The article tries to contribute to the understanding of Michel Foucault’s analysis on the relation between forms of exercising power and forms of resistance. The resistance issue is taken as the guideline to analyse a series of notions like: revolution, relations of power, “counter-conducts”, up-risings, struggles. This study about resistance makes possible the discussion on the issue of subjectivity in contemporary societies, since a foucauldian perspective.

The internal resistance to religious forms of power is often at issue in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity. For this anti-clerical Nietzschean, religion is, like science, always a battle over bodies and souls. In his 1978 Collège de France lectures, he traced the nature and descent of an apparatus of “pastoral power” characterized by confession, direction, obedience, and sacrifice. Governmental rationality, both individualizing and totalizing, is its modern descendant. At different moments, Foucault rather infamously opposed to the pastorate and (...) governmentality such ethico-political spiritualities as the Iranian Revolution and ancient Greek ascesis, but he also took care to identify numerous forms of resistance specific and internal to Christianity itself. His lecture of 1 March 1978 outlined five examples of “insurrections of conduct”: “eschatology, Scripture, mysticism, the community, and ascesis.” I will detail Foucault’s analysis of pastoral counter-conducts, and explore how he sets up the nature and stakes of this tension within Christianity and its secular kin. (shrink)

Within Michel Foucault’s own conceptualization of governmentality, there is little room for something like ‘ungovernable life’. The latter seems to hint at a form of social conduct beyond power-relations, which would offend Foucault’s basic philosophical postulates. I argue that this identification between governmentality and power as such demonstrates a one-sided focus on the history of Western power-relations. By opposing Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality to Ivan Illich’s critical history of government, I delineate indigenous struggles against governmentalization as a form of (...) ungovernable counter-conduct. Throughout his books from the 1970s to 1990s, Illich wrote a critical history of government surprisingly similar to Foucault’s, from the pastorate to modern political economy. However, rather than merely describing this history, Illich argued governmentalization alienated human beings from their autonomy. As a former missionary priest, he criticized the Church’s and modern governments’ attempts to subsume populations under a conduct of conducts. He advocated anticolonial resistance to subsumption under Western governmental regimes. In Illich’s appreciation of decolonized life, an ungovernable form of life can be discovered, which I defend with the example of Zapatismo and indigenous self-government through mandar obedeciendo. (shrink)

Is the ability to start and stay in dialogue a hard or a soft skill? Is it a courageous risk to stay in dialogue within an organization? Or is dialogue, interaction, the building block of organizing, and does its neglect lead to disorganizing? Organizations in their broadened context, riveted at state regulations, technology and environmental contingencies, are changing. Under the influence of far-reaching digitalization processes and redesign, management layers disappear in favor of personal responsibility. But are we, as human beings, (...) ready to take up high-risk and ultimate responsibilities? After all, not everyone is a whizz kid with extraordinary qualities. Moreover, can we deal with an economy that is no longer in need of traditionally skilled employees? An economy running out of paid labor because of—among other things—the growing amount of light, fast and IT-steered production processes? Societal issues that cannot be solved from one single point of view, the so-called boundary objects, need a lot of debate and dialogue with many stakeholders involved before a clear direction can appear. What, then, does dialogue actually mean, how can we implement it and what can it create and bring about in an organization? Can it manage the gap between system-oriented control and coercive power on the one hand and a growing fragmentation of high-skilled expertise and creativity on the other? Organizing randomly provokes and neglects resistance at the same time, but how does this dynamic work? In this chapter, the above questions will be addressed and the concept of criticism as ‘counter-conduct’ linked to dialogue as the turntable of organizing will be introduced. (shrink)

In this article, I examine what the ethical and political implications of conceptualizing and practicing philosophy for/with children in the neoliberal debt economy are. Though P4wC cannot alone bring about any significant transformation of debt political-economic realities, it can play an important role in cultivating oppositional debt ethics and consciousness. The first half of this article situates P4wC within the current global debt economy. Here, I summarize the analyses made by critical theorists of the ways that debt impacts public institutions, (...) and shapes individual subjectivity. The second half of this article builds on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of “counter-conduct.” For Foucault, counter-conduct is an ethical/political act of resistance against governmentality, one that makes possible alternative social relations and ways of being in the world. I argue in this section that P4wC should be conceptualized, and practiced, as form of counter-conduct that challenges power in the debt economy. Both the form of P4wC pedagogy, and the content that can be taken up in a collective manner in communities of inquiry, make P4wC a potential site for debt counter-conduct practices. Thought of as counter-conduct, P4wC is an educational practice with liberatory promise. I conclude this piece with brief ruminations on practicing P4wC in the time of COVID, and during the uprisings around the world against racial capitalism. It is suggested here that P4wC not only be practiced within formal education settings, but also in the social movements that are fighting to bring into being a world more just for all of us. En este artículo, examino cuáles son las implicaciones éticas y políticas de conceptualizar y practicar la filosofía para / con niños en la economía de la deuda neoliberal. Aunque P4wC no puede provocar por sí solo ninguna transformación significativa de las realidades político-económicas de la deuda, puede desempeñar un papel importante en el cultivo de una ética y una conciencia de la deuda opuestas. La primera mitad de este artículo sitúa a P4wC dentro de la economía de deuda global actual. Aquí, resumo los análisis realizados por teóricos críticos sobre las formas en que la deuda afecta a las instituciones públicas y configura la subjetividad individual. La segunda mitad de este artículo se basa en la conceptualización de la "contra-conducta" de Michel Foucault. Para Foucault, la contra-conducta es un acto ético / político de resistencia contra la gobernamentalidad, que posibilita relaciones sociales y formas de estar en el mundo alternativas. Sostengo en esta sección que P4wC debe conceptualizarse y practicarse como una forma de contra-conducta que desafía el poder en la economía de la deuda. Tanto la forma pedagógica de P4wC, como su contenido adoptados de manera colectiva en las comunidades de investigación, hacen de P4wC un sitio potencial para las prácticas de contra-conducta de la deuda. Pensada como una contra-conducta, P4wC es una práctica educativa con promesa liberadora. Concluyo este artículo con breves reflexiones sobre la práctica de P4wC en la época de COVID y de los alzamientos en todo el mundo contra el capitalismo racial. Aquí se sugiere que P4wC no solo se practique dentro de los entornos de educación formal, sino también en los movimientos sociales que luchan por crear un mundo más justo para todos nosotros. Key Words: Debt, Philosophy for/with Children, Counter-Conduct. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

Though Ali Shariati is well-known as the “ideologue” of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, this essay considers Shariati conversely as a student of revolution. It begins by posing a distinction between the apprentice and the autodidact through reference to Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and introduces a third term, the collaborator, that is crucial to Shariati’s account of counter-pedagogy. The essay then reconstructs Shariati’s critique of the pedagogical state. There, he recalls resisting interpellation by learning from other pasts, (...) refusing instruction, and learning from others. Finally, I show changes in how Shariati conceptualized self-transformation, from an autodidactic process of soul-searching to a collaborative process that gives soul to a collective. On becoming immersed in the sounds of his compatriots grieving the martyrs of struggle, Shariati attests to being a student of history: the curriculum of a people becoming, the history of struggle, and its instructors, those who modeled it, pivoted around a refusal to be instructed. Overall, this essay develops an account of media environments as informal pedagogical spaces. (shrink)

Cryptomarkets function as self-regulating forms of governance, close to what Hayek would describe as a spontaneous order. At the same time, in cases like the online market Silk Road, they construct an identity that portrays their illegal activities as operating within a framework of individual rights and voluntary transactions. As has already been examined in the wider literature, the political and economic philosophy of libertarianism has been mobilized by participants in such markets in order to provide a moral theoretical background (...) to their activities. This article examines: (1) why libertarianism indeed provides a suitable narrative for such activities and how the theoretical work of Foucault on power and resistance (and, more specifically, his notion of ‘counter-conduct’) can help us understand the contentious relationship between the state and cryptomarkets; and (2) how libertarian practices such as the ones taking place in cryptomarkets are at odds with neoliberal governmentality. (shrink)

In this article I reconstruct the philosophical conditions for the emergence of the notion of counter-conduct within the framework of Michel Foucault’s study of governmentality, and I explore the reasons for its disappearance after 1978. In particular, I argue that the concept of conduct becomes crucial for Foucault in order to redefine governmental power relations as specific ways to conduct the conduct of individuals: it is initially within this context that, in Security, Territory, Population, he rethinks the problem of (...) class='Hi'>resistance in terms of counter-conduct. However, a few months later, in What is Critique?, Foucault replaces the notion of counter-conduct with that of critical attitude, defined as the particular form that counter-conduct takes in modern times. This notion allows him to highlight the role played by the will in resistance to governmental strategies. But since the notion of counter-conduct is conceptually wider than that of critical attitude, I suggest in conclusion that it could be worth reactivating it as a “historical category which, in various forms and with diverse objectives, runs through the whole of Western history.”. (shrink)

When it comes to injustice, especially racial injustice, rage isn't just an acceptable response-it's crucial in order to fuel the fight for change. Anger has a bad reputation. Many people think that it is counterproductive, distracting, and destructive. It is a negative emotion, many believe, because it can lead so quickly to violence or an overwhelming fury. And coming from people of color, it takes on connotations that are even more sinister, stirring up stereotypes, making white people fear what an (...) angry other might be capable of doing, when angry, and leading them to turn to hatred or violence in turn, to squelch an anger that might upset the racial status quo. According to philosopher Myisha Cherry, anger does not deserve its bad reputation. It is powerful, but its power can be a force for good. And not only is it something we don't have to discourage, it's something we ought to cultivate actively. People fear anger because they paint it in broad strokes, but we can't dismiss all anger, especially not now. There is a form of anger that in fact is crucial in the anti-racist struggle today. This anti-racist anger, what Cherry calls Lordean rage, can use its mighty force to challenge racism: it aims for change, motivates productive action, builds resistance, and is informed by an inclusive and liberating perspective. People can, and should, harness Lordean rage and tap into its unique anti-racist potential. We should not suppress it or seek to replace it with friendly emotions. If we want to effect change, and take down racist structures and systems, we must manage it in the sense of cultivating it, and keeping it focused and strong. Cherry makes her argument for anti-racist anger by putting Aristotle in conversation with Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin in conversation with Joseph Butler. The Case for Rage not only uses the tools of philosophy to articulate its arguments, but it sharpens them with the help of social psychology and history. The book is philosophically rich and yet highly accessible beyond philosophical spheres, issuing an urgent call to all politically and socially engaged readers looking for new, deeply effective tools for changing the world. Its message will resonate with the enraged and those witnessing such anger, wondering whether it can help or harm. Above all, this book is a resource for the activist coming to grips with a seemingly everyday emotion that she may feel rising up within her and not know what to do with. It shows how to make sure anger doesn't go to waste, but instead leads to lasting, long-awaited change. (shrink)

‘The enigma of revolts.’ You can almost hear the sigh at the end of this sentence. Foucault is making a statement here, published under the title ‘Useless to Revolt’, on that ‘impulse by which a single individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says, “I will no longer obey”’. In this short piece, I question the two sides of the enigma—how to label the revolt—is the act of rioting, such as what we witnessed in Ferguson, Missouri in August (...) 2014 ‘proper resistance’—and, how to understand the ēthos of the rioter. The label of counter-conduct, I argue clarifies the enigma as it allows us, challenges us even, to see the event as political. Counter-conduct provides a new framework for reading spontaneous and improvised forms of political expression. The rioter can then be seen as political and rational, as demonstrating ethical behavior. The ēthos of this behavior is represented as an ethics of the self, a form of parrhēsia where the rioter risks herself and shows courage to tell the truth, the story of her community. (shrink)

The hermit posed a challenge to a medieval Church that emphasized rule, order, and discipline since oversight of their life could be virtually non-existent. The writings of Richard Rolle, hermit, negotiates the space between Foucauldian exomolgesis and exoagouresis as Rolle strove to articulate the identity of the hermit without any kind of church endorsement. As well, he forged his life out of a struggle with concepts of medieval sin, specifically Pride, which placed him in a queer position in terms of (...) relationships with his surrounding community. His way of life was highly influential in his local community, however, and, through manuscript dissemination, beyond. Because he experienced mystical visions without church oversight, his eremitic life and example inspired a movement toward lay, affective piety in the later Middle Ages. The hermit, in his case, challenges the medieval Church’s hierarchy in that hermits practice a form of living at a local level, placing them in dangerous, sometimes heretical, positions that force the Church to either absorb their practices or suppress them. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the question of how epistemic injustices can be resisted. Miranda Fricker, who introduced the term to describe situations in which subjects are wronged as knowers, has initially advocated an individualist, virtue-based account to counteract epistemic injustices. Epistemic injustices, however, do not merely operate at an individual level but are rooted in social practices and structures. Arguably therefore, individually virtuous epistemic conduct is not enough to uproot patterns of epistemic injustice. Institutional change and collective actions (...) are needed. Recently, Elizabeth Anderson has proposed such a structural remedy. Diagnosing patterns of social segregation that track existing inequalities to be the principal structural cause of epistemic injustices, Anderson suggests that integration is required to achieve epistemic justice. Pace Anderson, I argue that certain segregated spaces —namely spaces provided by subaltern counter-publics— can function and, in fact, have historically functioned as important sites of epistemic resistance. In particular, I argue that even if integration is sharply distinguished from assimilation, Anderson’s proposal insufficiently acknowledges the subversive potential of those spaces, in which shielded from the gaze of the oppressors, marginally situated subjects can assemble and question hegemonic epistemic practices. (shrink)

Fugitive Politics explores the intersection between politics and ecology, between the requirements for radical change and the unprecedented challenges posed by the global crisis, a dialectic has rarely been addressed in academia. Across eight chapters, Carl Boggs explores how systemic change may be achieved within the current system, while detailing attempts at achieving change within nation states. Boggs states that any notion of revolution seems fanciful in the current climate, contending that controlling elites have concentrated their hold on corporate (...) power along three self-serving fronts: technology (Big Tech) and the surveillance order, militarism and the warfare state, intensification of globalized power. Combined with this Boggs cites the fundamental absence of revolutionary counter-forces, arguing that after decades of subservice relevant, allied to the rise of identity politics and social movements, the Marxist theoretical legacy is now exhausted, and will not provide an exit from the crisis. Boggs concludes that the only possibility for fundamental change will come from an open style of politics, in the Jacobin tradition, operating within the overall structures of the current democratic state. Written for both an academic and general readership, in the US and beyond, Fugitive Politics will be of vital importance to those studying political theory, political philosophy, political history, Marxism and Marxist theory, authoritarian politics, ecology, environmental politics, and climate politics. (shrink)

"I" will is the percondition of knowing, while "I" is identical lift of both substance and spirit. Life will reveals itself from chaos. knowing belongs to life cross-referenced an in fact, it is a indication theory of will rather than a pure theory of knowing. "I" is a narrow sense of life, but it also should indicate a broad sense of life. Word is a life creature life is the only absolute one. The showing of one thing is before existence. (...) (Existence is a character of life rather than a certainessence transcending a life). Life spirit reflects the life of the life world. - Thought is life. Existence is experience, while the existence of experience is "human" - human is the product of experience of animals "human" is a personal from, and human doctrine is personal doctrine. A country is second person andgovernment officers are persons of great bulk. Power theory distories the world, while existence theory distories the life. Showing is the form of life and it is a duty - to show life, to show the life word, this is duty theory. It is compulsory struggle that can thoroughly guarantee the relative power. We human should set up a world country - a world life organization, to shake of counter action in a country. A country democracy is a false democracy, while back democracy is real world democracy. Life exists in a impulse way. This is the real final arrangement of life impulse. As soon as society get in to the life orbit the most ideal basicorganization for human is sex organization "Philosophy", in fact, it is life science, a broad sense of life science. (theory of life）. (shrink)

Capitalism is often modernised and stabilised by its very critics. Gramsci called this paradox a 'passive revolution'. What are the pitfalls through which critique becomes absorbed? This question is taken up using a Cultural Political Economy approach for analysing the resistant potential of 'degrowth discourses' against the neoliberal hegemony. Degrowth advocates an economy without growth in order to achieve the transformation that is necessary in ecological and social terms. It thus does not follow the neoliberal idea of green capitalism (...) that already has absorbed much environmental critique. This paper argues that degrowth needs to be further differentiated in order to draw any conclusions about its counter-hegemonic potential. Three dimensions are identified for differentiating sub-hegemonic from counter-hegemonic degrowth positions: the mode of growth critique, the interpellation of the individual and the subsequent actions motivated. (shrink)

One of the unique challenges of reading Les damnés de la terre ( The Wretched of the Earth ) today is that while it is an irredeemably revolutionary text, we live in a counter-revolutionary moment or in a global context that has tried very hard to discredit even the possibility of revolution. Fanon’s text does not only narrate the effective undertaking of an anti-colonial struggle—of what is required for people to identify the actual causes of their alienation and unfreedom (...) and together to will their elimination—it also outlines the various, often dialectical challenges of restructuring a society from the bottom up. Guiding and evident in the latter is the flourishing of what Fanon suggestively called national consciousness . Elaborating its meaning and ongoing usefulness is the focus of this essay. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Foucaultian genealogy offers a critical approach to practices of remembering and forgetting which is crucial for resisting oppression and dominant ideologies. For this argument I focus on the concepts of counter-history and counter-memory that Foucault developed in the 1970’s. In the first section I analyze how the Foucaultian approach puts practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remembered and forgotten, but how , by whom, (...) and with what effects. I highlight the critical possibilities for resistance that this approach opens up, and I illustrate them with Ladelle McWhorter’s genealogy of racism in Anglo-America. In the second section I put the Foucaultian approach in conversation with contemporary work in pragmatism and critical theory on the social epistemology of memory. In the third and final section, I explore some of the implications of the Foucaultian notion of resistance and what I term guerrilla pluralism for contemporary epistemological discussions of ignorance in standpoint theory and race theory. (shrink)

The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed for us to see that the pandemic has profoundly recontextualised those structures and systems of violence, bringing us into a fresh negotiation with, for example, (...) the question of how we discuss and imagine freedom. Responding in part to this unexpected provocation, activist-scholars Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson forged a collaboration from the lockdown of 2020, corresponding by letter to create their forthcoming book, Rehearsals for Living, due to be published by Haymarket Books (US) and Knopf (Canada) in 2022. In this interview, we asked them to explain the epistolary form of the book and expand on the concept of “rehearsal”, before inviting them to reflect on a series of issues that animate our current crises: the politics of recognition; the notion of apocalypse; ways to disrupt linear temporalities; practises of reciprocity against proprietary logics; the gendered violence of state apparatuses; and worldbuilding as a method of resistance. In their expansive answers, Robyn and Leanne draw on their experiences as organisers and educators, commenting on anticolonial struggles, the Movement for Black Lives, and the rise of abolition discourse. Stressing the need to build a multiplicity of shared homespaces in the face of racial/colonial capitalism and organized abandonment, they challenge us to rethink the predicaments and possibilities of the present, enabling us to imagine futures liberated of extractivist, carceral governance – “planting more liberatory futures in the present”, as Robyn puts it. The task of sowing those seeds is a collective praxis of rewriting the narratives that constitute us, refusing to hear that nothing can change and insisting that everything must. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Empire Writes Back, With A VengeanceDenis DuttonOne of the more uplifting aspects of the turn toward theory in recent years has been the growth of postcolonial cultural studies. Postcolonial studies are in actuality constituted by counterdiscoursive, decolonizing practices which acknowledge the recognition of minority discourses, deconstructing hegemonic texts and imperialist metanarratives, opposing unduly overprivileging Western canonical paradigms of “literature,” and—well, you know what I mean. As Benita Parry (...) so lucidly explains, “The labor of producing a counter-discourse displacing imperialism’s dominative system of knowledge rests with those engaged in developing a critique from outside its cultural hegemony.” And what an awesome labor it is. The noted postcolonial theorist Georg M. Gugelberger sums things up by saying (I’m not inventing this) “postcolonialism can be conceptualized as the last bulwark against an encroaching total capitalism.”But what of the struggling masses of oppressed peoples whose interests and cultural sensitivities are so caringly looked after by practitioners of postcolonial studies? How do they feel about the fact that the only thing standing between them and “total capitalism” is resistance being mounted in a comparative literature department in Idaho, or someplace? This is a question seldom asked, let alone answered. Fortunately, new light has been thrown on the matter with the arrival of a booklet at this journal. Indian History from Above and Below, by Rukun Advani, is published by Ram Advani, probably a member of the family, in Lucknow. It is dedicated to “all Bengali intellectuals and those whose dollar salaries rise in proportion with obscurity and jargon.” Advani notes in his preface that although Bengali intellectuals talk torrents in their native tongue, when they [End Page 198] disseminate their thoughts abroad, they translate into a “clogged, colonial, unfluid flow,” with footnotes such as: “Derrida; ibid.; see my recent essay on the modes and moods of Foucault in JPS, III.iii, 3–333; on Lacan, see Lacan, On Lacan; Barthes, how many times a day do you have one in summer; idem., do you really?; differentiated peasantry; undifferentiated peasantry; for a feminist, though partially anthropologized, hermeneutic-critical discourse on the post-colonial subversive dimensions of the undifferentiated middle peasant in Midnapore district in June 1959, see the provocative controversy between Ranajit da and Amiya da in Gayatri di, ed., Gendered, Gendered, O Most Gendered: Epistemology and the Male Menopause in Bengal between June 1959 and July 1959 (Oxford University Press, forty years later).”The first of the booklet’s two essays, “Indian History from Below: a Swiftian Consideration,” discusses a neglected but “important arena of subaltern existence, namely the history of belching, wind-breaking and defecation.” Just to name these three functions posits “a bourgeois hierarchy of disgust with what Marx, in one of his most decisively Derridesque reflections, termed ‘The Asiatic Commode of Production.’” Beginning with the Foucauldian notion of “the peasant’s overdetermined relative autonomy from the olfactory,” Advani describes “the Barthesian notion of the impossibility of critical transcendence by the historian into either the symbiotic acculturation of the pastness, and indeed the presentness, of the present-subject, or indeed the even greater epistemological and hermeneutic problems posed by attempting a recreation of the ontological presuppositions of the peasant.” Much of this is elaborated in the classic essay by Professor Lavatri Lavatory Spewhack, “The Post-Colonial Lavatory and Its Radical Implications for Nomenclaturing Among Gendered and Subalternized Third World Expatriate-Marxist-Feminists in the First and Second Worlds: A Derivative Discourse Decoded.”The debt that Rukun Advani owes to Professor Spewhack is clear from the sheer number of his references to books and articles by her. These include, on the subject of toileting, Master Disgusted, Native Disgusting: a Perspective on Peasants from 250,000 Dollars per Annum, “On the Symbolic Hegemony of Subsection Numbers in a Gendered and Subalternized Post-Colonial Context: A Derivative Discourse Decoded” (in The Phenomenology of Praxis and the Praxis of Phenomenology in a Postmodern Residential Colony), “The Violence of Steam and the Episteme of Violence: Foucault’s Views on Hot Air Balloons” (in Obscurata), and even parts of her autobiography: The Larger than Life of Lavatri Lavatory [End Page 199] Spewhack (chapter titled “My Collected Phonecalls and Faxes”). While some... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Empire Writes Back, With A VengeanceDenis DuttonOne of the more uplifting aspects of the turn toward theory in recent years has been the growth of postcolonial cultural studies. Postcolonial studies are in actuality constituted by counterdiscoursive, decolonizing practices which acknowledge the recognition of minority discourses, deconstructing hegemonic texts and imperialist metanarratives, opposing unduly overprivileging Western canonical paradigms of “literature,” and—well, you know what I mean. As Benita Parry (...) so lucidly explains, “The labor of producing a counter-discourse displacing imperialism’s dominative system of knowledge rests with those engaged in developing a critique from outside its cultural hegemony.” And what an awesome labor it is. The noted postcolonial theorist Georg M. Gugelberger sums things up by saying (I’m not inventing this) “postcolonialism can be conceptualized as the last bulwark against an encroaching total capitalism.”But what of the struggling masses of oppressed peoples whose interests and cultural sensitivities are so caringly looked after by practitioners of postcolonial studies? How do they feel about the fact that the only thing standing between them and “total capitalism” is resistance being mounted in a comparative literature department in Idaho, or someplace? This is a question seldom asked, let alone answered. Fortunately, new light has been thrown on the matter with the arrival of a booklet at this journal. Indian History from Above and Below, by Rukun Advani, is published by Ram Advani, probably a member of the family, in Lucknow. It is dedicated to “all Bengali intellectuals and those whose dollar salaries rise in proportion with obscurity and jargon.” Advani notes in his preface that although Bengali intellectuals talk torrents in their native tongue, when they [End Page 198] disseminate their thoughts abroad, they translate into a “clogged, colonial, unfluid flow,” with footnotes such as: “Derrida; ibid.; see my recent essay on the modes and moods of Foucault in JPS, III.iii, 3–333; on Lacan, see Lacan, On Lacan; Barthes, how many times a day do you have one in summer; idem., do you really?; differentiated peasantry; undifferentiated peasantry; for a feminist, though partially anthropologized, hermeneutic-critical discourse on the post-colonial subversive dimensions of the undifferentiated middle peasant in Midnapore district in June 1959, see the provocative controversy between Ranajit da and Amiya da in Gayatri di, ed., Gendered, Gendered, O Most Gendered: Epistemology and the Male Menopause in Bengal between June 1959 and July 1959 (Oxford University Press, forty years later).”The first of the booklet’s two essays, “Indian History from Below: a Swiftian Consideration,” discusses a neglected but “important arena of subaltern existence, namely the history of belching, wind-breaking and defecation.” Just to name these three functions posits “a bourgeois hierarchy of disgust with what Marx, in one of his most decisively Derridesque reflections, termed ‘The Asiatic Commode of Production.’” Beginning with the Foucauldian notion of “the peasant’s overdetermined relative autonomy from the olfactory,” Advani describes “the Barthesian notion of the impossibility of critical transcendence by the historian into either the symbiotic acculturation of the pastness, and indeed the presentness, of the present-subject, or indeed the even greater epistemological and hermeneutic problems posed by attempting a recreation of the ontological presuppositions of the peasant.” Much of this is elaborated in the classic essay by Professor Lavatri Lavatory Spewhack, “The Post-Colonial Lavatory and Its Radical Implications for Nomenclaturing Among Gendered and Subalternized Third World Expatriate-Marxist-Feminists in the First and Second Worlds: A Derivative Discourse Decoded.”The debt that Rukun Advani owes to Professor Spewhack is clear from the sheer number of his references to books and articles by her. These include, on the subject of toileting, Master Disgusted, Native Disgusting: a Perspective on Peasants from 250,000 Dollars per Annum, “On the Symbolic Hegemony of Subsection Numbers in a Gendered and Subalternized Post-Colonial Context: A Derivative Discourse Decoded” (in The Phenomenology of Praxis and the Praxis of Phenomenology in a Postmodern Residential Colony), “The Violence of Steam and the Episteme of Violence: Foucault’s Views on Hot Air Balloons” (in Obscurata), and even parts of her autobiography: The Larger than Life of Lavatri Lavatory [End Page 199] Spewhack (chapter titled “My Collected Phonecalls and Faxes”). While some... (shrink)

We argue the need for academics to resist and challenge the hegemonic discourse of sustainable development within the corporate context. Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory provides a useful framework for recognizing the complex nature of sustainable development and a way of conceptualizing counter-hegemonies. Published empirical research that analyzes sustainable development discourse within corporate reports is examined to consider how the hegemonic discourse is constructed. Embedded assumptions within the hegemonic construction are identified including sustainable development as primarily about economic development, progress, (...) growth, profitability, and “responsibly” managed levels of resource depletion. We call for multiple voices in the discursive field to debate and to resist closure and highlight the possibilities for academic researchers to actively resist the hegemonic construction. Specifically, we advocate vigilance and awareness, critical and reflective analyses, challenge and resistance based on other frames of reference, and strategies for communicating both within and outside the academy. (shrink)

Historical experience demonstrates that triumphant development of the cause of proletarian revolution depends on the correctness and soundness of the Party's political line. Basically, the continuous sequence of victories of China's proletarian revolutionary cause is the result of the continuity between Chairman Mao's Marxist-Leninist line and the triumphant suppression of the Right and "Left" opportunistic lines. In guiding the course of China's revolution, our exceptionally great teacher and leader Chairman Mao, from the beginning placed comprehensive emphasis on the (...) problem of inner-Party struggle. Particularly concerning the period after the advance into the socialist revolutionary stage and our Party's assumption of power, Chairman Mao acutely and systematically summed up the historical experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat in both domestic and international affairs and clarified the relationship between socialist revolution and inner-Party struggle. He thereby further advanced Marxist theory of inner-Party line struggle. To learn from this exceptionally great theory has great significance with respect to our persevering in continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, precisely grasping and developing inner-Party line struggle, and ceaselessly building up the Party's strength. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Just Revolution: A Christian Ethic of Political Resistance and Social Transformation by Anna Floerke ScheidRamon LuzarragaJust Revolution: A Christian Ethic of Political Resistance and Social Transformation Anna Floerke Scheid lanham, md: lexington books, 2015. 208 pp. $84.00Anna Floerke Scheid argues that the Christian just war and just peacemaking ethical traditions lack a comprehensive ethic for revolutionary nonviolent activity and warfare. She proposes to fill (...) this lacuna through a theological exploration of what constitutes a just revolution. While Scheid maintains a consistent [End Page 212] preference for nonviolent resistance against tyranny, she remains open to the possibility of revolutionary warfare.The author articulates four stages of a just revolution. The first stage is jus ante, nonviolent resistance against a tyrannical government. Here the opposition develops a democratic and revolutionary vision of society that respects human rights, models that vision within its organizations, and resists through nonviolent acts. Second is jus ad, the stage where a tyrannical government eliminates all avenues for negotiation and represses peaceful resistance. This forces the revolutionary opposition to consider armed resistance as a last resort. Here Scheid grapples with two limitations of traditional just war theory. The first reserves the authority to start a war with governments. She argues that the legitimacy for a just revolution comes from a revolutionary organization's ability to envision and model a just society. Because a tyrannical government's authority is illegitimate, a revolutionary movement's just vision and practices gain for it a de facto legitimate authority. This legitimacy is reinforced by a revolutionary movement's ultimate intention to effect reconciliation with their oppressors postwar. The second limitation is the reasonable hope of success. Scheid analyzes the history of this criterion and demonstrates how it supports defensive wars despite the uncertainty of success. Oppressed persons, as the subjects of their own hope of liberation, ought to decide what constitutes the probability for success in fighting tyranny. Throughout this stage, revolutionary warfare must be practiced in tandem with continuing nonviolent resistance.The third stage is jus in, the justice practiced during armed revolutionary resistance. Fighting is deemed necessary to force a tyrannical government to negotiations. Meanwhile, revolutionary military units would work to minimize violence and loss of life. The last stage is jus post, the reconciliation needed to prevent revolutionary warfare from spiraling into revenge. Here the exercise of restorative justice—where responsibility for past injustices is assumed by all sides and a just resolution developed for social reconciliation and the development of a new, democratic society that respects human rights—is all important. Throughout the book, Scheid uses the African National Congress's revolutionary struggle against the South African apartheid government as a successful example of her theory in practice.Scheid's well-argued proposal deserves careful consideration by ethicists. Students will profit from her excellent summary of just war theory, where she brilliantly recovers some of its forgotten features. On the other hand, her concluding chapter considering the Arab Spring's potential for just revolution would have been stronger if she extended beyond a comparison to South Africa to incorporate similar features found in other successful revolutions. The 1986 Philippine People Power Revolution, the 1989 collapse of Eastern European Communist regimes, and the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal come to mind. Moreover, important for South Africa's success was the durability of the [End Page 213] political institutions the British left behind. These institutions provided the framework that handled the transition of power from the pro-apartheid National Party to the post-apartheid African National Congress government. This feature could have been brought to light, as many recognize this structure as contributive to the peaceful transition of power in other countries that won independence through revolution, from the United States in the eighteenth century to India and the Caribbean in the twentieth.Ramon LuzarragaBenedictine University at MesaCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In the late 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a United States of America (US) intelligence agency, developed what is famously known as Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Its mission was to surveil, misinform, misdirect and subvert or destroy black ‘subversive’ militant groups. The main intention of COINTELPRO was to ‘prevent the rise of a messiah’ who could ‘unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement’. This insight is important as it reveals how those outside of black life (FBI) would (...) invoke biblical language to define the possibility of revolution. This article through Black liberation theology seeks to present the idea of messianism as both an experience of Africans and oppressed peoples in the Global North and Global South. The idea of messianism is part of biblical reception in Africa and the African experience of colonialism. In South Africa, messianism would be observed from the perspective of African Christianity, while another form of messianism would be seen from Nat The Prophet Turner as well as the radical identity of Christ in Black liberation theology. The article will not take lightly the idea of surveillance of black militant groups in the same way as the priestly class surveillance Christ ministry. At the same time, the article would reflect on why lunacy is associated with those that seek to subvert oppression. This article seeks to discuss the role of messianism and militancy in Black or African Christianity and highlighting biblical reception and African affectivity. Contribution: This article explores the imaginative ways the Bible or its themes have been used by both the oppressor and the oppressed, often the latter using the Bible for its prerogative, namely, revolution and liberation. (shrink)

Since the earliest human societies, there has been an ongoing struggle between hierarchy and resistance to hierarchy, and this struggle is a major driver of the evolution of moralities and of institutions. Attempts to initiate or sustain hierarchies are often met with resistance; hierarchs then adopt new strategies, which in turn prompt new strategies of resistance; and so on. The key point is that the struggle is typically conducted using moral concepts in justifications for or against unequal (...) power and involves the stimulation of the moral emotions. Both parties to the struggle treat morality as a valuable strategic resource; and the dynamic of interaction between hierarchs and resisters generates changes in that resource. The hierarch/resister struggle is in part a competition between moral concepts and justifications, and that competition drives the emergence of new moral concepts and justifications, just as competition in other contexts generates innovations. Among the moral concepts generated by the struggle are the following: authority, legitimacy, aristocracy, the divine right of kings, the mandate of heaven, natural rights, civil and political rights, constitutionalism, the rule of law, sovereignty, collective self-determination, exploitation, oppression, and domination. (shrink)

This article is based on interviews with former Australian immigration detainees conducted by the author. The interviews explored the experience and understanding of resistance while in detention. The article calls into question Agamben’s twin conclusions that nothing short of a complete re-founding of ontology is required to liberate humanity from biopower and that this refoundation will spring from bare life. Contrary to Agamben’s depiction, the camp proves to be a place of determined and often successful defence of a relation (...) of politics and life based not on the camp and biopower, but on solidarity and freedom. Detainees in Australian immigration detention, like prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps, refused to abandon their politics. Rather than seeking to transform bare life, they rejected it and made their own decision on life and politics. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo explore how clients in clinical settings experience the process of opening up and sharing their inner experiences in the initial phase of therapy.MethodsTwo psychotherapy sessions of clients were videotaped and followed by interviews. Interpersonal process recall was used to obtain in-depth descriptions of clients’ immediate experiences in session. A follow-up interview was conducted 3 months later. The interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis.ResultsThe data revealed how and why clients distanced themselves from inner experiences in the initial phase of therapy. (...) The overarching theme was “Holding back and struggling to open up,” which included four subthemes: fearing the intensity and consequences of negative emotions; experiences of being incapable and bodily stuck; being insecure about one’s worthiness and right to share inner experiences with the therapist; and struggling with feeling disloyal to loved ones.ConclusionThe participants held back because they feared different consequences of opening up. A range of concerns led participants to distance themselves from their inner experiences and/or to refrain from openly talking about them to the therapist. Concerns related to appropriate interpersonal conduct as client were especially important. This knowledge is highly relevant to clinicians when building safety for psychotherapeutic work. (shrink)

This article elucidates and expands on María Lugones's account of complex communication across liminal sites as the basis for deep coalitions among oppressed groups. The analysis underscores the crucial role that emotions and resistant imaginations play in complex communication and world-traveling across liminal sites. In particular, it focuses on the role of emotional echoing and epistemic activism in complex forms of communication among oppressed subjects. It elucidates Gloria Anzaldúa's storytelling and Doris Salcedo's visual art as exemplary forms of epistemic activism (...) that issue coalitional gestures and critical provocations that can wake people up from their epistemic slumbers and instigate forms of complex communication that can create new possibilities for coalitional politics. (shrink)

Discourses of recovery and resilience have risen to positions of dominance in the mental health field. Models of recovery and resilience enjoy purchase, in both policy and practice, across a range of settings from self-described psychiatric survivors through to mental health charities through to statutory mental health service providers. Despite this ubiquity, there is confusion about what recovery means. In this article we problematize notions of recovery and resilience, and consider what, if anything, should be recovered from these concepts. We (...) focus on three key issues, i) individualization, ii) the persistence of a deficit model, and iii) collective approaches to recovery. Through documentary analysis we consider these issues across third sector organizations, and public and mental health policy. Firstly, definitional debates about recovery reflect wider ideological debates about the nature of mental health. The vagueness of these concepts and implicit assumptions inherent in dominant recovery and resilience discourses render them problematic because they individualize what are social problems. Secondly, these discourses, despite being seen as inherently liberatory are conceptually dependent on a notion of deficit in that talk of “positives” and “strengths” requires the existence of “negatives” and “weaknesses” for these concepts to make sense. We argue that this does little to substantially transform dominant understandings of psychological distress. Thirdly, these issues combine to impact upon the progressive potential of recovery. It comes to be seen as an individualistic experiential narrative accompaniment to medical understandings where the structural causes of distress are obscured. This in turn impacts upon the potential for recovery to be used to explore more collective, political aspects of emotional distress. Drawing on the work of Fraser, we use this critique to characterize “recovery” as a “struggle for recognition,” founded on a model of identity politics which displaces and marginalizes the need for social, political and economic redistribution to address many of the underlying causes of emotional distress. We conclude by stating that it is only when the collective, structural experiences of inequality and injustice are explicitly linked to processes of emotional distress that recovery will be possible. (shrink)

This paper draws on research conducted in Manchester, UK, examining service responses to African, African-Caribbean, Irish, Jewish and South Asian women experiencing domestic violence (Batsleer et al., 2002). Popular discourses of domestic violence, which also feature in services, are underpinned by ‘victim-blaming’ together with an assumption that women only show agency and control when they leave violent relationships, and/or what are constructed as oppressive minority cultures. Contrary to these perceptions, firstly, I note competing notions ascribed to ‘independence’. Secondly, I highlight (...) the strategies of resistance used by minoritized women whether they stay, or leave, abusive relationships, and examine the inter-relationships between gender, class and culture. Thirdly, I outline the level and type of support on offer, including key barriers and dilemmas to accessing sensitive and relevant services that respond to women's positions of minoritization, focusing particularly on refuge or shelter provision as they offer one of the key points of transition for women using domestic violence services. Lastly, I indicate some positive steps that can be taken by helping agencies to respond more appropriately to minoritized women facing domestic violence. (shrink)

John Kinsella remains Australia’s most militant, morally cognizant naysayer, and his oeuvre is an archive of precepts running counter to master narratives of place. This essay re-reads Benjamin’s notion of the artist as cultural producer against the grain of Esposito’s etymological excavations of “community,” and frames Kinsella’s steady output of co-authored books as not only a mode of nomadic munificence but no less than a kind of formative guerrilla poetics. Pairing with poets, rock stars, others to extend his anti-capitalist project, (...) Kinsella’s co-authored works perform a suite of interventions, gifting readers a means by which we too might fathom the generative effects of banding together in a munus speaking its own laws to reconfigure notions of co-empowerment, equity, and indeed comradeship. Each of Kinsella’s co-authored books constitutes an intentional community of two and, as if dwelling in compositional possibilities, each text remains steadfastly optimistic. Refusing to be locked into despair by regressively instrumentalist political non-visionaries, from within an Antipodean milieu Kinsella and his many co-authors materialize gestures demonstrating how we might struggle for control of who gets to produce ideas, by which decentralized means, and to which generative ends. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution in the context of his thought during 1977-1979. The essay defends three related claims: (1) Foucault does not turn away from power toward ethics as many scholars have claimed, (2) Careful interpretation of the texts on the Iranian Revolution will help us to better understand Foucault’s essays and lecture courses from this period (in particular, the relationship between political spirituality and counter-conduct), and (3) During this period Foucault is working (...) on conceptualizing modernity as a multivalent set of practices—some that reinforce power relations and some that resist them. (shrink)

This paper considers debates around the neoliberal governmentality, and argues for the need to better theorize the specific ethical practices through which such programs of governmentality are carried out. Arguing that much theoretical and empirical work in this area is prone to a “top down” approach, in which governmentality is reduced to an imposing apparatus through which subjectivities are produced, it argues instead for the need to understand the self-production of subjectivities by considering the ethical practices that make up neoliberal (...) governmentality. Moreover, taking Robert T. Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad/Poor Dad as an illustrative case, the point is made that the work of neoliberal governmentality specifically targets the temporalities of conduct, in an attempt to shape temporal orientations in a more entrepreneurial form. Drawing on Foucault’s lecture courses on liberalism and neoliberalism, and Jacques Donzelot’s work on the social, the case is made that neoliberal governmentality exhorts individuals to act upon the residual social temporalities that persist as a trace in the dispositions of neoliberal subjects. Moreover, the paper concludes with a discussion of the potentials for resistance in this relation, understood as temporal counter-conducts within neoliberalism. (shrink)

Jan-Werner Müller’s analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’ represents a highly limited approach to the issue that is typical of many mainstream approaches within populism studies and liberal-democratic constitutional theory. Through a critique of Müller, the article develops an account of the historical emergence of authoritarian populism as a ‘long counter-revolution of the radical right’ against the values and institutions of the social-democratic welfare state. Focussing on the USA and UK, the article shows how, rather than being a novel phenomenon emerging (...) from the fringes in the 1980s and 1990s, authoritarian populism emerges from the middle of the twentieth century as a highly successful form of hegemonic struggle over the Republican and Conservative parties and over American and British societies. The political success of a highly contradictory ideological framework of the radical right has helped to largely normalise a language, rhetoric and imaginary of authoritarian populism and place it at the centre of contemporary politics and culture. By largely ignoring such a development, and the highly contingent nature of North Atlantic ‘democracy’, theorists and commentators like Müller fail to grasp the depth of the current authoritarian populist threat and offer only liberal-democratic mythology in response to the ranting and chanting of ‘fake news’. (shrink)

The Militant Listener: Reading Mongane Wally Serote's Sikhahlel' u-OR alongside Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History In Sikhahlel' u-OR: A Praise Poem for Oliver Tambo, Mongane Wally Serote presents an unflinching yet delicate meandering through the questions, reflections and provocations resistance history offers up through O. R. Tambo's life. As Ciraj Rassool points out, in this work Tambo appears not as an individual, but as an integral node in a web connecting various lives.1 This counter-neoliberal interpretation of (...) Tambo's life offers what Michael Löwy calls 'a heterodox form of the narrative of emancipation' rebuilding the struggle hero narrative along a decentred framework.2 By radically dislodging this narrative, Tambo is portrayed as the 'non-iconic icon' he was esteemed to embody, and in this move, the poem, notably, points to the dearth of dialectic politics, both in our quotidian praxis, and the commemoration of others.3 Aptly, Serote's work contributes to what Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle describe as a 'total decentring of all thought, one that rejects all "centrisms" and highlights instead branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time'.4 To this end, the poem presents us with a constellation of historical actors who flicker on the horizon, beckoning us to engage in the labour of freedom. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to compare the acute effects of traditional resistance training and superset training on training duration, training volume and different perceptive measures. Twenty-nine resistance-trained participants performed a whole-body workout traditionally and as supersets of exercises targeting different muscle groups, in a randomized-crossover design. Each session was separated by 4–7 days, and consisted of eight exercises and three sets to failure. Training duration and number of repetitions lifted were recorded during the sessions. Rate of (...) perceived exertion for effort, rate of perceived exertion for discomfort, session displeasure/pleasure, and exercise enjoyment were measured 15 min after each session. Forty-eight hours after the final session participants reported which session they preferred. The superset session led to significantly higher values for RPE and RPD and tended to be higher for sPDF, i.e., more pleasurable, compared to the traditional session. There was no difference in EES. The traditional session led to significantly increased training volume and lasted 23 min longer than the superset session. Eighteen of the participants preferred the superset session, while 11 preferred the traditional session. In conclusion, performing a whole-body workout as a superset session was more time-efficient, but reduced the training volume and was perceived with greater exertion for effort and discomfort than a traditional workout. (shrink)

The 2016 US presidential election exposed rising xenophobic and nationalist sentiment within the United States and other democratic countries. As populist movements grow, democratic freedoms erode. We Resist demonstrates that the things we often take for granted--safety, family, employment, health, a promising future--are under attack, and we must fight to preserve these resources before it's too late. We are currently witnessing the dismantlement of social programs, growing disinterest in international cooperation, and the devaluation of evidence-based knowledge. This disturbing shift in (...) politics is leading to increased national security measures, violations to basic human rights, and widening social and economic inequalities. The rise of far-right populism brings with it intolerance of ethnic, sexual, and all other minority groups, and a rejection of democratic society. We Resist gathers the compelling perspectives of scholars and activists who are deeply embedded within political and community struggles, who participate in policy decisions, and who are engaged in research that advances those struggles. An essential and timely book, We Resist confronts the problems we face as a human community and impels a cross-sectoral movement to defend our rights and revitalize the common good. "Into a world of bully-boy heads of state and the rise of xenophobic right-wing populism, comes this important collection reminding us that the common good is still attainable, if fragile. It depends on our ability to work collectively, to build community and to cherish our diversity, always advocating for human rights, respect and dignity. This collection of the best of Canadian values is a gift to the world in its time of need." Maude Barlow, chairperson for the Council of Canadians and author of Boiling Point: Government Neglect, Corporate Abuse, and Canada's Water Crisis. (shrink)

Celebrated yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn shares pivotal accounts of her life with raw honesty—enriched with in-depth spiritual teachings—to help us heal, evolve, and change the world “My first lessons in spirituality and yoga had nothing to do with a mat, but everything to do with waking up. They included angels, seeing God, and being in Heaven. But, believe me, not the way you might think.” So begins Revolution of the Soul. What comes next reads like a riveting (...) memoir filled with uncensored moments of joy, pain, wonder, and humor. Except, this book is so much more than that. Seane's real purpose is to guide us into a deep, gut-level understanding of our highest Self through yoga philosophy and other tools for emotional healing—not just as abstract ideas but as embodied, fully felt wisdom. Why? To spark a "revolution of the soul" in each of us, so we can awaken to our purpose and become true agents of change. Just a few of the stops along the way include: The everyday "angels" Seane finds in the gritty corners of New York's 1980s East Village; her early struggles as a total yoga-class misfit; the profound shadow work and body-based practices that helped her to heal childhood trauma, OCD, unhealthy behaviors, and relationship wounding; hard-earned lessons from some of the most heartbreaking places on the planet; and many other unforgettable teaching stories. (shrink)

“Veiled Resistance” explores the relationship between discourse and power through the figure of the veiled woman. Ingram argues that while veiled women historically have been produced as Other in Orientalist discourse, they also have subverted these dominant representations by manipulating the significations of the veil. Using the example of veiling practices employed by Algerian womenduring the Algerian Revolution , as well as the recent actions of Muslim women in Europe who are choosing to defy the law by veiling (...) and, in some cases, re-veiling themselves after a long period without doing so, Ingram examines the veil as a counter-discursive object. While religious, patriarchal, and colonial ideologies attempt to exploit, albeit in different ways, the women’sactions vis-à-vis the veil, these women can be seen to renegotiate the limits of representation through a conscious manipulation of the discourse that has attempted to discipline them and create new possibilities of embodiment. (shrink)

An in-depth and up-close look at the ONE energy principle you need to know to take care of your health simply and naturally. What is the one thing you should know to have a lifetime of abundant health? Just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west due to Earth's rotation, there are natural laws your body follows. One law, discerned by traditional Asian medicine, can decide the health of your body, mind, and spirit. Water Up (...) Fire Down by New York Times bestselling author Ilchi Lee reveals this golden rule of health. (shrink)

The Fair Trade movement seeks to alter conventional trade relations through a system of social and environmental standards, certification, and labels designed to help shorten the social distance between consumers in the North and producers in the South. The strategy is based on working both ‘in and against’ the same global capitalist market that it hopes to alter, raising questions about if and how Fair Trade initiatives exhibit counter-hegemonic potential to transform the conventional agro-food system. This paper considers the multiple (...) levels at which Fair Trade alternatives operate to identify the different forms of social action that the movement engages with, and to clarify where the movement’s counter-hegemonic potentials are being realized. I suggest the Fair Trade movement is most successful in encouraging consumers and producers to commit acts of resistance and in supporting redistributive action that shifts resources from North to South. Up to now, however, Fair Trade alternatives appear to hold only a theoretical potential to provoke transformative change in the agro-food system. A reconceptualization of the Fair Trade model and how it is implemented could allow it to manifest more of its implicit, oppositional promise. (shrink)

While Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is quite rightly considered a fully fledged response to May ’68 and as one with the radical politics of the 1970s, their 1980 follow-up, A Thousand Plateaus, has tended to provoke a more perplexed reaction. In this article, I will argue that we can nonetheless extract a definite line of argumentation serving a precise political end if we relate the text back to Foucault's mid-1970s output on power/knowledge. In particular, I will emphasise Deleuze and Guattari's (...) appropriation of the Foucaultian notion of dispositif via their concept of the assemblage, the former being understood as a concrete articulation of lines of power, knowledge and subjectivation, as well as the Foucaultian ‘diagram’, the latter being a more abstract or indeterminate stage of the dispositif whose relative indeterminacy, for Deleuze and Guattari, offers a means of escape. I will show that, making room for the assemblage's opening back onto the relative indeterminacy of its generative stages, the assemblage incorporates into itself a more immanent alternative to the dispositif that is focused on collective desire rather than power, within which resistance becomes a primary and generative dimension rather than a counter-attack. In the first section, I will outline Foucault's approach to power, knowledge and subjectivation, emphasising Deleuze's reading of Foucault though without trying to overdetermine my reading in this way. Next, I will turn to the Foucaultian diagram. In the third section, I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus, demonstrating how the notion of assemblage developed in this text responds to and builds upon Foucault's approach to power/knowledge and subjectivation in order to reconceive resistance. (shrink)

Change in scientific practice and its implications for the status of scientific claims, examined through an analysis of three episodes at a synchrotron laboratory. After World War II, particle physics became a dominant research discipline in American academia. At many universities, alumni of the Manhattan Project and of Los Alamos were granted resources to start programs of high-energy physics built around the promise of a new and more powerful particle accelerator, the synchrotron. The synchrotron was also a source of very (...) intense X-rays, useful for research in solid states physics and in biology. As synchrotron X-ray science grew, the experimental practice of protein crystallography, garnered funding, prestige, and acclaim. In Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron, Park Doing examines the change in scientific practice at a synchrotron laboratory as biology rose to dominance over physics. He draws on his own observations and experiences at the Cornell University synchrotron, and considers the implications of that change for the status of scientific claims. Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron is one of the few recent works in the sociology of science that engages specific scientific and technical claims through participant observation--recorded evocatively and engagingly--to address issues in the philosophy of science. Doing argues that bureaucratic change in science is neither "top-down" nor "bottom-up" but rather performed in and realized through recursively related forums of technical assertion and resistance. He considers the relationship of this change to the content of science, and the implications of this relationship for the project of laboratory studies begun in the late 1970s. (shrink)

In light of the rising anti-racist and decolonial struggles breaking out in the world, this essay seeks to displace the theoretical dichotomy between ‘violence’ and ‘non-violence’. We begin by revisiting Arendt and Fanon to argue that within the conditions of colonial-racial capitalism, ‘non-violence’ is merely a theoretical abstraction. Building on Fanon, who understands decolonial struggle as setting the ‘atmospheric violence’ of colonization into motion toward a new humanity, we develop our own vocabulary of revolutionary anti-violence that replaces a static (...) dichotomy with a spectrum of spontaneous insurrectional activity, non-retaliatory anti-violence, self-defense, and offensive armed struggle. From these, we reinterpret various struggles and distinguish them from terrorism. By centralizing anti-violence as an ethical ideal and political struggle, we aim to overcome the unproductive pitting of ‘good’ (non-violent) movements from ‘bad’ (violent or terrorist) ones and offer a political theory of violence more appropriate to our times. (shrink)

In light of the rising anti-racist and decolonial struggles breaking out in the world, this essay seeks to displace the theoretical dichotomy between ‘violence’ and ‘non-violence’. We begin by revisiting Arendt and Fanon to argue that within the conditions of colonial-racial capitalism, ‘non-violence’ is merely a theoretical abstraction. Building on Fanon, who understands decolonial struggle as setting the ‘atmospheric violence’ of colonization into motion toward a new humanity, we develop our own vocabulary of revolutionary anti-violence that replaces a static (...) dichotomy with a spectrum of spontaneous insurrectional activity, non-retaliatory anti-violence, self-defense, and offensive armed struggle. From these, we reinterpret various struggles and distinguish them from terrorism. By centralizing anti-violence as an ethical ideal and political struggle, we aim to overcome the unproductive pitting of ‘good’ (non-violent) movements from ‘bad’ (violent or terrorist) ones and offer a political theory of violence more appropriate to our times. (shrink)

Innovative, accessible, and easily implemented, One Degree Revolution is acclaimed yoga educator and leadership coach Coby Kozlowski's holistic program for self-inquiry and personal transformation. Her philosophy is deeply connected to living yoga-not just doing yoga. In fact, readers don't need to have ever attended a yoga class to dive into this book: her thoughtful teachings are for anybody interested in learning to navigate the waves of life more skillfully and gracefully. Imagine sailing a boat with a course set for (...) a lifetime. If that route changes by just one navigational degree, what would happen to the journey? How far from the original trajectory would we be in one year? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? Well, we would end up in a totally different place. In much the same way, we can change the course of our life by making a one degree shift. In other words, we don't have to change everything about ourselves or our world to make a difference. Coby inspires readers to dig deep, to ask powerful questions and to dive into the insights, experiments, and inquiries of living yoga: how can I best be with life? How can the teachings of yoga direct us to see the most aligned choices, let go of past hurts, and discover deep and meaningful connections? And what are the most skillful ways we can learn to savor all that life presents? These yoga philosophies are infused with practical strategies for creating the life you truly want and having a positive impact on the world. One Degree Revolution will guide readers to access infinite personal possibilities, celebrate their authentic selves, find meaning and purpose, trust the unfolding of life, and foster transformational change, one degree at a time. (shrink)

This article addresses two related questions: how do we read He-Yin Zhen’s political writing in relation to her broader political life and how should her political ideas be introduced to the English-speaking academy? I first concur with recent translators of He-Yin, Lydia Liu, Dorothy Ko, and Rebecca Karl, that He-Yin’s anarcho-feminism marks a significant moment in the modern Chinese history of political ideas and can potentially contribute to transnational feminist theories. Following this, I revisit and reconstruct He-Yin and her life (...) partner Liu Shipei’s life trajectories as documented in Chinese sources by at least two generations of Chinese historians of the late Qing dynasty revolution. I argue that, when introducing her to English-speaking audiences as part of “the birth of Chinese feminism,” her translators have provided a diluted picture of He-Yin’s political world that could easily give rise to a reductionistically heroic reading of her politics. He-Yin’s political participation includes but is by no means limited to her one-year career as the prolific anarcho-feminist theorist for the journal. (shrink)