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.”     

Bourdieu and the Logic of Practice: Is All Giving Indian-Giving or is "Generalized Materialism" Not Enough? For the memory of Louis Dumont

I argue here that in the end Bourdieu's theory of practice fails to overcome the problem on which it expressly centers, namely, subject-object dualism. The failure is registered in his avowed materialism, which, though significantly "generalized," remains what it says: a materialism. In order to substantiate my criticism, I examine for their ontological presuppositions three areas of his theoretical framework pertaining to the questions of (1) human agency (as seen through the conceptual glass of the habitus), (2) otherness, and (3) the gift. By scrutinizing Bourdieu's powerful and progressive social theory, with an eye to finding fault, I hope to show the need to take a certain theoretical action, one that is patently out of keeping with the usual self-presentation and self-understanding of social science. The action I have in mind is this: because the problem of subject-object dualism is in the first place a matter of ontology, in order successfully to address it there must take place a direct shift of ontological starting point, from the received starting point in Western thought to one that projects reality in terms of ambiguity that is basic. With this shift the dualism of subject and object dissolves by definition, leaving a social reality that, for reasons of its basic ambiguity, is best approached as a question of ethics before power.     

Where are we when we litigiously judge? Politics and aesthetics in Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the scenario depicted by Carl Schmitt, contemporary theory has contradicted the “thesis of differentiation” between aesthetics and “the political.” Critical theorists claimed aesthetic analysis’ relevance for grasping aspects of the political realm. And political thought took an “aesthetic turn.” Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière have been influential figures in this turn. Their thought offers a clear response to the challenges to the aesthetico-political Schmitt poses. To approach Arendt and Rancière’s responses, this essay proceeds in three parts. The first section analyses Arendt’s reading of the connection between aesthetics and politics. Focusing on a major shift in her perspective on judgement, I argue that her account is influenced by the ungrounded character of politics. The second section thematises the role that the relationship of aesthetics and politics has in Rancière’s work. I claim that his writings might be read as a challenge to Arendt’s attempt to “stabilise” politics by distinguishing it from the social question. Finally, the third section explicitly contrasts Arendt and Rancière’s accounts of the aesthetic-political. I conclude by arguing that their projects are crucial resources for formulating a critical theory that should resist the exceptionalist temptation to conceive “the political” as an incontestable nature.     

Durkheim's Dilemma: Toward a Sociology of Emergence

The concept of emergence is a central thread uniting Durkheim's theoretical and empirical work, yet this aspect of Durkheim's work has been neglected. I reinterpret Durkheim in light of theories of emergence developed by contemporary philosophers of mind, and I show that Durkheim's writings prefigure many elements of these contemporary theories. Reading Durkheim as an emergentist helps to clarify several difficult and confusing aspects of his work, and reveals a range of unresolved issues. I identify five such issues, and I show how Durkheim's writings on emergence suggest potential responses.     

Conflicts in the habitus: the emotional work of becoming modern

This article argues that Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and, in particular, the way habitus is transmitted intergenerationally, can be enhanced by considering conflictual conscious and unconscious processes that emerge in relationships. We suggest that Christopher Bollas's discussions of the ‘unthought known’ and of ‘transformational objects’ add relational depth to the concept of habitus and thus contribute to developing a more psycho‐social understanding of the relation between agency and change. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with a socially mobile chain of a middle‐class grandmother, mother and daughter in a period of rapid change, we describe how conflicts in the habitus are produced relationally and can either impede or motivate desires for change. Relational and object relational psychoanalytic theories offer a way to move beyond what we consider a problem in Bourdieu's theory of habitus that derives from his assumption of a subject who either consciously opts for change in habitus when faced with new social demands or non‐consciously and unconflictually reproduces habitus.     

AGENCY, STRUCTURE, AND THE TRANSITION TO DISABILITY: A CASE STUDY WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR LIFE HISTORY RESEARCH

If life history research is ever to truly fulfill the promise of the sociological imagination, it will need to engage insights from agency-structure theory that have hitherto been neglected. Relatively few life history researchers have explicitly interpreted their subject matter in terms of agency-structure theory, and those who do rarely go beyond Giddens' initial formulation to incorporate more recent theoretical developments. This article attempts to fill this gap, offering an exemplar theorized life history that frames an actor's experience in terms of agency-structure theory. More specifically, I examine the life history of a former urban gang member who was shot and paralyzed and subsequently became a world-class wheelchair athlete. I interpret the life history in terms of the iterative, projective, and practical-evaluative agentive processes that were operative—sometimes simultaneously—at different points in time; and show how this individual's adaptation to disability was influenced by enabling structural conditions that facilitated his agentive actions and by prior experiences he was able to transpose to his new circumstances. In doing so, I also indicate how the body is an essential part of social experience and the vehicle through which agency and structure are enacted.     

‘Cinema,Glamour, Atrocity’: Narratives of Trauma

Abstract

Cinematic treatments of trauma have to confront the challenge that every aesthetic choice is also an ethical one. This challenge poses special problems for questions of truth and the representation of victims and perpetrators. Three documentaries made by Mark Kaplan (1996–2004) explore the history of South African student activist Siphiwo Mtimkulu, tortured and murdered by security policemen in the early 1980s, and the subsequent interaction between Gideon Nieuwoudt, one of the perpetrators, and the Mtimkulu family during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings. Ian Gabriel's fiction film, Forgiveness (2004), uses key aspects of this history in his treatment of a repentant perpetrator seeking forgiveness from his victim's family. In my analysis, I argue that respect for a realist aesthetic – the notion that the camera can and does reveal the world to us – may be combined with self-reflexivity, narrative layering and generic innovation to produce a complex representation of truth, victim and perpetrator. I suggest, further, that the initial choice of subject will determine to some extent the degree of complexity with which issues of truth, on the one hand, and the nature of the victim and the perpetrator, on the other, will be developed.     

Robert W. Cox and the Idea of History: Political Economy as Philosophy

Abstract

Within the discipline of international political economy (IPE), the work of Robert Cox is usually associated with the tradition of historical materialism, especially its Gramscian-inspired version. In this paper, however, I explore some of the less visible elements of Cox's thought. In particular, I highlight a variant of historicism which, although not without a connection to Gramsci's conception of the philosophy of praxis and absolute historicism, is more fully aligned with the work of Collingwood, Vico, Braudel, and Carr. I identify this as a variant of historical idealism, and I suggest that it is this element of his thought which provides a deep intellectual coherence to his work across the different stages of his career. Furthermore, I argue that this use of the idea of history distinguishes Cox's approach from more radical and constructivist accounts of world order, and allows him to connect his framework of historical structures to his method of diachronic change, which centres ultimately on his conception of intersubjectivity. I close by suggesting that Cox's interest in civilizations is deeply connected to these formative historicist influences, which in turn helps to account for why his later work resonates less well with much contemporary historical materialist IPE analysis.     

THE DISABLED BODY,GENEALOGY AND UNDECIDABILITY

The received history of the disabled body is deeply problematized by a genealogy – inspired initially by Foucault – that disrupts the notion of a continuous development of ideas and images, and shifts the focus to competing, fractured and discontinuous discourses culturally embedded in particular historical periods. Following Foucault's explication of the emergence of modernist normativities and the operation of power/knowledge, disability scholarship has charted a break between early religiously-inspired models concerned with a god-given nature, a medical model that pathologizes the disabled body and, more recently, the social model of disability that effects a politicization of the problematic. Yet consistent with a Foucauldian analytic, even the latter resistant discourse gives rise to its own normativities and generates new resistances. Alongside the return of the disabled body to challenge the hegemony of socio-cultural determinations, I offer, then, a further complication. Where previous approaches speak to external discursive power – albeit embedded in the individual consciousness – as the motor of change, I seek to supplement and reconfigure the problematic by engaging with the operation of psychic elements. Within the historically contextualized transformations in the meaning of disability, there is, I argue, another current of interior and less accessible responses, which not only challenge the privileging of periodization in historical thought, but also disorder the alternative Foucauldian approach. Where his analysis is concerned with the multifarious mobilizations of the binary of self and other, a more specifically deconstructive approach seeks to uncover the other as an interior attribute of the embodied self. This essay plays over some historical moments and brings them together with postmodernist and psychoanalytic theory to show how binary differences are constantly undone by the irreducible différance of the disabled body.     

The relationship between physical disability and narcissism: A critique of the literature

This article critically examines some of the major psychoanalytic writings on the relationship between physical disability and narcissism. Tracing the evolution of thought about narcissism from Freud's original formulation to a self-psychological approach, it considers and contrasts pain, illness, and adult disability on the one hand and early onset disability on the other. The conclusion reached is that disability and narcissism are related in complex ways, depending on a variety of physical, developmental, and environmental factors. Thus, clinicians must avoid making a priori assumptions in work with disabled patients, for such assumptions may be countertransferential.     

A Question of History: John Berger's Labours

Abstract John Berger's work of the past dozen years, bearing witness to the disappearance of the European peasantry and seeking to rescue the practice of storytelling that it might be renewed and turned against the cultural amnesia of both industrial capitalism and State socialism, has represented a further articulation of his commitment to the necessity of critical historical thought and consciousness. This essay reviews Berger's earlier work and considers his most recent writings in terms of his commitment to historical remembrance and imagination. Though Berger's project is still found to be extremely compelling, the author finds Berger's formulation of the question of 'survival' as the central question of contemporary history problematic.     

KILLING THE ANGEL IN A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN. BEING AS UNCONSCIOUS AS POSSIBLE WHEN WRITING UP QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

The author begins this paper by establishing a context of writing within a qualitative research framework. He goes on to identify blocks to writing in part one of the paper. In part two various strategies for negotiating these blocks are suggested and illustrated. Extracts of writings from George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes among others are used to show how these great writers have acknowledged and negotiated blocks in the production of their work. Links and connections with writing up qualitative research are made. The crucial and recurring theme of the paper is that the unconscious is to be trusted as an invaluable ally in accessing and producing writing of value. Thinking about writing, while necessary to some extent, should therefore be given second place to the primary importance of clearing a space within which the unconscious can be befriended and surprise us and thereby facilitate the writing process.     

MARSHALL ON DEPOSIT MULTIPLIERS

Credit for establishing the exact nature of the relation between bank reserves and bank deposit "creation" is usually given by historians of economic thought to C. A. Phillips, F. W. Crick and A. Hahn on the basis of writings published by these authors between the years 1920 and 1930 (see, for example, Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis , pp. 1113–1117). As far as I know, Marshall's name has never been mentioned in this connection. In his testimony before the Royal Commission on the Values of Gold and Silver in 1887, however, Marshall offered the following remarks on the subject (see Official Papers by Alfred Marshall , London, Macmillan, 1926, p. 37):     

Parsons's Emergent Durkheims

Parsons's training as an economist, his graduate stay at Heidelberg, and his participation in the Henderson seminar at Harvard provide major clues to his familiarity with Marshall, Pareto, and Weber—three of the four figures whose convergence forms the major theoretical achievement in The Structure of Social Action . But what led him to Durkheim, since Parsons did not study or reside in France, yet read Durkheim in the original, remains an enigma. Without resolving the enigma, this paper argues that Parsons had a great deal in common with Durkheim, and, equally important, that in his mature and late periods he found in his 'revisits' of the later writings of Durkheim both inspiration and affinity. I argue that Parsons well deserves recognition as a major authority on Durkheim, and that both combined offer an alternative to the contemporary version of utilitarianism.     

Faith, Reason, and Charisma: Rudolf Sohm, Max Weber, and the Theology of Grace

Charismatic authority has been central to twentieth-century politics and theory, yet confusion about charisma is rife. Max Weber's classic texts on this subject have been a major source of insight, yet key features of his analysis remain obscure–so much so that many scholars who call themselves Weber's disciples defend views opposed to his. For Weber, charisma is a social status; for many "Weberians," charisma is a personal quality. For Weber, charisma is a quicksilver, unstable form of authority; for his errant followers, it is an existential limit to democracy. One reason for this contradiction is that, influenced by the theologian Rudolf Sohm, Weber used the vocabulary of the theology of grace. Many readers, unfamiliar with the nature of Weber's debt to theology, have thought that Weber, like Rudolf Sohm, viewed charisma as a divinely given personal quality. In fact, however, Max Weber's sociology of charisma is radically opposed to Sohm's theology.     

The terrorist,the artist and the citizen: Oscar Wilde and Vera

This article links Oscar Wilde’s prose writings with his earliest drama Vera, or The Nihilists (1880, rev., 1883) and suggests how the idea of terrorism and political violence was a spectacle and threat that Wilde acknowledged and encompassed in his writing and thought. I discuss Wilde’s adoption of a Hegelian view of the development of civilisation and suggest that during his 1895 trials he cast himself self-consciously as at once agitator and scapegoat, finding that his own life had come to imitate his art though not in the ways with which we are commonly familiar. Modern terrorism from its roots in 1870s Russian political unrest is recognised as both a new force and a familiar fantasy which shapes literature.     

Remembering reuel denney: Sociology as cultural studies

Selected writings from Reuel Denney’s work as a social analyst are reviewed in order to establish and highlight his often-overlooked contributions to sociology. Denney’s cultural studies of Americans at play, with specific reference to his writings on the subcultures of football and hot-rodding, and on television and the electronic media, advertising and architecture, are reviewed in examining some major themes emphasized in his sociology. These writings are discussed against the backdrop of Denney’s early life experiences drawn from his autobiography to better enable readers to gain an appreciation of his sociological thinking. The beginnings of a Denney postmodern are sketched as a conclusion to this paper’s major contention that Denney anticipated much of today’s sociology as cultural studies. As one of Reuel’s students, nearly forty years ago, I hope that this article serves not only to highlight Denney’s contributions and place within the discipline of sociology, but also that my personal recollections will serve to reveal the strong attachments we students felt toward him as our teacher, mentor, and friend. nt|mis|His teaching and research combine his interests in higher education and the professions, bureaucracy, social thought, mass media, and popular culture. His most recent book, Schooling As Entertainment: Corporate Education Meets Popular Culture, is available from Cedarreek Press.     

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.