Forces of Altermodernization: Urban Social Movements and the New Urban Question in Contemporary Poland

The article discusses contemporary Polish ‘right to the city’ movements and their potential for creating change, described here as the potential for ‘alternative modernization’, a term rooted in the alterglobalist movement. The waning of the latter’s energy has fostered the emergence of local movements focused on protest and reform. In Poland, both an historical anti-urbanity and monologic patterns of regime transformation (the latter producing the ‘anti-city’) have become points of reference for urban movements and their demand for alternative patterns of modernization, called here altermodernization. The altermodernist model focuses, among other things, on discourses and praxis of decommodification, institutional reform and visions of a ‘well-organized city’. The article is primarily a product of desk research and the author’s own materials based on in-depth interviews collected in six Polish cities as well as participant observation and content analysis.     

Family Change and New Balance of Family Roles: The Case of Siberia

The paper examines results of the study of the phenomenon of contemporary fatherhood from the viewpoint of the transformation of men's family roles. The modernization of marriage and family in Russia has led to an increasing dominance of individual values: broader freedom of choice for the woman and the man both in the family and in social fields, the equality of spouses or partners, as well as higher opportunities for self-realization. The Russian husband–wife ‘equality’ in exercising the role of ‘breadwinner’ seems to further diminish the man's role in the family and leads to a weakening of the function of social fatherhood; in consequence, fathers take less responsibility for the rearing and socialization of their offspring.     

Problems of Taxonomy,Issues of Class,Citizenship, Consumption,and Avdot’ia Smirnova’s KoKoKo (2012)

Sundry discussions of Russian society by scholars, journalists, and politicians suffer from imprecise taxonomy, wielding labels such as middle class, civil society, and creative class in an automatic transfer of discursive categories long defining Western societies to one at increasing odds with numerous Western values. As various surveys by Russian sociologists have indicated, a ‘middle class’ and ‘civil society’ in the traditional sense do not exist in Russia. Moreover, even ‘the intelligentsia’, as historically defined, seems to have diminished, evaporated, or emigrated. Indeed, the incisive portrayal of contemporary Russian class distinctions in Avdot’ia Smirnova’s film KoKoKo (2012) exposes the impotence of the self-serving intelligentsia, contrasted to the vitality and drive of ‘the people’, who may be the only hope for Russia’s future – neither the radiant future fantasized by the Soviet Union nor the democratic future that seemed possible after perestroika, but one that meaningful resistance to the authoritarianism of Putin’s regime will need to elaborate step by painstaking step.     

Quantum mechanics and the postmodern in one country

Abstract

The orthodox interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was banned in the Soviet Union in 1947, an episode usually glossed as another illustration of repressive Soviet science. This paper argues that the roots of this ban should be located at a much deeper level, in a tension existing between the ‘postmodern’ form of orthodox Quantum Mechanics and an ideology of modernization. In the West a similar ideological tension had a different result: when the occasion demanded, the orthodox interpretation was covertly exchanged for an agnosticism about metaphysical matters, and potential areas of conflict with the principles of modernization were thus defused. The latter strategy benefited the orthodox interpretation, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the West from the 1940s through to the 1960s. Using the Freudian notions of ‘transference’ and ‘disavowal’, I explain why the ideological tension with modernization was resolved differently in the West and in the Soviet Union.     

Pussy Riot,Putin and the Politics of Embodiment

On 21 February 2012, five young women clothed in brightly coloured short skirts, knit tights and rudely made balaclavas ruptured the silence of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, Russia, with an obscenity-laced song asking the Virgin Mary to deliver Russia from the impending re-election of its former president Vladimir Putin. The Russian Government responded to this provocative but non-violent act with unexpected and unprecedented coercive force against the small group of activists. In this article, we argue that Pussy Riot's ‘Punk Prayer’ and its aftermath demonstrate that the volatility of the conflict arises from a socio-historically specific form of the tension between a political citizenship and an embodied social agency. The Pussy Riot phenomenon was particularly explosive because it exposed the unstable coexistence of authoritarianism with a liberal constitutional state whose legitimacy depends upon the exclusion of arbitrary authority from the political field. Pussy Riot's ‘Punk Prayer’ and its aftermath demonstrate the subversive potential of even the most local, sporadic and symbolic feminist and queer challenges to the established order. The response of the Russian State exposed its dependence upon and investment in patriarchal and heteronormative power structures often rendered politically invisible through relegation to ‘private life’. The value of Pussy Riot's performance lies in its making visible, and thus available for public debate, the ways in which authoritarianism legitimates its exercise of power by exploiting social divisions through a network of institutionalized forces which civil society had come to take for granted.     

Actors,others, simulacra: a Deleuzean minority report on the early modern Dubrovnik stage

ABSTRACT

A playwright in the minor and marginal culture of renaissance Ragusa, Marin Dr?i? (1508–1557) has often been compared to Shakespeare, despite the obvious impossibility of influence in either direction. There is however an aspect of Dr?i?’s legacy which has received a scarce critical interest in Croatia, although it could also be discussed along the lines of Shakespeare studies: early modern Dubrovnik acting practice, culture, and style. Dr?i?’s actual and meta-theatrical treatment of acting will here be interpreted through the lenses of Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘One less manifesto’. In this essay, Deleuze expands his notion of ‘the minor’, arguing for a kind of acting practice that would rely on variation, movement, becoming, and a perpetual linguistic deformation, forces that hinder absorption into the discourse of ‘the major’. I will further suggest that Marin Dr?i?’s exposure of the anti-theatrical prejudice of his contemporaries – clothed in a mock-version of Genesis and elaborated in the prologue of his comedy Uncle Maroje – could be read as an exemplary inversion of Plato’s method of argumentation that makes a Deleuzian case for the actor as the ultimate, troubling Other, the simulacrum of true being, a promiscuous and metamorphic kin of marionettes, animals, and women.     

Locals and immigrants on the Yamal Peninsula. Social boundaries and variations in migratory experience

Western Siberia and the entire Arctic region have been a beacon for migrants from the European part of Russia, from the national republics and the southern regions of Siberia in the post-war era. In contrast with the other regions of Siberia, the oil- and gas-rich North remains a magnet for migration from the entire former Soviet Union to this day. This paper presents research into the contemporary sociocultural environment of Yar-Sale, the administrative centre of the Yamal district of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. The research focuses on the migrational experiences of ‘new’ migrants and their relations with the native Nenets population. Special attention is paid to concepts such as ‘local’/‘immigrant’, and ‘insider’/‘outsider’. The author holds that the boundaries between these categories are flexible. An immigrant may become a local and an insider may become an outsider, with ethnicity far from always being the deciding factor.     

Semantics of patient choice: how the UK national guideline for depression silences patients

Several stakeholders, including the National Survivor User Network and the British Psychological Society, have called for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to include an up-to-date review of patient experience research in the new depression guideline. In response, the Guideline Committee (GC) postponed publication, the guideline now due in February 2020. Yet the GC also stated it will not review patient experience research. Instead, it will incorporate a new element of ‘patient choice’, without elaborating what this entails. Here, we attempt to untangle a number of similar sounding terms including ‘patient choice’, ‘patient preference’, ‘patient experience research’ and ‘service user involvement’ in terms of how they relate to the NICE depression guideline. We argue that by conflating these concepts and implying that one will serve the purpose of another equally well, NICE risks leaving patients without a real voice, their perspectives buried in semantically void rhetorical jargon.     

At both ends of care: South Indian hindu widows living with daughters and daughters-in-law in Southern California

Abstract

Based on interviews with South Indian Hindu immigrant widows and the daughters and daughters-in-law they live with in Southern California, this article makes visible the care-giving and care-receiving roles of such widows, especially in relation to the household roles of these widows' daughters and daughters-in-law. The article explains the variability of the widows' care roles by focusing on three specific phenomena distinguishing their First World experience from that of paid, immigrant care workers: 1) a greater need for non-monetary resources than for monetary payment; 2) a ‘care shift’ from giving to receiving care as they age; and 3) an ability to move from one adopted/adoptive household to another. These phenomena suggest that the same forces of modernization, (post)industrialization, and globalization that have circumscribed many Third World women's status in First World households have simultaneously diversified the status and role of middle-class, South Indian Hindu widows living in their children's First World households.     

Starting somewhere different: methodological cosmopolitanism and the study of world politics

In this article, I contribute to the debate on Ulrich Beck's idea of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ from a political science perspective. How fruitful is Beck's idea for the study of world politics? How can a political science perspective turn ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ into a more transdisciplinary subject of debate? Guided by these questions, I speak to two audiences. First, I offer political scientists a distinct strategy for empirical ‘cosmopolitan political science’ research. At the heart of this strategy is a novel object of research, the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, understood as a discourse that breaks with the ‘national outlook’ to open possibilities for a world beyond ‘reflexive modernization’. With that, I shift the perspective from structure to discourse and broaden the normative grounds on which to assess cosmopolitan reality. Rather than just considering the emergence of normative cosmopolitan ideals, I build into cosmopolitan research the normative, empirical question of whether we see an emergence of a world beyond reflexive modernization. Second, I address scholars outside the field of political science who are interested in methodological cosmopolitanism by offering the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ as a novel object of study that could also be explored from other disciplinary perspectives and by proposing they put the question of the purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism centre stage. This question can, I argue, constitute grounds for substantial debates on methodological cosmopolitanism not already precluded through disciplinary premises and concerns. Contributing to such a transdisciplinary debate, I distinguish between the long‐term and immediate purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism, the former being about the development of a cosmopolitan language and grammar and the latter about empirical explorations of the reality of the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, eventually and in a collective and transdisciplinary endeavour building up to contribute to the former.     

Uncertainty: the Curate's egg in financial economics

Economic theories of uncertainty are unpopular with financial experts. As sociologists, we rightly refuse predictions, but the uncertainties of money are constantly sifted and turned into semi‐denial by a financial economics set on somehow beating the future. Picking out ‘bits’ of the future as ‘risk’ and ‘parts’ as ‘information’ is attractive but socially dangerous, I argue, because money's promises are always uncertain. New studies of uncertainty are reversing sociology's neglect of the unavoidable inability to know the forces that will shape the financial future. ¹      

Trotsky’s error: multiplicity and the secret origins of revolutionary Marxism

ABSTRACT

Uneven and Combined Development uniquely incorporated societal multiplicity into Marxist theory. So why did its first application end in Stalinist dictatorship? This paper seeks an answer by turning the idea back on itself, applying it first to Trotsky’s doctrine of ‘permanent revolution’ and then to Marx’s original idea of revolution. Trotsky hoped that Russia’s ‘revolution of backwardness’ would be rescued by ‘advanced’ revolutions in the West, modelled on the French revolution. But what if – as this paper argues – that event too was ultimately a ‘revolution of backwardness’? Two implications follow. First, Trotsky’s ‘permanentist’ strategy was logically flawed: if all modern revolutions have been internationally-generated catch-up revolutions, then the idea of Bolshevism being rescued by ‘advanced revolutions’ elsewhere fails. But second, the consequences of multiplicity reach even deeper than Trotsky realized: they underlie and explain the original political formation, and troubled history, of revolutionary Marxism itself.     

Social mobilizations and the question of social justice in contemporary Russia

ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding stereotypes of Russian apathy, long-term field research reveals that there have always been grassroots and labour protests in post-Soviet Russia, even as the shock of ultraliberal reforms led to mass precariousness and social disorientation. However, the social mobilizations that do occur are scattered, weakly publicized and mostly small-scale. This paper conceptualizes them as ‘everyday activism’, that is, an activism embedded in everyday life experience and pragmatic sense. Only recently, and in a paradoxical relation to the populist and patriotic Kremlin discourse, some new trends have emerged towards other popular variants of the new discourse that includes social equality claims and what the paper calls ‘social critical’ populism. However, this populism from below does not automatically lead to mass mobilization, although it provides the necessary background for it.     

A Conversation With Virus X: Outing a Malevolent and Subversive Force in Parents' Lives

The following conversation describes a narrative means of uncovering (or ‘deconstructing’) some of the invisible forces that undermine parents' capacities in caring for their children in preferred ways. In the authors' experience, parents can be hugely resourceful and provide a clear account of what they ‘should’ be doing, yet seem unable to act upon their own good advice — it is as though an external agent, named below as ‘Virus X’, prevents them from being the parents they would like to be. Through naming this external agent, identifying its influences and noticing parents' acts of resistance in the face of these influences, antidotes to Virus X can be developed. This paper describes the development of such an approach within a child behaviour management group. In keeping with the playful approach encouraged by narrative therapy, the authors of this paper join forces to act as investigative journalists in exposing Virus X to the readers.     

KI: The ‘Fervor of Vitality’ and the Subjective Self

Curiously, in the word ki, we find that the Japanese have internalized physical energy into a felt-feeling (e.g., a sense of vital potency and aliveness), thereby significantly expanding the substance of the T phase of the self. Of conceptual interest here is that in the word ki—used as a root word to indicate and connect elementary feelings and thought processes—the Japanese have reified ‘energy’ into a subjective entity that moves the individual to become both activator and respondent of interactional processes. The general awareness of ki by the people themselves is evidenced in various facets of their personal consensual life—from socialization practices to formal presentation. In closing, the author attempts to link ki to Mead's ‘impulse’ concludes that (a) ki is more substantive and active than ‘impulse’ in the movement of the social act; and (b) in contrast to that of Mead, the Japanese model provides an explicit conceptual demonstration of the substantive role of the ‘I’ as well as affective elements in social interaction.     

BECOMING HONG KONG,RAZING BAOAN,PRESERVING XIN'AN: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT OF URBANIZATION IN THE SHENZHEN SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE

Located just north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, the largest and oldest of China's Special Economic Zone (SEZ) has been both a project and symbol of post-Mao modernization. In this paper, I trace how the Shenzhen built environment mediates images and experiences of ‘Hong Kong’, arguing that transnationality in the SEZ is an everyday practice where tradition, colonialism, and the Cold War provide raw materials for the local reworking of the changing relationship between the Chinese state apparatus and finance capital. My story has a double focus: the ideology of urbanization as modernization and historic preservation. On the one hand, the ideology of urbanization-as-modernization legitimates a spatial order in which the rural is always posed to be superseded by the urban. Both the rural and the urban are empty signifiers that are created through comparison and deployed to guide action. In this important sense,‘Hong Kong’ has been urban with respect to rural ‘Shenzhen’ (formerly Baoan County), even as ‘Shenzhen’ has been urban with respect to the Chinese hinterland (neidi). On the other hand, historic preservation domesticates ‘Hong Kong’ as Shenzhen's past through the figure of Xin'an County, the geographic predecessor of both Shenzhen and Hong Kong. These complimentary displacements produce a nostalgia peculiar to the SEZ: a desire for a past that entitles contemporary Shenzhen residents to Hong Kong's prosperity. This nostalgia is structured with reference to a shared origin - Xin'an County - where Hong Kong's postwar history (1950–1979) becomes the past that Shenzhen (rural Baoan) would have had, if not for a cruel twist of socialist fate.     

The boy done good: football violence, changes and continuities

As football related disorders remain stubbornly impervious to ‘solutions’, so the study of football hooliganism has become almost a minor branch of the social sciences. This paper looks critically at the main academic approaches to the problem in the UK and Europe. The shortcomings of much of this work are revealed, both theoretically and in terms of the evidence employed about the nature of hooliganism. The meagre amount of data about hooliganism contained in the plethora of Government reports that have so far been commissioned is striking. This may well be the reason why ‘official’ remedies so often prove inadequate. One way of gaining an understanding of this phenomenon is by making contact with, talking to, and observing at first hand the behaviour of those people most centrally involved, the hooligans themselves. This paper concludes with a series of portraits of ‘the boys’, some of it based on their own published writing. This will illustrate different forms of hooligan involvements. It will also provide an understanding of its origins as well as the true scale and scope of hooligan activity, about which many myths prevail. Something of the changes as well as the continuities on the football scene over the past 25 years will be indicated. Finally we will attempt to locate the whole phenomenon in its true place within British youth culture. Clarence Rook Hooligan Nights (1899)     

Polanyi’s two transformations revisited: a ‘bottom up’ perspective

ABSTRACT

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi offers a ‘top-down’ analysis of the rise and demise of Europe’s unregulated market system. He assumes that changes in the organization of the international economy provide particular kinds of opportunities for states to act which, in turn, shapes the extent to which social forces will be able to influence state policy. Consequently, his analysis focuses, first, on the international institutions created by the self-regulating market system; then on the ‘liberal state’ which these made possible; and finally on how the system impacts ‘society as a whole’. The account which this analysis produces systematically underplays the social struggles which propelled and emerged from the rise of Europe’s nineteenth century system and which ultimately led to its demise. In revisiting the two periods that are the focus of Polanyi’s analysis, this article assumes that states and interstate systems reflect the interests of powerful social forces. Thus, working from the ‘bottom up’, it focuses on the class interests that produced Europe’s market system, the state and international structures which reflected and supported them, and the social struggles that ultimately brought about the collapse of the system. What this ‘bottom up’ account reveals is the centrality of a ‘double movement’, not of market expansion and a protective countermove on the part of ‘society as a whole’, but of dominant classes monopolizing economic opportunities from global expansion, and a rising ‘red tide’ of disaffected workers. This double movement, it argues, better explains the demise of the system and the changes that ensued from it.     

The established and the outsiders: legitimacy and economic niches of the four generations of Saint Petersburg cultural organizations

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the post-Soviet evolution of the sector of cultural organizations in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The study relies on a combination of qualitative (semi-structured interviews with employees of 34 cultural organizations of St. Petersburg) and quantitative (pile sorting) methods of data treatment, as well as synthesizes approaches from theories of organizations (organizational ecology, neo-institutionalism) and cultural studies and sociology of culture (Bourdieu, DiMaggio) to analyse the successively emerging waves of organizations. We show that the organizations can be divided into four waves, with the oldest ones existing from Soviet (and sometimes Imperial) times and the newest emerging during the economic boom of the early 2000s. The waves differ primarily in the degree of legitimacy resulting from their abstaining from or participating in a wide range of market activities. The aristocratic establishment extracting resources from ‘pure’ sources enjoys much greater prestige and, ultimately, economic security, than those who have to use less approved sources. Our general conclusion is that the ‘birth order’ is primarily responsible for the ability of an organization to occupy a desirable economic niche. Thus, the oldest wave occupies the most favourable niche, possessing the greatest legitimacy and receiving generous support from public and private foundations, while later waves had either to restrict their economic activities to prove their belonging to artistic field (second and, partially, third waves) or to combine different artistic (exhibitions, performances, and film screening), academic (lectures and seminars) and commercial (café and shops) activities within one public space, which, however, greatly undermines their legitimacy and deprives them of most sources of public funding. Ironically, the newer organizations embrace and translate the opposition between ‘pure art’ and ‘commerce’, which dooms them to suffering in a vicious circle of illegitimacy.