Hey Carl – Yes, it should be a good opportunity to disabuse a few people of some ideas, while abusing myself in the process… ;-P (I’m meant to meet my supervisor tomorrow – he is the… responsible party for this situation – and am planning on asking how many people are expected to attend. If it’s anything 70 or below, I’m somewhat tempted still to turn it into a discussion… Although the venue is lousy for that purpose…) Your proposal above actually sounds like something I wanted to do for a planning theory course I used to teach here – I didn’t follow through on it ultimately, as other people needed to be able to teach into it as well, and I couldn’t convince people of the contemporary relevance of romanticism… ;-) I should still have materials knocking around from that, though…

I’ve been buried in marking, and so have just been letting the lecture concept sit like a vague feeling of unease in the back of my mind – something usually manages to crystallise out of this… Of course, there are always exceptions… ;-)

Firstly:

Turn it back into an investigation of the necessary conditions for us to say positively that a statement is true, and that these truths demand certain actions.

It seems to me that this is what “An Inconvenient Truth” is about.

“Kant gives three examples: we are in a state of ‘immaturity’ when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be.”

And secondly:

It strikes me as a film that asks us to put aside the realities of the present condition (that decisions about the climate are made by those with priorities of the profit motive and holding power). Instead, Gore imagines ‘green capitalism’, and empowered consumers.

This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.

That way you can avoid climate change and talk about Kant ;)

I should add that I’m still working out my ideas about Kant and Foucault – I’m receptive to criticism.

I gave a job talk along these lines once where the people I made the most sense to (they were really excited) were the ancient historians who felt all included for perhaps the first time in their whole careers and wanted to talk with me about the pre-Socratics. And of course at that point I realized that I am really a very bad historian.

Anyhoo, Morris is a nice call here but if you push that back to Ruskin you really start to get somewhere. The romantics as the guilty conscience of industrialization. And then there’s all Polanyi’s stuff in Great Transformation about society discovering very early on that it had to defend itself against the destructiveness of the market.

I just know you’re going to end up having a lot of fun with this. Not least if you manage to use the occasion to convince some folks that you don’t know shit… ;-)

You’re probably right that the lecture and the class can be… loosely coupled… I think I had been counting on using the course materials to sort of work out some points of connection with what the students might already know, so that option is out… And I’m a bit worried about taking flak for going over the students’ heads if I stick too close to how I might talk for one of my own courses… At any rate…

Carl – Many thanks for that – and just to keep brainstorming. What I had also been thinking (but this can really stretch things for this sort of class) was that there is a strange element of historical periodisation in the metaphors used to talk about economic and natural “environments” – so, on one level, there is a tension and a conflict between the two “realms”, but on another level, there is a common history in which our thinking about both unfolds – I’m speaking in a very crude way here: ambitious “modernist” interventions into the natural environment give way to fears that the environment is a system whose operations we might disturb if we muck around too much – ambitious Keynesian interventions into the market give way to fears that we disturb *that* environment if we muck around too much… etc. But this is… rather abstract, in a sense…

I also can’t help but think a bit of the William Morris line (which I quote everywhere, so apologies for doing it again) – the one about fighting and losing the battle, and then having what we fought for coming about in spite of that defeat, and then other people coming along to fight for what we meant, under a different name: when I was originally asked to do this talk, I had been thinking more in that space – how the solutions (theoretical and practical) to the problems of an earlier generation, spiral into the problems we are handing down to the next…

But this is all still at the random muttering stage. I still have no real idea what I’m going to say… :-)

I thought it would be that course, but things might have changed a little. When I went through it we didn’t have a topic like this. And in any case, the lectures were optional, being tailored for the masters stream who had a different set of readings. My impression too – though this is true of most guest lectured courses – was that the lectures were often somewhat tangential to the readings, and were mostly there to offer an alternative viewpoint, rather than a conceptual framework for the topic.

Given what you’ve said, I’m guessing climate change was chosen as one of those “contemporary issues” students are already familiar with, and the readings chosen without a particularly clear idea of how they meshed with the actual topic (or perhaps even what the ‘actual’ topic is). Perhaps it is better to ignore that and go with your gut. The students will make links from whatever you say (or so I keep telling myself) so a broad brush background lecture on the historical relationship of science to social and political theory (or whatever suits your competency on the day) would be as good a setting for the tutorials as any other.

Carl – I should have mentioned: this is actually to be delivered in one of those massive lecture hall situations – if it were a discussion, I actually wouldn’t be worried: I can lead a discussion on anything. ;-) It’s the whole, stand-in-front-of-people-and-tell-them-something bit that has me worried… (And on lecturing “theory” – I’m with you, I really am…) Also, poking around last night, I’m noticing the lectures for this course have in the past been open to the public, so there’s real potential here for… demonstrating my lack of potential… ;-P At any rate…

Russ – To be honest, you may be… familiar with this course… So you might have a better sense than most of how this might have been tackled in the past. The focus of the course is political and social theory, so I’m assuming that they aren’t expecting the lecturer to address the issues of climate science. I don’t know if they’re expecting some sort of historical breakdown of how the discussion around global warming and climate science has unfolded over the past few decades – I would think there would be at least several dozen people around here who could probably ad lib that sort of thing fairly well; I’m not one of them. So I keep sort of trying to make sense of what the tacit match is, such that someone would think of me, of my background, in relation to this topic. I suspect I was probably asked for reasons unrelated to my background, but I’m looking to fool myself with a nice rationalisation here… ;-P

Andrew – I agree. So where’s that ballpark again? :-) More seriously: yes, my thoughts had been running along similar substantive lines. My guess had been, given the title and apparent focus of the course, that maybe this lecture had originally been intended as something like a case study in the theme of risk in contemporary social theory (hint to courses reliant on guest lecturers: perhaps let the lecturer decide which case study they would like to use, to discuss a particular body of theory…). To be honest, as major themes in contemporary social theory go, this one has never been a major focus for me. With a bit more warning, I might have enjoyed this lecture as a chance to rectify that. As it is, around other commitments, I’ll have something like half a day to prepare, so… ;-P

What I’m probably best equipped to talk about is something like the two “environments” (natural and economic) in which we are attempting to operate, how these “environments” have been conceptualised (broad brush) over time, etc… I can say some quasi-useful things on this, but it doesn’t really give me a thread on the climate change scepticism issue, in the way the “risk” discourses would…

Mick – To be honest, when I was asked to do this, the request was actually that I talk about trends in social theoretic critiques of science – which, again, is a topic I might be half-competent to discuss… My guess now is that this was intended as a sort of challenge: could I discuss how those sorts of critiques might connect in some way with contemporary denialism, etc.

At any rate… thanks folks :-) One way or the other, it will all come crashing down in some sort of heap in a few days…