The Technical Substrates of Unconscious Memory: Rereading Derrida's Freud in the Age of Teletechnology

In a rereading of Jacques Derrida's writings on Freud, I trace the connections between his treatment of differance and his treatment of technology and unconscious memory. I focus on the challenge which Derrida's writings pose for a certain idea of history, including the history of technological development, and I locate that challenge in Derrida's deconstruction of the opposition of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert. In proposing that these opposed elements are better thought of as deferrals of each other and that, therefore, neither of the opposed elements can be ontologically privileged, Derrida's writings offer a shift in ontological perspective befitting the age of teletechnology. In all this, Derrida's writings show that Freud's treatment of unconscious memory is still relevant, even while Derrida's writings offer a thought of unconscious memory that goes beyond Freud's, that is to say, goes beyond thought of the unconscious when it is conceived narrowly as a possession of the individual subject. Rather than referring unconscious memory to the individual subject, Derrida returns unconscious memory to thought and its technical substrates. It is in doing so that Derrida's writings propose an ontological shift.     

‘Not quite history’:The Autobiographies H. Selby Msimang and R.V. Selope Thema and the writing of South African history

This paper examines the kind of contribution autobiographical writings may make to an historical reworking of the events in which the writers are involved. Autobiography, being the very conscious revaluation ‐ often re‐creation — and presentation of the self, is a most problematic genre. Its narrative perspective is subjective; its authentication almost entirely personal, rather than documentary. These limitations should flash red lights at the historian: not to stop, but to proceed cautiously. For, problematic as self‐presentation may be, it is an additional source, speaking in a particular voice. It leads us beyond the petitions, letters, commissions and court records, vital as they are, into those sensitive areas of psyche: emotion, pride, deception and creativity, where many historians fear to tread. Much South African historical writing oversimplifies the role of individual character in helping to shape movements and events. Rather than depicting the complex ways in which subjects and societies interact, many historical studies have read off the politics and motivation of the individual from the organisation to which he or she belonged. Msimang and Thema are significant individuals, at once representative and idiosyncratic; deeply involved in SANNC politics, but also furthering their own careers. Their autobiographical writings both reveal and attempt to conceal important moments in their pasts and in so doing, exemplify the ways in which autobiographical writing may speak to the historian.     

Managing Contradiction: Civic Stratification and Migrants'Rights1

Political and academic interest in cross‐national migration has generated two very different and potentially polarized positions. One perspective emphasizes the continuing power of the nation state, while the other sees migration, and more specifically migrants' rights, as the manifestation of an emergent ‘post‐national’ society. This article offers a conceptual framework which addresses this polarization through the concept of civic stratification (Lockwood, 1996). In illustrating its application, the study shows how such an approach goes beyond a traditional citizenship framework (e.g., Marshall, 1950) in considering degrees of partial membership, but remains cautious with respect to claims about universal, transnational rights.     

Difficult friendships and ontological insecurity

In this paper we explore some of the negative aspects of friendship. In so doing we do not seek to join the debate about whether or not friendships are more or less important than other relationships but rather to explore precisely how significant friendships can be. Based on written accounts submitted to the British Mass Observation Project, we analyse how friendship, when it goes wrong, can challenge one's sense of self and even produce ontological insecurity. Friendship, it is argued, is tied into the process of self‐identification and so staying true to friends, even when the relationships becomes uneven or tiresome, can be a sign of ethical standing. Meeting ‘old’ friends can also become very challenging, especially if one does not wish to be reminded of the self one once was. The paper contributes to the growing interest in relationships beyond kin.     

Goffman's legacy to political sociology

Conclusion I don't claim that Goffman addressed the questions that animate political sociologists. He was not interested in analyzing interaction to learn how it contributed to mobilization for collective action aimed at social change. He was not interested in changing political consciousness or in how the mass media and other social institutions make such change so difficult. But for those who are interested in such questions, he is worth heeding. His is an unanticipated bequest — from the cranky uncle who we always thought had no great love or admiration for our line of work.I have tried to show how Goffman's arguments about the nature of the interaction order and frame analysis can be applied to increase our understanding of micromobilization and political consciousness. The help here is concrete and empirical, aiding us in interpreting historical cases and guiding us in systematic research.But perhaps Goffman's most enduring legacy is in the moral stance that pervades his observations about social institutions. It goes beyond ideology, to the spirit of our intellectual pursuits. It is eloquently captured in words written after Goffman's death by the poet, Joseph BrodskyThe surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn't be happy with .... Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. For Goffman, it was a lesson he knew and lived.

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Coping with trauma in domestic migrant worker narratives: Linguistic,emotional and psychological perspectives

Trauma can be defined as an event that goes beyond ordinary modes of experience and linguistic representation. It represents a break not just with a particular form of representation but with the possibility of representation at all. Drawing on a large corpus of domestic migrant worker narratives, the article analyses trauma narratives in which migrant women share their experiences while working for abusive employers. The stories deal with unspeakable suffering and humiliation, and the article attempts to outline the narrative structures that characterise trauma storytelling: broken narratives with voids in the narrative flow. It also analyses the emotional component of trauma narratives focusing on crying, which is seen as an authentication of feeling and meaning. Finally, the article considers how the women make sense of their traumatic experiences, and how peer support becomes essential in the narrators' attempts to rewrite their life stories from victimhood to survival and beyond.     

Différence et similitude: le marché du travail dans 1'esprit des adolescents et des adolescentes

This article recalls that the variance in the aspirations of young people and in their visions of the labour market is partically unexplained by socio-demographic variables. It argues that the young possess a common vision which goes beyond the routine of the social categories to which they belong. It suggests that the analysis which permits one to arrive at this result could serve to enrich the results of quantitative analysis. The article observes that the division of opinion among the young witnesses a great diversity in consciousness. But it shows that this heterogeneity could hide a deep structure, subtle but constraining, which assures not only the diversity of their knowledge but also its fluidity and homogeneity.
Cet article rappelle que la variance des aspirations des jeunes ou de leurs visions du marché du travail est partiellement inexpliquée par les variables socio-démographiques. II constate que les jeunes possedènt une vision commune qui dé le cadre des catégories sociales auxquelles ils appartiennent. II laisse entendre que l'analyse qui permet d'en arriver à ce constat pourrait servir à enrichir les résultats des analyses quantitatives. L'article observe que la répartition des opinions des jeunes témoigne d'une grande diversité des consciences. Mais il réalise que cette hétérogénéité pourrait cacher une structure profonde, souple mais limitative, qui assurerait aussi bien la diversité des consciences que leur fluidité et leur homogénéité.     

Governing the transnational organic cotton network from Benin

In this article, we attempt to conceptualize the historical development and the governance structure of the transnational organic cotton network from Benin. We aim to discover how the organic cotton production‐consumption network is governed locally and internationally. Existing bodies of literature on international agricultural production networks, in particular the Global Value Chains (GVC) perspective, focus on economic dimensions, but find it difficult to incorporate the sustainability dimension. We favour widening the concept of GVCs beyond economics by acknowledging and including environmental rationalities and the representatives of their interests, not as external elements, but rather as co‐governing or co‐structuring factors (or actors) of sustainable value chains. Our findings reveal that beyond the traditional producer versus buyer dualism, intermediate stakeholders, namely transnational and local environmental NGO networks, are instrumental in the construction, maintenance and transformation of the organic cotton network. It is also apparent that farmers' leaders play an important role in mediating and (re)building trust among organic farmers, though they exert insufficient vertical power in the organic cotton network to control it.     

Organization as a theatre of performance

In this paper we introduce Bergson's philosophy of "action, process and movement" and its relevance for social science and the study of organizational culture. Bergson's philosophy of change argues against the spatialisation of thought in which phenomena are broken down into discrete components to be numbered, sequenced and manipulated: rather he argues for a view of time as qualitative; intuition as situated within experience rather than about it; the importance of the body in social experience and the importance of morality and religion in social life - in short and embodied conception of culture. Bergson's culture is socialised time actualised in experienced duration or durée - culture is always in motion, and does not need culture clash to drive change, but cultural expression and formulations are not, which runs counter to functionalist and psychoanalytic views of culture. Creativity, or the élan vital , is the human impulse to organise, but to improvise rather than to locate, divide and control. Culture grounded in experienced time and driven by the élan vital is in ceaseless motion - it is duration because its is en-dured as a multiplicity rather than as a unity. Where heroic leaders in treatments of organizational culture invite us the change our place in the world, in Bergson's thought they invite us to change out time - our qualitative experience of duration. We examine these arguments through a review of Bergson's work, concluding that Bergson's resonates with postmodern approaches to culture which shift our attention from signification to implication.     

The Social Work Educator's Dilemma: The Academic vs. the Social Revolution

The chronic dilemma in social work education — between high standards of academic excellence and the demands of breadth and relevance — has been thrown into sharp focus by two major developments in the past decade One is an academic revolution, a vigorous drive toward a sound scientific base of professional knowledge; the other is a social revolution, which has challenged the field's claims of relevance to the urgent concerns of the urban crisis. The author proposes a synthesis of these two dynamic elements rather than a rejection of one or the other. He sees language as both complicating the problem and offering a possible solution.     

Sociology as a vocation

What does it mean to be a sociologist? Does it still make sense to “commit a social science”? This essay reflects on the former question and answers the latter affirmatively. It accepts much of Weber’s argument in “Science as a Vocation,” but it goes beyond Weber by suggesting that the practice of sociology is meaningful in ways he did not fully recognize. The point of doing sociology is not only being dedicated to specialized scholarly work or called to illuminate human affairs, but also being oriented to certain virtues and moved by a particular kind of passion.     

Social relations and the definition of work: Identity management in a low-status occupation

Work is an important source of self-definition in our society. Many low-status occupations, however, do not offer a definition of self that is agreeable to the worker. In these cases, workers may seek to manage the relationship between work and identity in a manner which enhances, rather than threatens, their self-conceptions. To examine this process of identity management, in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-seven custodians. It was found that the social relations between custodians and building occupants were important to this process in two ways. First, relations with clients, as well as other selected facets of work, were embraced as a fulfilling and humanizing aspect of their work on which definitions of work were based. Second, it was in the context of social relations that these selected definitions of work were asserted, negotiated, and maintained. While members of all occupations may tend to stress the silver lining of their work, for those in a non-professional position this is a continuous process, because a publicly recognized ideology which elevates the image of the occupation does not already exist.     

A Functional Stylistics Analysis on The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is one of the most popular novels written by Ernest Heminway.It may become one of the true classics of this generation.Systemic-Functional Grammar is deep-going in stylistic study as it goes beyond language itself and deals with the social environment of language and considers language system a meaning potential.     

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

The debate about the patenting of research is perhaps the most passionate now taking place about science and scientific culture. It is widely maintained that the expansion of patenting since about 1980 betrays a scientific tradition to which norms of universalism and common ownership of knowledge were central. This paper goes back to mid-twentieth century debates about science and intellectual property (IP) to argue that many of the norms we take as so central to science were themselves first articulated to critique patenting practices. In particular, it looks at how an economist (Arnold Plant), a scientist/philosopher (Michael Polanyi), and an information theorist (Norbert Wiener) responded to such practices. It especially focuses on the role of intellectual-property concerns in the making of Polanyi's philosophy of science, which it excavates through a reading of his unpublished papers. This reveals that the modern field of ‘science studies’ is indebted for some of its key concepts to an earlier generation of patent wars – an inheritance that exemplifies some of the strange ways in which the sociopolitical meanings of ideas can change from generation to generation. The point is not that present-day critics of scientific patenting are wrong, but that the very terms of the debate are more deeply-seated in the development of scientific culture than any of us has realized.     

Theorizing in sociology and social science: turning to the context of discovery

Since World War II methods have advanced very quickly in sociology and social science, while this has not been the case with theory. In this article I suggest that one way of beginning to close the gap between the two is to focus on theorizing rather than on theory. The place where theorizing can be used in the most effective way, I suggest, is in the context of discovery. What needs to be discussed are especially ways for how to develop theory before hypotheses are formulated and tested. To be successful in this, we need to assign an independent place to theorizing and also to develop some basic rules for how to theorize. An attempt is made to formulate such rules; it is also argued that theorizing can only be successful if it is done in close unison with observation in what is called a prestudy. Theorizing has turned into a skill when it is iterative, draws on intuitive ways of thinking, and goes beyond the basic rules for theorizing.     

Between trust and distrust in research with participants in conflict context

Trust is often treated as a binary where research participants either trust researchers or not, whereas in reality trust is multi-layered. Drawing on 10 months of fieldwork working with internally displaced persons and their non-displaced neighbours in rural Colombia, this article provides a more nuanced discussion of trust in research. It identifies ways in which participants are vulnerable, provides fieldwork strategies to address these vulnerabilities, and questions the assumption that extended time spent in the field necessarily results in greater trust. It argues that such beliefs underestimate the complexity of conflict and post-conflict research contexts where political and social relations are often unstable. Demonstrating that trust may be compartmentalised, and that trust and distrust can coexist, it proposes that the question researchers should ask themselves is not whether participants trust us or not but rather in what capacity and to what degree they (dis)trust us and what influences their level of trust.     

Multicultural Democracy: Toward a better democracy

Multicultural democracy incorporates socio-economic, cultural, and political diversity and goes beyond current conceptions of democracy. It begins by asking these critical questions: Who is and is not participating in democracy and on whose terms? And how wide is the path to participation? These questions serve as a foundation for exploring the three tenets of multicultural democracy: democracy as a path, membership in both large and small publics, and diversity as essential. After explaining the theory of multicultural democracy, I examine the extent to which critical pedagogy, building of community, and thorough disciplinary content contribute to classroom-based multicultural democracy.     

Sartre’s humanism and the Cuban revolution

Drawing its inspiration from the writings that Sartre dedicated to the Cuban revolution after his 1960 visit to the island, this article discusses his understanding of the relationship between socialism and freedom. The importance of these texts, which were never published in book form in France, goes beyond their specific analysis of the Cuban revolutionary process. They offer a good opportunity to deepen the study of themes central to Sartre’s thought and help us understand the complex connection that Sartre made between his criticism of colonialism and imperialism, and his vision of a socialist society that, by being centered on man and freedom, would not make the critical errors of so-called “real socialism.”