On Impasse:

Anthropological, Philosophical and Historical Inquiries

Maria Jos de Abreu

Emilio Spadola
Carlo Caduff

Presentation of Scientific Aims and Concepts

Many events of the past few years suggest that today we are confronted with a
particular condition of time and space: the impasse. The speed and stochastic nature
of electronic communication allows local events to unfold with rapid global
repercussions. From the uprisings in the Middle East to the migration of refugees to
Europe, from Brexit to the election of Trump in the United States, from the war in
Syria to the wave of right-wing political movements in France, Germany, India, the
Philippines, and elsewhere, the world seems to be on the brink of a global civil war.
Today, no solutions for these situations of instability and uncertainty seem ready at
hand. On the contrary, each situation seems to embrace its opposite, even derive
political energy from quandaries and paradoxes that escape the logic of either/or.
These quandaries and paradoxes, which increasingly configure reality around us,
suggest that it is urgent to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics that are governing
our political moment. The pace and scale of events seems to be unprecedented, yet
our thinking is incapable of assimilating new rhythms and patterns. Our technical
capacities of coordinating time and mapping space are unprecedented; we have
GPSbut where are we going? We have election pollsbut can we trust them?
How should we account for this discrepancy between prediction and outcome and
what is its political force? Taking this question as a starting point, the proposed
international conference will focus on the status and role of impasse in our current
political moment.

Characteristic for this political moment is an abundance of disorientation. Perhaps

we owe this sense of disorientation to the dissolution of more sequenced narratives

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that once allowed us to predict where things were heading, or at least entertain the
fantasy that reliable prediction was possible. Perhaps our disorientation arises from
the collapse of temporal and spatial coordinates allowing us to distinguish between
the remote and the proximate. At any rate, the questions, What's next? and Where
are we headed? that once structured models of future orientation seem to have lost
their traction. Even the word crisis has exhausted its valueit has become
ubiquitous and increasingly unable to provoke a response. As Joseph Masco argues,
The power of crisis to shock, and thus mobilize, is diminishing due to narrative
saturation, overuse, and a lack of well-articulated positive futurities to balance stories
of end-times (Masco 2017). The idea of crisis only reinforces the sense of no
escape, the sense of a fundamental impasse (Roitman 2014). The constant
invocation of the term has turned crisis from an exception into a stable normative
background, exhausting its capacity to generate effective critique..

While the notion of crisis once served as a powerful political slogan, the notion of
impasse resists political appropriation, and this marks its intellectual and ethical
potential. Thus, rather than yielding to the idea of impasse as deadlock or blind alley,
that is, to simple blockage signified by an impermeable wall, we propose to take the
notion at face value and explore, theoretically as well as empirically, whether
impasse, as a peculiar form of temporal and spatial standstill or situation of
indecision, may help us better understand our current political moment of expansion
and acceleration. Recognizing that reality rests at present at a precarious borderline
between neither this nor that, our key aim is to ask: What is the value or potential of
recognizing impasse? What makes the idea of impasse relevant and significant?
What kinds of flexible logics and improvisational responses emerge in situations of
impasse?

The logic of linear causation typical of Enlightenment knowledge formations has

enjoyed a privileged place in Euro-American thought. The models of engaging the
world that supported these formations operated through the systematic exclusion of
contingency, contradiction and bifurcation, which Valry called the manifold that
presents itself to mind (see Vogl 2011). It was a context where lateral thinking had
to be repressed for the sake of forward thinking, bound to the sovereign space of
European nation-states. Today, however, the fragmented character of

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technologically mediated events indicates that no linear narrative sequence is able to
frame or enclose the simultaneity of whats happening (Weber 2005). Each narrative
is itself traversed by endless streams of data, constantly interrupting the flow of
information while continuously withholding any final conclusion. Indeed, the very
devices that are supposed to create grounds for predicting the future are generating
opportunities for evermore discomfort (Zaloom 2009). This has resulted in an intense
and indecisive historical present (Berlant 2011), a temporal and spatial context in
which history, presence and context feel unmoored.

By highlighting the growing sense of impasse we aim to address both a pervasive

everyday sense of crisisthe increasing pressures on the lower classes and
middle classes, the lost faith in the possibility of a good lifeand the growing desire
for its transcendencethe hope for something extraordinary and absolute (the great
person or event or decision) that will lift us out of the mess and make us great
again.

But what, exactly, are the symptoms of impasse? Can we identify symptoms of
impasse with radical forms of resistance, such as Bartlebys notorious I would prefer
not to? Is such an active decision to remain passive an expression of or a response
to impasse? What about forms of enthusiastic resignation, anomie and spectacular
violence? Can impasse illuminate the fantasy of and flight to virtual and augmented
realities, or the proliferation of political theologies? Are these developments pointing
to an unconscious search for fantastic alternatives that will allow us to exit the
impasse in which the contemporary political moment is caught? Can impasse explain
the desire for total disruption when confronted with total inertia? Calling for a
transcendent figure that would rise above the playground of oppositions could pose
an episteme of resistance against what Carl Schmitt called complexio oppositorum,
which valued the accentuation of conflict without ever resolving it dialectically in a
higher synthesis (Schmitt 1984, see as well Weber 2005). Is impasse a form of
resisting secular notions of action and progress? To presume so, however, would be
to reduce impasse to a Western problem as a mere limit to the progressive unfolding
of liberal regimes. It would exclude other political traditions and ethical horizons that
shape other cultures volitional economies and processes of decision-making
(Pandolfo 2007; Simpson 2007; Povinelli 2011). Can scholars move from learning

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about or from others (Morris 2011), to, finally, learning with others as everyone,
everywhere struggles with impasses of otherness?

Rather than resolution, the political challenge at hand may be to learn to live (in) the
impasse and accept, at least for the time being, the contingent structure of the
condition. As excessive contingencies break free from the linear succession of
events, perhaps we need to find new flexible patterns and methodologies of
structuring time and value. Can we learn to think impasse? Perhaps impasse marks
an emerging ability to deal with complexity and to make room for the negotiation of
multiple possibilities that seemingly tear texts and contexts apart in myriad
directions. Where the complexity generated by the interpenetration of information
and process is endemic, impasse is perhaps not an obstacle but an energetic
expression of the system itself.

Such gestures would involve learning to dwell in what Nietzsche called the haze of
the unhistorical, before a beam of light breaks through it, when humans will again
be able to transform occurrences into history, when impasse will have been a
crisis, now resolved (Nietzsche 2013). The task may be neither to advance nor to
retreat, but to spread, and thus to live (in) the impasse.

Lines of Inquiry

1) Epistemologies of Impasse
The central focus of this international conference is to provide impasse with
analytical power. On the one hand, impasse can be seen as a form of interrupting
linear narratives and the rush to judgment and sovereign decision-making
characteristic of the liberal tradition. On the other hand, it can also be seen as a
strategy to maintain the status quo by lingering in, and ever deferring closure into,
the future via the promise that tomorrow things will be better. We aim to examine not
only how moments of impasse happen in space-time, but how impasse itself entails
a theory of space-time. Understood as a liminal concept between action and
inaction, this cluster explores the kinds of agencies that are possible to exercise
when thought gets stuck in paradox, contradiction, Catch-22s. With its emphasis on

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modes of knowledge production, this cluster connects us to the Foucauldian idea of
a general space of knowledge where the blank spaces of the grid themselves
become visible (Foucault 1982).

2) After the Next

The conference will also provide us with a better understanding of todays obsession
with the next. The seemingly self-evident injunction, organizing the political field
today, is to envision that which hasnt happened as that which is yet to occur. We
live in times, writes Brian Massumi, when what is yet to occur not only climbs to the
top of the news but periodically takes blaring precedence over what has actually
happened (Massumi 2010). This focus on the future has taken a particular shape in
the historical present: to prepare for whats to come is to prepare for whats next: the
next terrorist attack, the next global recession, the next refugee crisis, the next
financial crash, the next president. To what extend is this obsession with the next an
expression of impasse (even though it appears to entail an orientation toward the
future)? Is the movement from next to next really a form of progression from a past
(next) to a future (next)? Or is the very idea of the next, of being after the next, a
symptom of a more circular and convoluted temporal logic?

3) No Exit: Impassable and Impossible Borders

Is liberalism today impossible, yet rendered so paradoxically by its very conditions of
possibility? Political and economic liberalism were historically predicated on
circulation and the mobility of commodities and bodies within and across borders.
The liberal mantra, Laissez faire, laissez passer, accompanied new logics of
governmentality, the eschewal of city walls for the controlled risks of quasi-natural,
global economic and human flows. The long 1990s, from November 9, 1989, to
September 11, 2001, was its apotheosis, a point at which human and market flows
seemed containable. But no more. The very openings and circuits that make global
trade possible also transmit unprecedented masses of migrants and militants.
Economic liberalism can no longer abide political liberalism. Does the unanticipated
passage of Brexit and Trumpist chants of Build that Wall! signal a new mantra of
post-liberalism: Laissez impasser?

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4) Secularism at an Impasse
From Europes burkini bans as counterterror operations, it seems modern secular
states are more ill-equipped than ever to govern a world of public religions. Such
absurdities may simply denote the improper or inelegant application of secularism.
Or perhaps liberal secularism is itself at an impasse, no longer credible in claiming
indifference to salient religious differences. Can we think this impasse otherwise? If
secularism equates to modern state sovereignty itself, are we to envision new
secularisms (Asad 2003, Balibar 2011, Mahmood 2016)? Could imagin[ing] a
politics that does not treat the state as the arbiter of [religious] majority-minority
relations (Mahmood 2016) result in further embracing neoliberal logics of corporate
governance? Might this impasse prompt a reexamination of pre-modern imperial
plural societies and states predicated on religious difference and formal communal
autonomy? Or could impasse prompt another response: to let secularisms excesses
demonstrate its systematic idiocy?

5) Waiting Life
Migrants are stuck in countries, refugee camps and government offices. Waiting
always denotes a time and space of liminality, of being neither here nor there,
neither this nor that. But if waiting, like the liminal phase of rituals, is a kind of
suspension, it too is not non-action. Waiting is always a form of being engaged and
involved in a process or project. It can be a form of potentializing the present via the
not-yet as in logics of speculative governance and risk management, or in the realms
of affective expectation. Or, conversely, it can be a mode of distending time into the
future via the yet-to-come in modalities of finance and profit-related banking, for
purposes of military intervention, in cultural systems of revenge, retaliation or gift
exchange. Either way, as Ghassan Hage writes, waiting is something we do in
relation to a particular horizon (Hage 2009, 2015). Can impasse help us understand
waiting as a social practice and space of not non-action, into the queue (Abdel Aziz
2016) and bureaucratic torture (Lavie 2015), as quintessential modes of governing
populations and movement, of governing the relation between labor and opportunity,
between scarcity and abundance, between life and death? Can impasse elucidate or
prompt an ethics of Derrida's -venir, of encountering what is unrecognizable as
either event or horizon (Derrida 2005)?

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6) Impassivity
Lauren Berlant writes about the transitory nature of the historical present as a
situation where many things are happening at once but none seems to advance by
eliminating the others (Berlant 2011). Possibilities thus coexist and, at least for
some, the deadpan becomes a philosophical choice, a mode of economizing
complexity through gesture and posture. It is when the feeling of being stuck requires
proportional gestural economies aiming at maintaining composure; when in the midst
of ongoing crisis narratives, absolute impassivity becomes the form to inhabit the
most unbearably paradoxical situation. For others though, the deadpan allows one to
subdue and exorcise fear of the unknown. There are also faces and bodies that
express indecision but not without a purpose. Bartleby in literature or Buster Keaton
in film are two famous examples of impassiveness in popular culture. Such examples
do highlight the relation between periods of great societal transformations and the
desire to contain the differential intensities it provokes in humans. Instances of this
relation come to us today through the highly skilled but unemployed youth in
southern Europe, the white underclass in northern Europe and the United States or
the citizen dweller of precarious Japan (Bend Anderson-Nathe 2010; Allison 2013;
Kroijer 2015). To be sure, such modes of impassiveness are themselves expressive
of local cultural codes and embodied gestural economies (Stewart 2007). They are
historically and geographically articulated. Except when they are notwhen no
codified or habitual gesture can arise to express or grant recognition to encounters
with impasse. The aim of this line of inquiry is to emphasize the bodily and
expressive dimensions of lived impasse across cultural contexts by linking and
moving across domains such as politics, economics, labor, migration, religion and
aesthetics.

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