Showing papers in "Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory in 2013"

The online crowd: a contradiction in terms? On the potentials of Gustave Le Bon's crowd psychology in an analysis of affective blogging

Abstract: The aim of the article is to investigate whether the concept of the ‘crowd’ as developed by Gustave Le Bon can help us understand the new types of affectively charged collectivities created via spontaneous interaction on various social media platforms. To do this I analyze the case of Eva Dien Brine Markvoort's blog, 65 Red Roses, through the lens of crowd psychology. Initially I make a theoretical distinction between three different types of crowds that prioritize the role of physical co-presence in different ways: the traditional body-to-body crowd based on physical co-presence; the mediated crowd, which has a strong offline dimension but uses media technologies as tools or communication environments; and the online crowd, which I define as the affective unification and relative synchronization of a public in relation to a specific online site. Overall I argue that Eva Markvoort enables collective affective processes that can be identified in the responses on the blog, and that she functions as a crowd ...

Transcended power of the state: the role of actors in Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of the state

Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu's writings on the state consist of a series of more or less coherent investigations approaching the state from different angles. His writings on the state may seem to contain internal ambiguities. On the one hand, they argue for an actor-centered approach to the state while, on the other hand, elaborating the power of the state as an institution transcending these actors. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct Bourdieu's understanding of the state in order to examine if the opposition between these two apparently opposite approaches are in as sharp contention as they first appear. The article starts out by discussing how Bourdieu has approached the state through his broader sociological approach and concepts. Afterwards it outlines the state formation processes lying at the foundation of the state's power. Next it focuses on his special emphasis on the actor strategies that lie behind the emergence of the bureaucratic field. It moreover discusses Bourdieu's analysis of the abdicatio...

Speaking with things: Encoded researchers, social data, and other posthuman concoctions

Abstract: We apply our heuristics for ‘interviewing’ non-human research participants to the digital things of qualitative research itself: recording devices, data analysis software, and other sociomaterial concoctions recruited at different stages of contemporary research projects. We suggest that these ‘inorganic organized’ entities participate as co-researchers that inevitably extend but also disrupt research practice and knowledge construction, introducing new tensions and contradictions. Counterpointing phenomenology and Actor Network Theory, we usher some of the hidden and coded materialities of research practice into view, and glimpse unexpected realities co-enacted. Such immersive entanglements raise ethical questions about the posthumanist fluencies now demanded in social science research practice, and we outline several considerations.

Postmodern Crowds: Re-investing Crowd Thinking

Abstract: An old spectre once again seems to haunt political life, namely the crowd. The Arab Spring, los Indignados in Spain, and most recently the 2013 uprisings in Turkey, Brazil and even Sweden suggest t...

Comments on Patrick Baert and Filipe Carreira da Silva's Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond – Towards a ‘Hermeneutics-Inspired Pragmatism’?

Abstract: This essay provides an in-depth discussion of Patrick Baert and Filipe Carreira da Silva's Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond.

Democracy of the many? Occupy Wall Street and the dead end of prefiguration

Abstract: This article discusses prefigurative practices of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Although OWS cannot be reduced to this aspect, the idea of creating ‘a microcosm of what democracy really looks like’ next to Wall Street played an important role for the attractiveness of this new movement. Following Claude Lefort, OWS's criticism of representative government and the practice of general assemblies can be understood as a reaction to the ‘dissolution of the markers of certainty’ in modern democracies. Having recourse to assemblies of citizens and bodily experiences is a way to make ‘the people’, i.e. the invisible sovereign of modern democracies, visible and tangible. However, OWS does not fall back on fantasies of the people as a body with a unitary will: the ‘People-as-One’ (Lefort). Instead ‘the people’ is imagined as a crowd, a gathering of the many, as multitudes, swarms, or networks. The prefiguration of a democracy of the many entails practices of consensus decision-making that accommodate and maintain plura...

Political order and the challenge of governance: moving beyond the nationalism-cosmopolitanism debate

Abstract: The paper concerns the preconditions for post-national politics and criticizes the idea, central to contemporary discussions on globalization and the future of welfare states, that political orders require an overarching solidarity, whether national or post-national, as a basic source of social cohesion. It outlines a theoretical framework to account for the complex relationships among identity, solidarity, community, and authority, in the constitution of modern political orders. On the basis of this framework, the paper argues that neither national nor post-national identities are essential sources of political order since people have multiple identities and solidarities that are not necessarily conflicting or mutually exclusive. Social cohesion and political order rather require different identities, linked to different interests and solidarities, to be brought in accord with each other. On the basis this understanding, the paper maintains that the most crucial challenge with regard to improving the con...

Media in use: how the practice shapes the mediality of media

Abstract: My essay argues for a pragmatic interpretation of the concept of media in the context of the digital networked sphere. To develop my argument I start to discuss the media theories of McLuhan and Kittler and their rejection of any pragmatic understanding of media. A critical evaluation of these theories then allows me to expose my own philosophical approach to explain how social processes of media use determine the mediality of the media used.

The crowd in the Occupy movement

Abstract: In this article, I recast Elias Canetti's notion of crowds by placing it in the framework provided by Friedrich Nietzsche's Heraclitean dialectic of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites. The argument is introduced that, in European societies, the forms of social existence are mainly Apollonian, whereas crowds are Dionysian. Along this line of reasoning, Dionysian drives, and hence crowds, tend to be marginalized in Europe's Apollonian culture. I argue that, in the liberal democracies of the Cold War era, crowds were marginalized, although they did emerge in the rock 'n' roll mania of the 1960s. West European post-Cold War, I maintain, is characterized by the collapse of liberal democracy and the rise of global capitalism. The recent financial crisis is an event that has disrupted the hegemony of global capitalism. In the context of this disruption, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) emerges as a movement in which post-modern crowds play an important port. OWS is presented as a new social movement that is Apollonian in substance, while its crowds embody and manifest a certain Dionysian vitality.

Field notes: ethnographic writing reconsidered

Abstract: Even after the so-called ‘crisis of representation’ in ethnographic research the representation of cultural practices constitutes the focal point of ethnographic research practices. Although ethnographic representations are now conceived of as realizations of (other) cultural practices, from a methodological point of view little has been said about the devices with which ethnographic representation is performed. This paper discusses two of the aspects constituting ethnographic research: firstly, the switch between the perspectives of documentarism of the ethnographic data, and a reflexive understanding of this data, and, secondly, the implications of representation devices used in ethnographic research.

Bodies and surveillance: Simondon, information and affect

Abstract: Increases in the use of information media mark them out as significant forces on social and individual living Information is continually being shared and harvested through the growing presence of information technologies across society The technological aspects of these processes have led to questions regarding the extent to which technologies, and latterly information, are coming to define individuals, beyond the biological boundaries of bodies Key to these debates is our understanding of the relationships between bodies and technologies The increase in informational activity through engagements with technologies has led to a body of surveillance literature developing that has followed a course from the early panopticon flavor of CCTV-focused theory (watching bodies) to the networked assemblage flavor of the surveillance of information (bodies becoming digital) This paper takes up these questions in focusing on the role of information as a mediating force in designating transformative relations peop

More than just another crowd, we need a waiting line instead

Abstract: The Shanghai World Expo attracted over 73 million visitors from May to October 2010 making it the most popular international exhibition in history. Aside from its many spectacular features, the Shanghai World Expo also became famous for its waiting lines, averaging over four hours for the most popular pavilions. This paper proposes an examination of those slow, too slow, human gatherings. From classical crowd psychology to the recent political theorizing of multitudes, the bulk of reflections carried forward on crowd phenomena have mainly paid attention to the (hyper)active, noisy, protesting crowds. In this article, I will use the example of these exceptional queues holding many thousands of longing visitors on the site of the 2010 World Expo in order to assert the need for an examination of the stagnant, inactive, and at times bored crowd. Another set of actors come into play: instead of riot control forces, Molotov cocktails, gas masks, barricades, and demonstrators, we have security guards, hats, umbr...

Ideology and the crowd

Abstract: This article discusses the ideological role of crowd experiences. Utilizing both classical crowd theory and ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis, it suggests that what happens to the subject in crowds can be understood as a de-subjectification linked to the drive and to an encounter with Other jouissance. Finally, it is argued that the concept of charisma might link the always transitory crowd experience with more permanent ideological identifications if it is thought as a retrospective rationalization, which involves assuming that the leader is the source of the ecstasy experienced in crowds.

‘I don't know whether I need a further level of disaster’: shifting media of sociology in the sandbox

Abstract: If the media of research figure in the constitution of the sociological phenomenon, how is it possible to find out how they do so?1 Drawing on Garfinkel's idea of breaching experiments, we propose such an experiment to unearth the role of the media of sociology. The breaching experiment consists in an experimental setup to produce new disaster scenarios and accompanying forms of emergency provision. In the experiment, research subjects are asked to play in a sandbox with animal figures and other props to simulate disasters. The subjects are first asked to ‘build a world’, then to ‘turn the world upside down’, and finally to find an ‘emergency provision that would change the course of the disaster’. These plays are recorded with a purpose-built computer program and photographed and then transformed into fables and emergency provisions. The experiment breaks with three assumptions of media-use in sociology: First, sociologists use media exclusively for description, not creation of worlds. Second, sociologis...

Media assemblages, ethnographic vis-ability and the enactment of video in sociological research

Abstract: Video recordings offer great opportunities for qualitative social science research; their epistemological status, however, has not been left unchallenged. The paper picks up on this methodological debate, sounding out the specific potential of this research medium. Yet instead of primarily participating in methodological debates, we particularly want to inquire into the underlying empirical notions, settings, actors, and sceneries, which inform methodological debates on video. Reviewing research on ‘professional vision’ in Science and Technology Studies we try to raise awareness of the constructive nature of the practices, which manufacture and transform visual traces into evidence. We then look at our own research practice and ask about epistemic topologies which enable video to become a research medium. We will thus try to identify the resources, practices, and things – epistemic mediators – that make other things (video recordings) act like epistemic objects, and, with the help of concepts by Hennion a...

Doing it with couples: the chattiness of the social revisited

Abstract: The article rehabilitates the joint couple interview as a research instrument for creating data about modern intimate relationships. It refutes the reservations against data retrieved from the ‘artificial’ situation of the interview by contextualizing it in the debate about the ‘chattiness’ or the ‘silence’ of the social. In doing so, it reflects on some of the specific features of the couple interview. The task of the interviewed couple matches the task of the sociologist: both are busy translating and putting things into words. These tasks are never straightforward: while the couple perpetually shifts between narrating a story about intimacy and enacting and performing intimacy, the sociologist is switching between treating the interview as a resource and treating it as a topic. A new referential problem appears in this process that is not confined to putting into words what was silent before, but consists in the performative creation of something that escapes language. From the perspective of this arti...

Conviction and the crowd

Abstract: This essay fragment corresponds to the second half of Gabriel Tarde's 1898 essay ‘Le Public et la Foule’ (‘The Public and the Crowd’). While the first half of the essay was translated by Terry N. Clark in 1969 and gained a wide reputation in the fields of sociology and communication studies, the final segment has remained unavailable to English-language speakers until its publication below. Broadly speaking, ‘The Public and the Crowd’ is a theoretical intervention on the social nature of the crowd and its Other – the public. The portion that follows expands and develops many of the ideas presented in the Clark translation, while also adding a layer of nuance as described in the introductory essay that precedes this text. It consists broadly of three parts: a series of reflections on crowds with ‘positive’ (pro-social) tendencies, an extended discussion of criminality, and concluding remarks that discuss continuities between crowds and publics.

The tabulation of England: how the social world was brought in rows and columns

Abstract: This article chooses a historical approach to examine the influence of media practices in the constitution of sociological knowledge. Starting from the assumption that processes of technical mediation are more disputed and hence more visible in the beginnings of a science than in their state of maturity, it delves into the prehistory of sociological knowledge. From a genealogical viewpoint it becomes quite clear that the birth of a scientific knowledge about society in the seventeenth century is a birth from the spirit (or better: from the medium) of the table. Focusing on John Graunt's Observations on the Bills of Mortality (1662) which is not only a book about tables but itself an eminent example of tabular thinking, this text tries to explore the epistemological effects which are implied in the use of forms, lists, and tables. The problem addressed can be outlined by the question: What happens to the knowledge of the social world (and what happens to this world itself) when it is brought into a tabular...

Is the research medium the message?:on the performativity of media within social research

Abstract: It is a well-established claim that media transform the way we experience, relate to, and know the world, and it has been demonstrated in innumerable studies in the sociology and history of the sciences that, notwithstanding (realist) attempts to achieve untampered with/unspoiled access to the objective world, this is also the case in the sciences (Alpers 1998, Crary 1990, Foucault [1973] 2003, Jay 1993, Kittler 1999, Latour 1999, Luhmann 1986, McLuhan [1964] 2011). It can therefore be plausibly argued that changes of existing, or inventions of new, media bring about transformations in (and of) the way we know the world. While science and technology studies (STS) have shown how instruments and media are vital for the production of facts in other disciplines (Lynch and Woolgar 1990, Pauwels 2006), the same kind of analysis, writes Michael Guggenheim, ‘has rarely been performed upon sociology [... ]. Hence the fact production of our own discipline remains largely unexamined and falls short of what can be learned from these studies’ (Guggenheim 2013, n.p.). This special issue wants to help to close this scholarly gap and contribute to the reflexive endeavour by asking how media figure in the process of research in social sciences and coconstitute its results. The methodology of the social sciences is interested in adequate procedures of research allowing for the formulation of validity criteria which should inform and regulate the sociological construction of social phenomena in research practices. This endeavour of adequate representation entails a certain attitude of epistemological realism, relying on adequate mostly textual or numerical representations of ‘reality’, to serve as a basis for reliable analysis. The blind spot of methodology, however, is more often than not the question of how sociology constitutes its representations of the world and how the media of research (data, materials, communication, networks) figure in the constitution of the sociological phenomenon under examination. It is this performative and constitutive role of media in research that will be the topic of the special issue. What, then, is a medium? Or are there several kinds of media? In attempting a definition of ‘media’, Stefan Münker shows, one is confronted with a wide range of different notions. Colloquially ‘the media’ refers to mass media such as newspapers, television, the internet, and the like. In sociology there is a wide range of different uses of the notion of media. Media could be nearly everything – from electric light to love (Luhmann 1986). Thus, media seem to be characterized by their indeterminacy (Koschorke 2012). Media appear as intermediary agents nearly everywhere where messages are transmitted. It could be an object, a person, a quality, or a capacity. Media theory within literature studies has for a long time emphasized that media add something to their messages and that there is no neutral transmission of independent content. Thus, Marshall McLuhan formulated his emphatic thesis that the medium is the

Pragmatism defended: A reply to Simon Susen

Abstract: We would like to thank Simon Susen for his thorough critical assessment of our book. We have limited space to reply, so we will restrict ourselves to a short rebuttal of his main criticisms of the concluding chapter of our book (Chapter 9: ‘Conclusion: Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century’) and leave aside most of his earlier points, many of which focus on what he considers to be the considerable strengths of our book. We do have to stress from the outset, however, that the concluding chapter of our book presents a summary of our position developed properly elsewhere, which explains Susen’s repeated complaints about the cursory nature of some of the arguments presented in Social Theory of the Twentieth Century and Beyond. As a reply to these complaints, we refer to the other texts in which we elaborate on the various theses (e.g. Baert 2005; 2007). Here, a summary of our position vis-à-vis his criticisms will suffice (For his own position, see Susen 2007). Before addressing his criticisms of our last chapter, we would like to reply to his broader allegation that our book presents a selective overview of social theory. Of course it is selective, like any history is. We made a decision to discuss the broad theoretical developments, rather than their specific applications in various politically charged areas. This meant, for example, that we did not treat gender theory as a separate entity, but we did address some gender issues along the way, whenever relevant. Susen makes, however, a further claim which we find most peculiar: he complains that various minorities, amongst which, for instance, disabled people, are under-represented amongst our selection of theorists. Our answer is straightforward: we selected people on the basis of the quality of their writings and their significance in the history of the discipline, not on the basis of any other features. Whilst it could legitimately be argued that we should have created more space for discussing, for instance, theorists of disability (there is some discussion of this issue in the book, but there could have been more), it is plainly ridiculous to suggest that we should have included a theorist with a disability. This is not to say that our selection cannot be contested, and indeed what counts as the canon is a complex and deeply divisive issue. Yet, quotas make a poor basis to form decisions of this kind.

‘What can a crowd do?’: revisiting Tarde after the demise of the public

Abstract: Until now, Gabriel Tarde's essay ‘The Public and the Crowd’ was partially inaccessible to Anglophone scholars, as Terry Clark's 1969 translation – the only version in English – omitted nearly half the essay. As a result, the essay is typically understood as a diatribe against the primitive, uncivilized crowd, cast as the diametrical opponent of an eminently reasonable and thoroughly modern public. The pages that follow correct this lapse by providing the remaining portions of Tarde's essay in English. As will become clear, this translation reveals that Tarde was no champion of modernity, nor did he consistently celebrate the ascendant public's conquest of the savage crowd. In the process, the translation casts doubt upon rigidly ideological readings of Tarde, while lending support to a more politically ambivalent interpretation of his ideas. In its most open-ended moments, the newly translated segments recall Tarde's early affirmative statements about crowds and are suggestive of clear continuities throug...

Aura, cult value, and the postmodern crowd: a Durkheimian reading of Walter Benjamin's artwork essay

Abstract: This paper presents a reading of Walter Benjamin's much-read essay ‘The artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction'. Drawing on a Durkheimian conception of the relationship between the cult and its cult objects, I seek to differentiate (better than Benjamin himself) the notions of ‘aura' and of ‘cult value'. Thereby, I hope to contour a theoretical model for dealing with mediated sociality suitable for a postmodern reality. In this reality, de-auraticized objects – mass-produced objects and visual reproductions – proliferate concomitantly with forms of ‘cultic sociality'. First, I undertake a reading of Benjamin's essay. Second, I focus on the relation between aura and cult value. Third, I try to show the relevance of my Durkheimian approach through a critique of the Benjaminian literature and the standard readings of his essay.

Wittgenstein's visit to Ithaca in 1949: on the importance of details

Abstract: In this paper, which is based on secondary material as well as new and primary material, we present and analyze the visit that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein undertook to Ithaca, NY in the summer of 1949. During the visit Wittgenstein met with Norman Malcolm, his host, and also with a number of other philosophers. He also participated in the Philosophy Club at Cornell University. Most importantly, we trace and reproduce several of the conversations that Wittgenstein had during meetings and walks. These conversations covered a huge range of topics, from the Mormons and hamburgers to critical philosophical problems. We try to theorize this sprawling empirical material by problematizing the concept of details. We also draw on W.G. Sebald's work in this effort.