Showing papers in "Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory in 2011"
TL;DR: In this paper, a comprehensive framework for the study of categories and categorization is presented, which is based on French epistemology and includes systems of exchange, symbolic lifestyles and bodily schemes, and moral boundaries.
Abstract: This article presents a comprehensive framework for the study of categories and categorization. Sociological studies of the classic theme ‘categorization’ seem to have faded in favor of psychological research and – most recently – policy studies, and we argue that present theories lack an adequate conception of the distinction between political and social categories as well as an adequate conceptualization of the different social contexts for categorization. Concerning the first point, we suggest separating an understanding of the political as legitimate use of state power and performative and dislocative practices, corresponding to a conception of the social as that which is beyond political institutions and that which is sedimented and stable. Drawing mainly on French epistemology, the article further discusses three important contexts for social (i.e. beyond political institutions) categories and categorization, namely systems of exchange, symbolic lifestyles and bodily schemes, and moral boundaries an...
30 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the circulation of contemporary anxieties related to food through an engagement with sociological and geographical work on affect, and argued that the movement of affect should not be considered as a linear "manipulation" of mute subjects, but rather as a circulation of affective intensity that moves through heterogeneous milieux and is open to "modulation".
Abstract: This paper explores the circulation of contemporary anxieties related to food through an engagement with sociological and geographical work on affect. The paper draws on four case studies of ‘food scares’ in the UK and Sweden to consider the emergence, circulation and expression of food anxieties. It suggests that existing analyses of food anxiety neglect its affective dimensions, and that the circulation of concerns about food is an affective and embodied process as well as a cognitive one, taking place through encounters between heterogeneous bodies at a range of temporal and spatial scales. However, it argues that the movement of affect should not be considered as a linear ‘manipulation’ of mute subjects, but rather as a circulation of affective intensity that moves through heterogeneous milieux and is open to ‘modulation’. In contrast to manipulation, the modulation of affect is constituted through interactions and encounters, making its outcome unpredictable and uncertain.
20 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that economic calculation is an activity routinely conducted in economic life-worlds, from small enterprises all the way up to financial markets, and they advocate a sociological analysis of the world-constituting character of calculation.
Abstract: From small enterprises all the way up to financial markets, economic calculation is an activity routinely conducted in economic life-worlds. This paper argues that calculation is situated in the practice of participants involved in these life-worlds as well as in the technological tools they use. It champions a sociological analysis of the world-constituting character of calculation. As empirical examples the paper discusses risk management strategies, the embeddedness of calculation practices in banking infrastructure, and the process of internal rating procedures. Contesting the idea of the omnipresence of calculation, the paper analyzes the social phenomenon of the neutralization of calculation. The notion of undoing calculation is introduced and outlined both theoretically and empirically.
17 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the underlying reasons for and the dynamics of illness and family breakdown in Danish asylum centres, drawing on Giorgio Agamben's theory of states of exception, where asylum-seekers are deprived of not only some of the legal rights of citizens but also human rights.
Abstract: In Western societies, asylum politics is a highly debated issue, as modern nation states come under increasing pressure from globalization and find it more difficult to remain homogeneous institutions for ruling. In the context of these pressures, asylum-seekers constitute political and constitutional dilemmas deeply embedded in the issue of bordering, securing and sustaining nation state sovereignty. According to Giorgio Agamben, one solution to this dilemma is the creation of ‘camps’ as institutionalized ‘states of exception’, i.e. asylum centres, where asylum-seekers are deprived of not only some of the legal rights accorded citizens but also human rights. In Denmark, while the political focus is on increasingly restrictive asylum policies, studies show that asylum-seeking families suffer from deteriorating psychological and physical health and social life. Drawing on Agamben, this article examines the underlying reasons for and the dynamics of illness and family breakdown in Danish asylum centres, par...
17 citations
TL;DR: This paper conceptualized the relationship between critique and power based on the observation that both are often displaced in processes of major social change, not least in the recent decades' reversal of hierarchy.
Abstract: The relationship between critique and power is controversial in both society and sociology. Instead of setting a normative yardstick of critique, the article looks to conceptualize the intimate relationship between critique and power based on the observation that both are often displaced in processes of major social change, not least in the recent decades' reversal of hierarchy. The article conceptualizes the main idea about displacement of critique and power on the basis of what Foucault terms the ‘tactical polyvalence of discourse’ and similar ideas from the governmentality lectures. The argument is further developed in a discussion with Boltanski and Chiapello's work on the new spirit of capitalism. The discussion illustrates how effective critiques of power often turn the inside out of normative ideas about conduct or management, which is exemplified in the movement from anti-authoritarian critiques of hierarchy after 1968 to new and flexible forms of government.
15 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a different conception of resistance which reveals its crucial links with creation and change, and locate resistance within a network of resonating concepts for social theory which somehow sidestep classical sociological theories.
Abstract: Resistance is often understood as a practice that stands against change. The main characteristics of resistance are consequently identified in refusal and rejection. Even when it is acknowledged that change is in fact imposed change – so that resistance is actually resistance against imposition – the implicit premise is that resistance is centred upon inertia vis-a-vis some active force. In this way, resistance is framed as a practice essentially based on negation, or as the negative term in a dialectic of power. The aim of this paper is to propose a different conception of resistance which reveals its crucial links with creation and change. Resistance can be located within a network of resonating concepts for social theory which somehow sidestep classical sociological theories in that they draw on neither the analytic nor the critical tradition in social thought. Whereas the analytic tradition treats resistance as a residual, often suspect, category, the critical tradition accepts it, but only as an inco...
13 citations
TL;DR: Hobbes's theory of fear has two major implications for his political theory as discussed by the authors, one implication is how men's mutual fear is the source of a commonwealth by institution, and the second implication is that sovereign power also uses that fear to govern people.
Abstract: Hobbes's theory of fear has two major implications for his political theory. One implication is how men's mutual fear is the source of a commonwealth by institution. The second implication is that sovereign power is the source of fear, and that sovereign power also uses that fear to govern people. These two implications have not been analyzed fully in past studies. In a way, a sovereign captures mutual fear reigning in a multitude and transforming it into a political tool designed for government of the subjects. Possessing the right and power to cause death, a sovereign takes the place of God on earth. A sovereign has certain expectations of citizens: they should obey and honour the sovereign as they obey and honour God. Analyzing Hobbes's concepts of mimesis, aisthesis and honouring reveals how Hobbes aimed to construct a political object, the State, that would effect the whole sense experience of the subject. It shows that Hobbes's political thought is not only a legal political thought, but is based al...
12 citations
TL;DR: In a series of focus group interviews with Danish kindergarten teachers, managers and staff representatives, it became clear that the idea of flexibility has been incorporated into society's most basic reproductive stages.
Abstract: The demand for employees to show flexibility is not merely a characteristic of large companies, but one that can even be traced in municipal day nurseries and kindergartens. In a series of focus group interviews with Danish kindergarten teachers, managers and staff representatives, it became clear that the idea of flexibility has been incorporated into society's most basic reproductive stages. In this article we show that this demand has proved difficult to handle; it has been accompanied by the impression of unceasing change, which leads to insecurity. Inorder to lend theoretical explanatory power to the kindergarten teachers' experience of insecurity, Axel Honneth's considerations of how it has become harder to perceive the kinds of performance that will provide recognition have been included. Similarly, Boltanski and Chiapello's reflections on project work, in which the idea of showing flexibility is a central value in obtaining recognition, have been included and are discussed in relation to the fact ...
10 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that the universal rights of man have disappeared into the particular rights of the citizen as the emancipated individual man they seek to address has turned into a member of a people and argued that both the cosmopolitan and multicultural view reasserts the division between those capable of doing politics and those who are not, through excluding the latter from any political sphere and preventing them from articulating their own exclusion and inequality.
Abstract: Attempts to engage critically with citizenship, both within critical human rights theory and within cosmopolitan and multicultural citizenship theory, often underline how the status of the citizen has ceased to be perceived as a privilege and is instead viewed in terms of universal access to political rights and political participation The political man is thus constituted by his citizenship and not the other way around As a consequence, the universal rights of man have disappeared into the particular rights of the citizen as the emancipated individual man they seek to address has turned into a member of a people This article aims to reconsider the critique forwarded by critical human rights theory and argues that it reasserts the division between those capable of doing politics and those who are not, through excluding the latter from any political sphere and preventing them from articulating their own exclusion and inequality The text further contends that both the cosmopolitan and multicultural view
10 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors delineate three types of fear: iconic, indexical and intellective, and they can be related to each other in order to show their relevance as the basis for an organizing principle in social life as well as to our own precarious, political situation in the contemporary world.
Abstract: Hobbes's political philosophy forwards the advance of modernity: human emancipation can be realized through an enthusiastic development of science and technology. But that project is driven by human curiosity emerging from a sense of anxiety driven by Hobbes's insight – sustained too by Vico – that human beings can know only what they make. Tossed into a world not of their own making, human beings are thereby subject to fear of the unknown. But is that fear all of a piece? Against the prevailing view that fear can only be understood as arising from some specified cause, that is to say in indexical terms, the paper delineates, through an examination of Hobbes's writings – particularly his Leviathan – three such conceptions of fear. They are the iconic, indexical and intellective. They can then be related to each other in order to show their relevance as the basis for an organizing principle in social life as well as to our own precarious, political situation in the contemporary world.
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that a public sphere forms a constructive arena for citizenship practice if we by citizenship understand four components: rights, responsibilities, participation and identity as formulated by Gerard Delanty.
Abstract: The article's main argument is that a public sphere forms a constructive arena for citizenship practice if we by citizenship understand four components: rights, responsibilities, participation and identity as formulated by Gerard Delanty. The Habermasian (re)working of the concept remains an essential contribution to theories of democracy and of political participation. With this in mind, the author's ambition is to address and to rework a specific type of public: an opinion-forming public within a framework of feminist political theory. The article is informed by the assumption that an opinion-forming public sphere is a central democratic arena in which the process of deliberation has intrinsic value. The analysis draws on a debate where a broader concept of communication than the one proposed by Habermas has been discussed. Iris Marion Young's concept of ‘inclusive communication’, greeting, rhetoric and narratives, is an attempt to widen public communication and further an ambition of constructing a con...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose and develop three maps of citizenship strategies in three major sections: retreatism, essentialism, and engagement, which characterize both majority populations and Muslim minorities as they attempt to adapt to the rapidly changing world.
Abstract: This article is set in the contemporary context of global challenges: economic crises, state deformations, and rapidly accelerating flows of people, ideas, and ideals. It has two main aims. One is to establish theoretical and empirical links between securitization studies and analyses of citizenship in the light of globalization, multiculturalism and discourses on terror. The second is to illustrate how macro events play out at the collective and individual level in terms of socio-psychological (in)securities that condition different citizenship strategies. The empirical basis for the article includes our studies of Western Muslims in the Netherlands, France, the UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Canada. The article proposes and develops three maps of citizenship strategies in three major sections: retreatism, essentialism, and engagement. Each section elaborates psycho-spatial ways of being in the world that characterize both majority populations and Muslim minorities as they attempt to adapt to the rapidly chang...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the political and public implications of the involving public sector depend crucially on three key factors: first, the organizational engagement with 'innovation'; second, the ways in which ideas and norms of involvement are translated by particular professionals and organizations; and third, the way in which they become inscribed in particular political projects in different nation states, regions and localities.
Abstract: This article addresses the evolution of the idea of the involving public sector, and traces its relationship to earlier discourses of participation and choice. It asks whether we should consider the developing discourse of involvement as something that offers a progressive move towards citizen empowerment and social justice, or whether instead it marks a neo-liberal turn towards a smaller state and greater citizen responsibility. In responding to this question the article argues that the political and public implications of the involving public sector depend crucially on three key factors: first, the organizational engagement with ‘innovation’; second, the ways in which ideas and norms of involvement are translated by particular professionals and organizations; and third, the ways in which they become inscribed in particular political projects in different nation states, regions and localities.
TL;DR: Theories of affect have been offered in abundance in recent times as potential remedies for the many theoretical ailments that face the social sciences as mentioned in this paper, and some of these avenues, before arguing that theories of affect are required that can speak to specificity in terms of the challenges of embodied states.
Abstract: Theories of affect have been offered in abundance in recent times as potential remedies for the many theoretical ailments that face the social sciences. Post cognitive theories continue to grapple with new ways of thinking the unrepentantly tricky relation between the psychological and socio-material. This paper will explore some of these avenues, before arguing that theories of affect are required that can speak to specificity in terms of the challenges of embodied states. Drawing on accounts of changing medicated body states of mental health service users the paper will develop a specific empirically rooted notion of affect that sympathises with the pre-personal, relational models of ‘excess’ prominent in affect theory, but that attempts to realise a theory of affect that can speak to the concrete reality of embodied experience. Following a theoretical path that includes Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi, and Michel Serres, I will work towards an empirical engagement with affect that attempts to speak to specificity, rather than generality, as attempts at the latter can often result in over-tasked theories faltering in their explanatory pursuits.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the nineteenth century fear of the "dangerous classes" and present three aspects of this epistemological fear: the fear of heterogeneity, of a levelling of borders and of hybridization.
Abstract: The article focuses on the nineteenth century fear of the ‘dangerous classes’. From the dangerous classes – all social scientists agreed – emanated a fundamental threat to society. However, corresponding to this seemingly social threat, on a much deeper level an epistemological threat was caused by the dangerous classes as well. The epistemological fear of the dangerous classes – this is the thesis – results from the confrontation of the researcher with an object of analysis that keeps withdrawing itself from any analytical fixation and adjustment as such. In the article particularly three aspects of this epistemological fear – the fear of heterogeneity, of a levelling of borders and of hybridization – are presented and contextualized within a wider epistemological horizon, namely the nineteenth century ideal of objectivity. The last chapter of the article outlines what seems to be a reactualization of the notion of the dangerous classes within current social theories on urban violence and exclusion. In r...
TL;DR: In this article, the classic welfare state problem of balancing universal values with an attention to particular individuals and needs is addressed as a particular urgent case in point, and the authors consider Baumann as emblematic for a postmodern position on welfare.
Abstract: This article discusses the classic welfare state problem of balancing universal values with an attention to particular individuals and needs. Welfare for marginalized citizens is addressed as a particular urgent case in point. The article first considers Baumann as emblematic for a postmodern position on welfare. In contrast, Luhmann's systems theory is then presented to form a program of observation of concrete welfare services, using the ‘rigour’ of the latter to bound the ‘liquidity’ of the first. Instead of suspecting modern institutions tout cout, the article analyses in detail the discursive ordering practices of welfare services for marginalized citizens, i.e. the homeless. On this basis, it contrasts what we term a ‘modern’ versus a ‘postmodern’ perspective upon organized welfare. Some limits to a postmodern position are indicated, in particular with respect to the ideal of including ‘the whole person’ in modern welfare arrangements.
TL;DR: The concept of legal and political citizenship is a much contested concept and has undergone numerous transformations in its long history as mentioned in this paper, and the classical concept became dominant with the rise of political and legal citizenship.
Abstract: Citizenship is a much contested concept and has undergone numerous transformations in its long history. The classical concept of legal and political citizenship that became dominant with the rise o...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose to observe war as a system that can de-ontologize itself and thereby concern moving centres of gravity such as communication lines, motivation, public fear, and perceptions of risk and insecurity.
Abstract: Fear is defined as the distinction between risk and danger, a distinction that operates in communicative forms. War is always also warfare about the form of war. The article describes how fear in warfare becomes a symbolically generalized medium of communication, mainly focusing on how the form of fear evolves in asymmetric warfare. Asymmetric war induces fear in both parties, but in a communicative form that leads to very different experiences. Fear is observed and analysed with Niklas Luhmann's theory of self-referential systems of communication as well as his theory of risk. Following Luhmann and in continuation ofClausewitz' conceptual tools, yet with other means, the article proposes to observe war as a system that can de-ontologize itself and thereby concern moving centres of gravity such as communication lines, motivation, public fear, and perceptions of risk and insecurity. The final section draws together the theoretical insights by formalizing a risk analysis of fear.
TL;DR: In this article, Bourdieu's conceptual categories of habitus, capital and field are used to identify the processes by which theoretical forms of reasoning infiltrate and inflect agents' ontological security, along with a discussion of the negative consequences this has for theoretical debates and dialogue.
Abstract: Within sociology, engagement with theoretical ideas and concepts is consistently misrepresented as a ‘desubjectivized’, ‘self-determined’ and ‘rationally’ mediated process. This paper critically interrogates this position by drawing attention to the ‘other side’ of the theory/practice dialectic, the transformative effects engaging with sociological theory has, and the consequences of this for the theoretical advancement of the discipline. Utilizing Bourdieu's conceptual categories of habitus, capital and field, the processes by which theoretical forms of reasoning infiltrate and inflect agents' ontological security are identified and delineated, along with a discussion of the negative consequences this has for theoretical debates and dialogue. The latter part of the paper takes these arguments and uses them to identify the reflexive value, but ultimately contradictory logic, Bourdieu's concepts give rise to and the relevance of this for the problems dealt with throughout the paper. By way of a conclusion,...
TL;DR: In this article, the concept of guilt is seen as debt beyond repayment, and the notion of giving is placed in the economy of gift, an aneconomical gift that is not part of the exchange cycle.
Abstract: The concept of guilt is seen here as debt beyond repayment. Following Derrida, the gesture of giving is placed in the economy of gift, an aneconomical gift that is not part of the exchange cycle. At the same time, guilt is linked to desire, the desire to give and to be free from guilt. Desire is described as the urge to cross over, to apprehend the non-identical and to give oneself away. In this reinforced crossing, where the improbability of giving conditions the improbability of reaching out, guilt and its impetus are found locked up in claustrophobic self-reference. For this reason, the author consults Kierkegaard and Luhmann whose contributions show that the gesture of giving acquires its relevance not so much on account of its recipient, but precisely because of the absence of such a recipient. The combination of an absent recipient and an absented giver fills the gift with an emptiness that can only be channelled back upon itself, in the autopoietics of guilt. This is exactly the fate of the law, which can deal with the guilty but never with guilt (in the above sense). In its attempt to give away guilt, the law attempts to become other than itself: justice. The improbability of crossing over becomes more obvious than ever.