Showing papers in "Theory, Culture & Society in 2002"
TL;DR: In the 21st century, the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally as discussed by the authors, and this constitutes a revolution in the social sciences, which constitutes a change in the way of thinking.
Abstract: At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagin...
1,163 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors distinguish between three different axes of conflict in world risk society: ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global, and glocal conflicts which are local and local.
Abstract: This article differentiates between three different axes of conflict in world risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is glo...
587 citations
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that technology is always limited to the realm of means, while morality is supposed to deal with ends, and the two regimes of enunciation are compared.
Abstract: Technology is always limited to the realm of means, while morality is supposed to deal with ends. In this theoretical article about comparing those two regimes of enunciation, it is argued that tec...
439 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, an alternative political ontology is needed which goes beyond the reification of network space in order to give voice to the fluid objects which escape its unidimensional functionality.
Abstract: Law's article begins by restating the classical ANT position that objects do not exist `in themselves' but are the effect of a performative stabilization of relational networks. In addition, these material enactments inevitably have a spatial dimension; they simultaneously establish spatial conditions for objectual identity, continuity, and difference. Space must not be reified as a natural, pre-existing container of the social and the material, but is itself a performance. Moreover, there are multiple forms of spatiality beyond the Euclidean space of regions (e.g. networks and fluids), and objects may exist and achieve homeomorphism within several different spatial systems. Technologies such as the Zimbabwe Bush Pump present a fluid object which is able to exist and cohere without the presence of fixed boundaries or the permanence of a particular functional definition. The network logic, however, which gravitates towards stability and functionality, tends to exclude and silence this spatial Other. An alternative political ontology is needed which goes beyond the reification of network space in order to give voice to the fluid objects which escape its unidimensional functionality.
406 citations
TL;DR: In contrast to most literature on cosmopolitanism, which focuses on its elite forms, the authors analyzes how ordinary people bridge racial boundaries in everyday life, based on interviews with interviewees.
Abstract: In contrast to most literature on cosmopolitanism, which focuses on its elite forms, this article analyzes how ordinary people bridge racial boundaries in everyday life. It is based on interviews w...
260 citations
TL;DR: The authors revisited two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism, and discussed the fate of critical theory and of ethico-political sensibility in the face of heightened uncertainties about the distinction between what is real, what is constructed, and what is imaginary, and between what may count as a person and what as a thing.
Abstract: In their substantive introduction, the editors first revisit two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism. Obviously, these critical vocabularies emerge as crucial sites of perplexity as soon as the ontological boundary between subjects and objects is rendered equally problematic and fluid as the epistemological boundary between the imaginary and the real. A thumbnail sketch of the history of the two discursive traditions (from Marxism up to Actor Network Theory) provides an elaborate systematic framework for introducing the individual articles. The first axis of debate is generated by conceptual residues of the traditional tug-of-war between idealism and materialism which continues to infiltrate recent redescriptions of the web of sociality/materiality. The concern here is how much autonomy and agency can be granted to material objects in view of their social inscription and symbolic construction, and how far conceptual experiments with the ontological symmetry between humans and nonhumans may take us and/or should be permitted to go. The second axis of debate concerns the fate of critical theory and of ethico-political sensibility in the face of heightened uncertainties about the distinction between what is real, what is constructed, and what is imaginary, and between what may count as a person and what as a thing.
252 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the role of the computer screen within the establishment of postsocial relations around a sense of embodied lack, focusing on the construction of wants and embodying of the market in the work routines of workers on the Swiss foreign exchange market.
Abstract: This article focuses upon the construction of wants and the embodying of the market in the work routines of workers on the Swiss foreign exchange market. The authors are particularly concerned with the role of the computer screen within the establishment of postsocial relations around a sense of embodied lack. The screen does not provide access to the market but is the market as an exteriorized assemblage of practices brought together in one place. The screen is the (ontologically liquid) market rather than its representation into which traders immerse themselves. Traders engage with this market in their daily work practices through a constructed sense of lack that requires them to act passionately within the market in order to satisfy the self understood as a structure of wanting. While Knorr Cetina and Bruegger draw on a Lacanian understanding of the self as lack, rather than focus on the formation of direct human social relations around this issue, they look instead at the materiality of lack and its p...
236 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that cosmopolitan virtue is a respect for other cultures and an ironic stance towards one's own culture spells out this obligation side of the human rights movement, and that contemporary cosmopolitanism needs to be ironic to function usefully in hybrid global cultures, but it is open to the charge of being culturally ''flat' and elitist.
Abstract: This article is a contribution to the revival of `virtue ethics'. If we regard human rights as a crucial development in the establishment of global institutions of justice and equality, then we need to explore the obligations that correspond to such rights. It is argued that cosmopolitan virtue a respect for other cultures and an ironic stance towards one's own culture spells out this obligation side of the human rights movement. Cosmopolitanism of course can assume very different forms. The article traces various cosmopolitan ethics from the Greeks, Roman Stoics and Christian philosophers. Contemporary cosmopolitanism needs to be ironic to function usefully in hybrid global cultures, but it is open to the charge of being culturally `flat' and elitist. These criticisms are examined through the confrontation between Maurizio Viroli and Martha Nussbaum. While American patriotism is not a promising foundation for ironic cosmopolitanism, the republican tradition of virtue does offer a viable method of develop...
233 citations
TL;DR: The work of Michel Serres has not found a great audience within Anglophone Social Science, despite his substantial influence on modern Science Studies as discussed by the authors, despite the fact that he is a global thinker who describes his work as "structuralist".
Abstract: The work of Michel Serres has not found a great audience within Anglophone Social Science, despite his substantial influence on modern Science Studies. This article offers an introduction to his thought. Serres is a global thinker who describes his work as 'structuralist'. The notion of translation as a way of describing the communication and movements between different forms of knowledge and cultural practice is central. Serres offers a philosophy of science that is in stark opposition to the Bachelardian tradition of 'epistemic ruptures'. In order to make a break with 'breaks', Serres offers an account of science and cultural practice as multiplicities that are immersed within noise. Structure, when it emerges, comes about in acts of parasitism. Serres then explores how human relations obey a 'parasite logic' which contains an attendant risk of sacrifice. This risk is managed through the circulation of 'quasiobjects'. Serres' later work poses the question of what we can hope for when this circulation itself begins to falter
207 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the role of the computer screen within the establishment of postsocial relations around a sense of embodied lack, which is represented as an exteriorized assemblage of practices brought together in one place.
Abstract: This article focuses upon the construction of wants and the embodying of the market in the work routines of workers on the Swiss foreign exchange market. The authors are particularly concerned with the role of the computer screen within the establishment of postsocial relations around a sense of embodied lack. The screen does not provide access to the market but is the market as an exteriorized assemblage of practices brought together in one place. The screen is the (ontologically liquid) market rather than its representation into which traders immerse themselves. Traders engage with this market in their daily work practices through a constructed sense of lack that requires them to act passionately within the market in order to satisfy the self understood as a structure of wanting. While Knorr Cetina and Bruegger draw on a Lacanian understanding of the self as lack, rather than focus on the formation of direct human social relations around this issue, they look instead at the materiality of lack and its position within the postsocial relations constituted through trading on-line in the foreign exchange market. Desire is constituted and realized here through the object of the computer screen rather than with other people directly. In this way relations between persons are mediated by real objects that constitute persons virtually.
173 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the priority of symbolic, especially discursive, action over the material order in the genesis of social things is argued, arguing that what turns a piece of stuff into a social object is its...
Abstract: This article strongly argues the priority of symbolic, especially discursive, action over the material order in the genesis of social things. What turns a piece of stuff into a social object is its...
TL;DR: In the spheres of political philosophy, sociology and postcolonial criticism, debates about cosmopolitanism have on the whole ignored specific histories of the cosmopolitan imagination and itsverna... as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Debates about cosmopolitanism in the spheres of political philosophy, sociology and postcolonial criticism have on the whole ignored specific histories of the cosmopolitan imagination and its verna...
TL;DR: The concept of the stranger has always been the one arriving with questions, posing questions, making one pose questions and thus challenging the order as mentioned in this paper, but this time, however, it is not the stranger but strangers, without a single figure, who ask questions and cause us to question ourselves.
Abstract: Welcoming the Stranger Though you have shelters and institutions, Precarious lodgings while the rent is paid, Subsiding basements where the rat breeds Or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors Or a house a little better than your neighbour's; When the Stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?' What will you answer? 'We all dwell together To make money from each other?' Or 'This is a community'? And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert. O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger, Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions. (from T.S. Eliot's Choruses From 'The Rock') W ELL, PREPARING for the coming of the stranger should not be such a big hassle in the contemporary American city. With movement-sensitive lighting at the doorway and the 'armed response' sign in the garden, most families would feel themselves quite 'prepared' for the coming of the stranger. But is this a welcoming preparation? The 'stranger' has made it again – be it Plato's xenos, the daring Ruth, or Eliot's Stranger – the stranger, the concept of the stranger has always been the one arriving with questions, posing questions, making one pose questions and thus challenging the order. This time, however, it is not the stranger but strangers, without a single figure, who ask questions and cause us to question ourselves: the displaced people, refugees without citizenship, 'the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics', as Hannah Arendt,
TL;DR: The authors explored the consequences of the events of 11th September 2001 in terms of global space, which now becomes a new frontierland, where refugees, in a caricature of the new power elite, have come to epitomize extraterritoriality, and where floating coalitions and confluent enmities are both the promoters and beneficiaries of new global disorder.
Abstract: The events of 11th September 2001 have many meanings. Although seen as a turning point in a number of historical sequences, perhaps their longest-lasting significance will prove to be that they mark the symbolic end to the era of space.. The article explores the consequences of this in terms of global space, which now becomes a new frontierland, where refugees, in a caricature of the new power elite, have come to epitomize extraterritoriality, and where floating coalitions and confluent enmities are both the promoters and beneficiaries of the new global disorder.
TL;DR: An ethnographic inquiry into daily care gives a quite different insight in fasting by relating it to common practices of eating and drinking in nursing homes.
Abstract: In public debates about the desirability of force feeding in the Netherlands the inclination of people with dementia to refrain from eating and drinking tends to be either taken as their gut-way of expressing their will, or as a symptom of their disease running its natural course. An ethnographic inquiry into daily care, however, gives a quite different insight in fasting by relating it to common practices of eating and drinking in nursing homes. In a nursing home eating and drinking are important social activities that may be shaped quite differently. And while necessary for survival, food and drink also have other qualities: taste, temperature, texture, smell. Whether we want it or not, in the end we all die. But with different modes of care come different modes of dying and of living.
TL;DR: In a special section of Theory, Culture & Society on the State of Emergency as discussed by the authors, 14 articles written by highly distinguished contributors are varied in their theoretical viewpoints, the cultural intentions behind their texts and in their social emphasis.
Abstract: THE QUESTION concerning the condition and application of the contemporary State of Emergency is now at the centre of theoretical exploration across a range of specialities within the humanities and the critical social sciences, from sociology and political theory to literature, cultural, philosophical and international studies. The 14 articles written by highly distinguished contributors for this Special Section of Theory, Culture & Society on the State of Emergency are varied in their theoretical viewpoints, the cultural intentions behind their texts and in their social emphasis. The contributions are engaged with investigating questions such as the critical social significance of state and military institutions, with law and political order, the implications of terror and violence, and for whose political objectives the State of Emergency is planned. The orthodox modern State of Emergency was a situation, declared by the state, in which the strategies and tactics of the military were employed legally, typically because of a number of occurrences of civil disorder such as terrorism, the methodical use of carnage and coercion to attain political aims. Nazi Germany’s Decrees of 1933 are, for instance, a first-rate illustration of the modern State of Emergency. The 28 February Decree, for example, was one of the most oppressive acts of the new Nazi administration. It authorized the suspension of civil liberties in the wake of the fictitious crisis produced by the Nazis as a consequence of the fire that wrecked the Reichstag parliament building on the preceding day. Now, George W. Bush, the President of the United States, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, have not, of course, formally affirmed a contemporary State of Emergency in their governments. Yet, in this Introduction, I shall argue that the Bush and Blair regimes are certainly beginning to lay the foundations for the state and purposes of a ‘hypermodern’ State of Emergency (Armitage,
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the rhetorics of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in the aftermath of 11th September 2001 and explore the contexts, strengths, vulnerabilities, and political and ethical limits of anti-terrorism.
Abstract: This article explores the rhetorics of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair in the aftermath of 11th September. It takes their differing versions of masculinity as a starting-point. The speeches refer extensively to `ways of life', a concept also worth recovering theoretically. Anti-terrorism is a defence of ways of living which are without moral ambiguity and are in absolute opposition to terrorist `evil'. Bush constructs a hegemony at home as a basis for unilateral global interventions. His Americanism draws on familiar themes (`freedom', patriotism, religion), but also invokes compassion, pugnacity and sporting masculinities, drawn especially from the game of baseball. Blair's more `intellectual' version aims at the construction of an international `community' or coalition with Britain in a pivotal role. The contexts, strengths, vulnerabilities, and political and ethical limits of anti-terrorism are explored in detail, including some correspondence with Al-Qa'ida's fundamentalism.
TL;DR: The authors assesses whether some notions from complexity or non-linear theory help to make sense of the September 11th attacks, which relates to the author's more general concern, to interrogate ''globalization'' through the prism of complexity.
Abstract: This article assesses whether some notions from complexity or non-linear theory help to make sense of September 11th This relates to the author's more general concern, to interrogate `globalization' through the prism of complexity Some of the topics investigated in this article include the nature of networked relationships between the macro and micro levels, the character of a liquid and mobile power, the differentiation between and juxtapositions of wild and safe zones, the world-wide screening of certain global events, the unpredictability and irreversibility of time, the nature of attractors, and the more general character of systems that are neither ordered nor wholly anarchic remaining `on the edge of chaos'
TL;DR: In this paper, a critical appraisal of the impact of the Internet and related information technologies on processes of democratization and de-democratization in contemporary society is presented, and an alternative approach to global civil society minimally presupposes a cultural sociology of the internet: approaching information technologies as the product of specific sociocultural practices and as historical sites of ethico-political transformation.
Abstract: We present a critical appraisal of the impact of the Internet (and related information technologies) upon processes of democratization and de-democratization in contemporary society. We review accounts of `the information revolution' as these have become polarized into mutually exclusive rhetorics of future cosmopolitan or citadellian e-topias. We question the Manichean assumptions common to both rhetorics: particularly the fetishism of information technology as an intrinsically democratizing or de-democratizing force on societies. In opposition to this new technological fetishism we focus upon (1) Internet historicity; (2) the human/machine nexus; (3) Internet policing and appropriation presenting a different story of the Net, emphasizing contingent, indeterminate and negotiable characteristics of sociotechnical systems, preparing for a more radical critique of existing theories of `global technological citizenship'. Refiguring `culture' as technopoiesis, we argue that an alternative approach to global civil society minimally presupposes a cultural sociology of the Internet: approaching information technologies as the product of specific sociocultural practices and as historical sites of ethico-political transformation and reflexive self-figuration.
TL;DR: In this paper, the Maltese megaliths were examined in an examination of the first complex stone structures in the world and it was argued that knowledge is best seen as spatialized narratives of human actions and objects as materialized forms of those spatial narratives.
Abstract: The article explores the ways knowledge and space are co-produced performatively through bodily movement in an examination of the Maltese megaliths the first complex stone structures in the world. It is argued that knowledge is best seen as spatialized narratives of human actions and objects as materialized forms of those spatial narratives. Rewriting our social and historical narratives so that the performativity of place, space and knowledge is restored opens new possibilities for rethinking the social and material order.
TL;DR: Vandenberghe as discussed by the authors argues that the critique of reification and the ethics of emancipation require us to go beyond the ''flat ontology' of ANT and its intermediate level of sociotechnical networks towards a more stratified view of social reality, which is able to account for the determining effect of broader generative but invisible structures of domination.
Abstract: This article tacks back towards the idealist side of the argument, in a spirited defence of critical humanism against the radical symmetry of ANT. Vandenberghe argues that the critique of reification and the ethics of emancipation require us to go beyond the `flat ontology' of ANT and its intermediate level of sociotechnical networks towards a more stratified view of social reality, which is able to account for the determining effect of broader generative but invisible structures of domination. Reasserting the categorical distinction between the ontological regions inhabited by humans and nonhumans, he develops a critical opposition between the gift economy, which emphasizes qualitative relations of reciprocity between humans and which tends towards the personalization of things, and the commodity economy, which objectifies things as property, promotes the reification of persons, and turns them into strategically operating `humants'. This model is critically applied to ANT by suggesting that its `fetishis...
TL;DR: In this article, a discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material (sexpics) and communications over Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and argues that participants went to great lengths to make ''things' material.
Abstract: If materiality is necessary for social order, we can usefully investigate what happens in social settings (such as, in this case, an Internet setting) which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as `things'. This discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material (`sexpics') and communications over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The paper argues that although, or because, this `sexpics' scene problematized materiality, participants went to great lengths to make `things' material. They set in motion a considerable range of `mechanisms of materialization', and they did so in order to establish a sense of ongoing ethical sociality. Conversely, the kinds of materializations they produced need to be interpreted in the light of the precise ethical sociality they sought to sustain. In particular, the article explores a paradox: although sexual imagery and communications were hyperabundant (partly because they were `dematerialized' as di...
TL;DR: In this article, an alternative perspective on ecological globalization is presented which takes account of the "weedy opportunism" and inherent mobility of biological life, taking on the meaning of an opening of culture to the "unsettling" influence of biological and geological histories that manifest themselves at global scales.
Abstract: Spearheaded by Beck and the ‘world risk society’ thesis, contemporary commentators in search of evidence of political renewal ‘from below’ have discerned a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities. But through its foregrounding of the destabilization of matter by new technologies, this ‘environmental cosmopolitanism’ tends to reenact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture. It is suggested that this expresses a metropolitan detachment from the everyday experience of working with flows of matter and life. Drawing on the pivotal role of bioinvasion in the European colonization of the temperate periphery, an alternative perspective on ecological globalization is presented which takes account of the ‘weedy opportunism’ and inherent mobility of biological life. In this way, ‘globalization from below’ takes on the meaning of an opening of culture to the ‘unsettling’ influence of biological and geological histories that manifest themselves at global scales.
TL;DR: The authors en deplore le manque de contextualisation socioculturelle, selon lui, cette approche nuit au projet affiche de rendre la parole a ceux qui en sont prives, en ne mettant en avant que les elements de privation et de souffrance sociale
Abstract: En se penchant sur les interviews restitues dans La misere du monde par Pierre Bourdieu et son equipe, l'A. en deplore le manque de contextualisation socioculturelle. En effet, selon lui, cette approche nuit au projet affiche de rendre la parole a ceux qui en sont prives, en ne mettant en avant que les elements de privation et de souffrance sociale
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue for a greater emphasis on materiality, noting in particular the importance of the use and management of boundaries in social science analysis, and ask whether and how dichotomies themselves might fruitfully become the target of social science analyses.
Abstract: The excellent contributions to this special issue are organized around a duality between sociality and materiality. They argue for greater emphasis on materiality. This article reflects upon what sustains the dichotomy between sociality and materiality, noting in particular the importance of the use and management of boundaries. The article asks whether and how dichotomies themselves might fruitfully become the target of social science analysis.
TL;DR: The authors explored Schmitt's political theology as the theoretical basis of modern politics in terms of the concepts of state sovereignty and the idea of a permanent emergency within this Schmittian framework, the analysis of Islam as presented by writers such as Huntington, Fukuyama and Barber is critically analysed.
Abstract: The Huntington thesis of the clash of cultures and American foreign policy analysis are both aspects of the legacy of Carl Schmitt's distinction between friend and foe This article explores Schmitt's political theology as the theoretical basis of modern politics in terms of the concepts of state sovereignty and the idea of a permanent emergency Within this Schmittian framework, the analysis of Islam as presented by writers such as Huntington, Fukuyama and Barber is critically analysed Their analysis of fundamentalism and political Islam fails to grasp the complexity and diversity of modern Islam The article concludes by examining a number of social and economic processes that make the political division between friend and foe untenable
TL;DR: The authors describes the new strategic discourse of network-centric warfare that has come to dominate US operational doctrines and concepts as well as strategic thinking, and describes 11th September as a network attack.
Abstract: This article describes the new strategic discourse of network-centric warfare that has come to dominate US operational doctrines and concepts as well as strategic thinking. It also describes 11th September as a network attack. The state of exception becomes the rule via the confluence of geopolitical with biopolitical power and the strategic logic of network-centric thinking, and with it the problematization of security goes hyperbolic in the form of `The Terror'.
TL;DR: In this article, a brief history of changing attitudes and values in British public culture, leading to a suggestion that we are experiencing an era of cultural fragmentation, is explored, with a consideration of the possibilities for cultural citizenship in th...
Abstract: The article begins by noting that the widespread assumption that the social basis of more difficult or cosmopolitan art has been undermined in later modernity should lead to blander, less controversial art. An alternative interpretation is briefly described in which cosmopolitan art has become a spectacular tourist attraction. Significant questions that would follow such a development are: how national cultural institutions have been co-opted into a global spectacular culture and whether the work displayed in these settings can be radically critical of dominant social values; and the implications of the development of a public culture focused on spectacular attractions for notions of cultural citizenship. In the article these questions are explored through a brief history of changing attitudes and values in British public culture, leading to a suggestion that we are experiencing an era of cultural fragmentation. The article concludes with a consideration of the possibilities for cultural citizenship in th...
TL;DR: Derrida, in some remarks about the inauguration of new refuge-cities in Europe and America,argues for the invention of a new cosmopolitical polity which would be instituted on the basis of an ethic as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Derrida, in some remarks about the inauguration of new refuge-cities in Europe and America,argues for the invention of a new cosmopolitical polity which would be instituted on the basis of an ethic...