Visual mediation of critical illness: an autobiographical account of nearly dying and nearly living1

This article is concerned with the portrayal of the impact of critical illness on the author's life. An autobiographical approach is used to illustrate how imagery mediates personal trauma. A personal journey over a four‐year period, from the onset of illness towards recovery, is portrayed in the form of snapshots of critical events. Running parallel to the visual dimension is the application of mountain climbing as a metaphor for first understanding critical illness and then as a vehicle to aid recuperation. The journey is described in a narrative style that represents one reality.     

The narrative self in autobiographical accounts of illness

The paper analyzes autobiographical acounts of the experience of chronic illness and its treatment to develop a sociological theory of the self. It is suggested that ‘self’ is not a biologistic or psycologistic thing. Rather self is autobiographical narrative – hence the narrative self. It is argued that four elements constitute such narrative selves in autobiographical discourse: evaluative relationships between events in time; cosmology; power relationships; and conceptualisation of self as object.     

Migrant identities: Personal memory and the construction of selfhood

Gayatri Chakravotry Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason explicitly asks the reader to examine the limits of its argumentative structure. Just as Spivak has recently argued that the form of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy is paratactic (a way of using language that withholds connections and conjunctions), Spivak’s own A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is carefully constructed to force the reader to supply links between the sections of the text. In this sense, Spivak achieves a poetic effect, one that is not unrelated to the contemporary paratactic prose poetry of Harryette Mullen. The formal parataxis of Spivak’s work also serves to reflect an argument in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason about the difficulty of forging solidarity among disparate migrant and racialized groups in the Western metropolis.     

Narrative Manhood Acts: Batterer Intervention Program Graduates' Tragic Relationships

We analyze how twenty graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. We focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which we define as self‐narratives that signify membership in the category “man” and the possession of a masculine self. We also show how graduates constructed self‐narratives as a genre that was oppositional to organizational narratives: rather than adopting the program's domestic violence melodrama or preferred conversion narrative, graduates used the larger culture—especially “bitch” imagery and sometimes racialized discourse—to construct tragedies. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre‐making can be a method to resist organizational narratives.     

Taking Uptaking Up,or, A Deconstructionist “Ontology of Difference” and a Developmental One

This article elaborates and defends a thesis prominent in my recent book, The Formation of Reason; namely, that a human being gets to be free in the distinctive way that human beings are free through the acquisition of second nature. My treatment of this thesis in The Formation of Reason is much influenced by the philosophy of John McDowell. McDowell himself, however, is notoriously reluctant to offer a theory of second nature. In this article, I explain his reasons for taking this stance and show how, for all that, his work contains much that illuminates the idea of second nature and its relation to freedom. I make this argument by focusing on a number of McDowell's papers on Aristotle and Wittgenstein that I do not discuss in detail in my book. Finally, I consider the objection that although McDowell recognizes second nature as a property of individuals, he mistakenly rejects the idea of second nature in external form. I argue that his works do in fact contain resources to countenance second nature externalized, so long as we keep that idea insulated from the constructivist theories of normativity that McDowell rightly rejects. Understanding our thesis aright is, I maintain, a necessary condition of a compelling conception of the social dimensions of mind and of the end of education.     

Unpacking Pat Parker: Intersections and Revolutions in “Movement in Black”

This article explores Pat Parker's poem “Movement in Black.” It examines the ways in which she emblematizes intersectionality and simultaneity as forms of revolution in struggles of self and society. It begins with a theoretical and historical apparatus to contextualize Parker as an artist and activist. Then it offers a literary analysis of the poem, focusing on themes of time and space, marginalization and movement, difference and power, visibility and invisibility, and history and memory. It argues that Parker uses autobiographical writing to fuse personal and political sites of resistance.     

Eleven characters in search of an ethic,or the spirit of capitalism revisited

This fiction represents scenes from an imaginary MBA class's reaction to the showing of the Oliver Stone film, Wall Street, to explore different perspectives on the meanings of work and society in the light of Max Weber's pessimistic vision of the inexorable rise of capitalism. It is meant to end on an optimistic note.     

Diversity without difference: modelling ‘the real’ in the social aesthetic of a London multicultural school

This article analyses the social aesthetic of the visual displays of a multicultural London primary school. It shows that the social aesthetic of the school models the school as a site of the ‘real’ in Baudrillard's sense of a ‘real’ that is a simulacra of the real, one from which the violence that is produced within and is constitutive of capitalism is expelled. In this view ‘race’ is not a division of humanity caused by racism, it is simply a cultural sign marking diversity. Difference, in the sense of racialised inequalities or racism, can be expelled from the system without ‘race’ itself being expelled. By the same logic, nationalism, as an exclusionary ideology, is separated out from national identity, which becomes simply one of a range of cultural resources that children can draw on in assembling the self.     

“Romancing with a Wealth or Detail” Narratives or Ernest Jones's 1906 Trial for Indecent Assault

In March 1906 Dr. (Alfred) Ernest Jones was put on trial for indecently assaulting two young “mentally defective” girls at a special school in South East London. Jones claimed it was “the most disagreeable experience in [his] life.” A detailed reconstruction of the trial, drawn from contemporaneous records, reveals significant flaws in Jones's autobiographical account. Reading those records in the light of early psychoanalytic theory and recent British “political” texts on child sexual abuse—from “Cleveland,” “Orkney,” and “Jason Dabbs” through to “Lost in Care”—helps illuminate the dominant medicolegal ideologies that informed Jones's trial. Adapting Leo Strauss's concept of persecution reveals how details of the children's allegations were occluded from the trial reports. A jigsaw reconstruction of these silences offers a restitutive narrative of the children's persecuted speech.     

Mother-Writing and the Narrative of Maternal Subjectivity

This essay discusses how writing from a maternal perspective can construct maternal subjectivity in a linguistic form. Maternal subjectivity is understood as the aggregate of subject positions, or “representations,” experienced by a woman who is a mother. Writing can form connections between subject positions, including those which have been split off or denied because of culturally induced ambivalence, to establish a subjectivity that is multiple rather than split. Through a reading of Mary Gordon's novel, Men and Angels, I show how the text's narrative structure, as it represents a mother's discourse with her own mother, her discourse with herself, and her discourse with her child, incarnates the plurality of self positions that mothers possess and constructs a relationship or “grammar” between them. By evoking this complex maternal subjectivity, mother-writing can be understood as a gesture toward recognition–both within the text, for its characters, and outside the text, for the mother/writer.     

POPULISM AND SPECTACLE

In On Populist Reason Ernesto Laclau proposes that the reputedly ‘empty’ rhetorical excess of populism constitutes the ontological and aesthetic ground on which the existence of an entity called ‘the people’ depends. This essay considers the tensions and affinities between the particular set of aesthetic relations that Laclau attributes to populist rhetoric, on the one hand, and the set of apparently techno-economic relations that Guy Debord describes as the logic of spectacle in The Society of the Spectacle, on the other, arguing that Laclau's conception of populism compels us to recast the ontological problem of the relation that Debord describes between the social and the spectacular in expressly aesthetic terms. Beginning from this premise, the essay contends that the ‘empty’ aesthetic conventions likewise associated with spectacular entertainment – and in particular, the staging of the relation between audience and onstage spectacle that defines the variety showcase aesthetic in this account – enact a set of tropic relations that constitutes the audience as a generalized figure of ‘the people’ in much the same terms as Laclau's rhetoric. Tracing this aesthetic logic through an especially charged performance from the history of blackface minstrelsy, the essay concludes by considering how such a staging of the relation between populism and spectacle might challenge the dominant models for understanding what constitutes ‘popular’ aesthetic form within Cultural Studies, and in the process, afford new critical insights into the formal dimension of Laclau's political logic.     

Women Who Work: The limits of the neoliberal feminist paradigm

This article examines Ivanka Trump's Women Who Work, arguing that it represents the newest permutation of the neoliberal feminist subject. After providing an overview of the recent emergence of neoliberal feminism, I explain why the book should be considered part of the wider cultural landscape in which this variant of feminism has increasingly become commonsensical. I then turn to demonstrate how Women Who Work construes the ideal female subject not only as generic human capital but also incites her to invest in herself constantly, where activities ranging from professional workshops through hobbies to friendships are understood as practices that appreciate the value of the self. The conversion of women into generic rather than gendered human capital remains, however, incomplete, since the ideal of a happy work–family balance continues to serve as a push back to the wholesale erasure of traditional notions of sexual difference. Finally, I highlight that neoliberal feminism is erasing other long‐standing divisions and political differences. Not only does the private–public divide collapse, but so, too, does the distinction between one's private self and one's public enterprise as the self itself becomes an enterprise. This dual process of collapse and reconfiguration shapes the newest neoliberal feminist subject, the main protagonist of Trump's Women Who Work.     

‘Social control of the self’ and pleading guilty in criminal court

In Donald Black's 1994 work The Social Structure of Right and Wrong, he introduces the intriguing concept of the self-application of social control. According to Black, the ‘social control of the self’ follows the same principles of the behavior of law. Conceptualizing a guilty plea as a self-application of social control, this study of 717 homicide cases processed in an urban American court represents the first empirical test of this theory. Support for Black's theoretical perspective was mixed, with only the predictions regarding the effects of social morphology on the self-application of social control finding support. Defendants who were less socially integrated than their victims were significantly more likely to plead guilty when compared to other case configurations. When relational distance between parties was low, the case was significantly less likely to be resolved with the self-application of social control in the form of a guilty plea. The importance of Black's perspective for elucidating the theoretical linkages between social structure and individual behavior is considered.     

Ethical–aesthetic critique of moral organization: Inspirations from Michael Haneke's cinematic work

This paper looks at the work of the Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke as an inspiration for developing an ethical–aesthetic critique of organization. Haneke's practice of film-making is located in the tradition of an ‘ethical parrhesia’, the courageous and often dangerous ‘truth-telling’, which aims at the transformation of being. Haneke's approach is then illustrated with an analysis of his film The White Ribbon. This example is taken to illustrate an ethical critique of moral organization and for analysing strategies that seek to instigate the open-ended moral reflection. By discussing implications of this form of critique, the paper contributes to the development of a critical aesthetics of organization that seeks to open a reflexive space on how we are formed in social and organizational life, and at what costs.     

Boris Eikhenbaum's Response to the Crisis of the Novel in the 1920s

Abstract

Focusing on the Russian literary scholar Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959), the present article considers the interrelationship of autobiographical, scholarly and fictional modes of writing. In 1925 Eikhenbaum wrote in a letter of his 'longing for acts, longing for biography'. This article views the scholar's acute sense of diminished agency in the context of the crisis of the novel in the 1920s and discusses how Eikhenbaum's own generic experimentation becomes a means of finding an answer to the question he posed to himself and his age of 'how to be a writer'. The discussion is primarily based on Eikhenbaum's autobiographical sketches in Moi vremennik (My Periodical, 1929) and his scholarly monograph, Lev Tolstoi. Piatidesiatye gody (Lev Tolstoi: The Fifties, 1928), and attention is drawn to the generic, rhetorical and narrative strategies used across these hybrid scholarly texts, which in turn become invested with a certain emotional and ethical charge. In the end, the article shows how, above all, Eikhenbaum's empathetic engagement with Tolstoi marks for him the restoration of 'biography' and the solution to the entwined epochal and personal crises of genre and authorship.     

Self‐Perceived Competence in Mainland China: A Multiwave Longitudinal Examination of Internalizing Symptoms in Chinese Adolescents

The present 9‐wave, 2‐year study examined whether Cole's (1991) theory of self‐perceived competence could help explain vulnerability to depressive and anxiety symptoms in a sample of adolescents from mainland China. Participants included 624 adolescents (319 females and 305 males) from an urban school in Changsha (n = 308) and from a rural school in Liuyang (n = 316). Findings showed that self‐perceived academic competence was negatively associated with prospective depressive and anxiety symptoms. Meanwhile, adolescents with low levels of self‐perceived social competence were at heightened risk for depressive symptoms during times of increased stressors (supporting a vulnerability‐stress model). These findings advance past research by highlighting new developmental pathways for depressive and anxiety symptoms in Chinese adolescents.     

Portraits and collaborations: a reflection on the work of Wendy Ewald

This reflection on the work of Wendy Ewald as a photographer, storyteller and teacher highlights Ewald's methodology, her manner of presenting work and her images. First, in describing Ewald's artistic practice, I discuss the innovative ways she collaborates with children, sharing control over the process of visually representing children's lives, their stories and their faces. I also describe her influence as an educator and suggest that researchers as well may benefit from Ewald's approach to exploring individuals' social realities. Next, I propose that Ewald's body of work provides a rich source of material for those interested in the analysis of visual culture. As an example, I focus on Ewald's American Alphabets, which presents four visual alphabets and deals with questions of identity and language. The collaborative images simultaneously address and raise sociological questions and offer a compelling visual example of the confluence of gender, race and social class. I finish with a discussion of Ewald's two latest collaborations—In Peace and Harmony: Carver Portraits in Richmond, Virginia and Towards a Promised Land from Margate, England. In these new works, Ewald places larger‐than‐life portraits in symbolically meaningful public spaces. Her public art involves a complicated and conceptual exploration of context.     

JUNO (JASON REITMAN, 2007): A PRACTICAL CASE STUDY OF TEENS,FILM AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Jason Reitman's Juno (2007), the story of how a teenager handles her pregnancy, is the kind of film that leaves no one indifferent. Released at a time of conflicting discourses on sexual education, Reitman's film addressed the confusion experienced by teenagers as they came of age in a context where patterns of masculine and feminine behaviour were rapidly changing. In this essay I argue that Juno offers a complex understanding of the disorientation suffered by adolescents during the 1990s – a time when anti-sex discourses coexisted with an increasingly sexualized youth culture. This said, my intention is to move towards the film in a roundabout way by focusing, first, on why so many, supposed ‘cultural criticisms’ of films turn out to be so superficial. In this introductory section, the argument will be made for an approach in film analyses that takes full account of cinema as a visual medium. After exposing my critical stance, I shall draw nearer to the film itself by examining various of the overlapping contexts that, together, created a conducive space for its success – namely, the political scene; changing attitudes towards sex and gender; and most importantly, cinema's aesthetic dimension and the impact of genre conventions in the film-viewing experience. Once the complex diagram of differing (and sometimes contradictory) forces at work in Juno has been mapped out, my aim is to link these conjunctures to a detailed analysis of a key scene in the film as a means of demonstrating how the combination of film studies and Cultural Studies can operate as a method that eschews too easy, ideologically oriented, assumptions.     

Music to Remember Me By: Technologies of Memory in Home Recording

This article presents ethnographic data on home music recording to advance the concept of technologies of memory as way for interactionists to understand memory work as a practice of self. John Dewey's classic ruminations on memory as process are combined with Tia DeNora's contemporary articulation of music as a technology of the self to explain data on home recording as individually and socially meaningful mnemonic work. This specific case study demonstrates how home recordists use material technologies (technics) and technological practices (techniques) to form and reform the self in everyday life. More generally, this article demonstrates the efficacy of interpretive studies of memory, creativity, technology, and the self in everyday life.