Dwelling in epistemic disobedience: A reply to Go

In Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory, Julian Go continues his vital work on rethinking and redirecting the discipline of sociology. Go’s piece relates to his wider oeuvre of postcolonial sociology – found in works such as his Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016) as well as multiple journal articles on epistemic exclusion (Go 2020), Southern theory (Go 2016), metrocentrism (Go 2014), and the history of sociology (Go 2009). In this response article, my aim is to think alongside some of the central themes outlined in Go’s paper rather than offering a rebuttal of any sorts. In particular, I want to think through how the recent work on ‘decoloniality’ may play more of a central role in Go’s vision of sociology and social theory than he acknowledges. In doing so, I hope to engage in Go’s prodigious scholarship through centering discussions of the geopolitics of knowledge, double translation, and border thinking. Before proceeding to this discussion, I will offer a brief review of my reading of Go’s paper.     

Like Water in Water

In this paper I examine the anthropocentrism evident in key texts by Bataille and Heidegger. Starting with Bataille’s treatment of animality in his Theory of Religion I show how a contrast is drawn between animal experience, which is immediate and immanent (“like water in water”), and human experience, which cannot help but transcend its environment by imposing distinctions. According to Bataille the animal therefore remains unfathomably closed to us. Heidegger, meanwhile, suggests that it is the hand which denotes the crucial difference between human and animal. By means of the disclosive demarcation that the hand makes possible humanity enters a unique and privileged relationship to Being. I argue that both authors assume, without demonstrating, a qualitative difference between human and animal. This starting point might thus usefully be described as an “anthropocentric assumption” in the sense that, although neither author considers human experience to be superior to that of animals, each considers it first‐and‐foremost.     

Engendering Citizenship,Feminizing Civil Society

Abstract

In this paper, I describe how feminists in countries of the Middle East and North Africa are challenging their second-class citizenship largely institutionalized in patriarchal family laws-and are calling for an extension of their civil, political, and social rights. I use the term “feminist” to denote de jureand de factofeminists working to advance women's rights. The paper seeks to make theoretical sense of contemporary rights-based movements and discourses in the region through an application of theories of citizenship. It highlights the role of women's organizations in the regional call for democratization, civil society, and citizenship and it provides an empirical content to the discussion of citizenship, state, and civil society. Data and information are gleaned from a close reading of the literature by and on women's organizations in the region, and from personal observations and interviews.     

Georges Bataille's base materialism

Abstract

The French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897–1962) developed base materialism in his work during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with all existing materialism. This essay is an explication of base materialism and its radical implications for contemporary theory. Bataille argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. Then he attempts to use this to develop a radical libertarian Marxism, opposed to both Stalinism and fascism. Although it provided a critique of the emphasis in Marxism on production, the active flux of base matter could not be contained in a political discourse. This means that Bataille's thought has an impact beyond the political and into the wider domain of theory. One example of this is the influence of base materialism on Derrida's deconstruction, and both share the attempt to destabilise philosophical oppositions by means of an unstable ‘third term’. This explains why Bataille's materialism does not appear as conventionally materialist, and why it has had little impact within contemporary materialism. Despite attempts to force base materialism into the mold of a new form of materialism it disrupts conventional materialism and the ‘radical’ politics that often goes with it. Bataille destroys the promise of liberated spaces and offers a more radical and disorienting freedom which inscribes instability into all discourses. It is this that defines the importance and necessity of Bataille's base materialism today.     

Couch the Bricoleur: Using Ethnographic and Laboratory Traditions to Establish Data Careers

Carl Couch reinvigorated the Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction by combining the theoretical and methodological tenets of ethnography and laboratory science. He thus resembled a bricoleur, or researcher who masters several seemingly diverse practices in order to create a seamless whole. Couch's new Iowa School also produced a bricolage, or a sum total of research findings, that I call a data career. This article pays tribute to Couch the bricoleur and his bricolage by elaborating on his data career and discussing how he created ethnographies in the laboratory. I further link the notions of bricoleur, data careers, and ethnographies in the laboratory with Couch's democratic vision. I contextualize this vision in light of a particular representative-constituent study (RCS) which served as a metaphor for Couch's pragmatic outlook.     

Feminism,Management and Self-Actualization

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs has had an enduring influence on management theory, both in and of itself and in past and present theories of employee motivation and performance. However, management theorists have not been the only ones to embrace Maslow's hierarchy. Betty Friedan also accepted and used it in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan seems to have been attracted to Maslow's theory because of his earlier research on women's self-esteem and sexuality, research which was central to the development of the needs hierarchy. Thus, management theory and liberal feminist theory have a common base in Maslow's hierarchy and self-esteem research. This paper analyzes that common base, beginning with an examination of the masculine and hierarchical bias in the needs hierarchy. Then, after establishing the link between the needs hierarchy and the self-esteem research, the paper moves to an analysis of the latter, and demonstrates the ways in which it misinterpreted women's experience and sexuality and valued only those women with stereotypically masculine characteristics and behaviours. The paper concludes with a discussion of the effect of the acceptance of Maslow's ideas on the women in management literature.     

‘The letting go’: the horror of being orphaned in Nicolas Winding Refn’s cinema

In this article, I read the recent cinema of the Danish-American Director Nicolas Winding Refn through a contradictory complex of Freudian–Jungian psychoanalysis, Bataillean philosophy and Buddhist thought. By focusing on Winding Refn’s three most recent films, Drive, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, I explore his representation of what I call the horror of contemporary orphan identity, and show how he contrasts this with a mystical sense of wholeness and unity comparable to that which appears in the works of Jung, Bataille and before both of these writers, Buddhist philosophy. Beyond the lonely figure of the orphan, who we also find outlined in Jung’s work on child archetypes, Winding Refn constructs a nightmarish dystopia, the post-modern city, which is characterised by violence, objectification and estrangement. Inside this complex, Winding Refn tells the story of the destroyed self of the lonely orphan lost in post-modern urban space, and considers possible futures for this abandoned, exposed, desperate individual. It is this story of loneliness, abandonment and tragic attempts to escape from the pain of loss which I explore in this article by first, exploring the ways in which Drive exposes the horror of the orphan in contemporary Los Angeles and captures the terror of the self endlessly on the run; second, reading Only God Forgives in terms of an attempt to think through possible escape from the desperate condition of the orphan by taking up Buddhist philosophy and images of the ritualistic destruction of the self; and finally thinking about the way The Neon Demon opposes these two positions in a psycho-politics of on the one hand desperate self-making and on the other hand the Buddhist non-self and cosmological escapism.     

IMAX in canadian cinema: geographic transformation and discourses of nationhood

... the last post-industrial resource, acceleration exceeds accumulation . . . Paul Virilio (1987, 180)

The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is ... an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, and image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time . . . Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented!

Andre Bazin (1967, 21)

It's the ultimate in screen realism, and yet in many ways it's much better than being there.

Julian Temple, director of Rolling Stones At the Max (1991) (Gentry 1992,40).     

Bourdieu,Technique And Technology

This paper examines the place of technology in Pierre Bourdieu's social theory, and argues for the relevance of Bourdieu's thought to the study of technology. In moving from an examination of the status of technology in Bourdieu's work through to his broad approach to social practice and his widely cited concept of habitus, it is argued that technologies are crystalliz­ations of socially organized action. As such, they should be considered not as exceptional or special phenomena in a social theory, but rather as very much like other kinds of social practices that recur over time. Ultimately, through the use of Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, and capital, we are able to overcome the binary divisions such as technology/society and subject/object that have plagued technology studies.     

Time and mobility in the writing of Charles W. Chesnutt

Abstract

This article considers the elusiveness and ambivalence that characterize Chesnutt's writing in terms of the author's imaginative efforts to probe beyond the historical circumstances that condition and frame his authorship. Noting the focus on figures of absence and illegibility in recent criticism of Chesnutt, I examine the notion of a self in the process of uprooting itself that appears to preoccupy much of his fiction. In a close reading of Chesnutt's journals and his essay on 'Superstitions and Folklore of the South', I elaborate Chesnutt's conception of a literary voice as emerging from a context of commodification and contestation and oriented on a moment of posterior reception. I then discuss how this concept of a detachable voice informs Chesnutt's exploration of a transplantable self and an understanding of freedom in terms of a re-imagined social bond. This discussion focuses on the ways Chesnutt, in some of his short stories and in The House Behind the Cedars, evokes a passage from a condition of bondage to a capacity for multiple and variable attachments.     

'The look of hope or the look of sadness': Robert Frank's dialogical vision

Abstract

This article examines the work of Robert Frank with reference to his seminal photographic work, The Americans, and its relationships to his later post-1970s images. It argues that the 'outside eye' he brought to the US post-war consensus offered him a new comparative critical position and represented a fundamental, counter-cultural shift in the tradition of documentary photography. This vision formed around Frank's multiple 'dialogues', with the US social landscape, with earlier traditions of documentary and 'street' photography in Europe and the USA, and with the Beat generation's radical challenges to dominant post-war values. This 'moment' of overlapping and interconnected relations forms the basis for this discussion of Frank's importance as a 'political' commentator whose work has influenced generations of photographers and shares much with those writers who emerged as the Beats.     

Queer visual pleasures and the policing of male sexuality in responses to images of David Beckham

Since he stepped out in a sarong in 1998, David Beckham's sexuality and gendered image has been a popular topic of discussion in the media. He has also attracted academic attention for the expanded range of masculinities he seems to represent. Some academic studies of Beckham have employed ‘queer theory’ to analyse the destabilising of gender that his public presentations seem to embody but little attention has been paid to the specifically visual dynamics of images of Beckham. In this essay, I take Sam Taylor-Wood's David (2004) as a starting point to suggest the types of visual pleasure that images of Beckham might be seen to offer to both male and female audiences. For the remainder of the essay I focus on an Armani male underwear advertisement from the 2007–2008 campaign. Informed by discourse analysis and queer theory, I identify a set of ‘queer’ responses to the advertisement, suggesting they represent the ‘policing’ of male sexuality, which often accompanies potential signifiers of homoeroticism. I conclude by considering how and why Beckham has retained his status as a heteronormative masculine icon despite his continued appearance in homoerotic images.     

The impossibility of loving: blanchot,community, sexual difference

This paper aims to clarify Blanchot's notion of community and his practice of communism through, first, an account of his involvement in the Events of May 1968 and, second, an exploration of The Unavowable Community, in which Blanchot reads a short novel by Marguerite Duras, which recounts the tropisms of a brief relationship between a young woman and a homosexual man. As I show, Blanchot's affirmation of what he calls “the impossibility of loving”, which emerges from his reading of Duras, is linked to what he calls “worklessness [désoeuvrement]”; that is, the active process of loosening or undoing that contests any attempt to establish a community around a shared essence. I will claim that it is by attending to the relationship to worklessness that one might attend to what Blanchot calls the “spaces of freedom” that open around us: to those happenings which are not enclosed by prevailing determinations of the social space. A further aim of this paper is to address the concerns of Jacques Derrida, for whom Blanchot's writings on community betray what he calls in Politics of Friendship a “schematic of filiation”, in which the relation to the brother is the privileged model for the relation to the Other. I also provide an account of Blanchot's negotiation of Levinas's account of the relationship between ethics and eros as it is presented in Totality and Infinity.     

Ruin Value

In this article I consider Albert Speer’s theory of ruin value through a discussion of the work of two Weimar theorists of ruination, Ernst Jünger and Walter Benjamin. The first section of the article relates Speer’s original theory of ruins to Nazi ideology. After this consideration of the Nazi obsession with ruination, the second division of the article explores the work of Jünger in terms of his problematic relation to National Socialism. Beyond this investigation of Jünger’s work the final section of the article argues against what I call the Weimar right’s version of ruin value through an elaboration of Walter Benjamin’s catastrophic utopianism. In this section of the article my argument is that it is possible to save the concept of ruin value for the cause of human emancipation through the construction of a critical theory that seeks to oppose the politics of memory to the ideological necrophilia of the Weimar right and National Socialism.     

Seeing through transparency: Performativity,vision and intent 1

Abstract

This paper engages with debates around transformations in the production and circulation of images and the changes in modes of perception that these offer. Paul Virilio (1991, 1994) has argued that technological developments have produced a shift in the site of meaning‐production from the material reference space of the image (print or celluloid) to the time of visual contact by the viewer. I consider what significance these temporalities have in relation to social difference, and I develop debates around the performative to consider how the viewer is constituted in visual performativity. This focus on time and performativity opens up questions of how vision may constitute the agency, intention and responsibility of the viewer. Drawing on an example of visual irony in advertising, I explore how the temporal suspension of meanings allows for a suspension of the terms of intent and responsibility. This visual performative accesses and reworks the terms of social difference and privilege in what I have called ‘retroactive intentionality’.     

'The world will be saved by beauty': The Revival of Romantic Theories of the Symbol in Pavel Florenskii's Works

Abstract

From a study of Pavel Florenskii's (1882–1937) works on the symbol from the 1920s, it is suggested that Florenskii's understanding of symbolism bears witness to the revival of romantic theories at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The continuity between romantic theories of the symbol and Florenskii's understanding of the symbolic image has not previously been noted. However, the closeness of Florenskii's writings and Viacheslav Ivanov's on the symbol has been noticed, while Ivanov's indebtedness to the German romantics has long been known. Thus, another relatively little studied dimension of Florenskii's work is uncovered and, in particular, his involvement with Russian Symbolism and with its main theoretical spokesman. Florenskii's understanding of the symbol is seen in the context of developments growing out of the October Revolution, but also, more broadly, as a response to the crisis of modernity. The romantic definition of the symbol, as accepted by Florenskii, is an attempt to restore the lost sense of belonging to 'higher' reality through the ontological identity between 'being' and 'thing'. The mission of art in this project is of fundamental importance and it can be summed up in the famous words of Dostoevskii's character, Prince Myshkin, in The Idiot: 'beauty will save the world'.     

THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS OF MEADIAN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY*

Mead's life-long interest in Romanticism is the least studied aspect of his work. As summarized in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Meadian explorations in romantic philosophy and sociology provide a valuable insight into his substantive contributions. The present paper seeks to amplify this insight and explores its relevance to the interactionist tradition in sociology. Special attention is given to the Meadian claim that the modern notion of self first appears in the romantic literature. Mead's emphasis on the interplay between the social structure and the structure of the self is linked to the romantic vision of the self as the microcosm of the social macrocosm. The current controversy over Mead and Chicago sociology is given a new interpretation in light of the dialectical premises inherent in the Meadian and romantic theories of self.     

Transgression and conservation: rereading Georges Bataille

In this article, I read one of Georges Bataille’s most famous ideas, that of transgression, with a renewed focus on its structural implications for the human subject. Whilst Bataille’s discussions of erotic excess, violent transgression, obscenity and the threat of death are provocative and intoxicating, his anthropological philosophy of the human constitution repeatedly contextualises transgressive tendencies alongside the enduring structures and boundaries that define humanity. My reading examines key texts to elucidate a thorough explication of Bataille’s transgression, its relationship to taboo and its defining role for humanity, to claim that there is in fact a tendency towards conservation in even the most explosive and challenging of topics through which Bataille explored humanity.     

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.