This article examines the ways in which contemporary western cultures have attempted to legitimize certain sites of bodily nakedness (such as communal showers, bathing children and other `public' displays) by maintaining a contextual space or frame which attempts to exclude the sexual. Noting the ways in which that legitimacy has broken down in recent decades, the article suggests that the slippage between the sexual and the naked results from both a breakdown in the `heterosexual matrix' as well as a postmodern (...) crisis of `the context'. (shrink)

This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of current critical and socio-cultural debates. Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production. Gramsci's achievement is discussed particularly in relation to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas), to Brecht's theoretical writings and to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition especially Merleau-Ponty. She argues for Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of retreat from Marxist (...) positions on the postmodern left. Antonio Gramsci is distinguished by its range of philosophical grasp, its depth of specialized historical scholarship, and its keen sense of Gramsci's position as a crucial figure in the politics of contemporary cultural theory. (shrink)

The new terrorism is a major exemplifying case for complexity theory – for example, it exemplifies major disproportionalities between cause and effect, unpredictable outcomes, and self-organizing, emergent structures. It also illustrates, I argue in this article, the emergence of global microstructures: of forms of connectivity and coordination that combine global reach with microstructural mechanisms that instantiate self-organizing principles and patterns. Global systems based on microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (and (...) dispersed) interaction patterns. The analysis of complex global microstructures helps to collect and assess empirical evidence for the architecture of the global structural forms of a world society. It also suggests a theory of microglobalization – the view that the texture of a global world becomes articulated through microstructural patterns that develop in the shadow of (but liberated from) national and local institutional patterns. (shrink)

It is almost a truism that nature is social, but by what means is nature made social at the level of the interactional encounter? While the transformation of society/nature relationships is often approached through the problematic of distance, and at the scale of macro-historical transformation, this article uses a conflict between American birdwatchers and ornithologists over scientific “collecting” (literally, the killing of birds) to examine the processes through which individuals come to know nature, and come to know it so differently. (...) With John Dewey’s (1958 [1925]) “experience” as the unit of analysis, I trace changes in each group’s experience with birds over the past century; the phenomenology of the resulting encounters; and the understanding that emerges from each in order to understand (1) how, empirically, these two very different loves of birds are formed, and (2) knowledge of nature as an affective sensibility shaped by experiences of closeness. (shrink)

If we are to believe the proponents of the Theory of Practice and of Rational Choice, the gap between these two paradigmatic approaches cannot be bridged. They rely on ontological premises, theories of motivations and causal models that stand too far apart. In this article, I argue that this theoretical antinomy loses much of its edge when we take as objects of sociological investigation processes of historical change, that is, when we try to specify in theoretical terms how and in (...) which conditions historical actors enact and endorse shifts in patterns of relations as well as shifts in the symbolic and cognitive categories that make these relations significant. I substantiate this argument in light of the distinction between two temporalities of historical change: first, the long waves of gradual change and, second, the short waves of moments of breaks and ruptures. Along the way, I develop an argument about the conditions of emergence of self-limiting norms and the centrality of epistemic beliefs in situations of high disruption. (shrink)

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition. These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better understood as (...) a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alternative to the dominant forms of political modernity. (shrink)

The so-called new economy based on the global network of digitalized communication was welcomed as a platform of innovations and as a vehicle of advancement of democracy. The concept of virtuality captures the essence of the new economy: efficiency and free access. In practice, the new economy has developed into an heterogenic entity dominated by practices such as propagation of trust and commitment to standards and standard-like technological solutions; entrenchment of locally strategic subsystems; surveillance of unwanted behavior. Five empirical cases (...) within the present field of opposing forces serve as fuel for reflection: football hooliganism, sand-boxing, digital vulnerability of nuclear technology, sensitivity of studio projects, and streamlining academic computing. The main argument of the article is that a historic re-materialization is taking place within the new economy. This means cognitive as well as material divisions. Incommensurability in science is comparable with product incompatibility from the point of view of their implications to the users of knowledge and computers. Hype and banal attached to the new media are related to two ways of assessing social capital: as a means of peaceful functionality or a condition for cultural conflicts. The paper ends in proposing that there is a re-materialization of the virtual now taking place especially on the meta-level of the system. (shrink)

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of transnational commemoration of "Hiroshima." I also show that nationalization of trauma of "Hiroshima" involved (...) a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other. (shrink)

This study takes up Paul Gilroy’s recent call to take seriously the political problem of fascism in the contemporary conjuncture as an educational problem. Specifically, the study will begin with analytic work to identify a set of guideposts that delineate the political logics of fascism. It will then examine the still under-developed theoretical work examining the political problem of contemporary fascism as an educational problem. And, it will attempt to advance this necessary work by tracing the outline of an antifascist (...) educational project. It will be argued that an anti-fascist educational project must, in the short-term, develop polemical strategies that articulate a new set of political logics to challenge the increasingly cemented fascist logics at work today and, in the long-term, advance structural changes to educational institutions organized around normative aims of humane and humanizing education, morality and responsibility, and sociological knowledge. (shrink)

La trayectoria intelectual de Marcuse está acompañada de un compromiso constante con las formas de la crítica filosófica heredadas de la tradición occidental, desde la forma en la cual aparece la negación de lo dado a través del diálogo socrático hasta la manera en que se configura la crítica del sistema capitalista en el siglo XX. Esto no quiere decir que Marcuse haya sido un erudito que absorbió y comprendió a cabalidad todos los sistemas e ideas filosóficas y que las (...) utilizó al servicio de su propia consideración crítica del mundo; más bien resalta que entre sus elaboraciones han estado presentes algunos de los contextos e ideas más potentes del pensamiento que ha entendido de manera crítica la estructura de las sociedades humanas. (shrink)

Judith Butler claims to have based her theory of gender performance on Simone de Beauvoir’s path-breaking idea that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. However, Butler’s interpretation of Beauvoir’s work departs considerably from Beauvoir’s own expressed view which is that women are shaped by an interplay of femininity (construed by cultural and structural norms) and sexed bodies and that the concept of woman is a mutable one that can accommodate increasing degrees of freedom. In this paper I (...) explore Beauvoir’s theories further, showing how they depart from Butler’s interpretations of them and in the process exploring the contribution that Beauvoir and Butler respectively make towards understanding ongoing gender inequality. Finally, I compare and contrast the role of temporality and the life course in ‘becoming a woman’ and in performing gender respectively, focusing on the figure of the post-menopausal woman in particular. (shrink)

Emotion research that attends to the cultural dynamics of affective life remains underdeveloped. I outline an agenda for an understudied phenomenon that can orient emotion researchers to the situated, cultural practices of affective life: Neo-emotions. Neo-emotions, when situated within macro-level processes and cultural events, illustrate the constrained yet creative practices that social actors use to address the disconnect between one's emotional vocabulary and dynamic environment. As such, neo-emotions are analytically rich cultural practices that can be empirically explored through sociological, anthropological, (...) historical, and psychological inquiry. I discuss a range of neo-emotions, including doomscrolling, eco-grief, and Black joy, their social antecedents (digitalization, disasters/crises, and social movements) and methodological implications for an interdisciplinary agenda. (shrink)

We propose an account of the subject’s cognition that allows for a full articulation of the phenomenon of ideology. We argue that ideology operates at the level of the a priori: it transcendentally conditions the intelligibility of thought and practice. But we draw from strands of post-Kantian philosophy of science and social philosophy in repudiating Kant’s view that the a priori is necessary and fixed. Instead, we argue, it is contingent, and therefore revisable. More precisely, it is conditioned materially: it (...) must be understood as an activity, continuous with and shaped by material social practice. We conclude with some remarks about the possibility of agency over one’s relativized, materially conditioned a priori; that is, over the possibility of critique. (shrink)

This dissertation takes up questions of access at the level of language itself, as well as in the context of cultural institutions in emerging global communities. Using the texts of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Shani Mootoo, I argue experimental narrative techniques develop new understandings of mental disability by pushing against the limits of language, particularly in relation to mentally disabled women. The novels and plays examined function as creative objects that refigure the reader’s relationship to mental disability through embodied (...) reading practices. In resisting previous tendencies to read literary representations of mental disability as metaphor, I offer an alternative framework for understanding mental disability as an ongoing interactive process between bodies. Drawing on work from disability studies, critical gender studies, and trauma theory, I call for approaches to mental disability in literature that understand reading as an interactive process between reader and text, proposing a methodology for understanding how embodied reading practices inspire new understandings of mental disability and trauma in emerging global communities. In appreciating mental disability as an ongoing interactive process between bodies, readers can better attend to the nuanced ways in which complex embodiment calls for innovative modes of storytelling that challenge histories of representation. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the conceptual and methodological points of convergence and divergence of two intellectual currents frequently referred to as the decolonial and ontological turns in social and anthropological theory. Salient points considered are the ways both theoretical projects unsettle modernity’s dominant ontological and epistemological foundations by seriously engaging the conceptual potential of thinking with alterity (ethical dimension) and from exteriority (geopolitical dimension). I compare their subversive methodological contributions, examining, in particular, Enrique Dussel’s analectical hermeneutic approach and Eduardo (...) Viveiros de Castro’s ethnographic method of controlled equivocation. Lastly, I discuss how both theories and approaches complement each other’s efforts to destabilize Western modernity’s philosophical and anthropological foundations. (shrink)

Loneliness is often described as a deadly epidemic sweeping across the population, a silent killer. Loneliness, we are told, is a social disease that must be cured. But what does it mean to think of loneliness as a feminist issue, and what might a specifically feminist theorisation bring to conceptualisations of loneliness? In this paper, I argue that feminism helps us see that loneliness is not just personal but political. I trace how stories of loneliness surface, circulate, shift and compound (...) within the specificity of the present, centring on recent strategies proposed by the UK government in their ‘national mission to end loneliness’. I outline how this policy discourse upholds certain normative attachments as having the promise to alleviate loneliness: coupled love, the family, community. Such framings serve to depoliticise contemporary conditions of loneliness, positioning loneliness as a personal failure, with the cure for loneliness as the responsibility of individuals and communities. Absent in government depictions of the problem of loneliness are the wider mechanisms that condemn people to lonely lives, when infrastructures fail, when people find themselves violently cut off from the world. Finally, I speculate on what might happen if we were to challenge this framing of loneliness as always and only a problem in need of a cure. I seek to uncover some of the political potentials of loneliness, asking what can be learnt through reflecting upon shared experiences of loneliness? For, as feminist politics has shown us, feelings of disaffection and alienation can help us imagine other worlds. (shrink)

It should have become clear by now that the following discussion will be theoretical in perspective. Historical studies, like any other form of science, cannot be conducted without a theoretical framework. Sometimes, we are unaware of the distinctions we draw before we search for material, select and interpret it; some even think that we should just let the sources speak for themselves. Nevertheless, no material can speak for itself: it can only answer to questions we ask. And these questions we (...) ask are dependent on our present preconceptions of bygone societies and their historical development; as every hermeneutic endeavour, historical studies begins with a Vorurteil (prejudice). Many studies of the eighteenth-century public sphere have started out from those conceptions outlined by Habermas; as mentioned above, most of these studies found fault in Habermas's description of the eighteenth century and revealed his preconception as a prejudice. However, by exposing Habermas's approach as ideological, it seemed easy to claim a common-sense, bias-free position for oneself. I do not think such a position is possible: the hermeneutic Vorurteil can never be overcome entirely; it can only be adequately reflected and adjusted. Rather than claiming to work without all preconceptions, one should, I think, try to explicate one's theoretical framework as precisely as possible. If there really are too many findings that cannot be integrated into Habermas's model, one should look for a new model that might be better suited to give meaning to new historical evidence. It is such a new theoretical framework that I want to propose here. In order to do so, a meticulously detailed examination of Habermas's framework is necessary to find out which theoretical decisions led to the shortcomings of his approach. Following this re-examination, I will try to construct a new framework that avoids Habermas's shortcomings. Of course, this new theoretical framework will only be as good as the extent to which it is able to integrate historical evidence and extricate meaningful answers from these sources. Unfortunately, however, there is not enough space here to put the new framework to the test - that will have to be done elsewhere. (shrink)

The masterful works Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891) can be considered as post-colonial writings because they are constantly studied and used as tools for raising awareness and remembering the violence and personal experiences of the Filipino society. This is an indirect description of the colonial period in the perspective of modern times. However, the teaching and appreciation of these writings become complicated because they are often neglected or otherwise considered as a subject that needs to be covered (...) or completed within half a year or in just one semester. As far as the culture of teaching is concerned, it will also be discussed as a basic concept — whether a dominant or emerging culture revolves around this situation. Three things are highlighted in this study: observations, situations, and introductory descriptions in the teaching of the two novels. Aside from observations and analyses, data were also gathered through a survey for teachers and students in selected schools in Marikina City, Metro Manila. (shrink)

Situated approaches to affectivity overcome an outdated individualistic perspective on emotions by emphasizing the role embodiment and environment play in affective dynamics. Yet, accounts which provide the conceptual toolbox for analyses in the philosophy of emotions do not go far enough. Their focus falls (a) on the present situation, abstracting from the broader historico-cultural context, and (b) on adopting a largely functionalist approach by conceiving of emotions and the environment as resources to be regulated or scaffolds to be used. In (...) this paper, I argue that we need totake situatedness seriously: We need (a) to acknowledge that emotions are not situated in undetermined “contexts” but in concrete socio-culturally specific practices referring to forms of living; and (b) to agree that not only are context and emotionsusedfor the sake of something else but also that the meaning-disclosive dimension of affective intentionality is structured by situatedness as well. To do so, I offer a multidimensional approach to situatedness that integrates the biographical and cultural dimensions of contextualization within the analysis of situated affective dynamics. This approach suggests that humans affectively disclose meaning (together) which is at once product and producer of specific forms of living – and these are always already subjects of (politically relevant) critique. (shrink)

How do students learn about racism in the absence of ‘race’ as an explanatory concept for current social divisions? This article traces conceptual and affective negotiations of ‘race’ and racism in a Norwegian middle school classroom. Conceptual confusion about ‘race’, racism and lines of inclusion and exclusion in the nation is rife in this educational setting, where the curricular focus is on questions of immigration and integration. Treating ‘race’ as a ‘chameleon-like’ concept that adapts to the cultural context and political (...) situation, the analysis highlights the emotional investments and injuries that discussing race brings forward in the situation through a Kleinian psychoanalytic lens. Working through the affective as well as the conceptual aspects of the classroom’s struggles with ‘race’ and racism, the article argues that racism is enacted in the classroom partly as an effect of the denial of ‘race’ as a current effect of racism. Furthermore, it suggests that the denial of ‘race’ as an explanatory concept veils racial binaries that are enacted through Norwegian ethnonationalism, and facilitates enactment of racist dynamics in education that is intended to prevent racism. (shrink)

I argue that philosophical studies of the virtues of creativity should attend to the ways that our conceptions of human creativity may be grounded in conceptions of human nature or the nature of reality. I consider and reject claims in this direction made by David Bohm and Paul Feyerabend. The more compelling candidate is the account of science, creativity, and human nature developed by the early Marx. Its guiding claim is that the forms of creativity enabled by the sciences are (...) ultimately valuable insofar as they advance our emancipation from a state of existential alienation. I end by encouraging future investigations of such vertical explanations of the significance of certain virtues in the context of scientific enquiry. (shrink)

Seeking to capture the multi-layered, contradictory, nature of subjectivities and social positions through a framework which insists upon the complex, dynamic nature of the social, intersectionality feminism has inspired Marxist-Feminists to push the social-reproduction feminism paradigm beyond a narrow preoccupation with gender/class relations. Yet even its most politically radical articulations stop short of fully theorising the integrative logic they espouse. This article explores the roots of this under-theorisation, and suggests that a more fully integrative ontology informs certain formulations of social-reproduction (...) feminism. In understanding the social as constituted by practical human activity whose object (the social and natural world) is organised capitalistically, social-reproduction feminism highlights thedialecticalrelationship between the capitalist whole and its differentiated parts. The challenge for Marxist-Feminism is to embrace this dialectical approach while building on the insights of intersectionality feminism to more convincingly capture the unity of a complex, diverse social whole. (shrink)

In view of the philosophical problems that vex the debate on situated affectivity, it can seem wise to focus on simple cases. Accordingly, theorists often single out scenarios in which an individual employs a device in order to enhance their emotional experience, or to achieve new kinds of experience altogether, such as playing an instrument, going to the movies or sporting a fancy handbag. I argue that this narrow focus on cases that fit a ‘user/resource model’ tends to channel attention (...) away from more complex and also more problematic instances of situated affectivity. Among these are scenarios in which a social domain draws individuals into certain modes of affective interaction, often by way of attunement and habituation to affective styles and interaction patterns that are normative in the domain in question. This can lead to a phenomenon that is not so much ‘mind extension’ than ‘mind invasion’: affectivity is dynamically framed and modulated from without, often contrary to the prior orientations of the individuals in question. As an example, I discuss affective patterns prevalent in today’s corporate workplace. I claim that workplace affect sometimes contributes to what is effectively a ‘hack’ of employees’ subjectivity. (shrink)

This article will examine the emergence of a distinct bourgeois identity in modernity which differentiated itself from comparable social groups through its desire to exert 'virtuous' control through engagement with reform and philanthropy, and through the symbolic construction of a transgressive, socially marginal but redeemable other as subject of this reform. The ontological insecurities of late modernity had a profound impact on the sources of bourgeois identity, and this article will explore the emergence of the cultural omnivore as a new (...) form of social distinction which is no longer virtuous, but is still a manifestation of the desire to express identity through demonstrating control. It will outline the impact of the emerging omnivore on relationships between the bourgeois self and the marginal/deviant other, particularly in terms of the extent to which the reconceptualisation of 'other' as cultural univore exacerbates the exclusion and criminalisation of the marginalized other. (shrink)

At the end of his life, Stuart Hall called for the reengagement of Cultural Studies and Marxism. This paper contributes to this task. It analyses Stuart Hall’s works on communication and the media.The goal of the paper is to read Stuart Hall in a manner that can inform the renewal of Marxist Humanism and the development of a Marxist-Humanist theory of communication. This involves reconstructing elements of Hall’s approach, criticising certain aspects of his work, and through this engagement developing new (...) theory elements.The article’s analysis of Stuart Hall’s theory of communication and the media is conducted in four steps. First, the paper reengages and re-evaluates what Hall called the two paradigms of Cultural Studies: Structuralism and “Culturalism”/Humanism. It discusses the role of human agency in society. Second, the paper engages with Hall’s and Althusser’s notions of articulation and sets the notion of articulation in relation to the concept of communication. Third, it discusses the relationship between communication and work in the context of Hall’s works. Fourth, the article revisits and engages with Hall’s encoding/decoding-model in the context of digitalisation.This paper grounds a dialectical concept of communication that is based on the dialectic of articulating and articulatedness, the dialectic of work and communication, as well as the dialectic of communication in the public sphere and society’s power forcefields. It shows how a critical, dialectical theory of communication benefits from engagement with Stuart Hall’s works. The present work argues with, for, against, and beyond Stuart Hall in order or productively draw on ideas that emerge from this engagement. (shrink)

This article draws on the cultural materialist paradigm articulated by Raymond Williams to offer a radical historicization of the idea of identity, with a view to clarifying and resolving some of the issues animating the ‘identity politics’ debates currently dividing left academia and activism. First, it offers clarity on the concept ‘identity politics’, demonstrating that we should reserve the term to refer only to politics that mobilize specifically and meaningfully around the concept of identity. Second, and in virtue of this, (...) it provides new insights into five central questions that have driven the identity politics debates: Do identity politics always tend towards essentialism?; Do identity politics inevitably promote a politics of recognition over redistribution?; Do identity politics inevitably create political cleavages rather than solidaristic forms of political action?; What is the relationship between ‘identity politics’ and ‘call-out culture’?; And, are the problems of identity politics resolved by reference to intersectionality? (shrink)

ABSTRACT I suggest in this essay that the responses to the coronavirus pandemic by the North Atlantic elite ought to be accounted in part to the circulation of nihilism as a structure of feeling under late capitalism. I then pose the question, how ought we think of meaning and meaning making under the shadow of ongoing extinction?

Deconstructing Martial Arts analyses familiar issues and debates that arise in scholarly, practitioner and popular cultural discussions and treatments of martial arts and argues that martial arts are dynamic and variable constructs whose meanings and values regularly shift, mutate and transform, depending on the context. It argues that deconstructing martial arts is an invaluable approach to both the scholarly study of martial arts in culture and society and also to wider understandings of what and why martial arts are. Placing martial (...) arts in relation to core questions and concerns of media and cultural studies around identity, value, orientalism, and embodiment, Deconstructing Martial Arts introduces and elaborates deconstruction as a rewarding method of cultural studies. (shrink)

This paper draws on the cultural-materialist paradigm articulated by Raymond Williams to offer a radical historicisation of identity and identity-politics in capitalist societies. A keywords analysis reveals surprisingly that identity, as it is elaborated in the familiar categories of personal and social identity, is a relatively novel concept in Western thought, politics and culture. The claim is not the standard one that people’s ‘identities’ became more important and apparent in advanced capitalist societies, but that identity itself came to operate as (...) a new and key mechanism for construing, shaping and narrating experiences of selfhood and grouphood in this period. From a cultural-materialist perspective, the emergence and evolution of this idea of identity can only be properly understood in relation to the social contexts of its use, namely, the new contexts of consumption of capitalist societies, and the development of new forms of group-based struggle from the 1960s. What the analysis shows is that it was the commercialisation and politicisation of older essentialist understandings of selfhood and grouphood in these contexts that has given rise to the concepts of personal and social identity as we know them today.By exploring the material conditions that have given rise to the contemporary powerful attachment to ‘identity’, this paper offers a new point of departure from which to pursue many issues of concern to critical theorists and radical activists today, including the conflict over identity politics in radical circles, the historical and social processes behind their development and at least partial co-option, and their relation to neoliberal political-economic formations today. (shrink)

This article starts from the observation that research on conspiracy theories is currently thriving, but that it is also fragmented. In particular there is an increasing divide between disciplines...

At first glance, Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1969) might read like a regression from her earlier feminist and anti-Hegelian Passion According to G.H. (1964), given the female protagonist Lóri’s deference in large part to the male character Ulisses. I argue in this essay that any suspicion of such a philosophical letdown can be easily dispelled if we attend to Lóri’s attunement to affects and her immersion in them. As will be explicated in this essay, such (...) an affective investment signals, on the one hand, a return to Spinoza’s philosophy, thus suggesting a resistance toward the claim of a Hegelian philosophical system to surpass Spinoza; on the other hand, this investment, which exceeds the parameters of Spinoza’s philosophy as well, allows Lóri to put into practice an affective philosophy that is not only feminist but also nonanthropocentric. (shrink)

This essay investigates the differences and points of contact between Walter Benjamin's concept of ‘constellation’ and the notion of ‘assemblage’ as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both concepts address the entanglement of discourse and matter, bodies and devices, and raise questions regarding the historicity and temporality of different kinds of multiplicity. Presently, the term ‘assemblage’ figures prominently in the context of the new materialism, a theoretical movement which calls for a renewal of materialist ideas, proposing a break with (...) the historical materialism of the past. Against this backdrop, the essay has a twofold purpose: first, by focusing on the notions of constellation and assemblage, it seeks to highlight the differences and analogies between the materialisms of Benjamin, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other. Second, by examining the new materialism's appropriation of Deleuzian ‘assemblage theory’, it will not only analyse what is ‘new’ about the new materialism, but also underline its conceptual errors and political problems. Eventually, what the essay argues is that our contemporary understanding of assemblages might indeed benefit from a more thorough engagement with the historical materialism of an author like Benjamin. (shrink)

As academic literatures and political demands, global justice and populism look like competing ways of diagnosing and addressing neoliberal inequality. But both misunderstand neoliberalism and consequently risk reinforcing rather than undermining it. Neoliberalism does not just break down political and social hierarchies, but also relies on and sustains them. Unless populists recognize this, they will find that assertions of sovereignty do more to reinforce neoliberalism and reproduce its hierarchies than to resist them. Recognizing neoliberalism as not simply corrosive of solidarity (...) but also producing its own affective ties suggests that global justice advocates need to develop a critique of individual attitudes that egalitarian liberals have often seen as private and been hesitant to judge. In short, if either populism or global justice hope to take advantage of neoliberalism’s failures to advance an egalitarian politics, they need to reckon more carefully with their own entanglement with neoliberalism’s hopes and hierarchies. (shrink)

This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and ‘between the lines’ of his major critical essays. Wilde’s implicit ideas around world literature can be understood as being closely related to his broader endeavour of redirecting and revaluing the pejorative discourse around ‘decadence’ in art and literature. More specifically, the (...) arch-aesthete preferred to use the word ‘romance’ rather than ‘decadence’ (a term he hardly used at all in his writings), signalling a sensitivity attuned to what he called the ‘love of things impossible’. This reconceptualization of the decadent outlook was to inspire a critical ideal of literature which relied on creatively activating the other as Other, culminating in a vision of intersubjective, transcultural and unlimited literary communication. Wilde’s thought can be more specifically understood as anticipating central tenets of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s evocations of the planetary, thus preparing the way for an alterity-oriented understanding of literary cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

In this article, I explore, through the novels of Elena Ferrante, the role played by the ‘abject’ in mediating ageing in women, focusing on its role in the movement from a disempowered to a more powerful subject position. The article has three sections. The first describes the role of the abject in constituting the feminine, focusing on the place of temporality and ageing in this process. Represented by the symbolic figure of the hag, the old woman is a source of (...) primal fear which forms the foundation of a violently misogynistic gendered (self-)formation. However, following Barbara Creed, there are two representational forms of the hag, that of victim (hag) and that of monster (Hag), which I argue also suggest alternative subjectivities associated with ageing femininity. In the second section, I explore the movement from one form to the other by means of conceptual models drawn from Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, in which process a battle over the symbolic meaning of abjection is central. Moreover, ageing itself is significant in mediating the shift from an oppressed/fragmented to a powerful/integrated subject position. Whilst the structures of feeling involved in this subjectivity are emergent, fiction and imaginative literature may provide helpful early depictions and in the last section I illustrate the psychosocial domain with material drawn from two early novels by Elena Ferrante. (shrink)

This article looks at how various political cultures and imaginaries occlude the public’s deeply democratic political role, especially the currently reigning anti-political culture of neo-liberalism. Even in an era when millions of people the world over take to the streets in protest, dominant political imaginaries position most of the world’s people as largely powerless. What is needed is a radical political imaginary along the lines that Cornelius Castoriadis suggests. This imaginary foregrounds the ways in which all social and political formations (...) are already constituted by human beings’ ability to create new formations in the absence of foundations. But ignorant of this power, people are trapped in imaginaries where it seems that power resides elsewhere, only in halls of state or corporate boardrooms. This article offers an account that identifies where power originates and how it can be reclaimed through a more radical democratic political imaginary. The article proceeds as follows: the first two sec... (shrink)

Feeling that they must aim for certainty in their claims, each side presents its version of reality, monologically, simply for acceptance or rejection by the other. In this form of argumentation, one individualistically formulated, systematic, finished version is pitted (in an essentially Neo-Darwinian struggle) against another. By its very nature, such a form of rational argumentation prevents the construction of a shared version of things; it is not dialogical. In attempting to recover what has been rendered ’rationally-invisible‘ by our modern (...) modes of (monological) reasoning, I first explore the "structures of passion and feeling" (Raymond Williams) embodied in the ways in which people in a community interrelate themselves. Attention to such structures illuminates the nature of argument in a novel, dialogical, light: those who share in such structures do not share in a system of foundational principles or a logical framework, but in a "living tradition" (MacIntyre) or "living ideology" (Billig et al.). Bakhtin‘s concept of the utterance is then explored as the basic unit for understand dialogical communication and argument within such living traditions. (shrink)

Este artículo es una aproximación crítica e integradora de los procesos de subjetivación política en los trabajos de Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams y Stuart Hall. Para ello, se explicará, en primer lugar, el giro epistémico realizado por Michel Foucault a finales de 1970 que le conduce a buscar la estética de la existencia tras teorizar la relación de poder y libertad. Posteriormente se analizará qué entienden por subjetivación política estos autores. El análisis de la transformación teórica que lleva (...) a cabo Michel Foucault de la relación entre poder y libertad a partir de obras como El nacimiento de la biopolítica, El uso de los placeres o La hermenéutica del sujeto permitirá precisar el análisis comparativo entre hegemonía, cuidado de sí y contrahegemonía en los autores señalados. Por último, presentaremos la especificidad de la relación entre los trabajos de Gramsci y Foucault con Williams y Hall como mediadores epistemológicos. (shrink)

Hegemonic practices of memorialization rely on narratives of heroic, morally untainted resistance, which cast traitors as the aberrant “other.” This paper draws on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and historical and sociological accounts of betrayal to trouble this binary and construct a framework for memorializing betrayal in its ambiguity—in relation to the everyday reality of tragic dilemmas that resisters face. I show how attentiveness to the ambiguity of betrayal can help rethink heroic resistance myths beyond the exclusionary logic (...) pitting moral purity against the depravity of treason—and warn against the reproduction of systematic practices of othering in the new political order. The paper develops the political relevance of this theoretical exploration via the example of a South African novel, The Texture of Shadows, examining how its insights into the ambiguity of betrayal challenge the myths of heroic resistance in South Africa. (shrink)

The article argues that Marx’s use of the concept of ideology in The German Ideology is incidental to a sustained critique of how those he described as the German ideologists think and reason about society and history and that this critique is not simply of an idealist theory that represents society and history as determined by consciousness but of methods of reasoning that treat concepts, even of those of political economy, as determinants. His view of how consciousness is determined historically (...) by our social being does not envisage some kind of mechanical transfer of class status to class consciousness. Rather, he works with an epistemology that takes the concepts foundational to political economy as expressions or reflections of the social relations of a mode of production. The difference between ideology and science is the difference between treating those concepts as the primitives of theory and treating them as sites for exploring the social relations that are expressed in them. Thus, the historical rather than further undermining claims to knowledge, provides both the conditions under which knowledge is possible and its limitations. (shrink)

This article examines the critical work of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction novel Dawn, which follows Lilith Ayapo, a black American woman who is rescued by an alien species after a nuclear war destroys nearly all life on Earth. Lilith awakens 250 years later and learns that the aliens have tasked her with reviving other humans and repopulating the planet. In reframing Reagan-era debates about security and survival, Butler captured the spirit of ‘pessimistic futurism’, a unique way of thinking and writing (...) black female sexuality, reproduction and survival. Suturing concepts central to both Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism, pessimistic futurism carefully considers how black female subjectivity and labour create the coming world. By linking human survival to Lilith’s own ability to adapt to the new and dangerous world, Butler offers scholars of black studies a vital interpretive framework for thinking about the points of contact between pessimism and futurism. Specifically, Butler presents a form of futurism brought back to Earth, grounded in the sensibility of the black female experience. (shrink)

Hegemony is one of the most widely diffused concepts in the contemporary social sciences and humanities internationally, interpreted in a variety of ways in different disciplinary and national contexts. However, its contemporary relevance and conceptual coherence has recently been challenged by various theories of ‘posthegemony’. This article offers a critical assessment of this theoretical initiative. In the first part of the article, I distinguish between three main versions of posthegemony – temporal, foundational and expansive – characterized by different understandings of (...) the temporal and logical implications of hegemony. I then offer a critical assessment of the shared presuppositions of these theories, including their ‘pre-Gramscianism’, their indebtedness to Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of hegemony, and their characterization of hegemony in terms compatible with modern theories of sovereignty. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and oversights of the debate on posthegemony encourage us to undertake a reassessment of the real historical complexity of hegemonic politics and its different traditions of conceptualization. (shrink)

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations (...) of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such. (shrink)

The Depression Era collective started as several photographers and video artists joined forces in March of 2011 to create an archive of photographic images about the Greek economic crisis, amidst the social and political upheaval provoked by ongoing austerity impositions of the EU on the Greek economy. In this essay, I examine selected images from Depression Era, including images from Marinos Tsagkarakis’s series Non-Places of Transition, Yannis Hadjiaslanis’s series After Dark, Pavlos Fisakis’s series Nea Elvetia, and Georges Salameh’s series Spleen. (...) Bringing together Marxist philosophical approaches to aesthetics, via Walter Benjamin and Jean Luc-Nancy, I argue that these photographers’ work is a performative undoing of capitalist understandings of linear time that capture and foster desires for alternative radical temporalities, for non-capitalist senses of time. I discuss how these works disrupt linear notions of time as progress, and as measure of productivity and economic growth, which are intrinsic to modernity, and the creation of financial debt. Against capitalist linear temporality, these Depression Era photographs enable a performative encounter, a realm of visual experimentation in which the spectator is invited to feel time differently, to imagine different alternative temporalities that emerge from the collapse of capitalism. (shrink)

This article examines the limits and potential of hospitality through struggles over auditory space in care at the end of life. Drawing upon empirical research and a nurse’s account of noisy mourning in a multicultural hospice ward, I argue that the insurgent force of noise as corporeal generosity can produce impossible dilemmas for care, while also provoking surprising ethical relations and potentialities. Derrida’s ideas about the aporias of the gift and absolute responsibility are used to make sense of the pushy (...) generosity of alterity as it is made to matter through sound. (shrink)