Showing papers in "Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory in 2012"

Five theses on understanding logistics as power

Abstract: Today logistics has become central to the orchestration of globalized trade and production. Yet, despite the focus on global connections and disconnections across a range of disciplines, the material operations that enable logistical practices have gone largely unexplored in social and cultural investigations into the operative dimensions of the global. This series of five theses provides a programmatic introduction to a longer research project that aims to reverse this situation. Understanding logistics as power means questioning many of the economic and political shibboleths of current approaches to the global, whether they derive from generalizations about neo-liberal deregulation or assertions about the historical continuity of the state. In particular, it allows a rethinking of the global production of time and space in relation to the production of living labor and the production of subjectivity.

Listing the global: dis/connectivity beyond representation?

Abstract: This paper explores the topic of the special issue – global operations: (dis)connections – by approaching it through an analysis of lists. The list is understood as a communicative device which structures global operations as well as becoming a token for the global. The paper asks how the affinity between the logic of the list and the global is generated. For doing this, a model of the basic characteristics of lists is introduced, focusing on how lists organize the interplay between connection and disconnection. Eventually, the paper argues for an understanding of global lists which does not only account for its cognitive mapping of the global, but also for its affective dimension.

Global territories: zones of economic and legal dis/connectivity

Abstract: This article develops a notion of global territoriality for understanding the proliferation of special offshore zones in the context of globalization. It furnishes an account of how political territoriality is used for shaping global dis/connectivity. The argument is developed through the exploration of two distinct cases of offshore zones that are usually not theorized as a common phenomenon: one case is the financial offshore center on the Cayman Islands, the other case is the Australian offshore center for processing refugee claims on Christmas Island. Whereas the one site deals with non-resident money, the other one administers non-resident subjects. The article shows that despite the different aims that these sites serve, they are homologous in how they employ territorial strategies for modulating connectivity. We focus on three dimensions: the topological enfolding of inside/outside relations, the bifurcation between legal and physical presence, and a politics of visibility. By studying how these us...

Recognition and critique: an interview with Judith Butler

Abstract: In the interview Butler introduces a far broader range of thinkers dealing with the issues relating to the concept of recognition than the existing mainstream focus on the work of Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, and Charles Taylor. Butler specifically points out that ‘recognition’ becomes a problem for those who have been expelled from the structures and vocabularies of political representation. To Butler, there are schemes of recognition that determine who will be regarded as a subject worthy of recognition. She terms this ‘differential distribution of recognizability’. The scene of recognition is set by the existing norms and powers, and the subject does not operate independently of what can become an object of recognition. On the other hand, she also points out that without substantial forms of recognition, our lives are at risk. Butler also relates the schemes of recognition to the act of critique. She does so by explaining that the schemes of recognition that establish who will and will not be ‘recogniza...

Brutalization of the social conflict: struggles for recognition in the early 21st century

Abstract: In several of his analyses, Talcott Parsons describes the establishment of modern societies as a differentiation process across spheres of mutual recognition. In this paper, I use Parsons’ social theory of recognition to examine features of recent social conflicts. I begin with Parsons’ description of the struggles for recognition that took place during his lifetime in the highly industrialized societies of the West (I). I then use Parsons’ view of normatively ordered recognition conflicts to point out societal trends that led, in the final third of the twentieth century, to a gradual undermining of the pacification structures postulated by Parsons (II). An initial outcome of this apparent disintegration I describe as a ‘brutalization’ of social conflict. By this I mean a state of society where struggles for social recognition escalate and become anomic because resolution can no longer be found in the existing systemic spheres of negotiation (III). This paper shows the importance of the term recognition t...

‘Recognition’ and ‘interest’: a multidimensional concept in the sociology of work

Abstract: For decades, the German sociology of work had been dominated by a Marxism-inspired paradigm of interest. More recently, however, a paradigm of identity and recognition has gained prominence. This change is closely linked to a shift in the socio-theoretical, socio-political, and normative discourse as well as to a shift in labor relations, where identity, subjectivity, and recognition claims have become more important. The paradigm of recognition meets the requirements of these changes better than the old concept of interest. At the same time, however, the use of the concept of interest has become increasingly vague and has lost much of its explanatory power. Against this backdrop, the article argues for a multidimensional reconceptualization of ‘interest’ and ‘recognition’, which is necessary in order to save the concept of recognition from becoming a catch-all category. Based on the recognition theory of Axel Honneth and the contributions of Heinrich Popitz and Pierre Bourdieu, ‘interest’ is being concep...

Burnout as a social pathology of self-realization

Abstract: This article understands the growing problem of work-related mental fatigue in relation to the normative demand for self-realization that confronts contemporary Western individuals. The empirical basis of the study is in-depth interviews with individuals on long-term sick-leave with various mental fatigue diagnoses. The analysis of the interviews indicates that a common denominator was the search for being authentic at work by exploring and demonstrating one's capacities and skills to fulfill personal values in a working environment characterized by reorganizations and/or downsizing that the employees had little influence upon. The article shows how the consequences of these changes prevented an enduring authentic self-realization, giving rise to an escalating conflict between a standardized and unconditional self-realization. A discussion is then taken up on how this discrepancy was connected to a growing exhaustion, coupled with increased feelings of emptiness and low self-esteem. Finally, the fatigue s...

Connectivity as the strategization of space – the case of the Port of Hamburg

Abstract: Taking the Port of Hamburg as a site for analysis, this article is used to theorize the idea of connectivity as the strategization of space. Drawing on Foucault's understanding of strategy as an art of combinations, connectivity is explored as a quasi-transcendental, as a site of experimentation and innovation which opens up the possibility for a port's future market development and growth. The argument is drawn out of an analysis of specific practices and strategies currently developed by the Hamburg Port Authority, particularly the operation of Vessel Traffic Service and by exploring some of the historical forms of connectivity and dis-connectivity of the port.

Grammatology of modern recognition orders: an interview with Axel Honneth

Abstract: Axel Honneth has recently published a major book entitled Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundris einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit, where he, inspired by Hegel's philosophy of right, develops a theory of justice in the form of an analysis of modern Western society. The interview, which was conducted by email in the summer of 2011, is about the new book. Honneth presents the notion of ‘democratic ethical life’ (demokratische Sittlichkeit), a core concept in the book, before moving on to explain how the work relates to recent social trends, contemporary theories of justice, and Habermas’ book Between facts and norms. Further, Honneth discusses his intellectual development in comparison with his book The struggle for recognition in order to elaborate on conceptual distinctions in ‘recognition’.

‘Bringing the world into the world’: the material semiotics of contemporary culture

Abstract: This article puts forward the claim that culture is becoming topological. Rather than using topological concepts to analyze and interpret contemporary culture, it is suggested that the distinctively topological ‘abstractions’ of ordering and continuity of transformation now organize the movement of forms of social life such that constant change is normalized. This claim is supported by a discussion of the material semiotics of contemporary culture, which makes use of the Peircian framework of signs as icons, indices, and symbols to explore the changing qualities of live(li)ness as they are produced in processes of practical abstraction. The effect of these processes is to expand modes of relating, and in particular to intensify the importance of comparison as a social relation. Topological culture is thus presented as the introduction of new continuities into a discontinuous world and the making and marking of discontinuities through repeated contrasts; both are shown to emerge in the contemporary prolife...

Reflections on sociology and aesthetic value

Abstract: In this article, I survey a number of existing contributions to the debate concerned with sociology and aesthetic value and in doing so make a contribution to the difficult task of formulating an alternative approach. I argue that sociologists have excelled in ‘bringing art down to earth’, but in doing so they can also have a role to play in evaluating cultural objects. Awareness of the socio-historical context in which our judgements are formulated exposes the myth of aesthetic universalism, and institutional approaches highlight the ways in which certain cultural objects are imbued with value. However, by paying attention solely to contextual factors, there is a danger that the cultural object disappears. Therefore, in surveying the field, I call for a more balanced approach that considers value in terms of context, one which combines reflexive awareness of the position from which judgement is formulated with a renewed attention to the cultural object and, importantly, the dynamics of the evaluative mom...

Operations of the global: explorations of connectivity

Abstract: How to think the global – after two decades of globalization studies, this question seems to be far from answered. Instead, it has become a fresh object of inquiry. As many scholars of globalizatio...

Recognition, social invisibility, and disrespect

Abstract: In one of the great Swedish novels of the twentieth century, Doctor Glas (1905) by Hjalmar Soderberg, the following succinct reflection is noted down by the main character: We want to be loved; fai...

Globalization as it happens: on globalizing assemblages in tax planning

Abstract: Globalization is usually understood as a structural, epochal condition altering the environment in which people, organizations, and societies operate. But such accounts offer little insight into the infrastructures, practices, and connections that facilitate the production of the global. This article uses findings from an ethnographic study of tax planning to show how mundane practices and connectivities forge and organize global operations, and to argue for the value of analyzing processes of globalization in terms of assemblages and infrastructures. Empirically, the article captures how the making of ‘tax structures’ involves connecting, for instance, buildings in France, a human in Switzerland, a company in Denmark, various tax laws, a trust fund in New Zealand, and large amounts of money on the move. If studied along the lines of an analytics of ‘globalizing assemblages’, such financial objects can help us capture how the global is produced and navigated in finance and beyond. By engaging with these q...

Incentives, contract policy, and disrespect: a critical normative analysis of changes in welfare policy leading to the disrespect of ethnic minorities in Denmark

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to contribute to the theoretical discussion concerning the good and the just by means of an empirical case. Drawing on Honneth's theory of recognition, a critical analysis of changes in Danish social and labor market policy is carried out. It is shown that discriminatory social benefits to ethnic minorities lead to feelings of disrespect among the recipients. The confrontation of theory and empirical evidence substantiates Honneth's theory on the importance of equal legal rights. At the same time, it questions Nancy Fraser's attempt to make a logical distinction between redistribution and recognition. Still, however, Fraser may be right that Honneth has too little to say about justice. Therefore, the article concludes that his theory must be supplied with a stronger notion of just procedures and, most importantly, with a concept of judgment, since rules and ethics are always interpreted by a judgment in situations.

Fighting the network: a critique of the network as a security technology

Abstract: It is difficult to think about global connectivity without confronting the importance of the network as a metaphor and a model of contemporary social life and transnational danger. From the dispersed global terrorism threat, to the spread of (computer) viruses, from the identification of organized crime ‘hubs’ to the depiction of al Qaeda terrorism, the network has become a key metaphor of contemporary danger. This paper analyzes and critiques the network as a mode of security knowledge and as a risk technology. It regards invocations of network not simply as a metaphorical representation of danger, but as devices that render the world actionable and amenable to intervention. More than a metaphor for capturing threat discursively, the network is a device for calculating and classifying security risks and acting upon them. ‘Fighting the network’, in this paper, refers to the development of a critical perspective on the ubiquity of the metaphorical network in security practice and its operation as a securit...

The misrecognition mindset : A trap in the transformative responsibility of critical weight studies

Abstract: The ideal of being recognized feeds on developed recognition theories. In times of emerging self-reference, we have come to share what I call a ‘misrecognition mind-set’ making us translate every s ...

Tarde's phantom takes a deadly line of flight – from Obama Girl to the assassination of Bin Laden

Abstract: This paper argues that a return to a theory of crowd contagion can potentially provide a valuable resource by which to think through the operations of the global. In short, the question of how certain events ‘go global’ can be usefully approached by acknowledging how they ‘go viral’. Yet, although popular discourses, particularly those dependent on the purported virality of internet memes, have been quick to grasp something of the logic of globalization, what spreads, and how it spreads, is all too often analogically reduced to the workings of an evolutionary code which problematically fixes contagious phenomena to stringent biological laws. Global virality is alternatively grasped here by way of a convergence between Gabriel Tarde's society of imitation and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concepts of assemblages and communicable ritornellos. This approach is intended to draw attention to the persistence of often small and mostly unpredictable perturbations and shock events that can, on rare occasions...

The autonomy of gesture: of lifestream logistics and playful profanations

Abstract: Gesture – the work that it does – reaches deep into human sociality, to its affective and ancient core. (Brian Rotman) With the current integration of gesture-based user interfaces into the material infrastructure of our communicative practices, gesture returns as a conceptual concern in media-theoretical, political, and philosophical analysis. Analyses of biolinguistic capitalism that have focused on the ‘becoming-linguistic’ of labor and the centrality of linguistic conventions in the comprehension of contemporary capitalism should, therefore, be understood to include processes of gestural semiosis. Agamben's account of a gestural ethos and his call to return apparatuses of capture to ‘free use’ through practices of profanation provide a perspective from within which to identify the ethico-political stakes of the ‘becoming-gestural’ of new modes of relation, from touch-based mobile devices to responsive ‘sentient’ urban architectures.

Coping with the unknown – time and technology in formal organizations searching for safety

Abstract: The article deals with the paradoxical fact that, while living in a safer society, we feel that we live in a more vulnerable society than before. To explain this paradox a socio-systemic analysis of formal organizations searching for safety is undertaken. The use of technology as structural coupling between social systems and environment is first of all focalized in order to study the hypothesis according to which technology not only saves time, but also makes time scarcer than before. As a result technical plants not only solve but also produce prevention problems. That is, any technical control of dangers is a risk. Two related problems are taken into consideration: the scarcity of time and the scarcity of attention. This leads to the conclusion that formal organizations searching for safety are anticipatory systems which usually cope with the temporal paradox of normalizing rare events. Two forms of unfoldment of such a paradox are finally discussed, namely strategic planning and insurance.

Credit slips (but should not fall)

Abstract: Recent calls for ‘cashlessness’ – for abolishing paper money as a medium of exchange – draw attention to the operations of payment, the act of value transfer through electronic and other infrastructures. Exploring payment infrastructures and their multiplication through new networks, especially but not limited to mobile telecommunications, this paper argues that the attempt to eliminate cash from the palette of payment ‘choices’ throws into relief the role of the state as arbiter of value, and the credibility of institutions, persons, and networks subtending value.

The re- in recognition: Hegelian returns

Abstract: By using ‘the return’ as a dialectical figure, the author discusses four contemporary appropriations of Hegelian dialectics – as restoration, recollection, repetition, and interpellation – in relation to the concept of recognition in contemporary political philosophy. They are seen in the light of social and political forces influencing European and North American intellectual debates from the events of 1989 to the aftermath of 9/11. By a critique of Charles Taylor's work, it is argued that Hegelian return conceived as restoration sets recognition as an act of self-appropriation through social mediation. Recognition becomes a means for self-unification through identity affirmation, a coming back to oneself as undistorted. The author subsequently sketches out two alternative appropriations of Hegelian dialectics in relation to questions of recognition: as recollection and repetition. The dialectical return understood as recollection turns recognition into an acknowledgement of intersubjective vulnerability...

The negation of power: from structuration theory to the politics of the Third Way

Abstract: In the last two decades Europe witnessed a despairing zeitgeist. Neo-liberalism lived its golden age and dictated its iron laws. Right-wing populism had come to stay. What had gone wrong with left-wing politics? At one with Chantal Mouffe, we claim that the programmatic turn of social democracy towards the Third Way has been fateful. We theoretically query the Third Way by analyzing the work of its perhaps foremost intellectual, Anthony Giddens. We trace the evolution of Giddens' thought from his theory of structuration over his vision of modernity to the formulation of the politics of the Third Way and disclose a tight connection between social theory and political project. While in Giddens' view human agency functions as the major source of social change, he disregards collective forms of contestation as unrealistic. This holds even more under modern conditions, where immanent possibilities of emancipation have been rendered possible and where the task of politics consists in ameliorating the individual...

Taylor and the problem of recognizing cultural groups

Abstract: Recognition of cultural groups is an issue that puzzles those involved in the discussions around multiculturalism. Charles Taylor (1994) has done important groundwork in his ‘The politics of recognition’ where different possibilities of multicultural policy-making are discussed. This article concentrates on one social ontological problem that can be found in Taylor’s widely recognized theory. This article proceeds as follows. At first, Taylor's view on recognition is briefly introduced. This view potentially faces the reification problem, which states that recognizing a group that is not really an agent might result in misrecognition and disrespect of individual members of the group. The forms of misrecognition and disrespect range from homogenizing sets of individuals to forced identities anddissonance between individual and collective identities. After the problems of cultural recognition have been made clear, insights from the field of social ontology are brought into the picture. The agency of cultura...

The achievement principle, education, and recognition

Abstract: This paper examines how the ‘old’ achievement principle – elaborated on by the critical pedagogy theorists in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of schools – might be understood today. The main result of critical pedagogy is the critique of traditional school assessment; that critique argues that schools reproduce inequality by using an elaborated language code in their assessments of students, thereby supporting a hope of success in upper-class children and a fear of failure in lower-class children. However, the solutions to this problem offered by the critical pedagogy theorists bring us to the paradox of empty content with regard to pedagogical action. The paradox of empty content, an inability to define any clear content for pedagogical action, arises in particular from the central ideas of critical pedagogy by which content for pedagogical action is deduced from problem-solving processes in the classroom. The author concludes that the paradox of empty content may be overcome by following Axel Honneth...

‘Science of science’, reason, and truth: Bourdieu's failed case against cognitive relativism

Abstract: In a series of lectures delivered shortly before his retirement, Pierre Bourdieu claimed to have solved, with the help of his version of the sociology of science, the philosophical problem regarding the social conditioning of knowledge and truth. At the same time, he also proposed to have effectively countered any relativistic views of science. In this article, I contend that Bourdieu's project to develop an argument against cognitive relativism nevertheless fell short of its goal, owing to his confusion between consensus and absolute truth. It is absolute truth that is the opposite of relativism, not consensus. In addition, Bourdieu's project fails in its attempt to refute relativism on empirical grounds. An empirical argument has only limited value as an argument against cognitive relativism. Moreover, Bourdieu's overly sharp distinction between natural-scientific and social scientific research, if consistently followed, carries the risk of throwing sociology of science back into a Mannheimian sociology...