Abstract
Demands for relevance often become manifest as suspicions about the impact of social scientific inventions beyond the academy. In Chap. 5, Savransky addresses the question of how to think about the effects that knowledge makes to the worlds with which it connects. While those traditions that have embraced a logic of ‘performativity’ may seem well equipped to give an account of this process, Savransky shows that this logic tends to exaggerate claims to efficacy by oversimplifying the ecological relationships between inventions and the milieus with which they connect. In contrast, Savransky calls for attention to the dynamic and circulating forms of causality involved in making connections and examines the complexities of one historical case—the forced introduction of the concept of ‘belief’ in Colonial India.
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Notes
- 1.
When taken far enough, the logic of performativity even manages to turn failures into successes, as exemplified by Donald MacKenzie’s (2004: 306) notion of ‘counterperformativity’, which involves the successful accomplishment of a self-undermining effect.
- 2.
Which in French simultaneously denotes the ‘medium’, the ‘surrounding’, and the ‘middle’ (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari 1987: xvii).
- 3.
Although Jullien is not too widely read in the anglophone world, it is important to specify the kind of reading of Chinese culture and thought that he constructs, and, accordingly, the mode in which his work will be taken up here. Jullien’s approach to China is not exactly that of a conventional sinologist, but of one who works ‘at once as a philologist and a philosopher’ moving between hermetic sinology and a non-simplistic comparativism ‘toward the elaboration of a theory’ (1995: 19). Although the contrasts drawn in his work oftentimes seem to convey a considerable amount of Occidentalism (particularly in Jullien 2004), one should bear in mind that their task is neither simply to compare, nor to celebrate Chinese thinking per se, but to articulate, by means of a ‘tentative entrée’ (1995: 20), propositions for the transformation of our Western habits of thought. It is following this constructive, speculative gesture that I draw upon his work.
- 4.
By now, the reader might have noticed that I have, whenever possible, tried to confine textual quotations of Whitehead’s work to passages that do not require much explanation of technical vocabulary. This one, however, demands a note. For although it has clear aesthetic connotations, the term ‘feeling’ here does not denote a human psychological operation but a metaphysical one. As Halewood (2011): 32) suggests, for Whitehead ‘[a] stone feels the warmth of the sun. A tree feels the strength of the wind.’
- 5.
Including, of course, those who vociferously and righteously claim that they only believe in ‘Science’, and those that anxiously insist they do not believe in anything.
- 6.
Indian—and not Hindu—because as Ashis Nandy (2001: 126) argues, ‘these gods and goddesses not only populate the Hindu world but regularly visit and occasionally poach on territories outside it.’
- 7.
This is arguably the case for the ‘Christian West’ too, even in spite of the efficacious connection of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’, and despite so-called secularisation theories which prophesied the erosion of everything ‘sacred’ in an increasingly ‘modernised’, Western milieu (see Bruce 1992). In fact, some affirm that the West is witnessing an expansion of the sacred that, as Vásquez and Marquardt’s (2000) example of the apparition of the Virgin Mary on the facade of the building of the Financial Corporation of Clearwater (Florida) makes manifest, can sometimes take trenchant, if humorous, forms.
- 8.
As this phrase suggests, they might have wished an addition of Christian teachings to secular education rather than a replacement of one by the other, because ‘missionaries and government officials alike shared the belief that modern science was a solvent of Indian religious beliefs, which in their view mingled a false theology with fantastical and nonsensical explanations of the world and its functioning’ (Seth 2007: 49).
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Savransky, M. (2016). Modes of Connection. In: The Adventure of Relevance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57146-5_5
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