‘Women of substance’: Commodification and fetishization in contemporary advertising within the Indian ‘Urbanscape'

Advertising today has become an intrinsic part of modern culture. Apart from the obvious and tangible extolment of the virtues of a product and/or brand, more insiduously and less tangibly, advertising plays a key role in the functioning of social attitudes and values. This paper examines how advertising discourses in India, in particular the hugely successful and representative Woman of Substance’ ad campaign in the magazine Femina, transforms the manifold attitudes and qualities of the woman into commodities to be marketed; and how the ad campaign positions the woman within the nexus of her social interactions. The paper traces the economic and socio‐cultural changes that have characterised India's transition towards an open market economy to situate the role that advertising discourse plays in urban India today in the representation of the ‘Woman of Substance’. These changes have occurred in a relatively short space of time and have interacted profoundly with advertising discourse. This can best be seen in the fact that an urbanising trend in India has diversified the range of approved cultural models available to women in the search for what has come to be fashionably referred to in recent times as ‘lifestyles‘— exemplified both in the ‘Woman of Substance’ ad campaign, and the magazine itself, Femina.     

Playing the credit score game: algorithms, ‘positive’ data and the personification of financial objects

This paper is about how people are learning to ‘make themselves up’ in response to the market’s new algorithmic ways of seeing. More specifically, it explores how the self-datafication of informal financial relations is being used to affect the calculation of credit score. I argue that credit score functions as a legal technology of arbitration beset with contradictions that are giving rise to inchoate struggles over the distribution of calculative agency in consumer credit markets. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of credit building peer ‘lending circles’, the paper explores how financially marginalized groups and financial inclusion advocates are reacting to the blind spots and biases of credit-scoring algorithms through compensatory and transgressive data-generation practices.     

‘I,the people’: a deflationary interpretation of populism,Trump and the United States constitution

This paper advances a deflationary interpretation of populism, Donald Trump and the United States Constitution. It accepts that Trump utilizes a populist pose but rejects populism as too reductive for understanding his ascension and constitutional challenge. First, it argues that, although he merits the designation, Trump reveals more about populism than populism does about him. Trump illustrates populism’s conceptual elasticity, but employing it as a frame to understand him imposes coherence upon a figure whose monetized politics are chaotic, shallow and unanchored by principle. Second, populism provides a necessary but insufficient condition for critically explaining Trump’s ascension, either in terms of electoral populism or populism in power. Third, while democratic deconsolidation under Trump’s presidency cannot be discounted, the Constitution remains resilient in most important respects. A dispassionate constitutional sociology counsels a deflationary understanding rather than an uncritical alarmism that too frequently reproduces and reinforces the darker aspects of Trump’s populist political logic.     

Surviving and thriving by becoming more ‘groupuscular’: the case of the Heritage Front

Burstow explores the genus ‘radical-right groupuscule’ via a case study of the Canadian group known as the Heritage Front. She outlines and analyses three stages of the group’s history. Stage one, or ‘the heyday’, was characterized by a significant number of publications, a drive to recruit youth, meetings with leaders throughout Canada and the world, the organization of White Power concerts and militant fighting in the streets. In stage two the Front was far less active while also becoming more groupuscular: decentralized and comparatively leaderless. Burstow identifies the exploitation of the Internet as the principal characteristic of stage three, and elaborates on the possibilities for synergy that new conditions make available. A number of groupuscular features are identified as giving the Heritage Front the flexibility to survive during the present period of parliamentary democracy and to rebound from difficulties, including decentralization, leaderlessness, linkage, the facilitation of linkage, flexible policies, identification with the network as a whole, and use of virtual space. Accordingly, Burstow argues that the accentuation of groupuscular features is a plausible survival strategy for a groupuscule in difficulty.     

Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president

ABSTRACT

From the time of his nomination as the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential candidate onwards, Barack Obama was the target of a panoply of political attacks. Conservatives, Republicans and even some Democrats played on his alterity in a way that previous non-white political hopefuls, particularly the Reverend Jesse Jackson, had not had to endure. If the intricate twists and turns of Obama's past did not make those attacks particularly surprising, the way in which he chose to deal with them was. In what stands as a deliberate pre-emptive attack, Obama used two substantive texts, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, to create and shape a historical narrative of his own past in such a way as to present himself to the US voting public as a truly American figure, worthy of the presidency. By the time he was running for high office, therefore, Obama had already used his knowledge of the discipline of history to create a usable past with which he and his supporters could denude many of those political attacks of their potency, whether they were focused on the years of his upbringing in an Islamic state, his familial ties to Kenya, his religious background or his purported links to radicalism.     

Battles over numbers: the case of the Argentine consumer price index (2007–2015)

An unprecedented crisis of confidence in Argentina's public statistics rendered the declaration of a ‘National Statistical Emergency’ in 2016. This paper examines the battle over the Argentine consumer price index (CPI) between 2007 and 2015. It argues that in this dispute the index became the object of political struggle rather than a methodological controversy. The main characteristics of the Argentine CPI, its trajectory and the country’s inflationary history influenced the type of debate and the dispute that was possible and feasible. The battle was linked to the erosion of confidence in and social support for official statistics and to the emergence of alternative price indices. Both processes seriously undermined the government's ability to control inflation.     

Economics and the ‘nonsense’ of law: the case of the Chicago antitrust revolution

Abstract

The Law and Economics movement that emerged in the University of Chicago through the 1940s and 1950s, around Ronald Coase's example, is a manifestation of the neo-liberal project of applying neo-classical economics to state sovereignty. In the 1970s and 1980s, Law and Economics ideas revolutionized the application of antitrust laws in the United States. However, this achievement came about not through a transformation in economic orthodoxy, but through persuading legal experts to recognize the inherent ‘nonsense’ at work in their own normative assumptions. The Chicago antitrust revolution is therefore symptomatic of trends that Foucault viewed as definitive of neo-liberalism more broadly.     

Right-wing Euroscepticism and populism: investigating the concept of ‘the people’

ABSTRACT

Right-wing Eurosceptic political groups gained ground in the elections for the European Parliament in May 2014. The electoral victory of right-wing Euroscepticism was accompanied by a concern that populism is (once again) spreading in Europe. Associating right-wing Eurosceptics with populism raises the question of whether critiques of populism can be directly extended to right-wing Euroscepticism. By reconstructing the right-wing Eurosceptic concept of ‘the people,’ this article demonstrates that the Eurosceptic concept of the people has a dual meaning that encompasses both a transnational and a national concept of the people. The article concludes that while Euroscepticism shares ideological features with populism, it is problematic, due to the internal structure of the promoted concept of the people and the European political environment, directly to extend recent critiques of populism to right-wing Euroscepticism.     

‘I am an American’: protesting advertised ‘Americanness’

How are citizenships and nationalisms constructed, connected, and contested in the post-9/11 USA – performatively, affectively, and visually – and how do their relationships figure ‘Americanness’? This article takes up this question (1) by tracking how Americanness was advertised in the American Ad Council's ‘I am an American’ campaign and (2) by introducing the multimedia project ‘I am an American’: Video Portraits of Unsafe US Citizens, which engages the Ad Council's campaign as a practice-based protest of the Ad Council's advertised ‘Americanness’. The article traces how the Ad Council's campaign advertises what Evelyn Alsultany calls ‘diversity patriotism’. It also constructs a complex, mobile system of differentiation that marks some citizens as ‘safe’ and others as ‘unsafe’, which runs counter to the idealized notion of a unified ‘Americanness’ that it advertises. The article then examines how the practice-based protest project ‘I am an American’ takes these ‘unsafe citizens’ – US citizens who either will not or cannot make their differences normatively conform to the national ideal of the ‘One’ composed of the ‘Many’ propagated by the Ad Council's campaign – as its point of departure to reflect upon how citizenship protests function for and against citizenship, nationalisms, and various figurations of Americanness.     

Between ‘Objectivism’ and ‘Contextualism': the Normative Foundations of Social Philosophy

Abstract

One of the principal challenges facing contemporary social philosophy is how to find foundations that are normatively robust yet congruent with its self-understanding. Social philosophy is a critical project within modernity, an interpretative horizon that stresses the influences of history and context on knowledge and experience. However, if it is to engage in intercultural dialogue and normatively robust social critique, social philosophy requires non-arbitrary, universal normative standards. The task of normative foundations can thus be formulated in terms of negotiating the tension between ‘contextualism’ and ‘objectivism’. Six contemporary responses to this challenge are examined. Their respective limitations call for renewed reflection on justificatory strategies, in particular for a conception of ‘objectivity’ based in a normative theory of social learning processes.     

The ‘I’ and the ‘we’ of citizenship in the age of waning democracy: Wolin and Balibar on citizenship,the political and dedemocratization

Despite drawing on different historical traditions and philosophical sources, Sheldon Wolin and Étienne Balibar have come to see citizenship and democracy in fundamentally similar ways. However, the work of one has not been considered alongside that of the other. In this paper, I examine some of their key texts and draw out three areas of common concern: the historical specificity of the political, citizenship as a dialectical process and dedemocratization. The significance of Wolin and Balibar’s writing on citizenship and democracy lies in a set of proposals for the eternal rebirth of the citizen as democratic agent between action and institution, hierarchy and equality, individual and community, difference and the universal. Their open-ended frameworks can be seen as an antidote to contemporary pessimism about the fate of democracy as either political order or normative ideal. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary Ecuadorean and Bolivian debates about how to combine relational ontologies and liberalism has opened a fertile domain for re-imagining the I and We of citizenship.     

China and the world: The challenge of ‘opening up’

Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1800s to the 1980s, by Jack Gray. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, Toronto, 1990. Ixix + 456 pp. £35.00 hardback, £11.95 paperback. ISBN0–19–913076–0 and 0–19–821576–2.

The Pride that was China, by Michael Loewe. Sidgwick & Jackson, London; St. Martin's Press, New York, 1990. xxiii + 312 pp., illus., maps. £20.00. ISBN 0–283–99648‐X.

Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution, by Helen F. Siu. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1989. £30.00; $45.00. xxvi+378 pp. ISBN0–300–04465–8.

Asian Frontier Nationalism: Owen Lattimore and the American Policy Debate, by James Cotton. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989. vi+181 pp. £35.00. ISBN0–7190–2585–0.

China's Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy, by Andrew J. Nathan. Columbia University Press, New York, 1990. xi+242 pp. ISBN 0–231–07284–8.

The Spirit of Chinese Foreign Policy: A Psychocultural View, by Chih‐yu Shih. Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, 1990. xi+231 pp. £40.00. ISBN 0–333–51155–7.

Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences, edited by Howard Goldblatt. M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, and London, 1990. x+253 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0–87332–502–8.

Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II, edited by Jennifer Cushman and Wang Gungwu. Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 1988. xi+344pp. ISBN 962–209–207–1.

Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid‐Nineteenth Century to the Present, edited by R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1989. xvii+309 pp., illus. $25.00. ISBN 0–520–06256–6.     

Theorizing identity: beyond the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy

ABSTRACT

Yuval-Davis discusses three interconnected questions relating to identity. She first examines whether and in what ways the notion of identity should be theorized, on the one hand, and empirically researched, on the other, focusing on the opposing views of Stuart Hall and Robin Williams. She then examines the contested question of what is identity, positioning it in relation to notions of belonging and the politics of belonging, and in relation to several influential schools of thought, especially those that construct identity as a mode of narrative, as a mode of performativity or as a dialogical practice. Her third interrelated question concerns the boundaries of identity and the relationship between self and non-self. She explores both social psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to that question, and deals with questions such as reflexivity, identifications and forced identities. The last part of the article explores several types of relationships between self and non-self, such as: ‘me’ and ‘us’; ‘me/us’ and ‘them’; ‘me’ and other ‘others’; ‘me’ and the transversal ‘us/them’. Yuval-Davis's basic argument here is that dichotomous notions of identity and difference, when theorizing boundaries of individual and collective identities, are more misleading than explanatory.     

Providence Lost: ‘September 11’ and the History of Evil

Abstract

This paper discusses the philosophical significance of ‘September 11’ by relating it to attempts that have been made throughout the history of philosophy to read particular events as symbols of conceptual change. It draws especially on Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought and Giovanna Borradori's dialogues with Derrida and Habermas, in her Philosophy in a Time of Terror, to relate ‘September 11’ to Kant's versions of Progress, Providence and Cosmopolitanism.     

‘Ritual slaughter’ and the protection of animals

French courts produced contradictory judgments in similar cases involving daily newspapers accused of incitement to racial hatred.     

Corporatism and the ‘privileged position’ of business

This article examines the contradictions between Lindblom's thesis of the ‘privileged position of business’ and the corporatist views of writers such as Schmitter and Lehmbruch. The implications of the two theories are analysed in the context of the exchanges between the capital and labour in corporatist systems. The analysis focuses on the kinds of exchange business may enter into, with special attention to the question of capital mobility, for that gives important insights into the stability of corporatist systems. Case studies of Sweden and Norway show that the kinds of bargain struck under corporatism may have serious consequences for corporatism, both as an analytical device and as a working system.