Calibrating the go-along for the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This article contends that the ‘go-along’ contains more technical and ontological agility as a methodology for social research than is often assumed. After distinguishing the central spectrums of technical and ontological agility rooted in different research designs and philosophical orientations, I examine how researchers can nourish it while refining the go-along’s moral purpose in the context of environmental and related mobility crises that define the Anthropocene. I argue researchers can cultivate the go-along’s agility and moral purpose by deploying it with a quantitative context, comparing go-along case studies, moving past human supremacism and illuminating ecologically just forms of mobility that respect other species of life and their habitats. To show one way that the go-along can accomplish these things, I present two vignettes of cycling in urban Canada, drawing on a mobile video ethnography of cycling, a funded study in sociology, conducted between 2014 and 2018.     

Mediating affect in John Pilger’s Utopia: ‘the good life’ as a structure of whiteness

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that whiteness should be thought of as an affective structure, theorizing whiteness in terms of optimism, possessive subjectivity and multiculturalism. The article shows how the optimism of ‘the good life’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] is linked structurally to whiteness in the construction of the Australian nation-state. In this context, Utopia [2013. Film. Directed by John Pilger. Australia: Antidote Films] specifically identifies whiteness as an affective structure. The article develops by unpacking this claim. First, I consider how the affective structure of the Australian nation-state is encountered through the mutual mediation of ‘media’ and ‘place’. I focus on the example of the film's journey to Rottnest Island – formerly an island prison, now the destination of holiday makers – to highlight how the optimism of arrival links whiteness to the present. Second, I develop an analysis of the affective surfaces of whiteness by analyzing the film's encounter with ‘White Man faciality’ [Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] and Indigenous ‘slow death’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press]. Through producing a series of faces, Utopia portrays whiteness as a deflective surface that propagates the ‘onto-pathology’ of white Australia [Nicolacopoulos, T. and Vassilacopoulos, G., 2014. Indigenous sovereignty and the being of the occupier: manifesto for a white Australian philosophy of origins. Melbourne: Re.press]. Utopia also portrays whiteness as an absorptive surface in which Aboriginal self-possession – including, in the form of life – disappears. The film emphasizes the loss of Aboriginal life through illness and suicide linked to incarceration, overcrowding and state-induced impoverishment. The article concludes by locating media (including Utopia) within the tension between absorption and deflection as a tension between the different spatial actions of the affective relations that mediate whiteness.     

Hard men, shop boys and others: embodying competence in a masculinist occupation

Emerging studies on private security work in Britain's night‐time economy explore important sociological themes such as masculinities and violence. Contributing rich ethnography to this literature, and in furthering an embodied sociology, this paper describes the gendered construction of competency among ‘bouncers’ or door supervisors within the context of their potentially violent work. Centrally, it explores the door supervisors’ variable bodily capital (comprising body build and acquired techniques of the body) alongside normative limits to their violence. Here physicality is central to the practicalities of doorwork, risk management and the embodiment of dominant and subordinate masculinities. Within doorwork culture, embodied typifications such as ‘hard men’, ‘shop boys’ and others (eg,‘bullies’ and ‘nutters’) are related to assessments of possible violence against doorstaff, the delineation of (flexible) boundaries for their own (in)appropriate violence against ‘problematic’ customers and the construction of competent identity. Besides contributing empirical data to the literature this paper underscores the integrative potential of embodiment for social scientists and urges policy makers to appreciate the degree to which (potential) violence is embodied in the night‐time economy.     

Un-imagining the local/future: cinematic engagement with the absence of hope

ABSTRACT

With reference to the 2014 Umbrella Movement and Hong Kong’s uncertain fate come 2047, I ask how one un-imagines the cultural future of inhabiting the locality. As people take prompts from the present predicament to cope with real possibilities about the future, they realize that a strong embodiment of local consciousness permeates the sociocultural space. I discuss how such engagement takes place through cinematic experience, and examine tactics of the spectator’s critique centring around the erosion of hope at the core of everyday, intellectual and affective imagination. I trace the ways in which postcolonial subjects engage with hope and with the shock of hopelessness in a lived social imaginary. Examining in detail three differently representative recent films, namely, The Midnight After (2014. Dir. Fruit Chan, The Midnight After Film and One Ninety Films), Overheard 3 (2014. Dir. Alex Mak and Felix Chong, Sil-Metropole, Bona Film and Pop Movies) and Ten Years (2015. Dir. K. L. Ng (‘Local Egg’, Boon-deh dan), J. Au (‘Dialect’, Fong-yin), K. Chow (‘Self-Immolator’, Jee-fun jeh), F. P. Wong (‘Season of the End’, Dong sim), and Z. Kwok (‘Extras’, Fau gua), Ten Years Studio), I depict the modes in popular imagination that invoke people’s engagement with the ‘local’, albeit in its affective state. Accordingly, in the context of ‘externalized’ social realities, I identify three interlocking modes of cultural engagement, which I characterize as figurative, performative and prefigurative, respectively. In their ‘future’ imaginary, I look for ordinary people’s ways to face the absurdity of the status quo and the performativity of local struggles with the self.     

Non‐understanding as a heuristic to hypothesizing cultural models: A meta‐oriented sociolinguistic strategy1

This article is concerned with the development of an analytic strategy to construct U.S. cultural models of war and terrorism, which are ‘mediatized’ or significantly shaped by the media. Central to that strategy are repair cues to non‐understanding as heuristics in intercultural encounters. These are applied to an inherently mediatized discursive ‘reality’ of war and terrorism. Theoretically, I synthesize sociolinguistic and anthropological perspectives into a ‘meta‐oriented sociolinguistics’, which analytically focuses on the meta‐dimension of discourse. The strategy is applied to a text on war and terrorism from the New York Times, to demonstrate its utility. Furthermore, I provide implications for enhancing validity in the ethnography of mediatized discourse. Specific to the findings of this article, I suggest that corpus studies of media discourse should be conducted on the metadiscursive keywords kamikaze, surprise attacks, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 in particular temporal frames.     

Invisible,undervalued and excluded: Practicing working-class girlhood in affective space

In contemporary culture of Empire and its ‘cult of the self’, to be a young person means to be recognized, and the display of the self is read as a display of value. However, working-class girls who are economically oppressed, marked by a history of racialization, colonization, and stigmatization are assigned no value, thus remaining unrecognized. In this article, I explore the affective economies circulating for female youth who are navigating both marginal social conditions and experiences of long-standing exclusion in urban Canada. This article draws from a two-year long critical and visual ethnography conducted at a drop-in social service center for youth and the adjacent neighborhoods, where I explored the everyday gendered youth culture of a group of Canadian, working-class girls who are marked as ‘a problem’. Here I uncover the role of affect in working-class girls’ attempts to be recognized in various aspects of their everyday life. I also discuss how affective economies operate as the present expression of the girls’ collective histories to reveal the structures in place that produce the abject girl.     

Knowledge work and practices of seeing: Epistemologies of the eye,gaze, and professional vision

Much practice within organizations is to some extent embodied in and centered on the visual capacities of the agent, the acting subject. Distinguishing between ‘epistemologies of the eye’, i.e. theories of how knowledge is acquired through visual practices, and ‘practices of seeing’, i.e. theories and studies of how vision and visuality are actually used in everyday working life, the paper points to the need to understand vision and visuality in organizational practice. Using the case of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it is suggested that professional vision, i.e. practices of seeing that are shared within epistemic communities, is firstly technologically mediated and, secondly, based on the ability to combine vision, speech, gesture, and other embodied and cognitive resources in order to make sense of the images produced by fMRI technology. The paper concludes that organization theory should examine practices of seeing in greater detail and as part of the project in order to understand how knowledge is constituted and used as a collectively constituted resource within organizations.     

‘Going to Brazil’: transnational and corporeal movements of a Canadian‐Brazilian martial arts community

In this article I use a case study of capoeira (an Afro‐Brazilian martial art/dance/game) in Canada to bring together sport and transnationality literatures. I show that understandings of transnationality can be extended through both investigating people born and raised in the North, since they play an important role in creating transnational spaces, and attending to the corporeal means that people deploy to connect to a homeland or ‘travel’ to a foreign country. Through adopting a particular racialized/ national style of movement, those who ‘stay put’ in the North can ‘move’ across ethnic boundaries, if not geopolitical borders. Real (international), imagined (virtual and emotional), and corporeal (embodied) ‘travel’ to Brazil are key experiences of the senior capoeirista (capoeira devotee). Sporting activities provide an exceptional window onto transnationality studies, given that ways of moving are fundamental to social, cultural and national identities.     

Transforming habit: revolution,routine and social change

Compelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context – while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current socio-political and economic landscape. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson and others, this article asks whether critical work on habit can provide different, and potentially generative, analytical tools for understanding the contemporary ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I suggest that it habit’s double nature – its enabling of both compulsive repetition and creative becoming – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful socio-political patterns to persist in the face of efforts to generate greater awareness of their damaging effects, as well as the material forms of automation and coordination on which meaningful societal transformation may depend. I also explore how bringing affect and habit together might productively refigure our understandings of ‘the present’ and ‘social progress’, as well as the available modes of sensing, instigating and responding to change. In turning to habit, then, the primary aim of this article is to examine how social and cultural theory might critically re-approach social change and progressive politics today.     

The sound of liminality: MHD's afro trap,affective listening,and the (re)invention of Afropean identities in France

This article is an exploration of the world making capacities of afro trap. Through an extended case study of MHD's discography, I ask what can be learnt about the liminal experiences of postcolonial black citizens, or Afropean citizens, in France, by listening to popular music. I argue that through embracing, reinventing, and (re)producing familiar Afropean soundscapes, MHD claims and creates from his liminal subject position. Going against the assumption that Frenchness and blackness are always mutually exclusive and in tension, this music sonically proposes a way of being otherwise in France, stemming from this liminality. I see in what I call ‘the sound of liminality’ an instance of ‘queering ethnicity,’ one which channels the affective capacities of sound. I propose affective listening as a method that, incorporating autoethnography to consider critical listening positionality, facilitates a renewed attention to sound as an object of sociological inquiry.     

Performative identity regulation in rehabilitative home care work: an analysis of how experts’ embodied mediation of the managerial ideology ‘activates’ new frontline identities

ABSTRACT

This article explores how therapists when introduced as new so-called frontline ‘experts’ in home care work, become both discursive and embodied mediators for the managerial ideology of rehabilitation, and how their presence regulates the care aides’ subjectivities at work. We show how the managerial discourse of rehabilitation mobilizes the care aides to transform their identity from traditional nurturing to rehabilitation, as a result of promoting the latter as more professional. While the traditional managers/nurses promote the identity transfer through more classic discursive regulation at a distance from ‘the office’, the therapists do so through what we label performative regulation. Performative regulation is exercised by the therapists performing the desired role at the frontline and thus embodies the ideal and transfers it by embodied practices, not directives. With this notion of performative regulation, the article emphasizes the material, physical, embodied and performative dimensions of professional identity regulation.     

Cruel (im)mobilities and the nearly utopian intimacies of Italian migrants’ personal relationships

Most research on visits focuses on (semi)successful connections that equate valued intimacy to adaptation to transnational life and ethno-national kin obligations. In contrast, we highlight important migrant relationships where adaptation is minimal and contact diminishes, yet they also take on heightened affective intensity. Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography that includes migrants and friends and family, we examine the affective and ethical dimensions of visits and ICTs (information and communications technology) within the personal relationships of highly skilled Italian migrants in London. Deploying the concepts cruel optimism and polyrhythmia, the paper examines how contrasting rhythms of visits and ICTs provoke reflections and feelings on whether intimacies at a distance are ‘real’. Despite difficulties, informants suggest intimacies ‘feel normal’, imbuing relations with hope for their authenticity that grounds relations in a state of mobile impasse: where feelings of normalcy lead to less interest in recreating connections yet also constructs hope that sustains visits and digital connections.     

Playing with materiality: an agential-realist reading of SethBling's Super Mario World code-injection

ABSTRACT

This article takes inspiration from Youtuber and software developer ‘SethBling’ and his 2016 ‘code-injection’ (Bling, 2016), in which, using only a standard Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller and in-depth knowledge of the console, he ‘injected’ and executed the code of popular mobile game Flappy Bird (Nguyen, 2013) into a running instance of Super Mario World (Miyamoto, 1990), effectively transforming one game into another through play. Drawing from this I propose a performative understanding of videogames (and software in general) to reinvigorate discussions of software's materiality. Though it is possible to contrast Wendy Chun's (2008a) suggestion that one can view software as ‘vaporous’ against Friedrich Kittler's (1995) assertion that ‘there is no software’, I propose a more holistic approach. Academics and users alike should attempt to see software as living a double-life: as simultaneously solid as it is (metaphorically) gaseous. It then becomes possible to embrace software(s) as performative examples of the entangled ‘phenomena’, suggested by Barad (2007), that produce everyday reality through quantum activity. I explore SethBling's code-injection suggesting that actions clearly reveal software's double existence as both tangible ‘thing’, locatable on magnetic memory, and as a vaporous non-entity. Accepting these propositions together, software can be understood as continuously re-emerging through shared activities. Following Barad, I conclude that this quality is not unique to software, but software – and videogames above all – are a useful tool for understanding a vision of reality that favours activity over materiality as the basis of our existence.     

On the limits of a realist conception of knowledge: a pragmatist critique of Archerian realism

In her book Being Human (2000), Margaret Archer presents intriguing pragmatist emphases on practice, embodiment and non‐linguistic knowing‐how, as regards to understanding humanity. However, as Archer attempts to conjoin these ideas with the morphogenetic realism she has been working on for the last few decades, she ends up holding on to a subject–object dualism, which makes things complicated. The authors’ alternative pragmatist account defended in the article flows from Deweyan pragmatist and Rortian antirepresentationalist insights. The main issues in the article concern Archer’s complicated tripartite concept of knowledge, which is contrasted with a (Deweyan–Rylean) distinction between linguistic knowledge‐that and embodied knowing‐how. It is argued that knowledge is a natural, sophisticated tool that human organisms use when coping with their environment; it is always acquired on the strength of embodied knowing‐how, from some actor’s point of view, but the term ‘knowledge’ itself should be reserved for the propositional, linguistic knowledge‐that.     

Seeing culture through the eye of the beholder: four methods in pursuit of taste

When it comes to making aesthetic decisions, people commonly account for their taste with intuition. A cultural good, symbol, or object is simply right and respondents “know it when they see it.” This article investigates the cultural meanings professional tastemakers see as they make such deliberations, while also illustrating the problems sociologists have in seeing culture. Using the case of fashion model casting and scouting, I present four methods to trace how cultural producers recognize and value models’ looks in the global fashion market, demonstrating how each method results in a different emphasis on how culture is used to acquire and deploy aesthetic sense. First, interviews capture justifications of aesthetic decisions, as well as general processes about day-to-day work routines, which are next tested with network analysis, the second method, which emphasizes structural arrangements in taste decisions. The third method, ethnography, discovers taste as a situated form of knowledge production and emphasizes culture in interaction. The fourth and related method, observant participation, sees taste as phenomenological as culture becomes embodied and tacit consciousness. Each of these methods is an optical device that renders a particular and complimentary account of taste and affords researchers a certain way to see how culture works.     

Keeping up appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling industries of London and New York

This paper addresses itself to literature on ‘aesthetic labour’ in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming ‘enterprising’ with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005 ) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a ‘cardboard cut‐out’, and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or ‘body/self’, and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project ‘personality’ requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by Hochschild (1983 ). Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on‐going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are ‘always on’. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as Witz et al. (2003 ) would have it.     

Marrying the social and the biological? A rejoinder to Newton

Marrying the biological and the social raises a complex series of issues that defy easy answer or simple resolution. In this brief rejoinder to Newton's (2003 ) recent paper in this journal –‘Truly embodied sociology: marrying the social and the biological?’– I take up some of these issues through: (i) a restatement of my own position in these debates and the broader sociological context within which it is located; (ii) a discussion of various problems and tensions within Newton's own critique of this ‘nascent material‐corporeal’ project to date. Newton's paper, it is concluded, is a welcome, timely and topical contribution to these (evolving) debates, though any such ‘dispute’ is probably more apparent than real: a case, in short, of reinforcing arguments about the complexity of these relations and the consequent need to ‘tread warily’.