What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

We Have Never Been Modern

The article explores the issues of how law and space intersect in the area known as 'The South'. It examines the intersection between 'Northern' traditions of law and space and indigenous Australians experience of this 'history'. These intersections are germane to the question of how living in the South should now be understood in terms of the shape and pattern of legal relations. Ultimately, the question of indigenous and local traditions that form patterns of the lived experience of local peoples is mediated through law, but is not entirely subsumed by Northern law. Spatial and temporal existence is culturally embedded, and Aboriginal experience of time, for example, does not adhere to Northern parameters. Accordingly, the interleaving of law, tradition and 'existence' is played out in various ways in the colonial and postcolonial history of the South. Thus the interaction between the imposed legal concept and process, and that lived experience of the peoples of the South (whether we designate it as 'tradition' or not) is what is at issue in framing responses to the question of what it means to be positioned in the South.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1399188_code427203.pdf?abstractid=1399188&mirid=3

The Invention of Tradition: Property Law as a Knowledge Space for the Appropriation of the South

The paper introduces the current debate in the human sciences between the opposing conceptual positions of 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' and discusses its implications for organizational analysis. The debate focusses on the nature of 'discourse' (information, knowledge, communication) and its role in social systems. The discourse of modernism rests on transcendent yet anthropocentric criteria such as 'progress' and 'reason' which are varyingly exemplified in the work of Bell, Luhmann and Habermas. In contrast, postmodern discourse (represented here mainly by the work of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari) analyzes social life in terms of paradox and indeterminacy, thus rejecting the human agent as the centre of rational control and understanding. The paper then considers two contrasting views of the organizing process which follow from these opposing approaches to discourse. In the modernist model, organization is viewed as a social tool and an extension of human rationality. In the postmo...

Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction

tive, both Formalists and Substantivists had entirely missed the point, because all their debates had been about distribution and exchange. To understand a society, they argued, one must first of all understand how it continues to exist—or, as they put it, “reproduces” itself—by endless creative activity. This was quite different from functionalism. Functionalists begin with a notion of “society,” then ask how that society manages to hold itself together. Marxists start by asking how what we call “society” is continually being re-created through various sorts of productive action, and how a society’s most basic forms of exploitation and inequality are thus rooted in the social relations through which people do so. This has obvious advantages. The problem with the whole “mode of production” approach, though, was that it was developed to analyze societies with a state: that is, in which there is a ruling class that maintains an apparatus of coercion to extract a surplus from the people who do most of the productive work. Most of the real triumphs of the MoP approach—I am thinking, for example, of Perry Anderson’s magisterial “Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism” (1974a) and “Lineages of the Absolutist State” (1974b)—deal with outlining the history of different modes of production, many of which can coexist in a given society; the way in which the dominant one provides the basis for a ruling class whose interests are protected by the state; the way that modes of production contain fundamental contradictions that will, at least in most cases, ultimately drive them to turn into something else. Once one turns to societies without a state, it’s not clear how any of these concepts are to be applied. One thing Marxism did introduce was a series of powerful analytical terms—exploitation, fetishism, appropriation, reproduction... —that everyone agreed Marx himself had used brilliantly in his analysis of Capitalism, but that no one was quite sure how to apply outside it. Different scholars would use these terms in very different ways and then would often end up quar-

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

Discussions of the spatiality of globalization have largely focused on place-based attributes that fix globalization locally, on globalization as the construction of scale, and on networks as a distinctive feature of contemporary globalization. By contrast, position within the global economy is frequently regarded as anachronistic in a shrinking, networked world. A critical review of how place, scale, and networks are used as metaphors for the spatiality of globalization suggests that space/time still matters. Positionality (position in relational space/time within the global economy) is conceptualized as both shaping and shaped by the trajectories of globalization and as influencing the conditions of possibility of places in a globalizing world. The wormhole is invoked as a way of describing the concrete geographies of positionality and their non-Euclidean relationship to the Earth’s surface. The inclusion of positionality challenges the simplicity of pro- and antiglobalization narratives and can...

/pdf/the-spaces-and-times-of-globalization-place-scale-networks-1dhzqausxm.pdf

Donald P. Spence

Papers

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.

When the medium is the message.

Legend, myth, and magic in the image of the artist: A historical experiment.

Construction or Reconstruction

The Psychology of the Self: A Casebook.