| | I appreciate both Ashwin Desai and Patrick Bond's responses, but would like to make a brief clarification and update. There is no holy grail of 'genuine accountability of researchers to their subjects' as Bond is hoping for. In contrast, I am arguing for unravelling how these divisions re-inscribe grammars of power, trapping 'subjects' in their own subjugation. It is precisely the re-enforcement of the 'community-intellectual, town-gown divide' which disables political possibility. Ranciere perhaps explains this better than I have when he argues that, "in Bordieu as much as Plato, the poor comprise in their very exclusion from the vocation of philosopher the condition of philosophical possibility. Present as objects rather than subject of knowledge, appearing only in the guise of philosophy's exempla, the poor enable the philosopher to constitute himself - as other than the poor" |
