A TEMPLE FOR THE NATION: REDESIGNING A COMMON SYMBOLIC SPACE OF CENTRAL EUROPEAN CONSERVATISM

In the wake of ‘1989», the redefinition of a common European identity and national identities turned the symbolic representation of these identities into a major issue of political debates. Especially the construction of conservative and right-wing-populist politics in a redefined central European region relies on a symbolic redefinition of national identities in the frame of and in conflict with the design of a common European political culture. Examples are based on an analysis of the symbolic representation of politics, as the image design of the Austrian ‘Wende»-government (2000-2002), the symbolic representation of Forza Italia and the image-construction of Berlusconi, as well as the cultural representation of the former Hungarian government (1998-2002). The contribution proposes a reconstruction of a common right-wing conservative (political) culture and its representation in the region under the notion of ‘neo-patriotism».     

Straight out the barrio: Ozomatli and the importance of place in the formation of Chicano/a popular culture in Los Angeles

Abstract

Ozomatli's history of formation, the multiplicity of its sounds, the role played by its music in enabling political activism and political coalitions illuminate the relations between identities and politics at the present moment. The group is grounded in Los Angeles contemporary Chicano/a culture and in the new social relations, new knowledges, and new sensibilities of an emerging global city in a transnational era. Speaking from the interstices between commercial culture and the new social movements, Ozomatli's music and political work offers us invaluable bottom‐up perspectives on the terrain of counter‐politics and cultural creation at the beginning of the twenty‐first century.     

A mundane voice

This essay offers strategies of speaking and studying ‘the mundane’ as a means to inaugurate an interventionist politics in cultural studies. Using Meaghan Morris’s example of anecdotal and colloquial address, a mundane voice is shown to situate and contextualize our understanding of major concepts circulating in international theory, and broaden the audience for academic debate. Studies of ‘everyday life’ have been hampered by a too-close affinity with hegemonic structures of knowledge production, requiring further gestures of parochialism to hasten a speaking position aware of its own partiality and limitations. Attention to the singularity or ‘this-ness’ of a cultural site humbles the tasks cultural studies can perform, introducing some curiosity to what we think we know about the cultures from which we speak. Reflecting on the fate of Michel de Certeau’s work in the boom period of cultural studies’ expansion, the paper suggests that cultural studies’ radical potential can be expanded if we are not inflected by preconceptions about what defines politics, especially against the fashions of intellectual commodification. Morris creates affective connections between past, present and future political concerns: a different temporality for political investment than the cycles of electoral models, or the dictates of commodity culture, afford, and one that cultural studies might still learn to adopt.     

Restricted and Elaborated Modes in the Cultural Analysis of Politics1

The “cultural turn” that swept across the social sciences a generation ago ushered in renewed attention to the cultural analysis of politics. Yet despite this growing area of research, there remains a lack of integration between cultural and noncultural studies of political phenomena. Should this state of affairs be a source of concern for cultural sociologists? I believe it should be. In this essay, I outline reasons why this is the case and what might be done to address this issue. Drawing loosely on Basil Bernstein’s distinction between “restricted” and “elaborated” codes, I suggest that cultural analyses of politics need to be more “elaborated” in nature and I offer three guidelines that can orient this type of research program.     

Ulak (The Messenger): a mystic fable of Islamic messianism

Although modernity considers religion as a fable, religion has always been part of modern politics. The ‘return of religion’ in global politics, which marks the contemporary political and cultural imagination, accentuates this paradox. Religion has now become indispensible for the idea of truth. In this article, I approach this problematique by discussing the relationship between religion and art in terms of their relation to the idea of truth. In this respect, I focus on a Turkish film, Ulak (The Messenger), and analyze the film’s thought about religion and the link it establishes between the artistic/narrative fable and the idea of truth. The film’s choice of Gnosticism as the language of the dispossessed indicates a political position in relation to both the ‘return of religion’ and the popularity of the cultural turn in politics. On this basis, the article examines the film’s take on the concept of the event as a miracle (in religious messianism), contrasting it with the philosophy of revolution. Thus, it navigates the ambivalent border between art and non-art, between the mystic fable and politics. With modernity, it is said that, art has replaced religion and borrowed its sacredness. A reverse process in place today: a resacralization of art and politics. Art and religion share a common element: illusion. However, art profanes illusion, while religion sacralizes it. On this basis, the article concludes that Ulak is a cinematic form of antiphilosophy. It is a spectacular movie as a critique of institutional religion, yet it is captivated by the understanding of truth as a miracle, by the truth of the fable. Following Badiou, who views art as a truth procedure, one could say that Ulak’s potential to clarify the value of the truth event remains questionable.     

Star Architects,Urban Spectacles,and Global Brands: Exploring the Case of the Tokyo Olympics 2020

Olympic stadia are often regarded as political showcases stemming from a range of influences: the host nation's international politics, the interests of transnational capitalism, site‐specific meanings, and the power of iconic architecture. By examining the 2020 Tokyo Olympic main stadium as a case study, this article analyzes the controversial Zaha Hadid Tokyo stadium design in relation to the Japanese national branding initiative. The article argues that branding should be seen as part of an economic and cultural system that seems to enhance the global value of iconic architects and their buildings. Yet the power of brands can be understood as contingent. Their ambivalent nature entails a tension between exclusiveness and banality; additionally, branded architects may find it difficult to work across the different regimes of global and local politics, and they are of course also constrained by the logic of neoliberal transnational capitalism. By investigating a major global branded architect, Zaha Hadid, the article considers why a new image of Japan could not be adequately created by Hadid's aesthetics and narratives of the Olympic stadium, which could have been regarded as a national cultural legacy. The article then discusses the contested processes of image‐making and narrative creation in relation to the representation of Japan in contemporary Olympic culture. The article concludes with an examination of Kengo Kuma's architecture language in his 2020 Tokyo Olympics stadium design.     

Humor and satire in politics: Introducing cultural sociology to the field

The landscape of political humor and satire is changing rapidly, and it is becoming an increasingly relevant aspect of our culture. Although scholars have been actively trying to capture this change, majority of the existing frameworks for understanding humor and satire in politics still reduce these phenomena to mere genres or rhetoric tools. In addition, they provide insufficient accounts concerning the reception of humor and satire, and neglect to interpret and explain what they communicate. In the article, a general understanding of humor and satire outside of a political context, followed by an overview of studies discussing humor and satire in politics through their applications in social movements, as leadership tools, and through their manifestations in mass media has been presented. Lastly, a cultural sociological perspective to the field has been introduced. It has been argued that approaching humor and satire in politics through a structural hermeneutic method of the Strong Program will enable us to recognize and treat political humor and satire as autonomous and complex cultural systems which carry an internal power to move people.     

Street art in non-capital urban centres: between exploiting commercial appeal and expressing social concerns

ABSTRACT

How do local cultural agents in particular places adopt new policies towards street art as having commercial and political value? The present article takes up this question through a discussion of street art festivals and their role within urban culture and cultural policies in two large Russian cities. It considers the activities of cultural intermediaries promoting street art vis-à-vis the existing constellation of over-centralized politics, creative industries, urban development and precarious labour. Drawing on fieldwork in these cities and conducting critical sociological analysis of the street art curating, I show how the appropriation of street art by cultural intermediaries is subtly changing its ecology and values and argue that this change contributes to the range of ambivalences of neoliberal cultural politics. The article also sheds light on cultural policy and practice in Russia at a juncture characterised by the impact of globalization, on the one hand, and the country's isolationist and conservative politics, on the other.     

"They're Worse Off Than Us"- The Social Construction of European Space and Boundaries in the German/Polish Twin-City Guben-Gubin

In the context of globalization and European integration, the interplay between social boundaries and territorially defined political borders becomes more complex in that they become increasingly delinked. In some regional settings, this might imply that while the political border is softened, the socio-cultural closure between the border communities becomes even tighter. This article investigates this issue in relation to the German-Polish border region. Looking at the German-Polish twin-city, Guben-Gubin, the first section describes the ways in which cultural closure materializes. Emphasis is given to the link between cultural closure and an increasing alienation of local people from the Europeanized symbolic cross-border politics pursued by the local and regional political elite(s). The second section, however, argues that the "cultural closure" thesis is perhaps too simplistic to grasp the complexity of cross-border interaction of local people. Investigating the cross-border strategies of three milieux, the article concludes that what can be found in a setting like Guben-Gubin is in fact a complex configuration of openings and closures at various spatial and symbolic levels, sometimes taking place simultaneously in one and the same milieu.     

Outlines of a Critical Sociology of Consumption: Beyond Moralism and Celebration

The 'new' sociology of consumption that emerged in the 1980s acknowledged that consumption is a significant cultural and social practice and not just a mere signifier of the pathological elements of contemporary societies. Arguably, this rehabilitation of consumption has overshot its mark and has led to an overly positive, complacent and celebratory rendering of consumption and to an overriding concern with the symbolic and communicative dimension of goods. Driven by the debates on globalization, political consumerism and the relation between consumption and citizenship, current work shows increased interest in the politics of consumption. The article explores in what directions the classic concern with the symbolic and communicative dimension of goods might be taken if it is more thoroughly grounded in an analysis of the politics of consumption and of the current reconfigurations of consumers and citizens. The overall aim is to outline a basis for a critical sociology of consumption.     

Migrant Workers Home and its practices on shaping the culture and community of ‘New Working Class’: a criticism on cultural-political activism in contemporary China

ABSTRACT

New Workers Home (Beijing, China) has been the most important site of activism and organizing of New Workers culture in Mainland China over the past 15 years. Beyond today’s intellectual atmosphere of liberal and ‘left-phobia’ in China, exploring the formation of a New Working Class can give us a new sense of class discourse and imagination of socialist China in the dimensions of both knowledge and activism. Based on my half-year fieldwork in New Workers Home and participant observation in knowledge and activism of New Workers culture, this paper aims at providing an in-depth analysis of the implications and tensions in the Migrant Workers Home’s imagination of New Workers culture and the organization’s energy and internal turbulence in their imagination of the community of the New Working Class, through reviewing their cultural actions focusing on the ‘cultural battlefield’ and community culture of Pi Cun (an urban fringe village in Beijing), their wider actions in social enterprise, ecological agriculture, organizational works among New Workers and their own organization’s internal situation. The outline of the problematics in this paper can be drawn by putting forward the following questions. How is the New Workers culture shaped by Migrant Workers Home? According to the situation of New Workers in contemporary China, what is its imagination of this forming class? How does it intervene the forming of a New Working Class with its cultural activism? By establishing a museum, college, social enterprises and ecological farms, how do these practices show its imagination of labours’ culture and politics? Located in Beijing and facing special political conditions, how does it arrange the guidelines and strategies of movements? What are the dilemmas of these practices, strategies and real politics?     

Heavy metal in Turkey: Tracking the tensions of democratization in the 1990s

Music, as a form of public discourse, invariably becomes a social science field that is considered more in the postmodern era when the boundaries are blurred. This study examines the political and cultural links between the emergence of the heavy metal genre and Turkish democracy. There are correlations between the prevalence of heavy metal in Turkey and the country's social and political transition in the 1990s and the search for a new path. The main argument here is that, among the country's tense democratization efforts and social problems, the heavy metal genre also indirectly carries the distinct traces of a different political search for the youth of the 1990s, although not directly. Democratic politics is a process established by daily life with the direct influence of societal interactions, and Turkish politics, and cultural life, in this case, heavy metal, include important notions in this remarkable manner. The main point symbolized by metal music in Turkey was its lyrical and artistic ability to express different points of view loudly enough against the uniform religious and nationalist culture that could be offensive, while other mainstream ranges such as pop and arabesque music didn't mind this issue.     

Transcending the Nation-State?: The European Commission and the (Re)-Discovery of Europe

Abstract: This article examines the process of European integration from a cultural perspective. Taking up questions posed by social scientists and European Community (EC) officials concerning the possibility of transcending nation-state and nationalism in Europe, it explores the European Commission's attempts to do this, particularly through the EC's campaigns and initiatives for forging a sense of European identity and culture at the level of popular consciousness. Following Hobsbawn and Ranger, I argue that the history of EC cultural politics provides an interesting case study of invented traditions and manufactured heritage. The political implications and problems of using culture as a vehicle for nation-building at a pan-European level are analysed. The article concludes with a critical appraisal of the concept of European identity and questions whether the EC's project for constructing a post-nationalist political order in Europe is feasible or politically desirable.     

The Cultural Politics of Childhood: Public Policies in Post‐authoritarian Chile

This article offers an interpretation of the cultural politics of childhood during the second decade of post‐authoritarian democracy in Chile (2001–2010), as sustained by the discourse of public policies in this area. I understand cultural politics as the combination of cultural contexts, social practices and political processes through which childhood is constructed in different societies and different times James and James (2008b). I develop a ‘textual’ analysis focusing on the discourse of the most recent official governmental policy document on childhood, which is still in force, as well as a ‘contextual’ analysis that examines the historical relationship between the state, public policies and childhood in different periods of Chile's history as a republic.     

Culture and Its Discontents: Recent Theorizing on the Cultural Dimensions of Protest*

Recent analyses of the cultural dimensions of protest have gone some distance in correcting the structuralist and instrumentalist biases of early resource mobilization and political process models. They remain limited, however, by their retention of dichotomous conceptions of culture and structure in the emergence of protest, of cultural and instrumental orientations in ongoing collective action, and of cultural and political targets of protest. As a result, they have neglected, respectively, continuities between structured inequalities and the movement challenges that are made to them, the cultural shaping of instrumentally rational decisionmaking, and the strategic possibilities that lay in cultural challenge made within the sphere of institutional politics. I draw on recent theorizing in the sociology of culture and on several case studies of collective action in order to highlight these lacunae and to propose analytical alternatives.     

Gendering the Bone: The Politics of Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina1

This article explores and intervenes in the deadlock produced by the identifications of bodily remains resulting from genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Every day, in that country, bodily remains are exhumed, counted, reassociated, managed and consecrated as ethnic remains. This is done through the strategic collaboration of forensic science; multiculturalist post‐conflict management, with its politics of reconciliation; and religious ritual — an uncouth alliance between the scientist, the bureaucrat and the priest. In doing so, the scientist, the bureaucrat and the priest assume the perspective of the perpetrator of the crime. For it is in the fantasy of the perpetrator that the executed person is an ethnic other. The article intervenes by posing the question: what different praxis could deactivate the reification of bones as ethnic victims, would stop the prolongation of the injurious gaze of the perpetrator and would return the bones to common use through which we can contemplate hope after genocide? In other words, what is the politics that will enable us to be hopeful subjects in relation to these bones? Drawing on cultural production in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the article both challenges and goes beyond current mainstream political choices. Thus, it identifies and strengthens hopeful politics in cultural‐as‐political practices that productively bear witness to the precariousness of life. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is mainly women artists who harness traumatic events and the loss of the past and present in order to announce a more hopeful politics. What this hopeful politics after genocide is, through what praxis is it enacted, and by which subjects are the main concerns of this article.     

Theorizing Globalization

I sketch aspects of a critical theory of globalization that will discuss the fundamental transformations in the world economy, politics, and culture in a dialectical framework that distinguishes between progressive and emancipatory features and oppressive and negative attributes. This requires articulations of the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization and the ways that globalization both is imposed from above and yet can be contested and reconfigured from below. I argue that the key to understanding globalization is theorizing it as at once a product of technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism in which economic, technological, political, and cultural features are intertwined. From this perspective, one should avoid both technological and economic determinism and all one–sided optics of globalization in favor of a view that theorizes globalization as a highly complex, contradictory, and thus ambiguous set of institutions and social relations, as well as one involving flows of goods, services, ideas, technologies, cultural forms, and people.     

The Hobo Anomalous: Class,minorities and political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World

This article is an analysis of minority political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Against the tendency in recent social and cultural theory to dichotomize class and difference, it argues that it was in and through the IWW's formulation of class that minority political and cultural invention occurred. Using the framework of Deleuze and Guattari's minor politics, the article shows how the IWW's composition in the simultaneously diffuse and cramped plane of work operated against the major political identities and subjects of worker, immigrant, American, citizen and 'people', and towards the creation of minority political knowledges, tactics and cultural styles premised on the condition that 'the people are missing'. Seeking to understand the IWW's modes and techniques of invention, the article explores the general plane of IWW composition, its particular political and cultural expressions (in songs, manifestos, cartoons and tactics), and its minor mode of authorship. The article focuses in particular on two aspects of IWW minority composition, the itinerant worker, or hobo, and the politics of sabotage.     

HYBRIDITY AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

There is a steady consensus within academic cultural studies concerning the fact that reifications (or ‘essentializations’) of ethnicity, whether literally meant or practically used, like reifications involving gender or national identity, are not good from a political perspective. The common response invokes hybridity as a counter-concept strong enough to dissolve the dangers of either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic reification and by the same token is able to ground a sufficiently fluid politics of identity/difference that might warrant the cultural redemption of the subaltern. Nevertheless, the political force of hybridity, such as it may be, remains to a large extent contained within a politics of the colour line. Without abandoning it, that is, without altogether abandoning the terrain of a politics of the subject, it would seem necessary to move beyond the theorization of hybridity in cultural studies in order to find ways to articulate subaltern resistance against the terror of dominant identities more effectively within a larger commitment to economic justice.

Hybridity categories, once they solidify into a strategic political project, circumscribe political life to subjective agency; but subjective agency does not exhaust the political. Ultimately, the postulation of subjective agency as the limit of the political remains trapped within a Cartesian game of calculation and counter-calculation which is by its very nature unable to break through and beyond the internalization of hegemony. Some appeal to a position of exteriority remains necessary in order to restitute the possibility of what,following Balibar, we might call ‘unconditional insurrection’. Unconditional insurrection does not name a voluntaristic project of world revolution. It names, rather, the possibility of an other history, of an alternative historical memory: a memory made possible by the simple fact that things could be, and could have been, other than what they are.