Showing papers in "Thesis Eleven in 1997"

The Stranger - on the Sociology of the Indifference:

Abstract: The article sketches an approach to the sociology of the stranger which is based on historical semantics, on comparative studies of social structures of premodern societies and on a reconsideration of the `classical sociology of the stranger' and of marginality (Simmel, 1908; Michels, 1929 and others; Schutz, 1944; Park, 1964). The guiding hypothesis of the article is that there is a discontinuity in the modern experience of the stranger which has not been reflected sufficiently in the classical sociology of the stranger. Whereas in premodern societies membership criteria are binary codes such as `kin' vs. `stranger', `friend' vs. `enemy', and elaborate arrangements were then necessary for institutionalizing a third status (e.g. for internal strangers) between the binary alternatives, the modern experience is wholly different. Modern society is no longer a membership organization. The third status (i.e. being neither `friend' nor `stranger') has become constitutive of our everyday experience of other pers...

Inside the Romanticist Episteme

Abstract: Many contemporary critiques of `modernity' target a caricatured construction of `modernity-as-universalist-reason'. Such critiques are often blind to the constitutive splits and tensions within the philosophical and political horizons of modernity between a rationalist and a romanticist episteme. These critiques are therefore also oblivious to the fact that their own critiques of modernity move on a terrain heavily structured and prefigured by older romanticist critiques of reason and scientific objectivity. Some of the persistent problems in romanticist thought - the celebration of authenticity and a recurrent essentialism - reappear in current post-structuralist critiques of modernity. This is particularly evident in the debates in South Asia - emerging from the subaltern studies group in India, from debates on hybridity and migration, and on post-coloniality as a critique of Western modernity. Rather than launching essentializing and totalizing critiques of `modernity-as-universalist-reason', which ten...

Global Market Cultures and the Construction of Modernity in Southeast Asia

Abstract: Belief in the benevolence of free markets has become a fundamental credo of professional experts, economists, business people and politicians. We regard this discourse as part of a new culture of markets, which has also taken root in Southeast Asia. Expanding markets and using high-tech devices of communication are interpreted as cultural systems that are used in the construction of modernity. An `unbridled romanticism of productivity' (Baudrillard) and a `romance of capitalism' are the meta-narratives underlying the culture of markets. This theme is followed up on two empirical levels. The development policy of three Southeast Asian governments, namely Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, is briefly characterized as market corporatism, market socialism and high-tech developmentalism. We then focus on the emergence of the new middle classes, their actual and symbolic consumption and their lifestyles. Finally the decline of real markets, the creation of virtual markets and the state of postmodernity in Southea...

Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics

Abstract: The question of man is a question of philosophical anthropology It raises a particular problem because man is both the subject and object of any knowledge of man This question has ontological con

The Crisis of the Identification Process

Abstract: This paper considers the crisis of the identification process from the social-historical standpoint, for it cannot be understood when divorced from the social totality. Attempts to explain the current crisis in terms of particular institutions such as changes in habitat, a crisis in the family, etc. fail to account for it, since it also manifests itself in milieux and individuals not experiencing these changes directly. The crisis the identification process is undergoing must be seen as a crisis of the central imaginary significations that in the past have held society together. The crisis consists in the fact that contemporary society no longer produces the types that had made it viable as a society wanting itself. The author concludes that there cannot not be a crisis of the identification process, since there is no longer a cathected self-representation of society as the seat of meaning and of value and of a significant past and of a time to come.

Philosophy and Sublimation

Abstract: Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of sublimation is not only innovative within the Freudian tradition, but opens up the domain of inquiry as to society's process of radical social institution. Sublimation is indeed socialization, not merely aesthetic cathexis. A specific sort of sublimation that may be said to mobilize the project of autonomy is linked to philosophy both because it is implicated in a process of interminable interrogation, and because it involves the psyche's practical and poetic engagement with the creation of new imaginary forms. Philosophy's task, in this sense, is to consider thought from the standpoint of the unthought, a daring task that cannot ultimately take place without one's fully-fledged acceptance of one's own finitude.

State Formation in Southeast Asia

Abstract: The processes of state formation in the agrarian states of Southeast Asia lend themselves to fruitful comparative analysis using Eliasian concepts. However, in the difficult physical environment of a region endowed with plentiful land relative to population, the control of labour was more important than control of territory, as demonstrated by the cases of Siam and Java. Moreover, the religious, ceremonial and symbolic significance of kingship remained very important even when the coercive power of the centre was weak. Courts made absolutist claims, but their dominance depended on symbolic power and on complex intrigues and networks of patronage. Elias is useful to analyse these endogenous processes of state formation. However, the modern states of the region were forged by colonialism, nationalist movements and the more recent technocratic developmentalist programmes of authoritarian elites. Rapid economic transformation and industrialization have brought new classes and new tensions to test the adequacy...

Malaysian Modern or Anti-Anti Asian Values:

Abstract: Probably the most influential critique of social theorizing about the non-West in recent years has been one emanating from a `subalternist' perspective, by which I mean a critique mounted if not by, then in the name of, peoples/cultures/modes of thought that have been dominated culturally by `the West'. The rapid rise to prominence - economic, political, strategic and cultural - of an increasingly large number of nation states in the Asia-Pacific region poses a rather different kind of challenge to western perspectives on the project of modernity, a challenge to which social theory has yet to formulate an adequate response. Focusing on Malaysia, this paper examines the claims advanced by certain members of the new Asian political elite and intellectuals that Asian countries have discovered divergent trajectories of modernization, and argues that attempts on the part of contemporary western observers to dismiss these claims have so far been unconvincing. This suggests that social theorists need in future t...

Paradox preserved: From ontology to autology. Reflections on Niklas Luhmann's The Art of Society

Abstract: As a universal theory Luhmann's systems theory of society includes art in its ambit. The Art of Society (1995) reconstructs the formal and the social-historical conditions of the functional differentiation of a system of art since the Renaissance. The methodological focus of the reconstruction - Luhmann's theory of form (perception, first and second order observation, medium and form) and of systemic differentiation (social function, self-organization, codes and programmes, evolution and self-description of art) - are analysed in the first part of the paper. The second part examines the unresolved question of the code of the art system, the hermeneutic circle integral to Luhmann's theory design, and the relation of his theory of art to the `aesthetic epoch' of art theory with special reference to Heidegger and Adorno.

`Elias in Singapore': Civilizing Processes in a Tropical City:

Abstract: In recent years Singapore has come to be seen as a successful project of economic transformation and capitalist development What is more remarkable - but less discussed - is Singapore's success in building a multiethnic society and the unique concomitant civilizing processes that have accompanied this Singapore represents today a project of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural polity and a postmodern global city that combines civility, nostalgia and economic functionality Here it is argued that - despite some well-known and decisive dark spots on the political landscape - this success has to do with two concomitant processes One is the functionally administered extension of the state into the meaning-sphere of the individual, totalizing it from within his own nostalgia in an exoticized urban space The other is the soteriological transcendence of individual and intra-individual relations within and beyond the culturally recognized `communities' Westerners will not be able to learn from the Singapore pro

The Southeast Asian Labyrinth: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Abstract: In the Southeast Asian context, the questions of civilizational identity and civilizational premises of modernity cannot be posed in the same way as with regard to China or India. From a long-term perspective, the most salient features of the region have to do with intercivilizational encounters and their local ramifications. As the debate on `Indianization' has shown, Southeast Asian traditions took shape in active interaction with dominant external models, and it is a flexible combination of imported and local patterns that is most characteristic of the region, rather than any persisting indigenous infrastructure. Cultural patterns of state formation are the most distinctive outcome of this process; they can be traced back to the Indianizing phase, but they also play an important role in the early modern history of the region, and they are relevant to the debate on `re-traditionalization' in contemporary Southeast Asia.

The Self-Presupposition of the Origin: Homage to Cornelius Castoriadis

Abstract: Thinking the origin in a radical way amounts to thinking the movement by which what does not proceed from something else - what does not have its origin elsewhere - comes to itself, has within itself precisely the ontological energy to detach itself from itself and to exist as origin. In its primordial sense, then, origin is self-origin: it is, becomes, and is known starting from itself. This self-presupposition of the origin constitutes the very advent of Being, its unmotivated and permanent upsurge, which has to be thought in terms of creation. Human creation responds to this ontological genesis, to its indeterminacy and to its incompletion - and, consequently, to its temporality. At once individual and collective - that is, both psychical and social - human creation alone can give meaning to ontological genesis.

The Hypertrophy of Simultaneity in Telematic Communication

Abstract: The paper deals with the changes in the sense of synchronicity and simultaneity connected with the transformations in the structure of society. It examines and criticizes the modern concept of absolute chronology, understood as an objective temporal reference common to all observers. This notion is compared with the relative and flexible (but neither objective nor generalizable) forms of synchronization of different societies. The paper discusses finally the hypothesis that contemporary society is realizing a more complex and recursive form of temporality, that questions the modern ideal of synchronicity. This temporality is connected with recent developments in telematics.

The Meaning of Culture

Abstract: The article inquires into the uneasiness of sociological systems theory about culture. Culture alternatively is called the solution to the problem of double contingency (Parsons) and removed from t...

From `Cambodge' to `Kampuchea': State and Revolution in Cambodia 1863-1979

Abstract: The paper contrasts two readings of Cambodian politics and society, labelled by the author `Cambodge' and `Kampuchea'. The `Cambodge' reading was invented by the French in the colonial era (1863-1954). It blended the grandeur of Cambodia's past, symbolized by the Angkor ruins, with an assessment of the Cambodian people as insouciant and needful of protection. This reading persisted in the so-called `Sihanouk years' (1955-70). The `Kampuchea' reading was imposed by the Cambodian Communists (`Khmer Rouge') when they seized power in 1975. It emphasized the empowerment of the poor, a conflict model of society, the predominance of politics, and a Marxist-Leninist, linear view of history. Both readings were `top-down' and now (1997) that they have been discredited (although some of their ingredients persist) a comparison between them may be of historical interest.

Political Philosophy as Phenomenology: On the Method of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Abstract: Hegel's Philosophy of Right represents a unique theory type in the history of political philosophy. It is a normative theory that departs in its construction from an empirical facticity without reducing norms to facts. It unifies teleological and deontic considerations. It is a theory of the normatively requisite institutional structures able to realize the demands of a historically particular form of individuality, and simultaneously it presents the phenomenology of modern subjectivity committed to the ultimate value of true freedom. In this way it aims to transform into genuine self-knowledge the illusory social-political self-image of its addressees. The paper discusses the connection between this phenomenological method and Hegel's conception of freedom - his critique of unconditional, abstract normativity, his solution to the problem of collision between equally valid norms and the possible relevance of his methodological principles to contemporary political philosophy.

Novalis, Marx and Parsons: Niklas Luhmann's Search for Modernity

Abstract: In an essay on `the modernity of modern society', written after the demise of the Soviet model but against the premature triumphalism of mainstream modernization theory, Niklas Luhmann proposes to ...

Justice and Good Governance

Abstract: A reading of Solon's elegy to eunomia through Castoriadis's seminal theory of autonomy as the explicit and reflective self-institution of society can elucidate the question of what constitutes soun...

On the Marxist Imaginary and the Problem of Practice: Socialisme Ou Barbarie, 1952-6

Abstract: `On the Marxist Imaginary...' is an excerpt from a larger work that uses the history of Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-67) to examine the role of the problem of praxis in Cornelius Castoriadis's more...