Stengers SubjectivityWhat a pleasure to spend a day with a great intellectual-of-the-world – Stengers has seen it all, heard it all, and ends up incredibly humble, brutally honest and astoundingly unafraid during times when fear ensures the survival of so much redundancy. Starting off with a visit to Enkanini, then lunch at STIAS with the visiting fellows there, and then an afternoon seminar based on her paper entitled Experimenting with refrains: subjectivity and the challenge of escaping modern dualism, I was reminded what it means to inspire, question and probe the mysteries of what it means to be human. Written for the first edition of a new critical studies journal called Subjectivity, this paper is aimed at people who think that deconstruction is the only achievement that matters. She is primarily interested in the way critique undermines the real struggles for change by setting up a dualism between “them” who hold false beliefs, and “us” who always know best, who can always say “I told you so”. While her target is the deconstructionists, her critique is equally applicable to today’s academic Marxists who are fantastic at critique, but are incapable of traversing the divide between their much loved ‘fundamental contradictions’ and the messy real world of actually existing power struggles where decisions get made about policies and strategies. As Stengers so clear shows, modernity is quite happy to have these critiques around, for they are easily absorbed. What really subverts is action that changes things, and the co-production of knowledge that reinforces these kinds of “pre-cursive” transitions. The most memorable phrase of the day was when she said it is “so much easier to deconstruct than to foster”. Viva! (And thanks to Lesley Green from UCT for organising her visit to South Africa, for bringing her to Stellenbosch for a day, and to colleagues in Sociology’s Indexing the Human project for initiating the visit, and to Rika from CST for the logistics.)