Adi Ophir is now part of a group working on a “network encyclopaedia of political theory in the making." This work is the basis for one of the seminars he will deliver in the context of RT5 at Goldsmiths on the 27th Feb. Framing the project with the old philosophical question "what is X" ¬ (e.g., what is a state? what is power? violence, family, class etc.), the group initiates the writing of original essays on key concepts in political theory. The project is guided by a fundamental respect for the dual nature of knowledge: always on the move, always embedded. The project is interested not only in understanding but also in activating knowledge, in transmitting and diffusing it. Work includes experimentation with everyday terms such as "screen" “checkpoint" or "embarrassment” (diplomatic and otherwise), turning them into "bastard" concepts, imported from other disciplines, infiltrated from everyday experience, extracted from political histories, or invented in an attempt to capture new phenomena.

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A Global Context

The need to focus on key concepts in political theory or to introduce new concepts into its canon, to ask what indeed these concepts are, to reconstruct the genealogy of their discursive formation, and to explicate their meaning in one’s own discourse is a response to a sense of impasse and shortcoming in the way contemporary political philosophy and political theory cope with the new constellations of the present age:

a) Many liberal democracies have lost the centre and sense of their political communities and are immersed in identity politics that border on chauvinism and racism.
b) The triumph of a global neo-liberalism goes hand in hand with a surge of old and new forms of nationalism.
c) The new role of religion in political affairs and the rise of new religious discourse have turned every political theory into political theology, whether it addresses or fails to address the religious dimension of political life.
d) New forms of empire and colonialism have emerged along with new modes of exercising force, legalizing state violence, or dissociating violence from law; facing new forms of terrorism, emergency has become a popular means of governance and security has become a new form of governmentality.
e) The mediatization of politics, the evacuation of the public sphere, and the deconstruction of traditional practices of political participation are taking place alongside the emergence of new forms of nongovernmental politics and numerous nuclei of globalized citizenship.
f) Globalization of the market and the media on the one hand and advance of international law, human rights advocacy, and humanitarian intervention on the other hand have exerted pressure on old state formations, further diminished ³weak states,² and induced stronger states to reframe their apparatus.

In light of this series of transformations, a political philosophy that takes inspiration from Ancient Greece and Rome must ask itself anew: What is politics and what are the boundaries of the political? What is citizenship?
What is power and how does it operate? What is a state and where, exactly, can we find the line separating state and market, or state and religion?
What is violence? And what is law?

What is X?

Recourse to the oldest philosophical question “what is X?” frames the research and posit the basic principle of its methodology. When asked by Socrates and Plato, the question “what is X?” was raised as if for the first time, with the expectation that a straightforward and universally acceptable answer could be found and established. Today, such an expectation seems naïve. Usually the question is asked in a limited, technical way, by providing an ad hoc definition of the term in question in order to remove any obstacle that is blocking communication. Such a definition presupposes a shared space of understanding of a community of speakers in the case of everyday language, or an entire theoretical framework in the case of discourse among experts (e.g., asking “what is humanitarian law?” while assuming international law is the framework for answering the question and not part of what has to be questioned; asking “what is a survey?” while assuming the statistical theoretical framework and the entire industry of opinion and voting polls).

We shall ask “what is X?” in a radical way that questions the horizon of everyday expectations and the theoretical framework or frameworks that give meaning to the term in question. We are not looking for definitions that would simulate the closure of radical questioning. On the contrary, radical, straightforward questioning would welcome conflict and differences and would strive to bring them to the surface, calling for translation, and making translation both necessary and possible. More generally, the radical question is a way of bringing to the surface the need to re-think other concepts associated with the one in question and a way of creating new openings for reflection and critique. The researchers’ goal is to engage in genealogical and comparative analysis of specific concepts, to articulate how a concept relates to an associated network of concepts, but also to put the concepts in question to work in their own discourse, to explicate how they are used and to defend their usage within a coherent conceptual network. We assume that an “ontological commitment” to answer ¬ boldly and controversially as may be ¬ questions such as what is a state, power, revolution, the political, or totalitarianism is crucial for advancing contemporary political theory and not only the history of political thought.

Encyclopaedia as a mode of knowledge production

The series of essays on concepts would accumulate into a kind of encyclopaedia. But our task is to unmake the contemporary encyclopaedia as a static and non-selective container for compiling and disseminating knowledge which has been dissected into an aggregate of individual, separate entries. Our encyclopaedia is conceived as a dynamic means for production of knowledge; our concepts are carefully selected; understanding their association and the way they have been ¬ or should be ¬ networked is a crucial aspect of the research; the essays written on these concepts do not necessarily display consensus among experts but rather outline and also initiate controversies, delineate but also point to possible ways of bridging differences of approach and positions in unstable, open, and agonistic fields of knowledge.
We also conceive of the encyclopaedia as a mechanism of translation (between disciplines, theoretical milieus, cultural, and religious contexts) that does not resolve differences but rather articulates differences in a way that enables an ongoing flow of knowledge and exchange of ideas.

Three recent phenomena in the organization of knowledge serve as a point of departure for describing our project.

The first is a worldwide phenomenon: the proliferation and democratization of the encyclopaedia as a form for compiling, organizing, authorizing, and disseminating knowledge. The English edition of Wikipedia, the internet encyclopaedia, the ultimate form of this phenomenon, currently displays 2,500,000 entries, anonymously authored and edited. Wikipedia brings to extreme conclusion the principle of non-selective collection of entries; at the same time, through the use of links and hyperlinks it enables its users to follow the multiple ways in which concepts are or can be networked, while keeping the activity of networking itself as an option, leaving it to the discretion of its users.

The second phenomenon is the emergence of digital specialized encyclopaedias in which the accumulation of knowledge is still controlled and checked by experts according to the best standards of academic expertise while being continuously updated, sometimes contested, and often free to the public. The best example of such a mode of production, organization, and accumulation of knowledge is the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. This highly professional, top quality academic product still presents concepts as isolated entities. A short list of “related entries” is attached to every essay, leaving to the reader any further act of networking. In addition, the embedded and contested nature of knowledge is rarely acknowledged and its historicity is not always accounted for, and the posture of ³a final word on X² is characteristic of many of the essays.

The third phenomenon belongs within the specialized field of intellectual
history: the reception of Koselleck’s approach to the history of concepts
(Begriffsgeschichte) in several countries outside Germany; its blend with the English school of discourse analysis in the history of political thought; and the Foucaultian approach to the archaeology and genealogy of discourse. Here the selection of concepts to be studied is always an issue and the association of concepts is very much a part of the object of study (and also a question in dispute among the major players in this field).
History of concepts has become a sub-discipline within intellectual history and its efficiency as a tool for gaining far reaching insights into entire fields of knowledge, their history and their present significance has been widely acknowledged.

Modus Operandi

The project produces a model of an encyclopaedia that incorporates certain elements from these three phenomena but at the same time deviates from each of them in a significant way. The encyclopaedic work will be dedicated to concepts only. The product of research will be: a) a carefully selected group of concepts to be studied; b) essays on concepts written as long encyclopaedic entries; c) maps ¬ both historical, contemporary, and hypothetical ¬ of the concepts¹ networks. Systematic reflection over the entries’ selection and networking and the situatedness and historicity of the knowledge produced would distinguish this model of encyclopaedia in the making from all other existing ones.

a) The selection of concepts is the result of teamwork, attuned to the Team’s conception of the present predicament and the geo-political conditions within which it operates. The selection will reflect that which should be re-thought most urgently, and that which should be called by name and be articulated for the first time, lest it remain un-thought. The import of concepts from other disciplines, their borrowing from everyday life (e.g, “checkpoint,” “screen” and “screening,” “home,” “embarrassment,” “hospitality”), or their invention and use as thought-producing machines will be carefully considered. By restricting itself to a limited set of concepts in political philosophy ¬ yet thinking about both philosophy and the political in the broadest sense of these terms ¬ the group seeks to select and introduce concepts that are capable of changing the frontiers of theory, and at the same time best illuminate present political conditions, both local and global. The choice of concepts will be accompanied by serious reflection on the various confrontations and contestations that come into play in it. These discussions, in which efforts of translation and negotiation over cultural, political, and theoretical gaps would be of the essence, find expression in research notes and working papers published in an electronic journal that would be the main platform for the group¹s publication.

b) The task of an essay dedicated to an individual concept is to rethink the concept in its historical and contemporary contexts. A typical essay in the encyclopaedia reconstructs key moments in the history of the concept and its career in different cultural contexts as well as more or less explicit traces of its networking within various traditions and discourses. The essay will also give an account of the concept’s current place within one or more theoretical networks. Each author is free to determine the balance between genealogy and analysis, to present a comparative approach and focus on a specific tradition of thought. Essays do not seek to represent a consensus in the field or simply display knowledge that has been produced elsewhere but will rather take part in the production of such knowledge. Multiple essays may be written for the same entry by several authors and authors may re-write their entries following the discussion and critique that ensues from their publication.

c) Sketches of conceptual networks ¬ historical and contemporary ¬ are drawn from the beginning and change as the work proceeds. They guide the work of individual authors and reflect its result. The task however is to gradually achieve a dynamic conceptual map that captures and illuminates some of the major shifts, ruptures, and newly emerging configurations of power briefly mentioned above. This map would be especially sensitive to the way these configurations assume their specific articulation in our part of the world.
Instead of presenting side by side a plurality of perspectives and a variety of worlds of contents, the team consciously seeks to enhance the work of translation among interacting cultures and nationalities, expose links among concepts (their association, migration, and transformation) where they have been forgotten, and create links where this can prove productive for advancing knowledge.

Finally, recognizing the power of contemporary art to raise theoretical questions, offer anthropological, sociological, and philosophical insights, and revolutionize points of view and fields of visions, we plan to collaborate with a few “affiliated artists” whose work is highly conceptual. Artists working with mixed media, video art, photography, experimental cinema, or performance art will be invited to learn from the team¹s work and offer their own perspectives on some of the key especially “bastard” concepts studied by the group.

We take our inspiration here from two recent projects that combine academic and artistic work: “Dictionary of War” and “Be[com]ing Dutch,” in which scientists, artists, theorists and activists collaborate in various cultural venues, using various media, but relying first and foremost on the virtual space of the internet. The “Dictionary of War” is a collaborative platform for presenting, documenting, and publishing works on concepts concerned with the topic of “war.” These concepts are presented by scientists, artists, theorists, and activists at public events around Europe. “Be[com]ing Dutch” is an interdisciplinary project concerned with questions of political and cultural identities. It consists of debates, reading groups, artists’ projects, exhibitions, and other forms of collaboration. Thus scholars learn from contemporary works of art, while artists benefit from the fruits of academic research. We plan to collaborate with key figures in these three projects.