Proceeding from the debate opened by Beck, Giddens and Lash’s Reflexive Modernization, this paper seeks to clear the way for a more consistent and coherent concept of reflexivity in relation to the cultural-symbolic foundations of society. Seeing that Lash in his contribution to the debate inadvertently raises a key problem, i.e., the broad cognitive problem, the paper develops a critique of his hermeneutic culturalism. It focuses on the disparity between the position explicitly put forward in the debate with Beck (...) and Giddens and the cognitive one which more or less implicitly comes into play throughout his relevant essays. The disparity shows up already in his treatment of the problem of mediation, but it comes graphically to a head in his appropriation of Bourdieu. To lend the analysis some profile and depth, the argument is supported by elements of a socio-cognitive theory which has been gaining visibility in both social theory and the philosophy of social science. While the paper is critical of Lash, its overall aim is to strengthen his contribution to the debate. (shrink)

ExcerptTrends in the Political Critique of Modernity The political critique of modernity appears to have gained momentum in Europe in recent years. However, as with so many trends, it is a rather diverse movement, encompassing populist nationalist and national-conservative parties in Western Europe (including the Danish People's Party), a fascistoid Christian-nationalist revival (as seen in Serbia), and a number of trends that are directly incompatible with liberal democracy. A sinister connection between the cultural Right and centers of religious power may (...) not exist in Western Europe the way it does in Serbia, but a variation of the…. (shrink)

Investigating the neo-Kantian origins of structuralism and culturalism, this article analyses the development of Cassirer's thought by following his intellectual progression from knowledge to culture, and from culture to praxis. The article is in two parts. In the first part, the author presents an analysis of Cassirer's relational conception of knowledge. In the second part, the critique of knowledge is superseded by a critique of culture. The author analyses Cassirer's anthropological philosophy of symbolic forms and critically compares it to (...) Simmel's vitalist theory of culture. The article ends with a plea for a practical sociology inspired by Cassirer's return to Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

The successive announcements concerning the “end” of ideology or its “return” fail to register the major shift in its use as a concept in social theory: its redefinition in a culturalist perspective. The article begins by recalling the Marxist definition of the concept, comprising three ideas: the distortion of reality, the legitimation of domination, and the loosening of ideological “hold” through its critique. The article then notes the gradual abandoning of the term, before looking at the terms which presided over (...) its culturalist redefinition. The article then examines the contours of a possible renewal of the critical concept paving the way for a renewed critique of ideology. Such a reconstruction is notably based on the theory of recognition. It locates in the idea of the loosening or undoing of ideological hold the thrust of an internal critique. (shrink)

The proponents of critical pedagogy criticize the earlier Neo‐Marxist theories of education, arguing that they provide only a ‘language of critique’. By introducing the possibility of human agency and resistance, critical pedagogists attempt to develop not only a pedagogy of critique, but also to build a pedagogy of hope. Fundamentally, the aim of critical pedagogy is twofold: 1) to correct the pessimistic conclusions of Neo‐Marxist theories, and 2) to transform a ‘language of critique’ into a ‘language of (...) possibility’ . Then, what political projects do critical pedagogies present to us? What alternative visions of schooling do critical pedagogies offer against the mainstream pedagogy? The purpose of this paper is to identify main projects of critical pedagogy, and to explore overarching politics that underlie the field of critical pedagogy. Although there are diverse theories and approaches in critical pedagogy, three overarching projects can be identified, which I call: 1) the project of experience, 2) the project of anti‐system, and 3) the project of inclusion. Based on an examination of the general trends and characteristics of these three projects of critical pedagogy, I argue that three prominent politics that underlie the field of critical pedagogy are culturalist politics, self/identity politics, and grassroots politics. In trying to better understand why and how critical pedagogy has developed the political stances as it has, the last part of the paper links these three politics to the historical developments of the New Left and the New Social Movements. (shrink)

Abstract Nancy Fraser raises serious doubts about the critical potential of identity theories of recognition on the ground that they encourage the reduction of personal identity to cultural identity. Based on a comparative analysis of Charles Taylor's and Axel Honneth's theories of recognition, this paper argues that Fraser's critique is justified with respect to some aspects of Taylor's theory of identity, but not with respect to his conception of recognition, or to Honneth's conception of both identity and recognition. Taylor's (...) theory of identity recognition is vulnerable to Fraser's critique because under certain conditions of pathological socialization it cannot prevent the normative subordination of strong evaluation to whatever dominant goods are acquired through acculturation. Honneth's theory of identity recognition overcomes this normative weakness in three ways. First, Honneth differentiates between three types of self-relation that cannot be reduced to cultural identity. Second, he operates with a mixed, attributive?responsive model of recognition that normatively underwrites all these types of self-relation. Third, he makes the condition of reciprocity in recognition the criterion for successful self-realization that enables one to distinguish between misrecognition and non-normative experiences of human suffering. (shrink)

In the present article, working from within the framework of critical rationalism and focusing mostly on the views developed by some Iranian writers, I argue that the programmes of producing ‘Islamic Science’ and ‘Islamisation of Science/Knowledge’ are doomed to failure. I develop my arguments in three parts. I start by explaining that the advocates of the programmes of producing cIS or IoK subscribe to mistaken images of science that are shaped by either a positivist or outmoded culturalist/interpretivist theories of (...) science. I shall then focus on the similarities and differences of ‘science’ and ‘technology’, arguing that despite close interconnection between the two it is of utmost importance, for analytical purposes, to keep these two socially constructed entities apart. Drawing on the above distinction, I argue that while creating ‘Islamic’ or ‘indigenous’ sciences is impossible, constructing ‘Islamic’ or ‘indigenous’ technologies is, in principle, feasible. Lastly, I turn to some of the... (shrink)

The proponents of critical pedagogy criticize the earlier Neo‐Marxist theories of education, arguing that they provide only a ‘language of critique’. By introducing the possibility of human agency and resistance, critical pedagogists attempt to develop not only a pedagogy of critique, but also to build a pedagogy of hope. Fundamentally, the aim of critical pedagogy is twofold: 1) to correct the pessimistic conclusions of Neo‐Marxist theories, and 2) to transform a ‘language of critique’ into a ‘language of (...) possibility’ (, p. 108). Then, what political projects do critical pedagogies present to us? What alternative visions of schooling do critical pedagogies offer against the mainstream pedagogy? The purpose of this paper is to identify main projects of critical pedagogy, and to explore overarching politics that underlie the field of critical pedagogy. Although there are diverse theories and approaches in critical pedagogy, three overarching projects can be identified, which I call: 1) the project of experience, 2) the project of anti‐system, and 3) the project of inclusion. Based on an examination of the general trends and characteristics of these three projects of critical pedagogy, I argue that three prominent politics that underlie the field of critical pedagogy are culturalist politics, self/identity politics, and grassroots politics. In trying to better understand why and how critical pedagogy has developed the political stances as it has, the last part of the paper links these three politics to the historical developments of the New Left and the New Social Movements. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical commentary on the essentialist concept of ethnicity, which, it is argued, underpins the discourse of transcultural health‐care. Following a consideration of the difficulties that ensue from the way in which ethnicity has been theorised within transcultural nursing in particular, the paper turns to a consideration of alternative ways of thinking about ethnicity, which have emerged from more recent social anthropology and postmodernism. It addresses the question of how to therorise ethnicity in a way that (...) does not entail its reification as a set of fixed cultural properties, and makes some tentative suggestions for the possibility of a critical culturalist approach to difference and healthcare practice, which must include a consideration of racisms. (shrink)

Although nursing has a unique contribution to advancing social justice in health care practices and education, and although social justice has been claimed as a core value of nursing, there is little guidance regarding how to enact social justice in nursing practice and education. In this paper, we propose a critical antidiscriminatory pedagogy (CADP) for nursing as a promising path in this direction. We argue that because discrimination is inherent to the production and maintenance of inequities and injustices, adopting (...) a CADP offers opportunities for students and practicing nurses to develop their capacity to counteract racism and other forms of individual and systemic discrimination in health care, and thus promote social justice. The CADP we propose has the following features: it is grounded in a critical intersectional perspective of discrimination, it aims at fostering transformative learning, and it involves a praxis‐oriented critical consciousness. A CADP challenges the liberal individualist paradigm that dominates much of western‐based health care, and the culturalist and racializing processes prevalent in nursing education. It also situates nursing practice as responsive to health inequities. Thus, a CADP is a promising way to translate social justice into nursing practice and education through transformative learning. (shrink)

Cultural safety is a relatively new concept that has emerged in the New Zealand nursing context and is being taken up in various ways in Canadian health care discourses. Our research team has been exploring the relevance of cultural safety in the Canadian context, most recently in relation to a knowledge-translation study conducted with nurses practising in a large tertiary hospital. We were drawn to using cultural safety because we conceptualized it as being compatible with critical theoretical perspectives that (...) foster a focus on power imbalances and inequitable social relationships in health care; the interrelated problems of culturalism and racialization; and a commitment to social justice as central to the social mandate of nursing. Engaging in this knowledge-translation study has provided new perspectives on the complexities, ambiguities and tensions that need to be considered when using the concept of cultural safety to draw attention to racialization, culturalism, and health and health care inequities. The philosophic analysis discussed in this paper represents an epistemological grounding for the concept of cultural safety that links directly to particular moral ends with social justice implications. Although cultural safety is a concept that we have firmly positioned within the paradigm of critical inquiry, ambiguities associated with the notions of 'culture', 'safety', and 'cultural safety' need to be anticipated and addressed if they are to be effectively used to draw attention to critical social justice issues in practice settings. Using cultural safety in practice settings to draw attention to and prompt critical reflection on politicized knowledge, therefore, brings an added layer of complexity. To address these complexities, we propose that what may be required to effectively use cultural safety in the knowledge-translation process is a 'social justice curriculum for practice' that would foster a philosophical stance of critical inquiry at both the individual and institutional levels. (shrink)

This article seeks to enrich the social-theoretical and sociological approach to climate change by arguing in favour of a weak naturalistic ontology beyond the usually presupposed methodological sociologism or culturalism. Accordingly, attention is drawn to the elementary social forms that mediate between nature and the sociocultural form of life and thus figure as the central object of a critical sociological explanation of impediments retarding or preventing a transition to a sustainable global society. The argument is illustrated by a (...) comparison of the current situation of climate change to a similar situation some 10,000 years ago which conditioned the transition from hunting-gathering to farming. The crucial factor in the prehistoric transition had been the newly acquired cognitive fluidity, which not only became the defining feature of the modern human mind, but is also foundational of the corresponding social form of life. The cognitively fluid mind made possible new generative practices and the imagination of counterfactuals possessing an incursive force that is capable of transforming existing practices and social structures. The ultimate question, then, is twofold: whether there is enough potential left in the cognitively fluid mind for its societal significance to be activated to the benefit of a transformation of the current recalcitrant social formation; and whether we today are able and willing to recognize such potential and corresponding realizable possibilities upon which to act. (shrink)

Faced with the confused meanings of the concept of generation, this article defends the need to move from Karl Mannheim’s excessive emphasis on political and intellectual self-awareness as a pre-condition for generation formation to an enlarged social and cultural definition of generations. By developing the concept of social generations, we argue that rather than concrete groups, generations are better conceived as discourses with which individuals relate in order to build self-identification. Individuals living in similar historical contexts may share mental and (...) practical dispositions, but must always position themselves in face of the narratives that have come to be dominant to describe a given generational location. Such a contention implies redressing Mannheim’s culturalist view through a reformulation of his hierarchical view of the scheme of generations. By replacing generation-units by dominant ideas, we contend that generations are better conceived as discursive formations in the Foucauldian sense. (shrink)

In the past ten years, work by K€olbel, MacFarlane, Richard and others has rekindled old debates on relativism. In this important contribution to those debates, the authors defend a ‘mainstream’ view about the contents of thought and talk that they call Simplicity against the assaults from such ‘analytic relativists’.

This article identifies two strands of thinking about sexuality and identity within queer theory: culturalist and naturalist. First, the article critically assesses culturalist queer theory penned by Judith Butler and Lee Edelman by showing that their theories, even when acutely aware of the traps of exclusionary identity politics, remain indebted to thinking on the basis of exclusion and separation by positing a rigid identity and the untouchability of the ‘human’, of the ‘cultural’. The article proceeds by taking acts of sex (...) as objects of analysis and, with the help of Leo Bersani, elaborates how naturalistic thinking might help us break with the double edict of both culturalist thought and contemporary identity politics, i.e. sociocentrism and the injunction to the untouchability and unbespeakability of the singular (‘human’, ‘cultural’, ‘queer’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘trans’, ‘black’, etc.). (shrink)

Race difference and whiteness — key elements in the construction of my cultural identity — became a focus of my reflective practice that began over 5 years ago. This article reflects critically on the production of white identity from my social location as a white nurse. My attention focused on two aspects of whiteness: the social location from which I live and learn, and the hegemonic but unmarked discourse that informs the knowledge I read and create as a researcher. My (...) white identity is characterized by four features: the absent presence of whiteness; the need for an oppositional identity; the entitlement of choice and subjectivity; and the denial of a dominant position and relation to the racialized Other. Exploring these features is critically important at this juncture in global and professional history because of the persistence of neoliberalism and the popularity of culturalist approaches to diversity. Examining the process of my radicalization about race simultaneously calls attention to the historiography of ideas about whiteness and race difference and the institutionalization of beliefs and practices about race difference that continuously reproduce racialized identities and inform collective nursing practice and research. (shrink)

This article uses critical discourse analysis to examine how the higher COVID-19 infection rates among South Asians in general, and Punjabis more specifically, have been represented by conservative politicians and their representatives as a consequence of cultural and religious practices. Two counter-narratives are discussed. The first substitutes the negative image of the Sikh Punjabi Canadian community with a celebratory and positive view of Sikh humanitarianism and community service. The second attributes the high numbers to class attributes such as precarious (...) jobs, poverty-level wages, employment insecurity, lack of sick days, over-crowded housing, racism and lack of access to healthcare. We argue that the conservative explanation as well as the first counter-narrative reveal continuities in culturalist understandings of South Asian immigrants, albeit in slightly different ways. The second counter-narrative represents a discursive resistance by advancing a structural analysis of health and disease in immigrant communities. (shrink)

This article critically examines the structure and content of the ‘New American Cultural Sociology’, through an engagement with the recent writings of its main representative, Jeffrey Alexander. Alexander’s project to retool sociology and cultural studies alike is coherent and ambitious, and his transition from theory scholar to public intellectual makes an assessment of that project additionally necessary. I argue, however, that while it gives a necessary jolt to conventional thinking around culture and meaning, major weaknesses and problems can be identified (...) in each of the three main levels of analysis: the articulation of the theoretical programme of cultural sociology, its application in substantive cultural exploration, and its emerging political ideology of civil society multiculturalism. Overall, the key theme of the critique is that Alexander’s long-standing concern, and talent, for ‘multidimensional’ social theory is heavily compromised by his equally strong inclination towards excessive culturalism and idealism. (shrink)

This essay isolates and critically assesses the motivation behind the current backlash against the broadly culturalist and historicist paradigm that has structured research in the interpretative humanities since the 1980s. That motivation, it argues, has less to do with the noble desire to rescue the humanities from the alleged absurdities of the postmodernists than it has with a reluctance to face up fully to the secularism that many of the humanities’ contemporary critics profess. If historicism and constructivism are under attack (...) today, it is not merely because they offend certain entrenched epistemological or metaethical views. Rather, and more pointedly, it is because these secularist thought styles foreclose traditional sources of spiritual consolation, which many of us intimately rely upon. To make this case, the essay stages a confrontation between William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and Sigmund Freud’s “On Transience”, two texts that take a long hard look at the prospect of extinction and then diverge in their reactions. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, critical art history often chose to ally itself with a restrictive brand of formalism. As a result, representation- and ideology-critical analyses regularly reduced the artwork to the bare bones (Hegel) of the material signifier in its social use. By contrast, in the texts assembled here, elements of a critical materialism are combined with an effort to reevaluate the meta-physical implications of modern abstraction and art since the 1960s. Taking Gilles Deleuze s readings of (...) Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson as his starting point, the author delineates a topic in which the artwork s capacity for resistance is grounded in its relationship to an immanent infinity: the Spinozian substance, Nietzsche s Becoming, Bergson s duree. Against the backdrop of a critical rereading of Heidegger, this infinite dimension is interpreted in temporal and ontological terms as the vertical past of production, which can only be grasped in broken and technically encrypted form in the present shape and materiality of the artwork. Hence the notion of an aesthetics of production does not imply a nostalgia for the artisanal or for the artwork s singularity. The concept of production developed in this book aims at a realm that lies beyond finite representation but is still understood in materialist terms, and that threatens the circulation of positive, conceptually standardized knowledge. In case studies on Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Michael Asher and in framing essays on Kant and Nietzsche as well as Heidegger and Spinoza, this book articulates a concept of the artwork in the long modern era which takes account of the twentieth century s critique of metaphysics but without surrendering the truth claim of art and philosophy in favor of a culturalist and sociological relativism. ". (shrink)

This paper defends an account of cosmopolitanism as a corrective virtue of the sort endorsed by Philippa Foot. In particular, it argues that cosmopolitanism corrects a common and dangerous tendency to form overly strong identifications with political entities such as countries, nations, and cultures. The account helps to unify the current heterogeneous collection of cosmopolitan theories, as is illustrated by a discussion of the cultural cosmopolitanism of Jeremy Waldron, and the political cosmopolitanism of Simon Keller. The account also helps distinguish (...) cosmopolitans from their critics, most of whom share the cosmopolitan’s commitment to respect for human rights: for example, liberal patriots, liberal nationalists and liberal culturalists. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Our Philosophy The Problem of Latino Philosophy Historiographical Characterizations of Philosophy Latino Conceptions of Latino Philosophy Latino Philosophy as Ethnic Philosophy Latino Philosophy and “Scientific” Philosophy Universalism, Culturalism, and Critical Philosophy Revisited American Philosophy Latino and American Philosophy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 231-232 [Access article in PDF] Donald R. Kelley. The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. vii + 320. Cloth, $59.50. The field of intellectual history, once known as the history of ideas, intersects with many other historical sub-disciplines, especially the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, and cultural history. (...) Donald Kelley, a distinguished intellectual historian and editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas, has written a comprehensive history of his field that emphasizes the process by which scholars who studied the history of thought gradually adopted an approach to their subject that resulted in "the descent of ideas" from philosophical abstraction to the "sublunar" realm of human experience and understanding. This intellectual descent, just like the biological descent of man plotted by Darwin in 1871, has not followed a linear course. Displaying remarkable scholarly range and erudition, Kelley guides the reader through a complex and sometimes amorphous history of intellectual history that covers developments in scholarship from ancient times to the present.The most original and distinctive feature of the book is Kelley's emphasis on the importance of eclecticism in the emergence of intellectual history. The book begins with an exposition of the scholarship of the early nineteenth-century Liberal French philosopher and educator Victor Cousin, whose eclectic approach to teaching the history of philosophy was for him not only the best route to attaining true wisdom but also the key to organizing the history of thought. In this way Cousin helped to make intellectual history a distinct branch of historical scholarship, while his contemporaries Abel-François Villemain and François Guizot marked a parallel shift in interest from the history of ideas to the history of literature and the history of civilization. From this starting point Kelley looks back to classical, medieval, and early modern thought, exploring earlier expressions of eclecticism, including that of Diogenes Laertius in the third century CE, as a distinct and often maligned philosophical tradition. An excellent chapter on the "new" or modern eclecticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which rejected syncretism as well as skepticism and which found a place for Christian thought, gives new significance to the work of [End Page 231] Jakob Thomasius, his son Christian Thomasius, and J. J. Brucker, whose Critical History of Philosophy (1742-44) established the history of philosophy as a distinct discipline.Kelley devotes considerable space to discussing the intersection between the history of philosophy and intellectual history. The former has long served as the "taproot" of the latter, even after eighteenth-century philosophers, striving to establish philosophy as a rigorous science, rejected a historical approach to attaining wisdom. This development caused a split within the ranks of philosophers between the "purists" in the Kantian tradition and "culturalists" like J. G. Herder who, "following the descent of ideas into the medium of language, strayed off into what came to be known as cultural history" (p. 4). In a chapter devoted to the history of philosophy in modern times, Kelley explores the contributions made by the philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Benedetto Croce, and Arthur Lovejoy to the field of intellectual history.By taking a long historical perspective on the development of his field, Kelley is able to demonstrate that some recent trends in intellectual and literary history have longstanding precedents. Thus he traces the recent "linguistic turn" in historical analysis, which he styles the "linguistic return," back to the Renaissance, and he sees the claims of twentieth-century scholars who emphasize the importance of narrative structures in giving meaning to the past as restatements of ancient literary theory. In his chapter, "The Way of Ideas and the Ways of Words," Kelley shows that the descent of ideas began long before the emergence of intellectual history as a distinct field. As might be expected in a work of historiography, Kelley's methodology in establishing these precedents and continuities in scholarship is in a certain sense traditional. Yet there is little that... (shrink)

The increased focus on issues of gender and schooling in India over the last decade has produced several gains that include more incentive schemes to make girls attend school, greater employment of women teachers and improved efforts to incorporate female protagonists in textbooks. However, a closer reading of this ‘gender’ focus reveals an inordinate concern with numbers, i.e. enrolment. The instrumentalism that underlies these efforts is revealed through a double-move effected by existing discourses. The first is to locate the reasons (...) why girls are out of school strictly within a reading of cultural and familial practices and (secondly) to therefore fail to recognize normative practices of schooling and State policies as already deeply ‘gendered’. This double-move is epitomized in the Indian State’s more recent efforts to set up residential elementary schools for girls (Kasturba Gandhi Vidyalayas) in each district of the country; an effort that has been publicly lauded as the most effective way to overcome cultural barriers to girls’ schooling. Through a focus on policy documents that discuss this scheme, the article will interrogate the existing conflation of ‘gender’ with a biological/culturalist reading of the ‘girl child’. In what ways does this narrow focus naturalize a binary frame of reference around the traditional family/community and the empowered girl child? Why have State efforts around educating the ‘girl child’ not been subject to greater critical analysis amongst feminist scholars in India? (shrink)

In this paper, we explore Martha Nussbaum’s version of cosmopolitanism and evaluate its potential to reduce the growing global discord we currently confront. We begin the paper by elucidating the concept of cosmopolitanism in historical and contemporary terms, and then review some of the major criticisms of Nussbaum’s position. Finally, we suggest that Nussbaum’s vision of cosmopolitanism, in spite of its morally noble intentions, faces overwhelming philosophical and practical difficulties that undermine its ultimate tenability as an approach to resolving international (...) conflict. (shrink)

Enlightenment confidence in reason and in our individual powers of reasoning have been subjected to growing criticism. One criticism is that Enlightenment universalism about reason has provided a cover story for cultural if not economic or political imperialism. I identify and criticize three central assumptions about reason common from the Enlightenment to the present day: That reason and tradition are distinct, if not conflicting intellectual resources; that reason is inherently a power of individuals; and that rejecting individualism in epistemology entails (...) historicist relativism. The contemporary debates between defenders of universalist views of reason and their multi-culturalist critics reproduce on an inter-cultural level the contests between Christian religious sects that originally compelled the development in Europe of Enlightenment views of reason. Both sets of debates recapitulate at a practical level the theoretical issues posed by dogmatism and question-begging , problems crystallized in Sextus Empiricus' Dilemma of the Criterion. I contend that rectifying the three erroneous Enlightenment assumptions about reason shows that Sextus' Dilemma can be resolved by a constructive account of self- and mutual criticism. This account provides a constructive response to the contemporary debates between the Enlightenment and its multi-culturalist critics. Surprisingly, the basic views required for a tenable, enlightened account of reason were developed by Hegel, whose views have been widely misunderstood because they have been forced into the very dichotomies against which Hegel argued convincingly. (shrink)

Cosmopolitan concern for the whole world is often treated as oppositional to particular collectivities, to corresponding sensibilities and to the obligations that follow from them. Tensions revolve around demands made upon the self (depending on the emphasis on the local or the global) and infuse educational discourse accordingly. Culturalism approaches the self as a culturally or multiculturally shaped identity, monopolises the terrain of cosmopolitan debate and narrows the scope of cosmopolitan education only to encouraging hybridity of selfhood and to (...) cultivating respect and tolerance of global diversity. In this article, I discuss Jeremy Waldron’s conception of cosmopolitan selfhood by drawing on the exemplary status attributed to specific manifestations of hybrid identity. What will gradually emerge from my discussion is, hopefully, a broadening of cosmopolitan demands upon the self and an emphasis on the transforming and reforming rather than the forming or informing significance of cosmopolitan education. This trans/re-forming significance is attached to a critical positioning of the subject regarding the ethico-political responsibilities of one’s home (-land, culture, commitments) that often go unnoticed. Doing one’s homework is shown to be a precondition for a cosmopolitanism understood within the order of treatment of, rather than agreement with, the Other. (shrink)

The fact that there are different cultures in the world is too obvious for words. COnsidering thus cultural differences in the light of the phenomenological concept of life-world may raise the following questions: Do we live in the same life-world regardless of such cultural differences? Or do we live in different life-worlds because of cultural differences? The first question presupposes a singular life-world, whereas the second question entails a plurality of life-worlds. IN any case, how is the notion of cultural (...) difference related to that of the life-world? Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the founder of phenomenology seems to conceive the life-world as the bare ground of the natural sciences. THe life-world therefore acquires a universal validity regardless of cultural differences. IN contrast, for Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), who is more concerned with the foundation of human and social sciences than that of natural sciences, the life-world understood as field of praxis with social and cultural characteristics unavoidably assumes cultural differences. Besides critically discussing these two radically diverging positions, the book also discusses what Bernhard Waldenfels sees as a common denominator: the idea of grounding (Grundlegungsidee). BOth Husserl and Schutz develop in their own ways a foundationalist interpretation of the life-world. IN whatever case, the book seeks to overcome any foundationalism whether in the form of universalism or culturalism by suggesting to refocus and inquire into the status of cultural objects. UNiversals are ill-suited for cultural matters. COrrelatively, considering cultural objects from alien cultures requires acknowledging difference with a sense of humility that does not preclude the possibility of understanding. (shrink)

In the first issue of the renewed Analyic Teaching, A. T. Lardner opens a debate on how to react to postmodern and multi-culturalist positions and their critique on Philosophy for Children. Lardner concludes: This paper has not been set out to disagree with either the postmodern or multi-culturalist positions. Indeed, it accepts most of the claims made. It has attempted to show that the critique from these quarters of the work of Philosophy for Children in settings outside the USA is (...) based on a misunderstanding of what we do. It has suggested how those working in the program might answer such critiques along with suggesting caution in how we describe our goals and methods. Finally, it has suggested an uncomfortable parallel between the extreme postmodern and multi-cultualist position about eduactional work based on critical, reflective inquiry, and previous, elitist notions which the same people are sure to reject.I'd like to comment on some of Lardner's theses. (shrink)

This interview – conducted by Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan with Clinton Walker over the course of three months between Melbourne and Sydney via email and Skype – explores the questions of Australian popular culture writing with, against, and of the culture industries themselves. Walker is a leading freelance Australian cultural historian and rock music journalist. He is the author of seven books, five about Australian music. He has been a radio DJ and TV presenter. He compiled and produced four (...) double CD album collections of Australian music – Inner City Sound, Buried Country, Long Way to the Top, and Studio 22. He has been a key writer in several multi-media projects, including the Powerhouse Museum Real Wild Child exhibition and CD-Rom and ABC TV’s hit documentary series/CD/DVD Long Way to the Top. In 2006, a new US edition of his first book Inner City Sound was published. His Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car has been published in a revised edition in 2009. In 2012, his eighth book, The Wizard of Oz, will be published. Walker is currently writing with Beilharz and Hogan a book called The Vinyl Age: The History of Australian Rock Music, 1945–1995. The interviewers invited Walker to reflect critically on his 35-year ‘career’ as pop avatar, independent writer and critic in the post-war to post-modern Australian popular culture industries. Going from journalism to his path-finding books and television documentaries, the article traces this work’s development both in personal terms and as a symptom of the broader cultural evolution, from the suburbs to pop to art and rock and back again; between London and the provincial cultures of Oz; from one-way American consumerism to local DIY egalitarianism, analogue to digital to global dialogue, youth culture to multi-culturalism, and from the putative low brow to the legimitization process itself of popular culture. (shrink)

Revisionists have reclassified fascism as an autonomous revolutionary force based on the power of myth. Yet despite attempts to close the gap between materialist and culturalist readings, theories of fascism as the future-oriented projection of a mythic past overlook the point that, though intrinsic in the subjectification and deautonomization of the individual in collective-type societies, myths cannot be revolutionary because they derive their significance by projecting an idealized past that originates outside the emancipatory-developmental trajectory of modernity. Myths constitute a generic (...) feature of human societies, idealized narratives which synthesize historical events, values and ideals into all-encompassing and enduring social intuitions; myths cannot be criticized because they are ‘untrue’ but because they exhibit an intrinsically speculative and particularistic nature which is unable to provide an objective basis for the revolutionary transformation of capitalist social relations. As a violent rupture of incendiary modernism, the mythic narrative of interwar fascism dramatized the experience of modernity in a new and scandalous form, confronting but ultimately reaffirming the conformism and disavowal in bourgeois culture. Unable to rise above the powerful yet imaginary ideal of ‘manifest destiny’ – an imperial ideal shared by non-fascist European powers, fascism offered a beguiling glimpse into the transgressive power of the modern postdemocratic corporate state, pointing towards a social structure of accumulation based on an appropriation of the cooperative capacities and democratic potential of society by capital. Emphasizing the accumulated or ‘constituted’ violence of modernity, the fascist mythologization of power led to the functionalization of reason, the demoralization of socially motivated action, and the suspension of objective moral standards as grounds for civic association. (shrink)

My paper is divided into two parts. In the first one, I try to categorize the different strands in the criticism of development. In the second part, I discuss the values which could give a sound direction to development.I distinguish five different kinds of criticism.- First, the Marxist inspired approach. Development is seen as the result of imperialism, the satellization of a periphery around and for the benefit of a center or a class in a center.- Second, the criticism of (...) the extreme left. According to it, development no longer has either subjects or ends. The anonymous industrial system feeds on itself.- Third, the Greens' criticism. Ecological considerations are becoming more and more intractable limits to development.- A fourth kind of criticism is the culturalist one : development tends to suppress the originalities of the world's different cultures.- Fifth, some critics reject the technical mastery of the universe and seek a more convivial and more receptive attitude. The two last criticisms are still more radical. But we cannot turn the clock back, our only choice is to limit and repair the damage development has already done. We must redirect it, not refuse it. In the second part of my paper, I indicate the direction develop- ment should take : an utilitarian direction, that is to say, a maximization of collective utilities within a plan. But I stress three shortcomings of such an approach which need to be corrected by entrenched funda- mental rights.- First, utilitarianism aims at collective benefit but can be blind to the distribution of costs and to the rights of persons and minorities.- Second, planning inevitably ignores those ends whose beneficial consequences cannot be factored in. For example, the health of the elderly is a dead end whereas the health of the labour force of the future is desirable for the stream of benefits it promises.- Third, our values change, so planning has to be a process of constant revision. A democratic process, founded on and protected by fundamental rights can counter these three shortcomings.- First, defending each person's rights is a way to limit sacrifices imposed on individuals in the name of a collective good or development.- Second, rights of association and political expression for the poorest ensure that they have a say in choosing social policies.- Third, the respect of each person's fundamental rights is an ultimate end and gives a sense of direction to all social policies. (shrink)

While political economic perspectives of urban globalization tend to generalize the economic pressures upon socio-political transformations of cities, recent European research has stressed the institutional context of urban collective action. However, the structural bias of the European city model merely complements the criticized economization by a culturalist essentialization of urbanity, and thus fails to conceptualize political agency. In order to elaborate the theoretical foundations of a political counterhypothesis to urban globalization, this article clarifies the different historical and normative conceptions of (...) institutional structure and agency in the urban context. Most research of cities implies — more or less implicitly — a common urban ideal which associates centrality with a local integration potential of plural societies. However, distinguishing between a historically embedded empirical category, a normative model of public space, and an analytical ideal-type of political agency helps to overcome the static structural conception of an essentially European urban culture and problematizes the role of knowledge models in reflectively constructing urban realities. Therefore, a dynamic and contextual relation between political economic functions, historic heritage, and normative frames might contribute to an open-ended comparative framework of urban collective action that can be applied to any ordinary city across and beyond Europe. (shrink)

This article outlines the theoretical developments experienced in historical studies over the last two decades. As a consequence of the growing critical reconsideration of some of the main theoretical assumptions underlying historical explanation of individuals' meaningful actions, a new theory of society has taken shape among historians during this time. By emphasizing the empirical and analytical distinction between language as a pattern of meanings and language as a means of communication, a significant group of historians has thoroughly recast the (...) conventional notions of society, experience, interests, culture, and identity, and has developed a new concept of social action. Thus, historiographical debate seems to have started to transcend, for the first time, the longstanding and increasingly futile contest or dilemma between objectivism and subjectivism, between materialism and culturalism, between social and intentional explanation, or between social constraints and human agency. The groundwork has now been laid for an alternative to the declining paradigm of social history that does not entail a revisionist return to idealist history but opens a quite different path. (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)

In the first part of this text, the author exposes the main features of the liberal or civic state, because both communitarians and multiculturalists tend to criticize that type of state. Their critique of the liberal state and the liberal self as an unencumbered self is “culturalist” by its character. However, it is an expression of conceptual confusion, i.e. of their incomprehension of an essential difference between two conceptual levels: one that belongs to the purely normative rights-justifying perspective and the (...) other that refers to the ontological perspective. Consequently, both of them reject the central liberal thesis according to which the right is prior to the good.The author agrees with an assessment of Richard Robson that multiculturalism is only a form of communitarianism. Contrary to communitarians and multiculturalists, he additionally argues that collective rights are incompatible with the civic state in its pure form because there are structural differences between civic and specific minority rights.Further, the author attempts to show that communitarianism and multiculturalism are forms of postmodernism. Namely, brought to their ultimate logical consequences, the mentioned orientations can be connected to the postmodern notion of radical, irreducible difference.In the conclusive part of the text, he summarizes the common points of communitarianism and multiculturalism and emphasizes the importance of these contemporary theoretical tendencies. (shrink)

We explore aspects of what it means to be a ‘moderate’ Muslim in Britain. Based on interviews with 21 Muslim intellectuals or those active in public or community debates, we examine what these Muslims think about multiculturalism. While there is a variety of views, the respondents are promulticulturalism as long as it includes faith as a dimension of ‘difference’, something they believe has only belatedly, tentatively and slowly happened in Britain. Most of the other aspects of the multicultural ideal and (...) criticisms of contemporary British practice, such as the distinction between mutual respect and tolerance, the importance of non-separateness and dialogue, the need for transformative change on the part of the minorities as well as the majority, seem to be similar to the views held by non-Muslim British multiculturalists. Yet some believe that the Qur’an, Islam and Muslim history are powerful sources of multi-culturalism and represent a form superior to any that has been developed elsewhere or is on offer in the contemporary West. This view was held by those who are experts in using and engaging with contemporary Western discourses rather than those who are authorities in interpreting Islamic texts, and so they, like most others in the group could be said to be a relatively new kind of Muslim public figure. (shrink)

The article aims to show that the theory of open and autopoietic systems may be applied in such a way as to transcend the sterile opposition between autonomy aesthetics and culturalism. A theory of contemporary and modern art as an observational system is outlined. Art is seen as specializing to an increasing degree in cannibalizing the discourses and modalities of media & communication industries. Art is thus a parasitical observer (Serres 1980). Why should one affect a shift in framework? (...) What are post-Luhmannian optics on contemporary arts and media able to do beyond what post-structuralist and postmodern optics already achieve? Post-structuralist aesthetics deal with contingency, insecurity, paradox and autoreflexivity, surplus meanings, and the complexity and decentering of the subject. Switching to systems theory allows us to treat such issues without building a wall of irrationality around the arts and the humanities. It handles these important issues in a systematic manner which links up with scientific discourse and with the advanced problem solving and criticality of other social domains, like politics, business and the media industries. Notably the rigueur and self-reflectivity of the conceptual framework allows us also to define limits of our approach. What is it about art which aesthetics cannot and should not explain? (shrink)