Following the distinctions made by Susan Pearce between souvenir collections, fetishism collections and systematic collections, the present study will underline the idea that, for Walter Benjamin, collection was a way to reconnect with the past and to reconstruct an image of what was destroyed. Every object collected by Benjamin was for him a souvenir of the European cultural identity.

Daniel Bensaïd’s meditations on utopia and revolution assume a materialist form in his grasp of the non-linear temporalities of value relations in capitalist society. The result is a dialectical understanding of time as irregular and prone to ruptural transformations. Bensaïd’s unique reflections in this area open up a ‘strategic sense of time’ as the space of revolutionary politics.

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history."Few areas of American public life have received as much attention with as little actual on-the-ground study as citizen deliberation," Lawrence R. Jacobs, Fay Lomax Cook, and Michael X. Delli Carpini argue. "Whether and how real citizens engage in discursive participation; the nature, settings, and impact of this public talk; and (...) when and if 'talk' ever rises to the level of 'democratic deliberation'—each of these is ignored or, at best, occasionally introduced by way of illustration or anecdote" (2009, 20-21).This is .. (shrink)

Recent military coups in West Africa have put the continent’s democratisation itself into question. In some places, for the moment, these coups appear to have popular backing. Nigeria, where radicalism is firmly rooted in democratic values and a human-rights framework, the radical grassroots opposition to the Buhari government’s creeping authoritarianism lies drenched in blood. The roots of this development go back to the history of Nigeria’s radicalism in the twentieth century. Much has appeared on the global 1968 recently, including that (...) of Africa. 1970s/1980s-style radicalism is reappearing today with Omoyele Sowore’s 2018 presidential candidacy, with the African Action Congress party, the #EndSARS protests and the tragic Lekki Toll Gate massacre (2020) in Nigeria. The shift towards radicalism is palpable with protest music such as Falz’s This is Nigeria, and Burna Boy’s Monsters you Made, both explicitly targeting neocolonialism and police brutality. Contrary to Achille Mbembe’s sweeping dismissal of African radicalism, the movement with very deep roots under study is meaningful once again, and is gathering momentum in West Africa’s giant polity. This article applies Walter Benjamin’s and also Nigerian radical thinkers’ conceptualisation of political, social and artistic radicalism, while it frames the Nigerian version via the movement’s history, in which marxisant theory and praxis, feminism, human rights and pro-democracy movements interact with emancipatory strands of Islam, Christianity, Igbo Judaism, and animism. In the context of Nigerian radicalism, even expressly pro-capitalist art theory performs a radical social function by stressing the African’s right to make universal statements (Olu Oguibe) in its de facto defiance of the neo-colony. As these different strands of protest meet, ethnic uprisings (amongst them IPOB) find ways to establish common cause with social radicalism, posing a composite threat to the prebendalist oligarchy that rules and oppresses the country via a militarised neoliberalism. (shrink)

Benjamin has long been known for his literary and aesthetic theory but political theorists, as well as other scholars who are interested in questions of politics, tend to downplay (or simply not notice) his contributions to an actionable rhetorical-political discourse. In terms of a politics that speaks directly to the ongoing crisis of global capitalism, existing power arrangements, and the effective depoliticization of the vast majority of people living under such conditions (very much including advanced liberal capitalist democracies such as (...) the United States), it often seems that Benjamin might not have all that much to say.That, at least, is the way that he is often read. Marxists, if they pay attention to .. (shrink)

The concept of the threshold is a central one for thinking about relations between nonhuman and human animals. It refers to hosting and being hosted, the host and the guest, the inside and the outside of the domestic space. It also invokes values of mutual respect and attentiveness. This paper draws on ethological and philosophical sources to argue for the importance of the threshold in understanding human–animal interactions. Violence, sociality, technology and altruism are bound up in the threshold. As such, (...) the concept contains both descriptive and normative dimensions, encompassing both dimensions of the Greek ēthos. (shrink)

Although Machiavelli would appear to be only a minor figure in Foucault's genealogy of modernity, this article examines his 1977–1978 lectures at the Collège de France and argues that the author of The Prince plays a pivotal role in the development of ‘governmental reason’ and its critique. These lectures indicate how The Prince serves as the negative touchstone for the emergence of an extensive and evolving discourse on government, confirming that Machiavelli was more than a passing interest for Foucault. I (...) consider two ‘Anti-Machiavellian’ episodes in Foucault's genealogy as especially significant: the sixteenth-century discourses of the state and the eighteenth-century discourses of political economy. These moments are significant both in showing how the idea of government hinges on a repudiation of the political lessons of The Prince and in establishing the link between governmentality and another term so important for Foucault's thinking in this period – biopower. Finally, I show how the art of critique – or, what Foucault describes as ‘the art of not being governed quite so much’ – finds a timely resource in the figure of Machiavelli. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that archism, a form of political power that is ubiquitous in the world and is based on hierarchy and violence, effectively denies us a future. Archism in invested in continuing the current power dynamics. Accordingly, it projects a false sense of the future which is actually only a continuation of the present on and on forever. I look at two thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, who try to take the future back from archism (my (...) word, not theirs). In doing so, they do not seek to determine the future but on the contrary, to allow it to actually occur in all of its infinite complexity and unpredictability, that is to say, to submit it to anarchist forms of temporality. (shrink)

What can postmodernism do for, or to, educational research? The article discusses its potential for resisting closure and simplification. Developing a ‘preposterous’, anachronistic postmodern method that is caught up with surrealism and the baroque, the article plays with trompel'oeil paintings and outmoded popular entertainments such as magic lanterns, peep shows and clockwork automata as figures for critique and analysis. It argues for defamiliarisation, fascination, recalcitrance and frivolity as methodic practices for research in the compromised conditions of postmodernity, and as forms (...) of ethical resistance to the risk-averse literalism that pervades contemporary education policy. (shrink)

What can postmodernism do for, or to, educational research? The article discusses its potential for resisting closure and simplification. Developing a ‘preposterous’, anachronistic postmodern method that is caught up with surrealism and the baroque, the article plays with trompel'oeil paintings and outmoded popular entertainments such as magic lanterns, peep shows and clockwork automata as figures for critique and analysis. It argues for defamiliarisation, fascination, recalcitrance and frivolity as methodic practices for research in the compromised conditions of postmodernity, and as forms (...) of ethical resistance to the risk-averse literalism that pervades contemporary education policy. (shrink)

This study began with a fascination for the enigma of American artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987). I began to collect his words. I had been intrigued by German philosopher, literary critic, and essayist Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) philosophical snapshots and with the notion of an aura that could be pealed from objects by photography. And I was taken by French philosopher, professor of law, and theologian Jacques Ellul’s (1912-1994) claim that religion, philosophy, and aesthetics were mere ornaments that had gone the way (...) of the ruffled sunshade on McCormick’s first reaper. Benjamin’s epistemological understanding of aura, the capacity of the object to look back and to direct the viewer in search for origins, fleshed out Ellul’s claim. The symbol had lost its symbolic dimension in the technical process where words became images and images became concepts; clichés were the nature of this productivity, which became more than tired expressions. The cliché is the machine in its new suit. This insight informed my reading of Warhol and Benjamin with Ellul. And, of course, my reading of Ellul has influenced my reading of Warhol and Benjamin. (shrink)

This paper investigates the unique educational relevancy of Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts. While much has been written about Benjamin’s approach to both children’s literature and children’s theatre, his own pedagogical practice as a radio pedagogue remains largely marginalized in these discussions. In order to address this gap in the literature, I focus on the implications of shifting from the largely visual world of children to the auditory world of radio. Through a careful reading of the radio scripts, I argue that (...) a perceptual alteration unique to the sonic medium of radio jumpstarts historical thinking in children. The following pedagogical principles which I extract from the radio broadcasts support and enhance this mode of historical materialist education. In conclusion, the article argues for the ongoing relevancy of Benjamin for thinking through the pedagogical implications of new information technologies within a postmodern era such as podcasts. (shrink)

The following text is inspired by a special issue of the journal ESPES vol. 10, no. 2 (2021) entitled _Everyday Aesthetics: European Perspectives _and returns to the theme of _flâneurie_. It focuses on the Czech environment and, after a brief outline of the artistic _flâneurism _associated mainly with Prague, it moves on to the specific phenomenon of the Brno _štatl _and _štatlaři_, which are to some extent related to _flâneurism_. The _štatl _community followed the tradition of the _plotna_, a more (...) closed group of socially weaker inhabitants of the city in the first half of the twentieth century, whose features included a special dialect – _hantec_. _Štatlaři _recruited more from the milieu of the educated people, bohemians, and artists, adopted, and transformed. The aim of the study is to show which characteristics _flâneurism _and “_štatlař-ism_” have in common and in what ways they differ. Furthermore, we will address the question of how knowledge of the phenomenon of _štatlaři _can influence the perception of flaneurs when they are walking around the city of Brno. (shrink)

This essay explores the question of why M figures in the names of all of Beckett’s major characters. I connect M to the word murmuring, which proliferates in his work, and I claim that Beckett was influenced by a passage in Dante’s Purgatorio, in which each face in a group of penitents is inscribed with the letter M. With a rounded eye socket below each arch, the faces of the penitents spell omo or man. I argue that M stands for (...) man – not the humanist form of man that existed for Dante, but rather a ruined figure that is adequate to this moment. Throughout, I engage with critical approaches to Beckett that attempt to connect the posthumanism suggested in his work with the new form of ethics – and of love – that it makes possible. (shrink)

This article explores the 2020 Turkish Netflix series Bir Başkadır (Ethos) written and directed by Berkun Oya about contemporary Turkey through its objects. With objects surge memories, which are both personal and collective. From the charged objects that convey private attachments, traumas, and histories to ordinary household trinkets and finally archival audiovisual material, this series assumes the status of museum in its drive to carefully exhibit the material world on screen. As the Turkish title of the series indicates, these objects (...) are “bir başkadır”: one of a kind. Through themes and practices of lost innocence, counter-archives, and archiveology, I sift through the quotidian objects, miniatures, old photos, souvenirs, and analogue film footage re-presented and re-collected in this series with an eye to their new scope and allure. The past and present rest adjacent to one another in the mise-en-scène of this series. In engagement with the philosophical writings of Walter Benjamin on the collector, the archive, and memory, Andreas Huyssen's concept of the “museal gaze,” Jennifer Culbert's “counter-archival sensibility,” and finally Catherine Russell's practice of “archiveology,” this article examines how the objects that fashion the on-screen world acquire depth and meaning and the film as museum comes to form. (shrink)

Daniel Bensaïd was prominent among the revolutionary thinkers and activists who emerged from the mass insurgency of the 1960s, a period in which anti-capitalist organisers had genuine social weight grounded in connections to broad layers of the working class and radical movements. As the neoliberal offensive developed, working-class and allied movements experienced crucial defeats that marginalised anti-capitalist theory and practice. Bensaïd developed a unique theoretical analysis of radical mobilising during the neoliberal period, at once grounded in the history of revolutionary (...) organising and audaciously open-ended in assessing the impact of capitalist restructuring and the employers’ offensive. The basis of his theoretical renewal lay in a new approach to understanding temporality that undercut any sense of socialist inevitability, and a commitment to revolutionary pluralism that was crucially located in the political sphere. (shrink)

This paper considers and evaluates Jeffrey Alexander’s strong program in cultural sociology, which represents an exercise in paradigm formation and an ambitious attempt to refound American sociology along interpretive lines. Cultural sociology is assessed according to four axes, namely its social constructivist epistemology, culturalizing methodology, analytical realism, and internal and external positioning. In addition to discussing the accomplishments and limitations of cultural sociology in all these areas, the paper indicates ways to strengthen it by setting it in conversation with other (...) and more explicitly critical currents of thought. (shrink)

In this paper, I will explore the experience of noticing/becoming attentive to something in education. What does it mean to take notice of something in an educational way, and how does some...

In this paper, I will explore the experience of noticing/becoming attentive to something in education. What does it mean to take notice of something in an educational way, and how does something become educationally noteworthy? In order to grasp in more detail the idea of something being noteworthy, I turn to the metaphor of pearl diving – as this appears in the works of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin - and to Martin Wagenschein’s theory of exemplarity. These perspectives helps us (...) to grasp not only the centrality of exemplarism in education. It also helps us to grasp what makes something educationally noteworthy, and how this is connected to attention and formative experiences. From this, we can return to a formulation of what makes some forms of notetaking educational. (shrink)

In this paper, the notion of pearl diving as a metaphor for historical methodology is explored as a possible conceptual contribution to pedagogical thinking and practice. Pearl diving in the thinking of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin refers to a process of bringing to life and coming to terms with a fragmented past, and requires of the thinker a form of Homeric impartiality. This they contrast with the processual and functional modern understanding of historiography, where events and things are subsumed (...) by a causal linearity. According to Arendt and Benjamin, our past cannot be understood as though in one piece, but should rather be engaged as fragmented and crystallised into events—or pearls—which can be retrieved and can help us to illuminate our past and to understand our present. This paper considers what such an approach would entail for pedagogical theory and practice, as well as for the work of the pedagogical thinker and the teacher. (shrink)

The flip-flop trail is an object biography. It follows the translocal journeys of a pair of plastic sandals, unpacking the lives and landscapes hidden in the plastic. An important shoe-infrastructure enabling human mobility, flip-flops work as an offbeat proxy for globalization too. They proffer empirical footings in translocally-connected worlds in which people and the social textures and terrains of their everyday lives come to the fore, in place of economic processes and commodity chains favoured in hegemonic versions of globalization. These (...) reduce globalization’s complex social forms to the grand narratives of the logics of capital accumulation, implicitly naturalizing it, if critically, as inevitable, entrenched and robust. From the vantage point of the flip-flop trail, globalization looks rather different. It is more fragile and shifting, generating multiple forms of uncertainty in the lives and landscapes it simultaneously sustains and undermines. (shrink)

This article treats the intellectual problem of revolution, agency, and the advent of liberal democracy from the standpoint of mid-nineteenth century France in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. After a discussion of the theoretical and historiographical problem—in particular the relevance for this period in history of science studies—the article discusses the views of former Saint-Simonian and political economist, Michel Chevalier, eventually turning to the debate over the free market of goods and labor between the early French socialist Louis Blanc (...) and Chevalier in Chevalier’s new role of liberal free trade activist who trumpeted the ideology of the mass marketplace. Chevalier’s engagement of the social question turned on a distinctively moral, ideological, and, ultimately, technocratic defense of the free market—this free market utopianism became both starker and more ideologically refined as a result of Chevalier’s engagement with Blanc, especially in regard to worker-education. Both referred to the new mass marketplace of cheap, retail goods created by the rapid advance of mass transport, modern logistics, as le bon marché. French political economists went so far as to invoke a new way of life: la vie a bon marché (literally, “life on the cheap”). This notion of work and life was opposed by Blanc on the grounds of fraternal social solidarity. Finally, and potently, the moral virtues of the free market were conceived by Chevalier as a direct answer to social revolution, a means for affording social stability. (shrink)

In cinematic experience, a view from nowhere appears in an instituting moment – neither in time nor out of time, but part of time itself – when a camera reflex lifts the viewer’s perception out of somewhere and into the infinite time of the film. We argue that the view from nowhere found in Birt Acres’s film Rough Sea at Dover – a fifteen-second shot of waves breaking against a sea wall in Dover, England in 1895 – transcends all attempts (...) to turn it into a view from somewhere, as an empty space that carries the auratic trace of the past into the present through phase shifts of technical mediation. In Simondon’s terms, the view from nowhere opens up possibilities of becoming all ways at once in the reflexive capacity of the human organon. Following Stiegler’s organological technics, we identify the capture of perception by the apparatus of recording and playback in the digitally automated algorithm as a threat to the reflexive capability of the organon to see otherwise in the creative individuation opened up in the phase-shifting process. Our analysis triggers a switch from an anthropocentric to a neganthropic-ecological mode of seeing in which the auratic trace of the event of waves crashing against the pier is seen in an inhuman view from nowhere that carries the threat of automatized systems in which human noesis – self-reflexive capacity – is eclipsed by machines. By seeing otherwise, the eclipse by machines is reversed to reveal the complex becoming of the film in its materiality as a work of creative individuation. (shrink)

This paper explores the philosophies of myth of Walter Benjamin and Hans Blumenberg. It defends the thesis that both approaches to myth, despite their differences, bring the longer, more ambiguous, legacy of the history of the human species into relation with the more familiar history of logos. They do this by maintaining a distinction between myth as it probably first emerged, namely as a way of controlling human anxieties and vulnerabilities that arose as a consequence of the pragmatic, material conditions (...) of the pre-historical world, and myth as the vast array of orally transmitted traditions left to history. In the case of both thinkers, this dichotomy illuminates myth, not as one category of human expression, but as a representation of the deeper vulnerabilities experienced by human beings, and the concerted, collective attempts to overcome them. Philosophy’s task in the face of a longer, darker history of the species, is a vigilant negotiation with the human frailties that might see its work undone. (shrink)

The paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding the work of ethical remembrance in the classroom. Using David Hansen’s recent example of using Sebald’s novels in his classroom to do the work or remembrance, the paper argues that the effect of Sebald’s novels is best understood using Walter Benjamin’s figure of the angel of history. That figure indicates a view of history that goes beyond the progression of everyday time, to one called remembrance. The paper suggests that the work of (...) mourning effects such remembrance, but simultaneously points to hope through the emergence of weak messianic power. (shrink)

There has been widespread academic and popular debate about the transformative potential of consumption choices, particularly food shopping. While popular food media is optimistic about “shopping for change,” food scholars are more critical, drawing attention to fetishist approaches to “local” or “organic,” and suggesting the need for reflexive engagement with food politics. We argue that reflexivity is central to understanding the potential and limitations of consumer-focused food politics, but argue that this concept is often relatively unspecified. The first objective of (...) this paper is to operationalize reflexivity and advance understanding of reflexivity as an important tool for understanding the lived experience of food shopping. Our second objective is to explore the range of reflexivity observed in a mainstream “shopping for change” market sector. To do this, we draw from in-depth interviews with shoppers at Whole Foods Market (WFM)—a retail venue with the stated goal of making consumers “feel good about where [they] shop.” This group is chosen because of our interest in investigating the reflexivity of consumer engagement with the corporatized arm of ethical consumption—a realm of concern to food scholars as alternative agricultural initiatives are absorbed (both materially and symbolically) into corporate institutions. Our analysis suggests that shopping at venues like WFM is primarily motivated by traditional consumer pleasures, even for politicized consumers, a finding that poses serious limitations for a consumer-regulated food system. (shrink)

There has been widespread academic and popular debate about the transformative potential of consumption choices, particularly food shopping. While popular food media is optimistic about “shopping for change,” food scholars are more critical, drawing attention to fetishist approaches to “local” or “organic,” and suggesting the need for reflexive engagement with food politics. We argue that reflexivity is central to understanding the potential and limitations of consumer-focused food politics, but argue that this concept is often relatively unspecified. The first objective of (...) this paper is to operationalize reflexivity and advance understanding of reflexivity as an important tool for understanding the lived experience of food shopping. Our second objective is to explore the range of reflexivity observed in a mainstream “shopping for change” market sector. To do this, we draw from in-depth interviews with shoppers at Whole Foods Market (WFM)—a retail venue with the stated goal of making consumers “feel good about where [they] shop.” This group is chosen because of our interest in investigating the reflexivity of consumer engagement with the corporatized arm of ethical consumption—a realm of concern to food scholars as alternative agricultural initiatives are absorbed (both materially and symbolically) into corporate institutions. Our analysis suggests that shopping at venues like WFM is primarily motivated by traditional consumer pleasures, even for politicized consumers, a finding that poses serious limitations for a consumer-regulated food system. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin wrote extensively on children and childhood, though this aspect of his work has hitherto received scant attention despite continuing and growing interest in his thought. This article makes explicit the connection between his acute observations of childhood and his distinctive messianic philosophy. The twin aspects of redemption in Benjamin's writings: remembrance and now-time, as illustrated in Wim Wender's Wings of Desire, are explored in relation to the ‘task of childhood’. Benjamin asserts the emancipatory potential held within the development (...) of historical consciousness, and leads us to question how our understanding of childhood can foster this potential. (shrink)

Traditionally, transitional justice has referred to that field of theoretical scholarship that proffers recuperative strategies for political societies divided by a history of violence. Through the establishment of truth commissions, public confessionals and reparative measures, transitional justice regimes have sought to establish restorative conditions that might help reconcile historical antagonists both to each other and to the trauma of their shared past. Because of some of the theoretical lapses in this scholarship some have turned recently to the field of radical (...) democratic and ‘new pluralist’ thought – and especially to agonistic literature – to foreground a theory of post-conflict reconciliation based not on the principles of the sublimation of difference, but rather the perpetual deferral of accord. This essay works both to underscore that effort, as well as to problematize it. Through unorthodox readings of Giorgio Agamben, Jean Améry and Sheldon Wolin, the essay argues that an emphasis on messianicity as the temporal mode of political repair is ultimately less productive for what I call an agonistics of reconciliation than a more nuanced approach to what Wolin calls ‘fugitive democracy’. Where the former is allied with a problematic politics of mutual respect, the latter affirms a more germane politics of abiding resentment. In the end, a startling conclusion is drawn from reading agonistic reconciliation through Wolin: democracy may be a political experience reserved for scenes of transitional justice alone. (shrink)

‘Plastinates’ (i.e. corpses conserved through plastics) are lab created artifacts which since the nineties have been the subject of a cultural field experiment via an anatomical exhibition. Similarly to brain-dead or digitalized bodies, they constitute an ambiguous form of post-mortem existence. The article inquires after the ways in which the ontological status of these entities is constituted through the practices of body donors, anatomists and visitors. Plastinates owe their ambiguity to an oscillation between two different frames of perception. Their meaning (...) is determined by the extent to which an anatomy exhibition can impose a ‘medical gaze’ over a non-professional way of perception, which would stubbornly associate bodies with persons. This association depends on two qualities of plastinates, which refer back to the donor: on the one hand, they draw the observer into a communicational relationship, since the body is the archetypal medium of the self-representation of persons. On the other hand, the plastinated body, considered as ‘bequest’, acquires a biographical dimension: though the exhibition tries to appropriate the individual body anatomically, as an exemplar of a timeless, abstract idea of the human, the visitor’s mundane perspective reintegrates the exhibit into history. Plastinates are the embodied expression of the last will of those people whom the public meets in the exhibition. (shrink)

Through analysis of a critical engagement between Blanchot and Malraux on the museé imaginaire, it becomes apparent that both were seeking to understand the relationship between the museum and experience within modernity. This short article seeks to develop these ideas and to understand the museum as a key institutional space of modernity implicated in addressing the changing character of experience in the present. Following Benjamin's distinction between experience as Erfahrung and Erlebnis, the essay argues that the museum has always sought (...) to offer a fabricated sense of Erfahrung through its narrative and display techniques and that this facilitates a distracted mode of reception that is now prominent within contemporary cultural life. Through this we can see that the idea of the museé imaginaire is still a prescient one, but it has moved from the virtual space of the photographic art book to the simulated culture of the museumified city in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Task of the Name: A Reply to Carol PosterJason HelmsIn the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.—Walter Benjamin, Arcades N1, 1 (1999)Logos, in whose lighting they come and go, remains concealed from them, and forgotten.—Martin Heidegger, “Aletheia” (1975, 122)One of the first things learned in the most rudimentary attempt at stargazing is (...) that the utmost effort must be paid in neglecting to gaze at stars. Instead, one must gaze near them. Owing to the physiological organization of the eye, night vision is enhanced toward the periphery of vision rather than the center. Consequently, one can actually perceive one’s own lack of perception by staring at a star, finding it disappear, and then staring near the star only to see it reappear. What follows, in this light or darkness or tension of these two extremes, is not empirical in any sense of the word, which is given to its own extremes. Rather, I hope through various a/(i)llusions and sidelong tangents to glance offthe surface of my target. As you may guess, superficial puns—like star(e)—provide one of the most reflective surfaces offof which to bounce/riff. [End Page 278]Carol Poster’s recent article, “The Task of the Bow: Heraclitus’ Rhetorical Critique of Epic Language” (2006), provides much fruitful ground for a rhetorical critique of Heraclitus and a Heraclitean critique of rhetoric—many surfaces offof which to glance. However, her analysis is often in a decidedly unharmonious tension with itself. Accordingly, this essay constitutes an attempt to tune by ear. In the course of this response I will outline at which points I diverge from her argument, offering my own listening relation to, and consequently my own reading of, Heraclitus, and propose alternative, but perhaps corrective, views of Heraclitus’s relation to the Logos and his practiced rhetorics. Let us first start at the end before proceeding through Poster’s argument.Poster’s ConclusionsAt the end of her article, Poster offers five conclusions that afford us now an ingress for her essay. For the sake of brevity (and, of course, clarity and sincerity) I have shortened them and added a sixth with which she concludes the article:1. Heraclitus focuses on the problem of correctness of names substantially before Prodicus and Protagoras.... Heraclitus thus prefigures two themes discussed more extensively by later writers. First, Heraclitus seems concerned with the art of what came to be called “orthoepeia” (the study of correctness of names) for which the sophists Prodicus and Protagoras later became famous. Second, he at least considers the possibility that one can learn something about the nature of things by examining the nonliteral senses of their names, a position that is articulated in its most extreme form by the Heraclitean Cratylus in Plato’s dialogue of that name.2. Heraclitus is an early example of logos philosopher, in the Gadamerian sense, in that he believes that investigation of language can provide information that is not exclusively or trivially linguistic. He is an early example of the “linguistic turn” in Greek thought.3. For Heraclitus, the instability of language is part of a radical instability of the world. Since things change too quickly to be examined, their stable names are all that is available for investigation. While surfaces change, hidden harmonies, which are both concealed and revealed in words, remain. And yet even names themselves, if temporally fixed, are still interpretively unstable. [End Page 279]4. Each positively attributed name or statement should be read two ways simultaneously in a sustained and irresolvable tension, literally and nonliterally, with the opposing figurative statement both contradicting and yet sustaining the literal one.5. These considerations lead Heraclitus, in his own prose, to a constant tension between rejection of epic vocabulary and ideas as inaccurate and frequent use of them; even when Homer and Hesiod are partially rejected, inquiry into them remains a valid means of investigation. Heraclitus does not simply suggest that epic should be entirely ignored in favor, for example, of direct examination of or experimentation on physical objects, nor purely internal (Cartesian... (shrink)

We present a critical appraisal of the impact of the Internet upon processes of democratization and de-democratization in contemporary society. We review accounts of `the information revolution' as these have become polarized into mutually exclusive rhetorics of future cosmopolitan or citadellian e-topias. We question the Manichean assumptions common to both rhetorics: particularly the fetishism of information technology as an intrinsically democratizing or de-democratizing force on societies. In opposition to this new technological fetishism we focus upon Internet historicity; the human/machine nexus; (...) Internet policing and appropriation presenting a different story of the Net, emphasizing contingent, indeterminate and negotiable characteristics of sociotechnical systems, preparing for a more radical critique of existing theories of `global technological citizenship'. Refiguring `culture' as technopoiesis, we argue that an alternative approach to global civil society minimally presupposes a cultural sociology of the Internet: approaching information technologies as the product of specific sociocultural practices and as historical sites of ethico-political transformation and reflexive self-figuration. (shrink)

We present a critical appraisal of the impact of the Internet (and related information technologies) upon processes of democratization and de-democratization in contemporary society. We review accounts of `the information revolution' as these have become polarized into mutually exclusive rhetorics of future cosmopolitan or citadellian e-topias. We question the Manichean assumptions common to both rhetorics: particularly the fetishism of information technology as an intrinsically democratizing or de-democratizing force on societies. In opposition to this new technological fetishism we focus upon (1) (...) Internet historicity; (2) the human/machine nexus; (3) Internet policing and appropriation presenting a different story of the Net, emphasizing contingent, indeterminate and negotiable characteristics of sociotechnical systems, preparing for a more radical critique of existing theories of `global technological citizenship'. Refiguring `culture' as technopoiesis, we argue that an alternative approach to global civil society minimally presupposes a cultural sociology of the Internet: approaching information technologies as the product of specific sociocultural practices and as historical sites of ethico-political transformation and reflexive self-figuration. (shrink)

Ron Harris captured the popular imagination in October 1999 with a website where he auctioned off the ova of fashion models to the highest bidder. This article treats the controversy surrounding Harris’ site within a dual frame of critical theory’s approach to reproduction and a folkloristic approach to discourse. The website fuses traditional narrative motifs and structures with the logic of advertising, seventies television, family-values rhetoric, and the fertility industry. I argue that the great attraction of ronsangels.com is that it (...) put into relief the intervention of mechanical reproduction in human fertility together with the state of genetics at the turn of the 21st century. The result is not only a disconcerting aestheticization and commodification of biological reproduction, but also the biological reproduction of a particular aesthetic and moral code—a generation of reality by model. (shrink)

This essay returns to Jacques Derrida’s 1975 essay, “Economimesis,” to account for its unacknowledged Marxist language. Focusing on Derrida’s analysis of the mouth in the Critique of Judgment, this...

This paper identifies experiential processes through which social structures become taken for granted, termed processes of “structure marginalization”. Passive processes of structure marginalization relegate social structures to the margin of experience without the use of higher-order cognitive acts such as evaluation and reflection. Examples include adapting to social structures via routine and habitual practices, a lack of conscious awareness of the complexity, historical formation, and other details of social structures, and rendering social structures irrelevant when they are unreflectively judged to (...) be of no value for achieving ends. Active processes of structure marginalization reflectively and discursively relegate social structures to marginal consciousness. Examples include the use of naturalistic and necessitarian explanations for the social order that implicitly justify it as inalterable or “just the way things are”, normative justifications for the status quo, and conscious awareness of one’s powerlessness to control social-structural conditions. Active processes of structure marginalization originate in passive processes. The goal of the typology is to explain, at the level of experience, why social structures typically remain unproblematic and unnoticed in everyday life, even during periods of social crisis and change or when existing structures produce harmful effects. (shrink)

After centuries of relative neglect, the notion of the messianic is again in vogue in radical discourse. This paper explores the meaning and significance of this concept in the work of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. They have been chosen not only because of their biographical and theoretical linkages to the thinker most responsible for the current resurgence of the concept of the messianic – Walter Benjamin – but also because they offer two alternative readings of precisely this concept. After (...) exploring the meaning of this concept in Benjamin, Arendt and Agamben, the analysis turns to the related concepts of sovereignty and the “camps” in our principals in order to further elaborate the difference between them and to bring into focus the strengths and weaknesses of the theoretical/political deployment of messianism in contemporary leftist thought. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 1035-1053, September 2022. The article aspires to cast light on aspects of the radical character of Walter Benjamin’s work, that, sadly, have not, to date, provoked much discussion in the literature on him. The main issue it elaborates is his dialectic between fetishized, reified social form, and content-essence, which forms the core of the concept of critique in his philosophy. In Benjamin’s case, the concept of illusion, or, as the notion is (...) described in his texts, of phantasmagoria, or of the image, holds a special gravity that comes to the fore if it is connected not only to commodity fetishism but also to the fetishism of social forms as a process, and the concept of cracks in capitalism. (shrink)

This paper recognizes that we become bored in our post-modern, consumerist Western world and that boredom is related to this existence and hidden within it. Through Heidegger, it seeks to provide a way to structure our understanding of boredom and suggest ways of acknowledging its cause, and then to allow it to liberate our authentic appreciation of the world of our workplace and what can be learnt through it. Using the approach of focusing on being in a societal workplace environment, (...) and the link to Heidegger’s notion of mood, revealed in Being and Time, boredom’s fundamental role is shown as a complex temporal manifold. Our superficial attempts to deal with things in datable time means that we miss the essential importance of the temporal manifold through which our being is revealed and where the Augenblick, (moment of vision) is the authentic present and temporalises itself of the authentic future (Heidegger in Being and time (trans: J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson). Blackwell, Oxford, 1962 , p. 338). For Heidegger this is to be understood as ecstasis (ibid, p. 338) when the resolute Dasein “is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered (ibid, p. 338). Such resoluteness enables the private capabilities to arise in public practice, not, however, in the conformity of what ‘one does’ (Das Man) but as an authentically choosing being. The challenge of an ontological pedagogy, regardless of its place of revelation that this prescribes a possibly be edifying mission for Dasein. Instead of chasing away boredom through busyness, a moment of vision could produce creative and authentic ways of being. (shrink)

I would like to thank the following for their comments on earlier drafts: Yves Le Juen, Moya Lloyd, Iain MacKenzie, Shane O'Neill, and the two anonymous reviewers of Contemporary Political Theory.

The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of (...) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions. (shrink)

The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed an account of modernity that combined rigorous critique, a rejection of nostalgia, left pessimism or transcendental appeals, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden recesses of the everyday. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his ‘critique of everyday life’ but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Although often dismissed as trivial, boredom can be understood as a touchstone through (...) which we can grasp much wider anxieties, socio-cultural changes and subjective crises that are intrinsic to our experience of modernity. Curiously, although Lefebvre was very interested in boredom, he did not analyse it systematically, and he used terms like ‘boring’ or ‘boredom’ in loose, elliptical and seemingly contradictory ways. Such a lack of clarity reveals his ambivalence about this phenomenon, but also highlights a subtle pattern of differentiation he makes between particular modalities of boredom that can be highly illuminating. Through a careful reading of the full range of Lefebvre’s writings, we can begin to understand how he discriminates between different experiences and expressions of boredom, some of which are unambiguously negative, whereas others are judged more positively. With respect to the latter, as he says in Introduction to Modernity, under certain conditions boredom can be full of desires, frustrations and possibilities. Through such an investigation, we start to glimpse latent connections between boredom and utopian propensities that caught the attention not only of Lefebvre but also such thinkers as Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. (shrink)

The essay provides a commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “News from Flowers”, a review of the album of plant photography of Karl Blossfeldt. I place Benjamin’s account of Blossfeldt’s achievement both in relation to Goethe’s studies of the vegetal realm as well as to the fantasy world of Grandville’s Animated Flowers. This juxtaposition allows me to interpret Benjamin’s understanding of the possibilities opened by photography and the transformation it brings to the relation of art to science and the imagination.