Showing papers in "European Journal of Social Theory in 2012"

Denouncing European integration Euroscepticism as polity contestation

Abstract: The spreading phenomenon of Euroscepticism is manifested in critical practices in discourse that oppose European integration. This paper explores Euroscepticism as an element of discourse, which ca...

Rethinking transnational studies Transnational ties and the transnationalism of everyday life

Abstract: Once an alternative approach to the mainstream, transnationalism has gained increasing currency and salience in migration studies. What is left of its theoretical import, however, after establishin...

Cultural System or norm circles? An exchange

Abstract: This article takes the form of a debate between the two authors on the social ontology of propositional culture. Archer applies the morphogenetic approach, analysing culture as a cycle of interaction between the Cultural System and Socio-Cultural Interaction. In this model, the Cultural System is comprised of the objective content of intelligibilia, as theorized by Karl Popper with his concept of objective World 3 knowledge. Elder-Vass agrees that culture works through an interplay between subjective belief and an external objective moment, but argues that the external moment cannot take the form of ‘objective knowledge’ as this is understood by Popper. Instead, the external moment of culture takes the form of normative pressures exerted by groups of people: norm circles. Ultimately both authors share a commitment to a similar critical realist ontological framework, while offering alternative accounts of the nature of culture within that framework.

From mechanical to organic solidarity, and back: With Honneth beyond Durkheim

Abstract: This article focuses on the theory of solidarity presented by Emile Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society ([1893] 1969). Despite its popularity, the distinction between mechanical and organ...

Symmetrical twins: On the relationship between Actor-Network theory and the sociology of critical capacities

Abstract: This article explores the elective affinities between Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the sociology of critical capacities. It argues that these two research programmes can be understood as symmetrical twins. We show the extent to which the exchange between Bruno Latour and Luc Boltanski has influenced their respective theoretical developments. Three strong encounters between the twin research programmes may be distinguished. The first encounter concerns explanations for social change. The second encounter focuses on the status of objects and their relationship to locations. The third encounter is about the concept of critique. Drawing on their long-term mutual readings, we gain insight into how pleas for symmetrical analysis raised in response to Bourdieu’s theory of fields have evolved within both ANT and the sociology of critical capacity. We conclude by relating the development of the respective research programmes to the issue of disciplinary boundaries.

Many Europes: Rethinking multiplicity:

Abstract: This article advances a non-reductionist theorization of Europe as ‘multiplicity’. As an object and category of political reality, Europe is made (and re-made) within specific spatio-temporal configurations. For this reason, the first section argues that Europe should be approached as an instance of ‘historical ontology’. This counters a reductionist tendency to ‘fix’ Europe with definitive political and cultural characteristics or historical trajectories. The second and third sections of the article interrogate a few of the ontological ‘lines of flight’ taken by contemporary Europe. The article discusses Europe’s multiplicity through its fields, imaginaries and ways of being in the world. Such a preliminary sketch of European multiplicity is not meant to be exhaustive. Rather, it suggests a new ethos in the study of European politics that privileges historicism, practice, and Europe’s recursive relationship to the world/globe.

How to become an iconic social thinker: The intellectual pursuits of Malinowski and Foucault

Abstract: The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic...

Poststructuralism against poststructuralism: Actor-network theory, organizations and economic markets

Abstract: In recent years, actor-network theory (ANT) has become an increasingly influential theoretical framework through which to analyse economic markets and organizations. Indeed, with its emphasis on th...

Critical social philosophy, Honneth and the role of primary intersubjectivity:

Abstract: Gesellschaftskritik, or social philosophy that aims to provide firm criticism of pathological social practices, requires normatively grounded evaluative principles. In this article, we assess different possibilities for such principles with focus on a model that takes specific patterns of intersubjective interaction as its point of reference. We argue that in order to understand the full significance of this ‘intersubjective turn’ for social philosophy, and to strengthen the normative foundation of social philosophy, we need to distinguish several levels of intersubjectivity and, in particular, focus on the somewhat neglected level of primary intersubjectivity. The article will discuss the account of primary intersubjectivity in Honneth’s work. We show that Honneth’s account runs into difficulties, and drawing on recent findings in developmental psychology, we suggest a rethinking of elementary recognition in terms of ‘affective proximity’. This both renders the account less susceptible to criticism and p...

Critical Pragmatism Dewey’s social philosophy revisited

Abstract: Scholars like Alison Kadlec, Melvin Rogers and RW Hildreth have recently confronted the claim that Dewey’s pragmatism lacks resources to approach issues of power, but they have not given a unifie

Power and truth

Abstract: In the literature, the power debate is divided between modern and postmodern positions. The former hold that power and truth are opposites, while the latter view them as mutually constitutive. Thes...

Borders and status-functions: An institutional approach to the study of borders

Abstract: This article develops an institutional understanding of borders. Drawing on constitutive constructivism and theories of practical communication we argue that bordering as a process is a form of sorting through the imposition of status-functions on people and things, which alters the perception of that thing by setting it within a web of normative claims, teleologies and assumptions. Studying any border, therefore, extends to include the rule structure that constitutes it as well as the sources of that structure’s legitimacy. Furthermore, rule structures are both restrictive and facilitative and importantly they overlap while retaining different sources of legitimacy: actors bring different constitutive perspectives on the border depending on the particular rule structure they are drawing on in order to make legitimate claims about what that border produces. This recognition sensitizes analysis to the interplay between different sense-making regimes and their authoritative underpinnings. Methodologically i...

Agamben, arendt and human rights : bearing witness to the human

Abstract: The key theme in this essay is the rethinking the human as inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. The human here is not a model or concept to be realised, just as community to which the human is linked is not an ideal, but a ‘community to come’. This is revealed only by paying close attention to modes of bearing witness to the human, as instanced, for example by Agamben’s text, Remnants of Auschwitz. Current notions of political community and the human thus need to be reassessed. Only by doing this will it be possible to address the crucial issues that currently confront human rights – issues such as the tension between the principle of universal human rights and that of state sovereignty, the growing problem of statelessness, and the reduction of human rights to biopolitical humanitarianism.

Optimism and agency in the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman

Abstract: Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology has often been seen as a bleak worldview; he has been called the ‘sociologist of misery’. This article argues that assigning pessimism and misery to Bauman’s work relies on a reading which does not fully consider his sociology of morality. When this is accounted for, Bauman can be seen to have a very optimistic worldview. The significance of such an observation rests on where Bauman’s optimism lies—namely in the hands of inevitably moral individuals who can acquiesce to, reject or modify the demands of liquid modernity. This article argues, with reference to G.H. Mead’s concept of the ‘genius’, that this is where the potential for agency lies in Bauman’s conception of liquid modernity. This is given a political dimension by both Mead and Bauman’s advocacy of democratic forms to help realise this agency. Democracy operates as a ‘societal’ form of morality which builds upon Bauman’s ‘pre-societal’ discussion.

In search of community: Political consumerism, governmentality and immunization

Abstract: Political consumerism is consumer choice beyond self-interest. Allegedly blurring the public–private threshold and overcoming the limits of traditional politics, it epitomizes in many respects late modern governance. Reflecting on the meaning and scope of consumer political agency, scholarship has engaged with the governmentality perspective. Important studies have ensued, together with irresolvable disputes and a neglect of the relationship that consumers establish with their objects of concern. To address this question, and drawing on the philosophical contributions of Roberto Esposito, the article elaborates on the notion of immunization. Being immune means having nothing in common with others, no obligations towards them. This analytical register may significantly broaden our understanding of current changes in political agency. A review of three main issues (responsibility-taking, downshifting, and the public) shows that the paradox of political consumerism – like other forms of governance that repla...

Psychoanalytic theory and border security

Abstract: Freezing is a common sign of panic, a response to accidents or events that overflow our capacity to react. Just as all civil airspace was cleared after the 9/11 attacks, the US-Canada border was also frozen, causing economic slowdowns. Border policies are caught between these two panics: security failures and economic crisis. To escape this paradox, American and Canadian authorities have implemented a series of security measures to make the border ‘smarter’, notably the implementation of biometric identity documents and surveillance by UAV Predator drones. Psychoanalytic theory can help us explain why the Canadian and American governments have invested so much money for so little evident or measurable increase in either security or economic flows. The article uses the notion of phantastic objects to explain these (over-)reactions to risk management at the US-Canada border.

Community, transnationalism, and the Left-Right metaphor

Abstract: The imagery of Left and Right has been a common way to conceive democratic politics in modern Europe, and commentators have suggested it be extended to the European Union. This article examines the normative implications and plausibility of European politics being cast in these terms. It focuses on the challenges of rendering political division recognizable and acceptable at a transnational level, of evoking its continuities of structure, and of symbolizing the ties of political community. The article probes the Left–Right dichotomy’s potential in these regards, together with the conjunctural factors likely to raise or diminish its appeal.

Sustainable technological citizenship

Abstract: As technology has the ability to displace power and politics, it needs to be at the centre of political concern. This article develops the idea that technological citizenship is an important concept in cultivating political sensitivity to technology. Rather than straightforwardly correcting for the displacement of power, technological citizenship must cultivate this displacement and engage with it through contestation. Drawing on insights from the critical theory of technology, this article reconceptualizes the political effects of technology as internal to both politics and technology design, rather than externalities. By recontextualizing, the critical theory aims to reshape the input space of technology design, and include a broader range of values. This conflation of the political and the technical shows remarkable parallels with the generic concept of sustainability. It is thus concluded that technological citizenship is essentially sustainable citizenship.

De-gendering social justice in the 21st century: An immanent critique of neoliberal capitalism

Abstract: This article presents a blueprint of a feminist agenda for the twenty-first century that is oriented not by the telos of gender parity, but instead evolves as an ‘immanent critique’ of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism – within a framework of analysis derived from the tenets of Critical Theory of Frankfurt School origin. This activates a form of critique whose double focus on (1) shared conceptions of justice; and (2) structural sources of injustice, allows criteria of social justice to emerge from the identification of a broad pattern of societal injustice surpassing the discrimination of particular groups. In this light, women’s victimization is but a symptom of structural dynamics negatively affecting also the alleged winners in the classical feminist agenda of critique. The analysis ultimately produces a model of social justice in a formula of socially embedded autonomy that unites work, care, and leisure.

A common world? Arendt, Castoriadis and political creation

Abstract: Among the many parallels between Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis is their shared interest in the kind of politics that is characteristic of the council movements, revolutionary moments and ...

Peace through democracy

Abstract: This article is an attempt to discuss possible causal relationships between ‘war’ and ‘democracy’. One can ask: What is the impact of wars on democracies – and what is the effect of a state’s democ...

New individualist configurations and the social imaginary Castoriadis and Kristeva

Abstract: The broad purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical conditions for understanding the new individualist configurations of imagination and identity in contemporary culture and critical discourse. The article begins with a sketch of recent debates in social theory on identity, individualization and new individualism, focusing on the work of Giddens, Beck, and Bauman, as well as Lemert and Elliott. The second part of the article turns to consider, in some detail, the path breaking contributions of Cornelius Castoriadis on the demise of the social imaginary in conditions of advanced capitalism or what he termed the spread of ‘generalized conformism’. Whilst making the argument that the notion of ‘generalized conformism’ is of key importance in grasping the subjective and cultural dynamics promoted by the global electronic economy, the article also underscores the limitations of Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic and political position. The third section of the article offers a pathway beyond such con...

Autonomy and modern liberal democracy: From Castoriadis to Gauchet

Abstract: Marcel Gauchet’s recently published theory of democracy sheds light on the way his understanding of modernity emerged from Castoriadis’s notion of autonomy but also deepened it by contextualizing it within a discussion of modern historicity. Modern autonomy means re-shaping the world through a new, transformative, form of power that draws on humanity’s capacity for imaginary creation. Gauchet’s theory of modernity, however, rejects the possibility of radical historical creation. Faithful to the teachings of structuralism, it explores the structural conditions behind the genesis of modern power, which favoured the emergence of a new societal form that produces its own future. Encompassing capitalism, Gauchet’s modern power proposes an essentially paradoxical definition of modern democracy that stresses its essentially liberal dimension neglected by Castoriadis. In modern democracy, humans make their own history by liberating individual subjectivities but this deprives them of the means to direct history: l...

Castoriadis at the limits of autonomy? Ecological worldhood and the hermeneutic of modernity

Abstract: This article critically engages with Castoriadis’s elucidation of autonomy. It does so by taking into account the implications of Castoriadis’s enduring interest in the ecological devastation of th...

Plurality and Indeterminacy: Revising Castoriadis’s overly homogeneous conception of society

Abstract: Despite its ground-breaking character, Castoriadis’s theory of society remains, in some respects, caught up in conceptual difficulties common to social theory generally, particularly the problem of conceptualizing social unity without resort to an understanding of society that downplays heterogeneity and over-emphasizes the homogeneous. Unlike many other theoretical approaches and traditions, Castoriadis’s work also offers a possible path out of this dilemma in the form of philosophical innovations which could enable us to conceptualize social unity without flattening the heterogeneous characteristics of the social. Castoriadis sometimes fails to recognize the full implications of his own rejection of ontological determinism, and so ends up proposing a far too deterministic and homogeneous model of social types. This essay aims to show how this might be remedied by drawing on Castoriadis’s own fundamental insights.

The agonistic turn of critical reason: Critique and freedom in Foucault and Castoriadis

Abstract: Straddling the divide between universalism and relativism, agonistic reason as construed by Foucault and Castoriadis dismisses universal foundations without becoming context-bound or inescapably subjectivist. It is propelled by a strong commitment to freedom and it draws flexibly on available resources and its creative potentials in order to vindicate its conditional claims. This provides a hyper-critical and liberating mode of critical reason which delves into the underlying norms of agency in order to open them up to question and to enhance free self-direction. The argument that is put forward, then, is threefold. Firstly, Castoriadis’ accent on ontological reflection, the imaginative disclosure of new figures and the global intent of critique contrasts with Foucault’s account of agonistic reason and yields a more robust version of critical rationality. Secondly, this form of reflective agonism can effectively address fundamental challenges and reason across contexts, tackling moral and other issues tha...

Weber’s interpretive project and the practical failure of meaningful action

Abstract: The practical failure to understand in conflicts, where participants routinely challenge each other’s attribution of meaning, undermines the key assumption of the Weberian interpretive project: that the subject acts meaningfully. This article revisits Weber’s concept of meaning as an object of understanding for a social scientist. Ascertaining the empirical fact of subjective attribution, as Weber advised, may not be sufficient when it comes to understanding action whose meaning is disputed. The article uses the example of E.P. Thompson’s interpretation of eighteenth-century English food riots to show that the disputed empirical meaning is a product of rational understanding, which Weber would classify as dogmatic meaning. The social scientist fails to understand what the critic claims to: a failure to act meaningfully in cultural terms. Furthermore, because the subject acts meaningfully without fail, we close off the option of explaining conflict as a rational disagreement.

Book Review: Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age:

Abstract: The single most monumental study to appear in recent decades on the subject of secularism and the secular is no doubt Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). For a long time, post-war Western sociology of religion was concerned both with the idea that religion was in decline and with the idea that religion was becoming increasingly privatized. Working in a tradition that to a large extent harked back to Max Weber’s theses on rationalization and secularization, authors such as Berger (1967) and Luckmann (1967) became key proponents of the idea that religion was losing significance in general, and public significance in particular. For some time now, both ideas have been disputed. While some defend versions of the ‘secularization thesis’ (Bruce, 2002), many have come to doubt its empirical foundations. For one, the public irrelevance of religion in modern life has been critiqued, most eloquently by José Casanova (1994), and Habermas’s recent dialogue with then soon-to-be pope Ratzinger can be seen as a significant sign of a re-evaluation of the public relevance of religion (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2005; cf. Habermas, 2001). And what is more, the idea of a ‘decline’ of religion has come under attack, even so much so that it has by now become a truism to say that ‘religion is back’ (from never having been gone). Even a canonical author in the ‘secularization’ tradition, Peter Berger, has changed his long-standing views on the subject (cf. Berger, 1999). What Charles Taylor has brought to such discussions is a change of paradigm. Instead of focusing on either more religion and less secularity, or on less religion and more secularity, Taylor’s book brought a crucial reconceptualization of concepts such as ‘the secular’ and ‘secularization’. His book, at the time I write this only three years old, has rightfully already been much acclaimed, and Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age is testimony to its relevance. This edited volume collects contributions to many aspects of Taylor’s work, all of them by knowledgeable contributors, ranging from sociologists to theologians, from political scientists to anthropologists and from

Castoriadis as a civilizational analyst: Sense and non-sense in Ancient Greece

Abstract: This article argues that a civilizational perspective is central to Castoriadis’s interpretation of ancient Greece, even if he does not use the language of civilizational analysis. More specifically, his line of argument has clear affinities with Eisenstadt’s definition of the ‘civilizational dimension’ in terms of connections between cultural interpretations of the world and institutional forms of social life. Castoriadis has less to say about geocultural and geopolitical structures of the Greek world, which would also be important topics for a balanced civilizational approach. His distinctive variation on the civilizational theme rests on the idea of social imaginary significations; in the ancient Greek case, this starting point leads to the reconstruction of a ‘primary grasp of the world’, an imaginary core that conditions further developments and innovations. This core component of Greek culture centres on the human condition as the existence of mortals in a world characterized by imperfect order and ...

Castoriadis in dialogue

Abstract: This special issue is devoted to critical engagement with the thought of Greek-French thinker Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997). Co-founder (with Claude Lefort) of the Socialisme ou Barbarie collective and journal, Castoriadis was a political activist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, political and social thinker, and economist. Despite the richness and originality of his thought, his work remained on the margins of scholarly debate for a long period (at least in the Anglophone arena). This is now slowly changing and is evident, for example, in the continuing posthumous publication of his French seminars (e.g. Castoriadis, 2004, 2008, 2011b), the recent translations of his work into English (Castoriadis, 2010, 2011a) and the emergent—and burgeoning—reception of his work through monographs and comparative studies (Adams, 2011; Klooger, 2009; Mouzakitis, 2008; Poirier, 2011; Smith, 2010; Tovar, in press). Central to Castoriadis’s trajectory was the project of autonomy as the mutual interplay of philosophy and politics. Through the problematization and questioning of received thought—a key aspect of autonomy—the space for debate and conflict were kept open. In the spirit of Castoriadis, the contributions to this special issue seek to open up his work by pushing against the almost inevitable tendency to closure. They do so in two ways: first, in interrogating and extending key aspects of his theoretical project that have hitherto received less attention in the secondary literature; and, second, by bringing his thought into dialogue with other thinkers, with whom he systematically engaged during his lifetime. Born to a Greek family in Constantinople, Castoriadis spent his adult life in Paris where he emigrated with a French scholarship in 1945. During the post-war period he