Susan Buck-Morss

Bio: Susan Buck-Morss is an academic researcher from Cornell University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Dialectic & Hegelianism. The author has an hindex of 16, co-authored 22 publications receiving 4552 citations.

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

Abstract: Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In "The Dialectics of Seeing, " Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the "Passagen-Werk, " or "Arcades Project, " as it might have taken form.Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time--from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons--as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south--Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples--and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word."The Dialectics of Seeing" is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

Abstract: In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. "Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History" offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates.Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a "new humanism," one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase. She asks us to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and reaches for a common humanity.

Hegel and Haiti

Abstract: By the eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations.' Freedom, its conceptual antithesis, was considered by Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery-the systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies-was

Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered

Abstract: Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"' is generally taken to be an affirmation of mass culture and of the new technologies through which it is disseminated. And rightly so. Benjamin praises the cognitive, hence political, potential of technologically mediated cultural experience (film is particularly privileged).2 Yet the closing section of this 1936 essay reverses the optimistic tone. It sounds a warning. Fascism is a "violation of the technical apparatus" that parallels fascism's violent "attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses"-not by giving them their due, but by "allowing them to express themselves."3 "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."4 Benjamin seldom makes sweeping condemnations, but here he states categorically: "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."5 He is writing during the early period of fascist military adventurism-Italy's colonial war in Ethiopia, Germany's intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Yet Benjamin recognizes that the aesthetic justification of this policy was already in place at the century's start. It was the Futurists who, just before World War I,

Multiliteracies: Lit Learning

Abstract: Multiliteracies considers the future of literacy teaching in the context of the rapidly changing English language. Questions are raised about what constitutes appropriate literacy teaching in today's world: a world that is both a global village yet one which local diversity is increasingly important. This is a coherent and accessible overview of the work of the New London Group, with well-known international contributors bringing together their varying national experiences and differences of theoretical and political emphasis. The essays deal with issues such as: * the fundamental premises of literacy pedagogy * the effects of technological change * multilingualism and cultual diversity * social futures and their implications on language teaching. The book concludes with case studies of attempts to put the theories into practice and thereby provides a basis for dialogue with fellow educators around the world.

A Space for Place in Sociology

Abstract: Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review. It may be a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a “sociology of place,” for that could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects, or environmental historians. The point of this review is to indicate that sociologists have a stake in place no matter what they analyze, or how: The works cited below emplace inequality, difference, power, politics, interaction, community, social movements, deviance, crime, life course, science, identity, memory, history. After a prologue of definitions and methodological ruminations, I ask: How do places come to be the way they are, and how do places matter for social practices and historical change?

Music in Everyday Life

Abstract: The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure

Abstract: Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.

A Postcapitalist Politics

Abstract: Is there life after capitalism? In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies. A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity-one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist-and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions. Gibson-Graham bring together political economy, feminist poststructuralism, and economic activism to foreground the ethical decisions, as opposed to structural imperatives, that construct economic "development" pathways. Marshalling empirical evidence from local economic projects and action research in the United States, Australia, and Asia, they produce a distinctive political imaginary with three intersecting moments: a politics of language, of the subject, and of collective action. In the face of an almost universal sense of surrender to capitalist globalization, this book demonstrates that postcapitalist subjects, economies, and communities can be fostered. The authors describe a politics of possibility that can build different economies in place and over space. They urge us to confront the forces that stand in the way of economic experimentation and to explore different ways of moving from theory to action. J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, feminist economic geographers who work, respectively, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.