The end(s) of immanence in the anthropocene: militarized ecologies and the future of Deleuzian thought

Two features bear down fundamentally on our current historical occasion: structures of security, and breakdowns of planetary ecosystems. This essay argues that Deleuze is not only tracing a “geophilosophy” (that is, a nonhuman-centered theory of history that includes a geohistory of the planet) that moves from nomadic through State and finally through neoliberal forms that extend beyond the power of the State, but that he is also moving toward a theory of “control” that can teach us a great deal about the rise of the security society and its relation to the anthropocene. More specifically, this essay argues that philosophy is at a moment when the stakes of Deleuze’s conceptualizations of “immanence” have changed. This change hinges on the ecological circumstances of the twenty-first century – a set of conditions considerably underway, involving a course unlikely to change in time to reverse the seriousness of the situation (due in part to the supremacy of a self-destructive international neoliberal politics). The essay concludes by more sharply defining the workings of security in relation to immanence in the anthropocene.     

Public opinion and the Canadian political crisis*

This survey of public opinion offers little hope of a speedy resolution to the conflict between the federal government and the government of Quebec by reference to a wider public debate than is provided for in the existing electoral machinery. In Quebec, the program of the Parti Quebecois is supported by about one-third of the population. However, the very great majority of Quebecers wants recognition of the special status of French in their province, in line with the recent language legislation of the pq government. French Quebecers also strongly support the extension of bilingual opportunities in education and government in the rest of Canada, policies which are presently beyond the jurisdiction of the federal government and which provincial governments are not yet prepared to enact. A clear majority of Canadians outside Quebec opposes provisions for the special status of French within Quebec as the language of work and of schooling for non-English-speaking immigrants, and only a small majority supports the extension of educational and governmental facilities in French outside Quebec. Differences in public opinion are equally pronounced with respect to the issues of concessions and economic agreement. The great majority of Quebecers favours an economic agreement with the rest of Canada if the province becomes independent. Outside Quebec only a bare majority of Canadians supports any concessions to Quebec to prevent separation, and a large proportion of them draws the line at “minor” concessions. Similarly, only a slight majority of Canadians outside of Quebec is prepared to approve of the negotiation of an economic agreement should a majority of Quebecers vote for independence, and it seems likely that a majority in English Canada would oppose any concrete suggestions for economic union. Further insights into the structure of these political attitudes can be obtained from Table V1, which shows gamma values measuring the associations between the individual items discussed so far and compares these associations for the two large non-minority groups - the French in Quebec and the non-French outside Quebec. The generally stronger associations in Quebec among the responses to items a to E -measuring support for conventional policies of bilingualism - indicate that French Quebecers are more likely to view the extension of these rights in Quebec and English Canada in terms of reciprocity and that their beliefs are more coherently organized than those of English Canadians. It is interesting to examine the relationship between support for English-language schooling for Canadians who move to Quebec versus provision for this schooling for people who do not speak English and move to Quebec. In English Canada the two policies are very strongly related; the gamma of 81 indicates that both policies are seen as part of a single dimension. But French Quebecers see these as two distinguishable issues, though they are still positively related (the gamma is.25). In Quebec there is little relationship between support for independence and attitudes to bilingualism. Support for independence is weakly, but negatively, correlated with support for English schooling for English Canadians who move to Quebec and with recognition of the right to communicate with the Quebec government in English. Supporters of independence tend to oppose common Federalist notions of bilingualism, but not as strongly as might be expected. What is suggested here is that “independen-tisme” is a reaction to conditions within Quebec - as indicated further by the definite association between support for independence and the measures to protect French within Quebec - rather than a reaction to conditions in Canada or an ethnocentric response to English Canadians generally. The data in Table VI also indicate that amongst non-French-speaking Canadians outside Quebec support for the extension of opportunities for the use of French in Canada is associated with support for the recognition of the special status of French in Quebec and with approval of a more conciliatory attitude to concessions and economic agreement with Quebec. The relevant coefficients are in the order of.30, indicating a fairly consistent attitudinal structure. In English Canada, therefore, attitudes to bilingualism reflect a general orientation towards political developments in Quebec which can be seen in terms of the response of a dominant ethnic group to the assertion of “civil rights” by an ethnic minority. In Quebec, on the other hand, problems of civil rights in majority-minority relations within Canada have little or nothing to do with the demand for the right to self-determination. This demand reflects rather the concentration of the French population and the historical continuity of the French community in Quebec, and arguments over the right to self-determination are based upon interpretations of political and economic conditions within Quebec. Within Quebec, therefore, we expect to explain attitudes to independence and language rights in terms of conventional theories of support for nationalist movements, while in the rest of Canada we concentrate on theories of prejudice and support for civil liberties.     

‘So few of us and so many of them’

Public protest against the Persian Gulf War in 1990–1 was only part of the story of US American women's resistance to war in general and to that war specifically. Although the gendering of war is seldom discussed outside feminist scholarship, the events of 11 September 2001 and its aftermath as well as all events and processes having to do with war are gendered events and processes. Both women and men participate in war in various ways, some of which, particularly in the case of women, are either not noticed, are deliberately ignored or made invisible. In this essay, the stories of some women who protested the Persian Gulf War are represented alongside questions that their narratives prompted about what constitutes anti-war work, and what the ramifications of such work are in the present international context.     

The biopower of beauty: humanitarian imperialisms and global feminisms in an age of terror

As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article, which appears as a companion essay to Minh-Ha T. Pham's "The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terror," offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite, the fashionably modern and implicitly Western woman, become convenient metaphors for articulating geopolitical contests of power as human rights concerns, as rescue missions, as beautifying mandates. This essay examines newer iterations of this opposition, after September 11, 2001, in order to demonstrate the critical resonance of a biopolitics of fashion and beauty. After the events of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush's administration launched a military and public relations campaign to promote U.S. national interests using the language of feminism and human rights. While these discourses in the United States helped to reinvigorate a declining economy, and specifically a flagging fashion industry (as Pham addresses in her companion essay), feminism abroad was deployed to very different ends. This article considers the establishment of the Kabul Beauty School by the nongovernmental organization Beauty without Borders, sponsored in large part by the U.S. fashion and beauty industries. Examining troubling histories of beauty's relation to morality, humanity, and security, as well as to neoliberal discourses of self-governance, the author teases out the biopower and biopolitics of beauty, enacted here through programs of empowerment that are inseparable from the geopolitical aims of the U.S. deployment in Afghanistan.     

Negotiating cultural boundaries: Confucianism and trans/national identity in Korea 1

Abstract

This essay looks to the complex intercultural relations of China and Korea to highlight two important issues in political theory and international relations: the transnational nature of world politics and the limits of analytical binaries such as East‐West and tradition‐modernity. Discussions of international politics in East Asia characteristically address issues of security and development studies. More recently, Confucianism has been mobilized as part of the clash of civilizations of Asia with the West. This essay will consider how cultural boundaries are negotiated within the region via an analysis of the workings of the transnational discourse of Confucianism in the construction of Korean identity. While many make truth claims about what ‘Confucianism’ means in Korea, this essay examines the discursive economies of ‘Confucian events’ in three overlapping social spaces: official, mass media, and academic. This essay will show the diversity of Confucianism within East Asia, and underline how rather than being a simple orthodoxy, the shape of Confucianism is an active political issue. While many try to define a core ‘Korean Confucianism’, I argue that we should use Confucianism as an analytical tool to understand something else, citing how some scholars are using Confucianism for the specific project of building democracy in Korea.     

A DOCUMENTARY REGIME OF VERIFICATION

This essay is concerned with a critical but under theorized practice of modern society – official identification. It makes two arguments about modern identification technologies: they develop within an archival problematization of identity, and secondly, they should be critically analyzed as practices of verification. Although the essay is historical in focus these two arguments are intended as an intervention in debates about contemporary practices of identification and surveillance. The essay examines the emergence of the passport in the US from the 1850s to the 1930s. The contested development of the conviction that the identity in a passport is in ‘fact’ someone's identity is the subject of this history of the passport. The passport is used to argue that official identification, as a modern problem was rethought as the collection, classification and circulation of information through new bureaucratic logics of objectivity. The subsequent assemblage of modern identification practices formed what is best understood as a documentary regime of verification that produced identity as a stable object critical to the governing practices of the modern state. The passport as a technology of verification foregrounds that the modern production of this ‘official identity’ through documents is collapsed into a truth claim, which presents that identity as self-evident.     

Changes in Community Organization Practice in Quebec (Canada)

Abstract

This paper examines the changes that occurred in community organization practice in the public establishments of Quebec (Canada) in the 1990s. The results of replicated statistical research show that many changes in community organization practice occurred during this period. Most of these changes can be explained by the socioeconomic crisis that took place in the 1990s that affected part of the middle class, driving the reorganization of public social services organizations and important cuts in the government's budget. In this context of crisis, the government of Quebec more easily accepted the local development strategy to overcome unemployment and poverty. These changes can also be explained by a change in community organizers' perceptions of their profession and their strategy for professional recognition observed in the creation of a professional association.     

Slavery and the American university: discourses of retrospective justice at Harvard and Brown

American universities have drawn international attention in recent years as their ties to and historical complicity in slavery and the slave trade have been increasingly exposed. This essay examines Harvard and Brown's self-reflective investigations into their involvement in slavery and highlights how the universities have deployed a discourse of retrospective justice as a way to grapple with the incorporation of the history of slavery into the heritage of their institutions. The essay finds that by engaging in conversations about memorialization, apology, and reparations, the universities attempt to confront the past while constructing the future.     

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.     

World Social Forum – possible perspectives

ABSTRACT

In the first part of this essay, I reflect on the divergences of opinion that have always existed in the process of the World Social Forum. This first part was written before the elections in Brazil last autumn. Since then Jair Bolsonaro has been installed as president of Brazil and the divergences I discuss in that first part have cooled down, at least in Brazil. Nevertheless, it remains important to record those divergences when we try to take further our debate about the future of the WSF process, as I do here as well, in the second part of my essay.     

Therapy with Remarried Couples—A Multitheoretical Perspective

Work with remarried couples is often difficult and complex. The first part of this essay provides a comprehensive discussion of the many issues faced by remarried couples under the headings of: emotional consequences of separation, the presence of children in the new relationship, finances, lack of guidelines and models, complexity of structure, and women in stepfamilies. The second part addresses therapy, by first tracing the past contributions to the field by structural, psychodynamic and cognitive models and then moving on to speculate about the offerings of Adult Attachment Theory, Trauma Theory, Narrative Therapy and Feminist Theory. Consistent with the awareness fostered by feminism the essay attempts to create a respectful dialogue between these models with the hope of gaining value from all while elevating none. The discussion is illustrated by a case example.     

Altering Masculinities: The Spanish Conquest and the Evolution of the Latin American Machismo

Machismo, a stereotype that emphasizes hypermasculinity and associated with the Latin American male, was a legacy of the Conquest of the Spanish conquistadores and their interpretation of and reaction to the indigenous two-spirit. It was the product of the rape of indigenous women, the response to indigenous imperial ritual, and the sublimation of indigenous male sexuality. It was a response to social and religious control of the male body. As such, it is not something that is easily eradicated. Through an understanding of the complex roots of this variant of masculinity, however, it may be possible to filter out some of the negative traits and highlight the more positive. This essay examines the interactions between the Spaniards and indigenous peoples of the Americas and the interpretations of indigenous sexualities, genders, and social roles by the Spanish authorities, and how it all participates in the construction of the Latin American machismo.     

Quebec Sociology: A Discipline and its Object

Quebec sociology and Quebec society are categorically distinct from other sociologies and countries. Both are “communities,” both have French-speaking majorities, and both exist in Anglo-Saxon environments. As well, Quebec sociology has always been and continues to be obsessed by the national question. Interpretations proposed by sociologists—predominantly French-speaking—of and about the Quebec Question have never been independent of the struggles in which they have taken place. In fact, sociological readings of nationalism in Quebec appear to be a direct consequence of their social position and relationship with political power. Through the prism of sociology, the French-speaking collectivity in Canada has been, successively and simultaneously, characterized through categories of race, ethnic group, society, and nation. 2 This article presents five ways in which sociologists have represented Quebec society. First, the Pioneers: Léon Gérin and Marius Barbeau, or the Quebec “Difference” as a handicap. Second, the characterization of Quebec through race, territory, and soul. Third provides the external perspectives of Miner and Hughes. Fourth will examine the Laval (Quebec) School. Finally, this article will examine Quebec Society as either an ethnic or civic nation. Each theme has been set chronologically in specific periods of Quebec sociology: the Pioneers (Part 1 and 2, before 1940); the institutionalization of academic sociology (Part 3 and 4, 1940-1969); and the “nationalization” and professionalization of sociology (Part 5, 1970 to the present).     

PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES

This essay traces a body of work, as it emerges in the space between visual art and an engagement in the public sphere. A range of projects and exhibitions, using photography as medium, is described in the context of a discussion about the complexity of the photographic transaction. All of these projects explore notions of intimacy, pushing at the boundaries between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ in the South African public cultural domain. The essay focuses particularly on Hotel Yeoville (2010), a participatory public art project-based online and in the library of the old Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville. Yeoville's estimated 40,000 inhabitants are largely disenfranchised migrants and refugees from every part of the African continent. The project comprised a website and an exhibition space with a series of digital, interactive booths in which members of the public were invited to document themselves through mapping, video, photography, text and social media applications. The essay reflects upon the performative, evocative and expressive potentials of the media platforms that could be accessed through the Hotel Yeoville installation and in this particular social and political context asks questions about the photographic encounter and its relationship to self-representation, truth, knowledge and power.     

Social Economy and Home Care Services in Quebec: Co-Production or Co-Construction?

Third sector organizations have always played a significant role in the supply of home support services in Quebec, but this supply of services attained a crucial development phase in 1996, with the creation of 100 or so domestic help social economy enterprises (DHSEEs). These DHSEEs complemented the supply of public services delivered by the Quebec state, thus de facto taking part in the dynamics of co-production of services in the context of a mixed economy including the third sector. However, beyond that co-production, these enterprises also have to position themselves in a process of co-construction with the state, that is, in the joint, partnership-oriented construction of public policy, which provides the framework for their participation in services of public interest. Analysis of this public policy thus shows that the situation of DHSEEs in Quebec has swung, depending on the period, between co-production and various types of co-construction. A number of restrictive budget policies and subcontracting practices adopted by the Quebec state, along with tensions among DHSEE groups, curtailed the development of a genuine co-construction process during the 2000s.     

Introduction

Abstract

“What impact has city life on the individual–our behavior, personality, values, relationships?” George Simmel's 1905 publication of “The metropolis and mental life” remains a seminal essay on this central yet neglected question which we now term “urban psychology.” The centenary of Simmel's essay in 2005 is an apt time to take stock of the history and current status of urban psychology, with a special issue of this journal gathering data-based articles on diverse aspects of urban psychology. This four-part article (a) summarizes Simmel's 1905 essay, (b) comments on the dramatic population trends since 1905, (c) elaborates on 10 remarkable points about urban psychology, past and present, and (d) previews the five urban pychology reports in this special issue.     

Social closure in American elite higher education

Elite college admissions exemplify processes of social closure in which status-group conflict, organizational self-interest, the strategic use of cultural ideals of merit, and broader social trends and contingent historical events interweave to shape institutional power in the United States. The Chosen, Jerome Karabel’s monumental study of the history of college admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from 1900 to 2005, offers a political sociology of elite recruitment and a cultural and social history of the definition of merit that has guided these three schools and shaped much current thinking about college admissions. As Max Weber reminded us, the very definition of cultural ideals of an epoch bear the stamp of elite group domination: not cultural ideals but cultural interests and their strategic uses guide institutional power. The book provides an impressive empirical demonstration of that proposition: it identifies four different definitions of merit as organizational gatekeeping tools that have guided Harvard, Yale, and Princeton over the last hundred years and shows how these definitions were molded by status-group conflict and organizational interests. This essay outlines the central arguments of Karabel’s book; it identifies key contributions for our understanding of the history, culture, organizational interests, and politics of these three institutions; it highlights the social closure framework guiding the analysis; and it reflects on a fundamental ambiguity in Karabel’s thinking about meritocratic ideals as governing principles for modern stratified societies. A review essay on Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005,

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Feminist Readings on Abu Ghraib: Introduction

This article examines feminist responses to mainstream media coverage of female terrorists in West Germany during 1977. Women in left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) and ‘Movement 2. June’ (‘Bewegung 2. Juni’) inspired a gendered discourse reflecting a cultural unease about women participating in political violence, in which the media propagated notions that posited female terrorists as ‘unnatural’ women. This analysis demonstrates how different ‘Alltagstheorien’ (everyday or common sense theories) on female terrorists we find in West German media publications in the 1970s and 1980s served as a springboard for West German feminist activists to examine arguments about violence as legitimate means in their own political communities. This essay begins by briefly outlining key feminist positions on political violence that have made invisible the complex debates taking place in the 1970s. The second part of the essay uses images of female terrorists circulated by the West German media, such as the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror), to contextualize the ‘Alltagstheorien’ the magazine propagated in an article covering RAF actions in 1977. The third and main part of the essay then examines the responses this and other articles elicited from contemporaneous feminist movement publications.     

Trauma Screening in Students Attending a Medical University

Abstract

Clinicians seldom assess trauma history in patients who seek treatment for psychological problems, yet trauma exposure is often related to psychological distress. Assessing trauma history can provide valuable information for treatment conceptualization and provision, although patients may not spontaneously share their histories because of embarrassment, avoidance, or other concerns. The authors compared 73 students at a southeastern US medical university who sought counseling and psychological services and completed intake paperwork without a trauma screen with 130 students whose intake procedures included trauma screening. They found that (a) patients who were specifically asked about trauma history were more likely to report such events, (b) previous physical assaults with a weapon were related to current psychological distress, and (c) physical assaults with or without a weapon were related to clinically significant psychological distress. These findings suggest that screening for lifetime trauma history should be a standard part of mental health screenings in similar medical university counseling centers.     

The junior hospital doctors' pay dispute 1975-1976: an analysis of events, issues and conflicts

In late 1975, for the first time in the history of the National Health Service, junior hospital doctors in the United Kingdom took industrial action. Their pay and working conditions were basic issues, but the dispute was complex. The first part of this article describes these complexities - the significant events, and the grievances and their resolution. In the second part the dispute is analysed in terms of its causes, effects and implications, particularly for the medical profession. The ambivalence, confusion and ignorance about the new contract and the question of breaking government pay policy, problems of representation, and conflicts of interests within the profession are highlighted. It is suggested that the significant economic gains of the junior doctors were not achieved by industrial action.