‘Intercourse in every direction’: America as global phenomenon

In news magazines and scholarly journals a wide‐ranging ‘globe‐talk’ has arisen since the 1970s in response to recent transformations in the world. Much of the discourse reflects a growing international concern about U.S. dominance of the world’s economy and cultural production. Understandably, the discourse is about agency. The United States has dominated global affairs since the Second World War and especially since the end of the Cold War ‐ militarily, economically, and culturally. It is sometimes forgotten, however, how much America is a product of the internationalizing processes it has come to symbolize. This essay argues that the United States is as much a product as an agent of globalization and that, if we accept the logic of globalization, the United States as a national culture is being undermined in much the same ways as other countries. The title of the paper is borrowed from the Communist Manifesto, an ironically prescient document that 150 years ago outlined the processes of globalization that characterize America’s global history and forecast the transformations we experience worldwide today.     

New soldiers and empty boys: imaging traumatic memory

This essay reconstructs one important context for images published by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW): the testimonial practices of anti-war veterans. First in small rap sessions, and then in unofficial public hearings, anti-war veterans recollected their war experiences in an effort to inform civilians about the US war in Vietnam, and mobilise them to oppose it. Photographs of introspective veterans – lost in memory – provide a visual idiom for the experience of ‘flashing back’ that was the basis for veterans’ testimony. If these photographs signify the central role of self-reflection in veterans’ anti-war organising, they also imply a distrust of graphic war photography – both images disseminated by the mainstream media and atrocity photographs taken by soldiers themselves. Anti-war veterans worried that war photographs catered to a consumerist appetite for intense, vicarious experience and provoked only a fleeting sense of revulsion. Compounding this distrust of graphic imagery was the circulation of war souvenirs, atrocity photographs taken by soldiers of their dead and wounded victims. Exploring portraiture as an alternative to photojournalism, this essay situates images of introspective veterans in relation to the pioneering activism of the VVAW and allies them with images produced by other activists working in the visual field, focusing on Martha Rosler’s ‘Empty Boys’.     

Disability in British poetry of the First World War

In 2005, K.D. Laird published an abrasive critique of the poem ‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen. This iconic trench poet of the First World War was accused of portraying his impaired veteran as a tragic victim of loss. However, 50?years before the modern disability movement, Owen lacked the language to interpret impairment as oppression. What ‘Disabled’ requires is a contextual analysis that integrates its literary qualities with the historical conditions. This article applies such an approach. Firstly, the technical devices used to tell the story are examined: for example, rhyming, verse structure and allusions. Secondly, the experience of impairment represented in the poem is related to early-twentieth-century British society: in particular to the initial patriotic enthusiasm for the War, to the influence of gender roles and to the limitations of state provision. In this way, we see how Owen’s literary image is situated within a historical time frame.     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

Being and Landscape: An Ontological Inquiry into a Japanese Rural Community

This essay aims to reflect on the idea of landscape and our relationship with it by taking the Japanese notion of furusato (native place) in its ontological dimension. Grounded in Heidegger’s ‘phenomenology of Being’ and ‘ontology’, a phenomenological understanding of fieldwork experience in a Japanese rural community will be developed in order to rethink both the furusato and the ‘Being-landscape’ relation. As a consequence, we will be concerned not with how people speak about landscape, but with how the landscape speaks through people. What will be brought to light are the landscape’s moral and relational dimensions: namely, (i) the responsibility towards both our communities and future generations and (ii) a more-than-physical understanding of landscape that alerts us to our belonging to a common world comprised of relationships and tasks.     

The World Social Forum: Another World Might Be Possible

First, I briefly examine the genesis of debate to define the World Social Forum (WSF) as a contributor to the global justice movement (GJM), since its emergence in Brazil in 2001. I then consider Geoffrey Pleyers' argument identifying a central tension within the WSF, and the GJM in general, between actors seeking to achieve non-domination by expressing anti-power subjectivity and those for whom the path to non-domination lay in strategising and designing counter-powers. Describing what transpired at WSF Dakar 2011and debates since, I question Pleyers' classificatory schema as leading to an unhelpful essentialism. That is, identifying a ‘two paths’ ideal-type and setting out to locate it in the world serves to legitimise one ‘tendency’ of progressive social movements. By contrast with Pleyers' evenly balanced approach—treating of each ‘path’ as possessing the same positive and negative qualities, rather than as qualitatively different moments in the practice of opposing domination—I find that what he calls ‘the path of subjectivity’ might rather be understood as the product of a certain lack of appreciation of the nature of the demands that opposing political tyranny places upon particpants in an organisation or movement.     

Occupational Cultures and the Embodiment of Masculinity: Hairdressing,Estate Agency and Firefighting

Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded project, this article explores the implications of different occupational cultures for men's masculine identity. With a focus on embodiment and individual agency, it explores the argument that it is within ‘scenes of constraint’ that gendered identities are both ‘done’ and ‘undone’. In this article we examine embodied experience in occupational cultures commonly stereotyped as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ (hairdressing, estate agency and firefighting), showing how men conform to, draw upon and resist the gendered stereotypes associated with these occupations. What we argue is that gendered conceptions of ‘the body’ need to be differentiated from individual men's embodiment. Instead, processes of identification can be shown to emerge via embodied experiences of particular kinds of gendered body, and in the ways in which men negotiate the perception of these bodies in different occupational contexts.     

From Exclusion to Inclusion? The Legal Treatment of ‘Foreigners’ in Contemporary Japan

This article provides a survey of postwar Japan's policy toward ‘foreign’ settlers, focusing on the case of ‘zainichi Koreans’–Koreans who were taken forcefully, or migrated voluntarily, from Korea to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910–45) and settled down in Japan after World War II, and their descendants residing in Japan. The article explores how the Japanese government and society have treated them since the end of World War II, thus showing that Japan's policy toward foreign settlers has been changing from one of ‘exclusion’ to one of ‘inclusion,’ though there still remain some institutional barriers.     

Cursed creatives: alienation,sublimation, and the plight of contemporary creative work

ABSTRACT

This paper connects the critical discourse on the ‘creative class’ with a longstanding lineage of thought on creativity in psychoanalysis, demonstrating their combined value in understanding worker subjectivity and exposing the perils of contemporary creative work. Drawing upon object relations theorizing in particular, the argument is made that the ‘objects’ of contemporary creative work coupled with its surrounding ‘potential space’ prove severely impoverished, giving rise to a newfound experience of alienation. Accounts of creative workers are presented to further elucidate alienation’s unconscious correlates, as well as to suggest ways of mitigating creativity’s compromised expression through the process of ‘sublimation’ – a concept central to the psychoanalytic theorizing on creativity, yet wholly absent from the contemporary discourse. Implications for the critical study of the ‘creative class’ are discussed.     

What people do with pictures

This article argues that there is no single ‘voice’ that picturing makes audible, nor any single image that it makes visible. It examines how members of two different groups – hospital in-patients and homeless people – talk about photographs they had taken using cameras supplied by the researcher. Examples of these photographs are used in the article to examine conventions of picturing, different ways of narrating content and production, and movement of pictures through space and time. The argument is made that these features are variously deployed in explanations of what photographs mean. This leads to the conclusion that what pictures portray and what stories narrate are better thought of as versions of our experience of the world than as constructions of the world that we experience.     

Return Migration and Transnationalism: How Are the Two Connected?

Return migration and migrant transnationalism are key phenomena in research on international migration. Here we examine how the two are connected. The article introduces a special section and draws partly upon this selection of papers and partly upon the broader literature. First, we argue that there is often a blurred boundary between mobility as a transnational practice, for instance in the form of return visits, and purportedly permanent or long‐term return migration. Second, we examine the effects of transnationalism on return migration intentions and experiences. Third, we explore how migration trajectories, involving various forms of ‘return’ moves, create different forms of transnationalism. Examples include the ‘reverse transnational’ practices of returnees and the ‘residual transnationalism’ of migrants who have had an unsuccessful return experience and decided to settle permanently abroad. We end by considering how both return migration and transnationalism exist in the interplay between the personal and the social.     

ORIENTALISM RECONSIDERED: ISRAELI MEDIA AND THE ARTICULATION OF RESISTANCE

Questions of the relation between race and nationality are at the centre of Israel' defence narrative and its violence, its deployment of blood and domination of land and bodies. Usually, the discourse of violence in a nation' logic involves images of penetration to borders and land. However, this essay is about internal violence, about the reproduction of the state not through land, but through bodies, and babies, narratives and memory, knowledge and censorship. To understand this case is to reconsider questions of how Orientalism, as a practice of knowledge and of violence works. The author revisits the concept of Orientalism thereby relocating the different ways in which it internally works within the Israeli nation state. To illustrate her claim, she finds it useful to locate parallel features in the discourse of the Gulf War and the image of Saddam Hussein, created by Western media, and the discourse of the kidnapped Yemenite babies scandal and the image of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, created by Israeli media. Both cases involve questions of violence, resistance and Western domination. In the author' analysis, she focuses on the complexity in which Orientalism functions when the state demarcates people and identities rather then land and borders. It will be shown how concepts of violence, race and nationalism are reproduced through the media discourse of the kidnapped Yemenite babies at the junction of social conflict and resistance. A sample of newspaper reports on the Yemenite babies affair during the resistance of Rabbi Meshulam are examined, known in Israel as the ‘The Fortification in Yahud’. The author' analysis is also based on her experience as an investigative reporter covering the Yemenite babies affair, and first hand observation of the resistance of Rabbi Meshulam.¹     

The romantic self and the politics of internet commercialization

This essay looks at some examples of ways that certain pre-existing imaginary forms of ‘selfhood’ have been culturally mapped onto historically pivotal moments in the Internet’s development. It focuses less on how technologies have shaped culture than on the reverse: on certain ways that culture has shaped society’s embrace of the Internet. What the Internet is and will come to be, the essay suggests, is partly a matter of who we expect to be when we sit down to use it. Specifically, it looks at two key examples of ways that certain pre-existing imaginary forms of selfhood – ways of understanding oneself as a self – have been culturally mapped onto historically pivotal moments in the Internet’s development: the initial explosion of the Internet in the early 1990s and its supporting ethos exemplified by Wired magazine, and the Open Source Movement in the late 1990s. The essay suggests that significant parts of the culture of computing have been not only individualist, but also composed of two distinct if intertwined strands of individualism, romantic and utilitarian, and that their difference has political significance. Like its ancestor, the 1960s counterculture, the case of the computer culture suggests that romantic individualism stands in a tangential relation to capitalist property relations (and the utilitarian ‘I’ they imply), sometimes working in concert with markets and privatization, as was the case in the early 1990s, and sometimes working to call them into question, as was the case towards the end of the 1990s.     

Navigating the ‘shadow of loss’ in mental health social work

ABSTRACT

The human experience of loss has been at the centre of psychoanalytic understandings of the human condition since Freud’s first writings on ‘melancholia’. This essay draws on psychodynamic theory to show how workers who are attuned to the experience of loss in service users can shape their interventions accordingly. By reflecting on how a diagnosis of ‘depression’ might better be understood as the rippling wave of past grief, professionals can utilise the dynamics of projection, transference and containment to help understand the emotional pain of individuals they support. But this essay also suggests that the use of psychodynamic practice works best when it is bolstered by other frameworks – in this case an understanding of systems theory. When the two traditions are utilised together, they provide an understanding of psychic phenomena which can enable social workers to build a basis for effective interventions with service users experiencing mental distress.     

READING THE FUTURE

This essay asks how cultural studies practitioners can begin to found a critical practice that responds to the events of September 11 and their aftermath. Using Theodor Adorno' concept of ‘semi-erudition’, as developed in his analysis of horoscope readers in ‘The Stars Down to Earth’, together with Homi Bhabha' arguments about the links between racial stereotyping and fetishism, it is argued that those working in the discipline of cultural studies must respond to the multi-layered address of the official discourse regarding the ‘war on terrorism’ without becoming complacent about our own position vis-à-vis this discourse. The author connects this argument with a reading of Herman Melville' novella Benito Cereno to discuss the problem of American ‘innocence’ in this context. The concluding question is how, in the face of the current crisis, to begin to practice a truly responsive ‘criticism’, in the full sense of the term, one able to provide a different reading of the present and in turn affect the future.     

Work,family and public policy dynamics in France

To understand the relationships between changes to the family and changes to the sphere of work and employment, and how they have developed over time, requires considering a third factor, i.e. public policies, and in particular family policies. In this article, we attempt to clarify theoretically these interactions by taking into account the changes that have taken place in France since World War II. To appraise the French configuration in a special issue on Southern Europe, we begin by explaining why we consider France is following a ‘Southern path’. In a second section, we argue that family transformations are mainly the result of changes that affect work and employment. A similar process combining individualisation, flexibility and precariousness is affecting both spheres of existence. In a last section, we prose a matrix of ideas, ideologies and outcomes to understand the main family policy reforms since World War II.     

The concept of reflection: is it skill based or values?

Reflection, reflectivity, reflective practice, reflective praxis and critical reflection are all dialogical terms used interchangeably to mean different things. It is timely to take time out and pause on this important concept to consider the wider implications of its use. Whatever reflection is, we know there are difficulties in identifying this complex idea writers, practitioners and scholars constantly engage with reflection in new debates about ‘how to do it better’ assuming the ‘it’ is something assessed and understood. More worryingly a student’s ability to reflect is assessed assuming the idea of reflective practice is a measureable phenomenon. Some have identified problems of assessing reflection. There is limited empirical evidence of what is reflection. In the substantial literature on reflection we have failed to ask the question – ‘What is reflection it if doesn’t exist that I might be able to perform it better and others can measure?’ The problem of reflection is more complicated when presenting reflective performance through language, which will also be explored. This article presents a challenge to contemporary ideas of the way in which reflection is conceptualised and understood. The article concludes with insights and a way forward for a new argument on reflection and how it might be linked to virtue ethics rather than it being viewed as a skill that can be taught.     

Calling for accounts: numbers, monsters and membership1

This article questions how accounts are marked. In asking why some accounts ‘pass muster’ and others fail, the analysis brings into focus the extent to which membership work helps hold the social and the technical apart. The analysis contrasts a long insistence on narrative forms of interaction as defining conditions of co‐presence with numerical regimes in which there is an implicit deletion of social contact under fashionable slogans like ‘action at a distance’. Taking numbers to act as ‘bearers of culture’, the paper contests the idea that numerical forms of accountability delete the membership work traditionally associated with narrative forms of account. Attending closely to ‘occasions’ in which it is appropriate for members to deploy numerical accounts rather than verbal accounts, the argument challenges the idea that a face to face negotiation of social order has been superceded by a pervasive use of perfonnance targets. The article begins by exploring how ‘calls to account’ are created by a reporting of adverse budget variatices within organizations. Using an extended example to consider how such ‘gaps’ affect a manager's conduct towards a spouse who is sick, the analysis shows how the use of numbers becomes crucial to sustaining one's affiliation across a range of memberships. As illustrated, the rehabilitation of numerical artefacts into conceptions of the social greatly expands possibilities for interaction beyond that anticipated by the sociological ideal of ‘co‐presence’.