A trembling voice in the desert: Jean‐Luc Nancy's rethinking of the space of the political

Abstract

This essay explores Jean‐Luc Nancy's rethinking of political space in terms of an ontological ‘being‐with’. It elucidates how Nancy's thinking of community emerges out of the French philosopher's reworking of Heidegger's crucial notion of Mitsein. For Nancy, although Heidegger argues that Dasein is always already also Mitsein, Mitsein is nonetheless also occluded by the priority accorded to Dasein. The consequences for the way in which community or the space of the political is configured are profound since traditional conceptions of the subject of community thus remain unreconstructed. Nancy however does reconstruct community by emphasising that the primal ontological conditions of community are not conceived as the One, the Other or the We, but as the ‘with’, ‘relationality’, and the ‘between’. The question of being (Seinsfrage) thereby becomes the question of being‐with (Mitseinsfrage).     

‘Public toilets for a diverse neighborhood’: Spatial purification practices in community development discourse

This paper explores the dialectic of place and community identity in Mount Pleasant, a multi–ethnic and multi–class U.S. neighborhood where definitions of place are hotly contested among its residents. In a grant proposal for public toilets, Mount Pleasant writers use linguistic strategies such as presupposition, deixis, and contrast, coupled with discursive themes of filth and geography, to construct a core of the Mount Pleasant community. The writers place themselves and people who share their values in that core, and immigrants at the margins. These strategies serve as a discursive type of spatial purification practice (cf. Sibley 1988) through which the grantwriters set up a moral and spatial order where they and other core community members are deemed to use space ‘appropriately’, and thus inhabit positive moral positions, while immigrant community members’ imputed ‘inappropriate’ use of space is used to construct negative moral positions for them.     

‘Talk’ and Hermès

Attention to ‘textuality’ has been used in organizational studies to point to the strong situational quality of organizing, but there has been little detailed empirical or theoretical examination of talk in action. Simply stating that ‘organizing is talk’ is not enough. Starting with Boden's analysis of organizing as ‘talk’, the import of the communication‐based interpretation of organizing is examined. A ‘flat’ or ‘one‐dimensional’ analysis of organization, grounded solely on speech‐based causality, will be rejected. Michel Serres' philosophy of communication provides in the figure of Hermès, needed complex connectionist insight(s) into interaction. And coupled with Levi‐Strauss' concept of the totemic operator, Serres' philosophical insights are used to develop a concept of communicative agency in tune with a complex narrative analysis of organizing.     

Sensitivity to Confidence Cues Increases during the Second Year of Life

We investigated the emergence in infancy of a preference to imitate individuals who display confidence over lack of confidence. Eighteen‐ and 24‐month‐olds (N = 70) were presented with an experimenter who demonstrated the use of several objects accompanied by either nonverbal expressions of confidence or lack of confidence. At 24 months, infants were more likely to imitate the actions when demonstrated by a confident experimenter than by an unconfident experimenter; 18‐month‐olds showed no such preference. The experimenter then presented an additional imitation trial and a word‐learning trial while displaying a neutral expression. Twenty‐four‐month‐olds persisted in preferentially imitating a previously confident experimenter, but prior confidence had no effect on their word learning. These findings demonstrate a developmental increase in infants’ use of confidence cues toward the end of the second year of life.     

Revisiting 'communities in Britain'

In this article I re‐examine Frankenberg’s Communities in Britain (1966) and his use of a ‘morphological continuum’ within his analysis. This analysis is itself a re‐assessment of some influential community studies conducted within the British Isles. I look at some particular ideas within the more theoretical part of this book, especially the ideas of ‘social redundancy’ and the distinction between ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’. I then consider some themes arising from some more recent studies. These themes include identity, networks and social capital and time and I argue that Frankenberg's analysis can still provide the reader with useful tools to think through the ideas and practices of community.     

RACE AND CHARITABLE CHURCH ACTIVITY

The availability of public funding for charitable church activity has increased dramatically in recent years. A key dispute over this increase is whether congregations’ propensity to provide charitable services depends upon the local community’s racial composition. Using three congregation‐level data sets, this article investigates how race affects charitable church activity. Each data set indicates that all‐white congregations become less charitably active as the share of black residents in the community grows. This response is found only for charitable activities and not for other activities. Additionally, all‐white congregations favorably disposed toward receiving government funding respond no differently to black residents than do not‐all‐white congregations. (JEL H41, J15, Z12)     

Post‐maritime transnationalization: Malay seafarers in Liverpool

The lives of seafarers may provide examples of transnational connections prior to the globally interconnected era in which ‘transnationalism’ has risen to prominence. In this article, I examine the long‐distance connections of seafarers from Southeast Asia who settled in Liverpool, UK. Drawing on oral history/life story interviews with Malay pakcik‐pakcik (elders) in Liverpool, I examine the ways in which connections with Southeast Asia have changed over the course of their lives. Much of this concerns political geography, which is often overlooked in the literature on transnationalism. During the period of Liverpool's pre‐eminence as a seaport, irrespective of the depth or intensity of maritime linkages with Southeast Asia, connections did not involve the crossing of ‘national’ borders. Ironically, transnational connections are being forged in the post‐maritime stages of the lives of pakcik‐pakcik in Liverpool. I also show how Malay ‘transnationalization’ has resulted from expanded technological possibilities for long‐distance travel and communications. Post‐maritime transnationalization takes place in a ‘community’ clubhouse in Toxteth where the lives, emotional attachments and memories of pakcik‐pakcik are intertwined with those of people with diverse connections to contemporary Malaysia and Singapore.     

The trouble with 'inclusion': a case study of the faith zone at the Millennium Dome

Some sociologists of religion would argue that there has been a move away from ‘religion’, in terms of institutionalised dogmas and established corporate ways of believing, towards ‘spiritualities of life’ where the emphasis lies on the personal, the individual and the experiential ( Heelas, 2002 ; Wuthnow, 2001 ). Given the evidence for the apparent popularity of spirituality in contemporary Western society, it is surprising that between 1996 and 2000, the Zone concerned with religion at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich was re‐named from‘The Spirit Zone’to‘The Faith Zone’. A range of political, economic and religious interests lay behind the Zone’s re‐naming, and both the name (and the content) changed to reflect ‘religion’ rather than ‘spirituality’. The process of constructing the Zone thus moved in a diametrically opposite direction to some of the trends associated with religious belief in modern Britain. An investigation of the dynamics behind the construction of the Faith Zone at the Dome provides an opportunity to evaluate what ‘counted’ as religion ( Beckford, 2003 ) at a specific time and context in British society. The paper also shows that behind the Labour Government rhetoric of ‘inclusion’, various dimensions of spiritual belief and activity in Britain are excluded from the public sphere. When it comes to religion, taken‐for‐granted criteria operate – resulting in the prioritisation of the official, the ‘representative’, the ‘respectable’, and ‘the unified’ over the unofficial, the deviant, the private, and the contested. This paper looks at the struggles and the conditions associated with the idea and the policy of inclusion in relation to religion in modern Britain, using the Faith Zone at the Dome as a case study.     

A struggle on two fronts: boundary drawing in the lower region of the social space and the symbolic market for ‘down‐to‐earthness’

In this article we use qualitative interviews to examine how Norwegians possessing low volumes of cultural and economic capital demarcate themselves symbolically from the lifestyles of those above and below them in social space. In downward boundary drawing, a range of types of people are regarded as inferior because of perceived moral and aesthetic deficiencies. In upward boundary drawing, anti‐elitist sentiments are strong: people practising resource‐demanding lifestyles are viewed as harbouring ‘snobbish’ and ‘elitist’ attitudes. However, our analysis suggests that contemporary forms of anti‐elitism are far from absolute, as symbolic expressions of privilege are markedly less challenged if they are parcelled in a ‘down‐to‐earth’ attitude. Previous studies have shown attempts by the privileged to downplay differences in cross‐class encounters, accompanied by displays of openness and down‐to‐earthness. Our findings suggest that there is in fact a symbolic ‘market’ for such performances in the lower region of social space. This cross‐class sympathy, we argue, helps naturalize, and thereby legitimize, class inequalities. The implications of this finding are outlined with reference to current scholarly debates about politics and populism, status and recognition and intersections between class and gender in the structuring of social inequalities. The article also contributes key methodological insights into the mapping of symbolic boundaries. Challenging Lamont's influential framework, we demonstrate that there is a need for a more complex analytical strategy rather than simply measuring the ‘relative salience’ of various boundaries in terms of their occurrence in qualitative interview data. In distinguishing analytically between usurpationary and exclusionary boundary strategies, we show that moral boundaries in particular can take on qualitatively different forms and that subtypes of boundaries are sometimes so tightly intertwined that separating them to measure their relative salience would neglect the complex ways in which they combine to engender both aversion to and sympathies for others.     

Stakeholder identities in Britain's neoliberal ethical community: Polish narratives of earned citizenship in the context of the UK's EU referendum

This article examines the narrative strategies through which Polish migrants in the UK challenge the formal rights of political membership and attempt to redefine the boundaries of ‘citizenship’ along notions of deservedness. The analysed qualitative data originate from an online survey conducted in the months before the 2016 EU referendum, and the narratives emerge from the open‐text answers to two survey questions concerning attitudes towards the referendum and the exclusion of resident EU nationals from the electoral process. The analysis identifies and describes three narrative strategies in reaction to the public discourses surrounding the EU referendum – namely discursive complicity, intergroup hostility and defensive assertiveness – which attempt to redefine the conditions of membership in Britain's ‘ethical community’ in respect to welfare practices. Examining these processes simultaneously ‘from below’ and ‘from outside’ the national political community, the paper argues, can reveal more of the transformation taking place in conceptions of citizenship at the sociological level, and the article aims to identify the contours of a ‘neoliberal communitarian citizenship’ as internalized by mobile EU citizens.     

Mind the gap: financial London and the regional class pay gap

The hidden barriers, or ‘gender pay gap’, preventing women from earning equivalent incomes to men is well documented. Yet recent research has uncovered that, in Britain, there is also a comparable class‐origin pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations. So far this analysis has only been conducted at the national level and it is not known whether there are regional differences within the UK. This paper uses pooled data from the 2014 and 2015 Labour Force Survey (N = 7,534) to stage a more spatially sensitive analysis that examines regional variation in the class pay gap. We find that this ‘class ceiling’ is not evenly spatially distributed. Instead it is particularly marked in Central London, where those in high‐status occupations who are from working‐class backgrounds earn, on average, £10,660 less per year than those whose parents were in higher professional and managerial employment. Finally, we inspect the Capital further to reveal that the class pay gap is largest within Central London's banking and finance sector. Challenging policy conceptions of London as the ‘engine room’ of social mobility, these findings suggest that class disadvantage within high‐status occupations is particularly acute in the Capital. The findings also underline the value of investigating regional differences in social mobility, and demonstrate how such analysis can unravel important and previously unrecognized spatial dimensions of class inequality.     

Crime,citizenship and community: neoliberal communitarian images of governmentality

This article discusses the emergence, in the field of crime and safety, of a formula of government that can be called neoliberal communitarianism. This is a paradoxical governmental strategy that combines a focus on ‘individual responsibility’, ‘community’ and a ‘selectively tough state’. The discussion is based on the Foucaultian triangle of strategy, political programmes and techniques. The substance of this application consists of a discussion of recent Dutch political programmes and techniques in crime and safety policies. The discussion includes the local case of Rotterdam, a city at times regarded as a ‘policy laboratory’. Specifically, the role that notions of citizenship and community play in crime and safety policies is analysed. We hereby point at two different manifestations of responsibilization – repressive responsibilization and facilitative responsibilization – aimed at two governmentally differentiated populations. In addition, we describe how neoliberal communitarianism entails the selective exclusion of subjects imagined as ‘high risk’. Because the government of crime tells us much about the government of ‘society’, neoliberal communitarianism is a useful concept to grasp contemporary changes in government in the Netherlands and in other European countries.     

Disgusted subjects: the making of middle-class identities

Although the classed dimensions of ‘taste’ have, following Bourdieu, been widely discussed, expressions of disgust at perceived violations of taste have been less frequently considered in relation to class. This paper considers various expressions of disgust at white working‐class existence and explores what they might tell us about middle‐class identities and identifications. I argue that the narratives of decline and of lack present in such representations can be seen in terms of a long‐standing middle‐class project of distinguishing itself. Drawing on Bourdieu's critique of Kantian aesthetics, I argue that the ownership of ‘taste’ is understood as reflecting true humanity, and as conferring uniqueness. Ironically, however, this uniqueness is only achieved through an incorporation of collective, classed understandings. The paper calls for a problematization of a normative and normalized middle‐class location that is, I argue, given added legitimacy by a perceived decline in the significance of class itself. [A]n account of class, rank or social hierarchy must be thin indeed unless accompanied by an account of the passions and sentiments that sustain it (William Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, p. 245). Social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat (Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 479). What we read as objective class divisions are produced and maintained by the middle class in the minutiae of everyday practice, as judgements of culture are put into effect (Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, p. 118).     

Converging glances: A response to Cathy Caruth's ‘parting words’

Abstract

This essay empasizes the dimensions of opticality in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in Caruth's Parting Words. Thinking how to move from the ‘o‐o‐o‐o’ to the ‘a‐a‐a‐a’ central to the Fort/Da game, suggest that ‘u’ must be drawn into the creative act that inspires testimony, critical theory, psychoanalysis and love.     

Marginal movements and minority struggles? The case of the Japanese minority social and labour movements

In Japan, some of the socially, economically and politically marginalised have developed robust social and labour movements that engage with mainstream society. These movements have developed strategies challenging the conditions of the excluded, while also highlighting pathways to establish, or enhance, individual and collective participation in the labour market and the wider society. Two distinct though related, social and organisational forms of these movements are elaborated – firm‐centred and community centred respectively. The former especially has a combative past in the labour struggles of the 1950s in what are known as sa'ha shōsū‐ha kumiai (left wing Minority union, or, Minority‐faction union). However, this does not mean Minorities are inherently leftist in orientation. In the 1940s and 1950s, during a period of radical union hegemony, a collaborative form of second unions developed assisting the purge of radical leaderships. Our focus here is on a contemporary radical democratic current. While articulating concerns of those in full time employment outside the political mainstream they may also represent ethnically and otherwise socially marginalised workers. The community unions, a form of what are known as ‘new‐type union’, shingata kumiai (this term will be used here to describe the community unions) articulate the concerns of those socially and economically marginalized in the community and the wider labour market. Controversially, the term ‘Minority union’ is used to depict the different forms of oppositional social movement union in a broader sense than is typically understood in the literature. This is because they share a common concern with the articulation of Minority social and political interests in the context of the employment relationship and the local community. In considering the character of these social movement unions the article seeks to add to what Price (1997 ) describes as ‘bottom up history’ which we term ‘sociology from below’.     

‘The Girl About Town’: discussions of modernity and female youth in Drum magazine, 1951–1970

This article examines the trope of the ‘modern miss’ in Drum magazine 1951–1970 as a locus for debate over South African urban modernity. At the centre of Drum’s African urbanity was a debate between a progressive, positively ‘modern’ existence and an attendant fear of moral and social ‘breakdown’ in the apartheid city. The trope of the ‘modern miss’ drew upon both discourses. Drum’s fascination with the ‘modern miss’ reached a peak in the years 1957–1963, during which time she appeared prominently in the magazine as a symbolic pioneer of changing gender and generational relationships. However, this portrayal continued to coexist alongside the image of young women as the victims of moral degeneration. The ‘modern miss’ was increasingly differentiated from adult women within Drum’s pages, which distanced her from the new space won by political activists. By examining constructions of young womanhood, this article points to the gendering of ‘youth’ at the intersection of commercial print culture and shifting social relations in mid‐twentieth‐century South Africa. It is also suggested that understanding the social configurations of Drum’s modernity illuminates the gendered and generational responses of formal political movements as they conducted their own concurrent debates.     

Are all communities communities in the mind?

Studies of community undertaken over a period of some forty‐five years by the author and his colleagues are re‐considered to show how the significance of ‘communities‐in‐the‐mind’ has been inadequately appreciated. The distinction made by Clifford Geertz between ‘experience‐near’ and ‘experience‐distant’ is used to sharpen up certain assumptions and approaches of community sociologists, including Frankenberg. Some possible explanations for the decline in the perceived importance of comminity studies from the late 1960s are discussed in the context of the growing centrality of social class in sociological analysis in the 1970s and 1980s. Reference is made to recent research on personal communities by Liz Spencer and the author to illustrate how an ellision between ‘experience‐near’ and ‘experience‐distant’ approaches may be achieved. It is concluded that the imputed community‐on‐the‐ground, often based on materialistic assumptions, should not be conceptually privileged over the real community‐in‐the‐mind.     

Assessing Capacity to Change in High‐Risk Pregnant Women: A Pilot Study

Pre‐birth risk assessment is a process by which circumstances affecting an unborn child can be identified and support for mother and infant embedded. This mixed methods study describes a community‐based pre‐birth assessment and care pathway that utilised the Parents Under Pressure (PuP) programme to assess parenting capacity and provide support pre‐ and post‐birth for ‘at risk’ women. Sixty‐eight pregnant women referred to children's social care services were allocated to the pre‐birth assessment and care pathway (n = 35) or to routine care (n = 33). Standardised measures of psychological distress, social support and alcohol measured change for the women in the assessment and care pathway. Twenty women who provided pre‐ and post‐data reported significant improvements on all measures except alcohol use. Safeguarding outcomes at 12 months were obtained for both groups using administrative data. Forty‐two per cent of the infants whose mothers received the pre‐birth assessment and care pathway showed an improvement in child protection status compared to 14 per cent of the routine care infants. Safeguarding status deteriorated or stayed the same in 52 per cent of the routine cases compared to 26 per cent of those receiving the pathway. Qualitative data revealed that the pathway was acceptable and helpful to service users and service providers. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

‘Describes a community‐based pre‐birth assessment and care pathway that utilised the Parents Under Pressure (PuP) programme’

Key Practitioner Messages

• The current project found that a community‐based pre‐birth assessment and care pathway with high‐risk pregnant women was feasible and acceptable for practitioners and service users.
• The pathway began mid‐pregnancy and support was provided following the birth of the infant for up to 12 months.
• Over 40 per cent of infants whose mothers were allocated to the pre‐birth risk assessment pathway showed improvements in child safeguarding status at 12 months.

     

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies,modalities, pathways

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market‐oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post‐1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market‐oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.