This article explores the conceptual commitments underlying Luxemburg’s repudiation of the discourse of disappointment which had overtaken the European socialist movement during the First World War. My analysis brushes against the grain of the traditional interpretation of Luxemburg’s admonitions ‘to be cheerful despite everything and anything’ as arising from her allegiance to a Marxist philosophy of history which decrees that socialism must inevitably prevail and so refuses to give way to disappointment or despair. The philosophy of history which Luxemburg absorbed (...) from Marx, notably through the Eighteenth Brumaire, prophesies the ultimate victory of socialism but ordains that the actual events and experiences through which this victory is prepared will consist in catastrophes rather than conquests. In Luxemburg, I suggest, we can see more clearly how the experience of failure could make the realization of socialism more rather than less certain, and in terms that refer more directly to the inner situation of the socialist activist than the abstract assurances on which Marx relied: failure occasions the opportunity for deeper learning but, more importantly, it is in the experience of failure that the commitment on which the realization of socialism depends is tested and, in Luxemburg’s hands at least, forged. (shrink)

This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body – that is plasticity as a form of life – is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizing narratives, I draw on genealogical method to illuminate the unequal (...) distribution of plasticity across gender and ethnic groups. Finally, after analysing postgenomics as a different thought-style to genomics, I outline some of its implications for notions of plasticity. I argue that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead closer to an alter-modernistic view that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community. (shrink)

Perhaps no doctrine in our intellectual history has received more attention—critical, puzzled and celebrative—than that of “economic determinism”. To adequately catalogue the literature on Karl Marx’s epoch-making theory would require, no doubt, a considerable tome.I am not, therefore, going to attempt such a task here, illuminating though it might be as a study in the history and sociology of ideas. Rather I am going to outline an interpretation which will—if I am successful—be both faithful to Marx’s texts and immune to (...) the standard philosophical criticisms which have been hitherto advanced against the theory. (shrink)

Max Weber is seen by mainstream social scientists as a sociologist, social theorist, and theorist of bureaucracy. In this reassessment of Weber’s social science and its methodology, it is suggested that Weber can also be seen as a compelling early 20th-century critic of science and technology. The theme of technology, and Weber’s ambivalence about it, is approached through a discussion of his notion of disenchantment. In the modern, disenchanted world, social scientists are compelled to choose the values that guide research, (...) but research is constrained by the technocratic requirements of large, bureaucratic institutions that sponsor and fund it. The article asks whether Weber’s notion of individual values is still applicable in the context of social science in the early 21st century. In a line of thought that can be traced to Postman and Ellul, it is asked whether the choices social scientists make can puncture the dense web of bureaucratic-technological rationality of which Weber was critical. (shrink)

Critical discussion of the claim that Wittgenstein was a conservative thinker.

In this paper, I argue for the existence of pathologies of juridicism. I attempt to show that the Western regime of right tends to colonize our intersubjective relations, resulting in the formation of affective and habitual dispositions that actually hinder participation in social life. Speaking of pathologies of juridicism is to claim that the legal form fundamentally contaminates the way in which we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world, resulting in an ethically deformed, distorted or deficient form (...) of subjectivity. To support my thesis I consult a philosopher, whose work still provides a powerful analysis and critique of juridicism, namely, Hegel. Hegel provides an historic and a systematic theory of the pathologies of juridicism. His historical theory locates the origin of the abstract subjectivity of right in Roman antiquity. His systematic theory understands the negative effects of an absolutization of the legal domain as a persistent threat to social integration and an individual’s pursuit of the good life. I clarify these argumentative dimensions in two steps, beginning with Hegel’s historical analysis of right in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. I then reconstruct Hegel’s critique of the subjectivity of right in the short chapter on the ‘Condition of Right’ in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In conclusion, I argue that, although Hegel’s diagnosis is correct, his prescribed therapy must fail: instead of radically altering abstract right in terms of content and form, it only recommends its complementation through other ethical spheres. (shrink)

A particularly important topic for Marxist theory is that of popular politics: the ways in which the underclasses of society express their interests and values through collective action. Classical Marxism postulates a fundamental conflict of interest among classes. It holds that exploited classes will come to an accurate assessment of their class interests, and will engage in appropriate collective actions to secure those interests. The result is a predicted variety of forms of underclass collective action: boycotts, rent strikes, tax and (...) food riots, rebellion, and revolution. Underclass members of society instigate and support such protests because it is in their material class interest to do so. It will emerge, however, that this account is too schematic to provide a basis for explanation of popular politics. The microfoundations approach to Marxist theory will prove useful in this context because it directs us to some of the resources needed to provide a more adequate account of popular collective action. (shrink)

A particularly important topic for Marxist theory is that of popular politics: the ways in which the underclasses of society express their interests and values through collective action. Classical Marxism postulates a fundamental conflict of interest among classes. It holds that exploited classes will come to an accurate assessment of their class interests, and will engage in appropriate collective actions to secure those interests. The result is a predicted variety of forms of underclass collective action: boycotts, rent strikes, tax and (...) food riots, rebellion, and revolution. Underclass members of society instigate and support such protests because it is in their material class interest to do so. It will emerge, however, that this account is too schematic to provide a basis for explanation of popular politics. The microfoundations approach to Marxist theory will prove useful in this context because it directs us to some of the resources needed to provide a more adequate account of popular collective action. (shrink)

In several enigmatic passages, Paulo Freire describes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a ‘pedagogy of laughter’. The inclusion of laughter alongside problem‐posing dialogue might strike some as ambiguous, considering that the global exploitation of the poor is no laughing matter. And yet, laughter seems to be an important aspect of the pedagogy of the oppressed. In this paper, I examine the role of laughter in Freire's critical pedagogy through a series of questions: Are all forms of laughter equally emancipatory? (...) Certainly a revolutionary pedagogue can laugh, but should he or she, and what are the political (if not revolutionary) implications of this laughter? In order to shed new light on Freire's fleeting yet provocative comments, I turn to Jacques Rancière for his emphasis on the aesthetics of politics, and Paulo Virno who connects joke telling with critical theory. Overall, I argue that we need to take Freire's gesture toward a pedagogy of laughter seriously in order to understand the aesthetics of critical pedagogy and the fundamental need for a redistribution of the sensible that underlies educational relations between masters and pupils. (shrink)

This article explores the role of the antithesis between Athens and Jerusalem in the work of Karl Marx. Starting from an exploration of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, the essay attempts to situate Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’ within a longer history of philosophical writings about Judaism. It argues that, like previous writers, Marx depicts the Hellenic world as an implicit Other to Jewish modernity. Marx’s writings about Greece are heir both to the tradition of German philhellenism reaching back to (...) Schiller and to the insights into antiquity arising from the development of historical scholarship. While Marx’s writings have been instrumental in moving away from the Christian worldview, he has also played a contested and ambivalent role in the development of modern anti-Semitism. By exploring the representation of Greeks and Jews in Marx and Feuerbach, this article will trace how the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem played a crucial role in the shift from Christian anti-Judaism to secular anti-Semitism. (shrink)

Western representation of countries from the Global South implies a dichotomist view of business ethics: on the one hand, universal ethics largely reproduces commonsensical views of the South as ‘less ethical’, and on the other hand, voices from the South are often conditioned to present themselves as substantially indigenous and unambiguous to be accepted as legitimate ethical subjects. We join the growing interest in bridging this gap by drawing on studies from human geography, and ask to what extent the materiality (...) of moral dilemmas bespeaks the disputed underpinning ethical values of a given space. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s perspective of the production of social space, we outline and apply the idea of ‘spatial ethics’ to organizations, in order to approach the entanglement between center and periphery. We analyze organizations in favelas, which are, for many authors, territories where experiences are extreme, and poverty and violence mix with vibrant culture and ingenuity. We critically approach the field of business ethics and suggest that one way of moving beyond the North–South debate is to consider that ethics cannot be transmitted or represented in empty milieus. (shrink)

This article first surveys a significant set of issues that are intertwined in asking whether social classes are real. It distinguishes two different notions of class: class as organized social entities and class as types of individuals based on individual characteristics. There is good evidence for some classes as social entities—ruling classes and underclasses in some societies—but other classes in contemporary society are sometimes best thought of in terms of types, not social entities. Implications are drawn for pluralist accounts of (...) social classification and the individualism-holism dispute. (shrink)

Discussions of diversity tend to paint a mixed picture of the practical and epistemic value of diversity. While there are expansive and detailed accounts of the value of cognitive diversity, explorations of identity diversity typically focus on its value as a source or cause of cognitive diversity. The resulting picture on which identity diversity only possesses a derivative practical and epistemic value is unsatisfactory and fails to account for some of its central epistemic benefits. In response, I propose that collective (...) virtue epistemology offers theoretical models that can further our understanding of the benefits of diversity. And I offer a case study to illustrate how this approach could be used to explore the logic of the identity diversity bonus. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe examine Marx's critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and ‘cultural political economy’. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (...) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a ‘poetry’ of the future. We then consider the misleading ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx's work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy. (shrink)

A case is made for cultural political economy by exploring the constitutive role of semiosis in economic and political activities, economic and political institutions, and social order more generally. CPE is a post-disciplinary approach that adopts the “cultural turn” in economic and political inquiry without neglecting the articulation of semiosis with the interconnected materialities of economics and politics within wider social formations. This approach is illustrated from the emergence of the knowledge-based economy as a master discourse for accumulation strategies on (...) different scales, for state projects and hegemonic visions, for diverse functional systems and professions, and for civil society. He is best known for his contributions to state theory, the regulation approach in political economy, the study of Thatcherism, governance and, most recently, the future of capitalism, the capitalist state, and welfare regimes. His recent publications include: The Future of the Capitalist State and STATE/SPACE, co-edited with N. Brenner, M. Jones, and G. MacLeod. He is now working on the nature and contradictions of the knowledge-based economy. (shrink)

Sociology has long shied away from the problem of populism. This may be due to suspicion about the concept or uncertainty about how to fit populist cases into broader comparative matrices. Such caution is warranted: the existing interdisciplinary literature has been plagued by conceptual confusion and disagreement. But given the recent resurgence of populist politics in Latin America and elsewhere, sociology can no longer afford to sidestep such analytical challenges. This article moves toward a political sociology of populism by identifying (...) past theoretical deficiencies and proposing a new, practice-based approach that is not beholden to pejorative common sense understandings. This approach conceptualizes populism as a mode of political practice—as populist mobilization. Its utility is demonstrated through an application to mid-twentieth-century Latin American politics. The article concludes by sketching an agenda for future research on populist mobilization in Latin America and beyond. (shrink)

A rejoinder to comments by Marco Solinas, Giorgio Fazio, Alessandro Pinzani, Italo Testa, Federica Gregoratto, Leonardo Marchettoni and Matteo Bianchin in this Special Issue of Critical Horizons.

This essay argues that the material conditions of capitalist patriarchal societies are more integrally linked to institutionalized heterosexuality than they are to gender. Building on the critical strategies of early feminist sociology through the articulation of a materialist feminist theoretical framework, the author provides a critique of contemporary sex-gender theory. She argues that the heterosexual imaginary in feminist sociological theories of gender conceals the operation of heterosexuality in structuring gender and closes off any critical analysis of heterosexuality as an organizing (...) institution.... every sociological concept and thesis, as well as the overall patterning of these concepts and theses, is potentially open for reconsideration... With the emergence of feminist sociological theory, the critical emphases in sociology are strengthened by an insistence that sociological work be critical and change-oriented... in an intensely reflexive way towards sociology itself (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1990:318). We must produce a political transformation of the key concepts, that is of the concepts which are strategic for us (Wittig 1992:30). (shrink)

The article deals with the theme of updating of Cuba’s economic model mainly from the perspective of economic and political philosophy and its interdisciplinary contexts. First, it examines the historical origins of Cuba’s socialist model and the subsequent changes after the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Second, it analyses the actualization of Cuba’s model in the first two decades of the 21st century, that is, mainly the introduction of market and private ownership to complement planning and public ownership. Third, it (...) explains the codification of these changes in the new constitution. Forth and finally, it focuses on an interpretation of international cooperation both in Latin America, especially within the framework of the two pink tides, and with other partners in global interactions, particularly China. This will make it possible to understand the updated Cuba’s model, which the author has coined strategic socialism with Cuban characteristics. (shrink)

Socialism is dead and Christianity, at least in the modern West, is not feeling too good either. What remains of the substantive goals, ethics, and ideals of socialism in an epoch of political defeat and in the aftermath of a century of tragic experiments? Are ‘still existing’ socialists simply nostalgic, seeking consolation in an opiate of lost dreams, or are there fragments of ideas and policies that constitute a still living politics of hope for humanity? Christian socialism is one socialist (...) tradition well-suited to address these meta-questions of faith, meaning and goal, not least because it has no unitary political ideology, party or even movement. It is argued here that Christian socialism’s best legacy and use-value today is in its historic failure to be anything other than a modest discourse and practice of a social ethic of free association, political pluralism and a gift economy. To these ends, I use a case study of a clash between two rival versions of contemporary Christian socialism. I then explicate the more difficult and radical version to be found in the work of its leading representative. I outline Milbank’s arguments for Christian socialism as a counter ontology to the secular politics of the modern nation state, an alternative complex space that conceives of community as ‘nomadic city’, and a free market economy based on the poetic practice of gift-giving. This is an agenda, a discourse and a poetic practice bound to failure. Therein is its use value to socialism. (shrink)

I argue that the key ideas of the movement for Black lives have resonances with Frantz Fanon’s ideas particularly in Black Skin, White Masks. I first demonstrate how the mission to repudiate Black demise and affirm Black humanity captures Fanon’s critique of universal humanism. The fear of the Black body was central to the testimonies of Darren Wilson, Jeronimo Yanez, and George Zimmerman. Fanon prioritized the role of the body in his account of racism. It is difficult to not see (...) the relevance of Fanon’s analysis when one considers these testimonies. Lastly, I demonstrate how the chants “Black lives matter,” “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and “I can’t breathe” are acknowledgments of the significance of Black lives and serve as contemporary instances of Fanon’s sociodiagnostic approach. (shrink)

The sociology of knowledge can most generally be defined as the discipline devoted to the social origins of thought. It is an analysis concerned with specifying the existential basis of thought, and with establishing the relationship obtained between mental structures or thought, and that existential basis. Some very interesting and difficult problems arise from this conception of the sociology of knowledge. Perhaps the most obvious of these is whether or not a sociology of knowledge, as here conceived, is theoretically possible. (...) This is a problem I do not intend to deal with at present because limitations of time prevent me from doing even partial justice to it. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper compares Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic critical realism and Michel Foucault’s implicit discursive realism. It argues that there is a surprisingly high degree of correspondence between the two social ontologies. Specifically, both ontologies suggest that there are three largely autonomous domains in operation: cultural, structural, and agentive. Yet, while each of these domains have a level of independence, yet they are also partially constituted by the content and form of the others. This paper discusses the potential to integrate the two (...) approaches in such a way as to overcome their respective short-comings, namely the underdevelopment of culture in Archer’s ontology, and the underdevelopment of social agency in Foucault’s ontology. (shrink)

The gap between Marx’s theoretical writings on political economy and his historical writings arises out of certain limitations that Marx placed upon his political-economic enquiries. These limitations are outlined in the Grundrisse where Marx distinguishes between the universality of the metabolic relation to nature, the generality of the laws of motion of capital, the particularities of distribution and exchange, and the singularities of consumption. What an analysis of the content of Capital shows is that Marx largely confined his efforts to (...) identifying the law-like character of production to the exclusion of all else. While this allowed him to identify certain laws of motion of capital within any form of the capitalist mode of production, it did not and could not constitute a total theory of a capitalist mode of production. A better understanding of what it is that Marx can do for us through his identification of the general laws of motion leads to a far better appreciation of what it is that we have to do for ourselves in order to make Marx’s theoretical findings applicable to particular conjunctural conditions, such as those that have arisen throughout the economic crisis that began in 2007. (shrink)

This article argues that a transcendental materialist conception of subjectivity can move us beyond the orthodox idealist theories that dominate progressive thought in advanced consumer-capitalism. This position can shed new light on current forms of subjectivity that seem to prefer life in consumer culture's surrogate social world rather than active participation in cultural and political resistance and transformation, which requires far more than simply 'transcending the norm'. The rebirth of creative political subjectivity is impossible unless the subject is prepared to (...) risk a traumatic encounter with the Real, the fundamental indeterminacy that exists not in the ideal-symbolic but the material realm, and prepared to reject liberal-postmodernist identity politics to participate in the construction of a coherent alternative ideology. (shrink)

This article examines various positions within science studies on scientific hegemony. After discussing the work of Stephan Fuchs and the “ epistemological chicken” debate, it proceeds to take issue with the claim that science is both locally accomplished and hegemonic. It offers the suggestion that critical accounts would better reconsider the ethos of their audience rather than simply worry about the objectivism of their own representations of science.

The article explores the connection between enlightenment and comedy, as well as its importance for German Jewry. Following Hegel, whose thoughts on ancient drama as well as modern society have shaped the German discourse on comedy until today, this article demonstrates that questions of self-formation, emancipation, and historical self-location are central to comedy. In Carl Sternheim’s comedy The Snob, the idea of self-formation resonates with the historic concept of “civic improvement” through “Bildung”: Jewish emancipation in Germany stood at the end (...) of an educational project that outlasted Jews’ achieving legal equality. The Snob is a comedy about Jewish acculturation and bourgeoisification and embodies Marx’s understanding of comedy as ambivalent: on the one hand, comedy helps people to part cheerfully from their past that was characterized by inequality, but, on the other, it indicates that a world-historic fact like Jewish emancipation may be prone to repeat itself as a farce. Sternheim’s comedy develops a poetic that embraces ambivalence, but also opens the genre of comedy to the question of therapy and healing. It depicts the struggle between autonomy and social formation – the dialectics of German “Bildung.”. (shrink)

Grossman’s first major, published study of Marxist economic theory was a devastating critique of Fritz Sternberg’s ambitious and long book, Imperialism. The article exposed the way Sternberg failed to grasp Marx’s method and basic economic arguments, and drew impatient revolutionary conclusions from assumptions of anti-revolutionary revisionism. It also outlined Grossman’s own recovery, restatement and elaboration of features of Marx’s economic analysis, and Lenin’s conception of workers’ revolution. This abridgement consists of the first three sections of the article. An introduction to (...) Grossman’s article is published simultaneously. (shrink)

From the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the 1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands. This article seeks to intervene in these debates by challenging the terms through which they have been defined. Investigating the importance of ‘sex positivity’ and transgression as conceptual features of feminist and queer discourses, this essay calls for a new focus on the political and material (...) effects of pro-sexuality. (shrink)

Science and technology studies (STS) research challenges the concept of technological determinism by investigating how the end users of a technology influence that technology’s trajectory. STS critiques of determinism are needed in studies of agricultural technology. However, we contend that focusing on the agency of end users may mask the role of political-economic factors which influence technology developments and applications. This paper seeks to mesh STS insights with political-economic perspectives by accounting for relationships between availability of diverse technologies, variations in (...) political-economic structures, and farmer interests and characteristics. We present the results of an analysis on the recent development of three wheat varieties: (a) a wheat variety that was modified genetically to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate, (b) wheat varieties with characteristics selected to serve specific markets, (c) and emerging research and development of perennial wheat varieties. Using data obtained through a survey of wheat growers in Washington State, we analyzed whether farmer interest in these three clusters of wheat varieties was associated with distinct individual characteristics and attitudes and whether those characteristics and attitudes are consistent with political economic structures. Although our analysis did not allow us to assess the degree of direct influence that farmers have on the technological development trajectory for these types of wheat, we were able to document variation in technological alternatives and farmer characteristics related to different political-economic trends. (shrink)

This essay examines Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and his cultivation of a new form of authoritarian and hyper-nationalist neoliberalism, which I call ordonationalist. With particular emphasis placed on tracing resurgence of the national state, ordonationalism points to the neoliberal intensifications, but also the ruptures to neoliberalism through post-neoliberal advances, exemplified by the Hungarian state. Ordonationalism combines: (1) a newly empowered nationalist state invested in flexibilizing domestic labour and controlling access to domestic capitalist accumulation; (2) a national state captured by political actors (...) as a means towards controlling access to domestic capital accumulation; (3) a novel regime of social reproduction, linking financialization, flexibilization of labour, steep decline in supporting social reproduction, and supporting consumption as a source of social reproduction. This project is hegemonic. However, the contradictions between radical neoliberalization and radical nationalism generate ever-more instances where an authoritarian state steps in to solve crises generated by its contradictions. (shrink)

This article sheds new light on Karl Marx’s theoretical legacy to promote educational philosophy and theory in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education. Accordingly, this article selects Marxian thought as an exemplar case to elaborate critical pedagogy and aesthetics and culminate with an overview of the Marxian approach to the theoretical underpinnings of STEAM education. Hence, the article critically reviews Marx’s original works and earlier Marxian scholars’ contributions to extending critical pedagogy and its applications to the STEAM paradigm (...) and informational and communication technology (ICT) development. This article critiques notable structural problems of STEAM education that produce power differentials such as educational gaps and digital divides in the current age of digital capitalism. Given the context, this article refines art and communication theories through the lens of his biography and writings. Additionally, this article incorporates the Marxian viewpoints about reproduction and aesthetic literacy into STEAM education. Overall, this article reviews the theoretical legacy of Marx and his essential critical and pedagogical theory, calling on scholars to pay close attention to re-orienting STEAM pedagogy as an emerging multidisciplinary field. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt’s radio broadcast ‘Hegel and Marx’, aired on 13 November 1931, and newly translated here, recapitulates the account of Marxism that Schmitt started to develop in the 1920s. Beginning from Schmitt’s early theory of adjudication inLaw and Judgement, the concepts of decision, representation and the friend/enemy distinction are analysed, connected, and shown to structure Schmitt’s critique of Marxism, both in the broadcast, and in his other writings during this period. Some concluding remarks are offered on the substantive issues Schmitt’s (...) critique raises for Marx’s political theory. (shrink)

This article investigates the movement building dynamics of contemporary social movement milieus . It develops the concept of the “relay” to introduce four ideal-type movement building relays understood as distinct movement milieus: clustering relay, networking relay, organizing relay, and transforming relay. Each ideal-type captures different points on a continuum of increasing movement building and thus for generating commonalities, shared understandings and identities, mobilizations and strategies. Focusing on what I call the current “rhizomatic movement epoch,” which ranges from roughly the Zapatistas (...) to the recent occupy-type protests, the relay framework can provide a larger conceptual umbrella or schemata for movement-to-movement transmissions. Moreover, focussing on “the situated” element of movements, the relay seeks to highlight the milieu of cooperation attempts, the physical, social and psychological space, the political-economic and socio-cultural setting, in which actors and groups interact. It focuses on those elements that are between the outside of the broader political economy and political opportunity structures and the “inside” of intra-group or movement behaviour . While drawing on selected empirical examples from protests, social forums and networking attempts, this article has a conceptual focus, exploring possibilities by adoption of such a relay lens to further our understanding of movement building dynamics and the temporality of social movements, the current movement milieu and social movement theory more generally. As such, my hope is to raise questions and open further research avenues of interest to social movement organizers and scholars. (shrink)

The philosophical implications of the sciences of complexity suggest that complex systems (such as society) function according to a dialectic of chance and necessity, multidimensionality, non-linearity and circular causality. It is argued that one could employ aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory in order to establish a consistent theory of social self-organization. Bourdieu describes society in epistemological terms as consisting of mutual relationships of subjectivity/objectivity, individual/society, homogeneity/diversity, freedom/necessity, externalization of internality/internalization of externality, embodiment/objectification, modus operandi/opus operatum. The concept of the habitus (...) is a means of explaining the re-creation/self-organization of social systems in terms of human beings as permanent creators and permanently created results of society. (shrink)

At the end of his life, Stuart Hall called for the reengagement of Cultural Studies and Marxism. This paper contributes to this task. It analyses Stuart Hall’s works on communication and the media.The goal of the paper is to read Stuart Hall in a manner that can inform the renewal of Marxist Humanism and the development of a Marxist-Humanist theory of communication. This involves reconstructing elements of Hall’s approach, criticising certain aspects of his work, and through this engagement developing new (...) theory elements.The article’s analysis of Stuart Hall’s theory of communication and the media is conducted in four steps. First, the paper reengages and re-evaluates what Hall called the two paradigms of Cultural Studies: Structuralism and “Culturalism”/Humanism. It discusses the role of human agency in society. Second, the paper engages with Hall’s and Althusser’s notions of articulation and sets the notion of articulation in relation to the concept of communication. Third, it discusses the relationship between communication and work in the context of Hall’s works. Fourth, the article revisits and engages with Hall’s encoding/decoding-model in the context of digitalisation.This paper grounds a dialectical concept of communication that is based on the dialectic of articulating and articulatedness, the dialectic of work and communication, as well as the dialectic of communication in the public sphere and society’s power forcefields. It shows how a critical, dialectical theory of communication benefits from engagement with Stuart Hall’s works. The present work argues with, for, against, and beyond Stuart Hall in order or productively draw on ideas that emerge from this engagement. (shrink)

The servant lives within the social relations of feudal class estrangement. He is a natural moralist who keeps his eyes and his mind open, amidst the compromises, intricacies, and oppression of being a servant, and he sees and understands a good deal more than those around him. Above all, he is a craftsman of experience who, in making history with only a few resources, lives an examined life, and turns estrangement into a life lived for others. Along the way, and (...) ever sensitive to mundane hope and sorrow—even at the point of death—the servant offers educative insight into some of life’s questions. Within a broadly materialist and pragmatic framework, this article examines the concrete particularity of estrangement in terms of the servant’s actions, desires and relations with others. (shrink)

This article challenges what is now the orthodoxy concerning the heritage of Bourdieu (1930–2002): namely, the judgement that his distinctive sociological innovation has been his theory of social reproduction, and that he has failed to provide a necessary theory of social change. Yet Bourdieu consistently claimed to offer a theory of social transformation as well as accounting for continuities of power. Indeed, he provides two substantive keys for an understanding of historical transformation—first, a theory of prophets (religious or secular) as (...) the authors of heresies or “symbolic revolutions” that dispel current doxa; second, a theory of the “corporatism of the universal”: the role of intellectuals or other educated professionals in pursuit of social justice and other universalistic goals. Moreover, Bourdieu fuses his theories of “symbolic revolutions” with a materialist analysis of their social preconditions, including a fresh account of social crises. Crises—war, famine, recession, and especially the intensified precarity of the educated—have, for him, a profound impact, both within differentiated fields and across fields. Conflicts that become effectivelysynchronizedacross fields acquire great resonance within the wider field of power, particularly due to hysteresis or “maladjusted habitus.” Indeed, the appearance of crises, together with new prophetic heresies, leads the subordinate classes to question the taken-for-granted order of things and to orchestrate their resistance. Alongside his corpus of published writings, this article draws widely on Bourdieu’s posthumously published lectures. These cast a distinctive new light on how his well-known conceptual instruments can aid us in the study of historical change. They also expand on how social science itself might be used to facilitate progressive social movements. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms reshape how people communicate, exchange, and associate; how institutions sort them and slot them into social positions; and how they experience life, down to the most ordinary and intimate aspects. In this article, we draw on examples from the field of social media to review the commonalities, interactions, and contradictions between the dispositions of people and those of machines as they learn from and make sense of each other.

It’s not uncommon for people to make reference to atmospheres, including in relationship with educational spaces. In this article, we investigate educational atmospheres by turning to Western and Chinese literature on the air and wind. We pursue this task in three phases. First, we examine the Western literature to see the possible strings of thought that would help us reinvigorate the element of air/atmosphere as a foundational component of an educational sphere. Second, we historicize the Chinese notion of wind as (...) a style of reasoning which structures ancient Chinese cosmology, tempo-spatiality, teaching, and governing into a grid of intelligibility. Third, we argue for a bracketing of a trap of philology and a signifier-signified representational logic through reconceptualizing the atmosphere as a thing that blurs the material-figural boundary and that pushes into a new genre of educational life. (shrink)

The second word in the subtitle of this article is crucial. For there can be no doubt but that the possibility of sociobiology below the human level has already been abundantly realized in, for instance, the main body of E. O. Wilson's enormous and encyclopedic treatise Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. What may more reasonably be doubted, and what is in fact questioned here, is whether, as Wilson and others hope and believe, there is much room, or indeed any, for a (...) sociobiology of our own notoriously wayward and idiosyncratic species. In proposing this particular project Wilson and his colleagues have seen themselves as promoting a climactic conquest for evolutionary biology. For surely, they seem to have thought, now, more than a century after Darwin, it is high time and past time to launch the final assault upon the last citadel. But, as we shall proceed to argue, there are reasons—reasons which were available at least in outline even to Darwin himself—why the ideas which have been so triumphantly successful in explaining The Origin of Species cannot properly be applied to what is in truth a fundamentally different task. They cannot, that is to say, properly be transferred to explain developments either within or out of the particular problem species of which the author of that book, along with both all the authors and all the readers of all other books, have been themselves members. (shrink)

In this response to the symposium on our two books we try to deal as fully as possible in the brief space available with most of the major issues raised by our distinguished commentators. Although at least three of them are in agreement with the main thrust of the arguments put forward in our books, they all raise important issues relating to methodology, the history of economic thought, and a number of more specific issues. Our answer is based on the (...) restatement of the chief purpose of our two books, describing the intellectual history of the evolution of economic science emphasising the role of the excision of the social and the historical from economic theorising in the transition from political economy to economics, only for the two to be reunited through the vulgar form of economics imperialism following the monolithic dominance of neoclassical economics at the expense of pluralism after the Second World War. The importance of political economy for the future of economic science is vigorously argued for. (shrink)