The main goal of this paper is to offer a reading of Reinhart Koselleck’s work as an ally of critical theory. My contention is that, despite customary accusations of Koselleck being an anti-Enlightenment historian detrimental to social criticism and emancipatory politics, his investigations on the semantic fabric of modern society may actually expand our resources for the critique of domination. In order to make this argument plausible, I reconstruct some antinomies that are at the basis of Koselleck’s work (state/society, language/reality, experience/expectation) and discuss their critical potential. This analysis shows that, rather than a rejection of the spirit of critique, Koselleck contributes to the temporalization of the practice of critique as such: namely, a clarification of the contradictions and potentials of a reflexive practice imbued in the struggle between the need to comprehend the world as it is and the right to experiment with other forms of life.
This article compares the theories of democracy of John Dewey and Claude Lefort, identifying some common themes in their otherwise radically different philosophical outlooks. In so doing, it attempts to analyze the philosophical implications of a ‘democracy first’ approach to politics. It then explains in what sense Dewey’s idea of ‘democracy as a way of life’ and Claude Lefort’s conception of ‘democracy as a form of society’ provide the cornerstone of an original and so far insufficiently explored approach to political philosophy. Such an approach offers an alternative both to the classical-liberal and to the critical-radical projects which still dominate contemporary political philosophy. It then indicates some of the potential advantages of such a ‘wide view’ for contemporary debates in democratic theory.
The bigness of cities has attracted much attention from urban academics and professionals whose perspective may be divided into two camps: productive science using agglomeration-based analysis or impact science using anxiety-based analysis. The two approaches need to be joined in order to resolve issues of urban ‘bigness’, and in this article the growth of Perth is used to illustrate the potential and challenges of this integration.
The critical and polemic receptions of the work of Loïc Wacquant has been extensive, but to a large extent focused on specific works and colored by professional specialty, that is, in a word: fragmented. In counteracting that fragmented response, the article sheds light on the undercurrents in Wacquant’s works by stressing four prominent and consistent features: his heritage from (and updating of) Bourdieu; his emphasis on and constant practice of theory (implicit as well as explicit); the distinct ethos with which he addresses political sociology (in the dual form of a sociology analyzing the effects of the political productions of populations categories and a so-called ‘civic sociology’); and finally, the persistent and ubiquitous critique of everything in existence – a thematic indicator permeating each and every one of his works. Thus the article proposes a unifying reading of Wacquant as an interpretation advocating revitalization of a critical social science.
Phenomenological accounts of technology, mediation, and embodiment are beginning to problematize traditional distinctions between subject (human) and object (machine). This shift is often attributed to a material or post-human turn since it is usually associated with an interest in the non-human actors and objects that make media interfaces possible. This article contends that these tendencies should also be considered part of a deeper lineage of dialectical thought in critical theory. Using videogames as an example, I argue that academic debates related to the player/game relationship can be read through the lens of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Developing Adorno’s concept of mimesis, I argue that the interface is often treated as a dialectical question of how the space between subject and object should be traversed. I reflect on the possible advantages of focusing on this contested space through a discussion of game controllers and the Aristotelian concept of techne.
Since representations of social life are rarely separate in their effects from the worlds they aspire to depict, this article argues that as producers of such representations, sociologists are automatically responsible for considering the performative consequences of their work. In particular, it suggests that sociologists have an ongoing normative responsibility to draw out emergent strands of social hope from their empirical analyses. Through a comparison of Rorty, Levitas, and Unger’s different theorizations of social hope, the article argues for a pragmatic model of social hope that is rooted in empirical conceptions of the past and present, but, alive to the transcendent possibilities of the emerging future, refuses to be entirely determined by these conceptions.
In this paper, I discuss the idea of democratic love from the perspective of gender equality. More precisely, I argue that a particular form of gender inequality, namely a gender-specific division of care labour, jeopardizes democratic love. In the first two sections of the article, I introduce Anthony Giddens’ original idea of a ‘democratization of the personal’ and show how Axel Honneth has developed it by relying on the Hegelian notion of social freedom. In the third section, I discuss how the problem of care work affects democratic love relationships and depict the solution to this problem advocated by recognition theory, namely economic recognition. After having reconstructed some possible affinities between socialist-feminist arguments and Honneth’s suggestions, as well as criticisms against them, I outline another recognition-theoretic strategy for recognizing care work. I argue that the recognition paradigm conveys a view of the love relationship as inherently implying a caring recognition of human beings’ dependencies and vulnerabilities. I conclude by hinting at the idea that caring recognition may be extended beyond the social sphere of love, as constituent of social relations in general.
In the early 1980s Perth was probably the most important city in Australia for Cultural Studies. Through that decade many intellectuals who became leaders in Australian Cultural Studies and important players in Cultural Studies outside of Australia worked in Perth. Among them were John Fiske, John Frow, John Hartley, Tom O’Regan, Lesley Stern, Graeme Turner and, a decade later, Ien Ang. This essay discusses the presence of these academics in Perth and advances some reasons why Perth became so important to Cultural Studies in Australia. It also discusses the kind of Cultural Studies that became privileged in Perth and considers some of the reasons for this. Perth Cultural Studies in the 1980s was primarily text-based and focused on screen-related popular culture, especially television programs and popular film. Cultural Studies in Perth developed in a city thought of as marginal to Australia, in institutions that were either not universities or, in the case of Murdoch University, was a very new university, by cosmopolitan academics who mostly came from either elsewhere in Australia or from the United Kingdom.
This paper compares the democratic theories of Pierre Rosanvallon and Axel Honneth. The aim is to show how their work could form the basis of a ‘reconstructivist’ approach in political philosophy that rehabilitates the insights of 19th-century thinkers such as Guizot and Hegel concerning the benefits of combining political philosophy with history and sociology. Whereas the dominant procedural approaches in political philosophy tend to disconnect normative theory from the actual study of society and its history, Rosanvallon and Honneth argue that in order to understand the problems that face our democratic societies today we need a closer connection between theory and practice. Both have therefore developed a method that consists of historically reconstructing developments in modern society in order to identify certain pathologies. The paper compares the different diagnosis that Rosanvallon and Honneth give of the central pathology that faces democracy today, which in Rosanvallon’s reconstruction is related to the problem of representation and in Honneth’s account to the problem of recognition.
This paper examines the competing ‘languages’ of line in Julie Mehretu’s series, Grey Area (2007–9) and elaborates on the implications these lines have for theories of space, bodies and, in particular, the relationship between the two. Grey Area explores what Mehretu describes as a grey and in-between space. The series is composed of seven large abstract canvases covered in an assortment of gestural tracings and neatly traced rational lines (e.g. architectural lines). The juxtaposition of these competing linely narratives not only creates a grey space visually, but compels viewers to stretch their bodies across the canvases and between the lined layers thus, facilitating a brief inhabitance of grey space. Building from this analysis, the paper reflects on the relevance of the lines and the stretching they elicit for examining the complexities of contemporary modes of inhabitation that often extend across multiple geographical sites and temporal modes. Thus, engaging with Mehretu’s lined abstractions draws attention to the importance of space in the production of bodily boundaries, what I call geographical and temporal bodily outlines. In addition to contributing to body-space theories, the paper also demonstrates the valuable insights gained by attending to the unique social-aesthetic analyses of visual art and artists.
Norbert Elias’s concept of the civilizing process is perhaps the most controversial aspect of his work, attracting frequent criticism for its perceived Eurocentrism, as well as impassioned defences that critics have misunderstood the concept. In this piece, I explore how The Civilizing Process channels unacknowledged Eurocentric stereotypes in ways that infuse the theory at a depth level. I then examine the downstream ramifications of these stereotypes by contrasting Elias’s analysis of the Holocaust, as presented in The Germans, with his analysis of colonialism as presented in The Civilizing Process. I argue that Elias’s failure to integrate forms of state violence directed at the colonial periphery undermines his ability to analyse state violence in the core. A more adequate approach would theorize ‘civilization’ as an ambivalent and contradictory process whose violent character is often – though not always – more exposed and visible on the periphery.