?

[@HelsinkiFINketeli_berlin_com]

@@telemahos2 I smoke Pall Mall Red rolled into Rizla Bamboo paper.

[@nightoftheworld]

Well China subscribed to big “C” communism, they are by definition state-party capitalist-their economy is paternalistic and infantilizing far more than it is egalitarian or emancipatory in nature. China is a market economy with high levels of central planning-Xi is ruler for life potentially (with his removal of term limits) and has taken the country back from Deng’s liberalism into a heavily top down, conservative direction under a surveillance state style dictatorship which: neuters the independence of alternative politics parties, silences any party dissent, censors the internet and media, and entirely controls the state sponsored union allowing no autonomous bodies to emerge within the working world. Xi may not be engaging in such brute colonialism or imperialism abroad like other western countries have done, but the CCP has no democratic accountability to its people and systems which allow no light to reach in are not what I would name “communist”-they are Stalinist in nature, nationalistic cult of personality systems, rather than liberatory movements I’d say.

[@pauloansiaesmonteiro7987]

In China is impossible to change the Comunist Party, but they can change the polítics, in USA they can change the partys but the politics stays the same. 2 bad choices