Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Wittgenstein and the Scene of Contemporary Political Theory
- 1 Theorizing as a Lived Experience: A Wittgensteinian Investigation
- 2 Wittgenstein's Philosophy after the Disaster
- 3 Wittgenstein and Citizenship: Reading Socrates in Tehran
- 4 Why Wittgenstein is Not Conservative: Conventions and Critique
- 5 Aspect-Blindness in Religion, Philosophy, and Law: The Force of Wittgensteinian Reading
- 6 Seeing as it Happens: Theorizing Politics through the Eyes of Wittgenstein
- 7 Bare Life: Comedy, Trust, and Language in Wittgenstein and Beckett
- Conclusion: The Personal is the Theoretical
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Wittgenstein and Citizenship: Reading Socrates in Tehran
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Wittgenstein and the Scene of Contemporary Political Theory
- 1 Theorizing as a Lived Experience: A Wittgensteinian Investigation
- 2 Wittgenstein's Philosophy after the Disaster
- 3 Wittgenstein and Citizenship: Reading Socrates in Tehran
- 4 Why Wittgenstein is Not Conservative: Conventions and Critique
- 5 Aspect-Blindness in Religion, Philosophy, and Law: The Force of Wittgensteinian Reading
- 6 Seeing as it Happens: Theorizing Politics through the Eyes of Wittgenstein
- 7 Bare Life: Comedy, Trust, and Language in Wittgenstein and Beckett
- Conclusion: The Personal is the Theoretical
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Theory must … deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated material, which as such admittedly has from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic.
T. W. Adorno (1974)Introduction
The presupposition of this chapter is that the contemporary political landscape is composed of large, discontinuous areas that are difficult to see by design. In particular, the bureaucratic order and military and surveillance powers of the modern state have necessitated a transformation of dissenting politics from the sphere of public symbolism to subaltern counterpublics that value less visible and untraceable forms of action. The hard work of theorizing today is a matter of recognizing these new forms of political life, and this sort of theoretical vision requires mobility embodied by both the theorist and the citizen. Most often this work takes the form of conceiving democratic theory as flexible enough to go “outside the conventional public sphere, outside traditional ‘male spaces,’ partly by a radical, pluralizing rethinking of those spaces and what they can be for citizens” (Saward 2006: 407). But I am more concerned here, following a Wittgensteinian, street-level view, to see not how new spaces expand citizenship, but the way citizens create new spaces; and not how democratic theories conceive citizens, but how citizens use democracy and seams of invisibility to engage in political action.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Wittgenstein and Political TheoryThe View from Somewhere, pp. 66 - 86Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009