Digitally Mediated (Dis)embodiment

This article aims to demonstrate that the philosophical anthropology of the German philosopher Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) enables us to gain a better understanding of the experiential presuppositions and implications of information and communication technologies, such as telepresence and virtual reality, than we can obtain through interpretations that start from a dualistic, Cartesian ontology. With the help of Plessner's concept of "excentric positionality', developed in Stages of the Organic and Man (1928), Hans Moravec's Utopian claims about the possibility of disembodied existence in cyberspace are criticized and an alternative, more adequate interpretation is presented. It is argued that the corporal "poly-excentric positionality' that is inherent in the human experience of telepresence and virtual reality, radicalizes the existential " homelessness' which characterizes human life.     

Locating the Wild Man: Rain Forest Enchantments and Settler Colonial Fantasies Amid the Ruins of the Anthropocene

The figure of the Wild Man resides at the hinge where nature meets culture. In the Pacific Northwest, the Wild Man is known locally by different names and is interpreted through a variety of cultural and historical lenses. Settler colonialism in the region, for example, situated the Wild Man within wilderness and anachronistic spaces, aligning him with a bygone and romanticized indigeneity. Conversely, Coast Salish people invigorate new stories of the Wild Man as critique of the ruins of late capitalism. The Wild Man provides them with strength to assert their autonomy and authority in leading the restoration of the natural environment. This article explores monstrous entanglements between settler colonialism, indigeneity and the Wild Man on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.     

An indolence of the heart

Walter Benjamin’s understanding of allegory as developed in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and whose genius is Dürer’s image of winged melancholy, stands in diametric opposition to the symbolic unity proposed in Michael Fried’s emblematic modernist essay “Art and Objecthood”. The complex cultural tensions and expectations defined by these texts—as well as the complementary terms symbol and allegory—can be understood as a function of the category of time, and it is this temporal problematic that this essay situates with reference to the contingent art forms of the late 1960s and early 1970s.     

Like a River: The Million Man March and the Black Nationalist Tradition in the United States

This article examines the Million Man March in the wider context of black nationalism, a persistent, though inconsistent, factor in African American life, enjoying wider currency at some historical junctures than others. Those periods when black nationalism resonated strongly among African Americans are called black nationalist moments, four of which are identified here. The Million Man March, with its heavy inflection of patriarchy and black capitalism, is seen as the iconic event of the fourth moment. The subsequent Million Woman March is pivoted as a more radical and activist rejoinder to the Million Man March, a response continued by the even more recent Black Radical Congress.     

Table of Contents

Call to Action, Rally Boosting Parity's Last Chance in This Congress GAO: Weak Controls at ONDCP Raise Concerns in DFC Grantee Selections CDC: Tragic Results of Excessive Drinking by American Indians SAMHSA Seeks Comments on Proposed Match for SBIRT Grants Non‐Opioid Drug for Opioid Withdrawal Enters Clinical Trials Briefly Noted State Watch Business Call for Applications Coming up     

Tagging the spectral mobility of the stateless body: Deleuze,stasis, and graffiti

Following recent work by Eleanor Kaufman, this essay reads Deleuze as a thinker of stasis and immobilization in order to think through the fantasy of the refugee as an exemplary figure of mobility. Working through Difference and Repetition, I argue that Deleuze’s understanding of space emerges from a concern with both immobility and the singular concept of temporality articulated in his concept of the “third synthesis of time.” The essay then turns to two contemporary instances of stateless people immobilized by very different forms of nation state sovereignty in Tunisia and the West Bank. I examine graffiti in both locations and develop a concept of tagging, which considers both the graffiti tag and the digital tag as intersecting technologies of distributed social networks that serve to freeze and make visible the stasis of the stateless person.     

Moses and nation-building Zora Neale Hurston's Moses,Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European

Abstract

This article examines the significance of the representation of Moses as an Egyptian in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European. Pairing Hurston and Said continues Said's project of seeing authors 'contrapuntally', so exposing imperialism as a neglected, if submerged, context for Hurston's response to nationalism in Moses. I argue that Hurston's novel cannot be read as a straightforward critique of race-based nationalism. Although Moses is of a different ethnic group to the Hebrews he leads, Hurston's portrayal of his rule is haunted by imperialism, in which one ethnic group exploits another. In this sense, Moses, Man of the Mountain bears the signs and strains of her struggle against racialist thinking.     

The End of the World Designed with Men in Mind

According to Derrida, the European self-understanding marking the name “Man” is governed by eschatology and teleology. Man is that being on its way towards its proper end. The times of science seemed to Kant and others to be evidence of just such progress. For Freud, by contrast, the great scientific achievements of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud have cumulatively contributed a series of de-centring blows to our “self-love”. This paper explores the nature of great scientific achievements, and raises the possibility of a further devastating blow to Man, this time in the twentieth century, and connected to the name of Marx.     

The Concept of Oppression and the Development of a Social Theory of Disability

In this paper it is argued that a social theory of disability can best be developed through the use of the concept of oppression. This concept is outlined, and special emphasis is placed on the importance of the social origins of impairment in such an analysis. The ways in which this approach would utilise data gathered from other theoretical perspectives is indicated. General features of a theory of disability as oppression are specified.     

BOOK REVIEWS

The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community , by Harriet Zuckerman, Jonathan R. Cole, and John T. Brer
Music as Social Text , by John Shepherd.
Neighborhood Politics: Residential Community Associations in American Governance , by Robert Jay Dilger.
Tragic Magic: The Life and Crimes of a Heroin Addict , by Stuart Hills and Ron Santiago.
Juvenile Justice and Public Policy: Toward a National Agenda , edited by Ira M. Schwartz.
The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community , by Philip Selznick.
The Tragedy of Belief: Division, Politics, and Religion in Ireland , by John Fulton.
Off the Books: A Theory and Critique of the Underground Economy , by Bruce Wiegand.     

DEREIFICATION IN ZEN BUDDHISM

In this article, the concept of dereification in religion is developed, both theoretically and empirically, by analyzing Zen Buddhism. The central thesis is that Zen Buddhism, by virtue of the Mahayana concept of "emptiness" ( sunyata ), constitutes a dereifying persepctive. In addition, using the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, the experience of dereifying perception, which is acquired through Zen meditation, is described as a state of focused durée . Furthermore, several of the interactional methods through which Zen practitioners demonstrate their dereifying perspective are analyzed from an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, and the role of these methods in koan training is explained.     

One

“One” argues that the structural problem of the relation of zero to one has always been a presiding concern in Miller's work. It shows what is at stake in the problematic figure of the zero through a philosophical consideration of foundations for criticism, and relates this thinking to the issue of the foundational grounds for the historical event. Using the literary examples of Joyce and of Wyss, and the philosophy of Pascal, de Man and Frege, the paper argues that the real drive in Miller is towards a specific form of democratic criticism.     

Questioning the professionalization of recovery: a collaborative exploration of a recovery process

While the recovery concept strongly resonates in clinical mental health care today, it first arose in service user-led contexts. A major risk of this professionalization shift is that recovery primarily becomes defined by treatment providers. This study aims to keep the debate on recovery alive through a collaborative exploration of Pete’s recovery process by means of a bricolage approach. This resulted in an idiographic portrait of Pete’s experiences of recovery and treatment, clustered around four themes: life rebuilding, identity, continuity of care and the role of drugs. His experiences illustrate a number of contradictions in the operationalization of the recovery ethos in today’s mental health care; whilst recovery appears as a hopeful vision of empowerment, it also risks being reduced to a tokenistic model that fails to address the social realities of people in recovery and in which the assumption that mental illness is chronic is still latently present.     

FROM SOCIAL PROBLEM TO PERSONAL ISSUE: THE LANGUAGE OF LIFESTYLE

In this paper the way in which the concept of lifestyle has been mobilized in the debate over healthcare in the last decade is analysed. Has the USA become a more compassionate nation as former President George Bush urged? Or have neo-conservative and right-wing groups continued to impede the democratization of well-being? And, in the absence of full democratization through public provision, how have private sector health and fitness industries capitalized upon the lifestyle concept in the marketing of their wares? These questions are addressed as they pertain to the United States in the time immediately prior to and during the Clinton period.     

Knowing the social world through literature: Sociological reflections on Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities

The general thesis of this contribution is that 'literature' - which I very loosely define as any kind of imaginative and stylistically expressive presentation of experience through written language, typically with a narrative structure - offers a way of knowing the social world equal in cognitive value to the more scientific discourse of sociology. Just as scientific accounts of social life are not a priori superior to laypeople's accounts in terms of the claim to knowledge of phenomena - even though they may improve on laypeople's accounts by way of techniques of observation and methods of data analysis - so literary and scientific-sociological accounts of social reality differ only in the mode of linguistically communicating knowledge, not in the claim to knowledge itself. Literature may refer to fictional entities that do not exist, but it is no less capable of imparting knowledge and less no capable of being true. I defend this thesis first by way of some general remarks on the idea of literature as a medium of sociological knowledge and then turn to what I see as an exemplary instance of sociological insight to be gained through literary writing in Robert Musil's monumental novel of 1930-1942, The Man Without Qualities . I conclude with some further comments on the methodological issues raised by invoking literature as a vehicle of sociological communication, as well as on the context of Musil's writing in Austrian culture of the early twentieth century and his relationship to other sociologically significant writers of the modernist period.     

Croatian Regional Policy Fostering Competitiveness

An obstacle for the implementation of a modern regional policy in Croatia is the inherited concept of the reconstruction of war-affected areas. This concept is no longer appropriate for the needs of a modern regional policy, which should be formulated, among others, also in the context of the EU accession. This is particularly important considering that the EU emphasizes that member states should be in the position to withstand competitive pressures in the single market as a key condition for accession. And regional policy has a particular role in this regard. In this article the main obstacles for a modern regional policy in Croatia are discussed, particularly from the point of view of achieving economic competitiveness. It is necessary to tackle these problems and obstacles through a number of measures and initiatives from both the central and the regional level, which are discussed in this paper.     

Consistency between Sentiments and Acts

Consistency is a concept central to most social science research. In this paper we challenge the typical simplistic assumptions of consistency between words and deeds. We contend that consistency is a complex concept which must be studied through a situated approach. By employing the literature on motives in sociology and communication, we consider the means by which actors construct consistency and inconsistency in social interaction. Central to this process are anticipated, or actual, calls for accountability. Consistency and inconsistency become issues when we attempt to hold self, or other, accountable.     

Riding Instincts,Even to Die

This paper develops the concept of riding instincts, even to die through a queer reading of Winnicott’s “Primary Maternal Preoccupation.” Primary preoccupation narrates the ongoing establishment of what Winnicott calls “instinctual life.” Turning to queer social history and a clinical case, a relational-structural similarity between pederasty and primary preoccupation is proposed, and the concept of pederastic enactments is used to capture the fraughtness of this similarity. A patient’s deadened instinctual life is explored in relation to his family history and queer identity, and the difficulty of riding instincts, even to die in the treatment is connected to the neoliberalization of desire.     

Social analysis in the clinical setting

This essay examines the use of social analysis in clinical practice. Although the author is a psychoanalytically-oriented clinician, she advances the view of the self as both psychologically and socially constituted. When applied to therapy this concept of self leads to presenting a picture of reality that includes both social dynamics and psychodynamics. Based on clinical case material, the author demonstrates how social analysis contributes to psycho-analysis in changing client's self-concept and social identity. In addition, she identified conditions under which social analysis advances or retards the healing process.