Clemet Askheim: ”Spectral limits - the haunted history of sustainability”

Research presentation by Clemet Askheim, Oslo Metropolitan University

Abstract:

Can we think of conceptual history as ghost stories, where concepts are always haunted by their own history? And is there a structure or logic to the haunting? In this paper I will use the metaphor of ghosts as a productive starting point for approaching the history of concepts, alluding to how the past is working in and on the present, and how the present always drags the past along with it. I want to suggest that concepts tend to be haunted by remnants of the problematic that produced them, conditioning later iterations and impregnating the subject matter a concept is set to designate with a similar problematic. To explore and illustrate such an approach to the history of concepts, I will attempt to briefly sketch a history of sustainability, as a political, managerial and governmental concept haunted by different forms of limits and absolutes.