Critique is the critique of power
01:32:47 Share

Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. And welcome to the LSE and welcome to this event in which we will be discussing the notion of critique in sociology.

My name is Carrie Friese and I am an associate professor here in the sociology department at the LSE. As chair, I would like to tell you a little bit about the idea behind this event before I introduce the speakers and tell you about the format of the evening.

This is the second event in a series honoring the spirit of the group for theoretical debates in anthropology, which was originally organized at the University of Manchester, founded by Tim Ingold and later organized by Peter Wade and then Soumya Venkatasen. The group brought together scholars to debate propositions that have a chance of engaging almost every practicing anthropologist.

including students of anthropology. I'll give you just a few examples. 1993: The past is a foreign country. 2009: The anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love. 2012: The concept of neoliberalism has become an impediment to anthropological understandings of the 21st century.

I encourage you to check out the publications that came out of this project and note that the list is itself a very interesting "output". It serves as a sort of historical document that allows us to think about how the debate has moved on or has not moved on. We have had one event in the sociological version of this, which was on the proposition: "Social science is explanation or it is nothing".

You can still watch the podcast and an extended set of contributions has been published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology. Today we are debating the proposition: "Critique is the critique of power." I will shortly introduce our speakers, but first I want to thank them for being up, for participating in a slightly unusual experiment.

Speakers were approached with a certain brief in mind, as in they were recruited to speak either for or against. They have agreed to this, but of course they might slightly give in to their own interpretation or slightly subvert it, and this is okay. I also want to let you know that they were not asked or really enabled to coordinate, so we are not doing this as teams or anything of that kind of sort.

Rather, I'd like us to listen to these contributions as stand-alone, short contributions that are related by a topic. The first speaker speaking for is Claire Laurier-Decoteau, who is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago.

She is an ethnographer of health and medicine who is deeply engaged with post-colonial and post-structuralist theory, and the author most recently of "Emergency: COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life." The second speaker speaking against is Thomas Schoeffer, who is professor of sociology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt.

His research has addressed questions in the sociology of law, including an ethnography of the English Crown Court, and political sociology. Sheffer pays close attention to members' interpretations and is developing a sociological ethno-methodology that combines affirmation and critique by reaching out to the collectively pressing existential problems.

The third speaker speaking for is Nick Coldry who is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. His work has made immense contributions to media studies but we think of him as a sociologist at heart.

He is an expert in sociological theory and his most recently authored book is "The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can't?" The fourth speaker speaking against is Monica Kraus, who is a professor of sociology at the LSE. Her work is in the sociology of knowledge and expertise and in sociological theory.

She is the author most recently of Model Cases on Canonical Research Objects and Sites. Each speaker will speak for about 10 minutes or up to 10 minutes, and then we will have time for comments and questions from you. Just to let you know, this event is being recorded and will hopefully be made into a podcast subject to no technical difficulties. And so with that, I will turn it over

Hi, good afternoon everybody. I'll jump right in. Yes, to critique is to critique knowledge power nexus. Now more than ever, it is critical to explain the conjunctural factors, the ideological, political, economic, epistemological, and subjective factors that led to this historical moment, to the ascent of Donald Trump and his right wing rule, in order for us to refuse to be governed in this way. To get there, however, we must define both power and critique.

In an essay titled "What is Critique?" Michele Foucault suggests that since modernity is characterized by the expansion and decentralization of various arts of governing, which produce and subject us to power-knowledge regimes, critique is the art of not being good, of defying, challenging, sizing up, and transforming the arts of government to which we are subjected.

Critique, Foucault suggests, quote, "is the art of voluntary insubordination to ensure the deep subjugation of the subject in the context of the politics of truth." And in interviews, Foucault suggested that critique requires an act of distancing to force the field of thought in which we subsist to lose its familiarity, to visit from ourselves at its threshold, and to analyze, quote, "the limits imposed on us and experiment with the possibility of going beyond them."

After brutal retort of their critique in crisis, Didier Tassin defended its importance and suggested there were two main strategies. The first emerges from a Marxist at Frankfurt School of Theories, who critiqued in order to pierce the veil of ideology so that we can recognize our own domination. This form of critique demarcates falsity from truth. The second form of critique is proposed genealogy, which identifies, in Tassin's words, quote, what counts as true and false in a given

And this is accomplished by uncovering regimes of truth that make particular power structures, discourses, and knowledge systems possible. Now, Fassin admits that these two forms of critique can be combined, and that he himself combines them in his own work. However, he really only focuses on ideology and knowledge, and he doesn't attend to their complete interconnection. The imminent critique of critical theorists strives to uncover societal contradictions between dominant ideological forces

and historically situated political economic formations in development. Dialectical critique unveils the totality offered within dynamic ideologies by countering that accepted fiction with an historical account of the actual political and economic conditions in existence. Further, critical theorists analyze the world of positivist and empiricist science, as well as heightened forms of technological rationalization driven by the fascist state's desires for the ultimate control of knowledge, in foreclosing the possibilities of critique.

Foucault suggests that his own account has fellowship with historical philosophical practice of the Frankfurt School scholars, whose main purpose was to expose false knowledge and how it becomes a tool of domination. But rather than focusing on the ways in which physiology falsifies and dispirits structural realities, Foucault sought to uncover the links and connections between mechanisms of domination and knowledge, what allowed particular forms of truth to be made acceptable and rendered legitimate. But more than this, Foucault argued that

elements of any particular governing apparatus within a field of possibilities is forged out of conjunctural determinate elements. So resistance comes from conceptualizing that complexity and asking how its coercive effects can be dispelled, starting with the decision not to be governed.

As such, he critiqued singular formulations, a clear distinction between truth and falsity, and simple linear causal arguments, and instead formulated a genealogical theory of power and knowledge as dispositif. Foucault suggests that the dispositif is a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble that has a strategic function and is formed in response to an urgent need so that its emergence is functionally encouraged.

a plisky heterogeneity that leaves open the possibility for resistance. In History of Sexuality, LeCoultre famously declared that, quote, power there is necessary, and this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Power is fundamentally relational and agonistic. Within power, there is a mutual incitement to struggle that takes the form of a permanent provocation. But resistance is also critique, a, quote, chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations through the antagonism of strategies.

But genealogy also requires excavating the forms of knowledge and practice that were very disqualified and rendered inferior when the dispositif emerged as the dominant democratic system. Foucault explained that "genealogies are anti-science. They are about the insurrection of knowledge, an insurrection against the centralizing power effects that are bound up with the institutionalization of any scientific discourse." Therefore, genealogical critique attends to multiple causes and heterogeneous formations,

and gives us the ability to discern the contours and makeup of dispositifs that govern the very possibilities for speech truth and subjectivity. Resistance and critique are intrinsic to the operation of the copy. To critique, we must render the familiar order that gives us subjectivity, that allows us discourse, and that provides us orientations to truth, strange. And in so doing, we can begin to refuse to be governed as such.

And we can uncover the insurgent knowledges that were disqualified because the ascending enterprise, with prevalent amnesty, gained hegemony. And yet, because Foucault encapsulated ideologies and political-economic considerations within the dispositif, emphasis on their importance sometimes gets lost. Critical theorists urge us to identify the specific form of domination that ideology can take, and to consider capitalist logics, inequalities, and forms of violence.

In my work, I combine Marxist attention to the way capitalist accumulation relies on and exploits the differential violation of lives and labor, and genealogical attention to multiplicity, racial biopolitics, governmental and ethnic regimes, and subjugated knowledges. I also focus on the way that experiencing destruction can lead to critique and resistance to being governed.

I'm going to end by providing two examples from my most recent books, just to ground what I've said in examples. So I conducted ethnography with Somali refugee mothers living in Canada and the U.S. whose children were diagnosed with a stable influence of autism, despite the fact that they were completely unfamiliar with the condition before. Because the hegemonic formation of autism articulates it as genetic, white, and middle class, Somali children were not immediately able to understand the condition.

Smiling parents faced racist and xenophobic systems of knowledge and care regimes, as well as medical discrimination and neglect, as they attempted to navigate the landscapes of capitalist health care and education to get their children's service. I argue that this epistemic work that required them to transverse complicated bureaucratic and racist state systems, as well as their own experiences as post-colonial subjects with unique approaches to healing the body,

to forge new explanations of autism that took their unique experiences as outsiders within into account. They were able to forge post-colonial critiques from the thresholds of our capitalist medical scientific complex and unpack the racist uniphobic knowledge systems and care regimes that are central to the epistemic construction of autism in the U.S. and Canada.

As they traversed the multiplicities of discourses, knowledge regimes, scientific practices, and institutions that forged apparatus of autism, Somali parents exposed its conditions of possibility and resisted its coercive effects. In my most recent book that focuses on the mitigation policies enacted by the city of Chicago to address the uneven racial impact of COVID-19, my interview respondents offered similarly complex critiques.

Whereas the city of Chicago and the U.S. federal government focused on COVID-19 as an urgent, spectacular, but short-lived crisis that could be countered with socio-technical and data-driven measures, low-income frontline workers and racially marginalized Chicagoans experienced COVID-19 as the exacerbation and acceleration of a series of slow emergencies that their communities have been facing.

The city and state governed through emergency, enacting temporally bounded governmental strategies that presume scarcity, triaged care, and naturalized structural inequality by delinking the effects of racism from its core. Lower income and racially marginalized Chicagoans, however, experience COVID-19 as cumulative and ontologically unmooring. Slow emergencies unfold to protracted processes that make causality difficult, and that can invisibilize structural determinants.

Yet the Chicagoans that I interviewed pierced the ideological veil of dominant vote and identified the ways in which the slow emergencies associated with racially segmented and precarious work, disinvestment in their neighborhood and local institutions, uneven care infrastructures, heavily bureaucratized welfare and health care, and unauthorable housing were being ignored but also natural. And they resisted through critique and a rounded politics of care that countered the racial devaluation they were experiencing.

In both of these cases, people whose knowledge and practices had been devalued and disqualified refused to be governed through normative racial bio-quality. Thanks. - Wow, that was impressive. I tried to give my position, and I have a little script. I would like to apologize for my German-English.

So I hope you can still follow me, not to be too distracted by it. So as a critical scholar, I should wholeheartedly agree with this proposition that critique is a critique of power, but I don't. And not just for this event, I don't. I think I try to not to consistently. So why don't I? I want to unfold

The proposition presented as a folded one in four steps before I propose a certain kind of revision of it. First, critiquing power is crucial, especially for social scientists but also for members of society in various ways.

Critique reveals the destructive tendencies of power and revolts against the suffering that the power causes. This is all the more important in a world where power and its networks are threatening the social and ecological foundations of humanity.

first of our societies, but probably of humanity as a whole. Meaning this is the more important in our times of multi-crisis.

Second proposition, trying to understand this phrase, "critique is a critique of power", the second point would be that climate change and mass extinction, war and militarism, poverty and rising inequality, fascism and authoritarianism are all existential problems that can be attributed to power or to the dominating system of power.

Only, that is how the proposition goes, only by this attribution we will understand how things go wrong and how we risk our human existence including our basic socialities, our systems of cooperation, one could say.

Fundamental critique means breaking down core problems to their root causes that need to be overcome. Capitalism is, of course, a very good candidate for that. It is so because capitalism reaches into and pre-structures even the smallest capillary of praxis. It's a kind of meta-dispositive.

Third proposition, we must consider the causes of the problems, such as capitalism, and the means to overcome them together. Only by eliminating the causes can we hope for progress further.

in a proper way. This is why critiquing power comes with hope, despite its negativity. Once we understand the causes, we will know how to end the misery, for most at least. We won't be tricked by power into false, shallow, misleading solutions. Critiquing power means getting rid of the system that got us into this situation in the first place and start anew.

fourth and last part of that proposition, and my kind of reconstruction of it, once the causes cease to exist, so will the problems.

With the power laid bare, we will also disclose the obstacles to addressing them, such as violent exploitation and dependency, false consciousness, ideological manipulation, and monopolization of the means of communication and information. I think Nick is...

can talk about it. This is because the system of power not only causes existential problems, but also stands in the way of solving them, of caring and healing. Critiquing power will therefore not fall short due to wrong compromise or to revanchism.

So this four proposition may give an impression of the nature of power, its status within the critique of it. A unitary destructive force that is always excessive and can only be fought against through radical opposition. This excessive power captures all major capacities of society but would

utilize them but would not utilize them for the greater good. This is a note I don't understand, so I go on to the second part of my argument. At this point I would like to propose an alternative or revision of this critical program. Rather than critiquing the excess of power, we should, that is my suggestion, consider the lack of it. That we could say is the other

case, the other extreme case of the spectrum. So more precisely we should critique the failure to utilize the capacities, the possibilities of reducing suffering, reducing the problems that we face. Critique here explores the various problem shapes and the problem weights and how our society in parts fail

how our societies, at least in parts, fail to realize them. Again, in the sense of the Frankfurt School, critique reveals suffering, but it reveals the unnecessary suffering. So what do I mean by lack of power? Let me briefly explain with, again, four points that may revise the sub-proposition from above. First,

Powerfulness or power rests and derives from different logics of accumulation, whereas accumulation integrates operations through certain units or one could say currencies, allowing quantity to turn into quality. Capital is one such powerful accumulation. So two are cliques and likes in digital capitalism.

or as Bordieu suggests, various forms of capital can coexist, creating powerful forces in different competitive fields.

So rather than having one system of power, we might be confronted with a multitude or with a variety of different logics of accumulation and therefore power. Second, due to accumulation, the miserable situation the world is in today comprised in various existential problems. They cannot be overcome

by understanding how we got there, how certain societies or collectives got there. This is because certain causes, and think of for instance mass extinction or climate change as examples of such problems that accumulate.

This is because certain causal mechanisms set loose cumulative effects, resulting in increasingly powerful forces. Consider, for example, the exploited proletarian masses in Marxist historical materialism who evolved into a powerful historical subject, which is a kind of interesting case that we can discuss later, or other cases

derived from rather post-human materialism. For instance, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere that brings about certain qualities at certain points, as well as points of no return and so on, or the growth of anti-humanist ecologies, as Anna Tsing would call them, or the deadly viruses

during the pandemic that you talked about the growing weight of the problem the intensity and urgency of it cannot be derived from its original causes third in the narrow humanist sense power can be understood as a capacity that can be built up invested in mobilized and utilized so power is in a way an accomplishment that

in certain ways takes its time. In a broader sense, it involves processes of accumulation including natural and/or social forces, often within technological devices or apparatuses that stabilize the combination of both. As holding a range of possibilities, these apparatuses can be redirected against new problems.

I mean the capacities that the apparatus hold, mobilized for certain goods or goals or demobilized to prevent further harm.

However, this is again an empirical question since some forces, once unleashed, tend to be uncontrollable for the time being. Climate change and pandemics are such forces that require massive effort, collaboration and apparatuses to mobilize against them. Time is a factor here reminding us of the limits of available power and the need to rebuild and redirect it effectively.

Fourth and last point of my suggestion to revise, in certain ways, and especially with an emphasis on temporality, or better yet, multiple temporalities, since all these problems have their own kind of

space times in which they evolve, we are confronted with various destructive forces that cannot be reduced to one another, as well as powers that are insufficient and incapable of addressing those problems in their respective or upcoming cumulative stage. In light of the problems our societies need to realize today,

In light of the problems that our societies need to realize today, we can diagnose both a lack of utilization of the capacities we have or we obtain and a lack of those capacities. Here realization is understood as taking a problem as real in practice.

So the overall picture is even more complicated due to strategies for solving problems becoming in a way contradictory. Such problem-solving strategies offer solutions to certain problem constellations, for instance, social, the social question, which can easily become new causes or drivers that feed into other problems, for instance, climate change.

The synchronicity of fast accumulating problems such as climate change, war, insecurity or mass extinction demands the mobilization of other capacities and possibilities to fight them and it is therefore necessary to fight each problem with more than an eye on the others. In conclusion, I concede that my sketch leaves us with quite a mess.

particular when compared to the critique of power. We find ourselves in the middle of fights, and I found that interesting, the Foucault quote on the distancing, we find ourselves in the middle of fights, trials, and problem-oriented campaigns, along with the difficulties and confusions that come with them.

what is more the fighting is becoming more intolerant and ruthless due to problems that are increasingly existential for certain ways of life for certain communities and for our still democrat democratic societies therefore any critique of power must diversify into a critique of

various powers. It must consider the different types of power being addressed, the struggles involved and the problems being faced. It must consider whether reducing everything to one form of power confuses radicalism with scholasticism. In this sense, monological critique can result in an escape into abstraction, depoliticizing matters rather than subjecting them to processes of change.

From a strategic perspective, acting as if one monologic power is responsible for everything empowers reactionary forces, encouraging them to take over the capacities built up through decades of hard work and struggle by solidary movements, local resistances and emancipating governance. One final thought,

After the far right appropriated certain versions of system critique, we should reconsider whether the social sciences' main contribution to our today's society should be criticism in the first place.

Instead, our sciences should rather gain and regain the ability to fight for and defend the possibility of conducting meaningful social research in still-free universities. This requires critical verve coupled with radical, affirmative analytics, strategic diagnostics, and reflexivity of involvement. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Well, if I agree with a lot of that, I'm not allowed to tell you. So I'll just go on in my script anyway. I doubt any of us would deny that understanding power is an important part of the social sciences or that there are things other than power that the social sciences needs to understand. Hence the absurdity, for example, of reducing the impact of art or music to mere exercises of power.

But this debate is not about such crude denials. It's about a more specific and more interesting claim that among the decision points to which social sciences and humanities need to be oriented, getting a better view of power must have priority. And that's the claim I want to defend.

I'm a sociologist of media and culture, which now includes being, for my sins, a sociologist of data and AI. In other words, I'm interested in the consequences for social reality of the ability to control the production and distribution of symbols and to shape their reception in society. I started studying the convening power of television institutions 30 years ago and how audiences negotiate that.

And then I went on to research reality TV and celebrity culture. And for more than a decade, I've worked on the shaping of reality at a more elemental level by the design of data categories and increasingly the production of AI tools that process vast universes of data points. In other words, I'm interested in symbolic power, as Pierre Bourdieu put it, the power of constructing reality.

Other forms of power matter too, of course, but symbolic power is particularly interesting for tonight's debate because, I'll argue, there just is no way of making critical judgments about our priorities for research or interpretation in the social sciences and humanities unless we reckon with the workings of symbolic power. And I want to approach this from three directions.

The first is the impact that today simply writing computer code has in the world. Code, for example, the code on which social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok and X are based, is today shaping what can appear to us, what things seem to be connected to each other, what counts as possible knowledge or relevant comment or acceptable behavior.

This almost magical transformation from the act of writing code, code linked of course to many other things other than code including business models and infrastructures, this transformation from code to how reality is,

This transformation cannot be understood as mere process, as just making things in a sequence. The social transformation that goes on when one way of writing code on a computer takes precedence over others can only be understood as power, as the power to switch the way things are, to switch the way things become available for our interpretation. Bourdieu went as far as to call this symbolic violence.

But even if you don't accept that term, we can only ignore this form of power at the cost of not caring how our appearances come to be what they are, not caring about the conditions under which things appear to be for us in a certain way.

Our readers in the social sciences and humanities certainly care about these things. They want to know, for example, how social media platforms came to have the power that they do in our lives, which my new book is about. And they want to know whether that power can now be contested in any way. And that's one way in which critique today really has to prioritize the critique of power.

The critique of symbolic violence, as Claire was mentioning, matters especially though in 2025, when the world's most powerful government and economy, the US, is being reordered by a very distinctive type of symbolic power, reshaping the processes and resources of government, reshaping institutions of many sorts, federal funders, welfare agencies, cultural institutions, schools, universities.

The sociologist Alondra Nelson of Princeton University last week resigned from the board of the National Science Foundation.

And in a piece for Time magazine, she wrote about the impact on the operations of the National Science Board of Elon Musk's Doge watching over every decision and retaining power to veto everything. There was a guy from Doge, wherever it is, watching in on Zoom as they talked. Its process, she argued, became hollowed out. Quotes:

This hollowing out is not just about governance in the abstract. It has material consequences for which research questions get asked, which data sets get produced, which knowledge gets produced, and which perspectives shape our understanding of pressing societal challenges. It has consequences for the integrity of knowledge itself.

Now, in defending publicly her decision to resign, Nelson writes, "To watch these changes unfold without naming them for what they are is to participate in a collective amnesia about how knowledge infrastructures shape power relations." And we might add, "An amnesia about how new forms of political power can reshape knowledge infrastructures."

In the US today, the basic rules of what can be done and said are being reshaped by a type of politics that seeks directly to change how reality is. For sure there is growing resistance to this, or there will be, but what else can that resistance be based on but critique of this as an exercise of power? The effectiveness of such resistance will be measured by reference to the changes in the operation of that power.

Another French sociologist, Luc Boltanski, in his book "En Critique" wrote that "reality tends to coincide with what appears to hang together in a sense by its own strength, that is, with order. Resistance will mean stopping the Trump government's new ways of doing things hanging together. It will depend, in other words, on facing down acts of power in their very operation."

My third and final example is a little more personal. I mean the importance for me personally of working for nearly a decade on the colonial dimensions of big data and AI.

I don't want now to get into the detail of the framework of data colonialism with which I've become associated, but instead to emphasize that at its core is the idea that you can't understand what's happening with big data and AI today without seeing them as attempts to capture the world's resources, attempts to succeed in part by claiming a privileged access to knowledge.

A privileged power over our visions of the future. A special power to define what counts as knowledge and vision. This attempt to manage the actual plurality of the world's knowledges has been central to colonial rule from the start. And it's crucial to the attempt to impose a certain vision of data and AI on the world today. Why do I mention this?

not just because it's another example of how critique is above all the critique of such types of power, but because as I've continued to read and think around data colonialism over a decade, I've had to confront the very real gaps in my own perspectives on sociology and what counts as sociological knowledge. The gaps in the view that I inherited of the horizons of sociological inquiry.

Gaminda Bambra and John Holmwood's very important book, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, made me realize three or four years ago those limits in my own perspective. At the start of the book, they quote Walter Mignolo's remark about, quote, Anthony Giddens' missing chapters.

They recount how W.E. Du Bois' major work on black reconstruction in the US, that is, on the aftermath of the US Civil War, was for decades excluded from the canon of sociological research. They confront us with the unwelcome and inconvenient truth that, quote, "modern social theory represents a very particular type of amnesia."

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event.

The silent prioritization in our own disciplines of European and North American reference points, and therefore the silent deprioritization of other reference points from across the world, not completely of course, but when the reckoning gets made of what work is truly important, what horizons for future development are truly salient, all this confronts us with the deep role that force has had

and still has on what we claim to be knowledge. It confronts the deep role that non-epistemic forms of power have on our apparently epistemic possibilities, which means that our starting points for thinking about what we want the social sciences and humanities to critique have already been shaped

by a history of power far outside the official operations of academic disciplines, including sociology. And when we realize this, I would argue, we also realize that no critique can get underway without first examining the forms of power that make particular ideas of critique available in the first place. So critique really must give a special place, I would argue, to the critique of power.

It was alleged at some point that it would be an advantage for me to speak last, but I am not sure that this is actually the case.

Thank you to everyone so far. In speaking against the proposition, I am not arguing that critique is not also the critique of power, but I would argue that it is not only the critique of power and that it is worth reflecting on broader sets of meanings of the term, particularly when we're thinking about what different disciplines can contribute.

I would suggest that currently dominant notions of critique owe a lot to a particular moment at the turn of the 19th century when the notion of critique was captured by the notion of totality. We can associate this moment with the name of Hegel and then Marx, but I think there are broader intellectual and cultural current at play.

Intellectual historians describe the birth of cultural critique as a form at this time which was as much a conservative, or I should say reactionary phenomenon, as a progressive one. This cultural critique draws on and reverts much older cultural motifs which I would trace with Jacob Tauvis and others to the Abrahamic religions who invent a radical distinction between God on the one hand and world on the other.

I think I could evidence this link between critique and totality in reference to broad strands of work in the cultural and social sciences which have been influenced by 19th century traditions of cultural critique, where the commitment to the notion of critique as tied to the notion of totality is almost taken for granted.

If totality is rooted in the opposition between world on the one hand and God on the other hand, this conceptualizes the world as a whole at the same time as it turns it into a problem. This opposition invites a rejection of and contempt for the world, which is a prominent cultural theme since the 19th century, culturally and in the social and cultural sciences, and takes as its current form the denunciation of power.

The link to totality is not just widely practiced, but indeed at times framed as a moral obligation. In some conversations, if you have not linked your observations to the totality, which you denounce as power, you are not yet fully critical. This gets reproduced despite disavowals in prominent places by prominent and leading authors such as Stuart Hall, for example, and Donna Haraway.

We can discuss the work of Foucault as an individual who I think had some sense, but only some sense of the problems of critique of totality. If we think about his critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion or his move to the concept of power from below, the effect of the work has largely been with the

possible exception, a plausible exception of present company to reinforce totality rather than to offer analytical ways out of it because of a lack of institutional specificity that is sort of morally mandated and is not an accident.

As has been pointed out, commentators distinguish between two types of critique. The Sun calls one the Realized and the other the Historicist critique. Owen calls the first the Marxian and the second the Nietzschean. The Realist, briefly put, denounces false consciousness. The Historicist says this could be otherwise.

The notions I want to recover are closer to the historicist notion of critique, but within that camp, I think we again find a distinction between wholist approaches who say all of this is one thing which is power which could be otherwise, and those who aim to situate a given phenomenon in the context of a broader range of concrete alternative forms of social organization.

If we accept that the most fundamental operation of critique is not to say this is bad, but rather to say it is not necessary, it could be otherwise, I would add to that that it's not only about that it could be otherwise, but how it could be otherwise. By insisting on the how, I'm not talking about solutionism.

I'm not talking about an obligation on the critic to identify feasible steps that would get you from state A to state B. I'm talking of practicing the imagination of all the different specific ways in which things could be organized in a different way socially. It is here that I see the specific contribution of specific disciplines and also specifically sociology.

Sociologists have an ambition to be accountable in terms of the phenomena they are positing. The tradition has handed down a vocabulary for different social forms such as diets, triads, organizations, fields, interactions, regimes of racializations, regimes of kinship and gender, political orders and so on. Different traditions emphasize different forms and there are real intellectual issues to be discussed between these different approaches

But I think these could be brought together following relational principles, taking into account actors' interpretations and retaining a curiosity with regard to the different forms that these forms can take. Other disciplines offer vocabularies for other form elements, such as literary or other aesthetic forms. If we're looking at something specific, such as international humanitarian relief between around 1919 to 2020,

or the ways in which women were or were not incorporated into theater production in the Weimar Republic in Germany, to name things I've worked on or to name something I have not worked on but we're all interested in, the forms of authority or authority mixed with violence that is practiced under Trump too.

The whole repertoire of sociological notions can help generate critical perspectives with regard to what something is in light of all the different ways in which it could be otherwise and with regard to its conditions of possibility in terms of how the phenomenon coexists with specific instantiations of other forms.

Description and critique almost fall together here, but it's a very specific form of description that is tied to a theoretical concept of a sociological object of some kind. I want to situate what I'm arguing for with a final comment on the role of comparison in critique.

There's something critical in my sense in many forms of variation finding comparisons, including comparisons that make use of the full range of historical and geographical cases, including cross-national comparisons when national policy differences are consequential. These reveal differences that the critique of power can tend to make disappear because it can claim that they don't matter in the context of the rejection of the totality when I think they do.

I also want to highlight the role of comparison not just to what is, but to how things could be. This can be neglected in some routine forms of social science research. And I just had a reviewer chide me and a co-author for engaging in pure speculation in a section of a paper where I thought actually there was a really important part of the analysis in this paper.

I take this injunction to compare not just to what is, but to how things could be from Craig Calhoun, who many of us here at the LSE know, but it's been an important component of the contribution of Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial contributions to sociology. Comparison to what could be yields concepts such as the means of production, I would argue.

It's interestingly also something some sociologists do in some forms of quantitative modeling.

Having said that, I would further add that in contrast to what is routinely practiced in some of the traditions of the critique of power, the kind of critical analysis I'm thinking about can also get epistemic gains from a comparison to forms that are possible and are worse than what we see in front of us. There is, I think, an emphasis on comparing critically by comparing to what we'd like to see.

To complete, critique has a long history, different meanings, prior to Hegel, prior to Kant even. The meaning I want to recover draws on a kind of historicism and on the humanities of the 19th century, but marshals what has been achieved in the social sciences, which by and large appeared only later.

In, I think, exercising our form imagination, so how things could be otherwise, given everything we've learned in terms of what the options are by research in the sociological tradition, is not less and probably more important in this particular moment than in others. In 1919, in response to, on the one hand, the First World War, on the other hand, the Russian Revolution, the German theologian Ernst

Schreutz wrote that, I quote, we theorize and construct not under the protection of an all-carrying order which renders the most daring and most impertinent theories harmless, but in the middle of a storm of the new making of the world. The earth is shaking, and the different possibilities of future becoming are dancing around this.

I think this described aspect of the current moment, I'm not convinced we need a whole new language to capture this. There's some claims in ways that I think within the social sciences can sometimes be self-serving. We have a wealth of very relevant concepts, but we need ones that are open to variation and change. Thank you.

I would like to thank all the speakers and I'm very much looking forward to your questions which will allow these speakers to speak to one another as well. In order to allow for that conversation across the speakers, I'm going to take questions in groups rather than one at a time. And we'll start in the audience. We have two hands up already.

But first, could you state your name and your institutional affiliation? Thank you. Hi, my name is Kate Nash. I'm associated with the sociology department here. Visitor to the sociology department, Kate Nash. Now I've dropped my nose.

So as you were speaking, it was very interesting. It's making me think about a lot of things. But I suppose I was thinking critique of power is always somehow the name. The power is somehow named, isn't it? So you're sort of invoking both the Marxist and the Foucauldian, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. And the Marxist is, of course, capitalism. And the Foucauldian is really kind of scientific knowledge.

Whereas often you seem to be talking about power more as if it were capacity more than those kinds of domination. So I was a bit, yeah, I don't know if you would say a little bit more about definitions of power because you sort of seem to be going then towards, well, power is a positive thing also. It is a capacity. We need power sometimes. So...

Yeah, maybe just talk a little bit about thinking about the definition of power. Yeah, that's great. Definition of power. Thank you. Yes.

- Thanks, first of all, I really enjoyed all of the thoughts, really, really stimulating. So I have a question for the panel, which is, I wonder if it would be possible for you to reflect critically on critique as a body of knowledge, instead of critique as sort of something that is self evident in the mass of the tree, what it might be. And I'm referring to Foucault's other definition of critique, not just as

how we can be governed less. But he has this response to Kant in which he describes critique as the legitimate use of reason. And it provokes us to consider what might be the illegitimate use of reason. What are the bounds of critical knowledge? Where does it end? And what kind of fuzzy boundaries? And what lies beyond that? And it brings me to the question that you have of the critique.

And I guess most people have answered it in terms of, well, critique is or isn't the critique of power. But I'm wondering if we can look at the second half of that question, which is what else other than critique might be the critique of power? And there was a mention of Bruno Latour at the beginning. And he, of course, provoked us with the idea of the similarities between critique and conspiracy theories. And I guess what I'm wondering here is how this critique with conspiracy theories

Thank you. So, to unpack both power and critique. I did see, yes? Could you say your name as well? I'm an associate professor in anthropology in Norway. And I guess it follows less eloquently than the previous speaker.

Because one of the things I was, I attended another panel on critique at LSE and what struck me was how much pleasure I derived from listening to people talk about critique. And I was trying to figure out, you know, that ecumenical feature of just discussing critique from text and how, and it struck me, what is the opposite of critique?

Would that then be something like pragmatics? So I was trying to, you know, I didn't really, and I was also thinking of the friction that comes about in communities that do not agree on what the previous speaker said. I forget how he phrased it.

when we can't agree on this Habermasian discussion of critique, what critique is. So we talk sometimes about inclusivity, of including different voices. But I come from different departments or different traditions where there's so much friction around different ways of talking

in academic environments, some that are oriented toward undergraduate teaching, some that are oriented toward bureaucracy, that you can never get this sort of rational consensus around having a conversation about critique. So I guess that was sort of my question. First, is critique just something that is grounded in this ontological text from which we then gain pleasure as an ecumenical community and therefore

around that and that could be our political form? And if so, then what is the opposite of critique? Thank you so much. I think we should have the panel respond to those three questions. I'm turning around so I can see Claire. I'm wondering who would like to go first. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have the wonderful question. Thank you very much.

The definition question is probably a good starter and in my little statement the definition of power was layered. It started in a way with certain forces that come out of accumulation

and those forces can be relatively powerful compared to other forces. And then power in the narrow sense is probably those forces that then can be appropriated as capacity. So the forces that you can make

work for certain goals, certain systematic effects that you want to cause. By these multiple layers I try to introduce powers or powerful forces, now I need to be strict with my own vocabulary, that are non-human.

So we are probably confronted nowadays with a number of powerful forces that require powerful answers with climate change.

Saying that, and now I start the debate, is important because we need to understand that we are in many ways dependent on power.

as we are as humans dependent on society. And a lot of points when the critique of power says, "Oh look, here is power, and there is power," and so on, we often just mean that something has a great impact.

or that certain decisions come out of it, or certain things are pre-structured, or as Foucault would say, we talk then about the effects of effects. But observing those is as such not a reason for critiquing them. Observing those is first of all the observation of society being at work.

Since we need society or probably even a collaboration of societies for instance to tackle climate change, we need to admit that power is relevant, that we need to organize power, that we need to accumulate those capacities in order to gain

collective agency to deal with certain problems. So in that way my definition wouldn't be kind of clear on a positive or negative side, but I would not kind of invite a critique of power that is relativist on that part, that in general would because you find

something powerful be in the position to criticize it. So that is probably first. I mean there were other questions but probably I don't want to talk too much. Thank you so much for your questions and for everyone's contributions. I actually felt like there was a lot of

complementarity between the different talks and the ways in which many of us focused on the need to think about multiplicity and not unitary forms of power. So I thought that was a nice way the contributions from today kind of spoke to one another. It's interesting, so in that article that both of you mentioned, he talks at the beginning of Bruno Latour

walking back from his critique of science because his critiques were sort of taken up by reactionaries, basically. And then the question sort of asks, you know, how do these kind of forms of critique get taken up by folks promoting certain conspiracy theories? It's an interesting question, obviously, for this panel. Find somebody who actually studies kinds of scientific knowledge and it's people who sort of counter dominant and hegemonic forms of knowledge and science.

Like to use that in that piece, I think that doesn't mean you should step away from critique, but rather that you know any sort of new kind of truth regime, we need to analyze the conditions of this emergence and I think that that's really important in this moment now that we have.

promoting particular kinds of theories or Trump promoting certain kinds of conspiracy theories, I think we have to really dig into and understand where that's coming from, why people are buying into this, why it is that at this particular moment they are finding credence in that and rejecting sort of. I think that part of our job as social scientists is to precisely understand the conditions in which those forms of

discourse emerge and why and the power that they hold and why it is that people believe in them. Just like we have to understand why it is that people disassociate with certain medical forms of knowledge. So we have to understand that in order to be able to critique the rise of Trump and what is happening in the US. And that's a hugely important form of critique. And I think, I mean personally, I think that Foucault is useful for understanding

Thank you.

Yeah, I want to go back to the second question because I think you asked two questions. The second one was what else other than critique that helps us address power? And I think that's an interesting and subtle point. And I certainly don't fetishize the word critique. So an example of that for me would be the early work of Latour and Canon.

which had an enormous impact on me in media studies because it was the first way of understanding how media power actually works, where it comes from.

and I think I was the first person to adopt Kahneman to intermediate studies. And that, of course, had a certain critical edge to it, to say the least, in relation to other analyses of power. But it was, at one level, an unpacking of where power is and what it does, which doesn't fit the normal definition of critique. So that is a very important part.

As Claire was just saying, we need description and we need radical description, as it were. On the other hand, to go back to the third question, which I thought was a very interesting one, the pleasure of talking about critique when you apply the pain of not feeling able to critique. I think that's important because I think certainly in my area of the social sciences, the way that actor network theory was adopted was

was often to lead to a sort of pure descriptivism describing the detailed features of the operations of this platform here and there. Well, fine, yeah, we did learn something from that. But in the end, the more important thing was to discuss the power of platforms and the role, the symbolic power in a sense, but also infrastructure they had literally to change our world around us. And so I think there is a risk, unless we get this balance right, unless we hold on to the prior information

horizon of the goal of critique that we just lapse into endless complexity. I'm not saying you were doing that because I agree with everything you said pretty much, but we needed that complexity. But there's a danger of lapsing into just seeing complexity when it's pretty obvious as Claire and I were saying the challenges of power right now are literally taking apart the world that everyone in this room has taken for granted. So we simply cannot step back from critique at this moment of all moments.

Thank you. Yes, I mean, in response to Kate's question, I'm trying, legitimately or not, I think, to draw a distinction perhaps between the critique of power and the critical analysis of forms of power, which turns some of these questions into empirical questions.

And my experience has been that I learn from work in the tradition of the critique of power, including some work inspired by Foucault.

And including Claire's work, which I was thinking of that dialogue because I had written these comments before she presented, which does offer that institutional specificity in terms of her ethnographies and the diagnosis of specific forms of power. But I sometimes feel I learn from those analysis despite the commitment to the critique of power.

the commitment to totality and to the critique of power as the critique of totality is sometimes in the way of fully harnessing the analytical power of these specificities. I think what you just said, Nick, in terms of, and also previously, in terms of the necessity to reflect on power as we're doing research, particularly at the current moment, I certainly wouldn't deny that.

I think reflecting on power imbalances and important ethical dimension of research and of other types of practices, in my experience it doesn't exactly then tell you what to do.

because power plays a role in different ways in making concrete practices. You still need to balance it with different kinds of ethical considerations. And then still you've got to figure out how to make specific use in conducting a research project or writing something of the relative distance that universities afford. And so in that sense, I fully accept the ethical principle. I

I just think it's sometimes treated as though that then tells us what to do, which precludes the reflection about what we concretely ethically do in specific contexts and also how we then concretely politically oppose power. And I think as an ethical principle, it also, I mean, it's worth reminding that it doesn't get us out of politics. So the...

centrality of critiquing power doesn't get us out of the problem as an ethical principle of having to deal with people we think we agree with but then seem to have very different interpretations of the same values, having to deal as part of politics with people who we mostly don't agree with, with people who totally disagree with.

in the context of imperfect institutions, hybrid institutions that we have to negotiate as something that's politics and which the critique of power as an ethical injunction promises to get us out of when it doesn't. Not my critique, I didn't say that of course. I don't think you need to make such bold claims but I agree with you that certain debates around critique

which assume a social totality to be critiqued which i tried to avoid saying as you picked up that's a better way to deal with that to make this consistent but i i agree i i i can't make sense of the idea of a totality no i would completely agree with you i just can't make sense of that but i can identify the workings of specific types of power within the space where i'm looking and some like symbolic power are often quite clear in their operations although the consequences of

So I think there's probably common ground between us about that idea of avoiding some totality as our object. Yeah, I wanted to go back to the understanding, or one could say the criteria for critique. And my suggestion was that

Critique is important and has the kind of attacking points where we don't make use of the possibilities that we have in order to prevent people from suffering. But in order to do this kind of critique, we need a good deal of, I would say, affirmation. We need to understand

the abilities, the capacities, the competencies in carrying out certain practices, even on a more complex scale.

because those possibilities are exactly those, and now I go to what you said about Trump, those possibilities are exactly those which are attacked first,

in order to organize the road back to shift the ground for society. So we need as well by all the negativity that comes usually with critique, we need a good understanding

of in a way our political successes of what we gained through the struggles that were fought in order to defend what we have and not give it away

to those forces and that is why it needs to be leveled, the positive and the negative sides with a good understanding I think of the possibilities. And one point as well that we need to understand is that

The problems that we face are complicated and often we make it too easy to criticize government or to criticize apparatuses

because when you take a closer look then that often happens on the expense of bracketing out the weight of the problems that we face and admitting that things are complicated is part of this kind of understanding our possibilities at this very moment and understanding that we need to generate

and build up new possibilities in order to cope with the problems. Thank you. We have a question in the back of the room, and I have a number of questions from online, which I will condense actually to one question. And we have 15 more minutes just to let you know. Hello?

Yeah, my name is Zachariah, LSE alum. Very interesting discussion so far. I just wanted to sort of wrap my head around how can we approach the critique of power and how it would look like in practice. And here, two figures come to mind, Popper and Kuhn.

not best friends, but I think it's very conducive to this discussion because maybe one way to approach it is to continuously falsify the knowledge that we have, the science that we have. And if that's the case, could that be a sufficient sort of step to problematize the power in the status quo? And this feeds into the actor network theory that was mentioned earlier.

Is it sufficient to continuously falsify power as it is to then envisage what it could be or what it should be? Or should we just accept that certain things might not be plausibly for the better and so we just have to maybe work around it and deploy power in a more narrow sense? Thank you all. I'm Aaron. I'm in the sociology department here.

So my question is actually about history and its relationship to critique and how critique might connect with the present. And I'll maybe pose this as a couple of questions. The first two may be more to Monica and then the last one maybe to Claire, but I'm interested if others want to respond. So is counterfactual history a form of critique in that it imagines otherwise? Is history which merely illuminates contingency operating in this same realm? And then in terms of genealogy,

or the kind of genealogical method it seems like that's operating in part because it wants to try and understand the present through the past and so i'm i'm interested in whether critique has a temporal dimension can you offer critique of the past in the form that we're talking about here or is it something about the operation of power in the present does critique lose its force when it's separated from the moment that we're currently in i'm going to have the

question from online. Why do we take all the questions? We'll take these all and then you'll have to be quite short, but let me make sure I get the one that's online. They've been waiting for a bit. Basically, there's a number of questions and I would sort of summarize them as

in one way or another, revolving around the possible problem of a relationship between critiquing power and absolving of responsibility or accountability. At what point does critiquing replace accountability? And then, would you still like to ask a question? Hello, my name is Ray. Thank you very much. I'm academically unaffiliated.

I'm just wondering, there's often this phrase that crops up now and again quite a lot on social media, speaking truth to power. And behind that is the kind of thing where, you know, one day reality is going to come and bite these bats, you know, and then we'll have them. But it seems to me that there's a kind of closure of a loop there somewhere, you know, where just hammering this stuff that comes out of Trump and so forth

with facts and figures is just not going to work, you know, and actually maybe feeding the whole apparatus that produces power, as you say, produces reality in a certain sense. Reality is not going to come and bite these people because that becomes a kind of sentimental notion, it seems to me, which is still predominant on the left. And I just wonder, why is the right so bloody good at this stuff? You know, when...

The people on the left are kind of struggling all over the place. You're limited, tied in knots. We do have a question for Judy, and then I think that will have to be our last member.

My name's Judy Wiseman, I'm associated with the sociology department here for a long time. I mean it's partly picking up on Aaron's question about the counterfactual. And I did want to ask Monica to just say a few more words about how things could be otherwise. Because I have to say that I sort of share an incredible frustration with the limits of critique.

You know, in my particular kinds of work, it's always like, well, what would technology look like, you know, in a non-patriarchal society? What would it look like if venture capital wasn't the motor for so much innovation? And I'm endlessly trying to, and I think we should sort of engage with innovation

possibilities of what could be otherwise and so how do we do that within this sort of framework? I mean, can I just say I thought all of the talks were splendid and incredibly interesting so I'm just thinking them through but I just wondered if you could say just a little bit more about that. Thank you. I'm going to, Maria, do you have a short question? Okay. PhD student in the sociology department. I guess my question kind of relates to Judy's which

Starting off from Latour's article, why has critique run out of steam and his discussion of matters of concern, I was thinking what might the role of care be in critique and in the critique of power, thinking of how De la Bella Casa expands the notion of concern to care in her work. Thank you.

Thank you. So we have about five more minutes. So you each have about a minute to sum up. Who would like to go first? Can I go first? Yes, you can. Thank you. Sorry, just I know I'm like a talking head, so I thought maybe I'd just go first. These are great questions, and this is such a great conversation. So I want to address, I guess, the

the questions that have emerged, the possibilities for what could be otherwise, and this question about is one possibility just full supply knowledge. I actually think that critique power we should be absolved of our accountability. In fact, I think that's the point of critiquing power is to push back against really powerful discourses and

I think that false and lying knowledge to a degree is really important. I think that to the point about speaking truth to power, I mean, I think that you can't just keep saying that scientific facts are true and therefore you're wrong to RFA. That mechanism is not going to work. The scientific truths are also racist and

have lots of historical problems with the way in which they were constructed. And so we have to deconstruct multiple regimes of truth at the same time. But I also think that another form that gets lost often when we talk about Foucault is this point about explanation. So we also have to understand that new regimes of truth emerge, or any regime of truth gains power. It has also subjugated other forms

or indigenous knowledge, disqualified knowledges. And I think that part of resistance is also excavating those forms of knowledge to show the ways in which they were suppressed in order that it emerges. And that that's another part of finding possibilities of what could be otherwise, but also critiquing the fact that those particular forms of truth are not necessarily

Maybe I could just go next because I want to follow on from the point Claire's just made. Someone asked, can you do a critique of the past? Absolutely, I think you can. That's what decolonial thinking is. It's going back into the past to see the actual acts of symbolic violence which foreclose possibilities for us right now, which need to be

identified and then not undone. They can't be undone but somehow recovered so the new space possibly emerges now. So I think that's important. I very much agree with Judy's point of frustration. Obviously in the era where I look at social media platforms, it's easy to criticize. Although 15 years ago no one was criticizing but it's easy to criticize now. But it's exactly essential to think well what next?

What types of social media infrastructure do we need? Do we need a Euro stack so that Europe becomes independent from American tech power? These are incredibly difficult questions, but of course their force partly comes out of the critique itself.

it didn't needn't be a limit it's only a limit if we if if we want it to be and the point about of what at what point does critique of power in absolve itself responsibility well i absolutely don't agree it should i mean bourdieu was always very clear that the very act of speaking ex cathedra and criticizing the world was itself a privilege

that was acquired through a sort of sociological struggle. So one's got to be self-critical about how one's able to speak in the first place, which goes back to the decolonial point, but also, going back to your point, to link

the uses of critique in the world without the actual politics with others who are not privileged to be academics in working together to change things or at least think what our starting points would be. So critique without responsibility would be just a parlor game and there isn't time for that now.

I just wanted to get back to that question about what's the opposite of critique because I think it's a really interesting point and I think maybe we can take it with us as we walk out.

But, I mean, initially the prompt serves to highlight the point that also others in the audience have made, that critique really in some form is everywhere. So science is inherently critical, as you point out in some way. The right is very good at it. I think even power is sometimes justified by critique, which leaves the critique of power in a sort of paradoxical role and so on.

I'm not yet sure about the opposite of critique. I'm very interested, but I think so far we're at getting at different meanings within critique in terms of clarification. And I think thinking about the opposite can be helpful in that. I also note that we have assumed, and that's what the prompt invited us to, that critique is somehow a good thing. That's something we have all agreed on. It's just like, what precisely do we mean by it? And

I think it would be interesting to explore the other side of that argument. In terms of scholarship on technology and gender, or indeed the future of technology and gender, it seems to me that work in feminist science and technology studies, including your own shows, different ways

socio-technical junctures have been shaped that matter where the difference between going this way or that way or this way matters for people in a way that are somewhere in between the feminist revolution and the total oppression and it's that sketching of what are the concrete options that I think we have something to contribute to as sociologists.

Yes, one minute. I just remembered that often when I'm teaching my students in seminars about how to read text and how to do research, a very basic observation that repeats itself is that for the students it is more simple to formulate critique than to formulate what is in the text.

And I think that is an important hint that we have problems in acknowledging

achievement and accomplishments. We have problems in acknowledging for instance there was a question about accountability, responsibility that those things are democratic accomplishments that needs to be defended. It doesn't mean that they are already making us realizing the problems but they are a big step towards it and again

Here I would insist that we need to defend that. The Kuhn proper question is of course a great one because I think in critiquing them we got rid of a lot of stuff that we now need in order to defend a sense of reality even if we don't find the proper words for it.

But then there is a sense of that we need to care of certain things that we don't fully understand. One word to Trump, how is he doing that? I think he has a kind of short-term competitive advantage because he simply doesn't care.

He gets rid of reality full stop apart probably from certain economic figures, but getting rid of those complicated realities makes him move more easily towards discourses than any other responsible politician or human being could do.

With that, I think that's a good way for us to say thank you to the speakers. This has been an incredibly interesting conversation. I really appreciate it. And to all of you for joining us and participating. So, thank you.

Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.