All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

The Wretched of the Earth

The End of History and the Last Man

Capitalism and Freedom

The third way: the renewal of social democracy

Discourses of the War on Terror: Constructions of the Islamic other after 7/7

The objective of this paper is to investigate the sociological and existential situation of the inhabitants of Bransholme, a peri-urban council estate on the northern edge of Hull, in the context of the current economic downturn and contemporary regeneration discourses. In ‘reading’ life on the estate against economic decline and regeneration practices, I aim to show why the latter cannot really succeed because they are premised on (a) a failure to understand the situation of the socially excluded and (b) injustices and inequalities hard-wired into the very form of late capitalism itself. In light of this thesis, my claim is that only large-scale changes to the neo-liberal socio-economic system will save Hull, and as a consequence, the people of Bransholme, because only this will oppose the ‘winner takes all’, exclusive neo-liberal politics Meagher discusses in her 2009 work on ‘urbs sacra’ and ‘rurban America’ and offer hope for some kind of spatial justice. In order to reach this conclusion, I divide my...

Being-in-Hull, Being-on-Bransholme

This chapter suggests that we may regard conspiratorial thinking as a pathological effect of the dissolution of social recognition, a paranoid form of non-knowledge caused by the rise of political ideologies which foreground the rights of the individual at the expense of those of all others. In the first section, the chapter looks at Minogue's book Alien Powers (1985) as an example of such a political argument. According to an analysis of this theory of difference, which attempts to see the ideological critique of social inequality as emblematic of a form of totalitarian paranoia, we can understand how conspiracy theory represents an attempt to compensate for the repression of sociability. The paradox of Minogue's exercise is clear: at the same time that he attempts to problematize the ideological critique of social inequality as a subjective stance which limits the unfolding of difference, he continues to advance his own manifesto of absolute difference/freedom behind the veil of undecidability/ objectivity. Reading this reversal, which sees the absolute openness of difference contract towards the inflexibility of total closure, through Zizek's dialectical view of the popular science fiction film The Matrix, the second part is concerned to show how theories of absolute difference may inadvertently create an atmosphere for conspiratorial thinking. Through their disavowal of the reality of sociability one can argue that authors like Minogue hide both the motivated reality of the law and the violence which necessarily under-writes the integrity of such symbolic rule. Caught inside this nonsensical machine, where absolute openness to others inverts towards the absolute closure of claustrophobic solipsism, the alien-ated individual attempts to create meaning through the degraded medium of conspiratorial thinking. As such, the chapter will show how in an age that sees everybody cast outside the bounds of sociability, the obscure politics of conspiracy theory de-scribe the dark-side of theories of difference and mark the vicious mechanics of the state of postmodern second nature/capital which such political ideologies appear to support.

The obscure politics of conspiracy theory

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing o...

“Hoodie Horror”: The Capitalist Other in Postmodern Society

In this article, the author proposes to explore the state of the contemporary network society through an analysis of the human effects of the conditions of globalisation, fast capitalism, postmodern warfare and quantum culture. In the first section of the article, the author considers the problem of social relations in the global network society and, in particular, examines the effect of radical anxiety on self—other communication. Following this section, which turns off a consideration of the violence of fast capitalism, the author focuses on the relationship between the science of immunology, paranoia and postmodern warfare. Here, in the second section of the article, the author shows how the radical anxiety that plagues those who inhabit the lightning‐fast network resolves itself in paranoid reaction formations that make productive self—other relations more or less impossible. Finally, the author explores potential solutions to the problem of self—other violence in the network and concludes with a disc...

Mark Featherstone

Papers

Discourses of the War on Terror: Constructions of the Islamic other after 7/7

Being-in-Hull, Being-on-Bransholme

The obscure politics of conspiracy theory

“Hoodie Horror”: The Capitalist Other in Postmodern Society

The State of the Network: Radical Anxiety, Real Paranoia and Quantum Culture