Strangers and Others: From Deconstruction to Hermeneutics

Abstract

It is not clear that "cultural recognition" should be a central goal of leftist politics. The idea that cultures have value simply by virtue of being cultures seems absurd, so it might be better to talk simply about eliminating prejudice and stigmatisation.     

The Modern Concept of Aesthetic Experience: from Ascetic Pleasure to Social Criticism

Abstract

This paper examines the use of "pleasure" as the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience in post-Kantian philosophy. It shows how the distinctive features of aesthetic experience, such as pleasure, qualify this experience as a platform for social criticism. The key argument is that the autonomy of the aesthetic experience is not "false", rather it is paradoxical in the strong sense that the fact of its communicative efficacy, which follows from distinctive, "autonomous" aesthetic features, necessarily loads it with functions and expectations that are external to the aesthetic moment. Kant takes a complicated path to qualify aesthetic judgement as disinterested in order that it may eloquently testify for morality. He thereby sets up the cogency of the modern pattern of looking to aesthetic experience as a locus of meaningful communication for ideas that are experientially poor or remote.     

Body Politics with Feeling: The Power of the Clothesline Project

The Clothesline Project uses t-shirt art to address the issue of violence against women. Others have argued that the Clothesline Project empowers women in general and female victims of violence in particular. In this article we attempt to deepen this argument, first, by tying it to the existing "faces of power" literature. Using this literature, we argue that the Clothesline Project empowers by creating a public space for political action, offering an alternative communicative medium, educating in a context of dismissal and silence, and contributing to social and cultural transformation. Second, we develop the notion of affective power and argue that it amplifies the practical power of the Clothesline Project.     

The Writing Lesson: Imaginary Inscriptions in Cultural Encounters

Abstract

This article takes a moment of intercultural exchange, first reported as "The Writing Lesson" by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques and later explored by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, as the occasion for further reflection on the role played by the aesthetic in what it terms intercultural transference. Transference occurs whenever unconscious desires, fantasies or patterns of being and relating are enacted in an interpersonal or intercultural encounter, including the indirect encounters between literary or artistic objects and their recipients. It emerges as a largely unconscious operation designed to bridge, close, fill or deny the inevitable gaps in knowing another person or another culture, and to manage the affects such gaps bring forth. Intercultural transference provides a framework to read "The Writing Lesson" differently and suggests a theoretical model able to account for the complex performances of intercultural transference that enter any exchange or translation between cultures.     

Short notices on some new (and second editions) of cultural criticism

Cultural Difference, Media Memories. Anglo‐American Images of Japan PHIL HAMMOND (ed) London & Washington: Cassell, 1997

Literature, Politics and Culture in Post War Britain ALLEN SINFIELD London & Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1997

Structuralism. A Philosophy for the Human Sciences PETER CAWS New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997

The Language of Metaphors ANDREW GOATLY London & New York: Routledge, 1997     

The Political Vocation of Post-Metaphysical Hermeneutics: On Vattimo's Leftist Heideggerianism and Postmodern Socialism

Abstract

The paper examines the sense in which Gianni Vattimo's story of a long goodbye to modernity along with an interminable weakening of Being inaugurates a leftist philosophico-political project. The hermeneutics of "weak thought" is criticized for (a) its ambiguous concept of interpretation; (b) its way of integrating proceduralism in post-metaphysical philosophizing; and (c) the unhappy marriage it promotes between nihilism and emancipation. Finally, a philosophico-political version of hermeneutic ontology based on the idea of situated transcendence is suggested as an alternative to Vattimo's nihilistic socialism.     

Book reviews

Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy PHILIP GOODCHILD London: Associated University Presses, 1996

Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism EUGENE HOLLAND Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993

Australian Television and International Mediascapes STUART CUNNINGHAM & ELIZABETH JACKA Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Sociolingwistics and Language History: Studies based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence TERTTU NEVALAINEN & HELENA RAUMOLIN‐BRUNBERG (Eds) Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics No 15, Amsterdam/Atlanta., GA: Rodopi, 1996

Fear of the Dark. ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema LOLA YOUNG London and New York: Routledge, 1996

Deleuze: A Critical Reader PAUL PATTON (Ed.) Oxford: Blackwell, 1996

A Guattari Reader GARY GENOSKO (Ed.) Oxford: Blackwell, 1996

Counterworks. Managing the Diversity of Knowledge R. FARDON (Ed.) London: Routledge, 1995     

Signifyin' and Intertextuality: Killer of Sheep and Black Independent Film *

A Very British History—Without the Whingers * * Cf. the Oxford English Dictionary: whinge /winj/ colloq. v.intr. whine, grumble peevishly, vd. gripe.

Peter Hennessy, Never Again—Britain, 1945–1951 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).

Industrial Cities and Their Working Class: Notes on a Time Gone By

Robert A. Catlin, Black Politics and Urban Planning: Gary, Indiana 1980–1989 (The University Press of Kentucky, 1993).

Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

Anthony M. Orum, City‐Building in America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).

Against Green Gloom

Gregg Easterbrook, A Moment on The Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism (New York: Viking, 1995).

Talking Class(room)

Frances A. Maher and Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom: An Inside Look at How Professors and Students are Transforming Higher Education for A Diverse Society (New York Basic Books, 1994).

Working Out

Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Scitech and The Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).     

Political Theory,Critical Theory,and the Place of the Frankfurt School

Abstract

This paper explores the paradox of the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory where the notion of "critical theory" became identified with aesthetics and asks whether the disappearance of the political dimension of critical theory was necessary. This disappearance of the political also presents some uncomfortable affinities between it and postmodernism. But in the more sober world after 1989, post-communism poses more relevant questions than post-modernism for an assessment of the history of the Frankfurt School. The political project of the old Frankfurt School has to be revivified - or at least given a decent burial.     

What Is Political Science? What Should It Be?

This paper examines the five myths that govern political science: that it studies politics; that it is scientific; that one can study politics cut off from the other social sciences and history; that the state is neutral; and that the bulk of the work in the discipline furthers the cause of democracy. Within political science, there have been three main approaches to criticizing these myths: a moderate one that treats the elements in these myths as more or less disconnected; a radical one that sees a systemic connection between these elements; and a Marxist one that names this system "Capitalism" and privileges the role of the capitalist state in explaining both politics and political science.     

Book reviews

Making Sense in Law: Linguistic, Psychological and Semiotic Perspectives, BERNARD S. JACKSON Liverpool: Deborah Charles Publications 1995

Culture And Sexual Risk: Anthropological Perspectives On Aids, HAN T. BRUMMELHUIS &; GILBERT HERDT (Eds) Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1995

Virtual Geography, MCKENZIE WARK, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994     

Derrida on Identity and Difference: A Radical Democratic Reading of The Other Heading

Abstract

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power pre suppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that social actors have multiple interpretative horizons avail able to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism.     

Trade Winds: NAFTA and the Rational Public

The sharp increase in suppport for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) poses a challenge to many of our conceptions of public opinion. Most large shifts in public opinion follow major events. Based on models estimated from the September to November NBC News/ Wall Street Journal surveys, I show this was not the case with respect to public opinion on NAFTA. Instead, the increase in support for the pact reflected a slower response to a public debate over the merits of free trade versus protectionism. As the debate proceeded, large segments of the public— including the least interested—developed more highly constrained belief systems. By the end of the public discourse, the most and least interested citizens both linked attitudes on the merits of trade to their positions on NAFTA and to their evaluations of the elites on each side of the issue. People made up their minds on NAFTA on the basis of arguments about trade, not about their own self-interest. The NAFTA case suggests that there may be a rational public at the individual level after all, even among people who may not usually be interested in public affairs.     

Moderate Machiavelli? Contrasting The Prince with the Arthashastra of Kautilya

Abstract

Max Weber was the first to see that the writings of Machiavelli, when contrasted with the brutal realism of other cultural and political traditions, were not so extreme as they appear to some critics. "Truly radical ‘Machiavellianism,’ in the popular sense of that word," Weber said in his famous lecture "Politics as a Vocation," "is classically expressed in Indian literature in the Arthashastra of Kautilya (written long before the birth of Christ, ostensibly in the time of Chandragupta [Maurya]): compared to it, Machiavelli's The Prince is harmless." In this article, contrast Machiavelli's writings to those of Kautilya (c. 300 B.C.E.) and question why Machiavelli omitted the harsher aspects of political domination such as spies, assassination of enemies, and torture. Could it be that he was afraid to tell a prince about the harsher characteristics of tyrannical rule? If so, why?     

Religion,Violence and Cities: An Introduction

Abstract

The catalyst for this special issue was a symposium entitled Religion, Violence and Cities, held under the auspices of a five year inter-disciplinary research project on ethno-nationally divided cities.¹1. Conflict and Cities and the Contested State: Everyday Life and the Possibilities of Transformation in Belfast, Jerusalem and Other Divided Cities (2007–2013), ESRC Large Grant No. RES-060-25-0015. Principal Investigators were: Wendy Pullan (University of Cambridge), Liam O'Dowd and James Anderson (Queen's University, Belfast) and Mick Dumper (University of Exeter). The ‘Contested State’ of the title refers to states where the central political dynamic concerns the boundaries, or even the existence, of the state itself. While this project expressly addressed cities divided by ethno-national conflict, it was clear from the beginning that there was an important religious dimension to such conflicts in most, if not all, the cities being studied.²2. The two main cities studied were Belfast and Jerusalem while other cities researched by project personnel included Vukovar (see Baillie, 2013 Baillie, B. (2013) Structural Violence and the (Re)construction of Vukovar's Churches, Space and Polity, 17(3). [Google Scholar], this issue), Beirut, Kirkuk, Nicosia, Mostar, and Brussels. The rationale of the Special Issue is to examine how this religious dimension exacerbates (or moderates) urban violence within a broad comparative context. Although three of the following articles are informed by Project research, we draw the net wider to encompass a broader geographical spread from the Balkans, the Middle East, Nigeria and Japan.     

Punk Subculture in Mexico and the Anti-globalization Movement: A Report from the Front

This article explores some strands of the current movement against capitalist globalization. It examines the affinity between punk subculture and autonomous politics taking the Mexican punk scene as an example. Based on participant observation it describes what Bourdieu would call the habitus of punk in Mexico. Recorded music, subcultural style and political ideas arrive into this habitus where they are selectively adopted. Thus, attempts to articulate punk in Mexico to the "anti-globalization" movement are somewhat different than in the United States and Canada.     

The "Third-Worldization" of a "Second-World" Nation: De-development in Post-Communist Bulgaria

Post-Communist Bulgaria has fared rather poorly in the transition to a capitalist economy. By nearly every macroeconomic standard, it is in worse shape now than in the Communist past. Macroeconomic statistics show that the per capita GNP is sharply down, the social-safety net has all but disappeared, and even the physical survival of many impoverished Bulgarians is in serious peril. This article uses the political-economy approach to analyze the symptoms of sharp socioeconomic de-development, including the weakening of state capacity to perform even the most basic functions and responsibilities. The main conclusion is that in the global center-periphery structure, formerly "Second-World" Bulgaria is increasingly "Third-Worldized," that is, marginalized out of the international division of labor--a finding that raises doubts about the purported "success" of the transitions to capitalist economy in the former state-socialist countries.     

Diving into the Wreck: Aesthetic Spectatorship at the Fin-de-siècle

Abstract

The popularity of films like Titanic betokens a massive shift in the nature of aesthetic spectatorship in our time. The contemplative, distanced viewer who is able to judge from afar the spectacle before him or her, has been replaced by a more proximate, involved "kinaesthetic" subject whose body is stimulated as much as his or her eye. This is evident not only in mass culture with amusement thrill rides and the return of what has been called the "cinema of attractions"; this new spectator can also be discerned in avant-garde culture, as shown by the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists which caused such a stir in London and New York. This spectator is especially attracted to simulacral scenes of destruction and catastrophe, in which he or she is virtually immersed. If aesthetic judgement is to be a model for its political counterpart, as has been argued by theorists like Lyotard and Arendt, it cannot do so on the basis of this aesthetics of violent immersion.     

Morality,Law and the Place of Critique: Walter Benjamin's The Meaning of Time in the Moral World

Abstract

Critique as a philosophical concept needs to be recast once it is linked to the possibility of a productive opening. In such a context critique has an important affinity to destruction and forms of inauguration. Working through writings of Marx and Walter Benjamin, specifically Benjamin's "The Meaning of Time in the Moral World", destruction and inauguration are repositioned in terns of othering and the caesura of allowing.     

A Plea for Prometheus

Abstract

This essay takes issue with Critchley's diagnosis of the motivation crisis at the core of our supposedly nihilist political present, and with its pejorative characterization of a vanguardist or Leninist Left. Against the reliance of Infinitely Demanding on an anarchic metapolitics of responsibility, it proposes that we rethink the concept of solidarity and develop an intra-political ethics of egalitarianism, an ethics of unconditional rather than infinite demands that is happy to embrace the accusation of "Prometheanism".