Showing papers in "Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory in 2016"

Bandh politics: crowds, spectacular violence, and sovereignty in India

Abstract: In 2002, in Gujarat, India, the Hindu nationalist organization, VHP (World Hindu Council), called for a state-wide bandh – a shutdown of shops, offices, businesses, and transportation – to protest the death of Hindu activists by a Muslim mob. During the state-endorsed bandh, Hindu activists and the wider public, supported by the police and politicians, attacked Muslims with impunity. While the ruling Hindu nationalist regime claimed that the violence was spontaneous rioting, activists and survivors emphasized the organized nature of the massacre. If crowds are understood as a performative, and not simply a political tool, then the bandh is a form of political drama when crowds perform claims to sovereignty. Bandh politics entangle multiple audiences, anticipate public violence, invite participation from state and non-state actors, and symbolize popular sovereignty. Bandh politics transformed state-backed public violence against Muslims in 2002 into a mass protest that enabled new forms of solidari...

The symbolic economy of authenticity as a form of symbolic violence: the case of middle-class ethnic minorities

Abstract: While authenticity has become a main axiological principle in late-modernity, a desired good and token of worth, studies from different countries indicate inequality in access to authenticity: middle-class ethnic minorities often face difficulties being recognized as authentic and experiencing themselves as such. This phenomenon is discussed below in terms of symbolic violence. While doing this the article makes several theoretical contributions: (1) Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence is historicized. Different forms of symbolic violence (pre-modern, modern, and late-modern) are distinguished, each relying on a unique cosmology, logic, and symbolic economy. (2) Different strategies employed by social theorists to theorize authenticity are discussed and compared to reveal a gap between common understandings of authenticity as the dispositional depth of action and the misrecognized principle that often informs the ascription of authenticity, i.e. faithfulness to established discursive categories. Discur...

Regicide and resistance: Foucault's reconceptualization of power

Abstract: This article examines the role of resistance in Michel Foucault's political thought. The article recovers this otherwise obscured aspect of Foucault's thought through a systematic analysis of his theoretical regicide and consequent reconceptualization of power, agency, and resistance. It is argued that Foucault developed a highly original account of resistance, which was, and should continue to be considered, central to his thought and its critical potential. It is shown how Foucault's concept of resistance overcomes the limitation of voluntarism and determinism, which continue to mar contemporary political theory, providing a passage from the critique of contemporary configurations of power to the irrepressible possibility that they may be contested and changed.

Spatial culture, processional culture and the materialities of social memory in nineteenth-century Sheffield

Abstract: This article presents research about a wide range of processions and crowd activities in the English industrial city of Sheffield c.1790–1910. It identifies a theoretical weakness in the historical scholarship where an emphasis on the role of procession and protest in symbolically ordering the built environment too often serves to represent it as intrinsically un-ordered and lacking in definition. The effect, it is argued, has been to present symbolic regimes, particularly those of local elites, as something imposed on rather than in any sense arising from quotidian urban performance, and artificially to isolate research into processional and other mass participation activities from the shared material context of a city’s spatial culture. The notion of spatial culture is developed with reference to the work of Bill Hillier, Manuel De Landa, and Henri Lefebvre, among others, to propose an interpretative ‘mapping’ of the relationship between the evolving structure of Sheffield’s built form and the d...

The commodification of the personal: labour market demands in the era of neoliberal postindustrialization

Abstract: This article takes as its point of departure the observation that contemporary labour markets of highly developed capitalism have witnessed a new and profound focus on personal traits and characteristics such as social skills. We believe this focus is indicative of a new standard of ascribing value in contemporary capitalism and ask which are the societal and paradigmatic changes that may have led to this change. After an outline of demands to the labour force during earlier phases of capitalism the article seeks to establish an explanatory framework in current societal transformations towards neoliberalization and logics of postindustrialization. The effect of these shifts is on the one hand that the well-being of human beings is made to depend entirely on their individual competiveness, and on the other hand that postmaterial, cognitive, connexionist, and emotional assets that were hitherto considered personal and irrelevant to the sphere of production are now considered central to the labour market val...

Treating social suffering? Work-related suffering and its psychotherapeutic re/interpretation

Abstract: This paper examines how psychotherapists deal with social suffering in its work-related forms. Based on the results of a qualitative empirical study in psychosomatic hospitals in Germany, I show how psychotherapy can lead to a normalization of overburdening demands at work, and ultimately a de-thematization of social factors. I argue that psychotherapists transform social suffering into suffering related to the self by re/interpreting the links to society that figure in the patients’ subjective theories of illness. The reason for this transformation lies in the logic of the profession necessary to legitimate the claim that the patients’ suffering falls within the purview of psychotherapy. Therapists have to disregard ‘the social’ in this manner since there are no medical diagnostic tools that would explicitly refer to work. The result of this professional re/interpretation is a form of therapy that medicalizes and personalizes social suffering, thereby intensifying, rather than tempering, a self-r...

Decolonizing knowledge: neoliberalism beyond the three worlds

Abstract: This article argues that critiques of neoliberalism tend to rely on and reproduce the coloniality of knowledge. It analyzes how recent academic scholarship has mobilized the notion of neoliberalism to make sense of postsocialist transformations and identifies in it an epistemological meta-geography that reproduces the three-worlds scheme, a specific Cold War era articulation of the colonial matrix of power. The article traces various ways in which this meta-geography has structured academic debates on postsocialist neoliberalism. It emphasizes the importance of moving beyond the spatial and temporal infrastructure of the three worlds, and identifies a set of epistemological alternatives that would enable decentering this infrastructure. In conclusion, the paper argues that although postsocialism has received relatively little attention in attempts to decolonize knowledge, it has potential to serve as a critical form of thought in destabilizing Eurocentric assumptions in theorizing neoliberalism an...

Latour's empirical metaphysics

Abstract: In this article we examine the mode in which Bruno Latour engages in metaphysics in his social scientific and philosophical project. In contrast to Graham Harman's recent reading of his work, we take seriously how adamant Latour is about not creating a metaphysical system, and how he is thus essentially sharing the anti-metaphysical tenor of much of the twentieth-century philosophy. Nonetheless, he does not shun making bold claims concerning the way in which the world is. Therefore, we need to ask: what are, then, the purposes for which Latour evokes metaphysics? We recognize two main answers to the question. The first purpose is the creation of a makeshift, pragmatic, methodological ontology. His concepts such as trial, event, proposition, collective, and mode are not meant to describe ‘the furniture of the world’ in the style of classical metaphysics. Rather, they form a kind of ‘minimum-wage metaphysics’, an ‘experimental’ or ‘empirical’ metaphysics that serves the purpose of opening the world anew, in...

Crowding as appropriation: voting, violence and bodies in a nineteenth-century urban space

Abstract: This article seeks to address the relation between crowds and public space as a question of appropriation. With the new liberal constitutions in Europe, several phenomena of crowding emerge in major cities, of which Copenhagen is taken as an example. By focusing on the crowd as an agglomeration of bodies, it is assessed how the agency of the crowd works on an immediate level and in its more lasting effects on urban space. The notion of appropriation is related to the crowd’s claim, formal and informal, as resulting from a negotiation of this, mostly public, space, and articulated in empirical cases such as elections, political activism or pickpocketing. Thus, the article suggests terms for a bodily focused and historically situated crowd theory.

Making sacrifices: how ungenerous gifts constitute jobseekers as scapegoats

Abstract: Although they are the recipients of welfare we argue that the unemployed are pathologized and scapegoated by the ungenerous nature of this gift. The suffering of the unemployed is explored here as emerging not from the lack of economic, psychological, and social goods, but from how gift-relations are imbued with power-relations, particularly as generated in activation policies currently spreading through the OECD. Inspired by theoretical consideration of Mauss, Girard, and others, we aspire to offer an imaginative rethinking of unemployment, moving beyond the simple notion that it is just a lack of work, to positioning unemployment as a foundational axis of punishment which is constitutive for modern society. In this way, the unemployed exist as imaginary scapegoats for political legitimization and as surplus labour which allows capitalism to function. Illustrative empirical data are drawn from interviews and media reportage in Ireland, where the switch to activation policies was made swiftly and ...

The shadow: alter-visibility in an empire of the seen

Abstract: The article interrogates the concept of Multitude in capitalist society and challenges the simple notion of social exclusion as an operative force in contemporary social formations and their spatial dispositions. The Shadow will be offered as a spatial and psychosocial relational horizon of differentiation systemically inscribed into the social architecture, operating under a legitimating discourse of transparency politics. The concept succinctly characterizes the personal and social experiences of political opacity in twenty-first-century biopolitical capitalist society, and the exploitation of living labour by a topological apparatus of ‘alter-visibility’. The piece explores the emergence of various ‘Shadowlands’ in the social materiality generated by spatial technologies of political and social control. By assuming the juxtaposing archetype of the Trickster, and a dialectical politics opened up by the Shadow's technology of alter-visibility, the article argues for the potential realization of the Multi...

Living the neurochemical self? Experiences after the success of the SSRIs

Abstract: This is an exploration, in dialogue with Nikolas Rose’s conceptualization of the neurochemical self, of how people taking antidepressants through in-depth interviews make sense of their experiences of using selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The neurochemical self, according to Rose, is a self understood as regulated by neurochemical processes, where how we feel is mapped onto the body, more precisely the brain. The findings suggest that one of Rose’s points – that the deep inner self informed by psychoanalysis is gone – has some bearing. However, the plasticity of the biological that Rose argues accompanies a neurochemical understanding that cannot be traced; rather, the understanding of depression is gravitating towards it being a biological, constitutional malfunctioning. Adding to this, even though the users experienced that the pills worked, their understandings bore no relation to the wider neurochemical framework and were riddled with uncertainty. As a conclusion it is suggested that ...

A common sense of property

Abstract: ‘Progressive’ accounts of property developed in recent legal scholarship have attempted to shift focus from rights to exclude, often regarded as the ‘core’ of the idea and institution, towards focus on a plurality of human values served by property law. Like Thomas Grey's famous thesis about the ‘disintegration of property’ this raises the question of what might be called ‘property perspectivism’: does property looks different from different points in the social fabric? What is involved in the claim to ‘know property’? To understand the diversity of property arguments within legal scholarship and across the human sciences it is important to trace the implicit knowledge claims that accompany the explicit normative arguments, paying specific attention to the ‘exemplars’ that underpin lines of argument, and the ‘sources of property knowledge’ that are drawn upon. This paper draws on and reworks W. B. Gallie's classic discussion of ‘essentially contested concepts’ in order to show that debates about property ...

Smart swarms: some observations on contagion and cohesion in cell-phone society

Abstract: Swarming is a new kind of collective behaviour involving leaderless formations converging as data-gathering, action-oriented entities in physical and cyberspace. It differs from the classical crowd in terms of its proclivity towards data mediation and its susceptibility to informational contagion. Swarms may form to fulfil certain goals or simply as a type of mimetic collective. Either way, various levels of cohesion bring swarming members together as short-lived aggregations in media-saturated environments. The cell-phone as a feature of these environments has come to play an important role in the emergence of swarming. Not only is the cell-phone a facilitator of swarming, but it is also a medium for cohesion among swarming members. Researching cell-phone use casts new light on mobile communication as well as its relationship to swarming in media-saturated environments.

Social camouflage: functions, logic, paradoxes

Abstract: Camouflage is usually understood as a type of deceitful communication strategy in the animal and human domains. In this piece, we invite scholars to consider how the phenomenon of camouflage, while certainly grounded in antagonism and selection, might exceed its strategic meaning. Using the case of undercover agents movies, we attempt to flesh out the inner logic of camouflage and the type of social-existential situations it gives shape to. Exploring the mundane practical problem of ‘infiltration’ into a social group or social milieu, the article zooms in onto the experience of camouflage and highlights its relatedness to and distinction from imitation. Camouflage is here used not as an overarching interpretive category, rather as an instance that reveals something about the problems inherent in the constitution of inter-subjective life. The article seeks to contribute to a theoretical development in the study of social logic and social teleology, stressing the curious entanglement of deliberate s...

Out of the doll’s house. From zero-sum to positive-sum social freedom

Abstract: This article proposes that in order to be able empirically to follow Henrik Ibsen’s Nora out of the societal doll’s house, sociologists need to challenge the theoretical doll’s house of the zero-sum model of social freedom. When sociologists have not yet provided an adequate account of not only women’s emancipation but also the broader process of democratization of freedom in the West, it is at least partly because many are influenced by an inadequate zero-sum model of social freedom according to which social structure predominantly constrains individual freedom. Furthermore, the hitherto most ambitious attempt to transcend the zero-sum model, Axel Honneth’s theory of social freedom, has shortcomings due to its Hegelian premises. Hence, the main goal of this article is to develop a more comprehensive positive-sum model of social freedom extending some Weberian premises both at the micro-level of social (inter)actions and macro-level of institutions. Such a model will enable sociologists to yield a...

From social to socio-material pathologies: on Latour, subjectivity and materiality

Abstract: This article produces an encounter between the concept of ‘social pathology’ and the work of the philosopher Bruno Latour. It offers an introduction to Latour’s style of thought with regard to subjectivity. It argues that subjectivity is not an interiorized property of people, but a processual accomplishment from associating with different actors, which may be human or non-human. Subjectivity, from this point of view, exists in the interstice between affecting the world and being affected. Building on this Latourian perspective, the article goes on to argue that social pathologies should not be seen as a function of ‘society’, but rather as socio-material patterns of activity that spread across different spaces and places. Thus, the article posits that a more apt term for ‘social pathologies’ would be ‘socio-material pathologies’. It finishes by discussing the implications of these perspectives for both critique and methodology in social research.

From built to performed space: post-election protests in Tehran

Abstract: This paper redefines the protest space as a performed liminal space that is topologically constituted. The production of protest space is examined through the narrations of people and participants during the post-election protests in Iran in 2009. It is well established that social exchanges are manifested in very diverse platforms, from new media to urban public spaces; this paper particularly argues that there is a topological relationship between all manifestations of protest. In other words, the protest space is articulated as a topological space, in which the protest can unfold in its physical, social, mental, and temporal capacities. The discussions deal with the complexity of spatial manifestations of protest. On one hand, the protest is discussed within the theoretical framework of ritual, showing that the protest is a temporal/liminal space. This framework helps not only to integrate spatial and temporal dimensions of protest, but also to avoid problematic conventional understanding of cr...

The Language of the Crowd : Public Congregation in Urban India

Abstract: This essay details the fascination, apprehension, and ambivalence associated with mass crowds and public congregation in urban north India. Most studies of the crowd adopt a classed bourgeois or state planner’s perspective. As a result, the crowd is conceptually held at arm’s length, its complexities flattened as it is viewed from the outside. In studies of India, the popular and subaltern, made interchangeable with the crowd, is often viewed via prevailing concerns. This essay adopts another approach: it considers the internal, organic language used for crowds in urban north India. Drawing on an ethnography of male sociality in Old Delhi, it examines khalbali, which may refer both to undesirable crowd panics and excessive collective pleasure; dhakka mukki, for being hurtled helter-skelter in the metropolis, pushing and shoving onto the bus or Metro; and bheed, for congested crowds that nevertheless retain their allure. These terms inform a gendered and classed vocabulary of public sociality; main...

Lucid dreams, perfect nightmares: consciousness, capitalism and our sleeping selves

Abstract: Review article discussing three books: Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Mavromatis, Andreas. Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness between Wakefulness and Sleep. London: Thyrsos Press, 2010. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2014.

Introduction: thematic section on social pathologies of contemporary modernity

Abstract: Neither the life [or the health] of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. C. Wright Mills (1959) The Sociological ImaginationSocial pathology was ...

Crowds, protests and processions: revisiting urban experiences

Abstract: A chain of protests and social movements has been evident across the world, from the Middle East to London and New York since 2009. These events signify a new era of collective action that fundamen...